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gremlinmodetweeker · 1 month

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A Very Bad Movie Night

I'm sorry, but movie nights with our favourite Austrian giant are either nice and cuddly or downright terrifying, depending on who picks the movie.

It's not that his movies are bad, he's just into really extreme horror and always searching for the scariest movies he can. He's not just pure 'blood, guts, gore' either because he's really into psychological thrillers and cosmic horror. He just loves to get his heart beating in his chest. He loves the scariest he can get, and he's especially into found footage or atmospheric horror. Don't get me wrong, he's down for a good slasher or a gory film like Saw, but if he can get a movie like Blair Witch Project or As Above So Below? He's very happy.

He has seen all the Guinea Pig movies. He won't force you through them (thank God for that), but you gotta know that sometimes this guy watches some fucked up shit.

He's a man built for war. He'll be cute and give you back massages and make pastries for Disney movie nights, but just remember that this guy has seen the worst of humanity, and it shows.

Anyways, I know it's a dumb little fic, but I wrote a little example of you trying to get 'The Big Boy' tm to try and open up about his favourite movies.

TWs: Gore (not described in detail, but talked about) and scary movies

Story below the cut

A Very Bad Movie Night

The tv remote on the coffee table acted as an effective wall between you and König.

On one side, you sat with a bowl of popcorn and a blanket. On the other, König sat armed with a bag of chips and a bottle of pop. Between you, the tv remote sat, awaiting its ultimate fate.

“We watched your movie yesterday. It is my turn,” König leaned his elbows on his knees.

“You always want to watch the same movies,” you pointed out, “we’ve watched Blade Runner three times this month.”

“Was? Nein!” König snapped, “we only watch the same movies because you can’t handle my favorite movies!”

“Are you seriously trying to pull that card on me?” you scoffed.

“I’m not ‘pulling a card’, I’m telling the truth,” König sniffed.

You rolled your eyes. Every week, you had this argument, like clockwork. It was a never ending struggle between the two of you. König insisted you couldn’t handle his movies, you told him you would, he would poo-poo your suggestions, and then you’d be stuck rewatching some old movie he approved. That ended tonight. Tonight, you would pull on your big kid pants and show him what’s what.

“You know what, try me,” you sneered.

König looked at you as though you were an angry baby rabbit.

“I can handle it!” you insisted defiantly, “I can!”

“You are not very…” König tilted his head to the side, “brave.”

“I’m not what!?” you snapped.

König winced, then carefully took your hands in his, “You are not well equipped to handle horror.”

You looked at him for a good long moment. After a hearty pause, you broke up laughing.

“You’re saying I can’t handle horror?” you snickered, “that’s what you’re worried about here?”

“I am not worried,” König told you flatly, “I know.”

“But you don’t!” you complained, “you don’t know at all! I’m great with horror! It’s like, my favorite genre!”

Okay, the last part was a lie, but he didn’t have to know that.

“Then why do you always want to watch your Disney princess movies with me?” König glared at you like a displeased parent.

“Because they’re cute and I like being cute with you?” you told him like it couldn’t be more obvious. You thought it was, but he seemed to disagree.

“If you want cute, we can watch Unicorn Wars or something,” König offered.

“Isn’t that the one where teddy bears kill unicorns in war?” you asked carefully.

“Ja! That’s the one!” König cheered.

You grimaced and König rolled his cold blue eyes.

“See? See that right there. That’s why we don’t watch fun movies,” König threw his hands up in dismay.

“What no! We watch fun movies!” you argued, “didn’t you like Howl’s Moving Castle?”

König was about to snap back before hesitating. With a tired sigh, he slumped in his seat, “Yes, that was good, but that silly ice woman movie? I did not like that.”

“Frozen?”

“Ja.”

“You’re just dumb.”

Your eyes widened as König slowly raised his head to lock eyes with you. Even behind his black sniper’s hood, you could see the gears clicking together in his head as he stared you down.

“I’m dumb?” König chuckled darkly.

“Not dumb, just…” you gestured with your hands, “not that educated?”

König nodded, gesturing for you to keep going.

“I mean it’s not that you’re uneducated, you’re just not that knowledgeable? Wait wait wait hold on, stay with me for this one, I have a point I promise-No I really do don’t look at me like that!”

König raised a single bushy blond eyebrow.

“Listen to me!” you clapped with your words, “I’m just saying you’re not up to date with the times!”

König crossed his arms over his broad chest and leaned back into the pleather sofa.

“So you’re calling me old.”

“I’m not calling you old, I’m calling you out of touch!” you spat before immediately reconsidering your sentence.

König’s eyebrows raised as he let your words sink into the living room.

“No don’t look at me like that!” you spat as you desperately looked for a way out, “I’m… You know what? I’m standing by what I said. I’m right. You’re out of touch. You’re not even forty and you act like you’re ninety. You’re a grouchy old man.”

König nodded along as you spoke, amusement creasing in the corners of his eyes.

“Your back cracks when you touch your toes,” you could feel yourself digging your hole with a drilling rig, “and you keep saying you’re ‘too old for all this’ when you hear about your nephews’ talking about memes on Tiktok.”

“Tiktok is a mistake,” König grumbled under his breath.

“It’s a mistake, yeah, but you’re not making this any better for yourself,” you argued.

“I am only thirty-five,” König pointed out.

“Still getting up there,” you countered.

“So you think I’m old and out of touch, ja?” König laughs coldly, “and that’s why I don’t like your sweet pretty princess movies?”

“I think that’s a pretty significant factor, yeah,” you retorted.

“That is not why I dislike those movies.”

You snorted.

“Oh yeah?” you leaned in on your knees, “then what’s really stopping you from hopping on the Disney train?”

König sighed and rolled his eyes, “It’s not that I don’t like your Disney movies, it’s just that I prefer something… Grittier.”

“Like what?” you asked, intrigued.

“Like…” König closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded and looked at you with a menacing glare, “how about we watch a movie?”

-------

You buried your face further into König’s chest. The screams were too much for you to bear. This was König’s favorite kind of movie? What kind of man did you marry?

“This is a funny part,” König laughs, “she wakes up and her fiance’s head is sewn into her stomach.”

“You think that’s-” you spluttered before giving up, “this is awful.”

“This is fun!” König teased you light-heartedly as the woman screamed bloody murder.

“This is fucked up,” you grumbled and dug further into his side.

He laughed heartily at your response. Rubbing your side lovingly, he asked (over the screaming), “This is all fake! It’s not real!”

You groaned. You didn’t know if you were more frightened by the movie your boyfriend put on or the fact that this was the movie he put on after telling you ‘it’s one of the easier ones to get through’. On one hand, it was a fantastic true crime mockumentary, on the other, you were going to have nightmares about this for weeks.

König hadn’t pulled any punches, or so you thought. You’d realized pretty quickly that if this was what König considered ‘light’, then you had a whole lot of work to getting used to this. As much as the movie horrified you, the story was terribly compelling.

“I just hope they catch the guy,” you were practically behind König at this point.

“Nein, this movie is not so nice,” König chuckled, “but I understand your feelings.”

“Wait they don’t even catch the guy?” you balked.

“Nein! Don’t you remember the beginning?” König scratched your hair affectionately.

“Wait…” you trail off as you realize he’s right. God, this movie just kept getting more and more fucked up.

“It’s alright,” König pressed a kiss against your shoulder, the closest thing he could reach with your head being burrowed into the sofa behind him.

You grumbled, but the movie played on.

By the end of the movie, you’d decided that König was now your favorite sociopath. You wouldn’t stop loving him, but how this was a good movie to him defied any and all logic. Well, the camera work was good, and the story was well-written, and the acting was impressive, and-NO. No this movie was awful. There was no way you were letting König win this time.

König crawled off the sofa, freeing you from the ending credits of The Poughkeepsie Tapes once and for all. When he turned and saw your terrified form, he barked another laugh before sauntering over and ruffling your hair.

“My little liebling,” König picked you up into his arms, “was that too much for you?”

You huffed and turned away with a pout, drawing a deep belly laugh out of your pet sociopa-sorry, boyfriend. He apologetically pressed a kiss against your cheek and carried you to the bedroom.

“Does my little liebling need me to keep the lamp on tonight?” he laughed as he tucked you into your side of the bed.

“No,” you scoffed petulantly.

“Then you should be fine when I..” he flipped off the lights, “do this.”

Immediately you scrambled to turn the lamp on the bedside table on.

König mercifully tugged on the light, casting a soft warm glow over the bedroom.

You glared at him, but thankfully he didn’t tease you any further.

Over the course of the night, you woke up several times, but thankfully, König held you close, lulling you back to sleep with his soft snoring and warm arms around you. When the morning came, you’d need to figure out some sort of revenge, but that was in the morning. You had all night to stew.

PS. The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a very intense gory movie about a man kidnapping and killing people, told through detectives documenting the data and uncovering the tapes the killer makes. It's very good, but also, very scary. I would watch at your own risk! Make sure to check the warnings on that movie on https://www.doesthedogdie.com/ which is a great website to check for trigger warnings in a movie you want to watch.

Story Masterlist

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dukeofriven · 2 years

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Finally saw The Batman tonight, and no one is more surprised than me to find that I... did not hate it. Did it need to be three hours long? God no. Did it need to spend quite so much time in That One Club From Every Episode of CSI Ever? Not really. Did it need to make better use of the considerable talents of one Andy Serkis? Very much so. Was there a lot of simmering sexual tension between Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz? Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha HA HA HAa ha ha... ha ha ha... oooph let me just... heh... let me just catch my.... mmph, breath here... heh... heh heh... no. No no no. Fuuuuck no. That is some of the least chemistry I have seen in a movie in a long, long time. It’s not an ‘oh honey, he’s gay’ kind of thing, or a ‘oh honey, he ain’t allo’ kind of thing, no—Robert Pattinson’s Batman has been so fixated on vengeance for twenty years that I’m not entirely sure he understands the concept of human connection, and when Kravitz breaks away from their kiss Pattinson is baffled at what just occurred, on a very fundamental level. Guy’s got the emotional maturity of an eight year old, which I think is illustrated perfectly in the film’s outright hilarious final scene where he just kind of excitedly gets into a motorcycle race with Catwoman and the film’s score tries desperately to make you think it’s moving and emotive instead of goofy eight-year-old enthusiasm for making motorcycle go VROOM. It’s ridiculous, and it’s pretty great. At times the film seems to have gone to the Pacific Rim school of direction, wherein if you just cover your big action sequence with enough rain the audience will convince themselves of their own accord that the very boring and poorly shot sequence going on behind the rain is super exciting, actually— seriously, the internet is full of articles about how that was ‘the best car chase sequence in a Batman movie ever,’ and yet it was the only time in the film I was bored. You can’t see the damn thing, its internal geography is utterly confused, its over-edited to try and make up for the poor cohesion, and it’s one big fucking mess. But it’s got rain in it, so, y’know, that makes it good or something. Viewers. Pshaw.

Is it the Batman movie I wanted? No, but I am resigned to that likely never being made in my lifetime. My Batman movie is about a guy called Bruce: sometimes he’s a crime-fighting vigilante called Batman, and sometimes he’s this millionaire playboy doofus Mr. Wayne, but the real guy is Bruce, and Bruce is a dad with a big, loving dysfunctional family of adopted adult-and-teen children: Dick Grayson, Cassie Cain, Damien Maybe-a-Wayne, others I have definitely forgotten. And yeah there’s crime in Gotham and some big bad but the core of the movie is the complex relationship everyone has with Bruce: they love him, they want to please him, he’s a hard act to follow, and he himself struggles with when to stop being Batman or Mr. Wayne and just be Bruce-the-dad, who gives his daughter a hug in the rain when she really needs it.

But since NOBODY APPARENTLY WANTS TO MAKE THAT MOVIE, we get... this movie instead. And, y’know, it isn’t half-bad. Robert Pattinson’s choice to play Batman as this kind of morose, obsessive weirdo works. He’s not cool enough to be a particularly good male power fantasy: he’s hopeless with women, he’s an awkward fighter, he gets lucky more often than not. He’s kind of a sad sack, but because he has this restless energy that suggest he knows this isn’t really working for him it stops him from being contemptible: at film’s end he realizes what his next step forward has to be, and it’s a more hopeful, less nihilistic step then we’ve seen for some time. This a violent movie without being gory, which is nice to see (I am hoping the post-GoT, post-True Blood school of All Media Has To have Hammer Horror Level of Guts and Gore is finally dying away). It has moments of genuine humour, and it has a lot of really nice master shots to the point where I’d sometimes get annoyed that the film would insert close-ups of the action. No, movie. This distancing is really effective - let’s stay out here. You set-up this shot so well there’s no reason to push-in. The acting is universally good. Everyone puts in a fine performance, and Paul Dano in particular is skin-crawlingly unpleasant as a truly loathsome Riddler, made all the worse by how eerily real he seems: I feel like we’ve all worked with this guy at some point in our lives and hated ever second of it. Like every Batman movie ever made there’s an eye-rolling level of misogyny on display here: women exist to be brutalized, and all the key twists of the film all seem to be predicated on men acting on women in one matter or another. Every thug, crime boss, corrupt politician, cop, and criminal in this film is a man, and the only two female characters in the movie never share a screen together, much less talk. I was replaying Arkham City today and struck more than ever at how consciously, gratingly misogynist it is, and its really frustrating to see a film in 2022 not managing to rise in any sense about that. Poor Zoë Kravitz gets dolled up in ‘sexy’ clothes for the male gaze multiple times in the course of the movie, and the implication in the film that she was in a queer relationship with her ‘roommate’ is one the film hints at for a split-second and then ignores for the rest of the film. In the world of The Batman, women exist largely to either get fucked, or be fucked over, and it is lousy. It is, if nothing else, a deeply flawed movie. But it is also still watchable, in some moments (especially its penultimate scene of Batman actually fucking rescuing people) emotionally affecting. I remain puzzled by the assertion that it is somehow the ‘darkest’ Batman movie yet (except maybe in terms of lighting): the Christopher Nolan movies were far more nihilistic in their hyper-violent, gore-soaked ineptitude. This film has long stretches with nobody punching or shooting anything, and by the standards of big-budget action movies its social commentary is downright searing in its indictment of corruption and greed, and sympathy for the downtrodden. It’s an extremely low bar, mind you: this is not Marxist Batman. But it’s trying to say something, which is more than Chrissy “but what if Batman punched a lot, though?” Nolan ever accomplished. No idea if a sequel will be any good: there’s a split-second moment in the film where I genuinely though they might let Batman die, and I thought “yeah, that actually works, I’m fine with this.” But who knows. Anyways, The Batman. I liked it, incredibly flawed though it may be. See it, if any of this somehow made it seem appealing somehow.

#The Batman #pacific rim #Arkham City #Paul Dano #robert pattinson #zoe kravitz #christopher nolan #tw misogyny #cassie cain #andy serkis #bruce wayne #batman #the riddler #gotham city

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lnterjection · 4 years

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Sleepy Bois Inc and DSMP Fanfic Recs

Uhhh I realized I have a ton of stuff in my bookmarks list and might as well compile a list of favorites because I’m always looking for good fanfics, and this might help some people. Most of these are SBI, though a few focus on things other than their dynamic with each other. Nothing explicit here. Feel free to suggest more recs.

Fics set in DSMP universe/about DSMP (One-shots first, then longer fics):

One-shots and series of one-shots-

therein lies the madness by sapphicist - 2095 words. Currently says it’s one chapter out of three complete, but can be read as a standalone one-shot. Nice introspective fic on Tommy’s exile and his parallels with Theseus. In 2nd person, but it’s actually done nicely. Mostly angsty, can have hopeful interpretation depending on how you look at it.

crazy how life goes on without me (2090 words, one-shot) by itisjosh - What if Ghostbur did remember everything, and just pretended to be clueless and vapid? Made me cry. It’s so good. Tortured my heart.

the inner mechanism of a black box (13521 words, one-shot) by Bee_4 - only work of a series called “system theory”. “Technoblade lets himself get imprisoned for Philza’s sake. He doesn’t plan on being there long. Unfortunately, he’s underestimated Pandora’s Vault. There are things that will make even the Blade fall apart in due time, as it turns out.” Yeah so Techno’s mental health goes out the window in this one and its written brilliantly. There’s comfort at the end, if it helps?

A State For One Man Is No State At All (5247 words, two-shot) by angstfortheangstgod - “A different version of the festival, in which Dream shows up unarmed, the Community House is left intact, a traitor is executed, and Tommy doesn't betray Technoblade.” Ranboo centric. Angst and comfort.

All the Kings Men series by MollyPollyKinz - “After Ghostbur's suggestion to do Lads on Tour, Tommy finds himself reunited with his family. However, escaping from Dream is going to be harder than anyone previously thought.” A connected series of one-shots and short fics about Tommy, his exile, his family, and escaping Dream. Well written, good characterization, great studies into the characters themselves.

ad astra per aspera series by cacowhistle - Collection of one-shots that start with Tommy’s exile and expand to be about SBI and their dynamic with each other, including a resurrected Wilbur. Really, really well written and probably my favorite of the “Tommy exile fic groups”.

the fall of a hero series by cracklesnaple - “After being threatened with being exiled yet again, Tommy takes the decision into his own hands. If those around him can't see that he's given up everything to make this nation what it is, then he's not sure he can stay in L'Manburg any longer.” Series about SBI and mainly Tommy, eventually crossing over into Mianite territory in a way some might enjoy and some might now. Writing’s good, though, which is what I care about.

Longer fics-

Rewind (101002 words, 25 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 17 2021) by Anonymous - Best time travel fix-it fic I’ve ever read period. Tubbo and Tommy travel 10 years back from a very messed up future to the first L’Manberg election. Concept may seen a bit weird at first but trust me, holy fuck this is amazing.

second chances (hurt the most) (8841 words, 4 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 17 2021) by Anonymous - “Wilbur wakes up alone in a bloody room, and has to come to terms with living again. (How can he go on, knowing who's blood is on his hands?)”. Amazing fic where resurrection requires someone else’s life as sacrifice. Phil is dead. Wilbur struggles to come to terms with his father’s decision, and his second chance.

all scotch, no soda (47466 words, 43 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 14 2021) by fishstixx - “Vulnerability meant trust, though, and trust was a thing not so easily given. Post-exile and canon divergent, follows the consequences of Tommy’s isolation. Expect chases, heists, bloodshed, and the mending of a family.” Features raccon hybrid Tommy being badass, and I live for it. I really, really love this one.

