#i never had any interest in apocalypse stories or even horror for that matter

[raiiny-bay]

they've come a long way

[generalherasyndulla]

1, 3 and 8 for any fandom you're currently really into

Tbh I'm not really super into any fandoms at the moment I'm just hopping around various interests as a treat so I'm just kinda gonna with whatever fandom I think I have a good answer

1.the character everyone gets wrong

The answer is Komaeda Nagito but that's ONLY because no 2 people actually 100% fully agree on Komaeda Nagito. Every single person has their own perception of Komaeda as a character and while some bits might overlap there's almost always one aspect that someone won't agree with. And arguable this is true of any character from everything ever but I have never this phenomenon than with Komaeda. No one is right about Komaeda because every single person, myself included, just fully believe in out own vision of him and I think that's almost beautiful, you know?

3.screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

Okay so like there's this post I've seen in the Gakkou Gurashi!/School-Live tag about how it's unrealistic that the manga ends with all 4 main girls still alive and a happy ending which like is media illiterate to what the series is going for. Like School-Live is most known for the anime's shocking twist of a first episode revealing that the "moe slice of life comedy" is actually a zombie apocalypse story the the main character Yuki is just hallucinating a happier life to fucking cope (tm). But what the rest of the series is about isn't horror or shock-value, it's about 4 girls coping during a shitty situation and doing their best to not just survive but to live. And that's why it's important that they live in the end and that the world improves, they were able to live and thrive as best they can because they had each other and man that thematic cohesion and that feeling of caring for your loved ones no matter what is SO much more important than gritty "realism" (which who's to say what would be realistic in a zombie story anyway, zombies aren't fucking real).

8.common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

Gen saying he's like a dad to amame but then actually having romantic feelings for her is not fucking incest people. Sometimes people try to justify their romantic feelings as something else because they don't want it be romantic for whatever reason (denial or feeling it would be unrequited). I've literally had people around my age say I'm a mom friend and even some cases call me mom and that doesn't actually make me their parent you know? On a related note just because Gen has a deep voice and is built like a tank doesn't necessarily mean he's that much older than amame? I know his age is a mystery which I get how it can make people iffy but if ota can be like 24 and look 12 and lien can look 30 at 22 then looks aren't indicative of age in aitsf/aini.

Thanks for the ask :)

Send me some more "choose violence" asks

[mst3kproject]

Weasels Rip my Flesh

Weasels Rip my Flesh is an interesting movie to try to review.  It's really goddamn bad, the kind of bad where the MST3K treatment would improve it enormously, but it was made by a sixteen-year-old who roped his friends and family into helping him with the project.  It really can't be judged by the same standards one would apply to a real movie, no matter how cheap – even Manos had more money and experience behind it than this.  So I'm not going to at any point scold this movie for its spare change budget. My boy Nathan Schiff did the best he could with what he had.  Rather, I'm going to do what I hope I do best, and try to decipher the indecipherable.

I'm going to describe the movie in some detail, because believe me, there is some shit that goes on here.  First, a guy who's trying very hard to sound ominous gives us a speech Criswell would find difficult to parse, about how if we could only have foreseen the coming apocalypse, we would have wished we were never born.  Then I think a couple of drunk girls get murdered.

Then a plot seems to start, as a rocket on a fiery planet packages up a sample of blue goo and sends it back to Earth.  It splashes down in a pond somewhere to be retrieved, not by NASA guys in HAZMAT suits, but by two boys named John and Ed.  One of them gets bitten by some small animal, and the other pours the radioactive snot down the creature's burrow for revenge.  Since this is a movie, this action does not kill the unfortunate mustelid, but mutates it into a monster with a thirst for human blood.  It bursts from the ground like an alien out of John Hurt, and mauls the kids before setting off in search of another victim!

Shortly thereafter, the creature is run down on the road by a guy called Fred, who finds its severed arm lying on the pavement.  Puzzled, he wraps the limb in a bedsheet and takes it home to his kitchen, which is clearly what anyone would do in this situation.  There, the arm attacks Fred's friend Jake, who turns into a frothy-mouthed zombie and attacks Fred in turn!  Jake saws Fred's arm off, and then stumbles out into the wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.

Not far away, a dog walker discovers the bodies of the two boys, and the murders make the news.  Possibly as a result of this, a hunky secret agent is sent to investigate (we can tell he's supposed to be hunky because he gets saxophone music).  Him and a buddy go take a look at the scene, where they're ambushed by a guy having a bad hair day.  Bad Hair Day escorts them to his secret lair, which he built there shortly after the crash of the space probe. Apparently he somehow sabotaged the rocket so it would crash there and he could steal the goo, and he's been experimenting on it and on the armless weasel creature that Fred ran over.  He's going to unleash an army of these monsters to rule the world... and use its blood to make himself immortal while he's at it!

Bad Hair Day drugs the secret agents and begins some kind of experiment involving lots of syringes and one of the dead drunk women from the beginning, but Hunky Secret Agent comes to, escapes his bonds, and manages to shoot Bad Hair Day in the back.  Then, out of nowhere, Bad Hair Day is attacked by a mutated weasel-man in a plaid shirt.  He fends this monster off, only to have his arm ripped off by his captive giant weasel monster!  This beast attacks Hunky Secret Agent in turn, but Weasel-Man comes to his rescue and rip's the monster's arm off, while Bad Hair Day gets his other arm torn off by a shark and dies.

By any reasonable standards, Weasels Rip my Flesh is a disaster.  The picture is grainy and out of focus.  The dialogue is bad and the actors speaking it are terrible.  The story makes no sense.  The music was stolen from The Horror of Party Beach. There are more severed arms in this movie than there are named characters, and what I think are the main characters never have names at all!  Yet you can't help but enjoy yourself watching it.  Part of this is just knowing that it was made by a ninth-grader in his spare time, but a lot of it is a by-product of that: the movie is entirely in earnest.

Much as Starcrash was made by people who adored Star Wars and wanted to pay tribute to it, Weasels Rip my Flesh was made by a kid who just really, really, really wanted to make the best horror movie he could and therefore took the project entirely seriously even when the outcome was doomed to be risible. Shots of Weasel-Man fighting Weasel-Monster are filmed from the ground looking up as if we're watching Godzilla battle Rodan.  Nor does the film ever fail to deal with something simply because the people making it didn't want to be bothered.  It gives a hundred percent of what it has, which isn't much, but it's a lot more than a Larry Buchanan movie!

I said I wouldn't complain about the budget and I won't, but I do want to mention a couple of the cheap special effects because I honestly find them kinda creative and charming.  One of the more famous example is the lampshade with light bulb used as a rocket engine.  You can immediately tell what it is, but the sound effect laid over it means you can also tell what it's supposed to be.  This isn't a cost-cutting measure, this is the best Schiff could do, and he gave his all to make it work as best it could.  Then there's the domes containing Bad Hair Day's monster embryos.  We never get any idea how big these are supposed to be... they're about two centimetres across in real life, because they're clearly made from the inner packaging of a box of Toffifee candies.

Anyway – I also said I would try to examine this movie as a work of narrative fiction.  Weasels Rip my Flesh was clearly inspired by any number of 50's, 60's, and 70's movies about creatures from space and monsters spawned by pollutants.  I imagine Schiff and his friends must have watched dozens of these as they played with ideas for what their movie was going to be about.  The interesting thing about the result is that it's a synthesis of several monster movie subtypes.

First, we have the Space Monster Movie.  The man having the Bad Hair Day explains to us that the rocket from the beginning collected a sample of life from the planet Venus (another instance of terrible old movies being eerily prescient in unexpected places) and sent it back for study.  The idea that extraterrestrial life could be hostile has been around pretty much as long as the concept of aliens itself.  The first alien invasion story was The War of the Worlds, from 1897, but there are other types of hostile alien in movies... consider the growing space blobs of The Flame Barrier or Caltiki the Immortal Monster, or the Martian Blood Rust of Spacemaster X-7.  These creatures aren't trying to destroy humanity for a purpose, they're just life forms doing what they do.  What they do simply happens to be incompatible with what we do.  This idea shows up in the Toxic Monster Movie, too, so we'll revisit it in a moment.

As well as being dangerous, movies like this also postulate that aliens might be very hard to kill.  The blob in Caltiki could only be taken out by fire because, much like Reptilicus, any piece of it not utterly destroyed could re-grow an entire new creature.  The same is apparently true of the monster in Weasels Rip my Flesh: Bad Hair Day says as much, prompting Hunky Secret Agent to burn the Toffifee monster embryos.  I really do wonder how many of these movies Schiff and his friends saw, and which ones were on their minds during the writing process.

Space Monsters died down a little during the 60's, while the Radioactive Monsters of the 50's evolved into the Toxic Monsters of the 70's.  These are two subspecies of the same beast: an ordinary creature that has been mutated by man's hubris into a killer.  Here it's the weasel, which merges with the Venusian goop.  Like in The Crawling Hand, another killer created when something from space infected an Earth creature, the alien influence is transmissible: it turns Jake into a drooly zombie, and Hunky Secret Agent's sidekick into the Weasel Man! While space monsters can be categorized into those that are purposefully hostile and those that are just unhealthy to interact with, it's harder to ascribe intention to a creature like this.  The mutant bear in Prophecy seems to be just Being A Bear, but the Crawling Hand definitely wants to kill people on purpose.  Is the weasel taking revenge on humans who have treated it badly?  Or is it just angry and in pain?  Bad Hair Day tells us that the weasel also had rabies, so perhaps that's what is driving its behaviour, as well as that of its victims.

Finally, we have the monster created by Mad Science.  Dr. Bad Hair Day did not make the weasel what it is, but he certainly fostered it, and I think he deliberately created Weasel-Man through all his injections of stuff.  Conquering the world is definitely a standard mad science goal, as in The Mad Monster or The Transparent Man, and in both of those movies the mad scientist is creating an army (though neither has any apparent plan to control that army... nor does this guy).  Like most mad scientists, Bad Hair Day is even attacked by his own creations... although I have no idea where the shark came from.  I guess Schiff and co also watched Jaws and wanted a shark in their movie.

What Schiff and his friends have done is take all three of these archetypes – the alien, the mutant, and the creation – and meld them into a single movie that is meant to be a tribute to the entire genre.  And yes, for once, I’m quite sure that it was entirely intentional.  These kids had taken in something they thoroughly enjoyed, and what they put out again was a love letter to movie monsters.  They didn't do a great job, but that that love shines through to keep the result from being entirely unwatchable.  I can't exactly recommend this movie, but I can't fault the enthusiasm behind it.

[pocketsizedquasar]

it’s been a bit now so. misc 200/end of mag in general thoughts? under a cut because this is a bit long, and i will preface this to say that i mostly enjoyed the episode but this is going to be mostly my criticisms, bc i feel like the good parts have already been well covered by people other than me. so yeah just a warning this is mostly crit

- it’s Still very hard for me to parse how i feel about this episode, but i think after sitting on it for a bit, i’ve come to the general conclusion that i am very satisfied plot-wise (in terms of tragedy/the structure of tragedies, the open-endedness of our ending, the general Writing TM), but not so much satisfied character-wise (in terms of arc and relationship resolution). I think we deserved more resolution on wtgfs -- i wanted more with them! more with melanie and jon; more with the melanie and georgie and basira’s side of the plan. more than that really small tidbit that we got at the end! and... honestly? a little bit more emphasis on the weight of Jon actually dooming other worlds in the end, and what that means for Jon and for wtgfs/basira. Especially with the context of the consequences re: the Web...won. no caveats or complications, the Web got. Exactly what it wanted.

- on that note,  From a uh. Critique against capitalism standpoint I’m not sure how I feel about the ending? And I don’t really want to. Read too much into what isn’t there? But I mean mag has long been a pretty explicit anticapitalist narrative so...? Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the implications of WTGFs and basira basically just being treated as narratively right in terms of letting the eldritch evil stand-in for capitalism have whatever it wanted and feeding it and doing exactly what it asked them to do. and having Little consequence as a result of that. Obviously they’ll still face loads of hardship, but that comes from the apocalypse, not from, like,.,, doing the direct bidding of the Capitalist Monster/System/etc to be clear, i’m not like...mad they made the “wrong” decision; there was no wrong or right decision here. but I am a little upset that for all they spent 199 discussing the various consequences of each choice, we got to see very little of that actual consequence playing out...none of the survivors seem to really be carrying the guilt or even the full understanding of what they did, because they never saw the suffering they could create as anything more than a hypothetical. i feel like we could have spent just a bit more time with them dealing with that. a bit more time even with jon dealing with that, a bit more time spent on jon changing his mind. other people have said as much better than me but. yeah

- i feel like there was a lot of character stuff brought up in s5 and especially act iii that i would’ve loved to have seen more resolution of. why have that whole thing about Georgie telling jon to give melanie his last words himself, if Jon was going to come back but then never bring that up again (full disclosure this is smthn that @pronouncingitwang​ brought up!)? Why have Jon say he was “going to go  apologize to [his] boyfriend”/Jon tell Martin multiple times that they were going to talk about their fight “later” and then not have that happen on screen? Why did we have two whole episodes of cultist interactions if they were just going to be removed off screen? Why have martin’s “I’ll get jon to destroy me like the others” decision if that doesn’t really come up? what about salesa!! why tell us melanie hating jon is a projection of her self hatred and then not bring that up again? why give annabelle all those juicy interactions with martin and then turn her into a monster when jon shows up, why give her so much character and backstory and then so thoroughly remove her agency? why have all these really cool parallels between jon and annabelle if annabelle is just going to be this monstrous and agency-less plot device with no follow-up? what happened to her!

- on that note...annabelle. They... really took this character who is a Black woman and who had so many parallels to Jon and who they could’ve like. very easily Actually made into a protagonist of color (because we only got one!! and she’s a cop!!!!) (or if not protagonist, at least smthn more sympathetic), (which wouldn’t have negated previous racial problems w tma, but would’ve shown growth from them) and made her a scary monster who just Serves her capitalist entity overlord without personal agency and then bows out when she’s no longer needed...you can have whatever diagetic/watsonian explanations you want for how 197 went, like sure she was just ~being dramatic~ and putting on a show for jon, but all that is still something the writers Decided to do in the real world, and the racial implications of her character arc are just. not great. and her character had So much more narrative potential. idk i will forever be salty about annabelle

- i Still Don’t Like the web being sentient!! i said this after 197 and i’m sayin it again! i think it makes it less frightening and less interesting! with the End being aware of its own, well, end, I actually thought that worked, and i really liked the corpse routes ep, but for some reason I didn’t with the Web? which seems hypocritical of me, I know, but, look: The embodiment of the fear of dying being aware of and welcoming its own dying emphasizes the inevitability and the truth of that fear. Which is why it works for the End. It’s still not recognizably /human/, because it is inexorable and certain, in a way nothing human can be. So its awareness of its own end DOESNT feel like flattening the worldbuilding. And using my own logic, I guess sure you could say the embodiment of the fear of manipulation and schemes being capable of scheming does the same thing but it. It rly doesn’t feel the same to me? Bc that’s rly a fear borne of human sentience & behavior. and so to give it that sentience makes it feel more human, and less interesting within the context of the horror. this is definitely just a personal taste thing as far as how i like horror and eldritch deities and such but yeah.

- i liked the statement a lot like, as a little self contained story? it was really nice to have jon give us one last story before the end. I thought that was sweet and i liked how the statement was written! on the same note though, i could’ve also gone without knowing like. the entire cosmology of how the fears came into being. again, just a personal thing, i don’t like my horror to be known, even at the end of it all when it doesn’t matter what we’re still scared of anymore. I just. I want my fears to be frightening and beyond comprehension and unknowable. it just leads me to have more questions than i really need at the Final episode? i would love to keep the jon giving us one final statement thing, and you know what? i would've loved: statement of the archivist, regarding jonathan sims. no idea what you’d do with that but it sounds cool in my head.

- very minor and very specific-to-me thing but i Don’t Like that basira got to be the Last Words...sorry y’all I just don’t like basira i can’t get behind trying to make me feel sympathetic for a cop who stood by and let people get murdered by the state for years and only felt bad about it bc fearpocalypse i just can’t. i don’t like her never have never will and also melanie and georgie are right there why didn’t they get to have the last words it would have been so much better ... why not have the person who loved jon and Knew very deeply his tendency to self-sacrifice say something or why not the person who is in-canon very similar to Jon and self-admittedly projecting her self hatred onto him say some sort of her own attempt at peace why not either of these two ahhhh

- i uhhhh. really liked jon killing jonah. jon for once getting to be angry for himself. that felt really nice. no ceaseless watcher nonsense either, just him and a knife and beating the shit out of this guy who even now continues to underestimate and belittle him. and i liked jon doing what he did in general -- i actually changed my mind on this; i really didn’t like it at first but i do now. i’m sad that it came at the expense of his promise to martin, but it makes sense and...i don’t want to say jon was right, because i again don’t think any of the decisions were right per se, but in terms of like... not doing what the “elder fear deity who wants to feed on fear and pain for literal eternity” wanted... yeah. i get it. he would never have been able to go along with that willingly. and he really shouldn’t have been, considering all that he went through being a puppet for said elder fear deity. and from a tragedy standpoint too, i actually think it’s a really really well written end for him. considering how my favorite tragedies are structured and how the way out has to be presented to us, but the tragic hero Ultimately will always fall back on their faults, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. hamlet is granted a way out and he doesn’t take it; he always always hesitates. captain ahab is granted the chance to turn and leave his chase and love instead, and he doesn’t take it. orpheus turns around. etc etc. I think it was also really lovely that jon got a twist on that, that in the end he did change, for just a moment, and chose love instead. even in the face of all the horror that that might mean. i really like that he and martin are together, wherever or however they are. that martin is allowed to feel (rightly) furious and betrayed and still so, so unconditionally in love. 

idk i have more thoughts probably but again they’re very hard to parse and mostly just getting into the super specific realm which i don’t think is particularly helpful

i have a lot of feelings for jon and martin and their ending i think it was the best possible ending we could’ve gotten for those two and i Am really. I just have a lot of feelings.

