#more like now era stuff kinda but :0

[arklay]

sorry okay i can’t shut up. also. i am deciding to take like the vibes and kinda appearance but like tweaked of my hawke and throwing him into resi because um. brainrot. also ada simulator???

[unoriginal-and-dumb]

i need to know everything about your infected like. now

Okay Dokay! (I’m gonna say everything that comes to mind I might miss stuff or repeat previously said things but I love never re-reading what I wrote)

God I got a lot to say sorry, I put this at the bottom too but if anyone ever has specific questions I will be (very) happy to answer them!!!

Infected is, at face value, pretty good at kinda acting like Kasper. Which is why nobody else really seems too bothered by his switch up besides Lampert. Lampert knew him best and for REAL so, well yea you know. He would know when his best friend is acting wrongggg

I think that the virus was inside the roomba that infected has in their apartment. The irony is too perfect, because I don’t imagine Kasper being gods cleanest fella so the idea of the thing that basically wiped out his consciousness coming from something he got to try and start being cleaner. I think he would’ve gotten the roomba because Lampert was basically begging him to do something to try and fix his fuck ass apartment

The virus itself feeds off of consciousness, it overwhelms and takes over the pervious one then kinda produces a shitty copy of it so it can continue feed off any form of consciousness that could’ve been

Infected MAY have the iq of wall paper. Stupid and dumb.

Infected kinda just has like 0 form of self preservation because the virus itself doesn’t really… understand it I guess? It’s more of like a “FEELING PAIN IS A WASTE OF TIME!” Although it wouldn’t just be pain-centric. He just kinda does fuck-all because it’s fun or everyone else does it or whatever

The error pattern on his arm (and other parts of his body tbh) can spread to other things via touch, but it doesn’t really just stay there

The virus is kinda weird because it’s like. Very much digital but it also is clearly affecting him physically? So it kinda just. Is both things at once I dunno magic elevator magic virus yellow person with dot eyes and no nose what can I say.

Infected is a flat and static character, he is unchanging as is, he is only the face value personality of Kasper, it’s like trying to hold a conversation with a half baked answer machine. After a while he kinda just starts repeating things.

Infected is friends with Split and Poob, as mentioned on the wiki. It’s not even remotely comparable to what Kasper and Lampert had though (😢). They are more of like yea let’s invite Infected over to a party since he kinda seems to just stand in the corner and be a freak. They enjoy Infected’s presence, but again it’s like speaking to an answer machine after awhile

Kasper would frequently change up his look, keeping a few things like his hat always but he was like constantly trying out different colors and whatever clothing stuff, but when he became Infected he kind of jsut got stuck on the tough guys wear pink shirt era (going full npc, wearing literally nothing else because ah yes this is Kasper and I am “Kasper”)

Almost nothing truly gets to infected, yea he’s upset about pop tart but it’s all very shallow and more played off as a joke. Bros life is all sunshine and rainbows wait till he hears about taxes 😭

^ however, it’s not impossible for things to really break through for them. Albeit really just not that likely, they could be made SUPER MEGA UPSET! It’s times like that when he actually seems to have even just undertones of Kasper existing (which is why, despite Lampert HATING infected, I think there would be a time he shoves those feelings aside and tries to comfort infected because that’s still his best friends face)

Infected cannot stand be called Kasper. He ignores it for a bit but after a while he lashes out pretty badly. To be fair though, having 0 memories of someone but everyone else claiming you are them is kinda weird

Infected (specifically) would sound like cooper2723, shitty mic and all

Infected skates like skate 3. He does that speed glitch every time and nobody gets it. He also sometimes rolls full force into a curb and just flies off the skate board (he forgort)

Eczema rep as mentioned before, the stupid error texture is super extremely itchy, but that’s also why it’s spread so much because he fucking scratches the hell outta it. It also just hurts in general (LIKE IF U HAD SAND PAPER. ON UR SKIN. ALWAYS.) but again 0 sense of self preservation bruh don’t give a fuck

He wears the arm warmer to try and hide the error texture. He consciously does not really have a reason but it is in order for the virus to try and be more discreet. Not many people have really taken a notice or care at least so it’s kinda working..? (Not rlly it’s pretty obvious)

Infected HATES unpleasant a blood curdling amount. It doesn’t matter if unpleasant does literally nothing they will blame EVERYTHING on unpleasant. Uh oh bad weather? It’s that fucking gradient’s fault

Infected sometimes just starts tweaking. Like straight Blair witching or honestly even like the boss in s2 of smiling friends. He goes right back to normal but he just does that sometimes (it’s because there’s another backseat driver getting pissed off and existing again before going bed bye go the next however long)

Kasper had pretty bad anger issues but he was able to not start genuinely losing it. Infected however. Infected is gods happiest/angriest soldier

He could be a real smiler, a real big yaaaayyyyyy typa fella one second but one thing sets him off and he is a nightmare to be around. We talking cod lobby throwing shit hair pulling slur yelling type stuff

Infected lives on energy drinks.

They also don’t really sleep, it’s seen as a waste of time when he could be saying terrible things online or skateboarding off a building. Only real time he does anything that a normal human NEEDS to do is when he’s like sims 4 forced to (I.e straight up passing tf out on the floor)

I made this up because I wanted BOTH but his stupid ass SNOT, when it’s green that’s just icky snot when it’s pink that’s not snot or blood but a malicious 3rd option (the error infection thing, although it is kind of just like blood for him at least)

Infected doesn’t really realize that people change appearance over time and that’s like normal so he may do absolutely fuckall half the time but he does maintain appearance (hair cut/dye clothes) and stuff very well because they think they have to look exactly like how Kasper did at the point of infection

Errr he’s aroace :) and trans :) yah :) because kasper is :) 🧡💛🤍🩵💙🧡💛🤍🩵💙🧡💛🤍🩵💙🧡💛🤍🩵💙 yaaaayyyyyyyyyyy

Infected’s eyes actually are white, that’s not just stylistic choice. Or at least they kinda catch the light the way a cat’s does. He is very very eerie in the dark because of this. The error pattern is unaffected by lighting (because. It’s an error texture.) so that combined with white ass eyes and some guy who stands and moves like something else puppeteering a human is… eerie.

He’s Wasian! Korean-American specifically. He does have a Korean name but really just doesn’t go by it ever

This isn’t Infected-centric but relating to Kasper, he grew up mainly with his mom cuz his dad peaced tf out (lol). He did like his dad though, which is why he wore the hat all the time, at this point though he doesn’t really care about his dad and just wears it because it’s his fucking hat and he does not take that shit off

Infected constantly acts out of it, extreme fever style. Weird forgetful says nonsense half the time and just laughs at everything when he’s not busy smiling creepily

Infected is indifferent on everyone, he doesn’t particularly hold grudges (he just forgets about any arguments in general or ignores them) he only really hates unpleasant

He isn’t really enemy to anyone due to the infection trying to get a good way to spread (if ur around a bunch of people all the time, I mean likeeee)

There’s other things but this is very long and I dunno, if anyone has specific questions I’d be happy to answer!!!

[majimasleftasscheek]

Hi, im very sorry if this has already been answered or established somewhere else but im curious, with your Kazumaji stuff, around what time did they start dating (i.e. after the events of Yakuza 0 and all that) and how?

tbh, I dunno!

I don't really have an established date for that cuz sometimes I'm like man they'd be really cute during y0 and then other times I set it between post y0 and the beginning of y1. The latest they would start me thinks is some months after the events of y1 but in general it sorta depends on how I'm feeling and what silly scenarios play in my head

ideas under the cut tho 👀

if we're talking y0: I like to think Kiryu has to go to Sotenbori for some reason, be it business or he's there with Nishiki for some partying. he sees Majima at the Grand being depressed and is like "damn girl those bags under your eyes makes my dick go *boing sound effect*" and asks him out 🥺 Kiryu gets rejected immediately cuz Majima's in this cycle of 'I deserve nothing but pain and suffering' but Kiryu can't read the room so he is persistently showing up at the Grand despite Majima very obviously wanting to kick his ass. eventually he relents and goes on cute™ dates with Kiryu and realizes oof maybe human intimacy be kinda gucci

if between y0 and y1: Majima's fresh in his mad dog era starting shit with people just to be annoying and Kiryu's one of his targets mainly due to the events of y0. he's kinda like "lol this goober really did some important plot stuff, huh?" and his curiosity gets the better of him because Kiryu is an enigma who eats bugs and Majima cannot suppress his need to get some sense of understanding on this weirdo. in this timeline, it's more one-sided affection from Majima that comes in the form of stabbing while Kiryu is desperately trying to fight the gay allegations and failing. eventually he caves but it's a sorta unofficial, on and off thing that Kiryu doesn't really know how to evaluate for himself. Majima doesn't really care what they are since he's high on life atm and has a cute dude with big boobs on his arm

if during y1: literally just everything Majima Everywhere. Goromi. GOROMI 😩💦 Kiryu is all: I LIKE PUSSY but everyone's like okay big man then why's Majima pole dancing for you huh. the two braincells he has start to click and he realizes maybe Majima wants to hold hands or something unthinkable like that. ngl I like to think Kiryu's thing for Yumi is like a demisexual bi thing where he's like, I do love her but she don't zap my brain quite like the bowlcut freak who knows how to punch me real good and it becomes sorta his personal introspective journey during this time. Majima is also floating in the space of am I doing this for his benefit cuz "training" or am I falling for this dork. he's pretty sad about it cuz of the Saejima reminder vibes but eventually Kiryu falls into his own person that Majima really meshes with and the two of them struggle to actually voice how they feel all the while their pants are down in some dirty alley

if after y1: (going to insert shit from a fic I'm working on) Kiryu's absolutely devastated with what happened in the Millennium Tower + now having to take care of Haruka that he's shut himself off from everyone and everything other than doing the bare minimum to live. in comes Majima being a menace like yo you can't like, let a child parent herself you gotta get outta this slump and Kiryu's all fuck you stop breaking into my house. so it's a long pain in the ass process to help Kiryu deal with his grief while Majima keeps unintentionally making googoo eyes at him and both of them are like boy I sure hope this doesn't awaken anything within me. there's also a lotta dadjima stuff going on and Kiryu's like wowie zowie so you do have a heart and Majima's like no way loser while being just 😳👉👈

