Let it be known that Eddie Munson hates big box stores. They represent everything he’s against: a big piece of capitalist bullshit that underpays its workers and pump out unnecessary products like it’s nothing.
And yet, he finds himself in a Target on a random Sunday evening.
He’s not quite sure how he got roped into doing Chrissy’s shopping for her, something about ‘owing her a favor’ and ‘making up for all the times she had take out the garbage when it was his turn to do so’ or whatever that means. But here he is anyway, pushing a bright red shopping cart in search of every item on her list so she can go on her date with that girl from the concert in peace. The things you do for friends.
Eddie finds the first few items quite easily - they’re on sale and easy to spot with the big display in the middle of the aisle - but once he gets to the fourth item on her list: Fresh Cotton scented candle, he starts to panic just a little.
Why are there so many fucking candles?
He rubs a hand over his face in attempt to make himself focus on the rows and rows of glass jars in front of him, taking a deep breath before he starts looking for the Fresh Cotton scented candle Chrissy wants. Only to find out, there aren’t any.
There is Pure Linen and Natural Cotton and even one that’s called Laundry Day - whatever the fuck that’s supposed to smell like - but there is not one candle that says Fresh Cotton.
Okay. Okay. He can do this. He knows Chrissy like the back of his hand, he’s smelled that candle practically every day, he can totally figure out which candle she wants.
Eddie grabs the first candle that’s vaguely named after a fabric and smells it, but that one isn’t the one he’s looking for. He tries another (closer, but not quite the same) and another (doesn’t even smell like cotton in the slightest), until he’s smelled practically every cotton-linen-laundry candle in the store and his nose has become immune to any smell whatsoever.
Christ, he really is a terrible best friend if he can’t even get her shopping list right.
Something red flashes by in the corner of his eye and Eddie immediately perks up and chases after it. He stops himself from screaming in victory when he sees that he was right and that there is in fact a Target employee in a red polo walking in the main aisle.
“Excuse me!” Eddie calls out. “Excuse me! Can you help me?”
The guy in the red polo turns around and whoa- Eddie didn’t know that they were hiring actual models to work at Target. He’s pretty sure he’s never met a big box store employee that looks this good - with floppy golden brown hair and a chest that fills out that red Target polo really nicely.
“Uh yes?”
“Great!” Eddie gestures the Target guy to follow him back to the candle aisle and grabs the two candles that he thinks are the closest to what Chrissy wants. “Which one of these is Fresh Cotton?”
Target guy frowns and takes the candles from Eddie’s hands, his hazel eyes narrowing as he reads the labels. “Neither? This one is Clean Cotton and the other one is Crisp Cotton.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But Target used to sell Fresh Cotton, I think, at least that’s what my friend’s shopping list says.” Eddie rambles. “So I guess my question is which one used to be Fresh Cotton and got renamed or whatever.”
“Huh.” Target guy shrugs and takes the lid off both the candles, carefully sniffing each of them before finally handing Clean Cotton back to Eddie. “This one smells the most cotton-y to me, so I’d go with this one, dude.”
Eddie feels his eyes light up with relief as he clutches the candle to his chest. “Christ, that’s a relief. Thank you...” He trails off, searching Target guy’s polo for a name tag, only to come up empty.
“Steve.”
“Thank you, Steve.” Eddie beams. He puts the candle into his shopping cart and rummages through the pocket of his leather jacket until he finds Chrissy’s shopping list. Scented candle? Check. “Look, I gotta go. I have at least twenty other things on this list and- hey!”
In one quick motion, Steve has grabbed the shopping list from Eddie’s hands, scanning the items on the list and the items in the cart with precision.
“Dude. Your friend asked for shampoo and conditioner. You bought them that two-in-one crap.” Steve scoffs.
“Is that... bad? Seems to me like it gets the job done faster.” Eddie shrugs.
“Is that bad, he asks. If your friend cares just a little bit about their hair, they’d be devastated.” Steve chuckles. “C’mere, I’ll help you.”
