#what even is the point of going up to strangers and declaring an opinion?

[constantvariations]

Adam was a cringy edgelord ever since the trailers, he simply got worse in different ways later on

How can people even like that character is beyond me

It's called "seeing the potential in a character that the writers fucked over from the start because they couldn't give the racism plot they started and refused to drop any nuance or compassion thanks to their 'violence is uwu bad' white supremacist politics"

Also, cringe edgelord is not inheritely a bad thing. Just look at Shadow the Hedgehog - he's cooler than you or I will ever be. Or my current hyperfixation husband V from Devil May Cry, who is 100% a cringe edgelord and I love him for that specifically

Kill not the cringe but the part of you that cringes and you will know freedom

[claudemblems]

Jealous, Jealous | Wanderer + Itto Drabbles

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Summary: A man tries his luck with you only to end up on the receiving end of your boyfriend's wrath. Fem!Reader.

Notes: Itto's was so fun to write. He really does give off golden retriever energy 😭

Wanderer

The Wanderer may have sworn off his once violent and vengeful days, but the idea of taking the pathetic human being in front of him and burying him in the ground was a very tempting idea indeed.

“I’ll be all right going off on my own,” you’d told him, smiling without a single care in the world. Honestly, your naivety astounded him. Why did you feel the need to put blind trust into every person that you met? Didn’t you know that human beings are selfish creatures that don’t stop until they get what they want? That though they appear kind on the outside, they’re hiding a monstrous face underneath? All humans are the same in the Wanderer’s eyes.

Well, all but you, of course, and the Wanderer was determined to keep you untouched by the darkness of this world. 

That included shielding you from the worm that decided to try his luck with a taken woman.

"Please, sir, I'm not interested. I have a boyfriend."

"I can treat you much better than he can, sweetheart. All you have to do is give me a chance."

"I already declined. Please leave me alone…"

Just as the man's hands were about to meet your shoulders, he was sent flying backwards by a gust of wind, landing on the ground with a loud thud.

"W-What was that?!" the man yelped, his expression contorted in pure terror.

"Retribution."

The Wanderer's voice cut through the tense air like a knife as he hovered above the stranger, watching his face quickly drain of color.

"W-Who are you?" 

"I'm the boyfriend, and, if you don't make your way out of here in the next five seconds, your one-way ticket to the other side."

It didn't take any more convincing for the man to scramble to his feet and sprint away as fast as he could. He didn't even dare to risk a glance back in your direction, probably out of fear that it would be his last. 

"That’ll teach him a lesson," Wanderer hissed. He then turned to you, his gaze stern. "Don't go out by yourself again. Humans don't deserve you, especially when they're willing to take advantage of your kindness."

Gently taking hold of your wrist, the Wanderer pulled you alongside him as he began the trek back to your camp, no doubt biting back another lecture on his tongue. You'd learned your lesson, and that was enough to put him at ease. Still…

"I don't want to lose you, so stay vigilant. I'll take the world down with me if it ever tries to hurt you."

Relief washed over you as you placed your hand in his, squeezing it gently. "As long as you're here, I know I'll always be safe."

A small, brief smile appeared on the Wanderer’s lips at your words. "Yeah, yeah. Save the flattery for the next time I'm forced to give you a talking to."

Itto

Should you have been concerned that your boyfriend was in the background pouting like a sad, injured puppy, or was this just normal Itto behavior?

You weren’t sure what had managed to get him into such a dreary mood, but during times like these, you found it best to leave Itto to himself, giving him some space while still keeping the floor open for him to come and voice his concerns to you personally. However, upon closer observation, you realized that at some point his pouting had turned into a not-so-quite menacing glare. Who was on its receiving end? Well, it seemed as though it was the man in front of you. Oblivious to Itto’s irritation, the stranger rambled on and on about his skills in beetle fighting, declaring that he was one of the best fighters in the game. He went so far as to even invite you to attend one of his matches.

“Uh, that’s very…kind of you, but I’m not so sure my boyfriend would like me going to someone else’s game—”

“What does his opinion matter? I’m inviting you. You can speak for yourself, can’t you?”

“I mean, yes—”

“Then it’s settled! Meet me by the coast tomorrow at noon.”

You frowned. “Wait a minute. I never said yes—”

“You don’t have a reason to turn me down, do you? I’m just a nice guy inviting you out. What’s the harm in that?”

“You said I could speak for myself, yet you’re speaking for me!”

“Oh, come on! Stop being so stubborn—AH!!!”

You blinked, taken aback by the man’s sudden terror. “Um, what are you screaming about?”

“Little buddy here is afraid of the Grand, Mighty, Formidable Arataki Itto, the very loved and appreciated boyfriend of [Name].”

You turned your head to find Itto standing behind you with arms crossed, the expression on his face indicating that he was less than pleased with the scene unfolding in front of him. When did he get there? “You’ve had your fun you pesky little weasel. It’s time to mosey your way out of here before I put the Arataki Gang on your trail!”

“Y-Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”

You hadn’t even had the time to process what had happened before the man had already fled.

“What was that all about?”

Itto sighed dramatically as he clutched his chest. “You didn’t realize that he was trying to flirt with you? Oh man, I need to step up my romance game if you can’t even recognize the signs of love. I clearly haven’t given you enough affection. Don’t worry, I’ll fix that! I’ll shower you in kisses. I’ll carry you around everywhere we go. I’ll even get a nice new beetle and paint your initials on it to prove that I care for you—” “Itto,” you laughed, taking your hands in his. “I didn’t notice because I didn’t care. Everyone in Inazuma knows I’m yours. It doesn’t matter who flirts with me. I’m not interested in anyone besides the Grand, Mighty, Formidable Arataki Itto.”

A grin broke out on Itto’s face as he pulled you into a tight hug. “That’s my girl! I love you so much! You’re the best girlfriend I could ever ask for!”

You giggled, returning Itto’s enthusiastic embrace. “I love you, too, Itto.”

[woncon]

𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐒.

feel free to give your opinions and ask questions!

-> CURRENT PROJECT: summer go loco

𝐎𝐍𝐄-𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐓𝐒.

title: the case of the missing boyfriends

pairing: poly!stray kids x gn!reader

Last time, your cookies were missing. Now six of your boyfriends are. Or would it be more accurate to say that they are hostages to evil clowns? Or not? What is the truth?

genre: mistery

warnings: mentions of kidnapping, anxiety, evil clowns, horror house

status: writing

progress: ▓▓▓░░░░░░░  30%

a/n: takes place in "the case of the missing cookie" universe, but can be read as a stand alone.

title: make a wish (from a competent star)

pairing: skz family!stray kids & babysitter! gn!reader

Sometimes the stars are like genies. If you don't say exactly what you want, they interpret it freely. Do you wish for an exciting day? You got it! There's just going to be some big changes…

genre: crack, magic gone wrong-ish, parallel universe

warnings: gender switch (fem!minho, fem!jeongin, fem!felix, fem!hyunjin), family drama

status: outlining

progress: ▓░░░░░░░░░  10%

a/n: basically the boys turn into their skz family personas from that lil series because i NEED to write with auntie lina and hyunjin or else i'm going mad

𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒.

title: hybridz

pairing: hybrid! poly!stray kids x hybrid!reader

Desert fox hybrids believe that there is a road ahead for everyone. If they follow it, they will reach the oasis. But the path is not always straight. It's full of twists and turns, tempting obstacles that drop you into the sand. You have to wade through the branches, back on the right path, to get what you want. Jisung wants to go unnoticed, to keep his secret in his desk drawer but his colleague finds it out. You want independence, then an unexpected relationship to get over your unrequited feelings for Jeongin.  Jeongin agrees to accompany Seungmin to a predator therapy meeting and realizes what he really wants: you.  Seungmin wants to help Chan and find him a job where he will be treated properly despite being a wolf hybrid. Chan doesn't want to be a wolf hybrid. Minho wants Seungmin, but only in bed. Changbin would prefer to hide the fact that he's a rabbit. Or to gain more confidence. Or both? Hyunjin wants a super video series for his YouTube channel. Felix doesn't want to be any less important than a video series. It could also be, the foxes say, that by the time you reach the oasis, you realize you didn't get what you wanted, but what you really needed. As your paths cross at more and more points, this statement becomes more and more true.

genre: hybrid!au, fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, smut

a few tropes: meet-cutes, mutual pining, friends to lovers, fuckbuddies to lovers, strangers to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers, unrequited love, exes to lovers, fated mates (i am fate so i know it) ... and a lot more!

warnings: blackmail, trauma, panic attack, hybrid religion & lore, racism against predators, prejudices, emotional infidelity, many povs

status: outlining & writing

progress: ▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░  50%

a/n: this story is in many ways a first for me. the first i've done for nanowrimo, the first to develop a diversified polyamory relationship, the first to exceed 50k words. it also contains my longest smut ever. although, as hybridz stands at the moment, i may even beat that :3

title: a melody of daggers and scales

pairing: pirate!san x merfolk! gn!reader

Mama Tulla finally declares you a mature savior. You can go out on the open sea to guide sailors and help castaways like the other golden finned mermaids, not just help wounded dolphins. And almost immediately, the opportunity falls right into your fin when a boat breaks up on a rock near the island right in front of you. You dive in to save them. But taking them to the island is not enough. A hungry siren lurks nearby, and the island is small and uninhabitable. You want to protect the sailors somehow. Especially the prettiest one, the one they call Captain San.

genre: fantasy, forbidden love, enemies to lovers

warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, minor character death, merfolk & siren lore

status: outlining

progress: ▓░░░░░░░░░  10%

a/n: based on this timestamp

... and a bunch of timestamps and request!

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hi, I think this maybe constitutes a Wales Question! So, I'm English originally, currently in my third year at Aber university, and its reputation for "that place you go to study and then never ever leave" is looking like it's holding true. I've been living with two very good friends of mine who are extremely Welsh for nearly 2 years now, and in that time I've been slowly picking up bits of Welsh culture and language (it started with me not wanting to mess up trying to pronounce the biology building name and looking like an idiot, but I got very interested from there, and plan on taking a class after I graduate).

I'm serious about wanting to live here, I've fallen in love with the town and the country ever since my knowledge of it evolved from "dragons and sheep and funny long names on road signs" that I thought as a kid, and I've genuinely enjoyed being brought into the fold and joining in stuff with my friends, But. my friends are very adamant that this means I can Be Welsh, and I'm not sure how to take it. On one hand, of course I would like to be, but I'm not sure how much I can claim that confidently- I didn't grow up here, have barely lived here for that long, and there's still a lot I don't get so I'm worried about making it weird. On the other, I think adamantly declaring myself English instead and turning them down is very very easy to take the wrong way!

As the most vocally Welsh person I am aware of on tumblr, I am humbly requesting your take on this... would it be considered unreasonable for foreigners to claim Welshness, with enough effort put in to learning ofc? It would be very nice and appreciated to get a second opinion :)

Diolch yn fawr iawn!

Okay so obviously I am slapping on a HUGE caveat here that I am No One, I am just another stranger at the shouting match who sometimes has some thoughts about things I see and the ability to amusingly compare things to other things. What follows are the lukewarm takes of Just Some Person, and not to be taken as gospel in any way.

