#i want to see fifteen STRUGGLING to choose to do good

[wayward-wren]

I'm hoping episode 3 let's Ruby see the dark side of the Doctor. I feel that adds a very important dynamic to a Doctor-companion relationship, when they see how dark he can be and still choose to travel with him early on.

Rose watching Nine drag Cassandra back to die. Eleven yelling at Amy "Nobody human has anything to say to me today!" Donna begging Ten to stop drowning the spider babies, and then again to go back and save someone in Pompeii.

Fifteen has been FUN and I know he can do emotional range, I've seen his fear and his tears already. But I want to see him dark, and I want to see Ruby respond to that. I think it would add a LOT of depth to their relationship and is something missing.

Plus showcasing the Doctor's flaws (selfishness) will make him a much more interesting character. I want to see some conflict between the Doctor and Ruby.

[luveline]

I love anything strangers to lovers with James, something with him maybe coming to a muggle pub with the guys and coming over to talk to you, trying to be all suave but entirely relying on everything muggle studies has taught him and like mixing weird things up but he’s still so endearing you kinda don’t care

ty for requesting❤️

James is holding Remus’ hand when he sees you. They’re being touchy and weird because there’s nobody around to see it but strangers, aware that it’s a little too touchy but uncaring. The drinks they’ve had makes it less overly friendly and more this man is my best friend in the whole world. 

He sees you and abruptly drops Remus’ hand. 

“James,” Remus says, pulling his hand back. 

“Sorry, but– but look!” He gestures to you, leaning down as though this might stop you seeing him before he’s ready. 

You’re really something. In a group of friends two tables and what looks like fifteen chairs, too many bodies, you’re hanging back with your glass held to your chest, giggling at someone’s loud joke. You’re so pretty James feels it in his chest, like woah! Like, he has to talk to you. Maybe it’s the way you’re smiling as you laugh, he loves it. 

The longer he looks, the more convinced he becomes. 

“What are we looking at?” Sirius asks, back at the table with a new drink. 

Remus quickly takes it. “It’s who are we looking at,” he corrects. “There’s a girl over there James likes the look of.” 

“She’s gorgeous. I’m going.” 

Neither friend tries to stop him. James isn’t drunk nor stupid, and he’s not a bad flirt. Not that every girl he tries to talk to wants to talk back, but he isn’t disrespectful or grim. 

He tries not to overthink it. 

“Hi, ladies,” he says, directing his hello to your little gaggle off the main group. You sit between two other women, all smiling politely as he speaks up. “What are you guys doing out tonight?” 

“It’s my birthday,” you say. 

“It is?” he asks, surprised. “Happy birthday! You aren’t wearing a badge?” 

“It’ll poke holes in my shirt.” 

He nods solemnly. “Well, never mind it. Are you having a good night?” 

“I would be, if the person feeding the jukebox would stop playing Bee Gee’s,” you say. 

Feeding the jukebox, James repeats in his head. He looks around for some sort of animal but doesn’t find one, nor does he spot any games of Bee Gee’s. “People are terrible pet owners these days,” he says. 

You laugh like a riot, so he must’ve said something right. “Only an animal would play disco!” you agree, standing up suddenly. “I need another drink. Are you coming with me, or did you fancy someone else?” 

James grins. “I’m coming with you, please.” 

He sees the little twitch on your smile that shows you’re pleased; you aren’t as confident as you’re trying to appear, and your question had been a brave one. James will try to reward your courage. 

“Do you come here often?” he asks, following you through tight tables and down a step to the bar. 

“Only on birthdays.” You grin as he shields you from a passerby. “What about you?” 

“Here? Never in my life! It’s quaint though, I love the taps and the posters and the pork scratchings!”

“They don’t have pork scratchings at home? Where are you from?” 

He shrugs. “Somewhere awful. They don’t have birthday girls half as pretty as you are back there. Did you get anything nice for your struggle?” 

“What, the struggle of getting older?” You lift your chin. “Do I look like I’ve struggled? In ageing?” 

“You look like you’ve been deprived of a drink. What’s your favourite?” 

“Can you guess?” 

James slows with you, just shy of the bar. What a peculiar thing to ask. Maybe muggles play this game, maybe this is a flirting ritual. James chooses the prettiest drink for a nice looking girl. “A French seventy five,” he suggests. 

“What’s that?” 

“Gin and champagne, mostly.” 

“I don’t know about that one.” 

James grins. “A cherry spritzer, then. Ice, a little sugar, cherries on the rim. You look like you like cherries.” 

James buys you a cherry spritzer with extra cherries —it’s your birthday. You say thank you twice and sip it at the bar as he nurses a cold dark thatchers, your elbows touching. James briefly notes how you compliment one another in the mirror above the wines. He tries to catch your eye in it, but gets distracted when the TV box above it changes colour. 

“Do you watch the football?” you ask, noticing his gaze. 

“Oh, yeah. Love football. Weird shape for a ball, but. Do you like it?” 

You take a second to answer, “Well, what about rugby?” 

He’s more familiar with rugby, they talked a great deal about it in muggle studies. “I love rugby! All the scrums and scrimmages.”

“Do you play?” 

“Um, no.” 

“Well, you must play something.” 

“Are you flirting with me?” he jokes. 

“You look active!” 

“What do you like?” he asks, happy to change the subject and learn more about you at the same time. 

“I like lots of stuff, mostly books. Oh, I like karaoke,” you say. “I’m not very good.” 

James knows what karaoke is. “I bet you are. It’s about patience, right? Filling in all those little boxes. I can’t get behind the numbers part, I’m terrible at arithmetic.” 

You look at him like he’s grown two heads. You don’t mean to, he can tell, because your expression immediately clouds with guilt, and then something kinder. He likes fondness on you, and he loves for it to be directed at him. 

“I’m terrible at maths, too,” you say, smiling, nearly shy. “Do you want to get a table with me?”

“Did I say something wrong, before?” 

“No, I don’t think so.” 

It’s much later with his hand behind your neck when he realises the numbers game is sudoku, not karaoke. He laughs against your open mouth. You ask him what’s so funny, but the warmth of your breath on his lips has him forgetting.

(James was a tad weird, you think that night, his phone number on the back of one of your birthday cards and your lips still fizzing, but he’d been earnest even in kissing, and for that you can’t complain.)

[ultrainfinitepit]

Hello angel enthusiasts, it’s nearly that time of year again: time for Angeltober 2024✨

My goal this year is to use the prompt list to draw angel and vampire designs, since I've been wanting to do a bit of Vamptober too.

Feel free to follow along with your own creations! They do not have to be angels or angel-themed, the prompts are simply here to inspire you to create - there are no rules. You can pick and choose the prompts you like and do whatever you want with them. You can even repost old artwork!

If you post your work I’d love to be tagged to see it: 

@ultrainfinitepit​ here on Tumblr

ultra.infinite on Instagram

ultra_infinite on Twitter

I’ll be using #ultrangeltober, #ultrangeltober2024, #angeltober, and #angeltober2024.

My list this year has only fifteen prompts because I was struggling to keep up with all thirty-one last year. If you're looking for a full prompt list with thirty-one prompts, please check out @sancta-seraphina's Angeltober 2024. Their list is fantastic and I'm planning to do a few prompts from it as well!

The text version of my list is under the cut. Good luck and have fun!

Angeltober 2024

Egg

Shapeshift

Consume

Hunter

Chalice

Coffin

Smite

Eldritch

Song

Halo

Immolate

Gothic

Rose

Stained Glass

Corvidae

[moonstruckme]

I can’t believe I’ve never read this but Sirius getting a tattoo of your name and you and EVERYONE is like ! And James is probs jelly heheheh

Thanks for requesting!

Sirius Black x fem!reader ♡ 802 words

“Well, the font at least sort of covers the misspelling,” you say, peering at the skin just to the left of Sirius’ back dimple. 

Remus hums his agreement. “Yeah, I sort of messed up in the middle there, so I switched to cursive to make it less noticeable.” 

“What?” Sirius twists around to try and see. 

“Joking, joking.” You smile up at him as he makes a sound somewhere between relief and offense, holding him still by his hip and not at all minding the excuse to do so. “It looks good, Siri. I just wish you’d told me you were getting it, I would have surprised you with the same.” 

Your boyfriend’s pursed lips relax into a familiar grin. “Yeah, sweetness?” Remus groans, finding something else to look at away from the two of you. “You mean it?”

“Nope,” you say bluntly, using your grip to tug him back down beside you on the couch. “Sorry, Rem, you’re never getting near me with that needle.” 

Remus huffs a laugh. “No pressure here.” 

“But baby,” Sirius croons, though it’s really more of a whine, “it’d be so hot. You could get it in the same spot too, so we’d match.” 

“You two already match plenty,” James decrees, coming in the door sweaty and covered in dirt from training. “Outfits and nail colors are enough.”

“Envious green doesn’t suit you, Prongs,” Sirius replies. He leans his head back so he can give his friend a disdainful look over the top of the couch, hair flopping away from his eyes. “Y/n loves when we match, don’t you gorgeous?” 

It’s a struggle not to let your eyes flit down to your star print socks, twin to the ones covered by Sirius’ boots. You give your best impression of insouciance in your shrug. 

“She’s a hostage to your schemes.” James tosses his bag to the floor, perching on the coffee table lest Remus get after him for getting dirt on the couch again. “What are you trying to coerce her into now?”

“He wants her to get a tattoo of his name like he’s gotten of hers,” Remus answers, the tiny quirk of his eyebrow at James conveying his disapproval of this plan. 

James’ eyes widen behind his glasses. “You got a tattoo of her name?” 

“Yeah.” Sirius grins proudly, already turning and pulling down his waistband. “Wanna see?” 

“Does he always take his pants off when you’re all home together?” you ask Remus. “Is this something I should be worried about?” 

“He’ll take his pants off at any opportunity,” he replies. “You knew what you were getting into with him.” 

“I guess I did.” 

“Fucking what?” James’ gaze jumps from Sirius’ hip to his face, betrayal in his big brown eyes. “That’s my spot. You’ve given her my spot!” 

You feel your brows furrow. “Excuse me?” 

“We agreed,” James says, and though his outrage doesn’t seem meant for you, you’re a tad intimidated regardless, “that I would get to choose the tattoo that went on his lower back. Pads, you swore an oath of brotherhood!”

“I was fifteen,” Sirius protests, mouth agape, “and drunk! I hardly remember what I agreed to!”

“Moony was witness.” James gives Remus an expectant look, mouth a hard line. 

Remus sighs like he’d really rather not be a part of this, but he knows better than to argue. “You did say that,” he tells Sirius, then turns to James. “Though it was a long time ago, and I’d like to have it on record that I didn’t recall it when I agreed to do the tattoo.” 

“Ah ha!” James points at Sirius accusingly. Sirius slaps his finger away with a roll of his eyes. “You’ve conspired against me.” 

“Why,” you ask James, “did you want to choose a tattoo for his lower back specifically?” 

James scoffs as though this should be obvious. “Because that’s the claiming spot. As he clearly knows.” He crosses his arms, glaring indignantly at your boyfriend. 

You shrug. “Well, he has two hips. You could always have the other one.” 

Now it's Sirius’ brow which furrows. “I’m not sure I appreciate my skin being auctioned off like this.” 

“Nobody’s auctioning you off, honey,” you placate him, rubbing his shoulder. Predictably, he softens under your touch, leaning against your side. You give his bicep a little squeeze. “For it to be an auction, we’d have to be exchanging money. This is for free.” 

Remus chuckles, and Sirius elbows your side meanly, but he’s smiling. James ignores them both, uncrossing his arms to lean his elbows on his thighs and looking at you with interest. 

“I could get behind that,” he muses. “You’d be willing to share him like that, though?” 

You roll your eyes as you smile. “I knew what I was getting into with him.” 

[evilminji]

As I have recently discussed, with the ESTEEMED Quirk Scholar @mayfay !

