#legacies i know you got cancelled but bring my girl back

[henelopekru]

Illicit Affairs

CHAPTER ONE. Welcome Back

A Hope Mikaelson x Penelope Park (Henelope) Fic "Don't call me kid, don't call me baby."

Word Count: 2k words

Summary. Inspired by an old tweet I saw just after the second season of Legacies aired. In which Penelope had returned to Mystic Falls after all, only to realise Josie had moved on. Her so-called romance with a forgotten friend is only a ploy to make her ex-girlfriend jealous, never intending to go as far as it does.

A/N. Honestly this is a fic I've wanted to write for a while now. I actually haven't checked, but I imagine Henelope doesn't get a lot of love since they literally interacted twice the entire show lmao. Also please forgive me if some of this is a little inaccurate to the show, it's been a while since my last rewatch of Legacies!

Penelope wasn’t sure whether it was the circumstances that made her irritated by seemingly everything or if it was just Mystic Falls High. The school receptionist typing away at a computer likely older than Penelope herself, the ticking of a clock prehistoric in appearance.

8:55am, it read. Penelope frowned, it was far too early to be awake, especially while her body was still combating a severe case of jet lag. How long had she been waiting now? The email she’d gotten after enrolling last night had asked her to arrive at the reception at 8:30, it wouldn’t surprise her if they’d just forgotten about her. She contemplated asking the receptionist, who Penelope was about seventy percent certain was playing a flash game instead of actually doing any work.

She didn’t want to be here, pulling at a loose thread on her chair, trying hard to ignore the oddly stale scent in the air that threatened to make her nauseous. Still, this had been the agreement she’d decided on with her parents, she could come back to Mystic Falls without them, but she had to continue going to school - they just hadn’t specified what school.

Never in a million years would she have imagined she’d be going to a public school of all places, but anywhere sounded better than the Salvatore School right now. She couldn’t go back there, not after what had happened last night.

The plan had been to surprise Josie with her return. After the way their goodbye had gone, Penelope had assumed Josie would be thrilled to have her back. Sure, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten back together, but she’d just been excited at the idea of seeing her again.

But seeing her with someone else? With Landon Kirby of all people?

At least they hadn’t seen her, that Penelope had spotted them first. She’d managed to preserve her pride so far, but she wouldn’t have stood a chance if they’d known she’d seen them. That was the only silver lining she could see for now, but she didn’t feel optimistic enough to try and think of any others. It was a shitty situation, nothing could fix it.

Josie had been the only reason Penelope had even returned, wanting to warn her about the Merge, wanting to love her in spite of all her flaws and in spite of Lizzie. Her new school in Belgium hadn’t been so bad after all, designed completely for witches, the only downside it had was that there was no Josie. She was too late, Josie had moved on and there was no way Penelope could go back to the boarding school, she couldn’t stand seeing her and Landon together again.

The worst part was that she had no real place to be angry or hurt; Penelope had already broken up with Josie, long before she’d even left for Belgium, she’d broken her heart first - so this was what it felt like, karma stung more than Penelope would’ve liked. 

She’d never actually been broken up with before, or rejected, but she got the feeling her situation with Josie was more painful than any other kind of heartbreak could be. It wasn’t that neither of them cared, Penelope had just messed up and it was too late to fix it.

It was her own fault, she’d caused this.

Penelope had hardly had the time to give much thought to the other girl she’d seen near the mill that night, right after she’d left Josie and Landon. The girl was a student - maybe? - but not one that Penelope recognised, she’d simply chalked her down to being a new transfer, she didn’t look young enough to be a freshman, probably around Penelope’s age.

The girl was the last of her worries though, just as she had been last night. Besides, Penelope doubted that she’d even see her again, she didn’t intend on going anywhere near the boarding school.

“The principal will see you now, Miss Park.” The school receptionist mercifully tore Penelope from her thoughts before she could wallow in any more self-pity. 

Penelope nodded, standing up from her seat in the waiting room, boots squeaking as they made contact with the rubber floors. She grimaced at the harsh sound, approaching the door to the headmaster’s office, reading over the newly placed name plate.

‘Principal A. Saltzman’

It didn’t come as a complete surprise to Penelope, she’d known Alaric had taken a job in Mystic Falls High. Perhaps she hadn’t known it was the job of principal, but it made sense, considering he’d been the headmaster at the Salvatore school. Still, that didn’t take away the dreadful awkwardness that she knew would come with having to talk to her ex-girlfriend’s father.

With a near inaudible sigh, Penelope knocked on the door, waiting for permission from the man inside before she entered the office, unsure of what to expect.

“Take a seat, Penelope.” Alaric gestured towards the empty seat across from his side of the desk, hitting the witch with an odd sense of deja vu from her first day at the Salvatore Boarding School. It felt like forever ago now, since she’d first convinced her parents to allow her to move from her home in New Orleans to a small town in Virginia.

Sitting down, Penelope wouldn’t even dare to look Alaric in the eye, out of.. What? Embarrassment? Guilt? She couldn’t pinpoint it exactly, but both seemed to apply. Embarrassed she’d believed Josie would just take her back, guilty they’d even broken up in the first place. Penelope wondered if Alaric knew about Josie and Landon, if the kiss she’d witnessed the night before had been the first of many to come or if they’d been together since Penelope had left for Belgium.

The silence in the room was deafening, as Alaric quietly flicked through his computer screen, likely looking through Penelope’s files from her last two schools. 

She wondered if Alaric resented her, for everything that had happened. She’d never had to worry about that when she first broke up with Josie. While he’d been the headmaster at Salvatore’s, there’d been no room for him to take sides and if anything, Penelope wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him take Josie’s side - it was obvious he struggled to balance being a father and a headmaster all at once.

But now, they were in a different school, where maybe he could allow his love towards his daughters to take the forefront more often. Despite her silent disagreements Penelope had towards Alaric, mainly ones that involved him not telling Lizzie and Josie about the merge, she actually liked him. Surprisingly - even to her - she’d actually be quite disheartened if he treated her differently.

Eventually, Penelope cleared her throat, “Why did you leave the boarding school?” She asked, leaning back in her seat. In a way, she was relieved Alaric was her headmaster again, she didn’t feel like trying to suss out a brand new person.

Alaric was too occupied with the computer to look up, although Penelope didn’t take offence, she knew what he was like and it was just nice to have some sense of familiarity after everything that had happened since she’d come back.

“I thought the school would be more suited to a headmaster that can help better than I can.” He explained vaguely after a pause, looking up from the screen in front of him.

She let out a quiet burst of laughter, it had never been a secret that Alaric was ill-equipped when it came to running a school of supernatural teenagers. “You mean someone who’s not a human, right?” Penelope asked, earning a glare from Alaric.

“Penelope.” He began in a hiss, “You don’t know who could be listening.”

Penelope only shrugged in response, although she knew he was right, so she decided not to press any further. Even if she was hurting more than she’d care to admit, she knew throwing the rest of her former classmates under the bus would be unfair. Perhaps the council had stopped vampire hunting years ago, but there was no use in risking it.

“You applied for your enrollment quite late.” Alaric noted, looking up from his screen to shoot her a knowing glance. Maybe this Josie and Landon thing had been going on for a while. “Last night, to be exact. You’re lucky I recognised your name.”

Penelope could only pray that Alaric wouldn’t mention Josie. She wasn’t sure she could handle even the mention of her former girlfriend’s name right now.

She chose not to offer an explanation, to be safe, “So can I still enrol?” Penelope asked nonchalantly, like she had other options. Technically, she could go back to Belgium, but how would she even explain what had happened to her parents? They’d had no idea about her and Josie and for good reason, they never would have approved of the relationship.

Alaric nodded, “You can, but I don’t understand, Penelope.” He answered, finally tearing his full attention away from the computer, resting his arms on the desk he sat at, “You fit in well at the boarding school, you were well liked.. I just don’t see what you gain from coming here instead.”

Shifting uncomfortably in her seat, Penelope sat up straight. “Maybe I want a different experience.” She shot back, just about managing to hold back her sarcasm. She made a point of lowering her voice as she continued, “Besides, it’s not like I need help controlling my magic, I grew up around witches in the French Quarter.”

“And you’re sure there’s not another reason?” Alaric asked, as though he already knew but was just waiting for Penelope to confess the truth.

Penelope nodded in response; a lie that Alaric appeared to see right now.

He paused uncertainly, “Have you spoken to Josie since you got back? I know she missed having you around school.” Alaric commented, a statement that caused Penelope’s heart to sink.

She didn’t want to think about how Josie must’ve felt after she left, their tearful goodbye had been painful enough. She wondered how long it had taken after that for her to grow close with Landon, if he was just a rebound or if Josie really loved him - neither option was preferable.

“No, I broke up with her, remember?” Penelope clarified, feigning disinterest. She almost immediately dropped the act, more so out of shame rather than the fact that she was talking to Josie’s father. He probably didn’t think very highly of her after she broke his daughter’s heart the first time around. “If I see her, I’ll say hi..”

Seemingly satisfied with the answer he’d been given, Alaric momentarily returned his attention back towards the computer, clicking and typing a few times before he spoke, “Then congratulations, Penelope, you’re officially a student at Mystic Falls High.” He announced, not bothering to lace his tone with enthusiasm, he knew it was the last thing Penelope wanted.

With another click at the computer, a sheet of paper appeared from the printer behind Alaric’s desk, the machinery making a soft buzz. He turned around in his chair to grab the paper, handing it to Penelope. “This has your timetable and your locker number.” He stated, pointing towards each area where the necessary information was located.

Taking the paper in her hands, Penelope quickly skimmed over the information, enough to know that her first lesson of the day was History. She nodded, “Thanks, Alaric.” Penelope acknowledged.

“That’s Mr Saltzman to you.” Alaric corrected her half-heartedly. He shook his head, knowing that she wouldn’t listen, Penelope had been too close to Josie and the rest of the Saltzman family - excluding Lizzie, of course - to even consider Alaric an authority figure. “Just be careful what you call me around the other students.”

Penelope nodded again, humming in amusement as she stood up from her seat. “Yeah, sure.” She mumbled, gathering her things and folding up the sheet Alaric had given her, “I guess I’ll see you around then."

For the first time during the entire exchange, Alaric offered Penelope a smile. Strangely enough, Penelope found it reassuring, easing nerves she didn’t know she had about her first day, “Good luck today.” He said, “And welcome back to Mystic Falls.”

[thejonzone]

Riverdale is the Best Show You’ve Written Off

About once a month, a tweet will go around, reading something like “I can’t believe Netflix cancelled [SHOW X], but Riverdale is still on?!? *eye roll emoji, angry cussing emoji*.” It can be difficult to read tweets like these, because I like Riverdale. But I understand why it has struggled to keep an audience-- there is a perception that the show has gone completely off the rails, a chaos of hot actors in their mid-20s playing glamorous high school sociopaths, with the show choosing excess over narrative cohesion. That perception is pretty accurate. It’s an easy show to write off and easy to make fun of, especially because, as a CW show, it’s ostensibly geared to teens. So it brings me no pleasure to say that Riverdale, currently in its 5th season, has reached a renaissance, and its episodes so far this season represent its high-water mark. 

To appreciate how stunning and exciting Riverdale’s new direction is, it’s important to understand how we got here.

In the first season, a murder in the titular town revealed an underbelly of thugs, power brokers, and shady backroom rulers, all vying for control with gothic morbidity. What followed after that season though, was something else entirely. 

Riverdale, ramping up during Seasons 2 through 4, became a beautiful mess. I think it’s important to state that no other show on television is even attempting to do what Riverdale did/is doing. The show is, at any one point, 5-7 wholly different shows. There is a season’s worth of plot per episode. It’s storytelling mania and in-real-time dementia. I don’t remember what happened at the end of last episode because SO much happened. And besides, coherence is overrated! Give me hot actors, give me drug-addicted mobsters, give me creepy principals! On Riverdale, the parents are both former teen heartthrobs and serial killers, children operate underground speakeasies, and for some reason not one therapist has realized they could make a fortune helping our cast work through the intense psychological terror and emotional abuse they receive every episode.

This show is beyond pastiche, hyper-loaded with reference. My roommate and I had a joke that the show’s third season could be mapped to a quadrant of influences: Twin Peaks, True Detective, The Sopranos, and Gossip Girl. At any point Riverdale was acknowledging and playing into the influence of one of these shows. Season Four doubled down on the show’s horror anthology tendency. No one wants you to miss the references being made. You know that menacing boarding school Jughead attends in Season Four? You’d be right If it reminded you of Donna Tartt’s A Secret History. After all, consider Jughead’s classmate, whose name is Donna Sweet. Maybe you picked up on the violence simmering underneath the surface of Jughead’s other classmate, Bret Easton-Elli--  I mean, Bret Weston-Wallis.

Every week, the show seems primed for failure, attempting to juggle more storylines than possible or even necessary. The show is like a house of cards that has already fallen, and yet the writers are somehow still haphazardly adding more cards to the top. “Be reasonable!” I would plead. To no avail. And that’s the thrill of it. The plotlines are secondary to the spectacle. The show is a celebration and parody of violent legacy dramas, camp, teen horror, canonical literature, and anything else it can stuff under the hood, as much an ode to other pieces of media as it is an original work itself. 

But now, something completely different is happening. The beginning of Season Five brought an end to the seasons-long saga the show felt trapped in. Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead graduated high school, and the show flashed forward seven years. What might be considered a hokey technique was one of the best decisions the writers ever did. Because now we have a blank slate for our main cast. The writers effectively cut the fat from three seasons of violent, ridiculous maximalism. And it’s psychically refreshing.

At the heart of any good sitcom, we just want to see our main characters hanging out together. Change is part of life, but it shouldn’t be in television. Which is why this new season is so exciting-- Riverdale is now in the process of bringing its four main characters back from their adult lives and re-engaging them in the deadly politics of their hometown. Pop Tate, the owner-manager of Pop’s, Riverdale’s diner, is retiring, and Archie gets the gang back in town to celebrate the man who helped make the diner such a great hang-out spot. In the words of Jughead, “You gave us a home, Pop.” Like so mant other sitcoms before it, Riverdale used Pop’s to establish its characters and their relationships to each other.

I grew up on Seinfeld so I’ve always been attracted to the idea of the diner. The pandemic has made me yearn even harder for the sitcom diner, that idealistic place where all my friends are, where people enter with problems to be solved, drama to be explained, good news to be celebrated. Riverdale’s acknowledgment of Pop and his diner as the show’s connective tissue is a grounding and human choice. It works fantastically to set up this upcoming season, where our gang must confront the newest nefarious plot for control over the soul of Riverdale.

No doubt the show will continue its pattern of naming and spoofing genre. Veronica, in her adult life, had an Uncut Gems-style few scenes where she works as a charismatic (of course) diamond merchant. She married a possessive, boring guy who’s only characteristic seems to be that his voice is *exactly* like Veronica’s megalomaniac dad, Hiram. Something something Freud, something something daddy sexy. And credit where credit is due, Mark Consuelos is really hot.

