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bexorok · 1 month

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Poorly written Sonic Movie 3 Pitch/outline pt. 7

THE scene

This was actually one of the first scenes I wrote. Maria’s death might be one of the most heartbreaking but somehow beloved scenes in the entire franchise. Why is that? I think it’s a moment that a lot of people really connected with due to the shear amount of tragedy in it. A lot of people played this game as a kid, and this was probably the most thought provoking scene in all of Sonic media. I was too young to understand watching my cousins play the game what the scene really meant, but I had that moment latter on watching Sonic X. I was a kid seeing another kid go through this great sacrifice and felt the weight of her choice, and it made me understand Shadows philosophy before and after he remembered.

I wanted to make that really stand out. I wanted to build and feel the connection between Shadow and Maria the way Project Shadow did. I wanted to capture how they were just kids dreaming of seeing the world, and wanted the audience to feel the weight of the consequences of Maria’s choices, and the added tragedy that shadow only remembered the sacrifice and not what it was for.

I also wanted Amy’s speech to go beyond just “give humanity a chance”. I know her speech to him is pivotal, but I decided to make it focused on reminding him of who he really is rather than the means of revenge Gerald turned him into. I also wanted it all to tie back into her own experiences and character development through the course of the film. Of remembering those of the past while still opening yourself up to new people.

This might seem way too deep, or like I’m reading way too much into it, but this is how that original scene makes me feel now. I hope people enjoy it, and I hope people know that even though I title these as “poorly written” I actually put a lot of thought into them. Thanks for reading. I’ll definitely write more as my mind races with even more concepts I hope that the movies include.

Interior: Space Colony Ark

Amy’s search for sonic leads her to an open observation room. The entire wall is taken up by a single window, and earth can be seen. Lights continue to flash, and the distant sound of sirens reminds the viewer that the Ark has only 22 minutes until it enters earth’s atmosphere.

In the room, Sonic is sitting on the floor, looking out at the earth as it draws near. Amy opens her mouth to say something, then closes it. She sits down next to him.

Sonic: It's weird seeing it like this. We tried so hard to save it, and now it’s too late. I can’t fix this.

Amy: I know. You can’t alone. But maybe there’s still time.

Sonic: how? Shadow’s the only other person here that can use the emeralds’ power, and I can’t get through to him.

Amy: you don’t have the full story.

Sonic glances at her.

Sonic: Then who does?

Amy: I think he does. He just doesn’t remember.

Sonic: What do you mean?

Amy: I mean, I saw a security tape. I saw… everything that happened that day. And I heard everything too. Shadows story lines up, but it’s missing a huge piece of the puzzle. He doesn’t remember how much he and Maria loved the earth. All he remembers is the moment all of that came to an end, and nothing else.

Sonic: So what now? Show him the video?

Amy: no. This is something he needs to remember himself. I just need to talk to him.

Sonic: how do you know he would still want to work together?

Amy’s face brightens into a smile.

Amy: Sonic, you’ve always seen the best in people, given them the chance they needed to prove themselves. You never gave up on them, never gave up on me. It’s one of the things I admire most about you. You have an amazing power, and it has nothing to do with the emeralds. Somehow, despite being alone for so long, after everything you went through, you brought us all together, as a team. As a family. If there’s anyone on earth that Shadow would rally behind, it’s you.

Flashbacks of moments from the previous movies appear as Amy talks. Sonic asking Tom for help getting to San Francisco. Him talking to knuckles on the beach. Him holding out his hand to Tails to follow him through the portal. Him giving Amy a fist bump, signifying that she’s officially part of the team. The flashbacks end with one group shot of team Sonic celebrating finding their first chaos emerald.

We cut back to the room. Amy is dreamily staring at the earth, lost in thought. Sonic looks at her in awe, a blush creeping up on his face.

Sonic: that… that was the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever said to me.

Amy smiles at him.

Amy: And I believe every word of it. I’m sure that Shadow will too.

Sonic sheepishly grins back at her.

Sonic: I don’t think I’ll be able to do it alone this time.

A realization crosses Amy’s mind as her eyes light up.

Amy: I need to help him become the hero…

Sonic: sorry, what was that?

Amy: (more excited) I need to help him become the hero! The cards weren’t just talking about teaching you, they were telling me that I have to be the one to talk to Shadow!

Sonic: the fortune?

Amy: oh thank you Sonic!

She embraces him and his face flushes again. She realizes what she’s doing and stops, also looking bashful.

Amy: you go find the emeralds, leave the rest to me!

She runs out of the room and down the hall. Sonic watches for a moment before he smirks and takes off to find the emeralds.

THE scene

Interior: Space Colony ARK

Shadow is looking out the window of the observatory room. The ARK continues to gain speed, and earth slowly but surely gets bigger. Amy runs into the room.

Amy: Shadow…

Shadow: have you come to admire the view one last time? I must admit, it’s bittersweet seeing it like this.

Amy: Do you know why you’re doing this?

Shadow: an odd question. This was my mission. Destroy humanity.

Amy: Are you sure?

Shadow turns to glare at her.

Shadow: and what is that supposed to mean?

Amy: We found some records earlier. Do you really know why Gerald created you?

Shadow opens his mouth to say something, only to close it again.

Amy: You weren’t meant to be a weapon like GUN wanted you to be. You were created to heal.

Shadow winces.

Shadow: None of that matters! My purpose is gone now and it’s thanks to those despicable humans! The only thing left is this!

Amy: Is that what you really think?

Shadow holds his head in his hands.

Amy: (realization) You keep fighting it, the rest of the memory.

Shadow: Shut up!

Amy: I’m so sorry, Shadow. What happened was horrible. It must be so painful to remember, to have only that final moment replay in your head again and again. It’s the only thing you were able to hold onto. That isn’t your fault though.

Shadow writhes, his head pounding.

Amy: I know it hurts to think about. That’s why you haven’t let yourself remember. But letting yourself remember all the good times you had together, the moments that gave your life and hers meaning, it’s how you can honor her memory.

Shadow clams his breath.

Shadow: When? When will it stop hurting?

Amy smiles sadly.

Amy: I wish I knew.

Over Amy’s monologue, we see flashes of her past as well as Sonic and Knuckles. Amy with her grandmother, learning how to fortune read, followed by an image of her in front of a gravestone with a flower in hand. Sonic wrapped in a hug from Longclaw, followed by the scene of him racing towards her only to phase through the ring portal as it closed. Then the scene of him looking out at the hologram of Longclaw disappearing as he solemnly reaches towards it. Knuckles looking at his father walking away with the rest of his tribe, followed by a scene of him and the ghost of Pechacamac.

Amy: There isn’t anyone who can answer that. But we remember anyway. Because it means all those moments meant something. They helped make us who we are now.

Shadow exhales, seemingly preparing for something.

Amy: I know it’s painful, but please, try to remember the entire story. Remember what happened before the end.

Shadow relaxes, letting his mind finally go.

We cut to a flash of memories all coming at once. The first is of Maria looking at Shadow in a testing tube, covered in wires as he’s suspended in fluid. She presses her hand up to the glass and stares up in wonder.

The next is of them dancing in the halls of the ARK while Yellow Submarine play on a cassette tape. They laugh together as they trip up while trying to dance.

The clips get more brief.

There's a memory of Shadow helping Maria brush her hair, putting in her signature hairband, one of them looking up at the Milky Way, one of Shadow resting his head on Maria’s lap as they look at the earth, one of them eating together in the mass hall, one of them reading together, and moments that flash too fast to properly make out what’s happening.

The flashes suddenly stop, and we cut to the final memory. Maria is looking at Shadow through the glass of the space capsule with tears in her eyes. We hold on her for a few seconds before the camera cuts to Shadow, looking terrified.

Shadow: Maria, what are you doing?

Maria: I’m not going to let them catch you, Shadow. Grandpa and I found out the truth. If they catch you, they’ll turn you into a weapon. I have to do this.

Shadow: Maria, please… Come with me! We said we would go to earth together!

Maria: I’m sorry, Shadow. I wish I could go with you. There’s nothing in the universe that I want more than to go with you! But I wouldn’t survive down there. My illness would catch up to me the moment the capsule opened.

Shadow: I can’t leave you!

Maria: And I can’t let them take you!

The room is completely silent as they both stare at each other.

Maria: Shadow, there’s a whole world of people that need you. Give them a chance. You were created to help humanity, not just me. Please, I beg you, give them the same hope that you gave me. Protect them. Let them live their dreams. Promise me you will.

Shadow: Maria…

Maria: Promise me, shadow! Please...

The room is silent as we pan on Shadow, looking reluctant.

Shadow: I… I promise.

Maria smiles through her tears. She walks over to the lever, resting her hand on it.

Maria: Shadow. You’re the best brother I could have ever had. I love you. If you don’t remember anything else, remember this, I love you.

Tears stream down her face as she turns to smile at him.

Maria: Sayonara, Shadow The Hedgehog.

Before she can pull the lever, an agent holding a gun walks into the room.

Agent: freeze!

Maria doesn’t even turn to look at him. Both hands are on the lever, a determined look on her face.

Agent: I said stop!

Maria closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

Shadow: Maria! No! Please don’t-

Maria pulls down on the lever, and we hear the sound of a shot ring out as we focus on shadow, suspended in the single moment. All sound is cut, except for the sound of ringing.

Shadow: MARIA!

The cry is visceral, and pierces the silence. We only focus on the shot of shadow as the capsule finally is ejected into space. Shadow curls up. No sound is heard, but the full body heaving lets us know he’s crying.

We cut back to the present shot of Shadow. Tears are running down his face as he tries to maintain his composure.

Shadow: Maria… I- I promised you I would protect them. What have I done?

Amy: It's not too late, shadow!

Shadow turns to her, wiping his face.

Shadow: It’s not too late...

Amy: Sonic’s already gone to get the chaos emeralds. He should be waiting for you.

Shadow smiles in relief.

Shadow: I can’t believe I’d forgotten.

Amy: I’m sure it wasn’t easy remembering all of that.

Shadow: No. Remembering was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But now I know my true purpose. I won’t be the weapon they want me to be. I won’t be the means of revenge that Gerald tried to turn me into.

Amy: Well, what are you waiting for? You have a promise to keep.

Shadow smiles.

Shadow: Thank you, Amy.

In a flash, he runs out of the room.

Amy smiles to herself.

Amy: You’re welcome, Shadow.

She runs out of the room herself to meet up with everyone.

#sonic movie #sonic movie 3 #sonic 3 #sonic #shadow the hedgehog

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nicklloydnow · 1 year

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“I thought of Sam Bankman-Fried’s numbskull posturing recently when I finally read Nathan Heller’s article about the “The End of the English Major” in the New Yorker. The account of the collapse of undergraduate interest in the humanities touched off a lot of anguish, pained tweets, and op-eds this past month. For me, it clarified something about the trajectory of culture in the recent past, and made me think about the increasing widespread popularity of something I’ll call Quantitative Aesthetics—the way numbers function more and more as a proxy for artistic value.

(…)

The most-shared tidbit from Heller’s piece were the lines from professors lamenting that her Ivy League students who are social-media natives no longer have the attention for reading literature: “The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”

We’re talking about the period since 2011, the first college class since the introduction of the iPhone, and it is logical that mass adoption of such seductive and pervasive consumer technology has changed people’s relationship to culture.

But 2011-12 is also the first full college class since the financial crisis of 2008, and the other obvious culprit is the greater ruthlessness of the economy post Great Recession, the flight away from the “softness” of the humanities in a time when studying anything not directly seen as useful is viewed more and more as an unsustainable luxury.

(…)

As one student says in the article, “Even if I’m in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, ‘Well, who was your sample?’ I mean, statistics is everywhere. It’s part of any good critical analysis of things.” This provokes Heller to reflect, “I knew at once what [the student] meant: on social media, and in the press that sends data visualizations skittering across it, statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge.”

(…)

Nevertheless, there’s something called the McNamara Fallacy, a.k.a. the Quantitative Fallacy. It is summarized as “if it cannot be measured, it is not important.” The Heller article made me reflect on how a version of it is now very present, and growing, at the grassroots of taste.

On one level, this is seen in a rise of a kind of wonky obsession with business stats in fandoms, invoked as a way to convey the rightness of artistic opinions—what I want to call Quantitative Aesthetics. (There are actually scientists who study aesthetic preference in labs and use the term “quantitative aesthetics.” I am using it in a more diffuse way.)

It manifests in music. As the New York Times wrote in 2020 of the new age of pop fandom, “devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship, wins and shooting percentages.” Last year, another music writer talked about fans internalizing the number-as-proof-of-value mindset to extreme levels: “I see people forcing themselves to listen to certain songs or albums over and over and over just to raise those numbers, to the point they don’t even get enjoyment out of it anymore.”

The same goes for film lovers, who now seem to strangely know a lot about opening-day grosses and foreign box office, and use the stats to argue for the merits of their preferred product. There was an entire campaign by Marvel super-fans to get Avengers: Endgame to outgross Avatar, as if that would prove that comic-book movies really were the best thing in the world.

On the flip side, indie director James Gray (of Ad Astra fame) recently complained about ordinary cinema-goers using business stats as a proxy for artistic merit: “It tells you something of how indoctrinated we are with capitalism that somebody will say, like, ‘His movies haven’t made a dime!’ It’s like, well, do you own stock in Comcast? Or are you just such a lemming that you think that actually has value to anybody?”

It’s not just financial data though. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have recently become go-to arbitrators of taste by boiling down a movie’s value to a single all-purpose statistic. They are influential enough to alarm studios, who say the practice is denying oxygen to potentially niche hits because it “quantifies the unquantifiable.” (How funny to hear Hollywood execs echo Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “If an empirically oriented aesthetics uses quantitative averages as norms, it unconsciously sides with social conformity.”)

As for art, I don’t really feel like I even need to say too much about how the confusion of price data with merit infects the conversation. It’s so well known it is the subject of documentaries from The Mona Lisa Curse (2008) to The Price of Everything (2018). “Art and money have no intrinsic hookup at all,” painter Larry Poons laments in the latter, stating the film’s thesis. “It’s not like sports, where your batting average is your batting average… They’ve tried to make it much like that, like the best artist is the most expensive artist.”

But where Quantitative Aesthetics is really newly intense across society—in art and everywhere—is in how social-media numbers (clicks, likes, shares, retweets, etc.) seep into everything as a shorthand for understanding how important something is. That’s why artist-researcher Ben Grosser created his Demetricator suite of web-browsing tools, which let you view social media stripped of all those numbers and feel, by their absence, the effect they are having on your attention and values.

(…)

Again: Data analysis, done with care, can yield insights of great depth (Albert-László Barabási has even argued for “dataism,” a kind of sophisticated data analysis, as an artform). But as an instrument used to justify consumer preference within a landscape of complex values, a Quantitative Aesthetic often just becomes a way to deal with the problem of not wanting to spend much time thinking—the opposite of deep thought.

If you walk into a wine store, you could get descriptions of various wines, taste them, decide whether you want something more “foxy” or more “herbaceous,” match the subtleties to your palette. But most people will probably just pick the bottle that has the price point they think suggests about the level of quality they are shooting for.