Suprise Quirk Accident Babies! Gotta love um!

They're the, ironically enough, love child of "suprise child acquisition" and "suddenly pregnant" troupes! But SPEEDRUN! Because THAT IS A TODDLER/BABY! Right here. Right now!

Just?

POOF!

✨️~BABY~✨️

And now YOU! Yes, YOU! Get to deal with it. All those vague "do I want to be a parent someday? Would it be SAFE? I am READY?" Questions AND MORE! Suddenly NOT SO VAGUE.

Suddenly VERY RELAVENT. Immediate. People are asking you questions you are GOING to need to answer. And?

You are not the only parent.

You might be JUST out of fucking high-school. Staring down a top lister, high 20, maybe TOP TEN, Hero. Who is society gonna choose here? Your barely adult ass... or them? You might never see your kid again if they decide to take them. Decide to be an asshole.

They have enemies, too.

Can... can you HANDLE those enemies? To protect your kid?

It's been less then fifteen minutes. Fight has barely ended and your sitting under a shock blanket. Decisions are going to have to be made. And all you can think is the sound of your own panicked screaming. Static white noise. The reporters and shady Goverment officials already circling like sharks. Gotta make a decision. Gotta make a decision. Gotta....

It is? The BEST.

The more unlikely the combos the better! My asexual ass is thriving! Fuck yeah! Free baby, no sex!!! You can have platonic child rearing shenanigans! Interesting Self Insert Setups! New OCs! Character dramas! Or romance, if your into that sorta thing!

But you know what I think would be funny as hell?

The continued bloodline curse of AfO being so Platonicly Yandere at his own kin that they go Rabidly Feral Wet Cat and try to claw his throat out, bare minimum! Because obviously HE isn't the problem here! No, no, it's everyone ELSE that caused the issues last time! He doesn't have to learn from past mistakes! He's perfect! (Spoken by the world's most delusional man)

He ALSO has lost track of how many minor quirks he has shoved in metaphorical pockets at the moment. As he is, as always, a kleptomaniac. The way the react to each other? Cascade and shift? React to OTHER outside quirks?

Ha! He's never fucking studied that. Why would he study that!? He has power to steal.

So... set the scene~

Toshinori v. Afo: Kamino Ward.

Make the changes you please, add or subtract Heros, but the BIG TWO are there. They clash. Like Titans. Like GODS. AfO getting frisky with his quirk use, throwing everything at the wall. But?

Oh. This time. THIS TIME, you bastard! Toshinori is NOT ALONE!

The power of community, of an ARMY, is not to be underestimated. They make be struggling. Have broken bones and worse. But they know he just... just needs ONE shot! They... they can give him one shot.

Even if it's the last thing they ever do.

Because? They are god damned HEROES.

AfO feels his legs rip out from under him, just as he's about to dodge. It's going to be a killshot. He may... potentially... THEORETICALLY... conceivably... possibly... panic... just a bit. MAYBE. A microscopic amount.

He lashes out.

With everything.

And he DOES mean everything. Yes, including that "grow flowers" and the "summon apples towards you"Quirk, for all the good THOSE would have done.

Something? Happens.

The blast hits the Oaf infront of him... and? Resonates. Like the striking of a great clear bell. It RINGS. Deafening. Without noise. The damn brat...rewinds? No. He's not younger. He RESETS! OH YOU MOTHER FU-!

Something sliding off him. Like dust. From the reset. Drifting towards other dust.

Swirling. Some merging, like planets forming. Most not enough. Turning grey and falling to the ground. But... but he can SEE it. A whisp of white hair gets in the way. HIS hair. Ha. Ha ha hA HA HA HA HA!!! Reset! NOT JUST YOU, ALL MIGHT!

The heroes are getting up. It doesn't matter. He'll just put them BACK on the ground.

INTO it this time.

But then?

The dust from him, all might, so many others. Solidifies, compresses, the pops like a firework. Dumping a very started black hair, blue eyed, toddler on the ground.

AfO connects the dots first. He has AfO hair texture. Quirk weirdness just happened and their is ALWAYS a cost or drawback to Quirks. Such as... any overflow creates an infant? Did he just make his own child?

Not risking it.

He lunges.

All Might lunges for the simple reason of "oh GOD SUPERVILLIAN AND A BABY!" D:> same as every other hero there.

Meanwhile DANNY? Retired Halfa Superhero, Zone Councilman, and LATE to his DnD night... is beginning to suspect THIS is what Clockwork meant when he said "some roads take longer to get home".

Was that that a "Lol good luck buddy"!?

@mutable-manifestation @babbling-babull @legitimatesatanspawn @hypewinter @hdgnj

[sirianasims]

Chapter 43.5

Idiot.

The voice in my head is persistent. It’s been over two months but it’s not letting up.

I try to focus on the lines, struggling to keep the faint remnants of my Tartosan accent from creeping into Llama Man’s commanding voice. It’s always more difficult just after I’ve been home.

Idiot.

Images from the last year keep flashing by, little details seared into my brain. Her green eyes. Her smile. The delicate birthmarks artfully strewn across her face. I used to insist on kissing each of them goodbye before I left and it always made her laugh.

It was the best sound in the world.

Idiot.

The more recent images are a different story. Her tears. The look of shock and confusion in her eyes. She didn’t understand, of course, and some days I’m not sure I do either. Am I an idiot for leaving her? Or for letting myself fall in love with her in the first place?

Both?

“Alright, Paul, that was good, but let’s do an extra take just to be sure.”

I nod at the sound technician and start over.

“I’ve sent the files off to Mike. Personally, I don’t think he’ll demand another round, the last two takes were flawless.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry for dragging you in for pick-ups again, I’ve been feeling a bit off lately.”

“Hey, it’s a pay check. And I’m going to need it for the move. We want to get settled into the new house before my son’s wedding so we’re already packing.”

“Did you find a job in Henford yet?”

“Not yet, but my wife got an offer. We’ll make it work. My kid is the only family I have left, so if he moves abroad, we follow. And I never liked staying in one place for too long anyway, I get restless.”

“Well, best of luck over there, Charles. The new sound tech will have some big shoes to fill.”

“Thanks, Paul. It’s been a pleasure working with you.”

Charles leaves, and I turn on the coffee machine.

I’ve just finished pouring two mugs when Lee arrives.

“Oh, you must have read my mind, love, I am positively dying for a coffee right now.”

“When are you not?”

Lee settles onto the sofa with a sigh.

“It’s been one of those weeks, deadlines put such a damper on my creativity. But how was Tartosa? Did you have a nice birthday?”

“It was fine. I didn’t feel like making it a huge thing, but my mother had arranged a family dinner at the vineyard.”

“Ah, just an intimate and completely non-threatening gathering with fifteen to twenty people, then.”

I lean back against the counter and take a long sip of the coffee to avoid responding. It’s still too hot, and I grimace as the liquid burns my mouth. Idiot.

Lee isn’t so easily deterred, though.

“So, that’s it? You’re just never going to see her again?”

“Lee, first of all, she blocked me. On my birthday, no less. So I’m going to take that as a big fat hint and respect her wishes. Second, I broke up with her because it was a dead end. She’s not going to settle down for another decade, and when she does, she’s not going to pick some fifty year old relic.”

Lee raises an eyebrow.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, I said it. Sorry to break it to you, Lee, but you’re old. Ancient. Practically dust.”

“I’m choosing to ignore your hurtful remarks because you’re clearly heartbroken and out of your mind with grief.”

I snort. “Sorry. I’m fine, really, I’m just annoyed at myself.”

“For irrationally breaking up with the love of your life or for stubbornly refusing to reconsider?”

“For being an idiot in general, I guess. I knew it was a bad idea. I even told her as much the first time I met her. But then I just had to go back and talk to her again like a complete dumbass and she practically invited herself back to my hotel. How could I say no to that?”

Lee chuckles. “Oh, but you couldn’t, of course you couldn’t. I mean, she’s not exactly my type, but I can still appreciate the aesthetics, as it were.”

“Right? And that might even have been fine if it never went any further, but I got carried away and kept seeing her even though everyone could tell it was going to end badly. We’re both better off like this, I’ll get over it.”

Lee just looks at me over the rim of his glasses.

“Are you sure? I may be a dusty old relic but as far as I’m aware, the only way you could possibly know that she blocked you is if you spent your birthday trying to look her up.”

“Thanks, detective. It was a moment of weakness, you don’t need to rub it in my face.”

“I’m not trying to rub anything in your face, love, I know it’s not your thing. But you were clearly serious about her if you were planning to bring her to Tartosa. And just because the poor girl understandably got slightly intimidated, you drop her like a newborn giraffe. Why not give her some more time?”

“I didn’t… Lee, it was the sensible thing to do! I just turned forty, I can’t just spend years waiting for her to make up her mind and hope for the best.”

“I don’t share your fetish for monogamy, but I believe all relationships are like that, you can never be certain. But you’ve always been stubborn so I’ll just give you the usual break-up advice. Get a haircut, hit the gym, put yourself back out there. Will you at least see my stylist?”

“Never. I am not brave enough to let Jessica Clemons near my wardrobe.”

beginning / previous / next

[aruanimess]

Armin + braids

It's the third year of training, and the weather is blisteringly hot. The cadets are supposed to do an endurance run trekking up a hill while carrying their equipment on their backs, but most of them have barely enough energy to fan themselves with a lazy wave of the hand. Sweat is dripping on overheated temples, waterskins are passed around and welcomed like the blessings that they are.

Armin, in particular, is struggling more than the rest. Not because of his natural disadvantage when it comes to physical activity, but because his hair is getting everywhere, sticking to his nape and forehead and hindering his eyesight. Normally, he would have gathered his wayward locks into a low ponytail, but he got a haircut recently in preparation for the summer, and his hair is not long enough to stay tied.

He glances at the girls, with their pretty pigtails and their messy buns, and then at the boys, with their short cropped cuts and buzzed heads, and bites back his envy with a sigh.

He has just pushed back his sweat-soaked bangs for the fifth time that morning when a gentle voice speaks up behind him. "Oh, Armin, are you having trouble with your hair?"

He turns to see Krista, who is sporting an impressive braid that loops around her head like a diadem. "Oh, um," he says, a bit embarrassed, "A little. I'm going to be fine though, no need to worry about it."

"Do you want me to braid it for you?"

"I don't think it'll work. It's pretty short."

"Don't fret! I know just the way to make it stay in place!" she states proudly.

And, well, she says it with such confidence, that Armin has no option than to comply. If it works, it'll solve his problem, and if not, he'll have wasted a couple of minutes. No big deal. They're not even being graded on this drill. Not to mention, no one in their right minds would say no to a pretty girl touching their hair. He sits down on the dry dirt, and offers himself to Krista's talent.

Fifteen minutes later, he gets to his feet, dust his white pants (that have been irrevocably stained from the ground; seriously who picked white for a soldier's uniform?), and passes his fingers over his newly braided hair, feeling them over. Two matching plaits are lining his skull, from the crown of his head to right below the ears. He nods, satisfied, and thanks Krista for her help.

Miraculously, the plaits remain intact until the end of the day. Armin is beyond excited.

He goes to Krista and asks her to teach him how to replicate the hairstyle on his own. Krista and a gaggle of other girls are more than happy to guide him through the motions, and, after a few failed attempts, Armin has the hang of it.

It becomes his signature summer hairdo.

Sure, he gets a couple of odd looks. For example, when Annie Leonhart first spots him with the braids her eyes widen comically and her face turns an alarming shade of red, but she ends up murmuring something about him being practical and leaves it at that. The boys also all do a double take when he chooses to show up in class like this, but they're all pretty good sports about it. Except for maybe Reiner, who weirdly chokes on his saliva every time he sees him...

But all in all, Armin is very happy with the results. 

