#THEY POSTED THIS AND I WENT BONKERS FOR REAL

[timbunts]

"Must have been the Zeus socks 🐶"

(via leafs instagram)

SJS @ TOR | 11.30.22

[starkeyisthelastname]

Okay buuuut likeee, how does everyone react to pornstar!Rafe filming with reader a second time? Because I knowww hoes mad. Got every girl he’s ever fucked questioning their entire existence.🙂‍↕️

girl… bitches would be bonkers about this. 😅

Getting to film a scene with Rafe Cameron was a privilege in itself and everyone knew it. Not only was he gorgeous to look at, he had a huge dick and gave zero fucks about how brutally he fucked a bitch… especially since he was getting paid for it and the man was always money hungry. Any girl that got lucky enough to fuck him whether that was a random hookup or the ones he filmed with, always wanted more. He made it clear to every single one of them before they fucked or filmed to enjoy it because it was the only time they’d ever have Rafe Cameron’s dick.

Soo… when you waltz into the porn world as someone who’s fairly new to the industry and are getting fucked by the pussy slayer himself more than once… hoes are big mad. Not only did he film another scene with you, the twitter video he posted went viral and it was such a more intimate scene than anyone had ever seen. It wasn’t professionally filmed by any means, it was clearly shot on an iPhone and was in the privacy of your bedroom.

The shit talking would soon start around social media, about who you were and pointing out every flaw you had and why you weren’t good enough to be fucking him more than once. Really they were questioning themselves on why they weren’t good enough, but rather take it out on you. If Rafe would be filming another scene and someone would ask about it, he’d get them fired real quick. If it was a female star, whining about why he should fuck them again and not you, he was shutting them down real quick. “Her pussy is gold, got that bitch? Shut your fucking mouth, so I can get my money.” He would snap at them.

Rafe was already becoming very protective of you, and it started to really freak him out the way he wanted to defend you against anything bad. If anything was gonna make you cry, it was his dick sheathing inside of you. Not some jealous hoe wishing she was important enough for Rafe to fuck her again.

[artsykidwolf-2000]

Hello I would like to request something. How eould Sephiroth act when he has a crush on someone? Idc if it's post-Nibelheim or while he's still a Soldier. I leave that up to you. Thank you so much if you do this and have a wonderful day :3

Great question Le Anonymous! This is similar to what I thought for my Ravenroth ship (maybe?) BUT this topic is cute nonetheless. I might just do both ideas! Hope you like these headcanons!

SEPHIROTH CRUSH HEADCANONS

PRE-NIBELHEIM

Sephiroth as a SOLDIER he never really had romantic feelings, even as a teenager. Once he became more of an adult that's when his tables turned.

He would get flustered when Genesis or Angeal made a joke about the person Sephiroth liked. But he hid it well but you could see pink dust on his cheeks. He'd get confused about butterflies in his stomach and why they were there.

As he explores his feelings more, he tries to be braver around his special someone. When he eventually asked them on a date on his free time he was happy. He shined that shy smile of his. He took them to a fancy restaurant and bought them flowers or a little gift for a start. He's a good listener and would mostly let his date take charge of small talk if they were brave, if not he would.

He might take them on a walk or shopping on the next few dates. He has a lot of money to burn! As the relationship progressed he'd eventually confess his attraction. He's still new to all this lovey dovey crap so it'll be a slow start but with the help of his partner he would be just fine and even start to be very romantic on occasion.

Genesis and Angeal would absolutely still tease him about his romantic efforts and Genesis would try and coach him to the behest of Sephiroth's will. Angeal would just tell Sephiroth to be himself and be more gentleman-like and uphold honor in his word. He loves his friends' efforts but he's already had Genesis talk his ear off about Loveless references...Angeal is more tolerable.

Yes Zack would absolutely have his jaw hit the dang floor about hearing about ALL of this and how Sephiroth has a partner. Zack just can't help not hiding his puppy-like wonder.

Sephiroth talks about his mother a lot with their partner. If his partner was willing to research more about if his mother was truly dead or not AND found the truth then you bet your bottom gil he would try and find his real mother and bring justice to Hojo.

POST-NIBELHEIM

Good lawd where to start....

Ok! With Sephiroth off his rocker bc of everything that's happened. Things would be different and difficult to comprehend.

If Sephiroth still had his partner before he went bonkers he would ABSOLUTELY try and keep them with him at all costs. He still loves them but it's slowly creeping into bad territory. If he did not have a partner beforehand he would kinda stalk them like he does Cloud. Leave flowers and candy and whatever else on their doorstep. Then it turns into jewelry or expensive items. Then himself out of the blue.

It creeps the partner out but the love is still there. His good looks and charm works wonders. They try and figure out what went wrong with him. Maybe they try and reverse what happened if they're more than just a normal person. Magic can only go so far.

If their efforts are fruitful then he slowly reverses back to his old self just a bit but can't quite shake off Jenova unless someone destroys her. He also finds out about his real mother. He would search for her with them.

If it was in vain then he would be angered fairly easily. Trying to turn them into more like him or be more loyal or obey him. Regardless if he still had love in his heart.

Sometimes at night, you can hear cries...but from who is up to the mind's desire...

[rimunagenius]

I loveeee your writing! could you write some head canons about Caitlin clark dating a famous pop star think Sabrina carpenter and her just being obsessed with reader, talking about her non stop in interviews ect

hi anon! i love this idea and thank you so much!💕

Caitlin Clark x Pop Star!reader

you met the most cliche way but super cute nonetheless

you had been sitting court side at an iowa game after the wrap of your tour

you had been a basketball fan since you were a little girl; you played growing up and in college as well before pursuing your music career

she had caught your eye, you having a little crush on her (her confidence through the TV when you followed on tour, enticed you insanely)

your relationship is definitely she fell first and she fell harder (you fell first and she fell harder)

Caitlin loved your music, putting the whole team on you so when she saw you in the crowd, courtside, she came to impress

you just so happened to show up on the biggest night of her career (she broke all those records and she’ll say it was her playing…her teammates would say your presence contributing to her ambition to break the records quicker)

after the game, you stayed behind, talking to your other friends in the music industry who had been there when some of the team came up to you asking for pictures

Caitlin had press interviews, and when they were over so you asked to take a picture with her

“I should be asking you this question, shouldn’t i?” She smiled at you before putting her arm around your waist, and you to her taking the picture

“My biggest flex is I met my celeb crush.” You told your crowd at your small venue show. “I met the Caitlin Clark, and she’s so much prettier in person.”

You treated your fans like your friends. doing a lot of crowd work and have conversations. You told them the real meaning behind ‘because i liked a boy’

a fan had recorded and leaked the footage, it everting around everywhere and inevitably reaching Caitlin

Jada had showed Kate, who had told Caitlin

That’s when Caitlin had it bad

For the next several weeks after that clip went to the media you and Caitlin went back and forth sharing posts to your story of eachother with “stunning” (directed to you) and “i’m your #1 fan” (directed to her)

you didn’t try and hide it your lyrics more controversial than admitting you had a crush a Caitlin

then you both were at a event, you shooting your shot and inviting her as your date

You guys talked more after the stories so inviting her seemed like the right move to you in starting your evolving relationship

you guys definitely were close that night…

i’m talking paparazzi getting shots of you where Caitlin just so happened to have her arms or hands on your waist

then she started appearing more at your shows wether they were small venues or big arenas

Caitlin definitely was starting to get more confident and cocky with you

“this wouldn’t be an issue if you were my girl already”

“oh, so you got something to ask me?”

“no because you already know you want me, and you know i want you.”

Cait obv asks you to be her gf despite this, and it was very intimate and romantic

the hard launch went absolutely bonkers too because both of your fandoms were so large

you made ten times more appearances at her games, courtside, and repping her number loud and proud

you wrote songs about her, and they did so well because you guys were the model couple

“So how do you feel now that you’re dating the Caitlin Clark?” you’d get asked that so frequently the answer was automatic

“Like the luckiest girl in the world.” It was cheesy but it was true

your dream come true

you were subtle; no matter how cocky Caitlin had gotten and how she was usually the most dominant one (Cait is definitely a top and the more masc one when she’s put in a wlw relationship…can’t change my mind)

but was your biggest cheerleader and wouldn’t stop gushing about you when you came up in press interviews

she’d find ways to bring you up like

“oh, me and my girlfriend…”

“my girlfriend would’ve thought that was funny…”

“my girlfriend…”

you two were literally meant to be

two big careers matched you both

[inbarfink]

Okay, I’ve been considering it for quite a bit and I think that if Tumblr existed in Japanifornia… most of us would probably not be aware of the series’ main characters.

Like, lawyers just don’t tend to be high-profile publicly-known figures. Even within True Crime communities or the coverage of high-public-interest cases, people don’t tend to focus on the lawyers as much more than a representative of the defendant and the legal system as a whole. And yeah, you can say this is just because real-life lawyers are Boring and if they did the kind of Bonkers Shit AA Lawyers do we would pay attention to them… but we do actually have textual evidence that Japanifornia treats lawyers not-too-differently than real life.

Mia’s murder, and probably the uncovering of all of Bluecorp’s dirty dealing, was highly talked about, but Phoenix’s actions in court went kinda ignored. And note that this is the case where Phoenix literally defended himself and broke the Demon Prosecutor’s five years winning streak, and that wasn’t enough to draw eyes to his part in this whole case. 

And that’s also generally consistent with how characters treat Phoenix throughout the rest of the games. By the AJ Trilogy era, it’s clear that Phoenix has made quite a name for himself… in the legal world. If you are yourself a lawyer or another sort of legal professional or just unusually interested in court proceeding, you know the name ‘Phoenix Wright’ 

But if you’re just a regular person who cares about the law the Regular Amount, you probably have no idea who this is.

So I’d guess most of Japanifornian Tumblr would probably be aware of a lot of the cases in the games, especially considering how many of them concern, like, corporate corruption and organized crime and legal corruption and international politics and the entertainment industry and other such stuff that makes it likely to get national/international news coverage. And also so many of them are so bizarre and wacky and are thus prime meme fodder…

But most people wouldn’t necessarily know the name of the lawyer the Nickel Samurai blackmailed to defend him after he ordered an assassin to kill the Jammin’ Ninja, or even how involved that lawyer actually was in Matt Engarde’s downfall.

But there would probably be a small mini-fandom of Tumblrina Lawyers and other legal nerds who are ABSOLUTELY obsessed with the WAA, and trying to collect any piece of info they can find about their adventures. 

(That’s also another aspect to consider, the general public in Japanifornia does not have full knowledge of everything we get to see in the game. News coverage of the smaller cases would be extremely minimal and very regional - and even the bigger cases probably won’t give you a full line-by-line record of everything that happened in Court. Apollo Justice was, like, the Biggest Phoenix Wright Stan in the Universe and he had very choppy and partial knowledge of the Gramarye Trial. We have to consider that even folks who are trying to keep track of the AA Lawyers in-universe would not get the full picture from the media. And that’s before we get into fake news and rumors.)

And meanwhile, the rest of Tumblr would probably treat that Fandom the same sort of bemused delight we give to, like, the extremely dedicated gimmick blogs. Like, you’d probably see less posts about Phoenix and Co. as you’d see posts memeing about the fact there’s a Tumblr Fandom for ‘some random law agency in Japanifornia’, they’d be like five thousands people in the notes going “There’s a Tumblr Fandom for WHAT? WHY IS THIS THE FIRST TIME I’M HEARING ABOUT THIS??” and then one person from the WAA fandom going “NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS IS THE GUY WHO UNCOVERED THE PHANTOM HE’S JUMPED OFF A BURNING BRIDGE ONCE YOU LITERALLY TALKED ABOUT A TRIAL HE DID YESTERDAY YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HE WAS INVOLVED”. 

Now, that’s all for the Defense Attorneys. The Prosecutors have a bit more publicity. I mean, Phoenix literally heard about Prosecutor Edgeworth on the news.

