#none of us watch the 100 for the plot lets be real

[violetasteracademic]

I just finished cc3 and I’m worried the next book will be about nesta. Why do you think the next book is still about elain?

Hello my darling anon! Congrats on finishing CC3, you have sent this to a rare bird in the wild who actually enjoyed the hell out of it despite the flaws. So I hope you had a good time!

I'm a bit nervous to show you guys this side of me. Well, I suppose I've been showing it, but to compile it in such a way is quite another ordeal. That being said, I have toooons of links and resources to share why, for me personally, it is so clear that Nesta's story is *not* over, and Elain's book is undoubtedly next. Both of these things are true, but it has everything to do with the direction of the multiverse, which is very tightly woven, and *not* ACOTAR 5/6, which has been in the works for near a decade. Save this. Come back to it. Take your time working through it. I'm giving you everything, anon!

We have two parts at play: ACOTAR and the new series, which I have no doubt in my mind is Twilight of the Gods (more on that later) so lets start with facts before we move on to theory.

I am positive Elain's book is next because Sarah's messaging has remained 100% consistent since signing on the ACOTOR spinoffs in 2016. Moving forward from ACOWAR, she wrote ACOFAS as a novella to "bridge the gap" between ACOWAR and the spinoffs, and set up the future of ACOTAR. That was completely true for ACOSF, where everything that was set up has come to pass or been expanded on so far. The introduction of the Blood Rite, Nesta's mental health struggles, Morrigan being assigned to Vallahan, and the continued escalation of Elain's relationship with Azriel and Lucien's with the Band of Exiles. We meet Emerie, we learn more about the struggles of the patriarchy in Illyria, so on and so forth.

Then, we have ACOSF. The first dual POV romance of ACOTAR. This was only the beginning of a long term plan of dual POV romances coming to fruition. Here is youtube video from early on in the process describing the spinoffs as standalones that feature a different romantic pairing each book, but form a backbone when united.

By 2020, after ACOSF was announced, Sarah reiterated again that the new spinoff series features a new couple each book, with their own miniature plot and romance resolving within the overarching story of ACOTAR. Here she also shares that she plans to write a *lot* more than what she is contracted for, and has a ton of different ships to choose from. You can watch that here.

And now we move to 2021, after ACOSF was released, and Sarah confirms she always planned to write a book about Elain here.

This is actually a great interview and one of my favorites. You can watch the whole thing here. Eva Chen is a real one.

As far as ACOTAR goes, Sarah has continued to confirm in multiple interviews that her initial plans regarding the spinoffs have not changed, and still largely follow that initial outline she pitched back in 2016. And it was always going to be Nesta and Elain.

I will reiterate, ACOTAR is its own series with its own structure. Every ACOTAR book will feature a new couple with their own romance story. ACOTAR will continue to be exclusively a romance series from here on out. A lot of people speculate a lot of things on the future of ACOTAR. That we'll get a big finale with a multi-pov, that the story will end after Koschei, that we'll have a Kingdom of Ash style book. None of this is true. Sarah is going to keep contracting ACOTAR books until she runs out of couples. If you think this sounds odd, keep in mind that SJM herself is a fan of and grew up on Nalini Singh, who has series that started in 2006/2009 and are still going, featuring a new couple each book:

So, this is not strange behavior for the genre, and I think SJM is excited to have an ongoing fantasy romance series like this. And I'm excited for us to read it!

So, no KoA multi-pov finale. No second Nesta book. ACOTAR is an ongoing romance series with an "unspecified number of books remaining."

Okay! Now let's talk about Nesta! Bone Carver voice: Nestaaaaaaa

I'm going to do something just for you, Anon. And whoever catches this in the next week or so. I left titkok as far as booktok/content making and whatnot and privatized all my videos with my face on them (for a variety of reasons. Some fandom/bullying related, some not) but I did a massive breakdown of SJM's publishing contracts and all of the lore for Twilight of the Gods build up. I did get some of my screenshots from other Tumblr accounts, and linked my sources in the caption! Give this a watch (it's long) and pop back over.

Obviously if you spend some time in the comments section, mostly the questions at large are regarding timeline. I'm happy to chat theory, but focusing on Nesta, it is incredibly important and specific that she had her role in CC3 and that she connected The Valkyrie to Midgard, aka Middle Earth in Norse mythology which is where Twilight of the Gods, aka Ragnarok takes place. We have seen Midgard, Hel, and I have no doubt we will see Asgard.

But take a look at the difference between Nesta and Azriel's journey in CC3. Nesta had a deep emotional arc with Bryce. She developed trust and a relationship with her that Azriel didn't. In the HoFaS bonus chapter, Nesta forged a bond and a relationship with Bryce's mom, Ember. Nesta and Bryce's development is what is important here: Nesta has now created the bridge between the Valkyrie and Midgard. Valkyrie are the chosen fighters of Odin in Twilight of the Gods- the war at Ragnarok.

Twilight of the Gods is coming, fam. Crescent City three also revealed that The Mother, Urd, and Wyrd are all the same entity. The Goddess of all creation and fate. She oversees all worlds, and another important but oft overlooked element in the CC3 crossover is the frequency of the conversations about the Gods:

So yes, Nesta still has a huge arc coming up baby! She is not done. No one is done. But the Valkyrie are gearing up to play a major role in TotG, not the next ACOTAR. I believe this also grounds the continuation of the tension between Nesta and Rhys, and these two powers at odds when it comes to making decisions. Rhys will protect Prythian first. Nesta is building the bridges to other worlds, and is willing to fight alongside them. Rhys has no relationship with Bryce and Midgard. Nesta does. And lets not forget the Pegasi!

CC3 was not about Nesta. It was about Bryce and Nesta. Giving the Starsword back to Nesta is simply because that is who Bryce had a relationship with, and will continue to have a relationship with in the multiverse, not because Nesta is getting another book. Honestly- who else was she supposed to give the sword, Mask, and Truth-Teller back to? Twilight of the Gods will feature characters from all worlds. Sarah confirmed it will be emotional to write because of the old faces we'll see pop up in her Today Show interview here. This interview was thoroughly structured and planned, and released on the same day as HoFaS.

Speaking of the Starsword, let's talk Azriel and his role in CC3. Azriel is now the only person we have seen carry both the Starsword (likely Gwydion from here on out) and Truth-Teller. Light and dark. The power that combined to unleash the magic on Avallen, otherwise known as the Prison/Dusk Court in Prythian. Nesta has her own sword, Ataraxia. We have not seen Nesta touch, wield, or use Gwydion. Only Azriel has.

There is only one other character at home in Prythian who has also wielded and used the full power of one half of that pair of weapons: Elain.

Nesta used Truth-Teller to cut off the kings head, yes, but Elain used Truth-Teller to travel through the shadows across a battlefield with no experience and no training. She held that blade, and it worked to her will, tapping into its magic.

Azriel also learned about the corruption of the Cauldron. This was his primary experience in the crossover- discovering that the Asteri, who force mates and curate bloodlines to create powerful offspring which they then churn through a soul meat grinder for food warped the Cauldron to enact their will. Azriel did not form a relationship with Bryce, or Ember, or form any sort of additional connections to Midgard the way Nesta did. His part of the story revealed the problems at home. His (likely) love interest is the only person who has used his blade there, while Azriel is the only person who has used Gwydion. Bryce notes that Azriel must have some Starborn blood in him. Silene confirms that the Dusk Court can only be nurtured and looked after by Starborn heirs.

So while Nesta's compass in the crossover pointed to Midgard and her developing relationship with Bryce, as well as her clear willingness to work with her, Azriel's compass pointed home. It pointed to his lineage, to the corrupted Cauldron, to being one half of Gwydion and Truth-Teller combining, the Dusk Court. All of which points us to...

Yup. Elain.

If this STILL isn't enough for you, I have made a few additional posts regarding The Glass Coffin (aka Sleeping Beauty, which Bryce plays for Azriel in the HoFaS bonus chapter) and some, but not all of the little Elain coded details in HoFaS. You can find those posts here and here.

I could keep going forever. I can reiterate that there was not one but two ACOSF bonus chapters, and both were about Elain. I can talk about about the fact that SJM always planned to write a book about each sister, and ACOFAS was about- duh- each sister. But this is already so long and full of so many links and resources. The wrap up is this- ACOTAR is now an ongoing dual POV romance series. Until she tells us that is no longer true, it is true. A new couple each book. Nesta and the Valkyrie are key players in Twilight of the Gods. Sarah confirmed she was writing Crescent City and Twilight of the Gods at the same time. The multiverse is happening, and it just takes a little bit of exploration to understand where the characters are likely headed.

I'll end on this note. Azriel and Elain are light and dark. This belongs to them. The bridge of connection between them- Truth-Teller:

Now look at how the combination of the Starsword and Truth-Teller is described in HoFaS, and tell me if it looks familiar to you:

And now alllll together again, fam! Who are the only two characters who have properly wielded and/or tapped into the power of the Starsword and Truth-Teller in Prythian?

Azriel and Elain.

I think that's everything. I hope this comforts you. I genuinely don't ever feel worried or confused. It is all so clear to me how Sarah wove this together, and I think it's absolutely brilliant. Eep! I just get so excited! So take a little bit of my excitement and release the fear. Half of the people making content on this blatantly hate one half of the next book and they willfully ignore that she has had one of the most beautiful, breathtaking, well foreshadowed and woven storylines in the history of SJM's writing. Of course that is only my opinion, but honestly, how could you NOT be impressed and excited?!

I can't wait. I just can't heckin' wait.

If you got through all of this, wow. You're the real MVP.

[cfr749]

Initial Thoughts on Chenford in 6x07

All right... I'm feeling... a lot at the moment, so just sharing my initial reactions before seeing anyone else's. I'm sure my feelings will evolve. Also this turned into a GD essay and I'm sorry.

The Good

Grey acknowledging that Lucy was going through a lot ABOVE & BEYOND the break up. I just wish he'd mentioned the shooting, too. Lucy deserves to be more than her relationship with Tim and I need to actually see that in the future.

Lucy laying out 2 key things in her conversation with Grey - how easily Tim walked away and that he had no right to make that decision for her

Prior to the last scene (see The Ugly below), I thought Tim's interactions with the therapist were reasonably well done; if only therapy was that easy in real life lol

"You've always got a home with me" - I loved this final scene between Lucy and Tamara. I don't really have feelings either way about Tamara at this point, and this still hit me right in the heart.

Smitty's poll made me laugh, but also another solid indicator that these writers / producers do in fact really enjoy laughing at the expense of the fandom and shippers (which, whatever, I don't care that they do, I'd prob do the same; but it does irk me when people act like these writers should be worshipped because of all the things they "give" us)

The Tim

"I'm not depressed. I broke up with her."

"I was her TO." Not her friend, cuz god knows Tim has yet to deal with the fact that he started banging his former Rookie I suppose.

I dunno whether to put this in The Good or The Bad at this point; it depends on where they take it, so instead Tim gets a section all about why he's a dick.

To be clear, I do not like that Tim is a dick. But I actually do kind of like that it is very clear TO THE AUDIENCE that Tim is being kind of a dick. Do I still think people will bend over backwards to defend him? Of course they will.

From my perspective, I love Tim, I understand that he thinks he's doing the right thing, and has lots and lots of trauma. I've never seen Tim as a character that magically healed at some point between Seasons 1 & 5 (please see his storyline with his dad, his ongoing issues with UC work and unwillingness to confront or deal with them, his feelings about therapy historically, his inability to dump Ashley, etc. etc.). He's never been perfect and he doesn't need to be.

All of those things are true. None of those things give him a free pass to be kind of a dick. He still has to take accountability for how he treated Lucy (which, to be clear, was like sh*t).

The Bad

Lucy being petty AF with the invites to Tamara's dinner - let her be ANGRY, but give me villain Lucy over this dumb sh*t.

Lucy having no one other than Grey to talk to.

Others acting like Lucy is actually kind of pathetic (why do these writers love sh*tting on her so much? girl could not be down and kicked any harder at this point) -- Celina / Nolan and the double dumping crap, Lucy thinking Grey paid actors and him telling her she was out of her damn mind

The last interaction between Lucy and Tim. I am so angry for her. I needed to see that from her, but instead it felt kind of like her being dumped / a kicked puppy all over again. We got it, thanks. What's next? Lucy being incredibly happy with the hottest man on earth? I'm here for it tbh. Lucy plotting Tim's murder? Also here for it at this point. LOL.

The Ugly

I could not hate the implication of that final scene with Tim and the therapist and the door shutting more. There was ZERO reason they couldn't have had him show up during the day, and it actually disgusts me that they are pushing this line again, but especially with Tim. I am literally NEVER this dramatic, but in this case I really hope they did that to just get a reaction, because if anything were to actually happen between Tim and the therapist, I'd be 100% done with this ship and show as would a whole lot of the audience (I think). If I kept watching, it would only be to see Lucy be absurdly happy without Tim.

Well, what'd I miss? What did y'all think?

[eggdrawsthings]

The tbb finale was absolutely wonderful, but... since it now seems 100% for real that tech is gone for good (im firmly on team TechLives, never gonna change), it just makes me feel sad about how the show handled it. No mourning from the characters, not showing how cross or phee reacted to the news, no nothing... it actually makes me really sad. And a bit peeved.

What are your thoughts on it? Asking cuz youre my fav here <3

idk how I missed your ask for a whole ass month there I am so sorry. and yeh no I totally agree w your points there too.

🚨rant alert🚨 many personal opinions here proceed w caution🚨

I can't believe they just dangle Clone X in front of us to theorize omg maybe that's brainwashed Tech?? Maybe that's Crosshair clone?? And then?? It's just SOME GUY. Just a random ass clone. Bro you can't just give a character this much plot armor just to kill them off unceremoniously in the finale, with maybe like one blurry ass frame of his face just for it to be some guy. I can't believe it.

And what is it with recent Star Wars and grief man like are they so allergic to it or sth??? None of that in Mando 3 either??? Idm when a character dies as long as it serves the plot and makes an impact on the story and the cast. Hell my all-time fave SW movie is Rogue One and all of them die. Just let them grieve ffs. NO WAIT THE WHOLE AHSOKA SHOW IS SABINE MISSING EZRA WHAT THE FUCK. oH thEY aRe At wAr ThEY r sOldiERs. bro they fucking grew up together, hello???? What about Phee and Omega then? they are not soldiers, and they also spent a lot of time with Tech? Why tf they only mention Tech once or twice when the mission has sth Tech could do but they couldn't. Is Tech just a damn tool in their eyes???? Showing his goggles a few times is not the same as giving them at least a minute or so to reflect on their loss and figure out what to do from there. Bro Crosshair is sadder about Mayday's death than his own brother who's been through so many deadly missions with him is bonkers to me. When he said Tech is dead and so is TBB out of nowhere I lost my mind.

I love many things in this show, esp the improvement in their art direction and technical stuff but my god I have so many bones to pick with the story. Not saying that I can do any better, I suck balls at storytelling. But as a viewer who also reads and watches many other things, I can say that there are many different ways to sell this ending more successfully and impactfully to the audience, and this is not it man o(-(

[episodeoftv]

Round 1 of 6, Group 2 of 4

propaganda is under the cut (607 words) - may contain spoilers

summaries (pulled from imdb or wikis)

propaganda

Dancing with the Stars - 31.11 Finale

The four finalists perform their final two routines in hopes of winning the mirrorball trophy.

The winner had been pre-decided before the season even began which rendered the entire season pointless. I also watched on the West coast so I went into the episode knowing just how rigged it actually was because the results were already posted online. I don’t expect these shows to be 100% authentic but I at least expect the finale to use actual votes instead of having the winner put it in her contract that she wins.

Lost - 6.17/6.18 The End

The Man in Black searches for Desmond to achieve his goal of destroying the island. Jack, the newly-appointed "protector" of the island, sets out to stop him. In Los Angeles, the survivors reunite and recall their island experiences. / Locke puts his plan into action, which could liberate him from the island.

Locke puts his plan into action, which could liberate him from the island.

1) Worst payoff of all time. What the fuck does any of it mean and not in a fun twin peaks kind of way in a this had so much potential and such high expectations attached to it way. I haven't seen GOT but i really think Lost rivals it for cultural impact and widespread enraging of the audience. This final is proof that a TV show should never be greenlit without a complete story outline. I rewatch every so often though when it's good it's great it's a real tragedy

2) So many loose threads either messily explained or ignored completely. Extremely unsatisfying explanation of what the island was.

3) Legendary L, never been one like it, the king is on the top and we can see him, just fell on their fucking faces I can't explain I won't explain

4) They were just so unsatisfying. None of the build-up (and there was a TON of build up) paid off.

5) ok look. the Lost finale has been criticised a lot, and a lot of that criticism has been dumb (they weren't all dead the whole time and people need to stop saying that you guys are just misunderstanding the episode) HOWEVER. I maintain that even if a lot of the criticism of it historically has been unfair, it's still an awful finale. Its first and biggest crime is the main plot of the episode (and season as a whole) is really boring. It does away with the interesting character drama and moral dilemmas the show always excelled at and turns everything into a boring black and white good vs evil battle between two characters we don't care about. Just generally it feels super dumbed down compared to the rest of the show, especially when the stupid afterlife plot swoops in and starts explicitly telling the audience which characters were good, which were bad, and which characters were meant to end up together. It's frankly baffling, it feels like the writers suddenly decided they were sick of letting the audience interpret things for themselves. and again, one of the main strong points of the show had always been its moral ambiguity and openness to different interpretations. And the worst part is that we don't even really get a cute "everyone reunites in the afterlife" ending, because the writers FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT HALF THE CHARACTERS. WHERE WERE MILES, DANIEL AND CHARLOTTE? WHERE WAS WALT? WHERE WAS MICHAEL (actually I know exactly where Michael is he's stuck on the island as a ghost forever because his crimes were too bad to ever redeem himself) (his crimes were not that bad) (he had a very sympathetic motivation of wanting to protect his son) (this wasn't in the finale but I think is emblematic of the same problem of the writers really really dumbing down the morality of the show) (also it sucked and was racist). However at the end of the day this episode's true crime is being boring. I would forgive so many problems if only I cared even a tiny bit about the main conflict going on, which I don't. because no one cares about jacob and the man in black.

