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raincitygirl76 · 5 months

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A terrific review of Young Royals Season 2 in The Sophian.

The Sophian is the student newspaper of Smith College in Northampton, MA, USA. I don't know how long college newspapers keep their archives up, so just in case, I copy-pasted the article below. But assuming the link above works (and it worked just fine right now), please go to the link, don't read my copy-paste.

All Things Real: a Review of “Young Royals” Season Two

BY CATE CHRISTINIDIS ON NOVEMBER 15, 2022 |

ARTS AND CULTURE, POP CULTURE, REVIEWS AND TV

Photo by Robert Eldrim via Netflix.

Hillerska: a private boarding school tucked away in Sweden; horseback riding, rowing, rowdy parties and, most notably, 16-year-old Crown Prince Wilhelm. Still, “Young Royals” (2022) is no fairytale. A simmering pot of angst, romance, betrayal and battles of the conscience, “Young Royals” displays unadulterated teenage reality. Season One ended with Hillerska’s most scandalous term to date, and Wilhelm, played by Edvin Ryding, reluctantly left it behind to the promising tune of Elias’ “Revolution.” In the rubble of Season One, audiences couldn’t help but wonder: would Season Two be that revolution?

The short answer is yes. The romance that blossoms between openly gay Simon Eriksson (Omar Rudberg) and closeted Crown Prince Wilhelm enters uncharted territory. Wilhelm’s self-discovery is thwarted by the looming sense of duty pressed upon him by Sweden’s royal court, who deem queerness as a threat to the monarchy. Yet, the essence of the story does not lie in Wilhelm’s royal title, but in the title of the show itself: “Young Royals.” It is easy to forget, and equally important to remember, that the students of Hillerska are just kids. Their mistakes are children’s mistakes, and their resilience and bravery are monumental.

This also means that every catastrophe is that much more devastating. Both seasons deal with a case of child pornography –– a cellphone video of Simon and Wilhelm, recorded through Wilhelm’s dormroom window. Regardless of social power, money or fame, the problems that overwhelm Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship are unmistakably larger than they are.

“Young Royals” is all things real –– the bodies and situations portrayed on screen all reflect some semblance of teenage existence; simultaneous chaos, uncertainty, imperfection and beauty. The series doesn’t shy away from the ugly side of teenage life: where partying and stress meet drug use and where jealousy leads to impulsive, criminalizing mistakes. “Young Royals” is both dark and refreshing, unusual in its ability to look life right in the face.

The American media tends to place a beauty filter over the formative years. Audiences lapse into patterns of falsified viewing, scarcely aware enough to ask themselves: Hey, aren’t teenagers supposed to have acne? “Young Royals” doesn’t blink twice at these “blemishes” –– acne, crooked teeth, etc. In fact, they are clearly embraced, normalized and desirable –– clear skin and perfect teeth are not deal-breakers for being the most popular girl in school or the Crown Prince.

“Young Royals” likewise considers the psychological realities faced in the war between authenticity and duty. Season one introduced Wilhelm’s struggle with anxiety, but Season Two pursues the extent to which anxiety and panic consume Wilhelm after Season One’s events. It may sound cliché –– the prince who can’t handle the pressure of the crown –– but Wilhelm doesn’t ask the audience to feel sorry for him, and neither does “Young Royals.” Wilhelm is much messier in Season Two. He explodes with emotion –– fear, pain, anger, guilt and sadness –– and, without Simon, there is nowhere for it to go. He is selfish, rude, depressed, spoiled and makes bad choices. But Wilhelm’s reasons for not wanting to be Crown Prince are rightfully selfish; at 16, he is resigning himself to an empty and dishonest life. Forced by his mother, the Queen, Wilhelm begrudgingly sees a therapist, and while he resents the need for it, Season Two’s “revolution” finds Wilhelm overcoming his personal barriers to enact change.

Wilhelm and Simon are separated by class more than anything. Wilhelm, as a member of the royal family, is an elite, while Simon, a non-boarder, can’t afford to live at the school. While Wilhelm tries to understand Simon (and vice versa), there are times when their differences speak louder than they do. Simon’s inability to understand why Wilhelm, as Crown Prince, can’t disregard the crown and take a stand, clashes with Wilhelm’s inability to see how Simon’s social status caused him to receive the brunt of the backlash for the sextape. Season Two is a testament to revisions and the rightings of wrongs; as Wilhelm works through his own emotions, he learns to use his power and status for progress.

Season Two of “Young Royals” is all about decisions; specifically, revising and listening to one’s conscience to make the right one. Which decision will start a revolution, which will fuel it, which will kill it? Despite the tumultuous path to togetherness, Simon and Wilhelm have an incredibly realistic and healthy relationship. They show love through communication; their need to be seen, heard and understood by each other is unshakable. It makes the moments when they do touch –– which are surprisingly few and far between –– feel all the more worth fighting for. Wilhelm certainly agrees; each season begins and ends with his eyes locked on the camera. This is his story, and he’ll go to war for it.

#young royals #wilmon #prince wilhelm #simon eriksson #young royals analysis #young royals season 2 #simon eriksson analysis #prince Wilhelm analysis #young royals favourite posts #young royals reviews #wilmon analysis #young royals best posts #character analysis young royals #media young royals #press young royals #the sophian #smith college

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akuzeisms · 10 months

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⬐ @kenasakis ⬎

gibe me aria and shep for funsies

How did they first meet? Simple: she was looking for information, Aria had information to give. Their first meeting was… tense, but cordial; one might venture to even say they were friendly, a little. As friendly as a formerly-dead Spectre and an infamous criminal can be, anyway.

Who felt romantic feelings first? I’m going to wager… Kat. It’s painfully evidenced by the sheer gay panic she exhibited.

Did either of them try to resist their feelings? Both, and I think for different reasons, but one they share: privacy and commitment. They’ve both led turbulent lives, ones that aren’t really free of people spying and wanting to know their business. In Katrina’s case, she’s far more sensitive than she lets on, and I definitely think with her struggles to open up to anyone, that was a factor.

Who initiated their feelings first? Ooh, tough one. I am probably going to put that on Kat. I think she’s more likely to say something for her own sake, so that there’s no dancing around it or beating around the bush.

Who said “I love you” first? Probably Kat. She’s more the sappy one.

Who gets jealous easily? I think that’s probably both of them? Aria’s probably more likely to be vocal about it, Kat’s likely to be quieter about it but still just as jealous.

Who is more protective? Kat, probably. She has lost far too many people that are precious to her not to be. Not that she doesn’t trust Aria can’t take care of herself, but… There’s that underlying fear there.

Who remembers the little things? I’m going to go with both, though I think after the war given Kat’s mental state, it ends up being more Aria that remembers. Kat’s too all over the place and not really a functioning human being for a while.

Who talks about their feelings more? I want to say Kat—or at least, she tries to. Not talking about them has been an unhealthy coping mechanism for her, so she’s trying to talk about them more openly.

Who uses the cheesier pickup lines? Aria. No question. Kat’s not that smooth.

What does a first date look like for them? Drinking, probably. Drinking and either dancing or the casino.

What do they like to do together? Honestly, I see them visiting quieter things like art museums or the like. Kat is an artist so she’d feel at home there, and it’d be significantly quieter than the majority of their lives usually are. Things that are more low-key, maybe not even out in public, but quieter and away from the chaos that their lives bring.

Which one gets angry the most, leaving the other to calm them down? Aria has the more obvious temper, so I think Kat’s more likely to be the level-headed one calming her down. Kat has a very… calm fury, and she’s not as easily provoked.

Do they like PDA? Kat’s not particularly a fan of it; she enjoys the privacy, more accurately.

What are their big spoon / little spoon arrangements? Alternating, probably.

Does one like the cuddle more than the other? Specifically in private… probably Kat.

Who hogs the blankets? I’m going to go with neither. Kat probably wants her own separate blanket to prevent blanket-hogging. It’s just more efficient. (Also, she runs hotter than most humans because she’s a biotic, so… there’s that.)

Who’s more likely to initiate sex? Aria, hands down. Again, Kat’s not that smooth. She might as they get more comfortable, but it’ll last a whole thirty seconds before Aria’s got her gay panicking.

Who’s the kinkiest? Aria. No question. Kat is the furthest thing from kinky. There’s very little outside plain old vanilla that she’s into.

Who is the top and bottom in their sex life? Are they interchangeable? I’d say interchangeable, but Kat’s likely the more submissive one of the two.

Who likes giving and who likes receiving oral? Both, I’d say equally.

Can they last more than one round? Absolutely.

Which one is a morning person? Kat. It’s just part of military life. Plus, I think she’s more the type to want to get up earlier, get the day going, cook breakfast, etc.

Do either of them like to cook? Kat, given the opportunity and that she’s comfortable with it, actually enjoys cooking a lot. I think her specialty is more baking than cooking, but she can make some really good meals. She used to cook with her mother a lot, which is a contributing factor to why she can’t bring herself to cook any more.

If they get married, who proposes first? I feel like they wouldn’t, honestly. With the lifestyles they lead, something that binding would be too much… trouble for either of them. I also think, at least in Kat’s case, she doesn’t see it as a necessity or as important as others might. She wouldn’t be opposed to the idea, but it doesn’t have the same necessity to her. But if they did, it’s up in the air as to who would ask. I think they’re both just as likely to ask the other.

What kind of wedding do they have? Quiet, low-key, friends/close friends/family only. I don’t think Kat would settle for anything more than that.

Does anyone object to their relationship? @diewithaname’s muse would hate me forever if I didn’t point out that Ryker absolutely does (or at least, he’s very concerned with his little sister’s… decisions). Otherwise, I don’t think anyone is close enough to or has enough influence on Kat to stop her from doing what she damn well pleases.

Do they have any kids? Not with each other, no. Katrina’s neutral on the idea; she’s not opposed to it, but she’s not set on it, either. (Most of the work would be on Aria’s part, anyway, if at all.)

Do they have any pets? Katrina has fish and a pet hamster. Said hamster is surprisingly fond of Aria.

#answered. ❖﹙ pleasure fused with pain ⋄ this triumph of the soul will make you shiver tonight. ﹚#kenasakis ❖ aria t’loak﹙ i can’t push aside ⋄ all the broken bones you’re calling a spine. ﹚#kenasakis #lmao this took way too long to think of #aria needs to stop turning her into a flustered mess LMAO #is it a femshep thing because we both know kat’s reaction to aria = jane’s reaction to miranda LMAOOO

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sanguinexrosarium · 1 year

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Hub Blog • Vampire the Masquerade & Hunter the Reckoning • 18+ • Semi-Selective • mun is 21+ • EST

Muses: -Florian Lazarescu - 22 // Caitiff (formerly thinblood) // Anarch // A gay/trans mafia brat who moved to Santa Marta with his Family when he was fifteen. He was Embraced by accident when a 13th gen Toreador drained him and in a panic, fed him just enough vitae to turn him. His blood was "Rekindled" by a Caitiff named Wayland. Florian is based on a v5 chronicle that my gaming group is currently running, though tumblr Florian has now diverged somewhat from that storyline. He's vaguely bastard shaped, not very bright and kind of a slut.

-Killian O'Connell - 37 (physically 22) // Ghoul // Underground/Vengeance // A bisexual trans man who was previously the ghoul/body double of the Herald of the Prince of Santa Marta, a vampire (whose clan he does not know) named Caoimhe O'Connell -- his identical twin sister. Killian slipped the leash recently and is still trying to find his purpose outside of revenge. He works as "clean up" for Baron Ravi, who runs most of Santa Marta. He's crushing on a thinblood working with his cell and is trying to regain the Catholic faith that he lost while he was his sister's thrall.

Setting Notes: As a general rule, my characters live in a fictional city in Northern California called "Santa Marta" which is located between San Francisco and the Oregon border. The city is currently in what was thought to be a three-way turf war between the Camarilla in the north, the Sabbat in the south and the Anarchs caught between -- but it was recently discovered that in order to weaken the Anarch base, the Camarilla has been faking Sabbat attacks on the city.

Rules/disclaimer: - I'm fine with most dark/disturbing content in roleplay however, if you're going to involve my characters in a story that will involve transphobic slurs, sexual assault or parental abuse, please ask me in advance or give me some warning. I'm not against exploring these things in roleplay but I want heads up!

-My characters are not me and I do not endorse their actions in any way. I play WoD as a way to explore dark themes that often have personal significance to me and sometimes, this takes some really uncomfortable turns -- all of which are things that are somewhat explored in the source material for WoD anyway.

Beneath the cut there's more detailed disclaimers for the individual characters' storylines!

Disclaimer for @a-stolen-face -- Killian's story explicitly involves forced detransition and severe transphobia as his sister was not at all accepting of his attempts to transition and after her Embrace, sought out help to bring her twin 'back in line' with what "she" was supposed to be. Killian's story also has some heavy religious themes and some vague implications of a less than appropriate relationship between Caoimhe and Killian while he was her ghoul.

I will not be going into detail about that relationship as Killian doesn't remember all the details, but this is a heads-up for that being part of his backstory. WoD is a gothic horror setting so these kinds of themes aren't out of keeping with the literary tradition of the genre.

Disclaimer for @prodigal-son-reborn -- Florian's story involves explicit transphobia and homophobia, mostly from his biological family and from the kind of criminal society he grew up in. He is also in a somewhat dubiously "appropriate" relationship with his father's former righthand man, Viktor. This is mostly due to a combination of a moderate age gap (though Florian & Viktor were NOT together when Florian was a minor) and the fact that Viktor is currently ghouled to Florian.

#pinned post

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inevitably-johnlocked · 3 years

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heeeey any insecure!john?

Hi Nonny!

Ahhhh, you know I’ve collected fics over the years but I’ve mixed them up with the Sherlock ones, so I think I’ll start anew and start fresh! I know I’ve missed a lot when I pulled them out of the old lists, so forgive me! Hope you enjoy what I’ve got here for you!

As always, Lovelies, please add your insecure John fics!!

INSECURE JOHN

See also:

BAMF! But Insecure John

Insecure / Awkward John or Sherlock (Jan 2019)

Concussions And Good Old Fashioned Awkwardness by Belldere (K+, 894 w. || Humour, Hospitals, Mild John Whump, Misunderstandings, Platonic Relationship, Concussions, Not-Gay John, Possessive Sherlock) – When John lands himself in hospital... again, all he wants is to just get out of there as soon as possible, too bad his doctor has other ideas about where John may be getting his injuries. Good thing concussions make everything strangely funnier.

I Was Wrong by AllesandraQuartermaine (K, 1,496 w., 1 Ch. || TGG AU, Friendship, Hospitalization / Injury, John’s Self Esteem, Sleepy Sherlock) – Sherlock and John have a conversation a few days after the pool face off with Moriarty. And John hears something quite surprising.

Hell or High water by bluefire301175 (E, 2,250 w., 1 Ch. || PWP, Frottage, Alley Sex, First Person POV John, Case-ish Fic, Mutual Pining, Bed Sharing) – John wants. Sherlock wants. Plain and simple.

Not My Proudest Moment by charlock221 (K, 2,695 w., 1 Ch. || Lunar New Year, Mild PTSD / Panic Attack, Coping Mechanisms, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort) – John tries his best not to get in the way of Sherlock's cases, but when the vivid noises of fireworks unnerve his senses and begin to bring back unwanted memories of Afghanistan, he cannot help but to hope Sherlock will notice and help him before things go too far.

Closeted by Sexxica (E, 2,762 w., 1 Ch. || Trapped in a Closet, Panicking Sherlock, Hand Jobs, Coming in Pants, Awkward Conversations, Love Confessions, First Kiss, Fluffy Ending) – An improvised hiding spot and a bit of accidental voyeurism leave John and Sherlock in an awkward position.

The General Idea by agirlsname (T, 3,022 w., 1 Ch. || Retirement, Promise of Forever / Proposal, POV John, First Kiss, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Soft Sherlock, Idiots in Love, Crying / Emotional Sherlock, Love Confessions) – After twenty years of friendship, John is used to Sherlock acting weirdly. But the news Sherlock finally brings himself to deliver change the carefully built dynamics between them, and John realises it's time to act.

Paranoia by Ewebie (M, 3,789 w., 1 Ch. || Humour, Drinking Games, Scotland Yard Gang, Jealous / Possessive Sherlock, Inappropriate Questions, Embarrassed John, Matchmakers) – John and Sherlock join the gang of Scotland Yard for a night of drinking, and it gets a bit personal and revealing.

