#they’re both British and horribly traumatized

[secretly-a-catamount]

Susan Pevensie being a companion of the Doctor, is that anything??

[gabessquishytum]

really, really love the idea of dream getting bitched. i think it might’ve gotten discussed here before but i’m gonna bring it up again because it’s so good. also, not just bitching, but studding, too. and make it a royalty au just for funsies

dream and hob are in a committed relationship—they’ve been in love for a long time and dream wants nothing more than to finally knot and bite his omega and make him his mate, but they’re both the respective kings of their own kingdoms, and they have to be respectable and wait for the wedding (which is of course painted as a political alliance, but they’re secretly in love, so it’s alright by them). however, just before the wedding, dream’s kingdom is attacked by lucifer’s, and they happen to be an alpha prime. so, when dream gets captured on the battlefield, rather than kill him or enslave him, lucifer does what they believe to be far crueler, as someone who’s aware of dream’s situation; they bitch him and turn him into an omega.

dream gets sent home changed. he’s not the same, as before— everything smells different, his body feels different, even his center of balance is off. everything about him has shifted and he’s so horribly overwhelmed, and the last thing he wants is to run home to hob only to be rejected by his love for their incompatibility. after all, two omegas can’t mate properly, they can’t have babies, they can’t satiate each others heats….as much as dream loves hob, he can’t bring himself to force him into an unfulfilled life because of his new body. so he locks himself away in his chambers, spending his days clawing at his skin, panting and sweating through his heats, feeling like he’s going out of his mind as he goes through everything all on his own.

but hob isn’t entirely stupid, bless him, and he knows something is wrong. he knows that something had traumatized dream on the battlefield, but he had assumed it was something gorey and violent, so he spent so much time worrying himself about just how horrific something had to be to terrorize dream of all people. in fact, he spends so much time worrying about dream, and focusing in on what the hell lucifer had done, attempting to defend dream’s kingdom for him from afar as a soon to be ally, that corinthian can sneak in unnoticed. and he does, very well, and he studs hob— who then spends the next several days shoving his cock in virtually any and every surface in his general vicinity that can get him off and distract him from whatever the hell all these new feelings are like. while dream’s heats overwhelmed him with a sense of fear, and the feeling of being hunted as prey, hob’s mind felt stupid with lust; he manages himself better than his fiancé.

and since hob isn’t as self destructive as dream is, when his rut has calmed down enough that he’s able to act appropriately in public, he throws himself onto a horse immediately and sets out for dreams kingdom. (i was thinking more of a romantic and dramatic ride through the night to reach dream as soon as possible in order to come to his aid and be by his side, but now that i’ve written it all that i can think of is a paul revere “the british are coming!” night ride. sorry hobby) of course, he gets the whole charade of “his majesty is not receiving visitors at this time,” but dream, going through his second ever heat and quite frankly being very overwhelmed, finds himself on the verge of battery ramming his own door down just to get to hob. and of course he’s welcomed with open arms (and legs), and although they’re going to have one hell of a conversation about their new situation, so long as they can make each other feel good as their bodies want them to and secure an heir or twelve, they’re happy. <3

A mini fic in my inbox!!! Once again I am blessed by the horny gods!!!

I love this. Please know that I am yelling over the Paul Revere part in particular. Imagining Hob riding through the countryside and occasionally just yelping in pain because his dick is three times the size it used to be, he's not used to it and riding kinda hurts!!!! He's sensitive ok!!!! He just spent like a week fucking any object he could find and he's a liiiittle bit chafed. By the time he gets to Dream’s castle he's kinda hobbling along, wincing with every other step. And his immediate thought when Dream jumps on him is oh no not so much because he's upset that Dream is different but because he doesn't think his dick will make it through a whole heat with his new omega mate.

But he underestimates the power of his own horniness, and makes a very thorough job of knotting Dream until he's sated and sleepy. Having been an omega until approximately a week ago, Hob knows exactly what Dream needs, and he is very very generous in giving it. Dream is probably the most satisfied omega in the whole land.

He also might have to get his marriage clothes altered but hey, everyone loves a shotgun wedding. After everything they've been through, even the strictest of traditionalists agree that Dream and Hob deserve to do exactly what they want, at least for a little while.

[strangefellows]

So, yeah, here’s a bunch of stuff about my FGO Master, Komadori Fujimaru!

I know a lot of people go Full OC with their mastersona, but I really, really like Gudako’s design, so I stick with that but made her my own! Very very much my own.

Featuring her with her best bud Cu and her shiny asshole boyfriend Gil, and her usual mission team. (Yes it’s unbalanced AF no I don’t care about the meta.)

If you can’t read Komadori’s bio, it’s as follows (with her major relationships!); see readmore~

Komadori Fujimaru, age 22 (as of 2015), college grad -- anthropology major -- and part time librarian who rolled on into Chaldea to avoid the crippling existential ennui and depression brought on by losing her brother Ritsuka (yes, ‘Gudao’) when they were kids traumatically and her horrible neglectful parents. Before Chaldea, she was deeply lonely and just going through the motions save for her one true passion -- history/anthropology, which she loved since she was a child; myths and legends and the heroes within had been basically her only friends for most of her life. So, in Chaldea, this is basically her dream come true, she adores it there, it’s the best thing to ever happen to her, she’s genuinely happy and surrounded by friends for the first time since Ricchan died.

She’s an absolute troll chaos gremlin loud sarcastic force of nature, she is, she does not take shit, she isn’t afraid of you, and she will do stupid shit for the lols. Like, all of the troll/silly/jokey dialogue options? Her. She’s just full of life and cheer and joy and love for all of this period, and it means the world to her that she’s not pretending anymore. She is living her best life. She is also a huge, huge nerd, and will make pop culture jokes.

Unfortunately she also has PTSD from losing her brother how she did -- he saved her from a car accident at the cost of his life -- so, she uh. Does not handle heroic sacrifices or similar very well. At all. This proves very fun for her! (Not.)

Being told ‘welcome home’ (okaeri, more or less) means a lot to her too due to her previous loneliness, and it WILL make her cry.

She is -- in universe anyway -- a pro at summoning to abnormal levels, and most Servants she summons remember the Singularities/Lostbelts even when they’re technically not supposed to. No one is sure why, especially since she’s totally average a mage otherwise. She’s just completely a prodigy when i comes to specifically he handling of Heroic Spirits.

( This is because, unbeknownst to her or anyone else because the initial medical exam missed it and then Chaldea blew up so the equipment just wasn’t available for them to figure it out, she’s a homunculus. She and her brother were created by British mages and their cores were attuned to Alaya and Gaia respectively; they were inactive, though, so they were shipped off to a nonmage ally family, the Fujimarus, for observation. But once Ritsuka died, the whole project was axed because what use is one without the other? Her core, however, activated when she hit Chaldea, so she is absolutely just a slowly-awakening conduit for Alaya and the Throne of Heroes. As for Ritsuka...well, his story might not be as over as it seems. He’s a conduit for Gaia, after all. )

As for relationships...

She fell very hard for Roman by the end of the Grand Order, and was thusly devastated at the Temple, especially because she never got to tell him. This ‘Chaldean’ guy in the Lostbelts is both a spot of hope and ENDLESSLY GODDAMN FRUSTRATING, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU.

She also fell extremely hard for Gilgamesh -- of ALL people, she’s aware her taste is questionable but she’d loved the Epic before Chaldea shut up -- during Babylonia, and she basically spent the whole time sassing/flirting with him. She at first thought he was gorgeous but an insufferable prick, but warmed to him and by the end she had fallen very hard and basically almost cried into the summoning circle after Temple for him to come home. Lucky for her, her very vibrant personality and the way she both respects him and takes ABSOLUTELY NONE of his shit made the affection reciprocal. They’re awful, they sass each other constantly, get a room you losers. She wears his Valentine’s present bracelet all the time.

Her 100% top best friends are Robin, Cu, and Merlin.

Merlin and her are terrible gossipy trolls who sip tea together and talk shit, and bond over missing Roman if/when they get stupid drunk. She adores this absolute shithead wizard man. She WILL roast him constantly, with affection.

Robin she befriended in America and they got a lot closer when he brought him to Babylonia with her; they have a pretty close friendship -- her name, Komadori, means ‘robin’, so she was fond of him as a folk hero before Chaldea, and she was delighted to meet him. They’re bird buddies! Their relationship is basically him going WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS while she does dumb shit, but with fond exasperation. Someone has to carry her out of stupid situations, after all!

Cu was always one of her all time favorite legends, and she summoned him literally right after Singularity F; however, they didn’t bond until America. Because yes, they had the horrible luck of Cu going to America with her. The, uh, repeated slam dunks into Cu’s repressed trauma buttons made Komadori super protective, and at this point they are absolutely ride or die for each other. He’s the first person she goes to if she needs support or to talk or vent.

Drake is...well, they got drunk and probably had sex the first time they met in Okeanos? They’re basically drinking buddy besties with benefits. Komadori absolutely adores the woman, what a great friend.

Komadori ended up with a huge, huge, huge crush on Musashi, and considers her her best girlfriend, and Musashi feels the same, they’re ridiculous chaos gremlin gals, Shimousa was a ride, Vegas was a ride, best galpals ever. Olympus Sucked.

Emiya was one of the other first Servants Komadori called after Fuyuki, and at this point he’s her tired sarcastic protagonist brother-from-another-mother, they’re both full of sass and doneness and snark and Really Exasperated 20-Somethings. They have a bit of a clash over Komadori’s relationship with Gil, given Emiya remembers UBW and is wary of him, but they mostly agree to disagree on that and get on well otherwise.

Mash is Komadori’s baby sister, she imprinted on her as a sort of...”I failed my baby brother but I’ll protect her now” thing. She absolutely would kill and die for Mash, her baby sister. Baby. Protecc. Baby.

Honorable mentions for Servants Komadori’s really close to are: Dantes, Mordred, Ushiwakamaru, Osakabe, Mandricardo, Jeanne Alter, Jinako, Sanson, and obviously Enkidu (they double team Gil it’s hilarious). Moriarty is her Evil Ojiisan and she loves him too.

Oberon-Vortigern is TBA, along with Castoria; I am 90% blind for LB6 so will decide her relationship to them along the way, but tentatively Castoria is Little Sister #2 and ObeVorti is gonna either be a bestie or she’s going to fall hard.

[vanessakirbyfans]

Vanessa Kirby suggests we meet on the Mall, the central location for her on-screen triumph as the young Princess Margaret in The Crown. I’m standing outside the shuttered Institute of Contemporary Arts when she strides into view, a slender, leggy figure with bleached hair and brilliant blue eyes, clad in trademark black, but for her gleaming white Converse trainers.

"I haven’t been here since we were filming!" she marvels through her mask, gazing up the processional avenue towards Buckingham Palace. "I was whizzing up the road on a motorbike, holding onto the back of Matthew Goode [as Antony Armstrong-Jones] and feeling so exhilarated about what on Earth was happening to my life – being in a job I loved, playing someone I loved."

Her ebullient mood was dented when Margaret’s handbag, into which she’d put her own phone, was blown away from between her feet, and an opportunistic passer-by ran off with it. "By the time I could check Find My iPhone, it was already in Leicester Square," she says. "Of course, the costume department were furious because the bag was vintage and a one-off." We both laugh, rather ruefully, for such anecdotes already seem to belong to a more carefree time. This bright, crisp lunchtime in lockdown, the Mall is all but deserted –there would be no need for roadblocks or filming at dawn today – while the roles Kirby is here to discuss are light-years away from her embodiment of a pampered royal party girl.

The morning of our meeting, Pieces of a Woman has launched on Netflix to rapturous reviews and critical acclaim that has seen Kirby, in her first lead role, picked as a front-runner for the award season’s most coveted best-actress gongs.

It is not, however, an easy watch. Kirby plays Martha, a first-time mother whose baby dies moments after being born; the film follows Martha’s subsequent disintegration, alongside that of her close relationships. Her labour, which comes at the start of the film, is some 26 minutes of one unbroken take that manages to be simultaneously intimate and menacing as the camera swoops around the apartment and hovers beside the traumatised protagonists.

Kirby’s performance is astonishingly unselfconscious, which is the more surprising since she never went to drama school (turning down the offer of a place at Lamda in favour of stage roles at Bolton’s Octagon Theatre) and says she couldn't bring herself to dance in front of her friends. "I’m the one who sits in the corner and watches." She describes seeing herself on-screen as "disconcerting", and "not a very natural human experience", and indeed even finds making Zoom calls a trial. "There’s nothing to hide behind!"

For Pieces of a Woman, the director Kornel Mundruczo decided that the birth scene would be the first to be shot, she tells me, as we stroll around St James’s Park, conducting ourselves like a couple of spies in a Le Carré novel. "I knew I’d have to be naked, and literally open my legs and give birth in front of a group of strangers I’d only met that morning. I was actually quite thankful – I thought, the rest of it’s going to be a lot easier."

In fact, she says, she found herself swept away by the emotion of the story. "Normally, it’s so hard to forget there are machines in your face, but I had no idea that a camera was even there." Was it traumatic to act? "The first time we shot it, I was literally sobbing for 10 minutes afterwards. I couldn’t get out of it. My brain was telling me it wasn’t real, but my unconscious didn’t know the difference, especially with having a real baby in my arms.

"Kornel came over onto the bed and held me so tight. He didn’t let go of me for five minutes, and he said, 'Just remember this feeling.' That really helped me for the rest of the movie, when the character doesn’t express anything, but almost has to be doing the howling without speaking a word."

Kirby took her research seriously, even asking a mother-to-be –a total stranger – to allow her to be present in the delivery room at the birth of her son in a north-London hospital. "I remember every single second of it," the actress says emphatically. "I was there, glued to my seat, for seven hours, not even a loo break! I was just amazed, in awe. I saw a woman completely surrender and go on this spiritual journey, which involved indescribable pain, clearly, but also ecstasy. It gave me a whole new respect for women and how powerful they are, and a new empathy for men, because they feel so helpless. And obviously, seeing the baby come out was the most incredible thing in the world I’ve ever seen, by far. After he was born, all of the mother’s colour returned, she looked like an angel, she had a kind of holy glow." Bathetically, it was only then that the couple recognised Kirby. "They were going, 'Oh my God, it’s Princess Margaret! This is so weird!'"

The experience has given her a new philosophy on life, she says. "I was watching the mother go through these contractions, which were excruciating, and the pushing, and then there was a moment of calm, and of expansion. And so, when I’m going through things in my life, I say to myself, this is like a contraction, surrender to it, because there might be something born from it. Sometimes we don’t want that; when we’re feeling something horrible, we want it to pass as far as possible. I’m teaching myself to allow it to be there and not resist or push it away, and that’s because of that woman."