But also… I do think this publicity is highly regional. Like, Phoenix ended up stumbling on newspaper coverage of Miles because he lives in the same city as him. I’m guessing that most of the series’ Prosecutors are at least casually known not just to Legal Folks, but also generally to people within Los Angetokyo and people involved in Japanifornian Politics… but also not much outside of that sphere either. Again, the series does establish that they are not that well-known amongst laypeople even when they are famous amongst other lawyers

And are generally recognized by fellow legal professionals and journalists and people involved in criminal activity. So the situation with them won’t be that different than with the WAA, they might be a tad more high-profile, depending on how many Tumblr users are specifically from Japaniforina and wanna make memes about the local politics… but those who will get really invested in their misadventures won’t be that different from the kind of people who’d get really into Phoenix Wright. 

Klavier is the obvious exception. Like most Famous Lawyers, he’s actually primarily famous for something other than law. It’s just that in his case, instead of politics, it’s being a world-famous rock star. There’s plenty of textual evidence that the Gavinners are an actual household name and they’d probably have a pretty sizable Tumblr Fandom, but… well… while I assume any casual Gavinner fan knows that Klavier is also a Prosecutor, I’d guess only the insanely dedicated fans and the Haters looking for something problematic would actually start digging into the records of the cases he worked on. But then again, Tumblr does have a lot of insanely dedicated fans and Haters, so maybe Legal Misadventures Involving Klavier would be kinda mainstream on Japanifornia Tumblr.

[ashleyeveerson]

✨ THE DAN AND PHIL LORE pt. 3✨

CHECK OUT PART 2: https://www.tumblr.com/ashleyeveerson/760707933651746816?source=share

Phil ALSO comes out! (yeah no i'm not crying what? not them feeling comfortable enough to be themselves yeah). 2019 also brings us the adoption of a fish named Norman (a cutie) AND they also post pictures about their recent trip to Japan [the photo of Phil looking up to Dan behind the camera? yeah i am so normal about it, i swear]. There is hope in the horizon still for a Dan and Phil comeback...

BAM! A certain virus runs wild and forces everyone to stay at home. Phil continues to upload solo videos which distracted so many of us during these dark times. Dan, however is AWOL and the only pic we have of him is a shitty screenshot of him in glasses and a mask helping Phil rescue an injured pigeon (lockdown was WILD).

Also, my boy Dan post a cryptic tweet that leads to the announcement of a self-help book named YOU WILL GET THROUGH THIS NIGHT (because you will <3). Nah but I can't count how many times I've sobbed reading it, just him trying to help out others who have also struggled with mental health... istg i love this man

Hey so THEY BUY THEIR FOREVER PHOUSE TOGETHER they're gonna kill me one day istg. "Dan and Phil just decided to pay a mortgage together", top 10 sentences that would kill a 2016 phan. They are slaying, they are glowing... also rip Norman the fish you will not be forgotten

So during 2014 the fates (aka a random youtuber) foretold that Dan and Phil would be married in 2022. Since that clearly didn't happen the meme PHIVORCE united the phandom once more. ALSO Dan is out there shitting on youtube (as he should) and going on his solo tour WE'RE ALL DOOMED! Which i love with all my heart and also Phil being there for him every step of the way... AHHHHHHHH

Anyways a certain video called Dan and Phil finally tell the truth hits the internet and let's just say GOD DAMN. This also starts a wonderful trend amongst Dan and Phil in which they make fun of their audience (we deserve it ngl) and absolutley SHOCK US with new information about bonkers shit from their past [apparently they were offered a threesome MULTIPLE TIMES???]

It's the end. They've decided to give up their channel "Dan and Phil Games" forever... let's take a moment and silent and mourn with a compilation of Heart eyes Howell

...

SIKE! We're back baby and we're better than ever!!! The goodbye video turned out the be an ANNOUNCEMENT of their comeback. They are back, Dil Howlter is here and Phil confesses to having dyed everything green in the house when Dan went on tour bc he missed him (OH GOD). Also, the Halloween baking video introduced us to the icon that is.... *drumroll please*

SISTER DANIEL, the queen of making everyone reconsider their sexuality... she is the moment, she is an icon and she is serving astronomical levels of cunt at all time [jokes aside, Dan being comfortable enough to do drag in public, fuck they've come so far i'm so proud of them <3].

And here we are in the future, it's present day and they are queerer and happier than ever. THE PICTURES I CAN'T ISTG. Also Dan's Birthday stream is beyond iconic. First of all my unproblematic kings make it a charity stream to donate to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund (using their public influence for good hell yeah)... And how did they raise the money you ask? WELL BY HITTING IS WHERE WE'RE WEAKEST. Sister Daniel makes a spectacular comeback, FATHER PHIL is introduced and Dan even dyes his hair red to be more Good Omens coded... which timeline are we living in again? like how is any of this real?

Also them drawing the PINOF whiskers on their faces again... they're literally growing old together I'm gonna go sob in a corner. Also the fake apology video bc they have no fashion sense in the Sims 4 is hilarious as fuck. HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLY BE SO MUCH HOTTER ON THEIR THIRTIES EXPLAIN??

anyways the phandom is still speculating wether they're erasing "i love you's" at the end of their text when they show them on videos... guess some things never change. Nah but the vibes are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NOW, they are more open than they've ever been and participate on the phan culture FULLY to the point that they're the ones terrorizing us now.

QUICK DETOUR TO TALK ABOUT PHIL'S FAMOUS BAD LUCK (and then they wonder why he's always dying in the fanfics). Nah but my poor man has had his fair share of medical problems, the most recent being...

OH GOD WHY WOULD YOU ANNOUNCE SOMETHING LIKE THAT THIS WAY?? nah like using humor as a coping mechanism and all but do they wanna gives a heart attack?! iconic i fear however

So yeah the video where they talk about it is WILD (funniest shit about the whole ordeal is that a nurse mistook Dan as Phil's son). Also I saw a tweet speculating about Phil having a hickey like... first of all what is it? 2009? Second of all IT'S MOST LIKELY A POPPED VESSEL FROM LOSING ALL THAT BLOOD YOU KNOW

They still were able to go on their vacation (aka the rodent boy summer) which gifted us with this iconic pics... ALSO they dropped a new Dan and Phil beats for summer go check out the names of the tracks istg they wanna kill their fans.

Nothing is sacred anymore, they've infiltrated twtphan, they're actively reposting memes and writing fanfiction about themselves. It's the wild west, everytime you get a notification is like playing Russian Rulet. Cringe is dead and Dan and Phil ARE COMING NEAR YOUR CITY on a tour named "Terrible Influence" where Phil's spent 300€ on silicone. It's a wonderful time to be a phan.

OKAY SO here's some stuff that didn't make the cut but that i find too hilarious to not mention. In no apparent order: DAN DRESSING UP AS A CATBOY, Dan and Phil playing technicians 1 and 2 on Big Hero 6 and two brothers on the Lion King (wtf was that also they gave the gorilas matching fringes), Dan dressing up as a golden pig (my boy has RANGE) and finally Dan being too embarassed to admit he stalked Phil and telling a reporter he was only asking for "editing tips" if you know what i mean

Also a short compilation of Dan and Phil losing the idgaf war against eachother THEY ARE SO THOUGHTFUL ABOUT EVERYTHING. Special mention to Daniel's 🧡 when Phil praised "We're all doomed!" and Dan's ranch metaphor to describe their relationship (just go watch the mukkbang video OH LORD)

SO, in conclusion... Dan and Phil's refusal to belittle their past and instead embrace it as part of their story while actively moving into the future alongside the phandom YEAH THAT SHIT MEANS SOMETHING. They're simultaneously healing our inner child while embracing us as the adults we've become i have many feelings about them

So what are they?

They're just Dan and Phil.

[margareth-lv]

A question about the “C/T at a table” pic you posted…

Not sure if you were here back when this happened in real-time, but do you (or anyone else) remember what that lady’s name was that took the pic of C & T at the restaurant table?

I remember she claimed she was a writer/journalist/marketing professional, and soon after the incident started replying to posts from her Tumblr account too (named something related to army wife life, I think). I also remember her son really went overboard rage-responding to IG(?) comments and calling everyone who thought it was a setup a, “crazy c*nt” (or something close to that), lol.

You can see her last name on the computer in the pic, Macnaughton. Was Christine the first name? That whole episode was bonkers (one of many stupid moments in this whole saga).

I want to see if she’s still around and if the NDA has expired yet. :)

————————————— Dearest Gentle Anon,

I have to say, you sent me the question in an oddly graphic form (how did you manage that?), but I'm more than happy to give you a detailed answer. I’ve been blogging on Tumblr since March 2021. Admittedly, my initial activity here could hardly be called ‘writing’, as it was mainly reblogging, but by the time I joined the fandom, everything was already 'done', except for the unexpected appearance of The Little Soul in August 2021. So the ‘Hare Picture’ that was shared in May 2019 was already on the table here before my arrival. It seems you know a lot more about this photo (and probably a lot more besides) than I do. And yes, the photo we're discussing can still be found on Instagram. The account belongs to Clare Macnaughton, a writer and blogger who goes by @mrsmacnaughty on the platform.

You’re right – you can see her name written in the bottom left corner of the photo on the computer monitor. I hadn't noticed that before, so thank you for pointing it out. So yes, this photo is still available on Instagram, unlike the other post, shared in January 2018 by MELISSA HOYER [Pop Culture. Commentator. Collaborator. Consultant. Talker. Travel. Lifestyle. News. Fashion] ⬇️⬇️⬇️

*** *** *** Isn't it odd that this 'engagement' post has disappeared? 🤔 So my conclusion is that... It's always been part of the unprofessional activities of STARZ's PR department that the Strong Women Actively Present on Instagram were included to create the Narrative. In particular, they were used to announce to the public the milestones in Caitríona Balfe's ‘love life’.

It all seems really genuine and from the heart.

[25 June, 2024]

[batsplat]

if you were to direct a motogp movie (or make a one season of television) what season or rivalry would you make it about? and more interesting what artistic liberties would you take? it doesn’t have to be a straight up biopic bc imo those are often boring, instead it could be something like velvet goldmine (1998) aka fictional characters whose real life counterparts are pretty obvious, veering in like rpf territory. anyways👀

did you know. one time this guy put a curse on this other guy. and he never won a race again

anyway, look, I do feel like by this point that's the BORING answer from me, but obviously it's where my mind first went. I'm not sure I'd actually want it out there in film form because by now it's badly enough remembered that it's like, my cute little niche story, and I think there's something fun about the Wider World even within the motogp fandom not exactly getting how bonkers the whole thing was. (I know other humans have canonically watched motogp 2004 but I swear even journalists have forgotten some key key details and it's kinda annoying but also fun.) bold words from someone who's been blogging about it!! weird gatekeep-y instinct. but basically my job here is done as far as outreach is concerned - I wrote a very long post, now I get asks about it twice a week that allow me to think about it some more with the four other people who care, perfect balance. that rivalry doesn't need to go mainstream!! the whole point of it is that it's kinda cruel but narratively pleasing that it's gone under the radar, because it's another sign valentino won. but obviously, I cannot literally make a film about this, so the hypothetical repercussions I think maybe we can put aside for a moment here

okay I came back to this bit of the post after I increasingly got into of the spirit of coming up with dumb ideas, but it did make me flesh out what I'd even WANT from something like that. I'm with you anon, a lot of biopics are boring!! if you want to just know what happened, please just literally go and 'watch the races' and 'read books' like what are we actually getting here. you kinda want to give it a purpose for existing, right, a way of portraying real/mildly fictionalised events in a manner that is also taking some kind of stance on the material AND is doing stuff you can't do 'in real life'. thing is, look, you could make 2006 into a film, and I'm sure it'd be perfectly nice because it's fundamentally a solid underdog story (well, inherently winning a title with repsol honda is NOT being an underdog but you can write it that way), but also what are you doing beyond just telling people what happened? I feel like that generally about single seasons, they're not really doing anything for me. I was also turning around the biaggi/valentino rivalry in my head in part because that's the one valentino gave as his answer for 'rivalry he would turn into a film' (marc big wet eyes sitting right next to him), but like. a film about that rivalry from valentino's pov is fundamentally not something I'm interested in. you have all these isolated very memorable moments that make it work as a rivalry, like you can absolutely spin them into a dramatic yarn that goes through the genesis of their conflict to middle finger gate to punching gate to assen + donington + sachsenring + phillip island 2001 and it's basically *insert rousing music* successful coming of age. at most you can lean into the fact valentino became successful at being a dick. like idk it's fine but also what's the point? valentino is challenged in a sports context by biaggi, he's challenged because he realises his words have consequence and the press actually reports the words he says to journalists (the horror), but he is fundamentally not challenged on a personal level. that's the entire point, right? it's the ultimate comfort zone rivalry - biaggi is a dick who it is quite easy to hate and also reacts poorly to valentino's initial provocation. the animosity escalates and it is inherently fun to beat him. valentino is mean to him, but it's not like he even really crosses any lines to beat him. like you can make it into a film, and if you twisted the material a little bit you could make it satisfying, but I don't want to!

