#i tried to talk about this in the vaguest way possible in the actual post but im gonna get into more spoilery details in the tags | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smallblueandloud · 5 years

Text

on that bumpy road to love

summary: “And- you are?”

“I’m Eleanor,” she says, and holds her hand out. “I’m the Architect here.” The capital letter is obvious. “Welcome to the Good Place, Chidi.”

(or, five times someone in chidi's afterlife was a really big weirdo and he didn't know what to do about it)

relationships: chidi/eleanor, chidi & everyone in team cockroach (although he doesn’t know what that is, lol)

notes: the song to listen to is 'they can't take that away from me' (the sarah vaughan version), which i like to think was comforting to eleanor during the course of this fic. behind the scenes, obviously.

oh, man, this one took me a long time. i've had the idea for this fic since the season ended, and google drive says i created the doc in FEBRUARY, so uh, take from that what you will lol. i just really love the idea of outsider pov, and outsider pov + amnesia = the best tropes in existence.

check out the notes for the ao3 link! (which will include the italics as i wrote them instead of how i had to redo them for this post. i promise you, i’ll have missed some.) and feel free to like/reblog/leave the vaguest impression of happiness, like the faint notes of a flower’s fragrance on a summer’s breeze, on this post - i’m not picky. thanks for reading <3

1. Janet

Chidi opens his eyes.

He’s sitting on a couch, in a small, beige room. There are three notable things about where he is: a lot of potted plants, a door to his right, and big, friendly, green letters on the wall in front of him that read Everything is fine.

Yeah, right, he thinks, bracing himself for the usual anxiety spiral. The last thing he remembers, he was going to his friend’s wedding, and the fact that he’s here and not there means-

Nothing. It means nothing. It doesn’t matter that he’s at his friend’s wedding, because he’s here, and everything is fine.

Scratch that. There’s a fourth notable thing: the anxiety that has plagued Chidi his entire life is gone. There’s nothing - no butterflies in his stomach, no sweaty palms, not even an anxious rant directed at the plants. He doesn’t even have anxiety about his lack of anxiety.

He doesn’t know where he is. And he’s not panicking. He has to take advantage of this, immediately.

He’s sitting there, trying to memorize how it feels to just be without freaking out, when the door to his right opens. A blonde woman pokes her head out and looks straight at him.

(He doesn’t even feel the need to apologize for his presence. What’s wrong with him?)

“Chidi?” she asks, smiling. Chidi nods. She jerks her thumb behind her. “Come on in.”

As he follows her, he notices several things: a portrait of a white man who looks like a stoner on the wall, a bowl of paper clips in the corner, and the sheer normalcy of the blonde woman now sitting at the other side of the desk, which seems very out of place in this strange, anxiety-less set of rooms. What is going on?

He sits down in the only other chair (thank god for small mercies - no choices needed). Then he adjusts his position. Then he does it again.

“You okay there, buddy?” asks the woman, looking like she’s trying not to smile. Chidi laughs, sort of nervously, and realizes that the anxiety is back. Oh, great.

“When I opened my eyes, I felt really- uh- calm,” he says, hearing his voice get higher without knowing how to stop it. “And there was only one chair, so I didn’t think about- I didn’t have to- well, now the anxiety’s back? I don’t know how to-”

He can feel himself spiraling, so he takes a deep breath, drying his hands on his pants, and starts at the beginning.

“Uh. Where am I?”

The woman smiles, settling her hands onto the table in front of her, very carefully. “You, Chidi, have died.”

“Oh,” says Chidi, feeling unsurprised. That’s weird. Everything here is weird. Why is everything here weird?

“You’re now in the afterlife,” she says, and then frowns. “In the Good Place, that is.” She smiles again, and shoots him a thumbs up. “You made it! Good job!”

Chidi doesn’t know what to say to that, so his brain turns to the nearest thing to comment on in order to avoid processing. “They speak French in the afterlife?”

She laughs quickly, and for the first time he notices that she seems sort of nervous. “No, no, this place automatically translates whatever someone says into a language you’re comfortable in. I’m speaking English now.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding. And then: “And- you are?”

“I’m Eleanor,” she says, and holds her hand out. “I’m the Architect here.” The capital letter is obvious. “Welcome to the Good Place, Chidi.”

“...Thank you,” he says, shaking her hand, sort of awkwardly, because it’s just a little too close for him to stretch out his arm but far enough that he can’t really keep his elbow close, either. “I have- uh- a lot of questions? First, uh-”

Eleanor holds up a finger. “I’m gonna have to stop you there, buddy. I have a few more residents to get ready for, so I’m going to introduce you to Janet, and you can ask her all of those questions. She can also give you a tour of the neighborhood.”

Chidi nods, slowly. The Architect seems very competent, and he always does well around people who are good at their jobs. “Okay.” He stretches out the first syllable of the word and pats his thighs, the way he does when he’s starting to calm down, and that helps even more.

Eleanor smiles at him, seeming to understand that. “Great. Janet?”

A woman pops into existence right next to her. “Yes, Eleanor?”

“She- she just appeared,” says Chidi, tearing his eyes away from the woman in the purple dress. He’s not feeling relaxed anymore. In fact, he’s feeling dangerously close to having a full-out panic attack, and he doesn’t like that. “She just- appeared, out of nowhere? In plain sight? Is that even-”

“Remember, you’re in the afterlife, buddy?” asks Eleanor. For the first time, her calm demeanor is starting to really crack - her voice sounds panicked, and she reaches out a hand as if to touch his arm before pulling it back, quickly. “Chidi? Can you hear me?”

Chidi takes a deep breath, and then another one, and then chances a look at the strange, physics-defying woman. She smiles at him, calmly, and that helps. “Y- Yeah, I can hear you.”

“Good,” says Eleanor. “This is Janet. She’s not a resident, and she was never alive - she’s just here to answer any and all questions you have, about- Janet, what is your formal job description?”

“I am the source of all information and knowledge for humans within the Good Place,” says Janet, in a calm voice. Chidi’s shoulders relax. “I can also provide you with any object as requested.”

“Wow, your voice is really soothing,” says Chidi. Janet nods. “I am designed to be as helpful as possible to both the residents of this neighborhood and the Architect. To do that, I have a soothing voice and no real emotions, so I won’t judge you for whatever questions or requests you may have.”

“That’s- thank you,” says Chidi, and then he realizes he’s still leaning away from her, as if in self defense. He consciously moves back to the middle of his chair and smiles at her, apologetically. “Sorry, I’m still not- uh- over the whole appearing-disappearing thing. You just- show up? Out of nowhere?”

“Yep!” says Janet, smiling, but it’s smaller now. “Just say my name, and I’ll be there.” She glances at Eleanor, looking almost nervous - she must have simulated emotions, he realizes - and the Architect smiles at her, reassuring.

“Oh. Well. Thank you,” says Chidi.

“It’s my job,” says Janet, and takes a deep breath like she’s bracing herself for something. Which is weird, because he’d assume she doesn’t have to breathe. “Now, just for safety reasons, I have to do a little checkup on you.”

Before Chidi has time to consider what that might mean, she’s right next to him, and she’s asking questions faster than he can keep up.

“How are you feeling? Have you ever met anyone from Jacksonville? What’s the last thing you remember? Do you feel in any danger of spontaneously bursting into flames? Do you have a strong urge to drink almond milk? Does the name Shawn mean anything to you? What is the Time Knife? What-”

“Janet!” interrupts Eleanor. She mimes a cut it out gesture, looking worried. He doesn’t know why she’s bothering. He’s confused, but he’s not going to panic again over just some weird questions. “Tone it down, dude.”

“Sorry,” says Janet, and backs away, her face starting to crumple into tears. “I’m just so nervous about this experiment-”

“Janet!” says Eleanor, her voice getting more urgent. “Stop talking.” She turns back to Chidi, noticeably forcing a smile onto her face. “Why don’t you go explore the neighborhood, bud?”

He hesitates. It feels like something’s going wrong. Janet seems to be too emotionally volatile for someone with fake emotions. “Is everything okay?” asks Chidi, frowning. “Didn’t she say she doesn’t have emotions?”

“She doesn’t!” says Eleanor, louder than necessary. “I don’t know where you’re pulling this stuff out of, dude! Just- go explore the neighborhood - here’s a map, okay, bye!”

Chidi finds himself unceremoniously dumped back into the room that he woke up in. He spends a few seconds standing there, baffled, before noticing another door, opposite the one into Eleanor’s office.

Time to go exploring, I guess, he thinks, and tries not to think about his diagnosis of directional insanity. He glances back at the door, where he’s pretty sure he can hear raised voices belonging to both Eleanor and Janet. They sound upset, although he can’t imagine what about.

He can’t stop thinking about how weird Janet was just acting. If she’s only supposed to be pretending to have emotions, why was she pretending to have such weird ones?

And why is she yelling at Eleanor now? he thinks, and then shrugs. He’s in actual, literal heaven now. Maybe it’s time he started to accept that some things are out of his control.

Time to explore, he tells himself, and pushes open the door.

2. Tahani

Chidi has a tiny apartment in the middle of the neighborhood, and it’s kind of perfect. Which is weird, because determining a dream home involves a lot of choices that he knows he would never be able to make in a normal situation and-

He’s just grateful it seems to have showed up out of nowhere, with no conscious input from him. Eleanor really knows what she’s doing, and it’s comforting to have something nice for once without having to go through the anxiety beforehand.

Speaking of which: the usual anxiety seems to have calmed down. Significantly. It’s not absolutely gone, not the way it was when he woke up, but he’s able to make small choices with almost no freaking out. His theory is that since Janet created the whole neighborhood and everything in it, he doesn’t have to worry about repercussions like supporting the exploitation of workers in China or giving money to homophobic business owners.

He’s not sure, though - so he’d asked Janet what she thought the cause was, since she knows everything there is to know in the universe. But she apparently doesn’t know everything, because she’d stammered for a few seconds before saying that residents tend to keep their emotional state from their last few seconds and that he probably died perfectly at peace.

Which can’t be true. Chidi wasn’t at peace for a day in his life. Plus, he doesn’t even remember his death because traumatic memories hinder adjustment to the neighborhood. Eleanor had refused to go into any sort of detail, which only made him more sure that Janet’s theory was wrong.

He didn’t have to tell that to her, though. She’d winced as soon as she said it and changed the subject to meeting the other residents.

“I have a few that I think you’ll hit it off with,” she’d said, her voice sounding conspiratorial, before getting his permission to invite two people to his apartment: Jianyu, a Buddist monk who’s sticking with his vow of silence, and Tahani, a former British socialite who’s planning a welcome party in a few days.

“I’d host it tonight, but we still have two residents who haven’t arrived yet,” says Tahani, her gracious smile never wavering. She had ducked under his doorway with the same ever-present grace, but Chidi had gotten the distinct feeling that she was holding back several comments about how small his apartment was. “Isn’t that right, Eleanor?”

For some reason, Eleanor had tagged along. Chidi’s chalking it up to making sure no one starts off on the wrong foot.

“Huh- oh, yeah,” says Eleanor, studying the pictures on Chidi’s walls. “Where were these taken?”

“In my home city, in Senegal,” says Chidi. It’s weird that she doesn’t know about his decorations, given that she designed the whole neighborhood, including this ideal apartment. “That’s me and my parents. Why?”

“Oh- just curious,” she says, glancing at him, and goes straight back to staring at the wall. Tahani swats Eleanor’s arm, quickly, as if in reproach, and then looks back at him, her smile intact. Jianyu keeps grinning at her side. The monk had spent the first five minutes poking Tahani until she’d whispered something very fast and angry-sounding about pizza and he’d calmed down. “Please disregard her rudeness. I’d love for you to come to the party. It will just be a small get together, but formal dress, please-”

“Yes,” says Chidi, feeling slightly awkward. “Of course.”

“I’m so glad to see you arrived safely,” she says. How does she talk through a smile that big? “We were really quite concerned - strange circumstances surrounding your death, you know.”

“I... don’t, actually,” he says, slowly. “No one will tell me how I died.” He stops. “Do you... know... how I died, Tahani?”

She looks at him for a second, somehow looking like a very wealthy deer caught in headlights, before she laughs awkwardly and waves her hand dismissively. “No, of course not! How silly of you to think so. No, I only assumed- since, after all, Eleanor was so- well, anyways, it doesn’t matter much. You will come to the party?”

“Yeah,” says Chidi. He hesitates, but he has a bad feeling about the way that she just dodged his question, and anyway, it’s heaven, the anxiety is still at a low boil, and if Chidi can’t be a little rude here, where can he?

He takes the leap before he overthinks it. “Any other reason why you’re all in my apartment?”

“No!” says Tahani, brightly. She doesn’t seem terribly offended, just artificial. “We’re leaving now. Come along, Jianyu,” she says, grabbing him by the elbow. As Chidi watches, Jianyu gives him a wide smile and then bows slowly, before Tahani drags him out.

Eleanor doesn’t move.

“Uh- Eleanor?” he says. She doesn’t react. “Eleanor?” He reaches forward to tap her on the shoulder, and she jumps about a foot into the air. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says, without turning around. Her voice sounds watery.

“Um. Eleanor. Do you... need anything?”

“What?”

“Tahani said there are still two residents who haven’t arrived yet,” he says. “Shouldn’t you be- I don’t know, preparing or something?”

“Right,” she says, turning around quickly. Her eyes are dry, which is slightly surprising for reasons he doesn’t understand. “Fork! You’re right. Oh, I gotta go,” she says, hurrying to the door. Right before she gets to it, though, she flips around to look at him. “Thanks for hosting us. I know Tahani can be a handful sometimes.”

“No- problem?” he says, curious despite himself, because it sounds like their Architect has known those two for much longer than a couple of hours. “How long have they been here?”

“Not long,” she says, and spins around just as quickly as she’d dodged his question. “Bye!”

Then she pulls the door open and disappears through before he can register what’s happening. It strikes him as odd, sure, but next to what just happened with Tahani - maybe not so strange.

I can’t believe I’m stuck with these weird people for the rest of time, Chidi thinks, and then, since there’s not much he can do about it, goes to see a man about some frozen yogurt.

3. Michael

“Ah, Chidi,” says Tahani, gliding over to him in a blue dress that could be described as a wedding cake, if a wedding cake could have an excellent sense of fashion and a British accent. “I’m so glad you could make it!”

“This place is huge,” he says in response. He’s kind of incapable of saying anything else. “I’m sorry, I’m just- your house is enormous.” It’s not that he’s jealous, it’s just that - he’s taught in lecture halls smaller than this foyer.

“Isn’t it just?” says Tahani, beaming. “Well, make yourself at home!” she says, patting his chest. And then she moves away, presumably to welcome someone else.

Easier said than done, he thinks, looking around. Tahani invited every resident to her welcome party, and it seems like all 322 of them have shown up. The decorations are exactly tasteful, all of the attire is appropriate, and the music is perfect. It reminds Chidi of one of the fundraising galas his university used to host, only actually appealing; he’d always hated them back then, but tonight, he wants to get to know the people he’s going to be spending eternity with. So he puts his best foot forward and walks in.

Except, pretty quickly, he gets stuck in a conversation with a woman named Helena, who seems perfectly nice but has been saying absolutely nothing for five minutes. Coincidentally, Chidi has been silently discarding his ideas of being social for four and a half minutes.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spots Eleanor and quickly makes his excuses, sending a silent thank you to- well, probably Janet, if anyone.

She jumps when he says hello from her left, and he sees that there’s an older white man on her right arm as she puts a hand on her chest and smiles at him.

“Sorry,” he says, smiling slightly. Don’t make me leave. “Didn’t realize you had a date.”

“Oh, no, it’s not like that,” says Eleanor, glancing at the man next to her, who looks like he’s just been handed a pin and a grenade, separately. “No, this is Michael. He’s- he’s my partner Architect. I’m the newbie and he’s the experienced one,” she says, laughing slightly. She nudges him. “Say hello to Chidi.” Her voice is gentle.

“Hello, Chidi,” says Michael, getting over himself enough to wave both of his (very large) hands awkwardly. “It’s very nice to meet you.” His smile seems strained.

He’s very tall, has glasses, and is wearing a grey suit with a black bow tie. The clear symptoms of anxiety he’s showing make him look very harmless. Chidi likes him instantly.

“I like your bowtie,” he says, trying to make conversation. Please don’t make me go back to Helena, he thinks, and immediately feels guilty.

