#+ one would fight about if it were just a regular fandom dispute??????? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sankttealeaf · 1 year

Text

longing stares

read on AO3 here

fandom ; grishaverse

pairing ; nikolai lantsov x zoya nazyalensky

summary ; His eyes would always seem to be drawn to her, no matter what the two were doing. Zoya, standing proud, confident in every word that left her lips. Oh, how foolish it was to think about kissing her - yet his mind indulged him every time.

other info ; takes place pre-king of scars. absolute yearning from nikolai. as it should be, zoya deserves it. mentions of the darkling, and nikolai has a few self-deprecating thoughts (but aimed towards the demon, not him, he's perfect x) i've caught the zoyalai bug so i am definitely going to write more for them 5.6k words ⋆｡°✩

If there was one thing Nikolai despised since becoming king, it was the large number of meetings he had to attend. The people of Ravka had problems, and they needed someone to tell them to. That person happened to be him. Some of the issues were resolved quickly, all they needed was a letter from the king to back up their claim, and it was good to go. Others dragged on to the point where Nikolai saw no end to it and started to wonder if he was forced into his own personal hell. His father never bothered seeing those who had issues in person. In fact, Nikolai could not recall a single time his father addressed the public on a level like this. He supposed he was doing one thing right, then.

The two farmers who had requested this meeting in front of the king continued their discussion, which was turning more into an argument than a civilised conversation. Nikolai rolled his shoulders back, feeling them start to get stiff after sitting still for the past however long. He wanted to call a break, but knew that the longer he put off resolving the issue, the more it would drain him.

"I've had this land in my family's name for years, I shall not give it up just because someone wants more land!" One of the disputing farmers had said, causing the other farmer to get angry.

"It's my right! You are not using the space, and I need more room for my cows!"

Was this his life now? Listening to people argue over cows? How did this even get to be an argument held in front of the king? The farmer's voices were slowly getting louder and louder, and part of him wanted to see if they would get into a physical fight. How funny it would be. A quick glance over to the guards that stood watch by his side told him that any fight would be broken up before it could get dangerous. The other part of him needed to de-escalate the situation before it got to that point. He sat up straighter in his seat, immediately catching the attention of the two farmers.

He gestured to the one wanting more land. "Is there no other land you could simply purchase nearby?"

The taller of the two farmers, the one Nikolai was speaking too, shook his head. “I don't have the extra money to purchase more land. I shouldn’t have to--”

“Perhaps a loan would help?” Nikolai interrupted, getting the feeling that he was about to insult the other. “A loan would help to purchase more land, which, in turn, will help you with earning more money, correct?”

The farmer nodded.

“Wonderful. I’ll have one of my accountants get in touch. We’ll set up regular repayments and if this works, there should be no more squabbling over land.” He gestured for his guards to escort the two out, signalling the end of this dispute. The farmers bowed deeply, expressing their thanks before getting led out of the room.

When Nikolai heard the doors closed and was alone, he sank back into his seat with a long sigh. He rubbed at his temples, wondering if it was acceptable to just turn in for the night already. His moment of quiet was interrupted by a quick knock at the door. He ran a hand across his face as he sat back up, putting on the regal mask that he would not let slip in front of his general guards or citizens. Before he could think about calling out to allow the person in, the door opened. Nikolai looked up, seeing Zoya enter and gently push the door close with the heel of her foot. In her hands were what looked to be even more paperwork and he outwardly groaned at the thought of sorting through more issues.

“Is there really no one else you can bother with this?” He asked as Zoya approached. She stood before him, a smile on her face as she handed over the stack of papers.

“I thought you enjoyed reading about every problem Ravka has?” She replied, taking a step back once he had retrieved the paperwork from her. “I vaguely remember you proclaiming how much you love it.”

“I don’t think I was fully conscious when I said that. Must’ve been our other dear friend,” he said, quickly flicking through the sheets to see if there was anything of interest. There wasn’t.

“You could always let ‘it’ solve these issues for you. It will give you a lot more trouble to worry about, but at least that means you don’t have to deal with it.” Zoya shrugged, smoothing out her kefta. She had a point, Nikolai thought. Though he would prefer that the population of Ravka never found out about the guest that currently lived in his space with him, the idea of simply letting the beast in him deal with these mundane issues was quite funny to think about. He furrowed his brows in thought, weighing up the pros and cons to that idea.

“You aren’t seriously considering that, are you?” She asked in disbelief, as Nikolai let out a laugh.

“Only slightly. It would take quite a lot off my plate when you think about it.” He pulled out one sheet of paper, seeing a similar topic he was just listening to wanting to be discussed. More cow disputes, again?

“Whenever you want it to cause chaos in Ravka, warn me in advance. I need to make sure I look good when people see me take you down,” she said, pushing some of her hair behind her shoulder and folding her arms across her chest.

Nikolai looked up at her from the paper, and smiled. “You always look good.” He knew, deep down, that he meant it and it wasn’t just another flattering joke to boost her ego (not that her ego ever needed a boost). The way Zoya always seemed so perfectly put together both frustrated him and made him look at her in awe. He saw her in the early mornings after a bad night, and the tired look she had on her face seemed to only add to her beauty. How can one look so tired yet so pretty, he would wonder. It was times like those mornings where he would feel utterly monstrous compared to her - his hair dishevelled, clothes torn and body aching after a night with the demon inside of him. How the mighty fell, the King of Ravka crashing and burning behind closed doors. But there was always Zoya by his side, no matter how disastrous he looked or felt. He wanted to reach out, to thank her for everything. He pictured a heartfelt thanks, holding her hands and telling her he wouldn't want to go through this with anyone else but her.

Forcing himself to look back at the pile of paper, he began to properly read through them. More land disputes, more complaints about the trading routes now that the Fold was gone, more concerns about the rising growth in those worshipping the Darkling as a Saint. Mixed in between the more pressing matters were lots of calls for the king to settle disagreements over who owned what animal or land. Was this really worth his time? He didn't want to ignore his people's issues, so at the start of his reign he indulged a few of them, and at the start it was useful. Now it felt like it was getting too much for him to handle alone.

"Why is it that I get final say over who owns what cows?" He asked, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. He could afford a moment's relaxation around Zoya - she had seen him at his worst, what was improper posture between friends?

Zoya raised an eyebrow, moving to stand beside his chair to peer over his shoulder at the paper he was currently reading through. "Are you not having fun? Would you prefer it if they were fighting over something else?"

"I'd prefer it if they weren't fighting at all." He found himself holding his breath when he felt her look over his shoulder. It was times like this where he was glad she was not a Heartrender, he didn't think he could explain why his heart seemed to skip a beat every time she was near. He turned his head slightly to look at her. "Where do you even find these people?"

"I have a long list of those who would make you suffer. This is hardly scratching the surface." She smiled, though Nikolai noticed it was not one of sincerity. He didn't doubt that she had people ready to speak in front of the king, only to put him through more boredom and suffering. The mental note to not piss her off was always stuck on the forefront of Nikolai's mind. He underlined it a few times, just in case he ever forgot.

There was a separate pile forming of topics he wanted to follow up, and the rest could be dealt with at a later time by someone who had the free time to write letters or

"There are several complaints about the lack of water in one of the rivers flowing through a nearby town…" Nikolai paused in thought, watching as Zoya leaned away from him, an eyebrow raised. He handed the sheets of paper towards her. "I feel that is an issue more suited for the Triumvirate to discuss, don't you?"

She took the papers, giving them a once over and shrugging. "I suppose I can take away some valuable Tidemakers to sort out an issue sent directly to you."

"How kind of you. Ravka thanks you for your service."

Words began to blur into one as Nikolai skimmed through the last of the papers, finding a nice middle ground of what he wanted to follow up on. The rise in Darkling fanatics was definitely an issue and also the last thing he wanted to deal with on top of everything else.

He noticed Zoya was still lingering around, unusual considering how often she would walk in, hand him more work to do and leave before he could get a word in. Putting down the sheets of paper, he leaned over to where Zoya stood.

"If you've been yearning for my presence this badly, Zoya, you needn't use the excuse of handing me more paperwork to be close to me, you know," he said with a playful grin, as she turned to look at him. She took a few steps back from him and folded her hands behind her back, standing tall. Nikolai shifted in his seat, adjusting his posture to match her own.

She smiled back at him with the same lack of insincerity as before. "I see enough of you as is, I would hate to put myself through more of you.”

“Yet, here you still are.” He grinned, resting his arm against the arm of the chair, head in hand.

“Also, I wanted to see how long it would take for you to remember you were requested to attend the Triumvirate meeting that started five minutes ago."

He blinked. Was that meeting today? Already? He stood, gathering his piles of paperwork to organise properly later on. Maybe he could bring some of these things up at the Triumvirate meeting? The rise in the Darkling fanatics seemed to be important to both Grisha and otkatza’sya alike.

"And here I thought you just wanted to see me." He smiled as he began to walk towards the door, Zoya following in step close behind.

Triumvirate meetings were slightly more exciting to listen to than Ravka’s complaints, so Nikolai was glad to be busy with that instead. He thumbed through the top few pages as he and Zoya walked to the war room in silence. His mind was too occupied to make playful comments, though he knew the real reason why he was so quiet. It made sense to busy his thoughts with that of solving problems, pushing around pretend pieces on a war table, making calculated moves in a game he knew well. He’d rather think about that, than try and break down, piece by piece, what on earth was going through his mind a few minutes ago. Zoya, someone he trusted with his life, who had saved his life before and would most likely continue to do so. He didn't understand why he would find it hard to breathe normally around her, or why his gaze would linger on her more than normal, or why he sought her out everywhere he went. You fool, Nikolai. You know exactly why, his mind would tell him, and he would shove that thought down with more planning and strategic manoeuvres.

Zoya opened the doors to the war room. Genya and David were already inside, seated close together and talking in hushed voices.

“I told you he would be late,” Zoya announced as she walked inside, a grin on her face as she looked towards where Genya sat. “I’d like my payment now.”

Genya laughed. “And how do I know you didn't distract him on purpose?”

“I believe I’m immune to Zoya’s attempts at distractions by now,” Nikolai replied, taking his seat and setting down his papers. “There’s only so many times she can bat her eyelashes at you before you learn to resist.”

“I don’t recall ever ‘batting my eyelashes’ at you, your Highness,” Zoya retorted.

“Ah, must’ve been in my dreams, then.” He gave her a smile, leaning back in his seat.

The group settled down, the meeting starting with Zoya recapping on things they had put a pin in last time they met. Important Grisha business, things that Nikolai would either approve of or suggest a different idea. He was here simply to be the King, and that was a role he could easily slip back into.

Time ticked on, as issues were brought to the table and talked about, plans put in place to solve the problem. Zoya mentioned the water issue Nikolai had given to her, and they made note of which Tidemakers were to go down there with Zoya to solve the problem. The sheets of paper that held information about the Darkling fanatics were at the top of the pile that sat in front of Nikolai, and he took them off, sliding them over to Zoya. She raised an eyebrow, glancing down at it. Her eyes widened, picking it up quickly.

“Cults for the Darkling are popping up,” she said, and the table went quiet. She handed the papers to the other two, and there was a long moment of silence. The air was heavy, and Nikolai found himself adjusting his gloves, making sure they were on properly. A nervous habit he had developed, terrified that they would somehow fall off and the dark scars would be on show for everyone to see.

“They see him as a Saint…?” Genya spoke quietly. Nikolai looked over at her, noticing that David had placed a hand over hers for comfort. He gave a quick glance to Zoya, whose jaw was clenched, frown on her face, an air of general anger forming around her.

“There’s notes on where these people have been spotted. It should be looked into as soon as possible,” he spoke, folding his hands in his lap. “Just say the word, and I will get people on it.”

A nod from the others. His focus wavered from the conversation back to his hands, and the thought that each night came with the risk of turning into something of the Darkling’s creation. No matter how often he got caught up in the reality that the Darkling was dead, the curse would creep back in, ruin his night, and make him monstrous. If anyone found out, his rule would be put into question, people would target him more than normal. And if the fanatics ever found out… He blinked the thoughts away, now was not the time for this - there were more important issues at hand.

His eyes caught where Zoya sat, upright and to attention, though he could never quite work out if she was actually listening or just really good at pretending to do so. He wanted nothing more than to ask if she was okay, to reach a hand out and place it on her arm for comfort. A strand of her hair had fallen from behind her ear, and he imagined himself brushing it back delicately. His hand would linger by her cheek, and she would lean into it, her eyes closed. Their foreheads would touch, a comforting quiet passing between them both. Zoya’s hand would rest on top of Nikolai’s, her skin cool to the touch, like a gentle breeze on a spring day. She would look at him, eyes glancing down to his lips, and the gap between them would close, inch by inch.

"Nikolai?" He was thrown from his thoughts by the sound of Genya, standing from her seat and looking at him with a mix of confusion and a hint of a frown. "Did we lose you already?"

He blinked, hoping that the warmth of his cheeks was just that, and his face was not noticeably red. "Of course not! What could be more exciting than…" He leaned over to see what was laid out on the table - a large map of the surrounding towns and villages, each with their own notes on how many fanatics have been spotted and any correlation between each point. “... The Darkling.”

“I can think of plenty of things,” Zoya mumbled, giving Nikolai a look of discontent. He cleared his throat, as Genya continued to speak, though now Nikolai was paying attention.

The meeting continued on, all their attention was focused on the cult for the Darkling. It was still early days, but they wanted to work out a way to dissolve it as quickly as they could - the last thing they needed was for the Darkling to be worshipped as a Saint. They paused for food, bringing small snacks into the war room to continue their discussion. A plan was formed, and they needed to keep this quiet for now - only the four of them, plus potentially Tolya and Tamar, could know. If word got out, there would be questions from the other Grisha, and they did not want anyone to do anything without thinking.

The more that was mentioned about ways to rid the cultists, the more Nikolai became uncomfortable about what the night would hold. Would he wake up out of bed, scratching at the walls, demanding to be released? Or would he be fine? The more his mind was brought back to the Darkling, the more he believed the former. He felt a gentle nudge on his arm, and looked up to see Zoya standing by him.

“I can hear the cogs whirring in your brain when you think,” she said with a slight smile. “Are you planning on sleeping in here for the night?”

He looked around, noticing Genya and David had left. What was with him losing focus today? He stood, stretching his arms out, grinning at Zoya. “Only if you are staying here too.”

She scoffed, though the smile on her face told him she wasn’t mad at that comment. “Come on. I’d hate for your friend to appear in the halls of the palace. It would be a mess, and I don’t want to be the one to clean it up.”

He watched as she turned to leave, and he let out a sigh. Maybe he was just tired, that’s why he was thinking weirdly. He followed after her, each step closer to the inevitable.

The sinking feeling in his stomach grew as they approached the wing of the palace where his room was. It had been Zoya from the start who accompanied him to his room, to hand him the nightly tonic Genya mixed up, who locked the doors and told Toyla to wake her if anything happens. He wouldn't want it to be anyone else, though he would never admit that out loud.

“You’ve been awfully quiet lately,” she spoke, looking at him with a slight crease in her brows.

“Are you worried about me, Zoya?” He asked through a grin, diverting the question to become a conversation that was more tolerable.

She rolled her eyes. “I simply want to know what’s made you so quiet. I want to give it my gratitude.”

He thought for a moment to tell her how worried he was about the curse getting stronger, how he could feel something clawing from inside, begging for a release. The monster in him wanted out, and he was not sure how long he could control it for. Instead, he gave her a shrug. “Maybe I just want to be in your company in silence for a change.”

The silence continued as they arrived at Nikolai's room, the door already guarded by Tolya, who had propped himself up in a chair, a book of poetry open. He gave them both a nod, used to this routine already. Nikolai gave Tolya a two-fingered salute as he walked inside his room, the door closing behind him.

His room was dark, the light of the moon casting a soft glow over the furniture, and Zoya. She was quick to search through the drawer of his desk, the one where the tonics were kept, taking a small bottle out and uncorking it.