now the way the writing process of this post worked was that I was going to breeze through a bunch of non-sete/valentino rivalries and explain why I think some of them don't work for our purposes here, but then I ended up writing myself into changing my mind. so my take on the biaggi rivalry is that actually, you CAN make it work but it has to be from biaggi's perspective. basically, I think you've got to amadeus it (a web weave I have been thinking of making at some point btw). so,,, it's a meditation on talent and how unfair it all is, maybe minus the bit where salieri poisons amadeus (I know that doesn't happen in the film) or dresses up as amadeus' father to, y'know, make him write a requiem on his death bed. and it's not amadeus in that HERE, the clown prince gets a happy ending! but it's more like, in thematic terms, I think you have to zero in on this bit. biaggi didn't have parents who shoved him on a bike when he was three years old, he didn't have parents who were invested in his motorcycling career (or even necessarily particularly invested in him), he started the sport late and discovered that, yes, he did have a prodigious amount of skill in it - but one that he started honing far later than valentino did. he approached his career with a sort of grim resolve, surly and irascible and not interested in making friends with any of his competitors but very, very good. he goes away from the race track and dates all these models, he irritates fellow riders, he's not part of the gang and he's happy about it. he's very successful! four 250cc titles, wins his first ever race in 500cc at a time when doohan was very much winning everything. he's also just like,,,, an interesting and spiky enough character it's not hard to make him come alive

but then of course you have this gradual emergence of the amadeus character, the one who challenges his established position in the court of,, well... motorcycle racing, and also as the guy italians rooted for! and valentino's obviously, y'know, in so many ways the exact opposite from biaggi, and he's super young and cheerful and lively and is doing all his silly celebrations and is being a bit camp and goofy and treats motorcycle racing as a party (you really want to lean into the culture clash here, like in amadeus it's because you have stuffy austrian court vibes but here it's because everyone is having their bones broken every two minutes and just how... kinda grim a lot of motorcycle racing was). and he's also this innocent! yes, he insults biaggi, and yes, in retrospect we know valentino is kinda evil, but at the time he was a kid with a big mouth who was a little taken aback by how that biaggi feud sort of escalated beyond what he'd actually intended it to do! and biaggi just, hates him. and I think, sorry to the real man max biaggi here, but you've got to play with how once they're actually competing with each other, it's miserable how there's just this unbreachable gulf in talent. like, whatever biaggi does he cannot win! he isn't going to defeat valentino over the course of a full season! which is depressing and horrible and CRUEL, because there's this inevitability to the whole thing... and also! because valentino doesn't DESERVE it. and you don't have to go full salieri pleading with god to explain how god could give this CLOWN all this talent, but it's kinda the same vibe! how is it valentino, who is constantly just having a laff and canonically maybe wasn't the biggest gym-goer in the paddock and is just generally seen as, y'know, a bit of a dandy, this foppish clown who everyone loves and who doesn't have to work hard to be good - how is he the one who is winning so much!! it's miserable and unjust... and I think how you portray this is that you really emphasise the kinda, repetitive nature of the defeat. like, I think you probably want to make this into a non-linear narrative where all this biaggi backstory is communicated somehow but you don't just start it when he was born or whatever - you start it in 2001 when they're competing for a title and already hate each other. and then you heavy on the time loop vibes. the whole cinematic language and all that other shit should emphasise how all these weekends are structured in exactly the same way and if you're losing to this one guy, all these different weekends can start feeling the same. it bleeds into each other, it feels inescapable, you're trapped in this narrative you can't change... worst of all, you even return to the same places again and again - like play with that! biaggi keeps coming back to where they had the fist fight, to where valentino first insulted him all those years back. you play up the disorientation and the misery of it all, plus biaggi canonically gives us all this kinda messy freudian shit to play with like how he was dating 'valentina' and his relationship with her was falling apart because of how miserable valentino was making him. it's all there!!

ANYWAYS the way you conclude this story is!! welkom 2004!! so again we can artistic license this a little bit and, uh, ignore sete (though I do also think it's fun if you lean into biaggi being displaced as a rival and staring at them being friendly and happy with each other from the outside) - but the key bit is that valentino is finally making the big error. biaggi wasn't winning titles on a yamaha, since he left yamaha has gotten worse, now valentino is making this big mistake out of his own hubris. language of cinema that shit and make everything brighter and more hopeful.... the time loop is finally over, biaggi has escaped, this year will be different!!!! everyone in his circle agrees, valentino is fucked. step off the plane at welkom (pre season testing didn't happen in this universe) and it's literal dawn of a new day... staring out at the sun and finally, biaggi can move on, can live a new and different life. anyway. obviously we all know what's coming next - you have this big dramatic climactic race where biaggi throws himself at valentino again and again and again and he comes so close to winning it... but he doesn't. and you have valentino living his best life, being delighted, but the film is focusing on how like,,, we're bleaching the joy back out of biaggi's life, how actually he's returning to what he already knew. and it ends on the podium, with the camera focusing on biaggi on that fucking second step or zooming in or whatever (idk how cinema works) and it just finishes on this shot of biaggi dead-eyed in a bleak world, trapped again for eternity aka until the end of the 2005 season. done!! I'm not sure this is quite what valentino had in mind, but. well. that's how I'd do it

this is from the pushkin play from 1832 not the 1984 film but like. low key pushkin already kinda nailed the essence of sports rivalries in the 1830s and we just have to acknowledge that sometimes

right. so the casey rivalry is where I'm going to go completely off the wall. skip this bit to get to the slightly saner stuff. this is also one I fully admit to sometimes playing around with in my mind anyway, but. uh. I'm gonna be taking this one in just. well. places. I do have a vision here but I also don't quite know how to explain it in a way that doesn't make me sound like I've lost my mind, but well if you're still reading this then that's on you. so lemme get this out of the way: the classic sports biopic formula would work well with casey. if I had to point to a single rider I would sports biopic-ify, it's casey. so you have all this kinda,, obvious adversity that's easy to get across, and it's a narrative you can follow chronologically without too much trouble. you've got all the childhood stuff, the australian racing club not letting him join them, the move to britain, the rising through the ranks, it's also this very biopic-friendly 'nobody ever believed in him apart from like three people' stuff. and the premier class is also narratively satisfying, from the rocky rookie season to the kinda shock success to then all the lows of 2008 and 2009 and the physical ailments and the anxiety and then the switch to honda and the title and then him deciding to retire... that's all good stuff! you can absolutely biopic-ify it! gun to my head and sure, I can walk you through exactly what bits of his life I'd focus on and put in what order and so on, and I think ultimately you could make a very good sports biopic from that

[some mild gore to follow in this next section]

but also. thing is. that's fine. it's just not where I want to go here, because again I feel like at that point you can also pick up his autobiography and just read it - because what you're basically doing here is just filming that. and I get how this stuff works, you're bringing the story to a wider audience, you can show stuff in a different way in that medium etc etc, and that's all great but also I don't care about bringing stuff to a wider audience. I care about doing fun stuff in my brain. so what I'd actually do here is just, basically, go in the exact opposite direction and ditch all the realism. genuinely, ditch the live action stuff, we're going animated - what I'm interested in here is stuff where we need to be able to fully suspend our disbelief and lean into some surreal shit. I'm not going to bury the lede here: my idea is that you take that thing where casey said he hated how ducati was ruining the bike by letting valentino's yellow encroach on it and, basically,, just go all in on that bit. like come on, that is so singularly visually evocative, it truly captures a lot of what's going on thematically in that rivalry. (see also x and x for the most relevant casey posts.) casey sees valentino as the malevolent force, this infection! he associates him strongly with a specific colour, one that can be sickly or unnatural or just... evil. malignant, malicious, malevolent, all the m words. to casey, valentino is a personification of everything that is wrong with the sport. valentino is literally the walking manifestation for so many of his issues, from the dangerous riding to the lack of respect to the lying to the cult of personality to the obsession with image and the media to the backroom games to the politics to the injustice of how different riders are treated differently, like!! he's literally all of that! this is a topic for another post, but this plays out in a lot of kinda, weird and funky ways where it's a two way street and sometimes when casey talks about motogp you go 'actually I think that's just valentino?' (btw he also does this about 'europe' right I don't think those are europeans you hate casey that's literally just valentino) and sometimes when he talks about valentino it's kinda? this feels like it's about a little more than the bloke himself? and basically, right, I think you need to take this to its natural conclusion where casey used to admire him and look up to him and want to emulate him on track and then gets disillusioned when valentino's worshippers turn against casey and casey is the one to bring valentino down to earth and... listen, I think you need to play around with valentino being a literal god. and I think you need to have casey stab him to cover up the yellow on the ducati with blood

okay. look. the idea here, right, is that we're basically making the subtext text, and just digging into that process of 'bringing valentino back to earth', of taking on a god and having the audacity to succeed, and also treating valentino as this sort of. infection in his own mind. the bike is literally being infected!! casey may have left the ducati but he STILL has some fidelity and love for this project, those were his people he worked with, and now valentino is coming in and just twisting everything around himself!! but also I think how this functions is that, okay, so you have all this normal stuff that's the actual 'plot' in the 'real world', but the ISSUE with the real world is that there's a lot of stuff that just. isn't possible there. like the thing casey wants in that rivalry but is never going to have is... a captive audience. a big problem casey has in that rivalry is that he doesn't get the chance to actually say a lot of stuff to valentino. he starts using the media more and more and plays the game on valentino's level, but there's still this disconnect where mr straight talking is the valentino rival who valentino never really blanks or freezes out like... there's a disconnect! there's valentino the person, who casey never quite figures out how to just straight up hate, and then there's valentino the character, the racer, the rider, the god who casey DESPISES. but when they're doing small talk at pressers and podiums, casey doesn't get to talk to that version of valentino! he just talks to valentino the person, who obviously isn't literally a different person but is also not going to explain to casey where he's coming from, is he, and also isn't someone who casey can explain to where HE is coming from. and that gulf... it does bother casey. I don't think he can quite verbalise why either, but there's just... this creeping tension. I think it'd be easier for casey if valentino really were more of a caricature, just kinda a dick in all walks of life. and there's just these canonical hints of that... the way casey talks about how he's sure valentino as a guy is fine, but he never knew valentino like that, the whole 'I'd like to go with valentino for dinner to tell him where I was coming from in that rivalry' thing, like!! it's there

