#... this has all come a bit tangential to the post I guess lol but... just feels existentially cruel

[blujayonthewing]

had the thought 'it might be interesting to also collect a cicada nymph before it can molt and keep it as a wet specimen' and then immediately the concept of a cicada quietly growing underground for thirteen years to finally, finally emerge into the world only to get killed and put in a jar before it ever has a chance to stretch its wings just because some idiot thought it'd be neat nearly made me cry

[distort-opia]

It's strange how differently people from different culture react to famous characters. Even outside of batjokes shippers, I have seen a lot of DC fans of my country just straight up telling that joker loves batman and batman's obsessed with joker. Or just thinking that's he's gay, cuz like, you have a hot Blondie but you only thinking of batman? Well buddy I have something to tell ya. But it doesn't have the same reaction from people from USA, at least the one that aren't from batjokes fandom? Like, they seemed to get offended when someone point out joker obsession with batman and how it would be read this thing they two had....

How do you think people from your country read theses two? Because it was a kind of shock to me see a lot o straight man fans of DC just accepting that, welp, Joker definitely not straight and batman is... 🤨 suspicious for not killing him already. I guess its because the film with heath ledger is very famous here, and the line where he said that batman complete him stuck.

This is a really interesting question, trying to look at it from a cultural standpoint... I definitely heard of or encountered people entirely lacking knowledge of comics, readily agreeing that there's something more to Batman and Joker's relationship. As you say, just with tangential contact with Nolan's The Dark Knight or maybe the Arkham games.

However, I think that no matter where we're from, there's a distinction of three groups, with their own relevant factors, which explain their attitudes (at least to me). There's people who aren't into Batman or superheroes, but who obviously heard of them or maybe saw one movie or two. Then there's casual fans: people who like Batman and maybe watched the movies, maybe liked The Batman Animated Series, maybe played the games-- but you won't find them on Reddit or Tumblr or Tiktok as super active in fandom, just because it's not their main thing. And then there's hardcore fans, people who write and read fanfic, people who post on different platforms about Batman characters, the ones who consistently engage in fandom. But I'm putting the rest under the cut since I got long (with unnecessary psychological analysis, lol).

This is of course simply my personal opinion, based on what I've observed over time. A couple of factors might influence how these groups view Batjokes, though the first two I'm mentioning are a bit more likely to be found within non-fans and casual fans. A non-fan homophobic/conservative individual is still likely to reject actual canon of Joker professing romantic love to Batman or of Batman having to deny more than once he's in love with the guy-- although I guess you could hit them with straight Batjokes, hah (Thomas and Martha Wayne of Flashpoint). Leaving this type of person aside though (which you're more likely to find in some countries compared to others), I think non-fans usually easily agree to a romantic side of Batjokes, or at the very least to the existence of obsession. Just based on the tangential knowledge they have, it's obvious these two characters come as a pair and are defined by the other, so it doesn't take much to convince them. But within casual fans and hardcore fans... and here I'd add someone who's male, homophobic or conservative... well, we start to encounter one big thing about Batman that this kind of individual cannot get over-- projection.

For many men, Batman represents the ubermasculine ideal. He's handsome, at the peak of physical fitness, rich, has the coolest car and gadgets, has got women begging to sleep with him. He's cold and controlling and bad at social skills but still somehow beloved by all. Bruce Wayne has got terminal Main Character Syndrome, and it's undeniable a lot of fans consider him the epitome of the Alpha Male. So if you're gonna bring up that he's gay for the Joker... no matter how much proof you throw at them, they'll employ any and all mental gymnastics to shut you down or prove you wrong. That's not even getting into the guys who project on Joker, and who see Joker as this incredibly cool "agent of chaos" and strive to emulate that; trying to get them to admit Joker has been written as queer for decades (with multiple writers admitting to it) is another exercise in futility. They'll tell you Joker only said he loves Batman to scare him! He flirts with men to throw them off! It's all a tactic... because of course, being gay can only be scary to someone as masculine as Batman. It's the decades-old problem of queer-coded villains which I won't get into. But my point here is that fans who project onto either Batman or Joker specifically for how "Alpha" they are, are not likely to be open to Batjokes interpretations, no matter their nationality. But of course, just as with non-fans, there are plenty of casual or hardcore fans who are perfectly fine with shipping or potential homoerotic connotations. Hell, many times you might get them to go down Batjokes rabbit holes by letting them know about comic or game adaptations. They'll easily recognize the classical enemies-to-lovers trope this ship embodies.

But then again, both within casual and hardcore fans (though it's much more often the case of the latter) you'll have people who have no issue with shipping, who follow comics, who read fics etc. But to whom Batjokes is anathema, because they're too invested in a different way: not in the characters, but rather in showing how Good and Moral they are to other fans, and how they ship only the Good ships. It's the hordes of antis you see on Twitter and sometimes here on Tumblr too: the purity police kind of fan. "How can you ship Bruce with the monster who killed his son?" or "Joker paralyzed Barbara, how can you--" but it's entirely hypocritical and mostly rooted in the current trend of hating Joker. There's plenty of DC villains who have done similar things to Joker, or harmed the Family in similar ways to Joker, but he's the scapegoat right now for multiple reasons I talked about before (Joker fatigue and DC writing him like shit, the pushback from seeing all the alpha male dudebro fans latch onto him and hating that, etc.).

I got way too long, lol. But basically I think these generalized types of fan behavior can appear no matter the nationality, though there's undoubtedly a higher frequency of one or the other in different countries. Frankly, Romania is intensely religious and conservative, so in my country... even among my younger peers it's likely I'd encounter homophobic stances. And purity policing and that way of thinking is more likely to happen among fans from the US, like you pointed out.

[babacontainsmultitudes]

Ngl getting worried that "Sparrow doesn't like Normal" thing has been said so much on the show that the actual cast forgot that isn't true ......

Hi anon! Okay first of all, this was a very cathartic ask to receive, to the point that it kind of cracked me up when I first read it, so thank you, you were so real for this. I can empathize with this sentiment (though I had no plans on voicing it) and I've felt similarly for… A while honestly.

You sent this back in December (heh. classic baba.), and while I didn't forget, honestly I intended to answer this in a manner that's a bit more. Organized but… I sort of lost sight of where I wanted to go with things, to be honest with you, and I didn't wanna leave you hanging forever! Still, a couple notes and tangentially-related thoughts…

(Oh, maybe before we get into it- I assume based on the nature of this ask that you probably read this post of mine, but perhaps I'll leave it here as additional context for anyone who happens to find themselves reading this).

Okay, in Will's case to be totally real I've never confidently felt that he realizes that it's not true? If my memory serves, the first time the idea comes up at all is in episode 17:

Which irked me a bit at the time, in part because to me it feels pretty blatantly discordant with Sparrow's characterization- in general but also since he literally says this during the dance scene:

but even more so because it feels very inconsistent with Normal's degree of shock during this same scene. All the same, for a while I could still look past it, on the basis that y'know it's a very teenage thing to make mountains out of molehills and leap to increasingly cynical conclusions the way Normal tends to do, and so perhaps it was all intentional, and as both Sparrow and Normal went through a bit of growth and development, things would slowly turn out alright. :0 A bit willfully naïve, I suppose! But what can you do.

In Anthony's case… I've actually been pretty happy with what he's given us of Sparrow for the past little while, honestly. Sigh but still now and then Anthony will say things offhandedly like this (transcribing myself from episode 47 since the transcript isn't out yet):

Anthony: (…) The only thing keeping you together is the absolute ignorance you have of the fact that maybe the only person who ever showed you any real affection in the last couple years of your life is dead, and the fact that you don't know is all that keeps you going. But the only thing that keeps me going is [ADVERTIZEMENT].

And while that joke lead-in was very funny, it's also just. Objectively not true? Like even aside from all the instances of Sparrow being very affectionate with Norm (including in the dance scene), the other teens? Lark? Rebecca???? All of them have shown Normal affection in one way or another throughout the course of the show. Like, I get that he probably mostly did it for the joke but. Eh, still rubs me the wrong way I suppose.

As for the rest of the cast… It's hard to say, and I guess less important at the end of the day. The other teens' responses to Norm in the last episode make sense for the most part given their POVs imo, so while frustrating to a degree, I can't really fault them for it. Still… Hm, in Scary's case I briefly discussed what I would sort have wanted/liked to come from her own interactions with Sparrow after episode 37 here, and tbh I suppose everything outlined there is still more or less what my ideal scenario would have looked like!

So honestly I suppose that's it anon! I could talk more but I would most definitely begin to stray off topic if I did lol. Thank you kindly for the ask! 💜

[onejellyfishplease]

So, I noticed that Tinker-the-dragon showed you storyboards of their own animatic (which looks great btw, can't wait to see it), and since you said you enjoyed seeing the process, I figured I'd do the same! After all, having people acknowledge and get excited for my WIPs gives me a sense of accountability to finish it, which makes it much more likely to actually get done.

So, behold my chaotic, colorful rough sketches!

The process is slow-going, since I am simultaneously working on a couple other creative projects, some are tangentially related to this one (like how I'm finalizing my headcanon designs for all the turtles beyond just Donnie), and some aren't (like drawing long overdue art of my D&D party's characters).

I'm also making some guesses/taking some liberties when it comes to the timeline. Like, I'm assuming that this AU takes place post S2 finale, and thus will take place in the new lair, but I don't actually know. (If this has been addressed in asks before, I'm probably too new of a fan of SnapDonnie to have paid attention to those asks, and don't have the attention span to scroll through a ton of asks just to obtain a specific bit of information)

Similarly, I don't know exactly at what point Donnie starts attracting flies. It might not be as early as I'm depicting here. I can certainly move that part to a later section, but I don't know what I'd replace it with.

In general, if you have suggestions for things to be changed/switched around to better fit with the 'canon' of SnapDonnie, I'd love to hear it. It's better to make changes now while things are still very rough and flexible, than once I'm more committed and frames have taken quite a bit more effort to make.

Sorry for the super long 'ask,' this ended up being a bit of an info-dump lol.

WHA- YOURE MAKING ONE TOO????

thats so cool omg!! And im just gonna go a bit crazy over the frames if u dont mind me~ BUT THE ONE WITH THE SHADOW??? thats literally so creative im obsessed with it. I love cinematic shots like that, they just make my brain buzz <3

and the one where hes doing thumbs up to Raph absolutely cracked me up!

Also to answer your questions- SnapDonnie takes please after the movie, So Raph has a blind eye and hole in his shell/plastron, Mikey has his scars (though u cant drawing them in bandages to aviod drawing them if i want -i always forget to draw them lol) and Leo has a leg brace.

And as for the flies, Donnie starts to attract them basically immediately once the physical changes start, though he basically douses himself with insect repellent at first (while he still wants to repel them) So frames 24 and 25 would go after he really starts to change instead of before.

Hope that helps!! It looks amazing so far! <3

[furbygoblinxiv]

For Inktober, I like doing personal challenges. This year? That challenge is gonna be detailing out some of the media rewrites/aus that I have laying around, compiling my ideas into one spot.

First up! Miraculous Ladybug! A show I stopped watching after 2 seasons but kept up with tangentially lol. I used to have a lot of ideas and expectations for this show, but sadly never had those fulfilled. I will likely never post anything Miraculous related again btw.

More rewrite info, elaboration, and the villain picture below! Warning you tho, this is like a personal archival post for me, so the following is Very Long, like 3k words. You've been warned.

if this makes no sense then actually yes it does anyways

So! This idea originates from how I found out about Miraculous Ladybug. I saw art of it, I googled it, and the Wikipedia page filled my head with so many ideas that are never expanded upon in the show. Marinette is a fashion student and a hero! That love for fashion would be such a fun thing to bake into her character and the world! And yet while they up something like that in the show, it's never fully realized. Hence, rewrite.

The basic frame of how my Miraculous AU rewrite (that's been cooking since like season 3 i suppose) would be based on the idea of logos, pathos, and ethos. Marinette as being logos, the brains of the operation, the solver of puzzles. Adrien being pathos, the empathetic and playful one, in tune with the emotions of others. And Gabriel, with ethos, having immense credibility due to his status and wealth. I kinda tweaked their characters and the plot to reflect this focus on how they're three parts of the same narrative. Also, Adrien and Marinette are highschoolers.

First up, Marinette! I wanted to fully lean into her being a fashion student. While she does have friends and hobbies, her passion that she spends all her free time on is fashion. She knits, sews, crochets, and weaves to make clothes. She even volunteers for the local community theater making their costumes in order to get experience! She's not really a games or media nerd, or else she'd do cosplay, but she definitely helps others like Alya with their cosplays. She really like the technical aspects of fashion, and she's quite good at having an eye for things around it. She could eyeball someones measurements pretty accurately if she needs to tailor something for them, guessing their height and wingspan with ease. As Marinette, she's a bit of a scatterbrain when she isn't focused on something she's innately interested in (like clothes). She's fidgety and forgetful and rambling, and can get loud when she's passionate about something. She has her own systems of organization, which from the outside appear to be completely random and scattered.

As Ladybug, she's cool and confident and in control. She enjoys using her skills and brains to help people, and the work of saving Paris is just another puzzle that she needs to solve to help everyone. She settles down when focused, a feature that's reflected as Marinette. Her Ladybug outfit is different every time she transforms, the fashioning of the outfits reflecting her moods and mindset at the time of transformation. Her eye for technical fashion stuff comes in handy. In this au, the villains that Hawkmoth sends after Ladybug are completely unrecognizable due to how over the top their costuming is. Ladybug is able to use both her logical deduction skills and critical fashion eye to deduce who might have been transformed, and use that knowledge of them to formulate plans to pacify and save them. While she loves being able to use her deduction skills to save people, she prefers being the brains BEHIND the operation, and thus tends to avoid the press and public appearances where she can.