[froggyliciouz]

What I think happened in the final fifteen was…

•) the Metatron did convince Aziraphale to go back to heaven because Aziraphale fell into old patterns as well as wanted it to be true that heaven actually sees worth within him

•) what he said to Crowley was the result of him falling back into those old patterns (also him just being a bit of an idiot, a traumatized idiot, but an idiot nonetheless) HOWEVER

•) what Crowley told him (as well as the kiss) ended up changing his mind about wanting to go back to heaven, but his thought process wasn’t finished in the moment the argument between them was still happening

•) the „i forgive you“ was his attempt to remind himself what side „he’s supposed to“ choose, I don‘t think it was a deliberate choice of him to hurt Crowley, I‘m not even sure he realized what he actually said in that moment (or it was too late when he did)

•) when the Metatron came back to collect Aziraphale, he was still in the progress of sorting his change of mind out

•) the struggle you see in this scene isn’t to trick the Metatron but his real struggle of choosing between the believe system ingrained into him and the one he actually adapted himself through the time:

•) he made his choice, but hasn’t figured out how to get out of this situation / how he wants to deal with the situation:

•) he realized he can’t talk himself out of it, therefore comes with the Metatron to the elevator

•) in said elevator Aziraphale figured out a plan, determined to save the world (his world):

I don’t think he lied to Crowley about his reasons to go back, nor do i think that there was some kind of miracle or poison involved to get him to go back in the first place, the manipulation through the Metatron was enough to get him to consider it.

Aziraphale wants to do the good and right thing, so when his blind faith in heaven combines with the Metatron telling him how to do the right thing (becoming archangel), him showing him appreciation in form of a promotion as well as making him (possibly false) promises to get rid of an old misunderstanding aka Crowleys fall, which Aziraphale knows wasn’t the right thing to do, so of course he took the bait.

He repeatedly clings to old beliefs and patterns, hell, he doesn’t even upgrade his wardrobe for hundreds of years. Compared to an ever fluid Crowley he was always solid and never changing, so him actively taking the chance to do something and change something about a system he has finally realized isn’t perfect or toxic even is a big part in his character arc.

And most importantly: it‘s not out of character, because the struggles of change were present. Aziraphale was unsure in his next actions, he hurt people he loves in the process and he will come to realize more and more that there’s even more changes to be made not only in a belief system that only allows black and white thinking but also in his relationship with Crowley that still suffers through said system as well as ongoing miscommunications.

[spocks-evil-godmother]

To again enjoy SNW for what it is, I have just finished 2x8 "Under the Cloak of War" and am really enjoying my mixed feelings. There's a part of me that is like, "why did they do this to my friend m'benga" and part of me that thinks, "It would not have had the same impact with anyone other than my friend m'benga."

More so than other episodes in this season, there is something classically Star Trek about the entire setup. A character representing a dichotomy comes on board, the crew struggles with it, and people take action that does not align with Starfleet values, and there is an aftermath. The main difference, I think, is that the action M'benga takes is murder, and that he is a primary character on the show. For many other series, the offense would be less/more removed, and would not necessarily be performed by a main character (a recurring character, perhaps).

I think an episode like "In the Pale Moonlight" from DS9 is a fair enough parallel when I am trying to go to sleep, but: consider. The episode contends with Sisko doing something very Unstarfleet (committing an act of terrorism resulting in the deaths of innocent Romulans) but ultimately decided as necessary in the landscape of the war he is in. Sisko doesn't plant the bomb, but when the war criminal he hires does--the savvy audience member has to realize, Sisko is not naive enough to think that Garak was ever going to play by the rules. But, though this episode focuses on war and terrorism, Sisko is removed from the action. By his account, it isn't even really something he chose.

M'benga chooses to give a peaceful Klingon ambassador a highly dishonorable death, unprovoked, and lie about it to his captain. It's close. It's personal. It's problematic. And it really encapsulates where we are inside the story.

A little over a century later, it will still be controversial to have a Klingon serving as the Enterprise's security officer. Klingons are still feared and dangerous. They are still discriminated against. In that future, conflicts with the Klingons will remain frequent and frustrating, even if they are less lethal. I can't look up the details rn but I feel like the Klingons' tenure as members of the UFP lasts like, less than fifteen years. Those of us who love Star Trek know that though we may come to understand Klingons better, things stay rocky.

Peace, in this moment on Pike's Enterprise, must feel nearly impossible.

And M'benga is the doctor. We know him to have a big heart and a general concern for preserving life after being a soldier. And, more than maybe anyone else in the main group of characters, he has a cool head. He isn't like Erika, who is MAD and is LETTING PEOPLE KNOW. La'an and Una can get upset about the same (administrative) things. Spock is in his Feeling Some Kind of Way era. Chapel is on heartbreak island. Uhura doesn't fight with people but she is Stressed and Wants to Be Good Enough!! And Pike occasionally loses his mind for our enjoyment. M'benga, meanwhile, is a patient, thoughtful dude. And the horrors of war still haunt him, still grip his insides to the extent that when he is challenged with peace, it is not remotely in the realm of things he can accept. It is something to be resisted, disputed, denied, and put down. Period.

I loved this episode because it isn't an easy thing to watch. It doesn't have that characteristic hopefulness that many episodes (of both old and new trek) fall into. It is one thing to tell a story about peace and unity, and entirely another to live it out.

I cannot help but think that Major Kira would understand this episode implicitly.

My only other thought is just that I like that they chose the doctor. I think especially with Alvarado in the transporter buffer, we see that being a doctor on a battlefield means making life or death choices. And, we see that they are choices he has made before and choices he makes again. It is not a happy duty, but however we may feel about it, I think we see why M'benga accepts it as his duty all the same.

[farfromstrange]

WORDLE | Matt Murdock x OFC

Masterlist | Series Masterlist | AO3

Pairing: Matt Murdock x OFC

Summary: Eliza and Foggy play Wordle and things to a little out of hand. But what else do you expect to happen between two people who are more competitive than professional athletes when it comes to playing games?

Warnings: None. Some suggestive language maybe, but overall humor & fluff. Not proof-read. Just found this again after 5 months.

Word Count: 1.5k

A/n: This is a draft that’s been sitting here for a very long time. The idea just popped into my mind after i lost 5 times in a row BECAUSE OF ONE LETTER so yeah, have fun ig. I’ve written it with my OC’s name so I can’t exactly say you can read it like a reader insert, but you can still read it even when you haven’t read the series and don’t exactly want to. If you do though, the links are above. Enjoy!

“Franklin Percy Nelson! If you put a ‘j’ instead of a ‘y’ we’re no longer friends!”

“I’m gonna put the ‘j’. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“NO!”

Eliza’s voice boomed across the small office. Pretty sure at this point, even the neighbors were aware of their heated discussion.

The official Wordle.org page was the reason that the pair sat crammed over Foggy’s laptop on that particular morning. Eliza admitted that it was her idea. She found out about the game on social media. Everyone was playing it and she thought, why not? The worst thing that could happen was an extended vocabulary.

Foggy chose to play with her simply because he was competitive and he couldn’t stand Eliza winning all by herself. He heard her curse in Matt’s office earlier that day after her boyfriend left her to fend for herself – the good friend he was, he asked her what was wrong. All she did was show him the page. That was enough for Foggy to drag her into his office and pull up the page on his laptop.

Thirty minutes later, neither of them got any work done, but at least they’d won about fifteen rounds. The times they failed stood heavy on the piece of paper they used to keep score. Mostly, it was Foggy’s fault. Eliza didn’t take criticism on that. One letter always made them lose, and it was often Foggy’s choice to form the finishing word.

That’s how they ended up in this position. Eliza swore this was the last round to make an even twenty. Foggy agreed, telling her that he knew what the word would be. She’d never doubted anyone this badly before. His judgment was questionable, especially while playing games, and she was so not willing to lose the last round because of him.

Half of the boxes on the page were colored in yellow while the bottom line shone bright green. Only one gray letter remained.

“It’s obviously mayor,” Eliza insisted.

“Why?” Foggy challenged.

“Because I said so, duh!”

“That’s not a viable argument!”

“It is because I’m smarter! It’s ‘mayor’! They always choose the less obvious solution. ‘Major’ is too obvious.”

“No, it’s not. See?” he put the word down. “This is gonna work, trust me.”

Eliza slapped his hand away from the enter button. “Don’t you dare!” she hissed.

“Bet!” He pulled his hand away.

“FOGGY, NO!”

“Foggy, yes!”

She spun his chair around quickly, pushing him away from the desk. He yelped as he rolled across the room.

“It’s ‘mayor’, end of story!” She typed the word into the row.

Foggy came rolling back, catching her hands in the act. “IT’S NOT!” he said.

“IT IS!”

“IS NOT!”

“IT IS, YOU ABSOLUTE MORON!”

“You are insufferable.” He caught her by the waist. She struggled in his grip, hands tied to her sides. “How does Matt put up with you?”

Eliza hit him with her elbow directly into the ribs and said, without even missing a beat, “You’ve obviously never had sex with me.”

Foggy’s arms dropped. “EW!” he squeaked. “You are so gross!”

“Trust me, it’s phenomenal. Like my Wordle skills.”

“You can’t compare Wordle to sex.”

“Yes, I can, and I will.” Her finger ghosted dangerously close over the enter button. He rolled over her foot with his chair. She stumbled aside.

“Stop it, it’s not ‘mayor’!” he said. “It’s ‘major’! Do you even know what that means?”

“Yeah, I’m in a relationship with Matt,” she retorted and butted her hip against his chair.

“What?” Foggy asked.

“Yeah, because-“

“I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN, STOP IT! I DONT NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR SEX LIFE!”

“Who’s talking about our sex life?”

The horror in their eyes as they stared at Matt in the doorway was something he would’ve loved to frame.

Eliza’s hair was all disheveled, Foggy’s cheeks flushed. They kept each other rooted on the spot, neither of them willing to let the other gain access to the laptop.

Matt put his hands on his hips. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What’re you guys doing?”

“Nothing,” they said in unison.

“That’s not what it sounded like.”

“We were just… talking,” Foggy told him.

Matt tried hard to keep himself from smirking. “So you weren’t yelling at each other?”

“No,” he scoffed, “why should we?”

“I don’t know, I think I heard my name being dropped. I’m not sure about the context though,” he titled his head in Eliza’s direction. “Sweetheart, care to elaborate?”

He was just teasing her and she knew it. She knew Matt like the back of her hand. He was well aware of what this was about, yet she still blushed like a fool at the way his voice dropped into something that could only be described as mockery.

She did what she knew best. “Matthew Michael Murdock, get your head out of the gutter!” And she copied his stance perfectly.

He shifted on his feet. “Says the one who was talking about my-“

“MAYOR!” she pressed the enter button as Foggy was trying not to listen to the conversation.

He gasped in shock. “YOU-“ the confetti exploded at their victory. “BITCH!”

Matt’s jaw tightened. “What did you just call her?” he asked.

“Dude, you’re not part of this conversation. Stay out of it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know what,” Eliza said, glowing like a glow stick with her smile wider than anything else, “I may be a bitch, but at least I’m the winning bitch.”

“How is it ‘mayor’?” Foggy asked. “It’s supposed to be ‘major’, that’s not fair. I feel betrayed!”

“Boohoo, go cry about it to your mommy. You just can’t deal with the fact that you lost.”

“We need to play another round.”

“No, we don’t. You’re just a bad loser.”

“I’m not! This was obviously rigged. You probably used your powers to trick me. Ah-ha!”

Her eyes widened. “You take that back!”

“Nope.”

“Foggy!”

Matt looked between them, rubbing his forehead in exhaustion. “What did I just walk into?” he asked.

Eliza slapped the laptop shut. “The end of our friendship,” she said.

“You’re breaking up with me?” Foggy pouted.

“Yeah, I am.”

“No, I’m breaking up with you. You cheated!”

“I didn’t cheat!”

“Then the game cheated.”

“That’s not even a thing!”

“Who are you to judge that? Did you program the thing?”