Jughead is a writer now, in the most white guy college freshman fantasy of being a writer possible. He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop as an undergrad, something that is definitely not possible. He’s written a hit book but now suffers from *gasp* writer’s block?? He’s a cool guy writer who, in his opening montage, gets recognized by, hit on, and then has sex with a college-aged fan. Back in Riverdale, Jug writes a speech for Pop’s retirement and sends it to his agent. His agent is smitten with the work, calling it “tragic americana” and proclaiming that Jughead’s next book will be titled “Elegy for a Small Town”. This is almost certainly a reference to J.D. Vance’s bad book, and I’m sure the show will be bringing in more elements of “tragic” “americana” as the season unfolds. 

Betty is FBI in training, because as the show has loved to tell us, Betty has “the serial killer gene”, but is using it for good. For the record, her dad was a serial killer, and her brother was a serial killer. And it’s not like her mom or sister can cast the first stone. Betty’s endured enough trauma to fill 100 lives with unending pain and I’m sure the show will have no trouble heaping more on top. Already in the new season we’ve seen flashbacks to some point during the time jump when Betty was taken hostage, in what’s clearly a homage to The Silence of the Lambs. 

And then there’s Archie. I don’t know if anyone knows what to do with the guy. Played by K.J. Apa, who is both really good-looking with his shirt off and a god-awful actor, Archie has been in the army. The show is using him to shill for the military-industrial complex. 

I’ve long joked that the Riverdale writers have no idea what they’re doing. But through a global pandemic affecting TV production and *the* major narrative complication in any high school-set show (graduation), the Riverdale writers have seamlessly transitioned the show to a new stasis. Past seasons are informing this one, but we aren’t bogged down by the details in this new season. The bigger joke, of course, is that the writers have known exactly what they’ve been doing this whole time, and I’m just an idiot. Well I mean, of course I’m an idiot. I use television to regulate my emotions and simulate a static friend group that doesn’t leave or change. And Riverdale is perfect for that. If a renaissance is a rebirth, well then my friends, cut the umbilical cord and save the placenta to put in pills, because Riverdale is cranking out episodes that are better than ever.

[hysteriaww]

Presenting: The Bonkai Legacies 2x12 AU my soul needed written!

“You know Dad’s probably trying his best to find us a way out of Uncle Kai’s prison world, Lizzie.” Josie sighs.

“No, I don’t think he is.” Lizzie whispers furiously. “Trying his best, would be getting his shit together and just contacting Aunt Bonnie to-”

“Bonnie?” Kai’s voice interrupts them. The twins stare at him in confusion. “D-Did you say Bonnie?” He repeats breathlessly.

X-X-X

A/N: In all the excitement of Kai Parker’s return on Legacies, this Bonkai Legacies AU fanfic oozed out of me like I was some alien creature excreting fluids 😂Tho I should say, I’ve never watched Legacies, so idk much about the sand clock/dark Josie stuff so I’m not including it.

BTW this was all written before Kai’s Legacies episode(s) came out, so I assumed Alaric dumbly sent expelled Salvatore School students to Kai’s Prison World, but ultimately he, Josie and Lizzie got trapped there too, and now Kai’s happily threatened to sic Rick’s ex-students on Josie and Lizzie in a “supernatural Hunger Games” fight to the death/survival of the fittest situation.

My fic picks up at a point where we assume Kai’s holding Josie and Lizzie hostage while Alaric managed to escape him and is hiding elsewhere in the Prison World, trying to figure out how to save the twins. Hope you enjoy!

Part I

“So, not only are we trapped in a prison world, we’re trapped in the prison world.” Lizzie hisses at her twin. “The one with our trigger-happy Uncle Kai who’s tried to kill us since we were fetuses.”

Said Uncle Kai smirks while nonchalantly sharpening his machete only a few feet away from them.

“Lizzie, calm down,” Josie sighs, eyeing him warily. “If he really wanted to kill us himself, he would’ve done it by now.”

“Smart cookie,” Kai chimes in without looking up from his machete. “Just like your mother.” He sighs wistfully. “Sissy was so smart. She had her whole future ahead of her. Such a shame what happened to her.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Lizzie snaps. “You literally Red-Wedding’d her!”

“Not what I meant, Lindy.” Kai chuckles. “I meant, it was a shame she got knocked up by ol’ Rick-iana Jones. She could’ve done so much better.” He rolls his eyes. “You and Jody are walking, talking proof of that.”

“Is that why you tried to kill us before we were even born?” Josie asks quietly. “You hated Dad?”

“And once again, Nick’s idiocy gene rears its ugly head. You’ve had 16 years to figure out why I wanted to kill you and you’re still wrong.” He sneers. “Man, my proteges are gonna crush you two so easily.” He laughs. “Isn’t it gonna be hilarious when Ricky’s two dumbest mistakes-” he points at his nieces. “-get killed by his biggest mistake?” He gestures to the prison world around him, crawling with vengeful supernaturals loyal to him. “Nah, not hilarious.” He muses, then snaps his fingers. “Poetic.”

All traces of humor leave his face. Josie stifles a fearful shiver while Lizzie masks her fear with a glare. Abruptly, Kai smiles and resumes sharpening his blade, almost as if their conversation never even happened.

“What the hell is taking Dad so long?” Lizzie grits out. “I’m sick of waiting around like this. Especially with this creep.”

“You know Dad’s probably trying his best, Lizzie.”

“No, I don’t think he is.” She whispers furiously. “Trying his best, would be getting his shit together and just contacting Aunt Bonnie to-”

“Bonnie?” Kai’s voice interrupts them. The twins stare at him in confusion. “D-Did you say Bonnie?” He repeats.

The girls exchange glances. “…Yeah, why?” Lizzie frowns hesitantly.

His face practically lights up in sheer glee. “She’s here, too?”

“If she was here, we would’ve been home by now.” Lizzie narrows her eyes at him. “She would’ve kicked your ass.”

“Lizzie!” Josie chides her.

“No, no,” Kai chuckles, waving her off. “Lily’s right. Bonnie definitely would’ve kicked my ass. She’s done it before.” He smiles fondly. “She’d kick my ass, I’d kick hers back. Maybe I’d stab her a little bit. She’d give me an aneurysm or two, boil my blood,” he shivers, grinning softly. “God, she’s so hot.”

Lizzie and Josie stare on in horror.

“What’s she up to now, huh? Is she still single?” He asks breathlessly.

“I-I think so.” Josie nods and Lizzie nudges her for actually answering.

“Oh, great!” Kai beams. “If that answer was a no, I may have had to go on a minor murder spree and kill her boyfriend.” He resumes sharpening his machete. “And every ex she’s ever had.”

“Aunt Bonnie would crush you first.” Lizzie sneers.

“Aunt Bonnie,” he sighs wistfully. “She’s your Aunt Bonnie and I’m your Uncle Kai. It’s perfect.”

The girls cringe, but Kai suddenly stiffens. “That’s it. Change of plans.” He claps and stands up. “Alright, idiots. If you want me to consider cancelling the Hunger Games to help you avoid certain death,” he points his machete at them. “Bring me Bonnie.”

X-X-X

A/N #2: Depending on what y’all think (and my muse), I might post more of this random Bonkai Legacies AU I never thought I’d write! It’s oozing out of my eyeballs!

[thisbentleyplaysqueen]

Aight so none of you asked but here’s my Percy Jackson series fan cast

This is the first one I’ve ever done so I have no idea how this works. Also, I like the idea that the children be unknown actors so I only did the adults! Let’s get started!

Sally Jackson

Jennifer Hudson!!! The absolute queen! I think she would make an awesome Sally Jackson mainly because I love her acting and she deserves better after Cats.

Gabe Ugliano

David Cross. Honestly I’m not sure why I thought he would be a good Gabe...I think it’s because he was the bad guy in Alvin and the Chipmunks and that kinda stuck with me. I think he could pull off “jerk face step-dad”.

Chiron

Michael Sheen! Honestly the beard gives me ‘mentor that has been around for thousands of years and is honestly trying to keep this sixth grader from being killed by a “kindly one” on a field trip’ vibes. Also, he can do American accents (Prodigal Son is a great example). Not sure how he’d look as a centaur because my brain will not allow me to view that, so we’re just flying blind here.

Mr. D

So I’ve been a big advocate that Danny Devito should play Mr. D because if you listen to “Another Terrible Day” from the musical, to me that just screams Danny Devito. He could so pull it off!

Hades

Keanu Reeves just seems like he would be an awesome king of the underworld. He would threaten to trap Percy and his friends and I would clap just because it’s Keanu. Gah, I love him.

Poseidon

I don’t know if this is because I associate him with Aquaman or what, but honestly I want to see Jason Momoa as God of the Sea! Also, he could wear a Hawaiian shirt, chill and vibe, and wouldn’t have to go through the dangerous process of having abs on screen, so it would be great for him!

Zeus

GAH! Just... let me see Jeff Bridges as the King of the Gods! Look at him! I may know him as the Dude, the mentor from the Giver, and Kevin Flynn, but I would love to see him as an uber serious god who’s pissed because some kid stole his lightning bolt (we kinda saw that in the Giver and when Kevin Flynn Saw Some Things in Tron: Legacy, but I would like to see more).

Athena

I love Stephanie Beatriz, and it would be really cool to see her as the Goddess of Wisdom who does not approve of Percy, especially when it comes to her daughter. If not her, then I definitely would recommend Adria Arjona. In fact, now that I think about it, I would love to see her as Athena over Stephanie (but I love them both).

Hermes

I really think Tyler James Williams would be a cool Hermes. Also his ending in Whiskey Cavalier (where he presumably died or was kidnapped but we don’t know because it got cancelled) shows he deserves better. I would love to see him in this role!

Apollo

Will Smith would be an awesome Apollo! That scene from “The Titan’s Curse” where Apollo is driving his car across the horizon? I just see Will Smith. He would be so much fun!

Artemis

I just remember that in most scenes Artemis is portrayed as a young girl, about the same age as her Hunters. When I thought of that, all I saw was Erin Kellyman from her role as Enfys Nest in Solo. I would love to see her as Artemis!

Hera

I love Octavia Spencer and she serves “Queen of the gods” vibes at all times. I’m here for it!

Ares

Gonna be honest, this was my brother’s suggestion but I think Terry Crews would be a pretty cool Ares. I’m just curious about how he would pull of the biker vibe...

Aphrodite

I know in the book it says her appearance is always changing and I honestly do not have the strength to assign what actors would make a good Aphrodite so we’re just gonna skip this one.

Hephaestus

I love The Rock, and I would be happy to see him in any role in this series, but my brother suggested Hephaestus and I think it’s a pretty cool idea.

Aunty Em/Medusa

Honestly every time I thought about Medusa, I just thought of the White Witch lady from Narnia, so Tilda Swinton it is.

Mrs. Dodds

I honestly have no idea. For some reason, I can’t think of an actress that can pull off a southern accent that matches my image of Mrs. Dodds. So.....we’ll just move on.

Crusty

Ned Dennehy played Hastur in “Good Omens”, and he did such a good job of making my skin crawl. Those vibes are needed for Crusty the bed seller/ apparent child torturer.

Charon

This is another pull from “Good Omens” but Brian Cox did such an amazing job as Death! His voice just mixed with how I thought the ferryman of the Underworld, so bring him back for another death-related role!

And finally...

Kronos

Okay, so my brother made a suggestion of Andy Serkis as Kronos (since he is mainly just a voice character and ends up taking Luke’s form in the books if I remember right), and I could definitely see that! He voiced Snoke in Star Wars, and was the crazy white villain in Black Panther, but also (because I’m a total nostalgic) I just thought of someone who I could see voicing Kronos that I love so much....

BRUCE BOXLEITNER! For those who don’t know him, he’s mainly known as the voice of Tron in literally ANYTHING in the Tron franchise. He’s got this deep voice that would work so well for Kronos. Also, I miss seeing him in things that I deeply enjoy. Miss you king.

And that’s about it! Thanks for joining my excited rant. 

[just-dreaming-about]

SHOW YOUR FEELINGS #2

I was just in the mood for a second round of these two.

WARNINGS: Smutty? Just a little in the end. THINGS GOT INTENSE WITH SEXUAL TENSION SORRY.

(NOT MY GIF)

It took Sirius three years and cancel their marriage to finally talk to Gadea like a real person although she continued to show her characteristic indifference to his jokes and attempts to flirt.

-Be careful, Padfoot -James had said- Or sooner than you think you'll be engaged again. 

Nah, marriage was not his thing. He was sure about it. But at the same time he stopped flirting with others girls... 

-I'm bored, that's all! -he replied while Remus was just smiling. 

But he was often up late at night thinking about her. How many times had he seen her today? Had he been the one to make her laugh in history class? How many classes did they share together tomorrow? He had to make sure to make her angry tomorrow again, he never tired of seeing her angry.And this is how they finished their sixth year: they were still arguing about everything yes, but now there was also some complicity between them or at least he felt that way. They were no longer strangers who had once been engaged but they also could not say they were friends. There was this little connection between them that neither of them dared to name it but both were comfortable with the dynamics of their new and much more relaxed relationship.  Of course she didn't show her feelings openly, it took him a long time to get to know her and she wasn't exactly making it easy for him. He had to watch for any signs, any small gestures that gave her away, like her eyes widening a thousandth of a second at the surprises before she regained her indifference and began to analyze the new situation or her hands playing with the edge of her sleeve she was thinking of say something and didn't know if it was a good time to say it or her lips only lifted a little when he flirted with her and then she looked away to change the subject... And suddenly, just after the final exams Sirius found a new emotion in her that left him completely captivated by her.  She blushed.  It wasn't planned, he was just casually hanging around with the marauders after their exams and saw her exists the exam class with her things under her arms and a proud expression on her face. Not caring about his friends' comments, he ran to her and jumped over the small wall that separated the courtyard from the hallway to walk beside her.

-So?  -So? -she repeated without looking at him and without stopping or slowing down just because he walked beside her.  -It’s written in your face, you passed right? -The exam has just ended, Black. They won't give us the results until next week.

But she had this proud smile that gives her away.  The voices of Gadea's friends, all Slytherins, called her at the end of the hall, and that's when they stopped. It was as if no one wanted their worlds to collide: the world of blood-purity and social status and their own where they could speak without restrictions. She would prefer stayed at their own world.

-You know, those idiots don't value the amazing and stunning witch you are. They should appreciate how incredibly smart you are. 

He was looking at those prats already, crossing his arms and frowning at the looks they gave him.  She couldn't control herself and flushed bright red in front of him. She pretended that she was angry and insulted him and ran out of there like a storm. He had seen her blush other times: from rage after being the victim of a joke, from excitement at a new challenge, embarrassed because she had caught him with some girl in the hallways -something he was not very proud of now- but that way of blushing for him... Because he had caused that reaction in her! He had said the compliment and he had made her blush. He was so proud of himself even if he didn't planned it.  He couldn't see the end of his friends' teasing after this. They just saw how quickly he managed to make her run away angry about something. Little they knew what had just begun in front of their eyes. During the last days of class Sirius found himself for the first time not wanting to finish the course. James thought he had a fever and Remus even offered him chocolate to bring him to his senses. On the express back to London, Sirius and Gadea collided in the middle of the hall. She just wanted to go to the bathroom, he was running away from another joke he had made with James.

