#he's someone living in the era of the latter but has the mentality of the former and it sure does mix into a ridiculous cowardly slurry huh

[benevolenterrancy]

Odd, for as weird as it seems... Klink probably belongs better within the realm of Napoleon rather than that of the 2nd World War. But even then... Let's say Klink wears a Prussian Uniform, and Hogan and gang in their nations respective uniforms from the era... Honestly I can't imagine how that would go. Because think of it, Technically Newkirk is allied with Klink and Schultz, with LeBeau being aligned with Hogan, Carter, and Kinchloe....

But weird Napoleonic geopolitics aside, the uniforms themselves would look very dashing.

tbh i have NO knowledge about historical uniforms of basically any shape or form but i do enjoy this concept, absolutely adore people using their niche interests to create the wildest and coolest au's. you're so right about klink...

[666writingcafe]

An Interview With Belphie

Part One of A New Series

Question One: If you were the last person on Earth, how would you spend your time?

After catching up on sleep, I'd probably just walk around and see what I could find.

Question Two: If there was one day you could repeatedly re-experience, which day would you choose?

The day that MC kissed me for the first time.

Question Three: Can you describe yourself in three words?

Tired, angsty emo.

Question Four: If you wake up tomorrow and forgot your name and/or identity, what would you do?

Go back to sleep, honestly.

Question Five: Who are you, really?

Ask Beel and MC.

Question Six: If you could live in a different time period or era in the human world, which one would you choose and why?

None, because they all suck. Unless I could take MC with me, which in that case, I'd go wherever they'd want to.

Question Seven: Which is better: having superficial knowledge about a wide range of things or thorough knowledge about a few things?

The latter, but make sure it's about things no one would expect you of knowing so that you have the element of surprise.

Question Eight: If you were able to download your memories into a searchable spreadsheet, would you do it?

There are some things that are best left buried deep in the recesses of the mind, so no.

Question Nine: Would you rather float alone in space or at sea?

Whichever ensures the quickest death.

Question Ten: Would you swap places with an alternate version of yourself from another timeline?

No, because chances are, that alternate version of me is more active and hence has more responsibilities, and I am a lazy individual.

Question Eleven: If you could communicate with animals, which one would you talk to first?

Spiders.

Question Twelve: If you had the power to grant a wish to someone, who would you choose and why?

Honestly, I'd choose Simeon. He makes me look mentally stable, and I just want him to be able to relax for a little bit.

Question Thirteen: If you were lost and had just enough battery on your D.D.D. to make a single phone call, who would you call?

MC. They're the most level-headed out of everyone.

Question Fourteen: Does your life need more love, romance, friendship, or intimacy?

Intimacy.

Question Fifteen: If you could do anything you desire with MC for a day, what would it entail?

A hotel room with a charmed door and soundproof walls.

Question Sixteen: If you were on a dating game, what question(s) would you ask?

Honestly, the first question in this interview.

Question Seventeen: Would you rather spend a fancy night on a mountain or camp on the seashore?

Seashore all the way. The view's better there.

Question Eighteen: Is your life a drama, tragedy, or comedy?

It's a fucking soap opera that's gone on for far too many seasons, and I don't mean that in a depressed way, but in the way that the drama in my life is becoming more and more absurd as I get older.

Question Nineteen: Would you date an alien if you thought they were hot?

Depends.

Question Twenty: If you were a vegetable, what would you be and how would you avoid getting eaten?

I'd be horseradish, because it's one of the few foods Beel will not eat, and thus I'd ensure my survival.

Question Twenty-One: Would you rather have looks, brains, or riches?

Brains. Looks fade, and money disappears.

Question Twenty-Two: If you had to wear your emotions on your clothing, how would your outfit look today?

Like I'd rather be in bed.

[katatonicimpression]

Has Exodus been Redeemed?

So, I saw someone posting about this the other day, and they made two really good points. Summarised here:

Bennet being redeemed because of Krakoa is weird and bad.

Any redemption Bennet gets should involve children because of that thing when he kinda maybe sorta tried to kill Luna

And yes these are both good points but also... are we supposed to think of current bennet as redeemed at all?

Some thoughts on all the above:

Is Bennet actually doing anything different now than he was in Messiah Complex?

I mean, no. Right?

When it comes down to it, Bennet's moral failings are quite straight forward. He doesn't care who he hurts, who he kills, so long as he conceptualises it as a step towards securing the salvation of mutantkind. He is myopic, narrowly focused on whatever he's decided his goal is, and his thought process is (sorry babe) irrational. He is not stable. He's not able to recognise that instability. Neither is he able to recognise his own hypocrisy when it arises. His worldview warps to make sense with whatever he's decided he needs to do. And, when all is said and done, he'll say it was God's plan.

So, he's like any old cult leader or anti vax podcaster, really. He pedals dangerous nonsense and has the just the right combination of personality flaws and mental illness to still be a true believer and a moral crusader.

Or he's like, you know, a crusader.

In Messiah Complex - an almost incoherent sprawling mess of a crossover event from 2007 - Bennet is distraught and struggling after M Day and ends up taking his Acolytes to meet Mr Sinister because he has come to believe that the only solutions lie in mad scientism or something. Bennet gets on his knees for him (literally) and then he and his Acolytes team up with the Marauders to fight the xmen because something something Destiny's diaries something something baby something something ice-stique something something. Bennet straight up vanishes from the story before it concludes. Idk maybe he went out for lunch.

Anyway, I bring it up as an example of a time where Bennet is looking for direction is his Holy War, joins forces with other mutants/mutates, and tolerates an uneasy alliance because he is 100% devoted to the mission.

Psychologically speaking, is bennet really behaving any differently in the krakoa era? Is he making different kinds of decisions? I don't think so.

In fact, Krakoa challenges his character less than Messiah complex. Which is weird, because in the latter he's straightforwardly a villain. Krakoa era Exodus is not a villain, not even an antagonist.

(I guess he's Sinister's casual antagonist in Hellions, but a) that's a comedic role and b) Nathaniel is the villain of hellions so that wouldn't even count)

He's not a heroic character either. He's just kind of an entity. Protagonist of one issue of Immortal X-Men and primarily featured as an interesting member of the supporting cast.

Krakoa offers Bennet a course of action where he is able to do what he always does (throw himself wholeheartedly at a mutant supremacist project while thinking of himself as the good guy in all of this). He is a defender of Krakoa and an ally to their cause.

So, this is not an arc. Categorically, it is not a character arc of any kind because he does not change. So, in that sense it's not a redemption arc either. But of course he is a character who has gone from villain to "guy who's on the side you're rooting for"

I think it's not wrong, then, to argue that what we're seeing from Fall of X era Exodus is the presentation of an unearned redemption. He's good/better now, but no actual story arc is there to back it up. He's not grown or changed or learnt anything. He's not been challenged. There is nothing in the text to suggest that he would now see non mutant lives as valuable, worth sparing.

So... is this bad writing?

He has not changed or learnt anything, are we supposed to believe otherwise?

The Krakoa era contains many in-story critiques of the nation it depicts, and to mixed results. Interestingly, Bennet is not heavily featured in this regard. Throwaway comments about him being scary or insane are tossed around, but he is not meaningfully involved in a story that questions the ideology of Krakoa - or of his ideology specifically.

It's hard to tell, then, what we're looking at. Let's roughly divide it into two possibilities:

Bennet is being portrayed as nicer, somewhat redeemed, and the mission of Krakoa is understood to be a virtuous endeavour.

Krakoa is understood to be a morally flawed endeavour, and Bennet is just being his same old self and not redeemed at all.

2 seems closer to what Gillen is doing in my opinion, but I think there's room for debate.

It's not like immortal xmen is really about the moral implications in the flaws of Krakoa. It's much more focused on the psychology of the characters on the Quiet Council and their interpersonal conflict and intrigue.

But, of course, explosions go boom.

Despite the intimate themes of immortal xmen (and its adjacent minis and oneshots), its overarching plot threads primarily involve krakoa being threatened with annihilation (inferno, judgement day, dominion crap, miscellaneous orchis crap, etc). Because of this, bennet is primarily featured as a defender of the people of Krakoa when they are under attack. This absolutely does lend itself to interpretation 1, wherein Exodus' zealotry is position's as a (complicated) good in the necessary and just cause of Krakoa.

To me, it feels like gillen is telling a story featuring characters who are predominantly morally grey or outright villainous, and using a setting and plot backdrop that forces them into the same or similar boat, allowing the writing to explore their intricacies. If the setting and plot were too normal - if it were one where the heroes would refuse to work with the villains or one where the villains were constantly being antagonists - many of those more interesting character beats would be cut off.

However, I don't think he has fully succeeded in this regard. The overarching thread of the innocents of krakoa being in mortal danger and needing protection is one that has moral implications. It does end up framing Bennet heroically, even when the on-page material does keep reminding you that he's, you know, a deranged zealot.

There's more that can be said about how the fact that Krakoa is constantly under threat of total extinction undermines any attempt at nuance in its portrayal, and how it contributes to the greatest failings of this era. But I do plan to write that retrospective soon so I'll save it for later.

For now, I'll say that to me it feels like the intent was not to tell a story of redemption arcs at all. Instead, morality was not the focus and the storytelling deliberately steers away from the pedagogical. However, despite this intent, the shape of a redemption story remains, simply due to the nature of Bennets role in Krakoa.

Won't somebody please think of the children?

The one way in which we arguably do see change in Bennet is with The Children.

Bennet is shown telling stories to the children of Krakoa, teaching them and, also, protecting them. His interactions with Kafka in X-Men Forever are a good example of this.

The thing with Luna (he takes her from Fabian who was, unsurprisingly, responsible for all this mess) is a pretty bleak moment in Bennet's history. It also I believe leads to him being stabbed by Dane which I can't imagine him enjoying.

Bennets canon history is actually kind of weird. He's one of those characters with a lot of "idek how he got out of that but he turned up later on so he must have" in his wiki. The krakoa era is probably the most prolonged, stable period of his existence where the audience has had a strong sense of where he's at and what he's doing for the last five years.

Similarly, in universe the krakoa era could well be the first time Bennet's life has been anything close to normal for a long time. He has a home that isn't a supervillain lair, and actual down time for the first time since Mags woke him up. He is walking around in public and kinda sorta socialising for possibly the first time in his entire life.

He has that line about how he's old and wise, and that other line about how he's not naive (a repeat - he says it in the 90s and in krakoa) and both of those things are lies. Because he's, you know, a delusional cult leader. He is not literally old. He was a young man (which in medieval terms could literally mean still in his teens) when he went into that coma. And it's been 30 years real time since he woke up. But no characters who were adults then have aged in that time (and some (emma) have got younger) so whatever it is in universe it's not more than a few years. He's still in his 20s in my interpretation. Moreover, his life experience is extreme social isolation and a series of fanatical violent cults. He is naive. He's not wise.

He's also not really had a chance to just be and coexist with other people. So, in that sense it's not weird to see him be kind to children in Krakoa. Nothing we've seen technically contradicts the idea that he would be. Willingness to threaten a child in one situation and the ability to genuinely care for children aren't actually contradictory. But emotionally, there is resonance to showing this softness to him in this regard.

So, this is the one area where you could say there has been a meaningful change to Bennet, but again it has no narrative arc to it. Beyond simply the implication that if you let this guy chill for a minute, he eventually does mellow a bit.

But it is nice. And it is fitting.

Static characters and hypocrisy

Bennet is a character who fundamentally is incapable of seeing himself as being in the wrong. This is baked right into the type of villain that he is.

Redemption arcs can come in a lot of different forms. Sometimes the fictional universe has concrete concepts of good and evil, and a redemption is about aligning yourself spiritually with the good side (e.g. star wars) or by fulfilling some abstract metaphysical requirement (e.g. Buffy). Sometimes the emphasis is on doing the work to improve yourself (e.g. zuko), and sometimes it's a grand gesture at the right moment. Sometimes it's because a bigger bad came along, sometimes the redeemed one suffers a lot, sometimes they don't.

There's also the fun cartooney type of redemption arc where the bad guy is forced to just kinda hang out with the heroes and becomes part of the team by osmosis. Tgis is a personal fave but I don't think it suits Bennet - he should have an actual arc if it happens at all.

So, if there's an actual arc, it could vary a lot but one thing it requires is introspection and for the character's flaws to actually be confronted in the text.

Now, is it possible to write something like that for Bennet? Yes.

There are limitations, as with any character. He wouldn't suit an arc than evokes a grandiose good/evil darkside/lightside dichotomy because part of his problem is that he already thinks like that. Similarly, you would have to be careful when introducing a character foil (someone to be azula to his zuko for example) because he is not self aware enough to recognise his own flaws in the other. In general, he's someone who can very easily externalise any moral lesson he learns. It's doable, but difficult.

The example I want to evoke is Isaac from Netflix Castlevania. Isaac's storyline in s3 is basically him just travelling from A to B, and on the way he encounters these little vignettes. Some affirm his world view in s2 (aka "humanity sucks might as well help Dracula kill everyone") and some gently challenge it (e.g. "you should consider having friends") and he talks about it. He does philosophy. He reasons through his positions. And, eventually he starts to change. By the time he confronts Hector in s4, he's no longer here for revenge. He's moved on. He's now acting according to what he thinks will make things better.

I love this. I love that it's completely internal as an arc and I love how much agency isaac has. And I love that the dialogue is genuinely clever. Most philosophy dialogue in pop culture is written to just sound deep, but in castlevania they really managed to maintain meaning and coherence throughout.

And obviously the shape of Bennets arc would be different to this, but the idea of a well crafted "man does philosophy, sees the abstract concepts illustrated in narrative vignettes as he does so, and then eventually changes for the better". And a good writer could do this for him.

But should they?

So, this is that lingering thing. You redeem a villain in a comic book and now you've lost that villain. You let Exodus meaningfully improve and then he's no longer available to churn out as a big or medium bad. Maybe you might want to keep Bennet's delightful combination of flaws because it allows you to explore them. Maybe a redeemed Bennet isn't really Bennet anymore, or doesn't have what you want from him as a character. You make the unselfaware villain introspect then what are you left with?

A happier character, sure. But maybe not a good ingredient for a story.

And with bennet, the kind of introspection and self confrontation needed for a redemption arc would change him a lot. It would change him at his very foundation.

Does that mean he's doomed to be a static character? Not necessarily. I think it would be possible to bring shape to his storylines without shaking those foundations, but it is limiting. And also, they don't focus on him enough to do it.

Conclusion

The title of this section is a such a joke because I have nothing conclusive to say. I feel like if you read this far, you've been tricked.

I think Exodus makes for an interesting villain, and (imho) is actually best suited to be posed as not the only/main villain in a story. A supporting antagonist, if you will.

But that doesn't mean seeing him in a protagonist role isn't welcome. I loved it the one time it happened. And as for uncomplicated heroics? No, he's not there yet. And if he got there, it would involve a pretty hefty change to his character.

But it's not like I would be mad if it happens. We don't need a crusader villain (especially as I personally don't think Bennet's zealotry is well suited to paralleling modern religious extremism - at least not the mainstream stuff) and hell, I want to see what a fully sympathetic write of him would look like. Maybe he'd get to talk to Dane again. That could be fun.

But it doesn't look like that's going to happen. He'll probably continue to hover in this "villainous ally" space for the foreseeable future. He's in heir of apocalypse. I doubt he'll get a lot to do.

Anyway. Thanks guys if you made it this far. Hope you have a nice day. I'm currently spending billable hours sitting in a stairwell writing essays about comics. What a time we live in.

[linagram]

Hiii! Don't know if you remember me, I send you Naomi and Asahi sketches once. I want to repeat how much I like your project and I'd love to draw more for it, but I miscalculated how much free time I have so it took some time (I was supposed to finish the second drawing two months ago or smth...). Anyway! I present to you: the goddes of Linagram, Andou Miki! (I wuv her) Same as last time, I tried to make it look more like Milgram style, this time with color even. Not sure how accurate it turned out, but I kinda like the result. Tbh at first I just wanted to make an art of her, but now looking at the composition and background style... Dunno I just think it looks like it shoud be a series of art of wardens... I really want to make it into a series, but not sure if I will be able actually do it Aaand I guess I kunda screwed up some of her design details (jokes on you, I coildn't even be consistent with her design in my own drawings lol), but it's too late to change anuthing so whatever In the end I want to wish you good luck with both T3 Linagram and Linagram2 development! Oh, oh, and I also want to ask something, but you obviously don't have to answer: are there any special gestures or facial expression traits that your characters (both prisoners and wardens and maybe even victims or side chars) have that you'd like to point out? Like Shun having closed postures or Kei smiling a lot even if it doesn't look like he feels like it? I suppose you've talked about this before, or maybe someone even sent you a similar ask... If it's true, I'll search it!