Coldness/Heat by agirlsname (E, 3,790 w., 1 Ch. || Cuddling & Snuggling, Body Heat, New Year’s Eve, PWP, Bedsharing, Frottage) – The inn is booked up on New Year's Eve. The train home is cancelled because of the snow. The only option is to sleep in the non-heated guest room of a client, and John and Sherlock are freezing. You know where this is going. Part 1 of New Year's Kiss

The Oolong Disaster by unicornpoe (T, 4,151 w., 1 Ch. || John’s Beard, Fluff, Humour, Frustrated Sherlock, John Takes Care of Sherlock, Case Fic-ish, Pining Sherlock, First Kiss, Possessive Sherlock) – John has a beard. Sherlock has a panic attack.

Afghanistan in Baskerville by Amaya Ramiel (K+, 4,357 w., 1 Ch. || THoB Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Drugged John, PTSD / Panic Attack, Hallucinations, Worried Sherlock, John’s Past, Friendship) – What if John hadn't seen the hound when Sherlock trapped him in the lab? What if instead, his very real nightmares of the war had materialized all around him? Trapped and drugged, John can't tell what's real and what's not. How will Sherlock react?

Overture by Kate_Lear (M, 4,435 w., 1 Ch. || First Kiss / Time, Friends to Lovers, Angry John, Introspection, Dev. Rel., Embarrassed / Insecure Sherlock, Morning After, Bed Sharing, Cuddles / Limpet Sherlock) – A short snippet on how John and Sherlock might have got together.

What You Are Worth by Lastew (T, 4,488 w., 1 Ch. || Observant but Insecure John, Friendship, Crime / Case Fic) – John helps Sherlock with a case, but he questions his real value to Sherlock.

Let Down by Gandalf3213 (K+, 4,505 w., 2 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, John Whump, Insecure John) – John truly is sorry for letting Sherlock down. The only thing he wanted to do was finish the case, but bleeding out in a dark alley makes it harder for him to pursue that murderer running out of sight.

Sherlock and John Go Clubbing by wendymarlowe (E, 4,716 w., 3 Ch. || Clubbing, Dirty Talk, Dancing, Coming Untouched, Coming in Pants, Bi John, For a Case, Friends to Lovers, Flirting, Sherlock is Lost for Words, Sexy John, Mutual Pining, Possessive John, Floor Sex/Hand Job/Frottage) – John pinched the bridge of his nose - even for Sherlock, this was a new level of no bloody boundaries. “You want me to go with you to a gay club, wait around twiddling my thumbs while I let you get pawed by a criminal, then out-flirt him and talk you into coming home with me instead?” Part 32 of John and Sherlock's Kinky First Times

Pillow Talk by scullyseviltwin (M, 5,183 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S3, Angsty Fluff, Pillow Talk, Bed Sharing, Worried John, First Time Morning After, Soft Sherlock, Sexuality Discussion, Love Confessions, Kisses and Cuddles) – John has been looking at Sherlock for ages, it feels like.

Welcome Home, John by slashscribe (G, 5,504 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S3, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Awkwardness, Stabbed Sherlock, Protective Sherlock, Panic Attack (Sherlock), Self Esteem Issues, Love Confessions, First Kiss) – When John moves back to 221B, he thinks he’s the broken one, but after a while, it becomes clear that he might not be correct.

An Interpretation of Viewing Habits by akitsuko (E, 6,653 w., 1 Ch. || Porn Watching, Masturbation, Anal, Friends to Lovers, First Kiss / Time, Declarations of Love, Jealous Sherlock, Fantasizing, John in Denial / Internalized Homophobia, Bottomlock, Pining Idiots, Sherlock Has No Boundaries, Cockblocking Sherlock) – John watches porn. It's a perfectly normal thing to do.If every video he watches happens to feature actors with remarkable physical similarities to his flatmate, well, that's no one's business but his own. Or: John is in denial, until his infatuation with Sherlock is impossible to deny anymore.

Inconvenient Timing by TheMadKatter13 (M, 7,072 w., 1 Ch. || Omegaverse || Omega John/Alpha Sherlock, Romance, Public Heat, Scared John, Protective / Worried / Possessive Sherlock, Post-TBB AU, Caring Sherlock, Pre-Slash, Happy Ending) – When John's heat failed to appear three times in a row after he was shot, he figured it was just another broken piece off the broken toy soldier. So he was rather surprised to feel it start out of the blue...and not at all pleased with it starting while he was on the tube.

Sometimes When We Touch by kedgeree (M, 7,755 w., 6 Ch. || Post-TRF, First Kiss/Time, Inappropriate Giggling, Romance, Friends to Lovers, Virgin Sherlock, John Whump, Touching) – John might be touching Sherlock a little more often than is strictly necessary. Sherlock probably hasn't even noticed. Right...?

Victim, Bait, Hero, Friend by KimberlyTheOwl (T, 7,887 w., 1 Ch. || Post-TGG Epilogue, Angst, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Past Kidnapping / Torture / Implied Rape, Panic Attacks, Worried / Possessive Sherlock, Lestrade is a Good Friend) – Some insights into why John was perfectly willing to throw everything away for a chance to kill Moriarty at the pool. Trauma, ugliness, and finally healing. Some nice supporting work by Lestrade as well.

Every Night I Look for You by destinationtoast (E, 8,377 w., 1 Ch. || POV John, Post-TRF, Angst, Mystery, Unsafe Sex, BAMF John) – Every night, John looks for familiar hints of Sherlock in the men he meets in bars, and he does with them all the things he wishes he’d done before. Eventually, he stumbles into a situation that Sherlock would know how to handle, and John must decide whether he can handle it without him.

Just Like That by sussexbound (E, 8,442 w., 1 Ch. || First Time/Kiss, Frottage, Virgin Sherlock, French Kissing, Anal, Emotional Lovemaking, Enthusiastic Consent, Tenderness, Crying John, Bathing/Washing, Insecure John, Toplock) – John doesn’t want to talk anymore. He wants. Oh dear god, how he wants. For the first time in what feels like years he WANTS.

Unwasted by patternofdefiance (E, 8,966 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S3 / S3 Fix-It, Developing Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Angelo’s, Fluff, First Time, Anal, Cum Play, Flashbacks to ASiB, Mutual Pining, Love Confessions, Bottomlock, Cuddles, Multiple Orgasms, BJ’s, Bed Sharing) – John finds it three months after he's moved back. He's on the hunt for something to make for dinner, is scrounging through the cupboards, when he happens upon the graveyard of pasta boxes Sherlock still seems to create when left to his own devices. Behind seven boxes of pasta, all almost completely empty, is a dark-glassed bottle, with a paler coat of dust. It's unopened. John's face falls slack when he sees it, instantly recognises it, and for a long moment he just stands and looks at it.

Ravish Me by amalnahurriyeh (E, 10,025 w., 1 Ch. || UST / RST, Makeup / Lipstick, Sympathetic Sally, Experiments, Pining John, First Kiss, Face Fucking / BJ’s, Cuddling) – Sherlock is experimenting with patterns of wear on lipstick in daily encounters. John is going to go insane.

A Is For Aftermath by ElvendorkInfinity (T, 10,567 w., 1 Ch. || Injury / Whump, Hurt/Comfort, Friendship/Pre-Slash/Bromance/Platonics, Hallucinations, Introspection, Insecure / Worried John, Big Brother Mycroft, Alternating POV, Anxious Sherlock, Self-Deprecating, Mildly Possessive Sherlock, 3G Moment) – John is still hallucinating, Sherlock cannot sleep, and Lestrade has a new case for them. But will life at 221B ever be able to return to normal? Epilogue to M is for Moriarty.

London Gods by a_different_equation (E, 11,092 w., 5 Ch. || American Gods Fusion || Magical Realism, Sex Magic, True Love, PTSD John, First Kiss/Time, Marathon Sex, Sensuality, Genie Sherlock, Human John, Internalized Homophobia, Star-Crossed Lovers, Soul Mates) – Sherlock Holmes is a jinn who does not grant wishes. However, when Dr. John H. Watson, recently returned from the war in Afghanistan, gets into his cab by "accident", it might not even need magic to grant both men their deepest wish: love.

On The Fence by BeautifulFiction (T, 13,770 w., 1 Ch. || Fencing, Case Fic, First Kiss, Insecure John, Pining John, Hug, Greg Finds Out) – The murder of the King's College fencing champion leads to revelations about Sherlock's past. Will it be the point that tips them from friends to lovers, or will they remain on the fence?

A Silver Sixpence by _doodle (NC-17, 16,400 w., 2 Ch. || LJ Fic || For a Case / Case Fic, Fake Relationship, Humour, Romance, Marriage Proposal, Awkward Idiots, Cuddling, Touching, Kissing, Love Confessions, Bed Sharing, Friends to Lovers, Fake Until It’s Not, Schmoop and Fluff, Bottomlock) – “John, we need to get married. It’s for a case, not any romantic notions on my part pertaining to our partnership,” Sherlock said, with brutal honesty, and without even looking up.

Between Friends by SilentAuror (E, 18,036 w., 1 Ch. || Post S3, Alternating POV, Friends to Lovers, John in Denial, Abduction, Awkward Situations / Miscommunications, Porn With Feels, Blowjobs, Pining, Unrequited, Angst With Happy Ending) – Sherlock gets abducted. As John discovers him tied up naked in an empty storage facility and comes to rescue him, Sherlock's body has an unfortunate reaction which triggers a series of events. John is convinced that everything will be fine as long as they never discuss it. Sherlock isn't as sure...

Division by MrsNoggin (E, 19,542 w., 11 Ch. || Coffee Shop AU || First Kiss/Time, Fluff, Barista Sherlock, Clingy Sherlock, POV John, John’s Limp, Bed Sharing, Fluff, Sleepy Cuddles, Sensuality, Touching, Virgin Sherlock, Insecure John) – John likes mysteries. And every morning he dips into the local independent coffee bar with his newspaper and ponders another... one Sherlock Holmes.

A Life Well-Lived by Kate_Lear (E, 20,121 w., 1 Ch. || Original Male Character, Sherlock Woos John, Jealous Sherlock, Reluctant Bi-John, Past Abuse, Insecure John, Reassuring / Caring Sherlock, Protective Sherlock, Understanding Sherlock) – John got scared off men by an abusive past relationship. Sherlock has to try and woo him while not scaring him off with protective possessive rage.

Maintaining A Personal Life by Gingerhermit (E, 24,284 w., 6 Ch. || Alternating POV’s, Bisexuality, BAMF!John, Jealous Sherlock, Romance / Drama, Sort-of Case Fic, Peril & Angst, Love Confessions, Toplock, Soft Idiots in Love, Post S3) – Sherlock and John discover some interesting revelations about each other’s sexuality, which lead them both to question the assumptions they've made about one another for years. In the midst of their mutual discoveries, a dangerous psychopath looms on the side-lines who threatens to destroy their new beginning.

Nothing to Make a Song About by emmagrant01 (E, 36,833 w., 10 Ch. || Post-TRF, First Time, Reunion, Jealous John, Pining Sherlock, Romance, Angst with Happy Ending, Sherlock Has a Boyfriend) – When Sherlock returned from his faked death, John could not forgive him for the deception and broke off their friendship. Ten years later, John returns to London in search of yet another new beginning. Sherlock, not surprisingly, is waiting.

Turn Left at the Park by Glenmore (NR (E), 37,409 w., 28 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting / ASiP Divergence, Case Fic, Depression, Suicidal Ideation, Loneliness, No Mary, Possessive Sherlock, Fluff & Angst, Nightmares/PTSD, Sherlock Saves John, Sherlock Whump-ish, Doctor John) – So what would have happened if John hadn't walked through the park and met Stamford? What if, instead, he walked around the park and just went home?

Only To Be With You by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John (M, 40,768 w., 4 Ch. || Black Mirror / Future AU || Character Death, Future Technology, Sickness/Cancer/Illness, Heavy Angst with Happy Ending, First Person POV John, Pining John, Heart-Wrenching Angst) – I tell myself that next time I’ll come near this same place again. Wait around for the mysterious stranger in his coat to dash past me, hot on the heels of a new criminal in black. I think this all the way back to my Exit, planning where I’ll wait and what I’ll say when I see him. Scheming on how to get his name. It’s only once I reach the Exit Point door that I realize two hours and forty-five minutes have passed, and I realize that this won’t be the last time I Visit. It won’t be the last time at all.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by SilentAuror (E, 50,635 w., 1 Ch. || Post-S4/S4 Divergence, Case Fic, For a Case / Reverse Fake-Relationship, Conferences, Marriage Equality, Travelling / New York, Pride, Homophobia, Bottomlock, Marriage Proposal, John POV, Sexuality, Love Confessions, Emotional Love Making, Public Hand Jobs, Blow Jobs, Passionate Kissing, Needy/Clingy Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Touching / Hand Holding, Bed Sharing, Little Spoon Sherlock, Intense Orgasms) – John and Sherlock go to New York to attend a conference run by the National Defence of Traditional Marriage Coalition in order to investigate the potential bombing of the annual Manhattan Pride parade. As the conference unfolds, John finds himself repulsed by the toxic ideology being presented, which becomes relevent to his own unacknowledged issues and his friendship with Sherlock...

Never Change a Running System by Lorelei_Lee (E, 54,246 w., 18 Ch. || Pre-TRF, Romance, Humour, Drama, Sex Toys, Anal, Rimming, Masturbation, Frottage, Blow Jobs, Public Sex, First Kiss / Time, Virgin Sherlock / Loss of Virginity, Accidental Voyeurism, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Experiments, Naive Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Jealous Sherlock, Possessive Sherlock, Straight With an Exception John, Hand Jobs) – Sherlock discovers his sexuality – with far-reaching consequences for John.

The Thing Is by TSylvestris (E, 56,743 w., 21 Ch. || Case Fic, Dev. Rel., Anal/Oral, Blow Jobs, Meddling Mycroft, Drama, Romance, Humour, Casual Encounters, Pining Idiots, Possessive Sherlock, Orgasm Delay, Rough / Alley Sex, Public Sex, John Whump, Drugged John, Emotional Love Making, Awkward Relationship, Marriage of Convenience, Switchlock) – The problem with living with Sherlock, John thought, was that you never, never, ever knew the significance of anything. Like your flatmate's nose buried in your hair. Whilst you're in bed. Part 1 of Nitroglycerine

One Little Change by jadztone (E, 58,312 w., 12 Ch. || ASiB Divergence, Fake Relationship, Bed Sharing, Mutual Pining, Friends to Lovers, First Kiss / Time, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Bi John / Gay Demisexual Sherlock, Switchlock, Alternating POV, Jealousy, Misunderstandings, Case Fic, Angst with Happy Ending, Emotional Love Making, Butt Plugs, Cuddles) – Our story begins right after John and Sherlock's first meeting with Irene Adler in September. It splits off into an AU that imagines them taking a case where they act as bait to hook a killer targeting closeted gays in secret relationships. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, many things happen that have our boys wondering if maybe they have a chance with each other. Then Irene fakes her death on Christmas Eve, and things get a lot more complicated - especially since they still have a killer to catch.

Isosceles by SilentAuror (E, 56,609 w., 7 Ch. || Post-S4, POV John, Original Male Character / Sherlock Dates Another Man, Love Triangle, Jealous John, Virgin Sherlock, Sexual Coaching, Angst, Romance, Domesticity, Unrequited Feelings, Miscommunication, First Kiss/Time, For a Case, Friends With Benefits, Bottomlock, Love Confessions, Spooning) – After solving a case for a major celebrity, Sherlock gets himself asked out. When John asks, he discovers that Sherlock has no intention of going, at least not until John agrees to coach him through whatever he might need to know for his date...

floating through a dark blue sky by Lediona (M, 58,966 w., 15 Ch. || Notting Hill AU || POV John, Celebrity Sherlock, First Date / Time / Kiss, Past Drug Addiction, Angst with a Happy Ending) – Of course, I’d seen his films and always thought he was, well, brilliant -- but, you know, a million miles from the world I live in. Or, when John is the owner of a travel book shop and the famous Sherlock Holmes stops in one day.

