#and i think that's kind of universal for siblings. to some degree.

[matrixbearer2024]

Based on poll, here's some stuff about Athena + sketchies of her that I will eventually finish digitally. I totally didn't stay up until 4 am to finish these doodles-

Audaces fortuna juvat

- Athena "F" Pines

Named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and war 'Athena' and the english scientist 'Michael Faraday', she is the youngest of Ford's triplets and inherited his polydactyly! (She also inherited his felony of a fashion sense but let's gloss over that.)

Compared to her siblings, she normally covers up entirely just by preference and not because she's hiding something(like Max is). No she doesn't die in the summer heat despite turtlenecks and sweaters because she runs cold and would sooner freeze than melt.

Teena's a daddy's girl through and through, to the point that she and Max would fuss on sharing papa Sixer back when they were babies. Thank goodness Fordsy had two hands!

She's likely the most pragmatic of her siblings but not the most cynical or paranoid. Her most common mood is just tired, since she mostly runs on energy drinks and pastries.

Teena's not really one for candy either so she doesn't even dive for the groceries when somebody brings home jelly beans like the men in her family. When she does indulge though, you can find her eating dark chocolate.

Is practically allergic to color and frankly her closet looks like it was meant for 20s television. Just blacks, whites, greys and some other muted shades. At least she doesn't wear the same thing over and over again compared to her father.

Doesn't denounce dresses but finds them quite impractical and would rather wear cargo pants. Again, pragmatic. She's also quite tomboyish in nature which Mabel finds odd and Dipper thinks is interesting. Her laid back nature reminds Dipdip of Wendy to a different degree but the semblance is so fleeting he just usually shrugs it off when he notices. (Planning to have Teena actually be Aro: Demiromantic, she just doesn't know that there's a label for that yet LOL)

I wouldn't say that she is the closest to Ford however, she used to be back when she was a kid- but as an adult it's a different story. With her fractured family and blatantly obvious mutation, by the time she left to pursue a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University(North Carolina) she was already slightly harboring a sense of disdain for her mutation and anything odd.

The teasing and taunting only got worse in university as well, she wanted to become a medical doctor to practice orthopedics but made a promise with her siblings that they'd only pursue their dreams once they've gotten their dad back- hence the engineering bit and why she didn't even go through to med proper. She did figure out she had a passion for tinkering and robotics though.

Her peers were not kind, people were absolutely more accepting compared to Ford's time but she was still branded as weird or odd and the disdain for her uniqueness grew. She put everything off for as long as she could, only returning to Gravity Falls in 2010 after her siblings started calling and looking for her. At that point, Teena figured she couldn't just stay away forever so she bit the bullet and returned to gravity falls despite her hesitation. She was the last push they needed to completely fix the portal; problem being that they didn't have an iota of how the hell they would turn it on.

So yeah, that's why Dipper and Mabel are still pivotal in helping them all make amends as it stands(also finding the journals-). Haven't completely explained why for the other two yet, but that'll be in a separate post. Anyhow, enjoy and don't forget that my inbox is always open to asks or requests for fics or even about these guys!

[hyperfixation-or-death]

headcanon for the kids' concepts of their own ages during the time immediately following the finale:

i.

Post-finale, there was exactly one instance of Victor being unsure of how old he technically is. He regrets letting that slip, partially because of how concerned everyone looked, partially because Sam wouldn't drop the issue despite Victor very much not wanting to discuss it.

But Sam does drop it, eventually, leaving Victor free to ignore the age question. (Because seventeen feels wrong, but so does thirteen, and everything's a little fuzzy but some things are all too clear and he doesn't want to think about it.)

Until one day, he's talking to Sofia Belkebirs, and she's explaining why, exactly, he can't do [some risky thing with his powers, idk].

"You're thirteen-" She starts, slightly exasperated. "Seventeen." He interrupts, just to be difficult. "Fifteen." She continues without missing a beat. Victor blinks. "...okay." Average out the numbers; that was a fair compromise. Why didn't he think of that?

ii.

Romane doesn't care how old she was. She's fourteen now; that's what she wanted. She wants to be fourteen. And she can almost convince herself that it's that simple, except for the days when everything feels off. When she nearly stumbles with every step, disoriented. When she can't fight off the swirl of anxiety telling her how fragile everything is. When nothing feels like the fresh start it was supposed to be.

On days like that, she eventually figures out, it helps to count back and forth.

14 years old on that night in the bunker. 15 years old was her first birthday since age 10 that was spent without her friends. 16 years old was the birthday that Camille helped make cupcakes. 17 years old was the birthday her mom gave her a necklace and talked about the future with her for hours. 17 years old, in the bunker with Victor. 17 years old, in the bunker with Victor, Sam, and Bilal. 14 years old on that night in the bunker. 14 years old, at Bilal's house for cake and presents. 14 years old, remembering.

It's grounding, in a way, to straighten out the years in her head. The details don't matter as much, as long as she keeps moving forward. And she does.

iii.

Bilal doesn't want to know. There's too many contradicting memories, too many conflicting emotions. They all culminate in piercing headaches when he focuses on them for too long. Everything's more vague for him then it is for the others. There are gaps in his memory; sometimes he has no idea what he actually lived through.

A classmate asks him how old he is. He blanks, his head feeling like a static screen: inconsistent, loud, rapidly moving, and a signal that something was wrong.

"Um-"

Without looking up from her paper, purposefully nonchalant, Romane answers. "His birthday's [I forgot what his canon birthday is]."

"Oh. So...15, right?"

"Sure."

Yeah, that works.

iv.

Sam is fourteen years old. If the topic of age comes up, he'll recite birthdays and let whoever's asking do the math.

Sam is fourteen years old. When it isn't enough for Romane to go through the years in her head, he's fine with listening to her list what she can remember.

Sam is fourteen years old. As long as Victor stops claiming to be, "technically, in a way, older," he'll go along with the phrase "fifteen years old in theory".

v.

(As time goes on, its effects begin to settle. Some memories fade; others sharpen. Within about two years, the kids feel more tethered to this timeline, and more normal about their chronological ages.)

[novembermorgon]

After Aerion died, does Myrielle re-marry? And if she does, and her new husband already has kids, how would she, Maegor, and Aenys feel about them? If Myrielle gets pregnant, how do the twins feel about their potential half sibling?

think smarter not harder . have an affair with your brother in law so you can cash in later

i always kind of liked to think that in a scenario where aerion dies vaguely in line with how+when it happens in canon myrielle does remarry but more for a sense of security than because she's especially enthusiastic at the idea . she likes to feel as if she has something or someone to fall back on i think, and when aerion dies she kind of has the rug pulled out under her in that she doesn't really know where to turn or what to do or where to go . she has a place at court only through her sons then and when they marry she feels as if they too begin to slip away from her . so she scrambles to find that security again by remarrying

& the easiest most comfortable option for her is daeron - she's known him for more than half her life at that point and knows that they're fond of each other (maybe not in any super deep passionate soulmate way but there's a fondness there regardless) and so she locks in on that instead of trying to gamble with other men at court when she knows that it'd be tough to find someone that could avoid making her miserable. not to mention given that he'd be heir at that point he's kind of a step up from aerion just in terms of political value LOL . on a purely personal level i don't know if she would want to marry daeron . she doesn't think he matches her passion and she doesn't find him super attractive and she can't stand the drinking & whoring & general nothingsauce attitude he has towards everything, but again at this point she kind of just needs to settle down again so she can feel secure the way she did being married the first time

i ermrmmmmm . i haven't thought all that hard about daeron's timeline of events in this little universe so subject to change but i imagine he does marry kiera of tyrosh like in canon and she dies in childbirth (which seems kind of likely even in the canonsphere given her miscarriages + never being mentioned again + grrm's love for letting women die giving birth) so he does have vaella hanging around . which is funny because this means myrielle gets her princess daughter technically but again it's WRONG because she isn't hers biologically & vaella ..... hummm ... well in canon she's described as simple and as a fellow part of the club ☝️ i hc that to mean that she had some degree of autism which i don't think myrielle would be very equipped to handle . she doesn't have the patience or understanding so while she's not unkind or dismissive of her the way she is towards aerea i don't know if they'd really bond in any significant way . maybe vaella gets attached to her given she doesn't really have a mom here but myrielle wouldn't know how to give that energy back and so there's always a bit of a wedge inbetween them there .

maegor i feel is probably the most agreeable of the three here . both him and aenys are older than vaella would be so i don't think they'd really be friends in the traditional sense but maegor to me is very open and willing to really make that effort to be agreeable and to make things work so him and vaella are definitely the closest ... takes on the older brother role without any complaints .

unlike aenys who would probably just disregard the whole marriage & daeron & vaella altogether . i imagine he looks up to aerion so much and so strongly that the idea of myrielle remarrying, especially someone like daeron, really kind of peeves him off . it disturbs that already existing family dynamic and he already has a hard time handling aerion's death so it all just kind of piles up and he doesn't make an effort at all . you're not my real dad!!!!

not sure if they'd have any more kids though .. i talked about this in one of the latest asks i answered so it could either go the horror movie esque trapped forever as a wife and mother route or it just doesn't really go anywhere and they end up settling as is . i think given theyre both a bit older at this point it'd be a bit of a struggle but i don't know enough about pregnancy to say . <3 regardless the previous points stand for this potential half sibling . maegor is happy aenys is mad and has to go off and hit something really hard every time he thinks about it

[letsgetrowdy43]

Meet the Littlest Hughes—

I don’t know why I made this… but I got the urge to make a little intro for the babies

Au Masterlist!!

Warren Hayes Hughes ೃ⁀➷

Born August 31st, 2022 in Michigan

The oldest of the three

The mature and always composed child, very much like Quinn with his competitive nature and drive, but is empathetic and kind like his mother

Follows in his father’s footsteps and plays professional hockey after playing for two years at Umich

Is like the Crosby/Bedard of his generation, his talent plus his family’s legacy put a large magnifying glass on him

He is drafted first overall in the year 2040 to the Vancouver Canucks

Becomes their Captain after three seasons with the club

Hayden James Hughes ೃ⁀➷

Born April 14th, 2024 in Vancouver

Middle child, who much like Jack did not suffer with middle child syndrome

She is their wild child, think Jack but with an obsession for princess crowns

Resident daddy’s girl, she adores Quinn

She played hockey for a whole month before begging her parents to let her become a figure skater because the dresses were sparkly.

She also attends Umich, in hopes of graduating with a degree in Women and Genders studies, and then furthering her education and getting a doctorate and Masters degree so she can become a professor

Her focal of study is Women in sports, and later on in her career she becomes a spokesperson for the PWHL

Maeve Wren Hughes ೃ⁀➷

Born May 20th, 2030 in Vancouver

She and her siblings have a bigger age gap, but they adore their baby sister.

Maeve is Quinn and Honey's most unusual baby, she is their theatre baby.

They tried dance, but she because obsessed with acting and singing so they put her in some classes and watched her sing her little heart out on stage

She ends up taking a different path from her siblings and going to art school.

She ends up in New York at Columbia University School of the Arts studying for a theatre degree.

Maeve pursues her dream and ends up working on Broadway as a costume designer, and ends up marrying a New York Ranger (Jack feels very betrayed by this, but also loves her niece's husband, so he looks past it)

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for wanting a material thing rather than an experience for my college graduation gift, and being upset I still don't have it?

I skimmed through some other AITA posts to prepare me to write this one properly, and saw someone use the term "validation bait." I bring that up because I fear this post may read like that once all is said and done, but I genuinely am worried my perspective might be skewed. I encourage you to enter "Reddit Mode" if you decide to reply after your judgement with additional context and feel the need to be blunt.

Background context: I have an older sibling who graduated before me during the beginning of COVID. While his gift was delayed as a result, we as a family (three children one father) ended up going to Disney World, NASA, and Universal Orlando in 2021 to celebrate his accomplishment. It was a great trip, aside from the horrific humidity and the hurricane that just barely missed us. Later on, I asked my sibling if that was what he actually wanted to do, and he said our father proposed some ideas because he didn't really have any and Florida sounded like a good idea to him. My asking this will make sense later, but putting it here seems the most logical.

Additionally, it may be important to know that my father goes on a lot of trips. At least, more than anyone I've personally known. I'm not gonna try to calculate the exact number, but I will say in the span of less than a year (after the family Florida trip), he went to both Canada and Mexico for a week each, on top of additional excursions to Florida and Vegas-- almost all also including bringing his girlfriend. At the same time, he claimed assistance with college tuition was out of his budget, started having me pay rent on a part time job, and told my younger sibling fixing the AC in their car would cost too much as well. Even I know something doesn't add up here, but maybe I'm taking it too personally. End background context.

Fast forward to spring of 2023, and it's my turn to graduate college. Here's the thing: my brother was asked at least a year in advance to his graduation what he would like to do. I wasn't asked; I had to bring it up myself, and I waited until my graduation was only two months out. It was also over a phone call, because my father was out of town for at least the fifth time that year already. I dropped the hint that, for my graduation present, I would really like to get a nice gaming desktop. My father's response was, "... We'll see." Later on, he elaborated through text stating, "I took everybody to florida because i think graduations should be more about memories than what material thing you can get out of your dad."