SHDJAJASJKSJSJ SHE LOOKS AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH!! (and yes i remember you!) i love her expression in the first drawing so much she looks like a tiny scared kitten.. (and she kinda is one) i really love the shading on the second one too it looks so much like the milgram art style!! (and it's okay i kinda forget things when it comes to my own designs too 😭)

oh and also i haven't received an ask like that before so here it is! so sorry i think it turned out a bit long ><

akio is one of the characters who has changed the most throughout the seasons. in season 1 (and before milgram), he usually had this kind of annoyed or more serious face expression (but i really like to make his expressions look like he's a bit nervous or even scared maybe? like he's just putting up a front..)

in season 2 he looks much more tired and traumatized for obvious reasons and he's supposed to look like he's in a lot of pain (and he is).

and in season 3, he still looks very tired, but i like to think that now he just kind of.. accepted everything that happened to him. akio doesn't think he'll be able to live that long even if he's able to leave milgram so 😔 akio's character arc is just a humbling experience took too far

aimi's an interesting case! she's actually a character who has the most consistent face expressions and by that i mean. she's literally almost never seen without a smile on her face.

like this art is the only exception??

but also, in season 1 the faces she makes are usually more sad or apologetic-looking! she also likes to do. The Thing with her sleeves

she still has some of that in season 2, but she starts to smile a bit more calmly and even confidently.

and in season 3? she's in her girlboss era!! she's much more confident now, her smile is more wide, she doesn't look sorry at all!!

but some of the art that is supposed to show her outside of milgram shows her having the same smile too.. like she started to look more "like a victim" only when she came to milgram.. huh..

shun is a fun character to draw because most of the time he's either supposed to look stressed (or like "physically he's here, but he's not here mentally") or he's supposed to look so confident that it's kinda scary considering his usual personality. i like to think that in season 1 he mostly looked like the former and started to act like the latter in season 2 only to act like the former again in season 3 because of his punishment.

like!! the difference!! also im not sure if it's easy to notice but when i draw shun i try to make his poses look a bit.. tense? i like to imagine his movements being a bit unnatural, almost like he's in pain or he genuinely doesn't know how to move or make certain poses. it also could be related to why he has his hands close to his face so often, it's almost like he's trying to check if he's real or not!

like aimi, naomi is almost always smiling and her expressions and poses are supposed to make her look like the "mom friend".

she also has her hand on her chest very often, to make her look more.. confident, maybe? like she's supposed to have this "don't worry i'll take care of it :)" vibe!

SHE IS LITERALLY STILL SMILING EVEN IN SEASON 3 it's just that her smile is more wide now and it's supposed to make her look more unhinged rather than someone reliable. like aimi, literally the only case of her having a different face expression is this art.

I HONESTLY CAN PUT KEI, EIKO AND RIKU IN THE SAME SECTION all of them are the smiley characters too but the way they act is a bit different.

kei's smile is supposed to show that there's something. Wrong with this man. like you shouldn't trust him. i'm also not sure if it's easy to see but kei often has this expression like he's looking down on someone. he's supposed to look all cool and when he's drawn with another character, he's almost always going to either look at them or look somewhere else, like there's another person that we don't see.

this is also one of the reasons why this art with him and someone who is (or was?) very precious to him is so important bc he's!! looking UP at the boy!! and he's not smiling!!

riku also likes to smile a lot but it's often supposed to look a bit. forced. it's like kei really believes that he's better than others and breaks when he realizes it's not true, meanwhile riku has the same belief about himself but he KNOWS he's not really special or unique, so he has no choice but to fake it until he makes it. when i draw riku, i always have this sort of rule (?) in mind: riku's smile is never sincere. he is always too worried about his image, popularity and reputation. he hates himself too much to be truly happy even for a moment. which is why him suddenly not smiling in his t3 art is so scary to me it's like.. idk, it's like he's too broken to even pretend to smile now..

eiko is very interesting bc unlike the guys she is a genuinely very confident woman! she doesn't have that many issues with her self-esteem, yes, she's a bit too much of a perfectionist, but honestly, she just has very high expectations from others and if we compare that to kei and riku's problems, that.. doesn't seem too bad to me. her expressions are also often supposed to look like she's laughing at someone or she's about to tell a joke or she's just being playful.

asahi's expressions are surprisingly hard to come up with when i draw him, so i usually just go with whatever i think is cute or shows his personality well. so most of the time he looks disgusted or angry, but i like to make his expressions adorable at the same time too! like akio, he also often looks a bit scared or stressed on the inside. he is also often seen chewing on something.

yurika is another character i find hard to draw when it comes to expressions and poses.. but that's also why i like to take advantage of her. reputation in the linagram fandom and i like to make her look a bit insane!! i get to go crazy with her poses too like girl get a snickers or something!!

and when she's not in a silly goofy mood she just looks kind of >:( i also have a rule similar to the one with riku: if yurika is smiling, her smile is usually fake.

tumblr pic limit is killing me we have to do the rest of this quick!!

reina is another character that changed a lot and if in season 1 she was usually seen smiling, she quickly dropped the facade after it ended and now she is only seen with a more cold and emotionless face expression. who knows, maybe she will smile again one day..

eiji, ironically, was supposed to have expressions and poses a bit similar to kei in season 1, but after it ended and the plot (and yurika) hit eiji badly, i can only imagine him looking more and more stressed with each day. the fact that he's actually similar to kei, but he can't pretend as well as he does..

miki is almost always seen being a bit sad or scared, and she only starts to smile more when season 2 begins and she starts embracing her role here. interestingly, her smile isn't supposed to look fake or forced, and it's actually more sincere compared to kei and riku. when season 3 starts, she lets her hair down and her eyes become more empty (same goes for eiji, who had "swirly" eyes in season 1 and the beginning of season 2) and her tone is more cold.

hinode is a bit.. too relaxed for a guard. he often presses a finger to his chin, like he's curious about something, he's always smiling and his smile is like.. you can't say it's sincere, but you can't say he's faking either. he also often has to lean on something or someone because he gets tired a bit too easily so he's usually seen either sitting or lying down and if he's standing, he's either leaning on a wall or someone's shoulder (usually miki's).

[evilrat-sabre]

Centipede Tango Tek - CTT Au Master post

This is my master post about my Tango Tek is a Centipede AU/Headcanon, but now with more coherent thoughts of what I want.

TW WARNINGS: Zombies, Insects, Body horror, Gore, Low self esteem and mental health problems. (If you think I should add another tag pls let me know, this is my silly au I don't want to cause distress to no one.)

Note: As I am writing some things may change, so I will update this note with the date I last changed something here. (08/08/2023)

I swear it's not that bad, but messing with zombie characters gets messy very fast.

In this AU main plot I have:

-Tango is a parasitic modded mob that should not be a player but is.

-He specifically is a Centipede that lives in dead corpses and is basically like a zombie with guts that attack if the main body is damaged/destroyed. 

-Here is a link for a text book description I made of his species.(Somethings I wrote there are not up to date with my current headcanon.)

-Tango being a sentient being and a player, he mostly functions like a zombie hybrid player ex.Cleo and Zloy

- He has two bodies : His decoy body (The corpse of a permadead player he rides) and his real body (His centipede one)

-His two bodies are code linked. Let me explain: Tango Tek code will only show right when he is “complete”, when he is separated his close name tag glitches and Tango appears afk in an admin screen. He will only respawn if his real body is damaged and as his decoy body is a literal corpse, it will only repair itself when the damage taken caused a respawn death. Any other type of damage taken in his decoy body he has to repair it Himself (this type of damage and repair, applies to most undead players, Cleo is one of them.). If Tango is killed without his decoy body, the decoy body will not respawn with him, he has to go fetch it.

- Just to be clear, Tango didn’t just found a random corpse and started riding it, His decoy body is with him since he first “spawned”, He woke with all the information that a fresh new player needs to knows, but instead of the corpse receiving it, what got it was the vermin inhabiting it.

-One thing that makes him stay awake at night is the fact that, he already had a years long register from before he spawned, he had money, he had a Hypixel account and he had a name: Tango. He added the Tek latter, because of a dear friend of his, that is until now the only important OC I dared to put in this AU.

-Tango Spawned in an residential world where being a hostile mob hybrid wasn't looked upon with good eyes, so since early he learned to use makeup and clothes to pass as a mostly human player.

-He spend weeks of his early days training his fine motor coordination, so he can pass as a clumsy human and not a decaying corpse being controlled by a insect (It's like playing cuphead with your keyboard slightly upside down) 

-He spend years isolated in single player worlds, because of the fear of what he is and what would be done to him in the case that other people discover.

-His eyes are red, because his decoy body doesn't have its eyes anymore, so he just uses his own real body to cover it. When someone asks why his eyes are weird red swirls, he just says he was cursed by the "universe".

-This "he is a bug, that rides a dead body and is basically a zombie, but he is disguized as a human" thing, may have started as a form of defense to not suffer from the discrimination that aggressive mob hybrids suffered in that era, but with time it turned in a type of self hate. Even when compared with other zombies and undead hybrids, he can see he is not the same and this really bugged him. He can only say that his red eyes (that are a literal part of his real body) are a curse of the universe too many times, until he started to believe it himself.

-So his disguise turned more permanent than it should. It's been some decades and no one really knows the truth, the only one that really knows is himself "Human" if asked Tango Tek.

-As I said it started as a means of protection, but even when the wheels turned and the ones that were the real problem now are a minority, Tango still is hiding. He knows he is an anomaly, that he should not be capable of thinking of feeling! Someway in his path he started to think of himself as a monster, as an unlovable being and even when he entered Hermitcraft, a place where everyone is accepted, he continued to hide. 

-Now more than his self hate, he has fear: fear of being lonely again, of his family (his only family) hating him for what he is (he hates what he is, he wish he could be normal).

-Tbh he should see a therapist, the really angst part of this AU is Tango's poor mental health state, he is so blinded with his own fallacy, that he is a wrong unlovable monster, to notice that his friends and family never would trade him for anything else.

-This type of self hate is something that builds slowly, but Tango has decades of auto inflicted isolation to construct this narrative. Believe me, Isolation does things to a person's mental state.

Some little curiosities:

-Tango is a make-up guru as a moving plot point, he uses makeup to cover his undeadnes.

-Since he entered Hermitcraft his makeups started to become more and more detailed, he had a few hiccups in the path and Impulse has a lot of blackmail from his failed attempts.

-Because of his "is a bug riding a dead body" thing, he doesn't have a very fine motor skill, so he can't really do things like sewing or anything that requires a good working set of fingers. (His makeup is mostly a exception because he had years to really refine his ability to paint his own face)

-He does his red stone using mostly his real body, he puts the rough components in place with his decoy body and then uses his real body to do the finer connection and setup of the machines. 

-This means that when he does redstone his decoy body just lay where Tango put it before he goes to “redstone world” (anyone who finds it would think that Tango has permadied), he escaped a lot of close calls since entering hermitcraft.

-Fun fact, because he is a anomaly in the code his decoy body and real body are counted as one in his code, and because his decoy body was originally of a human player that permadied, his code when superficially looked just says that he is a human (it makes easier to lie to admins)

-Because of his "bugged" code, he can only access his inventory while riding his decoy body, so it can be tricky if Tango is separated from it.

-Tango can talk as a bug, It's harder without proper vocal cords and has a clicking intonation to it, but he can speak. It comes from nothing and he really doesn't wants to talk how it works.

-As I said previously, Tango is the name of the permadied corpse, the Tek is something that he put after. (Tek is the onomatopoeia of the clicking sound he does when happy. It is too a type of “happy greeting” between bug players)

-Tango has proper formal admin training, he has gone to Admin school and has a degree.

List of fics I am planning to do or I did already in this universe:

-Tango needs Cleo's help with undead things and its forces him to reveal more than he has revealed in a long time: Everyone always forget that corpses have a lot of things to say. (One shot)

-Someone finds Tango's body when he is redstoning things and now everyone knows: Tango’s Castle of Cards.(4/5 chapters still incomplete I am working in it I swear)

-Scar backstory

-Cleo and Tango go shoping in the Zombie market.

-Tango and Zed discover a thing

-Tango and Vintage beef bug friendship.

-Tango and Hypnotized visit a graveyard.

[liquidstar]

your ocs

BUT

in Re:Zero

how would they end up causing Subaru's deaths?

Omg that's such a fun question 😭😭😭 poor Subaru I'm about to kill him with ocs sorry

But here's what I think would happen:

In the case of Polaris I can see it being a fight caused by somekinda misunderstanding on her end and also on Subaru for being terrible at explaining shit. I don’t think she’d kill him on purpose through this but she does NAUGHT have good control over her powers so he might get an icicle through the heart or something. Typical day in the life and death of Natsuki Subaru though, who has been frozen like? 3 times? At least?

Saiph also can’t control his powers well once his sword is unsheathed- but it’s less so a case of physical control like with Polaris, and more so the kinda thing where the power overwhelms him and the more flames there are the less he realizes what he’s doing. So I’m picturing a scenario in which his sword is unsheathed for too long and Subaru is just caught up in either the fire or the sword. Preferably the latter, to be honest. 

Bella has a very strict NO KILLING rule so in her case I think it would have to be a pure accident. Not like the other two did it fully intentionally either but I was still thinking of fights against each other. Idk exactly what it could be in this case, maybe something like Bella swinging her weapon at a monster but it ends up dodging, and Subaru somehow ends up in the way before she can redirect the swing. In this case for Maximal Drama it would totally have to be the case that she managed to redirect it just enough to make it a much slower death than it would’ve been if she had done nothing. This is important bc it would fuck her up more to kill than him to die, at this point, and hes gotta see that. For the drama.

Al is probably the most prone to not listening to Bella’s orders, is the thing. Meaning that even if she has a “no killing” rule as the leader, he’d break it if he felt he had to. Subaru can come across suspicious at times, due to a variety of factors, and if Al believed him to be somekinda genuine threat and saw no other alternative. I mean he’s probably the only one who’d actually be willing to kill a guy on purpose really. He’s always been just a little bit unwell and whenever he decides to enter his shounen rival “villain” era maybe he’ll kill him again who knows. I will say though for the record that either way it wouldn’t be something he’d find any sort of joy or pride in at all, and ideally he’d prefer to avoid bloodshed at all costs. But, you know, he wants to protect people At All Costs too. And when weighing the lives of your friends vs some random sketchy dude… Sorry dude.

Also like the thing about Subaru is that he really wants to help people and sort of play therapist even when he’s clearly encroaching on sensitive territory. Mira is repressing quite a lot- If not outright deluding herself in a few ways. I think that if Subaru tried to scratch the surface of this mind palace of hers, she probably wouldn’t react well. If she has a mental breakdown it could fuck with the wind real bad, and would probably get worse if he continues to try to talk to her. Basically imagine something like the “choose me” scene (iconic) but wind instead of fire. And this time the person he’s talking to is not listening at all but closing herself off further, air ball style. So there’s not really any escaping the winds, he’d either get swept away by them or hit by something and that’d be that. If you wanna get a bit darker with it she could end up using all the air present to create her “bubble” and there’d be no oxygen around so he’d just suffocate.

Felis kills him for knowing someone with the same name as her. She has to be special. The end. (Joke answer. They'd actually probably love each other lol)

[monstercollection]

I’ve been slacking with my Literary Tarot Challenge posts so I’m going to do a quick drop with summaries of the ones I most recently finished, and hopefully get around to longer reviews of them later.

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon (Nine of Parchment)- diary of an 11th century gentlewoman in the Imperial court of Japan. Sei is just… the most. She’s so much. She’s petty, she’s decadent, she’s conceited. She’s 100% That Bitch. I love and hate her in equal measure.

This was an absolutely fascinating window into the Heian Era but I had to WORK for it. Reading a book written 1,000 years ago is hard enough, but as someone from the US with only a second-hand familiarity with Japanese culture, Buddhism and Shinto, there were a so many new concepts I had to learn. Lots of good appendices in the edition I read that helped with unfamiliar vocab and cultural references (and I’ll edit to include which one I read when I get home). By far the hardest book I’ve read for the challenge and the first one I thought I might not finish.

“The Outsider” by H. P. Lovecraft (The Tower)- Short story about a sad, lonely haunted monster man, so basically my bullshit. My familiarity with Lovecraft and his mythos extends to having read Call of Cthulhu in college and playing a few board games based on his stories. I think I’d have gotten a little more out this one if I’d known more about his interconnected lore but I don’t necessarily feel the urge to delve further into Lovecraft’s work. It definitely stands on it’s own as a solo story.

“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” by Herman Melville (Four of Light)- this is probably one of those stories assigned to me in high school or college that I either read just enough to fake my way through or read but remember nothing about.

It’s a short story about a lawyer who seems to collect weird, quirky, flawed little men for employees. He is extremely compassionate and I can’t tell if the lengths he goes to for them is supposed to make him the butt of a joke or if we’re supposed to see them through his eyes and empathize with them the way he does. I feel like it’s the latter. It’s stance seems to be that no one should suffer for being weird, lonely or mentally ill.

I’m sure my high school teacher bent it into some kind of puritan morality tale about how there is no point in helping those who won’t help themselves, but it doesn’t hit that way.

Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery (The Star) - I don’t understand why Emily has not gotten the same attention and love as Anne of Green Gables. This is a beautiful story deeply into the category of Magical Realism, Emily’s world is as full of fairies and nature spirits and prophetic visions as it is the injustices of early 20th century childhood.

It pushes so many boundaries. I can see why it would not have been popular in it’s own time— there is a healthy level of blasphemy from Emily and her father who believe that their loving God exists as a separate being from the puritanical God everyone else preaches about.

It also radically asserts the idea that children are whole beings deserving of the same rights as adults. Almost every child in the book is living with some kind of abuse or neglect— and it’s not treated as “period-appropriate parenting techniques” but as the actual injustice it is.

I’m going to do a longer post on Emily soon because I have SO MANY FEELINGS about it. It might just be my favorite thing I’ve read for the challenge so far.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (The Hanged Man)- How are we all sitting around for tea when the slow march of time leads us ever closer to death? The helplessness in the face of existential inevitability made this one feel just right for the Hanged Man

“The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (Temperance)- Hard sci-fi short story about a pilot who has to make the choice between jettisoning a stowaway into space or running out of fuel before he can deliver medical supplies to a colony. This was emotional as hell but a really good story.