[ryansjane]

ITSAY was beautifully shot but boring.

PP gives me the ick and I don’t know why.

Between Us and Cutie Pie 2 could have been an email. There was no reason for the spin off and the second season. The acting and storylines went downhill not that CP really had much of a storyline in the first place.

I don’t know if it’s the directors fault but Sammy almost always overacts.

When actors and actresses say they’ve never had a boyfriend/girlfriend or been in a relationship, ALMOST all of them are lying but not all. Fans will argue until they’re blue in the face that their fave is different and no one has claimed to be the ex of their fave so the actor is telling the truth about being forever single. That’s because the NDA was signed, sealed and delivered every night, babe. They are getting their back blown out and laying pipe like no one’s business but fans are making their lives difficult by wanting them to be cute little innocent virgins when they are grown. They all are probably fucking on each other too. The fans are 100% at fault for that fact that actors can’t have open relationships or live somewhat normal lives but none of us are willing to accept any blame. The unpopular part though: I want my favorite actors and actresses to be in relationships IF they want to be. I would like them to be happy since they make me happy. I think it’s selfish of fans to think otherwise. Let actors fuck 2k23 (I know this doesn’t apply for every actor or actress. Some are telling the truth, some are asexual, some are sex repulsed, some are religious, some have trauma, sexism and double standards when it comes the actresses definitely plays a part, etc. but fans need to realize actors and actresses are people too and they’re fucking beautiful and young and having fun)

itsay was beautifully shot but boring FOR YOU, who I'm assuming is more plot-focused than character-focused, and that's okay. but for girlies like me who LOVE shows that focus on every single detail of a character's development, it's the most interesting show in existence 😌 don't make generalizations of your own personal feelings 😘

pp is literally a cutie & an icon and you're wrong 😌

completely agree for cutie pie, didn't even watch between us bc I wasn't about to watch a sequel of a show I didn't even like 3 years later lol, even though I liked teamwin it deffo came way too late imo

sammy overacts bc her roles want that. it wasn't the case in 7 project for example, though the fact that she's barely been given serious roles keeps her from developing her acting further & makes overacting her specialty

"they are getting their back blown out and laying pipe like no one’s business" LMAOOOOOOOO ANON YOU KILLED ME WITH THIS ONE 😂 nah but for real, they do be fucking & dating lol, and anyone who thinks otherwise is fucking delusional. honestly I'm a nosy ass bitch but I'd literally sell my left kidney to know the tea of who fucked who 👀

xxx

[signorin-anarchia]

What are your impressions of the berlin spinoff new characters?

Hi Anon!

Thx for asking & mainly for giving me the chance to rant, I have a lot to say about this topic.

Sit back, this is gonna be a long ride.

I'll be honest, first impression was "lol, they're joking"

Second, I was quite annoyed.

Third, I am genuinely angry.

And I'm not even talking about Berlermo here, of course it's a bold move ignoring Martín in the spinoff, because, you know, timeline???

And don't get me started with Sergio, because I'm almost sure it will be a tough challenge to pretend that Andrés is an only child...

And while Pedro Alonso is a great actor and I'm 100% sure he'll fulfill his role at best, they're basically asking us to ignore that he's a man in his 50s playing a character in his 30s. Just because.

Also, they keep telling that "they want the show to have its own identity"; but that makes no sense, neither promotionally nor narratively. A spin-off works as soon as it has a link with the main show, there's plenty of examples around, eg. Better Call Saul. None of us would've watched without the promise that one day it would've crossed Breaking Bad's path. And I really don't get this urgency to move away from the original show: Berlin is a character from LCDP. Ignoring that LCDP ever happened will:

1) Keep away casual viewers

2) Disappoint shippers, fans and the whole fandom.

But, aside from that, let's get back to the real matter here: the new characters look like cartoons.

And I don't mean good cartoons, like those we used to watch as kids. I'm talking about, meaningless, silly, stereotypical, poorly made cartoons.

Now, I may not be Alex Pina, bit that sounds a little bit off from the mood here?! When the hell did Andrés become a comic figure being friend with a bunch of other caricatures?

If they wanted to make something with "feel-good" vibes, they could've pick any other LCDP character (Nairobi laundering money, Denver illegally fighting, Bogotà inseminating random women all around the world), literally anyone...

But no. They've chosen the terminally ill misogynistic dude dying by suicide in a tunnel.

Don't know what you think, but that doesn't sound very "comical" to me.

Berlin is a dramatic character. And although he has his good dose of irony, humor, sarcasm, paradoxes, he doesn't fit in an anime-style cartoonish kids show, because it flattens him as a character.

So, I don't what they're trying to do here, but it would be like taking Alicia's story with German's cancer and turning it into a rom-com, only without German, who's now replaced by a random dude who never had cancer in first place.

Not even telenovela style. Just cartoon.

Last but not least, and I'm pretty sure this is something that most of us noticed, they tried to give Andrés a whole new gang... Which is basically a bad copy of the original one.

There's a Denver, there's a Rio, there's a Tokyo, there's even a weird version of female Martin and, best of all, a "lifetime friend" dressing up like a fake Professor.

How are we supposed not to compare these action figures to the characters we know and love? The worst part is that they all look like Rafael, mere blueprints of characters, never mentioned before and, most likely, human plot devices subservient to a retcon.

And to attract what kind of an audience, exactly? I've never seen an Andrés fan who was not fond of Berlermo. Not. A. Single. One.

But during last days, I've seen a lot of people being very disappointed by how OOC their favourite character is going.

The only chance for the spin-off to be renewed and become something good, maybe even overcoming the original, was giving to Berlin's character some kind of depth.

Exploring his relationship with his brother, his years with Martin, what his family background is, why his homosexuality denial, why did he became a sexual predator, and maybe leaving some space for characters who maybe have still something to say, like Marsella & Bogota.

They've chosen not to. They've preferred to take a good, deep, captivating character and make a parody out of him.

What a waste, really.

I know it's too early to say. I know that they said "we can't announce members from the old gang cause it would be spoiler". I know that probably it's a little better than it seems.

But even if Martin shows up, what kind of show is this gonna be?

Don't know what to think, but the premises aren't that good.

-

So here's my 2(000) cents about this.

What about you, anon?

[nobodysdaydreams]

Ok for everyone upset about the Mysterious Benedict Society Season 2 Finale "Nathaniel/Nicholas' sister twist", I’ve thought about it, and I actually think it might... have potential? Please allow me to rant.

I see posts comparing it to the twist on BBC's Sherlock. Full disclosure, when I saw the “sister” twist on Sherlock, I didn’t like it. It felt like they wanted a "big shocking twist" and then they had to explain why she'd never been mentioned, etc. and it's been a while since I watched it, but I remember thinking that a 3 episode season was not a lot of time to explain/develop a twist that big or fully let us digest why she's been MIA despite us meeting Sherlock's parents and brother. Family reveal twists are nice, but they work because of how they affect the characters, plot, and relationships, anyone can just write them in at random for dramatic effect, but if the emotions aren't there or it's not given enough time to be explored and developed, then it's just a plot device. (No disrespect to the people who liked that twist in Sherlock, it just wasn't for me).

However, I'm way more into the twist being used here for several reasons.

First of all, it makes complete sense that the Benedict brothers would have family they have never heard of. In fact, it would be totally reasonable for Constance, the twins, Reynie, SQ, and Kate/Milligan (due to memory loss) to have multiple living relatives that they were separated from or can't remember. None of them know anything about their birth families as far as we know. Heck, a family reveal is what happened to Kate/Milligan and the twins in the books. We are in a universe with a device that wipes memories (and who knows how many people besides Milligan are missing information) and where most of the characters are orphans, which is a goldmine of opportunity for using family reveal twists in a way that isn't forced. Normally I think that writers are lazy when they repeat the same twists, especially this one, but this is a very rare instance where the circumstances that have been set up make multiple characters having unknown relatives not only probable but practically unavoidable.

Secondly, not only do the circumstances make sense for the twist, but the emotional implications also have potential. If they want to go the super basic route, they could have Garrison and Curtain be the "sad complex villains" that turn good to help take down this sister character who is the "real villain", but I hope they do more with it than that. The show already had Garrison and Curtain as villains, they didn't need to add any more, they chose to do that, and I hope they make the most of that choice. It's unknown whether Nathaniel has a history with his sister, what happened in 5 weeks, or if he is truly "100% changed" (e.g., how did Nathaniel find out about their sister off-screen and how long has he really known about her, did he flip sides just to get allies to fight her, if his redemption is real why didn't he fall asleep, what is he hiding, is he really redeemed, is the sister blackmailing or controlling him, etc.). Regardless, there is a potential for history there. And not just between the Benedict siblings, but everyone. How does this reveal tie into Constance's parents? Were they the bad guys or killed by the bad guys? Are Constance's powers natural or the results of experimentation? What does this sister character want, what were the three Benedict sibling's childhood's like? Why was Milligan working for Curtain and what happened to his wife? Why was Garrison working for Curtain? What happened to SQ's bio parents? Was my theory about Milligan/Curtain/Garrison/SQ's bio parents being kind of friends actually correct? You have a lot of characters with missing pieces, and there are some really cool ways you can tie them all together. I could speculate all day long, but I think you get the idea: there are a lot of really cool places to go from here. And I like the idea that all these characters (or their parents) had relationships with each other in the past, that they were once friends or colleagues that fell apart and destroyed themselves and then years later they or their descendants slowly come back together to reform this found family that's slowly healing itself but (from the children and Nicholas' perspective at this point) didn't exist until now.

However, on the second point, I will agree that there are ways that the writers could seriously mess this up. Not just by running the basic "Curtain/Garrison = sad redeemable villains (aw 🥺)" and "New sister character = big bad scary villain (boo)" formulas, but also because they are starting to develop something that has been the death sentence for many hyper-fixations of mine: the unbalanced plot, where the audience becomes way more invested in some storylines than others due to the emotional stakes/mystery being way more intriguing for some characters (the writers messing up the twin's ages when it's what they used to establish the timeline is an unfortunate red flag, I hope that doesn't mean they are gonna start making errors like this). The show's story develops the adult characters and adds new depth to side characters, but the main focus of the book/show/premise was always on the twins and the four children. In the above discussion of potential reveals of character histories and connections we see a ton with the twins (of course), they said they'll do Constance too, Kate/Milligan still need to get those memories back (and please give us SQ answers, dead horse I know). But I hope they are not so overfocused on those plotlines, that they default to giving Reynie and Sticky filler. The boys don't necessarily need big reveal plot lines (although you could give it to them. Reynie finding out that the same person who destroyed his bio family is now threatening Ms. Perumal and his new family would be good conflict. Sticky discovering his parents were somehow involved in all this or maybe even still alive (like they are in the books) would also be a good twist). I just felt like the season 1 stuff of Reynie fearing for Sticky as he watched his best friend succumb to the temptation of the Whisperer and slowly turn into Curtain's tool to bring about world domination was a lot stronger than him being sad he didn't get enough letters. Obviously, the letter thing is a more relatable problem, and I think it worked fine for what was intended, I just see a potential pathway opening up for giving some characters huge emotionally gut-wrenching plots and then just recycling Reynie/Sticky's insecure leader/anxiety script with no elaboration or development and I hope they don't go down that road because the boys deserve better.

Third, and the main selling point for me if I'm being honest, the sibling banter and interactions between the three of them would be hilarious. We don't know if this is their triplet, older, or younger sister or literally anything about her which means my brain has just been running every scenario possible and boy oh boy will I be posting the next few days, because I think my brain is actually making me... excited about this twist???

Anyway, that is just my rant on where I think the twist could go from here. Let me know what you think.

Actually no not done yet. I just realized. Number 2’s family house with all those bedrooms. There’s enough room for all the characters. They could all come back together as one big family <3. Okay, that’s it.

[jones-friend]

So recently I took it upon myself to watch through all the Fantastic Beasts series. Why? Because after the subpar release of Secrets of Dumbledoor all plans to continue making Fantastic Beasts movies have been axed. The series pulled a Divergent and got cancelled before it finished its series. It is also far past the initial wave of hype of its release, and with all the movies being on HBOMax I did not pay money to see these outside the subscription fee I already pay.

And oh goodness, goodness this is not the viewing experience I expected.

So the first movie is the one that acts the most like a movie. There’s characters with motivations and their actions drive the plot forward. I’m fairly certain JKR did not research 1920′s New York but she never makes the history relevant. So you win some you lose some. The premise is Newt Scamander is a wizard conservationist and his beasts get loose in New York, and they have to gather them back up. Unlike the rest of the movies in this series there are scenes I did like here, for example one winged snake grows to fill its habitat and they have to trick it into going inside a teapot to shrink it back down. It’s delightful.

The actors also bring a lot to what would be some flat characters. Eddie Redmayne specifically plays a Newt Scamander on the autistic spectrum without the movie making a big deal out of it, which makes me think this was a choice by the actor and not the writer. The characters have a wonderful charisma and all the actors are having a great time, its very easy to see why there’s so much fanfiction on this series bc of how underutilized everything is.

There’s a number of missteps, and the movie in my brain is better than the real one bc there’s a number of one off lines they could give to help fix things. And part of the problem I have with JKR’s world is that spells are just kind of nonsense. Newt fixes an entire apartment complex by waving his wand. A lot of her racism is still VERY present here as well, and the UK wizards taking pot shots at the US wizards for being unable to marry muggles is. A choice.

The second movie is where the problems begin. As Dumbledoor gets involved he becomes the main character over Newt. The second and third movies do not have to do with magical creature conservation, the creatures become MacGuffins (the item everyone wants) rather than what the movie interacts with. When we do get a scene interacting with Fantastic Beasts its a surprise, a breath of fresh air. Her terrible wizard politics come back and now Wizard Hitler wants to stop world war II, so its up to our wizarding pals to put an end to his evil deeds. It isn’t good.

But the third movie was something special. Out of all these the first can be a fun movie on its own, the second is Not Great, but the third movie is so unique. I have never had a moviegoing experience where the entire movie fell out of my brain immediately after the credits rolled. The issue is none of the scenes have connective tissue and the movie doesn’t set up or pay off enough elements, so this movie is extremely hard to recall in the correct order of scenes. It was like the men in black neurolized me immediately after the movie was over. So I’ll do my best to recall the plot here:

Newt helps a magical creature called a Qilin give birth. He’s attacked by Evil Wizards and is knocked out, one of his creatures flying him back home. Apparently the Qilin is an important creature to the wizarding world bc it bows to pure of heart wizards and decides wizard president. So it was giving birth 100% alone in the wild unprotected as evil wizards descended on it. Wizard Hitler steals the baby Qilin to make it choose him as wizard president. He also kills it bc its blood lets him see the future inaccurately. Bc of this Dumbledoor assembles wizard avengers and tells them the only way we can combat this is to not have a plan. An hour and a half of not having a plan passes. Wizard Hitler has zombie’d the baby qilin and will use it to become wizard president, but the other high profile expert wizards can’t tell he reanimated it like a puppet. There is a series of action scenes in the same physical set and then the zombie qilin bows to Wizard Hitler, but the good guys bring the secret twin qilin to the ceremony and tell it your undead sister can’t hear you. Then the blood pact necklace that kept Dumbledoor and Wizard Hitler from fighting decides to break and there’s a short fight scene. Then the movie stops.

I’m not trying to exaggerate, make hyperbole, it’s really interesting how unconnected all of this mess is. I wouldn’t recommend watching through the Fantastic Beasts movies as bad movies. I would say the first has good moments and isn’t a wholly bad movie, but that third one. There’s something really special about the third one. Its the only one to have the decency to leave nothing behind after it concludes.

[eponymousfics]

Ok so due to some Circumstances(TM), I’ve made an abrupt trip home, and on the plane I decided to watch a movie.

I didn’t have high hopes bc Hawaiian doesn’t really have a selection that overlaps with my tastes most the time, but today…

Uh

For SOME reason, they had the live action Osomatsu-San movie???

Like WHY

I can only assume it was cheap to license the showing rights or something. Will ramble below cut, with some pictures

It was, uh…bad! Real bad

But I honestly can’t say that I hated it 😂

I mean, the props/sets were really good, I liked looking at them and honestly a lot of the time I was like “clear out these actors let me just see the damn set”

The CGI was also surprisingly decent? And where it was obvious they made it look like a purposeful artistic decision.

I really liked Totoko’s actor.

Buuuuut everything else was kind of just cheap dreck on level with what you think of a live action anime adaptation. ALTHOUGH, the plot was bonkers bad in a way that was kind of in keeping with bad episodes of the show, so?? Kudos for accuracy?

I mean they did take a decent stab at the kind of fast paced wacky cartoon humor of the show, but it just doesn’t work with live action bc everyone is so AGGRESSIVELY a real human person, no matter how much makeup/fake teeth/wigs you use.

