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realcube · 3 years

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OVERHEARING SOMEONE TALK ABOUT THEIR S/O

characters ♡ baji, mikey & mitsuya

tw ♡ insults (in reference to the reader), violence & robbery

KEISUKE BAJI

♡ baji never mentioned that he was dating you to anyone in toman

♡ in fact, he hoped that none of them even knew about your existence, because that would only lead to trouble; and he was correct

♡ he was simply taking a puff on his stationary motorcycle, when members of the division started to filter into the parking lot that he was currently trying to relax in

♡ usually he’d try to ward off strangers so he could enjoy his time alone but he knew these guys from toman, so he allowed them to stay as long as they’d keep their voices down and not bother him

♡ most of his attention was on his own thoughts, but it was immediately redirected when he heard your name brought up in their conversation

♡ only your last name, so he wasn’t even certain whether they were talking about you, but still his interest was piqued

♡ “they are on shift friday night, the only one left at eleven,” one of the guys explained, gesturing to his bat with a wicked smirk, “we’ll break in then. i’ll drive getaway.”

♡ “what if they call someone? shouldn’t we wait until they’ve left?” another suggested but was quickly corrected.

♡ “once they lock up the security system activates and it’ll be impossible to get in without alerting the cops. so we may as well bust in, handle them, and then steal the bikes.”

♡ baji cringed, since he was certain that they were talking about you —since you happen to work at a motorcycle shop on friday nights — he hated to think about what they meant by ‘handle’.

♡ “now stop askin’ stupid questions.” the same guy scoffed, twirling around his bat, “i used to work there, idiot, obviously i know what i’m doing.”

♡ the group of six all laughed at the one poor guy who asked the question, and baji did too

♡ he laughed at the irony behind how they were calling each other idiots, when they were all the ones talking about auto theft in broad daylight, and discussing doing unspeakable things to a person, when their boyfriend was standing in ear-shot with a bat and a motorcycle ready

♡ he did give them the benefit of the doubt in the latter aspect though; how were they supposed to know that y’all were dating when you are never seen spending time with each other?

♡ baji suddenly felt bad; it dawned on him that perhaps he had been neglecting your relationship as of recently. of course, it wasn’t with poor intention, in fact he thought he was taking the moral course of action by avoiding a situation where you are harmed because of his ties with toman

♡ however, being in a gang was no excuse to be a bad boyfriend, he figured

♡ for now, the least he could do was take care of these guys to save you the trouble

♡ but perhaps that wasn’t his brightest idea, he realised as he stood amongst the dejected bodies scattered across the ground, “i know you are all alive, so consider this a warning.” baji chuckled at the grunt one produced as he kicked him aside to head back over to his motorcycle

♡ before he left the area, obviously he stole all the cash he could from those guys, which gave him enough to buy the thing he had been eyeing for you

♡ though it took him a while to get his hands on it, it left him with the perfect opportunity to give it to you

♡ “oi, open up!” baji hollered as he pounded on your door; if baji wasn’t such a bruiser, you would’ve thought he was dying

♡ “what!?” you hissed, throwing the door open to reveal your frantic state.

♡ you were half angry at how loud he was being, and the other half at how he has been ignoring you for the past two weeks and finally decides to show up just as you were about to leave for work, in fact, you were running late for your night shift

♡ “no need to rush.” baji said, an odd sense of sincerity in his voice as he motioned for you to stop putting your shoes on, “you’re not going to work today.”

♡ you simply laughed, ignoring him and gathering your stuff to leave, “and why is that?”

♡ “well,” baji started, rubbing his chin for effect, “these guys from toman plan on robbing the place tonight. i did give them a warning, but they might still do it. and you know i just want you to be safe.” he said with a mischievous grin, as you both knew there was no way your shop was getting robbed tonight, unless the dudes wanted to try it with both arms broken

♡ “so did you just come here to tell me that, or is there something else?” although you tried to hide it, baji could tell by your subtle flustered expression that you were thankful

♡ “i found this.” he lied, cupping your hand to lift it and drop in a gold bracelet, “one of the guys had it on him.”

♡ you gasped, taking the bracelet to examine the fine details, and noticed how it had a small crystal heart attached, “yeah, i’m sure a member of toman just so happened to be wearing a charm bracelet.”

♡ “i never said he was wearing it!” baji spat, swiftly snatching it from your hand and holding it above his head, “i can pawn it if you don’t want it.”

♡ “i like it, though!” you said, reaching up for it, only for him to grab your wrist and put it on you

♡ “then forgive me for not hanging with you.” he muttered, angrily clipping the bracelet through furrowed brows, while you leaned in to plant a kiss on his forehead

♡ “it’s fine. i forgive you.” you couldn’t help but snicker at his word choice of ‘hanging out’, which resulted in you getting a swift flick to the forehead

♡ but before you could whine, he quickly followed it up with a kiss <33

MIKEY

♡ one day he was visiting mizo to find takemichi and he happened to walk passed a group of guys talking about how one of them planned on asking out a person from a different school

♡ at first he didn’t pay much attention since it was none of his business after all, until he heard that the person’s name and description just so happened to match yours

♡ so like any good boyfriend would, he halted and told draken to grab takemichi while he listened in

♡ as he gained more insight into the situation, he learned that the person happened to go to the same academy as you and had the same bus schedule too

♡ it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the person they were talking about was you

♡ as it turns out, the guy who planned on asking you out had your bus times memorised so if he was able to run fast enough, he would be able to reach your stop before you got on the bus, which is when he will ask you out

♡ or at least, that is what he hoped would happen if everything went smoothly and there was no unexpected interference from a group of delinquents

♡ mikey had many options on how to deal with this situation

♡ he could ask you to take a different bus, he could do nothing (because he trusted that you’d reject the guy either way) or he could beat them up right now to save himself the hassle later

♡ however, he decided to go with a more peaceful approach

♡ he continued eaves-dropping until everyone besides the lover boy had left, so he could have an amicable one-on-one conversation with him — definitely no threats involved — and advise the guy to stay in his fucking lane and never go near you ever again, kindly.

♡ when the day of the proposal arrived, mikey paid you a surprise visit after school and offered to walk you to the bus-stop; not because he was afraid that the dude might confess, but rather since he had booked you both tickets to the movies!

♡ but once you both arrive at the stop, you were greeted by the guy standing there holding a measly bouquet of flowers, looking quite taken back by the fact you were with someone else; even though mikey had done him the courtesy of explicitly telling him to back off

♡ though he must’ve not got message despite the hand-holding, and he obviously didn’t recognise mikey, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have continued to confess, albeit with quivering limbs and a black eye

♡ but before he could even stutter out a greeting, mikey hissed at him, “what the are you doing?” yet the guy only replied with a shrug

♡ upon observing the interaction, your eyes widen as you turned to look at mikey, “do you know him?”

♡ “never seen him before in my life, dear.” he smiled sweetly, but it was ineffective; you already knew he was lying as soon as he called you ‘dear’.

♡ “(y/n)!” the guy yelled, trying to catch your attention, but only shaking even more as your gaze fell on him, “i was going to ask you, if—”

♡ mikey let out an exaggerated yawn, widely outstretching his arms to distract both of you, “this has been fun, but we’re running late for the movie.”

♡ “but i’m not fin—” the poor boy was once again interrupted by mikey waving him goodbye, grabbing your hand and swiftly guiding you around him, back on the route to the cinema

♡ before he even got the chance to cry another plea, you had both already disappeared around the corner

♡ once mikey had dragged you both far enough away from the bus-stop, you began your interrogation, “seriously, who was that? and what was he trying to say? did you give him the black eye?” you had to stop to take a deep breath, “also, you said the movie would start in the evening!”

♡ mikey brought your hand up —which he had a tight grip on — and kissed the back of it gently, “my bad,” he chuckled slightly, a mischievous grin playing on his lips, “i forgot to mention him. i met him a few days ago and he was planning to ask you out so i politely informed him that you were taken.”

♡ “for some reason, i don’t believe that last part.”

♡ he snickered, “and yeah, the movie starts in the evening so we’re not running late. but he wasn’t taking the hint!” he whined while clinging to your arm, as if you were going to run away from him at any second, “forgive me?”

♡ “sure, whatever.” you sighed, rolling your eyes as you watched his expression light up, “but next time, mind your own business! i could’ve just said no, instead of you beating him up, or whatever you did.”

♡ “noted.”

MITSUYA TAKASHI

♡ during his time as the second division leader of toman, he’s overheard all kinds of stuff that he probably wasn’t supposed to; awkward small talk, plans to commit felonies, deep conversations, weed brownie recipes, discussions about health issues — the list goes on forever!

♡ however, one topic he has never heard any one ever have the audacity to speak about (within a ten mile radius of him), is you. even though, your relationship was public to toman.

♡ your name was often kept out of people’s mouth since you rarely interacted with any of the gang members when you visited, hence they didn’t really have anything bad (or good) to say about you. none of them knew you besides the title ‘boss’ partner’.

♡ so, that’s why mitsuya had to do a double take when he heard someone in his division mutter to the guy beside him, “why does his friend keep visitin’? it’s annoying. plus, they just sit and don’t talk to anyone besides ‘im. they must think they’re better than us or something.” right after mitsuya mentioned that you were visiting toman.

♡ he couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow; did that guy really think that he was being sly and quiet? by the look on his face, he seemed pretty self-assured.

♡ “um, i heard you, idiot.” he hissed, pinching his nose and shaking his head as he watched the knucklehead stare at him dumbfounded, as if the whole room hadn’t heard him too.

♡ “don’t say shit like that. they don’t think they’re better than anyone.” he scorned, balling his fist and almost twitching with anger, fighting the urge to pummel that guy for the sake of his own reputation in toman

♡ and that impulse almost immediately dissipated as soon as you entered the room; his hand loosened and opened to cup your cheek

♡ he was as sweet as can be for the rest of the night, of course, and he still managed to send that dude daggers whenever he got the chance.

#baji x y/n #tokyo revengers #tokyo revengers x reader #tokyo revengers sano manjiro #mikey x reader #mitsuya x you #baji x reader #baji x you #baji fluff #mitsuya takashi x reader #mitsuya x y/n #mitsuya x reader #mitsuya fluff #mikey fluff #mikey x you #mikey x y/n

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cardentist · 3 years

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I haven’t been in the star trek fandom for very long (I’ve only just started binging the series in the last couple months), so it’s been pretty surprising to find out just how negative the perception of the reboot movies are.

this isn’t coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with the series, so it hit different for me than it might for people with a different relationship to TOS, but I thought it was genuinely clever and Respectful with how it was handled.

To quote leonard nimoy: “Well the alternative timeline gives them license to escape from canon concerns. I can’t see people saying ‘they shouldn’t do that because…’ or ‘that doesn’t tie in to such and such’ because it is a different time and place. Am I right about that?” [Link]

the entire Premise is that the original series happened as it was presented in TOS, but an event late in Spock’s life caused the creation of a parallel universe in which everyone’s lives were significantly altered through two key changes to the timeline. this gives them the freedom to Both revel in fanservice And explore different facets of the characters and their relationships.

the destruction of vulcan Vastly impacts the characters and the plot moving forward, and its a detail that a lot of people take issue with. but the emotional impact of sarek admitting Directly to spock that there is value in his humanity, that his feelings Aren’t wrong, that sarek married amanda because he Loved her cannot be understated. you can read all of these things into sarek as he was in the original series, but he Never had an open conversation about these things with spock. this creates a Believable and Rewarding change in their relationship, where we get to see a different facet of them Because of the changes made. and that’s exactly the appeal. showing us pieces of these characters that we never got in TOS that are nevertheless undeniably Them.

everyone is Different yes, but they’re also fundamentally the same people at their core and that matters.

kirk’s personality obviously takes the biggest change, with him experiencing trauma at a young age, losing his father, and having an implied abusive father figure after that point. he has a harsher personality in reaction to harsher conditions, he’s spikier and harder to love. but he’s also still fundamentally a Good person whose willing to risk everything to help people. he still has what made kirk prime a good captain and a good friend.

I’m not gonna say that it’s the most nuanced story in the world, but it explores a version of kirk that was born from even Less fortunate circumstances than kirk prime, exploring a kirk brimming with potential who learned to bite back after he was kicked down. exploring those themes of trauma and loss, of insecurity and growth, and coming to the conclusion that Fundamentally He Is Capable Of Good isn’t a Bad thing. you don’t have to like it, but his growth into a better person is The Point. they deepened his flaws (all of which were present in a less exaggerated form in TOS) To Show That Growth.

and then of course there’s his relationship with spock.

people are totally justified in not liking that they had a rough start to their relationship, I usually don’t like to see that kind of thing in reboots or hollywood adaptations either, but the way people talk about it is just unfair.

Yes kirk and spock and bones have a very strong relationship in TOS, they also already know each other by the time the show starts. to look at them having to learn to get to know and trust each other when they first meet and say that it’s Bad because they were already full on ride or die for each other in the og series is silly. TOS kirk and spock had to meet and fall in love with each other too, it didn’t just happen over night kings.

secondly, the entire point of the first movie is that Even With reality itself being altered to pull them apart they are fundamentally compatible people that are Bound to each other. they meet each other on bad terms because of circumstances outside of their control, and yet they’re still pulled into each other’s orbit and find the other slotting into place next to them as if they always belonged. one of the first things that spock prime says in the movie is “I am and always will be your friend,” spock and jim are Meant for each other and the movie goes out of its way to explain that. which is what makes it so Weird to see people complaining about how they don’t like each other.

it’s a Different relationship, but it’s absolutely no less steeped in yearning or queer subtext.

speaking of queer subtext ! some people are Very unhappy with spock’s relationship with uhura.

first thing I wanna say is that making the argument that they’re doing anything that the original series hasn’t done is just, completely untrue. kirk has fallen in love with more girls in the og series than he knew what to do with, leonard nimoy was a heartthrob in his time (and he deserves it, awooga) and spock reflects that ! Spock usually turns the women who come onto him down (or when he doesn’t it’s because a plant has literally altered his mind), but there are exceptions to even that. all of three of the main boys have plenty of romance subplots, it happens. if that takes the possibility of them being queer off the table for you (which it shouldn’t, m-spec people exist) then I’m sorry to say that TOS is not exempt.

now, I can understand why Specifically This Relationship could rub people the wrong way or being disappointed that they didn’t outright depict kirk and spock as having a relationship (if not in the first movie then in the following ones after they’ve gotten to know each other), but even in that context the way I’ve seen people talk about it comes off as insensitive.

no, the relationship did not come out of nowhere. they considered having spock and uhura date each other in the original show (and you can see signs of this in the earlier episodes, where uhura very obviously flirts with him and they spend time together in their down time) before they decided against it, and spock was originally going to kiss uhura until shatner insisted that he wanted to do it (because it was the first interracial kiss on tv). [Link 1, Link 2, Link 3]

nichelle nichols was asked about this exact thing (spock and uhura’s relationship in the movie), you can read the interview in full here [Link] but I’d like to highlight this paragraph in particular:

“Now, go back to my participation in Star Trek as Uhura and Leonard (Nimoy) as Spock. There was always a connection between Uhura and Spock. It was the early 60’s, so you couldn’t do what you can do now, but if you will remember, Uhura related to Spock. When she saw the captain lost in space out there in her mirror, it was Spock who consoled her when she went screaming out of her room. When Spock needed an expert to help save the ship, you remember that Uhura put something together and related back to him the famous words, “I don’t know if I can do this. I’m afraid.” And Uhura was the only one who could do a spoof on Spock. Remember the song (in “Charlie X”)? Those were the hints, as far as I’m concerned.”

the film makers looked at the fact there were Hints for uhura and spock, that they were Interested in exploring an interracial couple for the first time (both before and immediately after interracial couples won the right to legally get married) but Couldn’t because of the circumstances of the times and decided to Make that depiction. you don’t have to Like their relationship just because of that fact, but it’s Incredibly reductive to play down it’s significance as just a No Homo cop out. explicitly queer relationships are not the only progressive or culturally important relationships in fiction.

moreover, if you can’t imagine polyamory in the communist utopian future that’s on you.

moreover, this perception that this was a soulless cash grab is just, unfounded.

leonard nimoy returned to the role as spock for the first time in 16 years (since 1991) and this was Entirely because of the respect they had for nimoy, spock as a character, and the franchise as a whole.

