#is that the name of this community it’s been so long

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

Modern t4t au where Ed and Stede meet at a pride community center and immediately become best friends. Stede's newly out as trans and gay, and Ed's been in the local pride scene for long enough to show him the ropes and appreciate his fresh perspective.

As usual, they're smitten instantly, but it takes Stede forever to work up the nerve to ask him out because it absolutely went over his head that Ed's trans too and he's heard the horror stories about dating cis guys.

They eventually wind up asking each other out at about the same time, and Stede's like "Oh, I was so worried you might not like the trans thing!" And Ed gets really still and quiet.

He kinda goes "Stede. Babe. I taught you how to do your t shots. I filled out your name change paperwork for you. I help you shave."

Stede's like "yeah, you're so nice!" And Ed wordlessly unlocks his phone to show him his wallpaper, which is a selfie of them from last pride where Ed's wearing a trans flag like a cape. And the penny drops.

Stede: I thought you were being supportive

Ed: yeah, of my own damn self, Stede

[takeme-totheworld]

I think one of the most telling hints that Muriel is actually quite bright, despite how everyone treats them, is when they not only immediately get what Crowley is saying about bees, they extend the metaphor by arguing, "But you don't look like a bee, you look like a murder hornet!"

Like. That's actually some pretty sophisticated comprehension and communication from an angel who's been kept isolated in an office in Heaven for so long they don't know how long humans live or the name of any "human settlement" other than London or what a cup of tea is.

[bymarara]

Will and the Boys Don't Cry.

Remember the picture when we were first shown Will on his birthday? In case anyone hasn't noticed, there were headphones in the picture and let's think, who else was wearing headphones and under what circumstances? Uh, Max! Max wore them so that she wouldn't fall under the full influence of Vecna and become his victim, music helped her so called survival.

Now let's get to why Will carries them around. I have two suggestions.

Everyone on the team has headphones now just in case Vecna decides to face someone.

Will is scared. Will himself realizes that he can feel Vecna's presence, in addition he will probably hear him, his voice and his thoughts, which will be very frightening to Byers. Because of the fear, he may choose his favorite song and walk around with headphones on at all times, so that if anything happens, he won't be influenced by Vekna and Vekna won't take over Will's mind. I also think that there will be a similar situation as with Lumax, that Mike will have to turn on these headphones in case of anything, I think Will will warn him alone about it all, thus trusting Mike.

Now something I've been thinking about very, very hard. Most people, and I think or thought that Will's song would be “Should I Stay or Should I Go”, but if you notice the details, you can see the poster in Will's room! “Boys don't cry”, this song references Will in a lot of ways, and if it's in season 5 in his headphones, it will be very symbolic, and will show the meaning of everything we've seen.

Let's take Max as an example. She has “Running Up That Hill” in her headphones. The lines from the song literally refer to what Max is feeling and it also shows how she feels about Billy and how she regrets what happened at the end of season 3 and how she would take it all back. The chorus from her song, literally speaks to Max's morale and what she wants. -And if I only could, I'd make a deal with God, And I'd get him to swap our places, Be running up that road, Be running up that hill, Be running up that building. If I only could, oh These lines literally refer to the fact that if Max had known what would happen, she would not have stood still, but would have tried to help her half-brother. She would have been ready even for the same death as her brother, as long as he did not die. Also, there are very interesting lines like.

“You don't want to hurt me,but see how deep the bullet lies.” which refers to their relationship while Billy was alive. The guy hurt his sister, which she hasn't forgotten, and that deep down inside of her, she wished him dead inside of her, which she now regrets.

What about Will? I know most people have already figured this out, but for those who haven't and don't know the context - this song is about the inner thoughts that guys have when they're going through an unpleasant/transitional moment in their lives. It's also popular in the LGBT+ community. Let's go through the parts that I find most interesting and start from the beginning. -I would say I'm sorry, If I thought that it would change your mind. But I know that this time, I have said too much. Somehow it reminds me a lot of Will helping Mike with his relationship with Al, while ignoring his feelings and even confessing his feelings while hiding under his sisters name. Also, I think there's a season five reference here. I mean, Will could talk about the painting and the speech, but not say what he meant about his feelings! And the lines “I would say I'm sorry if I thought that it would change your mind.” show that Mike could have left with some anger and it left a mark on Will and that he can't even apologize now, and that apologizing won't change anything. (Yes, I know I sound creepy, please.) Now let's get to the chorus. -I tried to laugh about it,

Cover it all up with lies. I tried to laugh about it, Hiding the tears in my eyes. Cause boys don't cry. Boys don't cry. Sounds like Will's confession to Mike to me. He's not showing his real feelings, he's hiding everything under the “Al” mask. and underneath the mask, he keeps his feelings hidden, not showing them. He himself, quietly crying, quietly suffering, realizing for himself that his feelings will never be reciprocated, that he will have to live with it and come to terms with it, and he buries it all by himself and tries to cope with it all by himself. -I would tell you, That I loved you, If I thought that you would stay. But I know that it's no use, That you've already, Gone away… Again he says that he has buried all his hopes and feelings, he sees Mike pulling away from him and as if he is walking away from him, so talking about feelings, about declarations of love is useless in his opinion. Literally the whole song shows Will, shows a guy who in his opinion has already missed his chance, he realizes that he can't change anything and hides himself and his feelings only deeper into himself.

I hope that Will will have this song in season 5, but I will also say that there is a possibility that in case of anything, Mike can play this song, so much in this song refers to Mike.

[penelopepine]

Don't be a stranger! Pt. 3

Part 2 Part 3

Simon "Ghost" Riley x FemReader

Content: Neighbors AU, fluff, developing relationship

For the first time in a long time Simon wasn't glad to be leaving his flat. Every other time he would have already been out the door and on his way back to the base. Instead he's sitting at his table nursing a cup of tea at 5am; trying to take in as much as he can before leaving for who knows how long. 

You and Simon had said your goodbyes to each other last night per his request. He didn't want you having to be up this early when you still had to wake up for work in just a couple hours. Which was something that made him worried to think about. He had been walking with you everyday, and this was going to be his first time not doing that with you. You were going to start doing a lot of things without him now though. 

Simon was sure in just a couple weeks of him being gone you'll have forgotten all about him and moved on in life. Sure he had your phone number now, but he's not going to be able to communicate with you for long periods whenever he's out on a mission. He'll become the neighbor who shows up every once in a while, and no longer your friend. He just knew it. 

A sudden knock at his door broke him of these thoughts. He cautiously approached the door; there were only two options he could think of for who was at the door. Either it was someone who was here to try and hurt him or it was you. 

He looked through the peephole and once he had confirmed who it was he opened the door.

It was you. Of course it was you, as much as he wished you had listened and were instead asleep right now; Simon was happy to see you. Standing in the doorway with a wide grin on your face, and holding a box. 

"Simon! I'm so glad I managed to catch you before you left," You hold out the box towards him, "here this is for you as well!" 

Simon softly says your name before grabbing the box from you and letting you step inside, “What’s this? Also shouldn’t you be asleep right now. I thought we agreed to say goodbye last night.” 

“You did say that, but I never agreed to it!” You step inside giving him a soft shoulder bump, “and that is a gift that you are not allowed to open until you get back to base.” 

With a small smile on his face Simon gives a huff, “I suppose I should’ve known better to think that you would’ve listened.” 

“I’ll listen when it’s important, but you never could’ve stopped me from being up and walking you out to the car. It’ll be like our normal walks except I’m walking you to work this time.” 

Simon will deny it to everyone, even himself, but he felt so cared for in that moment. Here you were at 5am wanting to be with him to the last second. Not because you had to or worked together, but simply because you wanted to. 

"Should I expect an escort from the car to the building when I return as well?"

"Just tell me when to be there and I will." 

He hopes you keep your word on that. Before anything else can be said his phone pings, "It seems my car is here." 

You give him a sad smile as the two of you head to the door. "I'm going to call and text you by the way; you're not going to get rid of me this easily." 

"I won't always be able to reply." He wasn't going to lie and say the two of you would always be in constant communication. That would only lead to hurt for both of you, "but I'll try to when I can." 

"That's ok, besides who else am I going to get to listen to me ramble about my day?" 

"Then I look forward to your 20 minute voicemail messages then, love." 

The rest of the walk to the car is passed with you telling Simon what plans you have coming up, and that he shouldn't worry about his place since you'll hold down the fort for him while he's gone. 

You stood silently now standing by his side as he put his bag in the trunk. Looking at you he can clearly see a glassy look in your eyes as you look up at him. 

"Can- can I get a hug before you go?" You nervously ask. 

You and Simon had exchanged shoulder bumps, back pats, and side hugs at most. Never have the two of you given the other a real hug. It took just a moment to think before Simon was opening up his arms towards you. Instantly you rush forward and you both stand there for a moment holding on to each other. 

“Be safe.” You whisper before letting go, and taking a step back. Letting Simon get inside the car. 

He watched up for as long as he could; memorizing you to mind. When he couldn’t see you any longer Simon took a deep breath, and slipped back to what he was most comfortable with. Being the ghost he was once more. 

-

“Aye, Lt. good to see you again! How was your time off?” Johnny of course was there right as soon as he stepped back on base. Normally he’d appreciate it, but right now all he wants is to get to his room. You said he couldn’t open the package till he got here, and he didn’t want to wait any longer than he had to. 

“It was fine.” Simon says as he walks past the other, “I’ll meet up with you later Johnny.” 

“You better! I have a lot of gossip that I need to catch you up on.” 

“Copy that.” 

He didn’t stop walking till the door to his room was firmly shut behind him.  Placing his bag down he sat at the desk and opened the box. 

Inside was a small container, a bracelet, and a letter. Pulling out the container first he opened it to find the little thing filled with cookies and a note on top. 

“I know you have a secret sweet tooth! Hope you enjoy these!” The note read. It was hard for him to not smile at that. He didn’t know that you had noticed that about him; it was actually something he tried to hide from you. 

The bracelet was clearly homemade by you. It is made up of black and gray beads, and a small silver pendant the shape of a heart. He runs his fingers over the pendant feeling the smooth cool surface before he slips the bracelet onto his wrist. He’ll cover it with his sleeves or put it in his pocket when he’s not in his own personal space. 

A thought pops into Simon’s head as looks at it; taking out his phone he takes a quick photo of the bracelet and sends it to you. Along with a text thank you for the cookies as well. 

Looking back in the box there was only the letter left. This was the item that made him the most nervous to look at. Very carefully though he opened it. 

