#Also as usual i hate space station episodes. Every episode set on a space station is bad. except 1x02 but thats it

[mummer]

rtd why have you become allergic to subtlety my friend whats happened.

[lovely-necromancy]

A Cure for Insomnia CH 1.

This is a reader insert I originally started posting on AO3. I’m cross posting here because I know some of the fandom still lives here.

Quick Disclaimer:

This is a fic I'm writing for my own comfort.

I was inspired by RaeBees (you can check out their works over on Quotev and AO3), and how they characterize the "proxies". Having always seen the characters different than most of the fandom I've interacted with I never really shared my thoughts until now. This work is only placed in the Creepypasta tag so it reaches its demographic. However, I am fully aware of the fact that no main character is considered a Pasta.

It may also appear to lean more Toby X Protag in the beginning but end goal is protag with all three, and Brian and Tim already in a relationship. How I picture it now is a slowburn but Toby and Protag will be in a friends with benefits relationship before either has any feelings, so I think that counts. Some may be confused by the asexual protag tag but it'll be explained in story, as an Ace myself I get frustrated with media that only show one version and say it goes for us all. That being said I don't represent the whole Ace community but I hope to provide a bit more representation for some others out there.

Protag will be depicted as agender, and will have a few tics that stem from their Autism. Again I don't speak for any others with Autism but I hope to provide some representation for those in similar positions.

Tags will be updated as the story progresses. Canon-Typical violence and mental health issues are to be expected if you feel uncomfortable with those aspects I advise you to not engage. This story will also have a lot of NSFW themes and scenes so I highly discourage anyone under the age of 18 from viewing this work. You will get warnings on chapters with NSFW and I will make it skippable as well.

I'm also very nitpicky and gave the main characters birthdays just because it irritates me when it gets mentioned once and you have to do the math or imagine your own conversation when a birthday was too close to a character's.

Tim January 1st, home state Alabama

Toby April 28th, home state Virginia (saw this years ago no clue if it's accurate)

Protag May 13th, home state Virginia

Brian May 23rd, home state Alabama

Connor the service dog July 18th, home state Kentucky

I've referred to Protag as Protag here but in story they're referred to as YN.

Everything felt impossibly dull; your senses, the dark room you're currently in, the noise coming from the fan just to the left of the bed on which you laid. Turning to the window beside your head you stare out into that weird midnight summer sky. More of a gray than a true dark blue night, cast in an orange glow that made the night seem closer to day than it truly was. While the time was just half past twelve, you felt it may have been more accurate to say it was closer to four in the morning.

You're exhausted but that true sort of exhaustion where whatever energy you have left buzzes all around. It consumes your entire being, dances between being deafeningly loud in your ears to giving you twitches in your legs. You'd laid down hours ago thinking you'd be tired enough to sleep once your tics started to spasm in closer intervals, but to no avail were you able to rest. That buzzing preventing you from dreamland. Maybe the hum of your body was right, you didn't really need to sleep, you just wanted it to feel normal.

Knowing the battle had already been lost you push yourself off the bed and grab a pair of shorts off the floor. Slipping them on you contemplate your options for the night. Going into town was out since it was Sunday...well Monday now, but there would be nothing but bars open and you were never one for drinking. And as fun as a drive sounds right now, you feel the buzzing in your bones grow stronger, you need to move. A late night hike should keep you occupied, with it being so quiet and the middle of the night you wouldn't even have to take your headphones to cancel out the sounds of other people, you aren't likely to run into many people tonight.

Deciding on a hike you grab a mask and car keys and make your way to your yellow Kia Soul. A going away present from your parents that they gave you the moment you got your driver's license after your 24th birthday. Having anxiety throughout your life you'd never been in the head space to start driving till later on, and while you still don't enjoy driving you are pretty good at it even with your “late” start. Surfing through radio stations as you let the car warm up you find your latest obsession, it's a conspiracy theory podcast that someone in Kepler managed to blast through the limited air ways of the town. Impressive considering Kepler was in a radio quiet zone and even cell phones couldn't work in the small town, luckily you lived just outside of the zone so you could send texts and call your parents every weekend.

It seemed today's episode was a rerun, Mothman: Murderer, Man, or Myth. It was actually one of your favorites, the paranormal stories tended to be more entertaining than hearing about how a man could murder sixteen people while working as a cop ruining evidence to lead the others off his trail. Humans could be more vial and cruel than any little gray alien from the future or tall Fresno Nightcrawler could ever be. And they weren't as entertaining to hear about, nor were their exploits as impressive. You could always see patterns, either connecting clues first or finding connections no one else saw, it was never hard to tell where a certain case would lead so you'd always end up disappointed in humanity when they overlooked such obvious clues. Though that often led you down a path of deep diving for information to see just how obvious it was, more often than not you'd find that the most logical conclusion was shady public officers. After investigating so many cold cases you're sure if you're ever in trouble you'll never involve the police, in the end they'd probably just ignore you and rule your case closed if anything ever did happen to you.

'I'd haunt them if they did.' You decide and you shift gears and begin driving to the Monongahela National Forest, as the timeline of Mothman sightings and events play out before for your ears.

Instead of going through town and possibly loosing the signal of the show, you drive on the old dirt road that runs along the very edge of the town, partially covered in trees. This over grown road is the main reason Kepler doesn't see many visitors, the second someone makes their way onto it coming off the interstate they floor it until they see civilization. Over the few months you've been here you've nearly been run right off the road by spooked tourists, trying to escape whatever ghouls their wild imaginations created. The only real thing on this road was a mini mart gas station, and even though it was shady as hell the cashier didn't bug you too much when you came in in the dead of night. Plus they had a cat, how could you not stop in and say hi to little ole Magnolia?

Speaking of which you should probably get a drink for your hike, you could already feel your throat drying out. Turning into the parking lot you're happy to see no other cars around, putting your face mask on you make your way inside. As usual the store is dead at this time, and Ronnie is manning the desk. What's unusual is the man also behind the counter, he has dark brown hair that he's tied into a small and low ponytail, thick sideburns frame his face. You immediately take note of the slight imperfections of his face, most would see the slit in his eyebrow as following the current trend or even just a genetic thing, but you can see the slightly off color of a healed scar that starts just above his eyebrow and ends mid eyelid, he has a few smaller discolorations on his crooked nose, you'd guess he's had it broken at least twice.

Briefly taking a glance to his brown eyes before looking away, today is not an eye contact day. Nodding in their directions, the best acknowledgment you can give right now, you make your way to the freezers. From the freezer section you can hear Ronnie “explain” you.

“That's YN, a regular mainly at night though. A bit skittish and rarely ever says more than 'thanks have a nice day'” Even though she's whispering you can hear everything. Including the high octave her voice takes to mimic you, it feels more like mocking.

If being mocked hadn't already put you on edge the eyes boring into you have. The eyes may not be roaming over your body but the icky crawling of your skin sure makes it feel that way. The feeling of being put under a microscope has always made you sick, the stares, the leers and sneers, and the judgment just makes you want to implode on the spot. Cease existence, be swallowed into the abyss. You're about to set yourself into an anxiety attack with all these thoughts.

'Mask, mask, mask' you repeat over and over in your head, it's the only thing you can focus on. You are wearing a mask, there is one thing they can't perceive, the face is the most important for humans to perceive, your mask protects you.

Without looking you pull a water bottle from the cooler. You don't think you like this brand but the sports mouth makes up for it, and you can't focus enough to grab another. As the imaginary spiders crawl their way under your skin and your breath hitches you make your way over to the counter head down, never looking up at the employees beyond the counter. Your vision is blurring in time with the beating of your heart, you can't tell if it's due to nerves or from being up for five days in a row.

“Hey YN, how're you?” Ronnie asks, her tone is different from the past times you've been in. It's higher and has a lilt in it that you'd expect from a teasing friend. But Ronnie isn't a friend and has never spoken to you like this, you hate it. You nod to politely move on with the process, between the crawling of your skin and the buzzing underneath it you feel sick. And you're now very aware of the existence of your eyelids, you try to focus on ignoring that awareness. You need to move.

“Hmm, that's good. Anyway this is Tim! He's just started so go easy on him.” you hear the sound of a hand hitting fabric and assume she's patted Tim's shoulder as she introduced Tim to you. Why was she doing this, what purpose could introducing you two have? You nod again, was anyone going to ring you out?

“Hi, this all?” a deep voice asked, it isn't extremely deep more of a standard baritone that has a slight raspy quality, probably a reformed smoker. You don't smell cigarettes currently so he could've quit after years. Unfortunately despite your efforts to stave them off your blinking tics emerge. Making it difficult to keep your eyes open for longer than a nano second.

Startled and ticcing you look up and catch his eyes, you see pity in them, before casting your glance back to the counter. You can never tell what's worse people seeing you as weird or seeing you as something needing to be fixed. Nodding again, Tim tells you the total; a dollar fifty eight, and you hand him two dollars from your wallet.

Tim doesn't ask if you want the receipt or a bag, he prints out the receipt and hands you your change. The change goes immediately into the cat food fund for Magnolia. She got diagnosed with diabetes about a month ago and having worked in shelters and pet stores you know just how expensive her prescription food is. After folding the receipt into your wallet, Tim gently slides the water bottle over to you.

“Have a good night.” he says it so low and gentle, as if he thinks you'll shatter in front of him. As kind as the gesture seems, you aren't that fragile...or maybe you are if you have to keep repeating 'mask' over and over in your head to ground yourself. With a final nod you turn and make your way to the door, and just as you open it you hear Ronnie call out.

“Awwww, c'mon YN at least say 'Hi' to Tim.” You really don't like how she squeaked out 'hi'.

Taking a deep breath you prepare yourself, you'll show them both you can do this simple task. Even if you can't stop blinking long enough to see straight. Once you've steadied yourself you turn and look at Tim. He's sending you a look that says 'You don't have to' all that's missing is a slow head shake to complete his unease with this “peer pressure”.

But you can do this you can say 'Hi, Tim.' Two words super simple, nothing complex like 'Hi, Tim, nice to meet you.' and so much better than the option of your next meeting saying 'Hi, Tim. Sorry for spazzing out the other night.'. Yup you can do this just breathe, you open your mouth and...and you've forgotten what to say. Looking like a deer in headlights, well at least the tics stopped, you say the first thing that pops in.

“Mask.” You've said it loud and clear both cashiers heard you.

Tim stares with wide eyes and you see Ronnie failing to hide her laughter. Out of all the ways this could've gone this was probably the best outcome for her. The blinking has started up again, this time growing more frequent. You can't even hold your eyes open, to the two cashiers it must look like you're in pain or crying. And while you want to die of embarrassment, crying is a bit of an extreme for you.

So with red face and the inability to see you leave through the door, and try to make your way back to your car. Once in you lock the doors, switch the car on, and rest your head on the steering wheel. Out of every way this stop could've gone, being perceived by a new comer and Ronnie was not what you expected. While this hadn't been the worst five minutes or so of your life, it definitely would be another thing keeping you up at night for the next twenty years.

Calming down in the cool quiet dark of your car your slowly brought back to the world by the beginning of a new episode. This one talking about the Tailypo legend. A favorite story of yours from when you were a kid living on the coast of Virginia. So with yet another deep breath and the wave of nostalgia, you pull out of the parking lot and slowly coast down the old dirt road. Heading yet again for the Monongahela forest.

It's nearly two in the morning when you roll up to see an RV parked by the forgotten entrance of the park. It isn't surprising at all to find an RV out here since the Monongahela Forest is one of the most beautiful parks you've ever been to. You also don't think anything of them being parked by this unused entrance because you use it all the time since finding it accidentally. Figuring they just wanted to camp and be left to their own devices rather than use the RV sites and be bothered with other campers here for the summer.

Climbing out of your car you notice the RV isn't new by any means but it isn't a total rust bucket either, looks like it's been passed around throughout the years. There isn't anything to suggest it's been here a while, nothing left set up outside, must have just gotten into town then. You do happen to notice dog tracks around the sandy dirt you've parked in, good to know they have a dog before you slammed your car door. Closing the door gently behind you so you don't startle a pup and wake up it's owner or owners, you make your way through the woods. No real direction in mind, with no real thought in your head. Just the thought of moving and to keep on moving.

You could walk the same path every time you came through and always find something different. In fact that's exactly what happens, you're almost positive that you've deepened the imprint of the path just from walking through several times a week. Following the same winding path you usually do, climbing over the fallen tree, and through a scattering of blueberry thicket's you find yourself on the edge of one of the forest's many streams. It's your favorite spot in the forest so far, and about as far as you've gotten considering these hikes of yours take place during the dead of night.

The wind picks up and sends a chill through you, taking that as a sign you slide down to sit by the stream. Vans placed to your side as you sink your feet into the cool water. It's peaceful out here, so cool, and quiet, save for the slight noises the stream makes, various bubbling and drips. You try to think on things like your recent move, your job, the embarrassing 'mask' incident, just life in general. But you can't seem to form a single thought, this happens a lot, you've recently been conscious of the fact that you've been running on auto pilot for the past two months, hell a lot longer than that. You think everyone must get like this from time to time, but you think you've always been this way. Keen to dissociating and slipping in and out of existence.

It's quite nice really, except for the times like right now where you'd love to figure out why the silence in your head is so painfully loud. The more you think on it the louder it gets and the stronger the buzzing under your skin feels. And right now the static in your mind has been getting louder and louder for the past few minutes. You feel your head jerk to the right of it's own accord, moving back in place it happens for a second time, and then a third, then jerks up, before jerking a forth time to the right effectively cracking you neck.

“There we go.” you mumble, you can relax a bit as the verbal tic indicates the end of this round of tics.

Sighing you look at the sky...that can't be right. The sky has been painted it's fresh baby blues for the day, but again that can't be right. You just got to the stream, that path is a thirty minute walk meaning it should be just about two thirty in the morning, but the sky suggests it's five or six at the latest. Reaching for your water bottle you find it empty next to you. You didn't fall asleep you know that much, perhaps you did dissociate tonight. Well this hike was disappointing if you knew you were going to dissociate you'd have saved yourself that embarrassment and stayed home. Maybe done some painting or tidied up.

Sighing you push yourself off the ground, collecting you vans you're about to put them on when you notice a figure off in the distance. You freeze out of shock and stare at the figure, it stares back. The figure is about ten yards away, god your near sighted ass should really remember to not leave your glasses in the car when hiking. The figure starts to make it's way to you and after a few steps you realize it hasn't moved from it's spot. Rolling your eyes you ignore the hallucination.

You'd really needed to get sleep last night, today is day six of no sleep and though you haven't had many episodes these past few days, you have a feeling they'll start to get more prominent today. Hopefully tonight you can manage to get some rest, the longer you go without sleep the more realistic the hallucinations become. But for today you're content with the knowledge that it's just shadow like beings that you'll be seeing.

After putting on your shoes you start the thirty minute hike back to your car. You're thankful for the weather in Kepler, nothing like back on the coast. Here you can go for a morning hike through the forest while a gentle breeze passes by and the sun starts to give the area a pleasant warmth. Back on the coast you couldn't run and grab the mail without getting drenched in moisture from either sweat, humidity, or a mixture of both.  The coast sucks, hell Virginia sucks altogether, you're glad to be in Kepler.

“I want to go home, home.” you say out of nowhere.

Before you reach the entrance you hear barking, oh the RV campers must be up. Should you be careful not to scare them, or just walk normally and say 'Good morning' in passing, maybe just nod your head in greeting. Oh and you've stopped just beside the entrance as you got lost in your rambling. You didn't mean to come to a stop here, and as you try to move you notice how silent it's gotten. Did the dog go inside, maybe they've already passed...no it's too quiet for that. No the silence is oppressive like the one you deal with nightly, there's a reason for the silence. The situation's making you feel uneasy, but that could be the sleep deprivation talking.

You're about to brush it off and move when you hear a whispered, “Seriously man, I don't think anyone's out there. Let's get inside.”

There's a noise of agreement before you hear shuffling. Oh no, you zoned out and now you look like a weirdo stalker. Just perfect, maybe if you wait around a little more you'll seem more normal or at least feel normal. Not knowing how long to wait you walk along the tree line for a bit, looking at the ground as you do making sure you won't step on any snakes. In you quest to not step on any snakes you spot something suspiciously off white. It seems purposefully buried under a dead blueberry bush and some fallen branches.

Having listened to too many true crime shows, you know better than to implicate yourself in a murder. Grabbing a stick off the ground you gently brush the foliage away from the supposed corpse. No way, you can't believe your luck, it's an actual fucking skull. An intact skull of a deer! That is so cool, you've only seen taxidermists on TikTok getting so lucky and finding these dudes. Since the jaw bone is connected by tissue it of course isn't with the skull but maybe it's close by? Clearly this got planted or hidden by someone, maybe they were planning on pranking a friend by 'uncovering' a skull later. Oh well, finders keepers and all that, you have way better plans for this guy, hopefully you can find that jaw bone.

You set off searching through the foliage and near by bushes with the branch while holding the skull in your other arm. After searching about three feet around and finding no more bones you decide that this is the only part of the deer's skeleton in this area. A little disappointed but still thrilled with your find, you decide it must be a good time to go back to your car.

Surely you won't look weird now. You a little forager with their treasure in hand. Looks like you'll be busy cleaning, then bleaching, and cleaning these bones today. Is that the order to treat found bones? You aren't sure but you can look into that later. Placing the skull in the trunk so it doesn't roll about and get damaged you make sure it's secure before closing the trunk and getting into your car and locking the doors.

Not once did you notice the pairs of eyes that had been watching you. One watching as you found the deer skull, and the other set seeing you place bones into your car. They kept watching as you fiddled with the radio while the car was starting up. They watched as you pulled out of the sandy dirt lot and drove back down the old road a little faster than before now that you could clearly see.

[helisol]

dude im not sure you will get it after reading this either, but you Can read it now

okay so first of all do not expect me to adhere to rules of grammar or Proper capitalisation, I am writing from the heart

so it’s been said before by other people but if Quark and Odo didnt look like the aliens that they are but instead like two regular prettybois the fandom would do cartwheels over their dynamic and Not call them a crack ship. because really, their dynamic fucking SLAPS and I’m here to tell you Why.

their surface-level dynamic is “Respected and Talented Security Chief and Cunning Immoral Businessman who are in Love but pretend not to be” and that's just an off-brand version of enemies to lovers! which is excellent and for some people that’s all you really need to get invested in a ship.

but some people look at it and go “Hm, no, that’s not enough. I mean, they work as friends but it doesn’t really have to be romantic.” and to that I say you are Absolutely Valid, not everything has to be romantic.

it just so happens that these two fuckers have one of the most compelling romance stories ever, and it’d be a shame not to explore it.

so before I dive into the internalised homophobia and repression, I’d like to take a moment to talk about Quark as a character.

because if you have brainworms like me you can kind of see that its an honest to god greek tragedy.

this guy comes from a race of people where being kind, ethical and fair is considered Abnormal and Horrifying. and I’m not gonna call Quark out of all people kind, ethical or fair but,,, 

you ever notice how he’s A Much Better Person Than Pretty Much All Other Ferengi?

dont get me wrong, Quark is still a bastard, but every once in a while his True Character shines through. and I say True Character because guys,,, the way he behaves around other people is an Act. he’s pretending to be something he’s not.

he has to try so hard to be a good ferengi it’s honestly painful to watch at times. because he is a SHIT ferengi! 

he loves his friends- because that's what the ds9 crew are. they’re his friends! and it makes him miserable because that's not! normal! for a ferengi!

let’s compare Quark and Rom for a second. 

Quark reeks of self loathing because a lot of the time he just Doesn’t act like a ferengi is supposed to, and this drives a lot of conflict in the show. he knows how a ferengi should act, it’s just that he can’t!! fucking!! do it!! but he still tries and tries to fit into that mold, which straight up ruins his life on multiple occasions.

Rom is also not a Model Ferengi, but he lives without hating himself. and it’s mostly because he doesn’t care about how a ferengi Should act, he’s loved and cared for even when everybody knows that he’s a shit ferengi! because his non-ferengi-ness works to his benefit. it encourages and highlights his abilities as an engineer. the success and love he finds make it easy for him to be content with his true self. Unlike Quark, who doesn’t get unconditional love from anyone.

its so!! tragic!! because you can see what Quark is really like!! his true self!! he’s a nice guy who cares for people!

its right there all the time and it's so blatantly obvious. especially in episodes like “Body Parts”, “Bar Association”, “The Way Of The Warrior” and “Ferengi Love Songs”

his own wiki page literally calls him “a compassionate and generous man by ferengi standards” which pretty much translates to “not really a good ferengi”.

anyway so Quark is a tragic figure or whatever but we’re actually here for the REPRESSED! HOMOSEXUAL! TENDENCIES! that he and Odo both exhibit.

with characters like garak you don’t really need to have brainrot to pick up on those tendencies, because that was something andrew robinson chose to do, on purpose. 

and to be fair, Quark wasn’t intended to be Any kind of representation, not even by the actor. I’m just pointing out that he Does look and act and talk like a little gayman.

I will admit that he is Painfully Straight in the text of the show, but on a meta level he’s just. a dude who has a serious case of repressing his real personality. and taking it a step further- he also represses his feelings towards another man.

and that man is Odo.

a few things on him:

Odo is literally desperate to be a person. unlike Quark, who at least has the comfort of belonging to a society of people with a set of rules and expectations, Odo has never met anyone or anything like him in all his years of life.

like, we all know Odo basically grew up in a lab, right? 

with people who didn’t know anything about him. who he was so unalike that they literally called him “Nothing”

but he still learned to look and talk and act like them (because if he didn’t he’d feel *pain* which is very fucked up by the way?)

so we know for a fact that Odo wants to be recognised as a person- which is why he tries really hard to conform to the ideals of the society that raised him. instead of exploring his nature as a shape shifter he maintains a humanoid form, picks up a job and creates an entire personality around what he wants to be seen as. but not what he really is.

and that's the thing that causes all the conflict between Quark and Odo. the type of person odo wants to be seen as is the polar opposite of whatever the fuck quark wants to be seen as.

In the same way that Quark acts like a Normal Ferengi, Odo acts like a Normal Security Officer.  and in a cruel twist of fate, the Ferengi happens to be the antithesis of the Security Officer.

If you only look at them as the things they act like, and not the things they are, you might say they’re way too different to like each other, right? 

but,,, if you think about the fact that they’re both putting on this act,,, this performance of idealised versions of themselves,,, you can see that they are The Same. They Are Both Gay Repressed Loser Aliens Who Try To Act Like Things That They Aren’t!

Imagine you’re Odo. 

Imagine that you’re Nothing, because you’re not like anything anyone has ever seen- and because you are Nothing you don’t fall in love with anyone for years and years. since who could love something that isn’t like them at all?

But then one day this Thing shows up in your path and you just hate it. Because it’s not like anything *you* have ever seen. It’s disorderly and looks grotesque and it’s criminal to boot.

It’s all the things you learned would make a “Bad Person” It’s everything you aspire not to be, because if you were any of those things you would BE PUNISHED.

But the trouble is, eventually he’s not an “it” anymore, he’s “Quark” and you see him every day of your miserable little life because you live on the same damn station in space and it’s hard to avoid each other.

He also happens to be one of the only things in your life that are constant. He will never leave because he is stubborn and greedy and you just *hate him so much* that you’re convinced he must be doing all of it to spite you. And yet you also can’t seem to leave him alone.

So Odo Must Hate Quark. everything else is a non sequitur for him. he can’t not hate Quark.

because Quark is, and i’m sincerely sorry to apply christian fucking imagery to this, The Forbidden Fruit.

If he liked quark he’d admit some kind of moral failing. it would be the end of his act. but on the other hand...it might be a good thing, because at least he could have quark.

but Odo can never go through with biting into this apple because the consequences are horrifying to him. he could never have quark because, according to his performance, he would Never like quark to begin with.

and here’s a take for you: Odo's Brand Of Internalised Homophobia Doesn't Stem From Heteronormativity. It Stems From The Fact That He Was Kind Of Assigned Asexual At Birth.

and the show sort of alludes to this, for real! not just subtext! canon! except the writers used the wrong person. 

because instead of Odo having these Forbidden Feelings for Quark he has them for,,, Kira.

but since this is My Quodo Manifesto you’ll understand that i am 100% willing to just toss that part of canon out the airlock.

so Odo does canonically have that mindset of “no one could ever love me”  for decades he repressed any and all feelings of love to avoid getting hurt. in the show he breaks this cycle of repression when he takes a chance and enters a relationship with Kira. yay?

but we all know that aint it chief. and part of the reason why That Ship Ain’t It is the fact that Quark is Right There. and he is simply the more interesting choice for odo.

he and Odo literally share the same problem and have weird intertwined character arcs! they are both dreadfully afraid of not conforming to the ideal versions of themselves, so they reject everything that could challenge their Performance!

on some fucked up level they hate each other *and* themselves individually. and this hatred makes them reject parts of their real identities for the sake of protecting their image. which. yknow. in gay people. is internalised homophobia!

so you can see that they’re both repressing A Lot even if you view them as Friends, but the most important thing in this kind of romantic dynamic is usually,,, when the characters *stop* repressing.

and the thing is. the thing that Kills Me with these two. They Never Get That Moment. Thats Why You Need The Brainrot To See Them As Romantic.

