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innuendostudios · 5 years

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Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

#video essay

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anhed-nia · 4 years

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BLOGTOBER 10/17/2020: SPOOKIES

What do we watch, when we watch movies? This question was sparked by my SOV experience with the very different, and differently interesting BLOODY MUSCLE BODYBUILDER FROM HELL and HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5. Within the Shot On Video category, one can find inventive homemade features that are driven entirely by blood, sweat, and the creators' feeling of personal satisfaction. The results are sometimes fascinating, in their total alienation from the conventions and techniques of mainstream filmmaking, and after all, one rarely sees anything whose primary motivation is passion, here in the late stages of capitalism. But, all this talk about what goes on behind the camera points to a discrepancy in how we consume different kinds of production. The typical mode of consumption is internal to the movie: What happens in it? Do you relate to the characters? Are you able to suspend your disbelief, to experience the story on a vicarious level? One hardly needs to come up with examples of films that invite this style of viewing. Alternatively, we can experience the movie as a record of a time and place in which real people defied conventions and sometimes broke laws in order to produce a work of art. SOV production is usually viewed through this lens, where the primary interest is not the illusory content, but the filmmakers' sheer determination to create. We find some overlap in movies like EVIL DEAD, which simultaneously presents a terrifying narrative, and evidence of what a truly driven team can create without the aid of a studio, or any real money to speak of. See also, Larry Cohen's New York City-based horror films, in which a compelling drama with great acting can exist side by side with phony but beautiful effects, and exciting stories of stolen footage that would be dangerous or impossible to attempt today. I'm thinking about these different modes of consumption now because I just watched SPOOKIES, a legitimately cursed-seeming film whose harrowing production history has superseded whatever people think about what it shows on the screen. The lovingly composed blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome includes a feature-length documentary that attempts to explain the making of the film--which is accompanied by its own feature length commentary track by documentarists Michael Gingold and Glen Baisley. The very existence of this artifact suggests a lot about the nature of this movie, in and of itself. The truth behind its existence is as funny as it is tragic.

I'm not going to do a whole breakdown of the tortured origins of SPOOKIES, which is much better told by the aforementioned documentary. To summarize: Once upon a time in the mid 1980s, filmmakers Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran and Frank Farel conspired to make a fun, flamboyant rubber monsterpiece called TWISTED SOULS. It was wild, ridiculous, and transparently fake-looking, but it was loved by its hard-working creators; as a viewer, that soulful sense of joy can rescue many a "bad" movie from its various foibles. Then, inevitably, sleazoid producer Michael Lee stepped in--a man who thought you could cut random frames out of the middle of scenes to improve a movie's pace--and ruined it with extreme prejudice. Carefully crafted special effects sequences were cut, relatively functional scenes were re-edited into oblivion, and the seeds of hatred were sown between the filmmakers and the producer. Ultimately, everyone who once cared for TWISTED SOULS was forced to abandon ship, and first time director Eugenie Joseph stepped in to help mutilate the picture beyond all recognition. Thus SPOOKIES was born, a mangled, unloved mutation that would curse many of its original parents to unemployability. For the audience, it is intriguingly insane, often insulting, and hard to tear your eyes off of--but in spite of whatever actually wound up on the screen, it's impossible to forget its horrifying origin story as it unspools.

As far as what's on the screen goes: A group of "friends", including a middle-aged businessman and his wife, a vinyl-clad punk rock bully and his moll, two new wave-y in-betweeners, and...a guy with a hand puppet are somehow all leaving the same party, and all ready to break into a vacant funeral home for their afterparty. Well, this happens after a 13 year old runaway inexplicably wanders in to a "birthday party" in there, that looks like it was thrown for him by Pennywise, and he has the nerve to act surprised when he is attacked by a severed head and a piratey-looking cat-man who straight up purrs and meows throughout the picture. Anyway, separately of that, which is unrelated to anything, the island of misfit friends finds a nearly unrecognizable "ouija board" in the old dark house. Actually this thing is kind of fun-looking, having been made by one of the fun-havers on the production before the day that fun died, and I wonder if anyone has considered trying to make a real board game out of it...but I digress. Naturally, the board unleashes evil forces, including a zombie uprising in the cemetery outside, a plague of Ghoulie-like ankle-biters, an evil asian spider-lady (accompanied by kyoto flutes), muck-men that fart prodigiously until they melt in a puddle of wine (?), and uh...I know I'm forgetting stuff. One of the reasons I'm forgetting is because of this whole side story about a tuxedo-wearing vampire in the basement (or somewhere?) who has entrapped a beautiful young bride by cursing her with immortality. That part is a little confusing, not only because it doesn't intersect with the rest of the movie, but because sometimes it seems contemporary--as the bride struggles to survive the zombie plague--and sometimes it seems like a flashback, as our heroes find what looks like the mummified corpse of the dracula guy, complete with his signet ring. So, I don't know what to tell you really. Those are just some of the things that happen in the movie.

Some people like this a lot, and have supported its ascendance to cult status, which is a huge relief when you know what everyone went through to make this movie, only to have it ripped away from them and used against them. I found SPOOKIES a little hard to take, for all the reasons that the cast and crew express in the documentary. It holds a certain amount of visual fascination, whatever you think of it; something of its original creativity remains evident in the movie's colorful, exaggerated look, and its steady parade of unconvincing but inventive creature effects. But then, you have to deal with the farting muck-men. What was once a scene of terror starring REGULAR muck-men, that sounded incredibly laborious to pull off, became a scene of confusing "comedy" when producer Michael Lee insisted that the creatures be accompanied by a barrage of scatalogical noises. Apparently this was Lee's dream come true, as a guy who insisted everyone pull his finger all the time, and who once tried to call the movie "BOWEL ERUPTOR". But, of all the deformations SPOOKIES endured, the fart sounds dealt a mortal injury to the filmmakers' feelings, and even without knowing that, it's hard to enjoy yourself while that's happening.

Actually, all the farts forced me to ask myself: Is this...a comedy? Like for real, as its main thing? As the movie slogged on, I had to decide that it wasn't, but I was distracted by the notion for around 40 minutes. I was only released from this nagging suspicion when the bride makes her long marathon run through throngs of slavering zombies who swarm her, grope her, and tear off her clothes, before she narrowly escapes to an even worse fate. The lengthy scene is strangely gripping, and sleazy for a movie that sometimes feels like low rent children's entertainment. Part of the sequence’s success lies in its simplicity; it is unburdened by the convoluted complications of the rest of the movie, whose esoteric parts never fall together, so it seems to take on a sustained, intensifying focus. The action itself is unnerving, as the delicate and frankly gorgeous Maria Pechuka is molested and stripped nearly-bare by her undead bachelors, running from one drooling mob to another as the horde nearly engulfs her time and again. Actually, it feels a lot like a certain genre of SOV production in which, for the right price, any old creepy nerd can pay a small crew-for-hire to tape a version of his private fantasy, whether it's women being consumed by slime, or women being consumed by quicksand, or...generally, women being consumed by something. I wish I could describe this form of production in more specific or official terms, because I genuinely think it's wonderful that people do this. Anyway, Pechuka's interminable zombie run feels a little like that, and a little like a grim italian gutmuncher, and a little like an actual nightmare. Perhaps it only stands out against its dubious surroundings, but I kind of love it--and I'm happy to love it, because apparently the late Ms. Pechuka truly loved making SPOOKIES, and wanted other people to love it, too.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable place where I land with this movie. On the one hand...I think it's bad. It's so incoherent, and so insists on its impoverished form of comedy, that it's hard to be as charmed by it as I am by plenty of FX-heavy, no-budget oddities. Perhaps the lingering odor of misery drowns out the sweet joy that the crew once felt in the early days of creation--which is still evident, somehow, in its zany special effects, created by the likes of Gabe Bartalos and other folks whose work you definitely already know and love. But I feel ambivalent, about all of this. On the one hand, I can be a snob, and shit on people for failing to make a movie that meets conventional standards of success. On the other hand, I can be a DIFFERENT kind of snob--a more voyeuristic or even sadistic one--and celebrate the painful failures that produced a movie that is most interesting for its tormented history and its amusing ineptitude. I'm not really sure where I would prefer to settle with SPOOKIES, and movies like it. (As if anything is really "like" SPOOKIES) With all that said, I was left with one soothing thought by castmember Anthony Valbiro in the documentary. At some point, he tells us how ROSEMARY'S BABY is his personal cinematic comfort food; he can put it on at night, after an exhausting day, and drift to sleep, enveloped in its warm, glowing aura. He then says that he hopes there are people out there for whom his movie serves that same purpose, that some of us can have our "milk and cookies moment" with SPOOKIES. Honestly, I choke up just thinking about that.

#blogtober #2020 #spookies #horror #supernatural #vampire #zombie #creature feature #old dark house #cursed film #thomas doran #frank farel #eugenie joseph #michael lee #vipco #twisted souls #brendan faulkner #maria pechuka

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retrauxpunk · 5 years

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silicon valley grand finale recap: 6.07

everything under the cut, complete with spoilers :)

okay alec berg

okay

you won me over as i suspected and hoped and wanted you to but i dared not hope too much because of what a clusterfuck 6.06 was in my opinion

i had low expectations as a defence mechanism

but i’ve just watched this magnificent 45-minute farewell behemoth of an episode and you know what? FINE.

FINE

IT WAS REALLY REALLY GOOD and it’s good enough that i’m now slightly less mad about 6.06 because you know what OKAY the dumbass rushed-execution plotline about the AI — yeah okay now that the finale’s out, OKAY, YES, it was WORTH the russfest deus ex machina fucker to get THIS.

a really good finale that i’m. HAPPY WITH.

i FELT THE EMOTIONS when i was meant to feel them! it resonated! it was brilliant!

oh man

i don’t know if i have too much to say because i’m just quite happy with it and now that the whole thing’s over, i no longer have the suspense? but okay let’s see

so firstly i woke up to a DM from some fucker (someone i’d intermittently chatted SV with on instagram after they reached out to me; someone who, prior to this, i would not have called a fucker) and all i saw were the notifications reading something like ‘have you seen the episode’ and ‘heartbreaking’ and i swear to god i was fucking livid because, like, i recognise that that’s not a spoiler DETAIL about PLOT per se but i’m one of those freaks who, when i really like something, i don’t want to know fucking ANYTHING! including the emotional reaction anyone has to it because then!! then!!!! i fucking start thinking about what happened! it’s giving me some kind of information that i previously did not have and which i did not want to have because i DO NOT WANT my experience coloured by other people’s reviews! because they give away SOMETHING

(if you were doubting the veracity of me relating to richard the most out of the characters. behold this petty rage and tell me i’m wrong)

(also i KNOW it could’ve just been saying ‘the show’s over now and that’s heartbreaking’ but the point is I DON’T KNOW THAT RIGHT because you only get a truncated view in notifications and it’s not like i’m gonna open the fucking chat to CHECK if it’s ACTUALLY A SPOILER at the risk of viewing S P O I L E R S)

(they don’t call me the richard hendricks bitch for nothing, that moniker has a new dimension now)

yeah so i blocked this guy (and then sent him a technically polite and civil but otherwise really fucking pissy DM in response after i’d watched the episode) and then went about my day

i had a good day, which was good. gotta be in the right mood to consume the final installment of my favourite tv show ever.

i started watching.

documentary, huh? this is. INTERESTING.

and it becomes clear that something’s fucked up. even without instagram fucker’s comment, it is clear. given the fact that richard looks like a lonely soul in a retirement home at the beginning of the documentary, with all the colours/backdrop and the weighty comments of how ‘everything was fine’

and then there’s the party ... hurray ... richard in the cake! love it. sometime do some fic/art of richard popping out of a cake in a jarrich context lol

monica’s gift of the text messages! that’s really sweet and i loved it.

THE DOT. HOLY SHIT RICHARD YOU EAGLE-EYED MOTHER FUCKER

also u fuckin nerd with the ellipsis comment........... tbh i get it, i appreciate that joke

(oh jared. dutifully laughing at all his jokes. LITERALLY LIKE HOW SOMEONE WITH A CRUSH LAUGHS AT ALL THEIR CRUSH’S DUMBASS JOKES HHHHHHH)

I really enjoyed when jared mansplained and got bitten by monica lmao i just ............ i’m not fully able to articulate why i liked it but i REALLY ENJOYED IT hahah

GILFOYLE!! appearing with the lock the doors comment and cliff bars and a gun ...... oh boy i love him ;_;

i enjoy that they explicitly(ish) mention that gilfoyle’s an alcoholic lmao

also, dinfoyle shippers, gilfoyle passing out in the men’s room after a rendezvous with dinesh? huh? huh? -aggressively nudges and winks-

...anyway

i love that it’s the combination of richard’s obsessive meticulousness and gilfoyle’s hardcore work ethic and security-mindedness that reveal this fatal flaw with pied piper. it’s a nice collaboration of sorts and it speaks kind of to each person’s greatest strengths (diligence, thoroughness) (i mean we know richard’s other greatest strength is the talent of his coding and gilfoyle’s other greatest strength is also his brilliance and also his being smoking hot but y’know i didn’t say greatest strength at the exclusion of others...)