“Simon,  

The very first day I met you I was so worried that you were there to yell at me. That I had already messed up a relationship with one of my neighbors, but you had surprised me. You offered to help me, and I said yes. 

That was the best decision I could have made. Having you as my friend will never be a mistake. I’m going to miss you while you’re gone, but rest assured as soon as you get back home I’ll make you whatever you want!

Make sure to stay safe out there and bring me back any cool rocks you find!

Sincerely, 

Your favorite neighbor!”

Reading the letter he couldn’t help but think about every moment he spent with you; noting to himself how different everything seems to be now in his life. He never thought he would meet someone like you that made him feel a certain way. 

With something akin to horror Simon realized what that feeling was, he liked you, he wanted you to be his. Somehow you had dug yourself into his heart, and made a home. 

Taglist:

@nexthyperfix @spicyspicyliving @yourdaydreamerfan @tf141gloryhole

[thoughts-and-gayers]

no because the greater intergalactic community must have been SO confused when rick started carting morty around. like, the intergalactic terrorist known for having no morals and fucking everyone over is suddenly taking this random fucking human kid with him everywhere.

and at first, people are like, maybe the kid is a victim of some kind, like he was kidnapped or something, but nope! according to everyone who's interacted with the two of them together, he seems to be traveling with this known intergalactic terrorist (mostly) willingly!

and then, someone hears the kid call the rick sanchez "grandpa" and the intergalactic internet goes wild.

so people start trying to figure out how the hell rick fucking sanchez managed to get a grandson, and why the hell he's bringing said grandson along on his various errands and genocides. because this kid doesnt really come across as some crazy genius, or epic fighter, or anything like that! but one day, a story begins to spread starting from one of rick's former business partners.

see, this former business partner of rick's thought it would be a good idea to knowingly sell rick fake k-lax, and rick didnt react too kindly to it. but, as the story goes, just as rick goes to send a bullet right through the guy's skull, the kid stops him. he gets rick to stand down as long as the guy gives rick a refund. so this guy survives crossing rick sanchez because some human kid had some sort of sway over rick!

the kid's name gets leaked. it's morty.

so maybe some of rick's enemies decide kidnapping morty will be a good way to get sway over this intergalactic terrorist. and they lock morty up, sure, but theyre not that worried about using the most secure locks or hiding the guns or anything like that. after all, the kid's a pacifist, right?

then imagine their surprise when this human kid comes guns blazing out of the burning wreckage of their base, coated in the guards' blood, just in time to hop into rick's ship (which only just arrived) like its no big deal.

and people realize that this kid might be more of a threat than they thought.

and, eventually, morty smith's presence is almost as intimidating and panic-inducing as the presence of rick sanchez.

and people on space tumblr edit flower crowns onto pictures of morty that they stole from news websites.

[desceros]

sometimes i think about the future symphony "i should have married you" post you made and it makes me so sad but the other night as i was falling asleep i was struck with absolute agony by the awful idea of "i should have married you" because marrying her would have made her hamato and maybe just maybe then she would have been able to become a hamato spirit. and the brothers most likely would have been able to make contact with the hamato sprits like they do in the series. and because if he married her at least he would have been able to contact her spirit. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh anyways thought i should share hope your day is going fabulously captain desceros

oh, this is awful. allow me to make it even worse :)

we’ve seen in the series that you dont actually have to have the hamato name to be ‘a hamato’ as april demonstrates. we’ve also seen varying levels of. hm. ninj-oscity? ninpo skills? from the boys. like raph and leo doing a ninja mind meld. just. just mikey.

and we’ve always seen that donnie struggles with ninpo the most.

his ninpo is mechanical. when he uses it at its most conscious level, we see it manifest as blueprints coming together. literal pieces, as if constructed with real material. when he panics or doesn’t go through this process, it’s a vague shape that isn’t as strong or as defined in purpose.

so let’s take this scenario you’ve brought to us.

viola-chan would have, unquestionably, been a hamato. and for that reason, i can definitely see her having a hamato spirit.

…..but i dont think donnie would ever be able to communicate with it.

mikey would be the most likely, since he has the strongest ninpo. but he’d be in high demand since he’s so strong, so i think it would tire him and i dont know how much time and energy he’d have to talk to anyone. not to mention the stress he’d feel when donnie would come to him like Hey Can I Talk To My Dead Girlfriend and mikey’s like…. dude i just got home from 24 hours of straight ass kicking i’m about to pass tf out.

and raph, i imagine, died not too long after viola-chan, so whether he could or not is moot.

leo. well. i dont think leo could communicate with viola-chan either. leo is rather avoidant when he feels guilty or ashamed, and (without going into too much of spoiler territory) he’d feel largely unworthy to talk to you, i think. and since we’ve seen that it takes an open heart to use the technique, it wouldn’t work.

and donnie. god. donnie would try. he would try so, so hard. he would try, hours upon hours, every free moment, banging his fists on his thighs as he’d meditate until he’d collapse. reaching out. seeking. already not as strong at this whole ninpo nonsense. unable to calm himself from the need to see you need to see you please just let me see you one last time please please please that would make it impossible to focus. he’d start thinking about tech that could bridge the gap. that’s how his ninpo works, after all. modeling his blueprint. so if he can design a machine that can talk to you. his ninpo can bring it to life.

but he doesnt exactly have a lot of time to dedicate to a personal project like that, let alone one so fucking insane in scale, so actually impossible to do. and as the time passes he grows more and more obsessed with thinking about it. yet simultaneously more and more sure it’ll never happen. i feel like his last moments, alone, bleeding, staring up at the rust-colored sky, he’d be smiling. because of course he he has some kind of death drone army set to go the moment his ninpo cuts off, and it’s one last middle finger to krang. …but also i think he’d be a little relieved. hoping his spirit will find yours and lavi’s.

(do they? who knows. no more hamato exist in that timeline to find out.)

[midnightsxblue]

LUCKY

carl grimes x reader

tags: angst but then fluff !

masterlist here!

─── ─── ─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─── ─── ───

When the apocalypse started you’d lost all your family and were on your own for what felt like ages but you eventually found someone who made you feel safe and her name was Natasha. She was a stranger but she used to be a mother and had lost her son at the start. She’d protected you like you were her own; like you were blood.

She was everything to you, but she left too soon. She was attacked by a walker and you did everything you could. You got bit in the process and got so choked up over the fact you knew you’d die within the next twenty four hours, you let Natasha get swarmed. You ran away as fast as you could, basically sobbing. That night after finding shelter you patiently waited for the infection to take over. You couldn’t take the easy way out, you were too scared. Nothing happened for about two days straight when you realized, you might’ve just been lucky.

Ever since Natasha, you swore to yourself you’d never let anyone you cared for die like that again and you’d make sure of it with your immunity. Granted you could still get ripped to shreds but you knew you’d never let it get that far. Not after seeing what happened to Natasha.

After that, you traveled long and far, eventually finding yourself at a large gated community with a sign at the front that read “Alexandria Safe Zone.” They had let you in very kindly. You struggled to bond with anyone there, most of them had been there since the start and never had true experience in the world around you. Except Carl.

He, to you, was the most normal of all of them; your definition of normal at least. He’d seen it all, his whole group did but he was different from his group. He’d grown up in the apocalypse just like you. It wasn’t just a part of your guys’ lives. It was all you could really remember. It almost makes you feel bad for his baby sister. She’d never know what the world was really like.

So you two grew closer. You’d go out into the woods to ensure you’d never forget. You read comics, listened to music, anything that you could think of. It never occurred to you that maybe you should tell him about your immunity. You hadn’t told anyone before and you knew if you kept bonding like you were then he’d figure it out himself. You didn’t want to take the risk of him telling someone else, you don’t know what would happen to you.

You tried to ignore the topic as much as possible, you only have ever worn long sleeves and did whatever you could to ensure they would never see it. Carl had just assumed you were mostly comfortable that way so he never mentioned it.

One morning the two of you decided to go out to the forest to read. Although you’d heard talks of a horde of walkers that were supposed to travel through that day, you didn’t really listen. The communities horde tracking system wasn’t always accurate as it would usually be a couple days ahead.

You guys walked through the forest, your hands interlocked as you looked for your spot. You approached your fallen log and you settle into the ground as Carl begins to dig through a large black box filled with anything to entertain you both. “What do you wanna read?” He asks, focused on rummaging through the pile of comics. “I’m fine with whatever. Maybe Deadpool if you want.” You reply, also digging through your bag for the pretzels you had packed for you two.

He finds the comic and sits back next to you and you lean into his shoulder while you read. You loved this, reading with him. His presence helped you forget everything you wanted to. Losing your family, watching Natasha die, getting bit. Everything washes away when you’re with him. You focus on the comic for a while until you heard the irritating noise of walkers nearby. You completely forgot the warnings you’d heard this morning.

The both of you stand up and Carl tosses the comic back in the box. You look around to see that there’s a small horde. On a regular day you would go hide in the hallowed tree trunk behind your log but the walkers had already noticed you. “Shit. We’re just gonna have to take them.” You tell him. He pulls his knife from his belt and you do the same, preparing for the next step.

You handle a few, unfortunately not quite easily. Some of the skulls weren’t too soft and also you got quite a bit of blood on you. You handled about six of them, Carl handled 9. There was one final walker that you handled before you two could take a breath. You turn to Carl with a content look, almost proud of the work you accomplished. He nods and you’re interrupted by another walker which seemingly came out of fucking nowhere.

The walker pushes into Carl and your immediate instinct is to pull it off of him. You grab the walker just below its neck and before you know it, its teeth plunge right into your forearm. You didn’t know it but Carl’s heart completely shattered. His eyes went wide and he helped get it off of you. Your knife shoves into its chin and it’s finally dead.

You let it fall to the floor and for some odd reason, tears begin to flow from your eyes. It was too close of a call but you’d survived, Carl had survived. You were relieved; relieved that you’d saved someone from the fate Natasha had faced.

“Y-you’re bit.” He mutters. You look to him and wipe your tears, smiling slightly. His eyebrows furrow in confusion. How could you be smiling? “Why…what’s there to smile about?” He asks, his voice still quiet. You roll your sleeve up from your other arm, showing your old bite wound. He steps closer to see it and he gently runs his fingers over it.

“I-I don’t understand how’s that…” His voice trails off and he looks back to you for any answers.

“It’s from a while ago. I’m immune. I know I should’ve told you earlier but I didn’t know how, I didn’t know what people would do to me.” He looks back down at your arm before his hands move up to your shoulders. “I would never do anything to hurt you…I wouldn’t let anyone do anything to you.” You nod knowingly and look back at the floor as your tears continue to flow. “Why are you crying? You’re gonna survive.” His hand moves up to wipe your tears off.