[tearlessrain]

HELLO, I'm going to try and be the chance I want to see in the world, hahaha. So TELL ME PLEASE, who is your favourite swtor OC? And how do you relate them to the story of the game; is it canon for them, do you write/imagine/rp stories for them adjacent to the game or totally divorced from it...?

eeeey thank you for the ask! sorry it's taken me so long to get to it, my brain has not been cooperative on any front this week

I have several I'm very attached to but I'd have to say my favorite is my Imp Agent, Khatte Antilles (pronounced "cat." he's a cathar. I originally made him as a joke character before he developed a personality/backstory and now I just have to live with my choices.)

the fact that I had to go back four years in my art folders to find an image of him suitable for all audiences really tells you all you need to know already tbh

Overall he lines up pretty strongly with the canon basegame Agent story, it was kinda one of those "if it ain't broke don't fix it" situations because I do love the Agent storyline a lot. The headcanons kick in more in the DLC/Alliance zone and in his backstory, and I definitely fiddled with the timeline of things because he was very young for his first mission on Hutta (definitely no older than 20, probably closer to 17/18, he lied about his age and joined ImpInt at 13 claiming he was 16 so that makes everything more complicated. he only got away with it because the people doing his paperwork were all human and Imperial and had no idea what a 16 year old cathar would actually look like), but he's in his mid 20s for most of the basegame questline and in his early 30s by the Zakuul era. Basically it all works out that there are some unaccounted for years between Hutta and the rest of act one, and some very accounted for years during the Carbonite Timeskip because he's not the canon Commander and being incorrectly frozen in carbonite is one of the few medical horrors that hasn't happened to him. He spent that time having a mental breakdown because he believed that the only person he still trusted in the galaxy had been killed by the Empire, and channeled his feelings about that into wiping out every trace of the Castellan Restraints and their development, including the people who worked on the project. It was all very dramatic and probably would have also have included himself if Lana Beniko hadn't tracked him down before the Empire did and dragged him back to the Alliance to help organize and lead their Intelligence division, which wasn't fun for anybody but did ultimately lead to him getting therapy and starting to heal from the clusterfuck that was his career.

I also expanded on his relationship with a few NPCs quite a bit, he's got a History with Darth Jadus and met him not long after joining ImpInt, because Jadus saw someone that young and vulnerable as a perfect opportunity to mold himself a loyal (or at least scared into submission) man on the inside and eventual personal Hand. it did not work out for him; Khatte was both more willful and more loyal to Keeper than he bargained for, and by the events of the game he absolutely loathed Jadus and also knew him well enough to handily unravel the rest of his plan. he clashed even harder with Zhorrid once she "inherited" him because unlike Jadus he held no fear or respect toward her and no amount of getting barbecued by Force lightning at every meeting would change his mind. This has all lead to him having a distinctly unfavorable view toward Sith, which he voices probably more often than is advisable for one's continued health and safety in the Empire.

he also had an extremely toxic and mutually abusive situationship with Hunter throughout the latter two acts that he's still unpacking the baggage from to this day, and still has a much healthier slow burn romance with Vector (let him kiss the bug man EA I am begging you it's 2024).

But yeah, Alliance era he's honestly thriving as much as could be expected for someone with his history, I've got him in a whole multiverse situation with some friends' ocs where he's free to be a horny disaster in a much safer and healthier way than he used to be.

[yahooanswersblog]

Some more random Q/A’s from Ask.fm

Do you believe the decision to overturn Roe V Wade was unconstitutional?

If a state can punish someone for crossing state lines to get an abortion, then it's 100% unconstitutional.

Do you think I'm too old to be on social media? I'm 37 years old. D,:

Should older people just be into non-computer things like bingo and playing cards? It makes no sense.

Donuts with or without filling? I personally don’t like filling

Filling makes me feel either guilty or gross usually, maybe both. Maybe small amounts of the right kind of filling would be good.

Is walking around the woods naked illegal?

If a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, it still does make a noise.

who would go out with elliot page

He seems like the type of guy that could help a woman to feel safe when out in public and such.. I wouldn't want to run into him!

Has anyone watched Monk?

I never saw it, but I've wondered how many people can spot Buffalo Bill in that one.

WTF . . . people nearby? I can't see anybody but me . . . can you?

I'm within a few yards of you. Don't worry, you're not alone.

How can I make friends on this app?

This is an anti-friend app.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Assuming there will be a sequel, I'll plan on watching it. It would be nice to have Alec Baldwin back, but we'd probably have heard about it if he were to by now.

Meat eater or veg?

Slightly carnivorous.

What’s your biggest first world problem?

Better Call Saul is almost completely done with, marking the end of a very long era, if you count Breaking Bad, which I do. There is supposedly not a great chance of another spin-off.

might delete my ask. y’all are starting to creep me out.

Disabling anon questions didn't even help?

Mixed drinks or straight

Straight if the booze is high quality.

u wanna see my house?

You can post a pic of it if you want.

Which is more mentally frustrating school or a Job?

It's like comparing apples and... asparagus.

Drama vs Comedy

Usually drama, but that could be because there's too much shitty comedy.

Your favorite game is going VR. What game is that, and how will it be?

Lets see...

glances at current faves

Royal Match in VR would be pointless. I'll go back to an old classic like Duke Nukem 3D, polish the graphics and add some modern culture to it, then we're rocking and rolling with kickass fun.

Scream vs Halloween 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪

The latter is real horror, the former being more satire, if I'm not mistaken. I think I'd prefer actual horror IF well made, over so-called comedy horror.

what was the inspiration for your username?

Laziness, because mine is pretty shitty.

🖥 What's the best comedy movie you've ever seen? 🤣

for clean comedy: Happy Gilmore

adult: Cheap thrills, Happiness

6/26 what’s your favorite Jurassic Park Movie?

n/a not into that franchise.

let’s go buy a gun

👷‍♂️ What do you do for a living? 👩‍🍳

I'm a janitor at an abortion clinic.

Do you own a car?

Not right now. Not long after the pandemic started to take full swing, I thought fuck it, I should only spend money on what actually brings me joy, and not all of what makes me look good to society.

Can you search for people by area?

No. One of the only good (and great) things to be added to this site over the years is that all answers to a question can be found on one page. The so called developers of this site/app are brain dead, lazy pieces of shit.

[s-brant]

Cherry Bowl (3/8)

(gif: @kiekiecarrera) (PART TWO) (PART FOUR) (SERIES MASTERLIST)

Summary: When Kie cancels their plans together, Y/N asks JJ on a date to the Cherry Bowl Drive-In. Unsure of how to navigate his first ever date, JJ seeks out advice. Unfortunately, the night doesn’t go as planned, and both parties are left shaken by miscommunication.

Word Count: 10.6k

Warnings: Smut, public sex/exhibitionism, sexual choking, angst, depictions of mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and implied/referenced abuse.

A/N: Welcome back to Tokens! Slight trouble in paradise is brewing for these two lovers, so buckle up and read because it’s gonna be a rollercoster for a little while after what happens in this chapter. I hope you all like it, and if you did, feedback is very appreciated. Have fun!

"I'm just saying that oatmeal raisin is superior to chocolate chip, why is that such an egregious crime, Kie?"

The lunch room is filled to the brim with students going to town on questionably cooked frozen foods, soggy tater tots, and sugary drinks from the vending machines despite the Obama-era posters on the walls advocating for healthier school lunches that never seemed to make their way to Kildare County High. The extent of their healthy lunches extended to a serving of overcooked canned green beans served with the worst slice of doughy pizza known to human kind, so it was sort of contradictory.

Y/N sits across the table from Pope and JJ, the latter of which being the one who launched into a full-fledged debate with Kiara about which type of cookie was better.

The clear cling wrap sits, unfolded, on the table with one of her stickers neatly placed on the back of it. As consolation for his epic loss yesterday at the beach, she paid an extra .75 cents to get him it when she arrived first to their shared lunch period—one of only two class periods they have together, the other being gym. He was still in line when she peeled a surfboard sticker off of her sheet and placed it at the center of the wrapped up cookie as if to remind him of her triumph over him in the waves.

"Thanks, hot stuff," he said, voice somewhat quieter despite the fact that hardly anyone was in the cafeteria with them. Then his smile dropped into an deadpan expression as soon as he saw her choice of sticker and looked back up at her. "You're never gonna let me live that one down, are you?"

"Never in a million years. I'll be gloating about it until I'm elderly."

"That's my girl."

The sound of the constant chatter surrounding them from at least two hundred other people drowns out the memories of yesterday that threaten to haunt her when she watches him debate with Kie. The mere recollection of their night in the back of the van has her reaching to pull the collar of her cropped tee up to assure that the hickeys remain hidden on instinct, and he catches the action out of the corner of his eye. It has him fighting a smile.

Kie quips, "Maybe on another planet, but, here, I think we can all agree chocolate chip is better, right Y/N?"

Y/N's eyes widen around a forkful of mushy "green beans" at the sound of her name being said bringing her from the depths of her memories.

Usually, she's quick to jump in and give her two cents on whatever stupid back and forth they're all having, but her mind was elsewhere. Unbeknownst to Kie and Pope, she was mentally reliving every second of getting fucked in the van last night, so her attention to detail when it comes to the Chocolate Chip vs Oatmeal Raisin case isn't all too sharp.

"Uhhh," she stops for a second, looking at the half eaten chocolate chip cookie in Kie's hand, "If I say chocolate chip is better, can I get a piece of it?"

Kie's face lights up at her words, and she's already pulling off a generous chunk of the baked good to hand off to her. The sound of a certain someone whose lap Y/N's legs are outstretched onto from beneath the table scoffing distracts her from the first bite.

"I know you prefer oatmeal raisin, you traitor," JJ says.

Their brunette friend's brows scrunch.

"Why is she a traitor?"

They try to keep from making any faces or giving anything away, but Y/N has to stifle the sound of her choking on her mouthful of cookie at the question. You'd think one of them came out and asked if they were dating or something with how she reacts, and she feels JJ squeeze her ankle in a non-verbal way of telling her to hold it together. It was her idea in the first place, yet he's a lot smoother with keeping it under the radar.

Under it all, the aspect of keeping it a secret does unnerve him to a degree. He doesn't think he'd be brave enough to communicate it, especially not when their relationship remains undefined, but the darker side of his mind wonders...

He shrugs, saying, "Cause we were friends first. Duh. Other than John B, I've known her the longest."

None of them stop to acknowledge the identical aches in their hearts at the mentioning of his name. They skip right over it like it never happened. After the funeral a few days ago, they've filled their quota on mushy-gushy sad talk for the next week and a half.

The real reason is something far more complicated than him having a claim staked on her loyalty through having the longest friendship. It's something tied up in days of slowly getting pulled into one another's worlds like the tug of gravity itself, in how he has to refrain from slipping his arm around her waist in the hallway or kissing her goodbye after a sleepover at the Chateau. But until she gives him the go-ahead, he won't let it slip to anyone.

Pope speaks up from beside him, "You literally met her twenty minutes before we did."

"Still counts. Technically, I did meet her first, so her betraying Team Oatmeal Raisin is enough to be tried for treason in Pogue Court."

"Pogue Court isn't a thing."

He crosses his arms after he pops the rest of the cookie into his mouth.

"It is now. You can be tried for treason for breaking the rules. Rule number one is that all Pogues have to admit oatmeal raisin is superior."

He's about to ball up the cling wrap to throw away later when the surfboard sticker catches his attention again. It's the same color as his board, which he'd like to think is a result of her being an evil mastermind that went out to get this sticker sheet for the sole purpose of teasing him, but he's the one who got her the sheet as a gift for her birthday, so he knows it was pure coincidence.

Last second, he peels the sticker away from the cling wrap and looks down to place it over the top of her yellow converse that were once a vibrant, paler color when Big John got them for her, but have since turned into an ugly mustard/dirt-dusted color they heckle her over.

"What are the other rules?" Y/N asks.

One of the hands holding onto where her feet are casually planted in his lap, something that they've done long enough that their friends won't see it as anything odd, slides down to caress the stretch of skin beneath the frayed hem of her dark jeans. Something she didn't know about him before whatever it is they have together started was that he constantly needs to be touching her. She can't say she doesn't love it though.

Pope answers, "The oatmeal raisin rule is not official"—a pointed glance at JJ—"But I'd assume the rest of the rules of Pogue Court would be no lying and no macking."

"So, basically you two break almost every rule except the oatmeal raisin one, and I lie," JJ says and turns to look at her, "How does it feel to be better than everyone, Y/N?"

"Pretty good, not gonna lie."

He keeps caressing little circles and tracing up and down her skin beneath the flared out pant leg of her jeans while he swipes his phone off of the table top without attracting the attention of their friends, who continue on to a new topic. She isn't too focused on what it is. She only picks up that it has something to do with a class they're in that's more advanced that hers, so she promptly checks out of the conversation.

Ever since John B died, she hasn't been performing too well in school. She tries, truly tries, but her mind outright refuses to absorb any of the information. When she reads her assigned reading, she hovers over the same paragraphs over and over until she shuts the book in a huff and hides it in her backpack again. Losing someone you love has a surprising amount of side effects.

Her phone buzzing in her hand brings her away from the impending cloud of doom that often accompanies any thoughts of John B, and when she taps in her passcode, her brother's birthday, a message bubble appears with a banner displaying JJ's contact name.

JJ (Derogatory) ur a good liar. prob could've fooled me if i weren't the one macking on u

Their eyes meet for a second across the table, then he watches her thumbs move to type a response.

Kief Princess Little do they know I break every rule now that I've switched sides on the cookie debate. Kinda impressive ngl.

JJ (Derogatory) triple threat, baby

JJ (Derogatory) thanks for the cookie btw

She smiles to herself, so wrapped up in their own world that she doesn't notice everyone in the room starting to pack up their stuff in anticipation of the bell that is due to ring any second now.

Kief Princess Had to repay you for last night somehow ;)

When she glances up to see his reaction, she watches his chest rise with a particularly large inhale, and he chews on the inside of his lip in thought.

JJ (Derogatory) strategically bringing up last night so i'm turned on in physics? ur an evil mastermind

Kief Princess I try.

Kief Princess Apparently whooping your sorry ass at surfing isn't the only thing I'm good at.

She hears him scoff.

JJ (Derogatory) first of all, ouch. second, u barely beat me

Kief Princess I'm happy to challenge you to a rematch. I have plans with Kie tonight, so I can't till this weekend. All it'll prove is that I am the rightful winner, but we knew that already.

JJ (Derogatory) what r the stakes this time

Kief Princess No sexual favors. If you beat me (fat chance) I'll formally rejoin team oatmeal raisin.

JJ (Derogatory) :( sex makes it more fun but i still accept those conditions

JJ (Derogatory) team oatmeal raisin needs u, even if ur a traitor

Kief Princess Why bet sexual favors if you're just gonna fuck me after anyway?

JJ (Derogatory) good point

The sound of the bell ringing echoes through the cafeteria, and they both pop their heads up from their phone screens to see everyone, including Pope and Kie, already packed up and raising from their seats to scurry off in the direction of their next classes. Meanwhile, their stuff is all bestrewn across the table, particularly JJ's belongings.

The sight of Kie walking away makes Y/N ask after her, "We're still on for tonight, right?

She stops with Pope's hand interwoven in hers. The look on her face when she turns would make you think she got caught doing something she wasn't meant to. Something like forgetting about the plans they made last week to watch Fear Street together. The Cherry Bowl Drive-In is premiering the first two movies as a double feature for the horror movie buffs of Kildare, so they decided to get tickets. Kiara shares a fondness of horror movies with her. Since gory movies make the boys squirm, though JJ pretends they don't, it's their own thing.

"Actually, Pope and I were gonna go to the beach. I'm sorry."

JJ knows she's more upset about it than she lets on, but Y/N simply gives the pair a smile that doesn't reach the eyes.

The sound of JJ behind her makes them laugh on their way out, diffusing the minor tension lingering in the air from the awkward encounter, "Use protection!"

After their friends offer them a goodbye, they gather their stuff quite leisurely, not really caring about being late.

It's something they've talked about before here or there: her feelings surrounding Kiara and Pope's sudden relationship. It's not as if she harbors any ill feelings for them, she doesn't, but the ripple effects of their pairing on the group, and more importantly the girls' own friendship, couldn't be clearer from her perspective. Between the missed hangouts, forgotten plans, and the convenient way she never seems to have time to hang out with her and JJ unless Pope is there too, it's been building up for a month now.

What makes it sting the most is how close her and Kie used to be. They didn't hit it off immediately the way she and JJ did as children until her thirteenth birthday when no one she invited showed up to the party Big John helped her set up in the yard of the Chateau.

She was the one who rallied the boys together to walk to ask their school friends from the year above to come hang out for an hour or two, promising a slice of the wonky-looking but delicious strawberry cake her and John B spent the morning crafting together. She can remember the sound of their high-pitched laughs and the cloud of flour that hung in the kitchen when they high-fived over the finished product like it was yesterday. In her heart, it was yesterday.

That night was when she fell in love with her friends, and that was when she first knew Kiara was her best friend. They wove friendship bracelets on each other that night and wore them for years until they withered away. No one had ever done something like that for her before. Not even JJ.

"You okay?"

Feeling his hand on her arm, slipping down to take her hand for a moment in the seclusion of the empty cafeteria, makes her glance up at him with a distinct sorrow washed over her features.

You know what? Screw this. Why should she be torn up over Kie and let it ruin her excitement for the double feature tonight? There's no way in hell she's letting her best friend ditching her for her boyfriend get in the way of her plans.

"Do you wanna go on a date tonight?" she asks him abruptly, then adds, "To the Cherry Bowl with me instead of Kie?"

The question sparks a pause in his mind, a halt of hesitation in which he worries about her avoiding having to answer what he asked, but he attempts to play it cool and not fuss over her outwardly. There have been times where being treated like that has made her feel suffocated, so he doesn't want to risk it. When she's ready, she'll talk about it, and if she takes too long and buries her feelings, then he'll intervene. For now, he tries to keep his face neutral despite the frown tempting his lips at her disappointment.

