Saiki Kuriko I love you

if youre still doing the character thing, how about spirit or marie?

I sure am. How about Spirit And Marie? Both wonderful characters. I’ll do Marie first, then Spirit. Thanks for the excuse to infodump, really. You people are too kind.

Marie Mjolnir

My first impression of Marie was the same impression I get of most female characters in anime. It’s either “why do their clothes have to look like that” or “oh god here comes the obligatory sexist heteronormative romance”. For Marie, it was more of the second. They mention in the same episode she’s introduced that Stein is her “first love”, which told me that if she had a large place in the plot, her assigned male counterpart around which to orbit would be him. Though I’ve never read the Soul Eater manga, I believe they do end up getting together there (I could be wrong). Whatever the case, I was relieved that Marie’s and Stein’s relationship (though heavily implied to be romantic, at least on Marie’s side) was left open to interpretation in the anime. I’m just very sick of cool badass female characters like Marie being reduced to the man they pine after. So, I guess my first impression of Marie and my impression of her now are largely the same. While I appreciate the moments we get to see her strengths and ability to operate on her own, I do think that her character really suffers because of the whole sexist “oh gosh all I want is to find a husband and retire” “oh my I have to take care of Stein” like okay, I had enough at the cat girl smothering Soul with her humungo-tits. I had enough at sexualizing underage girls and women in general. I had enough at making sexual harassment a punchline. That being said, when we push all of the shitty writing to the side, I admire Marie for her strength and how she interacts with the children, Crona in particular. Which leads me to my favorite moment(s).

The relationship Crona and Marie have interests me the most, since I’m really drawn to the parallels between Marie and Medusa. As parental figures (and as characters), they’re about as different as you can get. As Crona’s mother, Medusa is obviously abusive. Along with being negligent, she abuses Crona mentally, emotionally, and physically. In general, Medusa is a person who doesn’t appear to value interpersonal relationships, putting it nicely. She instead is more focused on her own interests, often to the detriment of those around her. Crona is Medusa’s only immediate family (besides Arachne who she is estranged from), and so they suffer the most from her refusal to show even a shred of human decency or warmth. They suffer especially because they are her child, meaning they’re stuck with her essentially, and repetivie abuse between family members like a mother and child often becomes complex because of the necessity of having a parental figure in your life to support you as you grow up. Medusa teaches Crona that their boundaries don’t matter and that they are only good as long as they are useful and do as they’re told. This is what makes Marie’s influence on Crona so cool to watch. Marie is caring by nature, loving and nurturing by nature. Her very wavelegnth is healing. She is kind and does what’s right reflexively. Marie is the exact embodiment of what Crona always needed but what, even upon being rescued by the academy, still felt so foreign to them: unconditional love. Crona struggles to understand why the other kids helped them, why Maka felt the inclination to stop their battle and save Crona instead by trying to understand them, why the kids are still so kind to them even after everything. They do not understand that love is not a bargaining chip. It isn’t leverage in an argument. It’s not a tool for emotional manipulation. Love is caring for the people close to you, just because. Love for the sake of love. The other kids and teachers at the academy are the ones who are able to pull Crona out of all Medusa’s lies, and Marie is a Huge part of that. Even though I have greivances with this being the largest part of her character and what that implies for female characters in general, it doesn’t stop being so beautiful to me that she could help Crona heal in this way. Marie = best mom for the win

Most of the story ideas I have for Marie involve her relationship with Crona or Stein. Say, this covers my unpopular opinion too. I don’t like Stein and Marie as a couple, but I really enjoy writing them as friends, because even though I don’t really jive with them being together romantically, I think their dynamic is an interesting one to explore because they Are so different.

Getting into that a little bit more, I’d like to start by saying I don’t care if other people like Stein and Marie being a couple. That’s great doods, keep doing you. The fanart’s adorable, the meta’s fantastic. Whoever you are, SteinMarie shippers, ffs keep kicking ASS. This is just my preference and opinion. Zero shade in this house. That said, because of my frustrations about Marie’s character I discussed in the first paragraph, I don’t like the idea of her and Stein being together romantically. It’s really a classic sexist trope: the troubled man and his sweet nurse. I’m also just fed up in general with the hetero-nonsense, so there. However, they are both wonderful characters that I enjoy very much seperately. Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that I’ve only seen the anime, so I can’t speak for the manga as far as their relationship or Marie’s character in general.

Oh shit I accidentally already talked about this one lmao [see the second paragraph]

One headcanon I like to think about when I’m writing Marie is that she likes women (in addition to men or not) and she struggles with comphet. Just something interesting I like to think about. It’s really fun for me to take characters who have been written as pining or had 10 million failed relationships and be like “say what if they can’t find a husband cuz really what they really need is a wife”. I’ll talk about that more with Spirit inevitably.

Spirit Albarn

My first impression of Spirit, obviously him being a cheater, really came with a lot of distaste. I come from a family that was torn apart by infidelity, among other things, so it really rubs me the wrong way. However, his saving grace for me was that he genuinely loves his daughter. It appears that, whether it’s played for laughs or not, he just can’t find fulfillment in his romantic relationships. The reason is left up to the veiwers. Spirit, ultimately, is not just a shitty person, which is how most cheaters are protrayed in media. “Well, they cheated because they don’t care if they hurt people”, “they cheated because they are shit and that’s it”. That’s a fine explanation if you plan to do nothing with whatever character you’re describing, but Spirit is relatively recurring and is shown to be neither mean-spirited or emotionally unintelligent. It bothers me that his cheating and routine sexist behaviour isn’t taken seriously enough to be a subject that Soul Eater tackles and deals with. But that’s fine. I’ll just do it myself. At any rate, I still feel that same way about Spirit’s character, but I find it intriguing that he seems to genuinely want to become a better father and is actually a pretty good dad when it comes to his interactions with Maka. If Soul Eater had been brave enough to develop him more, maybe delve into the reasoning behind his impulsive romantic affairs, I think Spirit as a character could have been done more justice. It seems to me that he could be suffering from some of that wonderful compulsory heterosexuality that I mentioned before, then becoming confused when the woman he claims to love leaves him feeling empty. Rattling my gay little cage

When I think of my favorite moments with Spirit, I think of his moments with Maka, but I’m gonna hold off on that until I get to favorite relationship(s). In reference to what I talked about in the first paragraph, one moment I find really interesting when I’m thinking about my interpretation of Spirit’s character is the scene where he and Maka are on the roof talking. Maka asks Spirit why he cheated on her mother if he did, in fact, love her. He doesn’t appear to know the answer, and he doesn’t really understand how to effectively communicate that, though he was shitty husband, what he really wants now is to try and be a better dad. We hear his inner monologue, and he says something like “I love you [Maka] and your mama. That’s the truth. That’s the truth. That’s the truth.” Every time he says “its the truth” it sounds more like he’s forcing it. This is actually something that is SO strange to me. Even if I didn’t project a queer narrative on to the characters I love, I would look at this and be like “huh that is a Weird thing to say in that specific way”. Why does he say it like that? Why does he have to say it more than once? He’s only talking to HIMSELF. It isn’t like he’s trying to convince Maka. Why does he have to convince himself?? Could it possibly be because he’s reached a conclusion about his romantic/sexual orientation that he’s been trying to swallow his Entire Life??? makes ya wonder, doesn’t it, queers?

Just like I said when I talked about Stein, most of the stories I have in mind with Spirit center around that sweet gayness. But also, I like to think of ways Spirit could come to terms with his sexuality, how it might have affected him when he was young, his relationship with all these women, with his wife. I love to think about him being a dad at 18 and trying his best, but how much responsibility that must have been. Lots of great ideas when it comes to Spirit.

Um? unpopular opinion would be all the standard like I said with Stein lmao. “Oh no!” scream the heteros, “that they/them on tumblr is making Soul Eater queer we canst not allow that in our church!!!111!” But besides that, maybe even the fact that I think he’s redeemable?? Idk most everyone I’ve met thinks Spirit is funny at least and just calls him a dumbass and a slut (affectionate). Doesn’t mean anybody thinks cheating on your wife 56 times is okay so. I like this fandom, it’s chill here. My favorite is when I see my art tagged like “aw the stupid man and his crazy bf” like YOU ARE RIGHT

My favorite relationship when it comes to Spirit (besides Stein cuz if I start talking about them again I’ll never finish this ask) is the one he has with Maka. If you can call it a relationship lol. I guess I just find Spirit’s approach to Maka as a parent really refreshing. Not that the parents in other shows don’t love their kids or whatever, it’s just that the loving parent always seems to be paired with some other trope that makes their character hard to approach. especially in anime. Like the perfect mother who dies in the first episode, and we spend the rest of the show mourning her. Or the father whose love is somehow everlasting even though he’s never home. It’s really the fact that Spirit is even THERE that I love. He knows what Maka is up to. He talks about her. He’s invested in her life, and he loves her. All he wants is to spend time with her, and though he’s sad when she turns him down, he doesn’t push her. god dammit I just like a dad who actually loves his kids without all the usual strings attached like. oh my kids are a huge pain in my ass, but I love them in spite of it. oh i’m a man so can’t relate to my children in a meaningful way but i try. Get the fuck outta here with that shit. I want all the dads to get so happy when their daughters wanna hang with them that they throw up like Spirit. Give me the guy who loves his daughter so naturally, whose daughter is such a huge part of his life, that it doesn’t even occur to him stop trying even if she literally wants to murder him. That’s Spirit. jfc

To end with a cute little headcanon, I really love to think that when Spirit gets older and starts losing the color in his hair, instead of getting white or grey, his hair turns a pale pink color cuz he’s such an aggressive redhead. Wouldn’t that just be adorable? late 30′s, early 40′s, Spirit starts getting little pink streaks in his hair and then bam. Little pink old man Spirit XD

There ya have it. Thanks for the ask, and feel free to send more.

Everything wrong with... Ep 3 - Pretty Woman

*sigh* *big sigh*.  I’m back here giving you another politically charged review of a film I like to call a femmeçade:

Femmeçade /fɛm//fəˈsɑːd/ noun noun: femmeçade; plural noun: femmeçades; 1. A genre of films directed by men that forefront yet misinterpret the female narrative and representation on screen. "Pretty Woman is the worst femmeçade of them all in the way it depicts women as the lesser gender"  (definition by yours truly).

I have to say, I have never felt more compelled, more angry in my entire life to write such a review and tear this film down until there is nothing left but the underlining, prominent misogynistic aspects of this film. I am talking about the 1990s classic, Pretty Woman starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Now a musical, the film has survived three waves of feminism (if you count MeToo), and yet is still available to access for our entertainment. Even though censorship is less common in the Western World, the only good thing about watching Pretty Woman would be to see how vile and unacceptable it is in the eyes of our modern and ever changing society. It truly brought tears of anger to my eyes to watch such a film and see how its lead was shoved into the spotlight for a round or two of humiliation and prodding by the fingers and eyes of the male gaze. There is A LOT to go through here, so grab a snack and buckle in as I put Pretty Woman to shame.

Let's just start with the title itself Pretty Woman, a pretty lazy title for a film if you ask me. I understand it does what it says on the tin, like any title should, however the irksome thing about the film and title is what it’s selling. The lust and beauty of Julia Roberts as opposed to her character or story for that matter. Stood alongside Richard Gere in thigh high boots with her legs for days, months and years on show. We get it, Julia Roberts is a beauty, but why does a film have to focus on that sole part of her? By doing this it creates the idea that it’s her only asset and BOY does this film do a good job at reminding us just that. They’ve got the man’s vote and supposedly the woman’s seeing as the story is about them or who they’d like to be. WRONG, seeing as the crew behind Pretty Women were mostly men themselves. The writers, cinematographer, director, producers, best boys and gaffers, you name it. So who was this film for if it wasn’t to satisfy at least it's mostly male crew members?

Male satisfaction are the appropriate words to use when we are introduced to our leading lady in close up shots of her bra and knickers. Vivian is played by the highly talented and ordained Julia Roberts. Ever since seeing Erin Brodkovich which bagged her an Oscar in 2001, I’ve been in love with her spirit and confidence on screen. As we all know she is certainly one of Hollywood’s shiniest stars, up there with the elites like Meryl Streep, Viola Davis and Angelina Jolie. Why she decided to sign onto such a film, I would hate to speculate seeing as Feminism was more of a dirty secret than a positive movement back in the 1990s. Many (mostly men, though women too, especially those in the film business) would accuse the movement of threatening the comfortability and fun out of life’s pleasures, like women wearing makeup, dresses and being groped at office parties (sarcasm). However, as we now know, feminism isn’t the demon that the 1990s tried to make it out to be and I hope that Julia Roberts was unaware of feminism back then rather than being a strong opposer of it. 

Vivian Ward is a hooker living and working on the streets of LA, the city of dreams as some may brandish it. She lives with her roommate Kit (Laura San Giacomo) and between them they spend their nights trying to scrape enough money for their rent. I’m glad that sex work isn’t as scrutinised as it was back then and another arresting aspect of Pretty Woman is the way it depicts the so called “atrocities” of being a sex worker. The propriety and haughtiness of those who laid eyes upon Kit or Vivian was degrading and dehumanising, simply because they choose to lead a different lifestyle to those around them. It seemed so archaic, almost Victorian like the way people ogled and gazed upon Vivian at the hotel where she was taken in by her male counterpart. Pretty Woman again proves itself to be an anti-feminsit horror show for shaming women on choosing what to do with their own bodies and how they dress. We need to cut this BS out of society ASAP that women dress in certain ways to attract the attention of the opposite sex. Clothes are a form of expression and 9 times out of 10, that expression hasn’t anything to do with wanting to be leered at in public. Enough with the victim shaming as well; asking women what they wore when they were sexually assaulted. Instead let's ask what the attackers were THINKING when they decided to prey on an innocent victim....

One night whilst Vivan is looking for clients, she meets the so called delectable and mouth droppingly handsome male lead that is Edward Lewis, played by Richard Gere. I didn’t get the hype at all as I felt Vivan to have enough personality and lust for life to fill both of her and Richard Gere’s character. Edward Lewis was wooden, stern and boring, and despite this, Vivian seems to see more in him beyond her usual hookups. That’s another irritating thing about Pretty Woman. Edward Lewis didn’t have to do FUCK ALL to prove his love or worthiness in the life of Vivian. 

He didn’t have to (nor did) change one thing about himself throughout the entire film and that’s not only extremely sexist, but shit filmmaking. Did the writer of completely forget or give up on Edward Lewis’ character arc whilst he was too busy making drooling over Vivian? All Edward Lewis had to do was wave his card around and POOF Vivian was at his knees. No wonder the 1990s shamed feminists because this is the exact sort of crap they were trying to prevent from happening on screen. It may seem like fun and games when Edward Lewis tells Vivian to go shopping, buy herself a new dress for dinner, but in reality this is just a fresh case of misogyny, served up with a side of degradation and bigotry for dessert. 

Edward Lewis goes as far to hire Vivian for the week as his...escort? His actual motive isn’t known and we are left as an audience to conclude that it’s because she’s pretty. Again, selling the film title through and through and deminishing the worth of women with each scene. Vivian is never actually asked what she wants, nor do we get to know her seeing as Edward’s inflated ego and wallet covers up most of the screen time whilst watching this film. If you didn’t think this film could get any more horrific is the age gap between Julia Roberts and Richard Gere at the time of filming, to which Roberts was 22 and Gere, 40.

One moment in particular that proved this film to have zero substance to it, is when Vivian eventually gets down on Edward and to my absolute horror, her bra strap is INCREDIBLY and shockingly inauthentically loose. Like falling off loose. Not one woman in the world who chooses to wear a bra; not in China, India, Pakistan, the U.S, Ukraine, Hooker, doctor, astronaut, teacher, hairdresser or not would ever EVER wear their bra strap so loose. An impractical and uncomfortable choice, this tiny infinitesimal yet significant part of this film showed that this film doesn’t care or know how to show accurate female representation on screen and goes against any sense of providing women with strong characters they can use as role models. And all from one bra strap. 

The shopping and transformation part to this film had to be the big red thumb that stood out the most from the eternity of this film as AGAIN for the fifteenth time this film has proved itself to be in favour of entertaining those who like to ogle at Vivian as opposed to getting to know her. Edward thrusts his card at her once again (without giving her much choice, a common behavioural pattern associated with sociopaths and abusers) and she goes to Rodeo Drive to essentially pretty herself up for him so that Edward isn’t judged by those he introduces Vivian to. 

When Vivian had attempted to go shopping alone on Rodeo Drive in her casual attire, the female employees of one of the stores behaved abominably towards her, classing her as someone who didn’t have the means or appearance to shop in such a place. This film just got even worse as not only do we have the opposite gender dictating the appearance of women, we’re having our own sisters do the same whilst investing in the patriarchal narrative of the way women should be seen in public. At this point you may think I’m going crazy and repeating myself, of which I am doing both, however once you’ve fully taken the time to wake up and smell the patriarchy’s cup of coffee, there’s no turning back. These details become smoke signals that turn into epiphanies and realisations that have you questioning is this really okay? And a Pretty Woman is NOT okay.

Once Vivian has had her transformation (so kindly afforded by the dominant Edward Lewis) she seemingly begins to enjoy her new life as a piece on the side, until she is presented with Edward’s lawyer, Philip Stuckley.

So here’s what we have so far on our checklist of misogyny and anti-feminsit motifs to Pretty Women

A poster and title created in the eye of the male gaze CHECK

A female character whose worth is based on her desirability and propriety CHECK

A mediocre white man who doesn’t progress and gets his way through charm, money and power CHECK

Women who take unkindly to other women because they don’t fit the normalised standards of the patriarchy CHECK

Shaming women for their dress sense and career choices CHECK

Lack of women in general, most of which don’t speak throughout the film CHECK

The list could go on but another motif to add to the list from this film that acts as big shiny wrecking ball that smashes up feminism and leaves its values in the dust is sexual assault. Or attempted sexual assault at that, as when we see Phillip Stuckley’s first interaction with Vivian he says right out that he knows she’s a hooker, whilst running the edge of his sunglasses down Vivian’s arm and suggesting they get together after Edward’s demise back to wherever he came from. EW, this was one of the many moments of the film where I had to swallow my vomit. Phillip attempts to rape Vivian back at Edward’s penthouse suite, when luckily Edward comes in to stop it happening, which was the most decent thing he did the entire film. Edward’s lawyer represented a hoard of men that existed back then and now who feel entitled to a woman’s body, hooker or not. Even though Pretty Woman had dug itself a big enough hole, by the time I got to this part of the film I had been sold on the idea that this film is completely out of line with women’s liberation and empowerment. It’s just one big game to prod and poke at women, seeing how far they can go, which in itself is a metaphor for sexual assault. 

I’ll wrap up on the lack of diversity in Pretty Women. Because the world affords white men and women more luxuries and privileges than people of colour, they were at the forefront of this story whilst black and asian minorities were put in the background as butlers, maids and chauffeurs. It makes me so angry that on top of being a whirlwind of misogyny and sexism that such a film would have the audacity to misrepresent minorities entirely and highlight their so called use as servicing white people. IT. IS. GETTING. OLD.

Hopefully you’ve made it to the end of this “review” (kinda) and seen the damaging implications such a film has on our society. On reading Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies curated by Scareltt Curtis, I read that “Books and things reflect what’s happening in the world, Hollywood movies DICTATE IT and MOULD what people think”. 

You may think movies don’t matter or a film of the 1990s doesn’t matter, but if we are to learn from our mistakes and progress our movements, we must unpick the past and see it for how it was. Movies are our culture, our representation of what we’ve learnt or seen in the world. I don’t want to see women as sexual objects without their permission. I don’t want to see them being moulded by the patriarchy or by women who support it. I don't want to see women only good enough to be hookers, wives or mistresses. I want women to be the strongest versions of themselves and for films to buckle up and show that shit on screen.

Pretty Woman can kiss my ass and if it’s a film you like in  unlike it. Pronto.