[imustbenuts]

@theotherseapancakes

i mentioned ill rb a post about majima's sexuality/gender identity in the context of 1980s-2010s japan but i never got to it bc i cant find the post ;;

but gist of it is, the majima everyone knows is... kind of putting on an act. everything about the zanny funny majima everyone mostly knows is an act he puts on mostly to mess with kiryu. this video kinda sums it up succinctly:

even his kansai dialect is... fake as shit. (the meta explanation is that his voice actor isnt familiar with kansai accent and the director was like 'its majima its ok just roll with it')

it's probly hard to hear but his dialect is multiple levels of wrong. another joke video here but that isnt how kansai dialect sentence structure works! also his crazy persona is really how he behaves, mostly.

dont wanna inflate this post but theres plenty of kansai dialect language videos on youtube to hear what a usual kansai dialect phrase sounds like

majima's sounds like he smooshed standard tokyo japanese with some random stuff he picked up from osaka, which tracks with his backstory...

^^ he speaks with standard jp here. this takes place technically before y0 (i think)

anyway. so. the 'mad dog' persona both in universe and out he has is mostly an act and his character growth from 0-8 is largely like this: sane -> goes through SHIT -> plot -> snaps -> loses his sworn brother and is likely very depressed -> messes with kiryu for some semblance of normalcy -> kiryu helps stabilizes his life both directly and indirectly, thereby stabilizing his mental state -> sane but wears the mask bc hes made a name for himself as the mad dog

so all of that is important bc in a manner of speaking, LGBTQ in the 1980s to 2010s is considered... an 'act'.

super short summary of why: confucius idea dictates that men must pass on their bloodline to offsprings bc its honorable for the family bloodline. confucius bleeds into bushido, morphs, which bleeds into the larger fabric of japanese culture.

MEANING, its totally ok to be gay and play so long as a male offspring is produced. LGBTQ then is seen as a juvenile thing that most people will grow out off eventually. (at least prior to TV era)

then TV era brought in western media, and back the the mid 1900s, LGBTQ became synonymous with being a western idea. lots of tropes of flamboyancy is closely linked to westerness in characters. so queer became a foreign idea. JP TV then perpetuated this with okama stereotypes and sometimes made a mockery out of them, which continued pretty much until 2000s.

some also see it as a evil western mental virus/illness too.

(negative okama stereotypes are portrayed as highly thirsty male hunters dressed in a less than flattering drag with facial hair. often used to elicit"EW DISGUSTING GET AWAY FROM ME" reactions from other characters.)

smoosh that with existing cross-dressing theater arts and the idea of some 'kiddy phase' and suddenly being LGBTQ is more or less equated to an act.

add in the fact that transitioning is a very difficult thing to do if one doesnt conform fully into a binary Male or Female gender identity, suddenly genderfluidity looks very campy in JP media context.

which. majima kinda is. left: y0 appearance, taking place 1989. right, y1 onward, starting 2005

leather and TIGHT leather has some associations with the BDSM scene, which intersects with the sleazy night life and sexually related things. (queerness is perceived to be mostly this bc demonization in a similar fashion to... everywhere basically)

and also, there was one time where majima was goromi:

the context for this: Majima Everywhere was a system that y1k had, where Majima would spawn absolutely anywhere and everywhere to fight kiryu. for fun. theres a lot of interesting character moments bc his act or mask out slip off every now and then. this is one of those.

anyway, goromi is an interesting case of a more positive okama stereotype bc theres absolutely zero malice in the writing that i can tell. key thing: kiryu reacts bewildered but positively to this encounter

so all of this to say

yeah majima is really, really not straight.

[minuy600]

The Ported Arcade Games of 1981 #0: 1980 Games I Missed

Back to the grind it is. Firstly, let's go over some stuff that has happened in these 4 months of complacency.

First things first; I've changed the format for these reviews again. There'll still be a 40 point scale of rating things, because I enjoy being consistent, however everything around it will be changed to something more... manageable for me. You'll see, I don't think there's a point in a lengthy explanation.

Secondly, I feel baaaad for the games I have to skip because it's multiplayer-only, or didn't get an accurate port in a game I have the means of owning. So i'll give 'em a mention, even if I won't go into detail about them, let alone grade them. Cool? Cool. Let's get this started then. Here's a game that actually got added to Arcade Archives during my LEGO-riddled hiatus...

Tank Battalion

Other name(s): タンクバタリアン (JP name) Developer: Namco Publisher: Namco (JP), GamePlan (US) Release date: October 1980 (JP) What did I play it on?: Arcade Archives on Switch What's the game about?: You're a tank fighting off other tanks by shooting bullets at each other. There's 20 of those per stage, and they alternate between hunting you down or your base (oddly shaped like an eagle). If you get hit too many times or your base gets destroyed, that's game over. What's the game look like?:

What's the sound like?: Rumblings of your tank, booming noises when you shoot and explode tanks. The occasional beep happens when you put in credit or gain an extra life. What's new about this one?: Most notably, any shot that hits a brick wall will break it bit by bit. Allows for a bit more strategy as you could carve out a shortcut. These walls are absent in every 3rd stage, though, so strategy flies out the window there for the most part. How much singleplayer content is there?: There's no real limit to how long you could keep playing, but aside from, oddly, the 22nd stage, there are no new layouts after the 8th. How far did I get?: I got to the 6th stage and felt verrrry satisfied to leave it there. I kinda feel that with enough luck, I could improve to the 8th eventually. That's my definitive goal, reaching stage 22 is nigh on impossible. Any multiplayer?: Errr, does alternating turns count? Quick thoughts: This feels almost laughably out of place when put alongside Namco's other 1980 contributions from the latter half of 1980. Still uses the Warp & Warp engine and it shows. Minor stage altering aside, which IS neat, this is another game where you feel like it left zero footprint. Graphics: Yyyyyeah. Even with the flat colors and basic as hell title screen, the game still appears to struggle to run with the admittedly fair amount of tanks on screen. I would've forgiven it a year ago, but now? Not when Pac-Man and Rally-X are around, sorry. (4/10) Sound: Another sign that this is a polished up geriatric, these noises are very close to the ones i've heard in Navarone and Cutie Q. I will admit though! I actually think the explosions are nice and impactful. Then again, most games of this era had that down pat. Could do without the beeps, but overall it's still decent. (6/10) Fun Factor: Unfortunately, the whole 'game struggling to run' thing makes this a hard game to salvage. It makes the controls way too... chunky, with the tanks moving in blocks rather than being smooth. The whole luck factor is also quite stupid, the tanks seem to do whatever they want in this one, even if WHERE they show up is consistent. It's a shame cuz I do feel there was potential to make it more manageable and consistently enjoyable... At least Battle City exists. (4/10) Longevity: It says a lot I managed 12th plays on the Hi Score ranking by only reaching stage 6. If your idea of fun is playing through 12 identical levels to get a single new layout, do I have the game for you. Still, getting to stage number 8 in itself is a big feat and despite how unfair it can be, it's still reasonably addicting. (6/10)

Conclusion: It's a cute attempt to innovate with outdated hardware. I don't think they succeeded due to how it plays like a creaky war veteran. Namco's talent made it not awful, but they've done a lot better before.

Onto a game that pretty much made me debate if it was even worth playing stuff outside of Arcade Archives...

