#though you guys are great at sending really funny/sexy questions for all the characters so i'm always so delighted to read your messages

[bucky-at-bedtime]

Stucky Fic Recs

So basically I went through all of my ao3 bookmarks and collated a list of some of my favourites (I couldn't fit all of them on this list, so if anyone shows interest there might be a part two).

Please read tags and descriptions of the works before reading, some of them are pretty dark or extremely horny so just make sure you check that the fic is for you!!

Please please please send me your favourite fics in return! I am always happy to hear fic recs, headcanons and any other ideas/comments you all have!

Without any further ado, here are a few of my favourite Stucky fics:

‘Not Easily Conquered’ series by dropdeaddream, WhatAreFear

Rating: M, Words: 117,692

https://archiveofourown.org/series/115516

“I told you, you heard me: I told you never to follow me into Hell. Now I’m not vain enough to think that’s why you’re out here now — if there’s any person in what’s left of this God forsaken planet who’s part of a bigger picture, it’d be you. But I’ll keep saying it until it sticks. You got nothing to prove. I’m not worth much, I damn well know that, but I’ll ask you anyway: Stay for me. If you leave me alone in this world I’ll turn into something terrible. I’ll turn into the nasty creature that’s growing inside me. This war, it’ll swallow me whole”

[To me, this fic is like the classic Stucky 101 fanfic – if you're a Stucky fan and you haven't read this, I highly recommend it. The authors explore the Steve/Bucky relationship in such an interesting, tragic, emotive way and I cry every time I read it. I couldn't praise this work enough.]

‘Ain’t No Grave’ series by spitandvinegar

Rating: M-E, Words: 131,789

https://archiveofourown.org/series/426577

"Yeah, he never calls me by my name," Steve says. "It's always champ, ace, hotshot, that kinda thing."

"Man, that is flirting," Sam says. "That nicknames thing, he is flirting with you. He's just working his way up to calling you baby or something."

Steve goes redder than a damn coke can. Sam pumps his fist. "Yes, I am so right, I am wise as hell. He did, didn't he?"

"He called me sweetheart," Steve says grimly, "because he's a drug addict with brain damage."

"Or because he looooooves you," Sam says. Captain America throws a cookie at his head. Sam eats it, because he deserves a treat for being so damn wise.”

[I'm currently re-reading this fic and absolutely loving it. The way spitandvinegar writes Bucky's road towards recovery and Steve's entire characterisation – it's all just so good. It's another one that covers some pretty dark themes, so make sure you're checkin those tags!]

'Einherjar' by thecommodore_squid

Rating: M, Words: 71297

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7157024/chapters/16249814

But Steve was fine.

Sure, he hadn’t seen Bucky in months, and sometimes he was at the punching bag so long that his skin started to peel off to expose the bones of his fingers, and sometimes he couldn’t find the energy to drag himself out of bed, and sometimes he went weeks without sleeping, and sometimes he thought about throwing himself head-first off the nearest tall structure, but he was fine.

He was absolutely, perfectly, one-hundred percent, fucking fine.

AKA In which Steve learns how to deal with his shit, and Bucky learns how to stop leaving.

[basically the definition of a recovery fic, I absolutely adore it. This is tragic and amazing and makes me cry and smile. It’s got a bunch of fantastic cameos and It really just ticks so many of my boxes.]

‘Like real People do’ by 2bestfriends

Rating: E, Words: 67,775

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19887376/chapters/47103217

“"Ask me what?" demands Bucky. "I didn't hear a question."

Steve licks his lips. "Will you stay with me? Will you come back home, Buck?"

"Home," repeats Bucky in a small voice, and then he's crying for real.”

[Basically soft lumberjack!steve and lonely twink!bucky being horny and in love. This is a comfort fic for that’s really just about my favourite boys falling in love.]

‘This City Bleeds it’s Aching Heart’ by anonymous

Rating: E, Words: 34,537

https://archiveofourown.org/works/835829/chapters/1591736

“The one where Steve and Bucky pose as a happily married couple while on a mission for SHIELD, to catch an international arms dealer hiding in a suburban neighbourhood.”

[The plot in this one is just a good time and i think it’s just a really fun take on the fake relationship trope. Also some really great characterisation.]

‘Home is Wherever I’m With You’ by cydonic

Rating: E, Words: 88,570

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18868081/chapters/44783077

“Bucky kisses Steve and Emma goodbye before they leave for school, which is why – partway down the road – Amelia turns to him and asks, “why are you and Daddy kissing?”

Which is definitely a conversation Bucky’s been expecting since Steve just did it, but it still takes him by surprise. Again, he thinks he should wait for Steve, but Amelia’s not the sort of kid to let anything rest. Plus, Bucky’s taking her to school where she will undoubtedly share the story with anyone who’ll listen.

He also stops to think that Steve’s asked him to stay, which means Bucky must be trusted with their happiness and well-being, at least in some small capacity.

Bucky clears his throat and searches for some explanation that will help Amelia make sense of this sudden turn of events. “Because we love each other,” is all he comes up with.”

[Bear with me, this is a House Flipper!Bucky Au. And dad!Steve. I just love a found family trope I’m not gonna lie to you. Another comfort fic that warms my lil heart.]

‘Lucky Seven’ by BetteNoire (WeAreWolves)

Rating: E, Words: 94,364

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7033105/chapters/16002481

“Back from where--?” James says, the sentence ending in a distinctly undignified squawk as Steve sweeps him up in his arms, bridal-style, and starts carrying him upstairs.

James tenses momentarily then relaxes into Steve's arms and throws back his head and starts laughing. The laughter peals out of him, his body shaking, his amusement occasionally broken by little gasps of pain.

“What's so funny?” Steve frowns.

“You are,” James says, still giggling. “You're ridiculous, Steve Rogers.”

“Behave. Or I will drop you,” Steve growls.

[The shrunkyclunks modern AU of my dreams featuring Mechanic!Bucky and cap!Steve and some really beautiful writing.]

'Dishonor On Your Cow' by mandarou

Rating: E, Words: 111695

https://archiveofourown.org/works/10659162/chapters/23589582

“Sergeant Barnes?”

“Oh, hell no, don’t call him that, man,” Sam warned.

“Captain Fuck Off!” Barnes shouted over him. “Fight me!”

Steve didn’t know whether to laugh or just slink away. He managed to combine the two by pacing two steps and snorting instead. Like a bull.

“I’m gonna need you to calm your ass, Barnes,” Sam said as he went limp again, obstructing Barnes’s struggling under him. “This is so undignified. That is Captain goddamn America.”

“Captain goddamn America!” Barnes repeated, louder. And angrier.

Steve cleared his throat again. “I’ve been looking for you,” he told Barnes.

“I hope you brought lube this time!” Barnes shouted.

[I’m not gonna lie it took me a minute to get into this one but by the end I was crying with them, laughing with them, and just really in my feels. Some very insane things happen so here’s a few of my favourite tags: ‘Seargent Barnes is done with your Shit Steve’, ‘blatant disrespect of a man’s motorcycle’, ‘Steve you ding dong’ and ‘PR nightmares in the form of Supersoldiers’.]

Propietary Information by Notlucy

Rating: E, Words: 85141

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11964402/chapters/27054777

“Okay, so Bucky Barnes has a crush on Steve Rogers. The guy's gorgeous, talented and, oh yeah, the Chief Design Officer of the biggest tech company in the world. In other words: he's so far out of Bucky's league that he might as well be in a different stratosphere.”

[We were never gonna get through this list without a Sugar Daddy!AU (I have a weakness). This one is… saucy and sexy and sweet and uh pretty kinky so read the tags and all. I’ve read it a few times, and I love the way the author has written Steve in this one, he just makes my heart go '!!!']

‘Roots Have Grown’ by AustinB

Rating: M, Words: 17280

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6912451/chapters/15767941

“Bucky is a mildly agoraphobic veteran with funds to spare, who becomes enamored with the cute blonde guy in his building.

So when Steve mentions needing a roommate to cut down on rent costs, Bucky decides it would be a good idea to volunteer.”

[Another weakness of mine is Roommate AUs, and this one is phenomenal. I tend to go for post serum!Steve stories more often, but this is a pre-serum Steve that I just adore.]

‘The Cold Never Bothered me Anyway’ by icoulddothisallday

Rating: E, Words:75562

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11728869/chapters/26425530

“Bucky Barnes has spent his whole life in a state of mild hypothermia. Steve Rogers has spent the last 70 years in the ice. The two things aren’t related until, suddenly, they are. Shrunkyclunks soulmate AU (AKA the awkward bb au).”

[I think this is the only soulmate AU in my bookmarks? I would totally be down to read more though! This one is really fun and really enjoy Bucky’s characterisation here!]

'War, Children' by Nonymos

Rating: E, Words: 106615

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5373050/chapters/12409394

“After Bucky was released from the hospital, it only took him a couple of weeks to give up on himself. Difficult to believe in any kind of future when the simple act of staying alive was almost too big an effort.

Out the frosted window, across the street, there was a tiny homeless guy burrowing under an awning.”

[An interesting exploration of Bucky’s PTSD with a trans!Steve which was a cool take on his character too!]

'The Company You Keep' by orbingarrow

Rating: G, Words: 51191

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3468605/chapters/7613072

“Hurt, hungry, and on the run, the Winter Soldier doesn’t have a lot of safe options to go to for help. Figuring that any friend of Captain Steve Rogers is unlikely to be HYDRA, Bucky takes a chance and reaches out to the first Avenger he can find.

It works out better than anyone could have expected. Eventually.”

[hurt/comfort, recovering Bucky, protective Steve, found family and domestic avengers, need I say more? I absolutely loved this one]

[belovedbangtan]

DIVE : Part 2

<Part 1>

Pairings: Jungkook x y/n, Yoongi x oc

Word Count: 4.4k

Description: Camping with your ex, sounds horrible right? The camping trip was planned and payed for long before y/n’s shitty boyfriend broke up with her. Her best friend Abby, Yoongi, Taehyung, Jimin, and Jungkook are there to make sure she has an amazing time. However, sharing a tent with a smoke show like Jungkook is bound to lead to some complications.

Warnings: Language, lap dance, streaking, alcohol use, dom!Jk, sub!yn, fingering.

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When you wake up the next morning, Jungkook is already gone. You quickly start to brush your hair and make yourself look somewhat presentable before anyone has the chance to see you. You brush your hair, putting it in a simple braid to the side. You shuffle though your bag of clothes pulling out a baggy t-shirt and another pair of jean shorts. You jump when you hear the zip of the tent as you’re pulling the shorts over your hips.

“Sup Sexy lady.” Abby sings as she barges inside, plopping down on the air mattress.

“Fuck, you scared me. I thought you were Jungkook,” You scold as you pull the shirt over your bralette.

“Wait,” she sits up and looks around with a disgusted look on her face, “Should I be on this mattress?”

“Oh my god. We definitely didn’t sleep together if that’s what you’re implying.” You roll your eyes as you fold Jungkook’s blanket.

Abby’s lower lip jets out, “But why not.” She pretends to wipe a tear away.

“Uhm, idk maybe because I haven’t even talked to the dude.”

“Well… Kook, Tae, Jimin and Yoongi all want to go Horseback riding if you,” She wiggles her eyebrows, “would like to talk to ‘the dude’,” She rolls her eyes as she quotes me.

“And you’re ex is doing something with his group of douches.”

“Okay, that sounds fun.”

You both left the tent and met up with the boys who were waiting patiently for you by the SUV. When you got there you instantly noticed the way Jungkook’s eyes made their way up your body. When his eyes meet yours you quickly look away. Tae holds the door open for you as you approach, you slide in and he slides in after you.

“I almost punched your ex in the mouth last night.” Tae blurts out unexpectantly.

“What the fuck!” You gasp but you can’t help but laugh at the image of that. It’s definitely something you wouldn’t mind seeing. Tae starts to explain that after you had fallen asleep he came over to their beer pong game, and started to trash talk you.

“Kept saying that ‘it’s pathetic that she came to babysit me’ and shit like that. Like he deadass believes you’re here to win him back.” Tae’s eyes roll into the back of his head.

You take a deep breath, unsure of how to process the new information. If you were being honest, you didn’t think he thought about you at all. So for him to bring you up in conversation was a bit unexpected, and out of character. However, him claiming that you were there to ‘babysit him’ was something you could definitely hear him saying.

“You aren’t here to get him back are you?” Tae’s eyes widen as he looks over at you, “Because I definitely did not say nice things to him.” His presses his lips together thinking he might have fucked up.

“Are you kidding? No. Not a chance in hell.” You scoff.

“Good. You deserve better than that asshole, I can’t believe how close we used to be. Fuck… Jungkook was best friends with him when they were kids.” Jimin blurts out.

You slowly turn around to make eye contact with Jungkook. How did you not know this information. After being with Ben for nearly a year, you had no clue. Jungkook looks up at you raising his eyebrows and nodding as if to tell you that it was true, and definitely not something he liked to talk about.

“So, if you don’t like him, why do you guys hang out?” you ask the obvious question, hoping for a simply explanation.

“I mean, we’re still friends with people in his group of friends. So when we have big events, he’s always there,” Jimin explains he shrugs, “I guess we haven’t really thought about it much until now.”

You nod, looking out the window. You think about it and it makes sense. Anytime you went to a gathering, things were always awkward between Ben and the boys. Most of Ben’s friends would talk to them casually, and it was never awkward or uncomfortable. You remember Abby warning you before you were brainwashed into giving him a chance. She couldn’t give a reason to say no to him, you assumed because she didn’t know him well enough. Eventually she reasoned and backed off, telling you that she would support whatever decision you made.

After a short ride you finally arrive to the stables. You go inside and pay, then the instructors designate a horse for each person. The instructor brings over a beautiful grey horse, named Eve. You lightly pat her before your instructor helps you over. After everyone has mounted  their horse, you start on the trail. Side by side, Yoongi was next to Abby, Tae next to Jimin, then Jungkook was next to you. The instructors were ahead and behind the group to make sure the horses were behaving properly.

The trail you chose was supposed to take you to the top of the mountain to a lookout. You definitely didn’t anticipate the rocky terrain, or the feeling that you would fall off the horse. After a few minutes you peak over when you hear a quiet laugh coming from Jungkook.

“What’s so funny?” you blurt out, still maintaining your stiff posture.

“Are you scared?” He looks over at you with a smirk plastered across his face.

“No,” You attempt to loosen your grip, instantly regretting the decision to do so, “and if I was, should you really be laughing at me?” You mumble breathlessly.

He giggles, “No. Probably not,” You watch him as he pushes his lips out in attempt to hide the apparent humor in his features, “Look, just relax. You’re not going to fall off.” He lets go of the harness and leans back. He wiggles his body to show you that it’s okay to move.

“Eve, you’re not gonna let y/n fall are you,” He leans forward asking your horse with a voice sweeter than honey, “Yeah, see… she said no. So just relax, babe.” He says calmly.

You giggle as he attempts to distract you, you don’t miss the way the nickname makes your body heat up, “Okay, okay,” you sit up and roll your neck, loosening your body one limb at a time, “this better? Do I look like a pro?” You giggle, you’re knuckles still white from your tight grip on harness.

He laughs hard this time, “Mhm, definitely a Pro. The cutest Horseback rider I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.”

Your cheeks turn a deep shade of red and you try your hardest to maintain your composure.

“So you used to be best friends with Ben?” You ask quietly hopefully changing the subject.

He sighs loudly, looking off in the distance, “Unfortunately.” He responds quietly.

You nod, clearly not wanted to press on if he was uncomfortable. He clears his throat,

“Our parents were good friends. We stayed friends through school, until he slept with not 1, not 2, but 3 of my girlfriends.” He laughed to himself, shaking his head in disapproval, “And he would tell me, it wasn’t his fault my girls were such whores.” He mumbles.

You bite your lip, closing your eyes for just a moment. You couldn’t believe you wasted an entire year with someone as disgusting as him. You wondered if he cheated on you while you were with him. More than anything you were pissed that someone would do that to their so called friend. You couldn’t imagine the pain that must’ve cause Jungkook.

“That’s fucking awful, I’m sorry he did that.” You apologize even though you know it won’t mean anything.

“No its fine, just made me realize what a piece of shit he is. Just sucks we still have the same friend groups.”

“He is most definitely a piece of shit,” You chuckle, at least you can agree with that.

“Yeah I don’t know why someone like you even entertained someone like him for that long.”

All you hear him say is ‘someone like you’ and you need to know what that means. You pause before asking because you’re not sure you’re even ready to hear his answer.

“Someone like me?”

He smiles, “Yeah, you know. Someone smart, caring, down to earth, beautiful,” He pauses to look over at you, “the whole package, some might say.”

You look over at him in complete shock, you nod your head slowly looking for the words to follow up, but you can’t find them.

“Some might say?” You hear Tae laugh from the horse in front of you, “Bro, you’re the one that says that.”

Jungkook eyes him down and Tae knows that once they’re off of these horses his ass his grass.

You cant help but to laugh at the two boys, “I’m mean, I’m not sure I agree with that but… I can agree with the fact that we were definitely not a great match.”

Jungkook nods, his cheeks are rosy and you smile to yourself as you think about him getting embarrassed over Tae calling him out.

“Thanks for covering me up last night,” you whisper loud enough for Jungkook to hear. Not wanting to involve Tae and Jimin in our conversation they were clearly eves dropping on.

His cheeks turn impossibly rosier, “No problem, you looked cold.”

“I was,” you smile and he smiles back, “I should have taken you up on your offer to sleep on the air mattress with you, my back was fucked this morning.” You giggle

“So does that mean you’re going to let me cuddle with you tonight?” He asks without a beat.

The rosiness on his cheeks is gone, and dominant Jungkook is back and sending shock waves through your body once again.

“I guess it does.” You agree. You’d be crazy to say no to him. The fact that all you could think about as you slept was cuddling with him didn’t help either.

You finally get to the top of the mountain, and you watch everyone dismount their horses with ease. Jungkook get off and brushes his hair out of his eyes as he walks over to you. He holds his hand out for you to take. When you swing your leg over, he takes you in his arms and set you on the ground. His face a few inches from yours you wonder what would happen if you just closed the gap and let your lips touch. His eyes look from yours down to your lips as if he’s considering the same thing. He brings his hand up to your cheek, cupping it for a moment before he brushes something away along your cheek bone.

“You had some dirt.” He smirks, yet his hand doesn’t leave your face.

“Could you two keep it in your pants for a few more hours?” you hear Jimin whining from the lookout. You both pull away and laugh as you start walking towards the group. Abby pulls beers out of her backpack passing them out to everyone. You know you probably shouldn’t considering you haven’t eaten but you know she’ll call you out if you don’t. Every part of your body wants to look at Jungkook, wants to know if he’s looking at you.

After the instructors take a group picture of you all at the lookout, you get back on your horses and head back to the stables. Tae and Jimin decided to lead a sing-along on the way back, which you were thankful for. You needed time to process all the flirting between you and Jungkook. You clearly didn’t mind it but, part of your brain was screaming to slow down. Jungkook seemed like someone you could actually fall in love with and that scared the fuck out of you. You didn’t even feel that way the entire time you were with Ben, which was even scarier. The thought of you and Jungkook cuddling tonight makes you feel things you haven’t felt in a long time. A mixture of nerves and excitement confusing your brain. Hopefully, the rest of the day would ease your mind about the decision you already made.

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 A few hours later you’re all sitting around the campfire. Ben and his group of friends return from their activities and you instantly begin drinking more than you should. Each drop of tequila making your brain a little fuzzier. Jungkook walks over to you, with a shot of tequila and a hot dog.

You’re eyes widen as notice the shot, “For me!?” you squeal reaching out for the shot of tequila, only to be smacked on the hand.

“No, you need to eat before you have more Tequila,” he chuckles as he hands you the hotdog. You roll your eyes dramatically.

“You’re no fun, Kookie,” You pout and you take note of the way the nickname makes him blush. You want to make him blush like that a million times more. You wonder what other nicknames make him blush.

“Awe princess, I can be fun. I promise.” He reassured you, licking his lips as he puts the shot of Tequila to his lips and tilts his head back. You know you’re staring but you can’t help it. Everything about him was pulling you in. You turn away and you eat the hotdog because he was right. You choose to ignore the fact that he paid enough attention to know that you needed to eat something. The fact that he paid that much attention at all was mind blowing to you.

As you finish eating, one of the girls that’s in Ben’s group of friends starts a game of truth or dare. She demands that everyone has to play, instantly making your roll your eyes. Abby pulls her chair up next to yours, Yoongi, Tae, and Jimin follow her lead. Jungkook decides to sit on your left. The girl who starts the game, decides she’ll go first and she picks Lucas, daring him to kiss another one of the girls in the group. You groan knowing exactly where this was heading. Tae gets picked and chooses dare, they dare him run into the river naked. You gasp when he instantly rips his shorts and shirt off and runs towards the river. Jimin, Jungkook, and Yoongi laugh so hard they can’t breath. You and Abby look at each other wide eyed when you realize why Tae wasn’t nervous about being naked. He returns from the dare, everyone gives him a  round a applause and he bows after he slides his shorts back on. He looks around the campfire and it takes you off guard when you hear your name roll off of his tongue.