Excerpts from Rachel Cusk’s “Kudos”

“A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.” “What is history other than memory without pain?” “...for the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant.” “I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves.” “You asked me earlier... whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don’t have the answer to that... but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.” “We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it.” “They forgive so easily, it is almost as if nothing matters.” “And I wonder, she said, whether we haven’t done them a great disservice in sparing them this pain, which might somehow have brought them to life, at the same time as knowing that this couldn’t possible by true, and that it is only my own belief in the value of suffering that makes me think it. I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art.” “It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.” “Why should I trust your view of the world if you can’t even take care of yourself? If you were a pilot, I wouldn’t get on board - I wouldn’t trust you to take me the distance.” “You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.” “That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.” “We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in face we are all the same. It is for his empathy, she said, that Luis has received such acclaim, and so I believe he should congratulate himself, rather than feeling ashamed for being praised.” “... and it is impossible not to feel that we have broken him, not out of malice but out of our own carelessness and selfishness.” “Behind every man is his mother who has made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her.” “... because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty - rather than ambition and desire - that bring the ultimate rewards.” “In this country, for a woman to survive the numerous attempts to crush her, he said, she has to live like a hero, always getting up again and always, ultimately, alone.” “I replied that this was something all of us had felt in our turn, as we passed into adulthood and recognized the role of outside events in shaping history and their capacity to interfere in and change our lives, which until now had remained in the hermetic state of childhood.” “Great art was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterized those who found the world an impossible place to live in.” “Could a spiritual value be attached to the mirror itself, so that by passing dispassionately though evil it proved its own virtue, its own incorruptibility?” “And that was without mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct the tendency of culture likewise to err towards safety and mediocrity, a responsibility you couldn’t measure in dinner invitations.” “What he couldn’t tolerate above else, he went on, was the triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant: the fact that this triumph occurred with monotonous regularity was one of life’s mysteries.” “Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms.” “It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child’s perception.” “Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful.” “It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms.” “I remember, she continued, as a young girl, the realization dawning on me that certain things had been decided for me before I had even begun to live, and that I had already been dealt the losing hand while my brother had been given the winning cards. It would be a mistake, I saw, to treat this injustice as thought it were normal, as all my friends seemed prepared to do.” “These boys, she said, had the most ridiculous attitudes towards women, which they were busy learning from the examples their parents had given them, and I saw the way that my female friends defended themselves against those attitudes, by making themselves as perfect and as inoffensive as they could. Yet the ones who didn’t defend themselves were just as bad, because by refusing to conform to these standards of perfection they were in a sense disqualifying themselves and distancing themselves from the whole subject. But i quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective. And it was true, she said, that a number of girls were achieving academic success and cultivating professional ambitions, to the extent that people had begun to feel sorry for these average boys and to worry that their feelings were being hurt. Yet if you looked only a little way ahead, she said, you could see that the girls’ ambitions led nowhere, like the roads you often find yourself on in this country, that start off new and wide and smooth and then simply stop in the middle of nowhere, because the government ran out of money to finish building them.” “I also enjoyed the attentions of men, she said, while making sure never to commit myself to any one man or to ask for commitment in return, because I understood that this was a trap and that I could still enjoy all the benefits of a relationship without falling into it.” “It did not seem like enough, she said, simply to pass the baton to the next runner, in hope that she would win the race for me.” “I have a male counterpart on the show, she said, and he is not required to look attractive, but I am not in the slightest bit interested in that example of inequality. What I am interested in is power, she said, and the power of beauty is a useful weapon that too often women disparage or misuse.” “For a while, at university, I sat as a life model for the art students, she said, partly to make money and partly to get this subject of the female body out into the open, because it almost seemed to me that even by clothing myself I was inviting the mystery to take root there under my clothes, and to weave the web of subjection in which later I might become trapped.” “In my own case, she said, I have fought to occupy a position where I can perhaps right some of these wrongs and can adjust the terms of the debate to an extent by promoting the work of women I find interesting.” “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumptions, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.” “... That family was big and noisy and easy-going, and there was always room for him at the table, where huge comforting meals were served and where everything was discussed by nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he had put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility.” “The truth was that he no longer wanted to go there, beacuse the same things that a year or two earlier he had found warm and consoling he know found oppressive and annoying: those mealtimes were a yoke, he now saw, by which the parents sought to bind their children to them and to perpetuate, as he saw it, the family myth...” “He recognized that in taking their comfort he had created a responsibility towards them; and this realization, I said, had caused him to consider the true nature of freedom. He understood that he had given some of his freedom away, through a desire to avoid or alleviate his own suffering, and while it didn’t seem exactly an unfair exchange, I believed he wouldn’t do it again quite so easily.” “There was a word in his language, I said, that was hard to translate but that could be summed up as a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home, in other words as a sorrow that has no cause. This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find home is to end one’s quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story. Whatever kind of affliction it is, I said, its nature is that of the compass, and the owner of such a compass puts all his faith in it and goes where it tells him to go, despite appearances telling him the opposite.” “But you, he said to me, don’t belong anywhere, and so you are free to go wherever you choose.” “... these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person’s word against another’s.” “Our bodies outlive their use of them, and that is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don’t want to hear.” “I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy.” “You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.”

Partners

Chapter One

Rating: Overall E, this chapter T

Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Kix (mentioned), Jotopa Kaid, Toby

Warnings/Tags: Eventual Smut, dehumanization of clones, mutual pining, a pair of idiots running around a jungle

Summary: Anakin calls up his friend and fellow Knight Jotopa Kaid to run "a little mission" with clone captain Toby and basically ruins both their lives.

--- Mission Start ---

Unlike most of his brothers, Toby looked forward to the dreamlike state of deep stasis. He did not enjoy the fact that, born and bred as he was to command troops, he was put up in storage when not in use. Ever since the first hint of beard stubble had dusted the edges of his jaw as a gangly limbed cadet, whenever he dreamed, he dreamed of her.

Dreaming was not something of which he put much stock. Often, it interrupted what could otherwise be a deep and restful sleep with things he would much rather not remember. Even when he was young, it was so. It was better to sleep hard and think of nothing than so lightly that your mind is free to plague you with nonsensical renditions of all your fears, insecurities, and mistakes rolled into some terrifying metaphor that might trouble you for hours or days after and possibly lower your efficiency rating.

But dreams of her…

Despite popular belief, there were women on Kamino. There was the female Kaminiise, of course. They were as professional and impersonal in their treatment of him and his brothers as their male counterparts. When they hit puberty, the long necks exhibited the same levels of generalized disgust at their bodily emissions as well as their frequency. The Kaminiise seemed especially horrified by the fact that their position over their human creations and overall role as oppressors did not preclude them from being subjects of crude humor and worse. As if any human male had ever been especially picky when it came time to jack it. Their trainers, who they collectively regarded with a mingled sense of hate, respect, and misplaced love, also received the same treatment.

Not even the women trainers whom he had grown up under, who were brutal and competent, terrifying and awful and beautiful in the way only Mando’ade could be, could hold a candle to her.

He dreamed of her hands most often. The first time he saw them (in what his studies and training told him must be a forest though as a gangly seven and a half-year-old he’d still never set foot off Kamino, and half that first dream he spent staring in amazement at everything around him, everything he could never have dreamed of imagining) he’d been struck by how much smaller they had to be than his own were. A deep, dark brown, so rich he immediately wanted to reach out and touch it, the bones of her fingers long and delicate and strong. Elegant, he thought, the first time he’d ever needed to use the word seriously, these must be the hands of a princess. And then he watched enraptured as those lovely, lovely hands shouldered a rifle and sniped a man from three hundred meters.

Other dreams, regrettably, were not as violent or visceral in their intensity, but as he grew, his appreciation for them increased. Toby liked to see the galaxy through her eyes. He enjoyed seeing the vaunted, columnated, and shadowed halls she seemed to dread entering a little more each time he visited her. He looked forward to dreaming because it meant he might get to watch her practice movements that were strange and familiar in a room that seemed older than the bones of the planet he had been made on.

At first, nearly bursting out of his skin with excitement, with longing, with the urge to describe each new and incredible image seared into his rib cage, he would crawl into his brothers’ tubes and tell them about her, the beautiful princess he saw in his dreams. Pyro, the oldest after him, would listen sleepily so long as Toby let him stick his face in his neck and cuddle and didn’t complain about drool. Kit would listen absently as long as he offered the blank expanse of his back as a sacrifice for her doodling while he ranted. Checkmate wasn’t interested in his princess so much as her surroundings, and he would interrupt Toby’s sometimes painstaking descriptions of the exact curvature of her hips to ask detailed questions about her surroundings. Snow only cared when he mentioned food. But that who Snow was period, so Toby was unrepentant and unresponsive to his vod’ika’s complaints about missed sleep. Lucky was his most sympathetic brother in all things, always forgiving him his many, many faults, so he didn’t often disturb his rest with this.

Bad enough to be saddled with an ori’vod such as himself; Lucky should at least be allowed his complete ration’s sleep. And of course, for Toby, there was no breaching the solid wall of disdain Joker and Blue had erected. Within a few years, he learned to keep mentioning her to himself and focused on overcoming the mountain of defects he was decanted with.

When Toby was nearly full-grown and in ARC training, he comforted himself at night by recalling the vivid flashes of her in what must have been a festival in a small village. She’d caught the briefest glimpse of herself in a hazy mirror in that thick crush of sweaty, celebrating bodies, and the impression of her body burned in his mind’s eye. But there was still so much he didn’t comprehend no matter how he turned it over in his hands. He understood the glimpses of her thigh he got as she slapped a bacta patch over a wound, the sounds of blaster fire, of measured breathing as she ran or jumped or leaped what seemed to be impossible distances. She was a warrior and a competent one by all accounts. He did not understand why these seemed to occur less and less the older he grew. Why did the sound of her laughter make his chest ache? Why did it hurt more when reproachful silence replaced her laughter? And why, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t he explain any of it to his brothers?

Though he had very little to go on, Toby knew she was the most beautiful woman in the universe. He knew it like he knew the feel of his blasters, knew it as intimately as his face, and Toby knew that if given a chance, he would do whatever he could to hear that laugh again and ease the ache in his chest its absence created.

Neck still slightly wet, and his hair freshly shaved into his trademarked undercut, toweled dry but still damp and curling in the crisp, sterile air of medbay, CC-4267, Toby slowly pulled on his blacks and armor as his superior officer stood off to the side with the medic, Kix, and made small talk.

He hadn’t been in stasis very long this time, he thought quietly, putting away thoughts of her, watching the way Skywalker and Kix spoke with such easy familiarity and not even noticing the pang of envy that lanced him, applying himself to the ordinary tasks of cataloging his kit and body. He’d been in the stasis tank long enough for his wounds to close but not so long that his newly acquired scar had smoothed over. Several times in the scant hour he’d been conscious, Toby had to physically stop himself from fingering the thick tissue running the width of his nose, from grimacing at the way it pulled when he so much as twitched his mouth. It would take getting used to. Thankfully, that’s what buckets were for, and so far, no jetiise he had the displeasure of working with had been so desperate to see his ugly mug as to order him to part with it.

His kit was the same as the last time he laid eyes on it though someone, likely Rex for reasons Toby could never understand, had retouched the scratched and faded blue lines. All of it was standard issue infantry gear and had been brand spanking new when given to him his first days under Skywalker’s command. It had only been the work of a few missions to rectify that. His loadout hadn’t been all that different in the Guard, really, but it was more trouble than it was worth to try and blast all that distinctive red paint off the plastoid when he could be issued fresh. He was a new man. Shiny to go with his shiny new promotion and shiny new unit. In the end, all he’d been able to take from his native company was his kama and the pair of gloves a fellow lieutenant had surreptitiously stuffed in his pack.

The helmet, of course, was new and looked utterly out of place, but that was fine. It would match its owner in that regard. He’d have to go down to the armory to check out his deecees, but unless the blast that had cracked his bucket and given him his pretty new scar had also done damage to his blasters, Toby was sure he would be issued the same pair of 17s he’d carried since coming to the 501st.

He rolled his shoulders, irritated to find that they were already knotted up with tension, and started pulling his armor on.

—

When Jedi Knight Jotopa Kaid of the significantly diminished House Ordo was somewhere around twelve or thirteen years old, she began to have strange dreams. They came, as many odd dreams do to young and inexperienced Force users such as herself, right as her life was turning to shit. She found it hard to give much thought to the jolting sense of awareness of vague l o n g i n g, a hollow, itching pull in her chest that tugged with a dull sort of insistence always in the same general direction when her Master had just up and abandoned her. D’Aleric traded her away to a Corellian smuggler for a juicy piece of intel, and even with her sheltered Temple upbringing, she knew enough to be terrified by the long and considering look Choruk Vance gave her once her Master’s ship made the jump to hyperspace without her inside.

But the Force, and Choruk Vance, had something else in mind when the smuggler looked into eyes that, though frightened, still bravely met his own. It was not long before Jotopa found herself handed off again, this time to the Mandalorian, Asha Kaid, herself and her sabers swapped for some previously agreed-upon amount. Asha Kaid would bestow her clan name upon Jotopa. But in those early days, it remained a mystery how or why a Mandalorian would want a discarded padawan.

These events kept her from thinking about her dreams, but as weeks then months went by, it truly settled in that her Master had abandoned her. She may as well get the grieving process for her old life over with sooner rather than later, she began to retake note of them. They were nothing to write home about initially, impressions more than anything: of being submerged, of pale, statuesque beings walking to and fro, their forms hazy, a sleepy sort of awareness over everything. It was strangely soothing and familiar in an almost primal way. She paid it no mind, and the dreams were not such a frequent occurrence that it was worth interrupting the daily rhythms of learning what being Mando’ade meant, especially for her.

It was not so different in its way than her early years at the Temple had been though the lessons were learning her way around various types of blasters and blades, detonators and when to use them, when to stand and fight and when to save your strength for another time. Though, she knew better than to say so to Asha Kaid! Her mentor, quickly her buir, was a typical Mandalorian and would not have appreciated the comparison for all its accuracy. She kept her sabers and the skills associated with them sharp because the Force was another tool in her arsenal, and only a foolish warrior did not use every tool at her disposal.

The years passed with slow surety. Jotopa fought, she meditated, grew in the Force, and her murky dreams gradually expanded. Now there would be startlingly vivid flashes of the same group of identical faces, their brown eyes wide and old in their young faces, and when she would wake, something about the sight of their still baby soft hands disassembling rifles would disquiet her for the rest of the day. A week would pass or perhaps a month or two, or maybe she was seventeen now, a time when once again her life was going to shit. Her memory is a bit chaotic, but she sees them again, older now, but she’s sure it’s the same set of identical faces, the one that she knows lying down and humming soothingly to another one. Somehow, she knows that a live-fire exercise killed one of her special boy’s brothers.

She carries his grief on the back of her tongue, its weight as heavy as the presence of her Master come to reclaim her.

You don’t have to go, her mother said with the resigned air of a lifelong inmate. You don’t have to go back to the Jetiise, kebii’tra.

And just as resigned, looking not at her Master but through him, thinking instead of the golden-eyed boy in her dreams, she said, No, but I want to.

But going back to the Jetiise did not make her a Jetii. Not to her, and not to them. To be sure, to the Council it did, and in the end, it was their opinion on the matter that most counted, but in the final long year of her apprenticeship in which she and her Master did not pretend to have any illusions with one another, it was not so.

Do you think me cruel, Kadijah? D’Aleric’s question, like so many she could recall put to her as a young learner, did not warrant an answer, and yet the use of her birth name encouraged her to do so regardless. Her Master used it so casually, as though he was still worthy of the honor of knowing the young girl to which it belonged. As if that girl still existed. Typical Jetii bullshit, she thought, looking steadily into the crimson eyes and rich sapphire face that had looked into her own and found her wanting.

I think nothing of you at all, Master. She’d said with a small, deprecating laugh. Who am I to challenge the will of the Force as interpreted by my elders? She paused then, eyes dark and hard as unworked beskar. And you will call me Jotopa from now on.

A series of whistles and chirps from her astrodroid shook her from her half-dreaming, half meditative state. From the wide span of the viewport of her standard-issue starfighter, Jotopa could just make out the ruggedly elegant outline of the Resolute breaking up the uniform blackness of open space around it. Her droid, R6, well used to her mistress's ways, had dropped out of hyperspace farther away than was usual for most Jedi, and Jotopa didn’t think she imagined the wearied tone the droid took with her.

“Yes, thank you, R6; I can see we’ve made it. I wasn’t sleeping; I was meditating! Please, please: don’t let me stop you from hailing them! I don’t want to be on the receiving end of their guns either.” She said with a laugh in response to R6’s messages. The little astrodroid was a delight to a life spent so much skimming the surface of other’s turmoils. She rather hoped that she would be able to take her along on whatever “top secret, super special, you’d be doing me suuuuuch a huge favor, JaJa, pleaseeeee” mission Anakin had called her across the galaxy for.

The Force prickled across her skin, grew thick and heavy in her blood. A sense of anticipation that weighed almost as heavily as her curiosity as she landed in the large bay. Jotopa sat for a moment with the feeling, breathed deeply even as her eyes scanned across the familiar armored forms moving here and there a respectful distance away from her ship. Clone troopers, she thought, has it been that long since my mission with Lieutenant Thire? Maybe I’ll get to talk to one or two before I leave and find out how he’s doing. The feeling settled to a manageable level, and she opened the hatch, releasing R6 from her place. The little blue and pink painted droid wheeled around to where she was indulging in a full-body stretch on the wing of her fighter. Jotopa noted the trooper who seemed to be waiting patiently for her and tilted her head at R6.

“I don’t have to tell you, but see about getting a tune-up while I’m busy? Who knows what sort of trouble Anakin has in store.” She said to her droid before jumping down from the wing of her ship and approaching the trooper. She bowed to him in greeting, a move that, though he was completely encased in his armor, surprised him because when she asked if he was there to escort her to General Skywalker; it took him several seconds to process the question and answer in the affirmative.

The walk was mostly silent, which was fine by her; there was plenty to see. Boarding the Resolute was her first time on such a large ship, and the immensity of it, its incredible smallness in the grandness of the universe, was startling. The life energy of the troopers pulsed around her, bright as any star, and when she caught a look at a few of them without their helmets, she saw the same freshness of face that had unsettled and humbled her in Thire. And permeating all, the sense of anticipation thickened so that she could barely breathe around it. This is it, the Force whispered as they walked down hallways and took lifts. They were going to medbay, the trooper was kind enough to explain. He was fresh, she thought around the shouting in her blood, too young and earnest to die in a war like this. This is it. This is it. This is it, thisisitthisisthisisitthisisitthisisitthisis itthisisitthisisitthisisitthisistthisisitthisis

“We’re here, sir.” He said at the entrance to medbay, and behind the impassive face of his bucket, he was eyeing the details of her serene face, the rich dark brown eyes only outdone by the hue of her skin, her lush mouth, and the black, coily cloud of her hair framing it all, and he sighed, inwardly jealous of the vod who was assigned to accompany her on her mission.

“We certainly are. Thank you for guiding me, kotep’ad. I can take it from here.” Jotopa said absently, completely missing the subtle double-take the trooper gave her. Were her steps hesitant? No, nothing scared her, not since that night. Her steps lengthened. She could hear the low tenor of Anakin’s voice and could tell that he was in a good mood as he spoke to two others. His Force presence was as it always was: a red giant, swollen and pulsing. No. A more apt description would be a star on the verge of going supernova. A star could go millions, billions of years in that state, existing just on the edge until something tipped it over, and the resulting blast destroyed everything in its wake.

The medbay of the Resolute was moderately full, which told her that their last battle was recent but not terribly so. Most of the troopers in the beds were either sleeping or busying themselves with their datapads, but she could see sabacc cards and even a few poorly concealed dice bags. A few were well enough to sit with each other, a fact that one with heavy beard stubble and a healing slash across his eye seemed to regret as she noted him being bombarded by his very chatty bedmate. Jotopa was still stifling her laugh into her hand at the longsuffering look he shot her way when she passed him when she finally approached the row of bacta tanks and beds next to them.

Anakin was standing with his back to her, talking with a clone dressed in medical scrubs who she assumed must be a technician of some sort. Behind them was another clone, but she could only see his boots and the blue paint of his shin guards. This is it! Her blood was singing with the strength of the Force’s exultant song. This is it! Finally! Finally! It crackled over her skin, and her fists clenched around the wild desire to run and dispelled it. A sense of questioning, a tendril of sentience that most wouldn’t dare speak of: This is it, are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?

Those armored legs, the nervous tapping of fingers in a curiously red-painted gauntlet as he shifted slightly forward and a knee came into view.

Yes, she answered. Yes. Yes.

“I could’ve killed you ten different times by now, Anakin.” She said, grinning when he spun around, lively blue eyes wide and startled.

“Sleenspit, JaJa, you scared the hell outta me! Is it your mission in life to shave years off of my life, huh?” He asked, bundling her up in a friendly side hug. She rolled her eyes and tilted her head up.

“It wouldn’t be so easy if you weren’t so trusting.” She said pointedly, and now it was his turn to roll his eyes. Anakin was one of the few who had not shunned her when she returned to the Temple. Perhaps because of his pariah status, or maybe because they often ran into each other in the same deserted halls of the Temple, despite the vast gulf in their training though not their comparative years, the two of them had become fast friends. When she had been Knighted and took on the mysterious work of the Sentinel, he was one of the few she kept in contact with.

“Yeah yeah, you’ve said it a million times: a friend is quicker with a knife than an enemy. I hear you, O wise Jedi Master, I hear you.” Jotopa barely refrained from scoffing and instead glanced at the medic, who was watching their interaction with undisguised curiosity. Anakin still had her tucked loosely against his side, and his sturdy form blocked her view of the other trooper, the one the Force was leaping for joy around. Couldn’t Anakin feel it? Couldn’t he tell how special, how important that man was?

“Aren’t you going to introduce me? I know Master Obi-Wan taught you better than that!” She jabbed him gently in the ribs. With his flesh hand, he rubbed the spot where her elbow had dug into his side, his face relaying his usual crack about her sharp elbows. He nodded toward the young clone in the scrubs, a smile of pride lighting over his features.