OH MAN

YES GILFOYLE you have a strong moral compass and want to kill the monster!

laurie being in prison .......................for no clearly defined reason.....and her hair’s still perfect..... yeah i’m here for it. also she does strike me as someone who’d do pretty much fine in prison lmao

i liked richard and jared’s rooftop conversation. i ..... i was annoyed with jared mentioning gwart because THAT WHOLE THING WITH GWART AND JARED LEAVING AND THEN COMING BACK AND THE I MISS YOU AND WHATEVER I DON’T CARE WHILE LITERALLY CRYING AND ALL OF THAT STILL FEELS LIKE AN ARC THEY STRAIGHT UP FORGOT TO CONTINUE/RESOLVE AND I’M STILL FUCKING MAD but aside from that i liked the conversation.

this whole series has been instance after instance of richard’s idealism and moral compass seeming to thwart his success because he refuses to do shitty things and instead chooses the harder but ultimately morally good path, and it’s ...... i love that this culminates in him making one of the most difficult/painful idealistic choices of all: let his dream of six years come to fruition and possibly (rather than certainly, at this point) ruin the whole fucking world, or kill his dream and really truly make the world a better place by SAVING THE FUCKIGN WORLD?

UGH YES *chef’s kiss*

love that jared’s agreeing with him/supporting him the whole time and you can fucking SEE richard calming down from his initial rage and seeing that, oh, okay, no, he has no choice, he Must kill the beast he has created...

and at that point screaming FUCK from the rooftop seems like a pretty sane response

love the cut to him in his i-mean-business blue hoodie (was it his blue hoodie? i can’t remember but i feel like it was?) being like ‘gilfoyle’s right’ lol

THE THING WITH DINESH’S CAR AND CRACKING TESLA’S ENCRYPTION

this was cool enough that i did not care about technological feasibility, Rule of Cool achieved

and dinesh’s speech about how he couldn’t be trusted! oh boy

like jared said, it was a magnificently courageous moment of cowardice. LOVE. IT.

(also i couldn’t help thinking, lol was this done as a response to kumail nanjiani’s schedule clashing with the others so they had to have all his scenes separate rom the rest of the cast? i mean either way they executed it stunningly)

oh BOY THE THING WITH GABE AND JOHN STAFFORD!!! and you know if gilfoyle had been friends with john stafford then maybe john would’ve fucking called gilfoyle and checked before fixing this shit!!

is this what they intended? i’m not sure. but it sure makes the gilfoyle chess subplot seem a lot less frustrating than the other going-nowhere-but-comedic-relief subplots that were in themselves fine but made me mad when i saw how rushed 6.6 was

gabe lmao

fuckin gabe

BUT GOOD ON GABE FOR LETTING DINESH KNOW JUST IN CASE!! THANK YOU GABE!!!

and OH BOY DINESH! YOU CAME THROUGH! YOU HAVE A GOOD CORE AFTER ALL! YOU COULD’VE DONE NOTHING AND BECOME RICH BUT YOU CLIMBED A SKYSCRAPER’S WORTH OF STAIRS AND SAVED THE FUCKING WORLD!

lmao i loved kumail nanjiani’s horrible wheezing as he opens the door and then despairs and then wheezes his way up the surprise additional stairs, i actually started laughing in my seat. brilliant physical comedy.

also loved gilfoyle’s ‘are you jacking off’ ‘did you do one push-up’ jibes lmao

brill

YES DINESH SAVED THE DAY!

AND GILFOYLE SAVED THE DAY! WHEN RICHARD (not entirely unreasonably) FUCKING FROZE AND GILFOYLE MADE AN EXECUTIVE DECISION AND TRUSTED DINESH AND IT PAID OFF! YESSSSS

oh and speaking of trusting dinesh. richard being like ‘dinesh you fucked us’ and then apologising and dinesh being all ‘you’re good, i’d think i fucked us too’ AHHH *chef’s kiss*

THE RATS? LMAO THE RATS? verging on maybe too ridiculous but I THINK I LIKED IT.

oh boy

CONAN

BILL GATES LOL

KARA SWISHER

PRESUMABLY MANY OTHER BRILLIANT GUEST STARS I MISSED

YES

oh man that convo on the roof! the only issue i had with that was jared being relegated to the seats behind them WHY ! WHY WAS THAT!!

ok i’m gonna headcanon it as like, they were gonna make room for him but he was like ‘OH NO NEVER MIND I’LL SIT BEHIND YOU, I LIKE BEING ABLE TO WATCH OVER YOU ALL’ ok there i fixed it. it’s plausible and i fixed it.

gilfoyle drinking entire bottles of tres commas? man he’s so hot and alcohol-soaked i’m astonished he hasn’t spontaneously combusted yet

THEY SAVED THE WORLD ;___;

MY BABIES SAVED THE WORLD

oh and now the present day................ (of the episode) ......

gavin as a trashy romance novelist and denpak as his long-suffering ghostwriter/collaborator? LOVE IT LMAO yeah sure why not!! and that scene when they’re arguing but then have this breakthrough about their novel in progress? AMAZING HAHAHAH i hope they’re happy together

RICHARD IS THE GAVIN BELSON PROFESSOR OF ETHICS WHAT THE FUCK

I MEAN OKAY FIRSTLY he is well-qualified to be an ethics in tech professor given his experience

BUT DOES IT NOT KILL HIM TO HAVE GAVIN BELSON IN HIS TITLE LMAO

maybe gavin made a hefty donation to stanford and bighead gave enough of that to richard that richard doesn’t mind

maybe at this point richard’s developed a good enough sense of humour to tolerate it because if he didn’t, he’d go fucking insane

he said he was happy .................... was he? i’ve no fucking idea tbh. what do you guys think? richard’s happy with a high-paying non-stressful job, or richard’s sad and despairing? ......i’m gonna go with the former. maybe wistful. maybe he’ll start another company one day. idek.

god when he said his best friend gave him a job ... for a second i thought it was jared. but oh well. OH WELL. OH WELLLLL.

LOVE that big head is president of stanford and it’s not addressed AT ALL how that happened and you know what? we had enough of him failing upward that we don’t need an explanation! this seems totally plausible! amazing.

and josh brener’s acting when they’re like ‘do they call you that because your surname is bighetti’ .......... amazing

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH DINESH AND GILFOYLE STARTED A COMPANY TOGETHER AND HOLY FUCKING SHIT OH MY GOD

hey i just realised is NEWELL ROAD the place where the guy who bought dinesh’s laptop from the office clearance sale lived where gilfoyle turned up pretending to be geek squad to punch a hole in the laptop????!!

okay i just went back and checked and that’s not it. BUT newell road is the street the hacker hostel’s on!

which is fucking adorable and i love it.

ALSO

AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED THEY FUCKING MADE DINFOYLE CANON BECAUSE LOOK GILFOYLE SAYS THAT THING ABOUT DINESH BUYING THE HOUSE NEXT TO HIS BECAUSE HE LOVES HIM AND DINESH HAS NOTHING TO SAY BUT ‘FUCK YOU’ AND YOU KNOW WHAT

YEAH THEY DID IT

THEY STARTED A COMPANY TOGETHER AND GOT MARRIED

i swear to god when they said there was a meeting i just briefly imagined the ‘meeting’ was them sneaking off to a supply closet to fuck or something

YESSS

so we didn’t get jarrich but WE GOT THIS

okay whatevs i’ll take what i can get *blows coolly on nails*

jared working with the elderly! that thing about having parents and being someone’s parents! that’s so beautiful and makes so much sense it works somewhat as a salve to the darkly comedic but ultimately not really necessary punch to the gut that was the discovery about his biological parents.

judy reading one of gavin’s romance novels HAHAH YES

oh boy! the reunion!

i swear to god when richard and jared walked up to each other IT STILL FUCKING FELT LIKE THEY WERE GONNA KISS

everyone hugging!

GILFOYLE LOOKING TO THE CAMERA WHEN RICHARD AND JARED HUG

to me, that’s him being like ‘look at these two. ten years and they’ve not realised they’re in love yet’ hahahha

oh and Monica working for the NSA? yeah i can see it hahahah

jian-yang’s crazy jungle empire? yeah fuckin checks out

(RON’S PANIC WHEN RICHARD STARTS ADMITTING GUILT AND HE HAS TO BACKTRACK LMAO love the law jokes/references)

dinesh referring to gilfoyle’s horrible corner hahaha it’s so clear they fucking love each other they wouldn’t have fucking started a company if they didn’t also THEY LIVE NEXT DOOR TO EACH OTHER WHAT THE FUCK OH MY GOD THANK YOU FOR THIS GIFT

at first i was like oh god did richard and jared not see each other for years??? but then there was that line about ‘i saw you last week’ and i’m so happy again. headcanon best friends (not to say that big head isn’t also a best friend of richard’s) and they catch up and love each other and then fall in love down the line (TIME TO WRITE A FIC LOL)

WHEN JARED HAD THE THING IN HIS BAG I GUESSED IT WAS THE ALWAYS BLUE THING AND WHEN IT CAME OUT I ACTUALLY PUT MY HAND OVER MY MOUTH AT ALL THE FEELINGS AND OH BOY OH BOY YESSSSS

<3333

richard losing the thumb drive. HA.

good. good setup

now the spinoff of sv is this apocalyptic hellhole because the thumb drive fell into the wrong hands and now pied piper have gathered to face/fight the apocalypse

i..... could write that fic. i could.

i imagine in that apocalypseverse jared has super surprisingly become a ruthless leader of a tribe, dinesh and gilfoyle are dual rulers obviously (or like, scavenger rebels on the fringes), monica has a terrifying tribe of followers or has made herself indispensable to another leader, richard is working as a tech slave for someone horrible (or is out in the woods after being stranded away from civilisation when the first attacks/clusterfucks occur) but then gets rescued by jared/the rest .............. yeah

OKAY ANYWAY

in short i really really liked it and i think the whole idea of them having to purposely fail to save the world from the terrible genius of what they’ve created is a fitting and deliciously bittersweet way to end this wild journey and i LOVE THIS WHOLE FUCKING SERIES and i don’t wish it had ended any other way

except for richard and jared kissing and sailing off into the sunset of course

#rain watches sv s6 #silicon valley #sv spoilers #sv s6 spoilers #silicon valley spoilers #precipitation #my sv text posts

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spnfanficpond · 5 years

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June Angel Fish Awards

Every month all of you fantastic writers work your asses off to post some truly incredible stories. Our Angel Fish Awards are the way for all of us, as a community of writers and readers, to lift each other up and give praise to those who have captured our attention and deserve a few kind words.

The monthly Angel Fish Awards are peer-nominated, meaning ANYONE IN THE POND CAN NOMINATE ANY POND MEMBER’S FIC. While the Pond was founded to support the Guppies, everyone in this community deserves to be showered with love and feedback, and we hope that by opening this up as a Pond wide system, we’ll be able to share the love as far as it can go.

NOTE: WE’VE BEEN HAVING OCCASIONAL PROBLEMS WITH ASKS GOING MISSING. Please use the Submit button when submitting your nominations and make sure you’re signed into Tumblr or your URL won’t show. (If the form asks for your name and email address, then you’re not signed in.) If you like, you can also send a message to Michelle or Mana to check and make sure we got your submission.

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE JUNE’S ANGEL FISH AWARDS!

Nominated by @wingedcatninja and @mrswhozeewhatsis and @manawhaat

The Song Remains the Same (oneshot) by @sammit-janet

@wingedcatninja said - This fic by @sammit-janet is the best case fic I have ever read. It has everything: drama, angst, a witch curse, perfect characterization. Reading it was like being inside an episode of Supernatural. And, without spoiling anything, the ending broke my heart. To quote my own comment when I reblogged it:

“I don’t even know where to start. The story is fantastic. The prose is beautiful. The characterization is on point. The angst is delightfully painful. It’s just overall amazing. Thank you for sharing this awesome piece of art.”

@mrswhozeewhatsis said - The painful ingenuity of the spell in this case fic is genius. Pure freaking genius! Painful as hell, but genius. Characterization is wonderful, as always, and my heart is a little more broken, but I’m used to that with Sammit!! Brava!!!! *throws roses at you*

@manawhaat said- WOW! That was fucking awesome! We see witch spells so often and (maybe it’s bc of the genre I’m reading but) they’re always like lust spells of some sort, so it was super refreshing to see this kind of spell. This whole thing was just really well done, super interesting, perfectly in character and the realm of spn. And that last little bit. UGH! SO PERFECT! So Dean! So spot on! So fitting and heartbreaking and such a perfect little add on. I swear, this whole thing legit felt like I watched an episode of the show. This case fic is a perfect example of how I want every fic to read. I want the drama, the suspense, the emotion, the subtleties, the Winchesters as they truly are, this kind of gentle care for detail and attention to creating a realistic feel. I can’t say it enough- this is fucking FANTASTIC!

Nominated by @wingedcatninja

Never Wanna Say Goodbye (oneshot) by @deanwinchesterswitch

This is deliciously painful angst that leaves you with tears in your eyes and a smile on your lips.

Nominated by @risingphoenix761

Salty Stockings (oneshot) by @slytherkins

Cute, hilarious, and just the right amount of crack. Also risque and suggestive. Did I mention this is hilarious? So much good stuff in a short fic, and imagine if anyone suggested Dean take this with him on a hunt!

Nominated by @manawhaat

True or False (oneshot) by @thegirlwhorunswithwinchesters

The way this starts instantly pulls you in. There’s so much pent up shit rattling through Dean and the way it’s reciprocated through Y/n is an amazing build. There’s so much emotion and vulnerability to this entire thing, and it’s done in a way that’s completely believable and realistic for Dean. Fuck. It’s smart and really just opens them both up in such a refreshing way that speaks of Dean’s bravery, even in the face of being raw and exposed to someone else. And the way the tables turn. *screeches and flaps on the floor* Be still my fucking heart! I fucking adore this and the way you approached this fic and premise. There are so many ways it could have gone wrong or lost its power and impact, but you fucking nailed it!