The Book of Silence by SilentAuror (E, 60,056 w., 2 Ch. || S4 Fix It / Post S4, Virgin Sherlock, Rosie / Parentlock, Domesticity, Fluff, Praise Kink, Sex Toys, First Person POV) – As spring blooms in London, John and Sherlock begin to take new cases and cautiously negotiate this new phase of life with John living at Baker Street again. Despite how well it's all going, John struggles to forgive himself for the way he treated Sherlock following Mary’s death as well as trying to figure out how to finally put his long-time feelings for Sherlock into words. Part 1 of The Book of Silence/Rosa Felicia

Scars by SilentAuror (E, 60,494 w., 5 Ch. || Rape / Non-Con / Abuse, Gaslighting, Manipulation, Dub Con Elements, Homophobia, Angst With Happy Ending, Mary is Not Nice) – S3 rewrite, showing Mary’s manipulation of John as he realizes his love for Sherlock. Mary is not having it.

The Bells of King's College by SilentAuror (E, 64,019 w., 5 Ch. || Post-S4, Missed Opportunities, Angst with Happy Ending, Fake Relationship, Case Fic, John POV, Jealous John, John in Denial, Travelling / Holidays, Virgin Sherlock, Wedding Proposals) – It's only been two weeks since Eurus Holmes disrupted their lives when Mycroft sends John and Sherlock to Cambridge to pose as an engaged couple at a wedding show in the hopes of solving six unsolved deaths...

White Knight by DiscordantWords (M, 69,840 w., 13 Ch. || S4 Compliant/Post S4, Marriage For a Case, Jealous John, Pining John, Janine / Sherlock Fake Relationship, Serial Killers, Case Fic, Undercover as a Couple, Weddings, John is a Mess, Misunderstandings, Wedding Planning, Jealousy, Drunkenness, Love Confessions, Angst with Happy Ending) – Green. The word green was used to convey a great many things. Illness. Envy. Inexperience. Standing there amidst Janine's chattering bridesmaids, watching Sherlock furrow his brow and study fabric swatches, watching him smile and simper and flirt, John thought it a remarkably apt colour choice. Because he felt quite sick to his stomach, he feared the source of said sickness might very well be jealousy, and he had absolutely no idea at all what to do about it. Or: Sherlock needs to fake a relationship for a case. He doesn't ask John.

Just To Hold You Close by sussexbound (E, 70,841 w., 18 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting, Sherlock POV, ASD Sherlock, PTSD John, Demisexual Sherlock, Bisexual John, Cuddling/Snuggling, Platonic Cuddling, Enthusiastic Consent, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, First Kiss/Time, Sexual Tension, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Cuddle Negotiations, For a Case Until It Isn’t, Hair Petting, Sexual Negotiation, Anxiety, Trust Issues, Slow Burn, Panic Attacks, Frottage, Hand/Blow Jobs, Referenced Self Harm / Abuse / Suicidal Ideation, First Kiss/Time, Anal) – When a woman is murdered and the last person to see her alive is recently invalided army vet turned reluctant (and prickly) professional cuddler, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is pulled into a world of intimacy and intrigue he never could have imagined. John is a conundrum and mystery: frank yet reserved, tender yet angry, open yet afraid. Sherlock is instantly drawn into his orbit, and begins to feel and desire things he never has before.

Secrets and Revelations by Hisstah (E, 83,535 w., 9 Ch. || Sentinel / Guides Omegaverse AU || Adventure, Violence, Anal / Oral, Omega!John / Alpha!Sherlock, Case Fic, Politics, Mild DubCon) – Dr John Watson has some major secrets that he's kept from his flatmate, Alpha Sentinel Sherlock Holmes. Now the Sentinel Tower is after him. Can John stay out of their hands until he can reveal his secrets to Sherlock? Part 1 of Secrets and Revelations

Kintsukuroi by sussexbound (E, 91,823 w., 20 Ch. || S4 Compliant / Post-TLD, Grief / Mourning, PTSD, Internalized Homophobia, Therapy, Past Abuse, Alcohol Abuse, Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Anxiety, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, Cuddling, Suicidal Ideation, Masturbation, Minor Character Death, Sexting, Frottage, Inexperienced Sherlock, Rimming / Anal / BJ’s, Emotional Turmoil, Finding Each Other, John’s Self Esteem Issues) – “I love you.” Sherlock sees the words hit John with almost physical force. He reels back a little, jaw twitching and eyes filling. “I love you,” he repeats, a little softer, a little more gentle, as earnest as he possibly can. Because they’ve been teetering on the brink of this thing for years, and it had become painfully obvious over the last few months that they were at a tipping point. This had to happen. Now it has. Now they can see where they end up. The tears in John’s eyes spill over, and he wipes at them angrily. “Do you even know what that means?”

The Cost of a Wish by slashscribe (E, 102,493 w., 12 Ch. || xxxHolic Fusion || Spirits / Ghosts and Magic, Love Confessions, Slow Burn, Soul Mates / Fated Lovers, Adventure, Immortal Sherlock, Powerful John, POV John, Frottage, Wish Granting, Angst with Happy Ending, Nightmares) – John has been plagued by a secret his entire life that has made him feel hopeless until he meets a mysterious, seemingly omniscient man named Sherlock Holmes who owns a wish-granting shop. Their meeting sets off a series of inevitable events that will change the course of both of their lives forever.

Maintenance and Repair by patternofdefiance (E, 106,650 w., 71 Ch. || Future AU, Augmentation || Augmented John, Depression, Body Modification, Slow Burn, Worldbuilding, Sci-Fi, Self-Care, Body Dysmorphia) – John wants to explain the rush of sensation and data, which is just another form of sensation (or is it the other way around?). John wants to say: Augmentation circuits report temperature, pressure, various forms of quantitative input. Sudden changes are reported as pain, since sudden changes are dangerous, and pain is the quickest way to encourage reflexive extraction. But all John can manage is, “Nng.” Because this sudden touch is not reporting as pain. Part 2 of STATIC

A Study in Winning by Jupiter_Ash (E, 106,658 w., 11 Ch. || Tennis AU || John POV, Dirty Talk, Mutual Pining, Misunderstandings, Happy Ending, Sherlock Speaks French, Switchlock, Wimbledon) – John and Sherlock are professional tennis players and it’s Wimbledon. One is a broken almost was at the end of his career, the other an arrogant rising star tipped for greatness. It should have been a straightforward tournament. It really should have been. How were they to know that a chance encounter would change everything? Part 1 of Tennis

Shatter the Darkness (Let the Light In) by MojoFlower (E, 109,683 w., 23 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Genie/Djinn AU || Magical Realism, Kidnapping, Genie Sherlock, First Kiss / Time, Case Fic, H/C, Angst, Clubs, John Whump, Mild DubCon, Hand / Blow Jobs, Torture) – Fairy tales are for those who remember how to dream; not John Watson, broken and hiding from his bleak future in a beige bedsit. But then he discovers a lamp and finds himself in the dangerous riptide of an enigmatic man whose very existence is unbelievable, murder charges against his sister, and the growing pains of feeling alive once more.

The Burning Heart by May_Shepard (M, 119,150 w., 21 Ch. || Canon Divergence, Post-TRF, John’s Sexuality, S3 Rewrite, Pining, Angst with a Happy Ending, POV John Watson, John’s Gay) – When Sherlock dies, John Watson feels like his life is over too. He’s completely shut down, until Mark Morstan, a new nurse at John’s medical clinic, catches his attention, and helps him uncover the long buried truth of his attraction to men. Although he’s certain he’ll never get over Sherlock, John plans to move on, and build a new life with Mark, unaware that Sherlock is not quite as dead as he appears, and that Mark is hiding secrets of his own.

The Adventure of the Silver Scars by tangledblue (NR [M], 142,458 w., 41 Ch. || S3 Fix-It, Post-HLV/ Post-TAB / Canon Compliant, Case Fic, No Baby, Angst, Humour, UST, Slow Burn, Angry John, Reconciliation, Not Nice Mary / Leaving Mary, Dependent Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Caretaker John, Fist Fights, It’s An Experiment, Virgin Sherlock, Dancing, Drugging, John Whump, Pet Names, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Scars) – It’s been thirteen months since Mary shot Sherlock and John finds he’s still pissed off about it. Sherlock had thought everything was settled: John and Mary, domestic bliss. But when John turns up at Baker Street with suitcases, the world’s only consulting detective might not be prepared for the consequences. A new case. Some old scores to settle. Certain danger. Concertos, waltzes, and whisky.

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

#steph replies #johnlock fic recs #insecure john #my fic recs #Anonymous #long post

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tg-headcanons · 3 years

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I see Kaneki being close to Ayato like- he sees him as a younger brother. So I’m wondering if Hide gets to meet him and if so, what will be their friendship will be?

The emo kid!

One day Touka and Yomo just say “fuck it we’re getting our bastard back” and Drag Ayato to anteiku kicking and screaming

When away from Aogiri and not backed by other ghouls, he’s easy to keep contained since his rc type is built for speed rather than strength. While everyone is figuring out what to do with him, Kaneki is the first to notice that the boy is too on edge even for a captured ghoul. Turns out that hanging around war criminals who believe that any comfort is weakness wasn’t great for Ayato when he was a young and impressionable preteen, and neither he nor anyone else was taking care of him. He’s been avoiding kagune cuddles, not keeping himself clean enough, and has been pushing himself through overstimulating environments since he doesn’t want to look weak. The gang ends up getting him to shower, eat something, and wrestles him into the cuddle pile to get him to agree to stay an anteiku for now

It’s weird for him. He’s not used to feeling safe or comfortable after spending so much time as a homeless child soldier. He had planned on bolting once he got the chance, but between the warm bed in the room of his own, a place to shower with products that didn’t smell so strong, and the environment geared towards making ghouls feel safe, he couldn’t bring himself to. He agrees to stay on the condition that no one goes in his room, his goal was to sound like this was an even negotiation when really he did want to come back and feel safe and have a family again, but feared that saying it would make them lose respect for him

Kaneki starts out too scared of Ayato to be in a room alone with him, but after watching the kid struggle to calm down after loud noises and try to mask clear panic attacks with anger, he decides to help him. He gifts Ayato a cheap pair of noise cancelling headphones and an old iPod touch, and the boy almost cries at having something that can Block Out The Bad Sounds. After that he opened up more to Kaneki, holding him in the same category of loyalty as his biological family

He agrees to let Kaneki bring him in on the early morning Coffee+reading lessons he does with Hinami. He was extremely frustrated at being so far behind her in reading ability which translated to anger. They two had a small fight which ended in the girl simply holding him with her rinkaku until someone came to break it up. After learning that she is a chimera who can rock his shit If she so pleases he respects her a bit more. She becomes like another sister to him and he lets her teach him how to read better

He’d seen Hide around and assumed he was a ghoul since he smelled so strongly of ghoul. Turns out that’s just from Kaneki rubbing off on him a lot, and once Ayato learned that he was human he was entirely ready to kill him until physically stopped by his sister and Ken. He begrudgingly allows the human to live but doesn’t trust him

Unsurprisingly, starting puberty surrounded by war criminals who didn’t care about him wasn’t good. Hide was over at Anteiku the day one of Ayato’s heats started, and rather than staying in bed like a normal person he had wobbled his way to downstairs to work. Hide ushered him upstairs to explain that he’s not sick, what’s happening to him is totally normal for a ghoul his age and okay, and there’s nothing wrong with taking time to rest and recover. It was the first he heard of it being natural and not some sickness he needed to work through, so he’s decided to trust the human

He opens up gradually. First it’s the physical affection required of him to keep himself from entering My Pack Is Dead And I Must Kill mode, then talking to people on purpose, and finally actually caring out these people. It was hard for him to accept that he really is a child who should have been looked after, but he had to. He finally apologized to his family and Yoshimura from running away as a kid

Once he’s more open Hide talks to him more. They both tease Kaneki together and share music recommendations. Sometimes their talks can be quite helpful, such as the time Ayato was making fun of Hide for being gay and was told “I saw you googling ‘boys kissing’ earlier.” He’s been diagnosed with fruit and coached through it until he could understand that he doesn’t have to be the flamboyant stereotype he thought all gay people were and that he’s been in the closet due to sheer ignorance for a while now

After a while he’s doing better. Healthier, more stable, and with better relationships. Now when he mocks someone there’s no threat behind it. He’s been given the chance to act his age and be a kid, so he’ll take it

#tokyo ghoul #ken kaneki #hidekane #tokyo ghoul headcanons #ayato kirishima headcanon #ayato kirishima #touka kirishima #renji yomo

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amethystpath-writes · 3 years

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Maybe a Civillian whose been kidnapped by the Villain as leverage or whatever, and is being held as his place? Only to find out that villain has a little girl living with him. His daughter. She’s all giggles and smiles, and asking to play with Civillian!

Civilians hands are a bit tied (literally) scared of upsetting villain by getting too close to his daughter. Little does Civillian know that he actually adores how good you look holding his little girl

Tumblr f'd up so you might get this answered twice, or three times. Either way, I made this gay so I hope you don't mind.

******

"Have a seat." Villain gestured to the dinner table.

As Civilian stood frozen, eyes buggy and wide, Villain came over, placing a hand on his new captive's back, urging him forward.

"Maybe I was too harsh. Welcome to my humble abode. Take your jacket off and stay a while."

Still, Civilian said nothing, only breathed quick and harshly as he was guided to the table. He wasn't sure what he thought was going to happen at the table. Maybe the wood would turn metal and he'd be flipped on his stomach while Villain dug at his spine with just his bare fingers.

"Just sit right there while I make dinner." The villain's voice was cold and lazy. He seemed tired, which scared Civilian even more. Being tired meant being careless, and why wouldn't Villain already be careless with a captive? This was bad. This was really, really bad. And this was why Civilian let himself be pushed down into a chair. If he was cooperative, he'd be okay. Right?

The sound of fast feet sounded and Civilian's attention snapped to a hallway up and to his left. A little girl emerged from the dark.

"Daddyyyyy!" she yelled and promptly ran to...to Villain. Civilian nearly choked on nothing but his own shock. There was absolutely no way Villain had a daughter. No way. Kidnappers couldn't be parents. Bombers of cities couldn't be parents. Criminals like Villain weren't parents. It didn't make sense.

But the sight was right in front of Civilian as he silently watched from the table. The girl squeezed Villain's legs together while he fried something in a pan.

Villain said, "Honey, you need to step back. The grease pops and I don't want you getting burnt, alright?"

The girl giggled and hung on as if it was a challenge. Civilian didn't understand. Villain had a daughter, one who clearly looked up to him right now, and was...was happy living under the roof of a man who caused chaos seemingly just because he liked it.

A spatula clunked against the skillet. Villain turned, grabbing his supposed daughter's shoulders. Here it is, Civilian thought, and he nearly stood- despite his fear- to defend the young girl. Before he could even push his chair back, though, Villain took a step forward, forcing the girl back. "No getting hurt. Go sit at the table, alright? I'll bring you the food and some fruit punch when I'm done."

"Hawaiian punch?"

"That's fruit punch, isn't it? Did I get the wrong thing?" Villain seemed genuinely confused, which made Civilian even more so. This was wrong. It was all so wrong. Villain couldn't be a parent, much less a good one.

Villain shook his head. "I got you red juice. Now go sit down before I burn all of our potatoes."

This time, the little girl didn't argue or try to hug Villain's legs again. Instead, she came running over to a wide eyed Civilian, and it didn't take her long to notice him.

"Hello!" She gave a toothy smile and waved wildly at Civilian as he was sat across from her.

Civilian stole a glance at Villain who moved very, very slowly as he stirred. He was listening.

"Helloooo. Person?"

He said nothing. Surely, interacting with the Villain's daughter wouldn't bode well with his captor. Surely, it would lead to Civilian being split open with dull blades. Or- or maybe Villain would-

"Go on, Civilian. Introduce yourself, nicely."

Civilian coughed, fingers clenching into fists behind his back. "I- uh- I'm...I'm Civilian."

"And?" Villain piped from the kitchen, scraping the spatula against the skillet before flipping the diced potatoes he was cooking.

And? And what? He gave the kid his name. What else was there to say, to give? "And I'm a friend of Villain's- of your dad's." Civilian watched the villain nod.

"You're Daddy's friend?"

Civilian nodded at her with a discreet swallow.

"Will you be my friend, too? Oo! We can play stuff. Daddy bought me legos. Will you play with those?"

"I don't think- um..." Civilian's hands were wild behind his back, unable to separate as Villain tied them together so long ago, but to squirming with anxiety.