“Thank you, Chidi. Although it is rather plain,” says Michael, and something in his voice eases the guilt. “But then again, we are mourning. Your deaths, that is!” His laugh is loud, but when neither Chidi nor Eleanor join him, it peters out quickly, before something else hits him and he raises his left hand like he’s a fictional lawyer about to present episode-changing evidence. “And it matches Eleanor’s dress, which itself perfectly illustrates the human concept of irony.”

Chidi glances at Eleanor’s completely black dress, which is sleeveless and has some sort of tie in front. He doesn’t recognize it at all. He also doesn’t get the joke, although Eleanor evidently does, because she hits Michael’s arm with the back of her hand, softly. “That’s not funny.”

“I guess not,” he says, his gaze settling on Chidi. They stand in silence for a minute, awkwardly, until Chidi manages to think of something to ask him. “How did you and Eleanor-”

Michael looks away from him, his gaze falling on something over Chidi’s shoulder. “Oh look, Janet needs our help!”

With that, he clamps his hand over Eleanor’s shoulder and rushes her away. Chidi turns, but can’t see any hint of their resident Google.

Consciously, he shrugs it off and looks away. His feelings aren’t especially hurt - if Michael needs to take a breather, Chidi understands more than most.

Anyway, even though he doesn’t know who the last two residents are, he feels like he should welcome them, and hopefully save them from any extended encounters with the very odd people who live here.

Maybe they’ll even be slightly interesting, he thinks, and that’s what finally gets him to square his shoulders and start to search.

4. Jianyu

A few hours later, Chidi’s taking a break from wandering around the party. Everyone here is really nice, but rather boring, or as in the case of the two new residents, sort of annoying, and he has a bad feeling that the majority of intellectuals didn’t actually manage to make the cut into the Good Place.

He leans against the wall, thinking about asking Janet about where Kant ended up, and hears voices - Eleanor and Tahani’s, to be specific. They’re standing outside, he supposes, and this wall just happens to be thin enough that he can hear what they’re talking about.

“Eleanor!” says Tahani. She sounds exasperated. Chidi’s never heard her show so much genuine emotion, and it’s surprising enough that he leans closer. Against his better judgement.

“What, Tahani? What do you have to say to me?” hisses Eleanor. “How can you possibly understand-”

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself!” Tahani interrupts, sounding imperfect and unsmiling and worried. “You can’t, darling. You can’t keep watching that godforsaken video from Michael every day-”

“I do what I want-”

“You’re torturing yourself-”

“Well then, I fit in just right, don’t I?” says Eleanor, her voice low, and even Chidi knows that sentence was meant to wound. “Look, you need to get the fork out of my life and let me take care of myself, ashhole. Capiche?”

There’s a moment or two of silence that certainly sounds very stunned.

“I’m your friend, Eleanor,” Tahani says eventually, her voice quiet. “I’m your friend, and even if I may not understand, I’m here for you. That’s how this works, right? How we become better?”

Eleanor doesn’t say anything.

“It’s what we owe to each other, even if we’re all hurting,” says Tahani. The words sound vaguely familiar and he’s not sure why. “You know that.”

Chidi hears nothing, and then sniffling, and then something that sounds like Eleanor swatting Tahani’s shoulder. “You’re such a bench.”

“You know I’m right,” Tahani says. Her British accent makes it sound arrogant, even though he figures she meant it teasingly.

How long has she been here, anyways? Because it sounds like they’re really close.

“Yeah,” says Eleanor, and her voice gets quieter. “I guess I do.”

There’s a long period of silence. Chidi’s leaning closer, trying to determine if they’re just whispering, when someone taps him on the shoulder.

“I’m not eave-” starts Chidi, whipping around, but it’s just Jianyu the monk, smiling at him very wide. He’d thought he’d heard something about a vow of silence, but apparently that wasn’t true, because Jianyu waves and says, “Hey, dude!”

“Hi,” says Chidi, hesitantly. Something about this guy strikes him as weird. “Look, this isn’t-”

“How do you like the pizza?” asks Jianyu. “I asked for Tahani to get it so you could have some.”

“It’s... good,” says Chidi, feeling very lost. “Uh- why?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember pizza,” says Jianyu, as if it’s obvious. “Because you don’t remember anything else. Like how you think my name’s Jianyu-”

“Jianyu! Hey, buddy,” says Eleanor, from behind him. Chidi jumps - he hadn’t even heard her coming. “Remember what we’ve talked about? About Chidi and the other residents? We don’t-”

“We don’t talk about the Judge, or Mindy, or Derek,” says Jianyu, making a face. Then he brightens. “Or about me and my girl J-”

“That’s good enough,” interrupts Eleanor. “Thank you, Jianyu, you can go mingle now.”

Jianyu doesn’t move. “This reminds me of that time when we were planning this surprise party for my friend Pillb-”

“Pilibuster,” interrupts Eleanor, reaching out and grabbing Jianyu’s upper arm, glancing back at Chidi. “It’s Irish. He was the foreign asphyxiate at Jianyu’s monastery.” She turns her eyes up towards the ceiling. “Janet, please help me out here.”

“Did you mean novitiate?” asks Chidi, but Eleanor ignores him in favor of Janet, who’s just appeared.

“What do you need, Eleanor?” she asks. Eleanor sighs, her shoulders barely relaxing. “Can you take Jianyu home, please? I think he’s had enough excitement for tonight.”

There’s a pause. Chidi almost says something, like Are you okay, Janet?, but she starts to speak.

“Sure thing,” says Janet, nodding more than seems necessary. “No problem. I can take Jianyu to his house. The house that I know the location of. Which I only know the location of because I am omnipotent, and know everything. No other reason.”

“Janet.”

“We’re leaving now,” says Janet, turning around quickly. “Goodnight, Chidi.”

Jianyu waves over his shoulder as he’s marched away, with much more enthusiasm than Chidi thinks the action really deserves. He watches them go, feeling totally baffled. “What just happened?”

Eleanor sighs. “Trust me, bud, you don’t want to know.”

5. Eleanor

“This is your house?” asks Chidi, walking inside. It’s his third month in the neighborhood, and this is the first time he’s ever visited Eleanor’s house. “This is your house?”

Eleanor makes her way to the kitchen, starting to put dishes away. “Yeah, I know.”

“You- but- you hate clowns!”

“Yeah,” says Eleanor, absent-mindedly. “It’s sort of an- an inside joke.”

“You live in an inside joke?”

“It’s- it’s really not a big deal, bud- Chidi.”

Chidi looks up from his examination of the corner of clown portraits, because Eleanor doesn’t stutter often. Sure enough, she’s stopped what she’s doing, the way that she always does when she stutters or hesitates or looks at him like he’s not who she’s expecting to be there.

“It’s- it’s a nice house,” he says, lamely, because he never knows what to do in these situations. He’s not even sure why he’s here - she’d asked him over yesterday, with zero explanation. He’s hoping it’s not because he’s teaching ethics to someone who definitely doesn’t belong in her perfect heavenly neighborhood.

“Thanks,” she says eventually, emerging from wherever she was. “If you don’t know what to say, I get the feeling. Michael designed it, and I don’t know what the fork he was thinking-”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he interrupts. “Why do you keep saying fork?”

“Oh,” she says, looking down and blushing. Her smile is very pretty, although Chidi tend to try not to notice it, most of the time. “In the Good Place, not everyone appreciates cursing, so there’s sort of an automatic filter. I can’t say anything worse than hell. Fork. Bench. Ash. Shirt. And so on.”

“Makes sense,” he says, before realizing something that doesn’t. “You curse a lot for someone from a place that doesn’t approve of cursing.” If she’s an angel or whatever, shouldn’t she be as pure as the rest of them?

“What?” she asks, confused, looking up again. “Plenty of people- Oh, right. Yeah. I’m-” she stops, hesitating. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I’m not actually from here. I was human.”

“What?” he asks, frowning. He wasn’t expecting that. “How does- how does that work?”

“Well, I died, and through a really forking long series of events I became an architect,” she says, not really explaining anything. She does that a lot. “Michael sort of took me in. He’s not the main architect because- well- technically, they have to interact with the residents, and he’s not really- uh- good with people. So I got the short straw. And I’m trying my best! But I wasn’t really meant for this job.”

“Ah,” says Chidi. The anxiety in his chest is starting to get worse, and he has a bad feeling that a stomach ache’s on the way. He’s not up for this kind of constant lying. Eleanor’s done such a great job on this neighborhood (besides the obvious mistake), and he knows that things are harder than she likes to show. He doesn’t like lying to her about her life’s (actually, apparently, her death’s) work.

“You good, buddy?” asks Eleanor, probably noticing his expression. She’s finished with her dishes and is wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “What’s wrong?” She rounds the island and puts her hands on his shoulders, trying to help him sit.

“It’s just a stomach ache,” he says, silently apologizing to Kant as she gets him settled. Lying is immoral, he thinks, and then, Getting them caught would be worse. “I get those sometimes. It’s not a big deal.”

Eleanor stops and pulls back to look him in the eye. “You sure? You can’t lie to me, buster.”

“Yes!” says Chidi, louder than he was expecting, and then tries to backtrack. “I mean. Yeah. I’m fine. There’s nothing causing it, I don’t know why it’s suddenly coming on.” He looks up to smile at Eleanor and finds her looking up as her eyes unfocus, her brain a million miles away again.

“Uh- Eleanor?” he says, waving his hand slightly in front of her face. “You in there? It’s me, Chidi.”

She doesn’t react for a couple seconds, before suddenly starting to move again. “Yeah, I know,” she says suddenly, blinking rapidly as she backs away. “I know it’s you.”

He doesn’t say anything, because she’s looking at him like she doesn’t quite recognize him and he doesn’t want to make it worse. This odd behavior is getting more and more common, as time goes by, and he has no clue how he’s supposed to react. After a short while of silence, though, she seems to back down, sighing as her shoulders relax. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay,” Chidi says, and is surprised to find that he means it. “Uh- so- what am I doing here, exactly?”

Eleanor stops, looking at him.

“I mean-” he says. “It’s not that I don’t want to spend time with you.” He curses himself, inwardly - she’s The Architect and you’re a dead moral philosophy professor and you’re lying to her about who’s not supposed to be here and-

“I know what you mean,” says Eleanor, giving him a small smile. “It’s not a big issue, really. I just wanted to apologize for all of the weird stuff that’s been happening.”

“You mean-?”

“The sinkhole, the giraffe stampede, that time that trash started falling out of the sky...” she says, counting them on her fingers. “I could go on. But I know you don’t deal well with uncertainty, and I know it’s been kind of- weird, here. So I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” says Chidi. “I know you’re doing your best, and this is your first neighborhood.”

“Yeah,” says Eleanor, looking at him like they’re friends. “No kidding. And- I know-”

And now she looks nervous.

“I know some people here have been acting weird around you, too.”

“That- that is a thing that’s been happening, yes,” says Chidi. “But that’s not your fault-”

“I know,” she interrupts, studying his face. “But I’m still sorry. I’ve been talking with them about it, and trust me, it’s not about you. Tahani’s been having some trouble with John- I don’t know if you’ve noticed-”

“I hadn’t, actually, but that’s reassuring,” says Chidi, smiling at her. She smiles back. “Anyway, I’ve spoken with everyone - including Janet - and things should be a little more normal, now. At least, as normal as things can be, in the afterlife.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” she says. “And- Chidi?”

“Yeah?”

She looks away from him. “I really am sorry.”

He’s lost. He hates feeling lost, but it seems to keep happening here. “About what?”

Eleanor sighs. “About everything.”

He stares at her, and she looks away, throwing her hands up. “Don’t look at me like that, dude! I’m doing my best here.”

“I don’t know what any of this means, Eleanor.”

“I know,” she says. “It’s okay. Things’ll make sense soon. Just a few more months.”

“...Eleanor, what does that mean?” She doesn’t say anything. “Eleanor, I don’t know what that means.”

She takes a deep breath. “I know.”

“Eleanor,” he says, hesitating - except that the answer to this question seems like it’ll solve every mysterious thing that’s happened to him, in the months that he’s been here. “Why is everyone being so weird?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, quietly, and then she smiles gently, like someone who’s about to beat you in a poker game and is waiting for you to spot the final clue. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

He glances at the clock and jumps. It’s five minutes until the ethics lesson Chidi holds in his apartment, and it takes him six to walk there.

“Yes! Sorry, Eleanor, I have to go-”

And he stops.

Does she know about the ethics lessons?

What else could she be talking about?

Chidi studies her face, quickly. She’s looking at him calmly, but there’s no way she can know about the lessons. Even if she is the Architect, and she knows everything that happens in the neighborhood.

Or, well. Hopefully not.

(And it’s not like he can do anything, if she does know. Best to try not to worry about it.)

“I have a- frozen yogurt date,” he says, slowly. “That’s where I have to go now.”

“Right,” says Eleanor, nodding and shaking her head at the same time. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“So I’ll be- going now,” he says. “To the frozen yogurt place.”

“Yep,” says Eleanor, and then she shoots him a thumbs up, smiling like they’re keeping a secret. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

“Thanks,” he says, walking out and closing the door behind him. He stops, taking a deep breath. If she knows, she knows, and at least the conversation they just had makes some measure of sense. And if she doesn’t?

It’s just more proof that everyone here is completely insane.

#cheleanor #tgpfic #the good place #chidi anagonye #eleanor shellstrop #i've tried but i have NO clue how this fandom tags anything so... hopefully this works lol #i am SO ready to have this fic OUT of my life and my wips folder #sb and l writes #fic: on that bumpy road to love #chidi x eleanor #fic rec #and now i have to... reblog this with the ao3 link #ughhhhhh #why is tumblr so broken #anyways @ everyone who got this far: i love you and thank you for reading!!

36 notes · View notes

precuredaily · 4 years

Text

Kamen Rider Day 176

Episode: Kamen Rider 555 24 - “The Door to Darkness” Date watched: 1 April 2020 Original air date: 13 July 2004 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/9SnAeko Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

Today’s episode is..... strange. Even by this show’s standards. There’s several subplots, people continue to be strange, mean, and creepy to each other, and it both picks up on and ends on a cliffhanger. Basically it’s an Inoue show. Let’s dig in!

The Plot

Takumi sees Kaixa fighting the Lobster and Centipede Orphenochs and joins in, but Kiba happens to also be in the area and wants to fight his mortal enemy Faiz. Faiz quickly dispatches the Horse Orphenoch by throwing him in a river (of course) and helps out Kaixa, but Murakami arrives and shoots an energy blast at them all to make them stop fighting. He then tells Kaixa he wants to speak with him.

At a cafe, Murakami apologizes to Kusaka for the attack by his Lucky Clover members, saying he didn’t order that and he will make sure they don’t act independently. He then asks Kusaka to join Lucky Clover, but he declines. He then asks why Kusaka wanted to join Lucky Clover to begin with, and he responds that he wanted to crush Smart Brain. Confusing man.

Back at Smart Brain HQ, Murakami tells Takuma and Saeko why he stopped them, he wants to get his hands on the Rider Gear and find out why the humans are able to use it, when it should only be usable by Orphenochs.

Over by a bridge, a boy who was thought to have been killed reawakens as an Oprhenoch. Smart Lady approaches him and gives him a brief rundown before just walking away.

thanks I guess

We see Kaido and Yuka talking in their residence about why Mari might be refusing Kaido’s advances. Yuka suggests that a girl wants to get married to the person she loves (obviously referring to her own feelings for Kaido) and he decides to propose to Mari. He catches her on a delivery and tries to propose to her, which she ardently rejects and tells him to leave her alone. From around a corner, Yuka watches and smiles to herself, probably intending to sabotage Kaido’s chances with Mari. As he wallows in despair, even throwing the ring into the harbor, he sees the orphenoch boy jump off a bridge, attempting suicide. Kaido jumps in the water to rescue him, discovering he’s a fellow orphenoch, and takes him under his wing. Kaido sends the boy, Kobayashi Yoshio, to talk to Murakami to see how they can gain entry to Lucky Clover and secure their well-being for life. They learn that they will be allowed to join if they can recover the Faiz and Kaixa gears, so they stage a trap.

They intercept Mari and Keitaro’s car, and they call Takumi and Kusaka to come save them from the Orphenochs. The Orphenochs, meanwhile, just act menacing without actually harming them and it’s really silly.

