#very fucked up of de killer to not even give her a little treat. there was no reason to starve her smh

[alirhi]

okay. let's do this shit.

Guess what, bitches? Mama bear's back and angry all over again. Remember when I said I might dive into a ragepost about how Bucky's treated after completing the one about Loki? This is it. This is the post. Welcome to fucking Thunderdome.

I will actually try to keep it civil. No promises, but I'll try. and I will not be accepting "constructive criticism" about my rage. Just so we're clear.

Got it? Good. Let's dive in.

In case you don't want to read the whole thing (I know I get wordy) here's what this whole post will boil down to: BUCKY NEVER HAD A FUCKING CHOICE. NEVER. NOT ONCE IN HIS ENTIRE ADULT LIFE.

Now, quick reminder: I don't read comics. I know nothing about Bucky's comic canon, except what Sebastian liked to bring up as often as possible during TWS/CW promotions: at some point, Bucky boned Nat. XD Since Bucky only exists as a Marvel property, I won't be bitching about other source material being disrespected like I did with Loki. This is all MCU, my dudes. And honestly? That's enough, because though we don't see nearly enough of Bucky for my liking, we do manage to get a rich, deep backstory to him in the material we're given, partly thanks to better writing in the early days of the MCU, and partly thanks to Sebastian Stan's phenomenal acting. Unlike the writers of the Loki series, Seb knows how to show, not tell. And gods, what stories those eyes show...

Let's start with the army. In an old post illustrating what an absolute BAMF Bucky Barnes truly is, I mistakenly said he enlisted, and a kind soul educated me on the incredible attention to detail Marvel used to pay - in this case, Bucky's ID number. 32557038. As this kind, eagle-eyed soul pointed out to me, the first two digits of that number - 32 - signify that Bucky was drafted, specifically from the NY, NJ, DE area (that last part is rather obvious, as Bucky and Steve are from Brooklyn lol). Bucky didn't choose to go to war. He was drafted. He was forced to fight, or go to prison.

Bucky was born in 1917, which means - again, as someone pointed out to me a while back - he came of age during the Great Depression. As a child, he would likely have seen his parents living comfortably and able to shower each other and him and his sister with gifts and fun memories, and then POOF. Stock market crashes when he's only 12-years-old, and life becomes brutal and painful. He manages to have some fun with his best friend Steve, and spends his teens/early 20s chasing girls and keeping his stupid, stubborn, tiny friend from getting beaten to death.

Steve constantly has something to prove. He's absolutely got what my mom always called "little man's disease", and Bucky's just doing his best not to roll his eyes too much at this asthmatic chihuahua constantly trying to beat up Tibetan mastiffs. While Steve keeps lying on his enlistment forms (an actual crime) trying again and again to get into the army and prove what a badass he is (definitely not), Bucky's had enough trauma and upheaval in his life and he just wants his stupid friend to calm tf down and live. Enjoy the fact that he doesn't have to go to war and get his limbs blown off.

And then he gets fucking drafted. This sweet, resigned realist who knows exactly how dangerous the war really is, is forced to put on a uniform and go fight strangers alongside other strangers thousands of miles from everything he knows. And on his last night of freedom, when he just wants to hang out with his friend, see some cool gadgets, and dance with a pretty girl, his stupid angry chihuahua friend feels the need to lie and try to enlist again.

Okay. Gotta get back on track. Ragepost about mistreatment of Bucky, not how much Steve annoys me. Sorry. Anyway...

Bucky's drafted, accepts his shitty lot with a brave smile, and is shipped off to Europe, where he is captured by HYDRA and presumed by the Allies to be KIA. Instead, he's strapped down, tortured, and given the HYDRA version of the super serum against his will. Steve rescues him, and Bucky knows he can't leave his idiot friend to his own devices to get his head blown off, so he dives right back into the fray. And then he falls off a cliff, loses most of his left arm, and is declared dead...again. This one's pretty damn valid, though lol. Without the serum no one knew he'd been shot up with, there is no way he would have survived that fall.

Here is where Bucky's story gets truly heartbreaking: His autonomy, his ability to consent is stripped from him through electroshock torture/brainwashing. The trigger words are conditioned into him during this process, and boom. Ten words in Russian, and Bucky Barnes is gone. Even the confused, hurting shadow of him is gone, leaving only a perfectly obedient killing machine, with Bucky's pretty face. He's strong as all hell, though, so they can't keep him fully under their control for long, not without more torture, when the disorientation of being fucking frozen wears off on longer missions.

I cannot stress this point enough, guys: Bucky. Had. No. Choice. Not like the draft, where his choices (go and get shot at, refuse and go to jail, or dodge and run to Canada) just suck. No, he literally didn't have a choice. He had his ability to choose stripped from him. If that's too complex a concept to really sink in, try this: His brain was fucking raped. Repeatedly. For decades. Nothing the Winter Soldier ever did was Bucky's fault. Nothing. Ever. Not remotely, no matter how you fucking slice it. Bucky is not an assassin. I almost said "not a killer", but he was a soldier, and a sharpshooter. He definitely killed when he was himself, but that was in a war, not a series of assassinations.

So far, imo, so good. This is just a rundown of Bucky's pre-show backstory. I don't love what he had to suffer, but I do love how it was treated in the movies. People were afraid of him, but when they knew the whole situation, Steve, Nat, and Sam rallied behind him. Natasha had plenty of reason to want the Winter Soldier dead; he'd tried to kill her multiple times and almost succeeded. Sam had no reason to help Bucky at all; he didn't know him, didn't trust him, and again, TWS had tried to kill him. But he stood by Steve, and when Bucky showed the clear difference between himself and TWS, Sam stood by him, too, and fought alongside him.

And it's very realistic, imo, that Tony didn't give a single fuck that Bucky had no choice. He watched this man murder both of his parents on tape. If TWS had killed my dad and I saw proof of it, I'd try to kill Bucky, too. Grief wins out over logic. Most emotions usually do. And that's a very important point we're going to come back to in a few minutes.

Bucky was really only in like ten minutes at most of IW and Endgame, and for multiple reasons I hate those movies, so I'm just gonna skip them, kay? Kay. On to the main event!

Here's where I get pissed off. Even if I didn't have an unhealthy attachment to this character, or the depth of appreciation for his tragic backstory that I do, the lack of continuity between the movies and the show alone would still piss me off. It always does. Don't even get me started on Joss "Continuity? What continuity?" Whedon and his (iconic, but flawed) shows. Ahem. Back on track...

Let me just get one little thing out of the way real quick: I fucking LOVE The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I love it. This show amazed me when I first watched it, and I still love it after many more viewings lol. I have only ever watched it all the way through without skipping over as much John Walker shit as possible the one time lol but I love how Sam and Bucky interact, and I fucking adore how Sam's arc was treated. I just wish they'd show the same care and attention to Bucky.

Because what they did to Bucky in this show is a fucking travesty. There was a tiny ray of hope in the pilot, when he called out Dr. Bitchface for being a terrible shrink. I thought that would be the start of him realizing he needed to find someone else and ignore the damaging shit that woman was telling him. But...nope. No such luck.

The show really had a strong start, I'll give it that. We see Bucky having nightmares of his time as TWS and struggling to hide how his traumatic memories are affecting him as he tries to live in the world again. He befriends the father of one of HYDRA's victims, which can't be good for Bucky (and we're shown it's definitely not when he sees the shrine in Yori's home to his late son) but it's sweet, how he's trying to connect and reach out to someone who's hurting and lonely.

They drop the ball a little with the whole... Bucky can hack a fucking car, but can't figure out Tinder thing. Had they just run with the fandom interpretation of the tiger photos line, that it shows that Bucky is bi and left it at that, I'd have been okay with it (and no, that is not because I ship Sam/Bucky. it's because Bucky is and always has been a certified nerd who loves technology and has consistently shown very little issue learning to use new gadgets). The outdated flip phone he handed his terrible court-mandated shrink was a burner; I liked that theory when I read it, especially since it's the only time we see him even holding a phone that old lol. This all could have fit the "Bucky is a sassy bisexual nerd" narrative and it'd be okay. Instead, the director was like "NOOOOOO that line was just to show how old he is and how he can't figure out all this newfangled technology!" Woman, you had him remotely driving someone else's vehicle with a tablet. That is NOT a man who can't figure out a damn smart phone!

But that's just a minor annoyance. What fills me with absolute rage is how everyone - not just the shitty therapist who lashes out at and purposely triggers her traumatized patients, but EVERYONE - Sam, Zemo, people who should fucking know better ALL treat him like he's a psychopath and a ticking time bomb. Like he chose to take the serum and he chose to kill for HYDRA, and he's just seen the error of his ways. *barf*

Bucky in the movies is established to be a victim, through and through. His guilt over what he was forced to do is natural, and that he sees himself as a monster makes sense... but that doesn't mean it's correct. The one and only thing I ever liked about Steve Rogers is at least he got it. He pointed out that none of it was Bucky's fault, he tried to show him that he was worth saving. That's the other reason I refuse to talk about Endgame. This post will get a WHOLE LOT LONGER and a lot fucking angrier if I open that door.

Zemo supposedly knows everything about HYDRA and super soldiers... So why does he treat Bucky like he's a corrupt serial killer? (this, for the record, is why I don't like Zemo) Why does he never point out that Bucky was given the serum against his will, or that his actions, when he had control of them, proved that he was never corrupted? Bucky never wanted to become superhuman. Bucky didn't even want to fucking fight!

Sam, despite constantly resisting the label, is shown very clearly to be Bucky's friend. By episode 3, he cares. He worries about how Bucky is getting lumped in with the other super soldiers in Zemo's speech... But he never really defends him. He says "what about Bucky?" but he doesn't point out that Bucky's a good man, he's fought so hard to help people, he does everything he can to avoid killing... And that fucking speech in episode 5. I was with him on "you gotta stop looking to other people to tell you who you are." I was like "YEAH! Tell him, Sam! Bucky, you're WORTH SAVING, boo! Your value does not hinge on someone else's opinion of you!" And then... Sam dropped the ball.

He not only continued the disturbing pattern of victim-blaming in this show, and in Marvel/Disney properties in general, but he gave really dangerously bad advice! No one in their right mind, mental health professional or no, would EVER tell a traumatized former assassin (whether he was responsible for his actions or not) to go confront his victims' families out of the blue with no warning and no one to mediate and keep things from going to shit. Yori already knew his son had been murdered because he was in the "wrong place, wrong time." How is it being "of service" to tell him you're the one who killed him?! Remember how I said Tony's reaction to learning the full truth about his parents' deaths was valid and would be an important point later? Hi! Welcome to later. THAT is the natural reaction to facing the man who murdered your loved one(s). And even if Yori didn't get angry and lash out, HOW IS IT "HELPING" HIM OR BRINGING HIM "CLOSURE" TO KNOW THAT HIS FRIEND KILLED HIS FUCKING SON?!?!?! This man befriended him, bonded with him, watched him grieve... And now he's learning this is the man who caused all his pain and heartache to begin with? That is so toxic and psycho I just... I can't even... UGH.

And then there's the equally toxic and damaging "deeply traumatized person just needed a stern talking to and a hug to be ALL BETTER AGAIN" ending. I loved seeing Bucky happy and socializing, but it was too soon, and it was unearned. And it sends a fucking awful message to people actually struggling with PTSD, and to their loved ones who don't know how to help them. Heaping more blame on them and then hugging it out is NOT helpful!

This show could have been damn near perfect with just two changes. That's all. Just two. 1) Someone, anyone, bringing up the reasons why Bucky was never a villain in his presence. Someone being in his corner and reminding him, like Steve did, that it wasn't his fault and he's not going to "snap". 2) More time devoted to Bucky's healing. Actual fucking healing, not the shit they tried to pass off as a magic fix-all. He can have his happy barbecue moment, just don't frame it as "everything's great now!" Healing isn't linear, and there will be both good days and bad. Some of the most fragile people in the world have the brightest smiles.

If we get a season 2, which this amazing show absolutely deserves, and they address this stuff, all will be forgiven in my book. Expanding on his story and his journey toward healing will help to reframe that "happily ever after" garbage as something more realistic. But as it stands now... Fuck Marvel.

[jq37]

The Report Card – Fantasy High: The Seven Ep 6

Bitches Be Shopping

What is up y’all. A little late but let’s jump in with episode six of The Seven where our girls have just received a LOT of information, Sam most of all who got put into a little vision coma that she’s just now waking up from.

She explains the vision to her friends (as she interprets it, the other Eidolons didn’t die, just became part of the natural forces of the world) and then the bear that Penny made on a whim last episode (who is Russian, named Koda, and somehow a trained circus bear) gets into a fight with Katja with their friends buffing the two to make things more interesting because these are still idiot teens, life or death situation or no. Yelle decides to be the adult and tells them to knock it off and get back on mission.

That means Katja needs to call her dad since he’s knows the guy who’s the best lead to getting to TK ( Talcidimir Tallbreeze who I’ll call Tal). She actually manages to get her dad this time who is inside a giant snake on his hell mission. Katja asks what he knows about TK and he says she’s a sorcerer but also has a spell book so maybe she’s multiclassed. Sam and Ant desperately want to know if they boned and Katja absolutely is not interested in that knowledge. Yelle decides to just ask which makes her dad a little annoyed since he’s kind of in the middle of something (literally) and that annoys Ant, Ost, and Sam who--respectively, accuse him of gaslighting Kat, cast Command on him, and cast Bane on him to aid the Command spell. 

Mr. Cleaver fails the save and Ost commands him to tell Katja the truth. He admits that he did hook up with TK and he regrets it (note: it wasn’t like he cheated. It was just a casual hookup that wasn’t fulfilling it seems). Ost demands he apologize for not being there for Kat and Sam berates him for being at the top of the world and not lifting up his daughter too. For his part, Kat’s dad seems genuinely apologetic and promises to do better. 

“You don’t need to be the best father, you just need to be there,” Katja says, making her dad break down crying. 

Yelle, who has no daddy issues, is a bit less aggro and says that everyone makes mistakes and he can start making it up right now by helping with the Tal situation. She also gives them the tip that a cold spell will probably get them out of the snake lickety split.  She is on the money with the snake tip and Mr. Cleaver gets them all invites to a masquerade ball Tal is hosting. It’s being held on the Rumbosa which is this city-sized leisure ship. Mr. Cleaver says he’ll be back as soon as he can and, in the meantime, she should take care of her friends, “even the first 2 that were terrifying to me.”

The girls give Katja the axe they took as a birthday present (it was apparently her birthday the day before which Rekha just decided and Ost/Izzy refuses to accept without a fight because she *knows* Kat’s bday) which is identified as the Axe of Sundering (it can shatter objects, people, and sometimes concepts like halving movement). The two unnamed potions Yelle found are also ID’d as a Potion of Fly and a Potion of Gaseous Form. She distributes the Heath Potions to people without heals. Ant’s new arrows bypass some resistances and let her treat whatever she hits with the first one like it’s her favored enemy. 

According to their invites, the ship they need is docking in the city of Gravalvia soon (a very old city in the Baronies) so they need to figure out a plan. They have some downtime, during which:

Zelda tries to hype up the team.

Zelda tries to see if Ost is OK wrt dad stuff and Ost has a Full Breakdown after badly pretending she’s fine. 

While Zelda, Ost, and Penny are being Emotional and Sam is trying to literally cool them down with her powers, Ant and Yelle keep watch and experience emotional stability as the Adults Of The Party 

Anyway, after a night of rest, they head to the golden city of Gravalvia which is this very cool, very pretty city with mosaics and fountains and I assume columns. They get there and there’s a dramatic fight happening in the square which is halted when one of the fighters realizes that the country he’s fighting for doesn’t exist anymore. And now, it’s time for what we’ve all been waiting for. Shopping Montage! Let’s go girl by girl.

Katja and Ost

Kat asks for help from Ost with getting fancy for this gala since she’s never really done anything dressy before (and she had no mom to help--Kaaaat) and Ost is happy to oblige, dressing them both like “Jersey trash”. Kat, of course, still wears her Khakis underneath.

Antiope

Ant decides to get a vibe for what people here wear and picks something that will blend in but be forgettable so she can be stealthy. Classy blue dress and mask.

Penny

Penny...OK, I absolutely cannot describe what happens here in any way that will do justice to the scene. I am going to tell you what matters to the plot. You have to watch this yourself if you want to see the entire table have a collective breakdown. 

While looking for a costume, Penny runs into a halfling who is a member of the Society of Shadows--Laertes. He wants to know why she hasn’t responded to their invitation yet. She says she’s really eager to join, she just wasn’t sure how to respond (and also, she’s kind of in the middle of something). He says she can join by just messaging back and then her loved ones just have to sign waivers to have their memories wiped of her and she’s good to go. Say what now? asks Penny. She didn’t realize this was like a full Men in Black situation. 

He says it’s ultimately her decision and leaves.

Of course, I left out the parts where he ate a handful of Candy Heart’s remains, became violently ill, almost projectile vomited into Penny’s mouth, and she tried to kiss him despite him being a full adult. It’s A Lot, ok?

Also, we don’t find out until later but Penny picks a sexy duck costume for reasons that make more sense if you watch the scene but not *much* more sense. She also burns one of the healing potions on this dude as he is bar

Danielle

Danielle tries to get some info on the guests at the party and gets the names Lawrence LaDuc, Princess Autumn, and Duston who is the playboy cousin of Tal. She also hears some dude saying some colonize and plunder the earth BS and casts Heat Metal on him, fully mercing the dude. Ice cold. 

She tries to play it off like it’s the Curse of the Forest and when that doesn’t work and people start coming for her, she wildshapes into a dragon wyrmling and starts roasting people, killing 1 and dropping 2 to zero. 

Unfortunately, one of her party members is a known dragon hater and uses her new arrows to snipe her right out of the sky. Ant is horrified once she realizes what she’s done but Yelle says it’s all good. It’s NOT all good, says Ant, I STABBED YOU. You’re allowed to be mad! Yelle says she’s just really good at compartmentalizing but what Ant’s getting here is that Yelle doesn’t really believe that her feelings matter which echo the fears of her moms. 

Sam

Sam uses a combination of Mantle of Inspiration, glamour magic, performance, and good old flirting to get herself some killer clothes and also start a spontaneous musical number Giselle style.  

Brennan says she looks resplendent and, honestly, when does she not?

They reconvene, Zelda in a classic hoop skirt. Yelle realizes she never got a costume and just whips out a Met Gala level, autumn themed, Queen Mab-esque costume with Druidcraft which she could have done this whole time so I guess that’s why she was cool spending her shopping time getting gossip and playing Poison Ivy. 

They get to the ship and the way this works, everyone has to make an entrance and the really rich people (including Tal) are on a dais up top watching everyone come in. They all have to give fake names for the night since it’s a masquerade and they have to do Performance or Persuasion checks to see how impressive they look going in. 

Before they go in, they plan a little. Penny wants to look for TK. Sam wants to find Dunston. Ost wants to talk to the bouncers. Yelle wants to see if there are plants she can manipulate (there are btw) and for any exits. 

A quick rundown of how these all go:

Katja aka Mere (which means both mom and horse): 16 

Ant aka Midnight Huntress: 18 

Penny aka Penny Duckstone: 13

Zelda aka Madame Goodparty: 2 (Poor Zelda)

Sam aka Songbird: 22 (but she takes a hit to entrance save Zelda from totally flaming out)

Ost aka Stanley Gucci: 13

And Danielle, who never hogs the spotlight and is embarrassed to admit that maybe she does want to be the center of attention for once in her life with a Natural 20, gets a 29, absolutely bringing down the house as Empress Anima. As she walks forward she feels a voice say to her, “You got this. I love the name. You wear it well.”

Tal seems very impressed by her and a lady in a rabbit mask (Coeliabranca who I’ll call Coel if she comes up more) comes down to bring her up to the top with the high rollers. As she leaves, Sam casts Fly on her, just in case and holds the Concentration. 

Ost and Kat go talk to the bouncers and Kat decides to pretend to be her mom to get access to the area Yelle is. She rolls low and is told, “Hey, aren’t you already up there?” Kat is like, fuck and Ost saves her by using her charm earrings to get an entourage of guards who will let them through and do what she says. Once up there, Kat doesn’t see her mom which I can imagine she has mixed feelings about. 

Sam finds Dunston who is talking about Fantasy Bitcoin and seems like a real “Step on me mommy” type you know? Like, I feel like he’s into findom. Anyway, Sam charms him and his hangers on and learns about a procedure called a Phlebectomy that involves something going into their nose and then they feel better. Sam is rightfully horrified because, as I said, she is Most Likely To Survive A Horror Movie and can sense BS when she sees is. It’s apparently all the rage with the rich people here which is, como de dice, concerning seeing as they’re surrounded by them but we’ll get to that. Sam takes advantage of Dunston’s proclivities and gets him alone, knocks him out, steals him clothes, and pretends to be him (a *very* good scene by Sephie). 

Penny sees a gnome gnome boy (Lysander Higgins) shining shoes and finds out from him that there is a copper earth genasi woman here. In a very Cinderella move, she asks what shoes she was wearing. Then, she makes out with him which like, sure. At least it’s not a grown adult man this time. Before she gets her kisses in, she does tell the group what she learned. 

