#no i did absolutely not write this entire thing just to give context to a drabble im writing idk what youre talking about-

[abeejasarts]

I absolutely LOVE the Bill Goldilocks Cipher AU. (AU by @ckret2) I love it to bits. I think that its important everyone knows WHY I love it so much so more after the cut

I have recently gotten into reading the Bill “Goldilocks” Cipher AU, and I’m absolutely in love. (As an important note, I am on chapter 45) Not just because of the characterization and how it feels like how all the characters would act and adventures that could happen in the show, but also because specifically what Bill looks like. And I WILL INFODUMP!

Bill, for context, is stuck in this body. it’s not something he’s possessing, it’s his own body, but it was made by a computer. He created it instantaneously to escape the Theraprism (in an INCREDIBLE one shot I suggest fans of the Book of Bill read)

But then he got stuck. He couldn’t leave it, his soul was essentially stitched to the body with no powers and no way to escape. And he hates it. Bills body doesn’t look like him, not because it’s a woman, because it’s a human, and he wishes he was still a 2D triangle. The FACT that it’s a woman, the fact that it doesn’t match up with what we the audience imagine Bill would look like, let’s us imagine some of that “this isn’t right” dysphoria that is so essential to the story and Bill’s characterization. Of course we would imagine Bill to be a man, but he isn’t here. When he says he hates how his body curves and moves, we think, “oh, he means cause he’s a woman” NAW HE JUST WANTS TO BE 2D! It’s BRILLIANT!

But that’s not all!

Bills entire reason for escape is because he doesn’t want to stop being himself. He doesn’t want the prison to take away his memories or make him “perfect”, he just wants to be him and he’ll do anything to stay himself. He wants to be free.

and then when he escapes to try to stay himself forever, to “freedom”, he’s immediately trapped again. He’s trapped inside Gravity Falls, he’s trapped with the Pines, but worse; he’s trapped in a foreign body. He isn’t himself. The thing he wanted most cost him what he was fighting for to begin with.

This AU is so beautiful. It’s amazing. I adore it. And Author, if you’re reading this, your work has brought me many days of brainrot and joy.

Also, importantly, I haven’t read through the authors blog, so there’s a chance that they just think Bill should be a woman and that’s just what he would look like humanized, and there’s nothing deeper than that and I’ve made a fool of myself. If that’s the case, and the whole “the audience understands the dysphoria” part isn’t correct, I apologize, but if that is what you were going for, you did it perfectly and please never stop writing because it inspires me.

Also I have more fan art coming this AU really did give me serious brainrot like nothing else

[avelera]

A Doylist Argument for Why Alice, Daniel's first wife, is NOT Armand in "Interview with the Vampire"

So I know the IWTV fandom has more or less made up its mind about "Armand = Alice" but I have to say, I am still not convinced. In my opinion, the discussion of how Armand knew what Alice was thinking that night was because Armand was spying on Daniel and Alice as a powerful telepath, all things we've known Armand to do, not because he was somehow Daniel's first wife and at no point did Daniel, an investigative reporter, in the present day recognize that Armand was Alice, his first wife who he would presumably have photos of.

Anyway, let's start from a Doylist angle. Doylist means, "from the creator perspective, analyzing from the point of view as the work of art as something created by people outside the universe of the story, ie, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes, not John Watson who wrote the book in-universe."

First of all, it's pretty unusual for a show to outright lie to the audience. There used to be a whole script writing rule about it and if you look closely, it's very unusual in most TV shows for a character to outright lie unless the story is a mystery and unless the fact they're lying is well supported as being something the audience should be on the lookout for. But even when characters lie on tv, there's usually a bazillion neon signposts going, "The guy twirling his mustache and cackling is a liar!" and we're usually introduced to the actual truth at some point within the story.

Ok, all of that aside because I could talk about when and how and where and the nuances of writing liars into stories and why it's best generally avoided (unless it is the entire point, because audiences tend to take what they're told by a character at face value unless they're specifically told not to, etc etc.), IWTV by contrast with most tv shows is notorious for playing with lies and truth with this in very interesting ways.

Truly, I don't think I've ever seen a show lie to the audience as much as IWTV but even then, IWTV lies in very careful ways.

So, let's examine how IWTV depicts lies and subjective truth, and why I think this makes it unlikely that "Alice = Armand", which would be an absolutely gigantic lie to drop on the audience.

We always know that lies are going to be part of the story in IWTV. There's tons of support and scaffolding to the fact that the audience should know that this is a subjective story, that facts will be misrepresented and misremembered.

For example, it was an entire plot point with a long pay off that Lestat shouldn't have been able to communicate telepathically to Louis after he was turned and it was used to highlight that we should not take anything that happens in the flashbacks as objective truth. This has been told to us over and over and over again in this story.

This is so they can avoid the cheated feeling of a, "Gotcha!" Audiences do not like to be lied to but they do like to solve mysteries. If you're going to lie to the audience, you need to give them a chance to solve it. Generally speaking you accomplish this by telling them ahead of time what they should be looking out for and that there's a mystery incoming, you don't just "Rocks fall, everyone dies," dump it on them out of nowhere then laugh that they were too stupid to figure it out. That enrages audiences.

Now, it might seem like I'm contradicting myself here. "Avelera!" You might say, "We have it well established that something fucky is going on with Daniel's memories! A big red flag was raised that Armand has messed with Daniel too in the flashback to the 70s! We know from the books that Daniel and Armand had a relationship and the show is at least teasing that they had one in the show canon too! Isn't that enough to establish that Alice = Armand is a reasonable mystery that is being hinted at within the context of the story?"

And to this I answer, sure, it's reasonable. I think the number of people who are speculating that Alice = Armand is actually a point in favor of it being true, because a good established mystery should have enough hints that people can begin to put it together before it's confirmed.

But here are my personal hang ups about why it still doesn't feel quite right to me.

We have the fact that Daniel has ruined two marriages. This is set up early. Like, super early, in episode 1, before we even see the vampires. We also establish that Daniel's two marriages are with (presumably mortal) women and that he has 2 daughters. This is set up long before the themes and ideas around the subjectiveness and falsehood of memory are introduced. Generally speaking, you don't introduce a mystery before you introduce that there is a mystery. To my eyes, we were meant to see the details of Daniel's marriage and family life as objective truths about him that inform his character before the interview starts.

Even when we do get into Louis' interview, there is a strict dichotomy to the dreamy, subjective world of Louis' story and recollection, and the sharp reality and harsh brutalist lines of the apartment in the present day.

To my eyes, the meaning is clear: All flashbacks are suspect and subjective, but scenes that take place in the modern day are objective. They are really happening. We can speculate about what things like what the decor tells us about their mindsets and the way Armand and Louis present themselves to Daniel mean, but this isn't a dream or a lie or a framing device happening here. Modern day = objectively true.

Daniel talking about his two failed marriages and his daughters is not presented within the framework of the subjective interview flashback world. These are not facts we've been asked to question, these are the objective building blocks that tell us, objectively, where Daniel is coming from and why he's the bitter old man we see instead of the bright eyed interviewer seen in the IWTV film or books.

The very AU premise of IWTV from the books is that we are in a canon divergence world where Daniel was allowed to grow old, have a family, and have a successful professional life even if he never had a successful personal life. It is the way we are objectively meant to understand his point of view and other elements like his saltiness towards the vampires. It's how we're supposed to understand him as different from his book counterpart. I think it would be cheap to then pull a "gotcha!" about those, personally.

Now, there is a mystery introduced as far as Daniel's memory, recollection, and possible falsehoods in his own understanding of his life but those are questions like: "What happened after Daniel interviewed Louis the first time?" Which is part of the broader question of, "Why are we returning to the interview now?" Which also plays a bit into Daniel's broader questions of, "Am I going to survive this interview?" which is connected to the question of, "Why did I survive the first one?"

But those questions are generally raised and addressed within the flashback to the 70s, because flashbacks, as we've established, are (within the story of the IWTV show) where these doubts about objectivity are allowed to exist.

Note, that Daniel's 2 marriages and the existence of his daughters are not discussed in the flashbacks. What is discussed is, "Why did I survive that night in the 70s?" And we learn that Daniel's memories of that time have been tampered with, there's more to the story that it appears, and he had a moment of connection with Armand that he did not recall.

"But Avelera!" You say, "Is this not further proof of Alice being Armand if we establish that Daniel doesn't have the whole story and that he and Armand had a connection that he doesn't fully remember??"

I think it is a point in favor of the theory. I think it's a point in favor of the theory being a valid one to explore, but I'm still not sold because of a few reasons.

Armand has never:

Presented himself with feminine pronouns, never cast himself in a feminine light, never associated himself with the feminine.

Furthermore, Armand has never disguised himself as a woman. Disguise is a theme in the show, Daniel talks about how people put on disguises before he finds the truth of them. But if "Alice" is a way for Armand to disguise himself in Daniel's memory, it is not a disguise that bears any resemblance to the other disguises we've seen Armand wear throughout the show. It is not a theme for Armand, it is not related to his story. Armand is many things to many people, but he's never ever associated himself with the feminine.

Armand would not need to disguise himself as a woman in Daniel's memory for Daniel to plausibly remember having a relationship with Armand, because Daniel recalls having queer experiences in the 70s. If Daniel remembered a relationship with "Andrei", I'd be more inclined to believe he's substituted himself in Daniel's memories with a mortal. Going so far as to say, "Of these 2 women Daniel told us in the objective present that he's been married to, one of them was a man who was also Armand," just seems a bridge too far in tricking the audience for no apparent reason. To me, that feels like a cheap trick on the audience.

Now, what about those weird things Louis and Armand say about Alice when they're shaming Daniel with the memory of her?

Specifically: what about Armand knowing what Alice is thinking the night she turned Daniel down?

This is my biggest point of difference with those who theorize that Alice = Armand. After all, how could Armand know what Alice was thinking that night unless he was Alice?

To put it simply, I think he knows because he was stalking Daniel that night.

I think we are meant to go, "Wait, what??" when we hear that Armand knows what Alice was thinking that night. That conversation is mean to be a red flag when we're invited to notice that Armand and Daniel have more history together than we, or Daniel!, have been led to believe.

But we also know Armand is a powerful telepath. This is a hugetheme throughout the show.

And, personally, I'm big fan of Queen of the Damned the book. It is my personal theory that IWTV the show takes place in a world where Armand and Daniel had their "Devil's Minion" whirlwind romance in the 70s, but instead of Armand turning Daniel as he requested, he wiped Daniel's memories and then let him go.

IMO, Daniel continued life thinking that he'd lost his memories of the 70s due to drug binges, and then from the 80s onward lived a relatively normal life with his two failed marriages to mortal women, his two daughters, and his award winning career. That's the divergence point.

To me, it seems much more plausible based on everything we know about Armand, that after he "freed" Daniel from their relationship and "allowed" him to live a mortal life instead of "cursing" him with vampirism, that Armand continued to stalk Daniel. Because that's what Armand does. Even in the Devil's Minion chapter of QotD, he's constantly stalking Daniel to the point where all Daniel needs to do in a particular city to have Armand swoop in to save him is think about him really hard.

So to me, what I think that line of dialogue was setting up was not "Armand = Alice" it was, "Armand continued to stalk Daniel after their relationship ended and that is the red flag you're supposed to pick up on from this dialogue, not a convoluted masquerade where Armand replaced Daniel's memories of the relationship with a woman named Alice who at first rejected Daniel but then eventually agreed to marry him."

To me, Armand = Alice just seems too convoluted. It also seems too easy to disprove given that Daniel is an investigative reporter. You're telling me he doesn't have any photos with "Alice", his first wife? You're telling me that if Armand was Alice, Daniel's first wife, that he never looked at "Rashid" or Armand and said, "Wow, you remind me of you my first wife?" Because to me, that's the sort of line you drop (in a more subtle manner) if you want people thinking about Alice = Armand but there is nothing along those lines in the show.

Now, what about the line, "You felt safer holding her hand in Paris."?

That one is a bit of a head scratcher. That one I think does lend to the possibility that "Alice" was male, that "Alice" was Armand, because Paris is discussed as more queer friendly (even though we also have scenes of Louis and Armand receiving homophobic comments while in Paris so... idk, "more comfortable" doesn't mean it was truly accepting, much like Louis felt "more comfortable" being a man of color in Paris even if racism was still rampant, but I digress).

But I didn't take it as a comment on Paris being queer-friendly (and therefore Armand = Alice) at the time when I first watched that scene.

I took Louis statement there as much more of an attack on Daniel's hatred of Paris. Paris is the city of love. America is the country where Daniel lives and works and has his identity as a hard-ass American reporter. In Paris, though, he was able to relax and be in love, far away from his work. Daniel has now grown to hate Paris because Paris was the place where he was young and in love with his first wife, a relationship that ended badly.

I felt that Louis was more calling out Daniel's changing attitudes towards Paris, rather than implying that Paris was more queer-friendly so Daniel could be openly with his lover Armand.

TL;DR: Look, I think the theory of Alice = Armand has a lot to recommend it, but I still have my objections to it. I think it's too big of a trick to pull on the audience to say that investigative reporter Daniel Molloy wouldn't recognize Armand as his first wife upon seeing him. I think it's too big of a trick to pull on the audience because the identity of Daniel's wives has never been presented as a mystery to be solved. I think it's much more plausible that they were setting up that Armand has been stalking Daniel very closely over the years, not that he insinuated himself into Daniel's life under false premises as a woman, a disguise and identity he's never used before.

I think Alice is real. I think Armand is a stalker, and that was meant to be our take away from that conversation.

[your-turn-to-role]

also. i absolutely adored what lovm did with the pass through fire quote

but then it makes me emotional about the original context, so i have to share that too (minor plot spoilers ahead)

because it wasn't originally to do with the ashari at all. it was from patrick rothfuss' guest character, a blacksmith named kerrek, who helped vox machina fight against the dragon in westruun, and helped keyleth personally through some difficult stuff (he may yet appear on lovm, but given the context of the quote now i doubt we'll get all of it)

and a little after kerrek's episode, patrick rothfuss actually made a legit letter from kerrek to keyleth, with a present inside, and left it with matt until whatever point in the plot she was able to recieve it

which by coincidence was one of the hardest moments in the whole campaign for her

and this letter had marisha legit crying in the episode, because it's just. so beautiful, and so needed. and it goes:

Keyleth,

I write to let you and your companions know that the repair of Westruun is proceeding well. I will not bore you with the details. Suffice to say that our children are well-fed and safe, our elderly and infirm are cared for and comfortable. Without the help of you and yours, this would not be the case.

The folk in charge argue constantly, but that is to be expected, and it is no bad thing. They all want the same good things in different ways. I listen, mostly, and do what I can to make sure that they listen to each other. Without listening, nothing good can happen.