[nightingaelic]

I was reading your "Fallout 4 companions meet Arcade Gannon" reacts when I had an idea. FO4 companions reaction to visiting the Mojave Wasteland with the Sole Survivor.

"She was Boston, I was Vegas

She was Crêpes Suzette, I was pie

She was lectures, I was movies, but I loved her."

- Frank Sinatra, 1981, "I Loved Her"

Cait: "I've never been much of a gambler, but where there's gambling, there's usually a good time to be had."

While Cait finds the casinos of the Strip a little too ritzy for her liking, she rather enjoys the smaller, satellite venues: The Atomic Wrangler in Freeside, the Vikki and Vance casino in Primm, even the saloons in Goodsprings and the Mojave Outpost (the latter of which being where she foolishly engages in a drinking contest with Cass and happily gets her ass kicked). Her greatest enjoyment, however, comes upon discovery of the Thorn in Westside, with its arranged bouts between wasteland critters and the opportunity to go a round yourself if you're feeling lucky. Instead of the trapped horror she felt when the Combat Zone was taken over by raiders and she was forced to fight, Cait revels in the glory she reaps when choosing to face off against a fire gecko, a night stalker or a cazador with her trusty baseball bat. By the time the visit is over, she and Red Lucy have grown close, and the Thorn's mistress is going around openly calling Cait "my hunter."

Codsworth: "Ah, Las Vegas! Why, I can recall when you considered a quick getaway to this paradise just before young master Shaun's arrival. It appears we aren't too late, after all."

Codsworth is somewhat comforted by the lack of overt nuclear devastation in New Vegas, but that feeling wears off as soon as the first set of thugs in Freeside tries to corner him and the sole survivor and take their caps. Once the would-be muggers are laid out on the ground, Codsworth abandons his rose-colored glasses and puts his quippy, dismayed personality back on. Still, he loves the Strip, particularly the Ultra-Luxe with its refined guests, decor and hygienic practices, but he quickly sours on their hoity-toity attitudes. Instead, Codsworth turns to the presence of the NCR as a sign that civilization is creeping back into the wasteland. He's also tickled pink by the Kings and the Chairmen, but not the mobster-esque Omertas: They remind him too much of the pre-war mob activity in good old Boston.

Curie: "Excusez-moi, but what is that structure there? The tallest one, with the blinking lights."

Curie is thrilled to be out in the desert, observing the local populace and documenting their survival techniques, social structures and power struggles. She's fascinated with the area's history, and drags the sole survivor along to seek out the Mojave's most (in)famous individuals to record their stories for her research into post-war civilization. This lands her in quite a few questionable situations, but her general attitude of perseverance and wide-eyed wonder about the world open a lot of doors for her. She makes a lot of friends at the Old Mormon Fort among the Followers of the Apocalypse, though most of them assume her frustration about her own "biological reactions to extreme living conditions" is just her complaining about the heat like everyone else. Arcade's pretty sure she's a robot, though he's too polite to ask about it outright.

Danse: "We're close now, to the birthplace of the Brotherhood of Steel. This is an honor I never thought I'd experience."

Though it's boiling hot inside his power armor under the desert sun, Paladin Danse is overjoyed that he's accompanying the sole survivor on this journey into the cradle of the ideology that he's devoted to. He's heard about the Mojave from Brotherhood of Steel veterans, those who traveled with Elder Lyons when they initially came to the Capital Wasteland and those who accompanied Elder Maxson when he was just a Squire, and he keeps spouting off random trivia about the area. Any run-ins with disillusioned Scribe Veronica might leave him a bit put out, but it's overall a fun trip for him through a part of the continent that's a little less smashed to rubble than the rest of the world. He especially enjoys visiting the NCR and Brotherhood military outposts, if only to offer critiques and suggestions to any soldiers that give him the time of day.

Deacon: "Sheesh, visiting the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter, am I right?"

Deacon has been here before. Well, he doesn't actually say he's been here before, but he keeps dropping hints to the sole survivor that he's somehow on a return trip. He knows the legends of the Sierra Madre and the Blue Star treasures offhand, he has a whole conversation with the Securitrons guarding the Strip about what happened to Robert House, he even knows how to competently play Caravan. Every time the sole survivor asks him about how he knows so much, though, Deacon just grins and keeps chugging his Sunset Sarsaparilla. Obviously no one recognizes him by face, but he does have a setting-appropriate wardrobe along that includes NCR bandoleer armor, a coat-tailed tuxedo, top hat and White Glove Society mask, and a black leather jacket to go with his pompadour wig.

Dogmeat: [curiously sniffs everything]

Dogmeat can't figure out why this place is so dang dry, but he's on his best behavior for the sole survivor as they make their way over the dusty roads of the Mojave. He politely greets each other traveler on the roads, who keep asking his companion where they got "a non-cyber cyberdog." For the most part though, the trip is pretty in line with everywhere Dogmeat goes: Big rodents, big bugs, tired people and plenty of ruins to explore. Dogmeat's one outstanding adventure comes in the form of an attempted kidnapping by some of the Kings, who think their leader needs a new dog after Rex hit the road with some fool. The King doesn't take kindly to this, and graciously has the dog returned to his friend.

Hancock: "Oh, man, how does anyone live out here? I'm drying out, I feel like a radroach husk."

Hancock is having the time of his life in the Mojave, apart from constantly complaining about how he prefers the Commonwealth's weather. He's chummy with everyone, but especially with the ghouls he encounters. He buys Raul a bunch of drinks and asks him about his past, he suggests future career paths and hobbies for Calamity, and he is absolutely enchanted with Beatrix the dominatrix. He's also rowdy enough to attract the ire of nearly every casino in New Vegas: The White Glove Society seethes when the sole survivor points out that his Revolutionary War outfit technically meets the dress code, the Omertas howl when he starts encouraging the strippers and sex workers to band together and take over the casino, and the Vault 21 dwellers keep asking if he's liable to turn feral. The Chairmen, however, treat him as something of a novelty and gift him with a seersucker suit to go with his jaunty personality.

MacCready: "You know, I played cards with a guy from out here once. He tried to teach me a game called... what was it, Candyman? Kilogram?"

MacCready has the barest smattering of knowledge about the Mojave Wasteland, and he keeps injecting it into conversations no matter how inaccurate it is. He's fascinated with the sole survivor's recollections of what Vegas was like before the Great War, and his expectations are sky-high by the time they arrive on the city's outskirts. Those expectations are absolutely met once inside the Strip, even if the sole survivor's are let down. MacCready is just tickled by the existence of a city that is solely dedicated to parting you from your caps, and he settles into each new business for the express purpose of people-watching. He only tries gambling once, and immediately quits after he loses all of his pocket change.

Valentine: "Good old Las Vegas. Somehow, I'm not surprised it's still got a reputation as 'Sin City,' even this long after the bombs."

The Nick Valentine of old never visited Las Vegas, but he certainly knew about it well enough for the Nick Valentine of today to draw on those impressions. He's extra-wary about the city as a result, an attitude not helped by the many people staring at him because of his detective getup, jagged edges and golden eyes. Some people are polite enough to walk up and ask what he is: Others offer to buy him off the sole survivor directly, much to Nick's chagrin. When James Garret offers him a thousand caps for "one night of his services," Nick puts his foot down and starts glaring at everyone who so much as walks up to him and the sole survivor during their trip. The exceptions to this rule are Veronica, who is extremely polite and non-invasive with her questioning; Arcade, who is too polite to even mention Nick's synthetic state; and Raul, who finds the whole thing hilarious but admits that his ghoul status has landed him in some similar situations.

Piper: "I've heard plenty of stories about this place, and if even a quarter of them are true, I ought to get a good travel piece out of just about anyone we pass on the street."

Piper's on a mission to track down the history of New Vegas, which, like Curie, sends her on a path toward its biggest political figures. Aside from them, she's particularly interested in the services of the Mojave, like the Gun Runners, the Crimson Caravan Company, and especially the Mojave Express. Piper gets along swell with just about everyone, and she basks in the widespread acceptance that she lacks back home due to her chosen profession. She desperately tries to get Johnson Nash to ship a case of Sunset Sarsaparilla cross-continent for her, but he gently turns her down and tells her that the only courier he knows crazy enough to undertake a trip to the Commonwealth is too busy nowadays.

Preston: "They're not too friendly to outsiders here, or so I'm told, but there are always good folks to be found if you know where to look."

Preston, true to form, offers help to every little settlement he and the sole survivor come through on their journey, which delays their path to Vegas quite a bit. He makes a beeline for the Old Mormon Fort as soon as he hears the Followers of the Apocalypse have a base there, though, and spends most of his visit picking the brain of its leaders about the best ways to aid those in need in the wasteland. He and Arcade get into some spirited debates about the pros and cons of having a civil service force focused on military matters versus civilian matters, and the Minutemen leader leaves the Mojave with a lot of new ideas to carry home to the Commonwealth.

Strong: "Strong not looking for 'good time,' puny human. Strong looking for thing that make super mutants stronger."

Strong hates New Vegas, but that's nothing unexpected. The sole survivor tries to limit their time in the city and take him around the desert to locales where super mutants are more likely to be found, which brings them to Jacobstown. Surprise surprise, Strong hates Jacobstown - at first. Little by little, through talking with Lily, the other nightkin, and Marcus, Strong starts to realize that the super mutants of the town are doing exactly what he values and sharing their resources among each other for the good of the community, just minus the usual violence associated with super mutants. He struggles with this alternative way of life for a bit, but eventually comes to accept that to be a super mutant, you don't have to constantly attack those around you to show off your strength.

X6-88: "Be careful. The Institute's records about this area indicate high levels of theft, murder, and unsavory characters. It would be best to keep our guard up."

Like Nick, X6-88 greets everyone in the Mojave with open suspicion, and can hardly be convinced to leave the sole survivor's side for their entire journey. His dedication to this task leads those around him to joke about him being "a human Securitron," which the sole survivor finds amusing: X6-88 does not. Still, the ability to hire and maintain a professional-looking bodyguard while visiting New Vegas doesn't go unnoticed, and most people assume that means the sole survivor has a lot of money to spend or be separated from by force. Criminals are more likely to be ruthless, hell-bent on stealing the loads of caps the sole survivor surely has tucked away. Business owners, on the other hand, are more polite to the pair on their travels, giving them better service and goods that ingratiate X6-88 a bit more to the common people aboveground.

BONUS!

Ada: "Jackson brought us out here once, when Zoe decided she wanted to try acquiring a Securitron. The leader of the Strip turned us down."

While Deacon is playing coy about his experience in the Mojave, Ada is completely open about hers. She hasn't been to the Strip, the dam, or any of the Mojave's "fun" destinations, but she remembers the Crimson Caravan Company headquarters, the 188 trading post, and many of the small towns along the way. Her fondest memories are of scavenging around the ruins of the REPCONN test site, the Aerotech Office Park and HELIOS One. She also recalls that her caravan friends came to visit primarily to find a Securitron to take apart and repurpose, but won't say exactly what happened when they tried to do so, other than warn the sole survivor "not to invite the wrath of the House."

Gage: "Now this is a town that knows how to run a successful racket. We need to find out who's in charge, see if they can give us some tips."

Porter Gage walks right up the steps of the Lucky 38 as soon as he finds out that someone inside is running the Strip, and demands that the Securitrons let him in to "talk to the boss." The robots aren't impressed, of course, and toss him out straightaway. Gage, not one to be discouraged easily, tries to find information among the nearby raider gangs instead: Fiends, Vipers, Jackals or Great Khans, he's not too picky. The current state of the raiders in the Mojave quickly informs him that they're failing one by one against the power of New Vegas, and he renews his efforts to find the recipient of the endless streams of caps. Thwarted at every turn, he and the sole survivor retire to Gomorrah, where they bemoan their bad luck while the courier sits a few seats down from them, listening in and smirking.

Longfellow: "Just point me to the nearest saloon. If I can't cool down, I'll try to forget I'm hot."

Longfellow parks himself at the nearest watering hole and does his best to avoid the scorching Mojave heat. The Maine-born grandpa is pretty miserable during the daytime hours unless he's sitting in front of a fan with a cold beer, swapping stories about Far Harbor critters with the bar regulars. At night he's a bit more open to adventuring with the sole survivor, when the desert cools down and he can see the sights by moonlight. Although he's not a fan of the hustle and bustle of the Strip, most of the large casinos there have air conditioning thanks to the Lucky 38, so he claims a table in the back and glares at anyone who disturbs him and his drink. He gets along with most of the New Vegas crowd though, if they agree to pick up the tab.

Maxson: "We came this way, when the Elders sent me to the East Coast. I wonder if the chapter here is still persevering."

Elder Maxson is surprisingly reluctant to visit the two things that the sole survivor would've thought he'd be interested to see in the Mojave: The Strip, or the Hidden Valley bunker. If pressed, he'll admit that he's not the type to cut loose and gamble, drink or participate in general debauchery as a result of his upbringing and position of authority, but neither is he keen to drop in on the dying Western chapters of his order and become stifled by protocol and ass-kissing. He prefers to wander the desert itself, seeking solitude among the cacti and under the stars. Given the chance, he'd probably nip off to Quarry Junction and anonymously solve the NCR's deathclaw problem, if it hasn't already been taken care of. He refuses to wear his uniform for the entire trip.

Desdemona: "The Mojave probably wouldn't know what to make of our mission, which is how you know it's a good place to hide. I wonder if any of our rescued synths made it out this far."

This is by far the most relaxed the sole survivor has ever seen Desdemona, and why wouldn't it be? She's so far removed from her usual sphere that she drops her usual, tight-knit demeanor and embraces loosening up. She's still not talking openly about the Railroad's operations, but she is more likely to answer questions both personal and professional. Like Deacon, she knows a bit about the Mojave, but not so much that she can blend in completely. Instead, she embraces being a tourist and does all the usual things that go with it: Visiting the Strip, the Sunset Sarsaparilla headquarters, the Thorn, and especially Hoover Dam. When she's looking out over Lake Mead, with the sun getting caught in her hair as it sets on her left, she almost looks happy.

[tv-music]

Umbrella Academy Review 1.07

The Day That Was

We begin this episode with the story of Harold Jenkins, born on the same day as the Umbrella Academy kids, his mother died in childbirth leaving his father an alcoholic mess who takes his problems out on his son using his fist. Harold is a big fan of the academy and is convinced that as he shares their birthday he may be one of the 43. Dressed in his homemade uniform he tries to join the academy only to be told by Reginald that there is nothing special about him. When he returns home he is hit by his father and finally snaps, rather than get the beer his father asks for, he grabs a hammer and puts an end to his Dad’s abuse once and for all. He gets 12 years for the crime, and just 5 days earlier, the day we meet the siblings no less, he watched Klaus throw away dear old Reginalds diary and collect it himself. As he does this we get to see Harold's adult face for the first time, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, it’s Leonard. This brings us nicely back to where we left off in the last episode, with Leonard (I know his names Harold but for the sake of simplicity I’ll keep referring to him as Leonard) in the house taking one of the figurines but this time, as he overhears the rest of the family meeting take place, we see the first change caused by Five’s appearance, he realises they know his real name, even if they don’t actually know it’s him. 

The siblings continue their meeting, and Five convinces them that they need to work together to figure out who Harold is and he, Diego and Alison investigate. They go to the police station in order to get Harold’s file, when Diego is informed he’s a suspect in his ex’s death - no real surprise there. When Diego gets the file, Alison immediately recognises Leonard and informs her brothers who he is. I’m glad that it wasn't dragged out and the 3 of them head over to Leonard’s house to investigate. It doesn’t take long for them to find his weird shrine but when they do Five collapses and they realise he was seriously injured. They take him home and while their Mum is caring for him, Diego mentions theres another address they can check, unfortunately as he and Alison leave the house, Diego is arrested for his ex’s death so Alison heads out alone

Luther is still convinced that this has something to do with his time on the moon and once again deals with the discovery that there was no real mission. With no Alison to comfort him this time and no Diego to tie up Klaus, Luther and Klaus are left with each other. We’ve not really seen much interaction between these two characters so this was interesting to watch. This was the first time I felt any real sympathy towards Luther, when he literally started crying on Klaus’s shoulder I felt genuinely sad. I was also surprised by the turn this episode took with these two characters, Luther looking to feel numb and forget the way Klaus does and Klaus having to be the responsible one, a role reversal that didn’t feel forced or for laughs but just two people both going through something difficult, Klaus grieving for Dave and Luther realising who his father really was. 

Luther’s gone to the club and Klaus is following reluctantly, being led by Ben, to try to stop him. Klaus understandably doesn’t want to go in, but Ben makes it clear that Luther would do it if it were the other way round, no questions asked. I understand Klaus’s reluctance, he’s trying to get clean and a place like that is going to be really difficult for a newly sober person to be. While in the club, Klaus, already struggling with his addiction, started having flashbacks as part of his PTSD - give the poor guy a break. Klaus sees Luther in trouble and tries to help, almost getting himself killed in the process (or was he actually dead for the duration? I’m not sure if that was how it was intended) Klaus enters what we can only assume is the afterlife and while there he finally gets to speak with his Dad and gets some answers. Reginald wastes no time in expressing how disappointed he is in his son, while taking no responsibility for the damage he’s caused. He did reveal the answers to the mystery surrounding his death - he killed himself to bring them back together in order to save the world -  did he never think of just treating them better and speaking to them? Of course, in true tv fashion, Klaus returns to the land of the living just as his Dad is about to tell him something important

Leonard, realising that the Hargreeve siblings know his real name and it’s only a matter of time before they find him and reveal all to Vanya, takes her out of the city and to a remote cabin in the woods - it’s like Vanya’s never seen a horror movie before. 

