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kaypeace21 · 3 years

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Rebel Robin podcast (ep 3 &4 analysis)

For those who haven’t read them yet. Here’s the analysis for podcast ep 1&2. Analysis of Rebel Robin book-here. And eastereggs from rebel robin novel- here.

So the main things I noticed in ep 3 was how Robin spying was shown as a huge NEGATIVE-and Mr Hauser got upset over her doing so. Robin listens to mr. Hauser’s phone call (like Karen with Mike in s3/ us gov spying on calls in s1) & on a different occasion Robin also eavesdrops on a private convo he is having with someone else in his classroom ( like El spying on Mike talking to Lucas in s3). And when he finds out about this he tells her how wrong it was to spy on other people like that. In the past, I also talked about how the theme of spying is shown for many other st characters ( in the show) and how it isn’t romanticized like people think it is- here .

Anyways , Ep 3 ends with a call from a h*mophobic teen( Dash) telling Robin to “stay away” from Mr. Hauser cause he’s “dangerous”. Why he thinks he’s dangerous is solely for the fact he’s gay.I think this theme may come into play in s4 Hawkins (in relation to the satanic panic). In ep 4 Robin jokes to (gay) Mr. Hauser : “ So what are you into... satanism?” (Sadly most queer people have been told over and over we’re going to hell for being gay/lgbt+. it’s sadly an almost universal experience.) For those unaware- the ‘satanic panic’ was a right wing christian movement in the 80′s that WRONGLY associated certain things with supposed satanism. Just some of the many things they demonized : rock music , stephen king , wearing black, horror/fantasy media, and of course queer people and d&d (hellfire club - the name is a a xmen ref but in the show it’s probably an inside joke about the satanic panic and people being scared of d&d). We see foreshadowing of the satanic panic hinted in s3 (in relation to d&d)- on tv the narrator asks if “satanism” (pans to d&d set) is to blame for the odd occurrances in Hawkins. And given how the s4 el-trailer had the clock say 3:00am for the “witching hour” also called “the devil’s hour” since it’s supposed to be a subversion of jesus dy*ing at 3:00 pm. And the possibility s4 may take place around Easter. I think we’ll see that religious (Christian) extre*sm causes many people in Hawkins to interpret the supernatural as ‘satanic’. And no , I’m obviously not talking poorly about all religious/christian people).

After this Mr. Hauser jokes how Hawkins is like “lord of the flies” and how he “worries” what would happen if teens were left to their own devices-like in the book. The themes in the book mostly focus on the dangers of ‘mob mentality’ and how human beings can become v*olent and turn on each other- if the safety of civilization disappears...

This I believe is foreshadowing - i mentioned in a post a while back (here). How movies on the s4 list had the theme of : a supernatural event indirectly causing towns people to act irrationally and turn on eachother v*olently. Despite literal monsters attacking them from outside (they chose to turn on eachother instead). In the end some townspeople become the real monsters via mob mentality/v*oence/false witch hunts (the mist, the birds, etc). In ‘the birds’ (while people are hidding in a store)- they wrongly blame certain characters for the supernatural chaos. Similarly, in ‘the mist’ (crowd of townspeople are trapped in a store) and some start interpreting the monsters as being sent as punishment by god- some town’s people start quoting the bible and saying the only way to stop the punishment is to start “sacrificing the s*nners and nonbelievers”. BIG YIKES.ST references mapple street (where the wheelers and sinclairs live). It’s based on the twilight zone ep of the same name “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” .The ‘monsters’ of that episode -were the townspeople turning on eachother because they incorrectly think their own neighbors are part of an invading supernatural army. The enemy was actually the paranoia/mob mentality-not the supernatural force they feared. And yes i do think this concept is linked with 80s satanic panic and will cause some town division/obstacles for our heroes to deal with . **I also think the s4 bts of the Hawkins blood clinic-may be used to show h*mophobia (linked to satanic panic) in the town. Like in one s4 movie “paradise lost”the punk rock boys who were into black clothes, rock music , horror/stephen king books- were accused by the town’s people of being gay AND have demonic powers that are k*lling fellow town’s people.

Mr Hauser says he thinks steve Harrington is Ralph from lord of the flies. And Robin disagrees saying he’s Jack. Personally- since this was when Robin didn’t know/hated Steve. I think Mr hauser is right that Steve is Ralph (one of the oldest boys) who’s “commitment to civilization and morality is strong”. But Jack (perhaps the popular s4 kid Jake?) and his savage crew take control of the group and start trying to attack Ralph and his friends (steve’s crew- over satanic panic?). How this begins is -

Jack, torments Ralph and others. And some kids begin to develop savage personalities, after someone claims to have seen a Beast (demongorgan?) in the woods. This creates fear among the boys, which allows Jack to access more power.Ralph gets into an argument with Jack, who splits from the tribe. Many of the other boys follow Jack, who uses fear to manipulate the boys into leaving Ralph. And Jack’s crew begin attacking Ralph and his friends.

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Ok, next topic of ep 4- the sentimental part of my brain got emotional when hearing how upset Robin was. And than Mr Hauser-telling her she’s wrong and she’s not “broken” or “rotten” and “nothing about her needs to be fixed’” (got me right in the feels) . As a queer person- I feel like every lgbt+ kid/teen needs to hear what Mr. Hauser said to Robin.

However, the analytical part of my brain -did notice some easterggs/ series parallels.

The convo starts with them talking about music Mr hauser likes (such as Bowie). And transitions to Mr Haauser asking about things she likes, whether she’s being bullied, and he later tells her “ DON’T let other people’s small mindedness make you fell bad about yourself. you don’t need to change yourself-no matter what anyone else says” . And Mr Hauser than says him calling her the “weirdest girl in Hawkins” was a compliment (not an insult-like she initially assumed).

This is remarkably similar to certain scenes in s1/2. In s1, Jonathan mentions musicians he likes such as Bowie, asks Will about what he likes, and tells Will “don't like things cause people tell you you’re supposed to-especially not him (their dad who called him h*mophobic names)” . In s2, Jonathan tries to cheer Will up after asking if he's being being bullied. And calls Will “a freak” (and says it’s a good thing) and he should be content with being a “freak “ and compares Will to Bowie ( who was openly queer since the 70s) .

In ep 4, Robin also mentions how sad she is that her parents won’t let her ride her bike anymore cause their paranoid about her safety (like what happened to Will in s2).

Robin (before Mr. Hauser comforts her) says she feels like she has a “rot” inside her . This is a s2 eastergg that could be linked to either Will or El. Will says his now-memories are “growing”, spreading”, and killing.” Later Kali says the emotional pain caused by her father caused a “wound” to “spread”. Later allusion-Brenner tells El she has a “terrible wound “ (“a rot”) that Will “grow, spread, and kill.”

The reason Robin rants about feeling like she has a “rot” inside her is because she’s being bullied, and lost all her Hawkins friends and says “maybe I’m broken maybe there is just something about me that drives people away? I’m the only common denominator-there’s something wrong with me! There’s something inside of me that’s just rotten and there’s nothing i can do to fix it”. Which 1)-poor Robin. 2) I feel like could easily be How Will feels in s4(who will be the same age as Robin is here in the podcast)- his dad abandoned him, all his hawkins friends are gone , the st s4 movies have h*mophobic bullying in them (and he was bullied in the past). In a interview Noah said Will in s4 “doesn’t really get along with people-it’s just him and Mike.” I think it fits more so with Will than El . But they may feel similar: it’s implied in s4 audition tapes she’ll be bullied too, she moved away from her friends, and her father (Hopper) fake “passed away.” It could easily be how both Will and El feel in s4- that there is something “broken”/ “rotten” about them . In fact, in the rebel Robin novel there is even a character named Sheena. Sheena reminds me a bit of a mix between Will and el . She is very quiet, queercoded, and is often bullied. And she finds mean notes and other things stuffed in her locker- placed there by bullies. A bit like how Will found the zombie-boy note in his locker. A teacher doesn’t stop her bullying just blames her and says “ This wouldn’t happen if you made it just a smidgen easier for PEOPLE to understand you.”(sort of reminding me of that Noah quote about s4 Will not getting along with most people/Jonathan saying not to change himself cause “people” say to). But sheena can be another name for Jane (there was also a 80s show character named Sheena who was psychic) so ...maybe foreshadowing of el/jane being bullied in highschool? Along with Will?

*It’s not a eastergg/parallel...just speculation. Unlike the rebel robin book... in the podcast (in multiple episodes) almost every time she opens up to Mr Hauser about her problems she says it’s ok for him to do the same and she’ll be supportive and listen. However, Mr Hauser (so far) always rejects her offer-much to her hurt/frustration. In ep 4, she asks if he has someone his “own age” he can talk to about his problems-which he says he does. Now... since in ep 4 Mr hauser is paralleled to Jonathan maybe Jonathan will have someone his own age to talk to about his problems (maybe his new friend Argyle?) We see similar to Mr Hauser giving advice/pep talks to (gay) Robin. Jonathan is always giving advice/peptalks to our (gay-coded) Will. But so far- Jonathan has no one he really emotionally leaned on in the same way (Will does with Jonathan). I also wonder if Will in s4 starts gets tired of how he always confides in Jonathan (but Jonathan never does the same with Will in return)? Like Robin with Mr. Hauser?

#robin buckley #steve harrington #will byers #el hopper #jonathan byers #stranger things #stranger things theory

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shallowseeker · 2 years

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The positive meaning of 15x20

Lately, I've given you the evil versions of the finale filled with death and terrible views of the fractured self. Now, I'm going to give a more positive/thoughtful explanation.

Why did Dean die? "It was always going to end like this," because Dean died long ago, and Supernatural is Sam-Jack working out why and accepting it. Perhaps the trauma is just something awful like a car accident, or it’s something more difficult that would wound Sam badly and cause him to blame himself … like if Dean took his own life. A young child might easily view suicide as a sacrifice, and if that child is ill, that would compound the fracture. Sam telling Dean he can go in 15x20 is Sam accepting it. Sam leaving the bunker is Sam/Jack leaving his fantasy world. That's why the wife isn't Eileen. That's why they cut out all the hunter friends in the final episode.

The perspective of a child - So many of Sam/Jack's fears revolve around Dean giving up, and so much of the journey is Sam finding out stuff about his brother he didn't previously know, like that Dean always wanted to be a firefighter. This is why Dean is the most important person in Sam's life. Because he’s his parent. This is also why Sam fails to really know him. ❤️ Who did Dean point a gun at: Sam AND Jack. Who did Dean kill death protecting: Sam AND Jack. I’m not sure but Cas faces metaphorical mental brokenness and depression (the empty) for Sam-Jack. Whenever something bad happens to someone, Sam-Jack thinks it’s because he’s caused it. He thinks God let Jesus die, so maybe he’s supposed to as well.

The person behind the actual mask: Real Sam/Jack isn't good-looking or heroic, or the kind of guy who could wield Thor's hammer like in Last Holiday. He's just some guy. He might even be a very young person/teen! There's something about Sam needing blood to be stronger, going through trials, faith healing, etc that speaks to Sam having a chronic illness. Sam's later obsessions with healthy eating and parallel to Steve Jobs speaks to this as well. Purity culture and clean eating is a HUGE way to control illness. When you're sick, you often feel unclean, like it's your fault. My theory is that Rowena also likely has an illness but is putting her belief system in magic.

On illness: When you're ill, there's something horrific in being consumed by the illness. Sometimes you look around and feel like everyone is pouring their energy into you, and you haven't had time to learn the first thing about them. Sometimes you feel horrible needing basic things like blood infusions because that's someone else's life force. Don't even get me started on how our culture has up till now viewed organ donations. There's something really lovely in Jack eating angel hearts to "make his body strong," you see. It's a narrative tension about illness. With unclean blood, could be anything from thassalemia to cancer to Mary’s “demon” of doing drugs that passed on HIV-AIDS at birth. (What’d your mom die of. Oh, she had her demons. Where’s your dad? Oh he’s chasing his own demons, I suppose. Where’s Dean? Son, everyone has their demons.) A kid hearing that sort of talk might take it literally. Might even conjure up another hero self to hunt those demons.

Who is Dean: The Dean we see on screen IS a complex manifestation of Sam's memories placed in a heroic, monster-hunting setting. So what do we know about the real Dean? We know he was Sam's caretaker, and if Sam was really, really sick, then Dean likely gave up a significant part of his life to help him. John was absent. We don't really know why. Perhaps, Mary, Dean, and Sam even have a familial illness and that sent John chasing after miracles and mystery cures. Maybe he too was angry with God, the world, and lost himself to alcoholism.

The specter of drinking and suicide: We know that something terrible happened to Dean that caused Sam to generate this big epic love story to deal with it and try to solve the puzzle of his brother. Much of his logic throughout the narrative is like a child learning their parent is a *person.* We also know that Dean is HUGELY tied up in religion at some point, so I'm thinking that whatever happened, Dean sought absolution through church, and that introduced a whole 'nother dimension to sort through. What is a huge horrid thing religion says about suicide? That they go to HELL. That’s gotta be awful to deal with. Sam seems uncommonly afraid of Hell in general. 💔 And well, other reasons Dean might “go to Hell”? I mean, his dad sent him to a boys’ home at 16. One of the caretakers has rosary beads…

On the quest for the cure: Ezekiel/Gadreel wasn't a person. He was a treatment that went bad. Like chemo or other toxic therapy. He maybe got Sam's "permission" to treat him when Sam had given up, and Sam was so angry about that. So much of the boundary crossing in SPN can be re-imagined as various treatments for chronic illness. Just think about what eventually happens to Jack. Cas goes off on a quest to get a mystery “experimental” medicine...that makes Jack worse. It's heartbreaking, really. Cas is always searching for, "another way" for them in the last couple seasons. In fact, Cas and Dean together are constantly searching for cures, and that's...that's really something. Cas and Dean chase their own demons of purgatory and hunger, of depression, caretaker burnout, and incredible incredible stress over losing Mary, Sam, Jack, or Claire. Then they wanna kill themselves or god. It’s not fair.

