#Local man has to deal with teenage versions of all the people he knows including himself

[flockoff]

In a another world, Peak of Combat has a plot that involves Time Travel Shenanigans which puts V in one of the Funniest Situations.

[bunnysbrainrot]

Sinners - Teaser

Relationship: Sam Winchester x Reader

Content: Explicit sexual content, teasing, more kinks and details to come with the full version, nothing too warning-worthy right now?

Summary: Disguised as a priest and nun on a case, time alone with Sam back at your motel is everything but holy. The taboo of your situation has Sam dealing with some… impure thoughts. Will Sam be able to contain himself?

In the past few weeks you and the Winchesters uncovered some suspicious deaths in a remote area of Georgia. The locations of the tragedies spanned over 50 miles apart, meaning that the team had to split up to cover more ground. Dean had split from you and Sam two days ago, and the night before in the motel had been fairly normal. It seemed like Dean did this on purpose; you had drunkenly admitted to him of your affection for his younger brother.

Whether or not Sam knew of this, you had no clue. And now in your nun getup, it was all too fitting that you began to pray that Sam was unaware. The two of you calmly made your way past the yellow police tape, preparing warm smiles for a victim’s family.

Sam knocked on the door, letting out a bated breath. Weren’t nuns supposed to dress modestly? Your outfit was the proper attire, but the way it hugged your curves left too much to Sam’s imagination. It was his turn to pray that it didn’t stir too much in him, to let him keep his composure.

An older man answered the door, his expression easing at the sight of your attire. Turns out this costume was better received than you thought. You had to channel your tone and proper verbiage before speaking.

“Apologies for showing up unannounced, Mr. Peters. I’m Father Jeremy, and this is our sister from a local church.” Sam waved a hand for you to introduce yourself.

You chose to use your name, seeing that this was your first nun-appearance.

“We’re here on behalf of the church to offer support for your family, but we also have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.”

Hopefully there were no questions about the nearest Catholic church, otherwise this whole façade would crumble. Mr. Peters’ face only softened further.

“I’m glad you’re here, Father, Sister,” he addressed you with a sad smile, “Please, come in.”

Sam stepped in first, using a beckoning finger behind him to have you follow him. The house was modest, but eloquently decorated. You recalled the murder that had happened, that brought you to this town, and shuddered. Mr. Peters’ daughter had been brutally murdered and discarded in a creek, signs indicating the presence of a vampire. Their daughter had been missing for two weeks before the time of death, which is what you and Sam aimed to discover.

“Mr. Peters, we are part of a youth outreach program at the church. Our aim is to help troubled youth, with restorative services and social connection. We were wondering if your daughter had any odd behaviors before she went missing. Perhaps she became more secluded?”

The man looked confused at first, “Odd behavior?”

Sam gave a small nod, “We notice that teenagers in need of help oftentimes become more distant with their families. Our goal is to provide better services to our youth, which does include finding the source issue.”

Mr. Peters have a small background of his daughter, admitting that she had become distant with the family. Not just that, but her anger had only worsened, amongst several harmful habits. It wasn’t uncommon for teens to become immersed in the occult and all things dark, but being surrounded by the wrong people can lead to harmful connections.

“I see,” Sam started, “and do you know what kind of people she was surrounding herself with?”

Another confused look from Mr. Peters.

You added, “This way, we’re able to identify warning signs - things to be wary of as our youth members meet new people.”

This seemed to clear things up, bringing out a detailed recount of his daughter’s recent social group. But, their social media had been recently deleted, preventing the family from getting their closure. As far as they knew, their daughter had made new friends, ran from home, and was found brutally murdered.

Sam’s eyes darted to you when you shifted in your seat, the fabric of your black dress sliding gracefully along your thighs. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but seeing you dressed up like this sent his mind spinning. The last thing he should be thinking of is taking you dressed like this, but he couldn’t shake it. His mind raced of scenarios the two of you could create, each one dirtier than the last.

But right now, the task at hand was covering the tightness of his pants. He leaned forward, the broad muscles of his arms flexing beneath his black shirt. Blush creeped onto your cheeks, much to the attention of Mr. Peters, who looked at you with concern.

“Sister, are you feeling alright?”

You nodded and gave a small wave, “Oh, I’m fine. Just a little warm is all. I apologize.”

Mr. Peters stood, “No need to apologize, let me get you some cold water. I’ll only be one moment.”

The room had gone oddly quiet paired with Sam’s intent stare at your face. You turned to find a concerned Sam inspecting you fully.

“You sure you’re okay?” He asked softly.

A slight nod, “Yeah, it’s just stuffy in this outfit.”

“Well, once we’re back at the motel we can get you out of it.”

A beat later Sam realized how that sounded. He tried to backtrack, but Mr. Peters had already returned with your glass of water, which you gratefully sipped on. It took everything in your power to resist the images that came to mind. Sam’s hands roaming your body, stripping that baggy dress off of your body, his mouth finding every nook and cranny of your neck.

Sam seemed to have taken over the conversation for the last few moments before standing. Mr. Peters had already given a short list of his daughter’s friends, and their usual hang-out spots. Your attention snapped back to reality; you placed the water glass down with a small thank you, being pulled up by Sam.

His hand could practically wrap the entirety of your arm, his grip stable and warm. Goosebumps rose on your arms, brushing against the tough fabric of your dress. The air outside carried the comfort of fall, the breeze being cool and refreshing on your hot cheeks.

At the car, Sam reached for your door to open it for you, something completely new to the both of you. You glanced up at him with wide eyes. The movements he made to reach the handle had pulled your bodies dangerously close, fully brush against his chest, pressed into the car. A inexplicable scenario that would raise a few eyebrows, for certain.

“Sorry, I just didn’t want you to trip on your dress,” breathed Sam.

Honestly, he was thankful for the little slip up - being this close to you had been a wish of his, but there had never been any excuse for it to happen. Your focus shifted from his soft, hazel eyes down to his parted lips. Sam’s attention shifted to your lips, lowering to your chest for a split second. A selfish move on his part, but the damage had already been done.

Your hand fumbled for the door handle, fingers sliding over his own. The two of you shared another longing glance before getting you into the car. Sam tucked in loose bits of your dress so the door wouldn’t snag on them.

“Alright, hands and feet it, watch out,” he whispered. You noticed how his hands fumbled more than usual, surely due to the nerves. Perhaps you had been reading this wrong, maybe you had taken things too far? Maybe you had overstepped and embarrassed him?

“Thank you,” you replied, giving him a genuine smile. Sam’s cheeks flushed, unmistakably a sign that maybe your anxieties been just that. Simple anxieties from overthinking this whole thing.

Now settled in the car, the two of you made the trip back to the motel. After stepping inside you beelined for the bathroom.

At least, until Sam’s voice stopped you in your tracks.

“Hey, could I talk to you about something?”

You turned to face him, eyebrows raised. You’d be lying to yourself if you said your heart didn’t skip a beat.

“What’s up?”

With the silence in the room, you took the cue to sit on the bed. Sam towered in comparison, his lean physique defined by the lamplight.

His voice softened, “I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to get that close, I-“

“Sam, it’s okay,” you cut him off with a laugh, “don’t worry about it. I wasn’t bothered by it.”

He relaxed his shoulders. Sam began to dig through his bag for another set of clothes.

“You look good as a priest, by the way. You sell the bit nicely,” you stated.

What you said made his heart skip a beat. Was that a compliment, or just conversation? Sam couldn’t tell, so he turned to you once more with a goofy grin on his face.

“Thanks,” his expression darkened as his eyes raked you over, “You look good as a nun.”

There was no mistaking it - he was taking his time looking over you. Your breath hitched in your throat when he turned, leaned casually against the desk your bags laid on. You transfixed on the way his hands moved around his belt buckle. Mildly fiddling, but you couldn’t help but imagine him following through.

“Not my best outfit, but thank you,” you replied. Sam pushed away from the desk, slowly stepping toward the bed where you sat, tense with every step.

“I would agree there, you’ve worn better,” he commented.

You head snapped up to meet his eyes. A surprise note of flirtation filled your voice.

“Okay, so what’s my best outfit, then?”

He scoffed, “We playing twenty questions?”

You pointed to your outfits, smirking proudly at him, “Look at our getup, man, it’s like a confessional.”

A bright laugh came out of Sam; he tilted his head back as he thought.

“My answer isn’t exactly… appropriate.”

“Sam,” you laughed, “Confessional. You gotta tell me.”

He let out a groan before lowering his head, steadily giving you his answer, “Your dark jeans, and that long sleeve shirt. The, um… the one with the v-neck, you wore it almost every day over winter.”

“And that was inappropriate?”

“It’s why I like it that’s inappropriate.”

“Okay, then, why do you like it?”

The last thing you expected was for Sam to close the distance. He stepped until he was directly ahead, arms crossed over his chest as he locked eyes with you.

“It made your ass look nice.”

His tone was surprisingly serious, like he had been thinking of this answer for a while.

“Hugs your body in the right ways. And it makes your, well, chest… look nice.”

Sam humored your shocked expression but pushing things further. If you could dish it out, he could dish it back.

“What’s my best outfit?”

As you collected yourself, Sam stepped closer, bringing a hand to your cheek. He lifted your head, hai thumb grazing over your cheek.

“It’s a confessional. You have to tell me,” he joked, earning a slight glare from you. That sour face melted away when Sam placed his hand beneath your chin. He tilted your head back to have you look at him.

Shit.

“Jeans,” you breathed, “V-neck black shirt.”

Sam leaned in, brushing his lips across your cheek. The closeness set your skin ablaze, each trailing lip and finger sending shivers up your spine.

“Is that all?” Sam whispered.

His eyes met yours once again, a startling seriousness lurking inside. You pushed past the shyness of your answer. The honesty could break the tension that had building all this time.

“Pajama pants… no shirt. When you just get out of the shower.”

Sam’s lips curled into a satisfied smile before planting a slow kiss to your cheek. He moved gradually to your jawline, sprinkling chaste kisses until his lips hovered over yours.

“Have you wanted this?” he asked.

Your frustration was intangible - a bottle that had been shaken too much, and ready to blow. He was centimeters, millimeters away from giving you what you’d truly wanted. The silence between you signified the utter defiance to give him this so easily.

“Confessional,” Sam’s voice reverberated against you, but he offered nothing to your pleading lips, “tell me, little nun, have you thought about this? Wanted my lips on yours?”

A small whine escaped you as Sam’s hand lowered to your throat, pressing softly to the tender flesh. The loss of blood flow muddled your thoughts into complete ecstasy, with no urgency to regain control. With just one move, it was clear to Sam that you were undoubtedly his.

You gave him a small nod. A low growl thundered in his chest before pressing into you further, laying you flat on the bed. Locks of chestnut hair framed your face, with a breathy Sam hovering his mouth over your neck.

“Nodding doesn’t count. You gotta use your words, sweetheart.”

Amidst the constriction on your throat you nodded and choked out a small, "Yes."

Sam's growing smile is all you need to know you've satisfied something deeper within him. Darkness floods his eyes seeing you like this, utterly at his will under his touch. If he'd known sooner that this would be the outcome, he'd have bought that nun outfit ages ago.

"That's better," he whispered.

------

Hi everyone! I know it's just a teaser for now, but I wanted to show you something I've been working on! I've also been pretty busy with work and writing for my book series, so things have been a bit busy for sure haha

I love you all, and I keep an eye out for the full version of Sinners!

[brawltogethernow]

I suppose the next step then is "BBC Merlin but it's SpideyTorch"

Oh my god. TEACHER, TEACHER, SHE’S TARGETING ME okay okay uh.

Peter, secret warlock, goes to Camelot with his mother figure, May, who does not know about the warlock thing because it kicked in when he was a teenager and they both strategically decline to tell each other things. Gaius is Reed, who was the court sorcerer and is now the court scientist. (He’s not an old man except spiritually where he has been a senile professor since he was 19.) He literally didn’t change anything he was doing, considering science and magic as different points on one spectrum anyway-- No. That’s Doom’s schtick. DOOM was the court sorcerer, and was fired. He is upset about it. Reed is just a science guy but worked extensively with Victor, so he’s kind of useful, but not as useful as Peter was hoping.

I know very little about Sue and Johnny’s dad except that he’s a supervillain who...faked his death, revealed himself, and then died for real like 12 hours later? Did he also fake his wife’s death at some point? Would he do a mad king magic ban thing? Idk but for plot purposes we’ll say yes. They conveniently already share Arthur’s dead mom syndrome. Maybe their aunt whose name is different depending on what issue you’re reading is also here just to convolute the court drama. Wait no didn’t Arthur have a shady uncle show up after like five seasons. She.

Peter is very talented at finicky, specific magical formulas. (Reed: :) )But in practice he really prefers to just slam out a big wave of power, and if that doesn’t solve the problem, repeat until it does. (Reed: :( ) He gives this a go at the beginning of sorting out any problem, like restarting your glitching computer, and if it doesn’t work the problem is complicated enough to be an episode plot.

So obviously I’m still gonna do secret identity shit? Peter saves the young prince and heir’s life and is rewarded with a second job; he only came here for job reasons and you’re all lucky he doesn’t turn down paying jobs otherwise he’d be having some words with the king. Peter also accidentally becomes a masked vigilante out in the town. His very existence is illegal because he’s obviously doing magic! They keep sending his boss out to hunt him down, and their eyes are always locking dramatically and shit in brief silent stare-offs from opposite ends of the street in thunder storms at sunset until Johnny’s horse rears and breaks the eye contact causing Peter to snap out of it and flee. You know how it is.

Sue is older than Johnny and thus older than the magic ban, so she responded to it by going “:) That’s nice, Dad” and socking away a bunch of books before they could go on the fire, and now she’s just a sorceress on the dl. This is approx. a first season finale reveal, because her real superpower is being able to keep her mouth the hell shut. I literally cannot with how nobody in Merlin ever exchanges information, so shortly after Peter and Reed learn this they exchange secrets, like sane people, which opens up their resources a bit.

That said Sue is an extra legitimate royal, not the Morgana equivalent. Maybe Gwen should be Gwen, especially since I have thought Gwen/Johnny/Peter has potential since reading Spider-Man/Fantastic Four (which if you read an earlier ask, I recommend if you want to see new art of Gwen being mean in hair clips). But Peter/Gwen and Merlin/Freya are like...same energy except the latter wasn’t as well done. And Merlin’s Guinevere honestly more reminds me of Betty. Morgana--

(wheeze)

(cough)

Okay I thought this trying to reconcile as much of the cast as possible and I now can’t unthink it so. The king’s ward is Dorrie Evans. Yes she goes nebulously sapphic evil witch queen. Sure she was an unpleasant teenager and readers hate her, but you know what, I’ll simp, whatever. Let Dorrie poison some people. In a cape. This feels natural to me. Also Betty Brant and Dorrie Evans???? Betty/Dorrie vibes???? I guess!!!!

So like. The thing where Arthur gets mystically whammied by love potions once a month, except also Johnny’s normal relationship-anticipating giddiness happening organically mixed in, the part before he actually starts dating someone and becomes immediately depressed. Peter is in the bg sarcastically dismissing magical incidents saying he can’t even tell the difference, and Reed is like 😬 Please Check Anyway. Peter’s not, haha, Peter’s not jealous, Johnny is just an idiot, and, okay maybe Peter is a little jealous! But it doesn’t matter because the prince is going to marry some noble and--

Reed: Prince Johnathan is a bit like a little brother to me, so Please Stop Telling Me About Your Problems.