“Getting straight to it tonight, hm?” He laughed, making his way behind the room divider to change. Normally he had no issue changing with Zoya in the room, even though she couldn’t see him. But tonight, his hands hesitated to remove his gloves, the creeping thought that something awful was going to happen arrived back in his brain. He needed the gloves off first, otherwise it would be a pain to unbutton his shirt, but something wasn’t working in his brain. Something was holding him back. His mind cycled through images of his hands being scarred completely now, the dark veins moving up his arms, slowly consuming him, and he had to shake away the thoughts and ground himself back in the moment. If he never removed his gloves, he would never have to see the aftermath of the curse again. Instead it would just come to him in flashes of brief consciousness he experienced whenever night fell and he found himself with the unwanted guest.

"Are you taking your time for a reason?" Zoya called out, which made him aware of just how long he was taking, and he was still fully clothed.

"If you want to see me undressed that badly, it wouldn't take much to blow this partition down," he replied, his usual playful undertone not as pronounced as it normally would be. His heart wasn't fully in it, for a change.

"I will if it gets you to hurry up. I have a nightly routine, too, you know."

He stood, giving himself one more go at removing his gloves to then change. His hands hesitated at the cuff of his sleeve, unable to push it up to get to the edge of his glove. Would it be bad to sleep with them on? Most likely - the last thing he needed was to transform during the night and rip them. He had done that too many times before with shirts. He took a deep breath, deciding that it was no use forcing himself to do this when his mind was clouded with what ifs. He needed someone to tell him straight that he was over thinking things. He stepped out from behind the partition, feeling like a small child about to be reprimanded for his behaviour.

“Odd choice of nightwear,” Zoya said, hand on hip, waiting for him to be ready. When he didn't respond, she frowned. “Nikolai?”

He was quiet for a beat, hands clenching and unclenching as his mind searched for words. "We need a back up plan in case the curse gets worse. In case… I get worse." He had always refused to acknowledge that he and the demon were one and the same, and he looked at Zoya, who understood that he was serious about what he was saying. "We can't take the risk that this won't escalate with time."

"We're doing a lot already. Locked doors. Someone on guard at all times. What else can we do?" She replied. "Are you expecting us to tie you to your bed so you cannot move?"

Nikolai shrugged, though the idea could work. "I'm concerned, that's all." He looked back down at his gloved hands, still hesitant to remove them. "If people find out-"

"No one is going to find out."

"But if they do… If the fanatics of the Darkling find out there's still something of him left, they'll…" He wasn't sure what they would do, but he was certain it would only raise tensions between Ravka and the rest of the world. "I can't have them using me as a way to promote their agenda."

Zoya sighed, taking a few steps forward to close the space between them both. "Nikolai. No one is going to find out." She gently took hold of his hands, looking down at them for a moment. "You're guarded at night, you're covered up during the day. The only people who know are the ones you've told." She looked back at him. He noticed her hesitate, before speaking. "I refuse to let anyone try and ruin Ravka again."

If he wanted comforting words, he would have gone to someone else - Zoya was always to the point, which gave him more comfort than he would care to admit. He gave her hands a gentle squeeze in appreciation.

"If it gets too bad… If something happens and I can't change back…" He let the words linger in the air for a moment, and Zoya nodded. An unspoken pact, and he knew she would fulfil it if it came down to it.

"For Ravka," she whispered.

"For Ravka."

They stood, hand in hand, for what felt like an eternity. Neither wanted to move away first, to be the one to break this little moment. He looked down at their hands intertwined together, and he relaxed a little. The gloves made him feel like this didn't count as anything. He couldn't feel her like he wanted to. But the thought of removing them, of seeing what was really underneath terrified him tonight. Maybe it was all the talk of the Darkling, or maybe it was something else. He furrowed his brow in thought, feeling Zoya looking at him. She wordlessly let go of one of his hands, and he felt her hand ghost the side of his cheek, never getting close enough to touch. It was like she backed out at the last minute, and he looked at her with slight confusion. Her hand hovered away from his face, and she blinked, taking in a breath. He wasn't sure what she was doing, and was not expecting to feel her move closer, her hand now on top of the one she was still holding. Nikolai wanted to pause this moment, to capture it in all its tenderness, to keep it close to his heart and engrained in his mind forever. He wanted to pull her closer, embrace her like he wished he could. Instead, he watched her hand move, gently pushing the cuff of his sleeve back to reveal the edge of his glove.

Oh.

She pulled the fabric away from Nikolai's hands, slowly and with more care than he had ever seen her use before. Her eyes were down, focusing on the task, but he wanted nothing more than to have her look at him. When his hand was bare, she held it for just a moment, tracing one of the dark scars with her thumb absentmindedly.

Oh.

She moved to remove the other glove, taking just as much care as the first one. Nikolai had noticed that he had been holding his breath through it all, scared that if he moved or made a sound she would stop. With both gloves in hand, Zoya turned, placing them on his desk next to the small bottle of the tonic Genya had prepared. He held onto her hand, feeling more exposed than if he were standing in front of her nude. She turned back to him, now meeting his gaze. He gently brushed back a strand of her hair from her face, hand ever so close to resting on her cheek. But he stopped himself, instead lowering it down to rest atop of hers.

"Zoya," he said through a soft breath, scanning her face for something to give, for something to change and for him to wake up - that this was actually a dream.

Instead, the corners of her lips turned up into a soft smile. "You were taking too long."

There was a moment where he stood in disbelief, his hands in Zoya’s, the scene replaying over and over again in his mind. It was something so tender, so unlike them to share. General Nazyalensky and the King, sharing a moment of weakness, of soft movements and gentle touches. He couldn’t help but laugh at the idea, yet it had just happened.

He cleared his throat as he felt Zoya let go of his hands, the realisation of what they were doing had now landed on their shoulders, and she took a step back, putting distance between them again. Zoya turned, picking up the tonic and holding it out for him. He took it, and didn't give his mind any time to think, downing the liquid in one quick go. It was foul, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth that would linger there until morning. But so far, it has worked, keeping the demon at bay. And he hoped it would work for a long time after. Zoya held her hand out for the bottle, and he handed it to her, knowing it was safer for it to be discarded now rather than wait until morning. They learned that the hard way - after a particularly bad night they had entered Nikolai’s room to find glass shards scattered everywhere, on the floor and stuck in his hands. He remembered joking about it when Zoya called for a healer.

“It always seems to ruin the most useful parts of myself,” he had said with a laugh, holding his hands out in front of him to not accidentally make it worse.

“Is that why it never goes for your brain?” Zoya responded.

He hoped that that incident was the worst it would get. The scars from the glass had been removed, thanks to Genya, but the scars from the demon remained, no matter how hard they tried to get them gone. A constant reminder, Nikolai thought. He looked over at Zoya, who had begun to move towards the door, their nightly routine was complete and she was no longer needed here. Goodbyes were never their thing, so it didn't surprise Nikolai to see her leave without saying anything. It felt weird to him that they would not talk about what had just happened, but it was what they did. No need to talk about things that didn't matter.

“I’ll see you in the morning?” He said, making it sound more like a question than a statement of fact. They would always see each other in the morning to discuss if anything had happened during the night. Still, he called out for her, stopping her in her tracks as the question caught her off guard.

Zoya looked over her shoulder at him, pausing as she held the door handle. “Go to sleep, Nikolai.” She opened the door, slipping out into the hallway, leaving Nikolai standing in the middle of his room alone. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but couldn’t help but feel disappointed that she didn't say more.

The room felt too cold, too dark, too empty without her in it. Shaking himself out from whatever daze he was in, he began to unbutton his shirt, his mind still swirling over the moment they had just shared. He was almost certain it was going to stay at the forefront of his thoughts for a while. After changing, he sat down on the edge of his bed, running a hand through his hair with a soft sigh. Too much was going on with him today, and he hoped to any Saint watching him that this night would be uneventful. He fell back on the bed, waiting for Genya’s tonic to kick in. There was always a moment before it took effect where he would wish for a normal night, for nothing awful to happen. Maybe this time the beast would leave him, maybe this was the night his life returned back to what it used to be. Maybe this time he would call for Zoya to come back, to have her here with him and not be in fear that something awful would happen. One day he would be able to ask her to stay, just for a moment longer. He would hold her hand in his, and in his daydreams his hands were clear of the dark marks that he despised.

He’d kiss her knuckles ever so gently, wanting nothing but softness for his general. In a world that was full of constant stress and horror, he wanted to give her a moment of peace away from it all.

Maybe this time he would dream of her.

#grishaverse #zoyalai #nikolai lantsov x zoya nazyalensky #nikolai lantsov #zoya nazyalensky #grishaverse fic #shadow and bone #king of scars #; tealeaf's writing

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apparitionism · 4 years

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Hark

A merry early Gift Exchange to @kla1991, whose not-so-secret Santa I am this year. This is the first part of a story set somewhat in-universe: there’s no season 5 (what could that even be?), and only the first ep of season 4—basically, time wound back to right before the Warehouse exploded in Stand, which aired on Oct. 3, so the Christmas during which this story is set is happening less than three months after that momentous occurrence. I’m postulating that Helena became an agent again, and there was no Artie/Father Data business. (Oh, and Steve didn’t die, so no metronome. I refuse to force Helena through witnessing anyone being brought back non-nefariously from the dead.) I’ll do my best to post the concluding part(s) by New Year’s Day—no promises on that, but I’ll finish as soon as apparitionally possible. Anyway, happy holidays to everyone. Continuing to participate with you all in this wondrous exercise in fandom is a blessing in every tradition, and I’m profoundly grateful.

Hark

“Your upstart nation stole ‘God Save the Queen’!” Helena seethed at Myka.

For whom “upstart nation” was really too much. “Nobody owns that melody!” she fumed, reciprocally, at Helena. “You can’t steal something nobody owns, our version is perfectly valid, and anyway I’m pretty sure other countries stole it too. Look it up!”

“I’m not in other countries. You look it up.”

“I’m driving! Since when are you such a fan of the monarchy anyway?”

“Stop questioning my patriotism!”

“I couldn’t care less about your patriotism!”

“You brought up citizenship!”

“Because you don’t have any!” Myka had genuinely thought they would be having an intellectual conversation, one about documentation and—

“I did at birth!” Helena raged, and then she scowl-sang, “God save our gra-cious Queen.”

This gave Myka pause. She reflected that she had actually never heard Helena sing before. She then concluded that she never wanted to hear Helena sing again... because Helena could not sing.

However: “My country ’tis of thee,” Myka sang back, frustrated. It was the only reason she herself would ever have sung, because—

“You can’t sing,” Helena informed her, in the tone of a doctor trying to conceal joy at having to report that the patient would not recover.

“Neither can you,” Myka informed back, aiming for straightforward “snide.”

“And I never want to hear you sing again,” Helena continued.

All Myka could come up with in response to that was an inadequate “Ditto.”

Helena sniffed. “You just wanted the last word.”

Myka pointedly let Helena have that last word. To make her stew in it. In the ensuing silence, she continued to drive. On this last leg home from a retrieval, late on Christmas Eve—their very first Christmas Eve—the air between them was frostier than the South Dakota winter outside the car could ever dream of matching.

She was under no illusion that Helena cared at all about anybody saving the Queen, and she herself, while reasonably patriotic on the American side of things, hadn’t sung her way through that song since her childhood. She knew this dispute was ridiculous, and she suspected Helena knew it too. She suspected also that they both understood they were developing a pattern: A period of calm—a deepening of accord—that would sooner or later, particularly in the adrenalin-ebb aftermath of a dangerous retrieval, dissipate into some minimally motivated squabble, the respective sides of which they entrenched themselves into with such commitment that it seemed there could never be an unentrenching.

An early instance: Myka had threatened to storm out of their shared hotel room because Helena had mulishly refused to concede that it had been foolish to open a bottle of mini-bar water for which they would be charged five dollars.

“Go right ahead,” Helena had “suggested,” so Myka did.

In the lobby, she’d run into Pete, who wasn’t storming anywhere, just looking for free snacks. “See?” Myka demanded of him. “Like a normal person.”

“If you were normal, you wouldn’t be out here with me. ’Cause you’ve got a hot girl in a hotel room, and I know things got a little uh-oh chasing that guy today, but you’re both still in one piece.”

“Maybe not for long.”

“You volunteered for this.”

“No I didn’t. Artie said ‘Pete, Myka, Helena, get on a plane for Montgomery, Alabama,’ and so we—”

“You know that isn’t the ‘this’ I meant.”

Myka did. But she hadn’t volunteered for that “this” either. Nothing about her response to Helena was voluntary. Nothing about it had ever been voluntary.

“Fights and all,” Pete added. “After the thing”—he always called the barely averted explosion of the Warehouse “the thing,” and so did Claudia—“you could’ve let her leave. You could’ve made her leave. She would have done anything you said.”

“Not anything,” Myka said, to be contrary.

“Maybe you don’t remember how she’d hardly even sit in a chair without your say-so. Oh, but wait, I think I know somebody who remembers everything, some tall lady with a lot of hair, name rhymes with Opelika... hey, that’s you!”

“Shut up. It wasn’t... that simple.”

“It is now.”

She crossed her arms at him.

He sighed. “Lemme show you: ‘Sorry, baby,’” he said in his “Myka” voice, which was terrible. “Me too, darling,” he then said in his “Helena” voice, which was even worse. As himself, he finished, “It’s like you’ve never been in a relationship.”

In a conversation in which Pete had said several annoyingly true things, that one was the most annoyingly true. But: “It’s like,” she conceded, and he slapped the side of her head, very gently.

“Hot girl hotel room,” he said.

When Myka went back to that hotel room, the hot girl said, “I’m sorry,” as if she’d received the same instructions from Pete. “I was precipitately thirsty.”

“I’m sorry too,” Myka told her. “I was precipitately miserly.”

Myka kissed the hot girl, the hot girl kissed back, and they fumbled their way to fine.

Until the next trivial-yet-entrenched tiff... because apparently, peace was for normal people.

Normal people. When Myka and Helena finally made it back to the B&B, Leena, Claudia, and Steve were doing reasonably convincing “normal” impressions: drinking hot chocolate, eating cookies, and playing board games. They seemed to be playing all the board games; Leena was replacing the lid on Monopoly, which she set aside, reaching for the next box in a towering stack. “Chef’s-kiss timing,” Claudia told them. “I just bankrupted these two pathetic poser slumlords, and we’re about to start Sorry. It’s funner with four, so siddown, and you two can be a team.”

“Or not,” Myka said, glancing at Helena, who glanced back and gave a definitely not yet inhale-exhale. “Why isn’t Pete playing?”

“We’re supposed to tell you it’s because he’s doing some last-minute Christmas shopping,” Steve said.

Myka was about to ask, “This late at night?” but Claudia supplied, “Except it’s really that he goofed off today and didn’t finish inventory and thought he’d get away with it but then Artie called and yelled at him.”

“And you left him alone to keep working on it? It’s the night before Christmas, and—”

Claudia waved her hands. “And all through the Warehouse, not a creature was stirring, I swear.”

“Besides,” Leena added, “he’s a grown man.”

“Who always ruins Christmas!” said Myka.

“Always almost ruins Christmas,” Claudia corrected.

Myka demanded, “Is there anything about me that says ‘I like a close call’?”

All eyes turned to Helena, then back to Myka.

Of course Helena had been part of the closest of calls, and Myka hadn’t liked it at all: nothing but the outcome. The Warehouse, the saving of it, yes, the thing—but the real outcome had been the aftermath at the B&B.

That outcome was real, but it was also a dream, one that Myka had dreamed more often than she would ever have confessed to pondering in her heart, this dream of being alone with a present Helena, no disastrous endpoint looming. The dream-logic of it: I can touch her? And Myka put a hand to Helena’s elbow. Reached and did that. Helena looked at the hand, the elbow. She looked in Myka’s eyes then and said, “Don’t spare my feelings.”