“No, but-“

“THE GAME CHEATED, OKAY?”

They didn’t even realize that the door had closed again.

Matt distanced himself from the office. He walked by Karen on his way to his own quarters.

“What’s going on in there?” she asked him. “I only hear yelling.”

He only sighed, “Can I get a refund?”

“For what?”

“My girlfriend.“

Karen laughed. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, “just realized that I’ve got a weird one.”

The door flew open. Eliza peaked her head around the corner. “I heard that,” she said.

“That was intentional,” Matt retorted. This time, he couldn’t help the smile growing on his lips.

Her eyes narrowed. Next thing he knew, she’d grabbed his hand and pulled him into his office.

“Are you going to murder me?” he asked.

“Worse,” she smirked sheepishly.

“Oh boy.”

“You’re gonna play wordle with me.”

“What’s that?”

She pecked his lips. “Oh, you’re gonna love it.”

“Something tells me I’m not.”

He listened to her type in the password to his laptop, fingers eager and determined.

“Come here or I’m not having sex with you for a week,” she said. Her words sounded so sweet but the threat was obvious – and to some, that might not even have been a threat, but to Matt, it sounded like the end of the world.

He loosened his tie quickly, rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt. “What are we playing again?” he asked.

She pushed him into the office chair, making herself comfortable on his lap. He grunted at her weight on his still sore body. The second she tried to leave though, he pulled her back in. Her warmth was almost comforting to his injuries.

“Wordle is like a workout for your mind, you know? You gotta guess a five-letter word by typing other words. You’ve got five tries. The letters that are in this word will show yellow if they’re in the wrong position and green if they’re in the right position. You gotta get the last word right or you lose. I’ll tell you what color they are, of course, since you can’t see them, but you get the gist.”

He buried his nose in her neck. The words passed by him, only the sound of her voice filled his ears. “Hmm,” he hummed against her.

“Are you even listening to me?” she asked.

“Hmm.”

“What’s the first word then?”

“Warm.”

“That’s four letters, Matt. Take it seriously! This is an important game.”

“What if we lose?”

“Then I’m gonna be very sad,” she said.

He couldn’t help but kiss the pout on her lips away. “I wouldn’t want that.”

“Then will you play with me?”

“Sure, sweetheart. Let’s play Wordle.”

“Fucking finally! I just know you’re far more competent than Foggy will ever be.”

“Don’t let him hear that,” he chuckled, “But I do agree.”

She kisses him, her lips tilted up into the most adorable smile. “You ready?” she asked.

He tightened his hold around her, burying his nose deeper into her neck before agreeing, “Let’s do this.”

“Good choice.”

“I love you,” he said.

“And I love you.”

[brittskarma]

What are you going to do about him?

Jean Kirstein x reader (gender not specified)

When Reiner isn't good enough, you always have Jean

TW: cheating, mentions of Reiner, kinda bad

______________________________________________________________

This wasn't the first time you've ended up in his bed and you knew it wouldn't be your last. Struggling to stay with Reiner was getting harder and harder. Especially when you always had Jean to run to. Jean was different in many ways. He made you feel good when Reiner couldn't. He made you feel welcomed. Post-sex with Jean made you feel like you were on cloud nine. Fortunately, you've been lucky enough to experience that euphoria fifteen times already. Sixteen now.

"What are you going to do about him?" Jean suddenly asked. The man looked over at you. Sweat glistening on his forehead, which you could just barely see in the dimly lit room.

You cluelessly responded with, "About who?"

"Him. Your boyfriend." Jean panted, still out of breath. You looked up at his ceiling. Your parents loved Reiner, but they never saw Reiner behind closed doors. "I think..." You trailed off. Were you really thinking about wanting to break up with Reiner? You knew you couldn't have both men, but you had to admit, It was hard for you to choose just one. Jean glanced at you. If he could, he'd take you all for himself. He didn't want to have to share you.

"I think I might break up with him." You looked over at him. "Really?" He smirked immediately. "Really." You nodded in confirmation. "Gotta admit, I'm glad to hear that." Jean stated, standing up from the bed. His naked body, shining from the light that the moon provided through the window. He walked over to your side of his bed. He extended a hand.

"Let's get cleaned up, yeah?" He pulled you up. Once you were standing, his left hand moved down to your waist while his right hand was placed firmly under your chin, making you look up at him. "I can't wait to see the look in Reiner's eyes when he realizes you're mine." He pressed a passionate, yet firm kiss on your lips. You didn't reply in words, only kissing him back. Sure, the look on Reiner's face could be priceless, but you still didn't know how to feel about it at the moment. You just kept telling yourself one thing. There's no way you could love Reiner if you were cheating on him with Jean Kirstein.

[navree]

@selkiesstories got me thinking about it, so time for yet another round of “y’all tell me you want me to talk about something and i perform a thesis dissertation”, the viserys targaryen is the worst edition. 

so, positives i’ll say for viserys is that paddy considine is incredibly in the role. he’s a good actor and he worked really hard to imbue viserys with a lot of layers that, even while hating him, made me feel emotions for him anyway. there are times during paddy’s role where i could see the glimmers of viserys not necessarily being a bad person, just an incredibly stupid one who doesn’t think about how his choices impact others, and had potential to be something better, a better man and better father and better husband and better king (if he had kept his interactions with alicent strictly platonic, i could see the seeds for him filling a kind and nurturing paternal role in her life, to offset the fact that while otto loves his daughter, he will prioritize his ambitions to alicent’s detriment. alack alack, viserys had to go and crush on a fifteen year old). but also he sucks, and i wanna enumerate why in A List to excise all of my rage: 

viserys is a bad husband

aemma - i know paddy and everyone else and their mother have been on about how aemma was the great love of viserys’s life, and most likely he did love her, but viserys was awful to aemma. aemma’s function in viserys’s life was entirely to be a brood mare. even before she was named queen during the great council and thus had more of an imperative to try for a male heir, she’s pregnant, and not with rhaenyra, as the show has rhaenyra start off at fourteen and the great council takes place ten years before the start of main events. aemma has to endure a constant life in a hazardous condition, given that being pregnant is no picnic generally, and especially not in pseudo-medieval times, for viserys’s sake. and it doesn’t appear that viserys has stopped to think about how that might affect her, not just physically but also psychologically as ALL of these pregnancies, excepting rhaenyra, have ended badly either through miscarriage or stillbirth or infant death. viserys has to be told, point blank, in the simplest language, that aemma does not want to be pregnant again. it’s nearly twenty years of marriage before aemma is able to just firmly tell him that enough is enough, and it’s apparently been nearly twenty years of marriage before viserys even stops and thinks that maybe reducing his wife to a walking uterus is in fact a bad thing. 

and then he kills her. like, that’s the pièce de résistance of viserys’s treatment of aemma, he literally murders her. and the worst part, genuinely the worst part of it, is that he doesn’t let her have any say. he doesn’t even try to talk about it with her, this woman he apparently loves so very much, he does not explain what is happening or offer her the option of choosing, or explaining, or doing anything. he unilaterally makes that decision, and then does nothing to prepare her or help her or even try to comfort her. he lets her die not only in pain but in utter fear, and begging for her life, while people are actively holding her down, on his orders, while she struggles. it genuinely doesn’t matter to me how much viserys loved aemma, or was devoted to her in their marriage, or missed her once she was gone, he was a bad husband to her in her life and was directly responsible for not just her death, but the horrible state in which she died. 

alicent - god let me count the fucking ways. so first things first, i’m going to be really brave and strong and not dwell too much on viserys looking at someone his daughter’s age, a young teenager, and immediately deciding that this is someone it would be appropriate to pursue sexually, we all know it’s disgusting and vile and even if he was the best man on the planet in all other aspects i would still hate him for that alone. but viserys is also a bad husband to alicent, even more so than he was with aemma, as he appears to have no particular care for her as a person, for her own wants and desires and interests or anything about her other than as a fleshlight and a babymaking machine. he also doesn’t appear to have learned anything from aemma, as he has no problem impregnating alicent constantly in the early years of their marriage. the age gap for all of his children with alicent appear to be two years between aegon and helaena and two years between helaena and aemond (in the books there’s a four year gap then between aemond and daeron, but seeing as the writers definitely forgot about daeron until it was pointed out to them via twitter who knows what that will be in the show). considering that a pregnancy takes nearly a year to come to term, and that the human body does need a recovery period and can’t get pregnant immediately, it’s easy enough to infer that viserys was just constantly having alicent pregnant as soon and as frequently as possible from ages fifteen to twenty, and only stopped due to increasing infirmity, and likely the fact that they had four healthy children, three of them sons. 

viserys also shows an astounding lack of care for alicent’s physical wellbeing at all. he drags her to and fro around the kingswood while heavily pregnant, to the point where rhaenyra’s the one noticing that alicent’s uncomfortable while he doesn’t give a shit. not only that, he also summons her for sex in the dead of night at a whim to the point of demanding that she be woken up. alicent’s nineteen years old, she’s just had a baby she’s shown to be active in raising, most people would look at that and think “damn, let’s let her have a break, get some rest and a full eight hours of sleep”, but no, viserys needs to exercise his marital rape license so he has her woken up and brought to him and then doesn’t even give her the benefit of disassociation by trying to check and see that she’s engaged during the assault (i hate him i hate him i hate him i hate him). he also doesn’t compensate for this by caring about her emotional wellbeing. he is repeatedly and publicly dismissive of her and humiliates her in front of other people without a care to how it makes her feel, not just in front of family but in front of the entire court as well. he doesn’t give a shit about times she’s in distress, like on driftmark, or attempt to engage with her about her own feelings or take anything she says into account at all even in their private discussions. alicent is barely a person to him, let alone a wife, she’s a vehicle for him to satisfy his sexual urges, a functioning womb (honestly big “napoléon saying ‘it is a womb i am marrying’ when he married his second wife after divorcing his first solely for her apparent infertility vibes, and guess what i hate napoléon too) that gives him the sons he killed aemma for, and then a nursemaid for the bulk of the marriage. 

viserys is a bad father 

rhaenyra - so first of all, let’s be clear that the gap in viserys’s relationship with rhaenyra vs. his other kids is such pitch perfect “golden child and the scapegoat” that it should be required viewing for half of parents who don’t understand why their children don’t get along. but even with viserys’s clear favoritism and the detriment it causes to his other kids, that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t failed rhaenyra miserably. because he has. for the first fourteen years of her life, viserys appears to have somewhat ignored rhaenyra. she’s his cupbearer, yes, but by all counts they aren’t necessarily the closest behind perfunctory love from a parent to their only child and a daughter to her father, and he was just constantly not caring about her throughout her childhood. rhaenyra seems infinitely closer to her mother, and vice versa. this isn’t something that goes away even when rhaenyra is named heir, as they still seem to have a very stilted and cold relationship with each other, and it isn’t one that gets better, he doesn’t even try to connect with her after his marriage to alicent until she forces his hand through acting out. viserys never tries to foster any sort of personal relationship with his child, the child he’s supposed to love the most, even with the fact that he prefers her over all of his other kids, and even then his personal favoritism is highly likely a manifestation of his guilt over having killed her mother. and in spite of all his love and favoritism and guilt, he doesn’t have any qualms in completely decimating her friendship with the only close companion she appears to have, not to mention doesn’t even care enough to give her the decency or consideration of any prior warning of what he was doing to prepare her for dropping that nuclear bomb on his relationship with her and her relatinoship with alicent, and certainly never attempts to try and repair the damage he’s caused and the pain he’s inflicted on his daughter, or even apologized for the position that put her in. 