so basically EYE think what you should be doing is using the wonders of storytelling to actually. embrace that element. and just leave realism behind now and again. valentino is a god, he is literally worshipped, he's part of this pantheon that casey is trekking to reach. casey is brave enough to take him on in combat, he is the first one who is truly able to draw blood. he sees how valentino isn't just a god of joy or battles or speed or the SUN or any of that other stuff - he's a disease, an illness, a god who is also a false prophet... the worship never quite goes away, because who ever truly gets rid of their valentino rossi complex, but casey eventually is given the chance to face a chained valentino and kinda,,, ritualistically publicly humiliate him using the ducati as both this sick thing that has to be 'cured' and this symbol of valentino's failure. I'm sorry, visual language goes brr here, like chain him up, do weirdly eroticised torture idc!! (psst psst valentino's fucked up shoulder also extremely goes brr here, casey low key a teensy bit weird about valentino's injuries? his thing after the 2010 leg break where he goes 'why's everyone making such a big deal about this other people break their limbs too' and then after 2011 jerez immediately asking whether valentino's shoulder is okay in just a very obviously passive aggressive way. literally he opens with that, valentino isn't using it as an excuse or anything, for some reason it's already on casey's mind and I would politely contest it was out of genuine concern for valentino's wellbeing!! it's just kinda? I'm so compelled by it? I suppose it is kinda about how valentino's suffering gets taken more seriously than his own? how those absences are received differently by the motogp world? idk I find this fun because casey does know this is one thing valentino can't really be blamed for himself, so it just slips out a bit? but yeah, casey + valentino's injuries, nobody's talking about it but I sure will, let casey get weird and mean and a teensy bit sadistic about valentino's injuries in an artistic manner.) crucially I like animation as a medium here because I think it's easier to lean into surrealism when you don't have to hand hold the audience so much through the suspension of realism, also there's just some imagery you can do in cooler ways through animation where in live action it may just look. weird. (I think you can also do one of those things where you have a live action film with only those specific bits animated but also... why? it just feels like in live action you need more 'justifications' for things, like am I saying casey is having some weird hallucinations and is losing his mind? no I just want to have weird vision sequences ffs.) the colour stuff!! valentino/casey is big on the colour coding as a rivalry, to the extent casey is even, y'know, drawing attention to it in the literal text!! yellow and red are banger colours, valentino is big on imagery himself with all his sun + moon motifs, it's kind of all there to make the easy next step to kinda zany surreal imagery. ritualistic stabbing works better in animation, you can kinda get the blood to like. drip down and overwhelm the yellow illness that's slithered out across the bike

and. AND of course what this entire set up allows you to do is.... give them an opportunity to talk. they can't talk in real life! casey CAN'T give him his real thoughts on anything, and fundamentally valentino can't either. they're opponents. they're strangers who chat sometimes. it's not just that they aren't friends, it's that fundamentally they cannot be friends - because their ability to do their actual jobs depends on a certain level of professional distance. valentino of course does have a decent read on casey, and vice versa, because when you're figuring out how to defeat someone then (if you're valentino) you're looking to play the rider too. valentino's entire approach depends on focusing in on his rivals and attempting to throw them off, to make them unravel. he's watching casey closely!! the entire journey of casey's first three seasons in the premier class essentially becomes like, this god of their world focusing in on him. figuring him out. trying to gnaw away at him. obviously, animation also allows you to go big on the panopticon-y imagery which is kinda fundamental to their rivalry, because of their fundamentally oppositional stances to 'performing' for the ever present cameras where there IS a little bit of common ground in they have both struggled with it. but valentino isn't going to ever say that to casey! casey isn't going to open up to valentino! so if you give them,, you know, a different arena to express themselves, where casey actually has this external figure to talk to (as he's like, cutting him open I guess) whereas valentino actually is put in a position where he's allowed to respond, where he can taunt casey a little bit, where he can interrogate casey's approach and also the similarities between the two of them and how casey has been forced to become a little more like valentino to challenge him... because the thing is, right, valentino is so big on message discipline with his rivals and has completely stopped talking about that rivalry post mid 2013 that, first of all, you have this complete imbalance in who's been telling this story for the past decade, but second of all you kinda don't have a sense of what valentino would respond? idk!! I think this is mainly fun as a thought exercise for me specifically but also I do think it's kinda, digging into some of the bits that make this narratively work as a rivalry, how valentino in this rivalry is actually just kinda... removed. like he's not really emotional about it!! at most he's a bit bitchy, but even that just feels about The Game. it's the most extreme in this regard followed by jorge - but with valentino's other feuds you kinda... see a bit more an unguarded moment, see something a little more real there. the casey rivalry feels so uncomfortable precisely because valentino is a little... inhuman in this one. I mean, if you want to have valentino as some kind of cross between a deity and a monster in any of his feuds, this is the one. casey's just an obstacle to him. idk don't you think casey kinda wants to chain valentino down and stab him and make him see casey a little more... well, I think he should want it and I think it'd be fun to see and get them to talk to each other. ugh and also all the implications of making the faith vs non-believer elements more literal... casey the heretic!!!

there's some obvious stuff here you'd have to figure out, like 'how do you make this work as a narrative even to people who aren't familiar with casey stoner at all' and 'who the fuck do you think the target audience is here' and 'you do know this is not the kind of thing that would ever be made, right, go back to the casey stoner sports biopic like a sane person' but!! I do think it's material you can make work if you're just,,, efficient and smart in how you're actually telling the 'real life' version of the rivalry. also in my head this is. idk. an animated limited series not a film, which then brings in other stuff like 'episodic structure' because I'm fundamentally opposed to tv shows that think they're films. and look, I'm not going to write an entire film script treatment here, I just think a good writer can figure this stuff out. blood on the ducati is the framing device for everything else, simple. lots of animated floating eyes I reckon, first casey is watching valentino and then valentino is watching casey and the whole world is watching them... and it does bleed into real life just a little, where you're wondering whether casey is actually imagining/dreaming this stuff or valentino is or if they both know it somehow... you can get away with more ambiguity in animation. anyway, if you do want more thoughts on this one specifically for whatever reason, let me know because this one I do actually have more on

also laguna 2008 is a bit tortoise and the hare coded if you really think about it

[end of gore]

so. on to jorge. hm. the thing about jorge is that he was kinda writing a coming of age film in his own head, so like - yes, that's what you do go for? you can play it straight and follow how jorge has cast his rivals, or you can pin the whole narrative on the fact that jorge has cast them - the kinda artificiality of the narrative, the way jorge is this storyteller who isn't being recognised as much as he thinks he should be, isnt adequately appreciated. the way there's this three way discourse between what jorge thinks the story is and what the public thinks the story is and actual. you know. reality. I think this is a bit more light-hearted, like you know how the best stories about teenagers take their emotions seriously but also let them be kinda silly? because young people are silly! jorge was silly! he's got a lot of CHARM because he's so cocky and naive and full on and intense and awkward and kinda off-putting and tactless and a bit all over the place and so painfully, painfully young, like he's a good protagonist because that's a KID. but also, obviously there's also a lot of extremely not light-hearted bits of his story - everything about his father, his manager... idk this one's another one where, I don't just want to make it a generic sports biopic, and I'm trying to figure out the clear narrative arc here? I mean, you can point to the end of 2010 and really lean into him choosing victory on-track over popularity off it. the problem with 2010 is that it does not work as a dramatic season, yeah sure with the magic of biopics you can hack at it to shit but also. idk. what are we getting out of it. I think for narrative purposes you want to maybe narrow in, and end it at the end of 2008, with the switching of the numbers this kind of moment of emancipation? but also! this feels like we're straying a bit too far away from the fun sports elements and I don't want to REALLY suggest all the ways in which you could mine jorge's personal trauma in a jokey tumblr post, so I'm gonna move on from this one

the problem is 2015 just straight up doesn't work as a jorge-centric narrative, except in a very kinda comic way that leans into how absurd his role in that season was. 2012 as a season is a bit... y'know, it's fine. okay it's mostly terrible, but that's fine too. but it doesn't have a great narrative hook. which kinda leads you to the problem that I do think the valentino rivalry is more... juicy from jorge's pov, because for valentino, jorge is just kinda? an obstacle? idk he's more normal about it, it's just his job to destroy the guy, you know how it is. but also 2009 does work better narratively from valentino's pov, like it's the build up to catalunya specifically you can dramaticise... idk though, I do love catalunya but my heart isn't really in this exercise because I think valentino isn't really being... challenged here? it's a title fight where he's fundamentally using a set of tools he's already perfected, to beat a guy he doesn't really give a shit about. when the italian press is down on him pre catalunya, it doesn't spark any genuine self-doubt - it's just a handy source of extra motivation. there's no epic highs or lows that season, not real ones. and yes I know I was talking about making valentino who gets stabbed repeatedly to cover up an infection a moment ago, but that reflected real EMOTIONAL truths!! I'm committed to thematic fidelity more than I am to literal fidelity

genuinely I think the best way to tackle jorge is with the jorge/dani parallel journeys... what, film? tv show? maybe show actually - you don't have one coherent narrative Statement per se but you're constantly charting those journeys in reference to each other, really rooting it in their respective points of views, no neutral detached cinematic language like I want everything to be very much written to be from their eyes!! going from one to the other and back again. and you're charting these different journeys, right, and how they both captured different flavours of like... emotional successes and failures. I think it's actually about failure, yeah, about having to accept there's something you can't have and might never be able to get - whether that's universal love or a premier class title or whatever - but Actually, that might not be the end of the world. and during this process, they go from being enemies to tentative friends!! guys who realise they can maybe actually understand each other better than they thought!! this real moment of interpersonal connection. you have all these media narratives and the managers and so on and the fact they're competitors as these built in reasons why they've just been pitted against each other from the start... but y'know, again, it is also just a bit about maturing, about being able to set that aside, about making your peace with defeat and failure as an element of growing up. you can't win everything, maybe there's something you really really really want and you're just not going to get it, but at the end of the day it's kinda... yeah. self-acceptance. idk this is the nice one

so with marc you can go several different ways here I guess, and again he's also perfectly decent sports biopic material, probably second to casey in that category like yeah sure do the comeback story. but also, we do already have a very good self-produced documentary about what he thinks the narratives of his career are? idk this is also just a personal taste thing, I'll leave him to doing all the injury stuff himself, I don't have much to add there. we'll get to the obvious one in a second, but I was trying to figure out if there were other places I massively felt like you need the cinematic touch. and, again, the 2013 season is obviously very exciting!! but also, you have it covered in.,,,, multiple documentaries, I don't feel I have a take their either? his rivalries with dani and jorge aren't really substantive enough to sustain a bit of cinema. dovi... I mean, what are you saying there? what's the arc? I feel like if I tackled dovi, I'd go somewhere else and really go all in with the ducati stuff, and make it a bit more... you know, stark, stripped back, basically just the emotional component of how much he gave to that project and how he managed to beat away one rival after the next and how it all ended up falling apart in a kind of anti-climactic way? he's also good sports biopic material, but in a way I think the marc rivalry is the bit of his story I have the least to say on. so eg, 2017 is a dramatic season, but he's also kinda fine after it? he always knew it was a long shot, he tried his best and he got really close and then he lost. you can't amadeus it because dovi isn't (fictional) salieri. basically, I think what I'm saying here is that dovi is too well-adjusted to feature in this post. though I'd totally watch a film about his 250cc seasons, like it's a bit annoying because HE is the underdog who loses both title fights to jorge, but it'd still be kinda fun idk. I wouldn't really know what to do with the material but if someone made the film I'd absolutely watch it

right then. the thing about sepang 2015 is... yeah, sure, of course you can do it, it already exists as a narrative but... yeah, what are you adding!! idk I always think when you're adapting something, you kinda need to have a reason for it? I mean, what are you doing that's not already there in the footage? idk maybe this is just a sign of having been a fan of this sport for one too many years but to me the idea of sepang 2015 can get a bit boring (or maybe just repetitive) where I need a new TAKE on it to really get into the idea of fictionalising it. like where's the auteur's touch y'know, what can I still add to this!! but it also needs to WORK for someone who is new to the story, which kinda just makes you want to tell the story straight.... y'know the story is strong enough and COMPLICATED enough to stand on its own and it IS good but I don't really have anything interesting to say beyond 'yeah sure that'e be neat'. I can't tell you why, but I also don't think the casey approach quite works here? the idea of providing a framing device with which valentino and marc can actually talk to each other... eh. don't like that. hm. okay wait actually I just turned it around in my head for... a while and I think I've got an idea to make the worst motorcycle racing film of all time. so, my central stupid film-making gimmick here is just. centring the fact we're completely reliant on a few guys and what they're telling us in making up our minds, and our removal from that story and the imperfection of their perceptions and so on. so I think you kinda make a point of... not actually showing the motorcycle racing? like, you always show it by showing other people watching it, you're showing the tv screen rather than the actual racing. even in the cinematic medium, you're centring the theatrical aspects, where you drill it down to just a few characters. valentino. marc. uccio. marc's fuck ass manager. maybe a crew chief or two. keep it limited though, all the others are kept at a distance - you're constantly focusing in on the same few characters. and very early on you basically just like... get them to fourth wall break by telling you, the viewer, with their actual words how racing works for them, what meaning they take out of it - and again it's this remove because we're never allowed to actually feel the racing for ourselves (no helmet cams), and it sets up that as the tragedy unfolds, again and again we're just hearing from them what happened. it's all zoomed in on how claustrophobic the entire situation is, like doing the race direction room after the sepang 2015 is perfect for that kind of thing, and crucially they're only ever addressing the audience because they can't address each other. but fourth wall breaks also obviously draw attention to artificiality! I realise they are very much like, lame gimmick central, but also are these men not inherently about lame gimmicks... idk it's basically the same story but at least it feels like a kinda interesting way of telling it. kinda trite, but cinema allows you to get to the point and let valentino actually play with the camera... so literally take it into his own hands and lead it around and tell the story from his point of view. and you can play with how they do both change in what stories they think they're telling, how they're constantly revising their own stories, how their stories completely clash with each other... like. make them literal narrators. that's my pitch

