#non nocere: I AM GOING TO FUCKING SCREAM

[sbrn10]

On my extremely low expectations and how SG continues to somehow limbo under them: A Saga

First of all, I am prefacing this with: I finally watched 5x11 actually, and it was like, fine? It was one of the better episodes of the season, honestly, minus the William stuff. And the William stuff is incredibly hamfisted and out-of-nowhere to the point that it almost feels like it has to be a red herring because it’s just so bad. But, I mean, history is not kind to us on this point, so who knows. BUT ANYWAY, to be clear, I am saying: maybe William doesn’t actually happen and this is an overreaction. MAYBE. Like, probably not, but there’s still a chance, so I am acknowledging it.

Second, this is a rant. Sorry. It’s also really long. I didn’t realize it was going to get this long.

On to the actual post I was going to make.

So I've said this before to various people but I came into SG in early-ish s4 (November 2018). I had somehow successfully avoided the show despite knowing that it was the big new femslash thing for two years and my last big media fandom had been Once Upon a Time (which hahahahahahaha fml), so, a while ago.

Anyhow, at that point after catching up to S3 my genuine reaction was that supercorp probably isn’t queerbaiting. (Definition: Intentionally “baiting” fans with a potentially queer relationship while having no intention of making it actually queer in order to capitalize on queer interest in bad faith. Keywords are intentionally, not queer, and bad faith. Depicting queer relationships badly, not queerbaiting. Being forced to keep things subtextual because of outside pressures, not queerbaiting. Completely unintentionally depicting a queer relationship, not queerbaiting, just oblivious as all fuck.)

S2 seemed to be a genuine mistake--they are all so aggressively heterosexual that they created these scenes without a shred of intentionality and seemed genuinely surprised when queer fandom reacted to supercorp. "Wait, wait, we had a canon gay couple RIGHT THERE. Alex had a whole coming out thing! WE LOVE THE GAYS, but Kara and Lena are straight? Y’all are weird," seemed to be the general vibe of their reactions. Admittedly, in retrospect, I understand if you don’t believe them, as an office overflowing with flowers tends to have certain connotations, but honestly, in my experience, sometimes people are just really, really straight. Harold, they’re lesbians! is a whole thing because queerness can be literally and flagrantly staring them in the face and they don’t see it until they’re told. Some people just be like that. Okay, let’s operate on that benefit of the doubt.

Then S3 was an entire season of aggressively no homo-ing--between the continuation of the Mon-El story for Kara, Lena/James becoming a thing, and the weird (as in OOC for Kara, honestly) kryptonite rift story, it was the OPPOSITE of queerbaiting. They were saying very loudly that it’s not queer--chemistry notwithstanding. Were they probably happy to keep supercorp fandom around, sure, but they weren’t noticeably courting it other than, like, Katie and Melissa just existing.

(Side note: P5 told me once that I had missed like valentine's promotions and stuff that seemed to lean into sc more intentionally but I tend not to count the twitter/instagram stuff as honestly that’s probably interns.)

(Side side note: I am not commenting on whether this kind of obliviousness or no homo-ing is homophobic or not; that’s a separate discussion and one I don’t have the energy for now. BUT at the very least it’s not actively malicious, is the thing.)

So that was where I was starting, like, as a baseline. Yeah, this show’s creators are oblivious, yeah, this isn’t going to be canon, but I enjoy these people’s faces when they’re on screen together and I can fill in the blanks, it’s fine!

And then 4b and the between season promotions (”fight for Lena’s soul!” “half the fandom says they should kiss!”) and 5a all happened and like... like... y’all... either this was going to be a huge about-face and supercorp was actually going to happen or this had turned into the most blatant queerbaiting since Rizzoli and Isles. (To be honest, I have mentally blocked out most of what actually happened in canon OUAT and remember almost nothing of it, but also maybe that.) S2-3, at least someone in that writer’s room can say with a straight face, “Well, we didn’t mean for it to be read romantically but if that’s what you get out of it, god be with you.” Once you start doing shit like throwing in fucking Romeo and Juliet imagery, you lose the right to say “we didn’t mean for it to be read romantically” ever fucking again.

(Because images and tropes have history and context, and if you want to write a scene about two platonic-ass friends staring yearningly at each other, choose a setting OTHER than a balcony, and if you really wanted a balcony for it, I’m sorry, but tough shit, get over it. Obviously, this is only one example, but it’s the lowest hanging fruit--these people are fucking professional writers (albeit not terribly good ones); they know or should have known what they are doing. It is often said that one shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but it is, in my opinion, actually impossible for a group of 10+ people to be THAT stupid.)