Feelings? Are you really you in your skin, Myka wanted to ask. Is this your elbow. Instead, because she needed to know, she murmured, “What do you want.”

Helena didn’t say words, but she made a noise that evolution had found fit to preserve from a deep, animal past, a guttural push of sound through the throat-column: it told Myka everything. Told Myka: “Everything.”

No speaking then but by bodies, a language of desperation and culmination. Helena had a mouth that could be met by Myka’s own, clothes that could be removed to reveal a palpable body, with every response of that body real under Myka’s hands. Myka held her eyes closed for much of that night, lest sight confuse her about presence and its proof, lest she fail to attend to what her eyes could never offer: The fleshy heaviness of a tongue in response to her own. The soft give of a thigh interior under her insistent thumb. The steady pressure of a body that pushed back. No empty air, no absence; only presence.

No question marks intruded on their immediate intimacy, their immeasurable, embodied relief. Two days prior, Helena had been a sacrificeable hologram, but all at once she was Myka’s living, breathing, at-last lover. All destined... like meeting at gunpoint.

That night precipitated a fast fall into full couplehood, with seemingly little conscious choice on either of their parts. As inevitable as the gunpoint meetings, the wrenching betrayals, even the miraculous redemption.

But nothing good can possibly be so simple, Myka told herself. Or so inevitable.

“Is that what you believe?” Myka imagined Helena asking this, Socratically. She’d had so many internal conversations with Helena that she found the habit—probably a bad one—difficult to break.

“I’m tired of belief,” Myka told her beautiful, imaginary Socrates. “Sometimes I want to go back to my regular non-Warehouse life, where belief didn’t matter.”

Helena said, still in Myka’s head, still Socratic, “Or did you merely act as if it didn’t matter? Artifacts were born. Religions carried on as they do. Your ignoring belief had no effect on any of it.”

“My not ignoring it has no effect on any of it.”

“So you yourself, regardless of attitude adopted, cannot affect belief.” Socrates paused. Smiled. “Or that which is inevitable.”

Myka did, in such moments, briefly wonder why she needed the real Helena around, if the one in her head was such a reasonable facsimile. A hologram could have done that job just as well.

But the answers, the “here’s why,” came fast and thick, and Myka rejoiced that they could. The real Helena could make Myka laugh an easy laugh, because circumstances were not as they had been with that hologram, when laughter was an impossibility. The real Helena could touch Myka’s neck—not wonderingly, as Myka had known that elbow—but instead quick and hot, in that way that said “we have been intimate recently and will soon again be.” The real Helena could fall asleep and in relaxation display a face so devastating in its symmetry that Myka was inclined to regret not being Michelangelo, so as to recreate it in appropriately tributary marble.

Strange, though, or probably just ridiculous, to feel that your romantic relationship had made more sense when one of you was a hologram.

Myka should have expected Christmas, also a fraught inevitability, to loom as an existential test—yet another existential test—of that relationship.

She should have expected also that when this new existential test was administered, Pete would be the one helping to shove answer sheets and no. 2 pencils into their hands.

“Might be a close call or two in Sorry. Sorry!” Claudia cackled. “Anyway, go put your stuff away so we can get our Sorry on. Also our merry. We might even sing.”

“Or not,” Myka said again, and this time she got an eyeroll in response rather than meaningful breathing. An improvement? Hard to tell.

“Nobody’s required to sing anyth—” Leena began, but then she sat up very straight and cocked her head. “Do you hear that sound? Or I guess I mean, do you feel that sound? It’s not singing.”

Helena moved her head too, and not in a way Myka recognized. “I do feel that sound. In fact I believe I know that sound.”

“I do too,” Leena said.

Steve squinted. “Feels like... a weird earthquake? Is it happening all over Univille?”

Claudia said, “This is the kind of thing they blame on us even when it isn’t us. It’s why they look at us weird at the supermarket.”

“I can’t feel anything,” Myka said. “What is it?” She looked first to Helena, who was shaking her head—not at Myka, not with anger, but as if she might be able to find the right shake to rid her ears of the sound, or the feeling, or whatever it was.

“Agitated artifacts,” Leena said, performing a very similar shake. “They... rumble.”

“Agitated artifacts,” Myka repeated. “Pete’s alone at the Warehouse, it’s Christmas, and artifacts are agitated. Okay.”

Naturally, Pete chose that moment to march in, proclaiming, “I hope everybody’s ready to apologize to me.”

Steve asked, “Why should we apologize?” Now he was shaking his head too.

“Because everybody always says I ruin Christmas.”

Helena said, “As I understand the situation, the salient fact is not that they say you ruin Christmas. The salient fact is that you do ruin Christmas.”

“Almost,” Claudia corrected again. She canted her head, righted it. Canted it again.

“But this time I saved it.”

“By agitating artifacts?” Myka said, but of course he would think that. Probably encouraged them to have a party...

“More so by the minute, from the sound of things,” Leena told him.

“What? No! That isn’t what I did!”

“The artifacts are telling a different story,” Helena noted.

Claudia offered, “It’s more that they’re humming it real low. Like some geologic event that worked its way into a Björk track. Or vice versa.”

Myka—very calmly, she believed, under the circumstances—said, “What. Did. You. Touch.”

“Nothing, Mom,” he said, and his tone caused Myka to spare some sympathy for Jane Lattimer. He then said, as if it were some magnanimous confession, “Okay. Fine. I did, but I gloved up.”

“What did you touch after you gloved up?” Leena asked. “And why?”

“It was like it tapped me on the shoulder...” he began.

Still canting her head, Claudia muttered, “Sallah flashback, Sallah flashback...”

“And said ‘hey big guy’...”

Steve said, “This is already a longer story than I feel like it should be.”

“And told me it had to go the Christmas aisle...”

Myka had had enough. “If you don’t spit it out right now, I personally will Heimlich it out of you. Joyfully. WHAT had to go to the Christmas aisle?”

He turned to her and gave a palms-up shrug. “You know I don’t know anything about classical music.”

She reached to the table for the nearest board game, to throw it at him, but Helena preempted that move by saying, “Judging from Myka’s face, now is not the time for non sequiturs.”

She probably couldn’t have done much damage with a travel-size Aggravation anyway, but travel and aggravation made her think, in Helena’s direction, Oh, now you can read my face. An hour ago in the car, not so much. Then she sighed internally. Or maybe, an hour ago in the car, too well.

Pete was continuing, “But the Messiah had strong feelings.”

“Oh no,” Leena said, and Myka knew that Leena saying “oh no” in that particular way meant she knew something, and the something she knew wasn’t good, but Pete kept on, still enthusiastically proud of himself: “So I gloved up, took it where it wanted to be, and then came home. Because it isn’t Christmas till I’ve won the Trivial Pursuit Star Wars Classic Trilogy Collectors’ Edition!”

“Do I seriously have to remind you I’m the reigning champ?” Claudia demanded. “What you’re saying is, it’s never gonna be Christmas.”

“Not for a while yet,” Leena said, “because we’re going back to the Warehouse. Because I’m pretty sure I know what’s happening.”

“Why do I have to go if I can’t hear whatever it is?” Pete whined.

Myka told him, “I can’t hear it either, and it’s your fault.”

“Your ears are your own problem.”

“I might Heimlich you just for the fun of it.”

Steve said, with concern, “I’ve heard that ribs tend to break.”

Myka nodded. “Exactly.”

“Santa would not approve of that attitude, young lady,” Pete chided.

“All I do is lug around stockings full of coal,” she said. “Do your worst, Santa.”

She made the mistake of glancing at Helena, whose face betrayed a responsive ripple of disquiet. Exactly the wrong sentiment for ending a fight, even a foolish one, Myka realized: imply that nothing you carry with you is what you want. “I didn’t mean...” she began, but Claudia was demanding of Leena, “How do you know what’s happening? And what is happening?”

“He put the Messiah sheet music in the Christmas aisle,” Leena said, with what Myka considered enviable patience.

“You say that like it means something!”

“It does mean something,” Leena said. “You’ll see. More importantly, you’ll hear.”

At the Warehouse, when they reached the floor, they were greeted by... “Curtains?” Steve tried, because that was what they were. Tall, cream-colored damask curtains with a green floral pattern. Freestanding, blocking their path. Insistently blocking their path.

“For all of us!” Pete tried back. “Dun-dun-DUN!”

“No...” Leena said. She regarded the curtains. “I know who you are,” she said, and Myka found herself unsurprised to see the curtains rustle at that, as if in appreciation. Leena then said, “And now I know exactly what’s happening.”

“A play is beginning?” Helena suggested.

“Not quite, but you’re in the neighborhood. Surely somebody other than me knows who these curtains are really for.”

Pete leaned close to the curtains, then jumped back like they’d bit him. “Oh my god. Now that I look close—the von Trapp kids!”

“Good boy,” Leena said.

“I thought we were calling him a grown man,” groused Myka.

“Leena is providing positive reinforcement,” Helena said. Pedantic, as if Myka had never heard of such a thing.

“I know she’s providing—” But she shut herself up, sighed in frustration instead.

Leena made sure everyone was wearing gloves, then said, “Claudia, keep your goo gun in your pocket; we might find more of them taking their frustrations for a walk.”

“So do we just put things back where they belong?” Steve asked. “And they calm down and the rumble-chatter stops?”

“Any that got themselves where they aren’t supposed to be, we take them back. But here’s what else we have to do.” She paused. “Sing.”

“No,” Myka said, and “no,” she repeated. She chanced a glance at Helena, but she had closed her eyes and seemed to be pre-massaging a headache out of her temples.

Leena appeared not to have heard Myka, for she went on, “We’ll deal with the curtains first. Next, the Messiah goes back where it’s supposed to be—because that’s what started it all. After that, I think Claudia should tell us what we need to do.”

“Oh god,” Claudia said, sounding just about as dread-filled as Myka felt. “This is Caretaker practice, isn’t it?”

“What if it is?” Leena asked.

“Ugh. Thanks, Pete.”

He said, “Maybe it tapped my shoulder because it thought you needed Caretaker practice.”

Myka snorted. “Maybe it tapped your shoulder because it could tell you’re an easy mark.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“Particularly at Christmas.”

“Hey!”

Leena said, “I think the Messiah might have sensed you’d be an easy mark... mostly because you want to make everybody happy. Particularly at Christmas.”

“See? Leena understands,” he taunted Myka.

Myka once again considered the Heimlich.

They escorted the curtains back to the musicals section, passing by Ginger Rogers’s dancing shoes, and Myka was unnervingly tempted to put them on and bleed her way backwards and in high heels out of the entire situation as Leena explained, “People repurpose ‘My Favorite Things’ as a Christmas song. The curtains find that... troubling.”

Pete scratched his head. “I guess I don’t really get that. Isn’t it kinda great?”

“Wait,” Claudia said, “and this might not even be practice: I think I do get it. How they feel. So let’s say you’re you.”

“I’m me,” he said. “Gotcha. Awesome. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Exactly. But what if some holiday thingy came along and made like it was changing you into something else? They’re afraid we’ll put ’em in the Christmas aisle, and they don’t want to be there. Unlike the Messiah, I guess. Am I wrong, Leena?”

“You’re not wrong,” Leena told her, smiling.

“I feel that too,” Steve agreed. “They’re... afraid? Afraid it’ll diminish them. They’ll be about Christmas and that’s all. That’s why they’re so agitated.”

And so the curtains were serenaded with words about raindrops, kittens, kettles, mittens, and all the rest.

“Are they happier now?” Pete asked. “Do they not feel so bad?”

Leena, Claudia, Steve, and Helena all nodded, if not entirely vigorously. Helena said, “Marginally happier. Not knowing the song, I of course couldn’t participate. I hope they aren’t offended.”

But she hadn’t seemed apologetic at all while the singing took place. In fact she’d smirked. So Myka murmured, “Thrilled, more likely.”

Helena pretended to ignore her but also bared her teeth, minimally, in Myka’s direction, as she said, “Popular culture, alas, remains a largely undiscovered country.”

“It’s just one song,” Claudia said. “You’re getting your head around more stuff all the time! Take the Muppets.”

“Last week’s Christmas special,” Helena said, and Claudia nodded. Myka knew they’d been going one per week, because that was as much as Helena could take, whereas Claudia would have set up a holly-jolly IV drip if she could. Helena continued, “The one you called a ‘crash course’ in several shows’ worth of puppets?”

Claudia nodded again, even more enthusiastically. “Muppet Family Christmas! And now you’re up to speed, so for example when I say ‘Oscar,’ you say...”

“I still fail to understand how the large bird, which seems more accurately a costume than a puppet, qualifies.”

“The answer we were looking for was ‘the Grouch,’ so maybe we’re not quite as far along as I thought. I’m not going to bother with when I say ‘Fraggle,’ you say.”

“Consumer of the structures built by the devoted little workers who wear hats.”

“Aaaand that’s why not. Although your essay answer isn’t wrong.”

“Thank you,” Helena said, performing her funny little bow that struck Myka anew, each time she saw it, as a Victorian tell.

In fact, Myka had come home from the Warehouse just as that “crash course” was ending: Helena, as always after such a lesson, looked bemused but relieved, while Claudia was fidgeting with post-lecture satisfaction and, most likely, disappointment that she’d have to wait an entire week till the next one. Myka had asked, “Why does Helena need to know about the Muppets?”

Claudia responded with a puzzled, “Why doesn’t she?”

“Bert, Ernie, and the distinctions therebetween,” Helena said to Myka. “Would that I were you and could retain it all.” She smiled a small “but here we are” smile, and Myka leaned over the back of the sofa and kissed that smile. Because she wanted to; because she could. The smile then widened, and Myka tried not to make the mistake of wondering why every moment wasn’t like this one.

“You two can be pretty soft when you want to be,” Claudia remarked.

Myka had thought, No, we’re not this way when we want to be. It was when they weren’t actively wanting it—or needing it—that this ease stole upon them. But here it was... so Myka kissed Helena again, then asked, “What’s for dinner?”

The asking of that question, in the softness of that moment, had seemed an ideal step forward, one not about destiny or fraught inevitability, but balance and consistency. And then Myka did make the mistake: Why couldn’t every moment be like that? What was it that disturbed all the other moments?

Now, as they all headed for the Christmas aisle, Pete pulled on Myka’s arm and held her back a bit from the rest. “You mouthed the words,” he accused, very quietly.

“So what if I did? You know I can’t sing.”

“Maybe it makes a difference. H.G. said the drapes were only marginally better.”

“She didn’t sing either, by the way,” Myka pointed out.

Apparently her feelings about that were clear, for Pete said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I meant you and H.G. Incidentally, you walk a little bit like Big Bird.”

“We’re fine. Incidentally, if you got a chicken bone stuck in your throat I wouldn’t be at all upset about what could happen while I was saving your stupid life.”

“I sort of feel like if she choked on a chicken bone, right now, you wouldn’t want to let anybody else do the rib-breaking.”

Myka almost said a dark “you bet I wouldn’t,” but then she realized: “I think that’s always going to be true.”

Pete nodded. “Kiss her, kill her. I get it.”

Unless he was talking about vibes, he didn’t get it, not fully—Myka herself didn’t get it fully, and in everybody’s defense there was a lot to be got—but it was Christmas-sweet that he got as much as he did. She said a mollified, “Look, just don’t make me sing, okay?” Because if there was anything Myka was sure she and Helena definitely did not need right now, it was a replay of “you can’t sing” and “neither can you.”

“No promises, partner. When Leena says ‘jump’ I say ‘my knees are shot.’ You, on the other hand, when she says ‘sing’? Better say ‘how high.’”

“This is kind of a ‘my knees are shot’ situation,” Myka observed.

“What’s the matter with your knees?”

“Never mind.”

And then they reached the Christmas aisle. About which Myka felt, and felt she had a right to feel, a certain amount of post-traumatic stress.

“If you touch anything,” she told Pete, “I will turn your ribs into chicken bones.”

“That makes no sense.”

