wait can you elaborate on what you mean by how steddies treat dustin? im really not trying to incite an argument im just curious!

okey dokey.

first thing i have to make clear from the get go: there's probably some st/ddies out there that don't treat dustin like this, but i've never met them.

secondly: if you or anybody reading this disagrees with any of this, just block me. don't start an argument, don't send hate anons, just block me and leave. if any of you come in here looking for an argument, i'll just block you.

(sorry for all the precautions, but my friends have been harassed over answering an ask before and i don't really want to know what its like)

with that all out the way, let's talk abt one of my main issues with st/ddies. not with the ship itself (there's nothing inherently wrong with it, and when written well i like it), but with how st/ddies treat this character (and st/ve and e//ie).

to put it simply, st/ddies treat him like an accessory to s/eve and e//ie, and not as his own character. he's not only often used as the "HEY YOU TWO SHOULD KISS!" character, but he's never talked about apart from to support st/ddie.

which, by the way, i know about a LOT, being a lumax fan (just look at my url LMAO), considering how byIers use lumax to prop up byIer constantly to the point where they use our own fucking storyline and make it theirs. but that's for another rant.

in any case, i have a lot of experience seeing whether someone likes something for that something, or whether they like it because it supports their own stuff and in reality don't really care about it when its by itself, if that makes sense.

that's what st/ddies do with dustin. they take dustin and they just make him the person that links st/ddie together and then they just completely forget about him. you guys need to remember that st/ve only knew that e/die somewhat respected him bc of DUSTIN, and only because of DUSTIN would their feelings be able to increase, otherwise they'd be stuck in the strangers zone.

you can tell by the way they talk about a character whether or not they like the character as the character or like the character as the accessory to something they like just by the way they talk abt them, and how they talk abt that character's relationships with others (i've done it in the max tag countless times), and i'm sorry to say it but i've seen it so often that dustin is never mentioned outside of st/ddie, despite him being one of the core members of the team AND, let's admit it, more important, bc he figures everything out literally EVERY season.

A lot of din about the newly announced team names being so shit and so overtly commercialized in a garish way but it's like. It's just the kind of world we live in now. Current systems of movement of money and wealth that have been corrupted for years are just becoming glaringly obvious to the naked eye. It's unfortunately the deal with the whole world but also specifically with motorsports. When you get your 15 minutes of fame in this desperate attention economy, which F1 is currently enjoying, then whichever grift can afford to throw money will come and show up and pick at your flesh. All this aggressive commercialization that will make the rich richer while actual workers that hold up the sport will look at even shittier pay. Grift businesses such as a betting platform will enjoy some of that F1 fame while moving more money around random channels to funnel even more wealth upwards. While the sport gets shittier and contributes to a worsening planet.

Apparently there's another Alastor theory going around! It's Roo who is in control of him, she's the Root of all Evil or something? I too, have this deer man spinning in my head microwaving so I am eating up all these theories

I do not know much of this Roo character, but with all the eyes always watching him in the background it would somewhat make sense!

ohhHHHHH

I'm ngl I had no idea this character was even a thing and had to look it up in the wiki and hOLY SHIT.

That would... honestly explain a lot.

I still do think that Lilith being gone for the exact same timeframe as Alastor is a bit too specific to be complete coincidence, but maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Alastor's deal after all? I've been struggling to try and pinpoint a motive or purpose for such a deal, so maybe neither Lilith nor Eve are actually the answer here, or only a part of it?

I'm still in the process of rewatching the season and collecting notes on the side to hopefully try and make sense of later on, but knowing this character may come into play in the future definitely adjusted my perspective on things...

Like... Alastor seems to absolutely despise the idea of being seen as altruistic and selfless - maybe his overarching goal and/or his end of the deal is to spread as much evil and carnage as possible or sth like that? Idk man.

He also keeps everyone around him at a very deliberate distance (unless he's got an agenda and uses the friendship angle and physical contact to manipulate), then he seems almost genuinely sentimental during his talk with Niffty? But imo it sounds like he's expressing wishful thinking more than anything.

I think he's deliberately trying not to get attached to the hotel and its inhabitants because he already knows it's not going to stay that way, since the plan seems to have always been that the hotel and, in extension, Charlie, are mere stepping stones to whatever unseen goal he has. For now we are meant to assume that it's an elaborate plan to free himself from whatever contract it is that's plaguing him, but I think there's a lot more to it than that.

What I'm currently trying to figure out is what his plans are for after that...?

Like... what is he going to do with the newly regained freedom? What was the deal keeping him from doing?