So, at this point, I’m still thinking, okay, so wait, even if it’s queerbaiting, it’s still not going to be canon, because this is CW Supergirl, but I mean. Maybe they just end the series with both of them single? Wrap it in “women don’t need to be in a relationship to be fulfilled!” feminism, call it a Boston marriage, and be done with it.

AND THEN. AND. THEN. William gets recalled from the “did this character actually exist?” no-man’s-land they had banished him to for half a season (well, okay, that’s not QUITE fair as Crisis makes it feel longer than it was in the number of episodes) to flirt awkwardly with Kara over a sandwich and I almost punch a hole in my laptop screen.

The series isn’t over, I guess, so there’s room for this still not to turn out to be incredibly insulting queerbaiting? (I mean, if nothing else, William and Kara potentially NOT happening would demonstrate that nobody in that writer’s room knows what romantic tropes look like at all so actually perhaps exonerate them in relation to the stupidity-or-malice argument.)

But... look, I already had low expectations, and now I have, like, none.

tl;dr:

Genuinely, the infuriating thing is that I WAS FINE WITH THEM NOT BEING CANON. (I mean, in some ways, that seemed preferable since all the canon relationships they tried to write were... not written well.) All they had to do was not be complete DICKHATS about it. But they had to go and be FUCKING DICKHATS about it! You know?

[greenishbucket]

Via the Zombie Apocalypse

Ransom was the first to admit that he never would have pinned himself as the guy to survive the zombie apocalypse.

For @ransomweek day 1 (primum non nocere - “first, to do no harm”), 3 (crisis - a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger), and 4 (cacoethes - an irresistible urge to do something inadvisable).

Inspired by this tumblr post.

Ransom & Holster, 2.5k. Warnings for detailed descriptions of panic attacks, typical Bad Times of a zombie apocalypse, and a passing mention of the idea of overdosing. Also on ao3.

Ransom was the first to admit that he never would have pinned himself as the guy to survive the zombie apocalypse.

Like, sure, he used to play hockey before the world went to shit so he was pretty ripped and had some great stamina from running from the undead that wanted to eat his flesh. But he’s also had an anxiety disorder his whole life and he’d been in cities since birth, enjoyed the comforts available to him while those kinds of things were still around. Stuff like TV, salmon shorts, easily accessible amenities. Good music, the sound of his mom’s voice on the other end of the phone, food he didn’t have to hunt and/or extract from half-demolished supermarkets. Bagged milk. Small stuff.

And yet here he was. Surviving.

At least it’s not a movie, or you know we’d be the ones killed ten minutes in, his sister always said, back when it had first started, when they’d been sticking it out together. But then she’d got sick; not even zombie-sick, just regular sick, only there hadn’t been anyone left with resources or the knowhow, and if Ransom had just fucking gone to medical school like he’d said he would–

But there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. Now it was just Ransom, and some people he saw from a distance from time to time but didn’t risk getting too close to, and it sucked but that was how it was. He contained his panic attacks to a half hour each morning when it was light so at least he wouldn’t be a sitting duck to any zombie bros while his chest locked up and his head span and his stress responses went out of control.

And Ransom wasn’t all that sure what the point of it anymore was, exactly, but like fuck was that going to override his survival instinct.

And like fuck was this zombie apocalypse mess going to ruin every second of the last however long he had left. So he was making the most of the complete collapse of society, when he could – he watched movies for free in abandoned cinemas when he could get them working, he spent a nice couple of weeks by the coast looking out at the Atlantic Ocean and wondering if living on the sea might be better, he learned to drive manual and automatic.

What Ransom really wanted was to go and see Niagara Falls again. He hadn’t been since before he left for college, the last real family trip they ever got to go on, and he knew it was going to bring up all kinds of horrific repressed grief shit to see it again, but he still wanted it.

It was just an issue of logistics; he’d been travelling consistently further south to have a chance of surviving the winters, and he wasn’t sure about how to get the fuel to travel all the way back up north again, or how to travel safely on foot by himself. But Ransom had all the time in the world to figure that out, no deadlines coming up on the horizon other than the potential he’d turn into a zombie snack, which was a potential he mostly tried not to think about.

All in all, he’s pretty much settled into a routine of post-apocalyptic life. Ransom couldn’t help but create routine wherever he went.

And so it came as a bit of a shock, as stupid as Ransom felt to register it as a shock, when he was trying to scrounge up a couple of water purifying tablets to top up supplies and realised he wasn’t alone in the echoing, abandoned mall.