But her character’s storyline also demanded that Kirby understand the experience of stillbirth. A friend introduced her to a woman who had lost her baby Luciana under eerily similar circumstances to those in Martha’s narrative. "She shared everything with me." They have become close friends, and the film’s ending is dedicated to Luciana. Kirby continues to work with Sands, the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death charity, and is voluble in her admiration of the Duchess of Sussex and Chrissy Teigen, both of whom have recently spoken out about their own experiences of miscarriage.

"I feel so close to them and so proud of them for breaking that silence," she says. "Meghan is probably the last person who would feel comfortable sharing her very personal, intimate feelings. It’s that courage that I want to continue to honour. What they’re saying is, if you’ve been through it, we have too, we share your story. I think that makes you feel less lonely. But one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, which is far more than I knew about. Society finds it difficult to hold space for that kind of pain."

Her parents, to whom she is very close, have both seen the film and wept throughout, she says. As if on cue, her phone pings, and her eyes soften when she checks the message; it’s a childhood friend who herself miscarried, getting in touch to say how much the film has meant to her.

The integrity of Kirby’s performance has already netted her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. "It doesn’t seem real," she says. "I have it in its case – I wouldn’t have it on display, it looks like a football trophy – but occasionally I glance at it and think, 'Did that really happen? Or did I make it up in a weird dream?'" In a similar vein, she is reluctant to engage with the Oscar buzz surrounding her. "I don’t even know when they are," she admits. "My 13-year-old self would have a heart attack. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it!"

Kirby’s other film, The World to Come, is set in mid-19th-century America but touches on the same themes of bereavement and redemption. The central character Abigail, played by Katherine Waterston, has also lost her young daughter, and in her grief, turns away from her husband to have an affair with Tallie, her free-spirited, flame-haired neighbour. "I was glad I was playing Tallie rather than Abigail, because it might have been a bit too much," Kirby confesses – though without giving away spoilers, that role is pretty traumatic too...

The screenplay is taken from the short story of the same name by Jim Shepard, which was inspired by an entry he found in an antique diary: 'My best friend’s moved away, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.' "It was one woman’s voice, like an echo from the past, and we’ll never know who she was," says Kirby. "The World to Come really educated me about what life was like for women not that long ago. They didn’t have a choice about anything they did with their time. You were owned by the house, and the man, and you had no freedom outside that. The best thing about doing this mad job sometimes is having your ignorance illuminated. I gravitate towards things that push beyond my experience, I want to go to places I don’t know, I’m not familiar with."

The experience of making both films has changed her profoundly. "I can’t do anything unless it means something to me now," she says. "It’s a better way to work, because you’re not focused on yourself at all. So maybe I’ll only work once every 10 years!"

To ensure that this is not the case, and in order to find more untold, female-led stories, her ambition is now to set up her own production company. "Even a few years ago, a film about a woman losing a baby would have been unthinkable. There are so many voiceless people, and I have a voice in this industry, and I want to make sure the tribe is represented properly."

It is undeniably awkward, therefore, that her male co-stars in the films, Shia LaBeouf and Casey Affleck, both of whom play violent, abusive husbands, have been called out for their treatment of women. In December, the British singer FKA Twigs filed a lawsuit against LaBeouf, her ex-partner, alleging that he "hurts women. He uses them. He abuses them, both physically and mentally". While LaBeouf largely denied the accusations, he admitted in a statement to The New York Times: "I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I’m ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt. There is nothing else I can really say."

Meanwhile, Affleck was sued by two female crew members working on his 2010 film I’m Still Here, one of whom accused him of sexual harassment. He denied the allegations, and the lawsuits were settled out of court, but he later told the Associated Press: "I behaved in a way, and I allowed others to behave in a way, that was really unprofessional, and I’m sorry."

Kirby is understandably reluctant to get into any of this. "I can’t comment on a legal case that’s going on in someone’s personal life," she says. "I feel really protective of Pieces, so that’s what I want to speak about. Because it came out at eight this morning, all I can think about is the mothers I spoke to, and wanting them to be my focus. I just know my job is to honour them."

Perhaps counter-intuitively, starring in Pieces has awakened in her the desire for a family of her own. "It’s definitely made me want a baby, for sure," she says; but she hasn’t currently got a partner, having split up from Callum Turner (Frank Churchill in last year’s Emma), whom she met when they co-starred in the 2014 film Queen & Country. "This year has made me think a lot about the home I want to create. I like the idea of inviting someone into a space that’s mine, preferably before I have kids."

In the near future, however, Kirby has nothing on her plate except for getting through a third lockdown. "I’m free as a bird! I’ve read a lot of stuff, and said no to a lot of stuff..." She currently shares a flat in Tooting, south London, with her sister Juliet, an assistant director, and two friends. "I was just about to move out to live on my own in north London – my God, I would have been so lonely! My sister saved me. It was so nice to have routines together. We were trying to take a bit of exercise, cooking together, watching films that made us feel better, drinking wine on Friday nights..."

By now, having circled St James’s Park several times, we are strolling back towards the Corinthia Hotel, where Kirby has a full programme of Zoom interviews lined up for the afternoon. "That’s why I’m so happy to have actually had the chance to go out and meet you in real life," she says enthusiastically. "It’s funny when everything in your life closes down, and you have to sit with yourself, and you suddenly notice all the things you have and you’re grateful for. I hope that feeling never goes away – I will never underestimate how lucky I am."

[slytherindisaster]

IDENTITY

Full Name: Julian Xander Bennett

Birthday: 8th March 1973

Gender: Male

Species: Human

Blood Status: Pureblood

Sexuality: Bisexual

Alignment: True Neutral

Ethnicities: English, Greek

Nationality: British

Residence: Nottingham, East Midlands, England

Myer Briggs Personality Type: ESTP - The Entrepreneur

THE MAGE

Wand: Ash, curupira hair, 12 inches, Slightly springy

Misc. Magical Abilities: Seer; Wandless & Nonverbal magic; Apparition;

Animagus: N/A

Boggart Form: his parents saying that they didn’t want him and that’s why they left

Riddikulus Form: his parents start to dance ridiculously to some upbeat disco music

Amortentia (What do they smell like?): apple, hay, butterscotch, wood

Amortentia (What do they smell?): lavender, brewed coffee, wood, coconut

Patronus: Lynx

Patronus Memory: his mother singing him to sleep when he was six

Mirror of Erised: he’s with his parents and aunt and they’re all happy

APPERANCE

Faceclaim/Voiceclaim: Joe Keery

Height: 5ft 9inch (175cm)

Physique: Athletic

Eye Colour: Gray; turn gold when he has a vision

Hair Colour: Brown, with some reddish highlights under a warm lighting

Skin Tone: Fair

Body Modifications: N/A

Scarring: small scar on his right eyebrow; not exactly a scar but he has a visible bump on his nose since he broke it as a child

Inventory (what do they carry on them?): wand, spare change, at least one hair tie, pack of gums, tissues, sunglasses, a notebook or a piece of parchment, pencils

PERSONALITY

loyal, courageous, emphatic, protective, kind, creative, confident, strong, energetic, positive, cooperative, polite, gentle

ALLEGIANCES

Hogwarts House: Gryffindor

Affiliations/Organisations: Gryffindor House; Gryffindor Quidditch team; Circle of Khanna; Gringotts Wizarding Bank; the Order of the Phoenix

Professions:

11 — 18: student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

18 — 30: Cursebreaker for Gringotts Wizarding Bank

30+: Freelance Cursebreaker

HOGWARTS INFORMATION

Class Proficiencies (most to least):

Flying, Muggle Studies, Care of Magical Creatures, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Herbology, Divination, Transfiguration, Charms, Astronomy, History of Magic, Potions,

Quidditch: Beater (fourth to seventh year)

Extra Curricular: TBD

Favourite Professors: McGonagall; Kettleburn; Trelawney

Least Favourite Professors: Snape; Binns

RELATIONSHIPS

Mother: Daphne Bennett (née Hall) - deceased (probably)

Father: Walter Bennett - deceased (probably)

Aunt: Cassandra “Cassie” Bennett

[FC: Goldie Hawn]

Love Interest: Clary Walcott (@that-ravenpuff-witch)

Canon Friends: Bill & Charlie Weasley; Tulip Karasu; Nymphadora Tonks; Barnaby Lee; Diego Caplan; Jae Kim; Chiara Lobosca; Murphy McNully

MC Friends: Clary Walcott and Henry McClarnon (@that-ravenpuff-witch); Ottilie Reyes (@words-and-wands); Marti and Jacob Venturi (@smarti-at-smogwarts); Feen McKenzie and Atlas Marson (@cleverglitteryfoxtrot);

Enemies: Merula Snyde

Dormmates: Ben Copper; Charlie Weasley; Jae Kim; Henry McClaron

Pets: a rat named Ozzy (male)

BACKGROUND

He was born in England to a pureblood father and half-blood mother, he was an only child. His childhood was mostly happpy and he grew up showing signs of magical abilities. At the age of four he had his first vision in a dream, it wasn’t very clear and he couldn’t understand it but he felt that it wasn’t a good thing. His mother reassured him then that it was just nightmares. Because both of his parents were aurors, working for the Order of the Phoenix, they would often leave him on Walter’s sister’s — Cassie — supervision. She was an unusual character but little Julian kinda admired her wierdness.

His entire world changed over just one summer when Julian was six years old. His parents left him with Cassie again, promising they’d be back just in time to take him on a vacation trip they’ve been talking about for the past few weeks. So he waited for them for days, turned weeks, turned months. They never came back. Although he knew that they wouldn’t left him, and that something terrible must have happened he was still unsure whether that was the case. The fact that absolutely nobody seemed to know what really happened to them wasn’t helping.

Probably the darkest time of his short life begin. He was taken away from his aunt, because the authorities stated that she’s not capable of rasing him. Then he was passed from home to home, nearly put in an orphanage for good. His visions were starting to become more intrusive and he started to experience them even when he was awake. He wouldn’t understand what’s happening to him and he also was physically unable to not to say what he saw. People around them whether it was other kids or adults were really disturbed by things he were saying due to the fact that his visions were mostly about bad stuff that were going to happen.

Almost a year later it was reaveled to him that Cassie was actively trying to get the custody over him and he eventually succeeded. After a horrible time of not being wanted by anybody he was finally reunited with the one person he actually trusted. He went back to live with Cassie and things finally started looking good for him. His aunt quickly noticed that he can experience the visions the near future and tried to explain it to him. She was an incredible help for him in understanding what all of that means and she could understand what he was going trough, because she was given the same ability.

By the time he was eleven and his letter from Hogwarts came, he could much better understand how to deal with all the things he was seeing. Although he couldn’t control when the vision would come or what he would see, he managed to distance himself from it and have a lot better coping mechanisms after the things he saw were dark or traumatic.

LAST UPDATE: 11.01.2021 — things added: MC friends, love interest, dormmate, amortentia smell, pet

[5bi5]

I've never btvs in my life, I'll admit, but I do get the gay vibes from buffy and faith in the stuff you reblog, and I noticed you once said you ship em a lot and they'd be toxic though that doesn't stop you- would you mind going into that for a second? What makes fuffy(?) toxic? What makes you ship em despite that? Feel free to ignore this ask btw if you don't feel like answering das cool and Im sorry for clogging your inbox 😬

Oh don’t worry my inbox is empty lol 

So here’s a rundown of Faith’s plotline on the show (sorry this is super long i hope you have some time): In season three, Faith shows up and we learn that she’s a vampire slayer, and that her watcher (sort of a mentor who also happens to be a parental figure in this case and may also have been her primary guardian for a time) has recently died and she feels responsible. As a result of both this and a traumatic childhood, Faith is very defensive, distrustful, and reckless, and relies heavily on sex and violence (mostly towards vampires) as coping mechanisms. While she and Buffy initially don’t see eye to eye, they become close friends, with Buffy being one of the first people to show genuine friendship and affection towards Faith, and Faith offering Buffy an outlet where she can have fun and doesn’t have to constantly act like a responsible adult (they’re about eighteen at this point, and Buffy is dealing with both a lot of trauma and a huge amount of responsibility and high expectations in multiple aspects of her life). During this time, Faith is living on her own in a motel, and no adults offer her a place to stay or any financial or emotional support. Most of Buffy’s friends don’t become very close with Faith, but one character, Xander, hooks up with her, and she promptly kicks him out of her hotel room.

Things take a turn when Faith accidentally kills a human after mistaking him for a vampire. Panicked, she hides the body, tries to pin the blame on Buffy (who just wants to support her), and claims that she “doesn’t care” about having killed someone. However, the truth quickly comes out, and the Watcher’s Council (a group of stuffy, misogynistic British men who are meant to be in charge of everything re: vampire slayers) send some men to take her away and punish or possibly kill her. She escapes, and starts working for the Mayor, who is the main villain of the season. She develops a father-daughter relationship with the Mayor, with him doting on her and giving her new clothes, weapons, an apartment, and an xbox, as well as just generally the parental love and validation she is missing. She becomes an assassin, killing anyone who the Mayor needs to get rid of. While they genuinely love each other, he is fairly controlling towards her at times, and also he’s evil so this isn’t a really great relationship.

Buffy and her friends attempt to support Faith, not knowing that she’s working for the Mayor. Xander goes to visit her, feeling that they have a bond since they slept together, but she pressures him to have sex with her again, and almost sexually assaults him, so he leaves. Buffy’s on-and-off boyfriend, Angel, is a reformed vampire who has to live with the horrible things he’s done, and he reaches out to Faith, saying he knows what she’s going through, but she refuses to open up. Eventually, Buffy & co reluctantly accept that Faith is past the point of no return, and start actively fighting her. 

Faith, at the request of the Mayor, injects Angel with a poison for which the only cure is drinking the blood of a slayer. Buffy attempts to kill Faith, with the intention of letting Angel drink her blood, but Faith throws herself off a roof onto a moving truck. She doesn’t die, but she does go into a coma. Buffy talks to Faith in a dream (one of the slayer powers), and Faith tells her to defeat the Mayor by exploiting his human weakness, which is his love for Faith. Buffy lets Angel drink her own blood, saving him, but he moves to LA shortly thereafter since their relationship has no future due to him not aging.

A year later, Faith wakes up from her coma, and we learn that she has been dreaming about Buffy murdering her. She swaps bodies with Buffy and tries to flee the country (since the Watcher’s Council are still after her), but doesn’t end up doing it. She and Buffy fight, they swap back, and Faith leaves for LA, where Angel finally gets through to her, and she turns herself in to the police.