Footsteps sounded. This time they weren't soft and quick like when the little girl ran out. These steps were slow and heavy. Villain. Villain was coming closer. Did he not like how Civilian was talking to his daughter? But hadn't he just told him to elaborate? Oh god, what was Civilian supposed to do?

Villain walked behind him, and Civilian's eyes widened as he felt a cold plane lay up against one of his arms. There was an edge to it, too. "Of course he'll be your friend, darling. You want to play legos, Civilian? She's been working on the Millennium Falcon. Maybe you can help her out while I finish our meal."

That wall of cold disappeared and Villain began cutting at the rope. "Um, yeah. Yeah, I'll help you build that- that...what was it?" Civilian chuckled falsely in his panic. "The- the Star Wars thing. I'll help you build it. That sounds like fun. Fun."

There was a breath of warmth on Civilian's ears. His breathing picked up speed as Villain whispered, "Take a deep breath." Civilian didn't understand it was supposed to be soothing. He took it as a threat and braced himself for Villain cutting into his wrists.

But that time didn't come. Instead, the rope fell from Civilian's hands and he sighed in relief. Villain whispered again. "Now go play."

And so Civilian did.

***

"I'm done now." The kid stood from the floor, stepping out of the chaotic mess she and Civilian made.

This was just in time for Villain to call out from the kitchen that food was ready.

As Civilian began to stand up, Villain's daughter came running back and nearly knocked him over. "Up," she said. "Pick me up."

"Oh. I- That's- Maybe I shouldn't."

"Pleaaaaaase."

He stood up all the way, the girl clinging to his shirt. Civilian glanced down at the end of the hall, where, to the right, he would see Villain pouring potatoes into bowls or on plates.

This was a bad idea. He couldn't hold Villain's daughter. He told Civilian to play legos with the girl, not bond with her and hold her like Villain should be doing.

"Pleaaaaaase? Please please please. Pleaaaase."

Civilian could hear the way she was about to cry, and wouldn't crying be worse than just giving in and picking her up? Crying would imply that he hurt Villain's daughter or something. That would be worse. It would be way worse and Villain might kill him.

"Okay. Okay, okay." Civilian held his arms out and the little girl squealed, lifting her arms up so that Civilian could grab her pits and lift her up.

He walked her out of the room, stopping just before they could exit the hallway.

"Um," the kid said, "the table's right there. Can we go there?"

Civilian didn't hear her. He was too afraid of walking out there, knowing Villain would see him holding his daughter.

"Daughter, Civilian! Food's getting co- oh." Villain stepped into the dining room, visible from the hallway- which also meant Villain now saw Civilian. "You're right there. Come sit down."

"I'm sorry," Civilian spewed, setting the girl down. "She wanted up and I wasn't going to, but then she started begging and I could tell she was about to cry and I was afraid you'd-"

Villain walked to the fridge and pulled out a ranch bottle, while interrupting Civilian by saying, "It's fine. Go sit down. I'm getting ranch and vinegar- do you want cheese? I have sharp and mild."

Civilian might have read into Villain's words too far, noticing how he said sharp before mild. It was a warning, Civilian thought. "No cheese," he said, "but thank you." Thank you for not killing me when you saw me holding your daughter.

***

Dinner was eaten, and almost immediately after, Villain's daughter wanted Civilian to pick her up again- just to carry her around and see things from a different perspective.

When she told Civilian that she wanted to be taller than him, but not taller than her dad, Civilian flustered, nearly putting her down right away.

But Villain didn't mind, not at all. In fact, it was cute- the way Civilian blushed when Daughter asked for something, anything. The way, when he thought Villain wasn't looking, he smiled. Or he laughed when he thought Villain was too occupied to hear. The way he loved a villain's daughter like she was just some kid off the street. All of it.

The best, exactly, was when Civilian held Villain's daughter. Because it was then that he really became...something. Villain couldn't say what 'it' was. It wasn't attraction. It couldn't possibly be attraction. Civilian was here as a prisoner...but still. Civilian was pretty, and he was great with kids. He pointed at various objects and laughed as he held Daughter. She certainly enjoyed it.

Still, Civilian's light always dimmed when he realized Villain was watching- admiring- what all he did. Civilian didn't know it was admiration, though, and Villain couldn't tell him that it was. Why? Because Civilian was supposed to be leverage against Hero. If Villain ever admitted it wasn't scornful and threatening looks directed at Civilian, word would get out, and suddenly he'd become leverage against Villain, not Hero.

#request fill #hero x villain #ish #not bothering making all of the other tags again #thank you for the ask! <3

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lassieposting · 3 years

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Bit late and random but it's the anon you leave food out for here to give away I am also bi and I think exactly the same as you about bi val pretty much, every time Derek offers me representation my reaction is to slowly, hesitantly take it and say "thaaaaaaaaanks..." while rolling my eyes, in much the same way one accepts their least favourite flavour of sweet from an annoyingly enthusiastic uncle-type-individual. Ironically I feel I had more in common with her before the bi shit started up.

What I find really amusing is that Landy actually did reasonably well at representation when (and only when) he wasn’t trying.

Oh god, this got long, anon, my ass rambled.

tldr; I'm glad actual bi people dislike bi val (or how Laundry handled bi val) as much as me, this will probably offend at least one person but i don't really care, Dirty Laundry wrote better rep when he didn't mean to write rep at all, and if he ever starts trying to "represent" groups I'm part of I'll take him out back like a dying horse and shoot him.

Like, yes. He had stupid and potentially offensive shit - I say potentially because what offends one member of a group won’t necessarily offend all of them. His attitude to mentally ill people is, frankly, disgusting. We’ve had “Skulduggery can’t be abused, he doesn’t have feelings”. We’ve had “eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY”. We had Ping, who seemed to be pretty much universally offensive. And that's what's always going to happen when a straight, cis, white, wealthy, male author tries to write marginalised groups he doesn't know shit about, because inevitably he's going to fall back on stereotypes.

But we also had:

SEXUALITY REP: Phase One's nonstraight characters were treated like the straight ones, and like, isn't that the whole point? There was no need for a massive Coming Out Story TM to grab for those sweet sweet Woke Points, because sexuality isn't supposed to be important to mages. I never understood why Val needed that whole Coming Out Panic storyline. Like...Des and Melissa are ridiculously supportive, encouraging, loving parents. They accepted you dating a ~19 year old when you were ~16. They accepted you revealing you could do fucking magic and that you'd been lying to them for like seven years. They took your undead buddy in stride and the most pressing question your dad had was whether magic toilets exist. There is zero reason to think that "I'm bisexual" is gonna be the thing that makes them flip and throw you into the streets in disgrace, Valkyrie. Come on.

Tanith had girlfriends and it was just mentioned casually, because it's normal.

China had massive UST with Eliza. That was an opportunity right there to not only include a f/f relationship, but also to bring back one of the few precious surviving characters from Phase One, using characters and a relationship that already had several books' worth of setup and tension and interest from fans.

The Monster Hunters have a casual conversation about which one of the Dead Men they'd date.

Ghastly has a conversation with Fletcher about the pain he's been through being in love. He never uses any pronouns.

It was confirmed at one point re: the Dead Men that at this point, after 300-odd years, everyone's been with everyone else at some point.

Thrasher is gay, and while Scapegrace's...everything...is treated as a joke/comedic relief, Thrasher's love for him isn't. He's completely devoted to Scapegrace, and that in itself is not played for laughs, even though the rest of the scene usually is. Thrasher's description of their first meeting is essentially a love-at-first-sight situation for him.

"ABNORMAL" RELATIONSHIP REP: Age gap relationships are normal for mages. Off the top of my head, using only canon, canon-implied or almost-canon ships:

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

If you include fan ships, there's also things like Mevolent/Serpine or my Mevolent/Vile, which are both ~600 year minimum age gaps based on the timeline, or Valdug (and its variations) which is ~400 years.

Now, whether you consider this kind of rep positive or negative is up to you, but it’s there.

MENTAL ILLNESS REP: more like "Which characters in this series don't have a mental illness or a personality disorder?" I have some of these issues, but not all of them, so this is just how I read it, but:

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

Schizophrenia (or similar): Valkyrie & Darquesse, Valkyrie "seeing" Darquesse's ghost thing in Phase Two

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

Trauma/PTSD/CPTSD: Skulduggery, Valkyrie, China, Ghastly, Erskine...pretty much everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. People struggling with trauma are spoilt for choice of characters to see themselves in.

TRAUMA REP: This series is a trauma conga line, but everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. I see little bits of myself in more than one Phase One character.

Childhood Abuse (of varying degrees & types): Skulduggery, Carol & Crystal, Omen, Fletcher, Ghastly, China, Bliss, Sanguine...

Estranged Family: Skulduggery abandoning his crest, Fergus & Gordon, China & Bliss

Bad Romantic Relationship: Skulduggery is also very clearly an abuse victim. He’s got a solid history of romantic attachments to women who manipulate, use and gaslight him for their own agendas. There's a whole paragraph in SPX about how Abyssinia broke him down, isolated him from his friends and preyed on his desperate need to be loved, all classic abuse tactics.

And I’m personally a huge fan of this backstory for two reasons:

1) Society likes a plucky victim in media. The "My suffering made me stronger" type of victim. And it's not always like that in real life. Not all survivors come out of their abuse stronger or kinder or more understanding. Some of us come out cold and fucked up. Some of us end up as emotionally stunted, bloodied-nails-and-bared-teeth survivors, broken in ways that can't be fixed and sustained by enough rage to power a small sun. But society doesn't like to tell the story of that kind of survivor, because we're not usually a likeable protagonist. When we're shown in media, we're usually the sympathetic villain, or maybe the antihero. But Skug is someone who's done awful things and lost pretty much all his faith in humanity and been burned more times than he can count, and he still makes the conscious choice to try and be the good guy when he could so easily go Evil Supervillain on the world, and I don't know about any of y'all, but I've modelled myself on him in that. I've made the choice to do something good when all I really want to do is just become a horrible, shrivelled ball of nastiness and revenge. And that's because I saw him do it and realised that I could do that too.

Skug is an incredibly capable, strong, masculine Man's Man. He gets in fights all the time, and he usually wins. He's military, an industry that's Really Bad for stigmatizing weakness and mental illness, and he's right up at the top of the hierarchy. Almost everyone is afraid of him. He's a straight up cold-blooded killer. Skulduggery Pleasant is precisely the type of person who's not normally portrayed as a victim of anything. Nothing about him screams "victim" at all. But his abuse history is insidious. He's so conditioned to respond in a certain way to abuse from the women in his life, probably from a very young age, that despite all that strength and capability and stubbornness and ego, he just goes along with it. And it's an established pattern going back hundreds of years. He keeps going back to China, even though he knows she's bad for him and his friends keep telling him to stay away from her. Abyssinia latched onto him when he was traumatized and vulnerable and weaponized it against him to make him easier to control - and when she reappears, hundreds of years later, she jumps straight back into using, tmanipulating and gaslighting him and not only does he let her, he doesn't even seem to realise that behaviour is abusive. He thinks it's normal! That's how he's always been treated by his long-term girlfriends, with the notable exception of Wifey. Even when Val is being fucking nasty to him in the first couple books of Phase Two, sniping and lying and blaming him for everything under the sun, he just takes it. There's no attempt to tell her she's being unreasonable, no telling her to fuck right off and give her head a wobble, no defending himself even when she's bitching over something that isn't even his doing. And this is a man who has an absolutely gleaming steel spine the rest of the time; Skug has no problem saying no to anybody else, but he can't get past the way he's been taught to treat the important ladies in his life. Skug is a walking reminder that anyone can be a victim of abuse, even the ones who seem least likely to be susceptible.

GENDER REP: This one is the most iffy out of the bunch and definitely was not done very well in the eyes of the people who matter most, but I'll include it anyway because it mattered to some.

So there's Nye, who's...agender? Genderless? And uses "it" pronouns? Nye was generally considered horrible rep because it's also a war criminal and experiments on people and I've seen people say "Well I don't want to be seen like that" but? It's still possible to be a war criminal and also genderless. I never saw the two things as being related or relevant to each other.

There's also Mantis, who's in exactly the same gender/pronouns boat as Nye and always seems to be forgotten about, which sucks because Mantis is a war hero. It fought for the Sanctuary during the War and they never lost a battle when it was in command. It's called out of retirement to fight for the Supreme Council in LSODM, ends up fighting alongside Skulduggery during the Battle of Roarhaven, and ultimately dies attempting a very brave, very risky strategy. Mantis is, unreservedly, one of the good guys. It was also my introduction to sentient beings using "it" pronouns, and did it in a way that felt natural, so when I met my first person online who used "it" pronouns and hated to be referred to as he/she, it was...weird, but not as weird as it would otherwise have been, because I was like, "Oh yeah, like the Crenga. Okay."

And then there's the Scapegrace sex change plotline, which...I might have an unpopular opinion on this one. From what I’ve seen, trans people don’t seem to think was handled well or with any sensitivity at all. I’m not trans, so if the trans community says he was being offensive to them, I’m not going to claim otherwise. But...I first read the Scapegrace plotline as a young teenager in a tiny rural school with zero diversity, going through a period of being deeply confused about my own gender identity. He was more or less my first introduction to the idea that genitals =/= gender. I was relieved, at that point in my life, to read someone having a lot of the same thoughts I was having about being in the wrong body. So while it may have been badly done and yeah, the series would probably have been better without it, it did make at least one kid suspecting she might not be cis go “Huh! So there are other people who feel like this.”

Thrasher is also implied to be legitimately trans/gender-questioning, and that's not played for laughs either.

So? Phase One, while it absolutely had faults and issues and things that were just "Oh god why", was actually full of rep, at least compared to the other series that I read as a child/teen. But? As soon as Dirty Laundry started trying to be woke? He fucking sucks ass at it. Aside from confirming Phase One's hints that Skug has a background of abusive relationships, every single attempt at shoehorning rep into Phase Two is Bad.

The painfully OOC, forced, badly-written awkwardness of Val suddenly being rabidly horny for women out of fucking nowhere. The stilted, forced cringiness between her and any of the women she's flirted with - contrast that with Sorrowscorn's interactions, full of natural chemistry that had us all like 👀 I mean, I never shipped Val/Melancholia, but I could always see why people did - they had miles more chemistry than Val/anyone in Phase Two.

The fucking mess that is v*litsa, because if someone says "I'm really not interested in friendships/relationships right now", clearly the route to true love is to bulldoze their boundaries and forcibly insert yourself into their life and proceed to treat them like a delicate soft uwu flower, completely ignoring the horrible things they've done, while gleefully damning their best friend as an irredeemable monster for the exact same things, which is. You know. Gonna affect your so-called love's self-confidence and self-esteem because she knows she's no different to him. Y'all know I love an angsty ship, an unhealthy ship, a ship with fucked power dynamics, but I literally cannot roll my eyes any further back in my head at this shit. I never read Demon Road, but from what I've heard from friends who did, it does seem like every time Laundry tries to write an f/f ship, he comes up with a cringey abusive/manipulative caricature and tries to call it rep, and he needs to Stop.

Val's Mental IllnessTM arc. It's funny how he wrote Skulduggery as a wonderfully complex character with deep-rooted psychological damage and long-lasting trauma, but believes he wrote a character with "no feelings" - but when he tries to delve into the damage the world of magic has done to Val, he turned her into a weak, whiny drug addict who treats everyone around her like garbage and is so selfish and dislikeable that I? Honestly can't even reconcile Phase Two val with Phase One val. They're two completely different people. He's shown on Twitter that he doesn't have any respect for mentally ill people, and it shows. Other mentally ill people might see it differently, but the whole thing just makes me go "yikes".

Never, who has no personality outside of being genderfluid, and whose pronouns make no sense. I'm sorry, I have never met an nb person who insists that you change from male to female pronouns multiple times in a sentence, every time you refer to them. It's confusing as fuck. Now I have been told that Never has apparently received some character development in the last couple books, and if so, fair play, but I quit reading after Midnight, and Never and the rest of the personality-less new characters introduced in Phase Two who just seemed to be 2D Stereotypes to snag Woke Points were a big part of why, so. Development too late, I'm afraid.

(Now, if anyone is looking for a well-written genderfluid character, I recommend the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb. I have a lot of issues with her as a writer, and unfortunately I hate her POV character which puts me off the series as a whole, but she wrote the Fool/Amber/Lord Golden and their gender identity/approach to sexuality with so much more respect and realism. That is the kind of rep nb people should be getting: 3D, complex, realistic characters whose gender is only a tiny fragment of their personality, not the be-all-and-end-all of their existence. You know. Like cis people get. Nobody wants to be represented by a 2D cardboard cutout stereotype.)