“And yet you understand me perfectly.”

He took a step away from her. “In a very mobbed-up way, yes I do.”

Helena, Claudia, Leena, and Steve had ringed themselves around a shelf, and Myka peeked over Helena’s shoulder. Only in the Warehouse, she figured, could a piece of music manage to project the idea that it was pleased with itself.

“It’s gloating at me,” Pete complained.

“It did make you do what it wanted,” Steve pointed out.

Claudia said, “It’s like it knew we’d show up right at this moment.”

“I’m pretty sure it did,” Leena said.

Myka, still at Helena’s shoulder, felt a tension in the body that was not quite touching hers. She felt a tension, too, in words that were not quite meant for her to hear as Helena murmured at the music, “What else do you know...”

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #B&W Holiday Gift Exchange #kla1991 #Hark #second part coming sooner rather than later #(I hope so anyway)

58 notes · View notes

thisiskatsblog · 4 years

Note

Hi Kat, I often come to seek your wisdom and thoughts on matters such as these because you were the first Larry blog I ever found and the last time I did, you really seemed to understand me and my conflicting emotions and messiness haha. So. My question is what are your thoughts on the Ray and SBB twitter accounts? I found them a few months back when I found a thread explaining a theory of why it's L&H and go back now and again to see what is being posted. I am the darkest Larrie there is, yet

contd: I always prefer to be a cynic because I know just how devastating it is when you put your hope in something only to have it crumbled. And in this fandom, you can't trust anything or anyone unless there is hardcore evidence and proof (aka every millisecond of footage of fetus Larry). There is talk about clues, numbers, iphone/androids and these cryptic riddles and hidden meanings. People do admit in the comments it feels like they're clowning yet I also see thousands resting their hopes contd: on these obscure tweets. I will admit the proof thread I originally read made it seem believable but I then I thought 'who am I kidding, there's no way it could genuinely by H&L'. It doesn't seem like something they would risk, nor something either of them would actually do. It seems like two people baiting Larries and giving us false hope (because in this era where we never get public interaction, many have become far more gullible and willing to believe anything, no matter how far

fetched. Ahh I don't know. It just seems far too good to be true that the two of them are communicating with us through cryptic pictures and riddles and messages. Yes I do believe they both have always found ways to communicate with us, whether it is through songs or body language, because we opened our eyes, we were by their sides and stay strong for them because this is a fight they will win, but I really don't know. It's very cruel if someone is indeed baiting us. Thanks x

(^^^ March 23rd)

2. Anonymous said:

March 25th 2020, 7:06:01 am · a month ago

okay so I just read some master posts explaining RBB and SBB in detail (I didn't get why people were hanging onto every word of Ray and Seymour's tweets like that) and my mind is literally going INSANE trying to process it all. As usual their reactions when asked about it directly on that christmas sweater interview told me all I needed to know back when I watched it but had no idea the sheer significance of these bears until now. It's crazy all the ways L&H showed us the truth all along, to

this day it's just mind-blowing to me. Like they were screaming in the midst of drowning (cough cough Director's Cut), desperate for us to listen and thank God so many of us weren't blind. Sometimes I do feel like maybe I am going crazy or I am delusional for believing in this, as FIMQ said, the cognitive dissonance is real. My mind spirals catastrophically and I doubt my own sanity, and then my mind plays all these touches and glances, slipped words and monumental actions on a loop, far too

much evidence to dispute, and I know I can never go back, how can I, when I've never in my whole life witnessed such magnificent, almost otherworldly love, never cared about any celebrity's love life yet this is far more than that, it is fighting for their love, because they should have never had to be that strong, to endure so much pain, so so young, but they weren't that strong for us to be weak. And I can't wait for the day they are free. No one on this earth deserves it more than L&H.

3. Anonymous said:

March 26th 2020, 12:44:47 pm · a month ago

Even I am the darkest Larrie (and yes there is no going back, ever) sometimes I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Loving and supporting and fighting so fucking hard for a love that is as tragic and excruciating as it is the most beautiful, magnificent thing I have ever witnessed. I wonder, did I get it all wrong and what if they don't find their way back to each other, my waking moments are haunted by memories of them, so young, so clearly smitten, like who the fuck finds their soulmate at

that age? What if even if it is 'always going to be h for Lou', even if they were 'too young to know they had everything' but h doesn't forgive him or remember that yes, their love is worth it? Sometimes I feel I am teetering on the brink of insanity, what if Lou actually has a kid? And Harry's album was about a horrible woman who never deserved him? I think I'll be strong for them, even if I have to wait ten or twenty years but I also feel so much pain thinking about it all. I have never

doubted my own sanity in my life, but lately I wonder so often if I am delusional for having faith in the love of two boys who we're fated to meet and fall in love. I can't even watch them in their baby boyfriends stage or watch edits anymore because I feel physical pain because they never deserved that. I feel pain thinking about their pain, no one should have to face that so young. To be that strong. I want to be strong yet and I try so hard but i also feel I am going mad. I don't even know.

______________________________

Three anons that I suspect are the same person (and maybe even the same one I just answered). Big hugs to you dear anonymous person! And thanks for the compliment. And the patience. I’m so sorry it took me so long to answer. Not sure if I have anything helpful to say, still, except: the fact that you’ve started doubting your sanity, that cognitive dissonance you feel, that dizzy head nauseous gut feeling you get when what you see and what you hear and what you read, just doesn’t match up but you haven’t been able to rationally unravel it yet. That feeling is probably your best proof that something is very amiss, and that Louis’ and Harry’s relationship is very real. We all know that feeling, and it tends to get worse the more caught up in fandom you get.

Your sanity is worth preserving though, so - in my view - it’s better to leave the fandom for a while, however short, to take care of yourself, and be strong for yourself when you feel like it’s draining you too much. You can do that by physically leaving social media, or by taking emotional, and mental distance on a regular basis.

I always remind myself that I have no influence over whether Louis and Harry eventually make it together. And next to no influence over their careers, management, label. I can decide what I do, and have a wee tiny bit of influence on the modest amount of followers of this blog, and then a wee little bit more through the other one - but all in all, my actions, the person they matter most to, the person they influence most, is me. So I try to do, in life, and in this fandom, the things that make me happy. Worrying, does not make me happy. Arguing with hets rads antis and all the other new abbreviations i don’t really get, doesnt make me happy either - I only do it when I’m having one of those days or one of them really sets me off like the other day. But in general, what makes me happy is focusing on the positive. What this fandom has brought me. And has brought other LGBTQ+ people. What are we learning here, what stories do we tell eachother, how are we making eachother better here.

All of that said: Louis, and Harry, have both sung, in this past year, that they “made it”, and referenced eachother’s music videos in important ways. So I honestly don’t think there’s much to worry about. I think that, whatever was causing them difficulties, they already “found their way back”. I think they are allright.

And I want us to be allright to. That’s something we can influence, that we can do for eachother. So I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you

I enjoyed reading your SBB post, talking about the sweater interview. That part of it was wonderful, and everything we needed to know. I took RBB and SBB with a big grain of salt in the beginning, but I have reason to believe it was them, or someone very close to them, and that interview did confirm that.

With or without permission, that’s difficult to say. Was it queerbaiting? I’ve been asked that question so many times. In a sense noo, because they are LGBTQ+ themselves - but there is the fact that RBB & SSB very deliberately engaged with LGBTQ+ fans and kept them here while they must have known, at least after bullshit 2.0 happened, that they were going to stay closeted.

I don’t know exactly how I feel about that. It was a crazy ride, and some of it was enjoyable, and I think the support is important to them, so I do want to stay around. But I also think it’s shit that LGBTQ+ fans in this fandom have done SO much to support them, and are getting so much shit in return, still, not from them, not at all, but in this environment - and no one is stopping it.

And that’s not just the case in Louis’ fandom, where we’re definitely experiencing enormous amounts of cognitive dissonance with the bearding and babygate. But also in Harry’s. When LGBTQ+ fans bring rainbows night after night, but it’s constantly portrayed as if Harry is the one bringing them, and when it’s LGBTQ+ fans organising to light up arena’s night after night across Europe, but the only time that gets featured is when it’s two straight girls organising it, insisting they are not doing it for queer fans but because we should be one happy family inclusiveness all around.. I can understand the frustration, the impression of queerbaiting, the feeling of being taken for granted, that made some people leave Harry’s fandom. I will stay, I think he’s amazing, and I think he needs and is grateful for the support, but as an LGBTQ+ fan, I still feel like I am in a hostile environment - knowing he is with Louis, and that he cannot speak about it, has never spoken about any concrete relationship with a man. That’s... - that still tells LGBTQ+ people they are not 100% legit.

And that’s probably not a lot better for the straight fans who see what we see: a beautiful relationship they can’t speak about and that’s denied all the time. That, too, tells you your thoughts are not legit, and therefore you are not legit. The gaslighting... it’s probably the most poisonous, detrimental aspect of this fandom. Coming back after more than a year off, I was shocked, at how clear things seemed to me again, compared to how doubtful I had been about my own opinions when I left. Taking time off is not abandoning them. Remember that. For me, it made me stronger, and it allows me to support them now.

So I hope this gets better. Soon. I am still convinced they want that too. And when I start doubting, I listen to Only The Brave...

#doubts #sbb #rbb #cognitive dissonance #gaslighting #Anonymous #ask

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flamebearrel · 4 years

Text

Split Number One

Fandom: Super Smash Bros

Synopsis: It was simple, really. Three formidable fighters, or at least two and a kid trying his best, but only one could be saved. As experienced, top-notch heroes, Mario and Kirby should have seen it all before. They could have easily made the right choice. Yet they didn't. And it doesn't seem the winner understands.

Word Count: 1607

Original Post Date: March 6, 2019

Characters: Villager, Mario, Kirby (Minor Master Hand, Sheik, Marth, Galeem)

Ships: None

Trigger Warnings: None

Other Notes: I see Villager as a kid (like twelve years old); Kirby can talk with a simple vocabulary; the Trophy rules kind of align with Subspace

