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makeste · 4 years

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BnHA Chapter 285: You Looked Like You Needed Saving

Previously on BnHA: Deku was all, “hey guys I’m just gonna fight Tomura one on one and risk my own life rather than risk letting him do the whole Destroying Everything bit again.” Kacchan was all “WAIT NO ARE YOU SERIOUS THAT’S THE EXACT THING I HATE THE MOST” and indignantly launched into his “P.S. I CARE ABOUT DEKU” flashback, which was a revelation in that it proved exactly what Bakugou fans have been saying this whole time, AND YET OUR MINDS WERE STILL BLOWN ANYWAY, BECAUSE HOLY SHIT, HE REALLY WENT AND SAID IT OUT LOUD THOUGH. Anyway, so Deku’s strategy for defeating Tomura is to, you guessed it, break his fucking arms again; and meanwhile a frantic Katsuki is gearing up on the sidelines to do something really awesome and incredibly stupid, probably; and all in all it’s a pretty terrible situation our boys have found themselves in. Terrible for them, but GREAT for me, and I’ve never been so hyped in my life omg.

Today on BnHA: Deku breaks both of his arms like a dozen times over. Like, just pages and pages of arm breaking. Just like in the good old days! Meanwhile Kacchan is all “jesus christ, okay you know what would be a better idea, JUST SETTING HIM ON FIRE AGAIN”, and so he grabs Shouto and Endeavor, and they do a whole Prominence Burn combo thing. The AFO-inside-of-Tomura is all “‘sup it’s me again, but seriously now would be a REALLY good time to let me take over your body”, and so Tomura TOTALLY DOES LET HIM TAKE OVER, WHOOP, and so AFO is all “HELLS YEAH.” And then he STRAIGHT UP STABS MY SON, WHOSE BODY WAS SIMPLY MOVING ON ITS OWN, YOU KNOW, JUST HERO THINGS. Anyway so now Kacchan is fucking dead*, and so if I were AFO I would start putting as much distance as possible between myself and Deku right the fuck now, because boy, IF YOU THOUGHT HE WAS MAD BEFORE? Holy shit. We’re about to see a whole new level aren’t we.

LOL WE’RE OFF TO A GRAND OLD START

Deku’s arms should sue for legal emancipation. I think most of us can agree that they’re probably better off without him. sure they’ll have to buy their own food and stuff, but I think the trade-off is more than fair

oh wow that 100% shit really is something though

too bad it did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!! spoiler alert. I don’t even have to scroll to the next page, Deku. we already know

OH MY GOD ARE YOU SERIOUS

did Deku really pull off some “three hits in one” bullshit, or is this a mistranslation referring to the fact that Deku’s already hit him twice with his left arm, and so this is now the third 100% hit. kinda hoping for the latter, ngl. either way though, I’m really getting a “Deku’s arms are legitimately done for” vibe from this

ESPECIALLY SINCE:

DEKU YOU SHRUB!!! WAS IT WORTH IT YOU EGG FDKF KKDJ YOU DON’T GET BONUS POINTS FOR BREAKING THEM TWICE

goddammit I’m pretty sure he just Detroit Smashed the last remaining hero brain cell. now they have diddly squat to work with, oh this is bad

...

do you guys remember a few weeks back when I was joking about him breaking the rest of his bones and using Blackwhip to move his shattered body around like a grotesque marionette. do you specifically remember the part where that was a joke

holy shit Deku. it’s like we’re all the way back to square one with you. wasn’t that like the first thing Aizawa taught you, not to break your whole body apart? how are you supposed to fight Tomura if you can’t move?? why didn’t you wait for one of your pals who could hit him with an attack from long range WITHOUT BREAKING EVERY SINGLE BONE IN THEIR BODIES. WHERE DID YOUR BIG HERO BRAIN GO

boy you better pray one of those remaining quirks is a healing factor, or else you’re gonna be on IR for a LONG time. anyway. idk why I’m getting so worked up when I already knew this was going to happen lol. it’s just like Katsuki said; he takes himself out of the equation. it’s worth sacrificing his own body if it means he can take out AFO and prevent Tomura from hurting anyone else again. it’s just that... well. you know that saying about taking calculated risks when you are bad at math?

GUH I REALLY HATE THAT TOMURA IS STILL COMPLETELY FINE KSKWOILWKKJ AT LEAST PRETEND TO BE A LITTLE HURT, WOULD YOU

please ignore all of those worried-sounding thoughts; I think we all know that’s a bunch of bullshit. completely and utterly fine. the only person Deku’s attacks hurt was himself. hip hip hooray

anyway. so now, this!

pretty sure he can’t use Decay or AFO without at least touching SOMETHING, so I’m guessing this is another one of his new quirks. dammit Tomura why are you so fucking invincible

HAHAHA MEANWHILE

if I were you, Deku’s Arms, I would simply detach from his body altogether at this point. cut my losses. mmm

OOF HE HIT HIM WITH THE WHOLE OF TEXAS

spoiler alert: again, it did nothing. SORRY TO KEEP RUINING THE SUSPENSE FOR YOU GUYS. is there a single human being reading this who thought for even for the milliest of seconds that this stood a chance of working though

OH MY GOD

DEKU GET IT TOGETHER YOU’RE STARTING TO LOOK LIKE THE ENIGMA OF AMIGARA FAULT AND I CAN’T STAND THIS ACTUALLY

so Tomura is all “there must be something I can do to stop this fucking kid” and shuffling through his quirk pokedex while he’s tossed around bleeding in the air

hey Tomura I’ll tell you right now that you don’t actually need to do a damn thing except not die for roughly the next thirty seconds or so, and then you’ve got this. the quirk that can stop this kid is called “One for All”, and it just so happens he’s already got you covered bruh

and Katsuki’s realized the same thing, apparently!

SHOUTO YOU’RE NOT EVEN LOOKING?? wow that is some trust right there. focused on cauterizing Gran and Aizawa’s wounds, I guess

MEANWHILE KATSUKI IS PULLING OUT ALL THE STOPS. HE FOUND A NEW BRAIN CELL! A WHOLE DAMN CACHE OF FRESH NEW BRAIN CELLS, LOOK AT THIS

THANKS FOR THAT, PROFESSOR

OH SHIT SON ARE WE MOUNTING A COUNTERATTACK?

I like how Endeavor is just SITTING THERE in the background looking all disgruntled. yes, sorry about that sir, this is now Kacchan’s show. he’s in charge now. time for that long-range attack I was complaining about them not doing earlier?? hopefully?? omg

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS IT’S A BAKUROKI TRIPLE COMBO?!?!

ARE YOU GOING TO YEET THEM A LA GANG ORCA?? ALSO OH MY GOD, HE REALLY IS IN CHARGE. FIRST DEKU TOOK OVER FOR TWO MINUTES UNTIL HE BROKE ALL HIS BONES, AND NOW IT’S KACCHAN’S TIME. I’M SO PROUD OF YOU KIDS

LOL SHOUTO’S GETTING IN ON THIS TOO

THIS JUST IN, THE KIDS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE MANGA, ADULTS OF BNHA IN SHAMBLES

WELL MAYBE NEXT TIME DON’T LET AIZAWA GET SHOT THEN, YOU HAT!!!

WOOP OKAY WE FLYING NOW

Kacchan, tired of sitting back watching Deku invent new ways to die, decides to improvise a few of his own. hmmmmmmm

(ETA: HE LEARNED FROM THE BEST ORZ.)

OKAY WAIT A MINUTE NOW

why does this sound like he’s planning something on his own after the Todorokis have done their part. KACCHAN. EXCUSE ME, KACCHAN

SDLFKJLKJLJ

OKAY HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE

IS THIS LEADING WHERE I THINK IT’S LEADING, HOLY --

-- ooOF

I WASN’T FUCKING READY FOR THAT ONE. BAKUBULLYING FROM HIS OWN NOW-REMORSEFUL POV. SHIT. FUCKING FELT THAT. HERE I THOUGHT YOU WERE BUILDING UP TO AN “ALL FOR ONE FOR ALL” REVEAL, AND THEN YOU GO AND PULL THAT INSTEAD, WHAT’S GOING ON

-- HOLD UP WE’RE NOT DONE WITH THIS ONE YET MAYBE!!

“ONE FOR ALL IS”??!? KDSLFJAKLSJLKJLKJL AND THEN INTERRUPTING ME WITH THE CUTE BABIES WATCHING THE ALL MIGHT FOOTAGE, OH MY GOD. I’M JUST WILDLY REACTING TO EVERYTHING THAT’S BEING THROWN AT ME RIGHT NOW LMAO I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE THIS IS LEADING

OOF THE NOTEBOOK

KACCHAN THIS ISN’T EVEN YOUR MEMORY HONEY, GET IT TOGETHER

OH MY GLOB

THIS IS THE MOST NONSENSICAL SEQUENCE OF PANELS RIGHT NOW. I’M SURE THIS IS ALL SHORTLY GOING TO COME TOGETHER IN SOME PROFOUND WAY THAT’S GOING TO KICK MY EMOTIONS SQUARE IN THE BALLS, BUT RIGHT NOW I’M JUST ALL “OOH AHH” LIKE SOME HAPLESS RUBE ALONG FOR THE RIDE. p.s. this chapter still doesn’t have a title!! p.p.s. Horikoshi is a knave

(ETA: HORIKOSHI IS A FUCKING MALFEASANT!!)

I CAN’T TAKE THIS??

PLEASE STOP BUILDING UP TO WHATEVER IT IS YOU’RE BUILDING UP TO AND JUST SAY IT ALREADY, I’M DYING OMG

...and we’re cutting back to the action. godfuckingdammit it’s gonna be one of those chapters where the entire thing is just buildup to some huge reveal on the very last page isn’t it

(ETA: [sounds of screaming heard in the distance])

anyway so this next page is just Deku flying in the air, and Tomura flying through the air, and Endeavor+Katsuki+Shouto flying through the air, and everyone’s flying through the air, and we’re all just flying. TALK TO ME MORE ABOUT THE CURSE OF OFA DAMN IT

OOHHHHHH

guess if it was good enough for Hood, it’s probably their best shot huh. better than whatever the fuck Deku was trying to pull at any rate

OOP

gotta admit, if I didn’t already know full well that Tomura could not possibly die here, I’d have been pretty convinced he was dying here lol

DSFKJL ENDEAVOR BUDDY YOU MIGHT HAVE POSSIBLY OVERDONE IT JUST A BIT

wait... is that Blackwhip...?? or???

OH SHIT

WHAT EVEN IS THIS CHAPTER, COME ON

-- FMMMJAKAKJDJL, UM

TIME TO SCROLL BACK UP TO THAT PANEL OF TOMURA BEING MELTED, AND READ WHAT AFO WAS SAYING A LITTLE MORE CAREFULLY LMAOOOO. LOL. WHOOPS. OH NO KATSUKI WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

AHHHHHHHH

WHAT’S WITH THE NARRATION SQUARE ALL OF A SUDDEN AHHHHHH

oh my fresh and citrusy lord. this is it isn’t it. all of my theories converge at once. Tomura being possessed by AFO; OFA is AFO/Deku has AFO; Katsuki does something stupid and loses his quirk. THE PERFECT STORM. THEORY SINGULARITY

oh my lord oh my god oh my lord oh my god honey what are you doing, honey, no

his body’s moving before he can think. WHAT ARE THESE FLASHBACKS OF ALL HIS DEKU RELATED MEMORIES. BULLYING DEKU, BEING SAVED FROM THE SLUDGE MONSTER, RECONCILING WITH HIM AT GROUND BETA, OH MY GOD. I’M NOT READY. [WRAPS MYSELF IN A BLANKET BURRITO AND SLOWLY SCROLLS DOWN FROM THE SAFETY OF MY COCOON]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HORIKOSHI KOUHEI: [LOADS GUN WITH CHAPTER TITLE AND AIMS DIRECTLY FOR MY HEART]

ME: [SWEATING]

HORIKOSHI: [SMILES, REACHES FOR THE TRIGGER... AND THEN SUCKER PUNCHES ME SQUARE IN THE FACE]

excuse me WHAT. PARDON, THE FUCK. WHY ARE THE FIRST FEW LONE PIANO NOTES OF ADELE’S “SKYFALL” PLAYING. WHAT THE FUCK

excuse me, Horikoshi. excuse me, could I just -- could I get. COULD I JUST GET A WORD WITH YOU FOR A MINUTE. SIR

son of a. ...how am I even supposed to wrap this up. just

sob okay. so let’s just. ...

All for One 100% just took Tomura’s body over. like, he was all “Tomura, you’re fucking dying, just give me your body you muppet”, and Tomura couldn’t really argue on account of he really was dying, and so, YOINK. which is the sound that a body makes when it’s being taken over, I think

All for One then activated his forced activation quirk?? which OF FUCKING COURSE he passed on to Tomura as well. so THAT’S JUST GREAT

Kacchan is seriously the fastest character in the series. the reflexes, the sheer speed necessary to intercept that hit? goddamn

every single one of those BakuDeku flashbacks are now wanted by the FBI for first-degree murder of me

this has nothing to do with Kacchan fucking dying and stuff, but is it just me or were there HUGE “Kacchan as Bakugou’s hero name” vibes earlier on in this chapter with the flashbacks to Deku explaining the meaning behind his own name, HMM

and speaking of, this is the first time we’ve gotten Kacchan narrating in the little box panels, unless I’m completely mistaken somehow. Horikoshi really waited almost 300 whole chapters to do that. and it was worth it. holy shit

fun fact, this moment is something that’s been on my wishlist since chapter 12 lol, you can go back and check the recap if you want. back then I called it a long shot. oh how the times have changed

I DON’T KNOW HOW I’M EVEN SO STUNNED ABOUT THIS, GUYS. this is exactly what I predicted at the end of the last chapter. MY CHILD IS DUMB. THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT. HE’S THAT EXACT KIND OF SHOUNEN DUMB. WE’VE KNOWN IT ALL ALONG

oh my god. and now Deku’s gonna go ham, arms or no arms. AND BETS ON WHICH NEW QUIRK HE’S ABOUT TO UNLOCK? because the last time someone so much as insulted Kacchan in his presence, he SPONTANEOUSLY GREW SHADOW TENTACLES OUT OF THE BLUE AND ATTEMPTED TO MURDER THE PERSON. so if this kid has got ANYTHING left up his sleeve, I have to imagine that SEEING HIS PRECIOUS CHILDHOOD FRIEND TAKE A DEADLY ATTACK MEANT FOR HIM is gonna leave him feeling SOME KINDA WAY. I literally have no idea what’s going to happen next but I would not count this angry little broccoli out yet. not as long as he’s still conscious

anyway. so I wonder what’s the world record for continuous screaming, and whether or not I could break said record by doing such nonstop from now until a week from now when I finally get to read the next chapter

...lol apparently the record is only 8 mins and 45 seconds so GOOD NEWS GUYS, WITH THE POWER OF THIS NEW CHAPTER, WE ARE GOING TO MAKE HISTORY. DEEP BREATH. -- AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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cottoncandyreaper · 3 years

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(A story that I've been working on for a month now! I present to you: Heisenberg's Child)

She couldn't be fucking serious; she couldn't be absolutely fucking serious!? Years of pain, fears and dealing with this bullshit family as I'm standing here staring her right in the eyes and she's telling me that she created another near perfect vessel...with my fucking dna!? Not some cadou filled corpse but personally, my blood, my semen...she stole from me and I never even fucking knew it. It could have been a plan from the very beginning for all I knew; no other explanation worked in my mind.

"The child is being transported here to Romania thanks to Umbrella themselves, they are to hand deliver her to us."

"Why would we trust those, dogs mother Miranda? When they have only proven to want to kill you."

Alcina's voice held annoyance of the topic being about something regarding myself but she hid it well. Almost.

"Humans are frail of mind child, if you promise them anything worth gold they will bend to any request."

Her words no matter how she put them held a secretive meaning behind them; she had more planned then what she was leading on about and that's what I hated the most about her was all the damn secerts.

"Now why would this giant monster of a company need this...kid as a trump card?"

"Because the child has gained your ability through genetics my son and it seems they are very good at using it. You, dear Heisenberg have a unique and strong gift that has sparked fear in the eyes of many. Although given to you, seeing that a child can be born from you possessing the same gift only bods destruction once they are here with us."

Experimentation gave me this 'gift' oh so graciously without my want for it; hearing that it seeped so low as to embedding itself into my genes pissed me the fuck off more then I thought anything else in the world could. And hearing that it passed down to the unwanted next generation was even more then I couldn't have hoped for.

"Within a few days she will be in our arms, so ready yourselves to greet our new member."

She was dismissing us so soon after gathering us without even going over the finer details of whatever needed to happen or any info on this brat. Was there some mother out there with a broken heart of having a child ripped away from them? A step father that took my place to help raise it? Or was the kid going to be just as mentally jacked like I was? I hated waiting to find out standing from the couch and left without a word. But that didn't mean I wouldn't be harassed.

"You should feel some joy Heisenberg; a illegitimate child will be joining our family and their connection with you will be a wonderful parental bonding moment for you both."

For once I was speechless to the mega bitch choosing to let my mind wonder to more important topics then listening to her irritating voice. The next few days would be the longest I've ever dealt with.

The next few days had been nothing but beauty and eventful sight seeing. Uncle Chris had explained to me that the new factory I would be working in was state of the art and fully up to date on all the information about myself. But that conversation was now long gone since the helicopter had been shot down sending us into a whirling spin with fire on the tail.

"TUVA!"

My hand just barely brushed against uncle Chris's until the helicopter hit the ground jolting me back as it broke almost perfectly down the middle. It jarred my body sending waves of pain through out my limbs as my eyes, hazy still, focused on the movement and sound coming from Uncle Chris as he tried to reassure me.

"Tuva, Tuva don't move..."

"I...can try to move the plane, I can move it up..."

"Don't...its too heavy...you'll send your half down."

"...down?"

Risking it I turned my head ever so slowly even scared to do that simple movement to see that with just the right amount of luck my half of the plane was starting to tip over the edge.

"C-chris..."

"Hold on I'll get you, just stay still."

Breathing was a labored task as seconds turned into hours watching him inch his way towards me when another solid hit smacked into the plane.

"There's lycans out here sir!"

"Hurry up and kill them!"

Lycans? Like...werewolves? Where the fuck were we!? Even though my mind was trying to piece something rational together that all slipped away seeing the final pieces holding the two halves together break. It was a last ditch effort trying to use my power to stay afloat but Chris was right, it was too much for me; the sun greeted my eyes shining down its light while the echos of Chris's last call of my name faded away, all I could manage was a metal cocoon that I hoped would save my life.

The landing was hard almost sending me into unconsciousness with how badly it rattled my bones and brain. I waited a few minutes to listen and just settle down as the fact that something destroyed the plane and successfully separated me from the crew whirled uncontrolled in my mind. I wasn't going to lie but I knew that there was at least some kind of weird cult here in the area that weren't big fans of Umbrella corporation. All that information was supposed to stay buried but I was more clever then they thought I was. But that's what scared me the most; why did they hate us? The question swimmed mildly through my restless mind as I released my hold on the metal letting it fall around me yet immediately regretted it. Those...lycans, they had me surrounded so fast even though I never heard a sound. But what they didn't know was that I had a arsenal on my side as the pieces of metal from the cocoon unraveled as well as some from the other half of the plane began floating around me.

"Back off freaks! I'm alot more of a threat then I look!"

Some of them were fazed by my words backing off but others, bigger ones, were not. Just as I was seconds away from throwing what I had it was like thousands of pounds were added to the scrap pieces breaking my hold on them embedding them into the ground below.

"Now now kid~ no need to be so hostile. These guys are like giant...angry puppies."

A strange man walked out from somewhere in the back; a cigar on his lips, a wide brimmed hat and glasses covering most of his features besides his graying beard. Adorned in a trench coat, old looking tan shirt, pants and boots...he had a major western vibe going on. But was he...the one that forced me to release the metal?