There was some attempt from the main sextuplets to imitate their walks and stuff, like I think everyone understood the assignment, it’s just 100% NOT the correct medium for this.

Oh and the subtitles were bad. Those two pics up there aren’t terrible, but there were several points where I went “hold up, you just completely misheard that line, didn’t you? That’s just straight up incorrect.”

Which is fine with fan subs but this is presumably an official one?! Unless Hawaiian Airlines pirates fansubbed live action anime movies for some reason 😂

Oh, and possibly the funniest part of the whole thing:

There was a content warning at the start that literally just said “Contains sex.”

NO THEY FUCKING DON’T?????

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT??????????

And indeed no one was laid through the entirety of the almost two hour runtime

One of them did take a shit in the middle of the road though! (And not the one you’d think! Maybe the second one you’d think lol) And pissed on a rich person’s car! (Same one)

No warnings for that, and he had his whole ass out. Censored, but still 😂

Anyway have a couple more shitty pics from various scenes (none of the really wild ones though bc I was too busy making this face:

(๑•ૅㅁ-᷄๑)

[caltropspress]

FEEDBACK LOOP #11: Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals' "Sambo's Last Words"

But do we got to play Sambo? —dälek, “Abandoned Language” (2007)

Unfortunately, I will not be alive to see my name cleared. That’s what this is about, my name. —Chris Dorner, from the “Last Resort” Manifesto (2013)

They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet. —Gwendolyn Brooks, from “RIOT” (1969)

1.

Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are not detainable or discreet. You can’t dis- them in any manner—they won’t be disallowed to do anything. No hyperbole, harangues, or holds barred: that’s their daily operation. Allow them to introduce, and reintroduce, and reintroduce themselves. They do so repeatedly on King Cobra: “I’m Brian Ennals, and the funny-looking dude behind me is Infinity Knives.” Ennals dares his employer to do something, punking him with his chest puffed out. We know how the New York Post tried to do Ka—a mild-mannered church mouse on the mic when put beside what Ennals is spitting: the phlegm of plague rats. “I’m just waiting for the meeting at work,” Ennals has said, expressing only the slightest concern at the prospect of a boss googling his name. On the other hand, the statement sounds more like a veiled threat of workplace violence. 

Infinity Knives knows the ledge—so don’t push him to the point of going postal either. His papers say Tariq Ravelomanana, but his p.k.a. is drawn from The Blade Itself, a post-millennium fantasy novel by Joe Abercrombie. But me, I’m visualizing the Cutlery Corner infomercials I watched as a kid, and I’m hearing the clang of swords that precede the RZA challenging us to bring da motherfucking ruckus. You can never have too many names or blades, but Brian Ennals is out here with his government written across his forehead. “The E-R-I-C-K is my name, I spell,” Erick Sermon raps on EPMD’s “You Gots to Chill.” He later told Brian Coleman: “It was like taboo to say your name in a rhyme back then—you just didn’t do that in rap! But that’s how real we were.” The B-R-I-A-N Ennals, for his part, keeps it realer than Real Deal Baudrillard (that would be hyperreal, for all you hookers, hoes, and semioticians keeping score at home).

Chris Dorner’s manifesto to Amerika begins with a meditation on the value of one’s name, asking, What would you do to clear your name? He writes that it’s more than just a “noun, verb, or adjective.” “Don’t let anybody tarnish it,” he writes, “when you know you’ve live[d] up to your own set of ethics and personal ethos.” Me and Knives used to be humble, Ennals says before the serrated horn frenzy on “Coke Jaw,” but now we fuckin’ shit up!

2.  I’m in Chipotle with a robe on.

Ennals channels his inner Fatboi Sharif, rocking a robe with the same bravado that the Savage Skulls rocked swastika-stitched denim jackets in the Bronx in the ’70s. Some real Flyin’ Cut Sleeves swagger. He approaches the Chipotle counter like the Dude saunters through the supermarket, sniffing a carton of half-and-half in the opening scene of The Big Lebowski. “Sometimes there’s a man, uhm, he’s the man for his time and place….” Yeah, uhm, Ennals is the man for this time [100 seconds to midnight] and this place [amerikkka]. He’s a man for all seasons—for all robbin’ seasons, Baltimore-style.

On “A Melancholy Boogie,” he warns of a “swastika on your door,” so his bathrobe is a sort of Robe of Nessus—a garment soaked in centaur blood and hydra venom—eager to tell Nazi Punks to Fuck Off, to smother their faces in the lethal fabric. Call it his own Valkyrie plot, a regular Henning von Tresckow looking to lick shots at Hitler. A negro assassin, in Cube’s parlance. Even when the plan is foiled, he’ll go out gloriously—pridefully and suicidally—falling on a grenade like von Tresckow, who, before pulling the pin, said: “None of us can complain about dying, for whoever joined our circle put on the Robe of Nessus.” Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

3.  Alas, poor Yorick!

Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives are diggity-dead serious, but they’ll just as soon die laughing. Lots of id in the mix, and the idiot box on, because the revolution will most certainly be televised, brother. Ennals might house a burrito bowl at Chipotle, but he’s also Billy Mays, hawking Chipotlaway on South Park: “You love to eat Chipotle, but you hate all those terrible bloodstains in your underwear!” Ennals “wear[s] boat shoes to shoot dice.” He’s ashy-classy: B.I.G. sweating through a Coogi sweater with labored breaths, or LL with the inscrutable single pant-leg rolled up. Despite his partner having the lemniscate appellation [∞], Ennals is the fellow of infinite jest. A rictus grin behind the mic device; a Killing Joke Joker. Hamlet remarked, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know / not how oft,” but Ennals holds Yorick’s skull aloft and skull-fucks it. That’s where his gibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment are—a ruckus brought forth. Like erasing Rawkus from the historical record by traveling back in time and letter bombing Rupert Murdoch’s son at Horace Mann prep school.

Hamlet was in the churchyard, but Ennals and Knives are “in the sandlot, scared of the beast.” Fretting over the mark of the beast, maybe. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six (Revelations 13:18 KJV). RFID microchips implanted in their foreheads that hiss like basilisks when they cross the threshold of the anti-theft antennae at Wawa. They can’t stanch the brain bleed. In beast mode for the smash-and-grab. On a murderers’ row boat down the River Styx—not whistling Dixie but whistling 666. Ennals can be our “most poetic of poets and [our] leader into hell,” to crib one from Frederick Seidel.

Or maybe it’s obvious, just the beast of The Sandlot (1993), a slobbery mastiff named Hercules. On King Cobra, high and low art collapse in on each other like Building 7. A folksy implosion of images that combines barbarism and grace as well as the aforementioned sex-and-hex-crazed senex Frederick Seidel, like when the poet audaciously claims:

I’m Mussolini, And the woman spread out on my enormous Duce desk looks teeny. The desk becomes an altar, sacred The woman’s naked.

Ennals’ rhymes are as unadorned and brusque as Seidel’s, too—point-blank: he doesn’t have time for multisyllabic antics. He’s too busy juxtaposing PF Flyers and prophetic visions from Patmos. He’s like Dorner gushing at the conclusion of his manifesto about The Hangover Part III, which he knows he won’t live to see. “What an awesome trilogy,” he writes. “Damn, gonna miss shark week.”

4.

…when a multitude of shepherds is called forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor abase himself for the noise of them.

—Isaiah 31:4 KJV

On Brand Nubian’s “Dance to My Ministry,” Lord Jamar took the lead for others to follow: “The shepherd is here to protect the flock, / With my staff I walk through the wilderness.” But, then again, Lord Jamar is a homophobe and Holocaust denier. So Ennals abases him—smashes his phallocentric staff and passes him a staph infection; Ennals is a Debaser. “If you strike the shepherd,” though, you’ve still got to compete with the sheep—the leaderless flock, the lemmings, the true believers. You’ve got to be ruthless, murderous, a killer of sheep.

In Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s 1978 film, kids from Watts—Black boys—go to war, hurling stones and dirtbombs at each other. Richard Wright wrote about a similar episode in his autobiographical sketch “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Wright’s house was behind some railroad tracks, and his yard was “paved with black cinders.” Like clods of earth to the Watts kids, those cinders provided warzone entertainment—a joyful adolescent understanding that life is strife:

…cinders were fine weapons. You could always have a nice hot war with huge black cinders. All you had to do was crouch behind the brick pillars of a house with your hands full of gritty ammunition. And the first woolly black head you saw pop out from behind another row of pillars was your target. You tried your very best to knock it off. It was great fun.

But Wright’s fun ends when trouble arrives with a gang of whiteboys from the other side of the tracks (literally) that deliver “a steady bombardment of broken bottles.” Broken glass everywhere. One of the bottles catches Wright “behind the ear, opening a deep gash which [bleeds] profusely.” Bad to worse, though, when Wright’s mother gets a look at him: “She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two…. impart[ing] to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom…. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again.” Wright’s comeuppance is confusing and sets the tone for the remainder of his adolescence in the era of Jim Crow. 

Brian Ennals is exasperated too, and tired, like Killer of Sheep’s Stan standing in the slaughterhouse with knives chained to his butcher belt. (I’ll give you one guess as to how many knives he’s got.) But where Ennals differs is his willingness to turn a rudimentary work tool into a weapon of mass destruction.

5.  BURN A CROSS ON YOUR LAWN

Birmingham, AL. 1963. The Klan bombs the 16th Street Baptist Church. Louisiana. 2019. Three Black churches burned down in a 10-day span in St. Landry Parish. St. Mary Baptist Church; Greater Union Baptist Church; Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church. Baptism by fire? Must be next time. Or it always has been. “They been burning churches forever, man—that shit ain’t new,” is how Ennals tells it. The 2019 arson attacks were by one Yacubian juvenile named Holden Matthews, the son of a cop (ho hum). Not a hate crime, the authorities said. He had a predilection for Norwegian-style black metal, they said. Burzum be proud. Though they neglected to acknowledge how an adoration of Odin often coincides with Völkish beliefs—that’s Nazis all the way down, stupid. They been burning churches forever, man. Forever, man—like a sanctuary candle on the altar of one of those very churches.

“Niggas’ll look you in the face and say the sky ain’t blue.” Well, I suppose it’s not exactly blue when you consider the billowing black smoke that little Holden’s two-gallon gasoline cans have wrought. So much particulate matter it’s got asthmatics gagging. Ennals says, “A lie’s only a lie if you know it ain’t true.” What a conundrum. The post-truth line is a Gordian knot undone. Like some Wallace Stevens stanza: “...the nicer knowledge of / Belief, that what it believes in is not true.”

How did propagandist peckerwood Joey Goebbels put it? “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Seek your truth, and speak the truth like Lateef. The white ones with the power—who manipulate the knowns into unknowns—they want to smuggle that lie into belief, but you Ain’t Gotta Lie ta Kick It. Ennals, like Cube, is in the business of exposing White lies. He seems to have historically been less concerned with telling white lies, more concerned with arranging white lines—despite Melle Mel’s warnings to the contrary. (That coke jaw might mean Ennals took Mel’s parenthetical double-negative [“Don’t Don’t Do It”] as a canceling of the apparent get clean command.) “Lie all the fuck you want,” Ennals summarizes, “just know who you lying to.” Be forthright. Enough with the smoke and mirrors.

6.  Smoke circles the room…

Ennals gawks at the same “mystic moon” that Edgar Allan Poe does in “The Sleeper”: “An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, / Exhales from out her golden rim.” But when you’re gazing up, beware as “the pale sheeted ghosts go by.” Ennals’ “sheeted ghosts” are different from Poe's—one ghastly, the other ghostly. When we hear Poe, in his poem, wish that “Soft may the worms about her creep,” we know—in a Nasean twist—the titular “sleeper” is actually ding-dong-dead. Ennals knew it all along. “Taking walks through the cemetery,” he shared on “A Melancholy Boogie,” so that he could “talk to the graves.”

But that smoke-circled moon can function as less bomb-scary, less fright fest, too. Look to Lloyd Addison’s “Umbra,” where he warms to a better vision:

My sun has gone down in drum suite penumbra The mood of this rhythm my body is umbra

That’s a more suitable mood for “roll[ing] joints that look like caterpillar cocoons.” This is an example of Ennals waxing lyrical, poeticizing his most potent pot, but his prototype is blunt. Blunt like I hope Joel Osteen dies tomorrow (“Bluffin’”); or, Fuck Ted Cruz forever—I hope he gets stabbed (“A Melancholy Boogie”); or, The Catholic Church is a pedophile ring that rapes kids (“Bluffin’”). Put a better way, Ennals is Blunted on Reality. King Cobra, in toto, is the sound of renewed focus. “Sambo’s Last Words,” in particular, is a Philly blunt like a chrysalis split with a scalpel. Ennals and Knives surgically remove shredded tobacco leaves from the cavity of the blunt. They cut open a Death’s-head moth cocoon with an X-acto knife. They stare with wonder at all that flutters in Rawlings Conservatory and serenade butterflies: We know we got cha opin. 

7.  FLYBOY IN THE BUTTERMILK

“Fuck being fly,” Ennals raps, “when my momma turned sixty-five, / It hit me—son, she’s really gonna die.” Fuck being fly; Ennals is grounded in the grittiest of realities, as real as a plot of worm dirt and no souls are ascending the sediment. He addresses himself as son—dropping the illest illeism—just like his momma would. Her voice; his head. She’s one of the faithful. “She believes in heaven,” but Ennals “could give forty fucks” about forty days and forty nights. Even if Ennals did find his way to heaven, he wouldn’t sit down—he’s not looking to settle for any sacramental offerings. He won’t sign on for the lunch counter sit-in. He won’t let himself be pummeled by white-knuckled firsts and conked with vanilla malts. He’ll be sitting out Gandhi’s satyagraha.

In 1992, Paris dropped “Bush Killa” and took a similar stance: “So don’t be telling me to get the nonviolent spirit, / ’Cause when I’m violent is the only time the devils hear it.” Loud and clear, man: these are assassination raps. Ennals and Knives, yeah, they’ve got the “libs mad ’cause [they] shot Joe Biden.” In the spirit and style of Metallica, of Aes Rock, Kill one, kill a few, kill ’em all. Fill ’em all with guilt. Ennals and Knives are out for dead presidents to represent them.

8.  HERE TO PREACH THE GREAT AMERICAN FUCK-YOU

Chris Dorner is a motherfucking legend. On NEGRO, Pink Siifu did his darnedest to immortalize the man, but, with this declaration, Ennals clinches the win. On “Headclean,” Ennals raps, “Religion ain’t the answer, / White Jesus is cancer.” In that, he’s kin with Dorner, whose manifesto includes an anecdote from his school daze: “[The principal] stated as good Christians we are to turn the other cheek as Jesus did. Problem is, I’m not a fucking Christian and that old book, made of fiction and limited non-fiction, called the bible, never once stated Jesus was called a nigger.”

“My man robbed 7-Eleven,” Ennals confides in us, only to disappointedly confess, “he got forty bucks.” Ennals' mom may believe in Heaven, but by rhyming her paradise with 7-Eleven, he debases the promised land to that of a multinational convenience store. “I go a level down,” he raps. Bounding down the eight steps of imperfection toward Dante’s concentric rings. “Turning up” and/or getting turnt doesn’t suit his death-drive. He’s asleep at the wheel, channeling Dante’s arrival at the Ninth Circle of the Inferno:

If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous, As were appropriate to the dismal hole Down upon which thrust all the other rocks, I would press out the juice of my conception More fully…

The journey of the soul seems to detour through a Pornhub directory (“dismal hole,” “thrust,” “press out the juice of my conception”) before we receive Ennals’ message. He, too, offers an apostate’s erotic poem: “Satan’s in a blue dress? I’m lifting the Devil’s gown.” For all the Tony Robbins “level up” talk amongst rappers nowadays, Ennals keeps it gully. He flips the script on Michelle Obama’s when they go low, we go high bunkum. Ennals subscribes to the Monstars’ approach: hit ’em high and hit ’em low both.

So it’s no wonder he’s sticking it to the Devil. On “Bluffin’,” he informed us “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making Jesus white.” Tricknology, straight out the cave. Black Francis of the Pixies says this “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” but the racists are intent on sending Black folk to hell. Ennals and Knives load up on drugs to counter the effects of the Yacubian experiments. Simian drugs, simian drugs. Everybody’s in love with our simian drugs. 

Meanwhile, Black Francis calculates his own supreme mathematics:

If man is five, then the devil is six, and if the devil is six, then God is seven.

Ennals answers with Seven Eyes and Seven Horns. He’s not strictly anti-Christian, though—he’s irreligious en masse. Ennals and Knives strive for that mass appeal. Even if Cube said he “met Farrakhan and had dinner” on “When Will They Shoot?,” Ennals, again, boils the bullshit down to methane fumes. “Fuck bitches, get money like Elijah Muhammad,” he slanders on “The Not So Tired Sounds of Brian Ennals,” and he all-but-screams “Nation of Islam is Feds” on “Don’t Let the Smooth Taste Fool You.” Ennals establishes a No Hoodwinking Zone, cordoned off with his spine alone—stiff as a bollard. He’s simply intolerant of what Chuck D called “evangelical hustler[s]” on PE’s “War at 33⅓.”

9.  NEVA DIE ALONE

…We hafta die. That is our ’pointed task. Love & die. —John Berryman, “Dream Song 26”

“Lost my fucks, I got no more to give,” Ennals raps, breathlessly approaching a last breath. “Sambo’s Last Words,” though—by my count—has six fucks total. But if these are to be his last six (...six, six in the morning, police at my door…), then these objectified obscenities are bundled in a burlap sack and stashed in a trap house for safekeeping, for a rainy day.