Takumi and Kusaka show up and transform into Faiz and Kaixa. Kobayashi, the Rabbit Orphenoch, goes straight for their belts during the fight while Kaido, the Snake, tries to keep fighting them. At one point they double up on Faiz and Kaixa aims a shot at the group, not caring if Takumi is caught in the crossfire.

with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Faiz manages to dodge and both he and Kaixa prepare their finishers, but the orphenochs run off, so the riders detransform and give chase on their bikes. (Remember when Kamen Riders used their bikes on the regular? Pepperidge Farm remembers) However, they run into a suspicious police barricade, and two officers tell them they need to inspect their luggage but can’t tell them why. They grab the briefcases with the Faiz and Kaixa gear, take it back to the patrol car for “inspection”, and then hightail it out of there before Takumi and Kusaka realize they’ve been had.

Kaido and Kobayashi meet up with Murakami, Saeko, and Takuma and hand over the stolen Rider gear. Before they can be rewarded, Takumi and Kusaka catch up and recognize their equipment. Murakami tells his subordinates to fight them but go easy, he wants them alive, and Takuma and Saeko transform into Faiz and Kaixa, respectively.

Takumi and Kusaka try to fight back, unarmed, but Kusaka gets knocked down almost immediately and the episode closes on him lying on the ground.

The Analysis

Kusaka is as confusing as ever, and just as malicious. I have to give all the credit to Kouhei Murakami because he’s a great actor in other stuff and he really makes you loathe Kusaka. Even when he’s not doing anything terribly malicious he’s just sour, and he creeps on Mari hardcore despite her clearly not wanting to talk to him. The bit during the battle where he takes aim at Faiz and the two orphenochs, possibly intending to shoot all three of them, is chilling.

This episode is a confusing mess of subplots that largely seem irrelevant. Kusaka wanting to join Lucky Clover but refusing when invited goes nowhere, Smart Lady visiting Kobayashi to basically say “congratulations you’re an orphenoch, bye”, Kiba attacking Faiz and then immediately getting tossed aside, a bunch of scenes in the laundromat that go nowhere. I wish they’d keep it focused. The core plot about Smart Brain trying to steal back the Rider Gear and the subplot of Kaido trying to woo Mari are enough, they could have fleshed those out more and the episode would have been more cohesive.

I do enjoy seeing Kaido’s selflessness in action as he dives in the river to save Kobayashi, it’s not a side of him we see so often. He turns it into a way to advance his own interests but he does it initially purely out of his own goodness. Also, can I just say, including a suicide plot is pretty dark. Crazy what being an Orphenoch does to you. If the episode had been better fleshed out in the right places, they might have been able to concoct a better plan to steal the belts. I had to laugh at the two orphenochs running away from the fight and somehow having the time to steal police uniforms and police vehicles to set up a roadblock in the time it took Takumi and Kusaka to catch up to them on their bikes. It’s so absurd. And then they basically just outright steal the belts without any concrete justification. I don’t know much about Japanese law but this has to seem incredibly suspicious and it takes our leads way too long to figure out what’s going on.

We do get more hints of Kusaka’s past with Mari, but only the vaguest of hints, because the episode would rather have Takumi ask Kusaka if he wants to talk and be refused than actually give meaningful backstory.

The fighting is good, and feels balanced. When it’s 2 on 1, the riders struggle, and they maneuver around a lot as they exchange blows and try to gain the upper hand. Faiz I feel like could make better use of his equipment, but to be fair he doesn’t have a sidearm like Kaixa does, and Kaixa uses his gun somewhat sparingly. I did like the part where the riders were preparing to perform their finishers but the Orphenochs just noped out of there, that was funny and I kind of wish we’d see something like that more often, with the villains avoiding the finisher if it takes too long.

The ending was interesting with Lucky Clover acquiring the rider gear. This gives us our first female rider in-series (Femme only appeared in secondary media) for a little while at least. Kusaka will, of course, regain his equipment in short order but it’s something. Seeing him, untransformed, try to fight Kaixa was scary even if I don’t like him, so we’ll see what happens next!

Next time, more mysteries unfold!

Characters Falling In Rivers Count: 3! Kiba during his fight with Faiz, Kobayashi trying to commit suicide, and Kaido diving in to rescue him.

#Kamen Rider #Masked Rider #Kamen Rider 555 #KR555 24 #KRD176 #April Fools

2 notes · View notes

boystownhq · 5 years

Text

[ R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find Out What It Means To Me. On Communication! ]

Recently, I’ve been noticing a trend of people communicating out of character in the vaguest way possible, or alternatively being aggressive to the point of turning people off. I’m here to talk about the happy medium that helps us communicate our wants, goals, and limits. And to remind everyone of a few key things to always keep in mind when writing with other people in a group setting.

There’s also plotting and letting go of plots. Sometimes when you reach out to people, you’re really excited about a plot, and when it starts to play out, things go awry, and it creates a conflict that becomes difficult to deal with IC and we turn to OOC solutions. Character chemistry changes sometimes, or sometimes our writing styles don’t match. That’s OKAY! If you’re not feeling it, all it takes is a quick message. Something like:

YES ✓ “Hey, I’m not really feeling this plot/thread and would like to drop it. Thanks.”

NO ✘ Immediate unfollow and/or block.

Dropping threads/plots/etc does NOT give anyone the right to treat your fellow writers poorly. Being short with people and getting upset over in-character interactions is not the way to go. IC should never cross over into OOC, and we need to take a step back and really think about what we’re actually upset about. Be concise and specific when you message each other so nothing’s really left up in the air. Please remember that behind each character is a real, imperfect person using this roleplay as a creative outlet. Be patient with each other, avoid taking things personally, and if you can’t mesh well out of character, it’s easy to just bow out of a conversation with common courtesy and leave each other alone before things escalate. I’m going to go over a few points I think we need a refresher on.

Brace yourself, this is a long read, but worth it!

Consent: ALWAYS check in with your RP partners and make sure it’s okay to do something before just writing it, however insignificant it might seem to you. Please do not godmode dialogue, actions, or extensions of said characters (pets, children, parents, or other NPCs they’ve made) unless you’ve asked for permission. When in doubt, ASK to make sure it’s okay!

TAGS and Triggers: Please remember that a character’s actions and viewpoints do NOT reflect the actions and viewpoints of the writer. A little louder for those in the back: IC =/= OOC. We’re in a roleplay with a variety of characters that deal with things like infidelity, internalized homophobia, crime, sex negativity, sex positivity, family issues, race issues, gender norms, gender fluidity and other issues that affect people in the LGBT and POC communities every day. All we ask is that everyone portray these issues respectfully and if you don’t know how to, then please do not attempt to until you’re more educated. Nobody wants to read a mockery of issues we deal with on the daily in real life. While we love seeing diversity, you do NOT need to write about deeper issues to make your character interesting. That being said, don’t take it upon yourself to play blog police. Come to the admin if you see something that’s a cause for concern, and keep in mind that you do NOT have to interact with every character in the RP. We have a list of triggers, please tag them accordingly. As much as we all love seeing steamy aesthetics and faceclaim posts on the dash, please tag NSFW accordingly. Need something added to the list? Please reach out to the admin so we can add it!

SMUT: Sometimes, people bring in FCs that we REALLY like! And maybe you wanna write your character and that character getting together, but consider this: maybe that person doesn’t want to jump right into smut. It can come off as fetishizing if that’s the only thing you ever want to plot or write about. People do NOT owe you an explanation as to why they won’t write smut. Respect that. If your character is aggressively pushing a sexual plot and you are asked to stop OOC, then you need to full-stop. Sex is a sensitive subject, whether you think so or not, and we respect everyone’s boundaries here. We strive for a safe space to write IC and OOC. That doesn’t mean don’t write smut ever, just have full, explicit CONSENT. It’s that easy! Don’t be pushy or borderline creepy about it, because that’s the surefire best way to get unfollowed. Have a question? Come to the admin! You don’t have to tag NSFW, but you can if it’s getting extremely graphic, just out of courtesy.

Plotting: Are you reaching out to plot with someone? Have some ideas ready, don’t rely on the other party to come up with all the ideas. Is someone reaching out to you? Make an effort to bring something to the table, but if you feel pressured into coming up with a plot all on your own, it’s okay to decline if you’re not feeling it. Need help coming up with stuff? Reach out to us! We can help. Just don’t reach out to your peers, say you want to plot, and never come up with a starter or anything, then come back time and again asking for ideas when the other person still doesn’t have any. Not only is that annoying, it’s off-putting and indicative that the rp will rely on one person for the most part. Not cute!

Inclusivity: Don’t be afraid of branching out. Everyone likes writing with friends, and that’s a given, but make a conscious effort to reply to open starters. I understand sometimes people are nervous, but that’s something we need to work through. If you’re nervous approaching someone, consider that they might be nervous to approach, too. Don’t make assumptions about people based on what you see alone. Some people gravitate to certain characters, but that doesn’t mean they won’t interact with you. If I had a nickel for how many times people assume my characters won’t want to interact with theirs when that’s not true at all, I’d have a lot of nickels! Open starters are the best way to get a feel for a character. Be creative in your interactions and the way you invite other characters to interact with yours through starters for best results.

YES ✓ “Hey, a starter from this character I haven’t interacted with, let’s gooo!” NO ✘ Ignore starters because you think they only bubble rp and won’t reply to you. (Open starters are open for a reason!)

Respect Time and Muse: Sometimes, people have muse for certain threads, certain characters, and won’t always get to every single reply they owe. If you feel like there is a problem, too much time has passed, please approach that person because it’s likely they missed a response. Tumblr activity feed can be a little weird, and not everyone uses thread trackers. That’s okay! Again, this is a hobby. That being said, don’t agree to plot if you don’t see yourself following through, and please don’t disregard threads you have with other people. That’s frustrating, and you wouldn’t want the same done to you. Some people might be on sporadically throughout the day, or on for a brief time at night, or even be on all day! Either way, they don’t owe you an explanation as to how they’re using their free time. If it gets to the point where anyone is feeling pigeonholed in a plot, it’s affecting your ability to roleplay your character, and you’ve tried communicating, then reach out to us and we’ll help. Everyone’s got the right to write what they enjoy and progress their character’s development.

He Said She Said: Did you hear something from a third party about a person and now refuse to interact with them IC or OOC because of it? You should probably take a step back and ask yourself if it’s actually true or just hearsay just because someone else didn’t like them for whatever reason. A lot of us have similar or same aliases, but we’re not all the same people. If someone personally does something to you, if you SEE certain behavior, by all means bring it to the admin’s attention. But please don’t spread rumors or buy into unsubstantiated claims. That can be more damaging than you realize. Again, we’re all real people on the other side of the screen. What if it was you being talked about?

Unfollowing vs Blocking: Look, we get it. You’re not gonna mesh with everyone. Sometimes people won’t get a hint, or do things that you just do not agree with fundamentally on an OOC level. We have a no blocking rule because we don’t want anyone feeling left out. If you wish to unfollow a character, that’s not optimal, but allowed, but please respectfully let that mun know so they don’t continue to try interacting. If you have been asked to stop interacting, please respect that so it doesn’t HAVE to escalate to admin intervention. That being said, we are here to help and help keep the peace between everyone, so do reach out to us for any reason. Don’t block people. If it does escalate, reach out to the admin so we can step in. If you want to unfollow someone, be sure it’s not solely because of IC actions.

TL;DR: COMMUNICATE OOC and be respectful to your fellow writers. At the end of the day, nobody wants to feel ignored, disrespected, or passed over, so please don’t be the reason why somebody feels this way. Be inclusive as much as you can, but respect that you won’t mesh with everyone. Don’t spread false rumors. Character chemistry, writing style, or content will vary from character to character and mun to mun. If you have any questions at all, the admin team is here to help! But it’s not that deep, Jay, it’s just RP. YEAH, WELL that’s not an excuse to treat people poorly. We can do better.

#boystooc #Jay This Is A Wendy's #🙏🙏🙏#🌿🌿🌿

13 notes · View notes

xfilescat · 6 years

Text

part two: good morning, sunshine (steve harrington x reader)

word count: 1.3k

warnings: none! except I wrote this in abt... twenty minutes, so yeah

preview: “At least you’d figured out why you had gotten so intoxicated, but why had you come to Steve’s? Why not Nancy’s? You were closer friends with her than you were with him. Even going to Jonathan would’ve made more sense because you were pretty close with him, too. It wasn’t like you and Steve weren’t friends, but you were ‘have fun together’ friends, not ‘show up to each other’s homes drunk and secretly sad’ friends.”

A/N: hey babes! so I wrote this part at the same time as part one so that’s why I'm posting them within a day of each other! typically, updates won’t be quite that fast, but I'll try my darnedest to get things posted in a timely fashion :) I'm also aiming for longer parts! hope u like this installment, my friends!

You jolted awake to pitch blackness and thick silence. It took you a solid 30 seconds to understand why you were staring up at a ceiling fan that you didn’t recognize, and why your head felt like it was filled with concrete. You heaved yourself upright and looked around the room. It was empty. So was the kitchen, and so was the foyer. Outside, it was still dark. For all you knew, it could have been mere minutes since you first shut your eyes or it could have been hours.

“Steve?” you called. No answer. He was probably in bed.

You felt much more sober than you had when you went to sleep. Your entire body was killing you, but at least you could think straight. You guessed you’d been out for along time.

You stood up and sat right back down when vertigo slapped you across the face. You groaned. That was the worst part of being drunk.

Drunk. Oh god. You’d actually shown up to Steve’s house drunk. What the hell were you thinking? You cringed at your complete and utter stupidity. You tried to stand up again and this time you made it to your feet, but the dizziness still made you drop your head into your hands.

Out of the blue, you remembered the reason you had stolen your mother’s expensive vodka and downed half the bottle: your two best friends were ruining your life.

Kristen and Sue had been fighting ever since Sue started dating Andrew, Kristen’s ex-boyfriend. In all honesty, you were more on Kristen’s side than you were on Sue’s, but the situation was more of a misunderstanding than anything else. Sue expressed interest in Andrew, so Kristen sarcastically said that Sue could date whoever she wanted, so Sue thought Kristen was actually okay with her dating Andrew, and Kristen thought Sue would never really do it, but Sue really did it. They hadn’t spoken in weeks. You were losing sleep over it.

Each of them expected you to be angry with the other, and both of them were getting more and more annoyed every time you said you couldn’t. Earlier that night, both of them had called you—first Kristen, then Sue five minutes later—to complain about the other. Both of them got mad when you said you felt uncomfortable trashing your friend, and both of them hung up on you. You couldn’t handle the thought of losing either of them, and it felt like you just had. On the verge of tears, you had run downstairs, smuggled the stolen liquor up to your room, and gotten “wasted.”

It was an extremely unhealthy way to cope and you knew that. You were never going to do it again, especially since you’d be feeling the embarrassment from this one drunken experience for the next 50 years.

You sighed. At least you’d figured out why you had gotten so intoxicated, but why had you come to Steve’s? Why not Nancy’s? You were closer friends with her than you were with him. Even going to Jonathan would’ve made more sense because you were pretty close with him, too. It wasn’t like you and Steve weren’t friends, but you were “have fun together” friends, not “show up to each other’s homes drunk and secretly sad” friends.

It’s the story… of a man named Brady…

Another burning question: Why was the Brady Bunch theme stuck in your head?

Once the room stopped spinning, you padded into the kitchen to get yourself another glass of water. You flipped the lights on and peered at your reflection in the window above the sink. Gorgeous: your mascara was smudged around your eyelids, your hair was a rat’s nest, and your face was pallid. You sort of looked a cool goth chick, but only after she’d been hit by a train.

You took a paper towel and cleaned the makeup off of your eyes, and then you smoothed your hair back into the neatest ponytail you could manage. You still looked halfway dead, but it would have to do. It wasn’t like you were going to go wake up Steve to say goodbye. You just had to look decent enough to walk home without scarring any passersby for life.

After drinking a ton of water, which helped dull your motion sickness, you decided you’d write Steve an enthusiastic thank you note and leave it on the counter. You were so grateful that he’d taken care of you. He let you barge right into his house with absolutely no explanation and crash on his couch, for goodness’ sake. Maybe you two were better friends than you thought. You couldn’t help but smile.

As you explored the kitchen in search of paper and a writing utensil, you caught sight of what you were wearing. Your shorts barely skimmed the top of your thighs and your top didn’t leave much to the imagination. You might as well have been naked. You were such a colossal dumbass that it was almost impressive. You remembered that Steve had given you a sweatshirt to borrow and you definitely planned on wearing it home. How you had walked outside during a January cold front in your state of undress was beyond you.