viserys has also done an abysmal job in helping rhaenyra at all politically. we see this in episode 2, when he doesn’t want her actually participating in small council meetings, he doesn’t want her engaged in political happenings at all or doing anything an heir would be doing. this only gets worse once he has sons. viserys knows that the legal assumption in westeros is male primogeniture, it’s why he was willing to kill aemma just to have a son even though he already had a daughter in her teens. so viserys knows that, after having aegon, that the entire country is going to assume that aegon is now heir, and he knew that this would only be reinforced one aemond and daeron were born in turn. but viserys doesn’t do anything. he does not publicly state that rhaenyra isn’t going to be supplanted, in spite of what he said to her privately, he does not issue any sort of edict or official code or add and addendum to the targaryen doctrine of exceptionalism that says they’re also allowed to follow absolute primogeniture rather than male dominated primogeniture. he does nothing to publicly support her position at all beyond the original oathtaking, and that is the only thing he does for her in the TWENTY YEARS between proclaiming her as his heir and his death (no, his condition in episode 8 is not an excuse, given that it was apparently a recent enough of a final decline that vaemond needs to inform rhaenys of it as if it’s not entirely common knowledge, and even if we assume that he dropped straight into imhotep mode the second they returned from driftmark after episode 7, that’s still fourteen years of him being healthy enough and coherent enough and mentally agile enough to do his job and as such try to do anything to shore up rhaenyra’s succession and help her out). 

viserys also doesn’t seem to care about rhaenyra participating in the political process, which is a huge misstep on his part. he should be wanting her regularly at small council meetings, he should be wanting her to get some experience as a ruler, as a poltician, as a strategist, hell even as a battle commander, given that she’s a dragonrider and has been since the age of fucking seven. but viserys does nothing to try and help her or prepare her or give her any kind of guidance on what it’s like to be a ruler, to make decisions for other people, to really have any kind of experience in something approaching queenship to prepare for what’s to come. viserys basically ignores rhaenyra not just as a daughter, but as a political heir, except for occasionally telling people to ignore their lying eyes on whether or not a platinum blonde white woman and a platinum blonde black man can have two brunette children with skin so white it might as well be translucent. and given that rhaenyra’s inability to actually govern well is a direct cause to her downfall and eventual gruesome death, viserys is basically 0 for 2 in “not being responsible for the horrible ways his loved ones have died”. not to mention that the entire issue of the animosity between rhaenyra and his other children is due to the fallout of his own favoritism, maybe they’d hate her and her kids less if viserys wasn’t constantly holding up his precious golden child and her kids at the physical and emotional expense of his four other fucking children, god he sucks. good going with your favorite kid viserys, now let’s look at the ones you don’t even give a shit about. 

aegon - i don’t even know if i have the words to describe all the ways that viserys has screwed aegon up. imagine, for a minute, you’re aegon. your relationship with your mother is already gonna have issues, by sheer virtue of the fact that your mother had you at the ripe ole age of sixteen due to unwanted sexual advances by a man old enough to be her father, who is in fact your father. you probably spend a lot of your formative years hearing about how much your father has been wanting a son all his life, to the point where the wife he had before your mother died in the process, but now he’s got a son, and that’s you. but he doesn’t pay any attention to you. he doesn’t nurture you or love you or care about you or even seem to like you that much. is kid aegon going to have the emotional intelligence to think about whether or not there’s something deficient in viserys’s character and to not see his father’s lack of love as a failing on his part? no, he’s a kid. what aegon likely did was blame himself, was think that there was something so lacking in him, so horrible, that his father who is renowned for wanting a son, decided that he was such a bad option that he’d rather have a daughter after all, and would favor rhaenyra over aegon and all the rest of his siblings for the remainder of his life. aegon likely feels responsible not just for his father not caring about him, but for his father not caring about helaena and aemond and daeron in turn, because he somehow messed up. viserys’s abandonment and negligence of aegon is a huge part in why aegon turned to various different vices to try and cope; he has a complicated relationship with his own mother (discussed at length here) and his own father doesn’t give a shit about him. 

and when viserys does deign to remember that he has a kid, it’s never positive attention. we see viserys actually interact with aegon twice, and neither of them are good. in the first interaction, he’s scolding aegon, so already we’ve got an idea that when viserys notices aegon, it’s mostly just to point out his flaws or ways he’s failing, which does a number on anyone, let alone a kid. and the second is at driftmark. viserys at driftmark is a post unto itself because of how abysmally he behaves throughout the entire episode and how he’s the worst man in all westerosi history in that scene, but imma focus on aegon. aegon gets blamed for telling aemond that rhaenyra’s bastards are bastards (understandable of aemond, he wants to protect his mother from his piece of shit father, god bless you my boy), and viserys’s reaction is to get up in his face and scream at him and pull rank, talk to him not as a father to a thirteen year old, but as a king, the supreme law of the land who has the power of life and death over everyone, including his son. it’s the middle of the night, aegon’s not entirely sober, his father’s angry and potentially volatile, and he’s got to make a decision. does he say aemond’s lying and put the onus of the situation back on his ten year old little brother who has been grievously injured and permanently disabled? does he do what aemond couldn’t and blame his mother and potentially shove her at the king’s mercy, knowing it could end badly for her? viserys hasn’t created an environment where aegon can tell him any sort of truth and not have it end badly for people he loves, and he chooses instead to lie, because viserys doesn’t care about the truth, doens’t care about him, and doesn’t care about aemond or alicent. when viserys isn’t completely ignoring him and giving him twenty different complexes, he’s apparently terrorizing him, and forcing his own son to view him not as a parent, but as the head of state, and only the head of state, and to react accordingly. 

helaena - we don’t know as much about helaena and viserys’s relationship, because they haven’t done much to develop helaena as a character, which is annoying, but we still know that viserys is a failfather even with her. for one, he never interacts with her. not as an adult, and not even as a baby, which is put into stark contrast with alicent actively taking a role in nurturing and raising helaena as a baby even though she’s only eighteen or nineteen when helaena is born. but one thing i think is another point int the long list of points against viserys and how messed up his negligence of his kids is, helaena is a dragondreamer. you know, the thing viserys is? if viserys spent any time trying to bond with his daughter, or get close to her, or even just learn anything about her, he likely would have figured it out. can you imagine how nice that would have been for helaena, how much that could have helped her, to have someone who can understand what these random dreams and visions she has sometimes are? we don’t know how helaena feels about her prophetic abilitites, because again, lack of characterization, but we know that a lot of what she sees is violent imagery that she struggles to express properly, like foreseeing aemond’s attack and disfigurement, or getting frustrated trying to tell her mother about the imminent threat of rhaenys at aegon’s coronation. having a present father who would be able to tell that she’s talking about likely would have gone a long way with her, but viserys doesn’t give a shit about his children so he doesn’t even know that his own child shares this ability with him. 

aemond - listen, i am not the first, and i will likely not be the last, to point out that viserys’s treatment of aemond is horrendous. i am not reinventing the wheel by pointing that out, but i am going to talk about it, because it’s truly one of the worst things viserys has ever done. like all of his siblings, aemond suffers from viserys’s neglect and lack of love, he suffers along with aegon and helaena, watching viserys heap praise and devotion on rhaenyra while ignoring them and repeatedly demeaning their mother and he has issues that arise when you’ve got a parent in your life that isn’t present and doesn’t care about you, it’s left him with a constant desire to prove himself and an inability to express his emotions except in times of extreme emotions. but unlike his siblings, aemond doesn’t just have to deal with viserys’s neglect, he also has to deal with the ironclad, irrefutable knowledge that his own father doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. because when aemond is attacked on driftmark, he could have died. and not just in the immediate aftermath of losing your eye, but afterwards, from the possibility of infection or any number of issues that can come from treating a severe wound in a pseudo-medieval society. aegon is, at maximum, ten years old, in a tremendous amount of pain, having to come to terms not just with a long recovery process but a permanent disability that’s going to require him to relearn absolutely everything about the way he lives his life, and does his own father care about it? no, viserys decides that the real issue here is that someone called rhaenyra’s kids bastards. 

viserys’s son has been the victim of an unprovoked attack, he was not only beaten but had his eye slashed out, and viserys does not care. he does not think about comforting his son, or trying figure out what the prognosis is, or do anything to try and help him. he doesn’t even ask that luke apologize for maiming his kid! no, the real crime is that someone said something mean that might reflect negatively on rhaenyra, so he yells at aemond and forces aemond, a child, to make tough calculations, to choose who to sic viserys on next in order to keep himself alive, to have to try and protect his mother at the expense of his brother, to then have to actually be the one to de-escalate the situation in the face of alicent’s distress and viserys’s complete disregard for her emotional state, or aemond’s himself. that’s the position viserys puts aemond in by not caring about anything other than the potential insult to rhaenyra. aemond is now going to spend the rest of his life not just dealing with any trauma from having been physically assaulted and losing an eye at the age of ten, but dealing with the literal proof that his father truly doesn’t give a shit about him. it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to look at who aemond is as an adult, stoic and implacable (with bursts of real rage and hatred like we saw at storm’s end when he lost it at luke) and always keeping himself in check and in control, and extrapolate that aemond realized that he needed to be as strong (pardon the pun) as possible because the only parent he has to protect him is someone who needs protection herself from an uncaring spouse, who is his own uncaring father. 

and then, after years of aemond having to pick himself up and not getting any sort of support from him, or even an ask for someone to try and right this wrong done to his own son, viserys has the gall, the nerve, the audacity, to stand up and basically just say “why can’t we all just get along? for me?” in front of god and everyone. as if his son isn’t sitting right there, dealt a lifelong blow with constant consequences for the crime of...doing exactly what viserys did. viserys claimed the riderless balerion, and aemond claimed the riderless vhagar, viserys should be proud of his son, should be bonding with him over what it’s like to have something so ancient and powerful under his control, a dragon from the conquest itself. but aemond was punished for it because two little girls were grieving and irrational and two idiot boys didn’t stop to point out that they were being ridiculous and instead gang up on someone who hadn’t done anything wrong, and viserys doesn’t give a shit. viserys tells his family to love each other, he’s telling aemond to forgive someone who hasn’t even apologized for the huge wrong he did aemond and doesn’t seem to care that he did it at all. viserys is focused on harmony, for rhaenyra’s sake, at aemond’s expense, and aemond has to sit there and take it because if his sons do something he doesn’t like, viserys will pull rank like he did at driftmark to get them to fall in line even if their physical and emotional wellbeings are at stake (seriously, if you crank the volume at the start of the last supper scene, aemond’s bitching about how much he hates the idea of dinner and aegon’s attempting to offer advice, bad advice yeah but an attempt was made, cuz they both know that there’s no way they can try to get viserys to see their side and let them beg off, because he wants rhaenyra to have happy subjects within her own family). 

daeron - we don’t know anything about daeron because the writers apparently got a 404 error while looking at his side of the targaryen family christmas wreath they call a tree, but safe to say that daeron was probably neglected by him too, and likely made the calculation to spend what appears to be the entirety of his life at oldtown with his hightower relatives rather than be around a father who treats him and his siblings like furniture. but god, viserys has screwed up his entire family beyond repair. 

brief sidenote: viserys is the worst father out of all of hotd’s fathers. no i am not kidding. lyonel, by all measures, is a good dad to his sons, from the little we see of him, daemon in pentos at least was an actively present father who cared about his daughters and the third child he was gonna have with laena (and didn’t make choices on her bodily autonomy that left her dying painfully in absolute terror as people hold her down on his orders, finally daemon doesn’t fuck up, shocking), and otto, for all his myriad of failings and how much he sucks, clearly loves alicent dearly, wasn’t an ignorant or dismissive father to her in spite of actually having male heirs, and was as close and devoted a father as he could be before his own bad choices traumatized his child for life. and then viserys is there, ignoring his children until guilt makes him pick one as his golden child at the expense of all the others, and acting as if any emotional problems of physical traumas they endure are a mild inconvenience from strangers rather than his own children. 