Up with the rich people, Yelle is introduced to Tal’s friend who is into Eidolons because of the name she chose. Between the shoes and her knowledge, they confirm that it’s TK! Yelle asks what she knows about Eidolons and she says that 7 is a very powerful number.

We cut to Ant who is patrolling the room as the sun sets and she suddenly hears a little beeping. It’s coming from a small crystal that was in Preston’s shirt (which she still has on her because???). Guests start dripping goo from their noses and transforming into monsters. Ant realizes that some kind of spell is happening triggered by midnight and this beeping. Hope these costumes are battle ready cause it’s fight time baybee!

Superlatives 

Danielle: Most Likely to Be on The News for Murdering Fantasy Jeff Bezos

I cannot imagine what was running through Yelle’s head when she decided that, having just rolled into a foreign country, her next move was to start using lethal force on anti-environmentalist colonizing capitalists. Like, she’s not *wrong* per se but she is wild--in all senses of the word.  

Random Thoughts

Kat keeps saying yesterday was her birthday which Ost/Izzy (and the rest of the group to a less vocal degree) are simply not having because maybe her dad would forget her birthday but her girls absolutely would not.

“You’re great because you stayed,” is the other killshot Kat line to her dad.

At a certain point Sam says, “This is so unhealthy,” to I think Yelle and like, if SAM is telling you your coping mechanisms are unhealthy, get thee to therapy.

OK, so someone, presumably Anima’s spirit, talks to Yelle as she makes her grand entrance which seems like info they should get to Talura ASAP, right? Cause that’s evidence they’re not dead-dead, just changed in form. But also Anima, girl. Don’t talk to Yelle. Talk to your rampaging sister!

"That's my secret, I stay in initiative."

Just a process note, notes are taken for the next ep and I am working on getting that recap up ASAP. As a battle ep, it will be in the abbreviated style that I did for last battle ep. 

In this episode, Penny rolls a Nat 1 (which she rerolls) and one of Brennan’s NPCs rolls a Nat 1. Ant rolls 2 Nat 20s, Yelle rolls 1, and Brennan says that one of his NPCs gets a 20 which sweeps him entirely into Sam’s dance number. 

[lassieposting]

Bit late and random but it's the anon you leave food out for here to give away I am also bi and I think exactly the same as you about bi val pretty much, every time Derek offers me representation my reaction is to slowly, hesitantly take it and say "thaaaaaaaaanks..." while rolling my eyes, in much the same way one accepts their least favourite flavour of sweet from an annoyingly enthusiastic uncle-type-individual. Ironically I feel I had more in common with her before the bi shit started up.

What I find really amusing is that Landy actually did reasonably well at representation when (and only when) he wasn’t trying. 

Oh god, this got long, anon, my ass rambled.

tldr; I'm glad actual bi people dislike bi val (or how Laundry handled bi val) as much as me, this will probably offend at least one person but i don't really care, Dirty Laundry wrote better rep when he didn't mean to write rep at all, and if he ever starts trying to "represent" groups I'm part of I'll take him out back like a dying horse and shoot him.

Like, yes. He had stupid and potentially offensive shit - I say potentially because what offends one member of a group won’t necessarily offend all of them. His attitude to mentally ill people is, frankly, disgusting. We’ve had “Skulduggery can’t be abused, he doesn’t have feelings”. We’ve had “eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY”. We had Ping, who seemed to be pretty much universally offensive. And that's what's always going to happen when a straight, cis, white, wealthy, male author tries to write marginalised groups he doesn't know shit about, because inevitably he's going to fall back on stereotypes.

But we also had:

SEXUALITY REP: Phase One's nonstraight characters were treated like the straight ones, and like, isn't that the whole point? There was no need for a massive Coming Out Story TM to grab for those sweet sweet Woke Points, because sexuality isn't supposed to be important to mages. I never understood why Val needed that whole Coming Out Panic storyline. Like...Des and Melissa are ridiculously supportive, encouraging, loving parents. They accepted you dating a ~19 year old when you were ~16. They accepted you revealing you could do fucking magic and that you'd been lying to them for like seven years. They took your undead buddy in stride and the most pressing question your dad had was whether magic toilets exist. There is zero reason to think that "I'm bisexual" is gonna be the thing that makes them flip and throw you into the streets in disgrace, Valkyrie. Come on.

Tanith had girlfriends and it was just mentioned casually, because it's normal.

China had massive UST with Eliza. That was an opportunity right there to not only include a f/f relationship, but also to bring back one of the few precious surviving characters from Phase One, using characters and a relationship that already had several books' worth of setup and tension and interest from fans.

The Monster Hunters have a casual conversation about which one of the Dead Men they'd date.

Ghastly has a conversation with Fletcher about the pain he's been through being in love. He never uses any pronouns.

It was confirmed at one point re: the Dead Men that at this point, after 300-odd years, everyone's been with everyone else at some point.

Thrasher is gay, and while Scapegrace's...everything...is treated as a joke/comedic relief, Thrasher's love for him isn't. He's completely devoted to Scapegrace, and that in itself is not played for laughs, even though the rest of the scene usually is. Thrasher's description of their first meeting is essentially a love-at-first-sight situation for him.

"ABNORMAL" RELATIONSHIP REP: Age gap relationships are normal for mages. Off the top of my head, using only canon, canon-implied or almost-canon ships:

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

If you include fan ships, there's also things like Mevolent/Serpine or my Mevolent/Vile, which are both ~600 year minimum age gaps based on the timeline, or Valdug (and its variations) which is ~400 years.

Now, whether you consider this kind of rep positive or negative is up to you, but it’s there.

MENTAL ILLNESS REP: more like "Which characters in this series don't have a mental illness or a personality disorder?" I have some of these issues, but not all of them, so this is just how I read it, but:

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

Schizophrenia (or similar): Valkyrie & Darquesse, Valkyrie "seeing" Darquesse's ghost thing in Phase Two

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

Trauma/PTSD/CPTSD: Skulduggery, Valkyrie, China, Ghastly, Erskine...pretty much everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. People struggling with trauma are spoilt for choice of characters to see themselves in.

TRAUMA REP: This series is a trauma conga line, but everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. I see little bits of myself in more than one Phase One character.

Childhood Abuse (of varying degrees & types): Skulduggery, Carol & Crystal, Omen, Fletcher, Ghastly, China, Bliss, Sanguine...

Estranged Family: Skulduggery abandoning his crest, Fergus & Gordon, China & Bliss

Bad Romantic Relationship: Skulduggery is also very clearly an abuse victim. He’s got a solid history of romantic attachments to women who manipulate, use and gaslight him for their own agendas.  There's a whole paragraph in SPX about how Abyssinia broke him down, isolated him from his friends and preyed on his desperate need to be loved, all classic abuse tactics.

And I’m personally a huge fan of this backstory for two reasons:

1) Society likes a plucky victim in media. The "My suffering made me stronger" type of victim. And it's not always like that in real life. Not all survivors come out of their abuse stronger or kinder or more understanding. Some of us come out cold and fucked up. Some of us end up as emotionally stunted, bloodied-nails-and-bared-teeth survivors, broken in ways that can't be fixed and sustained by enough rage to power a small sun. But society doesn't like to tell the story of that kind of survivor, because we're not usually a likeable protagonist. When we're shown in media, we're usually the sympathetic villain, or maybe the antihero. But Skug is someone who's done awful things and lost pretty much all his faith in humanity and been burned more times than he can count, and he still makes the conscious choice to try and be the good guy when he could so easily go Evil Supervillain on the world, and I don't know about any of y'all, but I've modelled myself on him in that. I've made the choice to do something good when all I really want to do is just become a horrible, shrivelled ball of nastiness and revenge. And that's because I saw him do it and realised that I could do that too.

Skug is an incredibly capable, strong, masculine Man's Man. He gets in fights all the time, and he usually wins. He's military, an industry that's Really Bad for stigmatizing weakness and mental illness, and he's right up at the top of the hierarchy. Almost everyone is afraid of him. He's a straight up cold-blooded killer. Skulduggery Pleasant is precisely the type of person who's not normally portrayed as a victim of anything. Nothing about him screams "victim" at all. But his abuse history is insidious. He's so conditioned to respond in a certain way to abuse from the women in his life, probably from a very young age, that despite all that strength and capability and stubbornness and ego, he just goes along with it. And it's an established pattern going back hundreds of years. He keeps going back to China, even though he knows she's bad for him and his friends keep telling him to stay away from her. Abyssinia latched onto him when he was traumatized and vulnerable and weaponized it against him to make him easier to control - and when she reappears, hundreds of years later, she jumps straight back into using, tmanipulating and gaslighting him and not only does he let her, he doesn't even seem to realise that behaviour is abusive. He thinks it's normal! That's how he's always been treated by his long-term girlfriends, with the notable exception of Wifey. Even when Val is being fucking nasty to him in the first couple books of Phase Two, sniping and lying and blaming him for everything under the sun, he just takes it. There's no attempt to tell her she's being unreasonable, no telling her to fuck right off and give her head a wobble, no defending himself even when she's bitching over something that isn't even his doing. And this is a man who has an absolutely gleaming steel spine the rest of the time; Skug has no problem saying no to anybody else, but he can't get past the way he's been taught to treat the important ladies in his life. Skug is a walking reminder that anyone can be a victim of abuse, even the ones who seem least likely to be susceptible.

GENDER REP: This one is the most iffy out of the bunch and definitely was not done very well in the eyes of the people who matter most, but I'll include it anyway because it mattered to some.

So there's Nye, who's...agender? Genderless? And uses "it" pronouns? Nye was generally considered horrible rep because it's also a war criminal and experiments on people and I've seen people say "Well I don't want to be seen like that" but? It's still possible to be a war criminal and also genderless. I never saw the two things as being related or relevant to each other.

There's also Mantis, who's in exactly the same gender/pronouns boat as Nye and always seems to be forgotten about, which sucks because Mantis is a war hero. It fought for the Sanctuary during the War and they never lost a battle when it was in command. It's called out of retirement to fight for the Supreme Council in LSODM, ends up fighting alongside Skulduggery during the Battle of Roarhaven, and ultimately dies attempting a very brave, very risky strategy. Mantis is, unreservedly, one of the good guys. It was also my introduction to sentient beings using "it" pronouns, and did it in a way that felt natural, so when I met my first person online who used "it" pronouns and hated to be referred to as he/she, it was...weird, but not as weird as it would otherwise have been, because I was like, "Oh yeah, like the Crenga. Okay."

And then there's the Scapegrace sex change plotline, which...I might have an unpopular opinion on this one. From what I’ve seen, trans people don’t seem to think was handled well or with any sensitivity at all. I’m not trans, so if the trans community says he was being offensive to them, I’m not going to claim otherwise. But...I first read the Scapegrace plotline as a young teenager in a tiny rural school with zero diversity, going through a period of being deeply confused about my own gender identity. He was more or less my first introduction to the idea that genitals =/= gender. I was relieved, at that point in my life, to read someone having a lot of the same thoughts I was having about being in the wrong body. So while it may have been badly done and yeah, the series would probably have been better without it, it did make at least one kid suspecting she might not be cis go “Huh! So there are other people who feel like this.”

Thrasher is also implied to be legitimately trans/gender-questioning, and that's not played for laughs either.

So? Phase One, while it absolutely had faults and issues and things that were just "Oh god why", was actually full of rep, at least compared to the other series that I read as a child/teen. But? As soon as Dirty Laundry started trying to be woke? He fucking sucks ass at it. Aside from confirming Phase One's hints that Skug has a background of abusive relationships, every single attempt at shoehorning rep into Phase Two is Bad.

The painfully OOC, forced, badly-written awkwardness of Val suddenly being rabidly horny for women out of fucking nowhere. The stilted, forced cringiness between her and any of the women she's flirted with - contrast that with Sorrowscorn's interactions, full of natural chemistry that had us all like 👀 I mean, I never shipped Val/Melancholia, but I could always see why people did - they had miles more chemistry than Val/anyone in Phase Two.

The fucking mess that is v*litsa, because if someone says "I'm really not interested in friendships/relationships right now", clearly the route to true love is to bulldoze their boundaries and forcibly insert yourself into their life and proceed to treat them like a delicate soft uwu flower, completely ignoring the horrible things they've done, while gleefully damning their best friend as an irredeemable monster for the exact same things, which is. You know. Gonna affect your so-called love's self-confidence and self-esteem because she knows she's no different to him. Y'all know I love an angsty ship, an unhealthy ship, a ship with fucked power dynamics, but I literally cannot roll my eyes any further back in my head at this shit. I never read Demon Road, but from what I've heard from friends who did, it does seem like every time Laundry tries to write an f/f ship, he comes up with a cringey abusive/manipulative caricature and tries to call it rep, and he needs to Stop.

Val's Mental IllnessTM arc. It's funny how he wrote Skulduggery as a wonderfully complex character with deep-rooted psychological damage and long-lasting trauma, but believes he wrote a character with "no feelings" - but when he tries to delve into the damage the world of magic has done to Val, he turned her into a weak, whiny drug addict who treats everyone around her like garbage and is so selfish and dislikeable that I? Honestly can't even reconcile Phase Two val with Phase One val. They're two completely different people. He's shown on Twitter that he doesn't have any respect for mentally ill people, and it shows. Other mentally ill people might see it differently, but the whole thing just makes me go "yikes".

Never, who has no personality outside of being genderfluid, and whose pronouns make no sense. I'm sorry, I have never met an nb person who insists that you change from male to female pronouns multiple times in a sentence, every time you refer to them. It's confusing as fuck. Now I have been told that Never has apparently received some character development in the last couple books, and if so, fair play, but I quit reading after Midnight, and Never and the rest of the personality-less new characters introduced in Phase Two who just seemed to be 2D Stereotypes to snag Woke Points were a big part of why, so. Development too late, I'm afraid.

(Now, if anyone is looking for a well-written genderfluid character, I recommend the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb. I have a lot of issues with her as a writer, and unfortunately I hate her POV character which puts me off the series as a whole, but she wrote the Fool/Amber/Lord Golden and their gender identity/approach to sexuality with so much more respect and realism. That is the kind of rep nb people should be getting: 3D, complex, realistic characters whose gender is only a tiny fragment of their personality, not the be-all-and-end-all of their existence. You know. Like cis people get. Nobody wants to be represented by a 2D cardboard cutout stereotype.)

Anyway idk how much sense this makes it just really amuses me that Laundry would include all this rep completely unintentionally and then go on Twitter and remind us all that actually he's a massive asshole via insensitive/offensive tweets about the groups he'd actually done a fair job of including (i.e. Skulduggery has no feelings, mentally ill people should find another series to read, the bullshit about Val being "heteromantic bisexual" on Twitter and then spouting all the "the woman she loved uwu" shit in the books (proving he has no idea what he's talking about), eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY. He can only write half-decent rep when he's not trying and he inevitably outs himself as having a really shitty attitude towards those people anyway, proving that ultimately it's all either unintentional rep or performative wokeness.

[thatwriterkei]

-Moment of Tangency-

Series Summary: When Y/N's favorite fictional characters come to life, a mystery ensues as a killer wreaks havoc in Bangor, Maine.

~

Chapter Summary: What started out as a sleepover with your best friend turned into a night of unexplainable events.

Warnings: cursing, underage pining if you squint, mentions of sex.

Word Count: 1.7k

A/N: Here's the first chapter of the big series I was talking about! I really hope you guys enjoy this, I've been working on this for about a month and it would mean the world to me if you have feedback and brought attention to this to those who would enjoy it too! I'm really excited to see how this goes.

~

Main Masterlist

MOT Masterlist

click here to be part of my taglist

_________________

Chapter One: The Beginning

"You will soon receive support from an unexpected source.." 

The red letters of your fortune stared back at you ominously.

"Hey, that's great timing huh?"

"Too soon, Marcus..Too soon."

A sheepish smile formed on his freckled face, "Sorry..Here, have another."

You shook your head, waving away the cookie. "I'll just stick to mine. I only have a little bit of room left for it." 

You took small bites, slowly indulging in the delicious treat, afraid of letting it go to waste with just two or three bites.

"I'm surprised your dad let me spend the night."

"Honestly, me too..I don't think he noticed that you're in the middle of transitioning."

"He probably just thinks I'm gay or something.."

You let out a choked laugh, "Maybe because you are."

"Hey, you can't tell me that Mr. Fisher isn't hot as fuck!"

"He isn't, oh my god!" You tried to finish the rest of your cookie without inhaling crumbs, suppressing the laughter building in your stomach.

"Have you seen his hands?! Y/N, I don't think you understand how much I adore him!"

"He's 20, Marcus!! Not to mention, he sucks at teaching physics."

"Hey, I didn't say my future man had to be smart."

"You're ridiculous."

"Yes, yes I am. Oh! Speaking of guys, any good gossip for the ship of a century?"

You could help but roll your eyes at his teasing, blood rushing to the apples of your cheeks.

"Kolby and I haven't spoken since last week. I don't think he likes me anyway. He's been talking to Heather more recently.." 

And, for some reason, you weren't too interested in him either. Yes, he was a nice looking, athletic guy but you just didn't care enough to go further than a 'hi, how're you?' with him.

"Well, his loss. You're a wonderful girl and it's a shame he's wasting your time with his boyish nonsense. Besides, he doesn't even wear watches like Mr. Fisher."

"I swear to god, if you mention him or watches one more time.."

"You're right, sorry," he held up his hands defensively before putting them down, "I just don't wanna see you get hurt, Y/N/N.."

"I know you're worried, Marcus, but I'm fine. It's our junior year, I don't think long-term relationships are supposed to happen for us until we're in like college."

"You never know..Anyway, what do you even see in him?"

You let out a sigh, sinking in the mounds of pillows and blankets that are laid astray on your bed.

"Umm..He's cute, without a doubt. His jokes are sometimes funny, depends on who he's around. He has a nice sense of style, I guess? I don't know..We've only known each other for a little over two months."

Marcus laid beside you, rolling to his side with a dopey grin plastered on his pale face. "And a lot could happen in two more months if you just talk to him. I promise, I won't even bother you in Algebra..Okay? Just trust me on this.."

You groaned but, nevertheless, agreed with a silent nod.

"Love shouldn't be this complicated.."

"Sometimes it is, sweetie..But only time can lead you to where you're supposed to be.."

"Yeah, I know...Since when did you become my therapist?" You let out a scoff.

"Since third grade! Now, c'mon, get off your lazy ass and let's do something cool!" 

He pulled at your limp arm once he stood up, dragging you to the floor and down the hallway towards the mini library your stepmom installed about a year ago; who has yet to use it.

"If you were looking for 'cool', you brought us to the wrong place." 

Your eyes scanned over the bookshelves, catching titles of famous works.

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Great Gatsby

War and Peace

Charlotte's Web

"You only have that perception because you hate her."

"Of course! Have you seen her?"

"Yeah, but this is still cool! You should take advantage of it while you can." 

Marcus released his hold from your ankle, scampering over to the section of the library where a red and white book was gleaming for attention.

"Oh my god! Miranda got the newest edition of IT?"

You stood up abruptly and made your way over. "She got what?!" 

"Holy shit, this is amazing! We haven't fangirled over this book since freshmen year."

"Oh yeah, our biggest obsession since One Direction." You laughed, taking the book out of his hands and running your finger over the textured title.

"Not gonna lie, the older cover looked better."

You rolled your eyes and ushered him over to the desk in the middle of the room. "Wait, let's see if they kept in that one part.."

"Which one? Does it have to do with Stanley? You had a major crush on his fictional ass." He teased, pulling up another chair beside yours.

"No no no, the one with Eddie and-Oh, I found it!"

Man, he had hated it when Richie called him Eds…but he had sort of liked it, too. It was something….like a secret name. A secret identity. A way to be people that had nothing to do with their parents’ fears, hopes, constant demands. Richie couldn’t do his beloved Voices for shit, but maybe he did know how important it was to creeps like them to sometimes be different people.

"Oh, I absolutely love this part..It's just, mwah, beautiful. Stephen King certainly knew what he was doing.."

"C'mon, let's go back to my room and reminisce." You took his arm and pulled him back to your bedroom.

~

You internally screamed at Marcus's onslaught recollection of memories.

"Oh, and that one time when you had a major attraction for-"

"Okay okay, that's enough reminiscing!!" You tossed the book at him.

"Aww, what? Feelin' embarrassed, sweetie?" He barely dodged the book, letting it bounce off your bed and onto the ground with a dull thud.

"Shut up.." You grabbed the nearest pillow and slightly smothered yourself with it.

The memories he continued to bring up brought back some nostalgia but looking back at it now made you cringe. You were practically grown up now, not 15 years old. 

"Okay, I'm sorry. But wouldn't it be cool if the losers club was real? Like actually around, in real life? Derry was based off of Bangor so it's more than likely you could find your own Stanley Uris." 

You cracked a smile at that and threw the pillow at him, situating yourself underneath the covers of your bed. "Yeah, yeah. I wish."

Marcus promptly pulled out his phone and checked the time, turning it over towards you  and flashing the bright light in your face. "Well, it's almost 11:11..Make a wish!"

"Seriously?" You deadpanned.

"C'mon, it wouldn't hurt!"

You sighed, sitting up on your elbows and closing your eyes. "Tell me when. You wish it too, okay?"

"Okay," some time passed, "now."

I wish the losers club was real..The entire gang. Every single one of them.