But also lol you did ask and I love giving opinions, I do, so let's gooooo

So first up, I do think you're slipping into the fallacy here of playing the Boxes Game with something that doesn't fit neatly into boxes, as indeed nothing about humans and people and humans being people actually does. The thing about national/cultural identity is that they aren't precise, immutable data points. 'Culture' is already quite a loose and ethereal beast - you're basically drawing a circle around a bunch of things and going "Everything in here is X Culture!", and you'll be largely right doing that; but, the edge of the circle isn't, in reality, a hard border. It's a gradient. The circle will overlap with other circles, too. And sometimes even the things in the centre of the circle turn out to be absent half the time, and it's all a bit messy. Really, it's a bell curve, and you're just looking to see what turns up most frequently, with the understanding that you only get the big picture from all the data points together.

Nationality is even fuzzier, tbh. It's a highly personal thing. I'm very Welsh - my Welshness, though, looks different even from other Welsh people in Swansea, and certainly from a Welsh person living in Caernarfon. There are definitely unifying elements; but ultimately, it's something you kind of carve out for yourself, both consciously and unconsciously.

And I bring that up because part of your question is, "At what point do I cross the line into the circle? How long do I have to wait and how much do I have to do before Welshness happens? When do I get to claim the label?"

And there's no answer to that. Not for anyone. This is an identity issue, not a hard scientific concept. Kind of reminds me of a lot of questioning folks in the queer community, in fact. Humans like boxes and labels because they're comforting, but ultimately, we fit in them about as well as angry cats.

With that said, though, it's certainly true that there is a profound and observable difference between a naturalised citizen and a long-term tourist, which I think is the root of your fears here. A Brit who likes holidaying to Spain and decides to go and live there but doesn't learn Spanish, doesn't integrate with the local community, doesn't respectfully partake of any local customs (especially if they condescendingly view the local customs as quirky or quaint, or worse, look down on them), who learns nothing of the history of the area or wider country... that Brit could live there for 40 years, could even go the whole hog and get Spanish citizenship. But they are nothing more than a long-term tourist. Part of claiming culture and nationality is that it's not a spectator sport.

But by contrast, if that Brit were to learn Spanish and use it in everyday life (even if they sometimes fell back on English, or used a funky mix like Spanglish sometimes); if they learned all the history, INCLUDING and MOST ESPECIALLY all the pressure points that mean a Brit in particular cannot do X thing or make X joke; if they integrate with the local community, helping neighbours and coming to community events; if they respectfully take part in local customs, and only add elements of their own culture after learning about the customs properly so they know which bits are important and which can be amended...

Well, that's a totally different matter, isn't it?

It sounds like you're in the latter camp. It's particularly encouraging that your Welsh friends are already adopting you, in the broody chicken fashion of Welsh Mams Everywhere, because it suggests that while you may be English, you aren't English TM (you know the type). So, that's a good start, and it certainly puts you on the path to Naturalised Citizen.

So at that point, I suppose it becomes a matter of personal comfort. You're certainly right that it's still, relatively speaking, quite a new facet of your identity that you've only just started exploring and developing. Learning Welsh, when you get round to it (check with the university by the way, Aber is very keen on helping students learn and can get you cheaper/free courses), will push you several miles down that road, because that's a big effort expenditure AND it will put you in touch with the second of Wales' two dominant cultures.

But ultimately, the label you use has to be down to what you feel fits best, and what you're comfortable with. If you aren't comfortable with 'Welsh' yet, then that's completely fine - it's not for you at the minute. Put it on a back burner. Maybe use 'British' for now? In place of 'English', which is more specific. Maybe you can say you're "from England originally", or that you were born there but live here now; both of those are accurate, but also give the statement of intent. They make it clear that, as an adult, Wales is 'home'. This is where you're choosing.

In any case... croeso i'r clwb! And a thousand thanks for learning the language, and even just for the effort you've put in so far. Even just learning the pronunciation puts you miles above most English people, in spite of it being such a basic thing to do. It's more appreciated than you can know.

Also sorry this got long lol

[crusherthedoctor]

It's really sad how people keep going after your group just because you defend yourselves

Apparently, the statements "I'm generally content with the quality of my personal stories" and "I spot many issues with this comic" justify getting spammed with graphic death threats and ableist insults

Yet it's insisted that you're the ones who are too harsh? It's straight up unfair.

Who would have thought that a group of people might occasionally get upset after being crucified and ridiculed by countless strangers?

Funny how they NEVER have a justification beyond "well shut up no one wants to hear you"

Somehow, it's always YOUR fault that a part of the fandom goes rabid whenever someone doesn't conform to the current "right" opinion, and YOU'RE to blame for THEIR ungodly behavior. That doesn't make any sense, does it?

This fandom is vain and abhorrent to the nth degree and y'all deserve better. That's all I wanted to say.

Par for the course, innit. They'll lash out at us. They'll hand out death threats. They'll make disgusting ableist comments about my autism, and similarly terrible comments towards my friends. They'll threaten to bomb SEGA HQ and stick Iizuka's head on a pike, among other wild declarations of violence. But don't you dare make a goofy meme about Surge not living up to her hype. And whatever you do, don't even think about criticising the unprofessional antics of the IDW crew. What are you, a monster?

They dismiss us as insignificant one minute, then fearmonger so hard that they see fit to give us a boogeyman-esque moniker the next. I'd be surprised if they could walk in a straight line without contradicting themselves.

As for "You talk so much about your fics!" ...No shit. I'm a guy with a blog. This isn't a movie production with a budget, I don't have a team or advertisements backing me up. And unlike fanartists, I don't have my own art to catch people's attention. I kind of have to talk about my writing in order to get it out there and inform people of its existence, and while I try not to sound too much like an unskippable YouTube ad, what else am I supposed to do? Upload them silently and then never refer to them again? How is showing passion for my work any different from official creators showing passion for theirs? Just because fanfic tends to get less attention on here than fanart doesn't mean it's not worth sharing, do they want fandom to flourish or not?

When I compare my work to a certain comic, I do it to highlight the dissonance. If fanfic writers - plural, not just myself - can understand the importance of keeping the characters recognizable, and making the universe faithful despite any necessary differences, then what excuse do official writers who have been involved with the series for over a decade have? If someone who doesn't even love Sonic that much compared to other characters, finds him annoying and unfunny half the time (no, not just in the Pontaff games, in general), and even finds it a pain in the ass to write for him at times and has more fun writing other characters because of this, can still attempt to write what made him appeal to fans... why do writers who supposedly love him so much keep fumbling so hard with him?

I compare for the sake of highlighting why these off-kilter portrayals are so easy to spot. If Sonic Twitter only gets "He's just stroking his own dick" from all of that, then they haven't been paying attention.

The most ironic thing about it all is that they've only gotten more vitriolic as most of us have mostly moved on from the height of IDW discourse (cause the comic goes in circles at this point, and is very likely to be running on fumes due to IDW's financial troubles, so there's no point). Yeah, I'll still criticise it now and then, and make a meme on occasion, but I rarely make lengthy ted talks about it or participate in ongoing Lanolin Is A Bitch/Silver Is Uwu-ified/Whisper Is Trauma Bait/etc back and forths anymore, because it's just tiring now. And since most current Sonic stuff has been putting me off in general, combined with growing fatigue and frustration at not being able to criticise certain games without people waving the finger at me (especially SA2, since the Year of Shadow has made it the center of attention yet again...), I've took a step back from intense Sonic discussion to focus on Stellar, as well as other fandom projects, like my recent brainstorming for Paper Mario or: How I Learned To Insert Eggman and Love The Vivian™.

In no way can you say I've been up in their faces as of recent. Yet they continue to cry otherwise, because they want people like me gone completely.

[delimeful]

carry them home (4)

warnings: magical oaths, mentions of past harm/captivity, mentions of murder, canon-typical remus behavior, lmk if i'm missing any

-

His declaration, predictably, sparked an entirely new argument.

Logan had wasted a few moments trying to call Janus’s bluff, and then, once it became clear that a Deal was absolutely not happening, he had been promptly dragged into the brewing argument.

Patton was vehemently against murder, and the fire sprite seemed to be tentatively backing him up. Logan was clearly weighing the benefits and the risks, his clear irritation with Janus seemingly warring with the fallout of going against Patton’s wishes. Vee appeared to be holding up the pro-murder side of the argument through sheer force of loathing.

Nobody had asked Remus for his opinion, presumably because the answer was extremely obvious. The kid was still leaning obnoxiously on Janus, watching the debate like a tennis match and nodding faux-wisely every once in a while.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to look the other way while your companions are distracted?” Janus asked dryly, tilting his head slightly to see that the hands on him were utterly caked in dirt.

“And miss the opportunity to see how many ghoul fungi I could grow out of your corpse? You ask too much of me,” Remus replied, tilting Janus back slightly so he could peer upside down at his face.

Startlingly, underneath the errant patches of lichen and mold, the changeling’s face bore a remarkable resemblance to the fire sprite.

Rather than comment on it, Janus rolled his eyes. “At least grow edible ones. Waste not, want not, as the conscientious say.”

Remus blinked, and the edges of his smile grew sharper with delight. “Any corpse mushrooms are edible if you're not a coward!”

Janus hummed in agreement. “And if you don’t mind becoming a corpse yourself.”

Those mismatched eyes vanished, and there was a nasally laugh, as though he’d thrown his head back to cackle. “You’re awfully relaxed for a guy we might pull all the guts out of!”

Part of that was the lingering effect of the trance, as well as the theory that if he planned an escape too actively, he might send the soothsayer into another foretelling episode.

(It was strange. Normally, involuntary visions of the future were triggered by impending danger, but Janus hadn’t had any harmful intentions while pondering escape.)

Of course, he wasn’t about to tell them that.

“There’s no point to mindlessly panicking,” Janus said instead. “Besides, as far as captors go, I’ve had much crueler ones.”

“Are you sure? We’re literally trying to decide if I get to mulch your body!” Remus informed him cheerily. His sharp-toothed little grin was practically designed to incite terror; Janus felt a small surge of fondness despite himself.

“Indeed, but a few of you don’t seem to want me dead, so my statement stands.”

“‘A few’ is generous,” Vee muttered, and then ducked away from Patton’s puppy dog eyes.

“He hasn’t done anything wrong!” Patton insisted. Generally speaking, that wasn’t remotely true, but Janus wasn’t about to correct him. “We shouldn’t hurt innocents!”

“Patton, we have to focus on keeping ourselves safe,” Logan tried, a sort of halfheartedness to the words, as though he already knew they wouldn’t sway the other fae.

“What’s an epic voyage without a few struggles?” the fire sprite countered. “This serpentine stranger may have some tricks up his sleeve, but a hero such as myself will valiantly protect you all from any threat he may pose!”

Vee scoffed. “Ro, you can’t even protect us from your twin’s bad singing.”

Ro gasped, placing an affronted hand to his chest, but before they could return to bickering, Logan mantled his wings in an unspoken demand for attention.

“If we aren’t killing him—,” he pointedly ignored the groan from Vee, “—we need an alternative method of ensuring he won’t hurt anyone.”

“Remove his arms!” Remus offered helpfully. Patton winced, and Logan sighed.

“Physical restraints seem to be effective enough for the moment. Our primary concern should be countering whatever method the human used to break free of my trance.”

“Or,” Janus interjected mildly, “we could skip the mind magic entirely, and negotiate instead.”

“Right, because you’re so trustworthy,” Vee snapped. He’d started aggressively pacing at some point during the discussion, his shoulders hunched inward.

The kid made an astute point, as inconvenient as it was.