The “McNamara Fallacy” is named after one-time defense secretary Robert McNamara—a Harvard grad, like the students Heller talks to. A numbers whiz, he was the architect of the U.S.’s murderous, ultimately catastrophic Vietnam policy, and known for his obsession with “body counts” as the key metric of success.

McNamara apparatchik Leslie H. Gelb later recalled in Time magazine the debacle fueled by this quantitative mindset:

McNamara didn’t know anything about Vietnam. Nor did the rest of us working with him. But Americans didn’t have to know the culture and history of a place. All we needed to do was apply our military superiority and resources in the right way. We needed to collect the right data, analyze the information properly and come up with a solution on how to win the war.

(…)

Daniel Yankelovich, the sociologist who coined the term “McNamara Fallacy,” actually outlined it as a process, one that could be broken out into four steps of escalating intellectual danger. Here they are, as it is commonly broken down, with his commentary on each:

Measure whatever can be easily measured. (This is OK as far as it goes.)

Disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. (This is artificial and misleading.)

Presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. (This is blindness.)

Say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. (This is suicide.)

Based on the data I have, I’d say that we as a culture are approaching somewhere between the third and fourth steps.”

#aesthetics #quant #quantitative aesthetics #numbers #statistics #art #mcnamara #robert mcnamara #mcnamara fallacy #sam bankman fried #ftx collapse #culture #data #taste

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i-like-gay-books · 2 years

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lately been seeing a lot of pushback against the pushback against intellectual elitism, crying anti-intellectualism, and there are a few reasons this is bothering me which i’m going to try to list here to the best of my abilities all in one sitting because otherwise i’ll forget to finish it:

1. the whole attitude against consuming “easy” media like marvel or mainstream movies or books, etc, is intellectual elitism no matter how you sugar coat it. im not saying it’s intentionally malicious, in fact i believe most people doing it are unaware they’re doing anything at all. the thing is that privilege can affect you in many different ways, and the level of media you are able to consume and have an enjoyable experience with is one of those ways.

i am very well educated in language and writing, so reading experimental stories where the syntax and turn of phrase is almost more important than the actual plot or characters is easy and even sometimes enjoyable for me. however, i have next to no media literacy when it comes to films. i can watch something more artistic or experimental, but i likely won’t understand it even close to the amount i need to in order to enjoy it. it would take a lot of effort to fully understand and even if i got to the point of understanding it the effort it took would make the experience much less enjoyable.

i hope i explained that well enough. it’s kinda hard to put into words

2. it’s ableist. full stop. i’m not even joking here i saw someone seriously type out and post something that said people are using this callout of intellectual elitism as a way to hide the fact that they’re all just “jocks who don’t play sports.” that doesnt directly relate to this point in particular i just remembered it.

yes, less artistic or intentionally intellectual/ thought provoking pieces of art are easier to consume. speaking as someone who has not only dealt with chronic burnout myself but who is part of a generation of people living day in and day out with chronic burnout, sometimes easy media is all i can handle. by which i mean, most times. and its easier to consume again. and again. and again and again.

burnout is just one example of course, many disabilities can cause a lack of energy to devote to activities that are for leisure. and even without disabilities, humans are meant to rest. nobody wants to be thinking critically or philosophically 100% of the time.

3. communities are much larger surrounding mainstream/ easy to consume media. obviously that doesnt make it more worthwhile, but it does come with its own certain set of benefits. also you know what mainstream fandoms have a shit ton of? fan work. look at fan fiction and fan art and fan theories and tell me those people are not thinking critically and engaging meaningfully with their source material. just try to tell me.

some people work better with more hands on, creative pursuits. my favorite subjects growing up were always math and english, because there was a way to be involved, and not just be told the answers, the story. science and history never offered me that, at least not as openly. learning styles are different, and just because we’re talking about a leisure activity here doesnt mean that fact changes or becomes irrelevant.

this is just me word dumping onto a document because i didnt want to hijack a post at 12:30 at night, but these are a few of the reasons this “anti-intellectualism” accusation has been leaving a bad taste in my mouth for the few months its been going on. feel free to add on or ignore or whatever, i dont really care. i just needed to write it down and get it out there.

#anti intellectualism #intellectual elitism #media #disabilities #burnout #media literacy #privilege #cloudy rambles

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cinnamonest · 2 years

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Yandere Profile - Monkey D. Luffy (One Piece)

Every day. Every day I have to wake up. Look at myself in the mirror. Accept that I am sexually attracted to Monkey D Luffy. And I have to live with myself knowing that.

In all seriousness I love him so much he was one of my earliest anime crushes, he's my stretchy son, my paperclip IQ boy, my little meow meow, my sweet wanted-worldwide criminal, love of my life light of my sky. Imagine he yells out during sex just like he does the "yelling out the name of my attack" shounen thing while you fuck like imagine getting a fuckin Gum-Gum Cervix Bruising

Also note I'm not 100% caught up with One Piece (I mean, who is lol) and it's been a while since I watched it (actually picked it up again bc writing this made me want to go back to it!) so this will reflect what I've gotten to

That being said, because OP is so long and it's one of those pieces of media that takes such a long time to consume, which means people can't just "oh I'll finish it first then go back and read this", I tried avoiding spoilers except one very mild one. The mild spoiler just alludes to a person and their lineage without naming them (and while I had more on that character in here originally, it was kinda impossible to discuss them without more or less revealing the big spoiler of what happens to them, so yeah, I ended up going more general).

Tws: fem reader, n/s/f//w, general yandere content, noncon (in an... innocent/unintentional sort of way?), abduction, mentions of violence, rubber dick physics in case that weirds anyone out lol

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

Severity Scale

Intelligence/Perceptiveness: 3

Brutality: 6.5

Physical capability: 9.5

Mental/emotional instability: 6

Restrictiveness: 3

Sexual sadism: 3

Stubbornness: 8

What are they generally like? Lucid, aware? Obsessive? How do they behave?

Look at it this way... your life will certainly never be boring!

It would actually be quite the transition for someone who is not used to a very... active, exciting lifestyle, to use more positive terms. To be someone going from a more quiet, mundane, average life, to suddenly being strung along to a life where you'll find yourself being in the forefront of witnessing superhumans and monsters of unbelievable power, clashes and high-intensity battles between many factions of said beings, and inevitably at some point ending up shot at... talk about a shift in lifestyle.

One important note is that due to his low perceptiveness, he's very bad at recognizing your bad mood, hesitancy, unwillingness, resentment, etc unless you're very blatant. He's not the best at just reading your expressions or tone of voice or anything of the sort, you really have to spell it out for him a lot of the time. If you're the type of person who drops hints rather than being blunt, you're gonna have to change that, for your own sake.

That being said, he has those occasional moments of surprising depth, saying something to you, particularly an analysis of you, that actually strikes you as uncharacteristically thought-provoking and perceptive, something about yourself you hadn't even realized. Of course, he himself says such things without even realizing how meaningful it is... and it's usually quickly followed by a statement more on par with his normal simple-mindedness.

And that characteristic simple-mindedness must be understood to really get him in the first place, to understand how you end up in your situation. It is certainly a bit different from a lot of obsessive lovers -- the primary emotions are generally the same, but the expression of it, and how those emotions are understood and acted upon, can often be different.

This is primarily a lack of a desire to understand complexities -- to him, there are a lot of things he doesn't really understand and doesn't care to. He's not a person who's going to spend hours exploring their feelings and origins, thinking through possibilities, panicking over what-ifs about how you feel about him, do a lot of emotional self-reflection, etc. Things are or aren't, his world is often very black-and-white, and one doesn't need to fully understand all the complexities within something to know what they want to do and act upon their desires, much like how one can operate certain machines, change the dial on a clock, unlock a lock with a key, etc, without fully understanding the entirety of how those mechanisms work.

People aren't really different. He could not tell you why he likes you or when it began, does not fully understand what the emotion itself is beyond a positive affection. And he's not going to restrain himself in any capacity for some sort of fear of rejection or desire to preserve any self-image. No, he's very immediately straightforward. That doesn't mean he's saying he loves you and wants to marry you or something from day one, no, but that's because he just doesn't recognize the feeling as such yet.

Rather, what this leads to is a lack of shame. Some obsessed lovers will try to prevent you from knowing about their stalking tendencies or awful behavior, they give you a little bit of space, because they don't want you to think poorly of them or mock them, they don't want you to be angry.

Luffy doesn't really care. Nothing is going to prevent him from being very openly clingy and touchy and fixated on you. He doesn't realize how obvious it is, but even if he did, he wouldn't care. So what? Of course he's fixated... why would he be embarrassed by that? Hiding one's feelings or trying so hard for them to not be understood is just pointless.

On another matter, he's actually very determined to make you part of the group, rather than just solely with him. Most yanderes by nature are incredibly selfish in their interactions with a darling -- darling is for themselves only, and not to be interacted with by others. They will lock you away, keep your interactions with others either extremely limited to highly trusted figures, or keep you away from others at all, limiting your interactions to themselves and themselves alone.

Luffy is a bit more lenient than most to begin with, but especially in the fact that he's going to do quite the opposite of that. He wants you to get along well with his friends! In his mind, you're every bit as much of a part of them as any other member. It would make no sense to lock you away, and at first he's too naive to even think about one of his most trusted of individuals stealing you away. He trusts them wholeheartedly... even though that may not a good idea on his part.

With others, though, strangers and enemies, those people he doesn't want you interacting with, and feels quite the opposite from his crew - that is, he assumes they ARE trying to harm you in some way, or at least are intimidating you, and can get overprotective, that sort of glare he gets when people really upset him.

How likely are they to kidnap their darling? How quickly will they do so?

It's called recruitment, thank you very much.

We see in canon that when our boy has decided you're becoming a crew member... there's a pretty good chance you're becoming a crew member, one way or another, whether you like it or not. It's similar to the situation with Sanji -- he decides that you have a role to fill on board, and will accept no one else in the entire world but specifically you, and any rejection goes in one ear, out the other. Like talking to a brick wall. Perhaps you have some sort of talent, perhaps his brain has just decided it's necessary.

It's not like you're actually all too special, though, you're just a person he ran into at random, maybe someone who gave him directions or worked at a bar or something he came into. You're rather confused when he asks, comes up to you and tells you he needs you. It's not like he gives you the full detailed rundown, but it's still bewildering and confusing telling you all of a sudden that he's going to obtain the One Piece and become the Pirate King, you have to come with him because he needs you to join, he'll explain on the way anyway just put your stuff down and come on they're leaving tomorrow morning so you have to be ready by tonight and--

Yeah, if anything, you might think he's crazy at first, if not recognize him as 'that guy on the wanted posters in town.' So you react accordingly and try to back away or shut him down, but, that doesn't work out well. He's used to people being hesitant, that makes sense, but he's also very much used to the people who hesitated or fought him eventually joining anyway and coming to love the life they lead, so you will too!

Either way, he'll be pretty direct when it comes to you... as in, physical force. As in wrapping a rubbery appendage around you and dragging you with him. You really should not have been expecting anything elaborate or planned out of him in terms of abduction methods.

The unfortunate side of all this once he drags you onboard is that he has people to back him up, or to at least gloss over how unusual the behavior is. That's because at this point, the rest of them are more or less used to his antics, and since he was also so insistent with them, they have no reason to suspect it being for any other reason than him just being the way that he is... especially seeing as he actually does manage to get you on when they're not there (not that he planned that, it just turned out that way), so when they get on later and set sail, he just told them that you're there, but you went to sleep... which is true. Sorry about that, he didn't realize how strong his grip was until you went all limp, but as soon as you did he loosened up and you started breathing again, just not waking up.

Once awake, though, at first your natural assumption is to assume they're in on it. You feel too nervous at first to say anything, really. Realistically, most darlings will be too intimidated, or not even realize that they would help you if they knew how nonconsensual your presence is. You assume they're pirates, so they must be bad people right? They won't care if they find out you were forced here, they might even hurt you if you tried to get their help, so you just stay cold and quiet... until you spend a few days and slowly realize these are generally kind people, even if a few are a bit gruff or... strange people.

But at first, when you're thinking they're in on it and thus not speaking to them, meanwhile they think you're just abnormally shy, they effectively, albeit unintentionally, gaslight you to some degree into thinking it's normal, because for them, it is. In their minds, they just sort of perceive you as a bit grouchy, it hasn't hit them yet that you are truly, genuinely resistant. They don't realize just yet that his fixation on you goes beyond what they each experienced, nor think that he might have physically dragged you there (and if you came on your own like they assume, you must have wanted to right?) so they see it as merely the same as every other recruitment in their past.

As soon as you realize they're not that bad, you can try to confide in them if you want... but this puts them in a little bit of a dilemma. Like, they want to help you, and a few are willing to confront the captain on what's happened. To which he's... very transparent. Oh, yeah, she didn't wanna come, so I had to pick her up. There's a lot of heavy sighs, having to tell him you can't just do that! ...It's kinda unnerving to see how little the revelation seems to shock them, though... as if they're used to such outlandish things.

But he's very uncompromising about it, gets frustrated if they try reasoning with him, stubbornly says no. You have to be here. He refuses to listen.

That's where the dilemma comes in. They've never taken such a strong moral issue on his decisions before. They... don't really know what to do. Most of them can't really risk leaving, would never want to, and that wouldn't accomplish anything anyway, so, as awful as it sounds, they more or less end up accepting it to some degree. Several will try their absolute best to make life better for you and make you enjoy your time with them, though, so that's a plus at the very least. But in the end they're not really in a position to help you out all that much, they all have much bigger problems to worry about, and at this point, they can't afford to turn back and take you home, and it's not as if Luffy would ever let that happen anyway. So, uh, sorry, but... just endure it for now.

How difficult is it to escape from them? How do they keep you restrained? How do they deal with attempted escape?

Most of the time, it isn't restrictiveness that's keeping you trapped with him... it's the whole "surrounded by ocean as far as the eye can see" thing.

Consequently, most of the time he doesn't really need to be restrictive. It's not like you're dumb enough to think you can swim or even row that far. You more or less have freedom to roam the ship as you please, which is much better than many other poor darlings being tied up all the time.

But expect to be trailed. As previously noted, he's oblivious and shameless about his crush, doesn't feel the slightest amount of embarrassment or sheepishness blatantly following you from room to room, going wherever you go, like a lost puppy or something.

This is also the restraint used whenever you're off-ship and among civilization. He's clingy. Insufferably so. He cannot be away from you for more than a matter of minutes, and should he turn his head and find you gone, he'll immediately go looking for you. It's different from how he is with the others, where he's fine with splitting up to each accomplish different tasks each crew member needs to get done while they're docked. The same does not apply to you. He'll follow you wherever you go, or, more realistically, you will be following him everywhere he goes, attached by a grip on your wrist and being dragged along.

Should you run at an opportune moment while he's distracted, it really isn't difficult for him to get you back. He'll definitely notice your absence within a minute or two. Even if he can't immediately see you, it's incredibly easy for him to maneuver himself to high vantage points, from which it'll only take a very short time to spot you, considering you really couldn't have gone far in such a short time. It's also easy to utilize his body and slingshot himself to your general location (unfortunately at least once accidentally tackling you to the ground in the process... ouch).