so. one interesting pattern that has come up with my approaches to these rivalries is that with the exception maybe of the 2015 stuff, I feel like I'm more naturally inclined to treat valentino as a narrative device and centre his rivals. a big part of this is that valentino is a fantastic narrative device. he's kinda. this looming presence in every narrative in this sport where you can just sort of use him as a sort of way to poke away at all these other riders. the monster everyone loves who you are trapped with. BOO!! he's gonna eat you! which is fun! but ALSO, crucially, several of these rivalries aren't that emotionally challenging for him!! again, with casey right, he wants to beat him, but he's not having a crisis of faith over losing to casey. he thinks casey is annoying, he wants to beat him because he wants to win. valentino is casey's foil, but casey is not valentino's. valentino makes for an excellent personal antagonist to casey, but the reverse just isn't true. casey isn't forcing valentino to reexamine his approach except 'ramping up the levels of being a dick on-track' - like, yes, that's a serious competitive challenge, but also valentino is very comfortable in his own skin in that rivalry. sure, you could have valentino have some kind of massive revelation about the casey rivalry, but like. he doesn't in canon. he changes his behaviour towards casey in pretty predictable ways depending on what the relationship demands from his perspective at any given time. there's nothing more there

now, obviously you know where I'm going here. there IS a rivalry where you can make the argument he changes as a result of it, there IS a rivalry that tips him over the line and makes him to do stuff he hadn't done before that, there IS a rivalry that happens to coincide with a period of his competitive life that challenges him both personally and professionally. now, look, I have already talked about the sete rivalry. you know what I think about this rivalry - and if you don't, I really already have told the story here and here and here and here and also here. I think this works perfectly well as a narrative in its own right, and it's one you can tell from either perspective... but you kinda need both. I think again you probably naturally lean towards starting it from sete's perspective and that first proper meeting (I mean, idk if it is their first actual meeting, but it's the logical obvious place you start this story) with sete giving valentino advice during his first 500cc test and valentino just, y'know, ignoring him and being a cocky shit and then crashing. so you get to see sete being kinda exasperated by the whole thing. also, obviously ibiza is like, a key framing device here, like it's the most obvious in-your-face way of tracking their relationship with each other. I don't actually know how often they partied there together, but it must have been at least twice and if the commentators are to be believed it must have included 2003. artistic license and you can add one or two more times, but mainly you want to focus in on 2003 onwards right. so you've got this 2002 one where it's, y'know, high point of their friendship and in the name of narrative efficiency, you establish here that sete is looking to make the honda switch. the emphasis is on how valentino has been winning everything but on the flip side you're getting the first insight into his discontent. and there's a bit of a vibe of, what could you possibly have to complain about? like you are winning so much? so it's late one night where they've had this slightly unguarded alcohol-fuelled moment of genuine vulnerability but in the end it's actually characterised by how... unsubstantial the link between them is, because they wouldn't talk about this kind of thing with each other and they might both be similar in some ways but also don't gettttttt each other. it means you can return there as a location in 2003, where you've just had sachsenring and valentino's dramatic loss but they're still partying together and it's like. obviously In The Air that not everything is quite right... their relationship is already gradually altered and twisted because you're introducing this element of actual stakes and competition (obviously in 2004 they do NOT spend that time together, as far as we know anyway, and you can show them being very much not together at ibiza as a very obvious Oooh Things Will Fall Apart and maybe already haveeee)

and I do think basically I've already said what I think the themes here are,,,, several times by this point, so I'm not going to belabour the point. I think all of this fundamentally works as a narrative with like, minimal massaging and rearranging of the elements for dramatic effect. it's all there already, everything from sete's arc with the [insert non-tasteless way of covering a real life tragedy that fundamentally alters the course of sete's career] and how that leads to sete becoming the challenger and how he does want to win and his eventual downfall. with valentino, you have the element of liberation and self-discovery and... well, growing into your own but also kinda having the narrative drawing attention to how 'growing into your own' can involve becoming a fully realised character who is essentially quite cruel? you have this kind of... build up, right, towards this moment of revelation, where you lay bare who these two people actually ARE at sepang 2004, and then again at jerez 2005. valentino has gone his own way, he has freed himself from the chains of honda, he has embraced individualism and the chance to define himself and his own legacy and stand on his own two feet and not rely on the strongest bike or all this stuff within honda where they chose him as their flag bearer, for better or for worse... like he comes to his own here! he takes the step from 'great rider' to 'legend' because he gets to this dramatic moment of stepping into the unknown, he takes this massive risk that could have cost him so much, and it ends up elevating him. but it also puts him under duress, and in that moment he reveals himself - whatever sete did or did not do at qatar 2004, EVEN IF sete did all that shit, what you are left with is valentino vowing to ruin this man. valentino uses sete to make himself 'better', to fuel himself as a competitor. valentino turns sete into a tool in his own story. and again, thematically you've got all this stuff about how sete was managing the image of the rivalry and how valentino took advantage of that - how sete needed it to remain respectful and valentino was completely willing to abandon that. like, you have two protagonists who really are similar in quite a few ways, who think they have this shared understanding with each other, but when it comes down to it? they end up being super painfully different

now I can go on about this and how to play it straight, basically, you can just do that rivalry and I think it'd be cool and fun and very easy to arrange in a good narrative way. BUT I've kind of already. done that. like I don't want to suggest a film that is basically a nicer version of my tumblr posts. so I want to take this in a slightly different direction, and I think what we need to consider with this rivalry is this: what if you made the curse literal? basically, what's always kinda charmed me about this rivalry is that the curse should not work and all the misfortune that befalls sete after that is so comical that it's kinda... what do you do with that? and the answer is you just lean all the way in. my pitch is this: what if valentino sells his soul to the devil?

so, you know faust, right, and you know the bit at the start of goethe's faust where god and mephistopheles are basically making a wager over how corruptible this one human is. and faust is like... he's kinda disillusioned, he feels that everything he's dedicated his life to in academia is fundamentally hollow, gets very close to committing suicide. and faust has gone a bit new age-y, gotten into all this mystical shit and he's got this pentagram that ends up preventing mephistopheles from leaving his presence in their first meeting... and basically what the devil can give him is like, the chance to attain some true pleasure, and for that faust is willing to bet everything - so if faust can just have that, then maybe eternal damnation is worth it. and look, I'm not going to summarise the entire plot of faust here and it does go off the wall a bit with all the gretchen stuff, but the point is you have this version of the devil who is fundamentally a cynic and is attempting to win an argument with god by making this human succumb to his own nihilism. and what faust basically does is like, abandon his normal life where he's trying to live by normal virtues and goes off on this journey with the devil. and there's this little moment where mephistopheles,,, pretends to be faust and takes on the role of an academic adviser (you know how it is) and seduces this random student away from the word of god and sends him down a wretched path, which ends with this bit:

like, a big part of faust's tragedy is supposed to be about... well, hubris, of the relationship of god to man, of no longer being afraid of the devil... and obviously, this is all framed very much in terms of religion, but at the end of the day it's also about, you know, having purpose - faust is living a life that no longer has any meaning to him, all of his knowledge and studies now no longer fill the void inside himself. his nihilism opens the door for mephistopheles, and is what makes him willing to accept the devil's terms. now, and I am so very sorry to goethe here, I think we have some material we can use here to explore the valentino/sete rivalry. obviously, you can't do a one-to-one, you need to get rid of some of like, the depression and all that - there were times when valentino was feeling 'a bit low' in 2003, but not 'faust thinking everything he'd done in his entire life was pointless' low, yeah? also, unless you want to do a real long view here and even then it can't really be justified, there obviously isn't really a 'tragedy' here from valentino's perspective. like, he wins! this isn't valentino's tragedy, it's sete's! I was being a bit facetious when I said he was 'selling his soul to the devil', and you can kinda parse mephistopheles' motivations in different ways depending on what flavour and what interpretation of him you're dealing with here. you don't 'damn' valentino, you essentially just turn him into a tool of the devil!

so, this is how this works out in my head: the devil works more broadly as the manifestation of competitive impulses, the kind of 'how far would you go to win' question as a bloke who shows up and literally talks to the characters about it (magic of cinema). he's also engaging with valentino feeling like his victories no longer having meaning, with being disconnected from honda and from the entire culture there and just feeling like he's going through the motions. there's this element of like... opening the door to what is essentially a journey of self-actualisation, bringing him closer to being a 'god' but also allowing him to fully come into his own and become himself. to win on his own terms. I reckon ibiza is my preferred narrative device where the devil talks both to sete and valentino there (separately), first literally as a mysterious stranger and then... maybe not? he's talking to them at times of their lives when they're not at ibiza and it's not happening there in the physical world and they both end up kinda having to confront they're dealing with some potentially malevolent supernatural entity. but the important elements of the devil is that a) he's not going to do anything the humans don't actually ask for themselves, and b) everyone knows he's following his own agenda and you should be careful of the requests you make of him. so it's kinda like... essentially, the backdrop of this rivalry unfolding is they're constantly being challenged to decide what lines they're willing to cross. which culminates at qatar... and maybe you do have sete making like. a teensy mistake. a teensy error in judgement, one that is both real and deliberate but he could not have known would get that reaction and instantly regrets. and valentino, who is I think inherently sceptical of the devil coming to offer to help him and maybe does crank out the pentagrams (remember, the whole point of faust is that he was too arrogant to be scared of the devil, or one of the points anyway), in a moment of fury does decide - no, actually. I will take that step. I will curse sete. now the thing is, dramatically this is a teensy bit tricky because when you're talking about being damned by the devil, usually the consequences are a bit more severe than 'not winning a motorcycle race again' (yes, you can get into how sete did also seem genuinely cursed after that, cf his ambulance/bus crash situation, but again we are flirting with being in poor taste in this tumblr post). but the thing is, right, you have to lean into the silliness here! qatar 2004 is inherently silly, a CURSE is inherently silly, like real life is already silly here! you have to engage with the people where they are, and for these athletes all this shit is so heightened that the emotions are full on. like, valentino would've sold that guy to the devil! and to him not winning another race is basically the worst thing that can happen

so, obviously, you get to do the actual curse stuff. curses are inherently campy fun, the devil doing curses is campy fun, getting valentino rossi to crank out the pentagrams is inherently campy fun. you get to play around with this, right, like you know that bit in the brno 2005 race commentary where the commentators are talking about how valentino might as well have a little radio to talk into sete's helmet to remind him of how sete had fucked up at the sachsenring. OBVIOUSLY obviously obviously it is just so... idk scrunchy and fun to have this idea of valentino becoming a malevolent enough force to literally do that.... like damn the commentators did kinda eat with that?? ughhhhhh do you ever think about sete leading the qatar 2005 race for most of the way???? like that's SO fucked up because you literally have articles from about the race going 'hey maybe sete can break his curse' and then the commentators are talking about curses having one year expiration dates but obviously they!! do not!!!!! there's one race where sete goes off track and the commentators are talking about how valentino will surely have smiled into his helmet like that's so fucked!! it's so fucked!! but idk I think basically you have all this creeping curse-y stuff and devil stuff and then you get this twist and then it just becomes misery zone for sete until you sort of. compress the timeline and have him retire without getting into what happened at the end of 2006. and valentino just relishing in all his very worst emotions. and you've got sete who was the better man after jerez 2005, who took the high ground again and again and again and it did NOTHING for him.... and then he's cursed and his career is finished and the devil has had his fun getting mixed in with mid noughties motogp. and now obviously this is inherently kinda dumb and corny and silly but it's the devil!! mephistopheles to me is allowed to get up to dumb shit sometimes, let him have some fun!! idk I like curses being literal idc

