#i think ted spent a LOT of time convincing himself what he saw at the end of season 1 was something different than what he was seeing

[lunar-years]

I'm rewatching TL (nothing new there) and its really bugging me this time round how Ted is clearly aware that the traumatic event of his childhood has had a negative impact on his psyche and the way he behaves as an adult, yet he seems unwilling to give Jamie the same acknowledgement

yeah i think a lot of the disconnect between them actually comes from Ted comparing his situation and dad trauma to Jamie's situation and dad trauma without recognizing that they are actually very different situations and that he and Jamie are two very different people who deal with trauma differently as well.

Like, his whole speech about "sometimes having a tough dad makes you stronger/better/whatever the fuck" when Jamie asks to be let back on the team is for me a reflection that 1) One of Ted's own personal coping mechanisms is telling himself he's "overcome" the trauma of his dad's death and come out the other side of it a better & kinder (curious, not judgemental) person. When really he very much hasn't overcome it (in fact it's not something that can be 'overcome,' so to speak) and has only shoved it deeper down until it all comes bubbling back up again during the show.

And 2) it's easier for Ted to assume Jamie copes in the same way (and will therefore be reassured by the notion that he's a great player because 'surviving' his father's abuse has made him tougher and more driven) rather than actually reflecting upon or unpacking Jamie's completely separate situation.

what's fascinating to me is that when Ted superimposes his own situation onto Jamie he has Jamie playing two roles. One is Ted himself, who desperately and genuinely wants to forgive his own father (and therefore he think forgiveness is a good idea for Jamie) and the second is Henry, who Ted wants desperately to forgive him (and therefore he needs to believe Jamie can forgive his father, so that Henry will forgive him).

Anyway, that's why Jamie features so heavily in all of Ted's panic attacks despite the fact that the two of them are not actually that close and Ted actually knows very little about him.

Of course, the person who comes out worse in this messy dynamic is Jamie, who gets a lot of very bad advice from Ted as a result. And yeah it can be really bothersome as a viewer because I do think the state of Ted's mental health does continually result in him letting Jamie specifically down.

[threewaywithdelusion]

RoyJamieKeeley Fic

Still working on my RoyJamieKeeley post-S3 fic. I got stuck again for a while, but I got unstuck tonight, so he's a little snippet to celebrate.

A few days later, Keeley and Jamie left for Brazil for Jamie’s Nike shoot. Left alone for a week, Roy tried to keep busy so he wouldn’t think about them. He spent time with Phoebe, who was starting to get impatient for summer holiday but could be convinced to spend all her wayward energy on playing football with Roy. He saw the yoga mums twice, once for actual yoga and once for a night of drinking wine, watching rom coms, and gossiping. He told them he’d gotten back together with his ex-girlfriend and they all smiled and told him how happy they were for him and how much more of a grump he’d been without her. Roy didn’t mention that said girlfriend was dating another man at the same time and told himself it was just leaving out unimportant information and not actually lie, but he wasn’t sure he believed himself. 

Roy also had a meeting with Rebecca, who told him she wanted to promote him to manager of Richmond. He called her mad to her face and she still seemed to think giving him the job was a good idea. 

“I don’t want to do press conferences and shit,” Roy said. 

Rebecca was unfazed. “Here are my options, Roy. I can make you manager, which is a job I think you’ll be good at. You know football, you know these boys, and they trust you, which makes you the best fit. I can make Nate manager, which I don’t particularly want to do after he defected to West Ham last year. He has experience and the boys seem to have forgiven him, but I don’t trust him enough yet to give him that much power. The other option is to bring in someone from outside the club. Higgins gave me a list of candidates and a lot of them are very qualified and are interested in working for Richmond now that we placed second in the Premier League, because they think they can get us a trophy next year. However, anyone I bring in is going to have their own style and they’re going to undo all the hard work Ted’s done over the past three years. And what Ted did, however unconventional, has been working for us. So, if you don’t take the job, any thoughts on how I should proceed?”

Roy grunted. It was a good argument and Rebecca knew it. 

Roy liked coaching Richmond. He didn’t really want to work with some new shitbag coach who would come in acting like he knew anything. Who might tell the team to stop playing total football or take that shitty, ripped-up “believe” sign off the wall. Who might not flip Jamie off in the middle of a game or push him to go back out even with an injured ankle. Who might not support Sam’s protests when they cost the club their main sponsor or might not like the fact that Colin had a boyfriend. Who might not defend Isaac in a post-game interview after Isaac attacked a fan in the stands for his homophobic comments or who would hear that famous women got their private photos leaked and react with less horror than the rest of the Richmond boys. 

Roy liked the culture Ted had created at Richmond. Sure, his methods had been downright insane at times, but they’d worked. This was a team that respected Keeley and Rebecca, that accepted Colin, and that tried to be good people as much as they tried to be good footballers. 

Roy didn’t want to lose that. 

“Fuuuuck,” he said, a curse of resignation and realization. 

Rebecca knew him far too well at this point, because she just smiled victoriously. “I’ll have Higgins send you the paperwork this week. We’re also going to be looking at player transfers, so I’ll send you tapes for anyone we’re considering. Do you have any thoughts about which players we should take a look at?”

Roy grunted. He’d had this job for all of three seconds and Rebecca was already giving him work. He hadn’t even told Keeley yet. 

“We need a centre back with more speed,” he said. 

“Noted,” Rebecca said. 

On the way home, Roy felt a strange kind of loneliness take over him. 

He’d gotten a promotion and even though he’d resisted it, he kind of wanted to celebrate. Like when Keeley had been made a CEO of her own company and they’d popped champagne and Roy had spun her around and they’d fallen into bed together. 

But Keeley was halfway around the world with Jamie. On vacation, even though she’d refused to go on vacation with Roy to Marbella last year. And Roy knew it was different — this was a work trip with some fun thrown in — but Keeley was just restarting her business with Rebecca as the main investor and she couldn’t possibly be less busy than she’d been last year. 

A tiny, mean voice in Roy’s head said that the difference was Jamie. That Roy hadn’t been worth the time away from the office, but Jamie was. 

Roy shoved the thought away. 

He went home to his big empty house and stared at the bottle of champagne in the fridge. He couldn’t tell the yoga mums he’d been promoted because they still believed he was an accountant and he had no fucking clue what accountants did or what the fuck their position was when they got promoted. Plus, he didn’t want to spend all evening lying about the job he was celebrating. 

The team was scattered around the world, visiting their home countries and families while they were on summer holiday. What other friends did Roy have? Keeley, who was his girlfriend again? Jamie, who was Keeley’s other boyfriend and was also not in the country? Rebecca, who was more his friend through the transitive property than anything and was also his boss?

Fuck this. 

Roy took the bottle from the fridge. He was about to pop the cork and drink straight from the bottle when his phone dinged with an incoming message. 

It was a series of photos from Keeley, showing her and Jamie shopping. One photo showed Keeley in a dressing room, trying on a dress that made her look fucking amazing. Another showed Jamie with about fifty bags dangling from his arms, posing like he was lifting weights. Keeley was standing beside him, holding one tiny bag, and grinning widely at having a fit footballer to play her pack mile. Then there was a picture of Keeley standing next to a suitcase with a price tag on it, presumably something she was buying to bring all her new clothes back to England, a cute guilty smile on her face. The last picture showed the two of them in a store, both wearing black leather jackets. The one on Keeley was ridiculously oversized and the comical frowns on both of their faces told Roy that they were dressing up as him. 

Another text arrived from Keeley. 

Miss you! Do you want either of these jackets?

Roy was very picky about his leather jackets, something that Keeley had learned early in their first go at a relationship when she’d tried to buy him a present. It may seem like Roy put no effort into his all-black look, but he was very particular about what clothes he thought was worth buying. 

It was sweet of Keeley to ask. 

Send a video, Roy texted back. 

A minute later, his phone dinged. The video was of Keeley in a dressing room, wearing a shimmery grey dress with one of the Roy-sized leather jackets over it. Roy had clearly interrupted her in the middle of trying on half the store because there were clothes over every inch of the dressing room. Keeley did a little spin for the camera and Roy caught Jamie’s reflection in the dressing room mirror, smiling at Keeley like he was in love. 

Fuck. 

Would Roy have had that indulgent, lovestruck expression on his face if Keeley had dragged him shopping for stupid graffiti clothes for Jamie? This was Jamie’s holiday with Keeley and she was still taking the time to message Roy and Jamie didn’t seem to mind at all. 

Roy’s phone dinged again, this time a message from Jamie. It was another video, showing Jamie walking along a wall of all-black clothes, including at least four different leather jackets. 

“I think we found your store, mate,” Jamie said, panning the camera so Roy could see the words John John lit up in the back over the counter. 

Fuck. Roy was being a sorry sad sack and a bit of a prick. And he absolutely refused to be the biggest prick in a relationship that included Jamie Tartt. 

You look beautiful, he sent Keeley. I like the jacket Jamie was wearing. 

Keeley sent back a series of smiley face emojis. 

Roy called her and she picked up on the second ring. “Hi, babe? How’s London?”

“I miss you,” Roy said. It was probably the easiest thing he’d ever said. Usually, Roy had trouble expressing any emotion that wasn’t anger and he knew that. But missing Keeley was all-consuming. It was a physical ache inside him, just as real as the pain from his knee, and he didn’t know how not to say it. 

“I miss you too,” Keeley said. 

“How’s Brazil?” Roy asked. 

“It’s good! I think the photoshoot with Nike went really well. They might offer Jamie a larger deal as a brand ambassador when we get back, but don’t tell Jamie that. I’m negotiating right now and I’m not sure it’ll go through.”