-Have a nice summer, Sirius -she said a little awkward, almost like she was embarrassed. 

It was the first time she called him by his name. Usually she called him Black or idiot or other things like that. 

-You too, Gadea -he grinned broadly to her. 

That summer was one of the best in his life. The Potters were his new family, James was like his brother, even Remus came to stay over several times and they made Godryc's Hollow's nightmares reality while having fun around the city. For James the end of summer was the worst in the world, for Sirius it was an opportunity to see Gadea. They hadn't written to each other during the holidays, he hadn't heard from her since the last time he saw her saying goodbye to some Slytherins and dragging her suitcases out of the station. Alone. He hoped with all his heart that the marriage issue had settled and she was free at last. He wouldn't say it out loud to James or Remus. The three of them made it to the station willing to start their last year at Hogwarts. They had to take advantage of that last year and make it unforgettable.  Little does he knew how unforgettable would start their year.  There were many people at the station, that was not new, but as they dragged their suitcases they could see that many people were beginning to gather in the same place and from the center of that crowd there were screams. The three of them, together like always, made their way through the crowd until they only had a couple of people in front of them who had to look over their shoulders to see what was going on. And there she was. She was already wearing her perfectly flawless Slytherin uniform. Her hair had grown during the holidays. But something was wrong. Her blue-gray eyes staring at the ground, her lips pressed together in a fine line, her cheeks red in anger, her shoulders trembling and her fists closed.In front of her a couple, definitely her parents. The woman looked very much like her physically but with the man she only shared the color of her eyes. He was angry and was creaming as she tried to calm him down because they were making a scene in front of many people.

-You ungrateful girl! Your mother and I have tried very hard to give you the life that we didn't have and this is how you thank us? Your egoism has no limits? Think about your family, the legacy we have left you, you are throwing it to the ground betting on the wrong broom. Do you want to risk spending the best years of your life studying something that will ruin you instead of taking advantage of the path we have opened for you? Damn ungrateful, you should show more respect for your parents!

It was as if she had sensed Sirius's presence in the crowd and just as he stepped forward to take her out of there, she looked at him. Her eyes reflected a rage and pain so deep that he had never seen in anyone and hoped he would never see it in her eyes again. Her gaze was enough to stop him in his tracks and he thought that he wouldn't like to be in that man's place when the girl's eyes fixed on him.

-Show more respect? To the persons who treated me like I were less than an object? I am just one more chip on your perfect chessboard, dispensable if that means you will get what you want. Neither of you know me at all! Am I betting on the wrong broom for wanting to study? I am the best witch of my course, leader of the dueling club and you do not even know half of what I can do! -You insolent girl, take your words back!-Never! -I have to repeat to you why you should respect your father!?

To everyone's surprise, the man stepped toward her threateningly and raising his hand. To everyone's even greater surprise -except for Sirius- she didn't back down. In one swift movement she held the wand in her hand and an elegant twist of that wand was enough to hurl the man forcefully many meters away from her, over people and into the students' suitcases.

-Gadea! -her mother scolded her, looking at her between surprise and angry.She looked at her mother with the same swagger she showed in class when she won a duel without batting an eye. From the way the woman looked at her, Sirius thought it was the first time she had realized what her daughter was capable of.

-I will be the best witch you have ever seen, mother. Don't be shocked when your hist'ry book mentions me. You will swallow your words and come to beg me for mercy.

Without further ado and with a smooth wand movement, which at first her mother feared was a spell against her, her suitcases rose from the ground and followed her into the express but she stopped before entering.

-And don't expect me to come back this summer.

With that the fight was over and people began to dissolve, going back to their things and chatting about what had just happened. Sirius turned to look at his friends, the three of them still surprised at what had just happened.

-I have to go with her -he said frankly and his friends nodded to him.  -Go. We'll take care of your things -said Remus. 

With a grateful look he ran to the express and looked for her. In every compartment he looked in there were students from all houses and all ages, some even talking about what they had just heard about the Salaverts, others about what awaited them in this new course. But she was not in either and the train was already starting to move to Hogwarts and he was getting anxious. Finally, in the last compartment, just behind one that was completely empty, there was one with the window curtains drawn as if someone didn't want to be disturbed. She had to be here. So he tapped lightly on the door, leaning one hand on the window to prevent himself from the train moves and to gather strength on what might be found on the other side of the door. He have never been so nervous. He ran a hand through his hair to remove it from his face and called again.

-I don't want anything from the cart, thanks -her voice sounded calm which surprised him more than if he had caught her crying.  -It's me. Sirius -he said nervously and then added- Black. 

The door opened a few seconds later, revealing a quiet Gadea who was trying to untie her green tie.

-Are you aware that you are the only Sirius from Hogwarts? -she asked walking in the compartment to let him in. 

Still fighting with the tie. 

-I'm glad you find me unique and irreplaceable -he joked instinctively closing the door behind him.  -Stupid -she mumbled getting anger with the tie.  -Let me, you'll hang yourself -he said taking her by the shoulders to make her turn so he can undo his tie.

They were so close that he could smell the sweet fragrance she was giving off and his hands worked carefully so as not to touch anything other than her tie or hang her. He had to bend down a little because her head came to his chin.

-Why are you here, Sirius? -she whispered. -To be honest? -he was whispering too and she could smell chocolate for some reason- I was worried about you. But I should already know that you can get your own ass out of problems.

She smiled proudly and looked at the ceiling, letting him work. She didn't need to ask him how much he saw, he saw it all. She was worried that he thought she was fragile or that she needed protection but he didn't think that and that relaxed her. His hands worked fast and he quickly untied the knot in his tie, tugged on one end to finish taking it off completel, and set it on the seat to his right.

-That's it, it won't bother you anymore. You're welcome -he smiled and looked at her eyes.  -Thank you -she was still whispering- For the tie... and for coming. You didn't have to.

He was silent for a moment, looking at her as if determining her emotional state, but she wasn’t going to cry, she felt too free and rebellious and fulfilled right now to worry about crying.

-But I had to -a smirk started to form in his face- I had to take care of my fiancee.

She rolled her eyes, when would Sirius leave that stupid thing? They were no longer engaged! But she smiled too. 

-I don't need anyone to take care of me. 

He laughed because there was the cocky-bossy-proud Gadea that he had missed teasing all summer. 

-I know, but I want to be as close as possible to see how you become the best witch.

And she blushed again. She didn't know how he had this incredible skill to made her blush and look like he wasn't even trying. She knew for his smile he was just being sincere: he really thought she could become a great witch. It was like her heart was trembling for a moment too because she was feeling a lot of things at this moment. Embarrassment, nervous, excitemet, happyness, proud, she even had this feeling of not wanting to let him down. And of course the relief. Relief? No, it was something else but she didn't know how to name it. It was like all this time something was tide tight to her heart and suddenly he work with the knot like he did with her tie and her heart can beat freely now. He believe her. He believe her dream.  He really think she can do it.  And now she noticed how lonely she had been feeling all those years. She thought that she only needed herself, her hard work and nothing else. And now that she finally had someone in front of her who was as hopeful that she would achieve her dream -and without asking for anything in return- she didn't know why but that made her want to cry. But she didn't cry. She wanted but didn't. And then the train gave one of its shakes.  He was pushed back as she fell forward. The train continued its course without caring about the bump they just passed or that Gadea Salavert's life was about to change again. His back had hit the door, his head had found the glass in the most painful way. Then when he thought that nothing else could happen to him, Gadea managed to hit him so hard in the stomach that he twisted in pain. He squatted forward, holding himself and trying not to vomit in Gadea's shoes. The girl for her part began to apologize but he couldn’t speak or he would surely end up vomiting the chocolate he had stolen from Remus. When the pain subsided enough to take a deep breath, he let the girl's hands trespass the curtain of his hair looking for his face and let her soft hands lift him to be at eye level, looking at him worried and scared. Her stormy gray-blue eyes staring at his gray ones.  Damn. He was so fucked now.  He should have known. Confuse love with hate and interest with simply wanting to tease someone was too cliché even for him. But in his defense, she was the smart one. She should have known it too. When you spend your whole life without feeling anything especially pleasant and suddenly a person is responsible for making you feel a thousand things with just a look, a phrase or a smile... 

-You know -he whispered, licking his lips- I could kiss you right now. 

For her part, she said nothing, there was no hint on her face that could warn him of what she was about to do. But for some reason he wasn't surprised that she was the one taking the initiative. If it had been otherwise, she probably would have thrown him out of the compartment window with her best spell and he would have to end the journey to Hogwarts crawling. It was a fiery kiss. In fact, it was like they were fighting to lead the kiss. She cheated. Her hands tangled in his hair and she tugged on it inadvertently, causing his moan and her consequent victory. They stopped for air, taking a deep breath and looking each other in the eyes. She seemed to be challenging him to say something. He laughed loudly and as openly as he always did but this time she joined him in laughter. And he took advantage of the distraction. Now was she who was against the door and her surprise made it easy for him to lead this second kiss. He didn’t give her any truce. As soon as she recovered from the surprise and returned the kiss, deepening it and gaining ground, he made sure that his right hand slipped underhi her shirt -grasping her bare waist feeling her smooth skin shamelessly- regaining control of the kiss and of the situation.

-I could get used to this -he whispered and smirked against her lips gasping hard. 

-Don't screw it up, Black -she scolded him, gasping but frowning too. 

-Yes ma'am.  

[your-modern-shakespeare]

Maid in Manhattan (Prologue)

Summary: You are a maid at a hotel. He is an Assemblyman staying at the hotel. Call it fate or maybe just chance, but who knew that a white lie and a Dolce suit could cause so much trouble and simultaneously give an adventure of a lifetime. (Based on the movie Maid in Manhattan) 

Pairing: Bucky x Reader (Eventual)

Word Count: 869 words

A/N: Hey guys! I received this request from an anon and was so thrilled to write it. I had wanted to get this out sooner but decided to not get ahead of myself like I usually do and get some writing done in advance. This is just a short little intro, explaining the characters a little more than the movie does. Hope you all enjoy and look for Part 1 soon!

Warnings: I don’t think there are any? (Let me know)

Tags: @fangirl1802​, @iamwarrenspeace​, @the-red-world-of-jess-chibi​, @ssweet-empowerment​ (Let me know if you want to be tagged)

Y/N’S POV

I wasn’t one of those people who ever expected to get more than I had. I grew up knowing that life was never going to give me anything that I didn’t work for. That’s just how it was.

But growing up like that never kept me from having a good life. I was a good kid, who did good in school and got my first job as soon as I was able.

I wanted to do things the way my parents did. So just like them I got married young, to a man that I thought was the love of my life. And I guess he was for a bit. God knows I ignored every red flag because I thought he was.

He traveled a lot for work, so we didn’t see him much but I thought that the fact that he always came home to us was enough to make up for all the missed birthdays and Christmases and whatever else he cancelled on. Not to mention, when he was home he never wanted to spend any time with us, always saying he needed to see his family while he was in town, like we weren’t his.

When the visits stopped and the calls went to voicemail was when I decided that it was time to end things with him. He wasn’t ready to commit no matter what the marriage certificate said, so I was ready to commit to a life without him.

At the very least he gave me my son Ty, the actual love of my life. I was a single mom before he left us and now it was just more of a permanent thing.

So we got divorced after ten years together, eight married, I left my terrible job, and I moved to a better apartment. It was the hardest time of my life. No matter how strong I tried to be, I was still upset about how things had turned out.

But I pushed through that, because I had to, for Ty. So I found a new job at the Beresford Hotel as a maid and the move led to Ty switching to a better school system, one that could actually keep up with him. My friends at work helped me raise him to be the wonderful boy that he is and for the first time in over a decade I was in a good spot in my life.

So I guess in the end I couldn’t really complain about anything. We were lucky and happy, and that’s all that mattered.

.

BUCKY’S POV

I grew up knowing exactly how my life was going to go; my father had made sure to that.

My family was born and raised in Brooklyn and for as long as I could remember our life was politics. My father was the perfect politician, my mother was the perfect wife, and my sister, Rebecca, and I were the perfect children. To everyone else we were perfect.

To us though, my mom hated that my dad worked all the time, my sister hated the “plan” my parents laid out for her, and I hated that I just gave in to them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the life that I had, I just wish that I had gone about things differently.

See, I followed my plan. I went to school, made the perfect grades, went to a top Ivy league school, Harvard, got my Bachelors degree in Political Science and my Masters in Public Administration, interned with my dad before becoming an Assemblyman, and have been, as humbly as possible, serving the people of New York as so for the last five years.

There wasn’t too much to me...other than that, sadly. I worked way too much, had way too many failed relationships thrown all over the tabloids, and constantly had my best friend breathing down my neck.

My best friend and campaign manager, Steve, has been with me from the very beginning. We grew up on the same street and we went to the same schools until he decided to go to Washington DC to specialize in campaign management. Of course when I heard that, I had to wait for him to get back, he’s the only person I would have ever trusted to be my manager. He sure does get a kick out of it though, he says he’s less of a manager of my campaign and more of a manager of me. Funny seeing how he’s younger but he’s done a great job so far and he has my best interests at heart. I’ll give him credit where credit is due, no matter how annoying he can be.

But I guess having him around was better than being alone. He was there for everything, every girl, every scandal, he was there when my dad died… I want to do him proud, I want to do both of them proud.

I have a big legacy to live up to, one that I hope to do some good with. I don’t know what life will throw my way, but I sure know that being so close to home again can’t bring anything but trouble. 

. 

PART ONE (Coming Soon)

Let Me Know What You Think or If You Would Liked to Be Tagged

[brazilianchild]

Hallie: “I can take you out, oh, oh We can kill some time, stay home Throw balloons, teddy bears and the chocolate eclairs away Got nothing but love for you, fall more in love every day”

Hallie: “I can take you out, oh, oh We can kill some time, stay home Throw balloons, teddy bears and the chocolate eclairs away Got nothing but love for you, fall more in love every day”

On February 13th, Allie spent three hours with her daughter baking chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting. Little Cassie was as much as a perfectionist as her namesake. 

“Cassie, we don’t need to make cupcakes for everyone in your class. You can just make them cards.”

“But Mo-oooom, I want to make cupcakes not cards.” Cassie batted her eyelashes with a doe-eyed expression she’d inherited from her dad. Allie really needed to finish these proposals for work but she could never say no to that face.

Mia insisted on helping decorate the cupcakes. The little five-year old was really enthusiastic to put the heart-shaped edible cupcake toppers.

Harry got home when all three girls were scooping off the frosting of the bowls with their fingers (Allie always loved doing that as a child and she was not about to discourage her daughters from doing the same). He raised his eyebrows at the mess of pot and pans, “You guys making something special?”

Both girls squealed and attacked their dad with a hug. They smeared some pink frosting in his suit but he didn’t complain.

Allie rubbed the spot between her eyebrows and smiled. “Your daddy is going to get you both ready for bed.”

She gave him a look that they had long since perfected in their years of marriage that meant get these children away from me because I’m about to pass out. 

He gave her a small nod and picked Mia up. “Let’s go girls.”