The Ascent gives us an example of what happens when they both take their act too far. I mean, who could forget “Fascist!” and “Fraud!” That is what odo thinks of quark’s performance and vice versa, but we don’t really hear them adress the fact that they *are* playing these roles to a ridiculous extent.

We also never get an example of what would happen if they dropped their act instead of over-performing it. or rather we don’t get to see both of them drop it.

And the reason why we never get that moment is because there’s this one key difference between Quark and Odo. 

Quark knows that he’s constantly repressing his true nature and his feelings for odo. We pretty much hear him say so in the iconic root beer scene in Way Of The Warrior. he knows that he’s not a good ferengi but he keeps up his act.

So quark is aware enough to feel that sweet sweet self loathing. But Odo isnt self loathing as much as he is just self sabotaging.

and this subtle difference between them is why, at the very end of the show, we get “That man loves me, can’t you see? It was written all over his back!”

this moment is quark dropping his act and asking odo to do the same. he wants to hear a genuine Goodbye from him because they have known each other for Decades and they are Friends. but odo is so unable to express the feelings he’s been repressing all these years. that he self sabotages again and just walks away.

even though this is like. very anticlimactic. considering I just spent 2000 words talking about how Odo and Quark are Most Certainly Gay For Each Other.

The fact that their ending is so Weird is the reason why quodo is so engaging and appealing to me? especially post-canon quodo.

like, the amount of “what if’s” this ship has are Astounding.

What if either of them had dropped their act a little sooner? What if they both did, for just a moment, and it was the straw that breaks the camels back?

What if Odo comes back after a few years? What if Quark comes to get him?

What if, in that moment in the finale where Quark drops his act, Odo had returned the gesture? What if Gag-Reel Quodo Kiss.gif Real?

with the depth that I read into their relationship, those what ifs are really fun to think about.

anyway its 1 am and i’m not an english major so literary analysis is not like, my strong suit. plus most of this was written in a late night screaming session with a friend who has the exact same opinions as me. i just think aliens hot and in love. thats all.

[mikkeneko]

Got tagged by @veliseraptor for a writing meme!

How many works do you have on AO3? What’s your total AO3 word count?

193 works over 10 fandoms;  2,591,823 words.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

I would count 10 real ones. Dragon Age; Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle; Critical Role; Marvel Cinematic Universe; The Untamed; The Witcher; Cardcaptor Sakura; Fullmetal Alchemist; Gundam Wing; Weiss Kreuz. Some of these pre-date the existence of AO3, and some of them are better off that way.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

A Villain State of Mind; Cover Up the Sun; Laughing As I Pray; I do solemnly swear; The Morning After.  All Loki fandom fics. Not too surprising as that was the most mainstream fandom I wrote for, and they’ve been around for a while now, lots of time to accumulate stats.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do! I have a somewhat complex set of criteria for when I respond and how. 

I will respond to all  comments left on works in my current/active fandom except  for: comments consisting entirely of emojis (mainly because I have no idea what to say to that) comments consisting of single words (same) or comments that seem to be about something other than my fic entirely or focus entirely on negativity (i.e., the commentor is using this box as a space to rant about how much they hate a character, the show, or another author/trope.)

I will usually but not always respond to comments on my next-to-last fandom. On older fandoms I will respond only  to especially long or thoughtful comments, or ones that specifically ask a question that I can answer.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

That would have to be Rise From Ash,  the Loki timeloop fic I wrote in MCU. Since it was intended to lead into Avengers, it naturally had a downer ending since we know how Avengers went for Loki; but the story also ended with him having a major mental health break and resolving to kill himself in order to end the timeloop, so, uh, that was pretty unhappy.

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I think that the Never Gonna Tell A Lie series has to qualify for this one by default; two fics of the “characters from wildly different series meet in a bar” format, spanning seven different franchises.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Occasionally. I can’t answer in a lot of detail because I make a conscious policy of thinking about these comments as little as possible, so I tend to forget the details. Off the top of my head I know I received a few comments on my MCU fics of people complaining that the fic was nothing more than a Thor-bashing exercise (it wasn’t intended as such, but you can’t control how the audience will receive, I guess.) And then there was the whole infamous “ableist torture porn of a mentally ill man” episode.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I can recall. It may have happened that I just don’t know about.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Have you ever had a fic translated?

A fair amount! Sometimes people will leave a comment asking permission to translate. I have always granted it. Sometimes they go through with the translation and sometimes not.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! In Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle I co-wrote a couple fics with @faux-fires which were a lot of fun. (Which... doesn’t seem to be on AO3, huh. But Not Quite Paradise  is still on ff.net.)  And more recently @cerusee and I have been trading scenes back and forth for each other’s stories.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

I don’t know if I have just one. Maybe Kurogane/Fai. They really manage to straddle all my favorite ship dynamics.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Both of my WIPs in Critical Role fandom, Molly’s Moving Castle and Fjord Mustang’s YEEHAW! Fun and Pony Ranch,  are at this point probably never going to be finished. Partly because of Characterization Marches On; the characters that I thought they were when I started writing were not the characters they ended up being in canon. But mostly just because I’m no longer really in the fandom. 

Wonder if it’s worth closing out the WIPs on AO3 with final chapters describing how the fic would have ended?

What are your writing strengths?

I can do humor, I can do horror, I can do heartbreak. I can write a complex outline and stick to it, I have a fair amount of discipline and perseverance. People occasionally compliment my character voice, so I’d say that’s decent. I can spin up a plot for just about any situation. I love  adapting canon to AU. My dialogue is pretty punchy and my action sequences are adequate.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I’m really bad at writing OCs, as I admit to every darn time this comes up. I’ve also recently realized that I have a strong tendency to avoid writing about characters I don’t like, on several fronts.

The first way that manifests is that if there’s a main/good guy character who the fandom likes and I dislike, I will avoid writing about them whenever possible. I don’t do character bashing. (Which means that if I am  writing about a protagonist character, even if they’re being a jerk and the narrative is whacking them for it, that doesn’t mean I hate the character. It just means that the story requires that they get a good whacking, Thor.)

But the second way this manifests is that I will often just... avoid writing about the bad guys, if they’re unpleasant and I dislike them. Which in shorter things is fine! We’re here to read about the characters we like.  But in longer or more plotful things, that means that all of the villain’s bad things happen off screen  if they happen at all, so the audience doesn’t get a chance to really build up anger against them, so their eventual downfall is less satisfying.

I’m also weaker at writing romance than I would like, I’d say. If it’s a story that has a plot, the romance will frequently get shoved in around the corners or at the last minute. If it’s a story that’s supposed to be about romance, the characters will usually sidetrack into having philosophical discussions about moral relativity when they’re supposed to be flirting.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’m not sure I understand the question. I don’t think this has ever come up in my fic. I do not speak any other languages fluently enough to have ever tried to write any part of my fics, dialogue or otherwise, in a language other than english. Is this asking my thoughts on other  people doing that? Sure, why not?

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

That would have been Gundam Wing! Gosh, it’s been so long that I barely remember what  that first fic was. But the biggest thing I wrote for that fandom was a ghost story on a space station, which was not very good, objectively, but I look back on it and think it had some seeds of a pretty cool horror/psychological drama going there. 

Was Duo Maxwell really  haunting the space station? Or was Heero Yuy just going mad with grief? Who can say.

Tagging! Well, Lise tagged me, so she’s out. How about... @hollyand-writes (if you have the time to spare,) @curiosity-killed, @thethirdamell, @plotdesigner, and @cerusee ?

[snakeboistan]

Policing His Heart

Pairing: Sugino x Nagisa

This is loosely based off of the TV Show ‘ Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries ‘, which is now honestly my favourite show. Like I am only four episodes in and I am literally in love with every single character and Miss Fisher and Detective Inspector Robinson is literally Irina x Karasuma if they lived in the 1920s. And yes, I know that back then boy x boy was a crime (actually the episode that I took inspiration from is about how one of the suspects was man that’s in a relationship with his male best friend and the murder victim had evidence of it - but he didn’t go to jail because he was protected by Miss Fisher and the Detective Inspector when they got rid of the evidence) but let’s just pretend that people aren’t stupid and the world didn’t suck, okay

“So do you have any possible suspects, Miss?” Nagisa asked as he entered Irina’s lavish bedroom with a tray filled with plates, slices of toast and a variety of jams. The woman of the house herself was exquisitely reclining on the gold silk sheets of her queen sized bed, her scarlet robe flowing around her like she was a goddess as she continued to read the newspaper article that detailed yesterday’s murder.

“Oh you know, the usual,” Irina supplied to her companion, setting the paper down on her lap, “vengeful wife, greedy children, business enemies. The first people that come to mind when a wealthy charmer has been killed.”

“Did Mr Willis have many enemies?” the blunette inquired as he handed the breakfast tray to the blonde.

“A man of his reputation always has many enemies. It’s figuring out which one is daring enough to stab him which is the issue. Oh, come here, Nagisa, sit next to me” Irina called, patting the space on the duvet beside her.

“Yes, Miss,” Nagisa nodded and made his way around the bed so that he could sit by her side, making sure that he doesn’t crumple her garments. Irina made a pleased sound and she picked up a slice of toast and a butter knife with her manicured hands, deftly spreading on some strawberry jam before handing it to the boy.

“I think I’m going to have a word with Mr Thompson today,” the woman mused, “he was at the party yesterday and I’ve got a feeling that he has more information than he’s letting on.”

“Mr Thompson,” Nagisa inquired, “Clark Thompson? But he seemed so nice during last week’s party at the Robinson’s. I would hardly consider him someone that would kill.”

“Ahh, Nagisa, everyone is capable of murder when they are backed into a corner, and given Mr Willis’ business in blackmail I wouldn’t strike anyone at the party off of the list of possible suspects.”

“You seem to have few ideas on what to do, Miss,” Nagisa observed, “Is there anything you wish for me to do here in the house once you are out?”

“Nothing much, just make sure that the laundry is done and you can spend the rest of the day doing what you want. Although I may require for you to stay here in case I need to call on you. Oh that reminds me,” Irina chimed, a slight smirk forming at the corner of her crimson mouth, “I was having a word with Tadaomi at the crime scene yesterday.”

“And,” Nagisa said, because he felt as if she was silently goading him to ask, “what did Detective Inspector Karasuma say?”

“Well, apparently Constable Sugino wishes to ask you to the Fireman and Policeman’s ball.”

Nagisa choked on his mouthful of toast, sending stray crumbs onto his plain woolen brown waistcoat, “me?!”

‘Why yes,” she smiled innocently, taking her own bite of toast, “I don’t find it surprising. Our dear constable is very clearly taken with you.”

Nagisa blushed, looking down, “Oh, I wish you would stop teasing me, Miss.”

“I’m a detective, darling. It’s my job to observe people and gather information.”

“I’d much rather you do your detective work on your cases and not on me though. Anyhow, if he truly wishes to ask me, he’s cutting it awfully close - the ball is in two days.”

“Oh the poor man is simply nervous,” Irina waved him off, “give him time, he’ll surely come around. Now come on, I’ve got a suspect to visit.”

…..

When Nagisa walked into the Police Station to deliver his basket of baked treats to Irina, he stopped dead in his tracks when he caught sight of the ebony-haired policeman behind a camera. He was currently taking photographs of his employer, who seemed to have the time of her life by posing like a film actress, flaunting her figure with every click and shutter.

“Miss Jelavic,” Constable Sugino said with amusement, “I must ask you to keep still.”

“Oh darling,” she winked, “I never stay still.”

Nagisa cleared his throat, causing both the policeman and Irina to swivel their heads towards her, Irina grinned as Nagisa tightened his hold on the basket. Sugino’s eyes widened and his cheeks started to blossom with a faint rosy hue, almost dropping the camera if it weren’t for the fact that it was on a stand.

“I brought your lunch, Miss,” he informed the blonde woman. He turned to the smiled nervously, “good afternoon, Constable Sugino” - he nodded at the tall, no-nonsense policeman that stood at the doorway of the office - “Detective Inspector Karasuma.”

“Good-good afternoon, Nagisa,” Sugino stuttered, giving his own embarrassed smile, “I hope you’re well.”

Karasuma gave his own greeting before asking Irina, “you ordered lunch.”

“Why yes I did.”

“You said that the call was for an emergency.”

“Yes, I’m hungry.”

Karasuma gave an exasperated sigh as Irina took the basket from her companion.

“Excuse me,” Nagisa said, “I don’t mean to intrude but what was going on earlier?”

“I happened to catch Miss Jelavic in the act of breaking and entering,” Karasuma answered with irritation.

“It’s not breaking and entering if the window was already open,” Irina waved him off, “now why don’t you and I have a talk in your office about what was in that folder. You can have a piece of Nagisa’s apple pie, it’s to die for.”

Nagisa watched as Irina dragged Karasuma into his office, shutting the door behind them, before his eyes found themselves wandering towards Sugino only to find that the Constable was already looking at him. The two of them stared at each other for a second before retracting their gazes, cheeks blazing.

“So,” Sugino started.

“Yes, Sugino,” Nagisa smiled at him.

“I-uh-well, you-uh- see,” he was ringing his hands, as if he was mustering up the courage to ask Nagisa something homogeneously of Oliver Twist asking for more, “the thing is, Nagisa, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

“Yes,” Nagisa urged.

“I-I, I hope that,” Sugino looked straight into his eyes and his expression faltered, “I hope that you could-could-haveaniceday.”

The brunette blinked at the plastered smile that the navy-eyed man threw on after rushing out the last part of his sentence, something in his heart falling. He gave his own smile at Sugino, “thank you, Constable Sugino. I hope that you do too.”

….

“So, did you ask him?”

“No, Sir, I lost my nerve at the last second.”

“For heaven's sake, Constable, it’s a dance not a marriage proposal.”

“I know, I know.”

…..

“Oh,” Nagisa cried as he continued to pace the study, “I do hope that she’s alright.”

“Don’t worry Nagisa,” Taisei Yoshida said from where he was leaning against the study’s doorway with his arms crossed, “I’m sure that Miss is alright.”

“But it’s been an hour since she’s left to find the murderer,” Nagsa argued, hands flying everywhere, “she could be in danger. I hate not knowing how she is, I couldn’t even finish darning the pillowcases with how much my hands are shaking.”

“Why don’t I get you some tea,” Irina’s butler, Yuuma Isogai, offered kindly, “it would help calm your nerves.”

“Well, I don’t know about tea,” Ryouma Terasaka grumbled, “But I could use a drink. I still don’t see why she didn’t bring us with her - we always help her out!”

“Could you get us some cups of tea and a bottle of whisky please, Yuuma,” Taisei asked.

“Certainly.”

When Isogai left, Taisei turned to the still panicking Nagisa, “Calm down, Nagisa. You know Miss Jelavic. That woman is strong enough to handle herself even if she wasn’t accompanied by that Detective. She carries around a golden revolver at all times for crying out loud. Or are you worrying because it’s not just Miss that has left but also the Detective Inspector’s right hand man.”

“Huh, who?” Terasaka asked as Nagisa paused and blushed, gulping and looking down.

“Constable Tomohito Sugino,” Taisei enunciated with a sly grin, “the chap that helped us during the Asano case. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that he seems to be quite taken with our Nagisa.”

“It’s not like that,” Nagisa mumbled, face still red, “we’re just acquaintances.”

“I see,” Taisei smirked, sharing a look with Ryouma, “well, I know just what to take your mind out of this. Let me tell you what I heard from Taiga Okajima at the pub-”

He was cut off by the doorbell and heavy knocking at the door. Isogai’s voice could be heard saying, “Good evening, Miss, Detective Inspector.”

Nagisa gasped and rushed to the door, breathing out, “Miss, you’ve returned!”

Irina smirked, “Of course I have.”

“So you’ve caught him?”

“What do you expect? Now if you gentlemen don’t mind me, I am going to have a nice warm bath.”

As Irina sauntered up the stairs, the ends of her white fur stole swaying in tandem, Nagisa turned towards the two policemen at the door. After exchanging a glance with his subordinate, Detective Inspector Karasuma nodded at him, “I’ll be taking my leave then.”

Only Nagisa and Sugino were left at the entrance. Sugino looked at the shorter boy and opened his mouth, about to say something when Nagisa spoe instead,

“Are you alright? Did the murderer hurt you?”

“Wha-,” Sugino’s eyes widened, “no, no. Fortunately I am unharmed.”

“That’s good,” Nagisa smiled, “I was so worried. I-”

“Will you accompany me to the policemen and firemen’s ball?”

Silence descended onto the duo as Sugino���s blurted out words registered in Nagisa’s head. Nagisa inhaled deeply, staring intently at the Constable before him, the same Constable whose name would make him feel something in his soul like no other word could, whose face shined with nothing but kindness and soft care that made his day brighten in ways he couldn’t describe.

“Yes,” he breathed, feeling breathless and giddy, “I would love to.”

“Oh,” Sugino stated plainly, taken aback. He said nothing for a moment, his face had yet to lose its rosy hue, but then a shaky, exuberant smile made its way onto his mouth, “alright then. I’ll pick you up at ten?”

“That works for me.”

“Wonderful.”

…..

Later that week, Sugino extended the crook of his elbow towards Nagisa. The blue-haired boy smiled, remembering the star-struck look the policeman wore when he saw him wearing his raven black tuxedo (perfectly tailored by one of Irina’s friends - “almost too perfectly,” Irina herself had quipped). Nagisa interlocked his own arm through and together they walked into the ballroom.

[allforhader]

Why here?!

Barry Berkman x (F) Reader

Warnings: Blood, Language

Y/N and Barry have been dating for half a year, but secrets weren’t kept very long. When Barry told Y/N about his affairs, she needed space. She didn’t take the space to protect herself, she needed it to process the information. She needed other reasons to cloud what’s been said.

“Please don’t make me do this”

“You promised your fucking word Barry”

“I can’t do this”

“Just fucking do it”

Y/N jolts awake in her bed to a loud crash coming from the main room of her apartment. She grabs the bat from under her bed and braced herself making her way out of her bedroom. She reaches and takes a hold of the door knob quickly opening it about to swing when the silhouette was too familiar.

“Barry?” Y/N questions as she turns on the light and the first thing she notices was the broken window. “Barry I can’t afford-“ she stops talking when she noticed the blood on him. Was it his?

“I’m sorry I-I’ll fix....” Barry felt lightheaded as he stopped talking to process what’s happening internally until he couldn’t.

“Barry-!” Y/N freaks when he passes out on her coffee table, well what was her coffee table.

Fuck...

Why here?

I could’ve...

No I couldn’t have...

I trust her

I love her

She’s my everything...

Barry groans as he woke up eventually after passing out. He sits up in Y/N’s bed realizing his shirt is off and his wounds were taken care of. He looks around finding Tylenol waiting for him with a glass of water on the night stand. Barry tried to get out of the bed when Y/N walks in angrily smacking his legs to be brought back onto the bed. He noticed her hospital uniform and he immediately thought that he made her late, but the worried expression said otherwise.

“Y/N...what are you doing here...”

“I live here and there’s a patient in my damn bed. Who should stay in the damn fucking bed” Y/N’s anger seeped through the worry as she took his wrist doing the regular check of vitals she’d do in the ER.

——

Barry met Y/N in the ER, but it wasn’t for him that time. Sally fell and hit her head during an exercise, and Gene made Barry take her.

“Hello my name is Doctor Y/L/N and I’ll be your doctor this evening. Can you tell me...” Y/N trails off when she locked eyes with Barry. She immediately looked at Sally to bring back the attention. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I fell...”

“Well, you clearly hit your head” Y/N sets down the tablet for keeping charts on the end of the bed before putting on gloves. “You have a head lac. What exactly did you hit?”

“One of the floor speakers. Y’know, on stages?” Barry states as Y/N gave him an annoyed smile for talking to her like she doesn’t know shit.

“This is LA, Mr.?”

“Berkman”

“Mr. Berkman. So please. Don’t talk to me like an idiot when I get actors almost every day. The usual is heat exhaustion or dehydration. What is up with you actors not taking care of yourselves?” She frowns checking the lac as Sally winces. “Alright. You hang tight while I order a CT before stitching up that lac”

“Oh wait. Are staples faster?”

“Why?”

“I have an audition”

Y/N rolls her eyes taking the tablet and ordering the CT before waving over an ER nurse to put a pressure dressing.

“Ms....Sally Reed” Y/N reads the chart for her name before giving her a stern look. “Staples will definitely scar. If you let me take my time with your stitches, I promise there won’t be a noticeable scar”

“Fine...”

“As for you...Berkman. You can wait for your friend in the waiting room” Y/N states as she left to take care of a few things.

The hours went by and Y/N’s shift was over, she always leaves from the ER’s exit/entrance and when she stepped out. Barry sat on a bench outside the ER catching her attention.

“You injured Berkman?”

“No ma’am”

“Then what are you doing out here?” Y/N smiles walking over to Barry as he stood to his feet looking down at her.

“My name is Barry”

“Oh, first name formality is why you came here?”

“Well I thought I’d ask the badass ER doc if she’d like to get a drink”

“This...badass ER doc. Doesn’t drink on call” Y/N smiles. “But Y/N, would happily get tea with Barry this late”

“Then shall we?”

“We shall”

——

“You’ve been out for a week”

“I’ve been out for what...?”

“You lost a lot of blood Barry. I already stole gauze, a syringe, lidocaine, wraps, a few suture kits. I can’t steal blood to replace what you lost. So your body made it natural while you were out cold” Y/N frowns grabbing the clipboard off the night stand seeing the Tylenol and water. “You should take some right now if you’re still in pain” she states writing down his vitals as she’s been charting it down.

“Y/N, you didn’t-“

“What? Didn’t have to? Oh like I totally want my boyfriend dead on the streets for who knows what fucking happened to him” Y/N frowns making him sit up completely so she can check the wounds on his back.

Barry frowns feeling her take off some of the bandages to clean and re-patch.

“Tell me”

“What?”

“How this fucking happened”

“One bad job”

“Details Barry, for fuck sake”

“I was paid. Well. Boss-“

“Fuches”

“Fuches, was paid and then I’ll be paid. To take down this guy in downtown LA for the favor of Hank. I got stuck in a fight. That involved Guns of course. I only got grazed for the most part until I took a metal bat to a few places and well a knife to a gun fight”

“How many people were involved? Was it a trap?”

“It seemed like that. Honestly. You do a lot better job at taking care of wounds compared to Fuches when I fought a guy with a fucking black belt”

“Barry...”

Barry frowns turning around looking at Y/N upset expression only becoming her balling. He tried to move completely to hold her but she stopped him. Y/N got up cleaning up everything before propping Barry up with her pillows.

“I’ll....be back after my shift”

“Y/N...”

“Why here? You have actor friends. Aren’t actors supposed to be great liars? Lie to one of them that you got mugged. Just like New York, there’s a lot of jackasses in the streets of LA.”

“You’re the only one I trust Y/N”

“...it’s hard to believe that love”

Barry frowns watching Y/N grab one of Barry’s jackets on her way out. A part of her still loves him, even if everything is so out of the ordinary.

A few hours into the shift, Y/N sat down in the ER nurse’s station taking a minute as she watches interns freak out when nothing much is going on. She started trailing into her thoughts causing her to think out loud.

“He would’ve died...if he got shot...”

“What?”

Shit

“Huh?” Y/N looks over to find her favorite nurse Ollie look at her confused.

“You said something about getting shot?”

“Oh, yeah sorry. I’ve been thinking about an episode of Greys” wow.

“Y/N how can you watch that stuff when you do most of it everyday?”

“How can you watch that show AND it’s spin offs?”

“Okay. This isn’t about me”

“I just think about it a lot. They over dress a lot of stuff that we tend to see everyday. Can you imagine it being that bad every day? Also...I wouldn’t want to be Owen Hunt”

Ollie laughs at the final comment before answering the call. When he ends it he gave Y/N a look.

“You jinx the ER when you mention Owen!”

“Sorry!” Y/N laughs getting the trauma gown on as she makes her way out to meet the rig.

When Y/N meets with the rig, it wasn’t a big trauma but the person was too familiar.

——

Y/N sat in the middle of the audience waiting for the play to begin.

“Why are theaters so cold...” she whispers to herself as she heard a man laugh at her comment.

“Actors can’t sweat or the makeup will melt off”

“Tsk. Fucking actors”

“Who are you here for?”

“My boyfriend, you?” Y/N turns to look at him as he scoffs a bit.

“My uh. Nephew” Fuches laughs. “I hate acting. I think it’s an excuse of a job but he wants to do it. So whatever right? Support the ones you care about”

“Yeah, so. Your name?”

“You first little lady”

“Y/N”

“Fuches”

——

Y/N frowns putting her gloves on and checking Fuches for any major injuries but for the most part he took a beating. To her, he got what he deserved. But to her as a doctor, no one deserves to be in pain.

“Get an x-ray and CT. Let me know when he’s conscious”

“Should I admit him?”

“If there’s anything on the scans according to radiology that recommends observation, then yes. Please” Y/N states going to order the tests but before she did. She decided to handle all of it.

Fuches groans waking up in a hospital bed but when he looked around. The only one he spotted was Y/N.

“You...”

“You broke a few ribs and there’s a grade two liver lac. We are observing it and if it doesn’t resolve, we’ll do surgery”

“Why...our of all the doctors-“

“Did I help your ass?”

