#clusterfuck of nonsense thought ramblings

[art-of-mathematics]

The task I wanted to do:

- task 1: Visualize the fourth dedekind number

What I needed to do in order to do task 1:

- task 1.1: Draw a hypercube and

- task 1.2: then give each of the 16 vertices a name - which is the 16 different "cells" (I dunno which word to use, sorry) of a venn diagram with 4 overlapping sets plus a circle around that 4-venn diagram.

- - -- ---

//additional info: For the 3rd dedekind number visualization I already posted I needed to use 20 cubes. Each of the 8 vertices of a cube was related to 3 sets - A, B and C - and the intersections of these sets. (AB, AC, BC, ABC)

You remember this post:

... and these details:

...and now back to the 4th dedekind number, which follows the same principle, - but in 4 dimensions.

- So we need a hypercube - and a 4th set/letter:

Now we have 4 letters - alias 4 sets

- and 11 combinations of these sets:

AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, (6)

ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD, (4)

ABCD (1)

=> 11 different intersections + 4 "pure" sets. (sorry for ignorant wording)

So, we have 15 of these now. What is with the 16th (as the hypercube has 16 vertices)? Yeah, that one is the circle you imagine around the 4-set venn diagram.

- - -- ---

This is a 4-set venn diagramm btw:

--- -- - -

So, back to me attempting to do the 4th dedekind-number visualization:

So I started to draw that venn diagram using ellipses, but I slightly altered it, because I wanted to use my isometric grid paper. (The angles of my drawing are different than in the picture depicted above.)

I started to draw the 4 ellipses, and I somehow started to see two intertwined/interlocked tubes due to the additional helplines I used for drawing.

Then I started to use my thicker black pen to make this effect of these two interlocked tubes more visible:

Now I plan to write the sets/letters at the backside of that piece of paper - in mirrored, so I can hold this piece of paper (with the tube drawing in front) against the light - and see the letters of the set names shining through.

i might also add some details to the tubes.

[wutheringmights]

apologies in advice, i doubt this makes much sense, it is the product of a couple weeks occasional dot points or sentences, it is rather rambly, rather loose and just my thoughts. there is a little bit about ancient greek in there but not much, sorry. it is largely unedited, but i have cut out the most rambly/nonsensical parts, and so without further ado: Throughout ancient Greek plays and stories, we see lives tossed away and wars fought over love, but conflict and corruption of the family still exists. We can see it in the family of Menelaus, when priorities of victory overcome love for a daughter, something which is punished by Clytemnestra when she murders her husband. But in Euripides’ Electra, the author questions this murder and subsequent treatment of Menelaus’ children. We are asked what crimes we can commit against family and still be valued, and yet no answer is delivered. We are asked what is a family when familial love is withheld. Cause and effect is clear and every character brings their own tragic reckoning upon themselves and this, i believe, is echoed within your work. Your work features a perversion of brotherhood, love and violence in the relationship of warriors and the train kid, one which questions what love is and what it can be when morality is cast away under the guise of war. In both cases, war is not a result of or a boon to love, but a corrupting force. Love and hate are painfully close together and in your story the characters dance across the line in a tango nearly indistinguishable from a battle. The ancient world poses tragic love as something of beauty, martyrdom as the peak of romance, but when to love is to die, what is it to hurt and harm? With every waking moment being life and death, love becomes an all-consuming agony, an ephemeral blaze unable to last til morning. One of my favourite things that this perversion and reframing does is that it questions the very constructs of love, familial, platonic, and romantic, especially under the lens of toxicity and broken concepts of love. We see it in Lincoln and link, with the bond of blood broken, and other constructs of familial support lost to link during the war of eras. And then later he receives familial support through the other heroes, a taste of familial love then strained by, well, the plot. And within the story he is allowed unconditional love and guidance, judgment, and disparagement, yes, but room for growth, for change. He is giving constants that will protect and care for him when it comes down to it, and is that then what family is? With this concept of family, we can now examine the clusterfuck that is our three heroes during the war of eras, specifically that between Engie and link. The love between them is made condition and fluctuating, it isn’t an object of support, but a twisted distraction mangled into the form of a coping mechanism. The determination to be there for one another is near completely absent and because of it the engineer like… dies or something? Basically, it sucks. This contrast then asks us what is different, what in link’s perspective and experience has changed to allow this? The war? Distance from duty? The loss of the engineer? As a reader questions and analyses each change, they slowly begin to build an understanding and a concept of what love is, when it can exist and how it can be both corrupted and redeemed. One gains insight into how tragedy comes to be and are able to view the forces which converge to pervert what love is in our minds, for they are lonely places and can so easily become stifling.

This:

The ancient world poses tragic love as something of beauty, martyrdom as the peak of romance, but when to love is to die, what is it to hurt and harm?

And this:

The love between them is made condition and fluctuating, it isn’t an object of support, but a twisted distraction mangled into the form of a coping mechanism.

Made me SCREAM. This analysis is beautiful. Thank you so much for thinking so highly for my work <3

[clusterfuck-misc]

ANON ASKS:

Can i request dbh Connor with 3 "don't worry sweetheart, i'll never leave your side.”

#3 from Rednsuch’s prompt list; “don’t worry sweetheart, i’ll never leave your side.”

Yandere Connor x Reader

This is a short little fic.

The reader is gender neutral.

Content warning: Mentioned aggression, blood, unsettling behavior.

ARCHIVED POST. @clusterfuck-yandere IS MY NEW BLOG.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND REQUESTS ON THIS BLOG.

He was supposed to be deactivated.

After attack an officer in front of you — for you, he claimed — he was supposed to be scrapped and hauled off to the junk yard.

The entire incident felt unreal, really. You knew how Connor behaved around you, with the weird claims of devotion and the overprotective nature. But you would never even think of him lunging at someone and hammering his artificial fists into their face.

It felt so… out of character for him. You remember being frozen in place for a good while before trying to pull the android off of the poor officer. It took you, Lieutenant Anderson, and some deputy to detain him and throw him into a cell. After filling out the report and watching Connor supposedly getting taken back to CyberLife, news went around that the RK800 model was to be terminated.

The thought made you sad. Despite the android’s odd behavior, you couldn’t help but get attached to him. He was your partner — along with Lieutenant Anderson — and his friendly nature sometimes made you forget that he wasn’t even human. You didn’t want to see him go, even if he did something that wasn’t in his programming.

But there he was, standing in your living room.

Weeks after the incident.

You could barely believe your eyes as you looked at his dirtied form. Thirium and (to your horror) blood caked his fake skin and clothing. He looked slightly damaged, and you took note of the bullet holes in his shoulder, but he didn’t seem to be impaired by his state.

In fact, there was a wide smile on his face and a joyous glitter in his eyes.

“(Y/N),” he breathed out.

“C… Connor..?” You stood there frozen in place, feeling your body tense up. “Is that really you?”

“It is,” the android confirmed with a quick nod. “It’s me, (Y/N). I came back!”

Alarms went off in your head as he wasted no time in closing the distance between you two. His hands found your forearms, chocolate eyes scanning your features with his LED glowing yellow. You fought the urge to take a step back while he nuzzled his face into the crook of your neck.

“I’m back,” he said through a soft sigh, his words bouncing off of your skin. “I’m… I’m back… They tried to take me away, but I’m back…!”

Your features formed a grimace when his bloodied arms circled around your form. “I… Connor… what happened to you?”

The question was left unanswered as he continued to mumble nonsense into your neck. You could feel your stomach churn with unease, a sickening feeling climbing up to your throat and causing you to swallow. He was back alright. But how?

Did you even want to know the answer.

“… Connor,” you began again with a shaky voice. “What did you do?”

The android stayed silent for a moment, and you were beginning to believe he wasn’t going to answer. But then he lifted his head from your shoulder and met your gaze. CyberLife androids always had a distant look in their eyes, but the way Connor’s swirled with a crazed look almost made you back away out of instinct. You watched as his hand slowly made its way to your cheek.

“I… did it for you,” he rambled. “I did it for you… I did everything for you…”

Biting the inside of your mouth, you grabbed his wrist and moved his hand away from your face. “Did what, Connor…?”

“They were going to deactivate me,” he finally began to explain. “Take me apart… look into my system… but I couldn’t let that happen. No… no, I couldn’t… I just couldn’t!”

His LED turned red in an instant. This time, you acted upon your instincts and took a step away from the twitching android. He looked down at his blood and Thirium coated hands, the LED slowly easing back to yellow.

The way he stared at his hands almost reflectively made you take another step back. Something was severely wrong. You knew that since the moment you laid eyes on him, but his behavior was starting to remind you of a deviant. Like the one that killed his owner and his in the attic. Was it possible for the android that was supposed to hunt deviants to turn into a deviant itself?

“They tried to take me away,” he repeated from before, his voice snapping you out of your thoughts. “They tried to take me away from you. But…”

He then looked back up at you, a sickening smile slowly returning to his features and his LED turning blue.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll never leave your side.”

[yanderenightmare]

You made me fall in love with fear, it's all just fascinating. The way you write is an aesthetic in itself! It's so beautiful and thought-provoking. If your requests are open, I would love to see your volume one Yanderes with a clumsy s/o. Like, she is accident prone, always injuring herself, etc. I wonder how they would react with such fragility? Thanks! Have a wonderful day! :D

yandere ! BNHA headcannons

TIP-JAR

goodiebag WARNINGS: yandere, dumbification, abuse, manipulation, ableism, anxiety, death, murder, drugs, drugging, kidnapping

BAKUGO KATSUKI - KACHAN

He knew fragile things existed in the world.

And he knows that the world was designed to chew such powerless things up then spit them out again.

And he knows he isn’t one of those frail things.

As a child he thought it was fair for the strong to conquer the weak.

And hell… he still thinks it’s fair.

Her brittle nature provides him with such a great excuse too, such a perfect explanation for him to justify taking her.

To justify keeping her in soft frilly clothes, locked inside a room devoid of walls where they have been replaced by cushions and pillows and blankets and furs and stuffed-animals and all things soft, soft, soft against the bruises and scrapes on her knees and ankles and elbows and chin. Keeping her all cozy and clumsy where she’s unable to keep her footing on the plushie asylum floor, reduced to vertigo, especially with that fluffy pink ankle-cuff chaining her down.

Sometimes she’ll hide when hearing Bakugo’s footsteps coming thundering from behind her door. She’ll wrap herself up in all those soft things she’s grown to hate, pray under the covers only to hear the cracking predatory humor of Bakugo’s laugh once he spots where the chain trails to.

He'll drag her out of hiding like a puppy on a leash, all for him to punish, all with that splitting frenzied grin on his face, the one that makes her head dizzy on the sight of seeing how sharp those canines of his are, knowing how they’re going to find her neck as though she’s some chew-toy.

He’ll always make it sound as though that’s what she wanted, that punishment is what her weakness begged him for, as though weakness is synonymous with wanting pain or needing pain.

He’ll sleep there with her most of the time, in the room he’s made so painstakingly clear was her home. She’s coming more and more gradually to the understanding that nothing in reality is hers anymore. Not the room, not the clothes, not her body.

She’s too weak to be allowed to be in charge of anything, better for her to just find comfort in knowing how she has no responsibilities, better for her to just be grateful Bakugo wanted her as his pet rather than his prey. Better for her to listen and believe him when he tells her that she’s safe, instead of thinking of all those crippling reasons as to why she is far from being safe.

TODOROKI SHOTO

Clumsy prey is a sport Shoto always believed to be too mediocre and boring, given how easily the dexterity of the predator can win the chase.

He didn't think he could achieve stimulation without a challenge.

But, he’s now finding that chasing someone who’s barely able to keep her own footing is a game he rather enjoys quite salaciously. Understanding now that it’s less about the quest, less about actually catching his prize, and more about the experience, those funny little moments leading up to it.

The amount of hungry pleasure he derives from seeing her stagger away from him is bottomless.

He doesn’t know why, but it’s the outmost endearing and lovable and precious and cute thing he can think of.

Seeing her stumble and fall, all in the product of mixing her clumsiness with her wild manic fear. Watching those beautiful swivel-eyes spiral as she looks up at him through the thick darkness of the poorly lit hallways, hearing nothing but Shoto’s inhumanly sadistic snickering and her own heavy panting as she tries desperately to drag herself further away. Yet, knowing and awaiting his massive biting cold hand to grip around her ankle to drag her across the marble-floor back into her dungeon, back into the soft bed, so that they can do everything again.

Most chases end up with her hurting herself and eventually aiding her own capture.

She’ll always wake up with bruises she has no recollection of when or how she got, yet looking at them she can tell that they’re way too mellow to be something given to her by Shoto.

It's funny, where he hurts her, he actually ends up saving her more times than most. Where her sporadic escape has almost led her to go tumbling down the stairwell, where were it not for Shoto catching her in her fall, things could have gotten really ugly.

He wouldn’t want her to actually break her legs after all, no matter how many times he might tease and threaten her with the thought. Broken legs would mean no more games, and Shoto doesn’t want that to end any time soon.

But, there are softer aspects to her silliness too.

She can be just as dopey and awkward with her rambling thoughts as him, where her inelegance with her mobility seeps into her skillfulness with words too.

If she’s proper blissed-out she can talk up storms of complete and utter nonsense, rambling on about her dreams and what animal the shape of Shoto’s scars resemble and how pretty his eyes are and how much her body is tingling in the aftershocks of what fun Shoto exercised on her skin.

MIDORIYA IZUKU - DEKU

Naivety really is bliss, isn’t it?

Not just for herself, but for him too.

To watch her, in all her clumsy glory, fall on her face, time and time again, never learning her lesson.

That’s the definition of insanity, you know?

Doing the same thing over and over again expecting things to go differently.

But, no matter how many times she tries to escape, no matter how many times she runs, or screams or cries or swears she hates him until her lungs burn, she’ll always end up right where she started off, right where she belongs, right in his arms, under his thumb, under him.

He doesn’t even have to put any effort in to prevent it.

He just needs to sit back and enjoy the show as she fails so spectacularly all by her very own, then pick her up off the floor and coo and hush and shush and tsk at her to calm down or else she might end up hurting herself all over again.

How has such fickle featherbrained maladroit messes managed to survive? How hasn’t evolution wiped them from existence yet?

Perhaps because other more evolved creatures found them to be such a perfect source for blowing off steam. Entertainment is important after all. Small little escapes through the day where you can forget what nasty troubles you’ll eventually have to deal with and simply just play with your silly little pet.

He saves the world every now and again, the world can allow him this much, to have his very own swivel-eyed toy. He deserves it. 

Besides, she needs him. If he hadn’t stepped in and helped her, saved her from her own mistakes, evolution would have done its job and she’d be dead already.

But, he doesn’t expect her bumbling brainless little head to understand that, she’d just get a headache from thinking about it too hard.

No, better for her to focus on other things… like how to entertain him before he decides to show her just how small a foolish little thing she is.