Lets look at some quotes from nimoy in interviews regarding the film:

Leonard Nimoy: When I first read the script (...) I immediately contacted J.J. and said “I think it is terrific…I think you guys have done a wonderful job. There is still work to be done, but it is very clear that you and your writers know what you are doing and you know how to do this movie and know what it should be about….and I am very interested.” Then as time went by we worked things out with Paramount, but the most important things were J.J. and the script. (...) I am very pleased about that and I am very comfortable with where this is going. I think the writers have done a terrific job. They have a real sense of the characters and the heart of Star Trek and what it is really all about.

(...)

TrekMovie.com: Now in the case of the new movie you have been retired from acting for years. What was it about this one that made you want to act again and go through the make up again? What was it that made you say ‘I really want to do this?’

Leonard Nimoy: You are right, this is a special situation. First it is Star Trek and so I have to pay attention. I owe that to Star Trek. Second place is that it is J.J. Abrams who I think very highly of, he is a very talented guy. Then came the script and it was very clear that I could make a contribution here. The Spock character that I am playing, the original Spock character, is essential and important to the script. So on the basis of those three elements it was easy to make the decision. So those three things: Star Trek, J.J. Abrams, and an interesting Spock role.

[Link]

Praising the cast playing younger versions of characters from the original 1960s TV series, he [Leonard Nimoy] said: “Let me take the opportunity to say this. Everybody at this table [the cast] are very, very talented and intelligent people.”

“They found their own way to bring that talent and intelligence to this movie, and I think it shows. (...) When Karl Urban introduced himself as Leonard McCoy and shook hands with Chris Pine, I burst into tears. That performance of his is so moving, so touching and so powerful as Doctor McCoy, that I think D. Kelley would be smiling, and maybe in tears as well.”

“The makers of this film reawakened the passion in me that I had when we made the original film and series. I was put back in touch with what I cared about and liked about Star Trek, and why I enjoyed being involved with Star Trek. So, it was an easy way to come on home.”

“[In this Star Trek] they said things and showed me things, and demonstrated the sensibility that I felt very comfortable with, and I think that shows in the movie. I like it.”

[Link 1, Link 2]

again, you don’t have to like it just because leonard nimoy did, you don’t have to Agree. but the idea that nobody working on the film Cared is provably false. near everyone working on the project was already a fan of the series or were excited to be involved and did their homework. it’s genuinely a Miracle just how much of a labor of love this was, and in my opinion you can feel that through the movie itself. I’d highly recommend looking into interviews and behind the scenes details about the movies. they had a respect not just for the source material, but for leonard nimoy as a person.

there’s definitely more I Could say about this, but it’s 4 am now so I’m gonna shelve it jklfdsa

that said! it’s Fine to not like the movie, not everything is going to be suited to everyone’s taste, but the specific criticisms I’ve seen feel very off base

#star trek #kirk #spock #uhura #nichelle nichols #leonard nimoy #star trek aos #aos #star trek tos #tos #meta #long post #hello followers I write essays about star trek now

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bostonflavor · 2 years

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i recently started 911 (i say recently i’m already through season 4 lol) and I gotta say that Sgt. Athena Grant is one of my favorite TV characters ever. She’s written like a real cop. TV cops are usually written in two tropes Bad Bad Cop - the corrupt or inept or jerky cop that does shitty things or Good Bad Cop like Elliot Stabler or Hank Voight that does shitty things for the “right reasons” by Sgt. Grant is written as an effective cop who follows the law to a T and fiercely protects her family. It takes so much nuance to write a likeable TV cop in a drama or procedural without leaning on rebel with a cause narrative that most are written into. IRL cops (well most lol, some notable exceptions apply) have to follow the rules explicitly, cross every t, dot every i or their arrest gets tossed in court. I just think they’ve done an amazing job with her character and it’s really the main thing that’s hooked me into this show.

#911 fox #athena grant #sgt. athena grant

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kitkatopinions · 3 years

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I'm tired of fantasy world writers being like 'oh, this is my allegory for racism in my fantasy world where actual racism doesn't exist, also I'm going to not do any research on how to properly include said allegory, badly portray it, make my main characters affected by this white or white passing, and then use racist stereotypes later.' Long post full of RWBY criticism ahead.

RWBY is terrible with the Faunus racism they chose to make part of their story. They made the White Fang an evil terrorist group, they made Blake lecture fellow Faunus about how they're the ones actually hurting themselves by using violence against each other, they framed comfortable and peaceful protest as the only good way despite establishing that peaceful protest didn't work, and they made their child slave coded character who literally got branded turn into nothing more than an abusive stalker and then had him killed without ever addressing the aforementioned child slavery. Also, the only Faunus among our main cast now that Sun is gone is one of the most privileged of the Faunus. Blake can pass as a human if she wants to, she grew up fairly rich, she has two loving parents, and she comes from an inherently powerful position as the daughter of the Chief. Having Blake be privileged would be absolutely fine, if she acknowledged her privilege, wasn’t the mouthpiece on Faunus rights, if she wasn’t the only Faunus in our main cast, and if she didn’t repeatedly lecture other Faunus.

On top of that, two of our main cast have been racist (within the narrative of the show) towards our main Faunus character, one of them learns from it (even though that as well was badly handled) and became the only member of Team RWBY to ever call out human's being racist after season three. Oh wait, except the other member of our main cast that was racist that never had it addressed because it was treated like a joke now has yelled at a racist once, in an incredibly tense situation, so I guess her racism is gone. It’s good that it’s gone, since CRWBY is pushing her and Blake as a couple, but it’s frustrating that her racism never even got a ‘that wasn’t funny’ and we never see Yang learn any better, because it feels like CRWBY brushed it off and acted like it was fun and quirky instead of treating it like the casual racism it was. They do a similar thing with Robyn in season seven which came out in 2019, when she calls Marrow ‘Wags.’ Also none of our main cast are ever seen protesting for Faunus rights (sans a two second flashback of child Blake at a rally and a non canon RWBY chibi cartoon.) I don't think Ruby - our main protagonist - has ever even mentioned Faunus rights. In a world where Adam was branded with the SDC logo under fifteen years ago at the most, racism and fighting racism should be a big part of the story, and instead, it's brushed to the side and used for the occasional 'we don't like racism btw' moment now that Blake got rid of a Faunus run terrorist group. To me, this implies that the number one threat to the Faunus… Was the Faunus, and although some humans are still anti-Faunus, no one has to devote their time or energy into fighting for equality. In season 7, Blake doesn’t even attend the rally of the political figure running against Jacques Schnee - who as far as I’m aware, is the only business owner or person in power who has ever displayed anti-Faunus racism in the show. By the way, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. It’s been a hot minute since I watched through the show.

Instead of attending a rally that seems very important for the Faunus, Blake goes dancing with her crush. It’s like she stopped caring about politics and rights after the White Fang got removed. That feels so bad. Also, I'll note that most of the actual POC Faunus that can't pass as white in this show are on the bad side (Sienna, Fennec, Corsac, Lionheart, Ilia, Marrow.) And either they die, or they must learn to give up their destructive ways and become better people. I’m not saying this was intentional, I’m saying it’s a pattern, it’s alarming, and the writers should’ve known better.

I believe Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross have admitted that they mishandled Faunus racism, but first off, it still doesn’t excuse them because they were grown people putting out a product that premiered in 2013 and they should’ve known to do research and do better. But second off, I still feel like they haven't done the research they need to and continue to mishandle the racism by ignoring it when they want to and bringing it up only to let us as an audience know Weiss and Yang aren't racist anymore. They can’t just cut the Faunus from their storyline now, but they can’t just ignore it, and need to actually make it a better allegory. Honestly though, one of the big reasons I'm convinced that they still haven't done any real research on how to properly portray POC or racism is because of how terribly they're handling the Ace Ops.

They're writing a fantasy show, they aren't tied to real world portrayals of law enforcement, but they went the route of commentating on real world police, corrupt police, and use of excessive force. That's fine. But things are already pretty dicey just starting off because of how they've mishandled and continue to mishandle Faunus racism. Outside of Jacques Schnee and his company and business partners, I don't remember seeing Faunus racism in Atlas (not Mantle, Atlas.) If I'm wrong about that, again, please correct me, I may have missed it. But without seeing actual discrimination against Faunus within the police force, right off the bat, that's a mishandling of commentating on police brutality. But also, other than Clover who is now dead, the Ace Ops are all people of color. CRWBY made their bad cops all not white. Even Ironwood - who is white passing - is voiced by a person of color who has said he believes that James is Chinese American. I'll point out that being a Hunter is pretty much just being a cop with more freedom and seemingly less rules. Qrow (a Beacon Huntsman) goes around destroying public property and comments on how some hunters work outside of the law, and yet it's only the Ace Ops who are held to real world ACAB rules and everyone else gets to be a good cop/law enforcement officer. Ruby gets to proudly proclaim herself a Huntress, Weiss gets to arrest people, Jaune gets told that he deserves his Huntsman license, we've been getting told for seven seasons that Hunters help people and do what's right, and we're given long time Hunters and mentor figures like Oobleck, Glynda, Qrow, and now Robyn is being framed that way, and they back that up. Even training Atlas soldiers like Neon and Flynt are fine and fun. But only the Ace Ops are bad, corrupt law enforcement officers. So that way, we can have the entirely white passing Team RWBY beat up the entirely POC, not white passing Ace Ops. Even though Team RWBY is a byproduct of the same kind of program and even though we’ve seen the police discriminate against Faunus in Vale. If CRWBY wants their allegories to be taken seriously, they need to recognize that RWBY and co are also certified police. Also, it’s really not funny to see people use ACAB as a reason why the Ace Ops are of course bad, but then turn around and simp for Winter, and be like ‘We want Winter to be redeemed, but Harriet? What a bitch!’ Like… I’m side-eyeing that pretty hard.

Speaking of Winter, now she’s in charge of the Ace Ops. But unlike Marrow, Winter doesn’t just look sad sometimes and blindly only follow direct orders without protest. She’s actually feeling all kinds of things, and she’s actually being framed as strong, intelligent, and reasonable. I’m sure no one forgot this, but I’ll note it anyway; Winter is white. Having Winter be the only Ace Op to actually listen to JRY and do things without James explicitly telling her to (although I don’t consider what she did a betrayal or going behind his back) is dicey. They could’ve given this moment to Harriet and nothing would change. ‘This lady typically follows orders, is short tempered, and pushes down her emotions, but she can still recognize a fairly good idea when she sees one and can actually think for herself, so although this isn’t a betrayal, she compromises and lets Team JRY go after their friend.’ Yeah, idk guys, I feel like there was literally no reason to slot Winter in with the Ace Ops to be the lone voice of reason when Harriet could’ve become the new leader and played the exact same role. Instead, Winter gets to have a power move where she puts Harriet in her place. Winter is given actual depth and gets to put down the black woman who the writers have made display nothing but anger for the whole season. The fans rally behind Winter because she was given depth and hate Harriet because she has none, but that’s the fault of the writers. Btw, ‘this black woman won’t show any emotion besides anger’ is a racist stereotype. It would probably have taken like five minutes on google for Luna and Shawcross to have realized that it was a bad idea to write a black woman in any sort of position of power to be constantly angry + hiding her emotions. Elm is in the same boat as Harriet, and I was going to say it’s less severe, but then I remembered that she literally attacked Ren for talking about their emotions.

Look, my point is that RWBY as a show has never handled allegories like racism and corrupt police well, and either they should stop trying and stick to ‘make believe land is just different than the real world’ or start putting in the work and fix this. By the way, I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad for watching or even enjoying RWBY, but I hope people can watch it while recognizing that some of the things CRWBY has chosen to put into their show are destructive and that the creators need to be called out. I’ll continue to hope that most RWBY fans do recognize that RWBY is deeply flawed, but I’ve just been stewing recently about someone who told me that I shouldn’t have expected the show to address Faunus racism in the Atlas arcs because that ended when Adam died.

I want to make it totally clear that I agree with and support ACAB in the real world and I'm not against it being used in fantasy works, I just think CRWBY is doing a poor job of portraying it and many fans are misusing it and it feels disrespectful. This is an actual real world movement with actual real world consequences. It feels very bad to see people use it to argue that the writers who have never handled allegories of racism well can make an all POC group be a destructive, violent, easily controlled, easily beat group of corrupt cops that need a white woman and fellow cop to be the voice of reason.

#RWDE #rwde content #rwby criticism #rwby critical

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nimmy22 · 3 years

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A Mistake: Chapter 3

They weaved through the streets of the lavish neighborhood doing their best to lose their pursuers. They crushed countless flowers and shrubs beneath their feet as they jumped from backyard to backyard. The sound of gunfire forced them to pump their muscles harder, run faster as the rain beat down on them without mercy.

Why was no one calling the police? A commotion like this would at least draw crowds of families curious about all the noise or the dead bodies littering the street and their neighbor's home.

Sherry tripped, skinning her hands and knees on the pavement. She had a second to cry in pain before Cara was already pulling her up to continue.

"I can't. It's too hard." Sherry cried, breathing laboriously as her lips trembled. "Can we take a break?" She struggled to contain her tears, knowing full well it wasn't the best time to start crying.

"I'm sorry, Sherry but not here. We have to keep moving," Cara warned, glancing behind her. She saw no one and didn't hear any gunshots, but that didn't make it safe. "I can't let them take you, Sherry. Come on, just a bit more, and we'll find help."

Sherry nodded before she began to run again. However, one step, and she yelped, wincing in pain as she put her weight on her knee. It hurt worse than when she fell off her bike while trying to teach herself. She was alone and had to patch things up herself until her mother finally noticed days later.

"What's wrong?"

"M-my knee hurts," Sherry whimpered, watching the older girl move closer to inspect the wound. Blood trickled down the little girl's legs before getting washed away by the rain.

"That looks bad," Cara sighed, turning her back to the little girl before squatting down. "Here, get on my back. I'll get us out of here."

With Sherry clinging tightly to her neck, Cara ran to the edge of the residential area and down a dirt path leading straight into the Arkley mountains. She hoped to find a hiding spot for them to catch their breath and figure out what to do.

They hid inside the base of a tree, only having each other to keep warm. The spiderwebs were all forgotten, as the girls' fear was now too exhausted. There was nothing left to spare for the tiny arachnoids fuming over their ruined webs.

What felt like hours passed, and the girls grew too cold and tired. The little Sherry's knee wasn't looking so good, the bleeding had stopped, but an infection may already be brewing beneath the skin given where they've been.

Seeing the young girl wince every so often, Cara decided it was time to move again. She needed to find help. Perhaps the men all killed each other during whatever conflict brewed up tonight.

Carrying the young girl on her back again, Cara left the forest to walk along a side road. She was on the lookout for a passing car. But their luck was too dry at this time in the night despite the rain.

"Thank you, Cara. I don't think I would've made out without you."

"I... didn’t do anything. I couldn't fight. All I did was grab you and run. God, I'm so damn useless." Cara let out a long sigh and stared down at her feet.

"You're helping me now, aren't you? You could've just left me or...or listened to those men and gave me up, but you didn't. I will definitely ask daddy to give you a raise." Sherry giggled and rested her head against Cara's back. She knew that if her friend wasn't there tonight, she would've been in the dark all alone or worse. She might've stayed hidden in that closet only to be found by the armed men. She didn't have anyone to develop the skills of hide and seek with.

"Oh, you better, or else I'm suing somebody for the years shaved off my life tonight. Your dad sure pissed off some powerful people. Who sends a whole armed squad on some doctor's house?"

"Daddy says there are people who wanted to buy his medicine, use it for bad things. But he told them no, and now they want to steal it." For a split second, Cara imagined Mr. Birkin dealing drugs with a gang, but that image didn't last long. The disheveled, nervous reck of a man with a million things to do simply didn't look the type.

"Did he keep it in the house?"

"I don't think so," Sherry shook her head.

The older girl pondered over it, agreeing with Sherry. If Mr. Birkin had kept this medicine in his home, then surely the security would've been better. And he especially wouldn't leave his only child alone in the house with it.

"They wanted to use you as a hostage. Probably force your dad to give them what they wanted."