“This is Kix, my Chief Medical Officer. He oversees any time any of my guys comes out of stasis, and this,” he said, (Finally! This is it! Finally!) stepping back so that the trooper sitting on the bed could be fully seen, “is Captain Toby. When I heard about this mission, I knew he’d be the perfect one to help you with it, JaJa. He’s great.” Anakin’s words seem to come to her from a long way off. She heard them, and she was sure she was saying something, but Jotopa couldn’t tear her eyes away from the man sitting on the bed. He was sitting at attention, his shoulders stiff with a tension that wasn’t noticeable in the politely attentive expression on his face. The thick scar that stretched across his nose looked fresh, still shiny in a way that explained the faint twitching of his nose, as though he wasn’t used to how it pulled at his skin. He didn’t look thrilled to see her. There’d been something akin to horror on that achingly handsome face for the briefest of moments, but when she queried, hesitantly, of the Force, she was nearly bowled over by the certainty of the response.

This is the one. This is the one you’ve been waiting for.

Well shit. At least she could breathe a bit easier now. After accepting the datapad with the mission details from Anakin, Jotopa turned and watched as he and Kix walked away with only the slightest hint of rising hysteria. Leave it to Anakin, who did everything from the seat of his pants, to use her utter shock against her and dump a mission and a strange man on her. She didn’t even know if he’d requisitioned a ship for them to travel in, and the mental image of her attempting to stuff the captain in her starfighter nearly made her choke.

“Ah, excuse me…? Knight Kaid, sir?” He asked, and Jotopa closed her eyes and inwardly swore. His voice! It was just like hangar bay trooper’s and like Kix’s, and yet neither one of their voices made the fine hairs on her arms stand on end. Perhaps from being in stasis? It sent goosebumps rippling up her bare arms. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice. She forcefully released her anxiety into the Force and turned to face him. She’d met countless handsome men in her lifetime. He was no different, Force shenanigans or no, and she would not ogle him; she would treat him like the competent soldier he was, complete this mission, and that was that.

--

When General Skywalker told him the Jetii he would be working with was a good friend of his, Toby wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or a curse. He liked his General and admired his courage and fighting spirit, but it didn’t take an incredibly smart vod to notice how much of a disaster the man was. And with Jetiise in particular, like attracted like, so he couldn’t help nor dispel the nervous jiggling of his leg that started up when it came through that the Jetii, Knight Kaid, had arrived and was making her way to medbay. At least in the Guard, you knew what you were getting into day to day with snooty senators. Each Jetii was as different as a fingerprint. Skywalker, kind in his awkward way, noticed his show of nerves.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing with Jotopa, Toby. She’s excellent; you won’t have any problems. If you two don’t come back as best friends, I’ll file my reports on time.” He said with his usual confident smile.

Kix snorted. “Better not then, sir. If the General starts filing his reports on time, Captain Rex might keel over from the shock to his system.” Toby huffed a laugh at Skywalker’s indignant exclamation.

He would have thought they would announce her presence over the ship’s comms, but she slipped in among them silent as a ghost. His first glimpse of her was around the startled twist of Skywalker’s body, a flash of dark skin and a cloud of hair, and then her voice, soft and husky and sweet even in the chiding tone she took with her fellow Jetii. There was a feeling, overwhelming and strange and familiar. He swallowed his heart back down where it had lodged beneath his jaw, unsure where to look and even more unsure why, and then there was nowhere to look but Knight Kaid because Skywalker was stepping back and introducing them. It was all he could do to sit at attention and keep the blank face that hid all feeling because it was her, the woman with the elegant hands, the princess he saw in his dreams, and dead stars; she was even more beautiful in person. Like Skywalker, she didn’t wear the traditional Jetiise clothing; instead, she wore a sleeveless black leather vest brightly detailed in red and pink embroidery. It was half unzipped and revealed a mesh undershirt. To keep himself professional, he looked instead at the well-cared-for utility belt around her hips. Toby noted her black spandex shorts covered by a delicately detailed kama made of sturdy cloth. Her boots ended at midcalf. His eyebrows twitched in surprise when she turned to watch Skywalker and Kix leave, and he spotted the cleverly hidden handles of two knives on them.

Now that the full force of her gaze wasn’t on him, he ran a gloved hand through his hair and reasoned with himself. Calm down, di’kut. You’re still loopy from stasis. It can’t be her. She’s a figment of your imagination, a product of getting knocked around too many times as a cadet. Don’t start acting like a karking lunatic around this Jetii and get sent off for reconditioning. It made sense. It made a ton of sense, just as it had when Joker, sick of hearing his talk about his dream princess, had first sat down and said it to him. Lucky had told Joker to leave him be. It was a harmless fantasy, a coping mechanism. Just his luck that his coping mechanism manifested herself right before his eyes. She was still turned, the datapad held loosely in her hand, her head tilted. He got the impression that she would be content standing there until the last star burned out.

Against his better judgment, he got her attention. She turned to face him, a soft frown pulling at her full lips, and panic surged up his spine. Had he already managed to upset her?!

“Captain? Would you do me a favor please?” She asked, and now she was at the edge of his personal space, just enough that he could log away in the back of his mind that she smelled like jasmine and vanilla and had to tilt his head up just slightly to meet her eyes. Her eyes were an even darker brown than her skin but just as rich, he thought. From a distance, they appeared black.

“Yes, sir. If I can, I will.” He liked the way her nose crinkled around the smile she gave him at his answer.

“I know it’s probably in your regulations, gotta respect rank and all, but at least when it’s just you and I, do you think you could call me Jotopa? I would appreciate it a lot.”

He didn’t know who the brave soldier it was who rumbled, “Elek, think I can manage that, sir,” in reply but if it earned him more of those looks, a look he wasn’t sure she knew she gave him, he was fine with the vod seizing hold of his faculties every now and again.

She cleared her throat and looked down at the datapad in her hand, her brows furrowing as she scanned the details of their mission. Suddenly, she laughed, the sound vaguely disbelieving.

“I pity the trooper tasked with putting this briefing together. They might as well have not bothered. The barest details are here: the planet name, coordinates, and our objective. I’ve done more with less, but this is ridiculous. And I still don’t know if Anakin got us a ship.” Toby bit the inside of his cheek to control his expression. She was grousing like an old field sergeant! And had the face to match! He recalled his earlier sentiment about Skywalker and his friends and bit his cheek harder.

“May I see the datapad, sir? I may be able to see if the quartermaster requisitioned any supplies for us.” She handed it over easily enough, an annoyed glint playing around her dark eyes, another fascinating expression Toby memorized and logged away in the back of his mind before quickly focusing on the pad. It was interesting having her eyes on him while performing one of the simplest tasks he knew. Something about the heaviness of her eyes, her gaze almost a physical weight: it scattered his focus like water through open fingers. But still, it wasn’t more than thirty seconds before he had the pertinent information pulled up.

“Here it is, sir.” He said, muting his amusement as much as he could.

“Where?” She asked, and now she was entirely in his personal space, bent over to scowl at the screen, her hair and its thousands of tiny coiling ringlets brushing his jaw.

“Ah, see? Right here, it says you were issued a small ship, one ARC-rated clone, and two months’ worth of rations, plus weapons.” He said, only daring to breathe again when she pulled back, a sheepish expression on her face. She half-turned, her hands clasped in front of her. He had the fleeting thought that she was upset. The surety of the notion prickled across his skin, and Toby shivered, unsure of what to do with the feeling or why he was feeling it. He cocked his head, considering. Should he say something…? But she was smiling at him, her posture calm and assured again, and he dismissed it as more stasis nonsense. She was fine. She was a Jetii, wasn’t she? Wouldn’t appreciate the undue concern from the likes of him, of that Toby was certain.

“I’m glad to see that our supplies are in order, Captain. If you’d like to say your goodbyes to any of your brothers and gather whatever else you need, I’ll meet you on our transport when you're ready?” Toby knew a dismissal when he heard one, so he nodded and stood. It wasn’t important for her to know that there were no brothers on board who cared much about his comings and goings, so he followed her out of medbay, went right when she went left, making his way to the armory to check out his DCs. They were the same ones. The armorer, Oops, held him for about fifteen minutes because she wanted to know just what he’d gotten into for the blasters to need the kind of TLC she’d had to put into them to make them serviceable again. Since she loved his babies probably more than he did, he did her the solid of telling her the story blow by blow. They needed to let the kid out to see a little action now and then, but she had the magic touch when it came to breathing life into weapons that looked beyond saving. He made a note to bring her something nice back from wherever the hell he was headed if he could.

“All set?” Knight Kaid asked when she spotted him heading up the ship’s ramp with his weapons and pack. He paused halfway up to see her walking his way, a backpack and cloak slung over her shoulder, and a pink and blue astromech droid following after her.

“Yes, sir. Ready to go when you are.” He said, still studying the droid. It was of the same type as Skywalker’s R2-D2 though he doubted Knight Kaid’s was near as modified. The little droid’s casing was mainly white and pink with blue detailing. As the droid and her mistress walked up the ramp, the droid beeped at him in a distinctly disapproving manner. Knight Kaid laughed.

“Captain Toby, this is R6-D4. R6, this is Captain Toby. He’s a vital part of this mission, young lady, so be on your best behavior. Captain, if you don’t mind raising the ramp? I’ll get us into hyperspace while you’re getting settled in your quarters, and then we’ll try and puzzle out what the kriff we can do.” She called from within the ship, and Toby was halfway through following her orders before the rest of her sentence fully registered in his conscious mind.

“Skywalker, what the hell have you gotten me into?” He murmured as he watched the ramp close and felt the rumble of the engines warming. The ship shuddered slightly as it became airborne, lifting up and away from the Resolute. Toby put his hand against the hull and closed his eyes, breathed slowly and deep to attune himself to the hum of this ship and these engines, breathed out again when he felt the gentle lurch once they made the jump to hyperspace. Only then did he find the empty room that was his and dump his helmet and pack. Toby would have to be careful. More careful than he usually was. There was something…

He hovered just inside the doorway of the cockpit. His steps were light and near-silent, but Kaid still spun around in the slow, measured way of someone who’d sensed his presence a long way off. Her expression was not as animated as it had been on the ramp or even in medbay. Still, he thought it was softer and more genuine now, the tilt of the faint smile on her lips more real than even the playfulness she and Skywalker had openly displayed with one another. He rested his weight against the frame, at a more relaxed position of parade rest, and the faint smile widened.

“Our objective is a world called Cassios-7. The scans are centuries old, the latest intel just as ancient. There are Temple ruins there, and you and I have been asked to recover the important artifact that has been minding its own business all these long years. Sounds delightful.” She said dryly, and he didn’t know what to do with the odd desire he had to laugh at her tone. Rather than heed it, he tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment. The beautiful Jetii’s lips quirked curiously at him before she continued.

“Luckily for us, Anakin wasn’t too terribly far off from Cassios-7 to begin with. We should be there within five hours. A few days, a week at most, and I’ll have you back with your brothers and all the comforts of civilization, Captain.”

“I can’t wait.” He said in much the same tone she had just used. She smiled widely and motioned for him to sit in the copilot’s chair. Toby moved to obey, masking his surprise. None of the other Jetiise he’d had the displeasure of working with since leaving the Guard had ever offered him a seat. As he gingerly eased into the chair next to her, he realized he’d relegated all Jetiise barring Skywalker and Kenobi as being on the same moral level as the snobby senators. They treated him and his brothers as little more than well-trained animals.

“I love your enthusiasm, Captain,” she quipped, her gaze casual but somehow probing even as she threw her legs over the arm of her seat, careless of the way the edges of her kama splayed around it to display the bare skin of her legs from mid-thigh to the tops of those sturdy boots.

“It’s one of my better traits, sir.” He said, proud of how evenly the words left him and glad for his helmet and the way it hid the direction of his eyes. It would have been harder not to look at the dark brown of her legs when they were in such close quarters. The only way to avoid it would be not to look at her at all, which would be rude. And obvious. Behavior like that would land him in the stasis tank, and he was so tired of that, so tired of being put in storage when he wasn’t in use, like a rifle that didn’t have an owner.

It was just that she was so pretty. It was just that when she used his name, it felt like she meant it. And that must be a trick, right? Some Jetiise power he was only just encountering: this ability she had to make him feel important just by looking at him and saying his name.

In his lap, his hands flexed as he tried to dispel the unwelcome tension in them. Just a few days. You can handle that, can’t you?

Their first view of Cassios-7 was as they dropped out of hyperspace and settled into lazy orbit around it to complete a few scans to update their intel. The planet was a sapphire jewel flecked with shards of amethyst and emerald, whispers of white clouds swirling at its poles and trailing like wedding veils behind the sparsely located but dense and steaming jungle island chains that were the main landmasses. The purple was floating remnants of destroyed Temples, this planet having, as Jotopa theorized with a furrowed brow and an exhilarated light in her eyes, been part of some ancient war and then lost to obscurity.

“I can only imagine that it’s all this fighting that’s awakened the artifact inside the remaining Temple structure,” she said pensively.

“So, we’ve been called here to retrieve it before the Separatists do and possibly weaponize it against us, sir?” Toby asked as he watched her hands move over the controls. She had slender, elegant fingers. Her movements were competent, the fingernails blunt and bitten down, though this did not negate his preceding opinion one bit. She had hands that looked like they knew their way around a blaster. He jerked his eyes up to her face, flushed to see her smiling at him with seeming pleasure at his comment.

“I believe so, Captain. You and I may be able to save a lot of lives by securing this artifact.” She answered, and he didn’t think he was wrong in identifying a note of melancholy in her voice. He filed the observation away, shifted his focus toward the glittering shards of Temple ruins sedately hovering on one of the floating rock isles. Jotopa locked in a course towards it and stood up to stretch.

“Alright, then! We’ve got a few minutes until we land, so I’m going-”

There was a strange jolt; that’s what the both of them would later recall. A jolt and a winding down sound and then the s i c k e n i n g lurching of the stomach as it rammed up past the heart and made a home next to the brain stem.

Falling, free falling.

Heaving breathing. The sound of his blood pounding in his ears drowning out everything for a terrifying moment before everything snapped into laser focus.

Knight Kaid’s hands grappling with the controls. Her eyes, fierce, determined, focused.

Silence loud with the sound of turbulence and rushing wind.

Green, so much fucking green, rich with brown and purple and the azure blue of the sky, and Maker’s tears, they were going to die, they were going to die, they were going to -

a modern royalty au for ss? I loved Mutant btw 💗

This was longer than I anticipated and it came a lot later too! I’m sorry! I also don’t know a lot about modern royalty au’s which is shameful for someone who used to read so many Merthur fics back in the day but here it is! 

The Uchiha kingdom doesn’t work in the way the Senju kingdom works. In the Senju kingdom, the men of the royal family are usually more highly regarded than their female counterparts. Be it for blatant misogyny or just a big cultural gap between the two countries. The Uchiha and the Senju have always been different in the way they treat their royalty.

In the Senju they glorified their first king as equal to a god, they regarded their second as a prodigy and just like that they kept on loving their kings, princes and lords. From their martyr warriors like king Minato to their current heroic Lord Naruto Uzumaki. The boy with the sunny smile and kind altruistic nature. 

The future of their country.

Meanwhile, in the Uchiha kingdom it is not kings that the people love, neither are the princes the members of the royal family that the people look up to. Ever since Sasuke can remember, ever since he was a child. Still too young and too naïve to be aware of the nasty, superficial world he was part of. The queen, the princesses and the ladies of the royal family have always been the center of everyone’s attention on his country.

No one cared about his father’s marriage suit when he married his mother in the way they cared about lady Mikoto’s wedding dress, no one cared about his brother’s credentials on the military before he stepped into the throne in the way they cared about Izumi’s masters’ degree in child education.

No one cares about Sasuke Uchiha, next on the way to the throne, in the way they care about the commoner he falls in love with.

Sakura Haruno is not a lady nor is she related to anyone on the royal family. She’s a common girl, daughter of a baker and a taxi driver. A simple, freshly graduated med student who just happens to be Ino Yamanaka’s best friend.

Ino Yamanaka, the girl who just started working as the castle’s florist at the start of the year and without meaning to, introduced the future king of Uchiha to the woman he would eventually fall in love with and then even if just in his own head, would call his queen.

Sasuke meets her one Saturday afternoon as the bright eyed girl runs up to him to ask him about his mother’s private garden.

“Do you know where is the garden?” She asked him that day, looking at him directly on the eyes in a way that Sasuke wasn’t really used to. Already complacent with the detached life the rest of his family taught him to lead ever since the day of his birth until his current twenty-six.

“I’m sorry?” he inquired, blinking and shaking his head in obvious confusion. 

“The garden,” repeated Sakura. Her bright, green eyes curiously looking up at him from underneath her long, thick eyelashes. “The queen’s garden to be exact."

"The queen's garden is private property. Only members of the royal family and the appointed gardener can enter that place alone." Stated the prince automatically. 

"Then you can take me there." She smiled taking his hand in hers. "You're prince Sasuke aren't you?" 

Sasuke didn't respond, too surprised by the girl's forwardness to do anything more than be dragged to his mother's garden by the pink haired stranger. 

Sasuke couldn't keep away from that day on and now, every single newspaper column and every gossip site on the Internet is talking about the pink haired commoner who stole Uchiha Sasuke's heart. 

The bad thing about being part of a monarchy that concentrates completely on the women of the royal family is that the women the people don’t love are usually attacked with the scrutiny of the public. Sakura is not part of the royal family, she’s not traditional nor is she lavish in nature.

And some people hate her for it. They talk about her bright hair and speculate about her natural hair color. Calling her a Yankee for dying it in such a scandalous shade. They talk about her eyes and how she can't possibly be a completely pure Asian woman. As if such a thing really existed anymore, even inside the royal family. 

The worst of them call her a gold digger. Going as far as investigating her family and presenting her economic problems bare to the world: The current state of her student loans, the pending debt from her father's taxi loan, the way she still lives with her parents at twenty-seven and already working full time. 

Sasuke knows this isn't true. Sakura is no gold digger, she hadn't asked him for anything in the entire year they've been together and he can't even recall a time in which she accepted one of his, admittedly, lavish gifts without a single complain. 

“You shouldn’t bother,” she apologized sadly, with a guilty expression marrying her face the first time he gave him a gift. A gorgeous set of ruby and white gold earrings in the form of roses. “I don’t even have my ears pierced.”

“Please don’t expend so much money on me,” she would eventually tell him every time he spent too much money on a gift or a date. “I’m not dating you for your money.” She would say. And then she would kiss him, right on his lips with a playful look on her face “I’m dating you because you’re cute.”

The only time she ever accepted an expensive gift from him was only when Sasuke decided to donate an outrageous amount of money on her child’s mental health initiative at the hospital she was working on for their five month’s anniversary.

She cried right in front of the cameras from the tv channel his brother’s PR group hired just to showcase the future king’s show of altruism. She fell into his arms, kissed him deeply on the lips and whispered a heartfelt “thank you, Sasuke-kun.” For his ears only.

Sasuke fell a little more in love with her that day. He’s never met someone so simple and yet so profound on his life. Never saw a smile more beautiful or eyes more honest. He can easily say that he felt in love with her effortlessly. Saw all of which made the commoner who without contemplation treated him as one would treat a normal human being and couldn’t help but be mesmerised by it.

He just wishes his country could see all that he sees on her. Sakura couldn’t care less about the tv channels who showcase her as an overly emotional and yet raggedy common woman, and she doesn’t even bother to read the tabloids who work every day on trying to expose her as a poor, pitiable gold digger who won’t last even a year on the prince’s heart.

But Sasuke cares. He cares about his country and the woman he intends to make his queen more than anything in the world.

The internet becomes a sudden and unexpected comfort. The first positive comment he finds of Sakura it’s on the YouTube channel of two girls that decided to review the medic’s outfits for her last four public dates with Sasuke.

They talked wonders about Sakura’s natural beauty, on how she didn’t seem to prefer any major brands on herself and how she was such an inspiration for young girls all along their country on defeating classism and unrealistic beauty standards. Sasuke started following their channel after finishing the video that same day and he did the same with any Tumblr, YouTube or google blog that saw Sakura just as he saw her.

The YouTube channel though, that channel will always be special in his eyes.

ShyGirlLoudGirl starring Hinata Hyuuga, a lady from a family barely related to the Uchiha but known enough for her name to be recognised and TenTen a martial arts specialist who became Hinata’s friend by dating her cousin Neji. They were the first members of the media to ever be positive about Sakura and Sasuke never forgot them.

So when his brother asks him to make a couple’s interview with Sakura for the sake of appearances in their actual one-year anniversary, he contacts ShyGirlLoudGirl directly on their twitter account. They respond immediately and even Sakura is a little bit interested on the obvious PR move.

A few days later they sit side by side on a cute, purple love-couch on the girls’ studio, just one big room in Neji’s house that he speared for his girlfriend and beloved cousin. With both Hinata and TenTen siting obviously exited in front of them on their signature white and black computer-desk chairs.

“He-Hello, Haruno-san,” stutters Hinata, the shy girl and after a full minute she amends herself in the face of her prince “A-and Uchiha-sama. too! Of course!”