Here's the thing: it's no secret to my dad that I'm a gamer, and I like video games. Additionally, it's no secret that a gaming desktop is something I have wanted for a decade. Even since middle school I've talked about gaming desktops and how much I wanted one. Even so, I happily played games like Saints Row III on a laptop that chugged along at 12 frames per second and took every crash in stride. I also thought that this kind of gift would be a relief to my dad, as my thought process was it would be far less expensive than taking an entire family somewhere out of the state for a week. Not only that, but there wasn't really anywhere I wanted to go. I don't have the desire to travel like he does; I don't mind taking my time off at home or locally, and relaxing with the things I have rather than spending a ton on a fancy dinner or hotel or concert.

So, naturally, I was confused, dismayed, and heartbroken. While I started crafting a text response explaining why a gaming desktop would not just be for personal use, but would also be advantageous for my career (my degree was in animation and I learned surface level coding for making video games), I also wondered why it was wrong for me to want a "material thing" even if it wasn't something necessarily "useful." Because while, yes, a gaming desktop would have the power I needed for more intensive animation projects, that wasn't really why I wanted one. But I figured explaining as such would help convince my dad why it was a good idea.

My dad ended up calling me before I could finish crafting my text, so I did my best to explain my standpoint, as well as pointing out how the specs for a gaming desktop are pretty much parallel with the specs for a desktop for things like 3D rendering and animation. He stood his ground on "making memories" as well, and also hinted that I was acting entitled for asking about my graduation present. I think I pointed out to him how he asked my older brother far in advance what he wanted for his graduation, but those details of the conversation are a little faded with time. I did end up sending my text after that phone call anyway, as I felt it better explained what I was thinking and feeling than I could say in verbal conversation (I've always gotten a little flustered talking to my dad about things I want that he doesn't approve of).

Fortunately, after reading my text, my father seemed to come around, and invited me to put together a list of parts for my computer, since I wanted to build it. I got really excited and got the help of my computer-savvy friend to put together something I thought was reasonable-- it had a really good graphics card and processor, and I made compromises on some of the other parts to lower the cost. I haven't looked at the list in a while, but the total cost-- tower, two mid-range monitors, basic keyboard and mouse-- was something like 2.5k approaching 3k. Mid range (at least, it is these days) I think, but it would be enough for the things I wanted to do.

I put the list together, and emailed it to my dad. The assumption I had, was he would purchase the parts, and then we would build it together (or I would build it alone). However, later on I went to ask him if he had gotten my email, and while he said yes, he also said, "I'm not paying for the whole thing. I can't afford it, and it's not fair to spend more on you as an individual than what I spent on your brother as an individual for the Florida trip."

I find the latter point somewhat fair considering I'm the only person who benefits from this gift, but the first point, given the background context on my father's habits, I'm not sure how much I believe. But arguing with him would have been pointless. I definitely would have liked to have had that information beforehand, but it ultimately didn't change much.

This is getting long, so I'll try to summarize the rest. This was just the first instance of my father changing the goal posts for my graduation gift. First, he tried to convince me that getting a prebuilt tower would be just as good. I did the research, and a tower with the graphics card I wanted would have cost as much as building my own tower and buying a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and still not have been as good in other specs anyways. Then, he tried to tell me he was only going to give me $1000 towards the computer. I pointed out paying for my older sibling for the Florida trip would have cost at least $1500-- if I hadn't done the research, I wouldn't have known any better and just blindly agreed. Then, two days after my graduation, he stated that he wasn't going to give me the money for the computer until I had secured a full time job.

At that point, I just gave up, and agreed.

Fast forward to now. I'm still working the part time job, I barely make enough to put a couple dollars into savings, no one is hiring me full time, and my dad hinted that, instead of doing presents for Christmas this year, we all agree to go on vacation somewhere. Not only that, but his family in Canada just told him they're going to Mexico in November. Not only is my dad implying we should go too and I should pay a portion of my own way, I have a further feeling he may say that this will be our Christmas as well. I still don't have the computer, even though my dad has noticed how much I'm struggling.

If I had the computer, I wouldn't have minded the vacation-- but I feel like my wants and feelings have been completely pushed aside in favor of what my dad thinks is good and/or right, and the wind has been taken out of my sails regarding my graduation entirely. On the other hand, maybe he's right that I focus too much on a material thing and should redirect my attention to an experience and go somewhere to relax/get away from daily life.

Am I a materialistic asshole?

What are these acronyms?

[runwayrunway]

No. 7 - A jetBlue FaMintly ReBluenion - The Quest for the Bluest Plane

And now, for something completely different.

We're done with jetBlue. I said that and I meant it. But we're not done with this train of thought. This post might not be what you expect. This is a very long post (and I do mean very long), a journey through the history of the US low-cost airline, the cognitive dissonance of the everyman millionaire, the thinly-veiled cynicism of the start-up airline, human kindness squeezed through cracks of a soulless machine which can never stop churning, and above all one man's quest to make the bluest planes he can, and my quest to tell you all if they look bad or not.

Let's begin here: have you ever wondered how new airlines are started? Well, when a wealthy individual or group of individuals love making money very much, they get together and incorporate a publicly traded company, lease a few airplanes, buy some airport slots...

I'll get to the point. Readers, there's somebody I'd like you to meet.

"Never speak to me or my daughter ever again." image: Rick Maiman

This is David G. Neeleman. He's jetBlue's dad. And jetBlue...has siblings.

David Neeleman is a Brazilian-American-Cypriot businessman I would best describe as a serial airline founder. Normally the description 'serial entrepreneur', to me at least, implies flakiness and perpetual failure to get anything properly off the ground, but that's not the case for Neeleman. He's very successful. He's probably some sort of pioneer. I've seen him compared to Howard Hughes. There's really only one stain on his record, one failure to speak of, and it's been over ten years. He has a net worth of 400 million dollars.

image: bloomberg

He's an...interesting person. Very interesting. He was born in Brazil and raised in Utah by a wealthy Mormon family. There are many very funny images of him available through Google. He has ten children, an ADHD diagnosis, no university degree, a whole lot of money, and a weird, weird, weird personal philosophy.

This interview is hard to sum up, but there's clearly a lot going on here. This is a guy who wants so desperately to be down to earth and kind and generous, who thinks he is down to earth and kind and generous, but who just can't take the extra step to realize the implications of the truly obscene wealth involved in venture capital and the inherent contradiction of that with his own ostensible charity and drive towards a fair and comfortable experience for passengers. In a way he seems like he's just too wealthy to really understand what being wealthy means. (It's also an older interview, and I imagine any scrap of genuine convictions he held through cognitive dissonance are now long-gone, given the CoViD thing.) He's also clearly got a chip on his shoulder about being fired from jetBlue. To be fair, having seen what they've done with their livery...I get it.

What else...he's also been CEO of airline booking program Open Skies, was involved with bizjet charter airline Superior Air Charter (then known as JetSuite), is founder and chairman of security company Vizgul for some reason, and is a minority owner of TAP Air Portugal. His nephew Zach Wilson is quarterback for the New York Jets. Oh, and he funded a study to underestimate the prevalence of CoViD. Classy, David. Real classy.

This isn't about David Neeleman. Not really. Not yet, at least. At some point it becomes about him, about his journey, but even then it isn't. When you have 400 million dollars you cease to become a meaningful subject as a person and become a meaningful subject as a distilled effigy of the things which the money came from. I dislike the Tony-Starkification of real people and I refuse to approach him in a way that supports that view of him. His life only matters to me in the context of the airlines he makes, and in what the way he changed over time represents. There's at least one biography out there for anyone particularly interested in the lives of Mormon multimillionaires who take issue with making people die less because they want the line to go up more. He is worth 400 million dollars, which is roughly a million dollars times what I make in one paycheck, delivered every two weeks. He's a creature in a suit who owns an absurd amount of wristwatches, each of which could pay for some sort of surgery for someone out there. There's a bunch of those in the world and this one happens to have made something which eclipses him, and that something is what's been occupying me since Wednesday.

If you're a book-reader - and I recommend being one - I think you're probably better off reading Barbara S. Peterson's "Blue Streak: Inside jetBlue, the Upstart That Rocked an Industry", which talks specifically about jetBlue and the way it pioneered what we now consider normal for aviation in the US. Reading it brought back memories for me of seeing adverts for jetBlue's planes on television, guaranteed to have a TV screen on every seat, and having my little mind which was still scarred by hours upon hours of complete boredom flying all the way from Tokyo to the American Northeast completely blown. Air travel really is unrecognizable from what it was when I was a child, although 20 years feels a lot shorter than it really is when you've lived it. There was no one factor that changed aviation so much in my lifetime, but there were a lot that contributed. ETOPS, 9/11, the recession, geopolitics, gas prices, the internet, legacy airline mega-mergers, privatization...and the jetBlue way of doing things.

It's easy to forget from our current vantage point but low-cost air travel wasn't always like this. Southwest did a lot to pioneer the modern low-cost model but jetBlue is probably the second-biggest player in the airline industry's shift to a culture which tries less to be glamorous and tries more to be fun and approachable (they by no means invented the Fun Airline, but PSA had been gone for 20 years at that point and the market had a gaping hole). They were a huge player in the rise of in-flight entertainment as standard even on low-cost flights. They helped keep aviation going after 9/11, when it was one of the few airlines to actually make money. And jetBlue's story isn't Neeleman's story, even though he founded it. I literally just listed four other major involvements of his, and he hasn't been involved in the business side of jetBlue since 2008. His story involves the founding of four - count em! - other airlines. Let's take a look through them and see if we can spot any patterns.

Morris Air (1992-1994)

sources and further reading: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]

Never heard of Morris Air? Can't blame you. jetBlue's oldest sibling existed for two years in the 90s. Two years. That's pretty miserable. ValuJet was around for twice that. That said, you're actually probably more familiar with them under a different name: Southwest.

No, Morris Air did not become Southwest. Southwest existed at the time, and it was in fact Southwest which gave birth to Morris Air.

Morris Air was named for its founder, June Morris, who operated one of Utah's largest travel agencies. In 1984 she partnered with a then 25-year-old David Neeleman to launch Morris Air Service. The two had realized something that was about to shake the airline industry: plane tickets were really expensive, and you could charge even less than major budget carriers like Southwest by just buying all the seats on a charter flight and selling them on to customers at an attractively low price. If you did this, even regular working-class people trying to book a trip to Hawai'i or Disneyland could actually afford a plane ticket. This worked successfully, enough that Morris sold off her travel agency, until they incurred a large fine from the DoT for pushing too far and fraudulently passing themselves off as a scheduled airline (which mattered because commercial charters are operated under Part 135 regulations while scheduled services are governed by the much more restrictive Part 121). In response, girlboss queen June Morris and her investie David Neeleman went and started up Morris Air as an actual, genuine, fully certified part 121 carrier, making June Morris the only female jet airline CEO in the US. They operated a fleet of 21 737-300s around the west coast on both scheduled and charter flights, pioneering such cost-cutting measures as e-tickets (wrongly attributed to Southwest, they were actually first used by Morris). This fleet included N75356/N764MA/N697SW, the airframe involved in the TACA 110 incident, which was successfully landed on a levee after losing power in both engines.

image: Richard Silagi

Now, I don't know about you, but these planes don't scream 'vacation' to me. In fact, they don't scream anything. They barely whisper. They breathe lightly on my ear. There are a couple planes in their fleet with weird features, like multicolor painted noses or cheatlines, but these seem to be one-offs and I wouldn't even be surprised if they were just leftovers from previous paintjobs (the one with the cheatline does look suspiciously like the one used on Sierra Pacific planes, one of the operators Morris chartered from). So they don't count. What counts is this.

Maybe if Morris Air didn't want to be instantly forgotten they shouldn't have made their planes completely generic. I'm not sure they cared, though. They wanted to make money and they made money.

A D- for Morris Air.

In 1992, less than two years after gaining its air operator's certificate, Morris Air merged with Southwest and the brand was retired. Despite having posed a legitimate threat to the titan that was Southwest at the peak of its relevance, it's since largely been forgotten. June Morris and David Neeleman both worked in Southwest's upper management for some time, but it was only five months before Neeleman left Southwest for other ventures. Soon, something more familiar would spring up, fed by the dying rays of Morris Air's gargantuan profits.

WestJet (est. 1994, began operation 1996)

Not exactly a deep cut, is it? WestJet is actually the second largest carrier in Canada and the ninth-largest in North America. They carry over 25 million passengers a year. I've never been one of them, but David Neeleman probably has, because he was one of the group of absurdly wealthy individuals who founded this incredibly successful airline in 1994.

WestJet operates a primary fleet of over 100 Boeing 737s of various models and seven Boeing 787s; in the past they also operated the 757 and 767. They operate both scheduled passenger and charter flights, as well as having a cargo division, a fully-owned regional subsidiary, and a Delta Connection/United Express-style brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates.

These all use more or less the same livery, which has only slightly changed since the beginning of operations in 1996. Pictured above is the original livery. I like the colors, I like the angularity on the tail, but I despise the style of livery with just the isolated tail colored in. This said, they introduced a new, updated livery in 2018.

I am a very predictable person. Given a livery mostly seen on 737MAXes and Dreamliners, I will always pick the Dreamliner to use as a visual example. This is not a slight to the MAX. They are nice looking planes, but the Dreamliner's planform is just on another level. Look at that wing sweep. Immaculate.