“I’m not the one who chose to be dragged out here and interrogated,” Janus said, tone only slightly snippy. “However, I would be willing to swear a blood oath, if that is what’s required to ease your minds.”

All of the kids turned to him with wide-eyed surprise, though Vee snapped back into anger within moments.

“You don’t get to put any of us under oath—,” he started, edging in front of the others with bared teeth.

“I would be the sworn party,” Janus interrupted, heroically resisting the urge to sigh at the assumption.

Another beat of silence, though Remus and Ro seemed more bemused than anything.

“You’d rather subject yourself to a blood oath than a Deal?” Logan asked, his expression shifting to something more pensive as he studied Janus. “Have you… been under oath, before?”

Janus resisted a dry laugh. “I have,” he understated.

“But blood oaths hurt!” Patton chimed in, still looking far too worried on behalf of a relative stranger.

He was well aware. “The pain is only debilitating if I actively act against the agreed terms. As long as I am guaranteed my safe release by the end of the oath, I am willing to endure the side effects.”

Vee had gone quiet, watching him intently with those tar pit eyes.

“Alright,” Logan said, and settled into a neat, cross-legged sit in front of Janus. “Let’s negotiate.”

—

The agreement ended up being relatively straightforward, for how long-winded their discussion was.

Janus had agreed not to harm, or plan to cause harm to, any of the kids. He’d agreed to offer his honest knowledge on not only the movement of the Guard, but any relevant matters that could aid their journey. He’d agreed to follow the orders of whoever was currently assigned as his watcher, but only that designated person.

He’d insisted on that wording, having already picked up on the frequent bickering that went on between the kids. Being subject to one highly-opinionated child at a time was manageable. Being subject to magically compelled orders from all five of them was a recipe for disaster.

In exchange, he would not be killed, and he would part ways peacefully with the gaggle of infants after the oath period— a completed moon’s cycle— had passed.

He had spent so much time weaving loopholes into his requirements and playing innocent as Logan caught and unraveled the vast majority of them, that he hadn’t actually realized how heavily skewed against him the deal was until the oath was already being made.

That was what he got for indulging in bad habits, he supposed. A necessary evil, as he doubted the children would have trusted his word if he’d simply stated what he meant outright.

They had good instincts— it was always better to be watching for the trap— but in the end, they were still young. Rooting out Janus’s double-meaning machinations had successfully distracted them from including the conditions Janus wanted to avoid-- one that would force him to tell them anything about his own person, for example.

(Really, his highly suspect background aside, it was none of their business.)

He didn’t bother trying anything during the ritual swearing itself, both because Vee was watching him like a starved hawk, and because he wasn’t a fool that meddled with the processes of blood magic.

The heavy, dull ache of a blood oath settled onto Janus like an old jacket draped over his shoulders. He hadn’t missed it. Still, it was leagues better than making a Deal.

Five gazes watched him with varying levels of curiosity and wariness, as though waiting to see if he would spontaneously combust under the force of the oath.

Janus pushed down the stress that always accompanied arrangements like these, reminding himself that he was in the here and now. As far as captors he’d been magically bound to went, he’d endured far worse for far longer.

It would only be a month. They were children. This would likely be the easiest trip he’d ever made under blood oath.

“My first piece of advice,” he offered with a winsome smirk, “would be to move eastward. Odds are good that your encounter with the shopkeep will linger in her mind enough to mention it to the Guard, and I assume we’ll want to be well ahead of any scouting parties sent off the way I led you out of town.”

Vee crossed his arms, scowling. “We’re not going to find Sanctuary in the east. It’s in the mountains.”

“I’m not giving you information on how to get to Sanctuary, the place that isn’t real. I’m telling you how to not get caught by hunters,” Janus replied, saccharine-sweet.

Vee hissed petulantly.

“Ooh, ooh!” Remus waved his hand around wildly. “We could always go with my plan and immolate the Guard! I always wanted to go out in a blaze of gory glory.”

Patton chuckled nervously. “Immolate? I think I’d prefer we get moving immoearly to avoid the Guard instead!”

Remus booed. Ro also booed, but it seemed to be more about the pun than denial of mauling.  

“Patton is correct. We don’t want to be caught unaware, particularly at nightfall,” Logan said, folding up his map after adding a few careful notations to it. “The human’s advice is sound— for the short-term, Vee. We can worry about Sanctuary once we’re out of immediate danger.”

With a decisive nod, he shifted back to his feet, and everyone dispersed as though on cue, hurrying to grab the supplies and belongings scattered about the clearing.

Having left all his belongings at home pre-abduction, Janus leaned back against a tree, grimacing as the bark pressed into his wrists. He really would have to convince them to retie his hands in front of him, he was going to be entirely useless like this.

Patton would be the easiest to convince, though he doubted that Logan would assign anyone but himself to watch Janus for the first few days—

“Vee! You’ve got the human. Keep an eye on him.”

Or maybe the siren trusted the others more than Janus had originally thought.

...Or cared less about Janus's survival than he'd originally assumed.

Vee returned Janus’s mocking smile from earlier, a silent promise that the changeling was going to enjoy making life harder for him.

So much for an easy journey.

[masterqwertster]

12. “Did something happen to you that I don’t know about?” and 20. “Would you feel more comfortable talking about it if I turned around?” for Ashton and whoever you want?

I'm feeling 20 "Would you feel more comfortable talking about it if I turned around?" with the second character being Prism. Prism is just a curious little girl, and Ashton's got some very unique scars that just speak to the prompt of explaining (possibly) without being seen. Prompt

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Prism nervously asks. "I mean, I don't even have to look. I can turn around and you can just talk about it. You don't have to show me-"

"Hey, you offered to do research into similar shit. Isn't it going to be easier to tell if what you've found matters if you've had a good look?" Ashton counters, continuing to undo the buckles of their vest.

"I- Well, probably. But I don't..."

It takes a moment for Ashton to parse out the unspoken problem, but once they do, they laugh.

Body shy isn't something Ashton's been in a long, long time. Getting raised in an orphanage in the desert where water for washing is a limited commodity does that to a person. It was either let the teasing get to him, or ignore it to spite them, and spiting his detractors was just so much more satisfying. That or punching them.

And fuck, Ashton looks good, in their own opinion. They've got the muscle from their work on display, the beer gut they're coming into isn't more than padding on their stomach yet (and it's not like they'd have the smut novel six-pack anyways. They're not Orym, working out every fucking day), and despite the pain they cause, the gold looks beautiful against their jade skin. They've got a figure worth showing off.

"Oh. I didn't realize it was quite so... extensive," Prism comments once Ashton has removed his vest.

Ashton looks down at the gold that spiderwebs from the impact points on his head, shoulder, and hip. The clear radial lines from those points. How the cracks stretch across his collarbone, his waist, almost making complete loops in a couple places.

He shrugs, watching the light glitter across the shifting gold, "I hit the ground pretty fucking hard."

"...Um, may I?" Prism gently asks, a long-fingered hand outstretched towards his arm.

"...Sure," Ashton agrees after a moment's consideration. They absolutely fucking hate being touched by strangers, but Prism's scooched her way out of that category pretty quickly. And like they said, she'll have an easier time sorting out the good stuff from her research the more she knows about what she's looking for.

Prism's touch is light, and he's not sure if that's because she's a wimpy wizard who can't put a lot of force behind anything that's not magic, or if it's because she's trying to be gentle. Still, she traces the lines branching out from his shoulder with the same dedication with which she'd copied down the Judicator's tattoos.

"I don't think I sense anything magical about the gold. At least, not anything that isn't your general elemental-ness," Prism declares, gesturing to their whole rocky self as she takes a step back to give Ashton space.

Ashton nods. That's about what he expected. Though he still holds some hope she might come up with some information about other earth genasi being patched up in a similar way or something.

"And can I-?" Prism pops up on her toes and cranes her neck a little bit.

"Yup. Just... don't poke it too hard with magic? Imogen and Grass nearly got stuck in there or some shit last time, so, y'know, be fucking careful," Ashton warns as they crouch a bit to allow the shorter elf a clear view.

He does his best to keep an eye on Prism as she investigates the glass, but it's kind of fucking hard when he can't turn his head and his left eye is pretty shitty. He thinks he sees a hand reach up, but if Prism is touching the glass, she's using a fucking light touch that doesn't even give him any pressure feedback.

"Oh wow," Prism whispers after a while, drawing back once more. "That's definitely some powerful magic. Not that I didn't know that before, having seen you use it in all those fights and all. But wow. I've never felt anything like it."

"Yeah. That kind of seems to be the running theme with anyone I ask about it," Ashton agrees, standing up and stretching a bit. "You also might try looking for 'dunamis.' Didn't get much of an explanation about it, but it sure as fuck sounded like the sort of shit I do because of this."

"Okay. Dun-a-mis," Prism sounds out, taking a note. "You wouldn't happen to know how it's spelled?"

Ashton shakes their head.

"Alright. Guess I'll just keep an eye out for different spellings. And if I find anything, I'll definitely let you know."

"Thanks. And be careful, okay? Crime is fun, but only so long as you don't get caught."

[philtstone]

38 (fake kisses), your choice of Star Wars characters

#38 -- fake kisses

this is very silly, but the idea remains a classic one

Critical as it is to protect their strung-out ranks from Imperial infiltration, the subject in question necessarily cannot be an easy one to bring up. First, they need all the bodies they can get, if not in the least just to keep warm. Second, and more importantly, morale is at stake. If order and cohesion are to be maintained, one can't be going around throwing accusations of treason at just any guy who looks at you funny.

The assemblage has outlined this point very clearly for themselves, on the pilfered clearboard set up against Hobbie Klivian's ship wing.

"Well, sure, but we're not just going around throwing accusations," says Luke, to general mutters of approval. The fact that Luke is here lends weight to the conversation; Wes is owed money, Wedge is owed money by Wes, who cannot pay him back until he is paid in turn, Hobbie has to share a bunk with the man -- he snores -- and Han's opinions on the matter stopped being relevant the moment The Accused got that girlish giggle out of Her Highness.

Luke (much as he has his own giggle-related biases) is a decent sort. He'd never throw an innocent under the proverbial Y-Wing for selfish reasons.

"I don't know though," Luke is continuing, with a thoughtful, consternated shake of his golden head, "there's something about him that doesn't sit right with me, guys."

"Unreliable," offers Wes, referring to the unpaid debts.

"Inconsiderate," says Hobbie, of the snoring.

"He's practically a stranger," says Han, gesturing widely in the air with one hand, as he is wont to do. "What the hell do we know about him, anyway? He just waltzed in here two weeks ago and now he acts like he owns the place? Me and the kid had to prove ourselves, you know."

"Han's not even enlisted yet," agrees Wedge, as if this illustrates a grave necessity for long-term probation.

"And I'll tell ya what, Luke --" Han, who is ignoring Wedge, points with significance -- "his eyes are too close together. That's never a good sign."

The subject in question -- one Erich Telv, having committed no obviously evidenced sins outside of being a slightly below average sort of being who was unfortunately charming enough to make Princess Leia laugh -- is still in a debrief with the brass. He was sent on a scouting mission not two days ago, and with little to go on but their individual gripes and the general impression that Leia has been more stressed than usual in Erich's absence, a committee has convened. Chewie, who gracefully declined participation, has been spending the duration of the meeting cleaning his favourite hairbrush in the corner.