“Hello, Hinata-chan!” Smiles Sakura in that overly friendly tone of voice she always uses when meting shy or introverted people. “And TenTen-san! How are you both?”

“We are fine!” Cries out TenTen excitedly, already immersed in her LoudGirl persona, “we’re really excited to have you both here!”

“Well,” smiles Sasuke, falling into his charming royalty façade for the media with ease “I’m really happy to be here, I been following your channel ever since you did your first video on Sakura.” This he says it honestly.

“Really?” Asks Sakura herself, surprised. She holds his hand and leans into him in a slightly demure yet enamoured move.

“Of course,” smirks Sasuke, holding her close, embracing her by her shoulders and then kissing the top of her pink hair. He distances himself away from his girlfriend just enough to address their interviewers “I love Sakura, she’s the woman I intend to make my queen. throne or no throne, so it makes me happy to know that you can see her as I see her.”

“Sasuke-kun…” murmurs Sakura, looking at him in awe. He has told her he loves her a handful of times. But he’s never been so public about his feelings for her until now.

“You look really happy,” smiles Hinata, “like you really belong with each other.” Her smile is kind and dazzling, as if the very sigh of love and affection can make her genuinely happy.

Finally finding her voice and her normally strong attitude, Sakura kisses him on the cheek “That’s because we love each other.” She declares, firmly “we are happy because we are together.”

Sasuke kisses her right behind her ear, Hinata and TenTen sigh completely enamoured with their relationship. Sasuke smirks knowingly.

The media will probably never forget about Sakura’s origins, not even when he eventually gives her the lady title just for appearance’s sake.

Maybe they will forever talk about her clothes and her hair and maybe they will never accept the fact that Sakura will never stop being a doctor after marriage.

But Sasuke will never stop loving the bright eyed doctor who demanded entrance into his mother’s garden as if it was her right and he’s sure that his people will eventually understand this as fact and maybe, just maybe. 

They will love Sakura for who she is just as he and these two girls already do.

Because she is his queen already just as she will be their queen sooner or later.

57. i like mountain music (1933)

release date: june 10th, 1933

series: merrie melodies

director: rudolf ising

starring: sara berner (various), pinto colvig (yodeler/various), jack mercer (will rogers/various)

though the cartoon titles share the name of the songs they showcase, they can make for some pretty intriguing titles, like here. this is another installment of the books come to life series, pertaining to magazines instead.

open to a drugstore after closing. there are some wonderfully beautiful backgrounds as we view the interior, settling onto a magazine rack. all is quiet and peaceful... until a cowboy from a magazine titled “WESTERN THRILLER” tears a hole in the cover page with a spray of bullets.

he hops out of the book and motions for his dozing cowboy buddies to wake up, yelling “c’mon, fellers!” no further cue is necessary as they grab some instruments and launch into an instrumental solo of the titular song “i like mountain music”. an interesting array of gags: the double fisting gun slinging cowboy leaps onto a counter top and dances to the music, spinning around. his spurs cut a hole in the counter top and he plummets into the glass display case below, spraying himself with perfume. elsewhere, one of the cowboy musicians rides his accordion like a horse, making for some intriguing visuals. standard as these gags may be, the animation has come quite a ways since the beginning of our journey, and are thusly more enjoyable.

after receiving warm applause, the lead cowboy and some backup singers sing the vocals to the song. catchy and beautiful as always! a variety of spot gags accompany the song, such as polish pianist and prime minister ignacy paderewski playing the piano and singing along.

a caricature of eddie cantor (another looney tunes favorite, a whole cartoon dedicated to a chicken counterpart of himself with slap happy pappy) pops out of a magazine and pulls a violinists beard, shouting “look, jimmy! it’s rubinoff!” dave rubinoff was cantor’s violinist for one of his radio shows.

our saunters will rogers, actor slash vaudeville performer slash cowboy slash comedian. he makes his way towards a magazine covered in cobwebs dated october 1929, detailing the catastrophic stock market crash. he gingerly places a “NO SALE” sign by the magazine and says “well folks, all i know is what i read in the paper!” a group of babies from a baby magazine (mtself included) cheer him on and applaud.

some lovely animation as a figure skater from “dance magazine” leaps onto a mirror, tilting it horizontally beneath her weight and skating on it.

to top the gag off, a steady snowfall enhances her elegant routine... and it’s revealed to be a cowboy pouring talcum powder on her! highly predictable, but it got a good smile out of me regardless.

there are some babies waving jingle bells to the beat of the music... and members of an african tribe making clicking sounds to the music. not too fond of that one. otherwise a beautiful and amusing scene, but yeesh. as you can imagine, their depictions aren’t very savory.

the skater finishes her beautiful routine with a split, a group of toys applauding her (frequently reused from red-headed baby. i’ve noticed the amount of recycled animation has certainly dwindled within the past handful of shorts, which is always a refreshing sight to see!)

freshly picked from pagan moon, a hula girl dances to “it’s time to sing ‘sweet adeline’ again”, a chorus of steel guitar players backing her up in vocals. my affinity for steel guitars prevails, recycled as this scene may be.

a yodeler from travel magazine (who is actually pinto colvig! i’ll talk more about my thankfulness that this is the first merrie melody with some voice credits FINALLY at the end) yodels as he hops from cliff to cliff, mountain to mountain, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

the yodeling yokel sings “i like mountain music” from a woman sourced from the “college rumor” magazine. look at the difference in designs here! i know it falls under the category of “look at the sexy woman... and this man is ‘normal’ (not in this case but)”, but i can’t help but love the contrast in design anyways. very funny and intriguing. a caricature of ed wynn also lends his out of tune voice to the song as magazine creatures applaud the spectacle.

what’s a cartoon without a little nefarious doings, huh? a mobster ushers his cronies to follow him as he sneaks along the countertop. the screenshot doesn’t do it justice, but his toadies are actually walking at different intervals, but still synchronized! great animation as always. the musical synchronization is on par as always. sherlock and watson make an appearance, sherlock bending low and sniffing the ground like a dog for clues. words fail me in describing how much that amuses me.

the gangster’s plan becomes evident once he and his cronies make their way towards a cash register. the mobster pours some lighter fluid in a spray bottle, lighting it and using the makeshift blowtorch to weld a hole in the cashier and steal the contents inside.

edward robinson makes a cameo, grunting “they can dish it out, but they can’t take it” while the mobsters use a spoon to pour coins in a dish. good use of sound effects! robinson takes out a pair of guns and begins to shoot at the gangsters. one of the gangsters fires in retaliation, missing.

a phonograph from “RADIO magazine” calls out all the cop cars to stop the theft. even mussolini sends his italian policemen after the gangsters (ironic that even mussolini takes the role of one of the good guys, seeing the events of wwii, huh?).

a barrage of artillery is used against the thieves, such as gumball bullets and pins shot through a pencil sharpener (i love those pencil sharpener machine gun gags so much).

one of the gangsters (whose butt serves as a nice pin cushion) seeks refuge in a magazine with jean harlow on the front. quickly he learns to regret his decision, running from the pages as we get a ferocious shot of ping pong. not king kong, the star of the smash hit king kong released in march of 1933, heavens, no! ping pong!

ping pong barrels towards the camera and chases down the mobster. desperate for any source of shelter, the mobster dives into a glass. ping pong approaches a syrup tap and presses down on “razzberry”, the tap blowing an actual raspberry instead of any syrup. the gag is topped off as the mobster winced with each raspberry blown. the crowd celebrates his loss, and we get a rather interesting iris out—i’m not sure how to describe it. it’s like a double iris out. regardless, it’s pretty cool!

one of the more interesting merrie melodies for sure! i didn’t talk about the voice credits at the beginning—because i didn’t know they existed! halfway through this i consulted imdb for the soundtrack list, and saw that there were actually names available. sara berner would be one of the bigger voices behind looney tunes—almost like the female equivalent of mel blanc. bernice hansen would dominate the screen in the 30s with her wonderful baby voice (used to the best of its abilities in cartoons where she voices actual babies who turn out to be conniving little bastards, referring to porky’s naughty nephew and porky’s picnic. she’d also voice petunia, both tashlin’s “sexy” approach and clampett’s cute and childish approach!). pinto colvig is credited too, of course gaining notoriety for his role as the original goofy. jack mercer also voiced popeye and felix the cat. quite a list here!

anyway, enough about voices. this was a really entertaining cartoon! with the books come to life cartoons, you have a certain standard of what to expect (save for book revue LOL. that’s a trip and a half), so i was pleasantly surprised to see that this was about magazines instead. especially in a drugstore, there’s a lot more room to work with the setting. the animation was beautiful and the gags were on point, and the celebrity caricatures were drawn great. even if you don’t know who they are, you still get a good laugh. the only downfall would be the racist gag with the stereotypical african tribe members making clicking sounds... that speaks for itself. needs to be addressed (as all the blackface and stereotypical gags do), but doesn’t necessarily drain the short too much of its charm. overall, definitely worth a watch. paced nicely and very high energy and silly! just express caution at the clicking gag with the ice skating scene.

link!

The crack twilight shipping conversation

E :-"I took care of those girls who spread rumors about you"

"What girls?"

"Not important "

I have back flashes of this kid and I'm like yo she scares me.

K : Jane is terrifying. Just not in the same way to Bella as she is to others.

"We are going to Yellowknife, so you can see the northern lights at this time of year! They are glorious! This guy has agreed to fly us."

"Jane, I don't- wait, why is he shaking"

"Juicebox is also excited to see the northern lights"

Shaking man: "Absolutely ecstatic"

"I made sure that all the warm clothing fits your size! It's even real fur! "

Crack twilight ships

K - E, Crack AU, where Jane is the one who imprints on Bella, going after James for crime, and Bella has to deal with the insane situation of "I think I was kidnapped by a child, and the child is trying to woo me."

Except Jane's Idea of wooing is terrifying and surreal, and has some pretty bizarre stuff to try to impress her.

"Jane-"

"But let's double check!"

E -OMG

K :-”Jane, why do you always give people such strange nicknames? Quickmunch, O delicious, lunchmeat, mosquito bait, and now juicebox?

Except for Jaccob, who you just called stinky

Why do you call him that?

-Because he just is

He doesn't smell any worse than any other athletic teenage boy. You haven't even seen him since he got sick.

Hey, does she have a nickname for Bella, you think?

E -Jacobs sweating furiously at all these vampires

K -It's because he's a wolfy shapeshifter, but for story purposes, Jane has no Idea, just that she hates Bella's childhood friend.

Alec, who is back in Voltera, but Jane talks on the phone too, assumes she's being possessive of who Bella spends time with, and views him as a rival.

He tells her that.

E - The fact he face times this stuff. Supportive bro vampire.

K - Don't kill the rival Jane. Bella will be crying, and you don't want to spend time with her mourning. Maybe take her on a trip, and get some personal time

E -She does, but also scares ppl to give them cool shite.

K -I had a crack thought once, where I thought what's the randomest most out there mates I can give vampires. , where Jane's mate was a random old man that she met in the food chamber, was like ,"wait don't kill him!" It became quite a debate.

Alec's, on the other hand, was a toddler he met on a job, where a lady had been vampired, and had bad control.  The kid wasn't even related to the target, just on a walk in a bad place and time. He can't get the face out of his head.

Neither of them are decided on who has it worse.

But Bella being shippable with almost any vampire in the series has way more potential for comedy.

Still, question, does Bella ever come to return the affection?

Edward is hundreds of years older than her, but looks roughly around her age. Staying beautiful, and around his age was something Bella found important to her in their relationship.

Jane, for all she is also centuries older than Bella, can not easily be mistaken for a young adult. Admittedly it could be claimed, possibly by dwarfism, but given that  physical appearance is important to Bella, and plays a part in her affections to other people, how would that play into any potential relationship with Jane?

K - God, weird how what starts as crack, leads me to wonder about real questions.

If that random old man is in fact Jane's soulmate in the crack mate's verse, should she take her mate in the form she finds him, or eat him and hope he reincarnates. Is there only one possible match, or are there potential matches walking around that finalize when conditions are met? Is the old man, at his age, fit to be a mate to a centuries old vampire of a young body? What if he's amnesic. How would that translate to vampirism?

Should Alec keep tabs on the toddler who could be his mate, or let them go and hope for another chance encounter?

E -Probably yes, even though you are aware she is older than you, she is mature maybe *I debate on that due to they stay in that state forever* but you can't get over the fact that is a child's body

K -If Alec chose to keep tabs, when would be the time to reintroduce himself? And how?

E - I say let them go, cause this is a bit too close with the Renesmee and Jacob kind of thing

Hmmm I say reincarnation is kinder?

K-Is reincarnation even real, or a hope?

How would you find them?

E -They have vampires, werewolves and shit, but does reincarnation really draw the line?

First off how did they even know they were mates?

K -It is, though I can't see Alec child napping the toddler, and raising them himself

Some voice in their head screams "Mine!"

Edwards was just weird, because he thought his voice meant " my meal"

E -Bwhahaha

Oh God Eddy

K -The Cullens are unusual in that they turn people in life threatening situations.

Still,Carslie and Esmae certinally had some affection between them, before she commited suicide.

Why did Rosaline get Emmet turned again?

Beyond the bear wound, I mean?

She doesn't seem the type to go out of her way to do something like that for just anyone.

Maybe it was blurred by the blood, and the need for control, but something about him called out to her, I think.

"Rosalie confessed to Bella that she saved Emmett from dying because of his innocent look, dimples, and curly hair that reminded her of her best friend Vera's child, Henry, and that ever since the day she saw the baby she always wanted a child of her own just like him."

Somehow, I doubt she looked much at the appearance of someone covered in blood. She is trying to resist killing after afromented bear mauling.

That sounds like a post rescue justification.

E - True. Always wondered about that.

K - Anyway, I think he might just send Gianna, or something to guard the kid for a bit, if he decided to keep tabs. Gianna is just glad to be temporarily spared, and hopes that job success may mean Alec turns her into a vampire, or at the least, doesn't kill her.

E -Shot, i would make sure that kid have the best life ever if that means he doesn't kill me

K - But anyways, to a vampire who is not rescuing a human from a dangerous situation, or abstaining in general, sometimes they get a sense of "Mine!" About humans they see.

Jane, as a member of Voltri, where mates are occasionally found like this, has heard, and does not question, and in fact jumps on the opportunity.

Her human smells delicious, and is resistant to her gift, and absolutely perfect. Now, how to not kill her, while making Jane the center of her world.

That kid has aunt Gianna, who is not really an aunt, but is... A family friend now, and full intent to make the kid happy.

Gianna is a dead secretary as of Breaking Dawn, I think, But Alec has a need for the human, so he can borrow her.

She's well aware of her morality, at this point.

Also, get rid of that James guy, who found Bella while she was hiking in the woods, in this verse.

E - Yeah lets get rid of him!

Honestly the image of a grown asa man getting his ass handed to him by some 12 year old cracks me up.

K -While Bella might find inclination to view Jane romantically, possibly, sexual orientation may be an issue for her.

In cannon, Bella had the higher sex drive then Edward, and would have prefered that to marriage, indicating she may have a higher sex drive then romantic inclination.

Book Bella didn't show much interest in women, and I don't know what way she swings in this AU, but either way, that Jane has the body of a child would probably complicate things in that aspect.

Would Bella be exploring cross orientation here, or having a crisis for her finding a sex drive for someone who's body is closer to a childs then an adults?

Both would be complex issues.

-It does!First she takes him out with mental fire, then she fights and tears him up, in hopes of impressing her would (will) be  mate!

E -Crisis at the sex drive, cause again kids body, and I'd be hella creeped out. And orientation since I haven't seen her show much interest in woman so that's a lot of issues for her to start on

"And here we see the alpha female show her dominance by obliterating the high male in order to impress her mate"

K - Its kind of weird to even talk about it, yes.

But it would come up in this context

Bella herself, would probably be creeped out

Jane, might be less so, due to being centuries older than her, and living in a different time with different marriage standards

E - Bella is like "oh honey no, that's. ..no"

K -Jane was born in England around 800 A.D, the daughter of an Anglo-Saxon woman and a Frankish soldier.

She was 12-13 when transformed.

Let's bump it up to 13, because while both are far too young for being burned at the stake, 13 is slightly more

----

Was reading this

----

"Contrary to Victorian beliefs that pale, delicate women were the most attractive, Brown says that actually, muscles are key. It's the earliest known example of #fitspiration:

"All women would be healthier and none the less beautiful if they possessed firm muscles and strong limbs; this scarcely any one could controvert."

Even if she wants to consign herself to a life of singledom: "And if a girl never intends to marry she should be none the less mindful of her health."

Brown explains that women are often less inclined to discuss sensitive maladies than their male counterparts. But that's wrong.

"Young women should learn that to neglect disease is to create more," he stresses.

"Secondly, they should appreciate the fact that, though they may get very little sympathy from either the other sex or their own, there is no execuse for not taking their complaint boldly and sensibly to that quarter made for them, namely, their doctor."

---

And this guy sounds kind of radical for the time, and possibly today even, for some, but why does that last line still feel relevant to today's attitude of women's health.

brad majors: a character study

ok i think it probably says something when the first time i tried to make this post the power to my entire house went out, wiping my progress and turning off my dvd player, but fuck if i’m gonna let prognostic signs stop me from being on my bullshit. 

the point is: y’all ever devote a few hours worth of time and effort to making something that nobody is ever, ever gonna read? if you do, then we here at moovie groovies dot tumblr dot com feel sorry for you, although naturally we can’t relate. no, you don’t need to check how many notes we get on these stupid posts. don’t worry about that. ANYWAY

sometimes you just wake up and, despite knowing that your classes start up again in less than a week, you just have to spend some of the precious few hours you have left on deconstructing everyone’s favorite asshole’s fragile, fragile psyche. and by you, i mean me. and by sometimes, i mean now. 

let’s go! 

so, i’m gonna start with the scene in front of the church (let’s start at the very beginning, the beginning’s a good place to start...). brad’s introduction is the first time we meet any of the major characters of the film (unless you count patricia quinn’s lips and richard o’brien’s voice as an intro to magenta and riff), and it sort of sets him up as our “protagonist,” a role he... doesn’t quite maintain for the duration of the film. obviously, the second frankie shows up, he’s the main event, babey, but even for our “hero” and “heroine,” brad, who seems to be the main focus for the first act, gets less on-screen development than his female counterpart. plus, janet’s solo song wasn’t cut. sorry brad ): 

regardless, i like the church scene quite a bit in terms of brad's character. the movie isn’t entirely huge on the character development kind of thing, so you have to take it where you can get it, but imo, introducing brad with ralph as a counterpart/sort of foil was a good choice, because it lets us compare our hero with what i’m just going to assume is the standard for the society he’s living in. we jump in: the first conversation we see in the whole movie is between brad and ralph, who we learn is a friend of his from high school. it seems likely that brad and ralph aren’t as close as, perhaps, betty and janet are (this is just my speculation, but if you look at the other wedding guests, there’s at least one other girl who’s wearing the purple dress that janet is in, which could be the bridesmaid’s dress, while i don’t see anyone else wearing brad’s little outfit, making him not one of the groomsmen), but brad initiates the conversation, struck by social norms, if absolutely nothing else, in the need to be polite. their conversation seems awkward (asshole boxing!), but more so for brad than ralph, who just steamrolls on totally oblivious to how fake brad’s laugh is. brad comes off as the more thoughtful, conservative one of the two--he’s kind of cringing under his smile at the conversation, and everything he says is sort of.... stiff. also, did you notice his face when ralph says the only reason he showed up to the science class was because he was trying to get in good with betty? brad, who actually likes science, has sort of a blank/disappointed look while he announces this, which he turns to an awkward “ha ha ha” laugh. when betty throws her bouquet and janet catches it, ralph tells brad it could be his turn next, which he seems to somewhat brush off (”who knows?”), but once ralph leaves, he’s definitely caught up in thought again, perhaps contemplating the timing of his proposal (who the fuck brings a ring to someone else’s wedding??). 

side note about that scene: both betty’s dress and ralph’s suit are white, which, at a wedding, symbolizes virginal purity. even the lewd message on the car (”wait til tonite--she got hers, now he’ll get his”) implies that both betty and ralph have been waiting until their wedding night to, y’know, consummate their relationship, which brad and janet initially parallel, but...

the conversation then switches to brad and janet, and their first interaction together is kind of,,, tense. janet is gushing about the wedding, but once again, matter-of-fact brad majors is kind of awkward, and his comments are all very forced. “everyone knows that betty’s a wonderful little cook.” “ralph himself, he’ll be in line for a promotion in a year or two!” both of these come off as commentary on what he thinks people are supposed to be thinking about--brad, at this point, is a man who has a framework of what life should be (domestic wife, upward movement at a respectable job, white wedding) and who is doing his absolute best to fill his role in all of that. his stoicism even fits that, because, as we’ll see in a moment, he does have real, giddy emotions around janet--he’s just doing his best to keep them down until the very moment of his proposal.

