#okay at least we agree on this one

[never-looked-so-good]

📷 @/leclercsletters

[trash-can-sam]

What happens when your coworker kills your other coworker but both of you are in a relationship (kind of) with the same ethereal woman who had an admiration for said dead coworker.

+bonus Evandrey because it’s funny to me (I’m sorry Eva.)

[get-back-homeward]

Stage Play: My Old Friend

i've been here more than 2 years now and gone deep into the tags a decade back. but i've never seen anything about Two of Us 2.0: My Old Friend, a stage play by Stephen Larsen imagining a final meeting with John and Paul on November 5, 1980.

here's the summary:

The play begins on November 5, 1980. John Lennon, alone in his apartment at the Dakota in New York City, is at a crossroads. He has been having recurring dreams of death and is ready to make big changes in his life, that is if he can summon up the courage. Just then, who should appear, unannounced at his door but Paul McCartney.  The two haven't seen each other for about four years.  John is both glad and a bit wary at the sudden appearance of his old friend.  Can they mend fences? Can they come together? Or they forever doomed to be bound by the strands and complications of their shared history?

here’s a copy of the script.

it packs a lot of bug lore into a few acts (probably too much for a general audience) and leans a bit exposition heavy to fit it into J&P conversation (assumes they haven’t talked most of the decade but then they start bearing souls). the dialogue is an acquired taste, and it commits the Two of Us sin of making paul more normal for the sake of plot and using him to talk through to john. it also leans into very dark territory by the end (tarot reading with jayne mansfield among other things), which is probably tough even for devoted fans.

but it notably features some very J&P moments complete with goons humor, spontaneous bursting into song, and wild tonal shifts that are very them. it's funny then that the most authentic bits are the ones that make me doubt it could ever be adapted right to the stage. at least not without a devoted group producing it.

would have made a good fanfic though. it's especially poignant after Now and Then's release, even if i am a bit skeptical about the timelines (the idea john and paul didn't see each other for 4 years, that the fall 1980 meeting was out of the blue, time of writing Now and Then, etc.). with the biopics back in discussion, it's worth taking another look at it.

this script was read onstage in holmdel, new jersey in 2018. did anyone attend the script reading?

more importantly, has anything been done with it since?

[lecliss]

I'll never be able to take the theory that Vincent is Sephiroth's real father seriously cuz I cannot stress enough how important I think it is to the plot that Vincent wanted to fuck Lucrecia and did not get to.

[skitskatdacat63]

@lesharl-eclair here is the vettonso timeline I mentioned at some point!! I was gonna make a more refined version but ah, the original is fine so I'm posting it for you <3

Its written so its as if their careers began at the same time. There's obviously some parts where they deviate from each other(I blame Fernando), but they're pretty similar, no??

Here's some notes I have:

They both started at technically the same team(if you ignore that Seb raced one race for Sauber): Minardi/STR. And they spent 3 seasons either racing for that team or testing(Fernando for Renault, Seb for BMW teams), before being promoted to the team where they won their respective WDCS.

They both spent six seasons with their WDC team. And both won their WDCs using Renault engines. Both were pretty much the golden boys of their teams, beloved by their team principal and team in general. Unfortunately both aren't consecutive because Fernando tried out McLaren lol.

They spent a similar amount of years at Ferrari(five and six respectively.) Neither could win a WDC with Ferrai(😔) And both joined Ferrari in a very similar way. When Fernando joined, he ousted Kimi and it was very uncertain where Kimi was going. I think the commentators in 2009 predicted McLaren? (But he ended up taking a sabbatical obv.) But pretty messy, right? The literal same exact thing happened with Fernando and Seb in 2014-2015. They finally announced at the end of the season, even though it was pretty obvious, that Seb would be replacing Fernando. And where did Fernando go? McLaren! The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself. I guess I find it funny that Fernando replaced his former rival under somewhat messy circumstances, only for his other rival to do the exact same thing to him years later.

Okay McHonda and Alpine blah blah blah. Anyways they're probably going to have both end up competing their careers after two years with Aston Martin. This honestly is my favorite parallel. Because it's very sweet to me that Seb replaced Fernando, in an aforementioned messy way, only for Fernando to take Seb's seat in a very peaceful, almost "passing the torch" type exchange 🥰

[whatudottu]

Bestie I have got to tell you Mal TD totally listens to the Shadow the Hedgehog OST, and depending on the Total Drama timeline it would literally be perfect timing like- you can’t tell me this edgy teen nerd didn’t see a Sonic character with a gun and DIDN’T think it was cool, come on!

[newtness532]

why can't i just do things when i say i will do them?

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

I was reading sea glass gardens for like the 8th time in a row (listen I was praying to the gods for a fic focuses on Megumi & Yuuta, for a fic that shows Megs dynamic with the Zenins more, and for a fun little gojo adopts the fushiguro siblings and forced his friends to play aunt and uncle. You checked all my boxes. I am in debt to you now.) and its the way I'm still seeing the little details that should've been so fucking obvious to me —

Megumi and Tsumiki fucking around and adopting some of Gojo’s habits and sayings? I know he was so proud that his children is becoming mini versions of him. Toji is crying in the depths of hell while Mamaguro is happy as hell in the pearly gates.