I think the obvious critique here is 'this doesn't really feel like it gets the message of faust'. which, yes, is true - and obviously the way narratives are structured, a satisfying resolution isn't 'well selling your soul kinda slaps, actually'. and my statement to respond to this argument is as follows:

this is essentially canonically what happened. valentino DID do something kinda evil and it DID work out 100% for him and it DID kinda slap. at least when you add in the devil, you're making explicit the bit where it is a little bit bad. also, is sports not inherently about selling your soul for success... the story of valentino and sete is essentially about how we are twisted by competition, how pretending that we don't wish ill to our opponents is inherently dishonest. it is about lifting a facade for something that is already inherently there in the souls of men. this is obviously inherently a deeply cynical stance, but this is also a deeply cynical story beyond all the fun battles and camp dramatics. the devil is a cynic and he is basically the point of view character of goethe's faust - he's the one who is positioned closest to the audience. sports is all about living out some of humanity's worst instincts in a relatively low stakes setting, which means we get a free pass to have fun with a deeply cynical story that goes 'maybe selling your soul to the devil is fine, actually'

do I stand by this stance? not really, but the whole fun of storytelling is that sometimes you can just be kinda mean. I think goethe would get it... you can tell which character he enjoyed writing the most

the OTHER way you can do this is centre everything around qatar 2004 as like,,, the mystery box element...... okay look I have now made two posts that go WAY too deep on the 'what really happened' element but I do loveeeeee the whole thing like I would just make a film about that very end of the season and we show it from all these different angles as different characters narrate what happened... like fuck all the riders I want to hear from whichever mechanic used the scooter... the gresini mechanic who gave evidence to race direction.... various honda higher ups the crew chiefs like this is jb vs juan martinez it's war!!! obviously you still have the same emotional/thematic hooks as the general rivalry does but idk I would have a LOT of fun figuring out how to structure that, I loveeee mysteries... maybe I'd write it as a mockumentary yeah..... this one's just fun

anyway. a lot of stuff going on in this post, huh! you can probably tell I didn't edit this much. my classic tell when I edit my tumblr posts is I remember how 'paragraphs' work. unfortunately all I have energy for are like. a bunch of rants about things in my brain. I think when tumblr tells you that you've reached the maximum number of characters per paragraph and you need to figure out where to put a break, it's probably a bad thing? on the whole, my stance is I don't have anything AGAINST mildly fictionalised versions, but for me I'm always more of a.... well I want to take advantage of the full specificity of the events as they happened or just come up with a completely original story. kind of person. I know this ask probably wasn't looking for my 'what if you bled out valentino as he's strung up above a red motorcycle' vision but yeah. with a lot of biopics I'm always a bit 'well you could just read about this couldn't you' like I need stuff to take some kind of a stance on the material it's using... all my stuff takes a stance. that's all I've got. obviously all these stances mean that basically none of these things could ever be made. and I know what I said above but if they called me up to write the casey stoner biopic script treatment, I would also do that. if you've actually read to this point, give me a shout - you're a real one and I love you

[many-gay-magpies]

one thing that's been fun to notice as i transition from teen wolf obsession into dead boy detectives obsession is how the difference in the quality of the show directly correlates to my need to write fanfiction for it.

watching teen wolf propelled me into a frenzy of fanfic-writing like never before, the likes of which i had not even felt with shows i enjoyed just as much as i enjoyed teen wolf. the fact of the matter is, teen wolf sits in the purview of media that is really rather bad, but just good enough to make me absolutely fucking bonkers about all the ways it could be better. in other words, THIS SHOW WOULD BE SO GOOD IF IT WERE GOOD. similar to merlin, teen wolf has a variety of characters, relationships, and plotpoints that are incredibly interesting and compelling, but the writing choices made and the execution of said plotpoints leaves a lot to be desired. teen wolf was (and is!) "good" in that i enjoyed it, in that i fell in love with the characters and their relationships, in that i felt visceral levels of emotion when the characters in question went through the terrible ordeals the show had in store for them—but then there are so many missed opportunities, so much lost potential, so many empty places or holes that never get explained, so many emotions or relationships or traumas that don't get paid NEARLY as much attention as they should be, and that, coupled with my aforementioned love of the characters and burning sense of injustice over the wrongs they faced at the hands of teen wolf's sometimes-shitty writing, was enough to shoot my posted fanfiction count up from five-ish to an entire eleven (to say NOTHING of the countless other unfinished pieces still sitting in my drafts).

and then we have shows like the sandman, and dead boy detectives, which... are so good i can really do nothing except scream about all the different reasons i love them and drown my blog in content for them ('the sandman' is included here because i had the same relationship with it after watching it as i have with dead boy detectives now). sure, there are some things in the show that are probably unsatisfactory to some people, and of course 'fixing canon' is FAR from the only reason people write fanfiction, but... there aren't any empty spaces. there's nothing to FIX; only eight episodes of absolute glorious, campy, heartfelt, sensitive, beautifully-written nonsense that i am losing my mind over more and more by the day. like with the sandman, my only real urges to write anything for dead boy detectives are to try and concoct some possible crossover with merlin, because i just LOVE shoving that magical little twink into as many situations as possible. i love the characters, and i would love to see how they work and clash against ANOTHER beloved character... but other than that, i just want to yell my love for this show into the sunrise and appreciate everything the OTHER creators in this fandom have to offer.

[sassyfrassboss]

I’m kinda bored by the Sussexes. I used to get some entertainment out of them because they really surprised me time and time again how out of touch, delusional and entitled they are. But now nothing they do surprises me anymore. ...... I don't even think its boredom for me it's the horrible turn its all took its all so nasty and as Kates health issues and Charles Cancer has proven they have real life stuff going on but the Harkles just keep Pilling 💩 on them.

It was horrible enough what they did to The Queen but then the interview with Oprah just after PP died and then HMTLQs death and how they again made it about them and then accidently on purpose exposing Kate and Charles as the "royal racist" its Al so incredibly viscious and for what? A merch cheque? I'll never understand why she went out of her way to break up and bully a family who did everything they could and more to make her feel welcome.

They're very unhinged and even though I can't stand him I feel sorry for Harry when she's finally done with him cos all kinds of accusations are gonna come out about him.

Meghan has to be one of the nastiest people I've ever read about and it's not even just with the RF but how she treats people behind the scenes ETC not to mention The sugars are a whole new level of low with where they take it I mean when you're wishing the deaths of CHILDREN so your cult leader can take over a monarchy you say is trash amayway then it's gone too far.

Meghan was gunning for Catherine since Day 1. All because Catherine didn't offer a ride to Meghan to the shops. Bonkers.

When/if Meghan is done with Harry I imagine she is going to bury him. He is too stupid to believe she will ever turn on him completely.

So your post made me think of something.

Since 2018 Meghan has done everything she can to take away from Catherine. She has scheduled appearances on Catherine's birthday, W&C's anniversary, the kids birthdays, etc.

Hell, the announced Megxit on Catherine's birthday and Harry released Spare on her birthday as well.

It's incredible how much they target Catherine.

[5-pp-man]

another tierlist because ppl actually liked that first one;

the crème de la crop;

the first 2 eps i thought it was fine, but it didnt really captivate me as much as id hoped. but then ep 3 changed everything for me. i started to think "how could living armour work logically? everything so far has been edible, so this must be too, right?" i actually managed to think of the exact thing that this series did. that really made me realise the worldbuilding in this was something unique, and it only got better and better with each episode. its really managed to captivate me and i look forward to "delicious donderdag" every week :)

ANIME ORIGINAL LETS GOOOO absolutely bonkers show that almost slipped by me because it initially tried to fool its audience into thinking it was a regular dramatic military show. it still is but theres also a giant robot who plays by saturday morning cartoon giant robot rules. if that sounds like tonal whiplash to you, trust me, it is. and its amazing. have i mentioned how homoerotic this one is as well? yeah. originally a tier below this one, but immediately after finishing this post i watched the newest ep. i had to make an exception and edit the list because ep 9 changes everything. i havent been gobsmacked by a show this hard in a while.

(return of the) show(s) that execute their own premise very well;

i havent read the manga for yubisaki to renren so i cant compare, but the quality of this adaptation has been very consistent. you need a little sweet romance every once in a while :) this is one of those series where the characters really grew on me the longer it went on. im always a fan of mixing realistic struggles with romance and this one has been doing it well so far

adaptations that are ok (i read the manga for both of these);

i've been a mashle fan since before s1 aired. and the anime has some good changes and additions here and there! but its not very consistent in terms of quality, it does that shonen thing where the animation quality suddenly spikes for certain action sequences, but it also frequently had a lot of scenes where they recycle shots a lot and nothing interesting happens on the screen for a considerable amount of time. still! its a fine adaptation. and yeah the op for this. blew tf up lmao? very strange to see happen in real time

i actually rlly like the manga for this one. i read the whole thing up until vol.6 before the season started (all that was available back then) and it made me cry multiple times throughout. i was sort of missing that connection with the show, though some of the later episodes still hit. its mostly to do with the animation quality, which isnt that great unfortunately. the voice actors are knocking it out of the park though

wghere am i;

is this show good? i. uh. will you hate me if i say yes...? objectively, i know its not that good. especially in the animation department. but if you like other Umatani shows, you'll like this one. it's got the same brand of goofy reactionary humour mixed with gimmicky tacky characters and crazy stupid plot twists. ive been faithfully watching this one each week and I'm afraid i've become very invested. overscientific indeed

bro you fell off...;

i was so beyond excited for this one. i replayed the op a million times, watched each preview, rewatched multiple episodes. and then. ep 5 happened. and i started to realise. oh this show kind of sucks doesnt it? the pacing of the first ep was great, but the rest? way too fast. it became clear with ep 6 that theyre trying to do a double cour show with half the length, which is why they started hauling ass plot-wise. now. i was an arajin apologist for the longest time. but at that point i honestly started to loathe him. even when he stepped up, his praise still felt sort of unearned. and to top it all off, shindou's motivation sucked so he felt like a lousy antagonist. ep6 was better than 5, but it really made me lose my enthusiasm and hope for the series. and right as we were talking about them probably not having time for a filler ep, ep7 happened. feels like a waste of time to do an ep like that when you've still got a whole 2nd arc to go through. but who am i

it started off pretty good honestly. but then chris went to the hospital and it kind of just dwindled from there. this season does so much with characters that have not even been properly introduced like how am i supposed to care about these people if i barely know who they are. the stuff with finn and leo respectively was good though. but the lore dump? lord help me. also vijay just kind of. exists to be there in the background huh? i would not call him a main character they never give him any attention. wendy had another ep again and he didnt get shit. again. also i think finn was stupid as fuck for not listening to lala but again. who am i. i know we cant destroy high card because we need a show but. cmon man.

i am severely behind on these;

reason why im behind is because most of the eps are a bit heavy so i kept. not watching them. its starting to get rlly interesting though so i'm def gonna catch up this is one of those robo-racism shows so i have to really watch out to see where its going. dont want another marginal service situation...

sorry this is just. a little too boring for me. its charming, sure. but i think this wouldve worked better as something with an 11 min timeslot instead of 23 min. theres just a bit too mu- or well, too little for me to rlly get into this. i think reading it would be more fun for me personally

[mylittleredgirl]

previously on mylittleredgirl: [four seasons of m*a*s*h] [six weeks of screaming about margaret houlihan]

i have now finished season five disc one and a bullet point recap is due! [yeah there's more screaming in it]

bug out was a fucking DELIGHT

god i was so worried though when klinger had to trade all his dresses i was wailing internally. what if he just wears fatigues forever!?!??? but it's all okay!!!! that tassel mod dress he has on in "the abduction of margaret houlihan" healed me ten times over. his outfits have been 🔥 this season.

