Tumgik
#they’re really bored
sakihime02 · 1 year
Text
‼️MAJOR SPOILERS‼️
🪞Meanwhile….. In the mirror
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Let’s be honest They got bored so they had to entertain themselves with this ∠( ᐛ 」∠)_
Damn I forgot to put Vinter on fire…
444 notes · View notes
river-of-wine · 7 months
Text
I know I’ve mentioned this plenty of times before but I’m still kind of annoyed by how the fanbase just kind of completely declawed the four lords and placed the entirety of the responsibility for their wrongdoings on Mother Miranda.
The Baker family are great, I love them, they’re an incredible unit of antagonists who are intended to be very sympathetic, at least for the most part. Jack and Marguerite in particular have lost all control over their minds and their bodies, turning into extremely violent murderers and cannibals who threaten and attack their own family, kill anyone unfortunate enough to come across them and, especially in Marguerite’s case, lose complete autonomy over their own bodies. Marguerite turns into a walking bug hive who’s only purpose is to feed her family and birth her new children. Jack is an unstoppable murderous force of patriarchal violence who has so much fun chasing down and harming his victims, which in the Daughters DLC includes even his own daughter. The exception to this is obviously Lucas, who has been cured of his infection and his acting of his own free will. All of this is caused by Eveline, everything Jack and Marguerite do controlled by her, and yet Eveline is just as sympathetic as the rest of them. She’s a ten year old girl. Even Jack, who has watched his family and their victims suffer because of her infection, doesn’t seem to hold any of it against her. She just wants a family of her own, after all. It’s a complex and tragic situation.
The four lords, while I suppose being similar in structure, are not the Baker family. Not in dynamic, not in character, not in the kind of tragedy that they embody. I could talk for a while about just how completely different they are, but I don’t know if I really need to.
The Baker family are so tragic because they were just innocent bystanders trying to help a woman and a little girl they found in a shipwreck out in a storm. That’s the only reason they ended up in the situation that they were in. While the lords have similar origins, being victims of Mother Miranda’s experiments to bring her daughter Eva back, an important distinction between them is that in the case of the lords, all four of them are still acting of their own free will. Yes, Mother Miranda has undeniable power over them. She leads the cult they are part of, she has control over the village, she is their superior. However, I really dislike when every negative action by the lords is pushed onto her, as if the lords are not all grown adults who are for the most part acting independently of her.
With Alcina, she is the head of her own extremely brutal crimes. I think a lot of people have forgotten quite how horrifying the situations of the maidens are, possibly due to the prevalence shipping between Alcina and the maidens, and though we have minimal information what we do know is very frightening. Alcina uses her work force like livestock, draining them for their blood in a cellar full of horrific torture devices, and leaves their corpses to shamble around, armed and ready to attack any unwanted guests that have slipped out of the daughter’s clutches so that Alcina still doesn’t have to do her own dirty work, given how highly above everyone but Mother Miranda she appears to view herself as. While yes, Alcina does need human blood to survive, her methods are brutal, and none of this has been enforced upon her by Mother Miranda. Similarly to Jack on occasion, she takes a great deal of pleasure in hurting and attacking Ethan as he runs from her. Additionally, everything she does to Ethan is against Mother Miranda’s request. While yes, it is retaliation after he killed Bela, the part I often see people leave out is that Alcina is equally as upset that he entered her property and was attempting to steal from her, and she isn’t just after him to kill him.
Alcina has also been an active participant in aiding Mother Miranda with at least one experiment, considering that I’d how she got her daughters. While I’m sure her strong admiration for Mother Miranda and Mother Miranda’s power over her has absolutely had an affect in this, that’s not something I’ll deny, Alcina is still a grown woman and in her written entries about this shows no qualms about her participation in this. Her general attitude towards others, using young women as a good source and turning men into scarecrows, also leads me to believe that she does not exactly care who gets hurt or taken advantage of when it comes to her and Mother Miranda’s personal endeavours.
Donna and Moreau are the two more sympathetic people within the four lords, but they are not innocent. To start with Moreau, he’s desperate for Mother Miranda’s approval, as well as the other lords. He’s insecure and lonely, and he’s doing what he has been instructed by Mother Miranda when it comes to protecting the flask. However, he does also take quite a bit of joy in trapping Ethan in the reservoir and swimming after him with the intention to eat and kill him. Moreau though, given his conditions and circumstances, is the one I think is the least to blame for what he does.
Donna is hard to discuss because we know so little about her. Her parents are dead, as well as whoever Claudia was to her, she communicates through Angie and she can cause those who enter her house to hallucinate. According to Mother Miranda, Donna is severely mentally ill and that is what has made her an unfit vessel. I think a lot of people took this to mean that Donna is unaware of what she is doing, that the hallucinations she is showing Ethan are frightening, but after having been a fan of this game for years I just can’t agree with that anymore. Donna intentionally lures Ethan into her house with visions of his supposedly dead wife. Donna is going after fears she likely knows Ethan has, making him relive Mia’s death, take apart a mannequin of her, listen to her voice panic over something being horribly wrong with Rose, all building towards the horrifying baby that chases him through the house. There is no way Donna doesn’t understand how what she is showing Ethan is distressing, especially when you consider that, given how she can make herself appear and disappear at will within Ethan’s vision and that Angie is sitting in the hallways stationary and unspeaking, Donna was likely close by Ethan at all times and could see and hear his frightened reactions to what she was intentionally showing him.
Donna’s death is upsetting, but Ethan was not just chasing her down and killing her. Donna was attacking him, or at least she was controlling her dolls to do so. It’s still a hallucination, but Ethan doesn’t know that. When faced with a threat that is keeping you trapped and trying to end your life, you will likely try to get away or try to fight back, as Donna is doing to Ethan after he starts to attack her and Ethan is doing to Donna when he thinks his life is still in danger. I would also like to remind everybody that Donna communicates through Angie. What Angie is saying, that’s Donna. Angie doesn’t talk or move once she’s dead, it is Donna who controls her.
Lastly, Heisenberg. I think Heisenberg is the one of the four most entrenched in headcanons. Headcanons are fine, I am never in this post trying to suggest they aren’t, but my issue comes in when people use them to try and change the canon of the game. For example, it’s fine to believe that Heisenberg was experimented on by Mother Miranda as a child, but that isn’t canon. It’s fine to believe that Heisenberg mourned the deaths of his siblings, but that isn’t canon. The opposite is, with Heisenberg not viewing the cult as an actual family and being very openly mean to all three other lords, even Donna and Moreau who seemingly haven’t done anything to slight him. While his goal of killing another Miranda is a very understandable and sympathetic one given what she has done to him, using a six month old baby as a weapon and trying to bring her father into the mix only to try to get him killed when he denies him is not. I cannot overstate quite how little Heisenberg actually cared for Ethan and Rose’s safety when it came to his goal, and given that we are playing as Ethan, Rose is the priority.
Heisenberg has built an army of corpses he has presumably stolen and desecrated. This is kind of fucked up actually, and done completely independently of Mother Miranda. He also puts Ethan through a very dangerous lycan gauntlet before he even reaches the factory, which makes it even stranger to me that people seem to interpret Heisenberg’s deal as something that would have benefitted both him and Ethan and as if he ever had Ethan’s safety in mind.
All four of the lords have tragic aspects to them and there are definitely reasons to sympathise with all four. They’re victims of Mother Miranda, who knows they will all be killed. She wants them to be, giving her less to deal with by the time she has Eva back. They never meant anything to her. Not Alcina or Moreau, who were desperate for her attention. Not Donna, suffering from her unspecified but apparently severe mental illness. Not Heisenberg, who was seemingly her favourite creation. However, all of them are grown adults who do their own bad things independently of her.
