#people get arrested when google makes a mistake

[melyzard]

Okay, look, they talk to a Google rep in some of the video clips, but I give it a pass because this FREE course is a good baseline for personal internet safety that so many people just do not seem to have anymore. It's done in short video clip and article format (the videos average about a minute and a half). This is some super basic stuff like "What is PII and why you shouldn't put it on your twitter" and "what is a phishing scam?" Or "what is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS and why do you care?"

It's worrying to me how many people I meet or see online who just do not know even these absolute basic things, who are at constant risk of being scammed or hacked and losing everything. People who barely know how to turn their own computers on because corporations have made everything a proprietary app or exclusive hardware option that you must pay constant fees just to use. Especially young, somewhat isolated people who have never known a different world and don't realize they are being conditioned to be metaphorical prey animals in the digital landscape.

Anyway, this isn't the best internet safety course but it's free and easy to access. Gotta start somewhere.

Here's another short, easy, free online course about personal cyber security (GCFGlobal.org Introduction to Internet Safety)

Bonus videos:

(Jul 13, 2023, runtime 15:29)

"He didn't have anything to hide, he didn't do anything wrong, anything illegal, and yet he was still punished."

(Apr 20, 2023; runtime 9:24 minutes)

"At least 60% use their name or date of birth as a password, and that's something you should never do."

(March 4, 2020, runtime 11:18 minutes)

"Crossing the road safely is a basic life skill that every parent teaches their kids. I believe that cyber skills are the 21st century equivalent of road safety in the 20th century."

[literaryavenger]

Black Panther - Post Credit Scene

Summary: Bucky comes out of the ice.

Pairing: Avengers x F!Reader, Bucky Barnes x F!Reader

Warnings: Nothing really for this one, maybe language. Mostly fluff. My poor attempts at being funny.

Word Count: 1.8K

A/N: I want to specify that I used google translator for the Xhosa, so I hope it's at least decent, but I thought it would be cute to put it in there. I've had this ready to go for WEEKS and I'm so glad I finally get to post it! I hope you like the idea of a reunion like this as much as I do! Enjoy!

Masterlist | Series Masterlist

You’ve been on the run for a year now with Steve, Sam and Natasha. A few weeks after you all escaped the Raft, Clint and Scott decided to make a deal with Ross to get house arrest because being on the run and away from their families was too hard for them.

The five of you that remained went from safe house to safe house while doing as many missions as you could, never staying in one place too long and still trying to help people to the best of your capabilities, with Wanda disappearing from time to time to spend time with Vision.

Lately, though, you’ve been noticing Steve’s been a little fidgety, even disappearing here and there for a couple of days at a time.

You want to ask him what’s going on, but you don’t want to be nosy so you wait for if and when he’s ready to talk about it.

And that time comes one random afternoon as you’re all sitting around in the living room of the safe house you’re in, Wanda being off with Vision.

“Hey, can I talk to you?” He sits next to you and you nod, putting down your book to give him your full attention. “I know you’ve all been wondering where I go every now and then, and I’m glad you didn’t push it. But I’m ready for you guys to know now.”

He addresses everybody before turning to you and looking straight in your eyes as he finishes. “Bucky’s awake.”

Your breath hitches in your throat and you can’t seem to find it in you to say anything more than “Oh.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner...” He looks actually sorry. “We just thought it would’ve been better to keep it as lowkey as possible.”

You nod and look at the floor, trying not to show your disappointment.

It makes sense. After all Steve is his best friend, his brother, his only family. You’re barely an acquaintance.

Right? 

“He asked about you.” your eyes snap back to him. “He wanted you to be there, but he understood. He’s glad you’re safe.”

“From the government or from him?” you mumble and Steve gives you an apologetic look, but lets it go.

“The thing is, I kind of need to ask you a favor.” you narrow your eyes at him and he raised his hands in surrender. “It’s nothing bad, I swear!”

“Fine,” you sigh. “What do you want?”

“It’s just, the mission we’ve been planning is important…” he looks at the plans and footprints on the table. “And only three of us are needed for it.”

You think you see where this is going. “You want me to take over your part of the mission?!” you look at him like he grew three heads. How the hell can you take on the role of a supersoldier?

“No, of course not. That’s the thing.” he quickly clarifies. “I can’t be spared for this, and we know the mission is gonna last a while.”

“Where are you going with this, Rogers?” you’re just confused now.

“Could you look after Bucky for me?”

Oh. You try hard not to look too excited about the prospect of seeing Bucky again and spending time with him.

“Are you… sure that’s a good idea?” you ask him as coolly as you can.

“It’s not gonna be hard. You just need to keep an eye on him from a distance.” good thing you managed your expectations. “Shuri’s gonna be working with him and, when he’s ready, she’ll let you talk to him.” Okay, you’re excited again.

“Uhm,” you have to at least pretend to think about it, right? “I guess, if I’m not needed on the mission and you are, I could do you this favor.”

You fight a smile as you make the mistake to look at Sam, that’s grinning, knowing full well how you feel about Bucky. You groan and roll your eyes, but he says nothing, thankfully.

“Thank you.” Steve lays a hand on your arm and smiles at you. “This means a lot to me.”

“I know.” you smile back, then hug him.

“Okay,” he says as you let go “we’re leaving tomorrow morning.”

You nod and get up to finish packing the bag you were getting ready for the mission in a few days.

After you’re done, you go back to the living room to spend one last night with Sam, Steve and Nat as you don’t know how long it’s gonna be before you see them again.

The next morning you wake up thankful you’re not hungover and get your stuff with Steve’s into the jet, Sam and Nat accompanying you out to say the last goodbyes.

“I’ll miss you.” you tell Nat as you hug her “Please don’t cut your hair again while I’m gone.”

“I’ll try not to.” she laughs, hugging you back. “I’ll miss you too, Crazy.”

“Try not to miss me too much.” Sam tells you as he hugs you too, making you roll your eyes with a smile.

“Sure, birdbrain.” He groans at the nickname “Be careful.”

He nods and, after they say goodbye to Steve too, the two of you board the quinjet and make your way to Wakanda.

You are met by Princess Shuri and King T’Challa himself. You hug Steve goodbye as he makes his way to visit Bucky before his mission and to tell him he probably won’t be coming by again for a while. 

Shuri and T’Challa, who insisted you drop their formal titles, give you a tour of the palace and then take you to a guest room that’s basically a suite, and you’re shocked to find out you’ll be living here in the palace for the duration of your stay.

As promised you look after Bucky from a distance.

Every morning you and Shuri get escorted to Bucky’s hut where she works with him on his deprogramming as you and Ayo hang back.

Other than making sure he’s okay, there’s not really much for you to do so you take this time to get to know the people. It astonishes you how easy you get welcomed by the community.

You’re taught their customs by the locals, you pick up some Xhosa, not a lot but enough to have conversations and you’re even taught to fight by the Dora Milaje. Mostly Okoye and even Ayo since the two of you cleared the air after the whole airport fight.

She apologized profusely about the wound she inflicted in your arm, which has been fully healed for months now, and you assured her it was okay. You understood she was simply doing her job and admired her passion and determination to protect her king. 

Also, it turns out you broke a couple of her ribs, which you also apologized for, so you two decided to just call it even.

You got comfortable fast; dressing with their clothes, participating in their festivities and playing around with the children everyday as Shuri does whatever she does with Bucky.

You’re always careful to not get too close to be seen while still being close enough to keep an eye on them.

After their sessions Shuri always brings you up to speed and then you report to Steve to let him know Bucky’s doing good.

You’re making your way to Shuri’s lab where you’ve met her everyday for the couple of months that you’ve been in Wakanda.

“Good morning, Princess.” you tell her, bowing when you stop in front of T’Challa. “My King.”

“Stop that.” he swats at you as both you and Shuri laugh.

“Ready to go?” Ayo asks and you eye her suspiciously as she’s grinning like she does right before she makes a move that instantly knocks you on your ass during training.

“What are you up to?” you ask her but she just keeps on smiling.

“Today is the day, Agent.” Shuri tells you as smirks, knowing how you feel about the nickname.

“I’m not an agent of anything.” you roll your eyes, then register what she just said. “Wait, what do you mean, today’s the day?”

“Sergeant Barnes is ready.” she says and you can’t help the smile that comes to your face, which falls with a groan when you see them all smirking at each other at your reaction.

“Let’s just go.” you say as you turn around and start walking with Shuri and Ayo.

“Have fun!” T’Challa yells after you.

“Your order is my command, Your Highness!” you yell back and you all laugh at the loud groan he lets out.

As always, Shuri gets closer while you and Ayo hang back and she walks to the shore of the lake in front of the hut and then stops there.

You see three kids run out of Bucky’s hut, laughing, and the princess turns around as they run up to her and hug her.

“Are you playing around with that man again?” she asks, laughing. “You’re teasing him again.” she keeps teasing them as they chant ‘no’ between laughter and you can’t help but smile.

Bucky exits the hut and, like every other day, he takes your breath away. His sun-kissed skin, his Wakandan robes, his growing beard and the longer hair. The whole style just suits him.

You see him take a deep breath and then he gets closer to Shuri as the children run towards you giggling about the “Ingcuka Emhlophe”. [White Wolf]

“Uyayithanda Ingcuka Emhlophe?” you ask them. [You like the White Wolf?]

“Yena engaqhelekanga” one of the kids says and you laugh. [He’s strange]

“Kutheni ephulukene nengalo nje?” another one asks you. [Why is he missing an arm?]

You aren’t sure what to say, they are children after all, but you try your best.

“Kuba uyindoda ekhaliphileyo eyathi yenzakala xa inceda abantu.” [Because he is a brave man that was injured while helping people]

They all look at him in awe just as you hear Shuri say, “Sergeant Barnes.”

“Bucky.” he corrects her and you smile.

“How are you feeling today?” she asks him.

“Good. Thank you.” she smiles and motions towards you.

“Come. Much more for you to learn.” she says as she starts walking.

He takes a second to look out at the lake before following Shuri, but as soon as he spots you, he stops.

He stares as you’re giggling with the children that are now circling around you and dancing, and when you look towards Bucky again his eyes are already on you.

You blush a little at his intense gaze but he seems to snap out of it when your eyes meet his and he gets closer until he’s right in front of you.

“Sergeant.” you say, smirking.

“Doll.” he says, smirking back.

You smile at each other until Shuri clears her throat and you turn to look at her just to see both her and Ayo with a smirk of their own. You roll your eyes at them, but your smile stays on.

“Shall we?” Shuri says and starts walking, Ayo right behind her.

Bucky takes your hand and starts walking after Shuri too, pulling you with him, both of you feeling like nothing could wipe the smiles off your faces.

Requested taglist: @sapphirebarnes @aki-ham @mary-jinx @abbyyourlocalmilf @selcouthial @esposadomd @americaarse @multiversefanfics

[opinated-user]

Lily has responded.

More D.A.R.O style exercises.

raise your hand if you're surprised.

more than that… i can't stress enough how much LO is lying. and i don't mean about the accusations from Courtney or about Courtney, but on the very first line.

"my sister is lying about me because i talked about her being abusive and participating on the abuse coming from my parents so she's retaliating."

this is factually wrong and anyone can debunk this. anyone can go through my blog right now, see the date in which i started talking about "someone claiming to be LO's sister" claiming a bunch of things about LO and then compare that with the date in which LO started really hamming in about how her sister was awful, how Courtney tried to kill her, how much of a little bully she was.

before we started talking about the allegations from "someone claiming to be LO's sister", because we didn't had any confirmation at the time, LO barely even talked about her sister. the most all of us knew was the story about beating her 15 times over a control remote and she ran away from home. it was only after Courtney made her accusations that LO suddenly felt talking a lot more about her childhood and her sister.

i too need to point out how LO still doesn't know what reactive abuse is. LO, i'll explain it clearly since you don't seem to get this: everytime you accuse anyone of being an example of "reactive abuse", you're saying that they're reacting… to the abuse you put them through. that's what the actual term means. it doesn't mean "this person abused me in response to me defending myself from their abuse", which i think is what you think, but rather "this person is reacting to the abuse they're going through."

you basically admitted that you abused your sister and this is her reacting to it. you're not the victim, you're the main abuser when you use that term and applied it to someone else. this is the second time you do this same mistake, you did it with Lizzy too.

google is free. use it sometime.

on top of that… a racist? do you really want to talk about racism? with your brownfacing avatar and appropiating of a Cherokee identity that has nothing to do with you? i see you still have "indigenous" on your bio despite being white and having no relation with no indigenous community, because you simply refused to all these years. i see you aren't doing anything to change that disgusting feathered earring you shove on your avatar to try to make it seem more "exotic". if you want to talk about racism and colonialism, how about we start from there?

she's lying about what we're even accusing her too. now, why does a innocent person even needs to do that? we accuse her of being an enjoyer of CSEM, which we have reason to believe she is, not of producing that content ( if we did that you'd read me on a very different tone than the one i'm using right now), of preying on minors (some of them even gave testimony) and… is it really just an accusations if almost everyone you have met has come out accusing you of abusing them on some way? or is that just pointing out the obvious? but the animals part is completely made up. i don't think none of us would trust LO with our pets or to properly take care of an animal if one landed under her care, but that's a very different issue than outright accusing her of having already harmed an animal. but how interesting that you even brought that up. (especially with how you have talked multiple times about harming rats you found in your apartment and "joked" about throwing rocks to cats during streams. i almost forgot about that, but thanks for reminding me!)

for the hundred time… the fact that she hasn't been arrested doesn't mean anything. thousands of innocent people are rotting in jail and a bunch of criminals are walking around consequences free. you'd hope the person who made a big show about "denouncing a pedophile" (piggybacking from the work other people did in fact) who end up free and not arrested, despite the mountains of evidence and testimony, would know that. but suddenly the system is perfect and the law is always correct. only when it comes to show that LO hasn't been arrested… yet.