Years later, Faith breaks out of jail in order to help Buffy, who is facing the biggest evil she’s ever faced. The two reconcile, although their relationship is still somewhat fraught. They come to understand each other much better after each experiencing plot arcs similar to the ones the other previously had (sorry i hope that makes sense; basically Buffy goes through Faith’s original plot arc and vice versa)

They have a unique connection due to both being slayers, they’re foils for each other, and they have incredible chemistry. They clearly care for each other deeply even when they’re on opposite sides (there’s a notable parallel in season three where Faith kisses Buffy on the forehead after Buffy “gives up” on Faith, and Buffy kisses Faith on the forehead while she’s in her coma). However, they have a lot of shared trauma, and Faith in particular isn’t really capable of maintaining a healthy romantic relationship without getting some therapy and going through some character growth. 

Sorry that this is so long Faith is a complex character but hopefully this answers things. Thanks for sending an ask :)

[erikthedead]

entry #1

I have finally acquired Microsoft Word! I really didn’t want to pay a monthly subscription for it, but it is the best writing software out there. Every time I mention myself spending money, a small prayer goes out to all the tax-paying members of the nation, since all my money comes from Universal Credit, which is the United Kingdom’s cute name for a type of welfare money. I much prefer just calling it ‘welfare,’ or even better ‘NEETbux,’ which I discovered used in online forums as a word for the money people receive when they are not in education, employment, or training (N.E.E.T), which has been my status for about two years now. Then ‘bux’ is just ‘bucks,’ obviously. Bucks is just money, obviously. Many people receiving Universal Credit also work as well; they just receive less - enough to supplement their wages if they aren’t getting enough money from their jobs.  

My last job was working in a busy restaurant for just about a year. Before that I was in university, but I dropped out after only completing the first year out of three. Before that, I worked as a carer for elderly people for just under a year. Before that, I was in college for two years, and I actually passed the course. I only passed it because the subject was forensic science, which included lots of writing about psychology, criminology and lab reports. I was never that good in the lab practically. I got flustered and bewildered in such a bright, sanitary environment that required precision and organisation to achieve the desired results. When it came to scrambling together a report to submit the next day though, I was pretty golden. I only dropped out of university because I had a mental break down as a result of poor mental health and just the fact that going outside and interacting with people was and still is incredibly exhausting for me. After a year of doing that consistently it seems, I get fatigued. In the end I got an average grade for the college course because some of the work was difficult, or boring, and that fatigue was hitting me by the second year. However, the grades I was getting on my university assignments for psychology and sociology were anywhere between top marks and good marks (Between 1st – 2:2 in UK student language). I never once read the feedback from the tutors who marked my work. All I needed to know was the mark was okay and moved on to the next assignment, firstly because I was arrogant and secondly, I couldn’t handle criticism. The mental break down itself involved me walking through the campus one day only to find myself slipping into a dissociative state. Nothing had happened immediately prior to trigger this, it just happened. It felt strange, like I wasn’t really real, and neither was anyone else. Everything felt distant and off, both externally and internally. It was frightening and strangely peaceful, as if at any moment someone could come in and blow the building up and I wouldn’t even react to it. That wasn’t normal. The only way to snap out of it was to lock myself in a toilet cubicle and lightly slice my arm with a tiny knife I had on my keys. It worked, but now I was in floods of tears and a state of distress, so I went to the student welfare services to see if they could help me or at least let me sit somewhere nicer than a toilet while I calmed down. It was an open office waiting area at the side of the bottom floor of a building that matched the layout of a prison ward with the stairs and the upper floors creating a square boarder of classrooms, that would have been cells for a prison. More for practical purposes than for aesthetic reasons, I’m sure. Still sobbing, and hiding my self-inflicted cuts, I asked the person behind the desk if I could ‘see someone,’ which is one polite British way of asking for help. After waiting a little while, a plump middle-aged lady appeared and brought me into her own little private office to ask me what had happened. She gave me her sympathy and asked me about my life and my history, and gave me some more sympathy, while relating her own experiences to mine. She was a good counsellor, basically. But having a good counsellor on site wasn’t enough to keep me on the course after that incident. Getting a degree just wasn’t worth it at the time. Being such a depressed and pessimistic person, I was only actually doing the course for ‘fun’ anyway, not for the hope that it will bring me a better future. Until recently, I never saw a future for myself. It wasn’t even a bleak future I imagined; it was just blank. I couldn’t even conceptualise it.

It’s not a mystery where all my misery came from. My childhood was a bit inconsistent to start, and from what I’ve observed, children need consistency more than anything to develop promisingly. I remember reading a study once that found children raised by parents who were consistently abusive to them were in fact more mentally stable than those raised by parents who could be lovely one day and nasty the next. It was not knowing what treatment they were going to get that did them in. It makes sense because if you’re always expecting to face a thrashing or a shouting at every day, you can at least prepare for it and train yourself to deal with it. We’re very adaptable creatures, but we need to be able to recognise patterns around us to do that. If there is no pattern, then how can we possibly make predictions? Without predictions, how can we possibly feel secure about our future? Having said all that, I was never abused in any way growing up, but I was sometimes neglected by my young mother, who was only 16 when she gave birth to me. Of course, it’s understandable now, but from a child’s perspective all you think is ‘why doesn’t my mum want me?’ When she sends you to your room for no reason and tells you not to come down for hours at a time. I asked ‘why’ a lot. Never got a good reason. I’m sure plenty of people who were raised by a drug-addicted parent can relate to this. She herself was a good mother, not amazing, but good. She told me she loved plenty of times, she gave me what she could, including a little sister when I was three years old. I think it was shortly after her birth that mum started taking heroin. It was only during drug education in year five of school (I would have been about 11) that I put the pieces together. She hid her addiction pretty well from us, but I sometimes found pieces of tin foil lying around the living room with lines of black residue on them, and once or twice witnessed her junkie friends ‘nodding off.’ There’s also a clear memory in my mind of being taken along by her and my nan to score some brown out of town and I can picture in my head the massive set of old-fashioned scales this drug dealer had sat on his coffee table right in front of me. I was too young to understand any of their lingo, though. Yes, I mentioned my nan, my mum’s mum. They got smacked up together, and they eventually got clean together. I’ll never know the details of how that came about because neither of them are alive anymore to ask. Mum died when I was 14 by taking an overdose of her methadone, then nan died when was 21 of a heart attack, likely due to the COPD she had developed from years of smoking.

My nan was so full of love for my mum, my sister and me. Some of my favourite childhood memories are being snuggled up in bed listening to her read me stories, which she did with flare and enthusiasm. She would affectionately call us her ‘wobblies,’ and give us more hugs kisses than we ever wanted. My mum definitely inherited her loving nature from her. But love on its own isn’t enough to keep kids clothed and fed and able to go out and do things. This is where the legend that is my grandad comes in. He is still going strong at 66 years old as of writing. God knows where I’d be without him. He’s been my father figure all my life since I never knew who or where my real dad was. He’s hard-working, reliable, responsible and strong. He supported us immensely despite not relating to him biologically. My biological grandfather was a free-spirited busker who liked to smoke and drink a lot, who I only met a hand full of times before he hanged himself when I was 19. His death did not affect me, but my mum’s and nan’s certainly did. I’ll probably have to see my grandad die as well eventually, and I don’t dread anything more.

Although I started off describing my family background by saying it’s obvious where my source of misery comes from, I must emphasise that my family is not the source of my misery. My childhood overall was pretty forgettable. I only have a few memories and they’re fond memories, despite the unfortunate situation I just described. Even getting my face ripped open by the neighbour’s dog when I was six didn’t faze me. It was only when puberty hit me that life started to feel horrible, and it just got worse.

I was an early bloomer, if blooming is what you call it. I call it mutating. I started getting hairy and growing tits when I was 10, and got my period about a year later. Now THAT is a traumatic memory. Waking up and going for a morning wee as usual, sitting down on the toilet and being overcome with horror at the sight of blood covering my pyjamas, realising there’s only one place that could have come from, then investigating the source only to confirm ‘Oh shit, I’m bleeding from between my legs!’ I was living with my nan and grandad at the time and I stayed there (or here, since I’m still living in the same house as of writing) under their guardianship while mum sorted herself out. After the shocking discovery of blood, I immediately ran into nan’s bedroom to wake her up. I vividly remember what and how she responded to me. With a sigh of what seemed like unsettling disappointment she said “Oh, darling, I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve got your period.’  I wonder now if she said it like that because she felt guilty for not warning me about this, as she should have. Someone should have. In all fairness I was young, but the other kids in my year at school were soon popping into adolescence alongside me, so I thought that soon enough everyone else would be going through what I was going through, but that wasn’t the case. I was bullied for having chronic acne. I was also a bit of a chubby boffin, but it was mostly the acne that people targeted me for. The girls shaved their legs once they started to get hairy, and I remember thinking ‘Damn, I suppose I’ve got to do that too,’ despite never wearing a skirt. They also seemed to relish in showing off and comparing their bras in the changing rooms, while I hid away as very best as I could. Make-up was a constant battle between students and teachers because they all wanted to look pretty, but it wasn’t allowed in middle school (Year 5-8), so luckily, I had an excuse for not wearing it. I’d regularly complain to my family about hating going to school, and how depressed I was, but it was all put down to teenage blues. ‘You’ll be alright once your hormones settle down,’ I was told more than once.  I remember my nan telling me I would miss going to school when I was older and so far she’s been proven wrong.  

[obscuniverse]

Obscu listens to: The Magnus Archives - Episode 1 ‘Angler Fish’

@derinthescarletpescatarian​ has been ranting at me about this series for what feels like a million years so here I am. Also apparently I’m the world’s biggest stereotype. Let’s roll, shall we?

Oooh, I do like spooky violin. Can’t have a horror anything without spooky violin.

Okay can we pause and talk about the symbolism of having ‘Angler Fish’ be your first episode title? Fun Fact! As you may recall, the angler fish is what happens when you ask any child to draw any animal that they imagine has teeth, and the teeth come out all different sizes and directions but they’re definitely spikes, and then they get so caught up with the teeth that they rush the rest of the body so it looks like a particularly carnivorous poop? That’s the one. The part that’s particularly relevant is the the bit where they’re a bunch of glowing knobheads; that is, they have a fleshy forehead appendage where the end is colonised by bioluminescent bacteria, which they use as a lure for smaller, less coprotype prey. So we’ve got some strong lure imagery, and it’s the first episode, so on one hand this is literally the lure that the series is using to draw us, the readers, into consuming (or, if you know @derinthescarletpescatarian​, being consumed by) the series. Of course, it’s almost certainly referring to the content of the episode as well so I anticipate a protagonist (and possibly diverse other victims) to be _lured _into something bad for them.

Secondary Fun Fact! Anglerfish mating involve the male biting into the belly of the (several times larger in size) female and hanging on until their skin and blood vessels literally fuse together, with the anglerfish male being fed directly by nutrients from the blood of the female through their shared circulatory system. Will our protagonist bite off more than they can chew and become hopelessly, permanently enmeshed in something larger and more dangerous than they, so interwoven with it that they are unable to extricate themselves from it but also being given by it the means to survive? Will we the listeners? I guess we’ll just have to hit play because I’m only 36 seconds in. I do like the narrator’s voice though.

More spooky violin, can’t go wrong with that. Ooooh a crescendo. Hot fucking damn. Oh snap there was some sad tunelessness there!

Ohshit it’s a recorded diary! Every horror game I’ve ever played has prepared me for this moment.

Nothing spooky happens at a research institute named for strength or might in both Latin and Norse. Certainly not one that deals in esoterica. Okay, let’s see what Johnathan Sims (Simms?) gets up to at Swole Hogwarts.

What’s that? The previous Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher Archivist is dead and you’ve been hired by Spooky French Dumbledore who is almost certainly a monster because of course he is to replace them? This will end only well and definitely not with a spiral into a mental breakdown culminating in some Here’s Johnny! shenanigans.

“There are very few genuine cases” and now that you’ve jinxed yourself every single genuine case in the world is going to be crawling out of the walls to say hello. You’d think after 4 years you would’ve learned not to say such things. It’s like watching D-Class personnel at the SCP foundation.

“When an investigation has gone as far as it can it goes to the archives” (emphasis mine). So you’re gonna be digging into a 200 years’ of spoopy cold cases that are gonna get real hot real quick. I’m down. 

Ahahahaha. Oh academia. Even in Swole Hogwarts you can’t get away from theorists vs practicalists.

86-91-G/H is definitely going to come up again. I can vividly picture the wild strewn-about room of someone driven mad by the haunting nature of their job. Or of my own office because of who I am as a person. I wonder which file ate Gertrude. I also wonder if the lack of use of modern electronics is a safety measure that Old Mate Johnny has unknowingly violated.

“I have secured the services of two redshirts, and you can tell because they’re unnamed researchers” “I don’t expect Martin to secretly be the highly skilled wizard/creature manipulating events form their apparent background doddering disguised as a silly fool in keeping with long fairy-tale tradition contribute anything except delays” Martin is definitely Snape. OOOooooOOOooooOOH, attempting to digitise T̵̨̛͚͉̫̩̰͍̓̽̽̍̓͑̓̾͌͗̂̈́̉ḫ̸͈̪̉̆̓̀͌̓͒̈̋̐͝ĕ̵͉̻̻ ̷̜͙̤͎͈̝̮̘̄̅̓̆̿̕͝R̴̪͑̍̒̍̾̅̐́͘͠͠ę̸̞̪͕̠͍͉̝̀̈́́͌̽ͅc̴̟̱͈̦̎̅̋̏͆̌̇͘͠͠o̶͚̞͕̲͒̋r̷̲̟̭͚̠̾͑́͋̓̈́̎͒̾̚d̴̩͓́͑̀͊̂̿͛i̴̗͈̣̟̻̯̼̘̞͕̋͜ͅņ̶̡͍͚͙̩͇̟̝̩̬͍͖̳̓g̷̯̬̙̱͚̏͂̔͐̉̇̾̋̓̎̈́͘s̷̢̫̗͙̱̻̳̞̩̐͛͂̍̑̐̊̚ have been met with significant spooky magical fuckery distortion. Fancy that.

The redshirts are named Tim and Sasha, and they will be doing some supplementary investigation suicidal monster hunting to fill in Blanks That No Man Was Meant To Fill. Maybe they’ll survive now that they have names, but they really should’ve saved the name for when one of them is mortally injured and the audience has to care enough about them for them to survive so you can reveal that they are in fact a person.