You almost forget you’re playing a game, you nervously look around to see Ben clearly talking about you to one of his friends. Which only pisses you off, “Dare.” You decide confidently.

Devilish doesn’t even begin to describe the mischievous look that paints Tae’s face.

“I dare you…” His eyes flick over to Jungkook, “give Jungkook a lap dance.”

All you hear are gasps and laughter from the people you barely know. You’re heart starts to pound, but the Tequila coursing through your veins is forcing you out of your seat. Tae pulls out his phone and plays F&MU by Kehlani without being asked, almost as if he’s had this planned all along. You take a deep breath and you position yourself in front of Jungkook. He smirks lifting one brow, almost as if challenging you.

You place one leg on either side of his lap, you lean back rolling your hips forwards. He licks his lips looking down at you. The people around you start to cheer you on, hoping to get more from you. You lean forward still grinding into him, kissing his neck and making your way up to the spot just below his ear. You stand up as the chorus starts and you turn around, sitting back down on his lap. You lean back into him as you take his hands, sliding them down your body. You slowly grind to the beat of the song. You giggle as you hear multiple people yell ‘get a room’ jokingly. Jungkook, pulls you into him close placing a kiss to your neck before helping you get off of him and back to your seat. You compose yourself enough to ask Jimin truth or dare, he picks truth, and you bite at your lip as you decide what to ask him.

“Who is the sexiest person here?” You smirk already anticipating his answer.

He bites his lip as he thinks on his answer, laughing to himself when he decides, “After watching you give that lap dance and Tae skinny dip, I think it’s a tie.” He admits with laughter.

Everyone starts to laugh and agree, which instantly made you shy. The game was fun and you’re glad you played. Until one of the girls picks Ben, who of course picks dare. You take a deep breath, and Jungkook’s hand brushes yours. You don’t need to look at him to know that this was his way of comforting you.

She dares Ben to take a body shot off of her. You watch in disgust as he licks up her body in    familiar way, and makes out with her longer than necessary. You want to feel unphased by it.  You wished you didn’t feel anything at all. You’re heart starts to ache as you watch him pull her into his lap when he’s finished. You breathe easy thinking the worst was over, until he chooses another girl to give him a lap dance as a dare.

You instantly turn away watching the girl awkwardly squirm on top of your ex. Suddenly you feel yourself being yanked out of your seat. A large tattooed hand pulling your towards the table of drinks.

“I think you earned that shot.” Jungkook smirks at you as he pours two shots, handing you one and taking one for himself. He taps his shot to yours and you both shoot it back. The game starts to die off and everyone starts to split up into their groups. Some people head to their tents to take care of the built-up sexual tension the game caused. You stay up for about another hour drinking with Tae, Jimin, and Jungkook. Jimin being a drunk and giggly mess, and Tae being way too loud for how late it was.

“Okay boys, I really need to sleep,” you stand up and Tae tries pulling you back down to him, you giggle as you shake him off, “you should go to sleep too!” You yell as you walk towards the tent. You unzip the tent and bed over to slide inside. You sit on Jungkook’s blow up mattress as you slide your shirt over your head, and your pants off your legs. You reach for the shirt on top of your backpack, knowing that it was Jungkooks. You smirk to yourself as you put it on. Maybe you were poking the bear but really you just hated to wear pants when you slept and his shirt was long enough to be a dress. You pull your pillow and your sleeping bag to the mattress as you lay down. Maybe 15 minutes later Jungkook is unzipping the tent to join you. You see that he has two bottles of water and Aspirin. You’re stomach gets that familiar feeling again, realizing that for the second time today, he’s thinking about your needs.

“Sit up.” He demands and you listen, “So obedient.” He rasps, instantly making you press your legs together. You roll your eyes as he hands you two pills and a bottle of water.

“Drink a lot of that, okay?” He points in your direction; you start to chug it giving him a thumbs up. He tilts his head to the side giggling quietly. He crawls to the place beside you on the air mattress. Laying on his side, his arm propping him up with his head resting his hand.

You finish most of the water, and you set it to the side of the mattress knowing you would wake up with a dry mouth. Jungkook watches as you unzip the sleeping bag to make it big enough to cover the both of you. He smiles when he realizes what you’re doing. You lay down on your back, trying not the think about what might happen in the next few minutes. The air mattress bounces lightly as he closes the small gap between you and him. His fingers tug at the hem of his shirt on your body.

“Comfy?” He raises his eyebrows and you instantly blush. You nod your head so delicately, almost begging him not to be mad at you.

“I’m glad, I could definitely get used to seeing you in my clothes.” His voice is quiet and soft and it melts you like butter. His fingers slide up to your jaw and he gently tugs your face so that you’re looking at him. You swallow hard when your eyes meet his lust filled ones. Without even thinking you’re lifting your lips to his. His hand wraps behind your head lacing into your hair as his lips meet yours. The kiss is slow and you can tell he’s teasing you. You bring his bottom lip between your teeth, earning a low growl from him.

He pulls back and he starts to suck and kiss his way down your neck. You can’t help the moans that leave your lips. Each kiss he left felt like a tiny jolt of electricity. His fingers brush the spot on your thigh just below your (his) t-shirt. He slides the t-shirt up until he can see the top of your panties. His tongue runs along his lower lip and his eyes get heavy. You buck your hips up against his hand, you need him to touch you. You feel his chest as he laughs at your impatience.

“So needy,” He looks back at you, with a smirk playing on his lip, “What do you want, baby? Use your words.” He encouraged before kissing your lips softly.

“Please touch me.” He smiles as his hand ducks under the hem of your panties.

His middle finger presses against your clit with a feather light touch, making you want to scream already. He nudges your head with his nose so he can have full access to your neck. His fingers starts to circle softly around your clit before slowly running through your wetness. You know you’re wet, honestly you don’t think you’ve ever been this wet in your life. Jungkook groans as one of his fingers slides inside you.

“So fucking wet for me princess.”

You have to cover your mouth when he switches from one finger to two. His thumb dancing on your clit as he slides in and out of you. You sit up on your elbows watching him, turning every few seconds to bite at his jaw bone.

“Feels so good,” You moan into ear, he adds another finger.

You throw your head back, your back arching off of the mattress as he hits all the right spots. You’re body is hot and it feels like a coil inside of you is about to snap, you don’t stop the moan that falls from your lips.

“Come on pretty girl, cum for me.” He begs and you do, you nearly scream as you come apart on his fingers. He slows down and lets you ride out your high. He brings his fingers to his mouth to clean them, and the sight alone makes you wet all over again. You bite your lip when you realize he’s rock hard beneath his lose basketball shorts. You start to reach out for it but he laces his fingers with yours instead. You look up at him with the saddest face, full pout and scrunched up eyebrows, like someone just told you your dog died. He tries not to but he has to chuckle.

“I want you in my mouth.” You whine.

He laughs as he lays on his back, pulling you to his chest to cuddle. You look up at him with wide eyes.

“Why won’t you let me? You don’t want me to?”

His eyes get big and he takes your cheeks in between his hands, “Of course I want those pretty lips wrapped around my cock,” he coos with a kiss to your nose, “but I want you to be sober before we do anything else.”

You know that you’re not nearly as drunk as he thinks you are, but still it’s refreshing to have a man consider your mental space before his own sexual needs. Again, something you had never experienced.

You lay your head down on his chest, and his fingers work their way through your hair. Gently massaging your scalp. You couldn’t understand why everything he did made your body react in a way that was unknown. Maybe because you had never been with someone where there was actually chemistry. You feel his finger under your chin, as your head is pulled up to look at him. He cups your cheek, lightly brushing your cheekbone with his thumb. If you didn’t know any better, you would think that he loved you. That’s how he looked at you. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the post orgasmic bliss, but that’s what you felt. You swear he feels it too.

He swallows hard before pressing a soft kiss to your lips, “You’re the most beautiful thing, I’ve ever seen in my life.” He whispers with adoring eyes. You instantly look away, feeling the tears starting to form in your eyes. He wipes one away as it falls down your cheek.

“What’s wrong? I shouldn’t have said that?” He questions himself and you shake your head quickly. He was wrong, so wrong.

“No, I just…” you inhale trying to decide how to word what you were feeling, “I don’t think anyone’s ever talked to me like that.”

He nods, and you see anger cross his features for a moment and then leans back, his hand running up and down your spine. You lay your head back on his chest, letting the sound of his heartbeat lure you into a deep sleep. “He’s a piece of shit for not realizing how incredible you are, I hope you know that.” He whispers.

You let out a quiet sigh in agreement, falling asleep a few moments later.

A/n: Please dont forget to let me know your thoughts!! Also let me know if you want to be on the taglist! <3

[cosmiclatte28]

Twinkle Trust (Yuta x reader)

hello! I am here with a fluff happy end Yuta imagine / one shot! 

So far Yuta has been the character for my angst stories, but not here! 

warning : none i guess. YUTA IS A FLIRT HERE, BUT A NICE ONE. He is also sweet.

ENJOY!! 

You reach the front door of your best friend’s house. Passing the weight of the flavoured milk tea from one hand to another, you wait while mumbling how slow your friend is despite his young age.

You almost press the bell again just to be stopped when the doorknob turns and a young man with a big apologetic smile greets you through his fluffy pink bangs.

You gulp from the unfamiliar face; you remember Mark did not look like that he’s definitely taller and hit the gym more frequently than Mark. And when he flashed a second smile, you swore that was the most beautiful smile you’ve ever seen in the entire universe. You never knew a man could give a gummy smile that charming.

“Oh! Sorry we were watching a film and did not hear your ring.”

“You must be (y/n)!” he opens the door wider and naturally offers you his hand to transfer the heavy drinks. You thank him for realizing the heavy load you have and being a gentleman for helping you take over it.

“I’m Yuta, oof these drinks are heavy I wonder why Mark told you to grab these all by yourself.” He questions as the two of you come into the house and drop the beverages to cool for a while in the refrigerator.

“Nah… That won’t happen between Mark and me, we’re as close as a sibling and he won’t bother making me bring all those heavy things.” You giggle, realizing how Mark never treat you special as a girl.

“Don’t trust him then,” Yuta smirks

It came out of the blue, but it triggers something inside your mind. Your body freeze and you popped your eyes out.

“Woah, funny.” You fiddle with the rope on your sweater, “That’s exactly what Mark said about you.”

Yuta grins and leans back over one of the counters, “Interesting! Mark is my favourite brother here.”

There’s something intriguing coming from this man with a healing smile, some sort of invitation to “come and try me, proof it whether Mark is right or wrong”

“Well, don’t be afraid… I am not harmful. Now shall we join the others. I’m pretty sure they’ll look for us if in five minutes we’re not back yet.” Yuta winks and you laugh from his quirky remark.

“Sure! I also want to beat Mark for not sending anyone of you to pick me up from the bubble tea place.”

“Well next time, you can always call me, and I’ll carry them for you.” Yuta walks in front of you and the two of you ascend to the second floor.

Mark and the boys greet you with big cheers, it’s been a while since you come to join Mark and his gang’s monthly movie night. Usually you join him and went for a sleep over, but as the two of you mature you skipped that part to keep you and your friendship relationship healthy.

Mark now lives alone for half a year, since his parents are away for a business trip. It’s been three months since you last step into this house. Lately you’re busy with college and you only meet Mark on impromptu library meet up, sudden appearance in your flat while he brings Chinese take outs, and of course whenever you two cross paths on a class or just between breaks.

“Hey there you are! Thought you’re still queueing for the drinks.” Doyoung remarks as he engulfs you into a hug. He’s one of the savage members that acts as if he doesn’t care about you when he’s the most overprotective one about your wellbeing.

“Well if Mark here knows how to treat me like a lady, I won’t be this late! Imagine walking two blocks under the scorching sun with one heavy bag of 10 drinks?! He did not even open the door for me and instead Yuta here, the sweet smiling man you all hide from me, is the one helping me.” You quacked as a matter of fact. You throw Mark a death glare and the man only pulls out his innocent smile and peace sign.

“Let’s have Johnny and Winwin take the drinks upstairs.” Jaehyun commands from a blanket fortress he is comfortable in.

“Oh wow didn’t see you there…” You shook your head and took a dive into that one empty space. The one and only spot always reserved for you, the right-hand side of the sofa.

“Remote is yours I guess; coz we’ve chose a lot of film and you’re coming back after like three months?” Taeyong tosses you the remote he has been holding.

The movie room Mark’s parents made for the group is spacious. With one big screen and a projector, one big sofa for seven adults, a fluffy carpet and of course four big bean bags. The lighting option also provide a calming and comfortable ambience. The built-in speakers are also enough to consider this room as a cinema!

You make yourself comfortable and choose a favourite movie of yours. The opening song echoes through the room and as the three guys distribute the drink, Jungwoo dimmed the lights.

Yuta takes the empty spot next to yours, since there was no other room and Mark doesn’t seem to not allow him. Though you did glance for a second at Mark, like naturally asking him through a glance if this is okay. Like a good brother, Mark frowned and wants to just jump and sit between the two of you. He doesn’t like the flirty look Yuta is giving to you, but who is he to forbid Yuta?!

An hour and a half into action, you found yourself already leaning so close to Yuta’s shoulder. You did not realize if that’s because of the movie, or you’re sleepy, or just because your body is attracted to him. You think it’s the tiredness that made you naturally leaning into whoever is beside you. In the dark room, you feel his warm hand creeps slowly into your shoulder, when you did not move nor reject him, he confidently pulls you closer into his embrace.

Your fingers press the blanket’s edges tightly as you feel Yuta’s hand slowly rubs soothing circle into your shoulder. His eyes were glued to the screen and not for once he spares a glance to you. You’re no longer focus on the film, bleh you remember every detail already and that’s why you’re so distracted with this tingling fluttery thing Yuta did to you.

You did not slap his hands nor pull away; no this is a different sense of affection and attention. His touches are not harassing, not naughty. His ghosting fingers are just tracing friendly lines over your arms, giving it some frictions and attentions. The quick gasp escaping from your mouth did not even surprised him. He only stops for a second, thinking you did not like it, but your stupid hand automatically reaches for his and the Japanese boy smirks.

He knows you did not mind, you like it. You’re blushing so hard right now, you feel so embarrassed and you just hope the sofa could eat you alive right now and then disappear.

Sadly that couldn’t happen and you’re still there going red in the dim room surrounded by ten men who are preoccupied by the film or at least by their foods. Judging how Jungwoo is pouring the popcorn bowl into his mouth and looking for more chips to swallow.

“You choose a nice movie (y/n)!” Johnny surprises you when the ending credit rolls and the lights are bright again.

You did not realize the movie had ended; well your mind is busy processing your heart. Yuta had stopped drawing abstract circles on your arms, no he stopped that long way ago. However, you feel your skin longing for his finger tips again. He is already sitting back in his normal position pretending he is focused on the movie, or he really did. No body caught the steamy action between you and Yuta, no body even has the slightest hint that your red cheeks were not result of the hot room. They’re blunt or they’re good brothers who did not want to be a cockblock.

“Shall we go out and eat? I’m hungry and I’m craving sushi!” Jungwoo breaks the silence since some of the boys are starting to yawn.

“Great I love sushi!” Yuta enthusiastically jumps from his couch.

“You wanna join?” Mark asks you, to which you nod eagerly.

“Let’s go, how do we split the cars?” You grab your phone and tidy up your shirt.

“You can join me in my car; I have one free seat.” Yuta quickly takes you as his partner and guess what, no one else is going into our car.

You thought they were being so considerate, or just don’t want to be a third wheeler.

No. apparently Yuta drives a two-seater sport car! Sexy!

The short journey to the sushi bar several blocks away from Mark’s house is heart-fluttering. Yuta looks so cool driving in his sport car, looking so ethereal when the wind blows his hairs through the open sunroof. You exchange laugh, jokes, and get to know each other well.

“So, we’re here!” He smiles to you after parking his car and closing the sunroof back.

You smile, “Thanks for the ride,”

“Ah the ride was nothing, what do I get for making the trip entertaining and the movie time .. how do I say it- fluttering?” he leans his body boldly to face you.

You giggle, this man is so bold and you did not wonder why Mark told you to be careful with him.

“Okay, what do you want? I can give you something for being a good companion today.” You give up and give in.

Yuta brings his hand to one lose strand of hair on your face. His big hand tucks them nicely behind your ear, then he whispers by your ear shell. His deep voice resonates and vibrates through your bones.

“Mind to give me your number?”

You feel goose bumps and shiver down your spine. This man over here, sure can make a girl or even man froze and die from heart attack. He is so unexpected and unpredictably flirty.

You smirk and open your palm, “Want me to type it in, or you want me to read it out loud?”

Yuta brings his gummy smile back and hands you his phone. You easily go to his phone book and add your number.

You quickly type in your number and name it under your favourite nickname.

Your phone then rings and you save his number to your phone.

“Angel?” Yuta questions when he sees you type in Angel as his contact name.

You shrug your shoulder, “Coz your first appearance was helping me? Then your smile really heals me.”

He nods his head slowly, ”I like that, hmm cute.”

“And what did you put in as your contact number?” Yuta scrolls his phone when you return it to him.

“Twinkle,” he reads in confusion but a small smile pops through his lips, “twinkle? Coz like your entire nature is dazzling in my eyes?”

You gasp and give him a thumb up “That is a better explanation than what I have in mind! I simply wrote Twinkle coz I see twinkle in your eyes when we’re together. I know it sounds lame, but we’ll go with yours.”

Yuta’s smile grows wider and you wish time can stop there, because whenever this sweet man smiles, you feel all of your problem disappear!

“Twinkle and Angel, hmm can’t imagine what cute pet names we will have when we’re together one day.” Yuta winks and leaves you speechless inside the car. He stands outside the door, laughing for a moment when he peeks into the window and sees you still shocked.

He waltz to your door and like a gentleman he is, opens the door for you.

You realize you look so stupid and probably everyone is already inside, quickly you step out of the car and walk side by side with Yuta into the restaurant.

The rest of the night, you sit beside Mark and Taeyong. Yuta takes the vacant seat beside Winwin and Jungwoo. You believe if he sits next to you, you won’t be able to focus on the dinner.

Mark keeps you entertained and ensures you’re eating well since the men here basically gobble things up. You laugh at Mark, for you know you will not go home unless your stomach is full.

Amidst the chaotic jokes and story time from the boys, your eyes meet Yuta’s and he just stares back at you while smirking and shrugging his shoulder lightly. He then focuses back on the fun and loud conversations, while you… you’re once again questioning your beating heart. Come on why are you like a teenage girl?!

Mark drives you home that night, since the other men are still new friends for you. Mark felt he is responsible for you. You thank him though and the ride back home was enough for you to catch on with one another.

You wave him good bye and as you’re about to step into your house, Mark stops you in your track.

“You know what, forget the time I told you to be careful around Yuta. He’s the most trust-worthy guy in the squad. Good night!” Mark pats your shoulder and dutifully returns to his car and with a big grin, he waves to you and presses his gas back to the road.  

the end ✨

[tosikoarts]

SFW Alphabet | Shiraishi Yoshitake

Long live the King! You can check tosikowrites tag for more. Warning: there’s a lot under the cut.

A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)

Relationship for Shiraishi is more about friendship with intimacy than a long tradition-based order of courtship and conventions. His affection does not manifest in standard gestures like buying flowers or singing serenades, acting all gentlemanly and saving the day pompously like a romantic novel protagonist. If he ever does anything from list above, it is his daydreaming that he doesn’t try to bring to life.

One of Shiraishi’s main goal in the relationship is to keep his partner happy, and the main sign that they are happy is their shrill laughter. It doesn’t matter if they are laughing because stray toothy animal bit his head or because the joke was funny (yay!), mission accomplished and he is satisfied.  Seeing them cry is worse than being hit hundred times with a baton.

Every single soul in the one kilometer radius know whom Shiraishi loves and why he loves them and how amazing, adorable, lovely, cool they are. Sugimoto and Asirpa are making earplugs because Shiraishi can’t shut the hell up. He managed to piss off the men who kidnapped him with bragging about his loved one. Kiroranke puts maximum effort not to bury him in the nearest snowdrift. His admiration doesn’t die down through years.

B = Best friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)

The best friend to get dumb with. Sing inappropriate songs, prank others, annoy boring elders and all this jazz. His jokes are never offensive because Shiraishi wants to have good time only but they are unpredictable and never repetitive. His instinct of self-preservation goes m.i.a. in the process so it’s literally life-saving to have a reliable person by the side.

If you need a friend to gossip with Shiraishi is you best choice. He got hot tea on everyone, I mean e v e r y o n e, from old man Hijikata to naïve Koito and he needs best friend to spill it. Damn, Shiraishi is definitely that bih with neon acrylics and golden hoops.

Probably the friend that introduce you to people and brings you into new circles. Wide range of characters, social statuses, affiliations gives a chance to meet potential partners. There is one unspoken rule though: you come here as Shiraishi’s bff, you leave this place as Shiraishi’s bff.