He's not really mad at first, more worried and a bit frustrated. Hey... don't go running off like that. You'll get hurt or something. Good thing he found you. How come you didn't tell him where you were going...?

So yeah, he doesn't quite automatically assume you're trying to get away from him, and of course, you realize it's best if it stays that way, so you go along with his assumption and make up some excuse about how you got distracted or heard something. He'll believe you, at least this time. If it becomes a repetitive issue, or really just after the second time or so, he'll make sure to keep a really strong grip on your wrist the whole time, just to help you make sure you don't accidentally run off again!

If you snap and yell about how you're trying to get away from him, that you want to be free and go home and call him mean names, he gets more frustrated. He's like, already explained why you can't do that, and he already told you he wants you to be with him, so what gives? Did you forget or something? You really seem to have trouble understanding this... don't expect to get through to him.

But annoying as that may be, it's infinitely better than the average yandere's rage or hysteria and brutal punishments or the like for the same offense. So really, you might want to consider yourself lucky -- all you get is more and more carefully watched over.

How easy are they to trick, deceive, or manipulate?

Poor thing. You know how easy it is.

It's not as if he doesn't have some surprisingly perceptive moments, but as a general rule, he is rather gullible, particularly in regards to you. Even if you're making up some extremely unlikely and unbelievable excuse, he'll probably buy it with a smile on his face.

That isn't to say, though, that it will work, particularly due to him being somewhat socially obtuse. It can backfire. Prior to abduction, you can make all your excuses about having somewhere you need to be or something you need to do, upon which, if they believed you, most people would understand as a social cue that you need to be left alone, but he just sees it as an opportunity to tag along! You're going to pick something up, go to this store? Okay, he'll head that way too, you can go together! This, of course, also makes it a bit awkward when you then have to go do the thing you weren't actually intending to do, just to maintain the lie.

Also, he can certainly learn. While he's never good at telling when you're lying in general, if he knows you've done so over and over, have been proven to lie to him time and time again, he will start becoming more guarded and assuming you're lying, become more suspicious of you. He hates lying, it makes him frustrated, he'll start confronting you on it with his irritation quite evident.

Thankfully, though, his emotions can be very easily manipulated, as well as being easily manipulated in general. When he is mad, he's very easy to distract with something he likes, and can turn from frustrated to excited in a mere moment if you should present him with something he wants or likes. It's something you'll ultimately end up rather grateful for. Likewise, he can be manipulated into doing whatever you want on the promise of getting something he wants in return (food, sex, etc).

How lenient are they? What privileges can you have, and what will you be denied?

If you have a high tolerance for a suffocating presence, Luffy is actually one of the better yanderes you could be stuck with. This is namely because you won't be undergoing the typical "chained to the bed, kept in a cage, all your loved ones killed" sort of thing, no. He wants you to be a part of his life, which means sharing each and every adventure. He trusts himself and his crewmates to be able to ensure your safety (except for rare cases, in which case he will ensure you are kept away from conflict).

This is... actually kind of the opposite of most yanderes, in the way it can work out for a darling who wants absolutely none of it. No, you can't stay in bed all day, you can't stay locked away in the room! Why would you do that? It's depressing... it's sunny outside and there's a lot of things to be accomplished and done, you have to come with him and stay by his side, whenever you're docked somewhere, or at least out on deck with him if you are all at sea.

So yes, no staying inside, if he's going into town so are you. He can get pouty and frustrated, if you try to stay inside and have a mopey, bad mood about it. Why are you laying around all sad? Just come outside. It's easy. If you say you don't feel up to it... oh, that's alright. He'll carry you on his back. No that's not an offer, that's a statement. You're getting slung out of bed and (thankfully while attached to him) slingshot into the open sky and all the way to shore before you can even blink. He just sort of believes you'll be fine and change your mind once you get out.

Many darlings might kill to be in a position where they can go outside, you know... but honestly, even they would quickly end up with the same sentiment as yourself on the matter. Honestly, sometimes it feels more like babysitting a particularly hyperactive child, being dragged from place to place by him and trying (and failing) to stop him from rushing headfirst into interactions with people you come across, regardless of how shady or dangerous you think they look.

What kind of rules do they have? What kind of punishment would they use?

The thought of constructing some list of guidelines for you is simply something that never crosses his mind. He's generally a pretty lax and easygoing person in terms of the personalities of others and doesn't want to make any attempt to control your behaviors... and if there's something he really wants to accomplish, he'll just sort of... force his way into it. He wants you to go with him somewhere? He can just grab you by the wrist and take off in the direction you're headed, if not pick you up (or even rocket you together in the right direction). He wants to talk to you? He can just barge his way into whatever conversation you may be having, or pick you up and pull you close and talk to you.

Should you be difficult, doing something like silent treatment or just being rude, at first he doesn't really... get it. Honestly he can pester you into doing what he wants without even intentionally trying. Silent treatment is met with so many hey, hey's, and what's wrong? and can you hear me? that eventually you snap and talk back anyway. If you're mean, he sort of recoils, wide-eyed, but not discouraged. Huh. Okay. You seem really mad or something. He'll take care of whatever the problem is. Just say the word. Or maybe you don't wanna tell? Wonder why that might be...

If you get the courage to tell him you don't like being here, you want to go home, you're mad he took you away, etc, he does get it, but he doesn't quite grasp the severity of it, how intense your emotion is. Oh, sorry. That's about the most remorse you'll get. His attitude is basically 'yeah, sorry about kidnapping you, but too late to do anything now so anyway--' in the sense that the gravity of the situation goes over his head. He'll just kinda go right back to talking, asking you if there's anything else you want. Why are you so sad all the time? Come outside and get some fresh and air and stuff and you'll be fine. But you'll never know if you stay in here. Here, he'll help you by lifting you into the air and carrying you out...

If you say you want him to let you go, again, it's a half-hearted, oh, sorry, can't do that... you've definitely already been associated with him by this point (because of his complete lack of hesitation to have you seen by enemies), and so you probably have a bounty already. Can't let you go and let you get captured. Don't worry, it's fun here anyway.

There is no given command not to run away, because he doesn't think you would. If you ever do try to run, bolt when his back is turned for a moment or the like, he does make that the sole rule -- don't do that again. It's one of his more frustrated moments, so he has no problem issuing a direct order. But he'll be keeping a closer eye on you, so you won't really get the opportunity anyway.

How do they deal with rivals, or perceived rivals? Will they get rid of them? Will they kill them themselves, or find another way?

One of the first issues he has is recognizing the feeling he's experiencing. He doesn't recognize what he feels as "jealousy," it's not something particularly familiar to him in this context. All he knows is that when you talk to certain others, or even other crewmates if you're talking to them too much (or if you respond positively to them but negatively to him), he feels... a sort of knot in his stomach. So he thinks he's sensing danger perhaps, or maybe just sick. Thus, he can actually avoid addressing the feeling for a short time, feels like either something will happen or the feeling will go away on its own.

It persists, though. It doesn't go away. And it really flares up at certain moments, too, so he notices, takes note of in his mind. It flares up at certain moments where you laugh and smile. It's odd, because he normally likes it when you do those things.

Except this time it's not on your own, or over something that just happened. You're laughing and smiling because of someone else. Someone who said something to you. He finds himself desperately wanting to know what it was that was said, that gives you such a reaction. He wants to know why you would react in such a way, and why it makes him feel the way it does.

Honestly it's probably someone else that ends up recognizing it in the end and has to tell him, because it becomes very, very obvious. Again, he's really, truly shameless about most things, so he simply acts on his impulses rather than considering how his actions may be perceived or how obvious it will make his thoughts and feelings. The pit in his stomach tells him to pick you up, drag you away, go off to where you can be alone. That's what soothes the burning feeling, what makes him feel at ease.

And, of course, considering how direct that solution is, and the fact that he emotes very strongly and every feeling he has is immediately readable on his face and posture, it becomes very obvious to all the others within no time. That includes you, of course, if it wasn't already very clear to you. He's the only person who doesn't know how he's feeling.

But they don't quite realize the severity. They think it's just kinda him being the way that he is, but that it's ultimately harmless. That is, until it escalates, which it inevitably will -- he becomes uncharacteristically short-tempered/easily upset, and noticeably so, whenever he sees you with the subject of his frustration, and will make attempts to keep you away from them altogether. Generally, if it is another crew member, they do have respect for him and will ultimately steer clear of you in an attempt to deescalate. Which is not exactly great for you, but it prevents things from getting worse.

After the matter, though, he does get generally more restrictive than he was before. The naivete of his sense of trust is somewhat shattered, he becomes a bit paranoid. This means you might actually finally get the "locked in a room" treatment, except generally that will only be when he's there with you. Mostly, it just means he manages to become even clingier than he already was; before, you were actually at least able to get a few spare minutes when he went to go check on something or the like, but that's not the case anymore.

How easy is it to make them mad? What does their anger look like?

His quickness to anger depends on what's upsetting him; he has a high tolerance for some things, a low tolerance for others, and sometimes these make no sense, or at least don't line up with how most people would feel.

He can be a bit immature at times, so when it comes to you he can get frustrated easily. He gets... pouty. He makes a face, furrows his eyebrows, his voice gets grumpy. He makes no attempts to hide when he's upset, how some other yanderes would try to appear calm because they might not want to make their feelings for you too obvious, but he's very quick to ask you why you're spending so much time with someone else, why you ran off again, why you're being such a jerk today. Just staying put and being nice is easy... or it should be... you're kinda being annoying, you know.

Because of his naivete to you, always thinking the best of your intentions, believing your excuses, never thinking you're doing something bad intentionally etc, he's unlikely to ever get truly furious at you, only frustrated, which can easily be fixed by annoying and forcing his way into what he wants.

True anger, all the chaos and immense destruction he can cause with his fury, will come out towards enemies. Should he ever be tricked or mess up, something that allows you to get hurt by someone else... if he's already protective of the others, it's even more so for you.

So they see you as above them, beneath them, or equal to them?

Eh? Who cares? That sort of thing is... pointless. He's not going to waste time thinking about something like relative value of a person. Bleh.

That's more or less all you'll get out of him. Such a notion seems pointless, it's just something that never crosses his mind, and if asked he's not going to bother actually considering it, he just merely states his thoughts on the matter, that such a topic is dumb (and yes, that's the exact word he uses). He has better things to worry about.

How determined are they for you to love them? How hard will they try to make it happen? Or are they content just having you?

Well, let's see. The man has dedicated literal years of his life and his entire foreseeable future and existence, allowing himself to become one of the most wanted people in the world, all for the sake of finding something that many people initially weren't even entirely confident still existed out there. So, it's safe to say he's a rather determined person.

But really, part of it is not really grasping your rejection in the first place. When you respond negatively to him, he doesn't think about the possibility that it might be him that's the issue, that you would otherwise respond positively if it were someone else or if he just approached differently.

And that just... does not change. It's less not understanding, and more a very unique sort of delusional tendency -- he just always believes it's something else making you upset, and that you're just being mean, getting all angry because that's how you are. He can get frustrated, can get pouty, but he'll never really listen. It's infuriating for you, it literally feels like talking to a brick wall, like your words go in one ear and out the other and he acts like he didn't even hear you. He just. Doesn't. Listen. Sometimes it makes you even feel like you're going crazy, the feeling of trying to communicate with someone who refuses to be communicated with.

Bonus: Is there anything that makes them unique, in comparison to other yanderes?

Well, there's certainly the obvious... you have never encountered a rubber person before.

For a poor darling who once lived a very normal life, you may have heard of devil fruits, maybe encountered a few people with a power from one if you were lucky, but the rubber thing really takes some getting used to. At first, it's... kinda horrifying, to be honest. It certainly looks weird to see in action (especially if you're witnessing gear fourth, which is, uh, something) and suddenly, what once seemed like just a rather airheaded annoyance now seems a lot more intimidating when you see him once crush an entire ship with an elongated kick. You feel nervous around him more than you did at first.

It feels creepy when his arms sort of wrap around you, it honestly triggers a survival instinct, feeling like you're being constricted by a predator or something, which makes you panic, and trash around. And the first time he uses his rocket technique to launch the two of you from the ship all the way over a good distance, only given a quick "hang on" warning before being slung through the air, you're pretty sure you blacked out. He thought it was impressive, though, surely you'll think it's cool. And then there was the time you finally thought you were getting away for once, made the mistake of standing at a spot where he had a clear line of sight from his perch on a rooftop to you, and you felt a hand grab your shoulder... you didn't even process it before you were snapped back off your feet and through the air at lightning speed.

You have to just get used to it with time, honestly, it does take some getting used to. It's easier for others who just witness it, but since you are so often on the receiving end of its capabilities, it's more difficult for you.

And there's. Another thing. Some yanderes are known for certain... tendencies, or traits. Some are exceptionally smart. Exceptionally strong, maybe. Exceptionally violent. Cunning, well-prepared, restrictive, calm, distant, paranoid, delusional, all things that a certain yandere may be in excess that distinguishes them from most.

Well, Luffy is exceptionally annoying.

Sometimes he can almost feel kinda like babysitting a kid. He asks so many questions. Butts his way into whatever you're doing, be it working on making food (you do feel like you have to do something on this ship to help out, so you help Sanji sometimes), reading a book, working on something with your hands... he tries talking to you first. When you give a simple, one-word answer in an annoyed voice, he's still curious, sits down beside you, and a moment later, you find a nearly-disembodied head poking out from under your arm to get a better look, only connected by the now-stringy neck. Dear God. You're used to him by now, but that's a new one, makes you scream and drop your task.

He has difficulty getting some things, particularly if it's social. You now have to be the one to tell him no, you can't do that, that's a dumb idea to all his very straightforward solutions to complex problems that often would end disastrously if carried out, for one thing. And, of course, all the clinginess and his overwhelming presence get annoying fast too.

And if you seem upset... what's wrong? You tell him nothing, he says no, clearly something is. What's wrong? Hey, hey, answer him, why are you upset? Are you mad? Are you mad at him? Are you mad at something else? Did someone say something mean? Are you hurt? Hey, why aren't you answering? Why can't you talk about it? Huh? Oh, you look even more mad now. Why are you more mad now?

...Yeah, it's... something else. Poor darling.

Finally, one of the things that may bother you from the get-go is that, at least at first, by your perception, you think he has absolutely no concern for your safety. See, typically, yanderes who either have a lot of enemies, are wanted criminals, or are famous figures who realize you could be used as leverage against them, make sure their darling is kept well-hidden away from anyone who might bring about harm to them.

But not him. No, the world government, among plenty of others, is gonna get a really good look at you at some point, and much to your horror, by mere association, you'll find posters of your face alongside all the others pretty soon.

Not that he takes it negatively, quite the opposite. Ahaha, you got one too! Cool! Not a very high bounty, but it's a start. It'll only go up with time, so you have that to look forward to! Look, he's even in the background of the picture! Neat!

It certainly takes its toll on you and your health, you're almost certain to develop high blood pressure or worse out of sheer nervousness. But the constant sense of dread and mortal fear does actually level out with time, the longer you go on unharmed, you start to feel a bit more confident that you'll be fine and everything will work out in the end.