"i got accused of faking cancer"… based on the fact that you constantly contradict yourself regarding this issue, didn't know the first thing about the actual treatment and somehow expect us to believe that you were in treatment while also streaming long hours at night or morning playing videogames with no sign at all of illness whatsoever. it's based on the fact that we did actually google, some of us do have experience with cancer from our loved ones and we know that your story makes no sense no matter how many times you tell it.

it also doesn't help you the fact that you even started talking about a cancer when Courtney did came out with her allegations. almost as if you were using it as a distraction. you didn't thought i forgot about that, did you?

where is that lawyer, LO? i have been talking a lot about you in this blog, i'm one of the people giving out the worst accusations against your persona. even before Courtney ever said a word, in my blog is where the "rumour" of you enjoying CSEM gleefuly started. i accused you of preying on children, even more than other blogs did. i accused you of being aware that the material you enjoy was made with the suffering of real children and liking it all the same.

where is my formal accusation, LO? how come i can walk around a free funny onion if all i do is say lies about you and so egregious at that? i guess according to your logic, they must be true. it must be true if i haven't been contacted by your absolutely real lawyer that somehow you can pay with who knows what money. because those are serious accusations and, if it were me, i'd absolutely do everything in my power to stop the spreading of them. if i were innocent, that is.

i'll be waiting the call from Saul Goodman.

[ramons-elevator]

Cellbit's Document English Translate

This was done very quickly with google translate but I believe it gets Cellbit's message across. Feel free to add more if need be!

The Court is on Wednesday, May 24th. Cucurucho has no interest in creative blocks and revealed this when he didn't even think twice about Bobby's negotiation

He will not accept giving the blocks for the armor and any information that we try to extract in exchange for the blocks will be processed and mitigated in a way that means nothing to us

But if we have a new surprise which even our side doesnt expeacr, maybe things will change. Cururco made a mistake in the midst of chaos and bullshit Maybe thats the secrer

The plan is to try to use Forever's rule-breaking as a bargaining chip to create a direct conflict between forever and me by surprising both Forever and Cucurucho in Negotiation and Asking for Richarlyson's fatherhood as a form of betrayal showing that I'm willing to join the federation and have no problem antagonizing my friends to protect Richarlyson and have him all to myself

Then the idea w Purposely get away from everyone for a day Create something like an evil dark castle away from everyone just to see Cucurucho's reaction Federation of codes and of any possible imposter between us

If someone decides to ally with me it could be a possible suspect or someone who would not be trusted in the order

Things went a little differently than planned but the maste rplan worked out. Instead of being surprised by the betrayal during the court, I used an excuse the fact they lied to me and tried to blackmail me with the vivo meme to make a scene

Its a plus point because it makes it seem like I genuinely have a motive/ Grudge towards my friends and lessens the Feds's suspicion of my intentions, it doesnt look like I betroyed them "out of the blue"

Cosidering that maybe the Fed wates the streams canonically to get information, I think the best way to do a whole narrative arc to have a big twist later

I will avoid mentioning its existence to the Federation and if they raise this matter I will try to get around it

As proof that the plan was not a lie, I left a signed book for Richarlyson revealing my plan, and I didnt risk showing it on stream. Its still risky, considering the Federation may have acess to egg items, But hoenstly it broke my heart to see him sad and dissapointed like that. I hope I dont regret that

I also blocked access to Sofia for others to see how Max reacts. I dont wanna suspect him, but everything about her is weird

THE CODES attacked me shortly after I joined the Federation

A code made exclusively to kill? He practically ignored Richarlyson. It strengthens the theory that the codes kill those who seek to keep others on the island.

With luck, the Federation will also accommodate me to the hospital Max woke up to. I will try to persuade as much as possible.

Continuing the conflict with the members of the Order and trying to please the other members of the island with explanations of how I realized that the island's life and people are better than I am had before, and I don't want to miss it. They don't need to get involved in this.)

Using Richarlyson's court event, where everyone will likely be present and watching, to reveal all the information I can get from the Federation in front of everyone. So if they kill/arrest me I will become a martyr and all present will realize the truth about the Federation.

[allblackhoodagain]

I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’

There’s a point when you’re trying to get to sleep where your brain has to decide if it’s willing to shut reality off. You’re drifting, drifting, drifting, but then you suddenly realize, Of course I can’t get arrested for trying to do laundry in Georgia, and next thing you know you’re on the couch trying to find an episode of Chopped you’ve never watched before.

To get to sleep, your body, brain, and soul(?) somehow need to conspire together to shut everything down, but not so much that you’ll actually die – that’s why sometimes your leg spasms when you’re almost asleep – that’s your body making sure it’s still alive, according to some random Instagram post I once saw. It’s pretty damn complicated and absurd when you think about it, and it’s a bit of a miracle that most of us are able to accomplish this every day.

Similarly – and hear me out on this please – for pro sports to actually work, a huge number of people need to conspire with billionaire team owners, millionaire athletes, their friends and family, fellow fans, and the media/culture to pretend that these games actually matter, that the people of Denver are collectively happier when the Broncos win, that the team did it with the fans in mind, that this is glory that will last and be sung about for generations.  

Much like sleep, it’s a pretty damn complicated and absurd proposition and it’s a miracle to think that this conspiracy is still going strong as everything around us breaks down into water, smoke, dust, and trash.

To be fair, there is an uneven burden in this construct and that falls on the athlete. The athlete needs to put their body, brain, and soul(?) on the line every time they step on the field of play. They must live with their mistakes and their injuries for the rest of their lives. They can’t just turn the TV off and find something else to do, so to speak.

Of course, when you get to the level of the Denver Broncos or, say, the Brooklyn Nets, the athlete is compensated fairly handsomely for this burden. And that’s where it gets even more complex.

The athlete is paid to care about this team/city/fanbase that it probably had no connection to whatsoever. They have to learn to love this franchise or, at least, fake it reasonably well enough for the fans to not clearly see through the façade.

So . . .

Asking to be moved on from that team and/or have it’s entire management structure replaced for a reason that nobody is allowed to know, and then acting like a jackass on social media while that team is subjected to weeks and weeks of garbage fire takes and hot memes, and then, reaching a resolution with that team . . . I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how to care about whatever that may be.

To extend the metaphor – now I’m wide awake, eating Cheerios out of the box, and googling what a geoduck is. I’m not getting back to sleep for hours.

Sleep and sports fandom for adults are extremely delicate phenomena. Both involve shutting off reality in ways that we don’t really understand or appreciate – read Among the Thugs – to induce a manageable and socially acceptable mass psychosis.  

Big difference obviously – you don’t need to be a sports fan to survive. So then, as a sports fan, especially an adult one, you are always asking yourself: Is it worth it? Is it worth it to keep pretending?

And then, after the aforementioned jackassery, it gets to: Is it worth it to keep pretending when this is what I have to root for?

I mean, I already have enough trouble getting myself to sleep every night. Being a fan of this guy – and not to mention that guy and oh man that guy – it may be more than my body, brain, and soul(?) can handle.

But I was reminded earlier this week, that people make mistakes, pro athletes included. And when they then attempt to rectify that mistake, perhaps they shouldn’t be met with scorn, especially in the form of 800-word Tumblr posts.

The fact is, I have been able to get to sleep every night of my life (that I didn’t spend on an airplane) if only for an hour or two sometimes. I do genuinely think it’s a miracle. But it what’s we do as humans.

We can’t stop, won’t stop sleeping every night.

So with this in mind, I’ll probably be a sports fan again.

When it comes right down to it, what feels better than denying reality?

[catrinajean]

I’m very certain the body of Catrina Leblanc is going to claim defamation. 

Defamation :

the action of damaging the good reputation of someone; slander or libel.

I would categorize my review on her as freedom of speech. 

Reviewing this person on Google, is what i’ve done. Why can’t I share my outlook? Because it’s not a 5 star review? Because I didn’t decide to hide my name? Had I hid my name behind a fake, would that be better? Would she not still suspect me? Maybe I could avoid legal trouble but My words are the truth. Sorry you disagree but as you’re aware this is my perception of you, to me. 

Guess it was my mistake I thought Google Reviews encompasses all. Allows voice to everyone with an experience - in this case - with the person. 

Maybe set up a Wikipage instead of a Google page for reviews. 

I’m certain she will receive more poor reviews as a doctor. Will she also harass them ? Send cops to their home with a “warning” & threats of being arrested? Will she file an order of protection for every 1 star review? 

It seems to prove my point of putting her reputation first . 

Here’s what I wrote in my review. Copied & pasted. 

Catrina Jean, D.O.

---------->>>>>>>>>>>

Tremendously Terrible diagnosing skills. Can’t pick up on common sense clues to health issues. Pretends to care but couldn’t care less. Googles answers . Extremely! Manipulative! Loves to play victim and act confused & unaware of information told prior. Concerned with reputation over health of others & those in need.

-------->>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I never stated she was my doctor. 

I didn’t lie. 

Her skills are atrocious in my opinion. Which is what this is. An area for people to write their opinions. Their reality of their experience with a person, the restaurant, the business, whatever might it be. This is mine. Sorry you don’t like mine, be better . Why must you constantly trample my voice for your ease? 

If there was anytime to showcase your A+ skillset when you had the chance, you failed miserably & are hiding the medical records which is simply confirmation of everything i’ve mentioned. 

Inviting people to a birthday party does not hide that fact. . Sorry to say. 

You lived with a man for years and called him your husband yet knew none of his family and made no efforts until he passed. Call it a hunch but I sense evil there. Mal intentions for a malpractice needing doctor. 

According to your ill professional opinion, your dying husband did not warrant any official need in the hospital until it was too late. An internal medicine/family doctor couldn’t diagnose symptoms happening in front of her. Working in a hospital i’d hope you’d know when something is out of your scope and when to consult another doctor...So why didn’t you do it for the father of your then 6 year old child? The answer is lack of skill or willful ignorance. Unfortunately, i’m pretty sure it’s the second one. Based on every single interaction and conversation since. 

Disgusting. 

Evidently egregious. 

Outstandingly shameful.

Painting your reputation since his death like a celebrity recovering from a scandal.

Barely Brushing with jail since you took the proper actions to ensure that.

Like a corrupt politician ensuring they win the election.

A true menace to society disguised as a distinguished member. Holding arguably the most vital decision making position possible of life or death. You’d think the answer was always life but apparently not. 

If I finally deemed myself as a writer, a professional review maker, would that suffice? Will that make my words stand? Hold more weight? Is one voice really enough to take you down? Only when it’s the cold hard truth. If I had a bad review on my business, i’d work harder to get more positive reviews, as most businesses do. No doctor for sure has all 5 star reviews. Wondering what makes you special when you’ve already miscalculated? As only 1 of the 2 current reviews, i’d message all my friends and family to also write reviews and flush it out. Attempting to make yourself seem untouchable is unnecessary . I mean all the new family you’ve obtained from your departed husbands side plus your own and even other doctors that you know can’t just write a review? A review is not law. If I can do it, obviously anyone can. If you’re accepting clients as you are per your webpage, ask them to write reviews. Am i confused on why you’ve decided to harass ME for speaking the truth on my experience that you are 100%  aware of? Because you’ve garnered money due on my father’s death to afford a lawyer to attempt to scare me into your submission? 

Well anyways, off to have a marvelous new day full of adventure and new experiences. 

- Cass . 

[wazzupmrstark]

instead of you [part seventeen]

pairing: [best friend’s brother] tom holland x college!reader

summary: you didn’t expect to spend your summer pretending to be your best friend’s girlfriend- then again, you didn’t expect to fall for your best friend’s brother, either.

warnings: swearing, mentions of alcohol +sex

word count: 1.5k

series masterlist

The flight from Naples to Tokyo took fourteen hours, not including the two and a half hour layover in Istanbul, meaning you had sixteen and a half hours to sit in awkward tension-filled silence next to Sam. The tension was one-sided, of course, but it was still agonizing to endure.

You had been able to push your anxiety aside during your last day in Italy because it had been so busy. There had been a power outage in the middle of the night, causing everyone to oversleep and miss the ferry for one of your tours that morning. It had been a scramble to get back on schedule and do as much as possible with the time you had left. The boys had been hungover and their parents were tired of wrangling them. You had dozens of photos on your camera roll of Sam and Harry bickering when they were supposed to be posing for a nice picture, and even more of Tom flicking them off. 

But now you were stuck alone with your thoughts, unable to use distraction as a means to escape. You tried reading your book, but found yourself unable to concentrate on the words on the page. After staring at the same paragraph for over fifteen minutes Sam noticed and asked if you were okay and you finally decided to call it quits. 

You almost wished the Hollands hadn’t scheduled in a day and a half to adjust to the time zone change. You’d rather exhaust yourself with the nonstop tourist bullshit than have to cope with the reality that you had gotten off to thoughts about your best friend’s brother. Not to mention living with the secret that the same best friend’s brother had kissed you not long before that. 

If Sam noticed anything was off, he didn’t mention it. He probably chalked it up to lack of sleep, or perhaps was too tired himself to care. 

“Which one of us do you think will be randomly selected in customs today?” Harry asked, stretching his arms above his head. 

You were standing in the aisle waiting to deplane, placing bets on who’d get searched by border agents this time. Somehow each time you traveled to a new place one of you was always chosen to get pat down or have your carry-on searched. Tom had yet to be the lucky winner, and you suspected it had something to do with his celebrity status. 

“Y/n,” Tom answered easily. “She has the U.S. passport.”

You rolled your eyes. “Like England has a squeaky clean record with Japan.”

“At least we didn’t-”

“Bro, you can’t say the b word on a plane,” Harry interrupted.

“Even when the plane’s on the ground?”

Sam shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”

“Whatever,” Tom continued. “It’s definitely going to be y/n.”

-

“Would you mind stepping out of line, ma’am?” 

You sighed, not even bothering to look back at the boys. You already knew they were grinning like idiots and you didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. The agent ushered you to the side behind a glass partition, but not before you heard another agent repeat the same question to one of the Hollands. You smiled to yourself, happy not to be the only one singled out.

Behind the privacy screen another agent greeted you and asked you to take your sweatshirt off, explaining that it was too baggy and needed to be checked. You saw other people in baggy clothes who weren’t getting pulled out of line, but assumed they didn’t have the red flag of “U.S. Citizen” printed on their identification that would be cause for any additional suspicion. You complied with the agent’s request and pulled your sweatshirt off for them to further inspect.

You were glad you’d worn a sports bra underneath your sweatshirt because you usually didn’t wear anything underneath them. As soon as your head was out of the pullover you immediately met by Tom’s polite smile. 

