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#and of course she was hideously racist

moistvonlipwig · 2 months

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9, 10, and 12 for BtVS and/or AtS!

9. worst part of canon

OK, I'm splitting this into 2 answers, one for BtVS and one for AtS. For BtVS there are many contenders I could choose from -- I think Willow's magic addiction arc completely derailed her character, I think Spike's attempted rape of Buffy completely derailed both of their characters since the network was never going to get rid of Spike which meant that S7 had to be in large part about Buffy forgiving him, I think Buffy's choice to activate the potentials worldwide without their consent fundamentally undermines the themes of the show -- but I am going to go with the actual Slayer mythology they came up with in S7 because it is so incredibly racist.

As a refresher, in 7.15 "Get it Done" Buffy finds out through a ritual that places her in the shoes of the First Slayer (who, in another classic racist BtVS move, is never named by the show) that the Slayer was created when the precursors to the Watchers, the "Shadow Men", forced the spirit of a demon into a human woman. Which, OK, sure, but the actual scene frames this act as a metaphorical gang-rape perpetuated by a bunch of nameless black men against the First Slayer -- who, again, is represented in this scene by Buffy, a white woman. Which is bad enough, but it doesn't actually end there -- in 7.21 "End of Days" we meet a "Guardian", one of a group of women who created the Scythe and hid it away from the "Shadow Men" (terrible name with racist undertones) so it could one day be used by the Slayer. This woman, who is presumably from the same geographical location & time period as the First Slayer & the "Shadow Men"...is a blonde white woman. Because of course she is. :| Anyway, it's awful and racist and I hate it so much.

For AtS, there are also many contenders --I think Fred's death is hideously misogynistic, I think the implication in 4.15 "Orpheus" that Angel & Angelus are literally two different people is deeply damaging to the character & show, I think the fact that all the narratively important female characters are dead before the finale speaks for itself -- but I have to go with one specific, oft-underdiscussed yet crucial aspect of the Jasmine-possessing-Cordelia arc in S4. Which is that the audience is not let in on the fact that Cordelia is not herself until 4.12 "Calvary", and in 4.07 "Apocalypse, Nowish", Jasmine has sex with Connor while possessing Cordelia, an act that we the audience are meant to find objectionable & disgusting even without knowing about the possession. But because the audience does not know about the possession, the blame for this act of pseudo-incest falls on Cordelia. So for six straight episodes, the other characters and the audience are not just permitted but actively encouraged by the show to blame & vilify a woman for her own rape. I think that's utterly vile and it's by far the worst element of the S4 debacle. If I could change only one thing about the show, it would be that.

10. worst part of fanon

I know you've said you aren't so tapped in to the online side of fandom so I am truly sorry if I am the one who must inform you that there are a sizable number of people on this website who are very attached to the idea that Spike (yes, that Spike) is a lesbian. I don't just mean they make jokes about it; there are entire metas about why Spike is actually a woman and why Spuffy is a lesbian relationship. So, uh. If you didn't know. Now you know.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

See this is tough because the culture has changed so much on this site that I don't even know who's unpopular anymore! Cordelia and especially Dawn used to be unpopular on Tumblr but I don't actually think they are these days. I don't think Gunn is unpopular either though I do think he's underappreciated. But in terms of actually unpopular characters I am going to go to bat for my mans Connor Angel. I do think the writing did not always serve him very well but his actions are completely sympathetic if you get inside his head and he is also so so funny and sassy like all 3 of his parents. (Angel, Darla, & Cordelia. NOT counting Holtz. He can choke.)

#thanks so much for this ask i love kvetching about the buffyverse and its fandom <3 #occidentaltourist #well love is love and not fade away #it's what you do afterwards that counts

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starbright-cobweb · 2 years

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literally the only canon-compliant, viable, realistic, unproblematic Haidee fanon, really, is if she and the Count are in a hideously poorly negotiated and dodgy kink dynamic

(and by unproblematic, I mean. As written: Haidee's character and role is a mix of misogynist and racist and exoticising, and also unsatisfying as pure literature - if such a thing exists - it takes you out of the story because you're spending so much time going "ah wtf?". it lacks reality. And it lacks reality, in part because the politics of it are so bad - anyone who's thought about the world just won't accept the story-as-written as having the ring of poetic truth)

whereas

"r/BDSM_relationship advice: I (F14, sub) became an orphan trafficking survivor after my father was murdered and my mother enslaved. I am a recent immigrant to a new country. I never leave my room, except when I am with my lover/daddy/master/owner (M43, dom), who I depend on for all my needs; but he saved me from trafficking and I am utterly devoted to him and I have no other friends - what should I do?"

is of course, utterly plausible.

(And this isn't an irl justification, but I can sort of buy as plausible that a man robbed of his bride as a 19 year old and then denied normal human dignity and social interaction for years, may well come out of that experience feeling like his own timeline had been stopped, & what feels right to him is dating 19 year olds because in some ways, he genuinely hasn't been able to fully mature. it works as narrative, though not of course as ethics)

This scenario is messy. But at least it makes the mess into the text. It's overtly aware that this relationship is dangerous, uncomfortable, and can engage with it on those terms.

#cw csa #cw slavery

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andrewmoocow · 4 years

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Steven Universe: The Fantastic Mutants chapter 4: The Deadpool and Peridot Show (originally posted on August 29, 2020)

AN: Welcome back to The Fantastic Mutants everyone. This is a very special chapter because here I have a co-writer, whether I like it or not.

Surprise everyone, it's me Deadpool! Since this kid refuses to get his writing done quickly, I've taken it upon myself to "help" him out since no one can understand me better than me. Now then, back to my cohost here.

Yes, Deadpool of all people has decided to help me. Though I'd rather do all of this myself without any distractions.

Kinda like how this author's note is distracting us from the actual main event! Now let's just get this rolling already!

We begin on a talk show set in a blank white space, inhabited solely by a drop-dead handsome mercenary dressed in a beautiful shade of red with hints of black that was currently tearing it apart for no good reason. You know him, you love him, it's the sexiest anti-hero to have ever graced this dying industry, Deadpool.

"Thank you, thank you all!" yours truly bowed for an unseen audience as he finished tearing the set apart. "Now if all y'all have been lying under a rock since like, I don't know, '91, I am known as Wade Winston Wilson. I was created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Niecieza for The New Mutants #98 in February 199-"

"Wade, I believe everyone knows who you are already." My white thinky-box, represented by a bold underline, cut me off. "You're already an Internet legend and of course, there's Ryan Reynolds."

"Can we just can the prologue already?" my yellow thinky-box, also represented by underlining but this time it was in italics. "There's gotta be people coming here solely for us who don't know what's going on."

"Okay wiseguys, you asked for it." the man who looked like a cross between Ryan Reynolds and a Shar-Pei underneath that creepily adorable mask replied. "So in case you guys are just joining us, this is a crossover with the modern classic with some of the most psycho fans in the Internet, Steven Universe." I explained. "Last chapter, our smol sunshine baby of a protagonist was kidnapped by the Master of Magnetism Magneto for some most likely evil science experiment by our favorite evil dictator with a superiority complex to compliment his tiny dick, Doctor Doom. In response, the Crystal Gems have decided that they need more hands on deck, and more characters than this story already needs."

"What does he want this to be, the DC Extended Universe?"

"I'd watch that mouth if I were you buddy." I called the dialogue box out. "Our author here has had experiences with those fans. If that Englishman can think he's free to call MCU fans Marvel Zombies, than he's free to have his own opinion. But someone that fanatical deserves to be called something similar, like a DCheep! Get it, because he's a sheep!"

"Can we please move on? This recap has already taken up two pages and I got real-life things to do." The author begged Wade.

"Okay, okay! Let's get this started already, keep your pants on!" the masked macho-man declared, marching off stage in an alluring fashion. "Cue scenery!"

Not too far from Westchester County, there was a shitty apartment where dwelled the hideously scarred human mutate, Wade Wilson. He was out like a light after the badass battle to the death he totally had last night, no joke. Not even a chimichanga could wake him up, and he didn't care that much for them. Yeah, no joke.

"Come on you sack 'a crap, wake up!" his blind, black, elderly roommate Blind Al groaned while fishing Wade out of bed with a snow shovel. "How much off-screen carnage puts you this much to sleep?"

"Enough for readers to get a glimpse of what I do in my spare time." Deadpool declared as he woke up, looking like he had a fantastic night's sleep. "Morning Al, off to do a crossover, see ya later!" he hurriedly greeted the old woman before leaving his room.

"Should I tell him he's not wearing pants?" Al muttered to herself. "Naw, he'll figure it out himself."

And figure it out he did. Immediately after that scene, Deadpool was wandering around the street fully clothed and ready to get this chapter over with.

"So, can we have our co-stars please show themselves?"

The author complied by dropping Connie, Peridot, Lapis Lazuli, Bismuth and Nephrite into the scene. "Wait, how did we get here?" Peridot wondered aloud. "And who are you?"

"Ooh, I get to hang with everyone's favorite character!" Deadpool cheered. "I've been writing up jokes about the fans I've been wanting to say for quite a while." He added to the readers while searching his hammerspace for cue cards. "Let me see, Molotov cocktail, big-ass cartoon bomb, reminder to sue Marvel & Capcom for leaving me out of Infinite, God knows how many machine guns."

"Uh, while you're looking for whatever it is you want, let me introduce myself." Connie introduced herself. "My name is Connie, pleased to meet you."

"Hey, can you put your cue-card search on hold and say hi to the kid?"

"Ah, here they are!" Deadpool declared as he fished a series of flashcards from seemingly his butt. "Been wanting to do this for ages." He said before clearing his throat, and he began to read off of them.

"Here are some complaints I have heard about Steven Universe. Complaint #1: literally no one can stay on-model because storyboarding is the devil. Complaint #2: Rebecca Sugar is a total butchphobic abuse supporter because she treats Jasper like crap and lets Lapis off the hook despite the fact that she's even worse."

"Please note that these are clearly not the opinions of the author. He's just been around Tumblr a lot and knows just how these so-called 'fans' think."

"Who said that?" Bismuth wondered aloud. "Oh hey, Bismuth!" Wade exclaimed as he just took notice of her. "That reminds me, Complaint #3: Making Bismuth an antagonist in any way, shape or form is racist because all minorities are pretty little angels than must be defended at all costs despite the facts that we're all human beings who have the potential to be complete balls to the wall sociopathic!"

"Okay, now you're just being used as a mouthpiece for the author. Hey buddy, can you stop him by introducing your version of the X-Force?!"

As a way to shut him up, the writer dropped the X-Force into the current scene on top of Deadpool. Their members, aside from Wilson, consisted of big names like Cable, Domino, Bob & Psylocke, to those who are only familiar to movie-watchers like Copycat, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Yukio, Bedlam & Shatterstar, and even Outlaw & Fantomex!

"How did we get here?" Cable asked the other black-ops mutants as he got up. "Oh hey Natey, knew you'd come along sooner or later!" Wade greeted his cybernetic compadre. "I was just getting myself introduced to these characters that we'll be paired up with for this crossover."

"Hi, I'm Bob, Wade's best friend!" the HYDRA agent Bob cheerfully introduced himself. "Name's Domino." Neena Thurman responded.

"A pleasure to meet you, dearest jeune fille bleue." Fantomex greeted Lapis in a gentlemanly fashion. "You may call me Fantomex. "

"Charmed." Lapis replied.

"Wow, everyone wants Lapis! First Fandral, and now Fanto."

"Can you blame her? She's the writer's fave and top SU waifu! Favoritism much?"

"Name's Negasonic Teenage Warhead." Ellie Phimster introduced herself. "This here is Yukio." She added gesturing to a Japanese girl with pink hair and a big smile. "Hi there!"

"I'm Wade's girlfriend Vanessa, though a lot of people call me Copycat since that's my power." Vanessa stated. "Yeah, totally original."

"Call me Bedlam." Bedlam stated. "And this here is Shatterstar. Unlike the rest of us, he's an alien from the Mojoverse."

"And finally, these are Outlaw and Psylocke." Shatterstar gestured to the cowgirl and the ninja in the one piece. "Nice to meet ya." Inez Temple greeted. "Indeed." Betsy Braddock added.

"So, what brings you to my neck of the woods?" Deadpool asked Connie. "Don't give too much away, cause I already got a basic knowledge of what happened last chapter."

"Chapter?" Connie tilted her head in confusion. "Steven was kidnapped only an hour ago! What do you think this is, some kind of story?"

"You'd be surprised Girl-Who-Wasn't-Actually-Dressed-As-Gohan-In-That-One-Episode." The Merc with a Mouth grinned underneath his mask. Before anyone could move on however, a stereotypical overweight nerd who looks like he doesn't get out much wheeled in on an automated scooter with a plate of brownies in front of him. "And you are?"

"I am simply an SU Critical that wants to congratulate you for making my voice heard." The nerd congratulated Deadpool. "As a way of saying thanks, have some brownies."

"I get it! Deadpool won some brownie points!"

"Don't explain the joke dumbass. The punchline should be coming up now."

As Wade snacked on the brownies, he came to realize something was wrong with them. "Hey wait a second. Yo, stereotype! Why do these brownies taste like literal dogshit?!"

"That's my secret ingredient!" the nerd revealed, much to Wade's disgust and he angrily tossed the brownies on the ground. "It's to symbolize how I believe Steven Universe has gone bad ever since the barn arc ended since absolutely nothing can compare to the amazing character development Peridot got!"

"Oh, it's so nice to see someone notice my splendidness!" Peridot blushed as she felt humbled by the nerd. "Of course, then they had to devolve her into a mindless comic relief who only-"

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING MINDLESS COMIC RELIEF YOU CLOD?!" the small Gem shrieked furiously before she pounced on the basement dweller and began choking him. "I'll teach you to talk back to me immediately after giving my praises you hypocrite!"

As Peridot continued assaulting the nerd, everyone else watched in either shock, bemusement or in Deadpool's case, pride. "I think I want to be her new bestest friend already."

"But I thought we were friends!" Bob weeped sadly while Bedlam gave him a comforting pat on the head.

"And now it's time for a cutaway gag!"

"Cutaway gags? You gotta be kidding me, we're not Family Guy!"

"Just let the writer do his thing man, it's his imagination!"