Speaking of which, he comes across as possessive friend. Restriction of other’s social circle and constant need in validation aren’t his behavior traits, but Shiraishi is sensitive to subtle changes in communication. Sole possibility of losing the established connection gives him extreme anxiety. To avoid it he can make concessions and sacrifice his own interests for them.

C = Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)

Eeh, indifferent? He doesn’t seem like a big fan of cuddling but will do it on occasions. When lights are down and they are in a private of the room, Shiraishi may spoon them to feel the comfort of another person and a little bit of safety he finds in their touch. He doesn’t have a preferred position as well: whatever his loved one wants he will do without hesitation.

D = Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

The closest home equivalent that Shiraishi knows is a dark prison cell and this is how he sees the stability in its best light. Yep, same food every day, funny inadequacies behind the adjacent wall, and a guy in not-so-sexy uniform who checks his asshole now and then. What a paradise. Seriously, he needs time to get used to concept of comfort zone. Maybe, after few years Shiraishi himself will offer to find a cozy place for both of them. Average cook. Doesn’t know how to hold a broom.

E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

Breaking up with Shiraishi is a whole three-ring circus because he is hot and then cold, yes and then no. Get ready to prepare sad clown look for both you and him because it will be a long story: as soon as the idea settles in his head, Shiraishi will turn into giant wreck. Everybody around notices him walking in circles as well as asking Sugimoto how to properly show person that he is not interested. Of course, he ignores rational “just tell them, set a record straight”. Of course, Shiraishi plays dumb and tries to distance himself in all ways possible and impossible. The only way to end this agony is to break the relationship yourself before the mutual sympathy and respect turn into disgust and tension.

F = Fiance(e) (How do they feel about commitment? How quick would they want to get married?)

Doesn’t experience a burning passion to get married but doesn’t completely discards this possibility either. If person seems to be the only one, the meant one, Shiraishi will pop a question after 3-4 years of stable relationship. Cruel push and pull game, sudden break ups and get backs together kill his will to settle down. He may stay with them but Shiraishi will never bring up thought of marriage, wedding bells, and family.

G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

Even the prison could not knock softness out of Shiraishi: he is utterly gentle with his partner, dreading hurting them or jeopardize their life with the hunt of tattooed skins. Choosing the right words is a little more complicated so translation of an emotional mess in his head does not always convey implied sentiment. That’s the reason why Shiraishi may be unintentionally harsh when it comes to serious conversations: he is torn between being tender and showing firm character.

H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?)

Somehow, loves hugs but rarely initiate them. He is almost always cold, his skin feels cold and rough like papyrus paper, therefore, his partner frequently serves as a living heater. When they are busy with work or chores, Shiraishi catches their hand and embraces their arm, practically immobilizing it. Hints fly left and right when Shiraishi wants a hug: he really comes to the partner with puppy eyes and  index finger pointing towards one another because no, he won’t go for it himself, he want his loved one to do it.

I = I love you (How fast do they say the L-word?)

Mentally, he already did it when they met for first time but it takes at least a month for Shiraishi to say three magic words aloud. Two would be even better. He's not serious enough to wait for the friendly phase of a romantic relationship when people have already got used to each other. The longer the relationship lasts, the more serious Shiraishi gets though. You can hear it in the changing of his voice when his playful “I love you so so much” shifts to calm and earnest confession.

J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous?)

Easily jealoused walking disaster that will follow his partner like a poodle if they give him a reason to doubt their faithfulness. Sometimes Shiraishi overreacts, he even thought Sugimoto was looking at his loved one somehow weirdly but quickly brushed this idea off just for it to come back to him next day. Shiraishi gets extremely needy and tries to show everybody that this is HIS person. He is NOT sharing. They love ME. He gives them extra kisses, hugs, grabs their hand and squeezes it few times, smiles at them as much as he physically can.

If his loved one is the one being overly flirtatious, Shiraishi feels awful. Wave of insecurity knocks him off the feet and he doesn’t know what to do. He is overthinker so without proper explanation Shiraishi comes up with the worst scenarios possible. In this case he distance himself until person reassures him in their relationship.

K = Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

In the beginning, Shiraishi seems the worst kisser in the world. He has little experience, almost no experience to be honest: yujo do not have time to teach clients the art of kissing. So, yeah, he is pretty average, goofy, sloppy and eager. Wants to kiss everywhere anyhow.  

After a little bit of training his kisses become more sophisticated, and Shiraishi himself doesn’t try to jump on his partner with smooches. He is still impatient when they put their hands on him and tends to get touchy even in public places. When Shiraishi gets in the mood for kissing session, he is unstoppable.

There is a sweet spot right under the earlobe kissing which send Shiraishi on the cloud nine. One kiss and he surrounds to the will of the partner. Ask whatever you want. Besides that he doesn’t care where to be kissed. Likes to give his partner gentle pecks on the nose and cheeks.

L = Little ones (How are they around children?)

If you remember chart going around the Tumblr with categories like “wine aunt, great at babysitting, mediocre at babysitting” Shiraishi would fall both in “God is dead, house is on fire” and “Is a baby”. Kids absolutely love him because they are on the same level *cough cough* and he is overall funny guy unlike the most adults around. Shiraishi likes active games and never sits still. For every crying child he got a candy and few tricks in his sleeve. He would love to be a father one day so he has few more minions to annoy grumpy people.

M = Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)

People who sleep in together stay together. This is the rule of Yoshitake house. No matter what time his partner wakes up Shiraishi wakes up later. Nine in the morning? He is in the bed until noon. Three in the afternoon? He is still sleeping, squeezing his partner tightly in his arms. Even after waking up Shiraishi stays under the blanket. He playfully asks the loved one if they want to keep him company and cuddle too but if they are in hurry, he will lazily crawl out of bed and cook something for them.

N = Night (How are nights spent with them?)

Prefers to spend night outside gambling or drinking, skinny-dipping, lying in the grass and telling fables with varying percentage of truth. In the cold season Shiraishi still likes to go downtown but mainly to meet old friends and have dinner with them and his loved one. Rarely he chooses to stay in the comfort of home. Shiraishi teaches his partner different board games, and soon playing turns into a competition. From time to time Shiraishi loses on purpose, gifting sweet victory in shogi/igo/karuta to the most significant person in his life.

O = Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

You don’t have to ask anything unless you want to spend next hour listening to Shiraishi’s biography. He will tell you about the relationship with parents, about childhood scar on the knee, about search of Sister Miyazawa, and what a bastards his cellmates were. The list is endless, and every day Shiraishi remembers one more story he forgot to tell. There are only two things that can stop him: firm “no, not now, Shiraishi” from the partner and lack of mutual openness on their part.

P = Patience (How easily angered are they?)

It is impossible to piss Shiraishi off. His ability to reduce everything to a joke does not help only in advanced cases where person wanted to break his neck from the beginning. Even when his patience runs out, Shiraishi cannot explode in anger, he just grimaces, stomps, and spits sarcasm. In everyday life, he avoids conflicts as much as possible and does everything to find a convenient compromise so you won’t catch him slipping. He would rather go for a walk and leave another person to cool down than get involved in heated argument.

Q = Quizzes (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

He doesn’t remember shit if his partner doesn’t indicate that it is important information. Worth remembering. Shiraishi, please, listen. At the same time he notices slight changes in their appearance, from new haircut to ring, and keeps in mind such details like eye color, favorite clothes, maybe, particular qualities like never buttoning shirt up completely or writing notes on the wrist. Anniversaries? Baby, he doesn’t remember what day it is today. Just give up.

R = Remember (What is their favorite moment in your relationship?)

The first kiss. Not only did it happen completely by accident due to a bet, but it was so awkward and unexpected that Shiraishi forgot how kissing works. Yep, he froze feeling their warm lips on his, only eyebrows slightly raised up in disbelief. After this incident, Shiraishi could not stop thinking about them. God, he is disgrace, to embarrass yourself in front of the person you like. It could not be otherwise. To remedy the situation, Shiraishi pulled himself together, remembered the cheesiest lines in the reserve, and suggested to try again because he was astonished by their daring attitude. He has no idea what happened after that but that spontaneous kiss with a touch of childishness and innocence stayed with him forever.

Oh, one more moment! Meeting them after coming back from Karafuto. Honestly, Shiraishi didn’t believe he will make it out alive. Ogata or Kiroranke could slice his throat, hide the body, and tell Asirpa he left with his tail between his legs. Therefore, it is miracle to see their adorable face again.

S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)

Let’s be real, he is the one who needs protection. He also needs some ass-whooping for getting in troubles regularly too but that is not the point. Shiraishi rarely stands up against obviously strong opponents and chooses famous Joestar backup plan – run for his life with loved one under his arm. Another option includes involvement of threatening allies, mostly Sugimoto, to save them both. Sometimes courage overwhelms him, and Shiraishi comes up with risky but bold plan how to save them without outside help but it happens much less often.

T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

Most of the time, Shiraishi hopes that everything will be fine by itself, every event will run like clockwork without excessive effort. Dates are unpretentious: no fancy restaurants, exquisite gifts, long intricate confessions of endless love, etc. To his credit, Shiraishi takes chores more or less seriously and does his best. For the anniversaries he transforms in person you've never seen before: dressed immaculately Shiraishi holds a small bouquet of bright moss phlox and box of sweet sakuramochis, his face glows with happiness and love, however, you can sense a nervousness behind the wide smile. On days so special, he is afraid to ruin the mood with usual tomfoolery.

U = Ugly (What would be some bad habits of theirs?)

Canonically, Shiraishi is not the tidiest person around. For some it may be stumbling block because constant battle with desire to throw him in hot springs and scrub ingrained dirt with the hardest sponge can be too tiresome. Also Shiraishi bites his nails until they bleed as well as pulls the hangnails until his fingers start to hurt.

A sense of proportion leaves Shiraishi as soon as a bottle of sake appears on the horizon. Even though he is funny and harmless drinker, he goes overboard with alcohol to end up throwing out behind the nearest pine.

Little lies always slip through the conversation no matter what it is about. When the truth is revealed, it is too late to blame him.

V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)

Shiraishi doesn’t care about his appearance but likes to get compliments on it. He knows bunch of tricks how to remove different stains from clothes in the wild and doesn't know how to avoid them. One look is enough for Shiraishi: he could wear his old prison uniform for life time because it is strangely comfortable and universal for any event. Except the pursuit by guards, of course.

Has mixed feelings about his tattoos. Living with them is to sit on a powder keg: you never know when the new man with the gold rush will try to scalp you alive.

W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

Gets very, very attached to the friends and loved ones so break up feels like punch in the gut. Unlike the rest, Shiraishi basically refuses to let go. He gets clingy, keeps acting like nothing happened, like they are still the best friends, just to cover up growing emptiness inside. No matter how hard he ignores it, Shiraishi can feel how part of him fades. Sometimes even abrupt refusal doesn’t work, but it’s simply his way to deal with sadness.  After few weeks, he has an insight that things will never be the same and that when it hits him. Shiraishi tries to distance himself and it takes all of his strength since by this time he becomes easily distracted, irritated, and whiny. He needs months to get over it.

If they died or were killed, Shiraishi puts effort to maintain his clown image. Only closest people can notice small detail that give away his sorrow and melancholy. Doesn't attempt to get revenge. The time to recover increases to year.

X = Xtra (A random headcanon for them.)

Do you think Shiraishi went to jail so often because of negligence? Partially, yes. Besides the fact Shiraishi is being hopeless fool, he finds prison cell a great place to take a break from fleeting life. If you think about it time slows down behind bars. There’s no point to worry what tomorrow will bring, how to survive and make it through another scuffle, and his impressive skills guarantee him easy escape.

Shiraishi has joint hypermobility syndrome which helps him bend joints at unusual angles and even pull bones out of the fossae. Prolonged arthralgia is a side effect that Shiraishi had to deal with from the first conscious days. There are days when the pain becomes so excruciating that he just wants to lie still and stare at the sky for 24 hours.

Y = Yuck (What are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner?)

Continuous scolding when there is a reason and when there is not. Yes, with his behavior it is difficult to resist the urge to say a couple of strong words or raise your voice, and Shiraishi is totally okay with it until rebuke becomes daily tradition.

Shiraishi's thoughts are always in motion, usually Brownian motion, his body twitches even when he tries to sit calmly in one place so stagnation in any form would be the death of him. This includes repetitive thoughts, boring behavior, and general passivity.

Shiraishi is genuinely upset if his partner doesn't like children. This is an inexplicable feeling, he really hurts if they ignore little ones or, worse, openly express dislike for kids.

Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habit of theirs?)

Prepare yourself to unexpected awakening in the middle of the night, you will have a lot of them. Shiraishi keeps running from guardians of the law even in his sleep: he kicks, turns, throws his arms out to the sides for the most part of the night. Accidental elbow blow to the nose is not uncommon either. Worst of all, he does not wake up after that!

In the morning Shiraishi likes to sneak closer to his loved one and just presses him onto them. Like, completely. He throws his leg over them, hugs them, presses his cheek to their back, and if it feels just right in winter, in summer such cuddle can be a real test.

Abrupt sleep schedule changes do not bother Shiraishi at all. His organism is so adapted to the crazy lifestyle that he stays fresh even after sleepless night, after waking up at 3 a.m. and going to bed at 3 p.m.

[2bstudioblog]

Konami’s wheels are turning... slowly

Lot’s of interesting news heading to our heads this Monday from what I heard from Yong Yea’s video about Konami wanting to outsource their IP’s to 3rd parties.

Obviously, Akira Yamaoka has kinda given away a strong hint that he’s working on a project with Bloober which in this case would be the long awaited SH remake or the direction they had with PT before it got cancelled. Akira Yamaoka also decided that (too late) he wanted to amend the article from his interview and release it later down the line. It’s very unusual that these news happen, but we all know Yamaoka is most famous for his music in Silent Hill.

Which brings me to a funny story about my own involvement of a Silent Hill game. I mentioned this on a podcast that I was part of 2 Konami-owned IP’s that went into another direction and killing off their franchises which have been like dead bodies in a morgue for the last 7 years.

I got the request to write industrial-metal music for a Silent Hill (of course at this time I only knew the IP and their most famous version of the game has been Silent Hill 2.) game. First I was of course very excited to be part of the series, but I jumped to early until I found out it was a Pachinko-machine (A japanese style pinball-game mixed with a touch-screen and a one-armed bandit and a slot-machine in one.), and my heart sank a little. I think I produced 4-5 cues for the machine, but I’m glad that nobody will be able to hear my “mediocre” masterpieces because all you would hear are metal-balls falling into a tray. But the thing about this machine, it had taken cut-scenes from Silent Hill 2, upscaled or even re-mastered/remade the graphics which would have looked great if it was its own game. But it was the same thing they’ve done with all their other IPs when those transfer over to this kind of entertainment. All what was left of it, Jim Sterling turned the game into a Meme and all I can hear is the -”HIT THE LEVER!” and the effects overpowering the music behind it. But I’m glad it didn’t go further then that. Technically here, Silent Hill(s) died with the arrival of the pachinko-slot machine and the series have tried to re-establish itself ever since.

Another game I was a part of was a Castlevania (Dracula in Japan) themed Pachinko-slot machine, with the revolutionary phrase “Erotic Violence” in it’s PR material and video-commercial. I mean, they took the music production part of this machine very seriously because I wasn’t aware of the “EV” part. I just thought it would be a machine praising the history of Castlevania. I was assigned to re-write and re-orchestrate a few songs from Neo-classical Metal music into more Progressive Metal style, and I was super-proud of this one because they had the sheet-music already available for me. All I had to do was re-arrange some parts for a string-quartet (1 cello, 2 violins and 1 viola) and I believe it was engineered and recorded by famed engineer Kenji Nakai who was under and working with famed engineer Mr Bruce Swedien (Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones).

From that moment me and Mr. Nakai stroke a friendship because he has a passion for Progressive Metal and he asked me if I could send more songs his way. From this we both have been incredibly busy on both of our ends, but I hope we can be able to work on something in the future. I have a feeling that might be soon.

So a long story short, Konami spent a lot of money for recording, they approved everything and we were done. But when it turned out to be a pachinko-machine and not a world-wide videogame release, I just had to facepalm myself, asking the question why they keep doing so many poor decisions. Why leaving all those fans out in the cold and really start making Castlevania mean something. This void of “lots of fancy things, but no substance” started right here...

Konami are turning their wheels a little bit too late and too slow until now. After they got rid of Hideo Kojima (Who I believe was thinking of the international-market rather than the domestic one), Konami had only one thing on their minds: Making money quick and domestically. No more wasted time on translations, straight for the gambling crowd. No need to write interesting stories. No need to introduce kids to this adult material. They wanted to earn it back as fast as possible. But we all see their decisions put them on the map as a “black-company”, who mistreat their staff, shaming them out in the office for overstaying their lunch-breaks. Moving staff from one business to another, from a programmer to a Konami-fitness Center-staff, or as a toilet-cleaner at a Konami-owned pachinko-slot gambling hall. The management of the company has been horrendous for the full-time employee. I’m glad I was not part of these later projects and only wrote stuff for them for Pro Evolution Soccer series from 2009-2012. (My work on 2010-2012 was unfortunately un-credited work. :(

Metal Gear Solid V - The Phantom Pain In My Ass

When the playable teaser called Metal Gear Solid - Ground Zeroes, came out on the PS3 and later on the PS4, it was an introduction for the new graphics engine designed by Hideo Kojima’s team, simply called The FOX-Engine. Basically this “game” was more of a demo rather than a full-product. But it looked great and with a fantastic score by Akihiro Honda, Ludvig Forssell and Harry Gregson-Williams, it had everything going for it to become something really awesome. It became a standard approach from Hideo Kojima now to produce “Playable Teasers” to show a great concept while offering a 3-4 hour short campaign, showing off the engine’s graphical capabilities.

Still, the story was under progress and I knew early on that Hideo Kojima really didn’t want to do it after he always felt that Metal Gear Solid 4 was final. But here is the curse of the die-hard fans, and I’m sorry to say it. No matter how many Iron Man movies Marvel crams out, at the 3rd movie, I started to feel “This does not feel like Iron Man anymore”. But that’s what the fans wanted and is a standard in the movie industry. Always produce a trilogy. Indiana Jones has always been the 3 movies from 1981-1989. The 4th one doesn’t really need to be called Indiana Jones at all. It was there I felt, just like with Metal Gear Solid V, they were beating a DEAD RACE HORSE.

I can’t deny the talents on display for Metal Gear Solid - Ground Zeroes. It laid down some really cool foundations for the gameplay, but I still believe the better game-series for stealth was beaten by the likes of Splinter Cell and most recently Thief. Stealth in MGS has always felt a little bit childish and I only really enjoyed MGS 1, MGS 2, tried to play MGS 3 (still have it one my Vita!) and will try to finish it. MGS 3 has felt like the TRUE Zeroes experience, with the inception of the story and lore behind the cloning of Big Boss. MGS 4 finally brought it all to a great finale and I felt, there is NOTHING more to tell. MGS 1, 2 and 4 is the Trilogy, MGS 3 serves as the Prequel and I see nothing wrong with that.

Mission - Erase Kojima’s Legacy

The making of MGS V - The Phantom Pain is kinda true to it’s title. Can you feel the nostalgia? Or are we just imagining the sensation of a Metal Gear Solid game past it’s prime? The missing link? The missing limb? And with the worlds biggest cop-out  of everything that had to do with story was completely missing.

Each mission is playing out every time the same, with an intro to a TV-show, giving away massive spoilers to who would appear in the mission, you do your thing (not so much of story, just a “go-here, do that approach, sneak back out, head to pick-up) rinse and repeat. I wonder how much of this was Kojima’s fault? I don’t think he was up to it. I’m sure he fought for more story but the big heads didn’t want to listen to what makes a MGS game a MGS game. The new management had now already played the hand to disown the man who put Konami on the map for games since the mid 80s.

The game is no longer marketed like before. The tagline “A Hideo Kojima Game” no longer exists and will never be part of Konami’s mission of erasing the person who gave them their fame and the recognition that a game carrying the name Konami was a brand of quality for any gamer out there. Me myself, personally only played PES because of the stellar animations, but its recently since 2012, I stopped playing the series. FIFA had already cheapened itself, PES likewise. Updating the graphics, but the same old animations have been recycled back to the PES3 days. Maybe there’s been an update in the collision engine, but otherwise everything stayed the same, with the huge amount of data collected from previous years of motion-capture, why do it all over when its all about the brand recognition? Saving money on processes wherever possible. Simple Math. And here it is. MGS V is not a MGS game.

We already knew it was going to be a massive budget behind the game of MGS V. But what can Konami do to save money on MGS V? They already have the Fox Engine running from Ground Zeroes. The assets for “Snake” (I’ll let you know why I put quotation-marks around it) and standard models will extend somewhat. Oh, yes, let’s save money on a character that doesn’t speak (Quiet), over-sexualize the character to start a fan-base of people who just dig character design, animated a sexy “shower” routine for the character for boys to go nuts over. What about voice? Let’s not really try to sync the voices to the mouths. Let’s have the guy from “24″ record his performances onto tape-logs. Kiefer Sutherland would have been a good “Snake”, but I understand now that you are not “SNAKE”. The game explains pretty soon at the end that you are just a Medic and all the tapes you’ve been listening to is the original Big Boss. You never where the character of Snake. Even though this all could have been handled better, Konami wanted to save money wherever possible. We also knew David Hayter was not asked or put forward to return as “The Voice of Snake”. But in this case I start to wonder myself, David Hayter might have dodged the biggest bullet in the most expensive, commercial and very controversial game of all time once Konami decided to kill everything that built up their reputation.