And it’s fine to still like them. It’s fine for them to be your favourite character. It’s fine to have happy or nice headcanons about them or want to kiss them or be their friend or to want them to have survived. It’s fine to like characters who do shitty things. It’s to be expected in a game series like Resident Evil. It’s a horror game series. People are going to do bad things.
I just find it so boring when people take away all their bite. What makes a character like Lady Dimitrescu so fun it’s that she’s completely over the top. She’s campy and ridiculous, her castle layout makes no sense, she’s got three kids made of swarms of flies dressed like a set of goth triplets, she’s a lesbian who’s castle is full of naked statues of women, she turns into a big dragon and laughs maniacally while flying around and trying to eat you. She’s evil and it’s fun. It’s the same with Heisenberg. He’s a campy show off with a fun voice and a massive hammer he never actually uses. He can control metal. He looks like a cowboy. He pronounced Miranda in a funny way. He talks to you over an intercom while trying to get you killed. They’re fun and evil and they fight over who gets to kill Ethan like they’re two little kids. It’s absurd.
What makes a character like Donna so scary is that she’s silently working in the shadows, unassuming at a first glance and unseen for most of the time in her house. She is the least threatening of the four upon first glance, and yet she has undeniably the most frightening part of the game. Pretending as if Donna is completely unaware of what she is doing and babying her like she is an incapable child waters her down completely and takes away from the effectiveness of her character.
Villain characters are great! They’re very often the highlight of the story they are in, and they aren’t real! The four lords especially are often so completely exaggerated in what they do as well. It’s fine to like villains! It doesn’t make you bad! Characters can be bad people and you can still like them!
It’s just frustrating seeing a group of very fun and exciting villains, all designed with different aspects of horror, all over the top and campy and stupid and fun, all doing their own set of fucked up things, watered down to a set of poor innocent victims who have never done any wrong ever. If you want Jack and Marguerite, take Jack and Marguerite. Lady Dimitrescu loves killing and eating women and Karl Heisenberg turns corpses into soldiers. They’re bad people and they do comically exaggerated bad things. If you can’t stomach liking a character like that, horror is probably not the genre for you. Unless it’s Resident Evil 7, I suppose, but apparently tall women aren’t hot when it’s Marguerite Baker crawling on the walls.
2K notes · View notes
chirpsythismorning · 10 months
Text
S3 is underrated bc it comes off so meaningless the entire time, when in reality it’s the opposite. The jokes in particular were top notch and it’s because most of them went over everyone’s heads. Like, do people even know that they hinted at Robin being lesbian right at the start of s3???
373 notes · View notes
compacflt · 10 months
Note
For the requests/open inbox, this may not be the lane you're looking for, but you made a throw a way mention in a response to the ask about Ice's enforcement of DADT that Bradley and Ice probably got into it at one point about Ice being totally okay with DADT as a policy (which I love your read on Ice being like, 'yeah, nobody should ask and nobody should tell. what's the problem here?') I would love to see that argument go down. Or honestly, just any Ice and Bradley interaction after the reconciliation that suits your fancy. I find that dynamic in your world super interesting. Bradley sees him as a father, Ice sees him as the person whose father I killed. I love the drama.
Five times Ice was so obviously Rooster’s dad + one time he explicitly wasn’t.
[Carole. 1994.]
He’s such a nervous man. Usually that’s not the word people associate with him. Nervous? Never! But he is. Carole Bradshaw’s more a religious woman than a spiritual one. She’s never put any stock into “chockras” or “ouras” or whatever the other girls her age were fooling around with in the late sixties and early seventies. But she does believe that you can understand a person just by looking at him or her, and when she looks at Tom Kazansky, she sees a little anxious creature, shivering in the cold, like one of those tiny spindly dogs who always needs a sweater. Maybe it’s her southern maternal instincts, something primal and animalistic inside her, I need to take care of you—and when he nudges her with a nervous shivering shoulder and whispers, “Can I bum a smoke?” —she reaches down to take his hand and says, “I only have one left. We’ll have to share.”
She knows she makes him nervous. His ears are red, and so’s the back of his neck. It’s early on a Saturday morning, and the church is crowded, and he’s self-conscious about the fact that she’s holding his hand. Good. It’s so rare she gets to make a man nervous anymore. She waves to Bradley, proud in his little striped button-down and his little blue bow-tie, where he’s lined-up with all the other aspiring pianists against the stage along the far wall, under the bare postmodern crucifix. The recital isn’t going to start for another five, ten minutes, and it’s organized by age, so Bradley’s somewhere in the middle. If Tom Kazansky needs a smoke, Carole Bradshaw will bum him a smoke.
They exit out the side door, and the low murmuring of the other proud parents in the church fades to the quiet of the alley. Birds chirping nearby. The sound of a latecoming car on gravel somewhere far away. Her cigarette and the flick of his lighter, her eyes on his mouth and his puff of smoke—it’s lit. He takes a drag, closes his eyes, then passes it to her. “Sorry to make you share,” she says, and she’s watching the red flush creep up the side of his throat with a silent pleasure. When she takes her own pull, she looks down to see that the filter’s gone the sweet red-pink of her old lipstick. Kind of like a kiss, sharing a cigarette.
“That’s okay,” he says. Nervous spindly little dog. “Uh, what’s he playing?”
“Beethoven. ‘Für Elise.’” Then, before he can think to judge, she goes on quickly: “It’s more complicated than you’d think. Goes up and down and all over the place.”
“It’s a good song,” Tom Kazansky says, “though I don’t know too much about piano.” He pauses. “I’m learning a little German, though. I think it’s E-leez-ah. She must’ve been an alright girl if Beethoven wrote a song for her.”
Carole Bradshaw doesn’t know what to say to that. So she says this instead: “Thank you for coming. It made Bradley—well, over the moon, I guess.”
Tom Kazansky smiles shyly. “Sorry Maverick couldn’t come. I know he wanted to.”
Of course he brings up Pete Mitchell. Drags her back into reality. “He’s in Washington again, isn’t he?”
“Correct.” He reaches out for the cigarette; she gives it to him. “TOPGUN’s biggest advocate. I keep telling him he should go into politics. I just talked to him yesterday—he told me he went to the Natural History Smithsonian on Wednesday—he bought Bradley a dinosaur picture book, I think. Does Bradley like dinosaurs?”
Carole Bradshaw shrugs. What nine-year-old boy doesn’t like dinosaurs, but… “He’s more into sea life these days. Whales, sharks, fish.”
“Some fish used to be dinosaurs, they think,” says Tom Kazansky, clearly just trying to fill the silence. Ears red, lips red. Smoke out of his mouth like a fire-breathing dragon.
Carole Bradshaw doesn’t know how much dinosaur history she actually believes. So she says, “It’s still really nice of you to come. You know, Bradley—Bradley thinks of you and Maverick as his—well, his fathers, I s’pose. So it’s nice for you to be here.”
She watches his reaction—just nervousness. Straight anxiety. He doesn’t meet her eyes, like she’s just kicked him in the ribs. He does not want to be Bradley’s father. 
She says, “You don’t have to sign any papers, Tom. You don’t have to put a kid seat in your car. I’m just saying. Don’t worry about it.”
He says, “I can hear the kids starting inside—we should probably go back in.”