and that brings me to: dammit janet! it’s really very cute, and kind of the closest thing to a brad-centric song we get if you’re watching a version that doesn’t have once in a while which.... you probably are. brad gets flustered while he just tries to start the proposal, and compare his wide, shameless smiles at janet throughout this song with the way he kind of grimace smiles at ralph beforehand. he’s in love! and you know he’s in love, because he says it outright six times over the course of the song, while janet only explicitly says it once. maybe he just got luckier with the rhymes (dammit janet, i love you is the same syllables as brad, i’m mad, for you too), but tbh i think it’s sort of telling--brad’s playing the emotionally stunted prototype of the american man, but deep down he’s deeply in love and thinks his girlfriend is the most special person in the world. meanwhile, janet clearly cares for brad, but i think what she’s really in love with is the idea of marriage (she’s so enamored with betty monroe’s transition to mrs. ralph haphshatt, and in the scene beforehand she’s definitely anticipating brad’s proposal and waiting expectantly for it)--but this is a brad character analysis, so i’m going to try to stick to his side of things. he beams at her while he fumbles through the first bit (“hey, janet, i’ve got something to say”), and has to lean back on a tombstone once he gets through it. i love him! i love how he drops his composure and starts jumping and running around (backward!). also, peep that bit where janet leans in for a kiss and he pulls away at the last minute... telling? maybe not, he does kiss her in a moment. 

the most excited janet seems throughout the duration of the song is when he pulls out the ring. in his excitement, brad fumbles trying to put it on her, and falls over while spelling her name and telling her how much he loves her--meanwhile, she leaves him on the church steps while she goes inside to admire it. all of brad’s lyrics in the song have been about their courtship and how much he loves her, while hers are about how her ring is better than the one her friend got, and how it’s good that he’s already done the proper thing and met her parents. this isn’t janet hate, really, but i think the comparison is interesting--brad was introduced with somewhat awkwardly stunted emotions, but he’s the more open, idealistic one of them when it comes to romantic feelings. janet, meanwhile, knows exactly what she wants--but maybe it doesn’t matter so much who gives it to her, as long as she ends up in that dress she’s built up so well in her head. basically: he wants to plan their future, she wants to plan their wedding. 

that theme is showcased pretty well in this exchange toward the end of the song: janet leads with her “brad, i’m mad,” bit, which he eagerly answers with “i love you too,” though janet has yet to say that she loves him. also, i wish i had screenshots, but if you watch that scene, he’s looking adoringly at her, while she’s looking adoringly at the ring. the song is about different things for the two of them.

it’s pretty cute to me that brad’s immediate first thought upon getting engaged is not that they need to announce it to their family, or their friends (like betty and ralph) of similar age, but their tutor. also, look at them when he says this--i think that maybe the two of them were on different pages when saying “there’s one thing left to do.” janet probably did want to tell family and friends, because she’s finally getting her dream, she’s getting married, she has a beautiful ring, and she wants to tell people! brad wants to tell one person, because he thinks his whole relationship is owed to his teacher, whom he admired, and he wants to share his happiness with dr. scott. we learn later that the two of them had been working together on scientific pursuits even after dr. scott was his teacher in high school, which i like for brad. i love his devotion to science! i don’t love his devotion to dr. scott, because he’s the real villain of the movie, but brad doesn’t know that. i don’t blame him.

anyhow.

i bring all that up because janet looks a little disappointed when he starts talking about dr. scott, doesn’t she? maybe i’m totally reading too much into it for the sake of my theory, but she looks sort of blank until “made me give you the eye and then panic,” where she dutifully giggles and looks down at the ground. 

they do kiss at the end of the song, but it’s close mouthed and brief, and the screen cuts away to riff raff, magenta, and columbia (or their actors playing bit parts, at the very least) for most of it. this is probably more about the stand up american kid’s sexual repression than lack of attraction, if we’re being honest. i’m not saying at any part of this that brad wasn’t in love with janet. the two of them, at that point in the movie, are very dutifully filling roles they think they should be filling, and that means they’re being the perfect distant WASP couple. no impure thoughts until the wedding night. and so forth.

next up: the police statements. i actually hadn’t read them until just now, which marks the two hour mark of me writing this analysis... and i’m about 15 minutes into the movie. funny how that happens, right? don’t worry, i’ll have less to go on soon so i can shut up. until then, though: brad’s police statement is a fun ride because the whole thing is written like his first stilted conversation with ralph. also, it reveals his name is bradley j majors. what’s the j for? that’s for you to decide. he introduces himself and mentions that janet is still his fiancee (which is backed by janet’s police statement), and explains that everything started at ralph and betty’s wedding. he goes into some backstory with dr. scott’s class, and gives this line in relation to his first thought about janet: “she’s just the little help and support I’m going to need throughout my life.” god, brad, that was straight of you. it’s perfectly in character (fitting his comment re: betty that she’s a “wonderful little cook;” he’s thinking about women in a supportive, domestic role, and not so much as people, although his actions when janet are actually around make him a little less of an asshole about it), but it makes me want to slap him a little. at the same time, in the context of him having a perfected ideal in his head and trying to stick through it, that’s just about love at first sight for him. i think it might just be that janet is in love with the idea of marriage, and brad is in love with the idea of janet. he thinks he’s found the perfect woman to round out his fantasy american home life. she’ll give him support, and cook his meals, and pop out their 2.5 kids. meanwhile she’ll get to have her wedding and be a nice little homemaker, and if that’s not exactly what she wants, well, it’s what she seems to think she wants now. 

both brad and janet’s police statements are funny because you can see them projecting their thoughts and actions on each other while changing the occurrences of the story. i’ll scatter references to the stuff that happens after along with my commentary on the stuff themselves, but brad says that janet “got sort of excited and kind of did a bit of a hop and a skip – she gets a bit carried away when she’s excited – and skipped into the church.” yeah, brad. janet was the one who was carried away. he mentions that he should have noticed that there was a funeral going on while they were in the church (janet doesn’t comment on that), and that he would have noticed, had he “been so confused by her saying yes.” brad. darling. she was saying yes in her eyes before you even pulled out the ring. in her police statement, she says she “thought he’d never get around to it,” but that she “couldn’t hint to him. but anyway he did it.” janet’s been trying to get him to propose probably since they graduated high school. brad says that “ralph and betty got engaged and then married before [he] had the nerve to ask Janet if she would kinda get married to [him]. You know what it’s like ? You don’t like to take these things on until you’re sure.”

side note: i like his little “kinda get married.” he does that a lot in this--kinda, sort of. i think it’s his way of downplaying his emotions and what he wants. it’s sad, but it shows a lot about him, i think.

his full explanation for not noticing the funeral until he thinks back on it later is that he and janet “kissed, and [he] felt so hot and cold that [he] just didn’t notice.” once again, i say brad. DARLING. i love you. you are so so emotionally stunted.

their next scene is the car, driving to dr. scott’s house. i know i take the opportunity to wax poetic about my great love for brad majors just about every other line, but i LOVE how he’s got nixon’s resignation speech taped and playing on the way there. it’s such a funny little detail, and also it begs some questions in my mind--does he like listening to it out of some kind of respect for nixon? (i ask this mostly because the way nixon presents the speech is reminiscent of brad’s early dialogue/his police report) or does he just like hearing the bastard step down? (more likely, since brad would probably find unamerican actions quite heinous, and regard the whole watergate scandal as entirely treasonous) either way, it shows a trait i just want to call attention to: brad is a NERDDDD. i love him.

janet seems much more casual and chatty in this scene than he does. brad’s a man on a mission, or maybe his persona just doesn’t allow room for unnecessary chatter. either way, it makes for an awkwardly quiet car ride. janet tries to break the silence, first by offering him chocolate (this is also part of her seeming younger than him, though if they were in the same high school class i suppose they really can’t be), then by commenting on the motorcyclists. brad takes this opportunity to show his disdain for their “type,” probably meaning rebels, junkies, and general counterculturalists. oh, brad. you have no idea what you’re in for here, do you?

not that relevant, but i find it funny that while janet recalls that brad told her to wait in the car (which she uses to bring up the fact that she “wasn’t going to risk losing him if there was a sophisticated, seductive woman in the castle,” a comment which i find more indicative of her devotion to her wedding than her devotion to brad), brad describes leaving together as a joint decision. maybe it’s just not that important to him, maybe his ego smarts a little from her brushing off his attempt at protecting her, maybe he just wants to portray all their decisions as a joint effort. man and wife. awwww.

his actions in this scene are mostly focused on his protective element. he does the “mom hand” across janet when they first get the blowout, and then tries to convince her to stay while he wanders off into the darkness alone (which, let’s be real brad, would have resulted in a man door hand hook car door kind of thing, wouldn’t it have?). basically this scene is full proof that brad majors would 100% be “white dad in a horror movie” material if he wasn’t changed by the experience, which he seems not to have been, if the police statement is anything to go off. so, they both get out of the car. part of me likes to think about what it would be like if brad really had gone in alone, but at the same time, the au necessitates that janet be alone in that car all. fucking. night. so.

i don’t have any commentary on him in “over at the frankenstein place,” particularly, except that he’s a dork who doesn’t take off his glasses in the rain. seriously, brad, you have to be completely blind at this point. what the hell are you doing.

unrelated side note: amanda seyfreid should have played janet in the 2016 remake, i always think that susan looks a little bit like her in this scene. plus i just... didn’t like victoria justice in the role. whatever.

brad kind of ignores janet’s worry and fear from that point on for a while. on one hand, asshole! but on the other hand, like, why go all the way to the castle just to turn back at the door? maybe because castles don’t have phones, but he doesn’t know that yet. 

brad falls in to introducing janet as “my fiancee janet weiss” very quickly. in my heart, i’m going to say that this is because he’s been doing it for a while in his head. brad and janet seem a little uncomfortable with riff raff, but brad reassures janet it’s just a weird hunting lodge, and they go inside, still holding out hope that they might use a phone here before the night is over. oh, brad’n’janet. if only you knew. magenta (who both brad and janet call “madge” in their police reports) slides down the banister, and they get a little startled. both of them find this important enough to note in their police statements, with brad commenting that her maid’s outfit “somehow didn’t look right;” in fact, he felt “a bit embarrassed by it actually.” i think this is another instance of him downplaying every emotion/feeling he reports on. janet, meanwhile, just comments that her dress had lost some buttons, which i feel goes along with a common theme in her report--brad’s sexually frustrated, janet judges other women. it goes along with pitting herself against betty (”it’s nicer than betty monroe had!”); janet comments that the wedding was perfect, except betty’s train should have been longer. just little details like that. 

next: the time warp! janet Does Not Like the time warp. she faints twice, and another time right before sweet transvestite. brad is initially as startled and disturbed (?) as she is, but by the time columbia’s verse is over, he’s smiling and he seems sort of into it--bobbing his head and so forth. janet’s the one who tugs on his shirt and tries to lead him out. interestingly, in her police statement, she switches the blame for their inching out of the room and puts it on brad--“i would have quite liked to see the dance right through but brad insisted we leave and he’s so strong and brave.” brad, again, presents this as a joint decision he and janet had: “janet and i backed out of the room.” at this point, i really am just thinking that he wants to believe that he and janet are unified in their decisions, maybe as a kind of mental block to the shit they’ve been through. it’s cute. he still loves her quite a bit. 

oh, before i go on. i want to pull your attention to this bit from the police statement: “now, this bit is going to be a bit hard to believe but you’ve gotta believe i’m telling the truth. I mean I had a very upright honest christian upbringing and I don’t lie about anything. no sir. i never lied to my mother about whether I’d cleaned behind my ears or not.” 

i don’t like, have anything in particular to say about it. i just love him.

so, the time warp ends. janet urges brad to say something; apparently, him asking the transylvannians if they know how to madison isn’t the something she wanted him to say. that’s one of my favorite brad lines, honestly. it also proves that brad’s a lot more comfortable here than janet is--for now, at least. he defends the strangers’ rights to act strange by suggesting that they’re foreigners with different ways from their own, and seems to be a bit irritated by the fact that janet’s reacting so harshly (”get a grip on yourself, janet!”). his thought process at this point is probably that she’s behaving like a hysterical woman, while he’s a paragon of rationality. funny how those roles kind of switch by the end, no? right now, though, it’s still brad’s turn with the calm juice, so janet faints again when the elevator comes down--brad, to her right, says in his police report that he “was about to get angry with her” for screaming. harsh much, brad? 

these next parts are going to be hard to analyze because watching brad when frank is on the screen is... hard. i’m a man of simple tastes; i see tim curry in drag, and i watch him. ah, the things i’ll do for a completely pointless character study. 

anyway, frank’s first appearance has brad kind of stammering. frankie is going through the “how do you do’s,” and brad is just standing there, working his jaw. he didn’t catch janet that time. interestingly, though janet noticed from the start that frank was a man “who looked like a woman,” brad apparently didn’t catch that until he saw the corset--up until that point in his report, he refers to frankie as a woman, saying that janet fainted, and he “decided that there was nothing to faint about – there was just this woman getting out of the lift.” he goes on to say “yes, she was about 6’1”” which, baby, i don’t know who you’re kidding but tim curry is 5′9″ and that’s generous. i guess he was factoring in the heels, but he mentions the heels in the next line: “but wearing very high heels, a lot of makeup and a shiny black cloak with a silver collar. She motioned us back in to the ballroom and I thought we could follow her.” at this point in janet’s statement, she notes that “brad says that [she] went of [her] own volition, but he was really pushing [her]” to follow dr. furter. huh, brad, i wonder why you were so intent on following...? he goes on to say that “when we got there she started talking about being a transvestite. now, I don’t keep up with the modern trends that happen in new york and all those big cities and i wasn’t quite sure what a transvestite was.” brad... never change. didn’t frank only start talking about being a transvestite once the cloak was off? maybe this is one of those things where not all the song sequences happen in universe. whatever. anyway, he notes that frank is a man, and finishes with “yes, i did get further confirmation of this fact later and i’d rather not go into it, if you don’t mind,” which is the only allusion he makes to sleeping with frank.

brad is pretty stiff/shocked for most of the song, but by the time he remembers himself and recovers enough to ask for a telephone (brad, babydoll, you are never going to get a telephone here), he gives an awkward little nod/smile at the “well, babies, don’t you panic.” then it’s back to freaky & awk. he’s self consciously feeling his hair at the insinuation that he might not be shivering because of the rain. still, when he’s getting stripped down by magenta, he’s pretty cool again, introducing himself (asshole!) and janet (slut!) even while she’s pulling his shirt over his head. to columbia, he’s a little rude: she tells them they’re very lucky to be invited up to the lab, and that some people would give their right arm for the privilege. snidely, brad asks “people like you, maybe?,” which i think goes back to his “life’s pretty cheap for that type” comment from the car. he’s very us (clean, straight american kids) versus them (motorcycle junkie amoral delinquents) here. still, though, he’s not protesting too violently when they get put in the elevator. in the statement, he seems to be asked about whether or not frank’s castle was a gambling den because of his “we’ll pull out the aces” comment, to which he replies that it wasn’t, and furthermore, that gambling is evil--his mother told him. that makes a lot of sense--he seems quite a bit like someone who never questioned the morals his parents instilled in him. this is probably the first experience in his entire life that ever gave him reason to question them, and he still comes away swearing he tells the whole truth, and that gambling is evil, and so forth. even if he’s been shaken... he hasn’t been shaken that much.

when they get up to the lab, brad (who is, by the way, wearing the world’s ugliest underwear) does a little “ladies first” gesture and lets janet out in front of him. and they say chivalry is dead. he still gets out before columbia and magenta, however. 

brad gets to do his “i’m brad majors (asshole!), and this is my fiance janet weiss (slut!)” bit that i’m sure he’s been rehearsing in his head since tenth grade for a third time, but fucks it up this time with “vice,” which shows you exactly where his mind is. it’s interesting that this is where he fucks it up, and not when he was introducing them to columbia in the last scene--columbia being a scantily clad young woman watching while he was being stripped naked, while frank in this scene is still crossdressing, yeah, but is much more moderately dressed since he put on the gown thing. funny, no, which one elicits his freudian slip? i don’t think brad is completely gay, since i’ve already gone into how strongly he feels for janet, but i think a lot of his attraction to women is based around his idea of what he’s supposed to do, while when he’s not keeping a close grip on his feelings, he lets attraction to men just sort of... slip out. he’s back to being his dominating american man persona in this scene tho (it’s a bird, it’s a plane... it’s super asshole!), and seems awfully jealous when frank flirts with janet, probably because janet does very little to seem unreceptive. he also gets pissed as fuck when frank mentions how hospitable and generous he’s being by letting brad’n’janet stay here, which... there’s still no phones in the castle, asshole. he’s more reserved and a little bit self-conscious both when frank compliments their underclothes (don’t listen to him for a moment, brad, you area still wearing the world’s FUGLIEST underwear) and when his outraged “hospitality!” speech is met with frank telling him how forceful he is (which the conventionalists find ENTIRELY amusing). i guess it’s understandable--this is almost definitely the first time in his life he’s been hit on, by a man or otherwise really, and he’s repressed enough that he kind of shuts down. you can’t just be openly sexual in brad’s mind. that’s not how it works. the question about the tattoo brings him back to himself, though, which again shows his distaste for counterculture. tattoos are things that type has. not him. 

janet giggles when frank asks her, and he stares at her in disbelief for a while. when janet claps along with the transylvannians for frank’s experiment, he just stands and watches before holding her so she can’t do it anymore--but when janet starts getting scared of the lights and the noises, he’s back in his a-game, reassuring her there’s nothing to be scared of. he really does like being the one with power--he thinks he has it when he’s yelling about hospitality, frank brings him back to earth by looking at him, for lack of a more tasteful phrase, like a piece of meat. while he’s reassuring janet, and she’s thinking of how strong and protective he is (a comment that she makes many times in her police statement, and which frank is perceptive enough to have picked up to use in the seduction scene), he’s okay again, and he starts looking in shock at the machines frank is using. that’s another thing about brad--he can get used to these situations pretty easily, and he’s still easily distracted by his interest in science. it’s just frank himself and janet’s flirtations with frank that are throwing him off his groove. 

side note. in the police statement, brad implies that he thinks rocky was just “having a snooze” in the tank, though whether he says this because that’s actually his impression or because he legitimately does believe that the story he’s telling is too fantastic to be true is kind of unclear. if he did believe that frank was able to create life, i think his dislike at this stage would be pretty easily overcome by his dorky science questions--but maybe that’s just me. 

brad totally checks out rocky. he puts on his glasses and does this whole once over--subtle. in the police statement, he comments that “frank got very concerned about his being frightened and kept telling him he was beautiful. he wasn’t a bad looking guy – but i wouldn’t have called him beautiful.” suuuuure. maybe rocky’s just not brad’s type, though; he does go on and on about eddie.

when frank asks what brad and janet think of his creation, brad smiles briefly at janet for her (flat out lie that) she doesn’t like men with too many muscles; before frank even reacts, though, his face falls when the spectators laugh, and he seems a little embarrassed. i would have liked to see his answer--although, like i said in the last paragraph, it may simply be that rocky (whom he calls “rock,” citing rock hudson, who, side note, was gay, altho i have no idea whether or not they knew that in the 70′s) is not quite his taste. we don’t see brad’n’janet for all of i can make you a man, but we do see them again in hot patootie--eddie seems to flirt with rocky and janet and maybe even brad, a bit (if he was one of frank’s conquests, eddie must be bi too, right?). brad’s face seems mostly just flat out baffled for the duration of the song, but all his comments in the police statement seem pretty positive--“this guy who burst out on the harley sang his song. i held his sax for a while he was singing. good voice”--which is somewhat strange, given that eddie embodies all the stereotypes of the “other” that brad has been shitting on since the beginning--he has a motorcycle, he’s got tattoos, he’s part of frank’s little circle, and he pretty much humps columbia right there on the floor. brad doesn’t seem actually distraught by the murder, though, saying not much beyond “god rest his soul” like a good little christian boy would. he does note that he would have thought that eddie “could have made a lot of money as a singer,” which is again, cute, because he really doesn’t seem to believe all those stereotypes as much as he seemed to think he did. 

side note, if he was attracted to eddie, and we know he’s at least somewhat attracted to frank, doesn’t that mean brad has the exact same taste in men as columbia? which could be related to him thinking that rocky wasn’t anything to write home about--neither of them seem to be that interested in muscle.

brad’s not even slightly subtle about checking out frank when magenta and riff raff take the gown off him. he looks away, as if that helps anything about it. he also looks absolutely betrayed by janet’s announcement that she’s a muscle fan. dammit, janet.

he takes the time to mention frank and rocky’s “wedding,” which he makes sure to detach from the other one we see in the movie by assuring the police that it was nothing like ralph and betty’s, although he praises them on about the same level: about the haphshatt’s wedding, he says “very nice wedding it was,” while in regard to frank’s, he says “it was quite nice, i suppose.” i appreciate that he never really expresses disgust for any part of the night except for the cannibalism--he never demonizes frank as a q***r or anything like that. in regard to what happened after the wedding, he either is ignorant (unlikely) or feigns it--he says that he “didn’t think it was [his] business,” which i feel like is the polite streak that was pounded mercilessly into his head jumping out. 

