#it is the best number hands down tbf
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ʚ✟⃛ɞ LANGUAGE || J.J.K ʚ✟⃛ɞ
PAIRING: Jungkook X reader.
SUMMARY: forgive and forget… with a little dick on the side of course to make up for it.
WARNINGS: smut, unprotected sex, a lot of titty talk, a lot of hickeys, Jungkook has a big dick 🫣, so much kissing, Yeji is literally in the other room???, overstimulation cause purrrr, biting… I think that’s it? Lol
GENRE: best friends brother au.
Unedited because I bitch couldn’t be bothered… tbf tho I did edit a small bit but I hate editing so 🤭
WC: 5.3k
PREVIOUSLY… NEXT…
JUST LIKE many other people that surrounded you at the shop, you were tired, aching and internally screaming as you approached the lengthy queue, hoping to god another till opens up so you can get out of here as fast as possible and get home take a shower and sleep.
It’s been quite in the recent five months that you’ve last spoken to Jungkook, and like any good friends you and Yeji still hang out and talk. Which proved to be a little harder at first then you expected, but to your luck Jungkook has left for a match in America a couple days ago, so you and Yeji get to finally have a much needed sleepover at her place.
Rolling your neck around and trying your best to not fall asleep in the middle of the shop. As if to wake you up, a shopping cart bumps into you, and you whip around to look at the culprit, only to find two tiny hands holding onto the bar.
“Oh sorry!” The kid mumbles cutely, a floppy mess of hair on top of his head.
“Where’s your dad handsome?” You questioned, finally meeting the babies eyes, warm gentle and sweet.
“He said he’ll be back in two seconds” he smiled cutely, “and I’m five today!”
“Oh wow you’re five? Well happy birthday buddy” you smile just as you see his dad, a drop dead gorgeous man, approach.
“Thank you” he chuckles happily.
“I’m sorry, I hope he didn’t cause too much trouble” his dad, a tall beautiful Angel apologies.
Almost like you’re in a trance you softly say, “he’s a sweet kid, I don’t think you have to worry about him causing trouble”.
“Dad, can I ask her name?” The kid asks as his dad lifts him up in his arms.
“Well that depends if the lady will tell you her name.” He shrugs chuckling.
“I’m Y/N, what about you?”
“My name is roowon and this is my dad Seokjin!” He announces proudly.
“Nice to meet you guys!” You coo at him as he gives the sweetest smile to you.
Within small talk you exchanged numbers with Seokjin, promising to have dinner together as soon as both of your schedules clear up. And however much you may like about Seokjin, whose divorced from his wife for a year now, you can’t seem to stop thinking about someone who wasn’t even yours in the first place or the pain that comes with it.
Finding comfort in the warmth of your house did very little, and as much as you like the taste of your favourite wine, you know it won’t suffice the emptiness within you. Not even in a million years, but it does the job of keeping you calm.
However it doesn’t stop you from calling Jimin, and don’t get it wrong the sex is amazing, and Jimin is great. He’s apologised for what went down, and choosing pleasure over pain was too good to let go. You’re not one to hold grudges anyway, you’d rather forgive and forget.
But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what you needed, what you craved for. It wasn’t what you knew would settle the pain. And you felt awful about it, because Jimin was more than understanding as he laid beside you. Any woman would be lucky to have him, he’s a great person. The perfect guy even. The thing about you though, is you don’t fancy perfect. You like the waves that come with life, you adapted to that life. It’s all you know, since forever.
And life is just that, wavy, rocky and unsettled. But it’s comforting, it’s home. And Jimin… Jimin deserves better than that, he deserved someone as loving and perfect like him. He’s an Angel, an Angel you haven’t yet grown to appreciate. Which is ridiculous. Laughable. Stupid, even. Because any other sensible woman would ground him, marry him in a heart beat, and perhaps in another life you could see yourself with him. Having a family and a loving home, but at this moment? I’m this life? You don’t even know what the true meaning of a loving home is. You just don’t.
You’ve never had the comfort of your mothers embrace, or the comfort of your fathers protection. You’ve only ever had yourself. When you were little you’d cry yourself to sleep, you’d hug your own little body and comfort yourself the way your parents couldn’t. You didn’t have anyone to care for you, to worry about your late returns home on a night out. Your parents didn’t even have your number saved in their phone. They just didn’t care.
From a young age, you learned to fend for yourself. Cook, clean, and eventually make money to afford the things you needed, the things your own parents couldn’t provide.
The only thing you do remember, is the beatings, the way your skin would burn with every slap, whip and hit. The way you eventually stopped crying for them to stop, or the way your teenage self would wash away the blood or cover up the bruises. You knew all about that. You knew all too well how the rage in your fathers eyes was the only sense of comfort or attention you’ve ever gotten from him, the way your mother would grab onto your skin and dig her nails in, the way she’d scream and insult you and wish upon your death, that was the only touch of ‘love’ you’ve ever expected from her, the only attention you’ve ever received from them was just that, abuse. Neglect and pain.
Feeling loved, cared about and needed was more than welcome, but it was also more than strange. So maybe it wasn’t understandable, why you’d get slightly uncomfortable when someone would show you love, or kindness, and why you pushed away the people closest to you when they cared and worried about you because you never actually knew what it was before, so you weren’t used to it, so you pushed them away.
It’s bizarre how you want to love someone, to care and worry about them, yet don’t know how to feel about that being returned to you. You don’t know.
You carry the scars well though, they’re fairly easy to cover up and pretend like you’ve had the most general upbringing known to humanity. It’s, amazing.
Tiredness takes over you, and you finally fall asleep. Jimin watched the calmness on your face, covering you with the blanket more and exhaling. He knew about everything, he knew. He’s seen it too, maybe that’s why he knows you so well, he kisses your forehead before leaving your apartment and leaving a note.
The difficulty of waking up in the morning never gets easier, especially when you expected a warm body next to you, except to find it empty and cold. Confusion taking over your face as you roll out of bed, throwing on whatever first lands in your hands.
Your concern gets even worse when you notice the small letter on your kitchen counter, labelled Jimin.
You know better than to continue wasting time, I know you can never love me the way I’ve loved you for years, but within these years, I’ve learned that our souls are intertwined anyway, because I know exactly what you need, what you crave and what hurts you. I know it all in an instant. It’s almost like my body needs it too, and right the second I met him, I knew. I knew you were madly in love with him, I knew then, I had no chance. So within my frustration, I drank, far too much and let my mouth run. I am sorry. I know I apologised already, but I truly am sorry. You didn’t deserve it. I’ll move on eventually, I’ll learn to love someone else, like I’ve learned to keep your eyes staring into mine somewhere In the back of my mind, like I’ve learned to desensitise the scent of your hair away from my senses, or the need to feel your soft skin against my fingers. I’ve learned to love you from a distance, to care and appreciate you as much as I can because I knew that eventually, you’d fell in love with someone, that someone not being me was hard to accept at first, but it got easier. But stop the pettiness, fix the mess and go to him, you deserve love. You deserve to be happy, so be just that.
Happy,
Jimin.
That was absolutely not what you expected first thing in the morning, or the tears in your eyes. Or the guilt your body felt knowing you were unintentionally hurting Jimin. You wish it was easier. Easier to learn to love someone you don’t crave in that way. Easier to make yourself fall in love with someone who deserves you. You wish it was easy.
But nothing in life comes easy.
No, every step and breathe you take comes with effort. With every take want and need, you have to give. For the basic essentials and human life, you have to work. All day, all night, all life. Eternally. Everything has to be earned, because nothing. Absolutely nothing, comes free.
Work. Most of the time you hate it, but recently, it’s become your favourite place. You can take your mind off of everything going on in your life, invoke your mind with something else other than him. The person who so cruelly cut a hole in your heart and stole it, put it in his pocket and let it rot. How inhumane.
The bustle of the busy streets of Seoul always comforted you in some type of way. The many lights and many different people, styles and aesthetics made you feel alive, safe and not alone in this big city. It was easy to lose yourself once you were in it, but living here for half your life proved to help you out in some way.
“Mr. Kim wants you in his office.. pronto” Hoseok hands you your coffee, clicking number 9 on the elevator and you roll your eyes.
“I swear to almighty Jesus if he just wants to stare at me for five minutes and then ask me to order him lunch I will literally murder him with my hands” you grumble, obviously not amused.
“I don’t think that’s it…” he mumbles.
Sighing you walk out in a rush once the elevator dings, nodding a thank you to Hobi for getting you the much needed coffee. Preparing yourself for anything and everything outside of Kim’s office you finally enter the door, where he stands in almighty glory, looking good as ever.
“Y/N, please take a seat” he says, and you do, sitting in front of his desk and reading the name tag ‘CEO Kim Taehyung’ in pure awkwardness as he stares at you and then a letter.
“You need a break,” he takes a sip of his coffee as if the words he just said hurt him deeply, “take it and go before I throw a fit”
Shocked and taken a back you begin to protest, “hold on, Taehyung, no”.
“It’s Mr.Kim at work dumbass, now go before I literally slap you”
“But-“
“No but’s, unless we are talking about the other type of butts” he smirks chuckling.
“Tae are you pulling a prank on me?”
“Y/NNNAAAH, be professional and call me Mr.Kim” he whines dramatically.
“Shut up before I kick you in the balls,” you grumble, “why?”
“Because you’ve worked hard and as your only other male best friend aside from Hoseok, I am adamant on you getting a break before the bags under your eyes sue me”
“Oh don’t be dramatic,” you stand from your chair scoffing, “I’m fine, now let me get back to work”
“No can do workacholic,” he sets his mug on the table, “it’s home or the security guard will kick you out… or I’ll fire you.”
Shocked and gasping quite dramatically you say, “you would never.”
“Wanna find out?” He continues threatening.
“Kim Taehyung wait till I tell your father how manipulative you are” you practically growl at him as he pushes you other the door, and before he can take his hand away from your shoulder you bite him as hard as you can.
Flinching and gasping he looks flabbergasted as you straighten your back and sway your hips on the way out, “you are insane Y/N, INSANE” he yells after you.
At the elevator, once again, you ponder what to do now. Work was like your best distraction every since everything went down, Tae did a good job helping you mould yourself together and not to mention how considerate and sweet he was during that time. Taehyung’s wife was just a replica of him, except even better because she was a woman, and understood certain matters better than him.
Regardless, you sighed, opening your messages app and clicking onto Seokjin’s contact, messaging him a short “hey, off work for a couple days, want to have dinner soon?” And locked your phone again when the elevator reached third floor.
“Jung Hoseok, you dirty little cheating work husband, I will grab your balls and tie them in a knot the next time you choose to lie to me” you squint your eyes at him as you sit at the edge of his desk, watching as he gulps a little.
“I can explain,” he offers.
“No need, tell Yoongs to leave me a free space in a couple days hmm?”
“Can’t you ring him yourself-“
“He’s your roommate Jung, please he’ll listen to you more because you’re like number one best friends brothers thingy” you sigh rolling your neck around to release the gas that’s stuck.
“You’re so sly sometimes babe” he kissed his teeth as he leaned back into his chair.
“Mmm wonder where I got that from huh?”
Rolling his eyes with a small chuckle, he runs a hand through his dark hair, “you’re lucky I love you”
“On the contrary, you’re lucky I love you” you smiled.
“Besides, why do you need yoongi?”
Silence, dead silence fell into the atmosphere and Hobi figured you out in less than three seconds, “really?”
You nodded, biting your lip “a tattoo? I mean are you sure? Like that’s permanent?”
“Hoseok I know what a tattoo is” you dead pan, “I’ve been thinking of getting one for awhile anyway…”
His eyes turn worried for a minute, as he very gently speaks, “and you’re not just acting out because of you know….. Jungkook?”
Blinking you scoff, “you’re threading on thin ice Jung,” you get off his desk, leaning over him as you stare him dead in the eyes, face too close for comfort, “no man could make me do anything.”
Once you’re a safe distance from him, he lets out a breath shuddering a little, “do you forget I am a man sometimes?”
“No,” you smile sweetly, “I love watching you squirm because of me babe”
“I’m gonna divorce you”
“Awe too bad love, work couples can’t divorce.”
“Aren’t you suppose to be going home? Should I get Taehyung?”
Mouth falling open your eyes turn into slits and Hoseok prepares himself for the mouth full he’s about to get, “I will bite you and him. I won’t hesitate Jung Hoseok, besides keep messing with me and I’ll quit, no more seeing me no more free coffee and homemade lunch bitch” you walk away with a scoff.
Hoseok rushes towards you, desperately trying to catch up, “please not the homemade lunch,”
“Pfft, good luck sucker, he’s given me a week off” you stick your tongue out like a child once the elevator dings and the doors close.
“I’ve got both because I didn’t know what to choose” you mutter cutely as you set the wine and grocery bag on the counter.
Yeji stands beside you, eyes big and bright and expression that of a mellow kitten, like a child whose sipped on the most heavenly hot chocolate, “I missed you.”
Your heart skips a beat, internally beating yourself up for neglecting her during this whole thing. You awe as you hug her tightly, the smell of her strawberry shampoo never changing, “I’ve missed you too Ji.”
“I’m sorry, he can be an asshole sometimes but he shouldn’t be able to get between us” she mutters into your hair.
Your chest tightens as you hear her sniffle, she didn’t deserve this. You shouldn’t of done this to her, made her suffer with you. You’ve been a bad friend and you can recognise that, and you feel like utter shit about it because Yeji is priceless, she’s a diamond in disguise.
“I am so so sorry Yeji, I shouldn’t have let him get between us.”
The rest of the night was spent eating junk food and consuming an unhealthy amount of wine. As SpongeBob plays in the background and you apply the tiger sheet face mask on Yejis face you begin to tell her about Seokjin and Roowon.
“Was he good looking?”
“Oh ‘Ji,” you sigh heavily, “if you’ve only seen him, he’s like an Angel. God he’s gorgeous”
“Yah thats not fair! I wanna see him now”
“I’ll try sneak a picture of him when I’ll see him for dinner?”
Just as you say that, the sound of the hallway door dinging interrupts you, and both you and Yeji exchange looks of concern.
“Ji? I’m home, I hope you have no guy over because I’ll kick him out” the sound of his voice shakes everything inside of you. Everything becomes unstable like a poorly structured building during an earthquake.
Yeji looks at you sorrowfully, “yeah im here”
“The match got rescheduled so I thought I’d surprise you,” his voice faded it out as you didn’t dare to look his way, instead choosing to look at the wooden floor as your knees raised more inward towards to your chest, as if to protect your heart.
The silence was deafening, excruciating as all three of you didn’t know what to say, and you closed your eyes briefly as you cleared your throat, “I, Um, I can go?”
“No” Yeji immediately calls out, her voice, although not loud, seemed to echo off the walls as if even the furniture in the apartment froze in place, speechless.
“I’ll stay out the way don’t worry Ji” he mutters, pecking her head quickly before disappearing into the bathroom.
Yeji looked at you full of guilt, beginning to apologise but you stopped her, “it’s not your fault, plus we’re adults Ji, we can stay in the same room without hurting each other I promise. You’ve nothing to worry about, I’m okay.”
“I didn’t know he was going to be back” she continues, full of guilt.
“Don’t be dramatic, it’s okay. He’s your brother, besides, it’s not like I hate him. I still love him Ji, he was my best friend, that’ll never go away”.
For the rest of Jungkooks evening, all he had heard was your laughter. It rang through his body like an electric shock and he regretted everything. He hated himself for letting this drag on for this long, he hated that he couldn’t be there with you, laughing and sharing jokes like usually.
He drowned himself in everything possible to avoid hearing the conversation about a guy you met and how amazing he was, he worked, listened to music, texted his friends. But nothing worked.
And as the night died down and the house was consumed with silence. He laid on his bed, reminiscing the moments were he was your best friend. He remembered the time you went strawberry picking, you were dressed in the cutest outfit imaginable, a faded pink and white checkered dress, with pink wellies. Hair tied back in a bun with a strawberry claw clip.
He remembered how you shared the entire summer together, how he thought you to swim and how excited you were to be able to go to the depths of the ocean with him. How in love he was with you in the moment, the way your big surprised eyes stared into his as he dived underneath the water and came back up behind you, the way you’d call him Kookie in the times you needed him the most.
He remembers how you hate thunderstorms. How he spent the entire night with you on your couch, letting you cuddle into him and falling asleep in his lap.
It exactly that he regrets.
He regrets that he ruined the way you felt comfortable and safe around him and now he fears you’ll never be like that again.
For what seems like hours, Jungkook tosses and turns in his bed. Huffing in slight annoyance that his brain won’t shut off. Leaving his room in a haste he enters the kitchen, stilling for a moment as he sees you sat on the kitchen island, legs kicking back and forth as if you’re in deep thought.
He felt creepy standing there watching you eat your favourite cherry chocolates, the ones that had liquor inside. He remembers how much you love them.
He couldn’t go back to his room now, that’d be too awkward, especially since you’ve locked eyes with him for a mere second through the glass of the cupboards. He cleared his throat gently, going to the fridge to get his favourite whiskey, he could feel your presence behind him and he knew you were looking but you were stubborn.
You would not be the first one to say a word, he knows that, which is why he reaches for a second glass and fills both of them, turning to you with sad eyes, his hand extends toward you, holding the glass of whiskey outward, not thinking much you take it from him, throwing the liquid to the back of your throat and sighing. He does the same.
“I’m,” he clears his tight voice, “I’m sorry”.
You say nothing, biting your lip as he continues on, “I was out of line for the things I said. I’m aware, but I couldn’t help but feel protective. I’m sorry.”
“I was only angry because I have begged you to not get disqualified because of me, but you did that despite all of my begging” you whispered, barely audible and staring ahead as he looked at the side of your face.
“I’m sorry,” he swallows the lump in his throat, “I really am”.
“I know” is all you say. Not really giving him much aside from pushing the box of chocolate towards him.
“I miss you,” he mutters, “I miss having you in my life”.
Finally, as if your heart couldn’t take it, you look right into his eyes and he swears his knees buckle a little, despite your eyes looking a little sad, you smile gently at him, “I miss you too”.
“I never meant to say all those things, god Y/N, if I could go back in time” he closes his eyes. You pull on his shirt, pulling him between your legs as you hug him.
“Well you can’t,” you muffle in his chest as his arms tighten around you, “but, you can make it up to me?”.
You feel him nod as he not so sneakily sniffs your scent, “you can take Yeji out tomorrow, spend some quality time with her. She’s worried about you Kook, she needs her brother, she needs just a little bit of your time”.
He hugs you tighter, kissing your head, “I promise I will”.
You pull away, smiling gently at him as you peck his cheek, “good”.
You don’t know wether it was the buzz from the whiskey and alcohol infused chocolates, but whatever it was, it made your eyes drop to his lips. God he looked so good, hair messy and his sleeve on display. Fuck was he beautiful.
Almost like he could smell your slightly horny phase, he leans in deeper, eyes darkened a deep shade and his hand innocently laid on your waist, “you ok?” He asks.
Asshole, “yeah” your voice came out a little breathy within your whisper, and your entire aura soaked Jungkook in shudders. The way you were sat, legs spread to accommodate him between them, white shirt doing absolutely nothing to cover your perky pierced nipples.
He couldn’t take it anymore, and neither could you.
Looking into his eyes, your lips separated, inviting him in as your noses ever so gently brushed against each other, his hooded gaze solemnly fixated on your lips, and yours on his eyes, “what are you doing to me y/n” his voice husky, whispering in your ear.
“Kiss me Jungkook” your breathing got heavier and so has his, and he shook his head gently, scoffing in denial as your lips brushed past each other.
“Are you sure?”
“Fuck,” you gasped, as he licked your earlobe, what a fucking tease, “yes Jungkook”.
Not wasting anymore time he attached his lips on yours, moving them in rhythm as he basically abused the flesh, barely giving you any time to catch your breath as he switched his head from side to side, grabbing the back of your neck to pull you in closer, you could feel yourself growing wet, soaking your panties as you grabbed onto his shirt, nails digging into his skin as your hands travelled to his back, within pulling each other closer neither of you realised how close you have gotten, too immersed in the smacking of your lips as your core rubbed against his, hard and poking through his tracksuits.
You moaned right into his mouth and he swallowed it up, fuck he’d do anything for you. He’s dreamt of feeling your lips on his for years. His mouth travelled from your swollen lips to your neck, “fuck take my shirt of Kook”.
He could nut right there as you gave him all these orders, but he listened, slipping your shirt off to find your perky tits so ready for his mouth, he laid you back against the cool counter his mouth never giving up his abuse on your skin, marking nipping anywhere possible but the neck, he couldn’t be bothered to explain to his sister. He sucked bruises onto your boobs, hearing your quiet moans as he took one nipple into his mouth, twirling the pink nub with his tongue, before moving onto the other, but not before biting each nipple gently, the cold that was left on your nipples after his warm mouth worked you up even more as he trailed his kisses down your stomach, to your hips, once again sucking biting and bruising, fuck he loved your skin.
“Take your shirt of” you mumble quietly, taking your tits in your hands and rubbing the nipples in small circles, fuck he did not expect to ever see you like this. Sprawled out on his kitchen island, hands on your boobs and your panties sporting a wet patch on your clothed pussy telling him just how turned on your are right now. Shit.
His mouth latched onto your thighs before moving onto your clothes pussy, smothering his face in the warmth of it as you gasped quite loudly, smacking your hand on your mouth to keep quiet. Fuck. His tongue ran a strip from the bottom to the top, the fact that the only material keeping his tongue from touching you directly was your underwear was driving you insane.
“Kook fuck me already”
“I don’t have a condom” he said against you.
“Fuck im clean and on the pill”
“I’m clean too”
Without any more words, he helped you up, taking your panties to the side and taking his grey sweats down his legs. Fuck. His dick was hot, long and thick, tip red and oozing precum.
Fucking hell.
He ran his tip up and down your pussy, collecting your arousal before he eased gently inside you. Letting you adjust to him. You could feel him everywhere, his throbbing tip kissing your cervix as he bottomed out. And fuck were you so full, so deliciously full of him. With the way you relaxed he knew you were ready, slowly and carefully moving in and out, his hand found purchase on your shoulder, pushing you down gently as he watched the way your tits bounced slowly.
The way you moaned so quietly and the way your chest heaved, fuck you were absolutely ravishing to watch. Your skin was marked by his lips everywhere, stomach littered in bruises, hips and tits too, everywhere but your neck and it looked so inviting right now, begging for him to give it the same attention, and before he could think straight, he went for it, nipping at the skin of your neck as his body leaned fully into yours, before you could even take a breath he picked up the pace, smacking his hips lewdly into yours, his balls slapping of your ass as the noise bounced around the room. The sound your lips made as your lips connected once again adding to the mix.