Defender

Other name(s): ディフェンダー (JP name) Developer: Williams Electronics Publisher: Williams Electronics (EU/US), Taito (JP) Release date: December 1980 (EU, presumably) What did I play it on?: Midway Arcade Origins on Xbox 360 (played on Series S)

What's the game about?: You're a spaceship trying to avoid aliens from taking over the planet. They come in all shapes and sizes, first there's just some green alien dudes (called 'Landers') trying to snatch the 10 humans away by turning them into far more agressive mutants. Following that, you also get electric... squares that leave behind hurtful static and electric... pulses that turn into multiple small red particles. Gotta shoot those as well. Failing to protect the humans causes the planet to be destroyed and you're left fighting mutants in space. Yikes. At least you got an Asteroids-esque hyperspace button and screen-clearing smart bombs to delay the inevitable. What's the game look like?:

What's the sound like?: All kinds of weird alien bleep bloops dominate as you shoot your Atari 2600 laser. The humans that cry for help sound like squealing rubber. What's new about this one?: This game more or less created the horizontally scrolling shooter genre. The whole mutant thing is also brand new, and I don't think i've seen screen-clearing weapons used to this degree before. Same with the degree of variety in enemy patterns and how cleverly they've been interwoven as they've been given different 'tasks' of sorts. The lander chases the humans, the rest chase YOU. Also, uhhh... this is the first video game by Williams Electronics? Damn, that's one way to start. How much singleplayer content is there?: This took me ages to figure out cuz Midway Arcade Origins put me on the wrong foot, but it APPEARS that the difficulty peaks at stage 5. You don't get increased score multipliers after that, so... How far did I get?: I did get to that point when I gave myself 9 lives and 9 smart bombs, though that's hardly an achievement in my eyes. On the default setting (3 lives & smart bombs), I got to the third stage, which is a decent feat in itself as it propelled me up the online rankings. This game is brutal. Any multiplayer?: Alternating turns, again. Gonna be a bit before co-op becomes much more mainstream. Quick thoughts: Say hello to the game that brutalised my motivation to keep going. A very vague release date (i'm still not sure if I did it right), it's extreme difficulty and my own doubts on whether to cover games rereleased on Xbox made it the ideal cocktail for my ADHD brain to pretty much give up for a while. Upon revisiting though... Eh, although I don't think it'll ever be my favorite, I can appreciate it's huge influence on the shooter genre. Plus, if reaching the 3rd flipping stage is a serious achievement from what I can tell, I don't feel nearly as bad about my supposedly low skill level. This is another game i'll give a hat tilt. Graphics: Probably, PROBABLY the best looking space shooter thus far. I don't know for sure. But I mean, horizontal scrolling as smooth as this along with all the massive explosions that happen when things die, that's extremely impressive. Definitely makes it feel fairly modern, futuristic even. I'm surprised it is as much as a leap upwards as it is. Only Rally-X really comes close with being as advanced as this sucker. (9/10) Sound: Can get a bit overwhelming at times, all the shooting combined with the weird otherworldly noises, it's a bit much. Though nobody can deny that they sound COOL as hell on first impression. Very sci-fi. I'll let the incorporation of some 2600 noises pass. (7/10) Fun Factor: Depends on what you wanna get out of it. If you like games that will absolutely kick your ass with the smallest error and makes you feel extra guilty with every astronaut lost, this is a gaming HEAVEN for late 1980. I can't say i'm part of that crowd, but the more time I put into it, the less gruelling it becomes. There's only 2 things reeeally bothering me. You frequently have to be too precise with your movement to stick a shot or just straight up not die for one. The amount of buttons and therefore tactics on display, that's also a bit too much. Found myself frequently overwhelmed by this one, i'm sorry. If you're a gaming nut who doesn't mind an overload of spectacle and can deal with extra precise movements, then you can add two points to the score next to this sentence. (6/10) Longevity: Someone played one round of this game for 21 and a half hours straight. Huh. Reaching stage 6 will take you a WHILE, but at least it's a bit more based around skill rather than luck this time. There's people that only leave one astronaut alive or straight up lets them all die and focus on the shooting action, and manage to survive for a long while despite that. Seems like I may have to try that too... Also glitches. Lotsa glitches to extend playtime. Those are always a hoot. (8/10)

Conclusion in 3 sentences: My love-hate senses are tingling with this one. It's not a game for the faint of heart, but if you put your mind to it and grind it out, it can be a magical experience. Especially for the time.

The games that couldn't:

All of these are included on one of the Taito Legends games on PS2. The first game is outta reach entirely, while the second one is doable, just a bit too expensive to be worthwhile right now. I MIGHT come back to the balloon duology later. Don't count on it though.

Phoenix (Taito): Shame I couldn't give this one a go. This was THE game to bring boss battles into the mainstream. Was curious to see how well it'd fare compared to the seemingly very intricate way Sasuke vs. Commander did it. From first impression, it seems a bit less deep, though on it's own, it's still a fun spin on the ol' Space Invader formula.

Balloon Bomber (Taito): A hilariously out-of-tune jingle plays as you shoot single-colored balloons with bombs attached to them. ...Wait, did Pyoro on WarioWare copy the concept of destructible land from this game? Whaaaa?

Crazy Balloon (Taito): The balloon of Balloon Bomber fame must now traverse dangerous obstacle courses by floating around. Crrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaazy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If there's any feedback you wanna give on this new format, be sure to let me know! We'll be heading into 1981 next time. For realsies.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Doctor Who: The Star Beast- A Reasonably Watchable Mess

You may have noticed that, despite desperately positive, brittle reviews in the mainstream media, the last few years of Doctor Who went down like a lead balloon with actual fans and ordinary viewers. Turns out that a patronising gender-flip that served no plot purpose followed by a series of episodes in which the Doctor shilled for Space Amazon, murdered innocent giant spiders and delivered completely unearned straight-to-camera speeches like a fucking after-school special weren’t popular moves. The show’s viewing figures plummetted (despite contrary claims from the BBC that turned out, very simply, to be lies) and its review score aggregate on Rotten Tomatoes plunged, at one point, to literally 0%. Hilariously, the review aggregate from the mainstream media was around 90% at the time, once again demonstrating that the average critic can be bought for less than I spend assuring the silence of my past victims (the joke is that all my past victims are dead and I don’t spend a fucking thing on their silence). The abject failure of the Whitaker/Chibnall era was inevitable and any normal person could have predicted it. The BBC, however, didn’t and had a bit of a panic when they realised just how fucked their ratings were. Not that they admitted that, of course, but the fact they brought back the dream-team of showrunner Russell ‘The’ Davies and David Tennant for the 60th Anniversary Specials instead of letting the current incumbents stick around until after the anniversary kinda speaks volumes. So, now we’re getting three Anniversary specials, starring Tennant and helmed by Davies. The first one’s out, and it falls on me to review it as fairly as possible. So… how is it?

Well, put it this way: it’s not terrible, but it’s not the confident, unapologetic return to form I was hoping for either. It concerns a minor villain from the old DW comics called Beep the Meep who poses as a cute, furry critter while secretly plotting the genocide of the entire universe, a reunion with Catherine Tate’s always-delightful Donna Noble and a resolution to the Human/Time Lord meta-crisis that nearly straight-up killed her last time she was on-screen. And, in fairness, the stuff that works works pretty well. The jokes are funny, Tennant and Tate are excellent in their respective roles, the Meep is gloriously fucking psychotic (though the voice actor does sound like they’re phoning it in a bit) and Yasmin Finney, playing Donna’s trans daughter, is a lot less insufferable than she would have been if Chibnall had written her lines. I actually thought the bit where Donna threatens to “descend” on some kids who dead-name her in the street was well-handled and pretty accurately captured the protective instincts of a parent with a trans daughter. Mainly, she’s just there for the representation, though, and does the square root of bugger all to advance the plot. That’s probably a mercy, since I suspect the show would have had a hard time disguising the fact that this fifteen year old kid is being played by a twenty year old woman (who seems to have borrowed David Bowie’s cheekbones) if her part was any more prominent. But yeah- it’s a fun, knockabout adventure that doesn’t overstay its welcome and doesn’t try to outdo the entire show up to that point just because its been a completely arbitrary 60 years since the first episode. It’s basically fun and basically fine. It’s destined to be lauded to ludicrous excess by a mainstream media who are terrified of offering a proper critique because it’s got a trans person in it, while simultaneously being shat upon by online reviewers who know they can win easy points with the fans by challenging the suffocating ubiquity of the Standard Approved Opinion. In truth, though, it’s neither great nor awful- it’s just an hour of television that’s worth watching once but only once. It contains some good stuff… and some shite stuff.

Ah yes, the shite. That’s what you came to read about, isn’t it? Nobody in their right mind shows up at my blog-step for kind words and understanding: you come here because you know I have the pithiest insults and pissiest hot-takes. And yes: there’s some real fucking garbage to dunk on here. First of all, the Human/Time Lord meta-crisis gets resolved in the dumbest fucking way possible. For those of you who don’t remember, the ending of Modern Season 4 of DW was one of the most heartbreaking things ever attempted in a show designed for family viewing. Donna took on the consciousness of a Time Lord in order to save the universe but nearly burnt out her synapses in the processes. The Doctor wiped her mind to save her life, and then had to leave, because if she ever remembered him or the adventures they’d shared together, the crisis would reassert itself and her brain would overload, killing her. And the way they get around this, initially, is alright. Because Donna had a child, part of the meta-crisis got passed onto her, allowing two minds to take a strain that would kill just one. It’s a sweet and perfectly acceptable way of sorting a complex problem and something that legitimately wouldn’t have occurred to the Doctor at the time, because he had to come up with a solution that would work in the moment, not something that would require a nine month gestation period. But then, for some stupid fucking reason, they took it one step further and had Donna and her daughter simply relinquish the power of the meta-crisis, handwaving the obvious bullshit-ness of this move by claiming it just wouldn’t have occurred to a male-presenting Time Lord. The Doctor’s not an idiot. If that was an option, it would have occurred to him. Fuck, it did occur to him that one time Rose Tyler absorbed the Time Vortex and he had her give it up, channelling it into him to save her life at the cost of forcing a regeneration. It’s simultaneously contrived and slap-dash- a hasty right-on girl-power moment that fails miserably to play by the rules and cheapens the original story of the meta-crisis retroactively. It also brings us, neatly, to the phrase ‘male-presenting Time Lord’.

There’s a line in the excellent It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wherein Charlie describes himself as “a straight man who poops transgender”. The phrase ‘male-presenting Time Lord’ sounds weirdly similar to me. It’s too specific and technical, while also including a wildly silly element (‘Time Lord’ is a vaguely ethereal, grandiose title that doesn’t gel with earthly, human discussions of gender identity). People just don’t talk like that. Sometimes people write like that, seeking an economy of phrasing that looks good on the page… but nobody actually talks like that. I mean, the context in which it’s used is stupid, but the phrasing itself is stupider. It’s also emblematic of a problem with the script as a whole. It feels like a first draught.