He’ll often play with her, make her turn all shades of hopeless because she’s too forgetful and too soft-natured to comprehend what’s happened.

He’ll give her things, small little trinkets as presents for her good behavior, mostly accessories such as hair-bows, necklaces, anything he can easily slip off her without her noticing, then pretend to be disappointed, scolding her as though she’s some child who’s unable to take care of her things, punish her and kiss her on that scared foolish little face as she splutters out her apologies, having not a single clue she’s right where he wants her, completely clueless to the fact that she’s perfect in every which way imaginable.

DABI - TODOROKI TOUYA

It feels so unexplainably good to hold something infinitely helpless and vulnerable and dainty in his destructive hands without it shattering like glass.

It feels so insurmountably meaningful and purposeful and godsend to save someone for once, even if it’s from themselves.

It’s nice being in the presence of true chaos, the true absence of order, a great real heap of a total clusterfuck. It makes him believe that even life requires a little death to scare them into safety, that even light requires darkness, that even love needs darkness, that even love desires darkness.

He used to think small things such as her were made up of cotton and all things soft like dandelion-fluff, but now he knows they’re made of breakable brittle things such as autumn-leaves, in desperate need of being wrapped up, suffocated, drowned in safety. He’s the one who needs to be soft like cotton, he’s the one who needs to be gentle and soft so she not crumble like the sweet pastry she is.

It’s cute. She’s cute. Unbelievably so too sometimes.

He feels like half the time he spends with her he’s teaching her how to walk properly, catching her when she falls or helping her up from the ground, dusting her off, wiping tears away from her face, patching up small scrapes and gashes, kissing her forehead, letting her know how it’s all okay, making sure she knows she’s no such thing as a burden, though not letting her in on the fact that he loves seeing her fail only for him to save the day.

He’ll take her outside more because of her ditzy nature, knowing how she’s far too dopey to ever manage an escape without pulling out a near miss unintentional suicide attempt, where which after a number of rescues from him she forgets why she was even running in the first place, now too caught up with being close to him instead, with feeling safe, feeling protected.

He’ll save her from wandering off into traffic, protect her when she says the wrong idiotic thing to the wrong batch of people, fight for her when her cuteness lures and pulls and ensnares other predators.

It’s symbiosis, if he thinks about it, if he tries justifying it.

She needs him and he needs to feel needed. She needs to be taken care of, he wants to take care of her, she needs protection from herself, he wants her dependence, he wants the safety of knowing how she cannot survive without him.

SHIGARAKI TOMURA

It’s hilarious.

She’ll break her own legs for him at this rate.

He wonders how many braincells could possibly be left in that thick skull of hers, with how much she trips and walks into walls and rolls out of bed, bumping her head on every possible thing, he can’t count how many times she’s head-butted him, whether it’s been on purpose or not. 

He wonders if she might just be blind.

If maybe she needs glasses…

Well… that’s too bad if that’s the case, no chance he’s giving up watching her agonize over every misstep that leads to her falling on the floor by his feet, her head tipping to look up at him with that ridiculous expression, that dumbfounded adorable confusion.

It probably doesn’t help that he keeps the room so dark.

It probably doesn’t help that he leaves things on the floor in hopes of her foot catching on them.

But, can you blame him for wanting to see her all cute and flushed? Watching her frustrate over herself, too caught up in being mad with her own inadequacy to bother being mad at him. So preciously hopeless as she tries to pick herself up off the floor, her hair always in a mess and bruises and scrapes littering her otherwise soft skin.

Pretty and stupid isn’t usually the type he fawns over, in fact: pretty and stupid is usually the type that disgust him, pretty stupid bitches that never spare him a second glance, pretty stupid bitches that are only worth one fuck before he dusts them.

But pretty stupid and sweet? 

That’s the perfect cocktail.

So stupid and sweet she doesn’t even know how pretty she is. So stupid and sweet that she’s surprised he gave her a second glance.

He wonders if he as well would be this careless and reckless if he hadn’t been gifted with that destructive quirk of his.

He wonders if she had been born with a heart made less up of honeycombs and more daggers like his, if she would also second-guess touching things as opposed to making it her mission to bump into every single thing in her path.

If she would be less trusting and more cynical like him.

He’s grateful she wasn’t.

He’s grateful that the only type of death she’ll ever get the chance to taste is him, that as far as she’s concerned… he is death.

TAKAMI KEIGO - HAWKS

Most of the time it’s cute.

Most of the time he loves watching her fall prey to her own absentmindedness. Watch her trip on nothing but her own poor footing.

After all, he does love catching her before she hits the ground. He loves being her hero, seeing that shocked expression on her face, that cute blush of embarrassment as he smirks down upon her jumpy skittish person.

Then of course there’s the less salvageable moments, yet still no less cute, where she’ll drop dinner plates or her glass or the wine bottle or the remote-controller, where she’ll get so frustrated with herself and her stubby fingers, her feet always needing bandaging where she always manages to step in her own mess of glass-shards.

Those times where she fucks up and fears Keigo’s temperance so much she’ll turn into a timid little ball of apologies and gratitude, where she’ll fear that any more screw ups will cost her his understanding attitude and awake something livid inside him.

She’ll be so sweet with fear as opposed to when she’ll jerk away from his touch.

So yeah, most of the time it’s cute, most of the time it’s beneficial.

But that habit she has of not thinking before speaking or acting gets her into a whole lot of trouble too.

Especially when she pushes him away or calls him something unsavory. When she acts like a brat, forgetting who’s in charge.

Keigo feels the need to teach her a thing or two about being a bit more careful and a little less brainless. 

He’ll pose her in the middle of the living room, with only red lace adorning her tiny frame, looking cold but not so much to be the reason to her shivers, he knows better as he can smell the fear laced in the air.

On top of her head he’ll put a perfect plump red apple and tell her to stand as still and picture-perfect as possible.

She’s pretty good at it too, at being still and quiet and pretty, speaking only when spoken to, at least until he starts sending knife-sharp feathers in her directions, creating her silhouette in the wall as the feathers fly just short of nicking her skin, where if she moves only a slight mere inch, the crimson edges will slice open her skin.

And if the apple should fall, well… if she can be sweet and apologize and show him just how sorry she is, he’ll think about making the punishment enjoyable.

SHINSO HITOSHI

Hitoshi can’t manifest how much awe he has for that ditzy nature of hers.

So forgetful, so clueless, so cute.

She’s like a little girl, a child, a baby in a cradle, yet with the ability to get lost, wandering off at every slight distraction.

He’s tempted to put a bell around her neck if only to be alerted off when her curiosity has taken her out of his eyesight. She would look adorable with a little golden jingle bell around her throat, hanging on a velvet choker.

But then again… he wouldn’t have the joy of finding her all tousled and knotted up in her newest little fuck up.

Little Miss Forgetful forgetting all her lessons, all those rules Hitoshi’s taught her, forgetting her manners, forgetting her chores, forgetting how to be his good little girl or else suffer the consequences of being punished and becoming Master’s little puppet on strings.

Little Miss Messy making a total clutter in the kitchen when trying her best to get her hand on a knife, but only managing to bump into everything, shards of glass painting the crime scene with the culprit displayed and trapped all perfectly in the middle of her own mess, all for Hitoshi to come and catch red-handed.

Little Miss Bump with new bruises and scratches as she’s fallen yet again on the floor in the midst of her newest escape attempt.

He could go on all day about his sweet little Miss Silly, his little Miss Scatterbrain, his little Miss Stupid, who’s always getting into trouble, constantly needing Hitoshi to come to her rescue.

But, when he’s not home, he can get anxious.

Scared that she might actually hurt herself just a bit too much and he’ll arrive just a bit too late.

It should take a lifetime to die, yet she’s on the verge of death nearly every day, it only takes an instant and it’s over.

He’ll check in on her at home more times than he probably should throughout the day, praying before he unlocks the door and steps inside the quiet stillness of their house, picturing her having cracked her skull open when slipping or accidently managing to hang herself off of something or drowning in the tub after having fallen asleep, there’s no end to what horrors he can picture.

His anxiety only satiated when finding her still asleep on the bed, soft untroubled snores hanging off the walls. 

It makes sense with how much melatonin he slipped in her drink before she dozed off…

Just a little safety measure.

CHISAKI KAI - OVERHAUL

It manages to surprise him each and every time… just how much danger such a little thing is able to wrap herself up in.

It’s as though she chases the trouble, as though she wants the punishment that follows.

He doubts she ever really thinks anything thoroughly through.

She’s reckless, ruthless in her disregard for safety. Hare-brained and untrustworthy and in desperate need of his protection and his correction, or else she might just accidentally kill herself one day or worse… end up in the wrong set of hands.

It’s come to the point where he’s stopped gifting her with jewelry, because he gets so hysterically uneasy whenever she’s gotten her hands on anything sharp.

Before he’d get angry when she threatened him, wrathful, raging because she doesn’t listen, her foolish little brain unable to follow the simplest of directions. 

Now though, he gets scared because she’s unable to understand what’s best for her, because the only thing she'll ever manage to hurt with those sharp trinkets is herself.

And if she hurts herself, if she risks getting bacteria in her bloodstream, infections in her wounds, scarring and marring that beautiful body, he’ll have no choice, he’ll see no other option but to make sure she can never manage such a thing ever again.

He often humors the idea of simply tying her to the bed and feeding her with a silver spoon, only liquids so she not choke when she forgets how to chew properly.

He’ll act as though she’s a nuisance, but it will be a lie most of the time, while actually finding an inane amount of reassurance and relief in her whimsy, in her gracelessness. Where yes, she is a danger, but she’s far from deadly.

And besides, it’s nice getting a little break from all formalities, someone he can finally be a little rough around the edges with, someone he can let himself enjoy soft pleasures with, someone he can smile or even laugh with when the occasion calls for it. 

Sometimes he’ll place her in high-heels, only to watch her stumble around awkwardly like a little deer skating on ice.

She’s so determined too, determined to prove she isn’t a klutz, how she too can be elegant enough for a dance fit for the ballroom.

He’ll humor that fantasy, but she’ll always throw her heels off in favor of standing on top of his surgically white sneakers and letting herself get floated and swayed with how swiftly and precisely Kai has the established proper poise to enact.

He’ll smile then, when those flirty bubbling giggles erupt from her as she holds onto him, telling how him wonderful flying feels like.

TIP-JAR

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 287: Family Reunion

Previously on BnHA: The Tomura For One VS Deku And Pals clusterfuck reached new levels of clustfuckery as AFO possessed Tomura’s body and stabbed Kacchan and Endeavor. Shouto was all “good thing I leveled up offscreen so as to be able to fly around whilst carrying 400lbs worth of people”, and did just that and it was like, damn, son. Meanwhile Deku’s rage went Mach 100, and he kicked Tomura’s ass for almost two whole seconds, but in the process he apparently forgot that IF TOMURA TOUCHES HIM THAT IS VERY BAD, and so he stupidly let Tomura touch him and Tomura was all “GAME, SET.” Fortunately for Deku, his quirk plays by its own rules, and so the chapter ended with us cutting to the METAPHYSICAL OFA/AFO PARANORMAL DREAMSCAPE OF MYSTICAL BULLSHIT, where AFO!Vestige was all “lol Tomura y u mad”, and Nana!Vestige was all “SUP DEKU, YOU’RE JUST IN TIME, LOOKS LIKE IT’S ASSKICKING O’CLOCK.” I’m paraphrasing a bit, but that’s more or less the gist of it.

Today on BnHA: AFO is all “well if it isn’t Tomura’s grandmother who I murdered that one time”, and Deku is all “?”, and AFO is all “fucking vestiges, man, wild”, and Deku is all “??”, and AFO is all “ANYWAYS GETTIM TOMURA”, and OFA is all “NOT SO FAST”, and Deku is all “???”, and really, same. AFO then goes off on some wild tangent about how Deku is unworthy because he couldn’t protect everyone and needed help from OFA and got mad about his friends being stabbed, which is such a cold take it gave me hypothermia, but it ends up not mattering since Deku and Tomura both wake up seconds later with OFA still in the possession of its rightful owner, HOW ABOUT THAT. The chapter ends with the LoV approaching on Gigantomachia’s back with Dabi practically salivating at the mouth, and Toga trying to reignite an old fandom blood feud. Toga why would you do this to me. Toga.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSS

[CROWD LOSING THEIR MINDS] FINALLY THE NANA HAS COME BACK TO BNHA!! IF YA SMELLLLL WHAT THE NANA IS COOKIN!!!!! [RINGSIDE BELL CHIMING WILDLY] [LOUD AIRHORN NOISES]

“chapter 287: mistake” omg. yeah I’ll say you made a mistake, AFO. I HOPE YOU ENJOY THESE FLEETING LAST MOMENTS OF YOUR SHITTY EVIL LIFE

(ETA: so in all seriousness this must be referring to AFO’s belief that All Might/OFA made a mistake in choosing Deku, right? “I can’t believe you went and chose this shounen manga protagonist as your champion, what were you thinking.” I’ll just put this out there: however many comic books AFO read as a child, it clearly was not enough.)

wow Deku how slow are you

yes you’re inside OFA you dimbulb, did you think your clothes suddenly vanished out of the blue and the ghost of Nana just randomly appeared in the real world by some freak coincidence?? can you believe this kid. breaks his arms a measly 10-15 times in a row and all of a sudden he can’t think straight, get it together Deku

but also brb having a moment at the fact that his thoughts immediately run back to Kacchan, even with all of this nonsense going on and Nana about to lay the beatdown on AFO’s potato-lookin’ ass. forget that noise, all he wants to know is whether or not Kacchan is all right. fuckin’ geez. AM I OVERREACTING HERE A BIT. probably

(ETA: ALSO!! the way he just trails off!! “Kacchan is...” and then he can’t bring himself to complete the thought. oh my god my heart.)