“I apologise to my eventual replacement after I am horribly eaten by/transformed into whatever is in 86-91-G/H any future researcher.”

Johnathan Sims is Niles Crane from Frasier and I will accept no word to the contrary.

Ah yes, the most esoteric and terrifying of eldritch phenomena; someone trying to bum a ciggy off you when you’re 80% scotch and 60% regret.

Ah, so “can I have a cigarette” with a human form ‘asking’ is the glowy knob on this ghost’s forehead. Completely without intonation because it’s just playing back a noise that attracts hammered people at night rather than understanding words that attract hammered people at night. Pretty sure I’ve seen this in an anime.

Apparently totally sloshed British students make better horror/urban fantasy protagonists than most movies would credit.

I take it back.

At least the spooky poopfish got some dinner.

I wonder if the missing student’s name also been John is a bit of tongue in cheek.

Oooh he’s created a “this is all bullshit” category into which he clearly intends to consign most of these. STOP PLAYING CHICKEN WITH THE UNFATHOMABLE HORRORS OF THE VOID BETWEEN THE STARS. Or, y’know, keep at it. This will not be hilarious and/or traumatic at all.

“Check out this photo of a spooky ghost if you run it through a sixth sense filter” That’s right Johnny, get beckoned.

I’m actually not 100% on this format but I’ll give it a few more tries.

[bookmawkish]

Prompt fill: Secrets (ctnd)

Parts 1, 2, 3

@worldoftherandom can be blamed for pretty much everything about this except Bruce. Bruce got out of control. We totally owe Heckyl some fluff. 

Double prompt fill, including your request for “Heckyl kind of talking to Bruce about the fact they both have/had monstrous alter-egos.”

TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE ATTEMPT

“Loki - “

“No.”

“Hey, you’re back - “

“Later!”

It is Tony who gets the brunt of it, purely by being the last obstacle in Loki’s path between the elevator and the lounge. And, to be fair, by just being Tony at a moment where being Tony was definitely neither required nor welcome.

“Oh wow,” Tony says, stopping dead, right in the doorway. “Wow. Lokes, you really need to rethink your choice of holiday destinations. Prince Albert there looks like death. What have you been doing to him? Scratch that - I don’t want to know. Let’s -”

Loki’s hand - the one that wasn’t currently making sure Heckyl didn’t just collapse to the floor - shoots out and locks around Stark’s throat. Not squeezing. Not yet.

“Let’s not,” he hisses. “In fact, let’s never.”

And he lets go. Tony, for once rendered momentarily speechless, flattens to the doorframe as Loki sweeps past. “Okay,” he says, once Loki is safely inside, “okay. My fault. Something bad happened. I get that.”

Loki guides Heckyl to the couch, and Heckyl, apparently functioning completely on automatic pilot, sits down, drawing his feet up and hugging his knees. Loki starts unlacing his companion’s boots and removing them without a word. Although he won’t admit it aloud, he’s worried. Heckyl hasn’t said anything since declaring his memory is no longer lost. It’s been almost a day. And he looks utterly traumatized.

This is not unsurprising, Loki thinks, glancing around for a blanket, a throw, anything he can bring over. Heckyl’s skin is cold. Shock, he supposes. The alien is thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of years old. That’s a lot of memory to lose. And equally, a lot to get back all in one lump. In the best-case scenario here, it’s just all too much to process quickly.

A hand appears in front of him, holding a thick red sleeping bag. It’s Stark. Loki had entirely dismissed him from his mind.

“Here,” he says, and his dark eyes are, for once, serious and focused. “I’ll go get Bruce.”

Once he’s gone, Loki checks the place where Heckyl’s leg was wounded during the escape, and finds that it has healed rapidly and well. The same evidently cannot be said of his soul.

“I am not sorry,” Loki says, almost angrily, because he isn’t. Heckyl just curls up more tightly around his knees and doesn’t say anything.

 “Hey,” says Banner.

He doesn’t sit down, or approach. He stays at a polite, safe distance, as if Loki is a rabid lioness with a sickly cub to protect. “So I hear there’s a little problem,” Bruce continues, running a hand up over the back of his head in a habitual nervous gesture. “You want to talk about it?” He glances from Heckyl to Loki, back and forth. “Um. Either of you. It’s okay.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” says Loki, with more venom than is perhaps called for, but it’s been a long, exhausting and irritating few days, and he’s more worried than he cares to admit about the ridiculous alien now huddled under a puffy red sleeping bag on the couch. Bruce just looks at him for a moment, nods very slightly as everything is suddenly clear, then says:

“Well. I’m…I’m just going to make some tea.”

He leaves the door to the kitchen open. So naturally, Loki follows him and tells him everything, or at least an edited version of everything. It still takes almost twenty minutes, and Bruce’s tea gets cold.

And by the time they get back Heckyl has already managed to bite his own right wrist open with his teeth and is starting on the left. And he is doing it in eerie silence.

Loki‘s weariness, concern and annoyance instantly solidifies into pure rage at the sight. Rage at whoever did this to Heckyl in the first place. Rage at Amora for teaching him how to split souls. Rage at himself for not handling it differently.

“Oh, my god,” Bruce says, and then his tone deepens from alarm directly into firm crisis management. “Absolutely not. Stop that.” He lunges in, drags Heckyl off the couch and onto the floor in one motion, effectively interrupting the biting, and as Loki starts forward with a snarl, Bruce flings out his hand in negation. “And you. No. Just…just no. I’m not hurting him. Back off. Once he’s not trying to kill himself, you’re more than welcome to take a swing at me for touching your boyfriend. Now get me something to tie this with.”

“This” is Heckyl’s wrist. There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen. Of course there is. Avengers Headquarters is a hotbed of minor (and major) injuries. Bruce deals with it all very swiftly and professionally but keeps up a steady stream of monologue directed at Heckyl the whole time.

“Okay, first of all, hi. I know we haven’t spoken a lot, and to be honest, that’s not you, it’s me. Never been much of a joiner, especially not since the whole…you know. But I guess you really would know, huh? Yeah. So Loki told me. Don’t be mad at him. He’s worried about you. I’m serious. I mean, he was ready to take me on, and he’s probably told you that he and the other guy kind of have a violent history. That’s something he wouldn’t take on lightly, you know. Hold that there.”

Heckyl, who is regarding Bruce with wide, uncomprehending eyes, holds the loose end of the bandage with a finger as directed as Bruce completes the binding. “Great. That’s great. You know, you missed all the major veins here. Good for you. So what did he look like? Your Other Guy.”

And Loki finds he breathes easier when he hears Heckyl reply (albeit quietly, and as if his throat is sore). Evidence that he’s not irreparably broken.

“Huh,” says Bruce. “Well that sounds…don’t be offended…horrible. These other guys…they’re not often great strategic thinkers, are they. Now I’m going to put a couple of steristrips on this one. We might sew it later, I’m not sure.”

“He heals fast,” says Loki. “He’ll be fine in a few hours.”

Next to Bruce, Heckyl echoes, though less than convincingly, “I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, sure,” says Bruce, and when he glances up at Loki his eyes are steely. “He seems fine. Everything about what we’re doing here is…is absolutely fine. Listen, Heckyl, I get it, I really do. I’ve done worse to myself to try and break free. So I’m not gonna be the one to tell you not to. To tell you that you’re selfish, or weak, or stupid. I know you’re none of those things. But the next time, you talk to me. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning and I’m sleeping. I mean obviously I’d rather it wasn’t. But come to me. We can…ah…hang out. Swap monster stories. Okay? I’ll give you a hint, I’m not leaving until I hear an ‘okay’.”

“Okay,” says Heckyl, who looks completely confused by this whole situation. Unsurprising, really. Millions of years of people not giving a shit about you will do that. Bruce gives him an uncertain pat on the shoulder, then stands up, gathering the remains of the first aid kit. “Say, Loki, you want to give me a hand making some more tea? Heckyl looks a little dehydrated.”

Somehow it’s one hundred percent clear that this isn’t a suggestion. And Loki, for once, decides not to make an issue out of it.  

Bruce closes the kitchen door behind them and before Loki can get a word out, he finds a single finger in his chest, pinning him in place.

“I’m a normal kind of guy,” Bruce murmurs, and although his voice is as quiet and level as ever, somehow Loki can feel the full weight of the man’s massive alter ego behind it. Is that a hint of virulent green lurking in the man‘s irises? “And I wouldn’t presume to lecture anyone on how they handle their relationships, god knows I don’t have the high ground on that one. But you need to do better, do you understand? I don’t care if you want to be a complete asshole ninety-nine percent of your life. I genuinely don’t give a crap. But for the one percent you’re using on this man, you need to be the good guy. Because he doesn’t have anyone else and for some bizarre, fucked-up reason he’s chosen you.”

He thrusts the teapot at Loki brusquely. It’s probably one of the only times a teapot has been used as a threat.

“If I have to patch him up again, I’ll lock you in a room and let the Hulk go to work on you. That’s a promise. Now make him some tea, you can use my chai. Jesus. What a fucking day.”

The door slams behind him. And Loki is left in the kitchen, next to The Chart, holding a gorgeous original British Blue Willow pattern ceramic teapot and trying to decide between being furious at the sheer unadulterated nerve of talking to him that way, and being terrified that Bruce actually means it.

“Loki?”

Heckyl’s voice, from the next room.

“I’m here,” Loki answers, immediately. And he is.

[strmgrl-blog]

my name’s saturn & this is my meme shop ! aaaaah no, really though bonjour angels ! for a lil introduction for myself let me just get this out of the way GIFJDKL uhhh i love aoa, day6 & sm artists ( like .. all of them Help ). a traumatized bitch who loves suffering so i project onto my muses to Cope ! GIAUDFJKL god gdfroijmkl sorry ummm i love star wars & video games ? catch me throwing an ow comp match & feeding in fortnite ! i love the moon, she’s the only thing that keeps me alive. i don’t have a mitochondria, i have lunar force. i have one (1) indoor cat who i birthed & LITERALLY 4 STRAY CATS who appeared from the mist. i run a ratchet vet service from my front porch & it’s free, i should be named human of the year honestly, truly. more on this mess of a muse, hyeon, who ( btw ) is literally my everything ? i’ve had her for quite a long time & lost motivation to write her so i’m changing some shit up to see how it goes & this is the product ! i hope you all enjoy reading this EXTREMELY long intro ( bc it will be very long im so sorry ) & befriend both myself as well as hyeon. & if you’re feelin’ a little extra, like this to plot ! i have a few ideas in mind but they’re all worth brainstorming over bc they’re SHIT. anyway, i love u all so much already ? genuinely a kind community i’m nut & WITHOUT FURTHER ADIEU, here’s hyeon ~  ♥（ﾉ´∀`）

warning ! trigger warnings ahead possibly including ꞉ child prostitution, drug abuse, child abuse, mental abuse, sexual assault, depression, suicidal thoughts + other mental illness, murder, & probably a fuckton more. read with caution, please.

⌠ BACKGROUND ⌡

so starting with her parents, where all stories begin, let’s just preface by saying these were awful people. they ran in similar circles during school, a very bad one at that, & fell in love after sharing a joint. in their high daze they saw what their mind was conjuring but not the truth about one another. but for them, it had been enough. thus, their story began. it was a very rocky road but they managed to stay together regardless. the bond they had created blossomed as they partook in illegal activities such as petty theft, vandalism, & it slowly evolved into larger problems. 

after hyeon’s mother, named jung eunbi, stole from her parents for the last time she was kicked out into the street with her boyfriend ( who had also been kicked out ) with no place to go. both dropped out of high school as it wasn’t their “””scene””” & took to the dirty streets of busan trying to turn tricks. they’d do anything they could to get some money to feed their addictions. in the midst of their scrambling for what they deemed as important, they never thought to buy protection. so one fateful night after a good steal, they made love on a dingy couch high as a kite & eunbi got pregnant.

she hid the pregnancy for as long as she could from her boyfriend, he only noticed when there was a rather apparent bump under her baggy clothing. with the weight of the realization they might have to force themselves to become a real family, the couple got hitched & attempted to find real jobs. in some miracle, they managed to find a house to live in & eventually “raise” their child in. 

hyeon was born on the 8th of june, on a dark morning with clouds hanging ove the sky & rain starting to pour. she was premature as her mother did drugs during the pregnancy ( which was really no shocker ) & almost was pronounced a still born before they heard the tiny being crying & gasping for air. her parents had assumed that once she was born, they’d feel that parental love that everyone claimed to have but it never came. they stayed in the hospital a total of two days & hardly let their newborn get the help she needed before they hauled ass out of there. 

the first 3 years of hyeon’s life were better than expected, her parents at least tried to take care of her but once she was able to do everything on her own they left her be to pursue their own happiness. honestly think of matilda but a lot more severe ok

she would often get locked in a closet while there were parties held & her parents were too strung out to remember their child. she could spend days in there before she was released. this was only the beginning.

at 8 years old, her father lost his job ( her mother stayed at home ) due to a random drug test & he of course failed. this triggered her parents to panic as they no longer could supply themselves with their so desired highs. so after a night of scheming, they came up with a plan so sinister not even the devil himself would agree.

random men & women began to arrive to their dingy home as hyeon would be ushered into quiet rooms with them where they would pay to do whatever they pleased with the young girl. this went on for 2 years before hyeon was pulled into the principals office at school with questions about where those bruises on her came from. her mom was picked up for possession & this prompted the police to raid their home to find many illegal substances throughout the place as well as evidence of abuse towards the child.

soon after her parents were placed in prison, hyeon was shipped off to seoul to the biggest orphanage in the country. there she stayed for 4 more years. the time there was quiet, nobody asked her about where she came from & she never spoke about it. in truth, she never knew how to as she was a blank mind essentially. 

luckily when she was 15, after a long & strenuous search, hyeon’s grandparents found her & adopted her into their home in daegu. they were absolutely appalled at this shell of a girl, but could only blame her trauma on their own children. it was here that hyeon was loved for the first time in her life ( & possibly the only time ) & taught how to feel something besids fear. she was still horribly inept at processing emotions or showing them.

two years spent with them & one night as hyeon & her grandfather were sat at the family piano, playing & singing a song as her grandmother recorded them in secret. that same video was sent to an entertainment company without hyeon’s knowledge but was thoroughly surprised & equally as excited when she was recruited. only a measly year in training with her 2 group members before they debuted & they were suddenly the biggest gg in sk.

the group debuted under the name of PTL, hyeon’s stagename was now Tink as she accompanied her members in the ride of a lifetime. they were extremely popular with their girl crush yet enticing vocals with miss tink as the main vocalist & maknae. even so successful as to have a world tour ! the group had their differences, hyeon being the medium for them as the other girls were rather opposing forces. often she was put in the middle of their arguing only to run away when conflict came up. during this time she would write & compose her own songs, bringing a heavy soul feeling to the group with her powerhouse vocals.

with all this being said ( which was a LOT ), there is still more. a year after debut while the group was climbing in popularity, hyeon began receiving texts from an unknown number. she soon found out that the people behind the mask were her parents, somehow having managed to be released from prison & found their new mission in life was to harass their daughter. on an october night, after an argument went down within the dorms between hyeon’s two members, the youngest set out by herself to meet those who hurt her for dinner. 

as expected, it went horribly. at this point in her life, she was extremely impressionable, & witnessed how her eonnie handled things which was with a liquor bottle in hand. so, like an idiot, she went to a club by herself to get fucked up. while sitting at the bar, a random man drugged her drink & took hyeon home with him. the night was a blur but when the young woman woke up she felt familiar bruises & a blanket of rage took over. the man was still passed out next to her.

so as she slipped out of his bed & found the nearest blunt object, hyeon managed to bash his skull in. she blacked out after that only to come to with clean hands & far away from the corpse. this was the reactant to lead her to go blind in rage & come to with blood on her hands. soon enough, she took a liking to the feeling & became two people within one while somehow managing to remain anonymous as a killer ran rampant.

earlier this year, after too much shit going on within the group, ptl disbanded & all went their own ways. which hyeon appreciated. the people she had once called her sisters had become like strangers & only cared about themselves, didn’t have the time to look after their maknae. 

to say that her already pre - existing depression & anxiety sky rocketed would be an understatement. she left music for a while, deciding to stream on twitch & youtube as a gamer. it made her happy for a short time but has been planning on returning to music with hints of a solo debut soon that has fans excited.

edit: i forgot to put this in here originally IGJFDKL but she moved to jeju after her group disbanded for a new start. plus, her address somehow got leaked so she uprooted all her shit & left for the secluded island.