He averted his eyes as soon as he saw you, pausing his conversation with the official to mumble a quiet ‘sorry’ to you as he was shown to the spot next to yours. 

You zoned out as they spoke, only aware of him again when he started unbuckling his belt. You caught his eye this time. 

“Forgot to take it off,” he explained.

“Sweatshirt’s too loose.”

You both faced forward as the customs officials proceeded through the motions. You were stuck standing there half-naked with your arms wrapped around your chest self-consciously while an agent pat Tom’s legs down. 

“Dad said we can meet them at baggage claim,” Tom said after a few moments of silence between the two of you. “They went on without us.”

“Okay,” you squeaked back in response. 

You knew it wouldn’t take long, but it still made you nervous to be alone with Tom. Sam was like a safety blanket, or a buffer between you and him and without him you were afraid it would be painfully awkward. 

The woman handed you your sweatshirt back and you had to wait for Tom outside of the screening area. He joined you a minute or so later.

“They find any dirt on you?” you asked from where you were leaning against the wall across from the exit. 

“Nope, you?”

“Yeah, actually I’m in custody right now. Can’t believe you missed the handcuffs.”

“Man, what’d they get you for?” 

“Identity theft,” you sighed. 

“Damn, that’s a bummer,” Tom replied, false sympathy rolling off his words. 

He cocked his head in the direction the rest of his family had went, indicating that you should get going, and held out a hand to pull you upright. You took it hesitantly and let him help you. 

“I was actually hoping you could bail me out?” you went on, continuing with the bit. 

Tom made a sound through his teeth and grimaced. “I’m kinda broke right now.”

“Aren’t you an actor?”

“Sorry, but I think you have me confused with someone else.”

“No, you’re definitely the guy!”

“You’re thinking of Tom Hiddleston,” he insisted.

“Remember that IOU you gave me? I’m cashing it in now.”

“That’s not how it works!” 

You laughed. “No, but if I ever actually get arrested I’m using my IOU to get you to bail me out of jail.”

“I don’t think that a kiss and getting bailed out of prison are comparable, but I didn’t put any conditions on that postcard, did I?”

“Nope!” You smiled happily.

“Well that’s on me, so...”

You took the shuttle together to the other side of the airport where the rest of the Hollands were waiting and finally found them with all of your luggage at the furthest carousel from the entrance. 

“It’s about time!” Harry yelled over the crowd as soon as he saw you. 

Sam grinned when he saw you and you couldn’t help but grin back. He wrapped an arm around you instinctively and you relaxed into his shoulder, relieved to be with him again. It hadn’t dawned on you until that moment just how attached you were, but you didn’t have time to dwell on it because the other Hollands were all looking at you expectantly.

“Did everything go okay?” Nikki asked. 

Tom nodded. “They made y/n strip, but it was uneventful otherwise.”

You pursed your lips, cheeks burning. “It was just my sweatshirt!” you hissed to Sam. 

“Yeah, but you never wear anything under your sweatshirts!” Sam hissed back.

“I had a bra on this time.”

“Oh, so it was just another night at the bar for you?” You wrestled yourself out of Sam’s grasp at that and glared. “Am I wrong?”

Sam’s dad cut in before you could respond. He had a habit of calling “family meetings” in the middle of public spaces to finalize plans and get everybody on the same page, which was always an experience. 

“Alright, gather up, gang!” he said, beckoning you all closer. “So we’ll be staying at... this hotel,” he explained and turned his phone around to show you the name of it. “And the thing is, we have two rooms to share between the six of us. One for your mother and I, and another for you four.”

“What?” Sam asked. “You’re going to make us stay with them?”

“I thought we were getting three rooms like every other time,” Tom chimed in.

“We were meant to, but I made a mistake when booking it,” Dom clarified.

“How?”

“The entire website was in Japanese, Sam. I don’t know Japanese!”

“Dad, Google has a translate webpage option!” Harry groaned.

“Well no one told me that while I was booking this entire trip by myself!”

You traded a look with Tom, who looked just as panicked as you felt. But it would only be for a week. You would find a way to manage. You didn’t really have any other option.

“I’m sure it’ll be fun,” Sam tried, forcing a smile.

“That’s the spirit!” Dom cheered. “We’ll make it work.”

sorry she’s short this week :( but lmk what you think i always appreciate feedback!!

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[arty-shadow-morningstar]

Graveyard Siblings (4)

I am sorry for not posting in a while. School is a total bitch. Here is part 4 of a fic that is not a fic.

[Masterlist]

(Part 1)(Part 2)(Part 3)

-------

Tall Marinette.(I admit I might be projecting a little here.)

One day, she took out something from someplace high and the whole family realized that ‘holy shit when did you get so tall?’

Bonus if Jason comes back from a long mission and had a wtf moment because she was wearing 6-inch-heels and met his eyes with them on.

“Pixie?!”

------

You know how Bruce has the identity of Matches Malone to infiltrate the Gotham Underground.

While Jason does the drug deals more street crime stuff, Maria uses an excuse of being the representative for Red Hood excuse to mingle with the rich people who does crime on the side (Penguin), she uses it to go to black market auctions and buy some of the lost miraculouses which got into the hands of black market dealers.

Jason knows about it and acts as her ‘bodyguard’ anytime he can or sends one of his henchmen to be one with a death threat if she gets a single scratch on her.

Bruce is unaware of this. Or is he?

------

Mari helps with running WE since she is a little less busy with the vigilante side of things.

It started with Tim panicking about deadlines and Mari offering to help, to Bruce and Tim bullying the board to have her as co-CEO.

She has to be that and head of Afterlife. So she is very busy. Doesn’t know about what comes next….

------

Somehow the class comes to Gotham for a trip. It has been 3 years since her death.

Mari has changed her appearance since the day she left Paris. She has highlights in her hair after a ‘sibling bonding day’ with Jason. Her hair is kept short for convenience and not in pigtails. Along with her tall height and more confident aura, she is almost unrecognizable.

She rides a motorcycle too.

The class waits in the lobby for the tour and in walks this badass woman with aviator sunglasses, leather jacket and designer clothes which was all MT brand, making a lot of people swoon.

She takes off her glasses and walks past the class. Checking stuff on her phone and sipping coffee in her other hand.

She seems familiar but they couldn’t figure out why. (All except Chloe, Alix and Felix who are snickering in the background.)

Lila sees her and comments on how she must be a criminal with the way she dresses. (Lila internally freaks out because were her eyes messing with her? Because she looked a little like Marinette. Also jealous of the new arrival for stealing all the attention.) Alya takes the bait and calls security to ‘arrest’ her.

They just laugh. The class doesn’t understand, speaking in confused French.

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

“I am Maria Todd-Wayne, also known as designer MT. CEO of Afterlife and co-CEO of the very company you are in. I am allowed in here. Don’t judge a book by its cover.” she said in perfect French.

“But Lila told us you can’t speak French.”

“Who?”

“Lila Rossi, your friend. She told us that you and MT were dating.”

“Me dating myself. Okay I love myself because self-love is a thing but that is a whole other level. MT are my initials. Anyone who has a brain could have figured that out or at the very least do a Google search. I am not sure where your friend got that notion.”

“Hey, Bean, come on. We have a long day ahead of us.” Tim reminded her.

“Goodbye but cease the rumours or you would be escorted off the premises.”

As they rode up the elevator, “Tim, why are they here?”

“They are the lucky winners of the Wayne Enterprise Young Prodigies Contest. Why, Maria?”

“Lucky, huh.” She muttered under her breath. She might as well tell him. They are the Bats and they will find out anyway. “They are from my old class, the one you know…”

“Oh. Want me to send them back? I can do that if they are making you uncomfortable.”

“Nah. Too much to deal with. And it is unfair to send them back over a petty grudge. Besides, I could have some fun.”

“Anything that Bruce and I should be worried about?”

“I swear no killing. Just because Jason came back from the dead, hell-bent on killing. Doesn’t mean I am too.”

“Cool, just don’t do any property damage or traumatize our employees.”

“I might need you to erase some footage later and tell Bruce about this.”

“Some brownies, my favourite coffee cake, the ‘special’ brew and you have yourself a deal.”

-----

So basically she just showed up around where the class was ‘by coincidence’.

Talk to a few people and take them out of earshot of the rest of the class.

End the conversation by saying a few things only they and her would know. Insides jokes and secrets. (I pick her old childhood friends like, Nino, Kim and maybe Sabrina)

Uses Trixx to turn into a walking dead version of her 15-year old self and disappears as they freak out about how she knew that secret/story.

Freaks them out further by appearing again in front of the whole class and pretending not to know their previous conversation.

Mari manages to get Lila alone.

I should also say that Lila thought that her curse was making her see MT as Marinette.

It terrifies Lila when she finds out that MT is actually Marinette, not dead but alive after all this time and apparently living the high life she wanted. This fact made the Italian swell up with jealousy.

“I hope you are not lying about me again, Lila Rossi. Like you always do.”

“What do you want with me? I swear I didn’t say anything else about you.”

“Aw, Lila. Don’t recognize me?”

Maria flickers and Ladybug is in her place and later, the Marinette that appeared in her bedroom and back to normal.

“You! How? Why are you here? Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“Why not? I mean you did take away nearly all my friends, my parents and made my life a living hell. If you think about it, I am just repaying you the same favor. How are the others? Treating you well?”

“What did you do to me, you bitch?”

“I just put a curse on you. The ghosts of your past will haunt you until you stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop Lying, Liar. They all feed and grow in power from your lies. I wonder what would happen in a few years if you kept this up.”

“You think you can get away with this. This is war and I have already beaten you once.”

“Oh Rossi. This isn’t a war. It’s a death sentence.” With that she disappears.

Lila tries to tell her class that MT is actually Marinette. She is met with crazy looks. Some of them look like they want to believe her but don't because they don’t want to look crazy too.

Oh. Adrien wasn’t on the trip because his mother didn’t want him to go to the crime capital of America although the crime rate has gone down a little due to Hellbat curing some of the city’s bad energy..

Right after Lila told the class about MT, Scarecrow came to steal some Wayne tech and the class got caught in the crossfire. So later, it was brushed off as Lila seeing things due to the fear toxins.

-----

Joker made the mistake of kidnapping her. Once was enough to never try that again.

(It involved the use of nearly all of the Miraculouses, old and new. He was thoroughly humiliated at the end of it and his picture by the time Hellbat was done with him was on the Batfam’s Christmas Card. Like I said she doesn’t kill but making them beg for death was okay.)

It coincided with Jason’s Birthday and the video of the incident was ‘the best birthday present ever.’ The uncensored version was watched at the next undead siblings bonding day. Damian included.

After hearing a few rumours about what happened, most criminals were glad for Hellbat’s rare appearances. (which happens once a month and during really busy time of the year)

There was a time where Penguin was carrying out one of their plans and when Hellbat showed up, all of their thugs surrendered instantly. (No Batman did not pout at the fact that this French girl was more imitating than him.)

Scarecrow used his newest batch of fear toxin on her during the first year after she died.

He was astounded to see her still standing and she later proceeded to beat the crap out of him while being under the toxin’s influences.

He has tried to stay out of her way since then.

She saw Scarecrow as Hawkmoth and said a lot of things in French which scared everyone because she said it with so much hate, anger and in a very menacing tone that everyone is like ‘I am not touching this.’

It took Red Hood and Nightwing to restrain her from further beating Scarecrow up.

He was one of the people who sympathised with the Joker after the Incident.

The next was Riddler being so arrogant in his plans and managed to get Hellbat and Spoiler into a death trap.

“You know I have a few regrets in life. And my final one is that I got captured and am now going to get killed by a walking fashion disaster.”

“Hey! I made this myself. I will have, you know.”

“You have a brilliant mind but no sense of fashion at all. When I get out of here, I am going to burn that thing with you in it, for your crimes against fashion.”

“What is wrong with it?”

Cue a lot of roasting of Riddler’s costume and Spoiler adding more fuel to the fire.

They manage to escape while Riddler is crying on the floor, having an existential crisis.

The thing was no one knows why Riddler was silent the entire week after encountering Hellbat and crying when anyone mentions it.

They now think Hellbat is the scariest one in the Batfamily, second to Batman and tied with Black Bat/Orphan.

The few who find out what really happened in the warehouse that night. Blackmail material on the Riddler.

Three ( four if you count Penguin) of Gotham’s biggest villains of the Rogues Gallery scared of Bats’ newest addition. Hellbat was not someone they wanted to mess with.

---------

Magic crisis stuff. Like a world ending event thing. Dr. Fate says they need the Miraculous jewels but the last mention of them had been in Paris a few years ago and had vanished since then.

Costantine looked at Batman. “You know who you have to call.”

Batman calls Hellbat. Who hasn’t been introduced yet to the JL.

“Ah. Bats. Not that I question your authority or anything but how can your newest ‘ward’ help us?”

She takes off her helmet and reveals her face and more importantly, her earrings.

Tikki comes out of her hiding place.

“I am the current Guardian of the Miracle Box and wielder of the Ladybug miraculous during Hawkmoth’s reign in Paris a few years ago. Any other Questions?”

“Oh great Guardian. Tikki. It is an honour to meet you.”-Wonder Woman, who else.

“You too, Princess Diana. Pass on my regards to your mother.”-Tikki

A huge face-off and the big evil is defeated.

WW asks abt HM and gives a horrified face at the end of her story. Nearly everyone who eavesdropped on the conversation was.

"Forgive me, Guardian for not aiding you in your hour of need.”

“It’s okay. I understand that there are other crises, world-ending ones that JL have to take care of. I am better now. Mostly.”

“I doubt it with those revenge schemes I found lying around. But she is getting there with her therapist.”-Batman

“I hate you, Dad.”

“Did you just call him Dad?”

“No….”

“Do you see me as a father figure?”

“I see you as a nuisance with how nosy you are with my personal business. So you are more of a bother figure.”

“I see you as part of the family too, Daughter.” (Got that reference anyone?)

“Jason was the one who adopted me.”

“Legally you are adopted by me.”

Maria with Pikachu surprised face because nobody told her that. “My life is a lie.”