"Who are you!? Where are the others!?"

"My job was to separate and gather you up so that's all I got for ya for now, we'll make introductions later."

"Hell no! Stranger danger dude."

Grabbing ahold of the metal again I was able to throw it this time aiming straight for western man; I knew it would hit with how much practice I had done. Yet as it floated in mid air not moving a inch infront of him...I knew that it I wasn't controlling it anymore.

"What the fuck...?"

"Good throw there kiddo, but it doesn't work if the target can do the same thing."

Western man walked out from behind it waving his hand off to the side sending the metal away.

"Wouldn't it be much better to talk maybe somewhere not absolutely filled with creepy ass lycans?"

"Who are you!? Why can you that!? Why can you do what I do?"

He stood there thinking for a moment or two in pure silence until his hand shifted gripping the cigar between gloved fingers throwing it to the ground stomping out the embers.

"What can I say kid...its in the genes."

I could just see his eyes peak up at me from beneath his sunglasses before he lifted his head back up wearing a grin.

"You think you were lucky enough to be born like that without a little help from your good ol' dad?"

He was insane wasn't he!? Full of shit speaking crazy literally seconds after meeting me. My dad was dead from war, my mom died giving birth to me. That's what I knew for a fact and I was in no mood to argue those facts.

"Fuck...you."

#lord heisenberg #resident evil 8 #alcina dimitrescu #heisenberg #writerslife #female writers #writers on tumblr

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mst3kproject · 4 years

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Invasion of the Star Creatures

I promised you guys something truly awful this week, didn’t I? Well, how about a space invasion ‘comedy’ (big emphasis on the air quotes there) produced by Samuel Zarkoff to be a double-bill with The Brain that Wouldn’t Die? The closest thing it has to a star is Frankie Ray, whom MSTies might know as the writer of Laserblast. He also wrote Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, which I really, really need to see one of these days. Film Historian Bill Warren described Invasion of the Star Creatures as ‘so helplessly bad it’s almost unwatchable’. Let’s find out if he was right.

Fort Nicholson is the world’s center for atomic research, despite apparently being staffed entirely by idiots. The two biggest idiots are, unfortunately, our main characters. Their names are Philbrick and Penn. No, I don’t know which is which. No, I don’t care. I’m gonna call them Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice. The first ‘comedic’ sequence involves Rick With The Squeaky Voice sitting in a barrel pretending he’s going to space, and getting his ass set on fire.

That sets the tone for the whole movie quite nicely. It’s stupid and it’s not funny, and it never gets any better. In fact, as we shall see, it gets significantly worse.

For some reason, Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice are assigned to a mission to explore a cave recently exposed by a nuclear test. This turns out to be the base for two seven-foot space women, Tanga and Pona, and their tuberous minions, the Vege-Men, and the entire party is soon in their clutches. The aliens say that they have come to save humanity from destroying ourselves through nuclear war, but naturally the army isn’t into that. Rick With The Squeaky Voice discovers that kissing the women puts them into a daze, allowing the two idiots to escape, but of course nobody back at Fort Nicholson believes their story. Is it really up to these two to stop Tanga and Pona from heading back to their home planet with their report? We’re doomed.

I don’t remember which review it was, but I once invited you to imagine a movie in which every character is Dropo or Watney Smith. This is that movie. This is proud of being that movie. The aliens try to read the two Ricks’ minds and one is completely empty while the other is full of superhero fantasies. Pona calls what she sees ‘completely illogical and infantile’, which is a fair description of the whole movie.

There’s a sequence where one of the army men shoots a rattlesnake that was about to bite one of the Ricks, and then cries because ‘he might have had a family’. They try to lampoon the thing in old movies where the characters walk through the same set from different angles by doing it without cutting away or changing the camera angle, but it just looks dumb. The Colonel gives a long-winded speech about the merits of getting straight to the point. A forced march stops for a lovely picnic and wine tasting. A guy gets his ass kicked by a Vege-Man and declares, “that’s the first time a salad ever tossed me.” There’s a running ‘gag’ about fans of ‘Space Commander Connors’ recognizing each other’s secret decoder rings and immediately going into a full-on geek-out.

None of this is funny, much of it is downright embarrassing, and the worst part is that the writers have no idea how to include their attempts at comedy in the story. Rather than the hijinks advancing the plot, every time something that’s supposed to be funny happens, the whole thing comes to a dead halt. This gives the impression that the movie is stumbling around in the dark with no idea where it’s going. It finally seems to settle on a plot when we find out that the spaceship is about to leave and must be stopped. After some bullshit the Ricks convince the Colonel (and only the Colonel) to help them take on the aliens. At this point I was thinking that this movie was pretty terrible but it hadn’t actually pushed me to the point of being tempted to turn it off…

And then it got racist.

The last ten minutes or so of Invasion of the Star Creatures are a downward spiral in which it seems like they gave up trying to be funny in favour of being actively offensive. First, they encounter what’s supposed to be a group of Native Americans on horseback. Rick With The Squeaky Voice tries to get their attention by saying “hey, Kemosabe, I wanna buy some blankets!” The Natives don’t speak much English but they do a lot of grunting, and threaten to kill the Colonel because they think he’s General Custer (?!). Then they kidnap everybody and force them to smoke the peace pipe and drink firewater and the white guys only escape once the Natives have passed out.

Holy shit. Not only is this repulsive, it is, as previously noted, irrelevant. It has no effect on the plot other than to waste time. The Natives do not help them defeat the aliens and neither does the Colonel, who is also in a drunken stupor. And then, just when we think this can’t possibly get any worse, the defeated alien women declare that they must throw themselves on the mercy of the Earth Men. This turns out to mean marrying them, and the dialogue specifically likens marriage to slavery, which Tanga and Pona seem to consider a point in its favour! The end of this movie left my head spinning. It’s like I watched a guy get ‘comedically’ knocked over by a punching bag for forty-five minutes and then he suddenly turned around and punched me in the face.

(Hey, I just realized… remember how I said the cave was exposed by a nuclear test? The dialogue emphasizes how this whole area is irradiated and dangerous – and then totally forgets about it. It’s never mentioned again and the characters take off their protective gear and never put it back on. So… that was useless, too.)

There is stuff in this movie that could have been funny. The secret decoder ring stuff almost got a smile out of me once or twice, because the characters seemed so earnest in their love for ‘Space Commander Connors’ and his lore. The ‘Vege-Men’ also had potential. We get to see a greenhouse room where they’re grown to be the women’s slaves, and the seedlings are hands or feet sticking out of flowerpots with a few leaves around them. This is fairly amusing and I could see it being the juvenile form of a sentient plant on Star Trek TOS. Adult Vege-Men are actors in stupid carrot costumes that they obviously can’t see out of very well, which should have been funny just because it’s so terrible, but Invasion of the Star Creatures is so bad you can’t even laugh at it ironically.

The idea of using a bumbling idiot as your main character, let alone two bumbling idiots, frankly baffles me. Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice are supposed to be the guys we, the audience, identify with. We’re supposed to like and root for them and to perhaps be able to imagine ourselves in their places, but the only thing I feel for them is contempt. Why would anyone want to see themselves in these guys? Perhaps it’s an attempt to say that anybody can be a hero, but the two Ricks don’t even qualify as that. When they save the world, it’s basically by accident. The ending, which rewards them with promotions, medals, and beautiful wives from outer space, actively makes me angry because they didn’t earn any of that!

Invasion of the Star Creatures works very hard at being pointless, and there’s very little in it that comes anywhere near a theme. If any such thing exists, its in Tanga and Pona’s insistence that they’re here to save humanity whether we like it or not, and how the humans react to that idea. The women say it would be a shame to see a young civilization destroy itself because nations were too stupid to work together. Rick and Rick With The Squeaky Voice reject this entirely, which is supposed to be a joke: these guys are in the army, so if humanity transcends the need for conflict they’d be out of a job. The rest of the plot then seems at pain to emphasize that humans cannot work together, and do not want to.

After all, the two Ricks’ attempts to summon help come to nothing. The Native Americans never understand that these men want assistance, and the Colonel thinks it’s all a Space Commander Connors game before sliding under the metaphorical table, having never done anything useful. The Ricks themselves spent most of their time arguing and complaining and in the end succeed only through good luck on their part and poor timing on that of the invaders. Usually a story that begins with ‘aliens want to save primitive humans from ourselves’ would end with ‘the aliens were wrong about us’. Invasion of the Star Creatures seems to want to say the aliens were right the whole time!

So there you have it – Invasion of the Star Creatures. It started off kinda bad and not funny, then swirled down the cinematic toilet into outright offensive, racist, sexist drivel. I’m trying to think of some small thing I can say about it that’s nice, but I’m having a very hard time. I guess I kinda liked the rumbly noises that represent the alien language – that was more fun than just having the actresses spout random gobbledygook. Other than that, I’m at a loss. The actors suck, the sets suck, the effects suck, the costumes suck, and everybody involved was a bigoted dickweed. Fuck this movie.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #invasion of the star creatures #fuck this movie #60s

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mytrashs-blog · 4 years

Text

Movie Star- part 2!

Pairing: BFF! Tom Holland x Reader

Warnings: She’s a fluffy one... but also not straight away

Summary: You’re trying to save your friendship but the plan changes

Word Count: 3,071 words so buckle up

A/N: This is the last part I will be writing on this and that’s final, cause I had THE hardest time trying to write fluff... I’m an angst author, what can I say? I did love the final result of this, so I hope you enjoy! (Please if you do like it, reblog it so it can be read by more and more people).

Part one is here!!!, and here is my masterlist in case you want to read something else

(Gif isn’t mine, credits go to the owner!)

You’re sitting on the couch, two popcorn bowls sitting on the coffee table, because you like spicy sauce on yours and he finds soggy popcorn disgusting, there’s also two bottles one coke and one water, because you can’t stand fizzy drinks, but it’s his cheat day so he’ll take advantage. You’re both on the same couch, but you’re in your side, he’s in his, there’s two blankets and there’s no touching, not even accidentally, not even casually, none at all.

Frankly you’re even surprised you agreed to see him again after that one time you went out for coffee with him to come up with a peace treaty. It’s not that you don’t want things to go back to normal, it’s just that you don’t know what “normal” is for both of you anymore, you’re very sure there is no such thing after all the drama you went through a year ago. But you’re willing to try.

The movie has been going on for a while and you haven’t exchanged a word for the whole time, you intentionally decided to play a good movie so that you wouldn’t get the chance to start talking, so Pulp Fiction is playing, funny enough it’s your first time watching it and you’ve never been a big fan of Tarantino’s films, but you haven’t let Tom (your former best friend) see you yawning under your blanket. Thank Lord your thoughts drift away unitl the movie ends, but then you start getting anxious, you’ve been dreading this moment because you just know he’s gonna tell you something. And he does.

“What’s wrong? You didn’t say a word in like two hours and that’s not very you from you” he offers in an insecure manner, and that’s not very Tom from Tom.

“There’s… nothing wrong, Tom… I just don’t know what to say to you anymore. I don’t know who you are, we’ve been out of each other’s lives for a year. Last time we actually spent time together we destroyed our friendship. And then we attacked each other for the months that followed. We haven’t had a proper conversation in more than a year, A YEAR. And I’m not saying I don’t want us to be friends anymore, I just don’t know how to start.”

He stares at you for a few seconds, you can see he’s calculating his next dialogue, he really doesn’t want to fuck up the babies steps you’ve taken to fix things, and you don’t either so you wait for him.

“We…” he starts but soon stops again, thinking once more of an apropriate way to say things “We can’t really go back to the way things were before, because we were doing a lot of things wrong to begin with. I don’t want to have what we had before… I want to start fresh. You don’t know the new me and I don’t know the new you. So let’s get to know each other.”

That was the corniest speech you’ve ever heard. If you weren’t so moved by it, you’d be laughing at his face, but instead of doing that, you tried to follow along with the corny theme, so you reached your hand out for him to strech it and said “Hi, my name’s (Y/N), nice to meet you”.

He did chuckle at that but he took your hand regardless, offering one of those relaxed smiles you haven’t seen in over a year “I’m Tom, nice to meet you too”.

You kept hanging out a lot more often since that day, things were picking up a nice pace and you were getting more and more comfortable around him everyday. Sure, things changed, but they changed for the better. He made sure to take you to a lot of the fun things he did sometimes and you even invited him to the recital of the dance academy where you teach, which was a mistake because he had to smile and take pictures all afternoon with little girls and a bunch of moms… and the ocassional dad who actually cared about his role on spider-man and not only his beautiful biceps. Not that you were paying attention to the fact that he was getting buff again to reprise his role, no, he’s your friend, you don’t look at those things. You noticed because the moms noticed.

It was nice to fall back into your habit of late night phone calls to tell each other the latest gossip around your lives, you also missed sending him the most random, wackyest gifs at the most inconvenient of times and you missed him offering to drive you to places, maybe even go buy your groceries together.

Soon enough the press found out you were hanging out again and you were not safe from paparazzi for a solid amount of two weeks until it stopped being interesting, but of course half of the stories were written along the lines of “From bff to enemies to lovers? Is Tom Holland dating long time bestie (Y/N)?” and just like you did all those years ago when he was just becoming Hollywood’s newest hearthrobe you got together to laugh about what the tabloids were writing.

There was only one problem. You kinda were catching feelings.

It’s just that he had changed so much. He wasn’t mean aymore, to anyone and it’s not even that he went back to being the nice guy he was before the fame, he was even better, because he had matured so much and he knew just how much he meant to the people around him, so he made sure to let them know how grateful he was of having them around and it was so nice to see him become such a well rounded man. Regardless of all that, you know that it is a very stupid idea to come up like “Yo, I have a big fat crush on you” right now, because… you just got back to being friends! so you resolve to keep your mouth shut and your feelings at bay.

This one day Tom texted you asking if you wanna grab a bite, he’s at a table reading nearby so you accept and you get sushi because you’re basic like that, but he’s acting all weird today. He’s been staring at you for a little too long now and his gaze has been falling to your lips a few times now, which would be less weird if you weren’t currently stuffing your face with a salmon sushi roll.

You’ve been trying to get him to be less weird, asking about the script, his cast mates and all, but he’s just not cooperating and just keeps doing this thing that he does when he’s nervous where he justs sits there all stiff and plays with whatever he has in his hands, which right now it’s chopsticks and that makes it way too annoying, because it makes a lot of noise, so you decide enough is enough and just go straight against him. “Thomas “some middle name that you hate me calling you” Holland, what on earth is going on with you today?”

He abruptly stops with the chopsticks and you’re so grateful for a second, but then his attention shifts to his watch and it’s pressing your buttons pretty terribly, but then he decides he can actually talk. “Sorry uh… I’ve just been thinking… about… life?”

“What the hell do you mean? And don’t give me any bullshit answer cause you know I’ll know.”

You see him get visibly flustered, but he takes a deep breath to talk, “I’m just… I have been thinking…”

“Oh really? first time I take it” you laugh to lighten the mood that suddenly got terribly heavy.

“Oh, shut up… No, but really. It’s just that we’ve come such a long way, not only recently but overall in the course of the, what? 17 years? that we’ve known each other, you know? and I have been thinking that these past months our relationship has changed so much…”

Is he…?

“And I just think that we’re at a place where we could just try…”

Shit, he is.

“To go somewhere new, you know?”

Holy fuck… he most definetely is!

He falls silent and is looking at you waiting for your reaction, but you’re so shocked that you just haven’t even thought about what you’re going to say to him!

“When you say ‘somewhere new’ what does that mean?” you go for a question, just to get things clear as water before totally reacting.

“I just mean that.. I’ve realized just how much I like you, for real. No safety net here. I want to be with you and I can’t go for another 17 years pretending that I don’t”

For all you know you might just have choked on your sushi, but you haven’t so you decide to swallow whatever is still in your mouth and it’s hard, but mainly because air has just left your lungs. “I… don’t know, I mean… I can’t deny that I have felt that way, but I’m scared. Like what if it doesn’t work out? It’s been hard enough to go back to being friends after a ‘friend break up’ imagine if it was a real, real break up? Would we be able to recover?”

“I know. I’m aware that this is not a simple thing to do, I don’t expect you to just say yes and jump right into my arms. That’s just not your style. Do you want to maybe sleep on it?”

And you do. It’s the worst night of your life though. You’re restless all night, just can’t get your brain to shut up. How are you supposed to “sleep on it” if there is no sleep involved? You roll on you side for what feels like the millionth time and you see the time… it’s almost three in the morning and you haven’t been able to even blink. It’s just… You want to be with Tom so bad, you do! But you also know that you’ve never been good at relationships, they just never last, and then there’s the fact that you have extreme trust issues because almost every guy you’ve ever been with has cheated on you, and you don’t want be paranoid and crazy around Tom, but you just know at some point you won’t be able to hold it in. And for fucks sake! He’s an actor! He will have to kiss other girls for work and… you just don’t want to even think about it… but also, those girls are waaaay prettier than you are.

But on the good side, no one knows Tom like you do, he has never cheated on any girl ever, he’s a real gentleman, and you already have your fingerprint stored in his phone and you do know all his social media passwords which he doesn’t even know how to use so there’s no way he notices the thousands of girls sliding into his dm’s, you also have already met all his friends and family so you can skip all that awkward part of new relationships. How weird would it be to kiss Tom?

He does have very nice lips and he’s constantly using chapstick so they must be very soft, and you’ve seen him kissing actresses before and they’ve never complained about him being a bad kisser, and it’s not like you never thought about that. To be completely honest you’ve imagined how it would be to do way more than just kissing your best friend, which is normal… right? everyone fantazises about their best friend at least once in their life. Difference being that you spent about seven years doing so, if not more.

So if you’ve been in love with him for so long now, and you were able to forgive him for being an asshole and then he changed for the better after thinking he’d lose you then why not give it a shot? It can’t go wrong. You’ve already proved you’d rather die than not have each other in your lives, so even if it’s doesn’t work as a romantic thing you may still be able to save your friendship, right?

You were finally able to fall asleep at 4 a.m. and unsurprisingly, you did dream about you and Tom during your normal movie night, only you’re all curled up on each other, one of his hands is soothingly running through your hair and the other one is on your waist but slipping dangerously low, he ocassionally places a kiss on top of your head and you just feel extremely relaxed, it’s such a bliss of a dream, but then you wake up.

You want to text him the second you wake up, but you still want to keep thinking about it, just because you don’t want to say yes based on a really nice and domestic dream you had, so you make yourself a really nice breakfast and head to work which involves chill dancing around all day, and dance was always a nice way to analize things, at least to you. Also, not thinking is the perfect way of deciding wether you want something or not. By the time you’re done for the day, you’re ready to text Tom.

You ask him to meet you at yours as soon as he has some free time, and around an hour later, the doorbell rings and it’s him. God, you haven’t been this nervous over a guy since middle school, it is borderline ridiculous, but you gotta keep it together. It’s just Tom. Tommy, the guy that wears Hello Kitty pajamas and ties his hair in tiny pony tails when it starts getting too long, he’s the same guy that will regularly asks you how to spell “though” correctly. Just Tom.

You open the door and he looks just as nervous as you are, but you let him in and, as if he’s never been here before, he just stands there by the front door until you ask him to go to the living room. He plays with his hands and tries to clean off the sweat that he probably has all over his hands in his trousers, and you do the same. Just to be safe.

You’re sitting on oposite ends of the room, both of you visibly giddy and jumpy, but you’re so silent that a needle falling would be audible in the whole room. So you try to speak.

“H-how was your day, Tom? Everything okay?”

“Yeah… all normal, pretty chill. You?”

“Normal, just the regular.”

And you fell back into silence for a bit over a minute that felt like years. Unitl you decided you needed to speak again.

“So.. about the thing you told me yesterday…”

“Yes, tell me. Did you think about it?”