JJ looks around once more before throwing his arm around her shoulder to walk her out.

"You bet your ass I do."

What is a person supposed to act like on their first date that's not actually a date cause everything between them is the same, but kinda is a date because they called it one? If you ever find out, please find JJ and tell him because he has no clue.

Pope wasn't too much help in the Instagram group chat he made for it seeing as his and Kie's relationship is too fresh, John B isn't even alive, so he's out of service for advice unless there's Ouija Board he can borrow, and, thankfully, Kiara was his savior.

Their phones began blowing up as soon as he reached his class after lunch period ended. He couldn't under any circumstances let it be known that this mystery girl he had a date with was their friend, but thankfully Y/N already had the alibi of going to the Drive-In alone. All he had to do was make up a fake date scenario and get basic advice.

danknugstickiestickies added kiara-c and popeheyward to the groupchat

danknugstickiestickies named the group HELP ME

danknugstickiestickies i have a date with this chick i met on the beach when i was out with y/n last week. i need ur advice

His phone screen lit up with the notification that both of his friends were typing, signified with the three dot symbol bouncing in the bottom left corner as he thought it through. They couldn't possibly figure it out, right? They'd been careful, he'd been respectful of her wishes, and they'd been too busy together to notice anything new with them. He figured it would work. It was a risk, sure, but it was worth it to him. He didn't want to fuck this up with her.

Knowing her, she probably wouldn’t even treat it differently than any of their other hang outs. It's not like they haven't been romantic or sexual with each other. They've done everything but go out on an actual date, so why was he nervous?

kiara-c ummmm

popeheyward Yeah, I'm gonna need you to ELABORATE!!

kiara-c did hell freeze over? since when does jj maybank go out on dates??

danknugstickiestickies renamed the group hell froze over

kiara-c very funny, I'm laughing so hard 😐

popeheyward Do we know her?

danknugstickiestickies don't think u do. she moved here last week and hasn't enrolled in school yet. her name's steph

popeheyward What about Y/N though?

kiara-c ^^

JJ's chest muscles tightened with the question prompting a rush of anxiety that made his breathing feel slightly harder. He glanced up at his Physics teacher, who was essentially dozing off behind his desk with his hand in a bag of chips and an educational video on the projector as an excuse to not teach, and looked back down at his phone without the added stress of possibly getting his phone confiscated.

Pope's message might as well have been a sucker punch. Forget butterflies, he set a wasp’s nest loose inside of his stomach to tie it into knots and flip it every which way. His neglected textbook served as a prop for his phone to lean on as he set it down to think.

Did they know? As far as he was aware, they were getting away with it. No evidence, concrete or circumstantial, was there to prove it. At least the stress of the situation killed any chance of him being turned on by her reminder of last night in their messages. This shit was boner repellant of the highest degree.

He played stupid. Better to let them volunteer whatever information they had before he went in saying anything incriminating that they didn't already know. If anything would sour the experience of their first date, it would be him accidentally making their strange in-between relationship public behind her back.

danknugstickiestickies ?? what do u mean

Three dots bounced in the bottom left corner of his slightly cracked phone screen.

popeheyward ...

kiara-c I mean, you don't see it?

danknugstickiestickies see what

popeheyward I guess we were wrong, but all of us always thought you two had some feelings going on.

"You don't say?" JJ murmured sarcastically to himself under his breath. "Never crossed my mind, Pope."

danknugstickiestickies bro that's jb's little sister

kiara-c so?

danknugstickiestickies forbidden fruit? making john b roll over in his grave? do those ring a bell or am i speaking in tongues

He was already a proficient liar in real life, but, fuck, it was easy in text messages. There's no chance at deciphering facial expression or tone, just a plain message with no room to budge. Thank God he didn't do this in person with them. He could've survived, but it wouldn't have been as quick and painless as the group chat was.

kiara-c jeez, sorry

Pope didn't voice it, but he noticed something.

He looked up from his phone and stared off at the wall in thought in his AP European History class. It piqued his interest that JJ simply said she was off limits, forbidden fruit as he put it, but did not outright deny having feelings for her. In fact, he didn't even address the question. He made excuses for why he shouldn't have feelings for her, but he never said he didn't have feelings for her.

Kie did not notice. Not because she wasn't smart enough to either, but because she was too busy hiding her phone behind her backpack to think too deeply about it. Her teacher was one of those teachers that would flip shit if they saw a cell phone turned off and faced down on the desk, let alone being used by a student during a lesson.

In his classroom across the hallway, JJ bounced his leg up and down beneath his desk in an absentminded urge to release the built up energy the anxiety produced in an over abundance.

popeheyward Our bad then. Even John B thought y'all were sus lmao.

Since when was that a known fact? Could he tell? Did he talk to Pope about him and Y/N before he died? Either way, it wasn't the time to pry about it.

kiara-c yeah you guys honestly could've fooled me if you wanted to

danknugstickiestickies well thank u, glad ur invested in our friendship but

danknugstickiestickies please help, i have no fucking clue how to act on a date and this girl is too cool for me to screw this up

That was when they finally dropped the interrogation session and started offering up tips. The best ones came from Kie, which made sense to him since women are more likely to know what other women like than two dudes who share one collective brain cell and never had real relationships.

Rule One: Be ready to pick her up five minutes early.

He wasn't ready to pick her up five minutes early. His bike broke down by the time he made it halfway down his street, so he had to push it back up the road and into the yard before setting off on foot to reach the Chateau quickly enough. And by quickly enough, it means he got there five minutes late, not early.

Rule Two: Compliment her after you get in the car.

She tossed him the keys to the Twinkie from across the hood, not giving him the chance to open the door for her, and it wasn't until they were setting off down the road that he remembered the next piece of advice he was given.

Side-eyeing her in his peripheral vision, he tried to find something to compliment her on specifically rather than the general compliments about her being pretty that she never fully believes when he says them. He was intending to say something about the skirt she had on, but when he chanced a glance over at her, she caught him and asked—

"What is it?"

Sent into panic mode, JJ blurted out instead, "I like your shoes."

He could've bashed his face against the steering wheel twenty times right then and there at the utter absence of reaction on her part for the next few uncomfortable seconds. It wasn't that it was a bad compliment. She appreciates any compliments at all...but her shoes were hidden from his view. Not to mention, they were the dirty, mustard yellow converse that the Pogues bash on a daily basis.

She laughed, lifting her leg to expose the sneaker on her right foot, and asked, "These? Dude, you roast me for these all the time. You and John B said they look like Big Bird shit on them."

The skin on the apples of his cheeks scorched hot with embarrassment, and he was never so glad that the overhead lights in the van were burnt out until that moment. He would've died on the spot if she saw him blush like that, face flushed pinker than sunburn. All he could do to save himself was murmur something about the color growing on him and keep driving in the direction of the theater with his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel he fantasized about banging his face into.

Rule Three: Insist on picking up the check.

In this case, it meant insist on buying the popcorn and drinks, and he miraculously managed to drop his wallet somewhere along the way when he ran over to the Chateau, so when he stepped up to the makeshift concession stand with her standing at his side, he felt around for his wallet in his jeans to no avail.

His thoughts echoed back to him, You gotta be fucking kidding me. Seriously? Is this actually happening right now?

"JJ, it's honestly fine," she said softly as he leaned over to search back of the Twinkie for the wallet. "We can look for it on your street right now if you want. It has your ID and stuff, you don't want a stranger to have that. We don't need to stay—"

It took all of his control to not shout it in reaction when he said, "No way. You've been waiting for this, and Kie ditched you, so I ain't ditching you too. We're staying."

His wallet could go kick rocks.

He came too far to be dragged down by the old leathery piece of shit anyway. Would he go out and search for it tirelessly the second the date ended? Hell yeah, that fucker had twenty dollars and his debit card in it, but he couldn't bear the thought of abandoning her or ruining her anticipated movie night by taking her out to search the streets with their phone flashlights for a wallet they might not find. He'd wait till the movies ended, take her home, then haul ass around the Cut searching for it after.

Thankfully, he found a couple bucks crumbled up in his front pocket while she scavenged for coins in the glove compartment, and they came up with enough to buy a water bottle and small popcorn to share together.

Rule Four: Don't have sex on the first date.

And it may sound easy enough to not act like a complete Neanderthal for the length of two movies, but the girl makes it pretty damn difficult if he's to say so himself.

That's what led him here, laying in the back of the sideways-parked Twinkie in the farthest corner of the outdoor theater with her practically on top of him. In any other instance, he wouldn't be opposed in the slightest, but with the cursed fourth rule in mind, he isn't too thrilled with the feeling of her hand rubbing up and down his thigh.

It isn't even meant to be sexual. They're constantly touching one another this way. She'll even slip her hands up under his shirt just to feel the warmth of his skin or when he asks her if she can get an itch on a part of his back he can't reach, but for some reason his brain is short circuiting right now.

The thing is, when Kie and Pope said he shouldn't do it on the first date, they meant it for his and Steph's made up circumstances, not his and Y/N's full-blown relationship without labels. When you've had sex with someone as many times as they have with each other, the hesitancy on the "first date" is nonexistent. It doesn't matter. But JJ, trying to follow the advice given to him to the letter for the sake of being the date she deserves, doesn't think about it that way.

It shouldn't be this nerve-wracking. They've been best friends since they were children, they've been flirting since they found out what basic attraction was in the first place, and they've been forming this relationship ever since John B died. Why can't he relax? Why is this so different compared to how easy it felt between them yesterday on the beach or today at lunch?

Rule Five: Be yourself.

It takes him another few moments of laying here with her before he realizes quite abruptly what went wrong in a quick flash of a thought that brings the fifth rule back to him. The problem wasn't the bike, or the weird compliment about her Big Bird sneakers, or the lost wallet.

The problem is him. The problem is that he's trying way too hard to make this something it isn't. The part about them that he adores so dearly is how they never have to try when they're together. With any other girl or guy, they'd have to fake something or act a certain way, yet when they're together, they can simply exist and everything is runs smoothly. That's not to say they don't disagree or bump heads, they do, but short of those outlier moments, it's easier than anything else they do in life.

His eyes flicker away from the screen for the first time since the movie began, which, by the way, is gruesome enough at times that he had to divert his eyes to prevent himself from seeing it happen. They land on where she lays, completely content with the night in spite of its mishaps, with her head propped up on the pillows they brought from the Chateau.

He wonders if she can tell he's acting differently. Surely she must notice. She's the type of person that typically never misses a thing, perfect for the gold hunt they went on in the summer with picking up the clues and helping her brother unravel the mystery, so maybe she noticed how flustered this date has him. Does it bother her? Does he bother her?

With a confirming glance back up at the movie to see nothing important happening, he can't fight the urge to speak anymore.

"Can I tell you something?"

His voice appearing through the darkness of the shut off van after spending the past half hour in complete silence makes her jolt at first before realizing who it was. Though she loves horror movies, she can't claim to not be affected by them. The night she falls asleep after watching one, she often finds herself compelled to turn a light on and keep her feet from dangling off the edge of the bed. It's worth the fear, though.

When she turns to look at JJ, there's a warm smile on her face. She's cuddled into his side with a hand placed casually atop his thigh, caressing with no purpose or intent, and her movement halts when the light from the movie on the projector allows her to see the expression on his face.

Anxiety has become an increasingly significant presence in his life with the recent events in mind; John B and Sarah, the four-hundred million dollars they lost out on, and dodging his father whenever he sneaks home to switch out the backpack of clothes and personal belongings he keeps at the Routledge house.

It manifests itself in jittery nerves, stomach pains, shortness of breath, and, at worst, panic attacks striking either at random or in response to a specific trigger. It's one of the few things he still tries to hide from her, and she tries not to push him too hard with opening up about it.

She abandons the movie for the time being and rolls onto her side to face him, upper body propped up on her elbow as she examines his face with downturned features.

"Of course," she says.

The words left unsaid are, "You can tell me anything. Whenever you need someone to listen, or to talk to about shit, you can tell me." He's heard her say it enough that he doesn't need to hear it now to know it's true.

There's a pause, then—

"I feel like I fucked this entire date up," he starts to ramble and cuts her off before she can think about saying what she wants to, "and I know it's okay to you. You have way too high of a tolerance for my bullshit, and I've been trying so hard to make this perfect, but all that did was screw it up."

She's left quiet for a second, taking it all in.

Maybe if he hadn't been so anxious about it, he would've realized what was wrong with his bike when he rode it home from school, or he would've noticed his wallet fall out of his pocket. The point is, he wishes he hadn't let the label attached to this freak him out so much. He isn't sure why it does, but it does.

But she doesn't do what he expects. She isn't drowning him in reassurances and, "It's okay's" because she knows he doesn't care for them much. When he, the most stubborn person she knows, apologizes for something he did, he doesn't want it to turn into the person accepting the apology coddling him.

Y/N sighs.

"Is that why you've been acting so different all night? I scared you with the whole ‘date’ thing, didn't I? It doesn't have to be a date if you don't want it to be."

What she doesn't know is that he wants it to be a date. He wants it to be a date so badly, he risked Pope and Kie finding them out for the sake of getting some proper advice on it, and now he's caught up in the same game of tug and war in his mind that always occurs when he wants to tell her the truth about his feelings for her.

Part of him doesn't understand why he doesn't outright say it. With every other girl he once showed interest in, he had no issues in letting them know he wanted them, but this is different. This isn't simply wanting someone, he thinks he's fallen for her. But whenever he says he's gonna grow a pair and tell her after all this time, he chokes. Involuntarily, he's reminded of his parents. Other than his friends saying it platonically, the only people to tell him they loved him were them, and with how they treated him, he sure as hell doesn't think that is love.

From his dad's brutal physical abuse to his mom's abandonment, he's too timid to tell her he loves her because of what could happen if she loves him back. Everyone else that has said that to him has either hurt him, died like John B did, or abandoned him.

He won't let that happen with him and Y/N. What they have, albeit undefined and codependent, is safe. It's the only thing he has left. Maybe it isn't right, and maybe he should open up about it to communicate the correct way, but somewhere in the misshapen logic of his mind, he correlates love to abandonment. And he doesn't want that to happen with her.

There are two sides of him at battle inside his mind. One side, the side that wants to do right by their relationship and actually communicate his feelings for once in his life, wants him to tell her everything. The other side, the side that responds based on the history of his past, wants him to hide it all.

"Will you be mad at me if we don't call it a date?" he asks.

She shakes her head.

The heavy sensation inside of JJ's chest nears a point of vitriolic violence against him as he starts to realize what he's doing to her, clearly letting her down, but he can't stop himself. Like a passive witness watching himself from outside of his body, the instantaneous trauma response to the sudden confrontation of his true feelings for her guides his actions without his permission. It shuts down any protest he has.

The sound of the movie fills the gap of silence between them the entire time. It’s a variety of bloodcurdling screams and disgusting sounds that would've made him gag if he weren't as distracted.

They can make out each other's faces through the darkness, but barely. It takes a flash of bright color from the film or a nearby car's lights turning on for them to fully see one another. Without the other knowing, they both put masks of calm and collected coolness on their faces despite the feelings raging beneath the surface—more so on his part than hers.

"Maybe," he says, pausing, "we should just keep things the way they've been."

As soon as the words leave his mouth, a soul-crushing amount of disappointment weighs her down. She said it was fine if he doesn't want it to be a date—and it is, she would never hold it against him—but that doesn't mean it can't hurt her. Things have been going so well, she almost thought...If tonight went well, she was thinking about no longer keeping it a secret, but if he said he wants things to stay the same, then maybe he isn't as ready for it as she is?

Meanwhile, JJ is on another page entirely.

She's embarrassed of being with you, a familiar voice in the back of his head croons. She's gonna leave just like everyone else does. If she doesn't even wanna tell your friends, why should you pretend you're dating?

The internal comments are the type that cause him to physically grimace when he's alone. Intrusive thoughts are just that: intrusive.

Sneaking into the guarded sanctuary of a person's mind, they set out to convince them the opposite of their reality. The only thing is, where most people's minds are guarded sanctuaries with walls of impregnable defense, his mind is the equivalent of a fortress blown to smithereens. The castle walls lay in rubble, the guards no where to be seen, and the path for these thoughts to slip past and straight to the vulnerability of his mind is left wide open.

In the privacy of his room, these thoughts attack him the most at night when he tries to fall asleep—when things get too quiet. With nobody around, when they get this bad there's nothing he can do except break down. It builds from the mere anxiety of attempting to force the thoughts away to full-blown panic attack mode. The more he resists them, the more aggressive they become. He'll gasp for air with tears streaming down his face, hitting his head with the heel of his hand as if that'd do something to stop his relentless mind.

But he can't afford to react in front of her, so the extent of his reaction is a subtle twitch of his face that she cannot see in the momentary darkness before the movie switches to another scene a second later. In a way, it does make the thoughts go away to have her here preventing him from spiraling alone. Having to focus on her keeps his mind away for moments at a time until the thoughts ease their grip on him.

When she hasn't answered for a while, he asks, terrified that he did something bad, "Are we good?"

The question seems to wake her up, snapping her out of the lonely direction her thoughts went into when he "rejected" her. It takes every bit of common sense she has left to force herself to understand that this doesn't mean he doesn't want her. He does, and not calling this a date doesn't mean they won't be together in the way they have been since John B's death, but she isn't perfect. She gets as unsure and insecure as he does.

As if the cloud of doom was lifted off of her, she makes her face lighten where she lays on her side next to him. Seeing this expression makes his chest feel less heavy, and he could let out a sigh of relief at the realization that he didn't break her heart and stomp on it. He should've known. Y/N is the sweetest person he knows, so she never would've flipped shit over him not wanting to label this as a date. That's not how she is.