⌠ OTHER TIDBITS ⌡

stands at 5′7″, 168 pounds ( considered plus size tbh. one day i’ll put picture references LMAO ), with curly, thick hair & freckles from hell. 

can speak english, japanese, chinese, & italian. has a slight british accent from who she learned english from was from the UK.

has a rottweiler puppy named chewie, a hedgehog named leia, & two cats named opal & hazel. 

voice claim is a mixture of lee haeri, kim taeyeon, park sunyoung, & ailee.

her favorite color is blue, loves the rain, & will 100% be caught standing in the middle of a storm.

is a practicing wiccan ! very much so considers herself a witch.

her favorite drink is strawberry milk, & will eat anything that has strawberries !

[scripttorture]

Sources

So this isn’t exactly a Masterpost. Good sources on torture are hard to find and it’s not always obvious what they cover. I’ve had a couple of people recommend fictional titles in the comments and while fiction can be helpful for working out how to handle torture in stories it is rarely accurate and no substitute for factual sources.

 I thought it might be helpful to give everyone a quick run down of the sources I’ve found most useful and what they cover.

 This may well be edited in the future as I find more books. :)

 Torture and Democracy by D Rejali

 This is basically the book on torture.

 It’s the size of a breezeblock.

 Rejali covers torturers and victims, provides a systematic breakdown of why torture fails, gives a history of electrical torture, an analysis of factors that encourage torture in society and an overview of how the law fails torture victims. Interrogation is extensively covered.

 This book covers torture in the modern era globally and in that area it is very thorough. Historical torture is not extensively covered.

 But for a thorough understanding of the topic and modern torture, Rejali is a must.

 Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation by S O’Mara

 O’Mara’s book is much more focused on science than Rejali’s. It is a point by point analysis of some of the most common ‘clean’ (ie non-scarring) torture techniques used today, explaining exactly how harmful they are and debunking claims that they’re not ‘real’ torture.

 O’Mara’s speciality is the brain and he uses his knowledge to show the biological under-pinings of why torture can not work.

 An excellent source on torture generally and a brilliant explanation of how pain, memory and distress work. This is useful for writing any traumatic event but doesn’t cover a wide range of torture techniques and is very Western-focused in its approach.

 Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by I Cobain

 While I have some problems with Cobain’s book he remains an excellent source.

 My problems are pretty simple, Cobain’s a journalist not a scholar and he often allows apologist arguments to creep into his book. He often takes torturers’ word for it and believes them when they suggest that valuable information can come from torture.

 Rejali and O’Mara will tell you why that’s wrong.

 But the interviews in this book are incredibly valuable. Cobain interviews victims and torturers and sets them in a wider political context, showing how governments have supported or ignored torture.

 His interviews on the London Cage and the collected work on Ireland, Aden, Cyprus and the Mau-Mau is well worth a look for anyone interested in those conflicts in particular or the British ‘National Style’ of torture in general.

 Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement by S Shalev

 Shalev’s Sourcebook is a free resource that’s available online and an excellent break down of the damage solitary confinement causes.

 While this is obviously focused on one technique this Sourcebook contains pretty much all the information you could want on solitary.

 The majority of the data comes from US prisons and the book is obviously biased towards confinement in a prison context. But the discussion of symptoms, risk factors and long term effects makes this utterly invaluable.

 Any author who writes about solitary confinement or isolation should consult at least the second chapter.

 Mao’s Great Famine by F Dikötter

 One of the best books on famine in print.

 The style is somewhat impersonal, but I think that works in its favour. The focus is essentially on how widespread famine can occur rather than how starvation affects the individual.

 The discussion on community and the role of enforcers is particularly good.

 I’d recommend it for anyone writing a large-scale natural disaster or atrocity.

 Amnesty International Reports (Annual 2016/2017)

 Amnesty’s annual reports give good concise updates on torture globally, year by year. They are freely available online and generally contain a lot of survivor accounts.

 It can be difficult to find specific information using them. You can not, for example, tell from the summaries whether particular techniques are covered. They rarely contain follow-ups on survivors and so are not a good resource for the recovery process.

 But the accounts of survivors, in their own words, are invaluable.

 World Food Programme

 An excellent resource on starvation and malnutrition. If you want to know how a starving or malnourished character would be treated or recover this is probably the best free resource you can find.

 Very good for physical effects and for descriptions of disaster relief programs. Not so great on survivor accounts or giving an idea of what starvation feels like on a personal level.

 International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims

 If you’ve been following my blog for a while you may have heard of these guys. Not only do they work to support torture victims but they also publish a free online journal dedicated to helping survivors recover.

 Rather academic and dense, this material often requires a lot of effort and engagement. This is very much the academic side. It can be incredibly helpful, but it’s not always easy to find the information you’re after.

 A Darkling Plain by K R Monroe

 A collection of interviews with survivors of a wide range of atrocities, Monroe’s book shows a real range of both traumatic events and responses to them.

 The main focus of the book is how people move on with their lives after atrocities and how they hold on to their sense of humanity. As such it’s incredibly useful to authors whose writing touches on these themes and authors who want to include a wider range of realistic responses to traumatic events.

 Highly recommended.

 The Wretched of the Earth by F Fanon

 The appendix contains some of Fanon’s notes on people he treated during the Franco-Algerian war.

 These notes include two torturers, a family member of a torturer, victims and relatives of victims.

 This is still one of the most valuable readily accessible sources on torturers’ behaviour.

 The Question by H Alleg

 Alleg’s account of torture during the Franco-Algerian war is a classic for a reason. This is a lucid, often harrowing account of torture failing from a victim’s perspective.

 I talk about victims refusing to cooperate. Alleg describes what it feels like from the inside.

 I strongly advise anyone writing from a victim’s perspective to read this book.

 We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families by P Gourevitch

 The Rwandan genocide. This book provides both an overview of the events, interviews with survivors and transcripts/quotes from the time period.

 A difficult but important book, and extremely useful for writing conflict and war crimes.

 A History of Torture by G R Scott

 This book was written in the 30s and boy does it read like it was.

 The casual racism and sexism is extreme and off putting however this remains one of the most thorough books on historical torture globally. Just…read it with a critical eye.

 To the Kwai and Back by R Searle

 This collection of war drawings is, in my opinion, Searle’s best and most affecting work.

 They chronicle Searle’s experience of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese. The drawings document torture, starvation, forced labour and death marches and are interspersed with Searle’s commentary and memories.

 The book serves as both a survivor’s account and (as Searle is looking back) a discussion of how he as an individual recovered. It serves as a very good source on large-scale atrocities seen from a personal perspective.

 Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by M Kurlansky

 The focus of this work is in the title but torture crops up in this wide ranging historical narrative time and time again.

 It won’t be relevant to everyone’s stories, but I’m including this book for its numerous moving examples of people across cultures and history resisting torture, slavery and genocide without violence. We have very few fictional examples of this kind of action, and the history is rarely remembered.

 I want you, my readers, to be aware of as many sources as possible so you can break the mould if you want to.

 Tell Me Where I Can Be Safe: Human Rights Watch report on LGBTQ Rights in Nigeria

 This is a pretty harrowing read containing a lot of rape and sexual violence as well as torture. Victim accounts are prominent and the report only covers a relatively recent period in one country.

 I include this because my reading strongly suggests that it is typical of anti-LGBTQ violence across much of Africa and the Middle East. The methods and tactics used crop up across multiple countries and have been known to occur in Europe (though Gay and Trans Rights legislation has helped combat such violence).

 As a result I think this is a very valuable resource for writing torture and abuse of LGBTQ people specifically and an extremely important resource for Western writers who wish to write LGBTQ characters who are not from the West.  

 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by R Skloot

 An incredibly valuable overview of unethical experimentation in modern America.

 While far from a complete survey this book covers unconsenting or uninformed experimentation on minors, mental health patients, black people and prisoners.

 It talks about how experiments were conducted, how subjects were chosen and the effect on both the victims and their families.

 Highly recommended for anyone who wishes to write unethical experimentation.

 The Horrible Histories Series by T Deary and M Brown

 Yes these are children’s books and yes I am sure they deserve a place here.

 With their focus on the ‘gruesome bits’ of history these books generally contain quick and accurate overviews of historical tortures. Descriptions of punishments, methods of execution and medical treatments at the time are present in almost all of these short, accessible books.

 The focus is on English history as such there’s a lot that isn’t covered, but they’re very good for getting a sense of the tortures that were used during different historical periods quickly and easily.

Men and Hunger: a psychological manual for relief workers by H S Guetzkow, P H Bowman, A Keys, 1946 (The Minnesota Starvation Experiment)

 This is not the full text but the 70 page summary sent out to relief workers immediately following the experiment. This covers all the important psychological and physical effects of starvation in enough detail for an author writing a starving character to find it extremely helpful. It contains a lot of specific examples of behaviours and quotes from the men involved with the experiment, giving a rounded, detailed sense of their experience.

 However it does contain some racist and sexist language common during the 1940s when it was written.

UN Human Rights report on Rohingya refugees from Myanmar

 This is the UN report on the on-going genocide/ethnic cleansing taking place in Myanmar.

 The report contains accounts of murder, rape, gang-rape, torture and the murder of children. It also contains brief statistical analysis of the crimes survivors reported witnessing or experiencing (over half of Rohingya women reported being raped or sexually assaulted, over half of the survivors interviewed reported that a family member had been murdered).

 This could be useful to people writing about ethnic cleansing and genocide. I think it gives an overview of the situation within countries where these crimes occur, giving a sense of what they’re like before, during and after these atrocities.

War Child: Reclaiming Dreams

 This is a quick summary of the effects war has on children by the charity War Child. It focuses on the work they do in various countries; it aims to raise money for the charity and awareness of the causes they’re involved in.

 It provides a decent, quick overview of the many factors that affect children in war; both as civilians and as combatants. It talks about how children are used by armies (pointing out that the idea of they are always forced to fight is false) and how families and children caught in the cross fire are affected.

 A useful source for authors writing about children in combat zones and a good starting point for anyone planning on writing child soldiers.

The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the treatment of Prisoners, aka the Nelson Mandela Rules

This is a pretty dense legal document outlining how prisoners should be treated and the conditions that are a minimum acceptable standard for keeping them.

It’s tough reading but it could be useful for anyone planning to write about prisons and prisoners in a modern setting.

The collected works of S Kara

Kara’s research on slavery today is based on almost twenty years experience and thousands of interviews with enslaved people across continents.

He covers both individual experiences and the larger global picture of modern slavery. He covers multiple countries and slavery in different kinds of industries.

He also provides a thorough and convincing breakdown of the numbers; how many slaves there are today and where. This is accompanied by a clear analysis of how slavery has been allowed to continue and what needs to be done to stop it.

Brilliant, harrowing, necessary books that are a must for anyone writing about slavery.

Disclaimer

[grapehyasynth]

AOS Rewatch, Part 7

This is a bit of a long one....

1x16

There are more hints here about Garrett... Deathlok receives a message “Don’t say I never gave you anything” and Garrett recently said something like that to someone.

Who was the Brit who was sending messages to Amador? Do we ever learn that? Garrett is not British...

lol Fitzsimmons’s responses to ‘have they exhibited any strange behavior?’: “No more than usual” and “strange is such a subjective word”

Tripp never seemed to like Ward -- he’s got good taste

Fitz is playing with the drawers like he played with stuff NUMEROUS TIMES in S3 while talking to Jemma

but who WOULD be the Watson in their relationship?

Fitz sad/peeved she’ll “leave me all on my lonesome”

At this point it’s still very unclear to me/the audience how Jemma feels about Tripp

It’s funny that none of the other characters in TAC gear interest me, just Fitz

Why does Coulson not wear TAC gear tho.....

Fitz: “I prefer high-tech hardware” instead of toy -- is that what he calls his sex toys too? (I’m the WORST)

Ward is so. full. of. shit.

“Don’t use my name, Jemma” lololol worst spies ever

Coulson’s father’s death was a defining moment -- but it’s never mentioned again after this...

Omg Coulson almost had it right, asking Ward if someone ordered him to kill Nash -- and then he just doesn’t follow it up

Fitz’s cute little scared face when May comes in while he’s snooping

I’m also devastated by knowing Fitz is constantly feeling betrayed by people

May obviously didn’t check the lab very thoroughly if baby Fitz was able to evade her that easily

Also omg I’m so devastated by Fitz’s twitch and his face when May shoots the glass lab doors right by his face

I’m really sad Coulson believes ill of May so quickly. Like, really? After all you’ve been through?