On locking yourself away: The final seasons are haunted by Dean putting himself in a box. Putting Cas in a box and being separated from Cas. In drowning in alcohol. Being angry with god. Having versus being. Being able to say things. Like this is something Sam-Jack began to realize about the world and how relationships are perceived.

Who is Cas? Cas himself is complicated. Is he a doctor? A church counselor? A therapist? One thing we know is he's a constant presence, and he's constantly being taken away by work and church. His looming association to marriage and other children makes me think this was a constant source of tension and he may have been living as a closeted married man. Cas has/had obligations to previous families before tying himself to Dean (and taking on Sam-Jack's illness). Sam-Jack had a lot of trouble accepting the re-emergence of Cas into their lives initially (See: the specter of what Benny actually represents; “Not my Dean!” said Bobby), but nonetheless, Sam-Jack eventually chose Cas as his secondary father. That Cas said, "Nothing is worth your life," triggered a huge heartwarming hug from Sam. Like a kid, he picked Cas before he realized exactly why Dean needed him. Two of the most parent-iest things I can think of are “There’s nothing I’d put ahead of you,” and “Nothing is worth your life.”

Sam seeing the future: The Chuck-terrible future he saw where Dean gave up? It's because Cas died. The box is both a coffin narrative and depression and being closeted. Claire (Mary?) died. Dean lost hope. So, Sam had to deal with that too. In a way, that's the truth and a huge part of what happened to Dean. So Sam rejects it. I think Cas definitely really died. He symbolically died over and over when he left them to return to his Christian hetero-normative life. And Dean's "you're dead to me!" and the whole divorce thing that Sam-Jack saw in the beginning of season 15...that's complex. At some point, Cas chooses them, but marries that devotion to his previous obligations. Cas’s hallucinated death is a huge metaphor for depression because what disappears when you let yourself be happy? Sadness.

Who was Eileen? Disability narrative aside, I feel like Eileen was a fellow patient that Sam loved and could relate to. Maybe even one that he knew very young. One that loved popcorn and alligators and played games with him.

On Jack in the box: Putting Jack in a box is about not facing Sam/Jack's trauma and that this big story is just a fantasy. Letting Dean die and letting Cas die represent waking up. But the death of Jack or Sam represent death of the entire world/destiny etc. This is why I saw Jack-Sam is the self, and Cas and Dean's deaths are paths to accepting what happened in your life. Jack is the WHOLE self that worked through it all. Sam is the specific slice that repaired his relationship with his brother. ❤️

Maybe I'm not worth all this... We love you because you're you.

That's the most beautiful meaning of SPN. :D

#tw: suicide #15x20

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seeksstaronmewni · 3 years

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The Bear Roots of Burbank Cartoons: A Lookback at Boo Boo Runs Wild

5 years ago, [adult swim] aired the greatest of all Yogi Bear / Ranger Smith episodes, “Boo Boo Runs Wild” (1999), on August 13th, 2016 A.D. at 4 AM.

Look and see, kids, how America’s not-so-average bear connects in the wide world of animation that produces many of the cartoons that you love in Burbank, Canada and more!

As and after I saw it, I knew that I found the greatest band of cartoonists out there, and that greatest band of cartoonists out there was none other than...

Spümcø, whose many creatives would end up working at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Cartoon Network Studios, and many other popular Burbank and Canadian studios that made the cartoons I grew up and beyond watching.

Obviously, the character design is rather different, but they still look like the right characters, even with the slight color changes...

and with their items of human attire out. Ranger Smith, on the other hand...

Ranger Smith is wildly off model, and probably on purpose, throughout the picture.

Only in one scene appears he with a more familiar face.

Now, I didn’t have to watch Wild Kratts (which, by the way, features 6 Spümcø Canada creatives) to learn that “there’s only one thing a bear likes more than raiding a pic-a-nic basket.”

As the title suggests, Boo Boo loses his temper when Ranger Smith restricts him from tearing bark and decides to go primal in returning to his bear roots: “From this day forth, I’ll not dress in the man’s attire, and I’ll not speak in the man’s tongue. From now on, it’s going on all fours and grunting for me!”

Boo Boo wreaks havoc for the trees with his natural bear roots.

Unlike past episodes, however, the artists went far wilder than the usual Hanna-Barbera cartoon, making the trees alive and screaming in pain! OH, WHAT TOURTUE! Not to mention how I love Boo Boo’s goofy/manical laugh, a beautiful product of John Kricfalusi’s voice (Yes; I know that he was a formerly abusive megalomaniac who still has ADHD, but God knows what cartoons would be like today—at least those produced in Burbank and Canada—if it wasn’t for the many layout artists that he led).

Also unnatural to a Hanna-Barbera cartoon is the extreme levels of slapstick, wackiness and graphic nature of cartoons since such shows as Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Beany and Cecil’s DiC reboot, and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Boo Boo and now Cindy Bear are licking away at all of the honey... and bees... with insanely long tongues (may be that they’re sloth bears?). This left Yogi Bear practically speechless.

The mere sequence of dialogue between Yogi and Ranger Smith, discussing what to do about Boo Boo, involved HEAVY work in the storyboards by Vincent Waller. So many expressions that they couldn’t fit in each of Spümcø’s 3-panel storyboard pages!

As you see, in addition to Vincent Waller’s storyboards, John K. added extra poses (storyboard revisions more or less, but definitely layout poses) under the respective scenes. That way, Vincent could focus on telling and writing the story in rough pictures. (source of storyboards)

I also love the sound design. While it’s definitely true to a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, John K. and the late Henry Porch were very creative with some weird, dated and out-of-context sound effects, similar to what they and Horta Editorial did on The Ren & Stimpy Show in the first two seasons. The production music (probably APM and Capitol Records) also gave it a vintage, nostalgic feel.

Ultimately, with the aforementioned abusive megalomaniac aside, Spümcø undoubtedly harbored some of the finest animators and artists ever. Such names as Bob Jaques (Spongebob Squarepants, Buy One, Get One Free*, The Baby Huey Show), Ben Jones (DC Super Hero Girls, Cats Don’t Dance, Teen Titans GO!), Vincent Waller (Spongebob Squarepants, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog), Albert Lozano (Inside Out, A Kitty Bobo Show), Todd White (Spongebob Squarepants), Eric Koenig (Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Madagascar, Cats Don’t Dance, The Simpsons, and The Tigger Movie), and Erik Wiese (Samurai Jack, The Mighty B!) are among the hundreds of creatives who ended up almost everywhere working in Burbank and Canadian animation.

Other names on the Spümcø team that one might recognize include Gabe Swarr (Dexter’s Laboratory, The Buzz on Maggie, Foe Paws, El Tigre), and even background artists such as Richard Daskas ( @rdaskas - Samurai Jack, Time Squad, Sym-Bionic Titan, Batman Beyond), Richard Ziehler-Martin (Tiny Toon Adventures, The Wacky World of Tex Avery), Hector Martinez (Tom and Jerry: Robin Hood and His Merry Mouse, Timone and Pumba, Captain N, Evil Con Carne, Dora the Explorer), and Tony Mora (MAD, Teen Titans GO! to the Movies, Pickle and Peanut). I mean: in short, these artists worked for Warner Bros. Animation, Disney Television Animation and Walt Disney Feature Animation, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network Studios!

Spümcø’s production assistants on Boo Boo Runs Wild feature Matt Danner —a fantastic character designer, storyboard artists, director and producer, whose credits range from (Johnny Test and The Legend of the Three Caballeros to Team Hot Wheels and The Looney Tunes Show—and Cartoon Brew editor Amid Amidi. Brian A. Miller was an executive in charge of production, not for but probably in association with Cartoon Network.

Spümcø’s creatives, as I said, are all over the place in Burbank animation. Other shows that still air on @adultswim have ex-Spümcø creatives. For example: today’s re-run of Samurai Jack EPISODE XVI features Chris Reccardi (The Powerpuff Girls, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy)...

Scott Wills (Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat)...

Lynne Naylor-Reccardi (The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show, Wander Over Yonder) and Jim Smith (YooHoo and Friends, Tom and Jerry Tales, McGee and Me)...

and Leticia Lacy (TRON: Uprising, Sym-Bionic Titan, Wander Over Yonder, Korgoth of Barbaria).

Even outside of Cartoon Network Studios, where most ex-Spümcø artists end up, @cartoonnetwork’s The Amazing World of Gumball, from Cartoon Network Studios Europe (AKA Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe), features ex-Spümcø artist Charlie Bean (The Powerpuff Girls, Robotboy, Batman: The Animated Series, Timone and Pumba, Creature Crunch) on The Cartoon Network Europe Development Team.

One of Cartoon Network’s biggest and craziest hits, Teen Titans GO!, also features such ex-Spümcø artists as storyboard artist, director and producer Luke Cormican (The Buzz on Maggie, Brandy and Mr. Whiskers, Brickleberry, The Replacements, El Tigre)...

Gerald de Jesus (The Book of Life, The Ricky Gervais Show, TMNT)...

and Eric J. Pringle (Fosters’ Home for Imaginary Friends, The Problem Solverz). What wacky cartoon filled with live-action images, unpredictable visual gags and extreme slapstick humor wouldn’t?

Relatively, you could even tune in to Nickelodeon, the original home of Spümcø’s ground-breaking hit, The Ren & Stimpy Show, and see names of creatives associated with Spümcø and Ren & Stimpy, such as Zeus Cervas (Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Spongebob Squarepants, Clarence) on today’s episode of The Patrick Star Show...

or even Gabe Del Valle (Mighty Magiswords, Spongebob Squarepants) on today’s episode of Middlemost Post!

Overall, Boo Boo Runs Wild introduced me to the cartoon studio whose works I took for granted and on which I was missing out all of my life, and I strongly encourage this generation to support this Yogi Bear / Ranger Smith episode, which you can watch RIGHT NOW on [adult swim]’s site. It was officially on their YouTube channel, but it was removed for unknown reasons. This short never even got a DVD or VHS release!

The last televised airing of Boo Boo Runs Wild on [adult swim] so far was January 6th, 2019 A.D., but Spümcø also produced “A Day in the Life of Ranger Smith” and “Boo Boo and the Man” (based on true events in the life of John Kricfalsui) for Cartoon Network.

As I come to a close, it’s worth noting that layout Ed Benedict, an animator and artist whose credits go all of the way back to the 1930s with Disney and continued with MGM and Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network Studios, originally worked on Yogi Bear episode “Yogi’s Birthday Party” as a layout artist, and reprised that very role for “Boo Boo Runs Wild”. What a legacy the animators and artists of this episode leave!

Always will I remember how Spümcø, whose legacy connects to my Cartoon Network-infused childhood, blessed me and graced me that fateful day, August 13th, 2016 A.D., with the ultimate example of the fine art of cartooning that is the Yogi Bear / Ranger Smith episode “Boo Boo Runs Wild”. I was living in the moment, and I thank God for it.

“For years they have [been] asking me to make new Yogi cartoons, but I can’t even get a half a million [dollars] to make one, probably because I actually like the characters, but 60-70 million $ to make walking corpses is economical.” - John Kricfalsui on Yogi Bear (2010)

Another Ranger Smith, Boo Boo or Yogi Bear cartoon from the people behind The Ren & Stimpy Show is highly unlikely today, due to the abuse and harassment of John K. angering the world to the point of hating and condemning the man who helped to shape not only Cartoon Network but also television animation—and animation as a whole—with an undeniable legacy of artists and animators who deserve way more credit and respect than we perhaps thought of giving as kids.

Tweet version of this post here.

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stellocchia · 4 years

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Here’s an analysis of the “Tommy’s Plan To Kill Dream” stream (part 2)

Continuation of this here (though it really isn’t needed to read that one to read this as I will be recapping a bit as I go): https://stellocchia.tumblr.com/post/645995202162671616/heres-an-analysis-of-the-tommys-plan-to-kill

This is the less intense part of the stream. They already talked about their plans to kill Dream (well, Tommy’s plan that Tubbo is VERY reluctant about and Ranboo agrees with). We’re moving into the gathering resources for the surveilance post part now.

As always moving forward I’ll be soley talking about the characters and, for the dialogue, this are the respective colors: Tommy, Tubbo, Ranboo, Ghostbur.

Analysis under the cut as always

So let’s start off with the obvious: I absolutely love how protective Tubbo and Ranboo are of Tommy, I’m glad he has people who actually care in his life right now. We have various examples of this throughout the stream, but the first one is Tommy seeing a creeper, backing off immediatly (because of his hightened fear of pain, aslo known as algophobia apparently) and them immediately destroying the threat. Of course this is also because they don’t want Snowchester blown up, but it’s still sweet nonetheless.

He also opens up about his algophobia right after to them and asks for some armour, which Tubbo actually provides.

“You’re wearing Dream’s armour, aren’t you Tubbo?” “Yeah” “Okay, I wouldn’t- I genuinely would advice not. Anything that that man’s fucking been too near you don’t wanna be using” Tommy’s fear of Dream by now is just all encompassing. It is also quite peculiar that he would say this while still using Dream’s trident (right? It’s still his right?), though that could simply be because he puts himself in the category of “things that have been too near Dream” by now and really can’t be affected more then he already has been, though this is just a theory.

Same thing as with the creeper happens with a skeleton a couple minutes later.

“What happened? Holy crap” “Tubbo he beat me to death, he punched me to death” Bee duo starting to realize how serious Tommy’s situation is right after the scheleton encounter because Tommy was just genuinely panicking.

“Pain it feels so much more real now, ‘cause I know what’s on the other side” “Surely doesn’t that give closure?” “No... no it gives quite the opposite Tubbo” And what a good choice that was narratively speaking! If death did give closure as us and the characters in the story themselves expected, with resurrection it would be meaningless. This way though, death has just as much narrative weight as if resurrection wasn’t there, which is what you want in a story.