It’s dark, they’re alone at a creepy lake and Leonard is more than a little insistent on Vanya tapping into her power - at this point I’m screaming at Vanya to see the red flags here, why isn’t she getting warning signs from how insistent he is on her having a power and figuring out how to use it while isolating her from her family? I know she’s had a tough life but come on. He takes her to dinner and when they get back to the car, there's a group of men there ready to start a fight over absolutely nothing. In Vanya’s desperate attempt to help Leonard, she inadvertently uses her powers and causes what looks like an awful lot of damage to the attackers. I find it hard to believe that this was a coincidence, she was struggling to tap into her powers and he knows they’re rooted in her emotions, Leonard hired them, I’m sure of it. When Vanya is allowed in to see Leonard at the hospital he’s wearing an eye patch - it was his eye Five found

There’s no real changes to Hazel and Cha Cha’s  day which is unsurprising but it was interesting to see it from Hazel’s point of view. Instead we see the aftermath to Hazel knocking out Cha Cha, Hazel tells her he’s leaving and he hopes she can respect that, but Cha Cha makes it clear that she can’t stating that if Hazel doesn’t kill her she will kill him and Agnes - why is she so bothered by him moving on in his life, I never got any romantic vibes from them and no ones that bothered by a coworker or friend changing paths

Diego’s in prison, Five’s injured at home, Klaus is still sober and has some answers from their father he surely needs to share, Luther is high/drunk and continuing his party, Vanya is at the hospital with a newly eyeless Leonard and Alison is on her way to find her - the episode ends with the siblings all in very different places, in more ways than one - they all need to come together and fast if they have any chance of stopping the impending apocalypse

Extra Thoughts

I grow more and more fond of Diego every episode, him jumping through a glass window, when both Alison and Five had already found ways into the house and could have let him in had me laughing. The fact that the door was unlocked just made it better

Everything in the afterlife being black and white other than Klaus’s shirt was genius, but it was heartbreaking to see Klaus thinking he was going to see Dave but getting his Dad instead

I hope the story line with Diego being arrested goes away fast - it wasn’t surprising but was just unnecessary seemingly only there to separate the siblings 

[mittensmorgul]

As Above, So Below

I’m still trying to pinpoint exactly why the focus on “heaven is fixed and actually a paradise now!” is just so deeply unsatisfying to me. And I think I need to preface this with a bit of backstory about me, because I think that gives the rest of this essay some relevant context.

I know this isn’t relevant to my main point here, but this is a metatextual and thematically identical example of the exact thing I’m gonna lay out, because context is always helpful. So please forgive this seemingly irrelevant detour, because I promise it will be relevant by the end.

(plus, would it really be an Essay By Mittens™ without at least one baffling tangent? no, it would not!)

Tangent time!

I think everyone that follows me knows how skeptical I was... or should I say how WARY I was of the way Eileen was returned to the narrative this season. We were warned in the PREVIOUS EPISODE how much Chuck was attempting to interfere in their lives. I was accused of some very nasty things, of hating the ship, or hating the character of Eileen, or of hating Sam and not wanting them to be happy. No amount of pointing at obvious warning signs in the text, no amount of yelling about Sam’s God Wound or the absolute klaxon warning that the wound had become “quiet” and his Chuck-O-Vision Nightmares had apparently stopped seemed to matter. I was declared “wrong” and told to shut up.

And then 15.09 happened, and basically everything I’d been wary of was shown to be what actually happened, but there were still unresolved issues. Eileen doubted her own feelings and walked away. She doubted what was actually real. And at the time, I said many times that I would be thrilled to see those issues resolved by the end of the season, and for her to truly know that what she’d felt growing between her and Sam was real. And by the end of the season, despite my personal horror at her previous situation (and having that personal horror compounded by the fandom literally gaslighting me and attempting to bully me into ignoring this basic actual plot detail of this specific growth process which... in the context of what my personal objection was to accepting her return at face value in the first place having been personal trauma associated with gaslighting and manipulation...) by the time 15.18 aired, I was 100% convinced that Sam and Eileen had fully chosen each other, and felt the traumatic pain Sam suffered during that text conversation with her during the snap. She NEEDED to come back, because she had been set up to be part of Sam’s Win. They were clearly each other’s future.

The show literally put in all the work to make even *me* feel this to be True and Right and Good. And then after that point we never even hear Eileen’s name again. We never were told that she was even returned at the end of 15.19. Sam, who had been so entirely devastated by her disappearance in the previous episode that he couldn’t even process it was apparently hit with an amnesia hammer and just... never even thought about her again through a long greyscale life with a blurry baby Dean factory vaguely in the background of a single scene of his life. I can’t credit or justify how after an entire year invested in making us all truly care about Sam and Eileen and the happiness they found in each other if only the cosmos would allow them to choose each other in the end would just... erase all of that in the series finale.

Which brings me to the second tangent, which is specifically about *me,* and how I feel about the cosmic order in the television show Supernatural. Because I feel a lot about it. Probably more than most people ever did. And this is also important to understanding the main underlying point I need to make here.

Something I’ve been most looking forward to, for YEARS, about Supernatural eventually ending someday was writing a book, or a thesis, or even just organizing and compiling all my observations into a cohesive narrative specifically about the cosmology of the Supernatural universe. I’ve been cobbling together my observations and realizations about the nature of heaven, hell, purgatory, the empty, the alternate universes we’ve seen, and yes, even the cosmic function of the mundane level of the story as told by events that transpired on Earth. So of everyone watching this dumb show for the last 15 years, I don’t actually know anyone who cared more that I did about finding a satisfactory resolution and transformation of every plane of existence-- the mortal world AND the “afterlife realms” we’ve experienced on this show. And in the wake of the finale, I feel cheated out of that. Because in the end, it wasn’t about the triumph of free will and a flip of the script, it was just more of the same.

And now that I have those two preliminaries out of the way, I’ll finally get to the point. :’D

(hooray, it didn’t even take 1k words to get there for once!)

The “main stage” of Supernatural has always been Earth. It’s always been “Humanity.” At the very start, we meet two men whose lives had always been dictated to them by higher powers. At first, that “higher power” was their father who raised them in his vengeance mission, who trained them to hunt the supernatural. It was the inciting incident of the entire series, after all, their realization that forces outside of their control had irrevocably altered the course of their lives. It had forever torn down what they’d trusted in family, in personal safety, and would become something they couldn’t outrun or fight back against for long before another wave of cosmic discord would settle over them once more.

We watched this story play out in ever increasing spheres of cosmic significance, until Gabriel laid it out on the table for them in the simplest possible terms (in 5.08).

GABRIEL: You do not know my family. What you guys call the apocalypse, I used to call Sunday dinner. That's why there's no stopping this, because this isn't about a war. It's about two brothers that loved each other and betrayed each other. You'd think you'd be able to relate. SAM: What are you talking about? GABRIEL: You sorry sons of bitches. Why do you think you two are the vessels? Think about it. Michael, the big brother, loyal to an absent father, and Lucifer, the little brother, rebellious of Daddy's plan. You were born to this, boys. It's your destiny! It was always you! As it is in heaven, so it must be on earth. One brother has to kill the other. DEAN: What the hell are you saying? GABRIEL: Why do you think I've always taken such an interest in you? Because from the moment Dad flipped on the lights around here, we knew it was all gonna end with you. Always. A long pause. SAM and DEAN look down, then at each other. DEAN: No. That's not gonna happen. GABRIEL: I'm sorry. But it is. GABRIEL sighs. GABRIEL: Guys. I wish this were a TV show. Easy answers, endings wrapped up in a bow...but this is real, and it's gonna end bloody for all of us. That's just how it's gotta be. ***

And isn’t that all even 1000x more painfully ironic that it all still happened even 10 years later? It was always going to end with them. And lol, “I wish this were a TV show” because if it was then it wouldn’t have to end bloody.

But this… was a Major Acknowledgement that the meta level of this story was consistent, and was telling us something important. It demonstrated that the Cosmic Structure Itself was the cause for Sam and Dean’s “destiny” in this story. But that’s not what the point of this story has ever been.

Nobody (including me, who is literally obsessed with this aspect of the story) has ever invested themselves in the narrative of Supernatural because they cared about the fate of the cosmic order over and above the fate of the characters who had committed to overthrowing it all, to “tearing up the pages” and writing their own destinies. I mean, we became invested because Sam, Dean, and Cas as characters took us by the hand and invited us to come along with them as they battled against fate for the good of EARTH and HUMANITY.

And certainly, Heaven being a horrific sort of eternal replay of the “highlights” of individual souls greatest hits, where free will didn’t apply as everyone was just boxed away into their individual holodecks to serve as some sort of giant Heaven Battery powering the furtherance of this narrative, this “cosmic order” that had become so powerful it dictated the events and manipulated the lives of people who still existed in the ostensible realm of free will and human life on Earth… that couldn’t stand in the end. But what the narrative (and people I’ve seen attempting to justify the finale as narratively sensible) seems to have forgotten was that all of that was Chuck’s construct to begin with. That without Chuck holding his kingdom in Heaven together, the walls of all those soul cubicles ceased to even be relevant.

After spending their entire lives to this point constantly fighting their way to the absolute pinnacle of the As Above, So Below narrative and pulling the plug on the original creator himself, Humanity should’ve triumphed. And I’d argue that it DID, through Jack restoring the missing essential “humanity” to the divine condition. And, silly me, I thought they’d achieved the promise of “paradise” heralded by Jack’s birth at last, and truly “flipped the entire script of the narrative.”

Ever since they thwarted the original apocalypse, I had hope that they would continue to achieve the same result right up the ladder. Metatron trying to fill the role of Chuck Junior hit his own narrative wall in TFW, while Dean’s battle with the Mark of Cain, and Cain telling him he was “living my life in reverse” and would succumb to destiny by killing his loved ones in the “reverse order” to Cain’s own path to downfall cemented this for me. Dean not only failed to kill any of his loved ones (you didn’t kill your own brother. why?), he SAVED them. He didn’t fulfil the prophecy in reverse, he subverted it. He UNMADE it.

Perhaps I was thinking on too grand a scale, that the ultimate inversion wouldn’t be “God is overthrown and replaced by more of the same,” but “God is overthrown and the entire order of the universe is restructured from the bottom up rather than the top down.

I’d hoped against hope that the conclusion of the narrative would be “As below, so above,” with the fundamental power of human love becoming the new foundation of the cosmic order. It never even occurred to me that “taking back the narrative to rewrite it for ourselves” was not the ultimate goal of Team Free Will, or the ultimate expression of their biggest win.

This whole “well heaven really needed to be rebuilt, there was still work to be done!” seems… irrelevant to me if they’d truly won free of the cosmic narrative. The entire structure of the universe-- including Heaven and Hell-- should’ve defaulted to the paradise state that Jack was literally born to bring to fruition. Wasn’t that the point of his entire role in the story, ultimately?

And if that wasn’t the case in the end, why did we never learn the fate of Hell? Was it just… irrelevant and unchanged after this? Or just… abandoned as a concept entirely? It’s just strange to me to put such a focus on heaven being the sole sphere of import in the end that it undercuts the essential humanity of the narrative for me.

The story itself had kept Heaven on a back burner for years, only occasionally mentioning that the structure of the place was falling further and further into disrepair with a dwindling force of angels struggling to keep the walls in place at all, that it seems like it could’ve been an afterthought at the end of the series rather than a focus so large it required the death of both main characters to make sure we all understood that Heaven Had Changed Now. Because TFW had never been fighting to make Heaven right. They’d been fighting to save the world itself, for humanity to all have a chance to live their lives as their own.

And we didn’t need to see that in the final hope they might get their own lives on Earth to explore. In the end, the fundamental narrative that Life On Earth was dictated by the cosmic structure of creation was never fully subverted. And for me, that’s the main reason I just… can’t accept the finale. It wasn’t a victory of free will and humanity, in the end it was just more of the same.

I appreciate the attempts to take the essential bones of the story we did get and apply a different polish to the surface of the skeleton, but to me it still feels like we’re looking at completely different beasts in the end. Like… to me this was as jarring a revelation as those drawing of modern animals reimagined as dinosaurs entirely based on their skeletons. Like, all along the narrative told me I was looking at a swan. They told me this skeleton they’re building out from is definitely a swan, without a doubt.  I know what a swan looks like-- a graceful feather-covered bird with magnificent wings. I trusted that in the end it would be at least remotely swan-looking. And then the finale ended up looking like this

and I just don’t even know where everything went so wrong. Or maybe all along I just assumed they actually knew what a swan looked like, but weren’t sure they could actually pull it off and settled for whatever the heck this is instead. Either way, I’m actually kinda grateful to the finale for being so entirely disappointing on every level, because otherwise I probably would’ve tried to adopt the monstrosity of it anyway. And I’m really, really glad I don’t have to.

[heliads]

Connections Chapter 2: Closer

The plan is simple- if Peter Maximoff wants to get closer to his father, he needs to get closer to the girl Erik’s taken on as a trainee of sorts. He won’t be any more involved with her than that, right?

previous / series masterlist / next

Get close with Y/N, and you get close to your father. That’s all Peter had to do, right? Surely it would be pretty easy.

The first opportunity to do so occurs in training class. The young X-Men are all arrayed in the training room, and Logan announces that they’ll need partners for some sparring drill he probably thought up seconds before class started. 

Peter notices a slight glint of panic in Y/N’s eyes at Logan’s words- she’s barely been at the school for a few days. She doesn’t know that many people, and many more still fear her for working with Apocalypse. So, Peter takes matters into his own hands and strides casually over to Y/N. Logan walks by, and looks around at Y/N and the few other mutants in the vicinity.

“So, who’s your partner?” Peter raises his hand. “Me. That’s me. We are, uh, partners.” Logan raises his eyebrow, but walks away after Y/N nods slowly. After he leaves, Y/N looks back at Peter. “Why’d you do that?” Peter just shrugs. “I remember what it felt like when I first started going here. Besides, if I had to work with Scott again I’d probably lose my mind. He just stares at Jean the whole time.” Y/N stifles a laugh, and just like that, Peter’s plan is set into motion.

A while later, Peter is restless. It’s a hot, quiet night, and Peter can’t seem to close his eyes for longer than a second. One of the perks of moving as fast as he does is that he doesn’t need to sleep that long, but it’s certainly not a benefit now. Peter doesn’t feel tired at all, and he can’t sleep a wink, not even to pass the time.

Eventually, Peter can’t stand it and he gets out of bed, quietly closing the door behind him before taking off. Once he stops moving, Peter finds himself outside, under the gently swaying branches of a large oak tree. He sighs quietly, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

Out of the otherwise silent night, Peter hears a sudden noise behind him. He turns to see Y/N’s startled face behind him. Peter’s eyes widen. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there. Didn’t mean to surprise you.” At a closer look, Peter’s stomach twists inwardly when he realizes that Y/N’s eyes are puffy and slightly red- she’s been crying. Y/N smiles shyly. “It’s fine. I just thought I was the only one awake at this time of night.”

Peter looks at her quietly. “Do you want to talk about anything? I mean, I know that’s kind of forward of me because we just met and all, but do you?” Y/N glances at him. “It’s fine, actually. I know I’ve been crying- I just keep having these nightmares about my family, the night they died. Every time I close my eyes, I see them blaming me for their death. They died right in front of me, and I feel like I should have done something.”

Peter puts a hand on Y/N’s shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. I know it feels hard to hear, but some things can’t be avoided. If there was something you could have done to stop their deaths, I bet you would have done it, or at least known something to do. It’s not your fault that they died.” Y/N laughs bitterly. “I just wish I could convince myself of that.”

She looks at him curiously. “Why are you doing this?” Peter knits his eyebrows, confused. “Doing what?” Does she know about his plan? Y/N sighs. “Why are you being so nice to me? Everyone here thinks I’m still some agent of Apocalypse, but yet here you are, hearing me out and helping me in class that other day. Why bother?” 

Peter grins. “I guess I’m just a naturally caring guy. I”m sure all of my friends would agree. Mainly, I suppose I just felt as one of the X-Men the other kids kinda look up to me, in a way. I figured that if I was nice to you, they’d trust you again. Although I have to say, Agent of Apocalypse is a pretty cool sounding name, so if you want me to hate you so you can call yourself that I totally understand.”

Y/N laughs again. “I appreciate your willingness to act on my villain plans, but I don’t think that’s necessary.” She yawns, and then checks her watch. “I think I’m going to head to bed.” She walks a few steps away, and then turns back to face him one last time. “Oh, and Peter? Thank you.”

After that night, Y/N and Peter grow closer and closer. They become fast friends, and Peter realizes that even without the need to have connections to his father, Peter truly enjoys Y/N’s company and is glad he has her as a friend. That being said, this plan of being friends with Y/N to have a link to his father is definitely paying off. When Y/N and Peter are studying, Erik often drops by or shares advice as to how best control their powers.

Peter is now closer to his father than he had thought possible. Even at the beginning, a little voice in the back of his mind had told Peter that this wouldn’t work, that Erik wouldn’t be that interested in him even if he was friends with Y/N. However, Erik still comes over and talks to Peter even if Y/N isn’t there. It’s worth it, it’s all worth it.

Gradually, Peter notices that there’s something different about Y/N. He can’t find a name for it, but it’s like he’s noticing things about her that he never noticed before. There’s a gleam in her eyes when she talks about something she’s especially passionate about. There’s the toss of her head when she wins an argument, and the joking roll of her eyes when she loses. There’s the happy sigh whenever she feels the morning sun light up her face, and the way she tilts her head back late at night, watching the stars.