"Come on Willy, I know you can do it!" a child version of Deadpool called to a whale in a scene that is clearly a reference to a certain all-time classic "Boy and his non-human friend" story. However just as Willy finally leaped over the rock Wade was standing on, he was immediately harpooned in midair and dragged towards a pirate ship manned by Captain Ahab. "Hey, wrong whale story Habbo Hotel!"

"After so many years of searching, that accursed whale is now mine to profit off!" Ahab and his crew celebrated their capture. "I'm talking sequels and an animated series to start, but the sky's the limit!"

"This ain't the last you'll see of me Old Thunder!" Wade cursed the sea captain as he made off with his prize. "I'll bring that whale home, just you wait!"

"Okay, that's a pretty unique idea for a gag. But seriously, back to the show."

"So, we're here because Magneto has kidnapped Steven with a bunch of Sentinels." Connie recapped to Deadpool while they were out and about in the city. "Now that you know what we're doing, can you tell us what you do?"

"I'm glad you asked Connie." Deadpool declared. "Allow me to explain the only way you Steven Universe characters probably know how. IN SONG!"

"Wait, a musical number, in a fanfiction?! Seriously?!"

"Hey shut it, this is gonna be good!"

"Lights please." Wade announced, shutting off the lights with a snap of his fingers, and turning them back on with another snap. He was now dressed as an Elvis impersonator with Cable, Domino, Bob and Copycat as his band. "What song do you plan on playing?" Vanessa asked her boyfriend.

"Just watch and listen." Wade responded, and began playing a parody of a classic movie song. "Here I go!" he started singing while Cable provided backup on the drums. "Woo! Ah-ha, ah-ha, let me show you what I work with!"

"Well Gambit was in league with a bunch of thieves, Cyclops has almost two thousand tales!" For his first act of insanity, the Regenerating Degenerate made about fifty longboxes filled with comics appear for Peridot & Lapis to rifle through. As soon as they discovered one with Wade fighting a vampire bat creature on the cover titled "Deadpool: The Gauntlet," the Deadpool on the cover continued the song.

"Well my friends, you're in luck cause up your sleeves, you got a kind of guy that never fails!" After Deadpool emerged from the issue Peridot was holding, he shot down various villains emerging from the other comics while singing.

"You got a real badass in your corner now, a real Wolverine type in your camp!" he then demonstrated by transforming his face into that of Logan's and then back again before letting bullets rain from above. "He can shoot, kablam! Bullets galore, all you gotta do is say my name!" Wade crooned. "And I'll say: 'Miss Peridot and Lapis Lazuli, what will your pleasure be?'"

As he sat the Gems down on a beach blanket, Deadpool then assumed pirate attire and set a heavy treasure chest on the ground. "Just give me a guy and I'll shoot him down, you ain't had a mercenary like me!"

Peridot began to excitedly open the chest while Lapis rolled her eyes. "Life's like a treasure chest," Wade's disembodied voice continued. When the treasure box was opened, the mercenary exploded out of it and made gold fly everywhere. "AND I'M GONNA BE YOUR KEY!"

Unlike her smaller partner, Lapis was still not amused. "C'mon, whisper to me what you want," Wade kept crooning, followed by splitting himself into four smaller Deadpools. "You ain't had a mercenary like me!"

"Contractors pride ourselves on service." One of the mini-Wades stated, and then they merged into the prime Wilson while spawning a lavish couch for his two guests. "You girls the hoss, the queens, the Shah! No matter what you wish, I'll be your bitch! How 'bout a few chimichangas?"

"Have some of Sample A, try all of Sample B!" Following the chimichanga rain, Peridot and Lapis were handed free samples at a supermarket before they found themselves on a velvet pillow held by Wade. "Anytime, any day, I'll help you babes. You ain't had a mercenary like me!"

A brief dance number then ensued between Deadpool and his hands. His left hand vocalized and the degenerate replied with an "Oh my!" When the right hand started singing, it was responded with "No no!" Both hands harmonized and they got a "Ha ha ha!" They sandwiched Deadpool between them as he peaced out with a "Zip-a-dee doo-dah!"

When Deadpool returned, he pointed straight at Peridot. "Give me a good badda-yadda-yadda!"

"Badda-yadda-yadda!" Peridot excitedly repeated. "Good, scotty-wop!" Wade then pointed to Lapis. Her reply was more unsure. "Uh, scotty-wop?"

"Everybody now!" Deadpool compelled the readers. "Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!"

"Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!" the readers answered excitedly.

"Yeah, y'all got it!" Wade congratulated before proceeding to demonstrate his healing factor. "Can your friends do this?" he asked, casually dislocating his arms. "Can your friends do that?" he added, ripping out his spinal cord to bounce on it like a certain stuffed tiger. "Can your friends pull this?" With that, Wade tore his skeleton out of his body and started dancing the Charleston with it. "Out a little hat?!"

Suddenly, Wade's skeleton started filling itself with dynamite sticks on the verge of exploding. "CAN YOUR FRIENDS GO-" The human mutate was interrupted as the TNT exploded, and the clouds gave way to him beatboxing while doing a silly dance.

"Call me the Merc with a Mouth, I am always there. North, West, East and South! So don't sit there slackjawed, all buggy-eyed! I'm here to answer all ya evening prayers!" he continued. "You got me bona-fide certified! A hired gun for your charge affair!"

"I got a powerful urge to help you out! So who's gonna die? I really need to know!" Deadpool said as the song began to reach its climax while pulling a long strip of paper from Peridot's mouth and began rubbing his bottom with it. "You got a list that's three miles long no doubt. So all you gotta do is pay-wayho!"

For the final setpiece, Peridot and Lapis now stood atop a mountain of dead Marvel characters that are so obscure, not even the most hardcore fans knew a thing about them. "Miss Peridot and Lapis Lazuli, what will your pleasure be?" Wade asked tunefully. Peridot then picked up one body, and its head suddenly turned into Deadpool's. "Anytime anyplace, I'll help you babes."

A few bodies rose from the dead, only for Deadpool to shoot them all down. "You ain't had a mercenary, never had a mercenary." He concluded. "You ain't had a mercenary, never had a mercenary."

Bullets once again began raining, along with all sorts of violent weapons as the song finally ended. "YOU AIN'T, HAD A, MERCE-NARY LIIIII-IIIIIKE MEEEEE!"

With the X-Force performing a kickline to finish things off, Deadpool pulled on a string dangling from above. "You ain't had a mercenary like me!" A flickering neon applause sign dropped down, capping off the rather pointless number.

"Well, that was a waste of time that'll never be spoken of again."

"Sincerest apologies to Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and especially Robin Williams. He would've been 69 this year. NICE!"

"Okay you generic-looking monster, time to discover who you truly are!" Connie declared to a captured Sasquatch while she, Peridot, Deadpool, Lapis and Cable were dressed as a certain band of meddling kids and their voracious canine pal. Connie ripped off the Sasquatch's head to reveal that it was a mask worn by an evil parrot with a scar across his face.

"Zoinks! Like, it's a parrot!" Deadpool declared in a beatnik voice. "Wait, a parrot? Is that all?"

"Far from it mein friends!" the parrot answered in a German accent. Suddenly, large robots kicked the walls around them down. "Behold, my Nazi robots!"

"N-Nazi robots?" Lapis stuttered. "Jeepers, this is just getting too weird."

Deadpool then glanced expectantly at Cable, who groaned while pushing up his glasses. "C'mon Cabey, say the line!" he exhorted the cyborg. With a heavy groan, Cable quietly said "Jinkies, run."

"He's right, let's split up gang!" Connie commanded, and the crew were off to the races. After passing by the same flowerpot approximately five times because there wasn't that much in the budget, the five came across a hallway littered with doors.

When Deadpool and Peridot burst into one door, they came out of another not too faraway, same with the others. However at the end of a door, they came across a blue digital ghost with yellow eyes & teeth and a grainy laugh.

"Ruh roh, rit's Rames Rarles the Rindly Rohnny!" Peridot exclaimed, making every word she spoke begin with R before she coughed. "How does anyone speak like this?" she asked Wade. "Because speech impediments are funny!" the mercenary replied. "Now let's move!"

"Seriously, why can't I be Fred?!" Cable complained while emerging from another door with Deadpool by his side instead of Lapis. "Connie gets the cool ascot, and all I'm left with is this bulky sweater and a short skirt!"

"Well for one, that skirt actually looks pretty cute on you." Wade answered with a stupidly cheeky grin on his face. Before anyone else could charge through more doors, zombie cats and dinosaurs that could move without thinking came charging in. "Wow, Scooby-Doo became a lot weirder than when I was a youngin."

Returning to the real world, the Crystal Temps and the X-Force have just plowed through an entire armed squadron inhabiting a conveniently abandoned office building and now had their leader tied up in a chair. "We ain't gonna let all those hallway fights amount to nothing!" Wade declared holding the squadron leader at gunpoint. "We've tried every torture technique in the book: eating your own food, threatening your family, doing a silly dance to some awesome music and yet still you won't talk!" he exclaimed. "So let me ask this again! What does the guy who gave Magneto & Doctor Doom those Sentinels look like?"

"What?" the gunman asked nervously, causing Wade to smash another wall. "WHAT COUNTRY ARE YOU FROM?!" the mercenary shrieked. "What?" the captive continued squeaking. "WHAT AIN'T NO COUNTRY I EVER HEARD OF!" Deadpool yelled. "THEY SPEAK ENGLISH IN WHAT?!"

"What?" the man said a third time. "ENGLISH MOTHER-" Deadpool began, but then he noticed the T-rating and groaned. "ENGLISH YOU BASTARD, DO YOU SPEAK IT?!" he reiterated. "YES!" the gunman finally said something other than what. "THEN YOU MUST KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!" Deadpool kept yelling. "WHAT DOES YOUR MASTER LOOK LIKE?!"

"We could just beat the info outta him and be done with it." Bedlam advised. "No need for all this Pulp Fiction parody crap."

"Was I talking to you?" Wade asked his teammate tersely before going back to his captive. "Now where was I? Oh yeah! Does he look like a bitch?"

"Now you're just skipping lines!" the gunman squealed in defiance. "What else do you wanna do with me?!"

"Okay, I got another question for you." Wade stated. "Have you had your prostate exam lately?"

"What?" the gunman muttered, fearing what could come next. "In fact, I got just the girl to help me." Wade declared. "Hey Connie, your MILF of a mom is a doctor right? Surely you must know what I'm talking about!"

"Yeah, pretty much!" Connie answered. "Here, lend me your sword. We might need to operate." Deadpool said as he menacingly snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. "Hey author, why don't we cut to another scene before this gets too violent?"

"Now then, what are we working with he-There it is!"

"AUGH!"

Elsewhere, a stereotypical shadowy figure watched from a large video screen as the X-Force tore through his mercenaries. "That masked maniac is onto us!" he growled quietly while pounding his fist on an armrest and turned his chair to face Ruckus, Gorgeous George, Hairbag, Ramrod & Slab, the Nasty Boyz. "You five track him & those rainbow women down and kill them all!"

"Yes sir." The Nasty Boyz complied and set off for the Merc with a Mouth. "Now where do you suppose the merc could be now?" Hairbag asked his fellow Boyz. "My best guess, he's probably at that Hellhouse run by Patch." the Southern-accented Slab theorized. "Hopefully they have room for his head as a trophy."

"Well here we are at Saint Margaret's School for Wayward Children." Deadpool decreed as he suddenly parked a limo that he totally always had in front of the mercenary dispatch center he loved frequenting. "I suggest you try not to look at some of its inhabitants funny, some of them can get a little ballistic."

Entering the bar, the two teams had all eyes on them by all the other mercs at the establishment. "Uh, hello there." Connie nervously greeted one of them. "I don't think you're old enough to be here little girl." The mercenary replied ominously. "Don't worry Jessica, they're with me." Deadpool told the larger man. "So, where's Weasel?"

"Right here old buddy!" the bespectacled bartender called for Wade. "Hey, Weasel!" Wade exclaimed to his old friend while sitting down at the bar and exchanging a fistbump. "I see you're doing well Poolboy." Weasel said to his friend. "And who's the green midget with you?"

"This is Peridot, a member of the Crystal Gems." Shatterstar introduced Peridot. "Oh, you mean those rock ladies that creamed those Chitauri only to get creamed by Thanos?" Weasel asked, making Peridot pretty mad. "Hey, we creamed Thanos right back!"

"We're looking for information sir." Connie said to Weasel. "A friend of mine has been captured by Magneto & Doctor Doom using those Sentinel robots, and we want to know where they've come from."

"You want confidential info little girl?" the barkeep stated. "Go see Multiple Man over there at that poker table, he's usually the guy to talk to since he's a detective."

"Yet one mystery he can't solve is the mystery of why he can never get his own movie."

"ZING!"

At a nearby poker table, Jamie Madrox and some of his duplicates were playing cards with the albino mutant Caliban, and the four Jamies clearly had the upper hand. "All in!" one of the clones declared shoving his chips into the pot. "I know you are cheating Madrox." Caliban informed his opponent. "I mean, there are literally four of you!"

Just then, Deadpool abruptly shot one of the clones dead and sat down where he once was. "Deal me in." he simply declared as if nothing happened. "Caliban welcomes you Mr. Pool." Caliban nervously greeted the regenerating degenerate. "And who is your little friend?"

"You may call me Peridot, the suave, attractive and positively adorable leader of the Crystal Gems!" Peridot introduced herself arrogantly. "So, you more members of the X-Men? Haven't seen you around the mansion."

"Actually, we're members of a different team of mutants." Madrox replied, while his surviving doubles sadly carried their dead comrade away. "There are actually quite a lot of them you see. X-Factor; the one we're a part of, X-Statix, Excalibur, Generation X, the Morlocks and most famously Alpha Flight."

"Half of them sound so late 20th to early 21st century." Peridot commented. "I mean, X-Statix? Talk about totally cool dudes!"

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. "Is this Saint Margaret's? We'd like to have a word with the owner." A voice came from the other side, catching all the patrons and employees off-guard. All was quiet, but then the Nasty Boyz came crashing through the wall instead of the door. "LET'S GET NASTY!" they all cried out, springing into action.