viserys is a bad king

the only thing close to a smart decision viserys ever made was appointing otto as hand, as otto is actually a smart politician who knows how to do his job properly. in all other aspects as a king, viserys sucks. like, he’s just genuinely, incredibly, bad at his job. like, there’s a reason why he needs otto in order to function half the time, because all the things he does are really bad

daemon - viserys should have dealt with the situation better than he did. nearly every episode has daemon fucking up in some respect, but because daemon is his brother, viserys overlooks serious flaws that could cause him problems. daemon’s public contempt for rhea royce puts runestone’s, and the entirety of the vale’s, really, loyalty to the crown in question, and thus viserys’s reliance on one of the major houses of westeros at risk. viserys keeps on trying to give daemon political positions he’s bad at, such as master of laws and master of coin, and we have no reason to disbelieve otto that he was a problem in both positions. and when he was commander of the city watch, he could have seriously turned the population of king’s landing against the targaryens with the way he was acting (and if you don’t think that would be a problem, might i remind you that losing the support of king’s landing was what got rhaenyra in serious trouble, killed one of her sons, forced her off the throne, and ultimately helped lead to her death?). and he continuously lets daemon do whatever he wants, like occupying dragonstone even though it makes him look weak, or waltz back into court after being banished, which also makes viserys look like a king not worth respecting, and a weak politician. and before i get any “daemon’s stronger than viserys and a dragonrider that’s why viserys can’t stand up to him”, viserys is an absolute monarch in a pseudo-medieval society where his word is absolute law and nothing he does can be considered illegal with seven of the finest elite warriors in the country at his beck and call and multiple armies at his disposal, if he wanted to decisively deal with daemon like any decent leader might, he could have. easily. 

the velaryons - the issue with the velaryons is where i get to point out one of the reasons i hate viserys the most, which is ironically why i dislike historical figures like mark antony, or louis xvi: i hate stupid politicians. there is nothing that irks me as much as a stupid politician. viserys is a stupid politician (sorry dave and dan but however much you thought the “i’m not a politician, i’m a queen” line slapped, being a reigning monarch makes you a politician as it is a political position that requires you to participate in politics), and nothing exemplifies that as much as how he’s handled the velaryons. viserys (somewhat) isn’t a stupid man in general, and he’s aware of the fact that the velaryons, particularly corlys, have a chip on their shoulder about the great council and how both rhaenys and any of her heirs were sidelined for viserys’s sake. and in spite of that, viserys completely bungles that relationship time and time again. 

the dismissive and outright rudeness we see him use on alicent in social situations is the same way he treats corlys’s legitimate policy concerns in small council meetings, even though corlys is a major ally and powerful lord who shouldn’t be the constant butt of the joke in front of other political actors in the realm. viserys also publicly humiliates corlys in the ending of episode 2 when he says he’s marrying alicent, not just in having strung corlys along with the potential of the match with laena before pulling the rug out from under him, but also by springing it on him there. what viserys should have done was tell corlys beforehand, in private, that he can’t accept laena’s suit, citing the fact that she’s young and something something can’t wait that long yada yada, and given corlys room to process that in private, so that he’s not taken off guard and make to look a fool in a public setting in front of other lords. 

viserys’s favoritism of rhaenyra also posed problems for him with the velaryons, politically. we know that corlys didn’t care that rhaenyra’s kids weren’t actually laenor’s, but rhaenys and vaemond clearly did, and if corlys had listened to them more, viserys’s stubbornness not to see the truth could have been seen as a massive insult towards them and retaliated, could have decided that house targaryen had broken faith by this point with house velaryon and that they don’t need to be beholden to them anymore, certainly not when house targaryen and westeros at large are dependent on house velaryon and their fleet. and while this is mostly conjecture, as the aftermath is all in the time jump, the fact that viserys appears to have done nothing about laenor’s murder, which becomes egregious when you remember that the prime suspect for laenor’s murder is viserys’s daughter and her husband, viserys’s brother, and that the whole thing reeks of institutional coverup for the sake of rhaenyra and daemon’s reputations. it’s entirely possible that part of what drove corlys off (again, corlys being a powerful ally in the realm and on the small council) was the fact that his own king, who is a stupid politician, isn’t doing anything about this crime committed against his own family, for the sake of his favorite child, and that this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back in a long list of slights that corlys has been putting up with from viserys for his entire reign. viserys’s failure on the velaryon front is extraordinarily bad politics, and bad kingship that could have put himself and his entire line in jeopardy if the writing for the velaryons wasn’t so fucking schizophrenic. 

the succession - i’ve touched on it in why viserys is a shitty father, but viserys’s failure on the succession is a huge political problem as well. viserys all but lit the powder keg of the dance of dragons on fire by not doing anything to shore up rhaenyra’s succession. it’s not just about him being a bad dad, it’s him being a bad king. a good king wouldn’t have just made the lords swear an oath, he would have prepared rhaenyra for power and given her responsibilities and showed her how to rule and planned for her transition into power, like i mentioned above, all of which he didn’t do. a good king would have looked at the time passing since the oath was sworn, and figured out a way to renew it, such as making every new lord come to king’s landing and swear the oath once they inherited, or having a big renewal like it’s a vow renewal ceremony. a good king would have codified rhaenyra’s succession into law, so that it’s not just one man usurping tradition, but the legal qualifications of the realm, especially after sons started being born to him. and if viserys were a good king and a smart politician to boot, he would have, as mentioned, added the idea of absolute primogeniture to the doctrine of exceptionalism (the doctrine of exceptionalism is the general rule jahaerys worked out to explain why targaryens were allowed to marry incestuously even though it was sin in the eyes of the seven, and seriously how hard would it have been for viserys to go “yeah not only are we allowed to do that but we can also go with whoever was born first regardless of gender, #closertogodsthanmen” and be done with it!). but instead, he does none of this, and allows the situation to fester and does nothing to rectify it on any level and lets the problems of the succession build and build and build, doesn’t even put any safeguards in place for when he dies. somewhere in the seven hells, in between the beatings aemma’s ghost should be allowed to give him for what he did to her, viserys cannot be surprised at the outbreak of civil war, he all but ensured that there WOULD be a civil war by not doing anything about all the situations he’s caused with regards to rhaenyra’s succession and the lack of follow through. 

viserys targaryen is a bad husband to both his wives, a bad father to all of his children, and a bad king to westeros, and as much as i love paddy in the role, the idea that he was a good man who was trying his best and as lovable as ned stark himself needs to fucking die. 

[bedlamsbard]

1, 21, 13 for the choose violence

1. the character everyone gets wrong

STEVE ROGERS. There's an overwhelming tendency to smooth down Steve's sharp edges and generally make him softer, sweeter, gentler, more innocent. This man is all sharp edges and while he's not always going to push himself past his limits, when he's holding himself back from them you can tell and it's -- it's very weird to see. It's most common in the ensemble films, like Avengers and AoU and Endgame, there's this air of like...restraint? And then the sharp edges come out when he gets too tired of holding himself back. One of my favorite Steve scenes is in CATWS, during the fight with Batroc, because it's a perfect kernel of Steve characterization. Not just the on va voir part, but the actual fight itself.

But also, like, Steve is mad ALL THE TIME. He's probably the angriest character in the MCU, Bruce Banner included. It's true from CATFA onwards. (I talk about his anger in CATFA a little in Horizon, so I won't reiterate it here.) I see Steve as someone who's always struggled with depression, and his anger is part of that, because he does have those lightning flickers from being functionally depressed and going through the motions to suddenly being blindingly, furiously angry -- Avengers is the most obvious example of this, but it turns up in AoU, CATWS, and CACW too; I don't think he ever hits angry in Endgame, though. He's functionally depressed but there's nothing in that film that kicks him into the anger side of it. (Caveat: my specific brainweasels function this way, which is why I read Steve's as doing so.)

also, uh, here is probably the really controversial read on Steve: there's a tendency in this fandom to give credit for anything and everything Steve does to his feelings about Bucky, and I don't...think that's true. yes, Steve cares a lot about Bucky, but it's a huge disservice to his character to say that Steve only went to Krausberg for Bucky or that he only crashed the Valkyrie because of Bucky or that he only destroyed SHIELD/HYDRA for Bucky or that he was only opposed to the Accords because of Bucky. sure, Bucky is a factor in most of those situations, but Steve would have done all of them anyway. give the man some credit for his own agency!

21. part of canon you think is overhyped

outside of this side of the fandom, probably Endgame, but that's a given. on the Tumblr/AO3 side of the fandom I don't think that's true at all lol.

in this side of the fandom -- uh, Thor, the first one. I've been going through Phase 1 lately and the first Thor film, which a lot of Thor and Loki fans I know feel very strongly about, is a chopped up mess -- I think it's the only film in the MCU that really, really suffers from having its deleted scenes removed, but even with those it's trying to do too many things at the same time and it can't give any of them enough space, plus its Asgard design is a hot mess -- TDW and later Ragnarok had to essentially bend over backwards to fix it. It does a lot of things very well, but it also does a lot of things not well at all. The Thor films are all inconsistent across the board, though; it's the weakest line in the entire MCU.

13. worst blorboficiation

I have THREE answers for this, all of which are bad in their specific ways, but for absolute worst: Tony Stark. I like Tony! He actually is a character I like! He is also super fucked up in ways that Tony fans just ignore or soften or whatever; the weirdest part to me is the desire to make Tony a ~soft dad to Peter, Shuri, Loki, Nebula...Morgan sometimes. This man took a fifteen-year-old kid to Germany to fight Captain America without telling him why, y'all. what about that says "good father figure" to you. he's also brutal to Bruce in IW.

the other two answers are Peggy Carter and Loki, which are pretty self-evident. I think I'd also actually put Natasha on this list, too, because she's another character who people really want to soften.

[kitkatopinions]

Watched the rwby season 9 finale and I gotta say

Rwby criticism and spoilers beneath the keep reading as well as discussions of attempted suicide

First let's talk about Ruby's 'ascension.' We see Ruby see a memory of Summer sneaking off on her last mission with Raven, a mission that she lied to Tai about saying it was just a run of the mill Ozpin mission. Ruby is distraught by this, taking issue with her lying and sneaking around with Raven, and expresses anger and then when the blacksmith is like "maybe she had a lot of weight on her shoulders" Ruby is like "so does that mean I should just give up" and then she remembers the words of the mom she seems to barely remember saying "I love you just the way you are" And that drives her to pick herself and she comes back as herself, with her memories somehow completely intact and taking on no physical change at all. Is it explained why she's the only person who ascends who doesn't lose her memories or take on a physical change? No, not really. When she appears as herself again, Jaune says "she knew what she needed to be all along" which isn't true because she actually just spent an entire wanting to not be her, which just makes it seem like Jaune is ignoring all of the problems Ruby had in favor of pretending she's perfect. Then the Cat calls Ruby incomplete, broken, weak, and confused, and Weiss is like "You're wrong," but doesn't elaborate so it feels kind of empty tbh, then Yang says "she's never been any of those things," and I've just gotta say that after Ruby spent the entire volume in a depressed spiral being confused it feels really hero-worshippy putting Ruby on a pedestal of unhealthy standards and not noticing her feelings or turmoil or struggles for Yang to just be just be like 'my sister has never experienced confusion a day in her life.' And Blake says that Ruby's lack of weakness, confusion, brokenness, and incompleteness is the reason why they follow her, and call me crazy but that also seems to put crazy high expectations of perfection on Ruby that her team refuses to believe she's ever weak or confused and therefore rely on her as a leader when she just went off about not wanting to be a leader and not being able to meet their expectations.