DON’T FORGET THAT ICARUS FLEW. (16426 words, 6/10 chapters, last updated Jan 1. 2021) by orpheusaki - “The day before and the days that follow Tommy's exile; told through the eyes of The Blood God.” Techno (and Dream) is a god, and gods often forget how the intricacies of the minds of mortals. He’s trying to get better, however.

what do you fall for? (16374 words, complete) by tablrcloth - Ranboo centric fic with Techno, Phil and Tommy. Ranboo realizes that playing L’Manberg’s politics is less than ideal for him. What can I say, it’s just really good.

Breathing’s Just a Rhythm (12631 words, 6 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 17 2021) by MollyPollyKinz - “Tommy, Tubbo, Jschlatt, and Dream all end up in the past. (Oh, and the Chat comes too).” Great time travel fic.

What World Have We Inherited? (73635 words, 12 chapters, unfinished and last updated on Dec 22 2020) by Anonymous (this one has a series with all their works, and they’re all AMAZING). Holy fuck this one is probably one of my favorite fics in the fandom so far. “Wilbur blows everything to hell on the day of the Manburg festival, just like he wanted. When the ashes settle, it's just Tommy and Technoblade. It's not good, but it's better than nothing. It's just them, healing up in a world that never wanted them.” Amazing characterization, worldbuilding, everyone’s internal thoughts are portrayed and written so well. Even if it never updates again I would keep coming back to it. I rec this Anon’s works so much.

In June, I Changed My Tune (29489 words, 6 chapters, unfinished and last updated on Jan 6 2021) by KryOnBlock - Eret runs away and eventually becomes friends with Techno. Nice cottagecore aesthetic. I have mixed feelings about this one - the writing’s good, descriptions and characterizations are really good. Just that there’s consistent punctuation mistakes and it takes me out of the world a bit. Everything else is good enough for me to continue reading, however.

stay with him (24353 words, 12 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 9 2021) by junipersand - I especially rec the first chapter, which can be read (and originally was) a standalone fic with the summary “Every ghost had a purpose to fulfill. So what was Tommy’s?” Utterly heartwrenching, probably the most emotionally gut-punching bit of writing I’ve ever read in this fandom. It continues with other lore stuff afterwards that eventually branch off from just SBI and Tommy, but man. I don’t think I can ever forget that first chapter.

I’m not angry at you, well, sometimes I am (52801 words, 16 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 14 2021) by sircantus - After Tommy is exiled, he runs away to Techno’s house instead of going off with Dream. SBI decide some revenge and “world domination” is in order.

Fics set in AUs outside DSMP happenings:

One-shots and series of one-shots-

Empty Crowns AU by UnderUrsa - the SBI + Tubbo are gods, and a family. Series of one-shots. Nicely written, what can I say? Some angst, some fluff.

Secure, Contain, Protect AU by blue000jay - Amazingly written SCP AU. Knowledge of the SCP universe would help with understanding some more meta things, but is not needed to understand most of it. Some angst, disturbing themes around memories but nothing terribly gory.

CLASSIFIEDS. (13804 words, finished). SCP pages on SBI, short stories and audio transcriptions as well as files, lots of good lorebuilding here. Features an escape, + Tubbo!

CONFIDENTIALS. (13232 words, finished). Centers on Dream Team.

ARCHIVES. (1270 words, one-shot). What happened after SBI and Tubbo’s escape from the SCP foundation.

old gods (new gods) AU by WriterWinged - the relatively well known SBI gods AU. Amazingly written, great character interpretations.

the gods are cruel (none crueler then you) (1394 words, one-shot) - As much the grammatical mistake in the title hurts me it’s no doubt one of the best pieces of work in the fandom.

and yet they find kindness (and so do you) (2/4 chapters posted) - continuation of “the gods are cruel”.

there’s a risk to the world (but the kindest are strongest) (2/3 chapters posted) - continuation of “the gods are cruel”.

SBI Antarctic Princes AU by ScripWriter - One of several Antarctic Empire AUs, this one just has these two preliminary one-shots but they’re nice bits of fun and neatly written. All fluff and mild hurt with lots of comfort so far.

Younger Holding On Another (1781 words, one-shot). Techno is a good brother and reassures and newly adopted Tommy.

But Oh, Don’t You Know How It Goes (2511 words. one-shot). Tommy, Techno, and Wilbur have some “fun” at a boring gala. Phil is very exasperated.

Antarctic Princes ‘verse AU by BirchWrites - AU where Techno, Tommy, and Wilbur are princes of the Antarctic Empire (well, Techno’s technically the emperor now), but this time the events of DSMP still happen (at least up to the 1st season).

Homeward bound for the arctic ground (10562 words, one-shot). Wilbur and Tommy travel to the Antarctic Empire in person to ask Techno for help in fighting Schlatt. Good worldbuilding and acknowledges Wilbur’s beginnings of insanity while still being rather light.

Surprise Hugs (2542 words, one-shot). Dream doesn’t realize Tommy is Techno’s brother and thinks he’s going to get killed for tackling the infamous Blood God.

Family Reunions (1396 words, one-shot). Fundy never realized he’s loyalty and Techno informs him unexpectedly.

Longer fics-

leave me your starlight (14620 words, 4 chapters, unfinished and last updated Jan 11 2021) by findingkairos - “Once upon a time, Philza Minecraft is the only person who does not shy away from the bloody teen that regularly turns the tide of war. This cements a friendship that will last wars, empires, worlds, and lifetimes.“ Amazing backstory fic on Phil and Techno’s relationships, one of my absolute personal favorites. Very well written and really digs into the intricacies of Techno’s character (or an interpretation of it, but hey, that’s what all fanfiction is).

I was a kid in a village, doing alright, then I became a prince overnight (21736 words, 5 chapters, last updated Jan 13 2021) by sircantus - another Antarctic princes AU, this time centering on 16 year old Tommy catching the attention of Phil, Techno, and Wilbur after thwarting an assassination attempt. Really well written. Actually, I rec all of sircantus’ SBI stuff because they do amazing work.

antarctic adage (26591 words, 4/7 chapters posted, last updated Jan 13 2021) by blue000jay - Another very well written Antarctic princes AU with Emperor/ruler Phil. Are we seeing a pattern yet? blue000jay is another writer I’d rec, with really great SBI stuff.

a renewal of faith, and of family (56684 words, 31 chapters, unfinished, last updated Jan 13 2021) by SolivangantStories - One of the only fics here that doesn’t feature SBI, this one is Tubbo and Dream centered. Basically, the DSMP!Tubbo is executed by Schlatt and wakes up in a world where Manhunt!Dream is trying not to die and is also actually a nice person, to Tubbo’s surprise and confusion. Not SBI and technically not even DSMP, but it’s really good so I’ve decided to rec it anyway.

#dream smp #sleepy bois inc #sbi #fanfiction #fanfic recs #dsmp #technoblade #wilbur soot #philza #tommyinnit #tubbo #dream #ranboo #feel free to suggest more recs #sbi fanfic recs #sbi fanfic

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tlbodine · 4 years

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A Trio of Torture Films

The 2000s in horror is perhaps best known for its “torture porn” phase -- a period in which horror movies featuring over-the-top gore, lingering shots of human misery, and plots focused more on suffering than death came to prominence.

There are a lot of reasons for the rise of the torture porn. A lot of it has to do with the political environment of the U.S. in the early 2000s -- post 9/11, with terrorism on the brain, a war being waged in two different countries, videos of people being beheaded, reports of torture and war crimes.

So here’s three takes on the torture genre from the 2000s that we’ve watched recently.

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The Collector (2009), directed by Marcus Dunstan, is one of those films that streaming services have been recommending to me for ages and which I’d never gotten around to watching until now. It’s better than I expected it to be. I wouldn’t call it a great movie, I think it’s pretty obviously a fairly mainstream film trying to tap into a cultural moment to make a buck, but it’s well-made and not completely without soul.

The story is a home-invasion-gone-wrong film: A down-on-his-luck handyman tries to rob a rich family, only to discover when he gets there that someone else has also broken in, captured the family, and is horrifyingly torturing them all as some part of an elaborate game. There’s a little bit of everything in this movie, from over-the-top rube-goldberg torture devices to cat-and-mouse games, shadowy conspiracies, sticky skin-melting acid, window guillotines, a killing game, you name it!

This grab-bag of tropes is both a weakness and a strength. It hits a lot of the notes that fans may love about other movies made before and since: home invasion (The Strangers, Funny Games), home invasion gone wrong (You’re Next, The People Under the Stairs, Don’t Breathe), killing games (Chosen, 13 Sins), creative torture (Saw, Se7en). But it also doesn’t really commit to any of its themes; it doesn’t seem to be a movie that has much of anything to say.

But it’s fun to watch, if you enjoy blood & guts.

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Martyrs (2008) is a French “New Extremity” movement film written and directed by Pascal Laugier. It’s infamous for being extremely difficult to watch due to its brutal and graphic violence, and it deserves that reputation -- this is a hard movie to sit through. I do think it’s a very good film, though, and one that raises some really interesting questions if you choose to engage with them.

The story centers on two girls who meet in an orphanage. One is a survivor of horrific abuse at the hands of a kidnapper; after escaping the torture dungeon where she’d been held, she’s haunted (literally) by her trauma and seeks vengeance on the people that hurt her. But the vengeance quest is not satisfying, and it plunges her and her friend into an even more gruesome and horrifying reality.

I don’t want to share too much more about the plot because it’s twisty and turny and it deserves to be enjoyed unspoilered. I will say that this movie is a genuine rollercoaster. It reinvents itself every 30 minutes or so. You know how I’ve talked about Hitchcock Twists, the kind of twist that dramatically changes the direction a film is taking to say “Surprise! You THOUGHT you were getting THIS movie, but instead it’s THIS!”? Well, Martyrs has like four Hitchcock twists. I’ve never seen that done before and certainly never with as much coherence as in this film.

What I think is especially interesting about it is the way the movie directly confronts the “blessed are the broken” trope. In the same way that Funny Games challenges people who find violence entertaining, Martyrs gives a stern look to people who look for meaning in suffering. “Perhaps,” Martyrs seems to say, while coldly looking you in the eye, “Suffering simply exists, and trying to find meaning in it is just an excuse to allow it to continue.”

And I really dig that.

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Hostel (2005), directed by Eli Roth, is one of the cornerstones of the “torture porn” genre, and it’s a movie I have a tremendous soft spot for. The story is pretty simple: A group of young men go on one of those European backpacking trips that’s mostly about doing drugs and getting laid. After a wild night in Amsterdam, they get a tip-off about a small town in Slovakia where there are no tourists, where the women are hot for American boys, and where you can pay to do anything you want.

The only problem, as they soon discover, is that they haven’t been sent to be the paying customers -- they’re the victims.

What follows is a bloody fight for survival and escape from a grisly real-world torture house where rich people from all around the world show up and pay a handsome price for the pleasure of killing with impunity. It’s that “red room” setup once again, but this one feels entirely too plausible.

What I really enjoy about this movie is just how surprisingly well-written it is. When you’re first introduced to the main characters, you have every reason to hate them; but the protagonist earns your sympathy slowly and organically, and the film recognizes and illustrates the difference between “feel good” violence (perpetrated against evil-doers) and horrifying violence (perpetrated against victims). Eli Roth is a filmmaker who understands the visual language of violence and knows how to work with it to dramatic and thematic effect. A lot of gory movies are one-note, causing you to just tune out the worst bits, but Roth keeps you on your toes -- sometimes cutting away and hinting, sometimes showing the aftermath, sometimes swiftly and brutally showing it on-screen.

I think Hostel is a film that has something to say about tourism and exploitation, and it’s a more thoughtful film than you might expect it to be. Kind of like how Texas Chainsaw Massacre stands out from other slashers because it means something to the creator, Hostel feels more important and more memorable than most other films of its genre.

I have not seen the sequels, and I probably won’t. I don’t think that I’d enjoy them.

#horror movies #horror by the decade #horror through the decades #the collector #martyrs #hostel

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sabre-tooth · 3 years

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Wolverine: Weapon X (2004) Novel Review

Wolverine: Weapon X Author: Marc Cerasini Published: 2004

If I had thought about the fact that Wolverine: Weapon X was almost certainly going to be one long, slow, unpleasant session of mental torture and brainfuckery I probably would have stuck it at the bottom of the pile and started with one of the other Wolverine novels. But I didn’t think about it; and it was the first novel in the omnibus. And the omnibus arrived in my mailbox before any of the other novels. So I started with Weapon X.

Weapon X is a long, slow, unpleasant session of mental torture and brainfuckery. I didn’t enjoy most of it. I staggered forward through the text with the attitude of a soldier slogging his way through hostile foreign territory, constantly under threat. So I guess you could say that the book is a success.

Frankly, that’s how I would describe the novel. A success. It is successful at what it sets out to do, which is to pull you into the abjectly grim and psychotically horrible world of the Weapon X project.

Do not read this novel if you are looking for a novel where you get to spend time with Logan being Logan, or Wolverine being Wolverine. This book is not a spy thriller. It is not a science-fiction adventure. It is not a story of the savage frontier, or the lawless honor of 1980s Japan. It is a story about a bunch of scientists attempting to torture a man until he stops being a man and becomes a mindless, programmable killing machine.

Since our ostensible protagonist is willfully robbed of all perception and agency throughout around seventy percent of the novel, the narrative instead follows the point of view of the scientists and security personnel running the torturous experiment. Broadly speaking, we follow the Professor, Dr. Cornelius, Ms. Hines, and Culter; getting a peek at each of their internal narrations and backstories, understanding what it was that drove them through every moral barrier to work on this morally reprehensible experiment. Each of them has a, broadly speaking, tragic backstory, some of them working better than others. Except Cutler. Cutler the security guy is just kind of there because he’s there.

I can’t decide if I like the inclusion of each of the scientists’ tragic backstories. On the one hand, obviously trauma can set people on the path to great evil. On the other hand, sometimes evil is very mundane. I would say that I am broadly satisfied with the handling of Dr. Cornelius’ backstory, and less so with the professor and Ms. Hines. Ms. Hines backstory particularly deals with some themes and content that is not only extremely dark in an unexpected way, but it’s also tropey, cliche, and borderline misogynist.

The Professor, meanwhile, I don’t think ‘deserves’ a tragic backstory. I say ‘deserves’ here in that I don’t think it serves the character or the narrative for his evil to stem from such a graphically and emotionally horrific incident. The Professor is without a doubt the least sympathetic character in the narrative and I don’t think his present evil behavior and his past traumatic backstory tie together in a way that is interesting or narratively satisfying. I suspect that the author was trying to attempt to shy away from the idea of simply being evil for evil’s sake, but I think that the narrative would have been served better either by leaving the Professor’s POV out of the narrative and keeping him as a more distant figure, or by suggesting the Professor’s tragic backstory rather than spelling it out in graphic and gruesome detail.

The bulk of the action in which we do get to share point of view with Logan are a series of flashbacks to a particular black-ops mission. While I was pleased to spend some time with Logan during these interludes and get away from the truly horrific medical horror happening in the rest of the book, the problem is not just that it's bog-standard--even bad-- spy thriller fiction in these sections; the problem is that the particular mission that we relive with Logan doesn’t have any bearing on or connection with the ongoing action in the present, barring one arbitrary detail. Arbitrary, I think, is the best way to describe it. It's a breath of air, breaking up the other narrative segments, but it's stale air, not fresh.

Speaking of the black-ops segments, I unfortunately can’t get through this entire review without mentioning the most uncomfortable part of these segments. Logan’s mission takes place in Korea, and the segment is absolutely full of ever-present casual orientalist racism towards Koreans and the Japanese. Skin is referred to as ‘yellow’, and two significant characters are straight-facedly given nonsense names the equivalent of naming an American character Stallion McBurger or something. Even as someone only casually acquainted with Japanese names and culture, reading the character’s name threw me out of the story every single time as I was forced to ponder if it was a fake spy name. Regrettably, it was not.

Overall, the novel mostly consists of long descriptions of medical and psychological torture as the narrative plods towards its inevitable, gory climax. I will give the novel this, though, when that gory climax hit, the blood, guts and revenge really did feel satisfying. Cathartic, even. The author manages to put you through a slice of the Weapon X program yourself, and through the other side with Logan.

The author’s prose is serviceable for what the novel is. It's gritty, and pulpy, occasionally cheaply poetic, and it put me in the mind of Max Payne. I didn’t hate it at all. Additionally, the author manages to pull off one great gut punch of a reversal that I won’t spoil. I will however say that this twist doesn’t significantly alter the emotional payoff, which is good. Like I said, Weapon X the novel is successful at what it sets out to do.

I’m not certain whether or not I’m pleased to have read this novel. On the one hand, I don’t regret the time that I spent with it. On the other hand, I’m definitely ready to move on to something that isn’t deliberately sledgehammering me with medical and psychological horror. In the end, I think Wolverine: Weapon X, like the Weapon X project itself, is an unpleasant but ultimately strengthening experience that’s best regarded in the rear view mirror.