Also, something I think would be fun and would give Marinette a connection to Gabriel and play on her fashion interests would be if she actually managed to land a role as his intern. I feel like this would give them a dynamic thats like the opposite one to the lovesquare dilemma. Marinette sees Gabriel as her cool mysterious aloof competent boss who she respects and wants to imitate, and Ladybug hates Hawkmoth and resents what he keeps doing to Paris. Gabriel, while definitely viewing himself as above Marinette, does respect the work and ideas that she brings in. Meanwhile as Hawkmoth hes like plotting Ladybug's downfall. It'd also open up plotlines that include Gabriel as Gabriel as opposed to Hawkmoth, as well as more Marinette and Chloe interactions, since Chloe is a prominent model in the agency.

Also she owns a cat that acts lowkey like Plagg but lazier.

Next up is Adrien! Adrien is a normal human boy in this au, btw. I'm gonna explain his back story more in depth than Mari's since I didn't change too much about hers. He was raised by two rich famous parents, with Emilie being the one generally in charge of what he did. Under her direction, he was home schooled, learned music, and learned dance. She was artistically inclined, and wished to refine his skills in the arts, hoping he would be a cultured figure in the future. He also occasionally modeled for Gabriel, but that was more of a once a month type of deal, and he had plenty of free time to watch movies and play video games. He never left the house. While both of his parents worked frequently, he saw Gabriel less often, and viewed him as more of a distant influencing force in his life that he respected.

Then, not too long ago, Emilie fell into a seemingly permanent coma, which caused the rift between father and son to grow even more distant. Suddenly, Gabriel was spending even less time in the house, and the person who was directing Adrien's free time and education was gone, and neither pursued any therapy types of resources. Adrien spent some time grieving his not even fully dead mom while alone at home before Gabriel decided to change things. He started pushing Adrien to model even more, in a twisted attempt to spend more time around his son and ensure he kept him safe and supervised. He also promoted Natalie to his own personal assistant, giving her full reign over what happened to Adrien and their estate. While she cared for Adrien, she was never fully able to reach him on his level, especially following Gabriel's orders.

It actually ended up being Chloe, a girl he met while modeling, who became his first friend and actually started trying to drag him out of his depression. She watched movies with him, supported him at photo shoots, and most importantly, she actually listened to him and what he wanted. Under her questioning, he realized that what he wanted to do in the future was become a teacher. She's the one who pushed for him to go to public school, both so she could have a friend there and so that he could have more opportunities to pursue this dream. So long as he shows up to model, Natalie actually ends up lying and saying he's being homeschooled in order to cover for Adrien going to public school. For public appearances on tv, he acts like the perfect extrovert, but he's actually a quiet and reserved introvert, which is how he acts at school.

Chat Noir is an extension of Adrien's play at being an extrovert. He's also Adrien having the chance to let go of the guilt and the strings attached to all of his public appearances he does for his father. As Chat Noir he's a performer! He has showmanship! He's having fun and cracking puns! He also uses it as a chance to get out all his pent up jittery energy from being inside and inactive most of the time, especially in terms of talking to people. I want him to love talking to people, chatting with the random citizens of Paris, wanting to meet and get to know everyone. He's just a little stir crazy from being inside and isolated for so many years. He's also the one who willingly and happily does all the press appearances that Ladybug tends to avoid, which he has fun at due to being able to say whatever under the mask of anonymity. Also, after some time as Chat Noir and realizing how much he enjoys performing as this eccentric and energetic character, he ends up using some of his precious free time to go join the local community theater.

Also, Emilie had a little yapper purse dog that Adrien ends up taking on once she's comatose, because I think it'd be funny.

And now for the villains, all of whom have something to do with status wealth and credibility because of it, and side characters:

Gabriel is a well known and well respected man in the fashion industry and in Paris. He spends all his time away from home, focused on his job and furthering his fashion empire and career. His wife was also a prominent public figure and a working woman, and while he loved her, he didn't spend enough time with her. In her youth, Emilie was actually a villain with the peacock miraculous that she stole in her youth, with Gabriel being a hero with the butterfly miraculous who opposed her when he stumbled across it by accident. They fell in love and gave up their miraculouses, especially after the peacock got damaged. However, Emilie used it as a last ditch effort to stop a home invasion and save Adrien, and even that one transformation was enough to damage her body and lead to her going into a coma (this attack is also what led to Gorilla getting hired). Gabriel was determined to get her back, so hired a team of specialized doctors to care for her and keep her stable while he donned the butterfly miraculous to try to find and take the mythical ladybug and chat miraculouses that Emilie had told him about so many years before in order to wish her back to health.

See, while I like the drama of Adrien not knowing where his mom is and one day being able to stumble across her preserved corpse in the basement, if Emilie is a public figure and disappears, there'd be a manhunt for her. If she's said to enter a coma? Not only is there no manhunt, but Gabriel gets a perfectly curated tragic image to garner sympathy and support from the public, and Adrien has the opportunity for angsty moments of visiting his mother in the hospital

Hawkmoth is the form he dawns when hunting down the miraculouses. His outfits are over the top flamboyant runway style outfits, with his face obscured in abstract ways with each transformation. His lair is actually his office at work, not in his basement, part of the reason why he started spending even more time at work after the "death" of Emilie. Having to keep up the appearances of being at work is why he starts sending off akumatized people as scouts to do his work for him. Specifically, he uses his targets as bait to get the magic box holder to distribute the the ladybug and cat miraculouses in order to combat the problems he's causing. As things progress, however, and he gets more info on the powers, routines, and profiles of the miraculous holders, he gradually starts making more in person appearances as Hawkmoth.

Natalie started off as Gabriel's work assistant, who had worked with his company since graduating college. She had immense amounts of reverence and respect for both him and Emilie, and he in return had immense amounts of respect for her. After Emilie fell ill, he promoted her specifically to his personal assistant, giving her parts of the responsibilities that Emilie had in the company as well as over Adrien at home. At first, she takes her role over Adrien incredibly seriously, not really listening to him in favor of filling out Gabriel's orders. Over time, however, she finds herself getting incredibly attached to Adrien, wanting to connect with and help him wherever she can. She doesn't always understand him or his moods or his interests, but she cares for him nonetheless. It's after this point that she accidentally learns about Gabriel's identity as Hawkmoth. Since he trusts and respects her, he offers her to join him, though she knows she doesn't really have a choice. She ends up joining him and not voicing her concerns, determined to stay on his good side in order to continue being able to be there for and support Adrien. She still has respect for Gabriel at this point, especially once he explains his motive, but as time goes on, her motivations and allegiances become more and more muddled.

Chloe is another villain of credibility, but lessso. I really liked Chloe as a character, so I wanted to do a take that gave her more depth. Chloe's mother is an international superstar, and her father was a peer of Emilie's who died when Chloe was young. Chloe's mother married the mayor of Paris not too long after that. Chloe has grown up in an environment of money, privilege, and nepotism. She got into modeling work at a young age because she wanted to become famous and show off how beautiful she was, and her dream is to become just like her mother one day. Due to her upbringing, she looks down on those she sees as beneath her, but is actually incredibly kind to those she sees as equals. I wanted to kind of paint her as a foil to Adrien. Both have a distant parent and a parent no longer with them, and both have different responses to people and the world around them because of it. Adrien cares for people but tends to be reserved, while Chloe is cruel to others and tends to be loud. However, she does genuinely care about Adrien, and tries to be a nice person, it's just that this is all she's known. She has no idea that what she acts like could even be considered cruel since no one's ever told her before.

She worked alongside Adrien without much thought, but after he started working more due to the Emilie situation, she became fast friends with him. They shared a love of comic books and a desire to go on grand adventures, as well as a similar enough sense of humor. Chloe, having never had anyone willing to be kind to her and also build on her ideas and challenge her like Adrien does, gets attached. She thinks she's in love, but really the feeling was just friendship. She's the one who pushes Adrien to go to public school. I also think it'd be interesting if it was a reverse of what happened in the origins episode, where Marinette is the one viewed to misstep. Something she said is misinterpreted by Chloe to be a diss against Adrien, who she then defends with a passion as he is sad. Marinette, in return, feels genuinely awful for misstepping and hurting the feelings of the new boy even if she doesn't really like Chloe. By the end of this, Marinette ends up seeing Adrien as this aloof mysterious hot classmate of hers, and starts catching feelings. Adrien, meanwhile, ends up seeing Marinette as what could be considered his second friend, much to Chloe's chagrin.

Yes Chloe does eventually get the bee miraculous. That plus her realizing that are two reasons she dislikes Marinette so much: 1) she's leeching the attention of her best friend and 2) why is such a pretty girl so focused on her best friend and not her anyways, and uh oh Chloe accidentally develops a crush on Marinette lol. for the lols. anyways.

The only plot I care to develop beyond what's mentioned above is irt Alya. Logical Alya and logical Marinette, and brainiac duo. Alya, without knowing Marinette is Ladybug, starts doing independent research to track down who Hawkmoth is, just based on journalist curiosity. She uses things like cctv footage and areas of Akumatization to narrow down location and suspects. After learning about her research, Marinette tries to learn more, but Alya actually blocks her from learning more for her own safety. Eventually, Marinette reveals her identity to Alya in order to work hand in hand with her to track down Hawkmoth. Meanwhile, also for safety reasons, Ladybug and Chat Noir haven't revealed their identities to each other, despite Chat Noir's requests since he has a crush on Ladybug lol.

Beyond that, again this is a show I haven't actively watched since season two, so i dont really care about explaining every detail out lol (despite like three thousands of words to the contrary above). This is just how I would have shaped Miraculous if I was in charge of it or a reboot. If you've read this far and any of this sounds at all intriguing to you, especially if you're a miraculous fan, I encourage if not beg you to steal any ideas wholesale, idec about getting credit lol. I explain this every so often, and the initial typed explanation is in a screenshot of some instagram DMs, so this is all from memory with the hopes of preserving this au in a place I can actually access again the next time Im discussing ML with an irl and wanna reference what i'd change lol. If you're reading this still i genuinely like actually cannot fathom why but thanks i guess?

[whmp]

in case you're just here for the good stuff, i'll be tagging my personal ramblings as #whmpersonal so you can avoid em BUT this is tangentially related to the game project i'm working on, so stick around i guess? tl;dr: i'll probably make a more coherent post where I ask ppl for help (especially artists). also, i'll be more attentive and answer your asks faster, hopefully. : )

anyway, after a bit of a "review" of my creative process (and i guess my uhh way of living in general?) i've noticed that it's a huge clusterfuck. and that it has been since i was a kid. without some external pressure or an imposed structure (like deadlines, parents or strongly worded emails) i just sort of relied on random surges of productivity to carry me through life. on one hand, it's kinda fun: most of the time i'm not doing anything valuable and then all of a sudden i condense weeks worth of work into several sleepless days during which i feel like An Immortal Unstoppable God. lighting bolts shoot from my fingertips, my eyes glow in the dark, and my caffeine-to-blood volume ratio is hovering around 1.

unfortunately, it's not really sustainable. the "not doing anything valuable" stage that takes up most of my time is not me just chilling. it's me freaking the fuck out about not doing anything despite wanting to and finding myself just. not able to. not to mention that some things just need minor, but constant maintenance - at best i'd just forget about them and face the consequences later on. at worst i'd be acutely aware of them while procrastinating, clueless as to what's wrong with me.

couple that with a couple other unhealthy habits, a microscopic attention span and wow, i fit like all the criteria for adhd. i gotta admit i was super sceptical at first when doing any research, since, well. how the fuck am i even supposed to gain any unbiased insight into this. anyway, i spent a stupid amount of money on an official diagnosis (seriously why is this not covered by insurance gsygx), it took a million meetings and tests and i get a piece of paper that says i have add and deserve some medication.

this has also made me realize that i'm spread out super thin when it comes to projects. i love every single one of them, but im going to have to be a bit more realistic in terms of what can remain in "when it's done" limbo and what needs a bit of a push. the whump game is unique in that it's not just me who wants this to eventually get released. so! what this means is that it needs a proper, project structure. not a .txt on my desktop where i keep a backlog of missing features. but must important of all, it needs ~*people*~. this is the first time i took a step back and estimated how much time everything would take me and yeahhhh i was being very optimistic when i said "playable build in 2023" lol. i've been hesitant to ask for help bc 1. i'm stubborn : ) 2. im bad at coordinating stuff 3. i can't pay ppl - like seriously, there is one person making a model for me (if you're reading this sorry i didn't ask if you want a tag but this is just a personal post where i keep yapping) and it's looking so clean and professional,,, you gotta sell this as an asset.

HOWEVER im getting past the mentality of "i gotta do as much as i can by myself". and also taking meds so that im able to focus on tasks (both gamedev-related and others) and actually pay attention to what im doing. which is great news for development! and answering asks! ill be making a dev post where i tag all the ppl and will also ask for help.

that's it. im on a train rn and bored out of my mind so this is why this post exists, sorry. anyway check out this screenshot of a moment in clone high that i relate to deeply.

[bunny-hoodlum]

Asynchronous With You: Ch 4

Hinata had no idea what she was doing following this child around, being lead from booth to booth, watching her pick up snacks and play games as they went. She was asked if she wanted a taiyaki, but she hadn't the stomach for it. She was asked if she wanted to help win her a plushie, but she was too numb to respond.

Everyone was looking at them.

Her classmates made comments in passing.

"Hey, I didn't know you had a sister!"

"Whoa, shocker! You're not an only child?"