"Alright, what the shit is going on here?!" Bob "Patch" Stirrat, the elderly owner of Saint Margaret's growled, emerging from another room while stroking his big bushy mustache. "Oh god, it's the Nasty Boyz."

"The Nasty Boyz?" Peridot and Lapis repeated in unison before they laughed at the evil mutant team's name. Suddenly, the wood tables of the bar came to life and changed their form thanks to Ramrod, who used them to restrain everyone aside from Deadpool. "Okay boys, frisk him."

On Ramrod's orders, Gorgeous George used his shapeshifting powers to grab Wade by the ankles and dangle him above the ground. "Let's see what he's got here." Ruckus muttered, fishing through the belongings dropped as Wade was shaken up and down. "Various pistols, swords, nunchucks, staves, forks, a bazooka."

"Most of those were from a Ninja Turtles convention I went to last year." Wade revealed. "Don't know where the bazooka came from."

"Rubber chicken, five month old bag of pizza pockets; that are still warm," Slab continued for his teammate. "Ryan Reynolds's phone number, large collection of nude selfies from Thumbelin-WHAT?!"

To Slab's absolute shock and fury, he found an overfilled file of lewd pictures taken by his sister Kristina Anderson with her phone number on it, along with a message saying "I bet you want more, my raging sex machine!" Crushing the file in his hand, Slab furiously glared at Deadpool. "Wilson, you son of a bitch!"

"Geez Chris, I thought you had a sense of humor." Wade grinned cheekily. "After all, SHE'S YOUR SISTER!" Then like Thor returning Mjolnir to his hand, the mercenary wiggled his fingers to call one of his katana blades back and free himself from Gorgeous George before rescuing his friends. "SSSSSSmokin'!" he hissed before spin-dashing out of the bar.

"After that degenerate!" Hairbag exclaimed while Slab frothed in wordless rage and the Boyz gave chase, leaving the bar in tatters. "Hey, which of you assholes is gonna clean this up?!" Patch exclaimed, but then he answered his own question by handing Weasel a broom.

"Everyone, to the Deadpoolmobile!" Deadpool exclaimed as the X-Force and Crystal Temps piled into the limousine from earlier. "Where did you ever get this car anyways?" Bismuth asked him, and he replied. "Don't think about it!"

Far across the city, Robert Kelly was left facepalming and a colleague of his scratching his head when they discovered that one of Kelly's limos was missing, its place taken by a graffiti message saying "I O U".

"I hate that Deadpool." Senator Kelly groaned.

"You get back here this instant you red-masked c-" Slab called for Deadpool as the Nasty Boyz chased them in a stolen taxi, but his cursing was cut off by Deadpool popping out the sunroof of the limousine to open fire on them.

"Wait, if Deadpool is up there, then who is driving?" Connie asked the group, and that's when Yukio made a shocking realization. "Oh my god, Demon Bear is driving!" she exclaimed pointing to a demonic bear that was taking the wheel. "How can that be?!"

"That's right folks, Lawrence Abrams is here to report that the insanely infamous insane mercenary Deadpool has started an intense car chase where he's hijacked a limo belonging to Senator Robert Kelly and is being chased by a group of other mutants called the Nasty Boyz." Lawrence Abrams said on the television at the Baxter Building, where Garnet, Pearl, Colossus and Wolverine had now caught wind of the event. "And there's also some kinda bear driving the limo for some reason. Why's there a bear?! Who gives a damn! And now onto Sally Floyd with politics!"

"Deadpool." Colossus glowered in embarrassment. "Come my friends, we must go and handle this crisis ourselves." He declared while preparing to leave the building. "But you let Connie go on that mission for her optimism." Pearl stated to the metal mutant while setting Reed and Sue's young son Franklin Richards on the floor.

"We know Pearl, but that maniac is a whole 'nother level of unpredictable." Wolverine grumbled. "And there's a high chance Connie's life is at risk here! Right Garnet?"

"Logan is correct. I can see multiple paths where things go horribly wrong." Garnet agreed with Logan. "Oh, you're leaving already?" Franklin's older sister Valeria asked them. "Mom and Dad were just about to introduce you to H.E.R.B.I.E."

"It's alright Valeria, they still have friends to help." Susan assured her daughter. "Go on Gems, we'll catch up with you back at the mansion."

"It's been a pleasure to be shown around the Baxter Building and meeting the kids Sue." Pearl said gratefully and shook the Invisible Woman's hand. "I especially like how Franklin reminds me of Steven."

"Bye Ms. Pearl!" Franklin said goodbye by hugging the tall Gem's leg. "Oh, goodbye to you too Frank." Pearl replied. "Hey, what about me?!" the Four's AI H.E.R.B.I.E exclaimed irritably. "Don't I get anything to say?!"

"Oy Cain, you gotta check this out!" Black Tom called to Juggernaut while he was watching TV. The Brotherhood of Mutants had stopped to refuel their ship and Black Tom had run off on his own when he discovered a TV shop playing the same news report of Deadpool's car chase. "What say we give Deadpool an old one-two before Mags finishes up?"

"You son of a bitch, I'm in!" Juggernaut exclaimed eagerly, giving his teammate a fist-bump that knocked Tom to the ground. "You okay there?"

"We have your limousine surrounded! Come out of the vehicle with your hands in the air!" a police officer barked into a bullhorn as they had Deadpool and pals backed into a corner. "I would make a police brutality joke, but even I know that would be too soon." Wade said to the readers as he screeched the limo to a stop, making donuts on the street and damaging numerous police cars in the process.

"Okay, now you're just either showing off or defying us." The cop with the megaphone japed. Just then, a mighty thud briefly shook the ground. And another. And another. And another. And-

"Quit stalling writer, we know who it is! It's the goddamn Juggernaut!" Deadpool interrupted the third-person omniscient narrator. "Literally everyone and their goddamn long lost relatives know who he is!" The mighty Juggernaut continued inching closer to the fanboying mercenary while the police scattered out of fear of him and Peridot poked her head out the sunroof to see what was up.

"Uh, Wade?" the petite Gem squeaked nervously. "You know who that is right?"

"Didn't I just say that it's ol' Juggernaut?!" Wade exclaimed to his new best friend. "Oh, the things I could say about how much of a badass he is! This guy has beaten the shit outta Cyttorak, the Thing, Colossus, Blob & Thor and even called banging She-Hulk a stalemate! Maybe, that last one was actually a cl-"

Before Deadpool could finish the sentence, Juggernaut grabbed him by the neck with just two fingers and brought him very close to his helmeted face. "Hello Wade." He beamed callously. "Hey Cainy, is that new toothpaste I smell?" Deadpool greeted him nervously. "What flavor is it this time, Feeling Bad About Your Shitty Mutant Powers So You Get New Ones from Cyttorak?"

"Goddamn he went there." Black Tom muttered, only to receive a glare from his partner.

"Deadpool!" Garnet called for the Merc with a Mouth as she, Pearl, Colossus and Wolverine entered the scene. "Oh, hey guys." Peridot nervously waved to her fellow Crystal Gems. "What brings you here?"

"We came here to take control of this current situation." Pearl explained. "No matter how much you want to swear and kill and all sorts of other crass activities, we still need your help in saving a friend of ours."

"I appreciate you want me to be more involved in this story Mordecai," Wade said to Pearl. "but can this wait a bit? I'm currently in the middle of worshipping the Juggernaut, bit-"

However within seconds, Deadpool was mashed into the ground by Juggernaut, leaving only a few scattered body parts lying in a puddle of blood. "Oh, so rude!" his disembodied head declared indignantly. "And to think we were buddies at one time Marky-Mark." He then turned to face the audience one last time before the degenerate would meet his not very possible untimely end. "But since I'm literally nothing but blood, my head, a few fingers, an upper arm and my dick right now, let's lighten the mood a little with some more gags, shall we?"

"As if we didn't waste enough time already."

"I love the smell of 372,844 pancakes in the morning." Deadpool declared as he flipped his last pancake and added it to the growing mountain of pancakes. "Smells like victory!"

"Why on Earth would you need this many pancakes?" Bismuth asked while Deadpool turned on the ceiling sprinklers to pour maple syrup all over each and every one of them at once. "Well, that's pretty clever I'll admit."

"Okay Peridot, ace this test and you're on the team!" Wade, now a coach for the girls' swim team comprised of Lapis, Bismuth, Domino, Warhead, Yukio, Outlaw, Copycat, Psylocke & Nephrite, announced to their soon to be newest member Peridot while she prepared to dive.

"This is it Peri, get this right and you'll make everyone proud!" Peridot muttered to herself while adjusting her cap and gazing at Lapis. As soon as Coach Wade blew the whistle, Peridot leaped into the water…and soon began struggling to keep herself afloat in a very exaggerated manner. "AAAAAGH, SOMEONE HELP! LIFEGUARD, COACH, SOS! THIS WAS A HORRIBLE IDEA!" she shrieked for help before the chlorinated water won out and she sank to the bottom.

"I'll save you!" Cable roared while assuming the role of a lifeguard, preparing to jump in the water after her when Wade stopped him. "No no, wait for the punchline."

When Peridot finally breached the surface, she dramatically gasped for air and then frantically paddled towards the end of the pool, grabbing the ledge with a serious expression on her face. "So, how do you like my swimming?" she asked, acting like nothing had happened. However, no one else was there to answer except for Deadpool. "Hey, where did everyone go?!"

"They jumped ship an hour ago because they were tired of waiting." Wade answered. "But you still get on the team cause you really made me laugh."

"Gotta say Lapis, we got quite a team here." Deadpool remarked proudly to his fellow baseball player Lapis. "Uh, yeah, they're great." Lapis nervously replied while failing to get the joke. "So, who's on first?"

"Yeah, and what's on second." Wade responded eagerly. "No, I want to know who's on first." Lapis continued asking. "Exactly! We already established that who's on first, what's on second and I don't know is third."

"Wait, do you not know their names or are those seriously what they're called?" the ocean Gem asked, causing great irritation for her team captain. "Dammit Lapis, you spoiled the punchline!" he reprimanded her. "In fact, this whole Abbott and Costello tribute was just an excuse to see you dress up as Bob again! I mean, can you blame me with those shorts?"

"Abbott and who now?" Lapis remarked with a raised eyebrow.

"You really need to get out more." Wade deadpanned, lowering his eyelids in response.

"Welcome back one and all to Celebrity Jeopardy." Pearl announced, now dressed as Alex Trebek. "Now before we proceed, I'd like to apologize on the behalf of our contestants to all viewers with rather unusual lifestyles. We here at the studio refuse to judge anyone based on how they live, and sincerely hope you accept our apologies. Now then, let's proceed with our contestants."

Deadpool was in the podium closest to Pearl, now dressed as Sean Connery. "Mr. Connery is in first place with only -1 dollar." Pearl began recapping for the viewers at home. "About as many points as your mother gave you!" Wade cackled.

"Classy." Pearl responded crossly before shining the spotlight on Lewis Black, aka Peridot. "Mr. Black now has a score of, shockingly enough, -6,000 dollars." She explained, prompting the small Gem turned abrasive comedian to climb up on top of her podium in the middle. "Is that enough to buy my own bus?"

"And finally, Josh Brolin, now having raised 35 dollars." Pearl concluded while Juggernaut assumed the role of the aforementioned actor many may know as a certain Mad Titan. "I don't feel so good." Cain muttered. "Damn, walked right into that one!"

"Very well then. With introductions out of the way, let's move onto the board." Pearl stated, moving her eyes from the podiums to the categories. "Tonight our categories are Annals of History, Potent Potables, What Bulls Hit, Jokes, Popular Foreign Television, Places with Names Ending in 'Nia' and Video Games." Deadpool then pressed his buzzer. "Mr. Connery, you have the board."

"I'll take What Bullshit for $500 Al." Wade announced with a stupid grin on his face, clearly misreading the category he had chosen. "And I can tell you plenty of things that are bullshit."

"No, it clearly says What Bulls-" Pearl began to correct the masked contestant before she came to a realization. "Whoa! Okay, walked right into that one. Anyways, the question is: "It is commonly believed bulls are enraged by this color". Mr. Connery?"

"I'll tell you something I've hit recently." Deadpool chortled. "Hit up a few bars over the past week while hanging with your mom. She and I had a wonderful time, if you get what I mean! Wink wink, nudge nudge."

"I don't even have a mother!" Pearl ranted hotly. "And can we please return to what was happening earlier?! These pop culture references are nothing but a waste of time!"

"Thank you!"

"Boldface, you ignorant slut."

"Oh no, Wade!" Peridot yelled for Deadpool as she dashed out the limo to check on the puddle of blood and body parts that was once her new friend. "Please speak to us you clod, you can't die like this!"

"That's because I can't!" Deadpool proudly declared and in a beautiful Disney-like spectacle, slowly reassembled himself until he was the full-bodied lovable manic once again. "Healing factor baby! Got it when some asshole tried to cure my cancer, along with looking like a walking tumor."

"Uh hey, remember us?" the Nasty Boyz cried out in unison, catching the merc's attention. "Oh right, you guys. Gotta wrap up the chapter somehow." As a result, Wade opened fire on the evil mutants, shooting them in the arms, kneecaps and especially their dicks. "Oh and Bismuth, Peridot? You guys got Black Tom & Juggies. I'll take Garnet and Pearl!"

"You got it, I guess." Bismuth complied before she and her little friend squared off with Cassidy & Cain, leaving Wade alone against the senior Crystal Gems.

"Hey, what about us?" Lapis asked the writer, who responded by typing, "Didn't think that far ahead. You guys can just do crowd control."

"Okay Q-Bert and Drinking Bird," Deadpool exclaimed. "you two may have thousands of years of battle experience on your show but in terms of franchise ages, I've been doing this for far longer! There was even a graphic novel trilogy where an actually insane version of me killed the rest of Marvel, tons of classic literature characters and even other versions of me!"

"Do you have any idea what he's saying anymore?" Pearl asked Garnet. "I'm not sure. I fear he may be too unpredictable for us to comprehend!" Garnet answered fearfully. "You can try if you want." Deadpool beckoned them with a silly dance. "But I can assure you that hilarity will ensue!"

Pearl leaped at the Merc with a Mouth, but she was quickly denied a hit when Wade did a pirouette and kicked her in the back, sending her flying into a lamppost. "See, what did I tells ya?!"