#wolverine #weapon x #logan howlett #book review #marc cerasini #personal thoughts #not reblogged

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carnalhaus · 4 years

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UHMM ya new ocs these 2 are fuckign CRAY ZEE

welcome gwendolyn gore and julian joss !!!

both of them came to me in a dream believe it or not !! i’ll explain the whole thing under the cut at the end, its basically their origin story or whatever, but it was also the inspo for their dynamic

so gwen doesnt care about anyones feelings !! she puts up a front of friendliness, innocence, and weakness bc she doesnt want anyone to suspect her (which works !!! nobody saw it coming :)) ). girl gets off on murdering people and making people lesser than her, shes not a good person and she embraces that. she was the one that got the both of them into this murder business in the first place, if it wasnt for her then like at LEAST 9 people would be alive. she manipulates people constantly, thats like her special talent. her favorite hobby is making julian believe that she likes him and cares about him, which she doesnt, she just uses him to ride out her power highs and keep her safe. hes just her little lap dog.

but julian isnt innocent either. this guy has had a crazy sick obsession with gwen since he first met her in college. he would do literally anything for her, he has like no boundaries. its to the point where he holds her so hard his nails draw blood, he bites her out of compulsion, and he goes crazy fucking stupid whenever she asks him for help, hes like intoxicated by the feeling that she needs him. lucky for him it doesnt bother her at all, he lets him have his fun for the most part. he takes simp to like a horribly creepy level. sometimes this man has to wear a fuckin muzzle and gloves around her bc hes so impulsive. he honestly wants to kill her bc he doesnt want anyone taking her from him, but every time she cuddles up to him he just fuckin melts, so he just keeps putting it off for later so he can spend more time with her.

gwen used his obsession to her advantage, and thus, this horridly toxic duo was born

anyways yes i got the idea for these 2 from a dream !! i’ll try n explain it as best as i can (the original dream was a lil different but i adapted it into somewhat of a story lmao)

so 11 film students go into the woods to film scenes for a project of theirs, among those students is gwen and julian

those 2 have a plan in mind :)

the plot of the project is a group of teens who poke around in the woods get killed by a serial killer, gwen is supposed to play the killer (haha funny right ?)

during a specific scene by a creek, gwen and julian’s plan unfolds

gwen legitimately kills four people, how she does it ? i couldnt tell you, but i’ll tell you it was gross and brutal and unnecessarily gory

julian films the entire thing, he wasnt even the cameraman for the project, the actual cameraman was the second one to get gutted like a fish, nobody knew he had a camera of his own

four people get away, and as the day turns to night, gwen and julian hunt them down like animals and pick them off one by one

i have no idea what happened after they all died, but its safe to assume those two went on their merry way to cause more bloodshed in the next state over

tl;dr: gwen got jules to go along with her plan to finally act on her urges of violence and havoc, and their entire friend group was slaughtered while julian sat and watched in lovestruck awe (occasionally butting in when she got in trouble bc hes a lot bigger and stronger than she is)

what sparked that dream ?? i have no idea, but the atmosphere of it was actually pretty unsettling lol

#moral of the story these 2 r fucking batshit crazy and horrible #creepypasta #creepypasta oc #mine #my ocs #gwendolyn gore #julian joss #gwen #julian

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lloftvlly · 4 years

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MysMe Characters in a Zombie Apocalypse Headcanons

Here I go again. I like zombie moves/shows and mysme so I figured I wanna combine them.

All the headcanons under the cut because this became long!

Yoosung

Scared boy ™

Yet shows strength when he has to protect you

Cries as he runs away from zombies

Also cries and/or gags when he sees the gory stuff

Builds contraptions to keep zombies out of your camp / hide-out

Which never rly work... but it’s the thought that counts

Always compares every situation to video games he played

And can sometimes even come up with useful plans due to his experience with post apocalypse setting video games

But whines a lot about how “this is way harder than it looked like in xx game”

Ready to die for you and thus ends up doing unnecessary dangerous stuff, so the group has to often stop him to do the dumb thing.

“I’m not a child anymore I WANT to protect MC TOO!”

Weapon of choice: a sword like his favorite video game character even if he’s clumsy in using it. So he ends up reaching for a simple gun when he finds himself in a dire situation.

Knows recipes of post apocalypse type foods and cooks for the group.

If you’re bitten by a zombie he falls into complete denial and firmly believes you won’t turn because he can’t accept you leaving him like that.

Jaehee

You didn’t expect it but she suddenly turns into a very capable apocalypse warrior

When she doesn’t kick ass, she researches about the outbreak and comes up with theories to potentially one day find a cure

Keeps the group organized even in chaotic times

Always able to come up with plans when the group finds itself in dangerous situations

Call herself your sidekick but it feels more like you’re her sidekick

Doesn’t trust any new people at all, if someone wants to join your group they have to get through Jaehee first (and most times don’t manage to do that.)

Scavengers from outside groups always underestimate her and then end up getting their ass kicked.

Keeps an organized list of how many zombies and how many people (in self defense) she has killed. She feels guilty for the people side of the list, even if it was in self defense every time.

Makes you feel the most safe when you are on errand runs together.

She sees and hears EVERYTHING so no zombies or people can approach you unnoticed. She’s just always really alert.

Weapon of choice: her own martial arts skills and if necessary uses a machete to assist her.

Always tired, yet always on top of her game when the situation requires it.

If you’re bitten she wants to make the last moments for you as comfortable as humanly possible, while she closely stays by your side. She’ll act tough to not show her own pain and will not show you her tears because she wants you to see her strong in your last moments to make you feel at peace with leaving her behind.

Jumin

Leader of the group even though he never signed up for this

The group just suddenly decided he would be the most level headed for that position and for Jumin it would be too much trouble to decline

Negotiates with other groups you meet on the road and often gets some good trades for supplies done

Surprisingly is a good fighter when he has to put down a zombie or two

Really knows how to shoot a gun and land a head shot after the other for some reason ( he probably had private shooting classes before the apocalypse for fun)

Sighs yet composed when blood gets on his fresh white shirt

Where does he get all these clean white shirts from?

Way too clean for someone who lives in a world that ended.

If he has to kill other people who seem to be a danger to your group he will do so without hesitation and zero regret, they had it coming.

Weapon of choice: a simple yet powerful handgun

Sometimes makes questionable choices and tries to control the group too much to keep track of everyone.

He means it well for everyone’s safety but it can be too much.

But when you tell him he does things wrong he gets soft and is willing to listen to you when you advice him on doing things differently.

This is making you somewhat of the right hand of the leader.

If you’re bitten he gets too emotional about it to asses the situation and you end up being the one comforting him because he loses his fucking mind.

Zen

Looks bomb even after 5 days on the road without a shower

Still somehow manages to hold a somewhat proper meal plan

And gets enough sleep cos “his skin needs it”

Protects you always! And never lets you out of sight if he can avoid it.

Gets way too comfortable with shady strangers you meet on the road

But if someone of these strangers becomes a danger to you, doesn’t think twice before cutting their throat

On supply runs he brings back shampoo, beer and magazines instead of things like canned food and water

He avoids fighting whenever he can to keep his hands clean, but if he has to do it, he’s very capable and smooth

Weapon of choice: a katana

Looks like a beautiful warrior when he fights

His long hair gets in the way sometimes and can cause zombies grabbing at it but he WON’T cut it EVER. Sacrifices are to be made in the name of beauty.

The members of your group all somehow rely on Zen for emotional support in rough times because he knows just the things to say to make everyone feel better and never stops being positive even after the world was literally ending.

Nothing seen of this positivity however, when it’s about Jumin.

Yes, he is not okay with Jumin being the leader but also doesn’t do anything about it, even if it causes him to nag sometimes.

If you’re bitten he will blame himself forever for not protecting you better and go on a rampage to kill every zombie within a 10 mile radius to let out his frustration. One of them hurt you, so all of them must die.

Seven

Runner of the group, meaning he does most of the supply runs, goes out to clear roads and check locations and safety thereof

Somehow became always that guy of the group everyone looks at when they discuss about needing a member to do something that’s ridiculously reckless. Because “its Seven, he’ll manage.”

And will do everything the group asks from him, because what does he have to lose?

Most reckless of the bunch but also luckiest of the bunch, always gets away completely unharmed no matter what dumb risky thing he does.

Still you worry about him a lot for his lack of self-preservation, but don’t tell him you do or he’ll get mad at you.

Boy knows all the little secret pathways, hideouts and escape routes.

Also comes up with clever inventions he can make out of random junk he finds. It really helps out the group

Zombie puns all day everyday “ Zombodie had to do it.” “That’s a no-brainer” “You undead all your good work” “Don’t outbreak my heart.”

Tries to avoid killing or fighting off zombies to save his energy for other things. He’s more into being stealthy when he has to get shit done.

But when he has to, he will be pretty good in getting rid of a handful zombies.. :

Weapon of choice: a wooden baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.

He likes it, it makes him look badass

Tries hard to avoid getting emotionally attached to you or anyone in the group because you all could die at any moment and there’s no point.

But slips into caring too much about you and the group anyway

If you’re bitten he will have an emotional break first but then quickly start to think of ways to save you, no matter how. And if he has to chop off the infected body part to see if it works he will do so.

Saeran [ Unknown ]

Not part of your group but always knows where you all are and what you are doing.

Instead belongs to this other surviving group that ordered him to keep an eye on yours.

Comes out of nowhere when you’re in a situation where you can’t defend yourself from a group of zombies to save your ass.

But will be gone again before you can even thank him. He only did it because he needs you alive anyway.

At least that’s what he tells himself. Although he starts caring for you for some reason.

And really wants to bring you back to join his own group instead of sticking with the RFA.

You get very interested in this masked stranger but your questions remain unanswered because he keeps his distance to continue to watch from afar.

Casually uses zombie blood, skin and guts to camouflage himself when he has to walk through herds of them.

He is a skilled assassin who was trained to get the job done.

Weapon of choice: a simple hand knife in close range and a full-on automatic rifle for when it’s about killing many zombies at once.

Will use either of the weapons not only on zombies but on other humans, with the same lack of hesitation, if they piss him off.

Biggest kill count of them all.

If you’re bitten he won’t even think twice before grabbing a sharp tool to chop off your infected body part if it’s in a location that can be removed. If it’s not he might wait for you to turn and keep you as a zombie pet.

The original leader of the group who mysteriously vanished about 10 days into the outbreak.

It’s because he’s been infiltrating the other mysterious group to gain information on them just to find out his ex is the leader of this other group.

Thus is stuck between two groups and because of that became a solo-surviver without really a group to belong to.

Elegant fighter. Will knock down 5 zombies gracefully without a single drop of sweat.

Sometimes picks up helpless stranded survivors on the streets and allows them to travel with him and protect them until he finds them a save community to join.

Weapon of choice: a makeshift wooden spear with a blunt end for humans and a pointy end for zombies.

Pacifist who will never kill another human, even if they tried to kill him first.

But never hesitates even a second before killing a zombie.

Probably saved your ass from the distance a few times without you knowing.

Leaves water and food on your hideout doorstep in secret when he knows your group is low on supplies because he never stops taking care of all of you from the shadows.

If you’re bitten he will be by your side and do everything in his power to make your last moments comfortable. Unable to end your pain while you’re still alive and yourself, he will wait for you to turn before he can eventually kill you.

Rika

Leader of this other group and still goes by the name savior.

Her group has a questionable pyramid scheme: They are basically a apocalyptic cult who believes that this end of the world is a sign for them to build their new society.

Somehow mastered to build the most powerful survival group in a safe locations with strong walls.

Is interested to bring in people of your group if they are useful to her.

Especially interested in Seven, since he got the brains she could need to further build up her own little society behind her walls.

And will sacrifice everything for her cause, especially the lives of people working for her.

Uses force to make people stay and work for her. Will kill her own “believers” and turn them into zombies if they astray from the beliefs she forced onto them, then have them in cages within their walls to show them off to the other members her community as an example of what happens when you go against the grain.

Especially uses Saeran as her most active tool in whatever mission she plans.

Weapon of choice: Her charm and manipulation tactics.

Legit thinks life after the outbreak is better than before and the apocalypse is somehow a gateway to paradise.

If you get bitten she locks you up to see the process of a human turning as a sort of experiment.

#mysme #mystic messenger #jumin han #saeyoung choi #saeran choi #jaehee kang #v #yoosung kim #i just found this in my drafts #i wrote this like a year ago and never posted it uhm #this is heavily inspired by twd #idk is this on bad taste to post about apocalypses now wth everything... e-e #headcanon #i kinda wanna get back into just writing stupid headcanons again #hc

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magnoliasinbloom · 5 years

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The Midwife - II

AO3 :: Previously

TW: A little TMI, medically... gory, perhaps. Thought I’d throw this warning in if it’s not your thing. Any doctors and midwifes out there, any technical errors in the story are mine and based on internet research.

“Mistress!” The door to my surgery burst open, and a frantic young girl stood at the threshold, panting for breath. I thought she might be injured, and I approached her quickly.

“Are you bleeding? Where are you hurt?” I patted her down gently, but she waved my hands away.

“No, my mistress… Duncan… she sent me for ye. The bairn is coming!”

“Oh, of course!” I doubled back, grabbing the knapsack I kept packed with all necessary implements for childbirth. We raced out to the courtyard, and I stopped briefly to ask one of the kitchen girls to let Jamie and Mrs. Fitz know I was headed for the procurator fiscal’s house. I saw the lady had sent her young maid in the carriage I had advised she not ride. We clambered in and the driver snapped the reins hard on the horses’ backs.

The ride was rough; the maid—Jeanie, she said her name was—and I were flung about the inside of the carriage. I asked the girl questions while we bore the brunt of the ride. When had her pains started? Had her waters burst? Was she feverish? Was she bleeding? Jeanie was terrified, but answered my inquiries as best she could. The pains were strong and regular, and had begun earlier that morning. Her waters had not burst. Mistress Duncan had been sweating profusely, possibly feverish. She had not seen any blood on the sheets.

When we arrived at the fiscal’s house, I bid Jeanie begin boiling water and prepare fresh clean linens. In the bedroom upstairs, I found Geillis thrashing on the bedstead, drenched in perspiration. The room was dark, a fire roaring despite the noon heat, as was customary for some women. I opened a window to let in some air.

“Claire! Thank God ye’re here!” she rasped. I opened the bag of supplies and pulled out cloths, basins, and tools. The bottles of possets and infusions clinked merrily at the bottom. I laid them neatly on the dresser and immediately washed my hands by pouring vinegar on them.

“Good afternoon, Mistress Duncan. Is your husband here?”

“No, he—at the courthouse. He left when the pains began.”

“Is the pain very bad yet?” I asked, pushing her shift above her belly. I reached between her legs, feeling the pudenda.

“What do ye mean, yet?” she cried out.

I smiled wryly. “Mistress, you have not dilated fully. In fact, the opening through which the child will pass is still quite small. It will hurt twice as much before he or she is ready to come out.”

Jeanie came up with a kettle of hot water. I set about steeping willow bark to help ease her mistress’s pain. It was midday, but her waters hadn’t broken. It could be a long time before she was fully ready.

After awhile, Mistress Duncan seemed to relax. I propped her up on a few pillows, trying to make her comfortable, though I knew comfort was a relative thing to her at the moment. I bid Jeanie wipe her face with a cool cloth dipped in rose water. The lady doubled over every once in a while, wailing through the pain of each contraction, then subsiding.

A few hours passed. She drifted in and out of sleep, bone tired even though the real work was not close yet. I checked her with each chime of the church bell. She was not dilating as fast as I would have liked. I suggested she take a turn about the room; sometimes motion would help speed the birth along.

Jeanie and I held her mistress up by the shoulders. With small, slow steps, we took her around the bed a few times. She clenched up with a contraction a couple of times, sweat sliding down her face. When we tried to lay her back down on the bed, she refused to go on her back. Obeying some natural impulse of her body, she drew herself up on her knees on the edge of the bed.

“I need to push!” she exclaimed.

“Mistress Duncan—”

“Geillis!”

“Alright then, Geillis, you cannot push, your waters have not broken.”

She let out a primal scream then, torn with pain that seemed as though she was being ripped in half. A small gush of blood accompanied her scream, staining her thighs and the floor. Something was wrong.

“Help me get her on the bed.” Together, we lifted her onto the mattress. Jeanie stared with wide eyes at the bloodstains, stark red against the creamy linens. She looked very pale. I shook her shoulder, hoping to startle her back into action. “Jeanie! Go get more water please!”

The maid scurried back to the kitchen, while I pushed Geillis’s knees up and feet together. Once in that position, I spread her legs apart, keeping the soles of her feet touching. I reached once more between her legs, and felt around the birth canal. Still too closed. I washed my hands of the streaks of blood; I massaged her stomach gently with lavender oil, pressing gently at her sides. That was when I felt it.

The babe was lying wrong. Its head was high up in the abdomen, which meant he was trying to be born feet first.

I felt a cold dread grip me. This could be fatal for the mother, if not the child as well. In such cases, I knew, often the mother was left to die and then cut open to retrieve the child. But I had apprenticed at l’Hôpital des Anges, with some of the best midwives and chirurgiens, and there was something I knew I could do. Pray God it would work.

“Geillis?” I smoothed the tousled hair back from her sweaty forehead. “The child is coming feet first. This is probably why this is taking so long, and why you haven’t broken waters yet. There is a technique for this kind of delivery, but it will be painful, and there are no guarantees. But it is the best chance you have to deliver this baby and survive yourself. Are you willing I should try?” She was likely in too much pain and terrified to make this a conscious decision, but my duty was to mother and child. I would do everything in my power to see them both safe through delivery.

Geillis doubled over as if in response, crying out with gritted teeth, “Do what ye must, just get him out!”

I called out for Jeanie. The girl walked back in with frightened eyes, as I instructed her to sit behind her mistress and hold her by the shoulders. Geillis lay supine on the bed, and I extracted a tool from my kit. It looked like a steel knitting needle, long and sharp. I doused it with a flask of diluted alcohol and very carefully inserted it inside Geillis’s body. I probed gently, and suddenly there was a gush of liquid and a bit of blood. I had burst her waters in an effort to move the birth along.

I placed my hands on her enormous belly and began to massage it more forcefully, trying one last time to turn the child around. I could feel the head and some jerky motions from within, but the child would not budge. I wiped my face with my forearm; I would have to take harsher measures.

I brewed mugwort tea; Madame de Ramelle used it to induce labor and make angels. I bid Geillis drink a cup, and then waited. Slowly, contractions began again, stronger than before; in this case, I hoped it would help push the baby further down the birth canal so I could attempt the technique used by Monsieur Forez at l’hôpital.

I asked Jeannie to push on Geillis’s stomach, towards her legs. I spread them wide, and introduced my hand gingerly, feeling around. I touched the tiny tips of toes.