Covet (series) by @waywardjoy

Fucking Christ, this series stressed me the fuck out, but in the best way possible. The cliffhangers, the dark grittiness. The insanity! Fuck, I absolutely love it when stories are written in a way that completely immerse me in it. It’s dark, like, really dark. Fuck. It just hurts.

The Beginning of The End (oneshot) by @deanwinchesterswitch

OW! There is a secret desperation in this that is absolutely brutal and tears your heart in two. The way Dean is written is eye-opening and really just drags you down into a depth of pain and grief that only a Winchester can feel. I feel like I should say something about the sex being hot, but I can’t. Because to me it’s just so rough, borderline too rough, and so emotional. Which might sound weird, but in this situation and with the way everything is presented that scene is honest as fuck, very believable, and powerful. At some point things become more about the emotional release than they do being sexy, and this is a gorgeous example of that kind of repressed emotion roaring to life in ‘bottle it up forever’ Dean Winchester. This fic hurts so good all the way through and in different ways. That in itself is a feat, so have so many layers in one story. It’s anger and hurt and guilt and worry and all of it is wrapped so delicately together in this fucking stunning piece of art.

Born This Way (oneshot) by @evansrogerskitten

HAPPY PRIDE MOTHER FUCKERS!!!!!! This fuckin’ fic! Wow. This is the definition of the spn family. There’s so much love and support wrapped up in this story, in this fucking dream. I rarely get like, actually emotional reading fics (because I’m a heartless bitch) but this has me sitting here clutching my chest with my eyes closed just full body squeeing and smiling and my gut is clenching with all the emotion. There is something to be said of the spn family being allies. This song, this setting, this family, and the moment you’ve created here is so important and such a special thing! AND, as if the fic itself wasn’t enough to make me burst into happy tears, the tweets at the bottom sure the fuck were! Honestly, everything about this is so spot on and believable and just fucking pure and good.

Castiel Imagine (drabble) by @webcricket

Holy hell, that Cas fic was not only incredibly fucking sensual and well done but it was just so full of amazing language. Fantastic! I feel like a lot of writers who try to beef up their language tend to use words that feel out of place, but your consistency and the way you weave them together made me slow down to savor every line and that was such a beautiful thing.

Nominated by @sorenmarie87

Life for Rent (series) by @winchest09

The series has just started but I can’t wait to see where it goes. I love a good mobster!au and the set up so far has me wondering what’s going to happen next.

What Research? (oneshot) by @becs-bunker

What do I say about this other than I loved it? I mean Sam has been busy and the reader just wants some attention from him. Of course, they accomplish what they set out to do and it’s worth the read.

Born This Way by @evansrogerskitten

This was a fantastic fic. The reader has the casts approval and support, and the way they came out was fantastic. I almost cried, no lie. Ash’s fics are always fantastic but this hit me in an unsuspected way.

Once Upon A Dream (oneshot) by @welldonebeca

I haven’t honestly seen that many Human!Gabe fics let alone Alpha!Gabe at that. The story is so sweet.

Fallen Productions (series) by @welldonebeca

I always admire authors who can write A/B/O but this mini series works its way through the original Team Free Will in a different way.

He Is (series) by @coffee-obsessed-writer

This whole series is super sweet. Each chapter shows just what Dean means to you, and Jen nails it in each of them.

Make You Feel My Love (series) by @sofreddie

This was such a sweet A/B/O series. I love that Dean and the reader took their time, I mean Dean eased her through her earlier heats but I think it was sweet that it was just smut off the bat.

Nominated by @iflostreturntosteverogers

Almond Milk Lies (series) by @fictionalabyss

Mel is a fantastic writer 💕

Nominated by @shy-violet-soul

The Girl Next Door (series) by @luci-in-trenchcoats

An engaging AU, this writer keeps you hooked with well-paced timing & plot. Portrayal of characters is consistent with the show, which other fics struggle with when not in the SPN world. The story line is believable and genuine, and I enjoy the banter between the 2 main pairing-folks. Bravo!

Sunsets by @crispychrissy

Damn. This work is so beautifully painful, or painfully beautiful, it’s hard to find words. I don’t want to comment on a favorite part to avoid giving away the plot. But this writer has captured a lesser-written character powerfully and consistently, and hooks you in with strong imagery and pacing. Hold on to your heartstrings for this one.

Thank you all for the awesome work and great feedback!

As with the BFAs, these are not actual awards! This system is set up so everyone in the pond has a chance to share the love and promote a fic/author that has grabbed your attention. The more people that participate, and the more everyone remembers to submit their own fics after posting, the better this will be :D

THANK YOU ALL AGAIN, KEEP UP THE AMAZING WORK, AND AS ALWAYS, HAPPY WRITING!

#spn fic rec #afas #angel fish awards #afa masterlist #fic rec #spn #supernatural #spn fanfic #spn fanfiction #supernatural fanfiction #Supernatural fanfic #spn fan fiction #supernatural fan fiction #fanfiction

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andromeda---galaxy · 7 years

Text

glows world-wide welcome

With every birthday that passes Lukas feels weirder and weirder. He can’t believe they only have one more semester of college before they’re done, he can’t believe they managed to get through the last six months without completely crashing and burning, or doing anything too insane. Well, getting married in Vegas was insane. But there could have been worse things.

They got a restraining order against Dour and Philip won his case against him, which resulted in a major fine, probation and five hundred hours of community service, though Lukas was really pissed off there was no jail time. They’ve been trying to ignore it since it ended, trying to focus on better shit—the fact that he’s gone, that he won’t bother them anymore. But it still comes up in therapy, and Lukas entertains the notion of not going anymore. He still needs to talk to Philip about it. He knows the Ryan shit won’t ever go away, not really, but he sorta feels like he’s talked it to death, at this point. It comes and goes like the rising tide, and right now, when he’s not being questioned about it, the waters seem calm. The catalyst is gone. The dreams have subsided. Lukas thinks, for the moment, that Ryan and all the hell of that time have retreated back into his subconscious.

“It’s still so weird we haven’t done this yet,” Philip says, looking up at Lukas from one of the middle benches on the ferry. He’s bundled up in about six different layers and is still shivering. The boat is so full that Lukas didn’t get a seat next to Philip, having given his up to an older lady and her husband.

“I was lucky I got the tickets,” Lukas says. He’d booked their Statue of Liberty Crown experience like nine months ago, before he went off on the circuit. They’d been tossing around the idea of doing this for years, but it was so damn hard to get the crown tickets that Lukas gave up at least ten times before remembering to try again. Lucky was definitely the word for getting a booking on his birthday—more so that he actually remembered with enough time to get tickets for the right date.

“It’s probably better we’re doing this when it’s cold,” Philip says, looking over his shoulder as the boat makes a slight jump. “Uh, because—in the summer it’ll be grossly hot and we’d probably die on those stairs.”

“If you lose me on the stairs just keep going,” Lukas says. “Hopefully someone will drag my body the rest of the way and they can just leave it up there.”

“Shut up,” Philip says, smacking him on the leg.

Lukas grins, leaning down and kissing him on the top of his head. Philip looks absurdly cute sitting there, and Lukas doesn’t ever wanna stop looking at him. He can barely move in all these damn layers, but it feels a lot better than being cold. “I forgot to tell you, Rose’s RSVP came in the mail.”

“Oh?” Philip asks, his eyes getting brighter. “She coming?”

“Yeah,” Lukas says. “Bringing that dude, too, so we’ll get to see him again.” He makes a face.

Philip makes one back. “Oh, well—he’s nice enough.”

Lukas scoffs. “Sure, that’s exactly what you said when we first met him.”

Philip shrugs, smiling a little bit. “That’s the last friend we needed, right?”

“Yeah,” Lukas says, his heart doing that little flip it does whenever they talk about the wedding. “Just need some of my family members, but they’ve got some time.” He keeps trying to tell himself that they’re married already, that it isn’t a big deal. But he keeps thinking in a little over a year from now we’ll be having our ceremony. People are gonna watch us get married. People I used to be terrified of knowing I was gay are gonna watch me marry Philip. The love of my life.

He feels like a dickhead picking a date so close to Christmas, but then again he’s happy with the day he chose. He loves deep winter, he loves how Philip gets at this time of year. And plus, it’s so close to his birthday, which is a bonus. The best birthday gift ever. They just bought their wedding bands the other day and Lukas nearly puked, antsy to start wearing them. They are married, after all. But Gabe is still the only person that knows, and even though this secret isn’t nearly as big as hiding the fact that they witnessed a triple murder while trying to hook up, he still feels a little pang in his gut when he realizes what they’re hiding from everybody else.

“We’ll get ‘em,” Philip says, smiling. “We haven’t had anybody say they aren’t coming yet, even though my stress level doesn’t reflect how easy it’s been for people to say yes.”

“We’re more important than the holidays,” Lukas says.

“Oh, of course,” Philip says, raising an eyebrow. “I mean, it’s not even a choice.”

Lukas blows out a breath, grinning a little bit. He looks up and sees the Statue of Liberty coming into better view. “C’mon,” he says, reaching down and taking Philip’s hand, pulling him up. “We can see it.”

“Of course we can see it,” Philip says, following along behind as Lukas maneuvers over and gets a spot at the railing. Philip shoves himself against Lukas’s side, shivering a little bit.

Lukas wraps an arm around his shoulders, tugging him in closer. “Don’t you wanna get a picture?”

“I’ll drop my camera into the water and then I’ll die.”

Lukas snorts. “It’s around your neck!”

“It’ll come loose,” Philip says simply, sniffling a little bit and holding his head high.

Lukas gazes down at him as they get closer and closer to the Statue, clicks and gasps all around them. He can’t help smiling, every day his love for Philip eclipsing any other feeling he’s ever felt. Lukas pulls him in and presses a lopsided kiss to his temple. “You’re cute as shit and you’re gonna regret it later.”

“Being cute?” Philip says, adorably.

“No,” Lukas says. “Not getting this photo.”

Philip looks up just as the boat is making it’s turn, the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the New York skyline etched out behind, glittering in the shining sun. He makes a face like he’s debating between being stubborn and getting the shot he obviously wants, and finally he huffs, taking his camera in careful hands.

“Told you,” Lukas says, fishing his phone out of his pocket.

“Lukas don’t drop your phone into the water.”

“I won’t—”

“Lukas, don’t drop it.”

Lukas snorts, snapping a couple photos. “Babe.”

“Lukas, if you drop your phone—”

Lukas growls a little bit, leaning in and mouthing at the corner of Philip’s jaw. “Just hush and take your goddamn pictures.”

Philip smiles, smug, then gasps harshly when Lukas rattles him a little bit, edging them closer to the railing. “I’m gonna—kill you, Waldenbeck.”

“A little hesitation,” Lukas says, turning his camera into selfie mode and twisting it to face them head on. “What else are you gonna do to me, Shea?”

They both grin at the same time for the camera. “You don’t even wanna know,” Philip says, through gritted teeth.

Lukas is one thousand percent sure he does wanna know. In detail.

They stop in the shop before they start the climb and Lukas grabs a bottle of water to buy, eyeing a statue of liberty magnet that would look good on their fridge. He feels a tap on his shoulder and turns around—Philip is standing there with a green crown like Lady Liberty’s around his entire face. He’s smiling and he looks like sunshine.

“So, so cute,” Lukas says, warmth flooding through his chest. “I’m buying that for you.”

Philip laughs, pulling it off. “You don’t have to.”

“Yes,” Lukas says, taking it. “I need that in our pictures.”

“I should be buying you things,” Philip says, getting into the line as it moves closer to the counter. He wraps tentative hands around Lukas’s elbow. “It’s your birthday.”

“Um, please,” Lukas says, narrowing his eyes. “You’re my present.”

Philip hums a little bit, sliding his fingers up and down Lukas’s arm. “Maybe you can wrap me up tonight and make it official.”

Lukas’s stomach flutters a little bit.

“And I’ll wear this,” Philip says, tapping the crown. “Since I know you like it.”

Lukas scoffs. “Perfect. Just what I always wanted.”

They step forward in the line and Lukas feels his phone buzzing in his pocket. He told his dad what they were doing today, resulting in a lot of lamenting about how they’re probably gonna be living in the Statue’s crown from now on, because if they make it up there they definitely won’t want to attempt to come back down. Sure enough, DAD flashes on the screen when Lukas pulls his phone out.

“He’s probably checking if we’re still gonna go through with it,” Lukas says.

Philip snorts. “No faith, I swear.”

Lukas answers the phone. He feels Philip reach into his jacket pocket and retrieve his wallet as they approach the counter. “Hello?” Lukas says into the phone.

“Yeah, hey, Lukas,” Dad says. “Happy Birthday, son.”

“Hey, thanks,” Lukas says, putting the water bottle and the crown on the counter. Philip nods at him and Lukas nods back, stepping inside towards the lockers and trying to listen harder. “What’s going on? We’re about to go up.”

Dad laughs. “So you’re going through with it, huh?”

Lukas shakes his head. “Yes,” he says. “We’re hauling a couch up so we can start furnishing immediately.”

Dad laughs even harder and Lukas smiles.

“So what’s up?” Lukas asks again. “You really just calling to see if we’re still gonna go up?”

“No, uh,” Dad says, clearing his throat. “I might have—I might have done something. That hopefully you’re gonna, uh—you’re gonna like.”

Lukas narrows his eyes, turning to see Philip paying for their stuff. “Oh yeah?” Lukas asks, one hand on his hip. “Sounds ominous.”

“Hopefully not,” Dad says, laughing again. He sounds nervous, which isn’t something that Lukas is used to. “Uh, I wanted to let you know that, I, uh—I booked you and Philip a honeymoon.”