“I guess I was just scared of losing you.” You explain. He tilts your chin up to look at you before kissing your forehead, leaning his on yours afterwards.

“You’re not gonna lose me.”

─── ─── ─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─── ─── ───

a/n: yall it felt like going to WAR to get this shit out omg i literally couldn’t finish writing it for the life of me bc i’ve been soooo unmotivated BUT I FEEL BETTER NOWWW so i’m down to take even more requests i think i have one left in my inbox that will be worked on today and tmr and will probably be posted tmr :> THANK U ANON FOR THE REQUEST IT WAS PERFECT!!! (sorry for the ending being so shitty fhndnfnfnfn)

[in1-nutshell]

Bot Buddy being Rodimus's older sister and having a crush on Swerve

SFW, Platonic, Familial, Hinted Romance, Cybertronain reader

Buddy is a near carbon copy of Rodimus.

Key word ‘almost’.

Instead of sporting the red and oranges being her main color on her frame, Buddy has more blue tones with some yellow around.

That is where all similarities end.

Buddy being related to Ultra Magnus makes more sense than her being related to Rodimus.

“Hey Buddy! Watch this!”--Rodimus

Rodimus on the top of a tall shelf.

“Rodimus No!”—Buddy and Magnus

Buddy and Magnus look at each other in surprise.

“… I hate when you two do that.”--Rodimus

“Don’t care, get down here before you break something or hurt yourself.”--Buddy

“But—”--Rodimus

“Rodimus.”--Magnus

“…”--Rodimus

She was in fact close to him though.

Being a part of the Elite Guard for most of the war can do that.

The other part was stationed around communications and message relay for the Guard or the Wreckers.

That was where she first met Swerve.

It was purely by accident.

Swerve had been given the wrong number and connected her instead.

“Hello? How may I help you?”--Buddy

“You’re not Blurr. Who are you?”--Swerve

“You have the help line for the Wrecker’s and Elite Guard, do you require any assistance?”--Buddy

“Oh, no not really. I thought I had Blurr’s number. You know Blurr?”--Swerve

“Yes, I am familiar with the racer.”--Buddy

“Isn’t he the best! We were going to hatch a plan to build and run a bar when the war ended.”--Swerve

“Really? Blurr agreed to that?”--Buddy

“Absolutely! He even gave me his number, but I must have punched in the wrong digits and contacted you instead. Not that you haven’t been nice and all!”--Swerve

Buddy laughing a little bit.

“Its all right… umm… what is your designation?”--Buddy

“The names Swerve! And who might I be speaking with if you don’t mind?”--Swerve

“I’m Buddy—”--Buddy

“You’re THE Buddy!? Wow! This is just my day! I’ve heard so much about you and your work with the Elite Guard, The Wrecker’s…”--Swerve

Buddy gets a bit more comfortable on her end ready to continue this pleasant conversation with Swerve.

It was a slow day anyways… it felt nice.

That started a slow friendship between the two.

The chats had to happen on scheduled days since Swerve had a habit of talking too much and Buddy didn’t like to stop him.

Buddy refused to talk to Hot Rod about this.

Swerve was her friend.

Finally, someone that hadn’t been friends with Hot Rod before knowing her.

She was going to protect her friend’s identity as long as she could.

But of course, Hot Rod had a feeling his sister was hiding something from him and was going to get to the bottom of it.

Hot Rod dramatically draping his frame on Buddy’s berth.

“Why won’t you tell me!”—Hot Rod

Buddy rolling her optics.

“I’m not telling you squat Roddy.”--Buddy

Hot Rod suddenly sitting up.

“What if its… someone?”—Hot Rod

Buddy frame stiffens a bit.

“It is someone!”—Hot Rod

Hot Rod flopping on her back and starts popping her side annoyingly.

“Who’s the lucky bot who’s got my stuck up of a sister like this?”—Hot Rod

Buddy grabs his digit and slightly bends it backwards.

“Hey! OWW!”-Hot Rod

“Keep it up and I’ll bend more than your digit Hot Rod. Got that?”--Buddy

Buddy lets go of his digit and crosses her arms glaring at him.

“Fine, fine, I wont start talking about your secret—”—Hot Rod

Buddy judo flips her brother to the floor.

Hot Rod was over the moon hearing that there might be someone out there for his stuck-up sis.

Maybe it would help loosen her up.

Primus knows she needs to stop stressing so much.

Buddy just wishes that Hot Rod would drop the subject… but is secretly pleased to hear that he is happy that she found someone she likes.

…then came Rodimus Prime.

Buddy felt their sibling bond significantly weakened thanks to the matrix bonding.

Rodimus didn’t seem to notice but Buddy did.

But she refused to acknowledge it to him.

He was a Prime now, he had other things to worry about than her.

Just pushing through trying to get her work done.

Timeskip to the Lost Light…

Buddy was not aware that Swerve was on the ship until she got wind of the bar.

She walked in and zeroed in on the minibot.

Buddy walking over to the bar where Swerve had his back to her.

“Welcome to Swerve’s you see anything you like?”--Swerve

Buddy smiles a bit.

“Hmm… I don’t know you recommend anything Swerve?”--Buddy

Swerve stops cleaning the glass in his servo and turns around, wide eyed.

Buddy smiles a bit more seeing Swerve’s own face light up.

“Buddy!”--Swerve

Swerve reaches over the bar to hug his friend.

Several bots at the bar stop seeing the small bartender hugging one of the most strict bots on bourd.

“… 20 shanix that Buddy tells Swerve off.”--Skids

“Deal.”--Chromedome

“Domey--”--Rewind

“Wrong. 50 and she throws him out.”--Whirl

“She wouldn’t do that… right?”--Tailgate

Buddy hugs Swerve back while silent chaos ensues behind them.

So many bots thought that Swerve was going to die that day.

Rodimus had so many com pings within that hour.

He brushes the pings off like a rumor.

Especially when he hears about something potentially happening between Buddy and Swerve.

… That changes when Rodimus starts to notice Buddy hanging out more and more at Swerve’s.

This was the first flag to be raised.

Buddy doesn’t ‘do’ crowded bars.

But he brushes it off as Buddy finally letting loose.

Rodimus is talking with Drift when he notices Buddy at the bar.

“Isn’t it nice seeing Buddy happy?”--Drift

“Hmm? Yeah… but it’s a bit weird seeing her out here.”--Rodimus

Drift raises an optic.

“She doesn’t like big, crowded places, it’s ‘Too loud and too much engex being spilled all over’.”--Rodimus

Drift looking at Buddy happily talking with Swerve at the counter.

“Maybe she’s here for someone?”--Drift

Rodimus downing the rest of his drink laughing at the end.

“Ha! That’ll be the day.”--Rodimus

One time a rather rude bot had come to the bar and demanded to know why he was cut off from the drinks.

All while he was slowly tipping to the side.

Buddy tried to de-escalate the situation.

“Listen, we are all civilized bots here. Lets just get you back to your habsuite or the med bay if—”--Buddy

The bot looks at Buddy and spits in their face.

“Can it! Your nothing more of a has been-washout-guards-bot who is only good for a pretty paperweight!”—Random Bot

Buddy wipes the spit infused engex from her optics, glares at the bot harshly, about to unleash the Pits when she gets interrupted.

“HEY!”--Swerve

Swerve stands on the bar counter gaining some height, his servos shaking at his sides.

“Don’t you EVER talk to her like that! Now. Get. Out. Of. MY! BAR!”—Swerve

Buddy feels her spark skip a pulse looking at the mini bartender.

The bot tries to take a swing at him, but Buddy grabs the fist in her’s.

Buddy’s optics blazing in fury.

“You heard the minibot.”--Buddy

Buddy kicks the bot in the back of the knee and throws the frame across her shoulder.

Marching outside and kicking the bot several feet away from the entrance.

“Get. Out.”—Buddy

“… She gonna be my Amica.”--Whirl

“Whirl, not the time.”--Cyclonus

“Well, I can’t be her Conjunx. Swerve has that covered; this is the next best thing.”--Whirl

“Swerve does not—”--Tailgate

Whirl points at Swerve still standing on the counter with a lovesick smile on his face.

“…Maybe your right.”--Tailgate

“Tailgate, Whirl no.”--Cyclonus

“Hold on Cyclonus, they might have a point.”--Rewind

“Rewind—”--Chromedome

Cylcnous puts a servo on Chromedome’s shoulder shaking his helm.

Chromedome sighs giving in as Whirl, Tailgate, and Rewind scheming in silence.

Buddy managed to cuff the bot and send him to Magnus.

The bot never came back to Swerve’s.

Swerve has heart shaped optics behind his visor.

You’d have to be blind not to see his clear ‘admiration’ for the former member of the Elite Guard.

But he is convinced that all of this will pass.

It’s not like Buddy would actually have feelings for him.

Meanwhile Buddy has started creating Swerve/Love playlists in secret.

A secret that she is taking with her until she goes offline.

[gogandmagog]

Guys! Yesterday I had a book-shaped piece of mail, and inside of it was my copy of Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery: Continuing Conversations being returned, from another very dear user here! I bring this up only because some-months-ago I promised to copy out a particular article from this book, for yet another user here, who was interested! Interested because it’s on the the subject of a Fan Favourite thing... fan fiction. And better still because some of our (basically famous) mutuals here are mentioned by name! If you’ve ever wondered if the Montgomery scholarship is reading your fan fiction... the answer is yes, they are! They totally are. More than that, they also have some thoughts to share… as well as recommendations of their faves too! This article even covers the F/F and M/M fan fiction presented by fans in LMM’s universe, and I’m personally super excited to be able to begin reading these works, as soon as I can find them all. I’ve done my best to link what I could immediately find, but some of the mentioned stories were unavailable... potentially due to changes in usernames? (That said... if anyone knows of the works indicated here, that I haven’t provided a link for, please do share!)   This article, by the way, was written recently... in 2020! It’s very current, and it covers a few stories that were still being actively updated during the pandemic. The focus of this article is less so on canon (or really just the Anne/Gilbert pairing), though, and seems to prefer demonstrating the versatility of mixing relationships (Anne and Emily, for one!) and the wider more general universe-building aspects (the entanglements of future generations/Anne’s grandchildren) that fans have been expounding on for nothing less than decades. 