Even during production Kojima managed to start working on PT. The game Konami “silenced” after it was released on the PS-store. Guillermo Del Toro and his friendship with Hideo Kojima’s dream-game was put on ice. All because Kojima was about to get frozen out of the company that was according to Konami “Wasting too much bloody money”. I might get blacklisted for saying this, but once the new management started to mess with the other IPs for just domestic/gambling market, that’s where everything went sideways. Konami wasn’t treating their heritage with respect.

It took them 7 years to realize their mistake! And now, for those who wants to be part of 3rd party developers who would get a crack at a new Castlevania, a new Metal Gear Solid (remake I hope), Konami has realized that the only way they will survive (Yeah, Metal Gear Solid Survive killed them HARD) is to let other’s take over. Maybe my dream of scoring a Metal Gear Solid game would be somewhat more possible now rather than working in the confined space of limitations posed by the higher ups at Konami. Let 3rd party developers breathe life into the IPs because I know there are smarter ways to tell a story and I would gladly like to see the return of David Hayter in the seat, without having to deal with the blank-face approach that he was faced with every time he had to audition for Snake in MGS 2, 3 and 4! David Hayter is a fantastic writer, actor and voice-actor. He has the chops and I think we are all ready for either a re-make or a better follow up to MGS 2 and the time between that one and MGS 4.

[popculturebuffet]

The Casagrandes Reviews: Croaked!

Halloween Havoc rolls on as we shine a light on the other beloved holiday on October 31st, Day of the Dead! Sid and Ronnie Anne’s well meaning plan to help Sid’s sister Adelaide move on from her frog’s death ends up convincincing the small child she has power over life and death. I’m sure all big sisters do that at some point. More about the whole being dead thing under the cut. 

I’ve hyped this one up in both previous Casgrandes reviews, so as you can tell i’m excited for this one. As i’ve mentioned before but will repeat for anyone new here, I absolutley love this episode and when I did a binge a month ago for labor day of this show, it was one of the standouts by a wide margin. I only held off so long because why should Halloween be the only holiday I cover during spooky season huh? I mean yes it’s in my halloween coverage’s title but  there’s always room for incusivlity. Like jello or Wolverine. 

As for if i’m covering this show’s paired episode, the show’s episode for halloween itself...

Yeah I have nothing against the episode ITSELF, it’s just.. eh. I mean we do get bobby as a dracula and sid as a lobster, a cute dance sequence and Stanley griping about not getting to wear his costume at work, which is valid, and then wearing said taco costume at the end... it’s just wrapped around your standard “character blows off a family engagment for something that turns out to suck” plot, the only diffrence being Bobby being the best brother ever is supportive of Ronnie Anne going to a 6th grade party and gladly helps salvage the night at the end. And it wasn’t a plot I liked to begin with, so it had that going against it. And I Know, I tend to zero in on i’ve seen it before a lot.. but that’s because .. it’s OKAY to do a tried and true plot tha’ts been done a million times as long as you can do something entertaining with it.  Both She Ra and Avatar the Last Airbender are about a world tha’ts long been conquered whose long lost savior comes to turn the tide of the war.. but that’s about as much as they share in direct comparison and both are fucking fantastic for diffrent reasons entirely.  But as rehashes go that episode wasn’t BAD , just eh, and i’d rather focus on things I can write more about frankly. 

Speaking of which, yeah I love this episode, and like “Mexican Makeover” it comes from Lalo Alcaraz of La Cucharacha fame, a comic strip writer whose also the show’s consultant for mexican culture, and is part of why the former episode disapointed me: because this one was REALLY fucking good. So enough hype , pitter patter let’s get at er.  The episode opens with Rosa setting up a day of the dead altar for her Father, with Sid and Ronnie Anne wondering what’s up, with Sid out and out wondering if Day of the Dead is mexican halloween something i’m ashamed to admit I thought of it as for years and years, because i’m as white as I am dumb, and most cartoons didn’t go much beyond “the dead come back for a day” and get into the more metaphorhical aspects we get to here. I assume Coco is the exception, as is the book of life I just still need to watch both. And yes you may boo me over this, I certainly deserve this.  I do however like this line as it’s a common misconception, and gives a  lot of kids likely thinking the same about the holiday in the audience a surrogate.

Ronnie Anne also wonders what the altar’s for. Rosa, while minorly annoyed at the two is happy to edcuate explaning it’s a day for honoring your loved ones and inviting them back, metaphorically though the metaphor was lost on young me since both Mucha Lucha and El Tigre had the dead literally come back, via an altar with offerings of their favorite things. It’s a nice bit that not only explains the holiday for those in the audience who either forgot a lot of that (raises hand) or didn’t know any of that, and also helps explain how the holiday is metaphoircal, something I didn’t think about before because as we’ve established i’m kinda dumb. The point is I like it.  Sid however gets an idea: Her sister Adelaide has been down in the dumps since her Frog, Froggy died, likely named after Big the Cat’s frog but this Froggy’s penchant for running off probably just got him ran over since Adelaide lives in the city and Frogger is sadly inaccurate, as George Costanza leanred the hard way. 

So our ambigiously gay duo visit Addy, who being a 6 year old who just lost her pet is bawling her eyes out. So our duo tells her about day of the dead and they set out to get froggy’s faviorite things: From shoelaces to the hoppit, a frog themed version of the hobbit I both wish is real and belives is probably better than the second two hobbit movies, flies (with help from a dirty diaper because this show and it’s sister can’t resist poop jokes.. go with your audience I guess), and a lilypad. The result is this. 

I”m.. not going to ask why a 6 year old’s frog has the frog equilvent of a naked burt renoylds on a bearskin rug photo, froggy’s sexy secrets died with him. But unfortuntely nuance is lost on a 6 year old, so Addy assumed Froggy was actually coming back and just grieves harder now. So Sid comes up with Plan B B: bring froggy back from the dead at the old pet semetary. Though since they don’t want to defile his body they try a dead ally cat first instead.  

One Zombie Test Cat later, they decide sometimes dead is better and just go with plan b: Sid once had a goldfish that died and her parents got her a replacement, and since it worked on her, and apparently still works on Bobby, they decide to pull that. They rent a frog from the pet store. And if your asking “wait pet stores , even fictional ones, do that” and suprisingly.. no they do not, but Pete, the guy at the pet shop which is also named after him, likes Sid’s mom’s tour. Okay two questions: one is that little pete from the adventures of pete and pete all grown up? I mean I know what happend to his actor... 

But in universe we have no idea. And Brendon Small, the character and the actor, showed up on Clarence so it’s plausable. And secondly where can I get the job as owner of my own pet store near melissa joan hart doing a gator show. I may have a career goal now. 

So they sneak in subsittue froggy, and we get an adorable montage of Addy hanging out with Froggy the Second: Getting some son, eating flies (though Addy spits her’s out. She’s not Lana.), and watching the Hoppit.. as I wish to one day. I mean we see a trippy bit of it but not the actual thing.. I guess I can add seeing a full version to my small list of things related to this franchise that I only I want along with my a diffrent world-esque spinoff show following Lori and Bobby. 

Addy happily sleeps after that giant ball of adorable, and Sid and Ronnie Anne take Froggy 2 back to Creepy Guy at the Pet Store.. I mean Pete.. I mean Future Me. So Sid pats herself on the back metaphoircally for the plan.. which this being a sitcom, naturally has kinda snowballed. Now Addy thinks she has power over life and death. Guess she has the same Christmas LIst as Crow

As not to break a small child’s heart for the second time in two days, our heroines decide they have to bring back her wish list: Great Aunt Milly, Old Mr Woodburn, and Abraham Lincoln. 

Since they don’t have a time traveling phone booth, they’ll have to go with the next best thing, my boy Tio Carlos. Seriously why they don’t use this adorable nerd more is beyond me. But Carols being an adorable history nerd gladly agrees to play LIncoln for what he thinks is a play.. I mean greanted they could just tell him the truth. He’s a dad, he gets this kinda thing. Meanwhile our girls dress up like said aunt milly and shenanigans insue. It’s a really funny scene.. until it falls apart with the mr. woodburn impersination, revealing it was all a hoax, and sending Addleaide crying to her room understandably not wanting to talk to either of them. Still we got Carolos as lincoln. That’s not nothing. 

But yeah having made things worse by accident, the girls go to Rosa for help who while understandably annoyed at the mess they made, is more than willing to come with and help. Because Rosa is fucking amazing ,that’s why. She sucessfully coaxes Addy out and then takes her down to the Casagrande’s place to show off her altar and explain the true meaning of day of the dead: Thinking about your loved ones.. keeps the memories alive. Thinking about who they were, what they loved, what they meant to you.. it’s not raising the dead.. but honring them. It  not only made the real value of the holiday sink in for me but i’ts a good message for kids, and a good way to teach them about a holiday most probably didn’ know how it worked if they even knew at all. It’s a really sweet powerful moment, and the combination of alcaraz’s writing and Sonia Manzano really brings it to this scene. It’s easily the show’s best. Good stuff. 

Froggy II interupts the scene.. turns out a trail of bacon bits, that we saw left earlier, lead him back, and Pete’s been following him the whole way and is winded because of course he is. We’re in the same blobby shape I get it man your fine. So with Addy already liking the second froggy, and having fully come to terms with the first’s death, Sid offers Pete tickets to her mom’s show in exchange for Froggy II, whose named that in this scene and who we saw in uptown funk. As long as it’s the splash zone he’s fine with it and Sid knows her mom enough well enough to know Becca would probably gladly trade a ticket for her daughter’s hapiness. Plus it’s easier to get someone to willingnly sign the wavers about getting gator blood on them when they already want that so win win.  We end on a Day of the Dead party with the whole cast in day of the dead makeup, eveyrone happy.. except Carl who’se subplot of spreading marigolds everywhere I missed and he ended up at the Loud House. Why this didn’t lead to a crossover I dunno. I mean if Steve Urkel can jetpack into the family from step by step’s yard,  why not? I know the 90′s were a diffrent time but this was a missed opportunity. Funny gag anyway. And scene. 

Final Thoughts: I was pretty transparent with this one: I think it’s a wonderful, heartfelt, and well done look at day of the dead tha’ts educational without cramming the education part down your throat, like any good cartoon that teachs you something should do, and it’s also really funny and endearing.Not much else to say, it’s just really good and I was glad to highlight it and if you haven’t seen it, please do it’s perfect viewing for the season. If you want more Casagrandes I have two reviews under the nick tab on my blog, and will be covering the second batch of Halloween/Day of the Dead episodes later this month, along with the new loud house halloween special Ghosted. And if you can’t wait for either of those, monday i’ll be covering the new ducktales halloween special. Until we meet again, viva la muretos. Play us out Nimoy...

[superman86to99]

Superman #83 (November 1993)

Funeral for a Friend: uh, that one Green Lantern supporting character who died when Coast City got blown up (Joe? Gary?). In this issue DC’s superheroes pay tribute to the tragedy of Coast City while also deciding what the hell to do with the giant engine that’s now in its place. Weird early ‘90s Hawkman! Dr. Fate with boobs! Already-slightly-psychotic Hal Jordan! EVERYONE IS HERE.

(Nice one, Guy.)

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor Jr. is also sneaking around Engine City, supposedly to prevent it from falling into the ocean and killing some of Aquaman’s friends, but in reality he just wants to look into the Cyborg Superman’s computer to see if he can find a recipe for making kryptonite. As the heroes argue about what to do with Engine City (Hal says drop it into the water, screw the fish), some leftover Warworld aliens start attacking them, like the holdout Japanese soldiers who never found out WWII was over.

The attack precipitates the city’s fall into the water and the heroes have to think fast to prevent a fish holocaust. Their solution is for all the Green Lantern-related characters (Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, Alan Scott, Alan’s daughter Jade) to “detoxify” the debris with their powers before it falls into the ocean. And it works! These guys should totally open a carpet cleaning business.

As for Lex Jr., he does find the recipe for kryptonite inside the crumbling city, but just as he’s about to write it down (he wasn’t carrying any floppy disks, apparently), Supergirl yanks him out of there to prevent him from burning alive. What an unsupportive girlfriend. Anyway, Superman then takes some of the debris and builds a giant memorial for Coast City’s 6,999,999 anonymous lost souls, and Gary. Sweet Gary. You will be missed.

Creator-Watch:

If the art looks different that’s because this is the first issue inked by Joe Rubinstein, ending Brett Breeding’s classic two and a half year run as Dan Jurgens’ main inker (so classic that it feels a lot longer than that). Breeding will be back for Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey and other stuff, though. As for Rubinstein, Don says: “At  the time, I had trouble with the transition, being soused to Brett Breeding’s finishes over Jurgens’ pencils, but looking at it now, the art looks great. It doesn’t look as smooth or blocky as Breeding’s finishes, but Rubinstein’s hatchier style serves Jurgens pretty well, even if it takes some getting used to.”

Plotline-Watch:

At the start of the issue, Superman goes to pick up Batman to take him to Coast City, only to find him wearing a different costume, acting differently, and sounding like a different guy. That’s because that’s not really Bruce Wayne in the suit anymore, but the replacement he got after Bane broke his back. That’s right: freakin’ Psi-Phon and Dreadnaught.

Superman gives a speech about how superheroes must work together to prevent another tragedy like Coast City from happening, but when Guy asks him if that means he’s going back to the Justice League, he’s like “uh, not yet.” Wisely, he’s gonna wait for Grant Morrison to get there first.

Hal Jordan’s characterization in this issue is interesting. In Green Lantern #47 (which came out the same month), he’s bummed about Coast City but still hopeful and serene, while here he’s already going Parallax on us. Wonder if Dan Jurgens knew more about what DC was planning for Hal than the other comic’s writer.

There’s a cute scene where Superman is flying by Kansas on his way to Coast City and quickly drops some flowers for Ma Kent. (That, or Flash picked this moment to hit on a random older woman.) 

Former TV exec/crime boss Morgan Edge has released an autobiography where he trashes the Daily Planet’s Cat Grant for using her sexiness (and, you know, sex) to get dirt on him and send him to jail. He also accuses Cat of being a crappy mother to her son Adam. He kind of has a point there, because what kind of mom would let her kid play with an Atari in the early ‘90s?! The SNES and the Genesis were already out!

Believe it or not, Morgan Edge’s pervy dad in that screenshot above isn’t the creepiest thing in that scene. Don: “Very spooky how the guy dangling outside of Cat’s apartment goes without mention. An ominous foreshadow of one of the very few missteps of Jurgens’ run.”

But the most ominous part of the issue is at the end, when Clark Kent accepts Jimmy Olsen’s offer to become roomies, since Clark lost his apartment on account of being dead and all. Don wants you to know that “Jimmy is still in that towel by the way” in the scene below. I hope.

Patreon-Watch:

Shout out to our patrons Aaron, Murray Qualie, Chris “Ace” Hendrix, britneyspearsatemyshorts, Patrick D. Ryall, and a warm welcome to Samuel Doran! Last month our patrons got to read an article about Superman’s bizarre first Elseworlds appearance ever, the Kamandi: At Earth’s End miniseries, and got a veeeeeery early look at this post you’re reading right now (since Don finished his part way before I did mine). Right now I’m preparing this month’s Patreon-only article, which involves Superman wearing pointy ears and Luthor wearing make up. Find out more at https://www.patreon.com/superman86to99

Oh, and in case you missed it, we’ve been posting Don’s new commentary for older issues on the Patreon as free posts (click above and scroll down to see them). EVEN MORE from Don after the jump!

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow​):

Another classic issue, and such a nice wrap-up to the "Death and Return" storyline (as well as being a much-needed check-In on the DC Universe at  large).  We start with the cover, and it’s a very good one, letting the  reader know right away that it’s a big team-up issue.  (It also is a real showcase for 90s costume design, and how weird the JLA lineup was at this point).

The opening splash is a neat image of a rarely seen pairing, Superman and Commissioner Gordon.   Jurgens draws James Gordon a little heavier and more Pa-Kent like than I’m used to seeing him, but it’s still neat to see him interacting with Superman. A page  later, we get another rare pairing—the returned Superman with the imposter Batman, Jean-Paul Valley.  The tension in the interaction between “AzBats” and Superman comes across well in their exchange, as does Superman’s doubts about who he was really speaking to.

It’s a dreamy looking Superman crossing the country from Metropolis to Coast City, and I daresay that they’re trying to channel Dean Cain a little as he approaches Kansas.

The best panel of the issue though is the two page spread  of all the heroes gathering at the wreckage of Coast City, and there’s so much to love here.  The body language, and facial  expressions speak volumes about each of the characters:  Superman looking swashbuckling and upbeat, Green Lantern brooding like a man barely holding on, Green Arrow all attitude and shadow.  Just a great spread.

Another cool image is Aquaman showing up late, and emerging very royally in protection of his ocean (undercut masterfully by a legitimately funny couple of lines from Guy Gardner).  Page 14’s Hal Jordan is a great drawing, and this whole storyline seems like a table setter for the "Emerald Twilight" story coming up.

The sequence of a firelit Luthor  at the computer is a good look at his madness, but it does beg the  question of just how little Supergirl seems to take in.  He was JUST talking aloud  about Kryptonite, and she emerges seeming not to hear.  The image of  Supergirl flying Lex away as he struggles against her psychic grab is a  good one, even if her uniform is depicted as a little clingier than I imagine it to really be.

Superman floating above his obelisk with his arm in front of  his face like Dracula is a cool look, even if it is a little dramatic.

Lastly, the image of Clark turning up the stereo is a good one, even if his hair length is wildly  shorter here than in Coast City (and I usually dislike it when they  mention real world bands, as it comes off trying too hard to be hip).

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

I  have to love how meta it is to have Superman outright saying that Batman is dressing more “threatening” these days,  on page 2.  I guess he couldn’t come right out and say “you have an  extreme new look, and it’s totally badass! Batman the next generation!”

Last  we saw of Supergirl she was storming out of the party on Lex’s Zeppelin after Lex II was getting all horned up at  the sight of Lois Lane, but it appears here they’ve mostly patched  things up as they fly to Coast City.

More meta-stuff: Jimmy clunkily complimenting Lois on her new hair by saying she “oughta be on TV or something!”.   This whole exchange is very expository, really, “Clark must be pretty mad… though he’s busy worrying about where he’s going to bunk…”  Anything else to get in there, Jimmy?

The harshness some of the heroes have for Lex Junior seems a little out of place, especially since he’s still known to  most of the heroes as an ally from "Panic in the Sky", and the "Doomsday"  storyline.  Superman’s comment was borderline, but where is all this  anger Flash is showing coming from?

Being  as familiar as we are with these writers, there are certain phrases or ideas that a certain writer will go to way,  way too often.  Byrne had a number of stories where Superman would  “ionize” something with his heat vision, and it occurred to me that  maybe he just liked that word.  I would submit that Dan Jurgens likes the word “atomize”.  It was used by the Cyborg  Superman when talking about Doomsday, and is used a bunch just in this issue.

I find it hilarious that Hawkman appears so prominently in this issue, but doesn’t get any lines.  This issue is an  interesting time capsule—I had almost forgotten about the de-aged  Starheart powered Alan Scott era.

Speaking of lines, they don’t give Captain Marvel much to do in this issue, but I always like seeing him, even if his only contribution is the odd “Holy Moley!”

Colouring error on page 12, where Hal’s ring has a red centre (maybe the colourist had Alan Scott’s red and green look on the brain?)

A raging Hal standing by Green Arrow is a sad foreshadowing of their confrontation to come in Zero Hour.

[kur0kvmi]

The Menacing Mind of Felix Lombardi- Act 1 (Revised)

“The world isn’t a fun place. Don’t let the crappy movies and comic books about superheroes saving the day fool you. The world we live in isn’t anywhere near as cool or happy as the ones we read about inside the pages of Fantastic Four, or the one we see in the confines of our favorite TV Shows. The world sucks, and we’ve single handedly manufactured so many ways to distract ourselves from that fact that the ones who put more effort into these distractions are the highest praised and most celebrated people on the planet. Artists? What does that even mean anymore? It’s just some pithy catch all  for ‘person who doesn’t want a real job, and wants to play around with writing useless fluff all day’ and-”

    “Will you shut the fuck up already?” Hi I’m the actual main character of this little short story, pardon my language but you have to admit. That jackass wasted a whole paragraph with that bullshit. Oh, where’s my manners, there’s more story to get to:

    “WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP”The hero bellow- just kidding. I said.