1x17

I’m going to be stressed and concerned the entire rest of this season

But also this episode is so good

Oh god Fitz looks so devastated when he realizes Jemma’s at the Hub

I’m so glad Weaver isn’t Hydra

May assembled the team -- because of course she is, she’s a boss badass

Shouldn’t May also know and understand why Coulson has to be suspicious of her? She acts like it’s so out of left field but if she were in his position she’d need to suspect her team as well

I love love love love love the Hand/Jemma/Tripp loyalty test scene

Fitz shooting a guard with great accuracy, even leaning a little around someone else to do it -- I’M SO CONFUSED BY THESE FEELINGS

I love that Jemma is willing to stand up to authority when she really believes in it

The age and power difference between Skyeward is SO GROSS and I will never think otherwise

I love that Fitz is worried about Jemma but still won’t consider unethical methods of reaching her

I’ve always enjoyed the way Garrett is outed, with Coulson catching his little slip

Sitwell was Hydra -- bet everyone’s glad Jemma shot him

“No John, this is you being a psychopath”

God Fitz’s tearful courage in the face of Garrett’s threat remains one of the most beautiful Fitz moments in the whole damn series

Was that Fitz’s first kill? I’ve lost track of when he’s used ICERs and when not

THE FITZSIMMONS RUN AND HUG <3

Funny that no one suspected Tripp and Ward despite both having been proteges of Garrett 

1x18

Ward broke into a SHIELD prison and killed a bunch of people but no internal cameras caught him to alert SHIELD outside the Fridge to his presence?

I still don’t understand where the British English words in Amador’s instructions came from

It’s somehow strange seeing Fitz assure Jemma, not the other way around

First Talbot appearance!

I love the walk and talks because of how often they show up in bloopers

Coulson trusts Ward but not Tripp? Hmm.

Okay now the whole Fitz/Simmons/Tripp triangle is being made more clear to the audience.

So Garrett says he planned to eliminate Skye? This is confusing because her being injured helped lead him to GH and more answers about Coulson’s recovery, but either the show can’t decide on his motives or Garrett can’t.

Fucking Grant Ward: “I’m everyone’s type” lol bye

“Simmons got choked up” when she had to turn her badge in MY BABY

Coulson was just out of high school when Fury recruited him

Jemma’s all shy around Tripp. I don’t like it. I like when she’s crushing on someone and is flirty and outgoing and makes a fool of herself lol. (Though to be fair, she’s pretty shy and careful around Fitz when they first get serious, but they’ve got a lot more riding on it)

Ward explaining himself to Raina is really annoying talky exposition

lol Fitz is so snippy with Tripp

Everyone lookin’ cute in their non-SHIELD-issue winter hats

Jemma is afraid of bears. (And birds, as we’ll learn.)

Hydra is keeping Gravitonium in their underground base? That is setup for a MASSIVE workplace accidenct

1x19

the steal-your-light guy’s last name is Daniels so I’m going to headcanon that he was related to Will and the whole family is rotten because even if Will Daniels was in theory a good guy he is a plot device that was NOT NECESSARY and caused me and my children SO MUCH PAIN

The way “Garrett” sounds in Iain’s accent is divine. Like, say all the r’s please, Iain. (Damn my name has no r’s in it. Will change my name immediately.)

I hate seeing Fitzsimmons care for Ward

Tripp knowing things Fitz thought were reserved for the more ‘intellectual’ types like him and Simmons -- it’s the first threat to Fitz’s intelligence, which as we see in Season 2 is the thing that gives him his confidence

May literally called Hydra’s tactic and Coulson just ignored her. Great time to become a terrible tactician and leader, Phil.

I like that while others look nervous about the lie detector test, Fitzsimmons just look impressed.

I love Fitz’s little smile when he says “just me and my mum”

I could swoon over all of the FS polygraph results but you already know they’re the cutest/funniest things ever.

Though to focus on one: Jemma says she’s not entirely sure why she’s still with SHIELD. Fitz, meanwhile, says he wants to be with people he knows and trusts.

I wish Koenig had just shot Ward during the test

Fitz saying Tripp is a “horrible person” lol. Also, this is the first episode it’s fully canon-acknowledged that he likes Jemma and isn’t just platonically jealous she’s spending time with Tripp.

Fitz and Coulson are hit by Darkforce but are totally fine...convenient...

Patton Oswalt and Amy Acker are for sure some of the best guest actors this show has had

Ward is being so obvious, like way too friendly. How did no one notice he was acting strangely?

May is truly the hero we deserve

“Our best agents are watching” -- Jemma includes Fitz in her list of best agents <3

Coulson trusts Bruce Banner’s tech more than Fitz’s :(

I hate the intimate Ward/Skye moments. So gross

God I love Fitz and I’m so so so so sad he didn’t get a non-traumatic chance to love Jemma

Marcus Daniels didn’t see it was a trap when the cellist was just playing by herself with no audience??

I’m always gonna be proud of Skye for gaming Ward for so long

I can’t watch Skye’s bathroom freakout without thinking of the blooper where she accidentally opens the trash can

Coulson knows Fitzsimmons are about to have a chat and gives them space for it

JUST TELL HER FITZ *CRIES FOR A FEW MORE SEASONS*

Agent May’s mom lives in Pennsylvania (or at least has a car registered there). I want to know SO MUCH about her mom’s backstory.

1x20

Domestic Fitzsimmons with pancakesssss

Poor Fitz discovering Skye’s message. Definitely one of the best-acted reactions.

Jemma’s so clinical, but she’s also so obviously furious with Ward.

Jemma is so practiced at comforting Fitz with his physical, angry reaction -- I expect that’s something he learned from his father. But he stops as soon as Jemma is near, because he’d never hurt her. (AND NOW I’M CRYING)

Tripp calls Fitz a tech “ninja” (#tripplives #gonetoosoon)

lol May digging in the cemetery

I love Skye for calling Ward out for being a Nazi. This show should do more of that.

How many planes is Coulson gonna sneak onto for kamikaze missions?

Why doesn’t anyone shoot Mike in the head? Like obviously I want him to live but they don’t know he’s savable and that’s clearly his most vulnerable spot

MASSIVE product placement for Nokia, Marriot, Ritz-Carlton. Like, SHAMEFULLY obvious

Fitzsimmons at the pool I CRY

Coulson looks out at them while he’s talking to Maria Hill -- he can’t imagine setting them adrift from the team

Fitz would rather not believe some people are evil, Jemma believes some people just inherently are -- oh my how their views will change in coming scenes

The fact that no one dates Tripp is a TRAVESTY

People keep telling Ward he doesn’t owe Garrett anything and he disagrees, and it’s all set-up for the next episode where we get the whole backstory, but honestly that episode didn’t change my feelings towards Ward at all. More on that next time.

[entrenous88]

for the au meme: Pinto pirate au... Pinto /singing/ pirate au

Haha, omg, RC, HERE WE GO:

Zach and Chris meet as cabin boys on a naval vessel,and they both confess to each other that they hope to be -- wait for it -- realnaval officers one day!  Maybe they’ll even get to serve on the same ship!  But the voyagecomes to an end (they both have gotten only a minimum of whip lashings, in case you wereworried) and they part at the harbor with vows to sail together again one day. 

Zach goes home to help his widowedmother sell apples and knick-knacks from their family cart (I don't know --we've moved into Lord Fauntleroy territory or something).  Though he and Chris promised to write, he never hears from him.  Zach singsabout how lonely he is, probably up in a garret, and he doesn't even have anyapples to eat up there because they need to sell them all on the cart, woe.

Zach gets in with a rough crowd, partly because he'salways fighting boys on the street who make fun of him because his mom is poorand his father died (like, basically all the bullies are horrible, but don'tworry, because they'll die of influenza later because this is probably the1800s -- there's a great dumbshow later on, where they all perish in agony).

Zach’s mother worries that Zach will becomeaffiliated with a Bad Element, so she reaches out to an estranged wealthy uncle in aback-and-forth duet (the uncle on stage right, Zach’s mom on stage left, while theyharmonize about Kids These Days) and implores him for help to save her wayward son.  And the uncle...enrolls Zach in a naval academy!

Zach studies hard and survives all the hazing without being overly traumatized, andonce he's older and has served as a young officer, cuts Quite The Dashing Figureand gets promoted very quickly.  There’s a number at a ball or a gala or something where people waltz and whisper about how promising Zach is, and doesn’t he look good in his tight trousers? 

Soonenough Zach has his own vessel sailing under the authority of, idk, someone (did Imention I hadn't picked what country we're doing this for?).  ANYWAY, he's given a route to patrol on the highseas that's known to be dangerous, for it is the preferred route of PIRATES.  He and his men sing an enchanting sea shantyabout how they'll never let a pirate go without torturing them (there's tossing of mopsback and forth and general jolly clinking together of mugs of grog).

FINALLY, Zach's ship is accosted by PIRATES!  And it turns out the Pirate Captain swingsonto the deck of Zach's boat on a rope (which I'm never  sure how that would work, because wouldn’t they be so close that the ships could shoot the hell out of each other with canons?  But apparently it does) and it's -- wait for it -- CHRIS!  He and Zach are stunned to see each other,but they launch into a big old sword fight anyway (ahem) and sing about how Naval Captains and Pirates are Sworn Enemies (with solo spotlight bits of an interweaving melody in which they bemoan how they’re meeting in these terrible circumstances)

Finally Zach overpowers Chris, and orders that the PirateCaptain be brought to the Captain's Quarters for torture and questioning.  Zach storms around the cabin singing aboutbetrayal and for whatever reason taking all of it really personally, whileChris finally breaks in and sings a very melancholy tune about how -- he'sbasically a horrible pirate, seriously. Like, he's a total zero at looting and he's barely taken possession of afew ships, and the ones he did nab were mostly on their last legs and he andhis men ended up nursing the crews back to health and bringing them to awesometropical islands and cooking them huge feasts.  And then he and Zachclasp hands and sing a duet about how it all could have been different, had Chrisnot decided that it would be cool to have a lot of dubloons and Zach had not had his rich uncle-- they could well be in each other's places!

It turns out that there's one incontrovertible way of pardoning a pirate -- ...andthat's if they marry a Naval Captain!   Even same sex couples can take advantage of this loophole, even though this is the 1800s and pretty mucheveryone is dropping dead of influenza and there's the important matter of loyaltyto the Crown (or possibly just to some other thing, if it's not a British AU) and you would think there would be legislatively entrenched homophobia, but hey, it turns out there’s not. 

SoChris and Zach get married at seaAndthen Chris is Zach's Naval Spouse, and they hold hands on the deck and sing asong about how they never dreamed they would get to sail with each other again, andnow they're together on Life's Voyage, and no one gets scurvy, the end!

Thanks for asking; I hope you sang along!

[saferincages]

gAme over: in my end is my beginning

I can’t stop thinking about that ridiculous, unsatisfying finale, and how spectacular it COULD have been had they simply planned it well in advance and timed it properly. There are so many plot holes/plot threads/red herrings/unanswered questions that I cannot even begin to address them all, and I dreamed this up fairly quickly, so I apologize that it is a very rough draft and doesn’t resolve certain things completely, but it’s a sketched out version of the way I imagine this plot being able to actually work on some level:

Alex Drake is an unhappy and unstable child, abandoned by her adoptive parents and left to fend for herself at a young age, and when she is a teenager, she decides to find out the truth about her birth parents. She steals or hacks her adoption records, discovers their names and the place of her birth, and sets out for Rosewood, PA. When she arrives, she discovers that she has both an older sister, Cece Drake, and a twin sister, Spencer Hastings. Cece has recently been released from Radley (for whatever backstory reason you want to give her, because anything would be better reasoning than her canonical reveal), and is living independently, so Alex approaches her first, assuming (correctly) that she will have less of a chance of being rejected by another lost sibling than by the parents of her twin. Though Alex is of course immediately drawn to Spencer, Cece tells her horrible things about the Hastings, along with the fact that Spencer has no idea she was adopted, and so, instead of immediately introducing herself to Spencer, she hangs back to see what her life is like. 

She discovers that Spencer is close friends with a girl who is (as far as she can see) an awful bully, so she decides that the best way to immediately ingratiate herself to her twin and her twin’s friends is to remove this bully from their lives. “That Night,” she witnesses the girls’ sleepover in the barn, realizes Ali has drugged them, and takes the opportunity. She attacks Ali, hitting her over the head, meaning to frighten but not kill her - but, of course, she doesn’t know the girls all that well yet, and recognizing Ali from behind in the dark and the utter chaos of the night proves difficult. The girl she actually hit was Sara Harvey, who was simply passing through Rosewood - Melissa (also mistakenly thinking Sara was Ali), witnesses this attack and thinks she’s seeing Spencer, who is struggling with substance abuse and the mood swings and memory lapses which accompany it, murder Ali. Horrified, she approaches the body in a panic, but she sees her face, and knows it isn’t Alison. She rushes up to Ali’s room, where Ian is still waiting, and Ian (because of the NAT Club, or because Ali told him at Hilton Head, choose whichever makes more sense) has discovered that Ali has been planning to disappear, and tells Melissa she’s already gone. Ali left behind both her yellow top and her name bracelet. Melissa and Ian dress the body of the anonymous girl in Ali’s clothing, and bury her in the backyard, assuming that, should anyone find her, they will initially believe it’s Alison, and it will force her to stay away (both of them want her out of town, let’s say they’re the ones who replace her dental records and such, too), but Melissa is also attempting to cover it up to protect her sister (she does not tell Ian she witnessed the murder, and Ian assumes it’s Melissa herself who killed her, thinking she was Alison).

Alex flees back to Cece, but says nothing about what she’s done. Ali is reported missing, and Cece is wracked with grief and anger, and she tells Alex a piece of their story she’d withheld before - their connection to the DiLaurentis family. Ali is both their cousin and Cece’s good friend, as Cece spent the summer getting to know her, as an initial attempt to reforge a connection to her family. Alex, having no idea that the attack she planned was against her own cousin, cannot confess what she did, for fear of Cece’s wrath, and not wanting the only family she’s ever known to reject her and throw her out. 