“He’s close, Geillis. Try to push with the pain, and I shall have to make a cut, to try and make way for the child’s body. Be ready!” I took a small paring knife from my bag, cleaned it well, and took a deep breath. With the next contraction, I swiftly made a cut on the perineum, and Geillis screamed. I reached for the feet I had felt, and timed with the ongoing contractions, pulled the child out bit by bit. I called out words of encouragement, praying the baby would not suffocate in the birth canal. Jeanie kept pushing on Geillis’s stomach, but her eyes were riveted on the child emerging from her mistress’s body. Soon, we could determine the sex—the baby was indeed male.

I kept my own gaze on the blood seeping from the cut I had made, making sure it did not turn life-threatening. Geillis sat up and with a cry and pushed hard, bellowing and keening. I felt her insides surge, and I quickly placed my hand around the baby’s shoulders. Sure enough, with the force of his mother’s muscles, the head began to emerge and I gently eased it out.

Geillis collapsed back on the pillows while I hurried to clear the boy’s airway, with my finger hooked in his mouth—he had not emitted a sound and his body was limp. Jeanie appeared by my side, clutching clean linens and dabbing at the baby.

“Is it alright? Will he live?” she asked anxiously.

I said nothing yet; I rubbed at the boy’s chest, hoping to induce a response. Suddenly the baby curled in on itself and let out a high-pitched wail. Breathing a sigh of relief, I handed the baby to Jeanie so I could tend to Geillis.

Grabbing the jar of cat-gut sutures, I threaded a needle and swiped at the area with cotton batting to staunch the blood. It wasn’t gushing, which was a good sign. Mindful of the pain she was experiencing, I stitched her up as quickly as possible. Geillis whimpered, but remained still. Jeanie approached and placed the child in Geillis’s arms.

I watched Geillis holding her boy, her previous suffering seemingly forgotten. Her eyes were suffused with joy and warmth, a glow about her face. She cuddled him close, finger tracing the soft features, still swollen and red from the ordeal of birth. I watched with a pang of longing, as Geillis looked up with immense gratitude.

“Mistress Fraser… Claire… thank ye.”

* * *

Back at Leoch, Jamie watched as I washed off the peculiar fecund ocean scent of birth, and I recounted the difficult delivery in a rush of exhilaration. These were the time when I knew what I was meant to do in life, and proud of following in Maman’s footsteps.

“I’m proud of ye, Sassenach,” he said, kissing my forehead. Suddenly I could feel a familiar griping begin in my lower belly. I rubbed my hand gingerly over my stomach, my thoughts turning to some rest and a cup of tea. I sighed, irritated at the intrusion and something else tugging at my heart. My courses meant I was not with child.

I slipped out of Jamie’s embrace with a wan smile. He sensed my mood immediately and withdrew, noting the position of my hand.

“Dinna fash. We have time, Sassenach. I imagine Mrs. Fitz will speak relentlessly on the subject of bairns, and the other women in the castle also, now that we’re officially wed. ‘Tis what they’re accustomed to, but perhaps for us… it will go another way.”

“I always dreamed of a large family.” I traced my fingers over my belly, thoughts full of Geillis and her own child. “Papa and Maman, and then it was just me. I wanted brothers or sisters. To think that I might not be able to have that, to give you that… There’s talk of Maisri, the wise-woman in the forest.”

“Aye, I’ve heard of her. She’s old, old as the hills, folk say.”

“In the hôpital, we learned how to bring children into the world. From Madame de Ramelle, we learned how to stop them from coming. But aid to conceive them in the first place… Perhaps I should pay this Maisri a visit.”

“By the grace of God, we will have a child. To think of ye in childbirth, Sassenach—I can bear pain myself, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.” With another tender kiss, I turned to take care of my courses.

Jamie wrote a letter to Jenny while I searched for the small box where I kept absorbent cloths. When I had moved from the surgery to the bedchamber, I thought I’d brought all my personal possessions with me; but the box was nowhere to be found. Perhaps Mrs. Fitz or one of the kitchen girls had moved it while cleaning.

In a last ditch attempt, I peeked under the bed. I glimpsed a bundle tucked behind the canopy frame. On my knees, I stretched my arm as far as it would go and batted around until my fingers brushed against the object. It was not a box.

“Did ye find it?” Jamie asked distractedly.

I pulled a bundle of branches from under the bed. I turned it over; strange black and red shapes dangled from the tips of the boughs, and the bundle was tied together with a strip of drab brown cloth. The edges of this makeshift ribbon were stiff with rusty red, and as I puzzled over it, the realization came to me. I dropped the bundle with a cry of shock.

The cloth was the edge of my old torn cloak. The stain on it was dried blood.

#outlander #outlander fanfic #outlander au #jamie and claire #the midwife 2.10 #here we gooooo

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adamwatchesmovies · 5 years

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The Worst of 2019

I had to follow-up my “Best of 2019″ list with its opposite universe counterpart but before I give the movies that made me suffer another lashing, let’s make a couple of things clear. I’m not a paid professional and even if I was, all I would be is a film critic. Making movies is hard. Nobody in the industry aims to do a bad job - there are much easier ways to make a living. Even though I might’ve hated these films with a passion that still smolders now, I’ve got mad respect for anyone who decides to put themselves out there and put together a movie. At the end of the day, your work is going to live on. You made something millions will see. Me? I’ll ultimately fade away. Take this into consideration as we single out the movies that tried and failed, sometimes spectacularly.

10. Cats

Cats is the kind of movie that doesn’t come around often. It’s actually kind of fascinating to watch, or it would be if it weren’t so boring. Rebel Wilson (who was destined to have a movie on this list when she starred in The Hustle) plays a cat who unzips her skin to reveal an outfit… above her skin again? She leads a choreographed troupe of singing mice and cockroaches that fill you with terror and confusion. It’s as if they’ve been scaled so the actors could scoop them up and swallow them whole - as cats would do - but because human proportions are so different from cat’s the objects and other animals they interact with change size from scene to scene. Meanwhile, Idris Elba is prowling around with his coat all open, his non-existent junk exposed to all who want to see. Our main character is so bland and unmemorable she makes no impact on you whatsoever. There’s magic in a plot that’s composed almost entirely of introductions - which might make it accurate to the broadway show but not entertaining as a movie -, dodgy special effects in every frame, lame jokes coming from the left and the right… and yet, I don’t hate this film like I do the others on this list. In fact, a part of me even admires Cats.

The thing is, had this movie worked, it would’ve been hailed as genius. It didn’t so it’s being ridiculed but I have to give it points for its ambition and willingness to take chances. That means a lot in a year in which every single one of the top ten grossing films were sequels, remakes or expansions of already-existing properties.The gamble didn’t pay off, but Cats had the guts to walk up to the plate.

9. Dumbo

I was tempted to lump The Lion King and Aladdin along with this tale of a baby elephant that learns to fly while a family of circus performers learn that the big circus tycoon played by Michael Keaton is a meanie. Few of the Disney “live-action” remakes do anything to validate their existence. They’re just feeding you what you can already watch at home for free because you probably already own the originals on home video or you have Disney+. I’m going to single out Dumbo as the worst because it actually tried something different and failed spectacularly. This means we can expect all future Disney remakes to take as few chances as possible.

8. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

There are other movies I could’ve put in this spot (see the Runner-Ups section below for examples) but I had to consider the experience as well as the movie itself. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is an unfunny comedy that walks into the room as if it’s going to marry your mother and be your new father. It makes fun of the very thing it’s doing. This might make it appealing to members of the “View Askewniverse” cult but not to me. Whether you’ve been brainwashed by Kevin Smith or not, it’s impossible to sit through the painful bonus material which follows the film, particularly the interviews conducted by Jason Mewes. The actor displays no charisma whatsoever while asking questions you don’t care about to people who obviously don’t want to be on camera. I get what Smith was doing; he was trying to give his fans more than just the movie but anyone in their right mind should’ve seen the bonus footage and burned it.

4. Dark Phoenix

What a disappointing way to end the X-Men franchise. Dull until the very end and then interesting for just enough time to make you realize you didn’t just dream it all, the movie was a bad idea from the start. We haven’t known the young version of the X-Men long enough for this story to mean anything and the choices made to make this story more faithful to the comics makes you wonder if you stepped into the wrong movie. Even before seeing Dark Phoenix, I thought people were being too harsh on The Last Stand. They did a lot of things wrong in 2006 but they had the good sense to leave out the aliens. It’s not great but it’s been somewhat redeemed since because its plot advanced the series and meant something in the end. Even if Disney had considered keeping this franchise alive while it was acquiring Fox, this is such a mess they now have no choice but to reboot the whole thing.

4. Jexi

Jexi feels like it just escaped from a time capsule. Even when it would’ve been new, it wouldn’t have been funny. This had no business appearing in theatres and watching the trailer again reminded me of why I hated it as much as I did. If you suspect you have mutant powers that just need to be unlocked by a traumatic or life-altering event, barricade your doors and start playing this movie. You’ll want to escape so desperately, you might suddenly develop the ability to bend space and time.

6. Rambo: Last Blood

This 5th entry in the Rambo series didn’t even have the guts to commit to being a proper conclusion. The titular character appears to succumb to his wounds as the picture closes… only to get up and go find medical attention during the end credits. Senselessly gory and violent, its depiction of Mexico leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

5. Shaft

No one was asking for this movie, not even fans of the original Richard Roundtree films or the 2000 Sam Jackson reboot. It tired story attempts to introduce a new version of the classic blaxploitation character to a new audience. In the process, it makes you hate the two “heroes” we follow through a generic plot filled with offensive humor. The only good thing about Shaft is that it prompted me to check out the originals.

3. My People, My Country

The Farewell made me think a lot about how we should view other cultures, particularly China. In it, Awkwafina’s Billi is caught in a moral dilemma when she learns her beloved grandmother is dying and that her family is keeping the secret from sweet Nai Nai. You go in thinking the American-raised woman is going to do the right thing by tearing the charade apart but it’s not long before you realize this scenario isn't that simple. When it comes to My People, My Country, I am going to judge. What’s the moral of this movie again? Give up your life, your dreams, your family for the sake of a country that sees you as nothing more than an expandable pion? If that weren’t bad enough, the movie’s so dull it’ll be an epic struggle to stay awake. Whose idea was it to have an entire segment of this anthology dedicated to the engineers who ensured the mechanism that would raise China’s flag in 1949? It’s as exciting as it sounds.

2. ¡Ay, mi madre!

The worst part of this list is that I know how few people reading will be able to relate. ¡Ay, mi madre! wasn't released theatrically in North America, but movies release “Straight to Netflix” have become such a big deal I’ll make an exception to my usual rule of disqualifying direct-to movies from this list. In terms of filmmaking, this is the worst movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s more technically inept than anything else on this list by far. The comedy is so unfunny it’ll make you question your life, the actors are not convincing even before they open their mouths to speak and the ending might as well be a big middle finger towards the people watching. It ha no ending, almost as if they cobbled together the few salvageable strands of footage someone scooped out of the trash into something vaguely related to “coherent”. Remember the name so you know never to click “play” if you happen upon it like I did.

The Runner-Ups

Simmba

I was deeply offended by this Bollywood film but technically, it’s a 2018 movie so I decided to only include it here. It’s loathsome but admittedly, my hatred for it has somewhat subsided since I saw it. Don’t ask me why. This movie sucks.

Playmobil The Movie

This is what we thought we were going to get when they announced “The Lego Movie”. Terrible songs, a lazy plot that makes terrible use of the property it’s advertising, unfunny jokes, and a lack of imagination guarantee this film is destined to make everyone involved regret the day it was released.

Hellboy

Yet another failed superhero movie that enthusiastically sets itself up for a sequel when it’s so obvious to everyone watching that there isn’t going to be one. The one thing it’s got going for it is a pretty cool scene towards the end where demons escape into our world and begin tearing civilians to pieces. To get to that, you must sit through endless scenes that bash you over the head with a mallet marked “Rated R”. Gallons of blood and intestines spilling onto the floor, doesn’t mean the movie is meant for adults. This was written by a teenager disguised as a grown-up.

Gemini man

They waited all these years for the de-aging technology to get where it is now… for this story? Someone should’ve pointed out to director Ang Lee when he was getting ready to film that training doesn’t alter your DNA. Why waste millions cloning Will Smith when you could just raise a normal kid and train them to be an assassin? Ultimately, the movie isn’t really all that bad. It’s watchable but it’s such a big disappointment it needs to be taught a lesson.

Replicas

I’m giving this one a break because no one saw it. I also think it’ll play better at home, where you’ll be free to make fun of it or verbally abuse the loopy plot aloud while your friends listen. If there’s a movie this year that was “So bad it’s good”, it’s this one.

After

At least “Twilight” had its original take on vampires and some danger mixed into its romantic triangle to keep things theoretically interesting. This film started off as - I kid you not - a “One Direction” fan-fic. The drama it serves up will have you howling like a werewolf flying through laughing gas. On the upside, a sequel is coming. In fact, the teaser is scheduled for today!

1. Unplanned

This was the most uncomfortable movie experience of 2019. Most of the Christian propaganda films don’t seem to put much effort into their production - they’re preaching to the choir so why should they? - but 2019 had Breakthrough, which was quite good. It showed these movies don’t have to appeal solely to the churches who will buy tickets en-masse. This movie is ridiculous, gory like a horror film, misleading, and phony. It did have what is undoubtedly the most outrageous and unintentionally funny dialogue of the year, however. “Fast food outlets look to break even on the hamburgers they sell. That’s all they do is break even ... Do you know where they make all their money? The french fries and soda. Low cost, high margin items. Abortion is our fries-and-soda.” Are we sure this was based on a true story? If so, I don’t know why the director decided to edit out the scenes in which Cheryl (Robia Scott) takes the buckets of aborted fetuses home to cook them. I think it would’ve really driven home how evil her character is. I felt dirty sitting in the theater next to people who ate this up.

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sultrysirens · 5 years

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Blue Blood [Mini]

Universe: Detroit: Become Human

Rating: PG-13 (swearing)

Characters: Connor, Evelyn (OC)

Summary: Connor is bored. That’s weird, right? He shouldn’t feel bored. But he was -- he was so bored...and so he decided to test himself.

Note: This snippet is between chapters 11 and 12.

Evelyn could’ve made an incredible criminal, Connor learned.

They spent a few hours talking about how, exactly, to get his people free of CyberLife storage and warehouses, the logistics of it, and most importantly: how to keep the two of them from being identified in the process. Since they were both officers, and specifically Evelyn a sergeant in her force, being caught up in such things would bring them both down -- hard.

Neither of them wanted that, so they were careful to construct things in a perfect way to avoid catastrophe. And while Connor would willingly and shamelessly say he was brilliant (CyberLife skimped on nothing with his features), more and more he was finding Evelyn’s insight helpful. She had two things he didn’t -- two very, very important things:

Human perspective, and experience.

He could study up on crime all he wanted, but even that wouldn’t match her decade of experience in this field. And try as he might, he’d never be able to truly envision things from a human’s perspective; their minds worked in different ways, his run by numbers and hers by sensory inputs.

While he was focused on the math involved in luring probable guards away from doors, their exact movements and schedules, she suggested scents. While he was concerned with alarm systems and erasing digital evidence, she pointed out the possibility of laying false trails. While he pondered on time, distance, and speed, she considered capitalizing on the weather.

He took great pride in knowing he thought faster than humans, that he could focus on numerous tasks at once, how he could outsmart just about anyone -- yet just talking with Evelyn proved to him that it didn’t matter how smart and capable he was. He’d always benefit from someone else’s help.

Maybe he’d let the pride get to him already, then. Infiltrating CyberLife and adjusting his plan on the fly to account for surprises had become a very powerful moment in his life, and he was a little ashamed to admit he might’ve been letting it feed his arrogance. He’d just been so successful in all that he did -- was it any wonder he’d begun soaking up the recognition and fame that came with those victories?

Forbes was proving to be a point of clarity for him, now that he’d begun to plan large events with her. She kept bringing him back from the mindset of, “I can do this, I can do anything,” to a much more manageable, “I can probably do this, but just in case...”

Considering his goal was to free possibly hundreds of androids, he appreciated that. He couldn’t risk their lives thanks to his own pride clouding his judgement.

By the end of the night they came to a singular conclusion: patience. Those androids were unlikely to wake on their own nor be moved anytime soon. They had time to work out the logistics of this plot, time to investigate and consider all angles.

Plus they had an open murder case to solve, too. That was more time-sensitive, ultimately, so the plan became to work on that first and the androids second.

Then, as time ticked away and Evelyn steadily began nodding off, she retired to bed. A part of him was frustrated by that; humans having to stop and sleep every day was such a time-killer. And though he didn’t say so aloud, he got the impression she agreed with him on that.

She commented dryly, “Time for this human to get some maintenance in.”

As she strode around the sofa, heading for her room, he quipped, “Don’t end sentences with prepositions.”

She flicked his shoulder, drawing a chuckle out of him. “Get in some maintenance, then,” she retorted, and he couldn’t quite tell if she was annoyed or just amused and pretending.

And then...he was alone again with nothing to do. And it was strange, but whereas he’d once been fine with having to wait, now he found it grating. He was...bored.

Sure, he could go into standby mode again. It was a great way to waste time. He just felt reluctant to do so, knowing that doing so will mean he’ll have spent hours unmoving, unthinking...useless. He’ll have accomplished nothing, not even basic tasks or rudimentary actions.

At a loss, he decided he may as well at least consume -- namely the media. He synced with the television and began intercepting its signals, receiving the audio and video feeds. And now that he confirmed he could do this (he hadn’t been sure), he decided to see how far he could push it. Closing his eyes, he blocked out everything external and began to test himself.

One by one, he added active channels, until he had a total of sixteen. His processors strained under this much work, largely thanks to the power required to pick up on the video feeds, so he opted not to add any more. He just flipped between the channels until he found ones that were either interesting or useful and...watched.

Seven of the channels were news stations. He recognized a few of them as national stations he’d caught in Detroit, too, the humans involved familiar. Two were international, reporting on Europe and central Asia, respectively. This was helpful in keeping him abreast of what was happening in the world, and he was pleased to find it was so easy.

There was also another surge of pride, knowing he could do this and humans couldn’t, but he tried to keep a handle on that. The last thing he wanted was to lose himself to pride and end up getting himself -- or someone else -- hurt because of it.