Ao3 Link

~~~

Victory!

The R.O.B. clone fell to the floor before melting into a puddle of gold. As the substance slowly evaporated, they watched the Spirit inside rise from it. Mario gave a little smile. The Spirit floated for a moment, seeming to give a nod of appreciation, before flying away from the path and into safety.

“...I’m pretty sure that Guardian Spirit isn’t something we should just let go around,” Mario thought aloud, picking up the tiny puffball by his feet. Kirby blinked in response.

“Is that okay?”

“Eh, probably not, but don’t worry. There’s bigger things to think about.” The plumber put a hand on his friend’s head. “Let’s-a keep going, little guy.”

There were trophies on three sides of the courtyard, standing silently. The once-shimmering blue hair of the Hero King on the left had dulled. They looked up ahead, where Sheik towered menacingly, eyes void of any emotion. To the right stood the shortest of the three, Villager, with the smile he usually wore to battle wiped off his face.

Glancing between them, Mario felt something stir inside of him. Dismay, perhaps? All these fighters, individually trapped in eternal stasis, while he was up and running. With that train of thought, choosing who to save first felt like playing favorites.

So he’d leave that to his partner. The man with the red cap lowered Kirby to the floor again, asking, “Who do you want to help first?”

The puffball paused for a moment before running up to Villager. “Him!”

“Sounds good to me,” Mario said with a nod. Reaching down, counting in his head, the plumber tapped the base of the trophy and waited for the fight to begin.

It wasn’t that difficult with the both of them there. As Mario landed the final Super Jump Punch and sent Villager through the blast zone, the ropes of light circling his body tore to pieces. The mayor fell to the ground, battered, unconscious.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

“Kirby,” Villager muttered, “Mario… what are you… ow, everything hurts…”

Immediately Kirby ran to him, ducking under the weakened fighter’s arm. “It’s okay.” He pushed, trying to help Villager up. “You’re okay now.”

“Huh…?”

As he got to his feet, the third member took in his surroundings. “Where are we…? How did we get here? I can only remember the light.”

Mario nodded. “That’s what we’ve-a been calling this place, the ‘World of Light’! Though I wish it was as pleasant as it sounded. We should… probably find a better name-”

“I’d say.” Holding Kirby’s stubby hand in his own, Villager stepped towards the center of the courtyard. “With all this ‘light, light, light’, I’m surprised we all aren’t blind by n-…”

There was nothing to do but trail off as the mayor rested his eyes on the other two trophies. He didn’t respond. For a moment, all that was there was the weight of the situation finding a seat in an audience of shoulders.

Then the plumber cleared his throat.

“Oh, uh…” Snapping back to the present, Villager turned to them again. “Sorry, I… we should probably help them out now, huh?”

“Just what I was thinking.”

With that, Kirby sauntered to Sheik. “Here, then! If we keep going, we can save everyone!” He reached out to tap the base of the ninja’s trophy. “So let’s-”

Flash.

The three of them jolted, grouping together at the center of the courtyard in sight of the giant hand that was suddenly there. It was a Master Hand clone, again, looming above.

“Stay behind me,” Mario growled. A fireball flickered into the palm of his hand and he took a step toward the clone-

But the right hand didn’t want to fight. He simply snapped his fingers, and bam, something was there. They could do nothing but watch in dismay as glowing energy shields formed around Sheik and Marth. And then the clone was gone, and Mario extinguished his fireball and everything was cold.

What could anyone say?

Mario ventured, “Well. This might be a bit harder than we thought.”

Then, all of a sudden, Villager was sprinting toward the shield, shrieking, “No! No, you can’t do that! You can’t!” Without his boxing gloves, he punched at the barrier, drawing back when it burned his hand. Then he put them on and tried again. It didn’t work either. “That’s not fair,” he screeched. He planted a tree, grew it to full height, then sent it toppling. The barrier left it in splinters. A bowling ball, a Lloid Rocket, everything was dropped on it, and nothing, nothing, nothing worked.

The other two watched a while, speechless.

When he couldn’t take it anymore, Kirby rushed to the mayor’s side, pulling him back by his shirt. “Villager, stop, please! It’s not gonna do anything…”

“But I…” For a moment he resisted, but, slowly, he let the fireworks in his hands drop to the floor. He shook his head. The sparks fizzled away in the dust.

“…Are you okay?”

Quiet again. Stepping forward, ready to offer support, Mario opened his mouth- Yet no sound was allowed to escape him, because just then, Villager turned.

“Why did you do it?”

The man in overalls spluttered, “Wh-what?”

“Take a look around!” Villager gestured wildly at the shields, then at the rest of the world. “Everyone is dead, Mario! Just dead, completely dead, unless some hero can go out and save everyone. Do you know how impossible that is?”

“I know it sounds impossible, but I’m-a sure we can-”

“No, you don’t get it! Even if we did manage to save someone, Galeem would just mess it up again. Regular people can’t fix this!”

Reaching a gloved hand towards the younger fighter, Mario protested, “But we’re not regular people-! We wouldn’t be here if we were…”

“You’re not regular people,” hissed Villager, “but riddle me this! You have three choices: A warrior prince, a ninja, or some kid who panics as soon as the lights turn on. And you choose the kid? WHY?! What can I do that they can’t?” He scoffed. “I’m not a hero. I can’t save the world. I can barely even do my own job! So what do you want? Tell me! Do you want the extra burden, or just someone to pick on? Am I- am I comic relief?! Just- Just-! WHY DID YOU CHOOSE ME?!”

At that, his voice cracked.

Out of arguments, eyes glistening, the mayor simply repeated, “Why did you choose me…?” Then he slid down to the ground, in silence.

“…”

Mario stepped up to the younger fighter and took a seat next to him. He hesitated no longer that a moment. “Please, don’t-a go thinking that way. I stand by what I said, ya know? None of us are here without a reason. Like…” The man in overalls tapped his chin. “You’ve got confidence when you fight. It’s there in your smile, I see it. And- and you’re reasonable, something this team probably needs.”

“That’s a lie. Sheik and Marth wouldn’t yell at you as soon as they woke up.”

“This is your first apocalyptic disaster, paisano. If you haven’t seen ‘em in action, I wouldn’t be so sure!”

Villager pulled his knees close, staring at a crack in the stone floor. “Then I’ll never be sure, I guess.”

The plumber sighed. “Listen to me. We’re gonna save them; I can promise that. It might take a while, but we’re not stopping until everyone is here and everyone is safe. So what if you’re new to this? That-a doesn’t make you any less of a family member. You’re as much a part of this team as us, Villager. And we need your help just like you need ours.”

“We can all help each other,” Kirby chimed. A second passed without dispute before he pattered up and gave the mayor a hug.

Mario wrapped an arm around him too. Defeated, the kid leaned against the plumber’s chest, and the three simply sat. For a few seconds they were a single bundle of consciousness in a sleeping world.

“Okay,” Villager finally said. He straightened up. “Maybe, just maybe… You have a chance of being right. We should get back on the road.”

As the puffball next to them clapped his hands in satisfaction, Mario grinned. “There we go! It’s a good thing you finally came around- we can’t have the guy who holds the supplies be too upset to let us use ‘em!”

“Ha-ha, very funny.” He totally wasn’t smiling anyway.

The trio staggered to their feet and took their first steps down the rock path, Kirby leading the way. As he went to follow, Mario chanced one last look at the trophies behind him. The energy shields stared back, unyielding, undaunted, unbreakable.

Something about it shot dread through his veins. Galeem was toying with them. What else did he want? What else would he do?

Clearing these thoughts with a shake of his head, the red-capped man took off after the others. There wasn’t time to think about it. They just had to keep going. Going, going… Otherwise they’d never be able to save everyone.

It didn’t matter if there were more forked paths. It didn’t matter what Galeem was going to do. They’d fix it all, somehow. It couldn’t be impossible, because at the very least…

A Spirit whisked past then and there, nearly toppling them. Kirby looked at the other two, and when they nodded, he reached up to catch it like he would any other falling star. Another fight. Mario counted down…

Three, two, one.

Go.

At least they had conquered split number one.

#smash bros fanfiction #smash bros #smash ultimate #super smash bros #super smash bros ultimate #fanfic #villager #red shirt villager #mario #kirby #master hand #animal crossing #super mario #world of light #krispy kreme word machine

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raywritesthings · 4 years

Text

Bird in a Storm 3/17

My Writing Fandom: Arrow Characters: Laurel Lance, Oliver Queen, Tommy Merlyn, Thea Queen, John Diggle Pairing: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen Summary: The confrontation between the Hood and SWAT on the roof of the Winick Building goes differently, altering the course of Laurel’s career, relationships and efforts to save her city forever, the shockwaves of such an altered path making themselves felt throughout her family and friends. *Can be read on my AO3, link is in bio*

The end of the next week started out as a normal day. More normal than the last couple weeks had been, anyway. She had gotten up early, moving about the apartment with care not to wake Tommy, and gotten dressed for work. This was helped by the fact that she finally had use of both arms again. Talk about taking small things for granted.

Since she could drive herself, she met Thea at CNRI instead of being picked up by her brother or his bodyguard. She hadn’t minded that routine, but she liked having the freedom of her own movement.

A few hours into filling out some of the preliminary paperwork for a deposition, she received an email on her computer. Their boss wanted to see her in her office.

“Thea, see if you can locate the Schmidt folder. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Laurel headed back into the office. “Hey, Eric. What’s up?”

He looked up, the slightest frown on his face. “Sit down, Laurel. And close the door.”

She did so. “Why do I feel like this isn’t a ‘just checking in’ meeting?”

Eric sighed. “Because it’s not. Look, Laurel, you’re one of our best here. You know that. And I don’t like having to do this.”

There was a but hanging so heavily there she didn’t even bother to voice it. Just kept staring her boss down.

“It’s our investors. The ones we have left, so you can imagine we need to do all we can to hang onto them.”

“Yes.”

“Which is why I’m telling you they’re not exactly happy to have you on staff here.”

“What?”

Eric held up his hands. “Look, everything with the Hood is kind of making them nervous. Makes me nervous a bit too, if I’m being honest. The guy’s unpredictable. And they don’t like his methods.”

“I’m guessing they like his choice of targets even less,” she said with narrowed eyes. It figured they were more willing to empathize with their guilty fellows than to care about the innocents the Hood had helped.

“The point is, they’re not comfortable continuing to support our organization while you have this- this connection to him. And Kate Spencer has had a few things to say about it as well.”

“Let me get this straight.” Laurel leaned forward in her chair. “They’re holding my job hostage?”

“They’re holding all of us hostage. If you aren’t gone, CNRI is. But, there’s one way they’re willing to reconsider.”

“And that would be?”

“If you were to make a public statement clarifying that you do not support the vigilante known as the Hood or his activities, they would be happy to see you remain on staff.”

“Happy to see me toeing the party line, you mean.”

“It’s out of my hands, Laurel,” Eric said. “You’re the only one who can help yourself here. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“I’ll expect your decision tomorrow.”

Laurel was able to register the dismissal for what it was, even if she felt detached somehow from this moment. Like this was happening to someone else, and she was only a passive observer. She stood and left the room to return to her desk, but it didn’t even feel like she’d been the one to move. Her mind was too busy racing.

The philanthropists who thought they were God’s gift to man for keeping CNRI’s doors open were getting nervous about her connection to the Hood. To Oliver. If she wanted to stay, she had to delegitimize his whole mission to save the city. But she couldn’t, not when it was the one thing she really had left to believe in.

“So I got that file you were asking for—” Thea looked up as she approached and paused. “Hey, you okay?”

She was a beat too late in responding, and she was sure her smile looked forced. “Yeah. Just, uh, had to go over some things with my boss.”

“Okay.” Thea was watching her, so Laurel pushed everything else from her mind for the time being. She didn’t want her friend to worry.

Her boss was giving her the day to decide, but Laurel already knew what her decision had to be. Without Oliver, she would have never seen Adam Hunt’s victims get back the money they were owed thanks to the judge Hunt had bought who she’d been due to present the case in front of; she’d be dead in the ground thanks to Martin Sommers and the Triad; Peter Declan’s daughter would be an orphan. There was no decision to make. Even if it cost her her job.

Laurel stood. She couldn’t maintain her composure here, and she needed time to think about what her next move would truly have to be.

“Hey, Thea? I actually need to take a half day today. I’m really sorry.”

“Okay,” her friend agreed uncertainly. There was almost a scared look to her eyes.

“Just ask Anastasia for any additional tasks, and you can go home whenever you want.” She shrugged into her coat and rolled her left shoulder a couple of times to work some lingering stiffness out of it. She’d been out of the splint for only a couple of weeks now, and her mandatory physical therapy had just drawn to an end. That was lucky; no job would mean no health insurance. Yet again, it was probably on purpose. No one would know better how bad the optics would look on firing an injured nonprofit employee than a group of lawyers.

Laurel paused alone in the stairwell and pressed a hand to her forehead. No job… what was she going to do?

---

Tommy was just getting ready to head out to the Verdant when their front door opened and Laurel walked in.

“Oh. You’re still here.”

“Hey, you’re home early.” He leaned in for a brief kiss, but Laurel turned her face so that his lips landed on her cheek instead.

“Yeah, there’s a reason for that.” Her smile faltered and then fell as he stepped back to look at her. “I lost my job.”

He dropped his keys. “What?”

“Apparently it has been decided that CNRI and I should part ways because the investors are making noise upstairs. Not to mention the DA,” Laurel explained. She walked around him, setting her bag down and kicking her shoes off along the way.

“Noise about what?”

“The Hood,” she admitted as she found her spot on the couch.

Him again. He only barely held back a groan. “Well, what about it? You told the police you didn’t have any information to help their investigation.” He eyed her sitting there for a moment, wondering not for the first time if that was true.

“They think my association with him sends a message. And they probably don’t like that he’s gone after some of their friends.”

“But that’s what he’s doing. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” He walked over towards the couch as well. “Just because the Hood’s got some creepy thing for you—”

“He does not have a thing for me,” Laurel said with a shake of her head.

Tommy felt that was very much in dispute, but he set it aside to focus on the main issue.

“There’s gotta be something we can do. They can’t just fire you like that, after all the cases you’ve won them.”

“Well, they said I could possibly stay on if I publicly denounced the Hood,” she told him.

Relief hit him like a wave. “Okay. Good. At least they’re not totally unreasonable.”

“I’m not going to do it, Tommy.” Her voice and gaze were completely steady even as she was turning the whole world upside down. “I can’t.”

He only barely kept his voice below shouting. “Laurel, come on. What’s the problem?”

“It’s intimidation, for one thing. They’re trying to delegitimize what he’s doing. Stop people from taking his message to heart to keep them from fighting against the powerful and the corrupt in Starling.” Laurel crossed her arms over her chest and continued, “And anyway, it’d be a lie. I still believe in what he’s doing, and I think it’s a good thing. I don’t want to be a part of what stops that.”

“You do good things for the city. Think of your clients, all those people you’ve helped.”

“A lot of those people this year only got help because the Hood intervened. Hunt, Sommers, Brodeur, all of those guys would have walked away from a regular court case. The justice system in this city is broken, no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise.”

“So you’re fine with him just breaking it more?”

“If that’s what it takes to keep innocent people from suffering.”

She was determined to be stubborn. There was no getting through to her, at least for the moment. Tommy threw his hands up and went to grab his jacket.

“How long did they give you to decide?”

“Tomorrow. I have to go in and clean out my desk.”

“Or to make your statement. I have to go to the club, but we’re not done talking about this.”

“I’ve made up my mind, Tommy,” Laurel said.

He paused at the door and shook his head. “Just let the idea of unemployment and no money sink in for a few hours, okay? It did wonders for me.”

He headed down to his parked car in a much sourer mood than he’d wanted to be in to start back at work. Laurel was determined and not listening to him. But if she wouldn’t listen to him, maybe…

He was going to have to swallow his pride on this one. At least for the moment.

---

Tommy was running late. Oliver didn’t mind that so much; it put off his plans for tonight. The longer he could avoid heading to Queen Consolidated to confront his own mother, the better.

And he soon received additional distraction in the form of his sister, who hurried up to the bar with a nervous sort of energy.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

“Ollie, I think Laurel was fired.”

“What?” He couldn’t have heard that right. “What for?”

“I don’t know. She went in to talk to her boss, and then she told me she was taking a half day, but Anastasia and some of the others started talking after she left,” his sister said all in a rush.

Some people talking was just gossip, but why would they assume Laurel had been fired? What was going on?

He spotted Tommy at last, and his best friend looked in about as bad a mood as he’d ever seen him.

“Ollie, you gotta help me out.”

“Laurel was fired.”

“Yeah, how’d you — oh, Speedy, hey.”

“Hey,” said Thea. “It’s true?”

“Not quite.” Tommy looked at him. “She says they’re willing to let her stay if she just makes a statement about how crazy and wrong the Hood is.”

Oliver didn’t have to feign his shock. “They’re firing her because of the Hood?”

“Yeah, well their investors are kind of his target profile, aren’t they? And he is crazy, I agree with them on that.” Tommy scowled. “But Laurel doesn’t.”

His eyes squeezed shut. “She’s refusing to make the statement.”

“She’s refusing to make the statement,” Tommy echoed in confirmation.

“Well, isn’t it enough that this guy got her shot?” Thea asked. “I mean, they have to know she’s not in league with him if he was willing to use her as a human shield.”

Oliver tried not to wince at the words or the disgust with which Thea spoke them. His sister wasn’t wrong to feel that way; it was one of his lowest moments, and he was still paying for the repercussions of it now.

And Laurel was paying for them perhaps even more.

Tommy’s anger had faded. He turned to him with pleading in his eyes. “I can’t watch her throw her life away on this guy, Ollie.”

“You won’t have to,” he promised. Oliver walked away from the bar and out to the back, swinging onto his motorcycle. As he drove, the comm hooked into his helmet activated.