It was hot, it was wet and it was loud. But it felt amazing, it felt too good to stop. The way he ramming into, hitting all the right spots as you mewled underneath him, the knot in your stomach tightening at the feel of his tip abusing your cervix, but before you could release he sat you up, edging your ass to almost be off the counter before he gripped onto it and hammered himself into you, the only rational part of you hid your face in his neck, moaning as he fucked right into you, he tugged onto your hair as he leaned his forehead into yours, both of you watching the way his dick disappeared into your swollen cunt, and then it hit you, like a ton of bricks, you clenched around him, your legs twitching slightly as you came around him, your orgasm hurting in all the right ways like if you were electrocuted, you could feel it from your toes to your head.
He was close behind, his hips stilling as his dick throbbed, twitching the slightest bit before he coated your walls white. Leaning against your palms on the counter you tried catching your breath again, and before you could say anything, he was on his knees, his mouth latching onto your clit as you yelped, sensitive from your previous orgasm.
“Kook I can’t”
“Yes you can baby,” he mumbled, his voice muffled by your pussy, “for me”
Groaning you gasped as he sucked onto your clit, twirling your sensitive nub with his tongue as he eased his finger into you, hooking it up and fucking you slowly.
The mix of mouth and finger was intoxicating the way he was making out with your pussy was sinful but you couldn’t get enough, especially not when your legs shook, your eyes teared up and his hands soothed your legs, he switched his finger and tongue, fucking you slowly with his warm tongue and drawing figure eights onto your clit and fuck you couldn’t take it.
Slapping down your hand on the counter you moaned his name as you came for the second time this night, legs shaking and chest heaving as he stood up, kissing your lower belly before he grinned above you.
“What do you say for round three in the bathroom?”
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
A/N: part three? I mean they haven’t resolved much except for some steamy sex? 🤭
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#bts drabble#bts smut#bts fluff#bts imagines#jungkook x reader#jeon jeongguk#jeon junkook#jungkook#bts#jeon jungkook smut#jimin x female reader#jimin x reader#jimin fluff#jimin fanfic#bts jeon jungkook#bts park jimin#jimin smut#bts jin#jin x reader#seokjin fanfiction#seokjin imagine
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what's exhausting about bg3? I know me and a few others haven't been able to get it bc we're poor and I wanted your take on how it's exhausting if you don't mind
i called it exhausting for ace reasons so if you're not super ace you'll be fine. i do have other disappointments though:
visual character customization is lacking
like okay i'd bought the game blind so my disappointment is 100% on me, but can you blame me for assuming based on posts of people raving about the customization options and saying they 'made their oc' that there would be a fully-fledged cc with sliders for facial features and everything??
what you get is just a set of like 8 preset faces (for human/elf/half-elf/tiefling/etc at least) and 2-4 body options. there's an impressive amount of hairstyles at least, but what the fuck does that matter if i can't even really customize my character's face. there's not even much you can do with the textures--you only get a palette of pre-approved colors instead of a color picker, there's no option to flip or translate tattoos/facepaint, and you can't even layer makeup textures. the ui design here is very clunky too which just underlines how low of a priority it must've been
on one hand i get it, this all costs time and money and they clearly had a lot on their plate with the actual meat of the game, but on the other hand my character gets the most closeups on the camera in dialogue/cutscenes, so why can't i do more with their appearance?? the character customization possibilities everyone raved about really just boil down to class, stats, & numbers, so basically more like arpg character building, where it's more about gameplay than the character
don't get me wrong, the race/background/class you pick do influence dialogue options, but i can't do something as standard as sculpt my character's face?? are you kidding me?? like, if they're not gonna let me do that, then what the fuck are all these high res glossy graphics for?? everyone else in this game gets a unique look except for me, huh? if they care that little they might as well turn this back into a text-centric game and let me import a custom png for my character like in the old days
there are a few points in the game where i was like, they really took the trouble to write and pay a voice actor to voice responses based on player actions to that level of specificity… when that time and money could've been put towards the cc. like yeah it's impressive, but it's empty. i don't need this character to voice my exact actions--i KNOW i took those actions--i want something of worth to me.
navigating the map is kind of a pain
you use the keyboard to control the camera, and you use the mouse to click where you want the character to go. the issue i have with this is that the camera is SO frustrating to orient and zoom in and out sometimes--they go through great pains to try and not show the insides of any 3d models while you're moving the camera, and they'll cut away the rooftops and other levels for you, but sometimes the game just Doesn't Understand What I'm Trying To See. like they've made it so ~elegant~ and ~presentable~ that it gets in my way. i constantly feel like i'm fighting the controls--not just of the camera, but the movement too. tbf, i don't know how this could be made better so i think what they did was the best solution, but i do get very frustrated
there's no undo button if i click "hide" by accident
unlike literally every other button on the hotbar, there's no "click again to confirm" or "right click to cancel". they just instantly hide and that bonus action is WASTED
you can enable tutorial-like informative popups, but they forget to teach you some of the most basic ways to interact with the world
there's a heavy rock at some point that's "too heavy to throw" but is clearly meant to be interacted with. …you're supposed to click and drag to "drag" it away. i had to look up what to do with it and i'm not crazy because MANY people had the same question!! not to mention those small tunnels around the environment where your character's like "well I'M too large to fit in there" and i'm like "oh i'll summon my tiny familiar and have them scurry in there!" only for the tunnel to be like "uh your familiar can't interact with me actually". so i give up because i'm over it at that point and i go online hours later to look it up and SOMEONE SAYS YOU CAN SEND YOUR FAMILIAR THROUGH THE TUNN-- (at this point i have keeled over in rage)
you can press left alt to highlight interactable items, but they only highlight what they think is important based on their own mysterious criteria. you have to sweep around like it's an i-spy game to figure out ALL the interactables in the area
i would like this if the CAMERA WERE EASIER TO OPERATE and if--actually no! no! i would NEVER like this! either highlight everything or highlight nothing at all, don't waste my time! i understand that some stuff is left unhighlighted so that the characters can roll perception checks and go "OH! a hidden lever!" but JUST TELL ME OUTRIGHT WHERE THE CRATES ARE. i play with an unavoidable glare on my screen and also, frankly, i have better things to do than squint and pick out every item in the room. let me get my meagre satisfaction from looting and be done with it!
there is absolutely no firm indication of when you might be stepping into an exclusively romantic or sexual line of dialogue
i would like this if i could turn the sex off. like set sex to no. i'm a fan of not having too many dialogue indicators or visible approval bars, BUT ONLY when i know i can relax and feel comfortable in the game. this game loves suggestive wording so i can never tell whether a scene could just be played platonically or not. like (early spoiler) gale invites you to a private magic lesson that he says can only take place in an intimate setting, so you meet him after the party, alone. given the other conversations i'd just experienced (from the fighter & the vampire) i was like great this is going to be sexual isn't it, but i was weak and wanted character interaction so i gave in and i went--and then IT WASN'T??? in fact you could play it totally platonically?? so i almost MISSED a perfectly good companion interaction because of the overly suggestive way it was worded!
"sovo are you sure that isn't just gale's personality to say it like that" YES BECAUSE EVERY COMPANION EXHIBITS THIS. it's woven into the companions, into the narration, into all the word choices. it's just a suggestive game all around, the atmosphere NEVER goes away, even when it's just a false alarm. it's part of why it's so ABSOLUTELY exhausting--because i know every other person playing this and seeing this is having a blast, and i'm the only one out here with my guard up and 10 layers of emotional shielding because i CAN'T like any companions because they're GOING to proposition my character at some point and i WILL take emotional damage when my only options are "yes let's enter a fully animated sex scene!" or "no i fucking hate your guts". do you see?? do you see my pain?? where is the middle option--the compromise?? and oh yeah, the rest of the real life world thinks my complaints are baseless, ridiculous, and avoidable. "just don't fucking play, idiot!" but do i not deserve to have fun as well? can i not get a CRUMB of something in a world where i have to make everything myself?? just once, can i play a game and have it fit--not perfectly, but at least fit??
just give me the heart icons of da:2/da:i. tell me when i'm walking into a flag i don't want to raise. better yet, when the game asks whether or not you want nudity enabled, add an option there to opt out of romance too. i say romance even though all i want is to opt out of the sex dialogue options bc as we all know romance and sex can NEVER be separated--
anyway those are my gripes. the things i like about it are… well, there are a few fights where i was like, oh that's cool that it actually uses the environment and/or teaches you a mechanic about the game that you can put into use later. the environmental puzzles are interesting, but all satisfaction is lost when i have to look up the basic mechanics they rely on that i was never taught or made aware of in-game. but i don't play games like these for gameplay, i play them for the story and the companions and the romance, so given this specific game i guess i should just keel over and die
#sovo answers#kind of holding out hope that i can make it to sorcerous sundries to see it in 3d but since that's near the end and#i haven't even left the first map.. i'm not optimistic
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Rating Hunter Sylvester's Outfits
Cause I'm gay, let's go
Putting the outfits in the order of when they appear in the film, rather than a ranked order. Since many get the same rating.
Please take this with the lighthearted intent it was written in.
With gifs~
1. Sleeveless Madhouse.
It’s very good. I like it a lot. We take note of the nail polish, we enjoy it while we can, it will disappear shortly.
8/10
2. The Flannel Trooper
Technically this is the second outfit we see Hunter in. It belongs more to a later scene but that’s just this film’s odd relationship with continuity and time. It’s also his worst fucking outfit. I don’t know if he just does not suit plaid. I certainly think the jeans don’t quite work. Whatever it is, it’s not great. Love the Iron Maiden shirt, tho.
4/10
3. The Hidden Shock Shirt ft. The Jacket™
Solid outfit, love that edgy shit for Hunter. Want that shirt. Debut of the denim jacket. Sadly includes the grey jeans that I do not fuck with.
8/10.
4. Misfits At A Party
We love an all black vibe. Striking Misfits skull, all around a great look.
9/10.
5. Judas Brat
Another all black number. With or without the black denim jacket, it's a major vibe. I like the all-black converse. Very good.
9/10.
6. The Last Supper for Hunter's full head of hair.
Second to worst outfit in my opinion. It's basically a copy of the third outfit but without any of the flavor.
5/10.
7. Slayer Shirt For The Hurt
Calling this a comfort outfit. I like it a lot. Shirt looks kinda worn and soft and it’s a good level of oversized. Those fucking grey jeans again tho. But black converse, so~
8/10.
8. No Sleeves No Chill
Debut of the newly altered battle jacket as well as the earring. We also get the T-Shirt referencing the film's tagline, very good. The scribbled on 'tattoos' are so stupid and I love them.
9/10
9. The Violent Outfit Of Reason
Back to all black! And it looks comfy. I love it. I actually really like the, what looks like, black cargo pants???
This outfit was me at 13. Seriously, it looks like it was plucked straight from my teenage closet. I'm gonna be biased.
(Tbf I would 100% wear this now, as is the case for most of his outfits.)
9/10
10. Completely Gay
The sleeveless shirts are a gift that keeps on giving. (also the faded shitty little scribbled on 'tattoos')
8/10
11. The Best Outfit
This is it. This is the best one. Hands down, his best outfit. One may count the Rhoads as a part of the outfit idgaf, it’s his best outfits regardless. The silhouette, the battle jacket, the symbolism. Chef’s kiss.
10/10
12. Gym Shorts
eheheheheheheheh look at him
7/10
13. Ready For Battle
We’re considering the corpse paint as part of the outfit. It’s so very extra in the best way possible. The fact that they fit 2 continuity errors into 1 outfit and have the blue light randomly turn off, it's great.
Bonus points for Demonias~
(That collar looks so uncomfortably snug tho but I wear them really fuckin' loose when I do so maybe this is normal?????)
9/10
14. Rehab Boy #1
I actually really like his rehab outfits???? Idk I think they're cute. I mean I don't fully get WHY Hunter has to wear sweats when everyone else in rehab seems to just be in their own clothes????? I'm guessing Alan "Father Of The Year" Sylvester, dropped him off without any change of clothes, so these were probably provided by the rehab center.
7.5/10
15. Rehab boy #2
See entry 14, but beige.
7.5/10
16. Battle Of The Bands
I like it but I am SEVERELY disappointed by the LACK of eyeliner. I just think it could be more extra. Like mf really pulled out a custom Jackson but couldn't whack on some eyeliner or smth. We know Hunter can do extra, so give me extra. Still like it tho.
8/10
17. Reformed Asshole
At first I really didn’t like how they put Hunter in a very light outfit now that he’s ‘nice’ like some cliche visual shorthand. But I’ve grown to love the outfit over time. It looks comfy. Cute hurt boy vibes imo.
9/10
#metal lords#metallords#hunter sylvester#gif#yes I specifically went and made all of these gifs for this post it was only very tedious#my post#tbf#this aint that bad#a while ago I edited together a video ranking every single scene in the movie#I was going through some shit at the time lmao#huntermakesgifs
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Hello there, my dear friend! I hope you’ve been doing well 💛💛💛 I’ve noticed you answering them steamy asks and so I’m curious about your thoughts. We know what Lucas and Henrik’s exact body counts are. What body count numbers would you give for the rest of the boys👀👀👀 not sure if you had a similar ask prior but if so, please send the link lol
The audible *gasp* I let out at seeing you in my inbox! It's so nice to see you drop by tumblr again, I've missed you 😭🤍 And I'm good, been answering horny asks as you can tell sdjskdjs
Absolutely love this ask too, and I don't think I've answered anything like it before so I've done my best for you 😘 (for reference, the average number of sexual partners for men in the UK is around 9.8)
LITG Body Counts
1️⃣ Gary – 52
No surprise here, cause Gary's liberal about sleeping around and probably started young. It can add up quickly if you don't mind one night stands, and at 23 this is an impressive number. He's probably had one or two girlfriends, but generally he hasn't found someone who truly sees him.
2️⃣ Henrik – 13
Canon, and makes sense. Like most Scandinavians, Henrik probably started young and has always had a chill relationship with sex. It feels good, and Henrik likes making others feel good as well so why hold back you know? Still, he's faithful so he's had a few long-term partners between hook-ups.
3️⃣ Ibrahim – 12
Young, but with money, so Rahim's definitely had a few years of sleeping with hot women while away at gold tournaments. I mean, golf might not seem glamorous to a lot of people, but they're ✨rich✨ and attract models and whatnot. I can see Rahim having been insecure in his youth too, so he's probably struggled to turn women down when they suddenly showed such interest in him.
4️⃣ Rocco – 9
Rocco for sure slept around during fresher's week and while on his travels, so at 21 he's still got a decent body count. Wouldn't be surprised if he didn't see many of them again though, as I can't see him as someone who's been in a long relationship before.
4️⃣ Jakub – 9
Too busy working on his gains to go berserk with hook-ups (probably also went through a period thinking that *ahem* "not spilling his seed" builds testosterone and makes him stronger...). Still, he's for sure brought home girls without bothering to learn their names, so I landed on 9.
5️⃣ Lucas – 7
Canon, and feels about right for him tbf. He's 27 when on the show, and admits to needing a connection with someone before sleeping with them. Also cheated and been cheated on, so he's got some history but not as much as you'd think considering his *talents* in bed.
6️⃣ Bobby – 6
Baker boy has hooked-up with dates and been in relationships before, so he's got bragging rights to just over a handful but I also don't think he's someone who'll jump into bed with just anyone. He's quite insecure beneath all those jokes after all, and is afraid of getting hurt.
7️⃣ Noah – 3
Noah was probably a late bloomer, and was a bit too lanky and awkward before he people realised he's actually? super? hot? My headcanon is that he lost his v card to the sexy older librarian at his uni... After that, he had two girlfriends (one named Priya), but that's it. Of course, he also ends up sleeping with Hope on day 2, which brings his number up to 4.
7️⃣ Carl – 3
Similarly to Noah, Carl wasn't that people realised is actually super good looking until later in his teens. He was also probably too busy with his own studies and interests to be honest, and has had a few long dry spells, but he's been in three relationships and those are the people he's slept with (lucky them!).
#ask#litg s2#litg#love island the game#litg bobby#litg noah#litg lucas#litg carl#litg henrik#litg gary#litg jakub#litg rahim#litg ibrahim#litg rocco
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it was already like 4 days ago but i had such a fun time at atl/mayday parade!!
i lined up early to get a good spot cos i was expecting like a line, like for there to actually be a line, but when i got there i was only the 12th person??? tbf there were over a 100 people doing vip apparently so without a lot of them in our ga line there was obviously a lot fewer ppl, but still!
unfortunately it was warmer than i was expecting and i ended up getting a bit sun burnt :( mostly on my nose, brow, upper lip, and hands. nose was the worst! still a bit ouchy, or maybe hands were worst in that i got burned in the same areas as my dermatitis which is a bad combo! they're mostly okay now but my face still hurts a bit. but anyway! i didn't realise i'd got burned until after the show was over when we went into the bathroom so it was too late to do anything about it :/
but again, anyway! my sister and her friend joined me in line a couple hours after i got there so i hung out with some other ppl waiting. my sister said she doesn't like having to line up early but i like it! it's part of the experience to me! but maybe also because i don't have anyone to go to shows with besides her so i like getting to hang out with ppl??? it's nice to just get know ppl a little! and they're like my kinda ppl too i guess because we like similar music!! hard to find that in everyday life
it was a very orderly line though, like we didn't stay in a line, the people who got there first (at like 5am!) numbered everyone with a sharpie, which is like sure it's not official as my sister loved to point out, but it did make everything more chill. they number over 70 ppl before it got too much to keep track of, and then when it was close to doors everyone just lined up basically in order!? it was surprising but nice to see!
anyway, when we actually got into the show! we ended up second row behind some ppl who did vip and some who were ahead of us in line. i can't say it was the best spot but like that's closer than i've ever been to the front when seeing atl before so! i just wish the base of the barricade went a little further back? like it's so hard to jump up and down on an uneven surface!!!
mayday parade were soooooo good as always!! they played a lot of older stuff, like their classic best stuff, the stuff ppl know the words to and we can all sing together!! i wish their set had been longer!!! i mean i guess they were on for nearly 50 minutes? but still!!!
atl also were obviously great too!! we sung happy birthday to some guy? (idk? he was playing a keyboard or something?) 3 times lmao, and alex jack and the bday guy (plus someone in the crowd) all did shoeys (from their own shoes!! not like josh from ymas who used an audience member's lol). it was such a messy show, but like in a good way!! i DO want to see bands having fun together and chatting with us and that kinda thing, like alex was being so silly!!
i was also in the absolute perfect position that when jack threw up his first guitar pick, no one had no idea where it was going, including me, but it hit me right in the middle of the chest lmao. got to pick it up right off the floor cos no one knew it had hit me so no one was looking for it!! third time i've managed to get a pick like that, although first time actually getting hit by it lol
feel like there might have been more i wanted to write about but i can't remember now! oh well. it was a fun night anyway!! would add photos or something but i'm not on my phone so maybe some other time
oh but they played new religion!!! i was so excited when they played it!!!! actually they played two songs i didn't know, i guess their new one with avril lavigne that i haven't heard and some other one??? gonna have to look that up at some point i guess
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Ahah! Fren you think you are gonna come to my blog on this, the day of my daughters middle school awards show (it actually was) and think your slick giving me so many numbers.
WELL I TAKE THIS CHALLENGE
And give you #15 and every odd number before it!
Welp. I don't know if this plan has backfired or not... on the one hand, lots to answer; on the other... lots to answer. (jk; this is awesome and I'm thriving :) Thanks, dear!) Also, congrats to your daughter!!!
However, you also, um. Forgot to tell me what ship/character/film/show/etc each number belonged with. So. Whoops. Now I'm going to heckle you in Discord until you give me the criteria for each. (The actual answers will all be mine, though, so.)
EDIT. In order, they are: Deckerstar, Thirteen Ghosts, Count of Monte Cristo, Supernatural, TenRose, Destiel, Whoever you hate more Max or Sam, GentleBeard
ANYWAY. (keep reading because someone sent me eight different numbers)
(Fandom Ask Music Game)
1. A song that reminds me of Deckerstar: Definitely "Wicked Game", no question. Every time I think of/hear that song, my brain replays the scene with breaking-down Luci playing it in his red robe thing in the penthouse after coming to the conclusion that he couldn't tell Chloe he loved her. It's the first thing that came to mind when I read this part of the ask, so, yeah, maybe there's a better answer, but this is my instinctive one.
3. A song I wish was in Thirteen Ghosts: Well, someone's making things difficult. I think I'll say "One" by Metallica. It's pretty pertinent to the ghosts and/or to Dennis (kinda one and the same, at some points), and it fits the vibes of the film, imo. Plus, I just love Metallica.
5. A song that I associate with The Count of Monte Cristo because of exactly one (1) applicable lyric: You know. This is way harder than you think. Because there's an entire CoMC musical that's now invading my head and not applicable as an answer. BUT. I guess I'll say "Macavity: The Mystery Cat". (aka, it's the first think I came up with and it works decently well, so!) The pertinent line: "And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake." (and bonus points for "He's outwardly respectable/I know he cheats at cards.") It's very reminiscent of the way the Count looks aboveboard but is actually doing his best to take them all down,
7. A song the fandom constantly talks about fitting Supernatural perfectly but I just Don’t See It: (EDIT: I realized after I already wrote this that I turned "SPN" into "Destiel," but it's fineeee. tbf, the only songs I know people connect to the show --- Destiel or otherwise --- and don't agree with are Hozier songs and "Angel With a Shotgun"... which I only don't agree with because I'm a heathen and haven't heard them. SO. Destiel it is.) Anyway... "On My Own" from Les Miserables. I love this song so much, but it is not at all accurate for the show. (Note: Do I think that either Dean or Cas would have their perception be that it's accurate, yes. Do I think it's actually accurate, no. Does that make any sense?)
9. A song I wish didn’t remind me of TenRose but it does: I assume Doomsday doesn't count? Uh... Okay, got one. "We've Only Just Begun" by the Carpenters. And I confess freely that this is biased by my adoration of 1408 (the film; I didn't much care for the short story, tbh), but. That song is creepy af. it sounds soooo optimistic. And it's just got this edge of darkness. And if that's not 10Rose in a nutshell --- everything sounds bright and happy but you just know something's about to go wrong --- I don't know what is.
11. A song that makes me feel happy about Destiel: Back with the hard ones, I see. How am I supposed to be happy about a ship that practically definesssss tragedy? Like, "All Outta Love" makes me happy for its connection to them, but the context is tragic, so it's not my answer? And I have a bunch of applicable Hadestown songs, but those all hurt? I guess I'll say "Every Woman in the World". In addition to just fitting, it's also Air Supply --- so a connection to the aforementioned "All Outta Love" --- and has been used in both Slither (a family-favorite film) and a romantic comedy starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan (which was good enough that it overwhelmed my chronic dislike of rom-coms).