“...”

“I should’ve known that the funny guy sitting next to me during the showing of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, was the guy telling my boyfriend to go kill people”

“Should you...really be saying that out loud?”

“Who hurt you?”

“That’s none-“

“It’s my business if its the same fuckers that almost killed Barry”

“Tsk. So he’s not dead”

Y/N frowns realizing what she admitted as she crosses her arms leaning against the back of the chair.

“You leave him alone, or I’ll call the police”

“They’ll...only arrest Barry too Y/N..”

“The leave him alone or I’ll make it look like a complication in surgery, if there is one.” Y/N got up from her seat as Fuches watches her leave the room.

“Crazy bitch...”

Barry jolts awake when he heard the front door shut. He pushes himself to get out of bed and check on Y/N but she had already walked in when he stood to his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Barry frowns as Y/N just stood there. “Y/N?”

Y/N places her hands on his face giving him an angered look. Barry frowns resting his hands on her hips waiting for her to say something but for the most part all she did was look at him and tear up.

“Y/N what happened?”

“That fucker...that fucking fucker that told me he was your goddamn uncle at the play, was in my ER with semi similar injuries to you”

“Did he say anything? Anything of concern...?”

“No just....“ Y/N lets go of Barry trying to pull away when Barry only wrapped himself around her. She just didn’t want...she didn’t want this. She didn’t want to have to worry to an extreme level. Her job is already stressful enough...now there’s so much more.

“I’m in love with you Y/N...”

“...really? I should be saying that to you...I did just threaten to kill a man to protect you...” Y/N frowns feeling Barry squeeze her in his arms as she gripped onto his shirt. “I’m in love with you Barry Berkman...and I don’t want anybody hurting you anymore”

[bearpillowmonster]

Resident Evil 2 Remake Review

NON SPOILER

I've bought Resi 4 on Steam, after the first level of playing it, I realized that it wasn't for me, all the enemies looked the same and it looked repetitive, zombies kept spawning and there was no way to get rid of them all, I ran out of ammo, it was a mess. I knew that the genre did that, I know that that’s the point, but I didn’t like it. Plus, I couldn't even really get the gunplay to work right. I heard that it was at its best on the Gamecube but I haven't given it another shot since then. However I saw that Resi2 got a demo, so I played it when it released and I kind of liked it, I was sold on the game and asked for it for Christmas (or maybe even my birthday, so yeah it’s been a long time but I was busy with other games) Now, the RE3 remake is already out...wow, time to play RE2 then, huh? So, you can consider this my "first" RE game.

Right out of the gate, visuals are stunning, almost needless to say and the level of accuracy is immense. I mean I didn't expect there to be a gas station at the beginning but it even had the lighters and beef jerky towards the front and stuff, they really went all out. 

I can't imagine seeing this game when the original came out with PS1 graphics, it's ambitious, this is clearly the way it belongs. I thought a bug flew on screen but then I realized it was in-game, it's immersive, I don't normally read all the little tidbits and notes and stuff but it was generally interesting to read on the lore along with the VHS tapes and get some clues as to what to do next. I tried to play through it as if it were 1998 so I didn't look much up, I usually tried to do it myself with a few small exceptions. I felt accomplished by the end of each session like "Wow, I did that. I'm smart." It's rewarding. Now I played through each campaign so both Leon and Claire (starting with Leon) Claire on the other hand I was more lenient with, I looked up a decent amount because I was already in the station doing the same puzzles as Leon. It makes me wonder how they got the same items story-wise though, I mean we see Leon leaving her notes but you can't blow up the same wall twice in reality, that's nitpicking the game a little bit though. I will say that I felt like it was a wild goose chase when I did look it up because every thing I looked up was giving me different information "The portable safe is in this room." "No it's in this room." "This is the combination for the unicorn statue" "No it isn't, this is." Because it varies when you're playing on standard vs hardcore and whether it's your first or second run. So, I got my punishments for looking it up I guess.

But with that said, I know some of these types of older games have a tendency to make it really confusing and difficult without a guide so I was kind of worried about not knowing what to do or where to go. While I will say I had had to look a few things up, it became cut and dry once I figured out the pattern, most of the things I looked up were things I was going to do anyway but wanted to make sure before I somehow unleashed a hoard of zombies that I certainly didn't want. Same goes for story too, I knew close to nothing about it. But you basically just have to make it to the next area, think of it as that Chowder episode where he loses his hat and Chestnut has it so he has to go around doing odd jobs one by one in order to progress. The overall goal is to get out of the police station and kind of just find a way to survive but you have to focus on the smaller goals / getting to the next room. I looked pretty thoroughly through everything and managed to find everything I needed without even trying or knowing what it was for half the time like "Well this should come in handy later." *puts it in storage chest*  Speaking of, I like how each chest is like an Ender Chest and is interchangeable as if it was the same one chest in every location, that makes things much easier rather than some hardcore game of "where did I put my keys?" that I'm not into. But you learn to find your destination a lot easier than I thought. That was always something I hated about Resident Evil games while watching them, that there was a lot of backtracking but actually playing the game hits differently, it's not what I expected, it's actually kind of fun, like I mentioned saying "I know where that is!"

Maybe it's just the setting of a police station that did that for me or maybe seeing speedrunners doing it with the old games and paying no mind made me scared or maybe the fixed camera angle of the old games (so that each side of the room had the clip as if it were just a picture) along with the idea that the originals are dated rather than PS4 but regardless, it's just surprisingly not annoying like I thought.

Games can easily stress me out but I actually found myself cruising and feeling good about it despite all these zombies...then I met Mr. X. He chases you EVERYWHERE throughout the game. Thing of nightmares. I will probably hear footsteps in my sleep now. I knew he was coming but I didn't know his presence wasn't always scripted, it's just a game of cat and mouse...and he's the cat! It gets me paranoid because I'll stop and hear footsteps then stand still for a good 5 minutes and he's still tromping around. I walk down a hall. BOOM! Crashes through the wall, making ME screech. There's no way to get rid of him and it kind of ruins the atmosphere to be honest, I know it's trying to be scary but it's more annoying than scary because every time I move I'm like "Ok stop" and I'll stand around for a minute, checking the map, to check the fastest route to where I need to go, just to make sure and then continue... only to turn the next corner and then repeat. I couldn't even move comfortably anymore, it's space invading. The tension is high because he can come into the main hall which I liked to use to save but alas, I had to memorize where all the other save points were or check the map again.

So, you get to play as Claire, which I like, but with Leon's story it's kind of just like "Well I'm going to do my own thing and if she survives, she survives." I understand each step is essential to progressing and getting closer but for all he knows, she's just out in the rain, waiting for him to unlock the door. And I also know that she said that she can handle herself (before Leon had to point out the zombie behind her! lmao) and he has survival on the forefront of his mind too but still. They flirt every time they're on screen together but the thing is that I love it, I ship it, it's cheesy but I don't care, that’s half of what I’m even here for.

As for the rest of the story, you're telling me that they made not just one movie but a SERIES of movies and it wasn't this?! This is great, this is a master-craft in its work. I'm not a big fan of zombie movies, I'm sure there's one out there that I like but I can't think of any off the top of my head but this? This is it! (Jennifer Lawrence would make a good Claire tbh) Let alone the horror genre in general, I'm not even frightened all that easily, I just think a lot of the plots and decisions are stupid in horror, this goes against all that. Speaking of spooky, I know making the screen brightness balanced is normal for games but I don't think it's mattered more than here, brighten that baby up because sometimes it's pitch black, immersive but still hard to see.

Boss fights are something I didn't think a whole lot about until I actually got to it. Doing the first boss fight with G was really memorable for me because I could cower away all I wanted in that gridded pit of a machine room and just launch grenades at him but it wasn't until the bosses in the sewer that I really started to like it. First was that Crash Bandicoot type running sequence, then we had G-2. I had actually ran out of ammo at that point, I used it all on the sewage monsters (I didn't get the flamethrower, I didn't know how, as I said, I did this more or less blind) so I just kept running, and clicked X every time the option came up, hoping to pick up something good. All I got was a combat knife and a flash grenade, then I started messing with the buttons on the control panel, in hopes of cheesing it and just going to the next section but then I realized what I was actually doing. I was using those buttons to move a crate and using that crate to slam G into a pit. I love the classic boss style, I haven't played a boss like that in a long time. One where it doesn't matter how much ammo you have, but just using the environment to your advantage without it explicitly telling you (except the death screen giving you hints). That was until the later boss fights, you basically just keep unloading your belt until they die, kinda lame but whatever.

This actually made me rethink the genre and also about giving one of the other games a shot (PLEASE REMAKE CODE VERONICA, I BEG!) it might be right time, right place (PS4 with modern graphics and modern gunplay) that made me actually interested. The “true ending” is unlocked by playing through one of the two’s campaign and then playing through the other, which is basically the same game but with different cutscenes and context (some new areas too) so it’s definitely worth it, you could even just speedrun the second run if you’d like, you even unlock a secret boss and for those who have already seen the true ending, know that I liked it based off of what I said earlier, no spoilers.

[monsterywriting]

Werewolf Boyfriend (Mordecai) - pt 8 (epilogue)

AN: I’m so so sorry I’ve been dead basically this whole month my life has been seriously crazy… it felt like every week was some new problem cropping up. First I had exams then finals and then I had a very sudden death in my family that really just took a lot out of me.

I’ve had half of the ending for Kai done for awhile I had just been slowly but surely chipping away at it.

I’m also taking summer courses starting in June. So, my current plan is to 1) rewrite the chapters I currently already have up for Maledos while also 2) working on new chapters for dear ol’ Mal. Hopefully this gives me some time to get back on schedule and put out some new stories!

So, without further ado, the last chapter for Mordecai. Enjoy-

word count: 2,586

“Nervous?” You asked as you popped into Kai’s bathroom in his parents’ guest house to grab your lotion, Kai buttoning up the fifth shirt he’d tried on in the past hour.

“Terrified,” Kai corrected you as he pressed a quick kiss against your forehead before turning back to the mirror.

You huffed a quiet laugh as you spread lotion on your legs, “Hey, I survived your family’s fancy schmancy luncheon. You can survive one evening with mine.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t dating, then,” Kai pointed out, walking out into his bedroom to grab some shoes from his closet, “and this is both of our families together in one space…”

You smiled with a small eye roll before you walked out of the bathroom after him without answering. You knew the true reason Kai was so nervous was the bit of news the two of you had to break to both your parents.

After a few more minutes of watching your boyfriend scan his wardrobe for the umpteenth time that night, you clapped your hands together to draw Kai’s attention to you, “Well, I’m dressed, are you ready?”

Kai groaned as he turned and threw his arms over your shoulders and went limp on you, muttering about how he couldn’t decide on an outfit. You were barely able to brace your legs and hold the two of you up as Kai’s full weight attempted to take you down.

“Get up,” you grunted as you pushed Kai off of your shoulder by his face, “What you had on earlier was fine.”

Nearly twenty minutes later, you and Kai were finally getting into your car and heading out to the venue where Kai’s parents were holding their 40th anniversary party.

You had yet to see his parents since coming back down to Newport for the summer as they had been spending time with Kai’s oldest brother and his family out of town, so this would be your first time seeing them since spring break.

Kai had eventually decided on a simple off white button up shirt with black fitted slacks and mahogany-colored dress shoes, though it took some threatening that you would leave without him to get him to choose.

By the time the two of you arrived at the venue, cars already filled the parking lot. Amongst the rows of expensive cars, you were able to make out your parents’ old station wagon, Asriel’s beloved Tesla, and even Kay’s new model Toyota.

Parking as close to the entrance as you could with how late the two of you were, you and Kai dashed towards the entrance, hoping no one had noticed your late arrival.

Inside, the venue was packed as people mingled with each other, and the two of you fortunately went unnoticed as you made your way through the crowds, Kai’s hand finding yours so the two of you wouldn’t be separated.

You caught the eye of Kai’s parents first, waving as best you could to catch their attention without drawing the attention of others to you.

Denise beamed as she practically dragged Isaiah over to the two of you, engulfing you into a tight hug that caught you entirely by surprise.

“It’s so good to see you again,” Denise practically beamed as she let you go before giving Kai a glare and whispering loudly to you. “Kai never used to call home until the two of you started dating. I probably wouldn’t even know what he looked like right now if it wasn’t for you.”

You only smiled and ducked your head awkwardly as you insisted you hadn’t done anything in particular.

You tended to call your family fairly often, always video calling someone every evening, from your parents to your aunts or any one of your cousins. Not even getting into your family’s very crowded group chat.

You had hardly noticed Kai falling into the same routine until his occasional texts to his parents became calls even longer than your own.

Denise had been shocked to know Kai shifted around you at first, but soon she warmed to the idea of you being comfortable with Kai being a shifter.

“Don’t bother, she’s been bragging to everyone who listens her son has the best girlfriend,” Kai’s father interjected, a playful smile on his lips as Denise scoffed and slapped his arm half-heartedly.

You chuckled at the interaction as Kai groaned, though you missed his comment as you saw your parents making their way towards the group.

You squeezed Kai’s hand reassuringly as he stiffened next to you before letting go to embrace your parents.

Whatever introduction Kai had planned flew out the window as your mother pulled Kai into a hug just as tight as the one Denise had given you earlier, and he still looked dazed as your father hugged him in greeting as well.

Laughing at Kai’s startled expression as he took your hand once again, you thought back to your own first meeting with Kai’s parents.

Denise had awkwardly shook your hand and quickly moved on. And you don’t even think his father even said anything to you at the time, though you learned the man was just painfully shy. Even more so than Kai.

After quick introductions and the usual small talk about school, you and Kai quietly snuck away from your bonding parents to an empty table to sit, Kai leaving you to grab some drinks. The two of you had long decided to wait until the end of the night for your announcement, but you knew this wait was what was driving Kai insane.

After a few minutes of scrolling through your phone to pass the time and Kai still hadn’t returned, you sat up and started to look around.

You caught his eyes near the bar, surrounded by a couple of guys that appeared to be around the same age who you figured were his old friends from the east side. They were all in line for the bar, which was much longer than you’d expected.

You sat back into your chair, ready to go back onto your phone when an all too familiar voice sounded in your ear.

“Hey, stranger,” Kailani greeted you, pulling out a chair and sitting next to you, “How’s being back?”

“It’s been really nice,” you answered honestly, “Kai’s been showing me around the east side. I never realized it’s like a miniature city within a city.”

Kay chuckled at your obvious awe, nodding in agreement with your observation, “Yeah, I guess we’re more used to it after growing up there.”

Suddenly, Kay frowned, the bridge of her nose wrinkling as her eyebrows furrowed, and began to look around, “By the way, where is my brother?”

“I think he abandoned me,” you joked as you pointed to where Kai was currently talking to the same group of men he had been with earlier, now much closer to the bar than he had been when you last looked.

“He hasn’t learned by now to bring his own drinks to family events?” Kay scoffed as she pulled a water bottle from her bag and took a large swig, “i have a couple more so just tell me if you want one.”

You laughed, partly in bewilderment, with Kay. The two of you had gotten closer since you and Kai first announced that you were dating. Apparently, she’d been rooting for the two of you to get together since spring break, hence her sudden invitation for you to go camping with them. And as you got to know her better, you learned that while Kay may initially come across as somewhat pretentious, she was actually very caring and sweet.

As the two of you began talking, Kay told you some of the more embarrassing episodes in her and Kai’s lives.

“They really thought you two were rabid Pomeranians?” Breathless giggles escaped you as you gasped for air at Kay’s retelling of the time she and Kai chased some teenage trespassers in one of the many parks in the east side on a dare as kids.

“Oh yeah,” Kay said, “We were in so much trouble once the news came out and they figured out it was us. Our mom was beyond livid, and dad just found it absolutely hilarious. And Kai always hated being the center of attention, so us getting caught was literally his worst nightmare.”

“I still can’t believe you convinced Kai to go after them, though,” you wiped a tear from underneath your eye as your laughter died down.

“Yeah, I ask myself that every day,” Kai grumbled as he pulled out the empty chair on your other side, setting down your favorite drink in front of you and an empty cup next to himself.

“Kai always was the follower growing up,” Kay mused, easily dodging Kai’s hand swatting at her from over you.

“I was coerced against my will,” Kai exclaimed, draping his arm over your shoulder and giving you puppy eyes as Kay stuck her tongue out at him.

It was then you noticed one of the young men from the bar earlier come up to the table and sit across from you in front of Kai. Soon, the rest of the group were all seated at the table around you.

“These are my friends,” Kai explained as you introduced yourself to each person as they arrived, “we all grew up together in the same neighborhood.”

You struggled to remember everyone’s name so quickly, but after a few minutes of repeating everybody’s name to yourself, you were almost certain you had it down packed. Kay also seemed to be close to everyone, which you figured was pretty obvious since she and Kai were pretty close in age.

The rest of the evening was spent with Kai’s friends and Kay, and you were eventually joined by Asriel, with most of the conversation comprised of stories about about all of them growing up together, and you learned most of the memorable stories were pretty embarrassing for Kai.

“It always took weeks before Kai would even be able to talk to any teacher,” one quipped, “Even in high school he wouldn’t talk that much to anyone else.”

“Or what about that time he fainted during that one presentation?” Another recounted.

“Ugh, don’t remind me!” Kay frowned as she turned to you, “Kai got picked up early but my dad left me there. When I got home Kai was just lounging in the den watching TV in his underwear with the whole house to himself.”

“You all are the worst and I hate you all,” Kai growled, but you saw the corners of his lips twitch as he struggled to hold in his laugh.

As the time went on, everyone slowly began to leave. Soon, you, Kai, Kay, and Asriel were the only ones left at the table.

The hall was similarly empty, only a few dozen compared to the couple hundred earlier. After splitting up, Kai found his parents and you caught yours just as they were leaving.

Once the six of you met up again in a quiet corner away from most of the other guests, you took a long sip from your water bottle Kay had given you as you planned out what you were gonna say.

“Did you want something else to drink?” Denise asked you, “it’s an open bar… you don’t have to drink water.”

“Oh, no thank you, I’m driving tonight,” you answered politely before swiftly changing the subject, “Actually, Kai and I had some good news to share…”

You looked up at Kai, who looked down at you in surprise as you deflected to him before he finally started speaking.

“Oh, uhm. Well I- we- uh… were- well, we’ve been together for- ahem- but-” Kai fumbled over his words as he stared at your parents, which you definitely weren’t expecting. Nor were you expecting the words that came out of Denise’s mouth as she interjected.

“Oh, christ, you’re pregnant!” She exclaimed, her voice cracking as she sounded on the verge of tears.

You didn’t know if you wanted to laugh or cry as Isaiah looked at Kai with a textbook expression of fatherly disappointment and your parents’ jaws dropped as they both went through every stage of grief. Glancing around, you saw some people had definitely heard Denise’s outburst and were staring.

“I’m absolutely not pregnant!” You raised your voice above Denise’s moaning about how she wasn’t expecting and your father’s yelling, patting Kai on the back as he started choking at his mother’s startling conclusion, “we’re moving in together!”

All noise seemed to stop at once as the information sunk in. Their relief was soon overtaken by concern as everyone began raising their objections to the two of you living together so soon.

“Both of our leases are ending and [Y/N]’s roommate graduated this semester,” Kai finally recovered enough to speak, “So last month we were looking at apartments and found one for both of us. The lease is already signed and everything.”

“It would be better to split the expenses,” you added, “and it’s much better than most apartments out there.”

One by one, each of your parents gave in the more you and Kai explained your decision, though the fact that the lease was already signed and would be expensive to break was the main driving force in their reluctant acceptance.

By the time you and Kai made it back to the guest house, you both were beyond exhausted.

You showered almost as soon as you arrived, only throwing on one of Kai’s clean shirts as you didn’t feel like digging through your luggage for pajamas. The shirt almost reached your knees anyways, though.

When you opened the bathroom door, only the light from the bathroom illuminated the bedroom, and you saw Kai sprawled across the bed. The only sign he was still awake was his left ear twitching as he heard you walk up to him.

You flopped on the mattress next to him, careful not to undo the towel wrapping your head and resting your cheek on Kai’s bicep.

You squeaked when Kai suddenly grabbed on to you and pulled you on top of him, planting sloppy kisses all over your face.

Kai was always cuddlier whenever he was half asleep, but it was rare for him to be so touchy-feely before bed. You soon had to bite back moans as Kai moved his ministrations down, nibbling just at the base of your neck.

“I thought you were tired?” You giggled as Kai’s cold nose tickled you, a barely audible hum from Kai your only response.

“ ‘M up for now,” Kai said, his voice still obviously raspy with sleep.

Soon, Kai finally found a comfortable spot in the crook of your neck and relaxed into you, a contented sigh escaping him. You chuckled to yourself at your boyfriend’s antics. Kai was always so cuddly whenever he was drowsy, and you usually woke up in a tangle of limbs whenever you slept over.

“I love you,” Kai murmured, his breath evening out as he finally fell asleep.

Your smile broadened into an outright grin as you knew Kai meant it, tired or not. You whispered the words back and laid your head back, your mind filling with thoughts of your future and a warmth spreading in your chest. Your own exhaustion dissipated and you decided to simply enjoy your present time with Mordecai, unsure when sleep finally did overtake you.

[sastielsfandom]

Home

(For those who are too lazy to look up the Sastiel story, which is honestly me, here it is.)

Walking into my room, I was tired and relieved to finally be clean again. That hunt that was probably nothing, ended up being more than we expected. Monsters starting armies to protect themselves from the Darkness. When the apocalypse was happening, no one cared, but now people care?

"Hey Cas, there you are. Oh, I'm sorry, am I interrupting your show?" I said realizing he was still watching tv, he paused the tv and shook his head.

"No, not at all Sam. Do you want me to leave?" This is the part I should've said yes, he was already getting up and everything, but I couldn't.

"No, no, you're good." I said smiling, I realized he wasn't wearing his trenchcoat, it was set on my dresser and that made me happy in a way. He was comfortable enough in my room, he let go of his security "blanket."

"Are you sure, Sam?" Cas asked still not sitting back relaxed how he was when I first came in here.

"Yeah, yeah, who says we can't share?" I said with a small shrug and got into bed, trying to ignore my heart beating faster than normal.

"I'm not in your personal space?" Cas asked still making sure I was okay with this, maybe he wasn't?

"Well you are, but I don't mind as long as you don't mind." I said giving him an out just in case.

"I don't. How did the hunt go?" Cas asked relaxing back how he was before I came in.

"It could've gone better. We found out more about Amara, she's growing faster than she should. Also monsters are also afraid of her. Sounds like we're having great odds." I said sacrastically with a sigh but looking at him it reminded me to thank him. Usually Dean is around and would bother me for that sort of thing, but he's not around, so now's the perfect time.

"Also thank you for you research, it really helped. If you didn't help we wouldn't have made it." I wanted to reach and touch his shoulder or something but decided against it.

"You're welcome, since I can't be in the field, I can at least help with research." Cas said tiredly, I could tell he was being hard on himself.

"Either way, you're always important to the team." I said with a small smile, hoping that would help.

"Because I'm useful?" Cas asked and I frowned.

"Well yeah, but also, you're family. You're important to us no matter what. We just want you to get better." I explained, after all these years, doesn't he understand he's important to us? Maybe I have to express that more. Dean sure won't, not unless he or Cas is dying.

"Good night, Cas." I said closing my eyes, I let go of a yawn I was holding back earlier, for some reason, this bed felt more comfortable than the last time I slept in it.

"Good night, Sam." Cas replied back, he unpaused the tv, I could hear him turning it down and smiled at his thoughtfulness. The smile stayed when I heard his soft laughter, perhaps I need to watch a show with him sometime.

__________________________________________

'Am I hugging someone?' I thought not wanting to open my eyes yet, barely moving my arm back a bit, it confirmed I was indeed holding someone. Who the Hell can I be holding? I opened my eyes out of curiosity, and heard the tv playing in the background. Last night. Last night, I didn't watch tv...But Cas did! I looked up and my suspicions were true, I was hugging Cas.

I've had a lot of embarrassing moments in my life, more than I can count. This has to be in my top five.

"Morning Cas." I said lips pressed together in an awkward smile. Cas a little amused by my predicament.

"Would you mind helping me out? I gotta use the restroom." I said which was a lie until I thought about it. We untangled from each other while I rushed to the bathroom.

Coming back in a more calm manner to the kitchen, Dean was laughing at me, I might've almost ran him into the ground on my way to the bathroom.

"Did you trust a toilet in your dream, Sammy?" He asked smirking, I rolled my eyes and got a cup of coffee. He was in his robe drinking his own cup.

"No. What are you doing up early?" I asked and he raised an eyebrow at me, pointing to a clock. It was 11 a.m. how the Hell did I sleep in that late? No wonder I had to pee.

"Are you feeling okay, Sam?" Dean asked seriously, putting his coffee down, and checking for a fever.

"I'm fine Dean, just having an off day..." I said making my way back to my room with my coffee.

__________________________________________

Feeling dead tired, I was bumping into things trying to make it into my room. I opened my door and almost fell on the ground. It didn't sound like a bad spot to sleep, maybe I could sleep there. However, gotta land the right way, concrete floor, easy way to get a concussion.