-------

(Part 5)

[black-paraphernalia]

A CONVERSTATION TO THE STATMENT IN PART 1 

OF BLACK PARAPHERNALIA PSA REPLY to the inbox message (BP is replying to sections this is the 2 section statement) for the entire message go to part 1 of the Black Paraphernalia PSA

“  I don't understand is that when a person gets shot from being pulled over by a cop why is it always the guy screaming waving his arms running back to the car why can't he just get pulled over put his hands on the wheel and stay calm I've been driving for 30 years and I got pulled over three dozen four dozen times and I've never gotten a ticket   “ by  jerseyee blogger 

(Hmm lest take a guess maybe jerseyee is white man or a white women?)

@jerseyee Here is a thought, try to opening your mind and google thousands of videos of the police brutality placed on the black community maybe you will get an understanding. The sad thing we can not google thousands, nor hundreds, not ever an few of white people getting humiliated or killed during a traffic stop. Hell you don’t even see the crazy mass shooter killing up everyone get shot. They get walked out without a scratch and some ever get burger and fries. 

 THIS WAS A LT MEDIC IT THE UNITE STATES ARMY SERVING FOR ALL AMERICAINS EVEN THE VERY POLICE THAT PEPPER SPAYED HIM.

The police (not all but the ones who participate in this type of behavior only see black skin - not a Doctor, not a Lawyer, not a Professional Athlete, not a rich man, a poor man, or a baker man. They only see a thief and Black person  who have stole their jobs, their women, their county the way it was in the WS foot patrol feeble minds.

THEY DO NO SEE AN EQUAL HUMAN WITH EQUAL RIGHTS!  TO BE TREATED AS A PERSON WITH ALL THE CIVIAL RIGHTS AS ANYONE REGARDLESS OF THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN.

I DID NOT POST THE THOUSANDS OF BLACKS THAT WAS MURDERED BY THE HAND OF THESE RACE SOLIEDERS MASQUERADING AS POLICE OUT OF RESPECT OF THE FALLING AND THEIR FAMILIES.    

BUT HERE ARE SOME OTHER EXAMPLES TO DISPELL YOUR COMMENTS

Police mistake black teen riding with white grandmother for robbery suspect

Bodycam footage shows Iowa cop allegedly racially profile driver

New York Post Officer relieved of duty after violent arrest caught on camera

Reform: Officers Who Detained 6-Year-Old At Gunpoint 

Sued Under New Law | The Beat With Ari Melber

DISCLAIMER FOR ALL THE ABOVE YOUTUBES VIDEO’S USED

Please come back for part 4 of Black Paraphernalia’ reply

THE SECOND COPY AND PASTE OF JERSEYEE INBOX MESSAGE BELOW

“ I act cool and I make them feel okay not threatened but these assholes get pulled over and right away they were waving their arms screaming going underneath the seat what the f*** do you expect the police officer to do regardless if these black white or anything else if you stay calm you'll make them come if you act like a nut job you're going to make them nervous”                      by Jerseyee Blogger

Black Paraphernalia Disclaimer - Videos from YouTube

[fangirlinsweden]

Just One Kiss Part 1

Part 1: I Can’t Say No To You

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader

Warning: Swearing, Mention of Child Abuse, mention of death, accidents, and blood

Word Count: About 3 800 words

Summary: You have been suspended from work and do not know what to do with yourself. Then in just a matter of hours, you find yourself on a plane to Montana to stay with people you have never met before. And as if that is not enough one of the men you are supposed to get to know is handsome enough to make your knees shake.

A/N: I do not know anything about the professions that are detailed in this story. I have googled most things I did not know and therefore there can be some inconsistency.

English is not my first language, so there will be mistakes.

And a big thank you to the amazing @dreamcatchernightsky not only for being a great support and helping me stay motivated. but also for making the amazing dividers for this story!! You are the best!

I also want to give a big thanks to @banditthewriter @kaunis-sielu and @maw000 for their support!

And lastly a big thank you to the incredible Cat for being my beta reader!

The words "You are suspended” echoed in your head as you were walking out of the hospital. Your workplace. Brock’s face, when he had told you, had been smug and you wished you could have beaten that look off his face, but you were already in a whole lot of trouble. How were you supposed to know that the man, Alexander Pierce, you had tried to get arrested for abusing his son was some high and mighty person on the hospital’s board. Not that that would have made any difference - you still would have reported him. But now you stood here suspended without pay. For a month. Even though you knew you eventually would be fired. It was just a matter of time. You already knew that nobody would stand up for a nurse. If it had been a doctor, then maybe, but not a nurse. Many did not think nurses were worth anything and that made you angry. Nurses were the backbone of hospitals. Sure, doctors were needed, but nurses were also needed, even though many people did not believe so. Let’s just hope that the kid got the help he needed and could get away from his father. Another thing that annoyed you was that Brock was getting his way. He had wanted you fired since the moment you had turned down his advances on you. Or no, not the first seven times, but the eighth time when you had threatened to go HR and report him, after that he had wanted you gone. But there was no way you would date a sleazy doctor who made belittling comments on people's bodies as well as sexist jokes. What were you supposed to do now? You looked around. Going back to an empty apartment did not appeal to you so you took out your phone and called your best friend. Natasha, or Nat as all her friends called her, answered on the first ring. “Hiding in one of the patient rooms again?” she asked instead of a greeting. You sighed and before you could answer she asked you what was wrong. “Can I come to your work?” You shifted in place. “Yes, come on over,” Nat answered. “I will be there in twenty minutes,” you said, and you hung up. It was now far too Nats office so you decided to walk. To clear your head and hopefully be able to talk about what had happened without getting angrier or without crying. Because crying was what you were feeling to do right now. What were you going to do?

Twenty minutes later you walked into the lobby of the building where Nat worked. The security guard Stan winked at you and you walked to the elevator. You could hear some guy complaining that you could go on without checking in. It made you chuckle. Stan had a soft spot for you. He said you reminded him of his late wife and on slow days he told you stories about their adventurous life together. It usually made you wish for that kind of love and connection. When you arrived on the right floor you stepped out of the elevator and nodded at Rebecca, the receptionist. She smiled and told you to just walk on through. Nat’s office door was open and you saw that she was sitting behind her desk looking at something on her computer. You knocked on the doorframe and she smiled at you. You walked in, closed the door, and took a seat in one of the soft chairs opposite Nat. “Tell me what is wrong,” Nat tilted her head. She always got straight to the point. You took a deep breath and it all came spilling out. About Alexander Pierce’s son’s injuries and how you called the cops. Brock’s suspending you and stating that you had gone against hospital protocols since you only were a nurse and not a doctor. Nat sat there quiet just listening and nodding. When you were finished there was a knock on Nat’s office door. Nat’s assistant Zack opened the door and comes in with two coffees and a box of pastries that he placed on Nat’s desk. “Thank you, Zack,” both of you said and each took a coffee. He just nodded and left the room. “Your assistant is always so quiet.” You turned to Nat and took a sip of the coffee. “I know,” Nat smiled. “He is godsent.” You laughed at this. “But back to the issue at hand.” Nat took out a pen and paper. “What are you going to do about your job?” You opened the box of pastries to give yourself a moment. “Y/N,” Nat knew you too well to be fooled. “I don’t know,” you muttered and took out a chocolate eclair. Zack always knew your coffee order and always brought the best pastries. “You could take legal actions against the hospital,” Nat offered. You tilt your head. “I don’t know,” you admitted. “If they fire me, then I might want to do that, but right now… I just don’t have it in me to fight.” Nat nodded but you could see that she was holding something back. “I know you don’t agree with me,” you started to say but Nat holds a hand in the air. “You don’t have to say it,” Nat smiled at you. “But if you want to take legal actions, know that the firm would be happy to take your case.” “What?” You sank a bit down in your chair. “If I talked with my boss, he would say that we will take it on. If that is what you want.” Nat walked around the desk and put a hand on your shoulder. “You are not alone in this. You have me as well as Matt and Foggy on your side. We would take this lawsuit and win it.” “Thank you. I really appreciate it.” You placed your hand on top of Nat’s and squeezed lightly. Nat’s phone rang and she answered after you nodded your okay. “Hey, Steve,” she answered. You looked at her and saw how her shoulders tensed up and then she sighed. “I get that he messed up Steve, but he is just a kid.” Nat walked to the window. She had said Steve, which you knew meant that she probably was talking to her stepbrother or more like ex-stepbrother Steve. Or could a stepbrother, be an ex-brother, or were you stuck with each other for life? Nat sometimes spent the holidays with him, so maybe you should just say brother? Nat was quiet for a while, listening to what was said on the other end. “Of course, he should be punished, but I think that might be a bit too much.” Nat sigh and turned around to her desk again. She pulled out her calendar from some papers. “When is it?” Nat wondered, flipped through some pages of her calendar, and then she hummed. “Yes, we will talk more about this later. I can’t come until at least five days, maybe a week. But I am coming.” Nat nodded at something that was said. “Yes, I want to help. We will figure this out. Bye.” Nat hung up and turned to you. “Was that your step-brother Steve?” You wondered

when you saw the face Nat made at her phone. She nodded and sat down with a sigh. “Problems?” “It’s my other step-brother Peter. He has messed up again,” Nat ran a hand through her hair. “For like the hundredth time this year. It’s a whole mess.” “What did he do?” you asked and Nat sat down with a sigh. “A while back Peter created this website for the ranch, it was something that Steve and he had decided together. But what Peter failed to talk to Steve about was that he also made living on a ranch package available for people to book.” “What? Like, see how it works on a ranch kind of thing?” You tilt your head to the side. “More like try being a cowboy, get to go on a cattle drive, and so on.” Nat typed in something on her computer and turned the screen around. The site was expertly done and the pictures were breathtaking. And not even close to what you were used to. Being born and raised in New York City you had never been out of state and Montana had always been a place you wanted to visit. If it looked anything like the pictures showed, well then it just got knocked up even more on your list of places to travel to. What you missed when you looked at the pictures was Nat’s calculating face. If you had seen that you would have known that you were in for trouble or something that you could not talk yourself out of. “What are you going to do during your suspension?” Nat wondered and it brought you back to the present. You sighed and started playing with your bracelet. “Go to the store and stock up on chocolate and wine. Then lay in bed and watch as many Disney movies that I can,” you almost whispered out, feeling a bit ashamed over your lack of motivation. “And I guess I have a month to find a new job. I just know that Brock will have me fired.” “Why did you never file a complaint against him?” Nat wondered. You sighed again. “He is connected at the hospital and I just never wanted to take the fight or get fired,” you admitted. “But now I have a month to come up with all the ways I will tell him to go to hell when I get fired." “Do you know what you need?” Nat wondered and you shooke your head. “You need tacos and margaritas,” Nat said firmly. You knew that there was no point in arguing so you agreed. “I have a meeting in 10 minutes, but that won’t take a long time,” Nat looked at her calendar. “Meet me at the restaurant in two hours?” You agreed and left her office.

Two hours later you walked into the restaurant. All the staff knew you since this was Nat's and your place, and since you usually stopped by at least once a week for margarita night. Since Nat was not there yet you ordered margaritas for the two of you before you took out your phone to start looking for a new job. After five minutes Nat sat down in front of you and you put your phone away. “What were you looking at?” Nat wondered instead of saying hey. “I was looking for work,” you admit and take a big sip from your margarita. Nat frowned at you and you shook your head. “You know I will probably be fired by the end of this month,” you defended yourself. “And I need a job.” “I think you need a break. So why not take a vacation instead?” Nat sipped on her margarita. “Nat, I am suspended,” you groaned. “I do not have the money to go on a vacation right now.” “What if I pay for it?” Nat smiled and you started to get a sickly feeling in your stomach. “Nat, you can’t pay for my vacation,” you shifted in your seat. “And besides where would I go? Bahamas, Spain, or Italy? No, thanks.” “No, you would stay in the States,” Nat smirked. You tilted your head and just looked at Nat. “And you would be doing me a huge favor.” Nat continued. “Plus there would be a distraction for you as well.” “Doing you a favor and a distraction,” you narrowed your eyes. “What are you talking about?” “I need someone I trust to go to Montana and make sure that Steve and Peter don’t kill each other.” “It can’t be that bad?” you said. “You have no idea,” Nat almost growled. “On the way here I took a call from Steve, then from Peter, and then another from Steve.” Nat took another sip. “Apparently Peter has already taken bookings for the cattle drive as well as the money. 550 dollars per person and 10 people.” “Can’t they just pay the money back to the people who booked it?” You tried to see the problem. “No, Peter took the money and day-traded it,” Nat looked upset. “He is crazy. He lost it, didn’t he?” you said and Nat nodded. “So why doesn’t Steve pay the tourists and help him out of this?” you said and Nat took another sip. “Well, let’s say this is not the only time that Peter has messed things up. It is kind of his thing,” Nat sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Peter is seventeen and thinks everything will magically work out for him. This time he put the money on some company that went bankrupt and now he thinks Steve will just pay as he has done before, and as I have done before. But this time Steve wants Peter to learn his lesson and I agree.” “So you are saying Peter sold a fake cattle drive to tourists and people actually paid?” you wondered. Nat and you looked at each other for a while and Nat's eyes started to cross. At the same time, both of you lost it, which made the staff look over at your table and shake their heads; they were used to your antics. “Where did he get the idea? And who wants a working vacation? Vacations are for resting.” you started laughing again. Nat stopped after a short while. “This is not funny,” Nat said. You continued laughing and Nat laughed some more. “Okay so it is kind of funny, but it is also so wrong. Peter can get in a whole lot of trouble,” Nat tried to keep her game face. “Steve is really mad and Peter is upset and thinks he will get away with it.” “But you have to admit,” you giggled into your hand. “This will be so funny in a couple of years.” “Yeah, I admit. But I don’t think Steve ever will,” Nat said and then the waiter came to your table so you ordered. “I am actually surprised that Steve wanted my opinion on how to handle the situation,” Nat said when the waiter left. “We talked for almost an hour contemplating what to do with Peter. We talked about everything, from military school to actually calling the police.” “What did you settle on?” you wondered. “Something I never thought that Steve would do,” Nat smiled. “On Monday in two weeks morning 10 people are going to arrive at the Rogers Ranch and Steve is going to take them on the cattle drive. Steve is not happy about it. Cattle-drives are what Steve