“Oliver, we really need to get a move on.”

“Not right now, Digg.”

“Why not?”

“Laurel’s been fired because of her connection to the Hood.”

There was a pause on the other end. “Damn.”

“I have to talk to her. My mother can wait another night.” He knew he couldn’t put it off forever, but Laurel’s problem was far more time sensitive.

He went up to her apartment and knocked, and Laurel didn’t look at all surprised to see him when she opened the door.

“So, I take it you heard the news?”

“From Tommy.” He stepped through the doorway as she moved back, and he stood by the couch rather than sit down. Laurel shut the door and walked over.

“I’m going to make sure Thea is given another sponsor there to finish out her community service,” she told him, which caught him off guard for a moment.

“Well, thank you. But that’s not my main concern.” He looked her in the eye. “Tommy said there’s a way for you to keep your job.”

“I’m guessing he also told you I’m not interested in that way.”

His brow furrowed. “Laurel, this is an easy fix.”

She scoffed. “What about any of this is easy?”

“No one’s asking you for my identity. They’re just asking you to say what I’m doing is wrong.”

“How can I do that?”

“You just—” he struggled for the right word for a few moments. “—do.”

“But you aren’t — what you’re doing is complicated,” Laurel settled on. “And your methods sometimes have concerned me. I don’t know that I agree with everything. But it’s necessary work. For the state that this city is in, it’s needed.”

He tried changing tactics. “My father asked me to right his wrongs, to bring justice to the people who are poisoning the city. Letting those same people force you out of your job is directly counter to that mission. I can’t let that happen.”

Laurel only frowned. “Maybe it’s all about the mission to you, Oliver, but the people in the Glades don’t know that. What they know is that for the first time in years they have hope. They feel like someone has seen their struggle and decided to do something about it. How can I tell them that they are wrong to believe in that and then turn around and expect them to trust me to fight for them?”

He didn’t have an answer for that. They both knew it. Where he relied on secrecy and lies, Laurel had always kept her integrity when dealing with her clients. Letting her in on his identity had complicated that.

“How can I let you do this, Laurel? It’s your career, your life.”

“And it’s my decision to make. I would’ve made it knowing your identity or not, but at least knowing it gives me more than just a blind faith.”

Oliver didn’t know how Laurel or people in the Glades could have faith in him. He was a killer going after other killers. That was all. He wasn’t some hero.

“What will you do?” It was the only appeal he had.

“I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’m going to. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“It’s not that simple, Laurel.” He shook his head. “I’m always going to worry about you.”

She sighed. “Then I guess we have to settle for that.” She walked over to and sat on one of her chairs. “Look, I’m not happy to be losing my job, but I’d be even less happy if I compromised myself to keep it.”

“Nothing’s totally free from compromise. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to to keep going,” he said.

“But I haven’t been going anywhere at CNRI,” she replied. “All of my big cases this year have been won or settled because of the things you were doing as the vigilante. The law on its own has stopped being able to fix things in this city. Isn’t that why you’re out there?”

The problem was she was right. The problem, too, was that being right didn’t get her job back. He sat on the arm of the couch.

“What can I do? Do they need money? Different backers? I could—”

“You need that money to disguise purchasing your arrows,” Laurel cut him off. “And it would be your mother’s call as to whether Queen Consolidated became a full-time backer.”

Considering the little John had picked up from spying on his mother, Oliver doubted she would make the time or expense at the moment.

“Oliver, you set out to save this city, not my job.”

“Well, it’s part of saving the city. You help save it,” he insisted.

Her lips twitched into a smile despite herself.

“You’re really going to tell them no?”

She nodded.

Oliver sighed. That was the thing about Laurel; when her mind was made up, that was it. And unfortunately, he hadn’t made a single argument for why she should denounce the Hood that didn’t ultimately come back to keeping her comfortable. Laurel never cared about that.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. Ultimately this was his fault. He’d gotten too close, forgotten that while he’d protected his own identity with a hood that Laurel hadn’t had that same protection.

“It’s going to be fine, Ollie. I’ve already started a job search,” she stated.

He gave a small grin. “Of course you have.”

“So, you can tell Tommy that things will be okay,” she continued. “I know he’s upset.”

“He’s just worried about you.”

“Well, he seemed more angry at the Hood than anything,” she replied. “Do you think…?”

Oliver shook his head. “The less people that know, the better. And like you said, he isn’t exactly a fan.”

Laurel’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah.”

His phone buzzed, and Oliver checked it to find a message from Digg: Your mom’s gone home

“Something wrong?”

“No. No, I just missed something tonight.”

“You mean the vigilante did?” She stood and moved to the door. “Really, Oliver, I don’t want to be in the way of anything.”

“It’s fine. It wasn’t urgent.” Digg would probably say otherwise, but that didn’t matter right now. “You’re more important.”

“Well, now that you’ve seen I’m perfectly fine, I shouldn’t keep you any longer.”

He got up, meeting her at the door. “If you need anything,” he began.

“I know where to find you,” she finished for him. “Goodnight, Ollie.”

“Goodnight.”

As he left, Oliver did decide to take an early night. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to the club and Tommy empty-handed.

Laurel leaving CNRI because of the Hood. What had he done?

#lauriver #laurel x oliver #laurel lance #oliver queen #arrow #green arrow #black canary #my writing #bird in a storm

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revisitedgrunt · 5 years

Text

Anonymous said:

“I could also say if sun was a woman they would ship it sun and blake have actual chemistry with each other romantically and I have seen bxy shippers desperately jump through hoops to ignore evidence or act like black sun was sunk etc . I have seen bxy shippers trying to use monty card as well. or act like because monty said there will be lgbt characters it must be team rwby

not to mention that despite how bXy shippers pretend blake X yang isnt confirmed despite how much they try to twist adams lines as hinting at romance like destroy everything you love. or ignore adams racism or trying to equate bxy to renoras moments ignoring context and the way it was shot all they do is but both of them involve holding hands. or another argument I have seen is but both pairings in jnpr involve partners dating when that doesnt mean it has to be the case for rwby.”

Hi Anon, thanks for getting in touch. I was hoping my last post would start a conversation. Allow me to respond to your points.

First things first, my post wasn't about the relevant merits of Blacksun or Bumbleby. It was about how heterosexual and homosexual ships are viewed differently, even when both have evidence supporting them. I could have used another show, or other ships. The reason I used RWBY to illustrate my point is because the show made it very easy for me. It contains a scene where a man winks at a woman, and a scene where a woman winks at a woman. As the same thing happens in both scenes, it makes it incredibly easy to directly compare the two.

When you strip everything else away, both scenes contain the exactly same thing, a woman getting winked at. Both winks are of a flirtatious nature, the only difference is the gender of the winker, so why is the M/F ship automatically accepted, but the F/F ship is immediately dismissed? Why do you think that happens? I'd really, really like to get your thoughts on that.

I can give you my perspective. We still live in a very heteronormative society. It doesn't help that the media we consume conditions us to accept certain things, especially when it comes to attraction and romance. It all reinforces the notion that if a man and woman share an attraction, they are going to end up together. A lot of straight people, and this isn't their fault, lack perspective when it comes to homosexual romance. They don't see what's happening because they don't have a frame of reference. This is why people should be more open minded. If someone with more knowledge in a subject tells you something, you should listen. For example, if a black person says something is racist, it's probably racist. If a queer person says something is queer, it's probably queer.

As I said before, let me know why you think heterosexual and homosexual ships are treated differently.

Let me go back to the winking for a second. Some people have pointed out that Yang is playful and she's winked at other people, including Weiss. This is 100% correct. If Yang had made a joke, or was joking around in general, we could question if the wink was flirtatious. However, for the entire scene Yang is nothing but serious. At the end, when she says “and if you feel like coming out tomorrow, I'll save you a dance.”, listen to the tone of her voice. She sounds sincere, genuine, even hopeful. She doesn’t sound like she’s joking beacuse this isn’t a joking matter for her. She's inviting Blake out and promising to dance with her. This seems pretty clear cut to me. The suggestion that Yang is just being playful further reinforces my point on how differently heterosexual and homosexual interactions are viewed.

Now, onto the points you raise.

“I could also say if sun was a woman they would ship it”

You are 100% right. Do you know why we would ship them? Because we are desperate for representation. We latch onto any homosexual pairing that has even the slightest hint of becoming romantic, simply because we don't get the sheer amount straight people do. GLAAD published a report called “Where We Are on TV”. It covers the 2018-2019 TV season and states “ Of the 857 regular characters expected to appear on broadcast scripted primetime programming this season, 75 (8.8%) were identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer.” Heterosexual people can watch any show on TV and find someone to identify with. Queer people get 8.8%.

“sun and blake have actual chemistry with each other romantically and I have seen bxy shippers desperately jump through hoops to ignore evidence or act like black sun was sunk etc ”

No right minded Bumbleby shipper disputes the fact that Blake and Sun shared an attraction. That is clear from what is presented on the show. The split comes when the word romantic is used. We all know that attraction does not always equal romance. I haven't seen any evidence on the show to suggest that Blake and Sun's relationship went further than mutual attraction, before evolving into an amazing friendship that really helped Blake.

My personal opinion is that Sun stopped pursuing a romantic relationship at the end of Volume 3. He saw how much Blake cared for Yang and resolved to be the best friend he could be for Blake. I believe his speech to Neptune in Volume 6 confirms this. Having said that, the show isn't over, we have no idea what the writers are going to do. Maybe they will go with Blacksun, none of us really know what's going to happen.

Let me be perfectly clear here. I had assumed that Blake and Sun would enter into a romantic relationship. However, at this point in the story, I no longer think this. Am I saying Blacksun was never a valid ship? No. Am I criticising Blacksun? No. Am I saying you shouldn't support Blacksun? Of course not. I'm not even saying Blacksun has sunk. It's not sunk because the show isn't over, and both of them are still alive. That's the big difference here, in most fandoms, even if a M/F ship seems unlikely, it's still given more validation than an F/F ship. This is the point I'm getting at. Lets give M/F and F/F ships the same level of respect.

I'm not sure what evidence we're ignoring, or what hoops we're jumping through. Please provide some examples for us to discuss.

“I have seen bxy shippers trying to use monty card as well. or act like because monty said there will be lgbt characters it must be team rwby”

I guess Bumbleby shippers do use the Monty card. When we use it, we usually say “Monty wouldn't have a problem with Bumbleby.” We feel safe saying this because we have actual evidence to back this up. I wrote an entire post called “Monty Oum and LGBT representation” that supports this view. We don't make unsupported claims like the people that say Monty wouldn't want Bumbleby to happen. They have not been able to provide one shred of evidence to support this. Do you really think these two sides are the same? One is saying Monty was a loving, inclusive guy and the other side is calling him a homophobe.

The LGBT characters don't have to be on team RWBY. There's also no reason that the LGBT characters shouldn't be on team RWBY. There's no reason they shouldn't be Blake and Yang.

“not to mention that despite how bXy shippers pretend blake X yang isnt confirmed despite how much they try to twist adams lines as hinting at romance like destroy everything you love. or ignore adams racism”

I'm a bit confused here. Bumbleby shippers pretend Bumbleby isn't confirmed? So you're saying Bumbleby is confirmed? I think I can safely say that the majority of Bumbleby shippers will admit that Bumbleby isn't canon yet. We think they are right on the edge, but they aren't in a romantic relationship yet, meaning they aren't canon, yet.

We don't try to twist Adam's lines to hint at romance, the actual lines spoken by Adam hint at romance. “I will make it my mission to destroy everything you love. Starting with her.” “What does she even see in you!” Adam can see how much Blake cares about Yang, and he considers Yang a romantic rival.

I think you're implying that Adam hates Yang because she's human. I can see the logic, but Adam never uses the fact that Yang is human against her. So, there's nothing there to ignore. He could have said “Starting with that filthy human.” or “Why does she care so much about a human!” He doesn't, he clearly cares far more about Blake's feelings towards Yang, than the fact that Yang is human.

“or trying to equate bxy to renoras moments ignoring context and the way it was shot all they do is but both of them involve holding hands.”

Can you clarify what context we are ignoring? The way I remember it is, Ren and Nora fight the Nuckelavee, a monster that has traumatised them. They defeat it and grow closer, as evidenced by the looks they share, and them holding hands on the airship. The fandom unanimously agrees that Renora is now canon. Next we have Blake and Yang fight Adam, a monster that has traumatised them. They defeat him and grow closer, as evidenced by the looks they share, and them holding hands on the airship. For some reason, the fandom doesn't agree that Bumbleby is canon.

Damn it, this example would have been even better than the winking scenes. Renora and Bumbleby really does highlight the different ways heterosexual and homosexual ships are viewed.

“another argument I have seen is but both pairings in jnpr involve partners dating when that doesnt mean it has to be the case for rwby.”

I don't remember ever seeing this. Of course it doesn't have to be the case. If someone says this, I don't think they're being serious. I think it's safe to say that no one seriously expects Whiterose to become canon. The work hasn't been done and the hints aren't there. Bumbleby is another matter. There's a reason we think this ship is going to be canon. It's because the work has been done, the hints have been there and by the end of Volume 6, that line between platonic and romantic is looking pretty blurred.

If you haven't seen the hints and the work, please refer back to what I said earlier. If a queer person tells you something is queer, it's probably queer.

Thanks anon, that was fun. Come back if you have more points you'd like to discuss.

#rwby #Blake Belladonna #yang xiao long #bumbleby #lgbt representation

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telephobos · 5 years

Text

Recipe for Tartar-Sauce: A guide to understanding Octo Expansion’s AI.

So we’ve all had some time to enjoy Octo Expansion and it’s amazing story, and I think that enough time has passed for it to be safe to bring up this subject. Let’s talk about a certain AI that’s been causing quite a splash in the fandom lately. I am of course referring to Commander Tartar, the telephone with a love for blending.

So now you’re thinking “What’s so special about this guy? He’s just an asshole who blended people.”

Well what if I told you there was more to it than that? What if I told you there was differences in the Japanese and English versions?

What if I told you that the Treehouse Localization dun goofed? Again?

With the help of my friend @nenilein, who translated these pieces, I’m going to show you the differences between the two Tartars. This is going to be a long read, so it’ll be under the cut. Bring a smoothie with you and get comfortable!

First, let’s start off by listening to what Tartar has to say in the English version:

“I am Tartar, an AI construct created 12,000 years ago by a brilliant professor. My prime directive is to pass humanity's vast knowledge on to the next worthy lifeform.

When your kind became self-aware, I hoped that my long wait was finally over. But as I observed your evolution, I WAS DISGUSTED! You wage war over minor genetic deviations. You obsess over trivial fashion choices.

And so I created a new prime directive: destroy this world and start anew! From the best and brightest test subjects, I created a sludge of supreme DNA. A primordial ooze from which the ultimate lifeform will emerge.

Today is the day my vision becomes reality, as I destroy Inkopolis and everyone in it!”

Tartar sounds pretty petty, huh? Well, that’s not quite the case in the Original Japanese version:

“My name is Tartar… An Artificial Intelligence left behind by the Professor…” (Note: the word “Hakase” can mean both, ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’. It’s usually translates as ‘doctor’ in real life and as ‘professor’ in fiction. Note 2: He uses the sino-japanese, word “jinkou-chinou” for artificial intelligence, rather than the more common Anglicism “ei-ai”, which makes it sound more serious and like ‘hard’ sci-fi, rather than science-fantasy.) "In the 12000 years since I have received my orders from the Professor, I have been continuously collecting data on you fools…” (Note: He uses “Watashi” in Katakana for himself which is the most neutral you can get, and uses “Kisamara” to refer to the Cephalopods, which is an insulting way to say “You all”) “You… Molluskkind flourished with impressive speed,…” “…and finally achieved intelligence none inferior to that which formerly belonged to Humankind.” “HOWEVER!” “Can you deny that all you use it for is to lead pointless territorial disputes among one another!?”

“It is because you fools only live according to your own, fleeting desires.”

“You were supposed to be the seed of a new Humanity which would lead the world to its perfection… That was the purpose of my experiments on you test subjects…”

“BUT YOU HAVE DISAPPOINTED ME! Now, come, NILS Statue!”

“Let us reblend everything and take back the world of the humans that once created us!”

WOW! That’s a world of difference, isn’t it? Tartar has more legitimate reasons to hate these guys. He’s essentially calling out the Great Turf War and the Inkling’s hedonistic lifestyle (another little thing that was left out in the localization).

Now, let’s look at the quotes during the battle. First, English Tartar:

“Bzrrt... Submit to your destruction. Your time is over, semi-sentient seafood.”

“BZRRT! You will be blended up into the raw material of the new world!”

“B-b-zrrt... This world will be reconstituted, and the professor's dream fulfilled.”

“B-BZRRT... Cease, number 10,008! You cannot hope to defeat NILS!”

“B-B-ZRRT! The time is nigh, NILS! THIS WORLD MUST BE PULVERIZED!”

Alright, and now the Japanese Tartar:

“GAH…Oh, Mollusks, you should just stop struggling and allow me to reblend you!”

“GAH! I will reblend and reshape you all, so you shall become a part of the new world!”