"Now see here, gents," says Wedge. "We gotta be real sure of ourselves here. We need evidence. Hard facts. This could be serious."

"The morale," says Wes, pointing with the wrong end of a mop at their clearboard. It reads ORGANA WILL KILL US IF WRONG in Wedge's poor Basic penmanship, underlined twice.

"Who cares about the morale!" says Han. "I'm telling you, this guy's trouble. By the time we get your hard evidence he'll have already pulled a fast one."

Chewie, who is now inspecting a matted lump of hair just extracted from the brush, makes a low growling sound that even the most amateur of Shyrriwook speakers can understand.

"WHAT?!" comes the collective outcry.

"Kissed him!" says Luke, distraught.

"When?" demands Han. "Telv? That wormy little nobody? He ain't her type!"

Nobody suggests that there is no real evidence for this declaration.

"A gambler and a snorer, you mean?"

"Hobbie, in the grand scheme of things, your insomnia is not the worst of our troubles --"

"I knew I had a bad feeling about this ..."

Chewie confirms it happened just before Erich's scouting mission. He saw Leia do it and everything -- he thought everyone knew. Wasn't that why this meeting was taking place? Because they were concerned for her safety?

"Gentlemen," says Wes, amidst multiple spluttered protests that yes, of course, that was exactly why -- perhaps also the good of the Alliance -- and then of course, Han's added insistence that he didn't care what the Princess did or when, or, indeed, what happened to her at all -- "I am starting a new betting pool."

The door to Command, situated across the hangar bay, opens at this exact moment.

Erich Telv is bodily thrown out into the hall. He lands face first onto the floor.

"Pathetic!" comes Leia's raised, icy voice, immediately behind him. She strides out into the bay, her sleek little blaster drawn and pointed; the occupants of Echo Base's Hangar One pause to watch with open-mouthed interest; Erich, rather visibly, cowers. "Despicable! Moronic! Really, Mister Telv, to think that I wouldn't notice your especially idiotic brand of spy games is possibly one of the most singularly dolt-headed things I have ever encountered in my natural born life!"

"Please," pleads Erich, the yellow thatch of his annoyingly abundant hair standing up wonkily as his quivers. It appears as thought Leia literally kicked him out of the command room via his backside, as he keeps rubbing it. "Please, I was only just --"

"You were trying to make a few extra credits and you tried it with the wrong Rebellion, Erich. If you weren't such a miserable slimy little freight blister I'd almost feel sorry for you. Celchu, Darklighter, put him in the brig. We'll decide what to do with him later."

The whole thing happens in less than two minutes. Afterwards, Leia walks over to them.

"Hello," she says, a touch awkwardly. She looks pleased with herself, but also hesitant, as though the events that just transpired might garner her ill will of some kind. "I'm sorry everyone had to see that -- it's awful for morale. But Telv was being so obvious about it it was starting to get on my nerves."

Hobbie, Wes, and Wedge blink; Han's mouth closes with an audible click.

"Force, Leia," Luke manages, after a beat, "you knew Telv was a spy the whole time?"

Leia looks startled. "Oh -- of course. He was using an open channel to send our supply inventory to anyone who was listening. I'm not too worried about our location, but --" Her eyebrows crease, highlighting her large expressive eyes, "Don't tell me you all had suspicions too -- oh, but you should've said something --"

They scramble to assure her otherwise.

"No -- no! Uh, ours weren't really concrete," Luke says quickly.

"Just a gut feeling," says Han, over-loudly, not meeting Leia's eye.

"We, you know, didn't much like the man, but it's a serious business, accusing someone of treason --"

"Luke just had a Force premonition or two ..."

"... Never killed a guy to have a brainstorm session, if you take my meaning --"

"Now, don't take this the wrong way," interrupts Wedge, glancing sideways at both Han (who is still staring at Leia in faint amazement) and Luke (who keeps nodding, like this will absolve him of his participation in The Committee), "but did you really kiss the idiot, your Highness?"

Leia's look of confusion is very momentary. She arches a pointed brow at Chewie before turning back to the group, whereupon she seems to notice their clearboard. Looking on in mild amusement, she says, somewhat dryly, "Well, Carlist didn't believe my suspicions. I figured the stupider Telv thought I was, the easier it would be to have my evidence."

Again, there is a tightness right at the end of her words that stops any otherwise thoughtless comments that might have emerged. Luke's distressed expression clears into one of gentle understanding. Han visibly swallows down any lingering disgruntlement and grins widely. Wes, who is in charge of the clearboard, writes down evidence: slimy little freight blister under their other points.

"Well, there you have it," says Hobbie. "One of us should've just kissed the man."

"I vote Luke, next time," says Wedge. "The Princess shouldn't have to do all the work."

"Aw, Wedge, volunteer yourself, why don't you -- I don't wanna kiss the Erich Telvs of the galaxy!"

"Yeah, give the kid a break," says Han. "He hasn't got the necessary experience to fake a good kiss."

While the others bicker, Leia catches his eye; in spite of everything already said, she doesn't expect the touch of genuine concern in Han's expression.

Wild and unplanned, she mouths I'm sorry I kissed him -- what has she got to be sorry for, Leia will ask herself later, a bit viciously -- and any lingering bad feelings over the Erich Telv debacle are forgotten in wake of the honest, stunned look on Han's usually cavalier face.

[calenhads]

everything under hearts for sabina please :3

❤️ RED HEART — what are three of your oc's positive traits?

first and foremost, sabina is incredibly intelligent, though it becomes clear very quickly that she's book smart beyond anything else. she also tends to be considerate most of the time, with a strong sense of justice to back her up.

🤍 WHITE HEART — what are three of your oc's neutral/questionable traits?

sabina is a passionate person, and puts her whole heart into anything she cares about. often to the detriment of herself and those around her. the same can be said for her loyalty, which ties her to people and concepts in ways that she refuses to break. she is also reserved, and tries to keep her thoughts and emotions close to her chest even among those she trusts.

💔 BROKEN HEART — what are three of your oc's negative traits?

the biggest one if her vengeful streak a mile wide. in line with her loyalty to others, she will defend those she cares about bitterly and with a tendency towards violence. and, where she is not considerate (and even where she is) she tends to be callous and distant. her short-temper makes each of these traits worse, and she has a tendency to lash out at others for the most minor inconveniences.

💘 HEART WITH ARROW — what and/or who do(es) your oc consider the most important to them?

felix is the most important to her. she knows well enough that her answer should be lachlan, or her people, or any number of those who have stuck by her through it all. but she will always put her father first, and his opinion is the one she values the highest.

🧡 ORANGE HEART — does your oc tend to prioritize family or friends?

family. always family. her biggest issue is that she will always prioritize her family over the friends that have chosen to love and trust her. when it comes down to it, she will always leave her friends to chase her family.

💛 YELLOW HEART — how many languages does your oc speak? what language(s) are they learning, if any?

sabina speaks three languages: the common trade tongue, aretian, and little bits and pieces of kalina's mother tongue that does not have a name yet. she's not currently learning any more languages, but she does find linguistics fascinating.

💚 GREEN HEART — does your oc prefer being inside or outside?

this one really depends. if you had asked a young sabina, before everything went to shit, she would have adamantly declared that she prefers being outside where she can be among the plants and all their names that she knows. now, though... she's been chased away from her home, and the nights or weeks in which she's able to take shelter in an abandoned home or someone's barn are some of the best. she's so very tired of the outside. she just wants to go home.

💙 BLUE HEART — does your oc have any cool/special powers and/or abilities? how are they with magic, if it exists in their world?

this is also a tough one! she originally had magic when i first made her, but over time as i've refined my magic system, i really don't think she does. at best, her sword is enchanted and she has learned through the years how to best utilize its enchantment in her own way. otherwise, she's completely and utterly ordinary. she's not a seer, shapechanger, or enchanter herself.

💜 PURPLE HEART — what is your oc's ancestry/genetic background?

because she's from a fantasy world, this is a little harder to define, but she's aretian on cressida's side (mediterranean with heavy greek influences) and something else on kalina's side (russian influence with dips into poland). i still need to finish my damn worldbuilding.

🖤 BLACK HEART — has your oc killed or seriously wounded anyone before? have they broken someone's heart and/or broken someone's trust?

all of the above babey! before the events of the book, she would have never hurt anyone if she could help it. at this point in time, her family murdered and her home occupied by strangers, she is familiar with violence. her first real kill is her brother, nicodemus, in the end. and in chasing after her traitorous brother and abandoning the attack launched to reclaim the capital, she betrayed her closest friends and advisors, and utterly broke lachlan's heart. even felix is betrayed by this, but he is not surprised, and he loves her anyway.

[aconstantstateofbladerunner]

Kirin Izuku sounds great honestly. Though there is some serious explaining that needs to occur.

reference to this: (1) This is a test designed to provoke an emotional response. on Tumblr

it is really fun actually, but unfortunately i don't have enough ideas to justify a full fic. here are a few random ones though:

Izuku can't actually use his holy fire that often, since it can only hurt people who want to hurt him. Of course, none of his friends want to hurt him when he spars, and it doesn't burn objects so he target practice isn't much help either. But eventually, he might get angry enough to realize the fire works the other way around, when he intents harm on someone.

during the sports festival, the fire works on todoroki during their fight. guy was that jealous of Izuku's positive relationship with what Todo thinks is his dad, as well as being unconflicted by his seeming two quirks. He's also pissed for upstaging him up to that point in the games

izuku's kirin powers naturally ease Toshinori's chronic pain just be being near him. he just thinks being happy is distracting him from the pain

after the spirits arrive to help izuku at the training camp, no one is kidnapped and the kamino fight doesn't happen, so top priority is figuring out what the deal is with all the mythological creatures who are suddenly real. It's actually able to stay under wraps for a while, as the awakening was localized and who's going to believe that anyway?

The spirits and creatures of Japan were mostly content to stay hidden until Izuku was born, which they took as an omen the world was peaceful enough for them to live safely alongside regular people, but still decided to sit back and wait for Izuku to be the one to make the final call. But they couldn't just sit back and watch their destined leader be killed, so some intervened.

The dragon who saves Izuku identifies himself simply as "Uncle" and declares an oath of loyalty on the spot. Izuku, beaten within an inch of his life and coming off a severe adrenaline high, thinks he's a hallucination before he passes out. Uncle and the other spirits don't let anyone besides Toshinori even get close, but it takes a few hours for him to get there. Izuku has magic healing yes, but only some. With the delay in getting him to the hospital, the damage sets in and he's in a coma for longer.

This is the point where the word 'Kirin' first comes up. Izuku's friends, teachers, and Mom spend the time he's comatose independently researching the creature. The most substantial discovery is a story from Inko's hometown about a shrine maiden who vanished into the mountains, only to return a hundred years later with a young child. The Kirin father was said to visit their home during New Years.

The spirits willing to talk give conflicting stories about what exactly is going on. Some say Izuku is the reincarnation of a previous beast king, others a god plain and simple, or that he's something new entirely. The more introspective lot comment that their memories are more focused in the classical era, with modern times, quirk times especially, fuzzy. Perhaps they are merely extensions of Izuku's very powerful quirk that conjured them out of the folktale lessons he learned in history classes. This opinion is in the minority.

the spirits are often just as much in the dark as to the nature of the world as humans. They don't know if the gods are real, anything about the existence of universal moral laws, or if any other countries creatures are real.