The girls are traumatized, and Aria’s family leaves for Iceland - all also throwing a wrench in Alex’s plan to reveal herself as their defender and become part of the group. A year passes, Aria returns, the girls begin to reforge their friendship, and Mona is -A. During this time, Cece and Alex watch and wait, for different reasons - Cece becomes more and more convinced that the girls are guilty of harming Ali that night, and wants to punish them; Alex becomes more and more obsessed with their lives, their friendship, and how “good” they seemingly have it. When Mona is admitted into Radley, Cece (knowing the place all too well due to her time there), steals the game, with Alex as her helper - disguised as Redcoat and Black Veil (Alex has to either wear the Ali mask and blond wig, or a veil over her face, because, of course, no one can know she looks exactly like Spencer). Cece’s intent is finding out what happened to Ali, but Alex has ulterior motives - she’s decided to take Spencer’s place. Cece has already begun to build the Dollhouse, thinking that kidnapping the girls will push them to tell the truth about what happened to Ali, and she and Alex devise the plan of the night in the woods with the body they fake as Toby’s, pushing Spencer to the breaking point. The plan is to put Alex in Spencer’s place while she’s in Radley, as the first step to luring and eventually abducting the rest of the girls, but a sudden twist occurs - while Spencer is in the hospital, Ali sneaks in to visit her, and Cece discovers that she’s alive. 

Cece’s intentions shift, as she now wants to bring Ali home, and Alex becomes a liability. Unbeknownst to Alex, during this time, Cece has tracked down their birth mother, Mary, and Cece convinces Mary to take Alex back to London. Alex is infuriated to be taken out of the game, but goes with her mother because she wants the chance to know her. In London, she realizes Melissa (who, of course, is also her sister) has moved there, too, and she can’t give up her interest in her family or her propensity for stalking, so she watches her, and sees her with her charming British fiancee, Wren. She becomes infatuated, and eventually approaches him, as Spencer, which is the first time she’s able to test whether or not someone will believe her in her twin’s place. She convinces him not to tell anyone that she’s there, and his feelings for Spencer override logic, so he keeps quiet. By the time she finally admits her true identity (which she is forced to do when Spencer comes to London to visit Oxford), he is already in love with her, and promises to keep her secret.

Ezra has also been spying on the girls, for his ~book~ (I hate this, but want to try and keep this as close to the convoluted canon as possible, so), and Cece approaches him, saying she has additional information that could help him finish writing it, but what she really wants is to take advantage of his knowledge and clues to discover Ali’s whereabouts, which they do, when they find her in Ravenswood. All of those events can remain in place (it’s been a long time since I saw those seasons, so forgive me for being fuzzy on the details?), but the girls can still find Ali in NYC and bring her home, and of course, Mona still wouldn’t want that, leading to her “death” as Cece takes her to the Dollhouse so that she won’t expose everything Cece has done or tell the girls all that she knows.

S5, the Dollhouse, and the events subsequent to it can also essentially stay the same - Cece tells the girls a twisted version of the truth (passing herself off as Ali’s long lost older sister, not Spencer’s, to protect both Alex and Mary’s identities), and is admitted to Welby. Alex stays in London with Wren, because she’s content for the time being simply to have someone who loves her. He tries his best to help her with her delusions, her obsessions, and her rage, and she tries to give up her thoughts of Rosewood. Mary, assured of her youngest daughter’s safety, returns to Pennsylvania to keep an eye on Cece’s care, and to confront her sister and Peter for the mess they’ve made (thus, the details with Jessica’s murder also remain, but would happen a bit later in the narrative).

Five years pass, and Cece’s release is imminent, and Alex begins to become interested in returning to Rosewood and revealing herself, though Wren has qualms about it. But then, Cece is murdered. (idc about Archer, but he could feasibly still be a part of the plot, although I’d prefer him not to dupe Ali into marrying him). At this point, Alex would’ve known her older sister for something like seven years (even if she wasn’t physically with her the entire time, their bond is strong, it’s easy to assume they’d have stayed in contact even while Cece was in Welby), and she snaps - just as Cece assumed the girls must have done something to Ali on the night that started everything, Alex now assumes they must have killed her beloved sister. She wants revenge, and in her sister’s honor, she continues the game, plotting all the girls’ downfall, and determined to finally take her rightful place in the town from whence she same. 

We, the audience, know of Alex’s existence from at LEAST Cece’s reveal, if not sooner, and thus the suspense of when she reveals herself to the girls builds continually, plus there could be a lot more scenes of possibly not knowing whether we’re watching the real Spencer or not, along with being able to witness scenes of Alex clearly being creepy in the background and planning her torture for the girls. 

They are all targeted and taunted, but they all also actively work together to figure out who this person is, and end it once and for all. They are real participants, not sidelined and irrelevant in their final episode. A lot of S7 (especially 7B) would need to be polished and reworked, but it could have been done, and everything would still wrap back to That Night, and Alex would’ve been someone who had, indeed, been hiding in plain sight for years, rather than being a coincidental encounter in a London bar. Where Cece hated the girls and viewed them as her objects, her dolls to manipulate, Alex has developed a twisted love for them (limerence, perhaps?), she wants them to know how smart she is, how long she’s watched them and shadowed their lives, how much she deserves (in her mind) to be loved and accepted by them (this sort of retreads Mona’s motive, but then...so does everything else...but I think it might have led to the girls actually realizing that perhaps they ought to have let Mona in a bit more? idk), and if they won’t let her in for who she is, then she’ll have to take her twin’s place. Liars’ Lament has some sort of real purpose, the puzzle makes an actual picture (imagine if it was Spencer’s face, and for a moment the other four girls think Spencer is AD and spend at least an episode terrified and suspecting her, before they begin to piece together that the person who has been with them for a while...wasn’t Spencer at all). Alex uses the blueprint her sister established, intending to house Spencer underground, and there’s another cell for whomever murdered Cece, too (so, Spence and Mona would’ve been in there together, rather than Spence and Ezra, although she still could’ve kidnapped Ezra in the finale too, it’s almost irrelevant, as frustrating as that is). Spencer is abducted from the Blind School, and replaced, and Alex is masquerading in her shoes for the entirety of 7B, so the girls have many episodes to observe her odd behavior, spend time with her, and begin to unravel the final mystery, concluding with them solving the mystery and racing to rescue their missing best friend (I also would’ve had Alex die at the end, but ymmv).

You can extrapolate details from there (whether Wren helped her or not, how much Mona/Ezra/Melissa/Jenna/Jason/Ian/Wilden/Garrett/whomever knew, etc etc), but these are the primary issues it could have fixed:

Bethany, since she was ultimately meaningless, never existed, the body was always Sara, and thus Shower Harvey as we knew her isn’t in the story

Alex being Redcoat/Black Veil gives an actual reason for that enigmatic figure’s existence

The fixation on the girls’ appearances pre-Ali’s disappearance (ie: the way they were dressed in the Dollhouse, the way their game pieces were designed) was because Alex had been observing them since that time.

Cece was always a mistreated daughter, eliminating all the problematic “Charles” issues, and...there are just so many unresolved issues with her reveal that would have to be filled in differently that I honestly can’t even begin to chart them, but I know there’s a way to make her reasoning less messy.

Events of That Night, Melissa protecting Spencer (even the flashback with Spencer and the shovel being spattered in blood could’ve been explained, it was Alex), why Spencer was targeted to be broken in such a vicious way in S3 - it would all tie together (I think the lodge fire could be a puzzle piece fit into place here, too, but it’s been so long since I watched those episodes that I don’t trust my memory to make sense of it).

The motives are still a bit muddy and hinge on abandonment and feelings of scorn/loneliness/loss of family (plus mental illness), but at least there’s more clarity than...what they gave us, at least there’s a path that goes back to the start.

This doesn’t resolve things like ezrA (my ultimate favorite theory), or any other truly epic theory that has been written and analyzed in the fanbase over the years; it doesn’t fix myriad plot holes and nonsensical clues (again, a lot of which might have been written and delivered entirely differently had this been planned in a more linear fashion and had Alex been established much sooner), but I’m trying to work with what we were actually given by the writers, to see if there was a way to make it thrilling and compelling, and I’m convinced they could have, had they invested the thought and the time, and it breaks my heart that they didn’t, that they took a show that was exciting and unique and beloved by many, and made such a mess of both its mystery and of its brave, complicated heroines. I still consider their sisterhood and friendship to be important and beautiful and iconic, but the mystery should have been, too.

(Feel free to add to this with clarity and/or details if you wish!)

[julesplanb-blog]

“To understand the miracle of living”

(Day 2)

The following note contains heavy spoilers on the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero” (season 3 episode 4) and some minor ones on other episodes from the show. Please also check tags for content warning.

I used to be one of those persons relatively at peace with the very concept of death, yet always struggling with the unfairness of it, the way it strikes indifferently young or old people, comes as the natural ending of a fully-lived life for some, and robs some others of it. I don't believe in afterlife, at least not in an afterlife our beings, minds, souls, if you want to call it that way, could apprehend (thus, survive) anyway. And though the thought of _not existing anymore _would be utterly scary to me, the idea of life having an end wasn't. If anything, it appeared to me as something giving life meaning: if here and now was all that we have, then here and now was incredibly precious. Which is why I'd always fear I wouldn't get enough of it. Fear that I would die before I got to see everything I wanted to see, read everything I wanted to read, met everyone I've wanted to talk to, and wrote every story I had in mind.

Then something happened. The city I was living in went through several attacks. Friends got injured. Friends lost friends. The all city got traumatized. And, I guess, I got traumatized. In the following weeks, the fear of dying or losing people would eat a lot of mind space whenever I would be in the subway, on a café terrace, at the theather... Whenever I would actually be, you know, living on, and in the end, it was smothering me. Till the next attack, on a different city, but where relatives happened to live. For the 3rd time in 15 months I found myself calling people I loved on the phone, to make sure they did not die a horrible, unfair and pointless death. And I believe that's the day something snapped.

From that day I stopped being afraid. I stopped thinking about it. I stopped watching my back on every subway station. Which seemed like a good thing until I realized: I wasn't afraid anymore because I did not care anymore. For nothing. I used to fear death a lot because they were so many things that would make me happy, because I used to enjoyed living, so much, in so many aspects, and so the only way my stupid brain found to stop that fear was to make everything tasteless and pointless and not important anymore. Nothing mattered. Nothing would make me laugh, or cry. I couldn't feel anything anymore. Couldn't be inspired by any words, couldn't find beauty in any landscape, taste in any food, enlightment in any book. At some point, I wouldn't even experience physical pain from injuries, or physical pleasure from the touch of the water. This turned out to be the worst experience of my life. Worse than fighting that physical illness I've been struggling with for 12 years, worse than grieving the death of my favorite human being, and worse than being in fear all the time. I was actually missing it. The constant fear. The pain. The sorrow. Those proofs that not only I was alive, but that I wanted to be, that I wanted to stay longer. I figured out pleasure and pain, joy and fear, were just one big switch. I couldn't turn some off and still have the rest of it. And to my horror, I had no idea of to switch the whole system back on. So I held on as tight as I could to the smallest thing left: that fear of never getting it back. That tiny evidence that some part of me still wanted more life. For a while I would stay away from art, writing, fiction, books, because they were my very favorite things in life and it was devastating to try those on and realize they wouldn't work anymore. I was also scared to waste it on a shut down mind. "Oh, I'll keep that movie for when I'll be better and actually able to enjoy it"

I was all wrong of course. The best way to get better, was to feed that tiny piece of me left with art, writing and books. Which I started to do at some point, asking around for new things to read, watch, experience. I've read brand new authors. Wrote a short novel myself. Got back on drawing and music  And I could tell I was slowly getting my senses back, when a friend of mine told me I should try Black Mirror Season 3. Now, if you did watch the 2 first seasons of this british anthology on technology, you know how strange a choice it would be to advise such a dark show on someone trying to find reasons to being alive. But to this day, I suspect that friend actually wanted me to experience "San Junipero", and couldn't spoil the surprise by advising me to skip directly to that very episode....

The contrast effect with the previous episodes probably carries some weight in what makes "San Junipero" such a grand, beautiful piece of writing. If you recall the first episode of Black Mirror, "National Anthem", you know the show is not only about technology itself, but about the way we use it. About, with or without smart electronic devices, we behave. All it would have taken for "National Anthem" to end right was people behaving with basic decency. Same goes for the Waldo Moment. Or "15 millions merits": it's not the technology that guts you in the end, it's the choice the human protagonist makes. All and all, Black Mirror is quite a pessimistic take, not on progress, but on human nature.

But not in "San Junipero". In this one, we finally get to see a future where technology but more importantly, people, are displaying kindness. And it's all the more powerfull when you realize how easy it would have been to write something dark on such a topic.

Indeed, San Junipero, which appears at the beginning to be a "party town", in 1987, is actually a virtual reality where elder people can spend a limited amount of time every week as their younger selves, in order to fight alzheimer's effect or simply enjoy life pleasures in their final days, and where they can be uploaded permanently after they pass. As I said, death occurs in thousands of unfair ways and to me, the only thing that did seemed fair about it was that it's coming for everyone, no matter what you did, no matter who you are. It's quite easy to imagine a future, or at least a Black Mirror episode, where a technology used to cheat death would just be one more, final, unfathomable injustice. Say, only rich people can access it. But it's not the case here. If the time allowed in the system is limited, it's only to prevent people for losing their minds. And staying or not staying is entirely up to you.

Well, almost. The episode follows Yorki on her first night in San Junipero, where she meets Kelly (now there's a lot to discuss about the way Yorki being gay and Kelly being bi is addressed or not addressed, and I think it's done quite beautifully, but that's a topic for another note entirely). Ensue a bound between the two women, who ultimately fall for each other, only, they don't welcome those feelings the same way. While loving Kelly makes Yorki happy, Kelly doesn't want to "do feelings". Doesn't want to like anyone here in San Junipero. "So you've been just totally fucking inconvenient", she says to Yorki when the two are reunited.

We then find out about San Junipero's true nature, and about Yorki and Kelly's respective situations: they're both old, on the final weeks of their lives but those lives coulnd't have been more different. Yorki suffered a car accident about 40 years ago - the very night she came out as gay to her folks, who rejected her -, and has been quadriplegic since there, missing out on life, while Kelly was married for 50 years, and had a daughter who died in her late 30's, before the technology was even available. Her husband passed away too, a couple years ago, and wouldn't even try on San Junipero, because it could not foresee living on without their daughter.

And Kelly is set on the same choice: she's in San Junipero in her last months because she wants to "have a good time" but does not intend to stay after she dies. Not because she believes she'll actually be reunited with her husband and daughter in heaven - she in fact believes life is all, and that there's nothing past it - but because she gets a sense that living forever is meaningless. That it would take away meaning and taste out ouf everything in life, that she'll end up like most of San Junipero's permanent residents: alone, trying every fucked up thing they could in a desperate attempt to feel something. Because in a way, she gets that she already lived her life, experienced it all and is done.