13. A song I associate with my least favorite character: They. Are. The same. People. Ma'am. But anyway... I guess I'll go with Sam because I have a good answer (and it's not actually anti!!!): "Walk in the Dark" by David Byrne. In my head, it's largely Azazel POV as he looks in on Sam as one of his "kids", but I still view it as a "Sam" song. If that makes any sense?
15. Top five songs I would add to a Gentlebeard playlist: Definitely "The Chain", for obvious reasons (if you've seen the show). "Ain't No Sunshine", definitely. "Promises in the Dark", too. "Jolene" for the ouch. And... "I Will Survive". Because that's basically what Ed's doing when he turns into the Kraken, and that hurts.
If you're noticing that these songs are largely in order by artist/band name, it's absolutely not because I started going through my playlist for inspiration. Not at all. Obviously.
Thanks for the ask, jezebel :)
#answered asks#scripted downfall asks answered#there. are so many fandoms here.#security protocol 1! information: (sd)#i always come when you call (sd)#decrescendoed analysis
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“Sweet.”
uhhhh sooooo this ramuda week prompt list is by @/ramumemura on twt !! so shoutout to them for providing this amazing prompt list for such an amazing character !! give them a follow too !!
this is my first time posting here and i spent a good amount of time lurking in the ramuda amemura x reader tag and there is great lacking for oneshots about my number one boi so uhhh have this !!
this might suck as i haven't properly written anything in two years but i tried my best OTL have fun and enjoy tbf this was really fun to write and i love ramuda so much he deserves the world omg
lowercase intended !! idk how tumblr formatting works since i am very unfamiliar with it so uhhh apologies >< im also on mobile so double apologies ><
words: 1,043 <333
sunmary:
do you still want to taste the icing, y/n?”
you nodded then he pressed his lips to yours. the kiss lasted for a few seconds before he pulled away. an unprecedented whine left your lips which only caused him to chuckle.
“it tastes sweet, doesn't it, bunny?”
••••
eggs? check!
flour? check!
baking powder? check!
everything else that was needed to make cupcakes that ramuda couldn't list on the top of his mind? triple check check check!
ramuda stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth as he tied his bangs up to prevent them from being a distraction. after that, he grabbed a pretty pastel pink apron that had shibuya's cutest baker embroidered on it in different brightly coloured letters. he stood by the kitchen counter, happily waiting your return as you promised to bake cupcakes with him as an early birthday celebration. he stared at the door of his apartment, bouncing up and down on the soles of his feet, as if he was an excited puppy waiting for his owner's return.
a few minutes later, the door opened and ramuda's imaginary puppy ears and tail perked up and wagged respectively.
“y/n–nee!” he exclaimed, running over to tackle you in a hug.
“ramu–chan!” you steadied yourself because you almost fell over when he suddenly threw all of his weight on you. “as adorable as you are, please don't scare me like that. i haven't even properly entered the apartment.”
his response was a giggle and to snuggle his face deeper in your chest, holding you closer to him. you rolled your eyes playfully yet you couldn't help but smile at the affection you received from your boyfriend. you placed your hand on his head and gave his hair a ruffle, appreciating the warmth he gave off. it was surely needed after a tiring day.
he looked up at you with sad puppy dog eyes and an exaggerated pout on his lips. “but you promised,” he whined like a child, exaggerating his tone on the last syllable of ‘promised’, “you said we'd bake cupcakes so i prepared!”
you rolled your eyes, trying your best to remove his arms around your torso (to no avail, by the way). you gave up after a few struggles because his grip was strong.
“i never said we'd never bake!”
“but you took so long!”
you laughed at the way he stomped his foot while still looking up at you with a fake glare. he huffed, turning up his nose, and looking away at you to cement the fact that yes, he was ‘mad ’ at you. he showed no signs of letting you go. with the way he acted, you couldn't believe he was gonna be 25 in a few days.
“alright, alright.” you raised your hands in faux defeat. “i'm sorry i had to work today. let go of me so i can change and we can get started.”
his imaginary tail wagged as he smiled, letting go of you, raising his arms in victory. he stood behind you and began pushing you in and towards the room you two shared.
“hurry up, y/n–nee!”
“be patient!”
“no! i already waited all day!”
••••
usually, when you baked on your own, it would be swift, clean, and easy. usually you'd be done within an hour — preparation and other stuff already thrown in there. but when ramuda was in the picture… oh boy.
it basically took you two almost two hours to finish up because of all the distractions (kissing, flirting, throwing ingredients at each other's faces, all that stuff). flour wasn't only on the countertop like it should be when things get a bit messy but also on the floor, on the kitchen walls, in the sink … honestly it was everywhere in the kitchen. the mess due to a certain someone initiating a flour fight and of course, you wouldn't say no to an ongoing war so you had to fight along.
that was the only mess that you permitted because cleaning up would be a pain in the ass and ramuda would use his birthday as an excuse to get out of cleaning. so far, besides the two of you being covered in flour, sugar, and egg shells, everything went by smoothly and ramuda was the best (but also the worst) assistant there could be.
you took a breath of relief as you pushed the cupcake tray into the oven. you turned the oven on, set an alarm on your phone, and walked over to ramuda who was busy mixing the sweet lemon flavoured icing. he picked that flavour because yellow for fp, bunny !
you leaned on the countertop, looked at his face, and smiled. his tongue stuck out at the side of his mouth, eyebrows furrowed in concentration– you couldn't help but think he was adorable … and handsome.
‘i want to kiss him right now.’
when he noticed you were looking at him, he winked and gave you a side smile. he chuckled, breaking you out of your trance.
“like what you're seeing, bunny?” he said, his voice lower than usual.
you became red and buried your face in his shoulder. he giggled and leaned his head against yours.
“taste the icing if it's alright, y/n!” he said excitedly, his voice back to normal before moving his shoulder so you'll stop leaning on him (rude). but before you could react, he dipped his finger in the mix and booped your nose, leaving the icing there.
you twitched your nose and tried to reach it with your tongue. ramuda watched amused as you tried. you both laughed after multiple failed attempts. eventually you gave up and tried to wipe away the icing on your nose. but before you could, ramuda grabbed your hand, twirled you, then he placed his hand on your hips. your faces centimetres apart. he had a smirk on his lips as you blushed redder. he licked your nose, removing all the icing before he hummed.
“do you still want to taste the icing, y/n?” he asked the same deep voice as earlier, tongue stuck out teasingly. he leaned in closer, his lips almost touching yours.
you nodded. before you could process anything, he pressed his lips to yours. you kissed back, your hands going to the collar of his dress shirt, pulling him closer— deeper. the kiss lasted for a few seconds before he pulled away. an unprecedented whine left your lips which only caused him to chuckle.
“it tastes sweet, doesn't it, bunny?
#ramuda week 2022#hypmic imagines#hypmic x reader#hypmic#hypnosis mic#fling posse#ramuda x reader#ramuda amemura x reader#i love ramuda sm#adv happy bday ramu ramu <3#ramuda amemura
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For the OTP Question prompt: 1, 2, 4, 9 (otp of your choosing!)
Hm................ how's about DarkEgo for a blast from the past?
1. Who said I love you first?
Definitely Naoya. He would 100% say it first, especially given Kaname is not the best with feelings or words. (And, tbf, Naoya has very openly been in love with Kaname since they met and has told Kaname many, many times.)
2. Who loves to show off or tell people they're together?
Also definitely Naoya. He’s smart enough to know when it should be a secret for safety reasons, but he’s empathic and can be a jealous little shit. He knows when someone else is trying to flirt with his boyfriend and there’s only room for one major annoyance significant other in Kaname’s life, thank you.
4. Who was the most nervous on the first date?
Kaname. Not because he wasn’t sure Naoya liked him back (lol) but more that he’s a little jealous that his boyfriend is so... comfortable being on a date with him. (Between his own mixed feelings about being a demon god’s vessel and his own reservations about being so openly affectionate with another guy, it’s a mix of internalized emotions, but seeing Naoya actually smile instead of that fake smile he usually gives everyone is enough to trample those thoughts.)
Plus, Bael’s in the back of his mind making play-by-play commentary the entire time. (This isn’t what he meant when he said he wanted that twink obliterated. >:(((( )
9. Who likes to cuddle more?
Naoya, hands down. He’s a very physically touchy person with the people he actually cares about.
Send me an OTP and numbered prompt!
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sudden desire
chapter ten: the endless darkness and mystery of the ocean is becoming a bit tempting to dive into right now
part eleven of sudden desire
masterlist
word count: 3.2k
warnings: angst, hospitals, illness? it’s a little but of a sad chapter tbf sorry
author’s note: this is where it gets sad and angsty i hope y’all didn’t think it would all go smoothly from here lmaoooo sorry
but coraline and marcus are soft af so i hope you enjoy them pining for each other ... again
Marcus is sure that he’s only really known love twice in his life.
The first time, it was with his first wife. His college girlfriend. The first girl he’d ever said ‘I love you’ to, and meant it.
They’d married straight out of college; young and, maybe, a little too dumb. Not prepared for the pressures of real life, of the real world. They were still figuring themselves out, who they were meant to be and who they were meant to become. They’d grown apart as they’d grown older. They were no longer who they were. They were different, and not the same people who’d fallen in love those years ago.
The second time, it was with Teresa. At least, he thinks he was in love with her. Hell, he’d even asked her to marry him, to move across the country to start a life with him, after so little time together, after all. They’d moved so fast, tumbled headfirst into things without a second thought. He’s sure that, in that short period of time, he’d fallen in love. The heartbreak that had struck him down when she’d left him was so palpable that, sometimes, when he lies awake at night, he still feels the remnants of it rooted within him.
There had been others, before and since. Those that didn’t work out, those that weren’t and never were meant to be. A handful of awkward dates or a couple of nights at the other’s apartment. Nothing significant like his ex-wife or Teresa.
At least, not until Coraline.
He often wonders, if things had been different, if they’d met some other time, in some other place - maybe even in some other life - without their heartbreak and their baggage, if things would have been different. Would they be together and happy, living in some picture-perfect suburbia together, in each other’s arms. He guesses that he’ll never know, now. It seems silly to dwell on such an unlikely and unattainable thought.
But he likes this, falling asleep in each other’s arms, even if it’s only as friends on her part and he’s destined to feel the sting of unrequited happiness for the rest of his days.
The next morning seems lighter. It shouldn’t - the weight of the night before, all that had happened, should still linger; and it does, just not in the way he’d expected - but his admission, into the silence and not to her, had lifted this insurmountable weight from his chest. He hadn’t even realised he’d been carrying it. Even whispered into the gauzy blanket of silence after Coraline had fallen asleep, Marcus’ profession of love had slipped out, just the right time to relieve him of his fears and maybe any more heartbreak that might latch onto him.
He wakes with her still in his arms. She’s clutching to his shirt, the dress shirt’s cotton material bunched into her first, twisted around his torso. She looks endlessly peaceful; her breathing is steady, soft and measured and even, and her face is free of the worried lines that had tugged at her eyebrows the night before. Her lips are parted, soft puffs of air brushing past, tickling against the underside of his jaw. She’s swimming in the bliss of sleep. He’s endlessly glad that at least sleep can give her a reprieve from the torment of the night before.
He knows he should leave her bed, like he does every morning. That he should make her coffee and whatever breakfast food he can find. That he should have normality ready for her when she wakes up, so things don’t seem so different when sleep slips away from her. But he just can’t bring himself to let her go.
Marcus watches her gentle expression and the rise and fall of her chest for a moment. The subtle shift of her feet and hips. He knows she’s waking up, her body rousing from her deep sleep. He brushes a hand through her hair; it’s dried as she slept, and her usually delicate waves are even more prominent thanks to the soft cotton of her pillowcase. His thumb brushes across her cheekbone.
Coraline hums and it almost startles him. “Good morning,” she whispers. She leans forward and presses her forehead against his chest. Her hand pulls around his torso and splays her fingers across the expanse of his back, pushing his chest closer into hers. “What time is it?”
Marcus’ hand flexes against Cora’s hips. “9 am.”
“Shit, Marcus, you have work,” she gasps and pulls back, though her movements are sluggish and laboured, tethered with sleep, still.
He smiles and drops a kiss to her forehead. His thumb taps against her hip bone. “I’ll call in sick. They’ll understand.”
He’s sure that she wants to protest, to tell him to leave, but she just doesn’t seem to have the energy. She just drops her forehead back against his sternum and sighs. She nuzzles herself closer into him and pulls at his scent, just as intoxicating as always. It weighs her limbs down. She feels her head swimming with everything - the worry and the pain and the fear - but the familiar scent of his cologne keeps her rooted to reality, and stops her from floating away. She’s glad that he’s here, holding her. She’s not sure she would want to wake up without him there. “I need coffee,” she murmurs, voice muffled by the duvet pulled snug over the pair of them, and Marcus’ shirt. She makes to move his embrace and leave the bed, but her efforts are half-hearted and she keeps herself pressed against Marcus, inside his comforting grip.
Marcus chuckles. “Just a couple more minutes,” he insists.
He can feel her grin through the material of his shirt. “You’re comfortable like this?” She runs her hand up his torso, from his stomach to his chest, and toys with the top button of his shirt, by his neck. Her thumb brushes over his collarbone; he’s pretty sure it’s unintentional, but it almost makes him shudder. He’d be embarrassed if he wasn’t used to the effect that she has on him.
He shouldn’t be. Not in what he’s wearing. But the warmth of her against his chest is too comforting for him to muster the strength to move. “Very comfortable.”
She tilts her head back. Large green eyes peer up at him, sparkling and still laced with sadness. She’s trying her best to hide it, he can tell. “Too bad,” she whispers, “I want coffee.” She still doesn’t move. She stays rooted to his chest.
“And you’re expecting me to make it?” Marcus chuckles.
Cora giggles against him. “No- give me a moment.”
Marcus brushes a hand through Coraline’s hair - and pushes away the curls that have flopped over her face and obscure her sleep-kissed smile against him - as her phone begins to ring on the bedside table behind her. Cora groans and tightens her grip on his shift. “Who is it?”
He peers over her to glance at the display on her phone, which lights up bright with the name ‘Daniel’. He tells her and she groans again, pressing her cheek against his chest. Every time something calls her to leave the bed, she can’t help but burrow deeper into him. “Let it ring. I’ll call him back later,” she insists. The phone falls silent against the wooden table and she relaxes, until the phone starts vibrating again, and her shoulders go rigid.
“You gonna get that one?”
She shakes her head. “He’ll give up after this call.”
But her phone carries on ringing.
After the fifth ring of the third call, Coraline uncurls herself from around Marcus.
“Hello,” she answers, unable to sound very enthusiastic.
“Cora, thank God!” Daniel sounds out of breath on the other end of the phone. “You need to get down to the hospital right away.”
“What?” She shoots upwards in worry. “What’s happened? Is everyone okay-”
“It’s dad. It’s his lungs again.”
Panic strikes in Coraline’s chest. It’s her fault. If she hadn’t told him about her and Marcus and their plans for a baby, he’d be okay.
“I’m-” She desperately tries to catch her breath as she stumbles from the bed. Marcus calls after her but she’s fumbling blindly through the room, grabbing clothes like it’s second nature. “I’m on my way.” She drops her phone rather than hanging up and tugs on a hoodie and joggers over her pyjamas.
“Coraline, what’s wrong?” She questions.
She shakes her head and twirls on her heels. “My dad’s in the hospital.”
...
Marcus hadn’t even bothered to get changed. He looks presentable enough in what he was wearing - despite the wrinkles in his shirt and pants - and it seemed far more important to get Coraline to the hospital than it did to make himself look as if he hadn’t just rolled out of bed.
Which he had.
He hadn’t let her drive. Coraline had been biting back tears; they were burning the back of her eyes, blurring her vision, and she was in no shape to drive. Instead, he’d just taken her keys and driven as fast as he, legally, could towards the hospital on the other side of town. She’d sat in the passenger seat, bouncing her leg, silently praying that her father would be okay.
He’d rushed in behind her, as she raced towards the desk and breathlessly asked for his room number. And, by the time they’d reached him, she’d practically crumbled back into Marcus’ arms at the sight of him. Her father had been laying in the sterile bed, asleep, a breathing tube down his throat to help with the rise and fall of his chest. There were so many machines around him, cutting through the room with a thousand shrill beeps and chimes, she thought that he seemed more like a robot than a human being at all.
Without Marcus holding her up, Coraline was sure that her legs would have given way, and she wouldn’t be able to hold herself up any longer.
Her mother is there, Daniel and Kimmy, too, all gathered around his bed, looking solemn and horribly pale. Celine Meyer rushes towards her daughter as her sobs begin to bubble up ugly inside her chest. “Is he going to be okay? Please tell me he’s going to be okay.” She can’t bring herself to look at him. It only makes her chest hollow to see her father like this. The bright man she adored seemed so far away. “This is my fault,” Coraline insists, “I-” Her face is in her mother’s hands, and she’s shushing her, shaking her head and brushing away her tears as they fall, with the pad of her thumb.
“No, no, no. My darling, Coraline, no. This is not your fault,” she tells her.
“He was upset with me. He-”
Her mother shakes her head again. “No, he is still sick. It was only a matter of time. But he is here now, and they are going to do their best for him, I promise.”
The room is impossibly bright and claustrophobic. She can smell the disinfectant; it seems to drip from every surface, scrubbed clean and sterile, and nauseating as she thinks of her dad having to spend hours in a bed, with his laboured, wheezing breathing and broken, empty gasps. She feels like the walls are about to close in on them all, and stifle the life out of them all.
Coraline’s eyes waver towards her father and Marcus hears a sob rip from her throat. She gasps and rushes towards her father, dropping into an empty chair beside his bed. She takes his hand and presses her forehead to the back of his hand, her shoulders shaking as she cries, muffled by the blankets and the mattress. Marcus wants to make it better - he wants to make it all better - but there’s nothing he can do to quiet her heart wrenching cries and fix the sadness of seeing her father like this.
She doesn’t deserve this. All this pain. She deserves nothing but the entire world and all the stars in the night sky. Hell, he’d give her the moon if he could.
“Thank you for being here, Marcus.” Celine presses a hand against Marcus’ shoulder and smiles through her watery eyes. “You have no idea what this means to her.”
It doesn’t feel right to answer. He just returns her smile. Now isn’t the time to take credit for being here. He’s just doing what he has to do. What’s right. To be here for Coraline, if she needs him.
“Dad, I’m so sorry,” he hears Coraline whisper, her thumb brushing over his knuckles. She sits up in her seat to look at her father’s sleeping face. “I’m so sorry for everything. Please don’t leave me, I- I need you.”
...
Coraline hadn’t wanted to leave. Marcus doesn’t blame her, especially when she’d spent most of the day blaming herself, and had only really settled her nerves about five minutes before visiting hours were over. She’d been worried they’d force her to leave, and, then, had been even more worried when the nurse had poked her head into their room, smiled and asked them if they wanted anything to drink as they sat by his bedside.
Marcus knew it wasn’t a good sign, that they were letting him stay. The same had happened when his grandfather had died; he’d been so ill that they’d supposed he wouldn’t make it through the night. They’d let his mother and aunt sit by his bedside the entire night, until he passed away, holding their hands, the next morning. He hopes that this won’t be the case, here. For Coraline. For Celine and Daniel, for Kimmy and the kids. He prays.
Daniel and Kimmy had finally left in the late evening; they’d left their kids with the babysitter that morning, and they were both starting to grow tired. Celine stayed beside her husband, falling asleep early in the evening as Coraline and Marcus sat in silence, watching some old sitcom rerun on the tiny hospital TV. At some point, they’d settled into the same chair. He isn’t even sure when, or how, or even why, just that Coraline was understandably exhausted and shuffling awkward and restless in her seat, trying to get comfortable. She’d established that Marcus’ lap and the warmth of his arms around her was the best place to be. Just the way she’d woken up that morning.
She’d fallen asleep a little while later, just as an early episode of Seinfeld began to play on the television.
Marcus had tried, resting his head back against the high back of the seat, but, no matter what he did or how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to fall asleep. He’s tired - exhausted, even - but something keeps him away, a gentle urge to make sure that everything is okay.
Instead, he focuses his attention on the TV screen, too tired and far too distracted to follow the story.
The silence seems earth-shattering.
“Marcus.” He lifts his head at the call of his name. It’s quiet, even in the silence of the hospital room. The rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor is the only thing that shatters the emptiness of the sterile room. Marcus smiles at the sight of Coraline’s father awake. His breathing is still heavy; he can see the way his chest seems to rattle as he draws in his breath. “Is she good?” He questions, motioning to his daughter, who’s curled up, asleep, in Marcus’ lap, tucked against his chest. She sighs in her sleep.
Marcus lifts his chin from where it’s been resting against the top of her head. “About as good as she can be,” he answers, “She’s a fighter.”
Robert Meyer hums out a laugh of agreement. “That she is,” he agrees. He watches her as she sleeps peacefully. “You’ll take care of her, won’t you?”
The question hangs in the air. He knows what it means, and he recognises the weight of it. Celine had spoken to the doctor earlier - one of those ‘can I talk to you in private?’ moments that she hadn’t found the strength to share with anyone, yet - and wandered back into the room with fresh tear stains on her cheeks. He knows what that means. He’d seen it in his own mother when he was younger.
“I think she can take care of herself,” he insists with a gentle and fond smile down at her. “But I’ll always be there for her if she needs me.”
Silence befalls the room again; monitors beeping, machines whirring, the soft clicking footsteps of people against the linoleum in the hallway, the gentle rustle of hospital-issue sheets. Marcus knows that the silence lingering between them is a result of the night before, and the tension that had stretched, brutal, across the apartment, between them like a taut rubber band.
“Do you love her?”
It’s another question that settles upon the thick air.
He’s not entirely sure how he’s meant to answer. He could admit to Robert that he’s fallen head over heels in love with his daughter, but he’s not sure he can bring himself to say it out loud. At least, not to another person. But Coraline doesn’t know. Coraline will probably never know. And, as far as she’s concerned, the extent of his love is that fondness shared between best friends, who live their lives circling around one another, keeping each other just close enough.
“I think that Coraline is a truly extraordinary woman,” he tells him, instead. He thinks it holds enough weight to answer his question. “I swear to you that I’m in this for the long-haul,” he adds, “I’m the one who suggested the whole baby thing.”
“You suggested this?”
“I did. Please don’t be mad at Cora, she only agreed to the idea.”
There’s another silence. Robert settles back against his pillows. He runs his hand over his jaw. “And this is what she wants?”
“Yes. I think so.” He looks down at her, where she’s settled against his chest. “I can tell that it bothers her, worrying about never being a mom.”
“And you promise you’ll take care of her?” He questions.