He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about this, or why he cares so much. Shaking his head, Peter returns back to everyday life. He’s in the middle of lunch, sitting by his friends. They’re swapping stories about classes and other mutants that bring a light, bubbly atmosphere to the afternoon.

Peter realizes out of the corner of his eye that Jean is staring at him, amused. He turns to her. “What, did you say something?” Jean just shakes her head, but she’s got the grin of a cat that just ate the finest canary in the world. Peter narrows his eyes. “What is it, Jean?” The telepath smirks. “I can’t believe it. After all of your self-centric days, you’re finally interested in someone other than yourself.”

Peter glares at her. “What are you talking about? Also, rude.” Jean leans forward with the air of someone about to bestow the highest truth upon an ignorant follower. “You’re absolutely in love with Y/N L/N.” Peter scoffs. “That’s ridiculous. Of course I don’t. We’re just friends.” Jean laughs. “That’s funny- I don’t remember you spending this much time thinking about your other friends. She must be your best friend to be occupying this much of your thoughts.”

Peter swats her shoulder. “Uh, last time I checked unconsented mind readings were frowned upon. Also, I’m just thinking about her in a respectful, friendly way. All friends do that.” Jean’s smirk is impossible to bear. “I’m sure you do. Just wondering- were you going to figure that out on your own or did you realize you loved her just now?”

Jean has to lean quickly away to dodge Peter lunging at her, and she collapses in a fit of laughter. The two of them pretend to fight for a while, but after lunch ends, Peter’s mind dissolves into a rush of thoughts flying through his head.

Does he really love Y/N? Across the grassy courtyard, Peter catches sight of her. She’s talking to one of her new friends with a positivity that lights up the whole yard. Y/N catches sight of him, and waves happily. The beaming smile across her face is infectious, and Peter finds himself smiling too before he realizes it.

He walks away, headed towards some distant corner of the courtyard. He strides over to his favorite place to be alone, a cracked stone fountain where no one else goes. He leans over the stone fountain, staring at the distorted reflection of his face in the water.

He does love her, doesn’t he. Yes, he does. Peter’s not sure why it’s taken him so long to realize it, but he is absolutely in love with her. Jean was right. Peter’s knuckles tighten around the stone edge of the fountain.

He speaks to himself in a low tone, trying to convince himself of what he says. “You’re not in love with her. You don’t need her. Y/N is nothing to you. You only talked to her so you could get to know Erik.”

Behind him, there’s a quiet sound, like a startled breath caught in someone’s chest. Peter’s head whips around, and he’s filled with horror as he realizes that Y/N is standing behind him, and she has heard every word of what he just said.

“Y/N, it’s not like that- I was just talking to myself- I didn’t mean it-” Y/N’s eyes are already stony and cold, and she’s putting on a brave face to hide the tears already bubbling up. “You know, you really had me fooled. I loved you, Peter. I thought you cared about me. All of this was for what, to get to know your dad?” She continues despite Peter’s shocked expression.

“Yes, I know. Mystique told me. I can’t believe I didn’t see it. Of course you wouldn’t want me for anything else but to get to him.” Peter can’t find his voice to defend himself or call Y/N back to him, but it doesn’t matter- Y/N’s already turning away from him.

“Don’t talk to me again. I loved you, Peter. Why would you do this?” Peter finally opens his mouth to speak, but it’s too late. Y/N is already walking away from him, moving quickly to hide the tears that she’s kept at bay for far too long.

[c0ffeebee]

you got any rare kliego fic recs? i’ve probably read the first five pages of most kudos’d results but i know there are a ton that slip thru the cracks

ok, i'm sorry for replying so late, nonny, but i guess looking at the list you'll understand why ❤

i'll be honest with you once i've gotten into kliego i read through their entire tag of ao3 [at least those fics where i was ok with the tags and summary felt intriguing] so now i literally went through it again and picked those of the fics the names of which i remembered, and there's A LOT 😀 some of those are really popular, some not at all, but i remember loving those ❤

at first i thought i would tell you a bit about every fic on the list, but it would take me forever, so i will just give you titles/links, authors and summaries, hope it's fine ❤ look out for the tags tho, to know if you’re fine with everything! and some of those are benkliego ❤

i'm sure i forgot or missed something, but i did my best, trust me ❤

so without further ado i present to you: 

bee's big kliego rec list (in no particular order)

till you can breathe on your own by iwishii

Diego has never been more frightened than he is now, trying to help his brother reach the surface in time.

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practice makes perfect by iwishii

Klaus doesn't want to show up to parties totally inexperienced and virginal, so he asks Diego to help him get some practice in.

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master of my domain by achilleees

“You’re asking five 13-year-old boys not to jerk off for – it can’t be done,” Luther says. “Now that we’re older, it would be different, but back then –”

“Excuse me, I could do it,” Five says. “I could certainly outlast all of you.”

They all look at each other.

“Oh, no,” says Allison.

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the year that wasn't by achilleees

Diego turned to Five. “I’ve already, uh, lived today. This has already happened.”

Everyone went still.

“Ooh, that’s a mind-fuck,” said Klaus.

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The Weight of Himself by sarkywoman

If he could, Diego would unfurl his middle finger.

For the 'can only move the eyes' square at badthingshappenbingo. Reginald's experiments have devastating consequences on Diego, but both he and Klaus refuse to let that be the end.

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Laid Bare by MilenaDaniels

“So,” Five continued matter-of-factly, “you’re in a cramped, human sized box, in a graveyard where you can’t see light or hear sounds. What are the odds that you’re above ground?”

Diego blinked. He thought he’d been smelling the iron of his blood pooling and drying under his head but it was humid in here, and musty.

“Fuck,” Diego said.

Diego and Klaus are buried alive together.

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Flies in the Kitchen by yourfearlessleader

Klaus is sixteen and love is a rot.

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Before, During, and After by yourfearlessleader

Before the apocalypse, life was making the best of a bad situation, and Klaus found that he grew up to be very good at it.

During is, for lack of a better word, hard.

After they try to kill Vanya, after the apocalypse, after they jump through time to avoid it, after they survive and make up and a million and one other things, here they are.

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break it like you're breaking a code by findyourfortunefalling

"Are you planning to sit in a chair like a person today, or are we all eating our breakfast off of you this morning?"

"Kinky," Klaus purrs, but he rolls off the table anyway, and piles himself into a seat near the head of the table. Diego puts the plate of pancakes in front of him; he's put blueberries in them today. "Thank you, chef."

"Eat," says Diego. "Quietly."

Instead of replying, Klaus picks up a pancake with his fingers, stuffs the entire thing into his mouth at once, and chews noisily.

Diego sighs, and goes back to the stove. "Man, I remember a time when you were house trained."

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two boys emerging from shadowed hallways by spikeymarshmallows

After Ben dies, Diego drags a broken Klaus out of the Academy. They're both determined to never return, to find their own way out in the world.

Things are not as easy as they would like.

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the things i can't say by  spikeymarshmallows

"Diego, wait!" Klaus shouted, clutching Diego's arm.

"You look like Antonio Banderas with long hair," he choked.

*

Five times Klaus doesn't say 'I love you'.

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Into the Night by  spikeymarshmallows

"Hey," Klaus whispered, "hey, Diego, wake up." Diego grumbled, dragging his blanket higher up his body before settling again. "Hey." Klaus tried again, voice a little louder. "Hey, wake up." He poked at Diego's arm insistently.

*

The Hargreeves siblings go on late night adventure to get doughnuts

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all tangled close by spikeymarshmallows

They were all going to have to deal with the pheromones for however long Klaus' first heat lasted.

Diego was, in a word, screwed.

*

Five times Diego and Klaus have heat sex; and one time they don't.

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the kliego genderswap/sexswap by spikeymarshmallows

The name speaks for itself.

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The Fools' Journey by sweetstuff

After his release from prison on a manslaughter charge, Diego tries to leave behind the life he adapted to survive on the inside. He finds himself drawn to a beautiful and peculiar sex worker named Klaus in a local bar, and when danger strikes Diego makes a decision that will have them both running for their lives.

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and death i think is no parenthesis by laiqualaurelote

“You guys seem really chill about all this,” observed Ben. “By this point most people are running around screaming.”

“Occupational hazard,” said Klaus.

“I’ve lost a lot of blood,” said Diego. “I’m just accepting everything at face value right now.”

Allison is the best damn realtor in the business, and she is going to sell the Hargreeves Mansion if it kills her. Never mind that it’s packed to the rafters with the ghastly relics of grisly murders, or that there’s a vampire in the basement who looks like a 13-year-old, or that the medium she hired to exorcise its inhabitants keeps flirting with some of them, i.e. the one with the knives and the one with the tentacles. Or that if they all spend enough time together, they just might cause the apocalypse.

NotSiblings!AU that is basically The Umbrella Academy as American Horror Story: Murder House, though you need not have seen any AHS to read this.

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i got troubles (they won't let me be) by antipathy

“I don’t understand why you’re hung up on this.” Five didn’t bother to mask his scowl. “Let me spell it out for you: either you two fuck, or we all die.”

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Eye Of The Storm by shadowhive

Diego decides to surprises Klaus by taking them on a weekend trip, but it doesn’t go as planned.

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Mine, All Mine by Electra_XT

“No!” Klaus said. “Move the other way.”

“What are you trying to get a good look at, exactly?” Diego said.

Klaus blinked at him. His eyes were wide and kohl-rimmed, as fetching and alluring as the rest of him. “Why, your ass,” he said. “That thing is fine.”

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On Sight by Electra_XT

“Oh,” Klaus said, stopping in his tracks with his hand on the mouse.

Ben leaned over his shoulder. “‘Cute Latino camboy gives a show’?”

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Practice Makes Perfect Sense by punk_rock_yuppie

“Practice… kissing?” Diego asks.

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Aftershocks by punk_rock_yuppie

Saving the world is hard work, is Klaus’ last thought before succumbing to the heat of the puppy pile he and his other siblings have formed.

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Passenger by Cunninglinguist

“And you’re sure that’s okay?”

“I mean, yeah. It’s fine with me. All we have to do is ask Diego.”

“And you think he’ll be...cool with it?”

“Dunno.” Klaus shrugs and stirs his smoothie with his straw. “But I’m on board with it, and he usually gets on board with whatever I’m on board with, so. I’d say it’s at least worth an ask.”

Klaus feels Ben’s eyes burning into him as he sips his beverage. Sure, the idea of Ben possessing him had initially been about as appealing as a coffee enema, and the first few times in practice had been more than slightly traumatizing. But once they’d established ground rules and worked to get more in tune with one another, Klaus had come to find the experience to be...interesting. It could be pleasant, almost zen—there is no sensation in the world quite like being a passenger in one's own body. And to be privy to both his own sensations as well as Ben’s? Well, that’s something else entirely.

Which is why the idea of Ben possessing his body during sex both freaks him out and turns him on in equal measure.

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i am a dark and wicked thing by Cunninglinguist

Klaus is staring at Diego with hollow eyes, straw still perched between his lips. No reaction, not even a spark of joy or schadenfreude as he watches Diego disrupt breakfast. Diego shifts. He’s seen corpses before, and were Klaus not sitting close enough to touch, chest rising and falling visibly with his breath, Diego could easily mistake him for one.

Vampire!Klaus AU

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The Diamond Sinners by Cunninglinguist

Another drink and a half later, he’s finally back on the right side of numb. The house lights dim and a new dancer is announced. He’s gazing across the club, eyeing the buffet with semi-tipsy hunger, thinking that it’s probably time to call it a night, when suddenly, his heart stops dead in his chest.

There, onstage, rolling his lithe body sensuously against the pole like he was summoned out of one of Diego’s wet dreams, is Klaus.

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Broken Like Me by Starrstruck_64

“This s-s-stuff will kill you,” he says plucking the cigarette out of Klaus’ fingers, delighting slightly in the fact that he’d only partially stumbled through the sentence.

Klaus smirks and it’s such a far cry from his fun loving brother he had two weeks ago that Diego nearly flinches.

“Ever stop and think that’s the plan,” Klaus says moving to stand and reaching to snag the cigarette back.

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sing it out, hard as you can by plingo_kat

The first time it happens, Klaus doesn’t notice.

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Soft by Dirty_Corza

Sometimes, between the boxing matches and vigilante business, Diego likes to be soft.

Klaus and Ben surprise him by liking the softer side of him, too.

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Wait for it by nishiki

A mission gone wrong, a dream shattered.

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all that i have to lose by UnrememberedSkies

Diego does some good, and Klaus pays the price. 

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wasp by Chelseylovesllamas

Diego is scared of bugs, Klaus saves the day.

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Friday at Four by Kliegology

Diego's life takes a nosedive when he's forced out of work and into an art therapy class. He's clinging to his last shred of normality when he meets Klaus, who takes one look at him and threatens to tear it away.

“I think you’ll find you have a lot in common with the other people there,” The Therapist said, watching him shrewdly.

Diego was vividly reminded of the jittery, barefoot man in the pink fluffy cardigan. He snorted. “I don’t think so.”

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[nat-20s]

this is a Wild™ prompt so no pressure to actually do it, but i’ve had the scenario of “somehow s5 martin ends up in s1-s2, has to figure out how to deal with that” and if u want a narrower thing, maybe how he reacts to seeing someone again/for the first time? (Sasha, Juergen Leitner, Prentiss, etc)

Please have fun with Whatever this is:

“Don’t go wandering off in the middle of the apocalypse” seems like a pretty simple rule to follow. “Especially don’t go through any weird doors, Christ, Martin, how can that possibly be a good idea on any level, do you remember nothing from the last five years of your existence?” also seems like a generally easy thing to keep in mind. And yet, Martin is guilty of the same sin that appears to be intrinsic of all of those who find themselves under the influence of the eye, his need to know something overriding his common sense. In his defense, the door was only like 2 meters away and he wasn’t planning on going through it or even touching it at all. He just wanted to look, because it appeared to be made of a liquid version of frosted glass, and it was translucent enough that he could sort of make out the other side of it. As he got closer, he confirmed that the other side of the door a: definitely didn’t match the rest of their own little hell-scape, and b: seemed familiar in a way he couldn’t quite make sense of.  

Of course, in the dream logic of their reality, you don’t have to place your hand on the door knob in order for you to enter some place new. All it takes is getting within a foot of the door, squinting to futilely try and bring the scene across from him into better focus, and a blink and suddenly he is not where he’s supposed to be. Instead, he is staring down the hallway of his former apartment complex, watching as a familiar woman attired in a red dress and countless words is steadily knocking at his door. There’s a weight in his hands that wasn’t there before, and he looks down to find a fire extinguisher in prime position to be fired. Huh. How serendipitous.

Martin’s surprised to find that he doesn’t feel afraid, not in this moment. It appears that for all the two weeks spent hiding from her still frequent more often than not in his nightmares, for all that the sight of canned peaches still makes him nauseous, in his (probably) waking hours, she is far less intimidating than the myriad of horrors he has faced since. Or, perhaps, it’s simply that he is actually equipped to face her, and that takes away some of the teeth of his fear. Any semblance of preparation, of a plan, has given him comfort when he had little else, and that continues on now. Admittedly, though, while he does have preparation for this encounter, his plan is little more than “get Prentiss off of my fucking lawn and then see where we go from there” before he’s striding towards her.

He’s able to get close to her, about as close as he’s willing to get, before she takes any notice of him. Once he’s about five feet away, she turns her head, and briefly pauses that incessant, infuriating knocking. She gets as far as saying, “Oh, aren’t you inter-” before he sends a spray of foam directly to her face. It’s far from enough to kill her, but it’s enough to kill off some of the worms, so there’s no way that it doesn’t at least sting quite a bit. The CO2 makes her stutter and take several steps back, swatting at the foam at an attempt to get it off.

He considers pulling the handle once again, but he’s really more concerned with getting her to leave than hurting her further, and he doesn’t to run out of ammo this early should she recover and decide to go on the attack. However, he likes to think he’s not too much of a fool, so he keeps the nozzle trained on her as she becomes less frantic.

Finally she stills her swatting, breathing heavily and glaring at him, as much as she can make any sort of facial expression with what’s left of her face. “That was rather rude of you, little one. And we are trying to offer you an escape from being so tragically singular.”

Martin raises the nozzle slightly higher, just enough to bring focus to the motion as he replies, “Yeah, well, it was rude of you to stalk my apartment for two weeks and try to kill me and my coworkers, so forgive me if I don’t feel all that grateful for your oh so generous offer.”

“Hmm. So you are his future. That’s a shame. We are made so loneliness is impossible, it would not wrap itself so throughly into your form. Our love could still be given to you, in this time.”

“I have no interest in your hollow version of love. He has no interest in it. Now, leave.”

Prentiss give an airy wave of her hand, and the worms that had been trying to find any crack in the sealed door come crawling back to their home. “Fine, fine. This was just a bit of fun, anyway. I’ll be seeing him soon enough anyway.”

Martin makes a hum of acknowledgement, though he response makes little difference to her taking her leave. There’s a few silver-grey disgusting stragglers that be promptly and throughly kills with a combination of the fire extinguisher and some well placed stomps. It’s only after he finishes this that the hesitation hits him, the trepidation curling low in his stomach until it solidifies into something akin to fear. He’ll take a worm monster over facing himself any time of any day.

What would he even say to himself? Good luck, the next years of your life are completely fucked? Hey, congratulations, you actually made it to your 30s, so that’s a bit of surprise, but you’re almost certainly not going to get to 35? Don’t talk to a man named Peter Lukas, or maybe just avoid any Lukases in general? Maybe he should lie, tell him things are going to turn out okay when they’re definitely not?

Wait, okay, maybe he has something with the Peter tip. If there’s an opportunity to give this version of him some advice that could prevent future grief, he might as well go for it. It’s like, how badly could he actually mess up the time line with his interference? The world could end again? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Upon the realization that basically no matter what he does right now there’s basically no where to go up but up, he makes an executive decision to go in there and confront himself head on. Hell, maybe that’s the Thing that’s needed to get him back to Jon.