Anyway idk how much sense this makes it just really amuses me that Laundry would include all this rep completely unintentionally and then go on Twitter and remind us all that actually he's a massive asshole via insensitive/offensive tweets about the groups he'd actually done a fair job of including (i.e. Skulduggery has no feelings, mentally ill people should find another series to read, the bullshit about Val being "heteromantic bisexual" on Twitter and then spouting all the "the woman she loved uwu" shit in the books (proving he has no idea what he's talking about), eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY. He can only write half-decent rep when he's not trying and he inevitably outs himself as having a really shitty attitude towards those people anyway, proving that ultimately it's all either unintentional rep or performative wokeness.

#skulduggery pleasant #sp meta #derek landy hate blog #Anon #fire message #anti valitsa #anti val #anti phase two tbh #phase two fans will not enjoy this post

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onemuseleft · 3 years

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I am having a weird sad night and can't find the kiss ask list, can I get some jake/marco fake dating kiss in public?

*hugs* I hope your night is going better!

Also this came out more fake married than fake dating, I hope that’s okay!

Fake dating Kiss, Jake/Marco

About an hour into the charade, Marco was forced to the realization that if this was going to happen, he was going to have to do it.

“Your spouse is very quiet,” the Ambassador said, waggling one of her tentacles in Jake’s general direction. “Is he upset?”

Marco flashed a smile, though he wasn’t sure if it would come across quite as reassuring to a seven and a half foot-tall being with transparent - and, glittery? Sparkly? - purple flesh and multiple tentacles. Body language was a crap shoot in situations like this. “Oh no, he’s fine,” he said. “Jake’s just a quiet guy.”

The ambassador made a kind of… wibbling sound that made their whole body vibrate. Marco thought it might mean they understood. “Humans place great value on the stoic nature of their leaders. I understand.”

Marco wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but one thing was sure: of all the couples in the room, he and Jake were the only ones who weren’t cuddling, kissing, hugging or at least standing with their arms around each other. It made sense the Ambassador had noticed. He gave the Ambassador and their spouse - a slightly rounder, slightly more red transparent orb - a bright grin and made his excuses to slip away as soon as he could.

He caught Jake at the bar and threw an arm around his shoulders, plastering himself against Jake’s side. “You’re so bad at this,” he said.

Jake didn’t even flinch when Marco grabbed him which - since Marco had seen Jake once toss a guy over his shoulder for touching him unexpectedly - meant either Jake had seen him coming, or Jake knew it was Marco just from the touch.

The first one was pretty likely. Jake tended to be hyper aware in situations like this, where they were surrounded by unfamiliar faces and high-profile targets (like they weren’t high profile targets themselves) and he would have been keeping an eye on his six, and probably on Marco’s as well.

The second one kind of made his stomach do flippy floppy things that Marco was pretty sure shouldn’t happen when he thought about his probably straight best friend who had never once so much as batted an eyelash in Marco’s direction.

Jake turned his head a little so at least he was facing Marco’s direction. “Sorry. I thought maybe if I wandered off to get a drink it wouldn’t look so awkward, but…”

The holiday they were ostensibly celebrating was an alien one. Marco had skimmed the reports they’d been given in the briefing, but honestly hadn’t retained much besides “epic romeo-and-juliet-style romance from a hundred years ago ended the equivalent of a nuclear war and now the planet places a huge emphasis on romantic love and incorporates it into all their political and social policies to the point where they won’t negotiate with a non-married being.” It was phenomenally stupid in his opinion. Were there no asexuals on their world? People who weren’t comfortable with PDAs? Introverts? People who liked being alone for a while? So far none of these guys had split up long enough to go to the bathroom. It was weird. “Maybe they don’t need to use bathrooms,” he said.

Jake let that one pass, used to how Marco’s train of thought went after all these years. “Please tell me we can leave soon.”

“Sorry, buddy. We’ve barely been here an hour.” The party was supposed to last until dawn, as the fabled lovers had apparently ended the war with the break of a new day, and Marco was painfully aware of how far away that was. “What’s got you so wound up?”

Jake hunched his shoulders a little, then sighed and straightened up. “It just feels weird,” he said.

There was clearly more to it than that, but Jake was stubbornly silent. Marco cocked his head, eyes locked on Jake’s face. “What, the relationship thing? I know you don’t give a shit if people think you’re gay.”

“Not that.” Jake took a deep sip of his drink, which looked an awful lot like a plain coke. At least Marco didn’t smell any rum in it. Jake wasn’t a lush, but he wasn’t a teetotaller either. If he was going sober for this it meant either he thought they were in danger - which, while more or less the defaults of their lives since that night in the construction site, was a very low risk at the moment - or he thought he needed to be in control of himself.

“Wait, is it me?” Marco almost pulled away, but remembered their cover at the last moment. “Jake, hey, wait. Are you weirded out that I’m touching you?” He was suddenly, intensely, aware of his arm around Jake’s shoulders, how close they were standing, the fact that his mouth was just inches from Jake’s. They’d stood like this before, probably a hundred times - Marco had always been touchy and Jake had never seemed to mind.

But there was the whole “prentending to be married thing” now, maybe that was making it weird? Or.

Or there was the whole “Marco was more than half in love with his best friend and maybe Jake had finally noticed and didn’t like the idea that Marco was taking liberties” thing.

Panic bubbled up in his gut, pushing up his throat until he almost choked on it. Shit. If he’d been making Jake uncomfortable - he’d thought he’d been doing okay hiding it, but considering Rachel, Tobias, Ax, his father, and at least two different reporters had called him on it recently he might need to re-evaluate his standards of “okay.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Jake said. He made a face at Marco, apparently seeing more in his expression than Marco intended. That was always the problem with trying to hide something from your best friend. They knew you too damn well. Marco hadn’t been able to get away with anything during the war, either. “You’ve literally held my intestines in with your bare hands. We’ve shared beds since we were three, why the hell would I mind you holding my hand.”

It was an excellent point, but did nothing to explain what was going on in his head. “So tell me what’s wrong.” Marco glanced around, then tugged Jake away from the bar, toward a window along one wall. He positioned them so no one in the room could clearly see their faces, then leaned into Jake’s personal space.

Jake’s arm came up around his waist, tugging him in closer, turning them just a little so he was between Marco and the window - overprotective bastard. Marco didn’t bother calling him on it. “If something’s wrong we can bail early. This is just a diplomatic thing, no one’s going to get hurt if we take off.”

“No.” Jake gave the room a once-over, then focused his gaze solidly in the direction of Marco’s left ear.

The panic was back, pulsing in Marco’s chest. Jake wasn’t even looking him in the eye now? “Tell me,” he said in a low voice so it wouldn’t carry.

Jake sighed and pulled back, just a little, letting go of Marco’s waist. The sudden absence of touch felt strange and left Marco feeling cold. “I don’t want to get into it here,” Jake said, and me met Marco’s gaze suddenly. There was something there, something afraid, that Marco hadn’t seen aimed at him since… ever.

Jake wasn’t afraid for him - he’d seen that a thousand times during the war. But he was afraid of Marco. Right then, at that moment, he was afraid of what Marco was going to say or do if he kept talking.

Marco’s hand jerked with the sudden urge to pull away. He forced himself to be still. To stop, and not feed into whatever bullshit was going through Jake’s head. Because something had to be going on - they’d been friends for twenty years and Jake had never acted like this, not when he broke up with Cassie or got back with Cassie or broke up with Cassie again, or had to execute war criminals or give the order to abandon his own family. Jake had never not looked him in the eye.

“I need a drink,” Jake muttered under his breath and like a freight train, it all made sense.

Jake hadn’t flinched when Marco touched him - not once all evening, had even leaned into it a few times. But he wasn’t touching Marco back - and when he was, he stopped. Like the arm he had just removed from Marco’s waist.

Jake wasn’t drinking because he wanted to stay in control of his own actions.

“You’re weirded out about touching me?” Marco asked, fighting to keep his voice low. “Jake what the hell? That intestines and bed sharing thing goes both ways, you know.”

Jake snorted and almost spit out the Coke he’d just swallowed. “Jesus, Marco, do you listen to yourself? Intestines and bed sharing. God.” He took another sip of Coke and sighed. “Look, can we talk about this later? After all this,” he waved his drink in the general direction of the rest of the room, “is all over?”

It was probably a put-off. Marco figured the odds that Jake would conveniently forget all about this as soon as they got home and had a good night’s sleep between them and all of this were better than even.

But Marco also wasn’t going to bully him into doing something that made him uncomfortable. They’d all had enough of being forced into uncomfortable situations by the time they were in high school to last the rest of their lives. “Yeah, okay. Hey.” He caught Jake’s eye. “We’re good, right? You and me?”

His heart was beating hard enough that the entire room could probably hear it.

But Jake just scrunched his face up. “Of course we are.”

“Okay.” Marco gripped the back of Jake’s neck and squeezed a little, holding on for just a second. “So you and me, we’re gonna go get a real drink and we’re gonna nurse the shit out of it in a dark corner somewhere and take off the second the horizon turns pink. Plan?”

Jake swallowed, hard, then nodded, just a little. “Plan.”

Marco let go of his neck and reached up to tousle his hair. “God, you’re gonna give me an ulcer always worrying about you.”

Jake blushed, cheeks pink. “You worry too much,” he said. “I told you everything is fine.”

“Liar,” Marco said, but cheerfully. He ruffled Jake’s hair again, not quite a noogie but he made sure the intention was there.

Jake closed his eyes and leaned into Marco’s touch, just for a second.

Jake stiffened and pulled away, eyes cutting past Marco’s shoulder, and that fear was back in them. “I’m gonna go get a refill. What do you want to drink?”

Marco’s hand hung in the air for an instant before he let it drop to his side. “Jake.”

“Yeah, I know, anything but red wine. Give me a minute, I’ll just-” Jake stepped back, ready to beat a hasty retreat, but Marco snagged him by the wrist and yanked him to a stop.

“Jake,” Marco said again. “Are - are you as fucking stupid as I think you are?”

Jake’s eyes snapped up to meet his. “Hey!” He stilled as he seemed to see something in Marco’s eyes - Marco wasn’t sure what, but honestly at this point he’d settle for anything as long as he didn’t see Jake look afraid of him ever again. “Marco?”

“Such a fucking idiot,” Marco said. He curled a hand in the front of Jake’s shirt and yanked him down.

The kiss was a little messy, a little unpracticed, and Jake stiffened up so much that Marco thought for a moment that he’d misjudged and ruined everything.

But then Jake relaxed into the kiss and his arms came up around Marco’s back, pulling him closer.

Marco’s pulse was pounding in his throat, behind his eyes, so hard he thought he’d pass out. When Jake broke the kiss, Marco kept his eyes closed, and waited to see if he’d ruined everything.

Jake pressed a kiss against the shell of Marco’s ear. “If I’m an idiot for never saying anything,” he said, “then what does that make you?”

“The one smart enough to figure it out, obviously,” Marco said.

Jake didn’t stop laughing at him even when Marco pulled him down into another kiss.

#amaronith #my fic #nightwalker writes #animorphs

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pynkhues · 4 years

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I’m sure you’ve already gotten a bunch of asks since Manny’s Crime King interview! I’m just like confused about him saying he’s enamored by her world but honestly like how is his different (besides his obvious commitment to the game) he lives in a nice loft, takes his kid to baseball, drives a fancy car, and plays tennis at the club. It’s not like he’s living the life of a thug. I guess I’m not getting the exact contrast of their worlds.

(Rest of my ask) I’m probably missing some obvious point here which is why I’m asking you lol helllppp

I do think Rio’s enamoured with Beth’s world, yes! I think that really boils down to the fact that while on paper Beth and Rio aren’t living dissimilar lives in terms of their roles as parents, and while they obviously now share parts of the criminal world, I do think the show is actually pretty specific in how it represents those worlds, particularly in terms of the masculine / feminine, and how a part of the curiosity around each other is in viewing one another as a key that both compliments their own world, while also unlocking the other’s one for them.

The gendering of spaces in storytelling – but particularly films and TV is, hilariously, a topic that I’m incredibly passionate about and have both written it a lot in my original work, and written about it a lot for magazines, journals and media sites (I’m actually writing an essay at the moment for a literary journal about LGBTQI cinema and how lesbian romances are highly domesticised [i.e. Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, The Favourite, The Kids are Alright] while gay romances are usually very pointedly about keeping away from domestic spaces, moving and traveling [i.e. Brokeback Mountain, The Talented Mr Ripley, Moonlight, Midnight Cowboy, even Call Me By Your Name is heavily focused on being Americans abroad aka away from home] but that all feels like a different story, haha).

Luckily for me, Good Girls is actually about as obsessed with the gendering of spaces as I am. It’s a major, major throughline throughout the show for many of the characters, but particularly Beth and Rio, and their intrigue with the other’s spaces – her interest in his powerful, highly masculine one, and his with her deceptively innocent, strongly feminine one – is really central to their intrigue with each other more broadly.

So to talk about this, we probably need a little bit of context.

(Under a cut because this is literally 4,000 words)

Gendering Spaces in Cinema

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone here, but places and spaces in stories are about as gendered – if not more gendered – as they are in daily life. In particular, cinema’s visual and textual language has historically been very clear:

The inside is female. The outside is male.

This concept has really been around since the beginning of cinema but became very popularised through Westerns in the late 1920s onwards, and really underlined by war films particularly during propaganda cinema in WWII. Men are outside, battling the elements and other men, claiming land, building outwards, while women are at home – either literally or figuratively (if they’re actually out at war, like in the utterly fabulous So Proudly We Hail!, they’re at the ‘home base’ as nurses) – building inwards. Men protect the home while women create it.

Westerns feature these images very potently and very literally. Almost every single western dating back to the 1910s will have some combination of these two shots:

a) Woman at home, looking out into the wild:

b) Man leaving home, stepping out into the wild:

(These two stills are from John Ford’s The Searchers which is generally regarded as one of the greatest Westerns of all time. It’s………very racist and misogynistic, as many were and still are, but in terms of technicality and visual language, it’s a very well-made film, albeit not one I enjoyed).

The purpose at the time, of course, was steeped in historic sexism and invested in maintaining that culture, particularly westerns and war films which are heavily devoted to ‘macho’ narratives. Women were passive, men were active, but these images really set the stage for how the ideas of ‘space’ continues to exist in cinema. A fact that’s bolstered by broader social discourses that still exist today – schools, grocery stores, laundromats are inherently ‘female’ spaces because they are seen as an extension of the home, while police stations, car dealerships, warehouses, are inherently ‘male’ spaces because they’re about work, protecting and providing for a home, and being pointedly outside of that domestic space aka ‘the wild’. It’s not an accident that the girls are robbing grocery stores and day spas, but I’ll get back to that, haha.

These ideas of gendered spaces underpin everything we watch, no matter the genre.

Sure, these ideas can be subverted to varying degrees of effectiveness (often it’s steeped in my least favourite trope – the ‘not like other girls’ heroine), but you can’t subvert a trope without actually acknowledging it exists. Sometimes these subversions are done brilliantly too – like in Legally Blonde which was not just about Elle existing in a space that was quintessentially coded as male, but embracing her femininity and womanhood within that space; and often brutally too in films like Winter’s Bone, Room and The Nightingale which all brutalise women in ‘male spaces’ while simultaneously weaponizing female spaces against them – usually the home. The lead character of Winter’s Bone is going to lose her house unless her absent father shows up in court, the lead character of Room creates a home that is simultaneously a sanctuary and a mockery of a sanctuary to try and protect her son from reality and survive, the lead character of The Nightingale has her home invaded, her husband and baby murdered, and is horrifically raped within that home.

Hometown Horror: a divergence

This is a slight aside to where I’m going with this overall, but please indulge me, haha. I’m a big fan of horrors and thrillers, which explore this in a really stark way. In that, the invasion of a home or a domestic space – whether by ghost, demon or serial killer, is, generally speaking, synonymous with the invasion of a woman’s body and the violation of her as a person.

Films that focus on a female survivor or a ‘final girl’ are very generally focused on the invasion of her home as much as it’s focused on the invasion of her body. Think The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Scream, The Babadook, Hereditary, The Conjuring, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Panic Room. The violation of a woman’s home is the invasion of her, because cinema relies on over 100 years of movies telling us that a house and the woman who lives in it are symbolically the same thing.