"Daddy probably wouldn't care if they took me,"

"Hey! don't say that. Your parents love Sherry." Cara stopped walking and gave the little girl a shake.

"Then where are they? They are never home."

"Their work is very...important, I suppose,"

"More than me?"

"No! Not like that. I mean... it's just a lot-"

"Cara, look! There is a car coming!" the little girl jumped with excitement on Cara's exhausted back, but she paid it no mind as her eyes greedily drank the glow of the headlights coming down the road.

"Thank god," Cara exhaled deeply, feeling as if all her worries had just vanished. "Wait here, I will flag it down."

Cara stood in the middle of the road and waved both arms, trying to get the driver's attention like a madwoman. She definitely looked deranged, out in the rain in the wee hours of the morning. The headlights became increasingly more blinding as the car came closer. She couldn't tell the color of the car or anything about the driver.

The driver showed no signs of stopping, the speed fast and steady. "Please stop!" Cara shouted, her eyes pleading. "Please!" She won't waste the opportunity, god knows when the next car will drive by. She refused to move, standing her ground as the car sped towards her. Neither her racing heart nor the car slowed. For a moment, she thought it was the end, becoming roadkill at seventeen, having done nothing with her life.

But then it stopped, screeching to a halt inches from her shivering form. Cara let her hands fall to the hood, knees almost buckling beneath her. The hood felt warm and soothing against her icy skin. As she moved to the driver's side, she recognized the design of the police cruiser, one explicitly assigned to the STARS unit. Her heart pounded as a new source of hope offered itself to her. This seemed too good to be true.

"Thank you so much for stopping, officer! It's been a hellish night." Cara said, glancing over with a smile at Sherry, who responded with her own.

The door opened, and the officer stepped out, shining a bright flashlight at Cara. She was blinded and had to shut her eyes. "I know this will sound crazy, but please hear me out. I was babysitting this little girl when a group of armed men broke into the house and then-"

"Where is Sherry?" He asked all too calmly. Cara frowned. It wasn't his sense of calmness that unnerved her. It was the familiarity of his voice.

'Of course, it was too fucking good to be true.'

"Wait, how did you know her name was Sherry?" Cara demanded, taking several steps back. While his shades were missing, his slicked blond hair stood out to her. The rain dowsed her like buckets of ice. "You..."

"I won't ask again," He warned, walking towards her with a hand resting on his belt, ready to draw his gun. His eyes were an icy blue, radiating with the power of his cunning intelligence.

"I won't give her to you. Sherry, run-"

"Uncle Albert? Is that you?" The young girl limped over to them with newfound vigor and threw her arms around the older man. He hugged her for a moment before pushing her away, his eyes searching her for injuries.

"Sherry, no! get away from him," Cara jumped forward, snatching the little girl's hand, pulling her away.

"It's ok, Cara. He's daddy's friend." The little girl shook Cara's grip off her before hopping back into Wesker's arms. Sherry snuggled into the warmth of the older man, completely oblivious to the way Wesker stood, looking down at Cara. He cocked his head to the side with a conceited expression. Clenching her fists, she decided she didn't like him.

Wesker loomed closer to Cara, enjoying the way she stumbled back to get out of his way, almost tripping over her own feet. He deliberately bumped into her shoulder as he carried Sherry to the other side of the car, settling her gently into the back seat. He could've chosen the closest door, but where was the fun in that?

Cara stood dumbfounded, staring as the man who had only hours ago slit a man's throat and was now slapping a bandage on a little girl's knee in the backseat of a cruiser. She watched him with narrowed eyes as he tended to the little girl, finally noticing his police uniform.

"Who are you? Why are you pretending to be a cop? Who were those people? What are you going to do with Sherry?"

"I am an officer of the law."

"That's a load of shit. Say, in the slim, extremely slim chance you are actually a cop, shouldn't there be more...officers? Backup? A news station? A public statement? Something like this wouldn't happen in Raccoon and no one crowding in to watch."

"I handled it," Wesker said, strapping Sherry in the backseat before shutting the door. The little girl was already on her way to snoozing off.

"I don't understand, why-"

"Enough with the questions." He hissed, grabbing her arm. He found the little thing a pretty sight, but that mouth of hers was dangerous. "You better kill off that curiosity of yours before it lands you somewhere you'll never leave as a warm body. Don't be another babysitter we have to send a severance package to."

"You're going to kill me," Cara's laugh was void of humor, succeeding in tipping her tears down her cheeks.

"Just be quiet and get in the car."

"Why should I? You could change your mind in a split second and put a bullet in my head."

Wesker twisted her arm behind her back before shoving her against the passenger door. "Then don't tempt me," his hot breath tickled her ear as he delivered his warning. "And if I did go for it, I wouldn't simply kill you. I'll get everyone you love. One unfortunate accident after the next." His hand trailed up her back to wrap around the back of her neck. She whimpered as he shoved her face harder against the glass.

Cara shuddered, processing the gravity of her situation. The man was a trained killer and supposedly an officer. She had already witnessed him kill, had felt his icy blade to her neck. There was no doubt in her mind that he would deliver on his warning. The real question was when?

The first person to cross her mind was Claire. Truly, there were so few people that Cara cared about and who cared for her. The Redfield siblings only had each other, and Cara couldn't live with the guilt of being the cause of her friend's death. Claire was her anchor when everything spun out of control in her life. She would do anything to protect those important to her.

"Fine," She grumbled, taking out her frustration on her bottom lip. She sunk her teeth into the cracked flesh until she tasted the metallic flavor, but that didn't help get rid of the bad taste already in her mouth.

"Great, now we can finally get out of the rain." Wesker stepped away from Cara, already missing the warmth of her body. Perhaps he should've prolonged it for a few more minutes, drove her further into tears. The thought alone stirred something inside of him.

The tension left Cara's body as her arms were freed, and she rubbed her abused muscles, cursing the bastards' existence. She would do all she could to never again make his acquaintance. He started the car as soon as she was seated.

She banged her head against the window as he suddenly leaned over her. "The hell are you doing? I knew it! You already changed your mind," She hissed, failing miserably to shove his hands away.

"Safety first." He purred, a low chuckle leaving his lips as he reached over and buckled her seatbelt in one swift movement. She sat straighter than she ever did her whole life and simply stared straight ahead. She decided that if she simply ignored his existence, he would cease to be, and she'd wake up from this horrible, horrible nightmare. Her body has to be taking revenge for all the heart-disease heavy foods she'd been stuffing herself with, concocting such an awful nightmare for her. How is this a wake-up call if she couldn't pinch even herself awake?

It took too much effort for Cara to keep her eyes on the road. She immediately attributed it to sitting next to a killer. There was definitely no other reason. She kept shifting in her seat, unable to stay still. On the other hand, Sherry was out cold in the back, a fuzzy blanket draped over her.

Cara's fidgeting halted as Wesker tossed something into her lap. She picked it up with furrowed brows, inspecting it. It was some kind of badge, but not just any badge. It identified him as Albert Wesker, captain of the STARS alpha team. It looked legit, something similar to what Chris was issued. She has a thousand questions, but the man with the answers was the most uncooperative bastard she ever met. One more question and she's sure he will throw her out of the moving car.

'He was a cop, a crooked one. How many more in the police could be trusted? Who could help her? Was Chris- No! he wouldn't be part of something like this.' Cara's thought, mind fighting itself, too many thoughts wanted to be the focus.

"You were quite the shatter box not too long ago. Why so quiet now?" Wesker asked, enjoying the sequence of emotions flicker across her face.

"You practically told me to shut up," she tossed the badge onto the dashboard before resting her head against the window. She knew she was in way over her head.

"I said to stop the questions. You can still talk,"

"No."

"Alright then, suit yourself then."

It must've been the warmth of the car or the fatigue of the night that lulled Cara to sleep because she was startled awake by a ridiculously high-speed bump. Her sleep hazed eyes scanned her surroundings before she sat up straight, recognizing where she was.

Wesker had parked the cruiser right in front of her apartment building, a living place for the lesser members of society as it was all they could afford. Her wide eyes found him, and she audibly swallowed. "How did you know where I live."

"Of course, I help my dear friend run background checks on all his employees. One in his position needs to be incredibly careful with whom he uses." Wesker said, reaching an arm to rest on the back of her seat. She recoiled away as if stung by a bee.

"Is this your home, Cara? Can I come with you?" Sherry asked, having woken from her sleep minutes before. She leaned forward, resting her chin on her uncle's muscular arm.

"I-"

"Maybe next time Sherry. After we drop off Cara here, we're going straight to your parents." Wesker said, a sense of finality in his tone that had the little girl obediently return to her seat.

Cara opened her mouth to protest him knowing her name but remembered his background check and shut her mouth. He must know everything legally in the record on her, including her parent's colorful histories.

Unbuckling his seatbelt, Cara was surprised to see him exit the car. He came around to her side and knocked on the window, mentioning for her to get out. He barely gave her space to get out as he stood right by the passenger door with his arm resting on the roof of the car. She was forced to brush past him as his towering frame refused to step back. She caught the scent of gunpowder, soap, and the faintest traces of a cologne. And of course, blood. Despite her terror, she found herself taking a deeper inhale than she intended.

"Tonight, you watched Sherry until her uncle came home, and then they gave you a ride home because of the rain. Nothing. Else. Happened. You understand?" Wesker said, bending down to be at eye level with the trembling girl. With surprising tenderness, he moved her hair out of her face, but his eyes were anything but. She stood very still, wishing the ground would swallow her up. Her attempt at looking away was met with a firm grip on her chin, forcing her to look at him. "Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal." She answered, voice cracking under the weight of her emotions. A lump formed in her throat as her eyes welled up, but she refused to cry.

"Don't mess up if you can't handle the consequences." Satisfied with his work, he stepped away, watching as the girl raced home.

"You can be so mean, Uncle Albert," Sherry whined once the officer returned to the driver's seat.

"Really? I didn't notice."

#resident evil #Albert Wesker X OC #albert wesker

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dayshipper · 4 years

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OBX Season 2 Predictions

This is not what I necessarily want to happen, it's just what I think might happen. It's all just speculation and none of it might actually end up happening at all. Obviously, I’m just a muggle.

Ward: Well this could go a number of ways. I’m assuming that the jig is most likely up now that John B pretty much laid everything on the table. If the police are reputable in any way they are definitely going to be questioning Ward at some point based off of John B’s allegations. They will be sceptical about Ward now and will be less inclined to take his word for the whole truth moving forward. I also want to say that I do think that Ward really does loves Sarah, I think he cares about her the most out of everyone in his life. She must look like her mother or something I don’t know but he has definitely always had a soft spot for her. I don’t think he will necessarily put her in danger for the sake of himself. Maybe to a certain extent but not completely anyway.

Rafe: He’s just a downward spiral. The fact that Barry now knows that he killed the Sherrif makes his future completely dependant on what mood Barry is in. He is so unstable. I mean both of them are. But Barry is definitely going to be taking advantage of Rafe now that he can basically decide his fate. Better yet, Topper now also knows the truth. He is so in love with Sarah and has proved that he would do anything for her that he might actually end up being the one to dob him in. Especially when he finds out that Sarah is ‘dead’ he’ll blame it all on Rafe as the reason Sarah ‘felt’ she had to leave with John B. Even though the rest of the Pogues know the truth, they are too close to the situation and will probably not be taken seriously.

I also think that if this news does get out, that Ward will most likely take the fall for it and blame it on himself. He might already be facing jail time if the cops choose to believe John B’s side of the story so he’ll just take the blame for it as well. As much as Ward and Rafe’s relationship is rocky, to say the least, he is still his son and he knows that Rafe did what he did to get back in his dad’s good graces. Or then again, Ward could think that Rafe is a complete nutjob and might not intervene at all if he gets charged so that Rafe can finally take some responsibility. But I think that might be less likely...

With regard to Rafe and Kie... I don’t think anything is going to happen. As much as I think there might be something there, or at least on Rafe’s side, I don’t know if it's going to play out in season 2. I think it would be interesting if Rafe tried to pursue her just to see how JJ and the rest of the Pogues react to it but I’m not too confident that that will happen. Kinda want to see a glimpse into the past when Kie had her Kook year though, to see if Rafe had any role in it... That needs to happen. We need to know what went on then and how the Pogues were without Kie around.

John B and Sarah: Ok. I’m struggling to figure out how these two will play out. I think they will be together for the duration of season 2. But in terms of storyline, I don’t know. We know that they’re alive and everything but can we trust the people on the boat that saved them at the end of 1x10? Will they be telling anyone on the radio that they’ve just picked up 2 randoms? Will that then get back to the police and everybody back in the obx? I think they are going to stay radio silent for a good while until they figure things out. Assuming that they’ve lost everything that was on their boat they are going to struggle to communicate to the rest of the Pogues what’s going on. In saying that, I don’t think it's going to go all of season 2 without them revealing that they’re safe and well to JJ, Pope and Kie. This is a tricky one.

JJ, Pope and Kie: So they think their friends are gone and are going to be all over the place for at least an episode or 2 before they start fighting back. I think JJ will become even more reckless and will want to be on his own to start off with. Kie will want to be with the boys and try to be strong for them. She is the most stable one in the group I think so as much as she’s devasted, she’s going to keep a relatively cool head for the sake of the everyone else. Pope will also be devasted of course and angry at everyone who didn’t believe them. He’ll probably be the one to get the others together to fight back for John B and get everyone to believe them. They’ll all want their revenge but I think Pope might be the one to pull everyone's head in and get the ball rolling. I think he’ll want to take the lead now because he has kinda been against most things during season 1 because of his scholarship but now that that's no longer on the cards I think that he will put all of his energy into this. As a distraction.

As for their relationships, I think Pope is going to feel like he and Kie are official even without their relationship being made official...if that makes sense. Kie will probably play into it half-heartedly just to make him happy but I don’t think her heart is in it. Meanwhile, JJ might feel like he’s alone right now. Pope and Kie have each other so he might feel like he is the third wheel.

Kie will probably be most preoccupied worrying about JJ and will always bring him up because she is scared of what he might be off doing. If that does happen, I think Pope might take her constant worrying about JJ as a sign that she likes him and will slowly start to realise Kie’s initial hesitation in being with Pope from the get-go. He will then probably break it off with her without telling her the real reason he did so, just so that Jiara doesn’t get put out there explicitly for the sake of us- the audience. It'll be up to us to pick up on it without it being said. I think they’re going to make Jiara a slow burn romance so they can’t play into it too much. That’s why I think the only Jiara moments we get will probably just be restricted to Kie worrying about JJ (behind his back) and possibly JJ being a confidant for Kie when/if they talk about her change of heart in deciding to go forward with Pope. If that’s the case, I’ll be happy with that. I think slow-burn romances are the best in tv shows. It builds up so much anticipation and makes things so much more interesting.

Well, if you made it this far well done, you deserve some treasure. Although you’ll have to go to the Bahamas to get it...

Also, sorry that it’s all over the place, it kinda mirrors my mind in that way. In saying that, I feel like I have so much more thoughts and ideas in my head for season 2 but I can't think of them right now. When I do I'll be sure to put it on here just to get it out of my head if anything. Peace.

#obx #Outer Banks #jiara #kie #kiara #jj #pope #John b #rafe #sarah cameron #jj x kiara #jj x kie #rafe x kiera #season 2 #netflix

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legobiwan · 4 years

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Umbrella Academy - Season 2 Thoughts

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

What I really enjoyed about this season was how it mirrored, contrasted, and complemented Season 1. In the first season, we met the individuals in the Umbrella Academy being defined by their powers and their relationship (or conscious lack of relationship) to them and their heritage. Luther staying on way past adulthood, Diego using his powers to play at being a cop, Alison using hers to create a fake life, Klaus burying his in addiction, Vanya not even knowing she had powers and being defined by her buried emotions...

Now, in Season 2, we get to see the gang defined by themselves - outside their family and their supernatural abilities.

But here’s the thing - even when they are living a “normal” existence - they are still outsiders. Luther and his “deformed” body being used by the mob. Diego and his paranoia landing him in the asylum. Alison being black in the 1960s. Klaus being gay. Ben being a ghost. Vanya being gay. How do we define who is on the outside and by what parameters? It seems all the Hargreeves kids are outsiders, powers or not. (And Five is the perennial outsider, a man outside of time and his own body.)