off topic, but he wasn’t completely accurate in saying the wedding was nothing like ralph’s--at the end, the transylvannians throw flower petals and chant “rocky, rocky, rah rah rah!,” which parallels the wedding guests cheering “haphshatt haphshatt, rah rah rah!” at the end of ralph and betty’s wedding. is that a custom i didn’t know about, or was it a nod to the fact that the guests were supposed to be played by the transylvannians?

next: sex! i probably don’t have to say anything for y’all to know that this is one of my favorite scenes--i’m predictable like that. the seduction of brad and janet go pretty similarly, with mostly the same lines--frank changes “i think you’ll find it quite pleasurable” to “i think you’ll really quite enjoy it” for some flair, and brad gets angry (nevernever. never!) while janet gets weepy. janet protests that she was saving herself (for marriage, which she’s built up in her head), while brad gets pissed because he thought it was the real thing--it’s notable, though, that while janet was already getting hot and heavy when she thought it was brad, brad doesn’t get into anything sexual until after he knows it’s frank; he was only holding “janet” and petting her hair. frank gets smart after janet makes him promise not to tell brad and leads with the fact that he won’t tell janet, and after making sure that frank promises he won’t tell, brad’s out there arching his back and moaning. can’t say i blame him--i wouldn’t have even said no in the first place. in the statements, brad seems to have either blocked out the entire memory (which i doubt) or just refuses to say it, much like he did with what frank and rocky did in their room; first of all, he leads with “well, janet and i went off down all these corridors and things and were shown to our bedroom. one each. even if we hadn’t been given a room each, i would have insisted on it. you’ve got to do the right thing.” yeah, sure, brad--that’s why you let janet in so quickly, huh? anyway, he continues with “a few things went on during the night. no, i’d rather not talk about it. no, i can’t remember. yes, i think someone did come into my room. no, i’ve got no idea who it was. i was asleep at the time.” what was it that brad said earlier about always telling the complete truth? not that i really blame him--look man, it was the 70′s, and even if he didn’t have a 100% upstanding citizen’s image to maintain, casually announcing that you’re a fag probably doesn’t have amazing consequences for anyone involved. janet, in her report, is free with the fact that she knew it was frank, though she still doesn’t acknowledge that she had sex: “i thought it was brad at first, but then it was frank so that was o.k. i mean i would have been shocked if it had been brad. he’s always been so respectful towards me.”

basically, “i would have been shocked if brad touched me like that. he’s way too repressed to go beyond closed mouth kissing.” 

but i digress. 

we see brad again on the television monitor, smoking a “we just had sex” cigarette and looking back at frank casually. they seem to be talking, and frank seems super pleased with what he’s done. i suppose he would, he’s just gotten off two (three?) times in the last hour or so. like, fuck, that’s pretty impressive. especially if you have a dick. brad seems a lot more chill with what they did than janet does--janet’s crying and guilty at first, then crying and betrayed, which is... strange. janet, did you somehow forget that you fucked the exact same man in the past twenty seconds? maybe she just wanted to believe that his will was stronger than hers, or that he was straight. how would she have reacted if it was, say, columbia in that bed? i guess we’ll never know. 

maybe she’s just thinking about her ruined marriage, if we’re being honest.

anyway, brad, unlike janet, seems content to follow frank after they make it, and doesn’t really seem unsettled by what they did. he does seem unsettled by watching frank whip riff raff, but once that’s over and the three of them are looking at dr. scott on the television monitor, he’s gotten over that, too, and he’s happy to announce (with no mind for reading the room) that he knows scott--that’s an old friend of his! frank gets apprehensive and angry, concluding rationally that dr. scott (who he knows as a UFO investigator, and who would naturally prove dangerous to his continued stay on earth) sent brad and janet to his castle to spy on him. brad tries to reassure frank that he’s there because his car broke down--and here, he’s still smiling a little, until he drops to a serious “i was telling the truth.” maybe he should tell frank that thing about washing behind his ears? frank doesn’t believe him, and starts jabbing him backward (but not hitting him) with the handle of the whip. brad gets increasingly angry at this disrespect, and seems (like he did in the lab earlier) about to snap out, until he trips backward, and frank raises the whip, at which point his weird relation with power dynamics saves his ass. he almost forgot, before, where he stood, but now he’s looking up at a man with a whip who’s clearly not afraid to use it, and so he chills out quite a bit. frank asks him to confirm that dr. scott works for the US government in the investigation of UFOs, and brad shoots back that he might, which angers frank, until brad drops his own anger and submits in a more placating “i don’t know!” frank chills out, and then summons dr. scott up to the lab.

despite being threatened with a very real whipping, brad seems no less excited to see dr. scott than he initially was. he really is quite devoted to his mentor, and has no shame when offering his hand to shake--like, how does he not realize his robe has blown open and dr. scott can definitely see his dick through his ugly tightie whities? no idea. but damn if he’s not happy. frank makes a comment about how adaptable he is, and only then is brad embarrassed enough to look away. scott saves brad’s ass a little by assuring frank he had no idea that brad was going to be here, to which frank seems a little surprised, but probably pleasantly. it’s better to know that the dude you just fucked wasn’t secretly a spy conspiring to out you to the planet earth, right? 

brad seems hurt and confused in the rocky horror role call bit by janet’s betrayal--which is a little fair. after all, brad only fucked one guy, but janet’s been caught in bed with at least two. still, infidelity is infidelity, and neither of them has much room to judge at this point. brad probably gets this, because, while he still seems a little miffed when they sit down to dinner, he’s not trying to confront her about it or anything. in fact, he doesn’t try to do any confrontation at all until frank-n-furter implies that dr. scott is a nazi (which. doesn’t really work if he’s been doing the german accent the whole time, but whatever), and brad, who doesn’t know that it’s true, gets righteously angry on his behalf. poor baby. might want to get a better fcking mentor.

he still seems a little upset when dr. scott starts singing “eddie,” but makes his peace, i suppose, enough to get into the song by the end, where he sings with what i’m just gonna assume is righteous anger at how bad eddie was. i think at this point he’s more or less loyal to frank, at least in the eddie department. less so when frank slaps janet a second later; then he’s back in the “righteous anger” department. he takes off his glasses and then is apparently so blind he can’t see which way they went. that’s not how glasses work, brad. 

he’s pretty impressed with the science in the latter half of “planet schmanet janet.” like yeah, they’re glued to the spot, but he doesn’t seem as upset about that as janet does, and knows exactly what dr. scott’s impression of the transducer means. once again, i just want to emphasize how much i’d like a fic of frank and brad talking about science and machines and stuff. brad’s a scientifically minded guy! he’d be fucking fascinated with all this shit if he had time in between his bouts of righteous anger to be! 

despite being trapped, brad tries to get a hit in while frank sings the sexiest line of the movie. respect, i guess. and another after janet beats him for a little! 

there’s protective!brad again. he’s trembling with anger while he threatens frank... completely ineffectually. you’re trapped, dumbass.

ah, well.

then, the floor show! the floor show gives us kind of a jump in brad’s character. according to his statement, he wasn’t conscious for the part where he sings on stage--he says he doesn’t really remember anything between the dinner (which he refuses to answer questions on: “oh yes, we did have dinner at some point. no i feel ill when i think about it. i didn’t eat anything. at least not very much. i’ll be sick if you keep asking me about it”) and waking up in the pool. the little segment in the show itself tells a lot about him though: here, though brad seemed pretty cool & collected up until this point, we learn that he’s massively uncomfortable with the role he’s found himself in--the sex, the company, and probably above all else, the corset and the fish nets. he calls on his mother to save him, which supports that bit in his report when he says that his mother told him that gambling is evil--he’s kind of a momma’s boy, and he’s reverting back to that while finding himself in a situation he can’t control. at the same time, though, he doesn’t totally seem to hate it--he does admit to feeling sexy dressed like that, and once he gets in the pool, everything gets blissed out. even in his statement, he doesn’t try to hide that part of his evening--“yes, i did have a nice swim. it was warm – it was beautiful really.” that’s probably the most glowing review he gives of anything that happened that night, and his actions in the pool consisted of... licking frank’s chest, rubbing his head on rocky’s dick, and getting dipped by columbia. yeah, i think beautiful pretty much sums it up, actually. he returns to his “it’s beyond me” chorus for a moment in the pool, but columbia puts an end to that. 

oh, i love his pose while frank is singing, too. i know i’ve used the word repressed like fifty times in this review, but... 

all i can say about the rest of the song is that i’m really feeling his legs in the chorus line. he’s got more devotion to the dance than rocky does, at least. 

then there’s protective brad again; he pulls janet away from frank when riff raff and magenta start threatening him (and gets a heel to his foot for his trouble). during “i’m going home,” he looks appropriately sad at frank’s departure. maybe even more than appropriately, since this isn’t exactly his closest friend in the world, is it? still, we also get protective!brad protecting someone other than janet for the one and only time when riff raff announces frank’s death and brad yells out “you’re going to kill him? what’s his crime!” there’s that righteous anger again... and like, even though this is a man that brad has seen murder one man, brutally whip another, and who has threatened him and his beloved mentor and harassed his fiance... brad really can’t fathom why they would kill him! it might be a side effect of the mind control ray frank was using, but dr. scott was under the same stuff, ostensibly, and didn’t find a single problem saying that they had to kill frank for society’s protection. 

i love that short little scene with brad burying his head in janet’s hair while he holds her. i think he’s a little disillusioned with his mentor by the end, or at least i would hope so. poor frank ):

brad’s part in superheroes is mostly just about him being sexy for me. like. the words he’s saying mostly just tell me that he’s freaking out because of what happened. but the way he’s sitting and writhing around in the smoke.... undeniably hot.

anyway, holy shit, i’ve been working on this for like seven hours now. tl; dr: brad majors loves janet weiss a lot, or at least the idea of her, but is completely sexually repressed and can’t deal with it when he has his gay awakening and then subsequently tries drag for the first time before watching the dude who fucked him dying. i probably should have gotten more out of that, and maybe i did, but that’s in the past now. FUCK i wrote too much. ok.

Riverdale Characters as Tropes (Part I) ⭐️.

Here is a list of the most notable Riverdale characters and their tropes that best describe their character archetypes and personalities. I used tropes from TVTropes.org. Have fun reading!

#1. Archie Andrews (Main Trope: Big Man On Campus AKA BMOC; Secondary Tropes: Chick Magnet, Betty and Veronica, The Ace, Mr. Fanservice, The Hero, Lovable Jock, All-Loving Hero, Action Hero, Nice Guy, All Guys Want Cheerleaders)

Big Man On Campus (BMOC)

Guys want to be him, gals want to be with him. Maybe Even the Guys Want Him. The Big Man on Campus is the most popular guy in the High School. He is handsome, charming, a superb athlete and usually pretty smart and an A student. Unlike his peers Alpha Bitch (who is usually his girlfriend until he realizes how awful she is) and the Jerk Jock (usually his friend until he realizes how awful he is) the Big Man on Campus never bullies anyone: he rules through charisma and general awesomeness rather than fear and manipulation. But like the Lovable Jock (with whom he is often close, if not one and the same), woe to anyone who trifles with him. He'll probably grow up to become The Ace. Sometimes Truth in Television. The Big Man on Campus is very popular in Prep school fiction, as a well-read, handsome, athletic, affable, and articulate man is the epitome of prep. The High School Hustler is occasionally a Big Man, but more often lower on the totem pole. Generally this character is either the protagonist himself, or is the chief love interest in a story about a Cool Loser heroine. He rarely turns up if the story is about male outcasts (as the existence of a benign popular kid makes it harder to use jocks as villains) or about a popular girl (as those sort of stories usually give her an outsider love interest). The Big Man on Campus is Always Male. For a "popular but good hearted" High School female equivalent Spoiled Sweet is the trope of choice. Compare School Idol and Lovable Jock . For settings outside of High School, compare it to Magnetic Hero.

#2. Betty Cooper (Main Trope: Girl Next Door; Secondary Tropes: Tomboy With A Girly Streak, Ambiguous Disorder,  Amateur Sleuth, Beware The Nice Ones, Cute and Psycho, The Smart Girl, Tomboyish Ponytail, Wrench Wench)

Girl Next Door

A Girl Next Door is a character who, it is implied, an "ordinary guy" male protagonist might have known when growing up, and whom he might like without feeling intimidated. She may literally be from the same neighborhood as the hero, or she may just remind him of girls he knew back home. In simpler terms: the feminine equivalent of an "average Joe", in terms of looks and personality. An Average Josephine, if you will. They'll usually embody a "wholesome" sort of femininity, so they're rarely the promiscuous sort, though she might act as a foil to a woman who is. Since the trope is more about her personality, some can be considered knock-outs. In which case, they're likely the local beauty in the neighborhood, or a small town; especially if she's someone like the sassy, hot waitress from the local diner, or the Farmer's Daughter. Among their friends, they're easy to talk to and usually good listeners. But they also tend to be frank about how they see things and expect the same in return. In a Betty and Veronica duo, she's the "Betty". As such, her disposition ranges from even-tempered, to boisterous and, if she's a looker, she usually doesn't flaunt it. That isn't to say, she's incapable of passion; she's just unlikely to be extroverted about it. Girls of this nature will often appear in Harems, usually as the inevitably Unlucky Childhood Friend of the protagonist, or as said above, the "Betty" in a Love Triangle. In non-romantic stories, she'll either be best friends with one of the others, or she may be the Cool Big Sis. The Spear Counterpart, Boy Next Door, is the same, only—you know—male. Often overlaps with One of the Boys. Contrast with Hello, Nurse! and Peerless Love Interest. Also compare The All-American Boy, who might well be her High School Sweetheart.

#3. Veronica Lodge (Main Trope: Tsundere; Secondary Tropes: Lovable Alpha Bitch, Daddys Girl, Girly Girl,  The Beautiful Elite, Spirited Young Lady, Spoiled Sweet, Defrosting Ice Queen, Aloof Dark-Haired Girl, Mafia Princess, Uncle Pennybags, Antagonistic Offspring, The Fashionista, Fallen Princess, The Atoner)

Tsundere

The Japanese term tsundere refers to an outwardly violent character who "runs hot and cold", alternating between two distinct moods: tsuntsun (aloof or irritable) and deredere (lovestruck). The term was originally used to describe characters who began with a harsh outgoing personality, but slowly revealed a soft and vulnerable interior over time, which made this a plot trope as much as it is a character trope. Over the years the character archetype has become flanderized, and is now generically associated with a character who flips between the two emotional states at the slightest provocation, and usually at a specific person rather than a general sociability problem. The former is usually referred as Classic Tsundere and the latter as Modern Tsundere. A tsundere, especially a classic one, is usually a Tomboy with a Girly Streak. Tsunderes are mostly tomboys with hidden girly sides. The tsuntsun can range from the cold "silent treatment" to the hotheaded "kindergartener who pushes you into the sandbox." The reasons behind a Tsundere's behavior vary widely, but usually boil down to the conflict between their feelings of affection towards a love interest, and their reaction to having those feelings. The Tsundere stock characterization is very popular with writers of Romantic Comedy because the conflicts between the two personality facets can be easily utilized to generate both drama and comedy. It also acts as a source of Wish Fulfillment: specifically, the idea that every independent, hardened and just plain jerkish love interest (male or female) has a squishy emotional centre that will embrace you after you crack the outer shell.

Tsundere can be divided into two main categories, depending on their default mood:

Harsh (or Tsun): These Tsundere have tsuntsun as their default mood. It takes someone special to trigger their deredere side. The intensity of the tsuntsun can range from simple grumpy pessimism (Kagami of Lucky Star) to "I must glare and fight my way through life" (Louise of The Familiar of Zero). It's about which part of the tsundere personality is the public face and which the hidden. If the Tsundere is The Rival, she is more likely to be Harsh. Helping a rival out is usually accompanied by a line like "Don't get me wrong, I'm not doing this for you." Harsh types can overlap with a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but usually not. The moods of a Tsundere tend to switch in reaction to the actions of select people or adverse scenarios; the deredere side usually only comes out when someone has acted in a way to trigger it. A Jerk with a Heart of Gold is jerkish in general regardless of whether the other person is mean or nice, and shows their Hidden Heart of Gold only when the situation warrants, regardless of how the other person had been acting. Male characters in particular should be considered for Jerk with a Heart of Gold status, as arguably because of Double Standards, men are generally that instead of tsundere, although the kuudere subtype is more equally split in gender. Oranyan is sometimes used to refer to a male tsundere character—incorrectly since it means the complete opposite.

Sweet (or Dere): These Tsundere have deredere as their default mood. They are sweet, kind and generous, but just happen to have a hidden violent side as well. Don't confuse the sweet tsundere with Bitch in Sheep's Clothing because in this case, they have a temper almost always triggered by someone or something else, usually a Love Interest. Either they have Belligerent Sexual Tension, are an Accidental Pervert, or just have no idea how to handle feelings of love and attraction. In some cases, an Armoured Closet Gay character may act like a Tsundere to mask their feelings for the object of their same-sex affection. May also overlap with Violently Protective Girlfriend if her Love Interest is threatened or in danger. Sweet types should not be confused with a Yandere. If a Sweet Tsundere were really convinced that their Love Interest didn't want them, they would revert back to the deredere side and probably enter an I Want My Beloved to Be Happy phase, while Yanderes are Not Good with Rejection at all and have been known to get downright murderous under such circumstances.

See also the Analysis page for more detailed information on common "strategies" employed by Tsunderecharacters, and other, related topics. This site has an explanation on the appeal of the Tsundere character. A common way of showing that a Tsundere has mellowed or has had her heart won over by the Love Interestis to have her shift from Harsh to Sweet. If her motivations are inquired, she will often engage in a Suspiciously Specific Denial, complete with a Luminescent Blush and total evasion of eye contact (cue the squeaks of Moe). When paired with a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, together they produce Belligerent Sexual Tension. If done poorly, the result is an Unintentionally Unsympathetic Jerk Sue. Compare with Well, Excuse Me, Princess!, Jerkass, and Jerk with a Heart of Gold. Contrast with Sour Outside, Sad Inside, which shares the spiky exterior but has depression and self-doubt rather than kindness hiding underneath. When Flanderized tends to overlap with Mood-Swinger. Also see Don't You Dare Pity Me! and Anger Born of Worry; both of them likely actions with this character type. Aloof Ally may show the same hot-and-cold behavior but for differing reasons. Shana Clone is a specific subtrope with a particular set of characteristics. Because of their low tolerance for stupidity, they are always Enraged by Idiocy. Please do not confuse this trope with a Mood-Swinger, who flips between all the emotional states (not just tsuntsun and deredere) and is more of an inherent mental problem encompassing more than just their romantic life. Also don't confuse with Playing Hard to Get, where a love interest deliberately chooses not to reciprocate her pursuer's interest until she's sure he's hooked. Psychologically, tsundere-like behavior could be an example of "splitting", a maladaptive coping mechanism wherein a person alternately idealizes and undervalues others, including potential romantic partners. This trope is Older Than Dirt, dating back to at least ancient Mesopotamia.

#4. Jughead Jones III (Main Trope: Jerk With A Heart Of Gold; Secondary Tropes: Big Eater, Beware The Quiet Ones, The Cynic, Byronic Hero, Deadpan Snarker, Good Is Not Nice, Good Is Not Soft, Cool Crown Hat, Loners Are Freaks, Wrong Side Of The Tracks, Lower Class Lout, Face Of A Thug)

Jerk With A Heart Of Gold (JWAHOG)

A person you would expect to be a big Jerkass has some redeeming qualities behind their tough demeanor. Occasionally, they'll try to make it a Hidden Heart of Gold. In a romance series, a female character filling this role is usually a Tsundere instead (occasionally she's both). A male version is usually Troubled, but Cute, and his heart of gold should never outweigh his inner jerk because All Girls Want Bad Boys, though it can if Single Woman Seeks Good Man. If his jerkishness threatens to overshadow his good qualities, he's likely to attract a Love Martyr. Sometimes Truth in Television, though you can expect Real Life examples of this to be far more subtle than fictional ones. Often this is Played for Laughs, but not always. They are just as common in drama, suspense, horror and other genres as they are in comedy. One reason for this is that they make an convenient Plot Device. After all, the supposed jerkass turning out to save the family from their real stalker, instead of being said stalker, can be a source of Heartwarming Moments when done right. If he's a manly-man who pursues an unexpectedly delicate hobby, it may be a case of Real Men Wear Pink. Audiences may also sympathize more with the JWAHOG if he's shown to frequently have a good reason to act angry or annoyed. Even the most patient of souls can only endure being the Only Sane Man when they're Surrounded by Idiots for so long, after all. One or two Pet the Dog moments scattered around for character depth does not grant a heart of gold. A true JWAHOG has many Pet the Dog moments. Or maybe those moments are rare, but powerful. Or maybe they skew more toward the "Jerk" part but start making a point of showing the "Heart of Gold" part following a Jerkass Realization. Either way, ultimately they manage to balance out the jerk in them. If it doesn't balance out, they're just a regular jerkass, or worse, a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk. Not to be confused with a certain jerk whose spaceship is named "The Heart of Gold." Even if he is an example. Or a group of people who helped defend the Heart of Gold, even though — again — they include at least two examples. Compare/contrast with Hidden Heart of Gold, Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, Noble Demon, Bruiser with a Soft Center, Hero with an F in Good, Innocently Insensitive, Aww, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other, and Sour Outside, Sad Inside. Sometimes subverted as Jerk with a Heart of Jerk. The Lovable Alpha Bitch is a frequent Distaff Counterpart of the frequently male Jerk with a Heart of Gold. Any Nice Guy have a complete heart of gold while the trope on this page tends to vary between this trope and the former troupe. The Lancer and Loveable Rogue are often, but not always, portrayed in this light. One half of the Belligerent Sexual Tension couple. Also compare Good Is Not Nice. Truth in Television: Most of the jerks you'll meet in your life will have some redeeming qualities to them. Few people are such jerks that they don't care about anyone, and cynical people tend to handle bad situations better, so having one as a friend can be useful when things go downhill.