Horror films that focus on men are very rarely centred in the home. It’s men travelling, or men visiting a woman’s home, or men who’ve been taken. Think of the first Saw movie which takes place in a mysterious basement, Hostel which is at a hostel, Dawn of the Dead at a shopping mall, An American Werewolf in London while two men are on holiday, The Evil Dead is in a cabin, Get Out is at his girlfriend’s family home.

There are exceptions, of course! Family home invasion films like The Purge, Funny Games and The Strangers are rooted in the violation of that home, but still. You’ll generally find that it manifests differently narratively speaking for men and women. Rear Window too takes place entirely in a man’s apartment – but it’s interesting to note that most of the ‘horror’ comes from him spying on somebody else’s home – notably a woman’s, The Descent too is very much about women and is set during cave diving. Still! These are all exceptions, not the rule.

Good Girls and Gendered Spaces

Every single space in Good Girls is gendered. It’s actually one of the things I seriously love about the show because it’s thoughtfully done, and it is deliberate. We know it is, because they tell us explicitly in the writing multiple times. I mean – hell, think of Ruby telling us (well, telling Rio, haha) way back at the end of 1.04 when they’re selling him on the idea of washing cash through Cloud 9 – “Nobody thinks twice about a woman buying her husband a TV or new tires for the minivan.” A store like that is gendered, and Ruby’s reinforcing it by saying it’s a place women go to build a home. It hasn’t been weaponized yet - - but our girls know how to weaponize it. They’re playing on the fact that people think women’s spaces are effectively impotent, and they’re telling Rio – and us as an audience – that they’re going to exploit it.

This is an idea the show revisits frequently. Women’s spaces are – both in life and in storytelling – spaces that are viewed as passive because they are representative of women, and what the show is – I believe – very invested in, is showing how those spaces are fundamentally active. If you want a house to represent a woman – well, okay. Then you get to see what’s under the rug, y’know?

I’m going to come back to the home thread – because I really do think it’s very important, and I think the way the show depicts people in those spaces (and invading those spaces) is significant – but it’s not just homes that are looked at in this way. The show is very specific about having feminine spaces and masculine spaces, with only a few in between (and usually those in-between spaces are very specifically for Stan and Ruby, showing just how in-sync they are with each other and how much they operate within a shared space). Beyond the women’s homes, there are the kids’ schools, Fine & Frugal (very important here to note that Annie emasculates Boomer in what is an associated female space and that he retaliates by attempting to rape her in her own home aka not only another female space, but a space that is symbolically Annie, something he repeats later with Mary Pat – a violation on essentially every character, narrative and symbolic level, again), the waxing salon, Nancy’s day spa, Jane’s dance recital (and actually the physical object of the dubby – being a highly feminine object lost in a very masculine space), and already what we know of s3, with Ruby being at a nail salon and Beth being at a paper / card store.

The show also has very masculinized places – I’d argue Boland Motors is one of the biggest ones – very much about ‘boys and their toys’, which is why Beth pointedly feminising it when she takes over is so significant and symbolically indicative of Beth’s claiming of that space; but also spaces like the police station, the drug dealer’s house in 2.07, the hotel suite Boomer briefly occupies, even to an extent the church. When the girls are in these spaces, there’s a distinct feeling of encroaching on territory that isn’t theirs, or being in spaces that they don’t belong in. This is often done as a two-hander too – the police station and the church Ruby doesn’t belong in anymore, not necessarily as a woman, but as a criminal.

Nothing though, from a technical standpoint, is more masculine than the spaces that are shown to be Rio’s. From the warehouse spaces to the bar to his loft to his car, Rio’s ‘places’ are distinctly masculine and generally placed in direct contrast with Beth’s femininity. But I’ll come back to that point too.

Home, Identity and Invasion

Almost every female character on this show has a very defined domestic space, from Beth, Ruby and Annie, to Mary Pat, Marion and Nancy. These spaces are representative of not just who they are, but who they are as women, and really comes to routinely represent the interior lives of these characters. This is probably the clearest in 2.09 when Beth is uncharacteristically messy following Dean taking their kids, and in 2.06, when Beth and Dean switch roles, and Dean is incapable of maintaining that domestic space because it’s not his. But let’s not start there.

Let’s start with Annie.

Annie’s apartment is fun, feminine (but not overly so), youthful, sweet, and generally a bit of organized chaos. It’s often underequipped – there are several mentions of the pantry being understocked – but it’ll always do in a pinch. More than anything though, Annie’s apartment comes to life when her son is in it. She’s happiest when he’s there, and when he’s not, her loneliness drives her to pulling people into the space with her, whether that’s the electronics guy, Greg, or Noah.

This is particularly significant when Annie’s forming bonds with people. The show has symbolically relied very heavily on Annie’s moments of vulnerability and connection being grounded in her apartment or an extension of it – usually her car. There was her reconnecting with Greg over YouTube videos in s1, there was Nancy and her talking about pregnancy in 2.02, and there was Noah settling in across season 2. These are all substantial moments in terms of Annie’s interior life that are represented through her home – she lets them all in. Which is why it’s significant what people do when they are in. Particularly the show marrying Noah getting to know Annie while simultaneously rifling through her belongings, trying to know specific things about her.

This is only reiterated by Noah’s scenes with Sadie later in the season – always at home, reiterating just how much Noah’s invaded Annie’s life, how much he’s inside her, how much he’s using everything and everyone who’s important to her, and how much he’s a threat to all of that too.

Ruby and Stan are a little different. Ruby’s house is the only one that’s genuinely shared with somebody, and the show represents this across the board – Ruby and Stan wear similar colours, the house feels like theirs, and the parts of their worlds that are separate are still frequently pretty defined by each other (even when Ruby’s acting away form Stan, the show makes it clear that Stan’s at the forefront of her mind, and vice versa). This indicates their partnership, but the house really still is symbolically tied to Ruby. This is particularly represented by the effect of having Turner in the house, but, more than that, it’s underlined symbolically by Turner arresting Stan at home. If the home symbolically carries the meaning of the woman, Turner arresting Stan there is starkly about Turner taking Stan away from Ruby. That image would not hold the same weight if he was arrested at, say, the park or the police station, because the locations don’t hold the same meaning.

It’s also why there’s significance in Stan and Turner’s showdown narratively speaking happening at the police station. It needs to, because symbolically it should occupy a masculine-coded space, because that showdown isn’t just about who they are as people, but who they are as men.

Beth and Beth’s house is very, very different to Annie and Ruby’s, and holds a more substantial narrative and symbolic function. From the very first episode, the potential of losing her house is key to her arc, and key to her identity as a character.

Beth is a lot of things, but a recurring image with her as a character is that she is invested in projecting a dated idea of ‘perfect womanhood’, and, within that, actually pretty perfectly creates parts of it for herself. For Beth – as somebody who was a housewife for roughly twenty years – her house really is her in every sense of the word. Every threat to that house, every disruption, every wrinkle, every intrusion, every theft, every invitation is personal. Dean might have at least two rooms in the Boland House, but that space is Beth’s on almost every symbolic level. When people pop into it, it’s a direct invasion of her.

This is something that the show has revisited time and time again, particularly when it comes to Beth’s bedroom. When people want to be close to Beth, that’s where they go. Annie slept there across season one when she was vulnerable and lonely, despite Beth telling her to go home, Jane broke into Beth’s closet there when she felt she was being neglected, Dean’s constantly trying to sidle into it (and – pointedly – only really in it when they’re fighting and Beth is revealing something / letting him in on something – that they’re out of money, that she has Rio’s money, that she knows about his affairs). When Beth has been at her most vulnerable, she lets Ruby and Annie into it. That said, the only character who’s been explicitly invited into it has been Rio – significantly both in fantasy, and in the show’s reality.

It’s not just about inviting people in though – when she kicks somebody out of it, the act is loaded.

She’s not just pushing somebody out of a space, she’s pushing them out of her.

It’s not just her bedroom of course (although I do think that’s the most significant space on perhaps the whole show). Rio and Turner between them have regularly invaded Beth’s living room, dining room, her kitchen, her yard. These are often distinctly tied with her doing something domestic and / or distinctly feminine. She’s bringing groceries home, she’s baking, she’s trying on jewellery, she’s mothering her children. Symbolically, this is often when Rio and Turner both are at their most masculine and their most threatening, which just serves to underline the invasion of Beth’s space.

It’s not just the girls though, as I said above. Female domestic spaces on this show are significantly coded as belonging to women, even if they share those spaces. Think about Nancy and Greg’s house – which is Nancy’s space, not Greg’s, and throughout season 1, Annie was pitted as the outsider to that. She’s a smear of hair oil on Nancy’s perfect couch. It’s made all the starker when Nancy kicks Greg out, and when Annie helps Nancy give birth in that house – a distinctly female, intimate act, that not only operates as a significant feminization of that space, but also about Annie fighting for Nancy to let her in again.

These spaces all keep secrets for the women they belong to too – Mary Pat’s husband’s dead body, Boomer’s very much alive one – because, again, symbolically, they are these women.

Rio’s loft is a really interesting one to look at in this context, because not only is it hyper masculine, but the show underlines that it does not hold the same significance that the girls’ places have for them. Beth does not learn Rio by being inside him – something made stark through their game of twenty questions. In fact, being in Rio’s loft, in his space, only serves to point out how much Beth doesn’t know him. Not only that, but Beth’s inability to lose her house (which is really central to her arc) is paralleled exactly with how easily Rio can separate from his.

The domestic space is not male.

Rio exists outside of it.

Beth x Rio and the Feminine x Masculine

Rio and Beth are basically at polar opposites of the masculine / feminine spectrum, and it’s something that this show often casts in a really stark light through dialogue, visual language, character coding and symbolism.

Beth epitomizes the old archetype of femininity and the female world in a way that I don’t think Annie and Ruby do (although I do think Ruby does in some respects). This is coded into almost every part of her character – from her long history of domestic servitude and marital submission (letting Dean control their finances, not working, keeping the house, etc.) to her fertility (four children!) to the way she dresses in floral, bakes, to certain traits, namely her nurturing tendencies, overt empathy and guilt (not being able to kill Boomer). Even in terms of the casting – Christina is somebody who has a very distinctly feminine body.

On the other hand, Rio, in many ways, epitomizes the old idea of masculinity and the masculine world. He’s coded that way almost as much as Beth is coded as feminine – he’s physically strong (beating up Dean, holding Beth up while they were having sex), assertive, dominant, capable and collected. That’s not even touching on the fact that the golden gun is incredibly phallic, haha.

The show loves to place Beth’s femininity in direct contrast with Rio’s masculinity in a way that it doesn’t do with the other girls or – in fact perhaps more notably – with Beth and Dean (if anything, Dean’s frequently emasculated around Beth, but that feels like a whole other thing, haha), and it does this frequently, and often even in the same shot.

Most notably, think of her pearls on the warehouse door handle:

Their cars parked side-by-side:

Her necklace, his gun:

Her light, his darkness:

Her floral, his solid colours:

Interestingly though, these things are very rarely in competition or combative (although occasionally they are – Rio trying to use her femaleness and his maleness / their sexuality to literally bend her over a table in 2.06 being the clearest example of that). Generally speaking, the show’s visual language though shows us how these things compliment each other. They occupy different gendered spaces, so they can ‘crime’ in different ways – Beth using the big box stores, the secret shoppers, robbing the day spa, are all things that are highly feminised, and give Rio by proxy access to a world he ordinarily wouldn’t (albeit it’s not always a world he’s interested in – like it wasn’t with the botox), and the reverse of that is that Rio gives Beth access to spaces that are highly masculinised and that she ordinarily wouldn’t have access to (again, not always a world she’s interested in either). It’s why when they’re working together, and acknowledging they have different departments, they actually become something really whole, comprehensive and effective.

It’s the exploration of this that I find really intriguing generally, and particularly a thread that I think is reiterated where Beth’s usually at her worst and her most ineffective when she’s trying to emulate Rio’s masculinity. We saw that at the end of 1.10 and the start of 2.01, and I think we saw it at the tail end of season 2 too. When Beth’s succeeding, she’s typically doing something that revels in the strength and power and the underestimation of femininity and female spaces, and turns places that are typically viewed as passive into active ones.

The Secret Shoppers (which worked briefly! And fell apart because she couldn’t handle Mary Pat. Notably almost every scene with them was inside Beth’s house):

The day spa heist:

The Boland Motors takeover / reclamation that focused on feminising the place:

Pretending to be somebody’s mum to get into the kids’ space (which would’ve worked if Beth and Ruby hadn’t started fighting):

Breaking into Rio’s loft:

Again, this is something that seems to be being teased out already in s3 with the paper store and the nail salon, and I’m sure we’ll see it coming up again and again beyond that.

But yes! Your question, haha. I think Rio is enamoured with the strong, feminine space and the untapped female world that Beth exists in, and the ways that she is actively capable of utilising her femininity and her womanness in a way that is completely impossible for him. She can manipulate these spaces – either those already female, or those she makes female aka Boland Motors – in ways that he can’t, and in a way that, at the end of the day, lines his pocket, in the same way that giving her access to his powerful, masculine world lines hers. It’s market development, y’know? But it’s also something that could be a true and successful partnership if they could stop, y’know, playing games and trying to kill each other, haha.

I think it’s worth noting here too that the show has shown us explicitly that Beth absolutely gets off on Rio being highly masculine, and while I think Rio absolutely gets off on Beth being a boss bitch too, it’s also important to note how he responds to her when she’s displaying vulnerability in a way often defined as very feminine – namely crying – and how that display of femininity not only affects him, but often makes him want to touch her (and more and more, follow through on touching her).

Basically I think they’re as obsessed with the contrast between the two of them as we are, haha.

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britishchick09 · 3 years

Text

1984 livewatch

the time has finally come to watch the full movie! it’ll be sad, it’ll be disturbing, it’ll possibly be cringy, but it’ll be a lot of fun! :D

we start out with the mgm lion! noice ;)

epic quote B)

wait why is opera music playing i thought we’d start at the 2 minutes hate

OMG what if they’re gonna hate on opera

this looks like a drive-in movie tbh

narrator: “this is a land of peace and hope, a land of plenty...” OH SHUT UP YOU

they’re showing wheat like it’s little house on the prairie BOI YOU’RE IN LONDON

this is epic propaganda B)

what if the war footage was taken from ww2 and thus... isn’t real :o

HOLD UP is the eurasian war racist?

THE QUEEN HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

WHAT ARE THEY ALL SHOUTING I CAN’T HEAR WHAT THE FDR GUY IS SAYING SHUT UPPPPP

oh no it be u (his face is like ‘WHAT IS GOING ON’ and it’s very lol)

julia’s so into this! :o

o’brien’s like ‘ohhh!!!’

look who decided to SHOW UP FINALLY

he pauses a bit before reluctantly joining in yas ♥

OMG THIS IS LIKE A SCHOOL ASSEMBLY STOP TALKING GEEZ

good they stopped!

WOWWW DON’T EVEN LIST SUZANNA HAMILTON’S NAME WITH THE OTHERS GIVE HER A ‘WITH’ CREDIT WOWWWWW

this IS a school assembly they’re going back to work!

winston in glasses *chef’s kiss*

ooh a rotary dial! great use of tech from when the book was written :D

winston’s looking over at syme WITH SO MUCH JEALOUSY lol

what if the words they speak are just random stuff with no meaning

OMG confession!!!!!

poor winnie with his cough :(

this confession sounds JUST LIKE WINSTON’S OMG!!!!

winston: “bugger!” he’s a brit lol :D

epic B)

OMG this guy read goldstein’s book SO DID WINSTON!!!!

i love how the diary is in a brick hole that’s so cool :D

the diary scene was filmed on april 4th just like in the movie so that’s way rad man :D

i want you valley!!! :D

ooh they’re put a smol scene of his childhood in there coolio! :D

he s l e e p

this violin squeak tho :o

OMG THIS IS THE STANDING UP SCHOOL SCENE

it’s not but i can easily imagine it lol :D

he’s a stick omg ;o

when the lady talks to him you know it’s not a recording ;)

lady: “anyone under 45 is perfectly capable of touching his toes” BOI

oh no PARSONS

parsons: “choco rations are going up” c h o c o

parsons: “i seem to have run out of razor blades for some reason’ yeah,,, for some reason... ;)

this is so a cafeteria scene at school

THEY SAW EACH OTHER OMG

♫ i suddenly see him standing there, a beautiful stranger tall and fair, i wanna stuff this weird food in my faaaace! ♫ :D

me: “this is so romantic!” winston’s thoughts: “lemme smash HER WITH A ROCK”

wait did the lady say pineapple grenade???