Lukas’s whole body goes stiff and he tries to rewind a little bit to make sure he heard correctly. “Uh—what?”

“Well, I know you two are spending a lot on the wedding, even with our help,” he says, clearing his throat again, and Lukas is reminded of how nobody knows about the goddamn Vegas winnings, “and I know you were saying you didn’t have any plans and I thought I might… I thought I might help you out and take care of this for you completely.”

Lukas is a mess of emotions. He can barely speak, and when he does it’s only a strange sort of babble, maybe some stupid noise a baby would make when it’s still learning to talk. Philip walks over, cocking his head, and Lukas tries to express his current state of mind by using facial expressions, but only manages to look upset and constipated.

“I got you two a four night stay in the Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon,” Dad says, and Lukas’s heart does something he’s never felt before, banging up against his ribs and stuttering and plain plummeting into his stomach. “It’s a little historic cabin, but I made sure you got one of the better ones with a great view, you’re feet away from the canyon—I did, uh—late January—right after that race you were talking about, about a month after the wedding.”

“Wow,” Lukas spits out, and the word sounds warped. “Dad, I, uh—”

“I know you need to talk it over with Philip,” Dad says, fast. “So take your trek today, let him know, and uh—I hope it sounds like something you might like to do. It’s all set for you if you want it, and if not, well—that’s fine too.”

“Thank you,” Lukas says, his mouth dry as he looks into Philip’s increasingly panicked eyes. “Dad—”

“Call me back later when you’ve talked about it,” Dad says, clearly trying to get off the phone. “There’s lots to do up there, beautiful scenery, I’m sure you remember from when you were little—”

Then it clicks in Lukas’s head and he feels a little dizzy.

“—and I think it’d be—it’d be nice, if you—if you want. Anyway yeah—have a great time with Lady Liberty, tell her I said hello.”

“We will,” Lukas says. “I’ll, uh—I’ll call you tonight.”

They say their goodbyes and Lukas hangs up, slipping his phone back into his pocket. When he looks up again Philip is wearing the crown and Lukas laughs, covering his mouth.

“What was that all about?” Philip asks, his serious expression not at all matching the adorable look the crown gives him.

“Uh, my dad did something cute,” Lukas says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Maybe a little misguided but very cute.”

“What is it?” Philip asks, grabbing Lukas’s arm and letting the cold water bottle press against his skin. “Something that has to do with us?”

“He got us a honeymoon,” Lukas says, meeting Philip’s eyes again. “In a cabin at the Grand Canyon—and he totally did this because it’s what my mom and him did—they never got to have a honeymoon when they first got married, and when I was three years old they planned this Grand Canyon trip for us and we went and they always called that their honeymoon.”

Philip is grinning wildly. “You never told me this.”

“I mean, I barely remember it, I was too young—I sorta do, I think I remember more from the photos we have—”

“He—wait—” Philip’s mind seems to do some rewinding too and he blinks a bunch of times, looking cuter and cuter with that dumb crown on. “He got us a honeymoon? In the Grand Canyon?” He’s nearly yelling.

“He didn’t know where we’d wanna go!” Lukas says. “He just did it without asking!”

“He did it because that’s where you guys went,” Philip says, and he’s got this soft look in his eyes that Lukas knows means he’s essentially done for.

“What if we wanted to go somewhere else?” Lukas asks, a big family pushing past behind him to start putting their things into a locker. “We’ve talked about Colorado,” Lukas says. “I was thinking about going there for our—”

“Lukas,” Philip says, smacking his arm with the bottle. “We can go to Colorado later. Another time—this is such a big deal. That he did this. For us, the two of us together—this is—Lukas, of course we’re going on this goddamn honeymoon.” He tugs Lukas towards the wall and puts the water bottle down, so he can scan his fingerprint in and open a locker.

“What if it’s a trap?” Lukas asks, letting Philip manhandle his backpack off of him.

“How could it be a trap?” Philip scoffs.

“It could be really shitty,” Lukas says.

Philip pushes Lukas’s backpack into the locker and closes the door, making sure it’s locked. “It’s the Grand Canyon, dummy,” he says, giving Lukas the most disappointed look as he picks the water bottle back up and hands it to him. “It’s gonna be great.”

They start heading towards the entrance past the lockers, the two attendants nodding at them.

“You really wanna do it?” Lukas asks.

“You don’t?” Philip asks, looking over his shoulder at him.

Lukas realizes he’s looking for an ulterior motive when there probably isn’t one. He’s been so used to feeling the need to question his dad’s actions that this new, accepting version of him feels like a glitch in the system. He’s confused as shit.

“Is this like the old torch?” Lukas asks, peering at a stagnant flame larger than both of them put together.

“There’s a plaque,” Philip says. “Maybe if you read every once in a while.”

“I like just assuming things and probably being wrong,” Lukas says, grabbing onto Philip’s belt loops as he heads towards the stairs. “Why are you so eager to start climbing?”

“I wanna get up to the pedestal, if you don’t mind,” Philip says.

Lukas snorts, tromping up the stairs behind him. “You look cute in this jacket, I ever tell you that?”

“I was just thinking we probably should have ditched the jackets,” Philip says. “Just because it’s cold doesn’t mean we aren’t gonna sweat to death when we start up the staircase.”

“Just prepare for me to freeze up about halfway,” Lukas says. “I’m amped to see all the firemen that’ll have to come and get me.”

“If you had a fireman fetish you should have told me,” Philip says, looking over his shoulder as he keeps going. “We could definitely make that happen for you.”

Lukas thinks about it a little too hard and nearly trips up the stairs. Philip looks super happy with that reaction, a smug little grin on his face, and Lukas takes a few big leaps to catch up with him.

There aren’t a ton of people here at the moment and they walk out onto the outside rim of the pedestal without much fanfare, instantly greeted with a beautiful view of New York. Philip sighs happily, taking a few photos, ushering Lukas into the shot and coaxing a smile out of him.

“You’re not still adding to your portfolio are you?” Lukas asks, grinning for the photo.

“Not unless I get something really good,” Philip says. “I still have to do the printing and arranging but I’m pretty much done with my choices.”

“Okay,” Lukas says, and then he pulls a stupid face, sticking one finger into each of his nostrils.

“Oh, beautiful,” Philip says. “No, Lukas, I lied—this is the cover photo.”

Lukas drops his hands and laughs, shuffling up close to Philip as he lowers his camera. Lukas plants a kiss on his mouth, reaching around and sneaking his fingers under the jacket.

“Okay,” Philip says, laughing against Lukas’s mouth. “Let’s go around once and then back inside, start this death climb.”

Lukas never really focuses on how tall the two of them are until they’re trying to climb an almost 200 step staircase that’s the size of a small pantry. They both have to bend over just to make it under the stair above their heads, and Lukas thinks he made a mistake in going first because of how Philip keeps raving about the view.

“I mean,” Philip says, panting a little bit now, “I haven’t gotten a better view of your ass since…well, since…you know, the other night…”

“You’re the worst,” Lukas laughs, shaking his head. “How long have we been doing this?”

“Five minutes,” Philip says, taking a swig from the bottle.

“A lifetime,” Lukas responds. The next family is a little ways ahead of them and there’s no one breathing down Philip’s neck and trying to make them go faster, which Lukas thinks is good. “Okay, babe, distract me.”

“With what?” Philip asks.

“I don’t know,” Lukas says, his legs straining with every new step.

“Wedding checklist?” Philip asks.

“Sure,” Lukas says, since they haven’t actually gone over everything in a while. He likes doing this. It makes him feel pretty accomplished, considering how early in the game it still is. They’re right on track, according to the websites he’d already deleted from his browser history.

“Outfits,” Philip says.

“Done and already hanging in our respective closets in Tivoli.”

“I hate that we’re gonna be apart the night before, just to remind you,” Philip says. “Whose idea was that? We’re married.”

“Another reminder that no one knows that,” Lukas says, laughing. “It does suck, but it’s one night. It’ll be fine…I’m sure.” He’s not so sure. It was definitely their parents’ idea, some kind of old fashioned tradition that they wanted them to take part in. It’s definitely dumb, considering they’ve been living together for so long and are essentially attached at the hip. But their houses are close enough to each other that it won’t be much of an issue if one of them needs the other.

“It sucks,” Philip sighs, like he won’t be budged. Lukas looks over his shoulder and smiles at him, but Philip pouts. He pulls the crown off and lets it hand around his neck. “Venue, decorations.”

Lukas’s thighs are screaming. “The barn, duh. Uh—Helen and Gabe are all ready with the decorations and shit. They showed me that picture with all the flowers, you signed off on it—uh, I don’t know, Dad and Sarah said they were helping…I think they’ve got it under control.”

“Maybe we should check on that,” Philip says.

“Maybe we should stop and rest at the little platform up there,” Lukas says.

“Maybe absolutely yes,” Philip says. “How many more steps til then?”

“Like ten,” Lukas says, heaving. “We’ve—got this.”

“Okay,” Philip says. “Uh. Rings and ring bearer.”

“Rings done,” Lukas says, picturing where they locked them away in the coffee table drawer. “Uh—are we really gonna make Izzy and Samson do this? Will they be capable?”

Philip laughs as Lukas steps up onto the rest platform, and he turns around and pulls him up the last couple of steps. Philip collapses against him, still laughing into Lukas’s neck. “Worst comes to worst,” he says, “if they can’t do it themselves after some practice then Sarah is gonna walk them down. I talked to her.”

“Okay good,” Lukas says, arm wrapped around Philip’s waist. He knows that’s gonna be the cutest fucking thing and he can hardly wait to see it in action. He doesn’t care that they’re ‘that couple’ that involve their dogs in their wedding. “Uh—photographer? Can’t be you.”

“You know I asked Jennifer from my workshop,” Philip says. “I told you that.”

“Oh yeah,” Lukas says, trying to catch his breath, vaguely recalling the conversation. Philip hands him the water bottle and he takes a sip. More like a gulp. “Okay, food and drink—”

“Helen took care of all the catering and shit,” Philip says. “Got that open bar for a good price—”

“So we’re gonna forget this wedding too?” Lukas asks. Philip smacks him on the stomach and Lukas doubles over a little bit, laughing. “No, fine—good.”

“They come with this whole team of servers so we don’t have to do it.” He takes the water bottle back.

“Were you planning on serving people, weirdo?” Lukas asks. “At your own wedding?”

“I don’t know,” Philip says. “Maybe.” He sucks in a big breath and peeks over the banister. It’s so weird and mechanical looking in here, and it’s super strange to think that they’re actually inside the Statue of Liberty. Just casually discussing their upcoming nuptials. “Let’s keep going,” Philip says.

“Fine,” Lukas says. “But I wanna be in back this time.”

Philip smiles at him, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. He walks back over to the stairs and bends his head a little bit, continuing the climb, and Lukas follows. It feels a little easier watching Philip’s beautiful ass as they go.

“Tables and chairs and shit are covered,” Lukas says. “Dad has everything for the reception and Sarah got some long benches for the ceremony.”

“She came through with the arch, too,” Philip says. “It’s really similar to the one we had in Vegas, which is cute. We can compare the photos later when people find out.”

Lukas is a little terrified of the people finding out thing. He sucks in a breath and keeps trudging along, trying not to feel panicked and trapped in this small space. He just focuses on Philip’s ass in those jeans.

“And Gabe did his thing online,” Philip says, looking over his shoulder. “So he’s ordained or whatever. Which is cool, he’s excited.”

“When did he do that?” Lukas asks.

“I think it was like day before yesterday,” Philip says. “He texted me about it and I just remembered right now.”

“That’s awesome,” Lukas says, grinning. He’s so goddamn glad Gabe is feeling better, because the off days come and go and worry them every damn time. He can’t wait to stand there and have Gabe marry them. It was really an amazing idea on Philip’s part.

“Yeah,” Philip says, breathing hard. “And uh—I’m almost done making the guest book—”

“Can’t wait to see it,” Lukas says. He’d tried to help a couple times since Philip has had so damn much on his plate, but Philip insisted on working on it on his own.

“I’m using some of those dumb ones,” Philip says, laughing. “With Izzy. We need to take some more with Samson I can put in there.”

“He fooled us thinking he could sit still in the beginning,” Lukas says, trying to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth. “Little maniac.” He feels like he’s been climbing stairs for years.

“Imagine if we adopt a dog every time we get that drunk,” Philip says.

“Hopefully we’re never that drunk again,” Lukas says, gripping the handrail and closing his eyes tight. “Oh my God, my legs are gonna fall off.”

“Lukas, you like—you run, you’re athletic—”

“No, I’m not,” Lukas whines, each step like dragging twenty pounds of meat behind him tied to his ankles. “I’m—a sack of couch garbage—”

Philip snorts. “Shut up, you’re so dumb.”

“But you—”

“But I love you, yes,” Philip says.

“It’s so dark in here,” Lukas says, sliding his hand along the wall. “I don’t even think we’re in the same place anymore—we’re probably not even in the Statue, Philip.”

Philip snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure we’re in some other random Statue that looks like all the videos we watched on the internet.”

Lukas groans.

“The only other thing I can think of is the DJ and we got that Scratch guy travelling for us,” Philip says.

“That dude was weird,” Lukas says. “He kept being like…overdramatically accepting of us being gay. Like, it felt fake.”

“I think he was just being nice,” Philip says, laughing.

“Maybe he was looking at you just a little too much,” Lukas says, narrowing his eyes. He feels like he’s being petulant and dumb but also he’s super exhausted and ready to just curl up on one of these tiny steps and live here already. But he definitely doesn’t wanna prove his dad right.

“Oh, first he’s faking acceptance and now he’s into me?” Philip asks. “I think you just had some weird thing against him.”