The town... when I say the repair is going well, it is a hard thing for me to talk about. I am not a particularly clever man, and much of this is new to me. When you make a mistake with metal, you can melt things down and start afresh. It is irritating, and it costs in time and soot and sweat, but it can be done. There is a comfort in iron, knowing that a fresh start is always possible. But a city is not a sword. It is a living thing, and living things defy simple fixing. Roots cannot be reforged. They scar, and broken branches must be cut and sealed with tar, and this makes me angry, as it always has, and my anger has no place to go.

It was easier when I was young. I could use my anger like a hammer against the world. I was so sure of myself and my friends and my rightness. I would hammer at the world, and breaking felt like making to me, and I was good at it. And while I was not wrong, neither was I entirely right. Nothing is simple.

I do not work in wood. I am not brave enough for that. There is a comfort in iron, a promise of safety, a second chance if mistakes are made. But a city is more a forest than a sword. No, it needs more tending than that.

Perhaps a city is like a garden, then. So these days, it seems I have become a gardener. I dig foundations in the earth. I sow rows of houses. I plan and plant. I watch the skies for rain and ruin. I cannot help but think that you would be better at this, but circumstance has put both of us in our own odd place. You are forced to be a hammer in the world, and my ungentle hands are learning how to tend a plot of land. We must do what we can do.

Did you know that there are some seeds that cannot sprout unless they are first burned? A friend once told me that. She was... she was a bookish sort. I think of gardening constantly these days. I wear your gift, and I think of you, and I think it is interesting that there are some living things that need to pass through fire before they flourish.

I ramble. You have the heart of a gardener, and because of this, you think of consequence, and your current path pains you. I am not wise, and I do not give advice, but I have come to know a few things: sometimes breaking is making. Even iron can start again. And there are many things that move through fire and find themselves much better for it afterward.

I have enclosed a gift. Once it was a sword, but it has changed. It is a small thing, and silly. Please forgive an old man for his foolishness. Still, I hope it brings you some small comfort.

Kindly, Kerr.

and the present inside the envelope? a ring, engraved with the phrase "I have passed through fire."

[tocomplainfriend]

Episode 4

TW: Rape, Sexual Assault and Abuse, Physical abuse.

So uh, I really did just guess "there is no way it's that bad, right?"...

OK, SO LET'S TALK. So again if you haven't seen the episode big Trigger Warning for its content! It's real heavy, explicit and on your face. I'm a Sexual abuse victim talking about this, just so you know.

I think the bigger problem I have with the episode, it's the context surrounding it and what happens later on, specially. Many people can have different views on the poison scene itself, for their own. But that scene, even if you as a victim relate, can only really work in a vacuum. Why? Let's see... hum.... The jokes of male SA in Helluva Boss? How it's written as funny to Moxxie to get assaulted? By the Succubus, Blitz, Chaz? Not seeing any problem in Stolitz, and victim blaming Blitz.

Suddenly Viv wants to be like: "Male sexual assault and abuse it's so not talked about, I'm going to write about it". As if she didn't write all those HB jokes. All those jokes are only men getting assaulted too, by other men or woman. The SA and r-pe it's funny when it's done to men, why did this even happen?

Even if the entire episode 4 was good, why did the same person write all this jokes? Is the sexual harassment Angel does to husk, even going to be addressed later or...? The biggest problem, it's the bad execution. Something happens a lot with HB and HH, it's that scenes and concepts work In isolation, that way you imagine in infinite possibilities of the "what if this". But they give you is in it'self not that good. The series does expect you to be a fan, and have to watch the pilot. Because it doesn't really bother to introduce the characters or anything. So the emotional bits don't hit that hard if you didn't already care about the characters since or before the pilot.

Since the first episodes, Valentino has being changing between fucking idiot and horrifying monster. In episode 2 he is treated as a stupid dumbass. I feel like all the episodes until 4 were too much, on the comedy shit- to immediately jump into explicit abuse and SA is a lot. In the end of the episode they also shift back the tone, weirdly.

So we jump into Val and Angel's work, showing how shitty val is. Charlie jumps into interrupting the hole thing. AND VAL ASSAULTS HER TOO??? I didn't expect that. He grabs her kisses and lick up her arm, and gets too close to her in other scenes. Then Charlie accidentally ruins the set, and Val ends up physically abusing Angel. Living him with a black eye, and it's shown Angel did a deal with him. Leaving him fully trapped with him (not a legal contract, but a devil/sinner bound magic thing). Then it's poison music number.

Many people feel like it's too graphic. Other people will say it's okey, because it shows the problem straight on, and it's supposed to make you uncomfortable.

Explicit doesn't = good.

You can talk a lot of what does this level of graphic/explicit add to the conversation.

My main problem with it being so explicit comes from who is directing that hole part of the episode. I talked about it in the post above. The person in question:

(BLURRED CUT PICTURE)

Does this scene above seem familiar to you? This person put together with how the poison part of the episode is played out AND all the disgusting "SA is funny" jokes HB make this a fucking problem.

AND THEN THE FUCKING ENDING IS CRAZY BAD LIKE HELLO???? At the end, Angel is at a bar, and his drink gets spiked. Husk gets him out and fights against the guys that spiked the drink. Then they kindly have an argument... To get through the whole heavy ass episode- to then Husk hit with a song calling Angel a baby IS FUCKING CRAZY. I see what the point was supposed to be, but the execution absolutely kills it. The song tries to compare Husk and Angel, to say shit sucks but hey it's okay we are in this together, BUT HOLY SHIT. Why, comparing Angel Dust being sexually abused under a demonic contract (HE IS STILL UNDER)- to Husk having to work for Alastor. Yes, Husk fucked up his life in hell do to gambling- that's not comparable to Angel being in an abusive relationship where he gets taken advantaged of. Calling Angel dust a baby loser, "everyone got it difficult get over your self"- it's fucking crazy. The fact that the episode ends on everyone happy and laugh it off it awful! WHAT HAPPEN???????? Like Angel is still under Val's contract- his going to have to go back to work, or to any other place where his drink could be spiked. We are still in the same problem. I don't- I don't understand. The song wasn't even a "I'll help you", it felt more like "Hey shit sucks, get over it". How did you write that? I don't think the series has the time or good enough space to treat the subjects- and they are dealing in the worst way.

EDIT:

I cannot believe this woman made a cum joke, about the song that it's about being trapped with your abuser- that comes with really graphic scenes of assault and r-pe. Like the whole song it's about that???? It's not a "Hot sexy" song, it's literally all sexual assault and workplace abuse.

This scene is from a non canon comic from the same artist above, got immediately referenced in the scene after poison. That's crazy. Also, The artist is... uh......... Did you know that in episode 4. It got showed that Angel's real name is Anthony? They changed their name to Tony, make themselves look like Angel? Now does sex work like Angel. They choreographed the pole dancing in Addict?

AND Viv just reduced Angel's Sexual Harassment of Husk as:

Angel trows himself to Husk, grabs him, touches him, makes unwanted sexual comments. You, have never left the weird shipping of queer of mean that revolts around sexual harassment. It's like old ass garbage Wattpad yaoi, not acknowledging those problems. Why is there more attention to that than Charlie and Vaggie, who lacks so much personality and everything. WLW with no condiments and artificial as fuck MLM with microplastics.

[pdpenpals]

hihi! i was wondering if i could get a romantic letter from phoenix drop high gene? she/they pronouns please :)

and for the context of the letter, maybe Gene & Reader recently started dating but can’t text because Reader is away at an academic sleep away camp (preferably centered around literature/writing)? Reader is on the more academic/nerdy side and not officially part of the SK so them doing these kinds of programs is their usual summer thing but it’s the first time Gene and Reader have been away from eachother since they started dating

tysm <33

hihi!! thanks for sending this in, i think this prompt’s absolutely adorable!

unrelated but speaking of literature whenever i see gene now that i’m older i think of heathcliff (more of the name) or the phantom for some reason.

your entire being perks up at the mention that a letter’s arrived, and your heart races as you go through who could have possibly sent it in your head. the moment you have it in your hands, you can almost tell exactly who it’s from. the envelope’s a dark gray, close enough to be black. there are stickers all over its back next to your name and address, same goes for the front. opening it, you catch a whiff of someone familiar’s cologne. that cheeky bastard. 

you notice almost immediately that there’s not only a letter inside, but a bunch of printed photos and some unused stickers. after finding a spot to settle your new goodies upon, you get comfy and get to reading.

Hey cutie. Miss me yet? 

Heard a fair’s coming to town soon. I think it’ll still be there when you get back. There should even be fireworks on the last day. We can go there if you wanna.

Other than that, nothing much happened today. Dante was out, and I had the house to myself for a good portion of the afternoon. Without sugarcoating it, I was bored out of my mind.

It took me a while to figure out my texts or calls weren’t getting through to you. Mom must have seen how frustrated I was about it, so she shared some of her spare stationery with me as a last resort. She said something about wanting to hear about how your summer’s been doing so far.

That’s all the small talk I can handle for today. You might get too tired of staring at only words for too long over there, so you might want to check out the pics taken these past few days. The stickers are from Zenix and Sasha by the way, they also say hi.

Kidding aside, I know how much this whole camp thing means to you.  But I’ve been feeling weird ever since you left. It’s weirder knowing you’re not nearby. When you’re not a walk or a call away. Even though I know exactly how many days and many hours are left until you come back.

Sappy shit out the way, I decided to read that one book you lent me at random. I’m not sure you remember it much since you hurriedly gave it to me without a second thought, but it’s that really old one about the day before the world ends. All that apocalyptic and sad shit. Even though I didn’t get it, I guess it was nice that Vincent and Leticia got their happy ending. To be honest, the book overall didn’t stand out to me much, but the concept of having one day left to live sure did.

If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow I would

Y’know, maybe it’s for the best I save it for when we meet again in person, so you better come back home in one piece, yeah?

With an aching heart and hand, Your Gene, who misses you terribly

PS. I feel like you’ve been rubbing off on me recently, state-of-mind-wise. While it’s not that bad, it gives me the chills.

PPS. If not having you near me hasn't driven me insane yet, I definitely will go mad if this letter doesn't make it to you. Especially after all I've put my wrist through just for this. Maybe I should visit the post office a few more times?

[antianakin]

You’ve talked a little about ships before but mainly in the context of how that is connected with the/a specific Jedi. And also a bit about ships you don’t like

But in Star Wars as a whole what’s your favourite ship, which one do you think is the best, and which one do you think is the most compelling?

(I know that the answer to all three could be the same but for me personally there’s often little overlap in these things so ymmv)

Also which ship do you think has the most potential?

I'll assume that canon and fanon are both options here.

"My Favorite" is the easiest to answer, so I'll start there. I've made an entire fic rec list for it and made no secret of the fact that I really like Codywan. Star Wars wasn't a fandom I really did any shipping in when I first was introduced to it as a kid. It wasn't until I decided to get back into Star Wars a little as an adult that I was even introduced to the IDEA of Codywan as a ship, but once I discovered it, it had me absolutely hooked. I will admit that I have a hard time with reading Codywan fics these days and interacting with other Codywan shippers because I often end up feeling like my interpretation of the characters is very different than the norm and what I want from the relationship - the thing that makes it compelling to me - isn't the same as most other people who enjoy the ship. But it was my first Star Wars ship and I still really enjoy the version of Codywan that exists in my head, so it will continue to claim the title of favorite.

For "Most Compelling" and "The Best" I'm actually going to exclusively define those as being IN CANON because anything in fanon can be compelling depending on how well someone writes it. I could obviously put Codywan down for both of these categories, but it would specifically be MY version of Codywan, the version that only really exists in my own head, and not necessarily the more popular version of them in the fandom.

I'm going to give "The Best" and "Most Compelling" to Jyn and Cassian from Rogue One. I will readily admit that, as someone who identifies as aroace, the fact that Jyn and Cassian never do or say anything explicitly romantic to each other is a major part of the reason I like them. I also personally believe it's the reason they're so compelling. Without being able to use any of the usual narrative shortcuts that romance tends to provide, Jyn and Cassian's dynamic relies on actually showing the two of them connecting with each other on a deeper level. I love how so much of their relationship with each other exists only in their eyes, in the way that they look at each other (whether the other person is looking back or not). I love the way their relationship comes through in-between the lines rather than stated out loud. I love the subtlety that exists for Jyn and Cassian in a way it doesn't for pretty much any other more "canon" ship.

I have also said before (though I'm not entirely certain I did it on this blog or not) that I really like angst, usually in the form of hurt/comfort but a good tragedy sometimes just hits the spot. Jyn and Cassian living in a "maybe," existing in a perpetual "what could have been," is so fucking sweet to me. That shit hurts JUST RIGHT. I love the idea that these two people meant everything to each other but only in the last few days before they died and they never even got to explore what exactly that could be. Their love is shown in how they impacted each other, the ways their relationship changed each other, because that's all they ever had time for. I fucking love that shit. The ambiguity of Jyn and Cassian's relationship is what makes it the most compelling to me and I think that the fact that they never get together forced the writers to show us they loved each other in far more interesting and nuanced ways than usually exist for couples that more explicitly get together on screen.

And finally, my choice for "Most Potential" is FinnRey. I really liked Finn and Rey's dynamic in TFA, I liked the way they both learned to rely on each other when they'd never had anyone to rely on before, the way they were able to escape their respective prisons and take their first steps into a larger world together. I liked the theme of coming back for each other no matter what, of reaching out for each other so they couldn't be separated, and the idea of shared fate where they would become the hero of the story TOGETHER. Obviously we all know how that dynamic got sidelined and ignored after TFA, but both characters are still alive and definitely have more story to tell, so the potential remains. Whether that potential ever actually goes anywhere, even if it's just in things like novels and comics, is still super up in the air. But I think these two could have an incredible dynamic if anyone was willing to give them the time of day.

[starlostlix]

Moriarty the Patriot - Sherlock, William, uncertainty and control:

(aka me writing a lot about something i find a bit interesting)

I think what I find most interesting about Sherlock and Liam as a duo (platonic or romantic idrc in this context) is how Liam's ways of controlling Sherlock in his plans differs from the ways he controls others. Whilst people like Bonde and Moran are allowed to improvise as long as his goal is achieved, Liam lets Sherlock choose between a limited amount of ways where he still doesn't completely understand the goal behind the situation. Liam seems to think that it's not completely possible to actually control Sherlock the way others are and has to change his approach. In fact, Sherlock as a person opens Liam up to the idea that not everything can or needs to be controlled or certain.