You couldn’t find anything to write your note with and you didn’t want to go rummaging through the drawers and cabinets, so you’d just have to call Steve the minute you got home and leave a message. You shut the kitchen light off, went back into the living room, and tugged his sweatshirt over your head. It nearly reached your knees and the sleeves made it look like you had no hands, but it was warm and cozy and smelled like expensive cologne.

In the foyer, you slipped on your damp sneakers—they felt especially unpleasant since drunk you had elected not to wear socks—and opened the front door. You did it slow and steady, looking over your shoulder the whole time to make sure you weren’t making enough noise to wake Steve up again. Once you had it open, you pivoted and backed out of the house, right into somebody standing behind you on the porch.

You screamed, whirled around, and came face-to-face with Jonathan and Nancy. They looked as shocked as you felt. “Oh my god,” you breathed, your heart pounding in your throat. “What are you guys doing here?”

Nancy looked you up and down, taking in your outfit, and raised her eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”

You saw yourself through her eyes: almost half-naked, obviously exhausted, and sneaking out of a boy’s house in the middle of the night. Your stomach dropped and you shook your head vehemently. “No, no, no. Nothing happened. Me and Steve… I just… okay, I was drunk, and… no, I mean, wait. It’s not what you think.”

She blinked. “Okay…”

You shook your head again. “I just showed up here drunk and fell asleep on the couch, that’s all.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” Jonathan said. “Is Steve awake?”

“I don’t think so,” you said. “Hey, what’s going on?”

You hadn’t noticed it at first, but they looked frantic and terrified. It seemed like they’d been woken up in the middle of the night, too. Nancy’s hair was in an even messier ponytail than yours and she was dressed in a nightgown with a jean jacket thrown over it. Jonathan was wearing flannel pajama pants with a black sweater.

Nancy bit her lip. “Can we come inside?”

“Sure,” you said, like it was your house. “But you’re kinda scaring me right now. What’s the matter?”

They looked at each other, then back at you. They said nothing.

“Please talk to me,” you said, your breath hitching. “Did something happen?”

It was the vaguest possible question. “Did something happen” could be in reference to absolutely anything. Did you see a movie? Did you make a phone call? Did you run a red light? But you knew that they knew what you meant: Did somebody die? Did something attack somebody? Did the world fall apart again?

They remained silent, but the way their faces fell was all the confirmation you needed.

TAGLIST: @wefracturedmotivation @trashyemonerd

#steve harrington x reader #steve harrington reader insert #stranger things #stranger things reader insert #slow burn #steve harrington

82 notes · View notes

johnmurphysreddit · 5 years

Text

@awesomenell65 apparently I do have some mercy on my followers because I’m cutting off the bottom of this post and making a new thread. I’d hate for anyone to injure their page down finger and I think we’re far enough from the initial topic that it’s appropriate. :)

Your last post:

I’m sorry you lost your post - bc now I’m curious! What story do you think Jason tried to sell before and may have the chance to tell now?

ITA - and thank heavens for that! I thought I was totally alone! - on thinking the whole sweeping craze for redemption arc this and redemption arc that is mostly a fandom thing. Much of the time I wonder if the people writing those words have even the vaguest notion what they mean. In any context, much less the specific fannish/character one they are slaming it into.

And same on ‘character arc’ - what does that mean outside of a novel? I remember reading - who even knows where on some long drilling down day of link following - that one of the issues with series TV, especially long running series TV - is that ultimately your characters can’t actually change too much. They have to remain enough like themselves that their fans continue to recognize them. So no one really ever ‘grows up’ beyond a certain point, and they keep making the same mistakes in new forms…. they have to. Otherwise they would either leave their situation and thus exit the story one way or another - or the story becomes an entirely new story. And while it’s not impossible for a show to survive that, it’s REALLY HARD.

So it will be interesting to see if JR manages to successsfully transition to a new story with his same cast of characters.

The idea that Book Two is the show Jason initially tired to sell comes from Reddit which pulls its information heavily from Twitter and podcasts and also has a heavy conflict between Bellarke shippers and dude-type fans. Take that rumor for what it’s worth.

I’ve also seen the belief there that the season six writer’s room is stocked with sci fi writers instead of teen drama writers to better execute his vision. I never checked to see if it was true or not, but the rumor is that the heavy turnover that’s been fairly standard for the show has cranked up so high he had to bring back an early series writer (Kim Shumway) just to have anyone in the room who had worked with these characters before. I’d love to know which seasons he told them to watch to get a feel for the characters and how much weight Kim’s opinion was given. If I were walking into that job cold to start work on Book Two I’d assume that seasons 1-4 were backstory and give a lot more weight to the characterizations shown in season five.

My personal feeling on character arc is that it works best in a tv show when the writers know when a certain actor is quitting or being written out. Finn had an arc. Jasper had an arc. Everyone else has changed over time in response to circumstances. You can look at Octavia as having multiple stages like a wave, but you can’t really evaluate the full evolution from “the girl under the floor” to who she is at the end until she has an end.

On growing up, I think that’s a lot of the pushback on Bellamy. Be careful what you wish for, fandom. They gave him an arc. He went from hot-headed boy to thoughtful man. It’s a good arc. It’s also less familiar thus all the “not my Bellamy” nonsense. I also suspect that when people talk about character arcs they don’t consider that arcs aren’t ongoing. They end. This is who Bellamy is now.

I do think it’s possible to have a good emotional growth story with an ongoing character, but when fandom disagrees on what the core traits of a character are then you end up with a lot of people complaining about who the person has become. Real life works the same way, but no one takes to the internet to scream that Uncle Bell just isn’t the same now that he’s stopped shooting people and instead focuses on what’s always been true like his ability to forgive and his need for/to love.

On JR’s success. We’re going into season six, and since most of the original cast will have signed five, six, or seven year contracts, this is the time when actors can start dropping out. On one hand, it’s steady work, only a few months per year, and convention money is good. On the other, Ricky made it sound like a hell hole BTS. I’ve seen references to other unpleasant rumors, but I haven’t chased after those rabbits.

I’d really love to know if the show can survive without Clarke. As a plot driven show I know it could, but changing out the lead rarely goes over well with viewers and the permanent death of the hope of Bellarke would probably be the end for some fans. They’ve had a lot of opportunities to make it not a Clarke-centric show, and I think they considered testing that with season five but ultimately they still kept her as the center point around which the rest of the show rotates.

Did we ever get an explanation for why they started filming late?

#fandom #meta #writing

4 notes · View notes

suilinbride · 5 years

Text

Well, I didn’t See That Coming, and That Was Petty As Hell (Being Banned From A Pagan Dating Facebook Group)

So yeah, I was recently banned from a Pagan dating group on Facebook. What did I do to deserve being banned from said group? I was banned for the most petty shit I have ever read and experienced in the past half a year or so. Please, let me try to explain what happened a little bit.

So, despite still being only seperated from my former wife, with the whole divorce process being completely stalled at this point, I’ve been trying to put myself out there a little bit, meet new people, see if I can find someone special enough to start some kind of relationship with. Trust me, it hasn’t been easy thus far, nor has it worked out anywhere close to how I hoped or even expected it to.

If some of you are wondering why the divorce process has stalled out completely at this point, it’s quite simple actually. Both my former wife and I are mostly blind, on our country’s form of disability benefits, there are two diffrent countries worth of laws to take into consideration, and things are just a hot mess because of it. I mean the process is straight forward, at least on my end. All I have to do is fill out my end of the paperwork, send it off to my former wife, let her fill out her half of the paperwork, allow it all to be process, and boom it’s done with and we’re finally divorced. Hell, the paperwork will even be delivered and processed completely free of charge, because we’re both on disability benefits. Problem, however, is finding a lawyer, or in this case legal aid, that will actually help me fill out my half of the paperwork. I’ve basically been playing phone tag with them since 2016.

Thankfully my former wife and I are still friends at the end of our marriage. Not too many people can say the same thing.

I know that a lot of people tend to wait until the whole divorce thing has been done and dealt with, before trying to move on with their lives on a romantic and relationship level, but I honestly don’t know when it will be finialized. Hell, it could take another year or two at this point. So I started trying to date again about a year or so ago.

Okay, time to fast forward to what happened here recently with a Pagan themed dating group I found on Facebook. I joined said group because I thought it would be interesting to meet and possibly start a relationship with someone who practices some kind of spirituality that I do, even if only own the most vaguest of similarities.

I mean, some people just end up being weirded out by the whole Fairy Work, Spirit Work, God Spousery, or even Devotional Pagan/Polytheism thing. It happens.

However, I didn’t even last a single day on the group once I joined.

Following the rules of the group, I ended up posting an introduction post, talking a bit about myself, sharing a whole host of diffrent things that I think someone I’m going to interact with to see if there’s anything special there should know about me. I also added what I was looking for in a potential partner, and shared some of the important things about myself that someone needs to know up front before even thinking about dating me. Like the fact that I’m mostly blind. Or the fact that I’m bigender. Or the fact that I’m still in the seperated stage of my finished previous marrage.

I mean, I’m a very open and honest person about myself, especially when I feel someone needs to know something important up front, so they can make up their own minds. You know what I mean?

Well apparently that kind of approach was a no no in this group, as one of the moderaters sent me a message through Facebook’s instant messaging system and tried to get me to shorten my introduction post by what seemed like 90 percent. That particular moderator also felt like the kind of information that I was sharing about myself, the kind of information I believe people should know up front, was the kind of thing that should only be shared with after you started a relationship with...What the fuck? Okay, but what if you do start a relationship with someone, like they think should be done first, and you go ahead and share that important kind of information....like the fact that you’re bigender, and the person you are dating turns out to be someone completely straight and thus is not attracted to someone of the same gender, even if only on some level. That kind of thing can turn into a awkward train wreck pretty quickly.

Now, at the same time I was dealing with this moderator in the insant messaging feature on Facebook, I was also interacting with another moderator in the comment section of my introduction post. Apparently this particular moderator had a problem with me not posting a selfie as part of my introduction post. Which is weird as the rules of the group clearly states that posting selfies, while encouraged, is not mandatory.

Now, I have problems with various aspects of Facebook. I’m unable to post images to Facebook from my computer, most of the time anyway, due to my laptop being faulty from the moment I got it, to Facebook having a habit of interacting with and co-opperating with the screen reader I use on the computer in a very poorly, sometimes nonexistant manner.

And then of course I have another set of problems trying to post pictures to Facebook from my IPhone a lot of the time. My current phone was damaged, severely mind you, during the middle of a thunderstorm while attempting to update, back in late 2016 or early 2017. And while it has mostly been fixed and works mostly fine at this point, it has a habit to act and react in weird and chaotic ways at times. Like not allowing me to post pictures to Facebook half the time.

So I tried to explain to the moderator in the comment section of my introduction post tthat I was blind, using a screen reader, and was having problems uploading photos to Facebook, from either method, for several reasons.

And that moderator wasn’t buying at all. Turns out that moderator is completely blind, the wife of the moderator I’m also conversing with through Facebook’s instant messaging, and she’s decided to talk down to me in a very patronizing kind of way.

One of the first rules of being blind or visually impaired that anyone needs to know and understand is that everyone who is blind and visually impaired are going to be different. We’re going to be different due to different eye conditions or methods of losing our eyesight, to being different due to using different kinds of technology, reacting to those kinds of technology in different ways, and finding different ways of being accessible or making things accessible. There is literally no such thing as a one size fits all kind of concept in the land of the blind. And anyone who tries to promote such a thing is either lying, doesn’t know what they are talking about, or are being intentionally hostile on some level. Of course, a lot of people, corperations at the top of such a list, keep trying to come up with a one size fits all solution to various aspects of the blind and visually impaired community. It’s absolute failure waiting to happen, I’m telling you.

So all of my attempts at explaining my situation and the problems I’m having at posting a selfie is not being believed, and the completely blind moderator is starting to get irritated that I’m not just following her instructions, or her example for that matter, and thus stops replying to me. Fair enough, I found her attempt at helping me useless anyway.

Next thing I know, I receive one final message from the moderator I’m chatting with through instant messaging. He asks me if I’m going to follow his advice or not, and I instantly reply to him, telling him that I’m not going to follow his advice and that I found his advice problematic.

Next thing I know, I’m instantly banned from the group and blocked by all of the moderators from the group, even the half dozen or so others I never talked to in the first place.

I later found out from a friend of mine who was also trying to see if she could meet someone from that group that the two moderators basically started talking trash about me not five minutes after I got banned from the group. Apparently I was a good example of what happens to not following the awesome and never wrong advice and/or instructions from the two moderators who created and who own the group outright. Said friend tried to defend me but was banned from the same group as well.

I’m still a little upset about the whole thing, because I truely want to try and meet new people and hopefully find someone special to start dating again at some point in the future. I have since found a different Pagan focused dating group on Facebook, though I taking my time in posting any kind of introduction post on there. I’d like to try and see if I can meet other single and/or interested Pagans elsewhere. Who knows what may come in the future.

I just hate being banned from a group like that, regardless of how petty the reasons were. That kind of thing never looks, nor sound good. It makes me feel bad.

#Personal Life #Relationships #Dating Game #Online Dating Services #Pagan Dating #Facebook #Dating Groups on Facebook #Petty reasons for Being Banned #Online Dating Websites

1 note · View note

alastaircarstairsdefenselawyer · 6 years

Text

Runaways Comics Reading Guide

So, you wanna read Runaways, huh? Maybe the wait for season 2 is taking too long and you’re desperate for content or you heard that this amazing series was revived last September. Whatever the reason, you're in luck, because I sold my soul to Brian K Vaughn and all of his characters when I was 12!

You're also in luck because, compared to some other comic book series, Runaways is a little less confusing to figure out. Now, it seems a bit daunting at first, but the series is easily digestible, and you could easily get through all the comics in a couple days if you had a lot of free time. However, if you don't want to read their smaller arcs, I will note which ones are alright to skip. Here's my self determined reading order:

Runaways- Volume 1 (18 issues): must-read! Duh, this is where the story starts! The TV show takes off from here, but fair warning, the comics are radically different from the show (understandably, tv shows and comic books are much different mediums with different capabilities, but that's a different post). This is where you get to know our gang and the conflict with their parents, which is pretty important because the backstories are a lot different than in the show.

Runaways- Volume 2 (30 issues): vitally important, even if it will rip you apart inside and crush all of your dreams. At least through issue 24. After issue 24, our Lord BKV left, so some people regard the rest of the series as trash (tbh joss whedon is trash sooo). I guess from issue 25 onward, it's not all that important to read them, but I did and I would.

Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways (4 issues): nonessential to any plot, but I’m Young Avengers trash as much as I am Runaways trash, so I loved it. You may find it a bit boring if you’re not familiar with the Young Avengers. Note: this limited series takes place in the middle of Runaways Vol 2, I think in between #24 and #25. Since there’s no important plot, it doesn’t matter if you read it then, but definitely don’t read it before volume 2 to avoid spoilers.

Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers (3 issues): this one actually DOES take place between v2 and v3! like the other crossover, it’s not essential to the plot of Runaways. If you’re not familiar with the Young Avengers, you probably won’t understand what’s happening. As a Young Avengers fan, though, I loved it!

Runaways- Volume 3 (14 issues): like I said, most people find these ones to be throwaway comics, but personally I would read literally any content with these characters so like,, yeah. You should read V3 if you're going to read the Runaways arcs in Daken and Avengers Academy.

Daken: The Dark Wolverine- Issues #17-19: not necessary to read at all, maybe a lil interesting if you read Vol 3 Runaways bc it ends on a cliffhanger and this is the only time in comic canon where it's addressed, even in the vaguest way possible ("yeah, this character got hit by a fucking car. But they're fINE. Just pErFeCT.")

Avengers Academy- Issues #27-28: must read if you read Vol 3! You can either read the whole series just for the Runaways arc, or just read these 2 issues with the Runaways (which is what I did, but I went back and read the whole series bc I loved the characters, and they will appear again in a moment!) read for some wholesome dino fun (not,, but.. ehhhhh angst w a happy ending???)

Avenger's Arena (18 issues): battle royale meets teenage superheroes. A bunch of teens w powers (incl. Nico, chase, darkhawk, and some people from Avengers Academy) are thrown onto an island designed to kill them & make them kill each other. I understand that this kind of gore isn't what everyone looks for in a comic book and it's a bit childish, but I found it entertaining. Not necessary to read if you want to pick up the new series, but its events are referenced.