Like I said in the last paragraph, this guy is nothing but some sad dropout who’s angry at everything trying to explain to me in his infinite wisdom why art doesn’t mean anything. I apologize again, you’re probably extremely confused. “Why did this story start with a paragraph long intro that turned out to be a pointless diatribe?” “Who’s this guy who keeps stopping the story and speaking directly to me, doesn’t he know he’s a character in a story?” Answers to those questions are A: our wonderful author is stalling for time, and B: I’m not entirely of sound mind, that’s what my therapist, most of my childhood friends and my big brother have told me at least. However before we continue I’m going to use the next paragraph to tell you a bit about who I am.

    My name is Felix Lombardi. My parents were Italian immigrants who ran a bread shop. Two years ago they were murdered in cold blood by the mob. After that my brother Lou mysteriously came into half a million dollars, which he turned into a small fortune with pretty sound investments and now he’s helping pay my way through college. Happy ending, happy story, my life is great, except it would be if this motherfucking social reject wasn’t wasting my time at this gas station telling me how unfair the world is. Speaking of that I still need to respond to him.

    “The world isn’t fair, but that doesn’t make it a bad place. You’re just mad because life hasn’t given you everything you wanted. Try working for a change” I said in a subdued cool manner, much like a teacher in a school full of slow children would if one kid in the class began eating paint.

    “That’s easy for you to say, you’re probably some spoiled brat coasting through life on daddy’s paycheck.” Said the moron, completely oblivious to the fact that I was tacitly ignoring him and going about my business.

    I told him to back off, and I went over to the cashier and paid for the cigarettes and M&Ms I was buying. Took an exit, sat in my car and- You know what? This is getting boring and procedural. So I’m in my car, and I call my brother. He’s a nice guy, used to be a cop for a while, then he got really rich and he’s actually flipped his allegiances and turned into a bit of a crime boss. He’s a smart guy though, so he makes sure not to actively butt heads with any of the other families around, but this isn’t a Mafioso story, no no no, I apologize, this isn’t that exciting of a tale. This is a story about me, my thoughts, and how I relay them to you.

“Sup little bro”

“Hey Lou, did you get my text?”

“I was busy, couldn’t respond, still kinda busy. Something about needing money for that comic convention?” Lou said. He sounded like he was doing something physically taxing.

“You at the Gym?”

“Nope, I’m at work”

“Why do you sound out of breath”

“Information gathering is very tiresome”

Oh he’s beating up a dude for an interrogation.

“Oh you’re beating up a dude for an interrogation”

“What have I told you about talking about the job over the phone”

“Mi Scuso fratello Louis” (I’m sorry brother Louis)

“That’s Don Lombardi to you buster”

“Fat chance wise guy, so when can you send the money for the tickets?”

“I’ll see what I can do. Now if you’ll excuse me I have work to do”

[2 days later]

    My apartment is in the upper east side of Manhattan New York. It’s one of those places that looks like it was ripped straight out of a trendy sitcom that features a bunch of close knit friends getting into wacky hijinks. Fortunately for me though, I hate people, and Louie gives me enough of an Allowance to be able to survive alone and pay rent while being able to go to school. I go to a private Art School, I study Animation and I minor in sequential art, my hobbies include playing video games, posting my thoughts on the internet, watching anime, and reading Japanese firearm magazines. My favorite movie is Kill Bill Vol 1 (whoever tells you Vol 2 is better doesn’t understand film making and should kill themselves), and the kind of girl I’m looking for is one who’ll bully me and make me feel really crappy about myse- wait, sorry got lost in the sauce for a moment, I thought I was filling out a dating profile.

    Living by myself affords me the unparalleled privilege of being able to walk around my apartment in minimal clothing, and since I don’t like people, it’s very uncommon for me to have anybody over. The only people who come over are my 63 year old Landlady Ms Fujinami, and her granddaughter Ami who’s about my age. I know what you’re thinking ‘Oh, here comes the part where Felix talks about how much he likes Ami, since she’s the first female character of appropriate age to be mentioned, of course she’s the love interest’. Sorry to disappoint you fair reader, but it’s not that kind of story. You see, we’re not leaving my head. This is between you and me, I don’t need any bullshit like an “emotional arc” or “narrative depth” in my fucking story, I’m doing good being the person I’ve been all my life.

    So I’m lazing about my apartment like the sterling example of a productive citizen that I am when I get a phone call from Don Lombardi.

    “Felix you there?”

    “I wouldn’t have picked up if I wasn’t. What is it?”

    “Funny. I wonder how many jokes you’ll be making when you’re forced to shack up with a bunch of hideous college students in a prison dorm”

    “Wake up, eat, listen to Lou threaten me with student housing, go to class, come home, repeat”

    “I’m a man of habit what can I say”

    “To what do I owe this call, did you send the ticket money?”

    “I need you to make some friends Felix”

    “I need you to stop caring.”

    “You’re always couped up in the apartment, the only time you see sunlight is when you go out to buy Cigarettes, or when you have class, you don’t even talk to Ami anymore, weren’t you two friends?” I hate it when he gets like this. I don’t know why he cares about my social life. He doesn’t listen to me tell him how to do… whatever it is he does.

    “if you’re worried about my skin don’t bother, that sicilian melanin is doing me just fine” I said, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, puckering. Who said nerds can’t be sexy.

    “Calm down Ricky Martin, this is about more than sunlight. It’s about your life. Mama would cry if she saw what you are on some days” Lou said, in his bro voice.

    “Papa would cry if you knew what you did for a living” I retorted

“Would he cry or would he just break off into sicilian” Lou responded, letting out a chortle.

“PUTO RAGGAZINO” we both shouted, memories of pa and ma rushing, and bringing a silence for a good moment.

“How would I even go about making friends?” I asked, half jokingly.

    “Glad you asked. That’s why I bought you 3 day tickets to that comic book convention.” Lou boasted triumphantly.

    “How do you know I won’t just go there without talking to anybody?” I shot back with a sneer.

    “You know, when you’re in my line of business, you learn to have contingency plans. This is the part of the movie where the villain tells the hero ‘I’m glad you asked’”.

    Just at that moment, I heard three knocks at my door.

    “That should be my contingency plans”

    I  peek through my door lens just to see who’s there.

    Ami, motherfucking Fujinami.

    “The convention is this weekend right?” Lou continued. “Have fun lil bro”

    I hate my brother. I hate this. I hate you.

**End of Act 1**

[eggoreviews]

Until Dawn Characters RANKED

I honestly love this game to death. When it came out a few years ago and I kind of bought it as a last minute game to speed through on new year’s eve, I didn’t realise how cool of a game it was going to be and how much fun you can get out of multiple playthroughs. Now that I know basically everything about the game, I really wish I could wipe that knowledge from my brain and play it fresh u feel. Anyway, the characters, despite their sometimes awkward, cringey dialogue, are one of the driving factors of the game so in this list, I’ll be ranking these strange teenagers in order of personal preference. Hope u don’t hate me for potentially roasting your fave!

Just to say, I genuinely think all these characters are well-written n everything, this list is literally who I like and who I don’t. Also, I won’t be including Hannah, Beth or the Stranger bc they get like 5 minutes of screentime and it wouldn’t be fair to compare them to the main eight.

Until Dawn spoilers under the cut!

8. Emily

I’m sorry, I literally cannot stand Emily. She spends pretty much the whole game being horrible to everyone (deliberately starting beef with Jess, literally cheating on my boi Matt), while only being truly nice to Matt when it serves her own interests. She strikes me as a very manipulative, bordering on abusive personality (making Matt feel like he’s in the wrong for questioning why she had to go back and talk to Sam at the start of the game and don’t even get me started on the whole ‘Emily is always right’ thing). So yeah, she’s an intelligent character and a capable survivor, but she’s pretty much just a downright terrible person and it took all of my willpower not to get her killed on purpose.

7. Jess

Just so you know, beyond this point, I actually like all of the characters. The thing about Jess is she isn’t an especially bad person and in a way I feel bad for her more than I do the others because she has no clue that Mike is cheating on her like at all. It’s just that she’s absent for a huge chunk of the game and you never truly get to know her, other than a very brief, heavy-handed look at her insecurities because, by the end of the game, you’ve either killed her in chapter 4 or she’s so weak from her massive fall at the end of the game that her character is completely gone because she’s like, half dead. So yeah, I don’t mind Jess, we just don’t spend enough time with her in game to form a connection.

6. Mike

Mike is probably the character you spend the most time playing as in total and is also pretty much the hardest to kill (even though I still managed to in my first playthrough). What I’m about to say kind of contradicts my immediate dislike for Mike over his asshole personality and the fact that he’s cheating on Jess, but he’s the only character in the whole game who I genuinely think has some character development. By the end of the game, you can tell he’s kind of a changed guy after going through all the shit that happened in the game. What kept him from climbing higher on this list was, despite the development, he still almost kills/actually does kill Emily later in the game. Like, I don’t like her either, but it was a lil rash to immediately threaten to kill her for not leaving the room.

5. Josh

This is a bit of a complex one for a lot of reasons and I wasn’t sure where to put him, so he’s been slapped in the middle. Personally, I don’t blame Josh for the events of the game. Sure, it was pretty messed up to even set that prank up in the first place, but by the end of the game, you know that Josh has a lot of psychological issues that were around even way before he lost both of his sisters and had just come off of his meds without taking the full course before everyone came back to the lodge. By the time everyone is aware of the Wendigos, Josh is a guilty, distraught shell of the guy he was when the game starts. The fact that the only two canon endings for his character were either death or getting Wendigo’d feels bitter to me, he deserved better than that. I’m not saying he’s innocent in this, but there’s a lot of factors that came with him orchestrating the prank, not to mention that he obviously had no idea his friends would actually die from a threat he didn’t know about at the time.

4. Ashley

Overall, I like Ashley. Throughout most of the game, she’s a helpful asset to the group who has good chemistry with most of the other characters, most notably Chris because they spend the most time together (even though I was way more banking on Chris and Josh being a thing, this game is very straight). But Ashley ranks higher than some others purely because she has an intriguing darker side to her character that you don’t quite expect at first, but almost makes her seem cruel. The fact that she immediately wants to kill Emily upon discovering her bite, as well as the fact that she can even passively kill Chris if you choose to ‘shoot’ her earlier in the game on her request, gives her character a more vengeful edge. With a game full of characters you’re already kind of aware aren’t the soft beans you want them to be, Ashley is a slow burner who makes the game much more interesting later on.

3. Chris

Chris strikes me as someone who is desperately trying to be funny to get the attention he craves from his friends. He’s a little insensitive at times and doesn’t seem to listen to people on occasion if they contradict what he already thinks to be true (basically any scene that mentions a ghost), but it’s easy to forget that Chris wasn’t even a part of the prank that got Hannah killed. He was passed out drunk with Josh (in fact, the game even forgets this at one point during his lil talk with Ashley in the old hotel). But overall, Chris tries his best to be a good friend to Josh and everyone else, even when they’re all going through a lot of trauma, and I respect him for that.

2. Sam

When I say that Mike is the only character who properly gets a development arc, I mean that in two ways; that the good people stay good and the bad people stay bad. Sam is one of the good ones. Throughout the whole game, start to finish, Sam is a resourceful, well-rounded character with a strong moral compass that seems absent among most of her friends. I don’t really have a hell of a lot more to say about Sam. She’s just great.

Honorable mentions:

Doggo

Dr. Hill (gonna be honest I totally forgot about him until I wrote this sentence but he’s a cool n weird character I guess)

1. Matt

Literally nothing can change my opinion that Matt is a soft perfect boi who takes a lot of shit from people (Emily especially). Okay he’s not literally perfect, he took part in the prank after all, but this guy is so relatable and down to earth and he’s the one I most want to whisk away from Until Dawn like no you don’t belong here, you don’t deserve this trauma u sweet boi. It annoys me how easy it is to kill him. (Also, special mention to that convo between him and Emily where he’s like ‘I’m trying to be all like, you know... sexy’ just reinforced in my mind how pure this boi is)

Thanks for readin my shitty list. Send in ur fave UD character if u got one. Also, if you feel like I got anything wrong about any of these characters, feel free to let me know.

Have a fun ol day.

[sunalsolove]

Sunalso’s Spuffy Fic Recs

(With Shameless Self Promotion-because, hey, I was asked!) 

I’m not one for a lot of dark fic/angst as real life tends to punch me enough. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy conflict in a story, but it does mean that my recs tend to be a little biased towards things I want to escape into after a hard day at work. I read all ratings, but prefer the smuts, and I enjoy all the wide world of possibilities in fics, from baby stories to all human, from canon compliant to complete AUs. I love fanfiction, I love Spuffy, and I REALLY love both together!! (I also love chihuahuas.) All stories completed except those in the WIP section. Most links to Elysian Fields. You have to sign up to read NC-17 fics, but it’s a quick process, and then you can receive emails when authors (like, cough, me) post a new story, or you can follow a favorite WIP and know when new chapters post. Handy!

Under the cut because this is a LONG list! 

Long Fics

Only Time Will Tell by damperandspoons (NC-17, 75K) A fun time-travel romance! There’s sex in a carriage! This is one of the very first Spuffy fics I ever read and it’s still one of my favorites. It’s the sort of story you squee over and then cry over...and then go back to squeeing. There’s a delicious HEA as well. 

Echoes by Holly (NC-17, 116K) Holly is a brilliant writer and this is THE prime example. She takes the Buffyverse, sets it on its ear, and the result is wholly magical. Buffy and Spike start off existing in a vastly different context, one little demon bargain later, and Buffy finds herself 300 years in the future and dealing with present-day Sunnydale. 

Hide and Seek by dreamweaver (NC-17, 37K) Post series. Buffy’s in Rome and wait...who’s that history scholar...and that vampire?? I really enjoy watching everything collide in this fic. 

In Heat by Nautibitz (NC-17, 31K) In the summer after S5 (in a world where Buffy didn’t die) the weather is hot and there are demons that release a pheromone that makes poor Buffy even hotter. What’s a girl to do? 

Superstar Revamped by kantayra (NC-17, 54K) Set during S4′s Superstar. A very fun romp through the episode, as Spike and Buffy figure out both the spell and each other. I could use so many more Spuffy fics set during that episode! 

sex, lies, and sonograms by sabershadowkat (NC-17, 31K) Buffy’s  pregnant post S2...I get a huge kick from this story because it’s like a time capsule. It was written LONG before S5 (so no FFL) so is contains all kinds of early Spuffy stuff. I <3 it! 

Future Imperfect by cousinjean (R, 38K) Set 335 years post The Gift. A little angstier than many recs on this list. Buffy is humanities last hope and Spike is her only connection to her past. Lovely writing and so many feels. Also...Spuffy on the moon. 

Awakening by tempestt (PG-13, 32K) After a planewreck that leaves them alone and hunted in the wilderness, Buffy and Spike both have to survive and Buffy finds out she has more inside her than she ever knew. 

Frontierland by Gort (R, 66K) S5. Willow casts a spell, causing Spike to dream so he’ll see that things between him and Buffy can never work out. Buffy comes along for the ride. It does not go as Willow expects. Spike wears a cowboy hat. This is a touching story that dives deep into Spike’s head and is nuanced and carfully done. I can’t recommend it enough. 

Sunny Days by Gort (NC-17, 103K) Sequel to Frontierland, but we’re starting off in Riley’s head this time, but Buffy and Spike aren’t going to let that stand. Spike’s a hot english professor that wears a fedora. (If you need to know anything besides that...I don’t know what to tell you ;-)

Dreamer by Gort (NC-17, 86K) S4, starts with HLOD. Buffy and Spike end up captured by the Initiative and form a deep bond by the time their released. A close look at just how messed up the Initiative is. Also hair kink. 

Reveries and Ramifications by mak324 (NC-17, 386K) Spike and Buffy are drawn together and into a web of deceit involving the Initiative. No one does first person POV like mak324. it’s stunning and completely enthralling and you get through the 386 K and want more. 

Stitched Up by bewildered (NC-17, 50K) A sock gets a soul. It’s freaking hilarious while still being insightful. Buffy and Spike are adorable and it’s so enjoyable to watch the sock do his best to help them out! 

Send to All by Carrie-Ann (NC-17, 75K) A sexy text gets sent to everyone on Buffy’s contact list. Oops? A hilarious ride with a showstopper climax! 

With A Painted Ribbon by Apfeltorte (NC-17, 151K) Starts with Buffy in the mental hospital and goes like a freight train from there. 

Taking Chances by sandy_s (R, 107K) Starts with Something Blue, goes to an alternate dimension, and ends with the Initiative being destroyed. YAY. Is also a thoughful and detailed look at Buffy, Spike, Willow, Joyce, and others as they go through a great deal of emotional maturing that is badly needed by all. I compare the sheer imagination of the other dimension to Edgar Rice Burrows, it’s just that amazing. 

Etched in Stone by flowerofthewolf (NC-17, 116K) Dru turns Spike into a statue in Restfield cemetery in 1977. He sits there for twenty years with only himself to talk to until one perky Slayer takes a shine to him. Is both poignant and laugh out loud funny. 

Second String by Solstice (PG-13, 48K) Spike’s a watcher in need of a Slayer, Buffy’s a Slayer in need of a Watcher. Wonderfully written and winner of the best OC ever award. And best Xander characterization award. 

Short Fics

Fantasie Segrete by Holly (NC-17, 7.7K) Post series. Buffy’s friends treat her to a little valentine’s day surprise. I love how Buffy’s mind works in this story and it’s so much fun and so satisfying! 

As in ‘Recent’ by Nautibitz (Nc-17, 1.2K) The S7 smut we all wish would have happened. 

Vanishing Act by Nautibitz (PG-13, 1.6K) S6, post Gone...and DUH, Xander.  

Memories Without Words by kantayra (PG-13, 3.2K) 500,000 years in the future, The One is reunited with someone special. I love this fic so much and it gives me so many feels! 

Watching by kantayra (PG-13, 3K) One of my favorite fics of all time, and it’s Riley’s POV during the first half of S5. This fic is brilliant. 

If the Plane’s A-Rockin by Baphrosia (NC-17, 1K) What SHOULD have been the outcome of TGIQ. 

Independence Day by pfeifferpack (G, 4K) Post NFA. A loving and nuanced look at what Buffy’s life might be like. Amazing Buffy and Dawn interaction and a hopeful ending. 

#hashtagapocolypse by Wonder and Ashes (PG-13, 1.5Kish) A Buffy story told on twitter! It’s freaking hilarious.

Circulation by theblueeyedvampire (NC-17, 4.8 K) Pangs smut. Enough said. 

The Switch by Gort (NC-17, 13K) Buffy and Spike swap bodies in S4. It goes EXACTLY how you want it to. Bless you, Gort. 

Sinfully Delicious (NC-17, 843) Buffy catches Spike wanking. The title says it all. I seriously could read a million iterations of this (PLEASE). 

Bliss by kantayra (R, 1.8K) Spike comes to find Buffy in heaven. It’s happy and I still cry like a baby over it EVERY TIME. 

Young Robots in Love by Elsa Frohman (PG, 11K) William!bot meets Buffy!bot, sparks fly. Hilarious and touching                              

An Arousing Sexual Encounter Between Buffy Summers and William "Spike" Pratt by gabrielleabelle (NC-17, 523) How every Spuffy sex encounter goes! Hee! 

All Human

People get weird about AH. I’ve heard every excuse but they all boil down to: I don’t want to look/sound uncool. Thanks, 50 shades. AH allows authors to have fun way outside the usual playing field while still making the characters recognizably themselves. That’s the challenge and the draw. Embrace it, have fun with it. Don’t let being worried you’re not a cool enough fanfic person if you like these stories stand in your way of a great read. 

The Poet and His Muse by Addie Logan (NC-17, 45K) Spike’s a poet who can’t meet his deadline and Buffy--a muse with a less than stellar track record--is sent to help. They are simply adorable together! 

Unexpected Company by Paganbaby (NC-17, 25K) How can I say this? Paganbaby’s stories are an...aquaried taste? They are unashamedly my guilty pleasure. She’s got a size kink and I swear Buffy must have a tape measure handy at all times because there are regularly detailed measurements. This fic is experienced Buffy and virginal William that ends with Willow walking in on them with a ballgag involved. 

But for peak Paganbaby you need to read:

The Sitter by Paganbaby (NC-17, 95K) Underage twincest + 26 year old Buffy. You’re welcome. (I unashamedly LIKE this story) 

The Ghost of Christmas Present by Gort (NC-17, 22K) Buffy’s a lawyer sent to oversee the sale of a charming inn haunted by one William Pratt. BEST CHRISTMAS STORY EVER. I’m going to marry this story. I want to roll around in it. I LOVE IT. 

Not My Reality by dawnofme (NC-17, 44K) Buffy’s on the bachelor and Angel’s the fellow in question. He’s so dreamy...except who’s this bleached blond camera guy? This story is the definition of FUN. I reread it whenever I need a pick-me-up. Great Fred and Cordelia too. 

Closer to Midnight by xaphania (PG-13, 38K) Buffy and Spike meet up on a tour of a haunted island. They find themselves falling in love but there’s a ghost story waiting in the wings and everything isn’t what it seems. There’s a lovely NC-17 outtake of the sex scene for those who want it! 

