#and him learning Charles thinks he’s a murderer a monster - the one person who had never thought that of him besides his parents - and that

[ironhusband]

Thinking about Erik snapping at Charles with “well maybe you should have fought harder for them” and the pain in his eyes when Charles told him they didn’t want the same things.

[a-student-out-of-time]

//And I know you’re all probably sick of hearing it at this point...but too bad, because I’m going to say it anyway : P

//Nothing about this trial has yet invalidated my switch theory.

//In fact, I have to double down on it because, at this point, having Arei actually be dead? After all this? The fact that they’ve kept putting so much emphasis throughout part 1, hammering it like this, especially with David’s clear inconsistencies?

//All of it makes me even more suspicious that things aren’t as cut and dried as we assumed.

//The fact that Charles realizes something’s up leads me to believe that’s probably going to be the big focus next part: if it’s not David, then who could’ve had a role in her death? Realistically, what other options do we have?

//Well, I’d like to revise my previous theories and offer a new alternative, one I’m honestly stunned I never even considered until now

//From the looks of it, I was wrong about there being some kind of conspiracy against David. However, Whit still gave us some key information: he went to David, asked him about this and David convinced him to stay quiet. That’s why he wasn’t sharing and anything and why he was stalling.

//But that got me to consider something else, and that brings me to the other major fact of this episode: the fact that David is the manipulator.

//That may not come as a big shock to anyone, but that leaves us with three remaining secrets: the murderer, the self-harmer and the suicidal one. All very dark ones, but also equally attributable.

//The self-harming one has to be Veronika’s, I’m sticking with that one. I’m still on the fence if the depression one or the closet one actually belongs to Hu, but again, it could go either way. It really depends on what Charles has to say.

//But that brings me to the murderer one, and how everyone has been convinced that they were the one who had a hand in Arei’s/J’s death. Yet there’s something we haven’t yet considered here, not even me:

//What if the murderer is actually helping her?

//I do think that secret has to be Levi’s at this point, as he’s one of the few who hasn’t been revealed. That much would be very fitting. But let’s also consider some other details about him: Levi is not a remorseless monster. He has a rough history and wants to move on from that past, having been disowned by his toxic family.

//You know who also had a toxic family they wanted to get away from? You know who else was a terrible person for a while? You know who’s also trying to move on from that and be a better person?

//Arei

//Let’s also consider something else for a moment: many people have asked me “how could they possibly have done a switch to look like each other? It’s too far-fetched.”

//I’ve explained why I don’t think it’s as far fetched as people believe it is, but here’s something else I think we should be considering: who among this cast is a fashion expert?

 //Who among them has a talent that’s based on clothing and appearance? And who has a strong desire to help them?

//Perhaps we were thinking about this all wrong. Maybe Arei went to Levi about his secret, just like she did with David, and he proved to be far more understanding than she or really anyone would’ve expected.

//If those two got each others’ secrets, it would make sense for them to reconcile and discuss the possibility for change.

//And instead of retaliating, maybe he’s the one she roped into this along with J. If he knows this is the case, it might explain why Levi’s been largely quiet during this trial. Especially if, as we learned from Arei, he also knows that David is a manipulator.

//We never saw Levi and David talking about secrets, did we?

//And really, I can’t think of anyone else who’d be better qualified to make sure the two of them looked like each other than him.

[mysteroads]

Summary: Charles is having a perfectly relaxing day off, until he gets a text from Lydia asking if he knows how to set a broken bone. Emergency Dad Mode is activated.

It was the perfect sort of day to relax at home.

Charles Deetz sipped his tea and watched rain hammer down as if it had a personal grudge against the entire world. Lightning forked across the sky, almost instantly followed by the type of booming, kettledrum thunder that sent adrenaline zipping through the veins of anyone caught under it. Charles relished the tiny thrill, then took another smug sip. Yes, this was indeed perfect.

A thud above his head that was not from thunder interrupted his quiet. Frowning, he glanced up. Another thud. Were the Maitlands moving things again? They’d said they were planning on staying in bed today to better enjoy the storm, much as he was doing. Perhaps they’d gotten bored. Well, he didn’t mind if they rearranged the entire house, so long as they didn’t ask him for help. Not today. Today was his day off, and he intended to do absolutely nothing.

Then his phone chimed. Frowning, he went to the end table by the sofa where he’d left it plugged in. He’d left it on ‘do not disturb’, so the only ones who could contact him were emergency services, Delia, and Lydia. Delia, out shopping with some art buddies, knew better than to text him today, and Lydia was supposed to be out of cell service herself until this evening. The text was from Lydia, and it made his blood run to ice.

Did that CERT thingy you went to last month cover broken bones?

He dropped his tea in his haste to call her. His frantic call immediately went to voicemail and he received an automated text: Can’t talk now, sorry! :) A few seconds later, he got a real text from Lydia, I’m fine, Dad. Chill.

Collapsing onto the couch, he let out a long sigh, looking sadly at the puddle of spilled tea soaking into the carpet. After getting his heart under control, he texted back. Yes it did. Why do you ask?

Because BJ broke his arm.

Again, his heart seemed to stop for a second, but he recovered more quickly this time. Beetlejuice had become part of the household after his (sudden, but inevitable) return a month after the infamous ‘moving in week’. Charles had reluctantly learned to accept the mischievous monster because Lydia adored him and the feeling was mutual. It helped that “BJ”, now out from under his curse of invisibility and freed from an obviously abusive parent, was more hyperactive than murderously manic. He could actually be funny sometimes. But Charles hadn’t realized that the demon could be injured beyond quickly healed scrapes or comedically removed limbs. Exhausted from magical overuse, yes, but injured?

How did that happen? 

Too long to text. Can you come up here and help me? Hurry, please.

They were back? Charles blinked in surprise, then emergency parent mode activated in his brain and he heaved himself to his feet and into the kitchen, where their big first aid kit was kept. Lydia and Beetlejuice had been to the Neitherworld, and had planned to spend the day there. That they were back so soon spoke to real trouble. 

He raced up the stairs and to Lydia’s door. He paused to catch his breath and calm himself down, remembering the CERT training. Staying calm was the most important thing. You couldn’t help anyone if you were too panicked to think clearly. As he let his heart slow down, he heard Lydia through the door: “Don’t bother with the glamor, Beej. You said you need all the energy you can get to heal, didn’t you?” The words didn’t really register with him, only the worried tone, so when he opened the door he was taken completely by surprise.

Beetlejuice sat on the floor next to Lydia’s mirror, hair white with streaks of sickly yellow, one arm held tight against his chest. There were other changes to his appearance, major changes, but Charles didn’t get a chance to really take them in because the startled demon made a shoving motion with one hand and sent him flying out of the door and into the wall outside. THe door slammed after him.

“Beej!” Lydia shrieked. 

Groaning, he rubbed the back of his head, feeling a dull throb he knew would turn into a full body ache later. The door flew open and Lydia rushed out to him. “Dad! Dad, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, looking around for the first aid kit. It was a few feet away, luckily unscathed. “Maybe I should’ve knocked.”

“I should’ve warned you” she apologized. “He didn’t want me to tell anyone.”

“Because I’m fine!” snarled Beetlejuice, his voice even raspier than usual.

“No you’re not!” Lydia snapped over her shoulder. “Shut up and sit still, dumbass.”

Beetlejuice answered with a snarl. 

Charles stood up with a hand up from Lydia, rubbed his face, and grabbed the first aid kit. Then he looked at Beetlejuice. ‘Don’t bother with the glamor,’ she had said. Now he understood what she meant. 

Beetlejuice had never looked normal, but he’d been human enough. The… being huddled next to the mirror was definitely not human. How he’d hidden those truly impressive fangs and claws all this time was a true mystery. And those eyes. Charles did his best not to stare. Yesterday, he would’ve said Beetlejuice had yellow eyes. They weren’t yellow. They were gold as pirate doubloons and harvest moons, and just as luminous.

Remember, Charles, be calm. Taking a firmer grip on the kit, he headed into the room and knelt down next to Beetlejuice. The demon huddled back away from him. He had long, pointed ears, currently pressed tight back against his head. Charles would never admit it aloud, but they reminded him of a frightened puppy, and on any other person he’d call them cute. But that wasn’t what was important. He turned his attention on the arm Beetlejuice held against his chest.

“Will you let me help?” he asked, careful to keep his voice mild. 

....

[papermoonloveslucy]

BALLOWEEN ~ Spooky Kooky Lucy!

A Handy Dandy Guide To Halloween in the Lucyverse

FILM

LURED is a 1947 suspense film directed by Douglas Sirk starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and former Frankenstein monster Boris Karloff.

SYNOPSIS: Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) is a London-based dancer who is distraught to learn that her friend has disappeared. Soon after the disappearance, she's approached by Harley Temple (Charles Coburn), a police investigator who believes her friend has been murdered by a serial killer who uses personal ads to find his victims. Temple hatches a plan to catch the killer using Sandra as bait, and Sandra agrees to help. But complications arise when Sandra becomes engaged to a nightclub owner.

This example of film noir is more suspenseful than scary, but it is nice to see Ball in a different genre than comedy.

RADIO

"Liz’s Superstitions” (aka “Superstition”) is episode #59 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on October 21, 1949.

SYNOPSIS: A chirping cricket in the Cooper’s hearth is driving George crazy, but Liz is convinced it means good luck. When Liz insists that it isn't lucky to banish a cricket, George gets upset with her superstitions.

MR. ACME: “There are only three of us in this room. Only two of us will leave here alive.”

LIZ: “I hope one of them is not a cricket!” 

"Halloween Surprise Party” (aka “The Halloween Party” aka “The Surprise Halloween Party”) is episode #60 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on October 28, 1949.

SYNOPSIS: The Atterburys decide to throw a Halloween surprise party for Liz and George, but when Liz hears about their party at the beauty salon, she thinks that she and George just weren't invited. When the subject turns to everyone’s plans for Halloween, the Atterburys lie and tell the Coopers that Iris’s mother is ill so they are having dinner with her.

RUDOLPH: “Yes, we always spend Halloween with the old witch!” 

“The Ten Grand” was an episode of radio’s Suspense broadcast on June 22, 1944. The script is by Virginia Radcliffe. It was her only Suspense script in a long radio writing career. This story was included in Suspense Magazine #3.

SYNOPSIS: A broke chorus girl inexplicably finds ten thousand dollars in her purse after it’s been temporarily stolen on the subway. She’s not sure what to do about it, and it soon leads to trouble. She has been set up.

Lucille Ball had done a previous episode of Suspense in January 1944 titled “Dime a Dance”. 

"Early To Death" is an episode of Suspense that aired April 12, 1951. It starred Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in a script by John Michael Hayes and E. Jack Newman, produced and directed by Elliott Lewis.

SYNOPSIS: Ben is a co-pilot on a plane and he and his partner Evie (Lucille Ball) call in that their plane is in trouble. But the plane wasn’t in trouble, it was carrying the company’s payroll and the two of them jumped from the plane with the money and took it as they had planned and buried it in the mountain where they planned to leave it until things had died down. A few days later they strolled in to a nearby town like two plane crash survivors. They knew there would be questions to answer but they had rehearsed for this over the year. When the wreckage was found it was assumed that the money had burnt in it. It seemed that they were clear and all they had to do was wait but then a guy named Rico Sebastian turned up claiming that he had seen them bury the money in the mountains.

“I’d killed, then he’d killed. The way I looked at it, it was my turn again.” ~ Evie

TELEVISION

"The Seance" is the seventh episode of season one of "I Love Lucy" aired on November 26, 1951. Directed by Marc Daniels. Written by Jess Oppenheimer, Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr.

SYNOPSIS: Lucy is obsessed with astrology and numerology just as Ricky is about to be interviewed by a producer who also believes heavily in the supernatural.  To appease him, the gang hosts a séance to contact his dear departed Tilly.   

This episode is based on an episode of Lucy’s radio show “My Favorite Husband” titled “Numerology,” which was first broadcast on Christmas Day 1948. 

MEDIUM RAYA (in a trance): "Ethel to Tilly. Ethel to Tilly. Come in, Tilly. Over."

"Little Ricky's School Pageant" is the tenth episode of season six of "I Love Lucy" aired December 17, 1956. Directed by James V. Kern. Written by Madelyn Martin, Bob Carroll, Jr., Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf.

SYNOPSIS: Little Ricky is cast as the lead in his school play, with Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel also getting into the act. Lucy plays a wicked witch who threatens to kidnap Susie and her little brother Billy.

"Lucy and the Monsters" is 18th episode of season three of "The Lucy Show" aired January 25, 1965.

SYNOPSIS: When Lucy and Viv decide to check out the horror movies their boys have been watching, Lucy has a nightmare in which she and Viv are trapped in a haunted castle where they encounter a variety of horror movie characters - until their host turns them into witches themselves!  

LUCY: “The over-abundance of spooky stuff in movies and TV can cause traumatic experience in our youngsters.”

This is as close as Lucy gets to a Halloween episode, although it was first aired in January! It includes all the horror movie tropes: haunted house, vampires, werewolves, witches, mummies, and creatures.

"Lucy Cuts Vincent's Price" is the 9th episode of season three of "Here's Lucy" aired November 9, 1970, one week after Halloween.

SYNOPSIS: Lucy mistakenly buys a painting at an auction and brings it to art connoisseur actor Vincent Price to be appraised.  Price thinks Lucy is an actress coming to audition for his new horror movie and terrorizes Lucy in his study turned laboratory.

"Lucy and the Little Old Lady" is the 17th episode of the fourth season of "Here's Lucy" aired January 3, 1972, starring Helen Hayes.

SYNOPSIS: When a kindly widow from out of town (Helen Hayes) comes to the Unique Employment Agency looking for a part-time job, Lucy gives her a place to stay and Harry buys some real estate from her. Kim becomes suspicious that she may be running a con game so they plan to hold a fake séance to get Harry’s money back.

To be truthful, there's nothing particularly scary about this episode, even the séance!

[drstrangefictions]

One-Shot

James "Logan" Howlett x Female Reader

Word Count: 4,508

Spoilers: None

Warnings: Logan has big OOC energy. I wrote this today. It was a head empty, no thought fic so I am very sorry if it sucks LMFAO it was also not supposed to be more than 1K words but here we are.

AO3: Link

Logan sat on the couch, just barely past, watching the television (more like barely paying attention to it). It was normally peaceful, more often than not, the students and professors actually slept. Save for Logan. The nightmares typically kept him awake, sometimes they were things he remembered, such as the war; sometimes they were things he couldn’t recall, something he assumed to be of his mysterious past. It was truly a sick and twisted joke, not being able to remember who he was. He’s well aware of who he is now, just a man, a mutant, on the path to recovery (if you can call whatever he does with his life recovery). He still considered himself a monster, a murderer, but it was just another little thing Logan had to live with. Coupled with the fear of hurting someone in this new place he called home. Beer would be soothing (unlikely) if it had any effect. The damn healing factor makes it hard to drink problems away and it might actually be for the best.

Rogue was amongst his favorites at the X-Mansion. An innocent girl, simply afraid of herself, and astonishingly determined to find a work around, or a cure, or something to make her feel better. A little practice, ease of anxieties, and the works would help one would think. Time is the only thing, Charles seemed to think he had all the time in the world. She was a stowaway, that’s how he got stuck with her, and Logan didn’t mind at all. Jean was another one of Logan’s favorites. Something about her was just so different than most people. Whether it be her softspoken charm or her sincere nature, perhaps her inner and outer strength. Jean was nearly a friend. Amongst the favorites was another kind mutant; however, she was truly an unexpected favorite. Scott refers to her as Void, most people at the X-Mansion call her that. When she was first mentioned, Logan had no idea they were actually talking about a person – Void was often referenced as “The Void” as in the emptiness of space or general lack of something.

Void is something of a magician – “a street magician,” Bobby had jokingly told Logan the night before she returned. She played her cards just right; she always had an ace up her sleeve. Literally, she gave Logan the ace of hearts when they first officially met. He kept it, of course he kept it, he was intrigued. Logan twirled the ace of hearts between his fingers, he did this when she was absent. Odd for tonight, because she was just in her room (it’s not actually known if she really does stay at the mansion overnight, it’s an assumption based on observation of actions). She always had some kind of disappearing act. Logan was actually captivated by her magician skills; he could never quite grasp how she does her crazy tricks.

“Can’t sleep?” She stood against the archway. “There used to be a door here.” Her eyes traced the door frame.

“Thought you were asleep.” Logan looked up from the ace of hearts.