When the bullets rain down, Dorner promises to wage guerrilla and asymmetrical warfare. His manifesto is his War Report. He “embrace[s] death as it is a way of life.” Practical, tactical. “I simply don’t fear it,” he writes, “I am the walking exigent circumstance you created.”

“Sambo’s Last Words” is a last will and testament at one turn, a farewell address at the next. Before your hours go missing, let me tell you how to live. In the same way Ennals objectifies fucks, he also objectifies time—“hours” as a metonym for Time (straight from the slums of Synecdoche, Maryland). Ennals rocks a Flavor Flav corpus clock ’round his neck. You know what time it is, or at least you’re familiar with the expiration date on the bottom of your package. The swing of the pendulum grazes the pit of your stomach. But, “shit really ain’t that deep,” Ennals says—organs not being endless, of course, despite your brags of intestinal length. (Despite my musings making the case these depths are, in fact, fathomless. “Stay awake to the ways of the world, ’cause shit is deep,” Inspectah Deck raps, backing me.)

LIVING: A HOW-TO GUIDE by Brian Ennals: “Fuck as much as you can, love your kids, and pray you die in your sleep.” Fuck, love, die. (Picking up where the final issue of Life Sucks Die left off.) Like an Eat, Pray, Love for blasphemers. Edgar Allan Poe died at the tender age of 40 in Baltimore (of all places), childless from his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. “I’ll sleep when you’re dead,” it was rumored she told him. Fuck as much as you can renders the love-making harsh, impersonal, but Lloyd Addison again restores the balance: “And the silence neuter feminine night / is sighing verb-breaths of love.” Dorner put it less gently: “I thank the unnamed woman I dated over my lifetime for the great and sometimes not-so-great sex.”

10.  My mind is right next to where the sun sit…

The proximity of sun and sense—in all their astral fury and incandescence—takes me back to Roque Dalton’s “On Headaches” poem. The Salvadoran revolutionary counterbalances how “great” it is to be a communist with the fact “it gives you many headaches.” His reasoning, though sound, reads like a riddle:

Because communists’ headaches are historical, that is they won’t go away with painkillers only with the realization of Paradise on Earth. That’s how it is.

Plainspoken, but persuasive. Dalton’s closing stanza reveals how communism will be “among other things, / an aspirin the size of the sun.” Pass Brian Ennals the bottle of Bayer then, because “everywhere [he] goes [he] keep[s] hearing this dumb shit….” He’s exhausted. (Dorner: “I have exhausted all available means at obtaining my name back.”) Still, Ennals tells us the specifics of this so-called dumb shit:

Too many niggas, not enough kings. Too many bitches, not enough queens.

Ennals affects the Ludacris voice only to dismiss the sentiment—call it Incognegro, he spits a spiteful chant. He’s got no time for half-steppin’ or hoteppin’ (Ennals is decidedly more Kane than Dr. Umar). Undoing whatever oaths might’ve been made: Fuck that! My niggas, my bitches: go get cheddar. And somewhere Puff Daddy’s affluence raps bounce off satellites in the outer reaches of the solar system, residual space debris from corporate radio: I’m the macaroni and the cheese. But Ennals won’t settle for crumbs; he’ll dine divinely: God’s good. Pussy’s better. This is Brian Ennals kneeling in prayer, reciting a Hail Mary: “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me, / Revenge is like the sweetest joy next to getting pussy.”

In a 1991 episode of KRON-TV’s Home Turf, 2Pac appears as an audience member and responds to host Dominique di Prima’s question about a favorite rap song. Pac, facetiously, answers “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer. He elaborates that Hammer is “diluting rap…playing that Sambo role, and the reason everybody’s buying his record is because he’s no threat, and everybody wanna see Sambo dance.”

11.

The narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) searches for Brother Clifton, only to find him selling Sambo dolls on the street. The sight is devastating:

I saw a square piece of cardboard upon which something was moving with furious action. It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowd’s fascinated eyes and down again, seeing it clearly this time…. A grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask-like face. It’s no jumping-jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions.

Clifton, having clearly betrayed his membership in the Brotherhood organization, continues with his sales pitch—now sensationally, rhythmically, spitting entrepreneurial raps like a young Percy Miller:

Shake it up! Shake it up! He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down, —He’ll do the rest. Yes!

He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you sigh, si-igh. He’ll keep you entertained. He’ll make you weep sweet—

For he’s Sambo, the dancing, Sambo, the prancing, Sambo, the entrancing, Sambo Boogie Woogie paper doll.

This Sambo, this jambo, this high-stepping joy boy? He’s more than a toy, ladies and gentlemen, he’s Sambo, the dancing doll, the twentieth-century miracle.

Sambo-Woogie, you don’t have to feed him, he sleeps collapsed, he’ll kill your depression And your dispossession…

At first, the narrator is “held by the inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll,” but he eventually looks upon the doll and feels his “throat constrict.” “The rage,” he says, “welled behind the phlegm.” Brother Clifton runs off, pursued by police for his unpermitted hustling, and the narrator walks in the opposite direction, wondering “[h]ow on earth could [Clifton] drop from Brotherhood to this in so short a time?” But he comes upon the pursuit again, and this time Brother Clifton and the cop become entangled, with Clifton delivering an “uppercut that sent the cop’s cap sailing into the street and his feet flying.” The cop regains his footing and fires his weapon at Clifton. For the narrator, “[t]he sun seemed to scream an inch above [his] head.” My mind is right next to where the sun sit…

12.

Infinity Knives has proven himself to be more a composer than yet another (...another) Madlib poser pressing buttons on the SP-404, another Dilla dilettante. “Sambo’s Last Words” is carried by a seething synth line that sounds like Stevie Wonder’s clavinet on “Superstition” if Little Stevie had not been blind since birth but instead gouged out his peepers in a meth-induced psychotic episode, à la Kaylee Muthart. 

King Cobra’s opening prelude, “’Neath the Willow’s Leaves,” communes with the music of “Sambo’s Last Words.” Both equally forlorn but in different registers, a fabrication of salix alba and Saxo Grammaticus. Knives has cited his sources, but I refuse to believe he’s not corresponding across time and consciousness with the ballad “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” (#410 in the Roud Folk Song Index, you suckers!). The willows weep in the wind, overdriven and distorting. Ophelia’s body, drowned, floats downstream: “There is a willow grows aslant the brook, / That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. / Therewith fantastic garlands did she make.”

“Sambo’s Last Words” is nearly a minute in when we hear a haunting banshee wail—a windy ghoul vocal. No denying it: this is the spirit rising from beneath the willow leaves. Her keening over the ever-steady synths mantle the track like hoarfrost.

But with Knives’ compositions, sometimes the willows wither away in wattage—he goes full electro[cution]. He’ll arrange decade-spanning sounds with soulsonic force, an Arthur Baker writing scores for any night of the living baseheads. He summons ghost-in-the-machine spirits. Neve console! Prophet-5! Micromoog! Lexicon PCM 41 Digital Delay Processor! His studio shouts and susurrations stimulate the central nervous system. Like something out of Shakespeare, Knives “buzz[es] these conjurations in [our] brain” (2 Henry VI, 1.2.102). His beats fluctuate from nerve-racking to numbing agent—they’re a helluva drug. The post-apocalyptic Run-DMC need their mutant Rick Rubin—the same cowl of hair, but less plunderphonics; more polyphonic. Less barefooted guru; more blister-footed Orc. Max Richter bumping uglies with E Double’s “Richter Scale.”

13.

I wanna be a stupid and shallow motherfucker now. I wanna be a tough-skinned bitch, but I don’t know how. —Sparklehorse, “Pig” (1998)

Brian Ennals incites the crowd like an Intelligent Hoodlum. He possesses the ravenous raps of a young Canibus freestyling on a DJ Clue or Tony Touch mixtape, but only if Canibus stopped studying his own alien deoxyribonucleic acid and, instead, took a class with Fred Moten and studied the Undercommons. Ennals, you see, raps for the people. He’s got no time to do a tap-dance, a shoeshine, or a soft-shoe. There are more pressing concerns.

We can’t define, precisely, how Ennals’ be dropping these mockeries of Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses, but the impact is felt like a bludgeoning. “They worship pedophiles like Socrates,” he exclaims on “Don’t Let the Smooth Taste Fool You.” For Ennals, Western education is forbidden. He flexes with boko haram inked on his biceps.

On “The Badger,” Ennals settles his outstanding rent payments the best way he knows: “I’mma kill my landlord, so I got a heater, / Specifically, a nigga got a 9 millimeter.” Killing landlords…glorifying outlaws…it’s nothing new. Peep Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days on end, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen, or who commits suicide in order not to give away his accomplices—these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obviously, it's a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identification is automatic.

Same as Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” who knew what to do when “a deputy sheriff approached him”: he “grabbed a log chain [and] laid that deputy down.” Or Dylan's “John Wesley Harding,” another folk hero who “trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand.” This is why Ennals calls Chris Dorner a motherfucking legend. Because he knows we’ll be telling tales of him for years to come, and he does his part to make it certain. Ennals dons a Chris Dorner costume—his cindered LAPD uniform—and Dorner is the Sambo-no-more. These are his last words. Ennals is the medium for Dorner. Together, they come to understand “the American flag [is] the same colors as cop lights.” Ennals is the medium, and the medium is the massacre. BLACK COP! BLACK COP! KRS-One shouts on “Black Cop” from Return of the Boom Bap (Roy Christopher has noted the seated and spitting similarities between KRS’s album cover from 1993 and King Cobra’s). “Stop shootin’ Black people, we all gonna drop!” When you look for a motive, look no further than that.

14.

Admittedly Sambo, but a man’s gots to eat… Gladly buck dance and show teeth. For that kind of paper? You crazy? —billy woods, “DMCA”

In ’98, Boots Riley wasn’t seeing it woods’ way. On the Coup’s “Busterismology,” he had this to say: “If you ain’t talkin’ ’bout ending exploitation, / Then you just another Sambo in syndication.” Pam the Funkstress cuts crazily while Boots paraphrases Nas for the chorus: When we start the revolution all they probably do is snitch. Ennals allies himself with this Bay Area camp, this armed cell. But his focus is on revenge plots for the time being. On “The Badger,” Ennals is joined by Jim—his Iraq War vet companion, his accomplice—who’s schizophrenic. Ennals himself is a 21st century schizoid man, but it’s Jim who sees crimson and starts spraying during the home invasion. Let me remind you of Roque Dalton, my guy—these headaches are historical. And history keeps happening.

On 2007’s “Runaway Sambo,” Hell Razah emerges from the shadows of the Black Market Militia to set the record straight to hell. “They try to tell me I can’t blow ’cause I ain’t tap-dancing like Sambo,” he raps. He refuses the syndication trap that Boots spoke of: “We not no Buckwheats or Little Rascals, / Or Diff’rent Strokes, or whatever-have-you.” 

In “Angel Puss,” a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1944, “Li’l Sambo” is paid “four bits” to drown a black cat in a lake, though he’s too daft to notice the cat sneaking out of his sack. The cat paints himself pure white, disguising himself as an angel. He haunts and hunts Li’l Sambo down, enticing him with the sound of a set of dice shaking in his paws. Li’l Sambo, though, eventually figures it out and stalks the cat into an armoire before unloading his blunderbuss.

Li’l Sambo needs to turn the blunderbuss on himself, though—that would be a merrie melody. Travel back with me to Yorick’s skull—that stark symbol of inevitable death. Li’l Sambo needs to kill the buffoon in his head with a hollow-point bullet that can penetrate the Stahlhelms that sit atop the craniums, just as they’re depicted in the embroidered patches of the Savage Skulls. Li’l Sambo needs to break into his own mind, get all “Conscious Rap” sick wid it and trespass on his subconscious. In Larry Cohen’s 1972 black comedy Bone, the titular character, played by Yaphet Kotto, busts in on the Beverly Hills property of Bernadette and Bill. Bone holds the couple captive, forces them to empty their bank account, and threatens to rape Bernadette (don’t worry: when it comes down to it, he can’t maintain his erection—his, erm, boner—and the white lady of the house seduces him instead). Through all these funny games, Bone’s blue shirt is bleach-stained from the original poolside tussle with Bill, the husband—a Big Bang of chlorine chaos, a clever mark of Cain inversion.

In his career-spanning sequence of poems, The Dream Songs, John Berryman also attempted an inversion of the Sambo caricature. Berryman’s subject voice is in constant flux, always switching, in the poems. One “Henry”—who is “sometimes in blackface,” according to Berryman himself—goes by “Mr. Bones” when he rubs on the burnt cork. “Dream Song 273” reads like Ennals bars:

Survive—exist—who is at others’ will optionless; may gelded be, be put to stud, and were sweating sold; was sold. —Mr Bones, dat slavey still is of our former coast. —When they make me, Bud, I show my genitals, cold.

………………………………….. Come closer, Sambo. I planting in your face ilex. Your face. You jus like a flex where the bulb failed. Flail

…at one hundred-odd degrees at four in the morning, where the ofays’ cameras were dutyless.— Muscle my whack. We gotta trickle. Seize them Moslem testicles, and pull. Please hurt my owner, twice.

“The Sambo stereotype,” William Tynes Cowan explains, “served two social functions on the plantation: it helped the individual slave to survive, to hide true feelings and true intentions from the slaveholder; and it allowed the slaveholding class to maintain its belief that the institution of slavery was not only benevolent but was a necessary shelter for their innocent, enslaved ‘children.’” On King Cobra, Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives make their true feelings known. There’s zero chance of misinterpretation. They’re not children—that much is obvious. And for any white folks who feel them charming enough to put on a shelf as novelty knick-knacks, they are here to disillusion such crackers, to disabuse them of that belief. They finish what KMD started on the cover of BL_CK B_ST_RDS: they tighten the noose on that Sambo hanging from the gallows.

Images:

Chicago Seed advertisement page, c. 1970s (detail) | The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998 (screenshot) | The Number of the Beast is 666, William Blake (1805-1810) | Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett, 1978 (screenshot) | Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett, 1978 (screenshot) | Anne Moody “Sit-in at the downtown Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi,” Anne Moody, May 28, 1963 (detail) | Gustave Doré, Satan in the Inferno is trapped in the frozen central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Canto XXXIV (1861-1868) | Bone, dir. Larry Cohen, 1979 (screenshot) | Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) | The Conjuration, John Opie (1792) | “Angel Puss,” Looney Tunes, dir. Chuck Jones, 1944 (screenshot) | KMD, Black Bastards, album cover, the EMEF (1993) | “New York City street gang the Savage Skulls,” Jean-Pierre Laffont, c. 1970s (detail) | Chicago Seed advertisement page, c. 1970s (detail)

[completemurphamytrash]

other than the whole sheidheda shit, i really enjoyed 701

[shadowed-dancer]

Incomprehensible ramblings incoming (Spoilers for MHA 350):

I went back and watched the episode where the League meets Ujiko and DAMN I can't look at Nomus the same way again. Just seeing the Nomu made my stomach knot up. At one point I thought I was actually going to throw up. I'm not even joking. I've never had THIS MUCH of a visceral reaction to such a "nothing" scene before. I've cried at movie deaths, I've flinched at fight scenes, but this was literally a still-shot of a Nomu in a tank doing NOTHING and I could feel my stomach twisting.

Like, we always knew the story behind the Nomu is tragic, but I always felt that barrier of "the extra" preventing it from really hitting me just how disturbing the concept of Nomus are.

Nomus were never really "characters". They were made from people but like, in name only. It was horrifying, 100%, but it was just sort of a fact of their backstory. It existed to show how messed up Ujiko is, but since they were introduced as Nomus, it never really affected me beyond "damn, that's fucked up. Ujiko and AFO are evil and I hope the heroes stop them".

Like think about how none of us are sad the OFA users are dead. It's because they started the story dead and were literally written to be dead mentors. We met them when they were already ghosts. No one is here crying that Nana is dead because, like, that's the whole point. She was written to be the dead mentor. We never lost her because we never even had her. But if All Might died, then I think most of us would be pretty distraught.

In a way, it's the same with Shirakumo/Kurogiri. Shirakumo wasn't an established character (in the main series) beforehand. Yes, his brief story is sad (much sadder when you read his chapters), but in the main series, he's literally introduced as "a kid who got turned into a Nomu". There was just this level of disconnect, like Shirakumo as a character existed for this specific plot point. Horikoshi didn't create him for a purpose beyond that. It's not like we lost Shirakumo along the way and then learned about his tragic fate, he was literally name dropped once and then introduced as "the guy we think this Nomu was made from". Messed up, but that's his narrative purpose. (It also helps that Kurogiri is pretty sentient and is able to act as a character in his own right).

But while watching the anime and seeing the Nomus now (after 350) it makes me so uncomfortable because I just get hit with that thought of "that could have been Dabi". Love him or hate him, Dabi is a character we KNOW. We've seen him hanging out with the League, we've seen his backstory, we know HIM. He was NOT introduced into the story as a Nomu, he had his own stuff going on. He was existing and growing as a character.

He's complicated. He's fun to read about. He's got an interesting backstory and fascinating dynamics with other characters. And something about knowing that someone like Dabi would have become a mindless, faceless Nomu is just chilling. There would have been no Dabi to know. Touya, a sweet, innocent kid, would have become a literal nameless enemy for a hero to defeat without a second glance. All of that backstory and tragedy COMPLETELY GONE if he had been turned into a Nomu. And that's where it gets me, because that is the case for every. single. Nomu.