“On a side note for you two: Sam Nook great guy! Really lovely guy! Awesamdude is a bastard and does not deserve to be running that prison. If he let me die he failed his job” We can see that Tommy’s perception of the warden’s duty is strickingly different from Sam’s. To Tommy the top priority should be protecting others from Dream (even if it means compromising the security of the prison), while to Sam the top priority is keeping Dream locked up.

“My therapy update!” We all knew I had to include this one. It’s actually really great because:

1) Him actually reacheing out to Puffy to get therapy means that he actually recognises that he needs help and is willing to ask for it, which is the first step towards healing

2) Him acting so happy about it is actually such a good message for the younger viewers to see that therapy is nothing to be afraid of and it’s not taboo

One more thing we had him wanting to remove his own statues as they’re a grim reminder of his death in a scene that is very similar to Tubbo on the 16th asking to remove the decorations of the day of his execution.

“I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to... try and kill Dream. I don’t know how canon lives work for you anymore, but I only got one left” As I pointed out in the other post the 2 main reasons why Tubbo is reluctant about the plan are that he’s on his last life and that he managed to build a life for himself with Snowchester and Ranboo that he doesn’t wanna loose.

“Listen guys, I’ve experienced death now, it doesn’t matter how many lives I have left now, I’m NOT willing to go through that again” “Yeah that makes sense actually, that makes sense” This is an interesting question though of how many lives he re-acquired. We know Jack came back with 3 when he did it, but then again, normal rules don’t seem to apply to Jack Manifold. Also I wanted to include Ranboo’s quote there just because he’s literally been nothing but supportive and I love him for it.

Also all 3 teens decide at once that ignoring the Egg will most definitely make the problem go away, because that has always worked in the past of course! (Also, honestly, good for them. Let the adults take care of something for once!)

“I’m not very god at smal- that’s not true” “Mhmm” “So eh... you guys heard The News?” “The news about what?” “The news about...?” “You know... what-what’s been happening...” “What’s been happening?” “About- about umm... George” “About George? What happened with the Gogmeinster?” “Oh yeah, he got banned! Twice” “No no, he... he grew a third ear” “Really? Oh man!” “Oh yeah! I’ve seen a photo of that on instagram!” So, aside from this being so funny, the reason I’m highlighting it is because if there is one thing Tommy never struggled with in the past it was small talk. He could literally start blabbering with anyone about anything, no matter how dumb, with absolute confidence. Now he’s struggling with everything (both here and later in the Nether we have similar scenes for it). He is insecure about everything he says and socializing seems much harder for him. Regardless both Tubbo and Ranboo still go along with everything he says with absolute confidence, which seems to help him quite a bit. Considering that his biggest desire seems to be to be treated the same as he was before having them not pointing out his obvious insecurity (while still very obviously noticing it) is probably quite a big thing for him.

“Why are Punz’s eyes red?” “Why? Oh- Where is Punz?” “Oh, that might mean we have to kill him, he might kill us on sight” “Yeah, he might try to kill you. Where are you Tommy by any me- where are you?” “Yeah, stay away from him” “No I can fucking take him man!” “No because you get scared of damage...” “Tommy... yeah” “I don’t get scared of damage!” “That’s not true” “Tommy where are you?” I loved this scene so much! Tommy didn’t actually even see Punz here, he only saw his face on the players tab, but the other two were immediately on the defensive. Also this is what I mean when I say that it’s not that they don’t acknowledge Tommy’s situation, they’re just trying to give him some normalcy, because, as soon as he is in any actual or perceived danger they’re immediately in high alert.

“You’re like a living ghost” “I think that’s just called a human Tubbo” “You’re like a human” “That’s just called someone who is alive” “You’re treating me differently” So two things here:

1) Tubbo still has a lot of confusion towards the whole revival process an that’s what he was trying to express. Ranboo was not particularly happy with his choice of words though and kinda got the defensive tone again

2) Tommy shuts down very fast any time any kind of change is mentioned. In this case the change being Tubbo’s perception of him.

That said they manage to recover the situation really fast with Ranboo making a comparison between Tommy and Jesus (they’re teenagers, what can I say?)

“Tubbo I feel like we’ve grown less close while I’ve been in prison and dead” “That’s ‘cause you’ve been gone for such a long time...” “Do you like me less?” “Nope!” “Well it feels like you do” “Well, that’s all in your head then!” “No” “Maybe you superpower is immagination” “Maybe my superpower is anxiety” Well Tommy, do my job for me, will you? But yes, these kind of thoughts (fretting about what others, especially your friends or family think of you) is extremely common for individuals suffering from anxiety disorders. Also what Tubbo did here was really important, even if it is the bare minimum, he still provided the ressurance his friend needed and that’s good of him. Also, while Tommy’s dependence on Tubbo does shine through quite a bit during this stream Tubbo does continuosly set up healthy boundaries for them (introducing and keeping firm on his relationship with Ranboo and admitting that they did grow apart a bit and he is still confused about Tommy for example), which is extremely good. Ranboo is also presenting himself as a viable option for emotional support, which will actually be good for Tommy in the future as this would mean breaking out of the habit that was ingrained in him of relying on one single person every time.

“I’m not afraid of anything! The only thing I’m afraid of is, you know, waking up in the morning and...” “The- the thing your afraid of is waking up in the- are you alright? Are you- are you alright man? Are you good?” That’s concerning! But, again, very fitting with his newfound extreme anxiety he seems to be experiencing. Also ConcernedBoo, he just care about his friends and is worried. Pretty sure Tommy fits together with Michael and Tubbo in the circle of people he’s willing to protect.

Also, in case people were wondering, Ghostbur wasn’t handing out sugar because he was a fake Ghostbur, but just because Ranboo gave it to him and it was the only thing he had. Same goes for Tommy calling Ghostbur “Wilbur” and acting as if he was Alivebur and Ghostbur only correcting him after quite a while: it’s not because he’s fake, it’s because he gave permission to Tommy specifically to do so before. As I mentioned in the other post their relationship is complicated, but Ghostbur very much cares for Tommy a whole lot and he came back specifically because he heard Tommy needed help again, it’s not so weird he’d allow him to do stuff he doesn’t allow for others.

“Last time I spoke to you was like a few days ago...” Now, as some people pointed out this could simply be Ghostbur memory being sort of foggy and him not realizing how much time passed. But the OTHER theory is that he remembers talking to Phantommy (which we know happened thanks to Quackity’s lore, as they visited Glatt’s gym together). Honestly both are plausible (if the first one was true then meeting Phantommy may have simply made him upset and he could have forgotten about it, or perhaps he could have just forgotten that Tommy was dead).

“Ghostbur do you want him (Wilbur) to come back? Because I- I don’t. I don’t think that I do ever” “It’s... I... umm, hm. The-the world needs structure and order and he- he was good at that. He did that-” “No. The world needs less villains and he was a villain if I’ve ever seen one” “But a- a villain is just- is- sometimes the line’s a little blurry. You could say a little blurry, a tiny bit, it’s like a- a villain it’s just a hero you haven’t convinced yet” Now, as much as I love Ghostbur he’s half wrong here. Let me explain:

Simply put not all bad people can be redeemed for one thing (for example someone like Dream could never be redeemed because he hurt so many people in such horrible ways without ever regretting it), and secondly describing a villain as a “hero YOU HAVEN’T CONVINCED yet” puts the responsability of that persnon’s actions on their victims. As a matter of fact it’s most definitely NOT up to the ones who’ve been hurt to reabilitate the ones who hurt them (which is why Sam managing the prison now is considerable a conflict of interests). They shouldn’t even be forced to forgive that person if the person DOES change for the better. And here’s the crux of the issue: Wilbur hurt a LOT of people. He hurt Tubbo, he hurt Niki, he hurt Fundy, he hurt everyone who joined Pogtopia. And more then anything else he hurt Tommy. He was abusive and manipulative towards him and Tommy has every right to never forgive him. He has every right to be scared of him and regard him purely as a villain, because that’s what he was for him towards the end of his life.

Ghostbur bringing him back in the hopes that he’s changed at all just means that, once again, the responsability of his possible reabilitation will be left entirely on the shoulders of the teens of the server and the same goes for if there is NO reabilitation. The destruction will, once more, be left for them to deal with. Tommy specifically will have one more person who abused him to deal with. Wether Wilbur will or will not ally himself with Dream doesn’t matter, because he was still a destructive individual on his own (despite of course being that way because of his own mental spiral, but that just makes him more sympathetic, it doesn’t justify his actions nor make them any less hurtful for those around him).

Also Wilbur’s been dead for 10-12 years in Limbo time, I can’t imagine that doing wonders for his mental state...

There is a scene after that conversation where Tommy was talking about how being dead was, Tubbo asked a question about it and Tommy got upset. Of course the others got confused about his reactions since ha was already talking about, so, to clarify: the probable reason why anyone (aside from Ghostbur apparently) asking him questions about it upsets him is probably because of Dream. He mentioned multiple times now that Dream treating his death as a science experiment when he revived him was extremely traumatic for him. He hates the idea of being “just science” to the people around him. Ghostbur seem to be an exception to this, but that may be because Tommy seems predisposed to just trust Ghostbur more from an emotonal stand-point (perhaps because he reminds him of how Wilbur used to be before he spiraled).

“I love monster energy” “Monster energy is kind of scary...” “Mhm, it’s for monsters...” Man the very low-key constant self-deprecation sure it’s kinda worrying... I really do hope that someone will help him with his very obvious sef-esteem issues at some point.

“He (Wilbur) spent a lot of time around a bad guy. He spent around a decade, you said, around Schlatt and Schlatt- Schlatt’s the bed guy, Right?” “I don’t think Schlatt’s the only bad guy” “Him and Eret are the bad guys, right?” Once again Ghostbur’s view of things is very naive and still very much stuck in the past. It’s been so long now since Eret betrayal, and they tried to redeem themselves since. Meanwhile it’s also been months since Schlatt died, and, even back when he was alive, he was far from being the only arguably bad person, Wilbur being right there along with him if we consider what his actions caused. And now we have Dream and the Egg, we have Quackity indulging in torture, we have the syndacate having a gestapo arc, we have Jack back on his goal of killing a teen. We can be sympathetic toward many of this people, but this doesn’t change the fact that they hurt others a lot or that their objectives or actions are objectively morally wrong in some cases. By now it’s honestly pretty hard to draw the line of who IS and ISN’T a bad guy.

“Cobble is GOOD, people don’t like it when I use cobble though...” Again, the usual self confidence is completely lacking. This is worse then post exile: back then he still had the full confidence to build an ugly cbblestone tower on Techno’s front lawn, now even using a bit of cobblestone makes him self-concious.

Also apparently Sam instructed Sam Nook to keep Tommy specifically away from the prison for his own safety. Man’s still looking after him even if he probably won’t manage to do it directly for a while (at least until Tommy forgives him, if he does).

That’s pretty much it! It’s everything I’d consider important that I could find in the stream!

@mysweatymakerstudentworld

#tommyinnit #tubbo #wilbur soot #ranboo #ghostbur #tw abuse #tw manipulation #c!wilbur critical #I guess?#analysis #dream smp #/rp #my post #long post #though long ass post would fit better #I seriously just made a two parter on a block man roleplay huh?#god what is my life...

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deniigi · 4 years

Note

Jack and the other folks at the gym; how they met, what their relationships are like, how they are with Matt etc.

For you, anon. I have an old fic that answers all of these questions.

It’s written from the perspective of Jack’s best friend and sparring partner Rudy DeLuca.

Title: Tape

Summary: There were two generations of devils at Fogwell’s Gym

Warnings: child abuse, physical abuse, references to drug use and suicide/suicide attempts, and foster care

-------------

There was a famed baby at the gym at the moment and Rudy was scheming how to get it into his arms when the old man caught him leaning on the front desk and told him that he had two whole grandbabies waitin’ for him at home.

Matty took that moment to fly in from the back room where he’d been harrassing the shit out of the new ‘clerk’ (as Fogwell called him) to ask if Tina had finally popped.

Rudy was caught off guard by the image of Tina beating the shit out of Matt for that and then by the wave of nostalgia that the kid’s sudden enthusiasm bought.

“Well, look who’s here?” he drawled instead, slowly turning around towards the beast. “Where you been, neighbor?”

Matt beamed at him.

He looked good.

Happy.

Far, far too happy.

Rudy squinted.

Matt waited a beat, then scrambled back into staff entrance and knocked shit over on the desk back there in his haste to go hide behind Fogwell.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

That’s right, troublemaker, go hide behind Grandpa. He’ll protect you, you little shit.

The new gym baby was a full two months old. He was fat and grumpy and his papa’s pride and joy already. Rudy managed to snag an opportunity to get the thing into his arms when Bert and Kenny came in, signaling for the youths that the senior citizen shift had begun.

Fogwell was the most distinguished of the senior citizens, but, of course, he would wait his turn until the rest of them had finished lavishing attention upon his fiftieth great-grandbaby.

Baby’s papa was proud as a peacock.

“His name’s Henry,” he told Rudy, while Henry wrinkled his nose and eyes up at him.

Henry.

Ehn.

Terrible name.

“He looks like a John,” Rudy said.

Papa, who Rudy had forgotten the name of at least six times since he’d joined the gym, laughed.

“I thought about callin’ him Jack,” he said. “But my girl drew the line there.”

Ah.

Right.

This was that kid.

Kenny had gathered everyone into a group huddle in the changing room the other week to explain seriously how they all needed to avoid the fuck out of this guy. He’d said in a whisper that the guy was one of them people into vintage shit.

A hipster, he meant.

A fuckin’ hipster in their midst.

God, there were more and more of them in the gym every day.

Rudy lifted an eyebrow at baby Henry.

He didn’t deserve to be called Henry. He really did look more like a John. But, for the sake of the dead, Rudy decided that he’d squint for as hard and long as it took for him to become a Henry.