"Huh? Who's that?"

"Guess Hyuuga-san can't be mysterious and secretive forever."

And then there was Naruto's face angled above the river of bodies, wide, open eyes filled with confusion and concern.

She ducked her head down. At the same time, Hanabi tugged at her skirt and pointed at another booth ahead. Following her lead her closer to Naruto, who began to push his way through to reach her.

His prescence is always like the sun, at times warm and welcoming, other times overbearing. Suffocatingly hot, in fact. Like now. Like she's been abandoned without her shoes, wandering barefoot on an asphalt desert, and here he is bearing down on her, unrelenting.

Several takes are made between Hanabi and herself. He's assessing with his own eyes and verifying it against their history.

"How old is she?" He murmurs.

Hinata releases a shaky sigh. "Ten. Her birthday's in March."

And Kurenai had taken them in the summer before. Her parents must have gotten pregnant again shortly after.

They both watched as Hanabi grasped the baseball and threw her arm back. After a couple near misses, she finally got it through the 300pt hole. Hinata clapped, but it was hollow and robotic. This obvious show of pain only earned her more of his attention, and that pained her too.

Hanabi skipped over to them, another palm-sized plushie added to the others hooked inside her left arm. Her cunning upturned eyes widened upon seeing Naruto standing so closely to her Onee-san.

"Is that your boyfriend?"

Naruto froze up, a hand reached behind his head as he sputtered to explain without making things weird.

"He's someone that was nice to me in grade school," Hinata said coolly.

"Uh, yeah," The right half of Naruto's face pinched in mild disagreement, finding her answer a bit more impersonal than he was going for.

"What? That's all?" Hanabi's open-mouth frown made her look like the goldfish she tried to scoop earlier. She seemed visibly bored by this revelation.

Hinata also caught an indignant look from Naruto, whose eyes seemed to ask 'Yeah, that's all?'.

"Oh, I forgot," She met his stare, "You're trying to befriend the whole school by graduation." It wasn't code. He was almost obsessively expanding his contacts every day. He wanted to appear in every school photo for the yearbooks. He wanted the empty spaces so dense with inside jokes, fond wishes and signatures that no one could ever say he was unpopular and unloved.

"Hell yeah. And I'm halfway there, too."

It was Hanabi's turn to read the air between them as she glanced from person to person. A good-humored smirk curved her lips. "Looks like you have a long ways to go with Onee-san. Well, nice meeting you!" She grabbed Hinata's hand and began to drag her away, waving her flummoxed acquaintance goodbye. Hinata didn't even resist.

Naruto watched her disappear through the throng, as irritation and discomfort took seat inside his chest. She's walking around like a puppeted corpse and she gives him attitude?! His sigh transforms into a drawn out growl as he mentally works through the wrongness he feels. He comes out of it calmer, sympathy renewed.

She's simply not acting like herself. He has to forgive her for that.

As her brother, and the only one that's around, he has to fix this.

Otherwise, what is he good for?

______________________________

He had determined to find her again later in the day, when her sister surprise was no longer sucking the soul out of her.

And he does find her later, when the sky is a guava-mango sorbet dimming darker, and the school halls are shadowed in sleepy silence.

She's found a place to be alone, in a stairwell that hardly anybody uses.

Well, except himself. And a few others.

It's a great place for a post-lunchtime quickie.

It's not a hundred-percent guarantee to be unoccupied, but it's kind of a well-guarded school secret.

Now that he thinks about it, as she sits there much like his other catches have, and he's coming to meet her when everyone's gone, it leaves him feeling... exposed and shameful. Like they're both here for unsavory reasons.

A flash of a memory intrudes on him, of baby-soft, plump white skin that refused to be buttoned up in the shirt he shrank, bouncing with the force to cause an earthquake in his room, that tight-lined cleavage taunting him.

It took him weeks to look her in the face again, and he thinks about it now?!

He smacks his cheeks until he's regained stoic resolve. But then something else nags at him.

What if she was here, and she was waiting for someone else?

No one's invited her over here yet, he would know.

But they could. And when they did...

He shakes off these burdensome thoughts like a wet dog.

No one in this school has their eye on his sister. He would know that, too.

And he wouldn't allow it.

He can't think of a damn soul that's good enough for her.

So hardworking, so generous, so considerate and patient. Plus she was smart, she cooks better than Kurenai-obasan, and she's an amazing listener.

She's just so, so amazing.

And yet, stuff like this happens.

She's like the smallest thing to ever exist, that's what she looks like right now. As if he could scoop her up with both hands and still lose her between the cracks of his palms.

Just like when they first met.

Neji's voice rises up in the back of his mind. "You're the only one I can ask."

He's got a lot of experience cheering her up and making her feel safe, and this time will be no different.

Or so he thought.

When she looks up at him, he feels transparent. Her brow is furrowed like it doesn't make sense for him to be here.

"Can you take me to the train station?" She asks unblinkingly, thin tears escaping from the inner corners.

His mind goes a mile a minute with speculation, but he'd already been planning on saying 'yes' to her no matter what she had asked of him.

______________________________

They're taking the train to Neji's private high school. It's way pass curfew, so there's no visiting him at his dorm, but they're going to try.

Naruto can't talk to her because she's fully turned towards the window. Instead he takes this free time to picture himself in her situation. That he has family somewhere out there, and siblings he's never met. That they lived their lives without him. Maybe even erased his existence from their story. No photographs, no baby book.

Was Hinata even still on their family registry?!

He folded over and clutched his head, groaning. "This is so fucked. How could they do this to you?!"

For the past six hours, she's been asking herself the same thing.

She was also asking for Hanabi's sake, those fragile words ringing over and over in the back of her mind.

"Do you think I'm a redo?"

Hinata squeezed her eyes shut tight.

Because there are no redos without mistakes.

______________________________

AN: Sorry, this is only 800 words! D: I'll probably combine this with the previous chapter as well when I post it to AO3. Or maybe it's somehow fine as is? Like an Interlude? I also wanted to write that heartwrenching scene between Hanabi and Hinata and get some exposition out of the way, but today it felt tedious. :( I wish I had written it when I originally wanted to, lol.

That aside, I'm not totally happy with the flow of the middle scene, it just feels maybe... distracted? or disjointed? Hmm... tangential?

Plus I couldn't seem to dig very deep into Naruto's reactions and like, the logical progression of his emotions. I feel I just skimmed the surface. Oh wait, maybe it's because he ought to be belligerently outspoken about this stuff, right? （・□・；）

Sometimes I think I really miss the ball when writing Naruto cuz I subdue him to be more 'normal' and have enough situational awareness to get by on. (눈_눈)

[perfeggso]

I don’t want a lot (Johnny x Reader)

I wrote this as part of @suh-insane’s walking in a winter wonderland collab, so thanks to her for hosting! Happy holidays and I hope y’all enjoy ❄️☺️

Genre: domestic fluff

Characters: Johnny, fem! reader, Ten

Warnings: nothing really just mentions of bad things that have happened this year lol. It’s a very...2020 fic. Also I guess some language. Also, smoking pot.

Rating: teen and up

Length: 3.5k

My movie quote is “They can’t evict you on Christmas! Then you’d be ho-ho-homeless!”

December 18th 2020, 4:37 p.m.

“Knock, knock!” You pound your fist against the wooden door in front of you, then pull your coat tighter around you. You’d moved to Chicago five years ago for college, and you’re still not sure if you’ll ever adjust to the snowy winter months. It was at said college that you met,

“Johnny Suh!” You bang a fist on the door three more times. “I know you’re in there. Take your headphones off, you dumbass.”

You’re about to pull your phone out of your pocket and go to the trouble of removing a glove to text your boyfriend when you hear the door unlock from the inside, a metallic tumbling sound.

When the door opens all the way, Johnny is standing just past the threshold of his apartment, his catlike lips curled up at the edges. He’s wearing grey sweatpants and a blue flannel, and his freshly dyed blond hair falls to where his headphones rest around the base of his neck. You can hear Nirvana coming from them because you are dating a stereotype.

Johnny leans his large frame against the side of the door where he had been holding it and smirks, but there’s nothing but softness behind the expression.

“Long time no see, sicko,” he teases.

You roll your eyes as he moves to let you pass into the entryway of his and Ten’s shoebox dwelling.

“You look even more like a deadbeat than you did a month ago,” you say, not moving because your clothing is starting to drip melting snow onto the floor and you don’t even know where to begin with taking it off. “This is proof you need me around taking care of you.”

Johnny pushes off the door and closes it, pausing his music. He crowds close and starts unwrapping your scarf so you don’t have to think about it anymore, shakes some of the slush off it so it pools at your feet, and hangs it on the coat rack. He does the same with your puffer jacket.

“Aw,” he pouts, “you don’t like the new color?” He tries to remove your beanie too, but it was part of your Outfit, so you yank it back down onto your head and give Johnny puppy dog eyes, choosing to ignore the way your heart rate picks up a little from the proximity. Hey, isolation was rough, okay? Johnny tucks your hair behind your ears instead.

“No, baby,” you say, starting to toe off your snow boots. “I love it. It’s very Disney prince, but simultaneously very… Kurt Cobain.” Johnny smiles and lets you finish stripping your winter gear, walking his way back towards his sofa until he’s sitting, legs wide. Snow falls in flurries past the window behind him. “It’s just that, I dunno, you look like you’ve been spending more time on Reddit or something.” Johnny sulks jokingly at your ribbing as you hang up your purse and try not to fixate on how cold the indoor air still is. “I can tell you haven’t gotten laid in a while,” you continue. “Oh wait! I forgot you have Ten around for that.”

Now it’s Johnny who’s rolling his eyes, but he doesn’t seem too offended because he beckons you over to sit with him. You follow his gesture, skipping towards him until you can curl into his side on the couch. He removes his headphones and lays his head against the crown of yours, taking your hand softly.

“It’s not my fault my girlfriend abandoned me for a month,” he complains, rubbing his thumb over yours.

This makes you chuckle. Oh, how you’ve missed him. “If that’s what you call ‘considerately protecting you from the Novel Coronavirus’,” you joke, “then I guess, but I refuse to apologize for doing my civic duty.”

Your case hadn’t been bad, but it was a logistical nightmare. You’d spent two weeks in total isolation, nursing a cough, guzzling hard alcohol straight to see if you could taste it, sending your best friend out to shop for you, and thanking your lucky stars for having a job that would let you work from home. You’d spent the next two waiting to test negative for the virus and a positive for antibodies. Johnny was initially distraught when you told him, sending you cloying messages and calling everyday to see if your symptoms were getting better or worse. Once you’d convinced him you weren’t dying though, he went back to his usual obnoxious self, joking about planning your funeral and accusing you of faking it to avoid him.

Johnny pulls you tighter into his side. “Whatever,” he concedes. “Is it safe to kiss you yet?”

You look up at him and shrug. “Nothing’s 100% but…”

That’s all the reassurance he needs to pull you into his lap and connect your lips. It's soft and languid, and you hold each other through it. His arms are so solid around your waist it simultaneously makes your heart flutter and makes you feel like you could relax and take a nap right here and now. When you pull away, Johnny runs his hands along your figure, as if to reassure himself you’re really there. The smile he gives you glows, but only for a moment. You curl yourself into the crook of his neck and place the back of your hand on his cheek, tender. His skin there scratches yours just the tiniest bit.

“I missed you,” he says, chuckling.

“Mm-hm, I missed you too,” you reply. “How are you, anyway? You said you had something to tell me?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. He maneuvers you off his lap to sit by his side, and from this angle you can truly tell that he’s going sheepish. Suddenly it feels like there’s an alien hand in your stomach. What could this possibly be about? Johnny’s nervous silence gets your brain spinning – a zoetrope of stupidity. Am I being broken up with? No – obviously not. Does he have a family member dying of COVID? I fucking hope not; that’d be complicated on multiple levels. Maybe it’s good? Maybe he finally got a job offer but he has to move away or something.

Johnny starts talking before your mind can come up with any other ridiculous hypotheses.

“We’re getting evicted.”

You furrow your brow. Had you misheard him? You shake your head, incredulous. Johnny and Ten had always maintained a good relationship with their landlord. It didn’t make sense for everything to turn on a dime, even if they were struggling financially.

“You’re kidding,” is all you manage to say.

Johnny just purses his lips and raises his eyebrows as if to say, “it is what it is.”

What he really says is that he wishes he was kidding, but he’s not.

“Oh my god,” you respond, crossing your arms in irritation at, well, at everything lately. “Fuck! When is this happening?”

Johnny sighs. “Technically in a week.”

You feel the cogs of your post-COVID brain start to crank against each other. A week from today would be…hold on,

“Wait,” you say, as the situation starts to appear more and more ridiculous. “Like exactly a week from today? Like on Christmas? You’re being evicted on literal Christmas?” You’re trying really hard not to raise your voice, even if it’s clear that if you did, it would be out of indignation on Johnny’s behalf. You’re obviously not upset with him.

Johnny’s eyes roll around in their sockets as if this is the first time he’s contemplated the exact timing.

“Well, yeah, I guess a week from today is Christmas…”

The absurdity of this all is getting to you, and you can’t help it, you start to laugh. It’s that kind of nihilistic, fuck-all laughter that’s been one of the few things getting you through this year.

“They can’t evict you on Christmas!” you quote. “Then you’d be ho-ho-homeless!”

Johnny looks at you blankly for a second, so you contort your face into that open expression universally recognized as the “get it?” face.

“From Go?” You hint. “C’mon, Johnny boy.”

And before his nickname can fully escape your mouth, your boyfriend is cutting you off with a long sound of recognition and doubling over his lap in giggles.