HIS FACE LOOOL

syme rip boi

the 11th edition isn’t thicc :/

aww winston’s smol nod ♥

parsons: “by 2050 we won’t have conversations like this!” yeah because of screens lol

OMG the food looks and taste like meat but isn’t IT’S PLANT BASED MEAT!!!! :o

parsons just pulled a ‘hey need help with that?’ and put winston’s food on his plate EPIC

julia’s lookin’ at u ;)

YAS PROLES HOPE!!! :D

oh no DON’T TALK ABOUT THE 50 YEAR OLD WOMAN SEX WINSTON

OH NOOOOOOO

he liked the ‘bright red lips’ yet...

THIS CHICK’S LIPS AREN’T BRIGHT BOI

poor baby desperate for money :(

let’s GET THIS BEAT

hand on cheek = doublepluscute ^_^

epic foreshadowing B)

OMG CHESTNUT TREE POEM FORESHADOWINNNGGGGGG

OMG a couple is making out in the bar EPIC

winston’s just like ‘nnope’

OMG THE THOUGHT POLICE WERE FOLLOWING????

he’s at an antique store in prescott bless his heart ♥

mr. charrington sounds so kind WHYYYY

THE BIRTH OF A QUEEN ♥

mr. charrington says ‘4 dollars’ but they’re in london??

YAS BELLS OF ST. CLEMENS!!!! :D

winston: “what was that?” mr. charrington: “something old.” no DUH

they see each other againnn!!!!! :D

winston writes that he hates her SAME WITH A LOOK LIKE THAT

OMG SMOL WINNIE BIG O’BRIEN????? :o

his mom is lying dead in the field like the erza kid in ‘kirsten’s promise’ :(

he’s just... staring

OMG SPYING ON THE SPICY STARING ACTION :o

she PLONKED

that ‘ow!’ was so fake jules!

this is like anna and hans but not as bad underneath!

julia: “it’s nothing!” but this is turning out to be something... ;)

we’re half an hour in and wowza it’s gone by so fast! :D

winston: *gets a cute love note from julia* YEET!

THE HELICOPTER IS BACC!!!!! they’re really not making the spying subtle

OMG THIS IS THE THOUGHT CRIMINAL SCENE YAAAAS!!!!! :D

winston is the best plummer confirmed

kid: “you’re a thought criminal!” winston: *gives a slight ‘wha’ face and smiles* ICONIC

the crowd is clapping and cheering over the war yet winston’s not doing anything SAME

jules is just scooching by lol

HAND HOLDING WHILE PASSING A NOTE OMG ♥♥

the sky does exist! :o

the telescreen has some great music :D

winston’s joining the ‘big man’s hiking group’ suure you are... ;)

the train is going to the beat of the kids’ singing coolio! :D

big brother is called ‘bb’ yas bby!

YEEES THE I WANT YOU VALLEY SCEENE!!!!!

the lq audio made the twig crack and the leave brushing really weird lol

winston: “i want you.” I-CON-IC!!!! :D

THAT SMIRK THO

winston: “i want everyone corrupt.” julia: “i’ll suit you, then. i’m corrupt to the core.” *mal screech*

OH NONONONOONO SHE GONNA TAKE HER TOP OFF BI PANIC BI PANICCC!!!!!

she really went commando huh

ALL THE WAY

the sex looks like it hurts NO WAY MAN NOT FOR ME NNNNOPE

i’m glad it was only a part you couldn’t really see and not a full on thing I DON’T NEED THAT

awww she’s so peaceful after big naughty :)

this is vaguely gay...

aww winston’s hair ruffling in the wind ♥

c r o n c h

also did he just cronch into a potato???

OMG THIS IS JUST LIKE SCHOOL

teacher: “when the orgasm is finally eradicated...” totally julia: “NOT ON MY WATCH”

winston is the kid who smokes in glass while julia is the one kid who Just Doesn’t Care lol :D

thoughtcrime THIS IS THOTCRIME

wow syme is still alive?

julia: “you dropped your ink pencil” you mean pen?

winnie’s back in prescott! :D

the room is 4 bucks a night noice B)

BACC TO THE H8 BBY

the modern say 2 minutes hate is probably just a livestream with kids texting ‘h8 xd’ in the chat lol :D

winston’s thoughts: “she who is so careful...” boi she threw a dictionary at the telescreen in the book THAT’S SO NOT CAREFUL

hey girl CUTE LQ SMILE YOU HAVE THERE!!! :D

YAS THE REAL COFFEE SCENE!!!!! :D

she has so many smiles YAS!!!!

she’s so eager with showing him I LOVE YOU SO MUCH JULES ♥♥♥

she says ‘real sugar, real bread’ and... jam

winston: “how did you manage to get all this?” jules has her ways... ;)

winston: “i want you” julia: “i want you too” YAS :D ♥♥

the thiccc singer is here!! :D

she’s so pretty! ♥

aww the stroke ♥

his hands are shaking as he touches her :(

winston: “freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four. if that is granted, all else follows” iconic!

YAS THE PAPER!!! :D

it be gin time ;)

he scratches the face off the gin bottle woah :o

I JUST REALIZED THAT THIS IS O’BRIEN :o

winston’s little ‘yes!’ at getting the 10th newspeak dictionary ♥

that’s a look of longing my friends! :o

winston: “the call has come. all my life i’ve been waiting for it...” and now he’ll go into the unknown... ;)

AAND we cut to naked julia eating an apple! slight bi panic

she’s touching the paperweight queen love it ♥

SHE KNOWS THE CLEMENS YAS!!! :D

julia: “i just know it!” BOI YOUR G-PA HELPED OUT

winston: “the only thing to do is to walk out of here before it’s too late” thus my ‘julia lives’ au comes in! :D

winston: “never seen one another again” ...oh he was talking about that NOT IN MY AU SON

julia: “you do, i do.” omg marriage :o

YAAAS JULSTON KISS!!!!!!! :D

fluffy! ♥

julia: “i love you.” awww :)

winston: “julia. do you think the resistance is real?” julia: “none of it’s real.” STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER!

♥

OMFG THERE WAS AN EXPLOSION :o

work is scrambling like eggs!

poor headache bby! :(

epic B)

winston’s dreaming of his bishy selfish chocolate mom adventure!

the rats were there when his mom and sister were vaporized! :o

she’s in the dress! ♥

they’re talking about betrayal and julia’s like ‘they can’t do that!” OH BOI BUT THEY CAN!!!!

julia: “they can’t get to your heart” aww :)

awkward...

winston sees o’brien WITHOUT JULIA THE F????

this feels like the principal’s office lol :D

o’brien’s voice is so deep and british ♥

the way he clutches the newspeak dictionary is so cute! :D

aww he’s stroking the pages as he reads :)

the oceania anthem sounds russian :o

YAAAAAAAASSSS!!!!!!! :D

so soft ♥♥

winston: “julia, my love.” MY LOVE MY LOVE AHHH!!!! :D

YEES THE COFFEE SMILEEE!!!!! :D

she’s hungry... she wants coffee... who’s gonna tell her coffee isn’t food?

omg i saw winston butt :o

winston: “she’s beautiful.” julia: “she’s a meter around the hips easily” winston: “that’s her standard of beauty.” YAAAS!!! :D

winston: “the future is ours.” YAS

OH CRAP THEY SAID ‘WE ARE THE DEAD’ NOOOO

mr. charington is loud compared to how i thought in the book

his ‘you are the dead’ should’ve been quieter like winston and julia’s then he could be loud!

FBI OPEN UP!!!!!

charrington: “here comes a candle to guide you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!” OHHHH NICE ONE MR C!!!!!! :D

RIP TO A QUEEN :’(

i should be a bit more heartbroken BUT THAT MR C RHYME MAN

OMFG THEY JUST BEAT UP JULES

SHE’S IN SO MUCH PAIN NOOOO :’(

why does he look old

awww :(

delete the drunk old lady BUT GIVE US PARSONS SUUURE

i dread the scene to come...

parsons didn’t say that he said ‘down with big brother’ so that’s a bummer :/

aww poor parsons he’s crying! :(

oh SNAP room 101!!!! :o

poor parsons but at least that scene wasn’t a thing!

OUCH THAT SMACC LOOKED LIKE IT HURT

is this leading into the bloody mouth scene? I STILL NEED TO KNOW WHAT THAT IS

winston doesn’t know where he is IT’S THE I WANT YOU VALLEY!!!

hold up this is just a vision ok BUT WHERE’S THE BLOODY MOUTH SCENE

frankenstein and spirit halloween called!

also o’brien flipped the switch without warning BISH

o’brien: “you suffer from a defective memory” and you suffer from a BISH MEMORY SIR

remember winston it’s all in the mind... ;)

WHY DID O’BRIEN SHOCK WINSTON HE SAID FIVE

'how many fingers’ is a trick question because winston sees four YET WE SEE FIVE OHHH

mother gothel vibes...

awww winston’s little scared squeak :(

winston: “i don’t know... i don’t know!” SAY FIVE WINSTON SAY FIVEEEEE

o’brien’s voice is so calming yet it spouts evil words...

julia immediately betrayed winston BECAUSE SHE HAD A ROSEMARY KENNEDY yet she’s somehow still alive without damage by the end???

ooh a new shot! :D

they just faded to black and showed a new angle which is a bit weird...

o’brien: “you’re thinking that my face is old and tired...” because it belongs to poor richard burton!

o’brien just yoinked winston’s tooth out tho :o

mother gothel strikes again!

winston to o’brien: “i love you.” you don’t say that back to jules YET YOU SAY IT TO O’BRIEN BOIIIII

o’brien: “you’re one of us. one of the chosen.” one of us gooble gobble! also ANAKIN IS THAT YOU????

winston just said ‘i love you’ oMG OMG OM WAIT WWAIIITIT

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D

seconds after she says ‘i love you too’ SHE’S FREAKING SHOT DAAANG NO PUNCHES PULLED BACK!!!!!

aww he called her ‘my love’ even in a dream

so that was the infamous bloody mouth scene and it was quicker than i thought it would be? at least i have a bright julia smile! ♥

OMG winston’s calling for her yet it sounds so weird WHYYY

he’s much improved!

they’re skyping lol

after all he’s been through he still hates bb! :o

ROOM 101 :o

room 101 is a personalized experience just for you! :D

also IT’S A DREAM MIRROR

omg the rats are GOING AT EACH OTHER GEEZ

winston’s squeak at the rats no!!! :(

‘do it to julia’ sounds a bit selfish but it’s the betrayal we’ve been waiting for!

...NOT

uh oh here comes the awkward reunion...

they should’ve said “...sup.” to each other

the bartender saying “on the house!’ tiredly each time is great :D

winston: “thank you for coming.” julia in her thoughts: “yeah whateves bro.” :/

at least they can still bond over something :)

jules gin time ;)

they ratted out on each other true love???

julia: “we must meet again.” winston: “yes, we must meet again.” ...they never met again

but if they did it would be a bro time!

winston: “i have seduced party members of both sexes” BI NANI???? :o

since his crimes are like the guy’s from earlier... what if he didn’t do them and was convinced that he did? :o

in the book he says i love you to bb, but here he turns away and says it... what if he still loves julia? :o

and with that question, the movie has come to a close! it’s a fantastic little film that closely follows the book. while i would’ve liked to see julia with winston at o’brien’s and the drunk jail lady, the cutting of the gross parsons scene, the addtion of the bloody mouth scene and the possibly hopeful ending make up for it. overall, this is an amazing adaptation of such a great book! :D

#livewatch #i bet this is just as good as the book! :D

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comradekatara · 5 years

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I saw someone once talk about misogyny in atla and how the fire nation seems to be the least misogynistic (except kyoshi island); female soldiers while the water tribe wouldn't allow katara to learn offensive styles and toph was barely allowed to exist autonomously. Also, Zuko's daughter being heir. But I feel like that has more to do with the fire nation being "you there!! Destroy some other nations with us now" and wanting lots of warriors rather than being forward thinking

hmmmmmm...... people will often cite female guards as an example of why the fire nation isn’t misogynistic. women can work in maximum security prisons and abuse human rights too yaasss queen!!!!!!!!

and i agree (obviously) that the water tribe, as a whole, holds some pretty fuckin sexist beliefs. katara isn’t allowed to be a warrior, yue is married off as a teenager to a man she doesn’t even like as a person, and of course sokka is fed a bunch of bullshit that he espouses until he arrives on kyoshi. (which is episode four by the way. like, yes, sokka was sexist, but he also started chugging that respect women juice the second his beliefs were proven wrong! sokka is open-minded as fuck. but that’s for another time.)

kyoshi island is interesting. it’s basically this paradise for gender. when kyoshi broke off from the earth kingdom (inadvertently defeating chin the conqueror in the process), it was evident that she wanted there to be a place that was safe from dangerous convention–– where she and her comrades could be themselves. i find it hard to believe that under at least 95% of the kyoshi warriors throughout history have been lesbians or bi women.

the rest of the earth kingdom is a lot more...conservative. ba sing se is shown to have beauty standards that intersect with class. gaoling also shows this through the beifong family as a whole. if you’re rich in the earth kingdom and you’re a woman, your job is to sit there and look pretty. working class earth kingdom women have more autonomy in a sense, but obviously if they’re living in poverty (which many if not most are due to the conditions of war) then you’re stripped of autonomy anyway.

i can’t say much about the air nomads, as they do not exist in this world. they do appear to be gender-segregated, though.

as for the fire nation, i think the fact that female firelords can exist, (not proven through izumi, who lives in the future and therefore it can be assumed the world has progressed, but) proven through azula, doesn’t actually say as much as we think it does. plenty of deeply sexist societies have been ruled by women. look at ancient egypt. look at britain. female monarchs and female prison guards do not indicate that a society isn’t sexist, simply because the water tribe is more sexist. that’s absurd!

let 👏🏼the 👏🏼fire 👏🏼nation 👏🏼have 👏🏼female 👏🏼war 👏🏼criminals 👏🏼

in our world, it is evident that patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism & colonialism are intrinsically linked. of course, avatar does not take place in our world, but it does draw heavily from it. the fire nation parallels a history of japanese imperialism, and that cannot be ignored.

iroh, good, kindly iroh, who helps zuko so much, is a misogynist. he can critically reexamine the cost of war, but perhaps judith butler is a bit too far. he gives zuko a knife and azula a doll, the irony there being that it should have been the other way around.

and i think above all, it is the fire nation siblings that exemplify the sexism endemic to the fire nation. perhaps, on a surface level, women have more rights than they do elsewhere in the world, but through their society’s treatment of both zuko and azula, we see that gender matters. sokka comes from a place that insists he be a man (swift as a coursing river). well, zuko also comes from a place wherein he is expected to be a man (with all the strength of a great typhoon). zuko is not an inherent violent person (obviously). he adopts behaviors of toxic masculinity because it is the only way he sees himself regaining his honor, being worthy in his father’s eyes.

azula’s arc can definitely be analyzed through the lens of how misogyny shapes her life, because it does, even just in ursa and iroh’s subtle treatment of her, or her need to perform perfection and total competence at all times. but, besides toph, who has a parallel arc (but she deals with it a lot more efficiently lol), zuko’s is very much about Gender. what it means to be a man (as mysterious as the dark side of the moon). (okay thats the last one i promise.)

in the legend of korra comics turf wars, kya informs us that even kyoshi could not make progress in regards to homophobia in the earth kingdom (hence her isolationist approach. she was just like okay fuck this). apparently, air nomads were all about free love, which... idk about but whatever. and the water tribe as of lok times likes to “keep matters private,” but they “won’t disown you for coming out.” and according to these comics, “for most of its history, the fire nation was tolerant, but then fire lord sozin took power. he decreed that same sex relationships were criminal.” i think this is kind of flippant, just “bad guy do bad thing,” but i also think there’s truth in it. there’s no doubt in my mind that the fire nation is the most actively homophobic of all four nations.

just look at the episode “the beach,” which showcases not only how these kids (azula specifically) have been warped by this mentality that they exist as weapons of mass destruction before they are teenagers, but also how they feel forced to perform heterosexuality. azula attempts to get a boyfriend because she is jealous of ty lee, who is getting a lot of attention from the teenage boys around them, and even though she enjoys the shallow validation, the second they ask her out she panics and runs away. meanwhile, mai is as sullen as ever, which later in that episode we learn is a response to her mother’s insistence that she be Proper and Behave (again, class intersecting with misogyny!). and zuko is at his absolute worst this episode. like book 1 zuko has nothing on beach zuko, who sucks so hard i want to punch him in the face. especially when surrounded by other guys his age, he feels this pressure to perform masculinity, which he always takes to mean Be As Angry As Possible. the beach is about how they are lying to others, and to themselves. azula says she doesn’t have sob stories like all of them. mai says so as well. when azula asks zuko whom he’s angry at (and it does seem like she’s genuinely trying to help him here) and she says “dad?” he gasps and immediately says “no!” (but he’s getting there.) in a society with gender equality, do you really think they’d all be behaving the way they do? i mean, zuko’s entire arc is gay as fuck!!!! and azula’s also pretty clearly a big ol dyke, even if that’s less relevant to her journey.

basically, i think saying the fire nation isn’t sexist is a pretty surface level interpretation of a society wherein homophobia is deeply entrenched due to its imperialist values. there will always be sexism, misogyny & homophobia under patriarchal, industrialist, imperialist power structures.