Most of the others, including Uncle, were in the reincarnation camp and assumed Izuku was aware of his divine status. He was not. He didn't even know that Kirins were at the top of the Japanese mythology hierarchy until Uncle calls him their emperor, and has to explain what he's talking about.

when word does get out, izuku is showered with gifts from strangers seeking blessings. Religious leaders and random fanatics alike encourage (pressure) him into making more formal appearances. The leaders are less enthused when the gates of UA become a pseudo-shrine where people leave offerings, cutting into the profits of actual temples and shrines.

the weirdest part for Izuku is that he isn't actually expected to do anything. No evil to defeat or balance to restore. Being born was the sign that things are right with the world, so job done. But with how little the spirits themselves actually know about the nature of the supernatural in their world, he can't help but wonder if he really is a divine omen like they say, or if that's just their interpretation.

[biracy]

Obviously EVERYONE has been clamoring for my opinion on the weedsmell discourse, which, naturally, connects very nicely to a point I've made many times before: you do not get to control what other people do in public and sometimes going out in public means being exposed to things you personally do not like. Yes this includes smoke of any variety, yes this includes loud music, yes this includes other people's behavior/dress/etc.. You're going to have to learn to deal with that, you're not the center of the universe. It's fine that you think weed smells bad but also something smelling bad to you is not grounds to pass moral judgement, to declare it shouldn't be allowed in public, etc.. My brother likes this Greek yogurt that I think smells bad and I don't think it should be literally illegal for him to eat it around me. Sometimes u gotta put up with stuff that u think is unpleasant or even upsetting, because your needs do not necessarily get to dictate the actions of strangers

[nichestation]

INSIDE THE UNSETTLING, HOMOEROTIC TERROR OF ‘THE HITCHER’

Director Robert Harmon looks back on his 1986 classic, discussing the ambiguous relationship between its main characters, the brilliance of Rutger Hauer — and why he never thought he was making a horror movie

In the mid-1990s, Robert Harmon visited David Fincher on the set of The Game. “I’m a huge David Fincher fan,” Harmon tells me. “Seven, to me, is one of the great movies of all time — it’s just crazy-good, first to last.” But when the two directors met, Harmon discovered that the younger filmmaker was just as big a fan of his. “He said, ‘Your movie changed my life.’ It meant a lot to me, especially from somebody you admire so much.”

For more than 35 years now, Harmon has been pleasantly surprised whenever he learns that someone loves his first feature, The Hitcher, a nasty little horror movie with Hitchcockian vibes that terrorized viewers. The funny thing is that Harmon doesn’t consider himself to be a big horror guy — and, as he confides, “I don’t want to be controversial, but I was never even that much of a Hitchcock fan. His reputation just seemed way greater than his movies seemed to suggest it should be. I know it’s a minority opinion.”

And yet, this elemental story about a young man who foolishly picks up a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere, realizing too late that he’s made a terrible mistake, remains a primal cautionary tale — a worst-case scenario of what your mom always warned you about in regards to talking to strangers. But few strangers are as unnerving as John Ryder, the enigmatic loner who torments feckless young Jim Halsey. The film’s power goes beyond its killer hook, however, touching on something bizarre and unspoken between hunter and hunted. At its core, The Hitcher is a film about a codependent relationship, maybe even a twisted love story. It’s about finding something you weren’t expecting out there on the highway, something that’s been waiting for you all along.

The Hitcher was the brainchild of Eric Red, an aspiring writer and filmmaker who had driven from New York to California. He was somewhere in Texas, fighting off exhaustion, when it happened. “I picked up a hitchhiker just to pass the time, to help keep me awake,” he’d later recall. “But the guy just sort of sat there, smelling dirty and staring at me. I started feeling uncomfortable about the whole situation and thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea picking him up. He had a rough edge. I finally stopped the car a few miles down the road and asked him to get out. He left willingly enough, and that was it.” 

But the brief encounter, mixed with his memory of the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” — which contained the ominous lines “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad” — gave him the idea for a screenplay. Inspired by what he’d come up with, Red would later send that script to producers, declaring in an attached note, “When you read it, you will not sleep for a week. When the movie is made, the country will not sleep for a week.”

The 1980s were a haven for horror films, especially slasher flicks. What had started in the late 1970s, thanks to seminal works like Halloween, had morphed into a cottage industry, giving moviegoers franchises such as Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Cheap to make but potentially lucrative, horror movies preyed on adolescent fears, with the story’s bogeyman going after helpless, naive young people, punishing them for their horniness or lack of life experience. In these films, there was a strong sense that the victims had it coming.

The Hitcher played into that trend, while tapping into a deeper cultural anxiety. Hitchhiking had, at one point, been seen as an act of freedom, playing into a Kerouac-ian love of the open road and the possibilities out there beyond the horizon. It was a romantic notion, but as historian Jack Reid describes in his book Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation, that wide-eyed optimism eventually faded away. “[H]itchhiking was [once] a common form of mobility for students and travelers of all ages,” he writes. “This held true from the Depression era, when those seeking work could find transportation by sticking out a thumb, through to the early 1970s. … Yet by the time Reagan reached the White House, hitchhiking had lost traction. … [I]n the 1980s few Americans saw hitchhikers as heroic. To them, hitchhiking was a taboo form of mobility reserved for desperate and often unsavory individuals.”

That shifting attitude toward hitching — mixed with fear and loathing directed at those who would engage in such an activity — put fuel in The Hitcher’s narrative tank. We don’t know this as the film begins, but Jim (C. Thomas Howell, who’d been in 1980s teen-centric movies like The Outsiders and Red Dawn) is on his way to San Diego, driving through the night, rain pouring down, when he sees a solitary man standing by the side of the road. Feeling bad for the guy and deciding he needs the company, Jim offers him a ride. (“My mother told me never to do this,” he tells John with a friendly smile.) And for the next 90 minutes, John (Rutger Hauer) toys with this kid, clearly enjoying having the upper hand. Early on, he pulls a knife on Jim, demanding, “I want you to stop me.” Freaked out, Jim is able to get John out of the car, but not unlike the Terminator, John just keeps coming, following Jim — sometimes inexplicably — wherever he goes. John is like a curse Jim has inherited: By stopping to give him a lift, he now will never be rid of him.

Harmon’s path to The Hitcher was not a straight line. He was already in his early 30s when the script came his way, supporting himself as a photographer. But movies were his passion. “I’ve always wanted to make films,” he tells me. “Even when I was making a living as a still photographer, which I did for quite a long time, I was just biding my time. First thing I did when I moved out [to Los Angeles] from Boston was to start putting myself out there as a cinematographer. I had no experience, so I did student films to start with. I was always working my way towards this.”

Born in 1953, growing up “outside of Manhattan,” he was one of those guys who never got over the thrill of being at the theater as a kid, the curtain opening and a movie playing on that big screen. “It may be the reason, among about 4,000 others, that 2001 remains, to this day, my favorite film of all time,” he says. “It wasn’t just the scale of the original Ziegfeld screening — it’s because it’s a real movie. It’s essentially nonverbal, which is very unusual for a commercial, Hollywood-style [movie].” Before seeing Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterwork, Harmon had been tempted to apply to architecture school. “I saw 2001, I took the application, and I threw it in the garbage,” he tells me. “I never even sent it.”

When Harmon came out to L.A., “I had literally never directed anything,” serving as a cinematographer in order to see how people made films. Eventually, he was ready to direct his own: the 1983 short China Lake, which starred Charles Napier as a bad cop wreaking havoc across the California desert while on vacation. The short, which is currently available on YouTube, sans some of the original music, very much feels like an unintentional dry run for The Hitcher. Like his feature debut, China Lake probed the psychology of a disturbed individual, the action set against a vast, arid landscape that was both inviting and unsettling. “It was an insurance policy,” he says of making China Lake. “It was a kind of ‘If this whole directing thing doesn’t work out — if I’m going to spend every cent I have for X number of years on this — I better have some use for it so at least I can put it on my [cinematographer] reel.’”

He hustled to ensure China Lake opened doors for him. While writing the script, he saw Napier at a screening at L.A.’s venerable arthouse theater the Nuart, deciding that he had to play the cop. An attempt to get the script to Napier’s agent went nowhere, but then, through a friend, Harmon obtained Napier’s number and cold-called him, telling the character actor, a veteran of Jonathan Demme’s films, that he’d written the dark role with him in mind. “The reaction was very unlike anything I would’ve expected,” Harmon recalls. “He read it, loved it and fired his agent for not having ever even shown it to him.” 

Short films tend to do only so much for a burgeoning director, but in the case of China Lake, it was enough to get him noticed. As Harmon remembers, “[Napier] dragged Jonathan Demme to a screening over at Warner Bros. It was great. It was really fun.” China Lake only played one festival — the prestigious Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado — but the response helped stoke interest. “We’d hardly shown it to anybody, and I was stunned by the reaction. The audience was, by my recollection, exactly bifurcated. People were on their feet, clapping and whistling — and other people were screaming and yelling. I very clearly remember a voice from the back of the theater: ‘Who admitted this piece of shit to the festival?’”

Harmon smiles: “The answer to her question was her husband, who was on the board of admissions of the festival.”

Soon, he’d signed with a top-flight agent at William Morris, which was fielding offers for his first feature. There was just one problem. “I didn’t like any of the scripts,” he says. “I didn’t [think] it would do me any good to make those scripts. Then at a certain point, I said to myself, ‘Who do I think I am? I’ve wanted to [be a filmmaker] for my entire life. I can’t keep saying no.’ And then I read The Hitcher.”

Red’s spec script hadn’t gotten much positive feedback in Hollywood, but David Bombyk, a development executive, was blown away by it. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1986, he recalled that the screenplay was 190 pages, far longer than the traditional script. “I kept avoiding it,” he said, “but finally I picked it up. Then, it was just ‘Oh, my God!’”

The story’s violence and gore may have shocked Bombyk, who later would serve as a producer on the film, but Harmon was a little more muted when the screenplay came his way. “I thought, ‘Okay, I have all kinds of issues with this and with that,’ but I felt I could do something with it,” he tells me. “And it also had the thing I loved most in movies” — including his all-time favorite, 2001 — “which is, it was essentially nonverbal.” Many of the scripts Harmon had turned down after China Lake were, as he put it, “Much more slasher-y,” and even he acknowledges that Red’s screenplay made China Lake seem like “Hitcher Junior in a lot of ways.” Plus, Harmon felt pressure to finally commit to a project.

“Probably a good 50 percent of making me say yes was I’d said no too many times,” he admits. “I really thought, ‘I’d just like to do something.’ Not that it was a sacrifice, because I really did like the script — with some minor exceptions that we changed. And I liked the fact that it wasn’t run-of-the-mill. Eric Red is unique: Like him, hate him, his thing is a thing that you don’t find that often. It’s very singular and it’s very him. I think that’s rare.”

One thing he was clear about, though: The Hitcher wasn’t a horror movie. “I’m not the most objective person about that movie, but I don’t think of it as a horror movie,” he says. “I just don’t. We never did.” So what did he think he was making? “I was never conscious [of that],” he replies. “I didn’t have a target.”

Harmon had his heart set on Terence Stamp to play John, going so far as to have a picture of the Billy Budd actor in his wallet to show casting people who he had in mind. “But Terence turned it down,” Harmon recalls. “He said to me — and I thought it was actor bullshit, it may have been — ‘I don’t want to put myself through what it’ll take to do a good job on this part.’ But the sweetest thing in the world, I ran into him at some party years later, and he said, ‘That was one of my biggest, most sincere regrets, not having taken that part.’ Whether he meant it or not, it meant a lot to me. But still, how lucky could I have been to get Rutger?”