“Good one,” he says into his right knee, and you giggle along with him. “Wholly inappropriate, but clever nonetheless.”

“Why, thank you,” you say, enjoying the levity, but unable to uproot the feeling of dread in your gut at Johnny’s conundrum.

Go is one of you and Johnny’s favorite movies to watch around Christmastime, mostly because it’s only tangentially related to Christmas, it’s kitschy and ridiculous, and has a plot that is 90% crime. You’re surprised he didn’t catch the reference more quickly, but to his credit, he has more pressing worries taking up mental space.

“Where is Ten, anyway?” you ask, looking around performatively at the messy and claustrophobic room. A silver plastic Christmas tree twinkles on a table in the corner. “Have you two talked about a plan yet?”

“He’s grocery shopping,” Johnny explains. “He’ll be home soon. And yeah, we have an idea.”

“You do? Because you could always move in with me.”

Johnny scrunches his face up. “I would love to live with you.” Your heart rattles a little in excitement, even though you know there will be a ‘but.’ Johnny goes on, “but you know both of us wouldn’t fit in your apartment. Where would Ten sleep? Or put his stuff? We’d all be on top of each other.”

You nod, defeated because you know he’s right.

“Hey,” Johnny says, “but we can always have the ‘moving in’ conversation again, okay?”

“Okay,” you say, grabbing his hand. “Sounds good.”

It suddenly feels very dark in the apartment (it’s still chilly enough you think you might be able to see your breath, but you aren’t about to complain because you know there’s a very good reason for that), so Johnny pushes himself up off the couch to turn on a couple of lamps.

“So,” he says, facing you from across the room, “we’re gonna be evicted on Christmas, no matter what the cinematographic masterpiece that is Go tells us is right or wrong. Christmas is just as much of a capitalist construction as our rent, after all.”

You’re about to pipe up again about how fucked that is and how surely they can come to some sort of agreement with the landlord, but Johnny anticipates this and keeps talking.

“We tried to argue, babe, but as I know you know, we don’t exactly have much of a leg to stand on.”

Johnny is right. Again. How many months behind were they on rent at this point? They’d gotten a few months delayed back in spring, but they still owed everything that built up from that before the end of the year, and they’d blown through their stimulus check a long time ago. Johnny has tried to find work, but the theater business hasn’t exactly been booming. Ten, for his part, is able to make a bit of money doing freelance illustration and teaching dance classes over Zoom from his room, but his studio’s engagement has dropped since March and he still unfortunately gets paid per student. You can’t help wanting to punch a wall in frustration at how unfair this all is, but it’s not like any of it comes as a shock. You’re not naïve. You and Johnny met at a leftist theory club for Christ’s sake.

“We’re helping organize a rent strike,” Johnny says, calming you down. Finally, a glimmer of hope. “We’re not the only ones in the building going through it right now, and we know a lot of the tenants who aren’t being evicted well enough we can convince them to join.”

Right then, the front door flies open and thwacks a startled Johnny in the back.

“I’m home!” Ten calls from behind a sack of groceries. You can’t even see his face yet. “I’m terribly sorry,” he directs at Johnny, then heaves the bag of food onto the kitchen counter which is also sort of in the middle of the living room.

“Ooh,” he coos when he sees you, still sat on the couch. “The missus is back!” He strips himself of his winter coat, ignoring your scoffing and revealing an oversized red and white striped sweater. He shimmies against the cool air and lets out a sort of squeal. “I was not built for this actual winter shit.”

“Hi, Ten,” you say once he finishes his theatrics. “Missed you.”

Ten shoots a sappy pout your way. “I miss you too. I’m so glad you’re feeling better! You have no idea how morose Johnny got without you constantly around. Can I give you a hug?”

You nod and try to warm up Ten’s tiny frame with yours while Johnny mutters something about Ten not knowing what “morose” means. When you break away, Johnny is rifling through the week’s haul to put things away.

“I see you didn’t go off-brand for the ramen,” Johnny remarks, stacking several Shin bowls in the cupboard. He turns to Ten with a raised brow. “Big spender.”

“They didn’t have anything else but if you would answer your damn phone I could have called and asked you about it.”

“I answer my phone,” Johnny grumbles, stowing some orange juice away in the fridge.

“Besides,” Ten continues, ignoring his roommate, “since I’m the only one making any money in this household I figured I’d give myself some discretion for spending it.”

Johnny grimaces, and you figure this is where you should probably step in.

“We were just talking about the rent strike, Ten. Johnny was filling me in.”

Ten turns his attention back to you, letting Johnny house the food items in peace.

“We’ll see how it goes,” says Ten, looking out the window just past your shoulder, “but I’m letting myself hope a little bit. As far as I’m concerned, they’ll be kicking my corpse out of here before they put me on the streets.”

Johnny scoffs. “Always so dramatic.”

“Says the former theater major.”

“Touché.”

You’d missed the ‘old married couple’ dynamic your boyfriend has with his roommate.

“But really, just, please try not to get the cops involved,” you plead. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” says Johnny as he closes the last cabinet and crinkles the brown paper bag up for storage.

Ten shrugs. “No promises.”

You sigh.

Once everything is good and settled a few moments later, Ten decides the apartment needs a more festive atmosphere, so that’s how you end up getting dragged down the short hallway to Johnny’s room while Ten belts Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” from the living room and accuses Johnny of being a scrooge. Even still, Johnny sways playfully from side to side as he walks backwards, shimmying his shoulders and mouthing the words with a smile between protestations that this is “not how I envisioned finally spending time again with my girlfriend!” The way he buries his hands into the sleeves of his flannel to make sweater paws makes your heart so full you want to curl up and die. But, moving on.

Once in his bedroom, Johnny flicks on a warm-hued lamp and watches fondly as you collapse on the bed.

“I really did miss you guys,” you say for what feels like the hundredth time in an hour.

Johnny’s lips press into a little smile. “Yeah. We missed you. A lot. Especially me – you have no idea.”

You laugh sardonically. “Based on your text messages, I think I actually do have an idea.”

Johnny flops down on top of you, crushing you a bit.

“Oh really?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. His golden hair is falling in your face and it tickles, but Johnny halts any laughter with a kiss, then dots tiny kisses all over your cheeks and nose. They tickle too.

“You wanna smoke?”

“Sure.”

Johnny has a pre-rolled joint on his bedside table, and you watch him light it, feeling like you’re in a snow globe with the fall of snowflakes outside. The sky is that weird greyish off-yellow that only comes with a snowy night.

After a couple of hits, Johnny lies back down next to you and hands you the joint. The smoke brings you that usual tight feeling, like your lungs are shrinking but at the same time swimming in radiant heat. You don’t know if you should technically be doing this right after COVID, but you’re young and your body is resilient; you figure you’ll be fine. Besides, you can already feel the pleasant lightness setting in around your mind. It’s a placebo at this point, no doubt, but the relaxed anticipation is nice. You take note of the fact that Johnny had started playing music while you were thinking about lungs. The Strokes’ “Under Control” is doing battle with Ten’s Christmas tunes still seeping in through the cracks in the door.

You hand Johnny his joint back and roll onto your side, supporting your head with one hand and curling the other into Johnny’s abundant hair.

“I just want to say one more time,” you begin, “if worse comes to worst, you can always move in with me.”

Johnny takes another hit and holds it for a second, leaving you in anticipation.

“I know,” he says simply. “But I really think this’ll work. I have to, right? Besides, if Ten had to hear us fucking multiple times a week we would all start to regret living together. That, I can promise.”

You laugh, burying your increasingly silly-feeling head into Johnny’s chest. “Okay, fair.”

There’s stillness for a few beats where you just count your and Johnny’s breaths, trying to synch them up. This doesn’t work though, since Johnny’s lungs are bigger. Then,

“There’s no way your parents would lend you some money?” Your voice comes out quiet. “Or let you stay with them for a while?”

Johnny looks down at you, letting out a heavy sigh. “No, no. That wouldn’t be a good idea for…so many reasons. Besides, they don’t exactly have an extra few months worth of Chicago rent lying around either.”

You nod against Johnny’s chest. “I figured,” you say. “Just checking.”

Johnny brushes his fingers through your hair and kisses your part. “I appreciate your concern,” he says, offering a slightly sly smile.

You kiss the white fabric of his undershirt. It’s been so long since the two of you just laid together, and it feels better than you could have hoped, Johnny’s body heat helping to alleviate some of the cold of an apartment gradually losing its utilities. You wish you could get closer than chest to chest. You kind of wish you could burrow into him, but not in a weird way, you know?

“I believe in you guys,” you say. “However I can help, I will.”

“Thanks.”

Apparently, Johnny is done with talking, because he pulls you in for a warm kiss. Then, he gets the brilliant idea to shotgun the pot smoke. This activity quickly devolves into a very giggly makeout session, only to be interrupted by Ten’s voice outside the door.

“I’m opening the door in five seconds, you guys,” he says, “and if Johnny’s dick is out when I get in there, I’m evicting both of you myself!”

You and Johnny fall together laughing as Ten cautiously cracks the door. He swats at the air in disapproval.

“Stinks…” he remarks. “Oh, thank god you’re decent. Anyway, John, if the lady is staying for the evening, you both need to come help cook dinner, because I am not your housemaid, even if I do look good in a maid costume. Chop-chop.”

It takes way too long to get up out of bed because Ten, as usual, has made both you and Johnny absolutely lose it. Eventually, you manage to rise, but Johnny pulls you quickly back against his lap.

“Hey!”

“Just a minute.” He presses one last kiss under your left ear. “I love you.”

You can feel your skin tingle, although it might just be the weed. Either way, you’ll never tire of hearing that. “I love you too, Johnny.”

“I think Mariah was right,” Johnny whispers, voice displaying mock awe as if he were coming to a mind blowing realization. “All I want for Christmas is you.”

You give him a sympathy chuckle because that was kind of cute, in a corny way, and Johnny just swats your ass a little in response to get you back up to standing.

“Well, you and some basic shelter would be ideal,” Johnny deadpans. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask but I guess we’ll see.” You smile sympathetically. This strike is no doubt going to make for a stressful week, but you’re glad it’s starting like this.

“Hey, love birds!” Ten hollers from the kitchen.

“C’mon,” you say with a laugh. “Let’s not leave him waiting any longer.”

[gottagobuycheese]

4, 5, 7 for the writing meme. Thanks!

(Writing meme)

Thank YOU for indulging me with these questions, and sorry for taking so long to answer! What is possibly my final finals season just about wrapped up, and I couldn’t think about anything else until it did (so fingers crossed it really has wrapped up lmao). So without further ado, here are some unnecessarily long answers!

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

Ideas as in “I am actively working on this/making notes about it” or ideas as in “I have daydreamed about it at least once”? Because there’s…definitely way more of the second than the first lol.

But if we’re talking the former, then the thing that’s currently gripping my mind is a (hopefully) short post-true ending Undertale fic in which Undyne and Asgore catch up over tea and somehow get around to talking about the nature of human souls and what it what it takes to actually collect one (i.e. what it took to really, truly perma-kill a human). The problem is I don’t remember how much each character actually knows about the subject, so I’m rewatching a pacifist playthrough as “research” — and also falling back headfirst into the vast plethora of content that exists for the source material, predictably. It’s been a good few years since I was this fixated on it, which is great news for me because there is SO MUCH stuff to catch up on! (Tangentially, I guess it was kind of predictable, since I always seem to fall back into some kind of comfort video game around finals season, but usually it’s Ace Attorney, so this is new.)

In terms of the second, an idea that has been pretty solidly in daydream territory for a while is some kind of Stranger x Nobody Knows crossover fic in which (Senior) Inspector Han and (possibly former) Detective Cha cross paths for some reason. I have no idea what I’d want from it plot/content-wise, so I doubt it’ll ever be much more than a vaguely entertaining impression in my head, but I just think it’d be cool to see those two interact XD

Sadly neither of these things are the things I’m ACTUALLY supposed to be working on, so they probably (hopefully) won’t be done for a while.

5. Share one of your strengths.


Ah, one of my least favorite interview questions. Uh, I guess I have fun writing dialogue, and it definitely tends to come easier than other aspects of writing (like DESCRIPTION, blegh). Plus I have been told that it makes people laugh sometimes, which is usually my goal — or makes them feel Painful Feelings, which is my other goal that unfortunately rarely makes it to the publishing phase — so I will count that as a success! And therefore a strength of some sort.

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.


Oof, this is a hard one, haha. There is a subtle yet important difference between saying why you like something versus saying why you’re proud of something, but I shall try to veer more toward the latter since that’s the actual question.

As it turns out, being more comfortable with dialogue means that most of my stories end up being pretty dialogue-heavy, which I just discovered when flicking through fics to borrow a snippet from, but if we’re going with strictly prose, then this bit from a long-ish comedic Good Omens fic I still haven’t figured out all the plot points to was fun to write: 


In literature, funerals are often held in the pouring rain. This is because, in literature, authors can carefully describe how grief-stricken the attendees are, how their water-logged clothes, heavy and cold, cannot begin to compare to the weight of the sorrow that drags them down, how it pulls at their body, hangs from their shoulders and backs and legs and soul, begging them to join their loved ones in the ground. They can describe how the heavens themselves weep for the dead, that the earth, for once, pauses in its frantic flurry of activity, takes a moment to mourn what it has lost, and grieve for those who are left behind.