Along those lines...did anyone feel a sigh of relief when Vanya finally switched teams?

Ben keeps complaining about Klaus taking him away from San Fransisco. Even though it’s not explicitly mentioned, the Bay Area had a huge Asian-American movement (and population). Considering the political tone of the season, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was part of what Ben might have been pissed about. (Among many other things.)

It was also...so nice to see more Ben?

I really enjoyed seeing the siblings in very different combinations this time around - Diego and Five; Luther and Vanya; Diego and Vanya (at the end); Klaus and Alison (and Ray).

So the time travel thing. Young!Five basically pushes Old!Five back through the vortex/portal with the correct calculations. But is this the same timeline that births the “Sparrow Academy?” And what role would Old!Five have had in that?

This Season was a lot slower - and in some ways - a lot less quirky than Season 1. I sometimes missed the more “zany” feel of the first season, when everyone was still finding their footing and we were being introduced to these new characters/universe. That being said, there was a depth to this Season that was highly enjoyable, even if it did mean things got a little slow at times. I thought the civil rights storyline with Alison was really well done and a pretty unflinching look at race relations at the time. Same with Vanya and Klaus and their romances. While I find the Cold War to be a fascinating era of US history, I’m also really glad I didn’t have to come of age during it.

Ah, it wouldn’t be an Umbrella Academy season without Five having at least one good ol’ slaughter at some point.

I have to admit, I legit teared up at Ben’s second “death.” And the knowledge that he was only still around because he was too afraid to go into the light. (So...does that mean all of Klaus’s conjured figures are ones that were too afraid to “move on,” as it were?)

Okay, but a few questions. Firstly - was that Christopher Lloyd with Luther in the opening?

(Would make perfect sense, tbh.)

Also, Ray Chestnut is Famine from Good Omens and *knows* how to rock a damned suit.

Aidan Gallagher’s physical comedy was 1000% fantastic when he met his older self. It also birthed what, to me, was the funniest damn line in the season:

It’s interesting how so much of this Season was, again, about preventing the apocalypse but also more about family relations and finding one’s self. And Kennedy’s assassination seems to be one of those (to borrow from Dr. Who) fixed points in time, something that has to happen. (It’s also funny that they chose to roll with an inevitable nuclear standoff if Kennedy had lived, as opposed to the Night Vale rendering of the same subject, which saw Kennedy become President for life. No matter what you think, his (and RFK’S) assassination was a turning point in American politics and society.

What was up with emo!Ben at the end? I have questions.

I enjoyed the Swedes. They killed people, looked menacing, and served their purpose without taking over the narrative, which was fine. We had a big, big bad with Hazel and Cha Cha last season. This season, the real antagonists were a lot more subtle and yes, the Handler and Lila were they enemy, but so was the greater American society, in a way.

I will say that last episode had a ton of fakeouts and was totally balls-over-the-wall insane. You knew that advice from Reginald to Five was going to appear again at some point, but still, the initial slaughter was...something else.

I’m pretty sure that we’ll get a Season 3 at this point. I personally think the show can go 4 Seasons and then be wrapped up. They’ve averted the apocalypse twice, now it’s time to see if they can stitch their family back together and put together the mystery of Reginald Hargreeves.

Compelling storylines although a little lower on the zany humor and at times, the story dragged a bit. A typical Act 2, as it were. 8.5/10 would watch again.

#hello there #Umbrella Academy #tua spoilers #umbrella academy spoilers #legobiwan watches a tv show #at 3am because insomnia hahahhahaa

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fimflamfilosophy · 4 years

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Characters: Tearing Each Other Together

After the world-sweeping success of my previous article (forty notes on Tumblr, wow!) and being driven out of my house due to mold for the second time in two months, I think the time is right to add another essay to the subject of character design and writing. But what’s left to say after having definitely solved the entire process of character writing the last time?

Well, suppose you can figure out the emotional state of one person. That’s well and good, and oddly harder for people than you might imagine. And I think the reason it’s so hard is because in virtually any show you’re not going to be given a character in a vacuum to learn that process from. They have some story, something they’re trying to overcome, and other characters they’re bouncing off of, and the actual process of conflict is more complicated than knowing who your characters are.

Hate, Love, or Indifference, It’s All A Struggle

So what’s the essence of a story? There’s some motive that’s trying to be achieved. A conflict. And I can’t stress this enough. Conflict. Because it’s one thing if you say your main character is a kid who wants to be the best Poke’mon trainer and completely another to have that be a concrete objective with a satisfying story and conclusion. Wanting to be the “best” isn’t actually conflict. It’s a dream. Being forced to travel the known world to acquire eight gaudy pins that probably cost twenty-five cents each to manufacture? That’s conflict.

And not only do you have to travel the world, you do so with a shrill red-head who explicitly hates you because you trashed her bike, and a sex-starved pervert whose life dream is to make Poke’mon mate with each other for a living. And that’s important. Without Misty and Brock, Ash’s journey is a lot less interesting for a lot of reasons. Misty calls Ash out every time he messes up, and aside from being on a watch list, Brock is a helpful older character who tells Ash, and therefore the audience, what’s what.

But let’s back up, because people understand the benefit of Brock and Misty at a basic level, but when you’re starting off, how do you know who those people should be? Well, every show, from sitcom, to comedy to drama, does its best to balance personalities against each other so there’s always some sort of conflict possible between them.

Now, “conflict” doesn’t mean they’re trying to kill each other. It could mean they’re falling in love with each other. Maybe it means they don’t have much in common but have to work together over long hours in isolation. The idea is simply that there’s something to overcome between these people. Misty thinks Ash is stupid - that’s a conflict which is often leveraged to push Ash forward. Brock, however, has a reactive role in the show, only functioning in conflict when a womanizer who grovels at the feet of ladies Ash is already helping anyway.

It’s odd because if Misty were older she would be set up very well as kind of an “opposites” romantic torture device with Brock. They’re even depicted as professional equals, which would have made their levels of expertise and experience more balanced. Had they been closer in apparent age, a “will they won’t they” romance would have fit adequately, with Brock’s constant hitting on other women serving as a major, hopeless, long-lasting roadblock to a serious relationship between them; it would work especially well because Misty is established to have an inferiority complex to her prettier sisters. It also might help explain why Brock hung around so long. But as it was, Brock’s main contribution to the inner dynamic was to act as a mediator, caretaker, and mentor.

But circling back to Brock’s dream of Poke’mon husbandry. Well, on the meta level that’s why he doesn’t leave. Because it’s not a motive, he’s not taking steps towards it, and it’s not going to happen, it’s just a dream. Until it does happen, anyway, and then they wrote him out of the show - but we’ll dig more into this later.

Balancing Imbalance

The best place to look to see good conflict set ups between characters are popular sitcoms. Consider the show “Frasier”: it ran for eleven seasons and revolved mainly around the personal spats of Frasier, his brother Niles, their dad, and the dad’s caretaker, Daphne. Frasier was arrogant, Niles was insecure, Dad was an earnest roughneck, and Daphne was well-meaning. Frasier and Niles were also elitist pricks at times so they couldn’t even always agree where to eat together, much less with their father who was happier having a burger with ketchup.

Every episode had some central motivator; an ice fishing trip, a joint investment, an awards ceremony - but these things were just catalysts to the main conflict, which was almost always something between characters. We’d seen it time and again, that Frasier and his Dad would come to blows over differences in taste. Niles would try to court Daphne while torn by his commitment to his failing marriage, over and over. But the pithy banter and the way they resolved it would always be new, so people watched this show, episode after episode, for over a decade.

And the simple beauty of it all was that each of the characters had something to do with each other. Whether it be filial obligation, lust, sibling rivalry, friction between introversion and extroversion, or taste in food, they always had some source of conflict to make a show out of. Niles and Frasier were both psychiatrists, but from different schools of thought and different working environments, so they even had chances to butt heads academically and professionally. It was rich with writing opportunities and it’s not any wonder it lasted so long.

Another sitcom, “New Girl”, which was about a group of roommates, had a good dynamic set-up between two characters, Schmidt and Nick. Nick is a messy slob and Schmidt’s a type A neat freak, creating a really obvious source of conflict to work with. But then they had a third character, Winston, who they lampshade as the token black guy.

Now, the joke that Winston is the “black friend” has pretty much no legs, so in the early seasons you see him acting as kind of a third party mediator, or maybe a wild card, and it winds up being funnier when Winston is unhelpful. So as the seasons went on, Winston gradually lost his damn mind. He becomes a cop and meets a woman so that he’d have some character growth and dynamic, but also develops into a man who would burn a building down as a prank. The writers had no idea what they were doing with him and he gradually flew further and further off the handle.

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Winston as a character. Aside from being funny in the show, watching the writers gradually unglue him from sanity was its own meta comedy above that. I knew they were doing it on accident, but having such a good time with it that it was just going to keep getting worse. In fact a major component of the finale for the whole show is an insane thing Winston does. They wrap the show on the note, “Winston is crazy”. And it all happened because they didn’t figure out what Winston’s conflict was at the start. He didn’t have a source of conflict with anyone, so the man became a living breathing embodiment of conflict in general.

Your Story Ends With the Conflict

Now, the catch is, in any type of fiction, whether a video game, a roleplaying session, or a sitcom, the story ends when the conflict does, because if the conflict is over there’s nothing more to tell! It used to frustrate me to no end back when “My Little Pony” was popular and the other nerds on the internet used to ask, “How many times must Fluttershy learn not to be shy, or that being shy is okay? When will she overcome all that she is and eliminate the core element that creates conflict for her?”

The answer should always be that the character will learn their damn lesson when the show ends or when they’re written off it. If you are sick of seeing a character and don’t want to see them any more, the best thing to do is close out their issues, because once they have no conflicts, they have no story, and there’s no point in doing a show about them. Asking Fluttershy to stop being shy is asking to say goodbye to her, because she's a cartoon and her job is to entertain kids by being neurotic and yellow.

People think they’re so smart when they say they’d solve all a character’s problems if it were them. In the finale to the first season of Poke’mon, for example, Ash decides to gamble his whole championship run on Charizard, who’s a self-absorbed bitch of a creature that ultimately throws the match and leaves it an open question whether Ash might have won if he’d left the team primadonna sitting on the bench.

Some viewers see that and complain it’s the dumbest possible thing Ash could have done, but it’s probably one of the single most brilliant things the Poke’mon writers did in the grand scheme, because think about where it left us. Ash didn’t achieve his goal of proving he’s “the best”, but it feels like a fluke and if he got another shot, he might make it all the way. This gave the show a gateway to more episodes with Ash still having something to prove and a dumb mistake indicating he still had a lot to learn. Because he didn’t win, his story hadn’t ended.

In some cases shows can end characters just by addressing some dream goal they’ve been expressing since the first season. In the case of Brock, they intentionally removed him from the show by introducing him to some girl who was willing to work with Brock in the animal husbandry business. He’d been traveling all this time, his dream opportunity fell into his lap, and he was gone. What reason would he have to refuse, and why would anyone stop him? And of course, Brock’s dream job was incompatible with the central plot elements of the rest of the show, so that was it!

The Format Informs the Conflict

If you want to write something but you aren’t sure when it’s going to end, you need a concrete, long-term conflict that’s not just going to go away. For example, in “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts”, there were thirteen ghosts. By design, that show should have ended after Scooby Doo found all thirteen ghosts. It actually ended earlier than that because it was cancelled, but you get the idea. When you have a finite goal, your run time is going to be finite as well.

At least in theory. In “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” they establish at the beginning of one season that everyone’s magic powers were based on the Tarot. Now, I don’t know the Tarot off hand, but as the show went on I knew that sooner or later they’d run out of Tarot cards, and in my mind I assumed the season would be over when the Tarot ended. But then I got a good chuckle when a guy showed up and his powers were based on a totally different theme, because I knew the writer had realized he’d stumbled into something good and wasn’t ready to end it. He invented a cheap excuse to keep going! And I think if “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts” had been successful they’d have managed to unleash a whole lot more than thirteen ghosts because Hannah Barbera was not exactly a studio with a lot of shame.

Character conflicts like those in sitcoms are a great way to have conflict perpetually, because people don’t really change that much and there’s no reason why most of the fundamental friction shouldn’t be there indefinitely. But of course, character-driven conflict is going to be secondary in an event-driven show. “Jojo” actually does have a lot of character conflict, but the plot is primarily about the battles and the journey - if all the fighting ended Jojo’s characters probably couldn’t carry a sitcom, at least not without some serious hard work, a little genius, and a touch of elbow grease.

For event-driven conflict, you’ll want to establish a target - a moving target if you don't know when the story ends, and that can be pretty difficult. Old action shows and comics used to do it by having a rotating cast of villains, so that after one was defeated another would show up tomorrow, and it was assumed these guys regularly broke out of prison, or they escaped in rocket pods, or whatever, and they’d be back later with a new goofy scheme. In these cases you tend to find reactive heroes; they patrol the streets until a lunatic in tights and a garden-themed hat shows up and transforms everyone into people-shaped topiaries somehow.

For active heroes, you need to establish something that requires a lot of structure, like Ash’s journey to win the Poke’mon League. In every country he visits, they all have this asinine rule that you have to go to eight unique locations and kick the ass of someone who disadvantages themselves with an easily-countered mono team that all have the same exact weakness. You can’t be accepted into the League if you haven’t proven you own a water Poke’mon to utterly flatten the fire gym! Let’s be real, this nonsense is probably designed intentionally as a money gate - most people run out of cash before they qualify. Either way, it ends when Ash wins the league, and he lost the league so the show could keep going.

For roleplaying games, the same rules apply. With your players, you’re either going to establish a reactive goal - an adventuring guild hires a bunch of colorful salarymen with silly accents to go to a dungeon as part of their nine to five job - or you need players to set an active goal for themselves and keep the realization of that goal beyond their reach until you’re ready to end the game.

The Active Hero Acts

In my younger years, I learned to roleplay in almost exclusively player-driven games where we were expected to come up with our own goals and pursue them ourselves, but I’ve discovered that is stunningly rare in most roleplaying circles. Your typical D&D player likes to play the salaryman with a funny accent who doesn’t have to worry about the venturous part of adventure. His boss told him to go to the Cave of Everlasting Wonders and Torturous Screams, recover the Sword of Bad Portent, and then hand it over to the department of magic items where they’ll file the paperwork to get it delivered to the patron that wanted the sword for some reason. No need to have your own motives.

But what if you want to play a crime fighter who actually, you know, busts up all the crime? Clearly you can’t just wait for crime to happen passively - you’ve got to go after people. Act instead of being reactive. Purse snatchers are small time and in a more grounded setting the guys you’ll catch by being passive are just grunts being hired out by someone - usually kids in a lot of cases. You have to seek out the bosses.

Making an active character to fit into any setting can be challenging, and I’ve seen quite a few pitfalls. I think one of the funniest motives is always “the guy who wants to go home” due to its obvious failure condition. A lot of stories are about everymen who just want to get out of trouble, but those stories end when they get out of trouble! In many books, movies, shows, or roleplaying games, you’re almost always going to find opportunities to send that guy home, and you’ll have to either conveniently ignore it, switch motives and decide not to go home, or end the whole story with going home. These characters only work where the story is happening to them and it's all out of their control.

I’ve also seen my share of the “quirky genius inventor/scientist”. When someone designs a character mistaking a dream for a motive. They dream of building a better mouse trap, you see. That’s their inner conflict. And while this is a real world conflict, it’s difficult to make it a good story because actual science and invention involves a lengthy quantity of controlled experiments. You breed hundreds of fruit flies, expose them to nicotine, and try to isolate the gene that causes nicotine resistance. It can be fascinating work at its level but sometimes the most exciting part of your day is when you give yourself a steam burn cooking the fly food. The “quirky scientist” in fiction is usually more of a mentor, and if he insists on staying in his lab doing his work then he’s not even a main character - he’s a guy who explains fruit flies to the audience and then is never heard from again. Other times he’s the asshole who invented the story’s whole problem.

I once played in a game with “the quirky scientist who wants to go home”, and man was that a frustrating ride. The game itself was about occult magic and demons, and for most of the game the scientist was experimenting with teleportation magic to go home and was focused on that above the goal of finding and eradicating demons (the game’s premise). And when he finally met a boss demon that could teleport him home to his lab, he went! We wound up retiring a character who, to be honest, was barely even interested in the main subject of the story. Had he been in a film or a show, they’d have cut the character after the first draft because he served no purpose and wasted screen time.