Allie looked at the pile of dishes and decided she could deal with them later. She collapsed on the sofa and draped an arm over her eyes. She loved her daughters with all her heart but they were really draining sometimes. Mia was very young and enthusiastic while Cassandra was a determined perfectionist. These were all qualities that made their daughters exceptional, but not exactly easy to deal with.

But the cupcakes had made Cassie happy, and that was all that mattered. 

When Allie first got pregnant, Harry had been worried that naming their daughter after her dead sister would be too painful. He was scared that the name would just bring up too much grief, but Allie had disagreed. 

She told him that it was like passing on her legacy. It was about hope. It was about passing on a name from a person who was taken too soon, and giving it to someone who could bring good things and new memories to it. She’d eventually convinced him.

She felt his weight on top of her as he settled on top of her. His nose brushed her neck and she combed a hand through his hair absentmindedly.

“Why, oh, why would you give our daughters so much sugar before bed?” He murmured against her neck.

“It’s your fault. You were the one who passed down that goddamn charm to them.” 

“May I remind you that it was that charm that got you to marry me in the first place.”

Allie smirked against his hair. “Don’t remind me.”

“Ouch. You’re making me regret doing the dishes for you.”

“Oh God, I love you.”

“I know.”

She smirked at his Star Wars reference but was too tired to give a sassy comment back. They lay there in each other’s arms for a couple more moments, both just enjoying each other’s company after a busy day.

Allie scraped her nails softly against the back of his head in the way she knew he loved. His responding hum of content made her smile. 

“It’s Valentine's Day tomorrow.”

He looked up at her at that. He lifted himself slightly to rest his weight on his arm and prop his head up on his hand. “Oh, I know. I have all the balloons, teddy bears, chocolate éclairs and restaurant reservation at the ready.”

Allie reached for his hand. Her finger brushed his wedding ring. “How about we just get Sasha to look after the girls and stay inside and watch a movie or something?”

Harry grinned and leaned down to press a kiss against her lips. “I’ll cancel the reservation.”

He pulled back and pushed a couple curls out of her face. The way he looked at her...it never failed to make her heart skip a beat. 

“I’m glad that after all this time you still look at me like that.”

“Like what?” He asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Like… like you can’t believe your eyes.”

Harry smiled and shifted so he was fully on top of her again, both his forearms resting next to either side of her face. “It’s because I can’t. Even after all these years, I can’t believe this is real. I swear I fall more in love with you everyday.”

Allie leaned up to kiss him. “Harry. I have a very serious question.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“Will you be my valentine?” 

He snorted and buried his face in her neck to pepper her with kisses. She laughed as his hands pressed at her sides to tickle her slightly. 

God, she loved him.

[salvatoreschool]

Legacies Recap: Another Saltzman Birthday Ends in Death and Betrayal

Absorbing your sister feels like a weird theme for a birthday party, but try telling that to Josie Saltzman. No, really, we’re too afraid to say anything.

The newly crowned queen of darkness returned to the Salvatore School on Thursday’s Legacies to celebrate her big 1-7, beginning with a special gift for Lizzie: an early Merge! And to prove that she was absolutely not screwing around, Josie also killed Alyssa Chang, which was kind of a gift for… everyone but Jed, I guess? (Oh, don’t give me that look. Alyssa was a menace! Besides, Olivia Liang has already landed a starring role on The CW’s Kung Fu pilot. We’ll all be fine.)

Hope devised a pretty decent plan to trap Josie in a mental prison long enough to detoxify her, but that hinged on Lizzie winning the Merge, and Alyssa’s final words weren’t exactly encouraging. (“I don’t need a crystal ball to tell you that she’s going to tear you apart.”) So Lizzie did what any normal target would do in her position — she got the hell out of Mystic Falls. And even though MG was supposed to bring her back, he quickly became her accomplice. (“If you’re running, I’m running, too.”) Cutest li’l runaways ever.

But here’s the thing about MG — you can’t spend too much time around him without an experiencing an emotional epiphany, so it wasn’t long before Lizzie raced back to school… and just in time to stop her sister from impaling Hope on a spike! “Did you really think you’d be the one to bring out my good side?” Josie asked Hope. “I don’t even think she really likes you.” Lies. All lies. (And here’s a potentially controversial question: Am I the only person who wanted Hope to die here? Not to rush things along, but I’m ready for her to activate those vampire powers!)

Then came the moment we thought we had five more years to prepare for, as the Saltzman twins held hands and began chanting the Merge spell. Visually, it was just like when Kai and Luke merged on The Vampire Diaries all those years ago (video below!), but the emotional impact was significantly more intense. Give or take a few time jumps, we’ve been following these girls since their conception. And now they’re merging?! If nothing else, it was a real “Sunrise, Sunset” moment for longtime fans.

Oh, and how could I forget to mention the big Lizzie-MG moment? She planted a big ol’ kiss on him before battling her sister, adding this small disclaimer at the end: “Just to be clear, that was for you, not me. Just in case I lose.” Fortunately, she didn’t lose. At least not… technically? Honestly, all I know is that Hope’s potion tethered Lizzie’s life to Landon’s, so she was instantly revived when she died. But if she won, why did she die at all? Feel free to pick apart the mythological aspect of this week’s big twist in the comments section below.

When the dust settled, Lizzie awoke in Alaric’s office to learn that Hope has infiltrated Josie’s subconscious — and until she comes out, Lizzie needs to make like a corpse and play dead.

Elsewhere in the episode…

* Rafael’s scattered memories finally aligned this week — and the truth was not what we were expecting. It turns out he was murdered (by Chad?!) after returning from his recent trip, and now he’s one of The Necromancer’s undead puppets. Fearing that he might hurt someone he cares about, Rafael begged Landon to kill him, a favor that was emphatically refused. Little did Landon realize, Rafael was holding the golden arrow, which he used to stab the phoenix to… death?

* Alaric had a fun little subplot involving the magic box that sent everyone to a noir nightmare last week. I don’t have much to say about it, other than that I’m eternally grateful to the entire Legacies writing staff for continuing to get Matt Davis into Indiana Jones costumes. That’s twice in one season!

* I still can’t believe that Chad (?!) is the one who killed Rafael, but I did love this line from him tonight: “Hope always has an awesome plan… and somehow also has time for relationship stuff, too.”

* I also appreciated Josie’s response to Chad and The Necromancer when they feared their favorite show (i.e. spying on the kids) was about to get canceled. (“More like getting a spinoff.”)

OK, let’s break this all down: What was you reaction to Lizzie and MG’s kiss? Did you see Rafael’s reluctant betrayal coming? And what do we think is going to happen to Hope inside Josie’s brain? Drop a comment with your thoughts below.

[despressolattes]

AFTERMATH | CHAPTER TWENTY | LEGACIES

book masterlist » book one masterlist

< previous chapter

A glowing urn? Probably not the best sign from a mysterious and unknown Malivore object. The only thing left was to wait for the next monster to show up looking for it.

It was officially day one without Roman Sienna.

"Are you sure that's even safe for the kids there?"

"We're supernatural, Joshy," I laughed at the concerned vampire, but I spoke in whispers as I walked through the halls of the school. It was two in the morning, and I was heading to Alaric's to talk about the urn with him and Hope. "We all managed to keep Hope safe when she was a kid, remember?"

Josh called to ask how I was doing after the whole Roman leaving thing, which happened the day before. It was sweet of him to think I would need him company, but I wasn't sure if I should be offended that he thought I'd be crying at 2 a.m.

Okay, it's more likely that I would be than not, but still.

"Yeah, with a lot of casualties though," he reminded me.

"I think we'll be fine," I said, stopping in front of Alaric's office door. "Okay, I gotta go. I'll talk to you soon."

"Alright, love you, Lilah," he said.

Hope was standing by his desk while Alaric went through some of the books on his shelf when I walked in.

"How long do you think it'll be until the next monster shows up?" Hope asked when I closed the door.

"It's hard to say. I've never actually seen an artifact glow before," Alaric replied, turning around. He looked at me, "Thanks for deciding to meet us."

I rolled my eyes at the headmaster, but playfully.

"Where did you hide the urn, by the way?" he asked Hope.

"Yeah, where is it?" I chimed in. She hadn't even told me where it was.

"I'm not sure I should tell you," Hope said.

We both looked at her like she had two heads, and said in unison, "Excuse me?"

"Isn't it safer if only one of us knows where it is?" she asked.

"Then that one of us should be the adult," Alaric scolded.

"Funny, because I thought it should be the one of us with high-level superpowers," Hope sassed.

"In both of those cases, it should be me then," I said, causing Alaric to look at me with a scolding look.

I knew that Hope and Alaric were still walking on eggshells with me, trying to see if I was really as stable as I seemed. In truth, I felt better that day. I woke up and felt like there was things that needed to get done, and that I should do it.

My heart was aching for the Roman shaped hole in my life at the moment, but that was about it. I tried not to think too much about Elijah, about Lorelle. I looked at the old journals they kept, the ones I read religiously, but I hadn't opened them for a while.

I hadn't opened my own in a while.

"What?" I asked. "I'm way older than you, Ric."

"What should we tell everyone else?" Hope asked. "We should probably warn them before a cyclops crashes exam week."

"I would kill for a cyclops to crash exam week. Or to crash into me so I don't have to deal with exam week," I joked, earning more scolding glares from Alaric, and one from Hope, too.

Yup, it was probably comments like that that made them walk around eggshells with me.

"Well," Alaric said, ignoring my comment and sitting down on the top of his desk. "It's usually best to start with some form of the truth."

"What about those times the truth is the one thing you can't say?" she asked, looking at both of us.

Of course, she was talking about Malivore, Seylah, and Landon. My mind, however, drifted to the twin merge, it drifted to my own years of lying.

Truth about those times where the truth is the one thing you can't say is that it's the only thing you should say, but you don't, in the name of "protecting" the people you hide it from. When, really, you're protecting yourself. You're protecting yourself from having it eat at you that you told them information that hurt, you're protecting yourself from watching people you love be in pain.

It's not altruistic, it's not for the greater good of the other person.

Withholding the truth is the easy way out, but no one's ready for that conversation yet.

"Are you sure you want to keep all of this from Landon? I mean, I understand you wanting to protect him, but-" Alaric started, saying a lot of which I was thinking.

"He's been wondering about his mother his whole life. He finally meets her, and then she dies? If I can  keep him from knowing what that feels like, then it's worth it," she asid.

It wasn't. But she wasn't ready for that conversation either, and of course Alaric would see where she was coming from. I saw where she was coming from, too.

But I was the only one in the room who hide secrets and watched them unravel.

My secret about being a Mikaelson was what, in the end, stripped me of time with my Dad while he knew he was my dad. It stripped me of a life I could've had if I had just told them my identity, but I was scared. I wanted to protect myself from the messy Mikaelson lifestyle, from their enemies, from their blinded rage and anger. But I found myself craving their unconditional love for one another.

And when I got it, it was too late.

—

We were sending kids to the Lockwood mansion if they wanted to evacuate while we were still unsure about when the next monster would attack. Matt opened the doors for us. Exam week, wherever students were, was going to happen as planned.

Since, after all, telling the accreditation board we were cancelling mandatory testing because of monsters wasn't something that would bode well for the integrity of the school.

"Have you guys seen Hope?" Landon asked.

I had noticed him during Alaric's entire speech glancing around the room, searching for something. I had assumed it would be my cousin.

"I haven't," I shook my head, which was the truth.

Rafael shook his head, too.

"You two gonna evacuate?" I asked, hoping to change the subject from my cousin.

"Are you?" Rafael asked as we started to make our way back to our rooms.

"I'm untouchable, wolfie," I laughed. "I'm the best security guard this school will ever get."

"Then, I guess I'm safe here," he said, sending me a smile.

I chuckled at this, and I linked my arms through both of the boys' arms. Rafael yawned, covering his mouth with his free hand.

"So, Hope's M.I.A," Landon said, still thinking about her.

I guess I suck at diversions.

"Yeah, she's probably suiting up in her battle armor," Rafael said. "Girl's basically Wonder Woman."

I laughed at this statement.

"I don't even know what you are, Ms. Untouchable. I got no superhero that amounts to you," he said.

"Stopppp, you're gonna feed my ego," I laughed.

"Either that, or she's realized she's made a mistake bringing me back here 'cause where I go, danger follows," Landon said, too gloomy to join in on our "nerd talk".

"My god," mumbled Rafael. "C'mon bro. Now, this one's not on you."

"Sweetheart," I said, stopping all three of us in our tracks to grab Landon's shoulders, despite him being much taller than I was. "Hope and I are Mikaelsons, where we go, danger follows."

"I still haven't gotten too far in magical history class... so I'll let you know what I think of that statement once I get to the chapter about your family."

"Isn't all the chapters about my family?" I asked.

"They're not evil yet," he said, then stuttered. "N-not that I think your family's evil or anything, but-"

"They can be," I answered for him, giggling at how flustered he was getting when he realized I got be offended by what he just said.

"Hope being distant today has got to have something to do with us waking up in a field with amnesia yesterday, right?"

"Landon, I used to get to distant with Roman that I'd end up in New Orleans. It wasn't on him that I was acting that way, it was just how I cope. We Mikaelsons have a lot to learn about healthy coping, because we do do things that we shouldn't, like get so overwhelmed with wanting to save the world that we shut out the very world we're trying to protect."

"Look, until one of you can remember how you guys got there yesterday, I just... I wouldn't think about it," Rafael advised him. "Look, you're here. Think about the good things in your life instead of gettinv caught up in the bad for once, bro."

"Yeah," Landon said, nodding slowly.

"I'm gonna go grab my bags and hit the library," Rafael told us.

"Okay," Landon and I nodded.

They did their little bro-handshake, and Rafael pulled me into a side hug afterwards.

"Help me study for history later?" he asked. "You did tell me that I can use you as a primary source for most of it."

"Just text me," I replied, laughing. "I can't believe you remember that in all the chaos."

"You said it to me on my first day, how could I forget?"

He looked at Landon, "I'll see you at breakfast in the morning?"

"Yeah, see you at breakfast," Landon said, though the way he said it, I felt like he was retreating into his own universe of overthinking already, despite the speeches Rafael and I had given him about trying to relax.

Rafael turned around, and said, "Hey, Lan. I'm glad you're back."

This made Landon smile, looking at his foster brother with appreciation as he wondered down the hall.

"I'm glad you're here, too," I told the curly haired boy. "You make my cousin happy, so I wouldn't worry too hard about this, okay?"

"How did Roman handle it?" he asked, and I looked at him all funny. "I mean, how did he handle you being distant?"

I sighed. "There's a lot that I did in my relationship with Roman that he handled so well, I can't even imagine why or how. I'm a lot to deal with, and I don't know, maybe it was fact that we both have been around long enough to have so many relationships that we know to just let things run its course, maybe it's just that he and I had this understanding, or maybe he didn't handle it well at all and just never told me. Communication is key, and I know that Hope's distant and my distant is different. You just gotta learn how to move around her, if you want to be with a girl like her."

He nodded.

"I hope any of that made sense."

"I think it did," he nodded some more.

"Okay. Good. I'm going to go. Welcome home, Landon."

