i love the founding fathers of yaoi, gordon freeman and barney calhoun.

first time seriously drawing these two. i adapted them into my style well enough i think...

mwah

[ID: (Furries) Alyx and Barney stand beside each other, both looking bored. Barney is drinking something, and Alyx is reading something.

A: what kind of flowers does Gordon like

B: he's not a flowers kind of guy

A: maybe he just didn't like the flowers you got him specifically

B: rich coming from the kid who doesn't know what a daffodil is

A: (cut off) shut up /end ID]

This is technically 1 (My favorite fic of yours) but a bit of extra- Cornflowers and Coffee- I read that before I fully succumbed to fps madness. One of the handful of fics in the Freehoun tag- and I was like damn, this dude knows his stuff. So fucking tender. And that goes for all your Half-Life Adjacent stuff. Even if it's not in my personal little headcanon bubble of the guys, you have a vision and super compelling characterization regardless of what you do with them. CATHOUN! AMAZING! SHOWSTOPPING! I NEED TO WRITE SOMETHING AGAIN FOR HIM (THREAT)

WAAAHH THANK YOU. I REALLY LIKE CATHOUN, AND I'M GLAD SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE CONEFLOWERS AND COFFEE. I LOVE YOU!!!!

sorry for bein in love with the hl1 guard 😔

hi i wrote something with mine and emmys dnd characters Freedon and Barnaby where they go and live on a farm together. wanna read fantasy freehoun? here ya go

https://archiveofourown.org/works/28931625

Blue screen barney 🤝gordon freeman🤝 Barney Calhoun

YES YOU UNDERSTAND YOU GET IT

GORDON HAS TWO HANDS

once blue goes through his whole character arc, this ship? It’s Canon.

replayed some of ep2 yesterday.....thinking about them

This might sound a little weird but I like hearing peoples personal headcanons for characters: so do you have any HCs for the characters in RH that appear in the canon Half-Life?

I headcannon Gordon as trans and selectively mute. I also see him as the type to have anxiety, ADHD, and possibly Autism. (Just like me!) I also like to give him freckles.

I head cannon Barney to have past childhood religious trauma.

Breen is a gay ass man, this may be my headcannon but have you heard the sass in that mans voice? He just radiates gay to me tbh.

I headcannon Alyx as more of a sister to Gordon and Barney. Not just because Freehoun but because of another headcannon I have. That other headcannon being that Gordon used to baby sit for Eli and Azian back at Black Mesa.

I get a strong bisexual vibe from Kleiner. Also Kleiner is autistic. No one can tell me different. Gordon is basically Kleiner’s adopted son.

Technically Gordon has a sibling of some kind because of the picture of his nephew in his locker. So I use that to headcannon John Freeman in. And no I don’t mean in the same silly way as the full life consequences videos, I mean in a more serious way. 

im a freehoun fan but i think its kinda funny how people got up in arms about the technical age gap with freemance when hl2 freehoun has barney in his like. mid 40s

Thinking about their boys, respectively.

“just, stay with me for a minute, will ya darlin’? i, uh, i think this is it for me, doc.”

*long sigh*

As I wake up to yet another wave of nonsense Half Life shipping discourse, I find myself deeply regretting that I started writing for Freehoun when I did. I was really excited about finishing my current WIP, and I know lots of people are excited to keep reading it, but it’s so hard to find the motivation to keep writing something that is, at best, going to entertain a bunch of people who have been sending me anti-Freemance hate mail, and at worst will be used as an argument to illustrate why Freehoun is “better.”

I might finish chapter 3 this weekend, but I probably won’t. And I might publish it on AO3, but I probably won’t. If you see this and you’d like me to share it via some other format if I can’t bring myself to post it, message me. Clowns who think Freemance is “pedophilia” need not apply.

probably cause I'm not American and also I haven't seen much of the fan content you're talking about but I literally didn't notice that Barney had a southern accent at all its always just been American™ to me like everyone else's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The supposed accent seems to be most apparent to Americans who don’t live in the South. Southerners either don’t notice it or think it’s pretty subtle (because we know how pronounced it is in actual southerners), and people outside the US (rightfully) don’t think it stands out as remarkable, because it... doesn’t. It’s a slight twang at best, and it could just as easily be interpreted as midwestern or any number of other regional accents. 

All we know about Barney’s origin story is that he canonically spent some time in California (west coast) for college/technical school. His VA’s from Massachusetts (northeast). Mike Shapiro does seem to have a big of a twang in his speaking/singing voice at times, but still nothing approaching a southern gentleman cowboy accent or whatever. 

As for Overly Southern Barney in fan content, maybe it’s not as prevalent as it was a few months ago? I haven’t really been keeping up with new freehoun stuff on ao3 lately, but for a while, a lot of new fics seemed to have Barney saying “darlin’” and referencing southern cultural stereotypes every other sentence. And one doesn’t have to spend very long in the tags on tumblr or searching on twitter to find someone gushing about how hard they simp for southern dreamboat Barney (usually accompanied by an outright admission that they’ve never played the games). Coincidentally, these tend to be the same people who are ready to throw hands over freemance based on second- or thirdhand misinformation. 

Again, people are entitled to their headcanons, even if I don’t “get” them. But it baffles me to see people thinking Overly Southern Barney is canon, and it also bothers me to see people perpetuating harmful or ignorant southern stereotypes in their fanworks because they obviously either loathe or fetishize southern culture. 

Hey uh... sorry to bother you over stupid shit but... Do you use Discord? And if you do, do you have any recommended groups I could join? I’ve been searching around for any Half-Life based groups and I’ve been lead to mostly HLVRAI stuff. I’m relatively new to the series and I was wondering if you had any suggestions. I’m sorry.

Oof, yeah, it feels like it’s almost impossible to escape HLVR//AI in Discord communities, even the ones that claim to be mostly for HL. (And a lot of the ones that are technically mostly HL are like 98% freehoun, which sucks if that ship isn’t your thing, or if you’re an adult who doesn’t want to ship two traumatized fictional grown-ass adults like they’re a couple of uwu soft beans.)

I do use Discord, but I can’t do much to get you connected to good Half Life servers unless you message me off anon. Most of the good ones I’m in are closed and I’m not inclined to try to wrangle anyone an invite if I don’t at least sort of know them. 

If you’re not comfortable messaging me, I totally understand, and I wish you the best of luck in your search! Sorry I can’t be of more help. I don’t know how searching for servers works and I don’t want to publicly name the owners of private servers for obvious reasons.