Maybe it'll have near apocalyptic consequences and he was restricted for a damn good reason :'DD either way I'm fucking terrified.

oops, got myself thinking again about byan having a little hoard of weird and random trinkets and shiny things hidden away under their bed in the same way that some cats have collections of bottle caps under furniture.

like, none of it is particularly meaningful and they don't wear any of the jewelry that's under there, but they like to pull it all out once in a while to look at and are always adding more

my reading of that post was something akin to [sniffles] i'd like to talk about big gay bbq ;_;

also God yeah if ppl wrote about the ahl more there wld be a lot of firebirds fic. or maybe i just see men and am like ouuuughhhh kiss ? i have Angles for like so many different pairings / polyships

- ash

What if Joey Daccord was enjoying the Big Gay BBQ with his boys after a hard fought game...what if Kole Lind looked at him with a smudge of bbq sauce on his mouth and felt insane about it....and also, what if Chris Driedger was watching this while wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses and vaguely yearning for Grubi...ouagh

[I absolutely derailed myself into a psychological assessment of Chris Driedger his 20s + musings on the AHL fic -- cut bc I had to scroll four times to get to the bottom and the people on my dash who don't care about the AHL just don't deserve that...just a note that there is ZERO salacious imagines under the cut]

Actually Chris is very interesting to me bc irl he is a 29yo who invested in crypto, but he is also a 29yo who suffered his way through his 20s not unlike the rest of us, just with more of a spotlight on him. but it's like, or at least of me it was like this, I hit 29 and I was like, well. I made it this far through my 20s and it absolutely sucked so much and I hated every minute of it and I kinda wish I was dead, but maybe a new decade will be different. I gotta make it through one last year of pushing through this shit and if I take a step back, yeah, it's gotten a little better with every passing month. Maybe my 30s are not a chance to start over so much as they are a chance to start moving forward. And I think for Chris (this is turning in a psychological assessment instead of a sexy imagine sorry) who has suffered through some catastrophic injuries, some terrible setbacks, some truly awful decision-making of his own, and just kept coming back from it and kept pushing forward -- to me Chris at 29, back in the AHL and yet again a back up, but also BACK PLAYING AT ALL which is very much its own kind of triumph, it feels very much like an interesting thing poke at in fanfiction. Like, okay Chris, you turned 29 in May in the middle of a playoff push, back early from injury when everyone thought your entire season was done an almost full calendar year prior. You're a back up again, but you're not really playing. You just watched this kid you love so much and this team who has embraced you have an inaugural season that quite frankly set the standard for any expansion team yet to come and CERTAINLY any team moving around (Wranglers. Cuda.) in the current era. Like, irl he seems very confident, very full of swagger, but also very full of humility and gratitude for how many chances he got and very determined not take anything for granted anymore. If you apply that to the experience of being a queer man at 29, gosh there are so many possibilities. Very "I am going to make it through this year if it kills me." Where do we go from here, Chris???

But also yeah he should eat bbq and send a photo of himself to his friends with his shirt unbuttoned flirting with drag queens and Philipp Grubauer should have a horny meltdown about it and spend all summer sending him thirst traps to get back at him. This does many things for Chris's ego.

also AHL fic is so interesting to me as someone who spent a couple years in bandom when fob had more or less fully taken off but a lot of pete's proteges were grinding it out on one hit wonders or collaborations with more famous artists and they were all clawing for every show and even p!atd wasn't really a sure thing yet... there are a lot of parallels to the whole "boys in buses got it so damn bad but we love it like the last cigarette we ever had" liminal space of the grind of touring and fighting for every last chance and making these friendships you THINK are insoluble but more often than not just dissolve as soon as one of you makes it or one of you breaks down and quits and goes home...the way Warped Tour was a party every year because for a lot of bands it WAS the last cigarette they ever had and they probably knew that on some level...i forgot where I was going with this. OH. the NHL can't even touch that level of "every game could be my last game"/"every show could be my last show" and the kind of desperation but also weird situational camaraderie that comes from that. Like on a pro athlete way for sure but also in that, 5, 6, 9, 12 hour bus rides every week all over the damn west coast. What do you do if you hate the guy sitting next to you. What do you do if you love the guy sitting next to you. There's no escape man. I forgot where I was going with that again but yeah basically, AHL fic is an untapped and very rich universe for people who love dirtbags, writing about people in close quarters, desperate feelings, and accept that there's a solid chance you may have to delete your fic someday when a prospect bombs out of hockey and turns into a normie. You know?? It's great stuff.