calls getting back to his roots. He does not do it as most other ranchers do nowadays, with trucks. He does it as they did back in the day on horseback, with a couple of the men working on the ranch, and moves the steers to the pasture. He also takes the less chatty men from the ranch on these things, I don’t think he has ever taken Peter with him and now he needs to bring tourists with him. There will be people who might never have ridden a horse. I believe Steve would rather walk through town naked than do this. But he said that he was going to make Peter go along and do all the crappy jobs and hoping that will teach him a lesson.” “I take it Peter called you to get him out of this mess.” “Yes, but that did not work this time,” Nat said. “But I had to make a compromise with Steve and agree to come along on this cattle drive. Which actually made Steve happy.” “Why?” you knew you were probably putting your nose where it did not belong, but you were curious. “Because I always helped Peter, even when Steve asked me not to,” Nat said as you got your food. “But this time I am on Steve’s side. Peter is almost an adult, he can’t keep messing up like this. We can’t keep bailing him out forever and he needs to own up to what he has done.” “I still don’t know what you want me to do?” you said after eating in silence for a while and Nat gave you a smile. “I need someone to run interference with Steve and Peter until I can go to Montana in a few days, well Monday next week at the most. Someone who can help organize things, since Steve already has his hands full with the ranch and Peter is not to be trusted.” “So basically a babysitter for your step-brother?” you asked. “Yes, and you get a vacation,” Nat said. When she saw your hesitation she continued. “You love animals. You said just a week ago that you missed riding, I promise you will get a lot of riding in on the cattle drive. And Steve is really handsome, as long as he keeps his mouth closed.” “A cattle drive, Nat? That is not really what I had in mind when I said I missed riding.” You knew she would convince you, but at the same time, you needed to make a bit of resistance. For your own sake. You were not a doormat. “Come on, Y/N,” Nat pleaded. “You've been working too much the last year, never taking the time off for anything. And you always loved the outdoors. You can use my frequent-flier miles.” “The outdoors I am used to is a lot different from Montana,” you tried again and Nat looked at you. “Okay,” you said and Nat pumped her fist in the air. You both knew you would cave. “You will have a great time, and Steve is not the only handsome man on the ranch, plus I hear that Steve’s old friend Sam is back in town. He is also very good-looking and a doctor.” “I am done with doctors. And you have always said that you are no match-maker.” You narrowed your eyes on Nat. “What are you trying to do?” Nat just smiled and changed the subject. “I have a flight booked for you tomorrow. Steve will meet you at the airport and drive you to the ranch. Then I will come on as soon as I can,” Nat said and you shook your head. “I just agreed to this,” you groan and Nat winked. “I always knew you would cave,” Nat smiled and continued to eat. You decided to do some last-minute shopping to get yourself some boots for the cattle drive, and that Nat would go with you home to pack. That meant just one margarita.

Back at your shared apartment, you pulled out your suitcase and Nat sat down on your bed. “You will need durable clothes,” Nat said as you put the suitcase beside her on your bed. “I know you don’t have any flannel shirts, but I have some on the ranch that will probably work for you. Steve will let you have your own room, but then we might have to share.” You just shrugged. You lived together now, so sharing a room would not be a problem. “Can you tell me more about how Steve and Peter and you are family?” you asked. “I know some, but I also know I am missing things.” “You know that Steve and Peter are not my brothers by blood,” Nat states, and you nod. “Well, Peter is kind of a late child to Joseph and Sarah Rogers, Steve’s parents. Sarah died just hours after Peter was born, complications by birth. It devastated Joe and the town kind of gathered to help him raise his boys. Steve was only thirteen, but from what I heard he grew up fast. Five years later Joe went on his first vacation. He went with a couple of friends and he met my mother. They fell in love fast and got married within a month. So we moved to the ranch. I was fourteen and suddenly had two brothers. Steve was eighteen years living at the ranch working hard but heading to university to study. The plan was all along that he would take over the ranch after his father. But no one knew that it would happen so fast. Four years later my mother and Joe died in a car crash. I was at university and Steve was twenty-two years old and fresh out of university had to take over the ranch. Not only that he fought to keep custody over Peter. They had no family left, just the two of them. Or at least no close family, maybe some distant cousins somewhere. Steve had to take over the part as a father as well as keep the ranch going. Peter was just nine and already a handful.” “Wow,” was all you could get out. You knew that Nat’s mother had died in a car crash and that she had no other family, but that was unimaginable. “I have no words to express how sorry I am for your loss.” “I have Peter and Steve,” was all Nat said and she gave you a small smile, then she quickly changed the subject. But did she really? She spends some time with them in Montana every year, and you knew she kept in contact with Peter. With Steve, not so much? One call a month to Steve for as long as you have known her. Sure it was something, but you always thought there could be more than that. You continued to pack and talk about other things, like the number of cattle there were on the ranch and Peter’s different mischiefs through the year. It made Nat laugh and it was nice to hear and see. Your childhood had not been the best, but you never lost your parents at such a young age.

The next morning you were boarding the plane and wondering how this happened. Less than 24 hours ago you were suspended. Now you were boarding a plane to go to Montana and going to keep the peace between a man and a teenage boy, both people you had never met before in your life. It felt surreal. Like something from a movie or a book. Plus you had a four-hour plane ride to obsess over details like. What if Steve were not there to pick you up? And how would you recognize him? You should have asked Nat to see a newer picture of both Steve and Peter. The ones you had in your shared apartment were older. As well as get an address for the ranch or get to know what town was closest to the ranch. All you knew now was that there was about a three-hour drive from the airport to the ranch.

Everything tag list:

@buckysmischief

@allaboutthebooz

@dreamcatchernightsky

[startanewdream]

Captain Potter

Summary: Lily Evans has a secret that the army cannot know and it doesn't help that her captain is trying to be her friend.

Note: So I was watching Mulan and it's Shirtless JP May and this got me into googling shirtless army man, so please enjoy this piece of very much self-indulgence set in another AU. Also, I have no knowledge of military ranks, so bear with me.

Read on AO3 or below:

‘Evans’, the captain calls, and Lily turns to him, slightly afraid as she always feels when she hears her name. Maybe this is the day her secret will be found, this is the day she will be expelled and will fall in disgrace —

But Captain Potter has one of his carefree trademark grins, none at all looking as if he is about to arrest her. He looks at ease, leaning against one of the training posts, arms crossed lazily, watching her with interest shining in his hazel eyes as if she is a puzzle he will understand someday.

Lily truly wishes he won't, so she avoids looking at him directly in the eyes.

‘Captain’, she answers at least, saluting. That seems to amuse him.

‘I have a name, you know’.

‘Hum’, she stops, unsure. Her interactions with the captain have been restricted — well, her interactions with everyone have been limited —, but she has watched him from afar.

He is young and yet he never tries to act bossy with all the other soldiers, never tries to impose himself. He may have a more affinity with three of the soldiers (his friends for a long time, as she gathered), but he tries to treat everyone fairly, encouraging and teaching all soldiers equally, from the weakest of them to the strongest, and it’s not hard for her to see why everyone is willing to follow him into battle. The only one that he hadn’t been able to reach some sort of relationship was with her.

Something that had fit Lily’s plans and worries very well.

‘Captain Potter?’, she tries.

‘I am someone besides a rank’, he suggests.

‘Mr. Potter’.

‘That would be my father. I am James ’, he says at least, as if she is unfamiliar with the name of the youngest captain of the army.

‘I know , but — it would not be proper —’

‘Liam’, he stops her and, just as anytime someone uses that name, Lily wants to look around searching for that person until she remembers her situation. ‘Can I call you Liam?’

‘I’d rather Evans’, she answers, grimacing, and when he looks dismayed, she adds quickly: ‘It’s how everyone calls me. Not… it’s more personal, really’.

‘Fine, Evans’. He grins again. It’s a beautiful smile, so open and inviting, that again Lily has no difficulty understanding the success he makes with all the other soldiers, why their unity is unanimous in praising him. There is something on him that draws people to him — her included. ‘Well, call me James. I can order you to if it will make it more proper’.

Lily lets out a laugh before she stops herself, biting her lips, worried. She shouldn’t laugh; though she can disguise her voice mildly well, her laugh is too thin, too sparkling. It’s not a man’s grave laugh.

Fortunately, the captain doesn’t seem to find anything amiss. He looks just… glad with her reaction.

‘So you are capable of laughing’, he notes teasingly. ‘I had my doubts, you know’.

‘There has never been an occasion, Cap — James ’.

He opens his mouth in an offended expression; it’s so dramatic that, again, she wants to laugh. ‘I beg your pardon? Yesterday, when someone — a very clever someone, I might add — pretended to be shot by an arrow? That was an occasion!’

‘Wasn’t that you?’, she asks, raising her eyebrows. It had been a long tense one minute in which one of the other soldiers, Sirius, had been sure he had shot by mistake the captain and his best friend before James had revealed himself alive, laughing hysterically and showing the fake arrow attached to his badge.

Sirius had punched him, all rank forgotten, but then he was laughing too and everyone thought it was hilarious.

‘It was fun ’.

‘It was terrifying’.

‘Oh, so you were terrified I’d died?’, he jokes, his grin now very smug. ‘And I thought you didn’t like me’.

Lily blushes, lowering her head and hoping he hadn’t noticed it. Truth was she had misjudged him on the first day, annoyed by the way he acted with that captain badge pinned on his chest. He came from a long family of militars, after all, and he was very young, no matter what his father would praise about his grades in military school, so she had truly believed he didn’t deserve to be a captain, that he had only got there for his family name.

In the last few weeks, though, she was forced to admit he was a good captain. He had the vision for it, good ideas, an efficient way of training everyone and, of course, he was a leader.

‘I have nothing against you, sir — James’.

‘I’m glad to know’, he says, sounding earnest. ‘I am worried about you, you know’.

‘Have I done something wrong?’, she asks, surprised, fear involving her again. Lily had taken care of doing all exercises, overworking herself, all to prove that that stupid rule that forbid women in the army did not make any sense. They needed everyone in the fight against Voldemort, after all, and she would not wait patiently, especially when people like her were one of his targets.

‘No, no, you’ve been perfect, really, no one dedicates as much as you’, he assures her. ‘But you don’t socialize. You stay quiet during dinner. You don’t participate in any of the games', he pauses, before adding again dramatically: 'You don’t laugh at my pranks!’

All of it is true. Lily has purposefully gotten away from everyone, afraid they would notice something different about her, though that quiet soldier, Remus, had tried to talk to her. She just feels she can't risk.

‘I do not think it’s time for pranks, James’, she answers, deciding the last point was probably the easiest.

He shakes his head. ‘We are at war, Evans. If we don’t laugh now, we may not laugh after’.

She supposes he is right. And even though he enjoys more pranks than she thinks it’s reasonable, she knows he worries too. More than once, when she is on guard duty, she has noticed the light of his tent is on very late in the night. James may look carefree with everyone else, but he has concerns about the war — and what lies in his shoulder.

‘Your work has been impeccable’, he adds quietly. ‘I just want you to get to know more of your colleagues and for them to know more about you’. Lily presses her lips, hoping her worry doesn’t show on her face. That was all she was trying to avoid. ‘You will need to count on them in the battlefield and they will need to know you have their backs too. And the only way to do that is if we trust each other. Can we do that?’

James is waiting for her answer, his eyes boring into hers firmly, and Lily can’t turn away now. In the light of the morning, with the sun shining on his face, his hazel eyes seem to glint in gold, the pupil barely visible. He has wrinkles on the side of his eyes, and she suddenly wishes they weren’t meeting in the army while she is pretending to be an introverted thin young man.

He seems the kind of guy she would like to meet in college, or to grow up together with, or even in a dancing club with her friends; they would talk and she could be then fully herself, could share with him her witty side and even help him in a prank or two. In that other life she would appreciate how nice and beautiful he is, with that black hair that’s always messy no matter how much he tries to comb, and those hazel eyes that were made for laughing, not to be worried for the war.

But that’s not her life and she is sure that if he ever finds out about her, he will hate her. Somehow, with how much she has learned to admire him in the last weeks, she fears his rejection more than she fears being expelled from the army.

Lily knows she would trust James Potter with her life, knows she would do her duty and die for him if it was needed, and yet she also knows she can't ever tell him  her secret.

So she does what she has been doing best ever since she joined the army.

‘We can trust each other’, she lies.

He beams. ‘Great, Evans! And I thought we could start sharing your mourning runs’. He raises one eyebrow when she looks surprised. ‘I’ve noticed you awake at dawn to run’.

‘I like to train’, she admits. ‘I am… thinner than the others, so I am trying to get fitter’.

‘You look a lot better’, he compliments, touching her arm, where her biceps have been evolving nicely. It’s a pat, a soft brush, and yet it sends shivers down Lily’s spine; his hand is warm . ‘Mind if I join you?’

She hesitates just a little. ‘I will stay quiet’, she warns him. ‘I like to think while I run’.

‘Works for me. And if you want to share a thought or another, well, I’m here, Evans’.

He winks at her, again so friendly that she turns her eyes away, wishing she could tell him the truth. But she can’t, so she presses her lips, ties the ribbon around her hair so the bun stays in place, and kneels to make sure her shoes are tied. Then she raises and her heart stops for a full second.

James has taken out his shirt. She knows he is fit — there is no way he can’t be with all the years of training he had — and she has seen before shirtless, but only when she was far away in the line, hoping to get unnoticed as she trained the movements.

Now, it’s only him, his tanned skin glistening under the morning sun, a god coming out of her dreams. She is staring and she knows it, but there is no way she can avoid it; weeks at the army have made her lost a lot of discomfourt around men's body, but this... This doesn't seem fair.

She watches the muscles in his arms, his biceps far more evident than hers will ever be, and it suddenly occurs to Lily that she would like very much to feel them around her, involving her, holding her. There would be only benefits in hugging him, she realizes, as her eyes move to his torso, enjoying the firmness of his chest and the muscles in his abdomen, a six pack that seems drawn perfectly. In his arms, she would glide her hand through his chest, would place a kiss over his heart and then she would raise her head and they would be so close —

And then James stretches his arms, raising them above his head, and she notices the hair on his torso, a few patches near his chest that shine with a few drops of sweat she wouldn’t mind drying, and then the darked patch over his abdomen, in a path that goes on vanishing inside…

When she finds herself staring at his pants, Lily decides she has crossed more limits that it's reasonable.