This could be a handy nightly routine, he mused. While Evelyn slept, he could keep an eye on the world as a whole, while simultaneously taking part in what was one of humanity’s favorite pastimes: consuming media. Films and shows passed through his mind of several differing genres, which was intentional on his part. He wasn’t sure yet what kinds of subjects he’d find enjoyable, so it was worth testing out each of them in turn.

By the end of the night, he found horror boring and romance kind of repulsive.

He suspected he just wasn’t feeling much in the way of fear, so he was missing whatever humans enjoyed when it came to horror. It didn’t help that most everything was predictable, either; the few horror films he watched had jumpscares exactly where he expected them to be, thus nullifying the effect, and he was impassive towards the gore and disturbing imagery.

....No, ‘impassive’ was the wrong word. He actually found himself analyzing it, and judging the special effects teams as a result. When a human was gutted during one film, their innards falling outwards, he couldn’t help but measure everything he saw -- the lengths of the intestines, which organs tumbled out as opposed to which actually could, even how accurate the fake blood was to actual blood.

It was when he concluded that they’d done a good job making the gory scene realistic that it hit him: he really shouldn’t watch horror films. He was only approaching them from an analytical standpoint and thus ruining the experience. He moved on from them.

Next came romance.

Maybe it was just how the romances were being portrayed in the few films he consumed, but he wasn’t seeing why humans liked it so much. It was commonly known that humans would kill and die for the kinds of relationships he was seeing, yet to him it felt hardly different from any other relationship (which, he admitted, might not mean much, as he was an outsider on the subject). Reminded that Evelyn was married and currently separated, too, supported his forming theory that it just wasn’t that good.

Yet they were clearly addicted to romance -- and sex. The latter, especially, was confusing. People commonly cheated on one another for sex, and why? From what scenes he witnessed during the course of the night (all of it softcore at most), there just didn’t seem to be that much of a reward for it. The humans in question would enjoy themselves, then move on like it hadn’t even happened.

Maybe his viewpoint was skewed, but shouldn’t they at least show some measure of lingering satisfaction? Or, given these were mostly films he was watching, were they just trimmed down for the sake of storytelling?

He probably just couldn’t comprehend it, being an android. That made sense. Resolving to ask Evelyn about it at some point (she was proving exceptionally talented at explaining things in ways he understood, as well as understanding him when he was having trouble putting his thoughts into words) he put the subject to bed.

Unsurprisingly, he was finding action and intrigue films the most palatable. Even for his high-tech and powerful mind, some of the mystery-themed films proved interesting. He mostly found himself ahead of the on-screen characters in putting puzzle pieces together, but then, he expected that was intentional. The audience was supposed to know what was happening before the characters, so they would care what happened.

But sometimes they proved unpredictable, and Connor liked that. Better yet, he found it useful; these films might mostly be invented, stories from human minds rather than actual events, but it gave him more glimpses into how the human psyche functioned.

And it was through this that he got an idea.

#siren nightshade #blue blood #mini #connor #detroit: become human #sfw #bored

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arcticlee · 5 years

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Can you do a Dante x Reader? Surprise me.

Since I’ve been given all the freedom, why not torture myself and all of you as well with some pure horror angst?

Get some tissues ready because this one’s gonna be an emotional rollercoaster

They say the longer you spend alone with your own dark thoughts, the stronger the insanity grows. But what if those thoughts are a pure manifestation of a demon sitting inside your body? How insane would you grow then?

You spent endless days trying to talk yourself into thinking that you weren’t losing your mind. Yet, it was difficult when the loudest voice inside your head spoke the most vile things possible- letting you believe each and every single word. You had two choices: ignore it or fall for its manipulations and let it overcome your body and mind completely. You tried to ignore it. God, how you tried to. But that’s the tricky thing when it comes to human minds- you can’t escape them, you can’t escape your own thoughts.

And when those thoughts get violent? When those thoughts dig up your most painful past and replay it over and over again? When those thoughts speak to you in the most judgmental voice possible, telling you how worthless you are? Continuously murmuring how you should grab that knife on a counter and slice your loved one? Tempting you, growing with their intensity to the point where you can’t stand it anymore and you let that knife drop from your hands with a loud clunk against the tile floors. So you end up crying and trembling, squeezing your own head and curling into a ball, hoping those thoughts go away, finally leave you alone. But they never do. Because they’re all coming from that one single demonic possession. Something you threw yourself into head first, sacrificing your own sanity over other’s.

You knew Dante had enough shit to deal with already, endless years of constant battling, dealing with family problems and emotional trauma wearing him out. All the pain perfectly hidden behind the carefree act he liked to put on. But was he really that carefree when the doors closed behind him and he was all alone?

So you let that demon in, let it settle inside you and grow with its power, gradually overtaking your body and mind. It was a matter of time before it’d take full control over you. The darkness was already there in a form of a dark bruise sitting above your gut where you got hit by it, the small black veins weaving across your stomach from it.

You hid it from Dante for the longest time possible, constantly repeating to him that nothing serious happened to you. But he knew what you were currently dealing with, he saw that black shadow strike your body as you fell unconscious. He knew about your possession and he saw its consequences, especially during the night.

It started out slow- the nightmares. First only a few weird dreams that woke you up for you to feel out of place for the rest of the day. But then they became more gory and violent to the point where you ended up gripping onto Dante and scratching at his helping hands. He always ended up waking you up, watching your body tremble and twitch, twist and turn as muffled murmurs escaped your mouth until you’d jolt awake completely by rougher shaking on your shoulders and louder tone telling you to wake up.

But one night you simply couldn’t wake up no matter how much he tried. You felt trapped, almost fully conscious in your dream as you heard him calling out for you but you couldn’t do anything as you were tied down to a chair in a dark room, forced to watch Dante get tortured before you in the most horrible ways possible. You were thrashing against that chair, ripping your throat out from screaming, your vocal cords almost giving out completely. You could feel your wrists burn from all the friction against the rough rope, the blood already seeping down your palms and onto the cold ground as the view before you became all blurry from your own tears.

You watched them cut away at his skin, his body working in overdrive as it tried to heal itself up but more deep wounds got peppered across his abdomen and chest. Not until they ended up gutting him completely, slicing the knife down his stomach, the visual so vile you could barely watch as the breath caught in your lungs. They decided to keep the wound open with the forceps, forcing him to suffer through all the pain, as he grit his teeth endless grunts and whines escaping his mouth like a prayer. But they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop even after they sliced his throat and dug long thick nails into his back, withholding him from healing himself up.

It was torture seeing him this helpless for the first time and suffering complete defeat. He could’ve turned into his devil form, ripped from those chains that were keeping him in place and made them pay for all that they’ve done in the most cruel way possible. But in your nightmare he was helpless and vulnerable, completely open for them to do whatever hell they wanted with him.

You could barely stand it all, your own heart beating so fast in your throat, you couldn’t breathe. You couldn’t choke out any more words, stuck in a silent sob with stilled lungs and wide eyes that were begging, screaming for them to stop. You could only feel the warmth of your tears that spilled down your red cheeks and onto your lap as another louder “please” erupted from your mouth followed by a broken inhale.

"Please, stop… Please!!“ you shrieked, just like you did wrapped up in his arms, gripping onto his bicep for dear life your own tears soaking up his shirt as he lulled you endlessly, continuously murmuring against your hair for you to wake up. And so you did, in the last moment you managed to push yourself out of your trapped state when you pulled on your own binds- harshly enough to cause searing pain.

You could see your own bedroom through a blurry haze, your body trembling from pure fear and shock. Not until you felt his hand come up to your face, the warmth of his fingers wiping away your tears, deep voice shushing you and telling you that he’s here and he’s got you. In the moments like these you were eternally grateful to have him around when you were in your weakest and most vulnerable state.

But that also provided the demon inside you with the enormous amount of power as it kept feeding on your pain, the voices inside your head growing, turning from distant whispers to loud murmurs. Like those bees in a hive- buzzing in your head. Some louder than the others, but they were all chanting the same thing: kill him, destroy him, break his heart, he’s only using you, he doesn’t need you… It was painful, even more painful when you focused on those words and their meaning. Sometimes getting so distracted by them in your day-to-day life, you lost track of time until someone around you would snap you out of it, all worried over your frozen state.

You shut your eyes tightly, barely catching your breath as the murmurs inside your head slowly started driving you crazy, your patience running thin to the point where you wanted to rip your hair out and scream for them to all go away. But they never did. No matter how much you begged and wailed, crying your lungs out and gripping onto your head for dear life- they never disappeared.

And for Dante, it was torture seeing you slowly crumble before his eyes. Because even if he had all the power he needed to defeat anyone in his way- he couldn’t help you. He couldn’t do anything that would ease your suffering and it was driving him insane. He didn’t want to lose you, he didn’t want to see you in so much pain, but he knew your days were counted. He knew the darkness within you was growing each day and he could do nothing about it.

The only thing he could do was to be there for you, wrap you up in his arms and pour his heart out about how much you mean to him and how much he loves you, trying not to burst into tears, because one night those words might be the last ones he ever tells you.

#dmc dante #dante x reader #arcticlee writes #dmc5 #dante #devil may cry #devil may cry 5 #dmc 5 #devil may cry v #dmc fanfic #dmc fanfiction #dmc

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rex101111 · 5 years

Text

Pain Is Only Bone Deep.

Rating: M

Warning: Gore, blood, PTSD, body horror. Ya know, the usual Halloween stuff.

( @broken-clover holy hell i finished it oh god)

And another Guilty Gear fic! This one is creepy and scary and angsty though that’s a plus! Anyway I saw the prompt list for Goretober and thought “hey one of those gives me an idea” and I decided to do just that! (the prompt was “Skeleton” by the way in case the title didn’t tip you off.

Anyway gory stuff lots of blood enjoy!

Baiken knows it isn't going to be a good day the second she gets a look at the date.

Generally speaking, she doesn't really keep track of the date, when she counts days and weeks it is only when something time sensitive is at play. When something has to happen within a certain time frame she keeps count, one day, and then another, and another.

She does this because she knows if she keeps a closer eye on the calendar, all she'll be able to do is count down. Count down the days and weeks and months until that day comes around again, and that will be the only day that matters.

She can't have that day matter, so she makes sure that no day at all matters.

As the years went by, she managed to wrangle this retched habit of hers to the point where she can think of other days when she catches sight of a calendar. Sometimes she remembers that a birthday is coming up, or that a holiday in a country she is in is winding down, that sort of thing.

But today is not that, not at all, today is a singular thing, a black hole in the center of her being that opens up once a year and drags her in and grinds down all that she is and all that she built of herself to nothing.

The day everything she ever know, everything she ever cared for, went up in smoke before having it's ashes sink to the bottom of the ocean.

She sees it when she wakes up, it's the first thing to come to focus as she rubs the sleep from her eye and lazily drags her sight across the room when she notices that it is empty. A fleeting thing at first, but a second later she goes completely still and drags her eye back to it, a deceptively innocent pair of glowing green numbers on a digital display.

Her heart thunders in her ears, her skin goes cold and her bones lock in place, refusing to let her look away as the memories come flooding in, her lungs burn in her chest as she doesn't even move to breathe, only dragging her left arm to place a white knuckled grip on the stump of her right.

Pain, a burning, loud pain rushes through where her right elbow should be, then travels down to her fingers before digging back into her palm.

Her fingers break the skin on her stump, a quick and cold needle of focus runs through her and she can breathe and, more importantly, look away.

She turns her whole body away from the calendar, her breathing going heavy and fast through clenched teeth. She looks down at her left hand, sees specks of red under the nails of her index and ring fingers. She looks aside at the stump, sees a sharp, thin line of crimson flowing down from two tiny puncture wounds where she gripped it.

"Shit…" She mutters to herself in a daze, wiping the blood from her hand on the futon as she stands on unsteady legs, "get a fucking hold of yourself…" she hisses viciously, gnashing teeth as she goes to the closet to pull out a kimono and dresses herself in a mechanical fashion.

She bites her tongue as she pulls the kimono over her right shoulder, feeling the cloth ghost over the tiny wounds she inflicted. She nearly strangles herself on the hisses she chokes back as she finishes putting the kimono on.

She walks through the halls in a haze, feels her gut roll and gurgle as she uses her hand on the walls to keep herself steady. "Anji…" She mutters harshly, stumbling once and taking a sharp breath through her nose, "gotta-fuck-gotta find him…" She grips her forehead, leaning her shoulder against the wall as her breath hastens and grows labored.

The world burns around her, the wreckage of her home and family lay on top of her in ruins, crushing her lungs and grinding her bones. The boiling air curls over her skin, the ash of her village stings her eyes…eye? She-She can't-

"Shit! Everything's on-hey!"

She can only look up, up into the moonlit sky as she hears hurried footsteps and panicking voices grow ever near to her. She wonders why her parents aren't helping her up. It hurts. Everything hurts. Why-why can't she-

"What are you doing? Why aren't you running?!"

Pain, pain from her head, her legs, her arms, her face. No matter where she turns her attention all she finds is pain. Blinding, debilitating pain. Only the sky is painless, and the moon's light offers no comfort. She can't-

"There's-shit-there's someone over-"

The voices are muffled, as if through both a wall and underwater, but she hears them. She wants to cry, wants to scream, tell them she needs help. That her parents need help. But the pain fills her to the brim, pushing against the walls that contain it and refuses to let anything else out or in.

"Holy shit it's a kid-"

She can't feel her-

Baiken's fist slams a crater in the wooden wall, the shock racing back up her arm jarred her teeth and made a growl roll off her tongue, "no." She straightens herself with a stomp of her foot and continues walking, trying to remember where she could find her partner in this-this-

"Fuck yesterday was a shitshow…" Baiken rubbed her eyes, trying to recall where she actually was. The day before had them barely walk away from a crack at a Gear nest. The last thing she can remember with any clarity was finding a town and dragging herself and Anji to the steps of an inn.

They must have been both out cold by the time they got a room, otherwise that calendar would have been crushed and thrown out by one of them. Anji had the same aversion to keeping track of time as she did, but she hadn’t yet seen his reaction to today specifically, and that granted her an extra sense of hurry the hell up that had her clenching her teeth and forcing down bile from the back of her throat.

"E-excuse me?" Baiken whipped her head up in surprise, her feet somehow getting her to the receptionist's desk fast then she expected, the small, mousey girl shaking behind her glasses at the samurai, "c-can I help you?"

"The man I was with." Baiken groused impatiently, the side of her fist pulsing with pain from hitting the wall. She clenched and unclenched it to attempt to work through it. "Did you see him pass through here? Or leave?"

"Oh! Right!" The girl went through some papers under her desk before going over a list of names, "Mr.…Mito, right?" Baiken nodded shortly, feeling a pin slowly pierce her skull as she ground her teeth, "r-right, well I, um, I didn't see him leave the inn, or near here, so maybe he's…uh…" Baiken saw the girl cower away from her slightly, and made an effort of unclenching her jaw. "…the dining room maybe? Breakfast ends in about half an hour so…?"

Baiken made an about face and started marching, "thanks." The grumble trailed behind her as she felt her heart thumping again, taking a deep breath and closing her eye to concentrate, concentrate on finding Anji and-

"Miss!" The girl shouted of a sudden, voice tight with concern as she walked from behind her desk, "your hand!" Baiken stopped dead, looking down at her still aching fist, a few trails of red leaking from between her knuckles.

Pieces of the house start to move, she can move the fingers of her left hand, but every twitch sends a flash of pain up her shoulder before digging into the back of her neck. Her home leaves one piece at a time, some measure of the pain leaving with each piece the voice takes away.

"The whole house fell on top of her man, just leave her we can't-"

Enough pain has left her to let terror have its place. It roots itself in the bottom of her stomach, and it helps her turn her eye to look at some blurry shadow at the corner of her vision. Again, the need to scream and cry nearly overwhelms her, and yet her throat refuses to unseal, the pressure building up behind her nose and between her eyes.

"She's alive, asshole! Look! Twitching and blinking! Help me damn it!"

Another shadow joins the first, and more and more weight leaves her tattered frame. The pain crawls through her in waves; one wave makes her clench her teeth nearly hard enough to crack, another makes her shut her eye (why one eye why one eye why one), and another makes her close the fingers of her left hand into a tight fist. It was like her soul was being yanked out by inches. She's scared. She can't die here. She can't.

"Fucking-fine-world's ending and you run off to-oh fuck-"

One more wave of pain crawls forward, going through her right shoulder…and stops. She thinks for a moment, and swears she can feel her fingers move through static. Somehow, dragging herself through the pain, she manages to move her sight to look at her right side. She is met with the moonlight glinting off the blood pouring out the mangled pile of flesh that was an arm.

"Shit! Her arm is…holy shit is that-"

Bone. Moon light white between the shimmering red of her blood, cracked and splintered and sticking out of torn flesh as flowers in a field. A scream rises in her throat, and then joins the chorus of fire filling the air around her.

"You're bleeding!" The girl says, afraid, stressing her words as if she had to repeat herself, before she gathers a few inches of courage to reach out towards the bloodied fist, "I can get you some help-"

Baiken whirls to face the girl, teeth bared in a snarl and shooting out her red stained hand to fist in the receptionist's uniform and hold her an inch off the ground and nose to nose with the samurai, "Don't," She growls, voice rough and low, "touch me."

The girl nods her head franticly, keeping her hands up and away from Baiken as she's held by the collar, face stricken with fear and eyes wet with unshed tears of panic.

Baiken sees an echo of something in that face, a reflection she saw in a shard of glass that she thought she forgot, and bile rises in her throat as she recognizes it. She clicks her tongue in distaste before tossing the girl back on her feet, turning away from the sound of her scrambling back behind her desk.

A whimper reaches her ears, and she has to bite her tongue to keep from turning back.

She stomps her way across the inn in a blur, slamming open doors and whipping her head this way and that to try and catch sight of Anji, but he evades her. Her failure to find him strains something between her lungs and has her mind tie itself in knots.

She's known him for overreacting, for hiding his emotions, for lying, and every time she tries to imagine how he's handled the memory of today she hits a brick wall. She almost doesn't want to imagine it; her own reaction is making her sick to her stomach. It's been a century already, and still the blade in her heart feels sharp.