Reed/Sue is reciprocated but on permanent hold for class reasons. Spideytorch is in the same boat except they’re also stupid and working it out by dating their way through the whole country, except Peter is actually into that and Johnny is not.

The dragon is...Ezekiel?????? That’s the right level of wise wry mentor who’s very shady and will kill you, so he’s a dragon now. And when he tells Peter he’s the (other) chosen one, Peter full stop doesn’t believe him. This disbelief goes on extensively. Peter is not a fate-oriented person. Johnny would love to hear about the fate thing, but no one will tell him.

Literally I’m just going to add more chronologically unmoored medievalish shit to Merlin now to cram more of the cast in. There’s some kind of town crier/herald outfit, and Jonah is their boss. He’s just out in the road yelling sometimes even though he can delegate that. The buglers otherwise known as Bugle staff named Peter’s vigilante persona the Spider, which was supposed to sound menacing but is in practice also cool. This is out-of-universe fairly equivalent to Merlin’s real name as a neat two-syllable animal word and possible title. In-universe maybe I’d elbow out Emrys and just use this. Merlin is already very servants-don’t-work-like-that, so Betty just also has two jobs for no reason so she can knock elbows with them.

MJ is the court jester and knows absolutely everything, which is a dramatic mid-game reveal that isn’t exactly foreshadowed so much as always possible while carefully obscured from the viewer (the reader). Before this she’s already a Wise Fool, Shakespeare-ways archetype character, it’s just not clear how much. She is the most important character in Homestuck Merlin Spider.

Every ship is real for at least 30 seconds. Most of the extended FF cast are either magical antagonists or weird nobles.

Ben????? (Grimm, I mean. Ben Parker is dead. Ben Reilly is a recurring episodic plot.) This show was painfully formulaic and would simply not keep someone with any version of his deal in the main cast, but he’s a full quarter of the FF so. A magical accident approximated his rock body deal. Maybe specifically tying him to ~the magic of the land~. And then, uh. Wandering the country is too satellite-like. Hiding out in a forbidden castle wing is interesting but doesn’t do him justice. So I guess it’s a come and go semivoluntary transformation thing that’s kept secret? Rock werewolf. Were-rock. Good opportunity to fake out like you’re going to do a monster of the week plot, and then he contributes to the tension to abolish the magic ban.

Knights?? Wyatt is there from the beginning, being tall and reassuring (holding a sword edition). Not sure how him or his immediate ancestors got to Europe and then ended up this involved with the local nobility, but it was probably exciting. And Flash, or he’s an early addition. Either way he’s from the same village as Peter and is approximately White’s Kay, except directed at the wizard instead of the future king, and otherwise you can completely superimpose their comic dynamic including the fanboying over the secret identity angle, which is entertainingly seditious. ...Others. I don’t know enough FF characters for this. I’ve accidentally implied the eventual addition of Bennet Brant, but his evil sorcerer of the week energy is very strong, so maybe not. Randy eventually because I already implied the Robertsons and can see it.

This is so long, covers nothing, and explains none of the namechecks. Using both these characters’ franchises in one fusion is too much stuff. I keep not talking about the core relationship because it’s just. Like That. I don’t feel like I need to elaborate on the Merthur dynamic, even transposed on a different ship. It’s Just Like That.

[mondayrobot]

Year-End Fanfiction List (M)

This year has opened me to so many fan-fictions. Here are the list of EM fan-fictions that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this year.

Warning: The contents contain adult themes.

Rating: Mature

a royal weakness ( liquorisce ) @liquorisce

In everyone else’s eyes, she was just his Commander, the Silver Lady, the first woman to take control over the entire King’s fleet. But to him she was so much more, the girl who’d been by his side for the longest time, his most trusted companion… His lover. 

Abditive ( Blanca21 ) 

It was a countless time he heard them calling her cold-blooded and heartless.In his mind, she was anything except those words.

All I need ( liquorisce ) @liquorisce

This fic features long time lovers Eren and Mikasa, their bid to make their own family, and in that process discovering what family really means.

and i am a smiling woman ( orphan_account )

and they have longed for each other; mourned for each other.

Big Bad World ( MyTARDISsenseIsTingling ) @my-tardis-sense-is-tingling​

What if Eren hadn't gotten there to rescue Mikasa in time?

Broken Down ( miikasaa )

It's in the dead of night, with innumerable regrets and dead faces haunting them, that Eren and Mikasa use each other's bodies to chase away the horrors of a failed mission. It never works, they know this all too well, but it doesn't stop them from trying.

Come to Me, My Sweetest Friend ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in an Alternative Modern Day Universe where Mikasa and Eren grew up as neighbors with both their parents still alive.

Degrees of Sleeplessness ( cupofdaydream ) @cupofdaydream​

“To share in the night’s quiet loneliness, a companion for the vast hours of sleeplessness, is, perhaps, all they’ve ever wanted.” Two teachers at the local high school, Eren and Mikasa, in the midst of work and home-life, find themselves indubitably and inescapably drawn to one another.

Elysian ( miikasaa )

Collection of works showing Eren and Mikasa's relationship in canon, post-canon, and modern settings.

Feels Like Home ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

Even when their homes were a thing of the long past, they always found a home in the comfort of each other.

Games ( miikasaa )

Restless after beginning their days as trainees, the 104th decide to relax a bit by playing strip poker. It goes about as well as anyone can imagine.

Girls and Boys ( Lindsey (Lipstick) )

A collection of one-shots depicting the relationship between Eren and Mikasa in various ways.

Happy Anniversary ( blehbleehhhh )

It's Eren and MIkasa's second anniversary. Things get kinky after returning home from dinner.

How to Coexist ( spoilerarlert ) @spoilerarlert

Rent in NYC is ridiculous, but by a stroke of luck, Mikasa manages to snag an apartment for mindblowingly cheap rates. However, upon moving in, she discovers, to her horror, that her roommate Eren was a past one-night stand. In which two twenty-somethings struggle to shrug aside their misgivings, not to mention diffuse a helluva lotta sexual tension—for the sake of affordable rent.

I Bet My Life For You ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in the canon universe within the story line, or were predictions for future chapters at the time, focusing on Eren and Mikasa.

I'll Take You Back Where You Belong ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in an Alternative Modern Day Universe where Eren saved Mikasa as children from a home invasion that killed her parents and caused her to live with her much older brother Levi.

I'm Gonna Be the Man Whose Coming Home to You ( Lyssala ) @lyssala

Still determined to keep things normal after a twist in their relationship, Eren and Mikasa still go through with their plans to take a road trip to the the Jaeger's beach house with Armin, Connie, Sasha, and Jean their summer after their first year of college. Their friends are weary of everyone being crammed in a car with them at close proximity, but they soon learn not all is as it seems (and that there are far more awkward things to deal with in close spaces).

Kaleidoscopes ( Kaekiro ) @kaekiro​

A collection of stories that will follow Eren and Mikasa through various AUs.

Keeping Warm ( lionhart )

Eren and Mikasa’s first time.

king, lover, hold me tight ( artsycat )

Mikasa, as one of the heroes that single-handedly ensured the victory of Eldia against Marley during the war, must now use her newfound status to marry Eren, judged as a traitor in the eyes of Eldia, in order to ensure his protection.

Kiss With a Fist ( DenDenSushi, Lyssala ) @lyssala​

It's always a normal day at school when an Apocalypse decides to descend. One minute Eren is trying to pass his chemistry class & the next he's wielding a baseball bat against bodies trying to bite him. Along with Mikasa & Armin, they are forced into a world where all it takes is one bite & you're dead. 

Lawless ( kuchenackerman ) @kuchenackerman​

Despite his youth, Eren Jaeger is one of the best and most required doctors of the Kingdom. Among those interested on his services is included a recognized criminal clan, which does not hesitate to use the youngest of the Ackerman as bait. Eren never imagined that this "harmless" girl in red dress would get him into so much trouble.

Lullabies in the Night ( happymikasa ) @happymikasa​

People's voices sound quite beautiful when they sing, hum, or tweet. Mikasa discovered that after the defeat of the Titans.

Eren's voice is the most powerful though. Especially when he takes her to bed at night.

Lulls in the Sea ( dialectus ) @dialectus​

"Lull: a temporary interval of quiet or lack of activity."

milk and honey ( bbyunnie ) @moonguks​

a series of oneshots centered around eren and mikasa, across variant universes and situations.

OFFSIDE ( La_Ultima_00 )

Eren returns home and meets someone unexpected. After so long, his poor heart has not forgotten her.

Peace time ( almost_certain )

Eren and Mikasa haven't spoken since the last battle. Perhaps they can be civil long enough for their friends to tie the knot.

Reason for Dreaming ( mikasuhdude ) @mikasuhdude​

Mikasa and Armin have known each other for the past three years, having the same college major and all. It's traditional of them to study in Mikasa's dorm with her stoner roommate, Sasha. One afternoon, they opt to study in Armin's apartment, and that's where she meets his roommate. He's a fiery guy, interrupting their study session by loudly cursing over a mustard-stained shirt and a family-owned restaurant.

Reckless Roses ( mikasuhdude ) @mikasuhdude​

Not every couple is blessed with fertility.

Ruins In Bloom ( miikasaa )

Three years after the eradication of the Titans, Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and a few other survivors are ready to settle down in the free world. Finished with their travels and free from the oppression of the Titans, they're ready to begin their new lives. However, as each of the veterans knows, somethings are impossible to bury completely in the past. Scars will never completely heal, and sometimes, leaving behind a lifetime of warfare is unattainable.

Mikasa wishes for the domestic life she's always craved, and with Armin and Eren by her side, she thinks she'll finally get it. But the sudden change proves to be too much for Eren, and to her horror, he leaves. He leaves her behind, leaves everyone behind, and leaves her to deal with a change in her life she never wanted to experience on her own.

Say You'll Stay With Me ( miikasaa )

Sometimes it was enough simply to be with Mikasa, to hold her close, to hear her heart and know that they'd survived one more day together. And sometimes, she needed to be closer, to let him help her to forget the terror they witness every day. 

Seasons of the Sea ( Lindsey (Lipstick) )

At the age of twenty-three, Mikasa gives birth to their first child – a small, tiny little girl – in their home by the sea, built after the defeat of the titans. An hour later, Eren disappears for three days, only a kiss on her forehead prior to signal his departure.

set in stone ( Beatingheartanthem )

Eren is jostled around by time, experiencing and re-experiencing different moments with Mikasa. Some choices made are the same. Some choices made are different. He knows he's going to die, but he'd like a moment of peace before he does.

So, then— ( Beatingheartanthem )

Over the past two years, Mikasa and Armin have grown estranged from their childhood friend. With a new girlfriend, new friends, Eren Jaeger is a person they don't quite know. Senior year: With graduation around the corner, Eren disappears forever. Now Mikasa wonders if things could've been different. In every version of history, in every universe, every path taken, is his fate set in stone?

the rivers song ( artsycat )

Mikasa has always dreamt about life afterwards.

Under the brine ( milkywaywide ) @milkywaywide​

But Eren is still in her. And she can’t shake the utter alienation she feels, so bad it almost feels like an out of body experience, like a weird dream, like she’s drowning.

vermillion ( sionnacha )

Eren’s mouth tastes of blood—like putrid liquefied iron, and still, she cannot stop herself from diving in for more. Even though the earth around them is scorched, even though there is rubble and ash everywhere she looks, all she wants his him.

Washed-Up and Rundown ( spoilerarlert ) @spoilerarlert​

Levi, a washed-up ex-journalist working a dead-end custodian job, finds himself transplanted into a suburban neighborhood, serving as the legal guardian of his sixteen-year-old second cousin, twice removed, Mikasa. There, he struggles to navigate the dynamic of this two-person household and in the midst locks horns with the local pain-in-the-ass: a teenager a few houses down the street by the name of Eren Jaeger.

We'll Go Home and Start Again ( Lyssala ) @lyssala​

A collection of Tumblr requests that take place in Alternative Universes of many varieties featuring Eren and Mikasa.

When You Break ( cupofdaydream ) @cupofdaydream​

"And when he kisses her, she can immediately tell that tonight is no different than the others." Eren and Mikasa seek shelter from the memories that haunt them in each other's arms. Mikasa comes to realize that you can't always kiss away the pain.

With You, I Am Home ( cupofdaydream ) @cupofdaydream​

A collection of drabbles following Eren and Mikasa's relationship through various scenarios.

[pop-punklouis]

hi hope! i saw that you’re really big into film and tv. do you have any tv shows you could rec? i need something new to watch.

hiya grey! and of course. i always have tv shows on hand to rec

• Dark (3 Seasons)

When two children go missing in a small German town, its sinful past is exposed along with the double lives and fractured relationships that exist among four families as they search for the kids. The mystery-drama series introduces an intricate puzzle filled with twists that includes a web of curious characters, all of whom have a connection to the town's troubled history -- whether they know it or not. The story includes supernatural elements that tie back to the same town in 1986.

• Portlandia (8 Seasons)

this absurdist series set in Portland, Ore., that gently pokes fun at the laid-back Pacific Northwest city and the many eccentric characters that call it home. Among the many recurring guest stars on the series are Ed Begley Jr., Jeff Goldblum, Natasha Lyonne, Kumail Nanjiani and Kyle MacLachlan, who plays Portlandia's mayor.

• Parfum (limited series)

When a woman is found murdered with scent glands excised from her body, a detective probes a group of friends who attended boarding school with her.

• Trinkets (2 Seasons)

A grieving teenager finds an unexpected connection with two classmates at her new high school when they all land in the same Shoplifters Anonymous group.

• Fleabag (2 Seasons)

A dry-witted woman, known only as Fleabag, has no filter as she navigates life and love in London while trying to cope with tragedy. The angry, grief-riddled woman tries to heal while rejecting anyone who tries to help her, but Fleabag continues to keep up her bravado through it all.

• I Know This Much is True (limited series)

Middle-aged Dominick Birdsey recounts his troubled relationship with Thomas, his paranoid schizophrenic twin brother, and his efforts to get him released from an asylum. (Mark Ruffalo’s best performance to date)

• The Vow (limited series)

Following the experiences of people deeply involved in the self-improvement group NXIVM, an organization under siege with charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy brought against its highest members and founder Keith Raniere

• The Outsider (limited series)

Based on Stephen King's best-selling novel of the same name, "The Outsider" begins by following an investigation which at first seems like it will be simple and straightforward but things change as it leads into the gruesome murder of a young boy by a seasoned cop. When an insidious supernatural force edges its way into the case, it leads the investigators to question everything they believe in.

• Peaky Blinders (5 Seasons)

Britain is a mixture of despair and hedonism in 1919 in the aftermath of the Great War. Returning soldiers, newly minted revolutions and criminal gangs are fighting for survival in a nation rocked by economic upheaval. One of the most powerful gangs of the time is the Peaky Blinders, run by returning war hero Thomas Shelby and his family. But Thomas has bigger ambitions than just running the streets. When a crate of guns goes missing, he recognizes an opportunity to advance in the world because crime may pay but legitimate business pays better. Trying to rid Britain of its crime is Inspector Chester Campbell, who arrives from Belfast to try to achieve that goal.

• Schitts Creek (6 Seasons)

a wealthy couple -- video store magnate Johnny and his soap opera star wife Moira -- suddenly find themselves completely broke. With only one remaining asset, a small town called Schitt's Creek, which the Roses bought years earlier as a joke, this once-wealthy couple must give up life as they know it. With their two spoiled children in tow and their pampered lives behind them, the Rose family is forced to face their newfound poverty head-on and come together as a family to survive.