Garnet tried her hand at attacking by enlarging her gauntlets & launching them at her foe, but they proved to be useless against him. Deadpool then rapidly fired his gun at Garnet, but she blocked all the bullets with her gauntlets and then finally moved so fast, not even Deadpool could catch her and was punched in the face.

"Wow okay, you got the guts!" Wade yelled while readjusting his head from the hit. "Seems like I really am a bit outmatched by you Garnet. Or maybe a certain someone just wants to make things fair!"

"Come on you maniac, what else can you throw at us?!" Pearl asked pointing her spear. "Oh what else can I throw?" Deadpool replied, letting out a sinister giggle while wearing a pair of shiny glasses and clasping his fingers together. "Let me show you!"

Whipping out his katana blades, Deadpool laughed maniacally while using them to tear the background apart, leaving nothing but a blank white space behind. "WELCOME CRYSTAL GEMS TO MY TURF! I PRESENT TO YOU THE FOURTH WALL, WHERE LOGIC IS JUST AS ILLEGAL AS JAYWALKING!"

"This is starting to remind me of that Uncle person." Pearl muttered in awe. "I thought we promised to never speak of that man again." Garnet instructed the former servant. "Well if he wants to make jokes and talk to the audience, then so can we."

When the two Gems joined hand, there was a bright shimmer as the pair merged into the returning glamorous Sardonyx. "Ladies, gentlemen and everyone in-between, the Gem Hostess with the Mostest has finally returned!" the fusion of Garnet and Pearl announced. "And it seems we have a very special guest star today."

"Sardonyx, huh?" Deadpool muttered while scrolling through the Steven Universe wiki for statistics. "Oh I see, she's here because we can both break the fourth wall!"

"A worthy opponent for you I must say!" Sardonyx chortled before smashing Deadpool in with her hammer. "Of course you realize this means war!" Wade roared, proceeding to whip out numerous cartoon guns, launching them all at once. "RATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATATA-RATA!" he screamed while launching lead at his fusion foe, following up with a declaration of "Omae wa mou shindeiru."

"N-NANI?!" Sardonyx cried out in shock before she spontaneously combusted with a cry of "HIDEBU!" However, the explosion cleared up and she was perfectly fine. "Psyche! Hammer time!"

Before Sardonyx could hit Deadpool with the hammer again, he disappeared into a cartoon hole like it were a solid object and reappeared out another. "Ha, that Spot douche should take notes from-OH GOD!"

"Anyone up for Whack-A-Mole?!" Sardonyx exclaimed, proceeding to whack her opponent multiple times with her hammer before he vanished and popped out another hole. And another, and another, and another, and another, until the hiding began to tire him out. "Jesus she's good." Wade panted, and then he began to make a plan. "I swore that I would never use this the moment I stole it from those schmoes, but I'm left with no choice!"

Sticking a hand up his red-clad butt, Deadpool pulled it out while holding a small black jewel that seemed similar to the Infinity Stones. "Ough, I also swore to never use it again because looking for it is a literal pain in my ass!"

"That Infinity Stone isn't canon!" Sardonyx objected while sounding like a stereotypical nerd. "Oh it may not be canon my dear, but we're in the Fourth Wall where anything could happen." Deadpool explained deviously. "With this Continuity Stone, I could warp all reality to my whims! I could use it to go back in time and erase One More Day by preventing Civil War from happening, or maybe beat the shit outta that Judas Traveller prick and his butt-buddies! But what I plan on doing now is using this stone to erase you from this reality once and for all!"

"Oh no, I don't feel so good!" Sardonyx dramatically announced as she felt herself fading away. "I'm melting! Melting! Oh what a world, what a world!" With that, the fusion finally vanished and presumably Garnet & Pearl as well. As Deadpool let out a heavy sigh, he suddenly realized that the Continuity Stone was now missing. "What the?! Where did it go!?"

"Looking for something Ninja Spidey?" a familiar voice rang out. Sardonyx was now back to normal and smugly held the Stone in her hand, setting it down like a golfball and swinging it at Deadpool's eye, causing his body to explode.

"Can I at least get one F-bomb in Mr. Author Man? Please?" Wade begged the author by putting on his best puppy dog eyes until his disembodied head landed in one of Sardonyx's hands. "To be or not to be," she began quoting Shakespeare. "That is the question."

"I got a question." The mercenary's head growled angrily. "On a scale from one to ten, how much do you think I FUCKING hate you?"

"Watch the mouth sonny, children could be reading this!" Sardonyx chortled. "Now then, let's finish this chapter!"

One bypass of the chapter break later, Sardonyx and the defeated Deadpool were now out of the Fourth Wall and back in the real world where the Nasty Boyz, Juggernaut & Black Tom were now nowhere to be seen.

"Okay, I give up!" Deadpool complained while his body began to regenerate. "I'll go with your stupid plan! Didn't really need to treat me like how Pearl killed that one Irishman during the Easter Rising."

"It was an accident!" Pearl exclaimed as she and Garnet defused. "And how did you possibly know?"

"But before we move onto the next chapter, can we make a quick stop first?" Deadpool asked. "There's a joke I think needs resolving."

"You'll never take the whale from me Wilson!" Captain Ahab exclaimed as he engaged in a swordfight with the dread pirate Straw Hat Deadpool and his motley crew. "I'll surrender when I get eaten alive!"

"Funny you should mention that Habbo." First Mate Peridot sneered before she whistled loudly for Willy to breach the surface, breaking most of Ahab's ship and swallowing him whole. "I'll get you for this Wade!" Ahab shrieked vengefully. "You haven't seen the last of me!"

When Ahab was finally swallowed, Willy gave the pirates his farewells and dove back into the water, free again at last.

"What did parodying both Free Willy and Moby Dick have to do with anything?" Pearl asked Straw Hat Deadpool. "You know what? After what I've experienced, I don't think I want to know."

At long last, the chapter is done! Good thing too, because my partner has just started college as we write this and all that education is gonna cut into his freetime!

Yes indeed, the next chapter will take a bit longer to come out because of college. But I still get a few months off soon, so there you go.

Well, that should settle it. You get some free writing done and I won't take your ANDY ONLY stuff. Hasta luego amigo! And be sure to give my regards to your mom!

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davidmann95 · 5 years

Note

Velvet's battle is a great choice, though I'll always have a special place in my heart for the fight against the Grimm Deathstalker and the Nevermore in Episode 8. That said, what do you think of the individual members of Team RWBY?

I decided to wait on this until I caught up on the series thus far, which I just finished doing the night before last in pretty much the only time in my life I’ve ever really properly binged anything other than comics, and…wow. I knew RWBY was a thing just as a matter of course from being on this site and Youtube, and from watching Death Battle, so I picked up some major beats by osmosis. But my main impression was that it was a charming pseudo-anime online thing of decent quality that unsurprisingly got heavier as it went along as such things tend to do, with extremely rad fights and music along the way; figured it’d be more than serviceable to watch while I was on the treadmill as a disposable distraction from the agony of propelling my wheezing, sweating, loathsome meat-scaffolding forward.

I did *not* expect it to eventually end up after growing pains a - while far from flawless - intensely engrossing story of all-consuming personal and generational pain and people who choose to love and do the right thing in defiance of that trauma and loss and hopelessness, where also occasionally a corgi gets fastball specialed at mechas. Though once it became clear that’s what it is, it pretty clearly sat at an intersection of a hell of a lot of my favorite things, especially when characters copped in-universe in both the main series and spinoff material that this is basically a superhero thing. My initial impressions re: the fights and music were on-point though.

I actually have quite a few thoughts on pretty much all the protagonists of note at this point (other than I suppose Oscar and Maria. Like them both though, and I do hope that nice boy’s brain somehow doesn’t dissolve into the blender of Ozpin’s subconscious), but I’ll just stick with the core four here as requested for now unless someone asks otherwise. Weiss is the simplest to get at the core of, I’d say: her arc is learning that fuck rich people, actually. She’s a seriously difficult character to get onboard for at first - especially if you’re watching those first episodes for the first time in 2019 - as the mean unconsciously racist rich girl who learns to be less mean and racist but still kinda mean. But after you’ve extensively seen the hideously toxic environment she grew up in, and fully understand her efforts to grow past the empty values it inculcated in her in favor of everything she was raised to think of herself as above, she becomes a hell of a figure to root for. Assuming RWBY is gonna go, say, a respectable 10 seasons given it was just renewed through 9, I could easily see the upcoming 7th be the climax of her arc with her return to Atlas and likely further reckoning with the consequences of her families’ actions beyond how they’ve hurt her personally.

Yang is also, in a certain abstract narrative sense, simple, in that she’s built around the very oldest trick in the book for characters whose main deal is ‘can punch better than absolutely anyone’: give them problems that cannot be solved by punching. Except in her case it’s less a material “well, this person is invulnerable to punching!” or “well, actually this other person can punch most best of all” issue blocking her path than “punching cannot solve depression, abandonment issues, questioning whether what she considers her purpose in life is one she’s truly pursuing for noble reasons or if she even has the resolve for it anymore after what’s happened to her, or PTSD”. Yet, while it may not be the kind that manifests in the form of punching people with a smirk and a bad pun anymore (much as she still definitely does that all the time) what ultimately drives her and defines her is still her strength: to move forward, to forgive, to let go, to do the right thing in spite of the risks. Which could easily come off as some unpleasant “you just have to get over your moping!” dismissal - there’s a bit with her dad that means it saddles riiiiight up to the edge of that - but there’s a weight to how her traumas remain a consistent factor in her life and have shaped her outlook even as her circumstances and day-to-day disposition improve that makes it feel thematically like it’s coming from a place of acknowledgment and endurance rather than denial, even if it’s not handled perfectly. Great to see her apparently recapturing some more of her joie de vivre based on the trailer for Volume 7, and how that’ll interact with how she’s grown should be interesting.

Blake is…tough, because you fundamentally cannot talk about Blake without getting into the Faunus, which is maybe the biggest aspect of RWBY that leaves it in the realm of Problematic Fave. It really, really wants to have something substantial to say about the proper response to racism, and every now and then it pumps out a “capitalism greases the wheels of systemic oppression and vice-versa” or “it’s perfectly reasonable for the oppressed to seek to fight back directly against their oppressors, and even the pacifist in the room can recognize that’s a defensible approach that deserves its place”. But then Abusive Boyfriend Magneto literally murders nuance in Vol. 5 episode 2, and it descends into some borderline “but what about black on black violence” respectability politics shit. It’s the classic X-Men setup - this persecuted race of often superpowered folks torn between pacifism and efforts to prove themselves to their oppressors, and those who think they should rise up and annihilate the flatscans - with most of the same pitfalls, but also we haven’t had over 50 years to get used to that just being how it works here, and it doesn’t have the excuse of having to expand as best it can on a metaphor that was originally devised before most of the people currently handling it were born. All of which would be rough enough, but given I watched this right as Jonathan Hickman’s been completely refining the entire X-Men paradigm outside that outdated binary, it especially grates. I’d love to be directed to any solid counterarguments - I’ve heard it might actually be an analogue, and a well-done one, for The Troubles, which I am one million percent unqualified to evaluate - especially since apparently one of the writers grew up in a mixed-race household, and at the end of the day I’m a white guy who may well be talking completely out his ass. But it sure comes off at a glance as some well-intentioned dudes stumbling through stuff that’s not their business, and that’s inextricable from Blake’s character when so much of her story is her navigating through that metaphor. Hopefully with new writers coming onboard this is something that can be navigated more insightfully in the future.

On a purely personal basis however, Blake’s a standout in terms of relatability when her story comes down to a pretty universal shared horror: how to climb back from having fucked up. She tried really hard to do the right thing, was taken advantage of and led into doing things she eventually realized were wrong, was so shaken that she couldn’t tell who to trust, and then the situation spiraled out of control on every possible front just as things finally seemed to be stabilizing. The way a single mistake - enabled and exacerbated by an abusive past relationship in her case - expands into a self-loathing far beyond the bounds of anything she could possibly be responsible for is brutal and completely understandable, and seeing her start put her self-esteem back together with the help of those closest to her and the power of her original convictions is arguably the single strongest, most clearly conveyed individual character arc in the series. I’m very curious where it goes from here: Adam’s finish represents a logical climax and the setup for a happily-ever-after with Yang (or Sun if they end up going that way after all) for her to coast through the remainder of the series on, but the way emotional consequences have played out in the series thus far I doubt her demons are going to be put to bed that simply.

Finally there’s Ruby, and I am contractually obligated to note up front: she is clearly not a Superman analogue. There is precisely zero percent chance that she was conceived as such or was ever deliberately executed in such a way that mirroring him was kept in mind. Though she IS a super-powered idealist raised in the middle of nowhere with a significant deceased parent who wears a red cape, flies, gives inspiring rallying speeches, has black-ish but primary color-tinted hair, and has a mysterious birthright that involves being able to shoot lasers from her eyes, plus she has a dog who also essentially has superpowers, plus she tells someone they’re stronger than they think they are, plus Yang basically quotes a bit from Kingdom Come regarding her in Rest and Resolutions. But it probably goes a ways in explaining why she works so well for me.

There’s more to it than that of course, though it does bring up the closest way in which she relates to the superhero paradigm: she doesn’t go through an arc in quite the same way as the others, instead being an already solidly-defined character who is simply illustrated by how she interacts with the people and situations around her. She learns and grows and matures, but her most basic motivations and goals and outlook haven’t really changed since the day she enrolled at Beacon. She’s a good, caring person, a leader archetype who still has more than enough personality to spare to keep from falling into the genericism that can often plague that role. A big part of the key I believe is that she’s the audience surrogate in a profound way beyond the obvious touchstones of her frequent awkwardness and self-doubt: the reason she does this is because she was inspired by stories. She’s a fan, ultimately, but one who learned all the right lessons, whether recognizing from day one the way reality falls short of the tales she was raised on but still believing in the ideals they represent, or openly holding up Qrow as a role model while being willing to call him on his shit when push comes to shove. It’s a romantic, hopeful perspective that stands out sharply from even our other heroes even as it mirrors their struggles, but as of yet there’s little to suggest it comes from a place of naivete so much as a belief that it’s the only way to bear the pain of the world and continue to believe in it. Bit by bit it’s clear she’s heading for a breaking point, but all signs point to that being a matter of her ability to withstand what she’s been through, rather than any doubt that it’s necessary, and should that time come she’s inspired plenty who’ll be able to help her back onto her feet the way she has for so many others. So while I understand her speeches apparently grate on some, as far as I’m concerned keep them coming, they’re the beating caring heart of the series and often the sole respite in the eye in the storm.