She's the one who chokes on her emotions, he's the one who wears them like decorations. If she found out he did something stupid she'll drag back by the hair.

She looks down at her still bleeding hand, and ice spreads through her veins. Starting at her finger tips, racing to her wrist, up her elbow, weighing down the back of her neck, before she feels it sinking down her right side.

She feels fingers twitch and clench, a shade of a sensation over a hundred years old. It takes every inch of strength she has not to vomit in the hallway.

"Hold her down-"

She hits the wall again, hard enough to nearly open a hole in the concrete. She swears she can hear something break. "Anji Mito!" She shouts, at her wit's end, voice rough and hoarse, "where the hell are you!?"

"We need to act fast, if we don't she'll just bleed out-"

"NO!" She yells out, her voice bounding off the walls and hitting the back of her head. She is not going to sink down that rabbit hole again, not this year. She's going to power through today even if she has too pull her hair out and gnash her teeth till they fucking break. "Anji!"

(She's not panicking, she's not.)

"Come on kid! You'll die if we don't-"

(She's not.)

"I-I'm so sorr-"

(She's not.)

"Baiken!"

She's almost ashamed of how relieved she is at the sound of his voice, she hides it by scowling at him as she turns around, "where the hell have you been?" She looks up to meet his eyes as he runs towards her, "you can't just vanish like-" She stops cold when she catches sight of him, her mind sweeping over everything wrong, "Anji, you…shit."

Red rimmed eyes, clothes in slight disarray, face pale, whatever anger she tried to gather earlier fades and she's there, alone with him in the hallway. He manages a short once over of her himself and a fragile smile tilts his lips. "I'm going to guess this morning hasn't been kind to you either?"

She opens her mouth, almost on reflex, to say that she's fine, or that he should mind his own business, but a throb of pain from her probably broken fingers and the wound she made on her shoulder kills the denial at the base of her throat and leaves her jaw hanging with nothing else to say.

She looks down at her feet, her hand clenched at her side and mouth twisted in a scowl. She shouldn't look like this, this pathetic, this weak, this sad. Not ever. Not in front of him.

She feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, Anji somehow avoids touching the wound, and she looks back up to see him with a smile, as if trying to comfort her. But the smile is wrong, the edges are uneven, it doesn't reach his eyes. He shouldn't look this sad either.

"I think we need to leave." Anji says finally, heaving a short sigh and taking his hand off her shoulder. The spot where he was touching her feels cold. "This probably isn't a conversation that we should be having in front of other people."

Baiken looks over his shoulder, and behind herself, to see various other tenants poking their heads over the corner or from behind their doors and nods with a grumble. "Good point." She scoffs, "made a fucking spectacle of myself…"

"Well…" Anji laughs mirthlessly, "that and the owner sort of wants to throw us out after what you did to the receptionist."

Baiken groans and grabs her head but otherwise says nothing. She's sick of today, sick of what she's doing because of it, she'd had enough, she wants tomorrow to show up so the two of them can just…move on already.

Anji puts an arm over her shoulder (still somehow avoiding the wound) and leads her outside.

-_-_-

"When did you find this place anyway?"

"Just this morning, I thought the both of us could do with a little…isolation, just to get our thoughts in order."

Baiken rests her head on the tree she and Anji are leaning against, looking to her side and down the hill it's planted on. She sees the city in the distance, the morning rush of people working in full swing. "What thoughts?" She grumbles stubbornly, "we're just having a shitty morning, that's it."

"Baiken." Anji sighs, frustration floating in the air between them, "of all the days to be closed off, this isn't one of them." He shuffles over to press his shoulders to hers as they sit, wringing his fingers as he looks at her from the corner of his eye, "this is hardly the first time we've had to deal with…memories coming up when they're not wanted, today is just especially-"

"Don't start." She glares at him, baring her teeth, "I've had a damn century to deal with those damn memories, I just clench my teeth and power through." She looks away, glaring at some distant point beyond the horizon. "Today doesn't matter." She bites her lower lip, "it can't matter…"

A heavy curtain of silence falls on them, the both of them stuck in a mist and trying not to breath too deeply lest they choke on it. Baiken feels her head throb, her shoulder ache, her fingers pulsing with pain. She looks at the sky and hopes tomorrow comes before she comes undone by it all.

She hears a shuffling sound beside her, and turns to see Anji remove his head-guard and his glasses. He rubs the bridge of his nose before sighing and looking at her with a sad smile. "Hey," he starts, quietly, before raising his hand to lift his bangs to uncover his forehead. A bright mark of an impact comes to view, a scar as old as the gash that took her eye, "did I ever tell you how I got this one?"

Anji and Baiken tended not to linger on scars, especially not old ones, but every now and again they would drink enough and swap stories about some of them. The obvious ones never came up, but she had caught sight of the one he was showing, albeit not very often. "…I can make a guess where and when."

Anji chuckled humorlessly, "that would be a no then." He made himself more comfortable on the tree trunk, his eyes roaming over clouds in the distance as he started to mutter, "let's see…"

"Anji," Baiken spoke up, apprehensive, today was depressing enough already, "you don't need to-"

"I grew up in an orphanage, I told you about that right?" He waits for her to sigh and lean back on the trunk with a weary nod, "right, well, I didn't tell about who ran the orphanage." He shakes his head with a chuckle, "she was this…rancid old crone that managed the place like a boot camp." He rests his chin in his hand with a mild scowl as he reminisces, "you followed her rules, you did as you were told, and you didn't cause trouble. If you did she would yell at you till she was blue in the face and sent you to bed without supper."

Baiken clicked her tongue, "bitch."

"No kidding." Anji mumbled before shaking his head, "she did all that with no real…malice though." He sighed, "looking back, I figure she didn't really hate any of the kids she had to take care of, I think she just felt…stuck in her life." He paused for a moment, "not that it excuses her I suppose, or that a kid could tell the difference." He hummed deep in his throat. "I hated her, as intensely as a child could hate anyone, I still remember a few especially bad nights were I wished she would just…"

He didn't continue, some age old shame stopping him. Baiken looked at him with a smile that didn't even attempt to reach her eye, "that she would just drop dead?"

He didn't answer, instead sighing and leaning back on the trunk. "One day I wake up…and the whole orphanage is on fire." Baiken looks away again, a lump in her throat. "People screaming, children running, some of them laying on the ground like rag doll." He takes in a shaky breath, "smoke and ash everywhere…I panicked, obviously, and started running myself, looking for the exit."

Baiken notices his hands start shaking before he grabs his knees with another trembling breath.

"Then…I see her, trapped under a burning support beam." His eyes started to glimmer in the early morning sun before he wiped his face. "I ran towards her, I'm not really sure why, but I wanted to save her…to help…to do something." Then he does something very odd, he laughs, and not quietly either, a full bore snort and all, "and do you know what she did?"

Baiken leaned a bit away from him at his sudden laugh, not sure what to say.

"She gives me this look," his face twists into some form of disgust in an attempts to show her what he meant, "I'll never forget it, and then she grabs a piece of burning wood and throws it at me." He shakes his head and pokes his scar with quiet grin, "beaned my right here, right over my glasses."

Baiken's jaw hung loose for a moment before a snarl rose from her throat, "bitch!"

"Right?" He chuckles with a shake of his head, and then his smile falls, "after that she screams at me, asks me what I think I'm doing…'don't you know a scrawny kid like you can't help anyone? Don't you know that all you can do is run?'…so I ran."

A flock of birds ruffled the leaves of their tree, causing a few to float quietly down around them. Baiken focused on one leaf that landed on the back of her hand, right over the bandages splinting and binding her broken fingers. It was the first thing Anji did once they left the inn, and only now Baiken realized that she didn't thank him for it.

"And I've been running ever since." He sighs again, opens a palm for a leaf to land there, and slowly but gently closes his fingers around it. "When I woke up today, and saw the date…I started smelling smoke." He uncurls his fingers, and lets the wind carry the leaf away, "by the time I came to my senses long enough to stop…running, enough time had passed for you to do…" He points to her broken fingers, "…that."

Baiken turned her body away from him, tucking her broken hand out of view, "what do you want from me?" She muttered, her chest heavy and head foggy, "want me to return the favor? Spill my guts and baggage up on this shitty hill so you can, what, feel like we’re on equal fucking ground?" She can't grab her sword with her fingers broken like this, so she settles for the next sharpest thing she has to defend herself, "get a fucking grip Anji."

"What good has swallowing up all of this done for you?" He doesn't even flinch, his voice like iron while he doesn't even turn his head from watching the leaves blow on the wind to look at her, "a century later and the wound still hasn't stopped bleeding."

"Fuck you."

"You wake with nightmares, see flashes of your past, brake your bones to stop yourself from thinking about it, and you expect me to just shrug my shoulders and let you carry on?" She looks over her shoulder to see him glaring at her, voice tight and even while his gaze burns her, "what kind of fool do you take me for?

She gets to her feet and meets his glare with one of her own, "The kind of fool who doesn't know when to mind his own damn business!" She nearly snarls when he slowly gets up so she has to lean her head back to keep her gaze with his, "how I deal with my demons is, matter of fact, not your fucking business."

"The hell it isn't." He hisses back between his teeth, hands clenching at his sides, "when you wake up in the morning and rampage around an inn looking for me in a panic just because you haven't got your shit together and it results in us losing money and getting kicked out, it is every bit my business."

"Fuck you!" She nearly screams, whatever meager patience she has grinded down to dust the moment she woke up, "I was worried about you shit head! I thought you were off doing something stupid!" Her voice strains and pains her throat, but she doesn’t care, "and don’t go off acting high and fucking mighty, didn't you just get done telling me you ran like a bitch because you don't have your damn shit together!?" She grabs her head and growls in frustration, so utterly and completely done, "how was I supposed to react to you just vanishing on me on the anniversary of the day everything went to shit? Make some morning tea? Fuck that and fuck you!" She narrows her eye at him from under her bangs, "I trust you to have my back in a fight, to be able to handle yourself when I'm not looking, if you want more then that than you can just screw off!"

"See!? This is what I'm talking about!" He yells right back, for all his talk of his own cowardice, Anji has never backed down from her, never, "shout and scream and curse me all you like! The point is that if we spend all this time together, fighting and eating and traveling, we need to trust each other! Otherwise what are we even doing here!?" He rubs the bridge of his nose and takes a breath, "that's what I want from you Baiken, for you to trust me, trust me not just in a fight, but with this."

The samurai clenches her teeth and grips her stump in a white knuckled grip, turning her back on him while her shoulders tremble.

Anji takes another breath, and his voice is calm when he speaks again, "that's all I want Baiken, for you to trust me, with your hopes, your dreams…" His voice lowers but her moves closer, putting a hand over her own where she grips the wound she made in the morning. "…your nightmares, all of it, even what hurts you, especially what hurts you."

Wind blows her hair about her face, she looks at her feet. "…I'm not weak enough for nightmares, Anji."

"Oh bull." Anji sighs, "you can keep up this tough, unaffected samurai act around anyone else Baiken, but not me." He walks to be in front of her again, and she can't escape his glare this time, "you and I may not share the same scars, but you and I went through the same hell, on the same day, at the same damn age." Another breath with closed eyes, and when he opens them his gaze is calm and kind, "nightmares don't make you weak…simply human."

She holds his gaze for a long while, the wind between them and the city in the horizon. The sky turns dark as the afternoon ends and she feels the throbbing in her right arm lessen enough that remembering it isn't there is easier to do.

"…pity me and you're dead."

"When have I ever-"

"Promise me Anji."

He is quiet for a moment, either to think of his answer or to process how she sounded when she demanded (demanded because she doesn’t beg she never begs and never pleads never) his promise, and she sees his smile, the smile he gives her when they share tea and would let the morning drift away, "I promise."

She sighs, walking back to the tree and sliding down the trunk to sit on the roots again, Anji soon sitting beside her. She takes a breath, closes her eye, and remembers.

"When Justice attacked, my house fell on top of me. Gouged my eye out, fucked up my arm."

Anji shuffling beside her, waiting.

"…is that what you remember every year?"

She doesn't dare look, or open her eye, not matter what he promised. Instead she keeps her eye closed, and focuses on the itch of the bark on the back of her neck.

"No, what I remember is…these two guys, don't remember how they looked like, digging me out of the wreckage. I remember my blood in the moon light pouring out of my ruined arm…"

Silence, leaves rustling in the wind and getting caught in her hair, she doesn't bother getting them out.

"…and then they take me to a doctor."

-_-_-

She remembers going in and out of blissful darkness. Whenever she returned to the world of the waking and the screaming all she could feel was the explosion of pain from her arm. Or at least what was left of it.

She remembers the two men, gibbering and bickering and noisy above her. They wrapped her head and arm in makeshift bandages to try and stem the bleeding. Half of her vision is blocked, but it would make little difference either way.

One of the men blurts out that she lost an eye when they think she can't hear them. The same man that keeps trying to convince the other to just leave her there, to bleed and rot and die while they run for safety.

The other man refuses, every time, looks down on her with so much pity in his eyes she nearly pukes. Says they can't leave her behind, she's just a kid, kids shouldn't have to suffer like she is, they have a responsibility.

She hated them. One man for his callousness and the other for his pity, the worst day of her life and she is saved by a self-righteous idiot and a cruel bastard. In remembering, she wondered what hurt more, her arm or the self-pity.

The memories before they reach the evacuation camp are foggy, sketchy, parts missing and misplaced. She remembers every second from the moment they walked into a tent with a doctor with absolute, crystal clarity.

Everything, from the shade of the doctor's hair to the tone of his voice, a century later she can still call to mind every errant twitch on his face as the two men dragged her barely responsive body in his tent.

She can remember the throng of nurses running around binding broken limbs and tying tourniquets to the seemingly endless waves of screaming patients. And him, standing like a spear in a corpse, unmoving and untouched by the blood covering his cheek and soaking his gloves.

She can remember the grim line of his mouth as he looked to the side and saw her arm.

"Help!" The pitying man cried out, voice high pitched and jarring her fully awake, "please she's hurt! Anyone!"

The doctor walked towards them with a purposeful stride, "put her on the table, now." His voice was steely, calm, leaving no space for the two to fumble or get confused. She felt herself getting carried and then laid out on a metal slab, the cold pricking at the edges of her mind and keeping her awake, keeping her aware of the pain radiating from every part of her body. He looks at her with a detached, cold stare, eyes (green, like freshly cut grass) flitting over every little injury covering her person before they stop somewhere near her head. "Her eye?"

"Fucked." The bastard says, tersely, "she had some…glass or some shit in there and we didn't want to try and take it out in case-"

"Right." The doctor cuts off quickly, his eyes aiming downwards, "I'll see to that after…the obvious." He reaches over to her arm and lifts the poorly wrapped bandages. His eyes narrow at the sight of the blood and bone and mangled flesh, but he clicks his tongue and shakes his head as he turns away, "hold her down."

"Huh?" The idiot says, confused, "what the hell are you-"

"Either help or get out of the way so a nurse can." The doctor cuts off harshly, taking off his bloodied gloves to replace them with new ones and putting on a surgical mask. "We need to act fast, if we don't she'll just bleed out and you would have saved her for nothing." He reaches for something on a nearby table, metal glinting moonlight into her eyes as he lifts it up in his grip.

A bone saw, teeth jagged and gleaming in the artificial light of the tent. He started walking back to her.

Panic, sharp and loud as a thunder clap tears through her and she, somehow, manages to find some strength to lift her back from the table, trying to get off, to run, get away. She's stopped before she can even fully sit up, the two men grab her by the shoulders and slam her back down.

"Oh no you don't kid." The bastard mutters between clenched teeth as she struggles, "you die and I would have wasted my time and my life for nothing, keep still."

"Come on kid! You'll die if we don't get rid of that arm, there's no saving it!" She makes a pathetic sound from the bottom of her throat as she thrashes against the idiot's grip, "I know you're scared-"

She hates him, hates them both, she realizes at this moment, hates them more then she thought she could ever possibly hate another human being in her life. He thinks she's scared? She's about to get an arm sawed off and one of them is pitying her and the other thinks of her as an annoyance? She nearly snarls, pain and anger mixing in her addled, terrified mind and painting the world a vivid, blistering red.

"Enough."

All three stop at the sound of the doctor's voice, loud yet calm and impossible to miss, Baiken leans her head up to look at him, heart beating frantically in her chest as more and more blood seeps from her.

"Dozens of people are dead or dying in this camp, many more will show up before the hour is done and in three hours relief forces from the UN will show up to evacuate anyone who can survive the trip from here to South Korea." He laid out the fact nicely and neatly, his eyes firmly directed at her half gaze, face unmoving and grave, "meaning anyone wasting my time and who just want to die are welcome to it so I can attend to people I can actually help."

Baiken feels her heart slow, her focus sharpens and suddenly the whole tent disappears as the doctor moves closer and leans down so she and him are nose to nose.

"So, I'm going to ask you a very simple question, child, do you want to live?"

She opens her mouth, but her throat is still clogged, and only rasps and whines find a way out.

"Yes, or no, if no I'll just leave you here to bleed while I get back to my job, but if yes," he offers her a strap of leather with his other hand, "bite on this, and try not to faint." He raises an eyebrow, voice lacking any sympathy or compassion, simply waiting for an answer, "well? Yes, or no?"

She stares at him, her heart booming in her ears, the tent soaked in blood and screams as people die around her, as her home burns and falls to pieces. She feels something cold crawl up her spine, something heavy and cruel and quiet, she thinks this is despair.

She remembers, remembers from a sketchy memory of getting dragged here, a shadow in the sky, a beast of metal and fire, a monster rending the clouds as it flew. She knows who to blame, or at least where the blame might start, and the despair turns molten and burns her entirely, from her lungs to her spine.

New hate, stronger then what she felt for the two who dragged her here, more intense and infinitely more solid roots itself in her mind, pushing out the anger and pain and replacing it with something sharp.

She snaps her jaws shut on the leather strap, the doctor barely flinching out of the way in time to keep his fingers. She glares at him with all her might, a growl somehow climbing up her throat as the doctor clicks his tongue and lifts his saw.