I wish I could blow Bill Denbrough.

You opened your eyes after you recited your wish a couple of times, sighing. You raised an eyebrow at Marcus, seeing him struggle to contain his laughter though the crimson red covering every inch of his face gave it away.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"I wished that I could blow Bill."

"Goddamnit, Marc."

~

It took about a half hour before the two of you could fully relax into a deep sleep but once you guys did, Marcus took up most of the bed. 

A heavy gush of wind pushed open your window, the cool air from outside blowing into your room. You snuggled a little more under the covers, face being buried into someone's back. They smelled so nice, a light hazelnut scent and freshly washed hair that reminded you of late night drives with your older cousin when you were younger; Just absolute nostalgia exuded from them. You felt your entire body relax against theirs, the warmth overtaking your slightly exposed skin from the nippy air coming through the window.

You hear a quiet groan from the opposite side of you, the noise causing you to stir from whatever you were dreaming about prior; It was a bit fuzzy.

"What the fuck? Dumbass window.." It was just Marcus.

You felt the weight from the bed disappear, his dull footsteps moving around the carpeted room as he shuts the window.

He turns around and gives one look over the room, his eyes partially open. He sees a couple of people in the room, the sight confusing him in his drowsy state.

"What the..?"

A mix of someone screaming bloody murder and a smoke alarm going off floods the room, echoing off the walls and throughout the house. Even Marcus wouldn't be surprised if the neighbors heard him too.

It takes just a few seconds before your sleeping mind can process the screeching, thus causing you to flip over to your other side and turning on the lamp. Your eyes are piercing with annoyance, though you were still a little concerned about your astonished friend across the room.

"Marc, what the hell?! What's wrong? What happened?"

You cast a glance around your room, trying to pick the oddball out.

"What the hell?!" You hear from behind you, the sudden noise alarming you and making you jump off the bed towards the ground. 

Your head whipped around so quickly you were sure it was the dizziness that made your imagination run wild from the sight. There laid a guy, around your age, with very curly light brown hair that just looked absolutely divine to twirl your fingers around.

Underneath you comes a strangled groan, almost upon impact. Looking below, you find a girl with fiery red hair in a bob style. You push yourself off of her and scoot away until your back hits Marcus's legs.

"Who the fuck is yelling-Oh, holy shit..!" You hear another slightly deep voice exclaim. 

Turning to your right sat five other guys with drastically different appearances, one after another coming to the realization that they had no fucking clue where they were.

The room grew quiet, fear growing in your eyes as you try to find a person to focus on but the thought only made you even more dizzy than before.

_________________

Let me know if you wanna be tagged for future chapters!! 💖

-Moment of Tangency- tags: @beauregard-s @demoniclust @deepestofwaters @grapesauze @god-knows-what-am-i-doing @soulwillower @19tozier @phrogtheguitarist @kindofokayimagines @stenbrozier @stenbrozier @brxken-heartsclub @fucking-greywater @theliterarymess

[brideofcthulhu10]

Behold another Lost Boys holiday special! It was between this and Valentine’s day, but honestly I love writing Christmas specials, its such a cozy time despite the high suicide rates, but lets not get into that. A BIG SHOUT OUT TO @imlostinsantacarla FOR HELPING ME EDIT MY FINAL DRAFT!

Fun Fact! My husband, David (yes, that is actually his name) actually does have the bah humbug hat I mention in the head canons. He’s a heavy metal goth so when I found it at the store I had to get it for him. And you just know if our David found that, he wouldn’t be able to resist it!

Christmas with the Boys

Alright, so the whole touchy, feely and mushy feelings that surround even the topic of Christmas time is not something any of the boys will ever openly admit to enjoying. After all, they see themselves as these bad ass brutal killers who thrive off of death instead of holding hands and caroling with the goodie goodies of this coastal town. 

Yet, it's challenging for them not to get sucked into the glitz and glam of the holiday season. Everything is a big deal in Santa Carla. Dia De Los Muertos, Halloween, Thanksgiving- everything! But especially Christmas.

Christmas in Santa Carla dwarfs the frenzy craze of Halloween. The entirety of the boardwalk is decked out with red and green lights that are tightly wound around palm trees, red bulbous bows are wrapped tightly around street lamps, the reds and whites of velvety fabric swirl down the posts, creating the effect of candy canes. All the store windows are painted to appear frosted, or covered with painted snowmen whilst several rooftops are covered with white felt in which mimics the texture and sight of snow. Even the boats in the harbour are all extravagantly decorated in a sea of lights that parade around brightly at night in every color imaginable.

Between the dates of the 30th of November all the way to the 24th of December the city of Santa Carla hosts a plethora of wondrous events in it's annual Holiday Festival. Large green, white and red kiosks are erected, selling a wide range of baubles and treats, from delectable chocolate coated rice krispy Santa Clauses, elf candy apples caked in a plethora of dark chocolate and peppermint, to a variety of Holiday hats, masks and even hand made costumes by the many local artists. Even hand carved candles in wondrous scents of pine, mint, or spice.

Currently, David possesses a black fur Santa hat which he acquired on a night out that boasts the words "Bah Humbug" proudly sewn over the front. It's the only holiday attire he'll even humor. Last time Marko attempted to place reindeer antlers on his head, David had set them on fire roasting atop a pan of chestnuts. Now it's not to say that he's a grinch persay. Rather, the complex and intense emotions that come hand in hand with Christmas can leave him perpetually indifferent at best, disdainful at worst. The whole occasion leaves him displeased. After all, he was an orphan who had been almost eagerly abandoned by his hooker mother left to fend for himself from the beginning, and  of course never met his father. Even she could not identify which of her many clients may have been responsible. Most of his mortal life he had lived as a street rat, barely making ends meet by picking the pockets of tourists and Santa Carla citizens oblivious to the true dangers of the lower side of town. The rich and uppity classes who often snubbed their entitled noses his way would never suspect as he lurks between alleyways, leaving them cornered at knife point. It was scarce that he ever did see a kind face in the sea of those who had little interest for anyone that was not themselves. Back then it was rather uncommon for anyone to step outside their own little lives, which led to most interactions, outside of the other boys, having been met with great hostility, thus he had learned to be just as equally hostile in turn. Even the mere thought of anyone suddenly dawning a false kindness due to a certain time of year simply agitated David. It rattled him to the very core in a way very few other things did. Why bother with the lies? Couldn't people just face the very basic fact that they weren't nearly as charitable as they often deemed themselves to be? I mean, the young man had seen firsthand a family having previously snubbed a dirty homeless man with appalled disdain at the sight of his muddied clothes and dirt stained skin, only to then begin volunteering at a soup kitchen to purge whatever guilt they carried on their conscience once the holiday season began. The whole ordeal was pitiful! Nevertheless, - more so for Paul and Marko's sakes than his own -, he did humor these traditions amongst the holiday's festivities. Ruining a good time just wasn't his style. Unless they started fucking singing.

Most traditions David could tolerate, some he even enjoyed slightly; although he would never be caught dead admitting something as embarrassing as that! However, he just couldn't stand Christmas carols! They were the bain to his immortal existence. The repetitive nature of these overly cheery jingles left him covering his ears lest they nest in his brain leaving him humming the same damn melody for weeks. This was the case because the dynamic duo of dumbasses were well aware of his hatred for Rudolph the Red Nosed fuckin' roadkill! Stupid red nosed abomination. 

“OOOOOOH-,” Paul begins with cheerful mischief.

“Don’t. You. Fucking. Dare.” David seethes through tightly clenched teeth, eyes screwed shut in indignance. 

Paul hesitates. He looks at Marko. Marko looks at Paul. Wicked grins of agreement spread wide like wildfire across their faces as their master plan comes into play. Full throttle. What’s more fun than annoying the shit out of David? One on the left, the other on the opposite side of the cave on the right. This was nothing but Divine perfection if you asked the two troublesome vampires.

“OOOOOH DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW!” Paul belted out at full volume.

“IN A ONE HORSE OPEN SLEIGH!” Marko followed in suit, the widest eerie grin plastered on his face.

“OVER THE HILLS WE GOOOO” Paul howled enthusiastically. 

“I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU BOTH!” David's voice hit a whole new octave it had never in all his life so far. All the while Dwayne had opted to vacate the room lest he be caught in the middle of the escalating madness with Laddie in tow. He loved these guys, but not enough to dive head first into their fuckery.

Paul thrives during the Christmas holidays! How could he not? The food, the punk rock covers of Christmas songs, the absolute babes prancing around the town in Santa hats under mistletoe?! He loved it all! You can find him sneaking under mistletoe with many sweet honeys on a constant basis, regardless of whether or not he's acquainted with them. Most do roll their eyes or laugh it off, but every once in a blue moon the guy will get a little lovin' from a beach babe in the Yuletide mood. What else could he ask for? You can bet he’ll run into the woods December first, and quite literally RIP a pine tree out of the ground to bring home like a wee carrot being plucked from the ground. The bigger the better! He may even drag Dwayne or Marko along with him if it's too big for him to carry himself. And all the boozy drinks he can concoct up? This boy is in his element! Mulled wine, spiked eggnog, candy cane vodka, butterscotch bourbon hot chocolate?! Yes! David straight up refuses to try anything that Paul creates himself (remember the concoction he made in Max's kitchen? Those poor goldfish....) which is also another reason why he has Dwayne help him. Or rather, the other boys insist the most responsible of them monitors the blonde lest he poison them with some sickly brew. That, and the fact that Dwayne's the least likely out of all of them to blow up the damn kitchen!

Dwayne is indeed the designated cook during the holiday rush, albeit a field even he tends to struggle. Avoiding the kitchen catching aflame, perfecting his craft lest he blow up the stove, leaving only a pile of ash in its wake. As previously mentioned, ever since the dreadful chain of events that lead to the unfortunate destruction of Max's kitchen, this raven haired vampire has attempted his hand at learning to use a stove properly: Although he often finds himself forgetting ingredients either in the midst of cooking or after the final product is done and he's taken a big bite. 

“Shit! I forgot the milk and eggs!” Dwayne grumbled with a mouthful of dry crumbs, a true disgrace of a cookie.

Paul always gives him crap for it of course.

“Oooh I just thought you were going for a sandy, dusty dry cookie kinda thing.”

"Yeah man, these taste like ass!" Marko would cough out in midst of choking. 

"And what, like you dumbasses could do any better," Dwayne retorts with a huff. Only Star manages to have any manners when testing his failed baking endeavors.

"Well I mean, the taste isn't that bad. Just a little dry is all."

"At least Marko wouldn't be choking to death." David would mutter from the darkest corner of the room, a little late in the conversation.

In all honesty, Dwayne's biggest motivation when it came to improving his skills was obviously Laddie. The kid never got much of a Christmas whilst living with his mom, so now that he was with the boys, he wanted to ensure that Christmas's were something that Laddie would remember for all eternity. Though granted, it is quite the mess when he was helping in the kitchen. But when the mini vamp grins from ear to ear whilst coated in flour and rapidly stirring an overflowing bowl of chunky cookie dough--the sight is too freaking cute!

Since Laddie joined the boys, they participate in Secret Santa every single year, which definitely includes Paul bursting through the entrance of the hotel as Santa on Christmas day. We won't talk about the fact that each year he almost falls flat on his face and swears, ruining the surprise for the kid. 

"Santa where are your reindeer," he'd question, to which Santa Paul scoffs

"Pff, reindeer, I don't need any fucki- Ow," cut off by a firm and covert kick to the shin from Star, Paul quickly changes his response. "Oh! Ho ho, well, you see little boy, Santa can fly too! On his, uh, uhm… magic motorcycle! Yeah, that!"

But it's okay because Laddie already KNEW (he figured it out a year or two ago after Paul's beard fell off not once, but three times), he just doesn't have the heart to tell any of them because, well Paul really gets into it. And he knows the others are playing along for his sake. But to be fair, Laddie would have to be pretty dumb to believe it was Santa. I mean, the beard Paul's wearing is hanging half off his face by this point! But anyway, just like Paul's style, the entirety of the goody two shoes schpiel is thrown out the window, replaced with sleeves that have been ripped off, muddy boots, spiked bracelets and his Metallica shirt in full view beneath his flared red coat. He calls this BIKER CLAUS!

Laddie is not a squasher of traditions! But there was the one time that David had to intervene when Paul and Dwayne thought it would be great to use Laddie as the star at the top of the tree. David practically had a heart attack. Well, that's impossible but it still felt like he was having one!  

“Ho ho ho! Now, don’t be a bitch, little David or Santa will have to give you coal.” Paul stated mockingly to David, brows furrowed. 

“Well, Santa,” David scolds, a wry smile developing on his face when setting down the eight year old now off to shake his presents beneath their behemoth of a tree. “You best be careful. You never know what's in those milk and cookies, hm?”

Each year Marko buys bird toys for the pigeons in the hotel. Well, buy is probably the wrong word. More like he liberates the stores of their stock. And then for the next six months, David has to hear the agonizing jingle of bells. David almost roasted one pigeon in particular that kept flying over him to drop the ball with a bell in it on his head. That was Paul's entertainment for the next five hours, hell, he'd try to find it if the bird lost it and give it back. Marko defends the pigeon. Between running through stores buying up surprises for his friends, he's helping Paul throw out decorations for the cave. The dollar store has some surprisingly unexpected treasures, allowing him to deck the fucking halls to the max. Tinsel here, ornaments there,  tiny light up trees to hide around the caves, a butt ton of cinnamon pine cones which he ends up throwing back and forth with Paul.

And Paul often steals his gifts or goes dumpster diving for any hidden gems. He forgets to take the tags off of them the majority of the time, which is always an indicator whether or not its new. Any time Star asks where he got them from he refuses to answer. Just gets up and walks away. But for David's gift? Well this lucky bastard has found coal in the dumpster and chucks it to David when he's not looking and he sighs deeply in disappointment because this is the third year Paul has done this. 

 "Huh? What? Who did that? Wasn't me. Somebody's throwing stuff."

Other than that he'll find a fat bag of charcoal and just tape the name David on it. David is certainly not amused. Dwayne will actually try to figure out what the others want, and has the sense to save the money taken from their previous meals. After all, they're dead, they wouldn't have much use for it anyway. He's not about to waste his hypnosis on some poor cashier. That would be a waste of time in his eyes. 

When Christmas did arrive the tree was piled with mysterious boxes crudely mashed and taped together with bows and ribbons underneath it. It's obvious which ones are from Star since those gifts are wrapped in neatly pressed paper, wound tight beneath curled ribbons that remind the boys of her hair. Marko often goes on a food run rather than allow them all to be subjected to a potentially charred turkey, no offense to Dwayne of course. So, with a table covered from end to end with copious bowls of gravy, potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, a beast of a turkey in the center packed to the brim with cornbread stuffing, the boys cram into their chairs knocking back beers and spiked cider. Keeping to their own traditions, after fattening up, they gather around the tree and play card games, just as they had over eighty years ago on that frigid night. David still slays them in poker, and Marko is an utter dark horse when it comes to blackjack. Paul insists they try Go Fish. No one ever wants to play Go Fish. Closer towards the end of the night Dwayne will slip away to Jasper's shrine and bring him a fresh glass of rum as well as unwrapping what he got him that year. While Dwayne is there, the other boys will join him - omitting Star and Laddie left unaware of the Lost Boy they'd never met - in celebrating the last hour or so of the Holiday season with their fallen comrade.

Although Christmas time is often about uncomfortable mushy moments and emotions that create deep, unfamiliar times for David. The entire ordeal becomes that for everyone of the boys and Star. But God forbid anyone who even mentions it! I mean, it's kinda obvious though considering he's spending it with the people he always called family, knee deep in traditions that are sentimental to himself and the boys. There's a fluster of emotions running rampant during this particular Holiday Season, and although the blonde brooding vampire decides to squint at it with skepticism he savors these moments, knowing like Jasper, it could all be swept away with a single ray of light or the foolish hand of a hunter. So as they sit, drunk, full, and laughing beside Jasper's grave he can't help but smile at the sentimentality of it all. Christmas is a pain in the ass, but… it's a pain he'll gladly sit through for his brothers.

[johannestevans]

Livetweeting Hook & Smee in Barrie’s Peter Pan: Part One

Going from the Gutenberg edition for copy and paste ease. 

I’m gonna be separating this into parts because I get long-winded when talking about how I love these piratical homos, but I just want to state for the record in case you’ve never read Peter Pan before and think that you might want to based off of these two, like... 

Fair warning, Peter Pan was published at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is racist as fuck, particularly with anti-Black sentiment and some nasty stuff about Native Americans. The latter is not as bad as it is in the Disney adaptation, where they actually added in a lot of extra racism, but it’s still present.

With that said, I was raised on Peter Pan, and the queer vibes and gender vibes from the fairies were really positive for me, and I do still love it - what I don’t want is anyone to think “oh, this book Peter Pan looks fun” and then getting a gut punch when it has That Shit. The book is honestly not all that great, and Peter Pan himself is a violent serial killer and abuser disguised as an eight-year-old, so if you want to give Peter Pan a pass, you absolutely should.

So, first, their introductions!

...and the Irish bo'sun Smee, an oddly genial man who stabbed, so to speak, without offence, and was the only Non-conformist in Hook's crew...

I love Smee... so much. I love that he stabs without offence - Hook is very regularly described as evil and intimidating and scary, whereas Smee is constantly established as this kindly-looking uncle figure who is going to disembowel you with charm, and yes, that’s absolutely a contrast I have firmly internalised and that shows up regularly in my own work.

In the midst of them, the blackest and largest in that dark setting, reclined James Hook, or as he wrote himself, Jas. Hook, of whom it is said he was the only man that the Sea-Cook feared. He lay at his ease in a rough chariot drawn and propelled by his men, and instead of a right hand he had the iron hook with which ever and anon he encouraged them to increase their pace. As dogs this terrible man treated and addressed them, and as dogs they obeyed him.

This isn’t actually the initial introduction of Hook in the book - he’s initially talked about in conversation between Peter and the Darlings, where Michael just bursts into tears at the mere mention of the man.

Hook is terrifying, not just to children, but to his crew, who he kills so casually - there’s a lot to be said about why Hook is so frightening, because it isn’t just how easily violent he is, but his comfort in commanding others. Hook is a posh cunt who went to Eton, so he obviously lacks a soul in the way that people like that do, but conducts himself as though he’s the centre of the universe, and uses that to intimidate.

In person he was cadaverous [dead looking] and blackavized [dark faced], and his hair was dressed in long curls, which at a little distance looked like black candles, and gave a singularly threatening expression to his handsome countenance. His eyes were of the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly.

Someone get a Ouija board and tell Barrie that there are ways to describe scary people that don’t involve pointing out how “dark” they are, Christ

ANYWAY, I do think it’s interesting that Barrie presents the guy as looking like a corpse, while also being like “he was a bit of a ride though, like, he was handsome”. I’m also just... so obsessed with Hook’s eyes, because Hook is consistently described throughout the book - as well as in the good adaptations, like Hook (1991) - as being a man utterly consumed by depression, anxiety, and doubt. Like, he’s this deeply sad, unhappy man, and I’m obsessed with the idea that you can see that when you look in his eyes - the only time it seems like he feels anything other than crushing emptiness is when he’s killing somebody.

Sexy!

In manner, something of the grand seigneur still clung to him, so that he even ripped you up with an air, and I have been told that he was a RACONTEUR [storyteller] of repute. He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different cast from his crew.

“He was posh which, as you understand, reader, means that he was a monster and a sadist, and he was at his scariest when he was at his poshest.”

A man of indomitable courage, it was said that the only thing he shied at was the sight of his own blood, which was thick and of an unusual colour. In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of Charles II, having heard it said in some earlier period of his career that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts; and in his mouth he had a holder of his own contrivance which enabled him to smoke two cigars at once. But undoubtedly the grimmest part of him was his iron claw.

I’m obsessed with the double cigar thing. Like, you know how Cruella de Vil’s whole thing is that she has her cigarette on one of those long cigarette holders? I wish that Hook’s insane two-pronged cigar smoker was as iconic a part of his character design as that is of hers, because it’s genuinely so funny and so unnecessary and also just...

Imagine how depressed you must be as a man to need that much fucking nicotine and tar in your lungs on one inhalation.

Hook fainting over his own blood, iconic, love it; Hook dressing himself in his red brocade and his long coats and with his calves on show because some guy one time told him he looked like a Stuart? Incredible. Adore it. Hook is literally a theatre kid with no self esteem to speak of.

Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook's method. Skylights will do. As they pass, Skylights lurches clumsily against him, ruffling his lace collar; the hook shoots forth, there is a tearing sound and one screech, then the body is kicked aside, and the pirates pass on. He has not even taken the cigars from his mouth.

Such is the terrible man against whom Peter Pan is pitted. Which will win?

So this post is meant to be about Hook and Smee, not about Peter Pan, but I do want it said that while this is obviously a very horrible thing to do, especially because Hook killed Skylights for no reason than he messed his clothes up, Peter Pan traffics small children to Neverland and slaughters them in the woods, offscreen, when they’re too big to fit in his clubhouse anymore.

Tragically, huge spoiler, Peter Pan does win.

Anyway, ensues a description of stuff that doesn’t matter, and then the pirates find the hideout of the Lost Boys (Peter’s club of soon-to-be-lifeless-children), and the Lost Boys scatter, and the pirates want to find them so they can kill them, especially Peter.