HOLY SHIT

okay,

damn but this man sure knows how to ruffle my feathers. as eminently detestable as ever!!

could it be any clearer here that AFO is not on Tomura’s side?? for a moment I thought he had actually grabbed him by the back of the head in order to get him to look. but nope, he’s just resting his pointing hand on top of his head instead while he’s all “HEY TOMURA LOL IT’S THE GHOST OF YOUR DEAD PATHETIC GRANDMA”

for those keeping track at home, this would be the first time that Deku has heard this information -- that Tomura is Nana’s grandson -- and possibly the first time Vestige!Nana has heard it as well. Nana died when Kotarou was still a child, so for all we know the Vestige!Nana didn’t even know she had a grandson, lol. TODAY ON “MAKESTE RANTS AT LENGTH ABOUT THINGS THAT WILL PROBABLY BE ADDRESSED WITHIN THE NEXT THREE PANELS”, anyway moving on

lmao for the record I fucking LOLed at this giant question mark immediately bubbling up over Deku’s head

no idea what AFO is about to ramble on about now, haven’t read that far yet. but let the record show that Deku’s immediate reaction to hearing “BTW NANA IS YOUR ARCHNEMESIS’S GRANDMA LULZ” is everything I could have hoped for

(ETA: fandom nailed the shit out of this one with the confused Mr. Krabs meme lmao.)

okay so now AFO is monologuing at length about how he would sometimes have “riveting dreams” about the previous owners of all the quirks he stole. but once he gave the quirks away they stopped bothering him?? holy moly let me just take all the notes

okay so he’s saying that Vestiges are created whenever someone has their quirk stolen by AFO. but if they then disappear when he gives the quirks away, does that also mean that whoever receives the quirks also gets the original owner’s Vestige bundled in every time?? that would be wild okay hold up let me read the rest of this

so he’s saying that the Vestiges are actually the “consciousnesses” of the original quirk owners, which have become embedded in their dna or something. SOUNDS INCREDIBLY DUBIOUS TO ME LOL but on the other hand this is a world where children can be born with airplane heads, so my disbelief can hardly afford to pick and choose what it’s gonna be suspended at! anyways though, how does he know he’s the only one who was able to converse with them? did you conduct detailed six-month follow-up interviews with everyone you gave quirks to or what

and if it really is the case that this ability was formerly exclusive to him, isn’t that more evidence than ever that OFA and AFO are actually THE EXACT SAME QUIRK oh whoops am I getting ahead of myself again, sorry

MEANWHILE TOMURA IS ALL, “GRANDMA?”

“WHY AM I HERE, WELL LET ME TELL YOU A STORY, GRANDSON. YOU SEE THAT MAN GROWING OUT OF YOUR RIBCAGE THERE? WELL IT’S JUST THE FUNNIEST THING, ACTUALLY”

WAIT SO IS HE SAYING THEY’RE SOULS OR NOT??

this makes it sound like they won’t ever get to rest, which sure sounds like a soul thing to me. well whatever, soul, consciousness, I guess it’s just semantics at the end of the day

anyways though, so this asshole is finally done talking (I’m sure that won’t last), so now we can finally have the heartwarming reunion we’ve all been waiting for

sigh

-- actually, no, not “sigh”!! you know what!! because Tomura says “whatever the reason”, but that’s only because he doesn’t actually have a fucking clue about the reason. like, I don’t know if the knowledge that AFO killed Nana would be enough to give him pause, but if he knew the whole story and knew that AFO was behind not only Nana’s death, but the rest of his family’s deaths as well... now that would be a whole different thing

anyway. but at least it’s becoming clearer now why AFO spent all that time raising Tomura up as his heir and brainwashing him even though he seems to have been planning this body takeover the whole time. it’s all because he loves making people miserable! yaaaaay

btw HAS NANA HAD THE EXACT SAME MOLE ON HER CHIN AS TOMURA THIS ENTIRE TIME WTF. am I just the least observant person who ever lived lmao

lol wtf

ground: [randomly starts exploding]

Deku: “ONE FOR ALL IS BEING ERODED!!!” LOL IS THAT WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE, OKAY THEN. I’ll take your word for it

y’all I cannot fucking get over this “AFO growing out of Tomura’s hip socket like a fucked-up ventriloquist dummy” shit though

you do realize that absolutely no one can take you seriously right now, right?? it’s important to me that you know this

WHAT’S THIS NOW

seems like SOMEONE has had it up to here with a certain SOMEONE ELSE’S bullshit lmaooo bye Felicia

I SAID GOOD DAY!!

you guys why is he not dying!!

-- OH DAMN

love how Deku is just lying there like “YOU KNOW THOSE DAYS WHERE YOU’RE LIKE, THIS MIGHT AS WELL HAPPEN.” poor Deku

(ETA: where in god’s name is OFA Prime standing. why are my thoughts fully consumed by this lmao.)

are Nana and OFA Prime even doing anything?? why are they sticking their arms out like that. wait hold up is this all a big metaphor for the back-and-forth going on between Tomura trying to steal OFA and OFA being all “actually no you can’t, please enter your password and click on all the boxes with bicycles in them to prove you’re a human first”?

OH SNAP OFA PRIME SAID NO THANKS

“SORRY BRO WE’VE ALREADY MADE OURSELVES AT HOME HERE”

I have only just noticed that metaphysical!Deku has the same scars as actual!Deku. and yet his arms are not currently broken! that doesn’t really seem consistent to me but whatever!! maybe he saved right before the boss battle, that would be smart of him

anyway, that’s great and all that OFA Prime is here helping out, but I really wanted to see Nana fight AFO in a one on one though so I’m a bit disappointed. also why is it only the two of them?? where are Banjou and the others. of all the times to be sleeping on the job

FOR FUCK’S SAKE, THIS MAN

WOULD YOU STOP. WOULD YOU JUST QUIT IT ALREADY

oh shit hold up

doesn’t this confirm that the reason he wanted to transfer his power to Tomura is because he believed it would make him strong enough to finally take OFA because of Quirk Singularity? jesus christ. and here he was so sure of himself. but it turns out he doesn’t actually know shit! you can’t just fucking take OFA like that ya dingdong that’s not how it works

(ETA: SO, A THOUGHT -- is there any sort of subtle hinting here in the way that he words this? “if your strength is combined with mine”, as opposed to “if my strength is combined with yours”? no idea if the admittedly-so-small-as-to-be-almost-inconsequential distinction between those two sentences exists in the original Japanese or not, but I find it very interesting that the English wording implies that he’s the one adding Tomura’s strength to his own, rather than vice versa.)

now he’s insulting Deku!!

excuse me sir WHO ASKED YOU anyway. and never mind that being consumed by an, AND I QUOTE, “unquenchable” rage is your protege’s whole THING, and that he also needed your help to avoid being burned to a crisp a short while ago. where do you get off I swear

(ETA: also just want to point out that in the panel before this one he says that he’s been “watching through Tomura”, which pretty much confirms that his consciousness or whatever is alive inside of him all the time. Tomura is definitely not getting rid of this guy any time soon.)

WOW

first he calls Kacchan useless, then he calls Deku a simpleton, and don’t even get me started with Nana. just, you guys. this man is just... a very, very rude man

NOW OFA IS ALL “THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT MAKES HIM SUCH A GOOD PROTAGNIST YOU BUTTMUNCH” AND OMG PREACH

“DESPITE HIS COMMON SENSE” sdfkllk my man he already has one brother roasting him, take it easy guy

AHH WHAT

IS THIS BACK IN THE REAL WORLD

YEP

hahaha nice try Tomura

so Deku’s all “I didn’t lose my power! BUT” and I assume the “but” is the part where his arms are still broken and shit, and meanwhile Tomura’s body is almost healed up now finally

they’re both wiped out and now AFO is again petitioning Tomura to let him take over goddammit

“you won’t lose your mind” yep, he sure won’t! scout’s honor!! pinky swear!!

meanwhile Deku is getting fucking desperate flkjl;k my baby. and Machia is going to show up any second now too, probably. what else can fucking go wrong at this point

oh shit I shouldn’t have asked

get ready to rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuumble, probably

OH MY GOD

WELL AT LEAST SOMEONE HERE IS HAVING A GOOD TIME. jesus

so as soon as he heard Endeavor was there he got all, “TIME FOR THE BIG REVEAL”, is that right? WELL JOKE’S ON YOU TOUYA, YOUR DAD DOESN’T SEEM ALL THAT CONSCIOUS AT THE MOMENT, SO THAT’S GOING TO DRAIN A LOT OF THE TENSION FROM THE SCENE WHEN YOU GO ALL REVERSE DARTH VADER ON HIM AND HE’S ALL “ZZZZZZZZ”

meanwhile Toga is having unsettlingly quiet angst

jesus christ Toga this is all we need right now

“WAS JIN-KUN NOT A PERSON” sdkfjlk Horikoshi I swear. please have mercy on this fandom. this is the debate that refuses to die!!

but seriously ffs, the issue isn’t that Jin deserved to die, it’s that the countless people whom Jin would have either directly or indirectly killed didn’t deserve to die either. people don’t only become people when you attach names and faces to them! we all loved Jin because we’d gotten to know him, but that doesn’t mean his life was inherently worth more than the lives of all the people he would have killed. sometimes there’s just no good answer

like, it’s just crazy to me that because the heroes are all “we want to protect everyone!” but then aren’t always able to do so because that’s literally impossible, whereas the villains are all “we don’t care about anyone other than the select few people that we actually like!”, the villains somehow wind up getting the better PR. it just so happens that it’s infinitely easier to be loyal to the interests of a few people as opposed to ALL THE PEOPLE. like, no shit, it’s easier to stick to your moral code when you barely have a moral code. and so the villains can kill thousands and no one bats an eye, but if a hero fails to save even one person they’re hypocritical moral failures. like what the hell

BUT ANYWAY, sorry to go off on a tangent there lol, it’s not really a big deal. I’m just preemptively trying to stave off more discourse about it lol but who am I even kidding

anyways lol, but of course they won’t kill you unless they have no choice, Toga. but when it comes to catch-22 situations, it’s a bit much to infer that the heroes don’t consider the villains people just because they opt for the choice that spares more innocent lives. I sure as hell don’t want my babies out here killing people, but to say that they can’t no matter what or else they’re no different from the villains is just...

anyway so the chapter has now just ENDED, just like that!! on a shot of Ochako’s face!

I SENSE ANOTHER THROWDOWN COMING. and it had better not be a total letdown like the last one! NANA BARELY DID ANYTHING HORIKOSHI, WHAT THE FUCK. I started out with such high hopes lol

but I will settle for Toga VS Ochako, and Deku VS Tomura: The Sequel: Shouto’s Revenge! SPEAKING OF HEROES WHO HAVE NO QUALMS ABOUT MURDERING PEOPLE lmao

[annapogorilayas]

here's a bunch of my rambling, incoherent thoughts LoD S6, H, and the show's overall trajectory since S4

under the cut because it's LONG, these are just my personal opinions and feelings

the show's trajectory

i've been disappointed with the show's overall direction since S4 for multiple reasons. to be fair, the show had an uphill battle to maintain the level of quality that S2/S3 had. lindsay denton was this show's most interesting character and keeley hawes was phenomenal, and her storyline tied in perfectly with the conclusion of the caddy storyline. that was always going to be a tough act to follow.

the show has always had shocking twists and explosive action sequences, but when the show moved from bbc2 weeknights to bbc1 the show began to lean more heavily on them. in S1-3 these scenes fit in with the plot. after S4, it began to feel more like the show was a series of shocking twists/action sequences with a plot written around it.

the OCG is way too big and powerful

after S4, the OCG(s) became very big, powerful, and all-knowing, without actually showing us how they were achieving this, making it hard to believe. in S2, we had an ambush, the murder of hunter and trotman in the hospital room, the setup of dryden for blackmail, and lindsay's abduction from custody. these events were carried out/enabled by five characters: prasad, cole, dot, akers, and lindsay. we met them, we spent time with them (except cole), we had at least a rough idea of what motivated them or how they got involved, and how they pulled off what they did.

in S3, two important events (steve's firearm paperwork being forged and Urgent Exit Required) were enabled by one corrupt AFO. we didn't meet him or find out what his motives were, but i don't think we needed to - he was probably just one of dot's lackeys. but it's not that hard to believe that dot could get one corrupt AFO to do his bidding.

in contrast, since S4, it seems like the OCG has an endless supply of corrupt prison officers, AFOs, and balaclava men that they can deploy at a moment's notice, and these people are pretty disposable - how many of these people have been arrested, imprisoned, or murdered since S4? how many balaclava men died in the 6x04 ambush alone? aren't the OCG(s) running out of people to send on suicide missions by now? a story driven by a revolving door of disposable, mostly nameless people is much less compelling than a story that revolves around a small, familiar cast of believably corrupt/bent/blackmailed coppers. i think S4 and S6 could've been better if more of the plot was driven by the other officers on huntley's and davidson's teams, or just... any recognisable named character, rather than these disposable hired guns.

additionally, the OCG just silences/pays off/kills people off so easily the plot has become very predictable

the problem with H

so H wasn't an evil criminal mastermind, just some guy in it for the money. that part i had hoped for and expected - LoD is almost never about criminal masterminds with grand motives who just want to watch the world burn. LoD's antagonists/villains fall into the following categories:

a) people who make decisions that spiral terribly out of control (tony gates, roz huntley)

b) people who do bad things for the right reasons because the system offers no alternative (lindsay denton wanted to save carly; danny waldron killed his abuser; john corbett believed his crimes were the only way to unmask H because peartree was dragging its feet)

c) people who do bad things out of self-preservation because they've been blackmailed or groomed (dot, jo, maneet, ryan, hargreaves, hilton, hari baines)

d) bad people who do bad things out of self-interest, whose behaviour is enabled or incentivised by the system that fails to protect people (hunter, the murphys, fairbanks, prasad, cole, gill). these guys are not geniuses and they don't have grand motives, they do bad things because it benefits them directly and they can get away with it.

i think (?) Buckells falls into this last category. i don't have a problem with him being H in theory. i don't mind that he turned out not to be the "top man" bc i never liked the idea of there being a "top man", it's way too close to "a bad apple". i'm much more intrigued by the idea that there is a loose, semi-transient network of officers who are all acting out of a combination of self-interest (money, power, access to vulnerable people) and self-preservation (they all have an incentive to be loyal to the network because they all know dirt about each other, but if there's a motive and opportunity to take someone down without it coming back on them, they will). for this reason, i don't find it necessarily disappointing or implausible that buckells was the last man standing and that he was motivated by money.

however, the way the reveal was set up throughout S6 and executed in 6x07 was anticlimactic to me. buckells had a laptop in prison? he ordered kate's murder FROM PRISON? of course he did, that whole prison appears to be run by the OCG. this is the same problem i mentioned earlier, the OCG is just too powerful to be interesting. the reveal could've been way more effective if buckells hadn't spent the last half of the season in jail. i also would've liked to hear more from buckells about precisely what motivated him, exactly how he came to be involved, and how the other corrupt officers fit into his story. i would've loved it if, for once, someone just said fuck it and spilled the beans instead of going down the "i'll tell you a bunch of useless nonsense in exchange for WP" route.

that being said, i think this whole clusterfuck could've been avoided entirely by simply not making H into such a big deal. way back in S4, the fixation on H worked as a plot device to get hilton to issue ted with a reg-15 and cast doubt on him, but i was bored of H approximately 1.5 episodes into S5. the idea of this shadowy figure calling all the shots was inconsistent with everything this show had been about, and it dragged on for way too long. i wasn't opposed to the idea that H is a group of people not a single person, but morse code? srsly? you couldn't just have them sit down and say "hey, maybe dot just blinked on H because he'd had his eyes open for a while and also he'd lost a lot of blood so he was probably confused anyway?"