Void shrugged her shoulders and stepped into the living room. She turned to face the television, presumable to see what Logan had left on, and scrunched her nose at the boring show on the boring channel. “You could always pop a movie in. Might I suggest Event Horizon?” She faced Logan again and held out the movie case. “Sam Neill does a great job in this movie. A bit of science fiction, a bit of horror, but a whole masterpiece.”

“How do you do all those tricks?” Logan asked. Finally.

With a flick of her wrist the movie was gone from her hand. “Practice. I used to want to be a magician, until I learned it was a sham. It broke my heart for about a month. At some point I set my mind to something else. None of those things happened, I’m here instead.” Void walked over to the couch and sat as far away from Logan as she could manage with the couch being a lot smaller than it was when she was a growing up at the X-Mansion.

Logan glanced at her. “Child’s ignorance.” He smiled.

“Ignorance in all capital letters, get it right. Followed by disappointment.” She grinned and turned to face Logan. She pulled her legs onto the couch and pressed her left foot against him to be annoying on purpose. She draped her arm over the back of the couch and scrunched her nose again. This time there was no trace of disgust, but something else. “You always sound so grumpy.” She teased.

“Maybe I am always grumpy.” He said.

“Bullshit. Tell me about something you’re not grumpy about. I’m a nosy girl, so it has to be something no one knows about.” Void stifled her laughter.

Logan blinked. “No.”

She leaned her head against her arm and quickly gave him a thumbs down with her free hand. “Fine. Tell me why the professor thinks you’ve been acting so odd recently. He’s concerned, but only a little bit because you’re a big boy. He thinks something is bothering you, but he doesn’t want to be nosy. Which is shocking because this man has no respect for privacy.”

Logan looked at the beer bottle in his hand and shook his head. “He’s a bit of a dick at times.”

“Correction, massive dick. Like most adults here. Myself included.” She inhaled deeply. “Continue.”

“I have been acting different, yes. I didn’t think it would be noticeable. I have a few things on my mind.” Logan began. “Don’t worry about it.” He cut himself short. So close.

Void relaxed her shoulders and reached over to Logan, pressing her knuckles against his arm. “I won’t push, just know, you big oaf, that you can come talk to me when you’re ready. And if I’m not here when you need to talk, I’m sure you know to call me, right?”

Logan swallowed and looked at her and her unwavering kindness towards him. Flooded by recent memories, Logan could only stare. She wasthere for him, more often than she wasn’t. She has magicked herself into his room immediately after he woke up from another nightmare (her random materialization was no help at all, but at least she was there instantly). She would stay with him all night long. He always seemed to find her on the couch with him when her schedule allowed for it – between teaching these kids magic tricks (Charles considers this good old recreational fun and a course schedule elective) and teaching Astronomy and related subjects, and disappearing into the outside world, somehow, she was always there for him. She always seemed to find new way to disturb his peace childishly. She was childish. She has startled him on multiple occasions at three in the morning to haul his ass outside to view the stars as if they had never seen stars before. He hated it so much that he kept stargazing with her.

“Yeah, I know.” He looked away from her.

She flashed a small smile of concern. “I don’t like when the cool guy isn’t feeling a 100 percent.”

“Oh, so I’m the cool guy now.” He chuckled.

“Always were, dear friend, always were. Don’t tell the other guys, but I lie to them about their worth.” She laughed.

Logan shook his head, stifling his own laughter. “How does everyone not hate you?”

“Easy. I make dessert and if they hate me, they get nothing.” She shrugged her shoulders rather dramatically. “But honestly, I have my favorites. It’s me, I’m my own favorite. You’re a close second.”

“Geez, only a close second?” Logan faked his disappointment. He furrowed his eyebrows. “You’re such a wildcard.”

She leaned back and threw her arm over the back of the couch again. “Thanks, I worked really hard to become the wildcard. The damn threats that the Avengers face never expect me, Magneto is occasionally prepared for me. It all comes from not thinking. How can my plan be thwarted if I have no plan?”

Logan sighed; real disappointment settled. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all day.”

“Thanks, I came up with it on a whim.” She tried to maintain a stoic expression, only to exaggerate her need to laugh. She was funny, and she often laughed at herself. She was quick.

Logan looked anywhere but at her. Childish. “So, you spend your free time with those Avengers? What do you gain from it?”

“A paycheck.” She sighed. “It’s not very fun, once they find the guy they’re looking for, I never have to see them again. Charles thought it would be a good idea for me to go because I have a better chance of not mucking things up. Which is true, no offense, but you and Stark would get along so poorly that everything is jeopardized from the moment you lock eyes with him.” She leaned her head on her arm.

Logan nodded; she was probably right. “I can see that being the case.”

They grew silent, but it was a comfortable silence. Void’s presence was comforting. She was so laidback and collected, but she also worried far more than the average person. She laughed a lot and made everything funny with good intentions. Logan knew that she coped with humor. Sadness, concern for him, anger usually got covered by her humor and childish nature. Logan was told of the one time she lashed out and lost control; she frightened herself and others and, well, a family had to bury their daughter. He didn’t know what caused it, no one did, but he knew that’s why she hid her anger. He thought it was much worse than being angry. Where does that anger go if she’s just hiding it? Doesn’t it just build up? If it doesn’t build up, what is she doing with that anger?

Void shifted and dragged her foot away from him. She rested her head on her knee and kept her eyes on him. She was worried, and she was bad at hiding it (if she was even trying to hide it).

“There is one thing that is eating me.” Logan locked eyes with her. He curled his hand into a fist and clenched his jaw. Something was bothering him – well, more than one something. The nightmares, of course, were bothering him, so was his past, and what Stryker did to him, and there was also a girl. This girl. Void. But bothering him wasn’t what she was doing. He was actually bothered by the fact that he loved her.

Void raised her eyebrows and lifted her head. He had her full attention. “Tell me.”

Instant regret washed over Logan. “There’s this girl–.”

“Is it Jean?”

“Let me finish.” Logan inhaled sharply. “This girl. She means the world to me. She’s very funny, even if I don’t laugh. She’s bright and she always seems to have an answer to something. She’s very kind to me and most other people. I think her kindness towards me is misplaced – something tells me I don’t deserve it. She’s always on the move, whether it’s something for her friends, her family, or me. She’s always doing something. She’s honest, even if the truth sucks, she’ll tell me. Hell, she’s beautiful and so full of life. She’s a horrible liar. She hides behind her humor. Something could bother her, and she’ll joke about it.”

Void smiled. Logan can be a sweetheart, but Void already knew that. “I bet she’s lucky to know you. Do I know her?”

Logan thought for a moment. “She’s never mentioned you.”

She nodded sadly. “So, probably not. Damn, Logan, I don’t think you should be so down on yourself over her. Misplaced kindness? There’s no such thing as misplaced kindness towards you. And she’d be stupid not to feel the same way about you. I mean, come on, do you need me to ask her out for you?”

Logan shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. Can’t risk losing her to you, now, can I?”

Void snorted. “Oh, am I your competition?” She eyed him sadly.

Logan looked away; his smile faded at the glimpse of pain in her eyes. He felt bad for not saying: “Hey, my stupid ass is afraid of rejection, but I think you’re awesome, we should date.” He was talking about her. He was in love with her. He loved her. It was the pain in her eyes from thinking of Logan loving someone else that made it click. She started out just doing as she does because that’s what a good friend would do, she never planned to fall in love (I mean, no one ever plans to fall in love), Logan definitely never planned to fall in love. It actually scared him, seeing that twinge of pain in her eyes. He was afraid of hurting her – physically and mentally and emotionally. He was afraid to lose her to someone better eventually (oh, anxiety, you scamp). He was afraid of her growing tired of him. Even worse, he was hurting her now by avoiding the truth.

“I will give you money if you ask her out.” Void found humor.

Logan licked his top lip. “Don’t.”

Void leaned away from him. “Okay, but you told me about her, now you have to work your magic. I’m the friend that encourages everything, remember?”

“Pushing Scott off of a cliff into the ocean is notencouragement.” Logan chuckled. That was a strange day. There was no real reason that they took a little fieldtrip to the Etretat sea cliff, they just took it. She didn’t really push Scott, more like, she threw him in the ocean right after he said something stupid. Eventually they all ended up in the water somehow…

“Right, but you weren’t going to do it, so I did. He was lucky there was water down there. Otherwise, that would have been awkward.” She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “Seriously, though, I know you well enough to know that I should encourage something like this. You may not be able to identify your true past, beyond Stryker, but you know who you are in this present moment. Logan, the Wolverine, a X-Man. You might view yourself in a negative light, and if someone like me can understand and see past it, so can she. You’re not defined by what you did, well you are but you aren’t, if that makes sense. You’re not a monster – sure, your kill count might be higher than mine, murderer – but you’re really not a monster. Probably just wildly misunderstood.” She moved again, crisscross with her back against the couch and her eyes on the television.

“Key word there is ‘probably’.”

Void gave a thin-lipped smile. “Oh, you know, not everyone is misunderstood, it’s just a ‘probably’, right? You’ve worked pretty hard to be a functional member of society, Logan, if she can’t see your worth, she’s an idiot. I want you to take that chance, you only live this one life, no matter how long yours is. Don’t be a coward, I’ll start chanting and everyone will know everything.” She bit her bottom lip as her real smile grew.

“No chanting.” Logan pointed at her. “None.”

She put her hands up defensively and looked down and away. “Fine, fine.” She sighed and peered over at Logan. She leaned forward and shrugged her shoulders. “At the end of the day, you have to either go for it, or not go for it. If she’s an idiot, you know where to find me. If she’s not, be gross faraway from here, please. We don’t need another Scott and Jean moment.” She shuddered, disgusted.

Logan laughed, he really laughed at that one. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t torture anyone like that.”

“Thank you.” She slumped back, relieved. “You know no idea how disgusting and annoying it is. They’ve been together for a very long time and, ugh, I need a nice glass of bleach.” Void shook her head.

His shoulders bounced as he laughed. “You really hate them that much?”

“Honestly, I’ve spelt on this couch more times than I care to admit because, before we acquired children, they just went at it, and everyone heard them. This was the safe space. I’ve had mock sleepovers with all of the original members. Oh, to be young again.” She snorted. “Young couples, am I right?”

“They’re not that young anymore.” Logan exhaled, grinning. He paused for a moment, opening his mouth to speak before changing his mind.

“Back on topic, before you say anything, I just want you to know, at the end of the day, I want you to do what’s best for you.” She looked at Logan. “But seriously, don’t be Jean and Scott.”

Logan let out one last chuckle. “I got it. Thank you.”

“Well, how long did it take you to learn that little phrase. ‘Thank you’, say it again.” She smiled smugly.

Logan raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

She shook her head. “I’m joking.”

“No, I think you’re serious.” Logan pointed at her.

She sighed and looked up. “Whatever you say, big guy.”

“Well, since you’re joking, I guess you don’t want to hear what I have to say.” Logan shrugged his shoulders and looked away from her. She was nosy, she was going to want to know.

Void scooted closer to him with wide eyes. “Tell me.”

Logan looked at her, lips parted. He leaned against her arm. “Let’s put it this way. I appreciate you. A lot. There aren’t many people I can appreciate. And all jokes aside, thank you for everything.” He looked at her, almost unsure of how to really thank her for all she’s done for him. “You’re always there for me. There’s no doubt you’ve seen it all by now.”

“D’aw, you’re such a liar.” She giggled and leaned into him.

Logan snorted. “And you can’t accept what I just said.”

“Alright, alright. You’re welcome for everything.” Void mocked. “Since I don’t ask for much, can I ask you something? It’s kind of weird.”

Logan hesitated. Weird? That’s never a good thing. “Go ahead.” He pulled away from her and glanced at her.

“Would you happen to know how to get over someone? I mean, I’m never going to go after him. I’m sort of afraid to and I’m pretty sure he’s seeing someone anyway. I’d rather spare myself the heartbreak and skip right over to the moving on. It sounds weird because he was never mine to move on from or get over.” She slowly inched away from Logan and back to her side of the couch.

Logan drew his lips into a thin line. “Sounds like you want to skip out on being human. I don’t recommend that. I know you don’t want to feel upset over someone you never got close with, you should let yourself feel these things. Isn’t that what you tell me?”

“Ugh, bastard, using my own spells against me.” She started to slide down the couch. Dramatic. “That’s the exact opposite of what I wanted to hear. You suck at this.”

Logan watched her slide down. “Fine, fine. Do things you love to distract yourself. Go out and view the stars, stargazing, do research on the new space garbage they found, bully Scott for something new. And if all else fails, like you always say, you know where to find me.” He swallowed. It was really now or never.

“Scott’s hair is awful, and I need to tell him.” Void laughed. “I could bully him about that, right?”

“It’s horrible, please tell him.”

She nodded. “I’ll tell him you said it. Besides, Jean cut his hair.”

“That explains why it’s so bad.” Logan chuckled.

Void threw herself back up on the couch and nodded. She was dramatic and childish. The exact opposite of himself. He was a monster, and she was, well, whatever she was. Yikes, she was a telekinetic and a master at sneaking up on people, maybe she had some kind of phasing mutation or portal mutation to help with that. Meanwhile, Logan was an animal. Bone claws coated in metal. Natural born killer. Logan watched her. She kept her eyes on the television. She sat crisscross and played with the sleeves of her – actually, it was his – sweatshirt while she watched the boring show that they both had tuned out in order to talk. That was another thing – she dressed better than him even if she tricked him into giving her his sweatshirt (did she really trick him, or did he just give it to her without a conversation about it? We will truly neverknow). It was now or never. She’s sitting right there. He could easily ask her on a date.

“Get up, let’s go for a walk.” Logan threw himself off the couch and walked into the kitchen. “Beer?”

She looked towards the kitchen. “Not if we’re walking outside past midnight. I don’t care if you’re a big strong man, I know myself, and I’d like to be sober enough to know what the hell goes wrong.”

“You’re so paranoid.” Logan frowned. She had a point though. He also had no idea where they were going to walk to. Were they going to stay by the mansion?

She scoffed. “As if you aren’t, let me get shoes. Unlike you, I don’t wear shoes all damn day.” Void jumped off the couch and disappeared into the shadows of the X-Mansion.

Logan made his way to the front door. He leaned against the wall and waited for her to run up to him or to materialize in front of him. His mind wandered, how on Earth was he going to ask her? How was he so sure this was going to work? He didn’t even peak outside to see if they could see anything tonight. For all Logan knew, it could be cloudy as hell. He shook his head and grumbled about being so stupid and impulsive. Then a new problem came up: what if she says no? Logan, for all he knew, could have just saw what he wanted to when he looked at her.

“Let’s go.” She said.

Logan jumped out of his skin. “What the fuck?”

Void swung the door open and pulled him out of the X-Mansion. She locked the door behind them and threw her lanyard of keys around her neck and slipped it beneath the sweatshirt. She lurched at the cold keys tapping her warm skin, a bad feeling. She jogged down the stairs after Logan and looked up at the sky as she did every time they walked outside at night. Outside of the mansion they could see more than they would in a suburban neighborhood or in the city. But still not as much as one little spot she found in the middle of nowhere. She took him there once, a really bad night. He wasn’t one for stargazing or truly understanding the beauty of it all, but that night he didsee the beauty that is the night sky. That was about a year and a half ago, around that time, maybe even that night, he realized he loved her and all of her crazy childishness. They walked out towards the back of the mansion. The number of times his hand grazed hers was infuriating. He could just hold her hand, drape his arm over her, something “romantic”. But that would be weird considering their conversation earlier.

“Something’s really bothering you.” Void threw herself in front of Logan and grabbed his arms. She tried to shake him, but him and his metal bones just don’t budge all too often. “I’m the one that makes us go for walks or stargazing. Not you. So, what’s bothering you, Logan? If it’s another nightmare, you should tell me. I need to know what’s going on so I can help you.”

Logan looked at her, every inch of her face screamed concerned. “You should worry about yourself more than you worry about me. I know you stay up and wait to see if I need you.”

“One day, I won’t stay up all night to make sure you’re okay, but today isn’t that day.” She smiled sadly. “Wait, how’d you know?”

Logan shrugged. “Just a lucky guess.”

Void yawned into her elbow. “Bullshit.” She grabbed his arm again. “I guess it’s obvious.”

“With all the close calls, I don’t think you should–.”

Void inhaled deeply. “They’re only close calls because I get close. But I know how to avoid getting impaled. Earlier you asked me how I do all my tricks, the answer is wormholes, most of the time. I can create harmless little wormholes and that’s how I keep you from stabbing me. The room is so dark, you’re so panicked, you don’t even see it. That’s how I move around most of the time too” She looked up at Logan and smiled. She was clever.