“Shall I after him, Captain,” asked pathetic Smee, “and tickle him with Johnny Corkscrew?” Smee had pleasant names for everything, and his cutlass was Johnny Corkscrew, because he wiggled it in the wound. One could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing, it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.

“Johnny's a silent fellow,” he reminded Hook.

“Not now, Smee,” Hook said darkly. “He is only one, and I want to mischief all the seven. Scatter and look for them.”

Smee is so often described as pathetic, which he absolutely is, but - and Hook does later muse on this - although he is so pathetic and so not intimidating, he is completely content in himself and his life, whereas Hook is terrifying and very impressive, and wants to die all of the time with the depression, so who’s really winning here, James?

AND HE CALLS HIS SWORD JOHNNY CORKSCREW! HE IS SUCH AN ADORABLE UNCLE-ESQUE MURDERER!

“One could mention many lovable traits in Smee,” is so good, it delights me very time, because YES, one COULD, but you really should wipe your weapon, Smee, the blood will make the metal tarnish!

[gayregis]

(1) I didn't mean to trigger anyone with the sex question. and still I can't see how one's personal disgust for such a natural and beautiful (as we agreed) thing automatically justifies calling people names. and also, the fetish? I get it, but wasn't the point of said monologue more philosophical and less personal? people fetishize danger because it's the natural defense mechanism of the psyche. addiction is #1 problem for Regis, sure, but he was a serial killer. he is in no position to complain

(2) ofc we should keep in mind character's main problems, but is being sexualized really as important for regis as his addiction? or his socialization? you don't like him having sex because it's discomforting somehow, but he had relationships with the brothel maman and a succubus, and we should assume that it wasn't at all sexual? succubus has a primal need to feed on sex and she dealed with it with regis by drinking herbal tea and watching tv shows about how asexuality rules? idk 

ok im gonna break this down because it’s quite long, just skip to the end paragraph if you want a consise answer

I can't see how one's personal disgust for such a natural and beautiful (as we agreed) thing automatically justifies calling people names.

i’m not disgusted by sex / sex-repulsed. that’s of course a personal thing to share, but it seems to be what you are insinuating. all i said is that i do not want to see p*rn that i have not consented to seeing. 

but yeah i am gonna call these people names when they are unable to interact with any character/media without only making nsfw content of it and not considering anything else about that character/media. and when they don’t tag their content and post it w/o filter so that anyone who may not consent to seeing random porn can stumble across it, on a site that literally banned adult content months ago as well as has a large population of minors. 

i’ll be trying to talk to someone about regis lol or find non-sexual content about him and ALL I GET is porn and sexual takes. it’s fucking annoying

and also, the fetish? I get it, but wasn't the point of said monologue more philosophical and less personal? people fetishize danger because it's the natural defense mechanism of the psyche.

it’s vague as to whether it is only philosophical or personal, but those philosophizing typically do not speak about issues relating to their species without it being at least a little bit personal.

addiction is #1 problem for Regis, sure, but he was a serial killer. he is in no position to complain. ofc we should keep in mind character's main problems, but is being sexualized really as important for regis as his addiction? or his socialization?

okay first of all, i disagree with the statement that regis was a serial killer, lol, in baptism of fire, he mentions that the victims of higher vampires are rarely killed.

i think what you are trying to argue is that regis being sexualized in-universe is not a main issue for him, and you’d be right, it’s not a main issue in-universe. but if you had been following my points at all, you’d understand that i am speaking about how he is treated out-of-universe by the fandom. him having issues regarding addiction and socialization in-universe is not relevant at all to the issue of him being overly sexualized by the fandom. this argument holds no water.

he had relationships with the brothel maman and a succubus, and we should assume that it wasn't at all sexual?

i will explain a little about how i feel about regis’s canon female love interests: i’m gonna preface this with: why does anyone have to make a man and woman have a relationship. is that really necessary. come on.

i like how you brought up the queen of the night (assumedly, because i don’t know what you mean by “brothel maman” except maybe “brothel woman”) when her being in charge of a brothel was literally an addition / interpretation by CDPR and not in the books, like. who is oversexualizing women and vampires now. in the books regis just says it was probably / it was something serious but she left him because he continued to be an alcoholic. (of course, she has no canon name given in the books, and “queen of the night” is just a title she has. i don’t really care much about names and her real name is probably way longer than that. but i think it is a nice touch that regis’s name means king, and hers’ is queen, so i continue to call her this, i also call her “queenie” because i think it’s cute :3). i think they are both gay and were just trying to be heterosexual because it seemed like what they should do since they were already friends, then they had too many disagreements and fell out.

i think for the succubus, that was an annoying addition by sapkowski to give everyone in the hansa a heterosexual partner thus reason to stay in the fairy-tale duchy. plus the idea of “she’s a nymphomaniac, he’s an alcoholic!” is incredibly cringe to have as an idea of why they would be a good couple. and why must regis be shipped with a woman to be happy? even more cringe.

and we should assume that it wasn't at all sexual? succubus has a primal need to feed on sex and she dealed with it with regis by drinking herbal tea and watching tv shows about how asexuality rules? idk

“we should assume” ? you can have your own headcanons, i do not dictate what you believe! don’t be bothered by my headcanons if you disagree! 

i think it would be super fitting if their relationship wasn’t romantic or sexual though, because the witcher is all about breaking fantasy tropes. you know, there’s a vampire that drinks no blood, so why not a succubus that doesn’t have sex with men? 

the idea that succubi rely on sex to like, feed off of energy, is totally a tw3 conception, the books never said anything about that. for all we know, they could function like higher vampires and not need sex to survive, they just enjoy it like others do... though i think if they had to exist like that, then i would quote colin robinson from wwdits, with “i don’t live to feed... i feed to live” ... but yeah also having a whole character/fantasy species that is like. “a woman but she NEEDS to have SEX otherwise she will DIE” is pretty annoying lol

for me personally, i have headcanons that she was experiencing compulsory heterosexuality and regis just spoke to her like, so are you really having sex with these men because you want to or because you feel like you’re supposed to? and i think it would have been nice for natanis to speak with a man (a “man” ... heh... okay the post about regis’ gender is an entirely different post) who doesn’t just see her as a sexual being, much like regis gets to speak with humans who don’t consider him a monster. THUS CUE VERY FUNNY MONTAGE of her trying to sneak into human society to fit in and interact with humans (i don’t disagree with the tw3 design of succubi, so we can roll with that. she wears a hat kind of like sile de tancarville’s tw2 design to cover her horns, lol). idk how this turns out, i think she just starts fucking the noble ladies instead of the noble men, and then the noble ladies don’t want to complain anymore.

you don't like him having sex because it's discomforting somehow, but

i literally don’t even headcanon regis as asexual (okay, maybe in the scientific sense because my vampire headcanons are elaborate and i think it’s more interesting than heterosexual coupling) ... like you are literally sending asks to someone with the URL gayregis (although i know you can be gay and asexual simultaneously) ... i am not against regis having sex like, AT ALL, lol. i just do not find the content interesting and i do not want to interact with it because if you followed my blog / saw my pinned post(s) you’d know a large portion of my content about regis is family oriented and also about him being a mentor to angouleme, and i shouldn’t have to like, explain my family trauma to someone with an anonymous identity to get you to understand why seeing this character in this specific way is important to me and why p*rn of him squicks me out. why are you mad that i do not want to see p*rn that i do not consent to seeing? it’s my own business.

[foggedgrief]

so noemi and nicky were in part one but this is part two and y’all are going to get the loves of my life, poppy finnegan ( click here to find some quick facts about my boy ) and sebastian lazzaro ( click here to find some quick facts about my girl ) ! wanted connections can be found here.

be warned ! before you click that handy dandy little read more, the following triggers will be discussed : death ( multiple deaths due to the fog, not explicit : poppy ), divorce ( not traumatic, amenable divorce : laz ) !

writing  letters  to  your  mother  even  though  she’ll  never  read  them,  praying  for  forgiveness  when  you  press  flowers  between  pages  when  you  play  god  with  life  and  death,  staring  at  the  fog  from  your  perch  on  your  window  sill  wondering  what  it  might  be  like  to  stay  for  a  while,  the  ever  dawning  realization  that  you  are  less  than  you  could  be  but  more  than  you  were,  the  desire  to  wear  masks  more  interesting  than  your  own  (  what  would  your  mother  say  that  you  wish  to  be  someone  other  than  your  own  self  ?  )

penelope jean finnegan is the eldest child of the finnegan family and is like a de facto rory gilmore with just how often she’s seen around town and i mean that in the best kind of way. 

it’s mostly thanks to her mama, the late dottie finnegan. if you only knew one person in town, it was probably dottie. she owned the mad batter, has made almost every confectionary sold at the school’s bake sake, has made every birthday cake for most people in town since she was fourteen, and just radiated the best kind of mom energy that you would look for in another person. 

poppy was relatively popular in high school and was an active member of the thespian troupe. she won a superior and second place in the state level thespian competition in costume design and she’s been designing and sewing her own clothes since then. she also worked at the bakery from the time she was sixteen until she went off to college and was prom queen her senior year. 

also in high school, poppy and her parents converted one of the rooms in the house into an artistically inviting space and sometimes poppy treated it more like her bedroom than her actual bedroom when she was in school. while dottie expressed most of her art through paints, sketches, and cakes, poppy has always had a desire to design her own clothes and make them. she does take commissions around prom season for a little extra pocket money and opens her etsy store as early as january and runs through june for prom and graduation. 

she met her now boyfriend ( ex ? maybe ! ) in college and dual majored in two business degrees, one in entrepreneurship and one in marketing. she did so with the explicit of interest in going back to her family business and expanding it into a franchise across the state and eventually into a generational empire of baked goods and love. 

for legal reasons that’s mostly a joke but with her degrees and moving back to town, though, she did begin cultivating their social media presence and started nationally shipping orders about two years ago. the company has a large following, especially on tiktok, where poppy maintains her own account, the mad batter’s, and the finnefam account for the finnegan family. they are those people. 

poppy was always especially close to her mother and the loss of dottie has been horrifically detrimental to her stability and the additional loss of one of her best friends, max, only sent a downward turn into a spiral. all she wants is for the world to straighten out again but she doesn’t really even know what that means. 

when poppy came home from college, her arm was linked with marcus’ and they moved into the one bedroom mother in law apartment behind the family’s home. it’s cute as fuck and dottie helped her design it but it’s suffocatingly familiar with all of these losses that she’s found herself staying in her childhood bedroom instead of with marcus. ser maxibald, their corgi, is staying with marcus. 

when she took the job at the tower, it was under the excuse of wanting to make sure that august stayed safe. and maybe one day she’ll believe her own lie but if she had to choose between sitting up in a tower amongst the fog that took her mother and going to work at the bakery like her mother did every day for as long as she could remember... well the forest starts to look good after a while.

literally will fight anyone, including the fog, for the safety of her siblings and father. is 10/10 taking her anger, frustration, and sadness out on her father and boyfriend and honestly that’s not healthy and she knows it but we all do strange things in the fog of grief. 

the  desperate  feeling  that  sits  on  your  chest  when  you  feel  the  need  to  drown  out  the  silence,  the  walk  of  shame  when  you  have  to  collect  your  bowls  and  dishes  from  your  room  and  bring  them  to  the  kitchen,  happier  days  filled  with  love  and  laughter  polluted  by  sixty  hour  work  weeks  and  fifty  too  many  missed  recitals,  appointments,  holidays,  vibrant  dreams  of  better  days  and  waking  up  alone,  still  reaching  to  fidget  with  a  ring  that  isn’t  there  anymore.

sebastian isaac lazzaro, known as bash by his family, laz by everyone else in the world, grew up in pine haven and had that all american kind of boy small towns love to publish articles about when they get into a major state school on a scholarship for their athletic prowess and talk about that one time they rescued a cat from a tree. 

his sport was soccer and he got a full ride to umaine for it. he pursued a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and law. he went to law school and spent a few years at a practice in massachusetts before deciding to apply to the fbi. your man passed through training with flying colors and was assigned to his first choice, the behavioral analysis unit. 

laz married the sister of one of his closest friends in high school, rory finnegan. they didn’t start dating until they were at university of maine together and he was absolutely head over heels for her. she showed up a year later and it felt like a better time than any to ask her out properly without the prying eyes of the town trying to figure out what their relationship was and if it was more than friendly. 

they were married for about twelve years and dated for another five on top of that. they were married about a year after she graduated from college and divorced a little over a year ago. though their divorce didn’t end back of a lack of love, laz didn’t know how to appropriately prioritize his family over his work and watched the best people in his life slip through his fingers. 

they did have a daughter, sophia. she’s twelve now. she was named after laz’s mother and she’s the light of his life. when his wife first served him with papers, he agreed that she should take primary custody of sophia because of the unpredictable nature of his schedule and a desire to devote himself to a schedule he wouldn’t fuck up. he bought them a house in pine haven so his wife could be close to her brother and sophia be close to her cousins. the town isn’t the safest because of the fog but he knew that crime wasn’t going to be an issue. 

he’s incredibly consistent with his support payments and adheres almost rigidly to the custody agreement. now that he’s back in town because of the disappearances, though, things a little awkward. they haven’t had to see each other for this long before and laz is conflicted on how to approach something very obvious to him and his team: his love for his wife and the fact that every time he leaves pine haven, he leaves his heart behind too. 

but on to lighter notes: murder. laz hunts down serial killers for a living and helps construct the profiles that bring them to justice. it was in his office that he got the notification of death for his former sister in law, dorothy finnegan. laz had to leave the room when he saw her face among the missing and returned a few minutes later to tell the team to get together and they were flying out the same day. he didn’t really tell anyone he was coming back to town and has been here for two weeks. the last time he was in town was for whatever the most recent major holiday was because he spends his holidays with the finnegans, usually. 

over all good man. gives good hugs but not as good as nicky. 7.5 / 10.

[cyniciism]

´   ･   .   ✶   ⧼    manny   montana,   cis   male,   he   &   him   /   bury   me   face   down   by   grandson   +   a   grubby,   faded   duffel   bag   always   packed   to   capacity   ;   ready   to   be   picked   up   and   slung   over   a   shoulder   padded   in   worn   leather   at   a   moments   notice.   the   slow   build   of   white   hot   anger,   the   itch   in   clenched   fists   with   already   bloodied   knuckles   to   lash   out,   to   do   more   damage,   to   destroy   whatever   is   within   reach.   broken   windows   and   filthy   rooms   and   a   sinking couch   that   has   been   slept   on   one   too   many   times,   bed   clothes   still   knotted   on   its   frame   and   vodka   bottles   half   empty   on   the   mismatched   side   table    ⧽   ━━   don’t   look   now,   but   that’s   CRISTIAN   RAMIRO   DE   LA   CRUZ.   the   THIRTY   year   old   HUMAN   has   been   here   in   seattle   for   his   whole   life,   and   is   a   DETECTIVE   &   LOCAL   YOUTH   GROUP   LEADER.   they’ve   always   been   STAUNCH   &   VALOROUS,   but   i   guess   this   town   just   brings   out   the   worst   in people   ;   apparently,   they’ve   been   way   more   BELLICOSE   &   INJUDICIOUS   than   usual.   it   wouldn’t   surprise   me   if   they   knew   what   was   going   on.   you   can   check   out   his   stat   page   HERE   and   his   pinterest   HERE.

ALL   ALONE   /   whether   you   LIKE   IT   or   not,                alone   will   be   (   something   )   you’ll   be   quite   A   LOT.

SECTION ONE OF THREE : BULLET POINT HISTORY trigger warnings for talk of chronic ill health, prison, sociopathy, serial killers

anyone who knows cristian’s birth mother, mariana de la cruz, can agree on at least one thing - whether she SHOULD have or not, she ALWAYS say the best in people. it probably had something to do with how little about people she actually KNEW. ana was born, it seemed, to suffer ; she spent her whole life SICK, all of her time either in hospital, or AT HOME. she was BEYOND sheltered, and she had very few friends because of it. her kindness could only get her so far in life when she was so SEPARATED from it.

she started to write to CONVICTS in her late teens. it was a decision made out of loneliness, and she figured that was a feeling that the people she wrote to could RELATE to. as heinous as some of their crimes were, ana continued to feel EMPATHY for them. if she had just a few more critical thinking skills, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen in LOVE. he was a sociopath, and a homicidal sadist. he was a SERIAL killer. he was SERVING consecutive life sentences. and still, she got on his visitation list. STILL, five years after they initially began to exchange letters, she obtained a marriage license. and two years after that, cristian ramiro de la cruz, mariana and her locked up love’s child, came into the world.

back when he was just a BABY, of course he visited the prison with his mother ; they would make the trek together once every six months, as this was about as much as she could MANAGE. his mother thought that he was their MIRACLE, and at that, believed wholeheartedly that his father LOVED them BOTH. when he got old enough for conscious thought, he’d REFUSE, point blank. his mother was blind to the type of man that his father was, but cristian’s defining memory is from when he was SIX YEARS OLD, and he was gazing back at his father through the bars of their visitation room. there was no love, in those eyes - eyes they SHARED, and that he would HATE, later on. there was nothing in his expression, that even IMPLIED a hint of care. mariana was delusional, but cristian could SEE what she couldn’t. he would kick up a fuss ever after as his mother prepared to leave, and though it broke her heart - and her visions of a HAPPY FAMILY - she would leave him with a RELATIVE.

outside of this delusion she had, however, mariana was the best mother that he could have ever WANTED. she was the sweetest and most gentle soul ; she loved him with a real FEROCITY, this baby she had never thought she would have, and she was WICKEDLY over protective of him. mariana didn’t LOVE that cristian had to grow up quickly, because of her health. it didn’t make her happy to have a son that could cook for them both when she was simply too weak, or that knew her exact medication dosages off the top of his head, or who had been taught how to place her into the recovery position should the WORST ever happen. he should have gotten to be a KID, and he didn’t, because of her. it HURT, more than anything, and it was probably why the fact he wanted nothing to do with his FATHER pained her so ; they shared EVERYTHING, in their home. they experienced everything, together. and the one thing that cristian couldn’t do was love the man he knew was a MONSTER.

when he was ten years old, his mother collapsed the day before one such visitation. he found her at the bottom of the stairs, and he called 911 from her PHONE as he had been taught to. it wasn’t the first time that his mother had been to the hospital, over his childhood, but it was the first time that he didn’t leave with her. it was decided that mariana was no longer in position to take care of cristian, or herself. she was better off in assisted living, and he would do better in care.

it didn’t take LONG for him to be taken in, and his ‘new parents’... were good substitutes, for the one’s he didn’t have, though he told his adoptive mother more times than he could count that she would never replace his REAL mother. neither of them wanted to, and they won his respect very early on for how they approached DEALING with him. they were there, when he needed someone, and theynever hesitated to help him, when it was required. but they brought him to visit his birth mother once a week, and when he was old enough, he was allowed to go and see mariana ALONE. they helped him buy presents for her, they didn’t STOP him from leaving school early, when his mother’s health seemed to have dipped. they didn’t control him or attempt to take a place they had no right to, and so, cristian grew out of his grudge. it was as easy as that.

and what was more, as he got older and started to go through puberty - they stuck by him, even when he ACTED OUT. cristian had a huge capacity for ANGER - and when he lost his head, he would… break things, over yelling. they never lost their heads with him. they always spoke CALMLY, even after he had punched a hole into his wall, or shattered his mirror. and when he asked, they didn’t HESITATE in sending him to counseling ; something HE recognized he needed, all on his own, as he reached his sixteenth birthday and realized that his BIGGEST fear was being his FATHER, and he was very quickly turning into him.

cristian decided to become a DETECTIVE because he didn’t want to be the kind of MONSTER that his father was. he wanted to be LAW ABIDING in every way - almost to prove to himself, to his father, to EVERYONE who had ever known him, that the blood that ran through his veins wasn’t EVIL. he signed on as team leader for a local group for troubled youth, recently, because he had been there. he had been angry. he had lashed out. he had made BAD CHOICES in his teens that he was lucky hadn’t come back to BITE him. but he’d gotten past it, for the most part, and he wanted to help OTHERS. that’s all he’s been trying to do.

SECTION TWO OF THREE : HEADCANONS trigger warning for mention of cancer

mariana is still alive today, and cris visits her once a fortnight. he still brings her a bouquet of flowers every time, though the gifts he gives are ever changing ; she goes through periods, and right now, she’s enjoying an embroidery hobby, so he brings her thread.

his FATHER, charles brandt, is ALSO still alive - though he TREATS him like he’s NOT. he was diagnosed a year ago with stomach cancer, and cristian’s mother has urged him almost every time he’s visited to do what she can’t, and VISIT. he’ll never want to upset her enough that he’ll tell her the only time he will is when he’s DEAD, but he certainly thinks it quite a bit.

the ONLY reason cristian hasn’t taken on his adoptive parents surname, by now, is equal parts feeling it insulting and because there’s a part of him that thinks doing so would be HIDING. he’s cristian de la cruz, and yes, he’s the son of a serial killer. it’s certainly SOMETHING, and perhaps he would have had an easier time in life at certain points if he wasn’t who he had been BORN. but he’s pretty stubborn, so, here we are.

morals wise, cristian is a GOOD GUY. in every other sense of the words, he probably… wouldn’t be classed as so. he’s pretty arrogant, and he has a fairly bad reputation in the police department because of his TENDENCY to kind of run with things, and charge ahead. they like to say he doesn’t THINK, and that’s why he makes ‘poor’ decisions - but cris is actually very conscious of everything that he does, and he’s very willing to… make the tough call, so to speak, so that no one else HAS to.

he’s still very hot headed. he still goes to counseling. he still fucks up, from time to time. it’s all very human.