So how do you make sure your character has a working, proactive goal, in a nutshell? Establish a goal that can be achieved by the character within the framework of your story through action by leaving his house (or after burning his house down so he can’t go home), and then make sure the goal is big enough that it will take many broad steps to get there - those steps need to be concrete and visible, not things that would happen off-screen. Most importantly, tie that goal into the main premise of the story, so that reaching the end of the story generally may achieve what the character wants.

If You Aren’t Trying, It’s Not A Trial

Okay, I understand that last bit probably requires more unpacking. But think of it this way. There’s a writing structure referred to as the “Hero’s Journey”. Basically it goes like this: the hero is forced into adventure, he meets friends and goes through trials, he hits his lowest point, he is reborn into a better man, he ends the conflict, story over.

What I’m talking about specifically right now are the trials. The “wacky inventor” is usually presumed to do all his research off screen because most media likes to focus on the results of the invention and the conflict. But if you were to focus on the trials of a scientist, it’d actually be about procuring research grants and potentially materials. You wouldn’t watch a show about a man who checks gene A-235 for nicotine resistance in flies, then goes on to A-236, then A-237.

If I were to write a story about a researcher, here’s one thing I might do: the researcher fails to find what he’s looking for in gene A-235, and when he goes to seek a grant to look at A-236, he finds one of his colleagues has convinced the university that the protagonist’s research is a dead end. Hearing this, the researcher realizes he’s about to lose his lab, so he writes a bit of a lie into his report on A-235. He says it may prevent cancer.

Now, the protagonist is, deep down, a good man. He thinks this will generate some buzz at the university and get him more funding, but he’ll do a follow-up and show the data doesn’t hold up. After that he’ll ask for money for A-236 and everything goes back to normal. But disaster strikes. His article, which was only supposed to show up in an obscure research journal, gets picked up by a major news network and winds up being spread all over. Suddenly he’s “the man who cured cancer”.

And as he’s trying to figure out how to navigate the issue, another researcher comes out and says that under peer review, he was able to replicate the results. He too shows that A-235 cures cancer! Now the hero isn’t sure. He becomes a celebrity and simply lies about his research because he has no real data, but try desperately as he might, in private he just can’t get the results the peer review insisted were there.

He struggles and struggles, coming to blows with his colleague who’s scrutinizing his research notes. Throw in a love interest who’s impressed with what this guy did, and actually I think I’ve just described the plot of some movie I saw a long time ago about faking cold fusion. I think Albert Einstein was a supporting character in it. In my version the twist would be the peer reviewer was also trying to get a grant by lying. Point is, the central conflict of the film certainly isn’t the scientific process, it’s all the crazy crap that happened on the way from point A to point B.

The story is in the trials. If nothing changes, if the character doesn’t have to change their way of life or go through anything special, it’s either not a story or it’s not your typical story. There are plenty of experimental films or well-regarded books that can make a certain banality become interesting. Stories that explain the simple struggles of day to day living for people on hard times. But the trials, the palpable challenges, that’s really the meat of it all. When you think of what your character should be doing throughout the story, he should be going through these efforts, these steps, these trials, all in the name of whatever his broader goal is.

Where You Start Affects Where You End

It also matters quite a lot when and where characters are introduced. A lot of tales follow some basic notes, and one of the more common elements is “crossing the threshold”, which prevents your characters from going back to their life before the adventure. It’s used because it compels the characters forward, as they have no other direction they can go. It can be anything: the character’s home town is destroyed, the character commits a crime, he accepts a contract, his mother dies - so long as it prevents him from going back. It’s especially useful in roleplaying games where you really need everyone to be driving forward.

In one such roleplaying game, I got in a spat with the guy who wanted to run the game because I was trying to make a leader character, but the game master wanted to base his game around a movie he’d seen with a single main character. He’d elected another player to be that main character, and explained to me he’d be starting the game after that character had already crossed the threshold and had begun his journey. This meant that everyone else were supporting cast and could go back to their normal lives at any time, because they were coming willingly from where they were and not really facing any drastic changes to their personal status quo.

I eventually resolved not to play in that game at all, because none of the character dynamics I wanted were going to work. It was supposed to be a “wannabe” superhero game, with the premise that everyone wanted to be heroes, except one player had already started the journey and it turned out another had already reached the end of that arc and was going to play a character that had been a hero going on years before the story began. There was no plan to really reconcile the narrative clashes.

If that game were to work as it was, without me being present, then the person playing the pre-established hero would have needed to take the mentor role. The other players besides the main character would have needed to be comfortable in auxiliary roles, and the group would have to play as though they were part-way into the story. Still learning to be a team but well past the initial stages of a plot, and they’d all need to think up reasons to be in this group individually on their own, because the threshold had already been crossed and they didn’t cross it together.

The friend running the game was actually dismissive of my advice here, arguing that I was overcomplicating everything with a meta analysis of narrative and structure when all we need is a basic drive to play, and I don’t think he realized he’d set himself up with a much more complicated game and less cohesive premise by going about things as he had.

The already established hero couldn’t be the mentor because a mentor character had already been created as an NPC. The auxiliary players weren’t really informed at the outset they’d be auxiliaries - especially not me who’d wanted to play the team leader. The player who’d been designated as the central protagonist didn’t want to lead or be the central protagonist. It could have worked, but it would have taken a lot more planning and many more concessions than a typical game.

In a more recent game, I’ve got another bit of an issue with the start misleading the general goals of the players. It’s a sci-fi game, and first, one player is doing “the quirky inventor scientist”; his current stated dream is vaguely to create transhumanist technology. He also wants to play the leader, so he established himself as the most important man nobody has ever heard of. He has spies in every major institution in the known galaxy and is a genius beyond comparison. He’s currently based in a rusting pirate ship in the middle of the space boonies doing nothing with his life save being the most important man.

Meanwhile, I set up a disgraced military officer with a revenge quest against his own nation. But the pirate crew my character joined turned out to not believe in structure nor leadership and they killed their last commander to have a system of “democracy”. My structure-minded character has tried to take the lead and drive us forward, but he runs into general deconstructive resistance and the “quirky scientist” wants to be the leader, but hasn’t yet expressed self-motivated goals.

It’s not exactly my most harmonious game and there’s quite a lot going wrong here, but here’s how it could have worked: first, establishing that the crew of the pirates respects no leadership places the entire crew in the precarious position of being “chickenshit” at the outset. That kind of incohesiveness is why a band of rogues gets easily defeated; it’s not the behavior of scrappy men of action, but hopeless men of inaction. A corrupted “democracy” collectivises failure while awarding success to whoever actually has the most power in the group structure - it protects the weak leaders from responsibility and disincentivizes good work by allowing those same men to reap rewards while offloading the burdens to those lower on the ladder. In essence, “If things are screwed up, blame the democracy. If things are good, I did it.”

What should have happened was the “quirky scientist” should have been in charge to start with, because otherwise he has no reason to be on board the ship. He’s the most powerful man in the galaxy, after all. If it were because he was financing the pirates to go on raiding and salvage missions relevant to his research, then it would make sense. He’d have a purpose and a position of leadership just as the player wanted. It would also establish the pirates have some command structure and a level of respect for it that allows them to function.

And the power struggle between the disgraced officer and the scientist? Perfectly reasonable character conflict that would drive actual, meaningful roleplaying and story. The scientist may bankroll the operation but the officer is the tactical talent and the two pull in opposite directions, as power-hungry men often do.

However, the opportunity to start with a sensible and meaningful social dynamic has passed, and on top of that the “quirky scientist” keeps his galaxy-wide power a secret, so it’s all kind of messy and “badly written” in the sense that most audiences would be generally rooting for the crew to fail, and they’d find the grand reveal of the scientist’s galactic power to be frustrating and unrewarding because it’s more of a plot hole than anything. So close on so many counts and yet so very far, and the opportunity to pull it together eventually is present but a more challenging and uphill battle than getting it right at the outset.

In The End, Did We Even Learn Anything?

Creating a character is easy, in my opinion. Creating a working story with a group of self-driven characters can be a lot harder. This is especially true of roleplaying games or of cooperation with multiple writers, where you need to be on the same general page with a committee. It can help a lot to establish the exact conflicts at the beginning, but as can be seen with Winston from “New Girl” or the later seasons of “My Little Pony”, what you have can morph beyond your control as things go on.

Sometimes you never had control in the first place. Sometimes you lose control because you conclude the original conflict of your story and struggle to find a new one - the brand is too successful to let go. Maybe an executive comes in and injects an idea that throws the entire balance of everything totally out of whack and now nothing works. Sometimes your friend thinks story structure is overrated. It’s a difficult juggling act.

So at the end of this essay did we even learn anything? It depends a lot on what you’re trying to do and what you wanted to learn. If you’re the more typical Dungeons and Dragons group, you don’t need to think much about this. Just make your characters and passively react to activities handed out by Dungeons, Dungeons & Co - your conflict is event-driven. Are you writing a sitcom? Well, balance a tangled web of conflicting character habits and write the ensuing disaster. Want to make a complex film about a group of highly motivated, proactive people with sophisticated individual goals that ultimately converge while still respecting their rich, conflicting, inner politics, and do all that writing as part of a team? Well, good goddamn luck, but with the right start and enough care you can make it happen.

#essay

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basketballandtextbooks · 4 years

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Bat how do you feel after watching the special

There are multiple levels to my thoughts.

On a satire level, they bungled a lot of the information. They were trying to take an “all sides are stupid stance” on an issue where people are dying daily and there are actual medical reasons for one stance to be factually incorrect so taking an “all sides” stance is... fucking tone deaf. To be fair to them, I enjoyed the amount of meta that informed their episode about knowing that their episode was doing more harm than good and using Randy as a tool for that particular satire was a smart and effective mood. That said, it was a mixed message that promoted a lot of misinformation. While the meta parts were funny, lamp-shading how poor your satire is doesn’t actually make your satire good. It just means you’re lamp-shading the issue. It was disappointing because I had hoped for better as they frequently write good satire. Stan’s character journey was the only cohesive one throughout the episode and while it was a good one, there was so much of the episode that was tone deaf to the severity of this issue. While I think it’s valid to bring levity to the issue and I was hoping they would, they missed the mark by a long-shot. That said, they usually don’t do well with medical issues. The last time they bungled their satire this badly was the vaccination episode. And they infamously bungle literally every trans-related episode. There were aspects of the episode that were poignant, well thought out, and well executed, but the majority was an under-researched in-cohesive mess. Which to some extent I think that’s what they were aiming for because they view the pandemic as an in-cohesive mess. The issue is that one of the reasons that pandemic is such a pervasive issue (especially in the states) is the mass spread of misinformation so when they spread misinformation to criticize the spread of misinformation... it’s just stupid.

However on a character level I very much enjoyed the episode. It was yet another Randy focused episode and as I’ve expressed on a few occasions I just don’t find him funny. Oh no, he jizzed on the weed, that’s sooooo surprising. Honestly Randy is a very one-note character. He does something horrifying, people are horrified, he faces no consequences, rinse, repeat. That all established, I think it’s important character information that he cheated on Sharon twice in China with no guilt whatsoever. He only wanted to hide his crime because “my wife is a bitch”. Also considering he cheated with non-human entities, I think this is strong proof of Rowelie’s viability so take that as you will Rowelie shippers. Also the fact that people grow Randy mustache’s if they ingest his cum and Sharon had a mustache at the end... I sort of hate that Randy took that as proof that she smoked his weed. Now, even if she had smoked it his behavior still is completely and disgustingly inexcusable but also... everyone in South Park is openly smoking so she could have very easily gotten second hand Randy-stache. Or just given her husband a blow job. Also it’s interesting information that within universe Randy’s cum has mutagenic properties. Again for the Rowelie shippers: you could use this as an excuse as to how Towelie turns into a human, Randy’s cum mutated him. Also I think it’s likely that microwaving his balls could be what caused his radioactive jizz. Or one of the times he was experimented on by aliens. Or both. Altogether Randy was a repulsive bastard within the episode who I find boring at best BUT the amount of meta information that he introduced will be very useful to inform my theories. (Also again, the fact that he so easily and guilelessly cheats on Sharon tells me that he that he has done it a multitude of times. My theory is that after he gave Gerald a handy in the hot-tub and was forgiven he just never stopped, basically assuming the permission to do it once was broad permission to do it forever) (oh and second note: this is the second time within canon that Randy has poisoned people’s weed so uh... that’s fucked up)

Freaked out a lot about Jimbo dying, I’m really scared they’ll kill Jimbo but also since they already killed Ned I wonder if the two of them can be happy in the afterlife together because no one can convince me that Jimbo and Ned aren’t canon. Also Randy’s blatant racism and lack of empathy for Jimbo’s illness was really yikes. I dunno guys, I’ve always had a soft spot for Jimbo. He’s a stupid stereotypical red-neck but he had a sort of charm to him and I thought he was funny. I miss when him and Ned were regulars on the show.

CARTMAN DANCING AND SINGING WAS ACTUALLY THE CUTEST THING EVER ON THIS FUCKING EARTH, FIGHT ME I LOVE THIS STUPID SELFISH LITTLE CRETIN also it’s yet another episode to add to the list of “times Cartman shows he can grow into a better person” and list of “times Cartman seems to show a special soft spot for Stan”. Cartman does tend to listen more frequently when Stan asks and less frequently for literally anyone else. So the Stanman was strong in this one. Also really enjoyed the Stutters. While yes, Stan was completely using Butters as a tool to project his own feelings of unease I think it really says something that he chose Butters for that role. I think to some extent he felt that Butters might be feeling the same mortality-panic he was feeling (whether it was true or not) and that kinship he felt with Butters led him to feel that Butters was also feeling the way he did. He was panicked and he thought out of all his friends that Butters was the one who might share his feelings. I enjoy that sort of subtle connection between them and it’s been a consistent thread within the show that Butters and Stan just treat each other a little different than they do literally everyone else. It’s worth thinking about.

I think Stan was also at his limit because he was already suffering from isolation issues due to Tegridy Farms from before the pandemic. He’s always been a social boy and this brought him to the brink of what he could handle.

THEY SHOT TOKEN AND I SWEAR TO GOD YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LOUD I WAS SCREAMING AT THE TV I THINK I PISSED OFF MY NEIGHBORS i fucking knew it was coming too. The fucking SECOND they shoved those fucking corrupt ass cops in the same room as Token.... I fucking feared for his life. They’ve killed off fairly major background characters before and killing Token would be... topical. I will make it my mission to personally destroy every fucking cop in South Park (Barbrady gets a pass... BARELY). I hate them all. I’ve hated them all for a long time but they murdered several children (including Kenny, the bastards) and they SHOT MY BOY TOKEN I WILL RIP OFF THEIR FUCKING ARMS SEE HOW WELL YOU CAN SHOOT THEN YOU TRASH BASTARDS

Nothing big Kenny happened this episode, insert sad fanboy noises

There were some strong Kyman moments. Cartman went to Kyle’s house for help at the beginning of the episode, obsessed over whether or not he’d be in the same room as Kyle, tried to vomit on Kyle, AND THEN KYLE FUCKING JUMPED HIM AND BEAT HIS ASS DOWN, FUCK ALL OF YOU WHO INCORRECTLY THINK DIFFERENT KYLE IS A FUCKING DOMINANT TOP, HE DOESN’T TAKE IT, HE GIVES IT

Adding that to my long list of “episodes where Kyle shows he isn’t a pushover, is very violent, and can easily kick Cartman’s bitch ass” because every so once in awhile I have to break out that list when someone insists upon how submissive Kyle is. Bitttttttccchhhhhh, you haven’t watched the show if you think that. My favorite kid doesn’t take your shit

Very interested in Red’s new canon last name (McArthur) but I’m also unsure about it because in the scene’s where it’s shown I couldn’t quite tell if it was actually Red or Powder. She kept being shown from odd angles and her hair looked a little shorter than normal. That said, I’m happy if it is her because I’ve been wanting a canon last name for Red for a long-ass time. Even presuming you go by the cousin’s headcanon for Craig and Red, there’s no guarantee they would have the same last name.

