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azsazz · 10 months

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Dogfight

Fighter Pilot!Cassian x Reader

Summary: Anon Request: Lowkey, I think that Modern Cassian would be a fighter pilot.

I.E. A rewrite of a Top Gun scene but with Cassian as the pilot. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Warnings: N/A

Word Count: 1,193

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The sky is an ethereal thing, vast and wide, hues of all colors brushing the heavens in luxurious strokes. Cassian always loved it, sleeping out under the stars as many nights as he was allowed, finding shapes in the billowing clouds and connecting stars into forms, learning stories to go with them.

He always knew he’d find himself up here one day, a pilot after years of training, best in class.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters, steering the jet away from the fighter on their tail. The plane lurches severely to the left, wings tipping sideways to avoid enemy fire. “Shadow, where are they?”

His wingman twists around in his seat from behind Cassian, scouting the clear skies for the two jets behind them. There’s nothing but tense silence for a long moment before one of the planes careens into sight and he’s shouting through the comms, “On our six!”

Cassian yanks the yoke and the jet pulls upwards with enough force that he feels his heart in his gut. With a well-practiced maneuver, the plane twists and he’s pulling the trigger, releasing rounds of ammunition on the plane that's clear in sight.

It happens quickly. He watches with hawk eyes as the bullets land, tearing through the pristine metal and ripping open its body. A lucky shot destroys the stabilizer and the plane spirals out of view, the carcass dropping faster than a box of rocks.

A picture taped by the fuel gauge calms his racing heart. A photo of the girl he’d left back home, the woman he swore he’d propose to on his next leave. A pretty young thing that has stood by his side through all of his endeavors, even this most dangerous one.

He takes a breath. One down, one to go.

“Let me know when you see smoke in the air, Shadow,” he exclaims, righting the plane after a precarious turn.

Shadow, his wingman that he’s been working with since he joined up, scours the area for signs of movement. He’d been teased a lot, having the quietest recruit on his team being the one calling positions, but his eyes are as sharp as they come, and Azriel can be loud when he needs to be.

A jet lines up just behind, locking them into its sights, and within a split second it fires a missile their way.

“Smoke in the air! Smoke in the air!”

“Hang on,” Cassian calls back, taking the jet into a steep nosedive. The missile follows, agile as ever, but it’s Cassian who’s quick to fly by the already downed jet, the missile striking its side with an explosion he doesn’t stick around to see.

“Yes, Bloodshed! Direct hit,” Shadow calls, bracing his hands against the windows as he seeks out the plane again. It cuts through the black smoke like an avenging angel and his heart pounds in his chest as the pilot fires again. “Here comes another one!”

Cassian uses both hands to pull the plane up again, helmet sticking to the back of his seat as the plane climbs at a fast rate. “Boost the flares, now,” he orders, and Azriel does, letting them rain down for the missile to connect with.

His plan works, but they’re not out of the woods yet. Cassian splits the throttles and the jet swings around, flipping upside down for a moment of sheer terror they’ve become accustomed to. It puts them at the advantage, coming up behind the enemy plane. “Coming around!”

“You got him, Bloodshed, you got him!”

And he does, sights locking onto the enemy. “Taking the shot,” he says, pulling the trigger and setting their own projectile loose. He prays the missile lands but the pilot in the other plane is a skilled one, and maneuvers his jet in a way Cassian’s never seen before. The missile misses by a hair's breadth and the plane free falls for a moment, careening past their windows like an assailant of stealth.

“What the–”

“Holy shit. What the fuck was that?”

“Hang on, we have to get low,” Cassian grunts, flipping them so the belly of the plane is facing the sun and they’re dipping down, down, down at unnatural speeds. “We can try and dodge his attacks from between the mountains.”

Indeed, the large mountains he stared at for nights on end are enough to be able to do so, the plane nimble enough to avoid the rocky edges. Cassian pictures the three stars that are always settled over the peaks of the mountains and hopes that their other friend, Nightstalker, is doing okay. He lets them lead his way.

“Here he comes,” Azriel warns, and a second later they’re being fired at blindly. Cassian grunts, sending the jet into a series of jerks and twists to avoid the fray.

“Tell me where he is, Shadow!”

Azriel’s checking behind them again, watching the enemy burst through a cloud of debris with ease. “He’s still on us!”

They’re being shot at again, and this time, one makes their mark, he’s told by Azriel. Cassian curses low, steering through a wicked curve, not slowing down. Again, the pilot behind them fires, and Azriel’s calling out to him. “C’mon, Bloodshed, do some of that pilot shit!”

“Brace yourself,” Cassian warns before he’s pulling levers and the wings sweep open. He tugs on the yoke again and the lever switches, sending their jet into a steep climb that has both pilots struggling for breath before he’s leveling them out and nose diving towards the rushing river below.

The skill of the pilot takes them behind the enemy once more, weaving around the expanse of mountains, dangerously close.

“I’ve got a shot, I’m taking it,” Cassian says, pulling the trigger on the steering again. The missile soars through the air with undisturbed grace, locked on the enemy jet trying to outrun it. They let their flares fly and in an unfortunate turn of events, the missile strikes the rogue flares.

“Shit,” Azriel spits, “Out of missiles.”

“Switching to guns,” Cassian responds, hazel eyes flickering to your photograph for the split second they’re smothered by the missile's smoke. But as quickly as it’s cleared he’s taking his shot, firing round after round in hopes to take down the enemy plane.

He pauses for a breath as he takes in the amount of ammunition he has left before firing again and again.

None of his hits land.

“You’ve got him, Bloodshed,” Azriel encourages, peering over his shoulder to watch the battle.

“It’s not over yet,” Cassian mutters, pulling the trigger again. The ammunition is dangerously low, this is his final shot. “One last chance.”

By the grace of the Gods his hits land, flaying metal from the flaps and engines. Cassian watches the pilot eject from the plane just before it careens into the side of the mountain in a ball of fiery explosion, thick smoke coating the air.

“Yes!” Azriel cheers from the back, and it’s all Cassian can do to try and calm his breathing, the picture of your smiling face a beacon of brilliance.

Another day survived, another day closer to coming home to you.