“I’m sure it well,” Roy said. “You’re a brilliant negotiator.”

“You’ve never seen me negotiate,” Keeley said. 

“Sure I have,” Roy said. “What about that time you convinced me to try being a pundit.”

“That was in your best interest, and I’m pretty sure we were arguing.”

“Or that time you convinced me to go to that launch party for that watch company you were promoting.”

“You have to admit, that was great press,” Keeley said. “Everyone’d heard the story about your ex stealing your Rolex, so you replacing the Rolex with a John Hubert watch really connected the two brands in everyone’s minds.”

“Well what about the time you convinced me to both cook and do the dishes when I made you a fancy dinner?”

“I bribed you with blowjobs,” Keeley said. “I don’t think I can use the same strategy here.”

Roy laughed. He felt so much better after talking to Keeley for just five minutes. Suddenly, he didn’t care that she was a continent away. He still wanted to tell her the good news. 

“Is Jamie there?” he asked. 

“He’s in his own dressing room,” Keeley said. 

Roy was surprised. He figured Keeley and Jamie would take shopping as a chance to watch each other strip in the same dressing room. But he knew fuck all about shopping, so maybe it wasn’t that weird that they were in two different stalls. 

“Can you get him?” 

There was a long pause that Roy knew was Keeley working through her surprise before she said, “Yeah, just a sec.” Her voice sounded slightly farther away as she called “Jamie!”

A moment later Keeley’s voice came out sounding a little more robotic. “You’re on speaker, babe.”

Roy cleared his throat. “I talked to Rebecca today. She made me manager.”

“What?” Keeley said, sounding stunned. 

Yeah, maybe he should have worked up to that instead of announcing it right out the gate. 

“She gave me Ted’s job,” Roy repeated. 

A whoop went up from Jamie, so loud that Roy had to pull the phone away from his head so he wouldn’t blow out his eardrums. 

“Congrats, mate! That’s fucking mint.”

Roy grunted. He didn’t say that he was bricking it over trying to fill Ted’s shoes, but Keeley must have released because she said, “You’re going to be amazing, babe. I’m so proud of you!”

“I don’t know,” Jamie said. “I mean, mostly Roy’s been coaching me so far. I’ve got more talent than all the boys on the team and I’m a pleasure to coach, so you can’t measure Roy’s success by how brilliant a player I am.”

“You’re a fucking nightmare to coach,” Roy said, even though it wasn’t actually true. Jamie did anything Roy said, even when it was embarrassing or he was pushing his body beyond what most coaches would demand of him. Roy liked telling Jamie what to do and seeing how hard he would work to achieve the impossible, even when the only reward was a little grunt from Roy. 

“I guess we’ll see if you can bring the other lads up to my level,” Jamie said, cockiness and disbelief in Roy’s coaching skills rolling together in his voice. 

Weirdly, Jamie’s pestering filled Roy with confidence that he could do this. He would be the best damn manager Richmond had ever seen, if only to prove to Jamie that he was wrong. 

“Be careful what you wish for,” Keeley told Jamie sweetly and that buoyed Roy the rest of the way up. Keeley believed in him. She believed in him enough to tell Jamie to suck it, even if she did it in nicer terms. 

Roy wanted to tell her he loved her, but the first time he told her after they got back together couldn’t be over the phone, with Jamie listening in, while Keeley was on another continent. 

Instead, Roy just said, “At least I know what the fucking offside rule is.”

Jamie and Keeley both laughed, though Jamie laughed harder. Roy wasn’t sure Keeley knew the offside rule, which was a travesty given how many footballers she’d dated.

“Well celebrate when I get back,” Keeley said. “That’s wonderful news, babe. I’m so happy for you.”

They said their goodbyes and when Roy hung up the phone, he felt a lot more determined and a lot less alone. 

He checked his inbox to find an email from Higgins with his new contract and and some player files with stats and videos. Several promising young players were listed, as well as some old-timers on their way to retirement from some of the better clubs. 

He poured himself a glass of champagne and settled in to do his job. 

[alphawolfice1989]

Why barney and robin should have been endgame

Personally, I think that Robin loved Barney way more than Ted and there are so many scenes that make me believe that. For ex. in season 2 finale when Robin saw the ring, she suddenly thought that Ted was going to propose to her, and she freaked out. She said no to him multiple times and she clearly didn’t wanna marry him. When Barney proposed to her in s8 as romantic as it was, I have to admit it was a bit of manipulative and Robin knew that but even if she is a very rational person she said yes to him and to him only. Robin has always disliked the idea of marriage and commitment (as Barney himself), but he is the only one she chose to get married to. Another important scene that makes me believe in B&R more is when Ted complained about Robin’s independence because he wanted to feel needful in the relationship, while when Robin told Barney this he replied that he appreciates her independence: “That's a compliment! You're the least needy woman I've ever met. That's awesome! No guy's gonna say "Who's your daddy?" to Robin Scherbatsky; you're your own daddy. And mommy. And weird survivalist uncle who lives in a cabin with a shotgun blaming stuff on the government. And that is what makes you the most amazing, strong, independent woman I've ever banged.”

One of the main differences between B&R and T&R is that once Robin fell for Barney those feelings for him never truly vanished, while with Ted it was one sided and unrequited at some point. She surely loved him in the first seasons but when she started having feelings for Barney she always chose him over Ted. They got each other, they shared the same passions and ambitions. In season 5 episode 2 Ted said “Shouldn't we hold out for the person who doesn't just tolerate our little quirks, but actually kind of likes them?” and I don’t think this is T&R scenario since they complained about each other’s personalities and flaws a lot. As special as their bond was, I think it worked better as friendship. Robin once said to Barney “Turns out, I appreciate even the grossest, most sociopathic parts of you.”

The show itself showed multiple times that T&R didn’t work and that they weren’t right for each other. In s2 they were compared to Ted’s parents who got divorced for their same differences and divergences that split them up later that season. Lily – the most intuitive one in the group – always rooted for Barney & Robin more. Her porch test perfectly made sense and in S7 episode 1 she said that Barney and Robin have the kind of chemistry that just does not go away.

Robin’ insecurities’ about her wedding and Ted/Barney for me have always been pretty clear: her heart says Barney but her mind thinks that Ted – the one she can always count on – might’ve been a better choice, but she doesn’t love him like that and she knows it. In season 7 she turned him down and she meant it.

B&R’s divorce made me really angry since they spent most of the series building their relationship up and they kept coming back to each other. I remember when Barney was dating Nora, he heard this “When you meet the right person you know it. You cannot stop thinking about them. They’re your best friend. And your soulmate. You can’t wait to spend the rest of your life with them” and he instantly thought about Robin. He was convinced she was the one for him, they were indeed soulmates, (like Ted & Tracy) while Ted deep down knew, even if he loved her, that they were too different and that she wasn't the one for him. I can hardly accept their divorce but what I accept even less is that Ted and Robin were the final endgame. If a perfect combination such as B&R didn’t work, I doubt that T&R would last more than them. Ted always loved her more, he idealized her a lot and acted even a bit obsessive at times. Barney and Robin had a spontaneous and natural chemistry, something that T&R never had. The fact they got together in the end just because Tracy was out of the picture and Robin had no one else says a lot.

In my mind B&R somehow found their way back to each other.

Robinsparkles286·11/14/2020

https://how-i-met-your-mother.fandom.com/wiki/Barney_and_Robin

[bordeauxatdusk]

Mystique (A Detroit: Become Human Fanfic) Part 1

 Read the full fic (so far) on Ao3 here!

DISCLAIMER this fic is about gay android detectives in 2038. Please know that I am a BLM supporter and that I do not write in this in support of our current shitty criminal justice system. 

Forget-me-nots.

The dead woman’s eyes were the same color as the flowers in her hair.

She was poised, artfully, in an elegant position that looked almost like a sculpture. Rigor mortis held her in place. The crown of forget-me-nots was integrated with an elaborate veil of white lace that fell gracefully down her back.

The bloodstained silk wedding gown she was wrapped in extended outward, rippling over the room, which was staged like a movie set; a host of antique items and classic still-life objects had been structured to frame her. Elaborate globes mingled with vases of flowers mingled with stacks of old yellowing books, covers frayed. Warm light streamed in lazily from large arcing windows, illuminating the oakwood floors of the room.

The light glinted off the pearl dagger embedded in the woman’s chest. In front of her, a gold-leafed, leather-bound edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had been left open to the infamous scene:

“O, happy dagger, this is thy sheath.”

A human would undoubtedly call the scene beautiful.

To Nines, however, it was simply another murder.

He was capable of appreciating beauty, although many would be surprised to hear it. (Some people were surprised to hear that androids were capable of any abstract thought at all.)

Nines understand the concept of aesthetic value perfectly well. What he was not capable of understanding was how humans, in their love of aesthetic value, sometimes seemed to discard logic and reason.

The concept of a beautiful murder was immaterial to him. It was still murder. Whether it was committed in a wide-open oak room or in a rotting gutter made no difference.

Nines would hunt down and eliminate the murderer either way.

He was glad that Gavin felt the same, although Nines was concerned that he seemed disproportionately unnerved by something. What exactly it was, Nines couldn’t tell.

He knew that Gavin was upset partially from the rising levels of adrenaline in his scans, partially from the fact that Gavin’s pupils were dilated and he was beginning to fidget in the way he typically expressed distress (tapping his fingers together and pacing, mostly) and partially from the fact that he was increasing his profanity from its normal rate of about every one in fifteen words to every one in ten.

Nines had spent a lot of time analyzing Gavin Reed. Perhaps an irrational amount.