Avengers Undercover (10 issues): I didn't enjoy these that much (actually I probably spent more time ranting about these comics than anything, I really didn't enjoy them at all), but they are a continuation of avengers arena so you should probably read them if you read AA. Completely nonessential to understanding anything in any other comics ever.

Runaways- Volume 4 (4 issues): to be honest, I never actually read these. I tried, but the characters aren't even in it?? Why is a part of runaways??? The world may never know. Maybe if you understand more about Battleworld then it's more entertaining, but I was completely lost and confused.

A-Force- Volume 1 (5 issues): like Vol 4 Runaways, this takes place on battleworld, so like Vol 4, I was very lost and confused. However Nico is a main character and all the characters are totally badass and amazing and I have officially adopted Singularity so yeah? Also America Chavez is a BAMF. I think I'd recommend reading them? Sooo many bi vibes (bibes?) from Nico. since this takes place on a different world, it's not really relevant, but it sets up A-Force Vol 2.

A-Force- Volume 2 (10 issues): takes place back in the same world as the original runaways comics. I don't wanna spoil anything but there's more badass bisexual Nico. All in all, the series isn't necessary to understand any Runaways plots, but they are briefly mentioned in the new comics. They're also super awesome and if you like Nico you should definitely read them!!

Avengers AI (12 issues)- I've gotta be honest I never particularly cared for Victor so I didn't read these, what happens is probably important to the new Runaways but like,, I figured it out so you can too. I mean, I'll get around to reading them one of these days, I'm sure they're great comics but ya victors a ho

Runaways- Volume 5 (9 issues thus far): the new series!! Some characters come back from the dead and The Band Gets Back Together!!!!!!

I'd say if you just want to read the new series, the only ones completely vital are the Runaways comics, up to Vol 2 #24. However, all the rest are amazing (albeit frustrating sometimes) comics that I highly recommend you read!! They add a lot more depth to the characters and their experiences. I’m sure I’m missing some comics that they’ve appeared in, but I think these are all of the important ones? Correct me if I’m wrong!

Okay, okay this all sounds amazing. I'm so ready! How do I read them???

First of all, no one is ever ready. Second of all.. you have a few options, not all of them everyone will like

Buy them. Either at marvel.com, on their app, or at a comic book store.

Take them out from the library. I've never actually done this but once comics have been released issue by issue, they're then published as a volume. I'd assume some libraries might have these consolidated comics.

Read them online. I know, I know, this is bad. But realistically, not everyone can afford to buy every single comic, and not everyone has access to a library where they can take them out. HOWEVER, I'm begging you not to use this option for the new comics. Marvel can (and HAS in the past) cancel the series if it's not making enough money. Each issue is $4USD. Every issue that you can buy counts. If you don't have access to a comic book store where you can buy them (I get it, I live in morocco), you can buy a digital copy online on Marvel's website or their app. Personally, I only own one random copy from Runaways Vol 2 that I found in a comic book store in Madrid, but I own every single new comic either hard copy, digitally, or both. Please, please, please support these comics whichever way you can!! Now that I've made my plea, you can find all of the comics online here.

I hope maybe my rambling helped you somehow. I absolutely adore these characters and these stories. Feel free to send me a message if you have any questions or want to talk about the comics! Happy reading, and welcome to the abyss.

#runaways #marvel's runaways #runaways comics #chase stein #karolina dean #nico minoru #gert yorkes #molly hayes #molly hernandez #alex wilder #deanoru #gertchase #runagays

14 notes · View notes

ohnojustimagine · 6 years

Text

Bring Me Out

Drew Gulak/Reader 2435 words; um… there’s some smut? sort of angst? general weirdness with a happy ending, maybe? fuck knows, seriously.

Inspired by Drew’s match with Tony last week.

***

You’ve worked for WWE for a while, though up until now you’ve been based at corporate headquarters, only attending shows occasionally. But your promotion to the social media team means that you’re going to be on the road with the rest of the circus that’s the cruiserweight crew, and so far, you love it.

The weird hours, the travelling, the adrenaline of being backstage… you’ve never been one for the nine to five, so you’re pretty sure this is going to suit you down to the ground. And on your first night, Drew goes out of his way to introduce himself to you, which you appreciate. “Drew,” he says, shaking your hand firmly. “Drew Gulak.”

“Nice to meet you,” you say politely.

“I just wanted to welcome you to the 205 Live team,” he tells you. “We run a tight ship around here, and I like to think of myself as the captain of that ship.”

“Great,” you reply, a little too brightly, somewhat surprised that the nerdy, officious persona he effects in the ring is apparently not just an act.

“So if you need anything, anything at all, just let me know.”

“I’ll do that,” you say.

“Good,” he replies, nodding, and for a second you think he’s going to say something else, as if he’s hesitating, but then he hands you a GULAK pin and gives you a thumbs up before striding off.

You stand there, watching him walk away, getting the vaguest impression that you’ve maybe missed something, but you shake your head, dismissing the feeling.

***

You don’t see him again until next week, when he approaches you in catering, standing beside your chair as you sit, sipping a cup of tea.

“You settling in okay?” he asks.

“All good,” you answer. “Getting the hang of things.”

“You know,” he says, shifting awkwardly, leaning against the table for a second but then straightening up, “I wanted to say that if you ever need someone to ride with, or just talk to about things, then I’m your man.” He pauses for a second, but then goes on, saying, “I know this place can take some getting used to.”

“Well,” you say, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“And if you ever…” he coughs slightly, and oh god, you think, because he’s blushing. “If you ever,” he goes on, “want to, you know, get a coffee or something…”

He’s hitting on you, you suddenly realize. And he’s doing it in the most endearingly inept way possible, which is actually kind of charming.

But he’s not your type, not at all, so you say, holding up your mug, trying to be nice about it, “I drink tea.”

“Oh,” he replies, not getting the message, “tea, then. Any hot beverage, or just a… beverage in the general sense of the word.”

“I’m fine for now,” you say, kindly, wanting to let him down as gently as you can.

“Yes.” He nods. “Well, that is indeed okay.”

He’s so accepting of it, not trying to persuade you or argue the point, and you’re grateful for that, at least, and you don’t want him to feel like he can’t ever speak to you again, so you ask him a few questions about what he has planned for his PowerPoint tonight.

His face lights up, and he sits down next to you and talks at some length about the extra-special slides he’s prepared. And he’s so engagingly enthused about it that you find yourself listening, sincerely interested.

“Sorry,” he says, after a while, stopping himself.

“No,” you reply with a smile. “I don’t mind.”

***

And while Drew might not be your type, there are plenty of guys backstage who are. You’re a big fan of bad boys and risk takers, and there’s no shortage of those among the talent. But you’re careful to remain professional, always keep your distance, not wanting to jeopardize your job. In fact, the only person you end up becoming genuinely friendly with is Drew. Which is partly because you don’t find him even remotely attractive, and partly because he’s so fucking persistent. And not in a creepy sense, because he’s definitely able to take ‘no’ for an answer, but just in the way he takes the time to look out for you, always check in and see how you’re doing.

You have to admit, as the months pass, that he’s started to interest you. Because you’re beginning to suspect that there’s far, far more to him than that superficial veneer of uptight nerdiness that he presents to the world. You’ve never seen him let that front slip, not around you, at least, but it’s your experience that no one’s that tightly-wound unless they’re working very, very hard to contain themselves, doing everything in their power to control something that is by its very nature uncontrollable.

And the thing is, you muse, is that you have seen that side of Drew. He’s always been a tough wrestler, of course he has, and back in the day you know he had quite the vicious streak, but even in the ring he’s now mostly pretty methodical in his actions, taking his opponents down beat by beat.

Except on those rare occasions when he really, truly lets go, and when he does, the way he fights is something else entirely, something terrifyingly beautiful.

You’re lying alone in your hotel bed, unable to sleep as you think, and so you grab your tablet, opening up the network app and going through the older 205 shows until you find the one you’re looking for. It’s back when Drew was feuding with Mustafa Ali, the night Mustafa was supposed to have a match with Tony. You watch as Drew attacks him out of nowhere, and the sheer violence of it is startling. He pulls Mustafa up by the back of his neck, smashing his head into the ring post, and there’s something almost sexual about the pleasure he seems to be taking in it, relishing Mustafa’s suffering in a way that makes you shiver.

You slide one hand under the covers and inside your underwear, stroking your clit, slowly at first, but then faster as Drew takes off his jacket, his face alight with sadistic appetite, setting Mustafa up for Tony’s knee strike.

And after you come, you begin to wonder to yourself, about what it might take to bring out that other side of Drew, and not just in the ring.

You drift off into sleep, picturing Drew standing over you, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and telling you you’ve been a bad, bad girl.

***

No one’s happy when Enzo joins 205 Live, but you can see Drew’s trying to make the best of it. You watch carefully as Enzo tries to force him into a role that doesn’t suit him, even getting him to participate in the beatdown on Tony, but you can see Drew’s heart’s not in it, that he’s only going through the motions.

Afterwards, you wait backstage, finishing up the social media posts for the evening. “I brought you some tea,” Drew says, appearing beside you, handing you a cup.

“You’re so sweet,” you say. He beams at you, and you sigh softly to yourself, wistful.

***

And then everything changes, with Enzo gone like he wasn’t ever even there, vanished as if by magic and strictly never to be mentioned again.

Drew cuts his hair. “You like it?” he asks, and you nod, reaching up to touch it, stroking your fingertips over the close-cropped sides, feeling the slight, soft prickle of it.

“I like it,” you say.

“Good,” he replies, and he’s looking at you, and while he’s obviously pleased by your reaction, he’s not smiling, not quite. There’s something different about him, and it’s not just the hair. His posture is different, you’re sure, the way he’s carrying himself, that stick-up-the-ass thing he usually has going on somehow transformed. He seems taller, you think.

And then he does smile, broad and bright, and as he walks away, you stare after him, curious.

***

Drake’s appointed as 205 GM, and Drew’s seemingly his normal self, busy trying to impress the new boss. But Drake isn’t as easy to fool as Enzo was.

You’re backstage, taking a few pictures for instagram, observing as the team films a segment with Drew and Tony and Drake. And Drake’s harsh on both of them, but what he says to Drew… you wince as you listen, aware of exactly how much it’s going to hurt him.

Later, you find him, sitting alone in catering with a cold-looking cup of coffee, gazing into empty space, still visibly glowering.

You stand beside him for a minute before you speak. “You know,” you finally say, casually, though every word is considered, calculated for maximum effect, “for what it’s worth, I think Drake has a point.”

“That I’m a goof?” Drew says, bitterly. “A joke?”

“You’ve never been a joke,” you tell him, and you mean it. For all his PowerPoints and protest signs, Drew’s an amazing wrestler, and anyone who knows anything has never doubted that. “But maybe…” you say, letting your voice trail off suggestively.

“Maybe what?”

You shrug. “Things are changing around here, and sometimes change can be a good thing.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he turns his head to look up at you. His new hair has fallen a little at the front, and you run your fingers through it, lifting it back up off his forehead. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” you say, concentrating on what you’re doing, frowning to yourself, “would it be okay if I rode with you next week after the show?”

As you step back, Drew’s hair is perfectly in place, and he gives you a strange, searching look. But he only says, “Sure. Of course you can.”

“Great,” you reply.

***

A week later, you watch the match from backstage, holding your breath, because Drew’s everything you knew he could be and yet still so much more; way beyond even your wildest, most dangerous dreams. The bell rings, and he’s announced as the winner, and you know exactly what you want.

***

He waits for you, like he said he would, helps you put your bags in the trunk of the car, holds the door for you. “Congratulations,” you say.

“Thanks,” he replies, almost absently, and you’ve only driven a few blocks before he pulls over into a dark, narrow side street and stops, turning off the engine.

He unfastens his seat belt, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t even look at you, staring straight ahead into the night.

So you unfasten your own seat belt, leaning across the space that separates you. You lick his ear, biting gently at the lobe, and you can feel his jaw clench tight, hear him breathe. “Did it feel good?” you whisper. “When you were hitting him?” You slide your hand slowly down his body, between his legs, feeling the thick outline of his cock through his pants, and he’s already hard. He’s probably been hard since the match, you think, and that’s so fucking hot you can hardly bear it.

He swallows, as you touch him, and reaches to move his seat back, just enough. “Yeah,” you say, exhaling the word, “it looked like it felt good.”

“I was watching,” you tell him, kissing his neck, unzipping his pants, taking out his cock. It’s warm and smooth under your hand, your fingers curling around it, thumb rubbing through the precome leaking from the head. “At the end, when you put the sleeper on him and he went limp in your hold like that, I was watching and I was so wet.”

He inhales, and you stroke him, up and down. “And god,” you say, “when you were holding up the belt, like you owned the whole fucking world, I thought I was going to come right then, just from seeing it.”

He makes a noise that sounds like pure, desperate need, and then his hand is on the back of your head, and he’s shoving your face down into his lap with enough force that you have to moan in delight, barely getting your mouth on him before he starts to come. But you suck, and swallow as he pushes up into your throat, taking him in as deep as you can.

And when he’s done, you sit up, wiping off your lips with the back of your hand.

“Sorry…” he says, shaking his head. “That was… inappropriate.”

“No,” you tell him. “That was good.”

He looks at you, and he doesn’t seem surprised. “That’s how you like it?”

“Yeah,” you say, simply. “It is.”

He nods to himself, slowly, as if he’s at last understanding something, and then adjusts his seat back into place, starting up the car.

About an hour later, he pulls over at a deserted rest stop and fucks you in the back seat, pinning your arms either side your head and thrusting into you so hard that you have to bite down on your lip to stop yourself from screaming when you come, because it’s just that good.

And another hour or so after that you arrive at your hotel and you’re barely even through the door before you’re both tearing off your clothes, kissing each other like you’re starving for it and Drew’s throwing you down on the bed, his face between your legs, eating you out with a enthusiasm that’s so vigorously urgent that you feel like you might just levitate right off the fucking mattress. And he doesn’t stop, not for a second, not until you’ve come twice and you’re not sure you remember how to breathe.

“Damn,” you finally say, pulling him up by his hair, kissing the taste of yourself off his mouth. “I could get used to this.”

“What?” Drew replies, settling himself down beside you. “The new me?”

“Yeah, no.” You shake your head. “I don’t think this is the new you, I think this is the real you.”

“And you like the real me?”

You grin at him. “I like him a lot,” you say, running your hand over his chest. “Maybe you should let him out more often.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, then goes on, thoughtful, “Maybe he could go to Wrestlemania, win the championship.”

“Now, that would be something.” You lean in, kissing him again, and you know that this is him, this is Drew, all of him.

And you don’t want anything but this, anyone but him.