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

[raywritesthings]

Sheriff, Hood and Maid

My Writing Fandom: Arrow Characters: Quentin Lance, Laurel Lance, Oliver Queen, John Diggle Relationships: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen (Hinted/Unresolved) Summary: Long before the Hood arrives in Starling City, Detective Lance relaxes his loyalty to the law. His daughter must take on a double life of her own to redeem her family legacy. / AU What-If of Season 1 *Can be read on my AO3 or FFN, links are in bio*

It had been a moment of weakness. After losing Sara, seeing the bodies of all those young girls pile up one after the other, with stiff limbs and sightless eyes, it was too much. He’d have done anything to make it stop, to catch Mathis.

Anything, as it turned out, had meant selling his soul.

He’d received a call tipping him off to a location Mathis was supposedly using to conduct his sick experiments. When he’d arrived, there was no Mathis and no equipment. Just a mid-ranking member of one of the local cartels.

Quentin had been angered and then infuriated when the thug had proposed his deal. Immunity for him and his side in exchange for information. He had stormed out of that warehouse and not looked back.

Then another girl had turned up dead. And another. Before he could think it through too many times, he was dialing the number that had called in the fake tip.

What else could he have done? It wasn’t like people weren’t going to buy the drugs anyway if he refused to play ball with the cartel. He’d gotten a location and led a raid to catch the Dollmaker in the act. A serial killer behind bars.

“Just remember the favor you owe us, Detective,” he’d been warned. “Or your pretty daughter with the fancy new law degree is gonna wish it was Mathis that got to her.”

Okay, so one cartel was going to walk the streets knowing he’d look the other way. So what? They didn’t have the manpower to bring them all in.

The funny thing was, once one deal was made, it didn’t seem so bad to make more. It was like they could sniff him out all of a sudden. Maybe there was talk. He didn’t know.

Quentin found himself with a lot more convictions under his belt and a lot more friends in low places. His tab was always paid at his favorite bar before he even made it there after a shift. It wasn’t like he was letting all the criminals walk. There were still bad people getting put away.

How was it any different than Nudocerdo hobnobbing with the big wigs in their ivory towers? How was it any different than Moira Queen or Malcolm Merlyn paying all the right people to get their kids off the hook for crimes they ought to be serving sentences for?

Whenever he happened to be in a charitable mood, which he rarely was, Quentin could admit it wasn’t very different to all the wheeling and dealing he’d done behind the scenes to keep Sara’s record clean.

If he had one saving grace, it was Laurel. She alone was untouched by all the dirt and corruption their city was swimming in. He was prouder than he could say, and it burned at him more than he could stand sometimes the way she would remind him of all the things he had once taught her about the law and doing what was right. He snapped at her more than was warranted for it, and he knew she just couldn’t understand.

He never wanted her to. If she ever knew…

But it was pointless to even worry about that. The associates he’d acquired over the last few years would ensure he was never ousted, so long as he kept up his end of the deals he’d made. And he would, for her sake. This city was rotten to the core, and if all he could do was save one person from it, it damned well wouldn’t be the rich elites who could bribe their way through anything or the teens with rap sheets already a mile long. It would be his own flesh and blood, all he had left of it in the world.

With enough drink in him, most nights he went to bed with a muddied conscience. But it was enough to let him sleep.

---

Laurel had had a bad feeling for a long time. Various bad feelings, she supposed, but it was hard not to when her sister and boyfriend died while screwing each other, her mother left and her father fell into drinking. There weren’t many good feelings left in the wake of all that.

But this specific one had more to do with her work. Ever since she had started at CNRI, things had felt a little… off.

At first she hadn’t noticed, too caught up in the high of winning her first official case, saving a man’s son from prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Other little victories here and there. 

But then, every time she tried going up against something big, the systemic forces truly plaguing their city, roadblocks constantly sprung up in her path. A judge threw the case out, witnesses disappeared, evidence went missing from the police lockers and, lately, her boss had been getting very particular about handing out or approving assignments.

If she’d talked to her father about it once, she must have talked to him about it a million times. He’d been a sympathetic ear at first, promising to keep an eye on things at the precinct, but as time wore on he did little more than sigh and tell her that she couldn’t expect to change the world overnight. Joanna did him one better and suggested Laurel do something with all that pent-up frustration, which had led Laurel to seeking out boxing lessons at a gym not too far from their office.

While letting her anger out through her fists did wonders for her emotional self-control, it did little to fix the rest of her problems. Laurel’s mind chased itself around in circles night after night, wondering just where the trouble was starting from. Was there some kind of leak between their office and the DA’s? Was it Kate Spencer herself? Or was she being spied on?

Laurel started meeting her clients outside of the office and off the books. For a while, it seemed to help as she was happy to note to her dad. But gradually, whatever force was conspiring against her seemed to catch up to her new methods. It didn’t matter if she worked with Joanna or alone, if she wrote her files in plain English or in the secret code she and Sara had developed during a particularly boring winter filled with school cancellations due to the wind chill, making playing outside impossible. She was reaching her wit’s end with this enemy who seemed to know her as well as she knew herself.

Just as she was starting to wonder if everything was hopeless, an unexpected ally of sorts emerged from seemingly nowhere: an archer dressed in green. He’d appeared on the scene as suddenly as Oliver had stepped back into her life after five years of him being presumed dead, taking in Adam Hunt and his security team before Laurel was slated to lose her case against him thanks to a bought Judge Grell. Then again, he took on Martin Sommers and the Triad after they attacked her home while Oliver was visiting.

It was exhilarating seeing someone finally stand up to the untouchable in this city. She couldn’t help to wonder why no one had thought to do it before, couldn’t help but feel inspired...

Laurel kept these thoughts to herself while staying at her father’s that night. The police were still processing the crime scene that her apartment had become the other night thanks to the home invasion that she suspected was meant to have been an assassination if she hadn’t been able to take down one of their attackers and Mr. Diggle hadn’t shown up to confront China White. The bodyguard himself might have been killed had Oliver not been extremely lucky with his knife throw. She supposed he must have gotten very good at that sort of thing while hunting for food on the island.

Laurel’s dreams of a figure moving through thick, green overgrowth stalking the Fortune 500 were interrupted by the low snarl of her dad’s voice. Laurel startled awake, looking around in confusion.

“...don’t care that he got away. Sommers overreached, and that’s his and your problem, not mine!”

Light shone through the cracks around the bedroom door. He was still awake? Laurel slid off the mattress as quietly as she could, sneaking in her socks to the door. She opened it a centimeter and peered down the hall.

Her father was pacing back and forth, crossing in and out of view as he spoke into a phone. “My daughter comes first. The minute you agreed to his contract, that’s the minute you turned your back on me. I wasn’t gonna do a damned thing to save that bottom-feeder from some vigilante.”

Laurel’s mind raced. If this was about Sommers, and her father was talking to a person who had accepted a contract that had to do with her…

“Yeah, I know. I know what you have on me. I’d rather we continue on business as usual, too, but we can’t do that unless I have your word that the next time Laurel is in your sights, you let me handle it. Alright? She’s my responsibility, not yours. And you can tell that to China White herself.”

China White. The Triad. Her father was on the phone with the Triad.

She watched him hang up and rub a hand across his forehead. “Should’ve just let her go to San Francisco…” he muttered under his breath.

She couldn’t keep watching. Laurel shook her head and backed up into a dresser with a muffled bang, too loud for him not to have heard. “Shit,” she whispered.

Sure enough, she heard his shoes coming down the hall. Rather than comforting, they sounded loud and heavy and like a threat. What did she do? What did she say?

The door opened before she could make up her mind to flee, and Laurel looked up at her father.

“Honey?” He asked, sounding just as concerned as always. His gun rested on his belt.

She had to play this off. She couldn’t risk him finding out she knew. She couldn’t trust he wouldn’t hurt her — she didn’t know who this man was anymore.

“Uh, sorry. I was getting up to use the bathroom, and I couldn’t see where I was going in the dark,” she explained, hoping the strain in her voice could be attributed to the pain from hitting the furniture.

He nodded. “Okay. Lamp’s on the table there for it you need it.”

“Uh-huh. Are you going out?”

He looked down at himself. “No. I just, uh, was finishing up some work at the table. I’ll get to sleep soon, promise.”

Laurel forced a smile that was more a nervous twitch of the lips as she slowly moved past him into the hall, shutting herself in the bathroom. She let out a breath then drew it back in, forcing herself to focus on that and prevent herself from hyperventilating.

Her father was a dirty cop. How long had he been? Since she got her degree? Since the Gambit sunk? Since always?

He was the source of the leak. For three years, she’d been watching herself and who she spoke to, dedicated herself to nothing but work — and the one person she had felt safe in confiding to, the one person she’d thought understood her relentless pursuit of justice, had betrayed her.

She sat on the lid of the toilet and willed the tears that wanted to spill from her eyes back. There wasn’t time to feel sorry for herself. She’d unknowingly been helping the other side by giving them ready access to information. What was she going to do now?

The first thing was stop talking to her dad about her cases and make sure to lock up her notes even in the safety of her home. And then… what? That didn’t feel like enough.

What could she do to help the people who had suffered for her ignorance? The people who would continue to suffer thanks to this corrupt bargain her father had made? Or even, maybe, possibly, her father himself?

Was he just doing this to protect her? Maybe someone had made threats. Maybe he thought it was the only way. They were both semi-public figures. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for organized crime to make the connection between them and decide to exploit it.

If she could figure out how deep this went, how far this web of alliances stretched, maybe she could free him from it.

But she couldn’t do it as herself. It was clear that either her father would be forced to stop her or the Triad and whoever else would take matters into their own hands, and she didn’t want to test her luck a second time. Prosecuting them publicly would mean damning her father, too, and despite everything she had just learned, she didn’t know if she was prepared to do that.

She had to work independently of the law. Any misgivings she might have felt about that a month ago melted away now that she knew her father had abandoned his own credo a long time ago. This wasn’t some idealized mock trial in school. This was reality. And there was someone out there already proving that the only way to get justice in this city was to get it yourself.

Laurel stood and flushed the toilet to sell her story, washing her hands in the sink as she stared herself down in the mirror. Her eyes were dry and determined.

She would do what needed to be done.

---

Oliver was at a crossroads in many ways. Diggle was on the fence about joining him. Lance was hot on the trail of evidence he’d planted to set himself up for exoneration. And he still didn’t know quite where he and Laurel stood since his return in both of his personas.

He knew as Oliver he was making things difficult, wanting to atone for his actions yet also wanting her safe. He couldn’t be the man she saw in him in his public life because he was needed as the Hood. And while she seemed far more receptive to the Hood, his first encounter with her had proven… odd.

“How do you decide?” She’d asked him unexpectedly in the dark of her apartment. The little light come through the windows made her eyes look overbright and earnest. “Who gets hospitalized and who lands in the morgue?”

“It’s not a decision,” he answered eventually. “Not a conscious one. This city is in a fight for its life. In those kinds of struggles…” He had found himself struggling then to articulate what it was to be driven by the need for survival in the heat of battle, how everything else faded away.

But Laurel had nodded as if she understood. “Then it’s not a question of targeting.”

“Is there someone you wanted targeted?”

To his surprise, she did not dismiss the question, but rather hesitated. “I don’t have everything I need yet. And you’re right that Declan’s case can’t wait if he really is as innocent as you think.”

He’d let the subject drop, and there had been no time to address it in any of their subsequent meetings. Certainly not at Iron Height, where she had pulled him out of the fog of battle through her touch and voice alone before he could make yet another kill. He didn’t know how to thank her for that. Especially when the next time he saw her, it was because she was representing him against her dad, and he couldn’t exactly thank her for something he wasn’t supposed to know about as Oliver Queen.

It helped that Laurel was convinced there was no way he was the Hood. At least, he thought she was convinced until the polygraph test. Until he revealed some of the truth about what had happened to him there. The look in her eyes… he had fled before she could ask him anything, back to the party he was having Tommy plan at the house.

Oliver walked around the main room, making sure he was very visible as Diggle prepared to head out in the Hood’s suit. While he didn’t exactly enjoy himself in this type of crowd anymore, he didn’t truly tense up until he noticed something.

Outside the glass doors to the patio, someone was watching.

The strobe lights from the party illuminated her for a moment — he thought it was a her, though he couldn’t make out her face beneath the dark shawl she wore over her head and wrapped around her shoulders. The patio went dark and then light again, and in that time she had turned her back as she dropped something in one of the potted plants.

Oliver sucked around people as he made his way to the patio and the far edge, but he could make out no one in the darkness of the grounds. None of the attendees seemed to have noticed anything, either, thought that likely was due to their inebriated states.

He went back to the plant and pulled out what she had left behind.

It was a manila envelope with a note scrawled on one side in almost exaggeratedly bad handwriting.

For the Hood, if you know him.

Oliver’s heart thudded in his chest. This woman had clearly decided to believe Lance, or at least believed he had some role in the Hood’s appearance in Starling.

Did he open it? Ignore it to avoid proving this woman’s suspicions? But then, what did she want?

Oliver took the envelope back to his room and opened it, spilling the contents onto his desk. Pictures printed on computer paper. Typed notes. It was rudimentary and low-budget, but he was looking at a dossier. A dossier on Nudocerdo, the Starling City Police Commissioner. From the looks of it, he was in far too many pockets to be doing anything good for the public.

Take him down without death and I’ll tell you everything, was written at the bottom of the final page.

Now he was truly at a crossroads. If he acted, this woman would clearly know he at the very least had a connection to the Hood. But just what was “everything”?

Oliver found himself attacked by a hitman before he could ponder that much further, and only the intervention of Detective Lance saved his life and his identity from being exposed, as much as the detective looked like he might be happy to shoot Oliver as well. Long after the party had been cleared out and his family had gone to sleep secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t a vigilante was Oliver able to discuss with Diggle the woman who seemed to think he might still be the vigilante.

“I think you were visited by the Maid.”

Oliver’s face scrunched up. “The who?”

Digg shrugged. “She showed up a couple weeks back. Folks in the Glades say they’ve spotted her trailing gangbangers and cops alike. And the rumor is she’s had to fight her way out of a situation or two. That’s part of what made me realize I needed to join this fight,” Diggle told him. Folks are getting restless, desperate. You’ve shown them a new way, and they just might take it.”

Oliver frowned. He hadn’t been trying to show anyone a new way. This was just the most effective way for him to complete his father’s mission. “Why ‘the Maid’?”

“You said she was wearing that shawl over her head? Hoodette didn’t catch on, so people started looking to your namesake: Robin Hood.”

It hit him a moment later. “Maid Marian.” His uneasiness grew. Oliver knew, of course, that the whole point of what he’d just done was that the Hood and Oliver Queen were separate identities. But he didn’t like the idea of being associated, and romantically at that, with another woman. Not when he was meant to be proving himself to Laurel. If she could only know.

Unless she did? Why exactly had she wanted to know how the Hood chose his targets and what happened to them? What had she meant by not having everything she needed yet? Was she gathering information? And if she was…

It was a theory. The same kind of theory that this woman was working off of regarding his own identity, but if he was right it changed everything.

If he was right, he needed to know what Laurel knew. And he had a feeling he’d only find that out once Nudocerdo was out of the picture.