“Always, sir. Always.”
“Y’know, she’s still my little girl,.” he insists, “you have to understand that I just want what’s best for her.”
“I know.” Marcus smiles. “I want that, too.”
He sighs and leans back again. He gives his sleeping daughter the same easy smile he’d given her when he walked into the apartment the night before. “Then you have my blessing. I don’t necessarily… agree with this but, if you’re sure, I’m happy for you.”
It’s a brilliant relief to hear him say it. Marcus exhales happily and smiles. “I’m sure she’ll be relieved to hear that. She cares about you more than anyone, you know?”
“Oh no-” Robert watches as Coraline shuffles against Marcus’ chest. Her hand splays across the front of his shirt and she pressed her cheek against him. “-I think I’ve been replaced.”
taglist: @wheresthewater @ah-callie @its--fandom--darling @alberta-sunrise @sara-alonso @madslorian @freeshavocadoooo
#sudden desire#marcus pike x coraline meyer#marcus pike x original character#marcus pike x original female character#marcus pike x oc#marcus pike#marcus pike x reader
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Ooh... How about we take a page out of one of your Leokumi oneshots? You know, the one where colleges are super hard to get into for omegas? Felix wanted to get into the same college as Sylvain, and that college was actually relatively inclusive for omegas, not requiring an alpha's permission for them, but still had some discrimination and harassment happening. Sylvain, having seen some of that stuff happen around him, was initially pretty uneasy about Felix going there, which lead to an argument between them. He relented eventually and the application was sent. Unfortunately Daddy Gautier somehow got wind of this and threw his influence around to get it rejected, while making sure only the name "Gautier" is leaked. Felix finds out and is furious, because he assumes it was Sylvain, leading to the breakup. This would both explain Felix's anger and him still wanting to prove something to him, by showing both how competent and hot he is now.
Oooooh now there’s an idea!
I think this works best if there was like, some controlling behavior from Sylvain when they were initially together. I mean nothing too crazy, but he was pretty overprotective of Felix when they dated and they were both young and dumb so he could be kind of an ass about it, and Felix kind of started resenting him for it. So the application thing is totally believable and ended up as the final straw for him.
Their breakup kind of like. Imploded their friend group, too. I think Ingrid would have been pretty firmly on Felix’s side (though it wouldn’t completely end her friendship with Sylvain, it would come damn close), and Dimitri was kind of caught between them (because on one hand he doesn’t believe Sylvain would go that far, and he believes him when he says he didn’t do this, but at the same time Felix’s future still did get fucked up and he thinks it’s valid for him to be mad).
Suddenly they can’t do anything all as a group anymore because Felix can’t stand to be in the same room as Sylvain (which, tbf, totally valid given he thought Sylvain blew up his entire future). Maybe it even prevented him from going to college straight away and he had to take a gap year, just to add into the resentment. Luckily at this point Sylvain is in college and only comes home every so often, so Dimitri and Ingrid don’t have to keep constantly separating them so Felix doesn’t kill Sylvain.
Meanwhile Sylvain... I think he probably took it pretty hard, and his desperation to explain himself and get Felix back just upset Felix even more and drove the wedge further between them. I mean there was probably a week or two where he was calling Felix fifteen times a day and filling up his voice mail with desperate messages (which of course he deleted without even listening to them) before Dimitri had to pull Sylvain aside and tell him to just let it go, whatever happened there’s just no way Felix is going to let him try to fix it.
As soon as Felix is able he changes his number and moves away from home, and tells no one but his family and Dimitri and Ingrid where he’s gone.
I think sometime between their falling out and their reunion Sylvain finds evidence of what his dad did. But by that point it’s been several years and Felix has moved away to god knows where and changed his number (and I don’t think he was ever one for social media so Sylvain couldn’t really track him down). Sylvain might try to talk to Rodrigue about what he found, but Rodrigue is not exactly thrilled with Sylvain and brushes him off.
So faced with the fact that he really can’t fix this, Sylvain drops contact with his parents as soon as they’re done funding his education and eventually picks up a job teaching. Oh Daddy Gautier still tries, of course, and Sylvain might humor his attempts at contact a little, but their relationship is Done.
And oh my god this is getting long but he 100% absolutely never got over Felix. Ever. Those students he fucked? Squint and he can pretend. Never dated, never even attempted to, really. All his “relationships” (if you could call them that) were just hookups. Maybe he had a FWB or two, but absolutely never anything romantic.
When Felix shows up to his class the students that know Professor Sylvain immediately joke that he’s “just his type” (and boy they do not know how right they are about that) and they joke that if he plays his cards right he might end up in Professor Gautier’s bed.
Sylvain, of course, still has the evidence he found off his dad somewhere on a flash drive, so immediately after the first day of class he ignores all of the students coming up to talk to him and runs back to his office to print it all off. Which looks a hell of a lot like he’s running away from him.
Felix is fucking livid, of course. He probably wound up following Sylvain back to his office after class to chew him out, then once that was done he was going to head straight to the registrar to demand a different professor for the course. So he storms in, looking all angry and beautiful (because let’s be real he dressed nice for the first day, too, because he saw Gautier on his schedule and just the shape of the name made him want to look good to stick it to the professor that dared share a last name with that asshole), and Sylvain has to slam the door shut behind him and beg him to just listen for two seconds before tearing him a new asshole.
To be clear though, Felix initially thinks he’s full of shit. Maybe that he even doctored the evidence. It takes awhile for him to come around. He probably talks to Dimitri about it, who rightly points out... why would Sylvain make fake evidence? Up until Felix showed up in his class he never expected to see him again, and he had absolutely no time to make it between class and when Felix confronted him in his office, so why would he have prepared that beforehand?
Also let’s just say Felix joined this class last minute, so while Sylvain had access to a class roster, Felix wasn’t on it until the day of so there’s no way he would have seen his name ahead of time.
#sylvix#sylvain jose gautier#felix hugo fraldarius#professor sylvain au#3h omegaverse#abo#modern au#long#Anonymous
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BTS HC - Lockdown
In which each BTS member lives with y/n
I’m hoping these imagines might lighten the mood for anyone who might be feeling a bit lonely right now.
Please see the end of post first if you need some context or wish to see the notes
RM
Has good balance of me time and us time
steps back when you both need space
sitting in the back yard on some chair reading a book
taking in the sun
The restrictions don’t hinder him from making sure you both get plenty of sun and fresh air
it isn’t much but in week 1, he gave the back yard a little tidy up
turned it into a place to chill out
so there aren’t any flower planted or decor
but it makes all the difference
there’s chairs, a table and a parasol
to you, this is perfect
Spot of tea under cooler weather
or orange juice under the sun
Board games at the table in the back yard
you tried cards once out there but even just the slightest breeze...
“Goddammit!!!”
The card games are for when it rains
or for when neither of you quite feel like going out today
He swears you’re cheating at UNO
you swear he’s just really bad at it
turns out he keeps saving those wild 4 draw cards too long
which you gather over his last 3 rage quits
because he just slings the cards, revealing them to you
“You play it too safe” you tell him
so he plays it a bit less safe
“Yes! Finally I won!”
“OH! Look at that!” you smile
he smiles back because of how proud you...
“...it’s sunny again!”
‘Goddammit y/n...’
Shopping trips together
not so helpful when the rules get stricter
“One adult at a time please...”
oh dear
who goes in?
so you go in
“Crap! Namjoon has the shopping list!”
this period of time really shows how you complete each other
pretty much every day you each think
“what would I do without him/her?”
Random talks
he tells you about this one book he read
and now you want to read it
so you do
and you can’t take your eyes off it
you find a new love for reading
so sometimes when you both need me time
you remain in the same room, just reading a book each
Every day you feel enlightened
almost sad at the thought of going back to normal life
because you won’t have as much time for yourself
Jin
Everyone is suddenly having the time to cook from scratch
imagine Jin’s frustration since he did this all along
so when certain things he usually gets aren’t in stock
“Oh for crying out loud!”
you sometimes have to calm him down when shopping
and since only 1 adult in at a time it’s like a really awkward phone call
you’re just stood outside alone like
“For Christ’s sake Jin! Calm down!”
but he makes every meal taste great anyway
“Sorry it doesn’t have the usual...”
“Jin, please!” you reply
because it’s still really yummy because
“you’re still the best cook in the world, okay?”
“Okay fine...” he sighs “Thank you”
can I just add here food is the only time you both get hysterical at each other
He still low key hoard particular ingredients when he FINALLY can get them
and you have to explain how irrational he’s being
“We don’t need SIX tubes of tomato puree!”
“Jin... How are we going to use up all THIS fruit and veg before it goes off?”
But he’s not selfish, no
if he’s in a shop and sees someone elderly, he helps them out
“Would you like me to reach that for you?”
“Do you need any toilet paper? There’s 2 packs left - here”
“Here’s my number; let me know if you need me to run any errands for you”
ahh you’re lucky to be living with such a gentleman
Daily walks in the park to feed the ducks
“This is the best kind of exercise” he tells you “...relaxed and where you can connect with nature”
some of the ducks at the beginning of the lockdown are a bit nutty
Jin may or may not be low key scared of that one goose
“I swear it’s giving me the evils”
it may or may not have chased him the second day in
“Wahhhhhh!!!”
*Jin running away in the distance*
You cooked for him that evening
“Honey, I don’t know how to put this...”
“Aw sweetie it’s okay about what happened in the park; I mean you were the one holding the bread and...”
“oh no no” he replies. “this meal is awful”
r00d
but it’s okay
you knew the minute you offered to make dinner it wasn’t going to turn out well
so you both agree the kitchen will be his space to work his magic in during lockdown
and he somehow gets better than he already is at cooking
just woowwww
foodgasm
but neither of you get podgy
Lazy exercises together
chair exercises watching the tv
small periods of jogging in the woods
“oh wow, what’s that?”
you come across some random squirrel
and all of a sudden trips to the park for that daily walk
it turns into a nature watch
bird watching
luckily he forgets about the angry goose
Sometimes talking about what you miss
and then promising to do all of those things when everything is back to normal
so many plans
and it helps you both stay optimistic
because you just created a bunch of stuff to look forward to
Suga
Late night movie marathons
and accidentally getting into a routine of late mornings late nights
Cooking together
because neither of you want to do it
but someone has to
can’t live on instant food for all this time
Night time walks
less people, less danger
please don’t yell at me if we’re not supposed to do this in real life I haven’t actually been out that late during lockdown hahaha
it’s only around a few blocks
but deep talks, you know
There may not be much room in the back garden
but you have a ball and a hoop
basketball together
he teaches you to shoot better
“yes! I did it!”
*he hugs you from behind*
sorry that was gay
He’s actually quite chill about the whole lockdown situation
almost like he forgets the circumstances sometimes
“I think I might nip down to _____’s house today...”
“Uh, Yoongi, remember?”
“Oh yeah”
Detective series marathons too
the two of you trying to figure out whodunnit
sometimes even low key bets or light arguments if you disagree
a mildly sore loser when you’re correct
smug af when he is correct
Evenings lounging in the back yard with the drink of your choice
some quiet music on
random hypothetical conversations and questions about life
“what if...”
“what happened to...”
“don’t you think that cloud looks like a goldfish?”
Board games that keep the brain stimulated
why is he so good at scrabble
you can’t recall a game you’ve won
but no monopoly
not after the last time
“I want a divorce!”
“We’re not married”
“Yet”
tbf you might as well be an old married couple
because there’s those films you just watch over and over
close to unlocking the power of mind reading
“want a cup of tea?”
“omg I was about to ask that”
Some days you get on each other’s nerves a little though
so you each occupy yourselves with little chores
and even though you weren’t in the mood to do anything together
you’ve just made the house look great in a day as a team
and you’ve got everything you need just in time for dinner
“I’m proud of us”
“I’m proud of us too”
J-Hope
Picnics in the back garden
much better than one in the park though
there’s no packing involved
there’s cushions
sometimes low key fine dining
your favourite is the one evening picnic the other day
you had been shopping alone for the essentials
and he wanted to surprise you
he had set up a makeshift table out of a few old crates
did the cooking
the pasta dish was lovely
there was even dessert
okay the dessert was M&S
fairy lights
seriously you swear you weren’t out for that long how did he manage all of this so fast?
wine
staring at the stars
and there were blankets too
dozing off until early hours of the morning
finally coming indoors at like 2am
sleeping in til noon oops haha
then binge watching some random show together
and now it’s your new favourite
For some reason you have a big stock of popcorn
watching any old crap on the TV as an excuse to eat it
like there’s 3 films on this afternoon that sound shite
but you’re going to watch them all anyway
and the third one is actually really good
more popcorn more films
“we should probably go out at some point...”
whoops it’s been like 4 days now
and now it’s raining damn
fuck it, you go out anyway
dancing in the rain in an empty park
followed by shivering on the walk home
he gets in the shower first
but then runs a lovely hot bath for you
candles, bubble bath, the works
just so you can have some relaxing time to yourself
so thoughtful
lockdown doesn’t mean needing to compromise on showing you love each other
Jimin
You’re not quite sure how you got pulled into this
but Jimin decided to make use of his YouTube following
Virtual dance classes
and fun little exercise sessions for all the family
He does the dance classes solo
but he loves to flaunt you to the world even in lockdown
“Today joining me for this session... my lovely significant other, y/n!”
at first you felt uncertain and a little conscious
but thanks to Jimin your confidence grew
He helps you stay positive during a tough time
and you even feel like your self improvement has been going amazingly well
he even inspires you to make your own channel
to show the world what you love; [insert hobby/interest here]
people love the both of you
they go to Jimin’s channel to keep fit and happy
and your channel just fills them with joy
But not everything revolves around the virtual world
Care packages for all of your friends
food and other essentials get mailed to the ones that lost their jobs
and for the ones still working, a bundle of stuff for their mental well being
and a little drawing with rainbow colours in each
and a positive message
Woolly jumpers, cushions and hot chocolate
sweater paws
Sometimes in the evening you doze off
like you fall asleep just as you are
and you wake up to the smell of food and a blanket over you
Sometimes you miss your friends
and Jimin hates to see you down
so he organises a big surprise
his hands over your eyes as he walks you into the living room
“surprise!” you hear over the laptop
and then Jimin hands you some gifts
he asked them all a few days ago to send you something meaningful
and your heart just melts
and you may or may not cry a little in front of your friends on the video call
you just have to do something in return so
You make the living room all nice whilst he’s making a video in the garden
wow you’re actually quite proud
the lighting is just right
the improv decor is actually somewhat aesthetic
“Honey, why’s it so dull in here..... Woah, what’s this?”
“Dinner’s ready” you smile
and you have a gift for him too
you can’t wipe the smile off his face when he sees it
a scrapbook of memories between you and him
which you look through after eating
“We’re going to make more memories like this once this blows over”
V
Lots of online socialising
Calls with his friends
which you always end up being a part of in the background with your commentaries
Cute online double dates with Jimin and/or your best friend
Will try everything and anything to kill the boredom
“look what I found in the bargain bin at the supermarket!”
“Tae, I’m not really sure I’m in the mood to take up crocheting...”
but actually it turns out to be more fun that you thought
he has his little ways of making everything fun
one day you guys just find some random paints in a cupboard
and WOW
he’s so good at it
such beautiful landscapes
Makes sure that you both maintain some sort of routine
“best make sure we have an early night lovely”
“why? it’s not like there’s much to do tomorrow”
but no matter how sceptical you may be at times
he’s determined to be your sunshine
he helps you stay sane
makes everything sound productive
“because tomorrow we are going to make a playlist for when we walk, feed the ducks, go shopping, learn how to make a new dish...”
makes you a cup of tea just because
or breakfast in bed
the perfect companion
caring about even the people he can’t physically be with
“we haven’t heard from _____ in a while; we should drop a phone call or something”
but it isn’t just a phone call
it’s also a letter in the mail a few days later
plus a painting for the close friends
Dressing up really formal for a home date
3 course meal, courtesy of the microwave
then a slow dance in the living room
always the romantic
“tonight was amazing... will I see you again?”
“you are terrible Tae, you really are!”
such a joker
he keeps you smiling through it all
Jungkook
Tries to get you to go on daily jogs with him
“Can’t I just walk?”
“Come on, y/n; get those endorphins running through you!”
you try like once
*wheezing*
nope
Nintendo switch
Not that I have one welp
I can just imagine it okay
Lots of active games
thrashes you at Wii Sports Tennis
but you whoop his ass at Bowling
he does most of the shopping
so that he can go for a jog first
and also so he’s not out too often in any one day, two birds one stone and all that
Doesn’t quite always get the shopping list right….
“Jungkook?”
“Yes?”
“I wrote 1-2 bananas… You’ve brought back 12”
blames your handwriting
Small bits of banter like this keep you both sane
and he eats all those bananas in like 2 days
“What? There was no cereal in the shop”
someone teach this boy to cook please
*brings back like a crate load of instant noodles*
at least it means you’ve come up with something to pass the time
teaching Jungkook some basic meals
maybe beginning with breakfast first thing in the morning wasn’t the best idea
“Jungkook! I said keep an eye on it!”
“I did”
and he literally just watched the bacon burn instead of regularly flipping it over
bless
Singing to you whilst snuggling on the couch
bliss
meme-y dances before bed time
like you’ll be sat in bed maybe watching tv / reading
and something moves in the corner of your eye
oh my word Jungkook
*insert all the meme-y dances you have even seen him do*
the biggest dork
can’t stop laughing at his own silliness afterwards
jumps into the bed and puts his head on your shoulder
falls asleep like this quite fast
well you aren’t surprised since he’s always so energetic
Small campfires in the back garden
the best marshmallows you’ve ever had
and it’s so much fun
campfire stories
usually people have a guitar around the fire
not Jungkook though, no
*serenades you with a ukulele purposely singing out of tune*
has you in stitches
people in the neighbouring houses hear the laughter and some think it’s insensitive to be laughing so much
but seriously, if you can’t laugh, what can you do?
So I thought I’d make a post around the strange times many of us are living in. Whilst I get that some readers may not be in a situation like mine (UK) so a quick bit of context for you even though I made the location / country ambiguous in my writing. The circumstances explained in the imagines though are of course based on my experiences in England.
Right now, we are limited in what we do; only essential shops are open, (supermarkets, pharmacies, etc,) the country is being advised to go out as little as possible, (only for food shopping, medical reasons and exercise,) social gatherings aren’t allowed, our death rate has been increasing due to the virus (even our prime minister has it,) and our NHS is overwhelmed - currently more than 10,000 being treated as I’m listening to the news and writing this note.
I hope everyone is staying safe and doing the right thing by staying indoors and maintaining social distancing.
#ps sorry some are longer imagines than others#bts#bts fiction#bts headcanons#bts headcanon#bts fic#bts imagines#bts fanfic#namjoon#rm#kim namjoon#seokjin#jin#kim seokjin#yoongi#suga#min yoongi#hoseok#jhope#jung hoseok#jimin#park jimin#bts jimin#v#bts v#taehyung#kim taehyung#jungkook#jeon jungkook#bts fluff
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figured i would log my experience getting vaccinated !! focusing on physical symptoms and general feelings. i’ll add to this for funsies as things happen. get vaccinated!!!
wee bit of context: i track my heartrate regularly because of some ongoing issues with cardiovascular health and abnormally high resting heart rate (~85ish?). with that in mind, don’t take my numbers TOO seriously
12:12p - johnson&johnson vaccine received
12:27p - heartrate spiked to 131, heat waves, dizziness, blurry vision. very sudden, but brief. an intense but generally normal response to vaccination. heartrate calms down a bit, but fluctuates and remains high thereafter (~96-132). tbf i was very anxious!
12:52p - noticed arm soreness when i drove home. put my hand on the steering wheel and immediately went “oh no”
2:00-4:00p - tired, relaxed, took a NAP! unsure how much of my tiredness was from the vaccine and how much was from my ongoing burnout lmfao
4:00p - feelin good, feelin fresh, feelin wide awake and ready to roll
6:30p - little bit of nausea, headache
6:45p - significant fatigue, consistent heart rate at 110-119, couldn’t focus. left class early
7:15p - crawl into BED! all-over muscle aches and that general shaky-tired feeling. very weak. realize it’s been years since i’ve been sick, realize i forgot what being sick feels like, realize i’m in for it now. pop some ibuprofen and hope for the best baybeeee
9:20p - arose from snnz hell because i realized i forgot to turn in an assignment. fortunately feeling a little better, but still tired and very ache-y. also remembering how good ritz crackers are dklfjhkf
7:20a - wake up to nausea and headache. still weak. body aches are better, but still around. they get a little more intense as the morning goes on, especially at my hips, but overall still not bad.
10:30a - I dont feel that sick *walks to kitchen* *legs nearly give out* oh
by 3:00p i felt completely better. not ready to run a marathon or anything, but feeling good! arm still a little sore, but that’s no big deal.
my appetite was still pretty poor for the next 24+hrs. wee bit of nausea.
#my posts#if only i had a sweetheart to take care of me......#apparently even feeling ill wont stop me from pining
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In response to that slayin', hair flippin', finger snappin' answer you just published, would you be so kind as to list moments that reference how cruel Sansa is to Arya? (If you want!)
Thank you so much!!! When I say this ask made me scream with delight!!! I believe this is the answer you’re referring to (if not soz please tell me which it is) and I really had fun with it tbf 😂
I’m very happy to list some of these, because it is so often overlooked. In this instance, I will not be including moments that show how deeply it affects Arya, unless that is present in the same quote, because Arya’s self-esteem and mental health is affected by a number of things and people, and Sansa is only one of those things.
Without further ado, let’s get down to it:
She looked at Arya. “What did you think of Prince Joff, sister? He’s very gallant, don’t you think?” “Jon says he looks like a girl,” Arya said. Sansa sighed as she stitched. “Poor Jon,” she said. “He gets jealous because he’s a bastard.” “He’s our brother,” Arya said, much too loudly. - Arya I AGOT
This is more generic cruelty than specifically to Arya, but it does show how little she thinks of two of her siblings. Especially as she knows how close Jon and Arya are, and she chose to say it anyway, perhaps just to get a rise out of her (which is why I think Arya thought Sansa attracted Septa Mordane’s attention) or simply not caring about her feelings. Unclear, but we can see that Sansa calling Jon a bastard or half-brother (as she always does) is clearly hurtful to Arya who sees him as her brother, and both sisters acknowledge she is more like Jon than anyone else, so it’s hard not to see this affecting Arya negatively.
It wasn’t fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left. Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother’s fine high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys. Arya took after their lord father. Her hair was a lusterless brown, and her face was long and solemn. Jeyne used to call her Arya Horseface, and neigh whenever she came near. It hurt that the one thing Arya could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for figures. If she did marry Prince Joff, Arya hoped for his sake that he had a good steward.