SECTION THREE OF THREE : WANTED CONNECTIONS

you know the usual DRILL ! friends ( anything from best to passing ), enemies, hookups, exes, the very MOST. hit me up if you’re interested !

i’m going to send in wcs later but: 

his adoptive fam !

two half siblings via his serial killer dad !

cristian’s partner in the seattle police force

his oldest friend + current housemate

his enemy w benefits !

work friends , enemies , everything in btwn

his ex fiancé ( its super angsty )

the cotm who will eventually turn him

members of his group for troubled youth ! 

[ekkorn]

hi there, just saw in the tags that you didn‘t like endgame. would you like to expand on that? i am curious to know other people‘s perspective. personally, i liked it. it has flaws, yes, but to me it was enjoyable. if you don‘t feel like answering, that is fine :) have a great day!

oh wow. you really wanna know? okay, but on your own head be it. :o

i’m just joking, i’ll go easy, or at least give you the digest (a vicious lie) version. if you want to see the full extent of my derision and vitriol, you can go to @lowkeysebastianstan, which is the blog where i’ve tried to limit this too. but to give you the not at all short and not so sweet of it, here goes. (endgame spoilers obviously).

the first thing that really set me off was the ending, more precisely, what steve did. it made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and hit me closer to home than most of my followers here since bucky and steve are my fave characters, and the only ship i really have. now, i never thought stucky would become canon, not even a little, i didn’t even hope for it. sure, the representation would’ve been awesome, but there’s no way marvel could’ve done it justice, so it was just as well it was never gonna happen. what i hadn’t prepared for was to what extreme extent they were terrified of the ship and the effect it would have if they were to let it be even a hint that could be interpreted as some emotional connection between them, for 3 films they’re built bucky up as the most important character in steve’s life, he’s risked his own life to save him, he basically eradicated hydra during wwii fueled by grief for him, he was prepared to die for him in tws, he fought his friends and gave up everything for him in cacw, and then he just? leaves? to be with a woman who died of old age and natural causes after a long fulfilling life with another man and family of her own. who specifically told him to fucking move on in tws? yeah, sure. and do not get me wrong, i adore sam wilson, after bucky, and the real steve rogers, he is by far my fave in the cap verse (saving a few spots for my bp and cm peeps in the mcu, but we’ll get to them), and he is the superior choice to pick up the mantle, no doubt about it. (okay, a little doubt, they teased sebastian with that shield for 8 years, they based bucky on the brubaker storyline where he becomes cap, and so i do feel a little torn bc no matter how happy he must be for his friend, and him and mackie are good friends, he must be a little disappointed? but who knows, maybe they’ll do something with that in the series, which would be stupid af bc that would negate the positive leap in representation, and mackie deserves it too, so who the fuck knows, i’ll probably not be around to keep track anyways, and can you tell im rambling), but for steve’s last words to be to sam? while bucky stands and watch in the background? like??? i could go on in (more excruciating) detail, but that was why i linked the blog, there might be a point or two about this on there.

but that was just the start. all through the movie i felt disconnected and uneasy, they made some really weird choices, but i don’t think it was until nat took the plunge that i knew i had an absolute dud on my hands. 

the mcu has done a lot of things right, but their treatment of women is NOT one of them. and oh boy did they go out with a bang. first is the obvious implication, he got to live bc he had “more to live for”, and she didn’t have a family, and ye gods we know she can’t have kids, so why should she live? 

(see, if the bw movie wasn’t in the books, i’d completely get it, if it was to give scarjo her life back, and she wanted nat to be good and dead, sure. actually, when i first watched it, that’s what i thought tbh, that the bw movie was cancelled, so. but it’s not, so she will return. and since that the case it’s just fucked up that they yeeted her off the roster. and sure, some of the bw movie was always gonna be set in the past, but tbh? i don’t see much point in prequels for dead characters, you know that whatever happens won’t affect the outcome for the character at all, and i usually find them completely void of meaning. that might just be me though). and of course the fact that she died the same way gamora went didn’t help. (gamora’s death was maybe the single worst thing in aiw, she was fridged, not for the advancement of one man, but for two (thanos and quill) and it.just.shouldn’t.have.worked.thanos.cannot.love! again, mcu and women? not a good match.) 

then of course, it comes back to steve and how much he doesn’t give a crap about the people close to him in the present, we never see him care or grieve for anyone but peggy, and he could barely spare two tears for nat before it was all business again. and the rest of the team? i think clint cared a little, and banner threw a chair, but that was it. no memorial, not burial, no nothing, it was like she never existed, and she died saving the world just as much as tony, he couldn’t have done jack shit without the soul stone. 

and speaking of women, shuri and okoye? before the trailer dropped i was sure shuri was in this, that we’d get to see her lead in her brother’s stead. i actually did a short lament on this already, here.

carol was terribly underused, after all the oompf about her being there she was barely a blip. but the haircut was fantastic, and the best part of the movie was when she returned at the end.

then there’s nebula and gamora (again). at first i was actually quite pleased that they sort of found a loophole to bring gamora back, but then i thought about it (yes, sometimes i get seduced by the flashy colours too) and yeah. sure. a gamora is there, but she’s void of all the things that makes her interesting and all her development is just gone, everything “our” gamora achieved and experienced is gone, three films worth of arc is worthless. so what then is the point of getting “her” back? i don’t care about this person, i don’t know her. are we gonna see quill just harass her the next film, bc you know, she’s been with him, so why shouldn’t he expect her to just do that now? tbh i wouldn’t be surprised, but now that gunn is back maybe he can save it? not that i’ll be around to keep track though.

then nebula. nvm that time paradox, that’s a whole other fuckfest i’ll get back to, but we had to get to see her get killed too, didn’t we. by her sister, the only person in the world she loves. fucking fantastic, i cannot control my enthusiasm. 

and no, cool as it was, the a-force surrounding parker is not enough to bring this home. it was a cool sight though. (see? i can see the good.)

then of course it’s peggy. a woman he knew for a few months back during the war. (sure they knew each other longer, but i’d say, even if you’re very generous, they can’t have spent more than a couple of months in each other’s company, and they kissed once). who they stripped of all character development and autonomy so that steve could go back and get his “damce”. everything she achieved, every good thing that happened to her, her husband, her family, her advancement in shield, all gone. bc steve must have his happy ending, no matter that she told him to move the fuck on in tws, who cares. 

and then there’s sharon. yeah, they forgot about her, didn’t they. i mean, i was never really on board with that, the whole aunt/niece thing was a bit too weird for me, and this was way before i shipped stucky, but that doesn’t matter. bc they did that, they had them kiss within days after peggy’s death (oooh, look how he cared for peggy), making it clear that this was the beginning of something. (also marvel and several of the actors treated emily like crap, oh yeah, i remember, doesn’t help either.) 

(gods i said this would be short, didn’t i? imagine if i could’ve spent all the words i’ve spent ranting about endgame on my latest chapter? good grief.)

then there’s their so called lgbt representation. 30 seconds of a character that had a total of 60 sconds of screentime in tws lamenting his dead lover? well. i. they wanted credit for that. i just.

then there’s thor. they negated every ounce of development he had in ragnarok, this also goes for aiw, wasn’t happy about that, and made him completely ooc, he just spends his time drinking ab\nd playing fortnite of all things? bold of them to assume that will still be a thing in 5 years, but also? thor? THOR? neglecting his people? his friends? the world? thor? then they of course made him fat, haha, so they could add fat-shaming to the list while they make light and fun of his drinking problems, his grief and his ptsd. awesome. the funniest. 

then there’s clint. that they just randomly made a killer? just, like a straight up murderer? okay then. and still nat deserved to die. excellent.

then there’s banner. okay, i don’t think they fucked him up as bad as the others, but it’s still strange he would risk his intelligence to become hulk full time, but you do you.  

rocket and rhodey were the best things about this damn disaster, just putting it out there.

then there’s tony. i mean, we knew he was the main protagonist, and im not objecting that, (even if i think it’s really strange he’d be born in 1970) but idk. that was strange’s plan? all that for that? and pepper just went, eh what the hell, just die, i can raise this kid you wanted. (i know, i know, she’s her mom, she cares), but it was just so flat. and idk. i mean, rdj wanted his life back, just as evans, but i’d want to see that switched, that tony get to retire and steve sacrifice himself to save the world. tony could still be the deciding factor in strange’s plan even if steve delivered the coup de grace. at least he cared enough to show an emotion™when peter came back, which was more than steve bothered with. jfc they fucked up steve.

then there’s the time travel. okay, a few things about the 2012 thing. they put him in the elevator, and then, instead of having him just kick the crap out of the agents, they reference hydra!cap? the biggest shitstorm in the comics in the last two decades? like what the actual fuck? then of course there’s the americas ass thing, which, again, that’s steve, cares about his ass but not his friends! (but at least 2012 steve cares about bucky, maybe he’ll save him a couple of years early, back to the future steve will just live out his life knowing bucky is getting tortured somewhere in siberia, good times.) oh! and i guess they have their loophole to get loki back too, great, they’ll probably just forget that he’s not in the main timeline, bc who cares. 

and the fun just keeps coming with the time travel. oh they tried with some crap explanation that no one can make sense of, but here’s the kicker. they can’t either, they don’t even want to try, they don’t even agree with each other. 

+ +

how did they know to meet up in wakanda or wherever, the dustees? did strange send a memo? not just the ppl in the soul realm or wherever they were, but all the others too, like valkyrie and hope. time and place just magically popped into their heads? and what happened when they all came back? or some came back, bc obviously a shit ton of ppl died at the dusting, like the pilot of a 747 gone? plane goes down and such, ppl really dead. and where do they reappear? where they disappeared? aka those passengers that got dusted comes back mid flight? fun! and what about the ones that moved on in their absence? what happens to the ones that come back when their wives and husbands are remarried, when there’s no place for them in their old lives. did all of peter’s classmates get dusted, or did the rest of the class graduate without him, i must assume that all of those in s:ffh did, otherwise some would be in college by now, yeah?

and that’s another reason their watertight time travel is leaky af, there’s no way to get the logistics to work. the only option as such would have been to go back to 2018 and fix it, to reset time, bc otherwise there are just too many holes, it’s just not possible. but they can’t do that bc then they’ll undo all the things that happen in the future that the characters don’t want to lose, like tony’s kid. 

oh, i know, it’s a superhero movie, but im strange like that, i expect a modicum of internal logic in all my movies, the bitch that i am. 

okay, im gonna leave it there, ive run out of steam, and i want to gif a set. there’s a few things more, but i think you’ve gotten the gist, that i’m not a fan of this movie and a short (lol, so sorry, nothing is ever digest with me, i should’ve warned you) list of reasons why. honestly this is the first time i’ve really don’t a more general account, ive pretty much stuck to steve and that crapshute, there’s a lot of other blogs that concentrate on the other characters, i’d list a few, but i don’t have it in me rn, pop me a msg if you’re interested, also if you’re interested in some real meta, this rambling rant isn’t something that people should be exposed to honestly. 

avengers: endgame was a shit movie and no amount of “he’s worthy” and “avengers assemble” is going to fix that, BUT if you enjoyed it, i don’t think less of you, obviously everyone is different, and i envy the hell out of you, i sorely wish i could’ve liked it too. the russos directed what is by far the best movie in the mcu imo, tws, and they had us all fooled, even if we probably should’ve seen it coming after iron man 4: civil war.

hope you’re having a spectacular day, sorry you had to read this if you did, and and thank you for making mine better, i really had a rant in me needing out. (you’d think i’d run out of hate for this by now, but nah.)

thank you for the ask :) 

[anna-skeletons-gallery]

Joker X Teenage!Killer!Reader

Summary: You aren't a vigilante. You're just a nice teenage girl who's got supernatural powers from her necklace and who tries to survive and protect herself from the awful, disrespectful men of Gotham City by annihilating them from existence. Your inspiration was the man who started riots all over Gotham and also whom you mildly admired; the Joker. Who would have thought that he'd be slightly interested in you, though?

A/N:  Let's be honest, even if this movie doesn’t take place in the DCCU, this is still a DC character. Would it hurt if we add a few superpowers in this fanfic? I don't really think so. Also, I deadass didn’t know how to end this fanfic so I’m sorry if the ending is kinda trashy lmfao. Anyways, feel free to send me any requests y'all might have!

Warnings: Body mutilation, catcalling and public sexual harassment.

★・・・★・・・★・・・★・・・★

“And as we can see behind me, a third riot has gone loose on Wall Street this month. As for now, more people are participating than on the last two, yet there are no signs of their, so-called leader, the Joker who apparently escaped from Arkham Asylum about two weeks ago-” You turned the TV off. You didn't want it to be noticeable that you supported that type of stuff and raise suspicion from your coworkers, much less your boss. “(I don't give a fuck about what people might think of him. He's a fucking hero to me. He showed all those rich assholes what happens when you turn your back on the people that need help the most, leave them to die or just straight-up treat them like insignificant shit.)” You thought to yourself smiling while you finished mopping the floor of the restaurant you worked at. It was your closing shift today and as soon as your last chair was up the table of the restaurant and your boss left, you grabbed the front door keys, grabbed all your stuff and closed the restaurant's back and front door, you head straight to the subway.

It was a pretty chilly night, as usual. Once the subway arrived, you hopped in, put all your hair on each side of your front and put the big fluffy hoodie of your short black coat on. Although you and a strange man with a long purple coat and a black hat that covered almost his entire face were all alone in that big wagon, you didn't want to bring any attention from the next possible passengers. Unfortunately for you, that’s not what your luck had in store for you tonight. After arriving at the next station, two white, apparently wealthy and drunk men, got on the same wagon as you. You gave them a look. They looked like they got out of some kind of crazy party or club. You rolled your eyes and looked the other way, but apparently, one of them noticed your annoyance towards them and approached you.

“Hey, there! *hic* How you doin', hot-stuff? You’re lookin' *hic* real nice,” one of the sits right in front of you. God, not even the significant distance between the two of you could stop his disgusting alcohol smelling breath from going up your nostrils. “I’m sure you'd look *hic* even better in my bed all bent over. How much for one *hic* whole night, mama, huh?”

“(Ugh, men. Great.)” you think to yourself sarcastically before your eyes extend a little bit and an evil smile formed on your lips as an idea that popped up in your head. “(Wait, hold on... Oh, great!)”

“Hey, don't be rude! He’s complimenting you and asking you a question politely! At least take off that mask and show us a real smile!” the second guy says in a tone that kinda combined threatening and jokingly while sitting right next to his friend trying to touch your knee but you shove it away from his grasp. Although he wasn't as drunk as the other one, he still smelled like he took a whole shower with alcohol and you weren’t about to let a gross man who talked to you that way touch your body. At least, not yet.

You stayed calm and kept ignoring those guys in front of you until the subway stops at your station. You head out the wagon and just as expected and desired, the two men followed you while yelling at you in a failed attempt to get your attention. As soon as you saw a nice alley, you took a turn and waited for them to corner you.

“(Perfect.)” you think before leaning back on the wall of the dead end. They got closer to you. “Hmm... I’ve got nothing else to do tonight, y’know?” you say with your voice slightly high-pitched in an attempt to sound interested and completely seduced. “And to be honest, it has been a pretty boring day so far. Sooo... What do you guys think about having a little quick fun, hm? Here and now? For free, if you want.” you wrapped your arms around the neck of the least drunk guy and rubbed your left leg on his side. Both of them looked at each other like they just hit a nice big jackpot.

The least drunk one holds your leg up a bit more. “Shit! But out here?” he scoffs. “You sure about that?”

“Why not? Nobody will know. And nobody can hear us either. Now, why don't you start over here and find out what’s waiting for you?” you said pointing at your chest. The guy obeys you and unbuttons the first button of your coat revealing a pretty little rose quartz necklace. “Nice necklace,” he comments while going for the third button.  “Thanks. It's the thing that will help me send you straight to the gates of Hell.” he stops and looks at you as if you said something absurd. “What-?” Before he could even finish his question, your necklace started shining stopping his and his friend's whole body. You smiled childishly and walked back from them. This is the night they both die for approaching you inappropriately.

All it took was a small movement of your hand to lift up the two men in the air and slam them against the wall behind them. You could hear their panicked and pointless screams for help, but you stuck their lips shut so you could think of what to do with them. “Y'know? Most ladies nowadays carry pepper spray or pocket knives to protect themselves from creeps like you two. But for me? I carry something much, much better and far more interesting.” You took out a pair of surgical gloves and a long scalpel from your purse. After you put the gloves on, you took a black mouth mask with a white sharp-toothed grin print on it. You could see how the men were growing more and more terrified. You loved it. “Don't ask me how I got this shit, okay? Oh, that's right! You can't!” you started giggling at your own comment. “Don't worry. Just like you guys say to women before sex, I promise not to hurt you. I’ll be gentle with you.” still using your powers, you started unbuttoning one of the guy's white shirt and approached the scalpel to his body and started carving in his chest and torso the words he told you on the subway: ❛You'd look better in my bed all bent over.❜ His muffled screams gave you so much pleasure. His phrase was done, it was the other guy's turn: ❛At least show us a real smile.❜ “A smile...” you thought out loud. That gave you another idea. “Well, if you want a smile that badly, I can surely give you both one. And I can also make a little tribute to a certain someone.” you lowered the men a little, got face to face with them and began cutting the edges of their mouths upwards all the way to their ears to give both of them a big bloody permanent smile.

You backed up and gave them one final look to judge your work. You were proud of it. So proud you started laughing. You found their pain and suffering hilarious and delectable. You kept on laughing for a few moments until you finally calmed down, sighed and looked at the poor men who looked like they were on the verge of death. “Well, that was fun. Hopefully, this will teach you to not bother a girl because one day, you might fuck with the wrong bitch,” and with that said, you used the powers of your necklace to change into your clown costume. “and get what you fuckin' deserve.” Yes, your admiration for the Joker made you create a clown persona for yourself. After changing and letting out that last sentence, you cut the guys' wrists all the way up to their forearms making them bleed out and slit their throats twice. You wanted to be the last thing they see before dying. Once you made sure they were undoubtedly dead, you let them fall down from the wall on the dirty water from the alley.

Suddenly, a burst of laughter made you turn your face to the entrance of the alley just to find the strange man from the subway slowly taking his big coat and hat off, revealing a very unexpected surprise: the Joker. He threw his coat and hat on the dirty floor as if he could just get new ones with the snap of his fingers, and proceeded to walk towards you while applauding you slowly. Once he shortened the distance between the two of you he spoke “Well, that certainly was quite a show, sweetheart!��� he said between laughter and eventually stopped. You couldn’t believe the man who started these rebellions against the rich of Gotham and killed Murray Franklin on his own show was standing in front of you and saying that he enjoyed the atrocious act you just performed.

You took your right hand on your chest surprised and pleased with his comment and smiled proudly looking at the dead bodies and then turning to see him again “The Joker complimenting my... Killing skills? Thank you so much, sir! I’m quite flattered!” you said giggling because of your little pun and doing a funny British lady curtsy to him. He was the Clown Prince of Crime after all. You wanted to show him your respect. “I saw the whole thing,” he said starting to walk around you and examining you completely. “the way these... Pieces of scum were talking to you on the subway, the way you, SOMEHOW, pinned them to the fuckin' wall, how you made sure they suffered for their actions,” he looked deep into your eyes while grabbing your chin “the way you gave them a smile in my honor,” you pulled your mask under your chin and offered him a big smiled that showed your teeth “and how you didn't let them go until you made sure they were dead. Not bad! Not bad at all.” You giggled and looked at the corpses. “Thanks, it really means a lot coming from you.”

“Your techniques are something special and you’re pretty interesting, doll. Your name?” you thought for a second. You didn’t really think of giving your clown persona a name. Then you knew what to respond. “Melody. My clown name is Melody.” you looked at him while he lighted up a cigarette and took a long drag. “Melody, huh? That’s a nice name. A name perfect for a murderer. Would you like me to walk you home?” you thought about it for a second. You respected him and supported him, yes, but allowing him to know where you live knowing how dangerous he is? You couldn’t risk your safety like that. “I appreciate the offer, sir, thank you very much, but I’m afraid I’ll have to decline it.” he gave you a side-smile. “I understand why, no worries, doll, but first I would like to hand you a little something” he searched into his red suit jacket and handed you over a small card. You read both sides carefully. You raised an eyebrow. “A medical condition, huh? So that’s what it is?” he turned to you shocked and took the card from your hand “Whoopsie, wrong card!” he says with a chuckle and hands you over a different one with a direction. “Why are you giving me this?” you asked innocently. “In case someone as powerful and strong such as yourself decides to join me and my people, leave behind the boring working life and try something exciting, you’ll know where to find me.” you couldn’t believe the Joker thought of you as powerful and strong! You thought for a second. “How do you know I won’t use this to turn you to the police, though?” you didn’t understand why he trusted you this much after meeting you just a couple of minutes ago. “You won’t. And if you do, or someone else finds this card and chooses to be a snitch, it won’t matter. I always manage to escape. On my own or with the help of the people.” he took a long drag of his cigarette and exhale it while looking at his right. That looked awesome! As if he knew he was the big boss. You gave him a smile. “Thank you so much for the offer. I’ll think about it, but I gotta get back home now.” you started walking past him. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Joker” you looked at him and waved him goodbye. “And it certainly was a pleasure to meet you... Miss Melody.” you left the alley with a smile. You lied about thinking it over. You knew EXACTLY what to do.