And he's partly right. It isn't how she is. She would never hold it against him if he didn't want something further with her since she got herself into this position by pursuing him with his reputation with girls in mind, but she can't ignore it. Whether she wants it to or not, it had its affect on her as soon as he said it.

She leans in to kiss him, their lips meeting in the middle with the faint taste of popcorn salt mingling at the soft peck.

When she pulls away, she brushes the hair back from his face and says, "Don't worry. Nothing can change how I feel about you."

She has no clue what it feels like to hear that from her.

Despite the turmoil they unknowingly share beneath the surface due to this conversation, he could cry hearing her say it. It doesn't feel real to him that she feels the same way he does about her, because nothing could change how he feels about her either. That’s why he manages to work up the courage to repeat it back to her, and, for now, this is the closest he's physically capable of coming to telling her the truth.

"Ditto," he says.

It isn't what she wanted, but it's close enough, and if she dwells on this any longer, she might start getting too emotional and let the urge to tear up become too strong. Why does she have to be this sensitive? It's no secret that it's remarkably easy to make her cry, but this is insane to her. When all of this began with him, she didn't give a shit about him not wanting a label. She understood him, and she understood that he doesn't do this kind of thing, so why has it changed? Why doesn't she want to keep it a secret anymore? Why does she want this to be a date when she knows he doesn't want it to be?

Pulled by an invisible string back to him to silence her mind, she leans in to kiss him again with a hand cupping the back of his neck to guide him the rest of the way to her.

It shouldn't be laced with any sexual intention. She should be kissing him simply because she wants to, and, in a way, she is. Their kisses and touches are never lacking the motivation that is their underlying connection and mutual feelings for one another, but this is not the same. As he kisses her back with as much confidence and passion as always, she is reeling from the conversation that reminded her too much of a breakup.

It takes another minute of this for the kiss to heat up, their breathing becoming shallower in the moments they part to inhale, and she is undeniably the one instigating when she officially crosses the line between casual and sexual by crawling onto his lap. It's not hard for him to pick up on when their innocent moments take a turn. She's easy to read in that regard, and this has happened a multitude of times with them, so the shift of a mini make out session turning into something more is nothing out of the ordinary for them.

If he knew how shaken she is on the inside, he'd never want this. And the same would go for her if she knew what he was thinking before this. Neither of them wants to admit what they're feeling.

With her legs seated on either side of his hips, she kisses him like it's the last time she'll ever get the opportunity to. Her hands wander wherever they can, pulling at his shirt and feeling him up as his hands guide her hips to move against his in a steady grinding that she has no issue partaking in. It's an eagerness he hasn't seen from her in weeks. She's never un-excited when it comes to being physical with him either, but this is another level. The last time a girl was all over him like this, it was desperate touron at a party a few months ago.

In the span of time it takes her to glance over her shoulder to see if anyone could see them and reach to pull her skirt up until it bunches around her hips—no one can see them, by the way, since they got here late and were forced to cram the van into the back corner of the lot with no street lights illuminating the path—his brows raise at her presumptuous behavior. Not that he's one to complain, however, seeing as he's typically the one doing what she is.

Their next kiss clashes their teeth hard enough to make them wince, but he loves it. It makes him smirk into her parted mouth, alive with both the feeling her reassurance provided and the fuzzy-headed high that often finds him when they're together in this way. Incomparable to past flings or the high related to any drugs, she is the peak of everything to him. It's no contest.

His chest stutters against hers with a bout of amused laughter, asking within a brief pause in what feels like the most JJ thing he's said this awkward night, "Two for two in the Twinkie. What's gotten into you?"

Y/N's hand dips between where their bodies move together to unclasp the closed buckle of his belt in one smooth motion that has it falling apart with a clinking noise.

Her features are set with a look that tells him she means business. Whatever it is that sparked this, he wonders how the fuck to make it happen again another time. She's begged for it before, but never taken control so dominantly, and he can't deny what the role reversal does to him. The evidence is obvious in the distinct hardness she feels pressing up against the hand undoing his jeans.

"I was hoping it'd be you," she says, voice breathless and airy from the constant contact in a way that makes it ten times hotter for him.

If there were any chance of him not being in the mood prior to this, which wasn't the case anyway, it's gone now. He never wants to hear her say she doesn't deliberately try to tease him ever again.

He doesn't need to be told twice.

JJ surges forward to capture her mouth with his, this time with no intention of pulling away to breathe or speak again. No, he'll let himself get lightheaded and dizzy if it means he can stay with her for as long as possible.

With the circumstances of it all, them being visible to someone if they happened to pass by the open door of the van, they move at a pace quicker than usual. She's immediately helping him shimmy his jeans and underwear far enough down his hips to free his dick from the confines of his clothes, making him sigh out a breath of relief when her hand brushes against him in the process.

There's no opportunity to slow down, it has exploded into a full-throttle speed race that neither of them can halt.

His hand blindly flies out beside him to grope the floor of the van for the set of keys he tossed carelessly to the side once the movie started, eyes shut in the midst of the hot, messy kiss they share. His fingers find the fabric of one of the blankets they brought in case they got cold, then drifts again and lands on her Big Bird sneakers until he feels the sharp metal of her keys meet his calloused palm.

After the events of last summer, she bought a switch blade to keep on her key ring alongside the keys to the van, HMS Pogue, and Chateau. She may not like violence or weapons, seeing as she was a skeptic of JJ keeping the gun alongside her friends, but she saw it necessary. Between Rafe, Topper, and Kelce, how could she leave the safety of her and her friends up to chance knowing what some of the kooks did to them not long ago? What happened to Pope on the golf course alone was enough to make her skin crawl.

Right now, though, the knife flips out from the pressure of his thumb pushing the button to release it. He holds it out away from her at first to assure it doesn't nick her in the process, then uses his other hand to tug the side of her panties that hugs her hip far out enough to press the sharp side of the blade onto the inside of it.

She can hardly believe what she's watching as JJ cuts the delicate maroon underthings from her body as if he were doing something so normal, like it's something he's done before. Her forehead is pressed against his, her mouth parted both in shock and in a need to pant for oxygen, and she watches the knife ruin her favorite panties. The stitches come apart with a satisfying ripping noise that can hardly be heard over the sound of people reacting to the movie in the background.

Other customers of the Cherry Bowl Drive-In are too glued to the screen as a beloved character is chased down, reacting in shouts when she's seized by the killer and shoved onto the table of an industrial bread slicer, so they remain wholly unnoticed.

The lace, now ripped in half, dangles on the tip of the knife when he lifts it away from her, tosses it aside, and presses the button once more to retract the blade. It clatters to the floor, but is in no way forgotten with them resuming in a desperation to keep going until they both satisfy the need clawing at them from the inside. But her sense of need is different from his, and even with the fresh memory of him with the switch blade in mind, she's still somewhere else the whole time.

Her mind is faraway, muted through layers of sadness, anger, and disappointment as he reaches between them to line himself up to her entrance. The sensation of him running his cock, hard and messy with a few drops of precome, through her dripping pussy to coat it in her slick arousal is enough to make her moan pathetically. Yet when he's about to guide himself inside of her, she stops him.

"Wait, wait, wait," she breathes out rapidly, heart pounding so hard she can feel herself pulsating between her thighs, "Condom."

They were so antsy to get to it, they almost forgot.

"Fuck," he curses under his breath, and his eyes flicker from where they were trained between their bodies to glance back and forth around the van before it hits him. "I lost my wallet..."

But right when he thinks their public rendezvous in the back of the Drive-In is over due to his unfortunate mistake, she shakes her head and slips away from her perch astride his lap to crawl over to her bag.

She fumbles with the old tote bag and plunges her arm in to sift through the hodge podge of things that are purely Y/N in nature—stickers, glitter pens, a half-eaten bag of candy, etc—for the square foil package she decided to toss in before she left just in case. She usually doesn't keep them on her because he never fails to have one, but, thankfully, she had the random instinct to bring it tonight.

The only thing to bring her out of her cloudy, malevolent storm of feelings when she settles back onto his lap with the condom wrapper ripped open for him is him saying, "So you planned this, huh?" with his mouth tipped in a familiar self-satisfied grin.

She didn't plan it. In fact, she threw herself at him the second she sensed him withdrawing from her and can't stop herself despite the fact that she constantly feels two seconds away from letting a tear slip down her cheek. If that counts as "planning it", then sure.

"Maybe so," she answers, cool, calm, and collected—the antithesis of the truth.

They usually don't lie to each other.

They're thrown right back into it without any other hiccups once he rolls the condom on, and he takes in a shaky breath at her hand wrapping around him to align their bodies up. Before she can do anything, though, he takes chance to swipe the blanket he found a moment ago and wrap it around her back to keep her covered in case they get caught.

Y/N sinks down onto his cock with her lip caught between her teeth to stifle the sound that threatens to escape. JJ, on the other hand, doesn't bother concealing the sound of the groan he makes at the sensation of having her wrapped around him like this. The tension in her entire body from the anticipation and the looming threat of being seen by someone has her squeezing him so tightly, he can't help but be a little louder than he should.

Her soft palm slaps over his mouth with enough pressure to force his groan to quiet itself, and she watches his pretty blue eyes widen in reaction to the dominant action. Who is this girl and what has she done with his sweet, submissive Y/N? Don't get him wrong, he is very turned on by it, but it's unlike her to take the lead this way. He can't figure it out.

"What's wrong, angel?" she asks in a whisper into his ear, her hand over his mouth and her hips starting to slowly rock against him, "Watch the movie."

Once the words leave her mouth, she drops her hand, just in case he wants to stop and can't say anything because she had his mouth covered, and JJ is pretty sure he's died and gone to heaven.

He doesn't watch the movie, not at all, because he's too busy watching her. For someone losing their mind internally, she does not let it show, nor does she let it distract her from what's happening. If anything, the distraction in this situation is the sex, not what's going on inside of her head.

There's a moment of adjustment and going as slowly and gently as possible while waiting for the dull pressure of feeling him inside of her to fade away, but, for the most part, she doesn't waste any time. As soon as she feels comfortable enough with the ache between her thighs giving way to a spark of pleasure when she grinds her clit down on his pubic bone, she starts to ride him at a better pace than the initial slow movements of her hips.

She raises herself up and takes him again inch by inch, enjoying the sense of fullness she gets from having to fit him in spite of the slight discomfort at first, and she could swear that he'll leave bruises in the shape of his handprints with how tightly he clutches her hips. It's all he can do to prevent himself from moaning or saying something, ever the vocal lover she's come to know.

Unless his mouth is preoccupied like it was on the beach yesterday afternoon, JJ is usually impossible to shut up, especially in this context. With him always whispering dirty things to her, whether it be praises, pet names, or plans on what he wants to do to her, she has come to find it breathtakingly hot. He could likely get away with saying something if he wanted to, but he isn't sure he wants to risk it. If he opens his mouth to spew something filthy to her, he won't trust himself not to make a louder, different kind of noise that won't fit in the with background audio the other moviegoers are listening to.

The wet sound of their bodies colliding that fills the space of the van is drowned out by the loud and violent sequence occurring on the screen far ahead of them, and hearing it makes her bounce herself on him a little harder. She's fueled on by it all, and, strangely, what happened before she practically pounced on him is the main contributor.

Similarly to the nature of his intrusive thoughts, the harder she resists the memory of how it felt when he told her he didn't want this to be a date, the more forceful it is in its return. Her eyes trail down to watch where they connect with her forehead pressed to his, then she's thrown back into the feeling of helpless disappointment and insecurity. His head tips back against the window with his bottom lip dropped open and his brows furrowed just enough to create a crease on his forehead, and she's bombarded with the look of relief on his face when he realized he didn't have to be tied down to her with a label.

It makes her want to get rougher, harder, and she doesn't even care if it'll make her sore later on. She presses herself down so far every time she slides down on his cock, her teeth draw blood on her lip with how hard she must bite it to remain quiet. The pain of her hipbones rubbing against his doesn't even matter to either of them at this point. They're both too lost in the pleasure that has begun to take control of them to care about something as minuscule as that, or the burn in her thighs from the repetitive physical strain.

She grabs his wrist and brings his hand between them, flattening hers overtop of it and pressing down on the base of her abdomen in the midst of the increasingly feverish thrusts.

"Feel you here," she murmurs to him through a quiet moan, hoping he can hear it over the movie, and pushes down on his hand for emphasis. And if the way he reacts by cursing under his breath tells her anything, it's that he picked up on it. "JJ..."

He reaches out to grab her by the throat with his free hand and tug her forward to kiss him, as if something inside of him snapped in response to her doing that. The motions of her jolting up and down throws the already messy and uncoordinated kiss off-kilter, but they don't mind. It has them separating every time she lifts up, producing this heady little head rush from from them breathing in each other's air without actually letting their mouths meet in the middle.

Though they're trying their hardest not to alert anyone outside of what's happening, it didn't occur to him until now, when his eyes catch John B's old bandana swinging back and forth where it's secured around the rear view mirror.

They're worried about moaning while the entire fucking Twinkie is rocking with their movements. Well, at least it makes good use of the corny sticker he gifted John B last year as a gag gift. He tried to peel it off after JJ snuck it onto the side window to no avail. So, now Y/N is stuck with a sticker on her car reading, "If the van's a-rockin', come on in, we like orgies," rather than the more common phrase.

It almost makes him start laughing, and he prays no one takes that shit seriously, 'cause he is never intent on sharing this breathtaking girl. Ever.

Y/N isn't anywhere near laughing like he is, in fact, she's finding it difficult to keep herself together. She feels her eyes sting with the promise of tears, and she's never felt so pathetic before. Is she seriously about to cry during sex? Is she really that girl that is so ill-equipped to handle rejection, she can't get through it without tears?

She won't cry. Perhaps if he sees how glossy her eyes have become in a rare moment of good lighting, she can blame it on the hand around her throat putting pressure on the sides of her neck.

The worst part about her being near to crying is the timing of it.

The emotion of what she feels mentally mixes with the swirling, building sensation she feels in the pit of her stomach that tells her she's close to going over the edge, and it's so overwhelming. Was she imagining that their friendship had changed? More importantly, is this all she'll ever be to him? Sex is the only thing she's sure of with him, it's the only thing that doesn't require deeper emotions, and when the ground beneath their fragile relationship felt shaky...

He can feel her starting to unravel, and he knows that he'll come before she does if he doesn't do anything now, so he decides to take control.

JJ pulls the hand he had resting on her abdomen away as though he were burned by it, wrapping his arm around her waist to steady her body against his and using the hand around her neck for leverage to thrust up into her, effectively reducing her to a teary-eyed, moaning mess atop him. They both stopped caring about making noise the second he began to fuck her like this.

She cries out in ecstasy at the sudden change in pace and depth that has him hitting all the right places. Every time he thrusts up into her, just as rough as she wished for, the tip of his cock nudges into that perfect spot inside of her that makes her incapable of silencing her moans. This time, it's JJ that puts his hand over her mouth, letting the one he had around her neck move away to keep her from alerting everyone around them of what's happening.

There's nothing she can do to stop her climax as it barrels through her in its initial sweeping wave of bliss to contrast the venomous doubts in her mind. She's never felt such conflicting, yet powerful feelings before—the intensity of the physical pleasure that makes her whine into the palm of his hand, then the part of her mind replaying every word he said in their conversation before this.

Her body is rigid and tense through it all, squeezing down around his cock with the involuntary spasms of her orgasm, and he can't help himself anymore. All it takes are a few more frantic thrusts for him to bury himself inside of her one last time and spill into the condom, uncovering her mouth so he can drown out his own groans into a kiss.

Their skin sticks to their clothes on the inside with sweat from the exertion of their actions, and he can feel her stomach tremble where it presses up against his with each undulation of her hips that meet his as he rides it out.

But even with the added distraction of the sex, she can't rid herself of the feeling that started plaguing her as soon as things went awry. That was why he was acting weird all night. He must have been so worried about her thinking this was anything more than their typical hangouts that he couldn't bring himself to act normally.

She forces herself to look happy when they pull away from the kiss, panting, and JJ, unaware of what she's been thinking, doesn't notice the small deception.

Tag list: @gabiatthedisco

[staywrites]

tw // woojin , sexual assault , anxiety. please read with caution.

around 1 pm gmt+8, i noticed tweets from a cryptic account about a certain person from one of the big 3 companies saying that they had been sexually assaulted in a bar a few months ago. the account stated that the person was a former member of a group, and that they repeatedly used the group to assert power and authority to the victim.

people speculated it to be kim woojin from the victim's clues. people said that the victim confirmed it to be him, but i wasn't able to see a tweet about it.

after their story, their account was either taken down or deactivated, i'm not sure which. and since then, a few accounts had spoken up about their encounters with unnamed male kpop idols and what they had done. even more accounts were made to add confusion to the whole situation and drag other kpop idols in it.

a few hours later, woojin himself tweeted a statementㅡa short statement. he denied the victim's accusations by saying he didn't know the victim nor has he ever been to [the] bar, which the victim did not disclose. he continues by mentioning his upcoming debut as a soloist.

now, there were a lot of disappointed fans about this, but this only fluctuated more when he posted that statement, which for everyone, confirmed that it was him. apart from shamelessly promoting his career, he downright confirmed it was him by disclosing locations the victim did not mention. this started the circus of tweets clowning him, and concerned stays waiting for some response from the boys.

i watched a clip from chan's live implying about woojin's departure from the team, and he said that [he] was selfish and betrayed everyone, especially chan.

chan, who always took the hit for the boys, who posted a long paragraph about woojin's departure when the latter didn't even say a thing, who had to constantly look over the boys when they had to redo everything during cle:levanter era, who watched hyunjin break down infront of so many stays and witness jisung's mental health (and everyone else) deteriorate so much that he had to get professional help, handpicked woojin to be in his little team because he put trust in him to help the group grow and create fond memories with.

and when woojin left, all chan could say as per his idol duties was that he was betrayed. and because of this big information, all of us now know it's more than betrayal.

no sane agency would ever pull a departure announcement days before their comeback. but JYPE did that, swallowing the probable millions worth of budget for their comeback and redoing everything just to remove woojin from all of the upcoming content. they even went as to re-record some of their tracks, which was weird to me way before all of this happened. now we know why.