She turns, all her concentration in avoiding glancing at him again, though she feels it's fruitless. The sight of him seems to be recorded in her mind. He will appear on her dream, she is sure of it.

‘Everything all right, Evans?’, he asks, right behind her, and she jumps. 'You look red'.

Lily knows it; her face is hot, burning even before she has started to run, and she won’t fool herself pretending she doesn’t know the reason.

‘I'm fine, let’s go’, she answers quickly, heart racing in her chest. This was a horrible idea; mourning runs with her very gorgeous hot captain will do no good for her keeping her secret.

She sprints without warning, but he catches up with her easily. She keeps her eyes ahead. Don't look, don't stare, don't ogle.

‘There is something special about you, Evans’, he declares, the run not seeming to disturb his breathing. ‘I will find out one day’.

[antiporn-activist]

The Children of Pornhub

Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Dec. 4, 2020, New York Times

This article contains descriptions of sexual assault. It’s also really long.

Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.

Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from its website. So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again.

“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.

“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life,” Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer — but those old videos hang over her.

“I may never be able to get away from this,” she said. “I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.”

“You type ‘Young Asian’ and you can probably find me,” she added.

Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search. That doesn’t count videos that show up under “related searches” that Pornhub suggests, including “young tiny teen,” “extra small petite teen,” “tiny Asian teen” or just “young girl.” Nor does it necessarily count videos on a Pornhub channel called “exploited teen Asia.”

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”

It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.

Pornhub declined to make executives available on the record, but it provided a statement. “Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community,” it said. Pornhub added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site “is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”

II.

At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.

The boy was suspended, but Fleites began skipping class because she couldn’t bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, and Fleites switched schools. But rumors reached the new school, and soon the videos were uploaded again to Pornhub and other websites.

Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.

Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.

As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.

At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, “I’m not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body,” she told me.

Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn’t sure how to get there. “It’s kind of hard to go to school when you’re living in a car with dogs,” she said.

“I was dumb,” she acknowledged, noting that she had never imagined that the videos could be shared online. “It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it’s crazy how it turns into something so much bigger.

“A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake.”

III.

The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.

Google returns 920 million videos on a search for “young porn.” Top hits include a video of a naked “very young teen” engaging in sex acts on XVideo along with a video on Pornhub whose title is unprintable here.

I asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to compile the number of images, videos and other content related to child sexual exploitation reported to it each year. In 2015, it received reports of 6.5 million videos or other files; in 2017, 20.6 million; and in 2019, 69.2 million.

Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure. “Eliminating illegal content is an ongoing battle for every modern content platform, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront,” Pornhub said in its statement.

The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- - age.”

Congress and successive presidents have done almost nothing as this problem has grown. The tech world that made it possible has been mostly passive, in a defensive crouch. But pioneering reporting in 2019 by my Times colleagues has prodded Congress to begin debating competing strategies to address child exploitation.

Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called on the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub. PayPal cut off services for the company, and credit card companies have been asked to do the same. An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down. Twenty members of Canada’s Parliament have called on their government to crack down on Pornhub, which is effectively based in Montreal.

“They made money off my pain and suffering,” an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. “I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall,” she added, weeping as she spoke. “They were laughing.”

Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.

IV.

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Pornhub and Mindgeek also stand out because of their influence. One study this year by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third greatest-impact on society in the 21st century, after Facebook and Google but ahead of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Nominally based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, Mindgeek is a private company run from Montreal. It does not disclose who owns it, but it is led by Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both Canadians, who declined to be interviewed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?

Mindgeek’s moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

“The goal for a content moderator is to let as much content as possible go through,” a former Mindgeek employee told me. He said he believed that the top executives weren’t evil but were focused above all on maximizing revenue.

While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

The moderators fast forward through videos, but it’s often difficult to assess whether a person is 14 or 18, or whether torture is real or fake. Most of the underage content involves teenagers, the moderator I spoke with said, but some comes from spy cams in toilets or changing rooms and shows children only 8 to 12.

“The job in itself is soul-destroying,” the moderator said.

Pornhub appears to be increasingly alarmed about civil or criminal liability. Lawyers are circling, and nine women sued the company in federal court after spy cam videos surfaced on Pornhub. The videos were shot in a locker room at Limestone College in South Carolina and showed women showering and changing clothes.

Executives of Pornhub appear in the past to have assumed that they enjoyed immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms on which members of the public post content. But in 2018 Congress limited Section 230 so that it may not be enough to shield the company, leading Mindgeek to behave better.

It has doubled the number of moderators in the last couple of years, the moderator told me, and this year Pornhub began voluntarily reporting illegal material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After previously dragging its feet in removing videos of children and nonconsensual content, Pornhub now is responding more rapidly.

It has also compiled a list of banned content. I obtained a copy of this list, and it purports to bar videos with terms or themes like “rape,” “preteen,” “pedophilia” and “bestiality” (it helpfully clarifies that this “includes eels, fish, octopus, insects”). Diapers are OK “if no scatophilia.” Mutilation depends on context but “cannot depict severing parts of the body.”

So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like “underage” or “rape,” the company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos. A member called “13yoboyteen” is allowed to post videos. A search for “r*pe,” turns up 1,901 videos. “Girl with braces” turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying “exxxtra small teens.” A search for “13yo” generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.

Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. “Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets” is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.

While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled “Junior High School Girl After Class” and shows what appears to be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just taken down, was labeled: “Beautiful High School Girl Is Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped.”

“They’re making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body,” a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.

In the last few days as I was completing this article, two new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who was suicidal after it went online. I don’t see how good-faith moderators could approve any of these videos.

V.

“It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.”

That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.

Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

“Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?” Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. “You really need a better system. … I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website.”

Nicole’s lawyer, Dani Pinter, says there are still at least three naked videos of Nicole at age 15 or 16 on Pornhub that they are trying to get removed.

“It’s never going to end,” Nicole said. “They’re getting so much money from our trauma.”

Pornhub has introduced software that supposedly can “fingerprint” rape videos and prevent them from being uploaded again. But Vice showed how this technology is easily circumvented on Pornhub.

One Pornhub scandal involved the Girls Do Porn production company, which recruited young women for clothed modeling gigs and then pushed them to perform in sex videos, claiming that the videos would be sold only as DVDs in other countries and would never go online. Reassured that no one would ever know, some of the women agreed — and then were shattered when the footage was aggressively marketed on Pornhub.

Girls Do Porn was prosecuted for sex trafficking and shut down. But those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub; last time I checked, videos of six victims of Girls Do Porn were on Pornhub, which continues to profit from them.

One of the Girls Do Porn women I saw on Pornhub is now dead. She was murdered at 20, allegedly by an angry ex-boyfriend who is about to go on trial. I’m not disclosing her name because she should be remembered as a vibrant college athlete, and not for a sex video that represented her most mortifying moment.

VI.

So what’s the solution?

I had expected the survivors to want to shut down Pornhub and send its executives to prison. Some did, but others were more nuanced. Lydia, now 20, was trafficked as a child and had many rape videos posted on the site. “My stomach hurts all the time” from the tension, she told me, but she doesn’t want to come across as hostile to porn itself.

“I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’” Lydia told me. “It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’”

Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.

Jessica Shumway, who was trafficked and had a customer post a sex video on Pornhub, agrees: “They need to figure out who’s underage in the videos and that there’s consent from everybody in it.”

I asked Leo, 18, who had videos of himself posted on Pornhub when he was 14, what he suggested.

“That’s tough,” he said. “My solution would be to leave porn to professional production companies,” because they require proof of age and consent.

Right now, those companies can’t compete with mostly free sites like Pornhub and XVideos.

“Pornhub has already destroyed the business model for pay sites,” said Stoya, an adult film actress and writer. She, too, thinks all platforms — from YouTube to Pornhub — should require proof of consent to upload videos of private individuals.

Columnists are supposed to offer answers, but I struggle with solutions. If Pornhub curated videos more rigorously, the most offensive material might just move to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries. Yet at least they would then not be normalized on a mainstream site.

More pressure and less impunity would help. We’re already seeing that limiting Section 230 immunity leads to better self-policing.

And call me a prude, but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

I don’t see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.

These measures wouldn’t kill porn or much bother consumers of it; YouTube thrives without downloads. Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub, told me that my three proposals are “insanely reasonable.”

The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we prosecute individuals like Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly. But we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children. With Pornhub, we have Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.

[princessmisery666]

Honey Trap - Say My Name (mini series) - Part 3 of 4

Series Summary: Rick goes undercover to put an end to a crime syndicate. He makes the rookie mistake of falling for his mark, Ally. Will he go through with it and arrest her along with her family? Or does Amanda Waller have ulterior motives, as always?

Part 3

Summary: It seems Ally is no longer useful, and Waller needs to get rid of her. Can Rick save her?

Warnings: fluff, angst (what is wrong with me? Why can’t they just be happy? *cries in fangirl*), lovers to enemies, enemies to lovers, betrayal, manipulation, canon type violence.

W/C: 4.2k

Characters: Rick Flag, metahuman!OFC, Bruce Wayne (Batfleck).

Pairing: Rick Flag x OFC (Ally).

Bingo: @anyfandomangstbingo Square Filled: Shootout

Betas: @deanwinchesterswitch // @cockslut-padalecki // @wonder-cole

Graphics: pics found on google, title card made by me, divider by @firefly-graphics

Master Lists: Series // Main // AF Angst Bingo

Honey Trap

The birds happily chirped away in the trees, and Rick watched them fly back and forth, only mildly jealous of their carefree existence. Though laying at the edge of the lake on an old dusty sun lounger he’d found tucked away in an old decaying shed, with the midday sun warming his bare chest, wasn’t all that bad.

Static crackled in his earpiece, disturbing the bird’s song. “Honey Trap is on the move.”

He hated the code name Waller had assigned to Ally. It made her sound like some kind of hooker when in fact, it was Waller using her for political and professional gain.

“Honey Trap is leaving the kitchen via the east door toward the lake.”

Though he disliked the nickname, it was helpful to know she was headed his way. At least he had some time to try and prepare himself for another devastating conversation. Their relationship, understandably, was tense. But there was an easy fix; all Ally had to do was touch him, and she’d see that his feelings for her were real. Yet her stubbornness was winning out, and she was allowing her anger to make short-sighted judgments.

He watched her walk the cobblestoned path to the dock, a bottle of water and a novel in hand. He couldn’t see the title, but he knew it would be some fantasy thriller she’d found in the library. Her step faltered when she noticed him and her eyes blazed a path down his naked torso.

She reacted how she always had, swallowing thickly, the memories that ran through her mind written all over her face in the way she pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. Her eyes lingered on the healing bullet wound, courtesy of her brother, and the question hung on her slightly parted lips. He held his breath, a tiny shred of hope that she’d be concerned enough to ask. But she clapped her mouth closed with an audible pop.

“Why are you still here?” she asked, continuing her path to the deck chairs.

He spread his arms wide, flexed his pecs purposely, and smiled smugly in the knowledge he still had an effect on her. “I’m on vacation.”

It wasn’t exactly a vacation, not with the earpiece in, listening to the guards play a round of would you rather, but given a choice to be anywhere else in the world; a beach in the Bahamas, surfing in Australia, climbing a mountain in the Indies, he’d chosen to be there.

“Another lie,” she scoffed, “but are you trying to convince yourself or me?”

“I’m not trying to convince anyone,” he said, smiling widely, interlocking his hands behind his head and leaning back, “I’m off the clock.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To do what I’ve been trying to do from the moment I figured out what Waller was up to, protect you.”

“Protect me from who?” she asked, exasperated. “Waller? Batman? You? I don’t need protection.”

“Your current situation says otherwise.”

“I agreed to my current situation. I’ve been a puppet on a string my whole life, used for my abilities. The puppet master’s changed, that’s all.”

“Colonel Flag, sir.”

Rick turned a raging glare on the culprit of the interruption, “what?”

“I have some people at the gate,” the soldier, clad in black started, “said they’re here to dress Miss Knowles for the fundraiser.”

“Fundraiser?” Ally asked, a slight panic set in her eyes, looking to Rick for answers.

“Amanda’s pulling on those strings,” he explained through gritted teeth. “You got your very own squad to glam you up for the party.”

The glam squad had done a fantastic job; Ally felt like a million bucks. The blue satin dress they had put her in was something straight off a New York runway, and the heavier make-up they’d applied made her feel like a different person, which she guessed was the point. Waller needed to be discreet; if anyone recognized Ally, she would be useless for future operations.

Ally stood at the end of the bar, Rick was on the opposite end, and she fretted that his gawking would draw attention to them. The glam squad had done a fine job on him too. He fit in perfectly with the rich and famous clientele, clean-shaven, hair styled, a blue suit that made those phenomenal eyes pop.

His lips moved, and after a short delay, his voice sounded in her concealed earpiece. “You look nervous.”

“And you look like a stalker; quit staring at me.”

“I can’t,” he said, “one, you look breathtakingly beautiful, and two, I’m your protection detail. It’s kinda my job to stare.”

She rolled her eyes, sighing, “it’s gonna be a long night.”

“Won’t be that long if you don’t relax. Someone will figure out you’re up to something.”

Ally shook her arms at her sides, trying to shake off her nerves. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done something like this before. She’d coerced and seduced men and women before to gain knowledge. Perhaps the nerves came from being watched.

“Distract me, please,” she asked Rick, “tell me a story or something, give me something else to think about.” She met his eyes across the bar and gave him a small pleading smile.

“I’m sorry, I betrayed you,” he said without missing a beat.

“Not that,” she groaned, “not here, not now.”

“Well, when and where?” he asked, knocking back his whiskey. “Look, I don’t wanna do it like this, but if this is how I get you to hear me out, then so be it.” He motioned for the bartender and waited until he set down another drink before he continued. “I never meant to betray you, and I tried everything so I wouldn’t have to. But I failed. I should have realized what Waller was up to sooner. I was blindsided by you, though, and honestly,” he huffed a mirthless sigh, “I knew as soon as you knew the truth or Waller knew that I’d figured out her plan, it’d be over. I didn’t want to lose you. I loved June, she taught me what love was, but it was never going to work out. She wanted me to be someone I’m not, but you...you never asked me to be anyone but myself.”