QED

#i just like ending all my analyses w QED #BECAUSE I CAN #asks #anon #analysis #thank u for sending this ask ive been dying for an opportunity to talk about this #and i got to it first haha chell SUCKAAAAAA

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talkingismylifewrites · 5 years

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So I saw in one of your replies you came up with a mob boss au. Would you ever write it and put it on A03 cos I would LOVE to read it. Also please say John's the mobster who's like "if you mess with Roger you'll die" so a rival gang kidnap Roger to blackmail John. But then Roger turns out to be trained in combat and beats the shit out them all and escapes and when John hears he's just like "I fucking warned you not to mess with him!"

okay this is a) a long time coming and b) was born from me watching all of narcos in like...a week

in fact, it legit started with me texting lo “maybe i’ve been watching too much narcos but.....”

okay so our story begins with the knowledge that roger’s dad ran the mob

like roger is his heir and his son and his dad is the Big Kingpin

john’s dad is a shitty little lackey who has waaaaaaay too many debts so he grew up in the mob?? but lower ranks

and john sorta started getting involved when he was like 10 or so bc no one looks twice at the nicely groomed white kid right? and his dad was Desperate

and like he and roger had this whole Star Crossed Lovers shit bc a) roger was Not Allowed to be Gay and b) they weren’t ever supposed to have even met like completely different pay grades

BUT roger overheard him arguing with his dad over a better way to do a job that would be less dangerous and way harder to track but he got brushed off with a “the boss is always right you don’t argue john it’ll get you killed”

but rog was like.... shit no that’s WAY better

and ended up dropping a few lines to find out who this kid is cause... he’s smart and smart goes far right

like u gotta look Out for the smart ones, he knows that, his dad taught him that

(with backhands and cruel fists while teaching him chess, that one night in the barrel when he fucked up a simple plan when he was 13...)

(like rog is smart he’s just not Great at compartmentalization. so his plans start out great but go off the railed as he gets excited/pissed off) but like johns smart he picks up when he’s suddenly being tailed and is like Ok What Did I Do to one of them

and the guy panics and takes him straight to roger who is like..... how did u fuck up a simple tail, Jesus Christ

but yeah like he and john end up having a sort of clandestine friendship of sorts? in which roger essentially brings half baked plans to him and john Fixes them

which sorta turns into mutual pining

john is like this is my angry mob boss son best friend and roger’s like this is my evil genius best friend who kills people

but yeah basically roger’s dad keeps beating him when things go wrong, even if its not his fault

John is observant okay he was noticing the direct correlation between roger “getting jumped” and plans going wrong

So when it’s one of his??? That goes tits up (and tbh it wasn’t even like a bad screw up they just had a witness who was taken care of the next day) and roger like slinks into Johns apartment/office with the break down for John and his eyes is swollen completely close and he’s got a fat lip the size of a strawberry John immediately is ready for murder

And roger never admits it’s his dad???? who’s beating him???

because Taylors Should Be Better

Because why would he? It’s embarrassing but also it’s happened his whole life it’s expected of a mob bosses son (think the Baba Yaga scene in John wick 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻)

which then turns into john pounding him into the mattress and promising no one will Ever land a hand on him again when he turns up one time with a battered to hell face because something went Wrong on one of the plans (which. extra emotional effect bc it was one of johns)

and like a month later roger’s dad is mysteriously found shot dead

cuz John mentally is like okay. Plan Ides of March is a go. Moving it up three years he’s getting taken out tomorrow

And John KILLS ROGER’S DAD IN COLD FUCKING BLOOD

the only??? person??? roger would EVER take that from is his dad

like johns heard the stories about roger taking out men twice his size yeah? but roger never has any defensive wounds on his hand

John knows that roger can and will defend himself

He’s seen him in action

But he never raises a hand against his dad when he straight up could kill him with one hand tied behind his back

so john figures it out and a month later roger’s dad is dead

and now they need a leader?? another boss

and they look to roger, but roger is like no

he knows himself well enough, he is not strong enough in terms of planning and plotting, he’s a good action man but not strategist

that’s john

so roger steps aside and is like john is going to run the show

obvi there’s a power void and there’s basically civil war but with roger’s ruthlessness and john’s genius they fucking take all the little fractions down and they take them down HARD

john sits on his throne with roger standing over his shoulder, knuckles bloodied and grin wicked

and everyone knows if you fuck with roger??? you fuck with john

and vice versa

once, roger got shot on a mission and it was like, the one time?? john loans him out for a plan that wasn’t his

and he’s fine it’s just a graze but John and him in their bathroom and Johns like hyper focused on cleaning the wound and he furious and harsh and is like you fucking dumbass did no one teach you to duck?? You fool you dumb piece of shit

and roger just gently cradles john’s face in his hands and lifts his head to look at him and kisses him so gently and he’s like it’s okay, i’m fine, i’m here

and john’s like you are never going on any raid or plan or anything that i have not PERSONALLY vetted

the next day, the guy who’s plan it was is sniveling and apologizing on his knees in front of John and Roger; it was an accident, he says

and johns like “it’s okay. i understand, these things happen.”

and then just blank eyed shoots him in the femur

“these things just happen, you understand?”

roger just smiles from behind him, doesn’t even flinch in the aftermath

john and roger rule with an iron fist until one day things go tits up

and roger ends up taking the fall for john, and he gets sent to jail

john, in retaliation, goes on the warpath

Because he’s totally turned around the family business they’ve gone more corporate and it’s more like s legit business now?? They still kill people and rob and shit but they’re not monsters or criminals

And they give money back into the neighborhood and shit and donate to charity and kiss babies blah blah blah

But the authorities are like we need to show our strength against these villains so Rogers looking at like 25years to life

And John just kinda is like okay cool I can fix this

And it’s the biggest campaign ever he’s got the best lawyers on retainer he’s blackmailing people left and right he’s buying witnesses and finding loopholes like he’s fucking working the system and he’s gonna get roger out even if it kills him because in his eyes it was His Fault

Roger is like your honor clearly there’s been some sort of mistake

Because the only thing that places him there is a grainy cell phone video and a witness that’s not exactly clean

So like the case isn’t solid

But it’s enough for a trial like most of it is circumstantial

And John is like I would kill the whole world for you and Rogers like sounds excessive but same

the difference between roger and john is that john would kill the whole world for roger after sitting down and planning the whole thing for several weeks. roger would kill the whole world for john and not remember doing it after (though still probably not regret it)

Roger would act first think later

And John would be like oh I planned it all out two years ago in the shower

Just in case

so roger gets sent to jail and john just...looses it

like he has to get yanked off of miami when the verdict is read of two years sentencing because its not technically miami’s fault??? its just shitty

and meanwhile, roger is getting dragged off to jail and he’s like don’t worry, babe, it’s gonna be fine

(it both is and isn’t)

roger shows up in jail and within a week he’s running the joint, he’s got lackeys and he’s paid off the guards and its basically a vacation

meanwhile john is just burning his competition to the ground, he’s making people rue the day they ever crossed him

(they TOTALLY get conjugal visits that last longer than uhhhh usual)

bc you betcha ass they’d be So fucking possessive of one another. like roger rules that prison with an iron fist

anyways, miami appeals on the basis of circumstantial, and he basically proves that legit ANYONE else could have done it and this is clearly railroading and obviously roger is innocent

and after 8 months, he walks

when he gets out???? john is there to pick him up

they drive off to a safe house outside of the city and they had wicked crazy dangerous hot sex and its just insanity

and when they come back???

its like people know to just flee when they see them

john, mob boss and kingpin, and roger his dangerous and beautiful second in command

also freddie is roger’s bff, miami is their lawyer, and crystal is roger’s bodyguard who always gets into more trouble than roger but he once took a bullet for roger so he’s chill

ps anyone tries to kidnap roger??? gets dealt with a) by roger and if roger manages to let them get away then b) john. you’d rather be dealt with by roger, and not john

#roger taylor #john deacon #mob boss au #answered ask #caro writes

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swissmissficrecs · 5 years

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Other people’s favorites 2018 - Long fics

As I was assembling everyone's picks for their favorites from 2018 that didn't end up on my own Best of 2018 list, the post was getting longer and longer so I decided to split it between long fics (over 10K) and short ones. I also had to disqualify some that were mentioned as they actually completed posting prior to 2018 or were in another fandom. Sorry if it wasn't clear, this was only for Sherlock Holmes fics. All of these are BBC verse. I hope this helps you discover something amazing!

A Hundred Crimson Sols by elldotsee (55K, E, Johnlock) Will Holmes is a chemical researcher recognized widely for his contributions to the new Mars exploration program. Thanks to his ground-breaking developments, the IMMC (International Mars Mission Corporation) is one step closer to Martian colonization. Will and his team of scientists are headed out on the first of three manned missions before the first group of settlers arrive. Three days before launch, one of the crew has to be replaced. Will panics because...new people. The replacement is of course one John Watson, biomedical engineer and space hottie who was pretty sure he had retired from actual space exploration and was now content to work in the nice, quiet research lab.

A Walk in the Woods by Ginger_Cat (16K, E, Johnlock) After a series of traumatic events, John has left London in self-imposed isolation. Permanently. There is, of course, one man who might succeed in bringing him home.

All We Do Is Fall by vitruvianwatson (16K, T, Johnlock) There's obviously a very good reason for Sherlock to take over John's bed in the middle of the night. It's absolutely not just because Sherlock is a drama queen, no siree, not at all.

Beauty from Ashes by BakerTumblings (209K, M, Johnlock) John Watson, MD, is a freelance Medical Coordinator, who has been hired by British Government leader Mycroft Holmes to work miracles on behalf of his brother, who is suffering from terrible sequelae of addiction, failure to thrive, and unsuccessful rehab stints. Cue the headstrong encounters!

Chaperones by MissDavis (34K, T, Johnlock) Right. Of course. Everyone assumed they were a couple and no one would question it. John put his elbows up on the table so he could rest his head in his hands. "You want to pretend to be a couple so we can chaperone a trip to Disney World with Rosie's class and you won't have to share a room with a stranger?" "Exactly." Sherlock beamed at him. "Don't worry about the cost. The Birmingham case last month paid more than enough to cover expenses for all three of us."

Enigma by khorazir (289K, M, Johnlock) It’s the autumn of 1941, war is raging in Europe, German U-boats are raiding Allied convoys in the Atlantic, the Luftwaffe is bombing English cities, and the cryptographers at Bletchley Park are working feverishly to decode their enemies' encrypted communications. One should consider this challenge and distraction enough for capricious codebreaker Sherlock Holmes. But the true enigmas are yet waiting to be deciphered: an unbreakable code, a strange murder, and the arrival of Surgeon Captain John H. Watson of the Royal Navy.

Extricate - An Ex Files Special by 7PercentSolution (231K, E, Viclock) When Sherlock met Victor, and what happened next. A backstory that explains why caring truly may not be an advantage. This follows ACD canon and ignores BBC season 4, allowing the two of them to meet while at University.

Fragile by Tor_Raptor (160K, T, Gen) Sherlock gets sick, not 'he'll recover in a few days' sick, but hospitalised for a long time sick. His friends are all there to help him, but he is Sherlock, he doesn't want or need their help.

Give It Welcome by Glenmore (13K, T, Johnlock) Rosie Watson is commissioned to write a story about memories of her favourite gifts.

Heart's Desire by 88thParallel (20K, G, Johnlock, Jolto) Reeling after a tragic loss, John Watson is surprised when he finds love again. After a lifetime of illness, Sherlock Holmes finally feels his heart truly beat for another. But as they move toward something more serious, an unbelievable truth is revealed that threatens to break both their hearts for good.

Hello You by weeesi (20K, T, Johnlock) John kind of can’t believe he’s doing this and kind of can’t imagine doing anything else. He dips his head, heart pounding.

Hiraeth by BiancaAparo (281K, M, Johnlock, Warstan, Mollstrade, Sherlock/OFC) Sherlock scowled, “This is the thanks I receive for coming to fetch you.” “I never asked you to come get me!” Violet shouted as he slammed the bedroom door...

Keep Your Eyes Fixed on Me by elldotsee (26K, M, Johnlock) Nothing to theorize here- Sherlock jumped, and all The Queen's horses might not be able to put him together again. Sherlock was gravely injured when he hit the pavement. John is by his side, but things are a bit not good for both of them.

Licence to Kiss by fellshish (13K, T, Johnlock) Sherlock loves John, and John loves... James Bond. He only made Sherlock watch every single film. Tedious. And now John's birthday is coming up. Sherlock can't tell him how he feels, but he can organise an amazing gift: John's very own spy adventure. Sherlock begs Mycroft for a real case with some extra gadgets. And perhaps some actors pretending to be criminals. What could possibly go wrong?

Rewind by All_I_need (87K, E, Johnlock and Warstan) About a month before John's wedding, he and Sherlock embark on one last case together: a murder at a remote hotel in the middle of nowhere. A lot can happen in a week. And a lot doesn't. But what if ...?

Sherlock Holmes, undercover lover by fellshish (51K, E, Johnlock) When the celebrity bachelor on a dating show begins receiving death threats, Sherlock goes undercover as a contestant to try and solve the puzzle before it's too late. Problem: he doesn't know how to seduce people. Who better than John 'three continents' Watson to provide seduction tips? It's not gay if you're helping out a friend.

Signs Following by Vulgarweed (24K, E, Johnlock) 1976. Bone Fiddle-verse; Appalachian AU. A couple years into their relationship, John and Sherlock are cozily setting up for spring with Mrs. Hudson's expert guidance when a distraught young woman appeals to them for help and sends them on one of their strangest cases yet - in order to solve one murder and prevent another, they must tangle with a sinister preacher and enter the much-sensationalized, little-understood world of Pentecostal Holiness believers who strictly observe Mark 16: 17-18.

The Darkness Within, So Close by shiplocks_of_love (42K, T, Gen) Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller deal with a new string of murders in Broadchurch. Help comes from an unlikely place as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson travel to West Dorset. But when the new crimes open old wounds and unearth the ghost of Moriarty, it becomes clear the game is not over yet.

The Dead Detective by DiscordantWords (47K, M, Johnlock) John Watson has spent the last three years of his life simply going through the motions. A chance encounter with a man claiming to be a stranded spy changes everything.

The Real Great Perfumers by shelleysprometheus (45K, E, Johnlock) The case, this case. This extraordinary, fascinating, scintillating case. A house. Designed entirely by its eccentric owner, built by no less than five hundred expert tradesmen in the heart of Marrakesh. A house that had, seemingly not only driven its owner out, but also to his quite unpleasant death. And a perfumer, a chemist no less, the very thought of the secrets that house could reveal, would reveal was irresistible. Sherlock had to have this case ... and it seems, he also had to have John!

The Subscription by delightful_fear (25K, E, Johnlock) John is back in the UK, but he's stuck in a bit of a rut. Some friends get him a subscription to add some excitement back into his life...

whiskies neat by Ellipsical (20K, E, Johnlock) Home and hearth and whiskies neat, or, alternatively, Sherlock Holmes falls in love.

#rec list #other people's recs

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