Hauer, who died in 2019 at the age of 75, was a Dutch actor who’d worked with the likes of countryman Paul Verhoeven before starting to make his mark in American films in the early 1980s, his big breakthrough coming in Blade Runner as Roy Batty, the serene, menacing leader of the Replicants, the future society’s enslaved robots who don’t want to be terminated. “It was just a miracle,” Harmon says about landing the in-demand actor just as he was getting hot. But he hoped Hauer could bring something to the character that wasn’t there on the page. “The script that I read, John Ryder was just a monster,” says Harmon. “He was just evil, just a force of awfulness. And that seemed less interesting than it could be.”

In a 2012 interview, Hauer noted, “Out of all the films I did, I never quite understood why I liked it so much. The Hitcher for me was another dance, like Blade Runner. It felt like a haunting dust bowl in the desert. The games played were like a tap dance on a drum. I sort of created a little bit of a vague backstory for myself; there should be some sort of mad, strange magic to this guy who always shows up in weird places; he’s a real ghost I think. You can only do that with film — in a book it’s harder, in film you can be a phantom.”

That level of unreality was something Harmon was pushing as well. “The idea that we eventually did was, this Rutger Hauer character wants to commit suicide, doesn’t have courage to do it himself and wants help,” Harmon explains. “He’s desperately looking for someone who’s up to the challenge. It’s in a lot of the dialogue we changed, and it’s in his performance. It seemed like an interesting thing: This guy is doing all this terrible stuff, but it’s really because he’s desperately depressed. I used to say to everybody who’d listen when we were shooting the movie, ‘The way this has to feel is, if Tommy Howell hadn’t driven down that road, Rutger wouldn’t have been on that road.’ He’s there for him — their [relationship] became sort of weirdly codependent.”

At one point, Matthew Modine, fresh off the romantic drama Vision Quest and about to dive into Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, was going to play Jim. Harmon admits that he didn’t necessarily have a particular actor in mind like he had for John, but Howell “was great, he was a delight.” As for Howell, it was a chance to graduate from the types of roles he’d been doing up to that point. “I was rolling from gig to gig as a kid,” Howell recalled last year. “I didn’t give a shit. I felt like it was never going to end, I was never going to grow up, and I was going to play this kid role forever. Well, I did The Hitcher, and it changed everything.”

It didn’t take much work for Howell to convey Jim’s fear of John. As Howell put it in that same interview, “I’ll never forget how everybody else on set was petrified of him,” remembering how “Rutger ate alone in his trailer every single day. Nobody would talk to him apart from perhaps the director if his back was against the wall and he had to give him a direction.” The one time Hauer did invite Howell to have lunch with him, Howell meekly tried to engage his co-star. “Everybody’s been talking about Blade Runner and his other movies, and how nobody plays the villain better than him, but I just looked at him, and with my squeaky, petrified voice, I was like, ‘So, Rutger, everybody says you’re an amazing bad guy, so why do you play bad guys so well?’ What felt like an eternity went by as he just finished that final drag on that cigarette, and he hissed at me in that guts deep whisper, ‘I don’t play bad guys,’ and didn’t say another frickin’ word. I didn’t know what to do. I think I inhaled the rest of my food and started to back out of the trailer. That rattled around my head for a long, long time.”

Harmon, who stayed friends with Hauer for the rest of his life, says, “[If] he was just sitting here listening, [he’d] be slightly intimidating. His hands are like the size of catcher’s mitts. He’s really big, and he just commands space. He doesn’t have to do anything. I don’t know whether he works on that, or if that’s just one of those things.”

For those who haven’t seen The Hitcher in a while — or who have never seen it — the film’s cat-and-mouse game deviates from the classic slasher narrative in certain ways. Traditionally, the hero is trying to stay a step ahead of the killer, hoping to get others to believe that he’s being targeted. But Harmon’s film isn’t so much about John trying to kill Jim — rather, it’s as if John wants to teach him something. Framing Jim for murder, which puts him on the run from the police, and pulling bizarre pranks — such as secretly putting one of his other victims’ fingers among Jim’s fries — John hovers around the periphery of the young man’s life, driving him to the brink of insanity rather than simply hunting him down. Jim doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve this harassment, but for John there’s almost something personal about his antagonism. The fact that he won’t quite reveal his motives makes it all the more upsetting.

When I press Harmon on The Hitcher’s themes, he’s reluctant to spell things out, although he makes the film sound, in some ways, like an unconventional coming-of-age saga. “Not to explain it all, because I don’t think that’s ever a good idea, but on some unconscious level, the Tommy Howell character knows that he needs help in his maturation process. He’s not turning into the man he wants to be. He’s so naive — so almost childlike — when he stops and [picks up John]. And as a result of meeting Rutger, this maturation process that would have taken another 10 years is compressed into four days — like a diamond [which is a] piece of coal under pressure.”

After being told that there’s almost something paternal about the way John seems to be doling out tough love to poor Jim, Harmon responds, “That was a key piece of direction that I know I bonded with Rutger [over]: ‘Treat him like your son, with love.’”

Indeed, there’s a weird occasional tenderness that Hauer brings to the role — in particular when the two men are in a diner, Jim pointing a gun under the table at John, who knows it’s not loaded. John seems to be encouraging the frightened young man, like a proud papa teaching his skittish boy how to ride a bike. “Why are you doing this to me?” Jim asks, near tears. John calmly puts pennies on Jim’s eyes, cradling the young man’s face in his hands. “You’re a smart kid,” John says, “you’ll figure it out.”

Of course, that tenderness was perceived in some quarters to be homoerotic — or, perhaps, homophobic, just one more example of a horror movie that queer-codes its villain. Harmon has heard the objection, but he doesn’t agree. Asked if he noted a homoerotic quality in the tense rapport between John and Jim, he says, “Sure, but only in the movie — it was not in the script. That was something that just evolved — it was never a part of a plan. But I think Rutger has a kind of almost gender-neutral kind of thing. As I said, he has very large hands — big guy, certainly masculine — but there’s something ethereal about him. His presence and Tommy Howell’s flailing around trying to find himself — I don’t know, one thing led to another, and suddenly there we were.”

Whether you wanted to read The Hitcher as a father/son story or something more erotically charged, there was no denying that the two characters felt connected, as if their destines had become intertwined when their paths crossed out on that highway. Jim wants to get away from John, but if John is simply trying to kill the young man, he passes up several opportunities to do it. (He has no such problem offing others along the way, including cops and innocent passersby.) That tension of Jim not knowing what John wants from him — why this crazed hitchhiker won’t just kill him — gives the film an existential dread that was unique among slasher/horror films of the time. And it posed a troubling question: If your seemingly all-powerful nemesis isn’t out to murder you, is there actually something even scarier about the fact that he won’t let you go?

At one point during our conversation, Harmon recalls working with Hauer on set and it dawning on him how the actor viewed John. “He’s been playing him like he’s God,” Harmon remembers thinking. “Almost regal. It was something beautiful and strong, and that was very interesting to me.” And just like God, John could be anywhere in The Hitcher, sometimes able to do things that, logistically, he wouldn’t have been able to be present for. (For instance, how did he get that severed finger into Jim’s fries?) But Harmon liked the script’s logic-defying elements.

“I never felt we had to ‘fix’ that,” he says, “because I think for those who are open to that kind of ambiguity, it helps to understand that this isn’t 100 percent real.” And by the way, in Red’s original screenplay, Jim finds an eyeball, not a finger, in his food. “This is indicative of the change in the tone between the original script and the movie,” Harmon says. “Not only was there an eye in there — I don’t remember exactly how it was described — but he must have bitten [into the burger] and thought, ‘Hmm, that’s weird, what is that?’ And he pulls the top of the bun off, and there’s an eyeball and a note that says, ‘I have my eye on you.’ [And I thought] ‘That’s got to go.’ I thought it was unforgivably wink-wink. It just was totally wrong to me.”

If The Hitcher is about the saga of these two men, locked in this odd death dance, the closest the film comes to introducing a significant third character is with Nash, the friendly waitress who makes that hamburger and fries for Jim, unaware of the human appendage inside it. She was played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’d had her breakout a few years earlier with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Like many of the people involved in The Hitcher, she was someone Harmon landed on just before she got huge. His cinematographer was John Seale, who hadn’t yet received his Oscar nomination for 1985’s Witness, his first of five. (He won for The English Patient.) The music was written by Mark Isham, who was starting his composing career. (He’d later be nominated for A River Runs Through It and worked on the score for the Best Picture-winning Crash.)

Asked about getting such huge names for his first film, Harmon says the secret was simple: “They weren’t John Seale and Mark Isham at the time.” And that was also true of Leigh, who came in to read for the part like any other actress. “She might have been the third person we read,” says Harmon. “And then, we just stopped reading it — she was so fucking great. We all agreed: ‘As long as we can make the deal with her, let’s not waste our time seeing anybody else.’”

Nash becomes a potential love interest for Jim, but in keeping with The Hitcher’s playing around with genre tropes, nothing really comes of it. After all, not that long after she meets him, Nash meets a grisly, and memorable, end. Even those who have never seen the movie know what becomes of Nash. In his scathing no-stars review, Roger Ebert focused on that moment: “[T]he Leigh character’s death — she is tied hand and foot between two giant trucks and pulled in two — is so grotesquely out of proportion with the main business of this movie that it suggests a deep sickness at the screenplay stage.”

The scene had appeared in the original script. As Red later recalled, “I asked [truck drivers], ‘Well, look, if you wanted to kill a girl with a truck, how would you do it? They were suggesting things like ‘Put her in the back of the transom and run a kingpin through her.’” Technically, Ebert was incorrect — Nash is actually tied between a truck and its trailer, with John sitting in the cab behind the wheel — but, still, the image of a screaming, gagged Jennifer Jason Leigh begging for her life was a disturbing one. In the film, however, it was just the latest step in John’s plan to test Jim, egging the kid on to shoot him, which Jim won’t do because then the truck will lurch forward, ripping Nash in two. The scene amplified the idea that John just wanted Jim to end his life, but for Hauer it was more complicated, which Harmon discovered when they were about to start filming the sequence.

“[Executive producer] Ed Feldman comes to me and he says, ‘We got a problem,’” Harmon tells me. “I said, ‘Really? What’s the problem?’ He said, ‘Rutger won’t come out of the trailer. He doesn’t want to do the scene.’ I thought this was like a joke, because you hear about actors. That scene had not been touched from maybe the first draft — it had never been changed, there was never any discussion about it. So this came out of the blue.”

Harmon went to see Hauer, who “was almost near tears. He said, ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t mean to cause this production trouble, I know it’s costing time. But I just can’t play the scene the way it’s written. I don’t know what took me so long to realize this, but if I play the scene as written, the audience will think I’m the bad guy.’ I almost laughed, but I didn’t. A light bulb went off [in] my head: ‘That’s why he’s been so unbelievably great [in the movie].’” As he’d told Howell during that uncomfortable lunch, Hauer never thought of John as a villain.