Like, did they learn absolutely nothing? Also everyone and their brother was talking about how Ruby was going to shed the markers of Summer Rose and come into her own, but actually, no, if the close up on Ruby's emblem is any indication, they're just leaning into her having seemingly built herself on the example of Summer. Which... I feel like it's bad, I feel like if this arc was supposed to be about Ruby's growth and we're meant to think that she took a lot of inspiration from Summer in her life, that she should've grown more into her own person. Also I'm just gonna say that I think it was such a big mistake to make 'Ascension' so reliant on themes of death and suicide. I get that they were trying to do a heart-warming message about how you should choose yourself because you're enough, but first off, the messaging is so messed up when you consider how it frames 'trying to destroy yourself' as something that is either a generally good thing in the end or not permanent and something that you can come back from. Either the writers should have gone out of their way to make the purpose of Ascension clear prior to seeing anyone we know ascend and have it be something Ruby (and Little, Neo, etc) choose on their own fully aware of what it means and not through means outside of things like getting murdered, being manipulated into drinking poison, or jumping off a high thing Javert style.... Or they should've had it be something that nobody really knew about and still have Ruby and Neo not essentially try to kill themselves to get there. I literally do not care that we're 'meant to see the tree/tea like therapy uwu' because it was so badly done that the actual result is that if I'd seen this when I was fourteen or fifteen it would've hurt me pretty badly.

Next complaint! Ohhh my girl Neo. I am so so sorry. In case anyone's playing catch-up, Neo has existed since volume 2 and ever since, people have been clamoring for more from her and have wanted to see some focus put on her, especially after her return in volume 6 where fans (like me) were disappointed to see her playing sidekick to Cinder (especially since the only reason she wasn't targeting Cinder anymore was because the writers were making her act stupid for their plot) and kept talking about how much the writers could do with her. She kept playing second fiddle to Cinder with no focus from her return to all through V8, but then she was dropped into the ninth season which was supposedly character-growth focused! Although dropping anyone away from the main plot was a bad idea imo, I was still excited because I was sure it meant that Neo would get focus and be the main threat for the volume and we could see her come into her own and get fleshed out outside of 'wanting revenge' and 'Roman.' Aaaaaaand what did MKEK do??? They benched her for the better part of the season, had her the central focus of one scene that was written to highlight other characters being dead - proven by the fact that the characters said things Neo could have no idea about which meant the writers weren't focused on Neo and were instead focused on what would get emotional responses from Ruby/the audience. And then they had her get taken over by the Cat! And the Cat became the main antagonist for the season! Using Neo's body and speaking through her mouth (Neo is one of many disabled villains and the only mute character,) but leaving Neo completely absent again! And then Neo basically Javerts herself into tree-land with a vague idea that possibly she could eventually come back (if the authors were desperate for views) but is essentially dead to the plot now. As a fan of Neo, that's literally the dumbest most useless bad thing they could've done!

As for the Cat, the existence of it was gone into in the last second lore dump, and bro. They kind of imply that the Cat had no choice but to be evil, after Alyx's betrayal, and that it was not only good before then, but had spent like ages lovingly taking care of everyone in the Ever After, and so..... Am I supposed to feel happy that the Cat died? Am I supposed to dislike the Cat? Frankly, that's yet another life that just got fucked up by the Brother gods, and still no one in the cast of main rwby characters has talked about how horrible they are, and even the show itself seems to not fully acknowledge that they're responsible for so many problems. Anyway, despite their desire to make the Cat the big villain of the volume, I just wound up being upset that it got killed off just like that and nobody even questioned the morality of the situation.

Also just as a side note, who the fuck decided that what Rwby really needed was a backstory for the backstory for Remnant's existence? Who wanted that? What are they gonna do now, find out that the Tree was actually created by an even older god who came from an even weirder place?

Also about Jaune, I hate it. What was the point of making Jaune an old man? What was done that couldn't have been done through other better means that didn't put him in central focus? He's just back to how he was, just with Extra Special angst and as an Extra Special person who now has more experience than the rest of Team RWBY somehow and got to experience Weiss lusting after him. He is such an author's pet, I honestly wish he was dead. I'm gonna have to see him for several more volumes, aren't I?

My last complaint for this post (I have more to say, I just know this post is getting long so I'm saving two big complaints for later,) is that Little (now known as Somewhat or something) is someone I did not care about AT ALL and in fact I hated them, so the very forced Ascended Little running in and talking to Ruby and now being a giant rat that calls Ruby a Huntress for some reason (because she needs her position as a badge-carrying law enforcement officer to be affirmed and who better than the thing that has no clue what the fuck they're talking about)... It just served to make me annoyed. The entire volume would be improved by Little not being there at all.

Anyway, that volume was a fantastic waste of my time and the only good things that came out of it were ruined. We've now left the Land of the Hand of the Author and forced 'growth' that doesn't actually get the characters anywhere, and we've now entered the Hiatus heading to the next volume in a potential time skip.

[whatisreggieshortfor]

My Brother’s Keeper

Rohan x MC

Foster just wants to care for her autistic brother. Her parents are so sure she needs them to set her up to find someone that will love her that way. Too bad they don’t understand her or her brother.

@justtuesdays @csmicletters @rebelrayne

I hope I did this justice 😭

Foster had been described a lot of ways by people in her life.

Her mates described her as protective, softhearted, witty, sharp tongued. She was who they turned to when they needed someone to listen.

Her parents called her hardworking, social, driven, compassionate. She was who they turned to when they needed help.

Her exes complained she was closed off, too narrow focused, stubborn, a type A personality. They would say she never let herself rely on them.

Her exes and her parents had one thought in common- they believed she used her little brother as an excuse, a shield to keep away intimacy and vulnerability, a way to keep people- and romantic prospects- from getting too close.

Her mates had a different line of thinking. They believed that Stevie was more Foster’s final test for a companion. Not out of a place of malice, or even awareness. None of them thought Foster had any idea she did it, but if someone wanted to be in her life and they thought Stevie was a problem or obstacle in the way, then they were never around long enough to matter.

Because Stevie is autistic.

He had needs special to him that had to be met, and Foster was never nervous or agitated about meeting those needs. Their parents tried, they really did. But she was twelve when he was born and sort of just became his person. Like he was a baby duck and imprinted on her. When she was old enough and got a job that required her to relocate, her parents couldn’t handle the meltdowns he’d have not seeing her every day. So she offered, filed the paperwork when they agreed, and became his guardian.

Foster’s mates had been taken aback when they had visited her flat and her younger brother was suddenly taking up residence in the second bedroom, but her best mate wasn’t. Rohan had been the only one she told before the paperwork was filed, and he had volunteered to assist in moving Stevie’s belongings. None of them were bothered, they had met Stevie several times and adored him. Even when he struggled, they were understanding. Her mates understood that she was his lifeline, the only other person he was ever comfortable around was Rohan- they joked it was the hazard of knowing Foster as long as he had.

Their parents would visit, video call, phone them- they tried to make sure Stevie knew that he was still their son, whether they understood him or not. For him it was just part of the routine Foster helped him establish.

But their mum and dad were also convinced that she would never end up married if Stevie always depended on her- they didn’t pay attention to the fact that she didn’t care what they wanted for her. Convinced it was the only way she’d end up happy, her parents decided they needed to set her up. And what better place than their cousin’s wedding? He was a good man, marrying a well-to-do woman. They were sure that her friend would be perfect.

Foster hadn’t wanted to go. Not only did Stevie have trouble with traveling, but she didn’t care for their cousin.

Or more specifically, she didn’t care for his bride.

Lucas was a gentleman through and through, he never pressured her or got annoyed for choosing to care for Stevie and take his comfort into account rather than to go out and have fun. But his bride-to-be had always made it known that she didn’t care for children, especially those that could misbehave. Foster’s parents never saw an issue with her, only seeing her at family events where she had her best face on, but Hope never went near anyone under fifteen.

Where Lucas never flinched at hearing or seeing Stevie stim, Foster had seen his fiancé glare silently in her seat. She wasn’t sure what the woman would do if he couldn’t stay quiet during the big day. Regardless of her parents wishes, she was going to stay home. Lucas and Rohan had convinced her that it would be okay, Lucas would help her where he could, and Rohan would take care of things at home for them.

So she prepared. Stevie’s headphones were put in his bag, the spare set put in hers. Stevie rechecked the bags she packed three times, once each day leading to their departure. Foster watched as he did his best to remain calm as they started the drive, they had gone over everything they needed to know, and Rohan was taking care of the plants Stevie cared for every day.

Waking up at the hotel Lucas had booked for them, Foster sighed to herself. Stevie didn’t like new places- he had thrown the pillowcase off his pillow, he didn’t like the way it felt. His bag was emptied, his things set in the closest relative places they would be at home. But he was awake, he wasn’t unhappy, and he let her help him prepare for the wedding.

They sat near the back though they were early, she knew he didn’t appreciate crowds, and she would much rather be at home with Rohan than to watch her stuffy aunt and uncle parade her cousin around, but she didn’t get a choice. Nearly as soon as they sat down, a man occupied the seat next to her, essentially ignoring the large number of empty seats. “You must be Foster.”

She blinked, glad he at least chose to sit on her side away from her brother, but confused how he knew her name, “I am. If you’re looking for Lucas-“

“No,” the man grinned, he almost looked like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do, but it was obviously strained after a moment when she didn’t seem to recognize him through his posturing, “I’m Reese. Your mum wanted us to meet.”

She cringed internally, remembering how her parents demanded she give him a better chance than she had her exes. They kept emphasizing she couldn’t stay single forever. If only they knew, “Right. Good to meet you.” As more people filled the room, she became more aware of Stevie shifting uncomfortably next to her, so she directed her attention to him. Ensuring his noise cancelling headphones were in place, she turned back but Reese was gone. She couldn’t dwell on it as the wedding began, she had to focus to keep him calm.

But the room was crowded.

Stevie’s clothes made him itchy.

The seven or eight year old girl of the couple next to him kept trying to take his comfort toy- a stuffed triceratops Foster had bought him as a toddler.

She tried to calm him down, muttering lowly as to not disturb the others in attendance as she helped him count out the windows, focus on the patterns he could observe as he usually did to relax-

But then the girl finally slipped his toy from his hands, and Stevie had let out an instinctual yell as it slid from his grasp.

Foster didn’t think twice, snatching the dinosaur back and letting him tug it into his chest, eyes narrowed when the couple tried to glare her way at the disturbance.

The minister had halted his speech, all eyes in the room shifting to look at the two of them and she wished they would stop. Stevie hated having eyes on him. Lucas, bless her cousin, cleared his throat and insisted that they continue, but his bride had other plans.

“Not until that’s over.” Hope snapped, sneering at the groom, “I told you I wasn’t a fan of kids attending fancy things, they don’t care.”

Lucas pulled back like she’d slapped him, repulsion clear on his face, “Stevie is doing his best.”

“Sure, whatever.” She pursed her lips, “You promised me this would go off without a hitch, it was the only reason I let you invite them.”

Several of the guests were still turning to look at Foster as Stevie began to rock in his seat, she finally got him to look at her, “Want to go outside? We can watch the clouds.”

He didn’t nod exactly, but he jumped to his feet with his toy still clutched to his chest, and she followed him out, shooting Lucas an apologetic look as they went.

She hadn’t been sure how the rest of the ceremony went, finding a field for Stevie to lie in with a clear view of the fluff drifting over their heads. Eventually people started drifting out of the church, some glaring at them as they went, but some seemed to be shooting grateful looks their way. She noticed the former must’ve been from Hope’s side, while the latter she recognized from Lucas’s side. Their parents emerged eventually, both nearly red faced as they started to stomp their way over, but Lucas flew past them and scooped Foster into a hug, “Bloody hell, thank you so much.”

She blinked, entirely unsure what she was being thanked for, “For interrupting your wedding?”

“For giving me the reason to cancel my wedding.”

“I’m sorry- what??” Her eyes widened, disbelief flooding her features as he smiled far too largely for the news he shared.

Lucas just shook his head, “You know I don’t want kids, neither does Hope, and I thought that was a good sign for us. But she actually just can’t stand to be around children- especially any like Stevie, and I love the little guy too much to marry someone that talks about him the way she was.”

She nodded, still not understanding exactly what happened, “So what now?”

Lucas shrugged, “Reception is still paid for. We go have a drink and dance- I’ve got a room set up for Stevie in the hall we rented. Standard things he likes- food specified for him, those history channel shows on the Telly he loves on dvd.”