He could hear the heavy, soggy footsteps before he could hear the whistling breathing, laboured as decaying lungs tried their best. The rotting smell was permanent, didn’t matter if a zombie was right on top of you or a hundred miles out, lingering in the air so much Ransom barely registered it anymore. And maybe that had been his mistake, not that it mattered now.

Ransom had gone very still, frozen with a fear that left his mouth dry and his pulse thundering in his ears. He didn’t want to turn and see it; every time it was the same, the bone-deep instinct to not look, to go as still as possible and play dead. He felt like he was a kid again, curling up under the blanket and telling himself the monster under the bed couldn’t see him if he couldn’t see it, or a college freshman and hiding under his desk Googling how many anti-anxieties he could take before it was an OD.

It was with a sickening sense of dread that he realised he’d left his weapons across the way, beyond the now-dry fountain. It was a hot day, and the mall had a ceiling of glass that amplified the heat to unbearable, the AC had long rusted to uselessness. Ransom had put his shit down, figured it was best to conserve energy by not sweating himself into heat stroke while he looked around. God, I’m a fucking idiot.

But a zombie didn’t care if the dude it was eating was an idiot or not, and the zombie wasn’t moving all that slowly. Ransom breathed deep, sent up a prayer he wasn’t sure had any value, and turned.

Fuck, if zombies weren’t the ugliest thing he’d ever seen. Ransom knew some people had pegged him as a bit shallow back in the day, but this was deeper than that. There was something viscerally repulsive about zombies, the most basic parts of Ransom’s brain screaming at him that whatever was in front of him was wrongwrongwrong and he had to get away, now.

But everyone knew that you didn’t run away from a zombie. They’d only run after you, and a good seven times out of ten they could run faster, powered with whatever virus shit had got them that way unless they’d been zombie’d so long they were more rotten flesh than even a virus could hold together.

So it wasn’t just Ransom’s natural propensity for freezing when presented with fight or flight that kept him still. Plus, the zombie was closer than it had sounded and didn’t look as decayed as it could. The only way to escape would be to climb fast – except you’re in a fucking mall, dude, said a slightly hysterical voice in Ransom’s mind, are you going to climb the walls like Spiderman? – or to somehow distract the zombie enough to get time to run and grab whatever weapon he first laid hand on.  

For a moment, Ransom and the zombie looked at each other across the space between them.

Ransom could feel his t-shirt sticking to him with double the amount of sweat than before, and he’d already been pretty sweaty. The zombie was a tall, hulking mass of raw flesh, still wearing the remains of the dirty clothes of whoever it’d been before the poor sucker got contaminated. Its hair was blond, and its eyes were unsettlingly cognisant for all they were definitely not human.

Ransom felt sick. He was cornered, and this zombie was going to eat bits of him and then he was going to be a zombie and eat bits of whoever else was left in the world, and he didn’t want to hurt people. He would’ve taken an oath, if he’d ever actually gone to medical school. He was tired, and hungry, and thirsty, and the adrenaline pumping through his system was making him light-headed and twitchy. Ransom didn’t want to die.

And so when the zombie lunged at him, all putrid breath and gaping mouth full of broken teeth ready to rip out Ransom’s throat, Ransom did the unthinkably stupid: he bit the zombie first.

It tasted really bad. Like, so, so bad. He bit hard enough to break the zombie’s decaying skin and whatever came out wasn’t blood and it filled Ransom’s mouth and he pulled back, gagging and spitting and trying really hard not to freak the fuck out because did this count as contamination? No, that wasn’t how it worked, but had he made the zombie really angry? Did zombies even feel emotions?

The zombie collapsed. Just, like, flat out collapsed. Straight down into a crumpled heap on the floor of the abandoned mall, the bite mark Ransom had left in its arm still oozing sluggishly.

Ransom stared down at it. His thoughts were going haywire, everything moving too fast to catch onto, his chest getting tight and his head spinning and– oh. This was a panic attack.

It felt strange to sink onto the floor, put his head between his knees and shut his eyes tight. There was a maybe-dead-for-real zombie lying beside him, and this wasn’t part of the schedule. Ransom had already had his panic attack of the day, a familiar process of a curled-up meltdown after he’d pieced together some kind of breakfast.

He didn’t know what to do with it now, and the anxiety built as he realised without the imposed time-limit this attack could go on forever, what if it never stopped? He couldn’t live like that. Ransom couldn’t do life if it had to be like this forever, if he couldn’t repress everything and reassure himself one day it would be a funny story to tell in a therapist’s office when everything was fixed again. It had been hard enough adjusting cold turkey once his anxiety meds had run out; Ransom couldn’t adjust to this kind of anxiety as his new baseline. He couldn’t.