“It’s a garden” it took so long for me to peep that this was his domain. Like tfw when your domain is fucking you up. I pray that Gege shows us his completed domain. Actually I PRAY GEGE LET MEGUMI SHOW OFF HIS FUCKING POTENTIAL. But alas Gege is a coward.

THE NICOTINE PATCH? Oh Shoko my beloved. I get her. I fucking hate cancer sticks but if I had to spend time with corpses, being forced to converse with the higher ups, and having to be friends with Gojo and Geto AND witness their divorce. Well. I would’ve smoked something too. Like goddamn these bitches should’ve been at the club.

The little callbacks to the playbooks? How petty the sorcerer world gotta be for them to have cheat sheets on their enemies. Is that not crazy? Is this who they are? Petty bastards.

toji pulling up to get married in sweats. megumi killing curses at such a young age for his sister? toji giving megumi shit to get him to stfu? oh megumi you dodged a bullet with toji.

BUT WHAT I REALLT WANTED TO WAS THE BATHHOUSE. Megumi needs to go feral as a threat cause imagine how humiliating that must’ve been. A bunch of assholes & such watching you like some fucking cult. I really hope that Megumi and Gojo have some type of reassuring talk about his time at the Zenins.

(Yaga and Gojo going at it while Panda in the room is so funny to be but…it’s also kind of sad. Like imagine seeing your dad figure basically be okay, well not okay but not willing to fight back, about the higher ups and everything.)

Obsessed with the fact that I can toss up what seems to me to be a random niche interest and find a community of people who wanted exactly that. I’m thrilled I checked off your boxes.

The bathhouse was designed to be humiliating by nature. I talked about it more on another post (but fuck if I know where it is), but the point of including that whole bit was that I really couldnt think of any better way to emphasize that megumi wasn’t a person to them.

On its face, the private bathhouse with servants tending to it could be a sign of status. It’s kind of an old world nobility thing to have? Which fits with the Zenin, who are very traditional and value Megumi as their most treasured person to be born to the clan in centuries. He would be presumptive heir if Gojo hadn’t intervened. So they’d easily be able to cast this in their own minds as a good thing, as a way they’re taking care of him. He’s not subjected to the communal bathhouses or small private bathrooms like the majority of the clan—they’ve given him his own private facilities and servants to care for him in it.

However, once you take away Megumi’s consent, it becomes an absolutely humiliating and degrading experience that only happens for the Zenin’s comfort and not his own.

I spoke about this in the other post in more detail, but I tried to imply that this wasn’t the first time the Zenin had done this to him. And there’s two points that kind of implicate that—when Maki’s talking to Yuuta about how it used to be when Megumi was a kid, she says the first thing that they would do when he arrived in the clan was hand him over to the servants to make him presentable. She also talks about how viciously he hated the way they’d make him look in the clan, including stomping the clothes they’d make him wear in the mud. When Megumi himself is talking about the bathhouse, he says he was given over to the servants like when he was a kid. This wasn’t a new experience for him. They weren’t doing this to him for the first time. They did this to him when he was a kid, and he’s reliving all of that trauma anew.

In my mind, it was a product of how selfish the Zenin’s love for megumi is.

He’s their favorite doll. He’s a possession. They want him to look and act exactly the way they expect from him, and they despise any divergence from what they want the ten shadows to be. And they hate it when they’re reminded of how Gojo took him from them.

They don’t want him dressed in modern clothes. They don’t want his hair styled in a manner similar to Gojo’s. They want him to look like the Ten Shadows they always wanted, and one surefire way of controlling that is to simply do it themselves, whether or not megumi is on board.

And the thing is? It is such a fundamentally minor thing to let someone bathe and dress themselves. It would have cost the Zenin so so little to let Megumi do it. Even if they were still dictating what clothes he wore and how he styled his hair (which would still rob him of his autonomy on its own, they could have at least let him do the actual act of bathing and dressing himself. They could have violated him a little bit less than they already were. The biggest inconvenience it would have risked to them would be him doing something not to their exact standards and losing a few minutes to making him redo it. But on Megumi’s end, it symbolizes a huge source of autonomy and comfort. Letting Megumi bathe himself really does impact so little for them, but for Megumi, it could have saved him from lasting trauma.

The Zenin do it to him anyway because they value their minor conveniences over his very bodily autonomy. They don’t even recognize that as a genuine concern. He’s a possession to them. An object. They don’t actually love him, and the love they think they have is actively dangerous to him. They will violate him in a very fundamental way just so they can make sure he looks how the ten shadows is supposed to look, and they won’t care.