As he goes to turn the door handle he also, briefly, thinks that he should bring up that he’s madly in love with someone who feels the same. It’s not immediately relevant for trying to prevent some of the mistakes he’s made, but Martin remembers being 28, utterly convinced both that love was real and something that was completely unattainable for something like him. Being wrong on the second part of that conviction is one of the few true comforting things he can provide.

The door is, of course, locked, so he goes with plan B. Turns out fire extinguishers are rather handy for smashing things, and he brings it down several times in rapid succession until the knob breaks. There’s one step down, but he had forgotten about the furniture barricade that had been put in place. He can get the door open about 7 centimeters before it refuses to budge, and he begins to wonder if all of this is an exercise in futility. At least his voice won’t be muffled when he calls out, “Martin? You in there?”

There’s nothing but silence, and he sighs and leans his head against the apartment door. “Seriously, Martin, could you respond? And maybe move some of this furniture? If you’re dead that means things are way more messed up than I expected.”

After a beat, a strained voice calls out, “Oh, so a bad impersonation of me is part of your dumb monster powers now? Piss off!”

After a groan and an eyeroll, Martin calls back “I’m not-!” before cutting himself off. He meant to say “I’m not a monster, I’m you” but both of those things are only about 60-70% true. Instead he goes with, “I’m not an impersonation. If I was something pretending to be someone else to get inside, wouldn’t I pick one of your coworkers coming to get you? Like Tim or Jon or Sa- you know, um, one of them?”

Silence.

“You have a peephole, right? You could look through it, confirm that I’m not worm-infested?”

He doesn’t hear a response with words, but he does hear the sounds of motion coming from inside. After a few minutes, the furniture is pushed aside, and the door is opened for him. Jesus, the guy on the other side of the door looks like shit. He probably doesn’t look much better, apocalypse grime covering every inch of him, but still. The man in front of him has deep bags under his eyes and a gauntness to his face that will take a while to ease. Worst of all, he looks painfully young and painfully afraid, and while Martin can recognize himself on a logical level, there’s a forced disconnect that makes him feel like he’s looking at a stranger. The knife that’s being held between them probably doesn’t help matters.

His former self’s voice shakes with a mix of adrenaline and exhaustion. “You got the hair color wrong. And the age.”

“That’s because I’m 32. Also, still not an impersonation.”

“My hair goes white in 5 years?”

“Not in the natural way. You know those hokey stories where people are so scared their hair turns white? That’s...sort of what happened. And it’s not going to happen to you, if I can help it.”

That’s the wrong thing to say, apparently, as the younger Martin’s face twists up. It’s a lot, Martin thinks it’s a lot and he’s far more experienced in the reality of the esoteric, but sometimes things being a lot is unavoidable, and he’s pretty sure time travel is one of those cases. He shrugs in response to the younger’s confusion, and says, “Can I come in? I think I’m here to dole out some advice, and I’d honestly prefer to do while not standing in worm corpses.”

He’s studied for a few brief moments, before he’s told, “You broke my doorknob.”

“You’re never gonna live here again, and it’s not like you were getting the security deposit back anyway. Does it matter?”

The younger one’s face collapses, despondent when he replies, “But. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Martin’s been experiencing a nauseating mixture of anger, pity, and compassion while seeing his past self, but that’s enough to kick in his care-taking instincts, and he really just wants to wrap the guy in a blanket. That’s not going to help either of them, but what he says next might. With a frankly ridiculous wave of fondness for that uncomfortable cot (or, more accurately, for the memory of a certain someone offering said cot), “You will. After you go back to the institute, you, um, you won’t have to stay here again.”

Martin, junior edition, only looks more lost, but he does step aside to let Martin inside the apartment even if he doesn’t lose his death grip on the knife. Martin pulls the door behind him, and as he does so, it transforms into the door that got him in this mess, so looks like he made the right choice. It doesn’t immediately take him (hopefully) back to his own time, but Martin’s gut is telling him that he won’t be spending much longer here. “Okay, so, you have a notebook around here, right? Because I’m about to dump quite a bit of information on you all at once, and I happen to know that our memory for things of this sort is not fantastic.”

The younger one glances over to the table where a notebook and pen are laying and while he moves towards it, he’s clearly hesitant to occupy both his hands with writing. The precaution makes sense, but Martin’s getting tired of it nonetheless due to a combination of running out of time and generally being tired of people seeing him as a threat. With a sigh, he tries his best to evenly say, “The next few years are going to be, um, messed up, to say the least, but hopefully if you have more information than I did, they’ll be less messed up.”

Younger Martin finally concedes, putting the knife down to pick up the pen, and flips the notebook open. Primed to start writing, he gives slight nod of his head to tell Martin to keep talking. Martin takes a breath, lets it out, and spills everything he can think of. “Okay, most immediately, CO2 kills Prentiss’s worms, and enough of it will kill her. A fire suppressant system will do the trick, but make sure there’s a way to actually trigger it inside of the archives. Makes sure the weird spooky table doesn’t get destroyed, it seems like it should be destroyed, this instinct is wrong. Generally speaking, you should get a buddy system set up, as it’s usually when people go off on their own that particularly bad things start to happen, whether it’s on an investigation or going to America. Speaking of, don’t let Jon go to America. Don’t let Tim go to stop the Unknowing. The Unknowing won’t work anyway, but you’ll probably still want to have the circus blown up, just make sure everyone is doing it from a distance. Don’t let yourself work for Peter Lukas, actually don’t interact with Peter Lukas, except maybe to, I don’t know, hit him with a shovel. And most importantly, kill Elias Bouchard as soon as possible-”

“-What?!-”

“-and in particular make sure you destroy the eyes, that’s vital to this whole thing. Turns out he’s actually a 200 year old scumbag named Jonah Magnus, you know, the founder of the institute, and by getting rid of him, you’ll save yourself a quite literal world of pain.”

“I don’t, what, I don’t think I could kill somebody-”

Martin felt a sharp tug towards the door, and he knew his time here was up. “Oh, wow, I really have changed, huh. Anyway, uh, final notes: you’re not going to end up alone and unloved and forgotten before you’re even fully gone, so feel free to lay that fear that occupies a disconcertingly large amount of your mental space to rest. Good luck, and try not to die!”

Before he can hear his other self’s response, he’s back in the wastelands he currently calls a twisted version of home, and Jon’s arms are wrapped around his neck in a fierce hug. As far as he can tell, nothing’s changed from his little literal trip down memory lane. There’s a few explanations for it, but since Martin’s not going to go out of his way trying to prove any of them, he choses to believe in the one that’s the most hopeful; that somewhere, out there, with some well timed words, there’s a universe that has turned out kinder than their own.

[someplace-that-is-else]

‘Until We Meet Again: The 100′s Final Season--Wasted Potential or A Fit Ending?’

Editor’s Note: Spoilers for the last season of The 100 as well as past seasons.

 I was surprised.

 In the closing hours of the sixth season of The 100, the CW announced that it would be getting a seventh season. They also announced that it would be the final season.

 What? FINAL season? Really?

 The fifth season was a great season for the show with the six-year time jump, ending in another time jump that spanned 125 years and a new planet. The sixth season was an intriguing new world and storyline. It had been a while since it went hardcore sci-fi…A.L.I.E. in the divisive third season…the sixth season did it with ripe possibilities, plot twists, and…as was usual for this show…actual death. Labeled Book 2, I had been curious to see where the creator Jason Rothenberg and the writers would take us given Book 1 took 5 seasons.

 But now? Would main characters Clarke and Bellamy (aka Bellarke) end the show together? Would humanity learn any better given they have survived at least TWO apocalypses? Would Octavia (my favorite character who had gone from the girl under the floor to Grounder to Skairippa to lethal Red Queen) get a happy ending?

 With 16 episodes announced, there was plenty of time. Plenty of time to close out the story. My co-worker who was a big fan of course was worried. She grew moreso the closer it got to the time when the CW usually promoted. And…NOTHING.

 A sign of things to come…or just paranoia?

What’s the Endgame?: The 100’s Serpentine Final Season Plot

 I’ll say this much. I was intrigued.

 At the end of last season, our main characters revealed to the people of the new planet Sanctum that the leaders they worshipped as gods were not. They used technology to transfer their consciousness into ‘willing’ people. After being that way for centuries, how would these people go on when their belief system had been revealed to be false? Some people were angry at being deceived. Others felt mad at Clarke and friends for revealing the truth, destroying their system of living.

 Meanwhile we had Clarke and the others still dealing with the truce between them and the Eligius prisoners that were part of their crew now. Their leader Diyoza was missing, leaving the Eligius adrift. And due to the end of Season Six, Clarke’s own crew were on a slippery slope, thinking her ‘daughter’ Madi was still the Commander.

 Four different factions. So many possibilities. They were possibilities that the writers appeared to want to touch on. And there was the question of…could they all get along? Be greater and better than the sum of their parts? Or was the last of humanity doomed to be in constant conflict?

 Then there was the disappearance of Bellamy…

  Ah! Bellamy. After being a co-leader with Clarke basically for most of the seasons, Bellamy found himself at the center of a new mystery. Moments after his sister Octavia disappeared into mist after being stabbed by new character Hope, Bellamy was full of questions about what had just happened. What he got was knocked out, dragged across the ground by people unseen, and then vanished into the Anomaly, a circle of light that was a mystery left over from last season.

 What followed was several different stories. There was Echo, Bellamy’s girlfriend, on the hunt for the vanished Bellamy. There was the mystery of what happened to Octavia. There’s Clarke and Friends chasing after her as well as getting to the bottom of the Bellamy mystery. Meanwhile, there was Madi left behind, dealing with her duty versus a desire for a normal life. There also was the growing tension between the Eligius prisoners and the natives of the new world.

 Because that was not enough, there were curveballs. Oh…that crazy Commander from the Flame, the symbol of the tribes united under Clarke? He possessed one of the last False Gods on this world. You had one of Clarke’s group Starscream-que Murphy and his lover Emori…also pretending to be Gods themselves due to a plot thread from last season. Diyoza and Octavia’s whereabouts revealed the origins of new character Hope…and a whole other world Bardo. And behind Bardo…was a loose plot thread that was seeded all the way back in Season Four. Oh, and did we mention there was a lot of time jumping, one prequel tale (aka a backdoor pilot), and world travelling a la SLIDERS.

 It was not unusual for The 100 to throw so many ideas at the audience. But so many ideas…INCLUDING THE KITCHEN SINK?  In the FINAL season?

 Yes, a few of the ideas were intriguing. On their own. But all of them…together?

 I could not begin to describe how many times I felt like I needed a cheat sheet to keep up with everything. And even then…there would be weeks where the viewers never saw a set of characters or a plotline. There was one case when one character was gone for weeks aka a long stretch of episodes. Worse given how important that character was to several characters, no one noticed they were missing.

 Or the time jumping. There would be a plotline with a plot twist. Then the show would jump back three months. Then it would move a few weeks ahead to show another angle. Or when it decided to explain the whereabouts of Bellamy, it chose an episode where time passed and then it jumped ahead to the present, picking up a storyline from another episode. It was the very definition of whiplash.

 At the start of the season, the writers pondered an interesting question. Was the last of humanity doomed to constant conflict…or could they be better than that? While the Bardo plot thread tapped into that theme, the show became style over substance. And that style…was smoke and mirrors. I thought that theme was being tackled with the four factions on Sanctum. Now? The writers gave up on it. Sadly.

 By the time the writers revealed the whereabouts of Bellamy, most of the season was over. Worry kicked in. Was there still time to resolve the characters’ stories…or would it be…a rushed ending?

 Speaking of which…

 The Girl Under the Floor: The 100 and Natural Ends

 Clarke. Octavia. Indra. Echo. Madi. Miller. The names go on and on.

 Throughout six seasons, viewers have gone through the highs and lows with these characters. Viewers saw Clarke kill her first love Finn. Viewers saw Indra take Octavia under her wing, giving her a mother figure that she missed in her own life. Viewers saw Madi lose her mind. The Conclave. Praimfaya. Mount Weather. A.L.I.E. Characters had been known to go through it on this show. Things happened. People changed.

 So near the end of The 100’s run, viewers wanted to know…how would their favorites end up?

 What they got…AGAIN…was smoke and mirrors.

 The writers appeared to be more focused on new characters than the characters that viewers had gotten to know over six seasons. In some cases, like Bardo native Levitt, it worked because he became involved with a character viewers cared about. In this case Octavia. Others like that Diyoza-lite chick had no connection to the faves, other than being annoying no matter how sympathetic she was written. Or worse, they were like Hope. A rapidly aged child of Diyoza, Hope was more whining annoying brat than a fighter like viewers expected her mother to be. Given more time, she might have become likable, but…there was no time.

And speaking of time…what of the old timers? The characters the audience cared about. So many characters have come and gone. Finn. Lincoln. Lexa. Jaha. Jasper. Clarke’s own mother Abby. Only a handful of the original 100 were left along with well developed supporting characters. With this being the last season, were they coming to a natural end?

 Octavia was being dealt with efficiently as the writers highlighted the fact that she was on a path to redemption after two seasons of darkness and introspective healing. But what about Clarke…THE MAIN CHARACTER? After doing what she had to do for her people, what would her happy ending be…at peace with Madi, finding a new love, and/or finding a way for all humanity to live peacefully in such a way that the sacrifices were worth it? Or what of Indra…what end does she deserve as a warrior? What of Madi…would she choose a normal teenager’s life or the life of being a commander of her warrior people?

 Off the top of my head, there were two characters who had quite a nice end. First there was Octavia. After the horrors she committed as The Red Queen and trying to make amends, she discovered redemption through the eyes of others who saw her through a different and fresh set of eyes. First, Hope who looked up to her as a mother figure. Then through the eyes of a complete stranger in Levitt who found her inspiring. She found the one thing that she had been looking for throughout the whole series: belonging and acceptance.

 The other character was Murphy. The cockroach. From the ‘Starscream’ of the group to showing some sense of right and wrong. And along with Emori, they were the ultimate scheme team. Slowly, but surely there was love. Posing as false gods presented a new challenge for them…what happens when a scheme team is given actual responsibilities for people. And through this challenge, the viewers learned exactly how much Murphy had grown through the series as well as explored layers to Emori that we did not even know she had.

 That was not the fate for all the characters we knew and loved.

  Madi started off alone in the series, discovering love through her motherly bond with Clarke. And the constant debate of teenage life vs leader life has been a constant with her a la BUFFY lite. She was finally given a taste of what it was like to be a teen…then the plot arc of the Bardo people ended that. Abruptly, I might add. In fact, her fate felt like shock value for value sake given some of the other stories for characters.

 Gaia appeared posed to be a long overdue love interest for Clarke. Not to mention that the writers were exploring more of her relationship with her mother Indra. Instead, she became the character who vanished for the majority of the episodes. Worse, NO ONE noticed she was gone.

 There were several more instances of this (can we talk about the fact that while Raven got moments, she did not really have ANY endgame developments?), it was the main narrative characters who appeared to get the worst of this.

 And nowhere was that clearer than with Bellamy Clarke.

  Bait and Switch, or the Strange Case of Bellamy Clarke

I had always heard that you could tell how a TV show felt about a character/actor by how they were written out of a show. A recent example that came to mind was Charisma Carpenter’s character Cordelia Chase during Season 4 of ANGEL by way of a coma when all fans knew she was the heart and soul of that show. 

Another example was the character of Professor Maxmillian Arturo (played with wit, humor, and intelligence by John Rhys-Davies) on the sci-fi show SLIDERS. Not only was he stabbed with a syringe that rendered him dumb, but he was shot and his body left on a planet that exploded. All IN THE SAME EPISODE. Yeah, no love lost between the actor and the people in charge during that show’s third season.

 Which brings us to Bellamy Clarke…

 Bellamy Clarke had been with The 100 since the beginning. A reckless bad boy except for when it came to his sister Octavia, Bellamy went from that to being a frenemy to other main character Clarke to being a good friend and co-leader (birthing the ship name Bellarke) to a capable leader in his own right. Along the way, he made so many mistakes. Bellamy clashed often with others. But he grew. And the time jump saw him get a capable girlfriend in Echo. His bigger drama would always be with his sister Octavia as they clashed as only siblings could clash, but there was always love there. So it made sense that he would want to know the mystery of Hope and how it tied into his sister turning into mist and vanishing.

 But…he vanished himself. For the first half of the season, the mystery of his kidnapping was a plot. And then…during a shootout involving Octavia, Bellamy appeared to be blown up in an explosion. Granted, The 100 did not shy away from killing off a main character (Lincoln, Lexa), but it was so jarring to see it happen.

Just as bad as seeing Bellamy later…as a disciple of the Big Bad on Bardo. After a bottle episode involving a man vs nature theme (a theme I do not like and did not like in this case). And time jumping. AGAIN. Can we say whiplash?

 And then…Bellamy was SHOT. BY CLARKE. Body…left…bleeding…on…the floor.

 Can we say DOUBLE whiplash?

 I was aware thanks to the co-worker who got me into The 100 that there was some off-camera drama going on. And because of that, the actor had asked for some personal leave time. So his filming was very, very limited. HOWEVER, I know enough after years of watching tv shows (the situation with the two actresses on THE GOOD WIFE for example) AND soaps to know two things. One…if a writer had an actor for a limited time, you wrote a complete arc. You also filmed as much as possible. And if you needed said actor back at the end of a show and was not sure if they would be available…go ahead and film a scene to insert in the last episode. It was what the fans that have followed a show for years deserves. PERIOD.