“Wormholes. Sounds like a space thing.” He couldn’t smile at that. No matter how clever she thought herself to be, she was still risking a lot.

She pressed her head against his chest and shook her head. “You’re so annoying. You’re even more annoying because that girl you were talking about was me, wasn’t it?”

“What gave it away?” He raised an eyebrow.

She smiled and looked up at him, still leaning against him. “Oh, just a lucky guess. You couldn’t say much about they mystery girl without giving away who she was, you’ve pushed the conversation towards me, and you would have thrown me across the yard for leaning against you like this. I know you, Logan.”

“What about this guy of yours?” He asked.

“I may have twisted the story a bit,” she gave a nervous laugh, “because the guy is you.”

Logan loosely wrapped his arms around her. “I should’ve known. You’re a terrible liar.”

“Yeah, I’m not the moron that fell for it.” Void stuck her tongue out at him. “So, is this a date? Is that why you took me outside?”

Logan looked away. “If you want this to be a date–.”

“It’s a date.” She pulled away from him and dragged him over to the bench. “A very comfortable date.”

They sat on the bench – somehow Logan always ended up on the end and she slid next to him and took his left hand in her right. She couldn’t focus on the stars, instead all she could focus on was Logan – but when doesn’t she? Logan chuckled at her staring, she could be drooling, and he’d still stare back. As if they don’t spend all the time in the world together already, she kept herself pressed against his side. He could live with this, but she won’t change his mind about himself. Maybe she would ease his anxieties. She was clever. She was childish. Logan loved that about her.

[thephantomessoftheopera]

Notes on Gaston Leroux‘s „The Phantom of the Opera“ - Chapter 22: „Interesting and Instructive Tribulations of a Persian in the Cellars of the Opera“

<< Previous chapter

This is a flashback chapter that allegedly reproduces the Persian‘s personal account of his previous interactions with Erik before he and Raoul jumped into the torture chamber. It also provides some background on Erik‘s time in Persia. The Persian’s narrative begins with him stalking Erik in the hope of finding a way into his house. On one occasion, when he has taken the boat to get to the wall where the door of the house is hidden, he encounters the “siren”, one of Erik’s ingenuous defense strategies. The trick of the “siren” is to attract any intruder with its singing (as sirens usually do), so they can easily be snatched and dragged underwater when they are close enough. The “siren” is none other than Erik himself, who is using a reed to breathe and sing underwater - something that he learned from the Pirates in Tonkin, a french colony in northern Vietnam (does anyone else want to see Erik give Jack Sparrow a run for his money🏴‍☠️??). He recognizes the Persian just before he can drown him, and drags him to the shore instead, where he tells him that he does not want his presence in his house.

Apparently, when the Persian saved Erik’s life in Persia, he made him promise that he would not commit any more murders. Therefore, he wants to know if Erik was involved in the fall of the chandelier, but Erik denies it, saying that it was badly worn, and that he didn’t make it fall. It’s hard to know if Erik is lying or speaking the truth here - we naturally assume that it was his doing in the context of the novel. However, as the chandelier’s counterweight falling was a real event which happened in 1896, killing one person, all we know is that most likely, it did in fact fall without someone actively dropping it - unless you assume that a real ghost had a very real hand in making the accident happen.

Erik‘s brand of violence in general is a very artistic and impersonal one, which helps him separate his crimes from himself and focus on the art instead of the crime. When the Persian reminds him of the „Rosy hours of Mazenderan“, it is evident that he wishes to suppress those memories, sadly stating that he tries to forget about them, but that at least „he made the little sultana laugh“. Another indication of this mental compartmentalization is Erik‘s occasional use of „illeism“, i.e. referring to himself in the third person. This illustrates the „feeling of "being outside one's body and watching things happen", a psychological disconnect resulting from dissonance either from trauma such as childhood physical or sexual abuse, or from past outbursts that cannot be reconciled with the individual's own self-image.“ I think we can safely say that in Erik‘s case, both factors come into play. Erik was traumatized practically from birth - we don‘t really know about any physical abuse, but in any case, he was emotionally and mentally abused from his earliest childhood (a lack of affection is crippling to a child’s development). Disassociating himself from his crimes then serves as a coping mechanism for him. In his speech, he actually uses the first person far more frequently than the third person, though.

The Persian‘s insistence on controlling Erik‘s behaviour is due to him feeling responsible for any crimes he might commit since he saved his life, and it seems that he regards him as a mixture between an unruly child and a very dangerous animal. Later, we will learn that it was in fact the Persian who brought Erik to Persia in the first place, thus probably also feeling some responsibility himself for whatever Erik did there, and whatever he might do in the future. It is important though that Erik and the Persian - as chief of the Mazenderan police - were both in the employ of the Persian rulers, and those were allegedly far more monstruous than Erik himself, perverting his genius in a way that served their cruel ideas of entertainment.

Throughout his account of the story, the Persian usually calls Erik a „monster“ and always fears that Erik will go through with his threat against „many members of the human race“. He has been spying on Erik and Christine during their lessons, but cannot believe that Erik‘s voice would be „enough to make her forget his ugliness.“

When he witnesses the progression of the relationship between the two, and that they are now seeing each other, he once again tries to stop Erik when he is on his way out to go shopping for Christine, on the morning after the first night she spent at his house. For those who wonder how Erik was able to go out and run errands, here is the resolution:  when he went out, he wore a papier-mâché nose with a mustache attached, which would hide the fact that he had no nose - which is apparently his most horrible feature. The fake nose made him „almost bearable“ to look upon, so he was able to go out without wearing a full-face mask.

Erik is angry at the Persian for constantly following him around, endangering his secrets, and threatens that terrible things would happen should he be betrayed. He mentions the mysterious „man in the felt hat“ again, speaking of how he had to take the Persian to the managers twice, and that he himself was there, too. Unfortunately, this is not any more conclusive than before, as Erik usually speaks of his alter egos (the siren, for example) as if they were separate entities.

The Persian insists that he has come for Christine and accuses Erik of keeping her as a prisoner (which is not really true at this point, as he offered her her freedom the night before, and she hasn‘t unmasked him yet). Erik makes the Persian promise to leave him alone if he can prove that Christine loves him for himself by coming back to him of her own free will, and the Persian agrees because he thinks that no one could love „that monster“ Erik for himself (which is kind of a sad thing to think…).

He is therefore reasonably amazed when he sees Christine freely come to and leave Erik’s house, but concludes from observing Christine‘s and Raoul‘s engagement game that Erik „occupied her mind by terror, but her heart belonged wholly to Raoul de Chagny“. Now, as we‘ve seen through Raoul‘s eyes and Christine‘s own account, it was not as simple as that. While terror was definitely in the mix, Christine herself said she cared more about Erik’s tears than his threats, and despite her fears, was unwilling to hurt him and run away until it was too late. Therefore, I personally don‘t think that the Persian has much authority to speak of Christine‘s heart, especially since he does not seem to know her particularly well.

The Persian still intends to find the entrance into Erik’s house and one day, watches Erik enter it through the third cellar. The house is apparently not soundproof, as Erik’s music can still be heard in the cellar above, but obviously no one knows where this “ghost music” is coming from.

He then recounts the events of the day of Christine’s abduction and how he briefly considered preemptively denouncing Erik („the monster”) to the police, but chose not to do so because no one would believe him. He then provides several details from Erik’s backstory: how he learned to use the punjab lasso in India, how he fought as a type of gladiator armed with only the lasso for the amusement of the sultana of Mazenderan in Persia, and how he worked as a contractor for Charles Garnier and was therefore secretly able to build his house into the foundations of the opera during the Franco-Prussian war and the siege of Paris from 1870 to 1871, while official construction work on the opera house was suspended. The house is located between the inner and outer casing that was built to contain the water in the underground lake, presumably towards the western side of the building and roughly on the level of the fourth cellar.

Upon finding himself in the torture chamber, the Persian recognizes that it is the same type of chamber that Erik had built in Mazenderan, and which was used for the execution of prisoners (and occasionally, random people as well) by the sultana. He also concludes that Joseph Buquet must also have been trying to follow Erik and had fallen into the torture chamber where he hanged himself, and that later Erik must have moved the body and hung it on the set piece from “Le Roi de Lahore” (which basically translates to “The King of the capital of the Punjab” - did I mention he has a twisted sense of humour??). But as the lasso, being made of catgut, might have aroused suspicions, he apparently decided to get rid of it somewhere else.

Now, upon finding the lasso at his very feet, the Persian’s fears rise and he tries to get Raoul to stay silent and motionless so as not to alert Erik of their presence in his house...

Next chapter >>

[wormstacheangel]

Since your last post implied it I would love to know about your AU recommendations ❤ I am obsessed too!! Thanks in advance 🙏🏻

hello! I hope you don’t mind if I just make a basic list of some of the AU stories I have read or want to read. Not in any order I just went through my bookmarks on AO3 :) Also I need to read more...Under the cut because it got too long! 

Angel's Wild (not gonna lie this is my favorite fic. I have read this almost a dozen times now)

Summary: But that’s the whole reason he’s here, isn’t it? He’s not out here hunting Humans. He’s not even hunting deer, or bears, or anything else that featured in Bambi. He’s out here, freezing his nuts off every night, because he’s hunting Angels. 

Sometimes Dean wishes that Angels were like how they’re described in the Bible. How people from time too old for him to care much about thought Angels were messengers and warriors of God, protectors of Humans. He knows that how they’re really described in the Bible is actually pretty terrifying, but at least they were told by God that they’re supposed to love Humans, right? 

That’s a thousand times better than what Angels really turned out to be.

Checked Out

Summary:  Castiel Novak can think of many writers who would not be welcome under the roof of Heaven’s Gate library, where he is the librarian: Ayn Rand ranks highly (no explanation needed), as does Charles Dickens (he hasn’t forgiven Charles for the month he lost to The Pickwick Papers). And, of course, Dean Winchester. Dean Winchester, local author and obvious a-hole, who is entirely too handsome to be true and who is clearly totally lacking in profundity, intelligence, sincerity, and self-awareness. Unfortunately, though, Dean’s been invited to do a book signing at Heaven’s Gate - and Castiel’s about to be confronted by some unexpected feelings when he finally meets Dean for the first time.

A Ghost Story

Summary:  Castiel Novak has haunted his family's estate for 150 years, awaiting the return of his lost love. Upon their reunion, Dean Winchester learns of his past reincarnation. After the night of Castiel's resurrection, the two try to find out why they've been given a second chance. The answers may be hidden in the forgotten memories of Dean's former life - but sometimes the truth is better left buried.

Patient Love

Summary: Castiel Novak is 27 when he suddenly loses his twin brother Jimmy, and his whole world turns to ashes. How do you deal with losing half of yourself when your whole life always revolved around the two of you, like yin and yang and black and white? How do you deal with a broken soul and old demons looming over you with no one to hold you back anymore?

After 10 years as a Navy Special Warfare Operator and more than a dozen deployments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, a battlefield injury forces 28-year-old Chief Petty Officer Dean Winchester to chose between being stuck behind a desk for the rest of his career or going back to civil life. When he learns about his friend Jimmy’s death, Dean makes his way back to Kansas with his heart in his throat and broken pieces at his feet.

Things are already complicated and painful enough as it is, but when former lovers Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak meet again after 10 years of radio silence and a galaxy of wounds and scars solidly standing between them, it feels like both a curse and a blessing has been placed on them both. Is there any hope in putting back their broken pieces together after a decade, and how do you deal with grief and broken dreams?

The Unbroken

Summary: Dean’s life had been made of running. He ran from a curse that had desolated his life ever since he was a child — whenever he got hurt, he turned into a goddamn human-torch, killing everyone around him — and he ran from himself and his own self-loathing.

But managing all that at the end of a world full of Croats lurking around every corner was easier said than done.

Until a mysterious man with tousled dark hair paired with blue eyes as clear as the sky during a hot summer’s day stopped him from free falling, literally. In one fell swoop, the stranger had not only saved his life but also calmed the wildfire threatening to burn everything in its wake.

There was something about Castiel that made Dean want to stop running but also hid something darker — something Dean couldn’t quite put his finger on. And between soft, pillowy lips and feather-like fingerprints, Cas could very well shatter Dean’s world and maybe help save the whole world in return.

While You Were Sleeping

Summary:  A Destiel version of While You Were Sleeping! Castiel is alone and floundering. He has a crush on one of the passengers who passes through his subway station every morning. When the man gets pushed onto the tracks, Cas saves him. But when they get to the hospital there's a mix up and Cas finds himself engaged to a complete stranger. Enter, the rest of the family, including big brother Dean. How will Cas navigate the relationship with his supposed future in-laws? What will he do when Sam finally wakes up? And why can't he stop thinking about Dean?

Purgatory, director's cut

Summary: this doesn’t have a summary but it is dean and cas in purgatory and it’s soooo cool! I promise it’s amazing and worth the read!

Basic Lessons in First Aid, Magical or Otherwise

Summary: Most people probably wouldn’t take the naked, heavily wounded man they found in an alley home with them. Most people probably wouldn’t also offer that man a place to stay and become his best friend after realizing he’s suffering from an intense case of post-traumatic retrograde amnesia. Most people probably wouldn’t then risk almost everything they know to save said man, and maybe save the world in the process.

But then again, Dean Winchester, RN (with a specialty in supernatural care), has never been like most people. He may not have a magical bone in his body, unlike his brother Sam, but he’ll do whatever it takes to help. Even if Castiel has questionable opinions about Star Trek.

What Greater Gift

Summary: Story idea: The most wanted woman in town has announced that she’ll only marry the one who can open her front door with the key around her cat’s neck. Many men try to hunt the cat down, chase and trap it, but to no avail, the cat is simply too quick, smart and clever, and always finds a way to evade and avoid them. You are the first one to figure out the obvious: Do not chase the cat. The cat is befriendable. Get the cat to trust you, to genuinely enjoy your company, and you can hang out with the cat. You may eventually be allowed to touch the cat. The cat will freely let you take the key.

From a prompt found on Tumblr. Saw this and I couldn't resist a Destiel AU, and I've been wanting to write Witch!Cas for ages.

I know when you go down all your darkest roads

Summary: Dean and Castiel go undercover as a couple going through therapy, in order to catch a monster that specifically targets couples dealing with issues, feeding on their distress, anger, and pain.

They end up going through a lot more than a case, unfolding feelings left untold for so long, discovering parts of each other they never intended to uncover.

But will the feelings raging inside them be enough to bring their walls down?

A Fish Out of Water

Summary: To tie up the loose ends of a hunt, Dean is forced to go undercover and visit Brock Pleasure Ranch, a horrifying establishment that markets its inhabitants to people with ‘monstrous’ tastes.

It should have been a simple thing, to persuade a mer to give him a few scales for a spell. All part of the usual Winchester byline: saving people, hunting things.

But Castiel is far less of a ‘thing’ than Dean expected. He might not be human, but he’s definitely a person. And that means he needs saving, too.

The Way to a Man’s Heart is Through Chlamydia

Summary: Dean doesn't expect to see his one night stand again, but then again he also doesn't expect to find out he has an STD. Sometimes life is hilarious like that.

Just as lost as I

Summary: Dean's been in love with Castiel for centuries. He keeps it buried, never letting himself get too close, but when Castiel goes missing he doesn't hesitate. He's going to find him if it’s the last thing he ever does.

Love Bites

Summary: Cas Novak graduated with a 4.0 in Mathematics, but not even Naomi Novak’s money could help him at job interviews. Anxious and dissatisfied with life, at nearly thirty he’s still washing dishes in the back of his best friend Hannah’s café.Until one night when his cat drags an injured bat into his apartment.

Dean may be a vampire, but he’s not an asshole (well, not much.) He feels like he owes the awkward guy for rescuing him from the cat’s clutches, so he sets about changing Cas's life.

A silly story about families who aren’t quite what they seem, fake boyfriends, and falling in love with someone who’s never, technically, met you.

The Bad Cop, Worse Cop Adventures of Freckles and Feathers

Summary: Miami. A place with beaches, babes, palm trees, and a growing drug-fueled crime organization. To help combat the drugs littering the streets, Captain Singer puts together a Tactical Narcotics Team composed of Miami's two finest and fearless officers. Charming casanova Dean Winchester has fought tooth and nail, rising through the ranks for this position. Trench coat toting Castiel Novak knows more hand-to-hand combative techniques than he does people skills. Between Dean's big mouth and Castiel's take-no-shit attitude, their introductory meeting ends on a less than stellar note and a couple of hard to shake nicknames.