• Mindhunter (2 Seasons)

Catching a criminal often requires the authorities to get inside the villain's mind to figure out how he thinks. That's the job of FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench. They attempt to understand and catch serial killers by studying their damaged psyches. Along the way, the agents pioneer the development of modern serial-killer profiling.

• Mr. Robot (4 Seasons)

Young, anti-social computer programmer Elliot works as a cybersecurity engineer during the day, but at night he is a vigilante hacker. He is recruited by the mysterious leader of an underground group of hackers to join their organization. Elliot's task? Help bring down corporate America, including the company he is paid to protect, which presents him with a moral dilemma. Although he works for a corporation, his personal beliefs make it hard to resist the urge to take down the heads of multinational companies that he believes are running -- and ruining -- the world.

• Dark Tourist (1 Season)

Journalist David Farrier focuses on that area of travel, known as dark tourism, in this docuseries. In each episode, Farrier travels to a different locale to visit destinations and have experiences that wouldn't be on most vacationers' bucket lists. He embeds himself in a death-worshipping cult in Mexico, sees tourists soaking up radiation left behind in Fukushima, meets vampires in New Orleans, and travels to the most-nuked place on Earth for atomic swimming and fishing.

• Maniac (Limited Series)

Annie Landsberg and Owen Milgrim are two strangers who are drawn to the late stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial. Each has a different reason for participating in the experiment -- she is disaffected and aimless, fixated on broken relationships with her mother and sister, while he has struggled throughout his life with a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia. The radical treatment, using pills that the inventor claims can repair anything about the mind, draws Annie, Owen and 10 other subjects into a three-day drug trial that they're told will permanently solve all of their problems, with no complications or side effects. Unfortunately, things don't go as planned.

• The Witcher (2 Seasons)

The witcher Geralt, a mutated monster hunter, struggles to find his place in a world where people often prove more wicked than beasts.

• Living with Yourself (Limited Series)

A man who's burned out on life and love undergoes a mysterious treatment, only to find that he's been replaced by a better version of himself.

• The Society (cancelled after one season unfortunately)

The Society follows a group of teenagers who are mysteriously transported to a facsimile of their wealthy New England town, left without any trace of their parents. As they struggle to figure out what has happened to them and how to get home, they must establish order and form alliances if they want to survive. The series is a modern take on Lord of the Flies.

• I Am Not Okay With This (1 Season)

I Am Not Okay With This is an irreverent origin story that follows a teenage girl who's navigating the trials and tribulations of high school, all while dealing with the complexities of her family, her budding sexuality, and mysterious superpowers just beginning to awaken deep within her.

• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (1 Season)

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance returns to the world of Thra with an all new adventure. When three Gelfling discover the horrifying secret behind the Skeksis' power, they set out on an epic journey to ignite the fires of rebellion and save their world.

• Grace and Frankie (6 Seasons)

Two nemeses become bonded jilted wives after their husbands reveal they have been having an affair with each other since the 1990s and now plan to get married.

• Special (1 Season)

A young gay man with cerebral palsy branches out from his insular existence in hopes of finally going after the life he wants.

• Russian Doll (1 Season)

Russian Doll follows a young woman named Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) on her journey as the guest of honor at a seemingly inescapable party one night in New York City.

• American Vandal (2 Seasons)

American Vandal is a half-hour true-crime satire that explores the aftermath of a costly high school prank that left twenty-seven faculty cars vandalized with phallic images. Over the course of the eight-episode season, an aspiring sophomore documentarian investigates the controversial and potentially unjust expulsion of troubled senior (and known dick-drawer) Dylan Maxwell. Not unlike its now iconic true-crime predecessors, the addictive American Vandal will leave one question on everyone's minds until the very end: Who drew the dicks?

• Immigration Nation (1 Season)

A rare and expansive look into the consequences of unfettered power, Immigration Nation is a powerful, harrowing indictment of the current state of American immigration.

[rosecorcoranwrites]

Villain Motivation and the Banality of Evil

Motivation in Fact and Fiction

As you know by now, I am a huge true crime fan. I've read books by FBI profilers and crime historians, am addicted to the Investigation Discovery channel, and have even attended a semester of my local police departments "citizens police academy". This is a professional as well as a personal interest, given that I am currently outlining a mystery WIP set in an alternate version of our world. Thus, I want to understand crime investigation, different types of evidence, and, of course, motive. It's this last one—the motivation behind a villain's acts—that many authors, not just those who write mystery—concern themselves with. And, after examining hundreds of real-life crimes, I'm here to tell you that it's not that important.

Ok, it's a little important, in that a villain needs a motive, but it's not important that it be extremely groundbreaking, or extremely relatable, or extremely anything. Motives tend to be common place, not extreme, no matter how shocking the other aspects of a crime.

For example, the excellent book The Father of Forensics: The Groundbreaking Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury and the Beginnings of Modern CSI, which I raved about previously, contains a number of sensational cases where the bodies were either hideously mutilated or, conversely, found without any scratch on them. To add intrigue to injury, the murders happened in the early days of forensics, when procedures for dealing with evidence were still being worked out and when more modern investigative tools like AFIS, DNA testing, and psychological profiling were still decades away. Every case was fascinating in its details and in its eventual solution. Almost every case had, as a motive, either money or getting out of an unwanted relationship. That was it. The oddities of the bodies were the killers' attempts at not being caught, but the reasons for there being bodies in the first place were as average as could be.

In fact, the three main motives, according to Lt. Joe Kenda, of ID channel fame, are money, revenge, and sex. The more headline-catching serial-killer crimes happen, it seems, due to a desire for power or a thrill. I would say these five motives sum up most murders, maybe even most crimes. Once you cut away the mystery and the gore, all you're left with are some pretty average human desires: money/stuff, vengeance/justice, sex, power/control, and thrill/excitement. When people talk about the banality of evil, this is what they mean.

Take the motive of "money". We're all familiar with the idea, in real and fictional crime, of robbing banks or killing someone for their life insurance. Writers seem to find this an acceptable plot point: villain wants a lot of money and thus does very bad things. Yet, if you watch enough crime TV, you will know that real murders happen for sums as low as $400 or even $40. There was an episode of Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda where a man was shot and almost killed over an argument about 25 cents!

It also needn't be money, but material possessions. In one of the citizen's police academy classes, we learned about a local case where three teenagers broke into a man's house and stole, among other things, his corncob pipe. This pipe was the item he was most upset about, and often discussed in subsequent weeks. So the man lured one of the teenagers out to the woods and shot him execution-style. He was planning to do the same to the other two, and blame the whole crime on his teenaged lover. So that was one life ruined—and it would have been three others, had he not been caught—with the motive of revenge for a lost corncob pipe!

The Gap Between Good and Evil

I thus wonder why it is that we, as writers, tend to overlook such commonplace motivations. There's an unspoken assumption that the motivation of a villain must scale with their actions, so while sub-bosses or henchmen might get away with being in it for the money or the thrill, the Big Bad needs a more exciting or deep motivation. There's also a more recent idea being bandied about in internet circles that the villain should think he's the hero. I think both of these concepts are flawed, but let's take them one at a time.

Although I personally love "True Believer" villains that really do believe they are doing what is right, I don't think it's fair to say that all villains must be this way. After all, a great many real-life villains don't think they're doing something good; they just don't care. They want what they want and do what they can to get it without worrying about morality. I think the reason that this second sort of villain--the thrill-killer, the evil sorcerer, the bully--get a bad rap is that people (both readers and writers), don't understand evil. Yes, a villain who only desires evil is unrealistic, because, in fact, it's impossible to desire evil. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the Catholic tradition, we hold that evil doesn't exist; it has no metaphysical reality. Evil is a privation, or absence, of good, similar to how a shadow doesn't exist, but is a privation, or absence, of light. Thus, a person cannot desire evil in and of itself, because they would be desiring nothing. Every evil act is done because someone is desiring something good, but disproportionately, or in a way that removes part of the good from that thing. Again, look at the five motives for murder. Each of those is a good, in and of themselves, but none justifies violating another person.

And thus we come to the other assumption about villains, that their actions must scale with their motives. I think, in fact, the opposite tends to make a more interesting villain. The motive can be something small--wanting revenge for some slight, or a peaceful life, or to be like everyone else. These might even be the same goods that the hero desires. What makes the villain villainous, and what can make them even more interesting, is what they are willing to do to fulfill these desires. Who or what are they willing to throw away? What rules are they willing to break? That distance, between what they want and how they get it is what separates them from the hero.

Types of Villains

This principle, that a villain must desire a good, but desire it disproportionately, can work for any type of villain.

Take the True Believer types: those that believe they are doing what's right. In this category, I would put people like Thanos (Avengers: Infinity War), as well as A.I.s like Agent Smith (The Matrix), VIKI (iRobot), and the Terminators (Terminator... obviously). Thanos is widely lauded as one of Marvel's best villains because he really does think he's doing the right thing. He is willing to throw away half of all sapient beings, plus the one person who he actually cares about, in order to save the other half. What he wants--peace and prosperity--is understandable, but while the gap between that and his genocidal actions is mathematically non-existent, it is morally huge. Similarly, the three A.I.s I mentioned are trying to save either robot-kind or human-kind, but are willing to murder thousands or even billions of humans in order to do it. Essentially, these villains are doing the classic Utilitarian trolley problem, but on a massive scale. They think they are the heroes, and truly do desire a good outcome, but the actions taken to bring that about are inexcusably evil.

Similar to the True Believers are a type of villain I will call the Desperate. These people are also trying to bring about good, but know that what they are doing is wrong. Mr. Freeze (Batman) is a classic example, as he commits crimes to get money and technology to save his wife. Actually, there are a whole slew of villains, mostly in anime and JRPGs, whose entire motivation is to save or resurrect a dead wife or girlfriend. They're trying to save someone they love, but they rarely brand themselves as saviors or heroes; Desperate types hold no such illusions. Sebastian, in my own series, is such a villain, in that he is willing to betray his friends and ally himself to bad people in order to save Chiaroscuro and make up for his past sins. He's willing to do evil that good may come of it, and actually uses the "I'm a bad person anyway" excuse as a justification for his actions.

On the flip side are those who don't care about whether or not they're doing good, which I will divide into three types: Dark Lords, Thrill Killers, and Egoists.

Dark Lords, obviously, include literal Dark Lords, such as Sauron and Voldemort, but I'm also going to throw in your average serial killer into this category. Why? Because they all want the same thing: power. The books I've read by FBI profilers chronicle the most gruesome crimes with motives ranging from rage to lust, but there is an ever present need of the killers to control, whether that's controlling their victims, the situation, or the police and firefighters (in the case of arsonists). Control is related to power, and power, in and of itself, is a good. This, in fact, is why it's wrong for these villains to take away the power or freedom of their victims. While a True Believer like Thanos sought balance, Dark Lords seek an imbalance, and want everything for themselves in an attempt to prove to themselves that they are more powerful, and thus better, than everyone else. These types of villains are, sadly, very realistic, but don't lend themselves to stories requiring a strong interpersonal conflict between hero and villain. They tend to act as a force of nature the hero must work against--whether in a fantasy against a Dark Lord or in a thriller against a serial murderer--and thus don't do much in the way of interpersonal conflict.

Better, in my opinion, are the Thrill Killer types, who see the world as a game, and are willing to do whatever it takes to have fun. Example of this are The Joker (Batman) and Mr. Sato (Ajin). Though The Joker is a bank-robbing thug, he's mostly in it for the laughs, and cares very deeply about whether or not things are funny. That doesn't make him any less abusive or violent, but the gap between his humor and his barbarity is what make him an interesting character. Mr. Sato, similarly, sees the world like one huge videogame, in which he has been given extra lives. Fun and games are a normal and natural good, but his villainy stems from what he is willing to do in this "game". Mr. Sato has absolutely no concern for human life, even his own, and kills hundreds of people (including himself, on multiple occasions!). The interest in this type of villain comes from watching their crazy schemes and then trying to figure out how the hero can possibly beat them. These villains are similar to Dark Lords in that they are something like a force of nature, but different in that the hero usually has to face off against them personally, outwit them, and deal with them as an individual person.

Finally, there are those who want something personally good, but have no regard for others. Technically, this could also describe Dark Lords and Thrill Killers, but here I mean really personal, as in specific to that person. Rather than something big like power or a crazy thrill, they tend to desire the utterly ordinary. Take the robot in Ex Machina. I'm not sure everyone would classify her as a villain, though she certainly did some evil things (it's up to interpretation whether she understands good and evil, though). What was her motivation? She wanted to go watch a crowd. She was, essentially, created to gather information, so that's what she went to go do. It makes sense that that's what she wants, but it doesn't justify what she did to the main character (even if he was kind of a doofus). Or Rezo the Red Priest (Slayers), who, in my opinion, has one of the best motivations of any villain ever. He was born blind and wanted to see. That's a totally understandable motivation. But he's willing to sacrifice the entire world to a demon lord in order to get that wish. Now that is a heckofa gap between a good desire and an evil action! And yet, is it really all that different from the sort of selfishness present in a man who would murder three teenagers over a corncob pipe? Real evil motivations are banal, and real evil actions are completely disproportionate to those motivations. Art, in the case of these last villains, is simply imitating life.

Asking What the Villains Want

Obviously, there are a million different ways of combining these villain type and motivations. Some villains want money so they can save a dying loved one. Some villains desire revenge because they truly believe they have been wronged. A Thrill Killer might find excitement in killing criminals. There is no one right way to write a villain, and there is no one motivation that is the only interesting kind. To anyone trying to write a villain, I suggest reading about or watching shows on real life criminals, from the Big Bads like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to famous killers like Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy to run of the mill criminals in your local newspaper. People don't become mass murderers or even petty thieves for no reason, but they also don't just do evil because it's the evil thing to do. Even the most gruesome atrocities were rooted in the desire for misplaced revenge, or disproportionate control, or a false belief in some so-called greater good. Then, I suggest reading and watching your favorite stories and asking what makes these villains tick. Is it the same as in real life? Is it different? What makes a great villain so great? You'll may just find that it's simply a matter of proportion.

[fourteendaysinaweek]

Show Recommendations

Grimm

Platform: Amazon Prime

Official overview: Portland detective Nick Burkhardt, descended from a long line of warriors known as Grimms, defends his city from magical creatures known as Wesen, which are part human and part animal. Fighting alongside his partner, Hank, colleague Sergeant Wu and friends Monroe and Rosalee, Nick faces off against internal and external forces, including his police captain, Sean Renard.

My overview: Portland detective Nick Burkhardt thinks he's going insane when he randomly starts seeing monsters at the time his aunt goes into a coma. Turns out he's not, in fact, going crazy. He deals with shit trying to kill him and his girlfriend and friends CONSTANTLY and in reality all he wants to do his keep his city safe, and he accidentally saves the world in the process.

Thoughts on the show: I love it, it does have a habit of setting up for recurring characters and then never mentioning them again, so that's annoying. There are 6 seasons. There are some great romances in the show, and also some iffy ones, but the iffy ones are definitely regarded as such in the show, and eventually either develop past the weird stage or die before anymore harm can be done. Aired from 2011 to 2017

Thoughts on the fandom: Wayyyy too small, I know of 0 people around my age who like it, and 90% of the fan base is obsessed with Sasha Roiz who plays Sean Renard (not that I'm judging). Definitely not enough fics out there, and the ones that I've found seem to be poorly written or basically just pwp.