Of course I knew this before. I always understood that Nomus had lives beforehand. But it took seeing a character I KNOW saying "that's what you would have done to me" to make me realize how sick and twisted the Nomu are.

Let me clarify this: I never saw the Nomu as just faceless enemies for the heroes to kill. I still think it is VERY messed up that the heroes kill them so nonchalantly. But something about 350 made it so much more real and like... idk it really got into my head.

I got a somewhat similar feeling when I learned Aizawa was supposed to be Kurogiri. The thought of the Aizawa I know and love not existing broke my heart, but it was calmed by the knowledge that he would have at least been somewhat intelligent. I don't think Dabi would have been given that same luxury.

I think that's what it is: the thought that this character I've grown attached to could have (and would have, if he hadn't run) been this mindless monster is extremely upsetting, and seeing the other Nomu makes me realize just how disturbing of a concept they are.

Fuck Ujiko and FUCK AFO

(I don't swear often, but I make an exception when it comes to AFO. Ujiko has now been added to this list).

Congrats, you just read through me attempting to rationalize my thought process. Have a cookie.

Anyways, you write your horror manga, Hori. If you are able to do THIS to me with a single chapter, you're gonna do great.

[lemonlurkrr]

@aureateart​ ok. My favourite parts of twilight princess  (and some other random thoughts about TP sprinkled in there) taken from my monster TP word vomit google doc :

Link lmao

Ok but for real, I like this incarnation of Link :)

I love Ordon (it just seems like such a chill and cozy village)

ALSO love how easy it is to interpret Link as being a sort of older brother figure to the Ordon kiddos. It’s just,, super cute? AND GHHH nice nice good thanks nintendo for giving me characters to care about/characters that I can imagine Link caring about

He didn’t sign up for any of this (tbh, none of the Links really signed up for this jshdjsd). But I mean like, dude was just going to take a trip to castle town, drop a gift off for the royal family, and come back. But haHA oopsies he did get to castle town eventually but definitely not the way he expected hsjdhsd

He’s just a little dude?

AND FUCK. HE REALLY HAD NEVER BEEN OUTSIDE OF ORDON UNTIL ALL OF THAT

everything is new for the player AND Link

Midna

She’s cool :)

she really just

*teleports into your jail cell* hello whore.

I am no master at writing but AYYYY she do got a character arc!!!

She was actually pretty helpful sometimes, I ALWAYS checked in with her before turning to a game guide

Other NPCs

NICE

Love all of the TP character designs (ASHEI’S ARMOUR??? AOWOAOAOOAO)

Saving Zelda and all of Hyrule was important yea but thinking back maybe it was more like, the Ordonians and the kids were what was pushing Link to keep on going

I like the Resistance members :) Very video gamey of them to have one NPC assigned to each dungeon but hey!!! Kinda cool getting to see a little glimpse of each of em

Idk, it’s just fun to imagine Link popping into Telma’s bar after each dungeon and taking a little rest :) (or to celebrate? maybe just chat, idk, give this man some downtime!!)

Honestly it was just kind of nice that Link wasn’t entirely alone. I mean, I know Midna was there the whole time, but I am always for giving Link a big group of friends (see my love for hyrule warriors, age of calamity, and LU LMAO)

Hero’s shade, very very cool, kinda sad he died with regrets but HEY. He got to pass on his knowledge eventually

AND the connection to OoT?? AND assumed to be related by blood too????? GOOD SHIT

Ilia, I REALLY really wanted to like her (er, it’s not like I dislike her, she’s just,,, kinda there for me).

It definitely seems like Nintendo was pushing to make her the romantic interest, but GHHHHH they really threw that out of the window for me by having her lose her memories

I saw a text post a while ago that said it would have been interesting if Ilia was Link’s sister instead and YES!! That would have been cool too :0

Wish we got to know Zelda a little more

I feel like we barely know anything about her

Idk man, like I said earlier, I never really had any sort of drive to save Zelda during my playthroughs

She obviously knows Midna, so maybe if they gave us just a little bit more of that relationship I’d be more interested in her?

TP WORLD BUILDINGGGG

Botw has good world building too, but each race felt kinda,,, isolated? I absolutely love the different architecture and vibe each town has (and all the the weapons too) but ghhh yea everyone felt so separated. As far as I can remember, we don’t see tooo much of the races interacting with each other? Now that I’m typing that out maybe that’s to be expected because of the calamity but KLSJDKJFD ANYWAYS THIS IS ABOUT TP

The world feels nice and alive, love how populated everything is

Castle town I like castle town a lot, it feels dense and busy and I really like how you can’t talk to every NPC you see

Very cool very fun that we got to see the Gorons hanging out in multiple spots

kinda wish we got to see the Zoras a little more (I guess they are a bit limited since they need water but GHHHH the tp zoras are so prebby,,)

BUT HEY, I do remember seeing a zora or two hanging out in the hot springs around death mountain after beating the lakebed temple (I think, might have been a different dungeon) 

but aaaa would have been nice to see them in at least a couple of other places. I think it would have really added to the “congrats Link!! You’re restoring peace to Hyrule” feeling you get from seeing the Gorons hanging out in Kakariko and Castle Town

ORDON

Love how chill it is and how it’s kind of separate from Hyrule proper

They really do seem to be doing their own thing apart from the rest of Hyrule

Just kinda adds onto the “he’s just a regular dude minding his own business” kind of vibes I get from TP Link

Also I like Ordona :)

THE LIGHT SPIRITS,,

Love their design

And love how they’re not exactly like a pure white?

Different spirit representing each aspect of the triforce my beloved

But yes hi I think Ordona is very cool

Who are you, how did you get here, which goddess do you represent? Do you even represent one of the three golden goddesses? Do the Ordonians know about you? Have any of them ever SEEN you??? Do they worship you? Does anybody even know about the existence of the light spirits?? FUCK so many questions but ghhh I like how they broke the status quo a bit by throwing in a fourth spirit :)

I feel like this one is kinda weird but I like that voice sample they used in the light spirit music. It’s spooky and pretty at the same time :)  

cutscenes mmmmm

Ok ok, the spooky lanayru cutscene is very good

BUT THE “Link, Chosen Hero! Lend us the last of your power!” CUTSCENE MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM LOVE IT SO MUCH

IT just

Idk man

It just hit different

I like the music

And seeing the light spirits swimming around in the light juice water whatever it is

Summoning the light arrows?

AND HHHHH “Lend us the last of your power!” THIS IS IT. This is the final battle.

Seeing Zelda bow down, and then Link putting his hand out 👌👌👌

Link: ok bud, let’s do this together :)

Connection to OoT (did I already mention this? Maybe., Whatever)

Very cool nintendo :)

I love seeing connections between all the diff zelda games.

Because like, on one hand, they’re all separate from each other because of yknow, individual hero stuff. BUT ALSO, they’re all connected because of the reincarnation stuff

Grrrr walking through the sacred grove and going “The Hero of Time walked around here a long time ago” FUCK THATS SO COOL

Is the Hero’s Shade watching me? What does he think of me? DIsappointed? Proud? The Hero of Time went through HELL so this timeline didn’t have to deal with any of the shit Ganon was gonna pull with the triforce, better not fuck this UP Link!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Midlink is cute

Kinda hurts that she smashed the mirror but that was probably so Nintendo didn’t have to worry about people going “but what about the twili??????” for any of the other games LMAO

BUT ALSO LIKE SKJDKLJFJ There are some pretty massive plot holes in TP anyway so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever it’s fine we’ll just use this for angst because GOD do y’all like angst

So is Shadlink

Honestly don’t know where this ship came from but it’s cute so whatever

THE MUSIC??

Love Midna’s theme and how they referenced the dark world theme from ALttP (I remember trying to learn the dark world theme on the piano and doing the Leonardo DiCaprio point meme at the little jingle I recognized from Midna’s theme)

Hyrule field theme SLAPS.

Apparently references a couple of the other over-world themes from the previous zelda games (I got this from 8-bit Music theory’s video on the over-world zelda themes, he talks about TP at around 11:40 but def recommend watching the whole video if you’re into music analysis stuff)

So there’s this bit of the Hyrule Field theme, I don’t know the official name for it but I remember seeing somewhere it being called the “at an advantage theme” since yeah, you hear it during the boss music whenever you expose their weak points. FUCKINGGG LOVE THAT. Didn’t notice it during my first playthrough, but hearing it during my second was like a little easter egg for my ears every time :)

Midna’s lament is very pretty (and fun to play on the piano)

COURAGE THEME.

I didn’t care for it too much when I started playing the game but hearing it in ZREO’s arrangement of the Hyrule Field theme literally makes me turn into a puddle of emotions. Also hearing it around and of the Ordon kids (I think it plays after Link saves Colin) AAAAAAAAAAAAA

Orchestra piece #1 and #2 HOLY SHIT???????????????? 

Literally, the first time I listened to those I just,,,, plugged in my headphones, volume 100, layed on the floor/against my desk and silently vibed. I don’t know what the hell it is, but those two just fit so well with TP?? I still avoid listening to them nowadays cause if I DO I definitely will get overwhelmed with the “god I love this game so FUCKING MUCH” kind of feels.

Wolf link sucks at singing

the first time I heard him howling Zelda’s Lullaby I lost my shit because LKSJLDKSGLKJFSKG god that was.,, Bad. Anyways, hearing him howl some of the songs from OoT was cute :)

TP STAFF ROLL??? 

VERY GOOD. IT’s like 10 minutes long and GOD do I love every single second of it. It doesn’t have the same energy as the skyward sword staff roll or the orchestra pieces but GOD does it hit good??

Nice and calm after that big exciting adventure. Maybe it would have been more fun or emotional to have a higher energy piece but it was really nice getting to sit back and watch the camera fly around Hyrule. Seeing like, the Gorons and the Zoras having a good time, the kids returning to Ordon? GOOD SHIT.

and AAAAA that end, when you hear the main Zelda theme and see Link riding off out of Faron woods on Epona… good shit. It gets you thinking, where the hell is he going? What is he doing? Off ot do more adventuring? Going to help out the resistance or something? Going to help Zelda? Or maybe he’s trying to figure out a way to restore the mirror of twilight? Whoooo knows.

hhHHHHhhh it’s just that final reminder that YES!!! YOU JUST PLAYED A ZELDA GAME. JUST ANOTHER STORY APART OF THE WHOLE EPIC OF THE ZELDA SERIES AS A WHOLE

I also want to acknowledge the instrument/samples they used for all the twili stuff.

They’re all just so unique and contrast SO well with the rest of the TP OST. LIKE FUCK!! Anytime I hear the screech from the Twilit Kargarok? Sends a shiver down my spine. I associate those sounds SO strongly with the twili realm. (Like, the same way you associate the BSHEWW VVWWMMM sounds with light sabers)

I love it so god damn much

literally any time there’s a certain sound or motif associated with something I lose my shit

Sacred grove sacred grove sacred gro-

lovely lovely lovely so much fun playing that on the piano. AND again, I did the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme when I heard the theme from the lost woods come in GHHHHHHHH

shoutout to TP Faron Woods for helping me study and get through all of my schoolwork

BLEGUUHHH can you tell that I really love music?

and also yea I guess TP is kinda cool too :\

IF YOU READ ALL OF THAT THANKS I GUESS

[ggukbabyy]

bro... idk about the whole plot of the drabble but it definitely should have some sexual tension going on but i'm not talking about a quick tension, you know... it could take hours or days idk i feel like you would kill it

“No, never,” you comment with a small shake of your head. Taehyung looks indignant.

“Everyone has done something outside of the bedroom at some point.”

You simply shake your head. “Not me.” Your eyes flick to Jeongguk briefly, his gaze drilling holes into the side of your face. He leans forward, forearms resting on the table.

“You’ve never needed someone so badly you couldn’t wait?” His voice is deep and husky, a hidden implication giving his words weight. You hold his gaze.

“The waiting is the fun part.” The corner of his mouth forms a faint smirk.

“That’s where we’ll have to disagree,” he replies, holding your eyes as he takes a long pull from his drink. Everyone breaks off into different conversations, the intrigue of your reluctance to perform sexual acts in a public space no longer the most interesting thing to discuss. Jeongguk appears to be the only one not ready to let it go.

You sit opposite him in the pub, enough people occupying the space that the din of background conversation makes it hard for others to hear as Jeongguk leans across the table once again.

“Do you really believe that? About waiting?” You’re not quite sure why he’s so interested but you entertain his line of questioning.

“100 percent,” you reply without hesitation and Jeongguk nods slowly as he considers your answer.

“You don’t think the desperation to have someone near you, in you, there and then is fun? How is that not better than waiting?” His eyebrows are drawn together in skepticism. He can’t for the life of him understand how you could enjoy waiting. It’s disheartening to hear when he’s spent the better part of the night trying to figure out a plan that would get you to follow him into the toilets. You’ve been acquaintances for about 4 months and he’s spent an embarrassingly large proportion of his time in your company thinking of all the different ways he’d like to spend his time with you if he could get you alone. And not for one second would he want to wait.

“I enjoy the anticipation,” you begin, moving to mirror his position. Jeongguk gets a wonderful eyeful of cleavage and he takes his time appreciating it.

“Wanting it so desperately and knowing you can’t have it now makes it all the better when it does happen.” For most of the sentence Jeongguk is picturing his dick between your tits so he only half hears what you say.

“Anticipation doesn’t change shit,” replies Jeongguk, leaning slightly closer. A small smile plays across your face, head tilted to the side slightly.

“It’s my favourite,” your voice has turned sultry, the alcohol muddling Jeongguk’s brain preventing him from noticing the change immediately. “The person is so close and not close enough, almost touching where you want and you could scream in frustration because two centimeters to the left and it would feel so fucking good, but they make you wait,” your voice is soft and captivating; even with everything happening around Jeongguk you’re the only one he can hear. His whole body feels jittery yet he’s glued to the spot, his chest beginning to rise and fall just a little deeper as you draw the perfect picture for him. “And wait some more, until I could cry, until I’m begging for the slightest touch or kiss in just the right place, so desperate and needy.” The switch from describing a situation to talking about yourself doesn’t go unnoticed by Jeongguk. In fact, it makes the room seem a little hotter, his pants feel a little tighter, his brain seems a little more clouded as he tries to focus on anything but the sounds you’d make as you beg or the words you’d say to get what you wanted from him. Saliva pools in his mouth at the thought of you spread below him close to tears with desperation. Your eyes are alive and wild yet the rest of your face is the picture of innocence and he’s not sure how much more he can take. You’re inching closer to his face across the table as you speak.

“But you don’t like waiting, do you Jeongguk?” You ask and he can faintly feel the warmth of your breath against his lips from this distance. He swallows thickly.

“You don’t want to keep me waiting, don’t like the idea of making me beg for it? For you?” You add on innocently, eyebrows raised as though you’d asked a perfectly simple, appropriate question. Jeongguk can barely form a coherent sentence with his head so full of everything you’ve just said. You stay there leaning on the table for a few more seconds, Jeongguk’s eyes flicking down to your lips, the air around you both suffocating and heavy. You grin widely before leaning back into your chair triumphantly. Jeongguk’s eyes are clouded with arousal, not trying to hide where your words have taken him and his reluctance to return to the real world. By the time he does you’ve moved on to a conversation with Jimin, giggling at his shit jokes. You don’t look Jeongguk’s way once for the rest of the night and it drives him insane.

-----

Two weeks later and you’re at Jimin’s place for a barbecue with a friend. Only Jimin’s housemates are Yoongi and Jeongguk, and no one told Jeongguk you were coming over. Ever since the night at the pub, Jeongguk has fantasised about you more than he would care to admit - even to himself. More than a few times his hand wandered south with pictures of you flashing behind his eyelids, replaying the conversation you’d had over and over, vividly picturing you doing the things you’d described. So when he walks out of the patio doors into the garden to see you laid across a towel on the floor, the smallest bikini he has ever witnessed wrapped around your body, to describe his feelings as shocked is a gross understatement. From his vantage point he can watch you while you remain none the wiser, so he takes the precious time to appreciate everything that you are. Your legs go on for miles and are toned to perfection, your tits fill out your bikini with some left to spill over the side and yearning burns deep in his stomach to have his lips against the smooth flesh, dragging his tongue leisurely across your nipple. Images of you begging for him flash violently across his mind, and he’s itching to return to his bedroom for a few minutes. But then you turn over and notice him, a lazy grin creeping slowly across your mouth.

“Can I help you?” You ask innocently, eyes dancing with amusement at having caught Jeongguk staring. He saunters over to you, arms braced behind him as he sits down.

“You’re in my garden, I should be asking you that question.” Your eyes are glued on the way his biceps tense to support his weight. It should be illegal for Jeongguk to walk around shirtless, even if it is the height of summer. For the sake of your own sanity he should walk around in a full wetsuit - but you’re sure he’d manage to make that look sexy. His broad chest is on full display, the golden skin pulled taut against the toned muscles of his abdomen. Your eyes continue their journey down his stomach, thoughts swirling at the dusting of hair beneath his belly button, following it down until it disappears beneath his shorts.

“Are you nearly done?” Amusement drips from his words as you pull your eyes from their pleasant detour. You fight desperately to keep the heat from your face.

“Almost.” Jeongguk’s tongue pokes the side of his cheek at your answer. He’s used to girls fawning over him, melting into a puddle of shy giggles and doting compliments. Not this. The idea of having you begging beneath him becomes more and more appealing the more you demonstrate all the ways you need to be taught a lesson.