#cassian au #modern!cassian #cassian x reader #cassian/reader #fighter pilot cassian #azsazz #acotar #acomaf #acowar #cassian

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edoro · 2 months

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What are your thoughts about Thistle

stares straight ahead without making a sound as i begin to slowly vibrate until i start to ascend to another plane

I LIKE THISTLE A LOT AND I'M REALLY VERY NORMAL ABOUT HIM MMHM

uhhh putting this under a cut for Dunmeshi spoilers

me going insane over Thistle was probably very predictable because he is 1) a pretty elf boy 2) a fucked up little guy 3) possessed of astounding levels of molested energy

it's so. ooourgh. the themes and the motifs. the way that he's been a possession and pet of the Melini royal line since he was a child, how he just fully embraced that role, his desperate need to be of use or have a purpose, his batshit obsession with Delgal...

the way that he ALSO expresses an autism experience in that he stays basically the same but everyone else around him grows and matures much more quickly than he does, and suddenly for no reason that he can really figure out, everyone is unhappy with him when he's doing exactly what he's always done

the way he's so incredibly adultified, all the humans around him expecting him to behave like an adult and handle adult responsibilities, none of them seeming to realize that his immaturity and childishness is because he is a damn kid

the fact that he seems to have repeatedly been the placeholder son/brother/friend until REAL family came along - how we go from the king calling Thistle his son to Thistle calling baby Delgal 'master Delgal,' how gradually he becomes a less and less central figure in Delgal's life as Delgal gets married and has a son, a grandson, the way his place at the table keeps moving further and further away from Delgal

the mmmmm the fact that he was literally just. Acquired Somehow as a child. and given to the king because the king wanted an elven servant and they figured this little foundling would be a safe pet and status symbol. had his hair cut. was literally given a name based on the color of his eyes. this is the equivalent of picking up a cat out of the dumpster and naming it patches.

that scene where Laios tries to use a food metaphor to convince him that he's hurting the people of the kingdom and he seems to understand but turns out to have gotten "i should just capture everyone in body horror forcefeeding nightmare plants forever!" from it instead is haunting and i think says a lot about what his state of mind is and also like... how he views autonomy and personhood, and, hm, where might he have gotten THOSE ideas from?

i also think it's very impressive he managed to handle the winged lion for hundreds of years, compared to Mithrun only managing a few years in a dungeon

also, i think he should be allowed to rule over a Minecraft server with an iron fist. i think that would fix him.

#asks #thistle #dunmeshi

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theysangastheyslew · 1 year

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Hey!!!

I want to share more suffering with you, homie haha *crying*

What do you think of the episode? Especially 132 part ofc!

Hi friend! :'))))))))) Ooooooh honey that gif is such a mood XD I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts and this is the best I can do atm. Sorry it’s kind of wordy but here we go 🥲

Ok! So ever-present pacing issues aside, the overarching story made for a solid episode and the animation was incredible. Hell, even the things I disliked objectively looked well-done out of context. Overall, that was no small feat to pull off, especially in such harsh working conditions. I truly do want to acknowledge that.

But in regards to 132, you guys already put into words how I feel better than I could. I may not have anything new to add, but I’ll say what I liked first and then put my issues under a cut.

As someone who actually really likes Yams’ art style, I loved that they consistently kept Hange’s face accurate to the manga. It was really inconsistent throughout the final season and they struggled to not make it too short a lot of times. Hange was always still stunning of course but the difference always stuck out to me. Here everyone was drawn well, but you can tell she got some extra attention.

The way they inched Levi closer to where Hange was sitting while talking with Yelena. Insignificant yeah but consistent with their past behavior. Also I’m glad they tweaked the position of his bandages so it looked less like they were painfully tugging upwards on his nose.

The pained expressions of the kids and Hange watching Levi struggle to even hold his gear

The “unrequited love” exchange. It had most of the softness and emotion from the manga even though the weight of that line will never be realized in non-written form. The camera lingered on each frame in a way that conveyed the sentiment. This is what got my hopes up that they would stay truer to the source material with DYH.

I'm so glad they left in Hange's lines to Flochroach about not giving up. Helps show—once again—that they wanted to live

The choked way Levi said “Devote your heart” + Hange’s widened eye and soft gasp at his words. Though not tearing up like in the manga, the shot still looked lovely for the half second it lasted. He doesn't pause halfway through saying it though so this one I'm still wrestling with.

Of course, the last stand. Onscreen, Hange took out at least 16 colossals (including the ones we see trip and get trampled) and definitely more offscreen (when they cut away to show other characters) and for the last few, did it while in the most pain a human body can feel. 7/10 for combat, my ass. Idk about y’all but I can’t stop hearing Romi Park’s screams in my head. I knew it would be nauseating and brutal but dear God. At the same time I cannot put into words how proud I am of them. That's my commander 💜

Ok “like” is definitely not the right word for this but I had wondered when I first read 132 how Hange’s gas tank was so well-insulated that it didn’t ignite, and.. well I got my answer.

I’m thankful that they didn’t show a glimpse of Hange’s bloody, crushed remains the way you see in the og panel. That at least felt respectful to me. This is wishful thinking I know but the defined charred outline makes me choose hope they fell more off to the side from where the titans were walking so at least there was maybe still a body left to recover someday.

The afterlife scene, the kids all sobbing their hearts out, Levi holding his own hand in the aftermath trying to process what just happened, and Onyankopon confirming the plane’s significance all really were appropriately gut-wrenching.

I really recommend taking a little break between The Rumbling and Sinners. It definitely makes the shift in emotion less jarring and less

When I did that with my rewatch it helped with the flow of things.

Ok, now twist me up and call me a pretzel bc here there be some salt :|

I’ll try to leave out my og issues with the manga chapter itself (like how painfully obvious it was all just to make Armin commander and how unnecessary Hange dying was IN THE FIRST PLACE and IF it had to happen at all how it could have been done at the final boss skelepalooza showdown, etc.) and just focus on the episode.

Goes without saying but it bears repeating: pacing. 75% of my issues with the execution of DYH would be gone if they just slowed down a bit. Just let the weight of it sink in a little. That this moment —all shreds of shipping aside— is the end of the line for these two heroes who have been supporting each other for ten years while bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders. But Mappa completely reversed the timing of the sequence of events. In the manga we had a longer, more intimate farewell followed by a last stand that was so short even when you knew it was coming it left you reeling from how fast it was from start to finish. Whereas here they hurried it along to get to the “main event”. Hell, it flows better in gif sets than it does in the actual show.

To me, it felt like Hange’s demeanor didn’t really change from talking with the kids to speaking with Levi, making their false bravado seem like less of a front. I know their tone was meant to sound like they were keeping up appearances, but with how often Hange just gets reduced solely to being a titan freak the way they had Romi say the lines made it sound like actual excitement, especially with the way they drew Hange's facial expressions (more on that next)

Hange’s little smirk after the salute. I kinda get what they were trying to do here but to me it came off as very flippant and dismissive of Levi’s choice of words, especially since they all but got rid of their lips trembling and eye beginning to well up with tears. I wish we’d gotten the big fake smile and laugh because that would have shown better that Hange was overcompensating by trying to put their brave face back on after starting to lose their composure. Their fear is obvious in the manga but it just simply didn’t come through as well throughout this entire exchange.