Warehouse 13

Platform: Amazon Prime

Official overview: Following an abrupt transfer, Secret Service agents Pete Lattimer and Myka Bering find themselves in the middle of South Dakota at a massive, top-secret storage warehouse that holds every strange artifact, mysterious relic, out-of-this-world object and supernatural souvenir ever found by the U.S. government. Lattimer and Bering's new task, as directed by the warehouse's caretaker, longtime agent Artie Nielsen, is to investigate reports of unexplainable and paranormal activity in an effort to secure more peculiar and dangerous objects, and to help Artie manage the warehouse itself.

My overview: imagine the TARDIS except it's a warehouse and not a police box (bigger on the inside) and it's full of cursed objects to be kept there so it doesn't destroy the world.

Thoughts on the show: I love it. It accurately depicts trauma and has decent representation such as a black woman everyone is intimidated by because she's the boss, a gay man who isn't sexualized and has development and a personality other than "gay". There is even an incredibly homoerotic friendship between two women that the actress of said women played up because they wanted their characters together, even if one turned out to be not-so-good. The show deals with sexism and victims of neglect. You'll learn a lot of random history while watching the show as all of the artifacts tend to be historically based (the guillotine blade that cut of Marie Antoinette's head, for instance). There are 5 seasons and I'm s3 or 4. Apparently the show does something weird with Pete and Myka at the end, which probably means they get together. Ran 2009 to 2014.

Thoughts on the fandom: again, way too small, although a lot bigger than Grimm. There are quite a few fics out there, mainly for the two women which I ship with my whole heart. There might be some controversy with Eddie McClintock (Pete Lattimer) but I'm not very well-versed in it. I wish Grimm's fandom was as big as W13's.

The Umbrella Academy

Platform: Netflix

Official overview: On one day in 1989, 43 infants are inexplicably born to random, unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy the day before. Seven are adopted by billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who creates the Umbrella Academy and prepares his "children" to save the world. In their teenage years, though, the family fractures and the team disbands. Fast forward to the present time, when the six surviving members of the clan reunite upon the news of Hargreeves' passing. They work together to solve a mystery surrounding their father's death, but divergent personalities and abilities again pull the estranged family apart, and a global apocalypse is another imminent threat. The series is based on a collection of comics and graphic novels created and written by My Chemical Romance lead singer Gerard Way.

My overview: adult survivors of abuse with increasingly weird/out-there superpowers due to the weird circumstances of their birth come together to celebrate *cough* I mean mourn the passing of their "father" And accidentally cause the apocalypse.

Thoughts on the show: I love it. I've finished season 2,currenfly there are only 2 seasons, it's still in progress, I love it. I'm sure most of you have already watched it because what is the supernatural fandom if not emo? Also a good one for representation. Mexican man with a stutter, black woman with a daughter she is in a custody battle for, gay druggie veteran, Ellen Page, Asian ghost boy, 58 year old man in a 13 year old's body, and a half-chimp man.

Thoughts on the fandom: big. Big big big. Haven't found any fics that cater to my specific wants in a fic, but there are fics. Some of them have weird pairings, but since the show made two (adopted) siblings canon, I can't exactly blame them.

Lost Girl

Platform: I actually have no idea

Official overview: Bo is a small-town girl on the run after a disastrous sexual encounter with her boyfriend ends with his death. Bo learns that she is not human, but a succubus, who feeds on the sexual energy of humans. She and her kind are members of the Fae, creatures of legend, who walk among humans and feed off them in different ways. As she searches for the truth about her origins and runs from her inhuman urges, she vows to help those she meets along the way -- human or Fae -- who need to right a wrong.

My overview: bisexual woman finds out she's a succubus and she has to choose to be either good Fae or bad Fae (I think it's light vs dark but it's been a Hot Minute) she has a thing with a werewolf and also a thing with a Fae doctor who is human and a woman.

Thoughts on the show: it's good, 5 seasons, don't think I've finished the first season. Back when I started watching it it was on Netflix and has since been removed. It's on Vudo but it costs money which is bullshit. It's a little weird at first, but I like it. Ran 2010 to 2015.

Thoughts on the fandom: have not interacted with the fandom for fear of spoilers. I'd imagine this show's fandom is about the size of Grimm.

Being Human (USA version)

Platform: again, I don't know.

Official overview: "Being Human," based on a BBC series of the same name, features three 20-something roommates who each try to keep a secret from the rest of the world -- one is a ghost, another is a vampire and the third is a werewolf. The three roomies try to help one another navigate the complexities of living double lives.

My overview: again, weird starts off in almost the middle of the story. It deals with abuse, death, fighting urges, dealing with past sins, and, well, being human. The characters are Sally (Ghost) Aidan (vampire) and Josh (werewolf). The three of them are trying to live like normal, Aidan and Josh as workers at the local hospital as Sally works to deal with her death.

Thoughts on the show: I love it I just wish I could find it on a reliable site, again, it's on Vudo but it costs money. It definitely had the set up for a good mlm relationship but from what I've gathered they end up forcing heterosexuality.

Thoughts on the fandom: again, too small, roughly the size of Grimm. I have seen 0 fics.

The Librarians

Platform: Hulu I do so believe

Official overview: Cued by TNT's popular 'The Librarian' trilogy, this series introduces new members of an ancient group protecting mystical artefacts. Hidden below the Metropolitan Public Library, the secret society's longtime leader is Flynn Carsen, whose job has become very complicated. To help, the Library recruits Eve, a counterterrorism agent responsible for organizational security; Jacob, who has encyclopedic knowledge of art, architecture and history; Cassandra, who links auditory/sensory hallucinations to memory; and Ezekiel, a skilled thief and master technician. Overseeing them is Jenkins, the reclusive caretaker of the Library's sleepy little outpost in Oregon. Noah Wyle executive produces and recurs as Flynn, the role he played in the movie series.

My overview: very similar to W13. This time imagine the Bunker, and the Warehouse, and boom, you've got the Library.

Thoughts on the show: good! I love it, I just found out it was on Hulu and am going to be binging it as soon as I finish Grimm and Warehouse. I'd love to see a crossover between W13 and The Librarians I feel like they'd have a feud.

Thoughts on the fandom: probably the same size as W13 if not bigger as the series came from movies. Again, haven't finished the series so I haven't interacted with the fandom.

Eureka

Platform: Amazon Prime

Official overview: In the years since World War II, the U.S. government has been relocating the world's geniuses (and their families) to the Pacific Northwest town of Eureka. Daily life there shifts between amazing innovation and total chaos. U.S. Marshal Jack Carter learns this first-hand when his car breaks down in Eureka, stranding him among the town's eccentric citizens. When they unleash a scientific creation still unknown to the outside world, it's up to Carter to restore order. Subsequently, he's let in on one of America's best-kept secrets.

My overview: a small town but make every person a genius. Has some crossover with Warehouse 13, they exist in the same universe.

Thoughts on the show: I love it so far. Just the kind of weird shit I enjoy.

Thoughts on the fandom: I'd imagine about the size of Warehouse 13's but I've yet to interact considering I'm still in season 1.

[kob131]

https://rwdestuffs.tumblr.com/post/616806790896680960

Ironwood: Yells, screams, rants extensively, shoots things, breaks things

He never screamed, he never ranted, he broke like one thing (a chess piece) and shoot one guy (who in his mind was trying to stop him from saving people).

Yeah, Ironwood is emotional. He’s a fucking veteran Huntsman fighting a war that he was lied about by the man he trusted and the allies he thought he had. He also kind of just had HIS ONE GOOD ARM FUCKING SCORTCHED AND HIS PARANOIA CONFIRMED. Pretty fucking understandable, you shouldn’t be misrepresenting him.

Fandom: Clearly this man is a rational, logical person who is making his decisions based solely on cold reason. RWBY is being too emotional.

Who the FUCK has argued that James is operating under cold logic? He’s not, of course he’s acting under emotion.

What are you even saying?

RWBYJNR: Lies, cheats, steals, rants about a politician trying to do his best to protect a kingdom from going to shit, and also harassed a kid when they’re lied to

You know, Psyga, it doesn’t help that not only are you ALSO misrepresenting shit (They never cheated, the stealing of one airship pales to the numerous DEATHS that would have been caused, they didn’t rant and ONE PERSON  messed with Oscar while the LEADER RUBY comforted him) but you yourself are guilty of this shit (Lying, cheating and stealing? Gee I wonder who else does that? *cough* RWDE *cough*)

Fandom: Clearly these group of well thinking, mentally scarred teenagers are rational, logical people who are making their decisions solely on reason. Ironwood is being too emotional.

Again, WHO IS SAYING THAT? Also, implying that Ironwood isn’t basically a walking mass of mental scars.

Has it ever occurred to you that maybe grown men in charge of armies should be held to a slightly higher standard than teenagers, rather than the other way around?

Has it occurred to you that they’re both adults, they’re both fucking up and everyone screwed Salem’s pooch here? Honestly the only guy doing good is Ozpin. Yeah, he started this mess but he did some damn good work before Cinderella.

Also no Psyga, I am not supporting your hypocritical ass. “they’re taught to be pinnacles of man kind’’ By the headmasters....which includes IRONWOOD.

I laugh at the idea of James “A few city blocks”   Ironwood trying to do the best to protect his kingdom. Especially when he peaced out and decided to scarper not cos of Salem but due to a chess piece, all while ignoring the fact he had Salem agents on his stupid little rock already to instead focus on shrieking at RWBY a bout loyalty. 

The same James “I’ll promote you all to Huntsmen, I’m the one to tell my subordinates the truth first and I SUFFER FROM PARANOIA AND PROBABLY A HOST OF OTHER MENTAL SCARS” Ironwood right?

I mean you support Yang Tumblingxelian because ‘uwu vagin- I mean PTSD’ so SURELY you support Ironwood RIGHT?

Also, he freaked out about a chess piece because it’s SALEM’S SYMBOL. Its like saying “Oh its not Hitler it’s just his CALLING CARD”. And no shit James is calling out Team RWBY, he trusted them and they lied to his face. You know, the same position Team RWBY was in with Ozpin.

Plus Ironwood himself lies and steal in regards to supplies from Mantle and rants too, except unlike RWBY he doesn’t have nearly as good of an excuse save for the fact he’s surrounded himself with enablers and refuses to accept or seek out help. 

Amity? Yes.

Supplies? Where? Robyn says they should be going to Mantle, that doesn’t mean they’re Mantle supplies. Show me where it was shown, said or explained he TOOK the supplies.

Also, what enablers? People who put their trust in him? That’s like saying Team RWBY were enablers for Ozpin: it’s the Ace Ops and Winter’s fault for not looking out for their leader, just as it was James’ issue for not looking out for Ozpin.

Like seriously, nothing is ever done to show RWBY as unstable or irrational, at best they are uncertain which is frank;y better than Ironwood or Opzin’s “I know best” attitude because it means they are open to changing rather than breaking the moment they run into a problem their methods can’t solve. 

Changing, like going from opposing lying to lying themselves right AFTER knowing how bad of an idea that is.

This is the fucking Yang/Adam situation all over again, removing fault and agency just because you don’t like the other side.

We also literally see their rationales, they need to get he lamp to Atlas before either Salem’s agents find them or it potentially lures Grimm in. They make a good plan that only doesn’t work out cos the local general decided t bust out a super mech and prance around screaming and they still hung around long enough to help solve the problem that idiot created. 

Strange that you don’t their talk of telling the truth....

When it comes to Mantle their rationales for why its awful and Ironwood’s decisions are wrong are explained both morally and in terms of practicality, Ironwood sometimes listened but usually ignored them cos he’s an arrogant ass. 

Or, you know, he’s been lied to numerous times, he’s in immense physical pain right now, his mental issues are being played on and he’s in a rushed, fucked if you do fucked if you don’t situation.

You know, WHAT THE SHOW FUCKING SHOWS.

On one side is a pack of teenagers dragged into a lot of nightmarish shit they were in no way ready to deal with, who are trying to work together and find a way to save the world. They do this despite being horribly traumatized, physically dismembered in two cases, having to fight off their abusers (to the death in one case), all the while admitting they’re in over their head, they’ve made mistakes, and trying to fix them and generally improve things.

The other side is a military general blatantly abusing his political power to deprive a city of critical resources, leaving them exposed to man eating monsters, declaring martial law to stop the rest of the government from stopping him from outright abandoning the people of that city (and the rest of the planet) to those monsters, ordering the cold-blooded murderer of an elderly woman to steal her magical powers, ordering the arrest of a group of teenagers and one older man because SOME OF THEM vocally disagreed with these actions, then shot a teenage boy for politely disagreeing with him, with the intent being that the boy would die from either the bullet of the long fall that followed. He does all this while insisting he’s being logical, that he’s making the hard choices on everyone elses behalf, and that he is always right. While hallucinating, ranting and screaming about disloyalty, all of which because he failed once (And that’s ignoring how he backstabbed several supposed friends before that traumatizing incident.)

A. Ironwood is also dragged into this by the same metric.

B. James is ALSO in over his head. Everyone not named ‘Ozpin’ is and Ozpin BARELY qualifies.

C. And James is being abused and used too!

D. ‘physically dismembered in two cases’ One and *taps Ironwood’s metal arm*

E. To try and help EVERYONE he’s ‘depriving resources’ because shit ain;t infinite.

F. Aas opposed to the genocidal, ancient witch CONTROLLING the man eating monsters?

G. And the other option? Have everyone DIE in his eyes.

H. Cold blooded murder...that she agreed to of her own volition....

I. You misspelled ALL as SOME. As in, ALL of the protags disagreed with him.

J. ANd you know, trying to stop him.

K. You know, like literally everyone else

M. He never hallucinated, ranted or screamed

James Ironwood is a coward and a traitor to the Kingdom of Atlas. On top of that, he is an entitled little shit that neglected his responsibilities to the civilians of the Kingdom, and then was so fucking arrogant that he was actually OFFENDED that people were angry with him for not doing his job. Quite a lot of that can be blamed on the culture of the Atlas military, of the demands of blind loyalty and yes-men creating an echo chamber without him even noticing. But in the end, he made the decisions. He decided the people of Mantle are an expendable resource, months or even years before Cinder broke into his office. He decided to order the murder of an elderly woman, to overthrow his government, to arrest anyone that dared to disagree with him, and to personally shoot a boy in cold blood. 

You want to know the twisted part? I think those of us that admit Ironwood is in the wrong actually respect him more. We can see how he came to this point, the cultural indoctrination, the dangers of military culture, the PTSD he’s clearly suffered since Beacon... We can feel sympathy for a fallen hero. Those who support him continue to insist that he’s in his right mind, that all his decisions, from volume two onwards, have all been completely logical... And what kind of person would that make him?

Oh fuck you with that “Because I disagree that makes me better bullshit.”

You didn’t portray a fallen hero, you portrayed a flatter version of Adam, denying Ironwood’s reasons, glorifying Team RWBY and painted it black and white.

And before anyone claims I am supporting Team RWBY:

Actually look up my opinions of them on my blog. Or hell, this single post. I think both parties are at fault for the situation here for their own flaws. ANd I feel sad for both them.

The conflict in the fandom, however?

[problematicwelshman]

Michael Sheen on Good Omens, sex scenes, and why Brexit led to his break-up

28 NOVEMBER 2018 • 4:18PM

Michael Sheen may be 49, and sporting a grey beard these days, but mention Martians and the actor reverts to a breathless, giddy teenager.