She sipped her champagne, wishing for something stronger to settle her nerves. She called the bartender over, “tequila, please, and keep ‘em coming.”

“I fell for you, Allura Knowles, no tricks or magic,” Rick continued, “I fell in love with your mind; funny, intelligent, kind, and the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and your beauty, on the inside as well as the smoking hot smoke show you are on the outside.”

He paused to finish his drink again, and Ally looked to him while she rolled her eyes and subtly flipped him off as she brought her own glass to her lips. “Asshole.”

Rick chuckled gruffly, “And there it is, the deflection cause you never believe anyone truly loves you, for you. I promise you the only power you had over me was the power to break my heart, and that scared me more than anything I’ve ever faced,” he continued, tragedy and remorse almost choking off his words. “I honestly thought I could convince you to run away with me.” She became the stalker, unable to tear her gaze from him leaning on the bar, speaking into his glass as if the bottom of it held all the answers. “I thought we’d be sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere before I’d have to tell you the truth, but by then, you’d have realized how much I love you, how much I’d sacrificed for you. I used love as a weapon, and that’s maybe the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“Please stop,” she begged, taking another shot of the sour alcohol. Tears stung her eyes, but she wasn’t sure if it was from Rick’s confession or the burning liquor.

“Take it easy,” he advised, turning a sweet smile in her direction, “y’know tequila goes straight to your head; it could be a long night.”

Holding his gaze, she toasted, “to using love as a weapon.” She unceremoniously gulped the third round but almost choked when Rick stood taller, wide eyes staring at something over her shoulder.

He hesitated to take a step or remain where he was, but he met her eyes again, “don’t panic, I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise.”

There was no time to ask what he meant before a warm hand pressed firmly to the exposed skin at the small of her back, and she smelt the familiar cologne before he stepped into her line of sight blocking her view of Rick.

“Bruce,” she gulped.

Bruce smiled, charming and gentlemanly, unlike the debauched fiend he’d been the last time she’d seen him. “Allura Knowles,” he sighed, eyes roaming down to her lips and back again. He kissed her cheek, gentle and polite, but it made her gut twist in fear. He held out his hand, an invitation she was loath to accept, “dance with me.”

Ally stared at his offered hand and noticed a few people close by watching the exchange. Bruce Wayne, Gotham’s ultimate bachelor, asking a random woman to dance was hot gossip, and the longer she contemplated running for the door, the more attention she drew to them.

Rick’s assurance cut through the blood rushing in her ears. “He won’t try anything here. I won’t let him.”

She took Bruce’s hand and allowed him to lead her to the dance floor. She felt eyes on them, and not just Rick’s and the other guards she was sure were milling around somewhere, but everyone in the room wanted to witness the show.

The brute of a man wrapped an arm around her waist and held her other in a professional dancer’s stance. Almost nose to nose, he never lost his enchanting smile. He held her close to his body, and she felt every muscle flex as he led them in a simple dance.

“So I’ve looked into you. You certainly live up to your name, Allura. Do you know what it means?”

“The power of attraction.” she sighed. “Bruce, I’m sorry,” she said, surprised to realize she genuinely meant it. “I promise your secret is safe with me. I’m holed up in some safe house, guards on me twenty-four seven, I couldn’t tell anyone even if I wanted to, and who would believe me anyway?”

“Relax, I’m not mad,” he said and twirled her away from him. A hint of sincerity flashed in his eyes before he spun her back into him. “Well, not at you anyway. I know you’re merely a pawn in Amanda’s game. It was never about me; I know that. She wants your gift.”

“It’s not a gift.”

“It could be,” Bruce explained, “if you used it for good. Tell me why you’re here; who’s the target?”

Ally took a deep breath, conscious of eyes watching and Rick able to hear them, though she pondered why he hadn’t piped up to warn her against disclosing the intended target's name.

“Ally, I can help you,” Mr. Wayne implored, abruptly stopping their dance in the middle of the floor. “But only if you let me. I’m just as powerful as Amanda. I don’t want your gift in the wrong hands, so please, who’s your target?”

“Michael Briggs.”

Bruce’s brow furrowed, and he waited for a beat as if he were considering if she were telling the truth or not. Unexpectedly, he gingerly cupped her face and drew her to him, kissing her lips.

“Motherfucker,” Rick spat, venom oozing from his tone. That confirmed her suspicion, it looked kind and lustful to the outside world, but she felt the tension in it. Bruce was losing patience.

If the shock had subsided sooner, perhaps she’d have thought to use her power to make him leave her alone, but he broke the connection after thirty seconds or so. A few of the spectators audibly swooned and groaned with envy, and Ally was thankful she hadn’t revealed herself by using her abilities.

Bruce’s eyes full of desire and longing locked her to him, and she wondered if acting was a requirement to being a superhero. Under different circumstances, the amorous grin he gave her would have been arousing. Instead, it filled her with dread. It was all a part of his act.

Seductively he ran his fingertips from her shoulder down her arm and interlocked their hands, “Come with me,” he winked and whisked her away.

Ally kept up as best she could and shot a look over her shoulder to see Rick making his way through the crowd to get to her, but as Bruce had said; he had power, and the grand doors to the ballroom opened without a command and closed again just as Rick made it to the edge of the dancefloor. “Ally, no,” he shouted, “fuck, no! Let me through!”

There had been men, clearly secret service or hired muscle, in the hallway, but as the echo of the doors closing faded, they were suddenly alone. Bruce’s act had stayed on the dancefloor, and he not so gently shoved Ally against a wall, hands on her shoulders to keep her in place.

“Who’s the target, Ally?” he asked, “I’m done playing games.”

“Michael Briggs,” she repeated desperately.

“Stop lying!”

Rick cursed and threatened whoever was holding him back from getting to her, and she heard the commotion through the comms, but it was clear he wasn’t having much luck, and she saw no other choice.

“I swear that’s who it is. He’s got something on Waller, something that could get her fired, and she needs to know what it is! That’s all I know.”

“Briggs is in Fiji with his family; everyone knows that,” Bruce growled, “he was never supposed to be here.”

Rick’s labored breath huffed in her ear and the defeated, “Fuck!” blasted in her ear like an alarm.

“Briggs isn’t the target,” Rick and Bruce said simultaneously.

But Rick explained it to Ally, panic seeping into his voice. “You are. You’re the target, Ally! You have to get out of here!”

The ballroom doors flew open, Rick being manhandled by three guys twice his size, struggling against them, managing to knock one on his ass before Bruce intervened. “Let him go,” he demanded, “that’s Colonel Rick Flag; he’s with me.”

Hostility raged while four sets of lungs heaved to catch their breath, and Bruce finally released his hold on Ally. “I’ve got this,” Bruce told the bodyguards, “go back to the party. No one else comes through that door; shoot anyone who tries.”

Rick gave them a smug smile while he straightened himself out, and the obedient soldiers followed orders, returning to the party with a final suspicious look at the three people who remained in the corridor.

“Are you okay?” Rick asked Ally but turned a sneering look at Bruce.

She nodded, physically she was okay, which is what Rick had meant, but she could feel the panic building in her chest. Both formidable men were on edge, and the tension was palpable.

“What’s the plan here?” she wondered aloud, “Waller keeps me at a safe house only to send me to a party full of people to kill me? It doesn’t make sense.”

“You know too much,” Rick explained, “she doesn’t like people having too much power.”

He surveyed the surroundings, looking left and right, figuring out an exit strategy, and formulating a plan. At least that’s what Ally hoped. The only chance of survival she had rested in the hands of the two men standing in front of her. Both of which she had screwed over, figuratively and literally.

“You know her the best,” Bruce questioned, “what’s Amanda’s play here? How would she do this?”

Rick’s tongue sat on his bottom lip, a habit of deep concentration. “She’d want her alone,” he said with a decisive nod, “away from the crowd. Like in a corridor with no witnesses,” he said, chest puffing and stepping forward to put himself between Ally and Bruce.

Mr. Wayne smirked, “I’m here to help, Flag. I’m not the one working with Amanda.”

“I do what I have to do to protect Ally,” Flag spat, nose to nose with the billionaire. “I know all about your team of superheroes, Bruce. Ally would make a nice addition to your band of merry men!”

“I’m not here to recruit her, Colonel,” Bruce said, “and I’m not in the business of using people. I just don’t want her power in the wrong hands.”

“And yours are the right ones?”

“What’s your problem, Flag?”

“You, you’re my problem,” Rick snarled, “running around trying to be some knight in shiny plastic. Some of us live in the real world; we don’t have Mommy and Daddy’s money to fall back on when we get bored of our latest hobby.”

Bruce took a defensive stance, straight back, tensed for anything, and they stood chest to chest, a challenge for the other to make a move, throw the first punch or say something that goaded the other to do so.

“We don’t have time for you two to measure your dicks,” Ally shouted, pushing herself between the men and raising her voice. “Flag, Bruce is right, and I trust him.” she waited a heartbeat for Rick to get over the sting of her confession. “What do you think Waller’s plan would be? If you were in charge of the operation, what would you do?”

“Not here. I’d want a situation I can control, take you somewhere of my choosing.”

“An ambush,” Bruce agreed. “Drive her to a secluded spot.”

“So we can’t trust any of the drivers,” Rick decided, “we have to assume they're all in on it too.”

“I drove myself here,” Bruce explained, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “We can take my car, and I can have a chopper meet us a few miles away, get us off the roads.”

The quiet was eerie, as if the mansion walls knew what lay beyond its doors and were giving Ally a moment of quiet reflection. Rick and Bruce knew what to expect; they’d been in high-stress situations before. Rick had made her take off her heels; at first, she’d thought it was to make their escape as silent as possible, but a lump of dread, as heavy as concrete, dropped in her stomach when she understood it was to aid her in running if it came to that.

Ally had had a somewhat sheltered life; she’d never had to fight or wield a weapon. Though she felt lucky she’d been protected, now she wished she had some skills and weren’t so reliant on Bruce, who led the way, and Rick, who had her back.

They made it through the maze of corridors to the back of the mansion without incident though Ally expected they would. Rick was confident there wouldn’t be any trouble on the house’s grounds; too many uncontrollable variables.

The cars were spread out over a large area beyond the doors. Bruce looked back over his shoulder, hand poised on the handle, “ready?” he asked.

Ally took the deepest of breaths and was suddenly cold. Perhaps part fear and the chill in the vast house. She let go of the breath she held and nodded, “as ready as I’ll ever be.” Bruce turned back to the door, and a shiver ran through her entire body.

“Here,” Rick said, quickly shrugging out his jacket and draping it over her shoulders.

Ally followed Bruce out the doors and was too focused on pulling Rick’s jacket tighter around her arms to notice much of anything else. A nearby conversation came to an abrupt halt, and Ally, still adjusting Rick’s dinner jacket, failed to notice Bruce had stopped mid-stride. In the nick of time, Rick tugged on her shoulder to stop her from colliding with the man.

Her eyes traveled up his back, a sarcastic remark ready on her lips, but even though only able to see the profile of his face, she knew something was wrong. She followed his line of sight to find the source of the hold up.

A group of eleven or so men, dressed in black trousers, white shirts, and ties, flicked cigarettes away and stood to their full height, staring a little too intently at the trio leaving the party so early.

“Evening fellas,” Rick smiled, tipped his head, and pressed his chest to Ally’s back, a subtle ushering her forward when Bruce moved again. “Shit,” he cursed under his breath.

“What?” Ally asked, walking down the three stairs to the cobblestones.

Rick ignored her and instead asked through gritted teeth, “Where’s the car, Bruce?”

“Seventh row, nine cars in,” he said.

“Ally,” Rick started, caution and authority in his tone made him sound very much like the title he carried, a Colonel.

She wanted to look at him over her shoulder but something, instinct or his tone perhaps, told her not to.

Don’t stop.

“When we get to that first row of cars,” he continued, hands firmly on her shoulder, not quite pushing her but keeping her moving forward. “I need you to run, don’t stop for anything. Get to the car.”

She assumed an adrenaline rush would speed everything up, that everything would happen in the blink of an eye, but it did the opposite. Her heart rate accelerated as time slowed. Bruce’s foot leveled with the tire of the first car, and he took off running. Ally followed, stones cutting into her feet, but it barely registered. She saw every stone Bruce’s fleeing feet kicked up; the clanking sound of rocks hitting cars seemed excessive for the few stones that flew about.

Panic pinched her breath more than the exertion of running when the reality dawned on her. It wasn’t stones…

Gunshots. Bullets, not stones, embedding in metal. There was no shouting. The movies always depicted shootouts as being loud shouting and glass shattering. But there was none of that; the men that were shooting were calm and calculated.

Professional.

Bruce, two car lengths ahead, ducked behind a silver Audi. Ally stumbled as she turned to look back, half expecting to see one of the professionals bearing down on her, but only saw Rick barreling toward her, blood dripping from his nose, a motionless body lay ten or so feet behind him. She wondered how she hadn’t heard the fight they must have had.

“RUN!” Rick demanded a millisecond before he fell.

Too far away to help him, Ally froze to the spot and helplessly watched as he crumpled to his knees. He’d barely hit the ground before he looked up and yelled at her to keep going, but he was growing closer. It wasn’t until she was on her knees beside him she registered she’d run back to help him.

“Get up,” she said, with her hands under his shoulders, trying to lift him.

“Ally, you have to go,” Rick told her, twisting to sit on his butt and slump against the tire of the nearest car. “They’re regrouping,” he explained, and it was that that alerted her to the sudden quiet. “They won’t stop. You have to get outta here.”

“So get up,” she pleaded, “let’s go while we still can.”

He pulled his hand away from his gut, just above his left hip, and with the pressure of his hand removed, blood darkened his shirt. “Not an option,” he smiled, rueful and yet sweet somehow.

“Fuck,” she scolded as if it were his fault.