Sooo Hange almost tears up when Pieck said their words inspired her yet minutes later when their Best Friend tries to say goodbye there’s nowhere near that kind of reaction? Sure, Jan

Levi’s face. Ok look. It’s not a lack of emotion on his part that bothers me. It’s that it’s an entirely different one to begin with. He looks bummed at first yes, but then that changes to what I’m guessing is supposed to be determination which comes off as anger or annoyance (kinda like what changed with his scene with Armin on the stairs). They removed what made this parting different from previous ones, which was the sense of open vulnerability and the dawning realization that now he’s going to have to let Hans go too. See it's not like they were in the middle of the battle just yet. This situation came on suddenly and unexpectedly; it wasn't "supposed" to happen. One second they were on track and the next Hange is being torn away by fate. And yes, the highlights play a part in that transition. Anyone who draws eyes knows the importance of placement and intensity and the major impact they have over the final expression. And when drawing a comic you certainly don’t take up valuable page space with three panels focusing on the hope draining out of someone’s eyes if it wasn’t supposed to be the focus. I mean for fuck's sake, even the Final Season!Nendoroid Levi got it right. Plus, if they could make a point of getting Eren's eyes right during the raid on Liberio they could have gotten it here.

When the camera cuts to the kids watching the titans fall the angle doesn’t let you see that Levi can’t bring himself to watch for more than just a second

NOT MAPPA’s FAULT but since I’m being whiny right now I’m going to add that while ACWNR is a mixed bag to begin with, WIT’s adaptation not including Levihan’s introduction saddens me bc Levi asking Hange to keep watching loses a bit of extra oomph.

Really it just comes down to the fact that there was nothing wrong with the original page. It wasn’t overdone or dragged out by any means but considering many other scenes got shot-for-shot depictions I don’t think we were asking for anything outrageous by wanting a faithful adaptation. The couple frames we got that were almost perfect were so freakin fast you barely had time to process them before it cut away.

I wanted to like it, I really did. Especially since MAPPA did so many things so incredibly well as a whole. My expectations weren’t high, and I did want to give it the benefit of the doubt. But when it came to DYH, it felt both watered down and disjointed, like a completely different scene.

But so it goes. At the end of the day, Hange still dies a horrifying death for plot convenience, and Levi is left behind to suffer once again. It was always going to hurt and I was never going to be ready for it, no matter how it was done.

#gahhhh i keep seeing posts that better verbalize what im trying to say #words are hard #tldr: basically i agree with what you kleinzoe kachuusa warm starlight murdergiraffe nenithil glassesandswords and mcxynth all said #now imma go listen to voices carry by lights and the world is ugly on repeat bc if i see 1 more ‘hange was suicidal’ take ill eat my hand #le me #replies #ramblings #rantings #snk #levihan #analysis

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lairofdragonagelore · 1 year

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Murals in DAI: Red Lyrium Idol

This mural has been shown in Dragon Age Official Teaser Trailer - 2018 Game Awards.

[This post is part of the series “ Murals in DAI ”]

[Index page of Dragon Age Lore]

The context of this mural is unknown to us. We don’t truly know if it was Solas who painted it. We can only guess it was he because it’s a piece of Nick Thornborrow who usually draws Solas’ murals, and because in general the context of the game allows us to assume so. We don’t know where it’s located either.

The Background

As we saw in Murals in DAI: Basics, the inverted triangle seems to be used to represent the Fade, and it’s the symbol we see in the majority of the places in this piece that are not burning. I imagine that this may represent 1) the destruction of the Veil [or the barrier that surrounds the Black City), or 2) the “surface” of the Sphere of Fire [The Death of a Titan] that has been contained with vines which have worn-out over time. In any case, the fire is what overtakes the image, putting the Fade symbol on a secondary plane.

There is also a line in the background that seems to suggest that there is a mountain, and what we are seeing is happening at the feet of a mountain. This could also mean a metaphor to link this image with the one related to the sphere of Fire in “The Death of a Titan“ [remember that the right side of that mural shows mountains that may suggest connection with the Waking World or even with The Horror of Hormak].

The Panels

Here, we find a scene that I think is happening in the Fade and against the barrier that isolates the Black City. The background, beyond the fire, shows inverted triangles in a greenish-grey plain colour. The place is set on fire, potentially connecting this scene with the fire sphere in “The Death of a Titan” or simply implying Solas is destroying this danger enclosed in the barrier of the Black City.

I can’t say if this mural shows one or two panels. All the elements are so well integrated that I think the wolf, the elvhen, and the tree are in the same space than the white sphere with the idol inside. The whole scene seems to be a big allegory of what is going to happen. I was not sure if we should consider the white sphere as an independent panel, since the wolf and the elvhen seem to be focused on the white sphere. So, instead of trying to understand this mural in “panels”, I will explore each of the elements in it and see how they integrally connect each other at the end.

The Vhenadahl

The vhenadahl is a tree with a lot of mystery in the DA games. It’s naively presented as a cultural element kept by the city elves to remember Arlathan and the “Old Ways”. These trees are, curiously, painted in red with white lines and swirls raising up from their roots, which has a strange interpretation for the player who knows about the codex of “The Death of a Titan”: Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads.

In DA2, Marethari Talas has a very focused cinematic when she enters the alienage and looks at the vhenadahl, which is a bit strange. It can be considered as a scene that shows how the city elves respect her as a Dalish, but it’s curious that so many seconds of a cinematic were given just for that, in a game that has cut a lot of content with more plot relevance.

In The Masked Empire, Felassan makes a very brief comment about this tree too:

Felassan paused as they came to a great tree in the market square. The vhenadahl was decorated with ribbons, and the dirt around it was marked with sticks stuck into the earth and decorated with bits of bright cloth hung as offerings. “The tree of the People,” Briala said. “Your people.” “And yours.” Felassan looked away. “Though you don’t think so.” “It’s a nice tree,” Felassan said. “Let it just be a nice tree.”

It’s not clear the implication of such comment, although I think it’s not a good one for an elvhenan. He seems to imply these tree are “not nice” at all for the ancient elvhen but they are “the Tree of the people”, understanding “the people” as the city elves. This means the elves who came after the fall of Arlathan, the mortal elves, the elves that ended up rescuing a slave culture thinking it was their original elvhenan one. If the Aravels were ships to transport slaves to centres of experimentation [The Horror of Hormak ], and the Vallaslins were the brands of the noble elvhen over their slaves, there is a big chance that this tree has another horrifying meaning that has nothing to do with the original culture of the elves [or maybe, ironically, it is another representation of the “old ways”, like the aravels and the vallaslins are]. Personally, I think it’s related to the vines that covered the “fire sphere”, but I will talk about it later.

In the elven folklore that barely survived, we have some city elf songs that may still have some weak connection with the truth of the real function of these trees for the Elvhenan:

In the original song of Where Willows Wail, the presence of the words vhenadahl seems to be related to the loss of immortality and the loss of the ability to dream into the Fade. The translation is quite rough to understand it, but it seems to have an elvhen slave origin [it speaks of trying to lead despite the worn-out brands of the vallaslin] and a conflicting relationship with their freedom [they are committed to it, but they describe this freedom as inevitable and troubling]. This way of speaking about freedom makes me think in Abelas and his people: servants of Mythal are more than mere slaves, they worked hard to become her servants, so they embrace this submission to Mythal as a duty, as a purpose, and as a service, so only in this case I can see why freedom may be troubling. This interpretation also makes sense to some degree since the original song has been found in the Temple of Mythal, therefore it must have been written by Abelas’ people, after all.