 Two…the fate of Bellamy could have been written better than that. In fact, the writers were better off having Bellamy die in the Bardo explosion while trying to save his sister. That at least was true to his character and his complete arc on the show. If they had to do the disciple arc at all, there had to be some conflict over his loyalty to Clarke or his loyalty to Bardo. Allow the other characters to be conflicted, something the writers normally did not shy away from. Show, don’t tell the struggle. If Clarke had to shoot Bellamy, it had to make sense.

 From what was shown, there was plenty of time for Clarke to get the book of Madi’s memories. There was time to just simply knock Bellamy out. And if Bellamy had to be shot, there was time to write in the fate of his body. To fans’ knowledge, Bellamy’s body was still laying there on the floor, bleeding out. To add insult to injury, FakeRussell…who was in the same scene…was in the next episode with no Bellamy mentions.

 So let’s review. Bellamy was blown up in one episode. Bellamy was left on a world to fight nature on another. Bellamy was turned into a brainless disciple on another episode. Finally, Bellamy was shot dead by his best friend (who happened to be his wife IRL. How meta.).

 Shows what the writers and creator feel about the actor, don’t you think?

 May We Meet Again…?

 Regardless of the management of the character of Bellamy, The 100 had another main character to deal with. Clarke Griffin had been the main protagonist since Episode 1. She had lost her first love, lost a great love, and made quite a lot of serious choices for someone so young. And given that the theme of the last season was about humanity and its way of living, it was a sure thing that Clarke would have to make another major decision. But…would Clarke get a happy ending?

 Well…this show would not be this show…and Clarke would not be Clarke if she wasn’t put through it. My problem was that up until the end, Clarke was basically a cameo in her own show. That itself was an oddity given that she was the one focused on the hunt for Bellamy.

 There was potential. From what to do about Madi to how she was coping with her mother’s death to some vibes between her and Gaia, Clarke had several things spinning in her orbit coming into the last season. And what was surprising was NONE of it was touched on. 

And then…Bellamy was shot by her and Madi turned up brain dead in the service of the Bardo arc.

 In the end, Clarke was with her friends. And she was happy. But…she was not with her daughter though Madi did wind up in a better place. She was not with anyone though a cameo from the actress who played Lexa in the early seasons was nice. And her mother’s death was not touched on…though that actress also made a cameo in the last episode.

 Does Clarke deserve a happy ending? Debatably yes. But this season a happy ending did not at all feel earned. And it would be one thing if there was another season. However, this was the LAST season. Worse, was the central theme of this last season…a main theme of the show itself…answered? Did humanity learn to be better, or would they stay in constant conflict?

 In the end…humanity DID learn to be better. Interestingly it took Octavia and Raven going to bat for humanity to make that happen. And that was after Clarke had again failed after making a near fatal decision for the rest of the group. After watching Clarke grow into a capable leader, I was saddened to see that in the end she felt like a footnote. As did Bellamy.

 Well…I guess I could look on the bright side…Octavia got a happy ending. And a complete arc. So did Murphy. Raven proved she was also an important character akin to the many times that Bonnie Bennett had to save all the characters on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES constantly, usually at great sacrifice to herself. But Clarke and Bellamy…the actual main characters…well…

 For a show to be told they got 16 episodes to wrap up plots that had been going on and characters that have been developed over 7 years, I would say it went out with a whimper. Given other shows with notice like HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER and THE MAGICIANS went out with just about everything wrapped up fittingly and just about all characters serviced almost correctly if not outright perfectly, The 100’s last season looked like patchwork in comparison. Like the writers threw everything at the wall to see what would stick. Or worse…they got so distracted by what was shiny and new, they forgot about the characters that viewers cared about.

 In the end, I guess the last season was like a sandcastle. It looked nice, but once the waves come in, it went away. So much potential…washed back into nothing.

     #the100 #cw #bellarke #jasonrothenberg #octavia #finalseason #bellamy #clarke #sliders #charismacarpenter #angel #johnrhysdavies #arturo #starscream #buffy #whiplash #thevampirediaries #howtogetawaywithmurder #themagicians

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

It would be cool if they did another 400 days type mini series with some characters. like showing us the beginning/middle/different parts of the apocalypse from the perspectives of: Marlon, Louis, Violet, Sophie, James, and Lilly. I think it would do well

I think something like this would do well, too. We talk about this a lot and I keep hoping that if we continue to talk about it, they’ll somehow hear us and actually do it haha. 

Just think of the possibilities- a game with each episode dedicated to following a different protagonist during a different time in the apocalypse, telling a previously unheard story. They could even do more character-driven stories that focus more on that aspect rather than the walkers and outside dangers, y’know? 

Really the only downside I could see if they actually did this is that people outside the fandom would be whiney about it? I mean, people who casually played Telltale games would look at Skybound like “Rehashing old characters who aren’t muh Clementine? Pass.” Y’know? And to be fair, I could see people within the fandom being disappointed, too. 

But a majority? I think we’d all be happy to just have another twdg installment if Skybound wanted to make one... as long as they leave Clementine alone. That’s my one condition haha. 

Leave her alone, Robert. 

I’ll even throw out a bunch of possibilities for episodes-

Carley and Doug - I would love an episode that starts with Carley working as a reporter just as the walkers come. We could meet her crew, go through when they were attacked and explore the trauma she experiences after watching her producer get eaten alive in front of her. 

Then, in comes our hero: Doug. Doug saves her life, and the two of them manage to escape and hideout. This is the perfect time to explore Doug’s character, too, as well as the relationship he and Carley had before they met up with the drugstore crew. 

We can learn more about how Carley came to be so good with firearms and more about Doug’s technical background. Not only that, but it would be interesting to see these two actually interact since, y’know... they canonically have romantic feelings for one another. 

Then the episode could end with them meeting Glenn outside, who brings them back to the group at the drugstore. 

The St Johns - Here me out, but I would totally be on board for an episode about these people and how they starting picking off their farmhands for food. We don’t even have to play as any of the St Johns, we could play as a farmhand that actually escaped that fate after discovering what these people were doing. 

It could definitely be more horror based, too. Like a cat and mouse sort of chase scene with the protagonist and Andy or Danny with them escaping with their life at the end and journeying off. 

We could also see more of the bandits and how that agreement came to be with them. We could see more of Jolene, too. 

Lilly - Okay, I want to know what the hell happened to Lilly between s1 and s4. From what I’ve gathered and inferred, Lilly wandered alone for years before finding the delta, the first place she ever considered home since... well, the motor-inn. Which... is nuts. 

Then there’s all the trauma of losing Larry on top of what a piece of shit he was. I know I laugh at her for being all “No more ice cream, no more hair dryer” when she was telling Clementine about Larry cutting their power but we don’t know much about just how abusive Larry was. 

Plus, we don’t know what happened to her mom. Larry still carried her wedding ring even into the apocalypse and died with it in his pocket. There’s just... a lot of things. 

So I think an episode about Lilly by herself could be an interesting exploration of her being her own enemy, y’know? When I say character-driven, I mean solely character-driven with Lilly having flashbacks or nightmares or talking to herself or even hallucinations. Think Michonne, but even better executed. And with no ghost children. Maybe a ghost Larry, though. Which is arguably worse. 

And it could end with someone from the delta finding her. 

Christa and Omid - I feel like this is an obvious one since everyone loves these two and we’re still salty that they never brought Christa back. So it’d be cool to see these two either before meeting Lee’s group, or their time with Clementine between s1 and s2.

This is the only time I’ll allow Clementine to be here. If they feel they have to plop Clementine into this, then do it this way. We could explore Clementine’s guilt of what happened to Lee and the trauma she suffered while with the stranger, we could explore Christa’s pregnancy and learn more about her and Omid’s relationship. 

We could see some dad moments with Omid as he and Clementine bond, perhaps dive into the fear and anxiety of a baby that’s coming, too. 

Kenny and Sarita - So... while Kenny’s not my favorite person, I can’t deny that I’d be interested in seeing him after he apparently escapes the walker horde after killing Ben and what he went through before he met Sarita. 

Hell, have an episode where we play as Sarita as she stumbles upon Kenny and how she saved him from the restaurant he was hiding in. We could get a glimpse into Kenny from Sarita’s point of view and what they went through during their time together. We could learn about Walter and Matthew, too. 

Honestly, I just want to know more about Sarita as a character rather than a plot device to die in order to further Kenny’s development, y’know?  

Bonnie - Yeah, yeah, I know. No one likes Bonnie and “who wants to play as Bonnie again?? she sucks??”, but damn it... I want them to redeem how badly they fucked up with her story in 400 Days. 

I want an episode about her struggling with her drug addiction and how it affected her when the dead started walking. What she was willing to do to get her fix, y’know? Bring back Leland and Dee and how they helped with her road to recovery.

Leland himself even said that when they found her, she was still so stuck on those drugs. I think exploring that could be a fascinating experience. 

Jane - An episode about Jane and Jamie? An exploration of Jane’s struggle with keeping her sister alive while having that internal survival instinct trying to take over all leading to her finally giving Jamie what she wanted- to leave her. Then how that guilt and loss took a toll on Jane and hardened her.

And like, I know Jane is kind of in the same boat as Bonnie where a lot of people [specifically Kenny followers] absolutely hate her and would whine about an episode dedicated to exploring her character, but I don’t care. I’d play it, I’d love to understand Jane more, even if I don’t particularly like her. 

David - This one is here for selfish reasons. I want an episode all about David. I don’t care what you do, but I want to see David’s struggle of literally losing his entire family in a single night, as well as losing the world to the apocalypse and having to move forward.

Like... seriously, remember what Kate was all “I bet David was happy when the world ended” or some shit? I actually disagree, Kate, since the day the world ended, he lost his father, mother, brother, uncle, his fucking children, and you, his wife within a night.  He spent years thinking you all were dead while traveling with Ava and his unit, fighting the dead and trying to survive.... but no, the day the walkers came was probably super great for him. Ugh. 

The bonus is we get more Ava, too. Also, I don’t think anyone would oppose if you threw in the whole “David and Lingard might’ve had a thing”... just sayin’. We stan bisexual David. 

Javier - Throwing this one in there because I think an episode about Javi, Kate, Gabe, and Mari would do incredibly well. Everyone misses the Garcia’s, everyone was bummed that we ever got a follow up to what Javi was up to after ANF. 

Y’know... since ANF was a mess, they probably didn’t feel they could do a follow up because people wouldn’t play... but I’m telling you, we’d play another adventure as Javier Garcia. I don’t know what kind of story you’d tell, but it doesn’t matter. Well, it does... but ya get me. 

Plus, more Gabe and Mariana content. C’mon. 

James - *slams fists on table* I want my James and the whisperers episode damn it!! And I’m gonna keep saying it until someone either makes it or pays me to shut up. 

I don’t care if you like James or not, you can’t deny how fascinating it would be to have an entire episode dedicated to the whisperers. On top of that, we’d get to see James and Charlie and how their relationship suffered during their time with the whisperers, as well as James realizing what a monster he became. 

Maybe we could have a scene where James actually makes his famous mask, or a scene of James escaping them and leaving Charlie behind. It could end with James in his camp until he hears gunshots one night. When he goes to investigate, he finds Clementine and AJ trying to escape Lilly and Abel and we get him intervening from his perspective. 

There ya go, there’s a second Clementine cameo that doesn’t fuck everything up. Ta-dah. 

Sophie and Minerva - A popular one that most of us would want. Them after they were taken away and how they suffered within the delta. It’d be cool to play as Sophie, and tragic since we know how that would end. But we could be the one who acts out and tries to escape all while doing our best to keep Minerva from giving into them... which again, imagine the heartbreak. 

The Ericson crew - Like with the twins, this would be a popular one that most people would want to play. While I’d rather they kept their fingers off Louis and Violet since they’re bound to fuck them up, I can’t deny that I want to know what happened at the school during the first days. 

We could even play as Ms. Martin as she chooses to stay and take care of all these kids, how she bonds with them before inevitably meeting her fate in the greenhouse. 

And c’mon, you know you want to see baby child versions of our Ericson kiddos. Imagine Louis and Violet at these young ages? Seeing other kids we never got to meet? We’d eat it up! ...Well, assuming they did a good job with their characterizations. Y’know. 

---

Those are all the major ones I’d like to see, but hey, if any of you had other ideas for episodes following characters I didn’t mention, feel free to share! 

[hellstenglow]

Fiveya Meta: they need to talk

Endure me, I am on a fiveya-train and my thoughts don’t shut up.

After watching the most recent behind the scene videos of TUA season 2 we can conclude that they did make senseless choices in the plot because in some cases they had to. For example in the case of the snow storm created by Harlan in the final episode, that was added to the script because suddenly there have been a snow storm on the outside set the days before the scheduled filming and they couldn’t clean the place enough, in time for the recording. The snow was added.

I also think they could have written some of the characters better and given them real development (*cough* Luther, Ben *cough*). I wasn’t even a fan of the whole “Vanya lost her memory” thing, but I’ve read that Steve Blackman (the showrunner) doesn’t want to diverge from the original content too much (which is a bit silly to say since they did make major changes since season 1, but okay). I guess that’s why Vanya’s amnesia was still there, although they treated it differently. In the comics it was Mom-Grace who helped Vanya to find herself again and her own value, in the show it was Sissy who did it. I thought it was kind of a hint to the comics the fact Sissy resembled Show-Grace a bit (blond, kind and a mom). Did I think it was unnecessary to have a love interest for Vanya right after season 1? I did, but I justified the choice by thinking that the show wanted to give Vanya a taste of what real love (not like Leonard’s manipulative and abusive love) is supposed to be. I also thought it was a way to show how Vanya needs to stop clinging to the first person who gives her affection, attention and treats her with kindness. I hope she’d realize that and work on herself and family in season 3, first and foremost.

Even with the evident flaws I enjoyed season 2, especially because I decided to treat it as a passing by (detour/digression) chapter in a longer story. All Hargreeves siblings in the ‘60s tried hard to make a new life and ignored their actual life (Allison, Luther, Klaus) or had a convenient amnesia (Vanya) or focused on something too much to lose track of what matters (Diego). Everyone except Ben (who was not treated once again as a full character despite the apparent level up the PR promoted) and Five (who once again was running around in panic mode to stop an apocalypse). Remember Vanya saying, “New timeline, new me.” And Five replying “That’s NOT how it works.”? I may give the writers more credits than it is due, but I hope those two lines were some kind of meta messages for the more attentive viewers. Those two lines can explain perfectly season 2 to be honest.

Nobody can know how long a tv show would run, a fact that expose us to uncertainty. It’s always a gamble trusting writers and showrunners to deliver a good story, but all it’s fair game and one has only to accept it. I do not trust any of them, but I cannot help myself and still hope that they will not ruin everything. With all this said, let’s talk about something I think the show has to tackle in next seasons: Five and Vanya are two points of a theme that needs to be addressed and solved. They need to interact, talk and close their open theme together.

This is not a cohesive meta and I probably will lose myself in too many details, but I hope the message I am trying to convey will arrive. This is only my reading of the show and theories, so you can disagree. I just hope you’d find something interesting and maybe help someone to have a different perspective on what’s going on and where (I pray) the show will go. Here the points I will talk about, if you are in for a very verbose essay, please click on the “keep reading” button. Meanwhile I’ll wear my tinfoil crown and sip some margarita.

Five and Vanya are a theme

It was mean to be Ben

Why the Fiveya’s tension in S2 EP 7’s iconic scene is a symptom of something

I dare to hope in fiveya (at least until proven wrong)  

1. We have a theme: Five wants to stop the apocalypse and Vanya is the apocalypse

It’s a twisted joke of the universe that the very thing Five is obsessed about in season 1 (the apocalypse) was caused by the person he trusted the most (“I’ve decided you’re the only one I can trust” - Five in S1EP1). The red thread that linked Five and Vanya can’t be more evident, that’s one of the reasons why I started shipping them. The family’s dynamic, the siblings’ relationships and bonds are equally important, they add layers and motivations to the story, but if we strip everything else and look at the core, we all know Five and Vanya are at the centre of it.

It’s not a simple coincidence that Five said “I’m the four horsemen”. At first, it’s just a funny line, because Five is drunk and he described himself as those fearsome figures (because he is the best assassin of the whole world and time. Death incarnated in his humble opinion). You don’t take him seriously when he said that line, you don’t pay attention to it.  

However, later it gains a certain degree of truth. Subtly the show tells you that indeed Five is linked deeply to the “apocalypse” (Vanya), as much as the four horsemen (they are the prelude and the bringers of the end) are linked to the apocalypse (in the biblical sense). He lived it. He was trapped there for 45 years. He is obsessed with it. The Apocalypse is his business.

Timid little Vanya is the first person he looked for in the middle of the doomsday’s ruins and arguably his closest friend. On the first day of his return Five only have meaningful talks with Vanya. Five sought her to confide the horror of his memories and share the burden of the truth. He trusted her above everyone else. Then the universe made a laughingstock of him when it was revealed that Vanya caused the Apocalypse. Five didn’t know he was running towards her, despite wanting to go back to his family (her) all his life. 

In the first two episodes of season 1 they made clear that Vanya and Five had an intimate bond in their childhood and still cared for each other after so many years, then the show proceeded to separate them until the finale. They tried so hard to keep them far away from each other during season 1 and we all know everything would have been different if they had time to properly talk, process their situation and find a solution together. Of course, the show didn’t give them that chance, otherwise the show would have ended in episode 3 and goodbye drama!

They did not confront each other in the end of season 1, they let Allison take that role because the show built up their connection as sisters and I didn’t dislike the choice. Did it work thematically? No, Allison has no connection with the apocalypse. That’s Five’s business. He didn’t confront Vanya, he let others take the lead in the most crucial moment and with no surprise the apocalypse still happened.