such a mix of really dumb slapstick comedy and "oh god the war is Right Here" drama and little character sweetness... love it.

and the family reunion happiness at the end!!!! god bless. i left my body for like thirty-six hours.

i really really love the tone they're striking with frank this season. they've walked back the cartoon villainy of late season four, so he's once again a relatively harmless clown. i breathed a huge sigh of relief. he's soooo much more fun this way.

margaret's engagement: bonkers. delightful. she's unbearable. there is so much wrong with her. i want to study her in a jar. i will never shut up again.

with this put together with some bits later in the disc (including that cut scene crayon joke lmao), did she somehow manage to trade DOWN from frank? is that even possible??? it's either that or this new dude is actually just The Exact Same Guy, but now she'll be the fool wife at home instead of the beloved mistress.

i mean personally if i were louise burns i'd be very happy for my dumbass husband to fuck around on the other side of the world for as long as possible while i enjoy the $35,000 house and two cars without him, but for someone like margaret who is far more interested in being wined and dined than running a household, this... may not be the field promotion she thinks it is.

hawkeye rising to frank's defense and him and b.j. enabling frank's little takedown of margaret at the end felt very real. sure, in the grand scheme of things, margaret is Annoying and frank tried to have hawkeye executed last season, but bros before hos.

okay how FUNNY would it be though if the "little redheaded nurse" frank planned to seduce was baker-from-the-nurses, because she would have scratched frank's eyes out for trying and not felt bad about it

and actually, that's a plausible backstory for the extra bad blood between her and margaret, too??? oh yeah. that definitely happened.

i actively missed frank/margaret as the disc went along though. maybe the show had stretched the tension of that relationship as tight as it could go, and it's nice that they get to do new things... but they're so funny and awful together and i miss them sharing scenes!!!

i really assumed - like frank did lol - that they would continue to rabbit around together, only now she would also get to string him along with the jealousy game, but...... well, i'm glad it's still hanging out in the background of the narrative, anyway. i live in hope that they will slip and fuck and it will be soooo messy.

FUCK is it possible i shipped that for real???? god. i don't know if my family name can bear this dishonor.

out of sight, out of mind...

...has taught us the very important lesson that hawkeye is 9000x more annoying without something to do (annoying to everyone else i mean!! not to me. i will happily watch him annoy everyone.)

him asking b.j. to visit him a million times a day 🥺

i'm almost satisfied now by the "doctor-experiences-the-role-of-patient" theme that i didn't get in "hawkeye." i suppose hurt/comfort fic can take it from here.

however i'm totally satisfied by how sweet it was to see everyone taking care of him!! and how much they love him!!

lt. radar o'reilly... devastating. i mean funny and delightful but it's mean!! so glad that boy is back in stripes. however they could have at least promoted him a little for his trouble. sergeant o'reilly???

i have already said more about the nurses (post here) than ever needed to be said. and yet. i'm quite sure i could say more if pressed

the abduction of margaret houlihan

........ will i never be free of colonel flagg episodes 😞

i love the continuing evidence that she has invested time in learning korean, and i really really really love the slow expansion of our perspective to include like oh yeah. there's a village where people live full time and it's literally right here.

imagine if after the war she becomes an ob nurse...

on the one hand, how do they not make frank do gun handling training. on the other hand they probably don't because it always ends with stitches and an accident report.

i sometimes wonder if mash was like jury duty for asian actors in the 70s. you probably won't get to say anything but they call you up and you just have to go.

dear sigmund!!!!!! this is another episode where people were staring at me through the window so i'll comment a little more:

the fandom's favorite guy sidney freedman deserves that crown. what a weirdo. talk about a busman's holiday for a psychiatrist to come to the 4077 for a vacation and psychoanalyze everyone. but for fun!

i really don't have a proper sense of the geography at play here because he really does like. just come by to play cards once a week. and drives through a war zone i guess to do it? he has probably sacked out in the swamp before when the air raid situation changes but this time he just... doesn't leave.

and aaaa!! margaret took her very special episode about How To Make Friends to heart!!!! she joined the poker game!!!

she had plenty of time to work on that lesson though because the jeremy bearimy time shenanigans are in full swing here at the 4077. we went from midsummer in 'the nurses' to a bitter cold march two episodes later.

i always kind of assumed the mash weather was loosely inspired by real human weather, but no, in fact the actors just have to randomly suffer in parkas or getting sprayed in the face to look sweaty in alternating weeks regardless of the surrounding conditions.

SUFFERING for their ART

also jfc b.j.!!!! dunking frank in cold water in freezing temperatures is a serious health and safety concern my dude!!!!

i'm afraid b.j. is still not beating the little brother allegations, he has just aged up from innocent baby to fucking gremlin

(i should confess that my little brother diagnosis is guided by the fact that in my complex family and housing history i only ever lived with "brothers" younger than me, and never older ones. but the innocent baby and prank gremlin stages are real.)

i made a note here of "margaret randomly drinking gin in the swamp now!!?!??" like the poker game was one thing, people could strong-arm her into that while she feigns protest, but ma'am WHO are you and what have you done with— and then the next note is "oh good she's still insane"

potter named his horse sophie <3 also he's collecting granddaughters, i think the count is up to 3 now. or baby sherry is experiencing a temporal anomaly of her own!

the letter radar wrote to the dead guy's parents and potter reading it... fucking ended me. please let harry morgan do serious bits more often, it's outstanding and far too rare.

it's not surprising that frank's wife changing (wearing pants! doing activities!) would stress him out, and not just because he's a dick. any of them would struggle with their families growing without them, because that means they can Never Go Home to the life they left!! (e.g. trapper losing it because his girls were getting older.) but it is kind of fascinating that he loves both his wife and margaret, and even said mid-fever that he wanted them to be friends, but he also wants them to be NOTHING alike.

all in all it's understandable that sidney would check in to the no boundaries motel to have his poker buddies shake it out of him, but he could also have taken his leave somewhere with indoor heat. so he's as crazy as the rest of them. <3

also they're not his patients he's just observing them like zoo animals so forget confidentiality he's absolutely gonna write a book about them someday.

mulcahy's war: i don't know why i have been misspelling his name with an 'e' the whole time because it was literally in the end credits of almost every episode for four seasons.

oh god he's so precious i don't talk about it enough. playing poker for orphans. feeling like he doesn't do enough while potter thinks he has the hardest job. that unrelenting positive regard for everyone. always with that little grin.

that little grin in FULL PLAY as he sneaks out of the house to go off to war when dad's not looking

radar should never be sent on a mission where people are bleeding when will they LEARN

corporal cupcake deserves every medal he gets!!!!

frank's foot fetish becoming his one true medical specialty is just. i don't know what to do with this. good for him??? do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life???

speaking of unrelenting positive regard, margaret's policy of nurses never talking back to the doctors in the operating room sure has taken a hit. i realize this is about frank being an intolerable ex, but i choose to believe that the detente between margaret and her nurses has turned the O.R. into a pvp zone. the next time hawkeye tries to seduce a nurse over an open body, he's gonna get wrecked and margaret's just going to shrug pretty and look the other way.

in conclusion: season five is soooo gooooooood!!!!! can't wait for disc two!

[autisticlancemcclain]

fic rec friday 6

welcome the the sixth fic rec friday! where, on friday, i rec five of my favourite fics.

1. Chapped Lips by Creatortan

Lance's lips were a distraction, sometimes. Keith just couldn't keep his eyes off of them.

i read this one and forget to bookmark it and it haunted my mind for WEEKS as i desperately tried to find it again. i went bonkers bc i wanted to reread it so bad, bc it is EXCELLENT. its fun and gay and the team as family dynamics are AMAZING, no team bashing here!! and as usual the pining was chefs kiss.

2. Mine by Anonymous [EXPLICIT, ABO]

How do Lance and Keith react when the other is kidnapped?

Keith goes feral. Lance becomes deadly.

yeah, yeah, i know. another omegaverse. absolutely feel free to avoid this one if it’s not ur thing, i know it’s not for everyone, but it was one of my first pieces of bamf unhinged lance and i refuse to be ashamed of liking it lmao. also i think it’s fair to say that this fic inspired my unhinged batshit lance fic, at least a little. give it a try if ur like me an abo is a guilty pleasure lmao

3. the way i love you by @taylortot

quiet moments in which keith and lance fall in love. and kiss a lot. post s7.

words cannot explain how much this series means to me. genuinely a series that is so poetically soft and loving that it makes tears well in your eyes. i started reading this series right when i turned 16, and idk it truly made something crack in fizzle in my brain, it made me realise how careful and choosing love is. i have read this series more times than i can count, definitely one of the top ten, and there are lines from this fic that i repeat to myself when i am looking for hope. i know it hasn’t been touched since 2020 but i will be watching it carefully and hoping for years to come. (my favourite, in the series, although it was hard to choose, is i want to kiss you there)

4. Read Label: Lance McClain’s Boyfriend by @bleusarcelle

“You know I’m not ashamed, right?” Lance meets his gaze sheepishly. “Like, I’m not ashamed of you, of us. Far from it, babe, I swear –”

“Lance,” Keith cuts in kindly, smiling warmly at the teen in his arms. “Believe me, I know but I do want to tell the world what you mean to me. I wanna start with our team, our family.”

“You should come with a warning,” Lance whispers, stroking Keith’s chin fondly as he drops his voice. “Caution: words that leave these lips may cause falling deeper in love. Thank you for shopping at Mullets4sales.com.”

Keith throws his head back as he shakes with laughter. Lance grins proudly at sound before he props himself on the bed and drops unceremoniously on top of his giggling boyfriend’s chest.

“But yeah, yes; let’s tell them after dinner.”

[Or the one where the team is on their way back home and stop on a planet where a pissy prince drugs Keith with a love potion and Lance has to endure watching his secret boyfriend being lovestruck on someone else that isn't him.]

bleusarcelle always has and always will be one of the core founders of this fandom fr. trust me when i tell u their work was THE work. i remember greedily reading every fic of theirs several time, and i still read several of them regularly. but i will always be a sucker for the secret relationship trope. and this one managed to have that trope with none of the team bashing or miscommunication garbage so it’s a banger from the get-go fr

5. When Moonlight Touches Us by @pmwrites-blog1

Branches scratched his cheeks as he ran through the woods. Out of breath and covered in mud, Lance eventually crawled back under the fence onto the school grounds. He stopped at the large fountain in the plaza, leaning heavily on it. He splashed his face to wake himself up.

It didn’t work. Keith was real.

-

Based on 214b's Gargoyle AU

THIS IS MY FAVOURITE VOLTRON FIC OF ALL TIME. i dont know why. i have no idea why ive latched onto this fic so specifcally, what about this fic just makes me want to reread it again and again, but if i could print this aand bind it and keep a hardcopy with me every day of my life i would. im obsessed with it. beauty and the beast who?? like this fic is everything to me. i cannot recommend it enough. im fully convinced this fic did something fundamental to my brain. nothing i write will ever be so dear to me as this fic and that’s literally okay. the stars aligned to make this fic possible. is it the fact that i know there’s pretzellus art for it and so the whole story was cemented into my brain? possibly. i truly do not know. but i am fully obsessed with this story and likely will be for infinity

that’s it for today!! i’ll see y’all back next friday for the next fic rec post!!!  