Lukas shrugs and hums a little bit. He’s being stupid.

“You wanna get somebody else?” Philip asks. “The change fee wasn’t too much, and it’s still early, if you really want—”

“It’s fine,” Lukas says. It’s not really that important. None of the other DJs were any better or worse. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

Philip stops and turns on the step he’s on, putting the water bottle by his feet. “You sure?” he asks. “Because I really don’t care, there were a few other people on our list—”

Lukas steps up so he’s on the stair below him. He wraps his arms around Philip’s waist and tucks his head under Philip’s chin. “Baby,” he says. “As long as we get married—officially and in front of our friends and family—you could hire a homeless dude to be our DJ and I’d be okay with it.”

Philip snorts, bending over a little bit and hugging him. “You really sure?”

“Yes,” Lukas says. “He’s probably amazing. I’m just being dumb because I wish we were in the crown already.”

“Okay, let’s keep going, pissy birthday boy,” Philip says. He turns a little bit and looks up. “I can see the light.”

“Hey,” Lukas says, tugging on Philip’s shoulders. Philip looks down at him and knows what he wants just by the look on his face. He presses a big kiss to Lukas’s lips.

“This would be a really cute picture,” Philip says, kissing him again. “I wish we had someone following us around to take pictures whenever we’re cute.”

“But we’re cute a lot,” Lukas says, raking his hand through Philip’s hair. “Cute and sexy sometimes…you know, in private…”

The corner of Philip’s mouth quirks up. “I feel like you’re asking for something right now that would definitely not involve a personal photographer. Unless we’re our own personal photographers. Us and a tripod.”

“Reading my mind.” Lukas kisses him again. “Mmmm, maybe, maybe,” he says, getting some really nice images in his head. “Could be interesting to, you know—see what we look like from like—different angles—”

“Oh my God, Lukas,” Philip says, hands still braced on Lukas’s shoulders. “Stop trying to turn me on when we’re literally inside the Statue of Liberty.”

Lukas hums, inching his hands inside Philip’s jacket. “You know, just….thinking. Musing.”

“I know you’re picturing a sexy little movie, but in real life Izzy and Samson would be howling at the door and banging on it like a pair of Godzillas,” Philip says, pressing another quick kiss to Lukas’s mouth before he turns around, grabs the water and continues scaling the stairs. “He’s a terrible influence on her.”

Lukas snorts, shaking his head. “Yeah, that’s…you’re probably right, yeah.”

“The only thing I’m eight thousand percent sure about is the rehearsal dinner,” Philip says. “We’re doing the taco bar, and then we're gonna practice.”

“Yes,” Lukas says, heart beating heavily as they keep tromping on and on. He feels like this is definitely closer to five hundred steps.

“Oh babe,” Philip says. “I see it—we’re almost there—”

“What?” Lukas asks. “Really?” He tries to peer around Philip but can only see the damn stairs. But it does look a little brighter up above them.

Philip speeds up. “Yeah, yeah,” he says.

Lukas follows him and after ten more steps and fire coursing through his leg muscles, they finally goddamn make it, Lukas nearly crashing his entire face into Philip’s ass when he stops at the top of the stairs. Philip snorts, looking over his shoulder, and reaches down to haul Lukas up into a straight standing position again. They stand there waiting for a family to get their pictures taken, and then the attendant sitting on a really uncomfortable looking stool waves them forward.

Philip takes his hand. There are a bunch of little windows and the brightness of the day streams through them, the cold air too. It really looks like they’re in the crown now—they can see all the ridges of her hair above them, and when Philip drags him over to the window they get a view of New York that’s beyond anything Lukas has ever seen before—they can look down and see the damn book the statue is holding.

“Whoa,” Lukas says, pulling his phone out of his pocket and taking a photo.

“So cool,” Philip says, taking a few photos of his own. He positions Lukas all over the place and takes his picture, and they manage a couple selfies before Philip notices something.

“Hey,” Philip says. “There’s an open window over there.”

“Are you planning on sticking your camera out that window?” Lukas asks, following him, another family invading the crown behind them. “You—who was terrified of taking photos anywhere near the side of the ferry earlier?”

“That’s water,” Philip says, putting their nearly empty bottle under his arm and adjusting the camera strap around his wrist.

“This is like, twenty stories high,” Lukas says, laughing.

“Still better than water,” Philip says. He holds tight to his camera and sticks his hand out the window, holding it up towards the statue’s hand and the torch, clicking a couple times before turning the camera to face them.

“Oh man, we gotta send this one to the parents like, immediately,” Lukas says, leaning in.

“Yes,” Philip says. They mash their cheeks together and grin as Philip takes the picture through the closed window next to the open one. “Okay kiss me,” Philip says.

“Yes sir,” Lukas says, and he does just that. He keeps kissing him until Philip makes a little noise against his mouth, laughing and pushing at him with his free hand.

“I got it,” Philip says, grinning, their noses brushing together.

“Oh, I wasn’t sure,” Lukas says, smiling back at him. Philip nudges into him a little bit, blushing, and Lukas’s stomach flips. He loves how they flirt, still, after all these years. He knows it’s never gonna get old.

Philip pulls his hand back in and looks at the pictures, and Lukas gasps. “Oh shit, those are so cool,” he says.

“Yes!” Philip exclaims. “I love them.”

Lukas leans in and kisses him on the cheek because he can’t fucking help it. He feels rejuvenated after their climb, but he doesn’t think about it too hard or his legs start to hurt.

“You guys want your picture taken?” the attendant asks them, a small smile on her face.

“Could you?” Philip asks, politely, even though Lukas knows that’s essentially what they’re there for.

“Of course,” the woman says. Philip undoes his wrist strap and hands his camera over delicately, wrapping his arms around Lukas’s middle, and edging them back towards the windows. They fall into what’s become Lukas’s favorite pose for photos people take of them, and he leans his head onto Philip’s a little bit, slinging an arm around his shoulder. The woman takes a couple, counting down.

“Oh, oh, put your crown on,” Lukas says, tapping Philip on the arm.

“Oh yeah,” Philip says, pulling it onto his head. Lukas beams looking at him.

“So cute,” the woman says. She takes a couple more and nods at them, handing Philip’s camera back.

“Thank you!” Philip says, taking it.

Lukas sees a bunch of people coming up the stairs and he sighs, taking a look at Philip. “Think our time is just about up.”

“Ugh.” Philip takes more pictures through the window. “We should be able to live here after making that climb.”

“I feel you, baby,” Lukas says. He turns towards the window, peering out. At all the people down in the courtyard, all the water surrounding the island, and New York in the distance. Their city. Their home.

The climb down almost feels worse, which isn’t usually the case, and Lukas nearly tumbles down like an asshole about a hundred times. Finally they take the last couple steps and race back outside like they’re drunk, and Lukas doesn’t think he’s had a workout like this in a long time.

They both sit down in the courtyard against the brick wall and stare up at the statue.

“We gotta go get my backpack,” Lukas huffs.

“Yeah, we will,” Philip says, stripping off one layer.

“You wanna take more pictures?” Lukas asks, leaning on Philip’s arm.

“In like…ten minutes, maybe,” Philip says, pulling the crown off again. “We’ve got Ellis Island and then we’re gonna go back home and I’m gonna make you dinner.”

Lukas laughs.

“Don’t laugh at the idea of me making you dinner.”

“I’m not,” Lukas says. “I’m…very excited.”

Philip scoffs. “Make fun all you want.”

“No, I’m—super excited for the Philip-loves-Lukas birthday special, whatever it may be.”

“Mhm, mhm.”

Lukas sits up as fast as he can in his diminished condition and cups Philip’s face, pressing a long, sloppy kiss to his mouth. Philip laughs, tangling one hand in Lukas’s hair, pulling him down a little bit and kissing him harder. When the kiss breaks Lukas lays down in Philip’s lap, staring up at him now rather than at the Statue of Liberty. “I’m proud of us. We seem like we’re pretty prepared for the wedding a whole year in advance.”

“Yeah,” Philip says. “Which is good, like—we have plenty of time to figure it all out and make sure it’s all right and what we want. Time to change shit if we need to. You know, like a DJ you think is creeping on your fiancé slash secret husband.”

Lukas snorts, covering his face. “Everything about that sentence.”

Philip laughs too and every time he hears it Lukas is sure he wants to bottle the sound—he could put it in a seashell, something he can hold to his ear in those rare moments when he’s alone, too far from Philip to draw the lyrical sound from him in real time. Lukas moves his hand and sees that the sun is behind Philip’s head, shimmering amongst the curls of his hair, the cold wind whipping through it.

“I think it’s so, so nice,” Philip says, “that your dad did that…for us, with the honeymoon.”

“Yeah,” Lukas says.

“And calling about it on your birthday is just…adorable.”

“I know you like it,” Lukas says, with a snort. “I can tell you’re really into the idea.”

“We don’t have to go,” Philip says. “If you don’t want to, we can—we’ll figure out something else—”

“We’re gonna go,” Lukas says, and Philip breaks out into a grin. “I’m gonna call him when we get home, before everybody comes over.”

“We’re gonna have our honeymoon in the Grand Canyon?” Philip asks, eyes wide.

“We’re gonna have our honeymoon in the Grand Canyon,” Lukas repeats. “Thanks to Dad. Overstepping and being cute at the same time.” He’s actually touched by it, when he stops to really look at the situation. It means a hell of a lot. Especially because it’s sentimental. Something that meant something to him, so he wants to pass it on to Lukas and Philip. It feels like the final state of acceptance. Putting them where he and mom once were. Where the three of them were as a family.

And Lukas loves how much Philip loves it.

“Thank you,” Philip says, leaning down and pressing a soft kiss to Lukas’s lips. “We’ve got so much to look forward to.”

Graduation. Philip’s exhibition. A couple races. Then everything that comes with the wedding, including the honeymoon a month later.

And then the future. Whatever that means.

Lukas arches up a little bit, nuzzling their noses together. “I can’t wait.”

#philkas #eyewitness #philip shea #lukas waldenbeck #my writing #the boys visit the statue of liberty #there are only three-four fics remaining in college verse my friends #then i'm writing that star AU and then y'all will be rid of me

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segadores-y-soldados · 7 years

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Uprising: Retcons and Analyses

It’s my lunch so forgive the fast formatting but here we go: Retconning: 1. Jack’s reason for enlisting is now confirmed to be the Omnic Crisis. Which changes a number of things. In his original backstory, Jack “wanted to return to the family farm after a brief stint in the Army, but was swept up in SEP, where he met Reyes.” But now that that’s gone, this makes Jack more “worldly” and more “motivated to fight for change” in the world. “New” Jack is much bigger, much more global than “original” Jack was. His sights are not set on returning to Indiana - his sights are set on saving humanity. 2. Genji was not in Blackwatch as far as I am aware. What is interesting is that this proves that not all Blackwatch missions were undertaken alone, since Overwatch would have also been involved in his rescue (when know Angela was on-hand or close by). Blackwatch and Overwatch also engage in joint training sessions. We can see that even though Lena is the main focus of the training, someone is monitoring Genji’s systems in the background. This effectively CONFIRMS that - at the very least - Jack Morrison was aware of SOME of the Blackwatch missions. This also heavily implies that - coupled with the “complaints by the Japanese government about Blackwatch” - Blackwatch was involved in the fall of the Shimada clan. 3. Liao is either entirely scrapped or has been reworked. I personally think it’s the former. They haven’t been mentioned in any comic thus far, and Torb and Rein consider “the old team” to consist of the Strike Team plus Angela. 4. I’m feeling fairly convinced that the promotion angle is getting massively reworked or toned down. Gabriel’s light banter and sass over Jack’s statues, the lack of voicelines around the promotion, the fact that it is LITERALLY never mentioned anywhere outside of the “original” article makes it fairly clear that - at least on the surface - nobody thinks Gabriel is mad about it. Gabriel himself acts nonchalant about the differences in their ranks. 5. Lena’s new timeline is VERY SHORT. Her time as an active agent would have been relegated to the last year of Overwatch’s existence (Present time = 6 years since Fall of Overwatch, Comic takes place “7 years ago”). This means that propaganda/promotional posters like the one in the Hero animation PROBABLY DON’T EXIST. Which is like. Really subtle next level retconning. Analyses 1. “They’re not extremists, Gabriel - they’re TERRORISTS.” How relevant. I’m convinced Gabriel and subsequently Reaper are now firmly in the Chaotic Gool-Neutral-Evil alignment. His whole speech about Omnic Rights is FASCINATING for his character because it shows that he is actually sympathetic or understanding of their behaviors on a different level than Reaper previously implied (“Tin cans, a dime a dozen”). This is VERY GOOD. His subtle implication that humanity - specifically the UK - has forgotten the origins of rights and freedoms is MASSIVE for him, and reflecting on that through a “minority being abused and denied rights” (a minority he ACTIVELY FOUGHT AND DEFEATED) is HUGE. This really pushes the theories of Reaper as a “Chaotic Good-Neutral” agent much further, especially if we consider that he may see Talon less as terrorists and more as “extreme anarchists.” This really greatly aligns with Sombra’s whole mortality alignment and Los Muertos’ “ideals.” Gabriel is 100% aware (and self-aware) of the issues. 2. Gabriel almost certainly does not want Blackwatch directly involved in this uprising. His crew is already in hot water, and he has to think about the safety of his agents and their plausible deniability in the face of a UN investigation. Gabriel’s lines about McCree “being on vacation” and “nothing you need to know” reads as him trying to defend McCree in the event something goes awry with the higher ups, while also giving Jack and Ana the ability to deny information as well. This, unfortunately, PUTS A MASSIVE TARGET ON HIM AND HIM ALONE. Gabriel being blamed or implied to be responsible for the fall of Overwatch by other people (namely higher ups) looks more and more realistic and possible. 3. Jack and Gabriel’s relationship (along with their friendship with Ana) is indicated as being deeper and extremely intimate. Things to note: Jack now being the only character to call him “Gabe” (which Sombra references), Jack being able to pull information out of Gabriel even after Gabriel and Ana engaged in some sassy banter, Jack referring to him as “Commander Reyes” in his discussion with Lena, Jack using the picture of the three of them to remind himself of “what’s important.” I’m not gonna say this is confirmation of a full on relationship between them, but they are absolutely close. This, combined with Reaper’s “I know your every move before you even think it” line from Old Soldiers and Reaper calling him “Jack” even after the fallout, is extremely telling. This is not an ordinary relationship between “coworkers.” 4. Jack listening patiently and calmly to Lena’s speech, being reminded of himself and his passions for defending and helping others...is very good. Very good for his character. A little less revolutionary than Gabriel’s speech about Omnics, but good and grounding nonetheless. This also helps humanize his whole “you need to slow down/okay dad” lines with Tracer in the game as more cute and familial than before. 5. The new timeline is BONKERS. HOLY SHIT. So things have started to break down - there’s investigations and complaints against Blackwatch, and growing criticisms against Overwatch. Other people have speculated that Gerárd has recently died based on the news headlines, but what this means is that the collapse of Overwatch happened FAST: within at least a year, Lena has her temporal problems, McCree leaves, Genji leaves, Ana “dies,” Gabriel and Jack have their “falling out,” etc. A YEAR. That’s ridiculously fast for an organization that’s been around for nearly three decades. This certainly implies that the conspiracy that brought Overwatch down was FAST and THOROUGH. Sowing the seeds of discontent quickly and efficiently, almost certainly breaking up the “joint-relationship” between Overwatch and Blackwatch within months. That’s insane. 6. My friend Sami pointed out that Jack’s office is simple and small - not ostentatious or large. He literally has nothing but a desk, a massive monitor, and some shelves in there. 7. Jack being willing to step out of line for “the greater good” makes him complicit in ignoring “orders” or breaking “the law.” This sets up a great parallel between him and Reaper, and other characters like Lúcio, the Junkers, Mei, McCree, and Winston. And we know that the “higher ups” spun this “overstepping his bounds” as forcing Overwatch as a policing agency onto the world. Soldier: 76/Jack not being “respected” for his hard-but-morally-correct decisions lends itself well to his jaded, bitter manner later in life. 8. GOD. DAMN. TEAM. UNIFORMS. YES. THANK YOU.