If we see the original song, the first line use a negative structure [Tel’, Bana] with the name of the tree. The line translates, in my opinion, something closer to “never again the tree” [bellana= forever, banal=never]. They also speak of “abel revas” [abel= sorrowing, revas=freedom]. This encourages the idea of a freedom that has caused more sadness than anything: we know this applies for the Mythal’s servants who had suffered since she died. Maybe the tree is related to this event of losing Mythal too, so they say “never again the tree”. If we combine this with the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads, there are three elements that seem to be connected: the death of Mythal, the appearance of the vhenadahl, and the danger unleashed by the Evanuris that was the last straw for Solas. [Explaining my thinking process: Solas says to the Inquisitor that the Death of Mythal was the reason that made him banish the Evanuris; the codex seems to imply it was something else, more horrifying, and probably, connected with her death. Then, the Mythal’s servants suffer their freedom--because Mythal is dead--while sharing some mid-negative sentiment towards the vhenadahl. Hence, maybe the vhenadahl is also connected with her death and the “horrifying thing” that the Evanuris did. This is why I kind of connect these three events with one another]

The most curious detail in the song is that the last part of it is translated using the word "war”, but the original lines does not use the same word at all for that [in fact, we can’t detect any words that may mean “war”], so I feel there is something wrong in this translation or something tricky. The glory and the people were not lost to the war, but to something else which is not a word that can be repeated in both lines. And this “something else” that made lost the people and the glory is related to the “winning/failure” of the Wolf.

I imagine the fact that the translation of win/fail is so extremely ambiguous because the elven language uses a very ambiguous word on purpose, since the creation of the Veil--the only solution that the “wolf” found--caused a situation that was a win and a loss at the same time. But I still have my doubts about the “war” part. Sadly, DA series tends to be a bit inconsistent in their elven language and they do not provide much vocabulary about it to have a better guess. Maybe is “am” war? Unlikely, it should be an independent word.

There is another iconic tree in DAI related to the irony of a peace tree turned into a war table. There is not much said about it than this. We can assume it may have been related to the Elvhenan simply because Skyhold was part of a series of fortress under the command of Fen’Harel, so far we can guess, but the construction of this table may have happened at any moment of the history of Skyhold, which has been handed over other races such as dwarves and humans. The symbols we see in the book Art of Inquisition suggest little.

The tree symbol on this stone can loosely be related to Vallaslins such as Mythal’s [which is too asymmetrical to be related to this one] or the superior part of the vallaslin of Falon’Din [which is symmetrical, but makes no sense for it to be here]. In general, I hardly see any historical link with the elvhenan and a supposed truce [so far, we were not informed that such a thing ever existed]. Plus, if this stone is related to the time of the Elvhenan, it should be related to Fen’Harel, who seemed to have used this fortress as part of his network of operations all over the Waking World and the Fade in his opposition to the Evanuris. So, in general, there is little to say with respect to this tree and I will proceed to discard it from now on when talking about the vhenadahl.

Another connection that I can make with trees and Elvhenan is the disturbing codex A Flowering Imago, which doesn’t show a tree but a vine. Through the codex found on the mural of “The Death of the Titan” [Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads], we know that a “sphere of Fire” was contained by using vines. I’m not sure how much these vhenadahl can be considered “vines” [or maybe its roots can be described as such], but maybe through them and in combination of both previous codices, we may be hinted a subtle connection between Uthenera [which seems to be connected with the vines via A Flowering Imago], and a power to control or restrain a danger underground. Of course this concept is super loosely for my taste, but it’s impossible to say more than this without turning it into a wild speculation.

In one of the last peeks/trailers that showed some DA:D images, we have seen that it may exist an extra meaning to these tree, since one of them appears in an ominous way.

In that image we can see a tree similar to the ones found in the Exalted Plains, surrounded by some Dwarf with long limbs statues and a lot of funerary urns that were used in Ferelden buildings as well as in Elven ruins. The tree seems to be covered by an ignited vine that reminds us a lot to the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads, where the vines cover a red sphere and the runes worn-out over time [associated with anger and fire] as a way of preventing a disaster.

In our exploration of the Exalted Plains [a place that was supposed to have ancient Elvhen buildings such as the Dead Hand or the Citadelle du Corbeau, but were retaken long ago by ancient Dalish around the time of Halamshiral/before the Exalted March against the Dales], we see many big trees with corpses hanging from them. I’m not so sure how many of them could be considered as consequence of the current War of the Lions [Celene vs Gaspard], or as remnants of the time of the Dalish Kingdom and the Exalted March that separated the elves into city elves and the different Dalish clans. If the ancient Dalish got some symbols right [like the wolves as protectors] maybe their interpretation of these trees could have some hint closer to the truth than the modern city elves have.

As a last link to the vhenadahl, we should not forget that Mythal seems to be related to a tree symbology deeply if we take into account her Vallaslin, so the vhenadahl may be related to her, who represented justice and motherly kindness, but we need not to forget that she also had a clear side of Vengeance and Revenge as we learnt in the Altar of Mythal [A detail that has disturbed me a lot because makes Elgar’nan as another aspect of herself instead of being another Evanuris]. Mythal is also related to the Uthenera Chamber we saw in the Deep Roads, Lower Walkways, so we find another soft link again between Mythal, tree roots=vines, and Uthenera.

So, if we keep in mind all these details, and return to the concept art of the vhenadahl, and use the symbols we have gathered along the games such as the swirls [check Murals in DAI: Basics], one could be inclined to think that these trees represent something that absorbs a red danger underground, maybe even controlling it. This power of control may be related to lyrium or Fade [swirls] which is also compatible with the idea of being related to Uthenera too. Once again, we can see the subtle link between this iconography and a “vine covering a fire sphere” from the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads. All this also seem to be potentially related to Mythal and her death.

Considering all this context, we return to the mural:

The tree we see at the left of the mural looks a bit thorny. If we can link this to a subtle interpretation of a thorny vine we know via Murals in DAI: Basics that this is a symbol related to darkspawn and the Blight.

It’s also true that this tree has no painted trunk, but we need to remember that only city elves paint their vhenadahl. These tree represent something more ominous to any elvhenan elf.

With the details explained above, I’m inclined to think that this tree may be related to containing and controlling a danger described in codices as a “sphere of Fire”. Its roots can be aesthetically interpreted as vines, controlling the danger underground. Via A Flowering Imago, we can relate vines with Uthenera. The vhenadahl may be related to lyrium, Fade, and potentially Uthenera in an unknown way so far. In this mural, it is suggested that the tree is on fire as well, unable to control the “thing that will destroy the world” after aeons passed [Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads]: Its protective power has worn out. Since the vhenadahl may represent the last barrier containing the “big danger”, Solas’ figure steps forwards to take actions.