---

Once again, he found himself at the bar and, once again, he found his tab was already covered. He wasn’t drinking anything strong, though. Not tonight. Not when he’d screwed up bad enough.

He’d been so sure it was Queen. Locking up the Hood would’ve helped smooth over the ruffled feathers caused by the vigilante’s interference in Hunt and Sommer’s operations. Would’ve made his job a heck of a lot easier. And would’ve gotten the bastard far and away from his daughter.

When he’d been sure of the archer’s identity, it had all made sense. Queen returned from that island and thought he could slide back into Laurel’s good graces by putting his thumb on the scales of justice, so to speak. That was clearly why Hunt and Sommers had been attacked coincidentally as Laurel was mounting cases against them, and she had been picked out of all the lawyers in the city to help him clear Peter Declan’s name. Only now, it apparently was a coincidence, and he didn’t know anything anymore.

The Hood needed to be caught. No matter what good other people thought he was doing, he was a menace that needed to be off the streets the same as any thug. Just because he was stealing money and giving it away didn’t make him better than the likes of a kid jacking a car for a joyride. It made him worse, because he was causing unrest with the criminal elements who, like it or not, were woven into the very fabric of Starling. Had been for longer than Quentin had wanted to admit before he’d finally given in.

A man in a fine suit took the barstool next to him. “Evening, Detective.”

Quentin blew out a breath. He was not in the mood for another deal right now, not when he was still on shaky ground with the Triad. “So, which boss do you work for?”

The man pursed his lips. “Hardly. My name is Carl Ballard.”

Ballard? One of the big-wigs? Quentin sat up a little straighter.

“What’s a guy with all the money and success in the world doing in a hole-in-the-wall like this?”

“I’m here on business. I assume you haven’t heard since you’re clearly off duty at the moment, but reports have come in that Commissioner Nudocerdo has been attacked in his home by the Hood.”

“That son of a bitch,” Quentin swore. It wasn’t enough that the guy had to prove his Queen theory wrong tonight, but he had to go after the police department?

“I agree,” Ballard said lightly. “And so do some associates of mine who were fond of Nudocerdo. Given his imminent fall from grace, we want to see that things keep running smoothly. That’s why I’m letting you know you have the full backing of Tempest to fill the position of Commissioner.”

He reeled back a little in shock. “Commissioner? Me?” His eyes narrowed. “Just what is Tempest?”

“A group of like-minded individuals who want the best for our families and our city, like yourself,” Ballard told him. “We all feel you would be the best candidate in these uncertain times. Your commitment to catching the vigilante is unmatched, and you understand the way this city works.”

He knew what that last part meant underneath. Business as usual. It was hardly what he would have envisioned all those years ago as a beat cop with his head full of ideas about changing things for the better. He’d forgotten about that dream a long time ago.

“Say I accept. What’s in it for me?”

“A number of powerful allies. More if you prove effective.”

“Effective at what?”

“Tempest wants to find out the source of the Hood’s information. What he’s basing his crusade off of and how he obtained it. These are things you have to be wondering, too.”

He had, and he’d thought for a worrying moment that it might be Laurel. For the first time tonight, he was glad he’d been wrong about his assumptions on Queen.

“I’ve been in the Glades recently working on a gentrification project, and my security tells me they’ve heard rumors of a spy. A woman. They’re calling her his Maid Marian. We’d like you to start there, tracking down this young Maid.”

An informant for the Hood? That was something solid, something real at last. What did he have to lose?

“I’ll get on it — or, guess I’ll put my best men on it, since your people want me in the Commissioner’s chair so badly.” Quentin stuck out his hand for Carl Ballard to shake.

It wasn’t the worst deal he’d made.

[aion-rsa]

30 Rock’s Best Running Jokes

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

When 30 Rock drew its final breath in 2013, yards of column inches were devoted – deservedly so – to praising the work of creator Tina Fey. Article upon article applauded the characters, cast, performances and seven seasons of energetic, inventive, satirical comedy.

More than anything else though, 30 Rock was always about the gags. It was fruitcake-dense with jokes, regularly fitting in more quotable laughs before its opening credits than many shows manage in a full half-hour. As it returns for a one-off reunion special, join us in celebrating the many, many running gags of its seven-season history, from the fake movies, to the terrible yet incredibly catchy songs, Frank’s hats, and those godawful TGS sketches…

The fake movies 

The presence of Tracy Jordan (a bonafide Martin Lawrence meets the Wayans Brothers-style movie star) in the TGS cast opened up the world of film parody to 30 Rock.

Admittedly Jenna Maloney also enjoyed a movie career of sorts, but while she was being offered the part of “any blonde actress” in torture porn flicks by the producers who watched and rented Saw, Tracy was turning down the lead in Garfield 3: Feline Groovy to pursue his serious acting career. The latter climaxed with the release of spot-on Precious parody Hard To Watch (Based on the novel Stone Cold Bummer by Manipulate), for which Tracy received the O in his EGOT plan. Sheer class.

Over the years though, who couldn’t not smile at Tracy’s blaxpoitation-filled back catalogue, from the timeless romance of A Blaffair to Rememblack, to Sherlock Homie, Who Dat Ninja?, The Chunks 2: A Very Chunky Christmas, and last but by no means least, Honky Grandma Be Trippin’. The man is a chameleon (in that he’s always a lizard).

Two of Jenna’s TGS projects however, bring back the fondest memories of 30 Rock’s stinging movie satire: small-town legal drama The Rural Juror (based on a Kevin Grisham novel), and her GE-produced life rights-avoiding Janis Joplin biopic, Sing Them Blues White Girl: The Jackie Jormp Jomp Story.

The TGS sketches 

The quality of TGS’ output was never under question in 30 Rock; the sketch show was unremittingly bad (when the absence of their star meant a ‘Best of TGS’ series had to be run in lieu of live shows, Legal objected to their use of the word ‘Best’, and when a review dubbed it the worst comedy ever made, Liz was thrilled they’d defined it as a comedy). Liz Lemon’s opus was a fluorescent collection of fart gags, dodgy caricatures, Jenna’s songs, and misjudged celebrity impressions.

Beginning life as, in Kenneth’s words, “a real fun ladies comedy show for ladies”, TGS was Saturday Night Live’s idiot brother, the unsophisticated thorn in NBC’s side, under constant threat of controversy and cancellation. Forced to synergise backward overflow, advertise parent company products and promote GE interests, 30 Rock’s show-within-a-show satirised both the TV industry and tired trends in comedy (the always hilarious combination of a fat woman who’s sexually confident! Old ladies are crazy! Farts!).

Lemon may have seduced pilot Carol (Matt Damon) with her Fart Doctor skits, but TGS failed to win many hearts. With sketches like Pam the Overly Confident Morbidly Obese Woman, Ching-Chong Man Who Loves to Play Ping-Pong, Fat Hillary Clinton, Bear vs. Killer Robots, Me Want Food, and Gaybraham Lincoln, why it wasn’t more successful is a mystery.

Astronaut Mike Dexter 

Lemon may have ended up with James Marsden’s Criss Chros, but fictional boyfriend Astronaut Mike Dexter will always hold a special place in her heart. Handsomer than Dr Drew, less British than Wesley Snipes, less living-in-Cleveland than Floyd, and a million times better than Dennis Duffy, Astronaut Mike Dexter had it all… except of course, a corporeal self. 

The fake songs 

Over the years, Jenna Maroney’s singing career has vomited up some truly dreadful creations, and topping the list has to be Muffin Top (a big hit in the king-making music markets of Israel and Belgium). Seguing from its pop insanity chorus “My muffin top is all that, wholegrain, low-fat” into a Madonna-style spoken-word rap “I’m an independent lady, so please don’t try to play me. I run a tidy bakery. The boys all want my cake for free”, the song is a battery assault on the senses.

But is it worse than Jenna’s summer dance jam, Balls, which earned her the princely sum of $50 in royalties? Or her computer generated, generic benefit song in aid of an unspecific natural disaster, which urged viewers to donate to “help the people the thing that happened, happened to”? How about the Jackie Jormp Jomp performance she gave of Chunk Of My Lung, written by Jack five minutes before the show, containing the classic line “You know you’ve bought it if life makes you sweet food”? Or Fart So Loud, the un-Weird Al-able song she and Tracy wrote after he parodied the theme to Avery Jessup TV movie Kidnapped? Such riches…

It’s not only Jenna who’s provided 30 Rock’s musical intervals of course. Season three finale Kidney Now! welcomed an eclectic collection of stars including Sheryl Crow, Mary J Blige, Elvis Costello, Moby, two of the Beastie Boys, Wyclef Jean, and Cyndi Lauper to perform a We Are The World-style anthem at the Milton Green benefit gig. Angie Jordan famously released a fifteen-second single My Single Is Dropping, to ride on the wave of her reality-show fame, Frank and Pete’s Sound Mound came up with unforgettable rock anthem Weekend Woman, and in the very same episode, even Tina Fey got in on the action by providing excellent Joni Mitchell parody, Paints and Brushes.

The legacy award though, as in the 30 Rock fake song that will continue to bring joy to the hearts of fans decades from now, has to go to one song, and one song only: Tracy Jordan’s Werewolf Bar Mitzvah.

Frank’s hat slogans 

Off-set, stand-up Judah Friedlander favours his ‘World Champion’ trucker hat, the one he claims to have been awarded as the winner of the World Championships of pretty much all sports, martial arts, and that time he karate kicked Chuck Norris’ beard off his face and forced him to legally change his name to Charles.

On-set as Frank Rossitano though, Friedlander wears a series of self-designed trucker hats, each bearing a different gnomic slogan. Often incongruous, sometimes suggestive, and always odd, Frank’s hat slogans are part of the bricks and mortar of 30 Rock. In terms of favourites, we’re quite fond of ‘Alabama Legsweep’, or the laconic enigma of ‘And’, though ‘Shark Cop’, ‘Half Centaur’ and ‘Space Gravy’ also caught our eye over the seasons.

Jenna’s Mickey Rourke sex stories 

Like Dot Com’s intellectualism, this running gag may have been introduced late into proceedings, but Jenna’s torrid sexual history with putty-faced beefcake Mickey Rourke gave J-Mo some of her best lines. Jenna’s allusions to Rourke’s sexually deviant and murderous attempts on her life paint a fascinating picture for 30 Rock fans. Here are some of the finest:

“Your new vibe is a double-edged sword, much like the kind Mickey Rourke tried to kill me with”, “Nice try Hazel, but you made the same mistake Mickey Rourke made on that catamaran. You didn’t kill me when you had the chance.”, “I’m going to have to reinvent you. Break you down completely and build you up from scratch. Just like Mickey Rourke did to me sexually.” “Next time you’ll tell me Mickey Rourke catapulted you into the Hollywood sign.” “You know what they say, if you can’t stand the heat, get off Mickey Rourke’s sex grill.” Wise words.

Kenneth the immortal page 

To this day Kenneth Ellen Parcell remains something of an enigma to 30 Rock viewers. In later seasons, Jack McBrayer’s character went from being a simple country rube from Stone Mountain, Georgia to  the flesh vessel for a mysterious immortal with no reflection, no age, and links to a world beyond our own.

Plenty of reference has been made to Kenneth’s ageless and supernatural state over the years, including the suggestion that not only is he unable to die, but he’s also an angel, sent to oversee the transition of souls from one world to the next.

The fake TV shows 

It’s either a credit to the 30 Rock team or a condemnation of our times that Jack Donaghy’s hit reality viewer vote show, MILF Island, no longer feels like a parody. In generations to come, time will no doubt erode the boundaries between fact and fiction, and we 30 Rock fans will be telling our kids about the time we watched Deborah beat her competitors and claim MILF victory in the same breath as educating them about those people who ate kangaroo anuses for public approval.

MILF Island stands head and shoulders above the rest of 30 Rock’s fake TV shows (including TGS itself, lest we not forget), but that doesn’t mean that Gold Case, Los Amantes Clandestinos, Black Frasier, Homonym, or the inimitable Bitch Hunter deserve any less respect. Our fallen brothers, we salute you.

We could go on indefinitely listing the recurring jokes that made 30 Rock great, from Liz’s sandwich lust and desire to go to there, to Jack’s gloriously thatched head of hair and Republican conspiracies. As the show prepares to return, which of the above will live again?

30 Rock: A One-Time Special lands on NBC on Thursday July 16th at 8pm in the US.

The post 30 Rock’s Best Running Jokes appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2WjIevB

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Read: Jeannette Ng's Campbell Award acceptance speech, in which she correctly identifies Campbell as a fascist and expresses solidarity with Hong Kong protesters

Last weekend, Jeanette Ng won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2019 Hugo Awards at the Dublin Worldcon; Ng's acceptance speech calls Campbell, one of the field's most influential editors, a "fascist" and expresses solidarity with the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.

I am a past recipient of the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer (2000) as well as a recipient of the John W Campbell Memorial Award (2009). I believe I'm the only person to have won both of the Campbells, which, I think, gives me unique license to comment on Ng's remarks, which have been met with a mixed reception from the field.

I think she was right -- and seemly -- to make her remarks. There's plenty of evidence that Campbell's views were odious and deplorable. For example, Heinlein apologists like to claim (probably correctly) that his terrible, racist, authoritarian, eugenics-inflected yellow  peril novel Sixth Column was effectively a commission from Campbell (Heinlein based the novel on one of Campbell's stories). This seems to have been par for the course for JWC, who liked to micro-manage his writers: Campbell also leaned hard on Tom Godwin to kill the girl in "Cold Equations" in order to turn his story into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.

So when Ng held Campbell "responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists," she was factually correct.

Not just factually correct: also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We're trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We're trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to fandom for safety and sanctuary and community.

It's not a coincidence that one of the first organized manifestations of white nationalism as a cultural phenomenon was within fandom, and while fandom came together to firmly repudiate its white nationalist wing, these assholes weren't (all) entryists who showed up to stir trouble in someone else's community. The call (to hijack the Hugo award) was coming from inside the house: these guys had been around forever, and we'd let them get away with it, in the name of "tolerance" even as these guys were chasing women, queer people, and racialized people out of the field.

Those same Nazis went on to join Gamergate, then take up on /r/The_Donald, and they were part of the vanguard of the movement that put a boorish, white supremacist grifter into the White House.

The connection between the tales we tell about ourselves and our past and futures have a real, direct outcome on the future we arrive at. White supremacist folklore, including the ecofascist doctrine that says we can only avert climate change by murdering all the brown people, comes straight out of sf folklore, where it's completely standard for every disaster to be swiftly followed by an underclass mob descending on their social betters to eat and/or rape them (never mind the actual way that disasters go down).

When Ng took the mic and told the truth about his legacy, she wasn't downplaying his importance: she was acknowledging it. Campbell's odious ideas matter because he was important, a giant in the field who left an enduring mark on it. No one disagrees about that. What we want to talk about today is what that mark is, and what it means.