WIPs

It’s hard to recommend stories that aren’t finished an might never be, but sometimes the journey is worth it even if you don’t ever reach the destination. 

This Means War by mak324 (R) A newly chipped Spike meets up with a sick Buffy instead of Willow. Shenanigans follow as Buffy and Spike dance around each other. 

Prisoners of Love, Blue Skies Above by bewildered (NC-17) Post Something Blue Spike goes on a drunken ramage, Buffy ends up having to pretend to be his wife. It’s all sexy and adorable. It’s the very first Spuffy fanfic I ever read. I still have hope it’ll be finished one day. 

Buffy the Victorian Slayer by Flights of Fancy (R) Buffy’s the slayer in Victorian England. One night she saves one William Pratt from a vampire...things roll from there. I talk more about the WIP than any other! 

My Own Stories 

I love all my fics, but there’s always a few I’m extra eager for people to read!

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by sunalso (Explicit, 135K) A very depressed Buffy is sent back from a post Chosen world to S2. She still means to die...but other things happen instead. I adore my mad hatter’s party scene with Dru in this fic, and the fact that Buffy and Spike can’t hide anything from anyone (the poor azaleas!) 

World on Fire by sunalso (NC-17, 4.6K) I was not allowed to make the summary: Buffy boinks 1900 Spike because the author wanted her to. However, that’s the gist of it! 

Cursed by sunalso (R, 177K) Buffy and Drusilla switch bodies every time the sun goes down. This ended up being everything I wanted it to and Dru is a very strong character in it even though she’s not the main POV. 

Room Service by sunalso (NC-17) Boink or die! Only it’s so warm and fuzzy! 

Thing of Doom by sunalso (Explicit, 60K) During AtS S5 Spike is split into two parts (William and Demon). Much smut ensues. I’m overly critical of the first chapter, but the rest is a really fun ride! 

Someday by sunalso (NC-17, 54K) My accidental novel. Buffy has one day each season to save the world. However will she do it? This is stuffed full of tropes I like and I seriously named one of the sex scenes. Sort of peak me in this one. 

Pumpkin Spike by sunalso(R, 2.8K) Spike’s a pumpkin. 

Every Rose by sunalso (NC-17, WIP) A current project. Wishverse Buffy is sent back to 1880 to kill a newly risen Spike. She gets there a little early. Anne just wants grandbabies. 

Strange Partners by sunalso and Gort (NC-17, 42K) This is still SO FUNNY and I co-wrote it. I can’t believe I wrote it. It’s seriously funny, but with a cohesive plot as well. Don’t drink and read, it’s a choking hazard. 

There we have it! I probably forgot half the stuff I’d like to rec and am probably way too over critical of my own stuff, especially the newer stuff, which makes it hard to rec. I hope you find some fun things to read and please, if you enjoy something, let the author know! 

Cheers! 

[gretagerwigarchive]

Greta Gerwig Is a Director, Not a Muse

By Noreen Malone, October 31, 2017.

source: http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/greta-gerwig-director-lady-bird.html

Dave Matthews Band is generally not considered cool anymore. Almost certainly, it never was in the downtown New York world of which the actress and writer Greta Gerwig has become a cool-girl-real-girl avatar in recent years. But in a time and place (America’s vast, yearning middle-class suburbs, in the cultural desert of the Clinton and early Bush years) and to a certain kind of person (such as a teenager aching for the jazz-adjacent cred that jam-band fandom could provide but more comfortable with white ball caps and lacrosse than ponchos and hallucinogens), Dave Matthews Band was Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in 1966. And so there is a crucial moment in Lady Bird, Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, in which the title character, a Sacramento high-school senior in 2003, confronts the cruelest heartbreak imaginable to her by blasting the band’s ballad “Crash Into Me”: “Sweet like candy to my soul / Sweet you rock and sweet you roll.” The result is both sympathetic, and very funny.

“There was no other song it ever was going to be,” Gerwig said. “In preproduction, I realized I didn’t know what I was going to do if Dave said no [to its use]. I wrote him a letter. ‘Dear Mr. Dave Matthews … ’ ”

Gerwig was sitting at a small corner table near the window at Morandi in the West Village, not far from where she lives with the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. “I thought it was a really romantic song when I was a teenager. I would listen to it on repeat on a yellow CD player,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine a world in which a guy would feel that way about me.”

Maybe it was because of her sexy dirndl skirt of a name, maybe because of her squinting physical resemblance to indie Gen-X avatar Chloë Sevigny, maybe simply because of her distinctive delivery. But since the very beginning of Gerwig’s career, she has been a generational lightning rod of sorts. As what the New York Observer once called “the Meryl Streep of mumblecore” — the hyperlow-budget late-aughts movie movement led by directors like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers — Gerwig was near-instantly labeled an “It” girl and invested with all sorts of theories about what her success and acting style meant. Her brand of hipness was confusing — was she really that earnest? Were they all that earnest? How could that possibly be cool? Critics, especially those of an older generation, were suspicious.

She was, unmistakably, a gifted actress. But the Guardian also called her “the poster girl for wayward, brittle middle-youth,” a “galumphing work in progress.” In The New Yorker, Ian Parker wrote that, despite having a “precise, literate mind,” Gerwig “has the air, not uncommon among her contemporaries, of having swallowed a very low dose of LSD.” “Ms. Gerwig, most likely without intending to be anything of the kind, may well be the definitive screen actress of her generation, a judgment I offer with all sincerity and a measure of ambivalence,” A. O. Scott wrote in the New York Times. “Part of her accomplishment is that most of the time she doesn’t seem to be acting at all. The transparency of her performances has less to do with exquisitely refined technique than with the apparent absence of any method.” And then there was this sort of thing: “While watching Greta Gerwig on screen, you might be tempted to kiss her,” wrote Stephen Heyman in T in 2010. “This is not meant purely as praise. Gerwig, 26, plays characters who are given to discursive verbal forays with oodles of ‘ummmms.’ So planting an unexpected kiss would not only be a recognition of her adorableness but also a useful way to shut her up.”

In a way, then, Lady Bird, a remarkably self-assured debut, feels like a rebuke. Or at least an assertion of artistic intent. At 34, and moving, finally, behind the camera, Gerwig is exiting the phase of her life where she’ll be asked to represent a mysterious, fascinating rising generation. The winds have shifted some, and the microgeneration after her is just as earnest (or more so) but culturally preoccupied less with its own emotional wanderings than with larger political questions of identity, and of race. Gerwig seems still to be considering, and even reclaiming, some of the traits that hers has been tagged with: nostalgia, that earnestness, parental attachment. In other words, what does it look like onscreen when millennial sincerity is treated not with mockery or puzzlement but with, well, sincerity?

Gerwig appears to be a genuinely sincere person, a kind of spiritually permanent college student, in a way that might get under the skin of someone with more ironic armor. She wears a giant Hello, Dolly! sweatshirt and an even more giant backpack. She references Tina Fey’s Bossypants like scripture and listens to podcasts about entrepreneurship (“The one about the woman who created Spanx made me sob”) and religion (“Krista Tippett” — the host of On Being — “is like my fucking queen”). She quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to express her sadness over the Harvey Weinstein mess: “In a free society, some are guilty; all are responsible.” She goes to church sometimes, and though she doesn’t subscribe to any particular denomination (“The Catholic theatrics are pretty high quality, but the Protestants have better hymns”), she’s really into the Quakers right now: “There’s nothing that you have to believe or avow. The only thing you have to believe is that the light of God exists within each person.” She really, really loved her single-sex education, both the high-school portion and at Barnard, where she was delighted to discover that all the doctors at the health center were gynecologists and enjoyed her time on the parliamentary debate team.

Gerwig’s enthusiasms extend also to Zumba, but what she really likes is a barre class run by this one woman from Portland, Oregon, whom she admires for her “body positivity,” and on the day we first met, she was, with some embarrassment, about to try something called the Class, in which Tribeca women combine burpees and cathartic screaming. “It seems like maybe the fitness equivalent of the toy poodle,” she said. “Like, you have to admit that you love them and you want one that’s tiny. You’d rather be the girl who has a German shepherd who goes for a run. Not one with a fluffy piece of lint who goes to a place where you chant with crystals.” She considered. “Before they poured the floor at the studio, I read, they put rose quartz everywhere, and I was like, I mean … I can get down with that.” She has a friend who works for Moon Juice, and so she speaks highly of its sprouted almonds, even if “I always thought it was kind of ironic when she’d be stressing out about the moon powders.”

The author and illustrator Leanne Shapton, who knows Gerwig and Baumbach from the neighborhood, spotted Gerwig and stopped to chitchat. Shapton, as it turned out, designed the font for Lady Bird’s title and credits: “She made an entire uppercase and lowercase alphabet and painted it ten times the size that it needed to be and shrunk it down so it looks like a font but has enough imperfections so there’s a density,” Gerwig told me after Shapton had walked away. “I feel like movies are presents, and credits and fonts are bows and wrapping paper.” She paused. “I like everything to feel like it was given a lot of time. I hate it when I watch movies and it seems like they just went and picked a font and, like, called it a day.” She paused again, considering Shapton. “I also have a crush on her because she’s very beautiful. She is cool in the way that everyone wants to be, but she’s also a real person.”

“I’ve made so many films in New York,” Gerwig said, that “there was an assumption I think a lot of people had that I am a New Yorker, that I am from New York, and I always felt like nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve done a good job of convincing you, but I’m not, as so many people who live in New York are not.”

Lady Bird, which is also Gerwig’s solo writing debut, is the story of a high-school senior (Saoirse Ronan) at an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento who longs — despite her average grades — to be the star of the school play, to go to college on the East Coast, to be extraordinary. Though her name is Christine, she insists on being called “Lady Bird,” a pretension with which her salt-of-the-earth parents — a nurse and an out-of-work computer programmer, played with extraordinary sensitivity by Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts — comply. (It’s a complicated dynamic: Metcalf calls the mother character “totally passive-aggressive.”) The plot is a gentle one. Lady Bird acquires a couple of boyfriends (each recognizable as a classic type who might appeal to a smart-in-some-ways, really-not-in-others teenage girl), chases acceptance from the popular crowd, applies to colleges her family can’t afford to send her to.

Gerwig attended an all-girls Catholic school in Sacramento, with parents who worked as a nurse and a loan officer at a credit union, who sent her off to an expensive East Coast college, and although the movie has been widely discussed as a roman à clef, she says it’s not. For starters, Lady Bird is set in 2003, Gerwig pointed out, and she graduated in 2002. “I never made anyone call me another name. I never had dyed-red hair. She’s so much more wild and outspoken, and I think I was only ever that way in my head. In a way, I felt like I kind of put into her the sheer confidence and the id I find in 8- or 9-year-old girls. They’re just brash, and they don’t know that they should feel anything but great about themselves.

“When you write something you know, you’re making a story that will work, whether or not there’s bits taken. It’s always funny to me when people say, ‘Well, it’s clearly autobiographical,’ and I say, ‘Well, how do you know my autobiography?’ ” she continued. “Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it’s a very interesting assumption. In some ways, it feels akin to the assumption that I’ve experienced as an actor when people say … ‘This is you.’ Which I’ve always taken as a compliment because it felt like you were watching a person.”

The teenage Gerwig was an extensive diarist, but she didn’t look up her old journals until after she’d finished the script, called “Mothers and Daughters” in a first draft that clocked in at 350 pages. (“It originally had a lot more dances,” she said.) When she opened the old pages, she was pleasantly surprised to find that she’d accurately remembered some of the tiny details — the rumor that clove cigarettes had fiberglass in them, the very fact of clove cigarettes at all — that make the movie so spot-on evocative of high school. But mostly it was the vividness of her feelings that struck Gerwig. “I would go on for pages and pages about this crush I had, dissecting every moment. ‘Did he notice that our arms were touching, or was that an accident?’ And then I wrote, ‘Upon further reflection, I think that this might’ve been a more vivid emotional experience for me than him.’ I was like, Oh, honey, nothing you’ve written is more true.”

When Gerwig was young, her parents made a point of taking her to local Sacramento theater — she proudly ticks off the names of the companies, and the playwrights whose work they put on, and even the directors. At Barnard, where she studied playwriting, she became a Kim’s Video devotee, methodically working her way through the director-organized shelves. (It was Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail, she said, that made her shift her focus from theater to movies.) She rejected traditional paths like law and medicine. “Chekhov was a country doctor, spent all his time with people and in their homes. I was like, Well, that’s good, and then I was like, Well, I’m not interested in it, and also I don’t like blood, and there are no country doctors anymore,” she said. “The idea that I would become a doctor to become more like Chekhov is a pretty circular route.”

After college, Gerwig lived all over Brooklyn — East Williamsburg, Prospect Heights, deep Park Slope, or “Park Slide,” as she says fondly. She had odd jobs, including at the Box, the Lower East Side cabaret, and began working with Swanberg, whom she had met through a college boyfriend and who was making interesting movies that were unlike anything that had been done before, for almost no money.

Mumblecore was a big deal, for a small movement, in part for what it seemed to reveal about a certain slice of young, college-educated, mostly white people trying to figure out how they related to the world. It was hailed in the Times as something that “bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience.”

Gerwig now physically cringes at the mere mention of the word mumblecore. “I just hate it,” she said. “It feels like a slight every time I hear it. Because of the improvisational quality of those movies, and the fact that everyone was nonprofessional, I have had a bit of an uphill battle just to say ‘I know how to act.’ I didn’t stumble into this. I wasn’t just a kid.” But she credits her roles in those films — Nights and Weekends, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead — with helping teach her to write. “We called them ‘devised films,’ because we’d know the characters and what was supposed to happen in the scenes but not the words. It was a way of writing while I was acting.”

It was also that set of films — which made a bigger splash in the indie-movie scene than in the culture at large — that put her on Baumbach’s radar. (He actually recommended her to his agent before the two had ever met.) When Baumbach cast her in 2010’s Greenberg, released when she was 26, it was her big break. Shortly after he divorced his wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh (Gerwig had trained for the role, in part, by working as an assistant to Leigh’s mother), the two began their romance. Baumbach and Gerwig turned an email correspondence into a project: The duo co-wrote Frances Ha and Mistress America, both starring Gerwig and both markedly sweeter than anything Baumbach had worked on in the past. “I liked what she was writing so much that it made me work harder with my own to impress her,” Baumbach said.

This collaboration led to a spate of headlines referring to Gerwig not as a partner on the works but as their muse. “The actress Greta Gerwig has had the same liberating effect on Noah Baumbach as Diane Keaton had on Woody Allen: she has opened him up, lending his films a giddy sense of release,” went one typical summation in the Economist.

“I did not love being called a muse,” said Gerwig bluntly. “I didn’t want to be strident about it or say, ‘Hey, give me my due,’ but I did feel like I wasn’t a bystander. It was half-mine, and so that part was difficult. Also I knew secretly that I was engaged with this longer project, and wanted to be a writer and director in my own right, so I felt like the muse business, or whatever it was, was a position that I didn’t identify with in my heart. But I think one thing I learned early because of the group of movies that are called mumblecore” — she slowed down, a little archly, over the word, to acknowledge again her discomfort with it — “is not to attach too much to the moment you’re living through from a press perspective. I also had this sense of, Well, they’ll just eat their hat one day.”

TV was one idea when Gerwig hit a dry spell with acting gigs after making Frances Ha and Mistress America. “I felt like I had done things that I was incredibly proud of and I felt like I had authorship over, and done good work as an actor, but my wheels weren’t catching purchase with whatever the Zeitgeist was,” she said, forking her pasta. It was a curious double identity as an actress — plausibly the face of a generation, particularly of the privileged of that generation, and, just as plausibly, a near-anonymous actress who hadn’t yet made anything that any real number of people had actually seen. She met with the producers behind How I Met Your Dad, a planned spinoff of the long-running, quietly beloved CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and signed up for the starring role, along with a writing role. “It felt like this incredible lifeline for me. It felt like a place to give myself some structure,” she said of what looked from the outside like a bit of a career swerve. Not to mention that she was told it was a “sure thing.” The pilot wasn’t picked up. “They send the shows to Vegas, and people sit there with knobs, and they turn the knob down if they don’t like an actor,” Gerwig explained with a little embarrassment. “Nobody exactly told me I tested low, but it was insinuated that America did not like it.”

But that allowed her to turn to directing. “By the time I started, I felt like I had ten years of training. My film school was as an actor and co-writer and co-director, and whatever else I did, which included costuming, and holding the boom, and editing. It was a way for me to get my Malcolm Gladwell hours in.” She also benefited from more targeted instruction, in recent years, from DPs who’d heard she wanted to direct and let her sit with them while they constructed their shots. “When I finished the script, I had a moment with myself where I thought, You’re either going to do this now or you’re never going to do this,” she said. “Now you have to make your mistakes and get your gifts because you have to, at some point, jump. I think a lot of women have also particularly a need to feel that they can stand in their own expertise before doing something. A lot of my female friends will be so overqualified for what they do that by the time they do it, it’s like, Well, obviously.”

During the press tour for Mistress America, a journalist asked about whether dating Baumbach, and then writing with him, had opened certain doors for her. Gerwig acknowledged that perhaps it had, proximally, but refused to concede the larger point. “I don’t mean to sound annoying,” she told the reporter, “but I would have done it anyway. I will find that one door and then push it wide open. I’m lucky to find collaborators and kindred spirits. But I don’t need a man, and I would have done it anyway.”

A confident, direct version of ambition is another generational trait that Gerwig seems to comfortably inhabit. Recently, she saw Saoirse Ronan in London to promote the film; Ronan told her she was beginning to think about whether she could direct, inspired in part by watching her on set. “Greta is the one that I’d want to emulate,” Ronan told me. “She was incredibly clear about what she wanted but also supportive about finding our own way through the characters. We’ve been talking in a practical way, too, about stories that I’d like to do and if I could work with her in that regard. She’s a great one for the advice.”

Ronan was also struck by Gerwig’s actorly approach to directing. “She had very clearly mapped out each character’s journey, what it would be like to be a kid in post-9/11 America in California, how complicated it would be to think about leaving Sacramento for the first time,” but also “she gave us an awful lot of freedom to incorporate our own selves.” Gerwig even gave Timothée Chalamet, who plays one of Lady Bird’s love interests — a self-styled high-school intellectual — a syllabus for “what a paranoid anarchist type of thinker would have been reading back then,” he said, which included, in addition to the requisite Howard Zinn that shows up in the movie, The Internet Does Not Exist, an essay collection that warns of the dangers of a networked world. She also asked him to watch Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, which she told me contains a character who is an example of a long-standing type: “These guys who are just completely stuck on their ideas, whether music or progressive philosophy or whatever it is. Like, ‘I’m going to train you to like Pavement.’ ” Gerwig also gave specific directions on how to play the many comic moments in the script: Humor was to be achieved not through comic acting but by playing the situation with all the seriousness with which a high schooler would feel it. “I like things that are funny,” Gerwig said, “but I don’t like things that are in quotes.”

Gerwig plans to tip the balance of her work going forward more toward writing and directing (though she’d like to keep acting). “You just stay in it long enough, and eventually you’ll just be old.” Nobody will worry over whether you are an actor or a director or a writer. “Everyone will just think, Oh, she’s such a wonderful 75-year-old now. She’s our lady Clint Eastwood.”

She has one script, something she wrote before Lady Bird, in the drawer, but for her next project, “I have an inkling of wanting to make something that’s more silent, literally fewer words.” She wouldn’t give any more detail, however. “I worry if I put an idea out in the sunlight too early, it shrivels, and I don’t want to shrivel anything right now.”

Baumbach’s most recent film, The Meyerowitz Stories, was released on Netflix and in theaters just a few weeks before Lady Bird, which comes out on November 3. Both movies open with a parent and child, driving together, on the cusp of the difficult moment when college is about to force that relationship into its next, more distant, phase; both puncture the sweetness of the scene by someone melting down immaturely. In Baumbach’s film, it’s the parent. In Gerwig’s, it’s the daughter.

With Mistress America and Frances Ha, said Baumbach, the pair were able to create “a synthesis” of their two voices, “a kind of a third thing that allows you to try different selves on.” But the couple have strikingly different tones to their independent work, although they tread the same thematic ground (and give each other notes on drafts). Family, in much of Baumbach’s filmography, has been a source of neuroticism for his protagonists, often children picking up the pieces, learning to overcome the limits of a selfish, immature parent’s love. Lady Bird, by contrast, is about a child failing to recognize, in the moment, the expansiveness and totality of her parent’s love for her — as well as the complicated dynamic between teen girls and their mothers, even those who are fond of each other. Baumbach, though, sees their emotional truths as more related. Both movies, he said, are about “how hard it is to acknowledge positive things in someone you need to move away from, and how hard it is to leave.” Gerwig’s story is, in her phrasing, “a movie about wanting to leave a place that’s secretly a love letter to the place, and a movie ostensibly about a daughter that’s secretly about the mother.”

“Oh, I’ve got a lot of guilt,” Gerwig replied quickly when I mentioned that I had seen the film as, in part, a meditation on that particular emotion, and how deeply it can become intertwined with love. “We always joked that we should put up a title card at the end of the movie that said CALL YOUR MOTHER,” she said. The guilt kicked in. “I need to call my mother.”