Of course, grief is complicated. Authors understand this. Sometimes the attendees are angry, and so the funerals are sunny, and the attendees are angry because the world dares to keep spinning on its axis even when theirs has ground to a halt. They are angry because the heavens won’t hide their tears for them, won’t admit they did something wrong, taking away someone who was so loved, so cherished, so good. They are angry because their heartache isn’t enough, doesn’t nearly encompass the gaping void torn in their reality, doesn’t do the dead justice. The earth and the skies and the seas ought to be mad with grief as well. Thunderstorms, gale-force winds, surging tides and shaking stone. How dare the world imply it’s no great loss?

Or maybe the funerals are held in the snow, because grief is cold and numbing and relentless, and no amount of warm soup or thick blankets or knitted mittens will make it better, fill the hollow misery the way one can fill a grave with soil and ice crystals. No one really wants to be there, socks soaked through and half-asleep from the chill, but sometimes you need to slog your way through those waist-deep banks of grief anyway, that frigid, dull, powder-white pain, focus only on how your teeth chatter and your fingertips turn blue and put all the rest of it aside for later, when it’s warm again. If it will ever be warm again.

Or perhaps the author just likes snow.

I get to ramble about some of my favorite kinds of weather for three paragraphs?? Count me IN

Anyways, I think it did a good job of keeping with the vaguely whimsical tone of the rest of the story, despite this being the opening to a (fake) funeral scene. And yeah, maybe it’s a bit excessive and heavy-handed, but it fits the context well enough and has some actual Imagery™, not to mention that it actually segues somewhat neatly into the next bit, so I think it did its job — which is all I can really ask for, so I’ll be proud of that! It’s a bit of a narrative reprieve from the dialogue-and-emotions heavy previous scene and the comedic shenanigans of the subsequent scene. Which would probably also be quite dialogue heavy, except for the part where I haven’t written it yet sjkdhfskf

[sage-nebula]

Neo: The World Ends With You - Thoughts So Far

I’m on Day 6 of Week 1 and I want to compile my thoughts so far — not in a formal post, but at least all in one place, especially since I feel that jotting down what I think / feel as I go through will help me write my review when I’m done. Spoilers under the cut, obviously — and while it should go without saying, do NOT comment on this post with spoilers from later in the game, so help me. Even if I pose a question that gets answered later on — hell, especially if I do — don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I will find out in my own time.

With that said . . .

So obviously, I’m really enjoying it so far. You can tell that the writers / devs haven’t lost their touch despite it being thirteen years since the first game was made. You can also tell that a lot of love went into this; this isn’t something they churned out just to make money (if they thought this was a moneymaker we wouldn’t have had to wait 13 freaking years for the sequel), but rather something they really, really wanted to make. Not a total passion project, because those aren’t allowed in the world of capitalism, but there is still a lot of love there. 

That said, more specific thoughts:

THE MUSIC. It doesn’t really come as a surprise given that TWEWY’s soundtrack was phenomenal, but god, they brought it right back for this game. The remixes (“Someday”, “Three Minutes Clapping”, “Transformation”, “The One Star” etc) are all excellent, but the new tracks are phenomenal too. Tbh I’m not sure how any of the Players get any fighting done when the music makes you want to just bust a move right there in the scramble. It’s so good.

Most of the characters are great too. Of the Wicked Twisters, I think Fret is my favorite; he is pure of heart, dumb of ass, and I love that for him. I do like Rindo too, of course, and his habit of overthinking everything (since Fret has zero brain cells, Rindo has to make up for it), but him being standoffish / socially anxious and snarky makes him feel a bit like a toned down Neku, so he doesn’t catch my interest quite as much. And while I do like Nagi, the way she speaks in like . . . medieval-esque language is a bit off-putting. In particular it’s weird that Rindo didn’t tell her to knock it off with the “Lord Rindo” stuff since using such an honorific would be considered awkward / embarrassing in Japanese. I guess he’s just too socially anxious / awkward to tell her to stop, but it’s still a bit distracting.  Other than that, I’m really not a fan of Kubo (one of the Reapers) or . . . Susukichi, I think his name is? The leader of the Ruinbringers. I find them both to be pretty annoying, haha. But I love Shoka, as well as Kanon, and Motoi is a good bean, too. As for the Deep River Society . . . those nerds have issues lmao. Especially their leader. Although I can’t fault him for breaking down sobbing when he realizes that he now stands a very good chance of getting erased, which reminds me . . .

HOW ARE WE ON DAY SIX AND THE WICKED TWISTERS STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT BEING ERASED IS?? We have kind of an inverse situation where where Neku knew right away that he would get erased if he failed the missions / didn’t win the Game, but didn’t find out until later that he was dead. Here, the Wicked Twisters learn that they’re dead fairly quickly (and Fret has some realistic denial going on about it at first, though he gets over it pretty quickly), but they’re still completely in the dark about the fact that their souls will get wiped from existence if they lose despite erasure being mentioned at least a handful of times. Like I guess it was never spelled out for them, but especially as someone who played the first game about a million times, it’s a bit maddening to see them be like, “Why is he crying like his life is on the line? lol whatevs no big deal la di da!” Since the Wicked Twisters aren’t aware of the stakes, a new player wouldn’t be either, and so it rather tones down the urgency that was felt in the original game where everyone was very much aware that they were fighting for their right to exist.

Since I brought up Motoi, I want to say that I just played past the part where he reveals that he was An0ther, who is apparently Rindo’s favorite blogger / poet. I feel like this is meant to be similar to how Hanekoma was CAT, Neku’s favorite artist, but it doesn’t carry the same impact because a.) as far as we know An0ther didn’t have anything to do with how Rindo died; b.) we haven’t seen Rindo bring An0ther or his poetry up that much, much less have anything An0ther said be his entire life’s mantra; c.) we haven’t gotten to know Motoi that well either. Like we met him once before this revelation. That said I’m not sure it was supposed to have the same impact as the Hanekoma = CAT reveal, but if it was then it did fall short. (Also I saw it coming the second Motoi quoted An0ther lmao.)

Speaking of Hanekoma, WHERE IS MY MANS??? I know he has to show up at some point because if I’m not mistaken we saw him in the trailers. And if I am mistaken then he still has to show up at some point because he played a central role in the “A New Day” epilogue chapter of Final Remix, what with Coco being unable to control him and him knowing what was going on, plus he was testing Neku for something in “Another Day” and that has to be whatever is going on in this game. I’m sure he’ll come in for some big reveal later, but like, we have a new street artist in this game (MKN) with no mention of CAT as of yet, and I’m just like . . . where is he. Where is my mans. What is he doing. Bring him to me.

That said, we already got to see my #2 mans (Kariya♥) so I am happy about that at least. 

Back to my mans for a hot second: I actually erased my demo save data and started fresh to remind myself of everything when I got the game, and idk if it was in the demo or not, but regardless—at the end of the demo portion there’s this shot of the sky and then this nameless voice is like, “It’s finally starting. I hope you wake up soon. I don’t want you to miss all the action.” My current guess is that the speaker was Hanekoma, speaking to Joshua. Joshua being “asleep” would explain why the Game is as screwed up as it is right now, what with it having been going on for a year and people able to choose to play again and again and again while the rest of the Players—who tbh should also be counted as winners if they survive the week!—are trapped in limbo.

Because that’s the thing: I know that it was partially a lie to cover for the fact that Joshua’s game with Megumi was set to last three weeks, but at the end of the third week Megumi told Neku that a new rule was being put in place that wouldn’t allow repeats of the Game anymore. But even setting that aside, in the original Shibuya UG rules, anyone who survived the Game could get a wish at the end, whether that was to be brought back to life or made into a Reaper. This is why at the end of Week 1, the three winners were Neku, Shiki, and Beat. However, here the Ruinbringers are able to keep everyone trapped and they have been trapped for at least a year, given what Motoi said. It’s completely different rules and I’m sure that this has something to do with the fact that the majority of the Reapers we’ve seen so far are from Shinjuku (at least going by the spoilery trailer, and iirc it was confirmed in “A New Day” that Coco was from Shinjuku actually, but it’s been a while so I could be wrong about that).

Speaking of, has anyone noticed that the possibly-Shinjuku Reapers don’t have wings? No?

ALSO speaking of Coco, at least tangentially: Coco was the one who revived Minamimoto at the end of “A New Day”. However, he’s definitely not how I would have expected. Like despite Coco using the Taboo Noise sigil to bring him back, he’s clearly not in his Taboo form. He’s using psychs as a Player would, rather than a Reaper. And while it’s clear he’s up to some form of nonsense, it’s unclear exactly what form of nonsense he’s up to. I know that he’s here for fanservice and that him looking like Nagi’s bias from Elegant Strategy is a tongue-in-cheek nod to that, but I have too much faith in this series to think that’s all this is. I’m wondering if being revived for a second time fixed whatever screws were loose in his head before? Or if he was revived as a human Player by like, Joshua or something? (Although why Joshua would do that I have no idea. Maybe Hanekoma instead?) Hmmm . . .

Small aside, but we all know that Nagi has put herself into hundreds of thousands of yen in debt for Tomonami merch lolol RIP Nagi. (I’m also interpreting that she’s not actually older than Rindo or Fret, but she just skipped a bunch of grades. Like I feel like this might have been lost in translation a bit, and that she’s a senpai to them because she’s in uni but she’s not actually older than them. I could be wrong but that’s how I’m interpreting it right now. She just doesn’t look or act older than them.)

Oh another minor annoyance, but whether it’s due to the partial 3D environment or something else, I’m SO ANNOYED that some of the streets aren’t connecting as they should now. Like, how going in the direction of Molco spits you out at Spain Hill or 104 or whatever? I don’t remember exactly what area it was, but it wasn’t Molco!! I’m sure if I hadn’t played the original a million times like a loser this wouldn’t be such a big deal to me, but I have and it is lmao. Also, they’ve had the Shibuya Underpass / Cat Street blocked off this whole time and I’m like :( let me go to Cat Street :( let me see my mans

I’m relieved that Ken Doi is still making delicious food and I look forward to his ramen curry fusion. I was really upset about RamenDon being gone at first but as long as Ken Doi is still around I am happy.

My dinner just arrived so this is all I have to say for now, but I will update more as I play more. I love this game and I’m so happy to be back in Shibuya, even if the characters pronounce it wrong sometimes (saying “ShiBOOya” like pls . . . you are supposed to be Japanese . . . get it right . . .)

[canonicallyanxious]

12, 23, 34 and 35. pls answer as long as u need to!

thank you for the permission to ramble anon skjfnsknfs you genuinely have no idea how much i appreciate it

12.  Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about.

sndfkjsdnfksd what wips... really though i’m finishing up my one actual wip [davenzi star wars au scream] today and once that’s done i’ll have basically no wips to speak of, wowowow! i can provide a small list of au ideas for kieutou i’m excited to tackle, though. ABSOLUTELY NO PROMISES any of these will ever see the light of day or that i’ll even get around to starting the drafting process for them but right now in the brainstorming phase they do live in my brain rent free

summer fling/romance au

high fantasy au - kieu my as a half-elf, fatou as a human bard

korrasami au

modern persuasion au

also my friend suggested doing some druck new gen spin-offs of the star wars au which, like, i’m not NOT thinking about tbqh

23. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas?

Honestly i struggle with prompts/challenges in a major way, idk it’s just a lot easier to motivate my writing brain with intrinsic motivation [e.g being really excited about an idea i came up with myself] than extrinsic motivation [e.g deadlines/prompts]. i am trying to be better about taking prompts, though! often the issue i have is with being excited about an idea that i didn’t come up with but if i can find a way to make the idea my own then i feel like that’s good practice anyway, especially for times when i don’t really have the energy for coming up with my own ideas but i still wanna write!

[as far as challenges go tho i mean i’ve tried a few in my time and all i have to say on the matter is: never again]

34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm bold of you to assume i remember anything i have ever written skjdnfskdjnfsdkj anyway here’s a little bit from the most recent thing i posted bc i actually really like this bit of dialogue:

Fatou reaches into the pile of nail polish and pulls out a bottle filled to the brim with a deep crimson red.

“The color of your heart,” she says.

Kieu My looks up at her. “You think so?”

“Yeah,” Fatou says. “You picked the color of mine.”

Kieu My reaches out and closes Fatou’s fingers around the bottle, warmth of her palm resting lightly against her knuckles.

“You say such pretty things,” she says.

Fatou meets Kieu My’s eyes. “I only say things that are true.”

“Yeah,” Kieu My says, and smiles. “Same thing.”

35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

I HAD A TIME DECIDING WHAT TO RAMBLE ABOUT in fact i legit couldn’t decide skjnfskdjfsnd so i had @boxesfullofthoughts give me a prompt and this is what they said I should talk about: “the use of themes in your work and what themes you feel resonate most with you and your audience.” So i guess i’m gonna ramble about that now!

So one big reason why i gravitate toward fic is because i think it’s a really great avenue for exploring relationship dynamics and development. obviously in a romantic context yes, but what especially interests me is the blurring of lines between friendship and romance, as those have always been pretty nebulous concepts for me personally. like how do you even define those things? where do you draw the line? what happens when that line grows blurry and indistinct? idk i find it kind of hard to explain but for me intimacy in romance is oftentimes very rooted in intimacy of friendship and that’s what i like to explore [i think a lot about a little life by hanya yanagihara which imo does an excellent job of delving into this concept, the romance of friendships; it’s definitely a story i draw a lot of inspiration from, which i think probably says a lot about who i am as a person lol]

and a very big part of love imo is well-encapsulated by that meme quote “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known”. which yes i know the original article is about someone judgmental attitude toward the writer’s goats or something but ALSO as i am the kind of person to take something very silly and make it incredibly serious i legitimately think this quote captures the heart of what i find so compelling about love stories! to be truly loved by someone is to be truly known by them - all the deepest, darkest, ugliest parts of you alongside the good. and that’s fucking hard! it’s hard work to allow someone to know you like that - to be that vulnerable, to really expose yourself to another human being. but also ultimately after all that difficult work what is more rewarding, what is more comforting than existing in the presence of someone you don’t have to explain yourself to because they already understand you wholly and completely, in a romantic or platonic context or otherwise? it’s something i love to unpack in my writing, like really there’s nothing i find more cathartic than really peeling back the layers and figuring out how two characters get to that point.