#RWBY #Ruby Rose #Weiss Schnee #Blake Belladonna #Yang Xiao Long #Mental Health #Racism #Superman #Analysis #Opinion

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jamesbucksiclebarnes · 5 years

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Rating: Mature

Chapter List: [1] | [2] | [3] | [4] | [5]

[AO3 Link] | [Fic Page]

SERIES SUMMARY:

"Not human. She was not human. They all knew it. Could almost feel it, but couldn't make sense of it. That was why they were afraid. Not because of what she used to be Before. But because of what she was now."

Having found herself serving as the right-hand to the Governor for too long, Synnove le Jacques does her best to make things right with the people of the Prison. Stuck beside her partner in crime, her irritatingly obnoxious and hideously problematic best friend, Merle, she does her best to fight back against the monster she has let the Governor become.

CHAPTER TITLE: The Consequence of Morality.

It was easy to forget how fragile humans could be. How easily their bodies break, their minds more so. I should have seen it sooner. The decay. The absolute descent from decent man to homicidal lunatic. Really, it should have been clear as day to me. I’d been with the man since the beginning. Followed his lead. Obeyed his orders because I believed he stood for the good of all those still left alive in this goddamn hellscape.

We had been strangers once. At the beginning.

He, his daughter, and his wife had been waiting in the seen-better-days room outside the hanger of the private airport out west. It had been a present from his wife. A single day of flight lessons from a local pilot.

Me, on the other hand? Well, I’d been waiting for my getaway plane. My day job wasn’t exactly within the realm of legality and, often, I’d find myself requiring a rather speedy exit from the immediate vicinity. That time was no different. I did my job and got out of there like any self-respecting worker would do.

I’m still unsure whether it was his luck or mine that allowed us to be within the same place at the same time that day. The answer would likely change depending on which one of us you asked. I say it was my luck. He would say it was his. Either way, we both lucked out that day.

Well, as much as one could “luck out” at the beginning of the fucking apocalypse.

I had gotten him and his daughter to safety, along with the handful of other occupants of the hanger that day. His wife didn’t make it. She was the first to go. I’d had to drag him away from her in order to make sure the kid didn’t become a damn orphan within the space of two minutes.

After we escape the airfield, we made our way steadily towards the nearby town. We had passed by the prison. I remembered that quite clearly. The screams coming from behind those brick walls were horrendous. Lucky for the rest of them, I was the only one that could hear them.

The town was owned by the dead when we arrived. We should have known better, but it was only the beginning. There were many lessons we had yet to learn.

Myself and two of the others cleared a way to the towering city hall building at the centre of town, barricading the doors for good measure. We held up in there for almost three days before Phil came up with that brilliant plan of his.

Build walls, he said, like it was going to be easy. Build them high and strong to keep the dead at bay.

And we did.

It was hard work. Keeping the dead back long enough to place another panel, building more and more each day until the bodies piling up were almost as high as the fence itself. That was my job, of course. Killing them. I was good at it and the rest of them knew it. In fact, I was too good at it and I knew it unnerved some of them. Especially Marcus.

Often, I’d find him eyeing me up from across the room, as if he expected I would leap up and murder him on the spot for absolutely no reason. I’d been quite transparent about my profession since the start, believing it would solidify a sense of trust, but Phillip and Milton were the only ones that didn’t look at me like I was a criminal. Phil, I think, saw the benefit of having someone like me on his side. Milton just accepted it because I was the only one that would listen to him go on about his scientific theories.

It was only after the walls were finished around our newly thriving little community that Marcus made his move.

I wish I could say I hadn’t expected it. But they’d made their intentions glaringly obvious from the get-go. He, Zach, and Luke did their best to catch me off guard during my nightly rounds. Their best wasn’t good enough.

I didn’t kill all of them, of course. We had gained almost twenty new members to our community, many of which were small families. I doubted my straight-up murdering folks would make them feel at home. Marcus, however… He’d had to go.

Once I told Phil what they’d tried to do, Zach and Luke were the first to be exiled.

There’s only been a handful others we’d kicked out since then. Mostly newcomers that refused to get with the program.

I don’t quite know when I became the general of a small army. Nor I do I even remember at what point Phillip became “the Governor”. I don’t even know when I started calling him that if it was before or after Marcus. All I know is, it happened.

Those of us that could fight, that were unafraid of the undead, were sent outside the walls to scavenge and recruit. We were partnered up, given whatever weapons we wanted from the small armoury, and sent out into the world of the dead with a little pat on our backs.

My partner had been… a challenge, for lack of a better term. He was this pasty, old white guy with a dirty mind and a Southern mouth. Sexist, racist, and whatever other “ist” you could think of – this guy was it. And, my God, for a guy with one hand he could sure be handsy. At least, he had been for the first ten or so minutes after we’d first met. Once I’d made it very clear I had little issue cutting off his other hand and feeding it to him, he’d kept it to himself.

Other than that, as a woman with dark skin who was from another country – even one as benign as Australia – it had been a little… tense between Merle and I for a while there.

But, somehow – and I don’t even know at what point we decided we didn’t hate each other anymore – we started getting along. Inside jokes, begrudging respect, and a ride-or-die attitude – we had the whole nine-yards. It came to the point that, suddenly, this redneck, trailer trash, white boy knew me better than anyone. And I knew him. We traded stories like they were currency and barely spent more than a few hours apart. Which was weird, in retrospect, but at the time, it hadn’t felt that way. He was like a brother to me. An older, obnoxiously irritating and horribly problematic brother.

And, as strange as it was, the feeling seemed to be mutual. He’d jump in to defend my honour at every opportunity. One of the guardsmen looking at my backside? His fist would be in their face before I even had a chance to turn around. He knew I could have done it myself – in fact, as much as he said otherwise, I knew some of the things I could do freaked him out a little. Mostly, it was the things he couldn’t explain away – like how I could hear things that he couldn’t or how my reflexes were just a fraction faster than was humanly plausible. Thankfully, he gave up questioning me about it rather quickly, and now just kind of… accepted my weirdness. For which I was thankful.

It was hard trying to come up with logical explanations about my oddities without outright lying about them.

Anyway, the two of us served beneath the Governor’s rule for longer than either of us would like to admit. I wish I could say I knew the exact moment his orders became less than favourable. To be honest, I hadn’t thought to question them. My entire life had been spent listening to orders and obeying them with little enquiry. I’d grown somewhat suspicious of his mindset near the end, there, but the only thing I could actually pinpoint was the exact moment I decided I’d had enough.

It was that night, in the haphazardly put together cells out by the old warehouse. We had brought in two strangers, members of a rival group that had made their home in the once-overrun prison. It had been a completely coincidental run-in. We had been out looking for a woman, a newcomer that had caused some “trouble”. We managed to track her to a series of small shops out by a deserted strip of road. I went around the back while my partner surveyed the storefronts. She was lucky I spotted her first. I didn’t know what he would have done with her. While I had made my growing concerns about the Governor’s current state of mind clear, he hadn’t deigned to share his opinion of the man with me.

At first, she had looked at me with suspicion. The woman I knew as Michonne had seen how close I was with the Governor, knew it was his orders I followed. But when I had jerked my head toward the field behind me, indicating for her to make a run for it, understanding dawned on her face. I was letting her go.

Unfortunately, that was right at the exact moment I heard a voice I didn’t know ask, “Merle?”

A young Asian man and a pretty, petite woman were standing out the front of one of the stores, looking up at Merle as if he had just sprouted horns from his thinning head of hair. I peeked around the corner just in time to watch Merle lift his gun and decided it was likely best to intervene before he got too trigger-happy, like he usually did.

I kept things relatively calm for about three entire seconds before Merle pistol-whipped the poor guy and forced him into the driver’s seat of the nearby sedan. The two of us piled in behind them and instructed them to drive back to the gates of Woodbury.

Everything just seemed to escalate from there.

We threw the two strangers, whose names I learned were Maggie and Glenn, into the barely kept-together cells and began our interrogation. And by “our interrogation” I mean the Governor and Merle’s attempts at intimidation.

Merle’s I could handle. It was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Berating the guy, beating him, tossing a biter in there – the usual. But the Governor?

I had been standing in the room with Merle, watching him berate Glenn, probing him for answers about the group making their home inside the prison fences, when I heard it. The sound of his belt was oddly stark against the soft sobs making their way through the solid metal wall. I knew the other two couldn’t hear it. It didn’t matter.

That was the moment I drew the line. The second I heard that belt, I knew what I had here in Woodbury was over.

Without a second of hesitation, I spun on my heel and marched out the cell door. Martinez was standing outside it, keeping guard, and caught my eye as I made my way down the hall a step to the next door down. His eyes were wide as he shook his head.

“Don’t,” he warned me.

I didn’t listen.

Lifting my booted foot, I kicked down the door to the cell next door and strode across the empty space to where the Governor stood, still undoing his belt. Maggie sat across the metal table from him, naked from the waist up, arms crossed over her bare chest as tears slid down her cheeks.

The Governor turned to face me at the sound of my sudden entrance. I pushed him aside as I peeled off my own shirt and gave it to the sobbing woman. Rapid footsteps sounded by the doorway and I knew both Merle and Martinez were standing there, watching as I rounded on the Governor with fire in my gaze.

He snarled at me. “What do you think you’re doing, Jacques?”

“Putting a stop to this,” I snapped in response, stepping back around the table.

The Governor did his best to stare me down, but he was about as intimidating to me as a baby lamb. “You don’t get to make that decision!” he screamed, spittle flying from his thin lips. “I give the orders here! Me, not you!”

“And I’ve obeyed them!” I yelled. “But I can’t stand by and let you do this. It’s not right and you know it!”

The Governor looked as if he were about to explode. His face was red, and his mouth kept opening and closing as if he were trying to form a response. I turned my back on him before he could, reaching out for Maggie, who had turned around to shield herself as she pulled my shirt over her head. Gently, I took her arm and began leading her towards the doorway.

Merle gave me a warning look, shaking his head just as Martinez had done. Martinez was a close friend, and Merle was my partner in crime, but I didn’t listen to either of them. Instead, I pushed my way through, pulling Maggie along with me as I lead her back into the cell where Glenn sat. The tears that had been steadily spilling down her cheeks increased tenfold when she saw what Merle’s fists had done to Glenn’s face. Once I let her go, she ran to him and began to cry as he asked her what the Governor had done.

She didn’t get a chance to answer.

The man himself burst through the partially closed door and made to grab me by the arm. I sensed him coming and spun out of his reach, turning to face him with a sneer.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” I hissed.

The Governor looked slightly taken aback. I hadn’t spoken to him like that for a long time. Too long, it would seem. “You think you can just do what you want?” he snapped back, throwing an arm wildly in the direction of the two prisoners behind me. “You want to end up in here, too? Be my guest.”

Merle took a tentative step forwards, lifting his one remaining hand in a surrendering gesture. “Oh, come now. Ya don’t need to be like that, Governor. She’s sorry. Ain’t cha, Jacques?”

“Not really,” I replied plainly. “No.”

The exasperated look he gave me would have been comical in any other situation. What had he really expected? He knew I wouldn’t – couldn’t – lie. Besides, like hell I was going to apologise for stopping him raping a woman. Jesus Christ. I may be an assassin, but I wasn’t a monster.

“Have you forgotten who’s in charge here?” the Governor asked, his voice returning to a normal volume, though underneath the blasé tone I could hear his growing contempt. “Which one of us gives the orders and which one takes them?”

“Have you?” I responded, cocking my head to the side to regard him with cold, narrowed eyes.

The Governor blinked in surprise, his right eye twitching as he tried to make sense of my reply.

I gave him the curtesy of elaborating, making sure to emphasise each hissed sentence with a step in his direction. “Did you really think you had control over me? That I wasn’t only following your orders because I agreed with them? Do you think that highly of yourself that you forgot, for a moment, who I am? What I can do?”

The Governor’s legs seemed to act without his permission, pulling him back, matching my every step forward with one back. He retreated until I came to a stop, looking down at him despite the few inches of difference in our heights.

“If I had wanted that crown of yours, Philip, I’d fucking take it and there would be nothing you could do to stop me.” I stared at him with my piercing blue eyes until he dropped his gaze, swallowing, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead.

A moment of silence passed before I returned to my usual casual lean, the tension in my body evaporating almost instantly as the intensity in my gaze dissipated.

“Now that we’ve covered that,” I began in a chipper tone. “I’d like to continue by stating that I happen to believe freeing these two in good nature would be in our best interests as a community. However, if you say otherwise, I won’t argue.” Because I’d be wasting by breath.

The silence continued to stretch for another few moments before the Governor raised his gaze back up to meet mine once again. I could see the steely resolve in them, the growing sense of distrust and malcontent. He spoke in that authoritative voice, as if I hadn’t just put him in his place merely a few minutes ago.

“We keep them here.”

And that had been that.

Kind of.

No more than a few hours later, Glenn and Maggie’s people infiltrated Woodbury.

I had returned to the cells mere minutes before I knew of their presence, knocking the working guard unconscious – sorry, Andy – and picking the lock open to set them free. My intention, of course, had been to lead them out to the loose panel in the eastern fence, escorting them to safety. That had not exactly panned out, as the people from the prison had decided to launch their attack whilst I was partway through leading Glenn and Maggie to the cellblock’s exit. Once the smoke grenades went off, I brought them both to a stop and explained to them the best way to escape, telling them to keep low in the smoke and wishing them luck before we parted ways.

As much as I knew in theory that I was done in this place, I hadn’t quite accepted it emotionally just yet. After all, I had plenty of friends here, people I almost considered family. It didn’t feel right to fight on the opposite side, not in such an outright way as taking the prison’s side in this.

I should have just gone with them. I wouldn’t have ended up here if I’d just gone.

If it had been anyone other than fucking Martinez that came for me that night, I would have fought back. And I think he knew it, too. The apologetic look he gave me before forcing me up against the side of the building to chain my wrists together was the only thing that stopped me from punching him directly in the nose.