It all stems back to one evening when Sheen was about 12 years old. “It was a significant moment in my life,” he tells me over coffee in a London hotel. “My cousin Hugh was babysitting, and he put on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

“I remember us lying there, listening in bed in the dark. It absolutely terrified me, but I got obsessed with it. I’m worryingly into it. I know every single note, every word.”

Wayne’s 1978 rock opera has had a similar effect on countless fans, even if it prompts a bemused shrug from non-converts. Without ever topping the charts, it has slowly become one of the best-selling British albums of all time, and this Friday begins a stadium tour featuring a 35-foot fire-breathing Martian and a 3D hologram of Liam Neeson. It’s a geeky novelty, but one of epic proportions.

When Wayne asked Sheen if he would star in a new radio drama-style version for the album’s 40th anniversary, alongside Taron Egerton and Ade Edmondson, the Welsh actor “bit his hand off”. It had always been his dream. For decades, whether doing serious political dramas such as Frost/Nixon or the great roles of classical theatre – Hamlet, Henry V – the one part Sheen really wanted involved Martians saying “ulla-ulla”.

“When I was doing Caligula at the Donmar [in 2003], I was filming The Deal during the day – which was the first time I’d played Tony Blair,” he says. “I’d be so tired, to wake myself up [before the play] I would do whole sections of War of the Worlds.” He can even beatbox the sound effects, he adds proudly. “The other guys in the dressing room would all be really pissed off with me - but I was playing Caligula, so they had to put up with it.”

Enthusing about an outtake on a collectors version of the album where you can hear Richard Burton coughing, Sheen briefly slips into an impression of the late actor. It’s eerily spot-on. Burton played the role he takes in the new version, which feels apt; growing up in Port Talbot, Sheen was aware of following in his footsteps.

“Coming from the same town as him really helped,” he says. “It’s place you wouldn’t necessarily think would be very sympathetic to acting – it’s an old steel town, very working class, quite a macho place – but because of Richard Burton, and then Anthony Hopkins, there’s the sense that it’s possible [to be an actor], and people have a respect for it.

“Ultimately, though, we’re very different actors - Burton was very much a charismatic leading man, and I’m probably more of a character actor. He wasn’t known for his versatility.” Sheen, by contrast, is a chameleon, as he proved with a remarkable run of biopics from 2006-9, playing Tony Blair, David Frost, Brian Clough, Kenneth Williams and the Roman emperor Nero on screen in the space of just four years.

He concedes that he may have made a “partly conscious” decision to avoid biopics since then. “I’ve been offered quite a few I didn’t do. I did feel, for a bit, it was probably good for me to move away from it – certainly from playing Blair at least, because that’s the one I became synonymous with. I’d quite happily play real people again, but it’s hard to find good scripts and it takes a lot of homework. With some parts I’ve been offered, you might only have a few weeks to prepare for it - and you can’t do that with Clough or Kenneth Williams.”

Despite his best intentions, Sheen is playing another Blair in his next film – The Voyage of Doctor Doolittle, where he’s the nemesis of Robert Downey Jr’s animal-loving hero. “I don’t know if they did that as a joke or not,” he says. “He’s Blair Müdfly – there’s an umlaut that he is very specific about. He was at college with Doolittle, and hates him, and becomes the antagonist because of his jealousy of Doolittle. Müdfly is employed to try and stop him from finding... what he wants to find.” As the film isn’t out for 13 months, Sheen is tight-lipped about further plot details – but he hints that Müdfly is “a villain in the tradition of Terry-Thomas villains.”

It’s the latest in a series of quirky, eyebrow-raising roles. After playing a vampire in the Twilight films and a werewolf in the Underworld franchise, Sheen says he would often be asked in interviews why a “serious classical actor” was wasting his time on fantasy films.

“There’s a lot of snobbishness about genre,” he says. “I think some of the greatest writing of the 20th and 21st centuries has happened in science fiction and fantasy.” While promoting the films, he would back up that point by citing his favourite authors – Stephen King, Philip K Dick, Neil Gaiman. “Time went on, and then one day my doorbell rang and there was a big box being delivered. I opened the box up and there was a card from Neil saying ‘From one fan to another’, and all these first editions of his books.”

It was the beginning an enduring friendship, which recently became a professional partnership: Sheen stars in Gaiman’s forthcoming TV series Good Omens, based on a 1990 novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett. Set in the days before a biblical apocalypse, its sprawling list of characters includes an angel called Aziraphale (Sheen) and a demon called Crowley (David Tennant) who have known each other since the days of Adam and Eve.

“I wanted to play Aziraphel being sort of in love with Crowley,” says Sheen. “They’re both very bonded and connected anyway, because of the two of them having this relationship through history - but also because angels are beings of love, so it’s inevitable that he would love Crowley. It helped that loving David is very easy to do.”

What kind of love - platonic, romantic, erotic? “Oh, those are human, mortal labels!” Sheen laughs. “But that was what I thought would be interesting to play with. There’s a lot of fan fiction where Aziraphale and Crowley get a bit hot and heavy towards each other, so it’ll be interesting to see how an audience reacts to what we’ve done in bringing that to the screen.”

Steamy fan fiction aside, it’s unlikely Good Omens will match the raunch levels of his last major TV series, Masters of Sex (2013-16), a drama about the pioneering sexologists Masters and Johnson. In the wake of the last year’s #MeToo revelations, HBO has introduced “intimacy co-ordinators” for its shows - but, Sheen tells me, Masters of Sex was ahead of the curve in handling sex scenes with caution.

“It was a lot easier for myself and Lizzy [Caplan, his co-star], as we were comfortable in that set-up, because we had status in it. But for people in the background, or doing just one scene, it’s different,” he says. “It became clear very quickly that there needed to be guidelines for people who didn’t have that kind of status, who would probably not speak up. We started talking about that, and decided there need to be clear rules.”

Sex scenes, he continues, “should absolutely be treated the same way as other things where there’s a danger. If you’re doing stage-fighting, or pyrotechnics, there are rules and everyone just sticks to them. Whether it’s physical danger, or emotional, or psychological, it’s just as important.”

Despite having several film and TV parts on the horizon, Sheen says he is still in semi-retirement from acting. In 2016 he hinted that he might be quit for good to campaign against populism. “In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped," he said at the time. But now things are less cut. “I have two jobs now, essentially,” he says. "Acting takes second place."

While many celebrity activists limit their politics to save-the-dolphins posturing, Sheen has been working with a range of unfashionable grassroots groups aiming to combat inequality, support small communities and fight fake news. As well as supporting Welsh credit unions, and sponsoring a women’s football team in the tiny village of Goytre, he tells me that he's been “commissioning research into alternative funding models for local journalism”.

If he returns to the stage any time soon, he says it’s likely to be in a show about “political historical socio-economic stuff, a one-man show with very low production values”. It’s clear he’s not in it for the glamour.

Sheen was inspired to become more politically active by the Brexit referendum – which also indirectly led him to break up with his partner of four years, the comedian Sarah Silverman. At the time, they were living together in the US. “We both had very similar drives, and yet to act on those drives pulled us in different directions – because she is American and I’m Welsh,” he explains.

“After the Brexit vote, and the election where Trump became president, we both felt in different ways we wanted to get more involved. That led to her doing her show I Love You America [in which Silverman interviewed people from across the political spectrum], and it led to me wanting to address the issues that I thought led some people to vote the way they did about Brexit, in the area I come from and others like it.”

They still speak lovingly of each other, which makes their decision to end a happy relationship for the sake of politics look painfully quixotic. Talking about it, Sheen sounds a little wistful, but he’s utterly certain they made the right choice. “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it did mean coming back here – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.”

[potagepotiron]

Hate crime

Season 3 of WTFock has ended, Robbe & Sander have found love and everyone is eagerly awaiting Christmas. It is a time to be happy. Well I’m not. I’m not happy because of how WTFock handled an important event that could have been a gamechanger for LGBTQ fiction. I’m talking about the hate crime that ended episode 28. The way in which this plot line was conceived, handled and received, tells you a lot of how our society views minorities.

Fist and foremost, I am a SKAM fan. I watched every clip and every remake. My favourite is Season 3. Because I’m a gay man. I also know this series can change people’s minds. How different crews made it into their own and are very proud about the result. So I had high hopes when a Flemish version of Season 3 was announced.

So I was watching season 3, had a few remarks here and there, and then came that slur. I’ve written about it earlier. To a gay man like me, familiar with internalized homophobia, the concept of using a terrible slur and throwing accusations at Sander like Robbe just seemed baffling. Do not do unto others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you. You wouldn’t subject another human being to such hate, because you know how it feels. Pure and simple. And then, the hate crime happened.

Let’s be honest, WTFock failed in handling the hate crime, from the absence of trigger warnings before the clip, to the immediate aftermath, right until the very end of the series. There was no middle ground, it either had to commit to its choice and be brilliant or fail. It failed miserably. It chose to portray Robbe & Sander as victims and refused to show any form of queer resilience. And even when it became clear, near the end, that they decided to have the attack trigger other major events in the story, the writers opted to not address the hate crime. And to the optimists stating that the attack could be dealt with in Season 4, I say this: too late.

Personally, I wouldn’t have included graphic violence in the first place. To me there is no value in showing violence. I seriously doubt its inclusion in a series aimed at a teenage audience, because the negatives (trauma and copycat behaviour) far outweigh the learning opportunities, even when handled perfectly. I couldn’t finish the clip. That night, I, a grown man of 35 years of age, was wide awake in my bed until 4 in the morning. I couldn’t sleep, knowing that a number of LGBTQ youth saw that clip and became afraid. Decided to hide in the closet for a bit longer, maybe. The scene simply is not worth it.

And despite my sentiments, the reactions online seemed to disagree: “we needed to show this. We needed to be shown this. People need to know.” I couldn’t understand. Trust me, I know about gay bashing. And so should you. I read all the articles in newspapers about the atrocious hatecrimes in Belgium and elsewhere. I know who Ihsane Jarfi is. Friends of mine who are in a relationship have been scared to go out late at night. I’ve been called names in the street myself. I know. The quesion is, why do I need to see two boys being beaten and left in the street?

I don’t think the depiction of a gay bashing had its place in WTFock. However, I do think that a discussion of homophobia should be included, albeit in another way. Gay violence and intolerance could have been a part of the talk that Robbe & Milan had. I’m not demanding to turn a blind eye to homophobia or to sugarcoat a story. Also, I myself am not blind to homophobia. On the contrary, I have encountered more of it this year than ever before. Belgian football, for example, is still rife with homophobic chants. And recently far right politicians have stressed the need to clearly define norms and abnormality with regard to sexual orientation and the rights to adopt or to get married.

The real question is what kind of homophobia the show chooses, wants to or needs to battle. Gay bashing is a radical example of hate, but hate has many forms. And all hate is the result of a much more complex undercurrent in Flemish society. Hate stems from fear of the unknown, indifference or lack of knowledge. And that is why Flemish LGBT interest group çavaria remains committed to eradicating homophobia in schools. This behaviour can be unlearned. Education is key. And that is why it was a good decision for WTFock to zoom in on the reactions of friends after a coming out. They could have gone the extra mile, though. Homophobia is far more varied and widespread than WTFock shows you.

Back to the hate crime. I wonder why the WTFock writing team missed the mark. Norwegian SKAM director Julie Andem demanded that research into the local youth culture should precede any adaptation of the original content. I’m finding it hard to believe that the gay community was on board with the decision to show a gay bashing. I consulted among my gay friends and all thought it was a bad idea. I also wonder whether or not anti-gay violence is a problem that is typical of Flanders. It’s hard to find reliable data on hate crimes and to interpret it because there could be a reluctance to report incidents, but there seems to be no significant difference between Belgium and its neighbouring countries, nor is there a statistically significant rise in homophobic attacks during the last years. There has been a rise, but that could be due to a higher percentage of people reporting incidents.

I’ve argued that the choices the writers made are bad, and that there is little or no claim to say that hate crimes are typical of Flanders, no more than anywhere else in Western Europe or Scandinavia, where the series originated and where gay bashing wasn’t included. But do I believe that the writers knowingly sabotaged their own writing efforts? Surely not. Yet, it’s hard to pinpoint why the series was developed the way it was without hearing from the makers. Chances are we’ll never know. Unlike their French or Norwegian counterparts, the screenwriters have, up to now, chosen not to communicate on the series. It is my perception that indifference to its LGBTQ audience, an appetite for drama and shock value and a degree of ignorance manifested itself throughout the series. That may or may not have been the intention of the makers, we can’t know, but it certainly had that effect on me as a viewer.

As always, a part of me that says I’m being too harsh. I can imagine it’s a lot less difficult and a lot more relaxed to write series on superheroes then it is navigating your way through the pitfalls of minority representation or gay televised fiction, a genre that exists less than 30 years and of which the rules are being rewritten constantly. It’s also not easy to have a number of militant gays like myself looking over your shoulders constantly, scrutinizing every line and every motive and picking on the one detail that got overlooked.

And should we dismiss the entire series because of this one incident? Let’s move on, Sander and Robbe are happy. Isn’t that a heartwarming prospect to gay kids? But this relativity is the problem. Silencing a hate crime not a detail. Showing violence on tv has repercussions, and they can’t be undone by having a cute gay couple smooch underneath a Christmas tree. A SKAM remake has a responsibility towards its audience. And it’s not that a chance like this comes around often. Budget cuts in locally produced fiction will mean it will take years before there’s another chance to see local gay fiction on screen. So every chance we get needs to be perfect. Because it will affect a new generation of young people.

Ultimately, the question is why it is so hard to have good quality gay stories, made by queer creators for a queer audience? Why was this series made by three white middle-aged men with a background in marketing, with only one of them with proven credentials in screenwriting? Why is it so hard to hire gay actors or to find authentic gay voices? Is it really necessary that a series like SKAM S3 contains “learning moments for the straight community”? Can’t we, for once, make a tv series without taking into account the heterosexual majority? It might be a bit tentative of me to say this, but I’m sure Niels Rahou, the writer of Season 3 of SkamFrance, wouldn’t have included a gay bashing scene. He has commented frequently on his scenarios, he is openly gay and he stated he would have benefited from a similar series during his adolescence. I don’t think the Belgian writing team wrote with the same sense of urgency or treated SKAM as a passion project.

To end, let’s go back to the original version of Skam Norway. The reason why the format was so revolutionary is precisely because being gay or coming out wasn’t a big deal. Jonas didn’t bat an eyelid when Isak told him he’d been with a boy. His friends were fine with it, and so were his parents. Isak faced an internal struggle, gradually coming to terms with and being the result of living in a heteronormative society. But ultimately the mopey kid with a love of sleeping waged a bigger war with his eternally overflowing locker. He just accepted his sexuality. In the end, though, Isak had grown as a person and showed serious committment to his boyfriend Even. But the eye-opener of the series was the way in which same-sex attraction was treated as something not to worry about.

As a reaction to the way in which homosexuality was depicted as part of mundane everyday life, people rightfully complained that this story was a bit too rosy. And it’s true, there is white middle class privilege in this story. Among certain communities, coming out still isn’t evident and living a gay life is considered unsafe for some people. Yet, Julie Andem would rather show her viewers with a vision of an ideal world, in order to help and comfort a LGBT audience, than care about what the public would think of the season. I think WTFock could have been more attentive to that message.