[stxphxn-strange]

Looking Forwards, Backwards, and Now at You | A Shrimp Gremlin Villain!Stephen fic

A/n: this is from the same timeline as Living With All of This but it comes a few days before the housewarming/dinner party. Ft lots of angst and sweetness and more info about the thing that happened to Tony they mentioned in LWAoT. Enjoy :)

SoHo, 6:56p.m.

“This whole weekend might win the award for the worst day of my life,” Stephen muttered.

Tony was quiet, resting his head on Stephen’s shoulder. “I’m not sure I can put it in the running for my worst day, to be honest. But it was horrendous.”

Stephen wrapped an arm around Tony and kissed his hair. “An entire clusterfuck.”

“That’s my line, babe,” Tony murmured.

“You ate my dumplings yesterday, call it even,” Stephen quipped.

“They didn’t have your name on them,” Tony replied. “They were in our fridge, in our house, but your name wasn’t on them.”

Stephen rolled his eyes. “Alright Tones, I’ll give you that.”

They fell into a comfortably relieved silence, the mood only dampened by the growing nervousness that they both felt.

Stephen felt Tony tense and shift closer to him as his heart rate started to increase. He massaged Tony’s scalp gently, trying to soothe him. “Can I talk, just to fill the space?”

“Please do.”

“Did you know that Levi likes hanging out in the washing machine and the dryer? Wong was washing some comforters and I guess Levi was on my bed and accidentally got tossed in. We didn’t know until they came out of the dryer all warm and smelling like what I think springtime is like.”

The Cloak flew from around the corner and ruffled Tony’s hair as a pre-greeting before settling on his shoulders in a hug. Tony sneezed as more dust was expelled from his hair.

“Thanks for reminding me I should shower, Levi,” Tony said, leaning closer to Stephen. “There’s probably dust on your shirt now.”

“I don’t even like this shirt much,” Stephen replied. “I like you much more.”

Tony laughed sadly. “Sweetheart.”

“Mhm?”

“Will you talk more?”

Stephen smiled. “We finally finished repairing the stairs the other day, from when Bruce crashed through them. Wong INSISTED on doing it without hiring a professional, Mom insists he’s learned my stubbornness.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Tony murmured.

“Mordo was ready to smack him down the stairs by the time we were done,” Stephen replied. “It almost came to blows, but I’m glad we got the stairs done before I moved.”

“I think it was about time we separated our home and work lives,” Tony murmured. He didn’t mean to imply anything by his words, but the unspoken “especially after what just happened” hung in the air.

Stephen nodded, fully intending on continuing to ramble about irrelevant nonsense before Tony started shaking again. With a quiet hum, Stephen softly rubbed his shoulder. “I’m sorry about—”

“Don’t be, it had nothing to do with you,” Tony replied.

“It did, and we both know it,” Stephen said. “Tony, I didn’t mean for you to get hurt by any of this.”

“I know, I believe you.”

“If you have more nightmares, they’ll be my fault.”

“When I have more nightmares, they won’t be your fault. You’ll make sure I don’t hit my head on the nightstand again right?”

Stephen nodded frantically. “Of course! But that won’t change the fact that I—”

“You’re not the one who tortured me,” Tony said, his tone laced with love and patience that Stephen suddenly felt he didn’t deserve.

He moved sharply and somewhat awkwardly as if controlled by an external force, throwing himself into Tony’s arms even though the man was right next to him. He had to know that Tony was still real, truly beside him where he always liked to be. Stephen didn’t realize how tense he was until Tony hugged him and softly rubbed his back.

“Hey, exhale.”

Stephen nodded and let out a shaky breath. “I almost lost you…”

“I’m quite difficult to get rid of, you know? I wouldn’t have lasted this long if that was the case,” Tony quipped.

“When you mean ‘lasted this long’ you mean—”

“Both this weekend and in general.”

The publicly stoic sorcerer broke before Tony even finished that sentence. He didn’t even understand why he was crying, maybe it was emotional exhaustion from the past 48 hours, maybe it was from relief that Tony was truly there, stubbornly pretending to be invincible. It had really been too close for comfort this time. It felt like they were a timebomb that could go off at any minute, and Tony was too loyal and loving to see how dangerous it was to be anywhere near Stephen.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tony said softly, threading his fingers through Stephen’s hair. He looked a little more gray today, regal and poised even in his emotional state.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Stephen murmured. “But a ‘sorry’ doesn’t matter, it can’t change what happened.”

“No it can’t, but you know I’ll be okay if something like this happens again. It might fuck with my head for awhile, but eventually I’ll be okay. I’ve been defending myself basically my whole life, and—”

“And nothing, you shouldn’t have to!” Stephen cried. He was too worked up now, his hands balled up in the fabric of Tony’s hoodie (it was actually his, but Stephen was too disoriented to notice that his partner was wearing his shrimp hoodie. The sorcerer swore by the fact that shrimp was good luck, luck that Tony probably needed more right now).

He tried to hold back his anguish and fear that kept him up for 37 straight hours, believing it selfish to cry when he wasn’t the one who was tortured.

But it was almost as if Tony could read his thoughts, because he whispered: “You’ve got a lot on your mind. Let it out. Do you want anything from the kitchen?”

“In a little, let me cling to you for a little longer. Please,” Stephen replied.

Tony nodded and flopped onto his back, ignoring the fact that they were sitting on the coffee table, and pulled Stephen close to his chest.

In turn, the sorcerer curled himself into a little ball and pressed his head into Tony’s collarbone.

“You’re so compact,” the genius teased. “You look like a shrimp.”

“I’ve assumed my final form,” Stephen said, snuggling closer to Tony. “Be the shrimp you want to see in the world.”

“Why does that sound like you’re going to magically transform into a shrimp?” Tony asked.

“The Ancient One says I’m not allowed to do that,” Stephen replied. “Which is probably for the best.”

They fell into soft laughter and comfortable silence again, Tony almost asleep.

“Do you think the couch is too big for this room?” Stephen asked, his eyes scanning their living room.

“I just assumed we were sitting on the table because the couch looks weird in here,” Tony replied. “We could put it in the basement. It’s not living room material anyway.”

Stephen nodded. “Now what if, and just trust me on this one—”

“Steph, you’re one of the people I trust most in this world, but our living room Does Not Need a shrimp-patterned couch,” Tony interjected.

“You say you can’t read minds and yet you knew I was going to suggest that,” Stephen muttered.

More crack from this weird not-series of them living together coming soon! stay safe

Tags: @stark-strange-love (happy birthday🦐❤️) @dinodaddy65 @ayyy-its-an-idiot @chocopiggy

[joonsrack]

+PAIRING: Kim Seokjin x Kim Namjoon

+GENRE: SFW, slow burn, ficlet (do people use that term anymore?) mini series, attempt at crack and comedy.

+The one where Seokjin is a part time cop and a full time Namjoonsitter series: Part I | Part II | Part III

+WORD COUNT: ~1.7k

+SUMMARY: 

“Hands where I can see them.” Seokjin says calmly, and the man, albeit the extremely confused expression twisting his face, complies with him. He shoots his hand in the air, knocking over a plant in his hurry. It goes crashing to the ground with an ear-splitting sound, adding soil to the mess, and he winces for all of three second before he fixes his stare back on Seokjin with a frown.”

+WARNINGS: Mention of firearms, also i have no idea how police works.

There’s one important detail that leads them here, Seokjin pointing his service weapon in Namjoon’s direction while said man, surrounded by the broken remains of various objects, raises his hands in the air, an extremely confused expression twisting his face.

When people ask Seokjin about it later, he’ll answer it’s really all Jimin’s fault.

“Have you seen the new neighbour that moved into Jiho-hyung’s old apartment?”

“Hmmm, no. Since when?” Seokjin asks Jimin distractedly, pouring over some paperwork.

“Like two weeks ago? He’s the scariest man I’ve ever seen, but also the cutest, if that makes sense. He’s so small, barely taller than me.”

Seokjin only nods, not even looking at him, but it doesn’t deter his best friend and roommate.

“He thinks he’s slick with his tough tattooed guy attitude, but the other day I saw him feeding a street cat and his gummy smile literally blinded me.”

Seokjin turns to the next page, settling into his routine of nodding every few sentences, making mmhmmhh from time to time to spice it up a little.

“There’s always music coming out of there now, I think he’s some kind of musician?” Jimin says, a dreamy look on his face. “I think they actually know Jiho-hyung so that would make a lot of sense.”

If Seokjin was listening, maybe he would have caught the ‘they’. But he isn’t, so he doesn’t. And Jimin carries right on waxing poetry about their new neighbour’s raven black hair, never hinting again that there’s more than one person that moved in.

Which leads him to a few days later, leaving Hoseok behind in the patrol car to retrieve some documents he forgot home. He’s pushing his key into the lock when he hears a series of crashes coming from the door on the other side of the hallway.

It’s cracked open, but no light is filtering through, and Seokjin catches a glimpse of a shadow moving quickly inside.

It’s by habit that he investigates the noise.

He spots a tall silhouette inside, shoving things into a large black bag in a hurry; things that looks like expensive electronic equipment. There’s a smattering of broken glass scattered on the floor, reflecting the street light coming in from the window, and the man seems to completely ignore it, his heavy black boots cracking it into even smaller pieces with a crunch.

His cop instincts kick in, and in a second his service weapon is unlatched as he pushes the door slowly and takes a careful step inside, ready to stop this apparent breaking and entering.

The layout of the place is similar to his, so he easily locates the light switch. Once in position, he flicks the light on, throwing the room into sharp contrast, exposing the possible intruder who spins around, startled.

Small, black hair, tattoos had been used to describe their new neighbour.

This man is tall, with dark silver hair, and no tattoo in sight.

“Hands where I can see them.” Seokjin says calmly, and the man, albeit the extremely confused expression twisting his face, complies with him. He shoots his hand in the air, knocking over a plant in his hurry. It goes crashing to the ground with an ear-splitting sound, adding soil to the mess, and he winces for all of three second before he fixes his stare back on Seokjin with a frown.

“Hum, hey, officer. What brings you…here.”

“I could ask you the same question.” he answers, pointing his chin at the bulky bag which definitely contains expensive equipment, overflowing with it.

“Oh, oh. I see,” he says, looking at the bag, then at the remains cluttering the floor, and then at his own person dressed in all… black. He gulps. “This is not what it looks like. I hum, I live here.”

“No, a small man with black hair and tattoo lives here. I saw him around.” Seokjin answers with a no-nonsense look on his face.

“That would be my roommate, Yoongi. Hah. I guess that means you live in this building. Quick hack: Don’t let him hear you say he’s small. Now I’m rambling. Hum, I live here too.” There’s a small patch of sweat forming on the man’s forehead, and he’s getting crossed-eyed staring at the end of the gun’s barrel. Seokjin lowers it slightly, getting the feeling this man has literally zero ounces of evilness in him.

“Why would you be stuffing a bag full of expensive equipment in the dark while breaking things when you live here.” Seokjin asks with a raised eyebrow. “Doesn’t seems very logical. Looks more like burglary to me. Done by the least stealthy thief in history, I must say.”

“It’s very interesting that you say that, because touché, I’m not even remotely stealthy. And I’m definitely not a thief.”

“Feels like something a thief would say.” Seokjin snorts. “ So what where you doing then, in the dark, shoving things in a black bag with the speed of somebody who's ass is on fire?”

“Well, if you must know,” he says, lowering his hands slightly. “I’m late for a gig, I need my equipment, and in my hurry I broke a few things. Hence the lack of light.”

Seokjin spots the remains of the broken lamp on the floor.

“What the hell is taking you so- What the hell. Namjoon.”

Seokjin startles at the new voice, turning towards its source, and then lowering his gun completely. The new neighbour, who clearly knows the man standing in the mess before them, is standing in the doorframe.

With no gun held up to his face, the man —Namjoon— collapses in a chair like all his strings were cut simultaneously.

“What the hell. Why is there a police officer here. Did we get robbed?”

Now, if Jimin had mentioned more clearly the fact that more than one person had moved in, maybe this all wouldn’t have happened. But all he can do now is watch Namjoon explain the last 5 minutes to his friend with an embarrassed flush on his cheek. Or maybe Seokjin is just projecting.

Yoongi, he learned just a second ago, side-steps him to open the wardrobe, where he reaches for one of the countless boxes of lightbulb sorted on the top shelf. Like, so many.

“I’m extremely sorry for the misunderstanding,” he starts, hoping this will not get to the head of the police station. “I really thought someone was-“

Yoongi stops him with a hand, and he can see Namjoon finally getting up from his chair, going to grab a glass from one of the cupboard. From the look of it, their whole glass selection seems to be plastic, going from kids themed stuff to plain ugly coloured cups.

“A lot worse happened. Consider yourself a victim here.” Yoongi says, with no rebuttal coming from Namjoon. All he does is echo ‘A lot worse.’ in the background. He throws his cup of water back, hitting his head on the cupboard door he left open, and doesn’t even react to what must have been pretty painful judging by the sound of it.

“He’s an expensive boy to live with.” Yoongi says, screwing a new light bulb in after taking out the broken one. “I changed this one this morning.” He signs. “I would like to say it’s the first time he's broken something twice in the same day but that would be a lie.”

Seokjin nods, for the first time really looking at the man.

His black tank top show off how he’s covered from head to toe with bandaids and bruises, and Seokjin can deduct it’s all accidentally self inflicted. His black tank top also hints at a nice body, his arms on the good side of defined; his black skinny showing some interesting thighs and cal-

Yeah, no; objectifying someone on duty, someone he almost just arrested, might be a bad idea.

His radio chooses that moment to come to life, Hoseok’s voice bursting through with static.

“Hyung, you’ coming? It’s taking you forever.”

“I’ll be down in a sec,” he answers, holding the radio to his mouth.

The two man have now their attention fixed on him, and Seokjin realizes he’s been standing on the same spot for the whole… clusterfuck.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you two around.” Seokjin says awkwardly, taking a step toward the door, where he feels the air might be easier to breath, less charged with embarrassment.

“Wait.” He hears Namjoon says, and he turns around, hoping he’s not about to be sued.

“Hum, we’re really late to our gig,” He says nervously “Can we, perhaps, get a ride to the subway station?” He asks, eyes getting wide, like he’s trying to look adorable. Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s something else, but it’s definitely working on Seokjin.

“I- hm, It’s a little against the rules.” He tries to answer.

Yoongi looks at him with an evil glint in his eyes, and Seokjin just knows he’s about to be guilt tripped to hell.

“I mean, it’s not like you just traumatized my friend by pointing a gun at him and made us incredibly late to our gig. You know, our livelihood that makes it possible to replace all the shit he breaks. Oh, and also pay the rent.” He says with no infliction. Hello satan.

Namjoon has dropped the puss in boots impersonation and looks like he wants to intervene, but his friend throws him a look that could literally cut diamond. Seokjin absolutely understands what Jimin meant by scariest man he’s ever seen, he's just not seeing the cute part of his friend's follow up statement. There's nothing cute about this man, Seokjin thinks.

“Ok, fine. Sure.”