After six months of partnership, the nicknames have stuck and so has the sexual tension. When a murder in the middle of the night launches their biggest lead on a cleverly evasive drug lord, Dean is shocked to find Sam at the center of it. Sam comes clean with his involvement and Charlie, their witness, seeks revenge against the man responsible for killing her friend. As the stakes rise higher so do Dean’s feelings putting everything in jeopardy. Is a cop with everything to prove, a cop with everything to lose, one computer hacker witness, and a damn good ADA enough to save the day?

The Care and Feeding of Castiel

Summary: Dean’s quiet time in the bunker is interrupted by some stranger-than-usual behavior from his angel. Oh, and feathers...there are a lot of those, too.

First Gentleman Wanted

Summary:  President of the United States Castiel Novak is popular, charismatic, and knee-deep in campaigning for a second term. He’d be the ideal candidate if it weren’t for the fact that he hasn’t dated once while in political office. With his opponent’s relentless PR team calling him incapable of emotional commitment, Castiel’s staff decides to remedy the situation by finding their boss a fake, picture-perfect boyfriend. And when Dean Winchester enters the scene, he and Cas become America’s new favorite couple, except they’ve got a whole lot of history between them and complicated feelings to resolve.

The Graveyard Shift

Summary: Dean’s favourite coffee shop, The Graveyard Shift, is only open after the sun goes down. Which is perfect for him, because that’s exactly when he craves coffee the most while doing the overnight at the fire hall. The coffee shop’s owner is pretty perfect too, but it’s kind of a bummer that Dean never gets to see Cas during the day. In a world where the supernatural live more or less in peace with the rest of humanity, it’s a little impolite to ask Cas just what he really is - or what his dark past entails.

The Path of Fireflies

Summary: After his humanity is restored, Dean wakes up in bed with Castiel, a wedding ring, and no memory of the past twelve years.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Summary: Heaven is white.Well. Isn’t that fucking stereotypical.-Dean isn’t really sure how he got here. Or even why he’s here. And hell, for all the times the Winchesters have died, he thinks he ought to know the drill by now. But what he doesn’t know is when most folks go, they find something different.

There’s a system God put in place. That when you’re gone (for good), there are a couple things you gotta do first. There are five people waiting for you.

They are the five people you meet in heaven.

Doing this made me realize I need to read more longer fics. I usually just read the short ficlets on tumblr but I need to broaden my horizon and read more. But yes! These are the AU’s currently in my bookmarks. Hope you find one to enjoy :)

[sambergscott]

your son is going to love you

Summary: Peralta dads are cursed, destined to have terrible relationships with their sons. When Jake finds out *he's* going to have a son, he spirals. Amy helps.

goes without saying that if you haven’t watched 7x10 yet maybe don’t read this

She wakes up at 2am needing to pee.

She’s been waking up needing to pee a lot lately.

It’s like their baby has no respect for her sleeping pattern, perfectly honed over the years to maximise productivity, while still fitting in the full 8 hours of sleep needed a day. Their baby doesn’t care about the 8 hour recommendation, he laughs in the face of scientists. With the bad back and heart burn and constant kick, kick, kicking of her bladder, she’s averaging 4.7. She thought babies didn’t start keeping you up all night until they were born but, oh, how wrong she was.

She pats her husband to wake him up and come keep her company. If she’s awake because of their baby, then damn it, he’s going to be awake, too. But he’s not there, leaving her hand awkwardly patting a bare mattress.

“Jake?” She murmurs groggily, sitting up and switching on her bedside lamp. She’s half-expecting him to be sitting in the armchair playing Mario Party on his Switch (he has become a little bit addicted in the last few months and it wouldn’t be the first time she’s found him trying to beat Wario in the early hours of the morning) or have left a note beside her bed that he had a lead on a case and needed to go in with a scribbled ‘love you’ underneath and a lopsided heart. The armchair is empty, but there’s a light on down the hall and since there’s no way she forgot to turn it off before bed (she triple checks), she figures that it must be Jake.

Forgetting the whole reason why she woke up in the first place, she grabs Jake’s hoodie from the floor for warmth and pads into their living-kitchen-dining area. It’s the open plan-ness that made her fall in love with the apartment upon first visit and submit all her paperwork as soon as she was out the door. It’s the open plan-ness that would make the Property Brothers proud and the dumb people who go on that show foam at the mouth with jealousy. It’s the open plan-ness that allows her to see her husband straight away, snacking on the unfinished party food.

(Apparently people don’t feel like eating after a man cuts his thumb off and spurts blood everywhere. Who’d have thought?)

There’s a weird, pensive look on his face that draws her towards him.

“You OK, babe?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he responds. He pops a tomato from the salad bowl in his mouth, then another, then another.

She narrows her eyes. He never eats tomatoes unless they’re in ketchup or on top of a famous Sal’s pizza. Something is wrong.

She thinks back on their day, mentally rewinding the events from waking up to the morning briefing to their private sex reveal in the break room and finding out they’re having a boy (the empty cake box and blue frosting around Scully’s mouth was very surprising indeed). They were both floating on Cloud 9 all afternoon, came home and Zoomed the entire family, falling asleep on the couch around 9.30pm because pregnancy is exhausting.

Nothing particularly awful stands out.

Unless...

“Are you thinking about your Grandpa?”

He’d been so excited to see him again, so excited to reunite Walter Peralta  with Roger, The Admiral with the Captain. To be honest, Amy was less than impressed. He’d been nice enough to her, asked her about her job, about the baby, small talked about the weather. But he never asked her about Jake, probed about the 20 odd years of his grandson’s life that he’d missed out on. Which is frustrating because she has a lot of embarrassing stories ready to tell and a whole photo album of Jake on her phone. He couldn’t care less about Roger or Jake, storming out of the sex reveal party after calling his son a screw up and turning off his phone so they couldn’t get in contact with him. He’s a selfish dick and her husband deserves better. Still, he won’t be thinking about what a monster Walter turned out to be, he’ll be finding ways to blame himself that yet another father walked out of his life again.

He nods silently and she leads him to the couch.

“Talk to me, Jake.”

He releases a shaky breath. “The Peralta’s are cursed.”

“With devastatingly handsome good looks?” She half-jokes, trying to lighten the mood. Because, hello, her husband is hot; she constantly overhears other women in the precinct talking about his glow up and it would be impossible to ignore the female attention he gets in bars and even just walking down the street before he scratches his face to show off his wedding band and wraps one arm proudly around his wife’s shoulders. She’s seen the pictures of a young Roger Peralta, too, and with that charm smile... she gets it.

“Thank you,” he smiles briefly, “but no. Peralta dads are cursed with terrible relationships with their sons.”

“That’s not going to be you,” she says without hesitation, without a shred of doubt.

“How do you know?” He launches into a scathing personal indictment that leaves his cheeks stinging with tears. “I’m immature, obsessed with my work, messy, always late. My dad was never around when I was a kid. I don’t even know what dads do with their sons! And what if it’s in my genes? To be a crappy dad, abandon my kid like a dozen Peralta fathers before me. Your parents still don’t think I’m good enough. You didn’t even like me at first. It only makes sense that our baby would hate me, too.”

“Woah, babe. Slow down. Let’s unpack that one at a time.” She wipes away his tears with his hoodie sleeve and squeezes his hand. “First of all, you are way more mature now than you used to be. We bought a family friendly Sedan. You read parenting books. You were eating fruit, like, two minutes ago.”

“Tomatoes are fruits?”

“What? Yes, how do you not - not the point.” She shakes her head. “And so what, you enjoy your job. That’s a good thing, Jake! Do you understand how rare that is? You’re doing the thing you love while providing a decent income for our family. And besides, I’m way more obsessed than you. I have FOMOW, but that doesn’t mean I won’t love our kid more than anything. And as for the messy, late thing, if I can look past it because of how much I love you, so will our son.”

“Love you, too,” he mumbles.

“Now onto your point about not knowing what dads do, that is a straight up lie and we both know it, Peralta. You’re always hanging out with Charles and Nikolaj and Lord Knows Terry doesn’t shut up about all the activities he does with his girls.”

“I know what they do when I’m around, but what do you do when it’s 5am and they won’t go back to sleep?” He frets. “At what age do you introduce them to Die Hard? In Cry Hard With A Vengeance,” he quotes the parenting book she originally bought him as a joke but has kind of become his Torah, “Bruce Willis says right away, but what if he’s not ready to understand the complex plots? What if he prefers Timothy Olyphant to William Atherton? Oh my God, what if our son doesn’t think Die Hard is a Christmas movie?”

He’s spiralling and it’s a good job he’s with the only person who can truly calm him down.

“I think Bruce Willis is just trying to promote his franchise and that we’ll be watching more Paw Patrol than Die Hard for the next few years, babe, but I’m sure when he is old enough, he will love the movies as much as you.”

“Right,” he agrees, “you’re totally right. Action thrillers aren’t very baby friendly. I’ll just watch it on mute with subtitles.”

She laughs, her eyes crinkling in the corners. She loves him so much. Which segways them nicely onto his final two points.

“My parents do love you. Sure, they’re critical, but that’s just the way they are. They’re the same way to all of us. My mom complains to everyone she meets about how I can’t cook, how Tony hasn’t settled down and made her any beautiful grandbabies yet, even Perfect David faces her wrath when he goes a week without phoning her. If the worst thing my mom has to say about you is that you’re below average in height, you’re doing OK. And as for me apparently not liking you at first, I did like you.”

He furrows his brow. “But you said you found me annoying and difficult to be around.”

“Yet I didn’t ask to switch desks, continued working cases with you and went to Shaw’s whenever I was invited.” She stares at him pointedly. “If I really found you difficult to be around, I wouldn’t have stayed. I thought you were cute and funny and good at your job and yeah, you were annoying too, but,” she shrugs, “it never put me off.”

“So what you’re saying is that you had a crush on me first,” he grins.

“No. You obviously had a crush on me back then, too. What I’m saying is that I love you, our son loves you and you’re going to be a great dad.”

He blushes, ducking his head. “My dad said the same thing. About our son loving me.”

“He’s right,” she replies. “I feel him kick every time you get home from work, every time you sing to Taylor Swift in the car, every time I mention your name. Why didn’t you believe him?”

“I don’t know, still nervous about the curse, I guess.” He twists his wedding band on his finger.

Amy bites her lip. “Are you not excited about us having a boy?”

She has to ask. His excitement looked genuine in the break room, but it’s no secret that he was hoping for a girl. A mini-Amy, he said. While she’s always been more accustomed to boys considering the Santiago’s have, like, a million of them, Jake couldn’t get over the image of a little girl in dresses and doing ballet and with long, dark hair that he eventually learns to braid.

“Of course I am,” he’s quick to assure her. “Stupid excited. Never been more excited for anything. Not even the Ninja Turtles reboot. But still... nervous.” He rubs his hand over his face, muffling his voice. “Everyone is assuming what kind of dad I’m going to be. Whether I’m going to be good at it or not. To be fair, the only person who doubted me is that murderer I arrested last week, obviously not my biggest fan. Everyone else is convinced I can do it. What if I can’t? What if I’m genetically wired to be a bad dad? What if I disappoint you and our baby and Charles who has been dreaming about this forever?”

“Jake,” she softens her voice, pulling his hand away from his face, “the fact you are so worried about being a bad dad proves that you will not be one. Nor could you ever disappoint us.”

“But you’re my wife. You have to say that.”

“I would never have married you and become your wife if I thought you were the kind of person who could abandon your kid,” she promises him. “You have been perfect so far, dealing with all the vitamins and over-scheduled sex and washing my clothes when I sweat through them and holding my hair back when I’m being sick. You’ve been to every doctor’s appointment, read every binder, bought me every weird food craving. You hang out with the bump every night, talking and singing to it. I know you’re going to be a great dad, Jake, because you already are one.”

She kisses him and it’s soft and tender and filled with love, only interrupted by the kick, kick, kicking of their son.

“Hey,” Jake says in his best authoritative dad voice/John McClane dealing with German terrorists voice (he’s been practising in front of the mirror following Bruce’s advice), pointing a warning finger at the bump. “I’m going to kiss your mom as much as I want, Peralta. I loved her first.”

Amy giggles, stroking her fingers through Jake’s unruly curls. His bedhead is always wild and it’s maybe her favourite thing in the entire world. She silently sends a message of her own to their son to inherit his dad’s hair. And eyes. And handsome smile.

He kicks again as if to say ‘OK, mom’.

And then she really needs to pee.

[shortstackum]

The Creatures do work like cleaning to earn money, there's a shop near the very bottom so they can buy stuff

Phineas actually takes care of the whales and other marine life, meanwhile Aurla tries to kill them

Spooky's and Eyth's magic seems to make people stop aging or at least stop aging at a certain age, which explains why Spooky is still 12, 15 years later

Speaking of magic involving Spooky and Eyth, they were brought back to life by the ssme thing (along with Taker), that thing being one of the specimen 1s, that being Jeli

The Demon child was a child that was murdered in the kid's hospital and was brought back by Jeli as a demon, although it seemd she's trying to resist the magic that's trying to make her evil by hiding in a mirror

Some of the kill counts for Specimens are inaccurate as those a few were actually caused by the 1s (E.i, Bab, Jasper, Chomper..)

Phineas / Fin really liked marine life, mainly dolphins, Jeli got an idea and used his magic to make him go wild, causing him to operate on himself, everyone thinks he did it for his love of dolphins but Fin was just mind controlled

Lines' body ends at the end of his torso

Lines' speech tends to get distorted (backwards speech, random muting, glitching)

Paina was AI for sunshine academy but got out via Spec.1 magic, yet she can still be developed further

Subject 5s are named 5 as they are the 5th Specimen 3s, the others died either in testing, having to be exterminated or they just. Dissapeared

Lisa and Bab tend to get along very well due to their shyness

Bekka likes to blast music just to make everyone mad lol

Jaime has honks own dimension, it sometimes goes to it to see how everything is going (the dimension being an abandoned theme park)

They let other Specimens, monsters, dolls and unknowns in to play, although xe makes them leave after a while, claiming that staying for too long is risky

Hooky was a runaway and went to the mansion for security, didn't work out as planned for her

Parry isn't just red, xey can be green and blue too

When Parry has a host, xey are asleep and someone enters xem, the host will have trouble knowing where the person is, only when under xey're control or when xey are awake can the host know exactly where they are

Parry and Stanely are like roommates, they get along sometimes but they fight and annoy each other a lot

Stanely also has a furry coat

When first encountering Parry, xey were a greenhouse, xey kept trying to scare him and lock doors but he just kept pulling through, xey tried getting him attacked by ferocious plants and only let him have a scythe but he still lived, Parry got angry and tried xeir last trick was to turn into a mansion and hang him, and it worked

In some of the crates, Aurla has some things like files, or just random papers, in others there's some beach toys, in others theres drawings Bab made for him, that's another reason he doesn't get on the crates, he doesn't wanna accidentally break them

Lines can travel via electricity (through telephone poles, computers, wires.. obv he can't leave the mansion tho)

Taker and White Face are one of the biggest frenemies, they usually only get along when trying to harm others and most of the time they just argue

Tirsiak used to be extremely cold and mean to everyone besides Kanerek, he wanted nothing to do with anyone fearing they'd hurt him or he'd get attached only to lose them, but after a while of basically forced friendship activities he warmed up to Bab first and then slowly to everyone, hes still a prick but he's doing better

The ones made their own mansion, they only took in monsters that were similar to the creatures from Spooky's or made their own

They were created as back up and to challenge the others. They represent what the originals (reffering to the ones in Spooky's) don't wanna be and their trauma. The ones liked to joke and call some of them coincidences and calk them rip offs

Lisa is welsh and has a bit of an accent

None of the hospital monsters have forgiven Eyth for what xey did, it affected them all and Eyth takes it as a joke, xey constantly make fun of the monsters for being "petty"

Bekka and Jon are the only ones fluent in Japanese but their accent shows sometimes

Bekka has a lot of medical and biology based knowledge but is still a complete dumbass when it comes to almost anything else

Lisa hasn't and never will forgive her ex husband for shooting her. Hell she's happy that he's probably dead

Lisa has frequent aches and pains all around her body

Bekka REALLY likes chocolate

Tirsiak is very good at archery and hunting, as apposed to Kanerek who's pretty mediocre

Tirsiak used a spell to give himself antlers and appear more masc

Tirsiak had died in the past but never realized, his necklace kept him somewhat alive and is what gives him his powers

Bab sometimes cleans his sword, he's dissapointed in himself that it got a bit rusty as that sword used to belong to his dad

Aurla can talk to marine creatures and loves to take care of the landsharks

Jasper was interested in how humans made food so he'd often steal recipe books and try making things himself and when he got to the mansion, Otto helped him out

Jasper doesn't like being viewed as a fast food worker or manager, he just wanted to protect his kin from constantly being used as food

Spooper sees Lisa as his mom because his old parents were abusive and Lisa is the mother he never got to have

This makes Lisa very happy

Kal is like an older brother to Spooper

Bekka's hands are black due to frostbite

Noah is very good at reading people, mainly because of his own experience. He's very good at telling if you're lying, sad, happy, sketchy..