What do I mean by that? Well, there’s just a lot of instances where conversations feel slightly stilted or opportunities are missed. Case in point, there’s a bit where Donna’s discussing her kid growing up with her own mum, and it feels like it was meant to be a poignant discussion of the trials and tribulations of raising a child and then realising that they’re not what you were expecting but their own, completely separate person. What we get is just a placeholder where a couple of jokes occur but nothing of import is really said. Similarly, there’s a line where the Doctor muses that he doesn’t know who he is any more, which feels like it was meant to be developed into a meditation on his sense of identity after so many regenerations, metatextually addressing the show’s loss of a coherent, inter-regenerational identity for its lead character. Absolutely fucking nothing comes of it. There’s even a bit where a UNIT scientific advisor in a wheelchair encounters a flight of stairs and the way it’s shot makes it feel like there should have been a joke there. Maybe there could have been a really slow lift that she has to use while her soldiers rush up the stairs, or maybe she could have made one of them carry her. I’d have taken a lazy, low-hanging quip like “stairs…. My old nemesis” to be honest. But all we get is “sorry about the stairs,” and that’s it. My point is that there’s a superficiality to a lot of the scenes and lines that yells ‘PLACEHOLDER’, and areas that desperately need polish.

Speaking of polish: London is once again too fucking clean. I wish TV shows would stop doing that- making London look like the MCU’s version of fucking New York- all glass skyscrapers and clean streets. The real London is a bizarre, dystopian mix of impersonal steel monuments to capital, crumbling baroque architecture from the middling-glorious past and slumping, poverty-stricken housing from a fucking Dickens novel. The city has a really specific, slightly nightmarish character that most telly shows and films fail miserably to capture. It’s inexcusable in this case, because Doctor Who actually used to do a pretty good job of showing London as it is. Which is mental, since it used to be filmed in Swansea in cocking Wales.

But I digress. My final major issue is that the message of the show’s text is wildly at odds with the metatextual message of the specials’ mere existence. The whole reason the BBC re-hired Tennant and Davies onto the show was to announce a return of the Who everyone loved; a tacit admission than the last few years of lazy virtue-signalling and shoddy script-work had been a mistake that they were keen to move on from. There is literally no other reason to take such an obvious backward step in the show’s development. Yet the episode The Star Beast keeps bringing up Whitaker’s tenure as the Doctor as though it’s something to be celebrated. We get lines like “The Doctor’s a man and a woman. And both. And neither. And more,” (again, nobody fucking talks like that) that feel like an attempt to fold the previous three years into the acceptable canon, when the whole reason the specials are happening is to renounce them and leave them in the cold. Then again, that’s the Beeb for you- it's amazing if the left hand knows what the left hand's doing. If someone's bothered to inform the right hand, it's so surprising as to be frankly suspicious. Add to that the extra layer of complexity that comes from getting Disney to part-fund the show and you’re bound to end up with a confused mess. Also, why did they bother getting Disney to part-fund this? The Special Effects look like something a fourteen year-old could whip up in his bedroom. Which is fine- I never mind the sets wobbling in Who: I just can’t figure out where all the fucking money went.

I think the root problem is two-fold. First, as much as I loved Russell T. Davies’ original time as showrunner, it’s really obvious he’s gotten old. It’s only been fifteen years since his time in charge ended, but sometimes, the ageing process kicks a guy’s arse really suddenly (ask me about waking up one day to discover I now have man-boobs sometime). There’s this interview he did recently about how Davros represents an offensive portrayal of wheelchair users, and it’s clearly just the ramblings of a confused old man. Nobody looks at Davros, creator of the Daleks, and thinks ‘yup- there goes a typical wheelchair user’. Part of the point of his character is that he’s kind of admirable on paper, overcoming age and sickness to achieve the impossible… but he perverts and subverts those expectations by doing something fucking appalling. It’s a nuanced, complex take on the way pain and suffering can make a person sympathetic without necessarily redeeming them. And Russel T. Davies, a once-talented writer who should understand this stuff, just doesn’t get it any more. He’s well-meaning, but he’s clearly just not up to the job any more. I mean, he still has talent- his renewed tenure will be better than Chibnall’s… but maybe it would have been a better idea to let the poor schmuck retire on a high note.

The other problem is deeper and more intractable. The world has changed since Doctor Who was the best thing on television, and it might be that it just can’t work any more. The modern era of Who was born from a place of hope yet, also, a place of marginalisation. It was 2005. The government of the day had dome some pretty fucked up things, but they were nowhere near as evil as the governments who were to succeed them. Sci-fi was still a niche thing allowing for experimentation and weirdness. There were definite good guys and bad guys on the world stage and in domestic politics: there were genuine victims on one side and hateful bigots on the other, and it seemed like it might actually be possible for the underdogs to win for a change. 2023 is a different world. We’ve seen the worst UK governments since Thatcher in the 80s (and people kept voting for them) and the worst US President in history (a Savaloy-orange freak with the hair of a sexually-confused Nazi). On the cultural level, the lines between victims and villains have blurred, with the arrival of the never-ending Oppression Olympics birthing a generation of dead-eyed bullies who hide behind nominal ‘oppressed’ status in order to tear down genuinely nice people (like that time a load of wankers piled onto a scientist who landed a probe on a moving comet FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY because he did while wearing a T-shirt with a stylised naked lady on it). Identity has replaced solidarity as the go-to discussion in progressive (or allegedly progressive) circles. The sci-fi genre itself has become popular- meaning it’s infested with normies who don’t understand it but do want to own it. Doctor Who was never built for this world. The change in culture and society over the last just-under-twenty years is more significant, in some ways, than the changes that occurred between its original outing in the 60s and its reboot in 2005, and I don’t know if it can survive those changes. We inhabit a world where actual heroism and even basic decency seem less important than the performance of those qualities in ways that a mass audience can understand and where nuanced solutions, informed by kindness, are verboten because everyone’s supposed to pick a side. There’s no room for a genteel, British/Alien gadabout with two hearts and a silly sonic screwdriver in a world where the battle-lines are drawn and performative virtue has become a universal aspiration. In order to fit our tawdry world, Doctor Who would have to stop being Doctor Who. And, to be blunt, our culture doesn’t really deserve any form of Doctor Who at the moment.

So yes, The Star Beast is pretty good. It’s a nice slice of television that fails on many fronts, but still manages to entertain. But what next? Where can we possibly go from here? Personally, I intend to watch the specials and- if they’re okay- Ncuti Gatwa’s era after that. Then I think I’m done. By rights, the show should face cancellation while it’s still strong enough to bow out gracefully, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll still have to pick a point to stop watching. Sooner or later, all good things must come to an end, and if the BBC isn’t big enough to admit that, at least I am. I suggest you pick somewhere to draw a line, too.

[enchiibean]

Now I'm curious about what Narumitsu things you go "he would not fucking say that" about :0 Alternatively go ahead and give out the Narumitsu/Tasutsumu thoughts >:3

HELP OKAY. These will both be sooo incoherent and will contains spoilers so I will put this all under a read more just in case.

I will admit that I haven’t read any Narumitsu fics in a hot minute but I feel like a lot of the ones I TRIED to read back in the summer felt kinda like they were. Like. Stripped of the things that I personally like about them like the complexity and the admiration and how much they CARE for and will support each other despite being “rivals” on opposite sides of the court. And I’m not saying that every depiction of them has to be super complicated or emotionally life-changing or anything because I love reading just. Fluff or silly stuff. But I feel like they were being replaced by some generic yaoi pair where one of them is super dominant and possessive while the other one is super woobified, if that makes sense? And I would just stare and be like that is NOT them!!!! I feel like this happens to a lot of mlm ships though, especially when they’re popular. The nuance is taken away and the yaoi effect takes its place. Have you also seen this. Is this only in my imagination. Was I just bad at picking out fics (probably).

ANYWAY Narumitsu/Tasutsumu comparisons I am taking out my notes. This isn’t even necessarily romantic/from a shipping point of view, I just think they’re very similar!! First of all, they’re both pairs of childhood friends who had shared dreams. For Narumitsu, as children, they both wanted to become defence attorneys to protect truth and justice, while Tasutsumu wanted to become actors together. However, as they grow up, one of them changes paths, without warning, and not necessarily because they wanted to. Edgeworth ends up as a prosecutor instead of a defence attorney after being raised by Von Karma, while Tsumugi becomes a tutor instead of an actor. Meanwhile, Phoenix and Tasuku are both still working towards defence and acting but they both want to know what changed (although Tasuku has a lot better of an idea on that) and have no way of knowing.

Another thing is they both have a “divorced” arc where one of them had what they saw as a HUGE failure and then left to somewhere the other couldn’t follow. For Tasutsumu, this is the same situation above because Tsumugi abruptly changed paths BECAUSE this failure and Reni’s words affected him so much that he didn’t think he could act anymore. For Narumitsu, you could say that similarly, this aligns with the situation outlined before because Phoenix couldn’t contact Edgeworth in any way until they were on opposite ends of the court, but I was thinking more of the post-AA1 “PROSECUTOR MILES EDGEWORTH CHOOSES DEATH” era where Edgeworth got up and left to Europe. And I think these situations are more similar because in these, there’s more anger. Tasuku is angry that Tsumugi abandoned their dream, while Phoenix is angry at Edgeworth because he thinks that he’s quit being a prosecutor. I think that they both perceive this as selfish. For Tasuku, it feels like a betrayal to him because he thought that acting was so incredibly important to both of them and Tsumugi being able to quit after one failure is proof to him that it wasn’t as important to Tsumugi as it was to Tasuku. Plus, they’d been friends all their lives and he just leaves without a word!