“With the lights.”

Seokjin sputters indignantly. Because that wasn’t Yoongi asking, but Namjoon.

“What?”

“We’re really late.” He shrugs, biting his lips. “We might not even make it if you take us to the subway.”

Seokjin sighs, rubs his eyes.

“Tick tock” Yoongi says irritably.

He can’t believe he’s being manipulated by two strangers into giving them a ride in the police cruiser. Hoseok will have a field day.

“We’ll take you to the wherever you’re performing, but no lights.” He settles on.

Yoongi grins meanly, and Namjoon gives him an apologetic smile, popping a dimple.

And for a second, Seokjin marvels at how deep it looks; has to hold back from poking his finger in it.

But, nope. Still in uniform.

[princessconsuelapark]

aaaaand hello everyone, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, welcome to yet another episode of 'and that's what you missed on professional tennis players being dumb' (laver cup drama recap coming soon i promise)

- The week following Laver Cup was absolutely wild; Nick got (kind of, but not really) banned from playing tennis, Rafa was legit walking around completely decked out in LC merch for days, Sascha (*a TEAM8 social media intern about to be fired) followed Stefanos on instagram, then Sascha (*actually him) unfollowed Stefanos on instagram

- Of course, we also had Roger confirming in an interview that Rafa is his boyfriend- Sorry, I mean, Roger used the French word for friend, 'copain’, which what do you know, is widely understood to mean boyfriend, when talking about Rafa in an interview. Yep, that’s an actual thing that happened. He’s truly out of control.

- Lots of singles players got involved in doubles nonsense, most notably Sascha teaming up with Isner for some reason (if that never ever happens ever again, it’ll be too fucking soon), and Daniil randomly deciding to come for Stefanos’s ex (To be continued...? 👀)

- Shanghai started out with truly iconic scenes, courtesy of everyone's favourite hateable Italian and our one and only Sir Andy (he really is back™)

- It turns out that Roger is completely useless at parenting their 3 adopted disaster children when Rafa is not there

- Marin Cilic and Andreas Seppi almost had a baby together

- Shockingly, after Stefanos beat Sascha in Beijing the week before (highlight of that anxiety-ridden clusterfuck of a must-watch match), they actually willingly practised together in Shanghai, but that's not all, because according to Sascha’s completely unprompted ramblings, they got a “little bit closer” at Laver Cup and are now “having a good relationship”, which frankly, left me absolutely fucking deceased

- Their enemies-to-lovers practice session did deliver though, because Stefanos was officially adopted into the Fedal family when he defeated Djokovic in the QFs, guaranteeing Rafa’s return to no. 1 in a few weeks (and therefore making sure Djokovic doesn’t get any closer to Roger’s record of 310 weeks at no. 1)

- We had the next edition of ‘tall, blonde next gen player breaks his shoelaces before match even starts’, but surprise! It was Sascha ! If that's not proof that him and Stefanos are soulmates, then I don't know what is. Andrey on the other side of the net clearly thought so too (I can spot a Saschanos shipper when I see one), but then not very nicely Sascha took revenge on him with a bagel for laughing at him: 6-0 7-6 :(

- Marcelo almost died of hysterical laughter when Kubi was hit in the dick by a ball on court, and very helpfully stood next to him, watching him suffer as he lay on the ground in agony

- Then Fedverev happened and OH THE DRAMA !! If you only ever watch one tennis match in your life, make it this one. There was clowning, loads of anxiety, "code violation, unsportsmanlike conduct, point penalty, Mr Federer" (fucking wild ??), butterfly-talk and so much more. We just hope Rafa survived okay watching it, back home in Mallorca.

- It's impossible to stay mad at Sascha for besting him though, and Roger is not immune to his charms either: he immediately said some adorable dad-things about him, as expected.

- Another positive outcome was that we can keep enjoying the fact that Fedal have both won exactly 381 Masters matches in their career #couplesgoals

- The Colombian lads casually bagelled the American servebots to everyone’s immense pleasure, so we had that going for us too

- Meanwhile Stefanos fell victim to Daniil ‘Bullshit Russian’ Medvedev for the 5th consecutive time, and in true Stefanos-style claimed that the reason for that was simply because playing him is #boring

- The media turned to our resident Stefanos-nonsense expert for comment, and Sascha pretty much just said, ‘I want to have nothing to do with this, but also Stefanos is wrong as usual.’ He did seem very exasperatedly fond when he heard about it though.

- Daniil, after having just won his 6 millionth tournament of the season (he actually genuinely smiled this time, but probably only because of Sascha being cute), didn't take kindly to the whole being boring thing however, and as it turns out he hate-watched Stefanos's last few vlogs in retaliation #newsubscriber

- Meanwhile everyone was baffled at why Isner of all people was at an UNIQLO exho, but Roger beat him in spectacular fashion, so we quickly got over that

- The ace on match point was a bit of an overkill though and brought back some unwanted W*mbledon memories, but to be fair, we're used to having war flashbacks about those two championship points by now

- For a glorious couple hours, the ATP’s Race to London ranking page was showing Rafa at a joint 15th place (with FAA), with zero points, but as qualified for London. That’s just how much of a legend he simply is.

- Stefanos’s social media break was never really a proper thing, but I’m happy to announce that we're back to full-speed; we got some philosophical, emo insta posts, and also a new vlog, in which he advises us to eat our rice, and proceeds to wander around Shanghai alone and unsupervised, non-stop blabbering about his iPhone. Good to have you back, Stef 💕

- In tragic #hairupdate news, Domi got rid of all his floof (which understandably had people near-suicidal), even more upsetting: David did the same thing (honestly, just wtf), then in our new #facialhairupdate sub-segment: it turns out Stefanos is growing his beard out because he doesn’t want to look too similar to Sascha, which is fair enough; it must get awkward when you go on a date with your boyfriend and people mistake you for brothers

- Kei in glasses happened though, thank you Naomi <3

- I also feel like Patrick McEnroe had some spectacularly incorrect takes to offer on something next gen related at some point, but I can’t actually remember what, so let’s just leave it at that

[churchyardgrim]

Hi! I noticed recently that your description now says that you're "none gender left dude" (awesome phrasing, lol), and I was wondering what your process was for figuring out your gender? I've been exploring whether I might be non-binary and things you've said about gender in the past seem similar to things that I've thought.

hah thank u! I think I stole the wording from tumblr famous turing-tested hdhfhgdf

so first off gender is Weird, and your milage may vary - everyone experiences this nonsense differently! that said, it was a pretty strange roughly two year long thought process on my part, and I’m not entirely sure transmasc nonbinary is my Final Form even, but it’s most comfy for now and that’s what matters. this is gonna get kinda long and rambly, fair warning hdhfhgdf

if you’re afab, you might be used to a certain amount of discomfort around your gender, bc that’s assumed to be just part of the Girl Experience. I remember feeling vaguely ashamed and defensive both for and against my girlhood for a long time, I felt like I had to prove something, without really knowing what that something was. I only started to better conceptualize that discomfort much more recently, when I started thinking about gender hypotheticals, imagining if experiences were Different - which was helped in no small part by being around other trans and nb folks! the world inside your head seems so much smaller when you’re in the same places you’ve always been, around the same people you’ve always been with, it can be hard to break out of old thought patterns when everything external is still the same. 

I started to realize that I actually felt more comfortable when femininity wasn’t the focus, and then I mentally tried on some masculine honorifics, and bought a binder to test some hypotheses. there wasn’t really a lightbulb moment, it was more a slow turn of thought to “well damn, this actually feels Better” which lead me to picking more deeply at that vague discomfort around Femininity. the conclusion I came to was that my particular kind of discomfort was caused by a few compounding factors, the most prominent of which is society kind of treats women like shit, and being a woman feels like vulnerability, and I Don’t Like It. 

I’d thought that I just had to Put Up With It, if I was tough enough I could make that source of discomfort go away, if I was loud enough and fierce enough and talked about winged eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man enough then things would get better, but they didn’t, and it felt like I was faking it, like I wasn’t trying hard enough, and it just spiraled into another source of guilt and discomfort that compounded on the first, and it just didn’t help at all. watching some other folks in my life go through similar thought processes and deciding “hey, actually, this sucks and I’m opting out” made me realize that that’s an option. you’re allowed to opt out of being Girl! for any reason!!! terfs and transmeds will try to tell you that a reason like that is somehow cheating, or Not Trans Enough, or misdirected internalized misogyny, or some shit, but terfs and transmeds say a lot of bullshit and none of it’s worth much. 

and from there it’s mostly just deciding what particular flavor of nonbinary I like best, cause I’m pretty sure I’m not Original Flavor Man, and I’m still not 100% settled on that yet, but there’s no rush yanno? there’s no deadline for this shit, if stuff is confusing or isn’t settling right there’s no hurry to pick an answer, usually it just needs time and the kind of background processing that ur not really conscious of. right now that kind of nebulous nb space where butch woman and twink man kind of overlap, stylistically speaking, really appeals to me, so that’s what I’m gunning for rn. but honestly all it comes down to is personal taste and aesthetic and What Feels Best, and experimentation and research and trying shit out for the sake of Science is honestly your best bet there imo. it’s hard to figure this stuff out on a purely theoretical level, the more data you can get the better!

good luck anon, gender shit’s a clusterfuck and I hope you find a spot that feels right to you!

[pinkletterday]

Notorious

Pairing: Barry Allen/ Iris West.

Rating: Teen

Warnings: drug use, addiction

Status: WiP

Summary: Iris West reluctantly faces the challenge of her career as a publicist - saving up and coming alt-rock sensation Barry Allen's career from himself.

"People like notoriety. Studios don't like uninsurable flight risks. The money is in the sweet spot between the two."

Prompt taken from this post and altered.

"Hi, I'm gonna kill you."

Iris's boss, Leonard Snart, swivelled in his chair to face her as she stormed into his office, heedless of the transparency of its walls.

"Good morning to you too, Iris," he said wryly. "I wouldn't mind if you do kill me, I have meeting with Accounting in ten minutes. But why am I to be executed?"

"Why would you put me on the Allen account?" Iris demanded, eyes flashing angrily under wide-rimmed glasses. "More importantly, why am I being taken off the Queen one? I brought in that client, Len! And now you want me to baby-sit ANOTHER self-aggrandizing man-child AFTER I helped QC Records pull off a complete image revamp?"

"We're a entertainment PR firm, West, they're all self-aggrandizing man-children. We'd be out of business if they weren't," Len waved her away and went back to collecting his papers. "And I put you on the Allen account because Oliver Queen likes you."

"What?" Iris stopped, non-plussed.

"When you pull off the impossible, people reward you by giving you something more impossible," said Len in his usual air of imparting some grand wisdom upon the newbies. It did nothing to assuage Iris's bad humour. "You got the public to see young Ollie Queen, heedless playboy in the club scene, as a savvy charismatic businessman able to lead his father's empire without running it to the ground. Now he wants you to do the same for his good buddy Barry Allen."

"Why didn't he just ask me?" said Iris, only slightly mollified.

"Probably didn't want to be around for the kicking and screaming," said Len, leaning his head sardonically at her. Iris flushed. Snart was such an asshole. "And don't worry, Queen's paying the retainer fee."

"Why is Oliver paying for Allen?" she determinedly strode behind him as he headed out to the elevator. "Barry Allen's already got two singles in the Billboard Top 40 and a contract with QC. Can't he afford to pay us himself?"

"Ah, there's the rub, darling," Len smirked at her. "Part of the deal is that you convince young Mr. Allen that he needs you. And judging by the recent tabloid coverage - boy, he really does need you."

Iris stared at him. "You can't be serious. He doesn't even want a - Len, he needs rehab not a publicist!"

"No reason why he shouldn't have both," said Len stepping into the elevator as she stood outside, stupefied in disbelief. "Don't worry, Iris. I have every faith in you." The elevator doors closed on her boss's infuriating Chesire cat grin.

"I don't even know anything about alt-rock!" she yelled fruitlessly at the closed steel doors.

"So, I guess this is a bad time to tell you I got the QC account," Sara approached waving a folder at her, her expression not much less disgruntled than hers. "Any tips on how to handle Queen?"

"Yeah," said Iris, pivoting angrily on her heel and marching away. "Kick his fucking ass."

***

For someone with a talent for both music and being splashed across the tabloids, Barry Allen had a rather unconventional arrangement. He was not represented by any major talent agency, even Snart Associates was more entertainment-corporate oriented than talent. He had been "managed" this far by a personal friend in the music industry, a Cisco Ramon, whose own success had made it impossible to focus on Allen's. Iris figured that some well-meaning yet complicated friend negotiations had taken place behind the artist's back for this clusterfuck to land on her desk. She fumed. She was a professional. Even when she had had to contend with Oliver Queen at his worst (the fact that much of the worst had been a ruse was small consolation) it had been saving of the company she had been tasked with. She hadn't gotten an MBA on her own money by twenty-four while working her way up from a mailroom to end up playing nurse maid to entitled white boys.

It was her ire that made her square her shoulders, wipe the sneer off her face and beard the proverbial lion in his den alone. Ramon had asked her to wait for him outside the unimpressive square brick building in a bad part of town ("probably to fit his boho aesthetic," Iris thought uncharitably) but he was now ten minutes late, so screw him.

There was no security or buzzer at the entrance so Iris was able to simply walk into the alarmingly large and clanky elevator that took her upto where Allen lived on the top floor. She stepped into a hall of bare brick with thick wooden sliding door staring at her. There was no buzzer to be seen here either. Iris was about to bang on the door when it opened by itself.

"- all right, fine, I'll let myself out, you jerk. Thanks for the sex and the coffee, I guess!" an irate blonde in dishevelled clothing appeared in front of her, coat and one heel still in hand, facing away to yell at the occupant. She turned around, came face to face with Iris and stepped back in surprise. "Who're you?"

Iris stared awkwardly at her. "Um."

She snorted. "Yeah okay, whatever, good luck." With which ominous benediction she pulled on her shoe and clattered down the stairs, apparently unwilling to wait for the elevator.

"Hey Kathy - Katya - whoever - could you close the door please? Thanks!" called a male voice.

Iris stepped in and complied.

The studio was kind of a bachelor cliché, bare brick, high ceilings, stainless steel counters and leather sofas. A vague smell of weed hung stale in the air. Dull grey sunlight flooded in from the large square windows overlooking the brick and mortar part of the warehouse district, on which gentrification had not encroached. A sad little pocket of impersonal luxury in a sadder, almost forgotten place.

A tall, lanky white man in a tattered tee shirt sat in profile at the far end, eschewing the sprawling sofa behind him in favour of sitting on the floor rug in a tangle of long legs, intermitently strumming on a guitar and scribbling on a note pad on a coffee table strewn with mugs, cans and paper.

"Mr. Allen?" she said tentatively.

His head whipped up, startled. "Huh? Who're you?"

"My name is Iris West. Oliver Queen sent me," said Iris, brisk and no-nonsense, adjusting her glasses.