---

Fogwell’s had been legendary back in the day for producing pro boxers out of good-for-nothin’, trouble-makin’ guys with no other prospects.

Fogwell was that general from Mulan who made men out of boys (and the occasional girl. And the most recent kid who said that they weren’t a guy or a gal and if anyone wanted to throw down about it, they were posting their number on the cork board by the front desk).

Back in Rudy’s youth, that had been appealing as hell. And so he’d had a swagger on into the place, thinking that maybe he would pop his guns a bit in Fogwell’s direction and get the polishing he needed to make enough money to buy his girl a ring.

On the upside, Fogwell had, in fact, noticed him. But the downside was that Rudy had had no fucking clue what that actually meant, and so three years later, he’d found himself smoking only twice a week instead of every day, drinking goddamn protein shakes, and doing a daily fuckin’ jog like a military brat.

Fogwell had no time for dumb shit. He didn’t care if you wanted to kill yourself slowly with whatever vice you picked from the basket, but if you walked into the ring with his name on your back, then you would disgrace that name on pain of divine retribution.

It was way easier just to get one step ahead of the guy’s nit-picking than to suffer his judgemental silence.

That had been Fogwell back in the day, and that was still Fogwell in the now.

But as with any force of nature, even if the old man had planted his feet and announced his intention to rest there in that place for the next two millenia, the world around him still carried on spinning around.

Fogwell’s wasn’t just a facility for churning out pros these days. It wasn’t just legendary, now.

It was a fuckin’ institution.

God help them.

They were a tourist destination. Ghost hunters, folks on buses, sports fans, teen girls with a mighty need for a vintage-lookin’ selfie. You name it. They pressed their noses up against the yellowed glass to watch the people inside break their bodies down to build them up into something money-making.

It wasn’t an unwarranted curiosity, to be fair.

Fogwell had produced twenty pro boxers in the last several decades who’d really made it. Like, really, really made it.

Bert was one of them—to literally every one of the senior citizens’ surprise.

Bert had been a empty-headed wise-guy with a porn-stache at best way back when. And like, don’t get Rudy wrong, he was still an empty-headed wise-guy. He was just an empty-headed wise guy with a head like a helmet and a whole lot of money now.

Not that you’d have known it from lookin’ at him.

Bless him.

He was paying college tuition for all his kids and he was helping the older ones vet kindergartens with tuition or what the fuck ever, doing all that he could so that those babies didn’t have to live life out of Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese boxes like him.

Bert had made it. That was the dream.

The dream was just that, though. A shot in the dark. A drop in a bucket. Kenny had done alright, just like Rudy had done alright. They’d had their ten minutes of time in the spotlight. Had made enough to get by. Had made enough to be comfortable in Hell’s Kitchen. To retire and become personal trainers or sports commentators or whatever the fuck opportunity jumped up in their faces.

A lot of fellas hadn’t made it, though. And then there were the Almosts.

Jackie had been an Almost, god rest his soul.

This new hipster kid at the gym with his baby had latched onto Jack’s image, found in old magazines and grainy footage, and had decided that that whole vibe fit the image that he wanted to live in.

It made Rudy sick. It made Kenny angry—hence the group huddle.

There were about seven of them left who’d both known Jackie and who still used the gym on the regular. Eight if you included Fogwell.

Nine if you included Matty.

Jesus fuckin’ help them.

This dumbass hipster kid didn’t even know who Matty was. Most of the newcomers didn’t. He was just some bright, perky blind guy to them. He was Center-Left-Second-Back bag. That was his bag.

And he was good.

He was a curiosity to the newcomers and the people pressed against glass—one of a handful of middle-weights in a sea of heavyweights. He didn’t look like everyone else. He wasn’t packing muscle like everyone else. He was lithe and coiled and looked, honestly, a little out of place to folks who didn’t know the gym as Home #2.

He was interesting to the newcomers mostly because he was 100% Fogwell’s favorite. Fogwell doted on him by ribbing him and bullying him viciously, by bumping into him and throwing him off mark left and right, and all the while, Matty just beamed.

The newbies thought he got preferential treatment because he was blind. But that wasn’t it. Matty got treated that way because that was how his grandpa told him he loved him.

---

Before Jake and Carlos and Omar and Matty, Jack had been Fogwell’s favorite up-and-coming rookie.

It had been no secret. Well. To most people.

Jack had been horrified when he’d found out.

No one wanted to be Fogwell’s favorite. That’s how you went pro whether you liked it or fucking not.

Jack had pleaded with Kenny for hours to take his place, but there was nothing that could be done. Jackie was the youngest and Jackie had come from a shit home life and Jackie would do anything and everything Fogwell told him to do because he was just that kind of sweet and respectful.

Fogwell could smell Jack’s lack of a father-figure on him like Chanelle No. 5.

He could smell it miles away.

Jack had actually been at the gym before Rudy had joined up. He’d been around since he was about seventeen. He’d come in on the heels of his big brother who wanted to go pro.

It quickly became apparent to Fogwell that Tom Murdock didn’t have what it took to be a boxer. He was just a bully. But that little brother of his, Tom’s punching bag, now he had some talent. He had the diligence and respect that the game, in Fogwell’s opinion, was severely lacking.

So Fogwell did what he did best and drove a wedge slowly between Tom and baby Jackie, separating the two of them so that he could get his mitts on Jackie and do something with him before Tom and his junkie sister took Jackie down with them.

Rudy had met Jack soon after Jack’s eldest brother had been arrested for murdering his wife and stepdaughter.

The kid was a wreck. He’d just turned 18.

He didn’t talk. He just fought and fought and fought until he cried and cried and cried. All on his own, from 5pm to 1am, at Center-Left-Second-Back.

Fogwell let him.

Fogwell came over to put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed when he finally dropped from exhaustion.

It was hard to watch.

The older guard at the time had bared their teeth and clenched their jaws as Jackie had pummeled his heart out against that bag.

No one could help him.

Everyone but Rudy, at that time, had seen the man he’d walked into the gym with. They’d seen this coming a mile away. And over a few days of that, it become clear to Rudy that Jack didn’t have a home to go back to that didn’t scream at him from morning until night. At that time, the gym for him was Home #1.

---

It took about a year, but Rudy eventually got to know this weeping, heartbroken boy from the worst side of the Kitchen.

Rudy learned from the others about the Murdocks.

They were sinners and drunkards and addicts, word had it. The police were always in and out of their rooms, taking one of the five kids or one of the parents to jail for some damn reason or another. Neighbors wasted their hard-earned money on phone calls to the police for domestic disputes and violence and so on and so on. Everyone on the streets said to be careful of the Murdocks, especially them boys.

They got the devil in ‘em.

But not Jackie, Rudy learned.

He was shy, bless him. He wasn’t suited to those others’ kind of life.

Rudy actually had felt, for the second time in his life, strong brotherly feelings around this kid. He and his own sister didn’t get on until someone threatened the other. Then it was no-holds-barred, bear-like feelings. Just them against the world.

But Jack was different. He had puppy eyes with a constant black one and perpetually chapped lips. It had never occurred to him that he could spend a buck buying chapstick. It had never occurred to him that he could have friends that he didn’t have to smile at until his face hurt.

He didn’t really get what it meant to have relationships with other people and for the first six months of their acquaintance, Jack refused to meet Rudy’s eye, much less say more than five words to him.

He was more than respectful.

He was skittish.

The other guys, who were happy to haze Rudy, warned him that he if so much as looked at that kid, Fogwell would break his bones and his career would be over before it even started.

It had definitely turned into a kind of spite thing.

Rudy had absolutely been that kind of shithead back then.

He’d started by offering to hold Jack’s bag while he worked out his aggression. That had been a mistake.

He’d caught Fogwell snickering at him about ten minutes into it, after trying and failing that whole time to find a way to plant his feet that would let him actually hold onto the bag.

Jack had noticed.

Jack had gotten flustered and freaked out bad enough that Rudy had been forced to leave him be or else he’d hyperventilate or go hide in the backroom in a cupboard or something in self-flagellation.

It took some practice and some muscle, but they got there in the end.

Jack was a great sparring partner because he did not fucking go down. It was like trying to fight a pine tree sometimes. He would, could, and did take hit after hit without batting an eye.

And when it was his turn for offense?

Rudy was well aware that he’d signed up to be a human punching bag, but this? This was a lot.

Fogwell critiqued the fuck out of Jack’s everything.

His form.

His posture.

His aim.

His drive.

His commitment.

His tape.

His fucking hair.

Jack thought he was like that with everyone.

Rudy loved that kid like a brother, but he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. Not by far.

That had become more clear when Kenny joined their mottley crew and, aggravatingly sharp, had taken to teasing Jack. That was more frustrating for Kenny than anyone else because Jackie didn’t get a single joke or jibe.

No, Jack didn’t know Seinfield. Or Friends. Or Charlie’s Angels. No, he didn’t know anything about cars. No, he didn’t know about physics or chemistry or math. What the fuck was English lit? Wait, what’s the difference between books and literature?

God.

Bless.

That.

Kid.

He wasn’t unintelligent, he just wasn’t academic.

He was sweet about it, though. The youngest of five, he had no choice but to be sweet because all his siblings called him hopeless and useless and stupid, so he had to be something and so pretty it was.

Rudy had never met someone who performed so well under pressure and around two years into their friendship and, suddenly privy to the full extent of Jack’s honestly horrific, borderline surreal upbringing, he finally got it.

But then along came Grace.

The Lord’s agent herself.

Jack was a good Catholic boy who saw a nun and dropped his eyes, but for some reason, this novice caught his gaze and he was gone.

He got dopey and dreamy the night after she and some friends had snuck out in their novice habits to see a load of guys in desperate need of the Lord hitting on each other.

It was tooth-decaying the way Jack swooned for that girl.

Her name was Margaret, she told him saucily at the church one street over from the one he’d grown up attending, but he could call her ‘Grace.’

Jack banged his melon on a locker a week later at the gym and the jolt make him realize that he was in love with her.

He cracked his head a second time with everyone watching him in a mix of pity, exhaustion, and indulgence and then scurried off to the bathroom to hyperventilate over a urinal.

“Someone go keep Baby M from drowning in a sink,” Horace Whalin, a professional beast at the start of his career, had sighed.

Everyone had looked right at Rudy.

---

Grace was the worst thing that could ever have happened to Jack.

Everyone at the gym knew it. Fogwell hated that girl with a cold passion.

She made Jack stupider than usual. Bolder than ever.

She made him think and made him question things and like, that was probably a good thing in terms of Jack’s life experience and mental health, but in terms of boxing?

Not good.

Fogwell was openly dreaming up schemes to break them up the day Jack came tearing into the gym and announced that he was getting married.

It took everything in Rudy not to start cackling right then and there. The entire gym’s necklines bulged with the effort not to fucking laugh. Fogwell went silent and blank.

He’d waved Jack in close and and when he came—because he would always come to Fogwell, no matter what—the old man set a hand on Jack’s shoulder and told him that if he brought that woman into the gym he’d kill him.

Jack stared up at him and said that they were getting married in a church, Coach. Why would he bring her to the gym?

At that point, it would have taken a saint not to laugh and the gym was full of only sinners.

---

Grace was the worst thing that had ever happened to Jack, but Matty was by far, the best thing.

Fogwell, after being vindicated upon Jack and Grace’s abrupt and tragic separation, found that Matt could be used as a motivator for his up-and-comer.

Matty, of course, played the part beautifully.

He was unfairly cute with those delicate, whispy red locks and them big hazel eyes. He was bubbly and chatty. An unrelenting troublemaker. Just a barrel of laughs.

Fogwell took to letting Jack put Matty’s carrier on a bench next to the ring or on one of the metal bleachers around the mats in the weights and sparring room. He found that if Matty started whining or crying, that Jack got twice as motivated to finish whatever task was at hand with maximum efficiency.

Matt was the best thing to ever happen to Jack’s boxing career, truly.

He also immediately became the gym’s darling because all the veterans there at that point were dads. Rudy himself had had his first girl Tina the year before, but unlike Jack, the rest of them had childcare arrangements and the money to maintain them.

---

It was just natural for people to gravitate towards the baby. Out of paternal instincts, yeah, but also because Matty was a source of constant entertainment.

He called everyone uncle until he was seven and he needed to be negotiated with to leave Fogwell be until he was nine. Fogwell didn’t mind him. Fogwell had unwittingly adopted him.

Matty didn’t meet his own uncles and grandpa. Jack couldn’t bear that. He took Matty to meet Bill, Jack’s eldest brother—the one who’d killed his wife—in jail and afterwards had been heart-broken and anxious for days.

Grace did not approve, it turned out.

Grace, who went by Maggie at that point, and who had given up her rights to be the mother of Jack’s child, remained one of Jack’s closest and dearest friends.

They still loved each other, and in Fogwell’s very correct opinion, that was nothing but trouble. He snatched Matty at every opportunity and informed him softly but firmly that he was not going to fall in love with a nun when he was big or there would be consequences.

Matt seemed to have come to understand this rule over time, but he never seemed to put together pieces as to why Fogwell was so insistent about it.

---

When Jack turned up murdered, everyone at the gym decided that it was their fault.

It was surreal.

Unbelieveable.

He’d been right there, just fine, laughing and smiling the day before. Rudy had held his bag and Jack had told him to tell the girls and Mel that he missed them.

And, in a moment of crushing realization back then, Rudy had understood the implications of those words and then remembered how good Jack had always been about smiling at people.

He knew how to make himself seem okay and unimportant. He knew how to fade into the background.

Fogwell took it hard.

He blamed himself for not recognizing how bad things had gotten at home for Jack and Matty. He blamed himself for not booking him for more jobs, for pushing him harder and harder on his form lately.

Matty was taken away by social services and his absence from the table at the gym the next day finally brought out the tears that Rudy hadn’t been able to let fall.

He tried.

He tried, he did.