[ryouverua]

Trial 6 - Revisionist History, Pre-Accusation (2)

AND WHOSE FAULT IS THAT?!

Trial: 1

So last time on YGO I was getting a bit full of myself because everything was pointing to me being right about the mastermind, and then I proceeded to get clothes-lined by Shuichi’s conclusion about the first trial:

Sweetcheeks is taking revenge on me for all the times I got ahead of him in the trials. It’s okay I’m here for it -

TFW you’re called on in class and you were barely paying attention to what was going on -

Also yes any excuse to beat down on the Monokubs I will welcome with open arms THANK YOU DRV3

“Also hey, player controlling me right now? Fuckin’ duh.”

It’s okay Shuichi, I’m more than happy to have been wrong on this one.

... which also could have doubled as planted evidence to frame Kaede as the mastermind I-I’M JUST SAYING okay maybe not 100% over it -

But okay, ‘I’m getting carried away. The important thing is that there is no doubt that this shot should be associated with Kaede. She and Miu rocked that pink look, after all.

whispers I miss you Kaede; I’d like to think you’re with us in spirit right now

MAN Sweetcheeks is making this look so easy in hindsight! When I originally thought it was just part of the frame job, I didn’t consider the implications of having a clean shotput there with the fiber. After all, if it existed, the bloody version complete with the fiber would have worked just as well!

I’M SHOOK

But... but Kaede didn’t know that, did she? That’s why things went the way they did. She believed she was the killer the whole time. And that’s part of the genius of the plan...

And what, she - they got away with it? With all the groundwork and clues pointing to Kaede, it was just fine for Monokuma to accept that wrong conclusion? Does that mean if they had ever come to a wrong conclusion in any of the other trials - well, wait. No, the actual killer would know that they had gotten away with murder....

....

What..... if Monokuma had pulled a similar stunt in a different trial, but executed an innocent person anyway? I wonder how the killer would react to the idea that they wouldn’t be freed after all - and how they would continue living with everyone with that hanging over their heads. Well, I guess we know how Korekiyo would probably deal with it, but what about Kirumi or Miu, for example? Would they kick up a fuss or accept it quietly and bide their time with the knowledge that there wasn’t any way to truly graduate? Hell, what if they had chosen Kokichi for the 4th blackened and Monokuma accepted the ruling, and a totally oblivious Gonta survived with the rest of the cast to Chapter 5?

sorry don’t mind me just speculating...

Tsumugi adored Kaede, but she just couldn’t bring herself to trust her, huh. Did she have back-up plans for all of the murder plans or just this one?

STOP KILLING THE ONLY TOLERABLE MONOKUB!!!!

BLOW YOURSELF UP NEXT TIME SMH

because he made a great play to steal her potential girlfriend in a super cute nail-painting scen - I-I mean -

yeah that seems more likely somehow

But Kaede folded first...

Are you telling me that after all that planning, all that work, all that effort, all that agonizing -

she....

SHE MISSED?!

The goal wasn’t to kill them off.... well, of course it wasn’t. Rantaro even aid at the beginning that if they wanted them dead they could have killed them off with the exisals. It was always about the game.

So the plan fails, and because Tsu - the mastermind was keeping tabs on Kaede and Shuichi’s plan (for obvious reasons! I wonder if she was ready to deal with someone else finding the door aside from Rantaro?) she was able to prepare a second backup shotput and take things into her own hands... with Kaede none the wiser that she had failed.

Attempted murder and murder by proxy aren’t considered equal - Chapter 4 was proof enough of that. And yet...

‘Played along’ - again, talking about him like he’s a completely separate entity and that he should be treated as such.

“The moment you let murder into your heart, you lost.”

Again, what if Kokichi had ended up taking the fall for Gonta’s murder and Monokuma let him??? What would have happened? Would Monokuma have executed him? Would Kokichi have protested at the last minute??? And Gonta wouldn’t know better - !

It was always just killing.

The wound he got when Kaede died healed, but it was never truly gone. It’s been a few weeks at most, and it got ripped open again during the investigation. I’ll probably end up making a few small asides about how he’s only bringing up Kaede over everyone else (including Kaito who! just! literally! died!) but at the same time, he’s probably reeling at the idea that he was tricked into sending her to die. It’s not surprising that she in particular is monopolizing his thoughts right now.

“AND UH EVERYONE ELSE TOO BUT I’M REALLY OVERCOME BY FEELINGS OF SUNK SHIPS’ PAST!” okay I see like I really couldn’t resist

You know what’s really awesome to see amidst all of Shuichi’s speculation? How helpful the rest of the class is being. They’re contributing now just like they were in the investigation, in big ways! Even Himiko, who is definitely out of her element, isn’t letting herself get distracted and is trying to keep everyone’s spirits up!

With that said... hehe ~

fml that was cute

I didn’t need to keep this screenshot but I love Himiko’s spell names lmao

GRHGRKGHK

Shuichi literally blocked out the Kaede twin!theory from his mind.

“Tsumugi please - We’re not actually doing this, right? Right???”

My cousins are twins too! CLEARLY ONE OR BOTH OF THEM MUST BE MASTERMINDING A KILLING GAME SOMEWHERE -

“And all twins have at least one evil person in the set! That’s, like, science or something!”

“Well crap - I’d refute that but without the solid backing of the Ultimate Genetist, can we really say that’s not true?”

The ellipses better be leading to a ‘fuck no’, Sweetcheeks.

To think that all of those awkward ‘Himiko has a small bladder’ jokes have l had to suffer through were leading to this grand pay-off.

‘Please tell me this isn’t the answer. Damn you Tsumugi, I’ll give it 5 minutes of my time at maximum, but I will be so mad if it’s the answer.’

That noise is totally Shuichi’s inner voice, master of deadpan and silent sassy killer, breaking free from the confines of his mind to dunk on Kaede!mastermind theory one last time.

AND DUNK ON IT HE DOES. And oh boy did Motherkuma really screw Miss Mastermind over, because that line about ‘visiting the room often’ knocks that 17th person theory straight out of the park.

And honestly? That rules out a ‘faked their death’ student scenario too, for the same reason.

.... Which, just like the above, rules out a hidden student theory for a fantastic reason that didn’t really occur to me as a fully-formed thought apparently because I was nodding along with Shuichi’s reasoning, lol. There’s no use for a classroom that hides its contents for someone who could have easily set up a hidden room for exclusive use in their hiding spot. Though with that said... why not have it in the mastermind’s lab? What was the point of keeping them separate?

“Crap, you weren’t supposed to see that. Why didn’t anyone tell me he saw that???”

.......... This....... really does make it sound like he hasn’t realized who the mastermind is................

What a totally unbiased bit of speculation, Tsumugi!

I would kill to know her thoughts right now. There are moments like this where she helps out, but only with information that seems to be inevitable or easy to speculate. She needs to maintain the image of helping out. And then, of course, there are her wilder diversions offered under the guise of speculation that she’s able to throw out with that same tone of voice! What is your thought process, girl???

I think there’s a deep part of himself that’s known this from the beginning. Even if he didn’t know it was specifically Tsumugi, he knew that one of the last four people here was the mastermind. And ruling Maki (who got tricked and almost became the blackened) and K1-b0 (who literally just went berserk and had to be talked down from destroying the whole school) out, well...

The fact that Himiko is trying so hard to keep them all together and cheerful, even ending her speech like this:

... is, uh, darkly hilarious.

A WITCH!!! wait wrong series -

AND SOMEONE WHO DIDN’T PLAN ON ‘DYING’... just sayin’

I mean, the rest of them can be friends right??? Just because one of them trapped the others in a strange place, stole/potentially overwrote all of their memories and made them kill each other - wait, this is coming out wrong -

“Seriously, I’ll take any leeway I can get here.”

“Well now that you bring it up, we never actually saw Kokichi’s body and he’s absolutely, totally, 100% a Remnant of Des -”

..... Oh thank god no one actually said this. I was kinda expecting Tsumugi to try this tbh. 8′D So, um, when exactly are we going to use his motive video then?

WE’RE NOT PLAYING DR1 DAMN IT NOT AGAIN

Which Shuichi knows. Oh, Sweetcheeks definitely knows. And he remembers....

Ooooooh this is it. This is it!!! We’re finally going to the trial 1 alibis! And I know a certain someone’s alibi that isn’t going to stand up to scrutiny this time... ~

“A nice hole that we can just thrust our big, hard truth into. That was for you Miu, RII (Rest In Innuendos).”

can you imagine if we just had a little tribute to every character we lost along the way in this trial GET ON THIS SWEETCHEEKS

I cannot impress upon you all how desperately I have been waiting for this moment - !

So I let all the dialogue play. Every little bit of it. And oooooh boy, seeing Shuichi react to seeing that certain obvious part stick out....... well.

You can tell I was looking forward to this part because I was literally screencapping every bit of her dialogue lmao while also trying to maintain proper, y’know, control of the reticle.

Yup...

How very ~convenient~.

WHICH KOREKIYO BROUGHT UP SPECIFICALLY.........

WHERE IS THE GOLD TEXT

V

FUCKING

COUNTER

BABY!!!!

If he wasn’t sure before... if he even had a hint of a possibility in his mind before... there is no way he doesn’t know now. There’s no way he isn’t sure now.

HIMIKO YOU CREATED THIS CHANCE FOR US!!!

“Wow, I’m really glad I didn’t go through with murdering you after all!”

Tsumugi is absolutely standing there sweating bullets, just wondering when the hell this was discovered under her nose. You really should have tried to stick with Shuichi to mislead him further!

YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT IS.

“No seriously, when the hell did you find the bathroom secret passage?!”

FML okay the fact that Himiko is still hoping she could find a way to defend Tsumugi is.... incredibly sad....

he placed a receipt in the doorway

he put tape on the windows

the entrance was sealed via detective’s authority

I wonder how she knew the right timing to go to the girl’s bathroom... maybe she had a similar alert set up for when Rantaro went into the library? She was only gone for five minutes - any longer would have been suspicious. Does she have a way of accessing the cameras outside of the lab, or am I just nitpicking something that has an explanation I’ve forgotten?

.... WHELP ANYWAY -

Come on, you’ve been so creative up until now - there’s no way you don’t have something else up your sleeve!

OI -

OI!!!! HAVE SOME PRIDE!

wait why am I getting defensive about this -

The ability to navigate truth and lies and know when to be relentless in pursuit of truth... is this the new Shuichi we’ve been building up to? It’s interesting, because there are similarities to the last trial where he wouldn’t be shaken off the path to the truth - but taking after Kokichi, he won’t let emotions sway him this time. Where he was gentle and tentative in Chapter 4, he won’t give an inch here.

DAMN BOY! HE’S COMING OUT SWINGING!

Neither of these two are clamouring to come to her defense, I notice.

speaking of people who can’t deal with much more heartbreak and betrayal, how about that ‘slowly slipping back into depression’ Himiko here -

“HEY DON’T INTERRUPT MY DEFENSE YOU’RE MAKING ME LOOK WAY MORE SUSPICIOUS!!!”

Er, well, about that next chapter...

What proceeded was probably Shuichi’s most aggressive, brutal and merciless Rebuttal Showdown of the entire game. Damn, Sweetcheeks!

....... yeah, they didn’t stand a chance.

“.... and it will require you all to test me and yourselves by finding ways to slip the word ‘birth’ in casual conversation around me. Or really awkward sentences! That’ll work too, I’m actually not that picky.”

LMAO WAY TO THROW HIM UNDER THE BUS

“EVEN NOW, IN THE FINAL CHAPTER OF THE GAME, ROBOPHOBIA PERSISTS - “

let tsumugi say fuck

Maki gives NO FUCKS

Actually, you gotta appreciate how Maki isn’t swayed at all. Right now Shuichi really needs that steady support by his side and, with so few options left, it looks like Maki is ready to act that way for him. 

NO THIS IS TOO SAD, EVEN WHEN HE’S CREATED AN AIRTIGHT ARGUMENT HE STILL HAS A SHRED OF DOUBT IN HIS ABILITIES AND DEDUCTIONS...

But... more importantly, he’s okay with being wrong. He’s not afraid of being proven wrong and being potentially embarrassed in front of everyone the way he was before. That.... takes a lot of guts, for someone as perpetually anxious as him. Good on you, Shuichi.

And Maki is with him 100%. I think she may have already accepted Shuichi’s deduction as the real deal, tbh.

but what is there left for her to defend herself with at this point

What is going on in your head right now -

quietly skips over the random interlude where Monosuke attempts to conspicuously disrupt the proceedings and gets blown up for his trouble -

Thanks, dude.

GREEN PUKE

WE ALL KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS thank atua

Also it’s interesting - they have a bit of a back and forth about Monokuma ‘loving’ the kids which, you know, has been of a running joke. But unlike during the rest of the game, he’s never actively destroyed them before... but he is now. Why? He brought them back to man the exisals and attempt to take the fight out of the students after the fifth trial, so why is he knocking them off one after the other like this? Sure they’ve been shown to be replaceable but...

Two different entities with different goals, I’m telling ya!

The moment of truth..... it’s finally here.

It’s. It’s finally here.

Well then.........................

here we go.

Looking like she would rather be anywhere but here...

How strange.... to see the accused so rattled like this. Not crying like Gonta, not angry or upset like Kirumi and Korekiyo - and just think of the last game too, where they were resigned, resolute or just accepting - she just looks.... scared in a different way. And decidedly not ‘mastermind’-like. So where are we going to go from here?

“Any last words?”

“Goku didn’t die for this.”

[inviictas]

⌜   CIS MALE, HE / HIM   |   heavydirtysoul by twenty one pilots, slytherin, entp   ⌟   ⏤   meet CRISTIAN RAMIRO DE LA CRUZ ; a THIRTY year old who kind of resembles MANNY MONTANA, don’t you think? they originally hailed from SAN FRANSOKYO where they lived with their adoptive parent, GOGO TOMAGO (   BIG HERO 6   ), but word is that they’ve been working a desk for much of this year. they’ve always been pretty STAUNCH & VALOROUS, but have gotten way more INJUDICIOUS & BELLICOSE since they woke up. maybe their power of N / A can help in taking down the dome. you can check out his stat page HERE and his pinterest board HERE.

ALL ALONE   /   whether you like it or not,                 alone will be ( something ) you’ll be quite a lot.

SECTION ONE OF THREE : BULLET POINT HISTORY trigger warnings for talk of chronic ill health, prison, sociopathy, serial killers

i dont have the energy to write a long bio. b glad.

anyone who knows cristian’s birth mother, mariana de la cruz, can agree on at least one thing - whether she SHOULD have or not, she always say the best in people. it probably had something to do with how little about people she actually knew. ana was born, it seemed, to suffer ; she spent her whole life sick, all of her time either in hospital, or at home. she was beyond sheltered, and she had very few friends because of it. her kindness could only get her so far in life when she was so separated from it. 

she started to write to PRISONERS in her late teens. it was a decision made out of loneliness, and she figured that was a feeling that the people she wrote to could relate to. as heinous as some of their crimes were, ana continued to feel empathy for them. if she had just a few more critical thinking skills, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen in LOVE. he was a sociopath, and a homicidal sadist. he was a serial killer. he was serving consecutive life sentences. and still, she got on his visitation list. STILL, five years after they initially began to exchange letters, she obtained a marriage license. and two years after that, cristian ramiro de la cruz, mariana and her locked up love’s child, came into the world.

back when he was just a baby, of course he visited the prison with his mother ; they would make the trek together once every six months, as this was about as much as she could MANAGE. his mother thought that he was their miracle, and at that, believed wholeheartedly that his father loved them both. when he got old enough for conscious thought, he’d REFUSE point blank. his mother was blind to the type of man that his father was, but cristian’s defining memory is from when he was six years old, and he was gazing back at his father through the bars of their visitation room. there was no love, in those eyes - eyes they SHARED, he would hate, later on. there was nothing in his expression, that even implied a hint of care. mariana was delusional, but cristian could see what she couldn’t. he would kick up a fuss ever after as his mother prepared to leave, and though it broke her heart - and her visions of a happy family - she would leave him with a relative.

outside of this delusion she had, however, mariana was the best mother that he could have ever wanted. she was the sweetest and most gentle soul ; she loved him with a real ferocity, this baby she had never thought she would have, and she was WICKEDLY over protective of him. mariana didn’t love that cristian had to grow up quickly, because of her health. it didn’t make her happy to have a son that could cook for them both when she was simply too weak, or that knew her exact medication dosages off the top of his head, or who had been taught how to place her into the recovery position should the worst ever happen. he should have gotten to be a KID, and he didn’t, because of her. it hurt, more than anything, and it was probably why the fact he wanted nothing to do with his father pained her so ; they shared EVERYTHING, in their home. they experienced everything, together. and the one thing that cristian couldn’t do was love the man he knew was a monster.

when he was ten years old, his mother collapsed the day before one such visitation. he found her at the bottom of the stairs, and he called 911 from her phone as he had been taught to. it wasn’t the first time that his mother had been to the hospital, over his childhood, but it was the first time that he didn’t leave with her. it was decided that mariana was no longer in position to take care of cristian, or herself. she was better off in assisted living, and he would do better in care.

it didn’t take long for him to be taken in by leiko tanaka, also known as go go tomago. and she was a good substitute, for a mother, though he told her many times that she would never REPLACE mariana. she didn’t want to, and she won his respect very early on for how she approached dealing with him. she was there, when he needed someone, and she never hesitated to help him, when it was required. but she brought him to visit his birth mother once a week, and when he was old enough, he was allowed to go and see mariana alone. she helped him buy presents for her, she didn’t STOP him from leaving school early, when his mother’s health seemed to have dipped. leiko didn’t control him or attempt to take a place she had no right to, and so, cristian didn’t form a grudge. it was as easy as that.

and what was more, as he got older and started to go through puberty - she stuck by him, even when he acted out. cristian had a huge capacity for anger - and when he lost his head, he would... break things, over yelling. she never lost her head with him. she always spoke calmly, even after he had punched a hole into his wall, or shattered his mirror. and when he asked, she didn’t HESITATE in sending him to counseling ; something he recognized he needed, all on his own, as he reached his sixteen birthday and realized that his BIGGEST fear was being his father, and he was very quickly turning into him.

cristian decided to become a DETECTIVE because he didn’t want to be the kind of hero that leiko was. he wanted to be law abiding in every way - almost to prove to himself, to his father, to everyone who had ever known him, that the blood that ran through his veins wasn’t EVIL. he started his youth group, recently, because he had been there. he had been angry. he had lashed out. he had made bad choices in his teens that he was lucky hadn’t come back to BITE him. but he’d gotten past it, for the most part, and he wanted to help others. that’s all he’s been trying to do.

SECTION TWO OF THREE : HEADCANONS trigger warning for mention of cancer

mariana is still alive today, and cris visits her once a fortnight. he still brings her a bouquet of flowers every time, though the gifts he gives are ever changing ; she goes through periods, and right now, she’s enjoying an embroidery hobby, so he brings her thread. 

his father, though he doesn’t think of him as such, is also still alive - though he TREATS him like he’s not. he was diagnosed a year ago with stomach cancer, and cristian’s mother has urged him almost every time he’s visited to do what she can’t, and visit. he’ll never want to upset her enough that he’ll tell her the only time he will is when he’s DEAD, but he certainly thinks it quite a bit.

the only reason cristian hasn’t taken on leiko’s surname, by now, is because there’s a part of him that thinks doing so would be hiding. he’s cristian de la cruz, and yes, he’s the son of a serial killer. it’s certainly something, and perhaps he would have had an easier time in life at certain points if he wasn’t who he had been BORN. but he’s pretty stubborn, so, here we are.

morals wise, cristian is a good guy. in every other sense of the words, he probably... wouldn’t be classed as so. he’s pretty arrogant, and he has a fairly bad reputation in the police department because of his tendency to kind of run with things, and charge ahead. they like to say he doesn’t THINK, and that’s why he makes ‘poor’ decisions - but cris is actually very conscious of everything that he does, and he’s very willing to... make the tough call, so to speak, so that no one else has to. 

he’s still very hot headed. he still goes to counseling. he still fucks up, from time to time. it’s all very human. 

he came to walt disney academy for school, and he never left. it’s not because he loves the town, cause he really DOESN’T, but he fell in love while he was at the university - and his heart may have gotten broken, but he had already sort of set himself up for life, here, so... what can u do. 