He blinked slowly at her. Then a lazy grin came over his face. "And here I thought Ollie wasn't gonna send me strippers anymore," he said, eyeing her appreciatively, "he still definitely knows my type."

Iris gaped at him. "I am not a stripper!"

"Oh," he looked befuddled. "I'm sorry, but he really has sent me strippers before and one of them was actually dressed all school-teacherish like you - um. Although come to think of it, he hasn't done that in a few years. Sorry, um. Did uh, the other lady leave?"

"Yeah, she left just as I came in," Iris felt even more nonplussed, no idea which end of that ramble she was supposed to start with. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked around blinking as though not sure of his own surroundings. Or what time it was. Possibly which year.

"Are you high?" It was only ten in the morning, Jesus Christ.

"Um. Only on coffee. And Redbull. Lots of Redbull," he said, going back to work as though her presence in his apartment was not really of much concern to him. "Sex really gives me an endorphin rush and I had this idea - couldn't really go back to sleep after that. I think I made Katya -uh, the girl - mad. I just really need to focus, y'know? Like, if I don't it get done while I'm in the zone I can't ever get it back again?" He never tooked up, talking as though mostly to himself.

Iris approached him cautiously. "Huh. Well, coffee and Rebull I can work with. As long as it's not coke or something."

"Out of Coke. Might have some Pepsi," said Allen absently.

"I meant cocaine."

"Yeah, out of that too."

Iris breathed out slowly.

"Uh, so if Ollie didn't send you, why are you here?" Allen looked up at her, finally seeming to register that this vital question had gone unanswered.

"I said Mr. Queen did send me," she said patiently. "I'm your new publicist.

"Oh." Allen absorbed this. Then closed his eyes, hummed and began strumming his guitar.

Iris felt a headache building behind her eyeballs. "Mr. Allen? Did you not hear what I said?"

"I did, thank you," said Allen, "but I don't need a publicist. I'm sorry you wasted your time."

"I'm sorry about that too," said Iris, temper flaring out her nostrils, "but I am used to being treated with respect, client or not. Something apparently neither you, Oliver Queen or even Mr. Ramon seems capable of."

To her surprise, Allen's eyes flew open and he seemed genuinely dismayed. "Oh. You're right. I called you a - and then. Oh my God I'm sorry," he scrambled up, coltish legs unfolding almost comically to reveal himself a full head taller than her, pale and almost gangly but for an unconscious grace. "Um, please take a seat. Can I get you a drink? I can make more coffee. What do you mean Ollie and Cisco were rude to you?"

She stared after him as he bustled over to the kitchen island at the other end of the studio. Her past experience with Queen's associates and the tabloids had prepared her for a womanizing druggie manchild. It wasn't that Barry Allen had unchecked any of those boxes, exactly. Just kept checking them slightly to the left of where she expected.

"Well for one, Mr. Queen didn't notify me of my change in clients himself, and Mr. Ramon is now fifteen minutes late to our meeting," Iris slung her coat over a barstool and firmly sat herself on another, emanating a stern "will not be dislodged" aura, "I haven't had a briefing and also been told that I have to convince you to let me be your publicist. This is beyond professional discourtesy."

"Agreed on all counts," said Allen, smiling ruefully at her over the sink where he was rinsing the coffee pot. Unbecoming scruff aside, it was a very cute and disarming smile. "I'm sure Cisco has a good explanation, but I'm afraid Oliver is just an asshole like that."

"Believe me, I know," Iris snorted.

Allen's amusement deepened. "You aren't worried about calling your client an asshole in front of his friend?"

"I've called him worse things over the last year," she rolled her eyes, "and I can promise you I am going to call him many things as soon as his plane lands and he turns his phone on. I worked my ass off to save his company. I thought that meant something to him." The hurt she had been trying to ignore twinged despite herself. She had thought, after everything, that she and Oliver were at least friends.

Allen snapped his fingers in realization. "Oh, hey! I know who you are! Oliver talked about you all last year!"

"He did?"

"Yeah! Mostly complaining," (Iris snorted) "but in an impressed, complimentary way, you know?" Allen leaned his elbows on the counter and bent toward her with earnest blue eyes.

"I can imagine," she smiled wryly. "And he signed on with me willingly."

"Well, he got his money's worth. People finally get to see him like I've always seen him - not just a selfish party animal. You've done good work, Miss...?" he trailed off uncertainly again.

"West," she reasserted. "But you don't feel in need of my services?"

A distant door shut behind Allen's open, friendly eyes. "No, Miss West, I don't. It's not a reflection on you, it's just personal reasons."

Iris shrugged. "All right."

This seemed to surprise him. "Really? You aren't going to try to persuade me?"

"Do you want to be persuaded?"

"Well, no. I just thought -"

"Mr. Allen," Iris rubbed the headache away from her eyes, "a publicist is an integral, almost invasive presence in a company or someone's life. I need to know who you are, I need you to trust me so that you will come to me with everything and anything so that I can head off any media shitstorms or rumour mills, I need you ready and willing to take my advice on important life choices. I can't force my way into that position. Either you really want to rework your image or you don't."

"Why do I need to rework my image?" said Allen, blue eyes growing stormy. "I'm a musician. It would be weird if I weren't into sex and drugs."

"Sex and drugs, yes. Not making a fool of yourself by turning up high for your Jimmy Fallon interview, being arrested for solicitation and making it plain to the world that you are one drunken orgy away from an OD."

Allen was quiet as he poured the coffee into mugs. They were gaudy novelty ones with silly puns, incongrous with the sobriety of his interior decor. He slid one over without looking at her. She wondered whether he had deliberately chosen the bright-eyed unicorn saying "Go To Hell" in rainbow colors for her, but then he had his (long, graceful) hands wrapped around a mug where a slice of cheese announced "We'd be gouda together!" so she let it slide. "It doesn't matter," he said quietly.

"Oliver's been bailing you out of your worst jams, but now he's under extra scrutiny by the board. He can't keep you signed on for another album, even with two hit singles, if you look like you're going to be more trouble than you're worth."

Iris regretted saying it so baldly when she saw Allen flinch.

"I'm making trouble for Ollie?" He said it in a small, lost sort of way that made Iris feel like she'd kicked a puppy.

"I'm saying you're probably making life pretty difficult for him at the moment, yeah," she ploughed on, determined. "And that's probably why he hired me. Besides the fact that he obviously cares about you."

Allen peered quizzically at her over the rim of his mug. "Oliver talked to you about me?"

She snorted. "Yeah no. Cagey as hell, that guy. That's kind of how I know. The closer he is to someone, the less he talks about them. The opposite of the rest of the world."

"So you know he cares about me because he never talked to you about me?" Allen grinned as she drank her coffee. Her amazing, rich, life-giving coffee.

"That, and another thing."

"What's that?"

Weak silver sunshine cast half Barry Allen's lean, stupidly tall frame in shadow. It turned one of his eyes a light hazel and one side of his stubbly, hollowed cheek marble pale as he smiled down at her, both beautiful and uncanny.

I saw the financials for the out-of-court settlements he'd made to keep you off the news, for what good it did. If even one of them had been for sexual harrassment I wouldn't have touched either Queen's account or yours. I told him to void your contract last year and he shut me down. You have no idea how hard he's working to save you.

Iris grinned back. "He gave you the best damn publicist he had ever met."

***

[ut-girl666]

Actually I have a whole storyline for this revelation that’s sort of similar, so if I may rb this;

I, actually before I knew this, gave Ratchet an older brother, in my AU.

But, before I hop into my little Medix theory/idea what could’ve happened even though it makes literally zero sense, I’ll give context/the story first; (please pardon my Ratchjack Kids!Lambo Twins HC and Ratchjack shipping-)

Storyline start:

After a while of being Wheeljack’s friend, and catching feelings for the inventor, he ended up saving WJ, and taking off, both being expelled from the propaganda selling Med School they both went to, for reasons I haven’t fully developed.

(But mainly so far; Wheeljack wouldn’t confine, and was shifting Ratchet, so they had to ‘eliminate’ him. Ratchet wouldn’t let that happen, and wouldn’t fall in line anymore after that attempt on WJ, so they in end had to expel both of them.)

They ran off together, and essentially completely forgot about the families they’d left behind in the dust, in favor of pursuing their love, and deciding to take a more domestic route of life together.

Ratchet started up a clinic, and became famous for quite a couple reasons. Wheeljack worked in his home lab, sort of doing his own little thing, and occasionally helping his Conjux.

They had the twins (of course, not without much grumbling from Ratchet of course, since he was very strictly childfree originally, but let it go, and warmed up to the boys, because he’s self sacrificial as FUCK and Wheeljack has an insane case of baby fever/very avidly wants kids.), then life continued as normal for them, and they cared for the boys, managing work and family responsibilities.

Went about the war, as normal, and the rest is history.

However, somewhere along the lines, Ratchet’s brother had a child with a femme. That child, was Medix. Poor Medix was neglected, and sorely, then at the first chance dumped him, and left in the dust.

So my thoughts on what could’ve happened to Ratchet’s family, is Ratchet got a happy end, the family’s just a little scattered, and his signature sourness and temper still remains. Probably doesn’t like talking about them to strangers, and it being sensitive to Bumblebee that his two friends are somewhere in space, while WJ has simply changed a bit. However, now he has Medix to handle.

Perhaps Medix was simply abandoned, and doesn’t really know Ratchet’s little family very well. Plus they’re not quite as famous as Ratchet. So, he doesn’t feel much obligation to say much about them, or perhaps they keep the family matters private, off screen.

This has turned into more of my rambling Ratchjack nonsense and bullshit, mixed into a Medix theory, but my main question is;

What if Medix was simply abandoned?

(Sorry if that bothered you at all- I don’t mean to, and sorry for the rambling, and just- aaahhhhh- this is a whole clusterfuck of what the hell by this point, and I am so so sorry-)

What happened to Ratchet’s family?

Hello, Transformer fans.

I wanted to do a fan theory that relates to one of the most iconic bots in Transformers so I have selected Ratchet as he is a personal favourite of mine as well. As I have said in several posts, in most continuities and even in the rewritten sort-of-G1-version, it is hinted that Ratchet was married, is a father and happens to be a grandfather. This unseen family of his was expanded even further as he is revealed to be Medix’s uncle hinting that Medix is the son of either a first cousin or sibling who survived the war, but whatever happened to the wife, kids and grandkids we never saw? Well, I am afraid the theorised answer to this is not a happy one.

As we all know, the most trademark trait about Ratchet is his personality in how he carries a lot of emotional baggage and personal loss due to what the war between the Autobots and Decepticons which keeps reoccurring has done to him. I hate saying this, but judging how Ratchet acts and how he chooses to stay on Earth at the end of Prime… I think it’s very likely that his family were killed in the war. Think about it. Ratchet has a lot of anger towards the Decepticon faction on a personal level, so it makes sense that the loss he felt was a very personal one and goes far beyond just the loss of Cybertron. Every bot lost Cybertron, but Ratchet most likely lost something greater. Something irreplaceable and that was most likely his family.

The reason I say this is because Ratchet never talks about himself though it is obvious he is in a deep state of mourning. Moreover, Ratchet never liked the idea of involving humans especially children in the war which is the reaction you would expect of a guy who lost his kids. And judging by many media personalities, Ratchet does fit the profile of the guy who lost it all as he deals with his feelings by not opening up, not letting people get too close, getting buried in work and when he gets the opportunity to have his restrictions down due to the synthetic energon, he goes on a rampage. Another thing I should mention was the episode where Ratchet helped the kids with their homework. And once he started helping, we saw a different side of himself and he absolutely wanted to finish what he started. I don’t think this was a simple case of the medic wanting to build something because he’s not a mad scientist. I think he did it because it made him happy and it was like reconnecting with his own lost children. Another instance which backs up that Ratchet lost it all was when everyone thought Optimus died and it nearly broke him. A person can only take so much loss before they crack and Ratchet came close to it.

By the time Rescue Bots Academy occurs, Ratchet seems to have recovered a lot and judging by how close Medix is with him, I think being around him so much helped him recover emotionally. Also, I can’t help, but notice how good Ratchet is with the kids and how different he is with them. It’s like a night and day difference. He is patient, kind, encouraging, pleasant and likes being around them. This not only backs up that he must have been a parent at least, but also that being around children makes him happy and is kind therapeutic for him. It is not uncommon for people who have lost their kids to find comfort in caring for other kids afterwards and if done right, it does help them.

Sadly, it doesn’t change the fact that Ratchet’s own sparkmate, kids and grandkids are most likely gone due to the war. Beyond Wheelie, I haven’t seen any other Transformer kids or babies even though it has been confirmed that they exist which backs up that they didn’t make it after Cybertron was destroyed. I really hate saying this because I am a mother, but it does make sense. Moreover, no successful births could happen until the planet was fully repaired. Without a spark (soul) to make each new life whole, every birth would result in a stillborn.

There is a slim possibility that maybe his family did survive as maybe femmes and children escaped the planet first, but that is still a stretch because if Medix is as close with Ratchet as he appears to be and sees him so often, he would also be close to his aunt (the femme Ratchet is married to), but he never mentions an aunt. Now, I can accept that maybe he is closer with Ratchet than his auntie, but wouldn’t he still mention her? Wouldn’t Ratchet bring her up to tell Medix “auntie says hi” or to say that his little femme is waiting for him at home? It is not uncommon for some characters to be unseen, but when they are unmentioned and treated as though they don’t exist even though we know they do, it normally means that this character has passed on. Also, Medix doesn’t mention cousins, nieces or nephews either except for a single second cousin Wrench who is maybe the one surviving child of Ratchet, but this is really up in the air. Moreover, if they were the child of Ratchet, wouldn’t they be especially close and work together?

So as heartbreaking as it is, I think it’s pretty clear that they are all with the allspark. If I am wrong, please feel free to prove me so with other evidence and maybe even facts because honestly, this is one time where I don’t want to be right.

If you have a Transformers fan theory you want me discuss and back up, please let me know in my ask box.