#uprising #references #my writing #my essays #jack morrison #gabriel reyes #overwatch #the squad #old soldiers

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the-domestication-of-the-dog · 6 years

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The 9th Annual L.A.O.K Awards

I’m no artist, but I did love art class growing up, and let’s just say I’ve won a few coloring contests in my day (God did I live for coloring contests). Let’s also say that in high school I did a watercolor of one of my stepmom’s nature photographs, and let’s say that it ended up in the yearbook. That watercolor was the crowning achievement of my many classes with Ms. Warren, our high school art teacher. Let me paint a picture of Ms. Warren for you: short spiky blonde hair, this pattern Gap button down every day, long denim skirt, and the unfaltering attitude of someone who was born to be an artist but instead ended up teaching ungrateful teenagers who called things “gay” around you even though you were clearly a lesbian.

Months after completing that watercolor, I began work on acrylic painting I’ll admit was uninspired, but I still gave it my best. The composition featured a bird on a branch in narrow focus, so that everything in the background was blurry, and I had planned on giving it to my mom as a Mother’s Day present. The problem was that I had no idea how to paint something out of focus, and instead of doing any research or asking my teacher how to do that, I just dove right in and painted from memory and tried to make the lines really soft. Here is that painting, which still hangs in my mother’s bedroom to my everlasting shame.

If you look closely, you might recognize that I cut my losses on this one. That’s because it was at this point in my progress when I fully realized I was in over my head and decided to ask Ms. Warren for some tips. She came over to my desk, looked at the painting for a good 10 seconds, and finally uttered two sentences I’ll never forget: “Garrett, sometimes in art you hit, and sometimes you miss. Your watercolor was a hit.” And she was off to the next student.

That said, sometimes a year in movies is a hit, and sometimes it’s a miss. 2017 was a hit. Now on to the next desk:

Best Film Eighth Grade The Favourite First Man Mary Queen of Scots Sicario: Day of the Soldado

First off, anyone who didn’t like Mary Queen of Scots can meet me in a laundry cottage halfway between England and Scotland in negative 460 years for another asskicking. What is there not to like about this movie? According to Ben Friday, extreme historical inaccuracy. Okay, if anyone comes up with any non-nerd reasons, please let me know. The second film in my top five that you’re going “Guh, what?” to: Sicario: Day of the Soldado, was actually very good, and it turns out everyone is wrong for thinking it’s not. Wow, definitive proof here (https://letterboxd.com/g_baby9000/film/sicario-day-of-the-soldado/). I also loved First Man’s slow burn. La La Land was a misstep for me from Damien Chazelle, but now I’m right back on the Chazelle train. Bravo for making an unconventional, understated historical biopic, which drives through its seeming monotony with an ever building tension that keeps it compelling from start to finish. Then there’s The Favourite, which continues Yorgos Lanthimos’s reign over this annual list. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the dictum came down to the Fox marketing department that they were going to go wide with this movie.

And the Layokie goes to… Eighth Grade

In the lead up to Eighth Grade I thought two things: 1) I hope it’s not that good because Bo Burnham’s age and career make me feel inadequate, and 2) It probably isn’t that good because everyone’s talking about how good it is. In LA, if you don’t see a movie until after its release date you are a total loser, and I went even a few weeks after that, so it was already sufficiently hyped. I honestly didn’t expect much from it, and it totally blew me away with it’s humor and heartwarmingness in a way that no other film matched in 2018. I’ll talk more about this great film below.

Next Five The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Cold War First Reformed Roma Shoplifters

Also Great Avengers: Infinity War Beautiful Boy Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Outlaw King The Rider A Star is Born Vice (Why does everyone hate Vice? My thoughts on Vice.)

Best Original Screenplay The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (1/6 adapted) Shoplifters - Hirokazu Koreeda Eighth Grade - Bo Burnham The Favourite - Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara First Reformed - Paul Schrader

And the Layokie goes to… Eighth Grade

Not to retread the obvious, but I think about Eighth Grade and its screenplay in much the same way as Avatar. Predictability and the use of stock plotting does not equate to bad writing, and even if you know exactly what’s going to happen (Kayla must end up with Gabe) it can be done in such a satisfying way that the story still sings (which is the reason why the same story lines continue to be retread). From early on, we can guess pretty much what Kayla’s arc will be, but the fact that it plays out in just the right way, so that you can’t really imagine it had the potential to be anything else, is what makes it such a high mark in screenwriting. Getting to this point in a screenplay is very difficult, because it’s usually only after figuring out the 50 paths not to go down that you realize the obviously correct one. When it finally clicks which Scene B should follow Scene A, the screenwriter too realizes that it couldn’t have been any other way, it just takes a lot of work to get there. I put Eighth Grade on for my second viewing while building an IKEA dresser a week or two ago, and it filled me with such glee. I was doubled over with laughter more than once and had to watch some scenes five times before I could move on.

Best Adapted Screenplay Annihilation - Alex Garland Beautiful Boy - Luke Davies and Felix van Groeningen Leave No Trace - Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini Mary Queen of Scots - Beau Willimon Sicario: Day of the Soldado - Taylor Sheridan

And the Layokie goes to… Mary Queen of Scots

Like I said above, I don’t really know anything about the historicity of this movie. Apparently the rabble-rousing preacher that everyone was supposed to hate actually was cool and founded my own church’s denomination? Anyway, I loved the way this was paced, only parsing out the information you absolutely needed and trusting you to catch up through its many jumps in time, expertly illustrated via cutbacks to Queen Elizabeth. The characters were complex (especially Elizabeth) and the dialogue was snappy. There’s nothing better than seeing someone in an authority position take someone’s shit just long enough before thoroughly dressing them down at the exact appropriate time, and Mary gets many such chances to shine thusly.

Best Director Damien Chazelle - First Man Alfonso Cuarón - Roma Yorgos Lanthimos - The Favourite Pawel Pawlikowski - Cold War Josie Rourke - Mary Queen of Scots

And the Layokie goes to… Alfonso Cuarón

Was tempted after another viewing to switch this to Damien Chazelle, but I had already written the following paragraph, and I’m too lazy to redo it. From the opening shot of Roma, two things are clear: you’re in the hands of a great director, and it’s a damn good thing you’re in a theater because it’s gonna be a long, slow ride. If you watched this on Netflix from start to finish without looking at your phone, I salute you (and I’ll say the same for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs). If you haven’t seen it on the big screen and live in LA, it’s currently playing at the Landmark and Vista, so check it out. Also how insane is it that Cuaron will likely win the Oscar in this category this year, making Mexican directors winners in this category 5 out of the last 6 years? Specifically, Cuaron, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro, who were already known as the Three Amigos long before going on this stretch?

Honorable Mention Ari Aster - Hereditary Alex Garland - Annihilation Paul Schrader - First Reformed Stefano Sollima - Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Best Actress Emily Blunt - Mary Poppins Returns Lady Gaga - A Star is Born Joanna Kulig - Cold War Thomasin McKenzie - Leave No Trace Soarise Ronan - Mary Queen of Scots

And the Layokie goes to… Soarise Ronan

I’ve talked about this before, but it seems so many years I struggle to come up with a good list of best actresses (while supporting actress overflows with abundance). I had wondered if I was just a misogynist, but it became clear to me over time that there just weren’t nearly as many films with females in starring roles, let along female protagonists. However, not only did I have trouble paring down my favorites to five this year, there were many more female-driven films I could have drawn from. I really felt like this was a year for women in film, and it was great. The idea that women/minority leads can’t drive box office success seems finally to be a thing of the past, and it’s about damn time. This all probably comes across as liberal posturing, but if you know me well you’ll understand it’s really born from my own selfishness. First, I don’t want special treatment over anyone because I highly value fairness, and the reason highly value fairness is mainly because I don’t want anyone else to get special treatment over me. Second, I don’t care if a story is about women, black people, Asian people, aliens, some fish, or a fuckin’ toaster, a good story is a good story, and I don’t want to miss out one because some marketing executive wants to save his ass. Not once have I ever been not able to get into a film because the protagonist was a different age/race/gender than me. Even though some of them aren’t on this list, Annihilation, Ocean’s 8, Thoroughbreds, Suspiria, Roma, The Favourite, Widows, and Mary Queen of Scots not only had female leads, but fully female-centric casts, and all were either da bomb, fairly da bomb, or da bomb-ish.

Honorable Mention Yalitza Aparicio - Roma Claire Foy - Unsane Claire Foy - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Best Supporting Actress Olivia Colman - The Favourite Tyne Daly - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Cynthia Erivo - Bad Times at the El Royale Nicole Kidman - Boy Erased Regina King - If Beale Street Could Talk

And the Layokie goes to… Tyne Daly

Pretty thrilled TBoBS is on Netflix, because I recently went back just to watch my favorite two segments: “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” and “The Mortal Remains.” Still not really sure what “The Mortal Remains” is all about ‘cause I’m not that smart about that kind of stuff, but damn did all five of them chew up the scenery, and none more so than Tyne Daly.

Honorable Mention Zoe Kazan - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Marina de Tavira - Roma Rachel Weisz - The Favourite

Best Actor Ethan Hawke - First Reformed Nicolas Cage - Mandy Ryan Gosling - First Man Viggo Mortenson - Green Book Christian Bale - Vice

And the Layokie goes to… Christian Bale

I didn’t hate Vice, but it seems like everyone else did. I also didn’t love The Big Short, but it also seems like everyone else did, somehow causing the people who loved The Big Short to hate the Vice. But I don’t think you can deny Christian Bale on this one, or at least I don’t think you can triumph Gary Oldman in The Final Hour or whatever it was called, but deny Christian Bale in Vice. (Scroll down to see that I didn’t triumph Gary Oldman last year, even though he might have deserved it.)

Honorable Mention Mahershala Ali - Green Book Bradley Cooper - A Star is Born Joaquin Phoenix - Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

Best Supporting Actor Robert Pattinson - Damsel Linus Roache - Mandy Timothée Chalamet - Beautiful Boy Harry Melling - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs John Malkovich - Bird Box

And the Layokie goes to… Timothée Chalamet

It’s about this time that I get tired of trying to come up with something to write for everyone of these, so I’ll take my comments of the air. Timothée Chalamet was great!

Honorable Mention Jake Ryan - Eighth Grade

Best Documentary The Dawn Wall Minding the Gap RBG Three Identical Strangers Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Syeeeke. Did I say I was done coming up with things to write? ‘Cause I got lots to say about this. First let’s get it out of the way. Free Solo is a mediocre documentary about some excellent subject matter. Jimmy Chin made another one of my favorite documentaries, Meru, that definitely did not get the acclaim it deserved, so if he finds that acclaim with Free Solo, then super. And if it wins the Oscar, I won’t be sad about it. What I will be sad about, is that another documentary, also about climbing El Capitan, The Dawn Wall, got totally overshadowed be Free Solo. I watched The Dawn Wall first, and I think that may have something to do with shaping how I felt about Free Solo, but The Dawn Wall had a better, more interesting, more likable protagonist, with a more interesting story to tell about himself and his climbing attempt and way better climbing material! Now, there’s no denying that climbing the full height of El Capitan without a rope is riveting, awe-inspiring, and completely insane, and the 5-10 minutes of Free Solo that actually cover that feat are impossible to top, but if for the other 90 minutes (both films are exactly 1:40) you’d like to watch a doc about climbing El Capitan, it has to be The Dawn Wall. If you’d like those 90 minutes to instead be about a whiny guy who lives in van, then by all means, champion Free Solo. I don’t want to say too much more about why I think it’s better, because I want people to see it and experience it. Hopefully it starts streaming soon. (And if you did see and like Free Solo, please check out Meru, which is currently streaming on Netflix.) The other docs were also great, and what a shame that Won’t You Be My Neighbor? didn’t get nominated for an Oscar, which made me cry evertim.