Noah had to be bumped down to a hospital patient due to an incident and Bekka was his nurse

Noah usually has to change his bandages, he thinks he looks hideous but most people think otherwise (especially Jon)

Tirsiak used to be very cold and aggressive towards everyone as stated before, his best friend had died thanks to Ben in the past and he lost his tribe and family. He trusted no one

Once he learned how to speak english better he would learn to cuss out and shoo most people away. He only trusted Kanerek

Bab always tried to be his friend but was regularly pushed away even if all Tirsiak wanted deep down was a friend again, he was just afraid of losing everything again so if there was nothing to love there was hardly anything to lose.

It took a long time of lectures but one day he noticed Bab didn't seem to get the hint. Actually it never seemed like they did. Tirsiak gave in and let Bab just hang around, Tirsiak was surprised to find that he somewhat enjoyed Bab's presence.

He started to be less of an ass, he let Bab just hang out with him.

Maybe having friends again wouldn't be a huge risk?

He decided to be a bit nicer, he's still harsh and agressive but makes an effort to make friends and be nice

He found that he really liked Hooky and Ringu, at first he merely thought they were attractive but now he really does love them

Tirsiak learned english via the others teaching him and him repeating what others said. That's where he got his voice lines from, he stole them from Kanerek (and she ended up changing hers)

Lisa knows sign language

Bab's mom was trying to contact him in the afterlife via the cult and the cult tbought she was mother. One day her grasp and connection was slipping and she told thet cult that Bab was the new mother

Despite this, Bab never planned to be a mother, but then came the landsharks

Bab doesn't mind being their mother figure

Lisa sometimes gets carried away and will write their thoughts or make random doodles on notes made for chases

Lisa likes to listen to music while drawing, Bekka will let her borrow her MP3 and headphones when they're hanging out

Lisa has tourretes and autism and often hums and twitches

They'll flail their hands and tip toe as a happiness stim

Jasper has major sensory issues and the slightest High pitch, weird looking thing, anything that feels uncomfortable, or smells bad or extremely strong it'll will drive him off the walls

Lisa was taken away from the hospital while trying to hide from GLA and when she reunited with the hospital monsters, whenever they sense a GLA is coming they get hostile and if Lisa is over, Bekka won't let go of her until they're gone

The dolls sometimes disobey Spooky and GLA because of how bitter they are about what happened

Hooky tends to drown her sorrows in alcohol and it's become a regular thing for her

Because of how GLA treated him, whenever Charles feels any negative emotion coming on he'll go to sleep, it often results in nightmares but the emotions most of the time go away and he feels better when he wakes up

Frenzy has tried helping them but Husker knows all too well that there's no helping them

Clicky doesn't regret killing her dad, she always knew he was a bad man

She also just doesn't care

She never cared if her mom was unwell, she never cared if her friends were hurt. Sure she has some sympathy for the mansion residents but not much

Clicky likes waking people up with her constant clicking

She can detach herself from walls and walk freely, not very easily but she can still do it

Hooky, despite it being part of the reason she's in the doll, treasures hooks and many slim sharp objects

Although she also has an interest for anchors and morning stars

Frenzy often bakes small things like cookies and cupcakes for people and shares it's recipes with Jasper and Otto

Otto, despite seeming like he'd be a dumbass, does have common sense

He takes no shit from White Face, constantly triea to tell off Tirsiak for being a dumbass, gives Lisa the rudest reassurance and just ignores Spooper and Kal

He's friends with Jasper but even he admits that Jasper isn't very bright

Otto can swim and is warerproof

The pizza he gives you is poisoned, but it usually fails or takes a long ass while to kick in no matter how many times he's tried different poisons

Otto is aware of the whole FNAF thing and hates being seen as some FNAF rip off and being called the names of the animatronics from FNAF

Otto used to be a cook before he died and was stuffed inside of Otto The Otter

Spooper will sometimes change his costume to sort of socialize and copy others (dressing in all black because of Bekka, wolf outfit because of Tirsiak, face paint for Jaime..)

Hooky is drunk when he chases you

Husker is emotionally detached and has no desire to be attached to anyone, it just knows they exist and pays no mind to them

Jaime doesn't like scaring people and admits that she wishes she didn't look so ugly

WF used to be bullied to a breaking point

She gets overly attached and easily falls in love with whoever even tolerates her

She is aware people can die from her game but she just wants literally any fun even if it's for a short while

She loves to wear dresses and likes to appear femminine, and HER is unsurprisingly her favorite form to take

WF constantly picks on everyone due to her past, shyer and weaker people are often her main victims

She loves teasing Lisa all the time and is often super rude to them even though deep down, WF does care about Lisa a little

Bekka has a room saved for Lisa for whenever they come over to visit to the hospital

They love watching movies together and hanging out

They're also super comfortable with each other and will fall asleep together

The deformity wing in the hospital is a psychological torture chamber Eyth made

Some of the residents have tried exploring it but either got lost or got scared and ran out

Lector loves to make sure things are spotless and perfect, if it's body bag gets even the smallest stain it'll be pissed

Taker has a collection of stuffed toys but doesn't tell anyone

He thinks they're cute

Bab found out and hasn't said a word about it to anyone

Bab also thinks plushies are cute and will often help him in his collecting

Taker is surprisingly a good babysitter, the kids adore him

It loves to get into mischief with whoever it's supposed to be babysitting and pull pranks

Tirsiak has a stuffed toy of a wolf that Hooky made for it

It treasures it dearly and doesn't let anyone touch it

It even sleeps with the toy

There's a sewed on heart on it too

Sleeping with it reminds him of Hooky

Ringu and Hooky love cuddling Tirsiak because he's fuzzy and Tirsiak and Ringu Love cuddling Hooky because soft

Ringu is also cuddle material to them

Hooky is good at knitting and making plushies

If anyone tries flirting with the creatures it often times leaves them confused or angry or both

The most common one to take the flirt and possibly flirt back is White Face

Bab used to have a girlfriend but they broke up because her gf was an asshole to others

Fleshy is very good at reading people, they're even better than Noah

Kat can too but is too apathetic to care

Kat forces a smiley face and a good attitude when Fleshy is soon about to chase them to give the victim a false sense of hope

Fleshy often has to calm down or stop Kat from being overly angry

Fleshy can hear the other souls but is also capable of tuning them out

Kat is the spirit of a GLA who was used for testing and nya killed Fleshy out of rage

Kat is capable of giving souls and bodies to fleshy but doesn't want to because xe doesn't care

Kat fucking hates other cats, hell xey hate almost everything

Fleshy on the other hand loves everything but doesn't love some organisms enough to let them live

Fleshy loves to cause trouble and is a general nuisance

Bekka hates wearing pink

Ben loves making and trying on outfits and will willingly wear dresses and anything embarrassing

Goop can be mixed with other substances but it makes him uncomfortable

Goop boils and heats up when he's mad

Two and Three are capable of reproducing asexually, but choose not to because they know not a lot of people wanna deal with mini S3s

Lines is quick to anger and violence

Her body is electrical when she's angry

So

Yeah

That's gotta hurt

Lisa has dyspraxia and autism

Bekka has ADHD

Whoa. (゜o゜;

[pearlgrayrose]

All right so I’ve finished reading King of Fools by Amanda Foody, and as far as I’m aware, this is a relatively small fandom so idk if anyone will even see this, but:  I need to scream about this book and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so!!  My long, incoherent, and very spoilery thoughts are below the line!

JAC NOOOO!!  I’m so upset, Jac was an amazing and really intricate character and now...gone.  The stupid fucking omerta.  Yes, I knew that logically, an important character would have to die over the course of this series.  But I did not want it to be him  :(

On that note, I had been seriously concerned that he would get back on Lullaby over the course of this book.  So I’m at least happy that it didn’t end up happening, but Charles Torren was awful and deserved what he got

In spite of all the other amazing characters, Enne continues to be my favorite.  She just has so much depth to her, and she’s come so far from first arriving in New Reynes.  She is definitely a Sinner now and I love it.  The literal first thing she does at that meeting is threaten Jonas - Jonas!  Scavenger!  The Scar Lord! - and you HAVE to respect that

Sophia is such an interesting character and I love reading about her.  Can’t wait for her POV in Queen of Volts!

JONAS MACCABEES what the fuck.  This character.  He is the most confusing person ever written about.  Okay maybe not, but you get my point.  One moment he’s saving Jac’s life, the next moment he’s being a really frustrating person, then the next he’s being hilariously relatable, and then he’s betraying everyone and then being really noble and then disappearing and then WTF JONAS

The Jonas and Harrison thing.  I.  What.

“There are cats everywhere named after murderers”  I love this

Throughout the entire book, I kept thinking to myself, “What the fuck is going on with Bryce Balfour?”  And it took until the end of the book (and reading the online prologue to Queen of Volts) but now that I know what the fuck is going on with Bryce Balfour, he is an even creepier and more chilling character than before

Also now at least I know why Rebecca was acting like that

Levi’s relationship with Narinder was very interesting and fun to read about but I’m glad it’s over - and yeah, for Levi’s sake, but much more so for Narinder’s.  The poor guy, honestly.  He had no bad intentions or ambitions:  he just wanted to run his club and keep himself and his sister safe, and suddenly he has gangs overflowing in the Catacombs and Tock keeps risking herself and blowing shit up all the time.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Levi, but he does make mistakes and Narinder was completely right in saying that he was doing all the listening/giving and Levi was doing all the talking/taking.  Narinder literally just wanted to run the Catacombs and be left alone

Lola had better get her job as a librarian at the end of this.  Lola Sanguick deserves the world

The Spirits are all so cool, and having Enne as a streetlord makes them ten times better.  It’s just...so refreshing to see so many characters who embrace femininity without being ashamed of it, you know?  (And that scene where Enne is watching over Roy, her hostage, with a gun while reading a tabloid magazine with an article about the gang and she gives her own wanted poster a kiss?  Perfection)

I absolutely adore the friendship between Lola and Jac.  They are amazing and the support they have for each other is so awesome to see!!  They’ll bicker and tease each other, but when it comes down to it, they have each other’s backs and they’re the ones that the other goes to when they really need it.  It’s great.  Plus she calls him Polka Dots because of that one cravat that he didn’t even buy, which is hilarious

Grace’s existence.  She’s an assassin and a financial expert who just hangs around reading romance novels and whose sole life purpose is to torment Roy.  What more can I say?

LOLA AND TOCK

Another bullet point for Lola and Tock because they are sooo cute!!  Lola blushing when Tock flirts with her at the party?  Lola acting all flustered when Jac is trying to ask her about the date?  Tock sleeping on the couch with her head resting on Lola’s shoulder?  alskjdflskjfsldkfjslfjslfjsd

This is getting long but idc.  Vianca is such an interesting villain:  a terrible person but a great antagonist.  You can tell exactly why she does the things she does and why she reacts this way, but you still hate her for it because she’s a monster and oh my god

It boggles my mind how Prescott could just...be killed, and the election would still go through.  And people would call it fair.  Like, no shit Harrison got elected.  The opposition is LITERALLY DEAD

Harvey!  He’s done a lot of messed up things, but I honestly feel bad for him, especially after reading the prologue for Queen of Volts.  I’m excited to read more about him

Mansi leaving the Irons and joining the Scarhands...it didn’t affect me as much as I thought it was supposed to?  Idk.  I didn’t exactly expect that she’d swear to Jonas, but as for leaving the Irons, I kind of saw it coming.  It definitely seemed likely, at least

Levi has so much character growth in this book.  It’s amazing.  Between what Narinder tells him and his argument with Jac (and now, Jac’s death), he’s really growing up and learning to prioritize the things that are really important over the things that he simply wants.  Because, as Jac and he both say in this book, he wants everything.  But not really anymore

Yessss Lackluster burned

There is no way that Ivory’s actually gone for good

I get the feeling that there’s more happening with Rebecca than just “she’s sick and Bryce can’t find anything else to cure her.”  Like, clearly that’s the case, but I find it hard to believe that Rebecca (someone who has made it very obvious that she has legitimate feelings for Bryce) would be comfortable with him trying to sell his soul to the Bargainer in exchange for a cure for her

As a final note, this book was AMAZING and there were so many twists and turns and I just....asldkfjslkfjsdfls.  Still bitter about Jac, but I’m so excited for Queen of Fools to come out so I can see what happens!!!

[and-justice-for-zoisite]

𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓠𝓾𝓮𝓮𝓷'𝓼 𝓫𝓾𝓽𝓵𝓮𝓻...𝓪𝓻𝓻𝓸𝓰𝓪𝓷𝓽 (𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓇𝓁𝑒𝓈 𝒢𝓇𝑒𝓎 𝓍 𝑅𝑒𝒶𝒹𝑒𝓇)

So, this is a story I’ve been doing on Wattpad, since I’ve become a lot more active on there, and I actively update it every few days. Here’s a little teaser so y’all know what you’re getting into:

Summary: (Y/n) is the third of the Queen's butler's, having being picked by the Queen for her 'butler's efficiency' and being the only known female butler in the entirety of England. She gets along with her coworkers aside from the notorious Earl Charles Grey, who is childish and has a monster appetite. However, she finds through hardships that he is not who he makes himself out to be.

~

What do I think of the Earl Charles Grey?

Let's see...annoying, arrogant and self centered.

There really isn't much more to it. Not a day goes by where I don't hear him whine, (Y/n), I want food. (Y/n), I'm bored. (Y/n)...enough with it already! I'm sick and tired of hearing that same vexatious voice nag me for another duty that he could very well easily achieve himself if he'd only try. But really, I'm not sure what I was expecting working with the earl of such a prestigious family. One could call him a brat even. How he managed to attain the status of the Queen's butler is long lost to me, what with him being 24 and still unable to make his own meals.

An obnoxious knock at the door of my office startled me, which in turn caused the steel fountain pen I was holding against paper to spurt out much more of it's black substance than I would've liked, spreading a nasty black puddle that I was sure was going to stain the desk I was working on. The knock was followed by a sickening voice, one I wish wouldn't call my name so often.

"(Y/n)!"

Now, not only did I have a mess to clean up, but also a child to take care of. A 24 year old child with the status of The Queen's butler.

"(Y/n), I know you're in there!"

If I was spiteful enough, I could've easily have said that I hated him. But I knew that I needed to keep inner peace somehow, and expressing such a strong form of dislike would only cause me to spiral into insanity. Not that I was very far off such a state, courtesy of the silver-haired man child.

"Go. Away," I commanded, trying desperately to contain the anger that was swirling about my tummy like a great big ball of flames as I clenched my teeth tightly together to hold it all in.

"But why? I so enjoy your company, having lunch without you just wouldn't be the same!"

That sickeningly sweet voice came from the body who's neck I couldn't help but visualize strangling. Every single day that I was trapped in this awful palace was another day I had to restrain myself from harming and murdering Earl Grey. And believe me when I say it was getting harder to do so by the second.

"Perhaps that's because there would be no lunch for you to eat. You seem to forget that Phipps also has the ability to cook, Grey," I began, pulling the handkerchief from my breast pocket as I began dabbing at the inky mess, "Or, you could, you know, learn a little something in the area of the culinary arts for yourself. It'd do this entire palace a rather large favor."

"But if I learnt how to cook, then you'd spend less time with me!" He whined.

I could practically see the puppy dog pout face he was no doubt pulling, and the fact that I had that expression of his ingrained into my memory made me want to rip every last one of my hairs out. I wanted to kick, scream, cry, for the fact alone that he occupied such a large portion of my thoughts and I could do absolutely nothing about it.

"I think that it'd be for the better," I insisted, groaning as the ink soaked through my handkerchief and into the fingertips of my black gloves.

The upsetting thing is that this isn't the first time Grey has ruined a pair of my perfectly good gloves, and the stories are too many for me to ever remember just how many times he's been the cause of me having to throw out yet another pair of specially made gloves. And while they are black, they're still not dark enough to mask the stains of much darker ink, and I don't know why they didn't use darker material when I live with someone like this.

"(Y/n) please! I'm starving and I need food in my system now or I'll crash! Please!"