The first meeting with Sherlock is pure chance. Liam had no knowledge of Sherlock's existence until they bumped into each other on the Noahtic. They randomly strike up conversation by the pure coincidence of being in the same place at the same time. Liam in his letter states that this was entertaining enough for him to forget about his plan (something which is usually a constant in his mind), even considering abandoning it to continue mystery solving with Sherlock as they got to know each other more. All this from a chance encounter, something which Liam doesn't usually have room for in his plans. It opens him up to things, in this case a person, out of his control for the first time in the series as far as we can tell - and he enjoys it.

This leads to the addition of Sherlock into the Moriarty Plan, an unexpected but helpful asset in exposing the misdeeds of the nobility to the people. Liam sometimes describes Sherlock as the main character of the performance, which is significant in terms of their dynamic. With Liam as the director, Sherlock's narrative is technically under his control - so Sherlock is consistently put in situations where he has the power to act in a limited number of ways as per this narrative. This frustrates Sherlock greatly, as he seems to value being in control of the mysteries but now the mystery has control over him. He also knows he's being toyed by someone with more control of the events he's in. However, the control Liam has isn't absolute. Liam gives Sherlock many times to have the answer to the mystery handed to him, which Sherlock denies due to his mentality of wanting to solve the mystery himself. To me this shows that Sherlock is the one that has the choice over continuing the chase (and therefore the entire act) at all. If he'd accepted the answer from Hope or Alder, Liam's entire plotting would have to be rewritten. Sherlock overestimates the control Liam has over him, and Liam knows that he cannot control what Sherlock does completely (but can put restrictions on his options).

This dynamic is especially seen in The Riot at New Scotland Yard, where Sherlock specifically acknowledges that the way he acts could disrupt the Lord of Crime's plans, and is frustrated about his lack of control here. But the fact that Sherlock technically had the power to possibly disrupt Liam's plans at all in Scotland Yard shows that Sherlock has an element of free will in his situations.

In The Two Criminals (im going anime only from here since i haven't got all the way through the manga yet) is the next time we see something that Liam did not control for - Sherlock's act of murdering Milverton. Sherlock may have murdered Milverton to save Watson's marriage, but it seems to be also in part to prove to Liam that he cannot be completely controlled. This is when it occurs to Liam that, in his mind, Sherlock is definitely going to kill him and he plans for just that.

Liam's letter to Sherlock is a goodbye at its core. He plans to have Sherlock at his side in his final moments and thinks that despite their friendship Sherlock will stand by. But by now Liam feels that his control is fading - not only over his people, but his sins. The only thing he requests in that letter (which are the only things he wants to control for) are Sherlock helping others, and Sherlock being by his side to, in essence, pull the trigger and let him accept death.

Sherlock however has shown that Liam cannot control him before and does so again. On the bridge he perhaps does the thing that Liam expects the least - Sherlock tries to help him. In fact Liam is so appalled by the idea that he as the Lord of Crime is worth saving that he tries to regain control of the situation by starting a half-simulated fight. I say half-simulated since the fight is simulated by Liam to say that Sherlock defeated him after the event, but also is full of real tensions between the two. Sherlock is fighting for Liam to stay, Liam is fighting for Sherlock to give up on him and let him die (what he planned for almost his entire life).

Then, dangling above the river Thames, Sherlock pulls out the biggest surprise for Liam - Sherlock came to help because he's his friend. It's funny how Liam is accounted for all the people of London projecting their rage at him, but not for the fact that there may be one or two people that would want to spend time with him. He couldn't have planned for the genuine connection he and Sherlock had gained. He couldn't account for perhaps the most integral thing - a person that actually cares for him outside of his usual circle and wants him to have a happy life, despite everything he's done.

It isn't until he's falling that Liam realised Sherlock is truly an agent of chaos in his otherwise meticulous plan. He watched Sherlock jump to catch him, he views him strangely enough as a symbol of peace. Sometimes, chaos and unpredictablility can bring peace, something that had never accounted for can bring good.

By the time he wakes up in New York, Liam is in a state of uncertainty. No plans, no goals, his life is a 'blank'. It is Sherlock who convinces him that this uncertainty can be a good thing. He can 'paint that canvas however he likes' even if it takes some time. He can struggle to find his way, because the way him finds will still be right for him eventually. Uncertainty and a lack of control can create new opportunities and a new outlook on life. And Sherlock will be there to support him. No matter what he decides to do.

Sherlock represents the uncertainty of life for Liam and the good it can bring. He shows him that he doesn't need to plan everything, a lack of control can be a good thing, and that sometimes the best things can come from chance and uncertainty. They, as a duo, are an product of this uncertainty and lack of control.

(anyways can people tell that i kind of write essays/powerpoints on things i like for fun? this was going to be like one paragraph or two at first but then more details to explore came up. feel free to correct me if i've missed/misinterpreted anything in my writing! I'm still new to MTP - i watched the anime for the first time like 2 weeks ago and have read the first 9 manga volumes too, plus a few of the new york/time skip chapters - but this series has really taken over my life recently and that's not a bad thing)

[inoreuct]

I've been loving your ZoSan drabbles, they honestly make my day. I do have a potential drabble request if you'd like: I feel like these two idiots tease each other mercilessly for the dumbest things, like an old married couple. It's almost a game for the rest of the crew to how long it takes them to turn the teasing into either flirting or kissing. It's peak entertainment for the crew

thank you so much??$4!;7:)3 I’M SO GLAD TO HEAR THAT and yes. absolutely. I FLEW TO MY DOCS TO WRITE THIS AND IT WAS SO FUN. the tension is through the roof; not even with the bickering but the teasing. it’s playful and easy and they’re more fond than they should be and is an insult really an insult if it’s said with a smile? anyway. enjoy 😽

“Oho! The world’s greatest swordsman can’t handle a kitchen knife!” Sanji has his hands propped on his hips, faux-flabbergasted and crowing like a town crier. Zoro looks about three seconds away from chopping him up with said kitchen knife instead of the carrots on the countertop. Usopp fears for the cook’s safety.

“Do you think we should… do something?” he turns and whispers gingerly, leaning across his mug of tea so that Nami can hear him from where she’s seated across the table. 

“Something like preventing a possible murder, or getting them to finally kiss? Because…” She takes a pointed slurp from her own mug, her amused gaze fixed on the way Zoro is now animatedly arguing back. “We could do both. Or neither. I’m entertained either way.”

Usopp turns back around, hiding his face in his drink as he eavesdrops shamelessly. He must have missed some conversation, because now Zoro’s sniping about Sanji’s hair, of all things. How they got so far from the original topic in such a short time? Usopp does not know. 

“Well, at least I don’t spend an hour rubbing conditioner on my head,” Zoro scoffs, and Sanji gasps like the swordsman had just cussed out his entire family three generations up and down.

“And that, my dear marimo, is why it looks like a lawn,” he declares with a prim sniff, flicking the tap on with a flourish. “An untrimmed lawn. That a dog ran all over.”

“Wh—”

“No, no,” he laments, scrubbing at a dish in the most melodramatic way Usopp has seen in his life. “A pack of dogs. And they shat all over it, too.”

Zoro puffs up like an angry cat, clearly winding up to verbally throw down, and Usopp turns around to find Nami smirking at him with her eyebrows raised as if to say, see what I mean?

“This is incredible,” he whisper-shouts, amazed.

I know, she mouths delightedly, eyes shining like golden coins.

“What are we talking about,” Luffy hisses, and Usopp damn near jumps out of his skin.

“Great Mother Ocean, when did you get here?!” he nearly squawks, pulling his volume down at the last second, just in time to hear a victorious “and that is why no crab in its right mind would ever want to eat you!” from Zoro. He doesn’t even bother to question it anymore.

Luffy shrugs, biting into an apple with a satisfying crunch. “Like two seconds ago. Are Zoro and Sanji fighting again?”

“More like flirting,” Nami laughs, gesturing with her chin. 

Usopp gives up on straining his neck and gets up to straddle the chair properly. The convo has somehow turned back to hair; Sanji has one hand plucking delicately at green strands, the other covered in soap.

“Keep talking shit about my brows and see if I will,” he says haughtily, and Usopp strains his ears for context as Zoro bares his teeth in a grin, his eye twitching.

“As if I want you to cut it. You’d probably make it all uneven.”

A dry ha! “That’d be an improvement.”

The sniper whips around wildly to look at Nami. Either he’s hearing things, or they sound almost… fond. The way their navigator’s sitting forward in her chair hints at the latter. Luffy bites into his apple again, mumbling, “Why haven’t they kissed yet?” 

Usopp explodes into a flurry of desperate hand movements, mouthing exactly! Exactly! so enthusiastically that his cheeks hurt. 

His captain smiles and then pauses, tilting his head. “Have they kissed yet?”

Usopp’s worldview shatters into shards that then start rearranging themselves because that is a very real possibility. Sanji and Zoro have been bickering ever since before the cook came aboard the Merry, but somewhere along the line it had turned to something more lighthearted, less I’m-gonna-gut-you-like-a-fish-and-have-your-entrails-for-breakfast and more you’re-so-damn-annoying-sit-down-and-let-me-help-you.

The three of them turn in unison to stare at how Sanji and Zoro are now nose to nose, Sanji peering down the scant half-inch he has above the swordsman in height with a smug smile and murmuring “—not what you were saying last week, marimo.”

Zoro tips his head, not backing down even as Sanji cooes at him and somehow, somehow, it doesn’t sound condescending. Usopp is losing his mind. “Never said that, curly-brow. You were the one who filled in the blanks.”

“You left blanks for me to fill in.”

“You’re delusional. There’s gas in your brain, that’s why your head’s so big.” 

“Oh, yeah?” the cook grins, lazy and bright, eyebrows going up as Zoro steps into his space. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

Zoro smirks and tilts his head back. “I don’t know. You tell me,” he murmurs, before pulling away and dropping a whole stack of dirty crockery into the sink. “Better get to washing, dish boy.”

Usopp’s eyes are bugging out of his head as Sanji yells and sprays Zoro with water from the pullout tap, sparking a whole new round of squabbling and ankle-kicking and wayward elbows.

“You’re seeing this, right?” he asks desperately, turning around in his seat and gripping the edge of the table. Gosh, he’s feeling light-headed. “I’m not going crazy?”

“Nope,” Nami sighs, popping the ‘p’. “Wanna bet?”

“On?” Luffy shuffles closer, grinning around his apple and she shrugs a shoulder, feigning disinterest. 

“How long it takes dumb and dumber to get their shit together.” 

Usopp really doesn’t know how much he’d be willing to put into this. The way that they fight’s more pigtail-pulling than anything, and that in and of itself is telling— Not to mention, again, how this has been going on for months. Sanji would give Zoro shit for being messy but then go to clean anyway, only to find Zoro’s things already packed. Zoro would snip at the cook for being rigid about dessert before dinner and then find a slice of sour raspberry tart on his bunk, way after teatime was over. Usopp had honestly thought they’d been doing it out of spite, but now…

Then again, with how repressed the both of them were? “…A hundred berry, one month,” he decides, and Nami wrinkles her nose.

“Stingy,” she complains, but she’s hiding a smile as she turns to their captain. “Luffy?”

The boy hums thoughtfully, twisting around. “Are you two kissing?” he yells, and Usopp’s heart fucking drops to the floorboards as the pair stares at them wide-eyed and bursts into protests.

“What— this idiot?”

“The hell? No! Why would you—”

“—on any planet would I ever—”

“Absolutely fucking not. His refined palate—”

“—His brains are in his biceps—”

“Okay,” Luffy says, shrugging as he finishes the last of his apple, core and all, and flings a singular seed into the tiny bin by the sink with startling precision. “Five hundred, two weeks.” 

Usopp can’t help it. He bursts into laughter, smacking his forehead into the tabletop as he clutches at his stomach and the twinge in his ribs. He can hear Sanji’s panicked shouts of “what? What were you betting on? Usopp, tell me now—” and Zoro growling, “Luffy, I swear if this is what I think it is—” and oh. 

The sniper grins into the table. Oho. Did that not imply that Zoro knew something was going on? He could be wrong, but— “Seven-fifty, one week.”

“A thousand!” Luffy counters immediately, and Usopp cackles helplessly because he knows that his captain’s just shouting out numbers now, Luffy doesn’t even have the money. 

“How about we spill the beans on what the hell we’re betting on, and I make us all a special dinner, hm?” Sanji pleads, and it’s honestly funny how hard he’s trying to find out. 

“Absolutely not,” Nami replies, her grin saccharine sweet. “A joint bet of one thousand, seven hundred and fifty berry for one week. Y’know,” she studies her cuticles, pursing her lips in an unbothered moue, “This is the one time that I’d be happy not to collect. Don’t let me down, hm?” She gets up and slides out the galley door, and they hear her laughing all the way down the hall. 

Zoro looks like he’s about to have a conniption. Sanji has his hands buried in his hair, looking up at the ceiling and turning around like he’s begging for a divine answer. Usopp and Luffy share a gleeful look.

This is going to be a marvellously interesting week.

fin.

[sarabethsilver]

Unpopular opinion: I don't like Jess and Luke's "reconciliation" in S4... because I don't think they actually repaired anything. I think their dynamic in S4 is like every other parent-child dynamic in Gilmore Girls: unable to break their deeply dysfunctional patterns. (Stop reading now if you love their big hug at the end of S4. I don't want to yuck anybody's yum!)

Liz kicks Jess out and sends him to Luke. And without writing a dissertation about how unstable I think their relationship was the entire time Jess lived there, I'll just say: it wasn't awesome. Better than Liz, absolutely, but not great. And honestly, any good Luke did was destroyed when he angrily kicked Jess out in his moment of desperate need. In short: their relationship was badly damaged prior to S4, and true reconciliation would have to involve actual acknowledgement and repair of that damage. But that's not what happened.

I think you have to examine Luke and Jess' relationship in the context of Liz, because she is a key player here. And to be clear: Liz is Jess' Abuser. She gave him a childhood of chaos and neglect, and when he started to act out because of that... she blamed him, kicked him out, and never spoke to him again. It's difficult to explain just how thoroughly that kind of chronic abuse damages kids. Despite that, Luke prioritizes and protects Liz over Jess. I'm not even blaming Luke; this is a common family dynamic around abusive adults. The other adults in the family deny what's happening, because it's too painful to look at directly.

Liz and Jess both return to Stars Hollow in S4. Liz is given a mild side-eye by Luke, but generally she's welcomed. Jess is... not. Luke shouts at him and makes it VERY clear that Jess is not welcome to stay. He refuses to acknowledge or apologize for the fact that he kicked Jess out or stole his car. Luke shows no concern for where Jess has been living, how he's feeling, or if he has any of his basic needs met. The message is clear: you messed up, kid, and it's your own damn fault. Which is exactly what Liz tells him, by the way... Jess' reaction to her abuse is his fault. (This is part of that family dynamic around abuse; it's easier to blame the angry-looking kid than to examine the abusive behaviors of the adult. In therapy, we refer to this labeling of the kid as "bad" as the "Identified Patient." It's not intentional, but it's a way to deny abuse is happening.)