It hadn’t helped much.

Nines guessed that the cause of his partner’s distress must be some deeply-held psychological trauma. Humans often experienced it, and Gavin personally had suffered a difficult childhood. Whatever the reason for his distress, it must be very serious.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘ I don’t know ’, Tina?! ” his partner was currently yelling into his phone. “It’s a simple goddamn question! Do they have jalapeno poppers or not?!”

Fascinating.

Nines was well equipped to read Gavin, but very poorly equipped to understand him. The difference, he felt, was vast. He was... displeased by it. Androids were predictable, generally. Deviants much less so than non-deviants, of course, but they were still more logical than humans. At first Nines had been convinced that Gavin was simply uncomfortable expressing his emotions, but the android had begun to discover that Gavin himself was often unaware of them.

Perhaps there was some unpleasant memory jalapeno poppers evoked for his partner. He would have to ask later. Nines would have preferred to have Gavin leave the room and take a few minutes to calm down, but he had learned recently that it wasn’t an option. Apparently, Nines doing what he was designed to do and examining the physical evidence without Gavin’s interference meant he was “being a fucking know-it-all” and a “stuck-up asshole.”

“Look,” Gavin had said a few weeks ago, waving a hand dismissively to try and distract from the fact that he was clearly upset. “ It’s no big deal. Just don’t keep fucking asking me to leave in the middle of crime scenes, okay?”

Nines had been unable to see the point of this request. “ Gavin, you were clearly disgusted by the scope of the damage done to the victim.”

“Well, yeah,” Gavin had muttered sulkily, “but you don’t need to be all weird about it. Look, Nines, I want to do my job. Let me do it. Even if I’m not really helping, just let me feel like I am, okay?”

Nines had been even more confused. “ If you aren’t going to help, why are you so determined to be there? Humans aren’t exactly well-equipped for forensic analysis to begin with. I don’t hold it against you.”

It had escalated into a full-blown fight that left Nines more confused than ever until Gavin was finally able to articulate that he didn’t want to feel useless.

The absurdity and simplicity of the answer had caught Nines off guard. Gavin Reed, useless? They had won a medal together just six months ago for solving an incredibly dangerous case, saving the lives of ten other officers in the process (and possibly the entire DPD). Their success had almost entirely been due to Gavin. Useless?

Nines strongly disagreed.

He had told Gavin so. Nines always said what he meant.

Gavin had huffed under his breath.

“ Alright, shit, I get it,” he’d said, trying and failing not to smile. “You’re a big fucking suck-up.”

Nines knew enough about humans to understand that the insulting response had roughly meant, in Gavin-language,“Thank you, Nines. I’m flattered.”

What confused him is why Gavin didn’t just say that instead.

Humans never said what they meant. It was inconvenient.

Gavin's voice snapped him out of his reverie.

“Hey, Robocop. You find anything?”

Nines blinked. Gavin was staring at him, phone in hand, waiting.

Nine shook his head. “This crime scene is so elaborately staged, I can’t move through it without risking disrupting the evidence. Every object in this room is potentially a key to solving the case. There’s a very low probability the killer managed to set this up without leaving some traces of his presence behind-- fingerprints, hair, DNA. It would be better to wait until forensics arrives, and allow them to do their job. “

Gavin wrinkled his nose, thinking. It was a habit of his.

(One that Nines found extremely distracting, but it wasn’t the time for that.)

“Is something bothering you, Detective?” Nines asked.

Gavin huffed. “Yeah, stop calling me ‘detective.’ You know my name.”

He paused for a moment, sighed, and then gestured to the scene in front of them.

“It’s this whole thing, Nines. I hate it when they do this shit. It’s so fucked up. Trying to turn something so horrible into something pretty, or romantic, or-- I don’t know. You’ll see. These cases are always hell to investigate. We can’t let a single drop of this leak to the media, or else this poor girl is going to be on the front page of every newspaper across the country. ‘The Girl In the Wedding Dress’, or some shit like that.”

Nines didn’t understand. “I’m not sure I’m following you. You don’t want her case to be publicized?”

Gavin shook his head. “Hell no. How do I explain this? Okay. This girl, she’s not fucking Juliet, right? What's her real name? You know it already with your facial recognition?”

“Ashley Briggs.”

“Okay. She’s not Juliet. She’s Ashley. Ashley was a whole person, with a life and family and friends, and then some fucking creepy asshole murdered her and dressed her up like Juliet. The media’s problem is, they like stories with publicity. They like stuff that has a nice ring to it. Ashley Briggs, not so much. ‘The Girl in the White Dress?’ ‘The Woman in White?’ some other bullshit like that? They eat that up.  A picture of a pretty girl in a wedding dress with a dagger in her chest? That’s the kind of stuff they eat for breakfast. They love it, Nines! It’s like the Black Dahlia. If any of this gets out,  nobody will give two fucks about Ashley Briggs, but they’ll all love her death."

Gavin stopped for a moment to take a breath, hands gesturing wildly, eyes narrowed in anger.

"Rumors will be everywhere. Poor Ashley’s family is gonna have to deal with photos of their little girl murdered and dressed up in a fucking wedding dress all over every tabloid in the grocery store for the next eight years. And not a single one of the people obsessed with ‘Juliet’ is gonna give a shit about Ashley. Everyone’s gonna see her how the killer saw her, how he wanted us to see her, how he set her up: as pretty tragic Juliet in a wedding dress. Nobody is gonna know or remember Ashley Briggs. Don’t you see how fucked up that is? They never give a shit about the victim, even though they pretend to. It’s always about the fucking killer and his ideology.”

Nines was stunned. He had never considered that aspect of a crime before. Looking at it from that perspective, it did seem disturbing.

“They’ll romanticize her murder," he finished for Gavin, who looked almost too angry to continue.

Gavin nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. “The most fucked up part is, that’s what he wants. Her killer staged her this way because he’s trying to put on a fucking show. This is a murder with a message, we just don’t know what it is. I hate that those bastards always seem to get the attention they want. People always remember the killer, but they never remember the victim. Hell, how many people do you think could name a single victim of Ted Bundy? Or Jeffery Dahmer? Or any of the other sick bastards that decide to take their sexual fantasies out on so many innocent people that everyone forgets about?”

Nines raised an eyebrow. “We don’t know that this murder is sexual in nature.”

Gavin huffed. “Nah, but there’s a pattern when it comes to motive and method. There’s tons of examples. Um. Execution-style gunshots to the back of the head are cold, professional. Victim’s turned away, there’s a distance between them and the killer. No eye contact. Hired killers, a lot of the time.”

Gavin demonstrated with a finger gun, eyes distant, like he was remembering cases he’d seen before.

“Stranglings are personal, and a lot of the time they’re sexual. Killer’s up close, right in their face. Looking them in the eye, watching them slowly die, hands-on contact. It’s ‘intimate’ for those fucked-up pieces of shit. They’re normally sexual sadists. Hate those ones.”

Gavin’s brow wrinkled in disgust as he demonstrated.

“Stabbings are personal too, but in a different way. Bloody, aggressive, painful. Personal vendetta, lots of times. Someone close to the victim with a grudge. Betrayal maybe, ‘cause there’s anger behind it. Besides, she’s staged as fucking Juliet. Who do you think her Romeo’s supposed to be? The mailman?”

Nines hummed in response. He didn’t doubt Gavin’s theory, but any investigation should work from the external to the internal. The solid evidence should be interpreted to form theories, not theories interpreted to fit the evidence. The second an investigator began to let their personal opinions dictate the situation, they became biased.

“I still believe we should wait for the evidence to be analyzed before assuming anything.”

Gavin crossed his arms. His body language throughout this speech had been aggressive. Nines’ scans told him that Gavin was intensely angry.

“I’m not fucking assuming, I’m theorizing. If the evidence says something different then I’ll change my tune. I’m just saying, maybe the fact that she’s being staged all pretty in a fancy room in a wedding dress mirroring the suicide from goddamn ‘ Romeo and Juliet’ might have some tiny romantic undertones, Nines.”

“So perhaps we should interview her neighbors first.”

“Hell yes, we should,” Gavin said. “Starting with whoever found the body.”

He started to turn away to head out the door.

Nines stopped him. “Gavin, wait.”

He twisted back around in surprise. “What?”

Nines pressed his hands together, standing stiffly. “Are you angry with me?”

Gavin stopped in his tracks and paused for a moment in an emotion Nines was unable to read. There was a second of tension, and then Nines’ partner seemed to crumple inward as he sighed heavily, shoving his hands back into his pockets.

“No,” he said to the floor by his feet. “Sorry. It’s this case. Stuff like this- it’s fucking creepy. I get all tense. Of course I’m not mad at you, dumbass. I’m just- I’m not good at expressing shit, y’know. ”

Nines walked up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Is there anything I can do?”

Gavin’s entire demeanor changed, going from aggressive to something much more vulnerable instantly. It was a switch that, even though they’d been together for six months now, Nines had rarely seen.

“No,” Gavin said softly. “I just want to catch the bastard. Otherwise, cases like this, they always stick with me. I’ll- I’ll see her everywhere. Ashley, I mean. In mirrors, reflections, dreams. Asking me why I couldn’t do it. People always act like murder investigations are some cop-show badass bullshit, but they aren’t. The pressure’s gonna be hell. We’re gonna have to go through her whole life and dig up a lot of secrets. Everyone has graves that are better left buried. Take my word for it, it’s gonna suck. And even if we find the fucking bastard, he still might get off. Normally, I can distance myself from it, I guess, but when it’s something this creepy- I just- I don’t know if I can do it. There's something about this case. I have such a bad fucking feeling about this whole thing. It’s driving me crazy. ”

Nines reached out and wrapped his arms around Gavin, pulling him close. It was meant as a comforting gesture, and he noticed with satisfaction that his partner’s distress seemed to decrease.