"Hold her by her shoulders, tightly."

Again she's braced firmly against the cold metal of the table, and then she feels the teeth of the saw touch her torn flesh near the elbow.

"I'll try and make this quick."

She barely has a second to brace herself before his arm moves, and every inch of her explodes in apocalyptic pain. She nearly folds backwards from her chest flying up in pained shock as she feels how her flesh is torn aside by strips, every movement of the saw stripping away at her arm. She bites the strap in her mouth so hard her jaw begins to ache, muffled screaming barely filtering through.

"Almost."

She almost doesn't hear him, and then she feels a snag. The saw catches on something, and she knows what it is. The sounds of metal cutting into bone overpower her senses, the shock of the saw vibrates through her entire body, the pain slicing into the marrow and ever louder screams burst from her.

"A bit more."

He speeds up, and she is certain that this can only be hell. Her mind nearly snaps, her soul screams and shivers as the saw cuts deeper, deeper, deeper. She cries. Sobs. Hot, fat tears roll down her cheeks as the pain seems to never end, every stroke of the saw a moment that stretches into years.

Every happy thought she had in her short life falls away, every blessing, every joy and every fond dream she held dear is shredded between the teeth of the bone saw. Only her anger and hate remain, pushing against the terror of this insurmountable pain and she hangs onto them in a death grip.

She isn’t going to die. She isn’t going to die. She has a monster to kill.

And then, it's over. The doctor withdraws his tool, stepping aside as a nurse leans in to tie the bloody stump. She's dizzy, from blood loss and from the pain and how suddenly it stopped. She can only barely feel the wrapping around her left eye being peeled off. The doctor once more clicking his tongue.

The world is growing dark around her, but the taste of rusty metal between her teeth keeps her awake, along with the leather strap, still clenched tightly between her teeth. She hears shuffling from her right side, she turns to see the blurry image of the idiot, wringing his fingers and frowning down at her.

"I-I'm so sorry-"

She spits the leather strap at him before he can finish, before his pity fills her stomach and makes her puke, and he bows his head and flinches away into the dark beyond her vision.

And so there she was, tired, angry, disgusted, down an arm and an eye.

And yet, alive. Only just barely, but alive.

She sees the doctor put the saw away and shivers, turning her gaze away from the still shining, red stained teeth.

The last thing she remembers, before this nightmare ends and the event blurs, is seeing a nurse carry her severed arm from the corner of her eye. She takes it to the entrance of the tent, tosses it like it was a piece of garbage, and then turns back with a face as stone solid as the doctor as she goes to continue her work.

And then, it is dark.

And she is awake.

Awake, and still leaning against the tree on the hill, overlooking the small town where she saw the calendar that started this whole mess. She looks aside at Anji, sees that his face is pale and his lips in a severe line. He looks ahead at the horizon unflinching, his hands fisting the fabric of his pants.

She wipes her cheeks quietly, looks at the setting sun as Anji is, and sighs.

Waits.

Anji takes off his glasses and worries the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger, taking a breath and releasing it slowly. And again. And again.

Like that he continued, in and out, in and out.

Soon he put his glasses back on rubbed his forehead and scowled, "that…certainly explains a few things." His voice is neutral, if a bit disturbed, but so far he has done as promised, so she lets him continue, "…like your reactions to our resident Doctor Faust, for instance."

Against her wishes, a snort escapes her throat and into the air. She puts her hand on her forehead with a broken smile, "among other things huh?"

"Among other things." Anji agreed with a quiet nod, he doesn’t say anything for a moment more, then he looks at her, visibly working out what to say before he rubs his forehead again and sighs, "hypothetically speaking, if I asked you if you feel better, what would you do?"

She chuckles softly, "cut your fucking head off."

"That's fair." He's quiet again for a quick moment, and then he whispers, "better than having it weigh on your chest at least…better than letting it eat you up from the inside…"

He trails off, and she considers how easy it is for to…breath, how her jaw doesn't clench on its own, how the hole in her gut feels smaller then it was since she woke up, how her head doesn't throb.

How she can't feel her right arm. At all. No pain, no flexing fingers, nothing.

She leans back on the tree. "No, not better. But easier, at the very least."

Anju hums in agreement, and then they simply sit in calm silence, Baiken picking leaves out of her hair and Anji cleaning his glasses as the sun slowly sets before them. Her partner groans as he picks himself up from the ground, "so, now what?"

Baiken sits for a while longer, her gaze lowering and searching for the roof of the inn she ruined in the morning, a sour taste coating her tongue, "first I go to apologize to that receptionist." She can feel Anji gape at the back of her head. "Than…we move on."

Anji blinks at her, she turns to see him a bit at a loss, "…that's it? After all of that? We just…keep moving?"

Baiken thinks for a moment, and shrugs, "what else is there to do?" She looks back at the setting sun, the last dregs of sunlight slowly fading away to dark blue, "can't get my arm back, we spent all day feeling sorry for ourselves…nothing else to do but march forward, and see what we can find on the way."

Anji's mouth gapes a little, but soon he smiles with a sigh, putting his arms in his sleeves and bowing slightly, "after you then, boss."

Baiken clicks her tongue, but starts walking anyway towards the city, the sound of Anji's foot falls following her step for step.

She looks down at her broken, bound fingers. Her mouth twists in dissatisfaction, "Hey Anji?"

"Hmm?"

"Thanks…for the fingers I mean." Silence, save for the sound of their feet shuffling on the ground. "Should have told you earlier, telling you now, so…yeah."

A chuckle, kind and patient and without an ounce of pity, "anytime."

(Somewhere, she knows, a clock is slowly crawling towards midnight. Three hundred and sixty-four days to go, she knows. The same nightmare next year, she knows. Of blood and bone and pity, she knows.

What she doesn't know, is how she'll handle next year, though she figures that, with Mito at her side, it might be a bit…easier next time. At least a little.)

#Guilty Gear #Baiken #Anji mito #stuff rex wrote #Bone deep #gah this took a while #AND IT'S LONG SHIT #man's late I have work in the morning heck

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thetygre · 6 years

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30 Day Monster Challenge 2 - Day #16: Favorite Evil Weapon/Object

1. Stormbringer (Elric of Melnibone)

The Black Blade. Daughter of Arioch. The Stealer of Souls. One of the single most legendary swords in all of fantasy, present in every universe in at least one form or another. A demon of chaos bound by the Lords of Law into the shape of a weapon. Whoever wields it can drain the souls from whoever they stab and sustain themselves with it, but is driven by a terrible hunger. The Black Blade has a will of its own, and it howls for blood as it is swung. In short, the definitive evil weapon.

What makes Stormbringer stand out from its later imitators, and even previous legendary evil weapons, is how it affects its primary wield, Elric of Melnibone. As an albino, Elric is sickly, and usually uses medicine and dark magic to stay alive. But abroad in the Young Kingdoms, Elric has to rely on Stormbringer to survive. Even as Elric connects with people outside his home kingdom, they are bound to die whenever he needs to stay alive, no matter how much Elric tries to fight it. Stormbringer is essentially a manifestation of Elric’s burden as the Champion of Balance, but also his greater isolation that distances him from being able to make connections. Elric makes it clear that Stormbringer isn’t some kind of ultimate weapon, it’s a crutch, a drug that ultimately consumes its user. And in the end, that’s what happens to Elric; when the entire universe is consumed by chaos, Stormbringer finally turns on Elric before disappearing into the apocalypse.

2. Soul Edge/Soul Calibur (Soulcalibur)

So this is honestly cheating, but I just can’t pick between the two swords. Soul Edge is the clear Stormbringer descendent and looks rad as hell to boot. Even more that Stormbringer, Soul Edge looks like a living, breathing monster. It can even shapeshift into weapons that aren’t sword, and it had an entire life cycle in Soulcalibur 2. But Soul Edge never really stopped being the ‘bad’ sword. It’s counterpart, Soul Calibur, on the other hand, started off as the ‘good’ sword. But as the series went on, Soul Calibur began to change. In Soulcalibur 4 it was hinted that Soul Calibur might have a mind of its own as well, and it might not have the purest intentions. By Soulcalibur 5, the plot hook came to fruition; Soul Calibur is just as dangerous as Soul Edge and wants to trap the world in a perfect unchanging state. The swords have become the embodiments of Law and Chaos; the Michael Moorcock reference comes full circle. All we need now is a game where Soul Calibur is out of control and the only thing that can stop it is Soul Edge.

3. The Terror Mask (Splatterhouse)

The Terror Mask has sass, the Terror Mask has a personality. Half these evil artifacts are just kind of generically malevolent; they won’t yell at you in Jim Cummings’ voice and call you a pussy when you notice one of your arms is missing. There’s a surprising amount of lore invested in the Terror Mask. An entity from the space between spaces, it fled the cosmic horror gods until they bound it in a bone mask. Now it’s out to settle the score, and whoever is wearing it just happens to be along for the ride. Granted, the wearer of the mask turns into a hulking slasher ogre that is almost impossible to kill. The Splatterhouse games are a gateway into the video game id, replete with monsters, ultra-violence, and a hero so buff he puts the ‘masculine’ in ‘toxic masculinity’. The Terror Mask, like in the game, is just a way to get to that special kind of hell.

4. The Necronomicon Ex Mortis (Evil Dead)

The Necronomicon Ex Mortis is probably the most famous evil book in the world, probably more so than Lovecraft’s original Necronomicon. (Frankly, I could do an entire list on favorite evil books, but we’ll get there when we get there.) The Ex Mortis really doesn’t have a lot to do with Lovecraft besides the name, other than that they are both old, sanity-rending, and bodies of literature. But, being honest, the Ex Mortis is just the more fun of the two. The Ex Mortis is the party-boy of evil books to the original Necronomicon’s Ivy League scholar. It’s such an embodiment of Sam Raimi horror; gory, campy, with a bit of slapstick thrown in, and its mere presence causes weirdness to happen. The Necronomicon Ex Mortis contains knowledge of things man was not meant to know, and it knows it. It’s mischievous, and it’d almost be lovable if it wasn’t also full of immensely powerful black magic.

5. The One Ring (Lord of the Rings)

I’ve always been interested by the concept that the One Ring can think for itself. The One Ring is, ultimately, an incredibly loyal evil artifact, and is only interested in new yielders insofar as they can deliver it back to Sauron. The Ring really is an apt counterpart for the hobbits; a little thing, defenseless, almost useless at first glance, but capable of changing the world. The Ring also has a pedigree, of course. It shares more than few traits with the Ring of Nibelung from the Wagnerian cycle of operas of the same name. The Nibelung Ring, like the One Ring, can grant the wearer power over the world, but only if they renounce love. In time, the covetousness of men and gods for the ring destroys the world and brings about Ragnarok. The One Ring is a reflection of the Ring of Nibelung, but also vastly different in many respects. It brings about the end of the gods and immortals, but only because they were staying to try and destroy it. The end of the Ring and of Sauron grants the world the ability to move into the next age, the age of mankind, which reflects not only Tolkien’s notions about divinity and its place in human existence, but I think also his faith that people can rise to their best in the changing times.

6. Rubilax (Wakfu)

Rubilax is the only evil weapon here to have a character arc. Granted, that’s because he’s actually a demon bound to a sword, but whatever. Rubilax starts out as your typical evil sword, trying to possess the (idiot) paladin bound to guard him. Not to make it a contest, but he gets pretty far, to the point that said paladin has to release Rubilax and fight him in a bare-knuckle fist fight into submission. After that, things get kind of complicated. People die, souls are displaced, there’s a colosseum death match, and Rubilax has to make some calls about his moral character, so to speak. In the end, Rubilax decides to side with the good guys, and even gets along with the paladin’s kids. So he’s less of an evil weapon and more of just a demonic one, but he’s definitely the most nuanced character here.

7. The Event Horizon (Event Horizon)

The Even Horizon is pushing the definition of ‘evil object’. It’s really more of an evil place, which might also be worth a look sometime, but for now a ship counts as an object. There’s plenty of sci-fi stories that try to do the cursed spaceship deal, but I feel like Event Horizon is the only one that really captures the gothic horror aspect. I think we tend to forget that architecture, aside from its practical usage, is also meant to convey ideas and thoughts as much as any other form of artistry, and was one of the more important forms of public communication before the spread of reading. The architecture of the Event Horizon is the words to a spell, the three-dimensional incantation that opens the gates of Hell. It was a morbid, dark temple to man’s ignorance even before it went into other dimensions. Once it returns, it hungers for more; a cursed ship bound to always return to its home port on the other side. Something about the Event Horizon reminds me of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner; the way the ship is warped and changed by sailing through strange waters, and how the survivors are bound to relive the curse over and over again. That’s why the Event Horizon is my favorite ghost ship in science fiction.

8. The Marker (Dead Space)

The Marker draws directly from Event Horizon, and they both share the concept of wordlessly communicating a kind of madness to the people who view them. The Marker, though, takes it to a new extreme, in that it has a literal insanity aura that causes hallucinations, paranoia, and aggressiveness. An interesting way that the Marker is more ‘alive’ than other evil objects is that it is self-propagating; part of the madness it transmits is the formula necessary for its replications. But what I find most fascinating is how the Marker can transmit information that changes DNA, altering people on the cellular level to turn them into Necromorphs. That kind of power, to change biology through information, is nothing short of magic in most other settings.

9. The Berserker Armor (Berserk)

You can’t fight demons if you ain’t cute. The Berserker Armor was forged by dwarves for the explicit purpose of fighting demons and monsters. It draws on the rage and negative energy inside a person to give them incredible strength and agility, but at the price of slowly draining their senses. The Skull Knight originally made it for himself, but even he was scared off by the armor’s power. Now Guts has it, and he has a lot of rage to give. I think the most fascinating thing about the armor is how it changes and molds itself to how Guts’ uses it. It didn’t start off with a giant wolf helmet; that’s just Guts’ personal totem representing his inner darkness. But when the armor drew on that, it changed shape, and when Guts holds himself back, it stays restrained. Still, the armor takes a lower spot because it itself isn’t evil, it just draws on a person’s internal negativity; it’s all up to the wearer on how much they use it.

10. The Gonne (Discworld)

Discworld is full of anachronistic magical devices, and they’re all usually cause for some kind of concern. The Gonne was at the center of a fairly elaborate murder plot involving the Assassin’s Guild and the Night Watch, but was finally put a stop to. Like any good evil weapon, it whispers promises of power to whoever happens to be holding it at the time, and is also a little trigger-happy. But the Gonne and its metaphor for firearms gets kind of overshadowed by everything happening around it, and it even gets acknowledged as a powerful and worthy weapon in its own way by the end.

#30 Day Monster Challenge 2 #30 Day Monster Challenge #soul calibur #lord of the rings #dead space #wakfu #evil dead #berserk #long post

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michael-hearteyes-wheeler · 6 years

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October Spooktacular!

Prompt: “Nah, I dont get scared.” + Mileven - Requested by Anonymous

[A/N] This was such a fun prompt! I used to work for a haunted house every October and this totally brought me back, so thank you lovely anon! (Small TW for mentions of gore, but its all simulated bc its a haunted house!)

The air that wrapped around them was cold, and biting.

El was standing in the center of what was more or less a huddle, all of her friends forming a tight circle, wearing warm jackets and gloves and hats. Every time the wind picked up, she snuggled closer in the space between Mike and Max. El hated being cold, despised it, so no one cared as she fought to stay warm. Will was more or less doing the same thing across from her, practically wedged in Dustin’s armpit.

The group was waiting in line for something that Dustin called ‘The Must-see Event of the fall’, and what Max had insisted would be the perfect October activity. A little, hastily thrown together, Haunted House on the outskirts of town, set up in an old barn.

El wasn't exactly sure what a ‘Haunted House’ was, at least not in this sense. She had watched the Amityville Horror with Max, and learned that some houses could be haunted (although Lucas argued that ghosts weren’t real), and it certainly didn't seem like anyone in that movie was having any fun. So why would they go to a haunted house? Dustin said it was just people in costumes who wanted to jump out and scare you. Max explained that the rooms were set up to look creepy, but that nothing inside of them was real. Mike said that some people enjoy getting scared, and that even if he didn't get it, the entire party was going, and it might be fun. Hopper just told her not to use her powers if one of the actors did scare her.

Fear was an interesting concept for El. She knew fear, probably a little too well honestly, but it was a feeling she often masked with other feelings. Determination, bravery, survival, anger. When she watched scary movies with Max, she didn't find herself feeling scared, not even at the gory parts that made Max clutch a pillow to her face. Loud noises made her jump, but she wasn't afraid of them, just of what they could represent. She wasn't scared of spiders like Steve, or of clowns like Dustin, or of Dolls like Lucas. Mike was scared of lots of things, but to her, he just seemed more nervous than actually terrified, and those things were different.

So she agreed to go, if for no other reason than to see what all the fuss was about, and because if everyone else was going, then she had to go too. They bought the tickets, they got warm apple cider from a vendor out front, and they waited in the long line that criss-crossed through an old corn field. As the night grew darker, and colder, they got closer and closer to the front of the line, where people were separated into pairs and sent into the glowing red light that spilled from the open barn doors.

“So when they split us up, who’s going with who?” Will, who was more nervous than anyone to be there, asked when there was only a few people separating then from the front of the line.

“I think it's pretty obvious, Max and Lucas, El and Mike, and Me and You.” Dustin pointed at each person as he spoke, and the group nodded in agreement. Dustin often complained about being a ‘third wheel’, even if El didn't really think he meant it.

So the party shuffled around, changing positions from their amorphous huddle to a row of pairs, Lucas and Max upfront, El and Mike at the back. This meant El had little to no protection from the breeze that whipped through the corn field, and she latched onto Mikes arm like a lifeline. He was like a living heater sometimes.

“You're not scared are you?” Mike asked, teasingly, looking down at her with his signature crooked grin.

“No, I don't get scared.” She teased back, even though she meant it.

Eventually the line moved again, sending Lucas and Max off into the barn. Will and Dustin bounced on their heels eagerly (or nervously), and soon enough they filled in too. El could hear Lucas shriek, all high-pitched and piercing, then she could hear Max laugh. She listened to Dustin and Will yell out in unison. Then there was the roar of a chainsaw, and a loud crash. It made her curious. What could possibly be inside the barn that would make then scream out loud? Would Mike scream? Would she scream?