Scalzi points out:

There are still people in our community who knew Campbell personally, and many many others one step removed, who idolize and respect the writers Campbell took under his wing. And there are people — and once again I raise my hand — who are in the field because the way Campbell shaped it as a place where they could thrive. Many if not most of these folks know about his flaws, but even so it’s hard to see someone with no allegiance to him, either personally or professionally, point them out both forcefully and unapologetically. They see Campbell and his legacy abstractly, and also as an obstacle to be overcome. That’s deeply uncomfortable.

He's not wrong, and the people who counted Campbell as a friend are legitimately sad to confront the full meaning of his legacy. I feel for them. It's hard to reconcile the mensch who was there for you and treated his dog with kindness and doted on his kids with the guy who alienated and hurt people with his cruel dogma.

Here's the thing: neither one of those facets of Campbell cancel the other one out. Just as it's not true that any amount of good deeds done for some people can repair the harms he visited on others; it's also true that none of those harms cancel out the kindnesses he did for the people he was kind to.

Life is not a ledger. Your sins can't be paid off through good deeds. Your good deeds are not cancelled by your sins. Your sins and your good deeds live alongside one another. They coexist in superposition.

You (and I) can (and should) atone for our misdeeds. We can (and should) apologize for them to the people we've wronged. We should do those things, not because they will erase our misdeeds, but because the only thing worse than being really wrong is not learning to be better.

People are flawed vessels. The circumstances around us -- our social norms and institutions -- can be structured to bring out our worst natures or our best. We can invite Isaac Asimov to our cons to deliver a lecture on "The Power of Posterior Pinching" in which he literally advises men on how to grope the women in attendance, or we can create and enforce a Code of Conduct that would bounce anyone, up to and including the Con Chair and the Guest of Honor, who tried a stunt like that.

We, collectively, through our norms and institutions, create the circumstances that favor sociopathy or generosity. Sweeping bad conduct under the rug isn't just cruel to the people who were victimized by that conduct: it's also a disservice to the flawed vessels who are struggling with their own contradictions and base urges. Create an environment where it's normal to do things that -- in 10 or 20 years -- will result in your expulsion from your community is not a kindness to anyone.

There are shitty dudes out there today whose path to shitty dudehood got started when they watched Isaac Asimov deliver a tutorial on how to grope women without their consent and figured that the chuckling approval of all their peers meant that whatever doubts the might have had were probably misplaced. Those dudes don't get a pass because they learned from a bad example set by their community and its leaders -- but they might have been diverted from their path to shitty dudehood if they'd had better examples. They might not have scarred and hurt countless women on their way from the larval stage of shittiness to full-blown shitlord, and they themselves might have been spared their eventual fate, of being disliked and excluded from a community they joined in search of comradeship and mutual aid. The friends of those shitty dudes might not have to wrestle with their role in enabling the harm those shitty dudes wrought.

Jeannette Ng's speech was exactly the speech our field needs to hear. And the fact that she devoted the bulk of it to solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters is especially significant, because of the growing importance of Chinese audiences and fandom in sf, which exposes writers to potential career retaliation from an important translation market. There is a group of (excellent, devoted) Chinese fans who have been making noises about a Chinese Worldcon for years, and speeches like Ng's have to make you wonder: if that ever comes to pass, will she be able to get a visa to attend?

Back when the misogynist/white supremacist wing of SF started to publicly organize to purge the field of the wrong kind of fan and the wrong kind of writer, they were talking about people like Ng. I think that this is ample evidence that she is in exactly the right place, at the right time, saying the right thing.

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/20/needed-saying.html

[harley4l]

Chapter 10: Family stands together

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story

Beginning / Previous / Next 

A disappointment, as usual, his father had muttered under his breath every so often after Rocco had come home from school bruised and crying because he let his classmates beat him up again. Crybaby, they taunted him with wide sneers and eyes full of with callous glee. Little Mama’s Boy.

I’m not a Mama’s boy!, Rocco always insisted, their laughter swarming in his ears. His mother had wished for a daughter she could groom into a miniature version of herself, not a frail, cowardly son who could barely stand up against his older brothers. From day one, he’d been their punching bag, their prey to test the art of intimidation until they were old enough to inherit their father’s drug empire. When he was too young to properly understand what exactly his father’s legacy was, he’d asked Enzo and Rafael about it. His brothers had exchanged looks and smirked at each other before towering over Rocco. Dad is selling lots of candy, which makes other people happy, Enzo teased, mimicking a baby’s voice. Except if you’re eating to much candy, you’ll die! Rafel added with a chuckle. Better watch out for people giving you candy, it’ll kill you. Bring it to me and Enzo first, we’re testing it for poison. Timid and confused, Rocco had glanced from one brother to the other. But won’t the candy hurt you too? Hearing this, Enzo and Rafael had broken out into resounding laughter and slapped each other’s backs. Don’t worry about us, sissy, Rafael all but yelled. It’s only killing the weak pussies!

Back then Rocco hadn’t yet realized it how unwanted he was, but his family had put in the effort to make it clear over the following years. Dude, what a pantywaist, Rafael had snarled on an evening the three brothers were at home alone and they had watched a slasher movie on TV. Enzo and Rafael giggled when the killer started chasing his victims through the woods and rammed his chainsaw through their torsos, causing their guts to spill out – but Rocco had started to cry. Annoyed with his whining, his brothers had grabbed his arms and legs and dragged him downstairs into the basment, looking the door behind him. Rocco had sobbed and banged his fists against the solid door and begged for them to let him out. We’re only protecting you from the killer, Rocco! Enzo rasped behind the door. He’s coming for yooouuuu! Rocco screamed and screamed until his throat was sore and his knuckles were bruised from banging. Many hours later his parents had come down and unlocked the door, their faces twisting in disapproval at the sight of Rocco’s face which was swollen from crying. When they called Enzo and Rafael out of bed and asked why they’d left their younger brother alone in the basement for hours, Rafael made an innocent face. Because he’s weak, dad! Enzo and I, we were just trying to make a man out of him! Their father had sent the two back to bed without punishment.

With the years the brothers grew older, and with age they grew more hostile. They weren’t resorting to pranks to maltreat Rocco any longer, they just beat him up when he annoyed them and told Rocco he deserved this. Crazy as it was, they almost seemed to view it as a challenge. Fight back, Rafael coerced him after he’d destroyed Rocco’s solar system project for school and kicked him in the side when he scrambled to pick up the shambles. Fight back, FIGHT BACK! But Rocco didn’t know how. He'd always looked pathetic next to Enzo, the smartass brain of their family and Rafael, his father’s fierce and charming golden boy who could do nothing wrong. For the son of an infamous mafioso, Rocco admittedly had no qualities worth mentioning. He’d ― very briefly ― enjoyed painting with watercolor when he was nine or ten years old, but he gave up on the hobby after his siblings discovered his art hidden at the back of his wardrobe and boxed holes through the canvas’. Looks better that way, Enzo said when Rocco found the paintings completely destroyed. Afterwards, Rocco tried out boxing at school, but he was a hopeless case at sports and the trainer critiziced his moves were clumsy and weak.

After his brothers left to attend college, Rocco stopped talking to them for years. They rarely came home to visit and when they did he was basically air to them. Enzo studied history and Rafael economics. Both graduated with honors and soon afterwards Enzo got married to his wife Blaise and had Tessa, Rafael got married to Carol and they had Eleanor, Kara and Miranda. Rocco on the other hand was lucky to even graduate high school, seeing how badly his grades had dropped over the years. His teachers often complained that Rocco was distracted at school and didn’t do his homework, which was true in a way ― he was usually under too much stress to concentrate on homework. With grades as disastrous as his own, college plans were cancelled and he started out infinitely low on the career ladder, working as a tough guy in the criminal career in hopes of supporting his father someday. He’d lost count of how many women he dated up to that point ― since high school his girlfriends they had come and gone. He longed for a stable relationship such as his brothers had, but it seemed no woman could endure Rocco for long. They all insisted it wasn’t his fault that the relationship failed ― then in the same breath had criticized Rocco for shutting out emotions, not being tender, distanced, overall not husband material. It was almost funny after he’d spent all his life trying to be strong and not show his his emotions because in his family’s eyes emoting equalled weakness. He didn’t know how to open his heart anymore.

This november, Rafel had hosted a grand gala dinner at his house ― a celebration for his newly secured business deal with Nicholas Prescott, an influental politican and the richest man in all of Brindleton Bay. After they’d quaffed a considerable amount of liquor, Rafael led Rocco into his office and sorted the family pictures on the shelves, most of them showed little Miranda and the twins when they were younger. Then he’d opened a drawer and pulled out a frame showing a woman Rocco had never seen before. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, her lips a velvet red, her eyes a sparkling turquoise and her hair a curtain of platinum. Rocco was about to ask who she was, but his brother answered the thought before he got the chance to upen up his mouth. This is Patricia Prescott. Isn’t she the most gorgeous gem you’ve seen, little brother? Rocco shifted uncomfortably on his spot by the door frame, but Rafael went on, apparently a lot more drunk than he’d realized earlier. Weird, disjointed talk about how Nicholas was the most gullible fool Rafael had ever met, how empowering it felt to woo Nick’s wife behind his back. How he wished Patricia would go ahead and divorce her husband, so that their family could be complete. Rocco was not about to question what this bullshit meant, but the longer his brother kept on talking the more infuriated Rocco became. Their father’s business ― no, their family legacy ― relied heavily on Rafael’s business deals with Nicholas Prescott. He couldn’t believe his irresponsible brother was risking it all to mess around with Prescott’s wife! Losing Prescott’s financial help could very well push them into ruin. The business hadn’t exactly run smoothly after the old man retired and left Rafael in charge ― who messed up more deals with potential partners than he secured! Rafael simply didn’t have the brains Enzo could have offered, or the strategic talent Rocco had proclaimed for himself as a hacker over these past years.

A few hours after this confusing, aggravating conversation, Rafael seemed to have sobered up enough to realize who he'd been talking to. He approached Rocco, asking him to keep the newly aquired knowledge about his affair with Prescott’s wife to himself. Their father mustn’t know about this. Sure, he and Rocco have had their troubles with each other in the past, but that was long ago ― everything was forgiven and forgotten, right?

Rocco wished he had the courage to reply that nothing was forgiven. Didn’t his brother realize how shitty his behavior had been, how badly he'd messed Rocco up back when he was small and defenseless? No, this time Rocco was in charge ...  and he wanted to make Rafael pay. He wanted to punish him a hundred times worse, wanted to make him realize how strong and capable inferior little Rocco had become. They never took him serious until they all came crawling to him and asked for favors. Not so long ago, his niece had asked for his help to scare off some boys from school who followed her around. Nelly ― or was that Kara? He never bothered to try and tell them apart ― was always convinced someone was out to get her, although Rocco long suspected all of Rafael’s kids had some screws loose. But Nelly was by far the worst brat amongst them, the one always strutting around with a smug expression, acting like she was some sort of sovereignty. After Enzo declined his father’s offer to take over the company, Rocco should have been the one to be put in charge ― he had grown up to be far more qualified than both his brothers. Instead his father had chosen Nelly as his heiress, a naive little school girl, who had never contributed to anything. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair and someone had to pay the price for all the ways and years Rocco’s family had wronged him. If that someone needed to be Nelly, then so shall be it. The only thing Rocco knew for certain was that he would not be overlooked, or trampled over ― or underestimated ― ever again.

Next Chapter: Two can keep a secret ...

[lydia-yougowith-stiles]

My Top Ships 2018

I really enjoyed writing this article last year. So here we go again. Check out my favorite ships from movies and TV this year. 

12. The Goldbergs-Erica and Geoff

The Goldbergs has been one of my favorite sitcoms for a couple of years now and I have loved watching the development of Erica and Geoff’s relationship from a simple high school crush, to Erica discovering her feelings, to them now in the current season feeling like an old married couple at times. While they may still have their ups and downs I love how they are always there for one another and they are just adorable. Hope they’re in it for the long run like Geoff assumes they will be!

11. Throne of Glass-Chaol and Celaena 

At the beginning of 2018 I started reading Sarah J. Maas’ fantasy novel Throne of Glass. Instantly I could see the love triangle emerge between the assassin Celaena, the crown prince Dorian and the head of the king’s guard Chaol. While book one looked more like Celaena and Dorian would be together I always held out hope for the latter. And then I read Crown of Midnight! That book was one of my overall favorites and I got to watch this relationship form. It was beautiful and then everything blew up. I started the third book in the series and was instantly disappointed because it felt like an entirely new series. So while I have stopped reading it since then Chaol and Celaena will forever be one of my favorite ships. 

10. Supergirl-Kara and Mon-El

Mon-El returned to Supergirl last season and while Karamel was apart for the majority of the season viewers got to see a more mature Mon-El. There has always been much debate over his character as well as his relationship with Kara, but I have always been a fan of the Daxamite. In this season he returned to the present from the future where he was a part of the Legion of Superheroes and he was married. Kara, still recovering from the aftermath of season two, was thrilled to see him, but much had changed. While moments of this season were aggravating the two still had some great chemistry on screen. It was still very clear of their feelings for one another, but yet again Mon-El had to leave. This time taking Winn with him (which is a rant for another day). So while they might not have a future this is another ship that will always be one of my favorites. 

9. Victoria-Lord Alfred and Drummond

This ship instantly pulled my heart strings and ultimately (SPOILER ALERT) crushed my soul. Lord Alfred and Edward Drummond’s relationship started in season one of Victoria, but truly got its own story line in season 2. As expected in this masterpiece drama there were twists and turns that kept this couple part. Given the time period two men could not be together and Drummond was engaged to be married to a woman. But what none of us saw coming was his death. I still cannot believe it. He will be truly missed in the newest season which will air in the new year. 

8. Anne with an E-Anne and Gilbert

Netflix’s Anne with an E returned with a second season this year and we were blessed with more Shirbert moments between Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. While the beginning of this season saw Gilbert at sea (going off from L.M. Montgomery’s novel), there were still some great moments between the two characters from Anne writing him letters about the “gold,” to Gilbert not noticing her hair and letting her know it was good to see her. And who could forget this important moment (above) from the finale. Fortunately for us the series has just gotten picked up for a third season. I cannot wait to see what’s in store next!

7. Daredevil-Matt and Karen

While against popular ships I found myself shipping Matt Murdock and Karen Page hard as I began season 1 of Daredevil this past spring. In season 1 I took every moment I could get between the two of them and then I was a little too excited when they got “together” in season 2. While it didn’t end well for the two of them there were some really great moments I find myself reliving on YouTube. I have not watched season 3 yet (mainly because I want to continue to watch the Marvel Netflix shows in order and I have only just finished The Defenders). With the recent news of the show being cancelled I can only hope these two end on good terms. (Even if it is not romantically as I may hope. Please no spoilers.)

6. Set it Up-Harper and Charlie

This romantic comedy quickly made its way into my heart and into my top 10 favorite movies (I KNOW). This is all thanks to its lead characters Harper and Charlie. These two assistants were witty, relatable and just had an overall great chemistry that I am upset they are not together in real life. I have honestly watched this movie far too many times and each time my love for this ship gets stronger. I feel like the movie ends too quick because I want to know more about what happens to them. It might ruin it but would it be too much to ask for a sequel, Netflix?? 