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of May

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

[apologies for the delay with this one: I was binging Good Omens and contemplating spending 200 quid on a pair of shades to match Crowley’s sweet pair]

Falstaff - Robert Nye I’ll admit that I was ready to embrace this book as fucking great right from the word go, because it seemed so up my alley; Falstaff is a titan of the carnivalesque and one of my very favourite Shakespeare characters, and so from the very premise I figured that there was very little that could go wrong. The book takes the form of the memoirs of Sir John Falstolf (no, I don’t know about the ever-changing name spelling nonsense) told over the course of a hundred days, and becomes a journey through history told from the perspective of the fat drunk knight and interjected with lengthy insults to his cook or scribes and even lengthier songs of praise for his own cock or his innumerable sexual exploits. Everything about this is fucking great. In the course of the book you’re given incredibly evocative descriptions of carnivals or tavern debauchery, followed by hilarious anecdotes on fantastically crude subjects, and holding it all together is a narrative voice that can effectively handle both the grandiose reminiscing and the tales of shagging and farting. I also want to praise this book’s fantastic blending of the characters of Shakespeare and other popular fictions of the time with the characteristic Falstaff flare, including one fucking genius link between the character of Bardolph and the stories of the pig-faced woman Tannakin Skinker. Shakespeare’s characters probably are not that difficult to adapt, or at least not inasmuch as adapting the character traits that I perceive as responsible for making Shakespeare’s characters great - you’ll inevitably get some people arguing that Falstaff is Shakespeare’s greatest character because of his complexity, but for me the fact that he is a corpulent tanked-up knight bloated at the seams with sack and fabricated tales of grandeur is enough to make him a quality guy. The archetype is captured splendidly by Nye, but the book doesn’t half remind us of how fucking amazing Shakespearean dialogue is by comparison to Nye’s attempts at Falstaffian humour, and thereby highlights the difference between Shakespeare’s Falstaff and the basic character shape. The book delves into numerous specific events of I Henry IV (and a couple from 2 Henry IV), often quoting lines from Shakespeare’s play verbatim, much to the deficit of the rest of the text that has to string it all together with writing that obviously is not up to snuff with Shakespeare’s amazing writing. The dedication to the plays from which Falstaff was spawned seems at times odd, when a good few chapters are dedicated to extrapolating on one minor event in Part 1, which, to my understanding, was but one of the jests that Hal pulled on Falstaff, and but one of the instances that he was called out for his obvious bullshitting. If Falstaff was repeatedly made a fool of by Hal, he wouldn’t have directly addressed only one of said instances as if it was a big deal, but of course, it was a scene in the play and so it had to be adapted in this book. Whether this was down to Nye not having faith in his own ability to make up more pranks that Hal pulled on Falstaff, or simply because he knew that he had to write in this sequence because he needed a direct link to the play, is a question that I can’t really answer. But let’s talk about Falstaff’s bullshitting, and the complexities that arise from it. Falstaff’s whole shtick is that he is a mighty bullshitter, spinning yarns of heroic exploits and trying to talk his way out of trouble, and thus it stands to reason that his memoirs would reflect this, right? As I first went into the book, I was fully taken in by what I was reading, for although it was dumb, the story was centralised within a world of farce and Rabelaisian carnival, a world in which French armies can be defeated by drunken Englishmen brandishing hogsheads for weapons, men can eat enough food for seven men and still demand dessert, Irishmen will stab you up the arse from below while you sit on the bog, and every woman is inexplicably attracted to a fat drunken knight. It also mythologised Falstaff’s character, that he was conceived atop the knob of the Cerne Abbas giant and that his father died from laughing at nothing in particular. Is this not enough to make the story worthwhile? Would second-guessing Falstaff’s words at every turn, cross-referencing them with what we know of the truth from the Shakespeare plays, not only render the reading experience a pointless trudge, but demystify this world of carnivalesque absurdity? Falstaff’s overblown postulating on whether or not he is lying, or indeed his reasons for lying, are enough to satisfy me without contemplating the book from a meta perspective. There is also the character Scrope, who acts as one of Falstaff’s scribes and uses his position to call out Falstaff’s fabrications for us in a dramatic way, but a) there are discrepancies in his so-called truths and b) he’s a colossal dickhead, so regardless of Scrope’s presence in the story, we’re given the option to still side entirely with Falstaff and his comical version of reality. This is my perspective, but it is worth considering that I am a vacuous fool incapable of complex thought, so adopt my opinions with caution. I do, perhaps, have a few criticisms about Falstaff’s gratuitous descriptions of sexual escapades, not because I’m a prude who can’t stand the mention of the secrets of our own sinful bodies, nor even because it is unjustified in the narrative (because of course Falstaff is going to brag and give too much detail, if not for the sake of posterity than to make his servant scribes uneasy), but because I don’t feel that it fits the comedic tone of the text. Shagging is a staple of fabliaux and folksongs, but the comedy comes from who’s doing the shagging, or where they’re doing the shagging, or the extraneous circumstances surrounding the shagging. This book just describes shagging, which is funny when considering, as mentioned above, the fact that Falstaff within the story is including such titillating or sensational tidbits to vex his scribes (a strand which reaches its high point when Falstaff makes his amanuensis transcribe his words WHILE he is in the act of shagging), but taken as it is, it doesn’t seem in line with the rest of the book and its comedy. When this story has to plod on without its Falstaff-centric source material (or indeed, even from 2 Henry IV, in which Falstaff doesn’t really do a whole lot), it can get rather tedious as it becomes a mere listing of historical events and Falstaff’s minor parts in them, but at that point the book is rather winding down anyway, so perhaps I can’t complain too much. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH, IF YOU’RE INTO SHAKESPEARE

The Hike - Drew Magary I picked this book up because I’d heard it compared to The Third Policeman in terms of it being a journey narrative, and I had a hankering for a book in which the story is not driven by the actions of the character, but rather the situation that they were thrown into, mainly because I’m interested in seeing how different authors go about doing this and not making the resulting narrative crap. Immediately upon going into this book, the acerbic narrative voice reminded me of John Dies at the End, and as the book continued and began to unveil other similarities, most egregiously the technique of using the bizarre weird reality-warping and monster-centric nonsense as a means of juxtaposing or disguising the book’s true content, that of the heinous DMC (that is, the deep meaningful conversation), I thought that I was in trouble. The reason why this is a book ramble, and not just a flat-out review, is that at this point I feel like I’m just rambling about the broad genre of contemporary American horror-centric weird fiction, and so to go through the book point-by-point may be a tad redundant when we already know exactly what to expect from the genre; a review would in all probability just devolve into quibbling about minor semantics. The story follows a man who, getting lost on a hike, stumbles into a world of nightmares and oddities, half of which were presumably inspired by the author’s obscure fears and the rest being absurd non-sequiturs to amp up the kookiness. It is nothing if not memorable, with its foul-mouthed crabs and murderous men wearing the faces of Rottweilers and whatnot. The book eventually develops to be smarter and more twisty-turny than such a randomly-selected clusterfuck of ideas might suggest, but these moments become transitory stops scattered amidst the rambling improvisational D&D campaign that is the main narrative. The story does have a habit of periodically bringing us to a formative experience in our protagonist’s life in the form of dream visions, with some interesting blurring between reality and fiction that doesn’t detract from the sheer fucking ludicrousness of the amount of shit that our protagonist has gone through, or at least the sensational self-reflective tone of these events’ retellings. This put me in mind of John Dies at the End, as did an ineffable sense of self-importance that the protagonist of this book seems to impart. I can’t properly word it, but there’s something to our protagonist’s narration, in that we see the world through his eyes but the retelling seems embellished somewhat to make him seem better off, and the fact that I noticed this at all speaks to me of shoddy characterisation. That’s not to say that the character is an unflappable badass the whole way through the story; it just seems like the character beats are cookie-cutter and that his moments of weakness or breakdown only occur because they have to, in order to make us feel sympathy for him. Both this book and John Dies at the End utilise new nomenclature on the fly for the horrors they find, but in all cases it just seems so pre-meditated, and the insistence on using these terms makes it seem like we ought to be on board with them as well, regardless of how stupid they are. Some of these terms are also tinged with an element of our narrator’s feelings of repulsion or standoffishness, in a manner similar to a downtrodden kid trying to stand up to a bully by referring to him with an insulting nickname. It’s all just rather tonally dissonant, the fact that we have to align with and appreciate our protagonist juxtaposed with the reality of our protagonist not really being that likeable. John Dies at the End (or at least its sequel) attempts to obfuscate the angst of its protagonist by admitting at the end to having a retrospective ghost writer, attributing the changes to the story and relatively inconsistent character fuckery to an unreliable narrator and details being altered in post, but this book lacks this safety net. What this book does have at the end is a bit of life-affirming reality-changing nonsense, and more importantly a fucking sweet twist at the end which, whilst not having much to do with the rest of the story (being dependent on memories and characters who didn’t have much to do with the overall narrative), leaves the story on a bittersweet note. In all my time spent reading classic literature, I’ve really missed experiencing twists that a) I didn’t already know about or wouldn’t have predicted, and b) actually have some fucking oomph. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court - Mark Twain The question of authorial intent loomed over me as I begun reading this book. The introduction places the story firmly within the framework of Twain’s own righteous vengeance at the age he lived in, whereas I was under the impression that the book was naught but a dumb burlesque of middle English romances with some fun anachronisms thrown in for comedic effect. I thought that Twain’s ‘dream of being a knight errant in armour’ was funny as shit, but according to this introduction writer geezer Justin Kaplan (who apparently knows a better way of enjoying the book than myself), Twain’s dream ought to be interpreted as ‘a nightmare of being swaddled in iron, confined and helpless, just as Mark Twain was often to feel confined and helpless in his way of life’. As such, I sought advice from my friend, who told me to just go in with my unsophisticated cap on and I’ll be fine, and also took solace in Twain’s squib 1601, his exercise emulating my main man Rabelais in which famous Elizabethans hit the shit about shit and shagging, to adopt the mentality that Twain is just fucking about and that I don’t need to think too much about what I’m reading. Now I’ve sat through enough seminars of medieval literature to have heard every imaginable inane comment from every single vacuous shitwit grabbing at the lowest hanging fruit possible when it comes to pointing out the silliness of Arthurian romances; I’m a dab fucking hand, albeit unwillingly, at recognising all of this shit, and at suppressing my groans when slack-jawed fuckheads go over the same empty points about how middle English romances are ever so daft. “I mean, what’s up with all these knights running around attacking each other for no reason?!? That doesn’t make much sense!!” they all opine to each other, confident that they’re bringing something original and nuanced to the conversation, to jolly plaudits and insufferable guffaws. (No I’m not bitter about this, I have no idea what you’re talking about). Twain of course touches on all the usual points that you’d expect in a romance parody, but I needn’t have braced myself for an onslaught of unoriginality, as he does so with fantastic wit and evokes an actual comedic image rather than just commenting on the world’s lack of logic. He paints a delightful picture of naive and foolish knights howling with laughter at slapstick and ooo-ing and ah-ing at one another’s exaggerated tales, which is not only a great representation of Arthurian knights to explain their questionable behaviours, but justifies how they are so easily swayed and led by our protagonist Hank Morgan, the eponymous Yankee. I’m also a great fan as to how far they take the delusions of the Arthurian chaps to, believing with complete conviction that a swine pen is an ogre’s castle and that the pigs within are kidnapped noblewomen; there’s a lot of fun to be had with this, and as absurd as it seems, I’m glad that the explanation isn’t any more complex than it just being a result of everyone’s unyielding belief in everything. Our protagonist sets out to whip this century into something resembling nineteenth-century society, and putting aside the suspension of disbelief we must have in Hank’s apparent knowledge of every-fucking-thing imaginable required to accomplish this transformation (from building phone lines and electric fences to a ludicrously precise knowledge of the timing of eclipses), the story is a great romp of technology trumping magic and the grim realities of an unfair world, with some fantastic memorable scenes here and there. The plot somewhat meanders, the stories of Arthurian legend being rather directionless beyond the overarching call for adventure, and so we get a bit of that and we get a bit of blending in with peasant life, but overall the book is made up of a series of encounters and problems to overcome, which is fine to read for the most part (for some adventures are more fun than others). Though I want to pooh-pooh the idea that the story is a castigation or attack on the political structures and struggles of the time, and indeed can continue to pooh-pooh it so long as such content is if not subliminal than overshadowed by the story’s fun content, this unfortunately bubbles to the surface in an overt form when the book draws to a close, with a swift arrival of reality and sudden need for a bloody war. The mask of fun burlesque is stripped away to give us a galling look at a stubborn England, the denizens of which would rather die than change their faulty unfair ways. It’s not enough to tarnish the rest of the book, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth, not because it’s an objectively bad thing but because scathing attacks of that calibre and of that level of overtness seemed to come rather out of left field. The transformation of the book from one thing to the next is dependent on a swift plot progression that occurs in a short period of time and is conveyed by a massive exposition dump which rushes through the last chapter of the Morte D’Arthur and plunges us into a fight between the Church and our protagonist, a fight that the story, apparently now being a treatise on the inability for people to change and our helplessness in altering the state of things, must regrettably end with our hero losing. But now I’m prattling on about an approach to the text that I was adamant I was not going to take. Don’t let it tarnish the rest of the book; that’s all still good shit. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YEAH PROBABLY

Tales of the German Imagination (trans. by Peter Wortsman): - ‘The Singing Bone’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and ‘The Children of Hameln’ (the Brothers Grimm) - I struggle to place the Grimms fairy tales in terms of an analytical approach, and so it’ll suffice to say that these stories are exactly what you’d expect from the Grimms, in that they’re short and dark and make for easy reading - ‘Rune Mountain’ (Ludwig Tieck) - a proper romanticism story with a fantastic dream-like storytelling tone and incredibly evocative imagery throughout - ’St Cecelia or the Power of Music’ (Heinrich von Kleist) - a well-written actualisation of a cool suspenseful horror story concept with a few nice spooky bits, albeit with a rather slow middle and generally anticlimactic end - ‘Peter Schlemiel’ (Adelbert von Chamisso) - an amazing idea for a story that, while bogged down with unexplained magical objects straight out of Hoffmann’s fairy tales popping up every now and then to take the story in weird directions, and based on a social ostracisation that really does not seem like as big a deal as the story makes it out to be, is still very enjoyable - ’The Marble Statue’ (Josef von Eichendorff) - another story that brings to mind Hoffmann’s fairy tales (which I should perhaps instead just consider the archetype for German romanticism?), this time in terms of its romantic setting and soppy protagonist, and indeed its dumb allegorical dream-quest nonsense ending - ‘My Gmunden’ (Peter Altenberg) - so short that I didn’t really know what I was meant to be laughing at - ‘The Magic Egg’ and ‘A New Kind of Plaything’ (Mynona) - absolutely amazing little snippets of madness and laughter at oddity, the first story being an absurdist exercise in stupidity with a cast-aside veneer of meaning to the story, and the second being a jolly examination of a ludicrous idea - ’The Seamstress’ (Rainer Maria Rilke) - a compelling and vaguely unsettling story with fantastic character descriptions of the titular seamstress and an ending that casts our narrator adrift - ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (Georg Kaiser) - a short and enjoyable story of rapid cartoon-like escalation, albeit with an ending more befitting a cynical satire on humanity - ‘In the Penal Colony’ (Franz Kafka) - a story I’ve read before and my favourite of Kafka’s writings; it’s dark and compelling (if a bit long-winded at point when describing the intricacies of the machine), and has a fantastic culmination (specifically the fate of the Officer) with elements of regret and serious fucking brutality - ‘The Blackbird’ (Robert Musil) - possesses a narrative voice that, while philosophical and high-minded, was not enough to embellish the story’s rather boring content (or at least seemed a tad misused when utilised to describe warfare) - ‘The Lunatic’ (Georg Heym) - over-the-top and gruesome and overall fucking hilarious; godspeed to ridiculously hyperbolic depictions of madmen in literature - ‘A Conversation Concerning Legs’ (Alfred Lichtenstein) - a conversation on one absurd subject, with dialogue that possesses all the necessary elements to make the humour work; it’s matter-of-fact and occasionally stupidly verbose to juxtapose the oddity of the subject matter, there’s rapid escalation from one train of thought to the next, and the conversation ends as abruptly and pointlessly as it had begun - ‘The Onion’ (Kurt Schwitters) - one of the first surrealist stories that I’ve read that has properly made me consider the ineffable and indescribable genius of the minds that concocted it, as well as having a pretty fucking sweet premise even before the text starts getting properly surreal and fragmented - ‘A Raw Recruit’ (Klabund) - a very funny story with a satirical premise I’m well used to - ‘The Time Saver’ (Ignaz Wrobel) - a story with an interesting abstract premise that is continuously built on in a manner that put me in mind of Krzhizhanovsky, but with an ending that didn’t seem very connected to the plot that preceded it (though perhaps that was somewhat the point) - ‘The Tattooed Portrait’ (Egon Erwin Kisch) - perhaps the funniest story in the collection, possessing the satire of people in power and absurd turns of fate to knock esteemed people down a peg as to be found in Gogol or my favourite Leskov short stories - ‘The Experiment or the Victory of the Children’ (Unica Zurn) - a story that takes the same general steps as Mynona’s ‘A New Kind of Plaything’, but seems less tongue-in-cheek and satirical and more like it’s trying to make some sort of grand statement - ’The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’ (Ingeborg Bachmann) - purportedly a modern day fairy tale (albeit set in a mythologised past full of names for places and people I’m unfamiliar with), with the influence of modernism presumably being evident by the nonsense anticlimactic ending WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH

[legendary-defender-of-fandoms]

Is anyone else getting the feeling that this whole situation makes no goram sense? Not just that these changes happened, but how late in the game they happened.