Before Eddie can even protest, Steve has taken his shopping cart from under his nose and gestures for Eddie to follow him. Huh, personal shoppers must be a new thing at Target. He just hopes that Steve doesn’t charge him a surprise hundred dollar fee at the end of the shopping trip.
Turns out, a personal shopper like Steve comes in handy for a Target virgin like Eddie. Steve (obviously) knows the store like the back of his hand and seems to know a lot about the products they sell as well - from the difference between normal and purple shampoo for blonde hair to the package of colored notebooks that Chrissy needs for the next semester. His knowledge is impressive and Eddie can’t help but stare and listen to every word that rolls of Target Guy Steve’s tongue.
(And if he lets a flirty remark or two slip just to see a twinkle in Steve’s eyes in between the shop talk, that’s nobody’s business but his own)
He is a bit confused when Steve starts loading things into the cart that aren’t on Chrissy’s lists, though. Things like highlighters and staples and various arts and crafts supplies.
“What are those?” Eddie asks.
“Hmm?” Steve hums, following Eddie’s gaze to where it’s looking at the small pots of paint in his hands “Oh. Those are for me.”
“You can do that?”
“Uh yeah? That’s the point of a store?”
“Right.” Eddie nods. “Yeah, I mean, duh. Just didn’t know you were allowed to shop on company time.”
“Right...” Steve blinks at him in response.
They go through the rest of the list fairly quickly, much to Eddie’s disappointment. When he first set foot inside the store, he wanted to leave as fast as he could, but now that he’s got Steve around, he doesn’t really want this shopping trip to end.
At least not without Steve’s number saved in his phone.
There are only a few people in line at the register when they arrive and Steve immediately starts putting his things on the checkout belt. As he waits, Eddie lets his eyes linger at Steve’s toned back, at the way the red fabric stretches over the muscles there, at the way those jeans look practically painted on.
Yeah, he really has to get that number before he gets out of here.
“You probably get employee discount, right? Must be nice.” Eddie grins as he starts putting his stuff on the checkout belt.
Steve cocks his head to the side. “No?”
Christ, not giving your employees a discount in your own store is a new low, even for a big company like Target. “Oh sorry, man. That sucks.”
“I mean, I have my teacher’s discount.” Steve shrugs.
Hold up. What?
“Your what?”
“My teacher’s discount?” Steve repeats. “I’m an elementary school teacher and I get a small discount on stuff I need for my class? Like these art supplies?”
“You- you don’t work here?” Eddie squeaks, feeling the heat rise to his cheeks. Oh God, did he just drag a random stranger through a store and make him listen to all of his stupid problems with Chrissy’s shopping lists? This is embarrassing, even for him. “Fuck, I thought- I mean with the polo and- Christ, I’m so sorry.”
But luckily for Eddie, Steve doesn’t seem mad in the slightest. In fact, he just laughs, all bright and clear. “It’s alright, really.”
“But wait, if you don’t work here, why did you help me?” Eddie asks, ignoring the hopeful feeling that starts to bloom in his stomach.
Steve ducks his head for a second, suppressing a grin, before looking back up at Eddie through his eyelashes and fuck, he has no right to look this hot in a freaking polo shirt.
“Because I thought you were cute.”
A bright Target red blush settles over Eddie’s cheeks and there’s nowhere to hide, not even behind his hair because his dumb self from two hours earlier decided to put it up in a high bun.
“Plus, you looked like you were this close to having a panic attack in the middle of the candle aisle.” Steve shrugs. “I’ve been there, and trust me, it’s not a good look.”
The honesty in his voice makes Eddie cackle so loud that even the cashier turns her head to see what all the commotion is about.
“You’re ridiculous.” Eddie says when his laughter dies down.
“Maybe.” Steve says, his eyes already twinkling with amusement. “But did it work?”
Eddie really can’t say no to that.
(He leaves Target that night with two shopping bags filled with Chrissy’s things and a date with Steve the next weekend.)
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It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.
If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.
Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.
I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.
There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.
This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.
Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.
Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.
And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.
And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."
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