That is, except for all the near-death moments you do run into. That's where your perception versus his comes into play a bit. To you, you see the threats and the danger and run or hide, thinking it's all by sheer luck and timing you manage to be okay, maybe with intervention from him every now and then. But in your mind, you think he must just not care or something, after all you've come very close to taking a bullet to the head or a sword through the stomach more than once, even though you don't really do any fighting (it's all from running into the wrong people at the wrong time and what was supposed to be a peaceful gathering of supplies in a civilian area turns into conflict once he or someone else is recognized, and you're caught in the middle of it... something unfortunately common in this lifestyle as well).

What you don't see is that, for someone who normally thinks and acts in an entirely straightforward way, he now factors you into everything, and is keeping a constant eye on you to calculate your position relative to him and whatever enemies there are, and everything in the near surroundings, into each movement. It's surprisingly highly strategic for him, and yet he manages to ingrain into his thought process to a point it becomes subconscious.

Not that he doesn't try to get you out of harm's way altogether -- while he doesn't lock you away, he does try to get you to safely hide somewhere or in a safe location rather than having you out there in the heat of it all. It's just that since he's constantly by your side, he rarely can actually do so, and when he gets ambushed or attacked, you're usually right there too. But he will ensure your safety, even if it means making sacrifices in other areas, such as not obtaining something he set out to get, or losing some valuable item because it was either it or you.

But while you think you're just narrowly avoiding bullets, running with your eyes nearly squeezed shut, you don't see him stick his arm out to save several from going right through you. You don't see the guy that was about to attack you from behind that got taken out by a single kick. You don't see when he blocks this and that, saves you from this or that, everything is usually too chaotic at the moment. Once you do catch it a few times, though, you start to maybe feel a little less resentment.

General perverseness: how sexual of a person are they? What’s their drive like? How touchy do they get? Do they have any reservations about sexuality?

There are two questions you wonder about from very early on, that you will soon find both answers are yes.

Yes, he does know what sex is.

And yes... it stretches. Just like every other part of him.

Now as for the first part -- he doesn't know a lot. His knowledge is around the bare minimum. This will inevitably become an issue, but thankfully he's very willing to be taught -- he's not one of those people that gets offended when you try to tell them how to do what feels good to you.

Unfortunately, he has difficulty being very gentle as well. Not out of harshness or in a cruel way, but in an overly-eager, high-energy sort of way. He generally doesn't have to handle most things gently, and is used to using a pretty good deal of physical force with various tasks in his everyday life. This will, of course, apply to you as well, he tends to pick you up harshly, kinda throws you all around when needed.

But in general, he's a very touchy, cuddly person by nature. You have some highly touch-starved yanderes that have to get used to just being near you and gradually have to start off with soft touches and get more comfortable with time, some that are ready to hug or cuddle you but still tremble over it, some that are touchy but only in brief moments of contact... but Luffy is none of those. From the day (minute, really) he meets you he is entirely comfortable with touch, picks you up at random to carry you back in the first place even. He discovers very fast that he just... gets something out of touch. It feels nice, warm, comforting... so he clings to you. Physically.

Like. A lot. All the time. Honestly you reach a point where it doesn't even strike you nor the others as weird anymore to see you sitting down or standing or even walking with his arms looped around you. If you're sitting on the bowsprit as he tends to enjoy doing, he likes to more or less have you in a hold where your back is against his chest (kinda terrifying if you have any fear of the vast open water you could so easily fall into), and even when standing, he likes to keep a grip on you. You can even stand up and go get something off the counter or the like when you're sitting down in a room -- he won't stand up with you, but he keeps the arm wrapped around your waist and just lets it stretch across the room while you move around. You've gotten to where you barely even register it anymore. Like every other thing mentioned so far, he has no concept of shame or embarrassment about it, so he sees no reason not to do what feels nice.

Also, while it's not really an intentional form of touchiness, when he sleeps, he gets particularly cuddly, but like, in a way where he's coiling his limbs around you like some kind of constrictor snake. You have to kinda beat on his arms (or, if you're completely constricted, thrash around a bit) to get him to wake up and let you breathe.

In terms of sexuality, it matches the rest of his personhood -- high-energy, very active, overeager, rushes into things without really knowing what he's getting himself into... you get the idea. But, as said above, he does in fact actually know how it all works, which may come as a surprise to some who know him... but it is, once again, very minimal knowledge, and needs to be guided. He'll listen to you, to the best of his ability, but may occasionally get too lost in the feeling to really hear you.

It is, also, one of the many things he has no shame in. He has some, but very little, nakedness shame; if you walk in on him changing clothes or anything he's not going to really react to what you're seeing, more just tilts his head and asks if you need something. The issue with this is he has a similar presumption of your comfort level, and doesn't really see anything wrong with watching you perform activities such as changing clothes and showering and other things you would much prefer to do while not being stared at.

Likewise, he may more or less straight-up come up to you while you're with the others and more or less either verbally ask you to go back to the room with him and/or drag you along to do so. Everyone knows. And he probably knows they know, but doesn't see why he should care they do.

This also applies to groping and staring. Do not be surprised if the boy just kinda spaces out, reaches out and grabs a tiddy... and don't be surprised if he does so right in front of people once or twice, although he will at least usually make some effort to wait until you're alone. He does not make any effort to hide the fact that he's not staring at your eyes, though. Hell, his entire head tilts downward.

Also... if you clench down on him, in the pulling-out motion of the thrusting, it basically clamps down on his dick and, well, when he pulls back it stretches his dick out a bit... which, in turn, means like an extra inch or so slamming into you on the push-in movement. Then it snaps back to normal size right as the inward thrust impales you, and repeat. Ow.

How forceful are they? Do they care about your willingness?

He doesn't really recognize it as such.

Luffy is a very... iron-willed person, but also a spontaneous and eager person. Someone who can be inconsiderate, but not in a malicious way. It's not like his intentions are to cause harm, he just... doesn't think before he acts, a lot of the time, rushes into things making his decisions based on what he feels and more or less assuming it's alright or at least will turn out fine.

So it's not like he's knowingly forceful -- but rather, you make him feel good, he has all these weird urges to do stuff to you, so he's not really thinking about your reaction or feelings when he grabs your shoulders and pushes you flat against your bed... but he's not operating under the knowledge that it's a violation either. He's just excited! He's not really even consciously aware of what he's doing, he's sort of spaced out.

If you fight back, he actually does snap out of it, and actually will respect you and stop, although he's confused as to why. It's not like it'll hurt you, right?

Well, he's not sure. So, with perhaps actually the slightest hint of embarrassment for once, he goes directly to someone he thinks can tell him a lot about that sort of thing... Sanji. He knows a lot about girls, right? So he should be able to tell him... if not available, maybe he can go to Nami and Robin, or even someone else available depending on the time you join, like Vivi. They... sort of snicker and make fun of him a little bit, which just makes him sort of pouty... but are willing to give him some, ah, helpful advice. He's actually just perceptive enough to not phrase it in a way that makes it obvious he's referring to you, although it's more out of him finally feeling some normal sense of embarrassment, and not because he realizes they might put two and two together and realize what he's intended. So he phrases it as a general question of curiosity.

Which is great! Now he knows what to do! So he tells you, either coming into the room where you are and bolting over to bed at the speed of light, or picking you up by the waist and carrying you. Okay, so, now he gets it. Don't worry. He knows what to do. Hey, you're still squirming really hard, you're making it kinda hard to move around. Well, they did tell him something about you quivering or spasming or something... they said that's normal. He'll just have to hold you really still.

Huh? You're still saying stop so much... no, really, he's got it now. Trust him. Hang on, here, Nami murmured something about how it's best on her stomach... he'll flip you over, makes it better for you. You're just making noises now that your face is pressed into the pillow... well, it almost sounds like muffled words, but it's definitely not words, he can't make any of it out, so it's just moans. That's good. He thought those didn't start until after you put it in... guess that was wrong.

You may still be worried or something, but one of the people he consulted said it's normal for you to be a bit nervous and hesitant, and that he should just say nice things and comfort you, so he tries his best. But, since it feels so nice for him, and it's something you do together, he assumes that the physical feeling for him is the same for you, and it feels amazing to him.

Is part of it, deep down, wanting to believe you want it? Perhaps. Is it a subconscious way of justifying acting on the raging hormonal impulses and instincts clouding his judgement that he's not even consciously aware of? Definitely. But either way... it'll work out in the end, yeah? It's really fun, so you can do it against tomorrow and the next day, and some more after that too...

What sort of kinks or fetishes do they have, or would they fill?

Distension/Size kink

Honestly he treats it like a magic trick or something. You know how guys can kinda flex and make their dick twitch?? Well, he's figured out how to do that and make it sort of... expand. Look! Cool, right?

You're still taking sharp breaths and jolting as he says it, considering he just basically rammed the tip of his dick directly against the cervix... ugh. You have to try and explain to the best of your ability that he may be able to stretch, but you have a limited capacity, so he needs to keep that a bit under control... and he tries.

But look, you can stretch! At least a little, skin has elasticity after all. Which is why, when he's got you on your knees but sitting almost upright, leaning forward, arm wrapped around your waist and pounding into you from behind, he can see it on each thrust, distending your stomach a bit when he shoves it in. It's... really nice to look at, for some reason.

Also... you know how with gear third, he can kinda inflate things... maybe that can apply to spongy tissue if he tries and maybe... well, it would be very... filling? Anyway, just don't give him the idea.

Exhibitionism/Candaulism

It's another thing that he just thinks is cute, when you're all embarrassed, your face gets hot and you squirm around. Not to mention there's certainly a pride factor there, too, makes him feel a nice swelling feeling in his chest. And, in his mind, it fits the image of what a king of pirates would act like -- he would show off so everyone else can know how great he is and be jealous of him!

He takes direct methods as always. Convinces Nami or Robin to lend you some clothes and adjust them if needed and then throws whatever you were wearing when he abducted you away right off the side of the ship after promising to "take care of it," which you presumed meant wash them, unfortunately. So, you're probably, ah, familiar with how those two tend to dress a lot of the time... now you get to too! Note that he has no concept of body insecurity or anything like that. In his mind, since he likes it and likes looking at it, there's no issue, and you won't have any problem showing off since it looks nice.

But he is really proud of you, and can get into a little bit of that typical show-off attitude some guys have where he wants to have you by his side and be able to sort of let people see, unfortunately particularly enemies. Not that he won't make sure you're safe, but it would be really nice for some of those guys to at least get to see him with an arm around your waist all smiling to rub it in, you know?

How do they feel about pregnancy or babies? Do they want them?

A successor of sorts would be kinda cool. In a way, yes, because when he thinks about it, that makes sense doesn't it? The legendary figure that he wants to be, would logically have a successor to carry on that legacy! It just seems like the natural thing to do. Besides, Gol D. Roger had a kid, so it only makes sense to follow in that example to some degree.

But to say he likes the thought is a tricky statement, because he doesn't fully comprehend all the effort and work such a thing entails. In particular, he may struggle to realize how fragile the average child is, which is going to be a big concern. He's that father that gives everyone around him a heart attack with the way he handles a kid, but manages to always have everything work out perfectly in the end.

But in terms of his opinions, he doesn't actually seem to feel too strongly one way or another, perhaps surprisingly. When you pose the question, you get the sense that he isn't really thinking much about it, just sort of smiles at the thought of a cool protege and accepts it as a positive without taking many details into account.

What kind of (nsfw) punishments would they use?

Generally, he's not the type to think through such a thing, or even intend anything as a "punishment" per se. It's more like, if he gets particularly heated in his emotions, such as being upset or angry over something, he can lose a little bit of his restraint on his own strength. His grip is tighter and tighter, his movements are harsher and faster and more brutal. But overall, he's not going to do something really torturous of painful to you. If anything, he's more likely to just break his usual characteristic of lacking restrictiveness and may actually lock you inside the room for a while... all while getting to rail you more every day, of course.

What body parts of their darling do they like the most?

Probably the waist and hips. Luffy is... grabby. He likes to have a firm grip on you a lot of the time, likes to keep his hands somewhere on your person. He's always dragging you from place to place and grabbing onto you (really, your struggling helps, you end up accidentally looping his arm around you a couple times over...). And the waist is the perfect place to grab you by! Helps him keep a nice firm grip.

#yandere one piece

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0rchard · 3 years

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Minor do not interact

🍎 𝓟𝓪𝓲𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓰: Yamaguchi x f!reader

🍏 𝓦𝓪𝓻𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰: stepcest, femdom, masturbation, footjob, degradation/humiliation(if you squints)

🍎 𝓐/𝓝: So 👉👈 It's my first time writing dark content/smut scenario i only do hcs usually, it's also my first time writing for the haikyuu fandom. And I do that for my first hq crush 🥺 Anyways! This scenario is a part of the hqcest collab made by the amazing @dilfsuna ! Thank you Mabel to let your 😌💅 anon take part of it!

Yamaguchi didn’t know when everything went that wrong. Was it when he started to have a wet dream about you? Or maybe when he started to jerk off at the thought of you? Or has everything always been wrong since the first time you were introduced as his step-sister?

Probably all of the above… And things surely took another turn when both of you had to live together once you got into college, financially not able to pay for two different flats.

It was probably at that moment that everything started. He thought you would never notice how he always insisted on doing the laundry. He thought you would never notice how at least one of your panties was missing and magically was back again the next laundry. He thought you would never notice how he was looking at you when you bent in front of him to grab something. He thought you would never notice how painfully hard it makes him. He thought you would never notice how he quickly excused himself to his room. He thought you would never hear his voice moaning your name as the moon was rising high in the sky.

He thought he could do abstraction of his feelings because it was wrong. You were his step-sister and he shouldn’t feel like that toward you. And yet, was knowing that it was wrong preventing him to do what he was about to do? No, it didn’t.

Your flat was silent, only the light buzzing noise of the fridge could be heard in the living room, as he crossed it to go into your room, his heart beating fast, so fast that it was almost painful. Each beat was making his body shake a bit more as his trembling hands quietly turned the door handle of your room. You were out, needing to grab something at the grocery store near your flat.

He knows he didn’t have a lot of time, that it was risqué, that he had to be quick. But he couldn’t help it. He needed to know if they were there. The black panties you’ve been chilling in yesterday, only wearing them and a loose shirt. They were his favorite ones, he thought they were the ones sublimating the curves of your ass the most. So when he noticed they weren’t in the basket laundry today, he was pretty sure that you left them somewhere in your room. It's not his fault if you left them there… As a good step-brother in charge of the laundry, he should be sure that no dirty clothes should be left behind right?

Even he knew it was just because he wanted to smell it. To smell you. To get off at your scent again and again…

His heart stopped to beat ofr a moment as he op, noticing them innocentlyheart stopped for a second as he opened your door, spotting the precious panties, standing there, on the ground, innocently.

He could already feel his cock twitch into his pants, as he could smell your sweet scent surrounding the room. He knows he doesn't have a lot of time, that he should be quick, just taking the panties and leaving would be the less risqué thing to do, but something about getting off in your room sent shivers of excitement down his spine. It's not like he would last long anyway, he never did when he got off with your panties.

He brought the dirty panty to his face as he took a deep breath in, his nose against where your core was supposed to be, freeing his hard cock from his sweatpants.

"F-fuck… You smell so good…" a small whine escaped his lips as he sat down on the ground, one hand brushing against his cock, but not totally stroking himself yet.