#ohnojustwrites #drew gulak #drew gulak imagine #wwe imagine #sorry #but that match #with tony #was so good #STOP STARTING NEW THINGS #you fuckwit #honestly

137 notes · View notes

mysticsparklewings · 4 years

Photo

The Frustrated Introvert’s Dilemma

Well now, what do we have here? I'll go on record and say that yes, there is a specific event/topic that inspired this. But I'm not going to go into any more detail than that, because it's almost definitely going to come back to bite me nice and hard on the rear if I do. That's the unfortunate nature of our online-enabled world these days. That said, this actually happens to me a lot. Something will happen or I'll see a post (sometimes several posts all talking about the same thing) and I'll either have strong opinions on it or just otherwise be frustrated and want to share my two cents, and sometimes I really will go so far as to type out a Big Long Thing about it. Only, I think about it for a few seconds too long, and I end up deleting it. Because: What if the wrong person sees it? What if what I said gets taken out of context? What if I get labeled as [insert thing I don't want to be labeled as here]? What if I get in trouble some other way I haven't thought of? I don't have a very far reach, but I'd like to keep what I do have on good terms. But of course, deleting the post without posting it sort of misses the mark, and so normally I don't feel any better than I did before. But I rarely go back to it, since most of the time I either know or I think that I know posting my super-long (sometimes unpopular) opinion is only going to cause trouble I do NOT want to deal with. And thus, I'm better off keeping my mouth shut. Or, if I must, posting the vaguest-possible 1-2 sentences broadly touching on the subject. And that's where the caption, "Reasons Why I Don't Post Much" comes from. Aside from my art and the very rare things that make it past my "this is not a good idea to post" radar, especially on other social media that don't support long-form text like dA does, I'm usually fairly quiet. I am a "lurker" by nature, for the reasons above and because small talk kills me slowly. I'm sure I can't possibly be alone in this...whatever this is. This want to vent/rant/share your opinion but not being able to because you just don't want to deal with all the things that could possibly go wrong from doing so. So I made this little comic to expend my frustrations in the safest way I could think of. It gets the point across without nailing down a specific event/person/whatever. I haven't tried to make a comic in...in years. And the like 2 times I did, they were very simple and kinda dumb. (And I'm sure can still be found lurking in the depths of my gallery somewhere.) So hopefully this isn't too terrible. I tried to format it nicely so it's fairly clear and easy to read/follow, while still trying to keep it unique to me. (Or at least attuned to my own tastes.) I started with a rough traditional sketch of the four panels, done in a style similar to my Chibi Cards, which I use over on Twitter a lot these days. The character is, of course, supposed to be me, hence the purple hair, blue eyes, and black tank top. Fortunately, once the idea of doing a little "vent" comic came to mind, I was able to pretty quickly come up with a clear mental image/plan of what I wanted and what I would need to get the point across as simply as possible. And simplicity was a must because I knew I wouldn't be able to give this nice clean lines digitally unless I wanted to actually rip my hair out in the process. You can read the full details in my Ongoing Saga journal, but suffice to say I've been trying some things with my current not-Cintiq set up and Jesus Christ is it not becoming more and more aggravating. The biggest issue I dealt with here was the lack of precision, hence the messy, messy, messy lines, and the closer I got to completion with more layers involved, the worse staggering/lagging I also had to deal with. Obviously, I eventually got through it, but I am telling you guys I am so ready for a better tablet solution it's not even funny anymore. Anyway. I roughly traced my sketches to get the lines, then made the centering lines and rearranged things slightly, since my sketch wasn't perfectly centered or squared or anything. Then I expanded the canvas so I could add the frame. Then I moved on to coloring, and once again, for the sake of my sanity, I stuck with simple, flat, imprecise coloring. And I had to do it by hand since my messy lines mean the magic wand tool wanted to select about five times more area than it needed to when I tried to use it to just "grab" the sections I needed. My color choices were fairly simple. I know what colors I naturally am, and it made sense to me to make the background my "Mystic hue," since my walls are that color in real life, and it's just kind of my on-brand, go-to color now. The main colors I had to decided on were the desk and the computer screen. I went with a darker brown for the desk, hoping for a little extra contrasting, and the computer screen I kinda just went with what felt right. Picking fonts was a bit of an adventure. I wanted something relatively easy to read, but with a little be of extra flair than just Comic Sans or Generic Plain Computer text number 3,497. And I think this one hits a pretty nice place between something more computery and a handwriting look. I did have to use different fonts for the *type* 's on the second panel and for the caption/my name at the top to get the look/effect I was going for, though. It's not much and far from my best work. But at least it's a way to sort-of get my feelings out into the world. To know that I could at least do this one thing, even if I can't do anything else to vent my frustrations because other options will not end well. At the very, very least, I hope maybe somebody out there can relate or gets a small laugh out of it. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble | Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

0 notes

rospeaks · 7 years

Text

not!fic: myriad of subtleties

@firebyfire @silverynight -- so milarca ( @gramanderlove ) and i saw your post on grindelwald/newt, where newt falls in love with grindelwald!graves without realizing who it is he’s in love with until it’s too late! it gave us a lot of feels and is truly lovely

READ ORIGINAL POST HERE

we ended up thinking about how the story might continue, and ended up with some gramander and crying in the end. (very sorry if gramander is not yall’s thing, but the ending for yall’s thread was just so sad!)

Anyway, behind the cut: approx 4k words of Newt/Graves with background of Grindelwald/Newt with obsessive!Grindelwald)

M: I want Newt to be a wreck. I want Grindelwald to try and comfort him and he just screams at him. Because it's been too long and he wants to leave. he knows it's a miracle he's still alive and he knows he should be complacent - an obedient little pet - but surely...... if Grindelwald loved him then he would let him go?

R: God like. If they got attacked and Grindelwald just took Newt's suitcase, shoved it in his arms, told him to run.

"You're letting me go?" Newt asks, wonderingly

"Not even a little," Grindelwald says darkly. "I'll find you again. You'll never be rid of me, not that easily."

(M: That's a perfect way to 'end' it. Let Newt go but let him know he'll never be free of him. he checks up on him occasionally, Sends him messages. It drives Newt nuts, to near insanity or sickness. He wished he'd never stepped foot in America, for all the good it's done him)

R: Also, the awful taunt that comes with passing the real Percival Graves on the street (the wizard is sans memories, sans everything that made him Director, and though Newt aches at the sight of his face, a few day's observation makes it abundantly clear that the man that Newt loves is not the one he is watching now.)

M: Oh no.... so Newt was in love with the Graves Grindelwald made him out to be and not what the real Graves was actually like?

R: The base is there, I imagine. There's the potential. Perhaps under the right circumstances, in the right moment, something might spark between Newt and the original Graves. But the things that made Newt love him were the things that Grindelwald did. The focus, the longing, the way he seemed to care singularly about Newt's concerns.

M: Maybe Newt would want to keep his distance, but then there's also a drive in him that tells him, but what if they could make it work?)

It just hurts for Newt so much. The crushing weight of falling for someone and having the rug pulled out from under him. He wouldn't trust anyone for a long time

The agony of knowing the dark wizard is watching him would taint everything he did. Until Grindelwald was killed and even then it would hurt Newt because even tho he's a mass murderer, Newt loved him once, and it twists at his heart and makes him feel positively ill at the thought, but it happened and he can't go back in time and change it

R: Newt and Graves fuck once without exchanging names. Graves does it, he imagines, because he finds Newt attractive in some way, which is heartening. Newt does it for less savory reasons. He does it to see if he can fuck Grindelwald out of him, does it to spite Grindelwald—let Graves have this first, let Graves trespass where Newt has not allowed Grindelwald to even imagine. It's agony.

Afterward, Graves sits up from the bed, lights a smoke at the window, looks over Newt's sweaty heaving body with eyes that are so dark that Newt is afraid that he's been tricked again—that surely this is just Grindelwald once more, hiding behind a familiar face and teasing Newt with freedom.

"Do you..." Graves begins. Then stops. Licks over the front of his teeth. He rephrases it into a statement, rather than a question. "You know me, from before."

M: Newt looks so dark and bitter

R: Newt avoids his stare. "What makes you say that?" he says, but cannot avoid the ugly twist of his mouth. Of course he would get caught out. Of course.

"You don't kiss like a stranger," Graves says.

"But," Graves adds, finally breaking off his stare to grind the stub of his cigarette into the windowsill. "That said, you didn't seem to be kissing me either, so perhaps you didn't know me at all."

Newt wants to spit out that Graves has no idea how right he is. He wants to shout that Graves has no idea what name he almost said when he came.

The name he had to swallow back and smother into the sheets.

Regardless, Graves does not seem to care, and why would he—living like he is, on the fringes of Europe’s wizarding society, aware of Grindelwald's name and politics but not how deeply he's connected to Graves' past.

Graves waves a hand at the pile of their clothes on the floor, and without a word, Newt's items separate and fold themselves, suddenly clean with a silent scourgify. Graves casts his own clothing to a little hamper and hikes his low slung sleep pants higher as he wanders into the kitchen nook.

"There's a shower if you want it,” he says. “Breakfast too. You can stay, but whatever it was that happened last night, it won't happen again." and then months pass where Newt just lives with Graves, learning him in ways that he never did Grindelwald.

M: Newt staring at Graves with dark eyes all the time, trying to see something of the Graves he once knew. Maybe getting a glimpse of it sometimes. Then Graves starts to warm to him—this strange man who stumbled into his life rambling about dark wizards and dark secrets—despite himself

Because Newt is still fundamentally himself, if more hardened around the edges. But he survived WWI and he can survive this. His eyes are a little dimmer but his will to live and survive and thrive is fierce

He stays with Graves in his little shack somewhere in Europe, on the edges of society. He's not sure if he'll ever be ready to go back. Newt is perfectly happy hanging around. He never liked the city anyway, and now he has even more reason to hate it. And as Graves gets more and more attached to the man who gets the groceries and keeps house and maybe starts a garden while tending to his creatures, the thought of going back to work in New York at MACUSA gets even more absurd.

And Newt follows Graves' lead where intimacy is concerned. He knows he's the interloper here. Graves didn't ask for any of this. But then, Newt himself hardly had any say in falling for a dark wizard when he was in disguise as a charming man of the law. It's all so complicated and confusing, it makes him cry sometimes. Great heaving sobs that leave him feeling part empty and part cleansed. He walks and explores the land around the house. He disappears for days and weeks at a time but always comes back. He always comes back. And sometimes Graves goes to the village and fucks a pretty, willing girl, but he can't forget the softness of Newt's body or the pretty way he cried out when the pleasure was too much.

And he starts to like it when Newt comes back. He finds himself waiting for him and he knows it's insane to get attached but there's just something about Newt that clings to him like honey. The boy is sweetness and light and as the months go on he can't help but see that, see the light return somewhat to his eyes. He helps with Newt's creatures and Newt appreciates him but tries not to get attached himself..... but they both know deep down that it's too late for that. If Graves didn't want him there he would have shoved him out the front door and yelled at him to never come back. But he didn't.

R: Graves can tell that Newt has been burned by previous lovers. The way that Newt looks at him but also flinches away from him... it's telling. Worse still is the way that Newt is aware of himself, actively seems to fight his own instinct.

He tries to gentle Newt. Soft touches telegraphed early are accepted easily. They have Newt melting into his palm, even when they both know that Graves has no intention of giving him anything further.

"Why don't you tell me about him?" Graves says one evening.

Newt plays dumb. He does that a lot. "Who?"

"The one who hurt you so badly."

Newt's mouth does that twist again, that tight lipped grimace that says more than Newt's words ever will. "He was a lot like you," he says. "And very different from you, at the same time."

So Newt tell Graves about Grindelwald, in the vaguest of terms possible. No names. No physical description at all, where he can help it . Newt's never let himself think of Grindelwald in this way, if he's honest with himself—like an ex-boyfriend, an old lover, like someone that used to know and adore him.

He's always tried to put Grindelwald very firmly into the category of liar, abuser, betrayer, murderer. It had never been enough to help Newt resolve himself about how his gut wrenched every time he even half acknowledged what he felt for Grindelwald.

Graves nods in all the right areas, but does not comment. A part of Graves is very worried that the man Newt is speaking of was him—the him that he'd been before he'd lost his memories. Because there are times when Newt looks at him, looks at Graves' face and seems confused.

What if he was this man that Newt talks about, what if he's the reason for this pain?

The first kiss they have after... after everything... is almost apologetic.

Graves, fingertips trembling against Newt's jaw, whispers, "You're welcome here, for as long as you like."

As if Newt has not already stayed for half a year.

"This can be your home too," Graves says, as if Newt has not already started taking over part of the kitchen to help prepare the food for his creatures. As if they don't share a bed or meals or quiet moments in between. Newt wonders at this, at the frightened hopefulness in Graves' demeanor and it’s hard echo in Newt's bones.

Perhaps this is the fundamental difference between Graves and Grindelwald. They both love Newt. They both care for him. Ground down to the essentials, they even have some of the same mannerisms, the same turns of speech. The way they look at Newt, startlingly similar, every time. Graves is as capable as Grindelwald at killing in the name of a cause he believes in. But where Grindelwald held fast to his possession of Newt, denied him escape at every turn, Graves sees Newt's hesitation and simply nods.

"He'll come after me," Newt explains. "I wouldn't want you to get hurt."

"It's okay," Graves says. "You don't have to tell me why."

"But it's true—he's—"

Graves holds up a hand to stave off further excuses. "It's okay," he stresses. Cups Newt's cheeks, kisses him softly. "Run if you have to, but know that you can always come back here if you need to."

Newt runs—for thousands of miles, through dozens of countries.

For months, for a year—for three years.

He doesn't write to Graves, does his best not to think of him even. He keeps abreast of what Grindelwald has been up to in Europe, but even halfway around the world, he never truly feels free of him. He's certain that Grindelwald has had some way of keeping an eye on him all this time.

The war gets worse. There's talk that Dumbledore will eventually duel him.

Before then, Newt risks a final trip back.

A part of him wants to look Grindelwald in the eye before watching the other wizard lose everything. In truth, he just wants to come home.

Graves' home is obliterated.

The slim shack remains a half-standing pile of rickety boards, stripped of anything valuable by raiders. The little garden that Graves had so carefully fostered was a black scorch. Everything that Newt had come to associate with warmth and happiness, with love, had been utterly and ruthlessly cut down to the foundations.

He searches for signs—anything that might tell him what happened. The feel of dark magic is strong in the air, but there are no bones, no body—not even a blood stain on the concrete. Newt's grateful for what little hope that gives him, but with it comes a fresh wave of anxiety. What if Grindelwald had found Graves, captured him again? What if Grindelwald was, at this very moment, torturing him? Or—and this Newt thought was the most likely—erasing Graves' memories again, removing every happy moment he'd had with Newt from his mind?

What if Graves really is... dead?

Newt spends the next month fighting alongside the Ministry with grief as his fuel. He never should have left. Even with Grindelwald on his tail, Newt should have savored every last moment he could wring out of Graves' life before it was snatched away from them. Who knows how much longer they might have had? A year, a month? Even a single day would have been worth fighting for. There's much to be done. Muggles that need protecting. Followers of Grindelwald that need to be subdued. Newt finds himself very busy indeed.

At one point, he's achingly aware of how close they are to Grindelwald's headquarters. Grindelwald is somewhere in this city. The awareness makes Newt a tad sloppy, especially after a week of working with little sleep.

He slips, nearly falls off the edge of a building. Someone catches him. It's Graves, handsome as the day that Newt left him.

"Darling," Graves says sweetly, all crooked smile and charm.

Horror dawns on Newt's face.

"I told you that you'd never be rid of me."

As soon as Newt is back on his feet, he jerks away from Grindelwald. "What did you do to him?"

Grindelwald's smile broadens. "Him?"

"You know who I'm talking about! Percival Graves! Where is he? Did you kill him?"

Grindelwald dismisses Newt's questions with a wave. "He doesn't matter anymore. You had your dalliance and I allowed it. Consider it a gift."

Newt lashes out without thinking—slaps his hand hard across Grindelwald's face. The mask Grindelwald wears melts away—dark hair giving way to blonde, Graves' features easting subtly into Grindelwald's natural features. He looks much older than Newt remembers.

"Now, darling," he coaxes.

"Shut up!" Newt hisses, casting a hex that gets blocked. "I am not—" another hex, "your—" another, "DARLING!"

Rage boils over Grindelwald's face. He raises his wand—the elder wand—and Newt freezes, afraid.

A snap of magic sounds at Newt's elbow. A second snap behind Grindelwald. Newt gets the impression of Dumbledore's face as he confronts Grindelwald before Newt's suddenly swept away in a side-along apparition.

Newt sags in his rescuer's hold, relieved at being free of Grindelwald's presence.

Grindelwald's aura, his magic, everything about him had pressed in on Newt from all sides. Impossible to escape, and now he's on his own again and glad for it.

“So, that's him, huh?"

Newt shakes his head, clearing it of his dizziness. "What?"

"Your previous lover," his rescuer says. "I don't think I ever would have guessed Grindelwald, even if you had told me that he'd worn my face."

Newt looks up sharply, eyes widening as he takes in black robes with dragon leather vest-guard underneath. And then—Oh, Graves' face, softened with affection.

"I thought you might be dead," Newt whispers.

"I'm sorry," Graves says. "I would have told you, had I known you were here."

Newt shakes his head. He doesn't care that Graves hadn't known. It only matters that he is alive, that he is well, that he's here. He throws his arms around Graves' neck and hugs him tightly, kissing his ear and then his cheek and then his mouth with tearful happiness.

"Your house was destroyed," Newt says.

"I'll build a new one," Graves tells him.

"Your garden was burned."

"It can be replanted."

Newt nods, kisses Graves again—chaste and sweet. "Take me with you," he says. "Please."

Graves smiles, rests their foreheads together. "As if I would have you anywhere else."

("And my creatures, of course," Newt adds, more quietly, still crying. Graves laughs, "Of course, of course. Dougal can help with the garden.")