Things gets worse. Every time Jess tries to set a boundary with Liz - refusing to interfere in her relationship, declining her wedding invitation, saying no to walking her down the aisle - he is chastised. Luke yells at him, insults him, and guilts him. (Luke also takes a moment to shit all over Jess' life and call him a drug dealer. He doesn't give that label to Liz, the actual addict, he gives it to the Identified Patient.) So Jess, who has been totally alone for a year, does what any abused and neglected kid would do: he follows directions in an attempt to gain acceptance.

After a moment of Luke seeming to blame Jess for getting assaulted by his stepfather (again: Identified Patient), Luke makes a glib comment about Jess "hating" Liz. He doesn't want to understand how Jess feels about Liz, though, because that would be too painful to hear. The only thing Luke knows how to do is appease Liz and maintain the appearance of having a happy family. And Jess having a negative feeling about Liz interferes with that. So the message is clear: act happy or just get out of here.

So Jess stops trying to set boundaries or express his feelings. He shuts up, pastes a smile on his face, and dutifully walks his Abuser down the aisle. It's then - and ONLY then - that Luke gives him kindness. That's not reconciliation. That's Luke, unintentionally giving Jess the message that his feelings, boundaries, and safety are secondary to Liz's whims. It's easier to play Happy Family than to actually examine Liz's abuse, Luke's ignoring of that abuse, and do the hard work of repairing.

I see Luke's hug - and his "I'm here Jess, I'm always here" - and it rings hollow for me. Luke has done none of the repair work that would be necessary for a statement like that to carry weight. Nor has he "been there" for Jess at all in the past year. He's plainly prioritized Liz, Jess' Abuser, instead of protecting his nephew, the Identified Patient.

And I don't even blame Luke for that. Luke was deeply entrenched in his own dysfunctional family role. He's been Liz's caretaker for his entire adult life, and he seems to think that he's failing if he doesn't perpetually bail her out of trouble. He can't see past his role of Liz's Enabler and Protector, which is why he could never be an effective guardian to Jess.

S4 doesn't end with Luke and Jess mending fences. It ends with Jess learning that it's his role to shut up and placate Liz, no questions asked. And at the end of all that, Jess goes back to his dirty mattress on the floor and Liz gets to stay in Stars Hollow. Where she is joyfully embraced and fully supported by Luke at every single turn, no matter how many egregious mistakes she makes.

Luke loves Jess, and he does support him in various ways - paying for the car repairs, showing up to Jess' Open House, giving him advice about Rory. There's good stuff there. But it's clear that when push comes to shove, Luke is going to coddle Liz,Jess' Abuser, for the rest of her natural-born life. Jess, the Identified Patient, is on his own.

(By the time we reach AYITL, Jess is also dutifully coddling Liz and bailing her out of trouble. Lesson learned, I guess.)

Luke and Jess love each other, and I wanted a reconciliation for them so badly! But this wasn't it.

[s1ckh1mb0]

Lemme give you a megaphone so the ppl in the back can hear you bestie‼️🫶🏽

Like yes I wanna be longingly fucked sideways with fingers down my throat till I’m all teary eyed but….what if me and him just went to a museum and look at marble statues or paintings made by artists from long ago and point out the small details while sharing the historical context behind them. Or what if we held hands while going to a coffee shop owned by a small business then an old bookshop. We could read classic literature and write poems to each other or sum🤷🏾

I love this so much. Like the causal intimacy of being together with your girlfriend/boyfriend and being able to have interesting conversations and spending time with you is what makes doing things like this so great. Both of your phones away in your back pockets so that you both have one another’s attention. Time can go by so fast without the distractions of other people around trying to voice opinions. Learning together and growing together as you both grow older.

There are many different characters I can see this with. Especially when it comes to the women. Most time they are some of the most intellectual people and they just get thrown off. The AOT girls are the first ones that come to mind. Mikasa and Historia especially. Those two would absolutely love to do something casual with you. Historia is an absolute renaissance art lover. Michaelangelo is would be one of her favorite artists. She knows so many facts and can tell you for literal hours. Painting dates ejth Historia oh my lord. One of her favorite things to do. She’s so messy with it and it’s so cute.

Mikasa though? She’s all for cafe dates. She is obsessed with you. Now I think Mikasa and Historia had a bit more fancier taste because of who they are, but Mikasa loved being to be close to you and just hear you talk to her about just about anything. Her pretty nails that you did for her, twisting around your curls as she sat prettily on your lap while you fed the small cake that she bought for you guys.

Another girl I think this works for is Bulma from dragonball. Oh my god that woman is beautiful and smart. Museum dates are 100% guaranteed. She’s one of the smartest characters in that entire show and you think you’re getting out of hearing everything that woman knows? She is so graceful with it too. The two of you walking around hand in hand while she educates you on all the different facts is so amazing. She also loves how much you know on your niche and different interests. Especially if comes things about science or the body. She loves being able to talk to someone on her level or educate you.

When it comes to men the first thing to comes to men first people that come to mind are Nanami and Levi. We all know how Nanami is, he’s the hardworking man that we all love and there’s no way you guys don’t have a museum date at least once. But, I can see nanami doing bakery dates. Something small you both can fit in your busy schedules because nanami had made a vow to himself that you guys do at-least two times a month. He loves to use that time to discuss anything you think has been affecting you guys, whether to be in the relationship or just something bothering you at work or whatever. If there’s nothing bother you then you guys just talk about any events coming up or even planning the future you want to have for the both of you. It’s the ambiance of the bakery that makes you both feel so calm which is so different from the many things you have to do all day. He holds your hand as you speak, rubbing his thumb over your knuckle while watching your lips as he digest every word that comes from your lips.

Levi is totally the bookstore date kind of man. Sometimes you guys don’t really want or have anything to talk about. You just both miss each other so you sit together while reading. Both doing your own thing but being close enough to fill the need of being together. You both have your own books (headcanon that Levi prefers audio books instead cause of his lost of vision) and you rest your hand on his lap as you sit together on the small bench in for bookstore. He is retired so you two take a lot of time to yourselves, just enjoying the presence of one another..

Even people like Captain price and Laswell from call of duty, they love going out to drive in movies with you. You end up sitting on their lap while they laid in the back seat. Halfway through the movie those two aren’t even watchin anymore. Laswell would just be kissing the back of your neck while wrapping her arms around your waist, silently thinking about how lucky she is to have you in her life. While price is just happily watching all perched up in his lap, smoking his cigar, and thinking about how in love he is with you.

———————————————————————

Anyways I love all these ideas and a lot of people currently (especially men) don’t do dates and showing affection like people used to. I feel with how everything is on social media people just mostly look for someone sexually or they base a lot of opinions on the sexual aspect of the relationship. Like yeah that’s great and all but I want someone to YEARN for me. To want to be around me and miss me when I’m gone. Someone willing to remember small things because I feel like when someone knows you well knows what efforts to put in when it comes to loving you and showing you ways they do.

And I’m fortunately lucky enough to have a man like that❤️ @insane-juggalo

[carlyraejepsans]

I really respect your dedication to these characters and the fine nuances in writing them with pinpoint accuracy but lord it must be really really hard to find any amount of fanfics by people who feel the same and don't unintentionally do something kinda ooc once that makes you stop reading a story. With short comics and art and whatever you have to go out of your way to mischaracterize characters since there's not a ton of internal substance, they're just kissing or telling a line of dialogue, but with fic it's so descriptive and so much more thought on how a character's inner workings carry on, and I feel a lot of people have fun writing fanfiction in a way that does not result in 100% accurate characterizations because that would take so much continual, constant effort and very thorough character analysis skills and applications to get right pretty much all of the time. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say beyond it must be tough for you specifically to find stories that don't annoy you- or perhaps that is not accurate! I don't read much fic so I don't know, it just seems like it'd be exhausting from an outside perspective

BAHAHAHA the eternal struggle of the Hater. I'm kind of obsessed with how you described it here. You're mostly correct! And kind of missing a crucial detail at the same time.

It's true, it is extremely difficult to find fanfiction that agrees with me--especially for a fandom like Undertale with 1) a very young audience and 2) a very heavily character-centric form of storytelling, which inevitably results in nuanced personalities that are hard to grasp without full context (which means analyzing the canon... a lot!)

There's two very important things you should note though!! Undertale is a HUGE fandom. As hard as finding really accurate fics might be, they ARE out there, and when i find them I'm so invested in their accuracy and analysis that I enjoy them 10000 times more than someone who just... doesn't think about this stuff. It's about quality over quantity.

The other thing is: being this ""picky"" and analysis focused doesn't actually stop me from reading fanfiction. Just lately I've been going through the entire fandom tag on ao3 in reverse alphabetical order and trying out anything that doesn't immediately put me off via tags/summary. Is there a lot of stuff that reads ooc or that I just plain don't like? like, a LOT of it? absolutely. But at the end of the day, that ALSO becomes an exercise in analysis. Why did this portrayal come off as ooc? Was the character voice accurate to canon? If not, what made them differ? Was it the way the character acted, rather? Is this the author's bias or exaggeration? Why do I feel like it would be at odds with the person they are in canon? Would they ever be driven to behave like this? What would push them? Was that accurately justified in this fic? and so on.

it's true that engaging with fandom on the regular can heavily skew your perception of the original, but i feel that engaging with fanon and habitually returning to the canon as a point of reference, as contrast, as fact checking, is one of the best ways to truly understand both the characters and the fan communities that they gathered around them. overall, it's good fun!! well worth the occasional cursed content, and even then it gives me something to inflict psychic damage on my friends with.

[lenacosse]

bestieee hope u r doing well <333 id like to request a tan x reader where he surprises her for her bd??? like maybe the context is that they r both contract killers and they both have worked together several times, lem and reader r great friends but she has an enemies to lovers kind of thing with tan??? so she’s really surprised that he even remembered and he’s all shy and nervous cuz bbg isn’t good with voicing his feelings 😔 if u can’t write it it’s completely ok and feel free to change anything !!! mwuaks

(omg you’re so sweet stop it rn😭😭 im so happy to take this request I really hope you like it! I cannot think of a title or even a song for this so for now it remains untitled. hope this is okay and hope you enjoy <3333)

paring: tangerine x fem reader

cw: alcohol intake, mature language

word count: 2,455

════════════════

“Fuck this bastering banner won’t stick for fuck sake!” Tangerine ranted as the banner fell off the wall for the fourth time.

“Calm down I’ll do it,” Lemon sighed and helped Tangerine put the banner up. “See, not so hard just relax.”

“I am relaxed.”

“Relaxed?” Lemon laughed, “you are not relaxed. (Y/N) will appreciate this it doesn’t have to be perfection.”

“What? I don’t care. The banner is pissing me off,”

Lemon furrowed his brows and turned to look at Tangerine. “So what you’re saying is you don’t care if she likes this?”

“Exactly.” Mumbled Tan.

“Right that’s why you went out of your way to do all of this…”

Tangerine just scoffed and walked away, this only made Lemon laugh. He had never seen Tangerine so adamant to perfect anything.

════════════════

You receive a text from Lemon, he lets you know he’s on his way to pick you up. You touch up your lipgloss and take a final glance at yourself, the red in your cocktail dress making your eyes pop. You looked truly breathtaking. Lemon knocks on the door, you grab your bag and open the door to be met with a bouquet of daisies and a gift bag.

“Lemon! You didn’t have to do all this,” you smile and hug him. You and Lemon got on extremely well, you’d know him for a few years and occasionally worked with him which only further pushed your growing bond. He made you laugh and being with him was easy for you, not that you could say the same about his other half, who just like you expected was nowhere to be seen.

“Of course I did. It’s your birthday,” Lemon walks inside and you put the flowers into a vase, you set the gift bag on the counter and the two of you leave and get into his car.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going now?”

“Nope. There’s nothing you need to know until we’re there.” Lemon responds and you pout, which does not make him budge. Only laugh at you in response.

The entire car ride you pester him over and over about what the night was going to look like, yet he didn’t give in. So now you stand at a restaurant door, this made you assume you were going for dinner. Lemon said the booking to the waitress and she leads you both through the busy restaurant, the ceilings in the restaurant were high and the decor was fancy. Looking around the place you barely notice when she leads you both down the stairs, this confused you all over again, there was no seating downstairs.

It all made sense as you walked into the room to see your few close friends there, it was a surprise party. A wide smile of complete gratitude spread on your face as you looked around the space, it was completely decked out in birthday decorations, all of your favourite colour. And there sat a table with your favourite cocktails and party foods. Whoever’s idea this was pulled it off perfectly, you greet your friends who are beyond happy to be celebrating you. Being a contracted killer automatically made social life difficult, you had to be cautious about who you let into your life but the few friends you did have you absolutely loved. Since your friends were there you had assumed it was Lemon who planned it all, your friends had met Lemon before at a dinner party you threw but that was brief and you talk about them a lot, so he knew how much you appreciated them.

You go over to the table with the drinks and take one, you smiled knowing how personalised everything here was. Even the music was your favourite songs, you didn’t want to cry on your birthday but you truly couldn’t fathom the effort that went into making your day special.

“Happy birthday,” you hear from behind you, you’d recognise that voice anywhere. You turn around, drink in hand and look at Tangerine.

“Thank you. I’m surprised you even remembered nevermind showing up.”

“It’s your birthday, I wouldn’t not come.”

You shrug and crack a smile, Tangerine returns it. Not that you expected it considering how your last interaction went a few months ago, you were still pissed off at him but you didn’t want to argue on your birthday.

“Did Lemon force you here?”

“No I came on my own accord,” Tangerine looks you up and down, drinking in your beauty, you returned the gesture and you could almost sense that he was… nervous? “Who do you think put up the decorations?”

An expression of surprise overrides your face, you didn’t expect Tangerine to be involved that’s to say the least. “I just didn’t expect this.”

Tangerine just shrugs and walks over to sit with Lemon, they both jump into conversation as you finish your first drink, immediately moving onto the second. The night was exactly as you wanted, a few friends and drinks, birthdays always reminded you of your family. You had a tricky relationship with them and most of the time you were able to not think of it, but you wouldn’t let it ruin tonight.

════════════════

You finish your fifth drink, the alcohol completely overriding your system now and you were to put it plainly, wasted. It didn’t take much to have you drunk but it was your birthday, no harm in having fun after all.

“Having a good time?” Lemon asks, your swaying to the music and he came to join you, over your shoulder you notice Tangerine he’s acting strange tonight, extremely quiet.

“Yes! Thank you so much for all of this you’re the best.” You slur, a content grin plastered on your face.