Over the years, Matty had become a brother to Tina, Angie, and Penelope. He fit right in that two-year gap between Tina and Angie. Rudy had him over when Jack worked and Jack had the girls when Mel needed a break from the screaming and crying. And really, by then, everyone’s kids were everyone’s at the gym.

It wasn’t a matter of who belonged to who, it was more of a matter of when someone belonged to someone.

Rudy tried to get custody or at least foster rights. Mel gave herself an ulcer over it, trying to think of how to arrange things to make their home safe for Matt. Trying to think of how to make space for him. He could share a room with Tina. They were still young. They probably wouldn’t mind after some growing pains. But social services said that that wasn’t possible. Matt was too high-risk for them. They didn’t have enough experience with ‘his type of child.’

Which was bullshit.

Matt wasn’t high-risk, Matty was traumatized and scared and with people he didn’t know, who didn’t know him.

That was what made him high-risk.

He knew Rudy and Mel’s house. He knew their girls. He knew their neighborhood.

Still, nothing.

Fogwell himself tried. Shocked the shit out of everyone at the gym, but Social services sadly shook their heads.

By then, Matt had been placed out already.

---

Matt disappeared for five years. Just vanished completely. There was no sight of him until one day, Tina came home and said that ‘oh yeah, I saw Matty today’ while playing with her food at the dinner table.

Rudy and Mel had set down their forks.

Tina sighed and said that he was taller now, but he didn’t look good.

He looked sick, she said. With dark rings around his eyes and broken sunglasses. He’d been sleeping, leaning against the side of some stairs out in his school uniform at the Catholic highschool a few blocks away.

She’d poked at her chicken and then set down her fork and excused herself.

Rudy stroked her hair that night as she cried into her pillow for her lost brother.

---

Matt was, by fifteen, a troubled kid.

Rudy heard shouting one day from Clinton Church and stepped out to see what was happening. He was shocked to see that familiar ginger mop struggling in the arms of two cops, swearing that if these people took him back to wherever he’d come from, that he’d kill himself. He’d do it. Don’t try him.

The priest was called.

Matt was forced down to the ground and handcuffed, still fighting.

It was--it was a whole lot to see. Kenny swore softly behind him and Bert left them to go back inside. He went to the bathroom and didn’t join them out on the mats for a while.

---

Fogwell decided around then that enough was enough.

He went to the church and asked if he could borrow Matt for a while. He needed some help getting his accounts together and he knew Matt was a bright kid. Giving him a little work experience in a familiar and disciplined setting would be good for him.

But Matt wasn’t there.

---

The hospital didn’t allow anyone to visit Matt. He apparently hadn’t earned the privilege of visitors from anyone who wasn’t on his care team.

Rudy felt numb at the front desk.

Jack’s boy had tried to kill himself. He’d warned them all that he would do it.

He’d apparently screamed himself hoarse that he wanted to be with his dad in the ground.

He was still screaming.

This wasn’t the first time he’d done any of this, Rudy came to learn through a few whispered conversations with some nuns from St. Agnes.

Grace had found him after the three attempts the nuns knew of. This last one was just bad enough that she couldn’t bring him back from the edge.

Grace’s eldest younger sister had committed suicide. Grace had found her and then left home immediately become a novice. To find her own son as she’d once found her sister was cosmic and divine cruelty—enough that even Fogwell shook his head and said it just wasn’t right.

---

The first time Rudy saw Matty after the whole situation, he looked exactly as Tina said he did. Tired. With dark circles. Thin. His clothes threatened to fall off of him. They were threadbare and had holes in them here and there.

Matty didn’t talk.

He moved his head around a lot and jerked when anyone spoke to him or brushed against him, and he scrambled back and tripped sometimes if he was touched directly.

It was like looking at a smaller, thinner version of Jack all those years ago—this time with tightly bound wrists and a hospital bracelet that looked like it had been stretched and torn and chewed on.

Fogwell asked Matt if he thought he could do something with the accounts.

Matt said nothing.

Fogwell gave him a box of receipts and bits and bobs of payment cards and IOUs and Matt had frowned and put his hand into the box to touch its feathery contents. He’d lifted his face up in Fogwell’s direction and sneered.

“You can’t seriously live like this,” he’d said in a voice that almost brought tears to Rudy’s eyes. He’d heard Kenny clear his throat behind him.

---

Matty was the smartest person Rudy had ever met.

He set Fogwell’s accounts into order in an afternoon and then he fucked off for a few days, only to come back and digitize the whole thing after making the Big Man himself sit with him and read everything out individually to him as punishment for his nasty, twentieth-century ways.

Matt was disgusted with Grandpa’s living conditions.

He banged into every object in the backroom and swore like a sailor, loud enough that the folks hitting shit in the front room could hear him.

It was hard not to laugh.

“WHY?” Matt finally raged at Grandpa. “WHY. WHY. WHY?”

Grandpa shrugged.

Matt flailed at him in agitation at the lack of verbal answer and told him to get into the fartherest corner of the room and to get a pen, they were going to organize.

Matt was the reason that Fogwell’s Gym had survived for long enough to become a tourist trap.

Matt put every document in that place in order, ready for an audit. He made computer systems for payments and receipts and direct debits. He singlehandedly bullied Fogwell into the new century and made him get a card machine.

He bitched and moaned and belly-ached until Fogwell had interviewed a handful of tax people with actual, non-criminal reputations and picked one and once he was done with all that, Matt harrassed him to invest in a deep clean for the place and to make it accessible by ADA guidelines—the whole nine yards.

Matt, at fifteen, breathed new life into Fogwell’s Gym and it was kind of amazing how the place went from barely hanging on to a decent business once more.

---

After that, Matt seemed to be doing a lot better.

He didn’t have any more foster home placements. He didn’t try to hurt himself again. He decided, instead, that he was going to graduate highschool. He’d failed a fuckload of classes, though. Rudy found him despairing in the backroom over these and settled in across from him and asked to see the reports.

They weren’t good.

Matty’s teachers wrote constantly that Matt was extremely bright, but failed to participate in class or turn pretty much anything in for a grade. He slept in class. He seemed dazed. He didn’t ask for help or give any indication that he needed it.

His assigned para said that she found him challenging to work with. He was resistant to questions and seemed to be angry or, at best, uninterested in her speaking to him.

He was way behind.

Rudy had tapped the reports against the table back there and had taken a deep breath.

“It’s okay,” he told Matt. “We’ve got two years. We can make this work.”

And Matty’s head had jerked up from the table.

“We?” he’d asked in a small voice.

---

Matt really, really struggled with high school. Not because he wasn’t smart enough, but because his experience was so wildly different from other kids. He didn’t go home like they did. He went to St. Agnes’s. He didn’t play video games, he read books. He didn’t smoke cigarettes or joints. He didn’t drink. He was under constant surveillance.

He was bullied. Relentlessly.

Fogwell was quietly furious when Matt came in a few times a week to type away at the desk, inputting receipts for the new secretary to deal with later. Matt was always hurt. Always fighting.

He got his classwork done out of spite, seemingly, but then went home to the orphanage and got harrassed the whole way.

He fought his peers like the devil himself.

It was…

There was…

Something not quite right with him.

---

Bert pointed out when Matt was seventeen that he didn’t always use his stick like other blind folks. He forgot it sometimes and wandered around the gym like anyone else.

He didn’t trip over anything or keep fingers touching the wall like he usually did in other places.

They all chocked it up to him having grown up in the place.

Matt asked Fogwell to let him train.

Center-left-second-back.

That was Jack’s bag.

That was his son’s bag.

The veteran boxers all cycled through teaching Matt how to box. He knew—they all knew Matt already knew how, but there was always shit to learn.

Except that sometimes there wasn’t?

Matt seemed to already know everything that they taught him, including the nit-picky, little things. He listened to their descriptions, let them manipulate his hands and arms and hips, and then did what they asked immediately and with perfect form.

It was eerie.

It just wasn’t right. There was just something about it that wasn’t right. Rudy couldn’t put his finger on it.

---

Matt graduated highschool the year after Tina and it was only when Rudy saw the draft of the commencement program slip out of his bag on one of the benches that Rudy realized that Matty hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

He picked up the program while Matt was attacking his bag and considered it, then did what was done in the gym and handed the program off to Fogwell who, in a booming voice, told Baby M to get the fuck over there, front and center.

Matt clung to his bag in terror at the sound. He, unlike his daddy, had the good sense to be reluctant to follow Fogwell’s orders. Eventually, with his tail between his legs, he skulked over and had his nose shoved in the program.

He pawed at it when Fogwell made him acknowledge it and mumbled something about not going.

Which was absurd.

“It’s not a big deal,” Matt said. “I’m not valedictorian or anything. It’s just highschool. And no one’s got time to go anyways, so what’s the point if it’s just me?”

God, this kid.

---

Matt’s graduation was very Catholic. Far more Catholic than Tina’s had been, but when Rudy looked over his shoulder, he was pretty sure that even a school this Catholic hadn’t been prepared for the influx of nuns hurrying down from Clinton’s church, all bustling and excited about young Matthew actually getting his diploma.

Between those four (aw, Grace. Look at you trying to play it smooth) and the seven boxing families who’d shown up, Matt was embarrassed to the point of tears. He’d hidden behind his mortarboard for the thirty minutes it took for people started calling folks up on stage.

He didn’t want to come out to take any pictures afterwards, but Tina wasn’t letting that happen. Her sisters leapt on board with the program and Rudy had managed at least one picture of the four of them smiling. Even better, he had one of Matt trying desperately to keep a smile while Fogwell stood stiffly next to him in stone-faced approval.

---

Matty was the first in the gym’s kid’s generation to graduate college, and then he was the only one to go on to law school.

It was only at that big graduation that Rudy finally saw Matt beaming like a loon—like he had up at Jack as a baby, but this time at the long-haired, chubby guy next to him.

This, legend had it, was the Roommate.

The one Matt refused to speak about to anyone at the gym.

Period.

At all.

There was no discussion.

That is, until he was forced by Fogwell standing menacingly over him in silent demand for a hug, to introduce them all to Foggy.

Foggy Nelson.

And then, just like that. It was exactly Jack all over again.

Veins bulging as everyone tried desperately not to laugh at Fogwell’s face at the realization that Matty had gone out and found a better, nicer Fog-person to be friends with.

---

Foggy Nelson—Edward Nelson from the hardware store’s son—was not fucking good enough for Matty, Fogwell decided. He’d begun a stoic campaign to introduce Matt to every available boxer’s son and daughter in the city in the hopes that a little nudge would get Matty away from all them conniving lawyer-folk. That was all fine and well with Matt because Matt, they’d all learned after a few years in his company again, was a horrendous flirt.

God, this boy.

Incorrigible.

He flirted with Tina and Angie and Penelope and got slapped every time.

He flirted with Bert’s daughter Becka.

He flirted with Becka’s husband.

He flirted with Kenny’s son’s best friend at the son’s wedding.

He flirted with the new secretary’s sister-in-law.

He was completely unstoppable.

Kenny approved.

But Kenny also asked Matt pointedly if he and his roommate had worked things out yet and that sent Matt scowling and shuffling off to go hide behind Fogwell, wherever he was, for emotional support.

---

Matt was Daredevil.

He had to be.

Everyone in the gym suspected this.

He was too good at fighting. To flexible. Too sturdy and relentless and angry to be anyone else. They all recogized his shoulders in those little blips of videos people posted online. They recognized how close he got to people from the way he get up in his bag’s imagined face.

He had some kind of superpower—some kind of 360 degree awareness was the best Rudy could describe it.

He felt like he remembered Jack freaking out about something like this a million years ago. Nattering on about super-senses in the aftermath of the accident.

Fogwell was the one who’d brought it up again after he’d noticed that Matt liked to come in at night and spar on his own.

One time, just once, he’d left one of the security cameras on, concerned that Matty might get mugged in the night on his own there.

But Matty wasn’t getting mugged anytime soon.

No, for real.

Matt was…maybe something a little beyond them.

The video Fogwell had shown the older guys before deleting it and telling everyone to mind their own fucking business had shown Matt throwing his weight at the bag—throwing legs and fists—in complicated, almost choreographed movements that spoke of lethal intent.

He moved like a weasel. Like a predator.

Like a devil.

God knew where he’d learned those moves. The boy had lived a lot of life in those few years he’d fallen off of the gym’s radar. There was no telling who he’d met or how he’d learned to be as he was, but things made a lot more sense after that.

Jackie had had a devil in him. It only made sense that his dramatic-ass kid had one, too.

Matty had made something more of himself than his daddy. In so many other things, but in this, too.

Fogwell’s Gym was protected. It was home to a devil in disguise.

---

The hipster Jack-fan appeared with baby Henry a few more times before Bert asked him if he knew that his hero’s kid, who’d lived the life baby Henry was currently living, was actually a regular at the gym.

Hipster-kid gaped and fell over himself trying to ask Bert if he could meet the guy.

Bert smirked. And then waved across the place over to where Matt had just slithered in with absurd orange sneakers that he was very proud of. He was clearly on the hunt to go show Fogwell so that he could be disgusted.

He froze when Bert called his name.

The hipster’s jaw dropped.

“Matty, come tell this man about your daddy,” Bert said.

Matt stared.

Then made a sad, aborted gesture with his free hand that said that he had very important annoyances to make of himself, so could this maybe wait?

“You’re—you’re--?” the hipster stammered.

“Matt Murdock,” Matt said hurriedly. “Great to meet you? You’re the one with the kid, right? Congrats. Have either of you seen Fogwell?”

The hipster blinked.

“Uh?” he said. “Not today?”

Matt scowled.

“He’s not escaping these,” he said, tapping his way angrily back to the door. “I got him a matching set. No one is escaping them.”

The gym at large watched him stalk back out the door, tapping away furiously, no doubt on the way down the block to Fogwell’s house.

“That’s Matt Murdock?” the hipster asked.

“Man, I thought he’d be taller,” another newbie said.