Luckily, for most of us, being gay doesn’t lead us to being the victim of a hate crime. That doesn’t mean we can turn away from the reality of such violence. But almost all of my gay friends have, one way or another, been confronted with various examples of homophobic behavior. More often than not, these instances are based on ignorance and are more small-scale in nature. Being called names in the street. A supposedly witty remark made by a drunk uncle at a Christmas party. Or take the well-known Flemish tv personality who, in all his innocence, made a plea for abolishing the Antwerp gay pride parade during a televised comedy show in june. He was applauded by the audience and genuinely seemed impressed by his clever, seemingly inclusive reasoning. More often than not, the threats the homosexual community face consist not of the raw violence of the physical attack, but of vulgarity, stupidity or ignorance. It is a potentially dangerous to narrow down homophobia to physical attacks and take the risk to have your audience believe that they’re in the clear as long as they don’t punch someone to death.

The only way things will change for the better is when the heterosexual majority steps up its game. This means they have to change, they have to start questioning their accepted beliefs, or how they educate their kids. Ultimately, they themselves won’t benefit from these changes, on the contrary, society as a whole will be a bit less tailored to them when heteronormativity is eradicated.  Inclusivity is about the majority caring about the minority. So this is my advice to the WTFock team. Don’t care about clicks, controversy or drama. Don’t perpetuate the representation of LGBT individuals as victims of a harsh outside world. Dare to shake up old, established narratives. Show that homophobia is far more pervasive and far more subtle than the large-scale evil of a hate crime. And if you’re going down that route anyway, commit to it. Don’t brush it off. Status quo is no longer an option.

[imdoingthismspaintadventure]

Worm 1.6 - In which we meet futuristic techno Dredd

II heard the cape arrive on his souped up motorcycle.  I didn’t want to be seen fleeing the scene of a fight, and risk being labeled one of the bad guys by yet another person, but I wasn’t about to get closer to the street either, in case Lung was feeling better.  Since there was nowhere to go, I just stayed put.  Just resting felt good.

Yeah it’s better you stay and try to explain what went down. Fleeing after all this..wouldn’t be a good look. And let’s try to stay far away from  the knocked-out fire demon while we’re at it.

If you’d asked me just a few hours ago about how I thought I would feel meeting a big name superhero, I would have used words like excited and giddy.  The reality was that I was almost too exhausted to care.

You have experienced a loooot of things just today girl. It’s not everyday you get into a life or death fight and then meet some people of dubious character, all in the span of like 20 minutes. Shame your first encounter with a bona-fide superhero is in a situation like this.

It looked as though he flew up onto the roof, but the six-foot long weapon the man held kind of jerked as he landed.  I was pretty sure I saw the tines of a grappling hook retreating back into the end of the weapon.  So this was what Armsmaster looked like in person, I thought.

Armsmaster! So...master of weapons? He seems to have a pretty badass one in one arm, which seems to have multiple uses. Good old Grappling Hooks! The way for grounded super heroes to keep up with flight-types!

The largest superhero organization in the world was the Protectorate, spanning Canada and the States, with ongoing talks about including Mexico in the deal.  It was a government sponsored league of superheroes with a base in each ‘cape city’.  That is, they had a team set up in each city with a sizable population of heroes and villains.  Brockton Bay’s team was officially ‘The Protectorate East-North-East’, and were headquartered in the floating, forcefield-shrouded island that you could see from the Boardwalk.  This guy, Armsmaster, was the guy in charge of the local team.  When the core group of the top Protectorate members from around Canada and the States assembled in that classic ‘v’ formation for the photo shoots, Armsmaster was one of the guys in the wings.  This was a guy who had his own action figures.  Poseable Armsmaster with interchangeable Halberd parts.

Wooaaah. So he’s a really big shot! Leader of the local Protectorate which seems to be this universe’s version of the Avengers/Justice League/big main hero organization. He lives in that badass flying fortess! And seems to be pretty marketable as well. Meeting him in the flesh like this in your first day, woah .

He really did look like a superhero, not like some guy in a costume.  It was an important distinction.  He wore body armor, dark blue with silver highlights, had a sharply angled v-shaped visor covering his eyes and nose.  With only the lower half of his face exposed, I could see a beard trimmed to trace the edges of his jaw.  If I had to judge, with only the lower half of his face to go by, I’d guess he was in his late twenties or early thirties.

High-tech superhero armor and professional gear! Sweet!

He’s giving me a mix of iron man and judge dredd vibes with that costume. Either way he seems to exude “veteran and skilled super” a lot.

His trademark and weapon was his Halberd, which was basically a spear with an axe head on the end, souped up with gadgets and the kind of technology you generally only saw in science fiction.  He was the kind of guy who appeared on magazine covers and did interviews on TV, so you could find almost anything about Armsmaster through various media, short of his secret identity.  I knew his weapon could cut through steel as though it was butter, that it had plasma injectors for stuff that the blade alone couldn’t cut and that he could fire off directed electromagnetic pulses to shut down forcefields and mechanical devices.

HE HAS A MASTER WEAPON WHICH CAN ACT AS ALL OF THE WEAPONS AT THE SAME TIME. THAT’S SO AWESOME

I knew he was gonna be technologically-focused, with that badass floating island and all!

A spear-axe hybrid strong enough to cut through steel, with plasma injectors and EMP blasts?? Fucking sweet.

“You gonna fight me?” He called out.

“I’m a good guy,” I said.

Stepping closer to me, he tilted his head, “You don’t look like one.”

Oof. That’s true. Miss looking-like-a-living-bug with dark colors and yellow lenses doesn’t seem very heroic at... all

Also I really like how that line was delivered for some reason. You don’t look like one

That stung, especially coming from him.  It was like Michael Jordan saying you sucked at basketball.  “That’s… not intentional,” I responded, not a little defensively, “I was more than halfway done putting the costume together when I realized it was already looking more edgy than I’d intended, and I couldn’t do anything about it by then.”

Your power is very hard to use in a kid-friendly way! You command a swarm of biting, stinging, maybe-venomous, maybe-flesh eating bugs! That grimdark look is actually apropiate

I wonder if this work will explore heroes who want to do good things but have characteristically “evil powers”. Taylor could easily be one!

There was a long pause.  Nervously, I turned my eyes from that opaque visor.  I glanced at his chest emblem, a silhouette of his visor in blue against a silver background, and was struck with the ridiculous thought that I had once owned a pair of underpants with his emblem on the front.

Pfft! Taylor your young fangirl self is adorable

Also gave me Deku flashbacks, as with the hero journals

“You’re telling the truth,” he said.  It was a definitive statement, which startled me.  I wanted to ask how he knew, but I wasn’t about to do or say anything that might change his mind. 

Lie-detector?? God his suit just has everything

I love technology based powers by the way. When a hero stacks himself up to the teeth in sweet tech it’s a sight to behold

He approached closer, looking me over as I sat there with my arms around my knees, he asked, “You need a hospital?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t think so.  I’m as surprised as you are.”

“You’re a new face,” he said.

“I haven’t even come up with a name yet.  You know how hard it is to come up with a bug-themed name that doesn’t make me sound like a supervillain or a complete dork?”

Hmm that’s true! Swarm sounds villanous, same with Plague, Sting, Hivemind, Pestilence...

Bug is probably too simple. (Insect) Queen maybe? Eh Queen is so general that it’s probably taken already. Control? Probably taken  and sounds villanous.

He chuckled, and it sounded warm, very normal, “I wouldn’t know.  I got into the game early enough that I didn’t have to worry about missing out on all of the good names.”

There was a pause in the conversation.  I suddenly felt awkward.  I don’t know why, but I admitted to him, “I almost died.”

“That’s why we have the Ward program,” he said.  There was no judgement in his tone, no pressure.  Just a statement.

Hmm, what is that? Some sort of superhero training?

I nodded, more to give a response than out of any agreement with the answer.  The Wards were the under-eighteen subdivision of the Protectorate, and Brockton Bay did have its own team of Wards, with the same naming convention as the Protectorate; The Wards East-North-East.  I had considered applying to join, but the notion of escaping the stresses of high school by flinging myself into a mess of teenage drama, adult oversight and schedules seemed self-defeating.

Oooh so it’s like the Teen Titans, and other young superhero groups! Young teenage superheroes! Nice!

Also yeah, that would probably be similar to school, and you wanted escapism with this. I don’t think you would get bullied though, but I understand your reticence.

“You get Lung?” I asked, to change the subject from the Wards.  I was pretty sure that he was obligated to try and induct new heroes into either the Protectorate or the Wards, depending on their age, to promote the whole agenda of organized heroes who are accountable for their actions, and I really didn’t want him to get on my case about joining.

He probably is obligated to ask, yeah. I suppose they don’t condone vigilantism. So changing the subject to the dragon man is probably a good idea!

“Lung was unconscious, beaten and battered when I arrived.  I pumped him full of tranquilizers to be safe and temporarily restrained him under a steel cage I welded to the sidewalk.  I’ll pick him up on my way back.”

“Good,” I said, “With him in jail, I’ll feel like I accomplished something today.  Only reason I started the fight was because I overheard him telling his men to shoot some kids.  Only realized later that he was talking about some other villains.”

Armsmaster turned to look at me.  So I told him, walking him through the fight in general, the arrival of the teenage bad guys, and their general descriptions.  Before I finished, he was pacing back and forth on the roof.

“These guys.  They knew I was coming?”

Yeeah that was a pretty epic misunderstanding there.

Also they probably knew you were coming thanks to the kinda-omniscient know-it-all in their team soooo yeah.

I nodded, once.  As much respect as I had for Armsmaster, I wasn’t in much of a mood to repeat myself.

“That explains a lot,” he said, staring off into the distance.  After a few moments, he went on to explain, “They’re slippery.  On those few occasions we do manage to get in a toe to toe fight with them, they either win, or they get away more or less unscathed, or both.  We know so little about them.  Grue and Hellhound were working on their own before they joined the group, so there’s some information there, but the other two?  They’re nonentities.  If the girl Tattletale has some way of detecting or tracking us, it would go a long way towards explaining why they’re doing as well as they are.”

Insteresting! So Regent and Tattletale are very well hidden! I imagine it must be easy for Tattletale to do so, but I still don’t know what Regent does... He’s definitely the most misterious of them all at the moment.

Heh, and he uses Hellhound for Bitch, he’s a hero so of course

It kind of surprised me to hear one of the top level heroes admitting to being anything less than perfectly on top of things.

“It’s funny,” I said, after a few moment’s thought, “They didn’t seem that hardcore.  Grue said they were kind of panicking when they heard Lung was coming after them, and they were casually joking around while the fight was going on.  Grue was making fun of Regent.”

“They said all this in front of you?” he asked.

I shrugged, “I think they thought I was helping them out.  The way Tattletale talked, I think she thought I was a bad guy too or something.”  With a touch of bitterness, I said, “Dunno, I guess it was the costume that led them to that assumption.”

“Could you have taken them in a fight?” Armsmaster asked me.

I started to shrug, and winced a little.  I was feeling a little sore in the shoulder, where I’d tumbled on the roof after being blasted by Lung’s flames.  I said, “Like you said, we don’t know a lot about them, but I think that girl with the dogs-”

“Hellhound,” Armsmaster said.

“I think she could have kicked my ass on her own, so no.  I probably couldn’t have fought them.”

Yeah they didn’t really seem evil per se, they were pretty nice to us! Maybe because they confused us for a villain...

And yeah I don’t think you could have beaten them. Of the two powers I sorta know of them, hellbeasts and kinda-omniscience beat bugs, I’m pretty sure. So yeah.

“Then count it as a good thing that they got the wrong impression,” Armsmaster said.

“I’ll try to look at it that way,” I said, struck by how he easily he was able to employ the whole ‘take a negative and turn it into a positive’ mindset I’d been trying to maintain.  I envied that.

Heroes tends to be more optimistic than most.

“That a girl,” he said, “And while we’re looking forward, we need to decide where we go from here.”

My heart sank.  I knew he was going to bring up the Wards again.

Yeaah and he’ll put you in an awkward spot again...

What do you want to do Taylor? Start as a standalone hero and then work your way up through your acts and deeds? Could you even do that and still be well-regarded by the Protectorate?

“Who gets the credit for Lung?”

Caught off guard, I looked up at him.  I started to speak, but he held up his hand.

“Hear me out.  What you’ve done tonight is spectacular.  You played a part in getting a major villain into custody.  You just need to consider the consequences.”

“Consequences,” I muttered, even as the word spectacular rang in my ears.

Oh, so he wants to talk about who gets the credit? Huh, didn’t expect that. It could be a good first step for her hero career, but it could also be dangerous to let villains know about her existence, especially if she’s going solo

“Lung has an extensive gang throughout Brockton Bay and neighboring cities.  More than that, he has two superpowered flunkies.  Oni Lee and Bakuda.”

I shook my head, “I know about Oni Lee, and Grue mentioned fighting him.  I’ve never heard of Bakuda.”

So he has two liutenants with powers! Oni Lee was mentioned before and now... Bakuda. Baku- makes me think explosions from Bakuha, so it could be explosions-based?

Seems to be a new member, anyways.

Armsmaster nodded, “Not surprising.  She’s new.  What we know about her is limited.  She made her first appearance and demonstration of her powers by way of a drawn out terrorism campaign against Cornell University.  Lung apparently recruited her and brought her to Brockton Bay after her plans were foiled by the New York Protectorate.  This is… something of a concern.”

Damn, terrorism against a University and a conforntation with the New York Protectorate? She seems to have some infamy even before joining

“What are her powers?”

“Are you aware of the Tinker classification?”

I started to shrug, but remembered my sore shoulder and nodded instead.  It was probably more polite, too.  I said, “Covers anyone with powers that give them an advanced grasp of science.  Lets them make technology years ahead of its time.  Ray guns, ice blasters, mechanized suits of armor, advanced computers.”

Oh sweet

So tinkers are the inventors, the tech-based superheroes who use futuristic technology and all kinds of high-specs gear, and that is their superpower?

Oh I love technology-based powers so much.

“Close enough,” Armsmaster said.  It struck me he would be a Tinker, if his Halberd and armor were any indication.  That, or he got his stuff from someone else.  He elaborated,  “Well, most Tinkers have a specialty or a special trick.  Something they’re particualrly good at or something that they can do, which other Tinkers can’t.  Bakuda’s specialty is bombs.”

I stared at him.  A woman with a power that let her make bombs that were technologically decades ahead of their time.  No wonder he saw it as a concern.

So Armsmaster is a tinker! Makes sense with his impossibly-amazing plasma spear-axe, lie detector and super armor. I suppose a tinker’s threat can vary a lot depending on prep time and current gear. I like them!

Super-advanced explosives? Oh boy, that sounds like potencially a fucking nightmare

“Now I want you to consider the danger involved in taking the credit for Lung’s capture.  Without a doubt, Oni Lee and Bakuda will be looking to accomplish two goals.  Freeing their boss and getting vengeance on the one responsible.  I suspect you’re now aware… these are scary people.  Scarier in some ways than their boss.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t take the credit,” I said.

“I’m saying you have two options.  Option one is to join the Wards, where you’ll have support and protection in the event of an altercation.  Option two is to keep your head down.  Don’t take the credit.  Fly under the radar.”

Yeah I could see how Taylor could become the target of these two underlings, which would probably be more than she can handle.

So Armsmaster is offering her the possibilities of

a) Joining the teenage super-squad and take the credit for Lung or

b)Keep going solo but maintain your involvment in this a secret

I wasn’t prepared to make a decision like that.  Usually, I went to sleep at eleven or so, waking up at six thirty to get ready for my morning run.  At my best guess, it was somewhere between one and two in the morning.  I was emotionally exhausted from the highs and lows of the evening, and I could barely wrap my head around the complications and headaches that would come from joining the Wards, let alone having two insanely dangerous sociopaths coming after me. 