Lemon just pats your shoulder and goes to sit with your friends, they were drunk and you couldn’t help but laugh as they fawned over him. Maybe Lemon had a way with words. You look at Tangerine again and this time he sees you, he smiles at you which has your brain wracking an answer as to why the fuck he’s being so nice, you decide to go ask him.

You plummet down beside him, sighing as the soft back of the seat collides with your back. You turn to look at him and he takes a drink of his drink.

“You’re being awfully nice. Why?”

“It’s your birthday love, I’m not going to be a dickhead to you am I?”

“Oh how nice of you.” You roll your eyes and he just smirks. “Don’t look at me like that,” you scoff and shove his arm.

He chuckles in response. “Like what?”

“You know what I mean,” you mock him.

“You look nice,” he mumbles quietly, avoiding eye contact.

“I know right, we look relatively normal for contracted killers. No one would suspect a thing.”

“Like you don’t have knives strapped to your thighs right now.” Tangerine raises a brow.

“That’s besides the point.” You roll your eyes and unconsciously hum to the song that’s playing, you notice from your peripheral vision him actually staring at you. But not the harsh stare that he usually wears, a softer one that is actually taking you in.

“Are you having a good night?”

“Mhm. But why do you care Tan?” You cock your head to the side, looking into his deep blue eyes.

“I don’t know. Just want things to be nice for you.” He falters.

“You’re nervous. Why?”

“Im not.” He scoffs. You just raise an eyebrow at him to which he returns a stern glance back at you.

“Okay whatever you say,” you shake your head and leave him alone, you go sit with your friends, who are still fawning over Lemon.

“(Y/N)!” Your friend practically squeals upon seeing you. You laugh and sit beside her. You all engage in a conversation before your friend pipes up.

“Call your boyfriend over he seems so lonely.”

You look at her as if she was crazy. Your friends all share the same confused expression which you return.

“Im confused,” your friend says.

“About what?” You reply

“Isn’t he your boyfriend, the one who invited us all?”

“No he’s not my boyfriend and what do you mean he invited you all?”

“It seems like it, the way he was looking at you? He seemed to really care about you considering he pulled all of this off.”

“No he didn’t, Lemon done all of this.” You look at Lemon for clarification, but he just meets you with a knowing expression.

“No. It was Tangerine who pulled this off, it was his idea.” Lemon confirmed.

You try to process that fact, it shouldn’t be strange to know that someone threw you a party, but it was whenever that person was Tangerine. Tangerine who make ridiculous comments that made you want to punch him, Tangerine who soaked every statement in sarcasm, Tangerine who was a grumpy dickhead nine times out of ten.. but what about the Tangerine who opened your car door? What about the Tangerine who always makes sure you get home safe? Or the Tangerine who listens to rant about a mission? Or the Tangerine who put so much effort into tonight only for you to accredit someone else for it. You look over to where he was sitting but he wasn’t there anymore, you immediately get up and make your way back upstairs, you’d hoped he had only gone out front for a cigarette.

And rightfully so you find him leaning against the wall, tie loose and three shirt buttons undone as he smoked a cigarette. He notices you but does a double glance as you walk towards him. You stand against the wall and look at him.

“Hi.” You smile.

“Hello,” Tangerine replies, his voice softer than usual. You watch him as he exhales the smoke.

“Thought you left.”

“Do you want me to?” Tangerine looks at you, your expression dismisses that quickly.

“No. I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t want you there.”

“You said you hated me last time we were together.”

“Because you were being a dick to me. I was pissed off, but I’m not anymore. I want us to have a fresh start.”

“Why?” Tangerine ask as he finishes his cigarette, dropping it to the ground.

“What do you mean why?” You almost laugh. “You done all this for me tonight yet you cannot understand why I want to mend things between us?”

“How did you find out?” Tangerine turns to face you.

“My friend made it obvious. No offence but I didn’t expect you to be the one who done all of this. I thought you hated me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Well I don’t hate you either.” You nudge him with your elbow, he just playfully rolls his eyes. “How did you know all my favourite things?”

“I listen to what you say. You and Lemon aren’t exactly quiet,”

Your face flushes a little and you sigh. “Im sorry I didn’t realise it was you who done all this.”

“It’s fine. I’m sorry for being a dick.”

“Forgiven.” You smile. “But why did you do all of this?”

“To apologise.”

“That’s it? Thats the only reason?”

Tangerine shrugs and looks at the ground, you pull a puzzled expression.

“Am I missing something? You’ve been so quiet and almost shy the entire night, that’s not like you.”

“Just tired.”

“Tan… seriously what’s up?”

He turns to you reluctantly, his warm hand brushes over your cold one.

“You’re cold?” He takes off his jacket. “Take this.”

“Thanks,” you put his jacket on, his cologne strong on the jacket, you could almost sigh into it. “But tell me seriously we’re not leaving here until you confess.”

“It doesn’t matter (Y/N), honestly.”

“Ugh it matters to me. Just tell me.”

Tangerine sighs and you just cross your arms, not backing down from your point.

“Fine.” His voice is hesitant which only makes you more suspicious. “I wanted to tell you, that I,” he sighs. “I like you.” The last part is such a mumble you barely make it out.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“No I actually didn’t..”

“… I like you.”

You look at him a blank expression on your face, you didn’t know what to say. You felt yourself heat up as he looked at you intensely, you’d never really considering him liking you. Sure you definitely liked him even when you wanted to wrap your hands around his neck and strangle him but he had a way of charming you, he was interesting and extremely handsome that you’d be a fool not to feel something for him. But he definitely caught you off guard.

“You? Like me?” You say clearly baffled.

“I knew this was fucking stupid.” He sighs and starts to walk off.

You follow after him and grab his hand, pulling him back. “No don’t.” You sigh. He turns to look at you. “I didn’t expect this that’s all, I mean I thought you were repulsed by me. I tried to make you like me but I thought it wasn’t working.”

“You tried to make me like you? I like you the way you are.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner. I thought it was obvious how I felt.”

“I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t obvious at all, and I hate all that lovey dovey crap.”

“God you’re such a gentleman.” You roll your eyes. “So… are you going to kiss me?”

Tangerine scoffs and grabs your waist pulling you in, he presses his lips to yours and you share a passionate kiss, your arms warm around his neck and up into his hair. Your tongues interlink and the kiss intensifies. He backs you against the wall and you tug softly on his dark brown curls. Slowly he pulls back, both of your lips were swollen. He stands up straight and so do you, he smirks at you and you blush.

“Wait,” you laugh. “You have lipstick on your mouth.”

“Oh fucking great,” he grumbles.

You roll your eyes and grab his collar pulling him down to your level, you wipe the lipstick off his mouth.

“There quit complaining.” You tease.

You both stand there, looking at each other. You quite literally couldn’t believe that Tangerine was being nice to you never mind confessing feelings for you, but it made sense. He was a typical man who didn’t know how to express his feelings, so of course he pisses you off. But you didn’t mind, you were just happy to get the truth out of him.

“We should go back in..” he says

“Yeah.” You agree, he takes your hand and the two of you go back to the party. When you walk in Lemon starts enthusiastically cheering.

“Fucking knew it!”

[muse-matrix]

So... It's been a while since I last logged in here. Longer still since I properly did... much of anything here, outside of a few scattered posts. Part of me had been kinda dreading coming back here but looking at when my activity really dramatically dropped off, I think I understand what happened.

So, way back in february of last year, I was bouncing between a lot of things. I was running around doing a bunch of stuff to try and secure a new job, and I did manage that- A big component of my not being here was just me adjusting to having to work again, after being unemployed for almost an entire year. It was tough to get the right structure going, but I managed it. And despite starting college just a couple weeks ago, I've mostly managed that too so far, I think.

But that isn't... the main reason why. Probably. I think.

You see, what else happened in february, was that I got booted from a community I'd been a part of for years. It encompassed my involvement in a card game I loved, as well as the FF14 free company I'd been part of at the time. Someone who was, at one time, a good friend of mine misinterpreted something, and was so incensed by it, they took some things I said out of context and absolutely slandered me to the mod team of that community. (Yes, it actually is as bad as it sounds. I checked.) As a result, I was privately labeled some pretty nasty things, and shunted from their discord server without so much as a word. None of them would speak to me, none of them would even give me a chance to tell my side of things.

Obviously, that stung. A lot.

It had me pretty dejected about a lot of stuff, for a really long time. Probably why I mostly got off of here- I retreated to a different blog where there was less pressure (self-imposed) and more freedom for me to just, kinda, do whatever I wanted without fear or worry. I needed space and freedom to move myself around how I wanted for a while. And then that led to me feeling bad about not coming back here, which made me put off coming back here even longer... You see where this goes.

But at this point, it's been a year and a half. I'm pretty much over that fiasco, I haven't spoken to any of those people since, and they've evidently been content to leave it alone too, given I haven't had any mobs of angry pitchfork-wielding card game players coming after me.

And recently, Kako came back! She's RPing again and that's fun to see. I know a lot of you I've still been in contact with regardless, her included, so most of you probably are already aware of a lot of this stuff, but writing all this out is part of my process, so bear with it. The important thing is, after a lot of time and thinking about things, and seeing friends return to RPing and watching things happen from afar... God, do I want to get back into it with you all.

I very likely still won't be super active, but I'm going to at least try to be consistent. This is supposed to be my main, after all. I'll probably take the next week or so to clean up the muse list, cut a bunch of stuff, get a bit more focused and the like. Not that I'll actually stop playing any given muse- I'm wont to flip-flop between characters I enjoy, and I'm loathe to let fun interactions pass me by just because a character 'isn't on my muse list', but I ought to give myself a bit of structure, at least.

So... I'll try to be here every day, at least. Even if it's just to check in. This'll be a fresh start for me, I'd say, not that any of my old lore or whatever is getting abandoned. It's just... It's been a long time. It'll take some easing back into things for me, so I'm not even going to worry about whatever asks have been left to rot in my inbox, stuff like that.

Given it's been such a long time, some of you may... have blogs that I'm not currently following, cause I've missed them or what have you. So uh, if that's the case, please shoot me a message so I can correct that.

[batsplat]

if you were to direct a motogp movie (or make a one season of television) what season or rivalry would you make it about? and more interesting what artistic liberties would you take? it doesn’t have to be a straight up biopic bc imo those are often boring, instead it could be something like velvet goldmine (1998) aka fictional characters whose real life counterparts are pretty obvious, veering in like rpf territory. anyways👀

did you know. one time this guy put a curse on this other guy. and he never won a race again

anyway, look, I do feel like by this point that's the BORING answer from me, but obviously it's where my mind first went. I'm not sure I'd actually want it out there in film form because by now it's badly enough remembered that it's like, my cute little niche story, and I think there's something fun about the Wider World even within the motogp fandom not exactly getting how bonkers the whole thing was. (I know other humans have canonically watched motogp 2004 but I swear even journalists have forgotten some key key details and it's kinda annoying but also fun.) bold words from someone who's been blogging about it!! weird gatekeep-y instinct. but basically my job here is done as far as outreach is concerned - I wrote a very long post, now I get asks about it twice a week that allow me to think about it some more with the four other people who care, perfect balance. that rivalry doesn't need to go mainstream!! the whole point of it is that it's kinda cruel but narratively pleasing that it's gone under the radar, because it's another sign valentino won. but obviously, I cannot literally make a film about this, so the hypothetical repercussions I think maybe we can put aside for a moment here

okay I came back to this bit of the post after I increasingly got into of the spirit of coming up with dumb ideas, but it did make me flesh out what I'd even WANT from something like that. I'm with you anon, a lot of biopics are boring!! if you want to just know what happened, please just literally go and 'watch the races' and 'read books' like what are we actually getting here. you kinda want to give it a purpose for existing, right, a way of portraying real/mildly fictionalised events in a manner that is also taking some kind of stance on the material AND is doing stuff you can't do 'in real life'. thing is, look, you could make 2006 into a film, and I'm sure it'd be perfectly nice because it's fundamentally a solid underdog story (well, inherently winning a title with repsol honda is NOT being an underdog but you can write it that way), but also what are you doing beyond just telling people what happened? I feel like that generally about single seasons, they're not really doing anything for me. I was also turning around the biaggi/valentino rivalry in my head in part because that's the one valentino gave as his answer for 'rivalry he would turn into a film' (marc big wet eyes sitting right next to him), but like. a film about that rivalry from valentino's pov is fundamentally not something I'm interested in. you have all these isolated very memorable moments that make it work as a rivalry, like you can absolutely spin them into a dramatic yarn that goes through the genesis of their conflict to middle finger gate to punching gate to assen + donington + sachsenring + phillip island 2001 and it's basically *insert rousing music* successful coming of age. at most you can lean into the fact valentino became successful at being a dick. like idk it's fine but also what's the point? valentino is challenged in a sports context by biaggi, he's challenged because he realises his words have consequence and the press actually reports the words he says to journalists (the horror), but he is fundamentally not challenged on a personal level. that's the entire point, right? it's the ultimate comfort zone rivalry - biaggi is a dick who it is quite easy to hate and also reacts poorly to valentino's initial provocation. the animosity escalates and it is inherently fun to beat him. valentino is mean to him, but it's not like he even really crosses any lines to beat him. like you can make it into a film, and if you twisted the material a little bit you could make it satisfying, but I don't want to!

now the way the writing process of this post worked was that I was going to breeze through a bunch of non-sete/valentino rivalries and explain why I think some of them don't work for our purposes here, but then I ended up writing myself into changing my mind. so my take on the biaggi rivalry is that actually, you CAN make it work but it has to be from biaggi's perspective. basically, I think you've got to amadeus it (a web weave I have been thinking of making at some point btw). so,,, it's a meditation on talent and how unfair it all is, maybe minus the bit where salieri poisons amadeus (I know that doesn't happen in the film) or dresses up as amadeus' father to, y'know, make him write a requiem on his death bed. and it's not amadeus in that HERE, the clown prince gets a happy ending! but it's more like, in thematic terms, I think you have to zero in on this bit. biaggi didn't have parents who shoved him on a bike when he was three years old, he didn't have parents who were invested in his motorcycling career (or even necessarily particularly invested in him), he started the sport late and discovered that, yes, he did have a prodigious amount of skill in it - but one that he started honing far later than valentino did. he approached his career with a sort of grim resolve, surly and irascible and not interested in making friends with any of his competitors but very, very good. he goes away from the race track and dates all these models, he irritates fellow riders, he's not part of the gang and he's happy about it. he's very successful! four 250cc titles, wins his first ever race in 500cc at a time when doohan was very much winning everything. he's also just like,,,, an interesting and spiky enough character it's not hard to make him come alive

but then of course you have this gradual emergence of the amadeus character, the one who challenges his established position in the court of,, well... motorcycle racing, and also as the guy italians rooted for! and valentino's obviously, y'know, in so many ways the exact opposite from biaggi, and he's super young and cheerful and lively and is doing all his silly celebrations and is being a bit camp and goofy and treats motorcycle racing as a party (you really want to lean into the culture clash here, like in amadeus it's because you have stuffy austrian court vibes but here it's because everyone is having their bones broken every two minutes and just how... kinda grim a lot of motorcycle racing was). and he's also this innocent! yes, he insults biaggi, and yes, in retrospect we know valentino is kinda evil, but at the time he was a kid with a big mouth who was a little taken aback by how that biaggi feud sort of escalated beyond what he'd actually intended it to do! and biaggi just, hates him. and I think, sorry to the real man max biaggi here, but you've got to play with how once they're actually competing with each other, it's miserable how there's just this unbreachable gulf in talent. like, whatever biaggi does he cannot win! he isn't going to defeat valentino over the course of a full season! which is depressing and horrible and CRUEL, because there's this inevitability to the whole thing... and also! because valentino doesn't DESERVE it. and you don't have to go full salieri pleading with god to explain how god could give this CLOWN all this talent, but it's kinda the same vibe! how is it valentino, who is constantly just having a laff and canonically maybe wasn't the biggest gym-goer in the paddock and is just generally seen as, y'know, a bit of a dandy, this foppish clown who everyone loves and who doesn't have to work hard to be good - how is he the one who is winning so much!! it's miserable and unjust... and I think how you portray this is that you really emphasise the kinda, repetitive nature of the defeat. like, I think you probably want to make this into a non-linear narrative where all this biaggi backstory is communicated somehow but you don't just start it when he was born or whatever - you start it in 2001 when they're competing for a title and already hate each other. and then you heavy on the time loop vibes. the whole cinematic language and all that other shit should emphasise how all these weekends are structured in exactly the same way and if you're losing to this one guy, all these different weekends can start feeling the same. it bleeds into each other, it feels inescapable, you're trapped in this narrative you can't change... worst of all, you even return to the same places again and again - like play with that! biaggi keeps coming back to where they had the fist fight, to where valentino first insulted him all those years back. you play up the disorientation and the misery of it all, plus biaggi canonically gives us all this kinda messy freudian shit to play with like how he was dating 'valentina' and his relationship with her was falling apart because of how miserable valentino was making him. it's all there!!