Let’s see, I think I had some other thoughts but those were the main points

OH PAUSE THE SCREEN WHEN THE PARENTS ARE ON ZOOM it’s really cute/funny what the usernames are. For example Annie’s mom is totally just using Annie’s account so she’s probably not very tech savvy. There’s actually a lot of minor character detail that you can infer from those screen-names.

Yeah those are my major thoughts: Randy is trash, nothing new, Cartman was ADORABLE and also lots of good meta for him (I have some hcs that one of the reasons he adored the social distancing so much isn’t because he hates human contact because we know from previous seasons that he’s a bit of a lonely boy, but he likes the social distancing explicitly because it gives him an excuse to reject other people before they can reject him), good stutters moments, good kyman moments, good stanman moments, there were some style moments if you squint? Kyle was one of the people Stan consulted about his feelings of unease but since it wasn’t just Kyle that he consulted it didn’t really feel like that was a special personal part of their relationship, moreso that he wanted Kyle to kiss his booboo and make it better. Although further proof that Kyle is the dom in that relationship. Kyle was agitated over the situation but overall rational, Stan was flipping the fuck out. Stan came to him submissive, scared, and asking for Kyle to make him feel better. Kyle remained calm and logical. I swear to god if I read one more cutesy-innocent Kyle post I might flip a table. Literally Kyle’s canonical self is RIGHT THERE

OH YEAH MY BUTTERS THOUGHTS there’s nothing really new here but it continues the trend of Butters being a self centered prick. (I love him but he is) Instead of even trying to understand the number of people dying or the gravity of the situation, he’s just upset and throwing tantrums because he doesn’t get to play at Build a Bear. And it’s made explicit in the writing that unlike Stan he isn’t struggling with the nebulous fear of death (probably brought on by his uncle getting sick). Butters is just bitter that he doesn’t get to have special things. Also Stan was the only one who tried even a little to save Butters from getting taken by the guards. No one else tried to stop or warn Butters. So again, very cute Stutters moment where Stan is overtly worried for Butters’ well-being even when he’s throwing a bratty tantrum. (I don’t know how anyone perceives Butters as an altruistic person, he’s a selfish twat. he’s a lovable selfish twat, like Cartman, but he’s still a selfish twat. and none of his shitty behavior in this episode was even remotely related to Cartman so you can’t connect it to him. Butters, on his own and without anyone else’s influence, does and acts like a shit-head). There is the excuse that he’s only ten but literally everyone in that cafeteria is only ten. But Butters is the only one kicking other people’s food because he didn’t get his special prize.

This all sounds like I hate Butters. I love Butters, warts and all, I just get really annoyed when fandom ignores his warts because his warts are PART OF THE REASON I LOVE BUTTERS. Also it’s like... blatantly and observably canon that he’s selfish.

I’m going to happily ruminate on Stan feeling a strong pang of protectiveness towards Butters though. That was quite illuminating.

#official ooc tag #official ask tag #timmytimmytomcats

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mfingenius · 4 years

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Hi! I love your fic about the Sex Tape of Captive Prince, could you write a continuation, please? I have many questions, like, why Govart did that to Laurent and Damen?

WThis is happening at the same time as the other part, but from Laurent’s pov...

::::::::

Laurent leaves school early. He can’t stand the way people keep looking at him, how Damen keeps trying to talk to him. He can’t do it, he can’t. Damen is the first person he’s ever dated, the only person he’s ever fallen in love with. He doesn’t want to face the fact that Damen filmed him and sent it out.

“Can I come in?” Auguste must’ve left early, too, because he shouldn’t have been home yet.

Laurent nods uselessly. He’s sitting on his bed, hands on his lap, staring at nothing. He hasn’t moved in a really long time.

“You okay?” Auguste asks.

Laurent doesn’t respond.

“I love you,” Auguste offers, and Laurent’s suddenly crying, sobbing, heartbroken and anxious and still a helpless child. Auguste wraps him in a hug, and Laurent’s safe, even if he’s not okay, because Auguste will love him through anything, and that’s as much as Laurent needs. “It’s alright. I love you so much Laurent. It’s going to be alright.

Despite thinking that he can never show his face again, he does. He shows up at school the next day, and then the next one after that. He’s dying of shame, cheeks red and nearly always on the verge of crying, but at least he doesn’t have to talk to Damen.

He avoids him at any and all costs, even stops going to Auguste’s class just so he doesn’t have to face him again. The fact that everyone’s seen - and heard - him having sex is constantly on his mind, and it makes him feel... used. Dirty, even though having sex is not something to be ashamed of.

“He didn’t do it,” Nicaise tells him, when he catches Laurent staring at Damen again. It’s been three days since their sex tape first got sent out, and everyone’s still talking about it.

Laurent hasn’t talked to anyone, hasn’t said a word. He’d cried for an embarrassingly long time in Auguste’s arms, and then in Nicaise’s. For all him and Nicaise insult each other, they’re friends, real friends, and Nicaise had let him cry on his shoulder for as long as he needed. He’d punched one of the football players in the face after he’d made a comment about how good Laurent is at ‘taking it’.

“What?” Laurent shifts his eyes to him.

“He didn’t do it.” Nicaise says. “The giant animal. He’s too pathetically in love with you to do anything of the sort.”

Laurent’s heart clenches in hope. He wants, more than anything else, for Damen to not have done this, because that way he’s at least not been betrayed by the person he loves.

“It was his bedroom,” He says finally, stabbing the salad on his plate with a fork. He’s not eating it, but he can at least take out some feeling on it. “Who else could’ve filmed it?”

“Frat houses aren’t exactly the epitome of privacy.” Nicaise sounds skeptic. “And it’s not like Damianos is a prude, alright. He has other sex tapes. He asked all of his previous partners, or they asked him. He would’ve talked to you.”

And really, Laurent doesn’t want to think about Damen’s exes. He knows he has his long - long - past, and he doesn’t mind; it used to make him a little self-conscious, his lack of experience, but Damen has never made him felt bad about it.

“How would you even know that?” He asks. He didn’t know that; he hasn’t asked, either, and it’s not like he and Damen talk about his past experience unless Laurent explicitly brings it up, but he still feels the spark of jealousy.

“I know things,” Nicaise shrugs. When Laurent gives him a look he rolls his eyes. “Lykaios wouldn’t stop talking about it.”

Laurent hums lightly, shoulders dropping. Nicaise rolls his eyes again.

“Laurent,” he says, in a tone of voice that makes Laurent look at him. “He didn’t do it. Do you want to keep being miserable thinking he did, or do you want to find out who actually did?”

Laurent looks back at Damen again - Damen, who’s trying desperately to catch his eyes, who looks so fucking sad anytime Laurent finds another way to slip away again, Damen who holds Laurent close and whispers sweet things in his ear when he has an anxiety attack that seem to somehow calm him right down.

“I want to find out who did it,” He says finally.

“Alright,” Nicaise shrugs. “Let’s go.”

They talk to a lot of people. Laurent and Nicaise aren’t widely liked, but they’ve enough people willing to tell them things not to need to be liked. Laurent knows most of everything about everyone, and he always, always has the last word. It’ll be no different now.

Most of the information is useless. They get bits and pieces, of people who wanted to get back at Laurent - unsurprising - some who don’t like Damen - very, very few - and some who are just shitty enough to do it without reason.

Laurent’s about to give up when someone mentions it.

“Your brother,” Pallas tells him. He feels guilty for being the one to play the video, even if it wasn’t on purpose, so he’s been ranting for some time now. “Something happened, Friday before the party. I don’t know what, but when Govart got to practice that day he was furious. Kept talking about how he was going to get back at Auguste, how he had no right-”

“What?” Laurent asks sharply. No one had mentioned that. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Pallas says, apologetic. “But he was furious. Then this happened, and yesterday during practice he was whistling.”

It’s not evidence, not really, but it’s enough for Laurent.

“Thank you, Pallas.” He says, and he walks away.

Auguste is a good teacher. A good, good professor, Laurent knows. He finds out things about his students - a lot of things, because everyone trusts him to tell him anything - and he never uses it against them. Laurent knows that - in more than one occasion - he’s found students with drugs, or stealing, or doing a multitude of other things they’re not supposed to, and he never reports it like he’s supposed to. He helps them.

Auguste must’ve found something on Govart. And if he confiscated it, if he didn’t report it, it must be at their house.

Laurent is not one to enjoy to break into Auguste’s privacy - he loves his brother more than anyone, and trusts him to tell him anything he needs to know - but he doesn’t want to tell Auguste what he’s looking for. It’ll make Auguste feel guilty.

He searches his brother’s bedroom, doesn’t take long to find what is undeniably Govart’s.

Laurent stares.

“They’re not mine,” Govart snarls. “I didn’t - someone put them there-”

“Sir, cooperate and this will go easier on all of us.” The cop that is handcuffing Govart’s hands behind his back is frowning. Laurent had heard, of course, that if you wanted a little extra kick, you could get it from Govart. The amount of drugs he’d found in the house - and then the cops had found in his locker after an ‘anonymous tip’ - were something unreal.

“Get off me,” Govart snarls again, struggles against the handcuffs, but the only thing he’s doing is attracting more attention to his arrest. They’re in the middle of the hall, and Laurent is staring openly, smirk small on his lips.

“Sir, calm down.” The cop tells him. “Or I’ll have to use force.”

Govart curses and argues the entire time, but he lets himself be led away from his locker. Laurent watches with great satisfaction.

“Have you gotten rid of the camera?” Laurent asks.

Damen stands from the bed so fast it must be dizzying. The moment his eyes land on Laurent, his entire demeanor changes, face hopeful and open. “Laurent.”

Laurent is trying to pretend he’s fine, but he has his arms wrapped around himself, and being in Damen’s room - knowing Govart was able to put a camera there and not get caught - makes him feel vaguely sick.

“I didn’t do it,” Damen says immediately, with an undertone of urgency that makes Laurent’s heart clench. “I never would’ve - I don’t - I never would’ve done anything like that to anyone, least of all you, I love you so much sweetheart-”

“I know,” Laurent says quietly. “I love you, too.”

And he does, more than anything or anyone else. This time spent apart has only shown him how much he wants to be with Damen, by his side, them, together, against anything or anyone else, it doesn’t matter. It’s them.

“You know?” Damen asks.

Laurent nods and takes a step closer cautiously, uncertainly. He doesn’t know if Damen will be angry at him for not speaking to him, for doing this on his own. Part of him tells him he’s being unreasonable - Damen’s rarely angry with him - but another part tells him he’s ridiculous to have suspected of him in the first place.

“I - thought it was you, at first,” He admits lightly, mouth twisting, guilt and regret in his tone. “I thought that maybe - that that was the whole point of it.” The terrifying thought that Damen had only been dating him as a conquest, only to fuck him, show his friends, and then leave him, had been eating away at him. “Nicaise told me to pull my head out of my ass and see how stupidly in love you with me you were.”

“So I - I watched it again.” It had been sickening, to watch it again. Something he loved, something he enjoyed, something so private being exposed to the rest of the school and twisted into something that it wasn’t. “I recognized - the clothes I was wearing, at the beginning. It was from Friday’s party, so it could’ve been literally anyone who put the camera in your room. “Nicaise helped me narrow it down.”

“You know who it was, then?” Damen asks, fists already clenching. Every muscle in his body is clenched tight, and, in any other context, Laurent would’ve been pushing him into bed now.

“Govart,”

“Fuck,” Damen breathes. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“No need,” Laurent says. “I got him expelled.”

It had been quick work, after he’d been arrested. Gods forbid their university was involved in drug dealing.

“You did?” Damen sounds surprised and unsurprised both at the same time. “Fuck, you’re amazing. I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too.” Laurent smiles lightly. He shifts uncertainly, and then speaks again. “Can you - hold me? I just - I want to-”

He doesn’t know how to put it into words.

“Of course,” Damen says. “Here?”

And they could go to Laurent’s apartment, but Laurent doesn’t want to be scared of Damen’s room forever. He nods lightly, and so Damen sits on the bed with his legs spread, letting Laurent settle between them. Laurent curls into his chest, and Damen wraps one hand around his waist posessively and the other one around knees, so that he’s wrapped around him. Laurent exhales, relieved.

----------------------------------------

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rafael-silva · 4 years

Text

Thoughts and Connections Between Danny + 10.14 + McDanno + 10.07 (Steve going after Doris) + 10.12 (Magnum PI crossover): an essay

Okay, so. After thinking about 10.14 (and writing a continuation fic for the episode), I have some thoughts. They may be optimistic or just trying to grasp why that episode turned out as it did and that ending…but here I go. A little long, but I’m trying to connect some dots that is season ten and understand. This going to cover Danny + 10.14 + McDanno + 10.07 (Steve going after Doris) + 10.12 (Magnum PI crossover).

For the life of me, I can’t think of a single reason why 10.14 ended that way. For a while, the show has been hinting and teasing the idea of Danny and Rachel getting back together (which, I also have a lot of thoughts on, that are Hell No to that ever happening) and I’ve been constantly saying and repeating that Danny. Is. Much. Smarter. Than. That. Getting back together with Rachel would have been disastrous, them trying yet another time to make it work. I knew that would eventually end with Danny’s heart breaking again, and I couldn’t watch that happen. So thank God Danny and Rachel aren’t happening; with Danny telling Quinn during the Thanksgiving episode that things aren’t working out, Rachel barely being mentioned, and everything that happened during 10.14.

But here’s the thing. If 10.14’s sole purpose was to inform us that Danny and Rachel aren’t happening, then what the hell. A simple line from Danny could have confirmed that, especially with the first two points I mentioned above.

Stay with me here, I’m hoping there’s more to 10.14, connecting it to something in the coming episodes, because it just doesn’t make sense to me. At all. They introduced the perfect woman for Danny, in every sense of what perfect means, their chemistry, their playful banter, the way they looked at each other, their connection to the East Coast…I thought to myself, wow, Danny finally found the woman for him. And I was excited. Until I wasn’t. Aka: until they killed her off. Which, again, baffles my mind. Because why. Do they want Danny to end up alone? Because they had the perfect chance, but they blew it.

Remember that fic I wrote for 10.14 that I mentioned above? (Shamelessly inserts link here) One of the comments posted got me thinking. The comment mentioned something Danny’s woman said in the episode: “Things are going to work out for you.” And I started to wonder if that was the writers’ way of simply telling us Danny is going to be okay or if there’s more to it. Subtext. I will come back to the subtext in a little bit. I will mention that Steve’s love life is pretty nonexistent, with him meeting Emma the vet again and telling her he’s the problem, that his work life takes over his personal life, it ends with her wishing him the best. And that she’s seeing someone.

So, both Steve and Danny had women for them to date, women with great compatibility to each man (Danny mentioned that Steve and Emma’s first date went really well) and the writers had every chance to make both couples happen, but they didn’t. The last time, if I recall correctly, where both Steve and Danny were in relationships at the same time was Lynn and Melissa.

Also, I can’t help but notice how Steve said his work life takes over his personal life, that’s why his relationships don’t work out, but he spends his personal time with Danny and Charlie. And going to principal conferences for Charlie with Danny instead of Rachel. And tracking down the father of Charlie’s school bully with Danny. Like. Danny and Charlie are Steve’s personal life. So, in not so many words, Steve’s dynamic with Danny is Steve’s successful relationship. It’s almost like Steve can’t be in a relationship because he’s already in a relationship with Danny.

And the fact that Danny has been living with Steve for quite some time now. And with the events of 10.14, it’s Steve’s turn to look after Danny. So I think they’re going to be living with each other for some more time.

Back to subtext. I’m going to take you back to two episodes: 10.12 (the Magnum PI crossover) and 10.07 (where Steve goes after Doris).

Danny wasn’t in the Magnum PI episode, but he was mentioned. More than that, it was clear, even though I don’t watch Magnum PI, that Magnum and his partner Higgins, are the show’s will-they-won’t-they couple. Which is all well and good, and you notice the similarities between them and McDanno. Ever since the beginning of HF0, Steve and Danny are constantly teasing, bickering, bantering, even other characters teasing them about how long they’ve been married. It’s become text, rather than just subtext. And everyone sees it, even people who don’t watch the show.