So Carole Bradshaw drops the cigarette butt to the ground and steps on it with the bottom of her flat. They go inside, and wait for a kindergartener to finish an overly simple “Canon in D” to take their seats again. She takes his hand. He lets her. After another half-hour, Bradley sits down on the bench in front of the hand-me-down Steinway and busts out “Für Elise” without a single missed note. It still shocks her, sometimes, to watch him play—it still shocks her, sometimes, that she is the mother of all that talent. And now maybe Tom Kazansky is the father of all that talent. How did that happen?
At the end of the recital, Tom Kazansky lets go of her hand. She knew he would. Knew his fatherhood is only temporary. But he lets go of her hand to accept Bradley’s great-big hug in the parking lot: “Gosling, that was so good.” Bradley’s proud smile is missing a few teeth. It makes Tom Kazansky laugh.
And after he drops them off at home, and peels away with a wave and a smile, Carole Bradshaw lights another cigarette from the half-full pack she’d brought with her to the recital and brings Bradley out to the backyard so he can play and she can watch him. But before she lets him go, she looks down at him and says flatly, “If kids at school ask you about Uncle Tom and Uncle Pete—you need to tell them they’re just friends.”
And in his eyes, she can see the confusion of a little boy who hadn’t been aware that Tom Kazansky and Pete Mitchell were anything other than just friends—the confusion of a little boy learning about duplicity for the first time in his life. 
“Okay,” he says, so she lets him go.
[Maverick. 1998.]
“Don’t go easy on him,” Maverick hollers breathlessly over his shoulder, fishing around in the ice chest in the sand for two cans of Coors; “He just joined the J.R.O.T.C.; don’t go easy on him; he’s tougher than all your squadrons combined; beat him into the dirt…”
“Thanks, Uncle Mav,” shouts Bradley from across the volleyball court, where he’s getting initiated into one of the volleyball teams of younger fighter pilots. 
Maverick flashes him a thumbs-up and finds his T-shirt on the first bleacher bench, pulls it on with one hand, and then hops up the rest of the benches to sit with Ice, who’s got his CVN-65 ballcap on and a book open in his lap and is offering informal career advice to one of the other lieutenants: “Yeah, so, in my opinion, it’s all down to what you think you can stomach… If you want me to look over your C.V., I can totally do that—I think I’m free Monday at around thirteen-hundred, if you want to stop in to talk. Not a problem. Not a problem. Alright. See you later.” He watches the lieutenant go, then lolls his head over to look at Maverick, who’s tossing an ice-cold can of Coors up and down. “Hey. Good game. —Coors, Mav? This is an insult.” But he takes the offered can anyway, looking out onto the court, where Bradley—fourteen and just entering his beanpole phase of evolution—is currently spiking the ball. “Cool.” It’s a nice summer Saturday, a casual opportunity for the officers of Miramar to socialize with their families (Ice is wearing a golf shirt and jeans), and by now pretty much everyone knows that Maverick Mitchell’s raising his friend’s kid and that he and Captain Kazansky are good friends, so this is pretty nice. Not much to hide.
“C’mon,” Maverick says, popping open his own can, “you and I were having a scintillating conversation, a few minutes ago.” He’s hunting around for the sunscreen so the tops of his feet don’t burn to ashes in the sun.
“Scintillating. That’s a big word for you. Wow.”
“You’re rubbing off on me, Sir Reads-a-lot—”
“See, that’s funny,” Ice interjects, “because I seem to recall, before you so-rudely interrupted me to go play volleyball with the kids, I was telling you that it’s really not that interesting. It’s actually, Maverick, quite boring.”
“Well, I’m intrigued now. Go on. Finish it off, I wanna know.”
Ice slaps his book shut and gives the long tired sigh of a man who is very self-conscious about the fact that he’s about to turn forty. He pops the tab on his can of Coors and huffs in exasperation when it foams all over his hand. “I mean it, my family history’s really not that interesting. Typical eastern-European immigrant shitshow. U.S. officials change one letter in our last name and everyone loses their goddamn minds… Actually, that story might be apocryphal, I keep forgetting which former Soviet Socialist Republic I’m actually from, I just can’t remember, all the borders got redrawn so many times, one of ‘em…”
Maverick smiles and pulls his TOPGUN ballcap back down onto his head, tugs the brim down low over his eyes so he can tip his head back and not go blind from the summer sunshine. He’d thought Ice would be reluctant to share his family history, but it turns out that most people are just afraid to ask him, and he’s actually pretty eager to talk, if you just ask. Maybe over-eager. He’s rambling. Maverick cuts him off: “Yeah, you do have a left curve to you, don’t you. Genetic.”
The dirty joke strikes Ice dumb for a second, but then he forges ahead, wisely choosing not to engage. He keeps going, oblivious to the fact that Maverick’s not really listening… “Anyway, my grandfather was Jewish, but he died literally the second he stepped foot in America, so it doesn’t count…my grandmother was Orthodox, crazy story how they ended up together; actually, that story’s probably apocryphal, too…she’s the one who raised me, pretty much. I told you that. She brought my dad out to Southern California when he was a little kid, but I don’t know if you’ve noticed, So-Cal’s not exactly the Mecca of Orthodox churches or anything, so he wasn’t very religious at all… My mom was from Milwaukee, I think. Or maybe Minneappolis. Some kinda Protestant. Forget which kind. The preachy kind. But then she died and I didn’t have to go to church anymore, so I didn’t.”
“You just never believed?” Maverick mumbles, half-joking.
“Nah. I mean, I always had too many questions no one wanted to answer. For instance: okay, say you’re bad. Say you commit sin…”
“I’ve never sinned, sir. You’re talking hypothetically.”
“Right. Me, neither. Hypothetically speaking. So you go to Hell. Well, the devil’s there, too, ‘cause he’s a sinner, too. But why’s he want to punish you? What does he get out of it? You’re both in the same boat!”
“Probably a sexual thing,” says Maverick, watching the purple-green imprints of the sun dance around behind his eyelids. “He probably gets off on it. The devil, I mean.”
Ice laughs and laughs. “Sure. Try saying that in front of my mom and see if you survived. I learned pretty early on that they don’t want you to be too curious. So I kept all my questions to myself.” He’s also joking, not taking this super seriously, but that’s a pretty in-character answer. “What about you, Mav?”
“If I’ve told you my family’s history once, I’ve told you a thousand times…” That’s a joke. Maverick’s the one who doesn’t like talking about his family history. Ice hasn’t heard any of it, and for good reason. Maybe someday he’ll tell him about it. “Later. But, remember, I used to be Southern Baptist? Jesus, I was serious into that shit, Ice.”
Ice snorts. “Yeah, right. You.”
“Not joking. I had about eighty girlfriends between fourteen and eighteen, but that’s the most pious I’ve ever been. Lotsa loopholes to make my relationships biblical. Was thinking about being a youth pastor. —I’m not joking. It was my whole personality, for a while. Most of my childhood, anyway.”
Ice is still laughing in disbelief. “Oh, yeah? And then what happened?”
Maverick smiles. “…Got hooked on sinning.” 
“…Yeah,” Ice replies, and Maverick can hear the nervous smirk in his voice, “I guess I’d know a little something about that.”
And normally that would be the end of the conversation. But Maverick’s feeling a little sun-drunk, a little giddy, and he’ll never, ever, ever grow out of instigating stupid arguments with Ice just for the fun of it. From beneath the brim of his ballcap he mutters, “…You think Carole’s brainwashing her kid?”
Ice huffs a laugh, and says through a lazy yawn, “I’m not militant in my atheism, no.” But he, also, will never, ever, ever grow out of instigating stupid arguments with Maverick just for the fun of it, and his curiosity’s clearly been piqued. He stews in it for a second before he snaps, “Do you think Carole’s brainwashing her kid?”