THE END

#gramander #newt scamander #percival graves #grindelnewt #gellert grindelwald #my fantastic beasts fic #gramanderlove #help us we didn't know what emotional depths we were touching

42 notes · View notes

sillyfudgemonkeys · 7 years

Text

How I want PQ2 to go down.

(note hade to retype this cause it got deleted in the middle of publishing somehow so yeah round two! 8U)

Ok so this is going to be part of a series of connecting posts on how I think certain games should go down. Things to note with this game is I’m thinking it’ll be P3PxP5, so yeah I know you’re probably thinking “*gasp* Spoilers?!” And no I will try to make this post as spoiler free as possible, I might allude to something but it’ll be really vague so that only people who played the game know what’s up. So yeah you’re ok if you haven’t played P5. Also I will do a separate post that is like a Q and A and it’ll explain my reasons as to why in more depth, but it’ll also be a very spoilery P5 post so yeah if you want spoilers for P5 stay tuned for a separate post. With that lets get started

Note before reading: I will be referring to FeMC as Hamuko, P3 Male MC as Minato, and P5MC as Akira (his manga name) in this, you can still name them later just for typing purposes I’m doing this. Also you should note that while I did type a main plot for this, and tbh I think it came out fairly well considering I’m not well versed in one of the mythos and I did that after 2 hours of research, it’s not the thing I’m really concerned about beyond it setting the stage for P3PxP5 to meet. So if you don’t like the main plot and think you have a better one I’d love to hear it!

Name of the game: PQ2: Oasis in the Abyss as @kazusakai came up with it (and i love it cause it fits so well! ;w;). It fits since P3P had Vision Quest/Desert of Doors, and P5 has a desert dungeon and a song called River in the Desert (DON’T LOOK UP THAT SONG’S LYRICS THO AS IT CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS).

Themes: We know P3’s themes, death yada yada. P5’s being fighting corruption and justice yada yada. There’s also going to be a big theme with deserts and things associated with that as well as oasis/rivers (hence the name). (note this is to keep in mind that I tried really hard to make the plot revolve around these specific themes so yeah)

Setting: Just like PQ2 it involves the whole ripping out of your timeline stuff from PQ, tho in this case it involves an alternate universe as it’s Hamuko instead of Minato (from what we can tell by the easter eggs in P5, P5 seems to be in the same universe as P3/4 but later in the timeline like 2016). Like with P3 in PQ it’s right around the time of their cancelled school festival that they get pulled out. With P5 it happens around their school festival too (maybe actually a little later as this way all characters are officially on your team, like Haru). The world they get pulled into might actually take the setting of P5’s school, with the dungeon portion actually being part of the Desert of Doors.

Main Plot: Ok so like PQ, there’s a mysterious duo. They have no memories (except for the vaguest of vague), can’t summon a Persona, look foreign (like Zen does, aka they have darker skin), look somewhere around the age of a 3rd year in high school or a 1st/2nd year in college (they don’t wear school uniforms so that’s why it’s hard to tell), and have to fight as a duo. The boy’s name is Seto (世登, means the world) and the girl’s name is Nori (義 means Righteousness/justice). The boy’s appearance: white hair (Seto means white in Javanese, not the mythos I’m using but still neat), red t shirt with a weird dog on it (note following the link will spoil my surprise 8U), his weapon is a book or staff that casts healing magic (he’s very similar to Rei’s role). His personality is very easy going and happy go lucky, fulfilling Rei’s role in that regard as well. Nori has long brownish hair, with a blue t shirt with a falcon like bird on it, she uses bows and arrows and uses offensive magic (similar to Zen). Her personality is more serious, but not to the same point as Zen, as she can still take a joke and goof around. There will be ship feels with Seto/Nori just like with Zen and Rei, tho it should be noted that Seto has a tendency to flirt with Haru, not that he understands why, but it makes Nori jealous (note she’s upset with Seto not Haru, she likes Haru) and Seto comically has to apologize every time he does it (don’t worry there’s a good reason I’m having this kind of trope or else I wouldn’t have in here in the first place).

Ok so Seto and Nori have amnesia, but they do seem to remember just a little bit more than Zen and Rei, that being they know they came there themselves and have something to do there but just can’t remember what (Zen and Rei don’t have that memory back till their first dungeon I think). They also know that they’ve known each other for a long time and they think they remember that Seto and Nori are their names but yeah. Seto and Nori are really close, Nori likes to brag about how she’s always by Seto’s side and how she wants him to lean on her. Seto is shown to be upset that he always leans on her and wish she would lean on him once and awhile. Also like PQ, they start off pretty happy only to then get darker and more serious as it goes on.

(now to power though the story portion) Ok so we get through the 1st dungeon and we find out that the reason why they’re here is because they’re looking for someone. We get to the 2nd dungeon and we find out that it’s connected to Seto’s brother they are looking for, they can’t remember why still and theorize maybe he ran away and are trying to get him back. 3rd dungeon is where they find out that Seto’s brother was murdered (paralleling the doctor in PQ, also Death theme), and they realize that they might be there to find the killer and to avenge his brother (justice theme for P5). 4th dungeon we are confronted by a Shadow/Cognitive Existence (this is a term from P5 and while this concept has been used in past Persona games without having a name to it, it’s basically a Shadow or something that looks like a Shadow Self but isn’t and that’s your spoiler free explanation) find out that it was Seto who killed his brother (or so it seems). They fight a boss called “Osiris” (some of you might be connecting the dots now). The 5th dungeon revolves around Seto’s judgement and fight the goddess (c’mon there’s always a god) Isis (*gasp* Yukari control your Persona 8U Jk).

“Oh ok so it’s Egyptian myth” Ahaha nope not exactly, I want to make it more complicated than that (because spoiler reasons I can only say complicated). Like I could just go with only the Egyptian myth, but I feel the need to mix it in with another mythos (think Jun’s Chronos/Cronos from P2). Again sorry if it’s not mixed very well, I didn’t put more than an hour’s thought into it so there could be a neat way for them to do it. Ok so like, if you connected the dots or followed that link above, you’d find out that Seto is actual Seth/Set (spelled Seto in Japanese) the Egyptian god of storms, desert, chaos, violence and war (this also explains why he hits on Haru, if you still don’t get it stay tuned for a spoiler post). This guy is the one who killed his brother Osiris. BUT he’s also Seth from Gnostic/Christian mythos, who is the brother who “replaced” Abel after his death by Cain (hence why Seto wanted to seek vengeance). It turns out that in like a bonus boss fight (like with Zeus in PQ) that you fight Cain and thus connecting the two Mythos. As for Nori, while her name I derived from Seth’s wife in Gnostic lore, Norea (so I guess Norei would’ve been more accurate but alksfdklanf;a leave me alone ;w; 義 was too good to pass up), though in other lore his wife’s name is Azura (which reminds me of azul which means blue and that’s why her shirt is blue lafndsl;fna word play 8U). As for who she represents in Egyptian lore it’s Nephthys, Seth’s wife there too.

As for why they had their memories confused, it could be the fact that they fused together or the shock or whatever. Again I’m not too concerned with the main plot as long as I get P3PxP5 feels and it helps with their character I’m fine. Ok phew that’s over. I think I got everything from when I originally typed it. (I do go into some more detail on this in the endings later, and maybe splitting the two mythos into two routes could work).

Cast Make up: Ok before I get to B plot I should talk about how the cast will be made up cause it’s important to me. I think we should have a game where we only have the whole P5 cast and Hamuko (aka not the rest of the P3(P) cast except Velvet Room people). Ok like maybe I’ll have Aigis and/or Pharos there too (reasons stated later), but I’m mostly focused on Hamuko herself in relation with P5 kids. I have reasons, one is that we don’t’ get possible rehash of PQ’s plot. I say possible because unlike Minato, Hamuko SLs with her whole team and is in turn closer to them. So like P3’s side B plot could possibly not take place because of this, or it could but…yeah. As for the revenge B plot on the P4 side, while I’d LOVE to see how the P5 kids would talk it over I don’t want a rehash of the plot tbh.

The other thing this’ll fix is screen time and writing. Ok, PQ was a pretty great game but the way the characters were written was a little wonky (same with Ultimax but that poor thing got shafted so hard and let’s just focus on PQ). Like everyone was mean (dunno why they were, but the characters didn’t seem to offended by each other’s comments…still confused why this happened) and reduced to quirks (the main point). With just having Hamuko, Theo, Liz, and Margret (and again, maybe Pharos and/or Aigis) with the P5 cast it’ll make it easier than having to balance aaaallll the characters in from SEES and IT.

But I also think this make sense in a meta sense too. Like, PQ was part of what I dub the Labrynth Trilogy (PQ/Arena/Ultimax), PQ was made to explain how the P3/4 kids could trust each other so easily and work so well together, and that’s because they subconsciously remembered each other form that time. Now for P5? Say in Arena 3 the P5 kids meet the P3 team, but the problem is that it’s not the same P3 team (different universe with P3P remember?), P5 kids might feel the need to help P3 team but P3 team wouldn’t trust them (cause they don’t subconsciously remember them, only the P5 kids do), and then the P4 team def doesn’t know the P5 team and vice versa and alkdsfnkl;af it’d just be a real mess. I mean I can see them making it work but why make it so hard? But what if it’s just one person the P5 kids care about? What if the P5 kids do get in a tussle with the P3/4 kids over said person? That person being Hamuko. She’d be the Hamuko from the P3/4/5 timeline, she wouldn’t know the P5 kids, she wouldn’t know SEES, she’s not the same Hamuko from the P3P timeline (probably has a different name too), so she’s a different person, but it would be interesting to see P5 kids trying to help her because they knew another her from another universe (Oh hey P2 people am I getting you attention? 8U). It’s also easier to juggle only one person like that instead of a group of people. That’s my little preview for Arena 3 and/or 4, back to PQ2.

B Plot: Ok so like I said above I didn’t want a rehash of the plot, but if they did change it a bit…..it would be similar but different. Like, ok, so Hamuko is technically closer to her team than Minato. Instead of Yukari saying stuff like “we’re not that close”, Hamuko would muse to the P5 kids saying “Man looking at you guys I can see you’re all are really close as a group….makes me realize just how close my team might actually not be as I originally thought. Up until now I thought we all kind of got along, I thought we were close… But maybe it was only me that they’re close to….” She’ll later talk about how she might’ve instinctively known it all along, and so that’s why she tried so hard to get everyone to be closer to her. She realizes she’s the glue that holds everyone together and is afraid that if something happens to her they’ll all fall apart. She’ll then worry that maybe she’s actually not that close to everyone as she thinks she is, those reasons are: Yukari goes behind everyone’s back to ask Fuuka to get info for her, Fuuka doesn’t treat Hamuko the same way as she treats Natsuki aka her best friend, Mitsuru and Aigis can’t be SL at that time yet (tho Mitsuru does praise Hamuko and Aigis is always by her side so it’s like they’re strangers), Junpei/Akihiko/Ken all have a roadblock at some point so you can’t become closer to them, Shinjiro is fairly reluctant to SL with you even during ranks in the beginning, Koro is a dog (and also doesn’t want you to replace his owner) (so basically they’re all closer to her than Minato, but yet there’s still a barrier for her that she can’t seem to get over). And maybe the last B plot being that she hates how she has to be perky and a stepford smiler, as it puts a lot of pressure on her and she’s actually really stressed out. And also maybe how she feels like she’s usually stuck in the middle of everyone’s drama (ie Yukari vs Mitsuru cause she gets pulled along during the beach scene, Ken vs Shinjiro via SLing with them)

On the P5 side they could have their ideologies throw into question, maybe they start to second guess themselves on how they’re “heroes” considering they’re going about it shonen like and are peacocks about it, while Hamuko and SEES kind of have no choice in the matter (on top of not being recognized either). Or the ethical question on how they actually change the heart of their bad guys, did they really reform the person or did they force them? And other stuff relating to that.

Edit: Also how maybe hinting that if Hamuko hadn’t gone to Gekkou she would’ve been worse off than if she had gone (aka her living without the events of P3P is worse than her dying at the end of P3P, aka hint hint I might be foreshadowing another one of my “How I want Persona ___ to go” 8U)

Mechanics: Ok so it’ll basically be like PQ, fool arcana gets split up so everyone can use a secondary persona yada yada. The only difference is that I think there should be spell fusions (I have a very good reason for this, I won’t list it here but it’s a very good reason). Now how they go about the fusions depends, is it going to be like P2’s (or maybe like P3’s but with two people instead of one) and you can manually do it? Or will it be like P4G’s and it happens randomly. I kind of want the former but the latter would work fine (as long as they have a lot more combos, like everyone can have a different fusion spell with everybody).

Also Justine and Caroline will be in charge of the fusions (Igor isn’t there again btw), I think Caroline will do the fusions while Justine does whatever Marie’s job was (street passes). Theo and Liz have the same jobs as back in PQ. Margaret is here again, but she’s not the same as the one in PQ (she’s her P3P self), so the interactions between her, Theo and Liz will be different. Also the siblings interactions between the twins will be…..interesting. XD

Endings/story structure: Ok so this why I think we might need to have Aigis (and/or Pharos, but really Aigis). We could probably have 2 routes even if its’ only with fewer people on the P3P side, but we need some characters to bounce convos off of so that’s where Aigis comes in (other than her and Pharos having a special connection to Hamuko, Hamuko would need to be by herself for her to be pulled away, that place is probably her room, and Aigis and Pharos are the only two who would probably be in her room at that time…..cause Pharos does what he wants and Aigis would be taking care of you at that time. So yeah that’s why they’re the ones that would be there). Anyways we could have that. But I’m thinking more along the lines of having both MCs speak but having dialogue options that are similar to the ones Arena got (And P4D I think, anyways Yu had them and I know Kanji, Chie, and Yukiko had them as a way to get the gag endings, you chose and they just spoke the lines). And so because your choices matter maybe that leads to different endings, heck maybe we get two routes of the story (one being the Gnostic side and the other being the Egyptian side, depending on your choices up to that point), and then we get a true ending (where they’re mixed together) if you clear both story sides. 8U Or you still have the Gnostic/Egyptian routes, but it’s more connected to which MC you choose (like you play as Hamuko then you get the Egyptian route, you play as Akira you get the Gnostic route, you clear both then the true route is open to whichever MC you choose to play as only a few lines will be changed between playing as one or the other in the true route).

Dungeon: I’m thinking of having more dungeons in this game. Either be it more story dungeons (I know I did the 5 dungeon story structure up top but yeah) or just a lot of bonus dungeons. I think we should bring back Vision Quest (cause P3P is involved of course we should), be able to refight bosses but stronger, be able to fight PQ bosses but stronger. I think we should get the Group Date Café back as at least a mini dungeon (c’mon it was THE BEST part of PQ, and I know shippers are hungry for it).

And so yeah that’s basically all I have. I’m open to ideas. I hope Atlus does make this game (like legit just P3FeMC with P5 crossover is all I ask for). XD

Also here’s the spoiler Q and A post, feel free to ask questions I’ll answer them there.

#persona 5 #p5 #persona 3 #p3 #persona q #pq #persona 3 portable #p3p

22 notes · View notes

sagevalleymusings · 4 years

Text

Internet Addiction is Real (even when you use it to write about internet addiction)

In October 2015 I started a video game ban that lasted six weeks, and ended around this time that year actually. I didn’t post my reflections about it then, partly because it felt self-aggrandizing and partly because people were kind of shitty when I announced my video game ban, saying things like that they found the internet an important way of connecting with people and that they were going to spam me with videos of puppies now. And yes, it was kind of shitty to say these things to me because their forthrightness that they didn’t have a problem with social media or the internet didn’t change the fact that I do. It’s at minimum rude that not one but three of my friends thought the appropriate response to my struggle was not only to tell me that I didn’t have a legitimate struggle but to say that they were going to undermine my efforts to better myself.

And it did feel like I’d bettered myself. In 2015, in six weeks, I had:

Completed two books, and started two others.

Made my bed every single day

Started exercising intermittently

Learned how to cook two completely new dishes to great success

Been more productive at work

Finished unpacking my bedroom from moving in four months ago

Wrote a published piece on Patheos

Painted my nails twice (something I used to enjoy a lot)

It was actually surprisingly difficult, especially at first. I was spinning my wheels trying to do something that wasn’t video games, and coming up surprisingly short frequently. I tried getting back into whittling, which there was simply not conducive space for; I tried writing daily, which was exhausting and had many of the same pitfalls, as it was still extended periods of time in front of a monitor. But six weeks later, I felt lighter, more productive, and more present. Ultimately, I think this was an important exercise. A reminder that when a want becomes a need, it ceases to serve you.