Nines was beginning to understand how to react to Gavin’s moods, even if he didn’t always understand the reason why they were happening. They had both worked dozens of homicide cases. Nines didn’t understand how this case was any different, but it didn’t matter. He was programmed to adapt to human unpredictability.

He never knew what to make of Gavin’s hunches, though. They were objectively irrational, and they were also always right. It drove him insane. It defied reason.

Then again, nothing about Gavin was reasonable.

“We’re professionals,” Nines began, “and-”

“And you’re hugging me in the middle of a fucking murder scene,” Gavin interrupted, voice muffled from pressing his face into Nines’ shoulder, “like a true professional.”

“You needed a hug. Let me finish. We’re professionals, and there’s a lot of potential just in this room for the killer to have made a mistake. The chances of him staging all this with zero forensic evidence left behind are very low-”

“Mhmmm,” Gavin said, leaning into the hug.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Nope,” Gavin muttered.

Nines sighed.

He gently pulled Gavin away from him, brushing off his partner’s coat, which was eternally covered in cat hair.

“We need to go interview the neighbors. Listen. We work very well together. We’ve faced near-impossible odds before. Compared to our last big case, this will most likely be easy.”

“Nothing’s ever easy,” Gavin groaned. “Especially not in fucking homicide.”

“Well then, we’ll support each other, just like last time.”

Gavin smiled wryly. “Are you going to break a rib and give me a concussion again?”

“That highly depends,” Nines said, “on whether or not you plan to shoot me a second time.”

“You told me to!”

“I was paralyzed and all my communications were disabled. I couldn’t tell you to do anything."

“Your light flashed!”

“My LED,” Nines said, raising an eyebrow, “never stops flashing, unless I’m decommissioned.”

Gavin shoved him-- an adorably futile effort, considering he didn’t move even a fraction of an inch.

“Come on, smartass,” Gavin said. “We have some friendly neighbors to interrogate.”

[unfolded73]

“I Love You” (1/1) - schitt’s creek ff

The second of a series of snapshot fics centered around stages in David and Patrick's relationship. Dug this fic out of my google doc graveyard and finished it! It's funny, when you actually finish fics, you can post them, lol. Set just after 4x12: Singles Week. (ao3)

Rated Teen, 2800 words. Previous fic in this series: Boyfriends

__________________________________

David unlocked his motel room and entered the quiet, empty space. Closing the door, the room dimmed until the only source of light was a tiny sliver of morning sunshine where the curtains gaped. He flipped on a lamp, dropped his overnight bag on his bed, and began gathering up a change of clothes before he showered.

“Morning, kids.” His dad barged in, looking around at the unslept-in room. “Where’s your sister?”

David rolled his eyes. “Didn’t Mom tell you about what happened yesterday? I’m sure she’s at Ted’s.”

“Eh, she mentioned something about Ted making a grand gesture in the café, I suppose…”

“Yeah, and Alexis has been pining after him for-basically-ever, so they may not get out of bed for days.” David wouldn’t have minded a few days in bed himself, because it turned out that sex with someone willing to whisper ‘I love you’ into your ear at the most perfect, incandescent moment was pretty great. His knees still felt a little wobbly, and he didn’t really feel like talking to his father at the moment.

“And where were you last night?”

David huffed. “At Patrick’s. Where else would I be?” Ray had been home but David hadn’t been able to muster any worry about it. Patrick loved him. It still seemed impossible that Patrick hadn’t lost interest in him a long time ago, and instead somehow loved him. And was willing to say so. And even more miraculously, David had been willing to say it back.

“We can’t rent this room to paying customers, you know, so we expect you to actually sleep here,” his father said.

“And we do a lot of the time.” But for the first time in a long time, a future was starting to take shape in David’s mind where they wouldn’t. A future where Alexis moved in with Ted, and maybe he and Patrick got a place together. A happy future for him and his sister, something David would have doubted could possibly exist a few years ago. And not just because they lost all of their money. “But we are adults, in adult relationships, so sometimes we don’t sleep here.” He picked up his bundle of clothes and stepped around his father, intent on a shower.

“Well, I just—”

“I mean, Alexis and I are both in healthy relationships for once. With healthy, well-adjusted people who — in spite of our considerable emotional baggage — have decided we’re worthy of love. You should be, I don’t know, throwing a fucking parade, not harranging me about where we’re sleeping.”

His father looked taken aback at David’s forcefulness, and he held his hands up in a yielding gesture. “Okay. Sorry, sorry.”

David let out a deep breath and consciously relaxed his shoulders. “It’s fine. Did you need something?”

“Oh. Your mother and I are headed over to the café for breakfast; would you like to join us?”

David shook his head. “I can’t; I’ve gotta shower and change and be back at the store soon. I can’t leave Patrick to deal with all the Singles Week shoppers by himself.” He stepped into the bathroom and started to close the door, but his father reached out and stopped it with his hand.

“I am happy for you that you’re so happy, David. You and Alexis deserve all the happiness, you really do.”

He wanted to say something snarky, but his father’s sincerity made all the attitude bleed away. “Thanks.”

As David stood under the shower spray, his mind replayed the last day, the way Patrick had gently teased him about his love for Mariah while still somehow taking it completely seriously. The way he’d smiled when David was able to say those words back to him.

The thing was, when Patrick said ‘I love you,’ it was clear he’d been thinking it for a while. Weeks, probably. Or months. Whereas David really hadn’t been. No, that wasn’t exactly true — he had been thinking it, just not using the words. He hadn’t let himself even think the word ‘love’, not after how many times he’d been hurt. Not that he hadn’t been feeling it. In retrospect, he’d probably fallen in love with Patrick when he sang at their first open mic night. Or maybe that night they’d spent at Stevie’s. Or on their first date. Or when Patrick offered to help with the store. But now he’d thought the words — he’d said them — and it was like a champagne cork that once popped out of the bottle, couldn’t be reinserted. He was fairly certain he’d repeated it in the throes of passion last night himself, a memory somehow both mortifying and sexy.

Alexis came home as he was finishing with his hair.

“Oh,” she said, looking surprised that he was there. “I thought you’d be at the store.”

“I’m on my way now,” he said, examining himself in the mirror one last time before moving to gather his belongings.

“Okay,” she said, and then she crashed into him and hugged him.

“Ew, what’s going on?” David said, but he hugged her back before he extracted himself.

“Ted told me you guys talked.”

“Oh. I wish he hadn’t.”

“David, I basically owe you for the fact that Ted and I got back together so would you please just accept my gratitude?”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He continued getting his bag organized for the day. “And while we’re being emotionally vulnerable to an uncomfortable degree… what’s been going on with you and Ted might’ve inspired some declarations of love in my own relationship,” David said, feeling like his throat was actively trying to close up before he confessed anything so heartfelt to Alexis.

“David!” Alexis clapped her hands. “Have you ever said that to anyone before?”

“Not in the context of a romantic relationship, no.”

She squeaked. “You and Patrick are so cute,” Alexis said with her limp-wristed hands held up high under her chin like she was a hamster. Or perhaps the implication was that he and Patrick were hamsters.

David rolled his eyes and picked up his bag. “I’m going now.” Just before he closed the motel door behind him, he added, “I’m glad things worked out with Ted.”

~*~

David felt a surprisingly intense swoop in his stomach when he walked into the store and saw Patrick over against the far wall helping a customer, which was weird. If the love between them wasn’t new, only newly spoken aloud, why was seeing Patrick making him as weak in the knees as he’d felt in those first couple of weeks that they had been together?

Okay, perhaps it had a little something to do with how intimate the sex had felt between them last night. David could readily admit that his breadth of experience hadn’t prepared him for what it felt like to have the weight of Patrick’s love bearing down on him at the same time he pressed inside — slow, careful thrusts that David could barely process the physical sensation of when Patrick was staring into his eyes like that. Like he was precious.

David went to drop his belongings in the storeroom and to try to gain back some of his equilibrium. He needed to not be a mess. Patrick was so solid and sure about saying he loved him yesterday. Patrick took love for granted, growing up the way he had, spending most of his adult life loving Rachel with all the capacity that he’d had to love her. Loving his parents. Loving his cousins and aunts and uncles. Loving his baseball team. Loving his hockey team. Loving his math teacher, probably. David was the one so starved of love for most of his life that the very concept had seemed foreign to him a few years ago.

Hearing the bell above the door ring, David emerged to see if the customer count had increased or decreased. If the former, he needed to help on the floor. If the latter, he and Patrick were alone in the store.

It was the latter.

Patrick was behind the register, and he gave David one of those angelic smiles that reminded him of that morning after their first kiss, when David had been half-convinced when he walked through the door that Patrick was about to let him down easy. Tell him that he’d woken up realizing that he was actually straight, or that David wasn’t his type, or one of fifty other reasons David had begun concocting the second that Alexis asked ‘And you’re sure he wanted that?’ Instead Patrick had given him one of these smiles and had kissed his cheek and had told him a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“Hey,” Patrick said, kissing David briefly on the lips and then giving him a smirk. “Long time, no see.”

“Mmm.”

“Gwen was in earlier,” Patrick said as he moved behind David to get a box of facial cleanser from the stack next to the door. “What’s the deal with her and Bob, anyway? Did we figure out if he knows he’s in an open relationship?”