"Sam, are you okay?" Cas asked getting off my bed, aww he's still here. That's nice, Cas is a nice angel.

"Hmm? Yeah." I said leaning against the wall, just need a small break. My legs kept moving, I only knew since they bumped into my dresser. I felt two hands guide me to the bed. Which I relaxed into, I could smell, well me, and honey. Food sounds good.

"Sam, have you been drinking?" Cas asked, did I? Research, research, bad memories, drink, drink, more bad memories, research, drink, I guess I did.

"Maybe a lil bit." I smiled, which turned into a laugh, I felt a blanket being pulled over me. Soft, warm, Cas is soft and warm. He gives me butterflies inside!

"Mere!" I said opening my arms, I opened my eyes and saw Cas was debating if he should, instead he touched my forehead. I felt his grace moving, it was a nice cool refreshing thing, I frowned when I realized what he did. And what I did. If I wasn't so tired I would've gotten out of bed to think by myself, but even if Lucifer was here, I wouldn't leave this bed.

"I'm so sorry Cas. I haven't done that in years. That's, well embarrassing and stupid." I said with an arm covering my face, Cas didn't answer but I felt my shoes being taken off.

"Bad day?" Cas asked softly, I lifted my arm to look at Cas, he didn't look mad or irritated, he looked concerned.

"Yeah, I was researching, and I had my music on shuffle, stupid spotify started to play Heat of the Moment." I said, sitting up a bit, how did I let my emotions get the best of me?

"Logically I knew Gabriel wasn't here, he's dead. But I saw the date was Tuesday, and all logic went out the window." I explained, I could feel myself struggling to breathe. Just thinking of it, it's bringing it back.

"Then what?" Cas asked, sitting in front of me. I looked at him surprised when he held my hands, it was oddly enough, easier to breathe with him close by.

"I couldn't find Dean and decided to drink. Research how to get us out of this loop before Dean dies, and drank some more. It wasn't until Dean took my drinks away and I saw in was Wednesday that it clicked, I could go to bed. Dean sent me to bed, and, I can't believe I did that." I let out a humorless laugh, hours of research for nothing. Not only that, I wasted valuable time, for nothing.

"Sam, you watched your brother die over a hundred times, waking up to that song. It's expected to have moments like this, days like this. It's okay." Cas said bringing me into a hug, I felt tears threatening to form.

"It's been years, Cas. I've gone to Hell, I've seen worse than that. It shouldn't affect me anymore." I mummered into his shoulder.

"Sam, seeing worse doesn't take away from other traumatic experiences. This was a trigger, they happen. You are not in a loop. You and your brother are safe." Cas soothed, a few tears fell, and Cas just held me. Told me it was okay. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I know this, I know what he's telling me is true, but a part of me is telling me this is just a trap. I'm going to have to see Dean die a hundred times again.

"Cas, I just want it to go away. I hate Tuesday's. I hate that stupid song." I cried and he just held me tighter.

"Do you hate Gabriel?" Cas asked, at one point in time, it was a clear yes. How could I not? Years passing, new trials and tribulations, I didn't.

"No. I just hate those memories." I mummered into his chest, I didn't realize I had my head buried into his chest.

He laid us down, and was running his fingers through my hair.

"If I could take them away, I would." Cas whispered, I didn't say anything back, I stayed wrapped in his arms, as he lulled me to sleep.

__________________________________________

I woke up, wrapped in someone's arms once again, this time I was aware it was Cas. I didn't want to get up, I wanted to stay like this all day, but because of yesterday's episode, I wasted a lot of valuable time.

I started to pull away from Cas, he looked down at me, and seemed hesitant to let go.

"Are you okay?" He asked gently, I nodded, and he loosened his grip.

"Cas, I have to use the restroom." I said, he let go complety, but it looked like he had more to say.

I didn't have to go as bad as yesterday, so no rushing into Dean. I didn't bother going in the kitchen, instead I went back to my station.

I cleared all of yesterday's notes, threw them away, and started fresh. Barely a page in, Cas came in and sat across from me.

Wordlessly he picked up a book and a pen. I went back to work, we spent hours like this, silently taking notes.

Dean came in every now and again, bugging me to eat, I kept saying I would soon, right after I was done with the page I was on.

After the sixth time, Cas got up and went to the kitchen. He came back a few minuted later with a salad. He placed it in front of me and went back to working. Dean thanked Cas on his way out, and only returned to take my dishes, and hand me some coffee.

When I could barely keep my eyes open, and my notes became scribbles, I knew I had to go to bed. Cas noticed and set his book aside, and helped me to bed.

"Thank you." I mumbled as he set me on my bed. He nodded and covered me up. I thought he was going to go back to researching since he left the room, but instead he came back a few minutes later and got into bed next to me. My eyelids were heavy, I wanted to look at Cas one more time and tell him goodnight, but I didn't have any energy left.

__________________________________________

I woke up holding a body once again, I looked down to see Cas, whose eyes were closed for once. It threw me off, I tried to pull away but Cas held onto my arms.

"Cas-"

"You don't have to pee." Cas said, clearly awake, but his eyes remained closed. Did he use his grace to- Don't want to think about it.

"Stay." Cas ordered, as much as I wanted to, I still needed to do more work.

"Cas, I can't stay in bed all day." I said and he looked up to face me, eyes opened now.

"You can, and you will until I feel you are well rested. You won't take care of yourself properly, so I will. I've already told Dean not to bother you. If he wants research done, he can do it himself. You need rest." Cas said before turning around, eyes closed once again.

I sighed and got comfortable, his grip was too tight to wiggle out of. I closed my eyes, and felt myself starting to fall asleep again. Besides, it's what Cas wanted, and it seems like it's the only way to get out of this later.

So what if I rested my head on his shoulder, it was comfortable. Cas is comfortable. He feels like home.

__________________________________________

I woke up feeling lazy, I looked at Cas who was looking at me. He pushed my hair out of my face.

"You talk in your sleep when you're stressed." Cas said, I frowned, what did I say?

"Did I tell you anything important?" I asked, it wasn't the real question I wanted to ask, but it was the only question I could ask without stuttering.

"Yes." Cas answered, I looked at him expectantly but he didn't say anything further. I suppressed a groan.

"What did I say?" I pushed and he stopped to think, I could've said anything, from my crush on him, to dirt I have on Dean.

"Words I have been considering." Cas finally said, I felt like pulling away and getting coffee, something I needed to have patience right now.

"Your conclusion?" I asked, his eyes went from my eyes down to my lips, back up to my eyes.

"My conclusion? I now know why I saved you while you were in the cage." Cas started, looking at me in a certain way, I couldn't place it.

"Why I feel the need to protect you, before I protect myself. Why I wish you could see the good in you, and wish you cared more about yourself." He paused for a second, looking down, before looking back up to continue.

"Why I long for you when you're not around. Why my bond with you is different than my bond with Dean. I don't know when, but somewhere along our friendship I fell in love with you. I thought it was just a feeling of jealously, or my love for humanity, but it never felt that simple. I love you, or at least what I believe is love." Cas answered, I didn't realize I was holding my breath until I let it go.

"That is my conclusion. What is yours?" Cas asked, his eyes begging me for a similar answer. I let go of him with one hand so I could hold his hand.

"My conclusion? I fell in love with you ages ago. I have done my best to hide it, to pretend I don't feel this way about you. But everytime I'm around you, I feel at home. There's only one other person in this world who I feel like is home, but it is so much different with you." I said not knowing what else to say. I've imagined this a million times over, but it is always me confessing first, and most of the time Cas doesn't say anything back, he just goes for the kiss. The only way I know this is real is because I pinched myself already.

"Sam, can I kiss you?" Cas asked, I nodded. Before my mind could guess how it would feel to kiss him, his lips were on mine.

They were a bit rough, but the kiss wasn't, it was slow and calm. Almost as if he wasn't sure if I was really okay with this. I started to bite his lower lip, and he got the memo, he flipped us so I was on my back, and it seemed as if all his resistance and patience went out the window. It was now rough, and passionate, I kept up with the pace, years and years of pent up tension flowed through. I didn't want it to end just in case this never happened again. I flipped us onto his back, and I knew it was getting harder to breathe but I didn't want to pull away. Not until I absolutely had to.

When I did pull away, I was panting along with Cas, wanting to devour his lips once again. I heard a knock on the door, before it opened.

"About time, Sam I'm making burgers. Cas, I'm making one for you to." Dean said closing the door again, I looked back down at Cas and smiled.

"Can I kiss you?" I asked this time, he croaked out a yes, and I captured his lips again. It was tender this time, more of a "I love you" rather than a lustful kiss like the first one. I smiled when he brought his hands up to cup my face, if this is a dream, I never want to wake up.

Pulling back slowly, I rested my head on his, catching my breathe. I slowly rolled off of him, and looked up at the ceiling dazed like. I knew I had a dumb cheesy smile on my face, but I couldn't help it.

"I should've told you my feelings ages ago." Cas said, I looked over at him, he had a similar expression to mine and I smiled a bit bigger.

"I love you." It came out of my mouth without permission but I didn't mind, not when Cas came closer again, and repeated the phrase.

"Kiss?" He asked gently, I never knew how much I would love hearing him ask for kisses until now. It is so much better than him just kissing me.

"Yes." I said, we kept exchanging kisses, some were slow, and soft, but many were fast paced, animalistic like. No matter the kiss, I enjoyed every single moment. The only moment I hated was Dean pulling us out of the room to celebrate. But even then the smile on my face wouldn't leave.

[hippychick006]

14.15 - Peace of Mind

I thought I’d do one of these for the current season. 

Meh is the word that comes to mind for this episode.  Not great, not a stinker, just meh.  Would I recommend it as a watch?  Possibly as background while you are doing more important stuff like cleaning. 

If it hadn’t already been yet another episode separating Sam and Dean in an entire season where Sam and Dean have been separated (with only a few exceptions), it might have been okay.  I really don’t think I’m complaining needlessly.  To put it into perspective, the people that I’m watching for (that by their own admission, the show say that the audience is watching for) had a grand total of 108 seconds sharing the same scenes this entire episode.  108 seconds and 50 of those were shared with Castiel.  And I’m just trying to imagine any other show doing this.  Like Starsky ditching Hutch constantly and going on investigations with side characters like Huggy Bear (because Huggy Bear is no longer just an informant, he’s an investigator because he’s a “fan favourite” character and his fans constantly ask, Where’s Huggy Bear so they made him part of the team even though he doesn’t fit).  WTF even is this?

Moving on...  

The story is credited to Steve Yockey/Meghan Fitzmartin and the teleplay to Meghan Fitzmartin.  This is the one people were a little worried about, given Meghan appears to be an open Destiel shipper (which has no place in the writers room or for anyone working on the show - completely unprofessional for anyone working to do anything that might give rise to calls of bias).  From what I can gather, Destiel fans appear to love Steve as they think any gay/bi character he writes is a parallel for Destiel.  It isn’t and although Steve’s given us a mixed bag, he did give us the witch twins in Celebrating the life of Asa Fox and Twigs & Twine and Tasha Banes.   I love the witch twins, great new, interesting characters that we no longer see because the show is obsessed with old, tired, done to death characters that only a very small, very loud section of fandom harp on about).  Sighs tiredly and moves on.

Reading between the lines, I think there was a close eye kept on this one and I think it worked because I can’t for the life of me see anything at all that’s a nod to Destiel.  If anything, the Sastiel shippers got all the cookies and good for them.  Enjoy those cookies Sastielers!  I’ll be over here drinking the hellers’ bitter tears.

I liked the opener, head go splody.  Though the guy that played the gas station clerk was a very questionable choice by casting.  If that had been his 1 minute, then fine, but no, we see him later in the episode and because of the known nepotism on the show, I’m automatically wondering if he’s child/brother/friend/third cousin twice removed of someone on the cast or crew because he is terrible (sorry kid, don’t listen to me, keep working at it, the only way is up).  

Oh great, yet another Cass/Jack conversation.  Cass is not the best at speaking to people as we’ll see later in the episode.  Screams into the void about the distinct lack of Sam and Jack this season.  I know we’re heading for something between them, but this is my problem (or one of many with Dabb).  I think he has the weird view that if he rations the good stuff, then it makes it all the better when we get it.  Not really, it just switches me off from watching the show. I want good every week, I don’t actually think that’s too much to expect from someone who is getting paid to entertain the audience and not bore them to death.  

Anyway, Jack thinks his snake is sad and Castiel suggests it might be missing his former owner.

Ah, now Dean and Cass talk – is there a checklist? If so, it’s missing “Sam and Dean” on it. Interestingly, as I’ve pointed out many times before, their conversations revolve around other people; usually Sam, but Rowena and Jack get included, because “family”  

Speaking of Sam, we switch to him and see he’s having flashbacks of the dead hunters, so he really isn’t doing good. Appears he’s trying to keep his mind off things by hunting constantly and has found another case.  He walks in on the awkward silence between Castiel and Dean (not awkward because he caught them awkward, just awkward because they’ve got nothing in common, other than talking about Sam and Jack and when that runs out it’s just... awkward).   Dean says he needs a break, but Sam’s leaving in ten.  End of.

Castiel: Maybe I should go with him and you can stay with Jack

Dean: Why?

Me: * Whispers * because Dabb hates us and he’s passive/aggressive about it.

Castiel: You were right… Jack is struggling, and I’ve tried…

Dean (interjecting): Why do you think he’ll talk to me

Castiel: Because he looks up to you (Dean rolls his eyes, so I don’t have to), and his soul, I mean… you’ve seen this before...

Me (interjecting again): You really think he’s the right person to handle someone soulless after he beat Sam beyond the point he was already unconscious. Seriously?  I’m with Dean on this one.

Dean: No, no, no, see I was not great with Sam.  You know when he was…

Thank you show for acknowledging this.  

Castiel: Jack’s soul isn’t completely gone.  At least I don’t think so, we just don’t know how much is left.

As I’ve already seen in other posts, my instant thought on this is “You can’t do the fist check?” I’m really tired of wondering what powers Castiel still has and what he doesn’t.  They seem to switch them on and off as needed.

Dean asks how he’s supposed to know.  Castiel says just talk to him, get him to open up.  

I completely understand why Castiel is not going to the obvious person for this – duh, Sam of course – because he feels Sam is overburdened as it is and going though his own issues, so this does actually make sense for me and I’m fine with people trying to keep him out of it while they try and deal with it (It will go wrong though).

Castiel is driving and I seriously have to question Sam’s driving ability at this stage since he’s either happy to be chaperoned around or they don’t trust him in the driver’s seat. Also, all the beautiful classic cars in the bunker and this is the clunker Castiel chooses to drive around in? Would some soap and wax go amiss?

We’re back with Griffin from earlier and least said about this scene the better. The guy is just terrible.  Sorry, but he is and unsurprisingly, only has 1 other credit as “Asian teenager” before getting this part.  

I love the drive through the town.  It’s obvious something is going on with all the clothes dating back to I’m guessing the 50’s.  Castiel: “It’s like we’re stepping into a Saturday evening post.”  Sam at least knows what this is, he’s just surprised that Castiel does.  I however have no clue, so had to google it and it’s a magazine that ran from 1897 to 1969. Here’s one of the covers:

Men doing menly things and women… I’m kind of not sure what she’s supposed to be doing.  I think looking clueless at the engine.  Anyway, Sam looks at Castiel who explains that he “looks at them sometimes after you fall asleep at night.”  Sastiel for the win on this one! Who isn’t picturing Castiel sitting up on the bed reading while Sam sleeps, hmmm? Because as we all know, Castiel has zero boundaries when it comes to personal space and Sam’s not likely to call him out on it, because he’s used to having his personal space invaded..   

I like that they are five minutes into the hunt and they already want to call Dean. They can’t though as no cell signal, so they are on their own.

We meet Justin Smith (the first).  I like him, he’s swell. But he’s yet another clue that all is not right here, not least because he doesn’t know what a cell phone is. My first suspect of being a witch is his stepford wife, so we’ll keep an eye on her.

We head to Harrington’s for a milkshake.  They’re looking around and the place is straight out the 50s, but I’ve been in diners that are set up like this, so it shouldn’t actually be that unusual.    What is unusual, is that Sam accepts a free milkshake from the waitress (Sunny) in a town that he’s investigating and that clearly is under the influence of something. Let’s put this down to Sam being tired (*whispers lazy plot driven writing).

Chip points them to the boarding house where splody head guy was staying.  I love the boarding house, but would have to change the outside colour. I also love that everyone knows who they are, and the owner of the guest house is no exception.  Small towns really are like this.

Back with Dean and Jack. Jack’s trying out different food with the snake.  Dean investigates a Chinese take-out container that he quickly discovers contains live mice and not take-out.  He suggests going out with Jack for a drive.  Jack is hopeful for a hunt, but Dean says more of a field trip. Jack’s okay with that, but first Dean wants bacon.  Of course he does.

At the boarding house, Sam and Cass are shown to splody head guy’s room. Sam asks for coffee, leaving Castiel free to search the room.  He finds some letters under the mattress and is reading them as Sam comes back.  And I know Jared has large hands (beautifully in proportion to the rest of him), but I think there is an element of also finding the tiniest teacups they can get a hold of. However, since this scene gives us another Sam drinks tea gif, I’m happy. Anyway, the letters are from Sunny and are explicit from the sound of them.  

Sam says great, they’ll look into it tomorrow.  He wants to stay at the boarding house because the landlady is making pot roast.  Oh oh.  Castiel for some reason lets this slide and leaves Sam overnight.

We’re now at my first suspects home with Justin Smith (the first).  He’s still talking about cell phones.  He’s started to remember who he is.  He runs out of the house and his head goes splody.  Poor guy.

I’m really not sure that Dean’s test for whether Jack has his soul is legit.  Choosing Angel food cake or Devil food cake.  Jack looks like he’s going to choose devil food cake which arouses Dean’s suspicions but at the last second, chooses angel food cake. Dean heaves a sigh of relief.  

It’s the following day and Castiel goes to check on Sam who isn’t there.  I like Mrs Dowling, the landlady who is cleaning and dancing. She tells him Sam was going for a walk and a milk shake.

Sam is not at the milk-shop place, but Sunny is there.  Castiel seems to be as pissed off as I am that Sam repeatedly gets referred to as “the tall one”.  Sunny tells him about Mr Smith dying so Castiel turns up to Mrs Smith’s house to investigate.  Yet another house I like. Where are all these beautiful houses in Vancouver?   Anyway, Mrs Smith doesn’t look all that upset that her husband has died.  Castiel says he’s looking for his “partner” and that he’s tall with “beautiful hair”. He could have added “drop dead gorgeous” but it’s better than just “tall” so I’ll let it slide.  Mrs Smith is clueless, and I have to question if she’s a robot at this point.

Castiel goes to sit in a chair and Mrs Smith screams.  I have the exact same reaction after I’ve cleaned everywhere, and someone comes in and starts dumping their stuff all over the place.   Castiel starts speaking about her dead husband but Mrs Smith laughs and asks if Castiel has already had a martini today.  We hear someone call “honey” and I don’t know why they tried to hide the person in this scene because Jared has a very distinctive voice so we know it’s him.

I love this next scene though.  We get “agent” from Castiel, but Sam responds that he is: “Justin… Justin Smith” then asks, “And you are?”

Castiel (winking): Your partner

Justin (still smiling): Partner?  Super, that’s swell, great…

Justin (the second), asks Castiel to stick around as they are “having pot roast”.  This seems to be a 50s staple.  Thank Chuck the 70s added prawn cocktail and blackforest gateaux.  I like to give Misha his due whenever possible and his confused face here is brilliant.  Mrs Smith is sent off to make a martini and Castiel tries to get to the bottom of things.  He’s still wondering if Sam is “under cover”.   But no, Sam really thinks he’s Justin Smith and married.  Mrs Smith comes back during this and says they are low on olives and asks “one or two”. Justin is a fussy one though and asks for “three” and adds that he’s “feeling adventurous.”  Mrs Smith does a perfect “rawrrr”, Justin  responds awkwardly “roarrrr”.  I just can’t with Jared in this scene.

I didn’t pick up on it, but with the three olives and “feeling adventurous”, added to Castiel’s wink and “partner” comment from earlier, other people are suggesting threesomes.  If that’s the case, Justin seems up for it.    

While Mrs Smith goes to get more olives (or slip into something more comfortable - who knows at this stage), Sam asks Castiel if he wants one (get your mind out the gutter, he meant martini).  Castiel tells him “Your name is Sam Winchester…” Justin: “So that’s a no no on the hootch?”  Castiel’s had enough and commands Sam to “snap the hell out of it.”

Justin: Sir, you watch your mouth, if we cannot remain civil, then you can skedaddle.

Castiel: Sam…

Justin: That’s not my name.  (He grabs Castiel to see him out). “Cindy, grab his hat.”

Castiel: I don’t wear a hat

Cindy: Honey, I don’t think he wore a hat

Justin: Fine.  

He shows Castiel the door. “Sir, using language like that; h e double hockey sticks (Sam shakes his head and waggles his finger).  You should have your mouth washed out with soap.

Castiel: Sam…

Justin: It’s Justin! (slams door closed).

Dean and Jack arrive at a house, Donatello comes running out.  He and Jack go inside to chat and Dean waits outside.  I think the next bit was supposed to be funny when Dean taps the car to check on the snake then slides along to get away from it.  It wasn’t funny.  And that isn’t on Jensen at all, he’s a really funny actor, it’s on the material.  Don’t force the comedy elements.  Yellow Fever was genius, this attempt is lame.  

Donatello and Jack talk about souls.  And in sharp contrast to Jared with the ridiculous tiny cup earlier, could they have found a bigger cup for Alex? Donatello tells Jack that not having a soul is a lack of pity, empathy, humanity. He asks what Jack feels.  Jack doesn’t know.  He doesn’t feel nothing, but he doesn’t feel the same either. He just doesn’t want Sam, Dean and Castiel to worry.  Donatello, “They’re your family.  Families worry.” (Family mention box ticked – phew, I really thought we were going to get through an entire episode without one).   Donatello tells him he always asks himself “What would Mr Rogers do?”  Jack asks who Mr Rogers is and Donatello answers, “The best man I know.”

Jack: Sam and Dean are the best men I know. (heh!)  Look, I know Castiel isn’t a man, just let me have my petty moment in peace!

Donatello suggests that Jack thinks of WWWD.  What would the Winchesters do.  But considering the Winchesters have continually sacrificed themselves for the other, I’m not so sure this is such sterling advice.

Jack returns to Dean and Dean asks Donatello if Jack is okay and does he have his soul.

Donatello: I suppose the first question we must ask ourselves is… what is a soul?

Dean (I am not in the mood for your shit): Donny...

Donny says to keep an eye on him but if he says he’s okay, he probably is.  He goes on to say that Jack is the most powerful being in the universe, who knows what goes on inside his head.  They both turn to the car and Jack gives a dorky wave.   Dean is not in the least reassured.

Back at Harrington’s milkshake place, Castiel has decided that Sunny is the witch.   He says to tell him the truth or he’ll rip it from her mind (keep an eye on these powers, I’m pretty sure they won’t work the next episode).

Turns out not to be Sunny, but the mayor, he has Justin (the second) with him and he doesn’t look amused, he’s at least a little mildly ticked off with Castiel.

We then get villain monologue – why do villains do this? – Just get on with it. Long story short, Chip can make people do whatever he wants.  Sunny runs out during this - I don’t blame her - and Chip runs after her, leaving Justin and a couple of other goons to deal with Castiel:

Castiel (to Sam): I won’t hurt you, Sam

Justin: Golly, I told you my name is Justin!

Justin is a terrible fighter, even someone as bad as Castiel normally is manages to put him on his back (Sastiel for the win).  Castiel’s actually doing well this fight, but Justin suddenly realises he’s got height and weight advantage and lunges at Castiel, taking him down.  He sees Castiel’s angel blade and pulls it from his sleeve – and if this was Dean and Castiel, the hellers would be going wild right about now, about Destiel being end game and true love (because nothing says true love like one partner trying to kill the other).  Anyway, for anyone interested in the whole top/bottom debate, Sam is on top, but he’s cowgirl in this scene so I’m calling this topping from the bottom.  Don’t @ me top!Sam people!

Moving on, Castiel does that thing where he talks, and he shouldn’t.  He says he knows what it’s like to fail as a leader.  That Sam needs to fight and not lose himself, because if he does, he fails them, all of those they lost, he fails Jack. He fails Dean.  Sam raises the blade and slams it down…

So, a couple of things on that.  The narrative once again saying Sam has “failed” in some way kind of completely sucks. Done with Sam being told things like that and everyone else getting told they did good (*coughs* letting Lucifer out of the cage the second time around *coughs*).  But I’m sure I’ll get hurt!Sam out of it and Dean seems to be the trigger word for Sam to snap out of things so toxic co-dependent bros for the win.

…Sadly the blade slams into the diner flooring and Castiel lives to hunt another day (tries to summon up a “yay” but fails miserably).    But Sam’s back to normal (yay!!!).  

They exit the diner to stop Chip, who TK’s Castiel through the air and tries to kill Sam.  Sunny’s had enough though and uses her own powers on Chip, trapping him inside his own mind.

Dean and Jack are back at the bunker.  Dean asks Jack if he had a good time, Jack: “It was… illuminating.”  