ANYWAYS the way you conclude this story is!! welkom 2004!! so again we can artistic license this a little bit and, uh, ignore sete (though I do also think it's fun if you lean into biaggi being displaced as a rival and staring at them being friendly and happy with each other from the outside) - but the key bit is that valentino is finally making the big error. biaggi wasn't winning titles on a yamaha, since he left yamaha has gotten worse, now valentino is making this big mistake out of his own hubris. language of cinema that shit and make everything brighter and more hopeful.... the time loop is finally over, biaggi has escaped, this year will be different!!!! everyone in his circle agrees, valentino is fucked. step off the plane at welkom (pre season testing didn't happen in this universe) and it's literal dawn of a new day... staring out at the sun and finally, biaggi can move on, can live a new and different life. anyway. obviously we all know what's coming next - you have this big dramatic climactic race where biaggi throws himself at valentino again and again and again and he comes so close to winning it... but he doesn't. and you have valentino living his best life, being delighted, but the film is focusing on how like,,, we're bleaching the joy back out of biaggi's life, how actually he's returning to what he already knew. and it ends on the podium, with the camera focusing on biaggi on that fucking second step or zooming in or whatever (idk how cinema works) and it just finishes on this shot of biaggi dead-eyed in a bleak world, trapped again for eternity aka until the end of the 2005 season. done!! I'm not sure this is quite what valentino had in mind, but. well. that's how I'd do it

this is from the pushkin play from 1832 not the 1984 film but like. low key pushkin already kinda nailed the essence of sports rivalries in the 1830s and we just have to acknowledge that sometimes

right. so the casey rivalry is where I'm going to go completely off the wall. skip this bit to get to the slightly saner stuff. this is also one I fully admit to sometimes playing around with in my mind anyway, but. uh. I'm gonna be taking this one in just. well. places. I do have a vision here but I also don't quite know how to explain it in a way that doesn't make me sound like I've lost my mind, but well if you're still reading this then that's on you. so lemme get this out of the way: the classic sports biopic formula would work well with casey. if I had to point to a single rider I would sports biopic-ify, it's casey. so you have all this kinda,, obvious adversity that's easy to get across, and it's a narrative you can follow chronologically without too much trouble. you've got all the childhood stuff, the australian racing club not letting him join them, the move to britain, the rising through the ranks, it's also this very biopic-friendly 'nobody ever believed in him apart from like three people' stuff. and the premier class is also narratively satisfying, from the rocky rookie season to the kinda shock success to then all the lows of 2008 and 2009 and the physical ailments and the anxiety and then the switch to honda and the title and then him deciding to retire... that's all good stuff! you can absolutely biopic-ify it! gun to my head and sure, I can walk you through exactly what bits of his life I'd focus on and put in what order and so on, and I think ultimately you could make a very good sports biopic from that

[some mild gore to follow in this next section]

but also. thing is. that's fine. it's just not where I want to go here, because again I feel like at that point you can also pick up his autobiography and just read it - because what you're basically doing here is just filming that. and I get how this stuff works, you're bringing the story to a wider audience, you can show stuff in a different way in that medium etc etc, and that's all great but also I don't care about bringing stuff to a wider audience. I care about doing fun stuff in my brain. so what I'd actually do here is just, basically, go in the exact opposite direction and ditch all the realism. genuinely, ditch the live action stuff, we're going animated - what I'm interested in here is stuff where we need to be able to fully suspend our disbelief and lean into some surreal shit. I'm not going to bury the lede here: my idea is that you take that thing where casey said he hated how ducati was ruining the bike by letting valentino's yellow encroach on it and, basically,, just go all in on that bit. like come on, that is so singularly visually evocative, it truly captures a lot of what's going on thematically in that rivalry. (see also x and x for the most relevant casey posts.) casey sees valentino as the malevolent force, this infection! he associates him strongly with a specific colour, one that can be sickly or unnatural or just... evil. malignant, malicious, malevolent, all the m words. to casey, valentino is a personification of everything that is wrong with the sport. valentino is literally the walking manifestation for so many of his issues, from the dangerous riding to the lack of respect to the lying to the cult of personality to the obsession with image and the media to the backroom games to the politics to the injustice of how different riders are treated differently, like!! he's literally all of that! this is a topic for another post, but this plays out in a lot of kinda, weird and funky ways where it's a two way street and sometimes when casey talks about motogp you go 'actually I think that's just valentino?' (btw he also does this about 'europe' right I don't think those are europeans you hate casey that's literally just valentino) and sometimes when he talks about valentino it's kinda? this feels like it's about a little more than the bloke himself? and basically, right, I think you need to take this to its natural conclusion where casey used to admire him and look up to him and want to emulate him on track and then gets disillusioned when valentino's worshippers turn against casey and casey is the one to bring valentino down to earth and... listen, I think you need to play around with valentino being a literal god. and I think you need to have casey stab him to cover up the yellow on the ducati with blood

okay. look. the idea here, right, is that we're basically making the subtext text, and just digging into that process of 'bringing valentino back to earth', of taking on a god and having the audacity to succeed, and also treating valentino as this sort of. infection in his own mind. the bike is literally being infected!! casey may have left the ducati but he STILL has some fidelity and love for this project, those were his people he worked with, and now valentino is coming in and just twisting everything around himself!! but also I think how this functions is that, okay, so you have all this normal stuff that's the actual 'plot' in the 'real world', but the ISSUE with the real world is that there's a lot of stuff that just. isn't possible there. like the thing casey wants in that rivalry but is never going to have is... a captive audience. a big problem casey has in that rivalry is that he doesn't get the chance to actually say a lot of stuff to valentino. he starts using the media more and more and plays the game on valentino's level, but there's still this disconnect where mr straight talking is the valentino rival who valentino never really blanks or freezes out like... there's a disconnect! there's valentino the person, who casey never quite figures out how to just straight up hate, and then there's valentino the character, the racer, the rider, the god who casey DESPISES. but when they're doing small talk at pressers and podiums, casey doesn't get to talk to that version of valentino! he just talks to valentino the person, who obviously isn't literally a different person but is also not going to explain to casey where he's coming from, is he, and also isn't someone who casey can explain to where HE is coming from. and that gulf... it does bother casey. I don't think he can quite verbalise why either, but there's just... this creeping tension. I think it'd be easier for casey if valentino really were more of a caricature, just kinda a dick in all walks of life. and there's just these canonical hints of that... the way casey talks about how he's sure valentino as a guy is fine, but he never knew valentino like that, the whole 'I'd like to go with valentino for dinner to tell him where I was coming from in that rivalry' thing, like!! it's there

so basically EYE think what you should be doing is using the wonders of storytelling to actually. embrace that element. and just leave realism behind now and again. valentino is a god, he is literally worshipped, he's part of this pantheon that casey is trekking to reach. casey is brave enough to take him on in combat, he is the first one who is truly able to draw blood. he sees how valentino isn't just a god of joy or battles or speed or the SUN or any of that other stuff - he's a disease, an illness, a god who is also a false prophet... the worship never quite goes away, because who ever truly gets rid of their valentino rossi complex, but casey eventually is given the chance to face a chained valentino and kinda,,, ritualistically publicly humiliate him using the ducati as both this sick thing that has to be 'cured' and this symbol of valentino's failure. I'm sorry, visual language goes brr here, like chain him up, do weirdly eroticised torture idc!! (psst psst valentino's fucked up shoulder also extremely goes brr here, casey low key a teensy bit weird about valentino's injuries? his thing after the 2010 leg break where he goes 'why's everyone making such a big deal about this other people break their limbs too' and then after 2011 jerez immediately asking whether valentino's shoulder is okay in just a very obviously passive aggressive way. literally he opens with that, valentino isn't using it as an excuse or anything, for some reason it's already on casey's mind and I would politely contest it was out of genuine concern for valentino's wellbeing!! it's just kinda? I'm so compelled by it? I suppose it is kinda about how valentino's suffering gets taken more seriously than his own? how those absences are received differently by the motogp world? idk I find this fun because casey does know this is one thing valentino can't really be blamed for himself, so it just slips out a bit? but yeah, casey + valentino's injuries, nobody's talking about it but I sure will, let casey get weird and mean and a teensy bit sadistic about valentino's injuries in an artistic manner.) crucially I like animation as a medium here because I think it's easier to lean into surrealism when you don't have to hand hold the audience so much through the suspension of realism, also there's just some imagery you can do in cooler ways through animation where in live action it may just look. weird. (I think you can also do one of those things where you have a live action film with only those specific bits animated but also... why? it just feels like in live action you need more 'justifications' for things, like am I saying casey is having some weird hallucinations and is losing his mind? no I just want to have weird vision sequences ffs.) the colour stuff!! valentino/casey is big on the colour coding as a rivalry, to the extent casey is even, y'know, drawing attention to it in the literal text!! yellow and red are banger colours, valentino is big on imagery himself with all his sun + moon motifs, it's kind of all there to make the easy next step to kinda zany surreal imagery. ritualistic stabbing works better in animation, you can kinda get the blood to like. drip down and overwhelm the yellow illness that's slithered out across the bike

and. AND of course what this entire set up allows you to do is.... give them an opportunity to talk. they can't talk in real life! casey CAN'T give him his real thoughts on anything, and fundamentally valentino can't either. they're opponents. they're strangers who chat sometimes. it's not just that they aren't friends, it's that fundamentally they cannot be friends - because their ability to do their actual jobs depends on a certain level of professional distance. valentino of course does have a decent read on casey, and vice versa, because when you're figuring out how to defeat someone then (if you're valentino) you're looking to play the rider too. valentino's entire approach depends on focusing in on his rivals and attempting to throw them off, to make them unravel. he's watching casey closely!! the entire journey of casey's first three seasons in the premier class essentially becomes like, this god of their world focusing in on him. figuring him out. trying to gnaw away at him. obviously, animation also allows you to go big on the panopticon-y imagery which is kinda fundamental to their rivalry, because of their fundamentally oppositional stances to 'performing' for the ever present cameras where there IS a little bit of common ground in they have both struggled with it. but valentino isn't going to ever say that to casey! casey isn't going to open up to valentino! so if you give them,, you know, a different arena to express themselves, where casey actually has this external figure to talk to (as he's like, cutting him open I guess) whereas valentino actually is put in a position where he's allowed to respond, where he can taunt casey a little bit, where he can interrogate casey's approach and also the similarities between the two of them and how casey has been forced to become a little more like valentino to challenge him... because the thing is, right, valentino is so big on message discipline with his rivals and has completely stopped talking about that rivalry post mid 2013 that, first of all, you have this complete imbalance in who's been telling this story for the past decade, but second of all you kinda don't have a sense of what valentino would respond? idk!! I think this is mainly fun as a thought exercise for me specifically but also I do think it's kinda, digging into some of the bits that make this narratively work as a rivalry, how valentino in this rivalry is actually just kinda... removed. like he's not really emotional about it!! at most he's a bit bitchy, but even that just feels about The Game. it's the most extreme in this regard followed by jorge - but with valentino's other feuds you kinda... see a bit more an unguarded moment, see something a little more real there. the casey rivalry feels so uncomfortable precisely because valentino is a little... inhuman in this one. I mean, if you want to have valentino as some kind of cross between a deity and a monster in any of his feuds, this is the one. casey's just an obstacle to him. idk don't you think casey kinda wants to chain valentino down and stab him and make him see casey a little more... well, I think he should want it and I think it'd be fun to see and get them to talk to each other. ugh and also all the implications of making the faith vs non-believer elements more literal... casey the heretic!!!

there's some obvious stuff here you'd have to figure out, like 'how do you make this work as a narrative even to people who aren't familiar with casey stoner at all' and 'who the fuck do you think the target audience is here' and 'you do know this is not the kind of thing that would ever be made, right, go back to the casey stoner sports biopic like a sane person' but!! I do think it's material you can make work if you're just,,, efficient and smart in how you're actually telling the 'real life' version of the rivalry. also in my head this is. idk. an animated limited series not a film, which then brings in other stuff like 'episodic structure' because I'm fundamentally opposed to tv shows that think they're films. and look, I'm not going to write an entire film script treatment here, I just think a good writer can figure this stuff out. blood on the ducati is the framing device for everything else, simple. lots of animated floating eyes I reckon, first casey is watching valentino and then valentino is watching casey and the whole world is watching them... and it does bleed into real life just a little, where you're wondering whether casey is actually imagining/dreaming this stuff or valentino is or if they both know it somehow... you can get away with more ambiguity in animation. anyway, if you do want more thoughts on this one specifically for whatever reason, let me know because this one I do actually have more on

also laguna 2008 is a bit tortoise and the hare coded if you really think about it