[edwinspaynes]

cw past suicidal thoughts, post writer is stoned after a T-break

I love a lot of fictional characters, but I am actually bonkers about Matthew Fairchild. Deadass to people in real life he is like. One of my personality traits. People who know jack shit about TSC could tell you about Matthew, and would do so very fondly, if they cared about me. I'm absolutely feral for that man and he is so important to me. i do not think i would be the same person today as I am without him, if I had survived at all. If that makes sense. He's just so near and dear to me and I genuinely think he even as a fictional character holds a very large, very real, and very raw bit of my heart. He's staved off so much loneliness for me over the years. i loved him so fucking much even before we knew him. I saw that smiley little portrait. and i went 'that one's mine.' i loved him since 2014. i grew up with him, you see. since i was a teenager. He helped me deal with being the way i am and especially he helped me be comfortable being bipolar (hence my strong headcanon.) I am like So grateful for him. he and i both have a fake-smile thing. but we both persist and want others to be happy. He just is me, and mine, to me. If that makes sense? He will always be my ride-or-die. I am always in his corner. Even if he is doing something not amazing, I am in his corner. He's such a sprcial person. Also he helped me through my break up when I was trying to like. figure my life out. I feel like we have had comparable experiences at the same times when his work was published. Yea

[genesisgijinka]

I have returned with another essay on worldbuilding.

Part one: Design.

Your world has more animalistic pokemon. Going for a more... Adapted to a real functioning world where physics and biology are mostly in accordance with how it would work here.

My favourite example of this is this post. In it is pictured a Gardevoir. I don't know if the design is still accurate, but said gardevoir is less a funny alien creature and instead an elongated owl.

Another amazing example of this is the Power Scale post. The beastly legendaries and especially Arcy look sick. With "unrealistic" features like Arcy's fence gate being adapted into much more believable features/body parts.

That being said, we get to

Part 1.5: The Point

With most pokemon being animal-ified, there are some where that just isn't realy feasible. Good contenders for this are the magnemite line, a ton of Grass types and otherwise plant pokemon, and a bunch of object pokemon

small list of examples: Chandelure, klefki, Sudowoodo, oddish, bellsprout, shroomish, grimer, gastly, voltorb, Porygon, Koffing, Cofagrigus, and Ditto. (to be honest, ditto needs its own section)

How would you handle pokemon like that?

I kind of like the idea of naturally occuring mechanical life. You open up a dead Magnezone and there's just a load of gears and electric components in there. (imagine steampunk but with electricity instead of steam)

similarly, How would Gijinka of robotic/ object mons work?

Part 2: Pokespeak

In the anime all Pokemon speak Pokespeak. With pokemon being more animalistic, How do you handle them communicating?

Same question with the sentient mons situation from the anime. Most if not all pokemon on the protagonist's team (COUGH Pikachu) are of similar intelligence as a human, they have complex logic, can read, experience the entire spectrum of emotion, can perfectly understand language, etc.

How does that work?

That'll be it for now.

Part 1-1.5

Yep, gardevoir design is still accurate. Most of my design process for figuring out how I'm going to interpret pokemon design is deviating from a lot of common things that I see. Continuing with the gardevoir example, it's one of those pokemon that you don't google bc everyone just turns it into a booby waifu. I looked at the face and kinda went, 'Hey, that looks like the facial disk of an owl,' and started there.

For things that aren't easily interpreted, I switch to scribbling around with shapes. The Arceus fence thing was more inspired by the biblically accurate angels thing from the book of Revelations bc i thought that was funny lol. Sometimes I just give up tho and things like sylveon still gets it's weird ribbon things bc it's a Fey and they are not beholden to normal rules.

Other ways I design pokemon is by trying to figure out what niche they would fill and how would they have evolved to fill it bc nature is bonkers like that and doesn't like empty spaces. The universe of Genesis is absolutely riddled with ambient energy, so you get things like sentient almost-rocks and minerals or florauna creatures that make up plant types since everything is essentially swimming in a sort of low-key primordial soup. Sometimes a loose spirit just really thinks that chandelier is cool looking and would make a good home. The Good Soup™ makes it easier for that spirit to move its new body and now you have a new pokemon! All that loose energy gives life to things that on our world, would not work. But hey, such is magic-science.

There are lots of different paths I can take, so I don't really have a set process of how I generally do it. And there are so many theories of how certain pokemon came to be - either through in-game lore talked about in the pokedex/from NPCs or someone with their red string on the wall making a spider's web of what's going on in the world of pokemon - that I can take some of those and just run with it. For example; you brought up ditto. Congratulations! You've discovered Prime's "siblings," since I'm using the theory that ditto were Rocket's failed attempts at cloning mew. Little blobs that use the energy of the world around them to craft bodies several times their mass and size, using moves that they don't normally learn.

Robotic/object gijinka would depend on which pokemon is the base form. There's a whole lot of human in a gijinka which keeps things to a mostly human base (this is how I ignore the egg types in gijinka when it comes to reproducing and y'know, keeping your culture alive), so it would mostly boil down to types. If someone was of the magnemite line, they'd have iron/steel deposits in places where the skin is thin, like how Heph does on his knuckles, a characteristic of a steel type gijinka. They'd also be more prone to generating static electricity. Or a doctor giving a vanilluxe gijinka a check up has to have a different base body temperature to test against since ice types have a body temp that runs a little bit cooler than most others (fire types have the opposite problem. Razor has torched off shirt sleeves before, which is why he's almost always in a tank-top of some sort)

Part 2

How do pokemon communicate with each other? Idk, the same way they do in Tarzan. They just, can. Smth smth, pokemon speaking with their hearts, not words. Pokéspeak isn't suuuper well understood, mostly due to not having enough cases to study, but it does very rarely crop up in people from time to time. N is canon to the Genesis timeline (not sure when just quite yet but anyway) and he can fully understand pokemon. Biggest theory is that it's stored away somewhere in the human DNA, a leftover from when pokemon and humans were once considered the same, ala Sinnohian lore. Kinda like how every now and then irl there's a human baby born with a tail. Tail genes are still in our DNA, but it gets switched off at some point during fetal development.

That being said tho, some pokemon have managed to learn human language, in a way. Unown being the starting point for many languages in the world used to communicate more with people back in the day, but now it's considered a mostly dead/slightly resurrected language like Mayan.

The abra line are particularly clever and good at figuring out human patterns. Champion Red from Kanto taught a lot of his pokemon sign language as part of their training and a few of them can sign back at him. He's rarely seen without his kadabra, Pythagoras, and she's the most fluent out of all his pokemon. It's still broken and incomplete tho, kinda like how an african grey parrot would string words together.

A lot of how pokemon speak to each other is mostly body language tho, which even in humans is calculated to make up a whopping 55% of how we communicate with one another (38% is vocal tone and a measly 7% is the actual words and their dictionary definition/context. So it's no wonder why so many people get into arguments on the interwebs with black text on a white background) Pokemon still pick up on all of this, and with their different way of communication, they can still usually pick out human meanings just fine.

[alargehunkofdebris]

The Flip-Flopping Confidence of Aziraphale

So I made a post a bit ago about Aziraphale’s reaction to the kiss, and someone very correctly pointed out that Aziraphale does not believe he is undesirable (as I had claimed in-essay), citing that one little look in the first scene, after Crowley calls the universe “gorgeous.”

This is so true. What the heck is with that look?

I’ve thought about it, and here are my thoughts.

Long story short, Aziraphale is a big ol’ ball of contradictions, as is what sometimes happens with people who’ve suffered in toxic relationships.

But short story long, however…

Okay, so first of all, Aziraphale’s happy little expectation thinking that a complete stranger would call him “gorgeous” out of absolutely nowhere is bonkers. No other word for it. If I met someone for the first time, and they called me “gorgeous” straight to my face, apropos of nothing, no lead up whatsoever, I would be looking over my shoulder, wondering what the hell they were referring to. So this is either a very angel thing to do (they could just go around complimenting each other back then, who knows) or—and this is kinda my opinion—this was just a funny foreshadow thing that Mr. Gaiman did for the fans and to set the tone of the season. Or a mix of both. Remember, this is portraying the beginning of time—this is before they even really had corporeal forms. What we see, I’m guessing, is less a purely accurate visual of what happened and merely a representation. A stage-play version of the events. Yes, this is a comedy that uses modernisms to juxtapose for humor (referencing lead balloons before balloons were even invented, etc) but we can still (if we want) imagine that, for this to logically work, this is just a way of conveying these events in a way our 21st century brains can handle. For all we know, these two were balls of energy, conversing in some ancient star language through telepathy. And at this point, appreciation for another’s form might’ve just been a common thing. They were all so gorgeous, they just went around appreciating each other.

I don’t think this was meant to be so deep dived, however (doved? doven?). I think Gaiman just wanted a cute scene that shows their flirtation from the beginning. But I will argue, still, that this is at a point where Aziraphale hadn’t developed any kind of self-esteem issues. He was a baby angel, used to compliments, or maybe just so new with interaction that he wouldn’t have been surprised by anything. Let’s just say this: the Aziraphale of modern day probably wouldn’t have made that assumption.

It's a sad thing to think, but I think the modern day Aziraphale is one who has lost a portion of the self-confidence he’d carried in that first scene.

Because he is, at heart, a confident person, even when all evidence contradicts that feeling. He feels confident he can do slight-of-hand magic when he barely can, for example. But, after 6000 years of living amongst the humans, I’d say he’s also nestled very comfortably into the role of observer, never truly a part of anything. He playacts, and has fun, but knows he’ll never be a true magician. He makes believe, and has fun, but he’d never be a real reporter. He puts on ball, and dances, but he’ll never truly experience romantic love.

I think this stems hugely from this concept of being a mediocre angel. He’s felt that, ever since he befriended a demon. He’s been an observer of the “good” angels, but was never quite up to snuff himself (with exception, likely, to the time before the Fall). Crowley, on the other hand, while technically has been a “bad” demon, has still maintained a great reputation in Hell because he’s just damn good at selling himself. Aziraphale is too honest to lie, so he’s always (in my head) been a subpar employee, even before Armageddon’t. And his bosses don’t have any qualms about reminding him—they belittle him constantly, familiarly. To the point where Aziraphale has internalized this nugget of self doubt that keeps him from taking risks, going against the status quo, etc.

I know very well this weird, contradictory feeling. One moment you feel hot, and self-confident, and like no one on Earth can touch you. The next, moment, that old standby mode kicks in, and your feeling 6/10 once more. It’s a reminder, a wake-up alarm – don’t go too far, bucko. Don’t get too big for your britches. Remember who you are.

The times he feels the least connected to this self-doubt, this built-up lack of self-confidence, is when he is just doing small things with Crowley, and usually when it’s not anything high-stakes that would involve Heaven/Hell. He can bicker happily with Crowley about the car, he can nettle Crowley into doing a little apology dance, he can put on a ball and have fun. These low-risk times are when he can let loose, be happy and confident and himself, because these small moments will go unnoticed by Heaven. He’s not at risk of his bubble being burst, of being told “stop that. Remember your place.”

And that voice, tell him to stop and remember his place, is what keeps his confidence in check for the big things. Things like acknowledging that he and Crowley are more than friends, that Crowley wants to be with him so badly. Because, technically, Crowley is a much more “impressive” being than Aziraphale, and always has been. He was a higher-ranking angel, and was the demon chosen to tempt the humans. Though Aziraphale had a big job (that he screwed up on immediately, of course) he was still not the top in his rank (I don’t know anything about the bible, but if he was the angel of the Eastern Gate, I always assumed there were more guarding the walls/gates). Aziraphale was always getting reprimanded for his work, and Crowley was getting praise. Aziraphale is so used to being the “lesser” angel that he might even apply that title to him and Crowley, and be shocked at the idea that a slick, laid-back, higher-ranking demon (who is not typically even capable of love, perhaps) could make an exception for such a mediocre being. Despite all their flirtations and years of friendship, Aziraphale still sees it as this kind of play-acting – a dance they do for fun, but it’s never serious.

This is, of course, just one opinion in my brain – there’s a lot of ways to interpret it, and I can’t decide which one I really believe. Because if Aziraphale really saw nothing there, then what was the “you go too fast for me, Crowley” all about? It could’ve just been yet another moment of “You go too fast…in friendship,” thing, but who knows.

What I do know is that there’s something always holding Aziraphale back from Crowley, but it is not for lack of want. Aziraphale wants it just as much as Crowley. But he’s got many, many potential things holding him back from even considering this life – fear of heaven, lack of self-confidence, lack of trust, etc. It’s all adding up to one thought, the theme that’s threaded through his long, long, life—you’re not allowed to do this. You’re an angel, nothing less, nothing more.