“I don’t know,” David said, not in the mood to gossip and Bob and Gwen. Well, he was never really in the mood to gossip about Bob and Gwen, but especially now he wasn’t. He wanted to recapture that perfect intimacy that he’d felt with Patrick yesterday. He wanted Patrick’s eyes on him. He wanted to be the sole focus of Patrick’s attention. He craved it.

Patrick, apparently, wanted to restock the facial cleanser.

David’s brain started to spin out. Should he have told Patrick ‘I love you’ this morning already? How soon should he say it again? How frequently should he say it? Just wait until it comes up naturally in conversation, or… what? David wasn’t sure what the etiquette was, once those words were uttered. Patrick must know, he thought.

David approached him, putting his hands on Patrick’s shoulders and leaning over to kiss the back of his neck. “Hey,” he said, finally answering Patrick’s greeting.

Patrick shivered and set the box down, so David turned him and pulled him into a hug. He wrapped his arms around Patrick, loving the sensation of his boyfriend’s muscled chest through his thin shirt and the feel of Patrick’s arms around him, which never failed to soothe.

“You okay?” Patrick asked.

“Mm hmm.”

Patrick pulled back enough to focus on his face. “I understand, you know, if yesterday was kind of… intense and if you need some time to process it. I don’t want to you to feel like I’m expecting anything more from you just because we said—”

“It’s not actually that? At all?” David pulled back a little, letting his hands rest on Patrick’s shoulders where they always seemed to gravitate. “It’s not that I need to pull back or to process anything.”

“Okay.” Patrick was just giving him one of those looks of infinite patience he had. That look that said, take as much time as you need, I’ll be here.

“It’s that I want that feeling all the time? That way I felt when you told me you love me, I want it all the time,” he whispered.

“Well, I do love you all the time, if that helps,” Patrick said.

David huffed. “Even when I rearrange the store according to my unnecessarily exacting standards?”

“Especially then,” Patrick said.

“I’m in love with you,” David said. It felt important to say it that way. Not just ‘I love you,’ but ‘I’m in love with you.’ It made his heart race, to say it that way. ‘I love you’ was something he could say to Stevie if he didn’t think it would melt Stevie like a bucket of water over the Wicked Witch. ‘I’m in love with you’ was something he could only mean about one person.

“I’m in love with you, too,” Patrick said, his eyes so earnest that David felt a bit like he should avert his own gaze from them before he himself melted into a puddle.

The bell above the door rang and a woman towing a toddler behind her came into the store. David grimaced.

“I’ll take this one,” Patrick said softly. “Why don’t you see if the cheese needs restocking?”

David shot him a grateful look. “You really do love me, don’t you?”

Patrick winked and made his way over to see if the harried young mother needed any help.

~*~

After a few weeks had gone by, as autumn settled into Schitt’s Creek, the concept of it, of being loved by someone and loving them in return, struck David again and again as something he wasn’t sure he could live up to. He felt it when Patrick joined the Roses for dinner at the café and talked with his dad about baseball. He felt it when they were snuggled up on the sofa at Ray’s, eating pizza in front of the television. He was feeling it when Patrick took his hand as they were leaving the store one evening in late October, the two of them shuffling through the fallen leaves as they walked back to Ray’s together.

He caught himself imagining what it would be like to take Patrick to visit New York, to show him off to all of his old friends. Would they see what he saw in Patrick? That this smart, level-headed, generous, unassumingly sexy guy had fallen in love with him? Or would Patrick’s boring Levi’s and conservative haircut and disinterest in the latest trends blind them to what Patrick really was? Probably the latter, David thought, and he felt a surge of protectiveness against his so-called friends in his imaginary scenario. How dare they discount Patrick when he was so much better than they were in every way that counted? They weren’t worthy of Patrick.

The anxiety that had been a hallmark of those first few months with Patrick, that had made it so easy to react badly to the fact of Rachel, that anxiety had morphed into a different thing that occasionally wormed its way into the forefront of his brain: a certainty that Patrick was too good for him. He squeezed Patrick’s hand hard enough that he turned and gave David a quizzical look.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. ‘M fine.”

Patrick kept gazing at him for a few seconds before he shrugged. “Okay.” He swung their hands back and forth as they walked.

I’m not worthy of you, David thought.

“Because it seems like there’s something on your mind,” Patrick said.

“You should want to date other people.”

“I don’t.”

“I know it seems like the pickings are slim out here in the middle of nowhere, but there are other gay men. Or bi, or pan, or… whatever. There are other options for you. Better options, probably.”

“David—”

“Guys who understand that R-O-Y thing—”

“ROI? Return on investment?” Patrick stopped walking and stepped in front of David to stop his forward momentum.

“See? Guys who’ll watch sports with you and won’t criticize your wardrobe.”

“Well, you’ve pretty much given up on criticizing my wardrobe,” Patrick said with a smirk. “David, I don’t want other guys. I want you.”

“Sometimes I don’t understand why,” David said softly.

Patrick stretched up on his toes and kissed him softly, just a brush of dry lips against his own. “I don’t need you to watch sports with me.” He tilted his head to the side, considering. “Remember last Sunday, when Ray was out all day and the house was quiet, and we sat across from each other on the sofa under a blanket and just read our books? And then later you helped me make dinner?”

David rolled his eyes. “I didn’t help that much.”

“You helped some. The point is, that was a perfect day as far as I’m concerned. Days like that, that’s what I need from you.”

“We used to fuck all day when Ray was out of the house.”

Patrick smirked. “Those days are pretty nice too. All of it is, with you. Why would I want to be with anyone else?”

“Because you were a starving man when you met me, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t foods out there that you’d prefer.”

“Well, I don’t love that analogy, and also I think you’re wrong. David, are you happy with me?”

He pressed his lips together and nodded.

“I’m happy with you too. I love you. I’m not sure it has to be more complicated than that. Okay?”

“Okay.” They started walking again. “I love you, too.”

He suspected it did have to be more complicated than that someday, but maybe not today. Not just yet. Today it could be the perfect aesthetics of a crisp fall day and David’s boyfriend’s hand in his.

[aboyandhisstarship]

Kindergarten AU: car crash

Thanks to @dysphoric-artist for the prompt and proof reading

still written in a diary style  and () are still kid adding his thoughts in after the fact 

anyway without further ado lets hop into it 

Ok now, you may not unreasonably say something along the lines of “Mike, you have literally died, hundreds of times. A good chuck of which happened when you were just a kid…how are you not 8 different kinds of traumatized.” And I thank you for your concern (weird guy who is reading my diary…really who does that you would have to broke into my room and stole this thing…which is uncool in every state) to be frank, I am traumatized…but I can’t really tell anyone why, what am I going to tell a headshrinker?

 Headshrinker: so Mike…why don’t you talk to me about the tragic events at your kindergarten….”

Me:  *bursts out laughing* which one…the time I got killed by the principle…or bugs, or monty, or Cindy…or the janitor…or those weird monster things (this would go on for some time)

Headshrinker: uhhh, I think you’re crazy…off to the crazy house!  (ok in fairness I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work this way…but I’m not exactly keen to find out.)

“Ok Mike” you may retort, “They might think you’re crazy…but you could be a superhero! Like the Flash, or Batman! They could call you….Reapto!”  (First off Random guy, Reapto? that’s the best you can come up with?) I tried that once to be the big hero…it can be rather hit or miss.

 High school parking lot:

Nugget said with a smile “if friend Mike, Friend Carla and the Pretty Lilly would be willing to accompany Nugget, we will indulge in some super…”

Nugget was interrupted by the loudest car screech I ever heard, my eyes went wide as felt massive pain and the air forced out of my chest.

I shoot up hyperventling as my alarm went off screaming a little bit too loudly “FUCK!”

My mother bless her soul, responded with an “I know you don’t want to go to school today young man but I will not tolerant such language.” (yea that was embarrassing)

I shook my self-off, and considered putting on a tally before deciding that it was a one off death adding to my journal *Don’t go to the parking lot after school Dummy* (normally I leave myself notes like this…and normally they are a lot more helpful, like don’t mix the red and green flowers it blows up the room you know useful stuff)

 Hallway, My high school:

I had been glancing at my watch about 4 times and Carla (Perceptive as she is) finally snapped “goddamn it Mike you got a date or something?”

I smiled awkwardly “what me no!?”

Lillie frowned “alright you are sketchy…”

Nugget nodded “friend Mike is definitely hiding something.”

A second later a car came crashing into the school slamming through several walls, nailing all 3 of us I paused briefly musing  “man I didn’t think the school was this badly built,” Before hitting the ground hard.

I woke up to the sound of my alarm and groaned grabbing my pillow throwing my face into it saying “not again!”

Before throwing himself out of bed grabbing his marker he added two marks onto my skin

5 loops later:

Ok I didn’t know the school was this badly built, guess what no matter where I was I got taken out by that car, the bathroom, Boom, the library, boom…I even skipped school once…I may have gotten grounded but I laughed thinking I had in fact won, only to get hit by a different car crossing the road, and looping. (I sometimes wonder if the universe hates me…)

But before I died I did get some valuable intel, I saw the death count (the entire school by the way…yea after this I wrote a strongly worded letter to the school board…again) but also the names of the folks in the car, two high school seniors…(now for the sake of timelines I can’t tell you who they are, but mike they didn’t die! Yea yea…just trust me the less anyone knows about the other timelines the better off we all are, tried that once when I first started looping…the planet literally exploded, so no names) so these teens who I dub….Bob and Bertha  crash and kill the whole school…and I need to find out why.

 So I approached the gang saying “alright sit down.”