SECTION THREE OF THREE : WANTED CONNECTIONS 

you know the usual DRILL ! friends ( anything from best to passing ), enemies, hookups, exes, the very most. hit me up if you’re interested !

i’m going to send in wcs later but:

his enemy with benefits ! they’re just ... either, someone he’s booked multiple times, someone with villainous ties, someone who he’s just hated since he was a kid and who’s hated him right back. but they get p hot and heavy now and it’s just... fun ? can it b called that? prob not. should be 27+

cristian’s partner in the buena vista police dept ! they go way back to police academy, and they used to try and outdo one another at every turn before they realized they could work TOGETHER and be better than everyone. have become super tight friends even tho cris is def the bad cop in their good cop bad cop dynamic, and they get along.. real well.

work dynamics ! ppl he gets along with , people who think he’s horrible, people who love his methods, people that hate them. give me someone who hates him solely because one time he drank their whole carton of milk that they left in the work fridge

his ex fiancé ! they would have dated from when cris was about 20, up to when he was 23 ( so they shld be like... 28+ ). they were gross and in love and we can talk abt why they ended ! 

membeRS OF HIS GROUP FOR TROUBLE YOUTH . 

his oldest friend + current roommate. wld work really well for another older big hero 6 kid ! 

[le-petitmort]

Ye olde smut time machine II

***Back in the day I wanted to prove I could write any genre of erotica. Of course, I did. Here's a tidbit of my take on a sadistic psycho dominatrix with multiple personality disorder. Enjoy. ***

He had a noticeably Estonian first name, with a surname which made me reminisce of a prodigious, departed stranger from a winter’s night tryst in Bruges. A marbled chest, of which The Louvre was unworthy and that smile. That smile which screamed “rape whistle, where are you!?” Inhibitions to the wayside in the name of conquest and danger.

Yet why worry? As always my trusty girl, the dagger of my dreams was by my side. “Baby Doll I love you.” No silly, it wasn’t this dusky manchild baying his affection in a not very subtle attempt to woo and conquer. It was Karo, La Karolina, adjusting unblemished eyeshadow before sliding my crimson tipped index and middle finger over each faultless framing brow. One soft luxuriant palm dropped to pat the pearl encrusted handle of the trusted dagger at my hip. ‘Baby doll, I love you.” A girl and her poniard should never be underestimated.

I had allowed my suitor to accompany me home. Coy moves along the way ensued. He would twirl me into his arms. A dip low enough for my highlighted tips to nearly touch the filth of the sidewalk below. Natch, you naughty boy. As much pleasure as you seem to take in your own personal grooming, treat the Goddess with respect. It was as if he could read my mind. Chiseled forearms steadied me back atop my stilettos.

Slam, I crushed him against the nearest brick wall. Looking into his filled with shock eyes I bit hard at his collarbone. An abrupt release of my incisors from his salty skin followed.“A love bite, lover.” No sense in being bashful, my mouth attacked his. Voracious, open mouthed seductions between two tongues. He was smitten. I was decisive.

Back at the Palais de Figaro I asked that he make himself comfortable. By comfortable I meant shirtless. I made my way towards the bar. One of those girlish saunters that sent the finest of my assets swaying for his delight. U’luvka vodka was in order. On the rocks. The humorous thing about U’luvka is that in my mother’s native tongue, Polish, it quite literally means legless. My head tipped in a ponderous moment. I wonder what this manly piece of cheesecake would look like legless?

Would it be like the odd little knight in the Monty Python movie. Filled with a false bravado as each limb separated from torso? Or would he succumb to his failure? Sobbing a mournful bale of regrettable sadness at his impending doom. Begging for his last breaths to be taken by the shiny, delicate blade of Baby Doll. Fuckwit.

Slim fingers silently searched into the bartop drawer, identifying an small folded envelope whose contents were emptied in a slight of hand motion into loverboy’s drink. Stir and prepared. I made the same coquettish steps back towards my new man, handing over his tumbler, then dropping to my knees.

I sipped at the glorious clear liquid while my free hand latched to his buckle. Chin lifting I urged, “Drink my lover. Pić oraz moją miłość.” A tender smile cracked before dropping my head to engulf the incessant growth of his virile manhood.

Some say it’s all in the wrist motion. That light twist and grasp as your head bobs ruby lips and porcelain teeth to graze past the coursing with blood veins of his shaft. There is the requisite gasp before beginning. “It’s so large Baby! Can I even fit it in my mouth? Oh my?” That’s right before you go deep, burying your nose into the musky essence of his mons pubis. For effect I will allow him the auditory pleasure of my gagging, as if I were a trashy porngraphic harlot. Yes, big boy. Roll your fingers through my hair, scrunching it, messing it up, ruining it, you indignant fuck.

I pull back, a faux heaving breath as the trail of my spittle dangles precarious like an Amazonian bridge in the wind from my pouted lower lip to bulbous head of his cock. Deft digits pump at the shaft, I go back to work, head jackhammering over his rigid molten shaft until my tresses cascade back like a winged phoenix behind me. Breathe. Assess.

There we go little boy. Those kind eyes are beginning to falter. Lids drooping like the shades of my bedroom window when the perv next door removes his trash, standing at the curb far too long for my liking. I give a shake of his once proud, now diminishing cock. A suitable result, enough to plaster a smirk to my face. I rise, towering between his spread legs as he falls faster towards slumber, arm stretch to swipe away the remains of his drink. Then I spit. Not once but twice. A projectile towards his weak shriveled wanker and one to his cheek. Lotharios are not made to be loved.

Used is their purpose. I watched his jaw draw slack and the first audible snores, throaty and masculine. Good enough for me. With my own drink now in hand I retired to the den, snatching the remote from the mahogany coffee table and tuning in the DVR for a marathon of Young and The Restless. Time was on my side. 1:14 AM.

Three hours of that inglorious bastard Victor Newman later I returned to my sweet prince. If a daily regimen of pilates, crossfit and yoga have done anything for me it’s made this slim, flexible body more than just a fuck toy. It’s made capable of taking care of any situation and more than capable of heaving twice my weight across lean shoulders for the fifty seven steps towards my pleasure room. Stilettos included, because no pain, no gain and balance training is unf.

My heart rate bumped a slight acceleration in what turned out to total fifty nine steps with this lumpy sack of potatoes slung over me. Was it lumpy or was it the cut definition of his rigid abdomen and toned like Adonis pectorals? Clinically speaking as a physician I must err towards the latter.

With a thud I dropped Mister Beef to the safety and comfort of the adjustable examination table. His jeans were thigh high like a lingerie on a Victoria's Secret model, easing my ability to yank them away for the proverbial toss to the corner out of sight. I liked him better this way. As he was brought into this world and how he, time and date dependent upon my mood, would depart from it.

The task of moving him into place went by with ease. I took time to marvel at his feet as I strapped them into the stirrups. Hairless with a crescent curve to the instep leading down to the display of his obvious penchant for pedicures. Pretty nails deserve to be painted. Twisting my head back towards the clock, 4:47 AM. Time enough to pretty up my pretty boy.

In all of my lust induced revelry I had failed to notice the one predominant trait of my newfound friend. Tattoos. Yuck. No rhyme or reason to them. Now, as an educated woman I understand we all have the right to choice. Yet, these. These were random with no story to tell other than possibly a bad decision on drunken night. I am an artist of pain. Preference is given to a clean canvas. Tonight I would take the sullied, and revile him further for poor choices. Whether he could hear me or not.

I sucked in a long, tedious breath through the nostrils of my perfect button nose. “Relax Karolina. Oddychać Karo.” My entertainment had yet to begin and already I was becoming a manic mess.

“He wants to enjoy your gift Karolina.” I walked beside my paramour, finger sweeping away errant hairs from his brow. “How serene you look my lover. At peace. Rested in wait for me to give myself to you.” I clutched each thick wrist in a firm hold, a brusk yank over his head to bind them encased in supple brown leather cuffs. “So pretty. So, so pretty my beautiful boy.”

Six o’clock came and went, the golden sun rising in the east as I stripped and adjourned to the sanctity of my poolside patio. Saturday morning meant Ashtanga yoga. Strenuous poses performed rapid fire between exhale and inhale. Vigorous and absolute focus like the steeled eye of a killer. Perspiration beaded upon my golden skin. Sensual drips sliding over me in a cascade as I bent myself into a fevered pitch. “Namaste Karolina. Namaste.”

Namaste is a word which I love because it has a rough English translation of “Bow to you.” I’ve never been known as one to bow but, I have a sincere appreciation for those who do. Bow to me, that is. My benevolent and guiding hand will lead them along their path. Is it towards righteousness? Hardly. I only deal in the sinners. The wanton. The divisive. The scum. “I, Karolina Figaro, born upon this earth of Italian and Polish heritage seek the guidance of our lord and savior in purging the earth of misdeeds until I take my last living breath. Amen.” I am a proponent of spirituality.

Spirituality and grooming. Mi amore would soon begin to awaken, becoming aware that our tryst to his delight would continue through the daylight hours. Lucky man. To have me catering to sexual needs. Bringing him hurtling toward crescendoed skyrockets of orgasmic bliss.

I cracked two eggs on the skillet waiting until they began to congeal and covered them to baste. A girl needs her protein and from dripped taste of my inamorato I needed a little something more. Breakfast complete I climbed the stairs to the bright lights and mirrors of my elegant white dressing room. A pop in the shower cooled my skin as I adjusted the jets, soon adjusting the water temperature higher until steam billowed at my feet, flowing lazy cloud-like circles above me. “Heaven. this must be heaven.” My mind clicked. “The time Karo. Damn it you insolent child. You have a visitor waiting!”

“Get ready girl. Get ready. Now ragazza stupida!” I could hear the stern voice of my childhood governess chiding me. I felt mortal, small, as weak and low as a meaningless insect. “Yes ma’am. I’m sorry ma’am.” I rushed ahead preparing myself and in the tradition of a fine Figaro woman, making myself a stunning display of feminity for my man. My man. I couldn’t even remember his name now. Just those god awful, disgusting gutter trash tattoos. Freak! You freak!

Penciling mascara around my luminous sapphire orbs brought me back on pointe. Babycakes was sure to be up, groggy no doubt but, awaiting me. I did the final preparations, sliding on only a pair of six inch Louboutins and flew towards the stairs. Hey, I needed the shoes. Don’t judge. Extra height, leverage, kinky fuckery. A man appreciates a lady in heels.

As I approached the room I slowed my pace. Stay confident Karolina. He’s going to love you. How can he not!? “You fucking whore bitch!” It was the first words uttered from his foul mouth in hours.

I felt hurt. troubled by his verbal lashing “Baby, is that any way to talk to me after all I’ve done to take care of you.” I rushed forward throwing my arms over his straining physique.

“Let me out of here you fucking cunt.” He screamed. That word. The C word resonating like the chime of a bell tower. It was cause for me to withdraw my earnest goodwill and tidings.

“Cunt? Did you call me a cunt you pathetic excuse for a mammal.” My hand cracked splintered pain across his cheek, a gob of my spit meteoric in travel towards his eye. “You sub-human piece of shit.”

Thankfully, my examination table is well stocked. I threw open a drawer, grabbed a ball gag, which in turn I jammed in his vulgar mouth. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all darling.”

He truly did look like a Greek Olympian or Roman gladiator. Dark skin and solid muscles struggling against his restraints, fighting as if he were in a colosseum battling to the death. I could imagine him a victor valiant. A Goddess bestowing an olive frond upon his head. Then I remembered that he had called me a cunt in a not so nice tone.

“Time for your examination.” I sing songed the words just as I had when I was a lowly Johns Hopkins resident working with underprivileged pediatric patients. “Don’t you worry now lovely. Everything will be alright. Doctor Figaro is going to take wonderful care of you. Loving care.” Reaching into the still open drawer I slipped on a pair of latex gloves before grabbing a fresh tube of lubricant.

I gave my swain a benevolent smile hoping to subside his pain. “Don’t be embarrassed now. I’ve done this many time before.” The lube squirted onto my fingertip, thick and clear. “Let me warm it slightly.” Rolling it over my finger I felt the substance lighten then dropped my hand between his sinewy thighs.

Index pressing at the tight balloon knot between his bubbled buttocks, I began to circle clockwise. Urging, coaxing him to loosen. To not resist like a burdensome baby. I spoke with stern authority. “Let me slide it in. Do not make me force it.” I could feel his ass cheeks clamp together harder. Frustrating little shit. My free palm rose. Not one crack, not two, nor three. Five solid and crushing slaps to his limp little scrotum had Mister Gorgeous hearing my message loud and clear.

The barked order flew forth. “Push outward. It slides in easier if you push like you’re taking a shit. God! Everyone knows that idiot!” I grasped those reddened balls like low hanging grapes and twisted. “Stop being a little bitch. You want this as much as me.”

There it was. A slip past that first ringed muscle. Twirling my finger I began the process of loosening his insides as he groaned. “Delightful isn’t it?” I queried, accompanied by an eager smile. “There we go.” The digit slid deeper, his flaccid cock beginning to grow. “Mmm, you really do like it you naughty boy.” Loverboy’s hips jutted then instinctively clenched at my words. His bony hips lowering flat as an iron, in a thinly veiled attempt to subdue any further delving inside his virgin back door. It was time to help him find pleasure.

Grasping his excited tumescence, I began with languid strokes. Base to tip, insuring my thumb ran over that bundle of nerves under the head which would set his head spinning in sensual erotic craving. “There we go. Let it go. Let your hips rise to each stroke like you’re fucking my mouth. Close your eyes. Imagine us making sweet love in the ocean. Blissful waves crashing over us. Envision how you want to come inside me. Claim me. Make me yours.” His panting and engorged cock was the clue. He was soon to explode jets of his seed, like a fountain, spraying across that hot heaving six pack. “Stop!’ I quit pleasuring him and discontinued the enraptured loosening of his backside.

Sure that he wasn’t going to waste a drop I restarted on his ass. A withdrawal brought two fingers into play, scissoring his sphincter as he gasped in gratification. “Feels so good, doesn’t it? To get your boy pussy finger fucked? Do you want to be taken? Fucked?” the words were but a murmur from my lips. His consent evident in the higher, responsive thrusts.

I managed to step to the side of the table without missing a beat. Pulling from the drawer a heavy, black eight inch strap-on. I believe I heard an incessant no but, no means yes when you make love to a beautiful woman.

The harness slid up my slender, shapely legs. The same legs which many a man had worshipped and which would forcibly guide us towards a climactic denouement. Another squirt of lube and I tossed my soiled gloves, beginning to oil my own phallus before leaning forward to place it at his randy hole.

“Do you want to fuck baby?”

He shook his head vigorously.

“Do you want to get off?”

The shake continued.

“Let me pop that cherry and you can return the favor. Maybe. I’ll let you bathe me with that nasty tongue. Call your Daddy. Be your nasty little slut.”

Like that, the imagery of retaking his rightful place as a man overtook all thought process. My faux cock driving further into his milking, constrictive depths. His cock reacted to the prodding. That lightning bolt as the rubber thundered at his prostate. I could sense the tingle flashing throughout his body. That insidious, body enveloping way, much like hitting my own g-spot, which could make him squirt a cascade of his sinful juices. Withdrawal time.

I slipped back and held before pushing forward rhythmical. An insistent rocking motion as I latched to his hips. My pointy nails dug into the epidermis of his skin, ripping coarse gashes of pain that made his howls grow between the cosmic satisfaction of my downstrokes in his fiery little fuck hole. I was making him my decadent squirming bitch and he was all in. Hot.

My own salacious enjoyment could not be denied. Head falling, sweeps of hair a metronomic brush across my back. Feral moans emitted as I cupped my flushed perky tits providing a forceful twist to the coral pebbles. A storm of release was brewing. The sensation of touch like mind addling drugs to the overexcited nerves between my supple thighs.

“Say my name. Say Karolina. Say you want me to own your boy cunt.” I pounded harder.

“Say my name bitch. Say Karolina I adore. I love you Karolina. I am yours Karolina.” Nothing but tedious groans. Those tight nuts were back in hand in a nanosecond. Squeezing and caressing the fertile life out of them.

“No coming.” My eyes pierced through his. Into his cuckolded soul.

“Karolina.” I grunted guttural. “Say, you are my Goddess Karolina.”

And he did. Profusely exclaiming his assent to my commands with wide eyes and mumbled, gargling words. He was into our rite of passion. His body bucking, jerking on the edge of a stars shooting through the sky explosion of desire. Which is when I reached for the tray next to me, grabbed my beloved Baby doll, pressing down hard until his jugular bulged.

“Fuckwit.”

A sudden sound erupted behind me. Steel clanking a loud clatter as I became bathed in the glow of white light. My neck jerked, eyes hazy on the fevered edge of carnal obsession.

“Figaro..time for your lineup.” Those fucking dyke jailers. This dream was too good to be true. Oh, but soon. Soon enough I would be back on the street. Mommy said so. But, only the guilty do sleep in jail.

[mllemaenad]

'Imagine your children growing up in such a world. If a mage asked it of you, you would have to give him your daughter, not knowing what his plans for her might be. You could not resist him, and neither could she.' - Sorry, this line particularly came to my attention because take away magic and this? Is exactly what happens in the Tabris origin. And to that one Orlesian merchant in Denerim in DA:O. And probably to any number of peasant/elven girls at the hands of nobles every day across Thedas.

No need to be sorry. :)

You’re right. Absolutely.

The thing is – take this in context. This is an answer written by a grand cleric to a nobleman who seems (we don’t have his side of the conversation, obviously, so we can only infer from the substance of the reply) to have been challenging the Chantry’s treatment of mages. If you look at it like that, then what the grand cleric is describing is what happens to almost every mage child in southern Thedas.

Armed men come to your door and take your child away. You have no right to say no. And you have no idea what they’re going to do with them. They may take your child to a Circle across the sea. They may murder them. They may make them Tranquil. They may rape them, beat them, torture them. Maybe you’ll be lucky: maybe your kid is Vivienne or one of the Warden mages. Maybe they’ll do okay.

But you don’t know. And you can’t tell the Templars to go away; that they can’t have your child. They live in a world where this happens to parents every day.

It’s almost too much to imagine. The Circle, the Templars, they’ve shaped my life. I was no more than twelve when they came for me. My mother wept when they fixed the chains to my wrists, but my father was glad to see me gone. He had been afraid, ever since the fire in the barn. Not just afraid of what I could do, but afraid of me, afraid my magic was punishment for whatever petty sins he imagined the Maker sat in judgement upon.

– Anders (short story)

Anders’s mum couldn’t say no. Maybe she wanted to. At bare minimum, it sounds as though she didn’t want to lose her son forever. But that’s what happened. Little Ella is desperate to get back to her parents, because the Templars didn’t even tell them where they were taking her – and when we encounter her, a Templar is threatening her with Tranquillity and strongly implied sexual assault.

Wynne gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she was allowed one day with before he was taken into Chantry custody. The child, who was names Rhys, was taken to Lydes and from there transferred to the White Spire in Orlais when it was discovered that he, too, was a mage.

– World of Thedas I

They kidnapped a newborn baby and took him to a different damn country. It took decades, and fighting an archdemon, for Wynne to even get the chance to find him again.

Dulci de Launcet was lucky: she’s a noble, so she at least had letters and some general idea of where her kid was, but she hadn’t laid eyes on her son since he was six.

Yeah. Good fucking job, Chantry. You really solved the problem of powerful people coming to your door to abduct your children.

But while, yes, given the context of the letter I think the irony is best understood in relation to mages, I definitely think it can be expanded upon:

The demon had impersonated the human man who had bought her from the slavers that took her in after her father died. She’d had no idea back then who those kind men really were, only that they offered her food and a warm bed to sleep in. Then an even kinder man came to take her from them, and she found herself in his luxurious home and thought herself the luckiest girl in the entire alienage.

How very naive she had been. Count Dorian, as she learned her new master’s name to be, had been in search of an elven whore he could keep as a pet, something he could put in a pretty dress and bring with him on one of his many trips to the capital, like baggage.

– Dragon Age: The Calling

Ah, look. The exact scenario Grand Cleric Francesca was fear-mongering about. A little girl abducted, enslaved and sold to a nobleman who abused and tortured her. Yes, a mage-child as it happens, but that wasn’t apparent at the time. Fiona was vulnerable because she was an elf – an orphaned elf considered expendable by society.

“What they wish is irrelevant.” Celene turned and stalked away from the window. “I am already fighting a war on two fronts. I cannot be seen to fight a war on three.”

“Then don’t.” Briala rose, putting herself in Celene’s path. “Give them justice.”

“A lord for the death of an elf? I … damn this thing.”

With a quick jerk, Celene tore her mask from her face. Her face was flushed beneath, her eyes red from another night of little sleep. “Shall I declare the elves equal citizens before the Maker and the throne as well, while I’m at it?”

“Why not?” Briala took her own mask off, stealing a quick moment to steady herself. “Unless you don’t believe that, and I’m just a jumped-up kitchen slut you haven’t tired of yet.

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or here: a revolt that ends in genocide, and that begins because it is unthinkable that they arrest a nobleman for murdering an elf. The victim’s name was Lemet. He was killed shielding an eight-year-old boy who threw a rock at a carriage. And the boy said he did it because his mother had been murdered by Orlesian nobility:

“They killed my mother,” the boy said, pulling against Lemet’s grip.

“Be quiet.” Lemet looked back at the coach and heard its joints creak as the guards jumped down to the street. The driver would want to have that oiled, some part of Lemet’s mind noted.

“They can’t come down this street after what they did to her,” the boy insisted. “They can’t!”