Phoenix feels similarly betrayed because he went through SO MUCH to be reunited with Edgeworth and save him, to become his friend again, just for Edgeworth to disappear at the end of it all. In his eyes, Edgeworth is still operating on the basis that he needs to be perfect, and if he isn’t perfect at prosecution, then he might as well not be a prosecutor at all. To Phoenix, “Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth’s death” is him quitting prosecution for what he sees as a petty reason. By the end of Justice for All, we learn that for Edgeworth, this was not the case; “Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth’s death” was him abandoning his previous ways and becoming a new type of lawyer. He’d already been saved by Phoenix, and he was trying to learn how to become closer to that lawyer he dreamed of being as a child who fought for justice (rather than the ruthless prosecutor he’d been who was willing to do anything for a win and he also had to deal with the fact that he probably got innocent people convicted), which is what Phoenix had wanted. But can you blame Phoenix for thinking this? I mean, Edgeworth was vague as hell in that note and disappeared without a trace. Both him AND Tsumugi disappear without a trace, knowing where Phoenix and Tasuku are (Edgeworth reads about Phoenix’s cases in the news and Tsumugi goes to see Tasuku’s plays), but not letting them know where THEY are. Anyway, Tasuku and Edgeworth both thought that their respective friends were willing to give up on not only their dreams, their work, but also THEM because they were no longer perfect and were upset by this.

Also, this has less to do with their relationships, but a similarity between Tasuku and Edgeworth is that they were forced into “perfection” by their mentors. The ways their mentors made them act led them to becoming hated by their peers and also distanced them from why they were pursuing acting/law in the first place. Reni kept pushing Tasuku into the prince box and put him on a pedestal as the top actor, which painted a target on his back in God Troupe's competitive environment. This took away a lot of what Tasuku loved about acting; trying all types of new roles, doing it with people who share that passion, and just. Acting for the sake of acting!! And the way Reni had one idea of what “good” acting is and thought that he could only do princely roles, as well as his peers’ opinions on him and the way he couldn’t show weakness in front of them which furthered their opinion that he was cold and thought he was above them, when really he felt isolated and alone.

Von Karma hammered into Edgeworth since he was young that he has to be PERFECT, and that means a perfect win streak. I’m almost certain that he switched from defence to prosecution because of him (I just can’t remember if or where this was Actually Confirmed). He wants a perfect streak because of him. And similar to Tasuku, he’s kind of alienated by his peers because of it with the “demon prosecutor” image who’s willing to do ANYTHING to maintain that perfect win streak. And the fact that he’s been taught to care more about wins than anything else in his profession made him lose focus of his ideals and why he wanted to become a (defence) lawyer in the first place, which was to find out the truth behind a case and to bring justice and protect people!!

Also, they both eventually break away from those mentors!! Tasuku left Reni and God Troupe because he saw what he did with Taichi and Mankai in episode 3 and he couldn’t stay with a troupe that would be willing to sabotage others like this to stay on top of them. And after 1-4, after being on the defence podium, Edgeworth gets to see how Von Karma REALLY is and what he’s willing to do to maintain that streak and stay as the “best” prosecutor!! It puts things into perspective for him because he’s been taught to try to emulate Von Karma for most of his life but he realizes that if that means doing all of THIS then he doesn’t want to. They both decide they want to change. Perfection wasn’t either of their goals in the first place, they just wanted to improve and this is how they were taught to do that. And their morals lead them to changing for the better :)

[doctor-orbagels]

ONE SENTENCE REVIEW FOR EVERY GUNDAM PROPERTY I HAVE EXPERIENCED

Like i said in a previous post, it’s basically everything that you can watch on a screen from 0079 up to IBO. A few manga here and there and one light novel.

NOTE: Don’t take this too seriously, most of these are meme answers. Most of my strong negativity is said in jest. (My positivity is genuine tho)

Starting with UC:

•0079

Absolute classic but i prefer The Origin manga

•Zeta

Well done dark tone but kinda boring at times

•ZZ

Fuck you, the goofball stuff was great and a welcome change of pace

•08th MS Team

Probably the best down-to-earth mecha war story ever

•0080: War in the Pocket

*weeps profusely*

•Sentinel

Really compelling with a great cast, plus the idea of “other ways to emulate being a newtype” is still kinda unexplored both at the time this was written and to this day

•0083: Stardust Memory

Pretty damn good all things considered

•IgLoo

Zudah was a cool idea, too bad the tallgeese did it first and everything else about the show is boring af

•IgLoo Apocalypse

The best of the IgLoo trilogy but still around a 6.5/10

•IgLoo 2

Shinigami are canon to the universal century, 0/10

•Thunderbolt

Amazing in almost every way, plus the most effective usage of a sociopathic fed vs a well meaning zeon

•Twilight Axis

Meh

•Char’s Counterattack

The Resurrection F of UC

•Unicorn

Best anime i’ve ever watched

•Narrative

I just like that Unicorn got a direct sequel goddamn it

•F91

I so badly wish this was a series and not a movie

•Crossbone

Completely validates my opinion on F91

•Victory

Phenomenal use of character death, and I remember nothing else

•Reconguista in G

My favorite anime that i cannot recommend to anyone else on earth

Now for pre-2000’s au timelines:

•G Fighter

You cannot get more funny-bad in the entire Gundam franchise, it’s awesome

•Wing

I didn’t get the hype, but i still had a great time at points

•Endless Waltz

Much better mecha, slightly cooler plot

•X

I’m so sad this was rushed bc it’s by far my fave 90’s Gundam

Post 2000’s au timelines:

•SEED

Very cool pseudo-shounen remake of 0079

•SEED Destiny

Something good almost could have happened here, but no

•SEED Astray/R

Love all these goobers, really good

•Astray X

Worst official localization for any manga i’ve ever read, but there was still some cool stuff

•SEED Stargazer

*weeps profusely, but in the Cosmic Era this time*

•00

Behind the fujoshi bait is one of the smartest and well done mecha stories this side of Code Geass

•00 Awakening of the Trailblazer

… why aliens?

•AGE

I know that it’s my fault but I couldn’t even bring myself to get past the first generation

•Iron Blooded Orphans

I have never cried this many times or this hard over anime characters dying

•Build Fighters

Legit a 5Ds tier Toy Battle anime

•Build Fighters Try

A bit generic but still palatable

•Build Divers

Didn’t go far enough

•Build Divers: Re;Rise

Went way too far in the best way possible

And if it wasn’t clear already, Unicorn is by far my favorite Gundam and favorite anime overall, while IgLoo 2 is both my least favorite Gundam and my least favorite anime i’ve ever seen.

[thermodynamic-comedian]

do u mind giving me info about the ghosts and stuff

plus a bit of context (e.g. the one with the massive tits) and pronouns/hcs

YIPPEEE. ok im gonna give a quick autistic rundown of every ghost character, and then go on to some headcanons (under the cut). but i also highly suggest watching some lore explanation videos on youtube for more context!!

ok so. the general premise of the band ghost is that there's a satanic church known as the clergy, and they started the band to spread satan's message.

the leader/frontman of the band is given the title of papa emeritus. there have been 5 papa emerituses as of right now.

papa emeritus 0, also known as nihil, was the frontman of ghost in the '60s. he is the canonical father of the other papas (except for copia).

papa emeritus 1, also known as primo, was the frontman of ghost from 2008 to 2012. he failed to get more people interested in satanism, so the clergy replaced him with his younger brother:

papa emeritus 2, also known as secondo, was the frontman of ghost from 2012 to 2015. he also failed, and so they replaced him with the youngest of the emeritus bloodline:

papa emeritus 3, also known as terzo, was the frontman of ghost from 2015 to 2017. he gained attention, and was overall popular, but he lost sight of his mission, and was taken out by the clergy.

so, while searching for a new papa, nihil (now an old man) took over ghost for a while. this is how he was introduced to the fandom.

but eventually, the clergy found a new frontman for ghost: cardinal copia. at first, nihil was opposed to making copia papa, because he's not a part of the bloodline, but still eventually copia became papa emeritus 4, our current papa.

when copia took over the ghost project, all former papas except for nihil were killed. nihil later on died of undisclosed causes, but has since returned in the form of a phantasm (for some fucking reason).

another character you should be aware of is sister imperator, a member of the clergy, and nihil's lover from way back in the '60s. the two broke up after nihil made out with random audience members mid-show. it's also heavily theorized that imperator might be the biological mother of copia.

now, a little about the nameless ghouls:

the nameless ghouls are the masked band members of the band ghost. there have been different sets of ghouls for each era of ghost, but our current ghouls are: sodo (aka dewdrop or fire), rain (aka water), mountain (aka earth), aether (aka quintessence), and swiss (aka multi-ghoul).

there are also ghoulettes, or female ghouls! these are cirrus, cumulus, and sunshine!

it is not known wether the nameless ghouls are human or not, but the fan interpretation is that they're demons, summoned to serve the clergy.

another character you should probably know about: mr. saltarian. our newest character. all we really know about him is that he's a member of the clergy.