Funny enough, in later interviews, Hauer would sometimes take credit for the grisly scene. “I mean, you know, they’ve been doing this for 400 years, but they did it with one or four horsepowers,” he once said. “They’d pull people apart. The Indians did it. In the Middle Ages and other countries they were doing that sort of stuff. And I thought, it might be nice to do it with a tractor trailer, that’ll just up the stakes a bit. And Robert liked that. The scene was originally, she was standing against a wall and the pickup truck was pinning her against the wall, and the final thing was that he would drive her against the wall. But that was weak. So I came up with the tractor-trailer. The tying. Cirque de Soleil.”

But according to Harmon, Hauer only agreed to do the scene if they included new dialogue that Hauer himself had written. “Luckily, I recognized immediately what he had done — and what he had done was ruin the scene.” Harmon can’t recall specifically what the new lines were, “but it was so wrong, I do remember that. But all the changes were right at the tops of the ends of the existing dialogue, so we shot the scene with all these godawful lines in there, and then we cut them out, so it [remained] the scene as Eric had written it. And I never heard a word about it from [Hauer]: ‘I can’t believe you [cut my lines]!’ Never mentioned it again.”

The scene was so traumatizing that some might forget that we never actually see Nash get dismembered. “I do remember very clearly there was no discussion about it,” Harmon says. “Nobody wanted to [show] it, including me. It just seemed gratuitous, even then.” Naturally, in the 2007 remake, the filmmakers show the dismemberment.

Making a feature film had long been Harmon’s dream, but that didn’t make the actual process any easier. “It was a rollercoaster,” he tells me, “and then it was really a rollercoaster to shoot it. I put a lot of pressure on myself, because it was very obvious to me that if I blow this, that’s that — I’ll never get another chance. Sometimes [the shoot] was fantastic and sometimes it was hellish for me, but mostly I put it on myself.”

Harmon shot for about 40 days, not quite sure what the outcome would be. “I had people around me telling me that they thought it was fantastic and it was going to be great, on and on,” he says. “I didn’t trust it ‘cause I didn’t know. I knew it wasn’t a piece of crap, and I liked certain things. I don’t think I ever felt worried ‘cause I guess I knew it was good enough not to be an embarrassment and to be a career-killer before I’d even done anything.” Yet even as the film was being prepped for release, he had to fight against the notion that he’d made a horror movie. “I don’t like the poster,” he tells me, “but they didn’t listen to me. It’s the poster for a horror movie — or much more of a slasher movie.”

The reviews were decidedly mixed when The Hitcher opened on February 21, 1986, but what Harmon most remembers is a particular L.A. Times profile piece that came out soon after the film’s release. “Infamous — for me, anyway,” he says. “We were completely — all of us, all the producers — duped by that reporter.” In the story, writer Deborah Caulfield detailed the gory elements of the original script and the finished product, asking, “How do films like this ever get made? What could the people who make these movies possibly be thinking about?”

The article provoked disgusted responses from readers, with one woman wondering, “How does a writer — or anybody — even think of such scenes as a woman ripped in two, an eye in a hamburger, et al? What does it say about our society that such an unconscionable film is deemed to have a market?”

“It didn’t really bother me that much,” Harmon says now about the L.A. Times piece. “I was so green at the time, just the attention was welcome.”

The Hitcher wasn’t a commercial success, although it put Harmon on the map in Hollywood. “I started getting offers right away and made some very bad decisions,” he says bluntly. “One was from Joel Silver for Lethal Weapon. And the other was from Sherry Lansing to replace Brian De Palma, who had fallen out of Fatal Attraction. And I turned them both down.”

How come? “Because I was an idiot,” he replies self-deprecatingly. But then he adds, “Just because those movies were wonderful and huge hits doesn’t mean that would’ve happened [if I’d directed them].” He goes on to explain that after making The Hitcher, which he describes as “really difficult for all kinds of reasons, mostly political,” he was leery of being involved in films whose producers were known for being a handful — especially Joel Silver. “Offers were coming in for real movies all over the place,” Harmon recalls. “And [my agent] said, ‘You don’t have to waste your time with that jerk — he’s just impossible, he’ll make your life hell.’ And I thought, ‘All right, there’s a good excuse not to do it.’”

As for Fatal Attraction, Lansing was paired with producing partner Stanley Jaffe “who had a reputation for being not an easy character. I had lunch with Ed Feldman to talk to him about whether I should do this Fatal Attraction thing. And he said, ‘If you think I gave you a hard time, you won’t survive [working with Stanley].’”

Harmon has no hard feelings about saying no to two massive hits, although he acknowledges the lesson he’d quickly learn: “I didn’t realize that every movie is traumatic. So how I keep doing it is I have to just accept the occasional trauma. My advice [to first-time filmmakers] is you cannot predict how you’ll feel [while you’re making a movie] — and it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. There’s things coming at you from every direction — from the floor, from the ceiling, from every compass direction. That’s the way it is, and how you react to that is how you react to it. If you react to it negatively, you have to just find a way to deal with it. It doesn’t mean you’re fucking up — it’s just the nature of the work.”

In the ensuing years, he’d make movies with John Travolta (Eyes of an Angel) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (Nowhere to Run). He directed the 1996 HBO film Gotti, which won Armand Assante an Emmy and earned Harmon directing nominations from both the Emmys and the DGAs. (He garnered a second Emmy nomination for his 2004 television film Ike: Countdown to D-Day, starring his frequent collaborator, Tom Selleck, whom he’s worked with on Blue Bloods and a series of Jesse Stone TV movies.)

Meanwhile, The Hitcher’s influence and popularity has grown over time, unexpectedly impacting later projects. When Harmon was filming 2000’s The Crossing, a Peabody-winning A&E TV movie starring Jeff Daniels as George Washington, “We were out in the middle of a field, near Ottawa, on the St. Lawrence River. I’m wandering around because we have a big sequence due the next day, and I’m trying to get it blocked out in my head. And some guy walks across this field — this older guy — having heard that the director of The Hitcher was directing the movie. He wanted to know if I was him, and we talked about [The Hitcher]. Literally, nobody around as far as we could see, in the middle of fucking nowhere in Canada.”

The Hitcher inspired a direct-to-DVD sequel, The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, which came out in 2003. Howell reprised his role as Jim. Jake Busey played the new hitchhiker. (“That was probably a mistake, to be honest,” Howell said later. “It was mishandled. There was a time when Rutger was involved as well, so I sort of committed with the understanding that that was what was taking place, but then that didn’t happen. It was a bit of a mess. … It probably should’ve never been made. And thankfully, nobody really even knows it exists.”) Then, four years later, Michael Bay’s production company Platinum Dunes, as part of its plan to remake classic horror movies, did a new version of The Hitcher, with Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton as college students who pick up Sean Bean’s mysterious loner.

“I don’t know what he wanted. I didn’t have to,” Bean said when he was asked about his character’s ambiguous motivations. “There are a number of possibilities. Maybe he wanted to die and be rid of the evil inside him? Maybe he just didn’t care? Maybe he just wanted to kill who he wanted until he was killed himself? Maybe it’s just a combination of all those things? Or maybe it was just nothing at all.” It was just one way in which the bloodier, less psychologically-resonant remake differed from the 1986 original. Harmon and Hauer didn’t want to explain everything about John — and his strange relationship with Jim — but it was clear they had ideas about it. 

The original film is currently available in its entirety on YouTube and streaming on HBO Max. Ironically, you might be better off watching it on YouTube, where at least it’s presented in the right aspect ratio — the film on HBO Max is a fairly cruddy pan-and-scan version, which annoys Harmon to no end. “You cannot believe how angry I was,” he says. “I don’t know what to do about it. It’s awful, it’s really terrible.” He’s excited about an English company that will be putting out The Hitcher on Blu-ray for the first time. “They got the original negative. They’re doing [a new] transfer — it’s fantastic.” It will take some time, he reckons. “They [still] have to do the color correction. And a restored China Lake is also on there.”

That’ll be good news for all the Hitcher fans out there, whether it’s David Fincher or that random man who accosted Harmon in the middle of nowhere in Canada, or the thousands of other people who have been obsessed with that strange drifter who decides to insert himself into one unlucky kid’s life. “That experience is one of my favorite experiences in my career,” Howell said in 2013 about The Hitcher, “and it’s also one of my favorite films.”

The movie’s enigmatic attitude toward its two characters’ relationship carries all the way to the end, when Jim, convinced that he’s killed John by hitting him with his car, walks over to the body, lightly caressing John’s hair with the barrel of his shotgun, displaying the same surprising tenderness John had displayed earlier. To this day, Harmon doesn’t exactly want to assign meaning to that moment. “Make of that what you will,” he tells me. “But there was a very gentle gesture to someone who’d spent the entire movie trying to kill him.”

As for Harmon and Hauer, they stayed connected over the decades, sometimes meeting up if the actor was visiting L.A. “We’d have coffee and go to lunch or dinner,” Harmon tells me. The last time he saw his friend “was probably about a year before he died. He was doing his thing, making these very interesting, mostly European, smaller movies.” Their conversations were very rarely about The Hitcher. “I wouldn’t say we never mentioned it, but it certainly wasn’t centered on that. It was what we’re both doing — and that we had to find something [to work on]. ‘Let’s get back on set together.’”

They never got the chance. During my time with Harmon, he would sometimes talk about Hauer while gesturing at the empty seat next to us. “I’m pointing to that chair,” Harmon commented wistfully, “like he’s here.”

The impulse was poignant, but also fitting. After all, Rutger Hauer always said that John Ryder was a ghost.

X

[leonbloder]

Letting Go Of "Yes, But" Thinking

I journeyed to the mall with my middle and youngest sons this past Christmas to buy presents, and for the entire journey there and through the parking lot, my middle son and I had an intense discussion about a social issue that has been politicized.

I will leave it to your imagination as to which social issue… there are many to choose from.

At any rate, we reached a point in our conversation where we had a divergence of opinion, and things started to get heated as we tried to explain why we felt the way we did.

Finally, I said, "You know what, I agree with the central part of your argument 100%, but I also have questions and don't know how to feel about [this particular thing]. I think it's okay to just hold all that in tension."

I was trying to describe a "both/and" way of thinking to him instead of a "Yes, but" way of responding. Ultimately, we both agreed that was a good resolution for our discussion.

Then my youngest son, who had been listening to the whole thing, quietly spoke up and said: "Y'all talk a lot."

He was right, you know. And there's a more profound truth underneath his succinct observation.

A lot of us talk a lot. We speak more than we listen; even when we listen, we think about what we will say next in response to what others might be saying, especially when we have disagreements.

Because far too many of us in our culture respond to arguments about issues in our culture that divide us along political, social, and religious lines because we are constantly waiting our turn to speak so we can say, "Yes, but…"

We seldom try to find common ground with those with whom we disagree. It's far easier to say "Yes, but" and then make our point.

In fact, making our point, declaring ourselves correct, and planting a flag on the day's issues are more important than finding common ground.

Some time ago, a pastor and author I admire said this in a sermon, and I have never forgotten it, though I have ignored it on occasion:

"Sometimes, when you want to make a point, you lose the chance to make a difference."

Our current culture is permeated with "Yes, but" thinking. Most of us have opinions about everything, and social media gives us a willing partner to share our views with the world.

Social media is the ultimate "Yes, but" resource because we don't need to look the person with whom we disagree in the eye to say what we feel we absolutely need to say.

All we need to do is send our opinions into the social media void with little or no give and take with anyone unless people choose to say "Yes, but" to our declarations with their own comments.