His whining was the equivalent to chalk against a board and cutlery against a porcelain plate. I wanted so badly to kick down my door just to beat that boy to a pulp and watch him scream like the little brat he was.

They say don't bite the hand that feeds you. But really, at this point Grey might as well be eating the hand too.

"I made you plenty for breakfast this morning! Can you really not wait for Phipps and John to be finished with their morning duties so we can all have lunch together?" I asked, upset to the point that my voice was dripping in the surrender I knew that I was about to give.

"No! I'm hungry now! Please (Y/n)!"

For some reason, I always gave in. Maybe it was some sort of little brother complex, although he was a year my elder. No matter how annoying your little brother is, somehow you still end up loving him at the end of the day. In my case however, I don't think I'd call it love. Personally I'd call it fending off the beast.

With a loud, drawn out, exasperated sigh, I stood up from my cushioned arm chair, chucking my handkerchief on the mess in front of me as I pulled my gloves off and did the same. In my coat pocket, I'd always keep a spare pair, since I knew my gloves were never safe from the likes of the Earl Charles Grey. So, I pulled them out and slipped them onto my hands, savoring the sweet time I was spending before I'd have to open the door and leave to make that brat some lunch. It was savored alright, but those moments would never last long enough, myself walking to the door and pushing it open. I swear, every time I see his face, I could almost throw up and then start crying hysterically in my own puddle of digested foods. That fake sweet smile never seemed to be absent of his lips, and every time I saw it did I want to tear his entire face off more and more. I had to fight off the urge to punch him dead in the center of his face, instead poking him in the chest.

"You owe me a new handkerchief," I growled, a look of confusion unrolling against his face but I didn't care to explain myself as I began walking toward the kitchen without him.

He simply followed, his mind quickly becoming occupied with food once more as it always did.

~

I hope you guys do consider reading it! I put hours of research on the Victorian times into this book, and I really don’t want it to go to waste. So, uh, if you love this boy as much as I do, please read it!

My profile is @/sodapop_ramen and the story itself can be found here.

~ 

[razberryyum]

The Untamed/陈情令 Rewatch, Episode 3 (spoilers for everything)

(covers some of MDZS chap 13 and erm...that’s it. They mostly go rogue for this ep*)

WangXian meter: 🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰

(a 🐰 is earned every time there is a WangXian scene or even when they’re just thinking of each other...some scenes deserve more than one 🐰...don’t worry about it, it’s not an exact science 🐰🐰🐰)

Really, bless Team CQL for transforming what was only an anecdote in the novel into one of the most beautiful scenes in the show.  The first time Wei Ying and Lan Zhan first crossed swords played out like a moonlite, rooftop ballet and it is completely breath-taking and romantic and perfect. What makes this scene even more meaningful to me now is the added sense of poignancy of knowing that they will never be able to spar like that again due to Wei Wuxian’s diminished abilities in his Mo Xuanyu form. Although, even before his rebirth they wouldn’t have been able to repeat this dance since Wei Ying's extraordinary swordsmanship had already gone away with his golden core.  It's yet another reminder of not only how much he’s lost, but also how great a sacrifice he made for Jiang Cheng. Just thinking about that is enough to make my heart ache like crazy all over again over how much Wei Ying loves his bro and how much he went through for him without JC even knowing it for such a long time.    

But back to happier thoughts, what I also loved about this scene is just how downright adorable Wei Ying was being. Actually, he really was being a total mischievous cutie during most of his time at Cloud Recesses, which makes sense since this is the Wei Wuxian that was still brimming with boyish charm and innocence as his life still hadn’t been touched by heartbreak and tragedy yet. That reminds me of another reason why I am so impressed with Xiao Zhan as an actor is because he basically had to portray three different roles in The Untamed—as the youthful, wide-eyed Wei Ying, followed by the more bitter and mature Yiling Patriarch, and then finally the carefree yet jaded Mo Xuanyu—and he performed each persona with equal aplomb while injecting noticeable differences in each phase of WWX’s life as exemplified by alterations in his posture, expressions and even the way he says his lines. I'm not familiar with what acting awards are available in China’s entertainment industry, but I hope he receives some sort of award recognition for his work. He definitely deserves some nominations at least.  

That is not to say that Wang Yibo was being a slouch either; even though I had my doubts about him initially, I do still recognize that playing a stoic character is not an easy task since he had to find creative ways to avoid falling into dullness. A good deal of microexpressing is involved that can be difficult for an unseasoned and non-professionally trained actor, but WYB definitely lived up to the challenge as the show progressed. But because WWX is the more blatantly dynamic character, one’s attention is naturally drawn to him, even I was more focused on him at first, so I ended up neglecting what was going on with WYB’s Lan Zhan. It was only after revisiting this episode that I was truly able to appreciate the subtlety of performance.  

While it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to resist Wei Ying’s charms, I do believe Lan Zhan was indeed mostly irritated by him during their initial interactions. At the same time, however, he also clearly noticed that there was more to WWX than meets the eye since he was definitely intelligent (after all, he correctly deduced, twice, what was going on with the injured cultivator Lan Zhan brought back) and he was also quite skilled since their sword fight ended at a draw. But because Lan Zhan had years of propriety instilled in him by Uncle Lan, his automatic reaction to someone who was as unruly as Wei Ying had to be instant disapproval and annoyance. The irony of that is most likely because Wei Ying was such an annoyance to Lan Zhan that he couldn’t help but constantly notice him as a result, as one would do with an eyesore, so even from the first moment they met, his attention was already captured. It’s not the most positive way to start a relationship to be sure, but obviously it worked out for the best in the long run, especially once Lan Zhan got to know Wei Ying better and that animosity turned into something more affectionate.

Big Brother Appreciation Time

There are many reasons to love big bro Lan Xichen—he is such a sweet, caring, gentle, considerate, and loving soul who is also a skilled and talented cultivator—the least of which is his intent on playing matchmaker between his little brother and WWX right from the start. I loved that he noticed something in Wei Ying immediately and realized he would be a good person for LWJ to have in his life. Bless him for being so observant and intelligent.  

Random Bits of Randomness

If Lan Qiren knew that this rude, improper kid would one day be the person to “corrupt” his beloved nephew and steal his pure, innocent heart, he probably would’ve spit up all the blood in his body and dropped dead right then and there. I will always laugh at just how offended he looked when Wei Ying dared to rest Suibian on his desk, as if he had dumped dog shit in front of him instead. 

I just wanted to commend Mian Mian’s fellow sect-mate on the left there who, even though she was not complimented on her good looks or even given a second glance by WWX, still generously talked Mian Mian into allowing the Jiangs to stay at the hotel. I thought she deserved some credit for her nice gesture.

Not having read the novel yet when I first watched this episode, I was actually shocked at the reveal that Shijie was engaged to Jin Zixuan because I would never have thought they had that relationship from this scene. I know JZX didn’t really have any intention of honoring that arranged marriage at this point in the story, but the rudeness he allowed his servant to get away with was still unbelievable. I mean, seriously what the hell, she was still his fiancee, he hadn’t broken off the engagement yet, how DARE he allow that nobody back there address Shijie and his potential future in-laws in such a rude way. The fact that he actually kicked them out of the hotel was also shocking because it felt completely unnecessary. I really didn't like JZX because of this moment and that sentiment stayed with me for quite some time. What made the scene sadder is Shijie obviously was crushing on him and for the longest time I couldn’t understand why because I thought she totally could do better AND deserved better. I can’t say that I ever learned to love JZX, but I definitely don’t dislike him anymore.

Though I’ve been pretty critical of the CGI in The Untamed for the first two episodes, I do want to point out that not all of it is horrible: I was actually impressed with how both Cloud Recesses and Nightless City looked, even though I think their design for Nightless City was rather off the mark since it no longer suited its name. Since they were going to go with the dark theme and make the Wen Sect as blatantly villainous as possible, the production team should’ve just changed Nightless City’s name to Forever Night City (“長夜城”). Personally, I would’ve preferred it more if they had just stuck with the design of the Wen sect’s residence and uniforms as they were described in the novel (which was beautifully brought to life in the donghua) since I liked how deceptively righteous the Wens seemed. In CQL, they were so obviously the bad guys that they bordered on being cartoonish, especially Wen Ruohan (portrayed by Xiu Qing). Man, his performance simply was NOT working for me AT ALL. Even his make-up was a mess...looked like it was melting off of him all the time. In contrast, I thought Wen Chao (portrayed by He Peng) was bit much at first too, but then eventually I started to appreciate the actor’s performance, especially during his last scenes where he actually made me feel bad for his character because he was so convincingly pathetic. WRH never won me over and I was really relieved when he finally died. I actually thought they gave the actor too many scenes already leading up to his death. Felt like a lot of unnecessary filler to stretch out the episodes.  

Xue Yang is absolutely evil and horrible and psychotic and a total mass murderer and villain, but dammit, as soon as he showed up, I couldn’t help but immediately take a liking to him, and it’s all the actor’s fault. I have never seen Wang Haoxuan in any other show before...then again, I think he’s only been in two other shows prior to The Untamed, both of which I haven’t watched...but much like with Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, I think the show struck gold by casting him as Xue Yang. In addition to making his character difficult to hate, he has also made him so interesting and magnetic that I couldn’t wait to see him pop up again. I am so glad that Team CQL altered the Yi City arc so that we were introduced to Xue Yang, Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan sooner than in the novel. Not only did it allow us to become acquainted with the characters early on so that by the time Yi City rolled around, everything that happened in that arc would be even more emotionally effective because we were already invested in them, but we also got Xue Yang sooner and more often, and for that I am thankful. I already liked him before I read the novel so by the time I came across his character in the book, all I could imagine was Wang Haoxuan. He completely fit the image of Xue Yang for me. I don’t know if I would feel the same way had I read the novel first before watching the show, but I would probably still like Wang Haoxuan’s portrayal.  I know there have been criticisms that he is overacting, but for me, everything he did worked. It worked so much that I wish things had been different with his character, that Xue Yang wasn’t the monster that he is and committed all those atrocities that he did. I mean, he’s literally worse than Charles Manson. And yet, I still like him; I can’t help it, he’s just so much fun to watch. His eyes freaking sparkles. How am I supposed to resist that?? Look, there are times in a person’s life where one must make certain decisions that are undoubtedly not wise ones, but one still must stick with them because that’s the choice that was made.  Liking Xue Yang is definitely one of those decisions for me and I’ll just have to live with it.  

**I didn’t want to put this right at top since they would be unavoidable spoilers, but Shijie, Wen Qing and Wen Ning never attended the studies at Cloud Recesses. I’m really happy for that change in the drama, especially since we got to know Shijie more.  As mentioned above, the early introduction of Xue Yang and the yin metals was also a deviation from the novel.  

Questions TBD:

I had questions regarding the whole yin metal drama, but I have a feeling it’s only because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to that part of the story every time I watched these earlier episodes. I tend to zone out when we dropped in on WRH because I just find him so ridiculous and his whole set up in his fortress ridiculous too. Those zombie/ghost puppet dudes are just silly and I think it's kind of hilarious that WRH would just have his precious yin metal floating in the main hall like that for everyone to see. He has a cool throne, I’ll give him that, but otherwise, I really just can’t with him.  On this rewatch this time around though, I am going to really force myself to pay closer attention to WRH and yin metal stuff so that I can finally make sense of it all, or at least know for sure that it was never meant to make sense because they actually botched that whole storyline.

Overall Episode Rating: 8 Lil Apples out of 10

[chiseler]

THE MYSTERY OF SUNN CLASSIC PICTURES

It was like the positive, life-affirming New Age mysticism of the hippies took a sudden turn for the dark and very strange. In the mid-Seventies, as the country was overwhelmed by a creeping atmosphere of impotent anger, paranoia and existential despair in response to Vietnam, Watergate, race riots, Kent State, the Tate-LaBianca murders, bomb-tossing student radicals, pollution, high-profile assassinations, the oil crisis and the emergence of disco, Americans sought solace in some form by plunging headlong into a collective national obsession with all things Mysterious and Unexplained. Suddenly Bigfoot was all the rage, as was The Loch Ness Monster, The Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences, apocalyptic Biblical prophecies, and ancient astronauts. People were desperate to hold onto something, anything, no matter how ridiculous and fanciful, as the whole world seemed to be crumbling and burning around them. If something pointed toward an unseen world, a world outside this stinking mess we were stuck with, or better still promised the complete obliteration of this stinking mess, then at least there was a glimmer of hope. Almost overnight, a cottage industry cropped up, flooding the market with cheap paperbacks, magazines, movies and TV shows—even comic books and board games—devoted to unexplained phenomena of all sorts. Personally I didn’t give a Toss about the state of the world, but I still subscribed to UFO Reporter magazine, had a shelf full of cheap paperbacks with titles like The Search for Bigfoot and From Outer Space, and never missed In Search Of…, the half-hour syndicated series narrated by Leonard Nimoy that  delved into one mystery or another every week. For god sakes, I even had the Bermuda Triangle board game.

But in what may have been the strangest phenomenon of all, far more bizarre than the legends surrounding Area 51 or the Philadelphia Experiment, in 1971 Schick teamed up with the Church of Latter Day Saints to launch a low-budget movie studio that aimed to become the epicenter of High Strangeness culture.

Yes, a razor blade company and the Mormons decided to make movies together. How could the results be anything but unfathomable?

(It’s worth noting before we get too far that in my research into the history of Sunn Classic Pictures, it became clear the indie studio, which still exists in some vague form today, seems to have gone to some great lengths to fog their early history, never once mentioning the Mormons, and in some cases denying there even was a Sunn Classic Pictures prior to 1980. With only a few  rare exceptions, the reasonably small Sunn Classic catalog, now owned by Paramount, never received any kind of home video release, which only adds to the mystery.)

As the official story goes, in 1971, the employees of Schick—a subsidiary if the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert—approached Rayland Jensen and asked him to launch a new movie studio. Appalled by all the filth and violence and sex and cursing that infested American movie screens, as well as the so-called “intellectuals” who thought these movies were “good,” they felt real Americans needed a family-friendly alternative. Those Schick employees concluded Jensen was just the man for the job, as a few years earlier he’d handled distribution for a nature picture released by the Utah-based American National Enterprises. The picture had done very well.

Okay, let me stop there. As I said, that’s the official story, as far as it goes and as little sense as it makes. The real story goes more like this.

In 1971, a renegade group of American National Enterprises employees, led by Jensen and inspired by that same disgust with what American movies had become, broke away to form a new production company to release family-friendly, G-rated pictures. Patrick Frawley, the ultraconservative, paranoid, anti-communist conspiracy theorist who also happen to run the Schick razor blade company invested a bundle in the new venture, ensuring he would have some say in the kinds of movies the new company would release.

With headquarters divided between Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, the newly-christened Sunn Classic Pictures (aka Sunn international, aka Schick Sunn Classic Pictures) set out to Make family-friendly features and documentaries aimed at working class, conservative, God-fearing Americans who didn’t go out to movies very often, likely because of all the above-mentioned filth and sex and violence and cuss words. Moreover, they wanted to make certain these warm-hearted films turned a healthy profit. This involved two basic techniques.

The first was four-walling, a distribution method American National Enterprises helped pioneer. Instead of spending a fortune on all those prints necessary for a massive nationwide theatrical release, Sunn instead rented theaters serving the target demographic, inundated the market with ads and gimmicks, then screened their new film at the selected theater for no more than a week. After that extremely limited run, they packed up and moved the print to another theater far away. It was a tricky ploy. On the upside four-walling a picture allowed the production company to keep all the box office receipts without having to divide them among various middlemen.

If they knew the film was a stinker, it also allowed them to skip town before the bad reviews could do them any damage. On the downside, those limited runs also meant the picture would be there and gone before any positive word of mouth could work its magic. Sunn would try four-walling a new movie for a few months, and if it was making money, they might consider a nationwide release. If not, then they’d start trying to sell it to TV for syndication. It wasn’t a tack that worked all the time, but often enough to make it worthwhile, and it left them more of an escape route than a national release ever would.

So. “Family friendly.” Yes. If you want to make Disney-style pictures but don’t have Disney-style budgets to work with, animated features are out. So are live action films with any kind of special effects. Basically what you’re left with are nature films, right? No expensive sets, very few actors, and as a result very cheap to make. So Sunn began producing wilderness adventure stories.

In those very early days, you can definitely smell Patrick Frawley’s hand in the development process. Films like 1971’s Toklat, in which a man is forced to track down and kill a beloved pet bear after the bear kills a local rancher’s livestock, is a prime example. (As it happens, Toklat was the first Sunn picture I ever saw, Green Bay being a conservative working-class town, and so on Sunn’s demographic map. ) There was something decidedly Nietzschean about those earliest releases. Most of them featured lone individualusts with strong principles who flee the corruption of modern civilization to face the harsh realities of nature alone.