Before Dean can process that statement, Sam and Castiel are also back.   Dean not one to miss some good brotherly ribbing: “I heard you wore a cardigan.” Sam turns to Castiel.

Castiel: Yeah, I told him about the cardigan.

Jealous!Dean alert: And the wife. (Sam looks at Castiel again).  He said you were… really happy.

Castiel decides it’s time for him to exit stage left and goes to find Jack.

As usual with getting nothing out of the episode, the hellers are making a lot more out of the “off screen” conversation between the “hunter husbands” than merits.  Of course Castiel told Dean what happened, it’s more than his life’s worth not to if Dean found out Sam had been in danger and Castiel didn’t tell him.  The phone conversation would have went something like this.

Castiel: Now, don’t get angry, Dean.  First of all, the important thing is that Sam’s fine... now...

Dean: WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BROTHER?!

Back in Jack’s room, he tries to do what Sam and Dean would do.  He thinks they would help the snake so uses his powers to Thanos the snake to the afterlife so it can be with it’s owner again in heaven.  Jack, I really don’t think the owner would have passed the abacus good/bad test so no idea where you actually sent that snake other than purgatory.  Camera pans out and Castiel is watching from the doorway.  Parenting advice from me Castiel: you need to trust your teenagers and give them space.  Constantly checking on Jack is just going to make him feel closed in.      

[atmilliways]

You like AUs, right? Mash up Metalocalypse and That 70s Show, go! Mash up Metalocalypse and Friends, go! Mash up Metalocalypse and Frasier, go!

Oh jeebus, why?

… But yeah you’re right I do.

That Dethklok’s Show

You know what makes me mad is that I want to say Nathan and Charles are Eric and Donna, but Seth is unarguably Lori and that messes everything up.

Okay so Pickles = Eric, Seth = Lori, Calvert = Red but with hair, and Molly = Kitty except Seth is her favorite child too.

Skwisgaar = Kelso because he’s tall, pretty, and horny. Also, in this AU, he is drowning in brothers because Servetta can’t keep it in her panties.

Toki = Fez because he’s foreign, happy most of the time, sings and dances for the simple joy of it, and his room is decked out with toys and fun stuff.

Murderface = Hyde because of the righteous fa-RO baby, and also because he DOESN’T HAVE ANY PARENTS. He moves in with Pickles’ family and lives in the basement. (Pickles was hoping this would give Molly and Calvert another Target to rag on and give him a break. It didn’t work.)

Unlike Hyde, Murderface is not cool and doesn’t get any eventual Hyde/Jackie storyline. Instead, his relationship history goes more like Fez’s. Without the weird forced Fez/Jackie stuff at the end of the series, which really went downhill has soon as Donna dyed her hair blonde.

Charles = Buddy, the random rich kid who is canonically gay, only he’s a regular part of the group instead of a one-episode throwaway character.

I’m cool with Pickles/Charles, and that fits with Buddy coming on to Eric in the show. But I would eventually break them up and put Charles with…

Nathan = no one on the show, but he’s got a lot of Hyde’s qualities in terms of stoic, bad boy vibes. However, like Kelso, he is an Adorable Dumb (see “that’s doable” hat).

Rebecca Nightrod = Jackie, but she’s not a necessarily a regular character. Murderface fawns/lusts over her like Fez, even though she’s a bitch. Nathan hates her, even though he does date her briefly in a relationship that she holds onto tenaciously until, in an act of desperation that absolutely horrifies Pickles, he cheats on her with Seth.

Abigail = Donna, because she’s smart and has good hair. (Zero bleach kits in sight.)

Rockso = Bob, because he’s a cue ball on top and makes liberal use of crazy wigs. Bargain Rockso’s is that store that’s always open on holidays — just in case you’re driving home Christmas night, realize you forgot to get a gift, and rush in to buy a fridge to solve the gift problem and/or some cocaine to forget there was ever a problem in the first place.

Magnus = Leo. He gives Murderface a job at his hilariously unprofitable Photo Hut business, declines to sell his real cool car to Skwisgaar on principal, and generally supplies the gang with all their weed and assorted drugs.

Dory McLean = Midge. She’s young, dumb, has big boobs, and Abigail is exasperated as hell that she doesn’t understand feminism in the slightest.

Knubbler = Mitch, the weird kid who hangs around and is sometimes kinda entertaining but keeps hitting on Abigail, which annoys her. However, he’s also stupid and accidentally self-sabotages (see setting his sleeve on fire while trying to flirt), so she doesn’t really waste energy on slapping him back down.

Pickles “burning down the shed” = Eric telling Red “I do it too” when Hyde gets busted for possession. Either way Abigail (Donna) is standing in the background going, “For the love of god, DON’T.”

Trindle = Cousin Penny, only instead of prankish Pickles (Eric) she targets Nathan, who during her last visit when they were much younger helped Pickles trap her in a revolving door. Abigail is completely secure in her looks compared to Trindle and actually talks Rebecca out of a potentially disastrous sunlamp tan.

Nathan and Abigail go out for like, a second, while Nathan and Charles are I one of their off-again fazes.

Endgame parings are Nathan/Charles, Abigail/Rebecca, and Skwisgaar/Toki.

B.A.N.D.M.A.T.E.S

Nathan = Ross. Can you picture Nathan doing the *long sigh, ex wife is a lesbian blues* “Hi” thing? Because I can.

Abigail = Carol. They got together but it just didn’t work out in the long run. 

Rebecca Nightrod = Susan. Tbh, I think the reason she keeps popping up is because of how @little-murmaider portrayed her in Stay Alive. She and Nathan get along like a house on fire, in that it’s a disaster and Abigail keeps having to turn the hose on them to stop the bickering.

Toki = Monica, although his chef skills are mostly confined to providing fruit and burning plastic. He’s still got the overshadowed younger sibling thing going on though.

Molly = Judy Geller. Dotes on Nathan.

Oscar = Jack Geller. Is amiably odd.

Charles = Rachel. Except not as ditzy. But he does break an engagement off at the altar and moves in with Toki, an old acquaintance he hasn’t seen since high school and one of the few people he, ah, did not invite to the wedding. For the record, he was hoping that wouldn’t come up.

Skwisgaar = Joey. Except when they all go to London, Toki (Monica) does hook up with him, gradually teaches him how to relationship, and eventually they get married.

Murderface = Chandler. He hates his data processing job and keeps threatening to leave it to work on his side project, Planet Piss, but never actually does because the money is really good. When he goes back to the pet store to return the baby chick Skwisgaar impulse bought, he instead adopts an ugly-ass duck that no one wants because it’s original owners thought it was just an ugly duckling that would grow up into a swan. He feels that he can empathize with it, and names it Dick van Duck.

Knubbler = Dick van Duck. Listens patiently to all of Murderface’s Planet Piss ideas.

Pickles = Phoebe. He doesn’t even know who his dad is, and is proud that he doesn’t. (I’m not going to lie, Phoebe’s family situation definitely fits more with Murderface, but Phoebe’s dating track record is too good.) Remember the one where Pickles broke up with someone he’d just moved in with because the person shot a bottle of liquor?

Seth = Ursula. 100% Ursula. Seth is a “career driven” waiter and also a part time porn star on the side, using Pickles’ name.

Fraiser 

I don’t watch this one as much, so this one won’t be as detailed probably.

Skwisgaar = Frasier. Idk, because he goes on dates with a different woman at least every episode. Also, he’s a jackass, but good at what he does and there are some redeeming glimmers of not being a complete asshole that make his presence worthwhile.

Nathan = Niles. Minus most of the neuroses. Instead of successful musicians, he and Skwisgaar are both successful psychiatrists, although Skwisgaar usually gets the bulk of the public’s, ahem, attention.

Daphne = Charles. He’s oblivious to Nathan’s crush on him for ages, but when he realizes it’s there and thinks about how sweet Nathan’s always been to him, he falls hard.

Rebecca Nightrod = Maris. She and Nathan have a rocky marriage, and eventually a rockier divorce in which she accuses Nathan of being emotionally unfaithful because of Charles.

Abigail = The brilliant divorce lawyer that handles Nathan’s case, and briefly dates Charles. They seem like such a good fit on paper that they’re actually engaged for a bit, but they break it off amiably right before getting to the altar, and Nathan and Charles ride off into the sunset in an RV with “road warrior” vanity plates.

Toki = Roz. (I know, technically Roz’s promiscuousness would be more Skwisgaar, but Skwisgaar’s superiority complex fits better with Frasier.) Although competent and successful in his own right, he is not the on air talent. Unlike in Frasier, when Toki and Skwisgaar sleep together they actually become a couple instead of backing off and remaining good friends.

Rockso = That garbage man that Roz was head over heals with for a while… Rodger?He belongs in a garbage can. Anyway, after breaking up with Toki over the latter’s inability to get over his massive cocaine use, Toki goes to Skwisgaar for comfort, which leads to drinking which leads to sex. Toki flees the next morning and flies to Norway for the annual family reunion, only he hadn’t told anyone he’s broken up with Rockso. Skwisgaar, desperate to Talk Things Out and hopefully even Do That Again, follows and (cringingly, but of his own volition) answers to/pretends to be Rockso to help Toki save face in front of his critical family.

Murderface = Bulldog. He and Toki briefly have a thing, and he’s actually kind of sweet when you get right down to it, but things don’t work out. Masturbation photos are involved — don’t ask. Also, at one point Skwisgaar accidentally repeats a rumor that Murderface is going to get fired where Murderface can hear it, so

Murderface goes and yells at the station manager (then Knubbler) and quits. Then he’s unemployed for a while, and scrapes by delivering pizzas. I forget how that situation resolved itself in the show but it does.

Knubbler = Kenny the station manager. Weak willed. Weak chinned. Ineffectual. Good track record in his career, but mostly he’s just there.

Abigail = That domineering and extremely competent lady station manager that’s there for a while… Kate? Has a cat. But she does NOT get it on with Skwisgaar (Frasier) on his desk and accidentally bump the On Air button partway through. She has a very strict policy of not getting involved with anyone she works with, although naturally everyone tries.

That’s all I got.

Magnus = Martin. Because he’s a cranky old man. He and Nathan don’t get along and he resents having to live with Skwisgaar, but they all gamely trade barbed insults and leave it at that. Magnus is a retired cop who still works on old cold cases as a hobby, having vowed revenge on uncaptured murderers everywhere. He and Charles (Daphne) get along pretty well, and there is no stabbing of any kind.

Metal Masked Assassin = Cam Winston. At one point he blocks Skwisgaar and Toki in Skwisgaar’s SUV into a parking space with his own SUV, and only relents and backs out when Charles comes and calmly threatens him, because “that’s my bread and butter you’re blocking in.”

There, are you happy now?? I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this, asdf;lkj lol.

[mst3kproject]

108: Project Moon Base

Saying ‘fuck this movie’ doesn’t seem like enough, really.  Please take a moment and picture the full Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing it to the tune of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.  That should about do it.  I’m gonna say ‘fuck’ an awful lot in this review, like even more than I usually do. I really hate this movie.

This was a very moon episode.  After a couple of dull and suspenseless episodes of Radar Men from the Moon, we get on to Project Moon Base.  In the far future year of 1970, the Enemies of Freedom are working to destroy the UN’s space program.  To do this, they kidnap a Dr. Wernher and replace him with a lookalike, who is ordered to go to the atomic-armed space station and destroy it in a suicide mission. He’ll have crew-mates on his rocket, though – and Major Moore and space program legend Colonel Briteis aren’t going to let him complete his mission without a fight.

Wow, space spy capers and secret plots!  It sounds so exciting when I write it down!  Too bad this movie is actually so dismally fucking cheap and boring.  The KGB apparently works out of a nicely decorated living room somewhere, and the Spacom offices aren’t much better.  Everything is bare walls, clean tables and desks, and giant clocks on the walls, and none of it resembles a place people actually work in.  The actors all look like they’d really prefer to be anywhere else and recite their lines at a fast clip that suggests they’re just trying to get this ordeal over with. Given the characters they were being asked to play, I feel for them.

And then there’s the stuff that’s just fucking surreal, like the skullcaps or propane-tank-headed spacesuits that wouldn’t have been out of place in an episode of Rocky Jones: Space Ranger. Or the fact that the first ‘suspicious’ thing the fake Dr. Wernher does is support the wrong baseball team.  Or the annoying reporter whose name is Polly Prattles (I guess to imply that she endlessly ‘parrots’ everything she’s told?) and who dresses like a disco ball!

About the only thing that really earns any points is that the effects people made a commendable effort to be realistic.  Stuff like the lunar rocket and the frisbee-shaped space station are intended to look practical rather than future-y, and there’s a discussion of orbital mechanics (though it’s confusing and useless to the plot).  Navigation information refers to bright stars like Fomalhaut and Polaris.  Microgravity is mentioned and there’s even a pretty neat shot where characters walk on the ceilings with magnetic-soled boots!  I’m also impressed that they actually filmed some miniatures for their rocket takeoff scene, instead of using the same stock footage we’ve seen in fifty other films.

That’s only a fraction of the movie, though.  The other ninety-eight percent or so I absolutely despise from the very bottom of whatever twisted black abomination remains of my soul, and the reason why is the fucking characters.

The first characters we meet are the villains, although calling them ‘characters’ seems like a stretch.  I’m not entirely sure who any of these people are or who they’re working for… I’m gonna keep calling them the KGB for lack of a better descriptor.  They’re bland men in bland suits who behave as if destroying the capitalist west is just their day job – the bald bellhop guy may say it’s a twenty-four-hour job, but I bet these guys are out of that hotel room the moment the clock clicks to five pm.  Even the guy posing as Dr. Wernher isn’t very interesting.  Shouldn’t at least one of these people have some kind of motivation besides getting paid to do this?  What happened to revenge, or fanatical loyalty to an ideal, or desperation to protect a family who’ll be killed if you don’t comply?

Weirdly, it’s the fake Dr. Wernher who is the closest thing we’re given to a POV character!  We follow him into the hotel to take over from the real scientist, and them learn about the space program in tandem with him.  If not for the opening crawl I’d be wondering if we’re supposed to root for this guy.

Our so-called ‘heroes’ have some more personality, but those personalities are the furthest thing from likable. First there’s Major Moore, a big sulky baby whose masculinity is threatened by Briteis outranking him.  When he finds out he’s been cut from the mission in her favour he whines, and when he finds out he’s been assigned as her co-pilot he whines more because now he’s got to take orders from her.  At the end when they marry, he is promoted to Brigadier General mostly so that he’ll outrank his wife!

Briteis herself is no better – we see a few sides of her and they’re all terrible.  She pisses and moans about not wanting to interact with Moore, either, and then engages in passive-aggressive dick-measuring contests with him while the two of them are supposed to be flying a spacecraft and saving the free world.  You almost can’t blame him for his jealousy when she takes every possible opportunity to rub things in his face.  When things go wrong she manages to land on the moon, but then becomes a breathless damsel in distress, leaving Moore to make all the decisions… and then when they’re saved, she reverts right back to whining.

(Yes, by the way, the non-MST3K edit does show them actually landing, and no, it's not very exciting.)

The General in charge of these two is an ass, as well.  He basically guilts Moore into accepting an assignment he doesn’t want, and when Briteis protests it as well, he tells her to shut up and then threatens to spank her.  These people are supposed to be members of the military, an organization that is associated with rigid discipline, efficient organization, and a strict chain of command, and yet they display less professionalism than kids at a lemonade stand.  Jesus Christ, how about we just let the bad guys take over the world?  They at least have some fucking dignity.

The moment we discover Briteis is a woman is supposed to be a big surprise, since the characters have carefully avoided any gendered language so far – this seems to hint that we are looking at a future where equality of the sexes has been achieved, but what we see after that quickly disabuses us of the notion.  Not only is Colonel Briteis treated like a misbehaving child in spite of her rank, but we’re told that the only reason women are allowed in the space program is to save weight – though not in the case of Prattles, who is told to her face that she’s too fat to go!

In questioning Briteis about how she pilots the spacecraft, Wernher actually treats her with more respect in her expertise than any other character.  Are we sure we’re not rooting for this guy?

Of course the idea of Moore taking Briteis with him to set up the communications relay instead of Wernher never even comes up, despite the fact that she must be infinitely more qualified and much less likely to try to kill him.  This whole sequence is weirdly mis-used.  We’re expecting Wernher to either try to sabotage things somehow, or for Moore to believe he will do so and a fight to result.  I guess it’s more realistic, seeing as how the survival of both men depends on the relay, that they cooperate successfully – but if that were supposed to be the case, then why does Wernher die in a total accident, falling from a rock and cracking his helmet open?  It doesn’t resolve anything, it’s just a quick and lazy way of getting rid of the character so we can focus on Moore and Briteis and I don’t wanna focus on them.

Wernher’s death also leaves the audience sitting through the last part of the movie without any idea why we’re still watching this.  The villain’s dead, so why isn’t the movie over?  Even if we didn’t hate Moore and Briteis, we’ve actually known Wernher for longer and the movie was set up as if his mission and its defeat were the main storyline.  If he’d been dealt with in a more satisfying manner, either by changing loyalties, or by being killed or recaptured in a way that felt like a victory, it would be easier to move on with the rest of the story.

The final ‘fuck you’ from this movie’s sexual politics is the revelation at the end that the President of the United States is also a woman.  You know what that means?  That means the writers thought they really were showing us a gender-equal future!  They honestly believe that women in positions of power really will freak out and automatically turn to the men for help when things go wrong.  They seriously think that women holding high ranks in the military will be threatened with spankings by their superior officers and that’s completely okay.  And then when you watch the movie again, the scene where Briteis tells the General that the President has ordered Polly Prattles be admitted just looks like a bunch of girls ganging up on a boy they don't like.

Quite a bit of effort went into the effects in Project Moon Base and into its idea of the future (note how they predicted cordless phones!), but it was all wasted on bad actors, shitty sets, and a script that feels like a first draft.  Nothing in the film comes across as properly concluded – not the space mission, not Wernher, and certainly not the love story between Moore and Briteis.  Fuck this movie.  Fuck, fuck, fuck this fucking movie.  Fuck everyone who made it, fuck MST3K for bringing it to my attention, and fuck me for watching it again!  Fuck.

[pearlescent-words]

Greater Good

“I’m just on my way back to medical; there’s a new patient come in and they need my help, can this wait?” If Derix’s self-satisfied smirk and Kamern’s exasperated sigh were anything to go by I’d say they don’t quite believe me, “I’m afraid not.”

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

This will eventually be a Bellamy x OC story though I do intend it to be quick a slow burn, with a loooot of ups and downs so it’ll be a real ride if that’s what you’re after… :) There’s three chapters that I’ve written so far and I can’t say how many more there will be but, with how many chapters it’s looking to take to get through the first episode it’s set to be an awful lot - hopefully that’s more appealing than offputting.

Anyway, please read, enjoy and let me know what you think!!

Chapter One - Prologue

On the Ark everything is limited; food rations, medical supplies, free time and even oxygen. Nothing can be spared and everything is shared based on need. A nice idea in theory, terrible in action. Being from Alpha Station I can consider myself one of the privileged, only elevated by my status as Medic in Ark Station Medical and then reinforced by being Council Member Dr. Griffin’s personal apprentice. She took me on just after my fourteenth birthday and she’s dedicated every moment since then to teaching me everything she knows, and largely because of her dedication, within a few months, or less with some luck, I’ll also be granted the title of Dr. (Given that I pass the exam’s of course.) And having that higher title will only make my job easier, both medically and in my out of work activities.

Being part of the privileged sector makes it virtually impossible to ignore the Ark’s massive social hierarchy divide. Those working on Stations such as Mecha, Agro or Factory seemed to struggle with the less than satisfactory food rations given and limited quota for medical treatment, especially when factoring in that many of those workers face a much more dangerous job than, say, anyone from my station. But given my position on Go-Sci Station I think I’m more than able to help, and honestly, the guilt of knowing and doing nothing would be crippling.

You’d be shocked the amount of people who are in desperate need for help and under the age of 12, usually they’re attempting to help out struggling parents rather than themselves, but something about that just makes the situation more heartbreaking. The innocence of their childhood sacrificed in place of empty tummies, desperately sick parents and a crushing responsibility unwittingly shoved onto them so soon into their, what is guaranteed to be difficult, lives. I’ve been smuggling extra food rations and medicine to desperate families since I was around 16, at this point I have a list of regulars that sadly just keeps on growing, and then, of course, the popup patients in need of medicine that they’ve already gone over their quota for. Naturally covering this entire operation up is a bit tricky, not at all helped by the fact I’m doing this completely alone and the threat of being floated is looming over my head at every turn.

There are those who say my motivation for doing all of this is less than selfless, those who hate me because of my position on the Ark and take my attempt at assistance as charity or pity –that I’m seeking to make myself feel better rather than a genuine desire to help. Perhaps they’re right; perhaps it’s some deep-rooted sense of superiority that makes me help them despite the danger, a sense of safety from my valued position. Maybe I view myself as some modern-day Robin Hood; a messiah of the people. A twisted mentality of ‘Everything I do is to help the needy & desperate and you should thank me for it’; a side effect of growing up on Alpha station I’m sure. Irregardless of my moral reasoning, standing by and doing nothing just doesn’t sit well with me.

Occasionally, in the particularly difficult weeks, I’ll get the bright idea that it’d be easier to include more people in this little operation; perhaps then with a larger group we could expand and help more people on the Ark. Presently the only ones who know of what I do, are the ones I help. But then you’re given the issue of who to trust, how many to include?, would the risk of everything only go up?, would the risk for my patients go up?. Ultimately I’d elected to keep all of this too myself.

But that still wasn’t enough

Making my way back from food storage, with around 16 stolen rations stashed away on my person is risky enough as it is; having three guards waiting around the corner for you is practically a death sentence. And their slow approach wasn’t reassuring in the slightness.

I know two of them by name, the third appeared to be a guard in training and I absentmindedly note that I should cosy up to him as soon as possible – keep your enemies close and all that. I’d never consider myself friends with the other two, Derix & Kamern, but I’d made it a point to know as many guards as I could, from their names to general shift rotation. Partially to make smuggling easier and well, you never know who you might need a favour off. Nonetheless, we’re acquaintances at the very least, though that really didn’t help with why they were making their way towards me.

Kamern appeared to be leading the group, ironic really considering his small stature and quiet personality; Derix and the new kid towered over him in the back. His blonde hair was parted to the side and combed down as usual, and he was clearly attempting to look stern and give off an intimidating presence – not that that particularly worked with his baby face and light freckled skin, though I suppose he is practically a kid, only recently turned 18. Well he’s younger than me at least.

Derix towering behind him was clearly in his element here. Slowly approaching someone bound to be in trouble, uniform crisp, brown eyes conveying a bored indifference to all like everyone was the dirt beneath his shoe. We never got along particularly well, he’s difficult to talk too and takes everything much too seriously, but we were at least civil.

The new kid looked nervous, though a quite determination marred his brow as he approached with the others. He’d clearly only just started - perhaps I’m even his first bust. That ought to be a treat, the first person your set to float and its Dr. Griffins prodigy caught smuggling rations.

I briefly entertain the idea of running but the notion is dismissed as quickly as it came, there is after all absolutely nowhere I could attempt to hide in the long term. We’re on a ship in space there are only so many places, besides if they’re after me now running isn’t going to stop them coming after me later.

“Miss. Johnson, if you’d like to come with us please.”

Kamern, despite his less than guard-like physique, possessed an inherently authoritative voice that made you want to do anything he said. But this time I really couldn’t, I know I don’t actually have a choice right now, but I also know if I go with them I’m guaranteed to be floated within the week,

“I’m just on my way back to medical; there’s a new patient come in and they need my help, can this wait?”

If Derix’s self-satisfied smirk and Kamern’s exasperated sigh were anything to go by I’d say they don’t quite believe me,

“I’m afraid not.”

Once again Kamern’s authoritative tone left little room for argument, though that didn’t stop the notion of running coming back to mind. I’d have nothing to lose now anyway, if I go with them I’ll undoubtedly be searched, figured out and floated regardless of my position of the ark. But if I run maybe I ’ll stand some kind of chance, maybe the people I’ve been helping all these years can help me out; hide me perhaps.

But I can’t spend forever like that; flitting from room to room, and there’s nowhere else I could possibly go, no one I’d want to put at such great a risk. Perhaps it’d be better to be floated for my crimes, certainly quicker in the least.

Irregardless I seem to have run out of time to make my decision, though I never really had on one in the first place. The small nod Kamern sent to Derix and the new boy had them advancing on me in seconds, giving me no time at all to turn and run and instead be forced into their hands and marched forcefully down the hallway - Kamern leading all the way.

It wasn’t until we reached the Ark’s Go-Sci main hallway that I began to question how they found out about my operation. Being marched through the hallways I was met with concerned looks and quiet whispers, a majority of those I passed aren’t people I help out but the odd one here and there, the ones looking the most distressed at my situation or perhaps at the prospect of their own, I recognised.  And considering the only ones to know about my smuggling are those I’ve been helping, only one of them could have turned me in, which quite frankly made little sense. But I’ve always been meticulous with my plans, always checking guard systems for any changes, forging the medical forms to the letter as well as the food ration forms and after spending the last seven years doing this I’d gotten pretty good at it.