And the Layokie goes to… Duh, The Dawn Wall -- (See how the wall below makes Alex Honnold’s Free Rider route look like the freaking Aggro Crag from Nickelodeon’s GUTS?)

Best Foreign Film I only saw: Border Capernaum Cold War Roma Shoplifters

And the Layokie goes to… Shoplifters

Now, as always, on to the fun stuff:

Refuse to Watch Any more Clint Eastwood Movies

The 15:17 to Paris was truly a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back-breakingly bad movie. Literally worse acting and writing than some student films I’ve seen. And I’m not talking about the Student Academy Awards, I’m talking about the ones I watched from my own peers in my own undergrad film classes. And I’m not talking about some USC or UCLA film classes, I’m talking about University of Oklahoma film classes, where they actively did not give us film equipment to use, because we were a studies program and not a production program, even though no one there wanted to do anything but be writer/directors, and they seemed to resent us all for that fact so we had an edit bay in like an old closet or something and it was on one of the original iMacs with the hockey puck mouse and everything. The last tolerable Clint Eastwood move was Mystic River don’t @ me.

Great in Everything Award Joaquin Phoenix - You Were Never Really Here, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, The Sisters Brothers, (and when do we get to see Mary Magdalene??) Cynthia Erivo - Bad Times at the El Royale, Widows

Best Lesbian Rachel Weisz

Deserves Discussion Damsel

Hmm, a New Wave Anit-Western starring Robert Pattinson with folk dancing and real-life weirdo non-actors, an obvious grand slam slam dunk, right? Wrong. Boy do I wish I had known the Zellner Brothers were also the ones behind Kumiko the Treasure Hunter before going into this. I could have at least prepared myself for all the meandering. I don’t really mind meandering if it serves a story/theme, say like in another seminal film in the genre, Meek’s Cutoff, but you can miss me wit dat meandering for meandering’s sake. The script for Damsel is a great example of an antithesis for what made Eighth Grade so great. The meandering here is not only in the physical sense, but also in the story sense, where no scene absolutely had to happen, and nothing in particular means anything. You would think that a character strapping dynamite to themselves and walking a few miles would fill a theater with Hitchcockian dread and similarly provide a Hitchcockian catharsis when that character eventually blows up. Instead, it’s just one more in a long line of things happening that never add up to what we would call a “story.” Like in Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, the interesting parts that never make up a whole are in themselves still interesting, and I’ll forever be grateful for that film’s gift of the discovery of the Yamasuki Singers. In the same way, I’ll forever be grateful to Damsel’s opening credits sequence, the chance for another stellar character performance from R Patt, the incredible mise-en-scène, and for giving Mia Wasikowska another opportunity to put a mediocre film on her back and carry it to the finish line (what if some day she starred in a good movie??). Perhaps my harshest criticism of Damsel is also one of my proudest film-watching moments. The film’s true lead isn’t even featured on the poster; it’s a character named Parson Henry, portrayed by David Zellner. About 3/4 of the way in, I thought to myself, this actor is so absolutely lacking of anything you could call charisma, I bet it’s the director and he cast himself in the lead role, and you know what? It was. *sunglasses emoji*

Best Song All of the Stars

youtube

Best Score Tie: First Man and Isle of Dogs

Many LOLs Avengers: Infinity War Eighth Grade The Favourite Mandy

Most Surreal Movie-Watching Moment When me and Becca and Joe and Natalie went to see Rampage kind of as a joke when we had our Moviepasses so it was like whatev, and the theater was PACKED even though it was a week or two after it came out, and at one point The Rock is going in for a pound with the big white gorilla that he trained, and the gorilla fakes the pound, then flips off The Rock and starts gorilla-laughing at its gorilla antics, and the audience went. fucking. NUTS. Like it was the purest moment of comedy that ever existed. It was a Sullivan’s Travels-level eye-opener for me. Give the dumb galoots what they want, and what they want, is to see a gorilla give The Rock the finger.

Most Non-Fun Fun Movie Ready Player One

Please Stop Giving Melissa McCarthy’s husband bit parts in Melissa McCarthy movies (didn’t hate The Happytime Murders btw)

The Something Award Sorry to Bother You

The Nothing Award Crazy Rich Asians

Best Scenes Annihilation - Watching the camcorder footage Aquaman - Escaping the trench creatures Bad Times at the El Royale - Any time Darlene sings The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - All of “The Mortal Remains,” which was basically a single-scene segment Eighth Grade - Chicken nugget dinner The Favourite - The dance (putting my fingertips to my mouth then and then giving it a chef’s kiss: “MWAH”) First Man - the m-er f-ing moon landing (damn that was good, had me on the edge of my seat in both viewings) Free Solo - Despite what I said above, for a stand-alone scene, you cannot beat the final climb Incredibles 2 - Jack Jack/racoon fight The Girl in the Spider’s Web - the motorcycle escape Mandy - So many, but it has to be the Cheddar Goblin Mission Impossible: Fallout - The bathroom fight The Old Man & the Gun - When John and Forrest meet Outlaw King - When they finally(!) had sex A Quiet Place - The very beginning when the whole theater went silent Roma - Fermin’s naked martial arts, Fermin’s denial (so sad!), and the fire A Star is Born - v basic of me, but you cannot deny the first “Shallow” performance The Strangers: Prey at Night - The pool scene Upgrade - The first upgraded fight Won’t You Be My Neighbor? - A lot of them, but it has to be “It’s You I Like” at the end

Best Visuals Annihilation Cold War Mary Poppins Returns The Ritual

Worst Movie of the Year

The 15:17 to Paris (turnoff)

A Wrinkle in Time (walkout)

The Nun

Fireworks

The Meg

Winchester

Rampage

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Hold the Dark

Fahrenheit 451

Sadly Missed/Haven't’ Watched Yet At Eternity’s Gate Blaze Burning Destroyer The Kindergarten Teacher Lean on Pete Madeline’s Madeline Mid90s Never Look Away Private Life Support the Girls We the Animals The Wife

Absent on Purpose BlacKkKlansman Black Panther Blindspotting Bohemian Rhapsody

#layokies #movies #oscars

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corvidtales-blog · 6 years

Text

Late to the Party

Some more self indulgent crap because what isn’t.

Gabe and Jesse fucking Genji until he can’t remember his name pretty much

Contains: Trans!Genji, calling male identifying person’s genitals things like ‘pussy’ ‘cunt’ and ‘clit’ but also ‘cock’, humiliation kink, voyeurism and minor cuckhold depending on how you wanna look at it. Mentions of inhuman genitalia but halfway through I clearly forgot I was writing it but oh well this took a month to finish I dont even care

This fucker is 7 pages long in Open Office, fuckin enjoy

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If there was anything all of Blackwatch new about Gabriel Reyes is that he was one hell of a lewd fucker behind closed doors. Jesse was running late coming back from working on some training drills with Ana, leaving Gabe and Genji waiting in Gabe's room. Not that they hadn't found a way to occupy themselves while they waited.

Perched in Gabe's lap Genji was already squirming and panting, grinding his ass back against Gabe's hardening cock. Gabe had his hands up Genji's shirt, teasing his remaining nipple, which recently was regaining more and more sensitivity, and the commander was enjoying exploiting that. Presently that was all he was touching on Genji, and it was starting to drive the smaller man insane as he was starting to edge on over stimulation. A whimper escaped him, and he rut back against Gabe harder. “T-Too much” he finally gasped, squirming a little.

It got a chuckle out of Gabe, “Is it too much baby? I can't help it, this just started working again, I can't resist the way it makes you writhe” he pressed close to Genji's ear, whispering against it. “I bet your sweet pussy is already soaked, you love it when I tease you like this”

Genji hated how right Gabe was, and he squirmed again, this time more insistent.

That made Gabe click his tongue a little, “Tell me the truth, are your panties all wet already just from me playing with your nipple?” he rolled and pinched it before tugging a little, making Genji nearly sob, his back arching.

“F-Fuck a-ah yes! Yes, I am so wet, please” his voice cracked a little and his cheeks burned in humiliation. Not that he didn't /like/ being humiliated like this, Gabe would never hurt him genuinely. Finally relenting Gabe pushed a hand into Genji's sweatpants, rubbing two fingers against the crotch of the cyborg's panties. Crying out softly Genji spread his legs more, leaning back heavily against Gabe. “Oh, you really are soaked already baby” he cooed affectionately, starting to rub along the clothed seams of Genji's lips. Already his clit was swollen up enough to be felt through the material, but for now Gabe avoided it, much to Genji's frustration.

“You love me just touching you through your panties don't you? Fuck Shimada you really are a slut” Gabe chuckled again. “Bet that sweet pussy is ready to have my fingers pumping in and out of it, spreading you open. Mmm, but am I going to give you that just yet? I don't think so” he smirked and nibbled the shell of Genji's ear. “A-asshole” Genji growled, but fuck he felt his panties grow wetter the longer Gabe touched him. He knew the rules of Gabe's little games, no touching until Gabe gave you permission. So right now he was left fisting the hem of his sweatshirt, wringing it in his hands against every jolt of pleasure.

Gabe's touch immediately stopped, and Genji whined a little at the loss of sensation. “You know you can't get away with talking like that. Lay across my lap” Gabe's tone had turned stern, a little growl to it that made Genji's remaining skin prickle with goosebumps. He swallowed hard, but obeyed, laying across Gabe's lap. He was settled just a moment before Gabe was pulling his sweatpants down, cupping one of his ass cheeks in one hand. “For a ninja you've got a pretty plush ass” Gabe teased. Genji had really lucked out, and had only lost his legs from about the mid-thigh down, leaving his goods in tact. Sometimes he wished they had been ruined as well, but right now he was glad they were not. Gabe and Jesse made him feel good like this, and it made things a little easier on him. Even when they used degrading, dirty talk he loved every minute of it.

After a few moments of feather-light touches that made Genji shiver Gabe finally reared back and brought his hand down on the meat of Genji's left ass cheek, making the younger man yelp and jerk.

“Count. In English this time” Gabe purposely made it harder on Genji, knowing he lost his English sometimes during sex.

Genji's first words were a few soft curses before finally registering that he had to count, “One”.

“There, good boy, keep it up, you're getting ten of these. Forget to count and we start over” Gabe landed a blow to the other cheek, and Genji counted out the second strike.

The third was close to the first one and stung, making Genji hiss out a shuddering “Three”

Taking a momentary break Gabe took a moment to enjoy the fullness of Genji's ass, giving the more abused of the two cheeks a little squeeze. “I'm gonna enjoy having two handfuls of this while I plow you later”

Twitching a little at the thought Genji swallowed any smartass comments he had, he didn't want more punishment, not just yet.

“For now though,” Gabe smacked Genji's ass again, and Genji didn't miss a beat with counting. He didn't miss the next six either, much to his own amazement. Gabe praised him for it, rubbing his hand gingerly over Genji's redden asscheeks.

“I think you did well enough that you deserve to have me continue. Lift your hips a little and spread your legs” Gabe instructed, and Genji didn't hesitate one bit, spreading his legs as wide as he could and tilting his hips back to give Gabe better access to him.

“You're behaving tonight, looks like you're starting to learn” Genji had been defiant in the beginning, being a little shit really, but it hadn't taken long for him to realize that not back talking Gabe got him what he wanted a lot faster.

Pushing Genji's panties aside Gabe cooed softly, “Shit sweetheart, I bet you could already take two of my fingers all the way to the knuckle, you're that soaked. You really like your cute little chest played with that much?” Genji almost replied with words, but two of Gabe's fingers were pushing his folds apart, teasing his wet hole. “Hmm, but what would be more pretty, plunging these deep into your sweet hole, or stroking that precious little cock of yours?” his fingers trailed upwards, rubbing along the underside of Genji's swollen clit.

Genji gasped loudly, hips jerking. “A-ahh, yes, please!” he loved the way Gabe talked about that part of him.

Obliging Gabe gingerly took Genji between his thumb and first finger, putting just a little pressure on either side as he started to stroke slowly. Keening loudly Genji jerked into Gabe's hand, his head jerking back a bit before once again pressing his forehead against the plush armrest of the couch.

“I could probably tease you like this for hours, couldn't I? You can't cum if your pussy is empty, I know you can't. You need something to /clench/ around. You need something pounding into you, fucking filling you up right” Gabe stroked Genji a little faster, leaving the younger man nearly speechless. “If you ask real nice I might just give your hungry hole something to satisfy it”

Almost immediately soft pleas were tumbling from Genji's lips, “I want more, I want you inside me” Gabe had fucked him a few times already and Genji couldn't get enough of it.

“Mmm, not yet princess” Gabe snorted. “You don't get my cock unless Jesse is here to watch you bobbing on it. You both get off to it. He likes watching his sweet little boyfriend be broken in by his commander, likes watching me raw you. He even loves the way I stretch out that tight little pussy before I let him have a turn with you”

“Your fingers then, please, Gabriel I am so empty!” Genji nearly sobbed, Gabe had been teasing him too long, he felt like his mind was slowly slipping away.