“Yeah, I did. You know, we’ve been through a lot together and you know that. I am extremely afraid of losing you forever and I need to tell you that being in good terms with you is my number one priority.”

Tom’s face stays serious as he listens to you, his hands are clasped together to avoid fidgeting, but he hasn’t noticed that his leg is rapidly bouncing up and down to compensate on that field.

“But even with all that I just keep thinking that it just makes sense, you know? You and me together.”

He looks up at you and his eyes are glowing with hope.

“I… have been in love with you for such a long time and I feel like the longer that time goes by, the harder it is to bear it. So I want to jump in full force. Who cares if it doesn’t work?”

He smiles bright now, he even tries to bite his lip to contain it from looking so absurdly stupid, but he doesn’t. He looks just as excited and ready to do this as you do.

“We’ve already been through the worst case scenario and we managed to salvage and make it even better, so I think that even if this doesn’t end up being a bad idea… we’ll be able to stay together anyway.”

And the room falls back into silence, but this one it not overwhelming, the atmosphere feels a lot more hopeful and excited. Tom is just looking at you with a smile on his face and you are looking straight back, feeling anxious about the uncertainty of what is supossed to happen now.

At that moment, Tom stands up and walks towards you, never breaking the eye contact. He extends his hand for you to take it and stand up, so now you’re facing each other, mere inches away, you’re so close you can see the little freckles that decorate the bridge of his nose, and looking in his eyes you can see that he has tiny speckles of darker brown around in his irises.

“I’m gonna kiss you now, is that okay?” he tells you, voice barely audible, you doubt anyone else would’ve been able to hear it, but that makes it so indulgently intimate, so insead of nodding, you decide to say yes in an equally low volume even though you’re the only two people in the house, you want this moment to be yours and for it to stay only in your own tiny bubble.

He smiles before slowly leaning in, time goes painfully slow, but you’re almost unbothered about that, you want to cherish the moment as much as you can. He stops when his lips are barely brushing yours, so you take that last step and lean to seal the remaining space between you two.

You had been holding hands until now that his hands want to move to your waist, but you need something to keep you leveled, cause everything is spining so you place yours on his forearms. Kissing Tom made you feel so stupid. Why did it take you so long to do this? This is clearly where you had to be all this time. His lips feel like coming back home after a long and miserable day, he feels like home. This moment feels like putting in the finishing piece in the puzzle and feeling like all that you went through was worth it, because it gave you this. and that is all that matters.

...

Tagging some people to avoid the flop: @caeruleum-in-caritate-lupus, @softstarkk, @peterparkerbabyy, @dottirose, @legit-fandom-trash, @carostar2020, @appreciating-chase-brody, @mvmakki @madmadmilk @hollandrecs @starksparker @sunshinehollandd, @thatswhaticallfanfiction, @rachaeldonnaspiteri1, @writing-appreciation, @allieandcoffee, @ladythena,

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honhonluigi · 3 years

Note

What do you think about the ending of v3 and the plot twist?

I don't have time to go into a big emotional essay like I normally do for reviews and shit, so, I'm just gonna sum it up:

I fucking hated it. It was so stupid, and it made no sense. The ending of V3 thought it was being so meta by making the fictional characters we see into 'actual fictional characters' in the story, but it was just fucking dumb. And bad writing.

1). It made no sense. It made no sense at all. Literally nothing in the entire goddamn lore of V3 made any fucking sense. It did not work with the rest of the canon lore of the games. It went directly against the canon lore of the other games. It went directly against events that happened in the third game given that we see the 'pregame' versions of the characters in the prologue and they act normal, and nothing like their supposed pre-game personalities in the audition tapes. It made no sense. It went against itself, and the other games. It didn't work.

2). The pre-game concepts of the characters suck. They're all emo or Edgelord annoying pieces of shit with no real personality. Why would I care about these people and what happened to them after they 'signed up'? Seemed like they fucking deserved it. Also, people take these pre-game characters who have no personalities, and they use them more than canon characters. I see more pre-game content than I do content of the actual characters. But because pre-game characters have only one line and no personality, everything about them is made up. It just makes for a bunch of emo edgelord OCs with famous names and designs. And it's obnoxious.

3. It was trying way too fucking hard to be meta. I hate games that think they're hot shit because they know they're video games (Undertale, Doki Doki). Yeah, bitch. I know I'm playing a game. You're not surprising me. I fucking know already. You're not cool for telling me that. Everybody knows we're playing a game. And it's annoying when stories seem more like they exist to push a singular theme than they do to actually tell a story, which is what V3 did with their meta-bullshit. Trying too hard to seem original, insightful, and cool when in reality it was just an obnoxious copy of every other 'meta' game.

4. And that ^ was a horrible writing decision for several reasons. Primarily, it separated us even more from the characters. When you're writing fiction, you need suspension of disbelief. You're trying to make people forget that they're reading fiction. You're trying to make them invested and immersed in what they feel is a real world. When you push it so hard into their face that something is fiction, you're killing that. It's not cool. It's not fun. It's just bad writing. It kills any sense of reality and continuity in the fiction. It removes the reader from the story and the characters. We already have a degree of separation that you have to work hard, as a writer, to overcome. Because these are fictional characters. But when you constantly remind everyone of that, it makes that separation worse. It reminds everyone that they're just reading fiction with no bearing and no consequence. Then they stop caring, and they stop being interested.

5. On the same branch as the separation, it was horrible writing decision because: it made nothing matter. If Tsumugi and Team DR wrote everyone's plots, decided everything for them, an even created their personalities, then nothing mattered. Why did I fucking read any of this? Why did I bother? These people aren't real people, even in the context of the story (back to double separation), their relationships aren't 'real', and their character arcs aren't 'real'. If Tsumugi wrote them all, that just means that they aren't people. That nothing they did mattered. That their relationships weren't formed by real bonding, but forced for no reason. So they don't matter. And every decision they made and growth they achieved was not based on their experiences and personality, but just written in. It made sure that none of the things any of these characters did, experienced, felt, or loved ever actually mattered. It takes away everything that I read. Why the fuck did I bother?

And I know that the point of it was to parallel how we feel about these fictional characters, vs. how the audience felt about them. Like I said, they were trying really hard to be meta. They were trying really hard to seem insightful for telling us all shit that we already knew. It didn't work. They tried too hard when they had nothing to say. Anyway, I know the point of the game is saying 'well if you think these characters/their relationships matter when you're reading them, and they're fictional, then why would that change just because they're fictional in the game?' And it's supposed to be a witty parallel. But it doesn't work. Because of being too meta. Because of double separation, like I said. It takes away everything from the characters. Nothing matters. You're showing me that, not only are these characters not real in reality, but they're also not even real in the fiction that I'm reading. They're not real in their own story. The story that I was attached to? That I stayed for? They're not real in that. That story wasn't real either. Nothing fucking mattered. Nothing actually happened. The double separation is never cool. It's always going to ruin your story forever, just like Doki Doki. And it's true. I cared about V3 and the characters in it. But once Tsumugi revealed the TV show bs to us, I stopped caring. I felt cheated. I had put so much care into this story that wasn't even real in the story itself. As soon as I heard that, I absolutely stopped giving a fuck about the characters. Because nothing mattered. The characters I should really care about for this story are the pregame characters, since apparently the other characters didn't fucking exist. But their pregame personalities are obnoxious and we barely get to see them.

6. The ending literally fucking punished the audience for liking the games. Again, they thought they'd be really cool by showing us a parallel between ourselves and our fiction. But it wasn't cool. It was just obnoxious. Because 'you like seeing these people suffer! You get off on it!' Yeah, I like seeing people suffer in fiction, because otherwise there's no plot. But a lot of other people just like to see them be happy. Why do you think there's so much fluffy fanfiction in the world? Most people endure DR suffering because it's the only way they can see the characters. It's not like DR has a lot of games where everybody just sits around being friends and having fun. That aside, they just yelled at and berated their audience for enjoying the games. Called them cruel for watching these characters suffer and liking it. They punished and alienated their fans. You think that's a good idea? Just because they wanted to seem cool.

Not to mention that the moral lesson just didn't hold up. Us enjoying content that someone else wrote is not the same as taking real living people, re-wiring their brains, and writing them into a TV show where they actually die brutal deaths. But the games wanted to act like it was the same, to seem cool, to make us 'think' about ourselves. The lesson wasn't true. They were saying shit that was straight up false. So they just looked stupid and pompous. Trying to act like what Tsumugi was doing was the exact same as just writing a video game. Not at all. Not at fucking all.

Also, they tried to hold the audience hostage for liking the characters. They tried to justify their shitty writing by being like 'if you care about these people even if they're fictional, then you can't stop caring about them once we reveal that they're TV show characters!' and 'if you think their relationships had value even if they were just writing, then you can't take that back when Tsumugi says she wrote them!' Yes I can, and I will. Because of the double separation. These characters and their relationships mattered to me because I liked their fictional story. But then you turn around and tell me that their story didn't even exist? That they didn't exist? You turn around and change all of their relationships, which I watched grow with pride, into something that canonically has nothing to do with their personalities, and everything to do with Tsumugi. Yeah, that ruins it. No amount of emotional gaslighting is gonna change that, V3. When you destroy the story and the characters that I enjoyed, I'm going to stop fucking caring about it. I cared about their story, and you made them not even exist in the context of that story. Now they are nothing, and their real story is nothing. They don't exist in their own story. Tsumugi wrote them. The fact that a character in the story wrote the other characters in the story is so fucking...dumb. It makes everything so fake and inconsequential. Nothing matters. It's a fictional story and characters that I don't care about, deliberately replacing a fictional story and characters that I do care about. That's way different from seeing a bunch of characters all written by the same person, in a fictional story that takes itself seriously and aims to become like a real world to people, and acts like a real world. Yes, it is different. Yes, it is bad. You're not tricking me. And that's annoying, that the game tried to gaslight and blackmail and trick you into thinking the writing was smart or good, all because you liked the characters in the beginning. No. This is completely different. Liking the characters in V3 was not even close to the bullshit Tsumugi TV show plot, no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise.

7. And it all comes down to shock value. It's an unfortunate trend that new media is leaning towards hardcore. They prize shocking the audience and putting in random plot twists more than they prize satisfying conclusions and sensible endings. They try so hard to surprise you that they deliberately lie, cover up, and obscure parts of the plot just to throw it in your face later. You're not allowed to predict anything, or know what's going on. You are specifically told the opposite of what is going on, just so they can surprise you. It's weak and it sucks. Because if you can't see those plot twists coming at all, then they just don't make sense. They show up and they feel forced, disjointed, and nonsensical. Because they are. If you can 'see something coming', then that just means that the outcome makes sense. And good writers can create stories with sensible plot progressions that are satisfying, yet also have surprises and excitement as well. But nah, everybody's way too focused on 'shock value' to write a decent story. Everything in V3 was nothing but shock. Ex: Kaede's murder. We are deliberately told that she doesn't do anything, and everything she does towards the murder is obscured and hidden, so that we won't predict it. And when it happens, it just feels cheap. I felt cheated. You know that they deliberately lied to you just to shock you, and it sets the tone for the whole rest of the game. Like the Flashback Lights, which are just lies that are passed off as true by the game itself until the big shocking reveal. It's annoying to feel lied to in a story, not by an unreliable narrator or character for the sake of the plot, but by the author themselves. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I'm that stupid? Do you think I need blinders? And now I can't trust anything that happens, not for the sake of suspense and mystery, but for the sake of 'we need ratings and you mean nothing but capital to us'. It's not being used to tell the story at all. It's just about sensationalism. And it's obnoxious.

(Ironically, that 'shock value' ends up being super predictable as well. When iCarly came out, I could see that Sam and Freddy hated each other, and I knew right away that they were going to end up dating, because it would be 'what we didn't see coming'. Same with Duncan and Courtney from TDI. It's so predictable and boring.)

8. Another bad decision from V3 is that this lore ruined the other two games. It absolutely destroyed them, by saying that it was all fake too. The characters, the story, the experiences, and the lore that they had spent so many years carefully cultivating and telling? Nah. That's all fucking gone. It's all fake! It doesn't exist! They threw out the canon from their other two games-- they just threw out the games themselves-- all for the sake of some shock value. And now V3 doesn't even feel like it's in the same franchise, because it doesn't exist in the same world as the other games.

9. They had a million different, stupid plot twists. It's like nobody knew what to do with the lore for this one that would be 'different' (Hint: it shouldn't be different lore if it's in the same fucking universe), so they just threw around a bunch of backstory ideas, and they decided to go with all of them. The space colony, the crash to Earth, the apocalypse, the Ultimate Hunt, the second Hope's Peak, the re-birth of despair, and then the TV show thing. Through the flashback lights, they literally tried to pass off every single backstory as true. Even before the TV reveal, this was annoying and just confusing. They obviously had no idea what they were doing. They threw around so many conflicting ideas. So it was pretty clear that we were being lied to. And all of those backstories are bad for their own reasons. But none of them even come close to being as bad as the TV show one.

So, to sum up? Bad. Worst writing I've seen in a DR game. I hated it. But-- Do I think they did this just because they 'didn't care' about V3? No. If they didn't care about V3, they wouldn't have bothered to make it. They did this because they fell prey to shock value sensationalism. It's definitely not the first or only bad trope that DR has fallen victim to. I mean, look at Junko! And it's not out of character for DR to have horrible, shitty lore. The Despair lore itself is all shit anyway, except for Izuru. Everything about the Despair lore and Junko's place in it is just...dumb and bad. So it's not crazy or out of left-field for them to make a mistake like this. They do it in every game. I don't think it's evidence of V3 being 'the worst game' or 'they secretly hated it!' I think it's just Team DR being Team DR. Being a sensationalist anime franchise that embraces bad sensationalist anime tropes because...it's anime. (Which is why I don't like anime).

BUT. All that being said: I don't think the TV show ending is true. It's definitely left open for interpretation. There's a lot of evidence to show that Tsumugi is just straight-up lying to them. It wouldn't be the first time (flashback lights), and we see that she obviously programs thoughts, images, actions, memories, etc to look real even when they're not. (flashback lights again). So it's not a far leap to say that she could fake the audition tapes, and the audience. Especially because we see the pregame characters in the prologue, and they act exactly the same as they normally do. Not how they acted in the audition tapes. Obviously, the other two games canonically weren't TV shows. Tsumugi's 'cospox' excuse is bullshit because, given that Kaede is by Tsumugi's own admission a fictional character, she should be able to cosplay her just fine. And so it proves nothing that she can cosplay the other games' characters. Also, when she 'got cospox' she changed in the supply closet that led directly to her evil lair. Sus much? But I'm not just taking biased evidence because I don't want it to be true. The game itself gives you that option. Shuichi talks to Maki and Himiko at the end of the game, and tells them that he doesn't think it was a TV show at all, and that he thinks Tsumugi was lying. That at least tells us that we have the option to come to our own conclusion and be justified in it. The whole theme of the third game was truth vs. lies, so it fits. I think the game definitely gives you the choice of thinking that it is true or not, and I choose to think 'not', because it's a really bad ending.

But. That choice doesn't absolve the game's bad writing. Clearly they pushed the TV show ending a lot more. Clearly they wanted people to believe it. And the fact that they even leave it as a choice to be the 'true ending' is a sin in and of itself.

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critical-ramblings · 4 years

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Things that Mean More

On a second watch through of Critical Role campaign 2. (Ep 11-15)

“Maybe [Yasha] was a ghost the whole time, maybe the lightning exploded her, maybe she wandered out into the rain and lost her memory”...one of these is not like the others!

Molly: What should we do while keeping watch? Jester: We could find a candy store Molly: Wait there are stores specifically for selling candy?” sometimes Molly makes me sad

“Nott and Molly, you ready to go?” For some reason I expected him to say Caduceus and now I’m sad.

Matt is going really hard on the class differences between the Outersteads and the Tri-spire.

The three towers of the Tri-spire are the Zauberspire, the Constellation Bridge, and the Triumph Chime, which we don’t know much about because Beau rolled a 6 on her history check

Matt cracks himself up describing Chastity’s Nook. His face is SO RED. Liam: “I made you plan for this!”

Tusk Love makes an appearance! Who knew Matt’s smut shop prep would become a recurring theme this campaign

Beau, to Caleb: the Cerberus Assembly, you know much about them?

It’s so interesting to hear them talk about the state of the Empire and the Cerberus Assembly, because they’re just so...powerless.

I think Beau straight up says, “I don’t know, look at this. Look at how much money is up here compared to elsewhere. This is a lot of control.”

Caleb immediately asks, “so what do you plan to do about it?” after which Beau deflects to drinking booze and making money. Look how far they’ve come. :)

Caleb buys Jester bear claws and then Jester buys him the Courting of the Crick. Their love language has always been gifts

I remember not being a Huge fan of the political arc in Zadash, it’s pretty slow and doesn’t have a super conclusive end, even though they ‘succeed’

first explanation of the crick slur! this is also the first real experience we have with the Kryn Dynasty, and I remember wanting to know more about them! Xhorhas is like a black hole of knowledge, it’s just on the other side of the mountains and we know NOTHING

Doolan Tversky! What the FUCK Nott? WHAT DOES IT MEAN???

Dolan and Horace are...very relatable in today’s political situation

We talk about how bad it was for Molly to charm Nott, but she started it by stealing from Fjord. That doesn’t make it okay, but it does add some context. As far as PVP goes, she was the instigator

“I need him to be powerful. So he can save me.” the ‘using him’ undertones of the conversation are SO GOOD

Fjord is also asking all the right questions, but Nott is excellent at dancing around them. Even charmed, she doesn’t trust them enough to tell them.

“I did my own dental work” oh boooooooy i missed that one

the description of fictional Xhorhas is very :/

Fjord attempts to Manage Nott..it does not work...he asks Caleb to do it. Nott tells him she’s not an idiot. I think this is the first time she really pushes back against the infantilization

If you want your players to know someone is evil, have them advocate killing puppies and call tieflings ‘demonbloods’

proficient in mail fraud

man the Mighty Nein (and mostly Caleb) really Improved the Knights of Requital plan. We go from ~somehow~ tying Sutan to the Myriad and the High Richtor to framing the two of them for murder (of the Lawmaster)

intro of the meta-gaming pigeon! originally a signal in-game for investigating Dolan

Ren Sutan is the one they were investigating at the hospital, his father Deitrich Sutan is the one they frame in the Heist

The Hospital Scene....the last brain cell in the Nein went with Beau and Jester

the grin that Taliesin has when he says “I’ve got a plan” is Terrifying

after Molly’s done with his Disguise, Fjord says ‘do I dare ask how it looks,’ Molly says, ‘well, i can show you?’ and it’s CALEB who says “yes show us the goods”

“we are working together. we are TRYING to work together. Getting all of us out is more important than finding this asshole” Caleb, being a Team Player. This is 1 episode before scrollgate

Caleb tells Jester to keep her writing plain “not as charming as you normally speak”

hes so softe already

Nott and Caleb have a talk about learning Identify, how Nott supports Caleb, believes in him, which visibly makes Caleb uncomfortable. Nott is clearly fishing for ways to make Caleb more powerful without revealing why

The robberies/evidence planting actually goes off without (too much of) a hitch. Not much to say, until we get to the Scrolls

Fjord is classic dumbass, he escalates the situation (brings out the falchion) and then even if he agrees with Caleb (they’d already destroyed the rug in Sutan’s place) he can’t back down

Then Ulog’s sacrifice--absolutely the most interesting part of this arc, to me. He’s not just a thief, he’s a real revolutionary.

he also knocks Caleb out in one hit, which is Nice

The assassins strike the Zauberspire!!!!! Earlier this episode Sam says “We think Matt’s managing three plot lines, but there’s actually a fourth we don’t even know about” and he is Absolutely Right

god I want to write a fic about those two. It seems like the classic echo knight/wizard support combo, i want to know about these two special forces drow sent to retrieve the Beacon, the holy symbol of their people. Blessed by the Bright Queen herself. And they come so close. (if it weren’t for those meddling kids!)