They didn’t bother to search me until after we’d reached the skybox, apparently, they were confident enough in the information they were given, only reaffirming my suspicion that who every ratted me out is presumably someone I’ve been helping for a while now. They did eventually search me however and found exactly what they were looking for (much to Derix’s delight). I was briskly read off my reasons for being put into the skybox and told that the council would review my case shortly, which was completely unnecessary; I was over the age of 18 and therefore guaranteed to be floated for my crimes. All three guards left the room following this and I moved to perch on the edge of the bed as the grating, mechanical locks fell into place.

Life on the Ark; a paradise in space.

Sure.

[itsjustanothertuesday]

Lost and Found: Bechloe AU

Howdy, everyone! I wrote a quick AU drabble about a super famous Chloe meeting producer Beca within LA when Beca finds her lost dog :)

Description: Chloe Beale, an incredibly talented and famous actress, happens to lose her dog whilst filming her latest movie. After several attempts to find her dog, she ends up posting on social media for help finding him. It wasn't until amateur music producer Beca Mitchell randomly stumbled upon the dog on her way home that Chloe was able to reunite with her furry best friend.

Chloe Beale was a well-known actress. Everyone knew her bold yet characteristic red hair from the frequency in which she starred in blockbuster films. She was in at least one movie a year, hopping from project to project in a seemingly effortless fashion. Her workaholic nature and overall talent in acting had scored her a variety of roles, spanning from musicals to horror films to chick flicks. This kind of attention had granted her constant talk show interviews, magazine shoots, and even the title “the ginger Sandra Bullock.” She was, by consequence, everywhere.

Chloe Beale was a well-known actress.

So when her small little dog went missing, basically the entire world knew. She normally took her dog with her to every set, letting him sit in her lap whilst she sat in the makeup trailer. However, Chloe was stationed at a new set for an upcoming movie, and her dog had managed to escape her trailer during filming. After a solid day of forcing the cast and crew to search for her beloved dog, she ended up posting a sad callout post on her Instagram, hoping that a kind stranger across the city of Los Angeles would find her dog and bring him back to her.

chloebeale: The love of my life, my dog Billie, somehow escaped the set of When in Rome and has been missing for several days. I’ve been searching relentlessly for him and thought I would find him by now, but neither me nor the cast has been able to find him around the studio. If someone has any sort of news or has spotted my dog, please let me know!! He is kind and friendly so don’t be scared to approach him. He also really likes hot dogs!! He is most likely somewhere around LA and I hope you guys can help me find him!!

The fact that she had several million Instagram followers both helped and hurt: although her post would reach a lot of people, her inbox was usually flooded from fan messages. Adding to the point that wealth tended to accompany fame, Chloe chalked her dog’s return to good faith in humanity, hoping that someone wasn’t sadistic enough to keep him for ransom or to blackmail her. She was still obviously worried, and spent her time between takes constantly scouring her direct messages for any news. This current week in filming happened to be the more melancholic component of her upcoming movie, so she was still able to keep working despite the resurgence of a depressive episode. Once she left the set, however, she no longer had the hair and makeup crew to hide her disheveled, defeated demeanor.

Every now and then one of her friends would call her to check in on her – to which she dismissed them or had no updates. A few of them would try to take her out to lunch or get her out of the house, since she never left except to meticulously scan the surrounding neighborhoods for Billie whilst driving. Her roommate was at least making sure she was eating, and oftentimes had to physically pull Chloe off the couch to have her shower. Secretly, Chloe appreciated it. But she still pitched a struggle regardless.

After 4 days of coming up empty handed, Chloe was ready to give up. Of course she loved her dog to the end of the world, but she found it hard to function without him sitting next to her or sharing a space on her bed. She was steadily running out of ideas. So when she heard her phone ring on Day 4, Chloe was ready to brush off yet another phone call from her friends trying to drag her out of the house. As she lay horizontally on her couch, she could see her phone light up from the surface of her coffee table, chiming with a custom Britney Spears ringtone she had downloaded a few years prior. It rang the full course of the song, and the caller was booted to voicemail.

After several moments of staring at her phone, she ended up slapping her hands against the table to grasp it when it was just out of reach, curious to who was calling her at 1pm on a Saturday. Strangely enough, it was a number Chloe didn’t recognize. But they did leave a voicemail. A shaky voice started to speak on the other end, pausing awkwardly at points and leaving weird moments of silence. Chloe continued to listen anyway.

Voicemail, 1:04pm: “Hey, um, Chloe. I’m calling to let you know that I think I found your dog? Well, I know it’s your dog. Your name is on the tag of his collar, and I recognize him from online and stuff. Anyway, I found this number also on the tag so I thought I’d call. I found him down by the waterfront, so I took him to my place. I fed him some cat food… sorry it’s all I have. Um, yeah. Give me a call back when you get this. Thanks. Bye”

Chloe sat mouth agape for a strong second before immediately pressing the return call button. Her heartbeat continued to escalate as she listened to the dial tone, praying the person would immediately pick up since they only left a voicemail just a few minutes prior.

“Hello?”

“Hi!” Chloe breathed, excitement hitched in her throat. “You found my dog?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. I took him to my apartment for safety. He’s doing okay.” The voice reciprocated.

“Holy shit.” Chloe muttered, disbelief plaguing her face. “Shit, yeah, can I see him? Where do you live? I don’t know if that’s a weird thing to ask, sorry.” The redhead was near emanating the awkwardness from the other girl across the line, desperate to see her furry friend. She quickly debated whether or not this was a scam, but not many people had Chloe’s phone number, so she took the risk in thinking this mysterious girl actually found Billie.

“No, it’s totally fine, I get it. Plus I kinda know who you are anyway.” The girl realized that might have sounded crazy fan stalkery, so she continued: “You’re not a complete stranger, I mean. I can text you my address?”

“Yes please, that would be great.” Chloe bulldozed over the asynchrony. “When can I come get him?"

“Anytime today works, I guess.”

“Okay, be there in an hour.” And with that, the redhead quickly hung up the phone to go throw on better clothes and gather an assembly of dog treats.

Beca Mitchell was an amateur producer. She had skipped college to pursue a music career, thriving off a large SoundCloud presence and having a keen ear for mixing. She had self-moved to LA after being hired by a small producing firm by the shore, mainly keeping to herself and just concentrating on her music. Her days at the studio were long, but she didn’t do much at home to warrant complaining about her extended hours.

Beca Mitchell was an amateur producer.

So when she spotted the raggedy white dog that belonged to none other than Chloe Beale, she was a little beside herself. She was walking back to her apartment after surprisingly getting out of work while the sun was still out, taking several side alleys after picking up something at the pharmacy. Although the terrified pup was cowering by a pile of trash and was remarkably dirty, Beca could still recognize the characteristic mop-like look that she saw every now and again on social media. Even though she hated to admit that she followed current celebrity news, it was hard not to when living in the heart of all the showbiz. Plus, she had to keep up-to-date if she ever were to work with any of them.

After she cautiously approached the smaller dog, she took the liberty to take him into the safety of her apartment. Beca had a pet of her own, a goofy male tabby cat, so the only pet food she had to give Billie was technically for cats. It’s not like it really mattered all that much, since the dog graciously took the food and water Beca provided for him. She later soothed and stroked his back, relaxing him to the point where both the dog and the cat ended up lazily dozing on the couch. It wasn’t until everything calmed down that Beca realized that Chloe Beale’s dog was now in her apartment. And what the actual fuck was she supposed to do?

She investigated both Chloe’s Instagram and Twitter, but figured it would be difficult to get ahold of someone of that status. And how many people at this point claimed they found her dog already and were just hoping to meet Chloe in the process? Billie readjusting on the couch interrupted her thoughts, as the dog caused a jingling commotion from his collar during the shuffle. Beca’s eyes widened at the sound, immediately getting up to examine the collar for dog tags. Low and behold, listed on an engraving was Chloe’s name and phone number.

After a quick glance over at Billie, she tentatively picked up her phone and tapped the digits onto the phone screen. Her initial call was sent to voicemail, so she left a trembling message for the actress that her dog was now in her possession. It didn’t take long for the redhead to call back, and the two decided that Chloe was coming by to get her dog within the hour. Within the hour. Oh, shit. The mildly star struck Beca had already lost track of time, and the knock on her door was indicative that her hour had already passed.

She approached the door with soft footsteps, adjusting the dark flannel she was wearing and patting her hair down in an attempt to look presentable. She took a quick peek through her peephole before letting out an abbreviated sigh, unlocking the door from the inside and opening to the sight of Chloe Beale.

She was shorter in person than on film, but still surpassed Beca by a few inches. She adorned bright red hair, accompanied by crystal eyes that beamed in excitement but also a touch of anxiety. She fumbled her hands along the length of her fuzzy sweater, not speaking immediately but almost expecting Beca to say something first. Beca was too mesmerized by the beauty that was in her doorway to speak.

She shook her head and squinted her eyes quickly before breaking the silence. “Uh, hi. Come in.” The redhead crossed the entryway, waiting for Beca to close the door before following her to the living room. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to bathe him or anything.”

“Billie!” Chloe exclaimed, prompting the dog to bolt from the couch and greet her. Beca clamped her mouth shut from additional commentary, merely just watching the two reunite.

Only a few moments had passed before Chloe spoke again. “Thank you so much for finding him. I was beginning to lose it. I also thought someone had found him and just wanted to keep him, or something weird. Just thank god it was you.” She had put emphasis on the word “you,” a detail Beca was mentally over-analyzing as the redhead spoke. “And you didn’t have to go to the effort of giving him a bath too, nonsense!”

She continued to pet her dog as Beca stood there somewhat awkwardly, unsure of how to proceed in the conversation. The feeling of her cat rubbing on her leg prompted her to answer: “He became good friends with my cat, at least."

Chloe beamed at Beca from her crouching position. “That’s amazing. I didn’t think he liked cats.”

“His name is George Clooney.” Chloe giggled, causing Beca to also snicker at the announcement of her cat’s name. It was kinda stupid, she had to admit. But she got the idea from one of her closest friends naming their cat after Meryl Streep.

“And what about your name? I realized I never asked.” The redhead stood up to match Beca’s eyeline, cradling Billy in her arms.

“Beca.” The shorter brunette answered firmly.

“Well, nice to meet you Beca.” The two exchanged a semi-firm handshake, and they erupted into nervous giggles once they realized the formality of the greeting.

“I really appreciate this, you have no idea.” The redhead began, peering at her dog. “Can I make it up to you somehow? How about lunch, dinner?”

Beca smiled, easing into the kindness that she wouldn’t have otherwise expected. Chloe was genuine, and Beca could respect that. “I can do dinner, for sure.”

“Awesome. Then it’s a date.”

Beca blinked several times in a row, not sure if Chloe meant a date or a date date. Chloe refusing to break eye contact whilst flashing a wide smile indicated that she was serious. Man, that smile was infectious.

“Yeah, a date.” Beca finalized, breaking out into a larger smile as the two women continued to stand there, easing into each other’s presence.

[dreameater1988]

My Top 10 Twelfth Doctor Stories

I’ve seen other people do this, so I decided to make my own Top 10 of Twelfth Doctor stories.

10. Flatline

I have a soft spot for stories in which the Doctor gets in a bit of a situation and putting him in a shrinking TARDIS was a hilarious plan. I have to admit, I wasn’t that fond of the episode when I first watched it, but to be quite honest, I love it a bit more with every rewatch. I think this really is one of those episodes that you have to watch a couple of times to really appreciate it. I’m also glad that the Boneless were picked up again in one of the comics because who doesn’t love a recurring monster? They were creepy, they were threatening and quite difficult to defeat - which the Doctor eventually did while giving an amazing speech. I think it was the first Twelfth Doctor speech that really struck me because of how fierce and powerful it was. And a cute bonus: Doctor Oswald. All of these things definitely put Flatline in my Top 10.

9. The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion

Another thing I love about Doctor Who? Kate Stewart! So it would be a shame not to include one of her stories in my Top 10. I have always preferred two-parters over single episodes because of that little heart attack causing “to be continued” thrill and these episodes do it quite brilliantly. The Zygons as monsters aren’t exactly my favourites, but they were really well used in this case. I really enjoyed the storyline and the many jokes that were put in the episodes (Why do you have a Union Jack parachute? - Camouflage. - Camouflage? - Yes, we’re in Britain.) There really are so many things I love about this two-parter: the Doctor’s emotional speech, Jenna marvellously playing two different characters, Kate tricking the Zygons, . . . The final product is a thrilling episode and wonderful entertainment.

8. Dark Water / Death in Heaven

The finale of S8 has to be on this list for one reason alone: Missy. Michelle Gomez really, really rocked that part and I will love her forever for it. I never really liked the Simm!Master because of various reasons (mainly cause his version of the Master collided with the version in a book I’ve read and loved). Yet the Twelfth Doctor and Missy really brought that “true friendship gone horribly wrong” part across. There was also the storyline of Clara losing Danny and later losing the Doctor by letting him go which I think shaped her S9 character to a large degree that I really, really love. The Cybermen were less creepy in this episode than in others (the S2 two-parter has scarred me forever), but this story wasn’t about the Cybermen or an invasion at all, at least it’s not how I see it. This two-parter is about loss and friendship. And it contains yet another Twelfth Doctor speech that I will love until the day I die. He’s my idiot with a box and a screwdriver. 

7. Oxygen

I feel obligated to put at least one episode from S10 on my list and since this was the only one that really stirred something in me, here we go. I loved the space station setting (because I’m a sad sci-fi nerd), I loved the dystopian “oxygen on sale” bit, but you know what I loved the most? The Doctor going blind. Oh my God, how I loved the big reveal in the end when he said he still couldn’t see. The Doctor is a Time Lord surrounded by humans, he is always superior to them simply because of the fact that he’s (like he said to Clara in FtR) “less breakable”, but finally, we get to see that he is breakable after all, that he’s vulnerable, that he’s no longer the superior hero. I love that bit. Sadly, the episodes that followed didn’t really put this plot twist to use in my opinion.

6. Mummy on the Orient Express

Who wouldn’t want to go on a trip on the space Orient Express with the Twelfth Doctor? This episode was beautiful from start to finish: the setting, the costumes, the dialogues, the storyline, the tension between the Doctor and Clara. Every moment of this episode was wonderful and a pure joy to watch. It was also a big turning point in the relationship between the (new) Doctor and Clara because, for the first time, she saw him for who he really was. Now, a couple of weeks ago I bought Doctor Who - The Complete History and I read about the making of this episode and I have to admit that I probably would have loved the original script (in which the Mummy is a life-extending body suit that won’t let people die and Clara briefly gets turned into one) a little bit more because it contains more sci-fi elements than the version they ended up using. But hey, I’m not complaining. The episode is awesome.

5. Into The Dalek

“I see into your soul, Doctor. I see beauty. I see divinity. I see hated.” Just hearing these words in my head gives me goosebumps and I think that is a very good sign that this episode definitely belongs in my Top 10. A lot of things have been done with Daleks over the past 50+ years, but miniaturizing the Doctor and putting him inside one is definitely one of the more brilliant ideas. I also really love the early version of the Twelfth Doctor, I love my grumpy, old alien and he’s at his peak in this one. But he’s also still struggling to find out if he is a good man or not and I really enjoyed that conflict that we saw in Peter’s first season. Rusty the Dalek plays a big part in that conflict and their dialogue makes me shiver even after watching it about 30 times.

4. The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar 

The Doctor riding a tank into a medieval castle while playing the electric guitar! Do I need to say more? Yes, I’m definitely going to say more, but, oh my God, that was probably one of my favourite moments of the entire show. I sat in front of my telly, gawking at the screen. There will never be a season opened better than this. You won’t believe how much I enjoyed watching it the first time and how much I am still enjoying it every time I watch this episode. The rest of the two-parter is anything but a let-down. I loved the Twelfth Doctor/Missy interactions in this one because up until the end of the episodes you can really see the former friendship, you can see just how long they have known each other, how much they meant to each other back then (I live for this kind of thing). Also, bringing back Davros is always a nice touch. Bringing back Skaro was amazing (and seeing the fear in Missy’s eyes when she realized where she was). The Clara/Missy duo was amazing. The Doctor pleading for Clara’s life on his knees when he thinks he’s about to lose her. Honestly, there isn’t anything that I don’t love about this two-parter. Add “The Doctor’s Meditation” to this and you’ll get 10 minutes of pure, silly fun as well.

3. Listen

This episode was the one where I decided that Twelve was my Doctor. In fact, it was the pre-intro scenes with him that showed him sitting on the TARDIS roof and talking to himself by candlelight that got me. But that’s not why I loved the episode. It was properly creepy. I love the creepy episodes the most and sadly, there has been a bit of a lack in those in recent years, but Listen was definitely one of the best. I first watched the leaked black and white version and even then it gave me chills. This episode also showed how much of an impact Clara really had on the Doctor (apart from getting him to save Gallifrey and asking the Time Lords to help him). She saw him as a young, frightened boy and she put those thoughts in his head that would accompany him for the rest of his life. It was a wonderful, little twist. I also really enjoyed the fact that we never got to know what the monster actually was. I love that some people believe it’s a kid under a bedspread and some (like me, cause I’ve paused and seen a screenshot of what looked like Voldemort) think it was an actual monster. Whatever it was, I’m glad we never got the solution handed to us. That makes it even more interesting to me.

2. Under the Lake / Before the Flood

I don’t think I’ve said it enough, but this two-parter is actually perfect. Everything about it is perfect. The Doctor and Clara are at their peak, they’re having their “glory years”. It’s very likely that there was a large time span between TMA/TWF and this two-parter because we see them in full action, we see them incredibly bonded, we see them trust each other completely. This is the first time we see how intense their relationship actually is (“If you love me in any way, you’ll come back”, “I’m changing history to save Clara.”). They are the perfect TARDIS duo in this one, but we also get a sense of foreshadowing as to what is going to happen to Clara in the future. The minor characters in this story are all perfect as well, I can’t say a single bad word about them. I normally don’t care about minor characters because I’ve learned that many of them end up dead anyway, but in this one, I can’t help but feel for them as well. As for the storyline and plot twist, it was a two-parter full of exciting moments and surprises with a lot of laughs and emotions thrown in as well. And the Fisher King was a great monster. Perfect television entertainment for a Saturday night that almost ended up being Nr 1 on my list.

1. Heaven Sent / Hell Bent

Heaven Sent is, in my opinion, Steven Moffat’s masterpiece and always will be. It felt like he was working his way up from The Eleventh Hour to culminate in the S9 finale with two episodes that actually managed to blow my mind. I am very critical when I’m watching TV and I’m not so easily impressed, but Heaven Sent actually blew my mind. Heaven Sent, an episode that is longer than usual, that features only one actor in only a handful of rooms and it’s the best damn thing I have ever seen on TV. During S10 I often complained about seeing the “plot twist” coming, but this one took me completely by surprise and broke my heart in the process. Oh, the tears I’ve shed over Heaven Sent! It’s that moment the Doctor realizes what he’s doing, what he’s been doing and for how long that always breaks me and it’s underlined by the most perfect Murray Gold score I’ve ever heard. And of course the big reveal that Gallifrey was waiting on the other end. 

I think Heaven Sent / Hell Bent are the perfect depiction of the stages of grief in the Doctor’s 4.5 billion years quest to save Clara. And oh, how he did it! It’s not a secret that Clara has been my favourite companion from the moment she appeared on screen and after watching her become more and more like the Doctor over the course of the seasons, it was such a satisfaction to see her get her own TARDIS and run away. There is something so bitter-sweet, so emotional about this series finale and at the same time, it’s so full of twists and turns and surprises. It’s devastating and uplifting at once. In one word: perfect!

[fansplaining]

Transcript: Episode 74: Ask Fansplaining Anything: Part 1

(episode | show notes)

[Intro music: “Awel” by Stefsax]

Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.

FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!

ELM: This is Episode 74, "Ask Fansplaining Anything Part 1."

FK: Right. And spoiler, the "part 1" is not because we're going to be doing "part 2" for our next episode, it's because this episode is a bunch of listener letters and voicemails and we will someday probably do another episode like this in the future. We're not sure when.

ELM: We definitely will, we committed to it, we called this Part 1, there has to be a Part 2.

FK: Right. But it will be like...you know.

ELM: It can't be like, you know when you're saying a sentence and you're like, "There are a few reasons why we can't do this, A..." something something something, and B never comes. We're not gonna be like that.

FK: It's like reading a serial fanfic and there's a Chekov's gun moment and by the end they've forgotten about it and you're like oh, I guess you were writing this serially. Oops.

ELM: Oh, yeah. Does this happen to you a lot? Do you notice this a lot?

FK: Just a couple of times I've noticed it, where it's like...this didn't actually come back around.

ELM: Just a statement that was made at some point. Yeah.

FK: Yeah, and it would be...in normal novel writing process this would be edited out but because you wrote it serially it's not going to be and that's fine. No hate on those people. But.

ELM: That's part of the risks of writing serially!

FK: Exactly.

ELM: Yeah. So for context, obviously every episode we ask people to send their thoughts. So a lot of people do and sometimes we put them aside and say "we'll answer that eventually" and then they sit there for months at a time because we're delinquents. So a few of these are relatively recent, a few of them are a bit older and a million apologies if your ask has been languishing. We're getting to it now!! And I'm really sorry about that. [laughing] Usually the stuff we set aside too is stuff that we wanna thoughtfully answer, that's why, we don't just dash off an answer.

FK: We're like "yeah, we'd like to do that, but we should wait till we have lots of time to address this" and then we're like oh, shit.

ELM: And it's buried in the Tumblr drafts among the 8000 things we have queued up or whatever. So we're gonna talk about this and hopefully it won't be too long before we answer the other ones that are sitting in our box.

FK: Alright. Well. All that having been said, shall we get on with it and read some letters?

ELM: Yeah. What's our first topic?

FK: The first topic is fan tourism, based on our fan tourism episode. We've still got some of that lingering in our inbox, so.

ELM: People love fan tourism.

FK: Alright. The first letter is from Ruth. "Hi Flourish, hi Elizabeth, I have one more thought following your episode on fan tourism and Stephanie's letter on your Lori Morimoto episode. As she points out, New Zealand is not Middle Earth and Oxford is not Hogwarts. Of course if you really want to see Tolkien's old stomping ground, you really need to go to...Oxford. The film adaptations of these books have set up associations with the wrong places, but then given that neither Middle Earth nor Hogwarts really exists, what is the right place to go to be a fan tourist? Sometimes the real locations can feel like a letdown after what we've seen onscreen. The pubs of Oxford and the surrounding countryside won't seem very Middle Earthy after you've seen the Peter Jackson films. Keep up the good work, Ruth."

ELM: So I can say from personal experience, New Year's Day 2014, my friend and I were feeling kind of glum and we had lunch at the Eagle and Child, which is the pub where the Tolkien's...

FK: The Inklings. Also known as the Bird and Baby. [meaning the pub is called that]

ELM: Is that what they call it?

FK: Yeah, it's a whole thing. The Bird and Baby.

ELM: Cause my friend lived just around the corner and we were like sure, why not. I don't know. It was a very depressing New Year's Day, England in January, anyone who lived there understands, and we made the mistake of sitting at the table right in front of the display pictures and things like that. So during our depressing meal we had multiple tourists come and try to take pictures over our heads and it was like, "we can move if you want" and they were like "no it's OK." So I hope people appreciate us in those photos.

FK: I hope so too! [ELM laughing] I hope so too. No, I mean, I think that this is a good point. One of the things about this is that fiction takes us in our minds to a place that doesn't exist in the world, also. The heightened...I feel like we talked about this a bit in the Fan Tourism episode, King's Cross station not feeling like Harry Potter to me. Even though it's so important in Harry Potter. Of course, that's to be expected. And that's actually a case where literally it's written into Harry Potter and yet it didn't feel like that for me.

ELM: That's interesting because it feels right for me and I think it probably feels right for any Londoner.

FK: Yeah, absolutely, because that's what they envisioned, because they knew what it was like before.

ELM: And know what it feels like to be there and get a train...so it's as if you were not reading it in the way it was...you know. She also wrote it thinking of the wrong train station, famously. You know this?

FK: No!

ELM: There's no...because of the way the tracks are laid out, I believe it's tracks 1 through 8 are in the main section and then there's another section. I don't know if this is still true, cause it was under construction for years while they were fixing up St Pancras.

FK: But she was thinking of a different one where there could be a 9 and Three Quarters.

ELM: I believe she was thinking of Manchester. Train station. It was one of the northern train stations. There was no way for there to be a wall between 9 and 10, and so that's why if you go now you'll see it's just next to the Warner Brothers shop, which is next to the ticket office, you know? It's a big open space but yeah. So the first time that I ever went to Kings Cross was maybe 15 years ago, and it was under construction, and someone had just tacked up a sign near Platform 9 that was like "here it is!" [all laugh] Like, people just...and I like that a lot more than what's happening now cause it feels very commercial now. That felt kind of, not a sell out, you know?

FK: [laughing] I do know and I think that...I think that maybe the point of this is I don't think there is ever a "appropriate" place to be a fan tourist or an inappropriate place. I mean not like being an asshole to somebody, don't do that, don't go to a place where you're gonna be a jerk as a tourist, but I don't know, I think that people's relationships with locations and their imaginations of things in books is very personal and I think that that's...I think it's OK to not, to go and not have something be what you imagined it.