Sadly, far too many of us who claim to be Christian fall prey to this mentality, even though we ought to know better.

Jesus' teachings to "turn the other cheek" and to "be wise as serpents, but harmless as doves" tend to get glossed over by most people who say they follow him.

Even the Apostle Paul, who was no stranger to "telling like it is," offered up this bit of wisdom in his Letter to the Colossians: Colossians 4:6 Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. If this isn't a "both/and" kind of approach to addressing disagreements, I don't know what is.

When you have a conversation that is full of grace and appropriately seasoned with kindness and forbearance, you find that you can be curious and calm and also live in the tension of "both/and" thinking as opposed to the "either/or" of being a "Yes, but" kind of person.

There's so much we can do to make the world better, kinder, and gentler; for some, it might start with our conversations.

May we have "both/and" grace-filled conversations where our disagreements can become launching pads for deeper understanding and connection.

And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us now and always. Amen.

[quoteablebooks]

Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Content Warning: Violence, Blood, Fire/Fire injury, Bullying, Rape, Car accident, Sexual assault, Grief

Summary:

In the beginning, there's a boy standing in the trees . . . Clara Gardner has recently learned that she's part angel. Having angel blood run through her veins not only makes her smarter, stronger, and faster than humans (a word, she realizes, that no longer applies to her), but it means she has a purpose, something she was put on this earth to do. Figuring out what that is, though, isn't easy. Her visions of a raging forest fire and an alluring stranger lead her to a new school in a new town. When she meets Christian, who turns out to be the boy of her dreams (literally), everything seems to fall into place and out of place at the same time. Because there's another guy, Tucker, who appeals to Clara's less angelic side. As Clara tries to find her way in a world she no longer understands, she encounters unseen dangers and choices she never thought she'd have to make between honesty and deceit, love and duty, good and evil. When the fire from her vision finally ignites, will Clara be ready to face her destiny? Unearthly is a moving tale of love and fate, and the struggle between following the rules and following your heart.

*Opinions*

This book has been on my TBR since 2013, so when I picked books to read for a readathon, it seemed like it was a good one to finally clear from the list, especially since I could get it from the library. I was actually pleasantly surprised with the first third to half of the novel with how it didn’t seem all that dated. Yes, they had printed out MapQuest directions to get somewhere and people sent emails to stay connected, but the issues felt as if things like text messages and modern technology wouldn’t have changed all that much. However, as soon as the romance element became more intense, I did feel myself rolling my eyes. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t a teenager anymore, it was just that ridiculous 2010s YA romance that we all loved back in the day. 

Clara was a slightly frustrating main character, but as she is a sixteen-year-old, that kind of tracks. As someone with angel blood, she has this purpose that her mother has made her feel as if it is the most important thing in her life, but she also wants to be a normal teenager. The relationship between Clara and her mother was very interesting and if I had been reading this for a class I would have dug into it a little more. While most teenage girls do not have an angelic mother, I think a lot of people go through this point as a teenager that your parents are just people who get scared, lie, and make mistakes like everyone else. I will say that Clara is a pretty bad friend, not caring about Wendy or Angela’s emotions when she says and does things. Again, most teenagers are self-centered, it is developmentally appropriate, but it was annoying to read as an adult. 

I did appreciate the way that Hand dealt with the insta-crush that Clara has on Christian because of her angelic purpose. I also enjoyed that relationship became complicated and hard to navigate, which happens even when angelic blood and purpose are not involved. While there were times that Kay was the “evil girlfriend in the way”, there were times that she was humanized and that is groundbreaking for the 2010s. Where my enjoyment started to fade and my annoyance increased is the whole relationship with Tucker. The build-up was fine, Clara learning nature and spending time with him because everyone else left for the summer. However, the declarations were obnoxious to me. Now, I would have gone on a rant about this, but a YA author once tweeted that teenagers do fall asleep quickly, it has kind of calmed my annoyance with the ‘I love you” after three weeks. It just shows that I am not the target audience and I need to be okay with that. 

The climax of this story was very confusing to me. The battle with the Black Wing and the tense parts with the fires keep me flipping the pages. However, the way that everything kind of just wrapped up without a lot of fallout deflated all that. The entire book is about Clara fulfilling her purpose or else, and I know that there are two more books in the series, but I wanted some sort of loss at the end of this novel besides a horse that we see once the whole book. 

Overall, this is a novel of it’s time, which is not a detractor or a benefit. Even with that, this is a rather forgettable story and will not stay in my feelings. As I have to finish everything, I will be reading the rest of the series, but I am not worried about who Clara will choose at the end. This is a 2.5 rounded up to a 3 as I know I am not the target audience and reading it out of its time period. 

[wbwoqlqxoxxms]

Yishun Revengers Episode 7 "GWS"

"For some reason gws is an insult but kys isn't,"

-Asian mom logic

"Bukit Timah Hill, huh...weird place to set up a temporary headquarters...but then again, we've seen people make camps at WAYYYY stranger places. Oi kid, wher-" Esse was about to ask the kid to point the gang in the right direction when he suddenly burst out screaming, "WAAAHAHHAHA! It-it's Little Whitey! He's crying for help! Please, we have to save him!"

"WOAH WOAH WOAH CHEEL KID, CHILL, CHILL, also what the hell do you mean that little white guy is calling for help? You can hear him from wherever he is?" Codeine tried to calm the dude down who was now insanely crying like mad, and tried to reason with him about HOW THE HELL HE COULD HEAR THE CRIES OF HELP OF SOME ANIMAL FROM WHEREVER HE IS?

"Woo....I hear...he's there! Wah!" And then he just ran away quickly and rushed straight into A STONE WALL.

So it's either that he's dead and is a ghost or the Pillars are high and hallucinating, because he just straight-up phased through the STONE WALL.

"Wait what," Laju just questioned because she definitely, like the rest, had no idea what was going on or if this was another trick.

"What the actual..." Pertama couldn't even get to finish his sentence before the ang moh-wait, Ming, right, yeah, Ming-Ming (he's not tied up anymore obviously) also followed the boy and ran right into the stone wall-and just like him, phased right through.

"Um..." Sano questioned again, then summoned a card and forced the card into the stone wall-without much effort, since it phased right through as well.

"Well..." Sano stared at it for a while while the rest made weird, disgusted faces that probably meant they just didn't want to go in and were just waiting to declare him dead so that don't have to do work anymore.

Stefen, as if sensing this but not wanting to miss out on his next big scoop, grabbed Sunda's hand and before he could react, dashed right into the stone wall phaser, expecting the others to follow straight into rescue him...

as they did.

Well.

Once everyone had phased through the stone wall...it was kinda spectacular inside that wall though, with beautiful stone carvings on the stone walls of the interior. A large, spacious domain....which is mostly open space...what a terribly inefficient use of space...except for that one shaded part of the room where a woman was caged there, other than that it stretches out as far as the eye can see...and that little white guy is nowhere to be seen.

"Mommy! Please, guys, we have to save Mommy!" and ironically enough, the supposed 'mom' doesn't even look happy to see her son at all-in fact, she looks annoyed and disappointed, AS SHE SHOULD WITH HER ANNOYING AS HELL SON-

"Well, shouldn't we ac-" Stefen wanted to remind everyone what they came here for, but was then brutally interrupted...by Ming...who stabbed him from the back.

And not just with any ordinary knife. A retractable tentacle...that served as his hands...

Just as he pulled out the tentacle-knife did Stefen cough up blood like mad and fall over, clutching his stomach in pain and bleeding badly.

"Ugh...I knew this Ming guy wasn't to be trusted...AAGHHH!" Stefen muttered out his opinion which was probably the thing that got him stabbed in the first place.

But something strange happened just then. Before Sano could summon another healing card like he did at the library, his wound instantly healed-but not exactly in a good way.

His skin contorted and grew over the wound to cover it up and stop the bleeding, but that wasn't the end of it. His eye pupils dilated and went bloodshot.

His back shirt tore as proportional insect wings sprouted from his back and his forehead started growing oni-like pure white horns. His hands started clotting over with white blood bleeding from the hands themselves, and slowly forming the hands into strong muscular, pure-white hands.

At this point everyone was watching Stefen transform with weapons raised, not sure whether interrupting the transformation process would be best. Even Ming-though not to defend, but to admire his own wondrous creation.

All through the transformation, Stefen couldn't even scream-his vocal cords were changing as well, forcing him to be mute the entire time (though it was probably an evolutionary advantage because the noisy ones were considered annoying and killed).

When the transformation was finally over and Stefen gained back his senses and vocal cords, he felt around for his new body and effects, then realised just what exactly that Ming had done to him.

"What...the hell did you do to me?" Stefen screamed at him at the top of his lungs, demanding an explanation using his now-returned vocal cords.

"Ha! Be thankful! I have just bestowed upon you the power of the Demongazers!"

[capricious-and-caprine]

16-21 April catch-up

16 April: If you can perceive the facial expression of others, but struggle to learn the meaning, are there strategies you use to at least guess if the person reacts in a good, neutral or bad way to you (for example to spot if you made someone angry by accident)? Do you rely on how their voice sounds as a backup? - if this question doesn't apply to you, not even in your childhood, you have a day off! :)

A bit. Furrowed eyebrows can indicate quizzicality, anger, or concentration. If I don't understand, then I will infer from their tone.

17 April: If you can't perceive the facial expression of others (for example because you focus too much on details, struggle to perceive people in general, or because you're blind), do you pay attention to the tone of their voice? Can you hear if someone is angry if they don't tell you? - if this question doesn't apply to you, you have a day off! :)

Sometimes I focus too much, so I have to pay attention to the tone of their voice. I rarely go out, so I don't really interact with strangers. Sometimes I will think people are angry - they assure me they're not - and ask them why, and they get exasperated with me. I can try to figure out why; I'm rarely sure I reach the correct conclusion. Sometimes I detach myself, declare I do not care, and then ruminate on it for hours later.

18 April: If you can perceive the facial expression of others, how long does it take you to spot a pattern in new people (for example you observe someone for a while and at some point you know "This person is insecure because they always have that look when they're insecure")? - if this question doesn't apply to you, you have a day off! :)

Pretty soon. I love patterns. Like the coefficients of polynomial roots - 4, 6,4,1. Alternating between negative and positive. SO I do look for patterns in people's facial expressions. People show their insecurity through actions - never forming their own opinion or attacking you erroneously as a reflection of themselves. I know because I have done that.

19 April: Did your ability to express yourself improve or worsen/deteriorate over time? Or did it stay the same? Is it different depending on how you communicate (spoken language, written language, signed...)?

It's the same, pretty much. I trail off a lot more in person but I type and speak the same way.

20 April: If you can (or could when you were younger) say words with your mouth (echolalia counts), did/do you have a monotone or "odd" voice, speak too loudly/softly, etc.? Did/do you practice to modulate your voice?

I used to be in care. Surprisingly, I did not spend much time with people my age; my social skills deteriorated. One of the ways this manifested was the tone of my voice. Students in my class used to say I spoke like a robot. :(

21 April: If you can (or could when you were younger) say words with your mouth, did/do you struggle to pronounce words or sounds? For example r, th, s, etc. - if this question doesn't apply to you, you have a day off :)

I had a tongue tie when I was young. I don't really remember that time of my life. Luckily, I have records of my speech and language therapy. From what I've gleaned, I didn't struggle with sounds, but more with forming sentences.