Tears welled in her eyes, and Rick cupped her cheek, bringing her focus from his wound to his eyes. “Worried about me, sweetheart?” he quipped. She sniffed back the tears. It wasn’t the time to fall apart, but she couldn’t find the will to give a snarky response. “I’ll be fine. But you have to go,” he instructed, and in the distance, a car engine roared to life.

Thuds of bullets hitting metal splintered the quiet; only it sounded as if they were ricocheting off.

Rick must have read her mind. “Trust the douchebag to have a bulletproof car.”

“I’m sorry. I was so hurt and scared, and I should never have…I never stopped lov...”

“Don’t,” he said, a fierce determination in his eyes silencing her. “Not like this, not ‘cause you think this is the end.”

A sleek black sports car screeched to a halt dangerously close to the trunk of the one Rick was slumped against, the door opened, and a frantic-looking Bruce yelled, “let’s go!” while bullets pinged off the windshield and open door.

“Come on,” Ally said, feeling as frantic as Bruce looked. “Bruce can get you help.”

“Go!” The Colonel commanded that time. Rick had been buried for the moment, the commanding officer in him taking over and becoming irritated at being disobeyed when she didn’t move. “Ally, go, now.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“You have to.”

“Ally, c’mon,” Bruce said with as much conviction as Rick had.

“Please, go,” Rick pleaded. “Otherwise, all this was for nothing.” He kissed her lips, quick and hard, “I’ll come find you.”

Heavy boots crunched on gravel, getting closer.

“You better,” she said, tears slipping down her cheeks before she crawled as quickly as she could toward the car. Bullets dinged the doorframe, and she dreaded to think how close they’d come to hitting her, but the door closed, and Bruce sped away.

Part 4 - Shitty Rom-Com

Dabbling in DC: @xoxabs88xox / @petitgateau911

Risking it all for Rick Flag: @cockslut-padalecki

Say My Name series: @loverhymeswith // @b3autyfuldisast3r // @harper-emory-writes // @nerdysuperchick

Tag lists open

[etherealxgenie]

Why Lila is Marinette’s Own Fault || Miraculous Why?

(Before I begin, note that this is my opinion over the topic and am no way am bashing anyone’s love for the ship and/or character. I respect who and what you like, therefore expect the same courtesy. However, if this is something you cannot handle, please click the back button as this will be a heavily discussed topic. No flames allowed. Other than that, enjoy.)

So usually in the story, there’s always one or two mean girls who is out to get the main character for some kind of superior reasons to justify. And there’s no reason as to why they act this way just for the sake of being mean.

Like the Ashleys from “Recess”, who tend to pick on kids just for the fun of it sometimes or cause they’re popular.

Same can go for Libby from “Sabrina The Teenage Witch” who was out to get something for what she wants or just to be superior to the other kids in school.

For Miraculous, we already have that kind of character, Chloe Bourgeois, who is the daddy’s girl of the Mayor to get what she wants. And until we had some small character development in season two (which season 3 took it away!!), we had no reason feeling sorry for her and she was just for the convenient plot in the social life for Marinette in the series.

And then… there’s Lila.

Before I get into hand in this, let me note that Lila is not a good person at all in the show. She’s a liar, a manipulator and will do whatever she can to get what she wants. She breaks into homes, steals and molests pretty models. She’s been pretty shown to be just selfish without consequences and unless we get a background story of why she acts this way, she has no excuse. Especially when she teams up with hawkdaddy to now have permission to invade and spy on Adrien whenever she wants? Fuck that.

So in Volpina, Lila is introduced as this pathological liar to get attention in season one. She obviously goes for Adrien cause he’s the famous model after all. Reasonable considering as the new person looking for attention, you seek out the most popular/famous person in the school. That would Adrien.

Though considering with her connections, it would’ve been smarter to try and impress Marinette instead if Lila did her research before she came into the scene. But of course, new person so she wouldn’t know, but whatever.

And we can see Lila easily just says things just to get Adrien’s approval and such.

And so, Marinette follows them around (stalking? really?) because Tikki points out Lila has the book Adrien took from his father’s vault and threw it in the trash.

Now the SMART thing to do would’ve been to see how Adrien would handle the situation and wait for him to leave, if to acknowledge Adrien has a mind of his own and knows when to walk away (which he does). Or at the very least, try to distract them as Marinette while Tikki retrieved the book.

But… no. You transform into Ladybug to lash out at a girl PUBLICALLY, for anyone including Adrien to hear, just to embarrass her and call her out on her lying because she… “hates liars”.

Marinette, you fucking lie ALL the time! Most of those times to Adrien! And I’m not just talking about when in regard to being Ladybug, you hypocritical- (groans)

I can list plenty of episodes: Gamer, Aninmaestro, Ikari Gozen and hell, even Reverser counts! If she hadn’t lied about Marc’s book, Nathaniel wouldn’t have torn it! (sighs)

And before you all start jumping at me saying Lila got what she deserves, I only agree partially. Ladybug, as a public figure and heroine, practically the face of Paris, acted irrationally lashing out at a bystander because of lies which were or were not believable. Lila was broadcasting a post or making the news, she was trying (poorly) to impress a boy. Ladybug gave Lila the Regina George treatment.

Yeah, so you caused an akumatized situation and Lila hates your guts. Hell, I would hate you too. That’s like a celebrity jumping at an innocent bystander when they’re whispering to their friend about a rumor that only the two of them were talking about. You can’t jump to try and stop them and should just let it dispel on its own. At that point, Lila had no real power but you just influenced her.

And… oh boy did things get worse because of this.

Look season 3 was trash (except for moments in certain episodes) and I feel talking about the infamous ‘Chameleon’ physically hurts me but… yeah gotta point out a few things. The whole episode was unrealistic, and it was an obvious ploy to be sympathetic to Marinette with Lila back… but… you’re not fooling me.

So, Lila is still on her lying game, being able to fool the students and the staff?! Okay if you believe a student has so many disabilities without any paperwork proof, you can actually get fired for that for fraud. As someone who worked with education before, that’s just pure incompetence.

So yeah, Marinette comes to school seeing the seats changes to accommodate Lila and upright begins to plot to discredit her for her lies. UM… what happened to trying to start over with Lila after failing to do so the first time?

Oh, that’s right. She gets that way (at least partly) because Lila is sitting next to Adrien. I can understand if it was because they rearranged the seating without her say so but let’s face it. Lila sitting next to Adrien was her real trigger.

So since Marinette failed to acknowledge her mistake the first time, she spends all day trying to prove Lila is lying and in return the class is angry at her. Alya even comes to point out that Marinette is jealous of Lila.

And you know what? Alya is right.

Alya knows at least what Marinette is capable of doing so when it comes to Adrien and how far she’s willing to go. Remember that Alya is the one who encouraged her to break into his locker and steal his phone. So of course, she’s worried Marinette is gonna do something to the new girl.

I don’t blame Alya for doing one of the most competent things in the show: Warning Marinette to NOT go off the handle without proof and not make herself look bad in the process.

And because Marinette failed to do so… she made Lila her enemy AGAIN. It was bad enough you had her as your enemy as Ladybug, but now you get to deal with twice the drama!

Your own fucking fault, Marinette.

Also, the advice Adrien gave? I don’t blame for him for it and neither should you. Yes, his advice is not perfect, but with the options he has on his plate, its hard to do something otherwise.

For every encounter Adrien has had with Lila, it ended up with her being akumatized or a disaster no matter how he tried to handle her. We didn’t get to see how he would resolve in Volpina because of Ladybug’s intervention, but he would try at least in Chameleon and try to get her to see she didn’t need to lie and actually tried to befriend her. At this point, Lila was already triggered by Ladybug and Marinette so she just might have to take Adrien by force instead.

At that point, Adrien just wants to stay away and which he was trying to tell Marinette don’t interact with Lila or confront her cause there’s no way to do so at this point. Maybe he was trying to tell her to wait until her rumors got discredited, but he didn’t say it clear enough for her to understand.

And keep in mind, Adrien is a sheltered child with little to zero social skills taught to him by Nathalie and Gabriel. Hell, we don’t know how his childhood was really like even with Emelie around either and Adrien seems more like the pacifist unless he needs to absolutely step in. And he did by cleaning up Marinette’s mess in ‘Ladybug’. So now he’s gotta suffer being around Lila more because of Marinette making Lila her enemy.

But once again, this is bad writing as the writers of the show obviously forgot what it’s like to live in reality. In the real world, Lila would be immediately discredited without any proof the moment she came back. Not to mention, some of the class have their own connections and have more braincells proven in the previous episodes. Google search and such. A 5-year-old wouldn’t believe these lies in these times. Hey, I believe that because I once had a kid in kindergarten during my time as an afterschool art teacher look at one of my books I illustrated before and said they liked the ‘graphics’.

Kids are fucking smarter nowadays than you think.

The only reason anyone would believe Lila’s lies is if she’s magically influenced with some kind of ‘silver tongue’ spell or something and honestly? It looks like that’s the reason.

I dunno if Thomas Astruc or Zag is trying to insult the kids/adults or insult themselves to say Paris people aren’t that smart. If it’s the latter, you should see what you are doing because I don’t want to believe that because that’s disrespectful.

I know it seems I’m trying to stand up for Lila this portion, but I’m just looking things in a  more realistic and logical way. Did Lila take things too far? Yes, waaaayyy too far and should be arrested for it since she works for Hawkmoth. But it could’ve been handled better and that makes Marinette at fault too.

Part of me wonders if she’s done this before because in Zombiezou, she also causes Chloe to ruin her gift for Ms. bustier. If Marinette didn’t antagonize Chloe in the locker in front of the class, maybe she wouldn’t have done anything. Again, I’m not saying Chloe was justified, but if that was the reason, yeah I can see her doing it for payback.

So to all those fics where I’m supposed to be ‘Boo-hoo’ for Marinette because of what Lila did? Fuck you guys because you need to dig deeper into the story to see both sides and not just make it a pity party where Marinette is the innocent victim.

It’s called “Cause and Effect”.

And considering she made Lila her enemy, Marinette is gonna get effected enough because that’s how karma works.

[phoebehalliwell]

Paige/Henry - any (or all) season that isn't 8

going from the beginning and assuming this all happens off screen one second i have to google how old paige would be in season one. 21. meaning she's theoretically starting her 3rd year of college bc protip to all those w august babies its best to have them be the oldest of their year rather that the youngest <3 we don't know how old henry is, but idk i'd say he's probably like 3 years older that her

s1: paige is in her studious era, & has dreams of becoming a social worker, but is still interested in art. she's also into astrology and other witchy things, as we know from her friend/coworker in season 4. paige goes with all of her artsy friends to some sort of gallery/art show/party/something. henry is Also there with his best friend bc his best friend's girlfriend at the time has like some art showing there or something idk some skin in the game. but henry is like. So Out Of His Depth. really trying to stick to the walls like avoiding all the artsy fartsy folk dropping names he's never heard of until he hears one voice cut out from the rest because it's just so genuine and so unpretentious unlike everyone else here who seems to be talking out of their ass this girl no she's real. blah blah blah they have a conversation they hit it off paige reads henry's palm and we lay in some foreshadowing someone snaps a polaroid of them paige gives it to henry it's cute. and it looks like we're going to tee up a date or something where henry gets a call from work one of his parolees was just arrested for idk possession of a knife or something so henry leaves and paige is unsure of where he went. they don't get the others name, and there's this kind of feeling of i hope i'll run into you again, but it's a big city, so probably not.

s2: eclipse viewing party!! glen even made it into town for this and paige & him are in one of the more will they ish stages of the will they won't they. they're at an old high school classmate's rooftop get together and they've all made special glasses. from the roof, paige swears she sees that guy oh my god no that's that guy from the party and she wants to call out his name but she doesn't know it she wants to call out to him she's calling out to him but she has no words to say it with. later that day, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out the polaroid from season one. how did that get there (telekinetic orbing lol uwu 😛)

s3: she's started her job at social services. about halfway/ two thirds in she gets idk one of henry's parolees as like. idk something she's doing i really don't know stuff about things. henry's there. paige maybe has the polaroid pinned up in her cubicle. they meet! it's a it's you moment. they go out on a date. it's great. they go out on a second date. also a success. and a third, and a fourth. mm, but now it's kind of going really well. which is actually kind of a bad thing. as it turns out, neither of them have been in a committed relationship bc they always end up bolting. things start to fall apart. and it's bitter for both of them bc they were kind of a figment that lived in the other's head for so long that surely this had to be something but now it's kind of just collapsing and neither of them is really working to fix it are we really just gonna watch this fall apart? no!! dramatic rain love confession. we can do this!

s4: paige is a witch. ruh roh. hmm. can we do this? henry can feel her pulling away and was like woah didn't we already dedicate 3b to this are we really doing this again? but piper and phoebe are like ooh hmm human boyfriend like um. how much do u really like him? bc um. they don't really like usually like. last hella long around here. specially if they know about the craft. so now paige is torn because like she likes henry she really does but she can't have his death on her hands. but as the halliwells start to fall apart when phoebe goes full dark side paige ends up falling back into henry's arms bc he always makes her feels better feel safe feel at home. end s w the i'm a witch confession

s5: we're doing the simon marks bit bc i love henry in that episode. i forget the main plots in s5. henry probably clocks cole at least once for trying to kill paige and cole almost like barbecues him. we could also potentially go the other direction (or do both just spread over time) when cole's trying to be good him going to henry bc he's like hey you help like. fucked up people not make the same mistakes. and henry's like. sure? paige and henry move in together by the end of s5.

s6: chris is there! chris is weirdly close with henry (because well leo kinda wasn't there so hello surrogate father figure. henry, who had no father figure, is like hey what's going on). we take this season to unpack both paige and henry's relationships to their own childhoods and their families and how they were raised and how they would want to raise their family.

s7: we're skipping over the avatars bc that plot was weak tho idk could offer some interesting leo/henry bonding as henry's kinda like his brother in law. but idk we're going zankou. and paige runs magic school. henry's in his housewife era and like cooks dinner for paige who you know like works herself to death piper henry bonding over cooking henry does almost everything like kinda wrong because he's self taught but the end results are always good. henry also like reads books from magic school to you know better learn things like astrology or spellwriting to best support paige. paige realizes how much henry means to her and how much she means to him. paige proposes. henry says yes <3

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving. 

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/