ELM: Sure! Yeah!

FK: Disappointing, but I think it's fine. It can be. It's all right that I have a complicated relationship to King's Cross. That's fine!

ELM: Would you characterize it as a complicated relationship?

FK: Well it's not THAT complicated. [ELM laughing] As complicated as any relationship could be to that! But you know what I'm saying. It's fine. It's not a failure that that wasn't what I imagined, and it's not a failure on its part either.

ELM: I think it's just...it's hard with books because you can...and that's the moment when you went there, you might have realized oh, I didn't really understand. Not necessarily oh, she didn't explain it as well as she could have, but you were like I jumped to conclusions in my head or whatever. And that can be very surprising, but it doesn't matter! The Kings Cross in your head can be right too! I feel like I'm channelling that Dumbledore scene at the end. It's all in your mind, Flourish!

FK: But it's also like meeting a celebrity that you idolized and discovering that they're short.

ELM: Wow, are you being heightist?

FK: I'm not being heightist, it's just that as a tall person I envision everyone as my height until I see them and discover that they're short next to me. And then I'm always like, wait.

ELM: Were you the one who thought Danny DeVito was a regular height, or...?

FK: No, I would never think that but I love the idea that somebody could.

ELM: It was you and another tall person on Twitter and I was like, you guys know, do you think Danny DeVito... Danny DeVito is four foot eleven, I think legally...

FK: Yeah but you know what I mean. It's not that you have a vision in your head of this person. They're not that. But it's fine. OK. Shall we listen to the next thing, which is in fact listening cause it's a voice mail?

ELM: Voice mail!

FK: VOICE MAIL! Thank you. This is from Katie and thank you Katie for leaving us a voice mail, it is amazing.

Katie: Hey Flourish, hey Elizabeth! My name is Katie and I'm really excited to be leaving a voice mail. This is a really cool thing that you guys do because I love talking way more than I love writing and I love writing quite a bit! So I've just finished catching up on some of your episodes, and I just listened to the Fan Tourism one, which I really really enjoyed, but I just wanted to talk a little bit about the fan tourism that I'm about to do in about two weeks.

I'm going to Tulsa Oklahoma which sounds crazy but that is the birthplace of the three Hanson brothers! And every year we do a thing in the fandom called Hanson Day, it's in the middle of May every year, where pretty much the entire fan base goes to Tulsa, so the city is kind of overrun with lots and lots of Hanson fans, and they do some shows and there's different activities but the main thing that we do is kind of all get together in order to hang out. Which I think is pretty much the coolest thing about this weird fandom that I'm a part of, which is the Hanson fandom.

So basically it's just about four or five days where we all get together and hang out and see the city where they're from, we do their studio, and it's just a really cool behind the scenes situation that I don't think a lot of music fandoms get, and I mean, I know from being a part of huge music fandoms that that is very very specific to the Hanson experience. And I'm just really excited about it, and I think it's a cool thing that we get to explore as their fans. Anyway, I love you guys, I love this podcast, I listen as much as I possibly can, and I think you're awesome. Keep doin what you're doin. Bye!

FK: I really liked hearing about this because it was almost the in-between...when we were talking about fan tourism, fan conventions, Elizabeth, you were just in a convention center, and so maybe that was too sterile and it could be anywhere and the only thing about that is other people and it's not really tourism, and it seems like this is kind of...this is kind of in between that. It's a place that is associated with the band but it sounds from what Katie's saying that the experience is more about being with other fans. There is a tourism experience, but the main thing that makes it special is about the fandom, and I think that's really cool.

ELM: Absolutely. And to clarify especially with conventions and my experience with them, the ones where the convention...the hotel and the convention bit are in the same space, it's that people are not...barely leaving the building. You know?

FK: Totally.

ELM: Especially in the summer, that kind of thing. So it's impossible for me to think "oh, this is really..." Even if it was in the town that your television show is set or something. If you just stay in the convention center...unless your show is set at a convention center.

FK: Oh that would be amazing.

ELM: Why hasn't anyone pitched this!

FK: It's funny because the...you know, there's actually a YA novel out now called "The Pros of Cons" which is in part based on an experience at a convention that I ran, which we should read and talk about maybe.

ELM: Why have you never mentioned this before?

FK: I don't know, I didn't realize I hadn't!

ELM: All right! Well.

FK: Anyway, as we talked about a bunch of things recently I realized one of the reasons why I was so into the idea that conventions could be fan tourism, is because a lot of the conventions I went to had a lot more of that tourism incorporated in them. Going to the Harry Potter park as part of the convention, or once a convention we held was in Salem Massachusetts and the point was to go and do all the American witch history...

ELM: Such an American, Flourish.

FK: Yeah well whatever though right? This was at a time when lots of people were imagining what the American Hogwarts might be like, and that was the point of being in Salem.

ELM: Little did they know...

FK: Yeah, little did they know.

ELM: That it was gonna be in the proper Massachusetts, not the stupid end of the state, but the good end of the state. Get ready. You wanna have a Massachusetts fight? Cause you look like you're gonna throw down right now.

FK: [laughing] I'm not going to throw down, I was just amazed that you were the first person I know who is not actually from that end of the state who has made this assertion.

ELM: Well, I went to college in Western Massachusetts so I did live there for four years and my hometown is less than...probably about a half an hour drive to the border. So obviously I'm gonna defend Western Mass.

FK: You are kind of from there.

ELM: But I don't dislike Boston, but I do think that Boston thinks that the rest of the state cares about it, and I just want to clarify right now that Western Mass is not worried about Boston.

FK: Boston thinks that a lot of people care about it that don't care about it at all.

ELM: [laughs] That's true. But it doesn't even need to be said for something like New York. I know. This came up when the Ilvermorny thing came out and people were doing all these Boston headcanons. "Do they take the T to the..." and I was like, This is in the fuckin' Berkshires! Are you serious! [laughing]

FK: I remember these discussions. We don't need to go further into it.

ELM: They take the bus to Albany!! It's the closest city! [laughing] Oh man. You want me to write about the Albany wizarding scene? Cause I could do that for you.

FK: You know what's horrifying I've been to the train station in Albany so many times and now I'm forced to imagine that there's Albany Harry Potter trains and I'm horrified.

ELM: I know it only seems like there's the two tracks but there's a secret magic track that you probably don't know about cause you're not from the area.

FK: Alright, we need to move on. [all laughing] The next ask...

ELM: New topic, new topic! So I believe this was an anonymous ask on Tumblr. We got this awhile that so you're one of the people we're apologizing to for the delay.

"This isn't so much a question as something I've been thinking about. Recently I was having a discussion with my father about the difference between Civil War Reenactors and the SCA." Pause, that's the Society for Creative Anachronism. I just learned about this. We'll explain that in a second. So it continues, "I mostly think of transformative works in the form of fanfic and fan art, but I started to think about the SCA in that light too, because they're not just reenacting the same battle, they're taking bits of history and making things, like arts and crafts and fights too. Love your guys' podcast!" Thanks! I'm saying thanks to that bit. And thank you for writing in! So tell me about the SCA.

FK: So the SCA is a group of people who like to get together and be creatively anachronistic. And basically what this means is they do anachronistic...

ELM: Anachronistic, to clarify, if people don't know what that means, anachronistic means something that is temporally incorrect, I would say. Like if you were wearing jeans, if you time traveled to the 1600s and you had a pair of jeans on.

FK: Right. And the SCA is into the medieval period, but kind of as I understand it, and I am not myself an SCA person so SCA people please correct me, but as I understand it they're not so...when someone attends an SCA event they dress up in a particular time period and place, but someone else might be from a slightly different time period and place. One person is, this is from 1300, and the other person is from 1400, and they're very...one of them's Dutch and the other one is from somewhere in the Middle East and they are doing a very, they're attempting historical accuracy for the point that they're in, but this other person is doing historical accuracy for the point that they're in, and then they meet up in this big meetup and they joust.

ELM: OK but it wouldn't be like, I went and wanted to pick and choose parts of my outfit, some from 14th century...

FK: I don't think that would be appreciated.

ELM: Or steampunk it.

FK: I think there are people who like steampunk who are also in the SCA but I don't think that's part of the SCA scene.

ELM: So you need to be internally consistent but you all get together in this vague general long middle ages.

FK: Right, and then there's also these different kingdoms, these areas of the country which are ruled by courts and people are elected to the courts as members of the group and they get together and enact battles, which are not historical battles, they're fantasy battles but they're historically accurate kind of fantasy battles. So it's this interesting place between historical reenactment and have some medieval inspired fiction.

ELM: That's interesting. So it's interesting that this also sprung up as the asker talking with their father about the difference between that and civil war reenactment, which is...civil war reenactment...for non Americans, I feel like civil war reenactment probably does get a lot of people outside of the US have probably encountered this concept via American pop culture. But basically people reenact battles from the Civil War.

FK: And it's also I think, interesting, because everywhere in different areas of the country, people reenact...do historical reenactments. Where I grew up there was, near Sutter's Fort [in California] where gold was found, there were these Pioneer Days where people would go and reenact, I took part in some of them.

ELM: Did you shout things like "I'm prospectin' for goooooold!" Did you sound like a prospector?

FK: No. I was mostly a child, and so my job had to do with doing a lot of chores. And having a backstory.

ELM: I think it was 5th grade we had to do a poster for history day or whatever and I chose to do it on women in the gold rush. Women made a shitload of money!

FK: They did make a shitload of money! Women made a ton of money.

ELM: I'm so proud of those ladies! And my mother helped me...

FK: Sell shovels. [laughing]

ELM: It was literally, they were charging extraordinary markup for basic tasks. My mother helped me use a lighter or a match or something, some fire, to make the edges of the poster look worn.

FK: Yeah!! Did you soak it in tea and everything?

ELM: I think we found posterboard that was already kind of mottled and legit. I think I did pretty well on that one. [laughing]

FK: Point is this is common in the US, I don't know how common it is everywhere else, I assume other places also do this historical thing to do with teaching or to do with particular historical sites, but civil war reenactment is a subculture and it's obviously a fraught subculture because the civil war is a fraught issue!

ELM: There are different ideological takes on the civil war and definitely if anyone's involved in these community I would love to be corrected but my understanding from reading about this, it's definitely ways that you can do it that further an ideological narrative that is probably somewhat problematic in framing it as, you know. I don't know. Just tiptoeing around what's going on right now. So...that's tricky.

FK: Right. I think it would be fair to say that there are definitely reenactors who go all the way on the "the South was a lost cause, the glorious South, things were better when there was slavery," all that.

ELM: You're gonna go right there, this is what I was tiptoeing around [laughing]

FK: I'm gonna go right there! Because I think there were some people who are like that and some people who are very much on...

ELM: Historical accuracy.

FK: I'm just a history nerd and this is the most important thing that happened in the town that I'm in so I'm interested in it, you know what I mean. It's a complex issue. Which by the way, this reenactment stuff is still complex in other places. At Sutter's Fort it is not uncomplex to do a reenactment of gold rush settlers showing up and fuckin' up the Miwok. I mean, they didn't...it's not like...

ELM: Do they do that part in the reenactment?

FK: Well, it was an economic...as I understand it it was a long term economic fucking up, so yes, they are reenacting the long term...

ELM: That's harder to reenact.

FK: No it's not, it's easy to reenact cause you have all these people here in this fort engaged in what would be one day of the long term economic fucking up, you know? I think that it is in fact, it's harder to see but it is totally implied in the reenactment, so.

ELM: This is a tricky thing to think about, too. I don't know, did I tell you about the Hitler record that I saw last week?

FK: ...no.

ELM: [laughs] It's haunted me! I discussed it at length with the friend that I saw it with yesterday. I went to this used record faire last weekend and there's thousands of thousands of records and I wasn't playing, I don't have a record player, I was just hangin' out with my friend who was looking for some specific stuff. So flipping through these hundreds of records, idly, I came across one that looked like it had come out in the 60s, I would estimate, from the way the cover looked.

And it was Hitler's speeches, some of them, and it did not look like an archival historical thing. It was clearly certain excerpts of his speeches had been chosen. One of them was Goebbels introduces Hitler, that was one of the tracks, and then there was patriotic Nazi songs. And then there was this blurb on the back that was like, well, obviously this was all very bad. But we must not forget history. And I just thought it was the most halfassed, I just thought, this is incredibly irresponsible and who did they think they were making this for if not for neo-Nazis a few decades after World War 2?

FK: I don't know but I now am really interested to find out what the story is behind this record, because...

ELM: I should google it. If we can find out any information obviously we should put a content warning on this, uh, but we were discussing it a lot and it makes me think about civil war reenactors too or people who engage with history, if there are lines that should be drawn between engaging with history in a fannish way, and what that means, an enthusiastic way. Obviously this is something I've thought about a lot as someone who spent years studying the history of British imperialism. There's definitely on the conservative end of the spectrum of people writing about the British empire, they're writing about it in a reverential "we should go back to that!" kind of thing. Obviously most post colonialists are not, they are critiquing it and saying it was really racist. But you know what I mean?

FK: Totally. I think that there's also...I don't know enough about it but I think that some of these conversations have been really highly relevant in the SCA as people have talked about for instance how you have people dressing up from different parts of the world and how that fits in too, and how to expect and to talk about that and think about it and, yeah. It's further away, so it's less immediate than the Miwok at Sutter's Fort and what...what is that, cause that was literally less than 200 years ago, but it's still a relevant issue.

ELM: Still, these are all the things that...and World War II is obviously more recent than that. I just think that fandom, a lot of...all across all sorts of corners of fandom right now people are getting so wrapped up in talking about the morality of the fictional things that they're into, or the ship that they like, or whatever, and it's really a lot harder when it's real stuff. And you see some of these clashes when it comes to RPF. And that's contemporary...in a way that's the contemporary version of history, right?

If I'm really into, I don't know. I wrote a paper on Charles James Fox, the Whig leader in the late 18th century, back in the day I was really into reading about him. Obviously I've always really liked the Whigs. I think that regular listeners can tell. I think you see it with contemporary RPF conversations where people get really muddled because it's easy enough to say, like, this thing you like, this book is problematic. But it's a lot harder when it's a human or a historical event that happened. Obviously you can say that's problematic but there's no way to erase that. You can just say "don't read that book" but you can't say "oh, this historical event didn't happen," or "this person didn't actually cause this harm" or whatever. You know what I mean? Complicated.

FK: And also the way those things get used or re used as symbols. We talked a little bit about pagan symbols being white nationalist or hippie pagan, but also I studied classics in college and a lot of people I know have different tattoos of things to do with the Roman empire, and those get used by fascists. You know? Again, it's something that's 2000 years old and doesn't mean that in the context of a classicist [laughing] getting a tattoo, but at the same time there can be these moments where you're like "ah fuck," so. This is sort of off the point of the question.

ELM: The Roman empire, so problematic, Flourish.

FK: Can I just say that Cicero is my favorite, favorite awful person?

ELM: Good to have one!

FK: He is, was, an awful person and I love him so much.

ELM: I gotta figure out who my favorite awful person, it's a long list.

FK: Cicero's definitely my number one. OK. Let's keep going.

ELM: Alright, let's see.

FK: That closes out our fan tourism and people being fans together section and the next section is about our alternate universe episode! So this first letter, we got an ask that said something similar to it as well and they were so close that we're just gonna read one, so thank you asker. But here's the letter. And I think we're gonna cut this one down a little because it's pretty long. Hope we cut it down right, Emma.

"Hi Flourish and Elizabeth. I'm a super big fan of Fansplaining, I really appreciate the work you all do and I've learned so much. However I was a little bit taken aback by the recent episode about alternate universe fic. Neither of y'all like to read AU fic according to this ep, which is obviously totally fine, but then the guest on this ep also doesn't particularly read AU, so the episode was mostly about why y'all don't like AU fic. There seemed to be a lot of pondering about why someone might like or even prefer AU fic, but without any real answers because that point of view wasn't represented.

"I think that y'all had lots of good points about the negatives of AU fic, especially modern AU fic. I think it's true that it's more common for characters to feel quite different in a modern AU fic than a canonverse fic. However, I've read canonverse fic where the character or characters felt quite different based on the assumptions made by the specific fic writer, or on a different interpretation of canon events or actions.

"I don't read modern AU fanfic for every fandom I'm in, but I did want to talk about why I read only modern AU fic for one of my fandoms, The 100, just to put that perspective out there. I was a mega-fan of The 100, it was my favorite show. Then Season 3 happened and was a dumpster fire. Normally when a show turns to shit you read fix-it fic and move on, we've all been there, but The 100 was different to me. Season 3 was so shocking, so heartbreaking, so viscerally upsetting, that I couldn't and still can't bring myself to go anywhere near canon. I find it too painful. Modern AU fic allows me to hold on to the characters and relationships I love but discard everything that's upsetting or rests too close to that upsetting material. I also get to stay connected with my friends in the community, even though I no longer watch the show.

"While modern AU fic can feel distant or out of character, I think that it can also serve a purpose and I think that's worth discussing. Thanks for reading! I look forward to listening to the next episode." And that was from Emma.

ELM: OK! So I have a lot of thoughts about this, do you want me to read the second AU letter and then we can talk about all the AU stuff?

FK: Yeah, let's do that. We'll talk about them together.

ELM: "Hi guys. I very much enjoyed the latest episode on AUs, but it sounds like none of you have read idiopathicsmiles' wonderful Les Mis high school AU, 'World Ain't Ready.'" Pause, side note, eight million people have recommended this in the Rec Center. It's incredible. I feel like we should read it just because so many people are into it.

FK: Alright!

ELM: "I highly recommend it. I'm not usually a fan of high school AUs, but 'World Ain't Ready' is one of my all time fave fics in any fandom. You don't need any knowledge of the canon to enjoy it. Like Morgan's fic, it leans into the idea that teenagers are dumb in a very affectionate, relatable way, and it's also hilarious and emotionally affecting and you should definitely go read it. "Incidentally, Les Mis is another fandom that is completely dominated by AUs to the extent that canon era fics need to be tagged as such for people to be able to find them." Wow. "Part of this is due to the..." I said wow, just FYI. [laughs] "Part of this is due to the difficulty of writing fics set in 19th century France, if you don't have the relevant historical knowledge, but I think another factor is the fandom faves..." I never know how to say these guys' names.

FK: Enjolras and Grantaire. I think.

ELM: How would you pronounce...

FK: Enjolras. I think.

ELM: I took French, I don't know why I am having a crisis over these names. Enjolras and... Grantiere?

FK: Grantaire.

ELM: Grantaire! Grantaire. "...have only minor roles in canon and are quite broadly characterized as a pasionate idealist and a drunken cynic respectively. These basic types, and the dynamic between them, are very appealing, especially for stories about social justice and political issues and the lack of detailed characterization in canon makes them easily transplantable into a modern setting and allows fans to fill in additional details however they choose. For instance many writers show Grantaire struggling with mental health issues, which isn't explicitly indicated in canon, though it definitely can be read into it, but it's an idea that a lot of people find compelling and it's something that's easier to deal with in a modern setting than in canon era.

"I think that's a key part of the appeal of AUs generally, the ability to focus on just the aspects the writer's interested in, whether exclusively romance or other things as well and ignoring the complicating factors that may be present in canon.

"Anyway, thanks for reading all my rambling, I hope it makes sense, orangistae." I hope that's how you say it, who is a frequent submitter to the Rec Center, so you are one of my heroes thank you very much orangistae.

FK: My first thing, and I just want to get this out of the way in talking about this, I feel like I must have given the wrong impression in this episode, the AU episode, and suggested that I never like AUs and don't like them at all.

ELM: I was actually taken aback that two people, both the asker and the first email writer, both said that. Maybe it was the impression we gave about high school AUs that led people to think we disliked all AUs? But you talked at length about how you were always there for certain things.

FK: Yeah, but also... I think I must have given the wrong impression and I think you're right that that must have been it. I think if people go back and listen to our Reylo episode, I wrote, I even wrote a whole thing about what are the reasons why I like AUs in that fandom, so I don't know. That's tough. But that said, obviously it was an impression that people had, so I'm glad that people wrote in and said why they liked AUs, because I agree with. [laughing] These are good reasons to like AUs!

ELM: Sure, and I also think it's a fair point and I regret that we didn't say this, the idea that there are plenty of quote unquote canon fics where characterization is wildly off...like, so it's not...it's not, and to the point where sometimes people even say it, they'll be like "this is kind of OOC but I'm just going there" and you're like "OK."

FK: And also the difference between canon and fanon interpretations of people's character and what that character even means. Obviously the one that I care about the very most at all times is Snape who has a canon characterization that is, he is a total fuckboy. And [laughing]

ELM: He's so bad, Flourish.

FK: It's just so bad.

ELM: Uchhh.

FK: Whereas I think there's a very highly developed fanon idea of him that actually conforms in many ways to canon, but the difference is that he's not such a dick. And this is...this exists for historical fandom reasons, but definitely is not in character. So. I think. You know. Yeah. That's a thing.

ELM: It's hard, and that thing leads me into the idea of whose...not even rough edges but whose problematic shit canonically gets softened away. You know. This comes back to this idea that we're constantly talking about of who gets certain treatment and who doesn't in fandom and that kind of thing.

FK: Yeah although I will say that I think that for Snape in the best ones it's...he's actually still awful just in not exactly the ways that JK Rowling makes him awful. But.

ELM: Still! You know.

FK: They're boring ways. They're boring ways!

ELM: Yeah but you could say that if you spend all your time...I don't know. I don't wanna really get into this idea of, you're glossing over an abuser or something, you know. Which is definitely a discourse point talking about Snape, that kind of thing. But I do think it's tricky sometimes when fanon can overpower canon so much that you wind up glossing over certain things or, and then as I just said, the fact that it's sometimes it's not universally distributed, this kind of softening.

FK: Right, because people do it in order to make people fall into tropes or stereotypes, this is obviously what's happening with Snape, so yeah, totally.

ELM: Yeah, it's tricky. But on the flip side of that, this kinda connects back to what Emma was saying about The 100 and their experience there. And a kind of way of, I don't know how to characterize it. Protecting yourself? From the trauma, maybe trauma is too extreme. But the sadness...I'm not being very articulate right now [laughing] But if you find something that's really hard to watch but you still love the characters, AUs can definitely perform that function. The flip side is true too, not necessarily an AU for this, but if you want to use fiction to process your own traumas, then go ahead. You can write your characters, it doesn't have to be hurt/comfort but it might be. You can put them in situations that help you, that give you a lens through which to process the hard things too. It can go in both directions. I think there is a stereotype or an assumption that it only works one way, that it's taking hard canon and making it softer and approachable.

FK: Right, but it does go the other way for sure.

ELM: I think that's a ...and this ties up in a...

FK: And even sometimes in the same piece. In the same character you can have people who are taking hard canon and making it softer, and people who are making it harder.

ELM: You mean like in the same story?

FK: No not in the same story but in the same fanon character. If you have a character...I'm trying to think of a non Snape character to use as an example [ELM laughs] But if you have a character who's like that, who some people are like oh, but I'm really into this person even though they're a dick, people take that in both directions. People woobify, and they also...

ELM: Dickify?

FK: Dickify.

ELM: [laughing] Yes, that's true. I'm also thinking maybe it can even happen in the same story. We were talking about when you have big swooping canony stuff, you can take away the swoopyness, which not necessarily softens it, but makes it more realistic. And then that can actually give you space to do more character work, I feel like.

FK: Right. And then you can also do it the other direction and make it bigger and swoopier.

ELM: You can always make it swoopier.

FK: [laughing] As we know because the most popular Reylo fic right now takes Reylo, already big and swoopy, and makes it even bigger and swoopier.

ELM: Swoop it up!

FK: Swoops it up. It is a canon compliant with the Legends canon forced marriage AU. So. As you might expect.

ELM: Your favorite.

FK: My favorite!

ELM: Lack of agency, forced marriage.

FK: Lack of agency, love it, #loveit. OK. Should we take a break before we read the rest of the letters?

ELM: Yeah, I think we should.

FK: OK.

[Interstitial music by Stefsax]

FK: Alright, we're back.

ELM: We are back! Alright, what's next?

FK: OK. This first letter is by PersephoneGarnata, Seph, and I'm gonna compress it a little bit for length just so that we have enough time to get to everything. So.

"Hi Flourish and Elizabeth, not prompted by anything in a recent episode of the podcast, but I was wondering if you were planning to do anything on fandom and age at any point? There's a popular perception that fandom is full of teenagers and people 'age out' of it. I expect that's true to an extent, but there are of course many people in their 20s, 30s and older who are still in fandom.

"My own experience here is perhaps slightly unusual - I've aged into fandom. I didn't get seriously into fannish activities until my early 30s. There are a few reasons for this. One reason is simply that, for a period of several years, I wasn't really into anything that came with a significant transformational fandom. Another reason is that I suffered a period of ill health when I had a lot of time to fill, at home, by myself - fanfic to the rescue! And a third reason is that, as I've matured, I've become a lot less judgey about fandom. I used to be a bit sniffy about fanfic, thinking it inferior to 'proper' books and 'proper' writing. Even after I got into reading it more, I kind of thought of it as mostly a guilty pleasure, reading about sexytimes between your favourite hot guys, not as something that could stand up as literature. That all changed after reading some fic which ruined my life (in a good way). These days I am a vocal proponent of the Fanfic is Great school of thought, and I just wish I'd got the stick out of my butt a bit sooner.