Another thing i think a lot about is a quote from a random tumblr post i no longer have the link for, which goes something like “tenderness is softness in the face of pain and shame”. and that is really IT, isn’t it? that’s exactly the kind of vibe i strive to capture in my writing always. particularly in the context of queer stories, when our community has had a long history of pain and suffering and repression and shame and yet despite all of that we still find ways to love each other, to take care of each other, to be ourselves and help each other be themselves too. that’s the kind of shit that drives me fucking insane! and it’s the kind of shit i love to write about. that’s all i can really say.

[is this still fic related? probably only tangentially. but this is the kind of shit i usually end up writing about on some level across all my fics so i think it still counts lol.]

q’s for fanfiction writers!

[tonyglowheart]

This entire thing is a rant, feel free to ignore it, but I saw your post about how destiel fans can’t win in this context, and yeah. So have some rambles.

I’ve been thinking about the fact we (current spn/destiel fans) can’t win all night... I’ve seen so many people talking about how homophobic it is - and while I would very much like to argue, as every point I’ve seen made by a non-spn fan has been wrong so far, if I did everyone inside the fandom would agree and everyone outside would either call me straight or pity me for believing it’s okay.

(Cas wasn’t even sent to hell lmao. He was sent to angel death (the empty), a place he has escaped in the past. Other points, like that meta about spn has been predicting exactly this for months, that Dean ended up sobbing on the floor because he was so upset, like that death means next to nothing on spn, like that there is two episodes left, etc etc. you feel me right? I just don’t want to post wank to other spn blogs atm, we’re getting enough frustration as it is, no need to add to it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the bar is very, very low. Spn is a prominent TV show - not a Netflix show, or indie, or whatever - and it just said “main character in gay love saved the world”. [insert gif of ghostfacers dude saying that gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day here]

I just saw someone saying that spn having Naomi try to brainwash Cas out of loving dean makes spn homophobic (it is a conversion therapy parallel). My first response to that is that Naomi was the villain lmao? I guess we can’t write villains doing anything homophobic because having villains do homophobic things makes, uh - checks notes - villains look homophobic, and clearly we can’t have that.

There certainly are legitimate things to criticise spn about, but this isn’t it lol.

Also now some people are unironically trying to cancel Jensen because “his acting was homophobic, and so he’s clearly homophobic”, nevermind that he’s an actor and his character struggles with understanding his emotions (which I think he played excellently, myself. That scene had a very Dean delayed emotional response), nevermind the support he’s given to us queers in the past. Like. Idek man.

We would have been laughed at if we got no destiel, too.

It would have been worse, had the writers pulled a dumbledore. At this point I also trust the writers not to pull a GoT - they have explicitly criticised that ending in spn’s canon.

Spn’s writers did that by making the main villain of this season, Chuck / God, say GoT had a good ending. To reiterate a previous point I had: villains do bad things because they’re bad. And the bad things they do make them bad. For the people out there not still following, if someone does something in a story and it makes them a villain, that is explicitly telling you the story (and probably the writers) thinks that thing is bad. In this case, Chuck likes to write things for him, and we the audience have been shown and told that is bad.

Apparently thinking a gay confession is good in 2020 makes me straight. Seems unlikely, but whatever. Sorry for the length, I guess I went overboard, I’ve been holding it in lol. Anyway, DESTIEL IS CANON 💚💙 hope you have a good night

Helloo supernatural anon I hope you are living your best life right now. Yeah I’m like..... skeptical and leery myself but having lived through some absolute garbage discourse that is general purity wank, as well as the C/QL greater fandom here and on Twitter I find myself... much more wanting to question the “general wisdom” of things esp in terms of negativity, bc a lot of the time I find.... it’s wrong? Like so wrong. Or at least presents such an incomplete picture of the whole situation and also presents it in such a removed context that words that have meaning and are operationalized in a certain way for a reason, no longer have meaningful usage.

Anyway I don’t... know too much about the specifics of Spn but someone I follow is into it and talks a lot about the Gnostic stuff and that all was very fascinating to me, and I also have been grappling a lot with cultural Christianity bc of cmedia and the way ppl just *clenches fist* unthinkingly or uncritically slap some Christian norms on it and call it a day 😩 help I’m Tired. My thing here being... I actually got tired of the uncritical “superhell”s at some pt bc I am, in fact, incredibly exhausted with cultural Christianity, and because it does seem like, even possibly(?) without the Gnostic stuff it’s different from a “hell” or other Protestant-derived afterlife concept, and also yeah that it wasn’t seeded out of nowhere, it was set up to happen, which then... lends credence to the idea that whatever the current era of Spn is doing, the current showrunners are doing it with purpose.

And idk I just... refuse to believe the concept that ALL of the fans of Spn - esp the ones who have been following it still, or got back into it and are following it currently, are acting under delusion or are fooling themselves into liking it or thinking it’s good or whatever. I personally find that kinda infantilizing and patronizing and playing into issues of dismissing things women and/or other marginalized identities like.

Plus I find the concept that (from what I think I’ve been seeing Spn fans say) that the current era of the show is quite actively grappling with itself, its past, its legacy. to be very interesting and compelling; it hearkens back to like an old lore kind of feeling, of a thing that has grown into a nigh undefeatable monster and realizing that, also realizing that the only way to defeat itself is through grappling with its own nature and transforming and transmuting itself into something else. I personally find that more plausible and compelling than “Supernatural has been actively and continuously queerbaiting for 15 homophobic homophobic years., so right now we’re all very sorry for you because this maybe is no longer queerbaiting but it’s still homophobic and it can never be anything different ever.” I’ve been sort of tangentially aware of Spn thru the years and didn’t we agree, around the time of that in-universe play about Spn and with the lil Destiel shoutout, that Spn has come a ways as far as coming to terms with its fandom and working to treat its fans better? Why the sudden regression into “oh no, Supernatural is and forever will be homophobic and a hate crime”? 🤔 

The rest under a cut bc the ask is already long and then my rambling will get longer-

But yeah I mean..... I get that the legacy of Supernatural has been certifiably Rough, but I think people also forget how different of a time 2005 was? Hell, how different of a time 2015 was, even, prior to, say, Obergefell v. Hodges. Now I’m not saying that to blanket-excuse Supernatural, but like, you look at mainstream shows from the era and... there’s a lot of shit lmao. The fact that Supernatural has existed this long seems to me like.... maybe we CAN look at how it’s developed through the years vs just insisting it is what it was 15, 10, hell, 5 years ago. Especially since, to my knowledge, there’s been showrunner changes? Which seems to me like it would... affect things? I mean honestly, I remember back when I got into Spn for a hot second because of Castiel, I remember watching panel, Q&A, etc vids thru the years, and like... I thought we agreed that... it was the fans who were going a bit far pushing the shipping question like literally ALL the time to the actors, who are not in control of the show and.... like at the time.... that could have had personal implications for them? And yes homophobia bad, and people can still be allies despite that, but again like.... I do feel like - from what I’ve seen - that these guys were NOT ready to deal with a lot of that but they’ve (okay Jensen I’m talking about Jensen here) genuinely grown and learned? Also how many years ago was the essay autograph thing that people keep trotting out, like what year was it in and what year of spn was it, and what were the prevailing opinions on LGBT issues and bisexuality then.

I’ve been seeing some murmurings of identity politicsing surrounding ppl who enjoy Supernatural, and I’m sorry that that’s happening to you, it really fucking sucks and it’s also the dumbest way to “make” or “win” an argument because it shouldn’t ever be a final determiner, just factors to consider when considering what life experiences might have informed someone else’s PoV and views as well as maybe how you can better communicate with them. Instead of it being a “weapon” or “tool” to either dismiss someone or de facto validate an argument.

Also yeah I get it that you don’t want to send discourse to spn blogs bc I imagine you guys ARE actively grappling with all the bs rn and it’s a lot. Even just from like, the stuff I see around, I’m like tired of it. I’m genuinely having more fun with ppl who are having a good time with Supernatural than the ppl who are hating on it, even in this sort of backhanded “oh we’re not clowning YOU we’re clowning the writers and showrunners who think you should be satisfied with this,” when... yeah? the people who HAVE been watching the show and therefore... know what’s up.. DO seem to be? And all this based on *fake gasp* context. And that’s where the backhandedness becomes kind of poisonous to me, because it implies that it IS bad, and that you SHOULDN’T be satisfied, but poor little you are but don’t worry, we’re not making fun of YOU for liking garbage, you’re just the hapless victim who is consuming the garbage bc... idk, whatever reasons ppl are coming up with ig.

idk man it’s 2020. Fandom isn’t activism, performative or otherwise, it’s okay to let people enjoy things even if you think they’re “objectively” bad, and like... I don’t know if people can call something bad when they’re not even working with the whole context and instead are dealing with rumor and reputation. 

[bigskydreaming]

LOL sorry not sorry, I don’t care how annoying or repetitive it makes me sound, when it comes to Dick and Jason’s relationship when they were younger, I am a broken record on eternal repeat and can’t stop won’t stop.

Like, if there’s an even slightly tangential place for me to reference “bee tee dubs, Dick didn’t hate Jason, there is literally no canon of that, Dick was literally written making a point to put aside his resentment towards Bruce for Jason’s sake. After Jason’s origin was rebooted to the stealing the tires story, and his first encounter with Dick being rebooted to the druglab teamup, Dick made a point to give him his blessing and Robin costume and phone number and offer of being there so Jason could have a family relationship that didn’t depend on Bruce, had nothing to do with Bruce, like he literally stood there and gave him advice about how he knows how Bruce is better than anyone, and that not talking about stuff is Bruce’s problem but that doesn’t mean Jason had to make it his, so gimme a call whenever Bruce is being a pain - and yet even in fanfics that reference this exact story and even the part about Dick giving him his phone number, they all go on to write about how Jason tried calling but Dick never picked up, because yeah like it really matches ANY characterization of Dick Grayson to say he already went to the effort of extending that hand to his replacement only to then just end up ghosting the kid, please. 

Even Bruce recognized all that as an actual effort on Dick’s part, with the last panel of that issue being Creeper!Batdad spying on his two boys bonding together and saying “Thank you, Dick” even though neither of them could hear it. And just like the Nightwing: Year One retcon that revised yet again the specifics of how Dick was fired, became Nightwing, Jason was taken in and made Robin, and Dick and Jason met for the first time (and ended the story yet again on good terms, like they were literally teasing each other)....like these stories only retconned the hows and whens of Jason becoming Robin and Dick becoming Nightwing and how they first met. And they were flashbacks. Because Jason’s rebooted origin story was written fourteen issues before the issue he died. 

There wasn’t time to chronologically show any other interactions between Dick and Jason in that short a time frame, especially when the next Titans story took Dick offworld until after Jason had already died. So unless you wanna go with the idea that Jason actually at most was Robin for a few months and ignore every other story with him as Robin that was then just supposed to be read as being set after Batman #416/Nightwing: Year One.....its made fairly clear that even without us being actually shown on panel the first time Jason called Dick or Dick reached out to him again, whichever it was....I mean, one of those two definitely happened. Because otherwise you’re suggesting that Batman #416 or Nightwing: Year One were literally the ONLY times Jason and Dick even interacted, period.....because that’s the timeline. 

Every which way you look at New Earth continuity, those issues were of Dick and Jason’s FIRST encounter, and so saying this never led to any kind of bonding between them after that because Dick didn’t pick up or Jason died before he could use the number....like, it basically implies that Dick and Jason only met once the entire time Jason lived with Bruce and was Robin, and has there ever been any interaction between them after Under The Red Hood that suggests these are two guys who literally only met ONCE and once only, and only knew each other by reputation before that?

Nope. Because the issues that have them interacting as brothers are all still canon, the events within them are canon, and thus that relationship between them is canon. They’re just supposed to be read as having happened AFTER Dick and Jason met in the new retconned ways of Batman #416 or Nightwing: Year One....hence why the former opened with the caption: One Year Ago, and the latter was similarly just meant to retcon the specifics of their first meeting. 

But it literally doesn’t work to acknowledge Jason saying to Tim that he was a Titan too once, in reference to the two stories he teamed up with them, and then act like the parts where Dick was the complete and total opposite of an aloof, bitter asshole to him just....somehow got cut out of that story.

Its literally only fanfic that insisted on that interpretation of Dick and Jason pre-Death in the Family, (well, at least before someone told Scott Lobdell about it, I’d guess, lol, because like....I bet more than anything he just heard that fanon take and figured it made sense and ran with it because he thinks the only way for Jason to be a bad ass is if he’s hard and broody and isolated and alone, and he obviously can’t be that if his family like, loves him lfashiofhalfsh, don’t be ridiculous.”)

Anyway. Its not like I feel like everyone needs to be a Dick Grayson fan or agree he’s the best Robin or most important or even feel a need to make comparisons or rank the brothers at all.....but given that the experience of seeing a character you relate to be condemned for shit they didn’t do or unappreciated for stuff they did do IS such a hugely relatable experience and that’s WHY its such a huge fanfic trope......like, that one particular thing is always gonna be the thing in Batfamily fandom that always just makes me RAAAAAH with thwarted rage over my inability to make a mind ray gizmo that makes everyone share my opinions and nobody else’s. Knew I should have paid more fucking attention it science class.