I like this color scheme a lot. I just happen to really like sea-green-adjacent colors, this is not the first time I've mentioned this. The font is nice, big, legible. I like the all-caps, I like the descender on the J. I think removing the logo mark on the wordmark and making it solid color was fine as a choice, makes the whole plane feel more balanced between the turquoise and the dark blue. The 'l'esprit du Canada' feels utterly pointless and is blocked by the wing and too small to be clearly read anyway. Tail design not limited to the tail, but mostly white fuselage regardless. Boring, but there's nothing here I can really call...bad? It's what they don't do that feels like the issue here, not what they do. Like, some sort of design on the nose and directly above or below, maybe? I didn't even realize there's any paint on the engines until I was editing my first draft and from most angles you just can't see it. Come on.

Grade: D+

Before I move on, there is something I have to mention. And that is WestJet's sub-brands. WestJet Encore is a fully-owned subsidiary which operates a respectable fleet of Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, and WestJet Link is a brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates a couple Saab 340s. And that is...fine, normal, even, but...

Is this a joke to you?!

Change your name to WestProp. Now.

...

Hey. Wait a minute.

David! The large blue plane is coming! It has no engine power because it ran out of fuel and is about to hit you on the racetrack during family day! Oh no, he has airpods in! He can't hear us! image: Cean W Orrett

This guy. David Neeleman. Yeah, him. We were talking about him. I mean, it's been a minute since he came up because as far as I can tell after founding WestJet he did nothing of note related to it again, but...what's he been doing? Wait...wait a minute. This is becoming a habit, David. All your airlines are...well...they share a certain trait, in a very specific area.

David knows what I'm talking about. After all, his next move, in 1998, was to found NewAir, which would shortly become jetBlue.

I have not stopped to count how many words I have written about jetBlue this week. It is a lot. I already delivered a verdict. We are moving on.

Because David didn't stop here. Why would he? It's 2008 and he just got fired from his own company because a winter storm went Southwest-holiday-scheduling levels of horrendous for the airline he raised from infancy. He's got time to kill and money to burn and he wants the line to go up, damn it! Well, maybe he can be in the right place at the right time again. Make a second jetBlue, win back what he's lost. After all, he's got something else up his sleeve - dual citizenship.

Just your regular average Mormon, lurking in forests with a model plane. Nothing sinister about that. image: conde nast traveler

I did mention earlier he was born in Brazil, right? That's always been part of his life. When he was in charge, jetBlue was actually the launch customer for the Embraer E190, an incredibly popular mid-sized regional jet made by Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.

Is it just me, or do the men in this picture somehow look like cardboard cutouts holding a real airplane? There is something very strange about this image. I would go so far as to call it unsettling. image: The Gainesville Sun

So, figuring he'd bled the US dry, I suppose, he moseyed on down to his birthplace with his millions of dollars and presumably a couple little blank model planes waiting to be painted and shown off at a press conference. If you've seen a pattern emerging, prepare to see it continue.

Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (est. 2008)

Mmm. Helvetica Neue Heavy. Not impressed.

Okay, sure. Technically there was a 'naming contest' and this name 'was the most popular'. But I think at this point I would believe that David Neeleman botted his own vote years before I would believe that Blue Airlines of Brazil just happened to be the winning name.

Okay, all else aside, I would really love to gently hold a plane like this. There's a certain caressing nature to the way he's holding this plane's snout which I crave to someday replicate with a similarly sized model aircraft. image: Paulo Whitaker

Much like jetBlue, Azul began operating Embraer 190 and Embraer 195 aircraft before expanding its fleet to include Airbus models, a handful of ATR 72 tubroprops, and two Boeing 747s for cargo. They started with just five aircraft but grew rapidly, absorbing a bunch of other airlines and securing large investments from the likes of United and Hainan Airlines. Today they operate a fleet of over 150 planes to 161 destinations and are the third largest airline in Brazil. They have a set of crossover liveries with freaking Disney. (I might review those sometime.) They also have a crossover livery with John Deere for some reason. You know, the tractor company. In 2020 TripAdvisor named them the world's best airline.

In addition to the name of the company, they also name their airplanes. I do not speak Portuguese, but thankfully a close friend, @ametri-e, does. I asked him if the names were silly puns like jetBlue's are, and I got this response:

some of these are puns but not particularly funny, some of them just have the word blue in them, and one was funny

So there you have it!

Unlike Morris, which no longer exists; WestJet, which he seems to have minimally contributed to past its founding; and jetBlue, which tossed him unceremoniously on the tarmac with his bags, he remains the chairman of Azul at time of writing.

I find myself briefly wondering if this is all an attempt to recapture his lost glory. Is jetBlue, larger even than the impressive heights Azul has reached, the one that got away? Is he now forced to go forward modeling his work in the image of that which he was robbed of, that which he can never go back to?

I don't know and I don't care. I care about if the livery looks good or not.

Well, I wasn't just going to leave the John Deere plane out. It's a bit underwhelming, though, isn't it?.

So Azul is pretty different from jetBlue at first glance. Mainly, it uses a much darker blue and has a logo to go with the wordmark - a cute little pixel Brazil that looks a bit like a heart to me because of the specific way it's drawn. Everything is scaled nicely so it looks pleasing on the turboprop and I think the dark underside and the way it curves around the ventral fairing actually looks really good with the ATR's airframe, which has a very pronounced ventral fairing relative to similarly-sized props. But, okay, let's look at a jet.

This...is not terrible. I really like the highlights on the trailing edges of the winglets and the end of the rudder, and bordering the deep blue belly. Not crazy about the Helvetica Neue still. Why doesn't the 'u' being cyan carry over to the actual livery? Also, Detached Tail Syndrome. In fact, although it has features beyond this which make a further discussion worth having, the basic layout is what I call the 'Deltalike' because that's the airline I associate with it despite them certainly not being the first to use it - detached tail, painted engines, painted underside that's large enough to see from the sides. It avoids a lot of pitfalls of the other popular archetype, that of the very tail-heavy (which WestJet fell into), but has its own loathesome features. All said, though, I do think Azul is one of the better takes on the Deltalike.

In the first picture the highlights look green, but in reality they're one line of green and one of yellow, for the Brazilian flag. I think they look really nice with this particular blue color, but I am exhausted of this man naming his airlines blue and then having the planes be majority white. They have such a nice shade of blue here, couldn't they make that the primary color of the body?

That aside, the way that the line curves up towards the middle of the plane combined with the tailing-edge highlights creates a sort of aerodynamic feeling. You even see them in other colors sometimes, like the pink ones on the E190s and blue ones on the E195.

It also comes in pink! Were this not a one-off I would ask them to change their name to Rosa Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras, but it is a promotion.

It seems like reconnecting with his origin has given David Neeleman the creative push he needed to beat jetBlue in at least one way - livery. All said, Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras clocks in at a final grade of...

C+

Aww, not quite a B for Brazil. Better luck next time! Though I'll admit I considered putting it there for a bit. This is a very high C+. Still, no cigar. Next time try putting less white on the plane. If you're all about blue, why are all your planes still so white? Come on, David. You are spreading blue paint on every airline you've ever touched but never letting it get past the tailfin. Who are you kidding? You know you're holding yourself back. There's a desire deep in you. You know it's there. I know you want to. It's just a matter of when. You are going to give in to your most animal urges. This isn't enough for you.

You need a bluer plane.

You can feel the thirst for a plane blue enough that you might as well own a piece of the sky straining against the bonds you've tried so hard to impose on it all these years. When will you finally unleash it?

Breeze Airways (commenced operations 2021)

image: inc. usa

Here we are, David. Time has almost caught up to us. It's just you, me narrating, and a very, very blue plane indeed. We have finally reached jetBlue's youngest baby sibling.

"Together, we created Breeze as a new airline merging technology with kindness," David Neeleman said. ​"If you can just be nice, the people will be nice to you in return and your job will be more fun.”

This is an interesting pitch. When Cape Air, with its fleet of tiny airplanes and its founder who started the airline with himself as pilot just to fly one route that he found himself needing to travel regularly, makes their motto Make Our Customers Happy And Have A Good Time Doing It (Mocha Hagodti), it feels...well, it feels like the person who said that didn't understand yet what a company was. Cape Air is its own story with its own contradictions and the vicious cognitive dissonance of capital on stark display but you can sense the desire in its inception to provide a service before running a company. It is the opposite of cynical - it is naïve. It is hopeful and human and starry-eyed.

When a man on his fifth airline makes a pitch like that it's like trying to cloud-watch looking at the ceiling.

That's not the only pitch for Breeze. I mean, even if you've started four successful airlines already and it seems like everything you touch goes on to revolutionize some part of the industry I think that would be a hard sell to investors in 2021. There's a bit more going on here. I'm going to start with the bit that's boring and makes me roll my eyes.

Ever since JetBlue, Neeleman has, like the kid peering into the circus tent, longed to get back into the U.S. airline industry. 

Bill Saporito writes for Inc. USA. I let out one tepid physical laugh. Yeah, David. You've got something great going in Brazil right now, but you want more. You want jetBlue and you can't have it. So instead...you give us an app.

The Breeze app is designed to eliminate chokepoints between passengers and planes. That means fewer people on the ground and lower cost.

Is this revolutionary? Is this destined to end in a Southwest-tier scheduling catastrophe? I'm not sure. I think David Neeleman's history suggests he could make this work, and I think the history of apps being used for things that didn't have apps before suggests that this could horribly blow up in his face. It seems to have gone fine so far, as I haven't heard anything else about it. To be fair, I wasn't exactly invested in the idea, so I haven't been looking. There's always time for some situation to happen nobody had foreseen and it all to go belly-up. Saying you never cancel flights works fine until a blizzard hits and then you have to start all over again, but he didn't build jetBlue by being afraid to take risks.

More interesting is the service they offer. Breeze has a bit of an identity crisis. Breeze wants to be an ultra low cost carrier with a first class cabin. That sounds contradictory because it is. The ULCC model as used by airlines like Ryanair and Spirit fundamentally relies on charging a low fare upfront with the expectation that customers will not receive a crumb extra without paying for it. Everything from seat reservations to snacks to anything else you can think of, you can pay extra for or you can do without. Breeze also follows other trends common with ULCCs, like a lack of seatback screens (the very thing jetBlue pioneered!) and flying point-to-point to smaller airports located outside of major metropolitan areas rather than routing through hubs. Yet Breeze insists it wants to have a first class cabin!

It does have a first class cabin, apparently. The classes are called Nice, Nicer, and Nicest. I wish airlines wouldn't do this. Air travel is the floorboards of stand-up comedy. Everyone already hates flying except weirdoes like me who spend enough time looking at pictures of airplanes to write reviews of their paint jobs, and even I get pretty tired of it if I go too long sitting there without the plane doing some sort of plane thing. You can be honest. You can call the classes Bearable, Unpleasant, and Painful. We all understand. It's okay. I would rather buy a ticket for Miserable But Cheap class than Nice. It probably won't actually be that bad, since Breeze doesn't do long-haul, which makes the presence of first-class even more bizarre. If you want first-class short-haul and have that sort of money just charter a private jet! And David Neeleman has been involved with at least two private jet charter companies too, so...what is he doing?

In 2011, almost exactly 10 years before Breeze began operation, Neeleman was interviewed for Business Jet Traveler. I linked the interview above. It's a powerful display of the cognitive dissonance of a man who considers himself a regular everyday Mormon dad, who donates his salary to his employees, who insists on calling his employees crewmembers, even as the line goes up, and up, and up. I've heard anecdotes about him sitting in the backs of his own planes at jetBlue, observing what he could change to make the experience better for the cabin crew and passengers, noticing a lot of those things could even save money, and I have no reason to disbelieve them.

As the head of a company he is by necessity exploiting those under him, as a businessman he is providing a service not from altruism but because he knows that people need it enough they'll give him money, and the more comfortable the experience for both the less likely he'll lose their labor and their money. Conscious or not, altruism is a means to an end, but it is still startling surrounded by airlines which don't even go that far. 'Nice' as a name for economy class is a pretty good summary of the man David Neeleman was, and the one he still tries to present himself as. But there's a specific question, and a specific answer, which I feel the need to place here.

The airlines have been cutting back on frills and first class, which is driving more people to business aviation. Do they need to find ways to treat their high-end customers better? Well, JetBlue doesn't have first class. We treated everyone the same. Maybe it's funny I'm in the JetSuite market because it's so weird to me that on a plane with 150 seats, you give 12 people a great ride and you stick it to 138-squish them all back there because of 12 people. There's something about that that just feels wrong.

Does it still feel wrong, David? Did something change about you between the first million and the 400th? When did this transformation happen? Was it the Ship of Theseus effect? Or...was this what you inevitably were working towards all along? Was it a fool's errand to pretend that there is a difference between what you do and what you are? Aviation is not immune to the society which it is built to serve - it is shaped by it. It feels wrong for 12 people to have a nice ride while 138 are squished in the back, but if you think about the life that 5 million Americans live and the life the other 326 million have to live, all squished back there so the lucky few can have a nice ride, doesn't it feel a little less wrong? After all, you've got the reclining bed. You can just pull the curtain closed. You've probably known what you were all along.

The airlines are a tough business. Why start another after JetBlue? Well, I've done this three times. It's what I know. I've always made money at it, always been successful. I figured out a formula that works and Brazil really needed it. And I had this idealistic view of trying to make a difference. I've got 3,000 people in Brazil that work for us and love their jobs and we flew four million people this year and a lot of those people had never flown before.