Aand one of those options is already giving Taylor a headache

On top of that, I wasn’t so ignorant as to miss Armsmaster’s motives. If I opted to not take the credit for Lung’s capture, Armsmaster would, I was sure.  I didn’t want to get on the bad side of a major player.

....True, politics could be at play here

Athough I don’t know if Taylor has just a bad view of power structures in general, considering she thought that autobiographical book she read was probably all propaganda

...Which could be true, and the whole system could be corrupt at least a little, and Armsmaster is offering her two options where he hopes he gets the credit and the glory

“Please keep my involvement in Lung’s capture secret,” I told him, painfully disappointed to have to say it, even as I knew it made the most sense.

He smiled, which I hadn’t expected.  He had a nice smile.  It made me think that he could win the hearts of a lot of women, whatever the top two-thirds of his face looked like.  “I think you’ll look back and see this was a smart decision,” Armsmaster said, turning to walk to the other end of the roof, “Call me at the PHQ if you’re ever in a pinch.” He stepped off the edge of the roof and dropped out of sight.

He seems very pleased at her decision, which reinforces my belief that he did want to get the credit after all. Or he’s happy she doesn’t get in trouble. Or both.

Armsmaster seems like an ok guy, probably a little vain, or glory-seeking, but in a way, all superheroes are a bit like that. I have defintely seen much worse examples.

You get a thumbs-up, cool plasma-spear man

Call me if you’re ever in a pinch.  He’d been saying, without openly admitting, that he owed me one.  He would take the lion’s share of the credit for Lung’s capture, but he owed me one.

Before I was all the way down the fire escape, I heard the thrum of his motorcycle, presumably carrying Lung towards a life of confinement. I could hope.

Oh true! Nice, you can call in a favour of a team leader of the superhero mega-alliance! Good start to your superhero career, Taylor!

And he just took away Lung so it seems she was indeed the push the situation needed to get him into custody! Yes!

It would take me a half hour to get home.  On the way, I would stop and pull on the sweatshirt and jeans I had hidden.  I knew my dad went to sleep even earlier than I did, and he slept like a log, so I had nothing to worry about as far as wrapping up the night.

It could have gone worse.  Strange as it sounds, those words were a security blanket I wrapped around myself to keep myself from dwelling on the fact that tomorrow was a school day.

It could have gone worse is a good mentality to have!

Let’s hope the three bitches aren’t too insufferable tomorrow.

[norcumii]

Yet more meta from the prior tumblr, originally posted on 12/11/2017.

Mmkay. There’s this post floating around about Obi-Wan’s characterization (link coming up in a minute). I want it on the record that I am all for people characterizing fictional characters however they want, on whatever criteria they have including “because I was in the mood for it,” ‘cause going ‘there’s only one true interpretation’ is totally a dick move.

Nonetheless this post has been slowly driving me bonkers so I’m trying to do the polite thing and make my own post deconstructing it rather than adding to theirs.

Hell, it starts off with “Please can someone explain to me why there’s this fandom thing where Obi Wan is nothing but angst and sads for 20 straight years on Tatooine?”

You betcha.

First off, OP is basing character assessment on the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. Look. I enjoy personality tests as much as the next person, but that thing is just as useful to behavior prediction as a Facebook quiz about which Disney Princess you are. Here’s a nice convenient article about why which a minimum of digging on Google netted me. MBTI presents archtypes that are sometimes useful for casual commentary, but that is not a diagnostic tool.

So let’s take a look at Obi-Wan, as we see in the movies (and Clone Wars), just after Revenge of the Sith. We have a man who is anywhere from 33 to 38 years old (depending on your version of canon), who has spent the last three years overworking himself at the heart of a hideous civil war that he was essentially drafted for, and oh yes, his side lost. Not only did his side lose, but it got massacred. Yoda was able to feel the death of the Jedi Order as it was happening, do not tell me that Obi-Wan had no idea what was going on too. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan was also dealing with the betrayal of his closest friend (his brother), who tries to kill him. Meanwhile, said brother does kill his wife (pregnant wife) who is a close friend of Obi-Wan’s, right there in front of him. All this leads to Obi-Wan doing the unthinkable: mutilating and then killing his brother – or worse, not being able to kill Anakin, leaving him in torment for another two decades.

There is so much PTSD fodder here, and that doesn’t even touch the betrayals from the clones, nor the question of ‘did he feel the psychic backlash from the chips kicking in and twisting the clones’ minds?’, nor the mental trauma from The Phantom Menace wherein he was replaced, failed his teacher who died in his arms but only after saying ‘that kid what replaced you, you need to train him now,’ and then 10 years of raising a kid when he was literally just sorta-kinda-not-exactly declared an adult himself. He was not prepared for that.

So once Obi-Wan’s handed over Luke (the last remaining link to his brother, who he is now not allowed any contact with since Luke expresses he’s never really met Old Ben) – that’s the first time he’s had to really stop and breathe in over 13 years. Ten years to raise a responsibility he never asked for, was not prepared to handle, and was a reminder of his greatest failure. Three years of running at least a literal third of a galactic war that was stacked against him (did he realize that by the end? That they were being played, and could never have won?).

Yeah, he’s got 20 years to work at recovering from that, but without a skilled therapist that I don’t think you’re going to find on Tatooine, you’re going to be lucky to be functional. I know that Star Wars as a whole doesn’t concern itself with mental health (seriously, mind healers are becoming one of my most cherished additions that Re-Entry brings to the table). That doesn’t mean ignoring it will get you a good character assessment.

Depression and PTSD isn’t going to make someone “a sad, bitter, lonely man” nor does it mean that one will metaphorically “be playing All By Myself on repeat for 20 straight years while sobbing into a cup of Bantha milk.” Depression expresses itself in any number of ways. It can mute things, so that while you laugh and even enjoy life, that joy doesn’t linger, or pales quickly. It can add a haze to everything, so you feel numb and distant. It can make someone who once expressed themselves exuberantly seem calm instead of manic. It doesn’t have to affect one’s wit, or habits of cracking jokes even if those jokes might feel flat and hollow to the speaker.

Sometimes it just leads to going through the motions of living, how one would have approached things Before – but it’s just empty motions.

PTSD can express itself as flashbacks. It can look like nothing until it is reactions to a different time and trauma instead of what is now and present. It can be a person haunted by their past, it can be explosive, it can be quiet and turned inwards. There are days when it doesn’t hit you, there are days when it’s so heavy on your shoulders that it feels like all you can do is sit, stare at a wall, and hope your brain shuts off. Then there are the days when despite that weight, you still need to go get groceries, or make dinner, or fix a vaportator, or fight off wayward Tuskens or something.

Nothing says that depressed and traumatized Obi-Wan wouldn’t sometimes take delight in lightsaber play, or practical jokes. I just don’t think that it would overtake the depression and PTSD.

On top of all of that is what you get when you take a look at the EU. Obi-Wan’s been traumatized since he was a kid. He was bullied through his tweens. He was rejected by the ONLY teacher he could hope to have until the Order booted him to the AgroCorps, at least a week before the official deadline. Then that shuttle crashed, and he saw his first major battle which led to approximately FOUR HUNDRED dead.

At not quite 13. Over the next year (probably less, but let’s be generous), he had to deal with: kidnapping, enslavement and hard labor, an attempted mind wipe, an actual war accompanied by abandonment by his teacher, and his teacher’s prior student trying to blow up his home. By the time Phantom Menace rolls around, we can include: several more wars, 6 months to a year on the run across war-torn Mandalore trying to keep a teenage Satine alive, taking responsibility for the death of Qui-Gon’s Love Interest – and that’s just what’s off the top of my head.

Y’know what’s interesting? During Attack of the Clones, what I see is a man just barely holding his shit together. That scene in Dex’s Diner breaks me, because all I can think of is my time doing food service while going through my own PTSD and depression – and I recognize that empty smile he has for Dex. I know it’s all interpretation, but I can’t help but think he’s faking that smile. That sure, he means it: he’s happy to see a friend, he wants to reassure him, but that doesn’t change the hollow inside that he knows if he lets go and falls into it, he will never climb out.

The war provided an alternative focus. It gave him clear, concrete goals: beat back enemies here and here, keep as many of these people alive as possible, here are resources and here are the end goals. He could legitimately bond with brothers in arms who could grok black humor, who wouldn’t look askance at someone covering long-standing grief and discomfort with banter and flirting, “who winked and witticized his way out of death and imprisonment a million times, who always found something to laugh about or make fun of even in the most difficult situations” – regardless of how inappropriate or relevant that might be to the circumstances.

Sometimes, that laughter is all that keeps you from breaking from all the pain.

Yes, people heal. Yes, he had 20 years to work through that trauma and injury. He’d also be doing it alone, with a legacy of stoicism and philosophies about releasing his emotions into the Force. The last major friendships he had ended in betrayal or in death, and people he depended on tended to either die or betray him.

That’s not something you blithely overcome to play pranks on the locals while watching over the kid of your best friend what you almost killed as he was trying to kill you, like he killed most everyone else you knew and loved. There is so much trauma and pain he’s had to see over the last 20 plus years, and Tatooine is the first time he ever gets to breathe and react.

If you want to write trickster archtype Obi-Wan, I applaud you. Without any sarcasm or mockery: you do you.

Meanwhile, I’ll be writing traumatized Old Ben.

(Many thanks to @morgynleri​ and @elegantmess-southernbelle​ who provided brilliant points and conversation, though I suspect I phrased it with much less grace and coherency than they did)

[its0katka]

A Personal History of Mountains

I’m five years old, seven years old, thirteen years old, and I drive through mountains to get to my cousin’s house an hour away in Duchess County. I know they aren’t really mountains though, because they aren’t tall enough, or craggy enough. They don’t look like the mountains I see in books and on TV. 

I’m used to tall things because of living in New York but the skyscrapers are oftentimes too tall and give a warped perspective on what tall actually is. Nature is different, though. Nature is real.

They look pretty in the fall when the leaves change colors, but when it’s summer they just look like oversized bushes, in the winter they are a dead bark brown. They aren’t rolling, it’s usually one large dome and then normal-sized foliage otherwise. Sometimes they look pretty when they are covered in snow.

I try not to think about mountains because one time I tried to hike Bear Mountain and I hated it.

I’m 20 years old and I’m flying to Ghana. We transfer planes in Germany and as we fly south, we cross the alps. I don’t know which alps, but we’re so high up above them that all we see is snow-capped tops and sharp peaks clearing the sky. I remember how excited I was to see them, because they looked like real mountains, and I was so close to them.

In Ghana I went on another hike to Mount Afadjato. I thought it’d be fine because I’d done a hike to Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh the summer before, and that was alright, it was the same amount of time (two hours up, an hour down) and I figured I was spry enough to do it.

I wasn’t. I fell behind the group quite far, especially when trying to walk down the mountain. I was suffering badly with the elevation. I was wearing Crocs. 

Arthur’s Seat was 822 ft tall. It had stairs along the way, and safety ropes. Mount Afadjato 2,904 ft tall. It had nothing but steep climbs, slippery rocks, and a worn train. I lost my footing at one point and slid down the mountain, I thought I was going to die. The group went to a cave the next day and I opted to stay home and try to watch the Ghanaian version of American Idol on the TV we had that never really worked.

I’m 22 and living in Žilina, Slovakia. I was provided with a three bedroom flat all to myself, for the modest price of $400 Euros a month. My Independent Study stipend pretty much covers the rent, I have to use my personal funds to buy food but it’s not too bad because I don’t have a fridge, so I basically have to eat vegetarian, eat out, or not eat at all.

From my balcony (yes, I have a balcony, yes, it’s where I keep my milk, cheese and yogurt to stay cold in the frigid November temperatures), I can see the Malá Fatras, a Slovak mountain range that’s popular with skiers. I love standing out on the freezing balcony looking at it because these are the tallest mountains I’ve ever seen, and the closest I’ll ever get. It makes me feel normal, like the world is not so vast, like there are borders and boundaries and it’s somehow cozy, in a weird way.

One weekend, all employees of Stanica are gone on holiday; Dusan goes on a trip to Bratislava with his girlfriend, Audrey and Helen go to Budapest. I am on my own except for Ints, who offers to hang out with me while everyone is gone, who makes sure to take me out to bars and have a good time, who drags me out to a mountain nearby to go see some castle ruins, except that I’m hungover as hell and the walk up is steep as hell and we stop for a cigarette break halfway through and I admit that I’m dying and I’m sore and dehydrated and can’t go on, can we please go home?

We stop at a bar on the way home and have warm beer. We go out later that night and I scream at him drunk in the snow because I want to have sex with him but he keeps saying he has a girlfriend but no one has ever met her, ever, not even his closest friend Aldrick and everyone keeps saying to me, “Wow are you Ints’s girlfriend?” and it killed me every time.

Years later I would understand that he was doing the right thing, he liked me but he was doing the right thing and knew it would be bad if we got involved. 

I’m 28 and on my honeymoon and we make a stop in Lake Como. I’m still not feeling 100% health-wise, and I welcome the chance to relax along the lake. Our Airbnb is a time capsule, it’s a separate room and bathroom attached to the home of a spry Englishwoman who married an Italian man and basically gets to see out her days in their Sala Comacina flat, with paramount views of Lake Como and a water taxi stop down the road. 

It’s more beautiful than anywhere I’ve ever been. The air is clear and crisp and warm, the Italian alps are visible in the far distance, snow capped and a stark comparison to the emerald green, sloping hills along the lake. When the sun sets, it turns them brilliant neon colors of pink, orange and purple.

We dine on prosciutto pizza and grilled fish at a place where the tables and chairs are made of plastic, and the local teenagers drop by for cokes. I take a picture and post it. Someone asks, “Is this a painting?” No, it’s reality.

I’m 30, and we’re driving through Switzerland, exhausted and half sick but determine to visit Berggasthaus Aescher, the famous building built into the side of a mountain, which serves food if you’re lucky enough to get there. I’ve done all the research, including figuring out how to get there by car, through winding roads and up steep elevations and narrow streets where the Swiss sports cars zip around like it’s no big deal except if you aren’t careful enough you may well drive off a cliff because there are zero barriers, dude.

We see old people, old people, riding bikes up the hills and I just feel really bad about myself, in comparison.

We find pockets of green space, sprawling hills with farms and cows, so many cows, cows everywhere and adorable cottages and I just keep wondering, “Oh my god what does one do here to occupy their time, especially with all of these insane hills and narrow roads to climb?”

Finally we reach Ebenalp and the cable car that will take us to the top of the mountain. All the way there we’ve been surrounded by tall crags and ranges of snow-peaked geo wonders. I can’t stop taking photos of them because this truly is the closest I’ve ever been to a real mountain. It’s 5,380 ft high and I wonder how on earth it’s possible for this cable car to bring us up so steeply and yet be so smooth and yet never just one day fall apart and crash.

We get to the top and realize we are sorely underdressed; I, in a thin sweater and a designer purse, Handsome Man in a long sleeve shirt and dress boots. Everyone else around us is wearing legit hiking gear — industrial boots, heavy coats, snow pants, bandanas. All of the things I read about Berggasthaus Aescher said it was an 15 minute hike to the guesthouse. I am winded in the first five minutes and I am walking down, not up.