Now, think back and ask yourself honestly” what kid in his right mind has ever liked nature films, Nietzschean or otherwise? Maybe Mormon kids did, but certainly not normal kids. Nature movies are dull as dust, all those endless shots of trees and rivers and shit. Even if it’s supposed to be a true adventure story about some historical frontiersman, so what? Where are the explosions and car chases and monkeys doing funny things? You know who liked nature films? Grandparents! Grandparents loved them because they were wholesome and taught valuable lessons. They insisted on dragging their grandkids to them because they didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed or having to define certain words on the trip home.

The handful of films Sunn Classic released in their first three years—most all of them wilderness adventures about solitary manly sorts learning to dominate nature in one way or another—did okay. They didn’t lose money, but they also didn’t become runaway hits.

In 1974, even after several rewrites, no one at Sunn Classic Pictures had high hopes for the next film on the docket, something called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Sure, it was loosely based on an historical figure who again fled the corruption of the modern world to live in the wilderness, befriending a grizzly bear along the way. But the character was not some stalwart and steely-eyed Ubermensch—he was gentle and kind-hearted. What the hell were they going to do with that?

Enter Charles Sellier, and the second technique that would be central to Sunn Classic’s success. Sellier, today considered one of Sunn’s true founders together with Rayland Jensen, was a recently-converted Mormon in his thirties, as well as the author of the 1972 novel upon which Grizzly Adams was based. As Sunn’s new executive producer, he had a different—and eventually hugely influential—approach to marketing films.

Sellier set aside an estimated $85,000 for market research before a new film went into production. This involved targeting the desired demographic with door-to-door and telephone interviews asking housewives and construction workers what kind of movies they would like to see. This also involved screening early rushes from films currently in production for hand-picked test audiences in order to get their reactions and advice. This is, of course, standard operating procedure now, but it was radical back then, and something that mortified directors and screenwriters. In some cases Sellier even had members of the test audience wired to biometric scanners to measure their reactions to the scenes they were being shown, and use those reactions to have a script rewritten more to the test audience liking. If audience pulse rates went up whenever a certain character was on screen, well, they’d build up that role. If a certain animal warmed their hearts, well, maybe they’d make a whole movie about that particular animal.

Sellier’s method of crowd-sourced filmmaking was first tried on The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and sure enough, the film, starring former viker movie regular Dan Haggerty, became Sunn’s first bona fide international hit, bringing in over $20 million. The film was such a smash among grandparents it quickly spawned a Sunn-produced TV series, which was also a big hit among grandparents. To date, the Grizzly Adams franchise remains Sunn’s biggest cash cow.

But something else happened in 1974 that would help make that iconic Sunn Classic logo as familiar and comforting as the Toho, American International, Shaw Brothers and Troma logos. To some of us, anyway.

In 1968, Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, a book which argued, through some mighty suspect and loosely interpreted archaeological evidence, that aliens had visited Earth thousands of years ago, and among other things helped build the Egyptian and Mexican Pyramids, Stonehenge and the statues on Easter island. It was one of the first major hallmarks of the High Strangeness Culture to come.  Originally published in Germany, the book became an International sensation among those with a very high tolerance for pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and bullshit in general..

In 1970, German director Harald Reinl made a documentary based on von Daniken’s book, and it, too, became a big hit across Europe. As sillyassed as the whole thing was, I’d argue the film was even more effective than the book thanks to the visual presentation of all the supposed evidence.

Well, after seeing how much money Chariots of the Gods? Was pulling in overseas, and interested in such topics himself, American TV producer Alan Landsburg acquired the U.S. rights, re-edited the filmn, brought in Rod Serling to narrate, and broadcast it in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts. It would be the first of a trilogy of TV documentaries about ancient astronauts produced by Landsburg and narrated by Serling.

Noting the ratings that Landsburg doc brought in, as well as that European box office, Sunn obtained the US theatrical rights to In Search of Ancient Astronauts, changed the title back to Chariots of the Gods? And began four-walling it around the country in 1974. It didn’t matter that by that time countless articles and books had completely debunked all of von Daniken’s claims, nor that critics had savaged the film, in some cases even calling it racist for purporting indigenous people in Mexico, Africa an elsewhere could never have created these wonders by themselves. The picture made money. It may not have been Grizzly Adams money, but enough to leave Sellier and Jensen convinced they might be onto something with these documentaries about weird shit. Documentaries were even cheaper to make than nature films, and the demographic they were aiming at seemed eager to believe in monsters and aliens and conspiracies, so there you go. For the next five years, along with the wilderness adventures and wholesome TV adaptations of Huck Finn and Gulliver’s Travels,  Sunn gave the half-wits like me what we wanted.

In 1975, Sunn picked up the theatrical distrobution rights To The Outer Space Connection, the last of Landsburg’s ancient astronaut trilogy (as well as one of the last things Rod Serling worked on before he died). This final entry argued not only that aliens had visited earth thousands of years ago, but had planted humans here in the first place and had been guiding our evolution ever since. This wasn’t exactly a new idea, and could be traced back, so far as I’m aware, at least to Nigel Kneale’s 1958 BBC miniseries Quatermass and The Pit. But the film, directed by Fred Warshofsky, went several crazy steps beyond Kneale, claiming we know exactly where the aliens came from and why, that the Mayans were themselves aliens, and that these same aliens would return to Earth on Christmas Eve, 2011.

The TV documentaries made enough of a splash for Landsburg that he parlayed them into the above-mentioned weekly In Search Of… series, which began airing in 1977, right around the same time Grizzly Adams hit the airwaves.

Both Chariots of the Gods? And The Outer Space Connection helped cement the template that would define the rest of the Sunn-produced High Strangeness documentaries that would follow, making them so effective on the young, the susceptible, and the merely desperate. The real key, it seems, far beyomd the film’s actual content, was conscripting an authoritative host/narrator who can present the most insane pseudoscientific theories and shaky evidence with a straight face while repeatedly using terms like “indisputable,” “Proven beyond a doubt,” and “scientists agree.”: “It’s an incontrovertible fact these ancient carvings prove alien visitors walked on Earth over five hundred centuries ago.” It was the simplest of carnival sideshow techniques, but one that kept drawing suckers to the theaters.

The same year they released The Outer Space Connection, Sunn also released The Mysterious Monsters, which was less a documentary than a series of vignettes about Bigfoot, the Yeti, and The Loch Ness Monster. Director Robert Guenette had been making what you might call speculative Sunn-style documentaries long before Sunn even existed, so he was in familiar territory. In fact, The Mysterious Monsters includes scenes borrowed from Guenette’s 1974 TV movie, Monsters: Mysteries or Myths?, which coincidentally had been narrated by Rod Serling. The (mostly) new and expanded Sunn production was hosted by Peter Graves, who was as straight-faced as they come. In between shots of Graves and ten other men in cowboy hats wandering the forest on horseback looking for Bigfoot, we get eyewitness accounts from those who claim to have actually seen Bigfoot, Nessie, or the Yeti. Unlike most Bigfoot films of the era (and there were a bunch), The Mysterious Monsters infers a decided fearlessness and hostility on Bigfoot’s part, claiming he not only terrorized innocent victims, but wandered into the suburbs to terrorize them. The recreated Bigfoot encounters here are kind of fun, and in fact the film contains two solid scares, at least if you’re nine. Nessie and the Yeti get short shrift, and those scenes of Graves riding through the forest with that hopeless hunting party are interminable, but the picture was another big hit,arriving at precisely the right time given 1975 was a banner year for Bigfoot cinema. In the end, and where he got his information who the hell knows, Graves announces there is a community of some two hundred Bigfeet living in Northern California, though Graves and the hunting party find none of them.

Another hallmark of Sunn’s documentaries was that most inevitably ended with an outlandish, shocking, unexpected, and wholly unsubstantiated claim. The influence of mondo films—Mondo Cane, Africa ama and the like—on Sunn’s documentaries is undeniable. But while mondo films aimed to shock grindhouse audiences with footage (whether real or created) of bizarre and extreme human behavior, Sunn aimed to leave family audiences womderstruck at the possibilities of a mysterious world of magic and monsters just beyond our perceptions.

In 1976, Sunn followed up The Mysterious Monsters with The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, also directed by Guenette, this time narrated by Raymond Burr. The film is less a cohesive documentary than another shaggy dog series of vignettes exploring extrasensory perception, astral projection, and telekinesis as well as ghosts and spiritualism, featuring an all-star cast of celebrity psychics including Jeanne Dixon and Uri Geller. Not surprisingly, Burr, who doesn’t seem terribly convinced himself, informs us that there is irrefutable scientific evidence that all these powers are absolutely real and for true.

That same year also saw the release of one of Sunn’s more patently ridiculous outings, In Search of Noah’s ARk, a film which, in many ways, proved a turning point. The film was the first to be hosted/narrated by character actor Brad Crandall, who would go on to narrate most of the remaining Sunn Classic documentaries, as well as appearing in a few of their TV shows. It was directed by James L. Conway, who quickly established himself as Sunn’s go-to in-house director, churning out five or six features and TV movies a year.

Apart from turning to mostly in-house staffers to make their films instead of bringing in outside directors and celebrity hosts, In Search of Noah’s ARk also marked the point at which Sunn further fed their demographic by adding a decidedly fundamentalist Christian focus to many of their films, from Noah’s Ark to their TV series Greatest Heroes of the Bible to two documentaries about near-death experiences to 1979’s (and grammar be damned) In search of Historic Jesus.

In business terms it was a savvy move. To this day, films aimed at a fundamentalist audience, especially if they support a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, can bring in more money than most Hollywood films. They certainly bring in more than most Mormon themed films, and apparently the more patently ridiculous the involved claims, the better.

The supposed “scientists” who lay out the evidence that the remains of Noah’s honest-to-God ark are still sitting up there on top of Mt. Ararat (should anyone care to take a look) aren’t, um, scientists at all. One, a supposed physics professor, argues there’s a mountain of geological evidence proving the world was deluged by an all-consuming flood, um, five thousand years ago. Another claims the ark was first discovered by a Russian expedition sent by Tsar Nicholas II in 1916, but all the reports and evidence were destroyed by dirty communist revolutionaries, um, two days after the expedition returned. It all goes downhill from there, and you have to feel some pity for the poor gullible fools who believed all this nonsense.

I saw nearly all of Sunn’s documentaries in the theater when I was a kid, and now feel sorry for my mom, dad, and older sister, who I suspect drew straws to see who had to take me whenever a new Sunn picture hit town. When I was ten I bought every last nutty claim. Going back and watching them again four decades later, I find myself blurting, “Wait, what?” Aloud after nearly every scene. They do, however, remain fascinating artifacts and a mirror of a certain psychological makeup. They’re also still fun as hell for all their crazy dumbness, if you keep your critical thinking skills at the ready.

Sunn found themselves in the middle of a shitstorm in 1977 with the release of The Lincoln Conspiracy, also directed by Conway. Historians, critics and the media at large attacked the film for presenting as fact a convoluted conspiracy claiming the assassination of President Lincoln was an inside job, closing, as Oliver Stone’s JFK would years later, with a demand the investigation be reopened. Conway would later claim the film was just a silly speculative docudrama based on a couple recent books, but even the authors of the books denounced the film. Still, a little controversy has never been known to hurt the box office.

Over the next few years Sunn continued to release two or three pseudoscientific documentaries  a year, including Beyond and Back, Beyond Death’s Door, and The Bermuda Triangle, the latter of which claimed all those ships and planes vanished after being zapped by a malfunctioning Atlantean particle bean that was lost somewhere on the ocean floor near Bimini. Bimini? Well, I gotta say, as explanations go, it makes about as much sense as any other.

A personal favorite from the late Sunn era for its sheer nihilistic simplicity was 1979’s Encounter With Disaster, this time directed by Charles Sellier himself. Using his patented market research techniques, he brought a test audience into a theater and showed them dozens of newsreel clips of fires, earthquakes, The Hindenberg, race car crashes and the like, measuring responses to see which were considered the most exciting. He then strung all the most popular disaster footage together and released it as a feature.

Encounter With Disaster was perhaps the one true mondo film Sunn released during their brief heyday, and a definite anomaly. Toward the end, instead of documentary footage, talking heads and manipulative narration, films like The Bermuda Triangle, Beyond Death’s Door and In Search of Historic Jesus cane to rely more on speculative recreations with actors, sets and scripted dialogue. Although a narrator does pop up occasionally to say, in essence, “Yup, this really, really happened!,” the films come off more like splintered docudramas than documentaries, which somehow makes their assorted theses seem even less plausible.

It’s worth pointing out here that In Search of Historic Jesus, as delightfully awful as it is, does, without saying as much, offer a clear case study of the effect Sellier’s marketing machinations could have on a film.

Directed by Sunn’s in-house cinematographer Henning Schellerup (who prior to Sunn had worked on everything from softcore porn to Corman productions) and again narrated by Brad Crandall, Historic Jesus clearly began life as a documentary aiming to present all the independent historical evidence proving the Biblical account of Jesus’ life was accurate. Given there was precious little of that to be found, it became a documentary about the Shroud of Turin. Given there wasn’t really ninety minutes worth of material about the Shroud of Turin, they shot an interview with a fake scientist offering some, um, plausible scientific explanations for the Star of Bethlehem, then plundered some footage from the Noah’s Ark movie (though oddly the data offered in the latter somehow changed between 1976 and 1979). All this left them with a film that was about twenty minutes long.

The film was saved when Sellier gathered a test audience of fundamentalist Christians. After showing them a few scenes, he quickly learned they didn’t need any scientific or historical proof that Jesus really existed. They just wanted to hear more Jesus stories.

Taking their advice, the bulk of the film became a  string of recreations of Jesus’ Greatest Hits acted out by amateur actors playing Jesus, Mary, Herid, Pontius Pilate and assorted disciples. No effort whatsoever is made to prove these recreated scenes actually happened. So instead of a pseudoscientific, pseudohistorical account of the, um, historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it became another Sunday School-ready Jesus movie, all primed and ready to be rented to church groups across the country. In short, then, calling the film In Search of Historic Jesus actually makes sense.

By 1979, Sunn’s documentaries seemed to be running out of gas. They were still turning a profit (especially that Historic Jesus thing), but the profits weren’t what they once were, and the films were costing more to make. Also, other production houses had picked up on the Sunn Classic formula and began releasing High Strangeness docs of their own. In 1978, for instance, Amran Films and RCR released The Late Great Planet Earth, based on “Biblical scholar” Hal Lindsey’s massive bestseller which claimed all the prophecies in the Book of Revelation were coming true, and the long-promised Apocalypse would arrive any day now. If I remember correctly, the world was supposed to end in 1986. The film was hosted and narrated by Orson Wells, who had once been asked to narrate a Sunn film, but was so horrified by their marketing practices he turned down the job.

(A few years later in 1981, Welles would also narrate a documentary about Nostradamus’ prophecies, which was directed, coincidentally enough, by Sunn Classic alumnus Robert Guenette. Just to illustrate how influential Sunn’s experiment had been, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow was distributed by goddamn WARNER BROTHERS, of all places.)

What struck the real death knell to Sunn’s hugely successful string of pseudoscientific and pseudo historical extravaganzas was a changing culture. We were own the brink of Morning in America and the Reagan Era. Interest in silly monsters and psychic phenomena was waning as everyone put the ’70s behind them, focusing instead on the stock market, the threat of nuclear war, cocaine, designer clothes and other tangible real world issues.

Charles Sellier

In 1980 Sunn Classic Pictures was bought out by Taft Enterprises, a Cincinnatti-based conglomerate.  The suits in Taft’s entertainment division had a few ideas of their own about what American moviegoers wanted. When they correctly saw that the days of four-walling were about over as the business ties between the major studios and national theater Chains grew stronger, Charles Sellier walked away to continue writing, producing, directing and marketing films on his own terms. In 1984 he directed the notorious holiday slasher film, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a picture remembered more for its ad campaign than anything in the picture itself. Sellier also later converted from Mormonism to evangelical Christianity.

When Taft likewise decided family friendly entertainment was a dead end, that the market for G-rated wilderness adventures simply wasn’t there anymore, that a film had to be rated PG or R if it hoped to make any money, Jensen and a few other original American National Enterprises refugees quit in disgust, and once again formed their own production company to offer honest American families wholesome entertainment options. Their first film was 1981’s Private Lessons, a teen sex comedy starring Sylvia Kristel. It made a lot of money.