“Kid, that is the least of your problems when it comes to Matt Murdock,” Bert laughed. “Now, all of you, back to work. This ain’t a dog and pony show. Go on.”

---

#daredevil #fic #ficlet #jack murdock

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thunders-rumblings · 2 years

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GONEbutNOTforgotten

gone, not forgotten, memory tatted in my brain this the track where i'll make magic so we'll attach it to your name the name they dragged up in the mud, i can't really explain it but all your passion, your best attributes, they travel thru my veins feel em' in the plasma in my blood, they bangin' gavels cause they judge anything they don't understand, for example an honest man The king's presence riles the peasants, Gods walk among common man How fast I'll go down that rabbit hole when I visit Wonderland late for an important date, stuck in limbo, stagnant waste the hottest topic since the tropics, since yo ass lacks imagina-sh-un That's a bit aggravatin' when you factor in the badass rating Plus add in the savage nature of my tracks, then you subtract the haters I'm a self aware and admitted addict, former dragon chaser A magnet for any kinda madness, lurkin' in the shadows waitin' Graduated to jack the ripper status, started out back in the day as a major Pain in the ass, fake it til you make it, catch you later Casted in the role of chaos, evil scientists energy People been tryin' to finish me like a pair of twins intertwined with their sentencing You stupid thinkin' that you could take B, when you scared to battle me Great minds think alike but the best communicate telepathically Laughing maniacally as lightning flashes in the background behind me Adjectives I'd be comfortable with as they describe me, nasty and grimy Passionate, timeless, one of a kind, one in a million, straight in a billion, b Had to break through the glass that hit my head as I was scrapin' that ceiling, free At last, open the cage, notebook engaged, focus the rage so it flows on the page Go through these stages, like a teen goes thru a phase, I never know if I'll stay For a moment or maybe most of the day, sometimes it lasts for a week Perhaps if I keep on mastering ink on the canvas, I'll keep spittin' heat matchin the beats Rinse, lather, repeat, never wastin' a fresh epiph-en-y set to rhythm Better take it and put it on a record, education thru repetition Better believe that Brandon envisions himself as a man on a mission You see me as a cancer living inside of my family, law had my brother remanded to prison No wonder he struggled to manage with freedom, enough abandonment issues To damage a kid who stands up for his crew, backin' his people Voice for the muted, man for the whispered screams Damned if he doesn't, damned if he did too, seems Like a double edged blade, that's what he's grippin' Squeezin' it tightly inside of his palms as his blood gradually drips thru The cracks in his fist, flooding into the puddle below Where ever he'd go, always struggled with pickin' whoever he chose To trust between the angel who put him in danger Or the favored winner, the devil you know The lie you can live with, mistakes that you made The secret you may have agreed to take to ya grave, that way you'll be safe How tangled the web is whenever we weave it With threads of deceipt, would you ever believe it If I said I was deep into Christians who'd teach the lessons of Jesus I feel like I could float via telekinesis, but ya'll wouldn't ever believe it You'd swear it's a CG Edited piece of footage if I videotape it Or a more practical trick in your face but the shit is so basic Either way, I'll never win so I'm sayin' there isn't a point for the effort I'd make To meditate a second before levitatin' get a taste of your medication Sick of never being takin' seriously since forever ages ago "Brandon's pathetic, baby you will never make it" I hope the day that my vengeance awaits me Is close enough to taste on the tip of my tongue Cause I keep having dreams about getting it done But each ends as I wake up feeling hollow and empty Depression be finding ways to leave me blind to my blessings, ashamed

Envious of any hatin' bitches straight up livin' to the fullest While I'm sittin' grippin' a pistol trigger, pull it send the fuckin' bullet Through my temple, save the optimism for them bitches in different situations Wish I could trade for one day, me and Bill Gates switchin' places

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madlilsongbird · 3 years

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Watching The Amazing Spidernan movies so that I’m all caught up before No Way Home. Will add my thoughts as I have them. Note I am not some big Spider-Man fan nor have I read the comics so if my thoughts sound kinda stupid they probably are.

First movie:

That’s a good trick with the broom. Making a mental note as we speak.

Actually seeing Peter say goodbye to his parents is horrible and I would like to never experience it again

SALLY FIELD IS AUNT MAY?! Why does this one have the good cast? (not good as in better but good as in more well known)

The sexual tension in “good morning flash…good morning Peter” (this is a joke I’m not shipping him with his bully)

Jesus roid rage much?

Shut your blinds! I don’t know who would be looking in your window at this exact moment but close them anyway!

First careful, you never know who is watching what you search (when did I become this person)

Second…curt connors is ableist.

Poor Rodrigo Guevara

Oh internalised ableism. And that is the only comment I will make going forward because my disabilities do not include limb difference and I dont want to overstep.

Stop following the man, you are not subtle…wait wtf how’d he do that?!

This is where he gets his powers right?

Okay but when would 5 men make that much of a fuss over a woman that only 1 of them seems to know?

Same. (This is in reference to smashing the alarm clock)

Oh my god is it really necessary to show all the different kinds of spider bites.

Actually just going back to the internalised ableism thing…he is allowed to feel whatever type of way about his own disability that is his right. But insinuating that all disabled people are weak and wanting to breed out the weakness is eugenics and just kinda gross. THIS is the final comment I will make on the matter.

No but seriously he is way more aggressive than regular teen boy aggressive so either he’s on something or he’s overcompensating for something

The way he looks at him doe (again all jokes am not shipping flash and Peter)

Why is this so awkward? And not like teens navigating a crush awkward just genuinely awkward. I feel no chemistry between them.

I like the song, it’s an interesting choice for this scene but I like it.

Stop does uncle Ben die now? Like I know uncle Ben dies at some point but I was really kinda hoping he just wouldn’t in this iteration. I was going for a ninth doctor moment “just this once everybody lives”

MOTHERFUCKER

God Sally is incredible

Don’t show me moments of Flash being human I might accidentally start shipping them for real and that simply can’t happen.

Oooh he’s a fashion designer

I just really enjoy how he takes the piss out of his victims? Arrests?

Is Gwen aware that the school nurse can’t cure everything? Both legally and just like generally doesn’t have the knowledge to cure everything. She suggests going to the nurse a lot.

This family gives me bad vibes

This is a long movie…it’s not even half way through

Well that’s one way to tell her

NOT GEORGE FOYET!

I think with what I remember of SpiderTobey and what I know of SpiderTom, Andrews Spider-Man is definitely better with the people he’s rescuing. Smoother, good bedside manner.

His sons name is Jack. Why does that make me angry?

So he’s just not gonna rescue the other people hanging off the bridge?

It’s almost poetic that the son of the man tried to stop him the first time will be the one to stop him now

Now how is he getting enough power in the sewer

No means no Peter

Does she die in this one or the next one? I don’t imagine her dying will help captain stacey see him as a good guy

Stan 🥺

This movie is exhausting and I don’t know if I mean that in a good way or a bad way.

MoThEr HuBbArD aRe YoU sErIoUs

He managed to get three whole words out and you didn’t think to ease up on the trigger a little to hear what those words might be?

She’s very clever and I will be sad to see her go

That wasn’t her scream. Or it was but from a different take.

Foyet about to be coming in clutch

I’m going to cry.

He’s so ugly. Some lizards are really cute but lizard + human, kinda gross looking.

Well shit. I didn’t know that happened. I guess what I said about him being upset with Peter about Gwen is irrelevant. Unless it isn’t, like if you believe in the afterlife, imagine how pissed he’s gonna be when Gwen arrives.

He finally got the eggs 🥺

As someone who’s boyfriend at the time didn’t go to her fathers funeral I feel ya Gwen. I mean I don’t care now but at the time it sucked.

Dr Connors was just in a silly goofy mood. He seems to show genuine care for the boy (this is mostly sarcasm).

Second movie

Oh we’re going back to peters dad.

How do they have access to a private jet?

Miss Honey is badass

Ngl I’m actually quite relieved they both died before the plane crashed. Stil devastating though.

Okay so this is first up on the list of potential mystery villains in No Way Home…he looks like a tool.

HeLLo PeDeStRiAnS

He really just let Spider-Man put his hand on his tongue. Sir do you know where his hand has been? Not to mention just in general the feeling of spandex on your tongue. I feel ill.

No respect for the proper care of plutonium.

Please don’t ever say “come to daddy” again 😂

I’m kinda sad Jamie Fox becomes a villain, his character seems kinda sweet so far from the 2 seconds I’ve seen of him

You mean to tell me he missed his girlfriend’s fathers funeral AND her valedictorian speech?!

Stan x2 🥺

Because you can’t lose me you’re going to lose me? 😂

I love her jacket

Why are they still pretending like she doesn’t know?

I may have spoken to soon about Max

See I would be speeding up daddy’s death if he told me he’d passed down a genetic disease and just decided not to tell me.

Friendship.

Okay max is still a little bit nutty but you gotta feel bad for the guy. He must’ve been so scared.

Don’t smile that’s not cute, if he was a regular boy you’d file a restraining order.

Oh I see Spider-Man is gonna fight him which will make him turn and become the “bad guy” whether he will actually be a bad guy is still unknown.

This scene is actually kinda just making me angry (the time square scene)

Cops suck man. Peter was talking him down just fine.

Did nobody teach these people not to touch metal when there’s electricity about.

Interesting that I didn’t pick up any chemistry from them in the first movie weren’t they an actual couple for a while?

Another good song with an interesting placement

I’m sorry did the caller ID not say Mary Parker? How was it Harry on the phone?

Run Gwen!

This version of Harry is kinda creepy I’m sure the actor is swell but the character is terrifying. Original version Harry was swell whereas the actor is…

“Maybe everyone has a part of themselves they hide” gives him the eye

This movies shorter or at least it feels shorter

An excellent show of what happens when you tell a rich daddy’s boy no for the first time.

This makes me very sad. She’s so excited for the possibility of Oxford.

As much as Harry disturbs me, I want him to burn his entire team.

His daddy really did love him!

I think it’s mostly his eyes, his behaviour can be explained by trauma (why I find Harry creepy)

Okay most of his behaviour. The taking joy in killing people that’s just him being nutty and not a trauma response.

This is fucked up. And where is Peter? he is off chasing a girl who has broken up with him twice now.

PLANES NEED THE POWER!

I really like SpiderAndrew, the movies are fine but as a character I thoroughly enjoy him

Sorcerers apprentice who?

Captain Stacy can’t blame him! She’s clearly stubborn as hell and her own free woman

I quite literally stopped breathing (in reference to the almost plane crash)

Is this why they made it Gwen and not MJ so that he could kill her and be an actual bad guy? From my little knowledge of the comics and what I’ve seen from the movies Harry would never hurt MJ so it had to be someone else important to Peter but not super important to him for him to a real bad guy

I like that Harry actually looks like a goblin.

What was the disease he’s supposed to have?

This poor family. I know I said they gave me bad vibes in the first movie but nobody deserves this.

He looks less like a tool with his suit on…but only slightly less

Baby you better get back behind that baracade!

Nobody talk to me I’m very emotional. This child looks very much like a magical mix of all 3 of my brothers put together and seeing him stand there so brave but so scared is doing something to me.

Final thoughts:

So I think SpiderAndrew might be a close second favourite for me. I like the relationships of the original the most, the comedy of the mcu version the most but this one was like a nice in between. Im a little disappointed there won’t be a third not cos I think I would have enjoyed it just cos the original had 3 movies, the mcu version will have at least 3 movies and this one is left out with 2. Don’t think I would have loved Shailene Woodley as MJ though so I dunno. I think the only thing I would have wanted from a third movie is to know who fedora guy is…and for Peter and May to acknowledge that they both know that he is Spider-Man. Apart from that it was fine and I now feel fully prepared for No Way Home.

#the amazing spider man #the amazing spider man 2 #the amazing Spider-Man #the amazing Spider-Man 2 #the amazing spider man spoilers #andrew garfield #emma stone #sally field #criminal minds #george foyet #spider man no way home

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willddheartt · 4 years

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26 Days | Wilbur Soot

30 days to fall in love with someone? Sounds easy right? It would be if that person wasn’t so unbelievably annoying in almost every sense.

You’re not sure how you found yourself in this situation, but you were positive there was no backing out now…

Series Warnings: Mostly fluff and angst, and a very poorly constructed enemies to lovers plot.

Word Count: 2264

Masterlist Series Masterlist

26 Days

God, you hated him so much! You wanted to scream it from the top of a building how much you truly hated Wilbur. But you couldn’t

Lately, no matter what you did or said on stream, he always had a problem with it. You had been streaming Minecraft together, on the SMP. You were just messing around, no lore this time. You suggested you made a house together in L’manburg, no matter what you did, the two of you couldn't agree on a material, you wanted to build it out of birch wood and cobblestone but he insisted on dark oak logs and spruce planks would look better together. You gave up and let him have what he wanted because he was so persistent and you knew had it gone on you would have blown up on him in front of all your viewers, and that’s the last thing you needed right now.

You were up late, last night, planning out when you were going to meet up, and just a few hours ago the two of you got along perfectly. Laughing over the phone as you were laying in bed, chatting mindlessly. You wondered what happened between then and now. You and Will planned to meet up in the middle of next week, you were going to drive down to see him and stay at his place. Although you brought up getting a hotel room, Wilbur insisted you stay with him, too tired to resist you agreed, but now you're starting to think maybe getting a hotel room might be for the best.

You and Wilbur ended your streams at the same time, and you sighed as soon as you were sure it was off.

“What?” Wil asked, still in the voice chat. “What was that back there? Why the hell are you so disagreeable?” You let out. Will scoffed, “Me? You’re the one who kept on insisting birch and cobble when that wouldn't even fit in L’manburg!” “Jesus Christ,” You sighed, leaning back in your chair and running your hands down your face. “How in the hell are we going to get through this month?” “Maybe you should stop being so uptight and argumentative.” Wil shot “Fuck you,” You mumbled before clicking out of the chat and leaving your PC.