Foster had just finished listening to a forty five minute ramble on the intricacies or pro wrestling when she felt a tug on her sleeve, turning to see Stevie, “Every day at three o clock.”

“What?” Reese cocked his head, somehow looking annoyed that someone was stealing his limelight, “What does he mean every day at three o clock?”

She shushed the man beside her, redirecting all her attention to her younger brother, “Were you supposed to do something today at three?”

“Every day at three o clock.” The boy fidgeted, glancing around like he was looking for something, “Every day at three o clock! It’s nearly three- I’m gonna be late!”

“I understand.” She offered firmly, but softly, understanding without the strength to scare him, “I know you don’t like questions, but you need to help me understand what happens every day at three o clock.” She had schedule memorized, but Lucas had talked her into a drink, and then she needed two or three more to deal with Reese’s non stop ego talk.

“Cat. Every day at three o clock. I need to feed the cat- the cat is always there! I need to feed the cat.”

She smiled, hands hovering in front of her to show she wouldn’t touch him, before she gave him a gentle reminder, “Someone is feeding the cat, remember? We wouldn’t let that poor stray starve just because you aren’t home.” Pulling out her phone, she realized the time was two fifty eight as she opened a video call, the flat they shared immediately coming into view, “Hey, Rohan! You know what time it is, right?”

The dark haired man’s beaming smile didn’t fade as he laughed at the check up call, “I am opening the cat food right this second,” he flipped the camera to show the can opener latched onto a half opened can of wet cat food, a familiar dish sitting next to it, “I have the bowl Stevie bought for him, I’m going to put it exactly two feet away from the wall centered behind the rubbish bin under the fire escape. Stevie, you are welcome to stay on the call and watch it happen.” He didn’t ask if he wanted to watch the simple action of a cat being fed. He gave him the option, open ended, and left it up to Stevie to decide.

Neither were surprised when he didn’t take the phone, but watched with an intensity as Rohan put the food into the bowl and began carrying it outside. She resisted the urge to reach out, as she would for anyone else, when his shoulders started to rock forward and back, the time was two fifty nine. At exactly three o clock, they watched as he set the bowl under the fire escape, centered behind the rubbish bin, measured and marked two feet from the wall. And they saw the stray cat edge out from behind forgotten scrap piles in the alley, cautiously approaching the man he didn’t know, before recognizing the bowl and hurrying forward. “Thanks, love.”

“Thank you.” Stevie echoed.

“No problem, little dude. Enjoy your day, if you want to call again at seven, I’ll be here to water the plants. Swear, I’m following the schedule to a T. You can catch me up on the big day.”

As soon as the call ended, Stevie was directing himself back out of the crowded room they were in, and she watched him meander down the corridor to the room Lucas had set up for him.

Only for an annoyed voice to cut into her attention, “Love?” Reese scoffed, “Bit familiar to address a friend, innit?”

Foster snorted, “Maybe, but how else do you address the person you’ve been dating for two years?”

Reese was gobsmacked, staring at her like she’d grown two heads, “Wha-“

She waved her hand, “Yeah, yeah, my parents wanted to set us up. But it’s not because of me being single, it’s because they refuse to acknowledge that my boyfriend understands my brother and loves him as much as I do. They think I need to find someone that loves me despite Stevie. Not including him. And that’s where we differ.” She shrugged stifling a laugh as the man stomped away. She didn’t feel the need to explain, even though she would when prompted. Lucas understood, because he loved Stevie just as much. Her mates understood, because again they loved Stevie just as much. But Rohan had always been her best mate. Despite the feelings she had spent years smothering inside, she never let them bubble to the surface until she had seen it one day.

Stevie had been having a terrible day. They needed to take the tram because her car had died, people kept getting too close and bumping into him, his dinosaur had gotten wet when someone spilled juice on it at the café they had stopped at for lunch, the waitress had given him mango slices instead of apple slices and he bit into it without looking as he counted the tiles in the ceiling. He hated the texture of mangos, too slimey. She wasn’t sure what she could do, what could be done.

And then Rohan had gotten the text about it, showing up at her flat without her ever uttering the request. He distracted Stevie with the DVR’d episodes of How the States Got Their Shapes he’d recorded for them to watch together, giving Foster time to wash his triceratops and prepare food that he would eat. And when she finally made it back to the living room, she saw Stevie- eyes still focused on the tv- reaching and gently resting his hand on top of Rohan’s. She had nearly dropped the plate, surprised to see him touching anyone else. Rohan had stiffened, imperceptible to Stevie, and glanced back at her with nearly teary eyes.

That was when she knew.

Because yes, admittedly she used Stevie’s attachment to her as a shield, a test, but not to keep people away.

But to keep him protected.

Foster always knew that she would go to the ends of the Earth for Stevie, so anyone that wanted to be in her life needed to be able to be in his.

Rohan had been in her life nearly as long as Stevie had, ten years compared to his twelve, and he treated her brother like his own. He helped her find everything she needed for guardianship, he would babysit during the seldom times she needed to go to the office for work, and he learned the boy’s schedule by heart so that he could help him get through the day.

So when he made a move that night, after Stevie had fallen asleep holding his hand, Rohan had originally only given her a hug and promised to always be there when she needed a shoulder to lean on.

Somehow the lines got blurred in that talk and they ended up confessing to each other in the same breath, but she would never look back.

Because Rohan was exactly what she wanted, exactly what her brother needed, and everything in between.

Masterlist

[loganwritesprobably]

Peter Fucking Hale

So I reblogged that post about gay Peter but I’m just.. not done talking about him. All those cursed words tumblr has come up with to describe your favourite character? He’s all of them. Literally my entire brain is consumed by Peter Fucking Hale. So I’ve just decided to keep going! I do roleplay on discord and since April the only fandom I’ve interacted with is Teen Wolf so I have a lot of thoughts and my own very special entirely fanon concept of Peter Hale and I’m sharing it all with you now.

I think Peter is younger than we think. Derek’s age is hard to pin down because it changes through the series but even then, he’s not an old man. He’s young. At his oldest, he’s in his early twenties in season one, and Peter was young enough in appearance to be able to get onto school grounds when Derek was roughly fifteen. If I want really young Peter, I tend to float somewhere between having him seven and nine years older than Derek. Laura was older than Derek, making him somewhere between five and seven years older than his oldest (canon) niece, that we know of. 

If we go with the low range for Peter’s age, making him five years older than Derek, and Derek was sixteen when the Hale fire happened that would make him just twenty one when his entire family was burnt alive, and he was abandoned by a niece who he was only five years older than, meaning that he grew up with them.

If Peter is that much younger than his sister Talia, then it isn’t a stretch to imagine that he would have been an accident. We know absolutely nothing about Derek’s grandparents, (can you hear me cursing Jeff Davis?) so we don’t know how they would’ve reacted to this. Parents that love him despite him coming along so late, or parents who constantly remind him that he was never supposed to exist? Is there a real reason for Peter being such a hateful teenager that he would do that to Derek and Paige? Who was the Alpha before it was Talia? Was it his father? Imagine having a father that is also your Alpha who hates you for something you cannot control - existing.

Peter Sebastian Hale. I just like that middle name for him.

Peter is a bisexual man, as I mentioned in the previous post, but I’ll go over it again. Imagine Peter, a young man in a rich family (and therefore presumably well known in the town) realising that he likes men. Imagine how scary that is. Look at Jackson. Something I like to use is that Peter only came out when Derek was struggling himself, to show his nephew that he wasn’t alone and that Uncle Peter was just like him. They could be strange together. Of course, Derek is accepted by Talia because she’s a good mother, and she’d accept Peter too, but this comes back to his parents. If we assume he had parents who resent him, I can’t imagine they’d take kindly to this. But Peter doesn’t care, he’s used to it by now, and instead chooses to lean into it. He’s flamboyant and dramatic, even more than he used to be, deliberately stays out late with older men just because he can.

Peter is damn smart. He’s annoying and taunts the pack and skirts around things, but he is clearly intelligent. It takes a level of intelligence to be as good at manipulation as he is. So picture Peter, still young enough to crave his parents approval and smart enough that school is too easy, he uses his family money to hire a tutor. He learns extra things. He picks up an extra language, maybe two (I personally see the Hales as being bilingual, speaking both Spanish and English, so these would be Peter’s third and fourth languages). He gets into exercise so that he can be strong enough to protect his family, because what is he good for if not that? He has nieces and a nephew to care for. He begins studying druidic practices because God forbid he ever be bored. 

He finishes high school a year early, he just tests out, he’s bored. He goes to college. Gets a bachelors or two. Think law, literature, philosophy, psychology, something essay based that makes his brain work. Something that makes him think and allows him to debate with people. Peter’s tongue is vicious, and he puts it to good use with debate. His claws are more vicious, he comes home and becomes their enforcer as Talia becomes the Alpha. He will protect them, by any means necessary.

Peter floats between jobs. He doesn’t need to work because he has family money invested securely and family businesses that practically run themselves, but it again comes to boredom. He needs something to do. He picks things up, works until the job stops entertaining him and then moves on again. Think lawyer, librarian, teacher, interior design. Or he would. But the fire happens. And he loses everything for a very long time.

Peter Hale loves to cook. If we assume his mother was a good woman, I like to think she taught him. He can cook anything with even the most ridiculous ingredients, and he does it well. He enjoys it. He loves cooking for other people and in another lifetime, he’d cook for people that he cared about to show them that. He was never good at expressing his feelings, even before the fire.

If we assume that Peter isn’t much older than Derek, and that maybe Malia isn’t actually the same age as Scott and Stiles, we’re looking at Peter in a similar situation to Derek. Being a young man, a boy really, under the age of eighteen that was taken advantage of by an older woman. But his consequences were far different. Corinne became pregnant. That’s why Talia treated her the way she did. She contained Corinne, the repercussions for taking advantage of her little brother, and when the baby was born and the ‘Coyote ran, and Talia took Peter’s memories. His memories of what he’d endured, and the results of that.

This one is a little more self-indulgent, but I’ve found a surprisingly large amount of people agreeing with me - Peter is autistic. I imagine that he likes order and cleanliness, that he perhaps is more sensory seeking than sensory avoidant but likes his routine. While Peter may not be the morally black and white character that Scott is, he does have his own strict sense of justice which we see when he wakes up from his coma and decides his priority is justice (revenge) for the murder of his family. An autistic trait. He’s also very blunt, a less strong point and I’m sure there’s other things I’ve forgotten but those are my points off the top of my head.

Following the coma, he was once again killed by being burnt. Peter would absolutely be suffering from mental health issues following these things. I would imagine anxiety, perhaps even panic, around fire. I would imagine nightmares. I would imagine him becoming more protective of what remains of his family, this is why he keeps trying to run. Why he wants Scott’s power in season four. He wants the strength to protect what he sees as his. What remains of his family. That‘s why he’s surprisingly tender with Cora when she’s in the hospital in season two.

I also picture Peter as a collector. He has a lot of money, what is he to do with it other than spend it on things of value? Imagine the size of his library, comprised of ancient tomes and books that need to be handled with the utmost care. Books on the supernatural that have a surprising amount of correct information, so that he can be the person most informed when threats pass through.  I think he’d buy wolfsbane so that others couldn’t, or so that he had it on hand for if he got injured.

I think Peter is someone that is good ay buying gifts, and he always knows what to get for you if he cares enough about you to get you anything. 

I think Peter would be very particular about nicknames, not pet names but nicknames - his name is Peter, and you will call him that, not Pete or P, or Petey. 

I think Peter used to be very touch driven and tactile, but now is more withdrawn and so incredibly touch starved and after all he has been though would probably flinch away if someone tried to touch him unexpectedly. 

I think Peter wouldn’t celebrate his birthday, because he hates the reminder that he is getting older when his family cannot. He probably made a big deal out of his birthday before the fire, but now he hates it and would prefer to ignore it entirely.

I am done.. for now. There may be more in future, we shall see