“I’m just saying she has him readin’ outta the Bible, like, five times a day. She sends him to church camp. Does something to a kid.” He has no dog in this fight, but this is fun.
“And what did it do to you?” Ice says, reaching down to shove his shoulder good-naturedly. “Weren’t you just telling me not five seconds ago how you used to be the perfect model of Christian charity?” Maverick mumbles a retort sleepily; Ice pushes on through it: “Bradley’s a human being. Either he grows out of it like you did, or he doesn’t, in which case, whatever, land of the free. That’s the First Amendment. You swore an oath to the Constitution. Maybe you should read it.”
“I’ve read it. I’m not Congress, shithead. How’s it go, you want me to cite it to you directly, ‘Congress shall make no law…’ actually, I don’t know what comes after that. Got me there.”
“Don’t call me shithead, dipshit. And whatever. Good thing he’s Carole’s kid and not yours, then. He’s got a mom who wants him to go to church. It’s up to him if he wants to listen to her or not. That’s growing up.”
Maverick tips up the brim of his ballcap to look at him, sprawled out in the bleachers very unprofessionally for the CO of this entire volleyball court, and snaps back, “Well, he’s a little bit my kid. The same way he’s a little bit your kid.” 
Ice just flicks his sunglasses down onto his nose and purses his lips and neither confirms nor denies this allegation. 
They watch the game together for a while, Ice’s toes pressed against Maverick’s lower back discreetly, trying to work their way under Maverick’s T-shirt. Until one of the young pilots approaches a few minutes later: “Sir!” / “What’s that kid’s call sign again?” Ice mumbles to Maverick, prodding him with his foot. / “Hooker.” / “No shit.” / “Sir!” says Hooker again. / “Which one of us, kid?” says Maverick. / “Captain Kazansky, sir. We’ve got a spot opening up. Wanna play?”
Maverick looks up at Ice expectantly. Ice sighs and harrumphs and waffles for a minute— “I’m too old for this shit.”
“Sir,” says Maverick, “it’s not a competition, but if it were, I’d be winning.” 
Lighting the fire of competition under Ice like that is always a good strategy. He rolls his eyes, but immediately stands and tugs off his shirt and rolls up the cuffs of his jeans; “I’ll only play if I can play with the kid.” 
So Maverick watches the teams get scrambled again with a smile, and sits up to watch Ice join Bradley in the sand. Bradley’s only just now taller than Ice, and Ice clearly isn’t used to having to reach up to curl an arm around his shoulders to strategize, his eyes narrowed like an eagle’s, staring down the competition. Maverick can read his lips from across the pitch: Alright, kid, I’ve been watching for a while, and I think I know these guys’ strengths and weaknesses…okay, here’s what we’re gonna do… And the game begins when Bradley spikes the ball.
Ice won’t always be this fun, this down-to-earth, this human. The admiralty and the guilt and the grief of the years to come will strip it all away from him, bring him back to the cold, remove him from his own humanity. And maybe, even if it isn’t conscious, Maverick can recognize that, right now, watching Ice dive into the sand with a laugh: this summer sunshine is only temporary. It’s gonna have to end at some point. So he doesn’t take it for granted. He keeps his eyes open and watches and tries to commit it to memory.
And after the game, Ice and Bradley come over so Ice can finish his beer and put his shirt and his baseball cap back on, and Maverick can make fun of them for losing. And: “What were you guys talking about for so long before the game?” Bradley asks Maverick with a grin.
“Whether or not your mom’s brainwashing you,” Maverick says.
“Oh!” Bradley says mildly. “…No, I don’t think so!”
“Oh, that’s a great start,” Ice laughs. “You would’ve made a great Soviet. No, I don’t think I’m getting brainwashed. Hey, by the way, Gosling, if you want a beer, Maverick and I won’t tell anyone.”
“Aw, really?” whispers Bradley. “Thanks, Uncle Ice!” And he races down the bleachers towards the ice chest in the sand.
Maverick watches Ice watch him go, fingers still pinching the brim of his CVN-65 ballcap, clearly worrying about something the way Ice always is. 
Then he looks down at Maverick, stares openly for a minute, and says, “You don’t think we’re teaching him to rebel too much, do you?”
[Bradley. 2000.]
“Kiddo! You’re here early!” It was Uncle Ice, walking through his own front door, catching a glimpse of Bradley watching the Astros-Nats game on the TV. He was still in uniform, but smiling wide, and he set his bag down near the couch and leaned over to ruffle Bradley’s hair goodnaturedly.
“Practice ended early today.”
“Oh, okay. Cool. Maverick should be home soon, still at work—your mom’ll be here in about an hour—she told me to put the chicken breasts in the oven, but you know me, every time I use this oven I set off the fire alarm, so you oughta help me with that…”
“And,” Bradley said, watching Uncle Ice wash his hands in the kitchen sink, “I got here early because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh, sure!” chirped Uncle Ice. Then he paused, sensing a trap. “What about?”
“Advice,” Bradley mumbled. He took a deep breath, and stood to follow Uncle Ice into the kitchen “I was just—I was just curious. If you had any advice for me joining the Navy. You know, with me being gay, and all. How do I—I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s kinda been weighing on me. Do you have any advice?”
Uncle Ice was still drying his hands off on a kitchen towel. Rubbing them red and raw. And when he raised his head to speak, there was something dull and startled in his eyes: “I don’t, um—no, I don’t—I don’t know anything about that. —You should ask Uncle Maverick about that.”
“I did,” Bradley said desperately, because he had. Yes, he’d gone to Uncle Mav first. “He—he told me to talk to you.”
“…Oh,” said Uncle Ice, now standing in front of a shelf to return one of his books to it. This surprised him. Maybe hurt him a little. “No. I—I, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“But—”
“And there are probably better people to ask than me or Maverick. I—I don’t know—that’s not really my…I don’t know.”
“Okay.”
Uncle Ice swallowed, put the book back on the shelf, then clasped his hands together and set them on the shelf, too, as if leaning over his captain’s desk to chastise someone. He blinked for a long moment. Clearly shifting gears. Becoming someone else so easily. Why couldn’t Bradley do that? “But I can tell you this,” he said, and his voice had gone grave and dim, “and I know you and I don’t always see eye-to-eye on politics—but I can tell you this, professionally, because I respect you, and I care about you, a lot—you’re going to have to keep it a secret.”
Dismayed, Bradley said, “Why?”
“Why’s a funny question to ask about something like this,” said Uncle Ice curtly. He shrugged. “Why? Because it’s the law. That’s why.”
Bradley swung his bat at the hornets’ nest. This was always dangerous with Uncle Ice. “It shouldn’t be a law. Don’t you think?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. It’s the law. And we get paid to enforce the law, internationally speaking. And the military doesn’t work if personnel refuse to follow the rules in broad daylight. So.” He trailed his fingertip along the spines of all his precious books, then eventually found a different one, started flipping through it absentmindedly. “And even if it weren’t the law, it’d still get enforced extrajudicially. You know what that means?” He did that, when he was intentionally being cruel; used big words that Bradley didn’t know to make himself sound smarter. “It means outside the law. The way people talk to you. The way people respect you or don’t respect you. And this business, the one you want to go into, is all about respect. Being a pilot is kind of like being a knight: you have to be noble, you have to be honorable, you have to respect your service and your adversaries and yourself. And because I respect you, and because I care about you a lot, I’m just telling you the truth—you’re going to have to keep it a secret.”