Gerwig showed her parents and friends the script before shooting and screened the film for them before it premiered, but she also spent a lot of time considering how she’d treated her mother as a teenager. “I could only see the faults in clear relief, but as I’ve gotten older, it’s like, Goddamn, she was right about almost everything.”

For all that she insists Lady Bird isn’t exactly her own story, it feels like a coming-out of sorts for Gerwig’s own sensibility, her preoccupations. “I only ever write from a place of love,” said Gerwig, “which sounds goofy but is actually true. Some writers write from a place of anger or analysis, or something that feels more didactic, but that impulse means that I also write out of real love, which is complicated and changing.”

“Sincerity means a lot to me,” Gerwig continued. “Actually, in Frances Ha, at the beginning, she’s reading out of a literary-criticism book called Sincerity and Authenticity. Basically, the question she’s setting up is, what do we mean by sincerity, and does it diminish the thing?” She considered. “But I’ve always felt like it heightens it.”

[queen-of-deans-booty]

The Truth Comes Out

Characters: Dean x Reader, Sam, witch

Word Count: 2,758

Warnings: this is fluff honestly, implied smut, reader being under a truth spell

Request: Hi jordan! Could you write a dean x reader where she likes dean and on a hunt a witch give reader a truth potion so she starts saying a lot of smutty things about dean and it's kind of a awkward/ funny and sexy situation?

Author’s Note:  I have reached 1,000 followers and I have hosted a writing challenge is you want to take a look at it. Whether you’re a beginner writer and want to practice or a writer that has been writing for a long time, then this is for you. I give feedback to all the fics.

I didn’t make it as smutty as you probably wanted to be but I hope you like it!  If you want to be tagged, leave an ask or message and I’ll add you! Same goes for my Series Rewrite! If you want to request a fic, please send them in! I love writing what you guys want!

Feedback is always appreciated

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You remembered it happen like it was right in front of you. Why you didn’t stop it, was beyond you. You watched her do it. You watched her spike your drink.

But you drank it anyways.

“Alright, I think I’m going to go play some pool and maybe I won’t come home tonight.” Dean said with a smirk, getting up from his bar stool.

“Alright, be safe.” You said with a smile even though it hurt you to say it. He walked off, leaving you and Sam alone for the night.

“When are you going to tell him?” Sam asked, drinking his beer.

“Tell who what, Sam?” You asked, already knowing his answer.

“Are you really playing that game? Dean, Y/N, I’m talking about Dean. I know it kills you to see him go off with all these women.”

“So? It’s not like that’s going to change anything. Besides, you’re implying that I love him or something.” You scoffed.

“I never said anything about love.” Sam said with a smirk. Damn that Winchester.

“Like, love, same difference. I don’t like him. He can fuck around with whoever he pleases and it doesn’t bother me.” You lied. It broke your heart to see him go around with different women because it was Dean, of course he could get different women all the damn time. He was a fucking God.

You’ve just been harboring feelings for the older Winchester ever since you met him. His charm worked you over just like it worked over every other girl. You were just too scared to do something about it. So, you thought it be best to stay in the shadows and hopefully not let your feelings get in the way- which it did.

“Want another beer?” You looked at the blonde bartender but shook your head, opting for something else.

“Actually, can I get your strongest, please.” You said with a smile.

“Be careful, Y/N, we’re still on a case.” Sam teased.

“Shut up, I’m trying to deal with my feelings right now and alcohol is my best friend.” You said. The bartender nodded and took your empty beer bottle and got to work making you the strongest drink she could make. You watched her every move, not trusting people after what happened to you in a bar long ago.

Nothing major happened, just that you would have probably been raped and killed if you didn’t catch the man spiking your drink. So, better to be safe than sorry. Just because she was a bartender, didn’t make her trustworthy.

She put in a few different alcohols but when she got to the end, she put in this purple powder stuff and chanted a few words under her breath. You knew you shouldn’t have taken the drink. But you did. You knew you should have warned Sam that this was your witch. But you didn’t.

She handed you the drink when she was done and you smiled, taking it from her hands.

“Thank you.” She nodded and walked away, keeping an eye on you. You knew you shouldn’t have drank it but you did and it tasted amazing. All it took was one sip and you were cursed. The next thing you knew, you woke up in the motel room, having no recollection of how you got there.

Your eyes fluttered open and you looked around the room, not really remembering last night. You did remember Dean leaving the bar with a skanky blonde on his arm and you remember the bartender but not much after that.

God dammit, you didn’t see Dean which implied that he was still out with his date. God, why did you have to love him so much?

“Be careful, Y/N, Dean is in the bathroom. You keep talking like that and he’ll definitely know what’s up.” Your head snapped to Sam who was typing away at his computer. Did you say that out loud? You didn’t say anything back but looked over at the bathroom when Dean emerged from it, wearing only a towel.

“How was your night? I heard you got pretty wasted.” Dean said with a chuckle, walking over to his bag. You couldn’t help but drool as you stared at his muscles, the threatening v-line just hiding what you really wanted to see. Damn, he was just perfect in every sense of the word.

“What did you just say?” Dean said, looking over at you. Crap, did you just say that out loud?

“I said you were perfect in every sense of the word.” You said, spilling out the truth. What the hell was going on?

“Right, I’m going to get changed.” Dean said, looking at you as he disappeared into the bathroom with his clothes.

“What has gotten into you?” You looked over at Sam who was staring at you.

“Sam, I think something may have happened last night at the bar.” You said, your brain trying to think hard about it.

“Yeah. You got so wasted, I had to drag you back here because Dean took the car with him.” Sam said, grimacing at the memory.

“No, Sam, well, yes, that happened but that’s not what I’m talking about. Look, that bartender did something to my drink.” You said, getting up from the bed.

“Y/N, you think everyone messes with your drink after what almost happened.” Sam said, looking back at his computer.

“No! That’s not what I mean, damn it!” You sighed out in frustration. “Look, I think that bartender is our witch.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I saw her mess with my drink! She put some purple dust in it and chanted some words that I don’t remember at all.” You said truthfully, remembering what happened now.

“Then why did you drink it?”

“I have no idea! Sam, please help me!” You said, begging him.

“I don’t know how to help you. I don’t even know what kind of spell she put on you, if she is our witch.” Sam said with a sigh. Dean came out of the bathroom and grabbed his keys, heading to the door.

“I’m heading out for food. Do you guys want something?”

“No thanks.” Sam said, going to say something else but you interrupted him.

“Yes, I do.” You said, wincing when you knew what was coming.

“What do you want?”

“You.” You said, looking at Sam for help. Yep, a truth potion. Just fucking great.

“Excuse me?” Dean asked, puzzled by your behavior.

“Dean, we have a problem. We found our witch and she cursed Y/N. Judging by what’s happening, she is cursed with a truth spell.” Sam said, shutting his laptop and grabbing his jacket.

“Sam! Don’t tell him that, now he is not going to stop asking questions!” You scolded the younger Winchester.

“Forget breakfast, let’s do that instead.” Dean grinned, tossing his keys on the made bed. You rolled your eyes

“Dean!” You said with a glare.

“Alright, I think the bar is still open. Now, I don’t know if she’s still working but I’ll go and see where I can find her,” Sam said, grabbing Dean’s keys. “You two stay here and figure something out.” You knew that Sam was teasing you because he saw this as an opportunity for you to tell Dean about how you feel. With how you were acting, you probably will but that doesn’t mean Dean will return it.

Without waiting for a reply, Sam left the room, leaving you and Dean alone.

“Alright, let’s see if this thing really works.” Dean said, grinning as he sat on the opposite bed.

“Dean, please.” You begged, not really wanting to do this.

“Alright, the summer of ’15, I hooked up with someone. Who was it?” Dean asked. He kept this a secret because it was someone you knew but you knew everything in his life.

“Amanda Walker, despite that you tell people it was Wendy Adams. Are you afraid I’m going to kick your ass for sleeping with one of my best friends from college?” You asked with a grin. It didn’t bother you that he slept with someone that you knew. It bothered you because he slept with someone that wasn’t you.

“Damn, I thought I could get away with that one.” He said, scratching his chin.

“As if, Winchester.” You giggled. He asked you a few more personal questions that you would rather keep to yourself but it was Dean and because you were alone, you were okay with telling him. As if you actually had a choice.

“What happened on July 4th, 2014?” You rolled your eyes. You’ve been lying about this event for as long as you could because what really happened was truly embarrassing.

“I snuck out of the party you threw, to go hook up with Sam.” You said truthfully, wincing when you heard yourself say it.

“Whoa, are you fucking kidding me?” Dean asked, shocked at that answer. The lie you told everyone was that you left with some random person but that he passed out from being too drunk and that is why you came back.

“Dean, are you really asking that question right now?” You glared at him.

“Well, did you hook up with him?”

“No, of course not, he was with some other girl and I felt so embarrassed. I don’t like Sam that way.” You said truthfully, glad that you got that off your chest. Not even Sam knew the real reason why you left. You were glad he wasn’t here right now.

“So, who do you like?” Dean asked with a smile. You knew he was only teasing you, expecting some random name to come out of your mouth but if he only knew just how terrified you were. You suddenly felt a sense of weight lifting off your shoulders and you knew, there and then, that the curse was broken.

You didn’t know how Sam did it but Dean was waiting for an answer. Here was your opportunity to finally tell him how you feel. You were scared, yes, but you had to do this.

“You.” You tried to keep the answers short and vague but with Dean, that would never happen.

“What?” Dean said with wide eyes. Here it comes, you knew the rejection was going to come soon.

“You heard me. I said I like you.” You said.

“Why?” He said. Your heart broke at that question. You always knew Dean hated himself and that he never allowed himself to be happy but you were going to prove to him that he was wrong. That he was everything you wanted in a man.

“If I tell you, this will definitely change everything we have between us. There is no going back but since you asked, I have no choice but to tell you the truth.” You said with a sigh.

“Tell me.” He said softly. You took a deep breath and nodded.

“Well, for starters, I love the kind of person you are. You have a big heart and you don’t let people see this side of you very often but I know you break down. Every person has a weakness and I know you have yours. I may not know all of them but I do know some of them.

“When I see you cry, I just want to hold you and kiss you and make you better because it breaks my heart to see you this way. I know you’re hurting constantly and I want to take that pain away. I love the way you constantly put mine and Sam’s life ahead of yours even when I don’t deserve it.

“You care for the people you love so much that you would do anything to keep them safe but who is keeping you safe? I hate that you don’t let me help you. I hate that you don’t let Sam help you and I know it’s because you don’t think of yourself as worthy but you are. In my eyes, you are.

“I love your eyes because they are so beautiful and so green. I love your mouth, especially when you lick your lips. I can’t help but think what else you can do with that tongue of yours. I love your body and I hate to see you get hurt. I love your voice and I know you don’t do it often but I do hear you sing sometimes and it’s the most beautiful sound I ever heard.

“You make me happier than I ever have been and you don’t even know it. You make me feel things I have never felt before. You make me want to live and to take whatever I want in life but all I want is you because you’re my world and there is nothing you can do that will change that. No matter how many women you take home.” You finished with a sigh.

You planned on just telling him the basic things but you figured you may as well go all out. You were putting your heart on the line and if Dean kept staring at you like he is now, not saying anything, you were going to lose your damn mind.

You stared right back into his candy green eyes but he still hasn’t said a word and you were going to start crying soon if he didn’t say a word. He was about to say something but his phone went off. You’ve heard in the background, his and your phone going off but neither of you cared to answer it.

Dean cleared his throat and answered the phone, saying Sam’s name. You sighed and looked down at your feet, wondering if this was such a good idea. Dean kept the call short and quick, looking at you in a new light.

“Why did you say those things?” Dean asked. Your head snapped to his and you felt yourself become hurt and angry. Was he really asking that question right now?

“Why the hell do you think? It’s the truth and I’m kind of under a truth spell right now.” You glared at him.

“No, you’re not. Sam just told me he took care of the problem 30 minutes ago. That is why he’s been calling us to see if it worked and that you were okay. So, let me ask you again: why did you say those things?” Dean asked, kneeling in front of you so you were looking down at him.

“I said them because they are true. I know I wasn’t under the spell when I said them. But, that is how I feel and I don’t need a damn truth spell to make me tell you these things.” You said, looking into his eyes.

“How long have you felt these things?”

“Are you going to keep asking questions or say something back to me because I am losing my damn mind right now.” You said, your eyes big and scared. One moment, he was looking into your eyes with such emotion, but the next, he had you on your back with his lips on yours.

You’ve waited for his moment for so long and now that it’s here, you needed to hold onto it for as long as you could because you didn’t know if you would have it again. You kissed him back, sliding your hands up his shirt to feel the warm skin he always hid.

You opened your mouth for him and he wasted no time sliding his tongue in to meet yours. You moaned in the kiss and took his shirt off, moving your hands up and down his arms, feeling the muscles there. He did the same with you but instead of kissing you again, he placed his lips on your neck, kissing around to see what spots had you trembling with pleasure.

Dean reached around to unclasp your bra but you stopped him. He looked at you in confusion, hoping he didn’t do anything wrong.

“Wait, Dean, what about Sam? He fixed the problem but he will come back.” You said, looking up at him. You didn’t want Sam to see you naked.

“That’s not a problem. I told him not to come back for the rest of the day.” He grinned, leaning back down and kissed you once more. You grinned and let him do whatever it is that he wanted to you. You had Dean, even if it was for one night. But you had a feeling this was the start of something new.

Masterlist // Series Rewrite Masterlist // Buy me a Coffee?

Forever tags:

@the-band-parade @maddieburcham1 @ginamsmith @mogaruke @whit85-blog @inlovewithbja @spn67-sister @kdfrqqg @jarpadandjensenaremyheroes @roxyspearing @supercalifragilistic26 @mishamigose @cobrakai1967 @essie1876 @innernightwerewolf

Dean tags:

@akshi8278 @winchesterandpie @mega-mrs-dean-winchester @spn-dean-and-sam-winchester

Other tags:

@jensen-jarpad @notnaturalanahi @27bmm

[tumblunni]

oreshika: you know who is not the bad guy? the bad guy also oreshika: you know who is actually the secret bad guy? this sweet harmless comic relief man who has done nothing wrong

except like its eight glowing brain levels deeper cos the sweet comic relief man is also a giant obviously evil demon mask that ANYONE could have pinned for “really just possessing this dude” since the very start but then his personality was very non bad and he was all ‘hey buddie why u no smile’ to his host and like I LET MY GUARD DOWN OKAY. I LEARNED TO TRUST AGAIN.

i’m at the final battle and I am so pissed off but also HYPED?? like im relaly mad cos like RIGHT FROM HIS FIRST APPEARANCE I was like ‘dear god please don’t make onigashira the real villain, it would be so fucking obvious’ and then i just got progressively more pissed because he literally did nothing evil in the entire damn plot, he’s just evil because Evil he’s some sort of Magical Evil Mask that was Made To Be Evil and like Unquestionably Is That and no sort of interesting exploration on that plot even though he HASNT ACTED EVIL EVER UNTIL THE LITERAL LAST FIVE MINUTES

and it raises SO MANY questions cos like why was he even cooperating with Seimei then?? why didnt he fully posess seimei at any earlier point?? why didnt he kill nueko at any of the five other mandatory boss fights we had with him?? Seimei at least had an intriguing personality that gave an odd justification for his plot laziness. Cos he’s an anti-villain who weirdly sees you all as friends or a mentor/student thing, and he’s really just pretending to be evil so that you’ll kill him, cos he can’t die and desperately wants to. So it makes sense that he doesnt do any of his evil actions until you arrive, cos the whole damn point was just to taunt you into arriving. And its nicely parodied cos he literally sends you tea party invitations to his latest evil plan and gets pissed off if you miss it XD i’m so sad for seimei plz say (mei) that we adopt him afterwards i wanted to adopt onigashira afterwards back when it looked like he was the not evil one of the pair I AM STILL REALLY SALTY THAT HE’S NOT!!!! HIS DESIGN IS REALLY COOL AND CUTE!!!!! AND HE WAS A COMIC RELIEF OLD MAN DEMON DRAGON DOOD!!! i trusted u

okay but to talk about why i am also HYPE i need to go into some endgame spoilers whoopy doop!

so yeah the twist of ‘evilman is actually just being controlled by his puppet dragon thing’ was WAY OBVIOUS and i was really wishing for it to not happen but they made up for it by having ANOTHER TWIST THAT’S WAY BETTER

random description of something else from the endgame that is cool but i dont really know where to fit it into this conversation lol you actually do get to fight Final Boss Seimei here, its a cool boss rush with him and then Super Onigashira Betrayal Mode but what I really like is that its an OPTIONAL boss rush! the first time you play it you fight seimei with his freaky spider legs superform, and then nueko steals it back cos it was hers first. Can i just say again that I love a sexy mom styled heroine who’s powers are entirely around growing friggin monsters out of her arms and stuff? Seriously way to subvert that fanservice bro! (its still a bit cringey when they show the monster tattoos being drawn on her butt and boobs...) so then you go into the second fight and your health has all been healed and now one party member has a new supermove (I was really pissed cos it didnt restore your MP and TP, so I couldnt use that move!) But then if you lose and come back it actually skips the first fight and has an altered cutscene that’s like ‘oh, you’re back for round two?’ and such. MUCH preferrable to stuff like kingdom hearts where i have to watch a damn ten minute cutscene each time! Tho I do wish there was an option to redo it in boss rush mode, I guess that’s just a reward for people who can get it on the first try. I’m prepared now thooooo... :(

OKAY BACK ON TOPIC

Now for this final arc of the story we’ve been investigating the mystery of the Nameless God, some dude in the past who was apparantly super great and then got erased from history. There’s also the mystery of who exactly was Nueko’s husband and what happened to separate her from Seimei and make him turn evil, tho i mean its PRETTY OBVIOUS his dad was this mystery god lol And even though its not really very much of a twist about his identity, its still really interesting how the whole thing is handled. Him being erased from history means that none of the characters can remember his name or face, but NEITHER CAN THE PLAYER! He appears in the interfaces long before the plot actually talks about him, as a silhouette and a name smudged out by ink.

Now the actually cool twist about him is that like.. we’ve been hearing for AGES about how great he was, and how someone must have put out a hit on him or something. And him being in the interface seems like a spoiler that he’s gonna be unlockable later as a godly husband candidate for your protagonists. And even when we see npc optional boss battle gods hating on him, it’s always the jerkass gods who have some sort of reason to be biased. Or (in retrospect) they’re hating him for entirely the wrong reasons based on other people’s flawed gossip about him. “He was too kind and if he made equality then I wouldn’t be rich!” says genericman mc gee, who is probably eighty times less evil than this man

COS THATS THE TWIST

He was an evil fucker and erased himself from history with essentially an alchemy equivelant of a mad science experiment gone wrong. And what happened with Nueko and Seimei was that evilbad mc trashdad tried to use his damn four year old child as raw materials for this experiment, and she tried and failed to save him. And then she was desperate and her only option left was to kill the kid so he couldnt be tortured like that, and then killed herself too from grief. But it all went horribly wrong because she didn’t know that the reason Seimei was a candidate for this experiment is because he had immortality powers as a half human half god. So the poor kid survived watching his mom stab him and then slit her own throat, and he had no clue it was because his dad was gonna kill him anyway, so he grows up hating her and missing her and being this big ol sad mess that’s easily manipulated by a fucko father...

COS THATS ALSO THE TWIST

ONIGASHIRA WAS DADS

WHAT HOW

DADS

And like if they were gonna reveal his entire funny cute sidekick personality to be completely false then I’m glad at least his real personality was Twisty Wow and Immensely Punchable like i still feel like i could never punch a cute puppet pal but i can surely punch an abusive father pretending to be his own son’s imaginary friend for twenty years and whispering bullshit in his ear just to drive him into his own grave and like POOR SEIMEI WANTED TO DIE JUST NOT LIKE THIS NOT LIKE THIIIIIIIISSSS

i still think that ‘hey i was made to be an evil superweapon demon dragon mask thing but i became sentient and decided to be a happy hugs jokeman’ would have been a really amazing character concept too either that or ‘hey it really is a harmless normal mask and i’m just super seriously angsty seimei doing ventriloquism as a hugs jokeman character because i’m lonely as fuck and please be my friend’ either of those would have been better than this but like if this is what we get then I’m at least glad they gave me good enough reason to feel ‘GAHH I WANNA STAB HIM AND SAVE MY NEW SON’ rather than just ‘oh blah this ending ruined my fave character, and i feel nothing towards anything now’

also his boss fight is really damn fuckin coolio wow like it was a HUGE WHOA MOMENT when the fight starts and his name is blanked out and you just instantly know who he was this whole time and your mind explodes that this guy was evil and then he’s like a giant buddha-esque multi armed dude doing sutra poses with a big ol spoopy demon head and then really fun classic gameplay of ‘him summon the many hands and u has to destroy the hands to get 2 him and then they regenerate after a short amount of time’ but he’s also got super hellish simultaneous buff and debuff powers and all sorts of other nasty tricks AND IM ON THE LOWEST DIFFICULTY GEEZ and like for some reason it really stabbed my heart seeing how just one of the many hands is still human, its like seimei’s still in there and maybe he might still be alive if we defeat this guy fast enough... and then the music is SO FUCKING GOOD and it has like three remixes for all his increasingly frantic stages. like he doenst actually have boss transformations for them, its just moveset changes and stat boosts as his health drops. but also the colours of the battlefield change and you get funky remix time so its still cool!

and then I was SO CLOSE, i had him down to 5% HP before he killed me T_T such a marathon boss and I was almost there... I’m really excited to try again tho! i finally got that damn curse off my inherited weapon from the first generation, and now i’m on generation 87, and now im ready to FUCK SOME SHIT UP! also my current party is all named after types of olives because i ran out of inspiration around character number 300 i am so fucking addicted to this grindy ass game!