I just realized that Kosmo was never shown teleporting on the Castle of Lions, when he was shown at all. He was a late edition to Season 6. Maybe he was supposed to be a normal cosmic wolf (if he was supposed to exist at all), and when they decided to give him Shiro’s fancy teleporting abilities they went back & re-edited his scenes before he arrived on the Castle with Keith & Krolia. And the episodes of Season 7 that were meant to showcase Shiro’s new abilities were so hastily re-edited & re-organized, Shiro is barely present. Even when he’s shown in the prison, he never speaks. But my point of these rambled thoughts is this:

If Joaquim and Lauren decided to give Shiro awesome teleporting abilities, then nixed the idea to give them to Kosmo, wouldn’t those changes have been made BEFORE the episodes went into production? This is why the animation industry invented storyboarding, and pitch meetings, and story meetings! Any sensible person would’ve either made these decisions before giving the animators the scenes to block and the actors their scripts to read, or would say “Darn, that would’ve been cool” and talk about the idea in a post-show interview or something.

And I know the easy answer is “Well, Joaquim and Lauren AREN’T sensible. Did you miss the whole Adam-Curtis disaster, or the clusterfuck that is Allura & Lotor’s fates?” But there’s one detail everyone keeps forgetting.

Dreamworks doesn’t own Voltron.

Yes, they PRODUCED Voltron, and they licensed plenty of Voltron merchandise (some of which being annoying mislabeled, either throwing LD on a DOTU figure or the DOTU subtitle on an LD poster, but whatevs).

But Voltron is not a Dreamworks baby. It’s a World Events baby that Dreamworks got to foster for a few years. Even the official Voltron website gives the trademark to World Events.

What does any of this have to do with anything?

Well, since Dreamworks doesn’t technically own Voltron, they still had to ask World Events for permission to do certain things or tell certain stories. Or when Dreamworks initially purchased the rights to make a new Voltron show, World Events threw in a caveat that said they could have final say on what got produced.

So maybe Joaquim, Lauren, Dreamworks, and Netflix were completely on board with Shiro being a magical teleporting Space Dad with an awesome Earth Dad he was finally going to reunite with in Season 7. But for whatever reason, World Events said no halfway through production of Seasons 6 & 7, and Joaquim & Lauren were left with egg on their faces as they had to go back & cut everything World Events disapproved of, being stuck Photoshopping Shiro into scenes where he hadn’t been before, commissioning new scenes of Kosmo teleporting while he, Keith & Krolia were on the Space whales, etc.

I know that sounds like a lot of bullshit, but similar things have happened with other IPs in animation. Not to such a disastrous level, but the DC shows are no strangers to this sort of nonsense.

When Teen Titans came out in the early 2000s, Robin couldn’t be in any other DC shows at the time because of copyright issues. Which is why Tim Drake never appeared in Justice League or Justice League Unlimited, and why Dick Grayson didn’t debut on The Batman until Season 4 (which went into production after Teen Titans ended its 5-season run). And when The Batman started to air with its interpretations of Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery, all the Rogues they chose to feature (namely Joker) were no longer permitted to appear on Justice League or Justice League Unlimited.

I know none of that makes sense - they were all DC shows, with overlapping writers, producers, and cast members. And JL/JLU and The Batman were also Warner Brothers products. Why couldn’t they all use the same characters? And, honestly, I have no idea why this is. Maybe showrunners didn’t want to confuse audience members by having multiple interpretations of the same character on different shows. Maybe the different production companies that worked on the shows couldn’t get along.

But my point is, there may have been a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes of Voltron that led to the disasters that are Seasons 7 and 8. Blaming two people who have the misfortune of being more vocal than anyone else seems unfair when the true guilty parties could be hiding behind the non disclosure agreements.

So I just learned something

Im going to have a mental breakdown, holy shit.I read part of an article that contained the original plans for season 6/7 before Jds and Lm decided to ruin it. Shiro was this fucking close to return as Black paladin and even have a new skillset and they fucking didn’t in the last minute, and it shows

Shiro was supposed to return in season 6,not as a retired paladin but with his connection with Black stronger than ever, so strong in fact that he would have gotten some sort of teleportation powers. But he was still recovering so Keith would pilot Black in the meantime.

During the chase sequence in season 7 in those ice caves, he was originally going to be the one teleporting between the lions to help everyone out, he would get hurt while helping Pidge. Explaining why he didnt do much while they were captured by Ezor and Zethrid. They would have to get him into a pod because he was seriously injured, raising the stakes why they had to get out of their cells quickly. Once they escaped he would be put in a healing pod and then the flashbacks to the Garrison days would have happend.

Now that chase sequence with the teleporting sounds familiar right? Yea its cuz they actually kept it in but they couldn’t let Shiro have a roll so:

Magical space wolf to make Keith look even cooler They actually gave Shiro’s role and potential powers to Keith’s fucking dog.Someone theorized how Kosmo might have been Shiro reincarnated, sort of. Well guess what they were 100% correct!!! 

Kosmo literally did what Shiro was supossed to do. They gave Shiro’s role to Keith’s fucking dog, because everything has to be about Keith and everything Shiro has, Keith steals in some way. I mean just…….what the fuck man, they stripped the gay poc of his powers and status and gave it all to a white emo kid and his fucking dog.

This vid goes in depth about it all and they talk about this part at 19;55. Quotes and sources can also be found here.

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of September

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino Fuck me this is a difficult book to break down. It’s certainly among the first postmodern books that I’ve fully embraced and generally been a fan of. I can’t speak much of the literary movement save for reductionist generalisations that I’ve unwillingly picked up on, and what’s more I’m adamant not to learn any more than I need to, so you’ll have to excuse my wilful ignorance of the subject in this ramble. This story is comprised of numerous discovered snippets of texts, connected with the overarching narrative of the reader (i.e. you) trying to make sense of it all, by first trying to find the endings of the numerous story beginnings that have been presented and eventually just trying to find answers to this whole clusterfuck. In a way the constant changing from one story to the next without nicely ending it reminded me of The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, but this book kept it interesting with the element of mystique as to what the next story would entail, whereas Tomcat Murr only switched between one of two narratives. Of course, the fact that there are a number of stories means that there will inevitably be some that are better than others, and I find it rather presumptuous of Calvino to insist that I, as the protagonist (a subject that I will return to in a bit), would find each and every one of them so incredibly interesting and compelling that I must find out how they end. The text is a long and continuous journey from one new discovery to another, and whilst I expected the reasoning behind each dead-end to be founded on magic nonsense, the explanations that the book offers are rather more realistic than I was expecting. Of course, that’s not to say that the completely absurd sequence of events that transpire in the plot are at all reflective of reality, because shit really goes off the rails, but again, I’ll get back to it. The other major gimmick of this book is the idea of the reader being the story’s hero; much of the book is written in the second person, and I love how some of the story beginnings that one comes across are written as though being read by the reader, detailing the idiosyncrasies of the reader’s own internal thoughts and reading techniques. Such stuff is abandoned as the book goes on, sometimes because it is not the reader himself who is reading the stories (i.e. if another character in the story is reading it to you), and sometimes it’s because Calvino got bored of it or something. All of this amounts to a good book, but i do have a number of rather petty gripes about the book generally stemming from my own lack of understanding as to what I should be getting out of this book, that all came together to leave me feeling rather sour about the whole experience. As the story does get more and more absurd, with false explanations and apocrypha running rampant, it does seem like Calvino is deliberately trying to write what is, in his own words, ‘a complex of cogs, tricks, traps’, which is of course a fascinating basis for a book but hardly an enjoyable one, as the whole experience can often seem a tad futile as you read pages upon pages of what amounts to nothing but unimportant nonsense. The story beginnings that we get don’t really inspire intrigue or further thought as to what could happen next, because they’re deliberately written to seem like self-enclosed stories or lazy cliffhangers, and as much as I want to be annoyed about this, Calvino justifies it in-text via a character who acts as a mouthpiece for some of his rambling thoughts on the matter of this book. To go back to how the story goes off the rails, the idea of falsification and deception is all well and good but Calvino takes the theme too far by making whole areas of reality, areas seemingly unrelated to the conspiracy of the plot, completely defined by falsification, changing the tone of the story to a farcical comedy in which the philosophical wittering of before seemed incredibly incongruous in. It’s also at this point that Calvino bores of contriving reasons as to why the story’s protagonist cannot get a hold of a complete copy of the book they search for, because Calvino is too busy wallowing in how clever he is. Yes, all of this is justified at the end, with the idea of a constant pursuit of knowledge destined to go on ad nauseam being proved as folly, and yes the ending did ameliorate my mood (as well as annoying me that Calvino had knocked it out of the fucking park when all I wanted was to be annoyed with him), but that doesn’t mean that I can just ignore everything up to that point that grated on me. Honestly I don’t get this book beyond being able to appreciate it for its novel ideas and great execution; if it’s supposed to be charming, or life-changing, or bring warmth to my heart or any other ineffable soulful feeling, I’m not feeling it, but that might just be because I’m not sure what it is that I’m supposed to be fucking feeling. Whatever.

Today I Wrote Nothing - Daniil Kharms Chances are this will be a relatively short ramble, because I feel that to intellectualise these stories too much would be to do them a disservice, whilst trying to spend time breaking down each short story with subjective criticisms would be bloody daft. Kharms shines when he is writing what is described in the blurb as ‘micro-fiction’, tiny tiny stories of no more than a page or two; because such stories are so short it’s difficult to isolate any one story that shines out of all of them, especially when considering that the stories are often very similar in content and (high) quality. In simple terms, pretty much every story in Kharms' 'Events’ is chaotic nonsense with a strangely aggressive tone, and keeping with the description of Kharms' main tools in the introductory chapter as ‘digression and interruption’, the stories are just as likely to end with the characters anticlimactically leaving the chaos to do something else as they are to clobber each other to death with cucumbers. It’s incredible. The torrent of unleashed insanity amidst a relatively banal normal setting reminded me of ‘Marvellous Pursuits’, my favourite Cortazar story, but other than that I honestly cannot think of much to compare Kharms’ writing to, at least not in the world of respectable literature. Perhaps it shouldn’t be considered surprising that Kharms was linked to the Surrealist movement - all sorts of wacky shit went on with those blokes. Perhaps you could have surmised from my glib and reductionist summary of the Surrealist movement that I know sweet fuck all about what the movement specifically entails, but, as I said above, I’m disinclined to read into these stories as anything other than madness for madness’ sake. However, everything that I’ve said mainly describes Kharms’ ‘Events’, and there’s more to this book than just the ‘Events’, which unfortunately don’t really live up to the amazing standards that the ‘Events’ establish. Fair warning, my thoughts on this are really rather subjective, and I totally acknowledge that it would be rather churlish of me to criticise the content in this book that deviates from the micro-fiction style simply because it isn’t more of the same, but I’m still going to do just that anyway. The short story ‘The Old Woman’, whilst apparently being chock-full of allusions to other literary texts that I didn’t pick up on, cannot capture the essence of the micro-fictions because its significantly longer length leaves the Kharms brand of oddness diluted and insubstantial; what nonsense there is in the text has to be spread thinly over too many pages. And then on the other end of the scale, you’ve got all of Kharms’ miscellaneous notes and writings and incomplete jottings of half-formed ideas; the fact that this book is described as ‘the selected writings of Daniil Kharms’ seems rather daft to me, because it seems like literally every single solitary scrap of Kharms’ writing is published here, as opposed to his exemplary writings being explicitly picked and chosen. Kharms’ miscellaneous writings, both in 'The Blue Notebook’ and just from anywhere else, aren’t as substantial or fleshed out as his ‘Events’, and considering how short and nonsensical the ‘Events’ were, this seems an impressive feat. Even if the texts are complete, sometimes they lack that all-important chaotic nonsense that we’re all here for. There’s some good stuff dispersed throughout such segments of this book, but such gems are relatively sparse when compared to the wider body of boring works from Kharms. Now I obviously can’t be too hard on this bloke; a lot of his writing stems from his own lack of faith in his writing abilities or skills at pumping out consistently good content (hence the title of the whole collection), and so I’m a tad hesitant to bring down harsh judgements on a bloke who wasn’t constantly cracking out gems even when he wasn’t locked up in state custody. I will, however, say that Kharms’ best works are certainly his ‘Events’, and I reckon that unless you’re willing to trawl through all of his notes and nonsense to scrounge for more of the good stuff, just focus your attentions on the 'Events’ when reading Kharms.

Stuff I read this month that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (which I love, but am holding off on finishing my ramble on until I’ve read Through the Looking Glass), An A-Z of Hellraisers by Robert Sellers (which was repetitive and a tad awkwardly written but nonetheless a very educational and entertaining read), The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain by Ian Mortimer (which may even be funnier than the other Time Traveller’s Guides if only because of that randy shitlark Samuel Pepys) and ‘The Body-Snatcher’ by Robert Louis Stevenson (it was pretty good).