The Elf and the Wolf

The elvhen figure, who seems to be Solas, has red eyes, same as the black wolf in the mural. Red eyes usually are a representation of anger, which in this case, and inside the context of having absorbed Mythal, could be interpreted as Solas acknowledging and indirectly working to accomplish Mythal’s revenge. I mean, I don’t think his main goal is to avenge Mythal, but his plan of destroying the Veil and fighting the banished Evanuris will have consequences that will fit such revenge.

We know Flemeth had decided to avenge Mythal, to give her “a reckoning that will shake the very heavens”, but she also agreed to give her power to Solas, because, most likely, she may have known that this revenge would be accomplished nonetheless through his plan as a side effect.

The elvhen figure is wearing a black robe with a symbol [a stylised dagger mark] that looks similar to the one I found in the Dorian’s tarot card. It’s still a bit different to the strange “dagger” symbol from the mural “The Creation of the Veil”. I really can’t guess with some decent justification what this symbol may imply. I didn’t see it in any other context/drawing of Nick Thornborrow.

The red circle behind the elvhen figure seems to be a halo, since it’s centred in his head. It could be a representation of Divinity [in a sense that it’s a halo, which is a symbol always related to sanctification and divinity] but filled with anger [since it’s red] so my guess is that this red halo may represent what Solas has absorbed with Flemeth’s powers: the duty to accomplish Mythal’s revenge alongside his plan of destroying the Veil and get rid of the sealed Evanuris.

The black wolf has red eyes and some parts of his fur show the swirly details that the statue of the Howling Fen'Harel statue displays, so this wolf is Fen’Harel, the guardian/protector.

Due to its grim-looking and the splashes of black ink around him and Solas [very similar to Solas’ last tarot card which shows black tendrils feeding the towering black wolf behind] it can also be associated with the Demon of Regret from the short story Callback from Tevinter Nights. This wolf in the mural can be a representation of Fen’Harel but also of this demon that Solas has been feeding since the day he created the Veil. It has a colossal size because that’s the amount of regret Solas has gathered in his long life.

Curiously, the ground where the elvhen figure is walking on looks like a part of a sphere or piece of land set on fire. Its border seems to show a certain kind of “dashed” line that we can interpret as a worn-out Veil-like barrier that we had talked about in other posts.

What if this piece of ground is a representation of the sphere of fire as well? Solas may be walking on the sphere of Fire that floats in the Fade [metaphorically speaking, this is art after all].

The white sphere and the Red Lyrium Idol

I always made a soft link between Solas’ words at the end of Trespasser with the murals “The Death of a Titan” and its codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads: the reason why he banished the Evanuris was “the death of Mythal”, but we also know it was more than that; it was about preventing the “release of something that would put at risk the whole world” [that it is implied in that codex] and that Solas kept in secret so nobody would be tempted to use it ever again [or maybe he kept it in secret so it would not be reflected in the Fade as well, and any reflection may be sealed inside the Black City]. In that sense, the Red Lyrium Idol seems to be the synthesis of both concepts in this image.

Due to the structure of this mural, the dashed border, and all our study of the iconography of the Veil in Murals in DAI: Basics, we can conclude that this white sphere with the idol represents something dangerous, and likely, related to all the symbols we saw that exist inside this kind of barrier in previous murals: Black City, red Lyrium, and Evanuris or pride creatures.

This circle has the same border we saw in other murals [ Murals in DAI: Basics]. It represents a strong barrier, usually the one that forbids the entrance to the Black City, where neither dreamers nor spirits can reach to. This circle contains a danger: the red lyrium idol.

The similarity of this idol with Mythal were explored in the post Red Lyrium Idol, and seems to coincide with Solas’ claim that the Evanuris were banished because the Death of Mythal [idol] and the whisper in the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads [potentially the red lyrium]. We need to highlight that the idol seems to represent the death of Mythal thanks to some common elements both images share like the spiked crown and the presence of a ring that looks like a Golden Ring [Elvhenan symbol].

Since this sphere is white, and it’s behind the wolf figure, it has an extra potential interpretation of a moon, but it’s not clear how much importance this has or how this affects Fen’Harel. The presence of the moon inside the DA lore has never been important, and it’s barely related to Elvhenan so far the games/books showed us. I know that the Dalish have some lore associated with it: Andruil is the sister of the “moon” [Andruil: Goddess of the Hunt], which may mean that the moon is Sylaise: the Hearthkeeper, but like I always say, this is extremely unreliable, and without another source that would guide us to see where the hint of truth lays, it’s usually a waste of time to make speculations only based on these legends.

Two of the seven semi-circles in here are still glowing in gold, meaning “divinity alive” or “god-like power” still alive. Inside of them there is an asterisk symbol. This may mean--if all our previous conclusions in murals like “The Creation of the Veil” or “The Death of a Titan” were correct--that the (power of a) "heart” of the Titans/ elvhenan orbs are related to the last archdemons: Moon-head creature and Beetle-head creature.

Thanks to one of the last trailers of DA:D, we see that the two semi-circles which are still active are related to the symbols of the creatures that appeared in the last mural of DA:D : the two remaining archdemons [further explanation about them in the post “The Destruction of the Veil”]

Integral conclusion

If we assume that this scene is happening in the Fade, according the inverted triangles in the background, Solas would be walking, metaphorically speaking, on the fire sphere related to the codex Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads. The vhenadahl seems to represent the worn-out mechanism that was protecting the world [green vines] from the danger inside the fire sphere [we can assume that its roots can also be seen as vines, which are restraining this ancient danger underground]. It’s not clear if the vhenadahl has a relationship with lyrium and Uthenera processes even though there are some codices that may show a soft subtle link to one another.

Solas walks in front of the vhenadahl since this last barrier has fallen and now all depends on Fen’Harel/Solas to fix the world, remove the Veil, and deal with the sealed Evanuris and the biggest danger that the world has ever faced for good.

Solas brings with him the ire of Mythal [red halo] while the black wolf also seems to join efforts against this battle, although it could also be a mere observer as he keeps feeding on Solas’ regrets. It’s not clear what function the big black wolf has in this mural. We can be sure it represents Fen’Harel [thanks to the swirly pattern on its fur] as well as the Regret demon that Solas has been unconsciously feeding since the day he created the Veil [due to the inky splashes around it].

The “big danger” seems to be represented by the white circle that should be containing the Black City. Instead, it has the red lyrium idol in the centre of the white sphere.

This makes a lot of sense when we see the mural “Destruction of the Veil”, where it is revealed that the Black City is contaminated with Red Lyrium too.

This terrible danger is contained inside a dashed lined barrier we have seen before, which has seven gates and/or protectors, where only two are alive now. This reinforces the idea that the contention mechanism of this big danger has been weakened severely. Based on another trailer of DA:D, we can connect symbols to these gates/protectors, which seem to represent the Archdemons shown in the mural “Destruction of the Veil”.