Matt pulls this Advanced DM trick, where you have the party fight an enemy that would be completely annihilating them--if it wasn’t already injured.

The first impressions of the Beacon, from what they manage to glean from this Charmed assassin, are so interesting. Jester’s eternal mis-interpretation about babies (which isn’t...really wrong?)

The drow twitched when Ulog’s name was mentioned! Though the Gentleman’s association did not deal with the Krynn, Ulog knows some shady people. If he wasn’t a spy himself.

They don’t even take the Beacon! (But the time they took futzing about with the assassin was what allowed him to be captured and killed)

I just realized that the reason Caleb stays with the Beacon that first night isn’t because he’s afraid it’ll be stolen--it’s because as long as he’s within 5 ft it can’t be scried on!

Okay, Molly and Beau really do team up against Nott in this talking to. Nott Does Not Agree with their reasoning--in the episode before, it was Caleb who put the scrolls back to deescalate the situation. Caleb is the one here who has the aside with the skull about how much he wants to make this group work. It’s Nott who’s on the fence.

“He’s MY boy. I take care of HIM.”

Caleb tries, after the skull interlude, he tries to tell Nott. “You know, I was going to go to that place. The Soltryce Academy...But I fucked it up.” He can’t bring himself to say more than that.

Nott purchases the enchantment for her never-ending flask. 250 gold is nothing, when you’re a goblin who just likes shiny things.

Whenever Caleb has money, he spends it on paper and ink to transcribe spells. Whenever he doesn’t have spells to transcribe, he buys them. :)

Taryon Darrington!!!! I also fell out of my chair when this book came up. Can’t wait for Caleb to read it someday and declare it trash

MOLLY! He bullshits SO well, I (and Cree) bought into the idea that he just really wanted to stay on the DL. That’s really what I take away from this revelation, his intense desire to keep his past under wraps.

Meeting the Gentleman! Fjord won 600 gold with some good gambling, they get a job dungeon crawling, Laura isn’t there to meet her dad.

Yasha backstory! The crumbs we get about Xhorhas are so little, and I remember being a little confused about how big Xhorhas was, the difference between the region and the Krynn Dynasty, how connected everything is over there.

Caleb asks Fjord whether or not he used party funds to gamble. Fjord reassures him, but Caleb says he would be alright with it. “Calculated risks.”

From home Jester strikes with the Wand of Smiles...

This interrogation has so many good one-liners from our good Mollymauk. “That person is dead and not me” “The truth is vicious, it thinks you owe it something” “joy can fill an awful lot of a person’s life”

Caleb’s Joke: (about Pumat) “Well, [he’s] not one of a kind.” Molly: “Did you just make a joke?” Caleb: “No.”

Yasha in Pumat Sol’s shop is the most awkward we ever see her. She stumbles over her words, bails on her attempts at banter, DOES manage to roll a 14 Persuasion for a discount on her healing potions.

Important Caleb & Yasha bonding over buying the throwing stars for Beau

Liam really is the best Jester (besides Laura, of course)

Some really great early Fjord/Jester in the Underworks. “Don’t read into it.” “This is just like that scene in Tusk Love.” I think Fjord did flirt with Jester, but that came from a) heteronormativity and b) Fjord always pushes his luck. His curiosity and playfulness have burned him more than once--I don’t think he considers that he might also be hurting Jester with these interactions.

bonus Caleb: “It is sad when ships sink.”

Highlight of this dungeon crawl is Nott completely failing to rogue. Nott and traps don’t get along...

#cr #critical role #c2 rewatch #started before it was cool you guys

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dreadnought-dear-captain · 5 years

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‘Til the End of the Line (or Not) OR: See? We TOLD You “No Homo.” Love, Markus and McFeely

*****WARNING: 99.9% SALT!! Contains spoilers for Avengers Endgame!!****

I guess this is part two of my personal processing of Endgame. @pitchforkcentral86 was not satisfied by my timey-wimey Endgame post, which centered on Steve’s choice to go back in time to be with Peggy and the implications of that choice. She remarked that yeah, it’s great that Steve might not be a total piece of crap, Pym particles, yada yada, whatever, but it still didn’t make her feel any less despair over this ending.

The source of her agony: Steve and Bucky’s relationship and its utter lack of satisfying resolution. So I shall address that now, because I think I feel worse about that than anything, and I can’t explain it away with Pym particles.

Anyone who has any investment at all in the relationship between Bucky and Steve — whether you are a Stucky person or whether you view them as platonic but deeply connected best friends — has probably had to spend the last two movies scraping around the floor, searching for crumbs, signs, any hints that these two people care about each other. We have been begging the Russos, the screenwriters Markus and McFeely, anyone who would listen, for anything to suggest that they are even on the barest of speaking terms, let alone that they have the intensity of relationship that the MCU spent 3+ movies explicitly convincing us that they have. I’ll even come out and say that although I ship Stucky in fandom and fic hardcore, I am not an MCU canon Stucky person per se. I’m 100% fine if the MCU wants to treat this as a deep, fraternal friendship. In fact, I see some benefits to this interpretation. How wonderful if men could love each other so deeply and have it NOT be sexual or romantic. But I’m also 100% fine with people interpreting this as romantic love, and there were times throughout this franchise where the actors, various parties in production, and Marvel itself has been agnostic on the subject, if not encouraging of gay interpretations of their relationship. Let it be what you want, fans have been told. Or just flat out post a pic of Steve and Bucky on #National Boyfriend Day like Civil War comic writer Mark Millar. Sure. At times, it almost felt safe to ship them. As soon as Civil War drew to a close, however, it started becoming... inconvenient for Bucky and Steve to be together. Steve needs to go to the Raft. Bucky needs to go into cryo. Steve needs to become Nomad and go secret avenging. Bucky needs to do his Vibranium Brain Magic (TM)/goat herding complex PTSD recovery program. Side note: Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) is my provisional diagnosis based on virtually nothing, because Bucky’s character has gotten so little substantive screen time that we can only guess at his psychological state, save what can be conveyed through glistening eyes and woobieface and “... but I did it.” Wow. Bowl me over, you really got me right in the McFeelys. Though +1000 to SebStan for working what he got to work with to the max. That motherfucker can act. We know for certain approximately jack shit about Bucky’s internal experience post-Winter Soldier. And so, like pretty much everything with Bucky and this friendship/ship arc, I will just guess at what is actually wrong with him. But after 70 years as a POW being tortured and possibly gaslit and definitely brainwashed, that is almost the textbook recipe for complex PTSD, so imma go with that. Returning to this distance. Now, it first appears to be largely logistical in nature. Steve is over here, Bucky is over there. Golly, just too busy to hang these days. All this secret avenging without you. And when we pine — pine — for the meaningful reunion of these two in IW, instead we got a “Hey brah, how's it hanging?” “You know, old and traumatized lol” exchange and a “let’s make sure our dicks don’t touch” back-slappy hug that lasted two seconds. This is without any hint as to whether these two have seen each other yet after Bucky’s de-thawing, leaving us to wonder whether this is really the big reunion we have been waiting for.

(If we had audio, the sound would be 70% slapping.)

I’m going to pause here, because for many of us, this was devastating. After all, we were left with this shot of Steve as Bucky made the choice to go into cryo, a choice that seemed only somewhat justifiable on the vague grounds of “I can’t trust my own mind.” (Me either, pal.)

Ugh.

Perhaps this was also an avoidance strategy — easier to go back on ice than deal with the emotional fallout of what just happened. And who could blame him? He is probably still relearning how to cope effectively with things after his entire coping system was destroyed by his time with Hydra. But Steve was clearly disappointed or, at the very least, saddened by this. He gets something back just to lose it again. Enter distance. He leaves and goes avenging. Emotionally, perhaps this move to cryo created distance as well. Their relationship was on such fragile ground at this point, mostly an artifact from the ‘40s, and their chance to deepen it was taken away by the writers because Bucky wanted to go on ice for reasons and Steve needed to do Steve things. And so when IW rolled around, oh, did we want them to have a substantive reunion. But alas, we did not get that. We saw equally substantive exchanges between Bucky and Sam or Rocket and far more substantive exchanges between Steve and pretty much anyone else. And then we got the ultimate separation — (fake) death. Again. A traumatic, unplanned loss that costs another five years from their timeline, all before they even got the chance to properly re-establish a friendship. Again, I’m going off of what we actually see portrayed, not off of what we assume or would like to see. We have absolutely no idea how much Steve and Bucky interacted in Wakanda. But Steve busted Sam out of the Raft quite early, early enough that he still had a messed up face from the time Tony went in (unless he was getting beatings on the reg, which is possible). So if he was hanging with Sam since before Bucky went on ice, and Sam just visited Wakanda for the first time in IW, either Steve was borrowing the Quinjet to secretly visit Wakanda on his own to hang with Bucky, or he hadn’t been back to Wakanda since he left the first time.

Regarding Steve visiting Wakanda between CW and IW — I found this bullshit from Markus and McFeely on the subject of whether Steve and Bucky met or talked prior to IW. The writers could not even agree about their own characters, with one saying that Steve and his crew probably visited Wakanda and hung out with Bucky and the other saying, eh, the two of them “maybe Skyped.” As to the former, this is not at all supported by the narrative or by logic. Infinity War is clearly Sam’s first time in Wakanda, with all that drama about “zomg you’re gonna hit those trees, bro!” as they are flying into the city. And why would Steve leave his team alone and vulnerable, probably taking the Quinjet, their only form of reliable and safe transportation, so he could go visit Bucky alone? He’s not there for a booty call, y’all, because these guys have barely even rekindled their friendship. Moreover, the other secret avengers know how important Bucky is to Steve. This isn’t a secret. There would be no reason to go alone and no reason for T’Challa to forbid Nat, Sam, and Wanda from coming to Wakanda. So it makes no sense that Steve has visited Wakanda prior to IW, and thus, that would make IW their first meeting, which is… utter and heartbreaking garbage. But at least they had motherfucking SKYPE. MAYBE. Fuck. You. Very. Much.

So, in the face of this shit reunion and Bucky’s subsequent dusting, some of us kindled hope for the upcoming Endgame. Perhaps we would get flashbacks. We knew there would be flashbacks or time travel because we saw stuff in the trailers and sneak peeks from the set. So maybe there would be something there to account for the utter lack of attention to their relationship in Infinity War. Again, this was the mere request that Markus and McFeely and the directors acknowledge wholeheartedly what they have been building for these characters since the beginning of their time in the MCU. This was not even strictly about Stucky. This was about doing justice for these characters as humans. But there were no flashbacks. Who knows what happened in Wakanda. We will have to fill in the blanks on our own. Not a single comment could be spared to even signal whether the IW Wakanda scene was their first time seeing each other since cryo. “How’s that new arm treating you?” or “God, it’s been so long”/deep emotion would be all it would have taken to not keep us wondering one way or the other. This suggests a lack of consideration to the fans of these characters and this relationship — which, again, Markus and McFeely slaved to get us to pour our hearts into. So… Endgame. What was that? Bucky and Steve didn’t stand next to each other at Tony’s funeral. Okay. Bucky is not an A-list Avenger. He did kill Tony’s parents. Awkward. Bucky was comforted by Sam, his… guy he sat behind in the Volkswagen in Civil War and fought next to in IW, and he needed comfort apparently (?) because he… killed Martha and Howard Stark (??), which was sweet, and much more spontaneous affection than we’ve seen from Steve in an age, but what the actual fuck??? Was that Mickey Mouse standing behind the Iron Man 3 kid wearing a “Falcon and Winter Soldier” miniseries t-shirt?

And that ending. This was maybe the one implied nugget of friendship between them visible with an electron microscope. They obviously had at least one deep conversation about Steve deviating from the plan to go have a life, and they obviously had a discussion about who would succeed him as Cap. My dreams of Bucky Cap were dashed into dust, but as @pitchforkcentral86 said, it would have been cruel to give it to Bucky. Bucky would possibly have taken it if Steve kicked the bucket in EG, but it makes the most sense to be passed along in a planned way to Sam. So maybe they had at least one good conversation. Way, way off camera. Bucky said he would miss him. Recycled TFA line. Thank God it was not involving the words “jerk” and “punk.” Glistening woobie eyes. Steve leaving to go be with the one person who can make him feel like a whole human being, apparently, because there is nothing and nobody tethering him to this time in history anymore.

Whoa— wait— WHAT??? These are the moments where I literally double check the credits for the Cap movies to make sure that it says “Markus and McFeely.” Then I check the latest Avengers movies to make sure they also say “Markus and McFeely.” And they ALL DO!! The same two men painstakingly crafted the story of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, two men who — let’s be literal in the narrative here, for the sake of making a conservative argument — are best friends from childhood. They hammered on this story HARD, making sure that their relationship was so strong that by the time 2016 rolled around, the depth and intensity of their friendship and Steve’s commitment to it would tear the Avengers apart. And along the way, something else happened.

When you put two people in relationship like this, you have to know that there will be consequences. People will grow very emotionally invested in their relationship, because that is exactly what the writers were asking the audience to do. These dudes did their job, all right! And then something else happened, quite easily, even though these things will also happen under much harsher conditions: Stucky. Winter Soldier alone probably launched a hundred thousand ships for these two — gay, gay ships, so very gay, the glitteriest, gayest of cruise liners — from a hundred thousand ports around the globe. This ship has permeated pop culture even outside the fandom (some dumb gross man jokes from Screen Junkies within, but the Stucky shenanigans start at around 3:15).

And perhaps that’s when Markus and McFeely realized what a monster they created, one that would clash in ugly ways with their forthcoming (heterosexual) narrative, — their endgame for Steve. And so what did they do? Overcorrect. Wildly. Pull the plug. Bucky and Steve can’t fall out as friends completely, but what’s the next best thing? Give them almost zero screen time together, lest anyone be tempted to think they have a serious relationship — and again, I’m just talking friendship at this point, let alone anything else. Make their lines devoid of substance. Keep us wondering about the nature of their dynamic. Did the distance grow too great? Is Bucky not able to reconnect with anyone? Is Steve too busy? Too salty?? Who knows! These are possibilities, but none are explained. Then just poof Bucky off the face of the earth for 5 years to create existential distance. And in the meantime, ensure that Bucky is shown as not even a passing thought for Steve Rogers. Ensure that his name is never once uttered by Steve until he is about to leave him to go be with Peggy — oh except when, in a real dick move, when he emotionally whumps his past self with the news that Bucky is alive for the sole purpose of getting out of a stranglehold. At the same time, ensure that Steve is seen becoming single-mindedly fixated on Peggy Carter, and make sure the audience — including all those pesky Stucky shippers — knows that he considers her the “love of his life.” Ensure we see the compass with increasing frequency and with maximum longing. Insert Steve finding the absurd photograph of himself on the Director of SHIELD’s desk, facing the door for any junior colleague to see her pining over him like a schoolgirl long after he died, which is just about the least Peggy Carter thing I can ever imagine (and these people created and wrote for the Agent Carter TV series!!!).

Then give us our first openly gay person in the MCU. And drop him in the same scene that you confirm once and for all that Peggy Carter is the love of Steve Rogers’ life. Have Steve be so fucking cool with it that he makes us proud and relieved that he’s not a homophobe. Whew! Only… it makes us feel kind of gross, and maybe we can’t quite figure out why at first. But maybe it’s because it feels personal, like a concession, like the writers and director knew exactly what they were doing to a lot of people who feel a very specific way about Steve’s sexuality and about his relationship with Bucky Barnes. It feels like a tone deaf nod to the fandom. Sorry, guys. No homo. We really did try to warn you with the whole Sharon Carter thing. (Sharon Carter, in an act of gross and misogynistic misuse, remains one of the most criminally mistreated characters in the entire MCU, arguably serving almost entirely as a “no homo” device before being completely discarded, never to be heard from again.)

Which got me thinking — was this move to distance Steve and Bucky so abruptly a reactive move? The divide between Steve and Bucky that happens in IW and EG feels so cold and inorganic. It does not feel at all driven by the natural arc of the characters as established by the creators themselves. It feels rushed and confusing, like it just needed to happen for plot convenience (though not even clearly that), and once again, we are left trying to figure out what the fuck is actually going on.

Part of that is probably needing to lay the groundwork for Steve’s feelings of alienation, which lead him to his ultimate choice to go back in time. He can’t feel too connected to Bucky or he won’t want to go back to be with Peggy. But could part of this also possibly be a reaction to how strongly Stucky was adopted by the public? Did Markus and McFeely realize how much more strongly we love the idea of Steve and Bucky — as friends or lovers, who cares? — rather than Steve and Peggy, which was probably their ending for Steve all along? Did they realize their terrible mistake of bringing them so close, endearing them to us so much, and then realize “OH SHIT,” and then slam on the brakes? Is that why IW and EG felt like absolute shit for their relationship, even for those who are not total endgame Stucky people?

Okay, but what if their friendship just ran its course? Friendships do that, even really deep ones. These two have had a huge chronological and experiential rift that never was really healed (thanks to our dear writers). Steve saved Bucky’s life thrice but they never really reconnected. Presumably. As far as we know in the narrative we are given by the writers. Okay. Let’s say you need to get Steve back with Peggy and for Bucky to become pals with Sam instead because contracts and actors. Whatever. Fine. But if you are going to play the “our friendship has come and gone” card, you need to fully PLAY IT. You can’t make it some vague option that might be true because we can’t figure out what the hell is going on. They need to have an actual conversation. For fuck’s sake, if we have time to fuck around with Korg and Miek on the couch and time to have Banner take selfies with kids and do stupid time gags and a bunch of other little shit, there is enough time to have a brief conversation somewhere to imply that “things have changed” or “people change” or something to imply that the writers were even thinking about the course of Bucky and Steve’s relationship as more than just a platform to launch Steve back to Peggy and launch Bucky toward Sam for their spinoff series.

There was just no depth. How can they give us three movies composed almost entirely of Mariana Trench levels of depth between these two men and then give us virtually nothing in IW and then next to nothing in EG to “round out” their entire storyline? The shape of the emotional momentum in this relationship is so wonky and dissatisfying, and the lack of comment on the dissolution of their friendship in the narrative, the fact that it isn’t even being acknowledged, is one of the worst parts. This relationship died without being honored or even attended to at the most basic level, after being told that it is perhaps the most important relationship in Steve and Bucky’s lifetimes and being shown evidence of that fact.

Moreover, let’s get real — calling Peggy the love of Steve’s life should do nothing to diminish his friendship with Bucky Barnes. That’s not how love works. You don’t just get one person. You can have a best friend — hell, you can have two best friends — and a woman you love. (And even moreover, you don’t have to leap back through time to find closeness just because you can. But that’s another matter with Steve’s character that I will address in a future speculative character analysis on Steve in an effort to explain how he got to this point, because I have a super depressing head canon about it involving traumatic grief and loss.)

But just like comic book science, perhaps there are comic book rules about love and affinity. You only get one person, and Steve gets Peggy. And apparently Bucky gets Sam. Because contracts. But as I said before, I would have been okay if they had a dissolution of their friendship because that was the course of their friendship. Just tell us what is happening. Have the decency to respect your characters by giving their relationship a true arc, whatever it is. You can’t just recycle a TFA line and call it an arc. That is not an arc. Markus and McFeely goddamn know better and we know they know better, because we just saw a beautiful relationship arc closing with Tony and Pepper and, on a smaller scale, with Tony and Peter fucking Parker.

By the way, the small in-person and symbolic interactions between Tony and Peter in EG? Those are what high quality, emotionally salient, brief interactions between people who care about each other look like.

1. Tony’s picture of Peter in his kitchen: He can see from where he does his dishes. He looks at it meaningfully and thoughtfully before making a major plot-essential decision that risks his way of life.