You can write dynamics and characters any way you want, nobody’s saying you can’t, but just....when you then make a point to use actual canon to back up your takes on Jason and Tim, but revert to this fanon in order to prop up the two of them as misunderstood and unappreciated by Dick and thus they’re totally right to view his attempts to hug them or express affection as him overcompensating and feeling guilty about being an asshole before....like...

Bah. Its just really annoying to consistently see the one and only character in the Batfamily who makes a point to regularly express affection for his family and his desire for them to be more like a family....like, rewritten as this pompous douchebag that has never understood them and that’s why they’re totally justified in being written as treating him (who btw, a shit ton of his fans DO like and relate to and project upon due to his being a canon rape survivor)...like when they end up treating his attempts to show physical affection in stories like its a VIOLATION that they want no part of and he’s yet even more of an asshole for never getting this.....when there’s over a decade of comics full of Dick physically showing his affection for Tim and Tim very much appreciating it....just like Dick did the same with Jason when he was Robin, and Jason, again, was shown appreciating it, not treating it as a refusal to respect his boundaries.

That more than anything is what bugs. 

Anyway. LOL. Yeah wtf, this is literally just me thinking out loud as usual, and I stg the actual inception of this post was just me rereading TNTT #31 again today and then immediately after going to read some fic which was a Mistake as winning bingo and getting three fics in a row with a line about how like....Jason resents Dick trying to hug him on his birthday because its clear to him Dick is just overcompensating for having been an asshole to him when they were younger and like....sigh. Epic, eternal forever sigh. Oh, fandom. Why. Whyyyyyyyy.

I just....I defy anyone to look at this scan and tell me how they see anything remotely along the lines of Dick resenting Jason for replacing him and being an asshole to him because of it or at least just aloof, and Jason resenting Dick because he was aware of this and never got the approval or recognition from Dick that he wanted and needed. And again, whenever you offhandedly reference Jason having been a Titan in pre-Reboot continuity....this is what you’re referencing, meaning you’re literally saying that THIS happened every bit as much as Batman #416.

(Btw, the trouble Dick references as Jason and the Titans bailing him out of, was them rescuing him from being kidnapped and brainwashed yet again by the Church of Blood, and it revealed that they’d secretly been controlling him for over a year before that. So....its in the actual literal aftermath of THAT, that Dick offers to take the fall with Bruce to keep Jason out of trouble, and selling all that as though it was Dick’s fault. Which....sounds like pretty consistent Dick Grayson characterization to me...just saying).

[mittensmorgul]

300, and other random observations

Last night Mel and I were scouring the episode looking for the expected obvious “300″ to jump out from some random door or building number, or appear SOMEWHERE in the episode the way 100 did in 5.18:

or 200 did in 10.05:

In case it isn’t obvious from this image, this is the 200 Motel:

So I was looking for the 300 in 14.13, and weirdly didn’t find anything quite this obvious. I rambled a bit about my search here on @drsilverfish;s post:

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/182669346730/14x13-lebanon-some-silent-storytelling-notes-on

But I saw some interesting things in the pawn shop and around Lebanon that I can appreciate, as well as some very well hidden “300″ references. Basically this is just my Jerry Wanek appreciation post, because what a guy!

All screencaps are from hotn.

The one thing I’d overlooked as a HUGE “300″ is the most prominently featured guitar in the shop:

That one right in the middle, raised up above the others, looks a bit downtrodden. It’s missing its strings, first off. While another guitar is labeled “PLAY ME!” this one isn’t playable at all. And yet it might be the rarest instrument in the shop, and with a bit of tlc could easily be worth thousands. It’s a ww2 era Gibson ES300. Between 1942 and 1946, Gibson only produced a few acoustic guitars, since metals for the electric pickups were needed for the war effort. I think this could be one of those guitars. So talk about a big, blaring 300. Unstrung, a product of war, seemingly unplayable, but with care and attention, possibly the most valuable and precious instrument in the shop. Easy to see why it’s given pride of place.

But again, this isn’t an obvious 300. You kinda have to know something about something to even recognize it among all the other second-hand guitars.

(also lol at the giant tv in the background that makes us think of 13.16)

(and lol at the tuba that makes me think of the house of horns or whatever from 6.06. This show has such a bizarre history with pawn shops...)

Under a cut because this got way longer and more rambly and tangential than I intended >.>

There’s a lot going on just at the register:

Roadhouse Monkey, “You break it, you buy it,” and the sign that says “Your baby daddy sitting in jail? Sell your gold and get bail!” with the weirdest assortment of random jewelry pictured on it... and oddly a mala draped around the register itself. Clearly this dude hasn’t been using his mala for meditation practice.

In the post I linked above, I already described their entrance into the secret back room, where everything was “one of a kind” and we immediately saw two identical goblets. Go read that post for more on that. :D

Behind the goblets, it almost looks like a heart frozen in a block of something. But what the shop owner points to is a Hand of Glory, which was the central magical item from 3.06, the plot of which had to do with people who committed acts of violence against family (and the spell they found to banish the ghost killing people forever contained the first use of the word “Castiel” on the show).

He goes on to point out “gris gris bags” and “anointed dove’s blood.” Gris gris bags are protective talismans, which my brain immediately associates with Gordon Walker. He traded his to Bela for the Winchesters’ location in 3.07, and after giving it up, he was turned into a vampire and then killed by Sam. I can’t remember any use for the dove’s blood in canon...

It’s hard to see, but one shelf over is a Jason Voorhees style hockey mask (which is interesting to me because of 14.04 and the horror movie callbacks that were referenced later in 14.13 again at the movie theater in Lebanon playing All Saint’s Day and Hell Hazers). Not to mention as we talked about during 14.04, the original “monster” they were supposed to fight with in 3.10 in their nightmares was Jason, but Kripke didn’t realize they couldn’t obtain the rights to it, so that scene had to be cut. So in a roundabout way we get another reference to that iconic scene between Dean and his demon self, rejecting John’s influence over him. Beside the mask is the first of three Centurion Helmets we see in the episode (actually the second instance is probably this helmet again, but in a different context, in the box the teens steal from the Impala and take into their party house, along with the teddy bear Sam plays with here in a minute).

There’s the spray bottle of Dragon’s Breath, that looks like an innocent bottle of perfume with the squeezy bulb, but shoots out a gout of fire. 

Inside his safe, along with the skull of Sarah Goode, executed during the Salem Witch Trials, is an odd assortment of things, double-locked inside this already secret room:

It looks like a clock of some sort, a brass globe, and a genie’s oil lamp. But it’s the fact he had the skull at all, stolen from a murdered hunter that they knew, meant that he’d been involved with that horrific crime, like the previous references to Bela who traded in these artifacts (and had sold the hand of glory when she’d needed to destroy it to save her own life... I mean this was pretty heavy Bela parallels here), the owner turns the Dragon’s breath on them and pulls out a saber:

It’s called “Chrysaor.” Whether the one from Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” that belonged to Sir Artegal, the Knight of Justice, and had supposedly been used by Zeus to battle the Titans, or to the offspring of Poseidon and Medusa and the brother of Pegasus, or whether it was a nod to Assassin’s Creed (I honestly think it’s the former and the latter is a bonus here...)

This reminded me SO MUCH of Gog and Magog and their Special Swords forged by a god, with the reference back to Zeus and the Titans here, AND to the actual circumstances around how Dean managed to kill them. Because Gog and Magog... just would not shut up. Dean even lampshades the fact this guy stood there with the sword over his head, raised above Sam sprawled on the ground the same way Cas was in 13.14:

But he talked long enough about Cas’s “beautiful death” that Dean was able to stab him from behind, just as he was able to shoot the store owner now, because he wouldn’t stop talking. Forged by a god, touched by God...

Then we see the store’s secret ledger:

I honestly don’t want to know what’s in the “genitalia jar.” But these entries are dated from 1956. How long has this shop been into this sort of shady business? At least as far back as the original MoL was operating in the US (they were annihilated in 1958 by Abaddon). And there’s even a reference to a “Men of Letters membership discussion” in the ledger:

Of interest on the next page is a lock of hair from a victim of HH Holmes (taking us back to 2.06), as well as trinkets associated with Vlad the Impaler and Napoleon, a “bag of sorrows,” and a “razor of the damned.” Among other items of interest.

But here’s the page with the magical pearl:

And nowhere in this book does it say the pearl “gives you what your heart desires.” It says, “a pearl that grants wishes.” So... where did Sam get that additional information? I find it fascinating how things that are written in books are interpreted in a much broader fashion by the reader-- first Dean with the book Billie gave him in 14.10, and now Sam with this entry in this ledger.

Because this has been happening a lot.

For example in the scene immediately prior to this, the kids outside are talking about the Winchesters when they actually drive up. Their conversation is really interesting:

Eliot: People say they’re brothers. All I know is I was standing right here when-- when I heard this BAM! from the trunk of their car. And then, this like, shallow breathing. Max: No way. Flower Shirt Girl: Eliot, you’re creeping Max out.

I have to assume this was when they still had Garth in the trunk of the car, and just :’). Eliot is making some assumptions, but he’s much more terrifyingly accurate than he probably could guess. And Max’s flippant comment in her next scene proves it:

Eliot: I mean think about it. Where do they even come from? Them or their weird sidekick with the trenchcoat. Or what about the kid with the dumb Bambi look on his face all the time? Max: So what, it doesn’t mean they kidnapped Bigfoot or whatever.

And they all laugh, and Eliot calls them dicks. :P

And all of this makes me think of how the show spent the early part of the season teaching us how to read between the lines, to fill in narrative gaps, and to parse the subtext to understand exactly what it was they were actively not showing us.

Like in the scene at the party house where the John Wayne Gacy clown appears, we don’t see Dean thrown by the clown (just as we didn’t see the other boy who was attacked escape from the clown), nor do we see Sam light the fire that burned the cigar box tethering the ghost. But it’s clear that Dean was thrown because we saw him land, and Sam obviously eventually got his lighter to work because there’s the evidence of the flames.

Also, did they bring that old pickup truck from the bunker? Because they should DEFINITELY drive that thing more often. :’)

And Eliot follows his instincts, wanting to know what’s up and witnesses the ghost going up in flames. And he knows what he saw, and doesn’t even question it. When Sam confirms it, he feels so validated. Just like us when we read the subtext and fill in the blanks.

I have no idea how I got here from rambling about finding the 300′s in the episode but here we are.

OH. Right! The Centurion Helmets!

The first we see was in the shop pictured above. We see it again at the Party House in the Establishing Shot inside, nestled in a box with Sarah Goode’s skull, which was the original Macguffin that led Sam and Dean to that pawn shop in the first place, which enabled them to find the pearl to even be able to make this wish at all:

And the second and third Centurions are on the wall of B&E Pizza:

(and the one on the other side of the menu board hasn’t been screencapped yet, but is much more clearly visible than this one because Cas lights it up:

Three Centurions. Each of whom commands a century, or a group of 100 soldiers. So I’m going to use the fact that the show is actively telling us to notice and read between the lines, and assume we’re seeing yet another 300.

Especially after Misha’s tweet joking about it: https://twitter.com/mishacollins/status/1093606706532282371

[silentauroriamthereal]

So. I met Benedict Cumberbatch the other night. 

I’m still processing, honestly, and the big thing that I need to write is another letter to him, one which I assume going in that he will never read (I can’t even imagine the volume of fanmail he must receive!), but I’ll still write it because I need to say it, even if it’s never read. In this post I want to talk about some of the stuff I want to say there, so I’m just kind of working through my thoughts here. 

This is going to be long, and a little emotional, so I’m putting it behind a cut to spare your dashes (among other things!). 

I have a few different things to say about the entire thing. First, let me just go through the evening as it unfolded: 

I managed to buy a ticket to the New York debut of Letters Live. I’ve adored the concept of this event since the first time they held it and when I found out they were doing one in New York right during the tiny window of when I was going to be there, I jumped at the opportunity, though the tickets were uncomfortably expensive for me. There is literally no other living person that I would have been more excited to see perform and potentially have a tiny chance to meet, though, and the timing seemed almost foreordained, so I did it. 

The event was phenomenal. A gigantic wall of a human was seated in front of me - an unpleasant man who was approximately 10 metres tall and 5 metres wide, and I’m 5′4, so... yeah. I waited until after the first act and managed to slip into a much better seat, hahaha! The performance was so well-planned, I thought. The selection of letters was specially curated for an American audience, with most of the content written by Americans. To hear Rose McGowan read her own letter to the Hollywood higher-ups was chillingly powerful, as was hearing Toni Morrison’s letter to Barack Obama. There were several letters funny enough to make me cry with laughter, and to my pleased surprise one of these was read by another well-loved actor of mine, Tom Hollander (who I keep feeling so sorry for these days - people must confuse him with Tom Holland all the time, and they’re not remotely similar, lol). Benedict’s first letter was an absolutely hilarious one that just went around facebook about a month ago, written by a Canadian man apologizing for having absolutely trashed, via a flock of seagulls, his hotel room in Victoria eighteen years ago. He also read one of the Chris Barker/Bessie Moore exchanges with Loo Brealey, and finished the evening with Stewart Stern’s incredibly stirring and moving letter to the family of James Dean following his death. 