“Hey, hey, hey, dude. Listen, dude. It’s all good.”

The shock of hearing another person’s voice pushed the attack to its winding down stages like the old trick of a cold shower. Ransom still couldn’t respond, but he listened as the voice chattered a grounding stream of nonsense around him.

“… And so then here I am, as a zombie, which majorly sucked but you fixed me and I’m actually kind of blurry on the details for what happened which is cool. I don’t think I’d want to remember all that, we’ve all got enough nightmares and trauma to deal with, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” said Ransom, because he couldn’t disagree. He opened his eyes, focused on the grimy floor for a moment. Dude was clearly out of his mind with that used-to-be-a-zombie thing, but it had been a long, long time since Ransom had spoken to anyone at all. It felt good, and bad, and a little overwhelming.

“Hey, you’re back,” said the voice, pleased, “I’d offer you water but I don’t even know where we are or what’s going on really, I’ll be honest with you.”

“The water hasn’t been cleaned, anyway, so–” Ransom started, and then he looked up and his voice died in his throat.

Where the zombie had been passed out, a dude was sitting. A dude that was talking to Ransom. He was as big as the zombie had been, and had the same blond hair, but his skin was smooth and whole, and his eyes were blue and human. He still had some massive fucking teeth, but they were all present an (a little unsettlingly) uniform. He was – someone smack Ransom for thinking it – kind of cute, for a definition of cute.

He also had a red ring of toothmarks on his arm, healed over like a few years old scar.

“Dude,” said Ransom. He didn’t know what to say other than that. His brain’s higher function section was entirely blank. This guy had been a zombie and now… he wasn’t anymore. Because Ransom had bitten him? The fuck.

“I know, right?” said the guy. “This is some pretty wild stuff. For sure thought when that zombie bit me there wasn’t any going back, but I guess sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire. Eye for an eye, bite for a bite.” The guy carried on rambling a little, in a way that made Ransom think he was trying to reassure himself with it. The dude did look a little twitchy around the eyes; Ransom gave him about fifteen minutes, max, until the guy was having his very own meltdown.

Ransom considered up and running. He hadn’t been around people in a long, long time and this dude had been a zombie a hot minute ago. Loneliness was better than getting attacked in his sleep, or, perhaps worse, being the one left behind again.

But then Ransom figured, well. Bite for a bite, support through a panic attack for support through a panic attack. He didn’t have to hang around longer than that if the guy did re-zombify, and if he turned out to be cool then Ransom would deal with any abandonment-grief if it came. The zombie apocalypse didn’t get to decide things for him.

“… and so I’m thinking, how about now I can actually appreciate shit and have sensation back in my limbs, I go to see something cool. Something that’s hopefully still around. Niagara Falls, maybe? Pretty hard for zombies to fuck that one up. I’ve only been once, but it was some pretty beautiful stuff and–”

“Bro, no way,” Ransom interrupted, else the guy anxiously talk himself horse and also because, “I’ve been thinking about going there myself.”

“No shit? You looking for an ex-zombie, newly found buddy to come with?”

The guy looked like he was trying not to look hopefully at Ransom and failing hard. Ransom couldn’t even imagine being a zombie and then coming back, let alone whatever horrible shit had probably happened to this dude before that. Like the guy had said: they all had enough nightmares and trauma to deal with. Maybe this was a sign it was time for Ransom to stop pretending to be dealing with it alone, to stop pretending that was a possibility for anyone.

“If you’re feeling up for it, man, that’d be awesome,” said Ransom, stomach flipping over at the excitement-anxiety-risk of it all. He hadn’t touched another human in years, but he held out a hand. “I’m Justin Oluransi, most people called be Ransom back in the day.” No one needed to know about Ranser; it sounded like rancid, Ransom wouldn’t be argued out of it.

The guy reached out to shake Ransom’s hand, warm and real and human. “Adam Birkholtz, the guys called me Holster.”

Ransom felt the last vestiges of worry about re-zombifying fade. There had been more unbelievable things since this zombie disaster started than the possibility that things were looking up for once, and he’d long learned to trust his gut instinct. Holster across from him didn’t send out the wrongwrongwrong signals now he wasn’t a rotting reanimated corpse; his hand felt good in Ransom’s and his smile as he introduced himself made something warm bloom in Ransom’s chest, a rightness that spread all the way down to his toes.

“Ransom and Holster,” he said, trying it out. “Off to Niagara Falls, via the zombie apocalypse. Sounds good to me.”