2. Tony and Peter’s reunion hug: It starts off with some humor and classic Peter rambling. Becomes a full-ass, real hug. Nobody slaps the other’s back. Peter remarks, very sincerely, “oh, this is nice.” <3

3. Tony’s death scene: Peter is visibly and truly wrecked. Tony looks at him in a heartfelt way. Words are unnecessary. It is perfect.

Bonus IW moment, because it is one of the most moving images I have seen in the MCU: Tony has Peter’s ashes in his goddamn mouth, eyes closed. Defeated.

Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me Markus and McFeely don’t know how to write characters and brief, powerful interactions, even when the characters are not together. They most certainly are very, very capable of this.

So why did we get the lifeless, quippy drivel and lame physical contact they gave Bucky and Steve in IW and EG? Which, regarding their last convo, was Bucky spilling his guts and Steve being like “Yeah brah, you’ll be fine, don’t be a fucking idiot while I’m off being happy with the only person in the universe who can make me complete #surprisesoulmates.” Bucky offers his quippy mandatory TFA callback retort so that the audience remembers that these two once gave an actual fuck about each other at one point in the narrative. Cue slappy-back-no-dick-touch hug. And please don’t tell me that this is just how men from the ‘40s hug. I would buy that for TFA, but after everything they’ve been through in Winter Soldier and Civil War? I am not buying it.

**Slap-slap**

So we get a Steve Rogers who exits the MCU permanently by making a contentious, questionable final choice with questionable implications that take a graduate degree and/or a hive mind to questionably figure out (or else I’m just a fucking idiot and I’m the only one who needed those things). And we also get the profoundly dissatisfying demise of a relationship that we invested a tremendous amount of emotional energy in because that is what the screenwriters and directors asked us to do.

I am not writing this as a diehard Stucky shipper. I love Stucky, don’t get me wrong. It’s all I read and write in fandom. And I can certainly buy a world (at least, in Caps 1-3) where canon Steve’s love for Bucky is the gay kind and vice versa. Sure. But I am writing this as a person who loves good characters and good story, and this is such a hard fail that even if I had no emotional investment in these two characters, I would wonder what Markus and McFeely had against Steve and Bucky that they let their garden succumb to drought while they tended so considerately to Tony and Peter and Tony and Pepper and Steve and Natasha and Steve and a dead woman and Thor and Bruce and Thor and fucking Rocket, pretty much all of whom (with the exception of Tony and Pepper) have had so much less at stake, so much less time invested, and so much less of a reason for the audience to give a fuck.

But more importantly, I am writing this as a lover of Steve and Bucky, two people who have a well-established, rock-solid, indisputable human relationship that deserves so much more than what it got, especially given all of the unspeakable suffering these men have experienced separately and as a byproduct of their separation. Canonically. This is not made up fandom shippery superimposed upon Markus and McFeely’s precious creation. This is the truth of these two men as determined by the hands of the creators who also neglected them into nothingness, which is arguably a fate far worse than one or both of them dying an actual, final death.

I am left feeling disappointed and betrayed as a fan, wishing, as others have confided in me, that I was more of a Tony person and had been all along. Because then I would be walking away from this still grief-stricken, but at least it would be for the right reasons.

I will leave you with this, arguably one of the last in-character moments for Bucky and Steve in the MCU.

#avengers endgame #salt #endgame spoilers #avengers spoilers #meta

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stupidstubbornbravebitchoftarth · 5 years

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What to do if Braime is your current hyperfixation and everything seems to be going to hell right now

Given the fact that the game of thrones Tag and by some extent the Braime tag is the equivalent of a burning dumpster fire at the moment it's hard to stay positive. Actually everytime I visit the tag, I am close to completly freaking out again. So I came up with some points to help my self stay calm and somehow survive the next two weeks as a functioning human being.

Tumblr!

Reading comprehension on this site and social media in general is piss poor and I say that as a non native english speaker. I have seen several quotes from interviews that were completely taken out of context/misunderstood. Always make sure you read/watch the source material!!!

Theories (the good and the bad)

Some people on here seem like wizards to me with their in depth analysis and leave me wondering why they are not in charge of the writers room @ Game of Thrones. However, they are not in charge of the writers room and therefore have as much of an idea of what is going to happen as everyone else. No matter how logical their theories seem there is a really high chance that they are completely wrong, too.

"But what about those who come up with their theories because they have seen leaks." Again, remember reading comprehension is a big no no for some people on here. Second, the minute I realize someone bases their theories on leaks I stop reading them because it is fairly easy to fake them so the chances that their theories are based on horseshit are +50%.

Also, remember that none of the ACTORS guessed the ending correctly and some of them have worked with their characters for 10 years. You really think that someone on the internet knows more about the plot than people actually involved with it?

Game of Thrones is mostly written by straight white dudes who write with their cocks instead of their brains. There is a big chance that they are completely trashing everything we have rooted for the last years. That is simply something we have come to terms with. And it sucks. We are allowed to be fucking angry about that because it shows how fucked up Hollywood still is. However that doesn't erase that Brienne of Tarth is one of the most important characters in pop culture in recent years and no matter what kind of bullshit the writers cook up next, they can't take her away from us and what she symbolizes to people. We are so blessed that Gwendoline Christie cares about Brienne as much as we do.

There are still two episodes left. I know it doesn't sound like much but if the writers are able to destroy us in a matter of minutes like they did in 8x04 why shouldn't they be able to actually surprise us with good writing in the next episodes? That is where the "fun" of Game of Thrones lies. I am just gonna give them the benefit of a doubt.

Fanfictions. I never was part of a fandom where I was convinced that fan generated content was better than the show itself however Game of Thrones proved me wrong. We are blessed with thousands of gifted writers who understand the characters better than the show writers. And I truly believe that if D&D can simply take characters and completely ruin them, fans are allowed to fix them. Game of Thrones fanfics are valid content especially because their writers understand the source material aka the books better than the show executives.

Basically what I am trying to say is, nobody knows what is going to happen no matter how much they want to convince you otherwise. There is a big chance that everything is going to hell, yes. However there is just as much of a chance that everything is gonna be alright, more or less. It is still possible that we get blessed with an epic finale for our beloved characters. That is something important to keep in mind.

#game of thrones #jaime x brienne #brienne x jaime #brienne of tarth #braime

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kaile-hultner · 5 years

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Dialogues With A Dreg, Part Four

Spoilers for Destiny and Destiny 2 ahead.

Hello, Guardian.

Let’s drop the allegory for a while. I don’t think it was working to begin with, and I prefer to speak plainly instead of in prose.

I love the game you serve as the protagonist in, at least mechanically. Part of the reason I’ve put nearly a thousand hours in piloting you around and clicking on enemy heads is because I’m chasing that satisfying “pop” when something’s brain explodes after I get them with a linear fusion rifle. I guess it’s better than being addicted to drugs or alcohol or video games with gambling mechan- oh shit god dammit wait, fuck, there’s Eververse here, I forgot.

Anyway, Destiny 2 has my full buy-in when it comes to gameplay, as I think it’s grabbed many folks in its three-year lifespan. I’m not as big a fan of the many modes to choose from in the game, and I think the story – when looked at holistically – is more-or-less a wash. But one aspect I can’t ignore is one I’ve tried to reason out in these Dialogues: Bungie, the game’s developer, wants me to live at least part-time in this world, and there are certain ramifications that come with that.

I first noticed these ramifications during the Faction Rallies in D2Y1, when it asked me to pick a faction and fuck shit up across the solar system. I picked what I thought was the coolest-looking faction, a group of (it turned out) thanatonautic, neoliberal warmongers calling themselves Future War Cult. They basically killed themselves over and over to see the future, and as a result they want Guardians everywhere to become absolute war machines. But as far as I could see, they were a “better” option than the other two factions: Dead Orbit, who just wanted to get the fuck out of the solar system and away from the Traveler, our slumbering charge, and New Monarchy.

New Monarchy is the MAGA hat gang of Destiny 2. They want to keep humanity safe by locking them inside the Last City, forming an eternal Guardian-led kingdom, and ruling with an iron fist. Yeesh.

In my first Faction Rally, I fought hard for FWC. I liked the gear they were giving me, not to mention the guns I could earn from them. They had an aesthetic I liked, and the story of thanatonautics is interesting enough for me to want to know more about how all that worked. But I didn’t like the insistence that we “reclaim” the far-flung reaches of the solar system, as if they belonged to us inherently. I didn’t like the ramping-up, constant drumbeat for war they were throwing out. Even if Lakshmi-2, FWC’s leader, seemed like the eye of a hurricane – calm, yet clearly still dangerous – the hurricane she was the center of was starting to irk me.

I’m sorry to say I didn’t drop FWC in subsequent Rallies, even if I wasn’t as enthusiastic about them as I was initially. If I could pick again, though, I know now I’d pick Dead Orbit. They had it the most right, plus Peter Stormare plays Arach Jalaal, the faction’s leader, which is just cool.

But the winner of pretty much every rally was New Monarchy. I couldn’t see the appeal, even if you stripped the clear trump-ass bullshit away. But a LOT of other Destiny 2 players fought for them, and they were the victors constantly. Bungie took the Faction Rally away in D2Y2, but it basically put me on an inexorable thought track to where we are today.

Simply put, I think the world that Destiny 2 is advocating for is at best a fascist one. At worst, we’re talking about reinstating the divine right of kings. Not only does mortal humanity lose in this bargain, but every other living creature inhabiting our solar system suffers for it as well.

Now, Guardian, I can see that this is an unwelcome statement to hear. I get it. After spending the entire five years of your existence thanklessly putting around the solar system and killing gargantuan, god-level threats to humanity and life itself, watching some nerdy, doughy writer cast aspersions on everything you do probably extends past irritation and into wishing you could shoulder-charge me into Glimmer particles. But I want to be clear: yours isn’t the only video game world – or even the only sci-fi world in general – that does this. As Nic Reuben (the original Destiny 2 fascism warner) put it in his 2017 post on the subject, Bungie writers are “blindly following a set of culturally encoded science-fantasy tropes”:

“‘True leaders are born. It’s genetic. The right to rule is inherited.’ Any time you play as a really, really ridiculously good looking person killing mobs of ugly things for a vaguely defined reason, you’re witnessing this kind of ideology first hand.”

One thing I would like to point out, though, before we continue: Guardian, I know you personally. I’ve fought as you across the stars. I know you don’t inherently want to rule over anything. You are intentionally a blank slate, you never voice your own desires except for that one time when a possessed Awoken prince killed your best ramen bud, and I want to believe that the only thing you want — which is the only thing I want — is to race Sparrows on Mars. But the version of you I play as is not the only version of you that exists. There are over a million of you. And aside from that million iterations of you that exist in this game world, there are others who absolutely want to rule. It’s high time to interrogate this world.

Fantasy Space Fascism: The Game

In his book Against the Fascist Creep, freelance journalist and Portland State Ph.D candidate Alexander Reid Ross defines fascism as “an ideology that draws on old, ancient, and even arcane myths of racial, cultural, ethnic, and national origins to develop a plan for the ‘new man.'” He continues:

“Fascism is also mythopoetic insofar as its ideological system does not only seek to create new myths but also to create a kind of mythical reality (ed. emphasis mine), or an everyday life that stems from myth rather than fact. Fascists hope to produce a new kind of rationale envisioning a common destiny that can replace modern civilization. The person with authority is the one who can interpret these myths into real-world strategy through a sacralized process that defines and delimits the seen and the unseen, the thinkable and the unthinkable.

“That which is most commonly encouraged through fascism is producerism, which augments working-class militancy against the ‘owner class’ by focusing instead on the difference between ‘parasites’ (typically Jews, speculators, technocrats, and immigrants) and the productive workers and elites of the nation. In this way, fascism can be both functionally cross class and ideologically anticlass, desiring a classless society based on a ‘natural hierarchy’ of deserving elites and disciplined workers. By destroying parasites and deploying some variant of racial, national, or ethnocentric socialism, fascists promise to create an ideal state or suprastate – a spiritual entity more than a modern nation-state, closer to the unitary sovereignty of the empire than political systems of messy compromises and divisions of power.”

Ross, A. R. (2017). Against the Fascist Creep. AK Press.

The Destiny franchise begins with you, a freshly-reborn Guardian, shooting and punching your way through a hive of vaguely-arachnid aliens your Ghost companion calls “Fallen.” You find a decrepit jumpship deep in the heart of the Old Russia Cosmodrome, which your Ghost fires up and uses to take you to the “last safe city on Earth,” a walled metropolis underneath the Traveler. You first meet with the Vanguard triumvirate, Titan Commander Zavala, Warlock Ikora, and Hunter Cayde-6, and then, after completing some tasks for them, you are granted an audience with the Speaker (voiced by Bill Nighy):

“THE SPEAKER: There was a time when we were much more powerful. But that was long ago. Until it wakes and finds its voice, I am the one who speaks for The Traveler.

“You must have no end of questions, Guardian. In its dying breath, The Traveler created the Ghosts to seek out those who can wield its Light as a weapon—Guardians—to protect us and do what the Traveler itself no longer can.

“GUARDIAN: What happened to it?

“THE SPEAKER: I could tell you of the great battle centuries ago, how the Traveler was crippled. I could tell you of the power of The Darkness, its ancient enemy. There are many tales told throughout the City to frighten children. Lately, those tales have stopped. Now… the children are frightened anyway. The Darkness is coming back. We will not survive it this time.

“GHOST: Its armies surround us. The Fallen are just the beginning.

“GUARDIAN: What can I do?

“THE SPEAKER: You must push back the Darkness. Guardians are fighting on Earth and beyond. Join them. Your Ghost will guide you. I only hope he chose wisely.”

Bungie. Destiny. Activision Entertainment, 2015.

This introduction to the world of Destiny is… shockingly reductive. Even playing the campaign when this happens, my first thoughts were, “wait so we’re not even smart or good enough to hear the children’s scary stories about the history of this world? what the fuck?” But over the course of years, we find out more and more about the so-called Golden Age of Humanity, the tools humans built with implied assistance from the Traveler, the various rich families and corporate megaliths that consolidated power over people across the solar system in the years and decades leading to the arrival of the Darkness and the ensuing Collapse.

Not only that, we start to get a pretty clear image of what life was like immediately following the Collapse. Humanity was almost driven to extinction, and the people left alive after this apocalypse soon wished they were dead. The Traveler “defeated” the Darkness but in the process put itself into something similar to an emergency reboot mode. It deployed the Ghosts, who resurrected people who could, as the Speaker put it, “wield its Light as a weapon,” but the first of these “Risen” were nothing short of horrific. They used their Ghosts’ regeneration and resurrection powers to become regional warlords, subjugating what few mortal people remained, draining the desolate wastes of what few resources they had, and basically sealing the deal on the “Dark Age” brought on by the Collapse. It wasn’t until the advent of the Iron Lords that these warlords were defeated and the “age of Guardians” could begin, but even the Iron Lords did some pretty heinous shit – like use a whole town of mortals as bait to lure in a band of warlords on the run.

But when it comes to creating a mythical reality, the Speaker has his formula down pat. Don’t get too bogged down with details, paint the conflict in stark good vs. evil, literal “Light vs. Darkness” broad strokes, and mythologize the actions of Guardians (but most importantly, our Guardian). And oh, what fodder for mythology we are.

By the end of the first campaign, we’re the hero who severed the connection between the Hive, the Vex and the Traveler and tore out the heart of the Black Garden. By the end of The Taken King, we’ve slain a god-king. In the Rise of Iron expansion, we stop the spread of a virulent nanoparticle with murderous intent called SIVA in its tracks, using nothing but our fists. In Destiny 2, we become the Hero of the Red War, the one who put an end to a Vex plot to sterilize all worlds, and who killed a Hive Worm God. We avenge our fallen Hunter Vanguard, we kill a Taken Ahamkara. We are the hub on which the spokes of history are turning.

In terms of video game power fantasies, I really truly can’t imagine a better-feeling one. It’s basically pure uncut dopamine being transmitted directly to the pleasure centers of the brain, one Herculean feat at a time. And if we were the only Guardian, if we were not part of a larger world, if everything around us was in a vacuum, I don’t know if I would be writing this article. But Bungie has been very clear about wanting to make a world where our actions do materially affect our surroundings. As such, we are essentially a walking propaganda tool for the Consensus, a pseudo-democratic government over the Last City, consisting of faction leaders, the Vanguard and the (now-presumed-dead, hasn’t been replaced) Speaker.

The Consensus wants badly to declare the advent of the New Golden Age, a time in which Humanity can finally emerge from under the shadow of the Traveler to pick up where it left off prior to the Collapse. The problem we supposedly face is the never-ending onslaught of Enemies. Four alien species showed up on our doorstep after the Collapse, all seeking to finish us off (according to the Speaker): the Fallen, the Cabal, the Hive/Taken, and the Vex.

Of the four-ish races of enemy, only one can said to be truly, deeply “evil” in the sense the Speaker intends: the Hive and Taken, led by Taken King Oryx and his sisters Sivu Arath and Savathun, the only force in the galaxy more fascist than the Guardians. The Vex are a race of machines whose only focus is on making more of themselves, a threat similar to SIVA. The other two alien forces, the Fallen and the Cabal, are certainly antagonistic toward Guardians but our initial reasons for fighting them are, frankly, butt-ass stupid. Basically, we fight them because they’re there. They have the audacity to land on planets that “belong to us” and scavenge resources from them. Until the Red Legion showed up on Earth, we basically only ever fought Cabal on Mars, and there’s really no reason as to why.

The Fallen, or Eliksni, on the other hand, end up coming off more as the tragic victims of our flippantly rampant genocidaire practices than actual “enemies.” They’re probably the weakest alien species we come up against. Their backstory involves them living in peace under the Traveler before their entire society was caught up in a Collapse-like “Whirlwind” and destroyed. Rather than give them Guardians, like it did with us, the Traveler instead just up and peaced out, leaving the Eliksni for dead against the maelstrom of the Darkness. The surviving “Fallen” got in their skiffs and desperately chased the Traveler across the heavens, stratifying the remnants of their society into “houses” and developing religious devotion to machines like Servitors in the process.

They tried to take the Traveler back at the Battle of the Five Fronts and Twilight Gap, and lost. Their armies were shattered, and we’ve been nonchalantly killing them en masse ever since. They are the “parasites” our Guardian must exterminate, along with the Hive, Cabal, and Vex. When we make friends with, or even simply allies with, a Fallen (like Variks the Loyal, Mithrax the Forsaken, or the Spider), it is made clear almost immediately that this 100 percent doesn’t change the relationship we have with the Fallen as a group. Variks is absolutely subservient to Mara Sov and the Awoken. Mithrax wants to create an Eliksni House that bows down to Guardians and Humanity for being “better stewards” of the Traveler than the Eliksni was. The Spider makes it clear that he only wants to grow his crime syndicate, but that we can help him out if we want. Never once does the Vanguard or the Consensus reach out to these allies and try to broker peace. And in-game, we simply don’t have an option but to fire on and kill Eliksni in droves. Kill or be “killed,” right?

When it comes to Humanity itself, while we never get a chance to actually leave the Tower and walk through the streets of the Last City, there are at least hints as to the deep class stratification at work here. You can’t get much more on-the-nose than an ivory tower of immortal beings overlooking an enclosed human race. Guardians atop humanity, the Speaker above the Vanguard over the Consensus over the people, and you, the very fulcrum on which history pivots, functionally over everything else. But in the mythical reality of this game, it’s really the Traveler über Alles, and humanity underneath the Traveler has become a wonderful, diverse melting pot without class, without fear. An ideal state where the walls keep Darkness at bay and humanity can discover the joys of tonkotsu ramen yet again.

A Light Story Vs. Lore Steeped in Darkness

Destiny has a reputation, unfairly earned, for being an okay game with a bad story, or at best a nonexistent one. The story isn’t really all that bad, it’s just poorly implemented up front, and I think my willingness to engage with the game’s world to the extent that I have is a testament to how powerful and evocative some of the beats in Destiny’s writing truly are. If we dissect the game we can separate the writing of the “story” from the writing of the “lore,” and in watching the plot develop over the past few years, we can see a gradual unification of these two areas start to occur.