Nymeria was waiting for her in the guardroom at the base of the stairs. She bounded to her feet as soon as she caught sight of Arya. Arya grinned. The wolf pup loved her, even if no one else did. - Arya I AGOT
I know I said I wouldn’t look at how it affects Arya, but this quote in particular is specifically about Sansa. The misogyny of the society is inherent in this statement, as it’s what is making Arya feel inferior, but we know Sansa lords this over her in this quote. Arya even mentions things she is better at, and still thinks negatively because that is all she can do well.
The only thing that scared her about today was Arya. Arya had a way of ruining everything. You never knew what she would do. - Sansa I AGOT
Sansa regarded her scrawny little sister in disbelief. “You can’t look for rubies, the princess is expecting us. The queen invited us both.” “I don’t care,” Arya said. “The wheelhouse doesn’t even have windows, you can’t see a thing.” “What could you want to see?” Sansa said, annoyed. She had been thrilled by the invitation, and her stupid sister was going to ruin everything, just as she’d feared. “It’s all just fields and farms and holdfasts.” “It is not,” Arya said stubbornly. “If you came with us sometimes, you’d see.” “I hate riding,” Sansa said fervently. “All it does is get you soiled and dusty and sore.” - Sansa I AGOT
Here we see how poorly Sansa thinks of Arya, and this is her own POV so there’s nothing to say about bias either. She also disparages one of the few things Arya thinks she can do well, and thinks of Arya as stupid and “ruining everything” which is not kind, especially when Arya’s presence would not affect her time with the Queen. Also interesting that she says this later on:
Be with you, Sansa thought, but she said, “Whatever you’d like to do, my prince.” Joffrey reflected a moment. “We could go riding.” “Oh, I love riding,” Sansa said. - Sansa I AGOT
Riding isn’t so bad as soon as anyone else wants to do it, huh?
One day she came back grinning her horsey grin, her hair all tangled and her clothes covered in mud, clutching a raggedy bunch of purple and green flowers for Father. Sansa kept hoping he would tell Arya to behave herself and act like the highborn lady she was supposed to be, but he never did, he only hugged her and thanked her for the flowers. That just made her worse.
Then it turned out the purple flowers were called poison kisses, and Arya got a rash on her arms. Sansa would have thought that might have taught her a lesson, but Arya laughed about it, and the next day she rubbed mud all over her arms like some ignorant bog woman just because her friend Mycah told her it would stop the itching. She had bruises on her arms and shoulders too, dark purple welts and faded green-and-yellow splotches; Sansa had seen them when her sister undressed for sleep. How she had gotten those only the seven gods knew. - Sansa I AGOT
Sansa knew all about the sorts of people Arya liked to talk to: squires and grooms and serving girls, old men and naked children, rough-spoken freeriders of uncertain birth. Arya would make friends with anybody. This Mycah was the worst; a butcher’s boy, thirteen and wild, he slept in the meat wagon and smelled of the slaughtering block. Just the sight of him was enough to make Sansa feel sick, but Arya seemed to prefer his company to hers. - Sansa I AGOT
Here we have an instance of Sansa thinking of Arya as “horsey”, so why are we trying to deny she called her that? She also looks down on all the people Arya makes friends with, which shows her classism and how low her opinion is of her sister and her sister’s friends.
Sansa couldn’t help but smile a little. The kennelmaster once told her that an animal takes after its master. She gave Lady a quick little hug. Lady licked her cheek. Sansa giggled. Arya heard and whirled around, glaring. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going out riding.” Her long horsey face got the stubborn look that meant she was going to do something willful. “Gods be true, Arya, sometimes you act like such a child,” Sansa said. “I’ll go by myself then. It will be ever so much nicer that way. Lady and I will eat all the lemon cakes and just have the best time without you.” - Sansa I AGOT
More of Sansa delighting in her sister’s misery. More of the “horsey” face. More Sansa telling her sister she isn’t wanted, which is something Arya is already deeply afraid of.
She was almost in tears. All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs. Why couldn’t Arya be sweet and delicate and kind, like Princess Myrcella? She would have liked a sister like that.
Sansa could never understand how two sisters, born only two years apart, could be so different. It would have been easier if Arya had been a bastard, like their half brother Jon. She even looked like Jon, with the long face and brown hair of the Starks, and nothing of their lady mother in her face or her coloring. And Jon’s mother had been common, or so people whispered. Once, when she was littler, Sansa had even asked Mother if perhaps there hadn’t been some mistake. Perhaps the grumkins had stolen her real sister. But Mother had only laughed and said no, Arya was her daughter and Sansa’s trueborn sister, blood of their blood. Sansa could not think why Mother would want to lie about it, so she supposed it had to be true. - Sansa I AGOT
Now, I’ve joked with my siblings about one or more of us being adopted, but I’ve never genuinely believed it, going so far as to ask my mum if it was true. This is worse, though. Sansa knows the kind of social ostracism and classism bastards are subjected to, and she genuinely wants that for her sister just to make life easier for her.
A bright bud of blood blossomed where his sword pressed into Mycah’s flesh, and a slow red line trickled down the boy’s cheek. “Stop it!” Arya screamed. She grabbed up her fallen stick. Sansa was afraid. “Arya, you stay out of this.” “I won’t hurt him … much,” Prince Joffrey told Arya, never taking his eyes off the butcher’s boy. Arya went for him. - Sansa I AGOT
Arya swung at the prince again, but this time Joffrey caught the blow on Lion’s Tooth and sent her broken stick flying from her hands. The back of his head was all bloody and his eyes were on fire. Sansa was shrieking, “No, no, stop it, stop it, both of you, you’re spoiling it,” but no one was listening. Arya scooped up a rock and hurled it at Joffrey’s head. She hit his horse instead, and the blood bay reared and went galloping off after Mycah. “Stop it, don’t, stop it!” Sansa screamed. Joffrey slashed at Arya with his sword, screaming obscenities, terrible words, filthy words. Arya darted back, frightened now, but Joffrey followed, hounding her toward the woods, backing her up against a tree. Sansa didn’t know what to do. She watched helplessly, almost blind from her tears. - Sansa I AGOT
Joffrey made a scared whimpery sound as he looked up at her. “No,” he said, “don’t hurt me. I’ll tell my mother.” “You leave him alone!” Sansa screamed at her sister. Arya whirled and heaved the sword into the air, putting her whole body into the throw. The blue steel flashed in the sun as the sword spun out over the river. It hit the water and vanished with a splash. Joffrey moaned. Arya ran off to her horse, Nymeria loping at her heels. After they had gone, Sansa went to Prince Joffrey. His eyes were closed in pain, his breath ragged. Sansa knelt beside him. “Joffrey,” she sobbed. “Oh, look what they did, look what they did. My poor prince. Don’t be afraid. I’ll ride to the holdfast and bring help for you.” - Sansa I AGOT
Now, I do not want to get into more crap about the Trident incident, but all of this is very telling, especially as it comes from Sansa’s POV so there is no bias. After watching Joffrey hurt an innocent boy, Sansa not only tells Arya to stay out of it and let the boy be mutilated, when Joffrey starts threatening her sister with a sword (remember, Arya only has a stick at best) she thinks that they are both ruining things. In this very dangerous and volatile situation where she should be defending her defenceless little sister, she not only blames them both, but is only annoyed because they are ruining her date. And then, she tells Arya to leave Joffrey alone. It’s pretty whack and I’d feel resentment too if I was Arya. And then, she abandons Arya and seemingly doesn’t care because she wants to be with Joffrey (remember that Arya goes missing for four fucking days) and opines about what they did to him, as Joffrey wasn’t the aggressor.
“They were not the only ones present,” Ned said. “Sansa, come here.” Ned had heard her version of the story the night Arya had vanished. He knew the truth. “Tell us what happened.” His eldest daughter stepped forward hesitantly. She was dressed in blue velvets trimmed with white, a silver chain around her neck. Her thick auburn hair had been brushed until it shone. She blinked at her sister, then at the young prince. “I don’t know,” she said tearfully, looking as though she wanted to bolt. “I don’t remember. Everything happened so fast, I didn’t see …” - Eddard III AGOT
We know she knows exactly what happened. This is a lie. Plain and simple. I don’t blame Sansa for this - we would probably all be her confronted with this intimidating situation - but that doesn’t make it any better for her sister.
That was when Sansa finally seemed to comprehend. Her eyes were frightened as they went to her father. “He doesn’t mean Lady, does he?” She saw the truth on his face. “No,” she said. “No, not Lady, Lady didn’t bite anybody, she’s good …” “Lady wasn’t there,” Arya shouted angrily. “You leave her alone!” “Stop them,” Sansa pleaded, “don’t let them do it, please, please, it wasn’t Lady, it was Nymeria, Arya did it, you can’t, it wasn’t Lady, don’t let them hurt Lady, I’ll make her be good, I promise, I promise …” She started to cry. - Eddard III AGOT
I feel for Sansa here, but she didn’t need to throw her sister under the bus, again.
The last fortnight of their journey had been a misery. Sansa blamed Arya and told her that it should have been Nymeria who died. And Arya was lost after she heard what had happened to her butcher’s boy. Sansa cried herself to sleep, Arya brooded silently all day long, and Eddard Stark dreamed of a frozen hell reserved for the Starks of Winterfell. - Eddard IV AGOT
Sansa’s eyes had grown wide as the plates. “A tourney,” she breathed. She was seated between Septa Mordane and Jeyne Poole, as far from Arya as she could get without drawing a reproach from Father. “Will we be permitted to go, Father?” - Arya II AGOT
“I don’t care about their stupid tourney,” Arya said. She knew Prince Joffrey would be there, and she hated Prince Joffrey. Sansa lifted her head. “It will be a splendid event. You shan’t be wanted.” Anger flashed across Father’s face. “Enough, Sansa. More of that and you will change my mind." - Arya II AGOT
So, she blames Arya for Lady when it wasn’t her fault (seemingly out loud to Arya’s face seeing as this is coming from Ned), distances herself from Arya and then insults her at breakfast. Me and my sister fight, but not like this.
That was when Arya missed her brothers most. She wanted to tease Bran and play with baby Rickon and have Robb smile at her. She wanted Jon to muss up her hair and call her “little sister” and finish her sentences with her. But all of them were gone. She had no one left but Sansa, and Sansa wouldn’t even talk to her unless Father made her. - Arya II AGOT
When Prince Joffrey seated himself to her right, she felt her throat tighten. He had not spoken a word to her since the awful thing had happened, and she had not dared to speak to him. At first she thought she hated him for what they’d done to Lady, but after Sansa had wept her eyes dry, she told herself that it had not been Joffrey’s doing, not truly. The queen had done it; she was the one to hate, her and Arya. Nothing bad would have happened except for Arya. - Sansa II AGOT
Again with the blaming when she is fully aware it was not her fault. I admire Sansa’s growth through the series. I enjoy reading her AFFC and TWOW chapters. But boy, did we truly start at the bottom.
She knew her father was still angry about that, but it wasn’t fair to blame Joff. That would be like blaming her for something that Arya had done. - Sansa III AGOT
Ironic, isn’t it?
“What did Gregor do?” Arya asked. “He burned down a holdfast and murdered a lot of people, women and children too.” Arya screwed up her face in a scowl. “Jaime Lannister murdered Jory and Heward and Wyl, and the Hound murdered Mycah. Somebody should have beheaded them.” “It’s not the same,” Sansa said. “The Hound is Joffrey’s sworn shield. Your butcher’s boy attacked the prince.” “Liar,” Arya said. Her hand clenched the blood orange so hard that red juice oozed between her fingers. “Go ahead, call me all the names you want,” Sansa said airily. “You won’t dare when I’m married to Joffrey. You’ll have to bow to me and call me Your Grace.” She shrieked as Arya flung the orange across the table. It caught her in the middle of the forehead with a wet squish and plopped down into her lap. “You have juice on your face, Your Grace,” Arya said. It was running down her nose and stinging her eyes. Sansa wiped it away with a napkin. When she saw what the fruit in her lap had done to her beautiful ivory silk dress, she shrieked again. “You’re horrible,” she screamed at her sister. “They should have killed you instead of Lady!” - Sansa III AGOT
Sansa is the aggressor here, telling blatant lies, and it’s a bit of an overreaction to a stain on a dress.
“Arya started it,” Sansa said quickly, anxious to have the first word. “She called me a liar and threw an orange at me and spoiled my dress, the ivory silk, the one Queen Cersei gave me when I was betrothed to Prince Joffrey. She hates that I’m going to marry the prince. She tries to spoil everything, Father, she can’t stand for anything to be beautiful or nice or splendid.” “Enough, Sansa.” Lord Eddard’s voice was sharp with impatience. Arya raised her eyes. “I’m sorry, Father. I was wrong and I beg my sweet sister’s forgiveness.” Sansa was so startled that for a moment she was speechless. Finally she found her voice. “What about my dress?” “Maybe … I could wash it,” Arya said doubtfully. “Washing won’t do any good,” Sansa said. “Not if you scrubbed all day and all night. The silk is ruined.” “Then I’ll … make you a new one,” Arya said. Sansa threw back her head in disdain. “You? You couldn’t sew a dress fit to clean the pigsties.” - Sansa III AGOT
The one time Arya tries to apologise and make amends, particularly by putting herself out there and offering to do something she hates to fix it, and Sansa says that.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Sansa pleaded with him. “I don’t want to go back.” She loved King’s Landing; the pageantry of the court, the high lords and ladies in their velvets and silks and gemstones, the great city with all its people. The tournament had been the most magical time of her whole life, and there was so much she had not seen yet, harvest feasts and masked balls and mummer shows. She could not bear the thought of losing it all. “Send Arya away, she started it, Father, I swear it. I’ll be good, you’ll see, just let me stay and I promise to be as fine and noble and courteous as the queen.” - Sansa III AGOT
“It won’t be so bad, Sansa,” Arya said. “We’re going to sail on a galley. It will be an adventure, and then we’ll be with Bran and Robb again, and Old Nan and Hodor and the rest.” She touched her on the arm. “Hodor!” Sansa yelled. “You ought to marry Hodor, you’re just like him, stupid and hairy and ugly!” She wrenched away from her sister’s hand, stormed into her bedchamber, and barred the door behind her. - Sansa III AGOT
Again with the unnecessary insults that prey on insecurities Arya already has. Especially seeing as Arya is trying to cheer her up.
“I’m not like Arya,” Sansa blurted. “She has the traitor’s blood, not me. I’m good, ask Septa Mordane, she’ll tell you, I only want to be Joffrey’s loyal and loving wife.” - Sansa IV AGOT
Sansa found herself thinking of Lady again. She could smell out falsehood, she could, but she was dead, father had killed her, on account of Arya. She drew the knife and held it before her with both hands. - Sansa II ACOK
There are about 3 Arya mentions in Sansa’s ACOK chapters, and one was negative. And this is all while she thinks Arya is dead.
Lommy had called her Lumpyhead, Sansa used horseface, and her father’s men once dubbed her Arya Underfoot, but she did not think any of those were the sort of name he wanted. - Arya IX ACOK
Sister. Sansa had once dreamt of having a sister like Margaery; beautiful and gentle, with all the world’s graces at her command. Arya had been entirely unsatisfactory as sisters went. - Sansa II ASOS
Again, she thinks Arya is dead, and this is still how she sees her.
Her name, she had to know her name. “Arya Underfoot. Your sister used to call you Arya Horseface.” “It was me made up that name. Her face was long and horsey. Mine isn’t. I was pretty.” - The Prince of Winterfell ADWD
I know Jeyne said she made up the name, and I know you’re all gonna say that means Sansa didn’t use it. But it doesn’t matter that she made it up, because that doesn’t mean Sansa never said it. Arya and Theon, who has no bias or reason to lie, admit that. It seems pretty clear to me.
There are one or two positive mentions of Arya in Sansa’s thoughts, but that’s not what this ask was about. I hope I answered you nonny and thank you for the kind words!!
EDIT: forgot to add the link at the start. fixed now!
#asoiaf#neve has mail#arya stark#the night wolf#again i've got people complaining i use the sansa tag even though my last answer was not negative at all#so i will not be tagging her here#i will on the next one though so bite me
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Book talk: Captive Prince
After putting this review off for so long, I finally have the motivation to type my thoughts.
I don’t even remember when I added the Captive Prince to my TBR list on Goodreads but one day, after doing a presentation for a final exam, I decided to pick it up as a way to wind down.
It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while; okay, this is just me being dramatic but this is also me being honest.
I’ve mentioned this before, but my prone-to-reading-slump-ass is often prone to reading slumps, but this series saved me from it, albeit briefly. (I’m back into a reading slump again, but I blame this trilogy AND Haikyuu fanfics, please don’t @ me)
The Captive Prince tells the story of Damianos of Akielos – a prince-turned-slave who at the beginning of the book was gifted to Laurent, the crown prince of his rival country, Vere.
But there’s an important catch, Damen was also the one who killed Laurent’s brother. Whether Laurent knew it or not, is for the reader to find out but you can find hints all throughout the books.
The first book felt more like an introduction and I couldn’t help but sympathise with Damen as he struggled to play the part of a slave, granted he told Laurent he was just a soldier back home in Akielos.
Laurent, on the other hand, was cold and calculating, but as the story progressed, you can see there is much more to him than being ethereal (I don’t think this word was used in the books, but Damen sure thinks so!) and intelligent.
The entire story was told through Damen’s point of view (with Laurent’s p.o.v getting one or two chapters I think???) and if you’re looking for a story driven book, then this series is not for you. However, this doesn’t mean that the story wasn’t compelling, but I do think that it became more interesting and exciting in the second book - Prince’s Gambit.
There isn’t much world building and the writing is simple (which, again, is not really a bad thing for me), although I did find a few sentences’ structure weird and some description got me confused (tbf though, there are still so many words I don’t know, I should definitely start listing all the new words I learn).
As much as this book was character driven, I wish we got more insight on the side characters like Jord and Nikandros. CS Pacat wrote an interesting world and I wouldn’t have minded reading more beyond Damen’s thoughts.
One of the things I love about this series is the slowburn romance.
Oh, the slowburn hurts, but it hurts so good.
You could feel the tension between Laurent and Damen through the pages (no wonder everyone thought there was something going on between them lol). Their feelings were not easy to deal with, but when they finally do – it makes Damen’s pining all the wait worth it.
The funniest thing I find about their love is how Damen can’t seemingly talk about Laurent without mentioning his blue eyes, fair skin or blonde hair. (WE GET IT DAMEN, YOU’RE WHIPPED)
Another beautiful thing about them is how Laurent could show Damen his vulnerable side, despite their past. Damen is the type of person that can be described as “what you see is what you get”, no hidden meanings, no secret agendas in Damen’s action or words.
And Laurent, growing up in a place where everything is done with mind games and deceit, finally found someone he could finally show himself beyond his cold and calculating persona.
In conclusion, the Captive Prince has become one of my favorite series, if the number of tabs and post-its I stuck on the books can be any indication.
To finish this review, here’s my favorite scene of the entire trilogy:
Makedon was explaining the virtues of iron tea to Laurent, and when Laurent massaged his own temple with finely bred fingers, Makedon remarked, rising, ‘You should have your slave fetch you some.’
‘Fetch me some,’ Laurent said.
Damen rose. And stopped.
Laurent had gone very still. Damen stood there, awkwardly. He could think of no other reason why he had stood up.
Whipped. I tell you.
No one can convince me that this was the result of Damen getting used to attending Laurent. Slave or not, Damen would willingly do this (amongst other things) for Laurent.
Also!!! If you want music recommendation while reading these books, then I definitely recommend Gallant’s Sweet Insomnia album. The songs fit Damen and Laurent’s relationship, especially Hurt, Sharpest Edges and Sweet Insomnia
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“Days Gone Bye” (TWD 1.1)
There’s so much about “Days Gone Bye” that is well done – not least because it operates primarily on silence and visuals rather than the preachy dialogue that takes over down the road. (Yes, season 2, I’m looking at you.) That said, not gonna lie, it took me bloody ages to figure out where the opening scene falls in Rick’s post-hospital, pre-Atlanta adventures. (And when I say ages, what I really mean is it took me about six or eight times watching the episode. Ye gods.)
I feel like Rick might have lucked out in the apocalypse. He’s a cop, so there’s obviously a uniform to wear as he waltzes off into the unknown. What would you opt to put on if you were in his shoes and didn’t have a uniform to default to? (Personally, I’ve realised I have a serious lack of practical apocalypse shoes on hand. Although I’m inclined to think that my high heels would come in handy for breaking dead limbs and stomping in undead brains, so there’s that to consider.)
Burnt out and/or flipped cars are popular for set design in post-apo/dystopian TV and films, as are buildings with blasted out/shattered windows, but until fairly recently I’d always viewed them as sort of abstract decorations without really registering how they might get that way. Indeed, in earlier drafts I spent some time snarking about how the zompocalypse must infect people’s driving abilities (a terrifying thought considering the actual driving ability of your average non-zompocalypse-affected person) and, to quote myself,
Given the amount of fire damaged/cars upturned/miscellaneous damage inflicted on cars, you’d think that fcking flamethrowers and grenades and rocket launchers were being wielded by random Georgian citizens as they frolicked through the streets escaping the dead.
But this year [2020], between the port explosion in Beiruit, which flipped cars with the force of the blast and turned high rises into ghouls with hundreds of gaping mouths, and the fires in California, leaving burnt-out hulks in their wake, it’s really come home to me how easy and careless that kind of destruction can be – and how swiftly it can come to be seen as a norm. No flamethrowers or grenades necessary.
Even the empty streets and the silence we’re greeted with in this opening scene, as Rick drives down a barren street and walks through an abandoned campsite, now has more resonance since the 2020 lockdowns brought that apocalyptic empty street into reality. I don’t think I’d ever really thought to walk down the middle of a street before, because, you know, traffic – and yet for a time, when there were no cars on the road and people were hidden away in their homes, that became a new normal. There was a freedom in knowing you could walk in the middle of the road with almost no risk, because all normal rules had been suspended indefinitely. Why stick to the sidewalk when you know a car’s unlikely to drive through?
I guess apocalyptic fiction only ever seems apocalyptic and unimaginable until the real world catches up.
There are a lot of things I could say about this opening scene, aside from the great visceral pleasure of getting absorbed by the camera work, feeling one with Rick as we witness the destruction, the abandonment, the death… There’s a stillness that I wish we saw more of in the later episodes. The introduction of the little walker girl sets up Rick’s hope and his despair in a wonderful way. Having the first appearance and first death of a walker be a little girl in her jammies really shows us just how much the world has been turned on its head – Rick’s a police officer, whose job is to help people (ideally, at any rate), and the realisation that in this new world the only way to help is to kill those he used to protect sets up a(n albeit inconsistent) through-line for the rest of the series.