Bradley blinked. There was something crushing and overwhelming about the truth—maybe the fact that it was the truth, maybe the fact that he hated the fact that it was the truth. It made sense. But it also meant his future was unspeakably bleak. He tried to speak over the lump in his throat when he said, “Yeah. That’s what Maverick told me, too.” And what he’d wanted to hear from Uncle Ice was that Uncle Mav was telling a lie. 
Something went soft and slightly wounded in Uncle Ice’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Uncle Ice said gently. “I wish I could give you better advice than that. But that’s all I know. I don’t know any more than that.”
“Don’t you want to know more than that?”
“No.”
And thus did the generational gap widen into a chasm. 
[February 2003.]
Dear SN Bradshaw, / Please call/email/write me back when you get a chance. / Love Uncle Iceman.
[August 2003.]
Dear AN Bradshaw, / I hope you’re doing all right. I hope at some point you and I can get in touch to talk. Please let me know if there is some other address I should be sending my letters to. I am not sure if they are finding you. / Love Uncle Iceman.
[May 2004.]
Dear AN Bradshaw, / I wanted to congratulate you on your acceptance to college. Yours is a very good AE program & you should feel very proud. Please let me know if there’s anything you might need as you prepare to start your first year. / Love Uncle Iceman.
[August 2010.]
Dear LT Bradshaw, / I wanted to let you know that I’ll be at NAS Oceana for a conference from December 6-9. I understand that’s your neck of the woods—would you be interested in having dinner with me on either that Tuesday or Wednesday night? I would love to hear how you’ve been doing. You can reach my secretary at the number below. / Love Uncle Iceman.
[October 2014.]
Dear LT Bradshaw, / We Maverick and I want to wish you a Happy Birthday 30th Birthday. We heard you are deployed out in the Atlantic now—we hope you will be able to enjoy the enclosed gift card when you make it back to terra firma. Our updated personal cell numbers are below. / HAPPY BIRTHDAY! FROM UNCLE MAVERICK & Uncle Iceman.
“Haven’t heard back from the kid yet.”
“…You think we ever will?”
The longest silence.
[Pacific Air Type Commander Beau Simpson. 2016.]
You could see it in the way they held themselves. An utmost similarity. Aristocratic propriety. Maybe a little sense of entitlement: look how hard we’ve worked to be here. All three of them had it. More accurately: Captain Mitchell and Admiral Kazansky both had it, and had passed it down to their son.
“Captain Mitchell.” Everyone was watching. The sun had only just set; the sky was melting from horizon-red through orange and yellow and teal up to midnight black above them.
“It’s an honor, sir,” said Captain Mitchell, accepting Admiral Kazansky’s handshake. God, you’d never know it by looking at them. Half the people here on this Roosevelt flight deck knew about them, but they were so convincing that more people weren’t sure. TYCOM Simpson glanced at Rear Admiral Bates, who glanced back in confusion—I thought they were…? They were, TYCOM Simpson signaled, just abnormally good at keeping it a secret.
“Honor’s all mine, Captain,” said Admiral Kazansky, and he passed by without a second glance.
And when he made it down the line of aviators to Lieutenant Bradshaw—you could see it. The similarity in the way they held themselves. Straight and rigid and unyielding. Cold and dismissive beyond belief, even to each other. Admiral Kazansky held out a hand. Lieutenant Bradshaw took it, but refused to make eye contact. Quiet rebellion under the radar: Admiral Kazansky had taught him well. 
TYCOM Simpson glanced at Captain Mitchell, to gauge his reaction. And for once, he and Captain Mitchell were clearly thinking the exact same thing.
Like father, like son.
You could see it in their stubborn determination. How far they were willing to go. How hard they were willing to push. How long they were willing to hold their own hands to the fire, if it meant the familiar painful comfort of staying warm. “Ice-cold, huh?” TYCOM Simpson asked him the next morning, trying to pin down their strategy, trying to secure a guarantee that their family would do what their country asked of them, even if that meant death. Even if that meant the ultimate sacrifice.
“Only when I have to be,” replied Admiral Kazansky, which meant always, and—soon thereafter, he ordered Lieutenant Bradshaw to his death.
But also, Lieutenant Bradshaw went willingly, too.
“Dagger One is hit.”
“Dagger Two is hit.”
Loss is supposed to hit a man in stages. Isn’t that the truth? —Not so for Admiral Kazansky, whom grief obviously swallowed whole in just an instant. He did not break, or bend under its weight. Just stood there staring at the E-2D AWACS screen with wide wounded eyes—not disbelieving eyes. They were gone. Captain Mitchell and Lieutenant Bradshaw were gone. He was in no denial whatsoever. He had leapt straight to acceptance.
“Sir,” said TYCOM Simpson hesitantly, and he reached out to touch him—the stars on his shoulder—guide him back to reality—what must it be like, to lose a son?—to willingly forfeit your family?—
But before he could make contact, Admiral Kazansky drew a breath, moved away, and closed his eyes for just a second. Perfectly composed, even with the waters of grief closing over his head, even with three dozen observers in this C2 room all scrutinizing him for his response. Perfectly composed. How did he do it? How could he manage? How was he possibly still this proud?
“Vice Admiral Simpson,” he said calmly, “I relinquish my command to you, until you deem me necessary to return to my post.”
“Sir,” said Rear Admiral Bates, darting panicked, sympathetic eyes to TYCOM Simpson, but it was too late—Admiral Kazansky was already leaving the room. Head held high and steady. 
Some confusing weeks later, after Captain Mitchell and Lieutenant Bradshaw returned from the dead, TYCOM Simpson and Rear Admiral Bates would casually debrief the mission together in the lobby bar of the Waldorf-Astoria in Washington, D.C. No hard liquor, just beers. Just barely enough alcohol to give them an excuse to philosophize. “You think pride is a sin or a virtue?” TYCOM Simpson found himself asking, tracing the rim of his gilt-edged Stella Artois glass with a finger, after having recounted the above testimony.
“Neither,” said Rear Admiral Bates. “Gotta be a vice.”
“A vice.”
“Yeah. Good men die because of pride, bad men die because of pride…we send our sons to battle because of pride…wars are fought and won and lost because of pride… every war in human history, when you boil it down, begins when someone says, ‘You’re wrong and I’m right, and I’m proud of my own righteousness, proud enough to kill, proud enough to die, proud enough to send my sons to die…’”
“Oh, okay. That’s the root of all human conflict, then, according to you, Warlock. Okay.”
Rear Admiral Bates smiled and laughed at himself, too. Pride, he mouthed. Then shook his head. “We’re a proud species. It’s our vice.”
TYCOM Simpson was thinking about the two proudest men he knew, Admiral Kazansky and Lieutenant Bradshaw, and wondered what it was, exactly, that had driven a wedge between them, you’re wrong and I’m right and I’m proud enough of my own righteousness to send you to your death/inflict my death upon you… And then he remembered the warnings he’d previously received about Lieutenant Bradshaw and Lieutenant Seresin and their open relationship, and then he remembered Admiral Kazansky coldly shaking Captain Mitchell’s hand… and he wondered if the wedge between them was exactly that: the matter of pride.
[Tom. 2018.]
“Merry Christmas and a happy new year, and all that,” says Pete, raising his glass and reaching over the dining table to clink rims with Tom and then Bradley. “A good year! A really good year! —Sorry your guy couldn’t be here, Rooster. We’ll call him tonight before you go. Tell him we miss him.”
“Where is he again?” Tom asks.