Monty asked “what this about mike.” His voice clearly impaintent

so I lifted my arm showing the tally’s, that was it they were all ears as I explained “alright in exactly.” I glanced at my watch “4 and half hours, a car comes crashing into school and kill literally everyone, we need to stop that so ideas?”

Jerome proposed “maybe tell them?”

Buggs shook his head “real high and mighty types won’t listen to us.”

Lilly sighed “well they crashed into the building…so they clearly were not leaving it…”

Billy nodded “that’s right, that means they left are coming back for someone or something…we figure out what and bing bang boom.”

I pointed out “has it literally ever been that easy?”

Ted smiled “me and penny can think about cars, figure out what caused it.” Quickly blushing

Penny also blushed “I would love to Teddy…”

Felix cleared his throat “perhaps me and Cindy can get close to them ?”

Cindy smiled brightly (she had grown out of her bitchiness, but she was natural born queen bee, even if she was cool with us all the snobs and assholes in school love her.) “I can reach out…maybe find out what they have going on and more intel.”

I nodded “right find out what we can but tell me before it happens, so I can write it down.”

Everyone responded “right!”

I spent most of the loop with Monty and Carla using their connections to figure out if they were getting any drugs or other fun stuff to explain there “Skillful” driving (got em….yea ok not the best burn)

 Loop 12th:

I woke up with another groan “If I have to read another book about cars I am going to lose it!”

He glanced at his notes the car (a 66 Camaro…I swear those two are like a couple form the 60’s) and the other intel he had gathered from the others (they had indeed been indulging in drugs those bad bad boys and girls…ok I’m not one to talk, seeing  the number of crimes I have technically committed…but those were other timelines…and you know what let’s not go down that rabbit hole)  but the issue was simple, they had indeed nought some weed from Carla and monty’s secretive network (I never asked) but had not in fact gotten it yet, so the question still stood as to what exactly caused it.

 Nugget hole:

The Lair  (Ozzy wanted to call it that)  is what we call our base of operation’s,  I have been spending my time shooting down ideas that we already tried and smiling with evil glee whenever I  make ted and penny work together (honestly I want to yell make out already whenever I see them) but then it hit us, instead of stopping the car crash maybe we should stop them leaving.

 Now mike, you are likely saying, I literally thought of that after like the third loop, first off no you didn’t you liar, (seeing as we didn’t even know who they were then) also, this loop was different normally there are multiple things that need doing to affect a change in the timeline, so it is almost never that easy (ohh jee mister principle, the star athlete and his girl are going to skip class and kill us all ohh geee, yea real convincing huh?)  there was of course the factor, that our group (ok just me) were not exactly popular around school or town, they called us the kinder busters (pretty badass name right?...yea I don’t dig it either) so people consider us bad luck (to be fair…we did end up at two schools run by crazy kidnappers in a row…if that is not unlucky I don’t know what is.)so we needed a couple of people that will actually be believed, now 3 guesses of who my friends who Is the most likely to believed about that kind of thing?

Cindy? Well no seeing as she has her queen bee rep they may think that she is “fronting” (there words not mine…I shuddered just thinking about them trying to street)

Bugs? (HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHA *snort* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA…wait your serious… HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA)

Carla or Monty (better, but no joy they are bit to up to something…we need purist faces.)

Ok by now you have either guess correctly (good job!) or are yelling at the page, “stop teasing me mike and tell me!”

And naturally the answer is Ted and Penny, (I mean have you seen those faces! Who could say no to them?!)

Of course I had to convince them to do it.

 Nugget hole:

Ted asked “are you sure about this?”

I smiled “of course I am…ninty percent sure this will work.”

Penny smiled “relax Teddy this will be fine.”

I pulled out 5 dollars “here you go get yourselves some ice cream afterwards.”

Ted pointed out “you know I’m a billionaire right…”

Penny took the five dollars saying “deal! Come on Teddy.”

Now you dear reader may be sitting there thinking “that was easy, that’s it, what no boss fight, no dramatic showdown, no sweet groundhog day style montage where you do whatever you want?” (that was happened…more on that later)

My rebuttal to that dear sir, is screw you  let me have this, alright most of time when I start looping I have to fight monsters and a whole thing so I think I earned a nice break, but you might be sitting thinking “that was anti-climactic! Did Ted and Penny at least go on a date!?”

My answer to that is a yes… and no, you see both told me (under the promise to never tell a soul after the loop) they also sadly made me promise not tell the other person, now you may say Mike…after the loop they would not remember, you can pull a sneaky and just tell them that they like each other, and while you are right I don’t for a couple of reasons, number one being I keep my promises, number 2 is they would think I am messing with them (I know right those oblivious idoits.)

But sadly this journal is not a relationship journal of ted and penny (sorry guys, but this supposed to be a record of loops) but I will quietly disclose that they may have been a kiss on the cheek (I screamed I tell you)  of course they are still claiming to be friends in front of us but I don’t buy it…anyway I should proably end this entry…

So thanks for reading? (I mean you are reading a private journal…so I don’t know why you are reading this)

Mike June 26 20XX

[mst3kproject]

1009: Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark

I spent a buck-fifty Canadian to download this movie. There’s not much you can get for a buck-fifty Canadian.  One sour soother, maybe, or a chipped coffee mug from a garage sale that has a photo of somebody else’s grandparents on it.  So now you know how much Hamlet is worth.

We all know the story of Hamlet, whether we wanted to or not. King Hamlet of Denmark was murdered by his brother Claudius, who then married Queen Gertrude and stole the throne.  We can’t be having that, so the king’s ghost appears to his son, Hamlet Jr, and tells him he must take revenge.  Junior then spends the whole rest of the play wandering around pondering the afterlife and battering his girlfriend Ophelia before finally running Claudius through during a climactic duel during which pretty much everybody else dies, too, except for the ones who were already dead.  Nobody has ever given me a convincing explanation of why these people have names like Horatio and Laertes instead of Svend and Rolf.

I’m definitely not going to try to review Hamlet itself, Shakespeare’s play, because I don’t know a damned thing about Hamlet.  I deliberately went out and murdered those brain cells with alcohol immediately after writing my final exam.  Instead I’m going to have to talk about this movie in itself, how it fares both as a film and as a retelling of this story.

That second point is a big one.  Hamlet has been done, a lot, and as the bots point out with their sketch about their all-percussion version, it’s really hard to do anything unique with it anymore.  If you’re an acting troupe who wants to give it a try, that’s cool because it means people will get to see live theatre, but if you’re making a movie you really need to bring something new to the table.  An interesting interpretation, an actor or director that people really want to see, an unusual setting or time period, something like that.  This Hamlet has none of that.

I am reasonably sure that what the movie is trying to do is to look like a stage play, much as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad was trying to look like an opera.  Sinbad pulled it off with extravagant sets and operatic bombast.  By contrast everything in Hamlet, from pillars to thrones to flights of stairs, looks like it’s made out of concrete.  There is very little music, which somehow makes the whole thing feel even more doom-and-gloom-y than Hamlet already does.  The costumes go for a semi-fantasy look somewhere between Elizabethan and medieval, which is very stagey, and the effect is heightened by the fact that most of the characters never seem to change their clothes. The actors don’t look comfortable in them, though, which means they look uncomfortable in their characters as well. Queen Gertrude in particular looks like she’s too worried about damaging her gown to move easily in it, and the giant chain around Claudius’ neck is absurd.

Adding to the impression that the movie was shot in somebody’s basement, it’s lit very pootly when it’s lit at all.  A lot of shots are quite dull, lit in a way that shows where things are but doesn’t create mood or drama.  The film is in black and white and the characters wear black, or at least colours so dark you can’t tell the difference, which leaves night shots (such as the one where Horatio and the guards are chasing after the king’s ghost) looking like a bunch of heads floating around.

It is, of course, very difficult to judge a dubbed performance. The actors we’re watching appear to be going for a sort of heightened melodrama, part of the idea that we’re meant to feel like we’re watching a stage play.  The dub actors, on the other hand, don’t seem to have gotten the memo.  A lot of them mumble, particularly Maximilian Schell as Hamlet, which is really weird because he’s dubbing himself.  Sometimes they manage to make the Shakespearean English sound very natural, but that often jars with the physical performances.  I have no idea what sort of accents some of them think they’re doing. There are a few who don’t seem to be trying to do an accent at all, while others sound like they’re aiming for British (because it’s Shakespeare?), German (because the movie’s German?) or Damn Worwelf.

Most of the actors are kind of bland-looking, and those who stand out do so because they look weirdly wrong for the parts they’re playing.  Polonius with his little mustache looks like a physics teacher who feels naked because he’s not wearing a necktie.  He’s also dubbed by John Banner, so if you keep hearing this is so klandinkto! every time he speaks… that’s why.  If Hamlet himself looks familiar, it may be because Maximilian Schell was Dr. Reinhardt in The Black Hole, or maybe it’s because he looks a lot like the guy in Atlantic Rim that I referred to as MacGuyver. He’s a very fine actor who won an academy award for Judgment at Nuremburg, but he’s way out of place as Hamlet.  His Hollywood good looks and crooked little smile make it feel like he’s trying to play Hamlet as a dashing heartthrob.

For all that, there are a couple of moments in this movie that I quite like.  The scene in which Hamlet is nodding and smiling to the wedding guests while the Too Too Solid Flesh soliloquy begins in voiceover is quite nicely done.  It gives you a very visceral sense of this man who is forced to bottle up his anger and grief.  I also like that during the Murder of Gonzago scene, the camera focuses not on the players but on the audience reaction.  Claudius and Gertrude smile at each other when the players talk about love, and then grow uncomfortable as the play condemns re-marriage.  Ophelia’s embroidery is an attempt at symbolism, the arum being a popular funeral flower.  Too bad it’s so in-your-face that it loses all subtlety.