“Gagah… I will reblend this world and make it into the place the professor wished for…” (Note: He actually absentmindedly trails off halfway through this sentence, but in English this is hard to convey without losing the meaning.)

“Gagah… It is useless, No. 10008! You cannot stop the NILS statue!”

“Gahgah! NILS Statue! The time to reblend is almost upon us!!”

He’s... less rude in the Japanese version. At the very least, I think “Mollusks” is less rude than “Semi-Sentient seafood.”

Now for after the fight! English Tartar:

“Number 10,008... No test subject has worked so hard to foil my plans...”

“But now you will blend into... the perfect world the professor envisioned.”

“Farewell, 10,008. Farewell to you and that worthless cesspool of a city...”

“Grrk...! G-g-gaahh!”

“Professor... our reunion beckons...”

“Krrrhhhssshhh...:

And Japanese Tartar:

“No.10008… You are the first test subject who has gone this far to turn their back on my plans…”

“If that if it how it shall be… then you shall become part of the perfect world the professor wished for.”

“Farewell, No.10008… You shall be reblended, alongside that wretched city!”

“GA…! GAGA…!!”

“PROFESSOR… I SHALL COME TO SEE YOU NOW…”

“BLEEEEEEEENDDDDDD….!!”

As you can see, Tartar has a thing for blending in the Japanese version. He likes to do it a lot...

So you can see the differences between the two versions already! But as an added bonus, we’ve got some properly translated excerpts of the Famtisu interview to further support our argument here:

Amano: […] When selecting weapons [in Octo expansion], the one on the very left is always the easiest to use.

Q: When playing, we thought that the recommended (weapons) are always the easiest to use!

Amano: The recommendations are issued directly from Kamabo-Co. (laughs) They are kind of the sort of weapons the institute thought the type of person they wanted to create would be likely to use.

[…]

Q: While we’re talking about the localization, in the Western releases “Neru-sha” became “Kamabo, Co.”, right?”

Inoue: I thought it was a pretty great translation for the name, but we could never have used that in the Japanese version. That would just have been too spoilerlicious.

Satou: Yeah, with a name like “Neru-sha”, it’s ambiguous enough that (Japanese) players won’t realize it’s a reference to blended food or paste right away.

[…]

Q: It may be just a small detail, but we’ve been wondering, what are the Mem-Cakes supposed to look like? Like Fish-Cakes made from paste, or like sculptures made from rubber erasers?

Inoue: I think it’s okay if you just think of them as rubber erasers.

Amano: Agent 8 starts out with Amnesia, but by clearing the tests, they regain fragments of their memories. We wanted the player to be immersed in the way Agent 8 feels as they regain their memories and designed the game accordingly. And, as for why they get the Mem-Cakes… Well, when the test subjects are finally allowed to “enter the promised land”, we all know by now what really happens, and once it comes to this, the Commander of Kamabo.Co allows their Mem-Cakes to be left behind as “Proof that this test subject once truly existed in this world”.

Q: That’s awfully… kind of Kamabo.Co?

Amano: That’s one way to put it. After all, the people of Kamabo.Co aren’t all bad. (laughs)

Q: While we’re at it, where are the Mem-Cakes of the previous 10007 test subjects?

Nogami: Probably in storage somewhere. However, you have to remember that a lot of those people never made it to the end of the test, so the exact number of Mem-Cakes in existence is hard to pin down.

Amano: Iso Padre, who you can find in the subway carts, had to give up after only two stations, remember?

Q: Even so, there’s probably been a lot of test subjects in the past who actually made it to the “promised land”. Did the 4 Thangs have to be put in place again after every single time that happened?

Amano: Exactly. They’re always returned to just where you found them.

Q: Every single time, huh? Sounds like a pain. (laugh) By the way, are the blue, sanitized Octarians you fight in the tests all former test subjects?

Amano: They are beings that have risen from the culture fluid of Kamabo.Co. In the process of sanitization, they have been zombified and lost their sense of self.

Nogami: They were sanitized for the sole purpose of being deployed in experiments by the institute. Once sanitized, they are unsuitable as test-subjects.

Q: So, in other words, they were put where they are solely to act as part of the test environment.

Amano: Exactly.

[…]

Q: There are a lot of spoiler-laden questions we want to ask, but first of all, is the Professor who created Commander Tartar the same person who put Judd into cryo-sleep?

Amano: Yep, the one and same. We’ve got of backstory lore laid out there, but we did leave some hints: For example, when you play Match-Maker Station in the Expansion, the sculpture you are asked to copy is actually supposed to be Judd.

Q: Huh? You mean that thing that looks like a dog?

Amano: You may think it looks like a dog, but it’s supposed to be Judd. It’s supposed to be a hint.

Inoue: Is it really, though? (laughs)

Amano: According to my calculations, that has yet to be made apparent! (laughs)

Q: There are a lot of other things we still have questions about… For example, Commander Tartar called the Test Subjects “The Seed of a new Humanity”, and it’s pretty clear that he was very desperate about getting his experiments right this time, but was Inklingkind itself perhaps also a result of previous experiments?

Amano: No, not really. Inklings and their kind evolved the regular way. The original reason for Tartar’s creation was that his Professor wanted to prevent a future civilization of intelligent life, that might follow humanity after thousands and thousands of years, from making the same mistakes that led humanity to extinction. However, after 10.000 years of isolation, loneliness got the better of Commander Tartar and his thought-processes ended up going a rather odd direction.

Q: I see…

Amano: And then, in the very end, when he finally found a being he considered wonderful in Agent 8, he couldn’t accept it when they wouldn’t understand or share his views and got incredibly angry over it.

Q: So, the reason he acted the way he did was loneliness. By the way, when he was defeated, there was an Octopus tentacle on Tartar. Is he Octarian?

Inoue: Those are the remains of the Octarians he blended. Think of it as similar to the goop he stuck onto Agent 3.

Nogami: That specific one didn’t blend that nicely. (laughs)

So there you have it! You can see just how complicated of a character Tartar is now. It’s more than just “petty reasoning” or “Tartar, that’s what humans did!” like the localization would have you think!

I think that there’s a lot of potential in writing Tartar, and that the fandom could bring out that potential!

#Splatoon #Splatoon 2 #Commander Tartar #Octo Expansion #Octo Expansion Spoilers

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wulfrann · 5 years

Text

Andreil Contemporary Dance AU Because I Can

I don't know what this is. Call it a bullet-point fic, a ficlet, a one-shot, but the point is - the thought of a Contemporary Dance AU wouldn't leave my mind, so I wrote it down and here you go.

It's messy and barely edited and very self-indulging, but maybe this can be my Happy New Year contribution to the fandom.

- Palmetto's Foxes is a dance school known as an eclectic, unsynchronized, bastard group that mixes various types of dancing into contemporary with various levels of success. Kevin is appalled at first and convinced that they need to stick to one genre, but then he realizes that it could actually work, maybe, as long as they reinforce the contemporary elements to make it a real basis for all the other stuff that they add to it. Also they need to work on their group dancing, because solo/duet stuff is great but they're a team too so they need to start acting like it.

- Dan knows how to pole dance. She does it once during a solo performance and it's the most majestic thing ever. Matt can't stop talking about it for months. (and no one can really blame him)

- Renee can breakdance. I will fight you on that.

- Allison used to do ballet at a high level when she was still living with her parents. It got her into a fucked up mindset that nearly broke her, but she's slowly learning to appreciate it again for what it is, and not the memories it is tied to. (Renee helps. with that. because I'm weak.)

- I feel like Nicky would know some ballroom dancing? He would have gotten into it in Germany with Erik because it is a Thing there to have ballroom dance classes when you can afford it (sources are my German teacher who's German). He's petrified with fear the first few times and only dances with girls (there are more of them than guys anyway), but after getting with Erik and starting to be at peace with himself they start practicing together. Nicky can't help but cry a little the first time, because this is real and Erik is real and he's dancing with a boy and that boy is smiling at him like nothing else around them matters, and it's all a little too much to take in. But he does, eventually.

- The Ravens are this super elite, very competitive dance club with. "disputable" methods. They do a lot of group dancing where everyone is doing exactly the same movement, with Riko as their only lead dancer. Kevin was his go-to partner for duets before he left. Then it was Jean, and then no one because he sucks.

- Riko broke Kevin's right foot, not hand. He has to adapt his dancing not to put too much weight or strain on it, which takes a lot to hide.

- When Jean joins the Trojans, he's completely unable to dance duets or any kind of non-group dancing. His feet are in the worst shape and he's got bruises all over.

- So Jeremy takes it upon himself to make Jean fall in love with dancing all over again and to Jeremy, that means reminding him that dancing can be fun, too. Which means Jeremy giving Jean improv dancing and ballroom dancing lessons in private, just the two of them.

- It works, of course.

- Except Jean doesn't fall in love with just dancing, and Jeremy gets caught in his own trap because a carefree Jean might actually be the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

- Neil mostly did ballet as a kid because that's what the Ravens have the children do (teaches discipline and all the basics, according to them, which isn't entirely false from my understanding).

- When he was running with Mary, he used to stare at any kind of dancing whenever he thought she wasn't looking. Not long after her death he's squatting in this house, right, and there's a small dance club two blocks away. Neil tries, he really tries not to give in - but it's a Monday night, or maybe it's a Tuesday, he hasn't been keeping track - he's out of food and hasn't slept in days, because the nightmares are worse than the frantic beating of his heart against his skull and the shaking, incontrollable, that makes any lock picking last minutes he can't afford. The sun is setting behind the suburban buildings as he walks past the dance club, and maybe the light catches on the picture window, maybe there's music filtering out the cracked-open door, or maybe Neil's feet are too heavy to keep going past the building and into the empty, cold house.

- Neil stops.

- He stops, and stares right through the window.

- He doesn't know what kind of dancing it is, doesn't remember anything about it except the focus, suddenly, the sense of purpose and here and this is what living looks like, and his heart in his chest. Beating.

- Neil picks his way into the house within seconds that night, and sleeps.

- In the morning he's gone.

- His mother would beat him up if she saw him taking dance lessons again. But his mother is dead, and dancing is the only thing driving Neil to make sure he isn't.

- When Wymack and Kevin show up after his contemporary dance class, Neil makes a run for it and gets punched in the stomach by a small blond guy, because of course Andrew Minyard came with.

- Both his parents' imprint in his flesh isn't enough to make Neil disappear this time.

- When Neil trains with Kevin at night they mostly do ballet, though Kevin makes sure that whatever they do doesn't interfere with regular training.

Andrew always dances alone, and Neil doesn't understand why.

His posture is good, and somehow melts into the movements without ever going soft. It's like watching a stream boil down the mountain's flank, except the stream is 5 feet tall and makes the mountain look pliable.

Every time he looks at him, Neil wonders what it must be like to dance with someone as steady and centered as Andrew. Wonders what it must be like to be centered.

Then he snaps out of it and pulls his mind back to practice.

"Why do you always dance alone?"

Andrew blows the smoke out of his mouth and studies Neil's face through the wisps.

"Why are you always in the back?"

"I asked first."

"And I asked second. Afraid you might trip?"

Neil crosses his arms. "I don't trip."

"So you're afraid to stand out."

It's not a question, so Neil doesn't answer. "Why do you only dance alone?"

Andrew takes another drag out of his cigarette, then lets it drop to the ground and steps on it.

"I don't do teamwork well," he says, and then goes back inside.

Kevin asks Neil to do a duet with him at some point during the regionals. They've been practicing together for a while now and although they clash a lot, Kevin and Wymack think there's potential there. Neil panics and says no. When Kevin starts pressing the matter, Andrew interrupts.

"Drop it, Kevin. Rabbits only know how to dance when they're running."

Kevin storms out, and Neil stares at Andrew with clenched teeth.

"I'm not running."

"Could have fooled me."

- Neil agrees to do the duet with Kevin, but only if they practice it during their night sessions for now.

- "If we can't make it work with the group, there's no point doing it."

- "Take it or leave it. We don't even know if we can sync together. If it works, we'll take it to the rest of the group."

- It's a disaster, of course. Neil has never done duet work since he was a child, and his approach to dancing clashes with Kevin's.

"I can't dance with him."

Neil and Andrew are on the rooftop, the smell of tobacco and ash floating up lazily to the stars hidden by the city lights. A red glow cuts out Andrew's features against the night, his silhouette a mere shadow but for his face.

"I thought you were done running," Andrew says, blowing out smoke.

"I am."

"Then act like it."

Neil lets his eyes wander to where Andrew's hand is tapping his cigarette against the edge of the rooftop, cinder flakes falling down like snow, weightless and bright. Stretching beneath them the city sleeps, a quiet map of lights.

"Help me practice."

The sound of his own voice surprises him. The silence that follows is filled with it.

Andrew turns a blank stare to Neil.

"I don't mean the choreography," Neil says, slowly forcing out the words. "Help me practice dancing with someone."

A beat.

"I only dance alone."

"I'm no one, aren't I? You said so yourself."

Andrew flicks the remainder of his cigarette into the darkness and leaves. Neil watches it fall down until Andrew's footsteps down the stairs stop echoing through the night.

It's not until three days have passed and Neil is this close to giving up on the duet that Andrew gives him an answer.

It comes in the form of a small stereo sitting on the rooftop, music winding from its speaker and escaping from the roof like smoke, slow and flimsy.

The first time isn't really dancing. Mostly they just stare, feet solidly planted into the ground. Then Neil closes his eyes, and Andrew takes a step forward. He takes a hold of Neil's wrists and brings them to his shoulders, then puts his hands on Neil's waist. They stay like this until the end of the song.

The second time they start shuffling along with the music.

The third time Andrew tells Neil to open his eyes. They swing, slightly, and Andrew's face is more blank than ever. Neil takes it as a victory none the less.

The fourth time, Neil asks if he can try something and takes Andrew's right hand in his. Andrew lets him.

The sixth time, Neil figures out a few steps - and smiles when Andrew goes along with them. They're awkward, barely in rhythm parodies of the dancing Neil has been watching with increasing frequency on his free time, but they start to settle into it after the third try.

After that, Neil keeps testing out steps, trying to place them on the music, and repeating them for as long as Andrew will let him. Sometimes they only go through it once, sometimes four, and sometimes Andrew stops before the end of the song. But he always comes back.

By the time Neil feels sort of comfortable dancing with Andrew, dancing with Kevin starts getting bearable - sometimes even rewarding. Neil stops trying to put as much distance between them as he can, and he starts enjoying the movements, too. Kevin is nothing if not meticulous, but he makes it look effortless, and the choreaography reflects that. It's a rapid, wild dance, with a lot of back and forth that gets suspended, for a split second, then starts again, changing forms. Kevin calls it a tide, once, and Neil starts to feel the waves in the music and the wind carrying salt across the pale wooden floor.

Kevin gives him a twelve-hour notice for their first group practice. Neil barely sleeps.

He doesn't know what, exactly, makes his body stiffen as soon as he walks into the room, but the whole thing is a disaster. Kevin makes him run laps, which he does enough of that the burning in his muscles is the only thing he can think about.

It goes about as well the next day, so Kevin cancels their night practice so he can get his thoughts together.

"If you can't give it your whole tomorrow, don't bother showing up."

Neil goes for a run. When he comes back, Andrew is waiting for him outside the building. They walk up to the roof without a word and start dancing, simply repeating the movements that Neil put together over time. The music, slow and familiar, wraps itself around them like a stream, and Neil is content just to let himself be carried. He loses the tension in his muscles, in his chest, lets the current wash it off into the night.

Then Andrew does something new - and Neil has to pull his focus back to follow, to stare, as well, to fall back into the regular steps as he studies Andrew's face, unmoving and unmoved, bored but for the the slightest hitch pulling at the corner of his mouth and his hold, steady, focused - open.

Neil debates saying something, but closes his mouth to smile instead.

"What?" Andrew asks, voice flat. Neil focuses on the music, adds a step without leaving Andrew's eyes.

"Nothing."

- The group practice with Kevin isn't perfect the next day, but it flows. Kevin makes him work even harder that night, "to make up for the time you wasted". Neil doesn't complain.

- They dance the duet for the regionals. It just about closes the whole performance, and Neil leaves the stage feeling like his chest will either collapse or burst out. It's not an unpleasant feeling.

Andrew's hand brushes his back lightly when he walks past.

"Junkie."

Neil grabs Andrew's tee-shirt to stop him. "Thank you."

Andrew pushes his smile away with his hand and a frown and leaves before the rest of the Foxes can get there.

"I want to dance like that again."

Andrew lights a cigarette and puts it on the ground next to him. Neil takes it, sitting, and takes in the smell. His mother is as fickle as the coils of smoke rising above them that night, so he lets it rest. Andrew picks it up from where Neil put it down between the two of them and takes a drag, blowing out the smoke with his gaze fixed on the horizon.

Neil waits for Andrew to turn towards him. "Next time I want to dance a duet with you," he says. Neither of them wavers, but the air between them does.

Andrew reaches for Neil's neck, bringing it down.

"What makes you think I want to dance with you?"

Andrew's words smell of smoke and Neil can feel the heat of his breath grazing his face, sees it in Andrew's eyes clear as the city lights.

"Because we did."

Something flickers across his face, quick as a ghost.

Neil knows he could pull away if he wanted to, but when Andrew brings him closer he lets him.

"Yes or no?"

There is a tension in them, pulling - whether it's a tide or a stream, Neil doesn't know. But he dives anyway.

"Yes."

Andrew kisses him, and the weight of Andrew's hand at the back of his neck is an anchor that the storm in his chest cannot reach.

Kissing Andrew is not much different from dancing with him, Neil thinks.

And then he stops thinking.