“Washington,” Bradley says with a smile. “Big conference at the Pentagon. I’ll see him next week.”
“You know,” Pete says with a sly grin directed at Tom, “I’ve never actually heard the story of how you two got together.” 
“Oh,” Bradley says, shrugging as he tears open a dinner roll, “not that interesting. Pretty much what you’d expect. Inter-squadron competition-turned-sexual tension. Not exactly within regs, but we did meet each other before D.A.D.T. got repealed, so it wasn’t like we’d’ve ever been within regs, either…” (All the while, Tom’s smirking over the rim of his wine glass at Pete, No, Mav, I’m not gonna tell him I had them reassigned to the same boat…) “We broke up when I got sent to TOPGUN. But we figured it out eventually.”
“Glad you did. Sorry he couldn’t be here.”
Bradley hesitates, then says, “You know what I just realized? I never heard how you two got together…! You’ve never told me that story!”
Tom glances over at Pete, do you want to take this or shall I, and when Pete motions all yours, he sighs and says, “Uh, we don’t really know. We’ve just been telling people nineteen-eighty-six because it’s easy. But in a much more real sense…” He thinks about it, then shrugs. “Whatever. If you really want to know. In nineteen-ninety-three, right after I came back to San Diego to take command at Miramar, he and I had a drunken one-night stand. By accident. Which then turned into twenty-five years of accidental one-night stands. So.”
“Oh, c’mon. You guys bought a house together.”
“Yeah, that,” says Pete, “that was, uh, to facilitate the accidental one-night stands. Make it more convenient for everyone.”
“Cut out the middle-man,” Tom supplies, then shrugs again at the look on Bradley’s face. “That’s our story, kid. It’s not super romantic. We weren’t thinking about it that way. We didn’t know how.”
Pete raises the wine bottle to refill Tom’s glass—though it’s still halfway full—and then raises his eyebrows when he “notices” the bottle’s empty. Changes the subject as he stands: “Okay, what’s everyone feeling? Red, white, what’s next?”
“Red,” Tom says absently. “Anything big, I guess—first cab you see…” But then he thinks about it, and he amends his order before Pete leaves earshot: “Actually—we’ve got that petite sirah we gotta drink—two-thousand-four. Israeli. Might be somewhere in the back, sorry. But now’s a good occasion, I think, to bust it out for the holidays. No reason to save it.”
“Israeli sirah two-thousand-four,” Pete repeats, “okay. I got that.” 
Then he steps outside, leaving Tom and Bradley alone. It’s not awkward—they’ve worked really hard over the last two years to make it not-awkward, after the mission—but human beings are human beings. Prideful, stubborn creatures. There will always be a little guilt between the two of them, and a little blame.
“I have to be honest,” Tom says after a moment, interested in being honest for Bradley’s sake, “sorry we don’t have a better story to give you, about us. It is a little hard to talk about.”
“Why?”
“Well—we don’t know the words we’re supposed to use, for one. It’s your generation who sets the standard for that kind of thing. You young people. We’re a little out-of-date. And…well. I guess we’re just jealous of you. It’s hard to talk about.”
“Jealous?” Bradley repeats quizzically. “Why?”
Tom leans back in his chair and really thinks through what he wants to say. This is one of those impromptu speeches you never really intend to make, but are probably still important to get off your chest. “Maverick and I,” he starts carefully, “will never stop feeling guilty about what we did to you. Ever. You need to know that.” And when Bradley scoffs and huffs and tries to interrupt, he goes on, “Not just pulling your papers from the Academy. It goes back further than that. We will always feel like we deprived you of your father. The merits of that feeling are debatable, sure, but it’s a fact of life. A fact of our lives, anyway. And it’s dictated so much of how we live, and how we’ve lived, over the past thirty years. Part of the reason I came back to Miramar in nineteen-ninety-three was to be with you and your mom. Because I felt I owed you that, in return for what I’d taken.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Bradley says. “Or, at least, I never blamed you for killing him. You or Maverick both. You guys were my dads. You didn’t take anything from me. —Excepting the obvious, the Academy, but that was mostly my mom, I guess, so, whatever.”
“I’m just telling you what our lives have been like since the day I met you. Why we did what we did.”
“Okay. But I still don’t understand why you’re jealous.”
Tom smiles, a little faintly. “Because the other part of the reason I came back to Miramar in nineteen-ninety-three was to be with Maverick,” he says, “and I’m jealous of you because I didn’t recognize that at the time. —Everyone hopes, when they have kids—because, look, I’m not your dad, but you are my kid, really—everyone hopes they can bring their kid into a better world than the one they had when they were a kid, and we did. But no one prepares you for how jealous you get when your kid grows up in a better world than you did. I’m not sure people your age understand how hard it was for us when we were your age.”
“I do.”
“Sure, but I don’t think you do. I—I didn’t…” He sighs. “I never meant to fall in love with Mitchell. He never meant to fall in love with me. There certainly were men in relationships in the Navy back then who could make it work—we weren’t those guys. We looked down on those guys. Most people did. And when you were an officer, your job security and your paycheck relied on your subordinates’ respect for you. If we’d rocked the boat, traded away our respect for our relationship, well, we’d have each other, but we’d be out of a job. And then, if we’d been fired—what did we kill all those people for? For nothing! What a waste of all the lives we took! It wouldn’t have been honorable. Would’ve disrespected the Navy, our careers, the men we killed. So we didn’t talk about our relationship. You know that. Didn’t talk about who we were, or what we were doing, or why, because we were afraid of losing our own honor. Didn’t talk about it until the day you two died and came back from the dead. That’s what it took. Maverick still hates talking about some of that stuff, all the labels, all the words—that’s why I sent him to get a bottle at the back of the fridge, he might be out there a while…”
“Cunning,” Bradley says softly, but leaves the space open after he speaks.
Tom looks away. “Maybe this is getting too deep into the weeds. I’m just trying to tell you what it’s been like for us. Not sure how much of this you want to hear.”
“All of it. —All of it.”
Tom clears his throat. “…Well, Maverick keeps trying to convince me that we never wasted any time. And I know there is some truth to that—we didn’t start out liking each other at all—even if we’d been as brave as people your age are nowadays, even if we’d been open with each other about that kind of stuff, we still probably wouldn’t have ended up together. I mean, we really didn’t like each other. Especially right after your dad died, and especially after you left, in two-thousand-two. So maybe it was better for us in the long run that we didn’t talk about it. But I look back on the thirty years I’ve spent with him, and…it still all feels like a waste to me.” Maybe he really is too deep into the weeds. But he just wants Bradley to understand. “Look, Mitchell is, beyond any possible shadow of a doubt, the love of my life. Always has been and always will be. Right? —I just wish I’d known that at the time. I’m jealous of you because you’re exactly the age I was when I came back to Miramar to be with you and your mom and Maverick, and you’re already married, and you won’t ever have to sacrifice any of your honor for your marriage. You’re one of the most respected men in the Navy.”
“So are you, Ice, and you’re also married to another man.”
“I’ll remind you, though it hurts a little, that I’m almost exactly a quarter-century older than you, and you and I got married within a week of each other. I had to wait for times to change.” He holds Bradley’s gaze for a moment, then finishes the last of his dinner and sets his fork down on his plate. “So, if you were ever wondering why Mav and I are a little bitter around you and Jake, well, it’s because we are.”
“Oh,” says Bradley. “See, I always thought it was just because you and Maverick are both notoriously bitter people.”