He put a bag over my head and dragged me out to the warehouse, where the sounds of curious, excited chatter met my ears. I could only partially see through the cotton fabric covering my face, but it was enough to make out the shape of the stands we often used during our Game Nights. They were as full as they’d ever been, overflowing with the townsfolk who had no doubt been gathered at the behest of the Governor.

His voice cut through the aimless whispers surrounding him, crisp and authoritative as he announced the purpose behind tonight’s entertainment.

“What can I say?” he asked the gathered people of Woodbury. “There hasn’t been a night like this since before the walls were completed.”

Yeah. Thanks to me. I wanted to scream, to yell at the people that our “fearless” leader had lost his damn mind, but I couldn’t. Not yet. Martinez still held my arm, keeping me in my place at the edge of the biter-lined arena. On the other side, I could see another figure being dragged forwards, bag over his head.

I knew who it was from the dirty wife-beater alone and gave an internal groan. Of course, the one time I wasn’t with him when he did something stupid, he got himself caught.

“I thought we were past it. Past the days when we all sat, huddled, scared in front of the TV during the early days of the outbreak. The fear we all felt then… we felt it again tonight.”

I could barely make out his shape, standing at the back of the stands, a blonde figure sitting in the place beside him. Andrea. She had come to Woodbury alongside Michonne; yet hadn’t heeded the other woman’s warnings. Nor had she listened to mine, when I’d tried to encourage caution around the man she was taking to bed. Well, she was about to learn. As were they all.

“I failed you!” the Governor continued, his voice breaking as if he truly were ashamed. “I promised to keep you safe. Hell, look at me.” I saw the outline of his hand gesturing towards his face, though couldn’t make out what the hell he was pointing to. “You know, I – I should tell you that we’ll be okay. That we’re safe. That tomorrow, we’ll bury our dead and endure, but I won’t. Because I can’t… Because I am afraid.”

Uneasy gasps of surprise rippled through the townsfolk.

“That’s right,” the Governor sighed. “I’m afraid of terrorists. Terrorists that want what we have – want to destroy us! And worse, because more than one of these terrorists are one of our own!”

Across the arena, Patterson pushed Merle forward with enough force to almost send him sprawling onto the sands. Thankfully, my partner kept his footing, skidding to a halt in the centre of the arena and looking around at the townsfolk that had gathered to watch what was no doubt his execution.

“Merle. A man I counted on. A man I trusted.” The Governor shook his head, the dismay in his voice almost, almost believable. “He led ‘em here! And he let ‘em in!”

Merle opened his mouth to argue but something in the Governor’s gaze must have stopped him.

“It was you,” the Governor hissed down at him. “You lied. You betrayed us all.”

From the side of the arena I couldn’t see, someone else was pushed through the gap between the biters and onto the sands. The newcomer stumbled slightly, barely managing to maintain his balance as he came to a stop in front of Merle.

I couldn’t see their faces, but I could tell by the change of air around them that they recognised one another. They were not strangers.

I bit my lower lip. That did not bode well.

“This is one of the terrorists,” the Governor announced to his audience. “Merle’s own brother.”

Ah. Shit.

“And worse yet,” he continued, his voice growing deeper in his attempt to sound dismayed. “Merle’s influence over my most trusted – our most valuable asset to this community…”

I could see him shaking his head, as if the words he was trying to say hurt him too much to voice. Had I not already been almost ninety-nine percent sure he was about to tell the world it had been me that had helped Merle, I would have laughed. He’d gotten good at this.

Behind me, Martinez whispered, “Sorry ‘bout this, ese. Orders.”

He pushed me forwards, keeping his grip on my upper arm as he led me out into the sands alongside Merle and his brother. When he brought me to a stop, he let my arm go and reached up to pull the bag from my head.

“He poisoned our beloved Synnove’s mind against us. A founding member of our community!” the Governor yelled, and the stands erupted with shock and malice.

My gaze, partially obscured by the blonde strands of hair that had fallen free from my ponytail, snapped to Merle’s. He gave me a pointed look, like he was disappointed I’d let myself get caught.

“Really?” he asked, brow cocked.

“Oh, fuck you,” I snapped in response.

From up in the stands, the Governor continued his speech and I was finally able to get a good look at him. He was dishevelled and battered, as if he’d been in a fight, and across his right eye there was a white bandage, splattered with red. Someone had come for him and I hoped beyond hope that that someone had been Michonne.

“What should we do with them?” the Governor asked his people.

From my right, a distinct cry broke through the torrent of voices. “Kill them!”

I twisted in place to look for the owner, only to see an ocean of familiar faces glaring back at me. Jesus Christ. Were they really this easy to manipulate?

“Kill them! Kill them!”

Apparently so.

The chant continued as the Governor smiled down at us, a chilling grin absent of any and all warmth it had once held. I could barely recognise the man standing there.

“You wanted your brother,” he said to Merle. “Now you got him.”

Merle just looked across to the man he called brother before meeting my curious gaze. With a casual gesture towards the man standing across the arena, he grinned. “Jacques, meet my baby brother, Daryl. Baby brother, meet Jacques.”

I glanced over at the other Dixon, my gaze travelling up and down his dishevelled form. He was shorter than Merle, but not by much, and had dark, unkept hair that partially over his forehead. His ruggedly pleasant features were scrunched into a confused scowl as I took my sweet time surveying him before turning back to Merle with a cheeky grin.

“At least now I know where all the looks went in your family,” I remarked lightly.

Merle snorted and gave me the finger.

“Brother against brother,” the Governor called, promptly ruining the moment. “Partner against partner!”

I looked up at him with my upper lip curled over my teeth in a snarl.

Andrea was standing beside him now, looking up pleadingly at him as if she had expected different. Expected better of him, despite all the warnings to the contrary.

“Winner goes free! Fight to the death!”

It was incredibly unlikely he’d keep that promise.

“Hey now,” I yelled out, over the cheers and jeering voices of the crowd. “I’m sensing a little unfairness here!” I jiggled my chains behind my back and gave the Governor a pointed look. “I’m the only one with chains!”

He merely looked down at me as if I were nothing to him, a fly upon his shoe. “Well, we wouldn’t want the fight over too early, now, would we?”

The voices from the crowd called out my name, called out for me to fight. It was almost as if this were any other Game Night, where I would tag-team with Merle against challengers in this very arena. We had been undefeated since the games had begun. These people knew only a fraction of what I could do and, even then, they had always put their money on me.

I looked over to Merle. His upper lip was shaking the way it often did when he was about to explode in anger.

Somehow, he managed to keep it somewhat under control. He took a step back and began to spin, looking at each member of the crowd in turn as he lifted his arms up like he used to do at the beginning of every Game Night.

“Come on, come on! I can’t hear yous!” he called out to the townsfolk.

A few scattered “Let’s go, Merle!”’s echoed around the warehouse, followed shortly by a “Get em, Jacques!”.

“Come on, ya’ll know me! I’m gonna do whatever I gotta do to prove my loyalty is to this town!” Merle continued.

Stepping further into the centre of the arena, I kept a close eye on both him and Daryl while I prepared myself to leap-frog over the chains loosely tied behind me. I knew Merle was talking shit. Knew him well enough to see that glint in his eye that meant the wheels in this balding head were beginning to turn.

From my right, Merle’s brother scoffed. “You really think this asshole’s gonna let you go?”

Merle looked at him with a smirk. “Just follow my lead, little brother. Ready, Jacques? Just like old times?”

I flashed him a wide grin before I jumped up, swinging my bound hands down and around the base of my feet so they were now in front of me. “Ready when you are, old man.”

Merle looked back to his brother, smirk growing wider as his excitement overtook his sense. “We’re gettin’ out of this right now.”

Merle and I leapt into it first. After all, we’d had plenty of practise fighting against one another in this arena. The chain linking my wrists made it a little difficult, but I managed to pull out some old moves to make it our battle somewhat believable. When I stumbled back, having been “kicked” in the chest by Merle’s dirty boot, I took a brief moment to look behind me towards Martinez. He was holding one of the Biter leads, pushing it closer to me each minute that passed.

I knew he was the weak spot. He wouldn’t shoot me, even if his life depended on it. Not after all we’d been through together. I knew it as well as he did. That was our way out.

While I had been “recovering” from Merle’s kick, the old redneck had started beating on his brother. They tussled on the ground for a moment, looking as if they were actually going at it more than they really needed to. Daryl managed to get his boot between them and kicked Merle off and when he scrambled up onto his feet, I stepped into his guard. He took a swing at me and I ducked beneath it, stepping around him and throwing my hands over his shoulders, pulling the chain taut across his throat, leaving only just enough room for him to breathe.

Merle locked eyes with me over his brother’s shoulder. He gave a little nod.

“Martinez,” I said, quiet enough so only Merle and Daryl could hear. “He’s the weak spot.”

Merle nodded. “Count o’ ten?”

“Better make it three.” I looked to the side of Daryl’s face. “You ready, little Dixon?”

He snorted in response. I took it as a yes.

Merle started a countdown.

One.

Two.

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ohjohnno · 4 years

Text

Outrageous Fortune Reviewcap: S1E01 (”Slings And Arrows”)

The first time I watched this show, it was more as an exercise in trying to learn New Zealand slang for a writing project than anything else. It didn’t really prove useful - the characters I was researching for were upper-middle class kiwis, as opposed to the bogans depicted here - but nonetheless, the first time I watched the first episode I was too focused on my project to pay too much attention to the actual quality. Only upon rewatching did I realise that this show was great right from the get-go.

The show, for those who don’t know, centers on what is sometimes called a “crime family”. But this isn’t a Corleone or Gambino style family; this is more like what you could call a blue-collar crime family, with the main breadwinner just happening to earn most of his income through crime (in this case, mostly burglaries). They aren’t a particularly violent menace, but they are nonetheless a perpetual thorn in the side of the police, from whom they get constant and generally perfectly justified visits.

It has flaws, yes. They’re especially apparent during the first season, and they never completely go away. But it’s the cast of characters that makes this show tick, and for the most part, they’re all compelling right from the get-go. It’s a fascinating bunch of introductions - let’s take ‘em one by one.

We have Cheryl West, introduced initially as your typical mama bear. She’s fiercely protective of her children, even as she remains very firm with them; she’s less firm with her husband, Wolfgang West, the only person in the whole episode she allows to lie to her face without challenge. (”Do you know where Van was last night?”, she asks; “no,” says an unconvincing Wolf, but she lets it pass without further comment). She claims that she loves all her children equally, and I believe her, but she’s particularly kind with Jethro West, the only one of her children who’s done everything with his life that she wanted him to. He’s on his way to being a big-shot lawyer at this stage in the show, and he seems nice; the first glimpse we get of any darkness below the surface is the revelation that he made up some Maori heritage to get hired. (Spoiler alert: this plot point gets quietly dropped pretty quickly, since, y’know, it doesn’t make any sense. One of them early flaws I mentioned.)

Cheryl is less kind to Jethro’s identical twin Van West, but that’s really only because he deserves it. Van is quickly established as The Stupid West, and accordingly provides most of the episode’s laughs, but it’s a little deeper than that; he is, specifically, the Stupid Man West, his stupidity really being almost entirely rooted in his crude, half-formed machismo and his desire to prove himself to his father. It’s clearly unhealthy - Van, and his good friend Munter (who will become more important later in the show), are clearly lacking the mental chops required for a life of crime, and Van especially is an absolutely horrible liar, which is maybe the worst possible trait a career criminal could ever have. Wolf, for his part, is very fond of him; he’s less fond of Jethro, with whom he shares only curt words (by familial standards, anyway) when he’s awaiting his court date.

Then there’s Pascalle West, whom I’ve heard described as a “vacuous trollop” by certain online folks. I guess that isn’t entirely unfair, but it’s important to clarify what exactly is meant by that. In absolute terms, she is certainly smarter than Van, and she’s much more strong-willed and, in her own way, independent-minded. But she’s deeply naive, and her blustering confidence combines poorly with her total lack of any life experience. Her dream is to be a model, and she thinks she can use her sexuality to help her get there, Jenna Maroney style; the problem, as she discovers twice in this episode alone, is that this doesn’t really work. The handjob she gives to her photographer brings his price down only a little, and her attempt at charming the men at Work & Income leads only to them degrading her further. She’s trying to navigate a man’s world using the tools men have given her, and she’s only slowly learning that these tools were plague blankets, a false gift designed to keep her down.

And then, of course, we have my favorite of the bunch, and very possibly my favorite character in television history: Loretta West. It doesn’t take long to introduce the traits that most define her, and that will mostly continue to do so: she is intelligent, lazy, pretentious, nerdy, witty, and cruel. The cruelty is at a fairly basic baby stage at this point - mostly limited to probably-joking familial jabs and the occasional spot of ruthless blackmail - but it doesn’t take us long to discover that she’s found a way to secretly skip school for the past several months in order to focus on writing a movie script, that she views just about everyone else in the world as her intellectual inferior, and that she just loves to deliver witticisms.

House of suffering and torment...

The others, at this stage, are mostly minor characters. Ted West will become more important very quickly, but for now he’s just the butt of a few softly ageist jokes; Loretta figures out that he probably burned his house down on purpose because he was lonely, and she seems to get on with him more than anyone else in the family does, but that’s the only real hint of depth we get here. Wayne Judd is firmly in antagonist mode here, serving us some lovely smug snake goodness as the righteous cop perpetually tormenting our family of lovable criminals. Eric Grady is a decidedly unlovable perverted cheapskate with a faintly sickening crush on Cheryl; he’s good because every laugh is at his expense, and so he shall remain.

The episode does a great job of introducing all the main characters, but the central plot is really only driven by Cheryl, Wolf, and, alas, Van. Wolf, at this stage of the show, is very difficult not to despise; he loves his wife, but clearly doesn’t respect her nearly as much as he believes he does, and his utterly self-certain male chauvinism passes well beyond insufferable and ends up actively loathsome. Getting sentenced, early in the episode, to four years in prison for burglary does nothing to dent his absolute certainty in the correctness of his decision-making. A prison visit from Van ends with the latter trying, in perhaps the most foolishly and (fortunately) harmlessly incompetent way possible, to get involved in some sort of drug trade; when Cheryl presses him, he repeats what Wolf told him: that “with Dad inside, somebody’s got to make the decisions around here”. Cheryl’s long-suffering exasperation with unearned male arrogance is palpable.