If we contrast this with Solas’ words about the Blight and his disapproval of killing archdemons, it seems to reinforce the idea that the dragons which are considered archdemons during the Blights are part of this mechanism of protection. Hence, there are only two dragons-archdemons protecting the world from this bigger danger.

This white circle also seems to look like a moon. It’s not clear if the moon representation has an important role in Elvhenan lore. We only know based on the unreliable Dalish tales that the moon can be related to Sylaise herself.

The most integral speculation I can make with all these elements is that inside the barrier that forbids access to the Black City even for the spirits, contains something that the Evanuris “unleashed in their lust for power” and it’s related to the death of Mythal. Maybe it’s the very thing that killed her [remember it’s hard to kill an Evanuris, because Solas implies they have some effective immortality going on, but they managed to kill Mythal anyway].

Solas managed to seal this danger, probably with the Evanuris trapped inside too, in order to prevent further spreading, and buried all this underground and under the most cryptic secret so nobody would be ever be tempted to use it, and sealed its reflection in the Fade inside a powerful barrier that keeps Dreamers and spirits away [so, he made a double seal= in the Waking World underground and in the Fade, inside the Black City]. Somehow, all these concepts seem to be represented in the red lyrium idol, which reinforces our suspicion that it pictures the death of Mythal protecting “the people” [further details in Red Lyrium Idol ] and unleashing a disease hard to control, accidentally or on purpose is not clear, as a last gesture of revenge.

#DAI murals #mythal #red lyrium #red lyrium idol #Archdemon #inverted triangles #Vhenadahl #wolf #Solas #fen'harel #veil #the veil #moon head creature #beetle head creature #asterisk symbol #fire sphere #regret demon

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volfoss · 25 days

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Hiiiii <3 I remember you talking about the boys comics vs the show, and I just finished the third season and it's really funny to me how almost every time there's an interesting storyline happening the little trivia window on Amazon says something like "this was not on the comics this was invented by the TV show" . Like yeah I'm not surprised lol

What character do you think is the most improved by the show? Is there anything that you think was actually better in the comics or is it just trash altogether?

hiii!! first off, SO glad you're enjoying it!! second off good god this may be long (i love to hate on mr ennis) so. under a cut :3

As for characters, let me first give a small run down of how every woman is treated in the comic:

the female (as she um. does not have a name in the comics) has barely any development other than oh she was raised in a fucked up lab and her mom sucks and that she and frenchie kind of have something going on. all of the really good stuff during the show w her brother or just... any of it is not there. again i need to emphasize she does not have a name. ennis does not care enough to give her an alt form of communication (like in the show, her teaching frenchie her own sign is SUCH a good thing. not in the comics lmao)

starlight. oh god where do i even START. so where the show handles her sa well and respectfully, um. well you see mr ennis loves to put rape in his stories and also loves to be bad to women. so its MULTIPLE scenes with her (where like. all of the men of the team line up for her to give them a bj. which to me really kind of... ruins the messaging he could have been going thru). hughie is like... genuinely really bad about her sa in the comics (as in. when he finds out via butcher getting tapes of the headquarters and purposefully setting it up so hughie SEES HER GETTING SA'D and goes to confront her about it. its great ennis loves women) and he BLAMES HER FOR IT. and then dumps her. and hes not supposed 2 be in the wrong there so thats great.

the only thing w her character that i DID like was at the start of the comics, she was pretty religious and as it went on, she started to lose her faith in religion bc she didnt get why jesus would let this happen to her. which was imo an interesting take but also ennis is OBSESSED w shitting on religion so like. its not surprising i guess that hes putting that in there lmao. she never really gets to confront the members of the team who REPEATEDLY either do/attempt to sa her other than doing a threat once or twice. theres none of the commentary on how society views women heroes or anything like that with her (i cannot emphasize enough that they kept like. the intro for the comics in terms of what kickstarted stuff and then just like... left the rest behind. which was for the best bc my god i think if u counted the amt of slurs and just bad stuff overall you would lose count (ik i did)).

maeve. good god its bad. so she was there when... homelander had part in 9/11 (tldr for that incident: in the comics, the supes are sent out to prevent one of the planes that was gonna hit (i believe the pentagon?) and then ended up crashing it elsewhere. but the plane scene in the show was THAT plot point done better) and that just made her become an alcoholic. and that is like 99% of her character in the comics. it is so so shitty bc the show did SO much w her and the comics just... did not.

the other non prominent women (stormfront was a man in the comics for like... clarification) are all... well what we call the ennis morality compass victims. a lot of the comics are the boys going to learn abt a supe group and learning they did smth bad (which youd think murder. or like smth equally bad. youd be wrong) and then its revealed that they are having orgies, being GASP gay, or being mentally ill (there is an entire team that hughie goes undercover w that the ... entire joke is that theyre too nice bc theyre not as mentally stable as the boys are. one of the bits is one of the teammates has tourettes so he has tics of just saying fuck or something similar and its treated as a joke). so if theyre not mentally ill or being gay or doing something that ennis sees as kind of fucked up (as the entirety of the comics is a test to how much garbage he can put in one series) theyre being used solely as sex objects. its pretty bad to put it lightly.

the men dont get out of the bad writing treatment either but. the women get it the worst. as for who gets improved the most, id say easily kimiko (it is NIGHT AND DAY) or maybe oddly enough butcher (his comic issues are... bad. we would be here all day if i got into them). and MM. oh my god you do not want to know how he was handled in the comics. honestly there isnt a character that DIDNT get improved a ton, all of them did. i dont know how the writers pulled it off but it is infinitely better for everyone.

as for anything i liked more... honestly not much. i think the shock value didn't work most of the time because ennis just made it the ENTIRE comics point to be edgy. i guess the fact homelander is bi in the comics is kind of funny but its just... not handled well (shocker right). as i mentioned earlier, i think the stuff with starlight starting out as super devote to religion and then becoming disenchanted with it was interesting. the only other really good thing about it is the art. it is HIDEOUS but i feel it kind of is intentional against the comic art of the time (as the artist is genuinely amazing outside of that). oh and if you can ignore all of the bad stuff, there was a kind of cool plot point that the show hasnt hit yet/wont touch, where they discuss the comics in the world with the context of them being propaganda. one of the owners of the local comic shop used to be a comic editor, and discusses how the comics were used to cover up the bad deeds that the supes were doing irl. it was an interesting take, especially since a lot of older comics WERE propaganda (ie like the wwii era comics are INSANE propaganda). tldr do not fucking touch the comics unless you want to see how many slurs ennis wants to drop (too many).

#asks #grain of salt on some of the details bc its been a month since ive read this #ask to tag #bc i do not fucking know how to tag this but like. god just know its a lot lol #sorry this is sooo long and prob not super coherent but i black out and get consumed by the anger when the comic is brought up lol #and unfortunately the comic is like... honestly some of the worst shit ive ever read. and ive read... probably 5k comics?