Director James Conway stayed with Taft for awhile, helming several pictures, including the monster movie The Boogens . Interestingly, the very first Taft/Sunn release, perhaps formulated to attract Sunn’s core audience, was the Conway-directed Hangar 18, starring Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn and Gary Collins. It was the perfect transitional picture, a sci-fi conspiracy thriller loosely based on what might well have been the subject of the next Sunn Classic documentary: Roswell and Area 51. Conway later went on to become an executive at Spelling Entertainment, overseeing a mountain of wildly successful crap.

Over the subsequent decades there were more sales and acquisitions, with the various companies overseeing the Sunn Classic brand themselves being gobbled up by even larger faceless corporate entities. Sunn vanished, then reappeared, then vanished again. Today there are vague, mysterious hints that Sunn Classics Pictures has been re-launched after Rayland Jensen teamed up with Lang Elliott, original founder of Tri-Star Pictures. But if Sunn really has risen from the grave, would it matter?

For good or ill, over the course of that five-year stretch between 1974 and 1979, Sunn Classic Pictures illuminated one strange facet of a very strange era, warped millions of impressionable minds (like mine), fully capitalized on a nation’s despair and collective neuroses, and left an indelible mark on the culture. Take even a cursory glance at what’s airing on the History and Discovery Channels, or at how the marketing departments of any movie studio large or small operates today. They simply wouldn’t be what they are In the second decade of the twenty-first century had it not been for Sunn Classic Pictures., and fore that we can thank the Mormons, a right-wing kook, and Bigfoot.

by Jim Knipfel

[medea10]

Medea’s Top 10 Worst Fathers in Anime

[kurtty-drabbles]

The Omen au (part 16)

N/A: Mike is having fun with friends. Rogue manages to enter in contact with him and Doom is arranged to someone to go after Mike as Prof X is testing Mike´s personality. Kitty is sorting things with her mom.

@djinmer4 @dannybagpipesarecalling @bamfoftheundead

The news of the Avengers hit the X-men hard, not out of love for this team, in fact, Scott is a great anti-fan of this group, but, rather how easy the group who faced aliens together is so now against each other. Bobby Drake and Spike are sharing the news with Michael who is also not taking the news well.

“So…they´re just gone?” Michael is not a fan of the Avengers, but, knows enough thanks to Tony Stark´s commercials and interviews about the team and how the public reacts to each Avengers and often left a poor taste on his mouth.

“Yeah, they´re gone. Scott is happy, but, Jean is concerned…if they can be dissolved so easily…can we be too?” Evan asked worried as the X-men are his second family and if he loses them…

“I´d not think it will happen…the Avengers tried to split the team, yes Scott told me about the recruitment program, and failed…whatever happened to them won´t happen to us” Bobby promised and Mike offers a small smile. They can´t know the future and speaking only for himself, and only in the safety of his mind, is possible to break any group…you just need to find the weak link.

“Change the subject! Hey, Mike, how are you dealing with all of this?” Spike asked giving full attention to the blue boy who is dreading this conversation. “if you´d not want to talk is fine…I get it” and Mike would like to say that no one could get it, but, then again…what he has to lose?

“Her mother thinks I´m the anti-christ if that´s not a bad first impression…” he jokes mildly. “If I think I´m the antichrist? I´d not know…not a religious person and my mother NEVER talk to me about my father….maybe they think I´m …but I think I´m just a mutant” and this a good answer for the boys. A good answer to soothe their concerns and doubts, but, Mike still has fears, but, he´s good in concealing. If, in the worst cases, he´s the anti-christ…what this will change for him? Nothing.

One month in the school and Michael Darkholme knows how to survive in here and how to blend in…and Michael quite likes here. He can move freely and can interact with more people. Marrow, one of Kitty´s friends show up and she´s funny(“so you´re blue bada badda?” “I´m not getting the reference”) and he has hobbies here.

Michael likes to cook and modesty apart, and Mike really does not like to brag all that much, he can make really good cupcakes. Kitty, sadly, still is getting the gist of how a cupcake should look like.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Kitty is having problems with her newfound powers and understandably so, Wanda is not present to help her, but, even if she was Scarlet Witch is the one to advocate for self-learning, so in the end, Kitty has to solve the problem on her own.

Terry Pryde knocks on her door to see her only daughter levitating her own bed and chatting some words that Terry has no idea of its origins. Once Kitty noticed her own mother, exchange a few words in Latin words, the bed is on the floor.

“Mom?” she asked and Terry is more than happy to see her magic progress. Even if it means accept Kitty is no longer the little girl she once was.

“I´m fine, how was your magic training going?” Terry´s tone is amicable enough and Kitty gives a summarize of her magic tranining. It has a month since Scarlet Witch had shown up to teach witchcraft to Kitty and now with the news of the Avengers…and her supposed betray.

“Mom, you think she´s a traitor?” she asked looking at her hands for a moment and then to her own mother. “This is a mess. The Avengers blame Thor, Thor blames Scarlet Witch and Scarlet Witch is accepting the blame” and the teen looks desolated enough that Terry, not knowing much of magic, can only hug her and kiss the top of her head, as she tries to make sense of this situation.

“I can´t say much here, Kitten, your friend Wanda seems to have her own reasons. Are they good? Are they bad? Not sure, but, I do know that you” and she boop Kitty´s nose with her finger. “Shouldn´t worry about this and should worry more about yourself. Trying to fix everything in the world at once will give you a headache” and Kitty nods accepting those words or at least trying to.

“Mom…do you still think Michael is bad?” is a code to say if Terry still believes he´s the antichrist and tries at Kitty might but she can´t believe in this story of Satan being his father.

“I´d not know” a good lie and Kitty can see beneath it so easily that begs the question why Terry even lied in the first place. “I know you don´t believe me. I know you think I´m wrong and maybe I´m…but, after all, I saw and after all you did, we could agree that Satan existing and having a son is not impossible”

“Maybe” she conceded. “But it would kill you to see Michael as what he is, instead of what you feared him to be?”

“I think not” not a lie and not a truth either. Terry is still firm on her beliefs as is Kitty. Both Pryde women are equally stubborn right now and both think this is each other greatest flaw.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Prof X is looking at some footage of Michael Darkholme. Speaking with friends (how quick he is to make more friends), studying, partying (this one image is the reason for the kids to be grounded as their secret party wasn´t a secret at that time) and of course, getting together with Kitty Pryde.

“Is time to test him” Prof X stated and Courtney Ross is in the room with him, her magic is mostly connected to her domains, after all, Courtney is just a servant of Zaorva, but, she has her little tricks.

“Test? I think the best case here is to kill while he´s sleeping, Charles” Courtney nows how unpleasant the image would be, but, this is the only solution. “Thor has been corrupted thanks to the little demon, I´m sure. The Avengers are no more and Doom is too silent…Xavier, kill the child. Kill him now”

“No!” Prof X stated. “Not if there´s something worth saving in him. Besides, Dr Strange is also silent, is also working…” and Courtney stops him.

“He´s trying to speak with Pheonix…we need a plan C if that monster turns out to be a bigger monster than we thought”

“And so far?”

“Pheonix is not returning the calls. Dr Strange is not pleased…and you should kill the child NOW”

“No, one test, I just need one test…if he fails…you, Dr Strange and even Doom can kill him, hell, I´ll gladly help, all I ask is one test” he pleads and he remembers flashes of his son, Legion, and how Xavier was more than ready to murder the boy and…how in the end, he did.

Courtney closes her eyes. “One test. One, and if he fails…we´ll kill him and not give a damn about your opinion”

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Clea provides the news for Dr Doom. The King of this country can ignore the rejection Clean offered to him and be professional, as much Doom is a villain even him has standers, and her news pleased Doom greatly.

“The Avengers are no more. The X-men are afraid. Thor is too tired of Earth to care and he´s taking care of his daughter along with Amora, who has no intention in interfering with our plan as long we stay away from her island” and Doom, for the moment, has no problem in fulfil this small request even if he would love to have such powerful kid on his side. “Hela is still fighting Thanos…uhm, fighting and fucking” and even Doom makes a gross face even behind the iron mask.

“Uhm, great, we can carry on…and Prof X´s test?”

“Is ready to crash and burn as soon you gave your word”

“Excellent, Clea, prepare yourself…because this little test will be bloody and will end the X-men in one strike”

“As you wish”

[irinapaleolog]

As we head toward the conclusion of the Skywalker saga with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s Dec. 20 release, one of the big unresolved questions is the fate of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Will he, like his grandfather before him, redeem himself and resume his former identity as Ben Solo? Or will he, mask newly reformed, remain on the Dark Side to be defeated by Rey (Daisy Ridley) and the rest of the Resistance?

For such a major character in the series, Kylo remains somewhat mysterious, masked or not. When his parentage was first revealed in The Force Awakens, the biggest question was how exactly did Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford), our heroes of the Rebellion, wind up with this petulant mini-Vader as a son? We saw that Kylo idolized his grandfather but had none of his cool-tempered menace, hacking away at ship consoles with such abandon that you wondered if the First Order had a permanent Kylo Ren repair line in the budget. At first, his brattiness seemed almost comical until he killed his father in a mistaken attempt to drown the light in himself. For anyone who ever thought Leia and Han would be cool parents — and that certainly includes the parentally neglected Rey — Kylo’s presence was a bit of a head-scratcher. How exactly did the former Ben Solo turn into this destructive and emotionally turbocharged Dark Sider?

The Last Jedi went a bit further in explaining Ben’s turn to Ren as his uncle, the legendary Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), revealed that one fateful night a terrifying Force vision got the best of him and sent his nephew hurtling down toward the Dark Side. It was this betrayal that haunted Kylo and left him both vulnerable and achingly lonely as his Force bond with Rey revealed. And despite the murder of his father, he still remained conflicted and couldn’t do the same to his mother when he had the chance, her love for him staying his hand. Even though he refused to rejoin Rey on the Light Side, Kylo turned out to be far more complicated than he initially seemed when he descended as the masked and hooded villain in The Force Awakens.

While the films have sketched the broad outlines of Ben’s fall and Driver has done fantastic work in suggesting the turmoil roiling under Kylo’s mask, there is a lot more we’ve learned about Ben Solo/Kylo Ren’s past from the various novels and comic books that make up the current Star Wars canon. If you are not familiar with them, read ahead to get a fuller picture of the character and what his past may portend for his future.

In Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy, which takes place in the year after the Battle of Endor, we discover that not only are Han and Leia now married, but that Leia is already pregnant with Ben. While we saw that Leia definitely had Force powers in The Last Jedi, it’s during her pregnancy that she really starts to explore her abilities. She can feel Ben’s Force presence in the womb, and that it’s mostly light but shot through with veins of darkness. She worries about that darkness but takes comfort when Luke tells her all people have that. It’s poignant to think how the darkness eventually overwhelmed that child, but the fact that there was so much light to start with shows he can turn back to it if he wants and that the Dark Side was not his destiny, but a choice he made. While the Empire is in its last gasps during Leia’s pregnancy, Ben is born on Chandrila the same day that the Empire formally surrenders and the war ends. In fact, his mother is already in labor as the peace treaty is being signed. Because of his family’s fame, his birth was accompanied by a flood of rumors, everything from being born with a full head of black hair, to a full set of teeth, to Luke attending the birth himself. For a child with so many expectations placed on his tiny shoulders, Ben just seems to be a normal, if somewhat fussy, baby, though one his mother seems much more comfortable tending to than his father.

On that note, Aftermath: Empire’s End, the final book in the trilogy, establishes the difficulty Han has adjusting to fatherhood and how that foreshadows the gap that will grow between father and son despite Han’s deep love for the boy and the boy’s deep love for his father. Han’s usual cocksure confidence is shaken by the helpless baby before him and he feels insecure that he doesn’t have the same Force connection to Ben that Leia has, thinking that’s the only way his son can be soothed. Leia, to her credit, thinks that their son just needs to feel his father’s presence to feel comforted.

But Han’s insecurity continues in Last Shot, by Daniel José Older. While the book is mostly about an adventure between Han and Lando in the early years of Han and Leia’s marriage, Ben makes an appearance as a 2-year-old toddler, one that Han is still a little baffled by. Here we see how Han’s restless spirit will eventually cause a problem in his relationship with his son. Ben idolizes his father and “Wanwo” (fingers crossed someone gives Kylo and Uncle Lando a scene in the new movie) and misses his father terribly when he’s gone on his mission. While his mother works to build the New Republic, Ben is in the care of droids and in what might be a key moment for a person with a lifelong abandonment complex, a malfunctioning kitchen droid almost kills him. Ben survives, but Han continues to struggle with being a parent and the responsibilities that come with it.

There isn’t a ton of information about Ben’s late childhood and teenage years, but The Last Jedi novel details that Ben’s epic temper tantrums and growing Force powers left many objects in the Organa-Solo household destroyed. Kylo recalls with bitterness an incident overhearing his frightened parents talk about him as if he was a monster and it’s obvious that his anger became such an issue that Leia felt it necessary to send him to Luke in the hopes that training to be a Jedi would help tame his darker instincts. Neither his parents nor his uncle realized that Snoke had gotten his claws into Ben at some point during this time. As the films and comics like Star Wars: Age of Resistance — Supreme Leader Snoke #1 make clear, Snoke abused and manipulated Kylo for years, twisting the young man’s feelings toward his family and nurturing those resentments until Kylo finally took his revenge upon his Master in the throne room.

We get a little more information about Ben before his fall from the novel Bloodline, by Claudia Gray, which moves the story forward to six years before the events of The Force Awakens. There are no direct scenes with Ben, who is about 23 years old in the book, but he is often on his mother’s mind as she works as a senator living on the not-yet-destroyed Hosnian Prime while Han is off sponsoring various racing championships across the galaxy and running a shipping company. Ben is traveling around the galaxy with Luke, still training to be a Jedi. Han and Leia seem to have a warm marriage but one that is marked by long absences from each other as Leia understands that Han’s restlessness would make him a miserable Senate husband and Leia’s duty to the faltering New Republic comes before even her personal preference to be with her family. The book suggests that Han and Ben have a strained relationship at this point, in that Han does not understand his son and that Ben’s Force abilities have created a wedge between them. Frustrated by not being able to parent their son, both Han and Leia mentor many of the young people in the orbit, a desire we see reflected in the films as Han mentors Rey and Finn (John Boyega) and Leia treats Poe (Oscar Isaac) as almost a surrogate son, the three seeming more like their spiritual children than their actual son.

Though Ben does not appear in the novel, the book contains a key event that dramatically shapes his life to come. Over the course of the novel, we learn that no one outside of Leia, Luke, and Han ever learned that Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker and also the true birth father of Luke and Leia. While Luke had witnessed Anakin’s redemption personally, Leia did not, and to her, Vader remained the monster that tortured her and helped destroy her beloved Alderaan. She had kept the secret that Vader was her father for decades and was still coming to terms with her true parentage, never finding the right time to tell Ben who his grandfather really was. Unfortunately, the knowledge fell into the hands of a political rival who outed her to the whole Senate before she had time to tell Ben first. We don’t learn what Ben’s immediate reaction to this news was, but considering he must have learned this information shortly before his turn to the Dark Side, it must have cracked the already shaky trust in his family that Snoke had help splinter, a trust that would be completely shattered by that fateful night with Luke in his hut.

Looking over these parts of his past, Kylo just didn’t inherit great Force power and Leia’s fabulous hair from his powerful bloodline but everything else that went with it, good and bad. That meant Han and Leia’s mutual hotheadness, Luke’s impulsiveness, Anakin’s brattiness, and Padme’s penchant for falling for the wrong people — though that last one might wind up saving him in the end depending on how his complicated relationship with Rey works out.

As we move closer to The Rise of Skywalker, we will be getting a few more missing pieces to the puzzle when the first issue of The Rise of Kylo Ren, by Charles Soule, is released Dec. 18. Though the project has been mostly kept under wraps, one tantalizing cover revealed that Ben Solo and Luke Skywalker actually battled the Knights of Ren at some point, so Ben Solo’s past might be even more complex than we expected.

All this leads back to what will become of the Skywalker heir? Will the Bendemption, as some fans have taken to calling it, actually happen? Will Rey’s vision of Ben’s future, that solid and clear picture that convinced her he would turn back to the light, finally come to pass? And if he does turn back, what will be the trigger? Repentance? His mother’s love? His own? Although it would be quite bold to leave Kylo on the Dark Side, it does seem unlikely that a saga that deals so much about redemption would end on a sour note and leave the once and maybe future Ben Solo unredeemed. Let’s hope the Skywalker saga gets a happier ending than that and that this tortured figure finally turns back to the light.