[existentialkendall-blog]

Swipe Right for Drunk Sexual Innuendo 

Pairing: Chris Kendall/Reader Wordcount: 1.9k Rating: Alcohol, sexy words Warning: This fic contains sexual flirting which some audiences may find cringe-inducing and uncomfortable. Read at your own risk. 

Request/Prompt: they met on tinder, and that night when they matched they both had something to drink and their tipsyness led to them being flirty etc and when they met they're super awks with each other but in a v cute way

A/N: Request a fic prompt here. Y/N means Your Name. 

He's hot. The first thing you notice is that he's hot, then again, that's the first thing anyone notices on the perverse dating app. You'd downloaded it initially because you were curious to see how many people would find you attractive, but now you're three days and twenty matches in. Except, the innocent smile looking at you from the screen, and brown floppy hair, makes him stand out from the others. And he's probably the only guy you'd make an effort into continuing a conversation with. The rest of his photos confirm that idea. In one he's wearing sunglasses, strands of hair sticking to his forehead and mouth open in a crying face. Such a dork. You giggle, and blame the wine you'd started drinking an hour ago. But the next photo has your mouth agape in shock, because wow. He's wearing a red and black checked shirt ripped at the shoulders, punk aesthetic changing him from cute to undeniably sexy. The last is a bathroom shot. His green lantern t-shirt is hitched up to reveal a slither of skin, and his hair looks like it needs your hands buried in it.

NAME:

Chris Kendall, 27

BIO:

About Chris Northern but not gross northern like Cheryl Cole Raving bisexual 6ft 2- perfect big spoon Tries his best but has lazy syndrome Winner of beauty contest in monopoly Best hair where he works (the internet) Very lonely Terrible comedian, slightly worse actor Entertains people for a living

***** "Made 50 Shades of Grey seem as tame as the teletubbies." -Anonymous tinder woman ***** "His tongue is as talented as his mouth is wide." -Anonymous tinder male *"Stop asking me for reviews you weirdo." -Anonymous tinder female ***** "So sweet, everything a man should be." -Chris's mum

What a sweetheart. His bio shows that he's both adorable, and funny, and okay really hot. Still. Proving that you're a great judge of character once you see a persons face. Without hesitating, you swipe right. Instantly the screen changes. It's a match! You either have a really depressing life, or you really like him, because the match makes you grin so much it hurts. Before you construct a perfect first message, you grab the wine bottle (because glasses are for people who like washing up) and take a long gulp. Okay, the perfect message. Drunk you has no inhibitions or awareness or tact. So you send You can entertain me anytime ;) Because you're very, very, classy. While you wait for him to reply, you consider replying to some of the other people who've messaged you. It hasn't really gotten past the 'hey' 'hi' stage, and you're never as forward as you are tonight. Alcohol speeds everything up. As you're about to try to start something vaguely interesting with a 25yr old medical student, Chris replies. You almost have a heart attack, smile returning to your face.

Entertain you how?

Cryptic. He clearly wants the attention, so you give it to him.

I can think of a few things...

I bet you're so much cuter than your pictures, and you're 10/10 in those

And you look like a kinky fuck

We can explore your kinks together 

And like that you've spammed him for the very first time. Damn. You groan very lightly, because you still feel the familiar feelings of shame and embarrassment. More drinking is required. He's even quicker replying to those.

What kinks do you think I have?

My sexual prowess is ready for your enjoyment

You chuckle at the audacity of his question. And when you brain provides the perfect response the chuckle evolves into a full blown laugh.

Clearly a praise one. Want me to tell you you're a pretty boy Chris?

Do it. I'll trade you one, you're cute as fuck and I think you'd look good on my bed

Your eyebrows lift in shock, and you reposition yourself on your bed so you're more comfortable.

You're so hot my eyes burned looking at you, and I really want to see your bedroom ceiling

I wish I was the sun so I could go down on you every evening

You're swaying unconsciously as you type, and you have to concentrate on each word to make sure it's legible. Chris is actually adorable. You really need to meet him. ___

Hangovers never really affected you. Sure you'd feel groggy, and weak in the stomach, but never full blown migraines and nausea. The day after is no different. You wake up, and like most mornings, flail uncoordinatedly to find the phone typically resting on the floor. No such luck. With a ridiculous amount of effort, you sit up. Half lidded eyes flicker around the dully lit room, hands patting the covers suspiciously. And then, "Yes," As you find the rectangular device. Checking the time reveals it's 11am. Under that is a singular text rising above your usual notifications like a bad omen. The number is registered as 'assfucker'. The message cuts off halfway, so you unlock it to finish reading 'Are we still meeting at 12? I'm in the mood for pizza!'. And then, 'I don't usually meet people off tinder but we agreed to last night and I don't want to cancel'. Oh shit. Fuck. Mild hangover sure, but this has never happened before. You open tinder, heartbeat pounding uncomfortably in your chest. There's a long list of messages you'd been exchanging with this weird guy last night, the most recent being a plan to meet at Pizza Express for lunch. It's currently 11:40am. "Fuck. Ugh, fucking hell," You scramble out of bed, and rush to the bathroom to get ready. It doesn't even cross your mind to cancel. What if he's had to travel ages to meet you and he's almost there? Or, if he does really want to meet you and you disappoint him? That old fear of disappointment again. So, even though you don't have time to shower, or make coffee, and you're barely out of the house with your clothes on, you make it to the tube station with 5 minutes before you're suppose to meet. Even though the transport system is fast, direct, and efficient, the one thing it lacks is mobile service. Your head is itching with a far away headache by the time you finally get above ground. You send a quickly typed 'I'm going to be a bit late, I'm so sorry'. 'Ah good. I'll get us a table' he replies. You can't remember what he looks like. You're standing outside Pizza Express and you've just realised you don't remember what he looks like and you didn't check his profile before you came out to meet him, you were in too much of a rush. You're trying to use the WiFi to find his profile but it's loading so slowly, and before it loads someones feet are directly underneath your phone, right in your personal space. "I've heard if you stare really hard you can teleport inside of your phone," his voice is light and rounded with an ambiguous Northern tinge to it. You look up and wow, his hair is so fluffy, and he's practically seven foot off the ground. "What?" and why are you talking to me, you're cute, where is the guy I'm meeting. "Seriously? ...From last night?" Of course. Now that he's said where he's from, it's obvious that he's tinder guy. Except you still don't know what his name is, and he's leading you to your table and it's too late to ask him so... Fuck. "For you," He gestures towards your seat with a magicians flourish. You return the favour with his chair, "And for you." He grins, and his smile is so wide you get sucked in for a moment. You order your meals without a hitch, and the conversation flows naturally. "You're very cute in person," He compliments you, and a flushed pink smile takes over his face. "You should see me in animals," You reply, dry humour dry as ever. His eyebrows raise and for a second he looks unsure of how to respond. But he laughs, and you're safe. "You too, are attractive," You nod towards him. If the whole meal is this awkward and stunted you might have to find something totally normal to do to pass the time, like shed a napkin or drink a lot of tap water. "Two? Where's the other guy?" Oh god, he's awkward like you. He has a natural boyish charm and you're suddenly glad you decided to meet, because this is everything you've been missing. "Good question, I was expecting someone taller."

"I'm a grower honey, not a shower."

"Jesus Christ."

"You called?" "Duuude!" You exclaim, and he bursts into a fit of giggles. His laugh isn't even a laugh, not really. It's multiple giggles layered on top of each other, each one with different personalities but all sound cheerful. "So this is awkward but..." You trail off, not entirely sure how to say 'I don't remember your name and I need you to tell me cause maybe I want to keep seeing you' without sounding like a moron. But then it hits you. "... I saved your name in my phone wrong.. And, well, here, can you change it please," You hand over the offending item, where he's labelled 'assfucker', and hope he isn't offended. He frowns at the screen, and it's adorable. Everything he does is adorable. "No, you saved it correctly," His frown lines grow deeper and he goes, "Hang on, you did get something wrong." When he gives the phone back to you, you check the contact name. Under Name, and where business is, he's typed out 'fucker of asses'. Complete it is, Assfucker, fucker of asses. "Nice. Real classy."

"I aim to please."

"Oh a line from a bdsm film? So that's what you're into."

"I'm into you."

"Not yet you aren't," You wink jokingly but his expression changes like he's taking you serious. Ahh, abort. You aren't capable of flirting in real life, only on phones to anonymous people. Except he's not anonymous anymore. Before he makes things worse you admit the truth, "I've forgotten your name okay?" "y/n! How could you do that to me? After everything we've been through? You tell me something like that?" You roll your eyes but you're laughing and he looks so pleased with himself. Smug bastard. "Dude, just tell me." "Or what?" He raises one eyebrow perfectly. "Tell me, you asshole." He sticks out one hand in the middle of the table, "Hi, I'm Chris," you laugh and take his hand, shaking it like you're becoming business partners. Some kind of partners. "Nice to meet you Chris."

"You bet your ass it is."

"My ass is not on the line."

"I wish it was." The weird flirty defensive conversation continues for the rest of the meal. And at the end, after you've splitting the bill in half and you're saying goodbye, he hands you the cheque. "Read it when I'm not here."

"Sure."

"I'll text you."

"Or I will."

"I'll miss you."

"I'd miss me too."

"y/n."

"Chris."

"Do I get a hug?"

"C'mere," He's six foot of pure warmth and you feel comfortable in his embrace immediately. He smells so good, and you're slightly sad when he pulls away, and walks down the street in the opposite direction to you. You wait for him to turn the corner before you open the cheque. He's written something on it in scratchy restaurant pencil that he grabbed from who knows where. 'Next date, your ass is on the line. And I will win it'

[amanda-teaches]

Amanda, talk to me about Dean and what you love about him throughout the seasons? I need to gush over Dean with someone!

Oh my gosh, Lynn, you came to the right place! I’m going to spend another 30 minutes gushing about my man. YES!!!!!!!!!!!

What do I love about Dean? EVERYTHING! But, since you asked throughout the seasons, I’ll go through specific episodes that stand out (we already went through Skin, lol). I could honestly talk about all of them, but that’d be longgggg.

Spoiler alert: it got really long anyways. I can’t shut up about Dean. So, if you’re in to read a novel, head below the cut. Sum up reasons for everyone else:

I love Dean because he’s strong, protective, caring, funny, smart, and loving. He’s willing to sacrifice himself to save his loved ones AND complete strangers. He is great with kids and kind to every victim he meets. He’s a family man at heart. He’s quirky and fun and sweet and just overall wonderful.

Get to know me more about me about sending me questions about myself or SPN (or Dean, lol)

Novel about Dean under the cut:

Ok, first off, Faith, where Dean crushes my heart by being willing to die. But, what I want to focus on is his connection with Layla. This is where we really see that Dean puts others lives above his. He’d die for complete strangers (something he almost/actually does two episodes later in Nightmare). He’s selfless, which is incredibly brave. We know he’d die for his loved ones, but the fact that he’d die to protect anyone innocent is really amazing.

I can’t move on without mentioning his scenes with Cassie in Route 666 (cough, especially the steamy one, cough). So loving and caring! This episode really shows me that Dean’s a one woman guy at heart.

Alright, now I’m going by random episodes: Season 2- Nightshifter. I love Dean in this episode. He is nice to the bank robber (Ron?), even though some people might write off the crazy. He listens to him, and not condescendingly, and he tries to save him. Shows what a great guy Dean is. Plus, when they escaped from the SWAT team, Sam and Dean didn’t kill anyone. They don’t kill innocents if they can help it.

Season 2- What is and what should never be: his connection with his family and how strong that is. His perfect life is a family-centered life.

Sam’s death and his subsequent deal showed how much he loved his brother. He goes to Hell for him. Enough said.

Season 3- The Kids are Alright. I’m not the biggest fan of Lisa, but I loved Dean and Ben. His relationship with Ben is just precious. More proof he’d make an amazing father.

Season 4- In the Beginning. I love his relationship with his parents here, especially his mom. I love family man Dean.

Monster Movie. His relationship with Jamie is amazing. He is sweet with her, while still being funny and protective. He’d be a very caring partner.

Heaven and Hell- The Impala scene. Enough said.

Season 5- The Curious Case of Dean Winchester. Yet another example of Dean sacrificing himself to save his loved ones. Plus, old Dean is hilarious.

Changing Channels- We learn Dean loves Dr. Sexy. That’s his quirky side that I’d love to just hang out and watch Netflix with.

Abandon All Hope- The scene with Jo. The love and longing he showed there was beautiful. They never officially got together, but Dean would love with all his heart.

Season 6- Exile on Main Street. I LOVE domestic Dean. Not a big fan of Lisa, but domestic Dean with his cooking and gentle sex and barbecue throwing and salt/shotgun under the bed. I’m so in love with that.

This whole season with Sam Soulless shows a great side of Dean’s love for his brother. Plus, Cowboy Dean.

Season 7 is just a lot of good case episodes that show Dean’s personality. Plus, introduction of Charlie, who I love with Dean and 1940s suit. The loss of Bobby hurts like crazy though.

Season 8. I love post-purgatory Dean. He’s so layered. His relationship with Benny is great, just like his relationship with Cas. He’s a strong friend. Plus, Medieval Dean. And, Dean trying to support Sam during the trials gets to me. More of him being an amazing man.

This is also where the Bunker comes in. I love Dean having a home. Although, Baby is his home. Oh, his relationship with Baby! He loves and cares for that car so much.

That continues into Season 9. The depth of his relationships with his loved ones gets to me: Sam (obviously), Cas, Charlie, Kevin. Anyone he considers family gets 110% of him.

Season 9 and 10 Dean- the Mark of Cain. He is so strong trying to fight against it. His strength and character is amazing to me, even as he keeps losing people.

I love the mature Dean in 11 and 12. He’s battle-hardened and wiser, but he still retains some of his trademark humor. He is less carefree, but he still loves just as deeply and he’s just as strong and protective.

[a-story-teller]

Lmao sooooo! My 18th birthday was a... I don’t take the Good Lord’s name in vain very often but God it was wild. I never thought I would say “last night was crazy” but last night was crazy. Much more under the cut. NSFW mentionings.

So I was at an anime/video game convention over the weekend, which ran from the 25th-27th. The con ran over my birthday (the 27th) and I quickly figured out since panels run late into the night, if I went to an 18+ panel past midnight on the Saturday schedule, it’d technically be the 27th and I could get in. 

So we made a do of it! My brother and sister and I went to a “dating game” panel run by a midwest-centered burlesque group and I got in with no shit from the security man. We went and sat near the front and basically it was ye olde 3-people-on-one-side-of-a-tarp-answer-questions-from-one-person-on-the-other-side setup. The one person on the other side, though clearly a member of the burlesque, was unknown to the contestants, and they were also most often in costume. 

We sit down. Things start. The announcer is in half a kigu and there are already sex jokes everywhere. They ask for their first contests, I raise my hand (the room was packed) and then yell “I just turned 18!” and the announcer’s like “then get your ass up here!” and then proceeds to gush over how cute me + my cosplay are. I’m contestant 2 and the questions start. I know myself well and I like to think I’m witty and by the time we’re nearing the end, I’m the crowd favorite. The whole thing is hilarious and I get chosen as the winner for this round! I come around the other side and the person is in a fucking sexy meowth cosplay lol and we hug and I get ushered backstage. 

The prize is a free print of any burlesque member (send nudes lmao). But before I can get to the print table my path is blocked by two burlesque guys, one of whom is already shirtless - junkrat cosplay, no duh - and the other, a team Instinct Spark cosplayer, immediately lifts his shirt and goes “You wanna touch?” and like. Bruh. This guy’s abs are amazing. I mean like “he said Kylo Ren was shredded” amazing. And God help me there’s even a bit of a happy trail. But what’s a girl to do when handed beautiful abs on a silver platter? So I just press my hand to it and like absorb the power and maybe get extremely flustered. Then the junkrat’s like “don’t I get some?” and me, being stunned stupid, just poke this kid’s abs instead of properly appreciating them. 

I bump around backstage watching the antics, sifting through large binders of nudes like it’s normal, standing next to a no-face cosplayer in high heels. I choose my picture - an artsy shot, only one tiddy out, able to be passed off as art reference should my mother ever find it. These are the things I think about. Everyone has been super duper nice and I head back to my seat with goods in hand, still reeling a bit from finding out what abs feel like, to chill with the sibs and laugh over all of it. We watch a bunch of the other rounds, the highlights of which include an extremely drunk contestant shaking her thong-clad bum at the crowd, telling everyone about how she’s been deprived by only having vanilla sex, and proceeding to invite up and snog, tongue included, a random woman from the audience; that no-face cosplayer slinkily pulling up the bottom of the skirt to reveal stockings and garters; and previously-mentioned Spark pulling down his pants to get “spanked” with the announcer’s flip-flop only to have her pull them off his butt, effectively mooning the audience. Remember, these are only the highlights. 

I slip backstage to get my print signed and take the opportunity (what, at this point, did I have to lose) to be like “can I just...” and full-on splay my hand on junkrat’s tiny ripped abs. Because the poke was wasted and I was doing this right. We laughed and had a couple jokes - he was super chill, really in character, the voice and everything - then I got my print back and returned to my seat. A couple more rounds go by, it’s funny as hell, I feel like all this is extremely surreal and I’ve entered into a much more interesting liminal space.

The panel ends and I come up to the Meowth chick because, just letting you know, I’ve been tossing around the idea of doing burlesque myself and I wonder if she has some tips on getting started. She sits me down all mom-like (seriously this crew was so amazing, considerate, warm, and welcoming omg) and tells me how she started, how she thought was the best way to get into it, and how to apply for this group specifically. She aks me how old I am and I’m like “18″ and she’s all “you’re a baby!!! :)” and I’m like “yeah, legit, I Just turned 18.″ Oh boy. The look on her face. She just starts yelling to the others like “It’s her BIRTHDAY! She’s EIGHTEEN!” and another member’s like “Oh gosh, we’re going to give you a present. Tell Spark to get over here.” And y’all I’m saying I can see the end. The light at the end of the tunnel. I turn to my sister like “I think I’m getting a lap dance...” lmao I’m losing it. I’m straight up questioning what parallel universe I’ve fallen into where I’m hailed as Cute by a large crowd and I’m about to be grinded on by a man who is ridiculously cut and I am Not mentally prepared for whatever might happen. But sure enough I’m shown to backstage, given a lone chair, and sit down in it. By the maker if, after all this, I’m getting a lap dance, then I am not letting my embarrassed bitch ass make things weird. 

But they tell me that if anything makes me uncomfortable to just say. I’m not going to describe the occurrence beyond three things: 1) upon seeing a short video clip after (no, not available for viewing sdklsadghgh) I realized it had been hella noisy the whole time but I’d been so preoccupied I had barely noticed there was Anyone else around 2) where the Fuck are you supposed to look? Eyes? Abs? At least the butt is safe and 3) How is simply bumping noses with someone Hot ???? asks a total virgin.

It ended and I was equal parts glad it was over and like got dammmmmn what the fuck man. I was pretty pink. Spark was totally peppy and cool as a cucumber, like, “Did you like it? I’ve been practicing!!” and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, it was great!” and he just sort of goes, “Oh, I’m glad, you were very stoic and I wasn’t sure.” Brev. Why I gotta stress about e v e r y t h i n g. That’s called a poker face and it broke exactly Once, at which point I giggled and covered my mouth. But it was the abs. Again. Of course. If you ever need to know my kryptonite, apparently it’s impeccable abs. 

But then I talked with the members a bit more, thanked everyone for the shower of special treatment, and we exited the panel room. I was Shook for the whole night, still am rn, and tbh the three things I left thinking were: 1) when you don’t drink you can Remember all the crazy shit that happens, not to mention stay in control of your behavior, I have no reason to Want to drink 2) people get paid to do stuff like stand and make jokes on a stage wearing a kigu, bra, and flip flops part of the time and spend the other part wearing nice costumes and lingerie and dancing, and I would like to be one of them 3) I Gotta get over this whole being jittery thing, me no likey. 

But no it was Nuts in more ways than one and I swear this thing is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, despite how wack it sounds. Trust me, it was wack for me too. But it was a fantastic time, biggest deal I’ve ever had made for my birthday, and now I guess I won’t need a bachelorette party.