“We are,” Tom admits through a laugh. Then he continues, “But—you should also know how proud of you we both are. How proud of you we’ve both always been. We’re not very brave men—well, we are, of course, but maybe not in the way that matters. It’s pretty gratifying to have a kid who’s braver than you are. Every parent’s dream, whether we want to admit it or not. You’re brave enough for all of us.”
It’s at this moment that Pete opens the garage door and sticks his head inside and hollers, “Ice, I can’t find it. What about a merlot? Can we do a merlot?”
“No, baby, the sirah,” Tom answers without turning his head. “It’s on the second shelf, you might—have to rearrange some of the bottles—we have too much wine. We need to drink more, me and you.”
“Not a problem,” says Pete, and he shuts the door again.
“It’s on the third shelf,” Tom tells Bradley in an aside. “He’ll find it eventually. He would’ve tried to change the subject six times by now. —The previous Secretary of the Army—he actually just got married this week, I think; I need to send a card—also gay. He and his partner invited Maverick and me out to dinner the last time we were in D.C. Most uncomfortable I’ve ever seen Mav in my whole life. Asking us questions like, ‘How did you guys get together…?’ ‘Was it easier for you guys because you were in the Navy…?’ ‘When did you…know…?’” When Bradley laughs, Tom does, too. It’s really nice, it turns out, to joke about this stuff with someone who understands. “We just made our answers up out of thin air. I was uncomfortable too, admittedly. That’s what I’m saying. Mav and I never learned the vocabulary to answer questions like that.”
Bradley starts taking their plates to the sink. What a good kid. “You know,” he says from the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder when Tom joins him at the counter, “it’s so funny you bitch that you and Mav don’t have a romantic love story, or whatever. When I was a kid, you and him were literally the pinnacle of romance.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yeah. There’s something romantic about the secret, too. When Jake and I made our relationship official—the first time—I begged him to keep it a secret just for a little while. You know; it was sexy, for a few minutes! Something only he and I knew!”
“And you immediately discovered how awful it is, I’m sure,” Tom says noncommittally. “I’m jealous of you that you learned that lesson young. —Yeah, real romantic. Maverick and I could’ve ended each other’s careers fourteen thousand times over. Real romantic.”
“And trusted each other not to,” Bradley points out—
—which makes Tom reconsider. 
Yeah, okay, maybe it’s a little romantic. The way Grimm’s fairytales, once you wipe away all the blood, are just a little romantic. “I’m of the opinion that the only thing getting old is good for is looking back on your life through rose-colored glasses. Sure. Historical revisionism it is. It was a little romantic.”
“What’s a little romantic?” says Pete, stepping into the kitchen and triumphantly brandishing his 2004 petite sirah; “Have I missed something funny? —It was on the third shelf, by the way. Could’ve told me that before I went and reorganized the whole fridge.”
Tom graciously accepts the half-annoyed kiss to the cheek, and answers, “Nothing you would’ve laughed at, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, one of those conversations,” says Pete, hunting around in the drawer for the corkscrew. “If you were planning on continuing, I can go out and rearrange the wine bottles by region instead of by year—” and scoffs when Tom kisses him back to reassure him, conversation’s over.
“Did you know,” Bradley says, “your husband is now openly calling you the love of his life?”
“Oh, yeah,” says Pete with a smile, popping the cork from the bottleneck, “he tells me that all the time. Nothing new.” Tops up their glasses, then deftly changes the subject: “Oh, gosh. I never asked. This is the big news. How are you and Hangman enjoying SOUTHCOM?”
“Oh, God,” says Bradley, rolling his eyes. “Let me tell you…”
“I think we did good,” Pete says later that night—they’re alone now, so he’s fine talking—as he tugs loose the tucked sheets to clamber into bed, and when Tom moves to turn off the light he adds, “No, you can keep reading.”
Tom sets his book down onto his chest and pulls his glasses off anyway. “Well, you and I are known for doing ‘good,’” he muses after a second. “We’re pretty universally renowned for being good at stuff. But, regarding what in particular? —Raising our kid?”
“Yeah. We did good.”
Actually, they didn’t do very well at all. But of course that’s not what Pete means. Pete means: it’s shocking and stunningly fortunate that they did as poorly as they did and still somehow ended up with such a good kid. Tom’s looking up at the ceiling and feeling very small. “How did that happen? Genuinely, how did that happen? I did always build getting married into my plan for my life—but I never thought far enough ahead to consider having kids. And now you and I have a kid who’s in his thirties. How’d that happen? I remember when he could barely walk!”
Pete yawns and rolls over onto his side and closes his eyes. “You and I have a kid who earned a Medal of Honor.”
“I know exactly how that happened” —and doesn’t like to think about it too much. “I suppose we’re just a family of overachievers. A lot of failing upwards, you and me. Somehow we failed our way upwards into a very happy lifelong relationship, a superstar kid…a few dozen medals each, ourselves…”
“That’s life,” says Pete sleepily.
“That is not most people’s lives. You’re aware that our lives look nothing like the average person’s life, right? You understand that?”
“That’s our life.”
Tom considers this. Yeah, it is their life. Wild how that happens. 
He smiles at the singular word life, sets his book on the nightstand, presses a kiss to Pete’s bare shoulder, and turns off the light.
356 notes · View notes
aroanthy · 1 month
Text
i love how fraught and complicated discourse around various utena characters ‘dying’ is when anthy is literally stabbed to death eternally by a million swords imbued with human hatred. and then utena gets stabbed to death by them also. like. ‘death’ is incredibly interesting in rgu because most of the time it’s this ambiguous figurative thing that has interesting implications re: ohtori as a closed-off world one can escape. we are all trapped in our coffins. mamiya is the only named character with a grave. nemuro memorial hall functions as one all the same. ruka is implied to have died in the hospital— was he dead all along? who was the boy we saw for these two episodes? is this dead boy the same boy, or is this just another coincidence from the shadow girls, cutting like a knife? it’s heavily implied that akio and anthy murder kanae by poisoning her, adding to the previous implication that they were poisoning mr ohtori too, but there are no perceptible consequences of this. kanae’s absence is not felt. she’s fed an apple slice. what happens to the bodies? we know what happened to the 100 boys, but what about everyone else? and so on and so forth. ‘death’ is a tricky thing in utena, i think it’s constantly functioning on figurative and literal levels in very different ways for very different purposes. dios died. dios was dying. dios didn’t die. he grew up. etc etc
#what am i trying to say here?#idk! think about all of the pieces you have#dying is complicated in ohtori in countless different ways#and i find it boring to see so much ‘this character is dead and that’s it’ stuff#when death is used farrrrrrr more figuratively than some ppl give credit for#and i think the movie too does wonderful things with death#and what ‘dying’ really means#being disbelieved. being forgotten. being rejected. haunting despite this#much more interesting to think about wrt commentary on abusive relationships than it is#to think about what?? oh me when my brother died but plot twist he’s alive and can walk on this road all cool. like?????#akio doesn’t have the power to make himself revenant#he THINKS he does and he absolutely has power when he’s alive and he imbues that power with such meaning that it does live on after him#but ANTHY. anthy is the one struggling with herself and her feelings and the impact of trauma and abuse (that power!!) in aou#he’s dead? he died? she brought him back through her memories? or she’s left him (metaphorical death) and he’s haunting her??#all such interesting interpretations#i haven’t mentioned touga bc i don’t have the energy today. if dead and just illusion of others memories then why active. why awful#like in aou akio is only Obviously scummy when he’s alive. his illusory self is based upon anthy’s love for him#if anime!touga is nothing more than nanami/whoever’s memories of him before he died……. why does he actively choose to suck again and again#like nanami wouldn’t do that. unless it was meant to be a subconscious thing like ooo he’s dead all along but that’s not what her arc is#it’s not ‘he’s been dead all along’ literally or figuratively. it’s ‘he’s unsafe and i don’t want him’#sigh. once again i am asking people to think about nanami and touga’s dynamic through touga’s eyes#it’s so interesting to me how people forget to consider his motivations or feelings on ANYTHING#like sure his motivations and feelings are scummy but they’re interesting!!!!! they intrigue me!!!!#compel me even#anyway ignore how i said i didn’t have the energy for this and then typed it all out anyway#dais.txt
69 notes · View notes
turtleblogatlast · 1 month
Note
Do you have a preference for you the younger or older twin is?