Both of you bask in the heat of the sun in silence, music drifting out from the kitchen, Yoongi’s contagious laughter bringing a smile to your face. Surreptitiously you peek one eye open, looking sideways at Jeongguk. The perfect definition of his jaw is showcased with the way his head is tilted towards the sun, little beads of sweat developing at his temples and clinging to the nape of his neck.

“You should really put suncream on,” you state, shutting your eye before he can catch you again.

“Are you offering?” His tone is bored but excitement thrills through his chest.

“Not really.” Jeongguk fights the smile threatening to reveal itself.

“If I end up burning, it'll be all your fault,” Jeongguk complains, and when you say nothing in return, his arms buckle under his weight dramatically, his back thudding against the grass.

“I can feel the blisters forming already,” he groans, rocking side to side. You suppress chuckles as you watch his performance.

“Unngh,” he groans, turning his head to look at you, a fake pained expression pulling against his features. “I need you to put suncream on me,” he whines, “please.” His lips jut into a pout.

“Only because you asked so nicely,” you reply with an eye roll, Jeongguk all but ignoring it as a delighted grin lights up his face.

While you grab the cream, Jeongguk arranges himself into his original position, a satisfied smile gracing his plump lips as he basks in both his small victory and the heat of the sun. His smile vanishes, eyes snapping open, when he feels the cool of a shadow passing across him only to be faced with you straddling his lap. Your expression is the picture of innocence, eyes wide, head tilted, soft lips slightly parted as you hold to bottle of cream in one hand expectantly, but a flicker of wickedness flashes across your eyes, there one second and gone so quickly Jeongguk could almost convince himself that you’re clueless to the effect your close proximity has on him. But the way your back arches into him gives you away.

Jeongguk hisses a breath through his teeth at the first contact of the suncream against his warm skin and you giggle. There’s no hint of amusement on his face. Having you so close and yet unable to touch you has his mind reeling and frustration bubbling like acid in the pit of his stomach. You smell incredible, sweet and floral, and your hands are delicate as they roam his chest and stomach, eyes completely focused on the task at hand. He sighs deeply as he lets himself become lost in the way you touch him, the way your hands rove confidently, traversing low enough to have him forcing down the urge to buck his hips against you.

Nothing in the world is going to pull your gaze from the path your hands trace against Jeongguk’s skin. From his broad shoulders and collarbones you would be happy to drag your tongue across, to your palm grazing his nipple, noting the muscle in his jaw jumping at the contact. Down, down, down his stomach as low as his shorts allow, over his hips and waist. All amusement has vanished as your fingers explore. Jeongguk’s breathing is deep as you toy with the waistband of his shorts, slipping the tip of your finger just underneath. He’s watching you like a hawk, nostrils flaring as he wills you to just reach down, give him the look so he can take you upstairs and show you there’s no fun in waiting. Instead you raise your eyes to his and breathe out, “I need to do your arms.”

He shifts his weight forward, one arm held out for you, the other sliding around your body, hand resting gently on your arse. Raising your eyebrows questioningly at the placement, Jeongguk simply shrugs, a devilish smile flashing at you.

“What’s the matter, darling?” His deep voice questions. You forego a reply, squeezing cream directly onto his arm. He watches your face with delight as you continue.

“Turn around so I can do your back,” your voice is barely above a whisper. Having him so close for so long is starting to prove difficult. You can’t get your thoughts away from his hands, how strong and big they are in your own, how they’d wrap perfectly around your neck or how easy it would be for Jeongguk to prod and massage your g-spot until you were exhausted from overstimulation. It hasn’t slipped your notice that he’s been getting progressively harder beneath you, every inch of him pushing against your core. It’s getting hard to breathe, hard to look him in the eye - he relishes every second of your struggle with a cocky grin. His eyes are heavy and clouded with arousal and he drags his gaze leisurely down your body and back again.

“I’m sure you can reach from here, darling.” The determined look in your eye has Jeongguk chuckling. The action of reaching your hands over his shoulders and down his back has your chest pushing into his face and a small groan rumbles in Jeongguk’s throat. Your stomach burns with desire at the sound, a desperate need to hear the sound over and over, louder and then whispered into your ear, claws mercilessly at your insides, threatening to suffocate you. Without thinking you push your hips down in an effort to garner some friction against your swollen clit. The manoeuver doesn’t go unnoticed.

Jeongguk’s mind is blank. Your arse is pushing back into his palms, his fingers massaging the supple flesh delicately. With your tits so close to his face he determines it would be criminal if he doesn’t lean forward just a little more. His hair tickles your cheek as he moves, his nose brushing your chest as he gets closer. He flattens his tongue against the swell of your breast, licking a stripe against your glowing skin before sinking his teeth into you. A small gasp escapes your lips, hips rutting against him of their own accord. He groans again, using his hands to push you into him harder, desperation and frustration intermingling at the clothing separating your pussy from his bare skin. He pulls back to look up at you, the muscles of his jaw jumping as he restrains himself. Your lips are so close, both of your chests rising and falling rapidly, each waiting to see what the other will do, the atmosphere suffocating as the tension rises. Jeongguk’s gaze is intense and his eyes flick briefly down to your lips, his intentions and desires clear.

“Come to my room.” His voice is gravelly and shoots heat directly to where you need his touch the most. “Let me touch you, make you feel so good, princess.”

“We can’t,” you whisper back, lacking conviction.

“Why not?” Whines Jeongguk.

“Everyone will see and they’ll know.” It’s a feeble excuse and your resolve to stick with it is crumbling quickly.

“I’ll happily fuck you out here if that’s what you’d prefer.” Your cheeks flame at the idea. “It would be easy,” he continues, mind so consumed with you and his need to have you as close as possible. His fingers skim the apex of your thigh, toying with the edge of your bikini. “I’d just have to pull this to the side and then I’d see your pretty pussy, but I bet you have a tight cunt, couldn’t take my cock all at once.” Your core clenches reflexively at his words and you know you’re absolutely fucked.

“Come to my room,” he states, moving your hips over his with his hands. You smile devilishly, leaning forward until your lips almost brush.

“I’m sure you can wait a little bit longer.”

an; so i clearly don't know the meaning of the word drabble and you said i'd kill it so the perfectionism took over and i couldn't stop until i thought it was good

[bestruction]

How it’d be to watch animes with them

A/N: While i’m working on my Mikasa x reader royal au, this little idea came to my mind. I tried to put the links when i mentioned a specific scene and speak a little about the anime in case you don’t know it.  So here it’s: 

Warnings: Me exposing my otaku self, mentions of 18+ animes (Not hentais) 

Eren -  Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen (13+)

A / N: The main characters like each other, but none wants to confess because being the person who takes the first step would also represent being the defeated person. The anime develops in a series of plans that both elaborate to make the other confess their love.

Warnings: None

It was his idea to watch an anime together since the two of you liked it a lot. You saw no harm and agreed to go to sleep with your boyfriend on Friday night. So, you would have the dawn and the weekend to see everything.

“We could watch One piece! Everybody likes"

“In three days ?! We will not finish even if we do not take breaks ”

"Naruto then?"

“Haven't you seen it all five times or more?

"But it is a classic!"

"It is also too long!"

He would sulk when he saw you reject each of his suggestions for being too big animes. The truth was, he was trying to convince you to stay longer. After much searching in the catalog, you choose to watch a short comedy of 12 episodes.

Biggest mistake ever

Eren is already annoying by nature, and after watching Kaguya-sama's two seasons he would spend the day and night trying to get you to confess to him EVEN IF YOU'VE BEEN IN LOVE FOR TWO YEARS AND HE HAS BEEN THE FIRST TO DECLARE. HIT HIM, PLEASE.

"Do you think that using such a low trick will make me give in?"

“Eren, I just got out of the shower. What trick? Wear an outfit? ”

“Showing off your skin won't make you win”

If you wanted to play with him, great. You are going to spend the day in this little game until he gets tired and just hugs you or something because he can't spend a lot of time without touching you. But if you didn't want to, just you could use that touchy side of him against him too.

"Maybe I shouldn't show you anything else then"

"Yes, of course, do- Wait what?"

"You heard"

“NO, BABE! YOU WON! I CONFESS! I LOVE YOU"

Watching anime with him would be quite an experience. For being very verbal, Eren would be the type of person who doesn't shut up watching anything. Especially, something that makes him laugh. You would see him laughing out loud and throwing himself back on the couch or on you, whether you were with him or not. You may even complain, but it would be fun to see him react to everything as immediately and naturally as an unfiltered child.

He will sing ALL the openings for the rest of the days around the house until you are humming some without realizing it.

For some reason, can I imagine him doing Chika dance ?? Yes, please film this big bear dancing like a little girl.

Levi - Death parade 

A / N: Do you want to cry and hurt yourself? This is the right place. Death Parade is a story about what happens after death. The characters are sent to mysterious bars where they will be judged to decide the fate of the souls themselves. (18+)

Warnings: Suicide, depressive themes, mentions of rape and domestic violence

I don't see Levi watching many animes. In fact, I don't see him watching much anything at all. He would be the type of person who can't spend a lot of time in front of the television without feeling like he's wasting time. Which would result in a very selective and demanding taste.

He would always read the reviews about the film, and after watching it, he would make his own. Ever. No exceptions. Unlike Impossible-to-be-quiet-Eren, Levi would be silent to be able to capture and understand all the details. This is interesting because getting his attention is a difficult task. But once it's done, he is 100% focused on the story and immersed in the characters.

So, after reading about it, he would agree to watch Death Parade with you.

He would have low expectations at first, and if the anime failed to hold his very difficult attention in three episodes, he wouldn't even try with the rest.

So when in the first episode, all suspense and doubts left to the viewer entered Ackerman's head, he would finish the other 11 without realizing it.

As a rational person, he would love things that make him think and reflect on the proposed theme. In the case: Life and death.

For some reason, I imagine him as someone who would like to study and read philosophy as a hobby and that he would love Nietzsche? So, you could expect deep conversations after each episode.

But without any arrogance, humanity's strongest soldier might not be the most talkative man in humanity, but surely when he opened his mouth to it, it wouldn’t be to show himself off with something that he knows and you don’t. On the contrary, he would be more than happy to explain if you asked and added your opinion.

He wouldn't cry, but he would be touched by the way the emotions were shown and created in the characters.

He would probably see the scene where Decim cries more than once for being impressed with how the pain of a character who is supposedly not flesh and blood is expressed so well.

And after the anime is over, you would always see him listening to the music of the ice skating scene around the house while doing something.

When you were finished watching everything, you would talk again about the anime. You lying on his chest and he touching his hair, smelling him.

"Do you believe in reincarnation, Levi?"

“If so, I wouldn't go back to this shit a second time. No matter what they offered me ”

"Levi!"

"Unless it was to have you again"

“What a cliché” He would roll his eyes after hearing your response “But I like clichés”

Again, he wouldn't cry, but he would be thinking about how ephemeral things can be, including being alive. Then you can expect a more touchy Levi for a few days.

Jean - Banana Fish 

N / A: Another one to cry and get hurt. Banana Fish is way more than just a story about one character just is hard to define. So in case, you didn’t watch it, here’s the trailer. (18+)

warnings: pedophilia, rape, violence, drugs, your heart being destroyed

You know that guy who says that no yaoi is good, it's just a way to feed a bunch of fujoshi and stuff like that? Jean. It's him. I just know it. So when you suggested Banana Fish and said it was a BL / yaoi, he would probably laugh and ignore the idea.

But after insisting a little and showing him the many compliments that both the anime and the manga received, he would accept.

At first, he wouldn't pay much attention. He really thought it would be just another bad anime. But by the end of the first episode, he would be too involved in the story to stop.

I think he would love crime novels for the same reason that Levi: To think. Try to find out how things are going to end and pick up any clues that the author has left about the ending. So the plot would hold him so much because he would make a ton of theories about the end.

He will ship Ash and Eiji with all his soul. I mean, how can he not ship? To see an anime in which the physical touch between the couple doesn't really happen and still builds a well-developed and healthy relationship would be a new experience for him.

Jean is somewhat similar to Eren in this respect. So you can expect to see him huffing in anger, cursing one of the characters, throwing a pillow away, or using it to hide a tear or two that he would let go of you. The kind of person who gets emotionally involved with the things he watches.

He would cry an entire river after watching the last episode and deny it later.

“I was not crying. The cushion fabric made my eyes itch a lot ”

Show him again and he will cry the same amount and intensity

Armin - Haikyuu

A / N: Considering all the texts on Tumblr for haikyuu characters, I’m pretty sure you know what anime it’s lol (10+)

Armin is an otaku with a license card and no one can change my mind. He would probably start watching it as a child. So, his first animes would be everyone's classics: Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, etc.

So it would be normal that as the vast majority, he would continue to have a preference for shounen when he grew up. So it would be your idea to see Haikyuu.

He would have low expectations because he thought it would be just another anime with cute characters for everyone to be thirsty as an inverted harem. And also because the synopsis does not create a strong impression, especially for those who consume shounen daily.

"So we are just gonna see a little boy trying to catch a ball?"

“It's gonna be good! Everyone is talking about it now ”

"Does he have some superpower?"

"No"

"Something scary?"

"Armin, just give a chance!"

He would like it. Did I say he would like it? Because he would love it. The atmosphere created and well developed with such a simple plot would hold his attention well. (Is it possible to dislike Hinata in the first episode?)

It would be a great anime for him to watch because 1. It is different from what he usually sees. Unlike shounen, Haikyuu deals only with real and tangible scenarios. Of course, still with that touch of anime, but it is very easy to recognize yourself in the characters and learn from them and therefore reflect on yourself as well.

It would be great to make him think about his own insecurities and how most of them were inside his head.

He would be so immersed in the anime universe that he would have to pause the game scenes because he would be too nervous waiting for the ball to fall.

You will probably see him taking a deep breath in each drawing scene of the characters and see him truly cheering for the team as if it were a real national game.

More than that, you will see his eyes full of tears when Yamaguchi hit the serve in the match against Aoba johsai.

In fact, Yamaguchi would be his favorite character. No discussions.

"I said it would be good"

"Shut up"

"Make me"

Mikasa - Heaven’s official blessing 

A / N: I'm going to leave the trailer here because I don't know how to define it very well. It's a novel, but the story doesn't focus ONLY on that. (14+)

Okay, you didn't suggest. She did not suggest. So how do you end up watching together? You catch her watching when you come home by surprise lol

Until then, you would know that she watched some anime, but nothing romantic. Never. In fact, that was her little secret.

Although common sense is that Mikasa would be cold even in a modern au (and I agree in parts). I think she would be the type of person who loves to see the sweetest and softest things to melt alone on the couch without anyone seeing. A moment for herself and a part of her that she would not show to anyone.

You would already know about her romantic side, but seeing her under the covers sighing while watching the Netflix special episode is a totally different story.

Please don’t mock her!!. She would be red enough by the time she was discovered.

When she was less shy, she would ask if you want to watch with her. She would say she saw no problem watching it with you again since doing it with you would be a different experience.

If you accept, you would spend the rest of the night in the room sharing a blanket and absorbing the soft atmosphere, the soundtrack, and the Chinese culture so present in history.

She would not speak a lot because she was paying attention, but she would hug you all the time. In the romantic scenes, she would tighten her arms around you a little and sometimes left a kiss on your shoulder.

I think she could relate to Hua Cheng's way of loving. He is always there to protect, care for and see his lover even if sometimes Xie Lian doesn't even know.

And that is what she wants to show you, that more than a girlfriend, she is also someone you can count on.

Days later, you will see her reading the rest of the work around the house because she couldn't stand to wait for a second season.

And later, SURELY melting and vibrating while watching Mo Dao Zu Shi.

[yelena-bellova]

Safe Haven: tfatws!Bucky Barnes x fem!reader - Chapter Two

chapter one -Chapter Two: According To Plan - chapter three

Series Masterlist

Plot: Y/n and Sam leave for Munich, gaining the surprise addition of Bucky Barnes to their team. 

Pairings: Bucky Barnes x fem!reader, Sam Wilson x platonic!reader

Warnings: spoilers for ep.2, language, violence, squint for fluff in between all the chaos, Y/n and Bucky ain’t feeling each other yet, protective big brother Sam, nobody likes Walker

Word Count: 7.5k (ya’ll, we had to split episode 2 into two chapters because I use too many words lol)

A/N: OKAY, thank you to everybody for supporting the first chapter. I didn’t really think anything would come of it but I was clearly wrong. Hopefully you enjoy this one just as much, each episode will probably be divided into two chapters if the rest of the season continues on like it is. 

----

The government hadn’t just failed Sam, they were rubbing his face in the fact that they thought their knockoff Captain America was a better candidate than him.

I followed my brother down the halls of the New Orleans air force base, trying to ignore the paraphernalia that hung on the walls. John Walker was everywhere you looked; the internet, televisions, posters were plastered all over the city announcing his new appointment. Each time I had to read the words ‘Cap Is Back’ I became a little sick to my stomach. Sam stopped in front of me once we’d reached the hanger to stare at one of the posters. Though he tried to keep his face neutral, the sadness bled through in his eyes.

“Seems like a good guy. You met him?” a man who I assumed was Sam’s military contact asked.

“No,” Sam answered before changing the topic, “Thanks for doing this on such short notice.” “Yeah, no sweat. I’m just finishing up the checklist, you two’ll be all good to go once you land in Munich,” he looked to me and reached a hand for me to shake, “Joaquin Torres.” “Y/n Y/l/n. Thanks for not making any noise about me coming along for the ride.”