Air travel is life-changing. It's not just for those of us who stand outside airports and take a picture of every airplane we see. It is a faster, safer, easier way of getting people and things from one place to another. There are people who live in the remotest places in the world, who deal with mountains and oceans and even just being so far away from anywhere else. They can travel now, and they can do more than that. They can visit their family. They can get places even if they're somewhere railroads don't run to. Cargo planes bring these remote communities necessities. They take their children to university and its sick to lifesaving treatment. It's a lifeline and a fundamental part of infrastructure. Once we invented it we stopped being able to go back.

It isn't an inherently cynical thing to start an airline - not more cynical than starting any other company, anyway. At least, it shouldn't be. But I think it's an inherently cynical thing to start five. To have your position at Azul, which is both massively successful and your own brainchild, which you think is doing good...and to say to yourself "I need more. I need America. I need what I was robbed of when I lost jetBlue."

Very few people have ever started one airline successfully. David Neeleman started four and sat at the helm of Brazil's third-largest airline and decided it wasn't enough for him. He's always made low-cost airlines. To a not-insignificant degree he made the low-cost airline what it is today. But he needs a first-class cabin.

The Inc. piece on Breeze continues to discuss the airline's planned operations. In 2011 Neeleman's employees were crewmembers.

Breeze is also introducing a program in which it will hire college interns from Utah Valley University and mold them into customer-service machines. In exchange for salary, free tuition, and housing, the students will undergo training and then work 15 or so days a month while taking their college courses online. "The big thing is we are going to provide a great service with kind people on a beautiful airplane with a fun atmosphere," says DePastino.

In 2021 they are customer-service machines. They will spend not just their days but their nights in Breeze's living spaces at one of the most vulnerable times in a person's life, learning how to be cogs in a machine right when they're transitioning from being students to entering the turbulent world of trying to find a job. And all of us want a job that makes us feel like we're still us, doing something that makes the world better and that helps us touch the tip of Maslow's pyramid. Almost none of us get it. Most of us slog through something utterly pointless that is entirely separate from our own self-identity to just keep our heads above water. Breeze turns this into a machine and it starts its cogs young.

Would I take this deal if it was offered to me? I'm a university student with barely enough money to keep myself afloat in a very expensive city while paying for university and for medicine and for anything else that may suddenly come up. I love aviation. I have customer service experience. I work in customer service right now and will probably continue to for a long time. I would hypothetically be an ideal candidate for this sort of program. Would I take this offer knowing that nobody, myself included, says to themself as a child that they want to be an airline customer service representative when they grow up? College is supposed to be the place you lay the groundwork for trying to start a career. Nobody wants their career to be 'customer service representative'. Nobody wants their obituary to say 'beloved son, husband, middle management at an airline's call center'. Sure, lots of people end up there, and plenty of them are happy and fulfilled and they have nothing to be ashamed of, but nobody's 18, going into college, and thinks that's what they want to live and breathe for years. They want to intern in the accounting departments, to shadow engineers, to see the sleek jets and peer in on the lifestyles of the people who built this. They want to be David Neeleman. But that's not an option for most of us.

So what would I do? Live this concession to the inevitability of automation which overtakes much more than the flight deck? I might, because at least it's a guarantee of shelter and stability that I don't have trying to stumble my way through an utterly shambolic job market caught between the price of school and the need to earn that money and the costs inherent to autoimmune disease and the number of hours there are in a week. I want to write, or even just to do something that involves words, because even a data entry job might let me pretend I'm still the person I thought I would grow up to be, and even that seems off the table. But it's one thing to know your dreams are never going to be realistic and another to say it out loud and yet another to commit to it in a place that even refers to you outright as a machine as if they don't understand the weight of that word when you provide someone's lodging and pay and everything else they rely on. This is a few steps short of being a company town populated exclusively by the young and vulnerable who think they're going to be entrepreneurs one day.

"When I started JetBlue, it was a customer service company that just happened to fly airplanes," Neeleman says. "Breeze is a technology company that just happens to fly airplanes."

He was talking about the app when he said this, but I think it comes through in a broader sense. jetBlue was a customer service company. Humans interfaced with humans. The idea was in nature lively, giving names to inanimate flying machines. It was a corporation, it made money, it did not actually care about people and it could not because it was not itself human, but it did not wear this fact proudly. It was a regrettable necessity of running an airline, and the CEO donated his salary to the employees. jetBlue under Neeleman and beyond clung to the human element, and to kindness and to making low-cost flight fun and comfortable even though there was nobody on the plane with a first-class ticket. You might be part of a fundamentally unethical system known for cutting corners and lying and sweetheart deals and never suffering consequences when something as simple as a jackscrew nobody lubricated kills 88 people, but you're going to at least try to dampen that impact. It might kill you just as dead but it can hurt less, maybe so much you never realize jetBlue occupies the same slice of the world as Pan Am and as ValuJet.

Breeze Airways lodges young individuals and molds them into machines. It is an ultra-low-cost carrier with a first class cabin. It presents a scenario where people are optimally herded by an app, served by employees who go home at night to the same place they work, and all of it can be reduced down to numbers so easily. It takes the human and it makes it technology. It makes it profit. The human element is gone. It doesn't matter how much it hurts you because if you aren't a person there's nothing to kill. It says the quiet parts out loud and makes you get on the phone and tell your family you're happy here with a gun to your head. It is a machine built of anonymized mannequins who, irrelevant to their role in it, happen to be alive, and it calmly tells you that this is a good thing, and that is a threat. The lowest category of experience you can have is 'nice'. Breeze Airways does not name their planes.

When I was a child I thought airlines were people and airplanes. I've flown many times in my life. There aren't many other ways to get from Japan to the East Coast these days. The world is huge but we can see it all so easily, assuming taking us there can make someone money. I remember being eight and having the pilot standing by the door to greet passengers, having him hand me a little pair of plastic pilot wings I still have now. I remember the stormy night I flew alone for the first time and the stewardess who let me sit next to her for a little bit and answered all my questions about the noises the plane was making. I remember the first time I flew on a propeller plane and the pilot who explained to me what all the gauges meant, and who insisted there was nothing to be afraid of and pointed out all the landmarks we flew past, who clearly knew this route by heart.

That's not what aviation always is. That's not what it usually is. People don't usually start airlines because they wish they could fly everyone around in their little single-engine plane on a commuter route from Boston to Provincetown, from Hyannis to Nantucket, provide that service to the people who don't have a plane and a license of their own, but they just can't do it all themselves. People who start airlines aren't usually intrepid pilots searching for new heights to push themselves to or flight instructors looking to fly people around in a single rented DC-3. They're businessmen. They want money. Juan Trippe was a businessman. Howard Hughes was a businessman.

The corporation is where passion goes to die if it existed to begin with. They build machines to suck the life out of pilots, exhaust them, put them in planes that are falling apart and let them take the blame when they fail to do things they failed to teach them. These people aren't your friends and they don't care about aviation, and if they do it's in the way an American child plays soldiers at the same time a school in Syria is being bombed. They're usually not even pilots. They're people with a lot of money who want even more money. jetBlue isn't unique in that sense and neither is Breeze. One just says it a lot louder.

Sometimes an airline is a technology company that happens to fly airplanes. That's true. Every single positive experience you have is with people, not airlines. I've never once spoken to jetBlue, just a matrix of pilots and flight attendants and customer service representatives who make up its many limbs. Maybe it should come as a relief, a sort of coming clean, that Breeze is tearing back the curtain and reminding you that the time a stewardess calmed you down during turbulence isn't really any different from the time a drugstore cashier let you off even though you were a few cents short of your total and said they'd take care of it. It's not CVS doing that. It's always people.

So many businessmen say they're here to do good, to make the world a better place, to reconcile kindness with venture capital. Any of them could build a tower that reaches all the way to the edge of the solar system and let us all know how many beautiful things there are that we can reach if they can find a profitable way to get us out there, and yet it's still the people who see your transit card is out of money and scan you in using theirs that make me remember that we are capable of kindness despite our surroundings. It is up to all of us whether we wish to be kind or not and it's not something anyone else can build for us.

Companies can't build a kinder, softer, funner, more human place. They can make money. They can provide a service. A service you need, at a cost you can afford, predicated on the fundamental question: whether they think you can make them money. Desperation, need, giving people a non-choice, that's how you make money and kill criticism. That isn't kindness. That's finding a gap in the market. Always has been.

I read that at JetBlue, you also didn't have your own parking spot and you donated your entire salary to a crewmember crisis fund, saying, "It seemed hoggish of me to have all this stuff when others didn't because every time I would get something someone else would have less." Yet then I read about your $14 million mansion in Connecticut. It's my wife's mansion. I never would have built that, ever. I think she's repentant. It was a project for her and it kind of got out of hand. But we all felt funny moving in. That's why we want to sell it.

I'd wondered how you reconciled the mansion with your philosophy. I don't.

image: Bill Bernstein

Okay, Marx or Megatron or whoever you think you are, that's enough of that depressing schlock. You are a tumblr.com airline livery review blog. We're here to answer if the plane looks good or not.

It's not like Neeleman's only goals are money and vapid personal satisfaction. We've been with him from the start. It was just an unacknowledged bit of the tail. He probably didn't notice it at first, but we did, with the gift of hindsight. It germinated. It took root. It grew. It became identity. It became his white whale. Are the planes blue, though?

Well, everyone, meet N206BZ. She's an Airbus A220-300. She's just a year and a half old and was delivered brand-new to Breeze Airways. She doesn't have a name, just a registration, but that's sure one blue plane if I've ever seen one!

The color scheme is visually pleasing. It's all over but it keeps visual interest with the darker tail and rear fuselage, the darker engines, the big white check-mark that serves as an instantly recognizable emblem for the airline. The repetition of it on the winglets is a nice touch.

I hate the wordmark, honestly. The text feels like it's located too low, the lightest blue blends in with the main fuselage until it borders on illegible. As far as I can tell, the typeface is custom. I hate it. It's ugly. The text is bad and it weighs down the rest of the plane.

A lot of how a livery looks depends on the lighting. So let's look at another example. I'd like to introduce you to N140BZ. She's an Embraer E195-200 and she's coming up on 15 but she hasn't slowed down any. She flew for Air Europa for a long time, but from 2016 on she was in limbo, all sorts of holding groups leasing her to each other but nobody putting her into service. Now she's with Breeze. They'll retire their E190s somewhat soon, but for the moment they like to have them. It allows them to operate shorter routes and free up time for charters on other days, just to maximize productivity. She doesn't have a name either. I'd say she still looks pretty blue. A lot of the concept art has a very metallic and reflective feel which I'm glad isn't as present in the actual planes, because it looked a bit sci-fi movie and not in a campy way. It was very blue chalk marker.

I like these colors just as much in this sort of washed-out environment as I do in direct sunlight gleaming at full intensity. Maybe more, even, since the text of the wordmark is so much more legible now and you can even see that the checkmark itself is blue. There's almost nothing on this plane that isn't blue. The only thing not blue about this airplane is that she doesn't have a name to revel in it.

The Breeze livery gets a B-.

It is a competently executed version of the thing it wants to be. There's visual interest. There are choices made. It's more than a logo slapped on a tail and sent off to sit on the tarmac with hundreds of other primarily white airplanes. I like it, I think this is the best Neeleman livery. It's also the bluest.

I find myself thinking the checkmark is an apt logo. Azul wore the shape of Brazil - a country full of people. Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras S/A is a company. It cannot have a soul. But its founder says it does. He wants to make something better for people. Breeze Airways is a checkmark. It satisfies a need. It is 'nice' but there is no pretense that it is people.

The pilots will be kind all the same, and the stewardesses. People will agree to swap seats so families aren't separated. People will compliment strangers' outfits and help the person in line in front of them who's fifty cents short for a bottle of water. We will hold the door for elderly men with canes and exhausted women with strollers. We will take every little chance we can to be kind. We do this because we are people, and not because of where we work, and it's definitely not the people with 400 million dollars to put down on a shiny new airline making that happen. Everything is scheduled through an app, minimizing contact with humans even as the ones we do talk to are 'molded into customer-service machines' over the course of years. N140BZ wears her blue colors well, and not having a name doesn't make her any uglier. So what is it that's changed?

David Neeleman can't make jetBlue a second time. But he doesn't know that. To a man with so much, maybe it makes sense how he could fail to realize that. When you're high enough in the air a thriving uptown and an area of condemned slums look more or less the same, just little blocks of color all the way down there. He doesn't even realize he's given up the ghost. This is only a tragedy if your definition of a happy ending was us believing someone is better than they are instead of being left no room to continue failing to recognize what money is and what money does. The corporation wears two masks - the mask that it wears when it is a corporation wearing a mask, and the mask it wears when it is so close to human that you mistake it for your friend. The businessman wears these masks too. To be sad they've taken them off is to invest more in the virtue of these men than they ever do in the life or death of the 138 people squeezed in the back.

There it is. Two decades, five attempts, the bluest plane. If you've kept reading all the way to the end let me know in the replies what your favorite Neeleman-proximate livery is. I'll see you all tomorrow for our regularly scheduled Runway Runway livery review, and I hope you all have a wonderful night.