This is helped greatly by third-party resources like Ishtar Collective, and by mechanical decisions Bungie made in D2Y2. Adding the lore back into the game with Forsaken was a good idea; choosing to fully integrate the lore into the world starting with Season of the Forge was a great one.

A side-effect of this lore-plot unification is a dismantling-in-real-time of some of the game’s most beloved and widely-spread legends, like the legend of Shin Malphur and Dredgen Yor. Even our personal legend is challenged in this way, and it’s a really neat way that Bungie writers new and old are critically engaging with their work. But it also really throws into stark relief some of the issues I’ve laid out in this article so far.

Take, for example, the lore book “Stolen Intelligence.”

Presented to us as intercepted secret Vanguard transmissions, “Stolen Intelligence” shows us exactly what the Vanguard really thinks of our actions, and what their goals really are. It was part of Season of the Drifter, which overall had a “trust no one” vibe to it, but some of the entries here are BLEAK, y’all.

Here’s an excerpt from the first entry, titled “Outliers.”

“Fallen armed forces continue to fall back from active fronts across Terra. Factions of House Dusk remain active in the European Dead Zone. Throughout the rest of the globe, refugee attack incidents have dropped by more than 70 percent since the conclusion of the Red War – largely attributable to depressed Fallen and human populations rather than any significant change in interspecies relations.

[…]

“The recent trending emergence of so-called “crime syndicates” (cf. report #004-FALLEN-SIV) is emblematic of the continuing destructuralization of Fallen society. Likely an artifact of multi-generational colonization of human strongholds, this agent believes that because these syndicates have no relation to indigenous Fallen culture, young Fallen are appropriating and imitating human mythology in absence of a strong cultural heritage of their own.

[…]

“VIP #3987, another former confederate of the Awoken, is a lesser-known personality known as Mithrax. Scattered field reports suggest that like #1121, #3987 styles himself a Kell of the so-called “House Light,” an otherwise unknown House apparently founded by #3987 himself. We have secondhand accounts that Mithrax has engaged in allied operations with Guardians in the field, though we have not as yet been able to corroborate these accounts with any degree of veracity. This agent is inclined to treat these reports with a healthy degree of skepticism until otherwise confirmed, as they may be propaganda from Fallen sympathizers in the Old Russian and Red War Guardian cohorts. We have requested intelligence records from the Awoken which may further clarify the matter.

“In addition, whatever the findings of said intelligence records may be, it should be stressed that one or two sympathetic outliers cannot be relied upon to erase the wrongs of past centuries, nor should their good-faith efforts to correct the sins of their forbears be taken as sufficient symbolic reparation.

[…]

“We have come too far to pull our punches now.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Outliers. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Here’s another piece of “Stolen Intelligence,” about our relationship with Cabal Emperor Calus:

“Related to the above, #3801’s aggressive propaganda campaign appears to have been successful. Despite #3801’s recent inactivity, sentiment polls captured in the Tower at regular intervals over the last several months indicate that he has successfully swayed a significant percentage of the Red War cohort to believe that he may be a potential ally. Given our history with the Cabal as well as the events of the Red War itself, this is shocking and perhaps attributable to a case of mass traumatic bonding.

“It is my strong recommendation that the Vanguard pursue a reeducation curriculum before #3801 invites any Guardians of the City to defect to his service, a possibility which we have documented in multiple previous reports.”

Bungie. Destiny 2: Forsaken – Season of the Drifter. Lore Book: Stolen Intelligence. Passivity. Activision Entertainment, 2019.

Other entries detail the efforts of the Vanguard from keeping ostensible “conspiracy theories” from being published in the Cryptarchy’s journals; show the apparent oddity of mortal-Guardian “integrated neighborhoods;” and discuss the ongoing surveillance of the Drifter, a rogue Lightbearer who has survived since the early Dark Ages and who uses Darkness-aligned technology to run a PVEVP game called “Gambit”.

There are many other stories like these, scattered throughout the lore. Stories of Cryptarchy students being banished for making fun of New Monarchy’s leaders, of Guardians messing with Hive technology being burned alive and killed fully by the Praxic Order for their crimes of experimentation. Stories like these wouldn’t happen – couldn’t happen! – to our Guardian, because they’re too important, but are seemingly everyday occurrences to less consequential members of this society. In the real world, we’d call that an increasingly oppressive police state. In Destiny 2, it’s just flavor text.

There was a degree of narrative complexity added to Season of the Drifter that hadn’t been in the game prior. The entire season was essentially boiled down to “which side are you on, the Drifter’s or the Vanguard’s,” and in our path to make a choice, we heard from various bit players in our world. The Drifter told us his story in greater detail than perhaps we needed (and how much of it is true is debatable), but his story is also the story of a less morally-pure Guardian class. Everyone from the warlords to the Iron Lords did heinous shit to humanity while the Drifter watched, and it hardened him. The Praxic Warlock Aunor goes all in on her adherence to the City’s propaganda and ideology, trying to show us how untrustworthy the Drifter is. She ends up revealing more of her order’s goals than perhaps was wise.

This narrative complexity is nice, but it still betrays the game in a fundamental way. We now have the documents. We know what Guardians are actually about, and how they’re not exactly shining beacons of unwavering good like the Speaker would have had us believe. Regardless of declining Fallen activity, of a shift in Fallen culture, of actual living Fallen who want to ally with Guardians, the Vanguard is still adamantly pursuing “extirpation,” which is a fancy way of saying genocide (I’m not kidding, it literally means “root out and destroy completely”). We know the Vanguard and the Praxic Order have a hard-on for exile, reeducation and information suppression.

On top of everything, the narrative complexity was not met with any kind of mechanical complexity. Even with proof that the Vanguard wants to kill every Eliksni in the system, conscientious objectors don’t get to opt out. The narrative path that forks between the Drifter and Aunor converges again by the end of the quest. The “conspiracy theorist” that has been trying to publish paper after paper detailing exactly how the Nine worked with Dominus Ghaul to sneak his fleet into City airspace undetected was proven right by lore WE FIND IN THE GAME, but that doesn’t change our combat relationship with the Cabal remnants anywhere in the system, and homeboy still gets his papers rejected.

Ikora and Zavala, our remaining Vanguard members, insist repeatedly that Guardians are not a warfighting force, that the Vanguard and the Consensus is not an authoritarian organization. But everything we do says otherwise.

“A peace born from violence is no peace at all.”

Guardians do not get to choose their paths in the world of Destiny 2. The paths laid out before them lead to a life of warfare, of pain, of endless murder. Ostensibly, they are agents of good, trying to beat back the forces of evil, but if you look too close you see that really they’re just a bunch of indiscriminate killers with a mandate from the Orb God. Desperate to get out from under the heels of warlords, the Guardians created a fascist society, and adding insult to injury they pretend it’s a democratic, free one. Killing the Fallen is genocide, but you can literally never stop killing them because the game won’t let you. The only right way to play at that point is to turn off your console and go outside.

Destiny 2 isn’t the only video game to fall into this trap. As Nic Reuben said in the follow-up piece to his first story on how Destiny 2 is fascist, “I’m not saying Destiny is propaganda, just reliant on some of the same narrative tricks that make propaganda so powerful. At the same time, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that games like Call of Duty make certain assumptions about what is justifiable, righteous slaughter and what is terrorism. Replace modern military hardware with future tech, replace terrorists with alien races that have traits synonymous with cartoon portrayals of traditionally marginalized social groups, and you’re effectively playing through the worst aspects of Call of Duty with a new coat of a paint.”

There is one glimmer of hope in the game. One sliver of lore that gives us pause and helps make the game bearable in its current state. It comes in the form of Lady Efrideet, former Iron Banner handler, youngest member of the Iron Lords, and a Guardian in self-exile from the City, the Vanguard, and its fascist dogma.

Lady Efrideet is one of the most fearsome Hunters in the Destiny universe. She is known as one of the best marksmen, if not the best one. She is impossibly strong, having once thrown Lord Saladin bodily off a mountain into a Fallen Spider Walker, destroying it. And she is also one of the only named pacifist Guardians who isn’t a member of the Cryptarchy. Her story is the story of the fall of the Iron Lords, as well as the beginning of the SIVA crisis, many years before our Guardian’s rise is documented.

But it isn’t SIVA or the Iron Lords that we’re interested in. Instead, we know that after SIVA was sealed away, Efrideet snuck away from Earth. She saw the deaths of everyone she knew and her will to fight was shattered. If this was the result of fighting for the Traveler, she didn’t want any part in it. So she took to the stars. In doing so, she ended up in the far reaches of the solar system, beyond even where we currently roam. It turns out, a small enclave of other Lightbearers, hesitant or unwilling to use their powers to kill, had also fled to this part of the system and had established a colony. It’s there that Efrideet resides, and it’s there I’d like to go.

Unfortunately, our Guardian is too “important” to the vast tidal forces at work in the Destiny universe for us to be able to leave for the outer reaches whenever we want. Because we are the hub on which the wheel of history turns, and there is no escaping that now, if ever we could. We are death, the flattening of a complex and intricate universe into one of simple shapes, the sword logic in a human/Awoken/Exo body. We are needed for the plans of the Nine/Mara Sov/Hive Queen Savathun to come to fruition. When or if the Darkness ever does come back, we will be the force that faces it and, win or lose, shape our future afterward.

Sometimes it’s nice having a video game place your character on a linear track. Games like Half-Life or Titanfall present to us simple choices in otherwise-complex story environments: progress, or die. Our characters are not immortal, but they have help from the technologies around us, are tenacious, are resourceful, are quick to adapt to changing situations. In Destiny, we simply exist. We can’t truly die. Even when it comes to the rules of the game, our immense “paracausality” causes us to shrug Darkness Zones off as mere inconveniences where other Guardians have died their final deaths. Because we are necessary. The Vanguard and Consensus need us to justify their horrific fascist policies. The great forces at work in the background need us to work as a pawn. Even Bungie itself needs us, powerful, trapped beings with a sense of right and wrong but no agency to actually act on those ethics, to continue its game.

I haven’t preordered Shadowkeep yet. For once I’m glad we’re not focusing on the Fallen or the Cabal. Going to the Moon means we’ll pretty much just be dealing with Hive, to say nothing of the unreal Nightmares we’re supposed to face. But I’m still undecided as to whether I even want to order Shadowkeep in the first place. If Lady Efrideet can go to the edge of known space and live peacefully with other pacifist Guardians, maybe I can put my controller down and step away, once and for all. It would be nice to have the extra space on my Xbox One’s hard drive. Other games exist to be played, and having the time and energy to do so would help me here, with No Escape.

But even then. I’m not expressing agency as a Guardian, but rather as the person who controls you, Guardian. While I go off to play other games, you sit and wait in stasis. Even if I don’t play, there are a million iterations of you willing to commit genocide daily for cheap rewards (shoutouts to the sixtieth Edge Transit drop in my inventory this month alone). Sure, it’s just a game. But this is what having a dynamic world means in practice. There are consequences to your actions. There always have been.

There is no reason why Humanity couldn’t share the Traveler’s gifts with, at the very least, the Eliksni. There is no reason why we couldn’t just ignore the Cabal in a state of mutually assured destruction, given how small a faction the Red Legion was relative to the Cabal army’s full size. Of the two remaining enemies, the Vex are less evil than they are simply a thing that wants the universe to be like it, and that’s threatening to diverse life throughout the universe, not just Humanity. The Hive/Taken are the true enemies in the game, but even they are directed, pawn-like, by their Worm Gods.

There is, likewise, no reason why the Risen had to organize in the fascist context they did. They could have created a society in which everyone could come and go freely, where ideas and actions could be given and received absent interference, where a true “golden age” could have sprung up naturally simply by living together harmoniously and using the Light the Traveler gave them to create, rather than destroy.

But that’s not how this story shakes out.

#destiny #destiny 2 #video games #antifascism

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franklyshipping · 5 years

Text

The Cutest Arrogance (Part 5) ~ A Markiplier and Jacksepticeye Ego Fanfic

Ooooohhhh I left it on a cliffhanger last time, but rest assured, everything will come together in the final part of this mini-series! The previous part can be found here aaand.....LET'S DO IT!

'......Wilford.'

Anti was wide eyed as he looked up at the grinning Wilford Warfstache, and Anti couldn't help but be embarrassed at how Wilford had caught him so off guard. He was definitely getting better at his poofing, which was one of the many things that the glitch admired about the vivacious Warfstache. Not only were his magical and reality altering abilities something to marvel at, but Anti found himself admiring specific things about Wilford like....the way he threw his head back when he belly laughed, or the way his eyes sparkled when he was listening to someone with excitement....or the way he tickled someone with such ruthlessness. As you can imagine, amidst Anti's inner thoughts, post his initial exclamation, he'd just simply been...staring at Wilford. Wilford himself chuckled as he looked down at Anti with a rather amused smirk, and he reached forward to boop the glitch's nose affectionately.

'Well fancy bumping into you glitchy-pie!'

Anti face scrunched up at the boopage, and he considered giving him a growled threat about such immature displays....but c'mon, who doesn't like to get booped? He ended up only giving Wilford a half-hearted glare, before thinking to himself....and then deciding to flex his biceps as he replied.

'These babies don't maintain themselves bubble-butt! Are ya hopin' to follow in my glorious example?'

Anti waggled his eyebrows, and giggled when he saw Wilford grin happily at the sound of the nickname. Anti knew that Wilford liked them, no matter how goofy they were, so Anti always went to town with them. Wilford was also grinning at the sight of Anti flexing his glorious arms; he pressed himself against one of the walls of the corridor, dramatically fanning himself as he crooned.

'Oh stop I beseech you, I fear my heart and loins cannot handle it!'

Anti, internally, was somewhat flustered by Wilford's words, which is a little strange given how it wasn't so uncommon for Wilford to make such flirtatious outburst. Anyhow, externally he snorted and played along by gasping in exaggerated, gentlemanly shock.

'Oh you poor thing, I know I am magnificent but I had no idea it would affect you like this! Allow me to escort you to your studio where you may take rest!'

Wilford grinned, knowing that Anti's statement actually meant ''I want to sleep on one of your comfy couches bitch''. Wilford, if not famed for his facial hair, was famed for his comfy squishy couches. Everyone loved his couches, including Anti, who would find any excuse possible to go and curl up on them. Of course, Wilford obliged, ending off their playful role-play with a giggle.

'Oh thank you sir!'

Anti snickered as they now ambled together, Wilford naturally slinging his arm over the glitch's shoulders; not that Anti was going to complain since he secretly was a big lover of that sort of wordless affection. Not fancy schmancy words, just good old initiation...which is a little ironic I find since he could never bring forth the confidence to give that much affection himself. Anyway, soon enough Wilford was clamouring out his thoughts.

'On the subject of things about you that make me absolutely weak at the knees....I saw our darling Yandere just now, looking like they'd exhibited quite a lot of exertion.....they tell me you've been enacting your vengefulness. I'm impressed.'

At Wilford's new words, Anti blinked in surprise before grinning and looking to the floor. Despite the teasiness in Wilford's tone, Anti could always tell when the man was being sincere, and right now he was. Anti felt something flutter in his abdomen at being complimented by Wilford, and he soon looked back up at the moustached man with gleaming eyes and appreciation in his voice.

'I swear you're just tryna destroy my hard-assness at this point Warfstache.'

That made Wilford laugh and wiggle his moustache with his soft mirth as they found themselves entering the studio, Wilford just thought that Anti was beyond adorable. They both flopped with equal lazy synchronicity onto the squishy lilac, two-man sofa. At which point, Wilford gave Anti a gentle squeeze on the shoulder amidst his reply, just to solidify the fact that he did really mean all the things he was saying.

'All good things deserve praise! Although, there's one thing about your revenging that I just can't quite get my head around.'

Anti's appreciative grin morphed into a curious one as he cocked his head at Wilford.

'Oh yeah?'

Anti's eyebrow was raised too, it was raised as an invitation for Wilford to pose whatever query he had bouncing around in his California Girl-esque brain. Of course, Wilford had no hesitation. He spoke slow as he leant into the back of the couch, his eyes searching Anti as he spoke.

'You've gotten revenge on Silver, Host, and Yandere all because they observed your....embarrassment. But, since I'm the perpetrator...why haven't you gotten revenge on me?'

Anti froze. Legitimately froze. Buffering videos and Elsa eat your heart out, this was what being frozen looked like. Anti's lips were slightly parted, and even his eyes didn't move, it was like he'd somehow short circuited. Which is an accurate metaphor due to how on the inside he was completely consumed by panic. There was a reason. A very good reason...and it was a damn embarrassing and humiliating reason. So, when Anti's exterior remembered it existed...Anti just deflected.

'Cuz it would be unfair, duhh! You were winning a bet fair and square, so any revenge wouldn't be justified.'

That made sense....yeah, yeah that made complete and total sense, there was absolutely no way that anyone of sane judgement and process of thought would find anything to nit-pick in that, right?

...

Enter Warfstache.

'Bullshit.'

Wilford was frank with his reply but teasing in his visage, lips curling into an amused smile as he analysed how Anti had transitioned from being frozen, to downright being a fizzling form of fidgets. Anti as blinking rapidly as colour came to his face, this was not good this was not good oh fuck he couldn't let this get out.

'Wha-?'

'That is bullshit.'

Wilford elaborated, he was not about to let Anti try and deflect again. Now he shuffled in closer to Anti on the couch, peering into his face when Anti tried to avert it out of pure meekness. Wilford was encapsulated. Since when did Antisepticeye get so meek, AND bad at lying? There was something to uncover here, and if there was one thing he had learned from being headhunted by a passionate, promiscuous detective, he learned how to coax things from individuals. With Anti....you had to rile him, and you had to rile him good. You had to make the words burst out in an uncontrolled frenzy, and so that's what Wilford was going to do.

'I know you're hiding something. You've never needed to justify yourself for anything in the past, so why start now with me, hmm? What's so different? You just scared because you know how bad I can get ya back glitchy?'

He made his smirk arrogant, he made his voice crooning and taunting, using every annoying tactic he knew like proximity and just simply pointing out the fact that he KNEW Anti was hiding something, and he couldn't get away from it. Needless to say, this affected Anti marvellously. The words just burst forth.

'Alright fine, you wanna know so bad?! I fucking like you, okay? And th-the thought of tickling you and seeing you all squirmy and blushy and squealy and happy because of me is flustering as fuck! I know I'd just have a breakdown right there and then and embarrass myself and confess in front of you, and it would be humiliating! So....yeah....there it is....'

Anti quickly went quiet, trying to hide how in his whole exclamation he hadn't even stopped to breathe. So he breathed now, but it was sporadic and reflected the uneasy anxiety that was building up inside of him. Anti expected rejection, I mean, what chance did he have with the strong, influential, charismatic Wilford Warfstache? The most charming, mentally unstable, beautiful, psychotic man that he world had to offer? So, you can imagine Anti's surprise, when Wilford descended into meekness himself.

'....you like me?'

Wilford's eyes were wide and full of hope as his mind raced. He'd gone so quiet because he had to make sure, he had to make sure that this was real because if this wasn't real and he said something wrong then he just wouldn't know what to do with himself. Wilford really liked Anti, and it was at this point that realisation hit Anti in the face like a goddamn truck. He had been such a fucking idiot, keeping his feelings to himself....because as he looked to Wilford's warm, happy face....joy outshone anxiety.

'Yeah....you're uh...well, you're really hot.'

WHY THE FUCK WAS THAT THE FIRST THING TO COME TO YOUR HEAD YOU SHALLOW TWAT?! Anti got angry with himself. Then he thankfully calmed down a little on the inside when he realised that Wilford had spluttered and giggled at his words, evidently liking them from how pink his face went. Then Anti felt his own giggles building up inside him when Wilford flipped his hair and purred.

'Oh stoooop....but keep going.'