He shyly tugs out his tongue to give a quick lap to the crotch of your underwear, hoping it could give him a light idea about how divine his step-sister was tasting like.

Another whine left his lips as he felt the sweet taste spreading in his mouth.

"So good… you taste so good…"

He was now sucking on it without a shame, high-pitched noise of pleasure leaving his mouth, redness of his cheeks covering a bit his freckle. He was already panting, his eyes closed as he hoped he was licking your wet pussy instead.

His cock twitched, the tip as red as his cheeks, asking for more attention.

One hand stroking his dick, the other playing with his nipple, as the panties were stuffed in his mouth, his tongue licking its crotch, eyes closed, he could already feel his end coming.

He was moaning again and again, and if it wasn't for the piece of clothing in his mouth preventing him to talk, he would probably moan obscene things like "Please, let me taste you", "I beg you sis' you smell so good", "I'm sure your wet pussy taste even better..." or even worst "I love you so much, sis…"

His hand was stroking him faster, without any regular rhythm, as continued to whine. He pinched his nipple, making himself arch his back a bit more and his legs shook under the overwhelming pleasure. Your panties were now soaked in his drool, letting some escape, rolling down his chin.

He was so lost in pleasure, so lost in his own fantasy, imagining that he wasn't sucking your panties but that you were sat on his face instead like he always dreamt about.

He wanted to feel your thighs squeezing his head between them. He wanted to make his hands run on them, feel your soft skin. He would kiss them, again and again, leaving small marks on them if you allowed him to do so. And as he would come closer and closer to your crotch, he would be able to see how wet you already are, how wet his affection made you go. He would be a bit hesitant at first, giving quick laps on your panties to hear you moan, before putting them aside and finally… finally tasting you…

Maybe if he wasn't that lost into his mind, he would have heard the door of your flat open. And maybe he would have also heard your footsteps going toward your room. He would probably have heard too that you shouted that you had forgotten your wallet in your room. But he didn't.

Neither did he hear the door of your room open… And he barely registered your voice calling his name.

"Tadashi? What are you-"

He froze up, his eyes widened, looking at you terrorized. What were you going to do? How would you react to see your step-brother jerking in your room, your dirty panty stuffed in his mouth?

And yet, he couldn't explain why but the shame, the humiliation provoked by being caught by you doing something so dirty, so forbidden… It excited him, it was such a delight that he almost came from that only, or maybe that was because of the sight of your bare thighs that he just fantasmed about.

"I-i could explain!" he quickly said, taking off the panty from his mouth, whipping his drool away, trying to hide his hard cock the best he could.

What could he explain exactly? How much did you turn him on? How perverted he was? How the scent of your dirty panties sent him to heaven? That he always dreamed to be between your thighs to taste his sweet sister? That he always wanted to suck on your nipples? That he always hoped to one day fuck you slowly on the couch, to prove to you how much he actually cared about you? To prove to you how much he loved you? How did he want to kiss you, to hug you, to be there for you in another way than your step-brother?

He gulped as you silently walked toward him, not saying a word, nor showing any emotion. You were thinking he was a dirty pervert, he was sure about that. He was also sure you will tell everything to your parents and that he would be disinherited, that you will expose him on every social media, telling everyone how dirty he was… He was screwed. His whole life was screwed.

He was surely not excepting the sudden pressure of your bare feet on his cock, which made him moan in a loud way.

"So like that you jerk off by using your step-sister panties? You're such a naughty boy Ta-da-shi~"

His eyes widened, as he could feel excitement running in his blood. The way you were looking at him… The way your eyes were clouded by the same lust than him… It made his cock twitch under your feet.

"I said I could explain I- Ah!"

He could feel your foot putting more pressure on his cock as a pitiful and ridiculously loud whine left his lips.

"Shhh~ Keep quiet Tadashi, the walls are thin, you wouldn't want the neighbor to hear you, or… would you?"

He shook his head from right to left, unable to say a word that would turn into a moan. He was heavily panting, his heart pounding in his chest. Never in the best scenarios, he made by his imagination did such a thing happen… And deep down he wished for that to not be another of his wet dreams about you.

“Look at you Tadashi~ All worked up from your sister's dirty panties scent~” Another loud whine escaped from him. He already felt so pitiful, so horrible to act like that. It wasn't good, it was not okay to feel like that… They were step-sister and brother, what was wrong with him? He wishes he could go back in time to prevent himself from feeling like that but… Now that it was happening… He couldn't deny how good it felt. How much he loved that. How much he loved her.

"You're a loud one huh? It's not like it really surprises me, you're always so noisy when you get off in your room… Moaning my name~" you teased him as your feet came up and down on his dick, already leaking in precum

He felt shame burn his chest. So you know how he felt since the beginning? You were acting like that on purpose, knowing how it affected him?

"What a shame, I would love to hear you moan my name again and again as you rut against my feet, but I can't take the risk for the neighbors to know what's going between us, right Tadashi?"

He nodded again, as he opened his mouth when you presented to him the panties that were already stuffed in his mouth some minutes earlier.

"You're such a good boy Tadashi~ Knowing how to act to please me…"

Was it the way his name sounded awfully sexy when you were the one saying it or the way you called him a good boy that made him arch his back a bit more and bucking his hips for more friction?

He could feel his arousal already building up in his stomach, and his cheeks turning into a darker shade of red as muffled whine escaped him again and again.

"That's it Tadashi, be a little good boy for your sister" you whispered at the ear, nibbling on the lobe of his ear. He bucked his hips, even more, as his moan became a bit louder, but overall, needier.

He was looking at you with so much love… so much adoration… so much lust… it was such a beautiful face, the same as you ever imagined when hearing him reaching his end and moaning your name out loud in his room.

"You want to cum for your sister Tadashi?~"

He nodded quickly, his heart beating faster and faster, sweat starting to pearl on his freckled skin.

"Then cum for your sister, pretty boy~" you whispered before softly kissing his cheek, lifting his face with your hand, to be sure to not miss anything about the beautiful expression you could see on his face.

His back arched, head thrown back, as his whole body was shaken by a powerful orgasm, his loud moaning that even the wet piece of clothes in his mouth couldn’t stop echoing in the room, while the white loads of his cums were staining both his stomach and your feet.

With a devilish smile, you looked down at him again, whipping out the cum of your feet on his pants, down his ankles, as if it was nothing more than a doormat.

Picking up your wallet on your nightstand, you looked at him again. He was a mess, panting, legs spread, wide open, as his cum was slowly dripping down his belly.

“Since I got what I’ve forgotten home, I can finally go to the grocery store now. You better be rock hard again when I will be back, understand Tadashi? I’m sure you wouldn’t lose an occasion to feel your dear sister’s pussy around your cock just because you didn’t behave well, right?”

He eagerly nodded as he gulped.

"You're such a good boy Tadashi…" you softly kissed him on the lips, after taking out the "gag" out of his mouth, vaguely able to taste yourself, before finally leaving the room.

The panties you were wearing were soaked in your excitement… Maybe that you should lend it to him as a reward tonight? He surely would be the happiest.

#hqcest #🍏.rotten apple #tw: stepcest #tw humiliation #tw degradation #haikyuu smut #hq smut #hq yamaguchi #yamaguchi smut #yamaguchi tadashi #yamaguchi x reader

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bespokeredmayne · 2 years

Text

…in which Eddie Redmayne spills to his fan interviewers about:

•His growing bonds with Fantastic Beasts cast members, old and new

•His deep dive into studying physical comedy at a legendary Paris school before tackling Cabaret

•Exactly how he served not just as the star but as “a silent producer” on Cabaret AND

•The real origin story of the manticore dance, involving his children’s bath time.

When the world was put on hold by COVID for two years, Eddie Redmayne threw himself into being a father and husband — but now his career is back in a flurry of high-profile projects drawing intense media scrutiny.

Thanks to his always-thoughtful and masterful team, our group of five fan interviewers was able to get him to sit still while he was in New York for some hit-and-run promotion. We had another a lovely, lively phone chat about the third Fantastic Beasts adventure — Secrets of Dumbledore — and his return to the London stage for four months as The Emcee in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. (Just three days later, he would pick up the Best Actor in a Musical trophy at the Olivier Awards in London, and the production would earn seven awards altogether.)

We didn’t even venture into questions about The Good Nurse, which Netflix has announced it will release sometime this year. Eddie plays a real-life serial killer, teamed with freshly minted Oscar winner Jessica Chastain. But he did bring it up himself in an enthusiastic way that bodes well for his portrayal.

As always, Eddie was warm and open with his interviewers — who are excited to share the answers to the questions we think Eddie’s fans want to know.

IVONNE: The first Fantastic Beasts movie came out in 2016. I imagine one of the perks of being part of this franchise as an actor is being able to really delve into Newt's world and his emotional journey throughout different movies. I wonder if there's been anything about Newt that has surprised you in this new chapter? Things you didn’t initially expect from him when you first started with the character or thought you had figured out?

EDDIE: That’s a brilliant question. What I liked about him in this movie was the two fraternal relationships — one with Dumbledore and one with Callum’s character, Theseus. There’s this kind of fraternal thing, this leveling up, I suppose, of this guy who is used to be talked down to and dismissed and given a moment.

But the thing I love most actually is that little scene with Dumbledore, in which Newt sees in Dumbledore his own vulnerability. He’s the guy who is normally out giving counsel to the world and being kind of father to the world, and that moment when Newt goes, “We all make mistakes and you can try and make things better, and that process of trying is the important thing.”

That breath of Newt having confidence to identify his own character in other people, or his own thoughts in other people rather than just keeping to himself, was the big progression — however small it may seem — for me.

CHARLOTTE: I’m fascinated by these two recent projects of yours, Cabaret and Secrets of Dumbledore. They are both hugely entertaining, and at the same time they manage to be quite thought-provoking and relevant to our world. How important is each of those elements to today’s audiences, in your view — On one hand escapism, and on the other, delivering a serious message through a cautionary tale?

EDDIE: I suppose that’s what I like from art. I love to be seduced, I love to be enthralled, I love to be repelled, and I love to be entertained. But what makes things have a lasting effect is, of course, that piquing of something that you interrogate after having seen the thing.

That is so rife in Cabaret and one of the reasons it’s lasted as a sort of seminal piece for so many years. There are elements in the Fantastic Beasts world — and of course it’s the magic and the whimsy and getting to delve back into this other world of pure escapism — but there are messages there and there are parallels being drawn that will hopefully make you interrogate things afterwards.

MARCI: What for you was the most challenging part of making this film and what part did you enjoy the most?

EDDIE: COVID was the most challenging thing. I did a day of pre-shooting on a Friday, and it was a moment down in Newt’s case that actually was cut from the film, and while I was meant to start shooting proper on a Monday, I got a call on Sunday night saying, ‘This thing called COVID is causing us to stop.’ And it was four months or so until we started again.

And the world had sort of changed, and coming back to the film set — first, we felt so lucky to be going back to work; it also felt complicated because Hannah was at home having to look after the little ones. I’d been helping to homeschool Iris, and suddenly I was allowed to go back to work and my life — although the process was completely different, as far as protocols and all the specifics of a COVID film set — I was able to go back to work. Whereas most of the world, and for Hannah, it was still having to look after two very young children.

As far as the making of the film itself, they’re such big things. It’s really in David and Jo and Steve’s imagination, and we just come and deliver what we can and bring as much joy and life and vibrancy to it. I really enjoyed the silly dancing bit. It’s not often that, as you guys know, I get into something that’s comedic — so it’s fun. There’s a kind of physical comedy element to it that I really enjoy.

CHARLOTTE: That’s great. That plays perfectly into Ali’s first question.

ALI: During your time portraying Newt, you have been able to add some comedy to your portrayal. In the first film, most memorably, you did the mating ritual with the erumpent, and now we’re seeing the manticore dance. You’ve described these as a kind of ‘ritual humiliation,’ but they’re giving you quite a reputation for physical comedy. How hard is that for you, as an actor, to do? What kind of pressure does it put on you when you see that kind of bit in the script?

EDDIE: All I see when I see that bit — I say it’s humiliating, and of course it’s also deeply joyful. I love try to get into things that are outside my comfort zone, and particularly physicality has always been an interest. I’ve always enjoyed making it a part of my process.

After Fantastic Beasts and before Cabaret, I went to this school, [Ecole Jacques] LeCoq, in Paris — this very famous physical theater school — and I went and did a workshop there for a couple of weeks. It’s a school I’d always heard about, always wanted to go to, and not specifically in preparation for anything in Cabaret — it was more about just feeling slightly in a rut, and I felt re-inspired by The Good Nurse, and I wanted to go and just fill my mind and push my myself in different directions and fill my mind with other stimulants.

I enjoyed it SO much, and it really sort of re-affirmed that kind of clowning, physical element of performance is something that I just get off on. I never went to drama school, and so this felt like a moment to go and just throw myself and watch other actors from all over the world, all different generations, trying things and failing at things.

We were all trying and failing — and pushing myself outside my comfort zone so that when I came to the rehearsal room for Cabaret I felt completely free to try whatever.

CHARLOTTE: What a great insight into your performance in Cabaret, the preparation — that’s fascinating. Erina, I’ve lost track of what time it is there (New Zealand), but you can tell Eddie and ask your first question.

ERINA: You really don’t want to know what time it is! (Laughter)

EDDIE: Awww, what time actually is it? Is it something like 4 in the morning?

ERINA: It’s 2:45 a.m. on Friday.

EDDIE: Oh, my God. You’re amazing, you’re amazing.

ERINA: I was worried my alarm wasn’t going to go off, but I’m here, so we’re good, we’re good.

EDDIE: If it’s any consolation, I’m about to be closer to your time zone. I’m about to go to Japan, so if we’d saved this for a few days, we could have been in a similar time zone.

ERINA: So my question is about Dumbledore. Which Dumbledore would you rather hang out with, the young version from Fantastic Beasts or the kooky older one? And why?

EDDIE: Hahaha. I really love Jude Law. When he came onto these films it was such a treat for me because he’d been an old pal. I hadn’t known him that well but socially, and sometimes you click with actors as far as what your process is, not just on set but also kind of in life — but he brings kind of his full-bodied wonderfulness to set. I love him.

We did a lot of questions about what it was about Dumbledore and who Dumbledore is, and Jude just has that kind of gentle, condescending-like wisdom, extraordinary talent, and this kind of slight twinkle in his eye, a funny man.

Certainly in this film, there’s a bond between Newt and Dumbledore growing that’s unspoken, but there’s a trust. I love that. I don’t know how the elder Dumbledore would be towards Newt, but maybe one day when we’ve both gotten even grayer, there will be a sort of Dumbledore moment in Dorset or where Newt’s meant to end up…

IVONNE: I’m going to ask the question that pretty much everyone is asking: How was working with Mads?

EDDIE: Mads was pretty extraordinary. He arrived with so little prep, and he’s genuinely one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. He has an inherent relaxed-ness to him, but he’s also sensationally talented and also really comfortable in his skin.

Tobias Lindholm, who directed The Good Nurse, had written Another Round, a film which Mads had done, and adored Mads. So we had some friends in common, and he was just magnificent from the word ‘go.’