[excelsior9173]

…

this is… a tough one. idk. it feels bad but i’m also at the point where it’s like, it is what it is, y’know?

my sister and i are very much the black sheep in the family as far as my dad’s side is concerned

and i think the worst part of that is that we didn’t do anything but be ourselves- dad’s family takes the fact that they never liked our mom out on us kids. we’re too much like her.

for me at least it’s always been subtle. i wasn’t always a problem, or undesirable. my sister had always had it harder, i gradually fell out of favour with them. i feel so distant when i visit, i’m close with my one cousin and that’s about it. everyone else sort of feel like strangers at this point. they’re getting bolder with their distaste too- try to veil it behind humour but it’s starting to get pretty blatant

i knew they’d poke fun at my colourful hair and facial piercing and i knew they’d hate it when i got tattoos (shocker- my grandma can barely bring herself to look at my ink) but the comments have gotten more blunt. convinced my cousin to get matching tattoos with me, she loves it and is planning more! my uncle has “jokingly” lectured me/confronted me about it three times now. like he’s trying to play it cool but is pissed that i have “corrupted” his precious daughter i think. he’s a control freak and i took that control away my grandma straight up flinched when i walked out of a camp bathroom in shorts and said “i’ll never get used to those tattoos”. like thanks, grandma, but i didn’t get them for you to enjoy them. all that shit is kind of water off a ducks back now, i expected those reactions, i was prepared for them. i don’t really care it’s honestly rather entertaining to me to see how much they’ll tie themselves in knots over choices i make for my own body.

the part that really made me realize i was falling out of favour as opposed to my cousin who can do no wrong in their eyes (i don’t hold it against her, i love her dearly and she was the closest thing i had to a sister growing up- until my sis transitioned) was my university convocation.

my cousin convocated last year, and i convocated in june. it was a whole big thing for my cousin! everyone came to see, we all took pictures with her, went out for a nice meal and had champagne to celebrate. my convocation? idk the family all came, we took a few pictures, went out and had lunch. they gave me their gifts and then everyone left- they had other plans to get to. i just- it felt like there was a lot less fanfare and celebration around it all. it was all “good job exie, but your cousin did it first and she has a grown up job related to her degree so 🤷‍♀️” they all ask my cousin how work is going, they ask her questions related to her degree, all that stuff. i get none of the same treatment. occasionally i’ll get asked something psych-related, but it always feels like they’re asking for the sake of being able to make a point. like i’m just a research engine and there’s no interest in my education. i genuinely wonder if any of them will even care once i get my next degree. it’s the same thing with holiday/birthday gifts. i feel like there’s thought and intent when they get gifts for my cousin, and for my sibling and i it’s just… random shit. the worst part is that my dad and aunt have asked for wishlists. my dad makes an attempt- his gifts are always thoughtful, last year he got me a heated sweater because i do dog walks in very cold weather. but the rest of his family? i got a mug and some froofy soaps and some kitschy novelty booze glasses (i have maybe a drink a month. except for new years and august long). even after they ask for a list :) i think i have become a stranger to them. my interests are so foreign and uncomfortable that they won’t even make an attempt at this point.

i kind of thought it would hurt more. realizing that i am not loved to the same extent as my cousin. that my sister, if they knew the truth, would be loved even less than i am now. but it doesn’t. i feel kind of numb to it. like i guess i knew this was inevitable. i would never be the perfect niece/grandkid. and i’m not saying it doesn’t hurt- it does, but it’s sort of like a long, old ache. it’s been hurting so gradually for so long that it’s sort of just a part of me. it doesn’t feel as bad as it is because i’m used to it. and that sucks to say. but it is what it is. i am not going to compromise any part of myself to earn the approval of people who can’t be bothered to even attempt to understand.

there’s more i wanted to say, or perhaps i wanted to say this all differently. idk. but that’s my rant tonight lol. family is great but it also fucking sucks.

[tierneyyyyy]

[TIERNEY ROSE. 26. FEMALE. SHE/HER] is here! They’ve lived in Asbury Park for [3 YEARS] and are originally from [LOS ANGELES]. They are a [MUSIC PRODUCER/PART TIME EMPLOYEE AT THE STONE PONY] and in their downtime love [GOING TO MUSIC SHOWS] and [COLLECTING CRYSTALS]. They look a lot like [MOLLY GORDON] and live in [MEADOWLARK APARTMENTS]. The song that makes people think of them the most is [LIVING IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS BY COBRA STARSHIP].

THE ESSENTIALS

a chaos queen. mid twenties, LA native. believes in yoga and crystals and the power of the universe and karma and fate and if it’s meant to be, it’ll be. which is in direct contrast to the rest of her family, really. rarely sleeps between her three jobs (all of which she literally loves) and partying. works in music, as well as lives, breathes, and sleeps music (like….it’s her entire life). she’s a producer first, but she plays multiple instruments as well as sings. and at any given moment, she could literally be doing anything, so it’s completely impossible to keep track of her - state lines unknowingly crossed, parties crashed, occasionally chased by cops. it’s all up for grabs with tierney.

pinterest - musings

CHARACTER INSPIRATIONS

rob brooks (high fidelity [the tv show]) - maxine baker (ginny & georgia) - seth cohen (the o.c.) - peyton sawyer (one tree hill) - jason mendoza (the good place) - gigi (booksmart) - begin again (not either of the main charas but the vibes of the movie, u feel?) - ben wyatt (parks & rec)

BASIC INFORMATION

FULL NAME: tierney rose

NICKNAME(S): tier, t

DATE OF BIRTH: february 13th, 1998

AGE: 26

ZODIAC SIGN: aquarius sun, libra moon, aquarius rising

OCCUPATION: music producer/podcast host/sound engineer at the stone pony

HOMETOWN: los angeles

CURRENT RESIDENCE: the meadowlark apartments in asbury park, nj

NATIONALITY: American

LANGUAGE(S): English

GENDER & PRONOUNS: she/her (cisfemale)

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Lesbian

RELIGION: Jewish 

PHYSICAL INFORMATION

FACE CLAIM: Molly Gordon

HEIGHT: 5′2″

EYE COLOUR: brown

HAIR COLOUR + STYLE: brown w/ bangs, curly/wavy, like this when it’s down, but will wear it up a lot

TATTOO(S): TBD

PIERCING(S): TBD

GLASSES: yes, a la this photo, but doesn’t wear them all the time

CLOTHING STYLE: very stereotypical queer tbh - lots of oversized flannels/hoodies over cuffed jeans, converse, graphic tees, floral prints. wears a baseball caps/wide brim hats a lot. two good outfit examples (with more on her pinterest board) - this and this.

PERSONALITY

MBTI TYPE: TBD

POSITIVE TRAITS: TBD

NEGATIVE TRAITS: TBD

GOALS/DESIRES:  TBD

FEARS:  TBD

HOBBIES:  record shopping, crystals, meditating, trying various kinds of yoga classes, tormenting the other residents of meadowlark apartments, getting high in her vw surf bus (and anywhere else), watching true crime documentaries, breaking & entering in a ~fun~ way

HABITS: TBD

SMOKES?: constantly

DRINKS?: yes

DRUGS?: will try anything twice lmao (and yes, i mean she will try everything twice, i didn't just get the saying 'try anything once' wrong)

EDUCATION

COLLEGE EDUCATION: USC

DEGREE(S): Bachelor of Music in Music Production w/ minors in Music Recording & Popular Music

FAMILY

SOCIAL CLASS: Upper Class

FATHER: Isaac Rose (FC: Harrison Ford) - corporate lawyer

MOTHER: Elizabeth Rose (FC: Ellen Pompeo) - entertainment finance manager

SIBLING(S): One older sister, Callan Rose (FC: Laura Dreyfuss) - entertainment lawyer

SOME FUN FACTS

tierney is a los angeles native

she is an industry nepo baby !! her family all works in the legal side of the eterntainment industry and she absolutely used that to her advantage !! she gives typical nepo baby vibes about that though

however, about a year after college, her parents were like, you need to get serious and stop being ... well, you, so she decided to move out to new york despite being such a true blue california native, and decided to try "supporting herself" "without their help"

she chose to live in new jersey because she is sorta obsessed with jack antonoff. but like in a casual cool way, not in a fangirl way (lie)

her other music hero is alexandra patsavas

tierney also has a podcast discussing music with one of her friends, as well as works as a sound engineer at the stone pony every once in a while when they need someone local

she has a MASSIVE record collection - it’s her pride & joy. she is definitely a regular at groovy graveyard, so if you have a character who works/shops there, they almost definitely have bumped into her

basically tierney lives, breathes, eats & sleeps music - it’s her entire life and she is insanely passionate about it. don’t ask her for her opinion on an artist unless you want an entire verbal essay and possibly a power point

as it is, tierney is a true music junkie, so she doesn’t dislike anything. she can find pros and cons and merits to pretty much any artist and enjoys talking about why they’re popular or they should be, or why they have influence/are good/talented/relevant, whatever the argument for them is

basically if someone asks her about music, be prepared to just have to listen to her rant about it for a million years

she���s kinda a hippie, she’s constantly going to yoga or mediating or trying new herbal concoctions or acupuncture or cupping or buying new crystals or whatever - any ailment she suggests yoga for rather than, like, going to a doctor? again, la native here

tierney is all about trusting in the universe

she’s like…wildly chaotic. she will try anything once (and usually more than that), goes out all the time, has the weirdest sleep schedule (maybe just never sleep in general), and yet somehow is always a ball of energy

other than groovy graveyard, places she'd frequent in asbury park are pipe dreams smokeshop, wonder bar, madam marie's, the abandoned casino & carousel, paranormal books & curiosities, sandoval dollar, & silverball retro arcade

overall, tierney is really laidback & chill & loves to vibe & party and gets along with pretty much anyone

CONNECTION IDEAS

i would love people who have been her podcast co-host ?? i kinda imagine it's a bit of a revolving door since she's insufferable lmao

give me a good luck, babe! inspired toxic situationship and i will love you forever

more will come soon but these are the first two ideas off the top of my head

and always down to brainstorm or fill tierney into anything that would fit !!

[callmesel]

A hockey player's move

(part 3 baby!!)

Maybe Oliver was a bit of an idiot for not recognise that the pretty Skater was Charlie's relative. And maybe a bigger idiot for not noticing him before this point. Well, he did see him in some of the games he played but he paid attention to any of the crowd. He was to busy being the goaltender.

It was obvious from a mile away that he was a Weasley but he didn't know that any of them was an ice Skater, not like he asked anyway.

He did knew the Weasley's quite well and to not know this one was just weird. Maybe he was a cousin? But he looked too familiar to be one. Agh he was going mad thinking about him. He should just ask Penny, they seem pretty close back at the performance.

After the competition ended, Oliver walked to the locker rooms looking for his friend when he noticed that outside of this where a kind of a waiting room where Penny was sitting and... And the pretty boy?!? Well, Percy, now that he did know his name.

It might have been a bad idea to walk up to them, they looked like they were having a conversation and Penny doesn't like to get interrupted but this time, she looked very pleased to see Oliver. Odd...

"Penny! I filmed your performance." he said as to got near them.

"Oh sweet! Did you got my good side?" She said jokingly, Percy stayed silence. "Oh! I should introduce you two."

She stood up to gesture to both of them. "Percy, this is Oliver but I suppose you already know. Oliver, Percy." She said teasing both men, making them both blush from embarrassment.

"Hi" Percy said awkwardly, showing a soft side smile that made Oliver's head dizzy.

"Hi." He tried to match that soft smile. Weasley's blush spread to his ears and neck, Oliver wondered where did the blush stopped.

"Well, I let you guys alone. I told Cedric that I was taking him home." "But-" "Bye guys, send me the video later Oliver." She blow them kisses to rapidly disappear around the corner.

The remaining boys could only look at each other in disbelieve. Quickly, the awkward silance was starting to feel to heavy and Oliver had to think of something, anything at this point.

"So... You are a ice skater? Cool, I'm a hockey player my self."

"I know, you play in my siblings's team."

"Oh, really? Who is your sibling?"

"Siblings, I think you are playing with Fred and George now." Oh, so he IS their brother.

"I didn't know that they had an older brother, apart from Charlie of course." Percy looked away embarrassed.

"I don't really go to their games anymore, the university is keeping me busy." That is why he doesn't see him that often as the others.

"And you do dance skating competitions on the side. You guys are a family full of talented people. What are you studying?"

"It's not like that. I normally only skate in my free time now and-"

"Now? What do you mean by now?"

"It's just that I don't really have the time. I going to stop competing at the end of this season."

"Why? You did great! I'm sure you could go profesional if you wanted." The soft simle from before appeared once again in his lips, making Oliver blush a little.

"Thanks, but I want to become a prime misnister some day. That is why I have picked Interational Relations as my degree in collage."

"Well, hello mister future prime minister." Oliver bowed to Percy as he could just laught. Oliver thought that it was the cutest laught he have heard in his life.

That day Oliver went home with a wide smile, happy to have been a brave boy and asked for Percy's phone number. But maybe he should tell his firends yet, Fred and George may murder him if they knew. And he definetely didn't want to know what Charlie might do if he knew.

[mangoisms]

i'll be the dangerous ledge (you be the parachute)

━ chapter three: like the world makes sense | read chapter one | read chapter two

━ pairing: tim drake x f!reader

━ word count: 5.3k

━ warnings: mentions of explosion, injury, and death (within the usual canon-typical violence parameters)

━ masterlist

You and Tim continue to hang out. 