At Berggasthaus Aescher, we realize it’s too late to buy food because the last cablecar leaves at 5:30pm, and if we miss it, we must hike all the way down, and who knows how long that’d take and what condition we’d be in by the end. We take some marvelous photos and retreat back where the steep climb has me stopping several points through to catch my breath. I see old women and little kids hiking and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.

I really liked Switzerland when we were there, it was this crazy place where everything was so expensive and no one looked like each other and the language, what even was it, and we paid $40 for pad thai at a takeout place, and Handsome Man got food poisoning because he didn’t cook his fondue meats well enough.

But what I can’t stop thinking about are those mountains, and valleys, where it’s just you and the land and the animals and the nature, and it’s so beyond beautiful and peaceful and you wonder how anything could ever be wrong there, and it’s not wrong there, it’s perfection.

[druchiigang-blog]

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The majority of the proof you need to believe is there. You might have more of a case he is interested. You are able to see several of the signs above in your existing situation, but are still in full-blown denial. You'd be amazed at how big of a deal having open communication about these sorts of things is. Money, in this case too, is employed as an incentive to purchase our peoples loyalty to such institutions that have mushroomed throughout the place. For fun, I like swimming, playing cards, reading, playing games on the internet and talking with those who dwell in other nations.

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[newstfionline]

Jacksonville shooting: The high-pressure, big money world of competitive gaming

By Kyle Swenson, Antonia Noori Farzan, Washington Post, August 27, 2018

With the final seconds draining away on the game clock, “Bread” pulls off a big finish.

It’s a chilly February night in 2017 in Buffalo. The flat screens plastered across the walls of the 716 Food and Sport are all tuned to a live-stream of the game, including a massive 38-foot television in the bar’s main room. More than six hours of video game competition has built to this moment.

Carlos “Los” Yancy and David “Bread” Katz are knotted in a tie, 20-20, in Madden NFL 17, the blockbuster football video game franchise. Yancy, the expected favorite at this tournament, is fending off a final drive by Katz, a Maryland native just beginning to build a reputation among competitive gamers. The winner not only pockets $3,500 but advances to a later contest in Los Angeles.

With the pressure mounting, Katz’s thin face is clenched in a serious look, his grey-green eyes pinned to the screen. As the figures on the screen snap into action, Katz’s quarterback fires off a final Hail Mary pass, connecting with a receiver who blows into the end zone for a surprise win.

“Bread!” the live-stream announcer screams as Katz’s face splits into a joyful grin. “The seventh seed upsets the top seed!” the shocked announcer continues. “I cannot believe it. The gunslinger mentality to go for it!”

“A lot of pressure on these young men,” the announcer tells the audience as the live-cast closes down. “You have to give it up to Bread.”

EA Sports, the company behind the Madden franchise, called Katz’s win the “most exciting moment in all the 2017 NFL Club Series Championships.” The Buffalo Bills tweeted out congratulations to Katz.

But the promising competitive Madden career Katz launched with his 2017 victory in Buffalo took a drastic turn Sunday in Jacksonville, Fla.

Authorities have identified the 24-year-old as the suspected shooter, “pending confirmation,” after gunfire erupted at a live-streamed Madden NFL 19 qualifying tournament held at a busy mall restaurant. Two people were killed in the attack, Jacksonville County Sheriff Mike Williams told reporters Sunday night. Eleven others were taken to local hospitals, including nine gunshot victims and two people injured fleeing the scene, according to Williams. The gunman shot himself fatally, authorities said.

The investigation continues to zero in on Katz, who reportedly competed in Madden under the tag names “Bread” and “RavensChamp.” On Sunday, federal agents and local police raided a home near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Neighbors said they have seen Katz there in the past. Police have yet to detail a motive for the shooting, although Katz was registered to compete in the Jacksonville tournament, according to the event’s website. A witness told the Florida Times-Union that the man allegedly opened fire after he was eliminated from the contest.

The shooting has delivered a blow to the tightknit Madden community just as the game’s popularity as a spectator sport--and the stakes involved--rise in the esport universe.

Once thought of as a slacker hobby, esports have become a highly competitive--and highly lucrative--pursuit for gamers in recent years. Top-ranked players compete for prize money as well as endorsement deals, with some championships offering prizes in the millions. They spend countless hours training to perfect their hand-eye coordination and fine-tune their ability to focus under pressure.

Some esports tournaments feature players competing in games that replicate traditional sports played by live athletes, like Madden NFL and NBA 2K. Others allow them to face off in games like Counter-Strike and Fortnite, which are based on battle scenarios.

According to the esports research firm Newzoo, the worldwide audience for esports is expected to reach 380 million people in 2018. Newzoo predicts that esports sponsorships for North American teams will reach $162 million in 2018.

A Washington Post-University of Massachusetts Lowell poll released this spring found that almost three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 14 and 21 had either played or watched multiplayer online games or competitions in the previous year.

For some young players, esports can be a way of paying for college. In 2014, Illinois-based Robert Morris University became the first college with a varsity esports program that offers scholarships to players, according to Engadget. Some 60 schools have followed suit and established esports teams recognized by the National Association of Collegiate Esports, while many others have unofficial programs, the site reported.

A little over a week ago, the University of Akron announced that it would be opening a 5,200-foot esports facility for its varsity, club, and recreational teams in October, touting it as the largest esports space at any university in the world. That same day, the university announced plans to phase out 80 degree programs due to low enrollment numbers.

The potential financial upshot for esport competitors rivals some traditional athletics. The five-person team that won The International 2018, a Dota 2 online battle competition that concluded over the weekend, walked away with over $11 million in prize money. Additional prizes for runners-up put the total prize pool at over $25 million.

But esports also present their own unique form of overwhelming pressure.

“There is no other sport in the world in which one day you can be a teenager playing a game by yourself, and the next day, because someone scouted you from your online account, you’re thrown onto a stage for millions to criticize,” ESPN esports reporter Tyler Erzberger wrote in a piece on the pervasiveness of mental health issues in the esports community published Friday, before the shooting. “There’s little to no assimilation period. There’s no road map for how to deal with the criticism. There’s just you, on the stage with four teammates, facing down the biggest moment of your life with no lifeline.”

Named after John Madden, a longtime pro football coach and commentator who in 2006 was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Madden NFL allows players to build a fantasy roster for their favorite NFL team and compete in online matchups. Some 46,000 people belong to /r/Madden, a Reddit community dedicated to discussing the series.

The first game in the series, John Madden Football, was released in 1988. By 2014, sales had topped $4 billion in revenue.

As of August 13th, more than 130 million copies had been sold, the game’s maker, Electronics Arts Inc., said in a news release timed with the release of Madden NFL 19, the latest version.

Despite Madden’s long-standing popularity as a franchise, the game’s status as a competitive game is only a recent development thanks to the uptick in tournaments with prize money.

Sunday’s competition was a regional qualifier for an October final round in the Madden NFL 19 Championship Series, which offers a $25,000 prize to the first place winner.

Three million players competed in the Madden NFL 18 challenge last year, which was the top-rated esports broadcast in North America, Todd Sitrin, a senior vice president and general manager for the EA Competitive Gaming Division, said earlier this month in a news release.

The release also noted that this year’s competition will have a prize pool of $700,000, the largest in the game’s 30-year history.

“People don’t realize Madden is a growing game in terms of esports,” gamer Matthew Lee told The Post. “There are guys who are going to make over $100,000 playing this year. With streaming and partnerships on top of the prize money you can win in tournaments, it’s becoming a way to make a living.”

However, the circuit remains a tight group of competitors, Lee said. Everyone knows everyone else--in part due to the intimate nature of the game. Unlike other popular esports titles like “Call of Duty” where players compete in teams, in Madden NFL it’s just you working to outsmart an opponent.

“It’s a mental chess match,” Lee said. “I liken it to a lot of card games with the way you fundamentally have to think about it. You make educated guesses, have to quickly do the math, measure possibilities. You have to outplay your opponent based on probabilities.”

The high-stakes can supercharge the emotions on the field of play.

“The Madden community is one of the most passionate and competitive groups of people you’ll ever find,” Michael Aldrighetti, a Madden competitor, told The Post. “During the actual game, it gets emotional. Frustrations mount, occasional chirping at each other. We’re competitors going at each other. Madden may be ‘just a game’, but the people and the emotions are real.”

[lifeofgroffsauce]

Subject: Life Update (AKA Jon Spills His Soul)

June 25th, 2018. *Email contains TWs*

Today was the Mondayest of all Mondays. I got sunburned yesterday at Pride (super fun by the way, always recommend. Pride, not the scorched skin.) Really wasn't planning on going anywhere today. Our flight got in at 2 this morning, which was pretty rough. Probably should’ve planned that spontaneous trip to Cali better, but then it wouldn’t have been spontaneous now would it. Uh, I slept in until 8, if you could, on any level, call that sleeping in. Something I overheard yesterday kind of stuck with me in a negative way. I ran into (okay, more like eavesdropped onto) a group of gay men conversing about bisexual men. They were super insistent that there’s no satisfying a bisexual man because they always crave women. I know you know where this is going so yeah, bare with me. It’s so stupid; it even sounds just idiotic, because how can you shame an entire sexuality for the wrongs of a few people. I know it’s not logical. I know, I know, I know. It triggered this... I’m not even sure what to call it. Insecurity maybe? Naturally, the smallest of shit just exacerbated it. I got into a disagreement with my boyfriend over lube. Aloe as lube (which has a consistency akin to vaginal fluids (I’m sorry, even more sorry for brackets in brackets) so that just, BAD ). Specifically, him using it when he topped (dominated, if you’re not familiar) me. He didn’t want to and it fucking spiraled into this even bigger thing where my brain did that awesome cute thing of not shutting the fuck up. I didn’t even want him to touch me. How is that possible? How does it make sense? It’s so frustrating because I know it doesn’t. He started getting moody (I think) and for some reason that made me want to fuck him but- let’s put it this way: I’m finally seeing those side effects of Lexapro. As if I don’t already feel comfortable with my body, the one aspect I’ve never complained about doesn’t work. To top all of it off, I received an email from my agent that says filming for one of my projects has been moved up to August. The producers were talking about pushing this out until November, now it’s August? That’s less than six weeks away. I’m so fucking worried. I’m unfathomably worried that this is too soon to leave my boyfriend. I already know I’m going to miss so much: he’s having another baby in a few months (I can already imagine the new-baby-bonding with his not-even-ex wife he’s going to do), his third to accompany his two other small sons, one of which is still basically a newborn too. I’m going to miss out on these big stepping stones (there’s a better phrase out there, I’m adamant about it but don’t care enough to seek it; jk we both know I’ll get to the end of this and be anxious and not send this email if I don’t find it). WAIT, milestones! That’s the word. Including my commentary because I know how much you enjoy my psyche’s crisis. Um, yeah. I’m going to miss everything; I’ll be continents away in an entirely different time zone, filming a depressing fucking tv show, all alone; with the exception of my ex-boyfriend (who has been weirdly appropriate with me. Are you tired of all my notes in brackets yet?) Everything in my head is screaming it’s a bad idea: leaving. I can’t stay though; like, I can’t back out of this project. Papers have already been signed, the cast is locked in, and I’ve already removed myself from two other projects. It won’t look good on my theatre sheet/‘filmography’ to have that little *incomplete* red mark. To add (lol didn’t I already say thing or something? Fuck it, let’s keep rolling): Jesus Christ, my niece Camden has been so salty lately. She’s feeling so left out since I moved, but it’s not like I’m ten minutes away anymore and I can just easily pick her up. That little girl is my heart and soul; I’d never intentionally hurt her yet, here she is. Declining to spend the night or even hang out because she doesn’t get “all of me”. You have a daughter; what would you do with that one? Right, can’t make it personal. Sorry. Which, I think it super ironic when you think about how your patients (clients?) spill their motherfucking guts out on the ugly commercial carpet of your office (sorry if you chose it, so sorry!) and you’re not supposed to share much in return. My pop texted me to see if I was still coming to my parents’ wedding anniversary party, with my boyfriend. This will be the first time he’s meeting my dad, and the first time any significant other of mine will be meeting the rest of my PA family/friends. I don’t worry about Lin at all- he’s fucking amazing with people, and so, so charming. Jesus, does he have a way with words. Before this turns into a weird, unfulfilling love letter to him, let’s refocus. I don’t want to think about the way my father is going to look at me, at us, as a couple, together. Me, with another man. I’m still reeling over the last glance that seemed to scream, “ew, my son’s gay.” You know how people say things like, “Your parents love you unconditionally; they would never change a thing about you”? That’s definitely not true in my case, and I can feel it every time we’re alone. When we’re joking or talking, it’s cool, but then... then, there’s a silence that sets my teeth on edge and he acknowledges we’re not the same. Not that we were ever supposed to be but, I don’t even think I’m explaining this right, now. When I was a teenager (I know I’ve told you about this), a story came out on the local news about two homosexual men being wrongly jailed for a crime they didn’t commit. While awaiting trial, they were raped and beaten by a gaggle of bigger prison guys. Apparently it was so brutal they required stitching, to which the inmates tore out and repeated the first occurrence. Awesome, right. It’s forever burned in my mind what he said, because I know he wasn’t meaning to be cruel or callous but the words just came out. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone but if anyone would like it, God knows it would be those sissies. That’s what they all want anyway.” Followed by, “Sodomy is sodomy; they shouldn’t complain.” Every time I’m at my parents house, my brother Dave is amazing at swooping in to provide this phenomenal (majorly liberal) support system. He really pushes to educate my parents and not leave an older generation in the dark. I have to admit, he’s worked wonders with them, on so many different topics. That one though. I just think he looks at me and wishes so badly I was hetero. He’d sell his soul just to watch me marry Lea, I’m sure. Wow, my “just” count is insane but, no editing. Rolling with it; thoughts as they come. TLDR; I just feel like I’m disappointing everyone, or if I haven’t already, I’m going to. I fucking shouldn’t, I know that I’m thirty-three and still waiting for my parents approval is so goddamn old. It doesn’t mean anything though. Regardless, I’m waiting for the ball to drop, and I’m not sure the meds are helping. I haven’t been hyperventilating or had an actual attack but I still feel the anxiety. It feels like a harsh hand around my throat that makes it hard to breathe but I always somehow manage to catch my breath; that must be the drugs. I’m shocked I haven’t once mentioned how huge and disproportionate my thighs looked in every pair of baggy sweatpants and basketball shorts I tried on today. There’s one. It’s so exhausting to even try to talk about, or convey through here. You know the drill: thought about it for hours, picked at my food, maaaay have googled ‘things to eat for slim thighs’. Definitely did. At this point in life... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Between typing out sentences of this email, I stopped to try to get hard (you’re getting the explicit, uncut version, sorry; also hi, wishful thinking) but all porn does is annoy me. I feel so wound up, anxious, and almost angry. Low-key (this is new generation talk for like, “kinda”, I think) want to just... cry. In conclusion: Jonathan feels all the things and I haven’t even told you half of it... believe it or not. I have a headache and this couch is hurting my neck. This is all you’re getting. Relief, right? You’re like, “Thank fucking god, Jon, you already sent me a Harry Potter novel. Let me respond then you may continue rattling on about your not-even-bad life you’re complaining about.” It really ISN’T bad, for the record. It’s not, at all. I’m just in my feelings and at the peak of frustration. Okay, done ranting. I think I feel better? I might not even send this. Let’s play russian roulette with the enter key. If you get this, thumbs up. If you don’t... I guess I won’t expect a reply. Thank you, always, for dealing with me. I’m sorry these thoughts couldn’t wait... three days. Face palm.

[Sent]