It was all in his eyes, and you just felt this genuinely terrifying figure emerge. What I loved also, going back to the physical element, is that Mads was a dancer, and so watching him do some of the duels with Jude, and the subtle physicality of the thing, was extraordinary.

MARCI: I really love the relationship between Jacob and Newt — the chemistry plays so well together. How does Jacob receiving a wand and experiencing what it’s like to have magical powers impact that relationship in this film and potentially in the future?

EDDIE: I have no idea, Marci. It’s interesting, because in some ways I’ve loved the new relationships that have developed in these movies, and I adore Jessica Williams, who brings such a new vibrancy to the films.

But I also have a sense of sadness that on the first movie it was Katherine and Dan and Ali and I, and we got to interact a lot. And what’s strange about the movies now is that I sort of barely get to see any of those guys.

When Jacob arrives on the train and Newt sort of — it wasn’t in the script, but I instantly wanted to give him a hug, because that’s uncomfortable for Newt, but at the same point, there is such love there between those two characters, and it’s sort of instinctive. Even though Newt isn’t particularly comfortable with physical interaction, there’s such joy there.

Dan is a true improvisational genius, and across all of these films, some of the funniest moments have been his improvisations on set that end up in the movies. It’s a real delight to watch. Everything is 100 percent real coming out of his mouth, and I think when they saw in the first movie that Dan had that extraordinary facility, they sort of — certainly in this movie, less of course in Grindelwald — but they realized that allowing him to riff is part of the joy. So it’s such fun getting to work with him.

CHARLOTTE: We’re going to veer off into Cabaret a little bit. Seeing you in Cabaret — more than once — and understanding how instrumental you were in bringing it to life in such a remarkable way really showed the depth of your talent. It seemed from what your colleagues say and by your own descriptions that you almost functioned as a producer on this, and I wonder if the experience is encouraging you to do more behind-the-scenes work on stage and film, including maybe directing?

EDDIE: I was a producer on Cabaret — like a silent producer, if that makes sense. I had quite a lot of input into the — obviously Jessie and I. The guy who produced, who created the venue when I did it at the Edinburgh Festival was the guy who came to me years ago, and then when I was thinking about doing this, I was thinking about Jessie, that instantly rang true.

So we were allowed to be, Jessie and I, at the forefront of those creative choices. Now once Rebecca (Frecknall, the director) came on, it was entirely her show. But as far as the way it was marketed, the way it was put out into the world, the secrecy of the thing — I kept wanting it to be something that if we had faith in what we were doing and if it became where you couldn’t photograph everything, that we wouldn’t release every image with hundreds of videos going out into the world to begin with —something that you had to come and see it live.

These were all sort of collaborative ideas, and I’ve always worked like that, whether it was on The Theory of Everything or the smaller films. I’ve always loved that ‘company’ way of working and that input.

Now with something like Fantastic Beasts, you just don’t have that. The productions are so grand and expansive that there are so many voices there. But it is something I love.

I love creating things as a team. I love having a voice beyond purely the performance. Because often — I suppose it’s because being an actor, you lack so much control, particularly on film. You know, you create this thing in your head, you give this performance, and then it’s taken totally out of your hands, edited by other people, and it tends never to resemble what was in your head.

Now of course that’s the brilliance of it because the alchemy is other people’s interpretation. But sometimes you want to at least have your voice heard. And so producing in the vaguest sense of the word — having more input than just your performance — has always been quite important to me.

As far as directing is concerned, I think I would love to direct a film one day. But directing is so all-consuming for so many years. It’s got to be a piece of material that for me, OK, I’ll give up four years of my life for something that could well fail, but this story has to be told, and I feel like I have the capability to tell it. I’m not quite there yet.

CHARLOTTE: What a great answer. That was so full of insight.

ALI: What caused you to make the decision to return to the stage, and and what was it about playing Emcee that made this particular role the right one?

EDDIE: I first did Cabaret when I was 15, in a school production [Note: at Eton College], and it’s been a bit confused in the press — I did a student production at the Edinburgh Festival when I was 19. When I did it when I was 15, it was a tiny little thing, but I look back on it as a time before I had any technique or self-scrutiny. And there was something instinctive in that part — it was purely instinctive, and I enjoyed it so much.

I remember it was my parents, who have always been super supportive but weren’t from this world at all, they always say that was the moment that they thought that I could be an actor. I had in my head that has always been something tempered, restricted — there was instinct related to this part — and so when I was asked if I would consider doing it, that had always been a dream, that had been a childhood dream, the idea of getting to do it out on the West End was a dream.

I said you’d be mad not to try and do it, and then I thought of Jessie. This is the version of Sally Bowles — I felt like she would be such an extraordinary actor and such an extraordinary singer, and has such total immersion and freedom. I was like, this is a reason to do it.

There was a moment a few weeks into rehearsal when I was like, how dare I do this? What was I thinking? Just because you were in a position where you’ve done some movies so you could get something financed — what were you thinking, playing this seminal iconic role — that just because you felt like you were OK when you were 15?

And I’ll never forget, there’s a wonderful member of the cast called Emily (Benjamin) and I was having a bit of a bout of insecurity, and she said, ‘You were cast for a reason.’ And I said, ‘No, Emily, that’s not true — I cast myself.” (Laughs)

The fact, honestly, that it went well — I couldn’t imagine the physical elements of doing Cabaret, how absolutely exhausting it was. The idea that if it had gotten horrendously reviewed, if no one had come to see it, the idea of doing that day-in-day-out, I can’t even imagine.

But that is the way I make decisions in the theatre: I go for the most pessimistic. I’m like OK: So the company — everyone hates each other. The rehearsals are a nightmare. No one comes to see it. The reviews are a disaster. Is there enough in this material to sustain me for four months?

Cabaret is one of the very few pieces in which that is a no-brainer. Getting to sing those songs and interact with an audience — even if there are only three people in the audience — that was a big ‘yes’ for me. So it was about fulfilling childhood dreams. That was a really long and ranty answer…

ERINA: Since you’ve just been on stage again, and since there’s now a precedent for Harry Potter coming to the stage — do you see any potential for any kind of stage version of Newt Scamander’s story?

EDDIE: Wow. I think fundamentally Newt doesn’t project much, does he? I mean as far as his literal vocal [projection] — other than when he’s doing that scream at the beginning of the erumpent scene. I just worry that no one would be able to hear him. People struggle to hear Newt on film, let alone on stage. There’d have to be some very good miking.

But I feel like there’s perhaps a potential musical version out there. He’s got a lot of moves that he’s accrued over the years.

It does make me laugh — where does the manticore dance come from? My kids, when they have a bath, I stand outside the bathroom door and I just walk back-and-forth across the door doing weird dances because there’s nothing quite like a 3- and a 4-year-old cackle — like a proper belly laugh.

There’d be that ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ thing, and that’s basically where the manticore dance came from. That’s the one they found actually the funniest.

When it came to doing ‘Willkommen’ in Cabaret, in those sort of opening moments, there was even a little bit of manticore dance that made it into there. I’m sort of restricted by my physical inabilities, so I feel I put a bit of Fantastic Beasts into Cabaret. I’m not sure there’s a fully fledged theater version of it.

CHARLOTTE: I definitely saw the similarities there in a couple of those moves.

EDDIE: I’ve got a very limited repertoire.

CHARLOTTE: But it’s growing, though — it’s growing. Thank you so very much for doing this. We can’t tell you how grateful we are. Good luck at the Oliviers! And we look forward to going to the dark side with The Good Nurse and chatting with you again.

EDDIE: And thank you guys for everything, for being so supportive. When you came to see Cabaret, I had to be quite monastic while I was doing Cabaret. I’ve never done that — I had to go home every night and try behaving like an athlete, but it meant the world that you guys came, so thank you.

THE INTERVIEWERS:

Ivonne Jofre, originally from Catalonia, is now a budding filmmaker who divides her time among London, Spain and New York — where she has been accepted for a master’s program in cinema studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She founded the first (and most popular) online fan site, Eddie Redmayne Net, in 2008 when she first met Eddie after seeing him on stage, and her @eddieronline account is the largest on Twitter, with more than 67,000 followers.

Charlotte Aguilar from the U.S., is an award-winning writer-editor-producer who has managed BespokeRedmayne accounts on Tumblr, Twitter + Instagram for nine years — assisted by granddaughter Maria Suarez. They have met Eddie in New York and London and coordinate an annual fan fundraiser for his birthday to support the Motor Neurone Disease Association of the UK, of which he is a patron.

Allison “Ali” Sherman from the U.S., has operated Eddie Redmayne Web/www.eddieredmayne.net for nine years years, with up to a half-million views annually.

Marci Wright from the U.S., is creator of TheRedmayneFiles accounts on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. As the single mother of a young adult son on the autism spectrum, she is particularly supportive of Eddie’s sensitive portrayals in The Yellow Handkerchief and the Fantastic Beasts films.

Erina Ellis, a television producer in New Zealand, manages the @AmazingEddieRedmayne account — the largest of its kind on Instagram, with 98,500 followers.

#eddie redmayne #fan interview 2022 #Fantastic beasts the secrets of dumbledore #cabaret at the Kit Kat club #warner bros #Ecole Jacques Lecoq #manticore dance

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misssophiachase · 4 years

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Happy Together

So, I’ve been writing a kind of 27 Dresses fusion but it deserves to be in multiple parts, hope you like it so far : ) Tagging all the lovelies who championed this Klaroline mix @sekretny13 @klarolineagainnaturally @realynn8 and so sorry for the delay.

Synopsis: She's a wedding planner and heiress, he's a journalist who thinks she's the perfect subject for his story. But both of them are hiding from the truth and each other in the process.

“How refreshing! A man who doesn't believe in marriage.”

“I'm just trying to point out the hypocrisy of the spectacle.”

“Oh! That's so noble of you. Do you also go around telling small children that Santa Claus doesn't exist? 'Cause someone needs to blow that shit wide open.”

“A-ha! So you admit that belief in marriage is kind of like believing in Santa Claus!”

“You are unbelievable.”

“Last time I checked you were the one who let it slip that Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist and I’m just wondering whether you truly are the Grinch in disguise.”

“Oh, puh-lease, I was clearly provoked and distracted by my current duties.”

Caroline was playing the dual role of bridesmaid and wedding planner at the Plaza Hotel for her former college roommate. Roles she knew extremely well and had too many times to count and had embraced over the past few years. Yes, she didn’t need the money, but it was something she truly loved to do.

Maybe because she'd been doing it since she could walk. Caroline would dress up the family cat as the groom and she'd walk down the makeshift aisle in her mother's best, lace tablecloth while humming the bridal theme at the top of her voice.

“And clearly while being provoked you also managed to multitask so well,” he joked, passing her the flowers that had found its way to him courtesy of multiple, jilted bridesmaids during the bouquet toss. “I don’t much care for lilies and, not going to lie, I’m disappointed you didn’t go in for the catch yourself. I really took you for the competitive type, Forbes.”

“You clearly have too many opinions for your own good,” she shot back, snatching it from his grasp but not missing how good his skin felt against hers in the process.

Bastard.

Those rogue dimples were also proving to be a burgeoning problem.

“If I’d known you were going to be such a smart ass, I would have uninvited you or at least insisted you be muzzled or tied to the table.”

“You gave me the chicken option, what did you expect?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the chicken.” He gave her a look which said there clearly was a problem with it. “The food budget wasn’t given the priority it deserved but I can only control so much. Okay, fine, it’s the least you deserved. You are so not the guy who writes those beautiful wedding announcements in the Post. Obviously you have a romantic ghostwriter hiding in the wings somewhere.”

“Why can’t you believe that I wrote those stories?”

“Well, for starters that sloppily tied bowtie at a formal event or the fact you don’t believe in love or marriage,” she snorted. “And this field trip to supposedly document my life experiences is just a public relations exercise, nothing else.”

“Public relations exercise? I do work in the media so those things go hand in hand. Anyway, last time I checked the Forbes heiress signed off on this project and was more than happy to be profiled and share her personal experiences.”

Caroline hated that misconceived title with a passion.

Heiress.

Sure, she was incredibly wealthy but she was also an ambitious, hard worker but nobody seemed to care about that part. It was something she felt devalued her existence and Caroline had done all that she could to distance herself from the gossip.

“Not exactly,” she shot back, knowing that much was true. She was going to kill Katherine for saddling her with Klaus Mikaelson in what was probably a weird and misguided matchmaking attempt knowing her evil tendencies. “But, even so, I thought the guy in question wouldn’t bitch and moan about poultry options.”

“Says the girl who entertains fairytales?”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Caroline replied bitterly. “But clearly I should have assigned you the vegan option in hindsight.”

“Tofu is my best friend, so you’re kind of stuck with me.” She looked at him dubiously, clearly not convinced. “And as much as I love the lilac tonight, I’m looking forward to your next ensemble.”

“How very male of you...”

“How very stereotypical of you,” he growled in response, his crimson lips twitching in annoyance. “That's not what I meant. You have no idea how many of our readers want to know the hottest bridesmaid colours for fall.”

“Spare me.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no comment.’ Whether you like it or not, your publicist has given me all-access for the next month in the lead up to the Fell/Salvatore wedding in the Hamptons, so I’ll see you real soon, love.”

“I have a name,” she shot back, her anger no doubt leaving a trail in her wake as she stalked away.

“So, Caroline, do you think I’m going to find my true love for catching the bouquet?” Caroline knew he was smirking and she didn't like it one bit.

“I think you’ll struggle finding anyone to love you. Period.”

“So, I assume that’s a no to being your plus one?” Caroline didn’t bother to respond, just returned to her wedding duties without a backward glance.

The Fell/Salvatore Wedding Pre Rehearsal , Bridgehampton, two weeks later

“How could you do this to me?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Katherine shared, swiping a piece of tasting cake and taking a bite. “Last time I checked given the devastatingly beautiful calligraphy on the invite Meredith Fell and Stefan Salvatore are soon to be joined in wedded bliss at this very site and I vote for the red velvet option.”

“How incestous,” she bit back, thinking about her ex-boyfriend being the groom-to-be and her the bridesmaid and wedding planner at his nuptials. Yes, she’d probably agreed to doing it so as to pretend that she didn’t really care he'd moved on and she was still just the same. “Who decided I needed a publicist anyway?"

"You did when Page Six was banging down your door three years ago about what you were wearing to the Met Gala and whether it was true that you drunkenly hooked up with John Mayer."

"It was once," she argued. "Although, just because you call yourself my publicist doesn’t mean that…”

“You agreed to the story, said it would help boost your social media following,” she argued but her subsequent and remorseful expression gave her away. “Fine, I might have overreached but given your already impressive reputation, it can’t hurt.”

“And you also never told me that the reporter in question was so…”

“Gorgeous?”

“Arrogant and presumptuous,” Caroline offered quickly. “He’s incredibly opinionated and nosy.”

“He’s a reporter, that’s what they do, Care.”

“Well, I don’t appreciate it,” she scoffed. “Any chance you can send him on his way? As far as I can tell he’s not the reporter he purports to be anyway.”

“He’s so endearingly persistent though…”

“That I am,” a familiar but annoying voice interrupted. “And our readers are so desperate to know about the bomboniere.”

“Wow, you actually know what that means?”