Through the week, after school lets out, you are often too tired to go and do anything, but this suits Tim fine as the two of you continue to think of movies you like that the other has not seen. 

You make him watch Mamma Mia, which he says is ‘okay’ but you think he likes more than he wants to let on. You do what he wants, too, and terribly dated as it is, The Devil Wears Prada is certainly fun enough. 

Every time you see him, you learn something new about him. His favorite color is blue. He used to play tennis when he was younger but not anymore. He also used to like photography, but he doesn’t do it much these days. Not because he stopped liking it. He doesn’t say that but you can tell. 

You wonder about that, about the things he used to do but no longer does. What does he do now, then? You ask him that, and he says he helps out with WE, with their R&D department, with IT, or wherever they want him. Not always but most of the time. 

He doesn’t talk about his parents and he doesn’t talk about Bruce Wayne or his adopted siblings. He’ll talk about Alfred, the butler (not the cat), who was also the one to do his laundry. 

You don’t mind. You’re more interested in him, in what makes Tim Tim. And on a lighter note, while you admit to having expected him to be a poor cook, he is actually decent. 

“I’m only good at breakfast foods,” he admits to you one evening, having commandeered your kitchen to make breakfast for dinner. “And pasta. I can do pasta. But mostly breakfast.”

Better than most rich boys, you think. 

You tell him about yourself, too. How you came here because tuition at Gotham University is dirt-cheap, largely because of the city in which it resides in, but the programs are still good. Good enough for what you wanted — public education with a small dash of child psychology. You worked at one of the elementary schools for two years before landing a job at Gotham Pointe. 

“Will you ever leave?” he asks one day, the two of you eating ice cream and watching Zathura. His pick today. “Most do.”

You swirl your Oreo ice cream, the ceramic bowl cold against your palm. 

It’s a good question. One your family wonders. 

You got the degree. You got the experience, too. And experience in Gotham is gold everywhere else because if you can withstand the kids here, you can handle them anywhere. 

With the fine print being that Gotham kids are what? Uncontrollable troublesome kids who will inevitably turn into criminals? Inherently evil? Your kids can annoy the hell out of you on a bad day but they’re your kids. They talk to you, they tell you about their lives, about what they like and don’t like, and they listen to your stories, too, and they show you that while others think living in Gotham is like living in some kind of barren wasteland… there is hope. So easily within reach. 

If Gotham was as bad as people tried to make it out to be, no one would be here. 

“I don’t think so,” you eventually say, looking at him with a small smile. “I like my job too much to leave. I like living here, too. And the company isn’t so bad, either.”

Tim smiles when you say that. “I would miss you.”

And what a thing to say. What a thing for you to have the privilege of. That someone, not just your kids or Ms. C, would miss you and your presence. 

Well, you think. You would miss him, too. Maybe more than you would like to admit. 

Friends. 

Still hard to quantify or believe. 

The city starts to ease into something like spring as mid-March creeps on you. Mornings and nights are still frosty but your breath no longer comes out white and you don’t have to watch out for patches of ice. The time in between is even more comfortable, allowing you to be outside mid-day without a jacket. You’re still in a long-sleeve but it’s a win in your book. 

You and Tim keep spending time together. He learns, with the onset of March, that you like baseball and used to play softball when you were a teenager. Semi-seriously, too. 

Gotham has its own major league baseball team, too — the Knights. It shares the name with your football team. 

The baseball team isn’t any good, but that’s fine with you. Tim prefers their football team, which has the best track record out of all of them. 

So, with that, Tim surprises you with tickets to their Opening Day on the last day of March. Well, the tickets are from one of WE’s partners, trying to suck up to him, he says, but it doesn’t matter that much to you since he didn’t technically pay for it. 

However, there is something to be said about the buyer’s wealth. 

“Look, I’m genuinely not trying to be picky or ungrateful but where, exactly, are the seats?”

“It’s not the Diamond Club, relax.”

“Okay, thank god.”

That would be too much. Mostly because of the notoriety around the seats themselves. Plus, with them being right behind home plate, your faces would most likely be caught on TV and that would be… a mess. 

No, the seats are in the second row in front of the Knights’ dugout. Still excellent but not the Diamond Club, thankfully. 

Tim comes dressed in jeans, a forest green long sleeve that meshes well with his pale skin and dark hair, and a nondescript ballcap. 

“Just a precaution,” he tells you. 

But upon arriving at the Knights Stadium up in Otisburg, you book it for the nearest merch stall and grab two black Knights caps — modeled like the iconic LA Dodgers and NY Yankees emblem except with GK — and shove one into his hands while putting yours on backwards. He acquiesces you with a smile and then leads you to concessions, happy to foot the bill, with you happy to let him do it, too. 

(Drinks and food are far too expensive for a team that loses more games than it wins. Seriously.)

But like the universe is looking out for you (and the Knights and all of Gotham, really), the Gotham Knights win their Opening Day match against the New York Mets. The first time they’ve ever won an Opening Day game, actually. 

Even Tim feels some pride, which is why, you think, after the game, he lets you drag him off to take a picture with the Gotham Knights’ mascot, King Arthur. One of his handlers takes the picture with Tim’s phone. 

“Hey,” he says, scrutinizing Tim’s face even as he casually adjusts the bill, pulling it lower over his face. “You seem familiar. Do I know you?”

You panic, because this hasn’t ever happened to you two before, what with how you two mostly spend time inside, but you know you shouldn’t be surprised. Tim is careful to make himself as boring as possible to the tabloids. Even while grocery shopping earlier in February, he had a cap on and made sure to blend in as much as he could. 

So, of course, Tim is the one to get out of it. 

He looks at you, mock confused, and says something equally as befuddling in… Russian? 

You match his look, raising your shoulders, and the handler decides this is not a situation he wants to be in as he shoves the phone into your hands and waves his own, enunciating, “Never mind. Never mind. It’s nothing.”

You and Tim leave them, making sure to look as confused as a pair of Russian tourists with not a lick of English would. It’s only when you are home free of King Arthur and his handler do the two of you break down into a mess of giggles.

“What did you say?” you giggle, nearly stumbling over the curb. 

“I said, My publicist is going to kill me.”

You laugh all the way to his car and then on the ride home, too. 

(“You know Russian?” you ask at one point, finally realizing that. 

“Some,” he says, and you learn he knows a handful of languages like Russian, French, Spanish (the stuffy kind, though). 

It’s cool, though he admits it’s from tutoring he had, so you have to make fun of those rich boy tendencies again.)

It’s one of the best days you have in a while. 

But you find most of your days shape up to be like that. 

Even long ones where the kids refuse to listen to you and lesson plans are thrown way off course. Tim will leave you to it if you need the space but other times, he’ll come over, make breakfast for dinner, and you two will watch some Ice Age and you go to bed in a much better mood. 

And while you and Tim continue to hang out, your brother remains in awe of that fact, too. 

He has some preconceived notions about who, exactly, Tim Drake is but you shut those down quickly. You know why he thinks like that and it would be a lie to say you didn’t think like that, either, but people are so much more different than they portray themselves. Especially ones like him. 

Your brother understands, then, and is happy for you. 

Not without a few well-placed jokes, of course. 

You should steal his debit card info

i’m not stealing his debit card info

Dude he’s a millionaire it’s like his civic duty to society 

Which is fair and you’ve certainly made that joke in regards to… some of the wealthier figures in Gotham before. (You flush thinking about your college friends’ jokes about being Bruce Wayne’s sugar baby. Tim will never find out about that as long as you live, thank you very much.)

Even Tim starts to foot the bill if you get takeout or something. And he says exactly that. 

“It’s my civic duty,” he manages to say to you with a completely straight face. (Which is funny because he’s also apparently not straight, much like you.) 

But it is true that Tim is decidedly well-off. Most of Bruce Wayne’s children are. 

You carefully prod Ms. C and the other teachers and aides about information on them, because the internet can only tell you so much.

They rehash most of the info about Tim you already knew — the drama when he was seventeen with the CEO thing, the engagement thing, and the attempted assassination thing. (So many things.)

Tim is the only middle child, though, out of five.

The eldest of them is Dick Grayson, taken into Bruce Wayne’s care after his parents died. He doesn’t live in Gotham, though. New York, you think, is where he currently resides. Then there is Jason Todd, who is a bit of an odd case, because he ‘died’ when he was fifteen then came back when he was older, but the real story is that Bruce Wayne was, apparently, in so much grief at the thought that he misidentified the body in Ethiopia, meanwhile Jason Todd was still alive but kidnapped. He would be until he escaped and came back to Gotham at nineteen. You have faint memories of that media hellstorm from college but these days, they don’t focus on him much. 

Cassandra Wayne, the most shrouded in mystery out of all of them; a cryptic figure that paparazzi only manage to capture every six months. She shows up for the occasional charity gala but most can’t actually find or talk to her. The only trace of her existence is other people saying they saw her. 

After her, there is Tim, and then there is Damian Wayne, the youngest of them. A teenager now and a model student at Gotham Academy. The one that economic magazines and tabloids say will one day take over Wayne Enterprises. Damian is also the only of them not adopted. He is, much to Gotham’s collective shock, Bruce Wayne’s biological son. You idly wonder about his mother, though, since he does have black hair like his father, but the brown tone of his skin and hazel green eyes sets him apart from his father’s obviously white ancestry. 

And well, there is Bruce Wayne, too. 

Starting to go grey, he is less of a playboy these days and more of a fatherly figure. Apparently, he’s on the Parent-Teacher Association for Gotham Academy. It’s an amusing thought. 

(It still doesn’t mean the Gotham populace isn’t drooling about him. If anything, the fatherly vibes seem to do something for, ah, certain cohorts. You did at once think he was attractive — really — but after knowing Tim… it just feels a bit odd.)

You are certain your prods for info go unnoticed. And they do. It is… something else that gets Ms. C’s attention. 

“You seem more happy these days,” she says offhandedly one morning, the two of you preparing the assignments for the day, as well as the tests the kids had taken last week that are now ready to be handed back. 

“I have a new friend,” you decide to say, because it shouldn’t hurt. 

She nods distractedly. “That’s nice. You did seem a bit lonely before.”

Which is funny because she never let on about it. And also because it’s so direct, you don’t know what to say.

“Nothing wrong with it,” she says after a minute. “I like to be alone. But there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely, isn’t there?”

“I suppose so.”

“It’s good, then, that you have someone now.”

“He’s just a friend,” you chuckle, scratching your cheek awkwardly. 

“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” she says, finally looking at you, amusement twinkling in her hazel eyes. 

“Right.”

“Well… good for you.”

“Thanks.” You smile at her and mean it. 

It is good for you. 

Really good for you. 

Which is why, you suppose, things take a sharp downturn one Thursday evening. 

Truthfully, you have no idea how you made it back to Rose Oaks. 

Your fingers shake as you try to lock your bike to the rack. It takes you a couple tries to get the lock into place. 

You straighten, your body aching as you do, and you limp through the entrance. The doorman does a double-take at the sight of you. 

“Have a good night,” you mumble to him, going over to the elevators. You press the button. Your eyes catch the shredded skin on your arm, red and raw. You let your hand drop. 

It happened too quickly for you to do anything. 

All you know is you’d been biking down Cameron, the sun setting, others starting to make their way home for the day, then there was a boom that rattled the street and buildings and people panicked, because this is Gotham and any unusual activity is dangerous activity and you don’t stick around to play the hero, and if people start running, you start running, too. Doesn’t matter if you don’t know what’s happening, just do it, because it could be the difference between life and death in a world like this. 

You know all of this. 

But you never stood a chance against the rush. 

You barely managed to scrape yourself off the ground, grab your bike, and break free, trying not to think about how you very well could’ve been stampeded to death and that’s not a very fun or dignifying death at all, is it? But it’s Gotham. Death is not fun or dignifying here. It’s miserable and painful and a cautionary tale to those that live to see the next day, just another addition to the fine print of living in this city. 

Ding. The doors open. You step in. Your legs feel weak. 

“Hold the door!”

Your hand shoots to the panel, holding down the open doors button. Someone rushes in in the next second. 

“Hey, thanks for that —” the polite gratitude is swapped out for frantic concern in the next second, your name wrapped up in it. 

You blink and find Tim in front of you, eyes wide in concern, hands hovering over you, as if afraid to touch you. It confuses you, because it’s not like you’ve ever shied away from him. If anything, you’re horribly, horribly touch-starved. If he let you, you’d be plastered to his side twenty-four-seven. Or, not twenty-four-seven, but you know. When you two are watching a movie or a TV show and he lets you throw your legs over his lap, you have to be really normal about how he rests his hands on your legs. 

(He isn’t even doing anything, it’s just the pressure, the touch, that makes you want to sidle up beside him and never let go.)

Oh. Where did that come from?

He says your name again and you shake your head. 

“What?” 

“You can let the doors close,” he says softly and you turn and realize you are still pressing the button. 

You let it go. 

The doors close. 

You hadn’t pressed your floor, though, so he does it for you. The elevator starts moving in the next second. 

Tim looks carefully at you, concern still clear on his face. 

“What happened?” he asks gently. 