Listen: seeing Benedict perform live, with my own two naked eyes, breathing the same air as him - it may sound ridiculous, but that alone was profoundly moving to me. Just seeing him, period. Then seeing him perform - breathtaking. And then hearing him read this particular letter was just - it’s hard to even put it into words. I felt a little as though I was hearing him read what could be his own epitaph. Listen to these words: 

A star goes wild in the places beyond air — a dark star born of coldness and invisible. It hits the upper edges of our atmosphere and look! It is seen! It flames and arcs and dazzles. It goes out in ash and memory. But its after-image remains in our eyes to be looked at again and again. For it was rare. And it was beautiful. And we thank God and nature for sending it in front of our eyes. So few things blaze. So little is beautiful. Our world doesn't seem equipped to contain its brilliance too long. Ecstasy is only recognizable when one has experienced pain. Beauty only exists when set against ugliness. Peace is not appreciated without war ahead of it. How we wish that life could support only the good. But it vanishes when its opposite no longer exists as a setting. It is a white marble on unmelting snow. And Jimmy stands clear and unique in a world where much is synthetic and dishonest and drab. He came and rearranged our molecules.

I mean, this is exactly how I already feel about the nature of Ben’s talent, the privilege I feel at being allowed to experience it in any way, in any medium. He has a talent that lights up the cosmos and I’m just so grateful to the universe that this talent exists and has been given a place to be seen and witnessed by the rest of us. His talent blazes, and my life is the richer for being able to experience it. 

I tried really, really, really hard not to hope too much to have a chance to meet him at the stage door after. It’s kind of impossible not to hope, but I told myself sternly that I already never thought I would have the chance to see him perform in person, and it really would have been enough. I’d joked to my friends before leaving for New York that if he so much as laid his own two beautiful eyes on me and actually saw me, heard my voice, any of that, that I could die in peace. I’ve never expected that, though, to have any sort of fleeting brush of contact like that. It’s not the nature of the way a person like him relates to a person like me. In fact, allow me a tangential paragraph here: 

Being a fan can feel one-sided. I know everything that a person can possibly know about a person whom I have never met. I can guarantee that I have seen, read, or listened to every interview he’s done, ever, with very, very few exceptions. ALL of the press junkets. I could have written his imdb page. Like many of us! I know every line on his beautiful face. I know the freckles on his skin, the tendons of his forearms and calves. I know every part of his physicality that’s ever been shown to the public, and with him, that’s a fair bit! His voice is my ringtone (it’s a clip of Sherlock saying “it’s a text alert; it means I’ve got a text”) and his voice is more dearly familiar to me than most of the people I know personally. I know his facial expressions, though he’s constantly reinventing the way the muscles of his face can move for every new role he plays. I’ve analyzed his accents from a phonetics standpoint. In short, I know everything that’s possible for someone like me to know about someone like him. And he knows nothing about me - not my name, not what I do, not what I eat, not my voice or my talents or my eyes or fingernails or passions or pet peeves - not of my existence, full stop. But that doesn’t mean that our relationship - and bear with me on that word - is one-sided. This is how it works: he gives. He gives and gives and gives. Benedict doesn’t phone it in. He BLAZES. He burned through so much energy playing Hamlet (any wonder, have you seen him in it???) in the summer of 2016 that one of the reasons Dr. Strange had to push back its filming schedule was to give him the chance to bulk up again after the play’s run. Benedict commits, and like the aforementioned star analogy, he radiates energy to every possible point of contact around him. THIS is his side of the relationship: he blazes out his talent/energy/love/passion/commitment, and we receive it, and the appreciation and love and passion we feel in return for it is something that we share with each other, not with him. That’s how fandom works: it’s not a direct thing. Not in the standard, interpersonal way. He shines; we turn to each other rather than to him, to talk about how it made us feel, how it moved us, how it excited us and made us laugh and inspired us. Somehow, this entire experience crystallized this for me perfectly. 

Now, back to the stage door: there was an absolute CRUSH of people at the barricades. I don’t want to talk about this part too much because it was extremely unpleasant. We had to wait for a long time. I would have stayed until he left the building, no matter how long it took, unless it would have made me look like a total creep, because that’s not something I ever want to do to someone I admire. He did come out eventually, and that’s when the pushing and screaming started. I once said that I would never scream at a celebrity, and I didn’t. The crowd, unfortunately, was a mix of three groups of people: 1. aggressive paparazzi 2. aggressive fanboys who had brought comic book shit for Ben to sign so that they could sell it on ebay 3. genuine fans. Guess which group was not at all problematic?? Turns out I was standing right in a knot of #2′s, and because they were hollering at him, like screaming at him to get over there and sign their shit, Ben went over to the other side of the barricade to sign stuff there. He told off one of the paps and said he was there to be with the “real people”, which I appreciated. He did come back near us, and I had the briefest of moments to talk to him. I thanked him for not having become a lawyer, and he laughed. Everyone was thrusting stuff in his face and yelling. I just had my little ticket from the show, and the comic book manchildren kept putting their stuff on top of mine. Ben finally said he was going back inside, that his wife was there waiting for him, but he turned back toward me and I managed to ask (possibly plead) if he would sign my ticket. He looked me in the eye then, smiled, and said, “Of course”. 

I stammered out a congratulations on Patrick Melrose and he smiled again and said thank you, while he was signing. But that one moment of eye contact is all I wanted. He looked at me, and he saw me. And I made him laugh. 

I was literally almost suffocated by the awful people around me, none of which were: a) female, or b) actual fans. I’ve thought sometimes, while watching videos of Benedict on the red carpet, with all of those media folk screaming at him to turn this way, smile into their camera, all of that, that it feels very much like harassment. I know that people in his position know that it comes with the job, that the fame and riches are supposed to be the offset of having no privacy, of being followed by media and fans alike, quite literally, of being shrieked and barked at like they’re trained performing animals (which I don’t like, either!). I know he knows that, but it doesn’t mean that it’s pleasant in any way. He handles it like a pro, because he is in every way a consummate professional. But it can’t be pleasant for him. He’s incredibly, extraordinarily generous with his time. As a performer myself, I know how I feel when I’ve just finished a solo concert or an opera - I feel like taking off my heels and fancy dress, putting on pyjama pants and relaxing every muscle I have on a couch somewhere, preferably with a tall drink in hand. Performing Hamlet is considered one of the most demanding male roles in the English theatrical repertoire, yet Benedict would not only perform it a stunning eight times per week, but then sometimes spend up to THREE HOURS signing autographs and taking selfies after. If he chooses to limit how long he gets screamed at by aggressive, even violent paps and shitheads who just want to use his signature for money, good for him! I respect that, even if I felt incredibly sorry for the people further back who didn’t get to have that, one brief moment of contact with this person we all admire so very, very deeply. And so, because of this, because of seeing firsthand how gross people are to him and just the sheer volume of what he puts up with for our sake, so that some of us, at least, can have that tiny moment, I don’t think I would do it again, if only to reduce that volume by one teeny tiny amount. I got my one, deeply, deeply hoped-for, fleeting, searing moment of contact. It’s all that I could have asked for. He saw me, and I had the chance to say some tiny part of my gratitude to him for what he gives of himself to all of us. That’s all I wanted. 

The wait, the near-suffocation, all of that, was worth it, to win that one precious moment. I clutched my precious ticket and fought my way out of the crowd and wandered dazedly off toward the subway, through late Friday night Times Square crowds, feeling so much that I didn’t even know how to process it. I felt like I was about to burst into tears and I couldn’t have even said why or whether I was happy or sad or possibly a cornucopia of every human emotion ever. I felt - and still feel - a bit like I just had a brush with an actual, blazing sun. It was shattering, and I will be forever changed by it. I am so grateful. 

[letthehatersbark]

hello~ can you still remember your wanna one mbti typing post? may i ask if you guessed their type based on the cognitive functions? if yes, can you elaborate? thanks in advance!

Hi!  I actually forgot I made that post. (From WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2017!)

I just found some notes I made on it at the time.  Yes I definitely use the cognitive functions for all my typings (most of which can now be seen at @theunit-mbti ) so here we go:

Jisung:  ESTJ

Jisung is one of the people I am the least certain of, actually.  On my original notes, I actually crossed out ESTJ and put ESFP, which is different other than being on the Te-Fi axis.  I’m pretty sure that Jisung uses Te, because he definitely thinks out loud and uses external methods to process his thoughts.  I think he has Fi because he cares about individuals on a personal level and in order to understand them links them back to his own struggles, etc.  I reckoned he was a sensor rather than an intuitor but in the end decided he possibly showed more Se than Si, but I’m still not sure.

Sungwoon:  ESTP

Cheeky, fun, manipulative Ti-Fe axis, but also that Ti-Fe ExTP thing of caring HUGELY what other people think of him while at the same time wishing that he didn’t.  Don’t think his lines of thought are tangential enough to be an ENTP.  

Minhyun:  ISTJ (or ISFJ)

Similar to Jin from BTS - they really always reminded me of each other, right from BTS’ debut.  Feels like he has surpressed and controlled Ne.  Concerned with order, and tidiness, to the extent that he will group-tidy (strong, boss-like Te).  Happy to lead, in a systematic fashion.  A somewhat “boring” intellectual.  Not as exciting as some of the other members (Si/Te) but quite clear-cut and to the point (Te).  However, has a sensor’s understanding of what is situationally appropriate.

Seongwu:  ENTP

I have seen Seongwu typed as an “annoying ESFJ” recently, which is interesting because an ESFJ has the same functions as an ENTP but in a different order.  I get this, because he always wants to please people and amuse them, which shows strong Fe.  But he is also more manipulative of a crowd’s engagement (Ti-Fe) than an ESFJ would be, where a manipulative ESFJ would simply manipulate emotions.  Hmm not sure that makes sense but he’s definitely an extrovert with strong Ne and Fe.

Jaehwan:  ISFJ

I wrote ISFJ/ENFP in my notes.  Not really sure which because they are two of the types I know really well from being an ISFJ myself and having lots of ENFP friends.  He would be in my friendship group tbh, but because I can recognise qualities from him that link with both myself and my ENFP friends, I’m not very adept at picking out from that what he is.  His messiness might indicate more ENFP than ISFJ though.  (But the ENFP nature of wanting to be good to your friends and make them happy makes him fine with adapting and improving e.g. when Minhyun wants him to.)  Also think he may show more signs of Fi now than Fe.  His Ne use is obvious.

Daniel:  ESFP

Since that post I’ve seen Daniel described by others as “a boring/generic ESFP”.  He is quite a textbook ESFP, in fact, perhaps the most ESFP-ish ESFP in the whole of the kpop world that i can think of at the moment.  He reacts quickly, he enjoys fun things, he sleeps easily (no nagging Ne thoughts) he is self-motivated, he can put haters behind him and move on with his life.  I think he’s quite a healthy ESFP tbh (unlike someone like EXO’s Baekhyun or Myname’s Seyong).

Jihoon: INFP

I feel like I’ve written up a summary about Jihoon before but I can’t find it.

He’s an interesting one who I’m kind of intrigued by.  He’s introverted.  He is weird and “random” in certain situations and moments (Ne).  But he is SET on his dream and by God he was DETERMINED (Fi).  He was the only one who I felt in the competition on PD101 S02 was actually aiming as hard as he could for first place (Te:  “I outworked you all!!”).  But I ditched the idea of ISTJ, although I guess he could be.  It might depend on his enneagram, which I’m just trying to get to grips with.  He’s darty, jumpy, unexpected, and cute though, which I link with Ne.  I really like him for more than just his looks.

Woojin: ISFP

I don’t know any ISFPs in real life (I think // that I’m close to) so this is always a bit of a hard one to explain.  Definitely an introvert, slightly slower than an ESFP might be, but still ready to react to any situation and go with it (Se).    Hmm.  Kind of hard to tell what’s going on in his mind (Fi).  All the Se stereotypes like being a good dancer/performer lol.  The “Se-stare” is definitely in use as well.

I also considered INTP for him, but I think ISFP fits better.

Jinyoung:  INFJ

Most people type him as INFJ, INFP, or ISFJ.  On my notes, I have him written as INFJ/ISFJ.  He says too many direct and plain statements for me to think INFP anymore, and was actually starting to consider ISTJ.  I think he’s also a bit colder than most INFPs are (not that he’s cold exactly, but he’s not overflowing with need for companionship;  he’s more independent than the average INFP from my experience).  I thought he had Ni because has has that sort of ability to pull a conclusion out of nowhere.  But then again, a lot of his statements are drawn directly from factual information which he’s just relaying at a particularly profound point in time.  I thought he had Fe because he was particularly good at listening to what other people thought was a good idea and fitting in with them.  He also cares what people think about him which can come across in his vain moments.  I’m not sure about him really, probably even less sure than Jisung.  I’d need to study him again.  I originally thought I got that “INFJ vibe” from him but almost a year later and suddenly I’m not so sure.

Daehwi:  ESFJ

This was the easiest one.  I usually have no trouble spotting ESFJs and he stood out to me immediately.  His mother-hen like nature (Fe), in spite of being a youngling.  His panic in situations where people aren’t getting along (Fe).  He seems more Si-like than Ni-like and definitely prefers to deal with the real (Si) rather than the abstract (N).  Very attached to his mother, almost protective (Fe).

Guanlin:  ISTP

Almost another mystery but sigificantly comparable to Jungkook.  I wrote INTP/ISTP/ISFJ on my notes for Guanlin, which is roughly what I originally thought for Jungkook.  ISTPs are also difficult for me to type because I’m not friends with any IRL, much like ISFPs.  However, I think Guanlin uses low Fe, because he responds to other’s emotions more significantly than his own immediate ones;  he can have kind of emotionally delayed reactions;  he can be quite analytical, suggesting Ti; and I’m sure he has Se over Ne.  He can read situations very well considering his slight language barrier.

Ok so none of these are definite or set in stone!  The ones I’m most sure of, however, are Daniel and Daehwi.  I hope this helped, and thank you for the question.  More discussion on the topic welcomed!