JYPE and stray kids want nothing to do with him, so everyone should stop putting the phrase 'former stray kids member' next to his name when he already left the company almost a year ago. this was a mistake on media journalists, because as they fish for readers with the phrase, they also come with the uncertainty of whether people will correlate this with the ot8 or not. with their steady rise of popularity and upcoming comeback, i hope everyone outside the stay community considers the fact that woojin isn't a part of the team anymore. this new content is something all eight of stray kids worked hard on to show everyone who they really are, without any trace of woojin whatsoever.

i've only been in this fandom for eighty days (i've been keeping count), so i wasn't really into woojin. but like everyone else, i was disgusted and ashamed. how could someone like him be with the most loving boys we've come to known and be comfortable with? to anyone who is overwhelmed, feeling betrayed, and hurt about this situation, please know that you never knew about this until today and it's okay to say you used to be a fan of him. the main point is that you realized he isn't what you think he is, and it's okay if you'll take your time before accepting it. take things at your own pace. you can always log out and reflect on this situation offline, and we'll always be here to welcome you back. it's okay if you decide to leave the fandom, we respect your decisions.

and to the victim, i hope they sleep better knowing they've told their story and i hope they know there's an entire (logical) community of kpop fans supporting them and wanting justice. that it doesn't matter who they are and what they do; sexual assault should not and should never be taken lightly especially with well-known people in the entertainment industry.

i love you all, and stay safe. support stray kids's comeback on september 14!

[superman86to99]

Superman #85 (January 1994)

Cat Grant in... "DARK RETRIBUTION"! Which is like normal retribution, but somehow darker. On the receiving end of Cat's darktribution is Winslow Schott, the Toyman, who suddenly changed his MO from "pestering Superman with wacky robots" to "murdering children" back on Superman #84, with one of his victims being Cat's young son Adam. Now Cat has a gun and intends to sneak it into prison to use it on Toyman. She's also pretty pissed at Superman for taking so long to find Toyman after Adam’s death (to be fair, Superman did lose several days being frozen in time by an S&M demon, as seen in Man of Steel #29).

So how did Superman find Toyman anyway? Basically, by spying on like 25% of Metropolis. After finding out from Inspector Turpin that the kids were killed near the docks, Superman goes there and focuses all of his super-senses to get "a quick glimpse of every person" until he sees a bald, robed man sitting on a giant crib, and goes "hmmm, yeah, that looks like someone who murders children." At first, Superman doesn't understand why Toyman would do such a horrible thing, but then Schott starts talking to his mommy in his head and the answer becomes clear: he watched Psycho too many times (or Dan Jurgens did, anyway).

Immediately after wondering why no one buys his toys, Toyman makes some machine guns spring out of his giant crib. I don't know, man, maybe it's because they're all full of explosives and stuff? Anyway, Toyman throws a bunch of exploding toys at Superman, including a robot duplicate of himself, but of course they do nothing. Superman takes him to jail so he can get the help he needs -- which, according to Cat, is a bullet to the face. Or so it seems, until she gets in front of him, pulls the trigger, and...

PSYCHE! It was one of those classic joke guns I’ve only ever seen in comics! Cat says she DID plan to bring a real gun, but then she saw one of these at a toy store and just couldn't resist. Superman, who was watching the whole thing, tells Cat she could get in trouble for this stunt, but he won't tell anyone because she's already been through enough. Then he asks her if she needs help getting home and she says no, because she wants to be more self-sufficient.

I think that's supposed to be an inspiring ending, but I don't know... Adam's eerie face floating in the background there makes me think she's gonna shave her head and climb into a giant crib any day, too. THE END!

Character-Watch:

Cat did become more self-sufficient after this, though. Up to now, all of her storylines seemed to revolve around other people: her ex-husband, Morgan Edge, José Delgado, Vinnie Edge, and finally Toyman. After this, I feel like there was a clear effort to turn her into a character that works by herself. I actually like what they did with Cat in the coming years, though I still don’t think they had to kill her poor kid to do that -- they could have sent him off to boarding school, or maybe to live with his dad. Or with José Delgado, over at Power of Shazam! I bet Jerry Ordway would have taken good care of him.

Plotline-Watch:

Wait, so can Superman just find anyone in Metropolis any time he wants? Not really: this is part of the ongoing storyline about his powers getting boosted after he came back from the dead, which sounds pretty useful now but is about to get very inconvenient.

Don Sparrow points out: "It is interesting that as Superman tries to capture Schott, he at one point instead captures a robot decoy, particularly knowing what Geoff Johns will retroactively do to this storyline in years to come, in Action Comics #865, as we mentioned in our review of Superman #84." Johns also explained that the robot thought he was hearing his mother's voice due to the real Toyman trying to contact him via radio, which I prefer to the "psycho talks to his dead mom" cliche.

Superman says "I never thought he'd get to the point where he'd KILL anyone -- especially children!" Agreed about the children part but, uh, did Superman already forget that Toyman murdered a whole bunch people on his very first appearance, in Superman #13? Or does Superman not count greedy toy company owners as people? Understandable, I guess.

There's a sequence about Cat starting a fire in a paper basket at the prison to sneak past the metal detector, but why do that if she had a toy gun all long? Other than to prevent smartass readers like us from saying "How did she get the gun into the prison?!" before the plot twist, that is.

Patreon-Watch:

Shout out to our patient Patreon patrons, Aaron, Murray Qualie, Chris “Ace” Hendrix, britneyspearsatemyshorts, Patrick D. Ryall, Bheki Latha, Mark Syp, Ryan Bush, Raphael Fischer, Dave Shevlin, and Kit! The latest Patreon-only article was about another episode of the 1988 Superman cartoon written by Marv Wolfman, this one co-starring Wonder Woman (to Lois' frustration).

Another Patreon perk is getting to read Don Sparrow's section early, because he usually finishes his side of these posts long before I do (he ALREADY finished the next one, for instance). But now this one can be posted in public! Take it away, Don:

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow​):

We begin with the cover, and it’s a good one— an ultra tight close up for Cat Grant firing a .38 calibre gun, with the titular Superman soaring in, perhaps too late.  An interesting thing to notice in this issue (and especially on the cover) is that the paper stock that DC used for their comics changed, so slightly more realistic shading was possible.  While it’s nowhere near the sophistication or gloss of the Image Comics stock of the time, there is an attempt at more realistic, airbrushy type shading in the colour.  It works well in places, like the muzzle flash, on on Cat Grant’s cheeks and knuckles, but less so in her hair, where the shadow looks a browny green on my copy.

The interior pages open with a pretty good bit of near-silent storytelling.  We are deftly shown, and not told the story—there are condolence cards and headlines, and the looming presence of a liquor bottle, until we are shown on the next page splash the real heart of the story, a revolver held aloft by Catherine Grant, bereaved mother, with her targeting in her mind the grim visage of the Toyman.

While their first few issues together meshed pretty well, it’s around  this issue that the pencil/inks team of Jurgens and Rubinstein starts to look a little rushed in places.  A few inkers who worked with Jurgens that I’ve spoken to have hinted that his pencils can vary in their level of detail, from very finished  to pretty loose, and in the latter case, it’s up to the inker to embellish where there’s a lack of detail.  Some inkers, like Brett Breeding, really lay down a heavier hand, where there’s quite a bit of actual drawing work in addition to adding value and weight to the lines.  I suspect some of the looseness in the figures, as well as empty  backgrounds reveals that these pencils were less detailed than we often  see from Jurgens.

There’s some weird body language in the tense exchange between Superman and Cat as she angrily confronts him about his lack of progress in capturing her son’s killer—Superman  looks a little too dynamic and pleased with himself for someone ostensibly apologizing. Superman taking flight to hunt down Toyman is classic Jurgens, though.

Another example of art weirdness comes on page 7, where Superman gets filled in on the progress of the Adam Morgan investigation.  Apparently Suicide Slum has some San Francisco-like hills, as that is one very steep sidewalk separating Superman and Turpin from some central-casting looking punks.

The  sequence of Superman concentrating his sight and hearing on the  waterfront area is well-drawn, and it’s always nice to see novel uses of his powers.  Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman does a similar trick quite often on the excellent first season of Superman & Lois.  The full-bleed splash of Superman breaking through the wall to capture Toyman is definitely panel-of-the-week material, as we really feel Superman’s rage and desperation to catch this child-killer.

Pretty much all the pages with Cat Grant confronting Winslow Schott are  well-done and tensely paced.  While sometimes I think the pupil-less  flare of the eye-glasses is a cop-out, it does lend an opaqueness and mystery to what Toyman is thinking.  Speaking of cop-outs, the gag gun twist ending really didn’t work for me.  I was glad that Cat didn’t lower herself to Schott’s level and become a killer, even for revenge, but the prank gun just felt too silly of a tonal shift for a storyline with this much gravitas.  The breakneck denouement that Cat is now depending only on herself didn’t get quite enough breathing room either.

While I appreciated that the ending of this issue avoided an overly simplistic, Death Wish style of justice, this issue extends this troubling but brief era of Superman comics. The casual chalk outlines of  yet two more dead children continues the high body count of the  previous handful of issues, and the tone remains jarring to me.  The issue is also self-aware enough to point out, again, that Schott is  generally an ally of children, and not someone who historically wishes  them harm, but that doesn’t stop the story from going there, in the most  violent of terms. In addition to being a radical change to the Toyman  character, it’s handled in a fashion more glib than we’re used to seeing  in these pages.  The mental health cliché of a matriarchal obsession, a la Norman Bates doesn’t elevate it either.  So, another rare misstep  from Jurgens the writer, in my opinion.   STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

I  had thought for sure that Romanove Vodka was a sly reference to a certain Russian Spy turned Marvel superhero, but it turns out there  actually is a Russian Vodka called that, minus the “E”, produced not in Russia, as one might think from the Czarist name, but rather, India.

While it made for an awkward exchange, I was glad that Cat pointed out how  her tragedy more or less sat on the shelf while Superman dealt with the "Spilled Blood" storyline.  A lesser book might not have acknowledged any  time had passed. Though I did find it odd for Superman to opine that he  wanted to find her son’s murderer even more than she wanted him to.  Huh?  How so?

I love the detail that Toyman hears the noise of Superman soaring to capture him, likening it to a train coming.

I  quibble, but there’s so much I don’t understand about the “new” Toyman.  If he’s truly regressing mentally, to an infant-like state, why does he wear this phantom of the opera style long cloak while he sits in his baby crib?  Why not go all the way, and wear footie pajamas, like the lost souls on TLC specials about “adult babies”?

I get that Cat Grant is in steely determination mode, but it seemed a little out of place that she had almost no reaction to the taunting she faced from her child’s killer.  She doesn’t shed a single tear in the entire issue, and no matter how focused she is on vengeance, that doesn’t seem realistic to me. [Max: That's because this is not just retribution, Don. It's dark retribution. We’ve been over this!]

[ask-risorgimento-italy]

Main Story Masterpost

I decided to make a masterpost for everything one might need to know in order to understand this blog and its story - historical background, characters and crucial plot points. I also added information that was not yet included on this blog but has been discussed on Discord.

Important terminology:

“Risorgimento”

(1) the 19th century movement for Italian political unity

(2) a time of renewal or renaissance, revival

“National representative”/”Representative” - the officially approved personification of a region

“Personification” - a semi-immortal being who embodies a region/culture akin to the idea of a “Leviathan” (Hobbes). Their origins are unknown. They might lead a very public life or prefer to stay anonymous. Usually they're somewhat obscure - most people wouldn't recognize them on the street. Some might believe them to be guardian spirits, pagan Gods, angels sent from Heaven or the spawn of Satan ...depending on who you ask.

“Fusion” - A personification gives up their immortality and allows another representative to “take over” their region. 

“Brother”/”Sibling”/”Partner” - personifications usually have multiple overlapping relationship dynamics. None of them are truly related by blood, but some will consider each other to be siblings. Some might consider each other related in the first half of a century and denounce it in the latter or vice versa.

What happened so far...

1798 - The Fall of the Republic

The story of this blog begins after the fall of the Serenissima. The maritime republic has been independent for centuries and is now in the hands of Napoleon. Even though Venice has been struggling to maintain power before, this is considered its death blow. Art is looted or burned and symbols of power destroyed. It is in the very moment Feliciano’s house is vandalized by French troops where he realizes that his life would never be as it was before.

1815 - The Kingdom of Venetia-Lombardo is founded at the Congress of Vienna 

Napoleon’s reign is over and Europe is drawing new borders at the famous Congress in the capital of the Habsburg empire. The Veneto is paired with its neighbor Lombardy to form a kingdom that now belongs to the Austrians. Feliciano and Benigno (the representative of Lombardy) have to agree to something akin to an arranged marriage.

1845-47 - The Prelude and the Financial Crisis

Famine, fiscal troubles and the demand for reforms all over Europe turn the continent into a powder keg. Feliciano and Benigno are no longer in a forced partnership. Instead, they are both angry soon-to-be revolutionaries, supporting each other in their struggles.

1848 - The Revolution

Revolutions erupt all over Europe. New governments are formed. Venice becomes the Republic of St. Mark. Lombardy goes through the Five Days of Milan. Feliciano and Benigno often fight in separate places, but are united in spirit. 

This is the first time in centuries where Feliciano personally gets his hands dirty in a conflict - he is angry and full of spite. Death to The Austrians is written on the walls with red paint.

1849 - The Fall of the Republic, Act II

After a long siege, starvation and sickness ultimately beat the city of Venice into submission. Feliciano’s fighting spirit is broken and his mental and physical health is at an all-time low. He is forcibly separated from Benigno and does not see him again until 1866.

1848-61 - The Predecessor State

After the failed revolution, the unification takes a much different form. 

Tactical warfare and treaties soon replace guerilla warfare. The driving force of this process is the Kingdom of Piedmont. It is sometimes called the predecessor state of Italy. Its personification is a woman called Cassandra. Her goal - to be the sole representative of the peninsula - is considered madness by some and visionary by others.

1861 - The Kingdom of Italy is proclaimed

After almost half a century of political struggles the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy marks the beginning of a new era. Cassandra, now referred to as Italia by most, offers great benefits to the remaining region's representatives if they “fuse” with her - fusion being an euphemism for a personification giving up their immortality and status as a representative and transferring it to Italia instead.

While many have agreed to the deal, others stay hesitant - namely Benigno (Lombardy), Romano (Naples) and Chiara (Sicily). And then there’s Feliciano, who is still under Austrian occupation...

1866 - The Veneto becomes part of Italy

Venice had somewhat of a special role in the Risorgimento. In 1861, it was not yet part of the Kingdom of Italy. The Habsburg empire has the city and the surrounding region in an iron grip for five more years.

Due to shared goals in their unification process, Italy and Prussia form an alliance against Austria, and the Prusso-German war finally decides over the fate of the Veneto. With Austria losing, Venice becomes Italian territory.

Feliciano as this point is all too happy to hear Cassandra’s offer about “fusion”. He feels tired and weak. Being able to shift the responsibility of nationhood on someone else’s shoulder sounds promising. It would not take long for him to finalize his decision.

1868 - And then things go wrong

Feliciano has decided: he would no longer be the personification of Venice. He says Goodbye to his family and friends, as he would forget his old life and start a new one as an ordinary citizen. Some don’t take these news well. Benigno especially reacts with anger, as he has believed that Feliciano would not agree to Cassandra’s offer. At some point they have a fight that causes Benigno to storm off teary-eyed. 

From this point onwards we witness the story from Benigno’s and Romano’s  POV.

Benigno is the one to discover Feliciano’s and Cassandra’s corpses. They lie on the floor of Feliciano’s villa in Venice. There is dried blood and flies. No one knows what has happened. The government is shocked to find out about this and tries everything to cover it up. Cassandra’s death could be a fatal blow to the new nation’s political landscape. Her body is preserved with formaldehyde and other heavy chemicals and hidden away in a house somewhere in Turin. Feli is buried in Venice. Benigno is the only one to visit his grave regularly. 

He is the sole north Italian representative to survive, and soon takes over Cassandra’s duties. This is where he also clashes with Romano, who is pissed off for not being considered a fitting substitute for the role (the anger is very much justified).

For a whole year, it seems like everything has gone to shit.

1869 - A mali estremi, estremi rimedi

Benigno and Romano are guided to Venice by a mysterious call for help. Neither the caller nor the call is ordinary in nature - it is their (presumably) dead sibling Feliciano somehow infiltrating their thoughts with garbled nonsense. When they finally open the mausoleum, Feliciano is in a bad state. Skin thin as paper, eyes sunken in and comatose - and yet, somehow, with a beating heart. They bring him to his old house where they try to nurse him back to health while they struggle to figure out what this means for Cassandra, themselves, and wherever...or whoever Italy is.

1870 - The Trespasser 

Some weeks after the gruesome discovery of Feliciano’s body, Romano and Benigno have yet to figure out how to make Feliciano wake up from his “slumber”. At the same time, a stranger is rummaging through the streets of Venice. The representative of Prussia, Gilbert, is onto something. After some digging (and bribing two police officers) he finally finds what he was searching for - the address to the old abandoned villa where Feliciano has once lived. 