Okay, here we go! xx

Continuing Stories: L.M. Montgomery and Fanfiction in the Digital Era by Balaka Basu

Fanfiction – the recreational (re)writing of texts – is a literary genre of rapidly growing significance. Abigail Derecho in her brief history of fanfiction identifies it as “a genre that has a long history of appealing to women and minorities, minorities, individuals on the cultural margins who used archontic writing as a means to express not only their narrative creativity, but their criticisms of social and political inequities as well.”

Insightfully defined by Francesca Coppa and Mary Ellen Curtin as “speculative fiction about character,” fanfiction can be even more precisely understood as fantasies about the diegetic positioning of characters in the context of various settings, communities, relationships both textual and paratextual, and eventually all manner of cultural mythologies.

Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson describe the production of fanfiction as “part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced.”

They point out that the shift in the method of dissemination of fanfiction from newsletters and zines to internet archives means that “ever-younger fans who previously would not have had access to the fannish culture except through their parents can now enter the fan space effortlessly; financial resources have become less of a concern because access to a computer is the only prerequisite; and national boundaries and time zones have ceased to limit fannish interaction.”

The nature of fanfiction allows participants to cross-generational and socio-economic boundaries in an ongoing exchange of responses to a source text with which they share a fascination, developing new texts that in turn elicit their own responses. While the creation of fanfiction is evidence of an affective, loving, communal relationship with the source text, this genre of writing is still dismissed in many quarters as overly emotional, purely erotic, and even perverse, a type of amateur and immature engagement with popular texts that produces writing necessarily divorced from literary significance. Produced in staggeringly vast quantities by subcultures with complex vocabularies and traditions that can intimidate the casual reader, fanfiction is perceived by many to be more of a cultural practice than a literary genre, variously denigrated for its pornographic potential and its lack of originality. However, close examination reveals that fan writers are able to create a critical dialogue with the originating author in acts of communal storytelling that incorporate allusions and reference points to which other dedicated fan readers and writers may respond.

In this chapter, after examining how L.M. Montgomery and her writer heroine Emily themselves engage in practices now associated with fanfiction, I survey four forms of fanfiction that remove Montgomery’s novels from her seemingly idyllic and timeless island settings, contextualizing her characters and plots within history and other genres: the sequel set during the Second World War, the modern AU (alternate universe), the gap-filler, and the slash fic, all of which allow the young readers who grow up with her novels to engage in dialogue with the stories they love, a type of literary conversation that Montgomery herself models within her texts. Emily’s reading, which is active rather than passive, resembles twenty-first-century fans’ ownership of the texts they love, provoking creative responses. For instance, after reading works by Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew Arnold, Emily writes, “Teddy lent me 3 books of poetry. One of them was Tennyson and I have learned The Bugle Song off by heart so I will always have it. One was Mrs. Browning. She is lovely. I would like to meet her. I suppose I will when I die but that may be a long time away. The other was just one poem called Sohrab and Rustum. After I went to bed I cried over it. Aunt Elizabeth said ‘what are you sniffling about?’ I wasn’t sniffling – I was weeping sore … I couldn’t go to sleep until I had thought out a different end for it – a happy one.”

The reactions Emily catalogues are those of the fan; they are viscerally felt in the body and attempt to dissolve the boundary between author and reader, producer and consumer. She inscribes Tennyson within her heart in order to possess the poem she loves; she creates a relationship between Barrett Browning and herself; and, most significantly, she interjects her own desired happy ending into Arnold’s tragic narrative, a corrective desire that is at the core of many works of fanfiction. Emily’s diaries and her story reflect Montgomery’s own experiences from childhood to adulthood as reader, writer, and reader-turned-writer discussed in the introduction to this volume. Depicting Emily as a voracious reader and a life-writer like herself, Montgomery places the child Emily’s voice in conversation with that of the narrator through Emily’s letters to her dead father in Emily of New Moon and through her diary entries in Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, creating a form of joint authorship that is referenced explicitly in “Salad Days,” the second chapter of Emily Climbs: “book is not going to be wholly, or even mainly, made up of extracts from Emily’s diary; but, by way of linking up matters unimportant enough for a chapter in themselves, and yet necessary for a proper understanding of her personality and environment, I am going to include some more of them. Besides, when one has material ready to hand, why not use it?”

The narrator’s willingness to use the “material” that is “ready to hand” reflects Montgomery’s and Emily’s practices, and also validates other writers’ use of the material Montgomery places at their disposal. As with many fans, Emily’s reading frequently makes itself felt within her writing.

Like Montgomery, Emily learns her trade through mimicry, from her first poem in blank verse inspired by James Thomson’s Seasons to her unwitting imitation of Kipling that is pointed out by her teacher, Mr Carpenter, in his review of her work. Like Sara Stanley of The Story Girl, whose compelling and fascinating stories are rarely if ever original, Emily is a fan of the oral traditions of her community, incorporating and building upon them in her own writing, transforming and recreating, for instance, the story of “The Woman Who Spanked the King” in Emily Climbs.

The retelling and versioning that Emily practises signal her immense admiration for the source texts she adapts, just as the creation of fanfiction does for Montgomery’s readership and fans. The possibilities inherent in versioning and adaptation are illustrated in Emily’s Quest. When Montgomery depicts Emily undertaking the reworking of someone else’s narrative, she is adapting an episode from her own experience while working for The Echo in Halifax, which she records in her journal. Montgomery, like Emily, was asked to create an ending for a serialized story, “A Royal Betrothal,” after compositors had misplaced the original text.

Like Emily, she claims that her “knowledge of royal love affairs [was] limited,” and that she was unaccustomed “to write with flippant levity of kings and queens.” Nevertheless, Montgomery manages to create a conclusion that passes muster, since “as yet nobody has guessed where the ‘seam’ comes in.” She is, however, curious about the original author’s reaction to her unauthorized adaptation, and while she never discovers this in real life, she does imagine it in her fiction when she introduces Mark Greaves, who is horrified by Emily’s new ending for the story but enchanted by its author. Neither Montgomery nor Emily engages in this sort of writing from a place of fandom; they have no previous attachment to “A Royal Betrothal,” and both are writing professionally. Nevertheless, the ability to solve the puzzle of the story and the weaving of their work into an already extant text are the very project of fanfiction: ludic narrative composition that recalls the way children play make-believe with the narratives they love, reworking and extending them. It is telling that Montgomery uses the metaphor of the “seam” to describe this particular craft. Jane Dawkins, writing about her fanfiction, which is inspired by Jane Austen, describes her fan novel Letters from Pemberley as “an old-fashioned patchwork quilt, where in place of the scraps of fabric reminding one of the favorite frocks or shirts whence they came, there is a line or a phrase or a sentence from one of [the original] books or letters stitched alongside the lesser scraps of my own manufacture.”

Montgomery’s final book, framed by the two world wars, is just such a patchwork sequel, albeit providing only brief glimpses of the characters that readers met as children and who have now grown older. When a version of the book was published in 1974 as The Road to Yesterday, these glimpses, lacking the interstitial materials, became even briefer, mirroring the more forced insertion of beloved characters that the two earlier collections, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, display. Only two of Anne’s grandchildren – Gilbert Ford and Walter Blythe – are obliquely referred to, in the story “A Commonplace Woman,” where an unpleasant young doctor reflects on both of them as potential rivals for the affection of a beautiful girl he himself hopes to pursue.

However, the full novel, The Blythes Are Quoted, published in 2009 and comprised of short stories about the people in Glen St Mary and over the harbour, is interspersed with poetry by both a young Walter and an adult Anne. The poems are cut with tiny slices of dialogue that suggest the continuing lives of fans’ favourite characters and how they might have developed. In “‘Dragged at Anne’s Chariot Wheels’: L.M. Montgomery and the Sequels to Anne of Green Gables,” Carole Gerson notes the mixture of feelings from pleasure to frustration that Montgomery records in her journals as she prepares to write her first sequel.

While Montgomery wrote the first installments of her various series out of inspiration, she was certainly aware of what her market desired from subsequent installments. She often regretted the necessity of marrying off her characters, but was aware that her fans demanded this conventional outcome for the characters they had come to love; these traditionally romantic endings, when not offered by Montgomery herself at the instigation of her publishers, are regularly deployed by contemporary fanfiction authors building on the source texts.

Indeed, long before the original structure of The Blythes Are Quoted was revealed to readers in Benjamin Lefebvre’s afterword, fanfiction writers were spinning off lengthy narratives that included a third generation of young Blythes, Fords, and Merediths dealing with the onslaught of the Second World War. While earlier installments in the Anne series – such as Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams – depict the deaths of Matthew, Anne and Gilbert’s first daughter (Joyce), and Captain Jim, Walter’s death in Rilla of Ingleside is somehow more striking. Unlike Matthew and Captain Jim, he has not yet had time to grow old; unlike Joyce, readers have had opportunities to get to know him as a child in Rainbow Valley and as he grows into young adulthood in Rilla of Ingleside. His death is unnatural and, therefore, all the more horrifying. These two aspects of Rilla of Ingleside – the evocation of history by a nostalgic fictional world that is still tied to real time and the use of high drama, tragedy, and romance – provide fanfiction authors with a model they can use to appeal to the emotions of those readers who are immersed in the next generation of Montgomery characters.

The Second World War, then, provides an entry point into the series for fanfiction authors, who can deploy real history coupled with beloved characters to create a tale that feels absolutely authentic. One example of this is a short story, “The Pen and the Sword,” written in 2007 by MarnaNightingale. Here, mimicking the style of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Wimsey Papers (a series of Spectator articles published between 1939 and 1940, which interestingly also continue the story of First World War–era characters during the Second World War), MarnaNightingale employs epistolary excerpts and newspaper articles to tell the story of a family going through the horrors of war for a second time. Grounding her fragmented story – like The Blythes Are Quoted, a mixture of genres – in the accounts of novelist Mollie Panter-Downes (1939) and war correspondents Ernie Pyle (1940) and Ross Munro of the Canadian Press (1941), whose articles are attributed to Kenneth Ford, she offers a story that, like Rilla of Ingleside, is anchored to the historical moment, while also nostalgically focusing on the character development that comes from Gilbert Ford’s death, Rilla’s and Faith’s reactions to the war, and the lives of their children. Here war also serves as an opportunity for new experiences, particularly for women and children: Rilla takes a factory job as a machinist, liking it better than working in Carter Flagg’s store; one of Anne’s grandchildren, Susan, plans to be a doctor; and Faith, who worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the First World War, mentions how she can sympathize. As well, the daily tidbits that flavour the pages of Rilla of Ingleside are there: one article, attributed to Anne, includes the recipe for Susan Baker’s war bread, reminding readers of the problems of wartime rationing, even in the Americas. Real life events – like the Canadian forces trying (and failing) to make a beachhead at Dieppe – arouse the passions of the reader. Unlike Austen – who also famously wrote of three or four families in a country town, but kept the Napoleonic wars firmly in the shadows – Montgomery brings the passions and high drama of the world stage into the sleepy villages of Prince Edward Island, which inspire fanfiction spinoffs.