So yeah, I could wax lyrical about the excellent beginning of “Days Gone Bye” – but because I’m a snarky arsehole, I’m going to talk about the dead. And I’m going to do so with the caveat that while I’ve read some of the behind-the-scenes commentary etc., I am not actually a Walking Deadhead, and consequently do not have at my fingertips the reasons why certain production decisions were made.
There’s an oddity in the first…two seasons? when it comes to cars and the dead, in that there are a startling number of people who seem to have just…died, while in the driver’s seat of their cars. We see two clear examples in the opening scene, as Rick passes between two cars, facing opposite directions, each with their own definitely dead driver slumped at the wheel. This appears, rather more egregiously, in the traffic snarl at the start of season 2, but for the moment we’ll stick with season 1. The camera’s shown us an abandoned camp, any number of cars that seem to have become part of stationary living. Yet we’ve got two dead people behind the wheel, in cars facing opposite directions. Now, I’m not disputing that people could die at the wheel. As the show later goes on to show us, you can get chomped, die, and resurrect within minutes. The problem is in the fact that a proportionally ridiculous number of people seem to die at the wheel. I suppose the logical conclusion is that said individuals stupidly had their windows down and their arms out, got chomped, and sent away the rest of the car’s occupants or anyone else in the vicinity, and then opted to just hang out in the car until death – at which point zombrain kicks in and any attempt to use a door handle is moot. (See, e.g., the number of zoms hanging out in closed cars.) Combine that with people more likely than this show’s putative heroes to shoot someone who’s been infected in the head before they turn and simply move on… Eh. I suppose it’s plausible. It’s just not very realistic. (Not least because oh my god, there are undead people, roll up your fucking window you fucking idiot. I know it’s hot in Georgia but roll those windows up, babe. You might sweat, but at least a stealth zom won’t use your hand for a snack. Gah.)
…not going to comment on the inconsistent zombehaviour in which a smolzom stops to pick up her teddy (see, later, other zoms climbing ladders, scaling fences, and using rocks to bash through windows – and in one instance, tugging her zip hoodie back up over her arm). Instead, my issue is with smolzom’s slippers. How has she not lost those by now??
(Total aside, but I’ve been bingeing L&O:SVU lately, and boy howdy do a lot of TWD people pop up like daisies there. Daryl, Shane, Noah, Dale, Beth, Lori, Amy, Tyreese, Lizzie, Liza (tbf from FTWD)…)
The fries that Rick and Shane are eating just look sad and wimpy and not worthy of eating. Do better, cops. (Do better, fries.) Really, it’s almost a surprise they’re not nomming doughnuts and coffee. There’s no doubt that the two are meant to be close, though; you have to be close to dab your fry in your partner’s ketchup (oh no, Lori).
Jon Bernthal is a good actor. I just wish they hadn’t given him a character who was so all over the place. (I’ll delve more into this in later episodes.) The first scene he appears in, after the opening credits, clearly sets him up as a chauvinistic dick, in contrast to pauvre Rick, whose relationship with his wife is suffering – and, critically, this is not because of Rick, but because of Lori. Her first introduction as a character is as a woman at odds with her husband – and the fact that her husband is in law enforcement really should not be glossed over here, not given America’s contentious relationship with LEOs. (We’ll get back to Rick and Shane eventually.) It’s no secret that spouses of people in law enforcement, or in the military, often struggle because their partners are always absent. I’m not trying to apply blame, here; law enforcement and military positions require a lot, and there is absolutely a high degree of trauma that can result due to the kind of work in which they engage. That said, the way Lori is set up as the antagonist from the get-go is just…distasteful. Rick is presented as reasonable, as wanting to try to make things right, as trying to do what Lori wants and yet always being the bad guy. The sad thing is that Lori is no one’s favourite character, and yet the character never had a chance. She was fucked over long before she actually turned up on screen, ensuring that our perspective of her is negative from the start. In a show that takes years to establish strong women, Lori stands out as a particularly egregious example of a woman, wife, and mother who realistically could have been a positive representation of a woman that instead was turned into a caricature everyone loves to hate. (We’ll get to Andrea eventually, I promise.)
I think perhaps, most egregiously, the fact that Rick says something like “It’s like she’s pissed at me and I don’t know why” sets up Lori as being irrational and Rick as being patient and anxious to fix things without knowing why. Lori is fucked in terms of character development from before she ever appears on screen and never has the opportunity to claw back some of that lost ground. Rick literally labels her as cruel – and cruel in front of their son, to boot. Who doesn’t view a person cruel to their child as a villain? Gah. Lori was absolutely fucked by merit of being Rick’s wife. And it’s really a shame, because every so often Sarah Wayne Callies absolutely kills it (no pun intended, but leading up to Lori’s death is perhaps the character’s best scene).
Of course, too, the whole convo between Shane and Rick sets up Shane as a “fuck me, women, man” – and yeah, absolutely, this attitude ends up extrapolated to his behaviour towards people in general. Yes, it bonds our two good ol’ boy policemen as lads who love each other and try to jive each other into better moods but are sensitive enough to listen to actual emotional shit… But ultimately it establishes Shane as a dick and Rick as a victim. Shane’s absolute disdain for women’s emotion/women talking about their emotions is in some ways bizarre when you look at his future relationship with Lori – and yet at the same time, that disdain echoes through all of anything he does with Lori, with Carl, and with Rick in future.
Okay, so, let’s move on to the fuckfest in which Rick gets shot. (Twice, Lord help me. These fuckers are alarmingly inept.)
Pro: they fling out the spikey “stop the bad guy” chains.
Con: …well, at least one dude doesn’t know about the safety, so that’s … not ideal. (His death: not surprising.)
Pro: Rick can apparently drive backwards with skill. I can’t even back around a corner.
Con: Leon is a fucking moron.
Pro: Rick and Shane disposed of their hats??
Con: what happens to the Black cop? Why is he the only one we don’t know the fate of? (See TWD’s treatment of Black actors in general…)
Pro: the car does not flip in their general direction.
Con: pretty much everything else in this scene.
I dunno about the average viewer, but I feel like the two apparently competent cops – Shane and Rick – should each be assigned to one of the shitty cops, rather than riding together, because really, do you want cops rolling in to save you when they clearly don’t know the first thing about gun operation? (Yes, as any number of viewers have pointed out, there’s no safety on the gun that Leon is holding, but the fundamental point is to articulate how much of a fuck-up he is as a cop. If you’re out in the field and don’t know how your piece works, should you even be out there? Don’t they give cops gun training? You’d hope so…yikes. Although I guess it does sort of set up the absolute nightmare of season 2’s gun control plot line. (Oh god, season 2. Help.))
Am I the only one amused by the name Leon Basset? He’s a cat and a dog at once!
It takes Rick and Shane and co. an embarrassingly long time to put down the baddies – one of whom manages to hit a cop in a spot not covered by his vest, after having been flipped violently upside down in a car crash. Seriously, the fact these dudes are able to crawl out of the car and start merrily firing away, much less actually hit someone, is fucking insane. Have they trained in post-car crash shooting? I have to conclude they have, because otherwise the fact they have better aim than the multiple cops shooting at them is absurd. (Also hilarious: bad dude #1 crawls out of the completely totalled, upside-down car with, like, a scratch on his cheek. Until bad dude #2 takes a shotgun blast the chest, he appears to have lucked out with almost zero wounds from the crash. Are we sure *they* aren’t actually already dead??) And really, Rick’s an idiot in this scene – his fellow cops are intelligently hanging out by the cop cars, using them for cover, while Rick displays a high degree of absolute idiocy in waltzing straight out into the open; it’s made even worse by the fact that he’s brandishing his cute little Colt Python revolver while at least two of the cops behind him are wielding shotguns.
Bad copping, Rick. Cop better, please.
There are several shots right before Rick gets shot the first time where the camera angle makes it appear that Shane has his shotgun pointed straight at Rick, including the actual frame where he *does* get shot in the vest – when he’s shot in the side closer to Shane than the unnamed assailant. Now, this is probably due to bad blocking, although you’d think Rick would know better than to walk directly between the baddies and his fellow cops when there’s active gunfire, since it makes him a liability (seriously, I doubt the efficacy of the cop training programme in whatever bit of Georgia this is), but with the benefit of hindsight you could also see it as foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of Rick and Shane’s relationship. Think about the scene in “Wildfire,” the penultimate episode of the season, when Shane and Rick are in the woods doing a sweep, and Shane sights down that shotgun at Rick walking through the trees ahead of him for a long moment before Dale turns up. In that later episode (and moving on increasingly through all of Season 2), Shane wants Rick out of the way, but it takes a very long time in terms of screen hours to actually get around to making his final move. Ironically, it’s only ever here in the opening episode, following Shane appearing to be aiming through Rick’s back at the assailants, that Shane ever successfully gets Rick out of the way. Unintentionally, of course, but there is nevertheless an odd parallelism created here due to blocking and weapon of choice.
Dammit, Shane.
You know, on thinking it over, I’m surprised that this police force functions at all. Yes, the dispatcher only noted two individuals in the car, but if I’ve learned anything from watching procedurals it’s that before stopping to chat about anything you clear every possible place an unknown assailant could be hiding. I’d think that would especially be the case for a car chase, because how accurately can you see inside a speeding car? (That’s a legitimate question; I have no idea.) And actually, entirely aside from the possible existence of a third assailant, if you shoot someone with a gun, surely the follow-up after they’ve gone down is to immediately approach, ensure any weapons are out of arms’ reach, ascertain if the individual is dead, and if not, call immediately for medical attention. I know the baddies took several shots to the chest, but come on. They also emerged almost entirely unscathed from a totalled car, so clearly they’re already marked as practically unkillable. And yeah, following procedure wouldn’t have allowed Rick to get dramatically shot for real after the first fake-out, but they could easily have had him get dramatically and unexpectedly shot by the third dude when following procedure and checking to see the other two were dead. Most of the dialogue could have been retained as well. But oh well. I guess the show sets up the failure of authority figures to function effectively from the very start; not following procedure proves to be useful to Rick, considering his future actions as leader of the Merry Undead crew.
Further proof these cops don’t know how to cop: literally no one notices the third dude crawl out of the car, not even to go “hey!” Dude literally has enough time to crawl out on his hands and knees, stand up, point a gun, and actually hit his target before anyone (aka Shane) so much as notices his existence. There are at least three other cop cars in the vicinity – the other car that arrived with Rick and Shane (the “wait what’s a safety” cop and his partner) and the two cars that were chasing the criminals in the first place (four more dudes) – and yet apparently no one noticed a third guy standing up with a gun in his hand. And yeah, I’ll cut some of them a bit of a break on the theory that they probably couldn’t see the guy until he stood up because of the car in the way, but with seven people standing, *someone* should have seen him. Given Shane’s angle when he shoots, the two cops behind him definitely should have noticed something. The fact that someone only shouts to move in after Rick gets shot is just…shoddy copping. Seriously, this is the kind of stupidity that leads you to wish characters would just die. I’m sure someone would miss these people, but the world isn’t likely to notice they’ve gone. (Also, Shane blowing away the third dude on the first shot is pretty much the only time any of these professionals have actually hit their target immediately. Glad to know the safety of the Merry Undead crew is in the hands of people with worse aim than people flung around in a totalled car. Hurray!)
I’ve decided that after Shane goes with Rick to hospital in the ambulance, the rest of the terrible cops get eaten by the reanimated baddie crew. It’s what they deserve, really.
Moving right along…
Rick has a frigging massive hospital room. Either he or Lori is secretly a drug runner, or else the local cops have some pretty sweet health insurance. Lucky for Rick; if he’d been in a shared room or on one of those corridors with multiple beds separated by curtains, he’d have been walker munchies asap. Unforeseen side-effects of the zompocalypse: healthcare edition.
I…am not going to deal with the time issues of Rick being in hospital and then waking up to a hellscape. Suspension of belief, yeah?
I think the weirdest thing in the cut from Shane with the flowers to Rick waking up on the bed is the silence. The background beep of the machines has vanished, telling us the power’s gone off; the off-screen background hospital noise – heard most notably in the undiscernible PA behind Shane talking – has also vanished. Rick’s harsh breathing under Shane’s words also vanishes when the shot does, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to suggest Rick is better, worse, or otherwise. The scene doesn’t show it, but it sounds vaguely like a ventilator is functioning when Shane’s in the room, which would suggest Rick’s still hooked up to breathing support following surgery; if that’s the case, Rick was taken off the ventilator to breathe on his own at some point after that, since he wakes up only with oxygen to his nose. The shift from all that background noise to absolute silence is incredibly effective, because though we can’t register it visually, and may not consciously notice the shift in audible sounds, it nevertheless conveys to the viewer that something has changed before Rick even opens his mouth.
Horrifying thought, though, being stuck in hospital in Georgia without aircon. (I’d melt. Not just in hospital, but in general. Heat and humidity are not my friends.) Frankly, I’m surprised Rick manages to get any words out of his mouth given he’s probably a wee bit on the thirsty side; my mouth goes a bit dry and I might as well be trying to talk through a damn desert for all the words I manage.
It’s kind of amusing that there’s a lingering shot of the clock on the wall. Yeah, it adds to Rick’s confusion and disorientation because dammit, he can’t even tell what time it is – and what is the world without timekeeping?? – but what are the odds it happened to run out of battery in time to inconvenience the last man standing in the zompocalypse? “Oh no! I’ve missed the end of the world! Ah well, better late than never.”
Helpful that Rick woke up during the day – can you imagine how disorienting it would have been to wake up in pitch dark with zero sound? Anyone who lives in a vaguely urban or suburban area is almost entirely unaccustomed to the dominance of both anymore; when I moved back to suburbia after living in a sort of downtown-y bit of an offshoot of the nearest city, I had serious issues for months because at night everything was so quiet and so dark, especially during the period when the house next door was unoccupied. Seriously creepy. (Although I’ve also seen raccoons, deer, and a coyote as well as the ubiquitous squirrels and birds and neighbourhood cats, so that’s exciting. Actually, weirdly, there’s a surprising dearth of animals, to say nothing of pets, floating around in the apocalypse. We see dogs occasionally as time goes on, running about the streets of Atlanta, eating the dead, getting eaten when times are desperate; deer pop up every now and then, and crows alight ominously all over the place, but…where are all the dead goldfish? The cats??)
Does Rick just have a super special water faucet in his private bathroom, or are the utilities still working? (Nice to immediately have a way to quench his thirst. It also apparently gives him super strength, since he doesn’t keel over again despite the probable weeks he’s been flopped out in bed not using his muscles.) Alexandria has running water, but if I recall correctly it was also designed as self-sustaining. Hospitals usually have generators, since if the power cuts for whatever reason (earthquake, hurricane, T-rex attack) you want to make sure a bunch of people don’t cut out as well as a result, but as far as I’m aware that…doesn’t affect the water systems? (I am definitely not a water engineer. Are there water engineers?) And since he later goes down stairs to get out of the hospital, is there really a system still functioning that pumps water up several stories when the electricity appears to be dead? Convenient water is convenient.
Obviously there must be a generator or some kind of power still functioning, since there are some lights on in the hall, complete with requisite horror-themed buzzing and flickering. (Help, I’m having flashbacks of my mother’s kitchen.) Useful, in any case, since otherwise Ricky boy would be tripping over the debris in the hall before he got to the nurse’s station. (I guess we’ll put his continued unclothed state down to disorientation, but if I looked out my door and saw that much of a hallway disaster, I think I’d find some shoes first. Yikes.)
The clock at the nurse’s station has also stopped. These are battery-run, guys, they don’t go off when the power does. Speaking of electronics, though – it’s 2010, right? Why doesn’t the nurse’s station have any computers? I mean, I got my first laptop in 2006 and I think we always had a family computer when I was growing up, so it’s not like this predates the computer era. Actually, that’s a point – in all of the places that the Merry Undead crew break into/crash at, I’m struggling to think of instances of computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Rick has an mp3 player at the start of season 4, when he’s in his farming phase, and Olivia in…season 6? still carries her long-dead mobile around, but aside from the CDC and actual hospital-related machinery, there’s a startling lack of technology. I dunno, it just seems odd. Like the lack of feral cats.
I know Rick wants to illuminate the situation (hah), but his first thought is RUMMAGE THROUGH SHIT TO FIND MATCHES. Like, seriously, open a drawer or something, there’s probably a flashlight in there somewhere? I suppose we couldn’t spend too much time on finding lighting resources, though, considering that would delay the DRAMATIC DISCOVERY of Rick’s first dead person.
On which point – what are the walker rules for nomming a corpse, and what are the rules for reanimation? If the only way to actually put down a walker is through the brain, why isn’t our eviscerated lady corpse in the hospital undead? Her head appears entirely intact, although we might be missing a wound on the far side. (Although jeez, given how many facial bites and tears we see throughout this series, including the little girl at the beginning of this episode, how has no one snacked on her delicious face??) A single bite will kill and turn you, and some people do manage to get an initial chomp and then remain unconsumed before turning, like Sophia and the little girl at the start of the episode. But is there a maximum limit of flesh that can be consumed before a person is thoroughly dead and won’t reanimate? A severed head sans body will reanimate, as we see later with Hershel and the Whisperers’ victims, so it seems like percentage of bodily consumption can’t factor in. Certainly bike lady later in this episode is missing her entire lower half without it having affected her walkerdom eternity. Yet we have people like hospital lady corpse and T-Dog in season 3 who get more or less entirely consumed without reanimating. And that’s without even talking about all of the dead who appear to have croaked in their cars without becoming undead despite the lack of a head wound. So where’s the boundary?
At least some of this we can probably attribute to early days inconsistencies, since most shows don’t dive in with all of the rules for new worlds and supernatural creatures laid out and set in stone, but the amount of consumption has always bothered me. From the other side, too, actually, because walkers appear to be wholly driven by a single purpose: consume. So when a walker has a nice juicy item in front of them with plenty of flesh left on it, why would they leave it behind to drift off after something else? Walkers are later shown to be drawn by light, by sound, by smell (operating on the suspension of disbelief that undead would retain any of the senses of sight, hearing, or smell, but never mind), but since the underlying drive remains to consume, why would light, sound, or smell be sufficient to draw them away from a meal directly in front of them? I could see it if, for instance, a corpse were being devoured by a whole bunch of walkers and so those who couldn’t easily get to the body went “welp fuck it, Imma go follow that gunshot I just heard,” or if a body has pretty well been picked to the bones, since then there’s not anything left to consume and the drive would push on to the next. But there are plenty of times over the course of the series when walkers abandon a perfectly delicious human with plenty of meat left on the bones in order to go chase something else. I’m not saying walkers are meant to be intelligent hunters or anything, since as Jenner shows us there’s just some sad little sparkles at the brainstem that are still operating, but if you boil it down to the most basic drive, walkers are driven to consume, and it makes little sense that they’d abandon something consumable in front of them that’s a sure thing to chase something else (I could see maybe abandoning an animal to chase a human, like dropping the pigs’ feet to chase after sirloin). But to leave something not completely eaten… Unless they get full? The human stomach can only contain so much at one time, so maybe there’s a default survival code that overrides the consumption drive to stop a walker eating if continuing to do so would explode the stomach. Although that doesn’t really make much sense, either, since any number of walkers are wandering around with their innards more or less exploded without it being a problem. Hmm. No real answers, there, other than that overriding logic of THE PLOT. I guess the only thing I can say with some confidence is that at least part of the walker digestive system seems to still operate, because when Rick and Daryl gut a walker to make sure it hadn’t eaten Sophia, not only is the woodchuck turned from fur and flesh into nasty black goo, the skull of the woodchuck has also been stripped clean. (Then again, I have difficulty envisioning how a walker manages to swallow an entire woodchuck skull, but that’s neither here nor there. Who’s up for woodchuck chilli??)
Anyway, back to Rick and his terrifying exploration of his new world of doom.
I have to laugh when I look at this disaster of a hospital. Did someone, in the last throes of the world ending, just take medical records and fling them everywhere? When is there ever that much paper floating around loose in a medical facility? Ye gods, Rick could learn confidential patient information! Nooooooo…
Ahem.
Like the episode’s opening scene of Rick working his way through the abandoned streets, silence is used to great effect from the time Rick wakes up through to his encounter with Morgan and Duane. The audience takes in everything along with Rick, unfettered by exposition. The silence, the dark, the emptiness, the dead – it all unfolds through Rick’s shocked and bewildered eyes. I mean, what would you do if you wandered down the hall and suddenly discovered a mostly devoured corpse? (I’d probably hurl. Ew.) Alas that so much of the series later gets bogged down by humans who never shut up. (Yes, Rick, I do mean you.)
Of course, in order to do that, the episode also, to quote CinemaSins, conveniently conveniences a bunch of its walkers. Where are they? Where they can’t hurt Rick before he knows what to do. Which is…kind of ridiculous. Logic be damned! I mean, if there’s one thing this show has been consistent about, it’s the inconsistency of its walkers.
Wait.
Man, I would not want to be walking across that floor barefoot. Ew. And ouch.
I’d be a terrible candidate for the apocalypse. I’m afraid of the dark.
I do like the background details of all the blood spattered on the walls. It’s more quiet filling in the blanks of what happened when Rick was in his coma – all that lovely show, don’t tell that later gets left by the wayside. BUT HE’S WALKING BAREFOOT THROUGH GLASS OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP AND FIND SOME SHOES AAAHHHHHHH.
PUT ON SOME DAMN SHOES.
DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE.
The fact that the doors are bound with a chain AND with a slat of wood just makes me laugh. I don’t think that wood’s going to do much if the chain breaks.
That’s a shockingly good manicure for a dead person. She might be stuck in a locked room for eternity but at least her nails look fab.
I know Rick is freaked out by the groaning and dead lady manicure and chained up door and blood all over the place, but charging into a pitch-black stairwell armed only with a fold of matches seems really stupid. This is perhaps the most egregious instance in this episode of convenient walker placement. The fact that Rick not only makes it down the stairs and outside without tripping and smashing his pretty face is one thing, but it’s really stunning that there are no walkers who got trapped between the stairwell doors. I guess maybe that was the military exit route so they cleared as they went (and…took the bodies with them, as well)? Then again, I’d rather rappel out a window using bedsheets than make my way through an endless stairwell of night, so…
I’m going to be *extremely* nitpicky here and wonder why Rick hasn’t noticed the smell. Between lady chewy and the not insubstantial blood puddle he walks by, you’d think there’d be at least a whiff of the smell of decomp, especially if the power and thus the aircon are out and humidity reigns supreme. Blood is a biological hazard, and it…is definitely not odourless, especially after it’s been sitting around for days. Rick does grimace when he first goes into the stairwell, implying he’s caught a whiff of the dead, but he doesn’t encounter anything going down the stairs that seems likely to have caused it (maybe the dead laid out that he encounters outside?). Scent’s an ongoing problem with this show, though; it crops up when it’s a useful narrative point, like smearing yourself with guts to escape detection or realising there’s an ocean of the dead nearby, but otherwise, not so much. Okay, yeah, maybe I can buy that after a while of living in close proximity you’d acclimate – humans are stunningly resilient – but given how quickly humans tend to get tetchy when in forced contact with disgusting smells, are you really telling me that Rick just…doesn’t notice? Or is his own “I’ve been in a coma for an indeterminate period of time” smell so bad that it overpowers the death smell? Yikes.