“I can talk about wedding details all day, love,” he chuckled. “Most people stupidly persevere with the sugarcoated almonds but more modern brides…”

“Just stop,” she interrupted, hand extended in protest. “I don’t need you to tell me how to plan a wedding, Mikaelson.”

“But it would be remiss not to mention that the readers want to know what the bridesmaids will be wearing. The hot tip is Vera Wang in Tiffany coloured blue. Oh, is that red velvet cake?"

“It's to die for," Katherine replied knowingly.

"Get rid of him,” she muttered, through gritted teeth and pleading with Katherine. “I can only take so much contrived sarcasm.”

“So, that’s a no on the Vera Wang then?”

“That’s a hell no to everything,” she hissed. “In fact, if I don’t see you again it will be too soon.”

“She’s jealous I caught the bouquet, right?” Caroline didn’t need to turn around to know that he was smirking. “It’s fine, we can catch up at the bridal table given we’ll be seated together.”

Caroline silently cursed her impending doom, wondering why he was persevering and she was doing the very same thing. Maybe they had more in common than she first thought, but Caroline would never admit that. She had far too many duties to fulfil and no arrogant reporter was going to ruin this next two weeks.

Or at least she thought.Or at least she thought.Part 1 on AO3 HERE

#happy together #27 dresses fusion #klaroline #klaroline fanfiction #misssophiachase #call me maybe

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tiny-ts · 3 years

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Development Workshop Reflection

In this work shop we were working on and looking at development and developing our skills with using different mediums and concepts. We were asked to challenge ourselves, choose mediums we aren't good at or as confident in - I choose paint because I really struggle with painting and find it difficult, I have a lack of control and precision and it's frustrating to me.

In this workshop we were given a lot of freedom with what we could and what materials we could use. The way I saw it was we were working of very little instructions and vast choice of what we could create and produce and this left me feeling very overwhelmed and lost at first. Even after I narrowed down what I wanted to use for mediums and material I still didn't know what I wanted to create for outcomes and the concept of my idea for the series of paintings I would be creating.

After thinking at previous pieces I've created so far in this project I decided on LGBTQ+ and relationships as a topic because in media a lot of the time the representation is there but minimal, as I've said before it feels like characters are placed there to check a box and nothing else. It's important to me that I'm able to give representation Queer representation through my art because that's what would've wanted to see more of and I'm lucky to see a lot more of now.

So my final idea and concept was to create a series of A5 paintings, to work with precision in painting, themed around LGBTQ+ relationships and relationships as a whole.

This was the first piece I created and it actually works best as a stand alone piece compared to the other, which can be grouped together as a collection. I added texture to the ocean because, I wanted to one differentiate it as well as give the sea harsh waves - the way I achieved this was using a tissue, dapping and twisting to create an interesting texture. Using pastel chalks to give the sunset a more vibrant fiery appearance to really achieve the beautiful colours of sunset.

I used layering different to how Gary Humes does in the way that I used different mediums for layering whereas Humes used different colours and it creates a completely different effect because you overlapping and interfering with a piece with other mediums. Although the way I used layering is different it's still as effective in different ways because it allows for me to use ink to create these dragged ink patterns on the boardwalk for example.

I didn't and still don't like this outcome because it feels so empty and in some cases lifeless and it's because there isn't enough going on - there is such a thing as too simple and this is it. Even though I added pastel chalks to surround and highlight the rings it didn't work because it didn't add anything, it didn't make the piece exciting or give a different emotional response. You can even see from my minimal notes around my sketchbook that there really isn't much to talk about in the piece either, there's nothing to discuss, it doesn't provoke thoughts or conversation because it doesn't have a purpose. Although it does make more sense with the other two pieces below, it still doesn't add or bring anything to the table.

Side Note:

I did play around with textures for a bit of fun on the edges of this card just to see how they would look, I was using the pattern on the tissue as a print and it worked and could be something to think about using in a college in the future.

On the plus side I did learn how to mix paint to make a colour that resembles gold.

These two are both pieces I don't like the outcome of the one on the left because I added detail as a layer with ink and I think it ruined the simplicity of the piece and added too much. I tried to add something else that could help me appreciate the artwork again but to no hope, so instead I attempted it in another medium, which kind of worked but again didn't achieve the simplicity I was looking for. I wanted the piece to represent interracial relationships of any kind and by using flamboyant colours I was trying to infer that it's a queer relationship.

There is a lot I've learnt from doing this independent development work - I've learnt that in order to get better at painting, something I want to be good at and succeed in, then I'm going to have top practice and although it's an oblivious answer, it's the truth and I need to keep practicing as often as I can to improve. It was suggested that I pick up an A5 sketch pad and try to sketch everyday to improve my skills because once you have sketching down, it can help with painting and help to progress your skills.

#lgbtq #collage #handmade #painting #struggle #unit1

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twentiethcenturymoviesandtv · 4 years

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Star Trek: Genre and Themes

Considering the fact that Star Trek was pitched as “Wagon Train in space”, it seems almost redundant to discuss the genre of such a show.

Since the beginning, Gene Roddenberry’s show’s genre seemed pretty obvious: science fiction-western. And really, it’s hard to argue with that. Kirk’s style has been outright referred to as ‘cowboy diplomacy’ by future installations of Star Trek. The adventures and ‘exploration’ of the new territory is very reminiscent of the western television shows of the time, and the setting of outer space would seem to place it pretty firmly in the ‘science fiction’ genre as well.

But, like always, there’s a little more to it than that.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, very few pieces of media can be categorized as only one genre. Even the most seemingly obvious and one-dimensional examples have elements of other genres. No show is designed to fit into only one genre, with any individual television program carrying many characteristics of one specific genre, while sharing many elements of other genres.

And while it may be easy to look at the setting of a film or television show and use that to determine a genre (space = sci-fi, medieval = fantasy), that doesn’t mean it’s terribly accurate.

Such is the case of Star Trek.

As a matter of fact, despite Roddenberry’s initial pitch to the studios, Star Trek actually doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the westerns of the day (Besides Spectre of the Gun). Kirk’s ‘cowboy’ nature actually doesn’t come into play nearly as much as one would think. Captain Kirk’s decision making isn’t quite the same as a traditional western lead, weighing more factors than just ‘frontier justice’. For another, the setup is totally different. The Enterprise is a military exploration ship, full of people on a mission, not just of exploration, but of diplomacy. Kirk’s job is not only to defeat ‘bad guys’, but to find the best solutions for problems of other cultures.

So while Kirk’s ‘good old fisticuffs’ solutions may seem a bit more of the ‘Wild Wild West’ than later incarnations of the show would resort to, it doesn’t make it a western. In fact, Star Trek has far more in common with future versions of science fiction shows than one might think.

Star Trek, at its core, is a show about an optimistic utopia, a future where humanity has learned to straighten itself out. A future where there is no oppression, no prejudice, no poverty, but of a unified, educated, compassionate Earth, reaching out into the galaxy to explore, extending a hand of friendship. This is Kirk’s job: being the hand of friendship. Set in a distant future, a twenty-third century where Earth’s problems are solved, as such, there is no need to examine humanity’s flaws as they are.

At least, not directly.

As is done with many examples of the soft science fiction (or speculative fiction) genre, Star Trek uses its setting and set-up to examine the problems with our own society through the disguise of another. Routinely, Kirk and the gang land on a planet or meet a people that represent a part of humanity that is less than pleasant to look at. Episodes like Let That Be Your Last Battlefield take a scathing look at racism, a huge social issue in the late 1960s. Other episodes examined topics like the Vietnam war, labor, and, a science-fiction favorite, the dangers of technology.

Add this onto the ‘traveling through the stars’ plotline of Star Trek, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good argument for a solid science fiction show, with or without the western elements to it. With that said, that doesn’t mean there’s more to the show than just sci-fi.

Star Trek’s storylines typically fell into the category of action or adventure. There were gunfights (or phaserfights), fistfights, chases, daring escapes, and space-battles galore. There was typically at least one hair-raising action scene per episode (with a few exceptions, such as The Trouble with Tribbles or The Way to Eden). Even the episodes without ‘action’ per say as it would later be solidified in shows like The A-Team or Magnum P.I. turned out a decent ‘adventure’ story, with emphasis on the journey and adventure as a whole, rather than action-packed sequences that kept audiences on the edge of their seat.

Star Trek was all about the adventure, as even the opening credits will make clear. The voyage of the Enterprise is aimed at discovery and exploration. The setup of the show is, at its core, the greatest adventure: exploring the unknown. Every episode is aimed at the exploration of the human experience and curiosity. By definition, an adventure is a risky undertaking, and the exploration of deep space and discovering new civilizations and planets is nothing if not risky.

It’s pretty easy to say that Star Trek fits pretty neatly into the ‘sci-fi/adventure’ category, although it does have shades of other genres. Episodes like Shore Leave, The Trouble with Tribbles, I Mudd, and A Piece of the Action have a distinct comedic slant to them, whereas episodes like Catspaw, The Enemy Within, Wolf in the Fold, and The Man Trap have a rather sinister, horror/thriller edge. Other episodes have dabbled into courtroom dramas, tragedies, westerns, and even war, giving all three seasons a wide range of types of stories that they tell. However, one genre that Star Trek has always been the absolute master of, even more than science-fiction or adventure, has been the genre of drama.

At the heart of every Star Trek episode, no matter how cerebral or action-packed, is an overarching sense of drama. Not drama in the ‘soap opera’ sense, mind you, but drama as in real character interaction and growth. The drama in Star Trek is in McCoy and Spock’s argument in Bread and Circuses, in the death of a recently married lieutenant in Balance of Terror, in the death of Kirk’s brother in Operation: Annihilate. Star Trek’s dramatic moments are rooted in character, from Spock’s admittance and sharing of Vulcan rituals in Amok Time and his muted desperation at thinking that he’s killed his Captain in a burst of uncontrollable rage to the doomed romance between Kirk and Edith Keeler in City On the Edge of Forever. The drama in Star Trek is in people, whether human or not.

The examples of Star Trek’s use of characters, be they regular or not, is truly groundbreaking. From Spock’s mind-meld with the Horta in Devil in the Dark to Kirk’s terrifying identity crisis in The Enemy Within, Star Trek’s strength is in the people, in the personal dynamics between the characters, most notably between the main trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Even the other, more minor characters on the show received levels of characterization unheard of for the time: Sulu’s love of botany and retro weaponry, Uhura’s musical ability, Scotty’s intelligence and romantic troubles, and Chekov’s obsession with spouting totally innaccurate Russian history, possibly just to annoy the rest of the crew. Even Nurse Chapel’s flashes of snark helped her stand apart from the many nameless crew members who came and went throughout the series.

In short, Star Trek’s characters were people. Nowhere was this more evident than in Mr. Spock.

By the 1960s, most ‘alien’ characters on television were either jokes or monsters, cast as gimmicks in My Favorite Martian or as evil conquerors in shows like The Twilight Zone or The Invaders. But in Star Trek, the ‘alien’ was as ‘human’ as the rest of us, if you’ll pardon the phrase.

A Mr. Spock type character was unheard of in 1966. A half-human, half-alien, treated as a respected equal of the rest of the crew, was a completely foreign concept at the time. Spock’s development as a character, and indeed, his criticism of the human condition proved to be one of Star Trek’s best elements of its use of character and drama. Spock as a character was constantly at war with himself, torn between the outwardly emotionless Vulcan half, and his emotional, illogical human half. Spock’s internal struggle proved to be one of the most gripping elements of the show, and as his interactions with Kirk and McCoy proved, although Spock did not like to be compared to humans, in many ways, he was more ‘human’ than we are. His subtle flashes of emotion and occasional bursts of illogical behavior proved repeatedly that there was a lot more to Spock than what he tried to let on. He, along with the other members of the cast, had layers.

And Star Trek was very good at exploring those layers.

No science-fiction show would introduce characters with layers to explore if they hadn’t had every intention of making the show hang on the relationships of the characters. And the relationships of characters is the absolute core of drama.

In the end, Star Trek is a science-fiction adventure drama, a speculative look at the nature of humanity and people in general. Star Trek is a look at a better future, an improved society turned to exploration. It’s about the new frontier, about the best and worst of humanity, about friendship, adventure, and morality, full of good and memorable stories and characters. It paved the way for even more complex shows to follow, and remains one of the most thought-provoking and earnest shows of all time.

Even now, audiences remember those characters, those stories, those little moments with these people that they grew to know. They hold up, remaining just as genuine and heartfelt as they were in 1966.

And they owe that, in no small part, to those wonderful characters.

But that’s a discussion for next time.

Thank you guys so much for reading! Don’t forget that my ask box is always open for conversation, suggestions, or questions. Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be looking at the crew of the Enterprise and their roles in Star Trek. I hope to see you there!

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electro-elemena · 3 years

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Random thoughts I just had about death note

this is very stream of consciousness and was written in google notes, so sorry for the format and grammar but I just need this to be out there. Also if some parts sound like they're spoken out loud it's because they were lmao

- media needs to be interesting (check)

- if you disagree with me go look at Ryuk and then come back

- love the concept of death note. Very *chef's kiss*

- tickles the part of my brain that likes unlikely and outlandish theories and scenarios

- however enjoyable media also has to be:

- not insufferable... Sufferable you could say

- OR insufferable enough to make it funny

- death note accomplishes the condition of the second

- never finished it, realized i was running out of fucks to give and looked for a reason to give more fucks or stop giving fucks

- spoiled the ending for myself, if you've seen the ending you know why

- spoiler alert for an old ass piece of media... Y'all have your reasons and if this bit doesn't fervently convince you to watch it then it will do whatever the opposite of that is

- misa dies too. Which is unfair

- she's a boss ass bitch and a whole model??? Like

- okay tangent

- light is not a good protagonist

- I'll take a potato chip... And eat it

- he's supposed to be one of those gradual unreliable narrators

- but past the first episode you immediately realize that he is in fact a horrible person

- you could argue that the capacity to kill people without consequence given to a teenage boy was destined to corrupt him

- and that's a cynical and bleh boring take

- (but likely)

- but tbh it takes a dormant god complex in the first place for him to turn out the way he did. He obviously already thought he was better than others

- loners are only loners if everyone thinks they're worse than everyone else or they think they're better than everyone else

- chicken or the egg first sometimes y'know

- so like if you have the death note to a kind person they'd like write down Jeff bezos or something and then hand it back

- or! They could be like "i don't trust you with this" to ryuk and just keep it (but secretly be like saving it for later in case they want to kill someone else with no consequences)

- or maybe they're just in love with ryuk. Which like. I'll squint at you, and judge you silently for, but won't say anything, because I'm a nice person and not because you possess the ability to kill me without consequences whenever

- anyways so he's a bad protagonist and objectively evil

- i say this even though I usually like the villains. I love the hero but I like the villains too

- i won't condone their actions but I'll think they're hot or cool or something

- cuz i always side with the protagonist, when they're not insufferable (wonder who that could be)

- but mass genocide is one of those rare things that's not "oh this is good but it could be gray if done for the wrong reasons" or "oh this is bad but it could be gray if done for the wrong reasons" it's very "no. This is not ambiguous. Throw the whole person away"

- far less forgivable than mass genocide, however, is how he's not down bad for misa

- like??? The only reasons I can think of for him to have been written like this are

- 1) he's gay or ace and they wrote him like that as queer coding and secret representation

- cuz i know that there are many characters like that and you will never KNOW if he is or isn't

- unless like the mangaka... What's his name... Comes out on Twitter and says so

Mini tangent

- i can not for the life of me remember asian names

- i was practically raised by anime and i still can not remember them

- does not matter how much I love the character or person. I will forget it at least once or twice

- every time someone mentions a mangaka i have to check the database

- i think it's mainly because I haven't learned any asian languages, and that's the only reason I'm referring to them as asian and not specifying, because asian languages have a lot of common denominators that they don't share with western ones

- anyways I can't pronounce them so I can't remember them

- or i think I can pronounce them and then the real pronunciation is just waiting to pounce on me and make me feel like an idiot

- had that ever happened to you? I mispronounced the word cicada until I was... 17

- i was walking with my best friend outside

- which never happened because we were hermits and we never left the cave

- and I'm like "oh you can hear the ciSAHdas"

- and he was like "..."