The long novel Cecilia of Red Apple Farm, by a fan author who posts under the pseudonym ruby gillis, also directly reworks passages and scenes from the whole range of Anne books, set in the late-nineteenth century, to The Blythes Are Quoted, set in the early years of the Second World War, to highlight the similarity between her new generation of characters and their ancestors. Cecilia is the daughter of Una Meredith and Shirley Blythe (characters often married off in fanfiction). Like MarnaNightingale, ruby gillis provides period flavouring in the styles of dresses and behaviour and in references to 1940s popular films and songs. Simultaneously, this setting offers new opportunities to her female character: Cecilia wants to be a doctor, and rather than staying in Canada, she joins up to be a nurse in England. She has a series of romances – one with Sid Gardiner (before he marries May Binnie), and one with her cousin Blythe Meredith, who is this generation’s poet – before finally ending up with Marshall Douglas (the son of Mary Vance). Just as Anne initially refuses Gilbert Blythe in favour of Roy Gardner’s resemblance to her ideal man in Anne of the Island, ruby gillis’s Cecilia is fooled by the allure of Sid and Blythe as Roy Gardner–like romantic heroes into believing that she does not truly love her fun, practical, “Gilbert-esque” friend. Published in 2004, Cecilia of Red Apple Farm further illustrates the opportunities presented by reusing and reworking a body of texts through its incorporation of Montgomery’s poem “I Wish You” as the work of Blythe Meredith. Montgomery includes this poem and attributes it to Anne in The Blythes Are Quoted, although ruby gillis could not have known this when writing. The repetition of names and circumstances might seem derivative, but for readers who have read and reread the original books so many times, the extension of the story world is prized, even if – perhaps even because of – its callbacks to the original text. Due to the tendency of fans to fixate on “the good bits” in a reread, these parts can be taken for the whole.

Austen fanfiction demonstrates this aptly. Indeed, Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones and the Edge of Reason (1999), illustrates just such a reading of Pride and Prejudice: she shows Bridget, a fan, watching the scene from the 1995 mini-series in which Darcy, dripping in a wet see-through shirt, exits the lake, and then rewinding and rewatching the scene multiple times. How many times might a similar fan reread Walter’s letter from Courcelette? This repeated reviewing of selected portions can replace the amplitude of the original novel. With this delimited focus, narrative is no longer seen as a progression, but as a single moment of pleasure, sustained as long as possible. Reading the Second World War as a repetitive sequel to the First World War further highlights this possibility.

Even Montgomery seems to do so, as demonstrated in The Blythes Are Quoted, with its new generation of characters confusingly named after the old: Walter, Jem, Rilla, Di, Anne, and Gilbert. A variation on Marah Gubar’s kinship model, this kind of continuation highlights the blurred boundaries between child and adult characters who are literally related to one another and whose adventures mimic one another.

In a third example of fanfiction set during the Second World War, Weeping May Tarry, a long novel by ElouiseBates, Meggie, the heroine, is Shirley’s daughter (and also, surprisingly, Paul Irving’s granddaughter). In this story, which like Cecilia of Red Apple Farm is an installment of a longer series, Meggie is sent off to a conservatory of music to study singing, aptly combining the traditions of the nostalgic boarding-school novel with “Girl’s Own” wartime fiction. Following the tradition of Magic for Marigold, which explicitly suggests in its second chapter that the Murrays of Blair Water and the Lesleys of Cloud of Spruce exist in the same universe, @e-louise-bates (like many other fanfiction authors, including ruby gillis) suggests that all of Montgomery’s characters exist in a single universe: Meggie partners briefly with the grandson of Sara Stanley (The Story Girl and The Golden Road) and is close friends with Jane Stuart (Jane of Lantern Hill).

Going even further, @e-louise-bates introduces the grandchildren of the What Katy Did series as friends for Meggie and includes Betsy from Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy as Bruce Meredith’s wife, creating a world where all the characters of early-twentieth-century girls’ fiction seem to have truly lived, where their descendants must cope with victory gardens and dances with soldiers at the Exhibition Grounds, and where kisses are much more commonplace than they once were.

These particular continuers of Montgomery are also desirous of membership in the community of her fans, seeing their literary endeavours as productive of approval from a fellow readership. Likewise, the novels are notable for their sociality – they seem to offer the reader not only a fantasy friendship with the characters themselves but also the very real society of fellow readers of the works. Thus, these fan authors attempt to diversify their stories so that they represent contemporary beliefs regarding multiculturalism; ruby gillis, for instance, introduces into the family by way of marriage a French girl who has had to flee the Nazis due to being Jewish, a situation Montgomery and her contemporaries might have had some difficulty accepting, considering early-twentieth-century attitudes toward interreligious marriage and Montgomery’s othering of the German-Jewish peddler who sells Anne green hair dye.

The Second World War thus offers writers of Montgomery fanfiction the loom on which to weave new, more diverse stories, even as The Blythes Are Quoted, which also traces the characters’ reactions to this new war, demonstrates how these readers-turned-writers followed Montgomery’s own trajectory, not knowing that they were doing so. On the subject of fanfiction, young-adult author Patricia C. Wrede writes: “The thing that fascinates me about fanfiction, though, is the way that it models the decision tree that writers go through (whether consciously or unconsciously) to get to their final product. For those of us who do this part mostly unconsciously, it can be interesting and instructing to see the multitude of alternate paths that a story could have taken, all laid out more-or-less neatly in different authors’ fanfics [… taking a slightly different fork in the road] resulting in the plot veering in a completely new direction. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends; goals and objectives and results shift and change.” Within these pieces of fanfiction, then, fan writers are able to follow these decision trees with subsequent generations of characters as well.

Another avenue of access occurs when fan authors transpose historical narratives into the contemporary moment. Perhaps the best-known example of this modern alternate universe [AU] conversion is the television program Sherlock, which takes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective into the twenty-first century. While new cultural contexts appear, the essence of character is meant to be retained. Just as Sherlock uses text messages and blogs to substitute for telegraphs and handwritten journals, fans of Montgomery reimagine the relationships between her characters as if they were taking place online.

For instance, “Work in Progress” (2012) by verity postulates a friendship between Montgomery’s most famous heroines, Anne and Emily. In this piece of fanfiction, Emily circumvents Aunt Elizabeth’s injunction against fiction during her time at Shrewsbury High by becoming a blogger who is restricted to the “truth.” The story’s online summary, a part of which reads “Anne rolls her eyes. ‘Is your aunt really going to know if you cheat on your nonfiction with some hot prose on the side?’” shows how the story preserves the character qualities that Montgomery laid out, complete with references to the Murray pride and Anne’s orphanhood. Mr Carpenter’s admonitions are spelled out at the beginning of the story:

“Emily Byrd Starr has a sticky note on her desktop. It reads:

ITALICS

CAPITALS

!!!!!

“just”

“really”

CTRL+F!

It is almost like having Mr Carpenter in the room with her.”

Verity creates humour through the juxtaposition of contemporary social media and allusions to Montgomery’s source text. Another story by verity detailing Rilla’s romance with Ken Ford and her friendship with Una Meredith, “Rilla of Toronto,” takes place mainly through instant messages. In this story, Rilla reflects on her life from eighteen to twenty-five, tracing a continuum from her child self to her new adulthood, underscored by verity’s translation of Montgomery’s work into contemporary millennial language.

A third type of fanfiction narrative, the gap-filler, focuses on and expands the implications of the source texts. Moira Walley-Beckett’s Netflix/CBC series Anne with an “E,” as Laura Robinson shows in chapter 12 of this volume, is somewhat fanfictional in and of itself: as Robinson points out, the show fills gaps by bringing to the fore the darker currents that have always been beneath the seemingly untroubled waters of Anne of Green Gables, including Anne’s potential post-traumatic stress disorder from the disturbing life she led before coming to Green Gables. This kind of versioning and adaptation tacitly permits fan authors to feel that their versions are just as valid as those produced by professionals. Gap-fillers frequently expand on romantic pairings and in fandom are often referred to by portmanteaux of characters’ names that perpetuate some inside joke or work as puns. “Shirbert” – a moniker for Anne and Gilbert – is the latter, and demonstrates how fans posting on sites like Archive of Our Own (Ao3), Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad (this last generally populated by younger fans) develop their own language to identify their stories within the community for which they write.

One such story, “You caught me staring, but I caught you staring back,” by Anuka, clearly inspired more by the television series than the novels, begins with an author’s note that reads, “I decided to write some fluff for these two, because I need more Shirbert moments, and season 2 is so far away. I added gifs to make it more vivid.” Here, the romance between Anne and Gilbert as depicted by Montgomery and Walley-Beckett is not sufficient for the reader-turned-writer. Anuka wants the gaps in the narrative to be more fully explored than they are on either page or screen and to be made more “vivid” by the inclusion of images that help make the story come alive.

Similarly, “Rilla Blythe’s Wedding: A Not Entirely Comprehensive Account” by Scylla also fills a gap: Rilla and Ken’s wedding day, a scene that Montgomery leaves to the reader’s imagination at the end of Rilla of Ingleside. Modelled upon other accounts of weddings within Montgomery’s fiction, the story also suggests that accounts of Walter’s death have been gravely exaggerated, as he makes a stunning appearance at his sister’s wedding. In order to align her work with Montgomery’s novel, Scylla ensures that Little Dog Monday’s awareness of Walter’s death remains, but makes it only a technicality, writing, “His heart had stopped for a full ten seconds – long enough for his Captain to feel for his empty pulse and for Dog Monday to be jolted with the fullness of his death. Little dogs, after all, can only have tender dogs’ hearts. Grief to Dog Monday was an all-consuming thing, and when Walter’s heart began to beat once more, he was deaf to its spark of joy.” After meeting with his eldest sister, Joyce, in heaven – which is, as he had always hoped, Rainbow Valley, Walter is returned to life so that he may write of peace as well as war (as he did when he was a boy), marry Una, and repair the broken hearts of readers who did not want to lose him.

While heterosexual pairings are the most prevalent in Montgomery fandom, there is room for queer imaginings as well.

This very popular genre of fanfiction, known as “slash,” is generally defined as stories that centre on samesex romances between characters, particularly between men. Montgomery slash fiction usually stars Walter Blythe.