"Being an 'Aged-In' fan can sometimes be a little odd, because I'm the same age as many of the people who've been in fandom for years and have the same level of general life experience, but I missed out on many formative experiences like Strikethrough and Dashcon. I went straight from Fiction Alley to Archive of Our Own! Many of the fans I interact with online are much younger than me, which is normally cool, but occasionally I get a bit weirded out when I realise that quite a lot of that interaction could technically be described as sharing sexually explicit material with minors (but hey, I always try to tag my stuff appropriately!)

"Finally... a callback to one of your early episodes for making me feel like an Ancient. In your episode on Wattpad, I remember you talking about teenagers writing fics called stuff like 'Dean Winchester is my father', and thinking 'but Dean isn't old enough to have a teenage daughter... oh wait, yes he is.' I'm roughly the same age as Dean so the thought of teenagers thinking of him as a father figure is oh my God I'm so old! Thanks for reading my thoughts, keep up the good work! Seph."

ELM: So we have talked about this a bit. We should probably dig up some of the links for the show notes.

FK: Yeah, for sure.

ELM: We definitely have talked about sharing space with minors, and how there seem to be differing attitudes on this. And I think both our perspectives come from historically having been minors in fandom growing up with the idea that it is up to the young person...we always had to kind of lie and say "oh it's fine! I'm 18, don't worry about it," never an expectation that adults would change their behavior or the way that they were communicating with each other. If you wanted to be included in adult conversation, you had to lie and say you were an adult. And I can't see the other way around, honestly.

FK: Yeah. I agree. I think that we've struggled with this because it has been such a hot button issue when we've talked about it before and also because I think neither of us want to be the old people talking about the teen experience. I think it's complex, to talk about age in fandom we would want to have on people with...

ELM: Teens?

FK: Yeah, teens, and also much older people, and it would just be hard to fill different kinds of experience.

ELM: I think it would be worth doing.

FK: I think the summary of this is yes we've considered it and yes we would like to do it and maybe we will do it. We have vague nebulous intentions. It's slightly moving partsy. But we're gonna figure it out. Right?

ELM: I just think, I think this discourse is gonna keep happening. I think that, it frustrates me to see but I also don't read it and think "oh, am I too old to be here?" Because I'm surrounded by people in their 30s and 40s and 50s who are in fandom and people who have great jobs and relationships and families and things and still manage to write extraordinary fanfiction and this weird...it's not just fandom, the idea that women in particular stop existing as whole people when they reach certain ages or when they have children or whatever. So don't let that get to you is what I would say. Easier said than done!

FK: True. Alright, let's read the next one.

ELM: OK, I'll do it. "Hello Flourish and Elizabeth! Ao3 announced that they will be updating their search feature, which is probably long overdue." This came in a few weeks ago. "But it got me thinking about fandom metadata and how we look for fic. (Blame Episode 19 of your podcast, Shannon Fay Johnson's article for Transformative Works and Cultures," we'll put a link to that in the show notes, "and the day job, I'm a cataloging librarian.)" Woooo! That's me, cheering for librarians.

"Most communities tag and organize their fic very differently from one another. FF.net has very rigid tagging capabilities, AO3 is a mix of formal tags and free-form tagging. tumblr is a mess, some people tag, some people don't. I was a member of several different livejournal communities, all had different ways of tagging fic. Sometimes this is on purpose - people would rather use fandom specific terms to keep outsiders from finding their fic. I remember when people used to tag things "Wolfstar" instead of Remus/Sirius, for instance.

"So my question for you is, how do we findthe fics that we're looking for? Do people stick to the same searching strategies, or do they vary across platforms? Mine look completely different, even in the same fandoms. The way I look for star wars fic changes with each level of the universe I'm looking at (prequels, original, new trilogy, clone wars, or rebels).

"I'm curious how other people go about it! Or is it all just luck of the draw when you go browsing? Waiting for recs? Finding a favorite writer and sticking with them and what they like? Thanks! I enjoy the podcast! Kate McManus." I love this letter!

FK: Thank you Kate! So actually I have a proposal for this. I think that we should invite, I think you and I should each write up our fic finding strategies, just quickly, and we should invite other people to do the same thing, and maybe we should write something about that. Cause I would be interested to know how other people do this too, and I think that probably there will be a wide variation.

ELM: Absolutely and I have a lot of feelings about this, because I am in literal AO3 hell for the last now it's been month and a half. Oh god. Time's tickin' away. So I've been having to actively find fic a lot, right? And I have strategies.

FK: I do too, and mine vary a lot depending on fandom and where they are. OK. So that's what we're gonna do then right?

ELM: OK so we are gonna write this down and listeners are gonna write in and tell us how they find fic. OK.

FK: And we're going to drum up people to do it and then we'll do a roundup or something.

ELM: Alright, so send in your stuff everyone.

FK: OK. Next letter. "Hey. Thank you so much for your excellent podcast! I'm writing with a request: could you maybe do an episode on how to make fandom friends online? This is something I've never figured out how to do, even though I've been a voracious consumer of fanworks since Highlander in 1996. How does one go from being a regular commentor on fic or resharer of Tumblr posts to forming a friendship with someone? I'd love to hear your stories of how you both managed it. Thanks!" And that I think was an anonymous ask on Tumblr.

ELM: Yeah I think it was anon. We are literally two of the worst people to answer this question.

FK: Because you never make friends and I always do? No, that's not right.

ELM: No I've made plenty of friends since I stopped lurking, but using my real name and writing very popular articles about fandom in mainstream publications! So I remember at one point in Sherlock fandom I made a rec list, someone asked me for recs and I added the people who I liked and I was like "oh I really love blank's fic, and I love blank for this and blank for this," and they all followed me. And if I had been some random person just saying "I like blank blank and blank," would they have followed me back immediately? But because my real name is attached to it and my real name is attached to articles that were being widely shared in the Sherlock fandom, they knew who I was and then they were like...I'm not saying that my writing is so irresistable that no one can say no to my friendship... [laughing]

FK: Yeah. But I will say this, I just started posting a long serial written fanfic under a sock...

ELM: Oh yeah!

FK: ...and no I'm not gonna say what the sock is but people can figure that out, I'm sure, if they look at my history, don't worry, you can figure it out. Go do some sleuthing.

ELM: And all of your psychological hangups in fic form.

FK: All of my hangups. It's just very obvious who wrote this fic if you think too hard about it. So anyway, I have this sock, and it has started getting comments and there is a person who I feel like I have a growing baby maybe gonna actually be a friendship someday at which point I'll have to tell them who I am and that that's my sock. And they commented and we got into a conversation in their comment on my fic. So I think that is...that's certainly the way it always worked before I was high profile in fandom and I think that must be how it goes.

ELM: I think a lot of people who want to make friends...being the fic writer is the privileged position. Because I think most people are not gonna be the fic writer. [FK makes agreement noises] Or if they are are they gonna be the fic writer that generates enough attention to get several people commenting? I think there is definitely resentment around "BNFs" in particular, part of that is because it's such a...it's kind of a celebrity-fan relationship in the sense of you can feel like you have an intimate relationship with someone's fan presence, their fic, if they have a lot of followers then you probably see their content a lot, you know. And how do you say...I'm here too! And I say this with many years of lurking, I definitely felt like I had a personal relationship with some of my favorite authors, but first of all I didn't...what was I gonna do, be like "hey!" You know? I knew these were very popular writers too so then it definitely feels like I'm a fan and they're a famous person. You know?

FK: I agree but I do think there's something...first I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right that...

ELM: [laughing] Cool. First things first!

FK: But I also think that it doesn't...I think a lot of people feel like it has to be "I'm going to be a writer and that's the way I'm going to contribute to this community, and then therefore people will talk to me and they'll care," and I don't think that's the only way you can make community contributions that cause people to speak with you and engage with you and make friendships. I think people do it through writing meta, through having fic recs, I think people do it through any form of...

ELM: All of these are creation! I don't mean to just pin it on, I think this is the example I gave.

FK: I think they are all creation but I think that is kind of part of how you make friends!

ELM: I think it's also quite challenging to make really good, you know, really good gifsets or really good fic rec lists! So that, I think that's a bar. It's really hard and I imagine there are actually lots of people in fandom who are semi lurkers who, and don't have access to cons, maybe don't feel comfortable with IRL stuff, and there's no...it's very hard I think to laterally find people who are also similarly not high volume content creators and who wanna be friends. And it seems like it's a, you know, you need some kind of singles bar or something cause there's so many parasocial relationships.

FK: I think it's one of the reasons people like cons. It's one of the few places where you can see people face to face and say "hey, thing!" And talk to someone in a line or whatever.

ELM: And that's not to say, I'm sure, I don't know what it would be like to be a popular fic writer but it's not to say that they're on some pedestal and they don't actually want fandom friends, you know. You never know...

FK: I also think that it's actually, it doesn't have to be a fan-celebrity situation. I think that just having opened a conversation through this creative thing that you made, then people contact you because they have engaged with it and then the conversation is started. And that is a position of power even if it's only incredibly small. I think saying "fan celebrity" makes it seem like it's a big deal, I can promise you that this fic I'm writing I am not a celebrity by any stretch in this fandom. [laughing]

ELM: Not celebrity but like...cult famous author.

FK: Oh, thank you, thank you. [laughing] I see what you're saying. I think it's hard, and that is the way that most people do it.

ELM: You know what, here is my recommendation. You should start a fandom newsletter and get thousands of people to sign up and then you literally write in the newsletter "I'm into this show Black Sails, you should message me if you like it." And then multiple people will message you and then you wind up in their guest room at Oxford!

FK: Sounds like very relatable and reasonable advice. [laughing]

ELM: This is why I'm saying it's not helpful! And I don't know, I say this with full knowledge of having been a lurker for a very very long time. And not, you know, ten years ago...it's not necessarily something I would have even wanted to do. Obviously I'm very grateful to the friends I made through fandom while talking out loud about things, but I have a complicated relationship with being really open about my feelings about the source material. Some of that's very private to me, you know?

FK: I agree with you, I guess the thing I'm struggling with is I feel like it relates to making friendships in any community to some degree. I've been bouncing around from church communities for a long while now and one of the things I realized after trying to find a church community and failing and feeling really alone and sad was that the only way for me to actually make friendships within that community was to volunteer for shit and be on fuckin' flower guild or altar guild or...you know what I mean? Just do shit instead of hoping people would talk to me.

ELM: Were you just hoping if you shook their hand and you said "Peace!"

FK: "Peace be with you!" right?

ELM: And then they'd be like "Best friend forever"? Sometimes I think this!

FK: Exactly! And I think giving a kudos or whatever, for a lot of people...

ELM: Have you had this feeling? I had this today. I always think this at peace. What if I shake hands with someone and then we decide we wanna be best friends? It literally will never happen from a peace, but yeah.

FK: So only by, and that's not easy either, and it requires...and not everybody can and this is one of the reasons why that's hard and I feel like it's not the same thing exactly in fandom, but I think they're related.

ELM: Participating. I like that you just compared giving kudos on AO3 to exchanging peace at church.

FK: It's like on May the Fourth. May the force be with you...and also with you. And also with your spirit.

ELM: And also with thy spirit, yes...you say and also with your spirit?

FK: We don't use "thy."

ELM: I am so glad I go to my church and not your church.

FK: I am so glad I go to MY church and not YOUR church too!

ELM: "Thy" is superior.

FK: Uhhhhhhh...it certainly sound snootier. OK! Let's talk about the next one!

ELM: I love history I don't know what to tell you.

FK: That's just how you are.

ELM: Also, thy was the informal. You was the formal.

FK: I know! If you remember when I was in...

ELM: Languagesplain!

FK: When I was in Sleepy Hollow fandom...

ELM: Oh yeah! [laughing]

FK: And I got really mad that the Quakers didn't speak right.

ELM: Yeah...you wanna read... this is the last one. I'll read it.

FK: It's your turn.

ELM: But I also have feelings about it, so what if I read it and just answer it without you.

FK: OK I can read it then and then you can have feelings about it.

ELM: OK so the first one came in and then the second one came in and I feel bad. I literally set this one aside because I had so many thoughts and now it's about the Infinity War premiere which obviously happened last week, so. You'll see. The asker I think, the problem was sorted out but I think this is still relevant to us.

FK: And this was an anon ask. Two anon asks.

ELM: Two of them.

FK: That were obviously the same person.

"I obsess over a lot of fiction for comfort or escapism (quite common I'm sure). Today my mother messaged me about travel plans she made for the family - the same weekend that Avengers Infinity War comes out. I've been looking forward to this movie for over a year and was planning to go with friends for midnight showing, dress up, take pictures, etc, be part of a crowd that's equally excited. I feel truly devastated but she thinks it's frivolous. I wish for her to validate how I feel. Any advice?" Next ask...

ELM: This came in shortly afterwards. It was within a few days.

FK: "Marvel studios moved up the release today which is awesome for me, but wow, what are the chances of that timing? So disregard my last message... sort of. I'd be interested in your thoughts re: explaining fandom emotional investment to non fans who don't "get it". I'll obviously prioritize real life (especially family) over hobbies, but you can't help but feel disappointment when fandom is so special and big to you. Especially when people write off your interests as silly and shameful."

ELM: OK. So what I was gonna write, and what I still think, is that in situations like this, one thing that's helpful is to apply what I would call the Big Game Test. I don't know if you can see where this is going. You wanna go see this movie at a midnight premiere, and your mom's made plans for you? And you're like, "don't you understand how important to me this is" and your mom is like "it's just a movie."

Now say your team was in the Super Bowl. Is this situation...so say it's your grandmother's funeral and you were like, "but my team's in the Super Bowl!" Depending on your family situation, but it's almost definite that your parents would say...

FK: Depends how Grandma feels about that team!

ELM: I don't know, a very serious...we don't know your family, but under normal circumstances you would have to attend a family member's funeral even if your team was in the Super Bowl!

FK: Unless you're in Lincoln Nebraska and...actually that's college but never mind.

ELM: Wow you think that your football team is the only one that anyone cares about but in fact it's like that for all the football teams in all of the towns.

FK: [laughing] I know it is.

ELM: Maybe not the best example because it's probably true that your whole family wants to watch the Super Bowl in this case. [laughing]

FK: But we get it.

ELM: Emotionally. There are definitely situations, whereas if you're gonna have to go to your grandmother's funeral and you're like "but mom don't you understand Infinity War comes out this weekend," sorry, you have to go to your grandmother's funeral. There are definitely times in fandom where I think—and we don't know the circumstances of this and this is not specifically about this ask—but there are times where people are like "don't they understand this is really important?" and it's like "yeah but...you can't...I wanna read only X-men fanfiction right now but I do still have to go to work." Right? And I think this is sometimes an issue that I run up to in talking to people in fandom because they're like "don't you understand I'm celebrating my passion" and you're like "yeah but there are things that do have to take precedent."

And obviously the asker knows that and they say it right here.

FK: But on the other hand also...

ELM: I think it requires clarification based on some conversations I've had with people! What's the other hand?

FK: But on the other hand also if Nebraska was in the playoffs when I was growing up, you bet your fuckin' ass, not only were we going to be watching this, but my grandfather would call the entire family to come and watch with him, even the parts of the family who don't actually like...and I'm sure this is the same for other people about other teams...

ELM: You say this like it's unique and this is literally how all America feels about football!

FK: But I'm not! My point is saying... first of all, not literally all Americans feel this way about football. I have to tell you not everyone feels this way about football. But the point being that's fandom and it's a fandom that takes over the entire family even if you don't like football, you still have to be there because it's a thing.

ELM: So that's why I think it is true that I feel like when you're talking to a family member, not to make it really gendered, but more likely a dad or a male family member than a mom, even though there are tons of women obviously that love pro sports, but I definitely think it's a way to contextualize if they're like "it's just a movie you can see it whenever," you can be like "would you feel that way if it was the playoffs and our team was there?" And they'd be like "oh no absolutely." It's an easy analogy to make but it's also one that I think helps. It helps people...one of my longstanding theories on this is the idea that it's much more rare for people to be casual fans of sports in the way you can be casual fans of something like the MCU. You know?

So there's a big debacle when Infinity War came out because Richard Brody from the New Yorker wrote this piece that was like...I don't wanna get into it because I actually think he had some fine points but it was talking about the structure of the franchise. Did you see this? Talking about the structure of the franchise and how you popped into it and the characters were placed into it and you have to understand what happened in the previous 19 movies to have any idea of the context for anything, and I think part of the problem there is this disconnect between thinking of a cog in a franchise as the same thing as the standalone film. And I'm not saying that he...he could figure that out. But I do think it's a problem that we review these very different types of movies in the same space under the same rubric.

FK: Especially when nobody would say, "this game, you could understand..." I mean you can understand I guess to some extent outside of the context of what's happened in a season for your team, but...

ELM: It helps! Right. So it's like, yeah. But that was an aside. I think that you get millions and millions and millions of people who are going to see Infinity War this weekend, and they may have a vague memory of what happened in the other movies and real chill for them and "OK that was fun" they walk away. And maybe they didn't like it, I've seen some weird reactions coming out of this movie.

FK: Actually maybe this IS a little bit like the Super Bowl. You have to watch the Super Bowl even if you don't care about the teams, but if your team is in the Super Bowl...

ELM: There's three things that happen in the Super Bowl I would say in my observation at parties. There's the people whose teams are in it, then there's me who cares about a football...I cannot watch a soccer game or an American football game without getting invested in them. Otherwise I'm just like "you're literally going back and forth and I don't care." In football I have all these very specific biases.

FK: Do you have a ranking system where...

ELM: Yes. So.

FK: "I root for X over Y and Y over Z." Is Dallas at the bottom? Because Dallas should be at the bottom.

ELM: Dallas, I think Dallas should always be at the bottom. Very briefly, anyone in the AFC who is not in the Bills' division, I will always root the most heavily against the Patriots, the Dolphins and the Jets, but I prefer the AFC over the NFC cause the AFC seems soft and pure and the NFC seems evil. BUT I will root for an NFC team if they are from the rust belt.

Everything is connected to the Bills somehow. If they come from a cold, hardscrabble place, I'll root for them. I'll root for the Steelers and I'll root for the Packers and I'll root for the Vikings, cause they come from sad-ass places where people need football! If you live in Florida, you can just go sit in the sunshine and wrestle an alligator! Do you need this sport? And it's all they have!

FK: All right. So now we've gone down that entire path but what I will say, I do want to get one thing into here before we get too distracted [ELM laughing] which is to say that I thought the asker was super wise to say that I wish for her to validate what I feel, because I think a very relationships thing of like...it's not just, the question is not just "can I go see it or not" or "will I go see it or not" it's "I want my mom to understand how much I love this thing," and that's hard.

ELM: But I'm not sure...this is why I bring up, why I think it's harder for people to understand this, because everyone's going to go see Infinity War. And then be like, "well I just watched it and it was fun" and walk away, and they're like "you...wanna write stories about these characters?! I like them but I don't understand." Whereas it doesn't go in the opposite direction where you just kinda swing by the football game and you're like "cool" and then you're like "I don't understand why you're so invested painting yourself." I think it's much more rare that you casually swing by a sports game.

FK: And if you do then you totally know why the people are painting themselves.

ELM: Yeah! I mean...do we really know why they're painting themselves. It's so much. It's cold out! The hardscrabble team, it's very cold in this place, they're gonna get frostbite. They probably have alcohol poisoning anyway.

I just think it's really hard. One of the things about Ship It, if you listen to the last episode, the mom character, she's very very very supportive of all things. You know, at one point the protagonist is like, "You're gonna let me be by myself?" Trying to get her mom to say no, actually. She's trying to get her mom to get her out of it, right. And she's like "I could be offered drugs! I could get pregnant!" And her mom says something like "those all sound like important life milestones that you need to pass at some point." [laughing] And obviously I don't believe that this is outside the realm of mom attitudes, but this is not a standard mom attitude! That's undeniably not.

FK: I will say that it is a very particular Pacific Northwest mom attitude.

ELM: Yes, and an artist mom. And I totally get this mom and I've met this mom before but...

FK: It's not the standard issue mom.

ELM: But it then makes her blanket acceptance and interest and the enthusiasm and interest in her daughter's passions a lot more believable. Whereas a different type of mom would be like, "why don't you care about something real, this is a fake relationship, focus on your own life." So it works for the story because obviously we've laid the groundwork of her being this kind of person, it's just like, "groovy! You have your things you love, I'm gonna go make a sculpture out of the mini cereal boxes in our hotel" or whatever, that's not an example but she would, probably. She seems like a mixed media kinda lady. [laughing] And her dad writing poems about the convention center!

But I just, I think some people just aren't gonna get it and their minds don't work that way and maybe the way to say it is contextualizing within the fandom saying, this is actually really important to a lot of people and I'm one of those people and I know you love me and it's brought me friendships and it's made me a more creative person or any of the positive things that you think fandom brings to your life, and I think that anyone who loves you, if family members want to see you happy...as long as you're not skipping, not doing your job or school or whatever I feel like it's convincing them. That's how they can see the value and if they see the value it brings...I don't like the things you're a fan of but I like that it brings you joy.

FK: Exactly. I think that this is one of the hardest things, maybe I'm just expanding my own experiences to the world, but I think this is one of the harder things about growing up and growing into an adult relationship with not just your family but also your friends and everyone else. Sort of finding the ways that you can have those people who mean a lot to you and who are never gonna get certain things that you care about and being OK with that. And I think different people have different levels of being OK with that and I think it can be really hard.

ELM: Look at everyone, every day on Twitter I see people angry that people like something. You know that cartoon where the angel comes down and hands, the guy is like "I hate that thing" and the angel comes down in the next panel and hands him a little card and he opens it and it says, like, "OK" or something. Alright! Just OK! You know? Got it. Please calm down. [laughing]

FK: Like I said I think this has to do with...there's a lot of things, people's personalities are different like this. I say this as a person who is significantly religious and is married to an atheist so obviously I have extremely high tolerance for people believing and caring about very different things from me in a fundamental way, and some people aren't like that and that's OK too. And that can be hard, if you're like that asker. I understand that that can be incredibly hard.

ELM: Yeah. The asker sounds like...

FK: They have their shit together!

ELM: I was gonna say "head screwed on right" but then I lost the train of...

FK: You got it though, you got it!

ELM: Was that right? Is that the expression?

FK: Yeah, head screwed on straight!

ELM: Cool, so yeah. So. Thus concludes Ask Fansplaining Anything Part 1.

FK: It does. And now if you have been inspired by this episode to ask us things, the very best way to do it is by leaving us a voicemail like Katie who we love.

ELM: Katie!!!

FK: Yeah, Katie!! Like the way Katie did.

ELM: Wait wait wait, a bunch of our asks were anon asks so...

FK: You're right. That's also a great way to leave us an ask!

ELM: I don't wanna force anyone. You can also call and use a pseud or not use your name at all, say hey I'd rather not use my name.

FK: Use a voice hider so no one can know your voice.

ELM: That's incredible. Sound like you're on a Dateline special in the dark.

FK: Yeah, do that. OK. So you can do that, but also genuinely it is true I didn't mean to suggest that...if you wanna leave an anon ask that's also great. Thank you, no one has been sending us hate, thank you for not sending us hate and keep not sending us hate. [ELM laughing] GOOD JOB PEOPLE.

ELM: On Fansplaining.tumblr.com you will see the phone number that you can call if you would like to use your voice. You will see the ask button that you can turn on anon for or not to send this stuff. Tweet or Facebook, both at Fansplaining though I don't think either of those really give you enough space to say too much so...

FK: And if you really wanna stretch out you can send us an email, fansplaining@gmail.com.

ELM: Yes! Other points of business, patreon.com/fansplaining, this is how we continue to make the podcast. Thank you to, every episode I feel like we get at least a patron or two and I really really appreciate that whether you've been listening for a long time or you're a new listener, if you find your financial circumstances allow you to give us even as little as a dollar a month. Or as much as four hundred dollars a month if you want Flourish to make you a sweater just in time for summer!!

FK: Actually if you did it right now you would probably get it just in time for winter, so.

ELM: It's an elaborate sweater. It's a Harry Potter sweater. But obviously I am not expecting anyone to give us four hundred dollars a MONTH. a MONTH.

FK: [laughing] Look it takes a long time to make a sweater ok? So if you don't have money or don't want to give us your money or whatever or even if you wanna do something nice to us in addition to giving us your money you can also review us and leave a written review, like a starred review and a written review, on iTunes. Really helps us get out there and helps people find us so please do that if you have a chance.

ELM: I think those are all the points of business!

FK: Alright! Well, in that case, you gonna go and read some X-men fanfic now?

ELM: Literally reading an AU.

FK: OK, I'm gonna go keep writing my AU under my sock.

ELM: Yeah! You know what, I do wonder, will I become a universal AU fan after this?

FK: Maybe.

ELM: And then we'll have AUs Part 2, we'll have Morgan back, we'll just...

FK: And you're just gonna be talking about how much you like AUs.

ELM: I'll be like "I only like AUs." We'll see, we'll see. I'm gonna go read some more. It's fine!

FK: Talk to you later!

ELM: Bye!

[outro music, thank yous and disclaimers]