Nope! Well, more specifically, I do have a preference and that is simply to not know. The difference is so minuscule that it’s way more interesting to me to have it deliberately unclear.
57 notes · View notes
salty-an-disco · 4 months
Text
You know, Smitten and Damsel were some of the least interesting characters to me– because, well, by their very own nature they’re very simple and surface-level characters, and while I always appreciated their roles and found their route really fun and fascinating, I wasn’t all that interested in exploring them further, not the same way I wanna explore many other voices and vessels.
In come (Explore) This New Old World, I give both Smitten and Damsel a major role because it feels right with the world I build, and FUCK, they’re so cute and fascinating actually!! They’re simplicity makes them bounce off other voices so well, and they’re so genuinely themselves and genuinely in love — with each other, with their friends, with the world around them — that it’s honestly uplifting and heart-warming.
Listen, I’m not a very positive person by nature, and I can be very cynical of the world around me; I had to drag my brain kicking and thrashing into more positive and hopeful forms of thinking– so I was a bit unsure of my ability to write characters as simple and positive as these two. But honestly? It was not only easier than I thought, it was kinda healing.
97 notes · View notes
thwackk · 11 months
Text
Tumblr media
part of a longass old man halbarry comic i never finished
351 notes · View notes
themakeupbrush · 5 months
Text
I get a lot of comments from people wishing the clothes I post were available in inclusive sizes
Technically, the majority of the things I post don’t have sizes at all. They’re mostly couture, custom, and made to order.
If you have the money and are able to connect with the designer, they would make it to your measurements exactly. Most of what I’m posting is just the runways and photoshoots for promotional purposes, not the actual clients
54 notes · View notes
thepenguisalive7 · 8 months
Text
Here’s my little food for thought. If this upsets you, please look away! You don’t have to interact with me if you’d rather not see it 👍
Okay, I think some people on Twitter, hmmm
Why are some of them making this about q!Foolish and q!slime? I think some people are misinterpreting and assuming q!bad is being played the fool, but really, his grievances is more about being seen as a tool? Maybe they’re upset because that’s what their characters are going through? But they’re also ignoring other things q!bad did for said characters.
Sure he said some off things with q!slime and arguably pranks q!foolish a lot, but he also helps give them so many things, I don’t understand why people say he deserves this karma? I mean, q!slime did try to kill all the eggs before, his egg included. In rp, wouldn’t you be upset if someone did that? Q!bad usually tries to lean into rp whenever he plays on the server. He words were terrible sure, but he gave q!slime a full deck of maxed out armour and a backpack for basically free once, just because he felt bad for him. Even went on a little adventure to cheer him up. I understand that maybe q!slime viewers didn’t see this because it was on another persons stream and slime wasn’t streaming but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
He helps to take care of Leonarda for q!foolish, and this isn’t to say q!Foolish is a bad parent, he’s a great parent! But it’s just that, so many people are saying q!bad deserves this law against him for wronging q!foolish? Land duo are just different in my opinion, they know when to push and when to stop, and it’s their thing. Q!BBH pulls pranks, but never really with the intent of permanent damage or significant damage. They’re almost always easily removed. Q!foolish calls q!bad names and they argue but that’s how they work. But if you want to argue their interactions a little, q!foolish also does leave and expect q!BBH to take care of his egg. There was even a weekend where q!BBH explained he would’ve liked a heads up, and q!foolish just said he already kind of expected q!bad would do it anyways. And there have been times where q!bad would ask for some thank you’s from q!foolish, for taking care of Leonarda at times, to which they banter and it never happened.
But this isn’t really about q!slime and q!foolish, so I don’t understand why people are so insistent in bringing up Bad’s wrongs with these two people? When this is his grievance. Saying he deserved it for the wrong he’s done with these two, when they’ve also done things that contribute to the build up on why he’d be upset? I’d rule out land duo personally, because I like to think they’re the only duo that can mess with each other and more or less understand, but if you’re going to bring it up, I’ll bring up my counter argument.
What his grievances is really about is starting to feel more like a tool, the government issues, and his relationship with q!forever. It’s about q!bbh, so why rope those two into this???
They say q!BBH treated them badly, so he deserves this. Q!slime tried to murder every egg after Juanaflippa died. Did he succeed? No. Does he regret it? Ye. No harm done yeah? But he did try to kill a lot of eggs, and the intent was definitely there, even if he’s apologetic of it later on. Do people have to forgive him straight away cause the intent was there, even if he was grieving and upset? I don’t think so. If q!slime did the same thing recently, people would be a lot more upset, seeing as to how they reacted when q!forever striked Leonarda during an intense moment.
I guess maybe it gives people more insight on the wrongs of q!bbh? Hmmm… But it kind of just feels at one point that people just don’t want to hear out his character at all, and just go ahead inserting other characters to discredit how q!BBH is being fleshed out. It feels a little unfair because when slime was upset, people were happy to support him, even so far as having six people defending him (q!BBH included) for attempted murder? And q!foolish lore where he felt isolated because of the pac and Mike arresting and being stuck in the nether. That lore was okay, and is appreciated. Why not this one?
I just don’t think it’s fair to call it karma? When all characters are a little morally grey. You can have favourites, but come on. And then saying he deserves it, despite the fact he helped out those two a lot as well. Feels a little in bad taste.
But this is again just my opinion, I’m not necessarily the best, and if you’d like to discuss, please do so politely! And if you disagree, just ignore this post and move on
81 notes · View notes
violetthekiller · 3 months
Note
Well, im bored to sooooo what do you think Tom and Zendaya are saved as in eachothers phones
My Spider-Man and My MJ
34 notes · View notes
francy-sketches · 1 year
Text
Lucemond shippers should have their brains studied fr bc everytime I accidentally catch a glimpse of whatever they’re doing they’ve descended deeper into insanity in a way that I didn’t even think possible
178 notes · View notes
Text
Alistair during Awakening when the Warden is off on her quest:
Tumblr media
The rest of his court:
Tumblr media
19 notes · View notes
segretecose · 2 years
Text
the english word pistachio is so funny they were like yeah we’ll borrow the entire word from italian but we draw the line at it having two Cs
394 notes · View notes
a-sketchy · 3 months
Text
man the lack of appealing stage design or visual effects or lighting or significantly interesting camera work completely kneecaps the dances from p3/5d as compared to p4d. i think the dances themselves are completely fine, if not better than p4d in a some cases, but there’s so little charm in the presentation that i can’t bring myself to care nearly as much
20 notes · View notes
chrollohearttags · 4 months
Text
ik it seems like every month that the fandom is in some bullshit and everybody all of a sudden hates it but idk if I ever could write for anything except aot + one piece (at least for my main fandoms) cause tbh, they’re really the only ones with sum personality and flavor 😭 I’m sorry. Them ‘it boys’ are quite bland.
23 notes · View notes