“I… I got knocked off my bike. It — it was an accident. People were just… panicking. There was…” Your chest tightens, until every breath feels like a struggle and why are you so cold? “An… an explosion. I… I don’t know.”

He realizes something. “Off Cameron?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can I —?” He gestures to your arm. 

Strange to ask. Unsettling in a way. 

“You… you don’t need to ask.” 

He softens at your response and his hand finds your left one, turning your hand up, where your palm is a little scraped up from your spill. Your forearm is worse off, road rash peeling the skin off, exposed and throbbing. 

Tim’s fingers are warm against your cool skin, his hands calloused but still soft. 

“I’m fine,” you say, though you aren’t sure why.

He looks up at you, the look in his eyes… You have to look away, shaking your head. 

“I’m fine,” you say again.

“You’re hurt,” he counters gently. “Let me take care of this. Do you have a first aid kit?”

“It’s old. I don’t… Haven’t used it since I got it a few years ago.”

“Then why don’t we go to my place so we can grab mine?”

“Okay.”

He turns to the panel to press the button for the fifteenth floor. 

The elevator pauses at the fourteenth floor but you two stay on. 

Tim’s hand holds onto yours, gently, avoiding the scraped skin of your palm. He leads you out, to his apartment. His is bigger, better, than yours. But it just feels more empty when you come inside. Alien in a way you don’t like. You’ve spent a lot of time here but you want your apartment, with the crabitat, your fridge with drawings from the kids, your messy coffee table with tests and assignments that need to be graded, your sometimes clumsily-made pottery pieces on display. 

He can tell, you think. Because he lets go of your hand at the door and moves quickly, murmuring for you to give him a second. 

He disappears down the hall. Your feet ache from work and your knee and thigh aches from the road rash you sustained there, too, the material of your slacks torn. Because it’s already April and the days are growing warm, you’re in a short-sleeved blouse, which accounts for the scrapes on your arms. 

More than that, you want nothing more than to lie down and sleep for the next week. 

But no… You have work tomorrow. The thought burns through you, frustration and exhaustion sparking hot in your chest. Your eyes sting and you close them, swallowing down the emotion. 

It’s fine. It’s fine. You can handle it. 

You will. 

Tim returns, then, first aid kit in hand. He pauses for a second, gazing at you, and you turn away first, opening the door. He follows you. 

You take the elevator back down. 

Soon, you’re stepping into your apartment. The light in the crabitat is the only thing on, glowing in the darkness like a lighthouse on the shore guiding you home. Something inside you unwinds. 

Tim turns on the light. You take off your shoes and drop your backpack near the coffee table. 

“Take a shower,” he suggests. “Then I’ll patch you up. I’ll be in here, okay? Want me to feed the boys, too?”

You blink, starting to return to yourself. “I… Yeah. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“What is it today? Fresh or canned?” 

You blink. “How do you…”

Tim cracks a smile. “I’ve seen you do it a bunch of times, the way you alternate. But I’ve also done my own research. I was curious.”

“Right… um, canned today. They had fresh food yesterday.” You pause, starting to feel this strange creeping feeling inside your chest. You don’t like it, so you try to push it away. “Thanks, Tim.”

His face softens. “Of course.”

You head for your bedroom while he heads for the crabitat. 

You pull out a fresh change of clothes, a pair of white linen shorts, heeding your scraped up knee and thigh, then an old high school softball t-shirt. 

You have a door to the bathroom in your room, then another door from the living room. You lock both and turn on the shower. 

Inside, you finally get a look at yourself. Your breathing stutters as you understand why the doorman was concerned, then why Tim was — is — too. Your cream-colored slacks are smudged with dirt and a few tire tracks from your bike when you fell. The fabric at the knee is torn, too, edges turned red from the blood. More fabric at the side of your thigh is torn, skin scraped and raw. Your pale blue blouse is in a similar state. Your arms are scraped up, rubbed raw from the sidewalk. 

You look like a mess. 

Hot humiliation bubbles inside you, along with fresh terror as you replay what happened inside your head. 

Your eyes burn as you strip. Your scrapes burn even more when you step into the shower, the hot water making them throb, and you finally let your tears fall. 

You work to keep your cries silent, though, wary of how noise echoes inside the shower. You don’t want Tim to know. You don’t want him to worry more than he already is. 

It takes a while for you to piece yourself back together, but after washing your hair and body with your familiar smelling shampoo and soap, you manage to do it. Your injuries ache, though, especially when the towel brushes against them as you dry off. 

Soon, you are reluctantly stepping out of your bedroom and into the living room. 

The TV is on, playing season one of Spongebob. Tim, in the kitchen at the stove, turns, smile flitting across his lips. 

“Hey, you’re just in time. I hope you didn’t mind me using the kitchen but I figured you hadn’t eaten dinner yet.”

Something spasms inside your chest. 

You shake your head. 

“Take a seat,” he says. “I’ll bring it over.”

You go to him. 

He doesn’t say anything, ladling tomato soup into a bowl cushioned by a potholder. A grilled cheese sandwich sits on a plate on the counter. You pick up the plate, then take the bowl and a spoon as well. 

“Water?”

You nod and seeing as you no longer have the hands for it, decide to just let him do it and head over to the couch. Your knee protests as you sit down. Your whole body protests, actually. 

Tim brings a glass of water for you, along with a bottle of Tylenol, then sits down. 

“You should eat, too,” you say.

“I can eat after.”

“Tim —”

He says your name. You stop. He grabs the first aid kit. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

But you do worry about it. You worry about this, about him making you food, about him putting off his own meal to take care of you, about him taking care of you. 

In that moment, you feel terribly, terribly burdensome. 

He inspects your hands first so you can eat and deems the scrapes not bad enough to cover, then moves to your leg. 

You sip your tomato soup and take bites of the grilled cheese, oddly famished. 

“It’s the adrenaline,” he says. You imagine you must’ve looked confused at your own hunger for him to say something. 

“Huh?”

“The adrenaline,” he says again. “Coming down from it, you get hungry. And tired.”

You have fuzzy memories of your psych classes. That is true. Also probably why you are still cold. 

How does he know that, though?

At your question, he shrugs. “You know how much time I have to myself. I have to do something to occupy it.”

“Maybe you can take up knitting.”

“Nah, I already know how to sew.”

“So, you know how to sew but not do your own laundry?”

He flashes a smile at you. “Exactly.”

You laugh despite yourself. 

His smile softens, then he looks back to your knee, grabbing a piece of gauze. 

“Aren’t you going to disinfect it?”

“Rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide aren’t great for cleaning cuts, actually. It kills the bacteria but it kills the normal cells, too. You need those to heal. Did you wash it well during the shower?”

You nod. 

“So, that works, and we can do something else, too.” 

He pushes up from the couch, heading over to the kitchen, riffling through your cabinets. You turn your eyes back to the TV and take a drink of your water. Your fingers itch to change it to the news, to see what happened, to see if there were casualties. 

But Tim returns before you can grab the remote. 

He has a bowl of soapy water in hand, setting it carefully on the coffee table, then sitting next to you again. 

“This might sting,” he warns, dipping one of the pieces of gauze in the water then gently dabbing the edges of the scrape. 

It does sting but not as bad as the alcohol might’ve. 

“So, how do you know this stuff?” you ask quietly. 

“I was clumsy as a kid.”

You wonder if that clumsiness has much to do with the scars you’ve seen on him. Some on his knuckles, on his arms. He sports fresher ones sometimes. The shadow of a bruise hidden under the hair that falls sharply over his forehead, the occasional cut. He always blames it on his clumsiness and you have no choice but to believe him. What other option is there? He isn’t dating anyone that could be doing that and he hangs out with his friends and siblings sometimes but they wouldn’t do things like that. 

Well. You don’t actually know them. But… still. 

He finishes cleaning the edges of the scrape, then he applies a little bit of Neosporin and tapes gauze over it. He does the same with the one on the side of your thigh. 

Tim works attentively, not even sparing a glance at the TV once. You should know by now, the way he dedicates himself to things like this, how he will listen to you talk about something to do with school or with the crabs or with a movie or TV show. Every iota of his attention and concentration is on you. It flusters you sometimes, to be paid so much attention, but you would be lying if you said you hated it. 

Now, with him turning that familiar concentration to taking care of you… you don’t know. 

He has to have better things to do than doing this. 

“Are you going to work tomorrow?” he asks, gently taping a piece of gauze over the scrape on your arm. 

“Most likely.”

He nods wordlessly in acknowledgement and moves back, leaning forward to collect the used pieces of gauze and trash from the tape. 

You chew at the inside of your cheek. “It’ll be fine. It’s… it’s fine.”

“Just don’t strain yourself,” he says gently. “Did you want a ride? I don’t —”

“No.”

An awkward silence follows your abrupt denial. You don’t miss the flash of hurt on his face. It stabs you right in the heart. You look away. 

“I mean, thank you, Tim, but, um, it’s okay. I’m fine. You don’t have to do that. I get up pretty early in the mornings and… Yeah.”

You stand, your knee — your body, really — protesting but you ignore it, stacking your plate and bowl, then grabbing your empty cup. 

“You didn’t have to do all of this,” you continue, dropping them into the sink. “And I appreciate it, really. Thank you. But you don’t have to do any more. So, if you have… other things to do. You know. Go ahead.”

“I have nothing else to do,” he says, surprising you as he appears by your elbow, throwing away the trash from the gauze and the tape. The look on his face is hard to describe. Caught between some cross of disappointment and determination. A part of you shrinks at it. At the thought of disappointing him. 

“Let me wash it,” he says, stopping you before you can turn on the faucet. “Give your hands a break. Give yourself a break, okay?”

Some part of you wants to fight it. Wants to say he should try that, too. As if you don’t see how tired he looks sometimes, staying up late to do reports for WE. For whatever reason, he’s working more with them. A few weeks ago, he had to fly to New York. Something about R&D. He returned exhausted from the trip. 

But you clamp the impulse. That’s not necessary. It’s not about him. It’s about you. This is… It’s unnecessarily difficult to let yourself be taken care of right now. You have an inkling as to why but the energy needed for that kind of introspection is lost on you. So, you let him take care of the dishes and slink back to the couch, slouching into the cushions, feeling exhaustion tug persistently at you. 

Yawning, you pull the blanket hanging over the back of the couch onto your body. The Tylenol you took before has already kicked in and with your hunger satiated and your pains taken care of for the most part, you are ready to go to sleep for the rest of the night. 

You fight the impulse, though, sparing a glance at the kitchen. 

“Tim.”

“Yeah?”

“You better eat.”

He laughs and your chest warms at the sound. 

“Alright,” he says, tossing a smile over his shoulder at you. “I’ll eat.”

You nod and turn back to the TV, picking up the remote and switching to the local news channel. 

The poised voice of the GNN news anchor replaces the Spongebob theme song. 

Tim pauses in turning on the stove.

“An incident in the Upper West Side tonight, a laundromat off Cameron Avenue went up in flames after a dryer exploded. Miraculously, there were no casualties inside the laundromat, however, the explosion caused much panic on the streets, resulting in at least one person dead from the rush and many others injured. No doubt, people believed it to be some kind of attack, especially with the recent news that the Joker has broken out of Arkham again and police have been unable to track him down —”

You change it back to Spongebob. 

A laundromat. 

Just a laundromat. 

No real danger. No threat of death. 

All this… because of the collective anxiety Gothamites hold. You aren’t holding it against them, you’re just…

Tired. Exhausted. That’s what this city does sometimes.

A lot of the time.

You swallow past the uncomfortable tightness in your throat, close your eyes, and let yourself be whisked to sleep, where things are easier, simpler, and you can just… forget. If only for a little while. 

━ end notes

1. it was brief but i largely prefer the thought that gotham is not as evil or horrible as people like to make it, or better yet, that the city does stink but people still stay there and they still try to be kind in spite of a horribly corrupt government that is in fact the root of almost all the problems. it's really just the sociologist in me (seriously, that's my minor!)

2. reader briefly mentioned the diamond club, which are typically the seats directly behind home plate and they are crazy expensive. here is the seattle mariners' diamond club prices for reference

3. technically, in canon, i don't believe the knights' have ever mentioned a mascot and what kind. i also admittedly did indulge in letting both the baseball and football team be called the knights but let's ignore that. anyway, i made up the king arthur mascot thing on the fly. couldn't think of anything else knight-related that would work, other than an actual knight. for mlb teams, it isn't always on the nose. like the seattle mariners' mascot is the mariner moose. so, that's why i went with king arthur.

4. dick is not living in gotham or bludhaven anymore and instead in new york because i think he deserves a little (a lot) of space from bruce for his own peace of mind and um general mental health

5. also yeah jason is alive to the public here. i know that is the same in rebirth (i think) but i don't know the details, so if the story behind that is different, that's why, because i also made it up. but it is slightly inspired by this fantastic au on if talia brought jason home after restoring his mind with the lazarus pit, seriously read this, the characterizations are so fantastic; also it's important to me that you all know i am the number one talia truther ever and that shit about him sleeping with her in lost days is blocked from my mind.

ANYWAY. continuing point number five. i have too many thoughts on jason. in my mind and in this, i've changed a lot but that won't Actually be discussed here. there isn't much batfam interaction at all other than these mentions. steph, cass, and duke do appear towards the end (as well as some very very brief appearances by cassie, kon, and bart) but that's really it. it's not very batfam-centric at all, it's more centered around tim and reader.