The other apocalypse in season 2 was still connected to Vanya and again Five ignored the cosmic signals and focused on dead ends. Despite knowing perfectly that the butterfly effect can come from any source, he didn’t even think about Vanya’s being the cause of the apocalypse again. Five should have listened Klaus when he suggested that Vanya might have been the cause. Funny how Klaus told him in S1 that he has an addiction and Five aggressively denied it. Funny how saving his family and stopping the apocalypse are always his top priorities, but Five still deny himself (for a reason or another) the time to confront Vanya (the apocalypse).

We have a theme waiting to be resolved: Five wants to stop the apocalypse and Vanya is the cause of the apocalypse. If Five does not confront Vanya the theme will never have a closure. It’s still open right now. It is still there, waiting to be picked up again. There is no resolution.

2. Vanya and Ben’s goodbye

The scene between Vanya and Ben was one of my favourites from season 2 and after pondering for a while I concluded that it couldn’t have been anyone else but Ben the one who helped Vanya in that moment. My theory is that the show will walk backwards the breaking points of Vanya’s life: Ben’s death, Five’s leaving and Reginald’s abuse.

Vanya is not fixed. How could she when she was barely Vanya in this season? “New timeline, new me” she said, but that was just a convenient escapism mechanism. Years and years of mentally and emotionally abuse don’t disappear in one week. The Hargreeves have still a lot to process and resolve, individually and as family. That’s why I hope the show will progress the story in the right direction and actually work on them in season 3. Especially Vanya, who needs to confront her trauma. That’s why the scene with Ben in episode 9 was necessary.

From Vanya’s book:

[…] Our everyday existence was full of evidence that Dad had [...]-pped into treating us like experiments. Not as children, but like animals. And what happened to Ben was the last straw that finally shattered the illusion for the others …

Ben died long time ago and his death was the last straw that shattered the illusion (for the others) that their father cared about them (even in his own messed up way). Everything changed from that moment and each sibling drifted away from one another after that. Ben’s death was the moment Vanya and the rest of her siblings stopped being a family. The definitive step of Vanya’s alienation from her siblings.

There was no place in the group for her. With Five’s absence and Ben gone (he is a caring brother, with Klaus is like that and I can imagine him being kind to Vanya in their childhood too. Although, Ben is not Five and we have seen him being harsh to her in the flashbacks in S1EP10), Vanya was truly lost.

The tearful and important moment between Ben and Vanya was a reverse moment in my opinion. Vanya needed that from Ben, his death heavily influenced the course of her life (everyone’s life) and it was only fitting that Ben should have been the one helping her to start again. It’s symbolic in a sense, but also very factual.

“Sorry that I left without saying goodbye” – Five, S1 EP2

“At least this time I can say goodbye.” – Ben, S2 EP9

I’m using my fiveya-goggles, but we all thought that what Five said in S1EP2 (when Vanya tried to find him at Hargreeves’ mansion) wasn’t just about him leaving her apartment. It’s a very specific line that works on double levels: text and subtext. The subtext of course refers to the day he run out the house and time jumped. I highlighted these two lines from Five and Ben because I think they share the same theme: leaving her without saying goodbye.

Vanya wasn’t on mission with the team when Ben died, and I doubt she even saw his body (or whatever remains were left) when the Umbrella Academy returned. She didn’t even see his manifestation during the Icarus’ fight, too focused in her own power. The scene between them in Vanya’s mind gave both the opportunity to make amend of untold words and missed moments.

Ben is dead, he is the one he cannot return. His departure is permanent, there is nothing they can do about that. However, they can have a closure. Ben needed to be the one first patching to mend Vanya’s relationship with her family, to remind her that she does belong. This sort of second death (finally move on into the Light) has more meaning than the first one, this time Ben completed the mission. He saved someone he loved (he couldn’t stop Klaus from destroying his life with drugs and alcohol) and could trust his siblings to take care of the rest.

I still think Ben didn’t need to die-die, but in a sense it was time for him to move on into the light. He was afraid to go on, but if he could move on so his siblings. It is time for Vanya to move on her own trauma.

(Yeah, I know. I still have problem with the scene because they erased canon in a way and Ben could do a lot more as character. They erased the fact drugs stop their powers like in Klaus’ addiction and Vanya’s pills, so how Vanya was able to use them under LSD? I tried to explain that to myself by the fact “they needed to bs that canon fact in season 1 and ignored it”.

We can also argue that Ben could have prevented the apocalypse in 2019 by doing the same thing, but in their defence S1-Ben didn’t know he could possess a body. Yeah, how did he do that without Klaus’ power help? No idea, that doesn’t make sense to me either. Ahah. I just swam with the flow at that point and accepted it as it is. Call it the power of superpowered siblings’ love. I’ve seen worse plot holes in my life. I can live with this).

3. Pass me the knife, there is some tension here!

From Vanya’s book:

Though prone to arrogance and outbursts, even more than the average preteen, Five was my sole confidante in the years before he disappeared. It almost seemed fitting […] the siblings to leave us, it would be him who [I fully?] […] who fully trusted me.

I said that Vanya’s walking backwards her life’s breaking points. So, after Ben’s death, she needs to address Five’s leaving. Five was her only confidante in the years before he disappeared, as she wrote in her book. Five was very important to young Vanya (and old Vanya needs to remember that) and I bet when he left, that was a scar never healed.

Vanya missed him and hoped for his return, for a while she kept the lights on in the house every night and prepared for him his favourite sandwich. When Five did come back Vanya couldn’t process that fact properly in season 1, all she could think of was that she didn’t want to lose him again. Five on the other hand decided that he would save everyone on his own and for that choice he made a bunch of tragic rookie mistakes.

Miscommunication is their kryptonite and right now Vanya and Five aren’t able to fully communicate at the same level. Reggie did such a good work at parenting that they’re so unfit to deal with their emotions and relationships, that will always be the root of their mistakes.

Same story in season 2, meanwhile Vanya is on the verge to provoke another apocalypse (although indirectly), as usual Five was too obsessed with his own plans and was not even aware of the situation. He knows nobody is insignificant when it’s about altering the timeline, but he always ends to focus on the wrong lead. The show again did incredible summersaults to avoid the two to interact properly and when they interacted things still didn’t work for a reason or another. She didn’t remember her past, he was not entirely sincere with her. She wanted to start anew (having a family with Sissy, easy-peasy), he is trapped again in a run against time to save his family. They are still not at the same page and for the show that is convenient. They still can play with their open theme (my point number 1 in this meta).

I don’t blame Five in S1 for thinking that if the worse happens, they would need to kill her. I think he was in a very delicate state of mind in that moment, he didn’t have time to process the fact Vanya (his favourite sibling and we all know she is his favourite) caused the end of the world. It was disappointing and cynical, but time was ticking fast, and he had been in his “maniacal-panic” mode for almost eight days. I also think he wouldn’t really kill her; he was the one who convinced the others that they needed to take her with them in the time jump. They need to “fix her” (aka help her to never feel alone in the universe and prove her we do love her) or they’re going to make the same mistakes again and again.

Just to be clear I think if Five wasn’t one day from the end of the world and in a rush to stop Vanya, he would had had the same reaction as Old Man Five in S2. His 14-days younger version take it very well “Fair enough” he said and then proceeded to tell Luther how to save Vanya, no mention about killing her whatsoever. Old Man Five had time (10 days more than our current Five) and a direct clue on how to stop the apocalypse (thanks Luther). Nobody was going to kill Vanya.

“Vanya will always be the cause of the apocalypse, unless we fix her.” - Five S1EP10 

“Vanya is the bomb. She will always be the bomb.” - Diego S2EP8

Vanya is the bomb and she will always be the bomb unless she heals. A fact that can be added to my number 1 point in this meta, there is an open theme and they need to tackle it. Five and Vanya need to confront each other and resolve it.

This takes me to S2 EP7: the iconic stare-power stand between Five and Vanya. THE TENSION was real, and you could cut it with a butter knife. The first time I screamed at my screen, I felt like Gordon Ramsay in one of those episodes of “Kitchen Nightmare US” when someone finally serves him good food.

Of course, the immediate reading of the scene is that Five needed Vanya to come along and Vanya didn’t want to go because at that point these Hargreeves are still strangers to her (amnesia is so convenient), Sissy and Harlan are the ones she knows and loves in that right moment.

They were still able to cut each other with sharp words and hostile glares though. Five let her have what she wanted, not because he feared her, but because as usual he cares more about her feelings than what he would ever admit. It’s the second time in S2 he let her go, his soft spot and favouritism for Vanya was showing once again! *fakes surprise*

I think the tension shown in this scene is a symptom that Vanya and Five are on the verge of something they will (they have to) confront soon or later. This is the subtext reading I came out with.

Even if you don’t look at it with shipper goggle, you feel there is something going on. They let the viewers feel there is a sensitive something whenever these two have an alone scene together. All their alone scenes have a specific grade of intimacy, they made it clear since the scene in front of Five’s portrait. They care for each other, they love each other (sibling love, platonic love, we-could-have-been-something love etc…) and it’s there. However, Five left and Vanya never truly recovered from that. They didn’t process that fact and I truly believe they can’t move on until they heal that scar.

Basically, S2 EP7 Fiveya’s scene = We have to talk, but this is not the moment because the show is only on its second season! THIS TENSION IS HERE FOR A REASON.

4. Hope is the last thing to die

I shouldn’t trust a show, I’ve been disappointed so many times in the past years and showrunners of popular shows tend to be unoriginal and cowards. However, I am an optimist at heart and until season 3 I dare to hope anyway. If proven wrong, there are always fanfictions who can do better job than canon.

If all was lost they could have eliminated Alluther too from the universe because of certain fans screaming “harcest is incest you weirdos”, but Allison and Luther’s situation still exist and still work on the parameter “will they or not”? I imagine for their shippers it was annoying to have such a regression in season 2, but they didn’t destroy it and they still gave them scenes.

Fiveya had even a more subtle situation than Alluther but they’ve been granted the same level of intimate interaction whenever they have an alone scene together. Until Five (the character) will gain an older body (which he can) the whole thing is suspended. However, I think they wouldn’t have been open about the possibility of Five changing back to an older body and spoke about in season 1 if they didn’t have an idea for that.

I brushed off the line Five said to Old Man Five about being forever trapped in his 13-years-old body. It’s canon that there is a way to gain an adult body for Five, the Commission has the technology and even if it’s not the Commission they can mambo-jambo the thing in a way or another. That would never work. The actor is a growing up teenager and from season 1 to season 2 he has already changed. I imagined he will change even more before season 3 will ever start recording (maybe very late due the COVID-19 situation).

Aidan is a fan favourite and I am one of those who can’t see anyone else playing Five, with this said there are still ways for the show to give us fiveya. Young fiveya flashbacks will be always an option to explore the idea of “they had a crush on each other when they were young” and make other viewers understand that it wasn’t all “sibling” love between them. Endgame in a distant season can always have an epilogue with an adult Five (another actor I mean) having a very non-platonic (let adult Fivey kiss please) moment with Vanya, meanwhile building up the longest slow-burn (kinda, deep down I believe those feelings for each other are there) of the century.

Maybe I am wrong, maybe my tinfoil crow is too tight, and my brain doesn’t breathe. Maybe the show will succumb to easy paths and angry bullies. I don’t know, but until proven wrong I dare to hope.

PS: This is a monster of a meta and it probably doesn’t make sense? I hope someone will get what I’ve tried to say. I hope you survive, brave readers. Here a glass of margarita for you. I’d love to hear what you think

[degenerate-perturbation]

Ultimate Good Omens Fic Recommendations

I read the entire AO3 archive. I started sometime in November 2018 and read all the way back to 1999. I did not read every story, but I tried. Here are my recommendations.

(Most Good Omens fic is very good, which is why I bothered to read the entire archive instead of just scrolling through the first few pages, despairing, and giving up, which is what I usually do when I read fanfiction. So if your fic is not here, congratulations! I probably still read it and liked it but this post is already very long.)

My Absolute Top Favorites

Deus Ex Machina by clockwork_spider -  Angels really aren't the most sentimental bunch, so when Crowley was escorted back to Hell, Aziraphale's initial reaction was to do nothing. But let it be known that God moves in ineffable ways.

Tryst On a Hot Church Roof by Macdicilla -  Crowley has some fantasies. Aziraphale encourages him to explore them and not to be embarrassed. Neither of them can really take roleplay seriously but they still have a good time.

Re-Recalled by Jennistar -  Halfway through an argument, Aziraphale gets accidentally discorporated and doesn't come back. Crowley does the sensible thing and panics.

The love that dare not speak its name by Lunasong365, sous_le_saule  -  London, late nineteenth century. Aziraphale finds that time moves slowly while waiting for Crowley to wake up. Meeting Oscar Wilde should break the monotony. But perhaps it will bring more of a change than the angel anticipated…

Safe Haven by JAMoczo -  A remix of Prodigal Son: January 1945; Aziraphale has a crisis of Faith.

(The rest below the cut, in convenient categories)

General

Five Things That Never Happened To Aziraphale by imperfectcircle - Five things.

Down to the Earth with Violence by Daegaer -  Crowley and Aziraphale meet after the end of the world.

Coming to an Arrangement by Daegaer  - The long, slow path to the Arrangement.

Act of Redemption by copperbadge -  After the world failed to end, Crowley got depressed.

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot by xylodemon -  In which Crowley starts over. Again, and again, and again.

A Few Conversations, Which are Mostly Related to Christmas by xylodemon - In which there is cocoa, conversation, and more Christmas cheer than Crowley think is strictly necessary.

The Ghost and A. J. Crowley by Argyle -  A heartwarming tale of grisly ghost plants and fearsome floral apparitions. Has Crowley finally met his match? Will Aziraphale come to the rescue? And just how difficult is it to remove dirt stains from white carpet?

Five Meetings (Steps in the Fall and Rise to Grace) by icarus_chained -  GO Noir AU. Bad things are brewing in the City of Angels, and one tired ex-cop is stuck in the middle of it.

How to Make Friends and Influence Flora aka Radio Four Never Mentioned This by WinterEyes -  The Fear of Crowley isn't all it's cracked up to be

Suntne Angeli? by Macdicilla -  Adam answers the question of whether angels need to eat and drink, and accidentally creates a major change in the (pants) fabric of reality.

Field Agents by Lunasong365, sous_le_saule -  How did ‘Human’ Resources (both Demonic and Angelic) recruit Crawly and Aziraphale to be field agents? Is it a coincidence that they both found themselves back on Earth after leaving the Garden of Eden?

The Devil Went Down to Georgia by ImprobableDreams900 -  Now Crowley went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal, cause he was in a bind and way behind and he was willing to make a deal.

Major Failings by irisbleufic -  It was quick and messy, the sort of thing that took you off-guard no matter how many beheadings, torture stints, and vivisections you'd seen otherwise. Actually, Crowley wasn't certain how many of any of those he'd actually seen. He tended to lower his eyes or look away at the last second. This was also a major failing in a demon.

Pre-Relationship

Gavotte by bunnyfication -  Crowley sleeps a decade or a few, and suddenly Aziraphale is dressing fashionably? And asking him to a dance at a club with a "select clientele"? Clearly something is amiss.

Something About Flamingos by Plumbeo -  Aziraphale and Crowley have a petty, stupid, pointless fight. After four days of not talking to each other, the angel decides to break the silence - in an equally stupid way.

it giveth light unto all in the house (the let's have some wine remix) by pocky_slash -  There's loving Crowley the way he loves their waiter at the café and the ducks in St. James Park and linzer tarts and there's—well.

growing season by ghostsoldier - In which Aziraphale kills plants, and Crowley is a generous sort of demon.

Afternoons and Espresso Spoons by Kirathaune

Home by LysanderandHermia - Crowley has a realization, and it's about the angel drooling on the couch while he sleeps.

Sweet Dreams, Angel! by sous_le_saule -  Aziraphale’s never been able to sleep. Crowley takes up the challenge.

Be Ye Therefore Merciful by AmberDiceless -  Crowley does something utterly unexpected, and Aziraphale must face an opponent who cannot be thwarted.

Saunter by Aria -  There is nothing to do but feel out of sorts, disjointed and slightly askew from the world, and watch as Aziraphale absently eats the apple, the world's hundred millionth apple, symbolic of nothing at all.

They Get Together In These Ones

And when he falls by torch -  There are many ways to celebrate having avoided the apocalypse.

The Member of the Wedding by Aja - Crowley comes to a realization.

Survivors' Guilt / For All the World by irisbleufic -  It was a dark and stormy night, and nobody was enjoying it.

Goodbody by copperbadge -  Aziraphael's new body is causing some problems.

Sunday (Or the First Day Of the Rest of Their Lives) by pollitt -  Sunday at the park

Under Cover by bliumchik -  There's a new little problem in Tadfield...

An Excellent Long-Term Solution by Beth H (bethbethbeth) - In which Hell seems more forgiving than Heaven, Aziraphale seems to have got himself into a bit of a pickle, and Crowley seems to have come up with the perfect solution, almost all on his own.

Firebird: III. Finale by htebazytook -  "In the background Crowley and Aziraphale met on the tops of buses, and in art galleries, and at concerts, compared notes, and smiled."

Old Fashioned by htebazytook -  Hell has changed.

Very Complicated Solitaire by htebazytook

Ordinary People (The Anything But Ordinary Remix) by cimorene  -  Crowley has started to take a proprietary interest in Aziraphale's bookshop.

The Speck in the London Eye by Vulgarweed -  A hot dame, a missing youth, a quirky consultant—and much much more than meets the eye at stake. Private Investigator A.J. Crowley just might be in over his head this time.

TwoFish by Grindylowe -  A love story about angels and demons. Also, fish.  

Snowy Evenings by htebazytook -  Five times Crowley couldn't stand the snow, and one time he could.

A Peculiar Sensation by Elvendork -  It happens at the Ritz: Aziraphale comes to a startling realistion, but takes it in his stride remarkably well.