That said, the moments of tension when Rick’s match goes out and he’s left alone breathing in the dark of the stairwell are lovely. It carries the audience along with Rick’s fear and anxiety and confusion, knowing he knows something is hinky without actually knowing what’s happened and what’s going on, while as a viewer conversant with the horror genre you keep expecting something to happen, to lurch up out of the dark. That nothing does actually is a delightful defiance of expectations. And after a silence and darkness punctuated only by the dim, narrow light of a match and Rick’s harsh breathing, the overwhelming brightness of the outdoors combined with the sawing of the cicadas almost begs you to retreat back into the contained, comparative safety of the stairs rather than venturing out into the huge unknown of the world outside the hospital and its endless supply of the dead.
Shame that the hospital’s flickeringly dodgy power doesn’t include the EXIT sign. Aren’t those supposed to work even if nothing else does? Maybe it was crashed with whatever took out the clocks. (Hah.)
Every barefoot step Rick continues to take hurts. Like, there’s all kinds of shit on the ground, and I’m not just talking bits of wire and other stabby pieces of metal. There’s blood and guts – do you really want to be squishing that between your toes?? Also, I’ve let it go this far, but Rick is wearing his hospital gown backwards, and if he’s been in a coma he…really shouldn’t be wearing boxers (and should have been hooked up to a catheter, but I think watching Rick rip that out instead of pulling the IV from his hand might have been a bit too traumatising for the average viewer). So out here in the open air, with all the wrapped rows of the dead, we get our first obvious sign of decomp in the number of flies buzzing around, and some of the limbs look like they might be mottling from decomp (kind of hard to tell, though). I know I said I wasn’t going to get into the time problems, but I promise I’ll try to keep it to this paragraph. The fact that the hospital and town are both almost entirely deserted, as we’ll go on to see, certainly suggests a decent amount of time has passed, since it takes time for that many people to up and leave somewhere. (I’m really surprised that in this show they only ever seem to encounter major traffic pile-ups on freeways or similar; if the people in my town were trying to skedaddle, we’d all get stuck on the road outside my neighbourhood. Hell, until they put in roundabouts it backed up horrendously just for getting to the schools in the morning! You’re telling me everyone was able to get out of their neighbourhoods to get to the freeway in the first place? Bullshit.) The state of the dead half-lady Rick runs into outside also seems to support that, since she’s pretty decomposed (though weirdly looks more mummified than not, which is odd considering Georgia’s on the humid rather than the dry end of the heat spectrum). On the other hand, though, the state of decomp of the lady in the hospital hallway and the corpses outside the hospital point to not much time having passed; they’re still juicy, if you like. As the following episodes will go on to show via characters’ minimal clothing and copious amounts of sweat, Georgia is hot and humid, and I hate to tell you this, guys, but if you keel over in a climate like that, you decompose quickly. You bloat up and your skin slides right off, and it’s all extremely disgusting. But here there’s a stunning amount of intact left on these corpses considering, again, it’s Georgia. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, so my observations might not be medically valid. Then again, the very idea that dead people are wandering around eating people is … also not medically valid.) In any case, Rick should be walking through a soupy mess of liquefying human tissue seeping through the sheets wrapped around the dead (yum. One more reason to acquire footwear, mate). The bodies piled in the truck should be sliding over each other as decomposing human makes the sheets slippery. I suppose that’s a major flaw in zombie construction in this particular zompocalypse; it forgot to take account of actual decomposition in the specified climate. (The smell also ought to be enough to pretty well bowl Rick over, but again, everyone apparently has the opposite of super smell in this series, so we’ll let it slide). Of course, if corpses actually decayed like normal, they’d be rid of most of the zombies in no time.
There’s a weirdly small amount of damage that’s been done to this hospital, from what little we’re shown. The hospital scene in “TS-19” suggests that bombing of the hospital, or nearby, has commenced, but all we see is a relatively small chunk of building missing, rather oddly in the middle of a wall, a downed ambulance sign, and then a bit more horizontal damage behind the military encampment when Rick gets up the hill. You’d think they’d have kept bombing, not least to eradicate the piles of corpses, but unfortunately we never really get to see much of the early days and the military reaction; we get snippets about bombing Atlanta and see Shane and Lori watch as Atlanta’s struck, and when Daryl and Carol stalk Grady Memorial there’s at least one shot of the city where it’s clearly suffered aerial bombardment. But there’s really not a lot of engagement with the drastic measures taken to try to control the situation, just the idea that those existed. Fear the Walking Dead, from my understanding, doesn’t really do much to deal with this either, despite ostensibly aiming to initially tackle the very period of time that The Walking Dead skipped over. So that’s a shame.
The military encampment is odd. Surely you’d only bail on things like helicopters and Humvees if you absolutely had to, since otherwise they seem to me like the first thing you’d hop into as an escape route (and certainly in season 3, the Governor indicates that military playthings are highly prized). Sure, maybe your random joe couldn’t commandeer a helo, but surely joe schmo could yoink a Humvee. I mean, if I were fleeing a hospital and there were a whole military encampment hanging out in the back yard that no one was minding, I’d be inclined to hijack something and zoom away. Operation Save the Toes! If a herd had passed through, surely we’d see more damage to what remains (for instance, would that nice tent still be standing?). Points, though, for framing of Rick against the broken military might that both visually and metaphorically shows us how small he is. Okay, so I have to ask: how far away from hospital did Rick and his family live? Because he appears to walk for quite a while – with a bullet wound that’s still healing! – and their house looks like it’s firmly in a nice suburban neighbourhood. So did he walk several miles to dead half-lady and steal her bike, or did he literally just walk down the street? Maybe the unhappiness in the soles of his feet is just being overwhelmed by, well, everything. All I can say is that I ran away from home barefoot around age 8 or 9 and ended up with such bruised and blistered feet – after maybe twenty minutes of walking total – that I couldn’t go to school for several days because I couldn’t walk. And I wasn’t even recovering from a gunshot wound!
(Also, can we talk about that hospital wristlet. That sucker should have waaay more info on it. Really, if nothing else I think we can conclude that the hospital Rick was admitted to post-shooting spent all their money on giant rooms and then forgot about actually hospitalling. Do we blame that on Georgia, America, or bad TV writing?)
CORAAAL!!
Further proof of the rapid adaptation of the human species: Rick spots the bike and goes AH YES MINE, sort of clocking the half of a lady ten feet away without really being fussed; maybe an hour (?) into his re-entry into this waking nightmare of a world, he’s already become so numbed to dead bodies hanging about that it barely registers until she moves. And, mind you, while he’s seen plenty of dead people, and seen undead fingers poking through the crack between doors, this is the first undead person he’s actually seen. His reaction to just…flee is very much in line with his general “holy fuck okay moving on” attitude that we’ve seen thus far; each thing is weirder and worse than the last, layering up the horror as a surreal reality that’s made even more bizarre by the utter lack of any living people to ground him. While his collapse and “is this real?” moment at the Grimes household is, I think, a bit misplaced, it’s also really understandable because everything he’s seen is so far out of the normal realm of expectation that the only logical reaction is to question reality. He’s almost certainly both dehydrated and undernourished, on top of which he’s been utilising muscles that haven’t been used in some time; probably the most unrealistic aspect of his first hours after waking up is that he actually manages to get out of hospital and home so easily, rather than keeling over somewhere in the street and becoming Walker O’s (part of a balanced breakfast!). Although I feel like I would have hit the “wake up” whacking yourself in the head point long before getting home and realising my family wasn’t there. I think I’d be more likely to believe I’d walk through the door and my family would be out than to believe that all of the dead or the moving dead were real. Obviously the latter for Rick makes the fact his family isn’t home that much more surreal and distressing, because thus far he appears to have awoken to a world where there are no living people aside from himself, thus leading to the conclusion that if there are only the dead and himself, Lori and Carl must be dead – but I think I’d crack before getting to that point. (Though I sometimes wake up in the morning and literally can’t tell reality from what happened in my dreams, so who am I to judge?)
Weirdly as well, there’s very little in the Grimes household that tells me anything about any of the family. I know Lori and Carly frolicked off with Shane super fast when everything went to hell and took pictures and photo albums, but this house (as excellent as it is) looks very much like a set. There’s nothing really personal. It’s weird. Who are the Grimes, even? It reminds me of my ex-boyfriend’s flat. No pictures, no posters, no books (!!), nothing on the walls, no trinkets or files or any personal touches at all (please don’t be a serial killer eek). No wonder Carl settles into the apocalypse quickly and Lori has no personality other than being a disaster. They had practically no pre-pocalypse life other than “I’m Rick’s child” and “I’m Rick’s bitchy wife.”
As Rick walks back out of his empty house, you can see that the letterbox appears to be full of envelopes. Do you suppose Lori wrote a bunch of letters to people on the off-chance they’d get picked up after she and Carl left town with Shane, or do you think the post carried on even after everything else collapsed? (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds… Nor zombies either, apparently. Now I really want a series of shorts following a postman as she strives to deliver every letter she can (well, not the bills, obvs) even as the world continues to collapse around her head.)
Okay, so if you get home and discover your family is not there, and everything is topsy turvy and haywire and omg what the hell is even happening – who just goes and plonks outside to think? Surely you’d think “hmm, okay, maybe I should check the neighbours”?
Are overhead fans on the porch a southern thing? I can’t imagine having one here in the Pacific Northwest.
Can we talk again about how absurdly lucky Rick is when it comes to the existence of walkers in this town? The only ones in the hospital are literally chained behind doors with an explicit warning to piss off. The only one he encounters on his journey from hospital to home has no legs, and thus poses minimal threat to a man able to walk (or cycle, as the case may be). The first mobile walker he sees is in the distance and hasn’t noticed him yet, and before he has a chance to shout out and put himself in danger, Morgan and Duane ex machina themselves into position to not only take out the walker but also provide medical support. (I guess Rick’s just been running on…adrenaline? And yes, I know Rick also takes a shovel to the face – we’ll ignore the fact that there’s no apparent lasting damage from a shovel to the face, good grief – but that’s a far cry from the fate of having his flesh ripped from his bones before he even knew what walkers were. Boy, would that suck.) A whole bevy of walkers turn up that evening, ostensibly because Morgan had fired a gun, but then they all vanish by morning aside from a single walker still skulking around for the convenience of whacking practice. (I wonder what would have happened if the single walker still hanging around had been Morgan’s wife. Somehow I doubt he’d have been as willing for Rick to practise his new world survival skills on her.) Quite aside from his dubious hospital survival, Rick Grimes should be dead. I really wish this could be attributed to his cop training (but we know that shit is dubious as fuck), but unfortunately he’s just a dude wandering aimlessly who gets super lucky. Sigh.
(I can’t be the only one who looks at the walker Rick sees and thinks he must be either a mortician or a goth kid. That much black? When it’s apparently warm enough in Georgia that Rick is totally fine in your not-standard-issue hospital gown and boxers? Also, thanks camera for keeping the walker blurred out so we can’t tell he’s dead (did you save on makeup?), but in retrospect it kind of makes you wonder if Rick has eye problems. Now there’s a real problem in the apocalypse.)
Two things about Duane’s first appearance. First, he was inches away from Rick; how did he get enough room to swing a shovel? Second, wtf is Duane doing shrieking for his dad? He’s been living in this world for at least a month and his mum’s a zom: he has to know that walkers are drawn to noise, yet he’s yelping out like a wounded dog here. Apocalypse better, kiddo.
Rather hilariously, it’s when Rick sees Morgan casually shoot the walker through the head that he starts to panic. OMG HE KILLED A DUDE. I feel like with everything Rick’s seen so far he ought not to jump so quickly to the assumption that Morgan killed another living dude. Then again, he did just get whacked in the face with a shovel and should probably have a concussion, so…
Convenient that Rick passes out when Morgan threatens to kill him if he doesn’t answer, since given his current state I’m not sure he could have done coherently. Note to self: when faced with difficult or awkward questions, keel over. It’ll give you time to think.
The first conversation Rick and Morgan have when Rick first wakes up tied to the bed raises far too many questions related to how long Rick’s been in hospital and how bad his wound is. I…am not going to spend much time on this, because it’s a never-ending chase with no real answers. This is the scene that rips us out of the glorious silent exploration of Rick’s new apocalyptic world and thrusts us into exposition, which at least in this case has a reason given Rick’s total ignorance of the current state of the world – but it’s still exposition.
Anyway, briefly – didn’t Rick get hit from behind, under the armpit? Shouldn’t Morgan have had to change two dressings? But there’s only one, and moreover, Rick’s original bandaging didn’t come close to covering where the original gunshot entry wound was. Magical moving bullets! Mystery wounds! Exposition! Hurray!
Ugh, reasons never to work on The Walking Dead: you have to film in Georgia, and it’s hot and disgusting and everyone sweats, even at night. Blech. Thanks but no.
Morgan’s stupid use of the gun to kill the walker provides helpful exposition, but his reason for why he did it – “it all happened so fast, I didn’t think” – doesn’t make much sense. It was one walker, with no others anywhere in the apparent vicinity, and while his son had potentially whacked down another walker, there wasn’t exactly an urgent need to use the gun. And while I’m not sure that Rick would be able to articulate the idea that what Morgan killed was something other than a living human being, the fact that he’s so insistent that it must have been a man speaks to his desperation to cling to anything resembling normalcy, while unfortunately ignoring his experience since waking up in the hospital. What do you do when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what you’ve seen?
As an aside, Rick chained up to the headboard wearing his boxers and hospital gown kiiinda looks like he’s ready for someone’s doctor dom fantasy playtime fetish. Good thing Morgan’s not into that, right?
There’s something deliciously hilarious about Morgan warning/threatening Rick with his tiny little knife when the backdrop is such delightfully mundane floral pillowcases. Laura Ashley does not approve!!!
Why couldn’t Morgan have found Rick a snuggie? Or, I don’t know, slippers? Or socks? Or an actual bathrobe? He’s stuck with blankie chic.
I do love that shot though.
Sidebar, your honour, I have a digression to indulge.
Morgan’s “friend, you need glasses” is kind of hilarious given that now they’re into the apocalypse, sucks to be you if you have non-perfect sight or any medical problems requiring medication or other intervention. There’s a surprising lack of your average American with lots of health problems on TWD, perhaps in part as commentary that many of those individuals would have stood no chance against the relentless people-eating horde. While the introduction of Connie offers a welcome insight into how someone with a disability is able to survive in an apocalyptic situation, the show on the whole oddly glosses over that whole issue. America is not a healthy country (we weren’t pre-Covid and we’re certainly not doing well lately). Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs, according to a survey from the National Center Health Statistics. Some of these are vital, in that without them the person would die sooner rather than later; others treat conditions that won’t kill you immediately if untreated, but will kill you eventually or will cause significant problems as time goes on; and still others treat conditions that, while usually debilitating, you can usually survive and be at least vaguely functional. Some medications can be substituted by herbal remedies (digitalis, marshmallow root), but many can’t. I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and deal with chronic pain and migraines; I take daily meds to counter both pain and migraine, as well as an assortment of supplements (and hayfever tablets, oh god) that I *can* function without, but which to do so would seriously suck. Where are these people in the apocalypse? There are so many people with disabilities or on medication who would be able to keep functioning as potentially beneficial partners in the post-apo world. Where are they? And where are the characters grappling with the choice of whether to sacrifice themselves or let their family and friends deal with an ongoing and worsening condition? The only times we really encounter that sort of thing are Milton’s test subject Michael Coleman, who ultimately dies of prostate cancer, the vatos’ little senior citizen safe haven, and Lilly and Tara’s father, all of whom are elderly. We only ever get a little blip of each of those instances, as well, in what appear to be relatively comfortable and secure locations, so we really don’t get a sense of how their frailties or differing abilities play into the survival of those around them. Hershel’s worst health problem was the leg amputated post-walker bite, and that ultimately was irrelevant to how he lived and died. I might be missing someone – I probably am – but it’s an oddity, one that I suppose arises out of both a narrative need – the elderly and disabled and sick are often viewed as less capable and thus less interesting except as an emotional zinger – and a practical in-world need that wants to focus on the strongest and most active rather than devoting time to people who’ve not only had to adapt emotionally but also physically and psychologically. I’ve got a main character in a post-apo situation who’s not only hauling herself through cities and forests with a bad lower back and weak hip and reliance on a cane but who also is unquestionably the leader of her group, because while her disability is not ideal in this post-civilised world, it doesn’t negate her value. The apocalypse doesn’t eradicate every non-fit, medicated adult, and leaving them out or using them as plot conveniences isn’t ideal. To get back to Morgan’s glasses comment – a quick google search suggests that around 61 percent of the population is reported to wear reading or visual aids at least occasionally. This probably isn’t nearly as many once you wipe out the need for reading glasses among the older population (and, you know, people in their 30s like me… *sob*), but nevertheless there’s a significant portion of the population who can’t see very well without glasses (and let me tell you, good luck getting contacts during the apocalypse). My sister is pretty well blind as a bat without glasses and has been since she was in middle school. Imagine how differently things might have played out if Carl’s vision had been super shitty.
Sidebar complete.
I like the all-male hand-holding over the meal prayer. There’s something sweet about it, a clinging to old habits even in chaos.
It’s interesting that Morgan asks Rick if he even knows what’s going on, because by this point it must be at least a month into apocalypse (per Morgan’s line later in the episode that the gas mains have been down a month or so) – what are the odds you’d run into a random person so utterly clueless a whole month in? I guess maybe the hospital gown, boxers, and bare feet clued him in.
I’ve been thinking this all episode: Rick’s beard is beautifully trimmed for a dude who’s been in a coma.
Rick’s response to Morgan’s “yep, the undead, they’ll try to eat you” line is so blasé it’s funny. Like he’s just so overwhelmed by everything of the day that zombie cannibals or whatever are hardly worth getting fussed over. He jumps right from sort of reacting “oh dead people” to going “so they’re out there? Okey-day then”. Meanwhile, Morgan’s cool air comment about drawing zoms never occurs again, and there’s such a time gap between the firing of the gun and the walkers skulking around outside the house that it’s odd they’re still hanging around. Actually, you see this too at the end of season 2, when the herd of walkers wanders out of Atlanta and eventually ends up on Hershel’s farm – they turn when they hear the gunshot, but how good are their powers of perception? Like, they’re attracted to sound – fine, whatever, I can buy that, fine – but a gunshot, for instance, is a single instance of noise that then dies away. If you’re not in the immediate vicinity, as a walker, how do you continue knowing where to go? The show suggests that when zoms are drawn by noise it’s like a magnet, pulling them in unerringly to the source of the sound, but how do they continue to know which is the right direction for ages after the sound has ceased? It’s not like they have a compass or GPS.
Aww, we’re still early enough in the apocalypse that car alarms still work.
Morgan’s wife makes me sad in a lot of ways. Obviously she’s undead and roaming around looking for her next snack and her son and husband love and miss her and find her undead state to be traumatic, but it’s not that specifically so much as the consequences down the line. Morgan and Duane stayed in the same house where Mama Morgan died, meaning they’re regularly within eyeshot, thus inflicting pain and anguish, or suffering the threat thereof, long after her actual death. (Yes, of course, they had a secure and safe base in the house and didn’t want to move, but still.) Morgan couldn’t kill his wife when she dies, the first time around (although that makes me wonder at what point she was booted outside, considering she died in the house; did they chuck her dead body out the front door before she turned, or wait until she was ambulatory and forcibly eject her?). This – I guess you could call it weakness – proves tragic. When Rick gives him a rifle, he sets out deliberately to kill her and still can’t. And then, because Morgan repeatedly failed to put her down, she ultimately causes the death of Duane – and Morgan takes the blame, flipping into a state of madness that operates until he meets the cheesemaker. (I’ll come back to Morgan in later posts. I have *thoughts* about him as both killer and pacifist.)
How do you grieve loss or try to move on if you can’t actually lay the dead to rest? It’s a question that I don’t think gets explored enough in the show, because most of the time everyone is so concerned with pressing on and surviving that grieving is set aside. I’m not going to go into this here, because there’s ample opportunity to do so in later episodes without needing to jump seasons ahead.
Early days: walkers attempting to work doorknobs are a thing, rather than just pawing at the door.
Man, I miss having a bat. I have a wok and a kitchen knife to protect against the undead these days…and assorted high heels, should it come to that. (Oh god the humanity. My shoes would be ruined!!)
There’s something adorable about Rick wearing a damn headshield mask as he waltzes out the door in the morning with his wooden baseball bat and WHITE T-SHIRT to whack the undead dude on the front walk to death. Where did the headshield mask come from? Did the Drakes just happen to have one in the back closet in case of a pandemic? (*sad hollow 2020 laughter*) In any case, it’s a laughable contrast with rest of the show; by the end of the season, no one gives a shit about facial protection or protecting the skin. Potential backsplatter? Eh, give it here, I bathe in zomgoo for the health benefits daily.
Lori appears to keep a glass jar of pinecones on a shelf. She also apparently took framed photos from the wall in addition to the photo albums. At least one photo album makes an appearance in this season, but unless Morgan repurposed the empty frames for defensive purposes, there’s no indication ever of what Lori did with those framed photos. (Sadly, the photo album is lost when they flee Hershel’s farm. One assumes, anyway, since Carl later gets hold of a single photo for Judith because there are no others.)
Atlanta as a safe haven/refugee centre is…well, it’s a plot point to get Rick where he needs to go. Realistically, you don’t want to go into an urban centre when there’s a pandemic. In America, Covid is now hitting rural areas with force, but pretty much all of the early outbreaks and spread were in urban areas. And that’s without the added complication of the dead getting back up again! Cities obviously have more resources, but… I dunno. Although, to be fair, unlike Covid or the flu or the common head cold, zombieism appears only to transmit through bites (since we don’t yet know that everyone is infected!), like rabies, rather than being so contagious that if someone breathes on you, you’re sick. But even then – even accepting that people think that it’s passed solely through bites and not any other way – being bitten doesn’t necessarily mean instant death (Carl is perhaps the most obvious example of this, I think, but Jim and Deanna both also survive for a time after being chomped), so you could conceivably be bitten in a non-obvious area (your side, for instance), waltz into a populated area with only minor symptoms or hop on a plane and then be released into the population of another country, only to then actually die and start to nom people. Eh.