But Cheryl is used to it. If anything, she’s too used to it, and her frosty confrontation with Wolf in a prison visit of her own is still far more charitable than he deserves. It does, however, lead to the most important early development in the show: Wolf’s hideously gentle insistence that she “doesn’t have the balls” for the sort of criminal work he expects from Van leads her to decide that the family is going to abandon the criminal lifestyle and embrace the straight & narrow. It’s a nice ideal, but it’s gonna turn out easier said than done. There’s far too many personality defects in among this cast of characters for anything to come easy.

Now, there is one notable flaw in this episode, and it heralds bad things to come: there’s a truly terrible racist joke about an old Asian woman who turns out to know Kung Fu, and it blossoms into the presence of an entire family of dumb stereotypes and silly lowest-common-denominator sex jokes (the Hongs) that’s gonna remain the worst part of the show for the duration of the season. It’s a shame, and the writers should really have known better, but I tend to just grin and bear it. They’ll be gone soon enough, after all, and they aren’t enough to get in the way of the generally excellent writing on display here. Plus - and this is one of only a few times I’ll mention it, ‘cos otherwise it’ll get repetitive - the acting from the main cast is universally incredible, to the point where I’m genuinely kind of angry that only Antony Starr has attained proper stardom. But no matter! We soldier on. To the second episode!

#antonia prebble #siobhan marshall #robyn malcolm #antony starr #grant bowler #television #outrageous fortune #frank whitten #rachel lang #gutter black #nz

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douxreviews · 5 years

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Outlander - ‘If Not For Hope’ Review

By Laure Mack

"We've lived with the fear of the unknown before, not knowing if the other is alive or dead."

Well, this was something. Not a spare moment with something happening in every corner of the board but it still somehow felt like mostly filler?

That opening was pretty effectively jarring. We haven't seen a modern setting in quite a long time. The first time through, I didn't immediately realize they were trying to trick us into thinking Roger had gone back. I was too taken aback by what I was seeing to see the implication. Poor Roger. We didn't see a lot with him or how he came to be recaptured so we're still left wondering if it was his decision to stay. Not seeing it makes me think that the reveal is being saved for something juicy and dramatic.

Can we be honest for a second? Am I the only one struggling to care about Roger and Bree as a couple? I think we are supposed to take their connection as a fact, but we didn't have enough of the build up of that connection. We've mostly just watched them argue and take turns abandoning each other and that simply did nothing to invest me in their journey to find each other. There were times that Claire and Jamie were separated that my heart would just break for the loneliness the characters were feeling. I get none of that here. I'd go so far as to suggest they date other people... if they, you know, asked my opinion.

Then we find Bree at River Run and she's had a busy (few?) months. She's very pregnant and sassy and into her art, bro. And very very busy pushing against the norms and racists and snobs. I kept waiting for some fallout. I was worried a few times that Bree was going to land Phaedra in some very hot water and I'm happy that I was wrong. I hope I stay wrong. Brianna wasn't too busy though, thank the stars, to make friends with Lord John. I'm sure I've mentioned before that I just never loved this character but I did really enjoy what looks like the beginning of a strong friendship. There was an ease between the two of them that felt very natural and lovely. I hated that Bree went for the threat of outing his sexuality though. Not cool, not what friendship is made of. Or a marriage for that matter, I guess.

Watching Jocasta work that Mackenzie magic to set Bree up on her own version of The Dating Game was somehow really heartwarming. I never thought I'd miss the days of Colum and Dougal scheming to use those around them to their own ends but Jocasta fills those fiery and smart and cunning shoes well. I chuckled when she was beaming with pride at Brianna for securing the proposal from John.

Back in Wilmington, Fergus, Murtagh and Marsali are all vying for best supporting character status. I just love Fergus so very much. Always loyal, he of course welcomes Murtagh into his home and helps him to fulfill Jamie's request to find Bonnet. Even with a family to think of and trouble finding work, he's able to be there for the people that he cares about without question. What a standup guy. And I've been waiting to see him and Murtagh together onscreen for weeks now and I wasn't disappointed. Their companionship and camaraderie jump right off the screen as people that know and trust each other. I wonder if I'll get lucky enough to see the two of them in a room with Jamie and Claire before the season is over?

I guess I shouldn't press my luck with Murtagh in the slammer now, though. I might be in complete denial but they wouldn't dare kill him off or write him out again, right? Right?? RIGHT??!!?! Especially not with Jamie gone.

Marsali is so cool. I loved her waking Murtagh up and chastising him for putting dirty boots on her cleans blankets. For pushing him to make her husband feel useful and whole and I loved loved loved the look on her face hearing Fergus decline to leave her and Germain behind. She is the greatest.

As much as I liked anything else, though, none of it compared to Jamie and Claire finally talking, hashing things out and getting back on the same page. Or on the same sleeping bag as it were. This relationship is still the glue that holds Outlander together for me. It's still the glue that draws me back every week. And I hate when they get pushed to the periphery for story lines heavy with relationships that I just don't care about as much. Claire has been sacrificed the most here. At least Jamie's blossoming relationship with Brianna had earned him some screen time. Sam Heughan spends so much time as Jamie breaking our hearts. This week he hit a new stride with it, though. It wasn't heavy handed or overly done, but he wore his pain so visibly and it was affecting. He pretty much seems to have given up on being able to be a father to his daughter. His daughter with Claire. The baby he sacrificed twenty years with his soulmate for. He has no hope of earning back a place in her life and if mourning that loss was difficult for Heughan to play, he didn't show it for a second. His pain felt palpable and tangible, and what's more – believable, throughout the hour. I think realizing that Claire didn't hate him did something to ease his pain but nothing to heal the actual loss he feels like he has suffered.

Give me more Jamie and Claire or give me death. Just kidding. I don't want death. Unless it's Bonnet's.

2.9 out of 4 spirit tunnels

It feels like it should be less, but there wasn't anything terribly wrong with the episode. Am I crazy or was it a little dull?

Bits and pieces

This review was hard to write. Like squeezing water from a rock. Or whatever that analogy is.

It was fun seeing Ian squirm trying to play Dr. Phil for his aunt and uncle. He really didn't like seeing them ununited. So say us all, Ian. FYI, I know ununited isn't a word, but divided feels wrong.

How much time has passed? Sometimes Bree looked very obviously pregnant and sometimes not even a hint of it.

Not that it matters in any way but did Jocasta just tell us that Jamie and Jenny's brother Willie wasn't a Fraser by blood? I guess Ellen could've been knocked up by Brian.

How is Stephen Bonnet, a man wanted for murder, running around Wilmington without a care in the world while Murtagh is recognized and arrested on his first boys' night out?

Why did John change his mind and agree to marry Bree? More deference to Jamie?

This is me not mentioning how hideously distracting Claire's wig in particular was in the tent at the end.

Did you watch the preview for next week? I don't usually comment on previews but I have to say it seemed bizarre and disjointed. I watched it three times thinking that I must be missing something. Maybe I should try again when I'm not so exhausted.

Lizzie: "God in heaven, what have I brought you to? A monstrous darkness, you're possessed." Bree: "Lizzie, I'm not possessed. I'm hurt and angry." Lizzie: "It's all my fault." Bree: "No, you made an honest mistake."

Jocasta: "You canna live on hope."

Fergus: "In Milord's eyes, I'm whole but to them, here, I'm less than a man."

Marsali: "It is burden enough harboring a wanted man under our roof." Fergus: "He would do the same for me."

Marsali: "If I wanted him shot, I'd do it myself. Besides its be unfair to shoot him first as he didn't put his boots on my clean blankets."

Marsali: "I'll have a whole man or none at all."

Lord John: "Your father would never divulge to me anything that you did not wish me to know. He's an honorable man." Brianna: "Don't talk to me about my father."

Claire: "Sometimes it's hard to separate fact from fiction." Jamie: "When you dinna have two sides of the story, aye, it is." Oooooh, burn!

Claire: "I'm sorry I didn't tell you it was Stephen Bonnet when I knew. Had I, it might have saved Roger. I never thought I would keep a secret like that from you." Jamie: "Until Brianna." Claire: "When I made you that promise there was no one else in my life that would come before you. But I don't know if I can keep that promise anymore." Jamie: "I understand, but I cannot be a father to her." Claire: "Of course, you can. She's just hurt right now." Jamie: "She doesna need me. I never thought I'd be jealous of a dead man." Claire: "Of Frank?" Jamie: "You heard what Bree said. Frank would have never said those things to her or made the mistakes that I have." Claire: "Frank made plenty of mistakes. All parents do." Jamie: "Bree thinks he's a better man. I thought perhaps you were beginning to feel the same, Sassenach." Claire: "You fool. Come here. She didn't mean it. She doesn't want you to go to hell."

I honestly could have quoted everything they said in the tent. It was so very good and so classic Jamie and Claire straightforward(ness).

#Outlander #Claire Beauchamp #Jamie Fraser #Brianna Randall #Outlander Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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dontforgetthedragon · 6 years

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You know what I’m currently peeved about???

I’ve been reading The Fates Divided, as in the sequel to Carve the Mark, and it’s actually??? Really??? Good??? Like, both books are just really good when it comes to good representation and well-written characters. They have:

Canonically nb people, whose identity no-one calls into question

Canonically gay couples, both young and older

Incredibly racially diverse societies

Mixed-race families and children that make my mixed-race, yearning-for-representation heart sing

The stance that adopted families can be your real families, and can have more claim on you than your biological parents

Disabled characters who aren’t portrayed as a burden on their societies

etc

And yet I have seen Carve the Mark slagged off on this site more times than I can count. I almost didn’t read it bc of the assertions people made about it, and because I was young, and naïve, and thought that if someone said something with such conviction then it must be true, right?

WRONG

In the end, I read Carve the Mark if only bc some of the people slandering (yes, slandering, as in making up negative things that turned out to actually contradict the source material therefore making them objectively untrue) the book were also trying to assert that fact checking was morally wrong and I mean that was obviously not true, even to my young and impressionable self.

Probably the most outrageous piece of obvious libel I almost believed is the assertion that ‘Carve the Mark is hideously racist because it portrays black ppl as violent savages’.

So, uh, let’s look at the actual facts here:

Both the Shotet and Thuvhesit people are describe as being multiracial. People from both nations are described as having fair skin, or dark skin, or curly hair, or straight hair, or freckles, or Asian eyes etc.

Akos, who has fair skin, is assumed to be Shotet on multiple occasions, which would not occur if the Shotet (the more violent of the two nations) were predominantly dark-skinned.

Akos turns out to actually be Shotet.

Both the Noavek (Shotet) and Kereseth (Thuvhesit) families are incredibly mixed-race, to the point where two very different looking babies could be switched without arousing suspicion.

Akos notes that his sister, Cisi Kereseth, is very similar in colouration to Cyra Noavek. Cyra is described as having brown skin and curly hair.

Cyra turns out have been born a Kereseth, and Cisi’s biological sister.

Lazmet Noavek is described as naturally fair-skinned, but tanned. He notes that Akos got his grey eyes from his side of the family.

While Thuvhe characterises the Shotet as violent savages, it becomes abundantly clear in TFD that this is a vicious and damaging stereotype that is completely unfair on the Shotet people, who are predominantly just normal people trying to live as best they can under the Noavek regime.

Attacks on both Thuvhe and Shotet are described with an equal sense of horror.

Literally nothing in either of the books draws any sort of correlation between violence and skin colour???

And I mean I guess at the end of the day, the moral of this story is that if anyone tries to tell you that it’s morally wrong to check the facts, it’s bc they know they’ve misrepresented the facts to you, or downright lied, and they don’t want you to find out.

Is Veronica Roth a perfect human capable of creating an absolutely uncriticisable piece of work that can be paraded around as the shining example of how to incorporate different minorities into your literature in such a way that absolutely no-one will have qualms about how you represent any of your characters? Of course not. But should she be slammed for trying her damnedest to produce good representation for a wide range of people instead of producing another story about straight, white, able-bodied people and their straight, white, able-bodied friends like most of the fantasy genre seems saturated with? Absolutely not.

tl;dr: don’t trust anyone who tries to disuade you from checking the facts for yourself

#carve the mark #the fates divide #veronica roth

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annarosewriting · 5 years

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Facebook Sucks.

To be fair though, all social media kind of sucks.

But Facebook is where the focus of my hatred lies.

It’s sole purpose upon conception was to rank girls on how hot they were (how have we, as a society, all forgotten that fact?), it fucked with the 2016 election AND it’s stealing our data and giving us ads for products we thought about once five years ago.

(I also recently learned they took down my girl, Liz Warren’s ads because she, correctly, called them out on their bullshit. We truly live in a dystopian society.)

Facebook is filled with Local’s whose narrow view of the world helped get Donald and Co. in office and brought fucking measles back. (VACCINATE YOUR KIDS. FUCK.)

It’s dripping with racist, “all lives matter!” bullshit and sexist, “well what about men’s rights” garbage. Relatives who believe click bait articles over NPR. And of course, everyone only posting The Good Shit that’s happening to them.

I was bored at work the other day and got on Facebook which was my first, and only, mistake. I scrolled down my feed and counted two proposals, one person buying a whole ass house and seven people getting accepted into their dream jobs/higher ed programs.

And for the hottest of seconds, I hated all of those people. I blamed all of my problems on them.

It was their fault I felt like I wasn’t good at my job. Their fault that I was feeling stuck. It was their doing with their emoji-laden announcements that I was feeling overworked, overlooked and under-appreciated.

Luckily I was able to reign it in and cut those feelings off at the pass. Because that’s ridiculous. And also I know myself well enough that if I did let myself go down that path a depresh sesh would hit so hard and fast that the rest of my week would be ruined.

I think the problem with Facebook and it’s hotter, more successful, cousin Instagram, is that it props up the idea that everyone’s performance art piece they call Life is a perfect, Academy-Award winning darling, that everyone can’t stop talking about.

Except for Twitter. That’s the only place where true Messy Bitch Culture is accepted, allowed and, to a certain extent, celebrated so it can stay.