One slash story, “but i don’t know who you are” by @freyafrida, imagines a bisexual Walter. Told in an enduringly popular sub-genre of fanfiction often referred to as Five Things Plus One (which involves a series of thematically linked but not necessarily chronological scenes), the story is summarized by @freyafrida as “Five people Walter thought he wanted, and one person he didn’t notice until it was too late.”

This last person is original to Montgomery’s text: Una, whose apparently unreturned attraction to Walter is woven through Rilla of Ingleside. The other five potential partners are all alluded to as Walter’s close friends, beginning in childhood with Alice Parker from Anne of Ingleside and Pat Brewster from The Blythes Are Quoted and then carrying on through adolescence and young adulthood with Faith Meredith, Ken Ford, and finally Paul Irving from Anne of Avonlea. While his feelings for Faith and Ken are clearly unrequited, Alice, Pat, and Paul all express their own desire for Walter. The inclusion of the famous poet and Walter’s “model” uncle, Paul Irving, in particular, particular, illustrates how traits of sensitivity and aesthetic appreciation that challenge traditional ideas about masculinity are frequently interpreted as queer by fan readers and writers.

In another slash fiction, cero_ate’s “The Moving Finger Writes, and Having Writ Moves On,” Walter discovers his homosexuality while fighting in Europe:

He wrote half truths and lies once more, when he wrote his Rilla that he could not form poems of the depths of the war. For who could write his sister of the phallic love he had found? He had found his reason in a tow-headed American boy. He meant so much more to Walter than mere friendship could explain. He wanted to write, as sweethearts write, of the tempest of joy in the darkest night. But how would they understand? How would they even try to understand he sought not the Dark Lady of Shakespeare but the youth, fair and Wilde? When he was presented with Una’s faithful heart, he spurned it. When his tow-headed darling presented his own, Walter took it, greedy for him. His grecian style love, the boy who’s [sic] eyes danced, even in the darkest of days. He would do anything to keep him safe. But he could not present him to his family, for their scorn or pity. War had broken him, but made him as well.

While male/male pairings are generally the most popular stories in fandoms, Montgomery’s novels, peopled as they are by communities of girls and women, require that readers who want to queer the text must explore what is called femslash (that is, slash fiction featuring two female characters).

Such relationships have been explored within the academic setting. For instance, Laura Robinson remarks in “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire and the Anne Books,” that the relationship between Anne and Diana uses “the language that readers associate with adult romantic love rather than girlhood affections,” even as it is expressed through the heterosexual paradigm of marriage.

One fanfiction author, ArcticLava21, makes it clear that such fan written stories are not speculation but instead address key issues of representation. The author’s note to ArcticLava21’s short Anne/Diana story, “Nature,” reads, “Hello everybody! Hope your [sic] having a wonderful day. Before anyone yells at me for ‘sexualizing platonic friendships’ please note that this is for all those queer kids who grew up pretending. Pretending that he ended up with him instead of her, or desperately wanted representation. Are we good? <3 Enjoy yourselves lovely people.” The intended audience of the story, “queer kids who grew up,” again establishes the transgenerational kinship between Montgomery’s child and adult fans.

All fan fiction, shared on the Internet, exist in dialogue not just with Montgomery’s fiction but with the author herself, and between the fans who read the novels as children and adolescents and the adults that these readers become.

Whether fan writers extend the narrative or fill gaps, transpose chronology or to queer the text, these pieces of fanfiction allow fans not only to insert themselves into the narrative, but also simultaneously to revivify the original novels, published a century ago. In performing interventions to the text, Montgomery’s young fans grow up to reply to the discussions that she began long ago in the pages of her journals and stories, ensuring that all three – author, reader, and text – are continually reborn into a conversation that will never end.

[bonesandblood-sunandmoon]

Tumblr has been working on implementing a Communities feature here, and they've gotten to a Closed Beta stage. There's more details in this post, but basically, some people will be getting emails with information about filling out a form if they're interested in a community and ideas will be selectively approved and created. There will be a community member cap while in Closed Beta, and taking part in feedback will probably be inevitable.

I'm honestly not sure if there's an underlying reason for who gets sent emails or if I was randomly chosen, but I have the opportunity to fill out a potential community form. Someone would have to approve it, and at this stage, allowing duplicates or communities that are very nearly duplicated with minor differences will probably be unlikely. Considering the tag spamming in Jumblr, I thought it might be a good idea to suggest some sort of Jewish themed Community.

If anyone else has gotten an email about creating a Community and has had this idea, I would absolutely like a response about it. (I have no idea if this is a 'first come, first serve' sort of thing, but I'd rather not make a duplicate suggestion.)

There is a note in the email that not every suggestion will be approved, and they're looking for a spread of different types of Communities. However, it also can't hurt to at least put forward the suggestion.

I haven't looked at the form in great detail yet, but it will probably ask for a name, description, community guidelines, and if the Community will be public or private.

Name: I'm not 100% sold on using 'Jumblr', 'Jewish', or 'Judaism' since those are so broad and general. However, if enough people like using 'Jumblr' or something that does seem personally broad, it's still on the table for consideration.

Description: A space for Jewish Tumblrites...? (Jews of Tumblr?) To be determined, really. (Should it be a space also open to gentile allies? Probably see the private vs public section.)

Community guidelines: Some will be the usual matters of what posts will not be allowed, how to tag for certain topics, and what conduct could lead to being removed from the comm. Specific guidelines to this comm are definitely where I'd appreciate some degree of input, though.

For example, it's entirely possible that someone interested in joining this potential Jewish themed Community will want to avoid examples of antisemitism. Does this look like a guideline about not posting antisemitic anon hate or reblogging conversations with antisemitic responses in the reblog chain into the Community? Does this look like needing to use a specific tag so other community members can blacklist or use Tumblr's filtering feature? What if someone wants to talk about antisemitism they've recently faced?

The Israel-Hamas war. Do the community members want a space free from news updates? Or would a guideline about not showing gory imagery or videos, but allowing text only updates, be alright? (Do community members want a space free from larger I/P discussions? Or as long it's tagged for filtering purposes, do they want to be able to talk about I/P without having trolls and random antisemites wander into the replies/reblogs?)

Zionism. I don't want this to be another space where people face the 'are you a Good Jew or a Bad Jew' sort of questioning. However, does this look like a statement in the description welcoming everyone including Zionists, or does there need to be a guideline about talking about anti-/non-/Zionism within the Community?

Other: I don't know what the community member cap will be in the beginning, so I have no idea whether there'll be a need for mods immediately or not. The only language I'm comfortable doing any modding in is English, so at the very least, I'd probably need someone who knows Hebrew at some point.

Public or private: I like the idea of a public community that's not dissimilar to the Jumblr tag, but you know, I'm not sure about how comfortable community members will be with a public community given the compilation of blocklists based on interacting with a particular post/user.

From the Communities Help page:

Public communities can be seen and visited by non-members, logged in or logged out. However, only the feed of posts in each community tab, and the About page, are accessible. Non-members cannot view the member list, see who reacted with what, or see community comments. Non-members with an invite can see everything a member can see, but cannot interact with anything until they accept the invitation. Private communities cannot be seen or visited by non-members at all. The existence of a private community is not hidden, however, if someone has the URL (they’ll see a message like “this is a private community”). Non-members with an invite can see everything a member can see, but cannot interact with anything until they accept the invitation.

-

Not directly related but notable enough to mention: I can easily imagine that some people will not be enthusiastic that I'm volunteering for this effort. This is the main associated with a conversion sideblog, but I have not felt comfortable with revealing my sideblog, especially after October 7th. However, I don't think a Tumblr Community can be associated with a secondary account, so I can't really change that my not-really-Jewish-looking account is the one associated with this idea. If someone likes this idea but still would rather have someone else try to implement it, I guess we'll cross that bridge if we get there in the response to this.

[emerald-antssss]

Happy Sunday!

“Hey kiddo, what’s up?”

Sonic looked down at his communicator. It had been buzzing just seconds before, informing the hedgehog that his little brother was trying to reach him.

“Hello,” came the soft reply.

“You okay?”

The kit hesitated before answering his brother. “Yeah, I-I’m fine.”

“O-okay,” Sonic said. Even over the phone, he could read Tails’ emotions and knew for a fact that the kid was not fine. “Was there a reason for your call?”

“Did you know…” Away from the phone, the kit coughed and whimpered. Sonic winced. What was up with him?

“Did I know what?”

“French Angelfish stay together until one d-dies…”

The hedgehog smiled to himself. He thought he could see where Tails was going with this. He leaned back in the chair he was sitting in.

“And… it’s unlikely to find one alone. Pairs of-of t-these fish work t-together to defend their territory against other A-Angelfish pairs…”

“That’s a lot like us.” Sonic chuckled. “We partner together to save the world from Eggman…”

“…And it’s hard to find one of us without finding the other,” the two finished together.

On the other side of the line, Tails smiled at the ceiling of his workshop. “Did y-you know t-that Eggm’n has badniks t-th’t shoot arrows n-now?”

“What’s he gonna name them, ArrowBots?” Sonic snickered. 

That got a small chuckle out of Tails, which ended with a whimper. For a bit, the line went quiet.

“Tails,” Sonic said quietly, “Are you sure you’re alright?”

Dodging the question, Tails whispered “I l-l’ve you.”

“I love you too, Tails.” Sonic sighed, leaning forward in the chair. “But I need to know you’re okay. You were stuttering a lot, did you have another panic attack?”

Silence.

“You‘re a g-g-good b’other.”

“Thanks, buddy. Uh… is something going on?”

The blue blur heard shifting from the other side of the line. It stopped abruptly. 

“N-no.”

“Okay then,” Sonic replied. He was confused, to say the least.

The line went silent again.

“If you don’t have anything else to say, I’m gonna hang up, lil’ bro.”

More quiet. Sonic could hear the AC in the background on the other line.

“I’ll see you tonight, keed,” the hedgehog whispered. Tapping his communicator, he hung up and leaned back into his chair, arms crossed against his chest.

Something was up.

And he was going to get to the bottom of it.

________

Tails was not picking up the phone.

It added some difficulty to Sonic’s dinner search. He wanted to know what the kid wanted to eat.

But at the same time, Tails was never a picky eater. Sonic knew he would eat anything he brought, even if it was absolutely disgusting. 

And the hedgehog was pretty sure he had bought more than enough food to the point where he could share with Tails and still have leftovers.

But the brotherly part of him told his to get something the kid wanted.

Sonic pushed the Chinese takeout bags further down his arm. Tapping on his communicator, he tried to get ahold of his little brother yet again.

It rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

Four-

“Hello?”

Sonic sighed with relief. “Jeez, kid. What took you so long to pick-“

“You’ve officially reached my voicemail. I got you there, didn’t I Sonic?”

The hedgehog glared at his communicator in response to the kit’s smug voice coming from the speakers. 

“Leave me a voicemail, would you?”

Beep.

“If you’re not gonna answer the phone, you’re just gonna get this takeout, buddy.”

Pausing for a moment, Sonic sighed. “You’ve been off today, Tails. I wanna talk about it when I get home, okay?”

Hanging up, the hedgehog glanced at the sky. “Come on buddy, talk to me,” he whispered.

________

“Hey buddy, I’m back!”

No response. 

The workshop was eerily quiet. No tinkering, no food cooking in the kitchen…

Nothing.

And that’s when Sonic noticed the bloody pawprint on the wall. It looked dry now.

Something had happened.

The hedgehog sprinted through the different rooms in Tails’ workshop. Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the kit’s bedroom, nothing in the-

Bathroom. 

A thick stream of half-dried blood trailed out of the bathroom. A jagged knife laid on the ground. The bathtub was murky with bloody water.

Sonic felt his ears press to his head. He was afraid to touch anything.

Whatever happened, it wasn’t good.

He followed the red line out of the bathroom and into the main room, where he was greeted with a sight that he would never forget.

He didn’t hear the cry that exited his throat as his eyes fell on the corpse of his beloved friend.

The fox was laying on his side on the wooden floor, an oversized puddle of blood surrounding his small frame. The kit’s dusty grey eyeswere half closed, and his lips formed a small smile. The Miles Electric was on the floor, just above the kid’s head.

Sonic dropped to his knees, gently touching Tails’ face. 

He didn’t mind the blood that smeared against his hands as he gently held the kid’s head in his arms.

Sonic stared into his vacant eyes.

They weren’t the bright blue he remembered.

Sonic gently put the fox down and slid the Miles Electric to himself. When he unlocked the device with his gloveprint, the first thing that he saw was the phone call screen.

There was a call to Vector from last week, and Tails had missed a call from Amy yesterday.

There was a more recent phone call.

The last thing that Tails had done was call Sonic.

The last thing he had done was talk to his brother.

He had compared them to fish who depended on each other and watched each other’s backs and loved each other.

Sonic’s Angelfish was gone.

And as he gently picked his kid’s cold body up and covered him with a sheet, the tears spilled over.

[incorrect-spideytorch]

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about spideytorch lately (as I am one to do) and a question popped into my head:

What is the most important spideytorch comic panel?

There’s a ton of great options in my opinion, but I think there also is an answer (at least for me) so now I am going to subject all of you to my thought process. Get ready for a way to long post breaking this down.

The most obvious starting point has to be this classic

Johnny Storm is going full house husband for Peter Parker, I mean c’mon! add in the fact that he’s in his undies and the way that he’s leaning over peter… yeah this is a classic. This might be the most famous spideytorch panel out there, but I don’t think it’s the most important one.

Another classic (but more antagonistic?) one takes place, of course, at the usual place.

To me this is peak identity shenanigans and the stuff that fanfics are made of. The betrayal, the heartbreak, the complications that go into the conflicting way these two view identity, oh boy I could talk about that shit for hours, but as an individual moment, it doesn’t really crack most important for me, it needs a bit more affection (they’re very bad at affection sometimes).

Another panel that came to mind very quickly for me is this set.

Johnny literally only had to say his name and Peter knew exactly what he meant and what he needed. This is top tier levels of communication, both between them and from the creators to us. I think this is another one that I could talk about for hours. That being said, it doesn’t feel important enough to me.

A friend in the spideytorch discord server posed this panel as the most important spideytorch moment in the comics.

I’m just gonna put their quote in cause it’s great. “I think this is one of my favorite panels cause Johnny was just speaking generally and Peter was like ‘oh my god! Actual wise words form johnny’ but also, I love that this was a more important moment for Peter than Johnny.” I must say, this entry is extremely important to spideytorch and gave my choice a run for its money. I don’t have a huge reason for not making this one the most important, other than personal taste. For their relationship, this is a key moment and sets them on the path to actually being friends (at least on Peter’s end), but idk it just wasn’t doing it for me.

Another panel I was reminded of thanks to this submission was this moment.

It’s not quite as impactful as the past one by a long shot but I do think it’s important. After being rivals for so long, to see Johnny give a genuine heartfelt compliment to Peter is fantastic (haha). This feels like the other half of the previous set of panels. There we had Johnny encouraging a stranger and here he’s encouraging his friend.

Some other friends in the discord server suggested the moment that Johnny invites Peter over to watch his sex tape (yes this is canon).

(Not pictured, Peter swinging away and saying he needs to take a cold shower). Now I’m not saying that the most important spideytorch moment needs to be serious, but I think this moment might be too unserious to claim that title. This moment was huge for the fanbase because holy shit did, he actually say that, but for their relationship, I just don’t think it was as important as it was to us.

Now I do want to knock out a few honorable mentions that I would hate to miss.

First, this look given to Spidey by Johnny, I mean yeah, he’s in love.

And to balance the lovesick flirty scales I must expose Peter as well.

Next, this heartbreaking moment that basically admits to the audience that Peter’s world becomes chaos when he loses Johnny. That shit hits.

Of course, the moment that gave us the ship name.

A panel that lives in my head rent-free because honestly marvel what were you attempting to convey here other than the fact that Peter really wants to have hate sex with Johnny Storm?

To take us outside of our duo, this quote from Ben Grimm (EDIT: it’s was Peter’s clone Ben Reilly, which honestly only adds more drama), because honestly same.

And of course, I have to include the panel which showed us the first time (on page) that Peter told Johnny he loved him AND gave us canon proof that these two have “date night,” many a fic writer was fed well.

And how could we forget! THE USUAL PLACE! Literally any panel mentioning this is top tier because its so good, like the core of the fandom honestly.

Lastly, before moving on to my own more serious contenders I have to share this parallel that @sciderman shared because I love it.

Now to my serious contenders for the title of most important spideytorch panel (please remember this is all my opinion and I mean no shade). This will be a top 5, but just know some of these rankings are pretty flexible (even flexible with some panels from the beginning), and this question should not be taken as seriously as I am taking it, I am fully aware of that.

Number 5!

So, I know that I discounted the sex tape scene earlier because I didn’t think it was serious enough and it didn’t do enough for their actual relationship, but I had to include this one I’m sorry. A lot of this is personal taste but the implications here are *chefs kiss* The first time I saw this panel was actually on Pinterest with the caption “wait a second, did spider-man and the human torch have sex?” which says it all for me.

Beyond that, this moment also shows how they reach out to each other when they have problems. Strange children show up in Peter’s life and the first person he calls about it is Johnny. Again, this is not the most serious, but I love it. This moment shows the banter of their relationship, how they care about and rely on each other, and also potentially reveals that they’ve had sex. There’s a lot to take in.

Number 4!

I will be honest with you all, this moment is here almost entirely because Ben’s quote lives in my head rent-free. Everyone around them sees how they feel about each other besides them. When they were rivals others could tell they actually liked each other and when they became friends others could tell that it was deeper than that. I think I especially love this panel because it conforms that we’re not crazy for thinking there’s something there but also because Ben specifically cites the way Johnny looks at peter. That is very specific and says a lot. I can’t imagine Ben would say this if the looks Johnny gave Peter were purely platonic, and just ahhhh, there’s so much said here just in one line from Ben. There was of course the Ben moment earlier, which I also love, but something about this one, the more specific phrasing of it I think just shoots it up my rankings a lot.

Number 3!

If you’ve been following me for a while I don’t think this is a surprise at all, I have already done a very in depth post about this panel so I’ll keep my thoughts brief. Red Skull knows that hurting Johnny will hurt Peter, Peter’s Spidey senses go off FOR JOHNNY, and we are given so much angst potential, I love it.

Number 2!

This one is probably a more popular choice than my number one, and I totally get it. The excitement and joy bursting out of Peter when he finally realizes that Johnny is here, he’s real, and he’s alive really gets me. Plus, the added context to the uniform comment being that Johnny literally left Peter his family and his spot on the team in his will. The amount of pure love in this moment and its larger context is abundant, platonic or romantic, it’s there. I feel like everything I could say about this panel has probably been said before, but it is definitely worthy of being the most important spideytorch moment, even if I have one that beats it for me.

Number 1!

For those of you who don’t know, this panel comes from Peter visiting Gwen’s grave and talking to her. That fact alone breaks me in half but then the things he says to her shatter me. Every spider-man fan knows how much Gwen’s death broke Peter, it destroyed him to lose her. Just the fact that Peter admits Johnny brings part of him back is amazing (haha) because that is a hug feat. But then he shatters me even more with his final sentences. After Gwen’s death, we often get a peter who spends too much time as Spidey in order to avoid having to cope with Gwen’s death as Peter, but also as a way to cope with the loss (he’s a complicate man). Spideypool also gets a lot from that arc because of Wade’s reaction to Spider-Man not holding back as much and becoming less of a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and that’s true. The fact that Peter feels like he’s becoming who Spidey is supposed to be again when he’s around johnny is huge! But then! He corrects himself. He’s not Spidey again, he’s Peter. The real person, the man behind the mask, comes back. And then you get the final correction. He’s not just peter again, he’s *Gwen’s* peter again. He is the him that existed with Gwen when he’s with Johnny. That speaks volumes and breaks whatever parts of me are left. How am I expected to read this and not think that Johnny and Peter are soulmates?

Now, I will acknowledge that this is much more of a peter moment than a joint spideytorch moment, much like the moment suggested by discord friend earlier. If that disqualifies it for you as the most important spideytorch panel, I get it. However, for me that doesn’t matter mainly for one key reason. So many classic spideytorch moments show a lot of Johnny having feelings for Peter or making a move on Peter. There have been a lot of times when I’m trying to get a friend into spideytorch, and I feel like I have to clarify that its not as one sided as it seems. Johnny is much more out there with who he is and doesn’t hide his feelings very well (except maybe from himself). So, when we get any spideytorch moment that hones in on peter’s feelings and love for Johnny, that feels so huge to me. This moment alone proves that it isn’t one sided, Peter has deep feelings for Johnny, even if he’s not sure what they are yet, he knows that what they have is special, he wouldn’t be telling Gwen about it otherwise. While it may not be as famous of a spideytorch moment, its an important one, and for me it’s probably the most important one.