There are direct comparisons between MagnumHiggins and McDanno: Steve is a SEAL, so is Magnum. Steve is impulsive and reckless, so is Magnum. Higgins is an ex-MI6 agent, and yes, Danny isn’t an agent but his career as a cop and detective comes close. Danny and Higgins constantly tease their partners in very similar ways. Not to mention the clear as day physical appearance similarities between them, too. MagnumHiggins are literally the hetero version of McDanno. Also, don’t forget that the parallel between them was explicitly stated on the show; when Magnum and Higgins were bickering and Tani looked at Lou and went, “remind you of someone?” and Lou replies yes.

And now to 10.07. I wrote another post pointing out all the McDanno and just how much McDanno we got in that episode, and I will point out again, that that episode was written and directed by Alex. He pretty much showed us he’s the captain of the McDanno ship, right down to the ‘oh my god there was one bed’ trope. I won’t go into too much detail regarding this episode but I will sum it up by saying: McDanno.

Now, up until 10.14, all those episodes and moments seemed like what we’ve been getting since the beginning of the show, the teasing and pulling and the hinting and ups and down we usually get with McDanno. They didn't seem out of place or weird, because they are natural and what we’ve always seen and expect at this point.

But with 10.14, and the recent potential for both Steve and Danny to be in good, healthy relationships (but that not happening), the ending of 10.14 and that line, things are going to work out for you, I can’t help but wonder if it is all pointing and directing to one thing: canon McDanno.

I know, I know. I may be naive, and I may be overthinking all this, reading too much into it and it all could just not be that deep. But still, it’s driving me absolutely nuts here. Danny’s woman was right there, and they killed her. That choice, they made. Why. It has to be for a bigger purpose, and that purpose better not be Danny and Rachel getting together.

Entertain the idea for a second: that bigger purpose, being McDanno.

I could be out of my mind but…

Or yes, it could just be the writers doing what they’ve always done, teasing McDanno without them becoming canon.

It just seems like season ten, from the beginning, has been building towards that. Hell, Steve told his date how much he loves Danny and how they're always being compared to a married couple.

Also, Lenkov shared a shot from the upcoming Valentine’s Day episode where Steve and Danny are sitting closely next to the each other (cuddling, if you ask me), which may or may not mean anything. But I’m just saying. Both men are probably (almost definitely) still single by that episode given the timeline, so, yeah.

And the mystery of the Champ box is said to be finally solved by the season finale along with its secrets, so who knows? It could all be related.

I thought Danny and his perfect woman could have gotten married at some point.

But could we get a McDanno wedding instead?

My mind keeps going back to 8.10 and Danny’s hallucinations. That last one, with old McDanno sitting together on Steve’s beach. And Rachel’s absence in all of Danny’s hallucinations. The one constant thing in them being Steve.

I just really wanna know what the writers are doing.

#hawaii five 0 #mcdanno #danny williams #steve mcgarrett #hf0 #long post #this turned out long #but yeah i've been thinking about this for a while #and connecting the dots #and reading between the lines

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thewriterwithnoplan · 4 years

Text

Dirty and Useless (Part 10)

Summary: Jason Todd had always said there were only two types of cop; Dirty and Useless. So when Y/N comes along with a spunky partner and a laughable code name it’s safe to say they don’t exactly see eye to eye. But if they’ve got anything in common it’s their secrets. Both are hiding behind masks whether they know it or not. Will the Robin get the Nightingale to come out of the shadows? Pairing: Titans!Jason Todd x Reader Word Count: 1449 Warnings: Swearing

There were many things that Jason Todd would never admit to anyone. The fact that he craved comfort and affirmation was one of those things. The fact that he often found himself in the alley behind his school with new bruises down his side was another one of those things.

Gotham Academy wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Not that he’d expected anything else but coming into the school – which Bruce practically owned – he’d expected a little more respect. From teachers, he’d heard all about how Dick Grayson had been a mathlete and a social butterfly.

While Jason was more into literature and time spent alone, he had at least assumed that people would be polite. He hadn’t come from a wealthy family but people like him – the Wards of billionaires who own half of Gotham – were supposed to be begrudgingly respected at the very least. Right?

Apparently, he was very, very wrong. In his first week, the other students had made it explicitly clear what they thought about him. Street rat was a name he’d thought had been left behind when he joined Batman’s crusade but the snotty rich boys at the Academy seemed to like it. Although the female population seemed to like Pity Case much better.

“Fuck you, Gregory,” Jason spat up at the rich kid gangs ring-leader.

The brunette snob gargled out in a clearly fake British accent, “Stay down, street rat. Wouldn’t want to have to call your fake dad.”

“I bet he’s never even met a Wayne,” Gregory’s current bottle blonde girlfriend added. “Why would they associate with a pity case like him anyway?”

Jason fumbled to his feet and reminded himself for what seemed like the umpteenth time that day, that he was supposed to be just like them. He was supposed to play his role as protégé son, a rich boy who couldn’t throw a punch. According to Bruce and his disappointment speeches, Dick Grayson had caught on much quicker.

“Of course, I’ve met the Wayne’s,” Jason bit out, “I’m the one who tracked down Y/N Wayne and brought her back to Gotham.”

He knew it was a cheap boast, he had been the one to “find” her but if Y/N hadn’t wanted to return to Gotham, she wouldn’t have. Realistically he hadn’t done shit to find the girl, he’d just been in Chicago at the right time. But Nightingale had taught him something important – it was about wielding symbols. And despite all that the girl could argue, Y/N Wayne was as powerful a symbol as any.

“You talk a lot of shit, Todd.” Gregory brushed at an invisible speck of dirt on his blazer before turning, “Prove it or I’ll make you pay for lying to me.”

Jason really really should learn to keep his mouth shut.

***

It was lunch, four hellish lessons down and he’d finally been given a break. Although sitting under a tree at the front of the academy, trying not to draw too much attention and keeping an eye out for Gregory seemed just as stressful. It was usually at lunch that the boy returned to follow up on whatever threat he’d made to Jason the morning earlier.

“What are you doing hiding out here Street Rat?” Speak of the devil.“Waiting for your fake girlfriend-slash-sister? You know that’s kinda messed up right?”

“Funny, coming from an asshole.” Was all Jason allowed himself to say. He was worried that if he said anything more it would be accompanied by his fist in Gregory’s face.

The bottle-blonde and one of Gregory’s henchmen began giggling, “I bet he’s just dating her to make sure the Wayne’s don’t get rid of him.”

Jason almost expected anger to bubble up, he half thought he might have shoved the blonde on her ass but that rage he’d become so accustomed to wasn’t there. He actually thought this whole thing was hilarious. They thought he was that desperate, that he would make up a story so utterly stupid-

He almost started cackling at the idea. He would have laughed at it, had the revving of a motorcycle engine not interrupted him. Their mismatched group – consisting of Gregory, his flossy and a very unintimidating backup dancer – turned toward the noise in confusion. Even Jason was startled by the bike, which stopped just in front of them.

The rider kicked the stand down, threw their leg over the bike and approached them. Pulling off the black helmet and shaking out H/C hair the rider finally paused in front of the group, raising an eyebrow. Y/N smiled in greeting at Jason, who could only stare dumbly up at her.

“Sup J.T?” Her eyes crinkled mischievously, “Bruce sent me to get you, we need a hand a Wayne Enterprises.”

“Uh-huh yeah,” He took her hand, heaving himself from the floor. “What do you guys need me for?”

“I need someone to go over the specs for the new building in Star City and Bruce needs help planning the next Charity Gala. I’m not interrupting anything am I?”

Y/N’s eyes strayed to Gregory and his entourage before she mouthed a word to Jason. It took the boy wonder a moment to understand her, his lip-reading skills were still a little rusty, not that he’d ever admit it. But after a moment he understood; three. She wanted him to follow her third condition, play along.

“Nah we were just having a lovely chat,” Jason said dismissively, a smirk working its way to his lips. “Nobody told me about the Gala. Don’t suppose you need a date to it?”

“You wish Jay,” Y/N made a good show of giving him a teasing smile. Then she shoved her helmet back on and handed Jason the second one from her bike.

“W-wait!” Gregory stumbled forward, “You’re Y/N Wayne as in the Lost Daughter of Gotham – What are you doing with someone like him?”

“You mean Jason?” She hopped onto her bike, letting Jason circle his arms around her waist. “He’s the one who brought me back. It’s a pity really, I finally made it away from Gotham, but you know, I grew up in these streets. I guess you can take the girl out of Gotham, but you can’t take Gotham out of the girl.”

***

“How did you know?” Jason finally asked when they stopped at some unnamed park. It was nice, empty and by no means lively, but it wasn’t yet destroyed by the cities night time visitors. Y/N raised an eyebrow in question, though her focus never left the ice cream she’d bought from the car down the street – both were sure it was an undercover GCPD truck but neither commented. “You showed up out of the blue – you said some things like... like you knew. How did you know those things?”

“You’re an ass and all but you’ve got guts. I admire that,” Y/N gave him a playful smile, “But you lack something that can’t be taught.”

Intrigue colored the boy’s face as he sat forward to better look at her. But in a very Wayne like fashion, Y/N only went back to her ice cream. For a moment he simply waited for her to tell him, but evidently leaving Jason to find the answer to his own question was much more entertaining.

“You didn’t,” He suddenly shouted, scrambling for his bag.

“What you lack is attention to detail,” She gave him a smug look, “A vigilante should be able to sniff a tracking device from a mile away. It was all too easy to slip the bug into your bag this morning.”

He groaned lowly, shoving his bag down as he held up the small device, “You were messing with me, is there even really a gala?”

“Oh, there’s a gala, you aren’t getting out of it that easy. But do you think Bruce would ask for your help on it?”

“Who else would he ask?” He snarked.

Y/N fell silent all at once. It startled Jason quite thoroughly – he’d been expecting some quick-witted rebuttal. He eyed the Wayne heiress carefully, wondering if he’d said something wrong. She wouldn’t outright attack him, would she? Jason wouldn’t rule the possibility out, but it was unlikely.

“Sorry,” She chuckled lightly – though her mind still seemed a million miles away, “You just reminded me of someone.”

“Who?”

“Someone gone,” Y/N shook her head, “It doesn’t matter.”

Perhaps Jason was having a stroke, but she seemed almost tender. In an attempt to stop her from falling back into their routine he said, “Tell me.”

She took a long breath. And told him.

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gothamslimpestwrist · 4 years

Text

s1e2 selina kyle

killcount:

“doug” the childsnatcher: “soldier” (homeless guy)

oswald cobblepot: douchebag college bro from the car, probably the other douchebag college bro as well.

jim gordon: quillan’s janitor

“patti” the childsnatcher: cat scratch fever dude w/ no eyes

episode total: 5 total count: 12

the dark knight rises: shit is clearly fucked in gotham. crime families are ruling the city, yes, but honestly that’s the least of it; look at the police force. we see that bo, the first responder, is late to the scene of the crime because he takes protection money from a local restaurant & gave them first priority (in other words, he’s a crooked bitch demanding a racket, AND it gets in the way of him actually doing his job). the cops are pretty much, explicitly, just an extension of the mob at this point.

interestingly, we also see the start of an exploration of the wayne’s corruption; falcone refers to “the wayne empire,” mirroring the way they talk about the crime families And Also setting the waynes up as, like, a picture of the wealthy elite taken to a whole ‘nother level. gotham is the last modern vestige of the city state--and that is the wayne empire. who takes the crown now that the emperor and empress are dead?

in OTHER news, the waynes really fucked bruce over. the murder itself was the lynching pin, causing him to jump over the fucking edge, so to speak, but he is Just A Little Boy! he is so troubled! he’s self harming and alfred yells at him and HITS HIM for being stupid, he’s listening to loud music and drawing fucked up shit, he’s both burned himself and is apparently cutting, and alfred, seeing all of this, refuses to get the boy who saw his parents shot a therapist, because the waynes told him to essentially let bruce raise himself. “the children are thoroughbreds,” basically.

quoth barbara (thinking about essen shushing the child snatcher case in fear of bad press): “i can’t believe the system is so corrupt.” quoth jim (thinking about how he was yelled at for not beating a perp, thinking about the cop/mob connection that demanded he kill a man to prove his loyalty, thinking...): “you have no idea.”

oh! and jim tells bruce the kids need more than money to keep them safe.

sliding scale of barbara kean’s sanity: she seems to be doing alright, but she’s troubled by jim’s troubles. also, this episode sets up some shit that will lead to irreparable damage later on; jim, even when he’s telling her things, isn’t telling her everything. she knows it. she hates it. he specifically hasn’t told her about oswald, which gives her reason to believe he’s a murderer pretty soon. plus, what she does w/ the information he does give her about his work (go straight to the press) gives him immediate reason to start trusting her less... and so they spiral.

sliding scale of ed nygma’s sanity: he’s a little bit more of a lurker this episode. creeps outside the captain’s office until someone notices him, lingers inside until everyone in the room makes it obvious he’s not welcome. he’s trying his best, but he’s not... very... “well liked,” shall we say.

continuity: montoya and allen are looking into the murder of oswald cobblepot. he was their snitch, after all. so that’s problems... many things are subtly set up in this episode: falcone and fish discuss maroni and his anticipated power play (adding another piece to the political chessboard of this season), the atp drug the child snatchers use is established to have been developed for arkham asylum, which is also established to have been closed for the past 15 years AND to have recently been in the works for a reopening, specifically by thomas and martha wayne. and that’s all just offhanded discussion. also related to the atp, when ed is listing the only three places that still stock it, it’s quillan pharma, drakatech (?)... and welzyn, which isn’t relevant at all to THIS episode (quillan’s the one dealing with the childsnatchers) but WILL become relevant to everyone in a few episodes, when welzyn manufactures viper. oh, and naturally the identity of the man the childsnatchers are working for: the dollmaker. hm!! on a lighter note, harvey’s ex-white knight tendencies that we explore in spirit of the goat are foreshadowed here; essen accuses him of leaking the child snatchers story to the press, w/ the reasoning that he’d done it before. after jim & barbara established that it was the right thing to do....

parallels: jim & selina meet in this episode. they are... The Same™. (look, i’ll come back to it later, but even tho my parallel in the pilot was btwn selina and oswald, and even tho they’re the two that are the villain counterparts to our heroes, jim and SELINA are the matched set.) also, this is the episode where fish expresses the wish that penguin wasn’t dead (because she wants him to suffer), but also she tells jim & harvey that she knew it was a mistake to order them killed as soon as she did it. so that means something?

neither here nor there, but gertrud tells montoya & allen how elegant and well dressed oswald is, and bruce comments on the orphans’ scruffy appearances and buys them new clothes... we love a dandy, i guess.

characterization: we meet some irrelevant street kids that selina knew; zeb, smoke, and mackey (corey in the house). i’m basically using the characterization tab as fanfic reference so i might as well record that.

lazlo, fish’s lover, is relevant, in that falcone beats him to get to her. it definitely does affect her, though she says she only keeps him around for exercise. maybe more b/c of falcone’s threat and the fear of what it implies, though.

and gertrud! ozzie’s mom. everyone connected to oswald, even outside (maybe even especially outside) of his mob connections, is a little twisted. she’s no different; she’s clearly a bit out of her head, she mistrusts the police (which i guess we’re supposed to think is suss, though really...Fair and Just), she’s got that almost creepy codependency with oswald while not really knowing what’s going on there. (other examples: elijah, oswald’s gothic horror father, martin, oswald’s lowkey homicidal son, edward, oswald’s fascist dog, jim, oswald’s corrupt boyfriend...) she also seems to think oswald has run off with some painted lady (actually, she says painted slut), which might be indicative of her experiences w/ van dahl and some unstable jealousy more than it is of oswald, who’s... you know.

in other news, jim is all over the map here. he stops harvey beating mackey (and later, quillan, after they’ve already gotten info out of him) and protests that they should leak the story to the press, but he also seems content to keep his mouth shut until barbara takes doing good upon herself. he adapts to the mob shit pretty quick, but expresses disgust w/ the corruption in the system. he gets off on the wrong foot w/ mayor james because he disagrees with locking up the kids w/o a trial, but he doesn’t... step in... either. we see this willingness to compromise and bend the knee that means he’ll never be the hero gotham deserves.

also, not to be a jim apologist on main or anything (ha, ha), but he’s just so... brainwashed. all this, & he still tells alfred that being a cop, which has thus far caused him nothing but pain & misery, is the “best job in the world.” because he thinks he’s helping people. (and he likes getting to feel like a hero... so where do the misguided good intentions stop and the selfish motives begin?) he also kills a man for the first time on screen this episode because for all its examinations of dirty cops... gotham is still, at the end of the day, Copaganda. in an actual moment of me drinking I Love Jim Gordon juice, jim is the one who advocates for bruce going to therapy, and tries to convince him to go personally, even when jim himself is too emotionally stunted for it to help him.

also, backstory: harvey pegs his love life, saying, “high school sweetheart, then a bunch of hoes (read: eduardo dorrance) overseas only made you sad... and then there’s barbara.” he also calls jim a monkey riding a race horse; jim’s face is really good @ that. i misinterpreted the line about high school sweethearts back in the day to mean that barb was jim’s highschool sweetheart. this is on account of auditory processing disorder and also general dumbassery. anyway, the point is that jim is a boring, predictable bitch! whom i love.