NOW ONTO THE HEADCANONS.

ok so. abt the massive tits thing. that would be secondo. idk why its just,,, me (and most of the fandom) are convinced secondo has big tiddies. no real reason behind it's more like a gut feeling.

all of the papas are trans. to me. specifically gender neutral primo (any pronouns), transfem secondo (they/she), genderfluid terzo (he/she), non-binary copia (they/vem). nihil is a he/him lesbian and that is all i have to say on that. same with the ghouls, except they're all agender to some degree, since they don't understand the human experiance of 'gender identities'. none of them care what pronouns they're referred to by, but he/theys and she/theys and obscure neopronouns are preferred.

copia is very very very autistic, i feel like most people can get behind that. constantly wearing gloves, little to no facial expressions, actively failing at social interactions. they just like me fr.

this is kinda off-topic but my favourite ghoul is mountain. idk why i just rlly like them.

oh also a weirdly specific headcanon of mine: sister imperator is estonian. i just feel like that's true.

[diorgirl444]

hii flo!<3 can't wait for this omg, i love the marauders era sm xx and your matchups are amazing x 💕🪐

my name is eva rose - eva's fine though lol - & i'm a sagittarius with a virgo moon and an enfp.

i'm 5''3 with auburn curly hair and a petite (i think??) hourglass figure. i have freckles on the tip of my nose and on my cheeks all year 'round, and i have deep blue-green eyes. i'm fair skinned and burn in the summer.

i like to dress alt, with maybe a little cottagecore. my go-to outfits are usually things like baggy jeans and tight crop tops. flowy dresses & leather jackets. i have adhd so i can't really wear certain stuff because of sensory issues.

i would describe myself as observant, fun, genuine, intuitive and witty. i think people's perspectives of me changes as they get to know me. i'm an introverted extrovert and can't handle being around people for too long. i prefer talking to listening and i'm an idealist.

i'm also a massive hopeless romantic and my love language is quality time - and sometimes physical touch. i'd say my dream bf would share the same sense of humour, and he'd be really supportive of me. we'd have late night conversations - if i'm close to someone i like to ramble about my hyperfixations ahah.

i like old cities, anything vintage, astrology, reading, spotify playlists, baking, psychology and greek myths. i like 60s-80s music - the beatles, david bowie, Fleetwood mac & a couple of the smiths songs

<33

your perfect matchup is 𝐣𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 💌

𝐢 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐣𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐧 <𝟑

𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝟐 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭 <𝟑

let’s be real could i really put anything else?!?!

we all know he’s totally in love with you and who am i to go against pure facts.

so since hogwarts is such a big school it’s highly likely that you wouldn’t cross paths till that one fateful year where you were in the same potions class.

we all know that slughorn is the type of teacher to very much have favourites and you two are both definitely up there.

but even he has to do his job and when james starts get particularly bad scores in his potions class he decides something must be done about it so he pairs james with one of his star students aka you!!!

but what slughorn doesn’t know is that the reason james is doing so badly in potions is because he’s way too preoccupied staring at you <3

when james finds out that he’s paired with you he’s ecstatic but also terribly nervous.

the pair of you agree to meet in library and do so each week.

and in each week you grow closer to the point where you almost kiss in one of your tutor sessions :0

pretty soon you have a test coming up and james makes you promise that if he gets more than half you’ll go on a date with him.

you don’t tell him that you’d go on a date with him anyways.

he gets 80% so you go out and well the rest is history <3

𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 <𝟑

no couple at hogwarts can even remotely compare to you two, not in an awful superiority way but just in the simple way that you and james completely adore each other.

like even in group settings the two of you are in your own little worlds together which if the pair of you had your say neither one would leave.

also can i just say slughorn is your biggest shipper, he takes full credit for you relationship just humor him please <3

i feel like you two are always slow dancing? like in the evening he just holds you close to him and you lovesick idiots just waltz together to there is a light that never goes out or cinnamon girl.

and on long journeys you always, always share headphones. it took him a while to get used to headphones but now he knows of them there’s no going back.

he picks flowers for you!! often they’re kinda limp dandelions but he tries his better and he loops them into your hair so he’s forgiven <3

omg he’s always kissing you, be it your lips, cheeks, nose,palms, even your ankle once… essentially if there’s skin on display he’s going to kiss it.

he also calls you the most creative nicknames to the point that they’re kind of ugly. like my little mugmate… gross but they’re said with affection <3

basically james is so smitten with you it’s ridiculous but you wouldn’t have it any other way <333

𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞 <𝟑

hugs and kisses, flo

[catboy-joyfriend]

i know jack shit about ghost music or characters but inform me on blorbos from ur bands

OK SO FIRST OF ALL ^. okok i think im just gonna kinda dump info and characters and stuff. SO.

In actuality Ghost started releasing music in I think 2010, but in the lore they've existed since the 60s. Basically the premise is that the clergy, which is basically the satanic church and is like. parallel reverse christianity. uses Ghost as a way to spread the word of Satan and convert people etc. the role of Papa Emeritus is like the antipope basically, the first of which we know of being Papa Nihil/Papa Emeritus 0 who was Papa in the 60s!

hes old now go peepaw. The EP Seven Inches of Satanic Panic, which has Kiss The Go-Goat and Mary on a Cross is supposed to be a rerelease of songs from when he was Papa Emeritus ! also hes dead but they revive him onstage during rituals (ghost concerts r called rituals 👍) so he can play the sax. again, go peepaw. The rest of the Papas are his sons ! (except MAYBE Papa iv depending on which theory ur going on.)

Ghost in the lore stopped making music after Papa Nihil's era because the world "wasn't ready for Ghost" iirc, and as of 2010 when the band actually started making music irl Papa Emeritus I (or Primo as some fans call him :3), Papa Nihil's oldest son, became the frontman for the band :D. I dont have much to say about him lol, he released the album Opus Eponymous. Peepaw 2. Also the only one without a custom made mask iirc. He served as Papa until 2012 when he was retired by the clergy for not spreading the word of Satan good enough lol

Papa Emeritus II !! Aka Secondo. Old man but moving out of Peepaw territory. He was Papa from 2012-2015 , and released the album Infestussumam. They made a documentary web series called Papaganda which is pretty much about how much of a slut this dude is. also they showed his dick in a music video one time. He was also retired by the clergy for not doing a good enough job

PAPA III MY LOVE PAPA III. or Terzo. Papa III is the youngest of Papa Nihil's confirmed sons, and was active as Papa from 2015-2017 and released the Meliora album. He's the first of the Papas to perform in an outfit other than his papal regalia, and was dragged offstage at the end of one ritual, I believe because he had become too focused on himself rather than the mission of the clergy. This is when Papa Nihil was officially introduced. Primo, Secondo, and Terzo were then killed by the clergy in 2018.

Cardinal Copia was introduced in 2018 and became the new frontman of the band after the deaths of the previous ones. He is the first non-Papa front man, and was noted to not be of the bloodline, although it is possible he is still the son of Papa Nihil, as Nihil's lover Sister Imperator is shown to be pregnant in the Kiss the Go-Goat music video, which lines up when he likely would have been born, and Imperator is heavily implied to be his mother (even nearly saying so in the video Tomb It May Concern ("As your m- as someone who loves you")) Though it is entirely possible he could be like the antichrist or something & it could be a virgin mary kinda situation cuz there's evidence for that too. He released the album Prequelle :) He's very silly very awkward (tho much more confident and charismatic onstage) & everyone decided he loves rats because. he released the song Rats. woo!

Cardinal Copia rose to the papacy as Papa Emeritus IV in 2020, and released the Impera album !! :D Some people also like to call him Popia but I tend to just call him Papa IV, or still just Copia. Like Terzo, he tends to not perform in non-papal outfits like this blue jacket or bat wings etc. He has the most outfit variation out of all the papas, something thats carried over from the prequelle era when he was a cardinal. His face looks different, which in reality was because his mask was changed, but character-wise they explained it by giving him plastic surgery. He is the currently active Papa and everyone is absolutely terrified that hes gonna die soon god bless. Hes my wife my babygirl mwah

All Papas are played by the actual frontman Tobias Forge in different masks except I think young Nihil who's only in music videos

There's more stuff I could go into like the nameless ghouls and Sister Imperator but I am ! Almost out of image space in this post lol.

[astral-from-afar]

Ooh nice to see a fellow Kamen Rider type of person

Personally, out of the three main tokusatsu, I think I watched Kamen Rider more than anything. I did watch all 3 equally at first but my interest went from Ultraman and Super Sentai (from when I was little) to more of Kamen Rider as I grew older.

I haven't watched much from Reiwa since I stopped watching Tokusatsu maybe 3 years ago. But growing up, my parents were into tokusatsu, so I was naturally shown a lot of it, lmaoo. I kinda stopped being open about it after some kid in third grade made fun of me for it 💀

After that, I became self-conscious about it as I grew up, so I told myself I had to stop watching it. My parents still watch it though, and they tell me it's good, but I don't have the courage to start watching again 😭 Lately I wish I didn't do that cause now I feel like I'm missing out on the fun lmao- it was really fun to watch because they tend to have a deeper/darker meaning to them, even if it seems to be for younger audiences at first glance, which I find neat.

I don't really remember much from W, since I watched it way back when I was younger, but I remember the acting was great (I think the actor for Philip was only 15 at that time? I've seen that guy in other J-dramas and his acting is amazing). I remember liking W but I just don't really remember what it was about. Maybe I should revisit it sometime.

I think my favorite was Den-O. I'm pretty sure I've watched all of the heisei ones but I can't recall all of the good ones that I liked. I do remember liking the 3 last Heisei ones which I believe were Ghost, Exaid, and Build, but out of those 3, I think Ghost was the best.