Anyway, this has been a way too long post about this topic but if you made it to the end thank you so much! I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic so feel free to share those. Also, just a reminder that these are my opinions, and I am not in charge at all so don’t take it too seriously (unless you want to).

If you’re interested in hearing me, go more in depth on any of these panels (or any other spideytorch panels) shoot me an ask because I could honestly talk in depth for a while about most of these panels and I would love to do so. Thank you again for reading this way to long post and good night spideytorch nation.

[canmargesimpson]

Doesn’t anyone else think about poor steve having to live in his house, where he is constantly reminded that he’s a failure. I mean, he graduated and instead of going to college like his parents wanted him to, he just got a mediocre job. I just can’t help but imagen poor Steve arriving home exhausted and his father yelling at him, telling him he has to move out and that he’s just a disappointment for the Harrington name. I imagen Steve keeping a straight face, but then going to his room and just shouting into his pillow, with anger, frustration, and pure rage. I imagine his parents giving him till the end of the year to get out of the house. And even after the starcout fire, his dad wouldn't have mercy on him. While his mother on the other hand, would every month an allowance to help himself to get back on his feet. She would still visit him every now and then, because he was her son after all. She would sometimes invite him for dinner sometimes, but only the times when his father wasn't in town. Steve would be so thankful for his mother, but he was never one to let her know, he was raised in a house where physical touch and emotional conversations were uncharted territory. So instead he would bring her flowers to every dinner and always tried to help out as much as he could.

 When christmas arrived, his mom would obviously invite him, with the grandparents and close family. His father was there but he didn’t even go to greet steve. At dinner, an aunt would ask about what he's doing and how his life has been. He told them about having to work at the Family Video store, and how he worked with his best friend, he told them about how he also helps Holly Wheeler with her homework sometimes, he talked about how, yes it wasen’t the best thing in the world, but he was still happy for his job,and how maybe he was considering singing up for community college in Indianápolis next year. His father, who had a little too much to drink, laughed at him and just teased Steve for his so-called ‘Jobs'. Rebeca, Steve's mom, tried to stop him, but he just kept going.

“Giving out movie tickets isn’t a job! Are you kidding me? And other than that, i bet you spend your time with that queer munson , huh? Apperently he comes oftenly to visit you, doesnt he?”

Steve freezed and he became a dear in headlights. He father kept on going anf going, and no one seemed to dare to stop him. That was until he said it. 

“Maybe you didn’t get into college because you’re such a f*****!”

Rebeca Harrington stood up and slammed on the table, with a loud “enough” and left everyone, dead silent. But the seconds of silences didn’t last long, as Richard stood up and left the scene. And soon followed steve. He got into is car and just drove.

He went to Eddie’s instead of going home.

Eddie was jewish, meaning he really didn’t do the whole “Christmas” thing.  So he knew eddie would be alone and knew that Wayne would work for those who wanted to spend time with family. Steve just went to his trailer and told him everything. Steve always felt comfortable around Eddie, even if he would not admit it to himself. But he just vented. About having to live alone for almost 2 years now, about having the constant fear of being alone, about his father abusing him all of those years before, and about how he couldn't stand looking at her broken mother, who was only trying to get this family back together. He even told Eddie about what his father said infront of everyone. That words he onces used to insults but now the roles were reversed. He told him that he never meant that friendship to go further on, but sometimes couldn't help it. Eddie was just too perfect for him.

Eddie didn’t know how to react. He holds the boy off his dreams in his arms, who is crying and shaking like a child. He just ran his hand through his back and arms, reassuring him that he was okay now and that nothing could hurt him. Even though Eddie was scared too, having Steve next with him made him feel better. So he did what his mom used to do when Eddie was a kid and had a bad night. He took him to his kitchen and got to cooking. This is the only thing Eddie knew how to cook. He opened the freezer and took out a little plastic box filled with frozen berries. He would place them on a little stove and he added sugar and a bit of water. He then mixed it till it was marmalade. Steve who was watching him smiled at his goofiness, and really made him feel better. Then Eddie took out a spoon, filled it with the marmalade and held it in front of Steve, who gladly opened his mouth for the spoon. He ate the whole thing and with an immediate smile he looked at Eddie, who just took a bite with his finger and tasted it.

“A spoonful of sugar, helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way” he said in a british accent like his mom used to do

“Mary poppins?”

“Yeah… it's the only thing I remember from my mom. We would… we would watch mary poppins together, it was her favorite. Every time I cried or even asked for it, she would make this for me. She said that there are only 3 things in the world to cure a broken smile. Sugar, something warm, and the person you most love”

After that, Eddie gave Steve a sleeping edible, gave him one of the many band t-shirts, and another spoon of the warm berry mix he loved so much. Steve went to his bed, and was fast asleep. Eddie instead, he stayed awake reading one of the many books he had. He was right next to Steve, who was snoring softly, which made him laugh. Sleeping Steve somehow made its way to Eddie, and placed his magnificent hair on his chest. Eddie blushed and started playing with it, while he read the stories of Alice in Wonderland.

For the next few weeks, Eddie always went to see Steve, to see how he’s doing and how he’s holding up. Though Steve completely ignored what happened on Christmas, Eddie couldn’t forget it. The sound of Steve's tears really broke his heart, and the fact he was so scared and lived alone, made eddie stay up all night. He had to do something about it. So, in the cold of January, Eddie took his van and drove to the other side of town to see Steve. Even if his van had no warmers, no chains on the wheels, and the roads were covered with snow, Eddie went to see Steve no matter what. Today tho he went up to his loft and opened the door to find Steve with an older woman sitting on the couch.

They all stared at each other, completely lost of what was going on, until Steve cleared his throat and presented it to Eddie, his mother. 

Oh… Eddie turned red. He didn’t actually remember steve saying anything bad about his mom, but he did remember about her and his dad being rude to steve, so eddie just went all out to defend steve… or something like that

“You- you bitch! How dare you let your husband shout at your own son! He is the best person I know, and he has a pure heart of gold! This man is nothing but a gift from god, and you just threw him out of his own house, even if he had no job or anything!?! SHAMEFUL! This man SAVED my Life! He even-”

“Eddie-”

“NO steve! She can’t just show up here, and drink your stupid tea and pretend everything is okay! ITs not okay. You show up at my house that Christmas and I had to hold you till you stopped crying because of what your parents did, and now you invite her in, give her tea… and a gift? Why does she have a gift? Oh…”

Steve stands up with pursed lips and an irritated face

“Eddie, my mom came here to apologize for the christmas accident, im handing her the gifts i didn’t have a chance to give to her”

Eddie looked at the elderly woman and then back at her son, and then back at her. 

“Oh shit… I’M SO SORRY!” he just went to the couch and sat neck to Rebeca, he holded her hand and apologized “I never meant to say you were a b-bitch, i just thought- and i got confused and i was so angry and i thought you- and i- Shit. im so sorry i never really meant anything that i said and-”

“Eddie” Steve smiled as he looked at his friends “Why don't you get a plate of cookies i have in the fridge”

Eddie nodded and ran to the kitchen. Steve placed his hands on his face, sighed, and sat down.

“He seems… energetic” she smiled

“Yeah, Eddie… he’s- he’s hyper and yeah, im sorry, i didn't know he was coming over,”

“It’s okay” she smiled as she stood up and dusted off her skirt “I'm gonna leave, it seems like you 2 boys, need to catch up” 

“Mom-” Steve followed her to the door and before she left she turned around quickly and looked at her son

“He seems like a great guy Steve, He really does care about you” she patted his cheek and left.

“I got the cookies!!” 

Steve turned around to look at Eddie with a bowl filled with cookies and one of them in his mouth like a puppy. Steve repeated his mothers words and just dashed to him, grabbed his face and took the cookie from his mouth as he pecked him. He ate the chocolate cookie, as Eddie's jaw was on the floor, dropping the cookie left in his mouth, and Steve kissed him once more.

[pooklet]

it's been nearly 10 years and your September 2014 default face templates are 100%, without a doubt, no second thoughts my go to for default faces. THEY ARE SO GOOD! Anyway. Thank you! I hope you and Azaya are doing well, and I'm so glad you guys are still here, stalwart defenders of violently colorful TS2 games, full of silly sims with sillier names! You two are such an important part of the TS2 community and I'm so grateful for y'all :)

omg anon, that is so sweet of you?? tbh i have so little confidence in my old cc including those face templates so that's rly nice to hear!

i don't think azaya and i will ever stop playing this game. it is how we met and so it is forever precious to us. (and also objectively the best sims game.) so long as there are computers that can run it, we'll be playing stupid lil technicolor pixel people getting up to Antics.

[talon-dragonbeast]

misanthropes are such losers. as a dragon, humanity is fascinating to me; i don't understand how anyone could hate it. humans are beautiful little creatures, and i cant help but wonder at their ways and customs.

i love how humans are so eager to help. yes, climate change exists and humans certainly played a big part in it, but remember how many of them are out there, fixing the mistakes of their predecessors. when there is a big disaster like an oil spill or something terrible like that, they are the first to go clean up the mess they made, helping nature recover the best they can. human compassion has no limits.

i love human faces; i talk a lot about how i dont understand their body language but i also find it quite endearing sometimes. how they smile easily, instinctively, showing their teeth in a wonderful display of happiness. their eyes are weird but so beautiful, with so many colours and shapes and i love how you can tell what they're feeling just by the eyes alone. i love their mouths, so soft and flexible and capable of producing so many different sounds. i love their ears, as small and unmovable as they are, i find them very cute. and oh, the wide array of emotions they can exhibit with their faces. i find it amazing, incredible, how humans communicate with eachother. their faces allow for so so many expressions, and they can show and understand them so easily! you have to admit that it's very, very cool.

i love human creativity, their intelligence and their weird but capable hands. they can make so many things with them! even children who haven't been taught how to use tools properly can make things from scratch, instinctively. i can't stress how impressive that is. humans make art, tools, musical instruments, even weapons; you name it, they can make it.

i love, love, love human stories. i adore every single one of them; from children tales to mythology to folk stories to epic novels to movies and series. humans share stories of their friends, of strangers, of things they've heard and of things they've made up. they can invent new stories on the whim, create entire worlds and experiences from nothing but their brains. humans share tales to teach new things, to warn of danger, to remember those who've left them. they say that as long as you remember a someone's stories, their souls can still remain on this world even after many years.

i just love humans, man. they are silly little guys :]

[dilutedbeanibeans]

GO ON GIRL GIVE US NOTHING‼️‼️‼️‼️

I DO NOT SUPPORT THIS SERIES ANYMORE‼️‼️ THIS IS FOR ARCHIVAL PURPOSES