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thyandrawrites · 1 year

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hm. maybe i'm raining on everyone's parade but i felt that the framing in this episode was completely weird. it was great, i loved seeing my boy. but utilizing what was supposed to be endeavor's flashback as a twisted view of touya as dabi the villain in his minds' eye in this episode proper, along with ignoring best jeanist's comments in the plane abt how he was mentioning domestic violence lol, i felt the framing was mainly about how awful and unhinged dabi is instead of any points he made

mmh, well, if that's how you felt about the episode then I respect it, and I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it fully :(

As for me, I only agree with half of this. They didn't ignore Jeanist's comments about the domestic violence. That part was the first scene of the next chapter (it was shown as a flashback after Jeanist's dramatic entrance in the battlefield). So I'm expecting next ep to start right on that line after the usual brief summary. Though I do understand the frustration with not seeing that line immediately animated with the rest, I also understand that they couldn't fit the whole reveal in a single ep, what with the togachako fight taking ten minutes of screentime away. They likely wanted to wrap things up on a cliffhanger to keep the hype up and the end of chapter 291 was a good place for that I guess.

Regarding the framing, here's where I disagree. I think that so far the anime has done a better job of humanizing Dabi and making him less callous than the manga. You'll probably disagree, but. For the sake of explaining why I think that... I don't know if you've been watching the whole season or not, but Twice's episode was a particularly good example of this imho. They cut out the scene where Dabi's speeding up the stairs with his face completely contorted with manic rage, and they had him say the words "This isn't your fault, Twice. As usual, scummy heroes are to blame" to Twice's face. Which. Might be a subtle shift, but it frames Dabi as an ally, as someone who was reassuring Twice, and not simply coming back to defend an asset. It shows that Dabi cared about Twice as a person. I feel like reminding the audience of that took some of the edge off of Hawks' unkind and unsympathetic remark later ("is that the face of someone who just saw his friend die?").

As for this episode itself, I share your same frustration about them using a distorted still from Enji's flashback to animate that part. I indeed found it out of place there, too. However, imho the voice acting and the body language of the dancing more than made up for any bad impression you might've gotten from that single animation. In Shimono's voice you could hear the raw vulnerability in some of Dabi's lines, you could sense that the anger wasn't just madness. And from the way Dabi moved, unlike the manga, you could tell that he wasn't celebrating just to be a callous asshole or a monster, he was working through his adrenaline, through his emotions. The clapping, the jumping on the balls of his feet, the twirling... You know when anxious people bounce their leg to let out some pent up stress? Dabi's "dance" gave me the same feeling. I didn't see him as a monster there, despite the way he might've easily come across as one if you judged him by his words alone.

I don't know, personally I feel like if Bones really wanted Dabi to appear like an unhinged asshole, they wouldn't have put that much effort into all those details.

But that's just me. It's more than fair to feel differently! In fact, I talked to an acquaintance this afternoon that told me they expected more from the episode as well. Right now you probably feel swamped by all the excitement, but I find that it's much harder to post complaints publicly than it is to be excited about something, you know?

*hugs*

#ali replies #bnha anime

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foodfightnovelization · 9 months

Text

Chapter 20: Analysis and Discussion

Chapter 20 begins as the war rages on, with Polar Penguin trying to fight off a horde of Xobytes using only a can of bug spray. Dex rushes over to help him, but doesn't make it in time and Polar is stung in the back by one of the Xobytes' deadly stingers. General X laughs cruelly at Polar's imminent demise, leading Dex to finally snap, firing both his price tag guns at the General and driving him back (back where?).

This is pretty different to how it goes in the movie- in the movie, Polar is fighting off the Xobytes with a cupcake, and after he collapses Dex says "Nobody puts Polar in the freezer- I'm marking you down, shrimptoast!", shooting General X with a single price tag gun. Then while he's incapacitated, Maximilius rolls a can of Dinty Moore stew over General X, flattening him as he begs for mercy. He says Lady X promised to make him tall and thin, and as the can flattens him into the sidewalk, Dex quips he finally got his wish. I can't imagine why this isn't in the novelization- it creates somewhat of a plot hole, as we never see what happens to General X after this, whereas all the other Brand X villains are explicitly dealt with. In addition, here in the novelization Dex says "I'm coming for you, lady", whereas in the movie he says "I'm gonna pop your corn". I think I prefer the novelization's version of events once again, although it would've been nice to see General X actually get taken down here like we did in the movie.

Meanwhile back at the Copabanana, Lola is tending to the wounded when Francois expires. She sadly drapes a cheesecloth over his body, as Dex brings in Polar. The penguin utters a chilly goodbye to Dex before succumbing to freezer burn, with Dex insisting they use the entire box of tissues to wrap up Polar's body. This emotional moment is interrupted by Dr Nustrix's arrival, with him saying he's been running tests on the Xobytes' deadly fluid. This scene is more or less the same as it is in the movie, except there Lola also covers Francois's body with a tissue, as opposed to a cheesecloth.

Dex insists Nustrix find a cure for the poison, but the doctor stresses he's not a miracle worker (even though this is very obviously setup for a cure to miraculously be discovered later on). Vlad then comes in and tells Dex all the lightning rods are in place, with Dex saying the rest of their plan is now up to Cheazel the Weasel. Then Dan comes in (boy, this scene is a whole lot of people coming into rooms) and panics that the rest of their plan isn't going to work- there are too many Xobytes and nobody has any way of stopping them. Dex suggests Dan use his plane to fly him over the Brand X tower, so he can cut off their fuel source and depower the whole army at once.

This goes pretty differently in the movie, where Dr Nustrix talks a little longer about all the ways Brand X's deservative affects various Ikes, rambling about how Dex is always asking him to do the impossible. Vlad's dialogue is entirely different as well, but once again this is just down to his voice actor Larry Miller improvising over all his lines. (In the movie he talks for a while about he can't guarantee the rods are all in place because his eyes aren't that good- but his heart's in the right place, or it least it would be if he had one). The Ikes building the lightning rods was actually a whole scene in the movie, but here it's entirely absent. In the movie it happens just before Hairy confronts Lady X on the Brand X building, and is accompanied by a song called "Fire in the Skies". It's an entirely visual sequence however, so it makes sense it was cut- however this does mean Vlad's line here is the only acknowledgement we get that the lighting rods have actually been built. In addition, in the movie Dex runs outside to meet Dan, whereas in the novelization Dan stumbles into the club and takes a seat before they start talking. That's not a huge difference, but I do think it breaks up the scene a little better- having Dan and Dex's conversation take place outside prevents the movie's version of the scene just being four people walking into the Copabanana one after the other, waiting their turn to advance the plot.