...in terms of characterization from the episode that i don’t agree with, i can’t really see oswald writing all the shit that they had on his conspiracy board, lmfao. “crybaby brucie,” “gordon=STOOGE,” & so forth. i pretend i do not see it.

#gotham #text post #meta #jim gordon #season one #selina kyle

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unproduciblesmackdown · 5 years

Audio

Over nine minutes of material here as Joe Iconis and Will Roland alternately provide explanatory introductions for “More Than Survive,” “I Love Play Rehearsal,” “Two-Player Game,” “A Guy That I’d Kinda Be Into,” “Loser Geek Whatever,” “Halloween,” “Michael in the Bathroom,” “The Smartphone Hour (Rich Set A Fire),” “The Pants Song,” and “Voices in My Head.”

Transcriptions!!

Hey, I'm Will Roland from Be More Chill, and this next track, "More Than Survive," is from Be More Chill's original Broadway cast recording; it is our opening number where we follow our leading man, Jeremy Heere, as he travels throughout an average day at school. In it, we get to watch Jeremy get tortured by everyone around him, and also tortured by himself, and the voices in his head, and it really rocks! It's a lot of fun to do every night, and I hope that you have fun listening to it.

—

Hi, this is Joe Iconis, writer of Be More Chill, the musical, and this song is "I Love Play Rehearsal." Which is the first song that our leading lady, Christine Canigula, sings, and the song just sort of encapsulates her feelings on theatre, and on life—y'know, she's a character who's really excited about theatre at this moment in her life, and all she wants to do is express that excitement to anyone who will listen. And so, this is the song that sort of encapsulates her as a human being. And, uh, the performance by Stephanie Hsu is pretty spectacular. It won several awards in my amateur theatre awards that I hold, uh, every month in my own apartment. So, "I Love Play Rehearsal."

—

Hey, everybody, I'm Will Roland from Be More Chill—"Two-Player Game" is the buddy-cop fun friendship song on our show; features myself and George Salazar as Jeremy and Michael, these are two guys who are supremely uncool and—and supremely uninteresting, but the thing that they have is each other, and their friendship, and this is a song wherein we find them, uh, playing video games, and, uh, discussing life together. On the surface you might think, "Oh, this song is about video games," but this song is actually...about friendship.

—

Hi, this is Joe Iconis, writer of Be More Chill, the Broadway musical, and this is "A Guy That I'd Kinda Be Into," sung by Stephanie Hsu and our incredible Be More Chill cast, and this song—it's a song that happens, uh, sorta towards the end of Act 1, and, uh, our leading lady, Christine Canigula, says that she has something that she needs to tell our leading man, Jeremy. And we think that this is going to be the sort of classic musical theatre love song, but what she, uh, lays on him is not quite that? Take particular note of the really, really cool orchestration done by Charlie Rosen; uh, this song is a song that could feel like a sort of very generic pop-rock tune, but it has so much character, uh, the instrument choice is so specific, there's such an undercurrent of technology in this song, even though it's kind of a bop.

—

Hi, everybody, I'm Will Roland! From Be More Chill. Uh, this next track, "Loser Geek Whatever," is from Be More Chill, the Broadway musical; it takes place at the end of Act 1, and, uh, in this moment we find our leading man, Jeremy Heere—he is alone onstage, and he has just been told by his SQUIP—uh, played by Jason Tam—the SQUIP, which is a supercomputer which is implanted in his brain and instructing him how to be more chill—the SQUIP has told him that in order to make this transformation and become the cool guy that he wants to be, he has to get rid of his best friend, Michael Mell, and leave his old life behind and become this person that, uh, that he thinks he's always wanted to become. My friend, Joe Iconis, often describes it as the—the "anti-Defying Gravity," because instead of singing about becoming yourself, he's singing about becoming someone who is not himself. This is: "Loser Geek Whatever!"

—

This is Joe Iconis, the writer of Be More Chill, the great big Broadway musical, and this song is called "Halloween." "Halloween" is our great big opener of Act 2; it takes place, unsurprisingly, at a Halloween party—the sort of ultimate suburban high school Halloween house party. There's debauchery, there's people dressed as killer clowns, it's sort of everything that you want and dread from a high school party. This song is notable because, uh, one of the main inspirations for the score of Be More Chill is the John Carpenter film, Halloween, and, uh, this song, uh, just completely stopped trying to reference it, and, in fact, it just stole its title! So here is..."Halloween," from Be More Chill.

—

Hi, this is Joe Iconis, writer of Be More Chill! The Broadway musical. This song is called "Michael in the Bathroom," it is a song that's—has been a lot of people's, uh, sort of gateway drug into the world of Be More Chill. The song takes place in Act 2, and, uh, the character of Michael Mell, who is the second banana character in our show, he's sort of the sidekick to the leading man, uh, Jeremy—Michael, uh, has been ignored by Jeremy up to this point in the show, uh, formerly his best friend—they have this big fight in the bathroom, Jeremy leaves his best friend alone in the bathroom, uh, and Michael, uh, depressed, and with this raging Halloween house party going on outside the door, sings this song, and the—the performance by George Salazar is one of the things that kinda catapulted Be More Chill from being this, y'know, sort of, uh, musical oddity that lived in the—the nether regions of social media, uh, to being, uh, a musical in New York City! Um, it's just one of my favorite performances of a song that I've ever heard, let alone one that I've written, check it out! George Salazar, singing: "Michael in the Bathroom" from: Be More Chill.

—

Hey, everybody! I'm Will Roland, from Be More Chill. This next track, "The Smartphone Hour," in parenthesis: "Rich Set A Fire," is a song that takes place in the second act of Be More Chill—it is this massive, uh, maximalist technicolor extravaganza. What happens is there's a big Halloween party, and then at the end of the party, uh, we see this one kid, Rich, um, sort of really—really, like, uh, tweakin' out crazy, and we're like, "Oh, is he okay?" And we find out, uh, in the first chorus of this song that Rich has, in fact, uh, committed a heinous act. And throughout we get to see all of the kids at school disseminate this information and—and share it amongst themselves, and it's really about, y'know, the way in which news and gossip can spread in the 21st century, and it's very much our homage to, uh, "The Telephone Hour" from Bye Bye Birdie mashed up with some 21st-century lunacy. As the song really ramps up, it becomes this sort of, like, pep-rally cheerleader situation, so imagine human pyramids, and people flying through the air, and—and air-raid sirens, and, uh, just the most insane experience you could ever picture in a theater. Transport yourself there, and it will really, uh, enhance your experience with "The Smartphone Hour."

—

Hey, everybody! I'm Will Roland, from Be More Chill. This next song, "The Pants Song," is, uh, sung in the second act of our show by the wonderful Jason SweetTooth Williams and George Salazar. It begins with Jeremy's dad, played by Jason; they've just had a big fight, and Jeremy's dad has realized that his son, Jeremy, who I play in the show, has really sort of gone off the rails—he's become this—this unrecognizable young man, and he realizes that he has been derelict in his duty as a father. And so, he decides, in one of my favorite lyrics of the 21st century, that "if you love somebody, you put your pants on." Because at this point in the show, he has literally not worn pants. At all. For the entirety of the play. And so this is a big moment where he decides to make a change, and he goes and enlists the help of Jeremy's best friend, Michael, and they decide that they are going to save their buddy. Here it is, from Be More Chill: "The Pants Song."

—

Hey, everybody, this is Joe Iconis, writer of Be More Chill, the Broadway musical. This song is called "Voices in My Head," this is our finale of our show, and it is sung by the leading man to end all leading men, mister Will Roland, one of my absolute favorite actors of all time, and I—I can't believe that I've been lucky enough to work with him on Be More Chill, and that I get to hear him sing the finale of my musical. It is the first song that I wrote after the death of the fella who wrote the original novel, Be More Chill, Ned Vizzini, and, um, y'know, Be More Chill is a show that's pretty wild and wacky and crazy and it's kinda easy to look at it and—and say, "Aw, this is this sorta goofy show about, y'know, technology and computers and high school kids," but it really is about something deeper, y'know—it's about how we struggle with anxiety and depression and how we deal with that, and "Voices in My Head" is the song that kind of most explicitly deals with that, right? It most explicitly talks about how, y'know, we all have issues, right? We all have voices in our head telling us what to do, uh, and the—the trick is to not make them go away, it's just to know which ones to listen to. So here is our celebratory finale, "Voices in My Head" from Be More Chill.

#resorting to a tumblr audio post...hmu if it's not working at all ugh #joe iconis #will roland #be more chill #bmc

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wunderlass · 4 years

Text

Max Evans, Princess of Power

“You’re the one who never wanted us to ask questions or call attention to ourselves, and we followed it blindly.”

“No one made you follow my rule, Michael. I’m not your dad.”

“You’ve sure as hell been acting like it all our lives.”

During a recent rewatch of the show, I started thinking about the power dynamics of the pod squad, and specifically the way Max is positioned as their de facto leader–largely through statements made by Michael. This led me to question whether Max actually does serve the purpose of leader (or at least, a paternal/big brother figure to the other two), or whether the power dynamics are far more complicated than that.

To that end, I’ve done a close rewatch of all the scenes involving the pod squad interacting with each other or talking about each other to try and answer this question.

(That title is a complete pisstake, by the way).

tldr: Michael doesn’t listen to Max and never has. Max definitely isn’t in charge of the pod squad.

The first time we meet Michael, he’s contrasted with Max: the irresponsible brother against the “self-righteous” one. The criminal vs the cop; the rule breaker vs the rule maker and enforcer. It’s implied that Max is the leader of the pod squad, keeping the errant Michael in line: a big brother reprimanding a misbehaving younger sibling, despite the fact they’re the same age as far as they know.

However, the dialogue in the pilot suggests their agreement to keep their secret was one they reached between them, rather than a rule that Max imposed on the other two. Isobel says:

“I keep this secret because you, me, and Michael swore that we would.”

During the pilot, Michael is the one trying to enforce this rule, tailing Max to stop him talking to Liz. The one who puts their survival above all else. Isobel tells Max that Michael won’t forgive him for telling Liz their secret—and Max states that he isn’t asking permission. This doesn’t suggest that Max has been running a little fiefdom of the three of them.

Within the same episode, Michael tries to steer Isobel to get inside Liz’s mind to send her away. And by “steer”, I mean he explicitly gives Isobel an order:

“Start preparing yourself. Because if Liz Ortecho turns on any of us you will get inside of her head and erase it, make her leave Roswell...leave Max.”

So far, we haven’t been told Max was the one making the rules, and Michael sure as hell isn’t following any. The episodes that follow compound this, showing that Max has no authority over Michael, who never listens to him and consistently pushes back against him. Michael and Isobel break into the Crashdown to threaten Liz, going behind Max’s back. They sneak around in episode three trying to get into Liz’s mind. By the time Max decides this is the best approach in episode four, they’ve already tried it for him (again), and his opinion is a moot point.

It’s in episode five where Michael first claims that Max is their leader: “You made the rules our entire lives—never be extraordinary! Just once we made a gametime decision for your own good!”

That’s pretty consistent within the pod squad—making decisions for each other. Max tries it, Michael tries it, Isobel does it but is usually going along with one of her brothers. The narrative at least tries to frame this is as a bad idea, something which leads to bigger problems for them. But Michael is the one who’s in on both secrets, initiating the lie to Isobel about who killed Rosa. We don’t at this stage know who came up with the idea to send Liz away back in 2008, but I’d put odds on it being Michael, just like it was this time around. Isobel was capable of doing that alone without needing to discuss it with Michael, if she thought it was the best approach, and without telling him so he couldn’t spill the beans to Max. Instead, Michael’s involvement suggests to me that it was his idea that time and this time.

It’s Michael’s claim here in episode five—"our entire lives”—that doesn’t ring quite true. As we find out over the course of the season, the pod squad were separated before they were verbal. It’s possible that they came up with some kind of mental pact to blend in, but given that Max doesn’t remember that period of time, why would Michael? This means any rules could only have been put in place when Michael returned to Roswell as a preteen. And during the tent discussion in episode six, it seems clear that Michael realises he has to cover up his powers for his own protection. This isn’t something he’d need telling by Max. He’s already successfully kept his alien identity under wraps while separated from the other two for years.

One of the things I found most interesting about that first scene in episode six is how, when Max has killed the drifter, both boys turn to Isobel to ask her what they should do. Isobel is too broken at this point to answer, so Michael takes charge, covering up the body to bury it. But this instinct of theirs, to look to Isobel, implies that maybe the first leader of their group was actually her. And when she wasn’t capable of fulfilling that role any more, they each tried to fill the void.

Throughout this episode, there isn’t really any sense of either boy being in charge. They share their problems, to an extent. Michael at this stage is the least sheltered of the pod squad due to his upbringing, and he’s used to not relying on anybody else. He can take charge where he needs to be, because he’s used to surviving on his own. When Max notices the issues with Isobel he suggests going to their parents, and Michael is the one who shoots that down. No rule, certainly not one imposed by Max, is mentioned.

Later this is reversed, with Michael imploring Max to involve his parents at the caves. Neither boy is wrong in the logic they use to discredit the suggestion, and neither boy is taking the lead, instead working together to produce the cover up. Max suggests they must cover the murders up; Michael lies to Isobel. Isobel pushes the cover up further. There is shared responsibility for what happened, rather than one person being to blame for what went wrong, and Isobel says to Michael that they agreed to never talk about that night. Everything they do is mutual, except for the lie Michael tells Isobel. But when the topic comes up in episode eleven, Michael blames Max for the cover up.

Based on what’s shown, it’s probable that Max moved into more of a paternal position after Rosa’s death, because he had to. Isobel wasn’t capable; Michael’s plans fell apart and it seems likely he started acting out in ways that could have led to his discovery, so Max stepped in to try and keep him under control. By this point, their relationship was already fractured, and Michael’s resentment of him began to grow, until his interpretation of their dynamic in the past is coloured by how it is in the present.

Max’s role as leader has been massively exaggerated by Michael's resentment of him. Nobody needed to impose a rule on any of them, because they all knew what was at stake. They’ve grown up in a society which is saturated with ideas of aliens (human and inhuman) as the enemy and examples of what humanity does to people it fears. If Max is the leader in the present (and it certainly doesn’t seem like Michael follows his lead) then he didn’t choose this role but was the last one standing capable of taking it.

One last thing I want to mention is how Max’s mere size could influence people’s perception of him, both other characters and viewers. NDP is a big dude with a deep voice, so Max’s anger when we see flashes of it is palpable. Max could be characterised as an “alpha” (not a real thing) based on physical characteristics alone. But when you look at Max’s behaviour, he really isn’t. He doesn’t want to be in charge of anything or anyone. He didn’t become a cop to gain power, he did it to assuage his guilt. Within their relationship, Liz is the more dynamic character and it seems very plausible that Max would be happy to hand over all the power to her.

Max may grow into a leadership position in the future, depending on the nature of his powers, but he’s certainly never held the reins of the pod squad. Even if they all believe that’s the case, it’s been an illusion. More flashbacks may provide more context and flesh out their historic dynamic further, but it seems clear to me that Michael is used to being beholden to nobody except himself, and it’s been that way their entire lives.

#roswell new mexico #meta #pod squad #max evans #michael guerin #isobel evans

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