5. Legacies-All of them

Okay, so by saying ALL OF THEM I don’t think I’m necessarily cheating. This show is still in its beginning and still establishing itself. They are still finding their ships and we are discovering the characters. But I have to say I like so many of them that it’s hard to choose just one pairing. Julie Plec has done a FANTASTIC job of having a lot of her major cast interact with one another and they each bring out something different in one another’s characters. One day I’m shipping Hope and Josie and the next I like Hope and Raphael. You can really tell good writing and characters when you can like so many different combinations and not feel mad about it. If you aren’t watching Legacies make sure to tune into the CW because you are missing out. 

4. The Originals-Klaus and Caroline

Yes, you did see this ship on my list from last year and that is because Klaus and Caroline are one of my top OTPs. I was excited to see Klaus on the Vampire Diaries so it is no surprise that I was beyond excited to hear of Caroline coming to the Originals in its final season. It was great to see the pair in the same room again. They were both parents now and had grown so much. Every time they recognized that in each other I got chills. So [SPOILER ALERT] while Klaus “had to die” I am extremely glad that he and Caroline got closure for their ship. In a way they were endgame and as a Klaroline fan, always and forever, that’s all a girl could ask for. 

3. Dawson’s Creek-Pacey and Joey

Dawson’s Creek was my summer binge this year. I wanted something “retro” that was just about regular teens (no superhero powers or magic). Going into this show I obviously knew a good amount of spoilers seeing as how it started in the late 90s, so I knew that Pacey Witter and Joey Potter would eventually become a couple. I now just had to wait for the when...and while at times it might have felt excruciating, I took any and all moments between the two characters (even before season 3 when things really get set into motion). There is just something so great about a ship between two characters who “hated” each others guts and tease each other constantly. It was well worth the wait because these two have become one of my favorite all time ships. While I am permanently paused on season four (pre their first break up) I have watched a bunch of spoiler videos to know that these two wind up together, which warms the heart. 

2. Brooklyn Nine-Nine-Amy and Jake

While looking for a new TV show to watch earlier this year it was suggested to watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine. (Only once I started binge-watching the show did it get cancelled and then thankfully renewed by NBC.) What a great choice it was to start watching this show. The void that was left by The Office and Parks and Rec was instantly filled by this sitcom. The characters and story-lines were hilarious and of course I couldn’t help but fall in love with the slow-burn of Amy and Jake. Again due to spoilers of coming into a show that already exists I knew the two would wind up together, but it was still so great to be a part of. The two are adorable and while the story line does not always revolve around their relationship you know they are still together by a quick line they say in a scene or two. They are just so right for each other. Right now I am catching up on season 5 (about mid-way right now) and I cannot wait to watch the next season premiering in January. So excited to see where their relationship is headed.

AND NUMBER 1 FOR 2018 GOES TO.....

1. THE 100-Bellamy and Clarke 

That’s right last year’s number 2 became my number 1 in 2018! While separated for 6 years with Clarke on the ground and Bellamy in the sky the two found their way back to one another. You could definitely feel the tension between the two, which made complete sense after all their time apart but there was still something that brought them back together. My heart still melts when Bellamy finds out that Clarke is alive from Madi and seeing Clarke’s face when Bellamy tells Diyoza that she matters. This ship is the slowest burn of my life and while Jason Rothenberg may still claim that the two will never be (and that we should read the books for that) this latest season gave us Bellarke fans a reason to hope. From Octavia calling out Bellamy’s feelings and saving the traitor who he loves (OMG) to Clarke’s looks every time Bellamy and Echo were embracing. They are the first two to wake up out of the pods and meet Harper and Monty’s son. They are deeply connected and I can only hope for moments like this next season. For now I’ll just re-watch my favorite to hold me over (and that includes Bob and Eliza’s SDCC interviews which were adorable). 

 Here’s to another year. Cannot wait to see what is in store for 2019!!

[jordancat]

Malec (aka Matthew Daddario and Harry Shum Jr.) Say Goodbye to 'Shadowhunters'...for Now

On that epic finale, fandom, and weddings...onscreen and off.

by EMILY TANNENBAUM MAY 7, 2019

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/amp27375054/shadowhunters-malec-wedding-finale-matthew-daddario-harry-shum-jr/

Please give the link a hit to show your interest in the show ans these two actors.  

But I always like to put the actual text of an interview or article in my posts in case the link moves or the article in taken down, so here it is.

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As I corral Harry Shum Jr. and Matthew Daddario around the Cosmo offices, Matt bounces on his heels, pointing to random objects—like a fancy golden coffee table and fuzzy pillows—asking me if he can bring them home with him (the answer is always "no"). Harry is much more calm, back straight and confident, happy to just laugh at his co-star.

It's jarring how their roles are almost the reverse of their characters: For the last three years on Freeform's hit series Shadowhunters (based on The Mortal Instruments, by Cassandra Clare). Matt played Alec Lightwood, the stoic half-angel leader with a heart of gold, while Harry embodied the eccentric Warlock Magnus Bane, always moving, portaling somewhere or changing his look...not to mention throwing shit around his beautiful New York apartment.

As they say, opposites attract, and Matt and Harry captured the hearts of the entire Shadowhunters fandom as a certified power couple. Malec has certainly had their share of rom-com moments (they share their first kiss when the warlock crashed Alec's first wedding) and dramatic breakups (don't remind me about 2X18). But last night, Shadowhunters gave Malec the happy ending they deserve, complete with gorgeous wedding and happily ever after as the Inquisitor of the Clave and High Warlock of Alicante.

A wedding finale is hardly unheard of in the TV world, bordering on cliché, but for Shadowhunters there was truly no other option. The union of a strong gay man and proud bisexual has been the cornerstone of this fandom throughout its run, inspiring countless LGBTQ+ fans and landing a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Drama (not to mention sweeping the 2018 People's Choice Awards the same year as its premature cancellation). How else do you celebrate their legacy, if not by throwing a giant party and giving our boys one more showstopping kiss?

Of course, as surreal as it is to discuss the end of Shadowhunterswith the ship to end all ships, it's even tougher for them to say goodbye. Here, Matt and Harry talk about the Malec wedding, balancing fandom with real life, and why Alec had to stay mortal.

THE MALEC WEDDING

Tell me about the wedding. You’ve built this relationship for three years now, and you’ve seen how massively people have reacted—what did it feel like to give them that milestone?

Harry Shum Jr.: It had to happen. It was a great moment to bring everyone in and say, "Look at this joyous moment."

It was nice to have everybody back on-set. It really felt both, for the show itself and for us as a whole, that this was a great ending. Because it was the last thing we filmed. I'm happy that we got these two episodes so that we could do it because it would have been really unfortunate if the fans hadn't gotten that wedding. And then fans can play in their heads now, Magnus and Alec are married and doing whatever.

Matthew Daddario: You know, it's like the end of a chapter.

Harry: We're safe now.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but Alec is just a Shadowhunter still? He's not immortal.

Matt: Just a Shadowhunter? [Laughs] Yes, I am.

Some fans were really rooting for Immortal Husbands...like, intensely. How do you feel about this?

Matt: This is the thing I always have trouble understanding is that people want the immortality. And this is a topic that's been written about and discussed for thousands of years, and everyone comes to the same conclusion: the curse of immortality. It is not always the best thing in the world to live forever. In fact, that's close to this kind of a godliness that is considered almost like a living hell.

For Magnus, he's living and living in this endless loop without the repercussion of the totality of life. And if Magnus was instead mortal, would we not celebrate their wonderful life? But it's because he's immortal, we worry about what happens after the fact.

Harry: But here’s the difference: It’s not the immortality that you get shot and you can’t die.

Matt: Right. You can get killed. They're immortal, and then they get the shot off the top of the castle walls, and you're like, "Whoa, that's screwed up." But at the same time, every mortal has to deal with that. [Turns to Harry] So it's not your mortality that you're upset about when you first lost your powers. You're not upset about the mortality, you're upset about the loss of your identity.

Some fans just want Malec on an even playing field. But I find it really sad that Alec would have to live and lose like Jace and Izzy—

Matt: Right. Magnus lost people constantly, and he was kind of a shell of a person at one time. Up until meeting Alec, he's filling his life with debauchery, anything to heighten the senses. And, you know, trying to find places where he can take care of people. And he does get involved with helping vampires because they're immortal as well. There is a kind of emptiness to him in the first season.

Harry: No, for sure. And I think then there is the big switch.

Did you get emotional reading the final episode?

Harry: Everyone did at the table read. One of our producers reading off the narration, he couldn't even get through and actually walked out and someone had to take over. And then there was this silence in the end when the last words were spoken. I think that silence spoke volumes.

ON FANDOM

Has the end of Shadowhunters hit home for you yet?

Matt: I think it will hit me when I don't think about it for a week. If one week passes without me thinking about Shadowhunters, I will say, "Shit."

We think about it every day. This is a huge part of our lives. This is three years of this. And this show, it's a hit. People are talking about it, people from around the world. It's hard to deny that.

Will you still engage with Shadowhunters stans, or are you emotionally ready to move on to another world?

Matt: Look, we're done filming Shadowhunters, but the fans of the show are always welcome to ask questions and all that kind of stuff. But eventually, we're going to run out of new answers.

I'm always happy to talk to a Shadowhunters fan because they are enthusiastic, they care about what they're talking about, and many of them have built friendships off of it, so it matters to them, and therefore it matters to me.

Harry: Because you gave a part of your life.

Matt: Your job is to have an effect on people, and therefore you have a certain responsibility to engage with the people who are affected by this. You can choose not to, you could choose to go completely incognito or to ignore it, but to dismiss it is, frankly, insulting and kind of silly and maybe slightly narcissistic.

But I think that you do need to have an understanding that you're not any different or special because of this involvement with culture. And why would you want to be miserable about it? Why wouldn't you embrace it?

Matt, you kept your own wedding a secret until your one-year anniversary. Was it harder to keep the details of the finale secret or your wedding?

Matt: [Laughs] It was definitely easier to keep the wedding secret. I just told everyone no one's allowed to take photos. And people did a pretty good job with that.

Harry: Yeah, sometimes I think it's a nice...regardless of what your profession is, but particularly ours, to have something just for yourself.

Matt: Not to say that people don't deserve to know, but I think that anybody would feel like, hey, I would like this moment just to be mine for a little bit.

People can be a little bit demanding. One time this girl is walking down the street, I'm walking down the street, she's on the phone, it's the middle of the day, she's FaceTiming somebody.

She sees me, she stops me by the touching me on the shoulder and says, "Oh, whoa, wait, look! Look who's here!" and hold the phone up like this and goes, "Crazy!" and then keeps walking. And I'm like, fuck you. Like, what the fuck?! [Laughing] You don't do that to someone.

It just felt so invasive. It just feels a little bit like, you're not a human. You're the thing I see on TV. But I guess it's just excitement, whatever.

IS IT REALLY GOODBYE?

You obviously know about the #SaveShadowhunters campaign. What would you say if suddenly, some other network wanted to pick up the show?

Harry: I think it's a conversation. You know, we love playing these characters. But as time passes, things change. Like introducing a baby into your life, or whatever the next phase is.

But it's also a wonderful group of people. So, of course, instead of saying, "Absolutely not," it's definitely open for conversation for me.

Matt: Honestly, the ending is successful. And, you know, there's a danger now. What if you screw it up? [Laughs]

[hellyeahheroes]

You know...Jordan White’s argument that they cannot let Academy X kids graduate because it will somehow make old guard look 50-years old is not just as shitty as Dan DiDio whining Dick Grayson makes Batman looks old (and these are basically two faces of the same argument) but also really lame excuse t keep them from getting a book. And not only because it flies against every time they do deploy these kids on the filed anyway.

I mean, people care about these characters. You want to keep them in school? Fucking keep them in school. But actually, make it a story ABOUT them. If they’re in character I would read a book about them just going back to teen drama with occasional adventures. Hell, many fans DISCOVERED these characters that way in Weir and DeFilippis run. 

Someone might say that Marvel supposedly did but it didn’t sell...bullshit. No book since the end of New X-Men actually tried to have the same characters. We got several books that tried to cherry-pick characters and attach them to other groups. Rockslide, Anole & Dust in Young X-Men, Pixie in Generation Hope, Hellion and Rockslide in Spider-Man & the X-Men. Or books that just used them as background for whoever writer actually wanted to write about like Wolverine & the X-Men or as it appears in the upcoming NextGen, where everyone will be the background for Glob Herman. 

And all of it always gave me a feeling that X-editorial KNOWS fans want to read more about these characters but stubbornly refuses to give the fans what they want but instead uses these characters as bait in hope people will come for them and then switch to whoever the editorial WANTS us to like (which often seem to be same 5-6 characters who appear to only be so consistently pushed because Jason Aaron said so). And that without bringing up cases when they’re actively shat on.

Cases when a writer actually cared for these characters are rare - Mike Carey in X-Men: Legacy or Brian Wood in X-Men actually tried to integrate them into a story, with mixed results. At least when Christina Strain picked Bling! (a character from a different book from the same time period and as such often lumped with NXM like Armor or Blindfold) for Generation X I felt she cares about the character and doesn’t want to just parade her as a glorified prop to make people read about the others.

This really gives off a vibe that yeah, it looks like the editorial would rather people stopped caring for these characters and stopped asking for more of them....because Marvel knows they cannot write these kids long-term without acknowledging what trauma they went through and that would make old X-Men look bad. And they cannot “get rid” of them without making old guard look bad either (though Jason Aaron tried to kick Anole out of the fucking continent).

 I have nothing against characters that Marvel does push like Quentin Quire, Oya, Nature Girl, Eye Boy, Glob Herman or Sprite, btw. Quite frankly, let them enjoy and milk support they get for as long as it lasts. Because I know Marvel well enough to realize at any moment they might change their mind and their fans will be on the same boat as NXM fans - “Marvel got bored of my favorite character” boat (I mean I think that already happenned to Genesis sad to say, Marvel got bored of him so suddenly he is no longer with the “cool kids”). Hating on them is pointless because the push is, imo, done not because Marvel actually believes these kids are superior but because they won’t remind anyone of 40 kids dying in an exploding bus in front of the mansion. 

So when I’m getting mad at things like NextGen being a clear stealth Glob Herman mini it’s not because I have something against Glob Herman or because I think he is being unfairly pushed. I’m mad that Marvel a) doesn’t actually believe in Glob’s strength as a character because if they did he would just have a mini titled Glob Herman and with attempts like that they’re probably only screwing him over in the long run anyway and b) wants to bait NXM fans again and then distract them with character before anyone remembers how much old X-Men failed NXM kids. It’s cynical on all fronts and it’s this cynicism that gets under my skin.

That being said, I cannot also blame writers for it. We had a number of writer changes over the years. Hell the clusterfuck of last year can be easily explained as Marvel flat out changing their mind what they want X-Men to actually be halfway through already ongoing change with how they were setting up new status quo with X-men: Red, Astonishing and Weapon X and then just...canceled them all for Uncanny. but we went through maybe half a dozen or more writers and it is clear that there are things being recycled, same beats being hit - X-Men books are ghost-written by the editorial and until there won’t be a change in that awful lot, nothing will get better, it won’t.

- Admin