“Hey, I trust an Avenger’s judgement on who to bring to a fight,” he smiled, stopping at the top of the steps to allow me to go before himself.

I elbowed Sam as we descended the stairs side by side, “Hear that? You’ve got good judge- why’re you making that face?” Before he could answer, a foreign voice announced its presence. “Shouldn’t have given up the shield.”

My eyes fell to the floor below us and climbed the looming figure waiting at the end of the staircase. I didn’t need to have any history lessons on who he was or why he’d come to talk to Sam about such a subject. James Bucky Barnes, the second 100+ year old man to walk the earth without a single wrinkle. The tragic tale of HYDRA’s bloodthirsty history. The man Sam had fought to protect and been sent to prison for.

“Good to see you too, Buck,” Sam passively greeted the man, swerving around his body to continue on our path to the jet. The hint wasn’t taken. 

“This is wrong.”

“Hey, hey, look, I’m working, alright? So all this outrage is gonna have to wait.” Bucky fell into step on the other side of Sam, pointing towards yet another poster of John Walker, “You didn’t know that was gonna happen?”

“No, of course I didn’t know that was gonna happen,” Sam’s tone became more emotional, “You think it didn’t break my heart to see them march him out there and call him the new Captain America?” “This isn’t what Steve wanted,” Bucky pushed. Sam was growing tired of the questioning, “What do you want me to do? Call America and tell ‘em I changed my mind? Huh? Yeah, right. It’s a great reunion, buddy, be well.” “You had no right to give up that shield, Sam.” I could no longer stay silent and let him try and make a good man feel guilty. “Okay, you’re out of line with that one, Barnes.” Bucky finally took a second to register my being there before looking back to Sam, “Who the hell is this?” “She’s none of your concern, but let me tell you what you’re not gonna do,” Sam stood in front of Bucky, “You’re not gonna come here in your overextended life and tell me about my rights. It’s over, Bucky. Besides, I have bigger things to deal with now.” Emotions I couldn’t fully understand took over Bucky’s face, “What could be bigger than this?”

Sam fished his phone out of his back pocket and held it up to the Super Soldier, “This guy. His connections with rebel organizations all over Eastern and Central Europe and he’s strong. Too strong.” “And?” Bucky asked, unimpressed.

“Well, he’s been connected to this online group called the Flag Smashers. Now, Redwing traced them to a building somewhere outside of Munich so that’s where I’m going,” Sam turned to me to signal we were walking again.

“Well, I don’t trust Redwing,” Bucky continued his pursuit, “Hold on a minute.” “You don’t have to trust Redwing,” Sam said firmly as we paused again, “But I’mma go see if he’s right. ‘Cause I have a feeling they might be a part of the Big Three.”

Bucky’s eyebrows lowered in confusion, “What ‘Big Three?’”

“The Big Three.”

“What Big Three?” “Androids, aliens and wizards,” I answered before Sam could. “That’s not a thing,” Bucky shook his head. “That’s definitely a thing,” Sam nodded. “No, it’s not.” “It really is,” I set my bag down on the ground and crossed my arms, there was no indication we’d be leaving any time soon.

“Every time we fight, we fight one of the three,” Sam insisted.

“So who are you fighting now, Gandalf?”

Sam inhaled to continue arguing before snapping his head back in surprise, “How do you know about Gandalf?” “I read The Hobbit,” Bucky answered confidently, “In 1937 when it first came out.”

“So you see my point?” “No, I don’t. There are no wizards.” I pointed to Bucky and tilted my head towards Sam, “Now there, I agree with him.” Sam looked offended that I didn’t automatically back him up, “You both are wrong…Doctor Strange.” “Is a sorcerer,” Bucky finished.

“Aah!” Sam laughed and poked Bucky’s firm chest, “A sorcerer is a wizard without a hat. Think about it, right? I’m right. I just came up with that, it’s crazy.” Bucky’s face read that he was thousand shades of done with Sam’s childish argument, even if he’d fought just as immaturely. I was beginning to see why Sam didn’t recount his brief time spent with the ex-Winter Soldier that fondly but I’d also forgotten how easy it was to push Sam’s buttons sometimes. There was some unwitting dynamic between them that I didn’t want to be in the middle of. “So glad we’re wasting valuable time on arguing over whether or not Harry Potter’s real,” I spoke up, tapping my foot out of impatience.

Sam was the first to snap back to reality, “That’s not the point. These guys aren’t magical, alright? They use brute force just like you, the incredibly annoying guy in front of me with the staring problem,” he reached down to grab my bag and hand it to me, “Let’s move.” “I’m coming with you,” Bucky called, the sound of his combat boots hitting the hanger floor behind us. “No, you’re not,” Sam answered harshly. “Oh my gosh,” I groaned before dropping my duffle bag again on the tarmac and spinning around to face the two men, “I don’t know how you two could have possibly saved the day as much as people say you have if you’re always like this! You,” I pointed to Sam, “Stop trying to do this on your own. You,” I moved my finger towards Bucky, “No more talking about the shield. If anybody needs me,” I wiggled my fingers and let the blue energy lift my bag into the air, “I’ll be waiting in the jet.” ——

Bucky and Sam stood speechless as they watched Y/n march across the tarmac, her bag magically floating behind her. “Who is she?” “My sister, Y/n,” Sam answered, “I didn’t know she could do that till today. She twisted my arm until I agreed to let her come.” Bucky’s eyes hadn’t left Y/n since she took control and ended Sam and his bickering. There weren’t many people who met him for the first time and didn’t give him a second glance. If she was Sam’s sister then she sure as hell knew about his past. Yet here she was daring to order him around and advocate for him to join Sam and her on their mission. It also went without saying that she was gorgeous. But she had proven that she didn’t understand the seriousness in which the situation with the new Captain America needed to be treated with, and that irked him. Still, his feet automatically wanted to carry him to the jet once she’d headed up the ramp and he’d lost his view of her. “Can’t decide whether I like her or not.”

——

Not having a suit to wear, I had changed on the jet from my sweater, capris and sneakers to a black shirt, jeans, booties and my favorite blue leather jacket that matched the blue that flowed from my fingertips.

When I stepped out of the jet’s bathroom, I expected to find Sam and Bucky fighting again. The whole flight so far has been filled with the same tension that had begun in the hanger and we’d been sitting in uncomfortable silence ever since. I was sure that the second I left, they’d be going at it again like children when a parent disappeared. Instead, they were quietly sitting on opposite sides of the jet with their eyes trained on one another.

“Can you guys quiet down for a second?” I sarcastically remarked as I walked across the room, “I can’t hear myself think.”

I deposited my bag in the corner of the jet near where Torres was climbing down the ladder, “One minute to drop off, Sam.”

I expected to turn around and see both Sam and Bucky up and preparing themselves, but the two men were still embroiled in a stare down. Sam and I had always cheesed each other off in a typical sibling fashion, but Bucky and his relationship seemingly consisted of nothing but that. 

Sam finally rose from his seat and Bucky quickly did the same, I brushed past him to stand on the other side of Sam. “So what’s the plan?” Sam ignored the question and handed me a small black device, “This is your comm, don’t lose it.” I nodded and placed the small ear piece in my ear, the faint hums of the jet coming through it.

With no direction from Sam, Bucky sat back down unhappily. “Great. So no plan?”

“Thirty seconds,” Torres shouted over the wind coming in from the open hatch.

“Enjoy your ride, Buck,” Sam remarked from beside me. “No, you can’t call me that.” “Why not? That’s what Steve called you.” “Steve knew me longer and Steve,” Bucky tilted his head to Sam, “Had a plan.”

I shook my head to shake off the ridiculousness of arguing nicknames at the moment. “I’m sorry, are we really playing the name game when we’re literally about to jump out of a plane? I get this is my first mission and all but- Bucky’s eyebrows shot up his forehead as he looked to Sam, “This is her first mission? What the hell were you thinking, bringing her?” “She,” I took a step towards Bucky, “Is more than capable of handling herself. First mission or 100th, I know what I’m doing, Barnes.”

“Fifteen seconds to drop!” Torres’ announcement ended any further arguing between me and Bucky.

“Listen to the woman,” Sam smirked as he put on his goggles, probably thinking back to a few hours ago when I’d body slammed him into the roof, “And I have a plan.”

“Really?” Bucky spread his arms out as we watched Sam walk away from us, “What is it?” Sam had already told me that he’d drop in first and I was to follow once he’d cleared the area. Bucky had not been privy to hearing that discussion and Sam had made no effort to fill him in. Without giving Bucky a second look, but winking at me, he dove headfirst out of the hatch and activated his wings, flying gracefully downwards towards the forest. I had never gotten to see him fly and felt a sense of pride as I looked out to see him glide above the trees.

“Where’s the chute?” Bucky called out.

“We’re at 200 feet, it’s too low for a chute,” Torres stated.

Bucky stalked towards the door, “I don’t need it anyway.”

“Neither will I,” I said, taking a step forward to see just how high we really were. I was confidant in my ability to keep up with Sam and wanted to prove my capability, but I was human. It went against every natural instinct to step out into the air and catch myself. Bucky moved to stand next to me, the two of us turning to face each other. This was the first time we’d actually made more than fleeting eye contact and I was finally able to get a good look at him. His features were sharp, his cheekbones and jaw were extremely prominent. Something more than scruff and less than a beard covered the bottom half of his face. His eyes were cerulean blue, just nearly matching the shade of my energy. Complete with a short, scruffy haircut, I wasn’t sure if handsome was a strong enough word for just how good looking James Barnes was. 

“Ladies first,” Bucky nodded towards our exit, never breaking eye contact, “Sure you know what you’re doing?” I smiled smugly, matching the amount of sass radiating from his words, “Do you?”

Not wanting to give him the opportunity to think up a come back, I turned away from him and threw myself out of the plane. An unavoidable scream flew from my lips as I free fell, somehow managing in the chaos to threw my arms out at my sides and expel my energy to control my descent. Once I got a hold on maneuvering the winds, the act actually became almost enjoyable. I found myself laughing as I weaved between the trees, until my laughter was accompanied by a fast approaching scream above me. A shower of branches began to rain down around me forcing me to swerve to the side just in time for Bucky’s figure to come crashing through. He landed harshly on his back, limbs spread out and a pained groan escaping his lips.

I floated directly above him, “I stand corrected, you definitely know what you’re doing.” “I have all of that on camera. You know that, right?” Sam’s voice came through our comms. Redwing flew up from behind us and zoomed in on Bucky’s face. 

“Get out of my face, Sam, or I’ll break it,” Bucky uttered, exhaustion filling his voice.

“Okay, head north. Come on.” I snickered at the exchange and lowered myself to the ground close enough to Bucky to extend him a hand. He accepted it and I helped pull him to an upright sitting position, trying to hide the fact that I struggled with his weight. “Thanks.” “Well, my mom taught me to always help my elders,” I said with a smirk, earning myself a scowl in response. “You’re as bad as Sam, aren’t you?” he moaned as he rose to his full height.

“Okay, okay,” I ceased my soft laughter, “I’m sorry. Seriously, are you okay? I know you’re a super soldier but still-” “I’m fine,” Bucky confirmed quickly, brushing the dirt from his jacket and turning north, “Let’s go.”

The two of us fell into a silence that wasn’t necessarily uneasy but certainly not relaxed. We weren’t enemies, we weren’t coworkers and we definitely weren’t friends. We’d spoken all of about five sentences to each other since meeting and none of them had been particularly chummy. “Sam only mentioned one sister,” Bucky broke the non-verbal spell.

“Sarah,” I stated, “We’re not technically related but they’re family. Sam told me he reached out to you and never got anything back. I think he was wondering how you were doing.” “Yeah, well…” he mumbled, stepping over a particularly large boulder and avoiding my gaze. 

I decided not to push the subject, not only were we nearing the warehouse, Sam could hear us through the comms and Redwing. But I made a note of the lightning quick wave of emotion that crossed Bucky’s eyes. Sam was definitely a trigger for him, but I had a feeling this was something much more complicated. Something I didn’t have time to get too curious over.

We made it out of the forest and Redwing led us to the back entrance to the warehouse. The graffiti and wrecked roofing made me want to believe that nobody had been there in ages, but Sam’s intel contradicted the setting. My brother, the esteemed military man, was also contradicting his age as he maneuvered Redwing just above us to provoke Bucky into taking a swing at him. “Oh-ho-ho, don’t hurt him,” he teased as Redwing quickly avoided the assault.

Sam stood in the next room staring down at the screen on his wrist, scanning the building through Redwing’s camera. He took a quick look at me to assess that I hadn’t been injured in the fall before turning back.

“You’re doing the staring thing again,” he commented without looking up. That one I’d give him, Bucky’s smoldering stare game was intimidating especially when he wasn’t saying anything. “They’re in there,” Sam tilted his head towards the nearest open doorway and stretching his arm out so Bucky and I could see what Redwing was seeing. There was a truck with two people loading in containers of something.

“Where’s the guy?” Bucky asked.

“I don’t know. I think they’re smuggling weapons though.” “Well, I think you could be right,” Bucky’s voice lowered. “Hmm,” Sam nodded.

“But there’s only one way to find out,” Bucky turned towards the doorway, “I see a clear path, I say we take it.”

As soon as his boot hit the ground in its first step, Sam reached for his arm. “We’re not assassins.” “Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, observe from a distance rather than attack straight away?” I offered.

Bucky’s eyes flicked to me when I spoke and promptly back to Sam, throwing away my suggestion. He probably thought me naive. “I’ll see you inside or not.”

He pulled his arm out of Sam’s grip and went ahead, leaving Sam chuckling to himself. “Hey, come on, man. I’m just messing with you, come back,” he called softly. “‘I’m just messing with you,’ the Avengers’ official slogan,” I dryly jested, “Here I was thinking we were doing serious work. Is Redwing still surveying?” “Yeah,” Sam was still smiling to himself as he turned to watch Bucky stalk down the hallway, “Look at you. All stealthy. A little time in Wakanda and you come out White Panther.” 

“It’s actually White Wolf,” Bucky responded in our ears.

“Huh?”

When we lost visual on Bucky, Sam snapped his fingers and nodded towards the hallway. We made our way through the various openings until we’d caught up, Sam held up a finger to his lips as we caught sight of Bucky and our steps became even softer.

“All right, I’m inside. Therefore way ahead of you,” Bucky bragged, turning back to where he thought we waited, “It’s not great but very doable.” His peripherals must have caught the red and white of Sam’s suit, he turned to see the two of us at his side. “Hello. How are you?” “Good. What did we miss? Nothing,” Sam replied.

“All right, let’s go,” Bucky moved to step forward again.

“No, wait,” Sam protested.

Bucky held up his prosthetic vibranium arm I had heard so much about. “I got a vibranium arm, I can take them.” “And I can fly, she can make things float, who gives a shit? Wait. I want to see where they’re going.” Bucky pointed towards the truck that was still being loaded, “There’s two people.”

“You only see two?” Sam started. “That’s what I saw,” Bucky confirmed.

“Let me see what Redwing sees.” “All right…” “Let’s see what Redwing sees…”

I held two fingers to my temple and rubbed, “My gosh, it’s like working with children.”

Sam fiddled with a few controls on the screen and activated the x-ray feature on his beloved drone, “Oh, look at that. How many people you see now? One, two…Oh, here it comes again.” Bucky sighed, unhappy to admit he was wrong, “Four. Five.” “Yeah, five.” “So they’re strong, whatever,” Bucky brushed off not only the math but our group’s capabilities. “Let’s go.”

“Barnes, wait,” I hissed as Sam reached out and took hold of his arm, his elbow hitting the metal shelves we were hiding behind and rattling something.

“Shit!” Sam whispered, he pulled me to his side to block me while Bucky ducked down. The group turned to investigate the noise but disregarded it at the lack of visible culprits. The trucks started and their doors were closed, each person getting into their designated vehicle. Sam started tapping on Redwing’s controller again, “There’s an eighth person. I think they have a hostage.”

With one look from Bucky, the three of us snapped into action. I raised myself into the air ahead of Sam who took off slightly behind me, looking down to see Bucky running impossibly fast. “Y/n, with me,” Sam called through the comms, I listened and hung back until he’d caught up. Bucky continued on his way until he’d climbed onto the back of the truck. I followed Sam’s lead as we flew to the side of the road.

“Shouldn’t we be helping him?” I asked as the two of us landed.

“They’re stealing medicine, vaccines,”  Bucky’s voice filled my comm.

“He’s got it, we’re staying here and waiting for him to come back with the hostage. Then you and I are gonna keep following the trucks and see where they’re heading,” he explained, “I’m trying to keep you out of as much of the fight as I can.” “That’s the whole reason I came, Sam,” I argued, gesturing towards the road, “To help, to fight.”

“Bucky, talk to me,” Sam favored to ignore my desire to do dirty work, “What’s goin’ on?” 

“Found the hostage,” he reported, followed only seconds later by a loud exclaim of “Shit!”