i miss the era of internet where all we got were anime fansubs made by people who had the time to do what they enjoyed

but yeah something something like... i definitely support including content warnings as much as possible, even ones that might be particularly unusual, but it's equally important to consider the impact of listing certain things as warnings.

like that meme of "can you trigger tag lesbians" i've seen before. like... i don't mean this at all in an insulting way, but if any group of people simply existing causes you so much discomfort that you ask people to provide content warnings for their existence, whether in fiction or otherwise.... that's something you really need to unpack and work through. because that very *very* easily steers rapidly into outright bigotry, intentional or otherwise, and working through that discomfort is the first step to unlearning that sort of thing.

watched the new matpat video and like. He's Right. Also interesting (though unintended due to how long these videos take to make) timing after someone got falsely mass-reported on Twitter because they were saying Gregory is morally grey and not Completely Good and apparently that pissed a lot of people off. Stupidly.

that being said basing the latter half of the video on myers brigg personality results is an interesting choice. I personally love hearing it, but I know people will hate it(if they didn't hate the vid already) bc personality tests in general tend to be like. Psuedoscience. Esp myers briggs.

.......I like hearing about it though so I don't mind, like I don't put my whole belief as a person into them, I just like fun personality tests and see what I get and be like :D (>looks at me still with INFP in my bio's)

(also took that test again out of curiosity to see if I got a different result and, nope! still got INFP.)

I want to be someone who has smart and interesting things to say about shows/movies that I like - like when I tried to convince my friends that they really need to watch Leverage. that would have been useful! instead I'm just like 'it's sooo good I like it so much I love all the characters they're all so awesome 🥰'

my thoughts are generally just like.

ooh he soo prettyyy. I want to braid his hair. hehe he punched someone. look at his lil face 🥰 baby boi. pretty smile his mouth is so nice I like his teeth. chest hair. hands! arms arms arms 🤤 his eyes are so pretty. oooh blood on his face, blood on his face! he's growling. annd his voice is all raspy again. I wonder [many many redacted thoughts]. ooh now he's in danger oh noo 😏

there's a bunch of 'she's so pretty' and 'I love her' somewhere in between all that too but mostly it's just. very, very stupid

headcanon + love

love's a complicated topic for and with knives; it's very much a double edged sword where he's concerned. his love isn't always healthy, for him or the other party, and he has a lot of self worth issues buried and tucked away so it can be fragile.

when he loves someone, and it doesn't matter what sort it is, he loves deeply and completely. he's all in. he will, as seen with vash, go to extremes to keep them safe, to make sure they understand just what depths he'll sink to for them.

it's his primary motivator for a lot of things, in its own twisted way.

he becomes the villain for vash because that's what he thinks it'll take to protect his brother, and it doesn't matter how much it hurts him, so long as he succeeds in what he's trying to do. as long as his brother is safe. and he'll do this for anyone he cares about.

but on the flip side, this means when he thinks he's been betrayed, when he thinks that he's been abandoned–it turns very quickly, very easily. love becomes hate so swiftly it almost blindsides him. like with rem. (and yet he still loves them, he's still planted his heart in this other person's and he doesn't know how to take it back)

romantically he's difficult just because he's wired that way, but in every other form? he's made of love, but he's buried it so deep down and tried to kill it so many times that he's very fragile when it comes to loving and being loved. he and his brother aren't that different when it comes down to it in this regard.

What's your interpretation of the weird/annoyed look Five gets on his face when Tegan announces that she wants to rejoin the TARDIS at the end of Arc of Infinity? I know it was probably meant to be played for laughs, but it annoys me every time i watch that episode and i'm curious what headcanons people have about it.

My favourite thing I've read about it pointed out that the cybermen specifically used Tegan as a weakness against five, that she's what it took to manipulate him (and through no fault of either of them, Adric's death was part of those consequences.) The novelisation really goes in to the descriptions of the doctor transfixed with the blood running down Tegan's chin from her bitten lip, the building tension as the cybermen get closer and closer to killing her and he's shaking trying to hold himself back from admitting his hearts are so easy to twist, just by threatening his friends. (Does Nyssa ever leave the TARDIS when it's on the spaceship? The cybermen don't even know she exists til they come onboard do they?)

As for why he looks so annoyed? hmmm. Does anyone want someone around that constantly needles them? Really, I think pre Arc of Infinity that even though Tegan had chosen to stay, they still had that power imbalance or even just tension between them that she had not come on board willingly. So five is expecting that to be the continuing, I don't know, continuing manner between them and it hadn't been good. It had its moments (mainly in the audios) but as an arrangement it was not ideal as friends to explore the universe together, all that terrible beauty and awesome monsters.