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or this, where soldiers rob, rape and murder their own citizens in the midst of a civil war:

“Two days ago, Lady Seryl’s men rode in and cur down every man and woman working the fields. Killed our guards, killed everyone in the village square. When they finished killing the other soldiers, they fired arrows out onto the water, killed most of our boys in the boats. They took all the food they could find. They spent the night.” A collective flinch splashed across the crowd. “Said we had been assisting enemies of the throne, that this was a lesson to anyone who’d help Gaspard’s men.” At the last, his voice broke. “My lord, I don’t even know who Gaspard is.”

– Dragon Age: The Masked Empire

Or the serial killer who is repeatedly allowed to walk free because he’s a magistrate’s son, and he targets elven children. Or the elven boys who fled to the Qun because a guard raped their sister – no one would arrest him, so they took matters into their own hands.

And yes, of course, you see the exact same thing in Ferelden in the alienage.

I’m sure everyone feels so much safer now they’ve locked up all the mages.

Orlais’s crimes don’t excuse Tevinter’s. That’s where they went wrong with Dorian’s … painful dialogue on slavery. You can’t point to the horrors of Orlesian society and therefore suggest that the Tevinter slave trade is not that awful. It doesn’t work like that. What you can do, though, is say that Tevinter’s crimes don’t excuse Orlais’s – particularly when they tend to do exactly the same shit:

Slavery still thrives in Thedas, even if the trade has been outlawed. Who hasn’t heard the tales of poverty-stricken elves lured into ships by the prospect of well-paying jobs in Antiva, only to find themselves clapped in leg-irons once at sea? And humans fall prey to this, too.

If they’re lucky, they end up in Orlais, which has only “servants.” Most nobles treat them decently because they are afraid of admitting the truth. Orlesians go to great lengths to maintain the fiction that slavery is illegal.

Of course, the greatest consumer of slave labor is the Tevinter Imperium, which would surely crumble if not for the endless supply of slaves from all over the continent. There, they are meat, chattel. They are beaten, used as fodder in the endless war against the Qunari, and even serve as components in dark magic rituals.

—From Black City, Black Divine: A Study of the Tevinter Imperium, by Sister Petrine, Chantry scholar

– Slavery in the Tevinter Imperium

Fiona is not an anomaly: Orlais kidnaps and sells people into slavery, too.

And this makes sense. Fantasy always draws on the real world, even if they mix and match the cultures and historical periods a bit. So, just like in the real world, you generally have to take anything the wealthy and powerful say with a grain of salt.

The Chantry has a very specific, empire building, agenda. It makes much of problems that aren’t really problems (demons and abominations are not widespread threats, and both are poorly understood); it pins the blame for actual crises on oppressed groups (the Blight is in no way the fault of this random peasant mage from Antiva); it uses racism and religious intolerance to create in- and out-groups (elves [and dwarves, but we haven’t conquered them yet] are degenerate heathens who are preventing the Maker from returning).

As much as I love Dragon Age, what Bioware does sometimes that is … uncomfortable … to use a mild word, is that it lets the powerful rule the narrative. Inquisition is worst at this, because it presents strong voices for people like Cassandra and Cullen, who stick fairly close to the party line. And then it takes characters like Varric and Sera, and distances them from their own cultures … which is fine for individuals but awkward when we’re not letting Briala or Fiona say much either – and where the fuck is Sigrun? No one’s spoken for Orzammar’s casteless since Awakening. But it’s there, to some extent, in all the games.

So the point, always, is that mages and Circles are misdirection. Mages are scapegoats in the Chantry faith who are held responsible for all the bad things, and represent a pretend evil nobility that the Orlesian Chantry is keeping under control.

But the actual problems of this fantasy world are more or less the same as the problems of the real world: powerful nations dominate the continent and force others to bow to their whims and adopt their culture, because empires are just shit; the rich and powerful hoard all the rights to themselves, and can do damn near anything to the poor – particularly where the poor are part of a marginalised group.

What Orlais doesn’t want people to realise is that they are Tevinter. It was never the mages that were the problem, it was the absolute power the Tevinter magisters held over their slaves – a power now held mostly by the Orlesian nobility, who use it in pretty much the same way. Not exclusively, no: of course the nobility of other nations can be, and bloody are, evil fucks. But even there, the Chantry view helps to obscure the truth: you should be scared of empires and those who rule them. Much more scared than you are of a possessed mage.

[fathersonholygore]

Ahhhhh. The house smells of cinnamon and cookies, it’s warm, cozy. Hot chocolate, egg nog with an extra drop of something in it. Perfect time to settle in with some movies. Especially some scary ones, or at the very least something weird and wild. Santa-themed horror movies are a sub-genre unto their own. Usually it’s the typical slashers you’d expect. Then there are some truly great surprises, such as the disturbing psychothriller Christmas Evil, one of the greatest slashers ever made Black Christmas. And then there are other Christmas horror flicks, like the classic Gremlins. This year, I tried picking out a few holiday gems I haven’t included on lists for the previous years. Some of them aren’t so much gems as they are very rough yet enjoyable little trinkets picked out of the trough. Moreover, this isn’t a list that’s strict. I’m bending the rules; in certain cases, big time. Bear with me. We all celebrate the holidays in our own way. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few horrors worth throwing on during the season, on a dark, snowy night, in the comfort of your home where nothing bad could ever happen so close to Christmas, right? RIGHT?

Oh, and if you’re mad at something I put on the list, get a grip on yourself – I’m in the holiday spirit, one way or another. Fucking sue me.

1) Tales from the Crypt (1972 film) 1st Segment: “And All Through the House”

Not only does this segment involve Joan Collins playing a housewife who’s had enough of her husband’s shit, murdering him, it also includes a killer Santa Claus in the form of an escaped asylum patient dressed as jolly ole Saint Nick roaming free in her neighbourhood. The murderous Mr. Claus arrives while Joan is trying to cover up what she’s done, so it makes for a real holiday treat. The part about this one that gets me is the Santa, he’s dishevelled and uneasy looking, exactly like an escaped mental patient who killed some Salvation Army bell ringer and stole his beard and outfit. Add that to a frantic Joan Collins trying her best to survive this horrible man, you’ve got some fine horror for Christmastime!

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Tales from the Crypt (TV series) Season 1, Episode 2: “And All Through the House”

This TV adaptation of the segment from the 1972 film isn’t as good, but it’s still damn fun. It’s got another solid lead female performance out of Mary Ellen Trainor, and Larry Drake as another really fucking eerie Santa. This one has a bit more dark humour than the relatively pitch black film segment. I love Trainor’s reactions to being told the police are heading to the neighbourhood to search for the escaped mental patient Santa, there’s just something hilariously disturbing about the whole thing. Plus, we do get a bit more than the 1972 version, simply because this is a full 22 minute episode rather than the segment itself being much shorter. Gives you more bang for the buck, either way.

2) Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Equal parts pseudo-archaeology, horror, and adventure, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale takes the story of Santa Claus into fresh, unexplored territory. On the surface it’s similar to other holidays flicks, where you feel bad for a kid. Here, that kid is Pietari Kontio (Onni Tommila). He’s treated much like a dog. His father Rauno (Jorma Tommila) takes part in the reindeer slaughter. Business has been on the edge for a long while. Things aren’t great. A massive herd of reindeer have turned up dead, taking a worse chunk out of Rauno’s business. At the same time, there’s a British company digging into a mountain, they’ve found something peculiar: wood, and encased within it is tons of ice. Strange, no? That’s because Santa Claus is coming to town. Nothing to be happy about, not like the song says. If you’re looking for something pretty different from most other Killer Santa films, Rare Exports is the ticket. It’s definitely got some stuff to make you chuckle. It’s got even more to creep you the hell out!

3) Sint

Something endlessly hilarious about Christmas and Santa are how deadly serious people can get over it. Forget the Christian stuff (reminder: it’s a pagan holiday, anyway) – especially in the US, conservatives can get wildly sensitive about the portrayal of Santa Claus, a fictitious entity that gives presents to all of the kids across the world who celebrate Christmas. That’s why it’s likewise endlessly enjoyable to see Santa treated as a malevolent, mean spirited entity rather than one bringing yuletide joy. Sint is the tale of Sinterklaas. Now, the legend of Sinterklaas says he’s not entirely evil, though he does have helpers called Zwarte Piet (Black Pete; whole thing traditionally gets a little too close to racism for my tastes, the movie avoids any of that nonsense). The film says shag that, this guy’s a creep. And boy, does he ever get evil, too. Director Dick Maas (De Lift, Amsterdamned) makes the legendary figure into a former bishop who has gone rogue, leading a gang of thieves looting villages. He’s killed one night, and every 23 years after, on that same night when a full moon is in the sky, the old bishop, St. Nicholas returns to kill. Dig in. This one’s fun, it’s weird, and makes no bones about doing its own thing. Fantastic Christmas horror! One of my favourite seasonal horror movies out there.

4) Good Tidings

This isn’t anything special, it’s not going to blow any minds. Good Tidings suffers from poor acting, whereas it excels in atmosphere. Particularly, the murderous Santa(s) here makes for true holiday terror. When three psychopaths lay siege to a homeless shelter celebrating Christmas, a poor war veteran must revert to old, long abandoned ways in order to help him and others survive. This has a lot of problems. Above all, this is creepy, there are lots of spooky scenes and little moments to unsettle you. The score, when it’s good, it is damn good, and a throwback to the 1980s when the killer Santa flick was thriving. Don’t expect too much, then this one will definitely provide a fun night with some friends, a glass of nog, and a bit of Christmas grub.

5) Silent Night, Bloody Night

Several films on the list are only barely connected to Christmas, Silent Night, Bloody Night is no exception. The event which acts as catalyst for the whole plot and story of the film involves Christmas Eve. Other than that it isn’t much related. Still, this is a pretty wild and genuinely good slasher before the sub-genre of horror was officially a thing. This was released in 1972, before Black Christmas, Halloween, any of the other films that defined the slasher going forward. Now I’m not daring to claim this was hugely influential, nor is it anywhere near as good as those aforementioned slasher flicks. Not at all. But, it’s interesting to see that this was doing things these other movies made staples of the sub-genre. Like the score, it’s a classic. And there’s lots of blood, blasphemous killing with the soiling of Christian iconography. In addition you’ve got some odd arthouse-style filmmaking going on, particularly when it gets to flashbacks to the Christmas Eve night in question. A wild ride all around. Definitely worth a shot around Christmas, to put you in that mood. Horrific Highlight: You’ll know what it is when you see it. The broken glass moment is one of fucking nightmares, it’s indescribable. Watch. Be terrorised.

6) Dexter Season 1, Episode 11: “Truth Be Told”

Just like the first Christmas episode of The X-Files, Dexter uses the holidays to dig deeper into its characters, namely the titular one, whose past begins to erupt further in “Truth Be Told” – not only do we gradually discover more bits of Dexter (Michael C. Hall), we discover more of the other characters, from Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) to the Ice Truck Killer himself. There are plenty of things going on here. The meat of the episode is the latest Ice Truck Killer crime scene, fine holiday treats for the forensic team and the cops to deal with, and though the whole episode isn’t Christmas-centric, the lights shine in the backdrop, the crime scene itself is smack dab in the midst of the holiday season. Then, when you get to the last few minutes, the plot gets cooking with gas. Doesn’t have tons of holiday flavour. What it does have is excellent suspense and tension. You can’t ask for more than that.

7) To All a Goodnight

The one and only feature film directed by actor David Hess (Krug from Last House on the Left and Alex in The House on the Edge of the Park) is, as expected, appropriately sleazy considering some of the films he’s done. This is a true Killer Santa premise, one that doesn’t stray at all from a formula that’s become the standard for Christmas horror. A group of young people + some breasts + bunch of blood courtesy of a naughty Santa + isolated environment + redder than red herrings = To All a Goodnight. Nothing special. Yet the cinematography’s surprising, really enjoyable. Then there’s the classic slasher score, which aids in building good suspense for the mostly by-the-numbers stuff; add to that a little eccentric music, it gives the score something extra. A lot of this is generic. It’s still fun, creepy at times, and just a proper flick to toss on with some friends at Christmas, if for nothing else but to have a laugh.

8) Prometheus

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (just like Alien: Covenant) gets shit on a lot. Father Gore loves both these films. Because they’re fun, they’re vast stories with far reaching themes, and we get more of the birth of the xenomorph, the world Scott began building in ’79 with the masterpiece, Alien. For all the shit it gets, Prometheus is a fantastic sci-fi film. And, I’m going to go out on a limb suggesting the Christmas connection isn’t one that’s added for nothing. It’s not merely fodder for a fun Idris Elba moment. We’re dealing with thematic content here concerning the existence of a God, as humans have known it. Follow me here. If Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) prove that God doesn’t exist, at least not in the form Christianity imagined, then there’s no birth of Christ, all that. Therefore, no Christmas. So, for me, the holiday specific scene in Prometheus is an especially tragic one, like we’re watching this Christmas go on in the shadow of much bigger things, perhaps the last Christmas as they know it.

9) The Children

Technically, this is cheating: The Children takes place just before the New Year. However, it’s a snowy, holiday-themed horror, it’s got the vibes of a Christmas horror flick. I vote it goes on the list. And, well, there’s nobody to stop me, right? And lord, is this ever a brutal, effective, mean little film. At only 80 minutes, director Tom Shankland’s The Children pulls not a single punch. It’s well acted, particularly in the case of Hannah Tointon who plays Casey, the sole teenager in the story. It’s a nasty horror, crossing the borders of decency in all the right ways, asking violent questions about the differences between adults and children in a primitive sense, as well as just a plain tense movie. Special Mention: The editing and sound design during the dinner scene will have you stressed out, ready to snap yourself. But the kids, they snap first. Boy, do they ever snap. This is the worst – in an appropriate way for the plot – dinner scene in cinema history, or at least in the top three. Makes me physically tense. Love it; but I’m a masochist.

10) All Through the House

This one isn’t one you’ll write home about – do not anticipate any impressive acting, above all else. If you can check expectations at the door, All Through the House plays out as a significant, relatively fresh twist on the Killer Santa sub-genre of horror movies. There are only so many different ways a guy ends up in a Santa suit, murdering people. This flick sort of flips the script, as far as it can, anyway. The reveal won’t blow your socks off. Nevertheless, it will disturb the hell out of you. That’ll also explain, later in the film, why early on so many penises are cut off; not that misandry isn’t my thing, because it kind of is, y’know. (sorry, not sorry.) Highlight: Santa humping the air with a pair of garden shears. It’ll be more horrifying when you actually figure out who the character is in the reveal later on.

11) Krampus

What I anticipated as being a cheesy Christmas movie with a few scares turned out to be a few good scares with a deliciously twisted Christmas movie wrapped around it. Krampus is, essentially, set around what happens when a family made up of staunch Republicans and Democrats have to come together for the holidays, co-existing in one relatively small space for a matter of days on end. So, when one boy starts taking the season for granted, wishing his family weren’t a bunch of shitheads, the folklore figure Krampus lays siege to his neighbourhood, his home, and decides to take the kid a lesson. Not only is there some enjoyable holiday horror, this flick is funny. The cast is phenomenal – Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, and Allison Tolman play the couples, all in-laws with their kids. And the young actors are pretty great, too. It’s Krampus and his legion of mischievous creatures that seal the deal. From toys coming to evil life to gingerbread men attacks and more, the horror is as fun as the comedy. What do I love most about Krampus? It’s not necessarily the typical Christmas movie, in that it may not end up where you expect. In a lot of ways, this story stays true to the Krampus legends. That means be good, boys and girls. Else you’ll get a visit, and it won’t be from no Santa Claus, either.

12) The X-Files Double Feature Season 5, Episode 6: “Christmas Carol”

Not only is this a Christmas episode of The X-Files, one of my most beloved shows on television, ever, this is also an episode that plays into the overall series mythology, as well as a strong, emotional, personal dive into the history of Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), whose infertility plays a large part in the story. When Scully goes home for the holidays, she soon starts getting strange phone calls. She winds up in the midst of an investigation, which soon proves to reveal things about her own past, things that, on the surface, look too impossible to be true. Even though the Christmas connection here isn’t huge, it provided Vince Gilligan & Co. a reason to have Scully reunite with family, setting off all the personal issues and emotions she faces throughout the episode. There’s a second part conclusion, “Emily” – that one doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas. But “Christmas Carol” is absolutely an interesting part of the series, not just a one-off holiday episode, rather a big piece in Scully’s puzzle. But let’s move on to the other Christmas episode of the series, one that also includes Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny)!

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Season 6, Episode 6: “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas”

Mulder’s “a left cheek sneak” fart reference gets this Christmas episode rolling with tongue planted firmly in cheek. All the better compared with Scully and her unimpressed attitude about being called out by her partner to an old house on Christmas Eve to deal with “ingrained cliches from a thousand different horror films” Mulder is, as usual, interested in. When Agent Mulder calls Agent Scully out to a creepy house they’ll be staking out, both the agents get more than they bargained for after they get inside and the house is much more than it seems. A dash of haunted house, a little Christmas spirit, some laughs, some scares and an intense showdown in the friendship between Agents Scully and Mulder. A fun, eerie, suspenseful chapter of The X-Files, pitting that usual sceptical, empirical mind of Scully against the ever theoretical, hopeful belief of Mulder, as the two FBI agents search through the old place. They even run into Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin who play the couple living in the house. Lots of good stuff. Good, weird fun for the holidays!

13) The Twilight Zone Double Feature Season 2, Episode 11: “Night of the Meek”

Art Carney is a treasure. The Twilight Zone‘s “Night of the Meek” is only one of the reasons why. This is the tale of a department store Santa who’s fallen into the bottle a bit hard. But he knows it. And he knows too much, about the world, about pain, of struggle, all those things. What starts out as a depressing tale of a rundown man becomes something else entirely. Not the typical Rod Serling-style fare that you’d expect. Definitely magical, fantastical, and like many great Twilight Zone episodes, there’s a message behind the story, about the nature of giving versus receiving during the holidays.

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Season 3, Episode 14: “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”

  There’s not much to say about this one, because saying too much runs the fun. Maybe don’t even pay much attention to the pictures, either. Anyway, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is not simply a Christmas-adjacent episode of The Twilight Zone, it’s one of the top ten greatest episodes of television that exists. Some people will tell you that’s not true, that it’s an overrated episode which gets more credit than it deserves. Fuck those people. This episode is tight, it is tense, and the reveal is worth a thousand twists in other films and television. You won’t realise it’s a Christmas episode until you get to those final moments. When all is revealed, then you’ll understand.

14) Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

Another cheat. Not a Christmas movie. However, it does feature Christmas, to a degree. It’s set during Christmastime, one of the initial scenes involves a family enjoying the holiday together in their quaint apartment before the ever present bureaucracy in their dystopian society comes crashing through the living room, into their lives. Brazil‘s all about bureaucracy. Terry Gilliam uses Christmas to exemplify the materialism of this society where he sees us headed. We’re caught up in his weird world, where every dumb custom, every rule, every last little thing is enforced, and everything costs money, and shopping is like one of the deepest circles in Dante Alighieri’s Hell. In short, Gilliam’s Brazil presents Christmas in its purest, most rotten economic form. Much as I love the holidays, he’s not wrong.

15) American Horror Story Season 2, Episode 8: “Unholy Night”

  I love American Horror Story. Fuck the haters. Season 2: Asylum has a special place in my chilly little heart because of the themes and the location, just an all around terror. The eighth episode the season, “Unholy Night”, is a particularly creepy chapter of Asylum. There’s lots of naughty stuff going on at Briarcliff, between the devil using Sister Mary Eunice (Lily Rabe) as his Earthly plaything, a stark raving mad Ian McShane playing a man traumatised by the holiday season, and much more. It’s McShane who makes this episode so memorable. He does appear in a second episode afterwards, but it’s this one where he leaves his best, darkest mark. At the start of the episode his criminal Santa’s laying out what he’ll do to a couple he has tied up, and his remark to the husband – as well as the look on his face while saying the line – is chilling beyond chilling. Even if you don’t like the series, this episode is worth watching if you want some Christmas horror. And there’s some horror, as is usual for AHS. Try not to laugh when McShane bawls: “Well I don‘t wanna be in your shitty picture, then.” Just be prepared for lots of horrific, unsettling holiday horror around the handful of laughs.

16) Syfy’s Happy!

Happy! stars Chris Meloni as a washed up hitman who starts seeing a little kidnapped girl’s imaginary friend, a blue, flying unicorn (voiced by comedian Patton Oswalt) after the girl is taken by a psycho, meth smoking Santa Claus. Not sure if there’ll be a Season 2, but Season 1 takes place during the holiday season, obviously, as a really bad Santa is the focus of the crime plot. Surrounding that is a ton of mayhem, laughs a-plenty, two excellent performances from Meloni and Oswalt, and on top of that? It’s violent as hell, just as twisted. The visuals are exactly like a comic book, seeing as how the story comes from a Grant Morrison work. Check this out, because Season 1’s been perfectly messed up TV for the holiday season! It isn’t horror, so to speak, yet it has the right amount of madness to be proudly on this list.

Father Gore’s Films & TV to Ruin Christmas Ahhhhh. The house smells of cinnamon and cookies, it's warm, cozy. Hot chocolate, egg nog with an extra drop of something in it.