As Above, So Below by JenTheSweetie - Crowley and Aziraphale talk, drink, complete paperwork, drink, fall asleep with abandon, drink, and do other stuff (maybe). And drink.

Modern Love by punkfaery -  Crowley, Aziraphale, and a series of religious buildings.

A Backwards Proposal by HoloXam -  An encounter with a bride-to-be puts an idea in Aziraphale's head. Crowley doesn't react very well.

Post-Relationship

Recall by busaikko -  RECALL: 1. To ask or order to return; 2. To summon back to awareness; 3. To remember; recollect.

That Subtle Knot by apple_pi -  I wonder. Does an angel get his wings when the bell is set off by a demon?

Never Mind the Gravitation by Argyle -  Sure, there's life on Mars. But Crowley can hardly call it living.

Flamingos by Interrobam -  "Las Vegas, Crowley had always maintained, was technically Aziraphale's fault." Crowley and Aziraphale go to Las Vegas, contemplate the history of civilization and the meaning of existence.

Snapshots by mirawonderfulstar -  Five photographs on the wall of Aziraphale’s shop.

A Resort By Any Other Name by TheLifeOfEmm -  Or in which Crowley and Aziraphale go on holiday, but have a bit of trouble with the weather.

Hell's Bells (Wedding Bells) by Macdicilla -  Hell finds out that Aziraphale and Crowley are together, and eventually Heaven does too. Hell sends its [unwelcome] congratulations.

Categorization by SleepsWithCoyotes -  Crowley calls 'em like he sees 'em.

Black Dog by HoloXam -  In which Crowley feels bad and Aziraphale makes tea.

The Flame No Dampness Dulls by mirawonderfulstar -     Aziraphale doesn't understand why Crowley's spent the last two months trying to seduce him when the demon hasn't ever shown any interest in sex.

heaven is a place where nothing ever happens by Contra -  After the end of the world, there comes a new morning.

These Ones Have Sex

Lethe For Two by SleepsWithCoyotes -  A visit from the Angel of Oblivion sounds pretty ominous, doesn't it?

Monday, Half Past Four by TruckThat -  Crowley decides that almost any course of action is justified if it manages to distract him from the fact that it's been nearly two days and so far nothing else is going wrong.

The Reason for the Season by Vulgarweed -  Adam and Pepper, now married with children of their own, worry that their kids might be losing some of the magic of the season. Adam calls in a little favour from some old friends - with a nice little bonus that's in it for them.

No Such Thing by irisbleufic -  "You mean [Agnes] was trying to reassure us the whole time that the world wasn't, in fact, going to end?"

Historical

Casual as Birds by apple_pi -  Aziraphale and Crowley in London, 1944.

New Day (The Dreaming of You Remix) by Daegaer -  Ettore dreams of friendship and love.

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Argyle - The Devil has all the best tunes. (London, 1940)

Theatrical Sins: A Play in Three Acts by Aria -  "What did you do?" Crowley asked in horror, the first time he saw Aziraphale after sleeping away most of the nineteenth century.

Natural Laws by Argyle -  Every object in the Universe attracts every other object. (Lincolnshire, 1665)

Species, Origins by bliumchik -  A prehistoric chat.

Lessons in Falling by Argyle -  You never forget how. (London, 1866/1899)

The Visible Universe by Argyle -  It was not a remarkable day. (England, 1928)

How Crowley Saved Christmas by such_heights -  It was 1842, and Aziraphale really didn’t want to do it.

Letters by inabathrobe for miss_narla -  Aziraphale and Crowley burn letters and bridges.

Myths Will Be Myths by palavreado -  Aziraphale says goodbye to an old friend.

On Transmutation (and Tortoises) by Vermin_Disciple -  c. 1859. In which Aziraphale reads the latest bestseller, and he and Crowley take a trip to the Galapagos.  

i wanted to hurt you but the victory is that i could not stomach it by gyzym

Three Times Aziraphale Was Almost Too Much Of A Bastard To Be Worth Liking by feverbeats -  They have to stop meeting like this.

Safe Haven by JAMoczo -  A remix of Prodigal Son: January 1945; Aziraphale has a crisis of Faith.

In der H'lle by Copinggoggles -  Snapshot in the trenches.

Hell Is Empty by bemusedlybespectacled (ardentintoxication) -  Crowley goes to investigate this Inquisition he supposedly helped to start and finds Aziraphale instead.

And All The Devils Are Here by bemusedlybespectacled (ardentintoxication) -  Aziraphale is taken in by the Inquisition for witchcraft and finds help from an unexpected source.

The Widening Gyre by Vulgarweed -  In the spring of 1916, some in London and Dublin were fighting a war on two fronts. Three, if you include the heart. (Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of it.)

Bacchanalia by furchte_die_schildkrote -  The first time Crowley was kissed by an angel, Aziraphale had wine on his breath, a nearly full moon hung in the sky, and Rome was burning.

Carmina Burana by Lunasong365 - Carmina Burana has been described as: Profane. Sensual. Irreverent. Satirical of religion.So why was its source text discovered in a monastery?

The Fourteenth Century by Elsinore_and_Inverness -  An Angel, a Demon and the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages

“O Serpent heart… Fiend Angelical, Dove Feather Raven” -William Shakespeare (R&J, 3.2.74-76) by Elsinore_and_Inverness -  'There are no sonnets immortalizing a demon with eyes like the sun. This is probably just as well.'

Don't Mind You Under My Skin by 50artists -  Five times that Crowley tempted Aziraphale (with mixed success), and one time Aziraphale tempted him.

Biblical

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear by Daegaer

Over the Face of all the Earth by Daegaer - The Tower of Babel seemed like a good idea at the time . . .

Father of Nations by Daegaer -  Crowley and Aziraphale keep having dealings with the same family.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Apple by Argyle -  In which one thing leads to another, and the Garden awakens.

build me a city, call it jerusalem by gyzym -  Man begets man begets The Tales of Men, and there's nothing godly in that; Those Above and Them Below haven't any need for the stories humans have been hungry for since the snake and the Angel with the flaming sword.

for I am come to send fire on the earth by tomato_greens -  The worst of it was that Crowley had already received a commendation, gleaming, from Below.

And Find for Herself a Place to Rest by tomato_greens -  So long as you avoided the thorns, it was a nice tree.

Another One Bites the Dust by diefiend -  Crowley and Aziraphale and the Crucifixion.

Other Characters

Revisited and Riding Out by Patrick Phelan

Of Woman Born by slythwolf -  A brief biography of Adam's biological mother.

Pennies From Heaven (Pound Notes From Hell) by Ineffabilitea -  Warlock just wants to feel special again.

Forgotten, As A Dream by Clodius Pulcher (Clodia) -  "They'll be back. They're never far away..." Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, aged eleven and a half, dreams red. Or rather, Red.

Good Help is Hard to Find, or The Hazards of Reading Prophecy by Fleur Rochard (fleurrochard), somnolentblue -  Wherein Aziraphale hires a shop assistant.

Love Me Tender by tomato_greens -  Bright lights and ice cream: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Except when it doesn't.

Memory Yields by Interrobam -  The thing about being destined to bring about the apocalypse when you're eleven was that no one quite made plans for how you were supposed to go about the rest of your life.

The Morning After the Morning After the End of the World by Aegialia -  Anathema moves on and figures herself out.

In which Adam challenges Crowley to a drinking contest and it is a terrible idea by Macdicilla -  It is a rather foolish thing to set a bet with the devil, or even with a devil, unless you have an ace—or better yet, all the aces in the deck—up your sleeve.

Anything by LoveChilde -  About ten years after the world didn’t end, Pippin Galadriel Moonchild meets an angel. Or maybe just a harmless homosexual. They have tea.

Forgive Those Who Trespass by JAMoczo -  Crowley and Shadwell share Madame Tracy and Aziraphale for a week. God help us all.

Crossovers

The Nice and Accurate Adventures of Aziraphale in Ankh-Morpork by Glinda -  All truly good second-hand bookshops are really genteel black-holes that have learned how to read.

Bargain Breakfast by Daegaer -  Crowley gets a suspicious sort of customer.

The Corsair of Carcosa by Vulgarweed -  Aziraphale gets his hands on a rare copy of the play The King in Yellow. Reading and its consequences ensue.

[ifyougoillfollow]

3, 8, 11 & 24 for the author asks :)

thanks!! (questions from this list)

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

here’s the thing. i’d love to be a chronological writer - mostly because i’m a big believer of outlining. unfortunately, forcing myself to follow an outline down the list never worked for me because i’d inevitably reach a point where i got stumped. eventually i figured out that i work best if just jump around to whatever part of the outline i’m feeling at the moment.

lately even my outlines have been weird. since i’ve been writing short-ish one-shots, my outlines actually start out as dialogue only. like, i have a conversation in mind, so i write it down without worrying about descriptions or prose or anything else. then, when i reach a good end point, i go back and add everything else. sometimes adding all the extra context ends up changing the tone or direction of the conversation. sometimes i don’t even have an end point in mind, i just work with what i have so far until it comes to me. as long as i keep writing, no matter the order, it all works out in the end.

8) favorite genre to write

speculative fiction, my beloved. <3

i know that’s kind of cheating because that’s such a broad category, but i literally cannot choose. i love all things sci-fi/horror/fantasy. i don’t think i’ve ever written anything that didn’t have some sort of speculative trapping, nor do i want to.

though i do have a very specific interest in writing apocalypse/post-apocalypse stories, ever since i was a youngin. it seems like every other story idea i get is about a new, interesting way the world could end, and how humanity would or wouldn’t deal with it. needless to say, i’ve gotten a lot of fodder for these types of stories during this past year lol.

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

oh, my narrative voice, for sure. i’ve always loved writing dialogue and had a knack for it - though even that’s improved over the years - but i used to struggle a lot with narration. it was either too flat or too forced. it just did not come easily to me at all.

reading helped me a lot with this issue. i’ve consumed a truly ungodly amount of fic over the past six months, and seeing what worked and what didn’t work for me as a reader helped me figure out how to go about it when writing. now, figuring out each character’s narrative voice is so much fun and i enjoy it immensely. even better, i’ve actually gotten positive feedback on it for most of my fics, so i’m much more confident about it.

24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

oh, i used to be very bad at this lol. if didn’t feel like i knew enough about something, i’d go down the wikipedia rabbit hole and never emerge. what’s worse is that i never retained any of this knowledge, especially once i inevitably stopped working on whatever story i was researching for in the first place.

now i just start writing, and if i need to know something, i either write myself a note or do a quick google search. no need to dive into hardcore research when i probably won’t end up using it anyway. i’ve learned my lesson lol.

[ginnyzero]

The Discriminatory Werewolf Archetype?

I love werewolves.

I hate werewolves in most fiction. Werewolves in most fiction are abusive, out of control, OCD, monsters that are usually white males that promote things like incest and rape and well, there tend not to be female werewolves. Werewolves in fiction are representations of toxic masculinity at its worst.

So, why do I love werewolves? I mean, who doesn’t want to be nature’s answer to the chain saw every once in a while or have four feet and run in the forest. I had a wolf dream once and I was so at peace in that dream. Best dream ever. (I blame an old roommate and her love of old WW Werewolf: the Apocalypse Tabletop RPG too.)

But the representation of werewolves in fiction is problematic and that’s putting it lightly. In mainstream traditionally published fiction, female werewolves are rare or they don’t exist. They don’t lead packs. Forget black werewolves or Asian werewolves or Latino/Hispanic werewolves. They don’t really exist either except as “token” characters. And nine times out of then there aren’t gay werewolves, or if there is a gay werewolf they’re outcasts because somehow other werewolves just can’t handle them being aroused by men?

Then there’s the alpha to omega and submissive pack hierarchies that are easily abused. The fact that werewolves are so “grr” angry all the time they can’t form normal or healthy relationships. Then some writers buy into the cult and noble practice and sometimes downright redneck mentalities that to be stronger werewolves you have to marry your cousins. And men are always in charge, always.

You see these werewolves always based upon the French idea of the Loup Garou mixed with bad wolf science over and over and over again. You want the out of control monster beast in your kitchen sink urban fantasy? You include a werewolf. Vampires are urbane and controlled. Fae are aloof, businesslike, and mystical. (Makes me wonder what fae stories these writers are researching.) It’s become a trope, an archetype.

I mean, usually, the conflict resolves down to that no one can understand the monster that is the werewolf. They can never love or truly be loved by a human or other type of being, be they human or supernatural. Angst. Woe is me! And if it’s a horror story, the werewolf dies at the end.

The fantasy romance genre isn’t immune to this. Sometimes they’re a tad bit better. They include female werewolves more often. But even then, the general rules still apply that are sick and twisted and mostly are there to support the premise that even monsters can be loved in the end. (Yeah, I’ve read my fair share of werewolf romance novels okay.)

Archetypes are archetypes. Tropes are tropes.

But in this era of MeToo and men being called out for toxicity and media being urged to be more inclusive of people of all races and sexualities, isn’t it time for our media to catch up including speculative fiction where vampires, werewolves, mutants, elves and so on are used routinely to represent the other, the disenfranchised and the discriminated against.

Viewed in this lens, the portrayal of the werewolf is sickening. This is the worst of the patriarchy on display in speculative fiction form. When women, LGBTA and people of color are the minority and not the normal, disabled werewolves don’t exist (or are killed) and men are always in control and their behavior is excused because they are “alphas” isn’t right. It’s wrong. It’s grossly wrong. Why are those in writing and especially in publishing and in Hollywood still pandering to these ideas?

“People like monsters.” Ugh. Rejection right there. Werewolves can be cool without being downright nasty and out of control monsters. There are more werewolf types than the loup-garou. Beep. Exit stage left please. “It takes time.” You say. “People aren’t ready for werewolves that have control of themselves and can have healthy relationships and are female and are all races and all sexualities.”

Bullocks.

The ideal werewolf novel by CrockpotCauldron has over 68,000 notes. Assuming even half of those were likes, that’s 34,000 people who are interested in werewolves that are women, LGBTA, POCs, based on good wolf science that have healthy relationships with those and others around them. (And what would a disabled werewolf look like? Ponder. I might have to figure that out. I have so much to else to delve into why not add another thing?)

Most books don’t sell 20,000 novels in their first year. Sure, okay, so many of those people who noted that post aren’t going to buy a book. So if you go with the 3% conversion rate of all the notes that’s only 2000 sales. And I’m going to say people aren’t probably going to buy the book because they may not like the plot presented. But you have to get the book in front of those 68,000 note people in the first place!

The day I wrote after I wrote this post I found yet another person complaining about alpha-beta/dom sub dynamics in werewolf fiction! The people are out there!

So that means you can’t just put out one inclusive werewolf story, you have to put out multiple ones until you find the one with the plot and world building that people are going to buy across all age levels. You have to get it in front of influencers like CrockpotCauldron and others like her.

(She also has a list of werewolves she’s excited about. Sadly, I’m not on that list.) (Yes, I sent her my first book. Oh well.)

Fiction is a reflection of our reality. It disturbs me that werewolves are still being presented this way. That the art I see is all about growling and werewolves dripping in blood. That toxic masculinity parades itself across the page and most times isn’t called out for what it is, wrong. (Kitty Norville did, Women of the Otherworld did not, Patty Briggs is halfhearted about it. Butcher is, omg, let’s not even go into Butcher. I swear Jane Yellowrock series ignored weres most the time. Charlaine Harris didn’t help anything. Kim Harrison’s werewolves were, well at least there were females! That’s the most I can say.) Many times the sexist and horribly toxic tropes are written in as world rules that can’t be gotten away from. (Women of the Otherworld, Blood and Chocolate.)

By the time I came across CrockpotCauldron’s post, I’d already written my books. I was already disturbed as much as she was by this one dimensional portrayal of werewolves and their origin and their dynamics. I wrote Heaven’s Heathens MC as a revolt of what I was seeing in werewolf media in order to start portraying that wolves are families that work together and not domineering hierarchies where the “Alpha” is in charge. That there can be werewolves of many colors and skin tones because well, a) medieval Europe was not white, white, white. And B) this is the future, and many people have mixed their blood together enough that’s it can be difficult to know what race they are. I have female werewolves. I have nerdy werewolves. I have big buff mad scientist werewolves who enjoy DnD.

And honestly, I don’t mention character’s sexuality at all unless it’s important to the story. I don’t base my characters around the idea that they’re LGBTA and that defines them. It doesn’t. If there are LGBTA characters in my stories I want it to come up naturally and that “oh, they happen to be this” rather than “this is a problem.” Because I don’t want sexuality to be a problem in my werewolf pack. That goes against everything my werewolf pack stands for. (If it is a problem for werewolf packs that aren’t the Heathens in the story then you know those packs are bad packs. Bad! Bad wolf packs. No biscuit.)

I’ll admit, writing people in healthy relationships that share emotional labor is difficult due to lack of personal experience to some extent and that it cuts out what is the fall back conflict of most television shows and books, aka miscommunication. (I hate miscommunication personally. It’s one of those growing up things.) This is how insidious toxic masculinity is! This is how deep the patriarchy runs. That even when you’re trying your best to stay away from it, you feel like it’s slipping in no matter how hard you try!

And I know this seems an odd thing to be talking about with all the problems going on in the “real” world. But I think that if there are those that would defend these werewolf archetypes and tropes, they need to be looked at hard especially if they are in the publishing business. Because Media reflects reality and any trope and any archetype that is as discriminatory as werewolves needs to be dissected (and Vampires need to be dissected too because they represent another side of toxic masculinity. But I can only do one post at a time) and then broken down and transformed.

That’s what werewolves are really about, transformation! So, locking them into one rigid role seems awfully backwards to what they are.

Is it discriminatory? I'll leave that to you to decide. I know that I don't like it and am trying not to pander to it in my books. And if this blog post wasn't enough for you, I also talked about this on Twitter.