[end of gore]

so. on to jorge. hm. the thing about jorge is that he was kinda writing a coming of age film in his own head, so like - yes, that's what you do go for? you can play it straight and follow how jorge has cast his rivals, or you can pin the whole narrative on the fact that jorge has cast them - the kinda artificiality of the narrative, the way jorge is this storyteller who isn't being recognised as much as he thinks he should be, isnt adequately appreciated. the way there's this three way discourse between what jorge thinks the story is and what the public thinks the story is and actual. you know. reality. I think this is a bit more light-hearted, like you know how the best stories about teenagers take their emotions seriously but also let them be kinda silly? because young people are silly! jorge was silly! he's got a lot of CHARM because he's so cocky and naive and full on and intense and awkward and kinda off-putting and tactless and a bit all over the place and so painfully, painfully young, like he's a good protagonist because that's a KID. but also, obviously there's also a lot of extremely not light-hearted bits of his story - everything about his father, his manager... idk this one's another one where, I don't just want to make it a generic sports biopic, and I'm trying to figure out the clear narrative arc here? I mean, you can point to the end of 2010 and really lean into him choosing victory on-track over popularity off it. the problem with 2010 is that it does not work as a dramatic season, yeah sure with the magic of biopics you can hack at it to shit but also. idk. what are we getting out of it. I think for narrative purposes you want to maybe narrow in, and end it at the end of 2008, with the switching of the numbers this kind of moment of emancipation? but also! this feels like we're straying a bit too far away from the fun sports elements and I don't want to REALLY suggest all the ways in which you could mine jorge's personal trauma in a jokey tumblr post, so I'm gonna move on from this one

the problem is 2015 just straight up doesn't work as a jorge-centric narrative, except in a very kinda comic way that leans into how absurd his role in that season was. 2012 as a season is a bit... y'know, it's fine. okay it's mostly terrible, but that's fine too. but it doesn't have a great narrative hook. which kinda leads you to the problem that I do think the valentino rivalry is more... juicy from jorge's pov, because for valentino, jorge is just kinda? an obstacle? idk he's more normal about it, it's just his job to destroy the guy, you know how it is. but also 2009 does work better narratively from valentino's pov, like it's the build up to catalunya specifically you can dramaticise... idk though, I do love catalunya but my heart isn't really in this exercise because I think valentino isn't really being... challenged here? it's a title fight where he's fundamentally using a set of tools he's already perfected, to beat a guy he doesn't really give a shit about. when the italian press is down on him pre catalunya, it doesn't spark any genuine self-doubt - it's just a handy source of extra motivation. there's no epic highs or lows that season, not real ones. and yes I know I was talking about making valentino who gets stabbed repeatedly to cover up an infection a moment ago, but that reflected real EMOTIONAL truths!! I'm committed to thematic fidelity more than I am to literal fidelity

genuinely I think the best way to tackle jorge is with the jorge/dani parallel journeys... what, film? tv show? maybe show actually - you don't have one coherent narrative Statement per se but you're constantly charting those journeys in reference to each other, really rooting it in their respective points of views, no neutral detached cinematic language like I want everything to be very much written to be from their eyes!! going from one to the other and back again. and you're charting these different journeys, right, and how they both captured different flavours of like... emotional successes and failures. I think it's actually about failure, yeah, about having to accept there's something you can't have and might never be able to get - whether that's universal love or a premier class title or whatever - but Actually, that might not be the end of the world. and during this process, they go from being enemies to tentative friends!! guys who realise they can maybe actually understand each other better than they thought!! this real moment of interpersonal connection. you have all these media narratives and the managers and so on and the fact they're competitors as these built in reasons why they've just been pitted against each other from the start... but y'know, again, it is also just a bit about maturing, about being able to set that aside, about making your peace with defeat and failure as an element of growing up. you can't win everything, maybe there's something you really really really want and you're just not going to get it, but at the end of the day it's kinda... yeah. self-acceptance. idk this is the nice one

so with marc you can go several different ways here I guess, and again he's also perfectly decent sports biopic material, probably second to casey in that category like yeah sure do the comeback story. but also, we do already have a very good self-produced documentary about what he thinks the narratives of his career are? idk this is also just a personal taste thing, I'll leave him to doing all the injury stuff himself, I don't have much to add there. we'll get to the obvious one in a second, but I was trying to figure out if there were other places I massively felt like you need the cinematic touch. and, again, the 2013 season is obviously very exciting!! but also, you have it covered in.,,,, multiple documentaries, I don't feel I have a take their either? his rivalries with dani and jorge aren't really substantive enough to sustain a bit of cinema. dovi... I mean, what are you saying there? what's the arc? I feel like if I tackled dovi, I'd go somewhere else and really go all in with the ducati stuff, and make it a bit more... you know, stark, stripped back, basically just the emotional component of how much he gave to that project and how he managed to beat away one rival after the next and how it all ended up falling apart in a kind of anti-climactic way? he's also good sports biopic material, but in a way I think the marc rivalry is the bit of his story I have the least to say on. so eg, 2017 is a dramatic season, but he's also kinda fine after it? he always knew it was a long shot, he tried his best and he got really close and then he lost. you can't amadeus it because dovi isn't (fictional) salieri. basically, I think what I'm saying here is that dovi is too well-adjusted to feature in this post. though I'd totally watch a film about his 250cc seasons, like it's a bit annoying because HE is the underdog who loses both title fights to jorge, but it'd still be kinda fun idk. I wouldn't really know what to do with the material but if someone made the film I'd absolutely watch it

right then. the thing about sepang 2015 is... yeah, sure, of course you can do it, it already exists as a narrative but... yeah, what are you adding!! idk I always think when you're adapting something, you kinda need to have a reason for it? I mean, what are you doing that's not already there in the footage? idk maybe this is just a sign of having been a fan of this sport for one too many years but to me the idea of sepang 2015 can get a bit boring (or maybe just repetitive) where I need a new TAKE on it to really get into the idea of fictionalising it. like where's the auteur's touch y'know, what can I still add to this!! but it also needs to WORK for someone who is new to the story, which kinda just makes you want to tell the story straight.... y'know the story is strong enough and COMPLICATED enough to stand on its own and it IS good but I don't really have anything interesting to say beyond 'yeah sure that'e be neat'. I can't tell you why, but I also don't think the casey approach quite works here? the idea of providing a framing device with which valentino and marc can actually talk to each other... eh. don't like that. hm. okay wait actually I just turned it around in my head for... a while and I think I've got an idea to make the worst motorcycle racing film of all time. so, my central stupid film-making gimmick here is just. centring the fact we're completely reliant on a few guys and what they're telling us in making up our minds, and our removal from that story and the imperfection of their perceptions and so on. so I think you kinda make a point of... not actually showing the motorcycle racing? like, you always show it by showing other people watching it, you're showing the tv screen rather than the actual racing. even in the cinematic medium, you're centring the theatrical aspects, where you drill it down to just a few characters. valentino. marc. uccio. marc's fuck ass manager. maybe a crew chief or two. keep it limited though, all the others are kept at a distance - you're constantly focusing in on the same few characters. and very early on you basically just like... get them to fourth wall break by telling you, the viewer, with their actual words how racing works for them, what meaning they take out of it - and again it's this remove because we're never allowed to actually feel the racing for ourselves (no helmet cams), and it sets up that as the tragedy unfolds, again and again we're just hearing from them what happened. it's all zoomed in on how claustrophobic the entire situation is, like doing the race direction room after the sepang 2015 is perfect for that kind of thing, and crucially they're only ever addressing the audience because they can't address each other. but fourth wall breaks also obviously draw attention to artificiality! I realise they are very much like, lame gimmick central, but also are these men not inherently about lame gimmicks... idk it's basically the same story but at least it feels like a kinda interesting way of telling it. kinda trite, but cinema allows you to get to the point and let valentino actually play with the camera... so literally take it into his own hands and lead it around and tell the story from his point of view. and you can play with how they do both change in what stories they think they're telling, how they're constantly revising their own stories, how their stories completely clash with each other... like. make them literal narrators. that's my pitch

so. one interesting pattern that has come up with my approaches to these rivalries is that with the exception maybe of the 2015 stuff, I feel like I'm more naturally inclined to treat valentino as a narrative device and centre his rivals. a big part of this is that valentino is a fantastic narrative device. he's kinda. this looming presence in every narrative in this sport where you can just sort of use him as a sort of way to poke away at all these other riders. the monster everyone loves who you are trapped with. BOO!! he's gonna eat you! which is fun! but ALSO, crucially, several of these rivalries aren't that emotionally challenging for him!! again, with casey right, he wants to beat him, but he's not having a crisis of faith over losing to casey. he thinks casey is annoying, he wants to beat him because he wants to win. valentino is casey's foil, but casey is not valentino's. valentino makes for an excellent personal antagonist to casey, but the reverse just isn't true. casey isn't forcing valentino to reexamine his approach except 'ramping up the levels of being a dick on-track' - like, yes, that's a serious competitive challenge, but also valentino is very comfortable in his own skin in that rivalry. sure, you could have valentino have some kind of massive revelation about the casey rivalry, but like. he doesn't in canon. he changes his behaviour towards casey in pretty predictable ways depending on what the relationship demands from his perspective at any given time. there's nothing more there

now, obviously you know where I'm going here. there IS a rivalry where you can make the argument he changes as a result of it, there IS a rivalry that tips him over the line and makes him to do stuff he hadn't done before that, there IS a rivalry that happens to coincide with a period of his competitive life that challenges him both personally and professionally. now, look, I have already talked about the sete rivalry. you know what I think about this rivalry - and if you don't, I really already have told the story here and here and here and here and also here. I think this works perfectly well as a narrative in its own right, and it's one you can tell from either perspective... but you kinda need both. I think again you probably naturally lean towards starting it from sete's perspective and that first proper meeting (I mean, idk if it is their first actual meeting, but it's the logical obvious place you start this story) with sete giving valentino advice during his first 500cc test and valentino just, y'know, ignoring him and being a cocky shit and then crashing. so you get to see sete being kinda exasperated by the whole thing. also, obviously ibiza is like, a key framing device here, like it's the most obvious in-your-face way of tracking their relationship with each other. I don't actually know how often they partied there together, but it must have been at least twice and if the commentators are to be believed it must have included 2003. artistic license and you can add one or two more times, but mainly you want to focus in on 2003 onwards right. so you've got this 2002 one where it's, y'know, high point of their friendship and in the name of narrative efficiency, you establish here that sete is looking to make the honda switch. the emphasis is on how valentino has been winning everything but on the flip side you're getting the first insight into his discontent. and there's a bit of a vibe of, what could you possibly have to complain about? like you are winning so much? so it's late one night where they've had this slightly unguarded alcohol-fuelled moment of genuine vulnerability but in the end it's actually characterised by how... unsubstantial the link between them is, because they wouldn't talk about this kind of thing with each other and they might both be similar in some ways but also don't gettttttt each other. it means you can return there as a location in 2003, where you've just had sachsenring and valentino's dramatic loss but they're still partying together and it's like. obviously In The Air that not everything is quite right... their relationship is already gradually altered and twisted because you're introducing this element of actual stakes and competition (obviously in 2004 they do NOT spend that time together, as far as we know anyway, and you can show them being very much not together at ibiza as a very obvious Oooh Things Will Fall Apart and maybe already haveeee)

and I do think basically I've already said what I think the themes here are,,,, several times by this point, so I'm not going to belabour the point. I think all of this fundamentally works as a narrative with like, minimal massaging and rearranging of the elements for dramatic effect. it's all there already, everything from sete's arc with the [insert non-tasteless way of covering a real life tragedy that fundamentally alters the course of sete's career] and how that leads to sete becoming the challenger and how he does want to win and his eventual downfall. with valentino, you have the element of liberation and self-discovery and... well, growing into your own but also kinda having the narrative drawing attention to how 'growing into your own' can involve becoming a fully realised character who is essentially quite cruel? you have this kind of... build up, right, towards this moment of revelation, where you lay bare who these two people actually ARE at sepang 2004, and then again at jerez 2005. valentino has gone his own way, he has freed himself from the chains of honda, he has embraced individualism and the chance to define himself and his own legacy and stand on his own two feet and not rely on the strongest bike or all this stuff within honda where they chose him as their flag bearer, for better or for worse... like he comes to his own here! he takes the step from 'great rider' to 'legend' because he gets to this dramatic moment of stepping into the unknown, he takes this massive risk that could have cost him so much, and it ends up elevating him. but it also puts him under duress, and in that moment he reveals himself - whatever sete did or did not do at qatar 2004, EVEN IF sete did all that shit, what you are left with is valentino vowing to ruin this man. valentino uses sete to make himself 'better', to fuel himself as a competitor. valentino turns sete into a tool in his own story. and again, thematically you've got all this stuff about how sete was managing the image of the rivalry and how valentino took advantage of that - how sete needed it to remain respectful and valentino was completely willing to abandon that. like, you have two protagonists who really are similar in quite a few ways, who think they have this shared understanding with each other, but when it comes down to it? they end up being super painfully different

now I can go on about this and how to play it straight, basically, you can just do that rivalry and I think it'd be cool and fun and very easy to arrange in a good narrative way. BUT I've kind of already. done that. like I don't want to suggest a film that is basically a nicer version of my tumblr posts. so I want to take this in a slightly different direction, and I think what we need to consider with this rivalry is this: what if you made the curse literal? basically, what's always kinda charmed me about this rivalry is that the curse should not work and all the misfortune that befalls sete after that is so comical that it's kinda... what do you do with that? and the answer is you just lean all the way in. my pitch is this: what if valentino sells his soul to the devil?