You needed to get out of the house and away from any form of contact you had with Wilbur and social media. You had been cooped up inside your apartment for close to a week at this point, maybe some fresh air would do you good. You grabbed a jacket and keys before leaving the apartment, leaving your phone charging on your desk. You didn’t want to bring it with you because you didn't even want to think about getting a text or any kind of notification from Wilbur right now, you knew you would have blown up at him completely.

The weather was just beginning to turn nice, the air was warm but the wind still had a slight winter chill to it, although all the snow was long gone Jack Frost still made his lurking presence known. Buildings lined the walls of a small square common area where teens mostly hung out after school and on weekends. The square had a fountain in the middle of it, the water had been shut off for the winter but with the warm temperatures from the last month, it had recently been turned back on. You sat on the ledge of the brick wall around the bottom pool for the fountain, looking at everyone passing through on this nice Wednesday evening. Older couples out for an evening walk, middle-aged business people speed walking their way home from the office, teens scattering the open area, sitting on blankets and laughing in their small groups of friends. You found watching people be interesting, it made you think.

We are all living our own lives at the same time and most of us on this small planet don't even know of one another, or if you know of them you don't know them, you only know their name. It's weird how that works. It's astounding to think about though, what are the chances of meeting exactly who you did, at the time you did, and what a gamble it is for them to stick around.

You had been sitting on the fountain for close to five minutes and when the wind had just started to pick up, sending a slight shiver down your spine. Your mind was clearer now and you were no longer angry with Wilbur, it was stupid what you fought about and as much as it pained you to admit, he was right. You were being stubborn and didn’t take into account the surrounding aesthetic of the area. It was your fault that the disagreement broke out in the first place.

You got home and saw your phone had been basically blown up by notifications from Wilbur, asking if you were really mad at him or if it was for a bit that you took too far, but when you didn't answer he slightly snapped you, asking if you were okay and where you were. You answered immediately, scared he might have been worrying.

Hey! You typed, Sorry I went for a walk after stream, needed to get out.

There you are! He responded within seconds, I got worried.

I’m okay, I left my phone home, needed a break from the internet and things. You know?

You mean you needed a break from me?

You could have sworn, had you been on a video chat with him you would have seen him frowning. You weren't sure what about that message got you, but you found yourself almost with tears in your eyes, you didn't mean to hurt him and you hoped you didn't -what were you talking about. Wilbur didn't mean anything to you, he was just someone you kept in contact with because you were in the same friend group.

No, you typed, not the whole thing at least. I just needed to clear my head, and i'm sorry for being such a dick on stream, I didn't mean to cause that, and you were right about the blocks.

You sighed when hitting the send button, never in a million years did you think you would be telling Wilbur, The Wilbur Soot, that he was right about something. I’m sorry.

Christ Y/N it’s alright, really. Just don't scare me like that again, I was starting to think something bad happened to you.

I didn't mean to scare you, Wil.

You found yourself feeling bad about leaving him in the dark while you were out, you didn't mean to worry him, you just didn't want to hurt him by blowing up at him.

Still call tonight, yeah? He messaged

You nodded, even though he couldn't see you. Yeah, I'd like that very much. I'll call you before I go to sleep.

In the time that you had been a fake couple, you and Will had started calling while you were getting ready to fall asleep in bed, you usually ended up falling asleep before he did, the sound of his raspy sleepy voice lulled you to sleep like there was no tomorrow. You'd wake up in the morning to find that Wil left the call going, you thought it was cute. Sure it might have been some highschool relationship stuff but it was cute nonetheless.

“Hello, Y/N” Will said through the phone, his voice sounding tired and soft “Hi Wil,” You smiled, giggling slightly. Although you had just been on a voice chat with him earlier you loved hearing his voice when he was tired, it sounded like stirring honey into your morning cup of tea, or reading an old book, but specifically an old book that smells of must and age of being stored at the back of your grandparents bookshelf that hadn't been touched in years. “You sound tired,” you mumbled, laying down with the phone resting on your stomach as you looked up at the ceiling. “I am,” He hummed, “You don't sound very tired though, did you drink a lot of coffee today?” He asked “A little more than usual, but I’ll be fine.” You sighed, your voice almost coming out in a whisper. There was something about talking to Wilbur before going to sleep that made you feel soft and loved, but you couldn't put your finger on exactly what it was. Maybe it was the thought of having someone there, or maybe it was just as simple as it was Wilbur and it was you.

“Are you excited for next week?” He asked “Right now it feels too far away to be real,” “Who’s talking here, is it you you or is it us you?” He asked, unsure if your thoughts were good or bad “Its both,” You said. “It feels so far away to me right now, but so close at the same time and a side of me cant wait for it to get here, so we can finally meet in person. But another side of me feels like it’s good that it feels so far away because maybe something will come up and I wont be able to make it and i don’t want to think that or even say it because thats a terrible thing to say but you know how it is.” You rambled, trying your best to explain it to him in a way that he would fully understand the crossroads your mind is at, and not sound like a dick while doing it.

Although you couldn’t see it, you could tell he was nodding along. “How about we make a deal, alright?” He started, “In these night chats, we don’t have to put on the face of the characters we play on stream and through out the day, Alright?” You rolled over to your side, putting an arm under your head and setting your phone on the mattress by your head. “I like that. Deal.” “Okay now tell me how you really feel about all of this”

All the thoughts ran though your head a mile a minute, you didn’t know where to start honestly, you had a lot of thoughts but if you really looked at it and narrowed it down most of them talked circles around the same thing just using different words.

“You promise what ever I say wont hurt you or make you flip out?” You asked “Swear on Tommy’s life.” You could sense the smirk that tugged at the side of his mouth when he said that. “Okay,” You started with a sigh. “So I din’t really know where I stand on it anymore, at the beginning I thought this was going to be insufferable, but now that we’ve gotten into it for a few days, you’re really not that bad, but I’m still on the fence.” “I hope come meeting, your opinion has changed a little bit more. But I do understand where you’re coming from. Its weird being able to talk off stream and such with you and not be fighting twenty-four-seven. It’s nice, I feel like I’m getting to know you better.”

He was right, you had told Wilbur more in the last five days than you had ever in your years of knowing him. You were surprised to find out that he’s actually not as bad as you thought, but you would never tell him that bit.

“Do you have to put on a character when we do those streams and such, Wilbur?” You asked,

“I don’t think I do, and if I do it I don’t know what I’m doing it. It’s just something thats easy to do, I’m not sure how to explain it.” He replied “Do you have to when we’re talking like this?” “No. Not at all, this is 100% me.”

You’re not sure what part hit you the most, when he said he didn’t have to put on a full character mask when showing your ‘relationship’ to the public, or if this Wilbur, the tired one was the real Wilbur who you've been falling asleep with for the past three nights. You weren’t sure what you though you wanted to hear when asking him that but it definitely wasn't what you go, but maybe it was what you needed.

The line went dead for a couple of minutes, you had the radio playing softly in the background to help you sleep better, and Wilbur seemed to be enjoying listening to you breathe through the phone.

“Hey Wil,” You yawned “HM?” He hummed, you could tell he had his eyes closed with the phone by his face, like he did on one of your face time calls the other day. “I’m soon gonna pass-out,” You whispered “Thats alright, go to sleep. Get your rest, I’ll be here when you wake up, love.” He was so sweet it almost made your heart hurt. “Okay” You nodded, but don’t hang up, okay? I like it when you’re here with me when I fall asleep.”

You struggled to keep your eyelids open, feeling heavy and light all at the same time. You felt so light it was as if you could float away but you were too heavy and weighed down to get up and move, even if you absolutely had to move for whatever reason you don't think you could have.

“Goodnight Wilbur, love you.” You mumbled into your pillow “Sweet dreams.”

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hookedonapirate · 4 years

Text

Trick or Treat

A/N: It feels so great to post again. I've been in a writing slump for several weeks now, so I wanted to write something short and sweet to get the writing juices flowing. Thank you @hollyethecurious for your ideas for the premise and @darkcolinodonorgasm for Killian’s costume!

Rated: Teen and up for mature language

“Well, that’s disturbing.” Emma grimaces at the zombie gnome with gnarly teeth, reaching out with dirt and blood covered hands like he's coming out of the ground to get them. Even though it's not real, the graphics are enough to give a kid nightmares.

“That’s so cool, Mommy!”

Well, any kid who’s not her seven-year-old son that is. Henry runs down the sidewalk, his oversized hat falling off his head. He’s a ball of energy most days, but tonight, he’s extra energetic, and he hasn’t even had any candy yet.

“Kid, your hat!” She follows after him, picking up his hat from the winding walkway which is lined with jack-o'-lanterns on each side. But as she passes each one, she’s surprised when she realizes these aren’t just typical jack-o'-lanterns with a mouth, nose and eyes carved into them. No, these are intricately crafted jack-o'-lanterns. One is carved into a haunted house, one is a graveyard full of ghosts, another looks like a skull from afar, but up close, it appears to be carved into long stem mushrooms and grass. Her favorite is the pumpkin carving that mimics a scene from the Nightmare Before Christmas.

Like seriously, who has time to carve out all these pumpkins? And why weren’t the Jack-o'-lanterns on display as she had seen at the Night of 1,000 Jack-o'-lanterns at the Chicago Botanic Garden? Whoever carved these has some ridiculous artistic talent. They are also way too into Halloween, because their yard is all decked out. There are games set up on tables in the yard, skeletons and ghosts hanging from the trees and tombstone yard signs all over.

As she walks up the steps to the house, fake fog sweeps around her feet, the porch is covered in fake cobwebs with large spiders and the porch railing is lined with decorated jars, “potions”, skulls and other Halloween themed knickknacks. She laughs at the potion bottle labeled, “love potion.” When she reaches the door, which is wide open, a group of kids in cute costumes gathered around waiting for treats, she’s expecting the three looney witches from Hocus Pocus to emerge from the house.

When a man in a black top hat, tailcoat and a cane appears through the door with a bowl full of candy, she realizes how wrong she is.

Boy, is she wrong.

Holy shit, he’s gorgeous. His skin looks ghostly white from the makeup on his face and he's wearing a brown curly mustache, but those vivid blue eyes are so very blue, even in the dark and under the hat he’s wearing. She’s afraid those eyes will set her on fire when he looks at her.

“Trick or treat!” the children chorus.

Emma can’t take her eyes off the man as he excitedly hands out candy.

“I love your costume, lassie,” he compliments a little girl who's wearing an Elsa costume.

He has an accent? Holy hell.

The little girl frowns, clearly not understanding what he meant by lassie. “I’m not a dog, I’m Elsa.”

He chuckles, dropping a candy bar into her pumpkin bucket. “My apologies, Elsa. Please don’t blast me with ice.”

“Thank you, mister,” she says cheerfully before scurrying down the steps to meet her parents at the end of the walkway.

“Trick or treat!”

The man looks toward the small voice, seeing Henry approaching him. He grins big and wide, which makes him look much creepier than he already looks in his costume. Creepy, but sexy. “Well, hi there. Captain Hook, I presume?”

Henry nods his head and opens his Halloween sack, using his plastic hook to hold one of the straps.

“Very nice costume, lad. My favorite one so far.”

“Thank you. I made it,” Emma boasts with a smile as she steps behind her son, placing the hat on his head. She’s not normally one to brag, but then again bragging doesn’t normally afford her the opportunity to talk to ridiculously handsome strangers.

The man looks up, and when his eyes finally connect with hers, he completely steals her breath. She was wrong. His smoldering blue eyes don’t set her on fire, but they do make her melt.

And his heavy stare makes her skin tingle.

“You made this lovely costume?”

She waves her hand nonchalantly. “It was easy. Just took a red, long-sleeved shirt, some ribbon and slapped some red felt and white feathers on a straw hat and voila.”

“Very impressive, lass.” He glances at her shirt briefly before returning his eyes to hers. “Did you also make your costume?” he asks, his eyes dancing with mirth. He must have been referring to her red leather jacket and white t-shirt that reads, “This IS my Halloween costume.”

Emma laughs. “No, I bought it on Amazon.”

“Wow, Mom, check this out! Full-size candy bars!” Henry shouts excitedly when the stranger deposits the candy bar into his sack.

Emma tears her eyes from this man’s mesmerizing blue ones to see the full-size Snickers bar Henry’s holding out to show her. “Huh, people actually do give out full-size candy bars.” She looks up at the man. “I’m impressed. Let me guess, you also carved those pumpkins, too?” she asks, pointing to the pumpkins in his yard.

He nods with a small smile. “I did. You’d be amazed by what I can do with these hands,” he says smugly.

Emma wants to roll her eyes, but she can’t deny she very much wishes to find out exactly what he can do with those hands. Instead, she flashes a sarcastic smirk. “So who are you supposed to be, Jack the Ripper?”

He chuckles. “Not quite. I’m a gentleman from the Victorian Era. A devilishly handsome gentleman, may I add.”

She cocks a brow, laughter bubbling in her throat. “If by a devilishly handsome gentleman, you mean creepy.”

He sets down the candy bowl and surprises her when he takes her hand in his and lowers his head, murmuring softly as he looks up at her. “The name’s Killian Jones. And it just so happens, I’m always a gentleman. Not just on Halloween.” His touch sears her skin, then he presses his lips to the back of her hand and it feels like electrical currents are surging through her. Her breath catches, and she’s worried he will notice. Judging by the smirk spreading across her skin, he definitely noticed.

Emma turns her head, looking for her son, whom she spots in the yard playing games with the other kids, their parents supervising them. “I should get back to my son.”

This man actually pouts as he releases her hand. And it’s freaking adorable. “I told you my name and yet you haven't told me yours?”

She bites her bottom lip, contemplating whether she should or not. But then again, what’s the harm? It is a small town, so they’ll probably end up running into each other again at some point. “It’s Emma.”

He grins, making her heart melt. “Nice to meet you, Emma.”

“Likewise.”

He scratches behind his ear, which makes him look less creepy and even more adorable. “I’ve never seen you before. Are you new in town?”