#5. Cheryl Blossom (Main Trope: Alpha Bitch; Secondary Tropes: Academic Alpha Bitch, Rich Bitch, Spoiled Brat, The Cheerleader, Bratty Teenage Daughter, Clingy Jealous Girl, Lipstick Lesbian, Pet The Dog, Lady In Red)

Alpha Bitch

Take your typical setting involving teenagers—say, a High School—wait an establishing scene or two or three, and there she is. See that attractive blonde cheerleader looking down her nose (often literally) and sneering at the frumpy girl in glasses? That's her. Often times, she is the authority of the cheerleading squad and decides who's on and off the squad. After all, who needs a coach? The villainess of many a Teen Drama, the Alpha Bitch is the Distaff Counterpart to the Jerk Jock, and usually his girlfriend;note what he does with his fists, she does with a sharp tongue and sharper manipulation. She is often surrounded by a fawning Girl Posse who suck up to her and act as her faithful minions. She's very likely to be a Narcissist, a Drama Queen, a fashionista, a Valley Girl, a Bratty Teenage Daughter, a Daddy's Girl, an Attention Whore, and/or a Proud Beauty. She's also usually the scion of a wealthy and influential family, the star of the school or head sister of the influential college sorority house, thus providing her a network of local celebrity, influence and wealth to exploit. She's also quite the seductress, and consequently, all the boys fight amongst themselves—sometimes literally—to be her oppressed boyfriend. And to top it off, she's also very good-looking. All this leaves her with the belief that she can do whatever she likes without consequences. Unfortunately, she's often right; the Powers That Be are not immune to her family's wealth, connections, and influence, and they can and will be corrupted or coerced into overlooking her bad behavior. Her natural enemy is the Cool Loser heroine. Whenever their eternal, jealousy-fueled struggle over possessions, boyfriends, and status is sparked anew, quarter will neither be asked for nor given. Usually the Veronica in a Betty and Veronica situation, if she's even presented as a love interest at all. Frequently on the Snob end of Slobs vs. Snobs. It's a Costume Party, I Swear!, the Prank Date, and the Party Scheduling Gambit are just some of the many nasty tricks she plays. Often receives her comeuppance at the hands of a member of her own Girl Posse in a Backstabbing the Alpha Bitch moment, or when the Cool Loser fights back (sometimes with an Engineered Public Confession). Normally joined by a Beta Bitch who assists her in her various cruel deeds. If given some Character Development, she will become a Defrosting Ice Queen and grow into a Spoiled Sweet, or a Lovable Alpha Bitch. This trope is probably so common because everyone who wasn't homeschooled knew someone like this... or was one. It self-perpetuates because girls who want to be popular will copy what works on TV. They might even become the mask.

Most examples fall into one of two types:

Aggressive: Despite being a not-too-bright, outwardly rude, bullying, mean-spirited excuse for a human, she will somehow still be the most popular girl in school, making her a weird mix of Card-Carrying Villainand Villain with Good Publicity. She may be manipulative from time to time, but the way she acts, it's a wonder people fall for her tricks. Usually, she will have a 0% Approval Rating, but even that won't be enough to stop her. Done poorly, she can break the Willing Suspension of Disbelief, but done well she can be used to show how masochistic teenagers can be, out of a need for acceptance and attraction towards people they perceive as powerful. Unlikely to be a Fille Fatale, she's too outwardly mean for that. But who knows, if All Men Are Perverts, they might overlook her personality in favor of looks. Common in Kid Comsand shows with Black and White Morality because she's a rather unambiguous character. This does not mean she is necessarily a Flat Character. She may in fact be Sour Outside, Sad Inside. Compare The Bully and The Lad-ette.

Passive-Aggressive: A smarter, more adroit version of the first type, she is often adept at putting on a friendly facade, all the better for her to lull the unwary into letting their guard down. Though sometimes Book Dumb out of a lack of interest in academics, she is usually of about average or greater intelligence, because maintaining her status requires some level of cleverness. Her beta is usually a good-naturedDumb Blonde, Brainless Beauty, or Asian Airhead for contrast. Very often a Fille Fatale, or if she's older, a Femme Fatale. Often, even she is just as oblivious to her inner nature as everyone else is, and thinks of herself as much like the way she presents herself to others. A Heel Realization may cause her to change her ways. Or she might be knowingly and unrepentantly evil and just knows how to hide it from others.

If she's not the cheerleader type with the fake smile, but is the (usually) unglamorous girl who will fight to be the best in her class, she's the Academic Alpha Bitch. Though almost always a she, rare male Alpha Bitches (called Alpha Bastards) do exist, but they're just that — rare. They're distinct from the Jerk Jock in that they're mainly catty and manipulative, rather than physically threatening. Not to be confused with the Prison Alpha Bitch, found exclusively in women's jail, whose methods of bullying are much more brutal and whose goal isn't social status but outright dominance. The reason this character type is hated more than other Jerkass characters may have to do with her privelege and looks, see also Jerk Sue. Contrast Unpopular Popular Character.

#6. Kevin Keller (Main Trope: Gay Best Friend; Secondary Tropes: Camp Gay, Adorkable, All Gays Love Theater, All Gays Are Promiscuous, Gay Guy Seeks Popular Jock)

Gay Best Friend

The Gay Best Friend exists mostly to add variety, funny mannerisms and cheap laughs to an otherwise all-straight story and sometimes shows of political correctness. The GBF may talk about sex a lot, but is seldom depicted as having any, because too many viewers would find that disturbing. Either he has no love life to speak of (which never seems to bother him), or it's forever offscreen, only discussed with the heroine over brunch at some pretentious cafe. As modern society grows increasingly comfortable with gay people, fiction is slowly seeing more well-rounded gay supporting characters with onscreen love lives, whose sexuality is incidental to the character. In fiction the most common use of this trope is a male GBF to a straight female protagonist but other permutations are very slowly beginning to appear.

#7. Toni Topaz (Main Trope: Biker Babe; Secondary Tropes: Bi The Way, You Gotta Have Blue Hair, The Ladette, Butch Lesbian, But Not Too Black, Twofer Token Minority, Tank-Top Tomboy, One Of The Boys)

Biker Babe

Women who operate fast vehicles are apparently attractive. Maybe it's the Action Girl in the tight leather. Also includes car drivers and female pilots. Compare and contrast Hood-Ornament Hottie. The two are similar, but a Biker Babe actually rides the bike and often wears outfits which are a little more conducive to road safety. (Although the page image is an exception.) May deliver a "Samus Is a Girl" reveal, if she wears a full helmet and doesn't wear her leathers skintight. Essentially the Distaff Counterpart to Badass Biker, in that she won't be a pushover if things get messy, although she may be less aggressively badass than he is. Will likely induce a Hello, Nurse! effect on nearby males, and maybe some Stupid Sexy Flanders from a nearby female. See also Badass Driver. If you have a team composed entirely of Biker Babes, you get Amazon Brigade.

#8. Josie McCoy (Main Trope: Idol Singer; Secondary Tropes: The Prima Donna, Sassy Black Woman, Quirky Curls, Face Of The Band, Black Best Friend)

Idol Singer

A wildly popular trope in fiction about Japanese Pop Music is the "Idol Singer" — a teenage or early twenty-something (NEVER over 25) female performer, chosen for her cute and attractive image and sunny personality more than for her actual singing ability (though having actual talent underneath is not completely out of the rule). Idol Singers are recruited by multi-level audition processes, manufactured and managed by Japanese media companies, and ruthlessly discarded after a few years of cranking out formulaic hits. Over the past decade there has been a shift towards "mega-groups" that can have over one hundred members, with the lead spots on songs and choreography going to the most popular performers. Sometimes, Idol singers don't actually sing (like Milli Vanilli). Most are tightly controlled by their producers and expected to maintain a public image of purity and innocence: for example, their contracts may include an article of her not being allowed to engage in anyintimate activities. While this level of control has loosened somewhat with the growing impact of social media, which allows idols to interact with fans more casually, as well as a Japanese court decision that effectively rendered the "No Dating" clauses of Idol contracts unenforceable (it's still very in-force in Korea, however), the industry has been slow to overturn its most problematic and exploitative elements. Naturally, every Japanese schoolgirl dreams of becoming one. Those who used to be one are often Broken Birds. Thanks to the Disney Channel, American Idol, and The X Factor, this trope is also prevalent in the West, where it often overlaps with the Teen Idol. If she's a villain in a Superhero or Magic Idol Singer show, she's an Evil Diva.

Look for Part II!

pt. 8, into the lion’s den pt. 1 (felix && naji)

and i oop-

ah yes, i did promise that mierrio would make an appearance someday >:)

i also love felix. fandom, please write more felix fanfictions.

written: 8.5.19. word count: 2,461

════ ⋆★⋆ ════ character song: holding out for a hero, bonnie tyler

character file: jedi master naji iresso, barsen'thor

-

naji doesn’t like admitting a lot of things. she doesn’t like admitting she’s a prodigy, or that lifting a few crates could be as easy as breathing. she definitely doesn’t like admitting her artistic talents, or anything not related to the force. it seems like bragging, being arrogant even. the tight-lipped barsen'thor hasn’t mentioned it to anyone on her present crew, and would like to keep it that way.

which is why when she thinks she has the cockpit to herself, sometimes she finds herself singing quietly in basic while in the captain’s chair, and then circling through her small knowledge of other languages as she sings through the verses. she brushes through her hair (which has grown quite long after three years of not taking as good care of it as she should), singing as she likes, the stars twinkling back at her.

she’s about to begin braiding, which she saves for her very small portion of mandalorian she knows (mako, one of qyzen’s contacts bonded with her over their shared lack of knowledge of the elusive language, and they’ve been learning together with a certain torian cadera since), when two warm hands find themselves over her eyes.

when this first started happening, it ended in the medbay as she apologized time after time for throwing her lightsaber hilt in fear and nearly knocking him out. but, naji knows from the bare, dark hands that it’s just her husband. most likely with another surprise, but it’s her felix. she smiles as her lover reveals himself.

“naj? you busy?” he asks as she jokingly peels one hand off her face. “wanted to talk to you.”

“go ahead, felix.” she giggles, turning to meet his eyes. he’s got that twinkle, that look that says he’s got something for her. it’s a real pity, she has so many beautiful gifts from him, and she has yet to be able to find one that makes her empty her account. naji had recently found a new assault rifle that she was sure felix would love, but had yet to actually purchase it from the catalog due to shipping expenses. she begins braiding again, fingers dancing through her hair as he sits down in a chair opposite to her. “is something wrong?”

“far from it. you didn’t tell me you could sing like that.” her cheeks heat as she remembers what she had been doing before he’d arrived. “it’s…beautiful.”

“thank you.” she says, smiling. “i don’t particularly like telling others about it.”

“why not?” he asks. “not that you have to tell me, i’m just curious.”

“it’s a long story. one i’d…rather not tell, if that’s okay.” she says, her mood dropping. he picks up on it.

“well, we’ve been pretty busy for the last couple of years.”

“okay?” she’s mildly suspcious, but he’s right. as not only the barsen'thor, but also a jedi in general, she’s been fighting on the frontlines for the rift alliance and the republic. she’s had her run-ins with the sith and imperials, but now that felix brought it up, she doesn’t remember the last time they’ve had real r&r. given, both work tirelessly and other than tharan complaining about the lack of supplies, it’s never been a real problem. they’re very overdue for a vacation, by felix’s military standards.

she frowns as she realizes that they’ve never had a real honeymoon. whatever that is. she’ll be the first to admit that as a teenage jedi, she missed out on a lot of life and traditions. “what’re you planning?”

“well,” he pulls out a box from one of his lounge clothing pockets as she ties off the braid, it hangs down her back as she turns her attention back to him. “you did say ‘i do’, just not with anything..y'know, special. thought i’d celebrate three years with something nice.”

“felix, please.” she tries not to seem exasperated as she sits a bit straighter up, facing her husband’s smiling face. “i don’t need anything else from you.”

“sorry?” he half-heartedly shrugs, as she playfully rolls her eyes. they’ve gotten each other little trinkets here and there, and she loves the ones that she does receive. felix, on the other hand, goes out of his way to get the most special things for her when he’s gone for a long period of time, and it seems this is no different. he hands her the box, and right off the bat she knows it some sort of jewelry. it’s light, and doesn’t inherently make a sound when she shakes it. looking back at him once more, she quickly looks away before she loses her will to not rip into it like a child. opening it carefully with little more than her index finger, she gasps in surprise. a ring lays in between two pieces of cotton, a gold band with two crystals laid into it, one orange and one green. “took me a while to find it, it doesn’t have a match anywhere in the galaxy.”

naji hopes she doesn’t look like she’s about to cry, because that’s exactly how she feels. “i-i love it..i’m sorry, i don’t have anything for you.”

“hey, hey. don’t cry.” he says smiling, as he softly pulls the box out of her grasp, taking the ring out and closing it. “here, let me see your hand.”

trembling, she holds it out for his dark hand to take her pale counterpart. he slips the band onto her ring finger, as it sits there twinkling back at her in the dark. it’s a gorgeous shade of gold, tangerine and a beautiful verdant green. even as soon as it’s done, tears are rolling down her cheeks as she pulls felix into a tight hug. “i’ll say yes as many times as you want, felix.”

he hugs her back just as tightly, “glad to hear it, naj.”

and that’s that. however, naji isn’t actually able to get back to work for the rest of the day, not that she was working to begin with. she keeps watching the ring as if it’s going to fly off her finger in a freak accident, and nearly has a heart to heart with herself about whether to take it off before getting in the 'fresher or not. she does, once logic comes into play, but slips it right back on afterwards.

she found a gold band for him the week following. she adores the way it glints off the dim lights of their room as they lazily hold hands, falling asleep in each others’ embraces.

-

“incoming transmission. playing it now.” zenith says once they’ve gathered near the holoterminal.

“who’s it from? i wasn’t expecting any calls.” naji says, felix’s arm wound around her waist as she leans into him. nadia gives her a devilish grin before turning back to the terminal as naji silently reminds herself that she’s only a padawan and that’s no reason to tell her off.

“unknown code, can’t say i’m sure where’s it from, but it’s not from our star system.” zenith responds. felix loosens his grasp on her reflexively (they got caught by one of her masters, thank the stars it had only been master satele calling and not the whole council) as she nods to her twi'lek companion.

“hello? don’t know whether this thing connected or not. never been good with holos.” a male zabrak appears on the other side of the screen, hood down and his eyes refocus from the datapad in his hand to her. clearly, a jedi considering the lightsaber hanging from his hip. “barsen'thor.”

“master delux.” she bows accordingly after recognizing him, (he’s rather popular among the younger generation of female padawans that haven’t grasped the 'no passion’ rule just yet), giving a small smile to the holo’s camera. “it’s good to see you.”

“i could say the same.” he responds, tapping at his pad before glancing around, realizing he had an audience. he clears his throat before continuing, “however, this isn’t a social call.”

“i understand.” she answers. “how can i assist you?”

“it’s an issue on alderaan we haven’t be able to resolve just yet. whenever you can come down to house organa, preferably in the next couple of days, i’ll meet you there.” he puts the datapad down and instead crosses his arms behind his back, like most jedi rest their hands. “it is urgent, so i suggest you set a course within the day. do not come ill-prepared, there is a major chance that we may encounter imperial resistance.”

“of course, master.” the holo flicks off, and she considers his offer. “i figure we’re going to alderaan. pack your thermal clothes.”

“back to alderaan. jedi, are you not aware of how cold it is there?” tharan asks sarcastically. “i think i’ll stay on the ship this time around.”

“keep talking like that, she’ll drag you out to hoth next time we’re planetside.” felix chuckles as she shrugs once tharan looks at her accusingly. the scientist was one thing, absolutely brilliant, but also completely unable to handle the cold. naji iresso would never do such a thing as to bring the man down into the frigid weather, but she likes to entertain the idea.“i’ll set a course for alderaan then.”

“thank you, felix. nadia, qyzen, i’d like you both to come planetside with me.” she catches felix’s soft frown before he kisses her forehead and disappears, though they both know why she doesn’t take him on more jedi-related missions (speaking to the council or not, naji was still leery about letting other jedi know about their less than platonic relationship) plus, it would be good to get the trandoshan hunter and her padawan off the ship. nadia was progressively becoming stronger in the force, and soon the defender would be too small for lessons. heading for her own private quarters, she’s proud of the white haired girl. she’s come far from relying on her emotions, but she may as well instill some sort of test while they’re docked here.

it won’t be long until they dock in the organa spaceport, as they’d recently left a few days ago, so she takes this time to meditate. naji doesn’t know master delux personally, only that many see him as the 'hero of tython’ and respect him as such. he’s one of her heroes, and would be for a long time. she’d been through the temple only a few years after him, and to now have him calling on her holoterminal, asking for her help?

she grinned at the thought. felix made her feel one kind of special, but being called upon by the jedi made her feel another.

changing out of her lighter robe, she ties her hair into a loose topknot as she lies back on the bed in her underclothes. not hugely scandalous, but a pair of loose leggings and a tighter white shirt that was thermal to keep her warm. naji wasn’t lazy, never was and never would be, but she learned something new everyday from her crew. all of them had (in their own ways) helped her relax and not care as much about what other’s thought. naps were common for the female jedi because of this.

her datapad dings with a notification. picking it up in her hands, she scans over the message sent by master delux. she cringes as she reads over the contents. it mentions that she’d be disgusising herself as a sith.

a sith of all things!

the mission is straightforward enough. the republic has an agenda against the sith, and the jedi particularily have it out for a sith lord by the name of darth nox, a dark council member. her face appears on the datapad, confidently smiling into the lens of the holocamera. the darkness has clearly corrupted her, the area around her eyes dark and her skin pale. there have been supposedly a laundry list of crimes against her, imperial and republic given, and reading through them, she shivers.

corrupting a padawan?

murdering a jedi?

and those are just against the order…

and she was going to have to be in kahoots with more like her at this…gathering. it’s described loosely as a gathering and later explained to be more of an alliance agreement for thul and some other minor houses. she, master delux and his newest padawan, a certain una…vee, would be the only jedi attending, though organa forces would back them up in case something went horribly wrong.

to be surrounded by that much darkness, it terrifies naji. being able to feel the coolness of their presences rather than the radiance of a jedi’s, it’s something new entirely. something she’s only felt once before.

something she’d rather never feel again if she can help it.

but, as she continues on down the letter, it reiterates itself. she was chosen for her level head and force sensitivity. she was chosen because as the warden of the order, she had a duty not only to protect the jedi, but defend them as well. her orders weren’t to kill darth nox, but to learn about her. where she docked, where she was going next, her plans for the immediate future. anything to help bring her into custody was of importance to the jedi.

the letter finishes by warning her of not only the fallen padawan’s presence (warned not to engage unless necessary. she has apparently been less than open to speaking with the jedi), but also a possible monster (only blurry photos of the thing have been collected, and no one has exactly come back with a clear recollection just yet), kaleesh (not expected to show, but has been said to be seen traveling with the inquisitor), and a gunslinging human male. (reportedly romantically involved with the inquisitor, and highly dangerous. also, warned not to engage unless-oh, nope. just don’t engage at all.)

and oh stars, it’s a formal event. there’s a hurriedly typed note (it’s misspelt in several areas that naji craves to fix) at the bottom that mentions formal jedi robes are not recommended. darker clothing is suggested, and a holo of a suggestable dress is included. and a p.p.s, an escort is required.

she would have qyzen escort her, but no sith is stupid enough to assume she’s romantically involved with a trandoshan. and tharan, while a wonderful healer, isn’t worth too much in a fight.

naji and felix would be wandering into the lion’s den. a gathering of scandalously dressed sith, and three jedi would be in the middle of it all. lords shevell (una..vee?? havel..zee?? naji was usually well-versed in figuring out names, but this confused her.), o'vare (herself) and x'ire (master delux), would be attending in their place.

stars above, today was not her day.

The Best Song From Every Rush Album

Rush drummer Neil Peart (pictured above) passed away last Tuesday, January 7, 2020 (aged 67). He was also the main lyricist for the band. Some time ago I read an article by Ryan Reed posted on the Ultimate Classic Rock website taking a look at the best Rush songs from every album. The full text is available at https://ultimateclassicrock.com/best-rush-songs/

I have put together these songs in a Spotify playlist (link below) as I believe that this is a true representation of some of the highlights through time of this amazing band.