so, you know faust, right, and you know the bit at the start of goethe's faust where god and mephistopheles are basically making a wager over how corruptible this one human is. and faust is like... he's kinda disillusioned, he feels that everything he's dedicated his life to in academia is fundamentally hollow, gets very close to committing suicide. and faust has gone a bit new age-y, gotten into all this mystical shit and he's got this pentagram that ends up preventing mephistopheles from leaving his presence in their first meeting... and basically what the devil can give him is like, the chance to attain some true pleasure, and for that faust is willing to bet everything - so if faust can just have that, then maybe eternal damnation is worth it. and look, I'm not going to summarise the entire plot of faust here and it does go off the wall a bit with all the gretchen stuff, but the point is you have this version of the devil who is fundamentally a cynic and is attempting to win an argument with god by making this human succumb to his own nihilism. and what faust basically does is like, abandon his normal life where he's trying to live by normal virtues and goes off on this journey with the devil. and there's this little moment where mephistopheles,,, pretends to be faust and takes on the role of an academic adviser (you know how it is) and seduces this random student away from the word of god and sends him down a wretched path, which ends with this bit:

like, a big part of faust's tragedy is supposed to be about... well, hubris, of the relationship of god to man, of no longer being afraid of the devil... and obviously, this is all framed very much in terms of religion, but at the end of the day it's also about, you know, having purpose - faust is living a life that no longer has any meaning to him, all of his knowledge and studies now no longer fill the void inside himself. his nihilism opens the door for mephistopheles, and is what makes him willing to accept the devil's terms. now, and I am so very sorry to goethe here, I think we have some material we can use here to explore the valentino/sete rivalry. obviously, you can't do a one-to-one, you need to get rid of some of like, the depression and all that - there were times when valentino was feeling 'a bit low' in 2003, but not 'faust thinking everything he'd done in his entire life was pointless' low, yeah? also, unless you want to do a real long view here and even then it can't really be justified, there obviously isn't really a 'tragedy' here from valentino's perspective. like, he wins! this isn't valentino's tragedy, it's sete's! I was being a bit facetious when I said he was 'selling his soul to the devil', and you can kinda parse mephistopheles' motivations in different ways depending on what flavour and what interpretation of him you're dealing with here. you don't 'damn' valentino, you essentially just turn him into a tool of the devil!

so, this is how this works out in my head: the devil works more broadly as the manifestation of competitive impulses, the kind of 'how far would you go to win' question as a bloke who shows up and literally talks to the characters about it (magic of cinema). he's also engaging with valentino feeling like his victories no longer having meaning, with being disconnected from honda and from the entire culture there and just feeling like he's going through the motions. there's this element of like... opening the door to what is essentially a journey of self-actualisation, bringing him closer to being a 'god' but also allowing him to fully come into his own and become himself. to win on his own terms. I reckon ibiza is my preferred narrative device where the devil talks both to sete and valentino there (separately), first literally as a mysterious stranger and then... maybe not? he's talking to them at times of their lives when they're not at ibiza and it's not happening there in the physical world and they both end up kinda having to confront they're dealing with some potentially malevolent supernatural entity. but the important elements of the devil is that a) he's not going to do anything the humans don't actually ask for themselves, and b) everyone knows he's following his own agenda and you should be careful of the requests you make of him. so it's kinda like... essentially, the backdrop of this rivalry unfolding is they're constantly being challenged to decide what lines they're willing to cross. which culminates at qatar... and maybe you do have sete making like. a teensy mistake. a teensy error in judgement, one that is both real and deliberate but he could not have known would get that reaction and instantly regrets. and valentino, who is I think inherently sceptical of the devil coming to offer to help him and maybe does crank out the pentagrams (remember, the whole point of faust is that he was too arrogant to be scared of the devil, or one of the points anyway), in a moment of fury does decide - no, actually. I will take that step. I will curse sete. now the thing is, dramatically this is a teensy bit tricky because when you're talking about being damned by the devil, usually the consequences are a bit more severe than 'not winning a motorcycle race again' (yes, you can get into how sete did also seem genuinely cursed after that, cf his ambulance/bus crash situation, but again we are flirting with being in poor taste in this tumblr post). but the thing is, right, you have to lean into the silliness here! qatar 2004 is inherently silly, a CURSE is inherently silly, like real life is already silly here! you have to engage with the people where they are, and for these athletes all this shit is so heightened that the emotions are full on. like, valentino would've sold that guy to the devil! and to him not winning another race is basically the worst thing that can happen

so, obviously, you get to do the actual curse stuff. curses are inherently campy fun, the devil doing curses is campy fun, getting valentino rossi to crank out the pentagrams is inherently campy fun. you get to play around with this, right, like you know that bit in the brno 2005 race commentary where the commentators are talking about how valentino might as well have a little radio to talk into sete's helmet to remind him of how sete had fucked up at the sachsenring. OBVIOUSLY obviously obviously it is just so... idk scrunchy and fun to have this idea of valentino becoming a malevolent enough force to literally do that.... like damn the commentators did kinda eat with that?? ughhhhhh do you ever think about sete leading the qatar 2005 race for most of the way???? like that's SO fucked up because you literally have articles from about the race going 'hey maybe sete can break his curse' and then the commentators are talking about curses having one year expiration dates but obviously they!! do not!!!!! there's one race where sete goes off track and the commentators are talking about how valentino will surely have smiled into his helmet like that's so fucked!! it's so fucked!! but idk I think basically you have all this creeping curse-y stuff and devil stuff and then you get this twist and then it just becomes misery zone for sete until you sort of. compress the timeline and have him retire without getting into what happened at the end of 2006. and valentino just relishing in all his very worst emotions. and you've got sete who was the better man after jerez 2005, who took the high ground again and again and again and it did NOTHING for him.... and then he's cursed and his career is finished and the devil has had his fun getting mixed in with mid noughties motogp. and now obviously this is inherently kinda dumb and corny and silly but it's the devil!! mephistopheles to me is allowed to get up to dumb shit sometimes, let him have some fun!! idk I like curses being literal idc

I think the obvious critique here is 'this doesn't really feel like it gets the message of faust'. which, yes, is true - and obviously the way narratives are structured, a satisfying resolution isn't 'well selling your soul kinda slaps, actually'. and my statement to respond to this argument is as follows:

this is essentially canonically what happened. valentino DID do something kinda evil and it DID work out 100% for him and it DID kinda slap. at least when you add in the devil, you're making explicit the bit where it is a little bit bad. also, is sports not inherently about selling your soul for success... the story of valentino and sete is essentially about how we are twisted by competition, how pretending that we don't wish ill to our opponents is inherently dishonest. it is about lifting a facade for something that is already inherently there in the souls of men. this is obviously inherently a deeply cynical stance, but this is also a deeply cynical story beyond all the fun battles and camp dramatics. the devil is a cynic and he is basically the point of view character of goethe's faust - he's the one who is positioned closest to the audience. sports is all about living out some of humanity's worst instincts in a relatively low stakes setting, which means we get a free pass to have fun with a deeply cynical story that goes 'maybe selling your soul to the devil is fine, actually'

do I stand by this stance? not really, but the whole fun of storytelling is that sometimes you can just be kinda mean. I think goethe would get it... you can tell which character he enjoyed writing the most

the OTHER way you can do this is centre everything around qatar 2004 as like,,, the mystery box element...... okay look I have now made two posts that go WAY too deep on the 'what really happened' element but I do loveeeeee the whole thing like I would just make a film about that very end of the season and we show it from all these different angles as different characters narrate what happened... like fuck all the riders I want to hear from whichever mechanic used the scooter... the gresini mechanic who gave evidence to race direction.... various honda higher ups the crew chiefs like this is jb vs juan martinez it's war!!! obviously you still have the same emotional/thematic hooks as the general rivalry does but idk I would have a LOT of fun figuring out how to structure that, I loveeee mysteries... maybe I'd write it as a mockumentary yeah..... this one's just fun

anyway. a lot of stuff going on in this post, huh! you can probably tell I didn't edit this much. my classic tell when I edit my tumblr posts is I remember how 'paragraphs' work. unfortunately all I have energy for are like. a bunch of rants about things in my brain. I think when tumblr tells you that you've reached the maximum number of characters per paragraph and you need to figure out where to put a break, it's probably a bad thing? on the whole, my stance is I don't have anything AGAINST mildly fictionalised versions, but for me I'm always more of a.... well I want to take advantage of the full specificity of the events as they happened or just come up with a completely original story. kind of person. I know this ask probably wasn't looking for my 'what if you bled out valentino as he's strung up above a red motorcycle' vision but yeah. with a lot of biopics I'm always a bit 'well you could just read about this couldn't you' like I need stuff to take some kind of a stance on the material it's using... all my stuff takes a stance. that's all I've got. obviously all these stances mean that basically none of these things could ever be made. and I know what I said above but if they called me up to write the casey stoner biopic script treatment, I would also do that. if you've actually read to this point, give me a shout - you're a real one and I love you

[darkangel1791]

Random Thoughts on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier:

I am aware that every line in every scene is there for dramatic and/or comedic purposes. So there's no need to point that out. It isn't that I didn't get the point or the joke. This is also nothing against Amy Aquino, who plays Dr. Raynor. This is just an opinion piece based on the reality that the show wants us to accept.

Trigger warnings for mental health and mental health treatment, and power dynamics.

From an actual standpoint of mental health and therapy, in 2024, Dr. Raynor is a terrible therapist.

So many reasons! Let's start with when she said to Bucky "The government wants to make sure you aren't gonna (mimes stabbing people)". A therapist, of all people, would always use their words! Always! Bucky communicates verbally, so the therapist must also. If she was afraid to say it to Bucky then she shouldn't have brought it up. Also, if she hasn't caught on yet that Bucky's major problem is that he was a killer and that haunts him, Bucky should have a different therapist. So she shouldn't have approached such a sensitive topic in such a flippant way. That would just make him shut down.

I think this plan about making a list and making amends with the 3 rules was something she put in place as part of his treatment plan. Doesn't seem like the sort of thing Bucky would come up with on his own, and I doubt that the government would condone him making contact with former Hydra members or families of his victims unless it was part of a sanctioned treatment plan, at least. That shows that as a therapist, she is results driven. If a results driven therapist asks if you're having nightmares, they will next want to know what you are doing to alleviate the problem. So Bucky most likely says no because he knows she doesn't actually care about the nightmares. They have probably already had that conversation once. When Sam asks the same question, Bucky says "All the time," without hesitation. Also, if she was any kind of a therapist, she would have asked enough questions to know that Bucky isn't having nightmares, he is having flashbacks, which is a different mental process.

"Give me your phone." No, absolutely not! That tramples on so many privacy boundaries, it is unreal! It is also a misuse of power, and the power dynamic, because what if he says no? She has the power to tell the government that he is a dangerous psychopath and get him locked away forever.

But, after invading his privacy in this way, she uses the information she gets to criticize and mock him? No. That is doubling down on the abuse of the power dynamic.

"What do you want now?"

"Peace."

"THAT IS UTTER BULLSHIT!"

Ummmmm, no. If a client is lying to the therapist, or to themselves, you deal with it in a completely different way. Yelling is never okay. Telling a person with mental health problems that you don't believe what they are saying, calling them a liar, is not treatment. She gives no context for why she thinks that is a lie, or why she thinks Bucky would lie to her. Or why she thinks that he would lie about that subject.

Finally, the notebook thing is absolutely passive aggressive. "You don't talk, I write." That is psychological manipulation. I can only imagine that whatever she writes is used in the weekly report she sends to the government. What if she writes that he is being uncooperative? The parole is revoked, he gets locked up. So she is putting him in a situation where he is forced to say something. But not about his true problems, nor will it be truthful information. We see that he lies to her when describing what he did to cross the most recent name off of the list. Which, of course he does! Along with that, step 3, being forced to identify yourself as the Winter Soldier and by name as who you are now, is incredibly dangerous and puts him in a very vulnerable position. That entire thing is completely out of whack with good, safe, mental health treatment.

I'm sure I have left things out, but this is long enough already. I'll do another post on the second session that we see.

Again ymmv, your mileage may vary. Meaning that these opinions are mine alone. They do not invalidate yours, or anyone else's who has written or spoken on the subject. No offense is meant. Your view of the subject is valid and I am not trying to negate that view by expressing my own.

In closing, when you first enter the office of a therapist, take pictures of, or write down, the information on the credentials they have displayed. If there are no credentials displayed, ask why and what their credentials are. If your therapist ever makes you feel threatened or ridiculed, don't go back! Ever! And report them to whatever organization their displayed licenses are from.

Dr. Raynor was a terrible therapist pt. 2

[antispopausandstuff]

when you get into a series and then stupid shit happens.

.

so, i got into a podcast from 2019 called 'The Two Princes', and i love it. it's very charming, basically like a show in audio form, and full of queer. listen to it frequently, got into the tags on my socials, found some fanart and fics and a bit of inspiration.

but during my searches of fanart, i came across two things.

people calling the main relationship ( rupert x amir ) an EtL

some people comparing it to c//a

both of these severely bothered me, and i'm gonna explain why.

for the first one, it's very simple. rupert and amir were not really enemies, in terms of their actual dynamic. according to this red herring of a prophecy, though, they are 'meant' to be enemies.

however, rupert lies about not being the prince of the west ( amir is prince of the east ), saying he's a thief, that his name is fitz, and that he wants nothing to do with his kingdom. this isn't because he holds any ill-will to his own kingdom, but because the east and the west are hostile and he didn't wanna get killed by amir leaving him behind in the forest.

so, their actual dynamic was more of 'unfriendly strangers to friends to lovers'. because amir was a bit uppity and micromanaged, while rupert was more soft(?) and tended to overreact // overly panic. that, and the span of the first season is 3 days. you can't really go from being enemies to lovers in 3 days. in most cases, i guess.

anyway, moving onto the even more frustrating point.

the princes are nothing like catra and adora. absolutely nothing alike. not even a little.

i'm guessing part of the reason is because amir asks rupert to stay. but the context of that situation vs catra repeatedly demanding asking adora to stay is entirely different.

amir asks rupert to stay because, despite being prickly, rupert saved his life and continued being kind to him. he doesn't ask him to stay because of any self-importance, or because he wants rupert to do dirty work, or for any other reason but because amir likes him and wants them to be friends.

that is entirely different from why catra kept demanding asking adora to stay. she kept asking because she couldn't take no for an answer. because adora's ideals didn't align with hers. because she wanted adora for herself, and took any other options as a personal attack.

and another reason this comparison exists, i'm guessing, is because of the whole "they saved the world // universe // kingdom // wtv by kissing and being gay", which. that's still. no. but okay.

the prophecy in 'The Two Princes' is a red herring because it's misleading. it's not intending to be, but it is. everyone thought it meant that the two princes would fight to the death and one kingdom would rule over, when it actually meant for one kingdom to unite the east and west.

and amir and rupert figured that out by kissing and later on deciding to get married ( that's a general way of saying it, but it's cute, aight? they're very cute ).

in the final episode of spop, there was no actual reason or explanation for why any of that happened. it just happened because the show wanted it to.

why did a viral infection go away the moment catra kissed adora? THE FUCK IF WE KNOW!

why did that activate she-ra? 'CAUSE- LOVE! EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE SISTERS, BUT WHATEVER!

why did the heart get destroyed by that? WHO CARES? WE DON'T!

final assumed reason is, again, because of the whole EtL thing.

like i said, 'The Two Princes' is not an EtL story.

and spop was never supposed to be an EtL story. but it is one, so there's that.

anyway, the writing isn't perfect, but if you like podcasts and wanna hear a cheesy-ass queer show with a disaster gay prince, disaster bi prince, a badass lesbian knight, a bi diva, a feral gay twink, a pathetic flirty gay twink, and a dragon and a dog, then give it a listen.

and there's a goat unicorn.