When Gilbert decides to break into the place, assuming no one is home, he kicks the door open with a loud bang. Feliciano unexpectedly wakes up in a panicked rush. The situation quickly escalates. There is a bloody fight on a stairwell between Feliciano (who is extremly confused and attacks everyone in sight) and basically everyone else. 

Gilbert manages to subdue him, but not before Feliciano has managed to knock out Benigno. As only Romano and Gilbert are left to clean up this mess, they agree to work together and for now ignore the fact that Gilbert tried to break into the house. They would deal with this later. For now, caring for Feliciano and Benigno was their top priority.

And this is where we catch up with the current chapter of the story, where Benigno wakes up and wants to know what the hell Gilbert is doing here in the first place. We will soon find out!

[rallamajoop]

...and the unironic joys of better living through chemistry

How do I love Venom: The Hunger, let me count the ways…

It’s by far the shippiest Venom/Eddie story to come out of the character’s heyday. It’s the only story of the era to treat Venom’s violent wild-animal instincts not as an immutable fact, but as something that can be managed. It pulls off an aesthetic like nothing else that was being done at the time.

And then there’s the way it says, Does the world around you seem sinister and foreboding? Do you lie awake at night contemplating metaphorical oceans of despair? Well shit, son – have you considered you may be suffering from a mundane neurochemical imbalance, and a round of the right meds could clear that right up for you?

It does all this without breaking the atmosphere, without a whiff that our story has been interrupted for a Very Special Message about mental health.

In the near-decade since I was first prescribed anti-depressants, I don’t think I’ve read another story that lands the message “Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s just your brain chemistry,” so well.

Fair warning: if you have not read The Hunger, I am about to spoil every major plot point. If you have, well, maybe I can still give you a new appreciation for a few details you might have missed.

It’s a strange book, whatever else you take from it. It’s almost the only thing either author or artist contributed to the Venom canon, and it’s so different stylistically and tonally from the 90′s Venom norm that it feels like a tale from some noir-elseworlds setting instead of 616 canon. When you take risks that big with a property, you leave yourself precious little landing space between 'unmitigated triumph’ and ‘abject failure’: if this book hadn’t absolutely nailed it, I’d be dismissing it as edgy, OOC dreck. Fortunately, if The Hunger is nothing else, it is a story that $&#@ing commits – to basically everything it does.

Now, I'm not going to tell you Venom: The Hunger is a story about overcoming depression, because I don't know whether author Len Kaminski even thought about it that way while working on it. There's always space for other readings, and this one take is not gospel. That said: holy shit is this thing unsubtle with its metaphors. And with that in mind, let’s start by talking a little about Kaminski’s take on Eddie himself.

As I may have mentioned before, I like to divide 90′s Eddie into two broad personas: the Meathead, and the Hobo.

Kaminski’s Eddie nominally belongs in the angsty, long-haired Hobo incarnation, but that’s a bit of a simplification: this version certainly has plenty of angst and plenty of hair to his name – but nowhere, not even at his lowest ebb, does he doubt that he and his Other are meant for each other, which is usually Hobo!Eddie’s primary existential quandary.

He’s also taken up narrating his own life like a hardboiled PI.

So that’s... novel.

The only other time Eddie’s sounded like this is, er, in that one other Venom one-shot Kaminski penned (Seed of Darkness, a prequel that sadly isn’t in The Hunger’s league), so I think we can safely file it under authorial ticks.

Then again, Hobo!Eddie’s always been one melodramatic SOB, so maybe this is just how he’d sound after learning to channel his angst into his poetry. You can’t argue it fits the aesthetic, anyway.

We’d also be remiss not to mention Ed Halsted’s art, which I can only describe as gothic-meets-noir-meets-H.R.-Giger. Never before or since has the alien symbiote looked this alien: twisted with Xenompoph-like ridges and veins.

But Halsted doesn’t treat Venom to all that extra detail in every panel. Instead, the distortion tends to appear when the symbiote is separated from Eddie or out of control – and I doubt you need me to walk you through the symbolic importance of that creative decision. More importantly, Halsted’s art provides exactly the class of visuals that Kaminski’s story needs.

Did I mention this is a horror story? You might be surprised how few Venom stories really fit that genre, but if all those adjectives about Halsted’s style above didn’t clue you in, this is one of them.

Anyway, with that much context covered, let’s get into the main narrative of this thing.

As our first issue opens, Eddie’s world has become a dark and foreboding place. He’s not sleeping, though he mostly brushes this off. (Fun fact: trouble sleeping is one of those under-appreciated symptoms of depression. Additional fun fact: the first doctor ever to suggest I might be suffering from depression was actually a sleep specialist. You can guess how that appointment was going.)

Just to set our scene, here’s all of page 1.

Eddie’s narration has plenty of (ha) venom for his surroundings, but the visuals are here to back him up: panels from Eddie’s POV are edged in twisted, fleshy borders and drained of colour, the people rendered as creepy, goblin-like creatures. A couple of later scenes go even further to contrast Eddie-vision with what everyone else is seeing:

As depictions of depression go this is a little on the nose, but then, you don’t read a comic about a brain-eating alien parasite looking for subtlety, do you?

Eddie  doesn’t see himself as depressed, of course. As far as he’s concerned, he’s seeing the world’s true face: it’s everyone else who’s deluding themselves. He’s still got his symbiote, so he’s happy. He’s yet to hit that all-important breaking point where something he can’t brush off goes irrevocably wrong.

But he’s also starting to experience these weird... cravings.

He just can’t put a name to exactly what he’s craving until a routine bar fight with a couple of thugs takes a turn for the horrific.

(I include this panel partly to point out even in The Hunger, the goriest of all 90′s Venom titles, you’re still not going to see brains getting eaten in any graphic detail. We don’t need to to get the horror of the moment across. The 90′s were a more innocent time.)

Eddie himself is horrified when he comes back to himself and realises what he’s done.

Or rather, what his symbiote’s just made him do.

Kaminski doesn’t keep us in suspense about why, though. Eddie may have just done something horrific, but there’s a reason, and it’s as mundane as a vitamin deficiency. He’s bonded to an alien creature, after all, and his symbiote is craving a nutrient which just happens to be found in human brains. And if Eddie can’t or won’t help it meet that need, it’ll do so alone. 

Now, giving us that explanation so quickly is an interesting creative decision: this is a horror story, and horror lives in what we don’t know. Wouldn’t it be all the more horrifying had the symbiote been unable to explain what’s going on, leaving Eddie without the first real clue as to where this monstrous new hunger had come from?

The Hunger doesn’t take that route though, and I love it. Eddie isn’t a monster, this isn’t his fault: he has a fucking condition, and wallowing in his own moral failings is going to get him nowhere. You might as well try to cure scurvy or rickets with positive thinking. Just like depression can make you feel like an utter failure at the most basic parts of being human, and all the affirmations in the world won’t fix it when it’s fundamentally your brain chemistry that’s the problem. Or like addicts aren’t weak-willed for struggling not to relapse, they’re dealing with genuine chemical dependency – or even like how someone who’s trans isn’t at fault for being unable to reconcile themselves to the bodies and the hormones they were born with by pure force of trying. Free will is more than an illusion, but we’re all messy, biological organisms underneath, and your own brain and biochemistry can and will fuck you over in a hundred wildly different ways for as many wildly different reasons and it’s not your fault.

We aren’t monsters. But if we do, sometimes, find ourselves identifying with the monster, there might be a reason for that.

(Ahem)

I’m just saying, that’s fucking powerful, and we need more stories that say it.

Anyway, in case you missed it during that tangent, issue #1 closes with the symbiote having torn Eddie’s heart in two itself free to go hunting brains without him.

I’m trying not to get too sidetracked at this point talking about Kaminski’s take on the symbiote itself. Suffice to say there are broadly two schools of thought on how it ought to function while separated from its host: the traditional ambulatory-slime-puddle version, and the more recently popular alternative where anything-you-can-do-with-a-host-you-can-also-do-without-one. I’m not much of a fan of the latter, personally: if your symbiote doesn’t actually need a host, I feel you’ve sort of missed the point. (The movie takes the route of saying symbiotes can’t even process Earth’s atmosphere without a host, which is a great new idea that appears nowhere in the comics, and I love it. Hosts or GTFO, baby!)

Kaminski has his own take, and I can only wish it had caught on. Without Eddie, the symbiote becomes an ever-shifting insectoid-tentacle-snake-monstrosity, driven by an animalistic hunger. It’s many things, but it’s never humanoid.

If you absolutely must have your symbiote operating minus a host, I feel this is the way to do it: semi-feral, shapeless and completely alien (uncontrollable violence and cravings for brains to be added to taste).

Issue #2 comes to us primarily through the perspective of the mild-mannered Dr. Thaddeus Paine of the Innsmouth Hills Sanitarium (yes, really).

Yeah, he’s not fooling anyone. Meet our official villain! He joins our story after Eddie is picked up by the police and handed off to the nearest available institution, on account of how completely sane and rational he’s been acting.

Naturally, Dr. Paine soon has copious notes on Eddie’s ‘crazy’ story about his psychic link to a brain-eating alien monster. Fortunately for Eddie, Paine also runs some tests and makes an interesting discovery. 

Congratulations, Venom: the ‘vitamin’ you were missing officially has a name!

Finding the right meds isn’t always this easy. I got lucky – the first ones my psych put me on worked pretty well – but I have plenty of friends who weren't so lucky. In fact, the treatment for Eddie's problems is so straightforward it arguably has more in common with, say, endocrine disorders like thyroid conditions or Addison’s disease, which differ from clinical depression but present many similar symptoms (but can sadly be just as much of a bitch to get correctly diagnosed – please do read author Maggie Stiefvater’s account of the latter when you get the chance, because forget Venom, that is a horror story).

‘True’ depression remains much less well understood by medicine, either in its causes or how to effectively treat it. But simply having a name for what was wrong with me made so much difference, and that’s an experience I imagine anyone who’s dealt with any long undiagnosed medical condition could relate to. It put my life in context in a way nothing else had in years.

(I can’t speak to the accuracy of the way phenethylamine is portrayed in this comic – a quick google suggests there may be some real debate that phenethylamine deficiencies have been overlooked as a contributor to clinical depression, but having no medical background, that one’s well beyond me. Either way, scientific accuracy really doesn’t matter in this context – it’s how it works in-universe for story purposes that we should pay attention to.)

Since this issue is mostly from Paine’s POV, we don’t get Eddie’s reaction to having a healthy amount of phenethylamine sloshing around in his brain again, just the assurance that treatment appears to be ‘completely successful’.

He’s still a paranoid, hostile bastard though. Meds can turn your life around, but they won’t make you not you.

But even if Eddie’s feeling better, he’s still psychically linked to someone who isn’t. Symbiote-vision still comes through drained of colour and edged in viscera.

That’s the thing about meds: they won’t solve all your problems overnight. If you’ve been depressed for a while, there are good odds you have problems stacking up. But working meds can be a godsend when it comes to getting you into a space where you can deal with your problems again, whether said problems are doing-your-laundry or all the way into not-giving-up-completely-and-just-accepting-you’ll-die-alone-on-the-street.

For Eddie, ‘dealing with his problems’ begins with stealing a keycard and busting out of the asylum.

Of course, that’s the easy part. How do you solve a problem like a feral symbiote? Like any good 90′s comic book protagonist, Eddie tackles it by putting on his big-boy camouflage pants and kitting himself out with weapons and pouches while quoting “If you live something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down.”

We can add this to the list of things I love about this comic. Even if The Hunger is a weirdly-stylistic tract about depression at heart, it’s also still a goddamn 90′s Venom comic, and not ashamed to be.

We’re into issue #3 now, and back to hearing the story from Eddie’s POV.

Eddie is very much aware that his symbiote has murdered innocent people while they’ve been separated. Even if this is the result of extreme circumstances, there’s a good case to be made that the symbiote is too dangerous to be allowed to live. Plenty of heroes would treat it like a rabid dog at this point.

But Eddie isn’t a hero, he’s a mess of a character and an anti-hero at best, so we don’t have to hold him to the same standard. He’s well aware his symbiote may be too far gone to save, that he may have to put it down – but that’s only his backup plan. He wants to help it. He wants it back. He’s down in that sewer with screamers and a flamethrower because he knows all his symbiote’s weaknesses, but he’s also carrying a large jar of black-market synthesised phenethylamine, because if he can just get close enough...

Depression can’t make you a literal monster, but it can make you an asshole. Miserable to be around, lacking even the energy to care who else you’re hurting. The depression doesn’t excuse that, but it makes everything harder, and it’s that much easier to sink back into your spiral when everyone around you has given up. It can make you think everyone around has given up even if that isn’t true.

So to have Eddie here say, in effect, I don’t care how many people you’ve eaten, I know it wasn’t your fault. I still love you. You’re still worth fighting for – god, does that get me right in the id.

There’s still a whole issue left at this point – we’ve still got to deal with our real villain, Dr. Paine, who we’ve just learned is into eating brains himself and torturing his patients recreationally, and who wants to capture the symbiote for his own purposes. There’s the scene where Eddie and his symbiote finally bond again, and Venom beats up all Paine’s goons while singing David Bowie because like I said, this is still a 90′s superhero comic and this is what Venom does.

But for our purposes, I'm going to skip to the penultimate page of the story, because the way it mirrors our opening page is really lovely.

Remember that shot of Eddie dealing with a beggar back at the beginning of the story, thinking about how these people would 'get their despair all over you'? Here he is again, cheerfully forking over the last dollar in his pocket to the next man to ask him for change. For all the gothic atmosphere and gore, it’s moments like this that make The Hunger easily one of the most positive, uplifting Venom stories ever written. Funny, that. (I could probably write a whole other essay on sympathy for the homeless as a recurring motif in Venom stories, but that... well, whole other essay and all that.)

What’s Eddie learned from this experience? Don’t take your symbiote for granted. Is ‘symbiote’ a metaphor for mental health here, is paying attention to its needs an allegory for paying attention to your own? I still don’t know how literally Kaminski meant us to take this, but it’s a lovely note to end on no matter how you parse it.

At the end of the day, The Hunger isn’t flawless. The conflict with Paine ends on a thematic but slightly unsatisfying note. Eddie makes much of his symbiote's loneliness and desire for union, but when the two of them are finally reunited, the only reaction comes from Eddie's side. In fact, the symbiote seems to have no response to being able to return to Eddie at all, and that’s an omission that bugs me.

But Kaminski is more interested than any other writer of the era in the truly alien nature of the symbiote, in its relationship with Eddie from Eddie’s side, and though plenty of others talk about the symbiote's love/hate relationship with Spider-man, no-one else had the guts to portray their relationship this much like a romance.

And Venom: The Hunger is no less interesting in the context of Len Kaminski’s other work. You don't have to look far into his Marvel and DC credits to pick up that the guy has a real thing for monsters. (“All of my favourite characters are outlaws, misfits, anti-heroes,” he says, in one of the very few interviews I could find with him, “I wouldn't know what to do with Superman.”) He's written for vampires, werewolves, victims of mad science, and all of three at once, littering his work with biochemistry-themed technobabble, melodramatic monologues, gratuitous pop-culture references, and protagonists who must learn to embrace their inner demons. So The Hunger represents more than a few of his favourite running themes.

For our context, his more notable other work includes Children of the Beast, in which a werewolf must make peace between his human and animalistic sides, and The Creeper, in which a journalist must make peace with the crazy super-powered alter-ego sharing his body. In fact, The Creeper and The Hunger share so much DNA (including an evil doctor posing as a respected psychiatrist who uses hypnosis on our hero while he's trapped in a mental institution) that it’s quite the achievement that they still feel like such very distinct entities beyond that point.

The human alter-egos of both werewolf and Creeper even use prescription meds while wrestling with their respective dark sides. The difference, in both cases, is that these are stories where meds play their traditional fictional role – and that's a role that could be as easily filled by illegal drugs or alcohol without making any substantive difference. You see, if a protagonist is using them, it's a sign of unwillingness to tackle their 'real' problems. Even among work by the same author in the same genre, The Hunger represents an outlier. And that's just a little disappointing – at least to me.

In real life, of course, prescription meds are no magical cure-all elixir. Depression meds that work for one person may not work for another, or may not keep working in the longer term. Everyone has heard stories about quack doctors who prescribe them to the wrong patients for the wrong reasons, about lives ruined by addictions to prescription painkillers, or the supposedly-damning statistics about how poorly SSRI's perform in rigorous clinical trials. The proper way to treat depression is obviously with lifestyle and therapy. People will still airily dismiss medications that we all know previous generations got along just fine without, or suggest that figures like Van Gogh would never have created great art if they hadn't been mad enough to slice off an ear. I mean, the fact you think you need those bogus mediations is probably the best possible sign of just how broken you are, right? Who do you think you’re kidding?

Our popular fiction loves stories about manly men who bury their trauma under a gruff, anti-social exterior and come back swinging at the world that broke them, bravely refusing even painkillers that might dull their manly reflexes. Other genres make space for broken people confronting their demons in grand moments of catharsis, finally breaking down into tears when someone gets through to make them face their problems. "I could barely make it out of bed in the mornings until I found a doctor who started me on this new prescription" is not only wildly counter to the accepted social narrative, it's a hard thing to know how to dramatise.

 Even other Venom comics have been guilty of this.

Believe me, I recognise all of this, and just how much progress we've made in the last few decades. But I haven't the slightest doubt that for so many vulnerable people, the stigma against prescription medications does infinitely more harm than those same meds could ever do. And just having the right to externalise my problems into it's not you, it's your brain chemistry, may have helped me more than the meds themselves.

(And again, no, being prescribed SSRI's didn't fix me overnight, but I honestly don't know if all the talk therapy and tearful conversations with family members in the world could've got me as far as I've come without them.)