On the whole, though, Hamlet is just dull.  The spartan, ugly sets and dark costumes offer us very little to look at, and in some of the darker scenes there’s almost nothing to see at all. The physical and dub performances don’t match, and neither hold the attention.  Watching it feels like a two-hour slog through a tarry morass of depression.

I kind of wonder what the purpose of this movie was supposed to be. It was made for TV in the sixties, and I guess it was an attempt to capitalize on the Germans’ love of Shakespeare – because Germans do definitely love Shakespeare, sometimes considering themselves to have a better claim on him than England because unlike the English, they respect him.  More Shakespeare plays are performed in Germany every year than in England, and in the leadup to World War II the Nazi regime tried to get rid of him, couldn’t, and had to settle for picking and choosing which translations were ‘German enough’ for them (this always reminds me of the joke about Hamlet being better in the original Klingon).

If this is the case, I would like to know what the Germans who saw this movie in its original broadcast thought of it.  Sixty-year-old reviews of made-for-tv movies in foreign languages are hard to find even online, so I honestly have no idea.  I know that people who have seen this English version hate it, and I have a hard time imagining it being much better in German even when you love Shakespeare unconditionally.  The fact that the Germans do love Shakespeare just makes it seem that much more likely that they’d consider this dreary pork-filled version an insult to him.

It’s also interesting to think about what made the Best Brains pick this one out as an MST3K project.  The movie is definitely bad, and in its own way it fits right in with a lot of the black-and-white crap from the Joel era that tries so hard to be important and just ends up being depressing.  Yet the source material remains as something a lot of people would consider untouchable (the Germans being high on that list… although Shakespeare himself, purveyor of fine penis jokes to Her Majesty the Queen since 1591, would probably be totally okay with the MST3K treatment.  He must have heard way more vicious audience commentary).  My guess it was something they considered a challenge to themselves, in the same way as RiffTrax tackled Casablanca just to see if they could do it.  The Amazing Colossal Transplanted Sci-Fi Channel Episode Guide entry on the episode is kind of interesting, as Kevin mentions the feeling that they had to be funnier than usual in order to live up to the play’s legend.

My high school English teachers (the same ones who inflicted The Most Dangerous Game on me) insisted that Hamlet is a play which should make you think.  I’m pretty sure this is not what they meant, but the thing I’ve always found myself thinking about while watching or reading it is the idea of marrying one’s brother’s widow.  The church of the time said that this was equivalent to marrying one’s own sister (Claudius indeed calls Gertrude our sometime sister) and frowned upon it most heavily, and this would have been common knowledge in Elizabethan England because it was Henry VIII’s excuse for divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth’s mother (never mind that he’d also fucked Anne’s sister Mary).  By portraying this as villainous behaviour, Shakespeare was sucking up to the Queen, emphasizing that her mom’s marriage was way more legit than Catherine’s.  Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

[frazzledsoul]

So if you’ve been following this blog over the past week or so you should know I’ve been going through a late onstage mourning over the HIMYM series finale, since it’s taken five years for me to realize how bad it was and 

The thing is that I think one reason I defended the writers for so long is because I still think the reaction to the finale was so viscera l and OTT is because I wanted for all of these characters to be okay with the futures that they were given, no matter how much they really sucked. So when I saw people directly attacking the characters for how they acted in that hour, there was always this part of me that went

Specifically, I am referring to the fan reaction to Barney going back to womanizing after he and Robin divorced. Fans called him every name in the book and insisted repeatedly that he was a sociopath and that the tacked-on chance of redemption he was given in the last five minutes through surprise fatherhood wasn’t earned.

I can’t argue with anyone on that last part. It was tacked-on, and the writers didn’t work hard enough to make us believe that was an ending that would work for him. As I’ve repeatedly said, if the writers had worked gradually towards those shock endings and put some effort into making us believe that these characters would be happy with them instead of having Ted whine for a year and a half that he was better for Robin than Barney was, it would have gone down a lot easier. I think a large part of how the finale was conceived was a refusal to cope with the reality that Barney wasn’t the comic relief or the caricature anymore, that he was a character that the audience loved and rooted for and rooted to become a better person. The fact that the actor that played him became a huge star because of this role also had a lot to do with it. The writers didn’t want to deal with that reality, with him ultimately winning the girl instead of Ted: he could grow, he could mature, he could redeem himself but only to a certain point. In the end, the show revolved around Ted and he had to win.

IMO, the concept of Barney being redeemed by fatherhood was envisioned for a character that had never grown and matured, who never was a viable option for Robin. The person we’re asked to believe that Barney became in the finale is the same person that we saw at the beginning of the show, who never experienced anything else. So we didn’t buy it. I kind of clung to that plot twist because after all of the events that led up to the end of the series, the guy deserved something. But it’s not given enough time to be believable.

Of course, given the plot events that we had to work with, the Barney that we see womanizing in the series finale is . . . well, sad. He seems to be be diving into this with a sort of vengeance and embracing it as a lifestyle because it’s the only thing he’s got left. We’re adamantly told that it is the only thing he has left when he tells his friends that if it didn’t work out with Robin it isn’t going to work out with anyone. They try to dissuade him and get him to change, but they’re unable to, and because the writers are still sticking to their original vision of him as a caricature, it’s not treated with the seriousness that it normally would be. I feel that if this plot element happened in the middle of the series (after some of that well-earned character development) they would whip out the intervention banner again and try to help him. However, by this point in the story we’ve got to stick to the plan, part of which is that his friends are busy with their own families and don’t have time to help him.

However, as someone who’s dealt with a lot of family members with substance abuse issues, I just find it absurd to blame Barney and call him a sociopath. The way he was acting was the way someone acts when they’re self-destructing and they don’t have any hope. This isn’t some great fanwank of mine: this was literally written into the text. It’s a sad devolution of this character, but I think most of us are familiar with this kind of thing. People can improve, they can mature, they can get better, but there’s a always a possibility that they’re go back to zero if their personal failures become just too much.

I think the writers knew this, which is why they wrote it the way they did. It’s why they gave Barney a kid as a reason to redeem himself. They just didn’t care as much about this part of the story as they did about reuniting Ted and Robin.

What I don’t think the writers realized is that Ted and Robin’s obsession with each other was their own version of the bad patterns that Barney resorted to. In a lot of ways, it was just as toxic.

When Ted was with the Mother, he wasn’t obsessing over Robin or constantly lamenting the dissolution of their relationship. He wasn’t doing that when he was with Zoey or Stella, either. It did come up with Victoria, but mostly due to Victoria’s control freak ways (and one could argue that Ted was also revisiting that relationship out of desperation, too). Robin only starts rethinking her relationship with Ted when she gets close to marriage and doubts that Barney is going to be capable of being the relationship model that she thought she wanted. They only revisit their past relationship when they are sad and desolate, when they think that they aren’t going to be able to achieve the happiness that they want on their own terms. When Ted is lonely and thinks he’s never going to get that wife/baby mama of his dreams, he thinks back on Robin and is willing to give up his dream of a family. When Robin doubts Barney, she starts viewing Ted as an option, despite the fact that he wants a domesticated life and she doesn’t. They’re willing to give up on their dreams and settle for each other because they don’t think those dreams are possible. They’re not turning to each other out of love. They’re turning to each other out of fear.

Viewed in this context, Ted and Robin’s reunion in the finale is even sadder to me. They turn to each other after their dreams have failed. Robin wasn’t able to maintain the jet-setting marriage that she wanted with Barney, and Ted’s dream of a happy family life fails when Tracy dies. Essentially, I don’t think they have changed. Ted is not done raising his kids or mourning his wife. Robin acheived the career that she wanted, but never seems to allow herself to enjoy it because she didn’t have someone by her side (this is totally unfair and out of character for Robin, but that’s a whole separate issue). They’re still not right for each other, and their reunion isn’t going to solve their problems.

They’re as incompatible as they were at the end of season 2, and as much as the writers have attempted to convince us otherwise, that still hasn’t changed.

In my head, there’s still room for a Swarkles reunion. Yeah, Barney has a kid, but her mother is not dead and presumably shares custody with him. Robin isn’t expected to be her mother. They can be fun and adventurous in middle age because they can be independent in their own way and still be together (especially since Robin’s moved back to the city and I can’t imagine that Barney wants to leave). Ted’s wife may be dead, but I’m sure there are single moms at the PTA (and he probably needs therapy first, anyway). It may not be the ending we wanted, but it’s better than what the writers envisioned. Because it’s what makes sense.

ETA: Since this is Tumblr, I’d like to put in a disclaimer that there was a lot about Barney’s behavior that was creepy and disturbing, but he spent six seasons behaving this way and most viewers seemed to accept it . . . I just don’t get the attitude shift that says it was okay during most of the duration of the series and becomes sociopath behavior after the divorce when he outright says he’s doing it because he doesn’t see the point in trying anything else. Clearly he was not in a good place and that kind of self-destruction was too serious of an issue to deal with in fifteen minutes of a sitcom that is about to end.

[emuchipmunk]

Booster Gold would love E.M. Forster’s Maurice and here’s why

This might get a little crazy but bear with me, if not for the actual content then for some of the best quotes you’ll ever read. Since DC doesn’t do shit with Booster Gold or Blue Beetle until it’s time for one of them to be evil or die (or both), that clearly means that I get to steal the characters and make them my own and that’s exactly what I plan on doing. I’ll put this all under a cut because golly gee I went off on this one. Also, like, this went from analysis to a little fic of sorts??? Have no clue what happened honestly.