Spotify Playlist - The Best Song from every Rush Album

'Rush' (1974): "Working Man"

Without this head-banging fuzz-rock anthem, Rush's debut LP would be an afterthought – a demo-worthy stepping stone to their prog destiny. But "Working Man," with its Black Sabbath-styled riffs and blue-collar lyrics, is a stone-cold classic. After a primal, two-minute pummel, they tease an ambitious streak with wild guitar solos, triplet drum fills and tempo changes, climaxing with Alex Lifeson's grandiose fanfare of string bends. Rush had only one flash of brilliance, but they harnessed its power to forge their hard-prog path.

'Fly By Night' (1975): "Fly by Night"

Bristling with energy at a compact 3:19, "Fly by Night" packs more unbridled second-by-second fun than any other song in the Rush canon. Lifeson's crunching, descending guitar riff is instant joy – the sound of, well, flying by night and changing your life – and the rhythm section's torrent of proggy fills (Geddy Lee's chorus triplets, Neil Peart's splash accents) achieve a perpetual, cinematic tension, as you wonder when and how the next surprise will emerge. (Even the bridge is built on a quality hook, with Lee singing merrily through a trippy wave of phaser – an effect achieved by running his vocal through a Leslie speaker.)

'Caress of Steel' (1975): "Bastille Day"

This song is the sound of the titular battle, the hard-rock guillotine claiming her bloody prize. Surprises aplenty: the downbeat shift at 3:55, the climactic tempo slow-down and slow-mo guitar harmonies. Lee's voice is still high and shockingly shrill, but by this point he'd learned to utilize more restraint, picking and choosing moments to shatter glass with his high trills.

'2112' (1976): "A Passage to Bangkok"

2112 is a tale of two sides: Rush saved their silliest, most long-winded ideas for the title epic and turned the second half into a catch-all hodgepodge. "A Passage to Bangkok" is one of the sharpest vocal melodies the band wrote pre-1980, and it's a load of fun as a lyric – Peart's lighthearted (lightheaded?) fable about traveling via train to Thailand in search of the world's finest reefer at each stop.

'A Farewell to Kings' (1977): "A Farewell to Kings"

The intro to A Farewell to Kings' anthemic title track signals the changes afoot: Synth and glockenspiel flutter over Alex Lifeson's gorgeously plucked, stereo-panned classical guitar, ushering in a trademark thunderous hard-rock riff. There are surprises around every turn: funky bass-led sections, rhythmic shifts, 7/8 time. Their future was limitless.

'Hemispheres' (1978): "La Villa Strangiato"

Rush subtitled this instrumental powerhouse "An Exercise in Self-Indulgence" – ironic since, by their geeky standards, it never offers a moment to yawn or check your watch. This one's full of subtle, deeply emotive playing: the rhythmic shift at 3:33, with Peart settling into a funky hi-hat pattern; Lifeson's palm-muted guitar figure; a swinging, jazzy section ("Monsters!"), mind-melting bass and solos ("The Ghost of the Aragon"). Perfection.

'Permanent Waves' (1980): "The Spirit of Radio"

There's almost a punk edge to this breakout hit, which helped Permanent Waves peak at Mo. 3 in Canada and the U.K. and No. 4 in the U.S. Another track where Geddy Lee wrote himself a quality melody that stands separate from the riff. The reggae breakdown and climactic piano stomp gave this one a commercial appeal no one could have predicted five years earlier. Peart's lyrics are about listening to Toronto radio station CFNY-FM.

'Moving Pictures' (1981): "Tom Sawyer"

"Tom Sawyer" is the ultimate Rush song in several ways. It's their most famous piece, occupying a prime piece of classic-rock radio real estate for almost four decades. It's their cleanest, most seamless fusion of prog and hard rock, boasting some of their tightest ensemble playing and a guitar riff catchier than "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Like the entirety of 1981's Moving Pictures, it's also a fascinating crossroads between '70s and '80s Rush, arriving a few years after the knotty conceptual sprawl of Hemispheres and a few years before Lee became obsessed with synthesizers. The piece originated from one of numerous jam sessions during a particularly frigid winter rehearsal at a Toronto farm; Peart, meanwhile, developed his lyrics of rebellion from a poem he received from lyricist Pye Dubois based on Mark Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The result is the Rush masterpiece – a compact, four-and-a-half-minute summation of everything they represented.

'Signals' (1982): "Subdivisions"

Rush had given themselves over to synth worship, but it hadn't affected the quality of their music. "Subdivisions" is menacing prog-pop with rumbling, pitch-shifted vocals and some of the tastiest analog synth leads this side of a Stevie Wonder album. Peart contributes one of his jazziest, most complex grooves in the 7/8 section, which only makes the pattern more satisfying when he "resolves" the implied tension in 4/4. Still, Lifeson has bemoaned both the song's and album's production in the years since, specifically calling the mix for "Subdivisions" a "disappointment for me."

'Grace Under Pressure' (1984): "Kid Gloves"

Alex Lifeson wiggles to the forefront on "Kid Gloves," flipping the bird to Lee's synthesizers all the way. The guitarist's delayed, palm-muted 10/8 riff – which conjures Genesis' "Follow You Follow Me" with a proggier sensibility – is the highlight of Grace Under Pressure, offering some grit to an album that often gets lost in reverb. He sounds like he's exploding with pent-up anticipation on the guitar solo, which flaunts an Eddie Van Halen-like tremolo bar flair.

'Power Windows' (1985): "The Big Money"

Lee is one of a handful of prog musicians with the chops – and willingness – to get funky. And on this dynamo single, he smacks the crap out of his bass strings like they owe him a gambling debt. But "The Big Money" is more than just a killer groove – it's also easily one of Rush's most deceptively intricate radio hits, bouncing giddily from atmospheric synths to tribal tom-toms to arena-rock choruses. The band's early '80s sonic exploration – the brushes with reggae and ska and synth-pop – had coalesced into a color all their own.

'Hold Your Fire' (1987): "Time Stand Still"

Singer-songwriter Aimee Mann's breathy vocal adds a soothing femininity to this Top 3 hit, marking the band's first collaboration with a guest singer. "When we wrote that song, I just became obsessed with having a female vocalist come in and add a different nuance to it," Lee told A.V. Club in 2015. "We talked about a lot of different vocalists. At that time, I was a big fan of Kate Bush, and I’ve always been a big Björk fan. Somebody suggested Aimee Mann, and we listened to her work. Her voice is absolutely beautiful and really possessed a lot of the qualities that we were after, and she was thrilled to come up to Toronto and lend her talents to our song, which I think really elevated the track. She’s such an awesome person and we had a ball with her."

'Presto' (1989): "The Pass"

"All of us get lost in the darkness / Dreamers learn to steer by the stars," Lee croons on this cosmic power ballad, the single most emotional moment in the Rush catalog. It's a perfect symbiosis of music and lyric, as Lifeson's rippling guitar solidifies the poignancy in Peart's poetry about teenage suicide.

'Roll the Bones' (1991): "Bravado"

Rush go into power-ballad mode here, with Alex Lifeson's huge, ringing chords wafting over Neil Peart's jazzy drums.

'Counterparts' (1993): "Between Sun and Moon"

Counterparts marked a return to Rush relevancy – the point where songwriting caught back up to technique. Everyone's on fire here: Lee crafts one of his sharpest chorus hooks, and Neil Peart pounds out a funky tom pattern on his all-acoustic kit. (You couldn't blame the guy for experimenting with electronic drums, but a player this precise doesn't need any excuse to sound more like a machine.)

'Test for Echo' (1996): "Test for Echo"

"Test for Echo was a strange record in a sense," Lee reflected in the 2012 Rush book An Oral History, Uncensored. "It doesn’t really have a defined direction. I kind of felt like we were a bit burnt creatively. It was a creative low time for us." One rare exception to that rule is the instantly hummable title-track – a radiant blast of modernized alt-prog.

'Vapor Trails' (2002): "Vapor Trail"

Rush get full-on atmospheric with Vapor Trails' pseudo title track, another flirtation with radio-friendly alt-rock. Lifeson washes his hands of distortion, and Peart bashes a snare with a ringing, marching-band style tone.

'Snakes & Arrows' (2007): "Far Cry"

"One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel, and the next it's rolling over me," Geddy Lee belts, preaching a universal truth. It's one of Lee's strongest choruses of the modern era.

'Clockwork Angels' (2012): "The Garden"

A rare Rush song that will leave you reaching for the Kleenex, "The Garden" stands out in the band's catalog for its sweetness and simplicity, its clarity and control. It's an unusual arrangement for these guys, with Lee crooning softly over a David Campbell string arrangement, Jason Sniderman's twinkling piano and Lifeson's restrained acoustic guitar. And its decollate quality initially concerned producer Nick Raskulinecz. "Nick was a little wary of it getting too sweet," Lifeson told MusicRadar. "The demo was very acoustic. The piano parts were there, as were the strings, but everything was kind of soft. Nick wanted us to toughen it up some." Luckily, they didn't do much toughening. If this is how the Rush story ends – and by all indications it will be – this was a poignant curtain call.

Got a question for you on the Lotor end given your view of his possible personality. So we know that in the first series, third dimension and force that he had this obsession with Allura. Do you think this will continue in this series, or do you think it will be down played significantly, and what sort of view point will he have on girl Pidge once he finds out, because that will inevitably come out at some point to him? Thanks for answering.

Honestly this is… partially “I think this is probable” and much more “I hope the case” but my speculative read on Lotor at this point is… I think he is going to be focused on Allura, and Allura specifically, but for reasons entirely unrelated to “heyy pretty girl” and I don’t think Pidge being a girl wouldn’t significantly change his perception of her.

I feel like if Lotor is going to be a flirt, it’s going to be… kind of how Lance is, where you get the feeling that he mostly just wants to feel validated and prop up his own insecurity and doesn’t really actively pursue or try to snare the attention of other people around him. Mostly because, considering Lotor’s position in the incredibly dominant Galra empire, I feel like any particular attitude of entitlement from Lotor would be an extremely uncomfortable attitude to see in a long-term antagonist. Even if Allura is not remotely beholden to his garbage, it would leave all kinds of nasty implications on various people who haven’t been able to refuse him, or, bit their tongue and offered themselves to him in the hope that it would protect them/people they cared about.

It’s just. really, really uncomfortable. And not in a way that sets up a meaningful antagonist. Especially because in DotU my understanding of Lotor’s attraction to Allura is a sort of “90s cartoon villain wants to date/kidnap/marry the Hero’s Girlfriend because of course”. He was set up as a nefarious rival to the heroic, straight-laced Keith and so of course he -nefariously- wanted Keith’s love interest.

It’s not what I would call an interesting or compelling thing. And basically it would be, I think, a flagrant reduction of Allura’s character how VLD has set her up if she goes from being opposed by villains who see her as both a potent figure for the enemy to rally around, as the leader of Team Voltron and pilot of the castle ship, and a dangerous threat in and of herself- to someone who simply lusts after her because she’s beautiful.

Allura is beautiful, but there’s ways to emphasize that narratively without throwing in a creepy villain.

Not to mention, I think that you would have to play a pretty arbitrary narrative dance to try and explain, if Lotor’s only focused on trying to woo Allura while attempting to fight her team, how he does not immediately just get decked by Allura- who, again, is every bit the dangerous and powerful fighter that the rest of her team is. The times we’ve seen Allura laid low by an opponent is when she’s facing odds that would’ve taken out any other member of the team as well.

Making Lotor powerful enough to not take Allura seriously isn’t just patronizing, it sends a really bad message considering Lotor’s going to have to lose against the characters somehow. It’s especially bad because at least from what I’ve seen, a lot of the DotU fandom kind of makes a joke that Lotor is a dork and we have scenes in the show that are tailored to support that read. 

I mean… a lot of people say and do a lot of things in DotU that make it very hard to take them seriously, like that time the entire voltron force stopped their precarious escape to argue about whether or not they should appreciate vultures more (I am completely serious) and a lot of it is just. that show has not aged well, but that’s pretty clearly, Lotor is supposed to come across as kind of endearing in a Team Rocket kind of way. His ostensible ally just stopping and taking some time to call him out as someone who wears shoulder pads to pretend he is buff.

Getting back on topic here: There’s basically no way to try to romance Allura and fight the rest of her team because Allura is an integral part of that team and if Lotor tried to amicably close with her without a pretty good excuse as to why she should hear him out, they would not be having an amiable chat. “Kidnap the Princess” isn’t just a trope that’s aged badly in general, but it just plain doesn’t work here.

I also would find it suspicious for Lotor to underestimate female opponents. I could be wrong about my assumption that Haggar is likely Lotor’s mother, but it remains to be stated that one of the strongest people in the Galra empire and someone who rather effortlessly has Zarkon’s ear in most situations, not to mention a sorcerer of truly terrifying power- someone who Lotor is clearly connected to somehow as she can simply order someone to send for him with the certainty that Lotor will come- is a woman herself.

That said- I do think Lotor has an angle to be fascinated by Allura and trying, ineffectively, to get a chance to talk to her. But I think this could well be divorced entirely from the one-sided romance concept.

VLD pulls a surprising number of things from GoLion, including the name of Takeshi Shirogane, the Galra, and Altea. In GoLion, Lotor’s counterpart, Sincline- is half-Altean, half Galra, and his fixation on Allura is partially because Allura resembles his mother. Now, GoLion takes that in an incredibly creepy direction, but, pulling back from that a bit-

As I’ve mentioned, I think Haggar is the most likely candidate we’ve seen so far to be Lotor’s mother. Which would, considering Haggar’s species, make Lotor half-Altean, just like Sincline.

Allura is a beautiful woman, yes- but also in VLD, she’s one of the only living Alteans, and the only known female Altean besides Haggar. And both Haggar and Allura in this continuity have long white hair- a trait traditionally that Lotor has.

My tentative read/hope, honestly for Lotor is that he is focused on Allura, but not because he wants The Hero’s Girlfriend. Some of that might come across, but I think largely because Lotor is going to be a deeply insecure person- in DotU he’s considered strange looking or even repulsive by Zarkon and it makes sense he is going to look unusual by Galra standards if he’s only half-Galra; and he’s also a basically redundant heir to someone who has lived for ten thousand years and has no intention of dying or abdicating the throne.

So Lotor probably wants validation. I wouldn’t put it past him to be interested in trying to get the attention of people he sees as pretty or desirable- a lot like how Lance flirts in VLD.

I think for the most part, Lotor’s interest in Allura is going to be, sort of like an antagonistic shadow of Keith trying to puzzle out his history and the muddled past that led to him being on Earth, with the Marmora sword- Lotor might be trying to work the opposite way.

We don’t know where in Zarkon’s thousands of years of life he’s come into existence- but it’s pretty likely he didn’t know Altea. In which case, it could well be that the other half of Lotor’s heritage shows, obviously- but he’s also able to do enough to blend in that it’s not something that majorly affects his relationship with others as much as the conscious effort to look “proper” and the knowledge that it isn’t really how he looks would be a private, but major conflict with his self-image.

Neither Zarkon nor Haggar are going to want to be resources for their hypothetical wayward son in this case. Neither of them like Altea or talking about it at all- in fact, I think it’s notable that while it’s Zarkon in s1e1 that talks about wiping out the last of the Alteans, while Haggar simply doesn’t comment- it’s Haggar in s2e5 that tries to make good on it by suggesting they focus on the castle while Allura is trapped, rather than free the castle to chase the Black Lion. That Haggar seemingly obstinately spends all time she possibly can in galran form does not suggest she has a great relationship with her homeland- something has deeply embittered her to the concept of Altea.

So if Lotor has never been given any means to understand himself beyond he’s a really weird-looking Galra with a strange ability that just further brands him as weird- and then he suddenly sees someone who might have those same under-eye markings or other traits he recognizes immediately in himself- he’s going to want to chase that- without revealing why. If he is the Weblum Galra, this would also tell us why, in-universe, he’d go for that stoic, helmeted persona- because Lotor is used to, and practiced at, trying not to be recognized under any circumstances. 

And, like any good antagonist, this could be used to pry loose more development from Keith because if I’m right that the Weblum Galra is Lotor- he now has a lot of ammunition and a good angle to start projecting that image problem on Keith something awful, because thanks to things Hunk and Keith discussed within the Weblum Galra’s earshot, it’s pretty clear Keith has both some amount of Galra lineage and a very testy relationship with the whole idea. And there’s clearly some layer to Keith’s appearance that we haven’t seen yet outside of s1e10- there was a reason they specifically had Keith get that burn, and realize it was there, but for it to disappear before anyone else sees it.

So Lotor could very well be the catalyst to that, because he’s hardly going to be focused on the Black Lion and Shiro the way Zarkon was- he doesn’t really have a personal relationship with Voltron, which means as an antagonist, he’s going to be trying to flex a completely different agenda, and focusing on different characters as a result.

Mamihlapinatapei - The look between two people in which each loves the other but is too afraid to make the first move. (I see this being an accurate depiction of Paps and Pappy lol)

Request By @mischief-rei​

Summary: Every day, Every time he dropped by to visit his little friend in Underfell it happened. That look. It always came out of nowhere, just for a moment, a small moment when there sockets met, and like it appeared it would vanish.

It was obvious Papyrus didn’t at all favor Underfell, He made that very clear, and by no means ever tried to hide it. Now what happened to lead him to such a dislike of them was never mentioned. “Bit of a disagreement.’ he’d say, then shut off any attempts to pry much more out of him. Yet he always came back to this one specific Underfell,  one that stood out, Not just because of the small girl who belonged to it, but also because of the skeletons what lived there. What started as a one time visit soon became a pass time, If he wasn’t sleeping at home He was there.  He never traveled much until then but now he found himself stopping by this timeline at least twice a week. He enjoyed his stays, He knew when to go Never really over stayed his welcome. 

Lately they were shorter, He didn’t stay long and only dropped by once maybe twice ever few weeks and that was on a good day. instead he’d lay in his room, or work in his lab to pass the time, he still remembered  the first time it happened, the first time he felt that strange sensation. 

The picture was beautiful, another painting made by his more ‘edgy’ counterpart. The two were like night and day standing side by side, One dressed in black and vibrant red,  while he on the other hand worse that same old orange hood, Sure its oversized and fell pretty low on him but he loved it all the same. Only thing that ever changed where his pants, and even then it was the same thick cargo pants just in different color’s. “Heh, gotta say it’s nice.” He said, breaking the silence between the two, before them aligned with the many other paintings was a beautiful work of art. A rose, One single rose in an empty, dyeing field. Dry and deserted, Neglected by time and yet, there it stood, A bright red rose. This piece spoke to him, it really did. In more ways than one he could relate to this picture.  He must have looked distressed because the moment he turned his gaze to the alternate he caught Pap watching him, but when he turned back he could see that same uncomfortable look.

Socializing wasn’t Pap’s best skill and Papyrus knew that, So to spare his copy the trouble of attempting to ‘comfort’ him he flashed that lazy grin of his while tugging out one of his cigarettes from the orange hood’s pockets. just managing to catch an irritated glare aimed right at him. Ah yes he nearly forgot, Pap was Just as bad as Sans at home when it came to nagging him about his health. “ Why do you insist on indulging on such harmful habits if you know very well they are harmful to your health?” He was very clearly not amused by Papyrus’s careless treatment of his own health, Even more so when he just brushed off the statement. 

“What can I say? The lady’s like a guy who’s smoke’n.” and such a lovely pun went unnoticed. ”Maybe so but if you ever wish to reach the high standards of someone such as I they need assurance you wont fall in to a pile of dust.” Was he mocking him? All in good fun but still. “Oh so you're a girl now eh?” he asked shifting from one foot to the other, nearly knocking out some of the content in his pockets in the process. He really had to clean this thing out. 

The look he got was priceless, Startled, and annoyed maybe even a little insulted “Of corse not!” Times like this Papyrus wished he had a camera, no telling when he’d get to see a look like that again, All huffy with his arms crossed glaring at anything in his line of sight, which was unfortunately his swap counterpart. “What even makes you assumed only the female gender would find that attractive?” Shrugging Papyrus raised a brow toward Pap a smirk of amusement slashing over his skull in the process “Just seam’s that way, What you say’n this ‘Disgustingly despicable habit’ of mine is attractive to ya?” “Obviously NOT, In fact you would be so much more desirable if you lacked that retched stench radiating off you.” And there it was Pap was obviously proud of himself for that little jab, The way he stood tall said it all both looking at one another waiting for the nest to make a move and it happened, that feeling.

 Thinking back to it now Papyrus couldn’t say he’d felt it before, how long had they stood there staring at one another long after it was obvious neither was willing to tease the other, and that same thing kept happening, Every time Papyrus dropped by the two would pause in the middle of a conversation, a playful banter, or even the occasional argument and stare, Stare like there was something unspoken  between them. He understood what was happening, he caught on faster than he expected and what did he do? He ran and distanced him self from the ‘situation’ He never was good with relationships.