On the other hand, Yorki can't wait to be a permanent resident, but her family - again - won't let her, so in order to do so, she has to marry Greg, a nurse at her care facility, who will allow her to be euthanized then uploaded into the system. When Kelly finds out about Yorki's situation, she offers to be the one marrying her. "Greg seems great but... why not someone you connected with?". (At this point I was already smiling ear to ear - and, ok, crying just a tad). Yorki thus becomes a permanent resident and finally gets to enjoy walking, moving, feeling. And being loved, something we know she was deprived of basically her whole life. So it makes sense for her to want to share it with Kelly, to have Kelly staying with her. "This is so real", she says to her. "This is not a trap". But Kelly then tells her about her own life story ("did it occur to you to ask?"), about her late husband and daughter, and states again that she made her choice not to stay in San Junipero.

So while I was actually understanding both their point of view, and especially Kelly's, I was fearing the episode ending on Yorki's finally getting her chance to live... in a solitary, meaningless place. Trapped. Because that's what that show is about: how technology and our way to use it is a trap. And that's what the episode was about, wasn't it? Stating that living forever is pointless without a reason, a person to share it with and that accepting death itself should not be that depressing. Yorki and Kelly's fight about it ends with Kelly running away in her car, and crashing, just as Yorki did 40 years ago following her fight with her folks, about being gay. And at the very moment Yorki reaches for Kelly's hand to help her back on her feet, Kelly's time in San Junipero is up, and she's sucked out of the system, back to her dying body, while Yorki remains alone. But then comes the final twist. The one that you usually fear for Black Mirror has the ability to leave you listless on the floor. The one, that, here, in an consistent, organic way with the rest of the narrative, actually brings tears of joy to your eyes. Yorki's line earlier turns out to be true: it's not a trap.”

So Kelly passes over, and actually chose to stay in San Junipero. For a second there, through the overwhelming wave of mere happiness I was experiencing, the tiniest part of me got upset. Because the former me, the "before PTSD and emotional shutdown me" was actually agreing with Kelly, on forever being pointless, on having lived your life and accepting there's an end to it and it felt like a let down to have a character not believing in afterlife but still finding meaning in death, going the other way in the end. This feeling lasted a second or so, before I realized something in Kelly's very last words and on the last shot of the episode itself.

Kelly did not change her mind about the meaning or aftermath of death, let alone about the lack of meaning in "forever". She doesn't say "ok let's go on living forever" but that, “all things considered” she’s ready for the rest of it. I guess that by mimicking Yorki's car accident, which left her trapped in a organic, natural and, yes, 'real' body but deprived her of any physical experience, Kelly put herself in her lover's shoes, became aware that the full life she lived, the joy, the pain, the all experience of it, was denied to Yorki, and that San Junipero is her chance to finally get that. To live. But as her last line states, Kelly's final choice to stay in San Junipero isn't made out of pity, but out of that second and more personal / self-centered realization that there's a "rest of it" for her too. Some things left to experience, some happiness left to live. She makes that choice out of realization she does have, in her love for Yorki, a reason to stay on a big longer.

I don"t think that "For the rest of it" happens to be San Junipero's last spoken line by chance. For me, it's one final description of what the system has to offer. Just like the very last image happens to be the computing servers hosting the population's spirits, consciousness, souls, if you'll have it.

Kelly and Yorki's souls still exist on a physical, thus perishable, mortal medium. At some point, that server will crash, or run out of power. Something will end it. Just as an organic body, it is ephemeral and won't last forever. Because San Junipero, the system, and, I think the story, isn't about forever. It's about love, connecting with people, and other reasons making worthwile to hang around a bit longer.

It's about "the rest of it". It's about more life. And as of today, yes. I do know what that's worth.

[kuwaiti-kid]

20 Lesser-Known TV Mini Series – You Should Definitely Watch

If you’ve already binged your way through Netflix’s Narcos, HBO’s Succession, or Hulu’s Big Little Lies and you’re looking for something new to watch — you’re in luck!

We have compiled a list of twenty of the best lesser-known mini-series that you can stream today. Many of the series star familiar faces and some of the biggest names from the past two decades. 

Top 20 Lesser-Known TV Mini-Series

The Night Manager (2016) 

Genre: Drama Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Coleman, and Elizabeth Debicki Streaming On: Amazon Prime

The six-episode British series was based on John le Carré's novel “The Night Manager”. The crime drama follows the work of former British soldier Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston).

Pine, a hotel night porter, is contacted by an intelligence operative who asks for his assistance to spy on international businessman Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Pine attempts to infiltrate Roper's inner circle, by becoming a felon, all the while keeping his mission a secret from his hotel colleagues and girlfriend.

The Shadow Line (2011)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Christopher Eccleston, Kierston Wareing, and Richard Lintern Streaming On: Pluto 

The seven-part British miniseries follows a murder investigated from both sides of the line – police, and criminals. It delves into the opposing methods they use to solve it and the lines of morality between each character and how far they’re willing to go. 

London Spy (2015)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery Cast: Ben Whishaw, Edward Holcroft, Charlotte Rampling, Mark Gatiss, and Harriet Walter Streaming On: Netflix

The series follows Danny (Ben Whishaw) as he delves into the suspicious death of his lover  Alex (Edward Holcroft), an MI6 code genius. Scottie (Jim Broadbent) guides him through the shady world of espionage and helps Danny as he steps outside of his comfort zone into a world of danger. 

Inside Men (2012)

Genre: Crime, Drama Cast: Steven Mackintosh, Ashley Walters, Warren Brown, and Kierston Wareing Streaming On: Pluto 

The four-episode British series centers around John Coniston (Steven Mackintosh), the manager of a cash counting house. He leads a normal life until one day he discovers that £50,000 has gone missing from the counting house.

He suspects the security guard Chris (Ashley Waters) and Marcus (Warren Brown) is responsible for the missing money. Instead of turning them into the authorities, he joins them in a plan to execute a multimillion-pound money heist. 

The Game (2014)

Genre: Drama, Mystery, Thriller Cast: Tom Hughes, Brian Cox, Paul Ritter, Shaun Dooley, and Chloe Pirrie Streaming On: Google Play

The BBC miniseries is set in 1972, during the high tension Soviet plot to bring down Britain. Joe Lambe (Tom Hughes), a young MI5 operative, attempts to defect to the Soviet Union to be with his Russian contact and lover, Yulia (Zana Marjanović).

The plan goes awry, leading to Yulia’s death. Joe balances trying to learn more about the KGB enforcer who murdered Yulia, while leading a team in the investigation of Operation Glass, tracking down enemy sleeper agents before it's too late. 

The Enfield Haunting (2015)

Genre: Biography, Drama, Horror Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Rosie Cavaliero, and Timothy Spall Streaming On: Amazon Prime 

The miniseries is based on real-life events that took place in a North London home in 1977. Novice paranormal researcher Maurice Grosse (Timothy Spall) hears of a family reported being terrorized by supernatural forces.

After the recent death of his own daughter, Maurice is drawn into the family's story, which involves a young girl. Maurice enlists the help of experienced investigator Guy Lyon Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen) to help him research the haunting. At first, Guy Lyon believes the case to be a scam until he comes into contact with the malevolent presence.

A Young Doctor's Notebook (2012-2013)

Genre: Comedy, Drama Cast: John Hamm, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rosie Cavaliero Streaming On: Amazon Prime

The dark comedy is based on a series of short stories written by Russian playwright Mikhail Bulgakov, as he recounts his semi-biographical experiences as a young physician in a small village at the dawn of the Russian Revolution.

The fictional physician, Dr. Vladmir Bomgard is portrayed by both John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe at different points in his life, leading to a series of comic exchanges between the two men. 

Accused (2010-2012)

Genre: Crime, Drama Cast: Christopher Eccleston, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Capaldi, Andy Serkis, and Sean Bean Streaming On: Amazon Prime 

This British television anthology series tells a different story each episode, following a different alleged criminal as they await their verdict in court, telling the story behind how they find themselves accused.

The main appeal of the show is that each episode the accused is portrayed by a notable actor. 

Secret State (2012)

Genre: Drama, Mystery, Thriller Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Charles Dance, Douglas Hodge, Rupert Graves, and Ruth Negga Streaming On: Amazon Prime 

Inspired by Chris Mullin's novel “A Very British Coup” the story follows Deputy Prime Minister Tom Dawkins (Gabriel Byrne) as he vows to take on the American petrochemical company Petrofex following a devastating accident on British soil.

After the Prime Minister dies in a suspicious plane crash, Dawkins' understated political ambitions are tested as Ros Yelland (Sylvestra Le Touzel) and Felix Durrell (Rupert Graves) vie for the role of Prime Minister.

This Is England ‘86 (2010)

Genre: Crime, Drama Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, and Rosamund Hanson Streaming On: Amazon Prime

An off-beat spin-off miniseries set three years after the award-winning film This is England. Rather than focusing on the skinhead subculture, it focuses on the mod revival scene with the gang variously adopting an eclectic mix of clothing styles.

As Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) completes his last school exam, he realizes that he will have to find his own way in the changing world. Two subsequent series were released which focused on 1988 and 1990. 

Injustice (2011)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller Cast: James Purefoy, Robert Whitelock, Lisa Diveney, Dervla Kirwan, and Nathaniel Parker Streaming On: Amazon Prime

Defense barrister William Travers (James Purefoy) has never fully recovered from a traumatic series of events that left him without faith in the legal system.

Despite his hesitation, he returns to the courtroom to aid his friend Martin Newall (Nathaniel Parker) as he finds himself facing murder and conspiracy charges. The series is a psychological thriller that examines morality and grapples with the question of guilt. 

State of Play (2003)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery Cast: David Morrissey, John Simm, Kelly Macdonald, Bill Nighy, and James McAvoy Streaming On: HBOGo

While investigating the murder of a fifteen-year-old teenager in what appears to be a drug-related killing, journalist Cal McCaffrey (John Simm) and his colleagues Della Smith (Kelly Macdonald) and Cameron Foster (Bill Nighy) find a connection with the death of Sonia Baker, a young researcher for MP Stephen Collins (David Morrissey).

As their investigation progresses, they uncover a conspiracy with links to the corruption of high-ranking British government ministers.

The Company (2007)

Genre: Drama, History, Romance Cast: Chris O'Donnell, Alfred Molina, Michael Keaton, and Alessandro Nivola Streaming On: Sony Crackle

Based on Robert Littell's best-selling novel, the miniseries chronicles the saga of the CIA from the perspective of three idealistic young college friends.

Jack McAuliffe (Chris O’Donnell) trains in Berlin with cynical mentor Harvey Torriti (Alfred Molina) while his best friend Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola) navigates his way through the power maze of “the Company” in Washington. 

The Kill Point (2007)

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama Cast: Donnie Wahlberg, Michael Hyatt, John Leguizamo, and Tobin Bell Streaming On: Tubi

The American miniseries follows a group of recently returned from duty U.S. Marines, led by Jake “Mr. Wolf” Mendez (John Leguizamo), as they come together to pull off a major bank heist of a Three Rivers Bank branch in Pittsburgh.

The bank robbery goes horribly wrong and they come under fire from some law enforcement and private security personnel. Forced to retreat back into the bank when their getaway driver is wounded, they take on hostages who end up helping them attempt to escape from the police who have the bank surrounded.

Im Angesicht des Verbrechens (“In Face of the Crime”) (2010)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller Cast: Max Riemelt, Ronald Zehrfeld, Marie Bäumer, and Mišel Matičević Streaming On: MHz Choice 

Set in the 1920s, this German miniseries delves into the world of Marek Gorsky (Max Riemelt), a Soviet Jewish immigrant, as he becomes a police officer who is determined to to solve the murder of his brother.

While investigating the Mafia and his brother’s death Marek falls in love with a young Ukrainian, who is forced to work as a high-class prostitute in Berlin.

The Take (2009)

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller Cast: Tom Hardy, Shaun Evans, Kierston Wareing, and Charlotte Riley Streaming On: Tubi 

Freshly released from prison, Freddie Jackson (Tom Hardy) is ready to use the connections he made behind bars. His younger cousin, Jimmy (Shaun Evans), dreams of making a name for himself on Freddie's coattails into a life of crime. Behind the success of their growing criminal empire sits Ozzy (Brian Cox), a legendary criminal godfather who manipulates Freddie and Jimmy's fates from the comfort of his prison cell.

Unforgiven (2009)

Genre: Drama Cast: Suranne Jones, Siobhan Finneran, Peter Davison, and Douglas Hodge Streaming On: Amazon Prime 

Ruth Slater (Suranne Jones) is haunted by her past, after being released from fifteen years in prison for murdering two policemen when she was a teenager.

Through the course of three episodes, Ruth searches for her sister who she learns had been adopted and had her name changed following the murders. Her search is met with dead ends, hard feelings, and a plot for revenge. 

Deutschland 83 (2015)

Genre: Drama, History, Romance Cast: Jonas Nay, Maria Schrader, Florence Kasumba, and Sylvester Groth Streaming On: Amazon Prime

The German-American television series is set in West Germany in 1983. Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) code name Kolibri is a border patrol guard from East Germany, who goes undercover as a murder soldier for the HVA. He is sent into West Germany to be an oberleutnant and aide-de-camp to Major General Edel (Ulrich Noethen).

Kampen Om Tungtvannet (“The Heavy Water War”) (2015)

Genre: History, Drama, War Cast: Espen Klouman Høiner, Christoph Bach, Anna Friel, and Pip Torrens Streaming On: Amazon Prime

The Norwegian/Danish/British co-production miniseries dramatically recount one of the most exciting periods of time during the Second World War. The series follows the German nuclear weapon project and the heavy water sabotage in Norway, with a particular emphasis on the role of Leif Tronstad.

It also delves into the Nazis' efforts to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies' desperate struggle to prevent it from happening. Although the series is based on real events, apart from Aubert, all other Nazi collaborating Hydro-directors were purposely not named.

Occupation (2009)

Genre: Drama, War Cast: James Nesbitt, Stephen Graham, and Warren Brown Streaming On: Amazon Prime

The miniseries follows three British Army soldiers, as they find themselves pulled back to Iraq for a different reason. Each soldier was inspired to return to Basra for different reasons: one leaves his wife and returns for love, one seeks a fortune for monetary gain, and one for his belief that he can help the people of that war-torn country.

Bottom Line

Hopefully this list helped you find your new favorite miniseries that you otherwise may have been unfamiliar with. If it didn't, be sure to check out one of the countless free streaming services and find something new to binge today!

The post 20 Lesser-Known TV Mini Series – You Should Definitely Watch appeared first on Your Money Geek.

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