“Well, you did ask so nicely” Gabe stopped stroking him and moved down to his slick hole again. He pressed one finger in, drawing a soft mewl of pleasure from Genji. He took the first finger so easily that Gabe gave him a second immediately after. “Look at you, I was right. Your cunt is swallowing my fingers all the way to the knuckle. Greedy little thing, aren't you?”

Genji was lost for words, clawing at the couch, rocking back against Gabe's fingers. “I can take more, please I can take more” the soft begging came between pants and moans that increased in volume each time Gabe pumped his fingers inside Genji.

“This is all you are getting until Jesse gets here, don't worry, he should be here any minute. Until then, I'm going to finger fuck you until you can't think straight” Gabe purred, taking his time with thrusting his fingers, moving at an almost agonizingly slow pace that made Genji nearly grind his teeth in frustration.

The door to Gabe's quarters opening and closing was the most blessed sound Genji had ever heard. He craned his neck to look over his shoulder to see if he could spot Jesse. He couldn't past Gabe and he huffed. Gabe didn't stop, and in fact started to fuck Genji a little harder, spreading his fingers and drawing a loud moan from him. Jesse let out a low whistle as he moved from the entrance hall into the living room. “Well shit, I'm more late to the party than I thought” he was trying to keep his cool, but he could already feel his cock twitching to life as he watched Gabe's fingers sink into and pull out of Genji's soaking hole.

“I've got him all warmed up for you. I think he could use your mouth, poor baby is dying to cum” Gabe smirked and spread his fingers more, making Genji scream in pleasure and clench around him, trying to cum. Gabe was quick to pull his fingers out. Thrashing and growling in frustration Genji punched the arm rest. “Why did you stop?” he gasped accusingly.

Gabe didnt give him an answer, he just pulled him up by the back of his hoodie and shoved him onto his back against the couch. “Come and get him Jesse. Mouth only, make him cum” Gabe wanted a show.

Jesse loved nights like this, he loved seeing Genji this far gone. “Hey sugar” he cooed softly as he came to join him on the couch, already peeling off his shirt and tossing it aside. “You look so good like this” he licked his lips, hungry gaze on the slick covering Genji's thighs. Genji gazed up at his boyfriend, biting his lower lip a little. He spread his legs to give Jesse a better look. “Jesse please, it aches” he knew how to get what he wanted out of Jesse, and it was to pout and bat those long lashes of his.

Oh, and was Jesse ever played like a fiddle by the younger man. He was crawling between Genji's legs immediately “Fuck sugar I'm never gonna say no to suckin' your sweet lil' cock”. Laying on his stomach he positioned Genji's legs over his shoulders, leaning in to lick at him, teasing his hole a little first, still a little open from all of Gabe's attention. Genji's toes curled and he gasped, his prosthetic hand clutching the couch while his other one fisted Jesse's hair. That encouraged Jesse, his tongue flicking up higher to brush against Genji's clit, circling it slowly. He pulled back just a little to lick his lips. “I think yer getting a bit bigger babe” maybe he was, or maybe Gabe had just been teasing him so long that he was more engorged than usual. “Less talking more sucking, Jesse” Gabe knew Jesse was prone to getting lost in the moment and breaking the scene a little. Hadn't been a problem before Genji arrived, but the cowboy was so over the moon for his little cyborg ninja. “Lo siento” Jesse murmured and went back to licking and sucking hungrily at Genji's cock, drawing louder and louder sobs of pleasure from his lover the longer things went on. Genji was thrashing now, pulling hard at Jesse's hair, hardly able to form words. “I need....I need to cum Jesse, please!” Genji really was close to sobbing he needed release that badly. Giving the underside of Genji's cock a little apologetic kiss Jesse trailed lower, pushing his lips apart with his tongue so he could plunge into Genji's already clenching hole. Hungrily he licked his way in, his tongue pressing in deeper with each stroke. Once he had had a good taste of the cyborg Jesse began to alternate sucking him off with plunging his tongue into him until finally, while lapping deeply at him Genji came with a scream, curling around Jesse for a moment before thrashing against the couch, his hips bucking wildly as he role out the orgasm. Jesse did his best to keep up, his tongue still working Genji any way he could until finally Genji was pushing him away, whimpering that it was too much.

Pulling back Jesse licked his lips and wiped Genji's slick out of his facial hair. “Shit sweetheart, yer beautiful when you come undone like that” He had nearly nutted just listening to Genji cum, from feeling him thrash under him. “Good boy, Jesse” Gabe praised, making the other two jolt a little, they had forgotten about their audience. Sitting in the arm chair adjacent to the couch Gabe had been watching them, stroking his cock lazily, just enough to keep hard. “C'mere, let's give him a few minutes to recover. Let him watch us a little” Nodding Jesse leaned up to steal a quick kiss from Genji, who mewled softly, not wanting to let Jesse go. His head was still fuzzy, almost forgetting that things were far from over. It wasn't over until both Gabe and Jesse used him for their pleasure. Moving over to sit on the arm of Gabe's chair Jesse waited for more instructions. “Strip” was the simple command he was given and Jesse was kicking off his boots, and peeling off his pants and socks faster than any man had the right to be able to. “Go on, show Genji just how riled up his moans make you” Genji had rolled onto his side to watch the pair, his eyes falling to Jesse's cock, and oh his stomach clenched a little. Jesse was full mast already, precum making the head slick, his knot already starting to swell up. Loving that hungry look on him Jesse started to stroke himself, moaning Genji's name under his breath. “Shit darlin lookit what you do to me. I can't get enough'a ya” Swallowing hard Genji felt himself pulse a little. He had a fast recovery time, and already he was starting to feel the tingles of arousal. “Funny that, I cannot get enough of you either” Genji's tone was still breathy, his skin still flushed. He dared brush his thumb against his clit, and he whined softly, still a little over sensitive. He let his fingers dip lower, pressing two into himself, gasping, oh now that felt good. He locked eyes with Jesse, and the two started to touch themselves in time with each other as best they could. Gabe loved every moment of this, and there was a little bit of smug satisfaction in knowing that he could have both of them eating out of his hand. “Take three, Genji, you're taking my cock next” More than happy to oblige Genji keened loudly as he pressed a third digit into himself, panting from how the stretch felt so good. “Damn darlin that's so good, lookit how full you are already” Jesse loved laying the praise onto Genji, loved the way it made him blush all the way down to his chest.

Getting up Gabe had Jesse take his place. “Remember, you're only allowed to cum inside him” “I know I know” Jesse grumbled, it was so hard not to when Gabe got going, the things he said to Genji, the sounds he made the smaller man make. It was all too much at times. Genji was already scooting back against the arm rest of the couch, making room for Gabe. He had stopped fingering himself and spread his legs invitingly. “I have been good, do I get my reward now?” he could sort of play Gabe the same way he did Jesse, but really only because Gabe let him. “You sure do,” Gabe hooked his arms under Genji's thighs, lifting him and dragging him closer. “Think you can take me just like this?” he had pulled Genji practically into his lap, his cock nudging up against Genji's soaking wet hole. Biting his lower lip and nodding eagerly Genji didn't trust his words at first. “Please, fuck me” Genji finally choked out as he ground himself against Gabe's cock, his own still over sensitive one making him quiver from the friction. Guiding himself against Genji's entrance Gabe popped just the head of his cock in before he paused, taking a moment to enjoy how good Genji looked splayed out under him. “Is this what you want? You want my thick cock inside your messy boy pussy?” he knew it drove both Genji and Jesse wild when he said shit like that. Sure enough Genji's hips bucked and tried to take more of Gabe into him. Chuckling Gabe gave Genji what he wanted, sinking into him pretty quickly, after all the prep and teasing he was more than ready for this.

Watching them Jesse's gaze was so hungry for both of them, either of them. “Fuck sugar you look so good like this, comin' undone like this” he knew he was allowed to stroke himself slowly, keep himself interested, not that it was hard too with the way Genji moaned. An idea struck Gabe, and he pulled out of Genji and sat up, sitting on the couch properly. “In my lap, now” he ordered the cyborg. Initially Genji had whined when Gabe pulled out, but now he was scrambling into the older man's lap eagerly, straddling him and almost immediately sinking back down onto Gabe with an obscenely loud moan. Jesse was pretty sure his mouth watered a little. “Shit sweet thing, feels good don't it? You feelin' nice n' full? Like he's even bigger like that?” he liked to join in with Gabe's dirty talk knowing full well it made Genji's head spin. Beyond words Genji just started to bob on Gabe's cock, holding onto his shoulders for leverage, shouting in pleasure when Gabe started to roll his hips up to meet Genji's pace. Gabe meanwhile continued to whisper utter filth against Genji's ear, making him squirm and cry out and beg softly.

“Keep it up Genji, just like that, fuck you're a good little cocksleeve. I bet you're this wet because you know Jesse and I are going to fuck your sweet little hole until we're satisfied” Gabe was starting to pant and groan, he was close now, just a few thrusts and his hips jerked hard, stilling inside Genji as he came with a growl. Genji felt that wave of heat fill him and he choked, he wanted to cum so badly, but Gabe hadn't touched his cock at all and he needed the stimulation to finish. He pleaded for it softly, his body throbbing painfully. He was silenced when Gabe pulled out with a groan and he mourned the feeling of being empty. “Stay there, lean forward and brace yourself against the back of the couch” Gabe slipped out from under him and moved over to Jesse. “Looks perfect like this doesn't he, with my cum running out of him? You're such a bad boy Jesse, look how hard you are from watching someone else raw your boyfriend” reaching down Gabe pumped him a few times, drawing a moan out of Jesse that made Genji shiver. “Go clean him up before you have your turn with him” he shoved Jesse a little. Getting the message Jesse was out of the arm chair and could barely remember how to use his legs to cross the short gap to the couch. Gabe took Jesse's place to watch like a content cat.

Falling to his knees behind Genji Jesse pushed his thighs apart more, loving how they shivered and how Genji's breath hitched. “You've been doin so good baby” leaning in he swiped his tongue along Genji's folds, licking down to his hole, lapping at Gabe's cum as it leaked out, mixed with Genji's own fluids. Moaning a little Jesse made quick work of eating Genji out until he was thrashing and could take it no more. Actual tears were trickling down Genji's cheeks and his thighs were shaking. “Jesse please, please it hurts so much I need to...Please fuck me, please cum in me I just want to cum so badly” his words were broken, almost unintelligible in places, but Jesse understood and he came to kneel one knee on the couch, lining himself up with Genji's entrance he took things slow, he knew Genji was probably getting raw and sore by now, even if he claimed he loved it when they fucked him to this point. He took his time easing up into his boyfriend, pulling him back against his chest a little, kissing over his neck and shoulders. “You've done so good Genj, you're almost there” he very gingerly started to stroke Genji's cock, drawing needy cries out of the smaller man. “That's right lemme hear you sing for me, song bird” the nickname always made Genji keen and flush, his eyes screwing shut. “You're beautiful Genj, you really are I can't get enough'a ya” Jesse started to pick up his pace, mostly letting Genji dictate their pace with how he was riding him. “Nice view of your ass, Jesse” Gabe had the ruin the moment a little. Huffing Jesse rolled his eyes, but pulled out of Genji who nearly shouted in protest. Jesse flopped down next to him. “C'mon sweet thing, he wants to see my cock vanishin' into you. Go on 'n face him an' we'll do it like that” Genji could hardly get his legs to work but he managed to get himself into Jesse's lap and sink back down onto his cock, choking out a needy sob. Fuck he just wanted to cum already. “There you go Genji, that's it” Jesse praised as he started to rock back up into him. This angle gave Genji much better stimulation and his head fell back against Jesse's shoulder as he reached behind them to cling to the couch for leverage, but really at this point he was at the mercy of Jesse's thrusts, he was becoming too exhausted to move on his own. Holding Genji by the hips Jesse was happy to take charge, giving it to Genji fast and hard just like he knew he needed it. “Go on darlin' touch yourself, I wanna feel you clenchin' before I cum” Genji didn't have to be told twice, one of his hands flying between his legs rubbing and stroking himself, his voice getting higher and breathier until finally he screamed, his walls clenching around Jesse as he finally got the release he needed. Jesse didn't last after that, a few more thrusts and he was there, too, biting down on Genji's shoulder as he filled him, panting and murmuring sweet nothings he wouldn't even recall saying later.

Slumped against Jesse Genji hardly was registering that his boyfriend was petting his hair and murmuring to him. He just nuzzled against where Jesse's neck and shoulder mean, hiding his face there. He was so tired now. Jesse eased out of him with a groan, and Genji whimpered at the feeling. He jolted a little when Gabe came over to get him cleaned up, relaxing when Jesse started to pet his hair again. “You both did so good tonight” Gabe murmured the praise as he kissed the top of Genji's forehead, and then leaned over him to kiss Jesse's temple. “I'll get your pillows and blankets so you kids can crash here tonight” he mused and left the hand towel with Jesse to get himself cleaned up as he was no where near as wrecked as Genji was. Once Gabe was back with the pillows and blankets Jesse moved Genji to the arm chair for a moment, he had put his shirt on him, loving how Genji was swimming in it he was so small in comparison. Jesse put together a nice little nest and brought Genji into it, holding him against his chest and tucking a fuzzy blanket around him. Genji had been dozing in and out the whole time, and just let Jesse position him how he wanted, nodding back off moments after he was moved. “Te amo” Jesse murmured into Genji's hair, sighing a little. He still hadn't been able to bring himself to say it while Genji was awake...

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