Adrenaline set every nerve alight in my body, something had gone wrong. Without asking for Sam’s permission I took off running down the road. I used my energy to lift towards the sky and flew the same way the truck’s had gone. Distantly, I heard Sam yell my name but made no effort to stop. “Barnes, talk to me,” I yelled over the winds I was flying against. As I spotted the trucks I saw the small silhouettes of figures standing atop one of them. Once I got closer, I could see that the one being aggressively pinned by two of them was Bucky. I landed on the vehicle’s roof just in time to see someone leap into the air, grab Redwing and break him with their knee. Between my want to help Bucky and my second hand protectiveness over Sam’s gear, I was pissed. The masked figure looked up at me, two brown eyes peeking out of eyeholes and marched forward, making me their next target. I created a ball of blue energy and aimed it at her, knocking her down but only for a second. She leapt towards me and landed a punch across my cheek, I went down with a groan and cradling my cheek. Now I was really pissed…

I opened an eye to see the shadow of Sam’s Falcon suit above me, he touched down on the truck and landed a kick to my assaulter’s abdomen. He quickly helped me to my feet as our enemy rose again and took a fight stance. 

“Good of you to join the fight, Sam,” Bucky yelled before kicking one of his captors in the leg. 

The person who had given me the shiner threw Sam aside to the second truck like he was weightless. She was far too small to be that strong, it was inhuman. I decided to hold back a little less and raised my hands toward her, extending waves of the blue energy and raising her up into the air. She struggled to try and escape my hold, grunting and groaning as she flopped around in the air. I was about to throw her into the trees when I was tackled from behind. We skidded towards the front of the truck till the boot of one of the thugs holding Bucky down hit me in the shoulder. Another masked figure, this one I suspected to be a man, had his arms wrapped tightly around my abdomen. He flipped me over and raised his head to slam into mine. Luckily he hadn’t thought to pin my arms down and his mistake allowed me to throw them in front of my face and create a force field that even the thickest of skulls couldn’t penetrate. I looked briefly to see Sam being pinned down as well on the second truck but couldn’t free myself to go help him. 

And then, in a conflicting twist of events, a red white and blue shield came flying through the air.

As I struggled to keep the force field up and my arms locked, I made out an equally patriotic suited man throw the shield at the one who had punched me earlier. A second figure swung in from a helicopter and kicked her off the truck, leaving her clinging to the edge of the roof. The shield flew in the direction of the people holding Bucky down and hit one square in the back before bouncing back to its wielder. The guy holding me down was struck next and rolled right off of me, I sent a significantly bigger blast towards his chest that sent him flying off the back of the truck. Bucky reached down and helped me stand up, he pulled me out of the way when the shield came flying by our faces to hit his other attackers.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I panted.

John Walker stopped briefly to introduce himself to Sam, like he hadn’t been living rent free in our minds since that damned tv broadcast before sending the shield flying past Bucky and I again. As it bounced off our enemies and back towards Walker, Bucky’s metal hand snapped up to grab it only for Walker to retake it. The time for anger or sadness wasn’t now, though the forlorn expression on Bucky’s face said otherwise. I broke from him and launched myself across the gap between trucks to land near where Sam was being attacked. Bucky followed suit and we began taking out each person one by one till Sam stood and turned too fast, hitting and sending Bucky plus one of the masked thugs over the side of the truck. Sam and I turned to face our last attacker who was stalking toward us, Sam glanced over his shoulder quickly before looking back ahead. “When I say ‘now,’ you shoot up,” he ordered, “Now!” I blasted upwards and over the overhead road sign he’d known would hit our attacker. I was too high to drop down suddenly but watched as Sam touched back down on the truck to be punched off the truck, activating his wings and catching himself in the wind. I flew downwards and lined up with the side of the truck, searching frantically for Bucky while trying to dodge the cars to my left. Bucky was clinging for dear life to the underside of the truck. His attacker stomped his metal arm with his boot till Bucky lost his grip with it and it dragged along the road creating a flurry of sparks. 

“Sam, what do we do?” I yelled into my comm. “Now when I say ‘drop,’ you drop.” “Are you insane?!” I screeched, looking down at the asphalt and trying to calculate how fast I may be going. “DROP!”

Putting the most trust I ever had in Sam, I stopped the energy flow and was tackled mid-air by him. I twisted in his arms to wrap my legs around one of his and my arms around his back. Without warning, he flew us under the nearest truck before letting go of me with one arm and tackling Bucky. I readjusted my grip to have one arm around both of them. We dropped out of the air and crash-landed, rolling like a grunting and groaning wheel through a field of yellow flowers. Eventually we ceased our tumbling with Bucky on top of Sam and me to the side still clinging to both of them.

“Could have used that shield,” Bucky ground out tauntingly in Sam’s face.

“Get off of me,” Sam strained, shoving Bucky off with another loud grunt. I rolled to his other side and coughed loudly, having had the wind knocked out of me during the crash. The three of us lay on our backs trying to regain our breath, Sam and I more than Bucky but I chalked that up to the fact that he was just as strong as the people we’d just gotten our asses handed to us by. “Those were all Super Soldiers, Sam,” he stated in awe. 

“I know,” Sam confirmed, “You’re welcome, by the way.” He pushed himself up painfully on an elbow to lean over me, “Are you okay?”

I was finally starting to feel like I could get some semblance of a normal breath in. I’d have wished it was running around with AJ and Cass that would have showed me I was out of shape and not losing a fight to Super Soldiers. “‘Big Three’ my ass, Wilson,” I wheezed, making no effort to sit up yet.

“I said ‘might be’,” Sam weakly fought, “‘Might be.’ Clearly I was wrong.” 

“Will wonders never cease?” Bucky winced as he sat up, “We need to get to the airport and reformulate.” “Oh, do we now? Do we need to reformulate?” Sam mocked from the ground, “I hadn’t thought of that yet, Bucky, what an incredible-“ I groaned loudly and forced my torso up, “Dear God above, if you two don’t stop acting like twelve year olds, I’ll catch a Delta flight home.” “Good, that’s where I wanted you,” Sam reprimanded as he rose to join me, “I told you if you took some stupid risk, you were going back home and what did you do? You took off on your own towards those trucks!” “I was trying to help him,” I threw my hand out towards Bucky, “One way or another I would have gotten hurt, Sam, whether I’d have waited for you or not. And now that I’ve actually seen what we’re dealing with? No way am I going home.” I rolled onto my knees and got to my feet, my muscles aching with each movement I made to stand in front of the two men. “When you two decide to start acting like adults, I’ll meet you back at the jet.”

Holding in each groan that wanted to escape my mouth, I started my trek back towards the road, not making it very far until I heard two pairs of footsteps behind me.

We walked that way for most of the way, Sam and Bucky muttering something every once in a while to each other and me ahead of them trying to wrap my head around the situation. I had gotten myself tangled in the world of super soldiers, ones who weren’t using their advanced capabilities to save the world from one of the actual Big Three. Not only that but we’d had the displeasure of being rescued by the person the three of us had wanted to see least in the world. I had started the day out having coffee with Sarah on our back porch and by eastern standard time zone’s definition was ending it in Germany mid-afternoon with a killer bruise developing on my cheek. Whatever I had expected to come from joining Sam, it sure as hell wasn’t this.

A car honk summoned me out of my thoughts, an open roofed vehicle came up beside me and I was quick to identify the passengers. John Walker and the helicopter soldier. 

“So that didn’t go as planned, huh?” Walker attempted to make friendly conversation, specifically with Sam and Bucky but I could sense I was also welcome to answer. I didn’t cease my movements and neither did Sam and Bucky which only caused Walker to instruct the driver to get ahead of us again. “Look, at least we know what we’re up against now, huh? And we’re pretty sure it’s one of the Big Three, so…” “Aliens, androids, or wizards?” the unnamed soldier double checked with Walker, who responded that he was still almost certain.

“There’s no such thing as wizards,” Bucky grumbled from behind me, sounding like the old man he biologically was.

“Then it’s aliens, or androids,” Walker shrugged. “Or Super Soldiers,” Sam corrected.

“Shit, Super Soldiers, for real?” Walker’s sidekick asked before turning in his seat to face, “Do you believe that?” “I believe that you two don’t know how to take a hint,” I frustratedly smiled at him, “But yes, I do.”

“Wow. All right, well, then we gotta work together,” Walker said. Bucky scoffed, “That’s not happening.”

“I think we stand a much better chance if we all just-“ Bucky finally lost his patience and said the thing we all were thinking, “Just ‘cause you carry that shield, it doesn’t mean you’re Captain America.”

Walker was quick to defend himself, “Look, I’ve done the work, okay?” 

Bucky was equally as quick to prove him wrong, “You ever jump on top of a grenade?” “Yeah. Actually, I have. Four times,” Walker explained, “It’s a thing I do with my helmet. It’s a reinforced helmet. It’s a long story, but, look…It’s 20 miles to the airport, you guys need a ride.” A sudden cramp tore through my shin causing me to sharply inhale and grab the leg. Through the pain I managed to exhale and begin limping back along the path, “We’re good, thanks.”

“At least let us take her, she’s injured,” I heard Walker attempt to convince Sam and Bucky, knowing that I was probably a means to an end to get them in the car. 

I didn’t get very far before I felt Sam’s arm wrap around my waist, “C’mon…” As much as I wanted to fight him on it, I knew I wouldn’t make it more than a few steps before I was bent over again in pain. The adrenaline had worn off and my whole body was starting to ache deeply in a way that made even breathing hurt where it shouldn’t. I dropped my head in frustration and nodded, putting my arm around Sam’s shoulder to let him brace me. He helped me limp back to the car where Bucky gently handled my other side, the two of them lifted me into the vehicle where Walker and his friend tried to help me sit down. I shrugged off their unwelcome hands and used the roof’s poles to lower myself into a seat. Sam jumped in and sat on one side of me, gently lifting the leg that was really bothering me onto his lap to try and massaging my shin. Bucky climbed in on my other side and gave me a once over, trying to assess if I was in any further pain that I wasn’t letting on to.

“Okay,” Walker began as the car rocked to life again, “So we’ve got eight Super Soldiers on a bulk supply run. Why?” “They say their mission is to get things back to the way it was during The Blip,” Sam explained, “Maybe they’re just trying to help.” “They had a funny way of showing it,” Bucky commented.

“That serum doesn’t exactly have a great track record,” Walker quickly looked to Bucky, “No offense.” I tried not to judge people too harshly upon first meeting them, but I had no problem deciding right away that Walker was an asshole.

“We need to figure out where they’re going,” Sam spoke up before an argument could break out, “How’d you track ‘em here? The Flag Smashers?”

“Uh, no, we didn’t track them. We tracked you, uh, through Redwing,” Walker’s friend answered, dipping his head down to avoid Sam’s stony gaze.

“You hacked my tech?” “Sorry,” Walker laughed, “It’s not exactly hacking. It’s government property,” he gestured to himself, “Kind of the government.” My lips parted and I tilted my head, ”Are you kidding me?”

“I’m sorry,” Walker extended his hand out to me, “John Walker, Captain America. And you are?” I glanced between his hand and him, “Not impressed.” He awkwardly retracted it and turned away from me to Bucky, “Does he always just stare like that?” “You get used to it,” Sam replied, suddenly he had no problem with Bucky’s habit.

“Okay, look,” Walker cleared his throat, “You know things have gotten kind of, uh…” “Chaotic,” his friend finished for him.

“Yeah. The GRC, they’re doing the best they can to get things up and running smoothly, post Blip.” “Reactivating citizenship, social security, healthcare. Basically just managing resources for the refugees who were displaced by the return.”

“The Global Repatriation Council does all that, I get that,” Sam said impatiently, “So why exactly are you two here?”

“Well, they provide the resources and we keep things stable,” the soldier answered.

“Yeah, violent revolutionaries aren’t usually good for anyone’s cause,” Walker said. “Usually said by the people with the resources,” Sam looked up from the work he was doing on my leg to look dead at Walker.

“We got a lot of resources,” he stated confidantly, “If you guys, if you joined up with us, we could-“ “No,” Bucky and I said in unison, now having agreed on two things. Walker was a phony and wizards weren’t real.

“I got mad respect for both of ya’ll,” Walker’s friend complimented, “You too, ma’am. But you were kinda getting your asses kicked till we showed up.” Bucky finally dragged his stare off of Walker, “Who are you?” “Lemar Hoskins.” “Look, I see a guy hanging out of a helicopter in tactical gear, I need a lot more than Lemar Hoskins,” Sam commented.

“I’m Battlestar,” Lemar reintroduced himself, “John’s partner.” “‘Battlestar?’” Bucky echoed the ridiculous nickname, snapping his head suddenly toward the driver, “Stop the car!”

The driver obeyed and quickly halted in the middle of the road, giving Bucky the opportunity to jump out of the car. He raised his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for me to join him but I wasn’t about to leave Sam’s side. I held a hand up to him to which he responded by closing the back door and starting down the path that veered off the main road. 

“Look, I…I get it, okay? I get the attitude, I do,” Walker started, he couldn’t come close to understanding how insulted all three of us were for one uniting reason, “You don’t think that the shield was gonna end up here. I get it, Bucky,” even the call of his name wasn’t enough to make him stop, “And I’m…I’m not trying to be Steve. I’m not trying to replace Steve.” “Could’ve fooled me,” I snorted, removing my leg from Sam’s lap as he’d stopped rubbing it long ago. “I’m just trying to be the best Captain America I can be, that’s it,” Walker focused his eyes on my brother, “It’d be a whole lot easier if I had Cap’s wingmen on my side.” Sam scoffed and looked out of the corner of his eyes at me as if to make sure he hadn’t heard incorrectly. He hadn’t, and I was about two seconds away from putting my powers to good use and beating Walker with his own shield that he could never truly hold ownership of. “It’s always that last line…”

Sam climbed over me and hopped out first before helping to lower me to the ground. A defeated Walker ordered the driver to leave and we watched to make sure they actually left for good. “Torres said he’s nice?” I asked sarcastically as we resumed our familiar posture of Sam helping me walk. “Torres is young, impressionable and follows every order he’s given. Guys like Walker have a problem with anyone who doesn’t take their every word as gospel.”

“Well, your mom made us attend enough church when we were kids for me to know that right there,” I pointed back to the car that was now a dot in the distance, “Is a false prophet.” 

I trained my eyes ahead of us, Bucky hadn’t gotten too far and it looked like he had actually slowed his pace for us to catch up easier. While I was angry with the government for appointing Walker and the man himself, I knew that the pain Sam and Bucky were feeling was exponentially heavier to deal with. They’d already lost their friend and Walker was the salt being rubbed in the wound.

When we did eventually make it to the plane an hour later, I was biting back tears at how much pain I was in. Sam took notice of how I was trying to conceal them as we approached the tarmac and carried me the rest of the way. 

“I gotta check for any internal bleeding,” he said as he set me down gently on the seats of the jet, “And you’re going home.” “No, I’m not,” I moaned. “Yes, you are,” he scolded as he lifted up my shirt to the bottom of my bra so that he could get a clear view of my abdomen, “Sarah’s gonna pound my ass into the ground as it is for bringing you back bruised.” My eyes could no longer stay opened, further fluttering shut as I didn’t hear Sam state that he saw anything concerning. “Get some sleep,” he ordered, “I’ll take care of anything I find.” Just before I drifted off, I heard a second body kneel down next to Sam. “She okay?” “Yeah, she’ll be fine,” he answered Bucky, “I just should have never brought her.” 

————

When I did wake up, the plane was dark except for the minimal lighting towards the cockpit. I attempted to sit up, biting back a groan as I did. There was a blanket draped over my bottom half and my jacket was now folded underneath my head as a makeshift pillow. Sam was sleeping upright near my feet, arms crossed and snoring quietly.

“Glad to see you’re okay,” a quiet voice startled me, I turned to see it was Bucky. “A little out of my depth,” I remarked, rubbing one of my eyes, “But yeah, okay.” 

Bucky nodded and looked back down at his folded hands, for some reason the contrast of the gold and black metal meeting the pale flesh fascinated me. He must’ve sensed I was staring because he peered up at me through his lashes. I quickly looked away, “I’m guessing we’re on our way back to New Orleans.” “Baltimore, actually,” he replied.

“What’s in Baltimore?” I whispered, trying not to wake Sam. “Someone that Sam needs to meet.” “Okay,” I slowly swung my legs off the seats to properly face him, “Who’s in Baltimore?” Bucky gave me a tired look, “Just someone, you’ll meet him too.” I bristled slightly at his answer, shooting him a half smile. “You don’t trust people, do you, Barnes?”

I wouldn’t call what his lips did was a smile, but maybe a sarcastic knock off of one. “You ask a lot of questions, you know?”

“Only when people don’t give me any answers,” I fired back in a contradictorily easy tone, “Look, you don’t have to trust me. That’s fine, I’m going home after whatever surprise you have for us anyway so you won’t have to deal with me slowing you guys down anymore.” “Sam was endangering you by bringing a civilian to an Avengers level fight,” he quickly said, “That’s on him, not you. And none of us were exactly at our best today.” A supercut of the three of us each getting slapped around silly on top of the trucks played in my mind. He was definitely right, nobody could have predicted that we’d be thrown for such a loop. Not even the man pretending to be Captain America. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about Walker,” I offered as softly as I could, “I’ve watched him parade that shield around on tv for days and I’ve gotten angrier each time. Not saying it’s the same as what you’re feeling but…I’m just sorry.” Bucky didn’t respond, he actually looked away from me and back down at his hands. “You should get some more sleep, we’re still a ways out.” It was clear I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him, not that I felt any burning desire to try to get him to open up. I’d only tried out of politeness and the slight glimmer of curiosity I held when it came to what lay beneath his hardened surface. “Goodnight, Barnes,” I said, laying back down and rolling over so I didn’t have to look at him any longer.

----

A/N: Let me know what you thought and/or if you’d like to be tagged! There’s still a lot of surprises that are coming...

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