But now I find myself falling into the same patterns that I’d gotten into in 2015. I spend almost all of my time in front of a computer screen. I work at a computer with unfettered access to the internet and very little structured work, get home, and hop on the computer. I alternatively work and play on the computer from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. I am in front of a monitor of some kind, for nearly 14 hours every single day.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t live near most of my friends anymore, but they’re on Facebook. I don’t have a TV but I can get news and entertainment from the internet. I am not the kind of person to bash new technology for the sake of its strangeness. But here’s the thing: the biggest detriment for me from this kind of access to the internet, to social media, to the entire compendium of human knowledge and endless possibility, is that it prevents me from completing.

Being able to change tasks to literally anything means that I do change tasks to literally anything. If I don’t want to do the laundry, I can just pick up Flight Rising. If I don’t want to do the dishes, I can snag Monster Super League. If I don’t want to finish my art project, there’s always Pokemon Go. If I don’t want to work on the budget spreadsheet, I can take Office Specialist training. If I don’t want to schedule meetings, I can look up the menu on this restaurant to make sure the receipt is within regulation. If I don’t want to write, I can practice Spanish on Duolingo.

Even when the thing I’m doing is still work, the issue isn’t that I’m not doing work, but that I’ll get five feet from the finish line and change tasks every time. It’s that my brain has somehow decided that being rewarded for starting something new is more important than finishing something old, because that’s how the internet works, so that’s how the world works.

Modern internet culture has no end. There is no finale. Movies that do well get unplanned sequels. Shows that were supposed to end in Season Five get extended to Season Thirteen and die a slow death after everyone has gotten way too sick of it to care. Facebook will literally scroll forever, as will Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, and Youtube. Games have switched from stories to live services - experiences that are only loosely connected to the vaguest semblance of a plot, and gameplay that you can interact with daily for literally the rest of your life (or until the server goes down).

And so, like layers, my modern interactions with the internet just built on top of one another. Unlike when I could play Legend of Zelda and then Super Mario 64 and then Prince of Persia consecutively, I would start Pokemon Go, continue doing that, pull up Monster Super League, continue doing that, pull up Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, The New York Times, Flight Rising, YouTube, ad nauseum until checking every “daily” that I had to do went from taking one hour to taking six, or eight, or ten. I feel like I’m constantly trying to “catch up” in order to complete whatever facet of the internet I’d started, while not realizing that they update faster than I could possibly catch up. It’s a common joke in people my age that we’re in a perpetual cycle of promising to catch up with friends. But with the way Facebook rewards shallow, brief, constant interaction, is it really that this is a product of my age, or is it a product of my time? Fifty years ago, did you say the same thing, or did you just write a letter?

Hell, even texting as the alternative to phone calls is just surface-level constant interaction. And yet a text “conversation” takes about five times longer than a phone call, but we justify it because it “doesn’t get in the way” so we’re all doing three things at once, all of the time, because we don’t have time for any of them. I can justify my 14 hours of screen time because I’m gaming, writing, and socializing, while there’s a load of laundry in the wash, and dishes drying in the rack. And that argument makes so much sense until the tasks I’m juggling become less and less significant and more a waste of time. Facebook is genuinely a waste of time if I’m scrolling past 50 different memes that 19 of my friends have shared when the point was supposed to be the people that shared them. It took me I think two weeks to notice that a friend of mine was having a serious emotional issue because I couldn’t hear it through all the social media trash that builds up like oceanic microplastic that you can’t even see but still swallow anyway.

So what do you do? Stop playing games I enjoy and have made friendships from? Cut out social media in my life and consequently stop talking to important friends? Block time wasters on my work computer even though the issue isn’t any one time waster but the way it re-wires my brain to start new tasks in the middle of old ones?

I don’t know what the solution is ultimately. But really all I’m doing is wasting time. I’m writing this at work. I know I’ll have neither the “time” nor the motivation to write this at home. And I’m only writing this instead of doing something more toxic and less valuable because my boss caught me on Facebook today.

So when I say I have a problem relationship with the internet, if your response is to become defensive about that, maybe ask yourself if that defensiveness means that you, too, are only one more clickbait article away from being the kind of person who has to change their Facebook password to a random key mash just to stop themselves from checking it on the clock, and yet can’t motivate themselves to do work instead.

#addiction #internet addiction #armchair philosophy #i'm literally procrastinating right now

1 note · View note

enchantingtigerbarbarian-blog · 6 years

Text

Chapter 4 - BANNON

BANNON

Steve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was sworn in. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, not rigorously cleaned on a regular basis, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite, and he immediately requisitioned the white boards on which he intended to chart the first hundred days of the Trump administration. And right away he began moving furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. There were to be no meetings, at least no meetings where people could get comfortable. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war. This was a war room.

Many who had worked with Bannon on the campaign and through the transition shortly noticed a certain change. Having achieved one goal, he was clearly on to another. An intense man, he was suddenly at an even higher level of focus and determination.

“What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. And then, “Is something wrong with Steve?” And then finally, “I don’t understand. We were so close.”

Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower—including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more remote, if not unreachable. He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done. But many felt that getting things done was was more about him hatching plots against them. And certainly, among his basic character notes, Steve Bannon was a plotter. Strike before being struck. Anticipate the moves of others—counter them before they can make their moves. To him this was seeing things ahead, focusing on a set of goals. The first goal was the election of Donald Trump, the second the staffing of the Trump government. Now it was capturing the soul of the Trump White House, and he understood what others did not yet: this would be a mortal competition.

* * *

In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. (One of the few people who seem actually to have taken him up on this reading assignment was Jared Kushner.) “A very moving experience reading this book. It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true,” Bannon enthused.

This was a personal bit of branding—Bannon made sure to exhibit the book to many of the liberal reporters he was courting. But he was also trying to make a point, an important one considering the slapdash nature of the transition team’s staffing protocols: be careful who you hire.

Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, is a Tolstoyan effort to understand how great figures of the academic, intellectual, and military world who had served during the Kennedy and Johnson years had so grievously misapprehended the nature of the Vietnam War and mishandled its prosecution. The Best and the Brightest was a cautionary tale about the 1960s establishment—the precursor of the establishment that Trump and Bannon were now so aggressively challenging.

But the book also served as a reverential guide to the establishment. For the 1970s generation of future policy experts, would-be world leaders, and Ivy League journalists aiming for big-time careers—though it was Bannon’s generation, he was far outside this self-selected elite circle—The Best and the Brightest was a handbook about the characteristics of American power and the routes to it. Not just the right schools and right backgrounds, although that, too, but the attitudes, conceits, affect, and language that would be most conducive to finding your way into the American power structure. Many saw the book as a set of prescriptions about how to get ahead, rather than, as intended, what not to do when you are ahead. The Best and the Brightest described the people who should be in power. A college-age Barack Obama was smitten with the book, as was Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton.

Halberstam’s book defined the look and feel of White House power. His language, resonant and imposing and, often, boffo pompous, had set the tone for the next half century of official presidential journalism. Even scandalous or unsuccessful tenants of the White House were treated as unique figures who had risen to the greatest heights after mastering a Darwinian political process. Bob Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part of this awesome pageant.

Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer.

* * *

But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s opportunity.

The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected—ever more peculiar people fill the White House. Of course, a point about the Halberstam book and about the Trump campaign was that the most obvious players make grievous mistakes, too. Hence, in the Trump narrative, unlikely players far outside the establishment hold the true genius.

Still, few have been more unlikely than Steve Bannon.

At sixty-three, Bannon took his first formal job in politics when he joined the Trump campaign. Chief Strategist—his title in the new administration—was his first job not just in the federal government but in the public sector. (“Strategist!” scoffed Roger Stone, who, before Bannon, had been one of Trump’s chief strategists.) Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.

It was a flaky career that got him here.

Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in the Navy, a lieutenant on ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master’s degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs—his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles—but not rising above a midlevel position.

In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entre-preneurhood under the auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something of a hustler’s shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry with a small center of success and concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film projects—none a hit.

Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed.

For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed. Jon Corzine, the former Goldman chief and future United States senator and governor of New Jersey, climbing the Goldman ranks when Bannon was at the firm, was unaware of Bannon. When Bannon was appointed head of the Trump campaign and became an overnight press sensation—or question mark—his credentials suddenly included a convoluted story about how Bannon & Co. had acquired a stake in the megahit show Seinfeld and hence its twenty-year run of residual profits. But none of the Seinfeld principals, creators, or producers seem ever to have heard of him.

Mike Murphy, the Republican media consultant who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC and became a leading anti-Trump movement figure, has the vaguest recollection of Bannon’s seeking PR services from Murphy’s firm for a film Bannon was producing a decade or so ago. “I’m told he was in the meeting, but I honestly can’t get a picture of him.”

The New Yorker magazine, dwelling on the Bannon enigma—one that basically translated to: How is it that the media has been almost wholly unaware of someone who is suddenly among the most powerful people in government?—tried to trace his steps in Hollywood and largely failed to find him. The Washington Post traced his many addresses to no clear conclusion, except a suggestion of possible misdemeanor voter fraud.

In the midnineties, he inserted himself in a significant role into Biosphere 2, a project copiously funded by Edward Bass, one of the Bass family oil heirs, about sustaining life in space, and dubbed by Time one of the hundred worst ideas of the century—a rich man’s folly. Bannon, having to find his opportunities in distress situations, stepped into the project amid its collapse only to provoke further breakdown and litigation, including harassment and vandalism charges.

After the Biosphere 2 disaster, he participated in raising financing for a virtual currency scheme (MMORPGs, or MMOs) called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). This was a successor company to Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a dot-com burnout, whose principals included the former child star Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks) who went on to be the founder of IGE, but was then pushed out. Bannon was put in as CEO, and the company was subsumed by endless litigation.

Distress is an opportunistic business play. But some distress is better than others. The kinds of situations available to Bannon involved managing conflict, nastiness, and relative hopelessness—in essence managing and taking a small profit on dwindling cash. It’s a living at the margins of people who are making a much better living. Bannon kept trying to make a killing but never found the killing sweet spot.

Distress is also a contrarian’s game. And the contrarian’s impulse—equal parts personal dissatisfaction, general resentment, and gambler’s instinct—started to ever more strongly fuel Bannon. Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish Catholic union family, Catholic schools, and three unhappy marriages and bad divorces (journalists would make much of the recriminations in his second wife’s divorce filings).

Not so long ago, Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of a romantic antihero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class guy, striving, through multiple marriages and various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment world, wanting to be part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time—a character for Richard Ford, or John Updike, or Harry Crews. An American man’s story. But now such stories have crossed a political line. The American man story is a right-wing story. Bannon found his models in political infighters like Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove. All were larger-than-life American characters doing battle with conformity and modernity, relishing ways to violate liberal sensibilities.

The other point is that Bannon, however smart and even charismatic, however much he extolled the virtue of being a “stand-up guy,” was not necessarily a nice guy. Several decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the hustle in hustler. One competitor in the conservative media business, while acknowledging his intelligence and the ambitiousness of his ideas, also noted, “He’s mean, dishonest, and incapable of caring about other people. His eyes dart around like he’s always looking for a weapon with which to bludgeon or gouge you.”

Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it had low barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was much harder to break into. What’s more, conservative media is a highly lucrative target market category, with books (often dominating the bestseller lists), videos, and other products available through direct sales avenues that can circumvent more expensive distribution channels.

In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and media. His partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and congressional committee investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join him as deputy campaign manager on the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart at a screening of one of the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In the Face of Evil (billed as “Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy the most tyrannical and depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a relationship with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer.

* * *

In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could not have done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon focused his entrepreneurial talents on becoming courtier, Svengali, and political investment adviser to father and daughter.

Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums—albeit still just a small part of Bob Mercer’s many billions—to trying to build a radical free-market, small-government, home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian, monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.

Bob Mercer is an ultimate quant, an engineer who designs investment algorithms and became a co-CEO of one of the most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies. With his daughter, Rebekah, Mercer set up what is in effect a private Tea Party movement, self-funding whatever Tea Party or alt-right project took their fancy. Bob Mercer is almost nonverbal, looking at you with a dead stare and either not talking or offering only minimal response. He had a Steinway baby grand on his yacht; after inviting friends and colleagues on the boat, he would spend the time playing the piano, wholly disengaged from his guests. And yet his political beliefs, to the extent they could be discerned, were generally Bush-like, and his political discussions, to the extent that you could get him to be responsive, were about issues involving ground game and data gathering. It was Rebekah Mercer—who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who defined the family. “She’s . . . like whoa, ideologically there is no conversation with her,” said one senior Trump White House staffer.

With the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, Bannon, in essence holding the proxy of the Mercers’ investment in the site, took over the Breitbart business. He leveraged his gaming experience into using Gamergate—a precursor alt-right movement that coalesced around an antipathy toward, and harassment of, women working in the online gaming industry—to build vast amounts of traffic through the virality of political memes. (After hours one night in the White House, Bannon would argue that he knew exactly how to build a Breitbart for the left. And he would have the key advantage because “people on the left want to win Pulitzers, whereas I want to be Pulitzer!”)

Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill, Bannon became one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington, the Mercers’ consigliere. But a seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project was the career of Jeff Sessions—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s affectionate moniker and evocation of the Confederate general—among the least mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom Bannon tried to promote to run for president in 2012.

Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem. (Many of Trump’s positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate.

Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.

However much a marginal, invisible, small-time hustler Bannon had been—something of an Elmore Leonard character—he was suddenly transformed inside Trump Tower, an office he entered on August 15, and for practical purposes, did not exit, save for a few hours a night (and not every night) in his temporary midtown Manhattan accommodations, until January 17, when the transition team moved to Washington. There was no competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or narrative. By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book or two.

And indeed who, during the campaign, turned out to be able to harness the Trump operation, not to mention its philosophic disarray, to a single political view: that the path to victory was an economic and cultural message to the white working class in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

* * *

Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch—not least because Murdoch had Donald Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last person Trump spoke to ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.

“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. But Trump couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes as a “loser.”

And yet in one regard Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman—as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out—and, he conjectured, as many heads of state as anyone living, Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.

This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an often distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits.

Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.

In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.

* * *

Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.

During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.

But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view. Foreigners were the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the one-track-mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs. And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their ethnocentric heart and soul.

To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.

Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good, whereas Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light could see that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And these were problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other end of the economic scale.

It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made this issue his own, frequently observing, Wasn’t anybody an American anymore? In some of his earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these people? Why were they here?

The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.

Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.

The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws, rules, and customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration. It was a double liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been quite aggressive in deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.

“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”

* * *

Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process. Rather than seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping liberal fig leaves in place—he sought the most.

Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of government as avoiding conflict.

This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected agencies and departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John Kelly, then the director of Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray caused by the immigration EO—wanted nothing more than a moment to get their footing before they might even consider dramatic and contentious new policies. Old appointees—Obama appointees who still occupied most executive branch jobs—found it unfathomable that the new administration would go out of its way to take procedures that largely already existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem terms, such that liberals would have to oppose them.

Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble, nowhere, in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally difficult and costly effects of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to acknowledge that even liberal governments, even the Obama government, were engaged in the real politics of slowing immigration—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to acknowledge this effort.

The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s) pitiless view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules and laws. This limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them. Process was their enemy. But just doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately, could be a powerful countermeasure.

Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do anything, it was therefore not clear what anyone did.

Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.

Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted. They would seize the day if they could—even if they really didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do.

Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.

Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views. He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences. He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy. He was supposed to be the house intellectual but was purposely unread. He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he antagonized almost everyone. Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the EO.

By the time he arrived in the White House, Bannon had his back-of-the-envelope executive order on immigration and his travel ban, a sweeping, Trumpian exclusion of most Muslims from the United States, only begrudgingly whittled down, in part at Priebus’s urging, to what would shortly be perceived as merely draconian.

In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty inaugural crowd numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost anybody in the federal government having seen it or even being aware of it, by an executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy. Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon’s low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.

On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect. The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an inundation of lectures, warnings, and opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? Do you know what you’re doing? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! Who is in charge there?

But Steve Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the two Americas—Trump’s and liberals’—and between his White House and the White House inhabited by those not yet ready to burn the place down.

Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.

“Errr . . . that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.

0 notes