ALSO YOU ARE SO RIGHT the kamen rider soundtracks tend to be bangers

Oops I kinda talked too much about myself LMAOA (I tried to shorten this the best I could. i really did. I DELETED 3 PARAGRAPHS LMAO)

No way you used to be a fan AS WELL. Now I feel a bit embarrassed for recommending stuff. Also Den-o is top tier. Deneb is probably one of my favourite kamen rider characters just for how funny he is.

To be fair I was more of a Power Rangers kid growing up. I started off watching mega force when it was still airing and religiously watched the reruns of older stuff like Dino Thunder, which was my favourite.

I stopped watching after a bit because man are kids RUTHLESS. Some of them made fun of me so I stopped watching for a bit. Luckily I have younger siblings who were watching the show up on it so I became a casual viewer, mostly watching for my siblings and then lying at school the next day.

The reason I got into Toku was actually because of a YouTuber that I was subscribed to. I had 0 clue what kamen rider was and they were praising fourze so I thought ‘I’ve seen jojo part 4, this is practically that with superheroes’ and then proceeded to watch the series. I then moved onto the other series like ooo, build,gaim,W,Den-o,ex-aid and blade.

Funny story about my watch through of blade is that I had no context for where most of the memes in the fanbase came from so I watched Blade to mainly understand everything. I had gotten up to the final arc but had to take a break since mock season was going on. When I finished I remember that I rushed home and decided to watch the last arc, despite being very tired. Yeah big mistake. Who knew a bench could make Astral cry but it did

I’m wondering right now what series to watch now. The smartest decision is to probably catch up to the latest season but I’m probably going to wait until it finishes to binge it. I’m torn on watching a late heisei era show or trying to see more early heisei works. I’ll do what I do best which is spin a wheel and decide what to watch lol.

Nooo man you don’t need to shorten down your thoughts. It’s fun reading this stuff and believe me I’ve been holding back from spamming the dashboard with my random Toku thoughts so you shouldn’t worry about if you’re saying too much. If you want to get back into it the newest season of kamen rider is around the corner so you could start getting back into it from there.

[lietpolski]

Denmark, 0! (I'm so glad they added an all option!)

!!! ok here we go :D

1) what would their social media page/activity be like: i've discussed this w/ a friend but i think denmark is the most technologically capable after sweden! i think on twitter he's a little more professional (but he loves rting feel-good stuff) BUT he shines on insta. it's full of artsy pictures of the danish countryside and embarrassing videos of him and his friends on his stories :,)

2) what animal they remind me of: i don't care that it's predictable that man is a puppy!!!! manga denmark is a golden retriever but anime denmark is a yippy chihuahua with that fucking voice

3) my thoughts on their design/aesthetic alone: LOVE!! i think his canon outfit is really nice compared to.... whatever the other four are doing!! his hair is dumb but it's dumb /affectionate /i love him

4) physical headcanons: i got a few! he's an early bird!! and a light sleeper. physique-wise he's the second tallest nordic and he has BIG ass arms (an axe was his main weapon so!! makes sense to me!) he has a huge sweet tooth + he loves pastries!! but his favourite is whatever norway bakes because he's a softie :) as for actual food.... this man survives on sandwiches hot dogs and beer. get well soon x

5) social headcanons: denmark is the nordic with the most friends outside of the group!! finland comes close, because everyone loves finland and he has estonia & hungary, but i think denmark's outside friendships are more involved! a strip that really stuck with me is one during the denmark-norway period, where he goes to the netherlands and asks him to give him the buddy price on weaponry and ned agrees despite how he usually is :,) within the group, i see him as having an older-brother-but-kinda-dad relationship with iceland. sweden and him are close now and they're just the brothers who had a fallout but now r coping by insulting themselves jokingly (only when they're a few drinks in sometimes it's not a joke). he and fin only became close in later centuries but their personalities are super compatible so they're great friends!! and he and norway... oughghhg you're talking to dennor lover #1 here HAH to me they've been basically on-and-off in love for 1100 years or so :,) i'll go more into it in a future post so i'll stop here but!! yeah!!

6) psychological headcanons: i feel like i covered most of this in my denmark analysis!! but hm yeah for me his greateast fear is for sure isolating his family again. and despite how carefree he acts, i think he weighs his decisions very carefully because of what happened in the past when he didn't. i think he's actually really good with dealing with anger in modern day (he's had a lot of practice) but he regrets how he used to be before. speaking of before!! i love to think abt him from the viking era to approximately the late 1500s just... cocky bloodthirsty denmark is really fun to explore and i think people should play it up more instead of making him p much as sweet as in modern times! i dont think he wouldve been anything like that to anyone but his family and own people (also animals btw this guy loves animals 100%)

7) ship(s) with them that i like or at least consider: in terms of like... my version of canon i'm a dennor soloshipper i think :,) BUT i find denmark/norway/finland/sweden fun to think about!! also denmark/estonia is a rarepair i think is veryvery cute. and some classic nedden never hurt anyone!

8) made-up connections with other characters that weren't in the canon (friends, enemies, whatever): yes!! estonia as i just mentioned! he was danish land once and he's a nordic fanboy now so they have to have some kind of relationship! also prussia; i know they do have the whole awesome trio thing going on, BUT i think historical denmark & prussia is not spoken about enough. the 2 were on the same side all the time back then!! finally i find it really funny if he and poland get on each others nerves HAH again because of historical reasons!

9) headcanons about their past: again covered a lot of these already but!! here's one that's a little different. denmark was the first to become christian, and i think he would've annoyed the fuck out of norway and sweden (who were still norse pagan) about it! sometimes it just got him exasperated eye rolls, sometimes it got him beheaded, yk how it goes

10) content about them I'd like to see more of: anything i love denmark sosososo much more iceland & denmark content!!! i adore norway & iceland don't get me wrong but they for sure overshadow ice & dan when it comes to familial dynamics and it's a shame! also i think a lot of the historical content focuses on the viking era, the fall of the kalmar union or 1814, and i'd like to see more of him in the 1500s-1700s!! he was up to interesting stuff!!

[localcryptideli]

Omg what crack theory about them you got that’s really sad? 😭😭😭 For me, I think MOM is Riku’s parent basically and Riku either lied about his name to protect himself or he lost his name and doesn’t know what he truly is cause MOM hasn’t revealed a face after so long so after Xehanort referring to KH as an unseen land I went “0: Oh my god you’re Riku’s mom dad”

Okay very short and cheesy and probably bad phrased summary because it's midnight and I thought of this like, six months ago so my memories are jumbled BUT -

It was less of a theory and more of an au based on a crack theory, in which, in an alternate reality to the canon one, Sora, overwhelmed by trauma, succumbs to darkness completely in a fresh new way, and consequently gets a bit dangerous ("a bit"), while Riku loses himself from the combo of his connected person succumbing to darkness + despair to save Sora and becomes the Master of Masters, mainly because despite his immunity, with Sora getting corrupted, he gets corrupted by proxy. He's a bit between our Riku and the nightmare version we saw in ddd. He is not quite fallen to Darkness, but not fully in the light either.

And because time travel is now a thing I imagined, again this all in crack theory fun, that he went back in time to try and find a way to save Sora (hence yozora being tasked with saving sora, and MoM calling Darkness "Old Friend"), and is currently trying to prevent Sora in our timeline to succumb to darkness, so that none of what happened will happen (hence encasing him to save him - can't succumb to darkness if he is frozen in a coma).

And he probably took an eye out when he clashed with his version of Sora in some previous instance, so he could track him around across eras, as you do, you know. Best friends matching outfit. The romantic friends to lovers to enemies longing for each other kinda deal with a swor-er, keyblade, pointed against him because you love him and you need to do this exactly because you love him, even though you know it's going to kill what little was left of the old you and make you a bit funkier in the head afterwards. Just another Tuesday here.

So you have our Riku, probably getting strung to work with him, not knowing he's an alternate version of himself, and then eventually going against him because he realizes his plan is, essentially "I tracked my old self down because while Sora was still Sora I was immune to darkness so I need you to find him and destroy him, and either this goes well or I will make sure we'll all be destroyed so darkness can have an end" and no, he's not doing that, he's not hurting Sora in any version, end of the story. He spent too long making it up for the one time he hurt him and he is not going to live through that guilt again.

And then because I am always a slut for cheesy romantic hurt/comfort stuff I thought our Riku would dive into Sora's heart again and get him to face his trauma so he wouldn't fall to darkness, see a Sora stuck in a reality where things are fine (you know the trope), get him to realize what is happening, get him to face his trauma, kiss him as dream reality collapses around them, and save him and the world. The end.

Note: it was a crack theory. My actual theory on what might be happening is quite different but the gifset reminded me so much of this one. But ironically from the khux ending and khdr I do think the solution to the war will ultimately be finding a way to live with Darkness as opposed to annihilating it so I guess at least I am coherent with my theories, crack or not. Although I also get a sense those two might pull a Fang/Vanille way of saving the world. Cause, you know, parallels.