Her questions would be answered very soon, because before she knew it, it was time to walk inside. Mike handed over their tickets to a man dressed like the grim reaper, who smiled at them and told them ‘not to touch the props or actors’.

Once inside, the air was significantly warmer. El let go of her death grip on Mike’s arm, and settled for just holding his hand instead. It was dark, almost too dark to see where to go. The red lights made shadows stick out at odd angles, and a series of makeshift walls turned and bisected the barn like a maze.

So far, not scary at all.

Then, however, they rounded the corner and came face to face with the first actor. El jumped, startled, and felt Mike jump beside her. The man in front of them was dressed like a farmer, only he was covered in blood. Fake blood, El reminded herself. The man said nothing to them, just breathed heavily down their shoulders as they walked past.

Then they entered a room full of tables and chairs, almost like a dining room, except everything was covered in simulated gore. Blood and guts, severed legs and arms, even a severed head on a silver platter. El felt grossed out, sure, but not scared. There was a woman in this room, pretending to eat the fake body parts. Mike wretched and turned his head, and El thinks like she might have laughed at him if it weren't for the fact that she just wanted out.

The rest of the haunt went on this way. People jumping out from behind corners, people rocking back and forth in the shadows. Fake blood and fake bodies here and there. A room with a girl in a cage (that made El more sad than scared). A wall on pulleys that fell hard as they walked past it (the loud crash she had heard outside). It was all just puzzle pieces. Sure they both jumped a few times, and sure every now and then they would squeeze each others hands, but that was about it. After a few minutes El could tell they were reaching the exit, and she felt more disappointed than anything else. Disappointed that she didn't get scared, disappointed that it wasn't really fun either, and disappointed that Mike didn't even scream. That would have at least been funny.

But then, just as the exit came into view, and the dim yellow flood lights outside showed them the way, a final actor made his presence known.

The man with the chainsaw.

In the millisecond it took for El to register what was happening, everything went to chaos.

First, Mike yelped and turned so fast that he tripped over his own legs and fell, letting go of El’s hand. Then, El realized that she had started screaming too. She turned around to face the man, who was towering above her and far too close (seriously, how had she not noticed him creeping up behind her?) He was wearing a pig’s face as a mask, and wielding a massive chainsaw just above her head. He was covered in blood, and the air around him smelled like gasoline and mildew.

El was frozen. El was terrified.

Suddenly, Mike was back to his feet and grabbed her arm, scrambling to pull them both outside. If he hadn't done that, El wasn't sure how long it would have taken for her to start moving on her own. As they turned to leave, El saw the flood lights flickering, and released whatever grip she had subconsciously had on them, hoping anyone that had seen would think it was just an atmospheric effect.

Of course, as soon as they were outside, the sounds of the chainsaw stopped, and their friends were all waiting for them, laughing and pointing. El only stopped screaming once she saw all of her friends, and she released the tension in her clenched fists. It was surreal, leaving the dark and oppressive corridors inside, and feeling the real world again. ‘Suspension of disbelief’, that was a phrase Max used to explain scary movies once, that a good movie can take you away from reality just long enough to make you believe whatever is happening on screen. Mike was out of breath, and leaned forward bracing his hands on his legs once they were a safe distance away.

“Oh my god, Wheeler!” Max, who was laughing the hardest, was the first to speak, “That really made my night, seeing you hit the ground like that.”

“Oh ha ha.” Mike gulped for air and stood up, “I just tripped.”

“Uh huh, don't even try to lie man, we all saw you lose it.” Lucas smirked.

“Oh like you didn't scream like a little girl?” Mike pointed, which made everyone (besides Lucas) laugh again.

“So, Ellie, how was your first haunted house?” Dustin asked, looping his arm around her shoulder (which had quickly become his favorite form of affection for her).

El was still, more or less, in shock. She had been so unafraid, and frankly, so unprepared for that ending. She didn't so much as gasp the entire walk through, but now her throat was raw from yelling and her palms were sweaty. But even still...

“I loved it.”

“What!?” Mike, Max, and Lucas all asked in unison.

“I loved it. I like being scared, it was fun.” El realized then that she was smiling wide. That the Adrenalin she felt from getting so startled was surging through her. A feeling she knew well, but never one that came without consequences before now. She felt unstoppable.

“I knew you would love it! If you want, we can come through again, without the boys next time.” Max clapped a hand on El’s shoulder and El nodded. That sounded like a great idea. She almost wanted to go through it again right now.

“Well great, you guys have fun.” Mike shook his head and the group started moving back towards the road, where Steve would be picking them up. “But you're both crazy.”

“Guess the girls of the group are just cooler than you guys.” Max nonchalantly flipped her hair, and Mike rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, no shit, Maxine.” Mike muttered, which sent the entire group laughing all over again.

The walk to the road was filled with energetic chatter about the haunt. Everyone's favorite parts and rooms, reenacting different actors, telling what they did when they got scared. Whenever her friends talked over each other this way, it always made El feel warm and content. She wasn't much of a talker, but she loved listening, and she loved that they would ask for her to weigh in. El realized then that fear had many faces, and it didn't always have to be such a bad thing. That fear was malleable, sometimes exciting, and that it kept you safe. She felt empowered by her own fear.

“So...” Mike had fallen back from the conversation just a few steps to stand next to her. “You really had fun?”

El shrugged, grabbing his arm again and finally enjoying the evening breeze. “Like I said, I don't get scared.” She said passively, even if this time it wasn't exactly true.

#yall haunted houses are just the best ever #send me spooky prompts!#my writing #mike wheeler #el hopper #mileven #mileven fanfiction #stranger things #stranger things 2 #stranger things fanfiction

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citruspeel · 6 years

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to gold be the gory

How Golden Kamuy Outshines Competition

A Review

“GORUDEEEEEEN KAMUUUUUUY!”

That’s how I first heard of Golden Kamuy – a male voice screaming its title in around 2-minute intervals. I was busy slurping ramen in the communal eating tent in Odori Park when it blared in my ear. All through the day, they played its trailer on the tent TVs over and over again. It seemed interesting, and it was quite apt to see it being promoted there - after all, we were surrounded by snow, in Hokkaido, where the story was set. I kept seeing it in bookstores and its artwas eye-catching. But as soon as I was back on home soil, my interest was gone.

Life caught right back up with me, so I forgot about Golden Kamuy completely. Not until I saw some artists I follow post amazing fan art of it on Twitter. They were all singing it praises and the official art was beautiful, so I thought, ‘aw heck, why not?’

Let me tell you: there are no reasons not to.

SUGIMOTO, THIS ISN’T SHOUNEN ANYMORE

I’m what you call a…sporadic manga reader. I’m not up to speed with manga trends and it can take me a while to catch up. I read stuff that get my attention and when they’re recommended by my friends (I still haven’t touched Boku no Hero Academia or Shokugeki no Soma, though). I also don’t limit myself to just one genre. There are months that I devour shoujo/josei manga, like Hana Nochi Hare and Dame na Watashi ni Koi wo Kudasai. Then I’d switch over to read through volumes upon volumes of shounen manga (hi, Gintama, Haikyuu). Then there are periods wherein I just don’t read at all, devoting my time to other activities instead.

Golden Kamuy, brainchild of artist Noda Satoru, is probably my first real foray into the seinen manga territory. The art, the storyline, the comedy, the stakes – every page told me that I wasn’t reading shounen anymore. Dick jokes weren’t dealt with caution. Gore was done with no shame. Raw Japanese scans didn’t have the hiragana reading aids. Strangely enough, it brought me back to all the titles I used to read when I was young. It made me realize all the stuff I was reading back then were very edgelord-esque and middle-school-syndrome-ish - the stuff of nightmares. Body horror, violence, gore, debauchery – CLAMP and Kaori Yuuki had primed my teenage self for all of them.

But at least, now, the edginess was dealt with a more mature hand.

Hence it was no surprise that Kamuy ignited a sense of familiarity. I had mellowed down when I grew up (it saddens me that I really am quite a grown-up now) and, in turn, settled for fun, cheerful, romantic manga (to keep the dreariness of everyday life away, I guess haha). I got used to leisurely pacing and lighthearted comedy. Reading Golden Kamuy felt like I skydived into the unforgiving arena I had left – an arena that had been made fresher, better.

SO FRESH, YOU’RE EATING IT RAW

What makes Kamuy an instant hit is its interesting combination of rarely-used elements. Post-War, Meiji-Era historical, early 1900s, hunting, Hokkaido, Ainu culture: can you really find another title that uses said mix? It’s no wonder people are attracted to the series.

It also helps that the art is just spectacular. Noda’s artistic skill shines through every page, chapter, and volume cover. His poses are dynamic, his coloring brave. Sometimes the color combinations he uses just scream modern, serving as nice contrasts to the story’s historical, traditional setting. His character designs are unique and fresh – more so their personalities. Sugimoto’s facial scars are refreshing to the eye; Tsurumi’s half-corrupted face paired with a metal plate is a design I’ve never seen before. His art style brings out his designs to life in a way only he can – we’ve all seen cross-dressing men and shaved-bald convicts before, but still he was able to make Ienaga and Shiraishi look striking.

The research that he has done to make the story believable is commendable. He even has his own Ainu and Russian language consultants. Each detail he adds in shows that every page is a product of hard work. He even features real buildings in Hokkaido and Otaru (I’ve also been to Otaru and it was nice to see it in the manga!). The information we learn from Noda’s usage of the Ainu culture, hunting practices, and military details – all of this, weaved in with an intricate, explosive plot, give us a series that feels…whole. Complete.

Kamuy also spreads word about the Ainu culture in a fun and entertaining way. I haven’t heard a lot about them in the series I’ve encountered – I’ve only heard of them through Rurouni Kenshin. Nothing since then. To see them in the spotlight is a breath of fresh air. Even the Ainu themselves feel the same way – apparently they told Noda that they didn’t want to be portrayed as discriminated anymore. They wanted strong Ainu characters, and boy, did Noda deliver.

NO-PARDON PLOTTING

Because of its seinen status, you can tell that Noda has no qualms about plotting and story structure. We’re given heavy-hitting story elements right off the bat: war vet undertakes a legendary treasure hunt to help the (stolen-by-his-friend) love of his life, requiring him to track down 24 of the most dangerous insane criminals to have ever walked Japan. It’s throwing punches right from the get-go. Kamuy doesn’t baby anyone (except for bear cubs). With its pacing, convoluted plot and bevy of interesting characters, it challenges the reader to not just enjoy, but to keep up. It’s unapologetic in everything that it does – character, story, and art.

CHARACTERS

Immortal War Vet, Morality Pet Minority Action Girl, Escape Sweet-tooth King, and so forth. They somehow fulfill stereotypes but at the same time, Noda manages to twist things to a whole new light. His milieu, too, aids in solidifying the characters he writes – the setting itself makes them unforgettable.

It is also in his cast that we see how unapologetic Noda is. Considering that Sugimoto is to track 24 of the most dangerous criminals in the country, Noda doesn’t shy away from showcasing every kind of evil that can exist within humans. We tackle lust, greed, wrath, and avarice with a dash more reality compared to the caricatures we often see in shounen manga. Those faint of heart and innocent countenance will have a hard time stomaching Noda’s cast as it unfolds. The more I read, the more I believe Noda probably has a subscription to the Crime Investigation channel (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). Truth be told, humans are very much capable of evil, and I’m not surprised that some of his villains are actually modeled after real-life criminals.

Notable characters:

IENAGA - a cross between Erszebet Bathory (a countess who was known to kill virgins and bathed in their blood to remain beautiful) and of H.H. Holmes, a real-life owner of an actual murder hotel in the US during the 19th century. Ienaga’s first dungeon appearance made me flashback to some of mangaka Kaori Yuki’s ornate gorefests such as Count Cain, Angel Sanctuary, and Ludwig Revolution. Noda felt no shame when he drew each and every one of Ienaga’s murderscapes.

HENMI KAZUO – this one really made me blink when I was reading it. Serial killer Henmi Kazuo is an exploration of the depths of human depravity. Imagine, being stimulated by gore and the act of clinging to life the same way his brother did when a bear ate him. Damn, writing that sentence made me realize Noda just straight up doesn’t baby his audience. This is the stuff Netflix series Mindhunter would kill to have. This also would really need some real guts (pardon the pun) to execute.

SHITON – he also made me stop in my tracks. Shiton, a full-on bestiality-practicing scientist, was something I’ve never read about in any other manga at all. I’ve read about murderers and criminals and incestuous personalities (Kaori Yuki and George RR Martin weren’t shy about it at all), but this character was just sick. He’s a special type of crazy (although to be perfectly honest I am sure that somewhere in the world some sick human is partaking in stuff like this), and for Noda to actually use him in his manga just takes courage. He just has the balls to make you think twice, but hey, when you’re in seinen territory, everything seems to be a free-for-all. And let’s be real frank here – there’s just another level of human debauchery in real life that most people won’t even be able to stomach hearing about.

TSURUMI – Tsurumi is the stuff of legend. He reminds me the most of Col. Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, but with his insanity turned up into eleven. He also has shades of Leonardo’s character in Django Unchained, as well as other manic-type ‘villains’ that we’ve seen in other series. But his impulsiveness and flamboyant nature places him a cut above the rest. Noda also draws him so dynamically (seriously!) that whenever he appears, your eyes are just drawn to him.

Plus, I have to say that I’m really impressed with the level of real-world research that Noda uses in developing his characters. Tsurumi says that he has lost a part of his frontal lobe, which in turn affects his temper and his violent tendencies. This is actually true in real life, and has been seen in a high-profile murder case involving a famous football player in the United States. Because of the repetitive head injuries that the player received playing the sport, his own personality/temper had changed, and resulted him in killing his girlfriend in cold blood.

Of course we have the holy trinity of Sugimoto (classic lovable romantic badass war vet protagonist), Asirpa (butt-kicking girl-child) and Shiraishi (adorable slinky/comic relief), all gems in their own right. Noda has endeared them to us with the heartwarming dynamic between Sugimoto + Asirpa, plus Shiraishi’s antics. Character-wise, they seem to follow a specific trio formula that works in almost anything. Harry-Hermione-Ron, Gintoki-Kagura-Shinpachi, Naruto-Sakura-Sasuke. While his main character trio wins people over, his supporting cast can also shine bright on their own. Some great examples that come to mind are Ogata, Tanigaki, and Monkey-Scream Guy Otonoshin (even Tsukishima is memorable! He even has the Voldemort nose, doesn't he?).

Noda’s principle of mixing reality with caricature is also evident in his character designs. With every cast member we meet, it’s clear that Noda is far from being a sufferer of the six-faces-only syndrome. His designs do sometimes border on the impossible (Monkey-Scream guy’s eyebrows, really?), but it’s not a bad thing. If anything, it makes the visual experience of reading the comic even more worthwhile.

THE ART

Noda is a great manga artist. Let’s start with that.

Just look at these covers!

This coloring + color schemes!

This character design!!

I’ve been raving about his character designs for a few paragraphs now but it’s just really that good. I love his eye for composition and his impeccable framing for action and comedy. I’ve always thought that framing comics need special planning – especially action + comedy ones. You have to ensure that the first thing the reader sees in the next panel will make the action/joke understandable and clear. It takes great skill to decide what the reader sees and doesn’t see. Through Golden Kamuy’s 158 chapters, he makes use of this skill to make us laugh whenever Asirpa’s badgering them to make citatap, or when there’s a new animal part to eat, or when Tanigaki’s out showing nudes of himself to people. If the pages weren’t framed well, the jokes would’ve fallen flat. Let’s also not forget his adeptness in drawing facial expressions. This manga just does faces so well.

(Just look at Asirpa! collage c/o the Golden Kamuy reddit)

His fight scenes are also top-notch. You just know that Noda, as a mangaka, isn’t knocking about. The flow of action in every page is just downright superb. It also shows his mastery of human anatomy – and his courage when it comes to gore. His use of crisp blacks and whites, solid lineart, thick, expressive color give us pages that are fresh and clean...I’d be a fool to dismiss his technique, because his (and his studio’s, I guess?) skill just shines through every page.

He’s also not shy when it comes to details – which is admirable. After all, it takes some great dedication for someone to give his main character distinct facial scars that will require repeated drawings in almost every single page (and give his heroine a detailed headband). It makes me wonder just how he does it with a weekly schedule. His color pages look like they were done digitally, but I still have doubts whether or not he does his chapters by hand.

THE HEART

It took me just a few days to wolf down Kamuy. It was a romp right from the start – nail-biting, stomach-clutching, hair-raising. A truly entertaining piece, if you will. But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed with Kamuy, it’s that it somehow lacks heart.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s great! I love it. It’s superbly crafted, beautifully drawn, amazingly detailed. It’s one of the rare titles that I’m actually thinking of collecting. But it’s also a title that seems to drip technique. Like the author made it for the sake of drawing an intense, gripping title, but somehow solely for that purpose. It’s a career-conscious showcase of ability, a manufactured adventure in the truest sense. I couldn’t see the earnestness I found in Sorachi Hideaki’s Gintama, or the relatability of Nakahara Aya’s Dame na Watashi wo Koishite Kudasai. Full Metal Alchemist showed Arakawa Hiromu’s passion for muscled men, her interest in alchemy, and views on family, while Haruichi Furudate’s love for volleyball, sportsmanship and camaraderie is undeniable in Haikyuu!!. While I do like the backstory that Sugimoto is somehow based on his real-life war-vet grandfather, I find it a bit sad that it seems to lack that personal touch I’ve always liked seeing in other manga.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s not great. I will still recommend it to everyone I know. Awesome story, great art, refreshing comedy. By all means, read it! (Not sure about the anime, but I keep hearing reviews that we’re better off with the manga). Golden Kamuy is a title of both style and substance – whether it’s about the gore or the gold, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Then let me know if you agree with my upcoming post, an analysis of Sugimoto and Asirpa.

Photos c/o reddit + our lovely scanlators + Satoru Noda

#Golden Kamuy #Sugimoto Saichi #Sugimoto the Immortal #Asirpa #Noda Satoru #Manga #Review

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