6. and this is my last one i SWEAR i know the order in which the kids were mentioned in reader's narration was dick, jason, cass, tim, and damian, but if we were going by ages, it's dick, cass, jason, tim, and damian. it is again important to me that cass is a few months older than jason for no reason in particular other than i think it would annoy him and please her.

reblogs are appreciated!

[annabelle--cane]

actually, no. I'm going to add to your askbox shame even more by asking a series of questions that you may like to answer, but will take some thought:

what kind of students were the tma avatars while they were in school? what cliques were they in? who made it to uni?

jude I think was stupidly popular. she wasn't a queen bee or anything but she was very charming to talk to, if a bit intense. alas, she went on to get a business degree.

jared had some friends as a younger kid but he got kind of annoying as they grew up and they stopped hanging out as much, though jared never really considered any of the bonds officially severed. canonically did not go to university.

of course jane was a witchy astrology girl, maybe involved in an art club. I think she maybe had a tendency to cry from sheer nerves in every presentation she ever gave, but she'd power through. not sure if she went on to higher ed? she definitely took a few years off in between, at least.

manuela knew she wanted to go into stem since she was about thirteen, she kept her head well in her books and didn't cause much of a stir. not to say she was friendless, she had some regular study pals, but they all kind of knew they were going to go in very different directions during/after uni so they never got all that close.

julia school experience was absolutely miserable. a lot of people tried very hard to be her friend, but even the most genuine ones were doing it mostly out of pity and the least genuine ones were. well. Bad. I forget if we canonically know anything about her higher education but my instinct would be that even if she didn't she still went as far away as she could get after graduating.

mike. hmmm. bit of a loner, I think. he was very aware that he was visually Different than other people + he was kinda uh haunted and it made him paranoid about making friends. I think he enjoyed his classes, though, for what it was worth. canonically went to university.

I think oliver probably had a very normal school life. a bit nerdy, a bit anxious, but not excessively so. he'd have a lot of trouble sleeping nights before exams, though.

annabelle was in clubs every day of the week. creative writing, school plays, arts and crafts, dance, music ensembles, a handful of sports, she tried them all. even as her older siblings graduated and moved out, that was simply too many people in her house and she wanted to stay out for as long as she could most days. she wanted close friends, but she didn't really know how to do it right; she didn't feel comfortable sharing much about her home life so she usually felt like she was playing a role that was mostly her, but not quite. canonically went to university, was probably involved in the psych department.

[seagull-energy]

Five Good Things

Inspired by @nocompromise-noregrets because my week has been pretty great :))

My mom and sibling have been visiting me in my university town this week and I’ve been having a wonderful time taking them around all the sights!! It’s so exciting to be able to go “let me take you to my favorite greenspace/museum/ice cream shop/etc!!” 

Following on from the previous, we took a day trip to the local castle yesterday and got to spend time at the beach and it was the best time I’ve had at a Proper Beach in years (not counting lake beaches). We collected shells, and watched the tide come in, and the sand was lovely and soft and the sun was pleasantly warm, and I’m going to remember it for a long time.

My flatmate and sibling and I have started watching Yu Yu Hakusho together!! This is my… fourth? rewatch I think (at least of season 1, I’ve only watched the other seasons once or twice) and I’m really having a good time sharing it with them. (the sibling has seen some before, the flatmate is completely new to it) Also I’m spreading my Team Urameshi polycule agenda so that’s great fun XD

I’ve gotten to see some of my university friends again for the first time in months and it’s so good to spend time with them in person again. I just got back from hanging out in the pub with a friend and it was so relaxing.

I start the second year of my animation degree in a week!! This year I get to focus more on actual animation!! I’m so very excited to see what my coursework looks like this year :))

I got to meet a couple of my online friends in person recently!!! (hiiii @the-daughter-of-a-wolf and @tuuliii <33) We had a great day going to pride together and discussing all things LotR/LotR Musical 

I’m directing my theater society’s weekend show this year!! We’re doing Starkid’s Trail To Oregon which should be… interesting to put on in 3 days. We shall see how it goes! 

wheee this was fun!! You're right that the good things do just kind of keep coming once you start thinking about them :D

[lawlietscaramels]

Maybe some Matsuda, Existential Crisis?

death note reborn

Matsuda seems like the kind of guy who is afraid to grow up. He is grown, but there's always a point where he's going to be older until he dies. He acts childish sometimes to give himself that sense of security that he can rely on others and remove the stress from his life. Because that's the scariest thing about getting older for him: the responsibilities, the expectations.

At the same time he'll do things like join the police force, partly impulsively but also because he wants to be able to overcome those fears and become someone who can live up to those responsibilities and expectations.

But sometimes he gets really scared about having to budget properly and manage a mortgage and all of that; Matsuda didn't have anyone who taught him how to manage finances and he wouldn't even know where to ask for help now. I think he'd probably live with his parents for a lot longer than others his age, and he probably has more regular contact with them even after he moves out. Maybe he moves in with a sibling; he gives me only child or youngest sibling vibes.

He also probably struggles with his purpose in life, which is kind of a different existential crisis, but it also fits in with the fear of growing up. I feel like he's probably buried in student debt because he kept changing degrees at university ahhshshhd

[hopepunk-humanity]

I just stumbled on your blog and it kind of felt like the universe dumped it it front of me like a cat with a bird. Weird coincidence, but I'm grateful regardless.

Anyway, in the last few days I've fallen down the doomsday mental spiral: climate change, the inevitable collapse of capitalism, all that fun stuff. It makes it really hard to look forward to the future when all these horrible things are quite likely to happen.

I suppose I'm trying to find someone or multiple someones who've experienced this and maybe have some way to not be crushed by a feeling of impending doom.

I know this is a heavy request, sorry about that ^_^**

Thank you for making this blog, it's made at least this person feel a bit better.

I get it, I really do. I want to look forward to the future, but it feels so difficult to do that most of the time. I don't see myself in misery, but I'm not confident the world will allow me to thrive either.

I try to look forward to the smaller things, the more reachable things. I think about having my degree in my hand. I think about how I want to decorate my first apartment. I think about how I want to treat my future partner.

I look forward to seeing my sibling graduate high school, and my younger cousins after that. I look forward to being financially stable enough to have a pet, and I research proper care in the meantime. Most of all I look forward to the small, soft moments I know are coming, because they've come before.

One of the things covid taught me is that even in the middle of crisis, life still happens. The apocalypse isn't going to be a dramatic firestorm. There will be time in between the shocks to love and be loved, to have small pleasantries and reach milestones. Life is like glitter, it gets everywhere and it's difficult to scrub away completely.

It's no fun living in a transitionary period of human history, but we live anyway. And we'll live to see the other side too, in one way or another.

[inklyqueen]

Literally all the critics are so up in their egos

Also Spoiler warnings for the Mario movie because I'm crying and yk it's opening day I'm not that kind of bitch

I don't think many of them understand that they've got it made rn, and they've never experienced the world some of us are living in

And I don't mean it in a mental health sense or anything, I mean in an actual survival as an adult sense

I was literally surprised by how much I related to Mario specifically. He's the oldest. I'm the oldest of six (under a technicality, two of them are my dad's girlfriend's kids but yk). I'm sure his parents have preached that he needs to take care of and watch out for his younger brother (I'm assuming they're still twins in this universe, Mario was always the older twin in the games and other lore), and I've been preached that too. I'm the same way with my siblings as Mario is with Luigi. Throw trash at my sister, see that happens. "The more you fuck around, the more you're gonna find out." And at the end of the day, my parents will be only in my memories at some point, and all I'll have left is my siblings, granted if I never get married, have kids, etc (God willing I hope, not the point though) It seems to me that Mario is incredibly aware of that too, that one day they'll both be at an age where it's literally only him and Luigi and that they may literally be the only one the other has.

What also struck me was the set-up they showed with the boys. They still live with Mom and Dad, still in their childhood bedroom(s?), just trying to find their footing, I assume they want to be independent of their parents. They put their life savings into a commercial to get their company off the ground. I'm assuming they didn't have very much in the first place, especially from the speech their father gave about how "you can't just give up a steady job for a dream," and how Mario (at least specifically I'm assuming) can't hold down a job in the first place. How he's the one that's bringing Luigi down, as if Luigi can't make a decision for himself, and Mario's like his legal guardian or something. It very much seems to me that they've literally leaned on each other for almost everything more than their own parents, and that's screaming volumes for me.

I still live with my parents, and I get the same grief as well over how I haven't gotten it all figured out still. C*vid was zero help, I wasn't even a year out of high school when it hit, I was just starting college and things were not going very well. I'm just now figuring out my degree program, what I want, trying to get my career off the ground, and getting money back in the bank. I can't afford rent, God no, and I'm blessed to have a job that covers tuition now.

But it seems to me that critics don't understand that. For some reason they want this incredible fleshed-out character arc, plot and overreaching plot, Oscar and Emmy winning from day one piece, and besides the fact that this is technically intended for children, some of the ones I've read are literally making just under upper-to-upper class pay and lifestyles by being that judgemental. They don't have to worry about gas (or the electric bills if they have an electric car) in the tank or food on the table or making rent. One said that they "failed to give Mario a personality" (paraphrasing), when literally I'm seeing myself and my survival struggles in this short moustachioed plumber with older sibling anxiety.

Which, I'm pretty sure he's got a mild touch of GAD, or maybe that's me projecting. I'm not a licensed anything. Also added bonus points because I'm shorter than all of the siblings that are at an age to have actual height. One of my siblings is in high school rn and she's taller than me by a good eight inches. I'm six years older than her.

I'm literally out here doing the best I can with a $200 Insurance payment coming and $80 in the bank.

So yeah. Mario is a really good character.

So thankful for him.

[39oa]

roboquinn!!!

thank you and tc for asking <3 but also girl this is literally just YOUR commentator au that i wrote down notes/snippets for and then gave up on as we kept talking because i was delusionally hoping you'd do it for us LMFAO. it's a very bare doc with only lapslock excerpts but i'm still attached to the concept and have many thoughts about how their dynamic would work... also funny because we came up with this like 8 months before quinn even got the c but in all our notes we were just like yeah obviously he'd retire as captain lol

anyway the thing with 4321 is that i would personally read a lot of different au permutations for them, especially anything involving umich/Midwestern College Hockey dynamics because there's a lot of au potential there. commentator au specifically was = what if robo never made it to the nhl? + what if quinn retired prematurely because of injury and both of them went into broadcasting?, and i think we'd decided on robo doing play-by-play because he has more natural personality and quinn taking on the ex-player analyst role alongside him. however what's most crucial to ME about non-player!robo is that i think of him as someone who is very secure in himself and almost neurotically dedicated to always doing the right thing/making the correct life decisions, so the only reason he doesn't make it professionally is that his family moves to michigan a lot later and he and his brothers miss out on crucial junior development opportunities, so he realizes that hockey is a pipe dream and decides to treat it as a hobby and gets a journalism degree or something. this also makes the nick sibling dynamic more interesting because in my head nick would still try to become a hockey player since he's way more stubborn and impulsive, but he'd max out as an echl/ahl lifer and it becomes less of like "look at how much my athlete brother has succeeded!!" but in a way still robo being more successful because he got a good degree and stayed realistic about his future and makes good money now.

i think 4321 is basically interesting because everything in the world for them boils down to Siblings and they're the oldest of their respective nhl sibling groups but still have very different upbringings. i love the idea of having history long before they meet as a broadcasting duo because robo also went to umich and watched some of his games, but quinn obviously not remembering him... i also think in this universe quinn retires early but not like egregiously so and therefore still has a historic career with the canucks, but then he still struggles to grapple with that because maybe at this age the devils are like a total wagon and he has to cover playoff games for jack and luke for example. AND IN HIS ENTIRE CAREER HE NEVER WINS A CUP!!! plus i think of quinn spending his entire career in vancouver and depending on petey way more than he'd thought he did and now being like unmoored from his second home while robo is very used to traveling and is extremely independent and self-sufficient, and then it's like You think you're the most adjusted member of your family because you're the oldest brother and spent decades living alone on a whole different coast but the reality is actually that you were still deeply accustomed to the insular niche of an nhl team bubble and are being forced to navigate what it means to be an adult for the very first time when everyone you ever cared about is still stuck in that environment. and you're in your 30s!

also the reason quinn gets hired is because robo used to broadcast with pavs (who eventually leaves the role because he's old and wants to spend time with his family), so by now he's totally used to working with hotshot american ex-players and is very blasé around Rich NHL Dudes, and again like with nick is basically the more adjusted one who kind of sees how like quinn is basically functionally alone and doesn't have any systems around him that aren't 100% about hockey and thus latches on to him a little bit. so the dynamic is like >we are coworkers but also do you even know how to book a hotel by yourself? and quinn thinking robo is a nerd at first but eventually deferring to his 100% faith in himself and ease with which he navigates social situations.

also robo would have longterm gf because it's the Right Thing To Do and he's never thought that there was another way to live... like he's adjusted to the point of being so mindlessly socially integrated that he never even considers the fact that maybe he isn't even into women, he just does it because it's what he's meant to do, whereas quinn has way more inner turmoil and could never really hold a relationship down and has a million crises about it and then stuff happens and they get together in a random hotel room in finland during world juniors blah blah more bad decisions and realizations the end. please write them for me 😭