[livefromtheyard]

loved the yard (obv) and wine about it, with the caveat that i think they shouldn’t drink. generally their chemistry is really fun to listen too even if both of them stray to far into “boys locker room” and “girls locker room”. also the yard is maybe the only podcast on this list that has never had severe audio problems

trash taste is ok, but the episodes are too long and usually contain one or two topics where they are just arguing about something that i know slightly more about than them so its just frustrating. i stopped watching them.

fear&: i really just don’t like the way hasan talks. he seems like a great guy but he just kinda sucks the energy out of the room. will is fun, austin is growing on me slowly and qt is amazing (but better on wine about it). also the podcast is really scuffed and not in a good way

otvpodcast: my parasocial relationships cannot carry me so far. the flow in this one is terrible, there’s so much dead air between topics and its always a bit awkward, ofc depending on the guest but i think because its like a once a year type beat for most of them they don’t really get enough practice in. its very professionally produced, yet still very scuffed feeling

safety third: its scuffed but actually in a good way its better in person but i also think they may have just run out of things to talk about. i stopped listening to this one a few months ago for whatever reason.

dear hank and john: kind of a random pick but for a podcast between two middle aged men there’s great chemistry and flow between topics, its really funny and they actually seem to care about the quality of it (like actually rerecording when the audio fails). they’ve been doing it for years and been pretty consistently good throughout.

revolutions podcast: slightly different from all the others here. but. a really clear and engaging history podcast about several different revolutions since the modern era. i’m not sure exactly what to say about it and whether my enjoyment of it comes from it being the exact domain of history i find the most interesting (political/economic stuff). but its probably my second favourite podcast on this list (under the yard)

there’s a lot of others i could talk about because especially before covid i used to listen to a lot of podcasts (and a lot of variety in podcasts) but that was so long ago and i probably wouldn’t be able to remember much. (mbmbam sucks; hello internet is good just for gray, brady is annoying; etc) but this is long enough (and i don’t think my insight is interesting or well written enough to continue beyond)

!!! thank you for contributing your thoughts 💞 love it. it is truly amazing that only one streamer podcast out of the ones that get talked about a lot has had almost zero audio issues, apart from it being a little quiet sometimes when they move too far away. i'm excluding trash taste from that group in my mind because they are too popular to me. i haven't heard of a lot of these though!! i didn't know hank and john had a podcast :0 the otvpodcast really interests me now....... i've never been into otv really, but i would like to see how awkward it is lol. i also might have to listen to a bit of the revolutions podcast bc the only one i listen to consistently besides the yard and wine about it is apocrypals, and i feel like there could be a lot of crossover with events from a bit earlier in history 🙇‍♂️

[savvythepirate]

Nordic Winter

Pairing: Jack Sparrow x reader

Warnings: None

Requested by: @hahajkjkmfs

The Request:

May I request something where the reader is from a nordic/generally cold country while its winter and Jack takes takes them there? I bet its kinda hot in the caribbean so its like a pretty new experience yk a lot of snow and stuff for Jack and his crew and maybe they do something fun in the snow and the reader shows them around or something like that? :D

Simply put Jack and his crew experience a nordic winter and the reader kinda has to explain certain things to them, maybe tells them a few stories or just something about their country and whats it like there in the north and the crew is like ”:0”.

Idk I think that would be funny since Im from a nordic country myself & I suck at imagining how Jack would react to tons of snow, cold and all that haha.

***

Ever since the first snow print Jack and his crew had ad made, they all wanted to turn around right in that same moment.

For a moment, they all took a look at their surroundings and deciding this colder environment must have gone from abandoned before becoming completely uninhabitable. The crew had was in the search of treasure that held great values, before Jack could take another step forward, Gibbs grabs hold of his shoulder as he tries to convince him that maybe this place wasn’t the best idea to be looking for valued treasures before suggesting that it they would have better luck if they went back to the Black Pearl and return to the Caribbean where it was warm.

Jack looked around once more, as if he was really putting a lot of thought into Gibb’s suggestion. Of course when he puts some thoughts into it, it ends up in disagreeing with Gibbs before demanding to move forward while talking to them with as much motive as possible.

“Don’t be such a coward, mate. You’re forgetting that this is practically no man’s land we’re on. Now come on and start searching what we came here for.” Jack commands before moving ahead of his team.

With slight hesitation, they follow behind, as no one was prepared for the cold weather, but with each complaint that Jack heard following behind him, he would stop and scold, giving them pep talks before pressing forward once more.

Jack would sometimes say, that the more they put effort walking in the deep snow, the more they would stay warm. All that he could think about while trekking through the deep snow, what had become of this land that it needed to be left behind, possibly for good? What was its purpose? Was it different back in the day of the early settlers trying to make a land their home? Maybe this could even be what was leftover from the ice age era, or perhaps he was just overthinking things in a wishful thinking, as it was a bunch of nonsense. Nothing was going to put a stop for him from moving forward and explore until he rules it out as basically a dead end of their journey in this cold god forsaken ice world. Confident that no one was occupying these old rundown homes, he went in ahead, finding the doors unlocked in every decaying homes that were left behind for some reason. Each one they walked into had the all too familiar smell of death, and when you smell death, you never forget it.

It was a smell so strong, it could almost be tasted as they breath in the homes, or what was left of the homes anyway which wasn’t much. Some of them had looked more damaging then others, and Jack Sparrow couldn’t deny the fact it was a saddening sight to see as they continue walking through each one, each one up until the last one.

The last home is where they would find you, huddled to a corner, wrapped in a thin blanket and near a dirty fire pit that looks it hasn’t been used in years. While walking through them, it was easy to know that the homeless had crashed here as they couldn’t find anything else more decent to stay in for shelter. So far, no treasure had been discovered, unearthed and they found no sign of life by far as it seemed to be ruled out as a ragged ghost town you wouldn’t dare step foot in unless you were like a professional idiot because you wouldn’t see the dangers that could be hidden anywhere, and sometimes even just below the ground you’d been standing on. They found no one around at all, so you could only imagine how much of a shock it gave them when they found you cramped up in the last home, huddling in the far corner, almost hugging it with a thin blanket wrapped around you, and a poorly lightened fire just a few feet away.

You weren’t quite sure how long it has been since you had last encountered an actual person like you, or even a pirate. It was frightening to say the least, as they were complete strangers to you. Once you had relaxed they were in fact, pirates, frightened you more and began to huddle back once again into the corner, placing your face in between your knees as if it would make them go away. Soon you find yourself begging them to go away, saying they can take whatever they want just as long as they don’t harm you. It had you sounding like you were pleading for your life, asking them to leave you alone, despite of you already living a hellish one already which in this case, you basically are.

But they didn’t, instead, you feel one approach you with such caution before sliding down the wall to sit next to you, gently introducing himself.

“Jack Sparrow, and you are?”

“(Y/n) (L/n).” You whisper.

“Well (Y/n), you seem to be the only one here, why is that?”

You begin to quiver in slight fear as he asks you that and you try scooting away from him again before he stops you.

“Listen, I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to know.” Jack informs you.

That seemed to have helped to settled you a little, until he notices you looking up behind him at the feast of his crew.

“They aren’t going to hurt you or do anything. They’re with me, you have nothing to worry about.”

Reluctantly, you nod in response before giving him your complete story. Having Jack finding a difficult thought of leaving you behind in this cold environment, a norodic winter and invites you to come along.

You uncertain of the invitation at first because you were just too cautious. You have alway wanted to explore the world and this may be your only chance and opportunity that’s being handed out for you to take. That’s what made it more tempting, but was stopping you was the fact that you’ve just only met Jack Sparrow and his crew, and it was unclear to you if you should trust them or not. Going against your better judgment, you begin asking him timidly where you would be headed if you agreed to go with them. Jack mentions the hotspot of the Caribbean island where it’s like summer all year, crystal blue water to go wade in if you wanted to. Despite of tropical storms could come through unexpectedly, you put a lot of thought after being told all that before making up your mind to go and join them. All it truly was you listening to what your heart was telling you to do, and so, you followed it and climbed aboard the Black Pearl.

On the way on course, you couldn’t help but think of how nice a change of scenery and weather would be, as it would be warmer then what you were used to. After agreeing to tag along, you didn’t realize how long it would take you to get there by boat, as it took about three days timing and the ship didn’t carry any entertainment to make the all the remaining time go by faster, but you made it through. During the journey, Jack would ask you more questions about your former residence and why it was all abandoned and that you were the only one there from where they picked you up from.

These questions were easy for you to give him answers, and you were honest with each answer given to him. But when he asked you why once more, why you were the only sign of life there, it was difficult to process and answer, as you really didn’t know what happened to your people or where they might have fled off too.

“Are you serious? They left and no one came back for you?”

“That’s right, it’s almost as if they assumed I was dead somewhere.”

“Well, you’re definitely not dead.”

“That’s right, so I just stayed where I was in that hellish Nordic winter, bitter cold winds. I’m surprised I still have my fingers and toes to be honest.”

“Is it that cold all year round?”

“I want to say yes, because it certainly feels that way. But in the long run, the winter starts in mid to end April and makes it’s last days in October. The coldest days of the year, the coldest place on the planet I would say.”

Jack was stunned, unsure of what to say next. You gave a small chuckle to break the awkward silence as he turns his attention back to you, looking almost annoyed.

“What is it?”

“Just the look on your face.”

“Just you wait, rookie, just you wait. Once we get to the Caribbean Islands, it’s my turn to get a kick out of your reaction.”

Which only causes you to laugh before saying much more of anything.

“We shall see how it plays out, Sparrow. We shall see.”

“We shall.” He repeats.

You continue to follow behind him and your new to a warmer environment.

That was where you found your happiness. A happiness you had longed for that you now finally have. Not realizing that it’s you who deserve it then most people. That was where you found your happiness, you had longed for you could finally have.

It was pure happiness, all you ever wanted.

***

Requests: OPEN

@savvythepirate