How many sets of keys do the Grimeses have??
I’d suck in the apocalypse because without showers I’d be so sad.
Ah, bonding is always best when undertaken half-naked and wrapped in a pristine white towel.
Duane is adorable. Why couldn’t we get a show following Duane and his sass?
This episode is almost entirely about following Rick in his discovery and acceptance of this new, batshit life, but in some ways I wish we’d got a snippet of flashback with Morgan and Duane and Lady Morgan. It wouldn’t really have fit into the episode, but I can dream.
Rick showers and puts his uniform on rather than civvies. The implication here is that the uniform retains a certain power – protect and serve – so anyone living who sees him would know that here’s a person whose job is to help. Contrasts sharply with the police officer in the second episode of Fear the Walking Dead who’s stockpiling water and clearly has already shifted over to an every-man-for-himself mindset. In light of America’s current epidemic of problematic police officers, it’s interesting to contemplate differences had TWD first aired in 2020. Or had it aired, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest or Northeast, which generally tend to have a more left-skewing and police-condemning attitude.
I mentioned guns briefly earlier, but seasons 1 and 2 have this cute “must respect guns” thread underlying any use of a firearm. Here Duane wants to learn to shoot, but both Morgan and Rick make sure to emphasise that he has to respect the weapon – “Yeah, it’s not a toy, son, when you pull the trigger you gotta mean it.” Season 2 has Shane (and Andrea) flouncing about articulating THOUGHTS about gun ownership and use and training. After that? Welp, fuck it. You get a gun! And you get a gun! And you get a gun! To be clear, I do think if you’re going to handle a gun you should know how to do so properly and safely, but in the context of the Walking Dead it’s an early seasons thing that’s totally dropped by season 3 as the zompocalypse marches on and nobody got time for that shit anymore. (I’ll get around to discussing the shooting practice in season 2 later…)
I don’t know if it’s just the camera angles, but when Rick remarks that a lot of the armoury is gone, it seems like a massive understatement – from what we see, almost all of the guns are gone. Which might be a prop issue (although given the number of guns floating around on this show you wouldn’t think that would be a problem), but does sort of make season 3’s trip to the ol’ hometown with Michonne and Carl kind of funny given that all the guns are gone if there were never really any left to begin with. (And, thinking about it, when Rick is trying to justify going back into Atlanta to get Merle, he comments that he cleaned out the armoury, which makes it even odder that Rick decides to go back for weapons against the Governor et al.
“Conserve your ammo. It goes faster than you think, especially at target practice.” Unless you’re in season 2 on Hershel’s farm, in which case everyone has so much ammo that they’ll never run out.
I know Rick is still in early days of understanding the apocalypse, but it’s still sweet, and ridiculous, that he gives Morgan a radio with the expectation they’d continue chatting and catch up with each other. It also highlights Morgan’s downfall: the unwillingness to get involved in others’ business. He could go with Rick and probably be safer, not least because there’s two grown men to protect one boy, but he instead waits – ostensibly to up his and Duane’s shooting proficiency, but ultimately we see that it’s very much about the unfinished business with his wife.
As an aside, it seems the police station was useful for (1) hot showers and (2) guns and ammo. I’ve never been in a police station, but weirdly I’d have thought they’d have supplies stashed away. Rick and co. didn’t even have a gander at what might be there. But again, early days, I suppose!
RIP Leon Basset.
I love how Morgan hammers the shit out of the wood he’s using to barricade the door. I guess the zoms are conveniently faffing about elsewhere. Especially funny given that he then goes upstairs to snipe walkers, none of whom seem to have noticed the hammering. Are hammers just soundproof??
Christ Morgan’s wife is beautiful.
There’s something…poignant about Rick tracking down the first living dead person he ever knew in order to put her to rest. It’s the same kind of early apocalypse care that we see in “Guts,” when he stops to look through the walker’s wallet so they know the life of the undead man they’ve killed. His sorrow and tendency towards mercy are both here clearly indicated and provide a sharp contrast with the man he becomes. The mercy and drive to do what’s right is what results in him feeling he has to go back to Atlanta to get Merle, what makes him so adamant that they don’t kill the living and should strive to go where there might be a cure, what drives him to hop off the road and go after Sophia and to keep optimistically searching for her. There’s a sweet innocence there that still exists because he came to the zompocalypse after the fact and still retains a strong need to do what’s right that time living in zombieland will beat out of him. The parallelism in this section of the episode, which switches between Rick and Morgan’s actions after leaving the police station, also highlights the difference between having to kill someone you love vs. killing someone you don’t know (or, rather, have no personal attachment to; Rick kills Leon Basset with few qualms, but also frames it as mercy).
Rural Georgia looks hot. And sticky. Thank God my sister didn’t end up moving to the south.
Are the cracks in the windshield and the dirty appearance of the glass supposed to be the result of the apocalypse, or just their police department being a bit short on funds? (Also, it’s Rick’s face in a cracked mirror! Premonitions of mad Rick??) At least Rick’s got his windows rolled up like a sensible person.
Initial observations of Camp Outside Atlanta:
Dale is wearing glasses that I *think* never appear again.
Amy is carrying an armful of kind of hilariously long twigs.
WHY IS AMY WEARING WHITE TROUSERS IN THE APOCALYPSE THIS IS A TERRIBLE DECISION.
Who on earth is on watch on the RV? From a distance it looks, frame-wise, like either Shane or Daryl, but Shane makes his appearance to the side and Daryl is off on a hunt, so who’s this? Actually, in general, it’s kind of amusing that there’s a whole slew of other people in this camp (mostly older/heavier people, based on visibility) that are just sort of vaguely there until the walker attack. It’s actually a shame, really that they didn’t do anything other than plonk some irrelevant extras in the background; it means that when they all die, it means pretty much nothing as a viewer. (I’ll come back to this.)
Shane has great hair. Shame he shaves it off later…
It’s difficult to see when you’ve watched the episode multiple times, but we don’t know what either Lori or Carl look like before they appear in the quarry group receiving Rick’s radio call – we only actually realise who they are when Rick flips down his visor. And, actually, despite what I said above, Lori’s first appearance is not that bad. She observes that there are others – Shane sort of dismisses it with “oh well we knew that.” And then she says that they ought to put up warning signs on Highway 85 to warn people away from the city. Which is smart. Yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but as we’ll go on to learn, they’ve sent people to Atlanta with no previous problem, on top of which the road into town is absolutely empty – Glenn’s exit from Atlanta on the same road Rick rode in on tells us that the road Lori is talking about here is the same road Glenn and Rick have been in and out on. And this is the first time that Shane puts forward an argument that’s just plain wrong. He says they’ve had no time. Okay, fair enough – but they have a group of five literally in Atlanta as they speak. And based on Glenn’s exit path on the way back to the quarry, that group of five followed the same route in. Setting aside the question of why the hell their scavenging team apparently couldn’t stop along the road to place a “Stay Away, Walkers Ahead” sign, Shane’s argument is that they can’t spare the time to place the sign, because it’s “a luxury we can’t afford.” This makes no sense. As we’ll go on to see, this isn’t the first time someone from their group has gone into Atlanta (although it turns out that Glenn, their “go to town” man, has previously only gone himself, without anyone else). Everyone else up by the quarry is basically just fucking around doing nothing. The fact of the matter is that putting up a sign to warn people away from the city isn’t a luxury, but rather a helpful, logical, and overwhelmingly safe thing to do. Shane’s objection comes, in the first instance, from a man reluctant to relinquish control; it’s clear that Shane is viewed as a decision maker with practical knowledge the other survivors lack, and as a result of that knowledge is viewed as a leader. It’s an important if subtle moment in which Shane is established as the leader of the camp, a position that he then unwillingly gets shoved out of when Rick turns up. It is interesting, though, that here Lori is gung-ho about leaving their mountain and going down to put up a sign, while she later adamantly vetoes her husband going back to Atlanta. Shane’s argument is that no one goes anywhere alone, but given later events, it seems that Shane’s objection is not that someone wants to go warn people away from Atlanta, or that they want to risk Atlanta itself, as much as it is his desire to not let Lori be in danger. And Lori’s frustration at Shane’s decree is obvious – and yet she relents and gives in once kisses are to be had. Shane following Lori to verbally whack her for even thinking of putting herself in danger just points up Shane’s chauvinism. NOT LEAST BECAUSE, OH MY GOD, HE CALLS HER GIRL. SHE’S A WOMAN, YOU TWAT. If the argument had been made that Lori shouldn’t go because she has a son, and she shouldn’t risk him being an orphan – that I could understand. But Carl is so side-lined here that he’s really just a reason to make Shane and Lori stop kissing. Sigh.
God I wish Lori would have socked Shane in the eye. He does have nice hair, though.
Also, those are some *really* nice giant tents. Although my best friend’s adventures have made clear to me that I have unrealistically small expectations about tents.
I’m a little concerned about the condition of the windows of Rick’s cop car. They’re…disgusting. The driver’s side front and back windows look equally awful – I guess it’s good the apocalypse happened, because good luck seeing traffic out those windows. His windshield doesn’t look much better. Is over-enthusiastic pollen a thing in Georgia??
So, about the dead couple whose farm Rick encounters/steals a horse from. They’re both dead, woe, sadness, etc. What I’m fascinated about is that dude took the time to shoot his wife, and then decided to write a message IN HER BLOOD on the damn wall. I mean, okay, you wanted absolution for killing your wife and being about to kill yourself. But you kill your wife and then use her blood to write on the wall??
Signs that Rick is still in early days acceptance: he doesn’t enter the house with two clearly dead people (and thus likely no walkers) and then has a sit on a bench, throws up, and then goes in search of alternative transportation.
…that poor horse.
Is horse-taming a southern thing? I feel like I’d be terrified enough of the giant heavy horse to…not approach it.
Iconic shot!
It’s stunning that Rick has encountered zero walkers aside from the little girl. Works with the need for the story to move along, but is silly in terms of later walker distribution (ignoring season 2, which is its own special disaster).
Is everything flat in Georgia? Legitimate question. The extent of my knowledge of Georgia is a flight transfer through Atlanta. (Atlanta airport employees are all super nice, though.)
There’s something about the two zomdudes hanging out on a bus that cracks me up. How do walkers decide to just park it somewhere? “Ah yes, I recognise this bus, I’ve taken it to work every day for ten years. Definitely the best place to spend eternity.” It’s also odd but entertaining that the two dudes on the bus are repeatedly seen once Rick is in the horde and then in the tank. Why these two? Yeah, they’re the first Atlanta walkers he passed by, but they’re not exactly presented as special or important enough to appear repeatedly. Rick pops out of the top of the tank and whacks the one across the face, and the other skulks around the base of the tank and makes eye contact.
One of the weirdest and most uncomfortable moments in this episode, for me, is the two crows nomming the dead military officer. Caw caw! There’s a mild horror at the thought of ever being carrion. Though I guess everyone is just food for something else…
I can forgive Rick for a number of odd decisions based on the fact that he’s really only been awake for, what, two days? Maybe three? He’s still adapting to the new world, learning its rules, etc. But he rides a damn horse into a major city and is just generally not concerned. He comments to the horse when they pass the bus with the two walkers that it’s no big deal, they can outrun them – and yet somehow doesn’t think ahead about the existence of the dead in a major city. I guess it can sort of be attributed to the fact that he’s encountered remarkably few dead, plus in his brain Atlanta and its refugee centres are the answer to everything. He just hasn’t actually thought about it.
And, again, I’m stunned at the amount of abandoned military equipment. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t trust the military, don’t trust the government, they can do fuckall to help you.”
So Rick sees a helicopter. When he meets the others after Glenn rescued him, they ridicule the idea that helicopters still exist. Which brings up two instances. Firstly, beginning of season 3, when Andrea and Michonne witness a helicopter crash with military dudes who’ve got others attached to them. Secondly, the helicopter that rescues Rick and has apparently set up Rick Grimes’s future films. I just wish I knew where this particular helicopter was from and where it was going.
For a cop, even one with minimal experience with the world as it is now, Rick is an idiot. He lunges forward as stupidly as he went forward alone in his confrontation with the idiot car guys. Surely you should be thinking ahead? He’s in relatively unknown territory in a relatively new world. I’m not saying he should have anticipated a horde of dead people, but you’d think he’d exercise as least some caution, especially when his nearby décor indicates that the damn military was swamped with the enemy, such that they fucked off elsewhere. But maybe it’s just me.
Ooh, look, an extra drinking water.
I like that the makeup artists decay the walkers more each season. Season 1, most of them are sort of “hai I’m a regular human, I just have some dramatic injuries and some zombie eyes.” They look like people who are mostly dead but haven’t started to decompose. (I’d never be hired as a walker – the longer the show goes, the more they need skinny people so the makeup and prosthetics aren’t so obvious…and I am not skinny.)
That poor horse…
Yet again, Rick seriously lucks out. We see him multiple times with “omg dead people” face, with walkers just sort of lurking/dancing in place because they can’t lunge in or he’d be dead. And then there’s conveniently a tank above him. I’ve never been able to decide whether Rick going “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry” and then putting his gun to his head is a genuine “Oh no, I’m about to die” or if he’d realised the hatch was above him and so it was a “welp if I die, I love you.”
Men have huge feet. Yeek.
It’s stunning how long Rick’s in the tank with a zombot before said zombot wakes up and attempts a menacing growl. Not least because Rick’s so overwhelmed at having been upwardly mobile that he completely fails to take in his surroundings. (Although, as we’ve seen, Rick has never been great at checking his surroundings. Dude should be walkerbait by now.)
Oh no, a walker. Haaalp.
I do appreciate that Rick suffered auditory pain from firing a gun in an enclosed metal space. I also find it funny that one of the buszoms comes into his eyesight, like for some reason he's important.
“Hey, you. Dumbass.” Glenn is fucking amazing and iconic. I wish he'd been the main of this show. No offense to Andrew Lincoln, of course, but Steven Yeun is great, and Glenn's development from a kid into an adult is just lovely.
Anywho, that marks the end of "Days Gone Bye." Good in so many ways, eh in so many others. What's not to love?
love
em
#scribbles and snark#the walking dead#twd#walking dead#review#s1e1#days gone bye#rick grimes#glenn rhee#andrew lincoln#steven yeun#zombies#walkers#walkerbait#walker bait#zoms#shane walsh#welcome to the apocalypse#hope you enjoy your stay#unfortunately hospitality has been eaten#so good luck filing any complaints#2020#apocalypse#apocalyptic#apocalyptic fiction#dystopia#dystopian#post-apocalypse#post-apocalyptic#post-apo
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RQG 145
My first EA episode and I'm getting to it 4 hours after release because I'm so excited about joining the Patreon I can’t focus. Its silly but hey birthday money well spent if it makes me this happy right? Ok I think I'm centered enough to hit play.
Eee its going to be my name there someday!
Poor Cel! Poor Azu!
I'm impressed, Alex managed to summarize pretty well given the circumstances.
Hamid: oh dear!
Skraak: Skraak, pressure equalization, Skraak!
What! I was right - he has been getting clearer! Did Alex imply he has been playing up how drugged is? Smart way to get a sense of the party while he gets his feet under him if so.
Thank you Alex, we need those numbers. Oh poor Hamid is confident on a 3.
Skraak is helping! Hamid is listening to him!
~~~Party time~~~
Alarms!
Blast doors? Yes! They won't drown!
Azu! Cel! Zolf!
Point Cel, Shoin seems actively against being useful
Nice, Salt Beard coming up properly after all this time!
Scary sounds! Bubbles! Thats got to be a good sign right?
Loving the bit with Zolf's thumb!
Not clear what happened plot wise, but Ben did some nice work showing Zolf’s emotions in ways I can’t put into works.
Healing time!
It is a very Cel, TBF, to quantify their health
Speaker time! Oh thank goodness everyone is healed up.
Yeah the food's poisoned we got that with the brunch Hamid was dragged from.
Sweet, torches in the bags of holding are fine.
Loving the character interactions, especially Zolf and Cel bonding over Shoin’s bad design.
Bryn! Alex! That is an actual crime! Conspiracy to commit angst!
I love Zolf's growth!
I will need a transcription of this scene!
Cel was in war zones?
Speakers again
~~~
Hamid is humming opera music (Carmen?)
Scratch? Skraak has been marking the path when Hamid didn't think of it.
I love Skraak!
Hamid dear, when you get a moment, I know there's a lot on your mind: double check on Skraak's name and pronouns would ya? Also Hamid is doing awesome with the changes. I had faith in him but its great hearing him cheerfully ask Skraak for input as a local expert; instead of trying to force the pattern that worked before even as Skraak gets less kid like. Love to see how this shakes out, even though I confess Hamid having a new younger sibling was a treat. OK enough tangent let's open a hatch!
Oh pressure gauge! I wonder if that helps with more than flooding.
Wrench! I love a call back.
That's one way to refer to Hamid's abilities. Also I am aware of Zolf and Hamid's dwindling spell slots; I am just convincing myself they will be able to camp for the night in a safe hallway before Alex Shoin happens.
Oh good something is maintained around here.
Green light?
Alex, did you come up with the hidden doors purely to mess with theoretical maps? Because Babs has been doing pretty well so far but I'll be her second if she challenges Alex to a fight in the parking lot after this episode.
~~~Break time, no ad is surprisingly weird, on edit listen is an ad with Mike that proves once again that I am so far gone on RQ that I even find the ads charming~~~
Oh more Hamid time!
That was a lot of dice, no numbers that I caught.
Oh dear! (Was that Ben teasing him?)
In the rafters of a very large room. Huge domed ceiling, sounds pretty. Have I gone 20 minutes without saying how much I love Alex's set design?
Thank you Ben, I will google it, *sticks out tongue*. Seriously as long as you enunciate and don't get into stuff so niche you lose people in England too, then don't worry about us from the US. Honestly you guys worry about everything, the occasional missed reference isn't worth the brainspace.
Still not happy about the lack of maintenance, especially given that's what stands between the party and drowning
Skraak sounds worried: it is his first time down this far and sounding more himself by the second. Still no hint of second guessing throwing in with Hamid! As good as Bryn is at avoiding spoilers, I thought he wouldn't have brought up Cohort on the discord if Skraak took it really badly as they sobered up, but is still a relief. Not that I would blame Skraak for much short of turning out to be the secret Big Bad: the circumstances were pretty messed up; even if I stand by saying you can't leave someone who pledged to you and isn't in a position to cover that up if their old boss catches them. Yes I know a conversation about spiders not being the most dangerous thing the party used on Kobolds is coming but with Skraak not turning out to be a kid, it might be more tense but cut my concerns in half. Hell the Kobolds might well be able to fend for themselves post Shoin if they loot the place in compensation.
"I still think that might be an exaggeration"
Oh Hamid has the Elven cloak too. How do you wear two cloaks at once? And don't say you don't, Hamid is not losing 4 levels of dragon awesome (or however Pathfinder put it) in the middle of a dungeon.
Skraak remembers the health potion and doesn't mind being asked to hang back.
Hamid arms Skraak with a injection spear. Has the canisters for it too. I may have underestimated him (or on the Doylist level this falls under reasonable retcon; then again I might just have missed Bryn saying he was pocketing this stuff because I thought he would run it by Zolf). *Shrugs* please keep a sample for testing, I have a pet theory I'd love to see tested.
Alex, just...thanks for using a tone of voice that made it completely clear you were joking
Skraak: Skraak avenger, death from above etc!
Hamid: Remember, General Skraak Avenger!
Hamid remembers what he said to Skraak whether they do or not! OK like I said I loved Hamid adopting Skraak as a new little brother but this new phase is a lot of fun if harder to quantify.
Oh the sleeves! The cloaks don't have to have much physical presence, do they? That makes sense. Sleeves and prestidigitation? Right after being so charming with Skraak? Hamid is in fine form
Alex is just feeling mischievous tonight, I like it.
An enormous pipe organ? I love Alex's set design. (also one day my brain will pull up the right person the first time when someone references Bill Nye or Bill Nighy but even with the Pirates context today is not that day)
I know, Ben, cosmetic or not its fricken awesome.
I don't like the pipes, I don't get the pipes, but I don't like them (that fine mesh better not imply there is something airborne in the complex)
Is it wrong that other than the more obviously ominous bits this sounds like a great place to live?
Chaise longue
Is this seriously set up for the party -wait...
Did Hamid skip to the end of the maze with only Skraak for back up and no sleep!?!
No reunion or camping scene first? Not even a spell restoring nap?!
Human IOD? ALEX, WHAT IS UP WITH THIS FIGURE? ITS SHOIN RIGHT? ITS GOTTA BE.
Don't listen to Ben, Alex will get you if you jump to conclusions. That's my dragon! Sneaky lad learned from Sasha!
~~~Of course he is switching to the party. Man has a sense of timing.
More party favors, daggers make my heart twinge
Azu takes Cel’s hand to guide them
Gonna light a torch? Or is Zolf keeping up his anti light thing.
Alex is simplifying things
No Zolf is not throwing open the door.
Oh thank hope, Zolf is lighting a torch.
Pathfinder jokes
We like it too Alex!
I like the zone thing.
Cel, I adore you!
Zolf just promised backstory! Get that down! And a miner/minor pun, these people are the best! Oh tin miner!
Lights! Golden bulkhead! Seriously where is this guy getting his money?
Azu spots a trap! Yes Alex, we respect your craft. Trip wire!
I love the boots
Oh Cel is clumsy, I hadn't actually noticed that.
Genre savvy Cel hulks out with bat wings! Claws! Fangs! HP goes up thank all the gods! (Azu lets go of their hand)
Ben needs to look up spells but Zolf is prepared
Azu puts on the iron beard
They throw open the door!
~~~
Poor Bryn, stuck waiting for the next episode like us listeners to find out the results.
I've been re listening to some early episodes and I really missed the "byes". It's a silly sign off but I think that comfort with silly might be part of why I like it?
Re: the bloopers, it would have been a little funny if they did a “detect traps” and got knocked out like when Hamid tried detect magic in, was it Rome?
OK bottom line: Skraak is awesome; I still miss Sasha but at least Lydia can be a bat even if it isn’t cloak of the bat; Zolf came back better than ever and actually wants to have at least 2 real conversations; and Azu is a champ for doing so well despite her phobias (which are still taken seriously because Helen and RQ are friggen awesome).
Fun and pulpy, that's how ya do it! Stakes from the sea floor to the stratosphere! Character moments! Sets that make Hollywood weep in jealousy!
Okay okay some people may be stressed out after that even though everyone ended up fighting fit, which is fair, ok? but physical peril? Just a roller coaster to me, I'll take it any day of the week and twice on Sundays!
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