In general, I’m very tired of social media. Which can’t bode well for the fact that I chose that as a vital part of my career BUT it doesn’t change the fact it’s an exhausting source of time, energy and a horrifying mix of performance and revenue that society can’t seem to quit.

I’m weary of feeling like I have to perform constantly. For feeling like I always have to be ON. That I need to measure up to what other people think success is. That my life needs to be one thrilling life event after another.

In the past, I spent a lot of time, energy and heartache constructing a poorly designed house of cards via Facebook and Instagram posts to prove that I was Someone who was Cool and Fun and Flirty and Someone Who Deserved to Be Adored By Everyone.

Every day I added to the shoddily constructed set that was my hideously low budget, community theater performance of My Fantastic Life (trademark pending).

Showing off before and after shots of my weight loss. Trying to prove I was in a Cool Liberal Arts College Scene. Snapchatting the evidence of me drinking shitty alcohol and going out. Trying to insinuate that guys wanted to date me. Throwing up full ass albums on Facebook just to prove I had a big ole group of BFF’s.

I wanted to prove I wasn’t alone!! I wasn’t miserable!!! I wasn’t hanging out with the same two people over and over again!!! I didn’t feel directionless!!! I was someone who had a big group of friends!! Guys wanted to date me!! I had an endless supply of shitty booze and frat parties right at my fingertips!!! I was the QUEEN of having the Classic College Experience and being Someone Who Was Popular!!!!

And I was profoundly, truly miserable.

The shitty booze caused me to say and do things that I deeply regret. Not to mention the violent hangovers they caused.

All the boys turned out to be garbage and made me feel even WORSE about myself. Not that that’s a surprise.

The big group of friends disappeared. I was more focused on me and what I could get out of others than being a supportive friend.

I was wasting so much time, energy and effort into trying to impress a phantom audience instead of trying to figure out what would actually make me happy.

I was doing things and participating in activities that went against what I believed in.

I was hurting and depressed.

So, shit blew up in my face.

It took an overhaul of my life and a long time to realize that that was a learning experience I desperately needed. And because of it, I like who I am a lot more now.

It made me realize that I don’t care about the numbers on social media. The only reason I’m still attached to it is Chris Evans daily tweets dragging the GOP, getting daily body positive inspiration and to keep tabs on all the members of 1D.

Except for Zayn. Fuck Zayn.

It taught me that I can post whatever the fuck I want because truly, who gives a shit. We’re alive on a rock hurtling in space and we’re concerned by how many people will look at a shitty picture of food?? Let me post shitty Captain America meme’s in PEACE.

Most importantly it taught me how I want to use social media and the effect I want it to have on me and the effect I want to have on it.

I like TYPING IN ALL CAPS ABOUT THINGS I LOVE.

I love tweeting 40 times in an hour then not tweeting for a month straight.

I love posting selfies of myself over and over again.

I love not posting on Facebook so no one from high school can know what I’m doing.

It can be hard to capture the messier, more vulnerable parts of life though.

Pictures of me modeling can’t capture how violently I beat myself up for skipping a workout or for how ugly I’ve felt for the past few weeks.

Pictures of me with friends, smiling and having fun don’t reveal the self-doubt that I’m a bad friend and the fear that they’ll all decide to leave me.

A snapshot of me and my family isn’t a great way to reveal the fear I have of what I’ll do when my parents are gone.

The Insta story of the Fun Office Thing I’m doing doesn’t convey the many days and hours I sit at my desk, trying to look busy, feeling like I’ll never measure up and how unsure I am of the career choice I made.

Snapchats of me going out don’t reveal the many nights I’m plagued by the persistent fear that what I’m doing with my life isn’t enough and that I need to do more, more, more, more.

So it’s challenging to convey the harder, messier sides of life on social media. But I think it’s important though. It can make people feel less alone and who doesn’t want to feel less lonely on this bitch of an earth?

Recently, I’m caught between the rock and a hard place of, “Why bother posting that? Who even cares?” And “Might as well post that. Who cares?”

At the end of the day, we all have different thoughts and have read thousands of think pieces on social media. How our society uses and abuses it. How it brings us closer together or further apart. How it’s the best thing to happen to us or the worst.

So why do I even bother posting this? Who even cares? In the grand scheme of things, does it even matter?

Probably not.

But I might as well.

Who cares?

#anna writes #anna rose writing #social media #existential crisis

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thisisonlyforclass25 · 2 years

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How Blazing Saddles Addressed Racism in Cinema and Typecasting

In 1974, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles aimed to satirize western movies as well as the people who made them through several means. Up to this point, there had been co-leads in movies of Caucasian and African American opposition that had to learn to work together in order to achieve a common goal. This was not without stereotyping the African American character and using their race or culture as an obstacle in itself. For those wishing to watch this movie, there are a great amount of racial slurs hurled around in a manner that may be offensive to multiple groups of people.

With Cleavon Little as Bart and Gene Wilder as Jim and set in 1874 on the American Frontier, Blazing Saddles is about stopping a plot of territorial attorney general Hedley Lamarr to force the abandonment of Rock Ridge in order to route a new railroad through it to avoid quicksand.

There is a scene with a medieval executioner that says he doesn’t discriminate in his position and place of work. Of course it is absurd in itself, but the message is that death doesn’t care about what race you were during your life, because it is all the same when you’re dead. This was not really talked about in any of our classes, but I feel it is a point worth noting.

While admittedly, some of the gratuitous use of racial and homophobic slurs make parts of the movie somewhat uncomfortable to watch, it is an accurate representation of what people found acceptable in portrayals of Western frontier movies in cinema. It also juxtaposed the stereotypes of characters in dramatic western cinema. For example, it has a Native American speaking Yiddish for the sheer absurdity of itself, and to oppose the general stereotype that the popular western genre had at the time for Native American people. Some of the tropes are used as embellishments of a stereotypes of certain races portrayed dramatic films of the time, such as a token Mexican blessing himself when the “dumb brute” character, Mongo, rolls into town riding an ox.

Eventually, Bart defeats Mongo in a cartoonish manner, and the old lady who called him a racial slur in the beginning brings him a pie and apologizes for the previous slur, then asks him not to tell people she talked to him. This was a pretty obvious reflection of how America was treating the African American people, and minorities in general, and it was pretty on the nose.

At one point, when they round up people to help drive the Rock Ridge residents out of town, they have Ku Klux Klan members, Conquistadors, a portrayal of evil people from the Middle East, Nazis, and general criminals. This was chosen as a mix of what is generally accepted as evil people throughout different eras of human existence, and what would be generally accepted in the 1970s without much controversy.

As the movie devolved into absurdity and breaking the fourth wall, the message still stays the same. The hideousness of American culture of the time that took racial and homophobic slurs and showed that the culture in 1974 was extremely similar to that of 1874, in terms of how minorities were viewed. While the words themselves are now culturally taboo to use, the viewpoints on minorities are still around in whispers rather than out loud.

Richard Pryor, comedian and co-screenwriter of Blazing Saddles, wanted Mel Brooks to push the envelope to portray the bad guys of the movie as racist and someone who would say racial slurs. He was the original first choice for the lead role, but Warner Brothers deemed him uninsurable with rumors that he had a drug habit and prior convictions relating to drugs as a black man. With context, it makes sense that the movie pushes the allegory to modern times so hard.

Overall, despite the crudeness of the movie, the movie sends a message that the words are not innocuous like the western movies tried to make them. The portrayal of the simple-minded white people who were racist through and through was the out loud part that isn’t spoken today.

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caredogstips · 7 years

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Twitter was all all about politics and celebrity spats this week

To announce Twitter became a bit hectic this week is an understatement. Disputes and taking sides went on for the entire seven days, to running high levels of bitterness.

From Trump vs. Hillary to Taylor vs. Kanye to Ghostbusters vs. Hordes of Angry Dudes, Twitter has become as much of a battleground as ever. But thoughts werent all bad, as people got good information from My Chemical Romance and even merrily married their re-tweeters( in one specific case ).

SEE ALSO: Obviously Pokmon Go and Calvin Harris dominated Twitter this week

1. Mike Pence shares a vice-presidential Chili’s lunch

Busy weekend in NY! Experiencing a speedy dinner with the family at @Chilis. Looking forward to getting back to Indiana. pic.twitter.com/ SUFjYcvQpH

Mike Pence (@ mike_pence) July 16, 2016

Like most legislators who receive good information, Mike Pence celebrated following the announcement that he would be actuality TV ace and Republican nominee Donald Trumps pick for vice president.

But unlike most grand galas, it happened at a Chilis restaurant, and the scorning Pence received initiated him to the world of presidential elections, although he most definitely enjoyed his snack. Too, in a creepy construction, his daughters reflection is missing from the mirror.

2. Woman goes wedded through bookstore’s Twitter

Dear reader, I married him #noreally #yeahidunnohoweither pic.twitter.com/ OKuosKzdJL

Victoria (@ VictoriaO_B) July 17, 2016

In 2012, a Twitter user called Victoria Carlin jokingly tweeted that she was in love with whomever was posting nerdy notes on the Waterstones bookstores account.

The Waterstones account responded, and shortly after, Carlin called the bookstore to meet its Tweeter.

One thing led to another and they got married( not Carlin and Waterstones, Carlin and Waterstones employee Jonathan OBrien ).

3. Leslie Jones busts racists and misogynist trolls

Stop saying ignore them or that’s just the way it is. Cause that’s bullshit. Everybody knows an asshole check them for their hate.

Leslie Jones (@ Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016

While Twitter users dissing the all-female Ghostbusters remake for supposedly non-sexist reasonableness is nothing brand-new, thoughts reached a boiling point when various self-appointed guards of the Ghostbusters franchise threw hideously racist and sexist slurs toward actress Leslie Jones, who plays ghostbuster Patty Tolan in the film.

Jones ultimately decided to stop stymie them and start testifying her partisans some of the stupidity molted been receiving.

4. U.K. heat wave melts good manners and this dog

Make sure to keep your dogs chill in the #UKheatwave, otherwise they will thaw. pic.twitter.com/ kgW7ChXElX

Scott Jordan Harris (@ ScottFilmCritic) July 18, 2016

Britain had a particularly red-hot era lately, with temperatures over 30 magnitudes Celsius( which would be around 90 degrees Fahrenheit ). Unprepared for the heat wave, Brits deterred themselves cool by tweeting off steam throughout the day about how miserably red-hot it was.

5. Ruby Rose calls out Kardashian popular children for bullying

@ChloeGMoretz @0hbubbl3s @khloekardashian Yo Khloe I thought you were rad when I matched you but this is awful and this is a 19 year old girl.

Ruby Rose (@ RubyRose) July 18, 2016

While the Taylor Swift v. Kanye West spat has been all-encompassing to its implementation of personalities whove noticed their space into it, frictions reached a strange breaking point when Khloe Kardashian responded to actress Chloe Grace Moretzs sympathetic Swift tweet, and actress Ruby Rose had to step in.

Particularly, Kardashian destroyed any promise of a civil debate by tweeting a nude photo she claimed was Moretz, something Moretz denied. The Orange is the New Black actress decided a grown-up adult bullying the 19 -year-old Moretz swept all sorts of rows, announcing the 32 -year-old Khloes behavior awful.

6. Hillary Clinton recollects being friends with her critics

Senator McConnell can be very complimentarywhen you’re not on the ballot. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/ RA9bCeaDht

Hillary Clinton (@ HillaryClinton) July 20, 2016

With the Republican National Convention in full swing, some speakers have been insulting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton more often than theyve been praising Trump, perhaps a side effect of Trumps tightened rise to superpower among establishment Republicans.

But Clinton, or rather her social crew, would let the poking go without a reaction. She posted personalized tweets for many of her biggest pundits , noting how they used to praise her before the nasty referendum cycle began.

7. My Chemical Romance posts cryptic release year for … something

pic.twitter.com/ kpr4a 5mu80

My Chemical Romance (@ MCRofficial) July 20, 2016

Rock party My Chemical Romance( lead singer Gerard Way doesnt like to be called emo) tweeted out a cryptic 30 -second video, peculiarity a nondescript flag waving patriotically while the intro to their hymn, Welcome to the Black Parade, plays in the background.

In typical teaser mode, the video ended with the date 9/23/ 16, observing September 23 as apparently the exhaust of a new album. Love unsurprisingly embarked freaking out.

8. X-Files sun find childhood photo of devotee Kate McKinnon

Kate McKinnon, we have something in common& it’s not slimy dark-green happenings. #Ghostbusters #thefutureisfemale pic.twitter.com/ 5m00Xk5CET

Gillian Anderson (@ GillianA) July 18, 2016

Counted amongst the followers of the new Ghostbusters movie is actress Gillian Anderson, famous for playing special agent Dana Scully on The X-Files , who noticed something she has in common with ghostbuster/ comedian Kate McKinnon( who plays Jillian Holtzmann in the movie ).

It is about to change McKinnon was a big X-Files follower back in the working day with her Agent Scully Halloween costume. Perhaps busting specters and immigrants/ the government isnt so different.

9. Garry Marshall is recollected by his Happy Days stars

GARRY MARSHALL Rest In Peace .. Thank you for my professional life. Thank you for your love, friendship and magnanimity.

Henry Winkler (@ hwinkler4real) July 20, 2016

Younger folks may be less familiar with filmmaker Garry Marshall, developer of the iconic 1970 s sitcom Happy Days as well as targeting films like Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts. But numerous, numerous personalities worked with him during his long job, and he received a long list of adoration sendoffs.

One of “the worlds largest” stroking came from performer Henry Winkler, best known as the leather jacket-clad Fonzie on Happy Days, who credited Marshall with helping start his career.

10. #FilmsThatAreCheesy takes happens a tad literally

The hunger plays: Catching Feta #FilmsThatAreCheesy pic.twitter.com/ aeEsLrPuWh

Dee (@ xDeemax) July 21, 2016

On a lighter memo, the week conclude with the trending hashtag Movies That Are Cheesy, which may have originally meant something like shabby movies, but immediately changed course to cheese puns and cheesy photoshops.

Fantastic Bries and Where to Find Them and a glob of feta Photoshopped over Katniss Everdeens face were some of the, ahem, cheesier examples.

The post Twitter was all all about politics and celebrity spats this week appeared first on caredogstips.com.

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