But it doesn't continue on in that manner - oh they bicker and make faces at each other, sure, but Tegan's conscious decision to step back onto the TARDIS irons out those imbalances, removes that bitterness and the past of her aunt's death. So when he makes that wee face, it's in expectation of the previous status quo. And never let it be said that Tegan's one to do exactly what's expected of her.

Anyway I really hope this makes sense and I may add some more thoughts later but it's 1:50 am Christmas Eve and I couldn't sleep for thinking about this.

----

It's 2am I'm back. I feel like there's also this uneasiness in five about tegan, that mirror that no one likes being held up to themselves. Their similarities but the starkly different ways they express them must be exhausting to five. and here she is back again. To push and prod and challenge and be brashly beautifully glorious. wait. that last bit was the two am shipper coming out. Anyway they draw strength and resolve and anger from each other and Tegan was vital to five, from his first moments till his very last.

i think haurchefant deserves the world. he deserves absolutely everything.

🏅👖💻

🏅 What is something you recently felt proud of in regard to your writing (finished a fic, actually planned for once, etc).

tbh I'm quite proud of the reception that Money Where Your Mouth Is received, for a silly joke/crack fic I think it turned out pretty well and people really seemed to like it which makes me super happy!!

👖 Are you a planner, plantser, or pantser? Is it consistent?

It sorta depends on the fic, but I guess I tend to be a planner for the most part? Generally I tend to have an idea of where things are going, like a lot of my WIPs start out as things that I know the beginning and end of and then the middle is a lot of figuring out as we go if that makes sense?

💻 Do you do research for your fics? What’s the deepest dive you’ve done?

Oh my god please ask me about nuclear shit. please ask me about hydrogen bombs and radiation and nuclear disasters I have done so much research I have learned so much about how nuclear/thermonuclear bombs work just for like a single goddamn chapter of a fucking Lost fic I just

The weirdest thing to me is Orihime is so... Seperate from everyone else. At first she got her powers from Ichigo, same as Chad, but then wait, Chad's actually just a fullbringer, shuffle him off to a different category, so Orihime's very unique and yet... It's unexplored? I know she has like two fights she REALLY gets to participate in (and one's in the FILLER) but she's made so special and so unused it makes for the weirdest vibe. Honestly all Ichigo's human friends get wasted but her case is special to me.

Oh god, don't get me started on the rest of the human crew. My tears, endless. And yet! Ripe and fertile grounds for plenty of fanfiction/ fan speculation! So it's not all bad, i suppose.

Anyway, I believe??? We get a crumb of validation vis a vis Fullbringers and their generalized weirdness in the novels...

[ lore spoilers for CFYOW and TYBWA if you're invested in keeping up with the anime + extra canon novels in order. Light spoilers under this note, heavy (picture/manga) spoilers under the cut]

I think that it's in CFYOW that Fullbringers are explained as actually having Tiny Mincemeat Pieces of the Soul King in them, which is what makes them so deliciously enticing to hollows. It's also said that you can have bigger/smaller pieces, leading to differentials in power.

And yet. Aura has a full organ (the soul chain/ power amplification organ) , and while she can put Kisuke Urahara on the back foot, that's still not quite the same as what Orihime does. Even for a fullbringer (if she does actually fit into that category along with Chad), she's pretty weird.

I don't beef super hard with her not participating in fights; it's cool that by the fullbringers' entrance, she's not afraid to get into the down and dirty of it, though. I mean, she does this to Ginjo:

and that's just some regular-degular boundaries and self-defense in in the day of a lady who can--

tank hits from Ywhach by the end of TYBW???

After he's absorbed the Soul King, no less. Her shield doesn't even crack.

Like. What's up with that? Weird vibes in fucking deed.

Husb also added an interesting aside, to the tune that souls in Bleach can be overwhelmed by spiritual power that far supersedes their own. It crushes them, renders them sweaty and unable to breathe- lays them flat out on the ground, in the case of Nanao with Yamamoto, or pulps them into paste outright (sometimes without them even being aware of it), such as Hyogoku! Moth-Aizen and that poor random human in Karakura.

It's not that Orihime is going to get 0hko'd, or that she couldn't sense Ywhach's reiatsu. If that were the case, her shield wouldn't be able to block a blow. Which leaves another scenario open to possibility....