Being forcibly bathed against your will is just humiliating, especially at Megumi’s age, and it’s one of the things that hurt him the worst out of everything the Zenin just did to him. I think Megumi takes physical pain better than he does humiliation. Having to be exposed and vulnerable the way he was with other people watching was a more effective torture than locking him in a room with curses for days.

But there’s extra layers to it if you consider 1) this is something the Zenin have done to him before and 2) this is something that he could have stopped.

When Megumi was six, he was definitely at the age where he was already bathing himself. Some parenting books say parents should still be helping at that age, but his parents were completely checked out well before then. He had already been handling all his hygiene needs on his own. Having strange adults force him to let them do it for him was a traumatizing and infantilizing experience that represented one of the many ways the Zenin robbed him of all control over his own life when they had him.

But now it’s happening again.

And megumi probably didn’t think the Zenin would do that to him again, walking into this. He probably explained it away as them doing that to him because he was still a little kid at the time. He told himself it happened because he was six, and he’s not six anymore.

Having it all happen again was a very visceral reminder of how helpless his abusers used to make him, and immediately kicked him back down to that level with a very potent reminder. It’s trauma reawakening trauma. He felt like he was six again. He probably told himself for a long time that it would never happen again and it still did.

The other thing is that he’s a lot more capable in a fight than a six year old. He’s a grade two jujutsu sorcerer. He’s a fighter. And he’s being manhandled by servants who don’t have a lot of cursed energy, if they’re even sorcerers at all, and aren’t meant to be combatants. These are people he should be able to defend himself against easily. He should be able to stop them from doing this to him again.

For whatever reason, he couldn’t.

Maybe Gojos theory about them having something on him was right. Or maybe he was too worn down and broken from the cursed spirits. Maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, this is something that he would have told himself he was strong enough to stop, and then he wasn’t. He either had to let it happen or couldn’t stop it even if he tried. It��s a new level of helplessness and humiliation that it made him experience.

In short, megumi does deserve to go feral over the bathhouse, and probably needs to. He’s really not okay over it. It would probably be cathartic.

[rabbithub]

You know the line, 'to be loved is to be changed'? I think that would work for Fallen Angel!AU.

[b4kuch1n]

good luck w the testing and a happy early new year!!

thank you it's already happened when this was sent but we all did get one free point for the listening section bc the audio fucked up and we didn't get to hear the part with the last question's answer. but I will now think this is luck borrowed from the future when this ask was sent

[countess-of-edessa]

baked a cake from scratch, fed the dogs and the father, cleaned the kitchen, wrapped christmas presents. wearing a beige sweaterdress and black ballet flats, hair in bun. reading a profile on hilaria baldwin…the cottagecore tradwife in me is winning i fear

[coredrill]

feliz jueves i was fucking right

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[kennexara]

can someone PLEASE invent a way to get energy that doesn't require spending energy you don't fucking have to start with

[diari0deglierrori]

I say ‘no’ one time and then get told I’m obnoxious…

[panicatthetwentyonechemicalboys]

OMFG THIS COMMENT. GUISE. THAT LAST SENTENCE IS SO FUCKING RAW

edit: i see a lot of people arguing over the 'eat the rich' thing and i'd like to clear up my standing currently! i know they aren't the same kind of fancy multi-million corporation that our beloved phrase talks about, and the reason i agree to a point with this comment is that watcher is evidently trying to become that. they're doing some shitty things in regards do disregarding poorer fans, and are seemingly blatantly ignoring the economic crisis by saying 'everyone can afford that!', all in direct contrast to their entire branding of being leftist and openly supporting things like eat the rich.

"You said 'eat the rich' then handed us the forks, laid on the plate, and expected us to spare you?" at least from my understanding isn't flat-out saying watcher are now the rich we eat, but are well on the track to becoming so, and are quickly developing the same ego.

BUT!! don't like people directly hating on steven like that!! they're all grown men who can make their own decisions, and pretending like shane and ryan are out little baby beans and then calling steven evil and whatnot isn't okay. they can all be held equally accountable. though i do somewhat understand being the most disappointed in shane, as he's the one who speaks on shit like eating the rich the most, and is generally more outward with his ideals, so it's perfectly reasonable to feel betrayed more deeply. but bottom line is they're all equally accountable for this decision.

some shit we can't take back. i probably got pissed and said some weird/uncool shit initially because of the intense emotions i was dealing with, which other people amplified. i do regret some of the things i've said to a point when it comes to being hateful, but i can't just un-say it all, so i'm not even going to try. i'm going to leave everything be and allow it to serve as something to look back on for what not to do in future circumstances. while this new path for watcher is, in my opinion, not the smartest and generally really shitty, they're human beings who make mistakes, and they deserve our acknowledgement of that.

in short, i don't like it but i'll stop being a bitch about it because they don't deserve that. also sorry for the wall of (probably incoherent lmao) text i got passionate <3

edit 2: guys. im screaming. the apology was amazing imo and i genuinely think they really mean it, like it doesn't seem bullshitted. i think they realized they fucked up for reals and feel bad. im so happy for them, but also for us as fans. yay :D