Ok so even though Booster is from the future I’d imagine that he’d still have to read some old ass books in school, even if “old ass” to them means like,,,now for us. BUT for the sake of this, I’m just gonna mirror Booster’s education and discovery of Forster off of how I discovered Forster with little detail changes. 

So in this English class, everyone in the class has to choose an author that they’ve never heard of before and read a few books from them and make a project of any kind that they think represents the author and whatnot right. The teacher maybe hands out a list of authors put in different categories of what they write and since it’s the future I’d think that the list probably has a few more LGBT authors than mine did, but Booster sees it and says he’ll give mister E. M. Forster a try because it’s a goofy name so he reads this book called Maurice. Now Maurice isn’t one of his more popular books, it’s actually kind of hard to find in book stores and I’m pretty sure it got most of its fame because of the story surrounding the book rather than the actual book, but the point still stands. 

Booster starts reading Maurice and literally from the first page absolutely falls in love with it. The dedication page says nothing about Forster’s family, nothing about his friends, it only says: 

Begun 1913

Finished 1914

Dedicated to a Happier Year

Now Booster isn’t a pro at history (at least this point in history) but he’s pretty sure that the dedication in the book and the LGBT category Forster was in on the teacher’s list probably had something to do with each other and not in the good way. But still, he reads on, already convinced that he’s going to like the book just from seeing that. And he’s right. 

Like I said, the future is probably hopefully a lot more open to different genders and sexualities so it’s not like Booster is particularly closed off about the fact that he likes girls and boys, but it still kind of is a complicated thing to come to realizing, and instantly he’s drawn to Maurice as he tries to navigate his feelings once Clive is in his life, showing him all these ancient Greek texts that are about same sex love and Maurice and Clive end up spending a lot of their time together. Booster just keeps waiting for this thing to fall apart because he knows this isn’t how same sex love happened back then, he knows that something has to go wrong. Yet Clive and Maurice continue being happy together and being off in their own little world. 

That is, until Clive realizes the dangers of being a practicing homosexual at this point and what it could mean for his future. This is it, this is where the story changes and it’s only going to go downhill from here. Except...it doesn’t. Sure, there is a chunk of the novel where Maurice has to deal with the fact that Clive, his first love, left him after opening his eyes to his own sexuality, but it doesn’t end like that. And once Booster finishes the book, a little teary eyed and unable to let go of the story, he reads the author’s note and falls even more in love with it once he reads Forster saying, 

“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

So after the project is finished, Booster has other things to focus on and kind of forgets about the book for a little while. He goes through all of the time travel, ends up with the JLI and all that stuff. And then as they’re hanging out, they start talking about school and all the dumb books they had to read for classes and someone asks Booster what kind of cool books they have in the future. He responds with “I wouldn’t know, I was reading old books too” and he remembers his favorite project he did in high school and starts getting really excited to tell them all about it. He keeps the story itself for himself, just tells them all about the cool poster he made that represented the Forster books he read. Eventually the conversation drifts off to something else but Booster’s still stuck on this book that he connected to a few years ago. 

He gets a new copy of the book and falls in love with it all over again and starts underlining the passages that he likes and making little comments on the edge of the pages. He comes back to read it every few months when he’s having a particularly hard time or even when he’s having a good time, whenever he just wants to look at it with a fresh perspective. He leaves different notes and likes different quotes every time. 

“There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.” He likes that one when he starts thinking he stands out too much and people won’t like him because of it. Finds comfort in the fact that it was like that back then too.

“He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because ‘this is my friend.’” He liked that one before him and Ted had such a close bond and he didn’t have any true friends in this time yet, not knowing how close him and Ted would get and knowing that the quote would become a little too real in the coming years. 

“He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.” That one jumped out to him after Ted died and he was left on his own for the first time in years without realizing how much his best friend meant to him until it was too late. 

There was even one line that he remembered word for word from back before any of this hero business even started, when he was in his own time and didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. Maybe it’s what brought him here without him realizing. “The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.” He was a coward, he couldn’t manage to get anything right and he was terrified of what would happen when he grew up and lost his good looks that everyone kept him around for. So he ran away to the past and now he’s here. 

It was when Ted came back that Booster decided that he needed to share the book that meant so much to him with somebody and so who else to share it with than his best friend? So he brought out the book one night while it was kinda slow for the JLI and Ted was hanging out with Booster in his room. The book at this point was pretty beat up, had sticky notes and pencil and pen all over it. Ted was immediately curious, as Ted is all the time, and saw how nervous Booster was and immediately knew that this was something important to him. And they spent the rest of the night talking about Maurice, the quotes that Booster comes back to time after time and what it meant to him as a kid when he read it for the first time. They’d both be lying if they said there weren’t plenty of tears that night. 

After that night, Booster read it one more time and this time a new quote jumped out at him. “He had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec’s turn to bring out the hero in him.” He realized that Ted was Alec all along and maybe it was possible to have a happy ending, maybe Forster wasn’t lying when he gave Maurice and Alec that happy ending so long ago. 

Years and years later, that quote from the authors note his first readthrough of the book stuck with him, and when Ted and Booster finally got married, the inside of the wedding bands reminded them that no matter what happens, “A happy ending was imperative.”

[sofiaesther-blog]

Callie Crossley’s “Unreality Check” and reflecting on the role of journalism in a post-truth era

When award-winning journalist Callie Crossley came to Simmons a few weeks ago, her talk opened with a scene: a gun-wielding man on a mission, determined to reveal the pedophilia sex ring he believed to be taking place in the basement of Comet Ping Ping Pizza. Later known as “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy involved members of the Democratic party hosting a child slave/sex ring, instigated by WikiLeak publishing John Podesta’s personal emails which conspiracy theorists became convinced were coded with phrases revealing illicit activity. The conspiracy has been widely debunked and is an ideal example of “fake news.” However, the day that Edgar Welch burst through the doors of the Comet pizzeria and fired three shots— that was real news. So where does the line lie between fake and real?

And in this so-called “post-truth” era, where is the line between true and untrue? It is tempting to think of the truth as only the objective facts, but that simplification doesn’t hold up. To Edgar, Pizzagate was true, enough so to drive from North Carolina to D.C. with a gun and investigate for himself. The Oxford Dictionary, which claimed “post-truth” as their 2016 “Word of the Year,” defines the term as: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” 

So how does journalism face this hurdle? By not viewing truth and untruth in such a binary way. The objective facts are true, by definition. But the emotions and personal beliefs are part of the truth, too. And those subjective elements are not a threat to journalism, but rather the lifeblood of it. If journalism merely consisted of bulleted list of facts, almost every news agency would be out of business. The job of journalists is to tell a story, to weave the facts into a narrative that readers can make sense of and piece together different perspectives (journalists can’t be unbiased, sure, but they can be balanced). And that narrative includes not just the numbers and the five W’s, but the reactions, the quotes, the varying perspectives, and all the other context. 

Consider the 2016 U.S. election. Donald Trump said a lot of bigoted and untrue stuff. That’s partly my opinion and partly objective. I remember the day the “grab them by the pussy” tapes came out I was horrified, but also unsurprised and relieved. At least he finally said something he can’t come back from, I thought. Four months into his presidency, clearly my truth wasn’t the only truth. I think many news outlets (“mainstream media”) failed the public in some ways, by focusing on their personal truths rather than the truth, which should encompass all perspectives. Many Trump supporters kept pretty quiet during the election because of their unpopular opinions, and polls didn’t predict the massive number of “Make America Great Again” enthusiasts perhaps in part because of that shame. But it’s the civic duty of journalists to bring the views of these people to light. 

One Mother Jones article focused on the lesser-heard side of the great Trump debate. Author Arile Hochschild spent five years in Louisiana, getting to know Trump supporters as more than “Trump supporters” in order to understand their truth. The surface level story she found was what we’ve all seen and heard: “I’m voting for freedom” (or fairness, or to make America great again, etc.) and “I was for Ted Cruz, but now I’m supporting Trump.” But the unifying narrative she heard when she dug deeper was this, what she calls the “deep story”:

“You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.”

When she read this back to the 60 people she interviewed, they felt completely understood. I don’t condone in any way the copious amount of hate speech spouted by Trump and many of his supporters, and so many others in so many places. And I really cannot speak for or defend Trump. But for many of the people who believed him, I can understand what they saw in his rhetoric when I think of how they would tell their own story. Is it true that Mexican immigrants are rapists, criminals, and drug lords, as Trump infamously claimed? No. Is it true that someone who feels Mexican immigrants are taking their jobs may find it appealing to dismiss these people in this way? Sure. Were black and female Americans deprived of the right to vote for years (it hasn’t even been a century since women won the vote)? Absolutely. Do people who have always held this and other privileges feel disenfranchised now that previously disadvantaged demographics are catching up? The Mother Jones narrative seems to say so.

If we want to bridge the Grand Canyon-sized political divide, we as communicators need to stop dichotomizing the truth. Differing opinions can coexist as long as we all recognize the objective facts (which is another battle in itself). And if we take the time to hear each other behind our bumper sticker and picket sign slogans, we may find that we don’t live in a post-truth era after all.

>>The Mother Jones investigation, a great read

>>Trump’s largest voting demographics: (men, white, aged 50-65+, salary of $50-99.9k, conservative, living in rural areas, with a high school education or less— as educated young women living in a city, it is easy to dismiss this demographic’s opinion, but that thought process made up almost half of the country, so we’d be wise to understand that point of view and where it comes from, so that we can learn how to productively educate&move forward)