#andreil #tfc #aftg #contemporary dance au #jerejean #renison #ficlet #bullet point fic #andrew minyard #neil josten #kevin day #I'm weak and gay so this is what I did today #wulfrann writes #fluff #(mostly)#one shot #the foxes #nicky hemmick #nerik

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spiders-hth-is-an-outlier · 5 years

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(I posted this as part of a thread earlier, and @otatma asked if I would cut and paste it into its own thing, so if this sounds familiar, that’s why! The inciting incident was a discussion about how people will get very emotional, to the point of aggression and genuinely antisocial behavior, over differing preferences in fictional ships, which -- yeah, strikes most people as super weird the first time they run into it, but quickly becomes just a thing that we all know will happen, just a regular part of Life in Fandom.)

I used to find this weird, but after lo these many years in and around fandom, I finally twigged that shipping wars, or really most fannish disputes, are never about fictional characters. The kind of people who find it easy to get invested in and noisy about fandom stuff have a particular – gift? talent? weakness? thoroughly value-neutral tendency? – that allows them to weave their own life stories and recurring issues into stories they read. People angry or defensive or super protective of a character or a relationship between characters – that’s *never* about the story in an objective way. It’s always about the person speaking.

And that’s okay if you’re hip to it and you use it productively, for Art Reasons or to help you gain clarity or feel less alone – shit, ask me sometime about why I’m at risk of losing my goddamn mind when people say things I don’t like about Ronon Dex or Castiel or Quentin Coldwater, three characters defined by their sense of lacking a homeworld, of being stranded where they don’t fit and will never belong. I am not a neutral observer here.

The problem is that a lot of people are reactive about this stuff. They ship based on what they feel would meet their deepest needs, or validate the stuff about them they most need validated, and that’s fine, unless you don’t have the discernment to realize that what a character or plotline or ship means *subjectively to you* is not objective reality. Then suddenly criticism of The Thing that you’re all tied up in feels like an *objective,* tangible, hostile unwillingness to see or hear who you are.

And people who feel like they’re being intentionally and maliciously denied that kind of validation and acceptance – well, it’s easier to understand how that feeling unlocks some fighting instincts in a lot of people.

It takes emotional calibration and maturity to be fully comfortable going, “Yeah, this has nothing to do with me and I don’t need to respond to this.” Like, I’m much, much better at it than I used to be, but I’ve still had to eliminate certain people from my fannish world because I was finding it such a struggle to watch them be OBVIOUSLY WRONG in certain specific ways that I was taking far, far more personally than I should’ve been. I’m sure they’re lovely people, but they were mashing buttons for me that – like, life is just too short, I needed to move on.

So I get it. And in Ye Elder Days when I was a slip of a fangirl, I sometimes handled that tension in ways I can’t recommend. It’s hard, I get it. And line-crossing that seems obvious from the outside doesn’t necessarily feel obvious when you’re defending vulnerable parts of your own psyche.

Still, you practice to get better. You practice setting boundaries for yourself and holding to them – “no name-calling or death threats even if you’re sure they deserve it” is a good one to start with. You practice accepting that other people may not see things like you do no matter how right you are or how well you explain, and that’s just a life thing that never goes away. Mostly, I think the core practice is learning to say to yourself, “Self, this reaction feels really strong, given the low stakes involved. What is this signaling me to pay attention to in me?”

But not everyone’s there. Some people are just going to feel a thing and get mad and lash out – particularly when internet fandom is probably a much safer outlet for expressing pent-up aggression than anywhere else in that person’s real life. It sucks, people should try harder and be kinder, but we’re all where we are in life, you know?

Anyway, tl;dr it’s never about the thing, it’s always about whatever the person has projected onto the thing. So it’s less bizarre behavior than it seems at first glance.

#bless your heart fandom

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emperorren · 7 years

Text

some thoughts by a long term multifandom-dwelling, meta-enthusiast shipper who has been countless times baited, disappointed, lied to, and kicked in the face by writers and showrunners backpedaling and boycotting their own narrative, taking impossibly stupid decisions, and being overall dumb as fuck:

“canon” is a non-entity. or at the very least a fluctuating notion, especially in the case of huge franchises (think of m*rvel). canon is incessantly rewritten, challenged, distorted, contradicted by new material. think of the ha n-leia romance, how it was a happily ever after at the end of the original trilogy. think of it now. there are old fans who utterly rejected the new trilogy as something essentially extraneous to the star wars story; for them, han and leia are still living their HEA, han is still alive, ben solo was never born, and nothing bad happened. This remains true for them as long as they ignore the new material, whose canon validity is disputable, if you’re a “purist”. These characters aren’t real, they are the product of someone’s imagination, and literally the only thing that separates your canon from THE canon is that the latter is imagined by someone who happens to be in charge of the commercial version of story. When none of this is real, several things can be true at the same time.

i’ve come to terms with the fact that shipping as we intend it doesn’t operate on the same level of mainstream storytelling. Mainstream storytelling is usually black/white and pretty straightforward; shipping exists in the margins and between the lines. For most mainstream writers, “romance” has a very narrow meaning. Very specific stuff has to happen to create “romance” (kisses, sex, googly eyes. “I love you” “I know”). Shipping doesn’t need those things. The shipper gaze is inherently transformative. The real essence of shipping is taking things that aren’t intended to be romantic, and RUNNING WITH IT, changing them, developing them, making them romantic in a way that the wider audience wouldn’t understand, or wouldn’t have the patience to follow in depth.

this is why we saw things as the interrogation and the duel and our brain wheels were immediately set in motion to come up with a million exciting scenarios. If we had seen a romance unequivocally blossoming between these characters, most of us (me included) wouldn’t be so drawn to this pairing.

some of us don’t even like mainstream romance. When people are like “huh, why do you ship this crack pairing instead of the canon one?”, well, this is the reason. Some of us feel a sort of disconnection from standard romantic narratives (and that’s because they are usually written by straight, cis, male writers, and designed to appeal to a generic and primarily straight, cis, male fanbase with little imagination. star wars, I’m afraid, makes no exception.)

because of the above, and because the perception of what qualifies as romantic is deeply subjective, it makes even less sense to talk about “canon romance”.

I can see two characters holding each other’s gaze for 10 seconds as more romantic than two characters having a long make out session. I can hear a “forgive me, rey” uttered in a mouthful of blood at the end of ix and read it as more romantic than a kiss. Get what I mean?

Lots of us, however, care for those kisses and for an explicit validation. It’s okay, of course. It’s completely okay and natural to want that to happen.

but, again, experience has taught me not to pin all my hopes on THAT. Thing is, the canon story isn’t under our control. It just isn’t. It’s in the hands of a bunch of professional writers we don’t know personally, who do this as a job, who might or might not be emotionally invested in the story they’re telling, who’ll move on new projects as soon as they wrap up this one, and who - i repeat - approach this stuff with a professional attitude (whether they’re good at it or not, it’s another issue), not an emotional one.

what is under our control is how we handle our fandom experience. The ship is ours, and we make what we want with it. Fanart, fanfiction, meta, headcanons. They gave us the basic bricks, we create the building. None of this is less valid than what happens in Rian Johnson’s or Colin Trevorrow’s head. They just happen to have a higher budget. At the end of the day, though, they’re creating a huge toy machine that we’re going to use as we like.

the biggest ships EVER, the real fandom behemoths, are usually the ships that “never happened”. Why? because no male writer ruined them because their stories were not completed, and it’s a natural human instinct to want to complete a story. Which means fandom tends to gravitate, by default, towards those pairings that weren’t given closure, or were treated unfairly, or had a lot of sexual tension but no resolution in canon.

I see a lot of (understandable) anxiety over what I’ll call “the j*hnlock fiasco* and LET ME TELL YOU ONE THING:

YES, the TJLC turned out to be a bunch of crap, but in the end, who ended up living in the same house, taking care of a child, and being FOREVER BROS? As someone who witnessed the whole thing from the sidelines, with no dog in this fight, I have zero doubt that Sh*rlock/Watson is, has always been, and was confirmed to be the central relationship of that show, and of that verse in general. The conspiracy theorists fooled themselves (and caused a lot of harm to both their followers, and those who disagreed), because they made it unnecessarily complicated, and pinned their whole understanding of “canon” on something very specific that they were repeatedly told wouldn’t happen. but regular shippers? I know a couple, and they were satisfied with what they got. (frankly, I loved the ending of Sh*rlock, because it left things open for EVERY shipper. I would LOVE for SW to pull a number like that. I wouldn’t feel cheated, at all.)

meta is great. as i said, I’m a meta enthusiast. But please remember that even the greatest meta is nothing but an attempt to make sense of things that remain largely outside of our purview, with limited information, no access to what is in the making, and no confirmation that the writers are actually as competent as said meta needs them to be. Enjoy the speculation. Don’t marry yourself to one. Be a speculation whore. No commitment, no regrets. Worst case scenario, it’ll be excellent fanfiction fodder.

none of this is an admission that *re/ylo won’t happen in canon* or an encouragement to stop believing it will. This is simply my attitude towards shipping IN GENERAL, and—after countless disappointments—I though it might be helpful for others, too.

remember:

in december, we’ll see these assholes battling AGAIN, and being intense again, and we’ll be obsessing over inane details and speculating and dissecting microexpressions and shit EXACTLY LIKE WE’VE BEEN DOING SO FAR.

sure, a lot of these things we obsess over might be completely accidental (it’s always good to keep it in mind)—but that’s part of the fun, in fact, it’s the WHOLE POINT OF SHIPPING.

TO CLARIFY:

(because I’ve seen some bizarre interpretations of this post)

while the shipping fanbase might be predominantly female and/or queer, this isn’t a rule. Contrary to what some media outlets and popular forums believe, SHIPPING ISN’T A GENDERED ACTIVITY, and I, for one, am ENDLESSLY PISSED AND FRUSTRATED at the constant, blatant misogyny and gatekeeping with which shipping and fanfiction are treated in mainstream fandom circles. The shipping fanbase is an extremely diverse group, composed by anyone with a more transformative approach to fandom (which isn’t in an either/or relationship with the curative approach, mind), anyone who, for whatever reason, might feel dissatisfied with or underrepresented by mainstream narratives, especially the very simplistic ones we normally see in blockbusters. At no point this post wants to reinforce sexist assumptions about shipping and fanfiction as inherently *female*.

what I’m also NOT saying, is that we should just passively accept this divide between what we WANT to see and what mainstream fiction gives us; that we should just suck it up and stay in our lane. No, fam, I’m just presenting the way things (I think) are in blockbuster fiction, and saying that SW is (probably) no different in that respect. But we should definitely fight to change this status quo, and make demands for more diverse, inclusive, non-standardized romantic narratives.

#fanwank #shipping #**#sw negativity #/////#//////#romancegate

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raptorific · 7 years

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hey! sorry to bother you, but I dont know about the whole gremlin dva thing? what is it?

Oh wow but I wish you’d asked this off-anon, racist overwatch fans are really sensitive about this subject and like to throw little tantrums whenever anyone says anything against it! I’m gonna start from the very beginning in case anyone doesn’t know the basics of the situation

Okay, so this is D.Va:

D.Va, AKA Hana Song is a nineteen-year-old professional Starcraft player from Korea. There isn’t a perfect analogy, but in Korea, Pro Gamers aren’t viewed the way western gamers are, they’re held in a closer regard to professional athletes, or even rock stars. D.Va’s name is indicative of her personality: She’s a celebrity diva. She’s confident to a fault, she’s courageous and a bit cocky, she’s charming and she knows how to work an audience. Her fame as a pro Starcraft player has led to a career as an actress, which brought her fame worldwide.

At age 16, through a “last starfighter/pacific rim” type situation, the Korean Government decided to address the problem of “giant robot keeps attacking Korea and traditional military tactics and regular soldiers are useless against it” by recruiting pro gamers (with their fast reflexes and unconventional tactical know-how) to pilot mechs to keep the giant robot at bay. D.Va was the best Starcraft player in the world (except her dad, the one person in the world she still can’t beat), and amazingly, she was also the best at fighting this giant robot. Because her gaming ability is what makes her so good at fighting this particular giant robot, she approaches her job the same way she approaches video games: by perpetually chasing the horizon of perfection and trying to improve her skills.

In-universe, she streams her missions worldwide on Twitch, and her fan following as a Superhero is as big as her following as a Pro Gamer or a Movie Star. Because she streams her missions, she’s often heard using gamer-speak in-combat because she’s addressing her audience directly. Outside of combat, many other heroes (like Lucio and Reinhardt) are huge fans of hers and look up to her, she’s a fan of reading scientific journals and is a bit starstruck to meet her favorite scientist (Mei) and she’s deeply hurt by the destruction she saw in her home country. She’s also sensitive about being called a child, because she’s now 19 (an adult) and a decorated soldier and deserves a certain level of respect.

This is Gremlin D.Va:

Gremlin D.Va is a fandom-created meme based on approximately nothing from the actual game or lore except the word “gamer” in her description. Gremlin D.Va is a caricature of western white male gamers (interesting given that D.Va is a Korean woman who acts approximately nothing like western white male gamers).

Gremlin D.Va is approximately four years old (or less!! A lot of the fanart includes her wearing diapers, sitting in strollers, sucking on a pacifier, the line is between “gremlin D.Va” and “baby D.Va” is blurry enough to be practically nonexistent). Gremlin D.Va is obsessed with doritos and mountain dew (she has her own brand of chips and sponsors a cola brand in-game, but we’ve established that the people making this meme don’t really care about what is or isn’t part of the game). She is supposed to be dirty and disgusting, she speaks in broken english even though Canon D.Va is fluent (they chalk this up to be “she’s like a baby!” but infantilization isn’t much better), she is mischievous and sneaky, she is presented as a childlike, and, well, pretty much aligns with every harmful stereotype of East Asians except the hypersexualization (which they claim makes it progressive). Also, as noted in the above picture, part of the meme is that she’s been adopted by two of the white characters, Soldier: 76 and Mercy, neither of whom she’s confirmed to have ever even met. She’s usually presented in the comics as a burden to that white man, which, yikes.

Essentially, Gremlin D.Va is a list of harmful and baseless stereotypes and tropes about Asians and Asian-Americans like “sneaky” and “childlike” and “perverse,” and defenders of the meme like to pretend it’s okay to project lots of anti-Asian racist stereotypes onto an Asian character as long as they’re not doing so because she’s Asian, but, the fact is, it honestly doesn’t matter whether or not they mean to be racist, but it’s somewhat hard to believe it has nothing to do with the character being East Asian: It would be very different if she were a white character being treated the same way, since there’s really no cultural baggage that presents white people as subhuman (you’re literally calling her a “gremlin”) and childlike (don’t try to dispute this, half those comics put her in a damn diaper), but for SOME REASON the white characters in the game are never presented that way!

The one exception to that is in the Halloween sprays where D.Va is very much presented as a child, and defenders like to claim this makes Gremlin D.Va “canon,” although this doesn’t really hold any water, since the sprays seem to show children dressed as the heroes trick-or-treating, and almost all the heroes are given a trick-or-treater spray. Here’s just a handful, for instance:

Now, I’ve gotten yelled at a lot for calling the meme racist, and 99 times out of 100 it is, but the fact remains, even if it was totally not racist: it’s just plain not funny! It’s boring and unimaginative and doesn’t make sense! People always try to act like “it’s just a video game, it’s fictional, let us have our jokes,” and I wholeheartedly agree, except that I expect jokes to be even mildly funny.

People also come back with “but it’s Chibi! Haven’t you ever heard of Chibi!” which, of course I have!! In fact, like all the Overwatch heroes, there’s a Chibi version of her available in the game! It doesn’t look like a screaming dorito-encrusted toddler in the care of a cheap knockoff Clint Eastwood, though, it looks like a chibi version of the character:

There she is standing next to her mech! She’s got a look and pose indicative of her trademark cocksure attitude, she’s clearly an adult and not a child, she’s not sexualized in this image without being desexualized through infantilization, and it looks like her, but in that style!!

Now, the thing is, I know it’s futile to ask racists to stop being racist, especially when they don’t agree they are being racist. They think they’re being funny, and they try to dismiss any criticisms with “it’s not that serious,” but the thing is, if it wasn’t that serious to them, why do they throw a little tantrum whenever anyone voices discomfort with it? And I mean every single time, they whine and complain and act smugly superior because they haven’t been “offended,” but the fact is that most normal fans of the game are content to roll their eyes and scroll past their unfunny meme, and they’re the ones who get all worked up whenever they find out people don’t think it’s funny.

Which is the most important facet of Gremlin D.Va: it’s not funny! It’s boring! It feels like the kind of thing Seth Green would write in a mediocre Robot Chicken sketch that he didn’t put all that much effort into. Even if it wasn’t racist, it just doesn’t make sense that people keep pushing this unfunny joke despite the fact that the response is more groans than laughs! In fact, most people I know mock and ridicule the people who are boring enough to find it funny!

So, that’s basically it in a nutshell.

#Anonymous #overwatch

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