- "you can hear the what?"

- and it's funny that out of the two of us, the AP student was the one that didn't know how to pronounce ciSAHdas

- did i just say that right? Fuck

- ciKEIdas

- anyways Carson did not do well in school, because he's the type of person that, if he does not give a fuck, he simply will not do whatever you ask

- no matter what reason you have

- so the old ass institution that "educated--

- mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!

- "educated" millions of people crumbled at his feet, like the true being of chaos that he is

- although you could argue that it didn't do me any favors either, since, well, here i am

- and at least he knew how to pronounce cicadas! Damn!

Death note (ctd)

- anyways back to death note because we weren't FINISHED

- so he's gay or ace. My vote is for gay because of his relationship with L

- and L was another character that was treated poorly, he's way better than the early death that he got because he decided to be kind and less suspicious and i HATE that they did him like that

- for a show called death note they really did get death wrong

- funny how everyone around light ends up dying horribly

- you could argue that's because of the death not but I like to think it's because he's just that shitty of a person

- so back to light and how he's super fruity, there's actually a scene where misa is throwing herself on him as usual

- and i don't remember what she's saying, like i can't remember most of her lines

- and i don't know if that means I like her more or less than i would have

- anyways she's saying something suggestive to him looking hot as usual and he starts thinking about L

- like LMAO

- bestie, the closet is made of GLASS

- it is transparent. We can all tell

- 2) reason he could be written to treat misa like that is because it's a ha ha funny that he can't be bothered to give her the time of day, when she's a model

- he's murder sexual. He wants world domination, not pussy

- this is also a reason he could be considered ace but I just think an enemies to lovers with L is more interesting so that's my personal favorite

- anyways there's another scene where she's once again chasing after this toxic ass man

- which. Her main flaw is her absolute dog water taste in men

- so she's trying to get him to like her

- and he thinks

- LMAO

- he thinks "never before have I been provoked to HIT a woman"

- and he says it exactly like that

- which is hilarious for many reasons

- first of all

- i don't BELIEVE you

- you mean to tell me?? That with HIS PERSONALITY?? no woman had ever pissed him off as much as one being in love with him

- which, by the way, gay

- i would like to think this is possible not because of the previously mentioned "maybe he was a good person before given this power" bleh bullshit

- but because all the women had understood he was a fuckwad before interacting with him

- like they sent it to the group chat. The group chat? Yeah the group chat

- they were like bro. This dude? Bad news

- walk parallel to him at all times. Do NOT intersect

- cross the street if you see him walking towards you

- this is also why i like to think incels exist

- like they were already going to be bad and women just knew that and avoided them

- an alternative theory to the group chat phenomenon is that women instinctively knew. Like an edm... That's not the right word

- i know the word and that's not the right word

- e d... e p...

- like the thing you throw out as like a pokeball and it just makes all the electronics stop working

- like they take a break

- electromagnetic... Pulse... EMP!

- so that was sent to every woman's brain instinctively and they just avoided him

#death note #death note misa #death note light #this is objective garbage but i need someone to be forced to read this

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malopascal · 4 years

Text

Misery

Warning(s): crying, language, mention of alchol

A/N: This was inspired by this post

No words left Pedro’s parted lips as he softly panted, his eyes still staring down at the picture displaying on his phone. The gut-wrenching pain that he felt swell up in his chest was indescribable. He could barely feel his heart beating while tears slowly blurred his vision.

He knew very well that you were faking a smile, but the fact that you had decided to hurt him by going out with your ex and being photographed was more than enough to put the Chilean actor in a state of shock, pain, jealousy and anger.

He finally was able to blink and lock his phone, the image already burned in his brain. His phone was tossed onto the couch without a care while he slowly stood up from the couch and proceeded into pacing up and down his living room. His hands ran roughly through his delicate and silk hair before gripping the ends tightly, the stress and pain killing him.

He had so many questions.

Were you really considering getting back together with your ex while the two of you were on a break?

Did you reach out to him first?

Was Pedro nothing but a backup plan until your ex had his shit figured out?

The poor actor let out a frustrated groan as he stilled in the middle of the room, his breath shaky and the tears finally cascading down his handsome face. He couldn’t believe what was happening, the betrayal broke his heart.

When you had demanded a break from your relationship due to the constant fighting, he thought that you’d use the time to sit back and clear your mind. None of you could explain why the two of you couldn’t have a normal conversation without turning it into a screaming match. The reason why was because you were so focused on yelling and provoking each other that you didn’t bother to get to the bottom of your issues.

You didn’t give each other enough space and time to process every single disagreement through. Your work and inner pressure of having to be perfect had gotten the best of you, which resulted in the two of you becoming each other’s emotional punching bag. What had been a beautiful three-year relationship had now turned into bad one really quick. The love was still there though, it was just when the two of you were angry at each other, the whole world had to crash and burn to ashes.

If you hadn’t demanded a break, Pedro would’ve asked for it. You were the love of his life, but the two of you needed to fix your personal issues by yourselves. Not by constantly lashing out on each other. He wanted to marry you, expand your family of two with kids and spend the rest of his life with you.

But never would he have thought that two months into your break, you’d go back to your ex and humiliate him in front of the whole world. He didn’t know how you were doing as you refused to answer his texts and calls, which quickly resulted in him drinking his pain away. His friends and family had found him plenty of times passed out cold on the floor or in his bathtub with a bottle of Whisky or a dozen cans of beer in his grasp.

Their hearts were breaking for him.

The picture he just had seen was a few days old. Pedro was never a slave to his smartphone and caught onto the news way too late. If he hadn’t been bombarded with all the urgent texts from his siblings, he never would’ve opened the Instagram app and tumble upon the pictures of you and your ex.

How could someone be so cruel?

He thought that you loved him just as much as he loved you. Not ever did you shut him down when he talked about your future as a couple, hell, you even gave him the most beautiful smiles and answers whenever he jokingly called you Mrs. Pascal. The endless hours where the two of you gave your all into making your relationship work, all the hugs and kisses you shared…All the times you made sweet, passionate or rough love to each other… now felt like it was being flushed down the toilet.

Pedro felt his stomach churn in great stress and discomfort. He bent down and placed his hands on his knees for support as he really thought that he was about to throw up the few drinks and small dinner he had. Tonight, was actually the only night he was able to keep the alcoholic drinks to a minimum and consume some food without his stomach being in tight knots. He really thought that tonight was actually a decent night as he also had showered and changed into a fresh pair of sweats and his favorite t-shirt, his skin and hair moisturized and smelling great.

The other days, his sister and brother had to force him to down a few bites of the food they had brought or cooked for him while trying to keep him away from the alcohol, their remarks of his unpleasant body odor didn’t even make him blink as he didn’t care about how he looked or smelled.

He was finally getting back on his feet again but then this shitshow had to happen.

“I-I can’t take this anymore” Pedro hissed to himself, the anger and jealousy bubbling up in his stomach. All he could think about was you, he needed clear answers, needed to know your motives and whether the two of you were officially broken up or not.

So without a further thought, he regained his posture and snatched his car keys from the small coffee table before stomping his way out of his house.

~~~

A loud sigh left your lips as you stared up at the ceiling of your bedroom. It was one a.m. but you still couldn’t sleep, the guilt of your recent actions leaving you with temporary insomnia. “Fuck” you groaned out loud and sat up in your bed, your eyes clenching shut for a few seconds as you felt absolutely disgusted with yourself.

Just an hour ago, you had blocked your ex on your phone and social media. Yes, the ex you had gone out with a few days ago. It was just for lunch but it was awkward as hell and you a got fresh reminder of why you had broken up with him in the first place. But you just had been sick and tired of hurting and being in suspense of whether Pedro still wanted to be with you or not that you had decided to let your pettiness and insecurities get the best of you.

You knew that it would only take a few days for him to see the pictures and hopefully feel as miserable as you were.

“Shit!” you hissed out and jumped out of bed, being hit with a wave or reality; Why in the hell did you even go out of your way to put up this stupid act when you refused to even let Pedro know how you were doing?

That man loved you to the core but instead of owning up to your past mistakes and contribution to the toxic circle your relationship ended up turning in to, you thought that being childish would solve everything and put you out of your misery.

Boy, were you wrong.

Tears filled your eyes as you felt so ashamed and disgusted by yourself. You had turned yourself into a monster and now the whole world had seen you make a fool out of yourself. You didn’t have to grab your phone and go on Instagram to know that people already were calling you a slut for jumping from Pedro right back into the arms of your ex.

You wished that you could go back in time and prevent yourself from sending your ex a text message that resulted in the two of you going out for lunch. The lunch itself was just bad and awkward, the narcissistic bastard happily voiced how he knew that “you’d run back to him” once realizing that “you needed him”.

Your stomach was in tight knots and you could barely swallow down the food while having to listen to him brag about all the other people he’s dated, even adding that you were “nothing compared to them”. Your stupid pride however prevented you from standing up, giving him the smack of a lifetime (something he really deserved) and leaving the place with the tiny bits and pieces of what were left of it.

Instead, you made yourself look like a bigger clown and pretended to enjoy the insults and useless information your ears were polluted with. You left the restaurant with the biggest, fakest grin on your face while holding onto your ex’s shoulders, trying to get to your car as quickly as possible. The second you hopped in it, you had noticed the paparazzis and knew that your idiotic plan had succeeded.

Ever since arriving home, the guilt started to eat you alive and resulted in you lying down in your bed since the late afternoon. Your stupid ex had the nerve to text you to let you know that he was horny and wanted some sexy pics of you. That text alone got him permanently blocked from your phone, social media accounts and life.

“I’m such an idiot” you cried to yourself, the room filling up with your sobs as you plopped back down at the edge of your bed. You knew that Pedro was somewhere hurting because of you, the mere thought of him in pain causing your heart to painfully clench in your chest.

You tried to calm down, even your breath while wiping the thick tears off your face. You needed to redeem yourself, let Pedro know that you loved him and hoped that he’d be able to forgive your petty and childish behavior.

“[Y/N!]”.

The loud call of your name startled you as your heart skipped several beats before pounding loudly against your ribcage. “Pedro” you whispered to yourself before slowly standing up and staring at the door.

The loud stomping of his footsteps approached your bedroom and you couldn’t help but freeze on the spot. You didn’t know what to do, you hadn’t prepared for this, but a part of you was excited that you’d get to see the man you loved so much again.

When the door to your bedroom finally opened and the love of your life was standing a few feet away from you, fresh tears cascaded down your cheeks again. He looked as handsome as always, but the stress and pain radiating off him was also instantly caught your eyes. His hair was a tousled mess and he was panting loudly while staring right back at you. His eyes penetrating yours so intensely, you started to feel shy under his gaze.

Seconds went by while the tension thickened in the room. A talk was overdue and you didn’t have the courage so initiate it.

“Why, [Y/N]?” Pedro finally asked, his voice calm but the anger still shadowing in the back. He swallowed hard while you slowly parted your lips.

“I-I-“

“Why?!” your boyfriend repeated louder, making you jump in surprise but also making you come to your senses.

“Because I wanted to make you feel as miserable as I am” you finally confessed, seeing him shake his head in pure disappointment. “So” he began and approached you, “You thought that hurting and humiliating me in front of the whole world would seal the deal?”.

Your stomach churned in shame and guilt as you avoided his now angered and pained glare. Your toes were suddenly very interesting to look at as you were being confronted.

“I-I didn’t know what to do…I was afraid and anxious that you didn’t want me anymore…That this break would make you realize that you didn’t wanted to stay with me…” soft sniffles left your nose.

You swallowed the last pieces of your pride and lifted your head, looking straight into Pedro’s eyes. “And instead of actually answering my texts and calls, you just jumped to that conclusion huh?”.

His words were cold like ice, his jaw was tensed as he waited for your response. “I-I’m sorry” you whispered weakly, exhausted and so over the thick cloud of pain and stress that was settled deep in your chest. Words couldn’t describe how sorry you were for having changed into this anger driven person that only sought out to seek revenge, focusing on the negative feelings instead of the positive ones.

“You hurt me” Pedro sighed, his expression changing from angered to pained and tired. You saw the dark rings he had under his eyes, silently concluding that he wasn’t sleeping well.

“

Scream how much I love you but also how much you’ve hurt me, [Y/N]”. Your heart painfully clenched in your chest as you threw your arms around his shoulders and buried your head in the crook of his neck, his delicate scent filling up your nostrils and making you realize how much you actually missed your boyfriend.

It took him a few seconds to hug you back as his brain was processing your touch. He had gone two months without it and had craved it so much to the point where he almost forgot how pleasant and soothing it was to feel you so close to him. When his arms finally wrapped themselves around your waist, you let out another sniffle before clearing your throat.

“I can’t explain how sorry I am Pedro, we were in a bad place and I am also to blame for it. Instead of telling you how I felt, I kept everything inside and just used every opportunity to lash out on you…

Your words and actions hurt me but I had to communicate correctly with you and try to get you to stop the madness and find a solution. Not turn into a petty child”. You could feel the pain slowly become lighter with every word that left your mouth.Why did you make the two of you suffer so much?

Pedro sighed and clenched his eyes shut, the tears rolling down his cheeks as he held you closer. “And I am so sorry for doing the same thing, getting angry instead of taking a breather and gently explaining the chaos going in my mind. Please forgive me, mi amor”.

“I forgive you. I forgave you a little while ago. I need you to forgive me too, my stupid actions and everything else…I don’t like him, never really did”. The room then was silent as you let your words process in your minds. Your boyfriend forgave you in a heartbeat, but knew that it would take some time for him to forget what you had done.

The sniffles slowly subsided, the tension lighter.

“I love you” Pedro whispered, his head nuzzling in the crook of your neck. His soft lips and beard tickling the sensitive skin there. “I love you” you instantly whispered back, your heart body and soul at peace again. He was the love of your life, no one could make you feel so secure and protected and at home. Both of you had some work to do as individuals but you knew that your love had only grown stronger for each other and would be able to survive other challenges life would throw at you.

~~~

Tag list: @pascalisthepunkest @thickemadame @talesfromtheguild @synystersilenceinblacknwhite

Thanks for reading!

#pedro pascal #pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal x you #pedro pascal x plus size reader

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