I love Venom: The Hunger. It's no-one's idea of high art, but it doesn’t need to be. There is a whole other post’s worth of things I love about it that I’ve already cut out this one as pointless tangents, and that may actually be it’s biggest drawback as a go-to example: I fully recognise that I would not be making this post if The Hunger hadn't also also grabbed me as a great bit of Venom canon, being the massive fan and shipper that I am. Other people who are just as desperate as me for more stories with the same core theme, but not into weird 90's comics about needy goo aliens, probably won't get nearly as much out of it as I have.

But if it sounds anything like your jam, maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

If nothing else, it proves that you can make a viscerally satisfying story out of a message that shockingly unconventional. And you may even have people still discovering it and falling in love with it 25 years after the fact.

[tangledbea]

Disney Villains

Okay so like, I am mixed on it.

On one hand, sympathetic villains are cool if done right and not everyone needs to be redeemed because they’re sad. They’re still responsible for their actions and need to fix that themselves to be trusted. On the other hand, villains for the sake of just doing villainy to establish their power and dominance are always fun to watch. Ex: Jafar, Maleficent, Lady Tremaine, Captain Hook, Ursula, etc.

Live action Disney villains are just stale to me sometimes. For example, I didn’t like the movie Maleficent because you could’ve done the same story with someone else. I liked evil animated Maleficent who felt insulted that she wasn’t invited to a princess christening and like, chances are she wouldn’t have gone in the first place, but an invitation would’ve been considerate. Sure I liked the L.A movie message that true loves kiss doesn’t have to be about romance, you have other sources of love from friends and family. Yet it takes away from the established Maleficent from the animated movie. I didn’t need a sad Lady Tremaine backstory in the L.A Cinderella.

Like Lady Caine I can sort of see as sympathetic villain/antagonist, but to an extent of how far her crimes go for revenge and why she does them. There’s always this line that is either crossed or never crossed in terms of villains.

I liked her story and motivation (I don’t care much for the whole “blame Rapunzel for being kidnapped as an infant because that blame should’ve gone to Gothel, but I guess people find it easier to lash out at Rapunzel cuz she’s right there.) I would’ve liked to see more of how Gothel not only affected Rapunzel, but also how much she affected Corona which lead to Fred’s crackdown on crime which eventually led to the creation of Lady Caine. Maybe a touch upon that while Fred’s crackdown on crime was based in personal grief and perhaps good intentions so that none could suffer like he and Arianna had, it wound up creating more problems than it solved.

I think TTS villains in general has more potential to them than what was given. Even Villain MoonCass has some potential if given a different script.

What are your thoughts on Disney and/or TTS villains?

See, there’s a difference between “sympathetic villain” and “cool motive, still murder villain.” I am all for the latter. Knowing a villain’s motivations doesn’t automatically make them sympathetic, but it does bring to light logic, and goes to show that unless you have a mental illness that causes you to just not care (ie, literal psychopathy) most people do what they do because they think they’re in the right. (That doesn’t justify their actions, necessarily. I’m not attempting to claim that.) It makes them human, and I respect that.

But taking an established villain who is evil for evil’s sake - Maleficent, for example - and giving them a tragic backstory and making them the hero of the story just makes me roll my eyes, especially because they went out of their way to claim that this was the “true” version of the story, and that everything we loved about the 1950s animated classic is biased and deceptive. Disney was leaning hard into “true love doesn’t have to be romantic” in that era, between “Maleficent”, “Once Upon a Time” and “Frozen”. (Not to mention, Maleficent was a frickin’ evil fairy. She literally didn’t need a motivation. She could just have easily been created when a bolt of lightning struck the shadow of a thorn bush, and because she’s a magical creature, that’s literally all the logic you need as to why she’s evil.)

When it comes to Cinderella’s stepmother (generally speaking, not Disney-specific), I was fond of how they handled it in “Ever After.” Baroness Rodmilla gives you a glimpse into her past. Her mother was hard on her, so that’s what she knows. We catch the smallest glimpse, the hint that she genuinely loved Danielle’s father, but she makes a point of masking it with cruelty. We understand her motivations are based on fear of losing her standing in society and jealousy that her new husband loved his daughter more than he loved her. (Which, come on. But it’s still a proper motivation.) This did not make her sympathetic, though, because she still chose to be cruel and abusive to Danielle.

Most of the most balls-out evil-for-evil’s-sake Disney villains are a combination of wanting power and having magic. “I want power, I have magic, let’s do this.” (I do love how Maleficent’s motivation is a petty grudge over a slight, though.) But they can even use that formula and back it off to “cool motive, still murder.” Look at Dr. Facilier. He wants power, he has magic. But his motivation is literally that life’s not fair for Black people. He’s tired of having to beg for scraps. But instead of using that motivation for the greater good to uplift the Black community of New Orleans, he’s using it to elevate himself, alone.

It seems to me that Disney is making a point of adding depth and tragedy to their villains in the live action remakes. Gaston has PTSD from the war, for example. He literally didn’t need that development. He was an asshole because he was a handsome, skilled business owner in a small town and felt entitled to anything he wanted. In the original movie, he was a warning about the kinds of things gay men have to deal with regularly. The whole story of Beauty and Beast, as Howard Ashman saw it, was facing the societal struggles and self hatred gay men in the 80s and early 90s had to face. The live action version didn’t make me care about Howard Ashman at all. I shudder to think what they have planned for Gothel. Are they going to make it, “Oh, boo hoo, many (hundreds of) years ago, I was slighted by a man because I got a wrinkle, so now my entire goal for centuries has been to stay young and beautiful while not making any meaningful connections to people for fear of being slighted again”? Ugh.

I agree that TTS’ villains had more potential than they were given, to a one. It was a case of too many cooks (or in this case, villains) spoil the broth. Because they had to make the series somewhat episodic, they also had to have villain of the week syndrome, which in turn gave them too many characters to explore and not enough time to give them each the spotlight they deserved. When we first learned about Saporia, I was so hyped, because all of a sudden there was this political factor that I hadn’t been expecting, and I was really excited to see where it would go. Then it was brought up again, once. I loved the fandom theory that Caine and Andrew would team up in jail and break out, then have an uprising. And while that came partially true, it could have been richer and fuller. Giving Demanitus and Zhan Tiri shared followers was a stroke of genius, but giving each a single story (Matthews’ just happened to be three episodes long) and never show their faces again was a let down. The story would have done better to be streamlined overall.

Recently, @auransmoltenhair made a post about how the series’ biggest folly was not knowing where it was going before they actually started writing for it. They changed too much about it on a whim instead of falling back on what they’d already established in the series. And I understand that the higher ups were demanding it be somewhat episodic so they could show reruns in whatever order they felt like (which turned out to be no order, since the didn’t tend to show reruns), but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have known where the story was going before they started. And yeah, they already had some plot points they wanted to explore (like Eugene being a prince, that was set in stone from the beginning), but they didn’t even know exactly what direction Cassandra was going in by “Challenge of the Brave.” They didn’t know what they wanted to do with Adira, and rather than figure that out before hand, they winged it, then abandoned her as soon as S2 was done, only to bring her back as a plot device rather than a character.

Wow, I’ve rambled on for a long time. lol Sorry about that.

TL;DR - Evil for evil’s sake villains = good. Villains with an understandable motivation who chose the wrong path = good. Established villains who are remade to be sympathetic, especially if they’re also made to be the heroes of the story = bad.

[passionate-hedgehog]

Impasse pt 2

Impasse is a 3-part series revolving around Reader entering society in Regency-Era London. Completely inspired by me binging the entirety of Bridgerton in less than 24 hours, Impasse will end with either Duke Damien Haas x Reader, or Courtney Miller x Reader.

Pt 2.

Pairings: Eventual Damien Haas x Reader, Eventual Courtney Miller x Reader

Warnings: None

Word: 2187

A/N: I know that my masterlist links arent working. If you try to use it, and things dont go where you want them to take you...well...I warned you. I’m turning this into a 4 part fic. There’s no way I can comfortably fit what I want into 3 separate sections. Part 3 will be out when this hits 15 notes! Thank you to everyone that liked and interacted with the first part. And thank you to the fans of my toher works. I love all of you omg. Enjoy ♥

Chapter Summary: The social Season has officially begun. Deals are being made amongst friends and old flames are fanning. Will there be any sparks igniting as well?

“What do you suspect he wants to talk about?” After the morning activities with Lord Haas in the drawing-room, Y/n and her handmaid found themselves busy with average daily activities.  

Caroline’s expression was nonplussed as she stared at the back of Y/n’s head. The women were preparing Y/n for bed. The latter was in her chair as the housemaid brushed through her hair.

“Why must you give me that look every time I open my mouth?”

“Why must such ridiculous things come out of your mouth every time you open it?”

They discovered Shayne in his favorite study, books littering the desk he occupied. Y/n would always ask him when he planned on attending university but the young man tended to reply with something akin to “that’s not for me”. The young woman didn’t understand. She knew how smart her twin was, how clever he could be given the situation. Mayhaps one day he’d see the things he could accomplish.

“To what do I owe this visit?” The fair-haired man asked as his sister sat at the opposite side of his desk. A rather thick tome set open before him while his right hand held a fountain pen to sheets of parchment.

Y/n perched her arms along the length of the armrests and sat comfortably. “I thought I might see what you’re up to. But I find that you’re doing nothing different than normal. When are you going to talk to Father about university?”

Shayne restraint from rolling his eyes visible as he went back to his books, and scratching at the parchment. “When are you going to talk to me about Courtney?”

“What? That has nothing to do with...Shayne. My favorite twin, you could be doing so many more things if you were off to study. Collegiately.”

This caused the young man to sigh. “Y/n-,”

“I’m being serious here, Shayne. You’re in here, every day, reading and writing. It’s almost a different book a week. Sometimes, your nose is in a book about far-off adventures in distant lands and sometimes it’s about the history and tragedies of the lands around us. Look that book right there.” She motioned to the collection of parchment before Shayne. “I gather that one is not Shakespeare. What is it? The history of France?”  

Shayne lowered his head back to the pages before putting his pen back on the parchment, not meeting his sister’s eyes. “Spain, as a matter of fact.”

Y/n held a blank countenance. 

“I’m trying my hand at the Spanish language. Does that quell your curiosity?”

Y/n smirked. “You’re just proving my point.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” The young man laid his fountain pen on the parchment and clasped his hands together before leaning forward. “I’ll talk to Father about university if you read and respond to Courtney’s letter..”

The young woman grumbled and stood up from her chair. “Suddenly, I have a desire for some poetry. Caroline, I’ll be in the library. I’ll call for you if I need you.”

The handmaid nodded from where she stood by the fireplace, her hands clasped in front of her as Y/n walked to the door. “Of course.”

Y/n turned one last glance to her twin before exiting the room and found Caroline in the chair Y/n’s ownself just left. The handmaid was smiling at Shayne as he talked. The rosy tint to Caroline’s cheeks as the man laughed sparked Y/n’s curiosity yet still managed to make her smile. It was cute if she had to be honest. The handmaid had the tendency, lately, to be quieter than usual. While yes, Caroline was well-mannered and modest, it was different when Shayne was around. Had it just been the two women, Caroline could be witty. Y/n enjoyed that in the handmaid. It was refreshing and reminded her of a long-lost friend.

“For Heaven’s sake, Courtney. You’re not even here but you’re still here.” The young woman fiddled with a woven bracelet made from brightly colored twine.

“Y/n?” A voice called from next to her as her hand was on the doorknob to the library.

“Oh, Lord Haas! I did not realize you were here.” Y/n peered behind her companion and to her own left and right, in case she missed any other person.

“It’s just me. And please, call me Damien. We’ve known each other since we were young, back when we had all of our friends amongst us.” The duke gave a gentle pleading look. 

“I was a tad cheeky back then. I wasn’t going to call you by any title.”

Damien cocked an eyebrow and smirked. “You’re still a tad cheeky to this day. Am I wrong?”

Y/n’s matched his smirk before opening the door to the library and making her way inside. A witty remark was caught in her throat when her eyes caught someone standing next to the nearest shelving of books.

“Court-Courtney?” Her hand slipped off of the knob of the door. “What are you doing here?”

The light-haired woman bit her lip. “I wanted to visit. You never responded to any of my letters. I thought...I thought maybe something had happened.”

“You...I can’t...Excuse me.” The young woman turned around in haste and scurried away. She found herself in the empty kitchen trying to breathe through what just happened.

Good going. You’re such a coward.

“I’m such a coward.”

“No, you’re not.” Damien had followed her into the cooking area. He led her to a chair and guided her to sit. “Some refreshment might make it better?”

Y/n watched her old friend as he went about collecting items. She noticed how at ease he seemed going through her icebox and cupboards. How expertly he sliced up fruit. She couldn’t help but notice how handsome he looked in his livery, as well, but there was enough going on inside of her head. Damien approached the table with a modest platter and placed it in the center of the table before he sat himself in a chair across from her.

“I figure that some soft cheese might do some good as well as figs and berries. I hope they comfort you the way they do me.” He had gestured towards the food.

Y/n gave a thankful nod before reaching for a bite. “Thank you, Damien. This means very much to me.”

The man grabbed fig and brie, biting into them. “If you need to talk, I’m all ears. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, of course. But I’m here.”

Y/n fidgeted with a slice of fig fruit. She mentally weighed her options before speaking again. “I haven’t seen Courtney in over a year. We got into an argument...about the things she wanted to do and where she wanted to be in life. I regret it. I regret it every day. I let our relationship ...decay...because I didn’t approve of what she wanted to do.”

“She wanted to work with horses, right? And entertain? That’s where she’s been this whole time?” Damien bit into some brie.

“I was treating her like she was someone like me. Someone that already had their life plans laid out for them. She was able to choose what she wanted in life.”

The young man studied Y/n’s face. “Y/n, were you...jealous that she had such an opportunity to live a dream that you tried burning bridges with her? She was your best friend. That had to be a hard decision to make.”

“It’s about more than that. I’m happy she was able to live how she wanted to...thrilled that she got to work with her passions. But..I wasn’t there with her. She wasn’t with me. It didn’t matter what she was doing...I just wanted it to be with..with me. 

“I had this asinine vision that society would be in a different place by now. That two close friends could...be closer. And that I wouldn’t have to feel like I was left alone for the rest of my life. I see so many friendships for what they could be. The feelings that I’ve had over someone that will never be attainable I see in others. All of the time. Especially while I promenade! And it makes me sad for those yearning and it reminds me of what I can never have.”

There was a moment of silence before Y/n’s eyes widened in the realization of what she had just let out. “Oh my. I-You didn’t hear any of what I just said. Promise me!”

Damien laid a soft hand on Y/n’s arm. “I promise. I had no idea that you had harbored such...persuasions. Not that it’s anything you need to feel sorry about. You can’t help it. Your reactions, for sure, but...not for what you feel.”

“You, Lord Haas, will make someone a fine husband someday. Maybe even sometime soon? It is our season, finally, after all.” Y/n tried to hide her watery eyes behind a coy smirk. “Someone is bound to catch your eye.”

Damien breathed out before responding. “Someone already has, if I’m being honest. But maybe I’m far-reaching more than I originally thought.”

His words seemed to spark a sense of excitement through Y/n. She sat up straight and gripped the edges of the table.

“Who is she? Will you point her out to me while we promenade? No. I have an even better idea; can you introduce her to me at one of the balls?” Y/n was nearly on the edge of her seat. “Damien! This is exciting!”

“It’s not quite that intriguing, I promise you. Especially since nothing can come of it.” The man picked at the fruit on the platter. “But I digress. It seems that you’ve got your own sorting out to do. What are you going to do about callers if Courtney plans on joining in on the festivities this season? She may not come from one of the families but she has enough friends.”

“Then I hope she enjoys herself. For all I know, everything I felt could have been my very own thoughts and not hers. If she’s here to find a match, then let her. If she’s here to have fun, then by all means...I hope she has it. I just hope I can keep my heart to myself this time. I don’t want to get hurt again.”

“Y/n,” The man licked his lips before continuing. “Might I suggest trying to find out what exactly it is that your heart wants before you do anything else with it?”

The young woman topped her fig slice with some brie. “I’m going to pretend that you did not just offer such advice. Who would even think about courting a woman trying to figure out whether or not she wants her story to end with another woman? You slay me, Lord Haas.”

“I’m being entirely serious. Y/n, you could…” Damien seemed to pause before paying very close attention to fiddling with a berry. “We could stop your callers from coming around and maybe I could use a distraction. We could work together.”

“What? Like...you and I? Together together?”

The german-born duke hesitated before taking one of Y/n’s hands into both of his. “We could go to promenade as a match. And then to the balls, And the parties. No one would be the wiser. You could use this time to figure out what it is you truly want. And then who.”

The young woman looked down at their hands, hers fitting inside his the way she suspects other women her age dream of, yet, she wasn’t sure what it did to her. What he offered could very much help her, but what if Courtney got the wrong idea? What if everyone got the wrong idea?

“But what if it went right?”

“Hmm?” Damien asked in confusion.

“Nevermind.” Y/n shook the thoughts from her head. “Damien, I think...you may be on to something. You’re right. I...I don’t know how to be a...a wife to anyone. Let alone a man. And I won’t know until I figure myself out a little bit more. And then if this girl is running through your mind and you firmly believe that you can never court her…”

“Trust in me with this. I always thought she was someone I could never hope to marry, far too good for me in so many ways. But...maybe this will help me to see who else is out there. Maybe I’ll find my perfect match. And if we come out as a couple, it’ll provide good reason for the other men to leave you alone.”

“Too bad they just don’t leave me alone as is.”

“I believe Olivia said the same thing after she met Sam.”

“Heavens, that was a riot.” Y/n lifted her pinky to solidify the agreement with her friend. “Lord Damien Haas, I believe we might have ourselves a deal.”