Anti giggled hugely and gave him and shove, dammit he was a cheeky shit. He was his cheeky shit. Anti was about to oblige and rattle off a series of charming, and probably inappropriate, compliments and comments he had stored away, until Wilford's eyes suddenly widened.

'OH MY GOD!'

Wilford had let out a gasp of joy, and soon Anti's head was cocked in curiosity once again.

'What?'

Wilford grinned at Anti with the most smug and gleeful expression even known to mankind.

'I JUST REALISED! I'M SAFE FROM GLITCHY TICKLES FOREVER!'

Wilford burst into cackles, giving Anti an arrogant wink as he threw his head back with mirth. Anti's face reddened when he realised what Wilford meant, and his mind went back to his confession. Then....something hit Anti. He had been too flustered and nervous to tickle Wilford because of the fear that his feelings for him would be revealed....but....said feelings were all out in the open now. There was nothing to hide anymore. There was....nothing to fear anymore. Anti's feral gaze suddenly drifted up and down Wilford's form, which shook with mirth. Anti growled under his breath.

'Are ya quite sure about that?'

Wilford rolled his eyes as he looked back to his sweet glitch....and then his stomach did a somersault. Oh that was a look. That was a look of a predator that had just realised its own strength. Wilford meanwhile really did well at mirroring the look of some sweet prey that realised that it had made a mistake....and was utterly screwed. How silly of him to assume that there was something in this world that could repress Antisepticeye for any true length of time.

'Ah.....Anti d-dEAR!'

Wilford shrieked when Anti lunged forth and made quick work of straddling him, all the while he bared his teeth in wild excitement as ideas and techniques and tickle spots flew through his head. Oh the possibilities, oh the free time; Anti was certain that this feeling of exhilaration was as close to heaven as he was going to get. All Anti wanted to do was to feel and play with every ticklish nerve that Wilford's body had to offer.

'Yes bubble-baby?'

Anti's voice was over-sweet on purpose, which didn't help Wilford as he wriggled and tried to collect himself. Nor did it help that the moustached man was already smiling from feeling Anti's fingers softly roaming and ghosting up his torso.

'N-Now a-ah....s-since we have j-just r-revealed our feelings, m-m-maybe we should....m-m-maybe wehe shohould....'

Wilford was a mess of voice breaks and warbling stutters as his eyes flicked between Anti's devilish fingers and devilish eyes....everything about him was just beautifully devilish. Wilford was so flustered that he couldn't even finish his thoughts, which allowed Anti to interrupt with a soft chuckle. He eased Wilford's arms above his head as he purred with glee.

'Hmm? We should what? Get more....closely acquainted? I entirely agree...'

Wilford tittered at Anti's wording, feeling warmth pool in his tummy as Anti's teasing fingertips traced down to his biceps...and lingered. Can you blame Anti though? Wilford Warfstache was ripped and Anti was going to show his appreciation for that as much as he was able.

'God you're so muscly, how is this even fucking possible....'

He growled with a mixture of disbelief and admiration in his voice as Wilford trembled, just letting out streams of light giggles as he gazed up at Anti. The glitch's determined expression made him smile even wider, and kept him stammering away of course.

'I-Ihihi w-w-wohohork ohout a-aha lohot I g-guehehess....'

Anti smirked, deciding to curl his fingers into claws against Wilford's shirt clad skin; that got the poor man letting out the sweetest squeaks as Anti purred.

'Soooo dedicated and firm....'

Anti decided to keep just curling and uncurling his fingers against the tender areas that were Wilford's biceps, and despite them not being pinned, Wilford couldn't bring his arms down. He just couldn't. He knew if he did then they would just be pinned anyway, and he wanted to cling to any scrap of freedom and composure that he had left....but lets be honest, it was all just diminishing. Wilford was a flustered, giggly mess of a man being teased by the man he cared for and he already couldn't handle it.

'S-Stahahap yohohour t-t-teheasing thihis is sohoho meheeean!'

'Ohoho, you think this is mean?'

Anti cooed tauntingly, adoring how such simplicity already had Wilford crumbling. He was making MANY mental notes. Now though, he decided to take his sweet love off guard. He sneered and without warning dragged his ''claws'' down into his hollows, firmly down his ribs at a careful pace, down his sides, and then over his lower belly. They never stopped or hitched against Wilford's baby-soft skin, and the diabolical action made Wilford shriek and clamp his arms down in shock. He'd never been tickled with such a motion and right now he was the definition of shook.

'HOLYFUCK-AHAHANTIHIHI DOHOHO NAHAHAT!!'

Anti chuckled and stopped with a playful grin, but the halt was only to allow him to slip Wilford's hands under his knees so he could pin those pesky limbs.

'Oh quit your fussing ya lil baby, it's not like it's gonna stop me from what I've got planned.....'

Wilford gasped softly as he recovered from the first of Anti's onslaughts, and now he was shaking his head and gazing up at his sweet devil with pleads of his lips and whimpers in his throat.

'N-Nohohooo oho nohoho.....'

Poor Wilford, Anti was not to be swayed. Not that Wilford entirely disliked the experience of course....though he'd never proclaim such a thing aloud. Now, Anti set about slowly pushing up Wilford's shirt, and soon Anti's eyes were fixed upon Wilford's quivering, bare abdominals. Hot damn. Anti's blunt nails skittered over the tempting muscles as Anti licked his lips and spoke huskily.

'Now what do we have here? More working out?'

Wilford squeezed his eyes shut; seeing Anti look so hungry for him like that was giving him chills that he could NOT handle. He whined through nervous giggles.

'Leheheave m-m-my ahabs ahahalone!'

Wilford was a wriggler and a desperate squeaker, reacting to every drag of a nail or a finger, and Anti loved it. He wanted to see the pretty reactions up close too, so he leant down to Wilford, getting them nose to nose. It was the feeling of Anti's warm breath on his face that made Wilford open his watery brown eyes, and he shivered with happy bashfulness at the sight of Anti's piercing chasms of black. Oh how he loved the darkness.

'I'm just scoping out my new play area honey....this is all mine now after all.'

Wilford couldn't help but grin, since he knew the possessiveness was part of Anti's playfulness; Anti's smirky-grin was proof of that. Anti's words still affected him though, and he was just about to stammer out an attempt at defiance....but he ended up squealing it out when Anti's hard, curling claws returned.

'NOHOHO YOHOHOU CAHAN'T OHOWN ME IHI'M AHA STROHONG IHINDEPENDENT MAHAHAN!!'

Anti's fingers curled and uncurled firmly against Wilford's muscles, which in Anti's eyes produced the most deliciously stunning belly-laughter and deep mirth that he'd ever seen in his entire life. He sneered at his Wilford's defiant words, and maintained the clawing as he replied.

'Says the man letting me feel and tickle torture him as much as I desire....admit it....you want my subjugation.'

Anti crooned evilly, and Wilford somehow became more frazzled inside his mind that even HE thought was possible. Wilford was thrashing and letting out the littlest hiccups as he felt Anti's deft fingers playing with the curves of his flesh like a hyper child with modelling clay. Wilford knew he had to gauge mercy somehow...in some way.

'NAHAHAHA NAHAHAHAHA IHIHI'LL GEHET YOHOU FOHOHOR THIHIS!!'

.....threats are always a good start, right? Well, that is if you want to get you ab muscles squeezed by the cruel digits of Antisepticeye as he snarled down at you with ruthlessness and sadism. Wilford figured that he'd have to elaborate on his threat, if he even managed to get his words out.

'Oh? And what exactly do you think you can threaten me with, hm?'

Wilford wailed and cried out in earnest through the malicious tickling, tossing his head from side to side in his insane mirth....before blushing and just deciding fuck it, it's worth a shot.

'AHAHAHAH IHIHI'LL WIHIHITHHOHOLD KIHIHIHISSES!!!'

Anti's cheeks.....burned. And mercy came for Wilford Warfstache. He gasped and shuddered, smiling slightly in triumph as he let out a few soft coughs, getting his breath back amidst the embarrassed silence that Anti had caused. Oh was he embarrassed....because Anti knew that if he couldn't kiss Wilford Warfstache, it would damage his goddamn quality of life. He gazed down at his recovering Wilford, whispering softly.

'You wouldn't....you-.....you don't have the restraint....'

Anti tried to sound confident but ah....yeah it didn't work. Anti was so embarrassed that Wilford thought that this would be a good way to punish him....and he was absolutely right. At Anti's words, Wilford smirked and giggled rather giddily.

'Oho don't Ihi?'

Anti gulped and jumped when Wilford suddenly yanked his arms free from Anti's pinning, and the glitch squeaked with flustered speechlessness when he was pulled down nose to nose with Wilford by his t-shirt. As Anti squirmed with fresh colour in his cheeks, Wilford's voice descended into a gentle purr.

'Let me ah, put it this way. If you agree to have mercy on me, for today, then I shall never ever ever withhold kisses or any kind of affection....because....'

Wilford paused, contemplating...then he met Anti's eyes.

'....you're right.'

Anti felt like he was being hypnotised, thus meaning he felt he could only reply in the softest of voices.

'I-I'm right?'

Wilford nodded, then tentatively reached up to cup Anti's face, stroking one of his cheeks as he spoke the most beautiful words that Anti had heard in a pretty long time.

'I need you to agree because....to not be able to give you affection would be as much a punishment for me as it would be for you.'

Today was a day of confessions it seems. Anti was smiling by this point, feeling completely enamoured by Wilford's gentle touch as he eagerly nuzzled into the man's hand like a small cat would. Anti somewhat mewled like one too.

'Mmm....f-fine....I-I'll have mercy today....'

Wilford smiled back at him....and then waggled his eyebrows suggestively. Nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. After Anti let out a few noises of bashfulness, they'd leant in to one another. The kisses were pecks, and slow ones at that. Soft kiss after soft kiss happened between them, and with every touch of their lips there was an agreement, a promise being made. They agreed that withholding such perfect affection....would be absolutely impossible.

HOOOOPE YA GUYS LIKED THIS LEMME KNOW IF YA DOOOO WOOOOOP I LOOOVE YOUS! XX

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taramaclaywasaterf · 5 years

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Okay so first of all, everything you say on Spuffy should be considered holy text... second of all, what do you think of Glory?

GLORY!!! Oh, Glory, how you make me almost as conflicted as Spuffy does. My feminist brain is beyond annoyed about Joss’s inability to write women who aren’t hyper-feminine, but my Buffy fan brain (and my lesbian monkey brain) transform me into another one of her minions whenever I talk about her. I just start groveling for her affection and calling her increasingly absurd names like the classic “oh Glittering, Glistening, Glorificus” and “Most Glamorous Yet Tasteful One” and offering to bring her the bloody body of Bob Barker.

First, my feminist brain: Glory’s character as a whole is pretty much the epitome of liberal feminism. She’s hyper-feminine all the time. She’s conventionally attractive and is unapologetic in her fixation on her appearance. She’s the poster-child for the phrase “winged eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man.” She’s essentially the god of libfems lol. She paints the picture that looking good = empowerment . (And, funnily enough, that picture is unintentionally destroyed the second Ben manages to take back control of their body, only to find himself wearing some skimpy dress...showing just how dehumanizing and degrading those clothes really are.)

She promotes the idea that our appearance and how well we adhere/conform to femininity is all that matters. That we ~Do It For Ourselves~ instead of societal pressure and oppressive gender roles forcing us to.

She wears tiny dresses and high heels in battle, cares more about her hair than the people she’s killed, and has to look good 24/7...and all this is painted as something that makes her a Super Cool Powerful Independent Woman. Worst of all? SHES AN ANCIENT EVIL GOD! SHES NOT EVEN HUMAN! This form isn’t her true form!!! She should have no concept of- let alone CARE about human beauty constructs! I get that she was supposed to have, like, been confined in Ben when he was created to be her vessel or whatever, so she did spend 20+ years observing the human world, but her whole character is based around the fact that she’s a fucking GOD. She thinks humans are beneath her. She doesn’t care what we think of her. She has a whole speech about it to Dawn in The Weight of the World. So why would a literal GOD give a single shit about conforming to humans (Eurocentric) ideas of beauty, unless the implication that the writers are going for is that femininity is ~*empowering*~ and innate and all that misogynistic bullshit.

It’s sort of like Eleven in the first season of Stranger Things, how she saw a picture of Nancy in Mike’s house and was jealous of the fact that Nancy was feminine and beautiful, despite the fact that El really had no concept of femininity, considering she spent her life in a literal government facility getting tested on like a lab rat. It’s as if these male writers somehow think femininity is an innate part of woman/girlhood...as if a literal God and an abused child with a limited vocabulary and no life experience beyond torture would innately be drawn to pink frilly dresses, simply because they’re female.

There’s also the whole thing about, ya know, Ben being created to be her vessel to contain her, and him fighting his whole life to have control of his whole body. It feels very...gross. I don’t know if this was the intention, so I’m not gonna go too much into it, but it does feel a bit like Ben is meant to counteract all the messages of female empowerment and stuff in the show. Like, here we have a man trying his whole life to break free from the control of a female God, who degrades him and keeps him from his job and his school. He has no true control over his body, it’s not actually his own. It’s sorta a parallel to vampire slayers, whose “gift” was forced on them as well. And slayers are a metaphor for female oppression, so that parallel, intentional or not, makes me feel.. not great. I can’t fully articulate this, but I hope you get what I’m tryna say.

My Buffy fan brain, however? I LOVE Glory. She’s such an entertaining character. Joss has a way of giving us twists on villains that we’ve never seen before. He throws tropes in our faces knowing that we’ll fall for them, then he slaps us across the face for being so stupid.

I adore the way Glory thought it was BORING that she fought a vampire slayer when she and Buffy met for the first time. I love how she saw Buffy as some annoying cliche, and really didn’t give a shit about her, because it was an interesting change of pace from everyone thinking Buffy was the greatest. I love how she just went to the fucking Magic Box and BOUGHT the supplies for her spell...like, what other villain would do that?! And it fit her character perfectly!!! I love how, in a weird way, she actually seemed to care about her minions a bit? Like when Ben stabbed Jinx, there was a moment that Glory seemed to genuinely be worried about him, before turning her attention to what Ben had told Jinx about the key being human. I love how she just walked right into Buffy’s house to threaten her, and acted like it was merely some minor inconvenience for her. I love her reaction to the Buffybot. I especially love her speech to Dawn about being the one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind. She’s fascinating and entertaining and Clare Kramer was absolutely flawless in the way she played this character. I obviously hate Glory for what she did to Tara and Dawn, but that’s a part of what makes her character so great: she doesn’t care who she hurts, she just wants to go home. I don’t like her as a person, but she makes some fantastic TV. Which is another thing Joss managed to do well: complex villains.

All around, I think Glory was a really cool Big Bad to throw into the mix, but looking at the writing behind her character through a sort of critical lens shows a lot of misogyny that stops me from being able to call her an all-time favorite. Which sucks, because she really is quite great.

#asks #anon #buffy

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bioticgoddess · 5 years

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Endgame: Opinions/Analysis

Spoilers ahead - under the cut- so read at your own risk.

The movie was good. I may not agree with how we go to the end of some of the Avenger’s stories but it was done well. Let's being.

Putting to stones back didn't undo Nat's death, I don’t think it could have without hurting her, not without changing her on some fundamental level. She went willingly into that void as much as Clint. She sacrificed herself not for him but for the avengers and her adoptive Barton niece and nephews. She died to protect her family as much as Clint was willing to. She was fraying, coming apart at the ends in a way that is keenly familiar to me. Yes, she found a family with the Avengers but that was the only family she found. Yes, she lost the opportunity to build anything beyond 2023 with that or any family. But that's okay. Sometimes you don't get more than a few years and your protect it vehemently. She did. She weighed the needs of the many against those of the few and wouldn't let her oldest/best friend join those numbers. I doubt she wanted to entertain the conversation with Laura about Clint sacrificing himself for this. For them. So she did what she does, she read the situation and made a play. She was the better spy, the better hero that day. I was reminded that because Wanda’s powers came from the mind stone, she may have a link to the Soul Stone so she has some awareness of that stone’s pocket reality. (So “Force Ghost” Nat and original MCU Gamora. Maybe?)

Tony got a happy ending. Or at least part of one. He was always going to be our Martyr. That's just MCU/RDJ Tony. It's his MO. He was always going to be the one we lost tragically, no matter how Endgame went. He got to flip out and call Cap on his bullshit from AOU and how he knew this would happen. He and Pepper have their Morgan and gods do I hope she makes appearances or is at least referenced going forward. But in the end, Tony did it all of this for HER and for PETER. These are his kids. He couldn't protect one but he'd be damned if he wasn't going to be there for the other right until he was given the chance to fix things from 2018. His death hurt me most because your spouse dying is one of if not the most stressful events that can happen to a person (so sayeth science). It's an inevitability and Pepper knew from Iron Man 1, the start of all this, that he could probably die out there. She's called him on in and cautioned him to be careful more times than I can count. He seldom heeded her warnings.

Thor blamed himself for everything that happened: Frigga’s death, Hela’s return and the inevitable destruction of Asgard, the losses in Infinity War, and those at the beginning of Endgame. It didn’t matter that destroying the planet of Asgard meant saving the people. He lost. He was their monarch and he failed to protect them in the ways he was expected to. Then Thanos showed up and cost him half the remaining people. The losses that day included at least one of his best friends & most trusted advisers (Heimdall) and Loki, the brother with whom he’d only JUST reconciled. The only way he wasn’t going to be the drunk we saw (or some variation thereof because survivor’s guilt manifests in different ways) was if he’d taken Thanos’ life before the snap. That was it. He’d still be dealing with Survivor’s Guilt, no doubt, but if he had at last avenged the assault on their refugee ship and saved everyone else from the snap. His going off to join the Guardians was fitting in that he’s not a ruler, not like he thought or was told he’d be. So he’s going back to what he knows, what he does best, and doing the things he does best - saving people.

Why not reverse the last 5 Years with the time travel heist/plot? What about all the time travel and Steve living a life with Peggy? Well, I’m gonna quote Doctor Who “it’s a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff.” The movie ctually established the MCU’s time travel rules through Banner Hulk and The Ancient One. First, they couldn’t change their memories or pasts. So STeve staying in the post WW2 era with Peggy doesn’t or can’t affect anything we saw in the movies. Bucky stayed in the present, so he’s the same Bucky. Loki snagged the Tesseract and BAMF’ed out so, as someone else posited, he’s probably something similar to his TDW self. Second, changes to the past would only result in branching timelines an d alternate realities. The current MCU timeline’s “present” is still likely that new/central timeline only Old-Man Rogers (Old Man Carter eheh) knew the future and he knew to stay ahead of his younger self. How uncomfortable would that conversation be? Third, things are inevitable as a result. Thanos’s 2018 assault: Inevitable. The fates of all our beloved characters: Inevitable. Bucky staying in the 2023 present as a physically 30 year old: Inevitable.

Now, I put the basic time travel overhaul up there because Steve’s whole ending is time travel. This video from ScreenCrush explains it better than I can. So I’ll hop onto the psych explanation since that’s more my jam than quantum physics. We all HEARD him say he’d moved on at the end of AOU. He told Tony as much. Then he got Bucky back in CW only to lose him again to both cryo and Thanos. During time travel he sees Peggy, who he’s definitely not let go of and never will, only to lose her a third time the second he and Tony are back in the present. He’s been broken and had to put himself together in new and interesting ways emotionally multiple times over the decade of the MCU. Like Thor, he’s likely suffering from survivor’s guilt and PTSD. With everything he’s been through it would impossible for him not to be. Unlike Thor, and I suspect even unlike Bucky, he never really found a home in the modern world. Bucky had Wakanda and was reluctant to leave his little farm to fight except that he was duty bound. Steve wanted the kind of life that Tony got to have with Pepper. Only he wanted it with Peggy. By the end of Endgame, he’d finally found a way to achieve that when he returned the stones and TDW Mjolnir to their original places in time.