“I’m from Chicago.”

“Well, love, welcome to Storybrooke.”

Oh. Now he’s calling her love? Can this man get any sexier? Jesus Christ. “Thank you.” She gives him a shy smile and turns to head down the steps.

“Wait. Before you go, I have a treat for you, too.”

She spins around, arching her brow. “Oh, that’s okay. Henry will share some of his candy with me.”

He chuckles and shakes his head. “This treat is not for kids.”

Emma gulps. “What kind of treat did you have in mind?” Something salty? Her mind definitely did not go into the gutter there. Okay, it totally did.

He heads inside, then returns not a moment later with a caramel apple.

“A caramel apple?” She almost sounds disappointed. But she’s definitely not.

“Aye, but not just any caramel apple. It’s an adult caramel apple. So make sure you don’t share this with your lad.”

She eyes it suspiciously. “It’s not laced with love potion, is it?”

He chuckles and leans closer, whispering in her ear. “No. But it is laced with cannabis-infused butter.”

Emma smirks as she takes the caramel apple. “Wow, you really go all out on Halloween, don’t you?”

He shrugs. “You should come back around Christmas.”

“Oh God, you’re not one of those people who goes completely crazy with the Christmas lights and the decorations and Santa and his reindeer on the roof, are you?”

He shrugs again, donning a smirk. “Guess you’ll have to wait and find out.”

“Is that an invitation?” Because she's definitely not thinking about inviting him to get high and engage in hot, sweaty sex with her. Not at all.

“Perhaps. Do you and your son enjoy hot cocoa and watching Christmas movies in front of a cozy fireplace?”

She eyes the caramel apple and then glances up at him. “Does Santa enjoy adult cookies with his milk?”

His grin widens, making her heartbeat skyrocket out of her chest. “Aye, then it’s a date.”

Emma rolls her eyes, a smile tugging at her lips. “Not a date.” She doesn’t like the idea of waiting until Christmas to see him again, though.

His face clouds with guilt. Sorry, love, I just didn't see a wedding ring on your finger so I assumed-”

“I'm not married,” she clarifies, her cheeks flushing because of the fact that he was curious enough to check her hand for a ring. “Nor do I have a boyfriend. I'm single.” Very single. She's never been so glad to be single before.

He sighs in relief, which gives her the courage to say what's on her mind and to thankfully change the subject.

“You know, adult cookies aren’t just for Christmas...”

He cocks his brow, and good Lord, she really needs him to stop doing that, because it’s doing things to her breathing and her heart. “No? What other special occasions are they for?”

She shrugs. “Like a Saturday night, say next week when my parents are taking Henry for the weekend.”

His eyes flash with something she can only describe as excitement. Or anticipation, maybe? “But still not a date, right?”

She shakes her head. “Nope, just two adults enjoying their adult cookies.”

He laughs. “Okay, I’ll bring the apple cider.”

“Sounds like a date,” she says accidentally when she had meant to say Sounds like a plan. But she doesn't even bother correcting herself as her cheeks warm with blush. She backs away and manages to rip her eyes from him to turn around and head down the steps. She finds Henry playing a game with the kids and takes his hand, telling him it’s getting late. He leaves with a groan but doesn't make a fuss.

As they leave the yard, Emma turns around, getting one last glimpse of the devilishly handsome Victorian gentleman. He winks and smiles at her, making her heart stutter, and she blushes and walks away as she leaves with her son.

She had doubts when she moved to this small town to start over, but the warm feeling in her chest is telling her perhaps coming to Storybrooke wasn't a bad idea after all.

Tagging a few people who might be interested in reading:

@kmomof4 @teamhook @ilovemesomekillianjones @onceuponaprincessworld @artistic-writer @nikkiemms @snowbellewells @donteattheappleshook @itsfabianadocarmo @searchingwardrobes @melly326

#cs ff #captain swan #halloween

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shirtlesssammy · 4 years

Text

15x15: Gimme Shelter

Then:

Dean used his words to save the world once

Now:

At a food bank community center, three teens dole out food while stressing out about one attendant who’s breaking their cleanliness rules. Connor heads over to talk to the woman, but is stopped by the center’s pastor. The pastor challenges Connor’s motivation. ”We have rules, but we also have spirit too, right?” The pastor tells Connor to lead with compassion, so Connor brings the woman food instead of kicking her out of the building.

Later, Connor walks home. Much like all other cold open walks, this one also involves a solitary alley. He hears someone calling his name. Trying to find the source of the voice, he trips and finds a talking teddy bear, and a metal hook around his neck.

Dean and Sam discuss research. Sam’s found a non-case, while Dean’s hit the jackpot in Atlantic City. Specifically, an unexplained blackout has him thinking that Amara’s enjoying her new gambling addiction on the East Coast.

Cas pops up and thinks he should go with the brothers, but they tell him to stay put and babysit Jack. I say TFW is just better together, but I’m not writing this episode. Hrmph. The brothers are packed and ready to go, but Jack stops them in the war room to ask about the case Sam found.

Sam tells him it’s nothing. Dean encourages Cas and Jack to investigate --to keep Jack busy. Cas seems skeptical, but Dean insists.

Agents Swift and Lovato meet with the local law enforcement to learn more about the case. Sweet Jesus is it cute that Cas continues to use pop-star names. It’s cute that Jack takes after his father with the upside down badge. It’s cute that Jack recognizes the teddy bear and says he has one (Did Cas buy it for him? He has a history of buying stuffed animals for his quasi-children.)

The sheriff tells them about the victim, and how the word ‘Liar’ was carved into him.

Jack posits that this all seems demonic.

Cut to Cas digging into the ground at a crossroads. Time to get some information. Cas buries a picture of himself that Dean took when he was wearing a cowboy hat (Don’t worry, Dean still has his copy, and keeps it safe…. for reasons.) and Jack sets up a social media account. He’s WAY under 13 years old, so he needs a parent’s permission. Cas grants it easily. (Also, ALSO!! ALSO, there are NOT too many cats on the internet. This writing is so OOC, smh.)

A demon appears.

He’s channeling his inner Crowley, and I suddenly miss the bugger for a moment. Zach, the demon, is very bored and desperately wants something to do. He’s not really British and tells the duo that no one's making demon deals right now. Rowena’s of the philosophy that “people will end up where they belong.” Cas realizes their mistake and moves to leave. “Sam was right, it’s not a monster,” Jack laments. “He was half right. Sometimes humans can be the worst kind of monsters,” Cas adds.

At the community center, a woman locks up, and grabs a whole lotta cash from the donation box before she bails. Once outside, she hears a voice call her name. She looks around but sees nothing. She turns back to her car to find a masked individual. A weird editing choice cuts back to her...and commercial.

Cas checks in with the brothers. Dean tells Cas to be wary of those “Hallelujah types” and I’m like, wha? Cas is an ANGEL OF THE LORD. He’s been around the block, Dean. Lol for looking out for your BFF, tho. Also, second awkward moment of the episode when Dean just hangs up on Cas? I’m…

Sam voices his reservations about the whole finding Amara --lying to Amara --killing Amara plan. Say it louder for the brother in the seat next to you, Sam!

(Boris: I’m just going to insert this in the middle of this recap and never mention it again. Can we trust Billie? Is her plan actually something that is GOOD for our TFW 2.0? What is her agenda and does it align with what we want? What if what SHE wants is as equally bad as what Chuck wants? What if we as an audience are getting played right now??) (Natasha: What if the strings she’s pulling are emotional and she’s playing a dangerous game of chicken with Dean’s rage and Chuck’s entitlement?)

Jack joins the community center. He watches Dr. Sexy the pastor in a prayer circle, and talks to a disillusioned young woman who asks him to fill out a form before walking away.

Cas walks in separately and wanders over to Dr. Sexy the pastor praying with a parishioner, and tells him about the cash stealing Valerie. She never made it home.

Cut to Valerie tied and gagged. Her hands are in an elaborate guillotine. She wakes. Her screams are muffled. A TV turns on and flashes the word ‘Thief’. And one of her fingers gets chopped off. A timer starts on the TV. AND WE ALL RECOIL.

Jack finishes the paperwork and tries to talk to the girls working the food line. The one girl storms off, upset. Jack follows her and tells her that he didn’t mean to upset her.

She tells him that Connor and her dated. Well, they watched a lot of old movies together. (AHEM! AHEM! AHEM! “I’m your Huckleberry.” AHEM. Please stop the clowning, it hurts so much.)

Jack confesses to the girl that he lost his mother. The girl tells Jack that her mom died three years ago, and now it’s just her and her emotionally unavailable father, the pastor. “I have more dads than most, and I’m always just feeling like I’m letting all of them down.” JACK!!!! The girl tells Jack to trust God, not people.

And we laugh, and laugh, and, guh, laugh.

Cas, meanwhile, meets with Dr. Sexy the pastor.

Cas interrogates Dr. Sexy Pastor about whether anyone else has gone missing recently. Well, there was one guy who used to work for the “faith-based community” but they parted ways. Cas and the pastor enjoy a little god talk. Cas, the weary angel, opines that God just doesn’t care. The pastor has a different take on faith - it’s about the people of his church doing what they can to take care of each other. We learn that this church recently changed from a fundamentalist branch to something more welcoming. Connor was able to come out as gay due to the changes, so some good happened. (Hindsight thoughts: this makes his death and the “Liar” all the more awful.) “A saint is a sinner who keeps trying,” the pastor concludes...and if that ain’t the truth about Cas!

Sam and Dean are on the too-slow train to Atlantic City when Amara drops in during a gas stop and invites them out for pierogi.

At Patchwork, the pastor asks Jack to share his journey of faith during a prayer circle. Jack falters, and Cas steps in. “I do know what blind faith is. I used to just follow orders. Without question. And I did some pretty terrible things. I would never look beyond the plan. Then, of course, when it all came crashing down I found myself lost. I didn’t know what my purpose was anymore. And then one day something changed. Something amazing. I guess I found a family. And I became a father. And in that, I rediscovered my faith. I rediscovered who I am.” BRB crying!

Later in the cafeteria, Jack asks Sexy Pastor, M.D. how he brought together so many people with different ideas of religion. “It’s not about what they believe. It’s what they do,” he reiterates. (I imagine, for a moment, an ending where Jack calls out to the whole world and all living creatures and Heaven and Hell unite to win the final confrontation and make a better world together.)

The tranquil moment is interrupted by the TV turning on to security feed footage of the victim. The timer runs out and she loses another finger and screams and screams. Jack rushes over to the TV and pulls out a USB stick from the back.

Meanwhile, the Winchesters dine with Amara.

They bring up Chuck’s destruction of the other universes and tell her they have a plan to stop him. They’ve got a nephilim on their side AND he’s super powerful. All they need is for Amara to help them trap Chuck and...WHAMMO. Amara gently refuses to betray her brother. She lays some new mythology on them. She and Chuck are twins - creation and destruction - and their splitting apart first brought life into the world.

Cas and Jack barge into the church’s ex-AV tech’s room. And by that, I mean, Jack gets hurled through another door? Um. Okay. The part of me that grew up with 3 Stooges is HERE FOR IT, tbh.

They discover the guy is dead, chained up in bed with cuffs, with the word “lust” painted above him.

Getting ready to leave town, Sam’s ready to accept Amara’s choice. Dean “Fuck Acceptance” Winchester heads back inside and corners Amara. He asks why she brought back Mary.

Amara tells him that she wanted him to see that the apple pie dream life he’s always striving for isn’t real - that Mary was only human - and BETTER because of that. Amara thought that would help him to accept his life. Amara also thought that having Mary back would release Dean from his anger.

He leans forward and lets her know that he’s furious. Everyone in this universe is trapped, he tells her - including her. And she’s doing nothing. Amara falters in the face of this, and then asks him if she can trust him. “I would never hurt you,” he LIES TO HER FACE. She tells him she’ll think about it.

That evening Sylvia, the pastor’s daughter, listens to her friend gush over the social media attention she’s getting after posting about the torture video. In a flash of rage, Sylvia stabs her friend and races away. Dr. Sexy Pastor finds the current (still alive) victim just as Sylvia catches up to him. She accuses him of laughing at her mother after her mother died from trying to heal by prayer rather than medical science. She accuses him of changing the church that her mother grew up in. Jack jumps into the fray and gets stabbed for his trouble. When Cas arrives, Sylvia is quickly subdued by his Vulcan forehead tap of slumber.

Cas yanks away the restraints from the victim (SOOOO strong) and then heals her fingers back on while the pastor looks on in wonder.

For So Strong Science:

Later, they gather outside while Sylvia gets taken away in cuffs. The pastor still cares about his daughter and vows to get her help. The driver of the car is Zach the crossroads demon? Oookay.

Cas and Jack drive home. In the truck of feelings, Cas asks Jack why he couldn’t share during the prayer circle. Jack confesses that he’s been lying. The spell Billie is doing with him is turning him into a bomb to be used against Chuck and Amara. It’ll work - they’ll cease to exist. But Jack will be obliterated too. “This is the only way they’ll ever forgive me,” he tells Cas.

Cas is horrified. He can’t watch Jack die again! Cas refuses to watch Jack die again, but Jack seems to have fully embraced this as his necessary fate.

Back at the bunker, Dean heads for the whiskey bottle late at night when he spots Cas shuffling towards the exit. Jack’s settled in his room, Cas reports. Cas then tells Dean he’s going to look for “another way.”

Oh AND, “In case something goes wrong and I don’t make it back, there’s something you and Sam need to know…”

FADE. TO. BLACK.

The Se7en Deadly Quotes:

You guys go Highway to Heaven that bitch

You look greener than Baby Yoda

“Did anyone find any tiny bags with chicken bones inside?” “Did anyone smell sulfur?” “Did anyone feel cold?”

There were too many cats

Where can I find the Kool-Aid?

I wanted you to see that your mother was just a person

It was a gift, Dean. Not a trial

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