So yeah. Weird vibes!

if u have a special interest in brainwashing i think you would simply explode if u watched karmaland (IN A GOOD WAY IN A GOOD WAY) (there’s a crap ton of plot points connected to brainwashing and the loss of memory, it’s really interesting and the way it ties into how the characters interact and the overarching plot line makes me go insane) (bonus post i found a couple months ago about the theme of memory in it: https://shikai-the-storyteller.tumblr.com/post/699057572266885120 )

HIHI I'm so sorry about getting to this late Oooo I really love that! (Checked out the post you sent) and from what I've just heard about Karmaland around it sounds very interesting! I gotta love me some good old fasioned loss of memory but everlastingly connected to some events vibe, because erasing the whole of a person is HARD. I cannot speak on a series I haven't watched, but that post is very interesting and those sort of plots have my whole heart. The main thing is that I really only speak enough spanish to have survived high school, and I still almost failed. I wanna get better at it but learning languages is just not something that comes to me with ease. Along with that, I listen to QSMP a lot in the background, and I couldn't do that if I needed to read subtitles constantly lol. There's something also to be said about how to be involved in the main qsmp plot rn you generally need to speak english but I feel like that is a victim of circomstance along with other things - People have noted the lack of Hispanic streamers online and how the French also seem disconnected from the main lore. Without going on too long of a rant I actually enjoy that I missed some content and lore that the Brazlians have and discovered it through the community, lol. Which is a long winded rant to say "I feel lucky that I am in the primary audience for the qsmp lore and I really don't feel like I could keep up with it if it wasn't in a language I spoke" Maybe sometime in the future, I'd love to check it out, or really if there were english plot summaries about I'm sure they'd be amazing, that's absolutley my sort of plot. If you have any reccomendations I'd love that!

I hope this was coherent lmao I have spent the last while feeling quite sick but sometime. Sometime I will ramble on the role that memory seems to play in the QSMP. sometime.

The thing about TFA is that I think it’s a pretty good Transformers cartoon, it’s fun and has interesting spins on the usual premises of TF. But I honestly don’t think it’s as deep as a lot of the fandom likes to act as it is.

Like, sure, in the show we have a few glimpses of Cybertron under Autobot rule and get inklings that this isn’t a pure and wholesome society. Except we literally don’t get anything besides that-- glimpses. All of the backstory that actually reveals the ~problematic~ and ~revolutionary~ things of the TFA continuity takes place solely in extra materials. And even if you could convince me that this is a valid way of telling a story (spoilers: NO because I shouldn’t have to buy multiple separate pieces of merchandise, half of which is shown via Word of God/meta texts and not actual story content, to be able to understand a single story), it honestly doesn’t make a difference. None of the extra material that shows the dark/gritty parts of TFA shows up in the cartoon itself.

It doesn’t matter that the flying twins were experimented on while on the verge of death because they sure don’t act like it matters. It doesn’t matter that the Decepticons apparently used to be enslaved as war machines, because the show sure as hell doesn’t give them any deeper characterization than “we’re gonna take over Cybertron because we’re the Decepticons raaaaawwwwrrr!” And it doesn’t even matter that Optimus Prime, one of the main characters of the show, is literally a high-ranking military officer of a regime that brainwashes/experiments on civilians, because as far as the story is concerned his biggest problems are 1. Trying to get his crew to listen to him 2. Fighting Decepticons 3. Putting up with his annoying superiors after he got kicked out of the Elite Guard. (Note that just because he didn’t make it in the Elite Guard doesn’t mean he’s not still important: Prime is one of the highest ranks the military has, and Optimus was given freaking Omega Supreme, a top secret war weapon/artifact, as his ship.)

The story is trying to pose itself as something deeper and more serious, but ultimately fails because those deeper/serious things are barely covered in the show or delegated to side materials.

Am I saying TFA is a terrible show that has no good ideas at all? Am I saying that people who like TFA are dumb and should watch another show? Not at all. I’m just saying that I think the fandom opinions of TFA as a show honestly overhypes it compared to the actual content of the show itself. Forget about the dark and gritty backstory, the vast majority of TFA is spent on human villains and random skirmishes on Earth instead of the actual interesting part, the Autobot/Decepticon war and the state of Cybertron!

If you want a TF continuity that has great lore (and doesn’t require you to watch a cartoon, read a book, find a bunch of old interviews, read a comic, and listen to a script reading at a con), IDW1 and IDW2 are both right there waiting for you. Especially IDW2, which is written as a single continuous story and not as the chaotic decade-and-a-half long mess that is IDW1.