I’m not going to launch into the arguments for/against him and Peggy, the internet and Tumblr in particular have done enough of that. The video I linked above also explains how he got to have both lives and still follow the rules put forth for Time Travel in the MCU by suggesting that his timeline with her was a branch and so never interacted or impacted the one we know prior. If I had been in Steve’s position, I can’t say I wouldn’t have gone back in time and risked my life to stay with the person I love.

Bucky’s the last person I’m gonna touch on. There was no way that he didn’t either know or suspect that Steve was going to stay back in time. For all know they had a conversation about it prior, even if it was one of those “so Hypothetically speaking what would you do if I stayed in the past with Peggy”. any conversation they may have had about him saving Bucky sooner would have probably included some mention of Sam and, I suspect, how Steve needs him to guide/keep an eye on his successor. It could have even included the same lecture(s) from Bruce Hulk and the Ancient One about branching timelines. Bucky needs to stay in the present because he fits there better than Steve did and he’s the link that Old Man Rogers-Carter is going to rely on to look after the others.

By this point I realize I’m talking in circles but I’m trying to look at the film in the context of what happened and how it ties into the rest of the MCU as opposed to what I as a fan would have wanted to change. Like somehow getting Nat back. Or maybe the Loki Outside Time showing up during that final fight to throw a knife or two at 2014 Thanos. Maybe a tie in to that video of middle-aged Peggy talking about her husband and kids where Steve is sitting another room, looking enough not like himself that the camera crew never bothers him. Something like that. Have Tony live somehow and just be the brains behind the team even if he couldn’t fight. And so on.

#avengers endgame #avengers endgame spoilers #avengers #captain america #bucky barnes #winter soldier #steve rogers #hulk #bruce banner #natasha romanoff #black widow #hawkeye #clint barton #peggy carter #ant-man #thanos #infinity stones

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countessofsnark · 6 years

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Snarky Recap - Thunderbirds Are Go: ‘Crash Course’

The One Where John, EOS, and Alan Deal With Two Stubborn Space Jockeys And What Is Doubt One Hell Of A Migraine.

And here we have the classic case of two vehicles heading down the same road, each of them confident that they were ‘here first’ - the space edition.

This vector ain’t big enough for the two of us.

I do love the sound of an orbital collision and flying space debris in the morning. (Except there’s no sound in space...)

*David Attenborough voice* And here we witness the mating ritual of the Stubborn Space Jockey...

A worried John hails the two vessels, only to be caught in the middle of a name calling blame game.

A textbook example of responsible adult behaviour, kids.

The international and intergalactic sign for ‘what are these idiots doing’. Also: John Tracy has had enough of your bullshit.

EOS: ‘Of all the strange human behaviours, I never understood arguing.’

John: ‘Me neither.’ More proof that John might just be The Perfect Partner.

After making sure that neither cargo is at risk of exploding due to the collision, John hails Tracy Island to get some back-up.

Sorry, Alan. No movie time for you. Time to untangle some ships and break up a fight. Pretty sure the latter will be the more challenging of the two.

John: ‘And bring Maximum MAX along for the ride.’ MAXIMUM MAX. *screeches* I can’t even.

Alan quickly realizes that John wasn’t kidding about the ferocity of the fight he’s about to interrupt. But a miracle happens as he manages to get both pilots to fire their thrusters and stop the spin.

Next up, deploying MAXIMUM!MAX to cut through the cargo holds. Except...

On their own, the cargo inside each ship is pretty harmless but when mixed together in the right conditions... it’s BOOM, baby. I knew it... No cargo cocktail for you, Alan.

These are the droids you are looking for.

As the ships fall further into the atmosphere, another miracle happens - our space jockeys actually apologise to one another. GASP!

Alan proceeds to tow the two tangled vessels back into lower orbit but in doing so, he is severely depleting his fuel levels.

However, he does get them out of gravity’s pull before running on fumes. Bring on the next problem: the debris from the collision has completed its orbit and is now heading straight for the three space crafts.

OH SHIIII-

The explosion knocked out Juliette’s life support. She only has a few minutes left. While John heads out to transfer fuel from the cargo ships to Thunderbird 3, Alan space surfs to Juliette’s ship in an attempt to fix the life support...

...which would be a walk in the park if the circuits hadn’t been fried.

On to plan C: rerouting life support from the other ship. Whose pilot is suddenly VERY concerned with Juliette’s well being. OoooOOOOOoooh. I didn’t know Cupid’s Arrows were space proof.

Oxygen resupply is successful. Time to get poor Juliette out so she can thank her Romeo later on. (sorry not sorry)

Who needs light sabers when you can have a supercharged space laser, eh?

John gracefully catches Juliette as the vacuum of space sucks her out at high speed. Too bad Mr Bell’s extraction isn’t that smooth.

TFW you wish you paid more attention to your diet resolutions.

Juliette: ‘You can do it, Mr Bell.’

Bell: ‘You can me Barrett.’ OHH WE’RE ON A FIRST NAME BASIS ALREADY EH. And such impeccable timing too.

And that’s when John realized he had missed out on a career in midwifery.

Barrett gets pulled out of his cabin just before another piece of debris all but demolishes the spot he just occupied. But don’t worry, they all make it safely back inside Thunderbird 3.

Let’s rock and roll!

Or... not.

The debris cut the fuel supply line, which means they’re literally not going anywhere. That’s when John gets a brilliant idea that would probably make Captain Lee Taylor proud: a controlled explosion using the two cargos that sit right beneath them.

Initiate Operation Space Mixology.

Wait a minute. Where did John’s sash go? *blinks* Then again, I can’t say I disapprove of this uninterrupted view of what is undoubtedly a nice six pack. *fans self*

MAXIMUM THRUST IS GO.

Thunderbird 3 narrowly avoids the incoming debris. I haven’t felt this tense since the first time I watched Gravity.

Use the Force, Alan.

Thunderbird 3 pulls away before the cargo ships are destroyed and all seems well.

In fact, our space jockeys have gone from outright bickering to... asking each other out for dinner.

Juliette disapproves of Barrett’s taco suggestion but counters with a new offer:

‘How about.. pizza?’

‘Perfect.’

The International Rescue Dating Service is now live. After all, John does have quite a bit of personal experience in that field, eh. *cough cough*

The Star Wars references keep on coming as back on Tracy Island, Brains is experimenting with what appears to be a miniature Death Star. Sadly, the simulation fails rather spectacularly. Oh dear indeed.

A wild Scott appears! Scott uses Mother Hen Mode. It’s super effective. Oh! And they’re working on a way to save the Mechanic. *SCREAMS*

As much as I appreciate these skeleton crew type episodes, I’m so ready for another classic team work episode. I bet those (mid) season finales are going to blow us out of our couches... *bounces*

#snarky recap #thunderbirds are go #crash course #tag spoilers

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nickireadstfc · 7 years

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The King’s Men, Chapter 8 – Baby, Now We Got Bad Blood

In which Neil’s birthday surprise bloody sucks, I have opinions about the Terrapins’ naming choices, Matt is too good for this world, and the Twinyard’s first attempt at Actual Human Interaction doesn’t quite go as planned.

Sounds good? Then it’s time for Nicki to read The King’s Men.

(This is a longass chapter and lots of shit happens, so this is a longass update. I’m sorry in advance.)

Neil flipped his phone open to stare at the date. It was Friday, January 19th. “Neil Josten” was supposed to turn twenty on March 31st. Today Nathaniel Wesninski turned nineteen years old.

OH SHIT IT’S HIS BDAY!!! HAPPY BIRBDAY MY BOY!!!!!

And we almost made it in time as well! 12 days late, but still – happy late birthday, my dude.

Actual footage of my baking disaster ass making a cake for our birthday boy.

Sadly though, Neil doesn’t care much for his birthday, and because he tragically keeps his mouth shut about it for most of the chapter, neither can anyone else.

I love birthdays. How dare you deprive me of some good good festivity. This is a gosh darn shame, Josten.

Neil knew he went to his classes, but he didn’t learn anything. He wrote down what his teachers said but didn’t absorb a single word.

In other news, when will Neil in uni stop being such a goddamn #MOOD.

Exam season is hitting me hard right now folks, and while I’m tryinfg to play catch-up on my notes this just feels like an unnecessary callout post to my lazy past self.

In other other news – it’s time for Orange Sportsball again!

Our Foxes are playing a home game against Belmonte which, if you’ll all kindly remember, resulted in The Most Epic Move Andrew Has Ever Pulled, Ever last time we played them.

So, you know, no pressure.

Before Neil can pop a boner about being on an actual game court again though, he has a little birthday surprise waiting for him, and it’s, well, how do I put this –

A bloody hell of a situation.

It exploded in his locker, triggered by the door opening, and Neil recoiled as it cascaded over everything insde. (…) The bag looked big enough to hold at least two gallons; it was more than big enough to destroy every single piece of gear Neil owned.

WHAT THE FUCK.

For all y’all non-American folks, two gallons are about 7.5 litres. SEVEN POINT FIVE LITRES.

For further reference, that’s about as much as would fit in this bucket.

Yeah.

THAT’S A FUCKLOAD OF BLOOD.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.

Neil wrenched the broken bag off the hook. When he turned to throw it Andrew caught his wrist. Neil hadn’t even heard Andrew cross the room toward him. (…)

“It’s ruined,” Neil said, voice ragged with an awful rage. “It’s all ruined.”

Yup – his entire gear, complete with helmet and shoes, now looks like it played a supporting role in the Red Wedding, and really took on some method-acting for it.

But we’re not done here, oh hot diggity shit no.

Matt’s startled voice echoed off the bathroom walls. “What the hell?” (…)

Written in blood across the tile was a bold message: “Happy 19th Birthday, Jr.”

OH SHIT.

OH SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT.

DAD’S HOME, FOLKS.

I am decidedly NOT FUCKING LIKING THIS.

I don’t even want to think about what this means.

If this is the Raven’s doing (which was what I thought about the blood), then that means they’re more in touch with Daddy Wesninski than we thought, which is super bad.

If this is Daddy Wesninski’s own doing, then he’s way more in touch with Getting Revenge On Neil than we thought, which is super super bad.

Either way –

(I also immediately regret calling Wesninski Senior ‘Daddy’. Please remind me to bleach my eyes at the next convenient time.)

He grabbed the fledgling sense of panic and buried it deep, the same way he’d smothered his broken heart long enough to burn his mother’s body. He would have to react to this later, but if he did it now with all of the Foxes as his witnesses he was going to lose everything.

And bury it he does – Neil, that badass motherf*cker, just buries oh, y’know, the realization that his childhood abuser and indirect killer of his mother is figuratively right behind him, somewhere in his brain and moves the fuck on.

What a dude.

“Can you play?” Kevin asked.

“I’m pissed off, not injured,” Neil snapped. “I’m not going to let this keep us from winning tonight. Are you?

GO GET EM, MY BOY.

WHAT A DUDE.

“I will give you one chance tonight,” Wymack said. “If I think your head isn’t in the game, I will pull you so fast you’ll get whiplash.”

HSM basketball gifs will never not be appropriate for this team.

In the cleanup process of the Bloody Hell of a Situation, Matt steps out to grab some underwear for a half-naked Neil, and when he comes back he takes the opportunity to remind us all again what a genuinely great character he is – lest we forget.

Neil opened the door just far enough to realize it was Matt in the hallway and was startled into saying, “You knocked?” (…)

It wasn’t the first time the Foxes had gone out of their way to accommodate Neil#s privacy issues, but they usually had time to think it through. Matt was late for warm-ups because of Neil and shaken by Riko’s awful trick. Despite that he’d remembered not to barge in.

Matt, you sweet considerate spikey black Billie Joe Armstrong, LET ME LOVE YOU.

And now that Neil is all suited and booted (and had his anger horn tooted), let’s fucking go.

The ghost of [the blood incident] egged him to go harder and faster. Kevin didn’t warn him to scale back, and they crashed into their backliner with an unusual aggression.

To the Foxes, what the fuck is unusual aggression?? Instantly fucking murdering a dude right there on the field?

“Unusual Agression” is pretty much those guys’ team motto, folks.

Unsurprisingly, our Foxy Sportsball Squad totally rules the following game, no biggie.

Nothing like a bit of blood, childhood trauma and accidental nudity to get fired up before a big game.

Two minutes later, the Foxes got the chance they needed. A Terrapin striker got around Matt and raced at the goal. (…) Andrew was outside of his box in a heartbeat, and he body-checked the striker hard enough to floor him.

GET REKT.

Also, to remind y’all non-Native English speakers (like me) what a Terrapin is, it’s these cute lil fellas.

Not exactly a threatening opponent.

Not so much a fast one either. Who the fuck thought that naming choice was a good idea, like “yeah, sure, let’s call our skilled Sportsball team after fucking turtles”.

The Team of Poor Naming Choices gets what they deserve, in any case – the Foxes run right over them and celebrate an epic 8-5 victory.

Wymack and Abby were waiting for them, Wymack with a toothy grin and Abby all smiles.

I love me some supportive Fox Parents.

However, the party is pretty much over instantly as the Foxes are back on their infighting bullshit.

Allison (…) kept her eyes on Neil. “I’ve hit the limit of what bullshit I’ll tolerate this week, let alone this year. I need to know how much worse this pissing contest between you and Riko is going to get.”

Can we have literally….. 5 seconds of happy celebratory peace up in this bitch, thank you.

At least Wymack feels me.

“I’m instigating a new rule where everyone is required to be happy after a win. You downers are going to suck the life out of me before my time.”

Thank you, my man.

Allison is kind of right, though – they do need to really fucking talk about this.

“First off: the massacred elephant in the room. Massacred birds, rather. I called in a favour with the faculty and got Abby access to the microscopes in the science labs.”

Oh, that is morbid.

If that Bloody Hell of a Situation was the Ravens’ doing, then that is the most macabre symbolism I’ve seen in a while.

If it was Wesninski Sr’s – then I don’t want to think about the symbolism, quite frankly.

Which reminds me of an interesting point: Everyone is automatically assuming Riko did this. This makes sense considering almost no one knows of the existence of Neil’s dad, but Neil does not only seem to be playing along, but he seems to have the same opinion. The writing on the wall clearly said “Junior” – why isn’t he considering the fact that it could have just as well been his dad?

Obviously, don’t get me wrong here, knowing their power situation Riko/Tetsuji are still behind all of it and would know of what Neil’s dad is doing to Neil. But to me, this doesn’t sound like Riko’s style. Gallons of blood set up like a crude school prank and words written in blood – this sounds much more like a man who calls himself The Butcher than a rich sleek featherfucker.

Unsurprisingly, Neil isn’t exactly a fan of presenting his entire life story to his team. However, a certain someone who is still massively Salty™ at Neil for ratting him out to his girlfriend intervenes.

“They’ll never find proof that Riko was involved in this,” Aaron said, “but they might find you, right? (…) Your looks, your languages, your lies – you’re running from something or someone.”

Ohhhhhhhhhh shit.

This is CALLOUT CULTURE.

While the team is busy collecting their jaws from the floor, Neil makes a weak attempt at sassing his way out of this situation.

Keeping his voice calm took every ounce of energy he had left. “You know, I expected low blows and backstabbing from the Ravens. I thought Foxes were better than that.”

Don’t generalize, my dude.

Dan, Matt and Renee would never.

Neil then does worm his way out of this situation, though – by making a Bad Callout Situation a Worse Callout Situation, Like So Much Worse, Oh God.

“I’m still waiting for a thank you,” Neil said. “From both of you, to each other. You’re even now, aren’t you? So why can’t you just wipe the slate clean and start over? (…) You don’t want me to be right, because if I am it’s your fault she’s dead.”

Andrew finally joined the argument. “No. It’s always going to be her fault.”

Oh no, honey, please don–

“I told her what would happen if she raised her hand again. She had no right to look so surprised.”

DID YOU JUST.

Wymack pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled noisily. “Could you at least let us leave the room before you confess?”

Same, my dude.

Also hah, nose puns.

It took Aaron a minute to find his voice again. He still sounded angry, but there was a muted edge to his, “You wouldn’t even look at me. You wouldn’t say a word to me unless I said something first. I’m not psychic. How was I supposed to know?”

“Because I made you a promise,” Andrew said. “I did not forget it just because you chose not to believe me. I did what I said I would do, and fuck you for expecting anything else.”

And this paragraph right there, this is so, so important because it just sums up both their worldviews perfectly.

Aaron is still the more “normal” one of the twins – hard and bitter, but eventually the more grounded, the more realistic brother. But he also never really got to know Andrew, the real Andrew – whether out of fear of him or out of Andrew’s refusal. Andrew didn’t talk to him, and Aaron never learnt who exactly he was dealing with, so how was he supposed to know?

Andrew, on the other hand, makes promises and sticks to them, absolutely no matter what. He doesn’t care about the means to achieve his goals, he is colder and more ruthless than Aaron – or any sane person – ever could be. And in his world, this all makes sense – legit murder isn’t out of proportion, nothing can be, when it comes to keeping those he cares for safe (lizziedunbar99 made an excellent point on this the other day). When he protects someone, he protects them, all or nothing, and fuck anyone for expecting anyone else.

Yes, hello, I love these idiots.

There it was again: a hint of that infinite anger at Andrew’s core. (…) He put his hand up between [the twins]. A heartbeat later Andrew’s expression went dead. Neil regretted his intervention immediately. No one could let go of that much rage that easily; Andrew had simply buried it where it could hurt only him.

And the moment that anger finally, healthily (!) breaks free will be the happiest day in this goddamn series.

Or, y’know, everything will go up in flames, but them’s the risks when you’re dealing with our favourite Murder Maniac.

In other news – in case you forgot (which I did), the other Foxes are still present, and they do kind of want answers at this point.

“Is [your past] going to be a problem?” Dan asked.

“No,” Neil said.

Allison arched a brow at him (…) “Are you sure about that?”

I want Allison to please barge into conversations like this always, her head appearing over the scene John Cena-style.

This meme is long dead, but watch me give no shits.

“Riko knows who I am because our families operate in similar circles, but he is a Moriyama in name only. He doesn’t have the resources to do more than threaten me.”

“Damn, Neil,” Matt said. “Your parents must be something else if even Riko’s got to follow the rules.”

Oh hon, oh my sweet summer child, you have no idea.

And with that, the conversation is blissfully over, and we have only two tiny things to get to before this monster of a chapter is finally done.

First, Neil gets a text message:

He didn’t recognize the number or the area code. He understood the message even less: “49”. Neil gave it a minute, but nothing else was forthcoming. He deleted the text and put his phone away.

Ah well, I’m sure this ominous and vaguely threating thing was merely a wrong number and is totally not going to come back to haunt our asses a few chapters from now.

And second, the Normal People Squad still has some opinions on the Murder Situation:

“Just like that,” Matt said dubiously. “You’ve always known what he’s capable of, but you said he’s never given you a real reason to be afraid of him. What the hell are your parents into, if you can glide past murder like it’s no big deal and get in Riko’s face all the time?”

OH HON, OH MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD.

Also, me a few books ago.

Oh, how far we’ve come.

Unsurprisingly, yet to my great delight, Renee is not as shellshocked as Dan and Matt about Andrew’s confession, and offers some much-needed insight.

“We cannot understand the situation entirely, Dan. We will never know Andrew’s frame of mind at the time or how bad life with her was for them. All we can do is make a choice: believe that he was protecting Aaron or condemn him for taking the most extreme path. I would rather go with the former.”

Mic drop, sweet smile, Renee out.

God, I love this girl.

If you like what I do here and you want me to continue writing fun things for you, why not buy me a coffee? Every lil bit helps, getting me through uni and all that jazz. Thanks so much!

#tfc #aftg #the foxhole court #all for the game #andreil #tkm #the king's men #nicki reads tfc #nora sakavic #LOVED THIS CHAPTER COME LOVE IT WITH ME

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