The scene continues as Dex and Dan walk outside (in the movie, they were already outside at this point in their conversation) and discuss their plan to take down Brand X. Dan believes it's suicide, but Dex insists it's the right thing to do, and that Sunshine always used to say you can't go wrong if you do what's right. This scene is mostly the same as it is in the movie- there are a few slightly altered lines of dialogue, and the narration tells us Dex and Dan are dodging cans of whipped cream and ducking into foxholes to avoid explosions. However, in the movie the explosions are mostly happening further down the street and they merely step out of the way to avoid one at one point. Other than that, there are no notable changes here.

Dex realizes he never should've given up, and says he knows now his problems were just a hill of coffee beans compared to their store, their world, and their family. He tells Dan if he doesn't make it back he's counting on him to take his place, and the two set off on their mission to take Brand X down once and for all.

This scene is identical to the movie, and it's also the end of Chapter 20! Of note is that the line about his problems just being a "hill of coffee beans" is another reference to Casablanca- Rick's famous quote about how he's no good at being noble but the problems of three people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. I've gotta admit, sometimes it's actually pretty fun to see such a iconic and beloved movie referenced so much in something so cheesy, and this is one of those times. Anyway, stay tuned for Chapter 21 as Dex and Dan try to take down Brand X once and for all!

#daredevil dan #dex dogtective #foodfight #analysis #book review #christopher lloyd #charlie sheen #eva longoria #lady x #mr clipboard #novelization

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brucenorris007 · 1 year

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PLEASE tell me more about the AU you have in that snippet you wrote! I want to hear all about it!!

I'd love to tell you more about it!

... Provided there was more to tell.

Honestly, that snippet almost wrote itself yesterday. The only sources I can trace it back to are my headcanons about an immortal Knuckles and the sort of relationship he and Shadow could have if given the opportunity.

They're fundamentally very different characters, but the potential for mutual understanding between them, to say nothing of earnest and interesting interactions, is maddening in that it hasn't been explored in canon.

So yeah, all that and me being in a mood for Destined Child just kinda spawned that scene. There are a couple details I'd thought of that didn't make it into the snippet that I can share:

I pictured that with all the time Knuckles spent uncovering the secrets of Angel Island, learning its capacity for travel through space, and teaching himself the ins and outs of the Tornado 2 for sake of bringing it home, he's the de facto mechanic of this ragtag group of functionally immortal misfits. It's closer to patchwork than anything Tails or an actual engineer could do, but it's enough to keep the bots from falling apart. He likely grumbled and groused about it early on, but like with Tails' plane, he self-taught what he needed, because he's still just that kind of echidna more than a century after his friends passed.

And like I said, I think Shadow and Knuckles could have some great conversations if just given the chance; the freedom to write them a century or more removed from canon, where they've already achieved that mutual understanding and are–perhaps not the closest friends like Knuckles and Sonic or Rouge and Shadow, but at least comrades who understand and would fight on the other's behalf–their interactions just flowed naturally.

I also figured that Vector would've been the last of Knuckles' tribe of choice to pass away, being a crocodile and all. I guess that means he'd also probably be the one hanging on to Gemerl by that point, assuming Cream didn't have a family of her own.

And now I've wandered into the stream-of-consciousness thing I sometimes do once I start typing; that is, details that are occurring to me right just now mixed in with half-thoughts I had before I started typing.

Might as well put in a cut at this point.

Anyway, the other point that I left out of the snippet is Silver, both through lack of mentioning him and by being vague about how many decades ahead of the canon timeline the scene is. I'd toyed with having Shadow or Knuckles bring him up, something something timelines so shouldn't interact with him but also maybe leave a clue that the ARK may be capable of contacting them off planet? Scrapped the idea for being too complicated for not being the focus of the scene.

I actually hadn't considered a particular reason for them to leave the planet. I think I felt that their grief–alongside Eggman being gone–plus the fact that Knuckles discovered they could without using the ARK or building their own ship was reason enough. Omega's primary objective had been removed, Shadow would probably feel relatively confident that Mobius wouldn't urgently need his protection anytime soon, a liberated Metal has no reason not to follow Shadow, Gemerl likewise had been freed from his self-assigned guard duty, and nothing in Knuckles' job description specified the Master Emerald had to stay on Mobius.

The fifty tons of ordinance line re: Omega was just... aside from Rouge, I wasn't sure what else they'd consider too important to leave without. OH. Circling back a bit, I had thought that perhaps Knuckles got a little less stringent with Eggman's leftover scrap on his island, (I'm thinking... maybe a fortress or two and other leftovers?) so long as it's not everywhere. Probably shoved it in one place rather than going through the trouble of tossing it all off the island. Extra pieces for damaged bots in a pinch and if Shadow, for whatever reason, misses industrial environments he can camp out for a few hours.

I figured as I posted the snippet that Gemerl's addition to the island, what he'd bring, would probably just be a designated plot to garden and attend to some plant life, reminiscent of Vanilla's.

I figure just about anything Metal needs it has in its supercomputer dome.

I didn't think of them having a specific mission in mind when they took off; perhaps scouring beyond the stars based on some clues about how Knuckles' tribe and species disappeared? That thought's also interesting because I could feasibly tie that into other thoughts I have about my Only Sonic Remembers AU, which would make this... er, Immortal Crew a spinoff I suppose.

That covers all I've got on it, really.

#ask #ask answer #ask that halfway morphed into #headcanon #and #Bruce talks about #this got long #Glad you liked the ficlet though Measly!#thanks for the ask

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afaramir · 5 months

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3, 4, 7, 9 for the fic writer asks :)

hi anna thank u c: this took way too long lol i just spent days agonizing over what excerpts to pick and how i wanted to analyze them and falling asleep over my laptop keyboard but here it is finally (questions from this ask meme)

3. What’s a fic idea that you have but haven’t written yet?

dude the multitudes i think i could spend the character limit of this post listing them. opening the entire separate notes app on my phone where i keep them all. highlight reel: pacific rim chosen-one-as-in-sacrificial-lamb raleigh & stacker pentecost (you and i are the only ones who ever ran solo combat that's why i brought you here is CRAZY); james bond m(allory) vs the portrait of m(ansfield) that is very much not present in the halls of mi6 (until it is); lotr faramir and pippin and the ghost of boromir and the debt pippin owes to gondor which is not the debt that denethor demands of him. there are also like way too many little nickjasper oneshots that are sitting around waiting to be written. a selection: jasper leaving messages on nick's phone when he thinks he's dead, putting photos up + building a home together, couch fic, sleepy leather jacket fic, nick sending jasper on his first mission since they got together, 4x nick sweeping jasper off his feet, ambient new years day fic, nick meeting jasper's plane in the hangar, can you tell i am just holding them in my hands so tenderly. these are all such nothing concepts and yet theyre everything to me...

4. Do you prefer writing multi-chapter or oneshot fanfictions?

the day i write a chaptered fic again is the day i am dead in the damn ground. jk but like its the 20k oneshot unlimited scene breaks life for me i am afraid. putting in chapters gives me hives what if i have to go back and change something...ending a chapter gives the adhd a convenient place to sit down and refuse to move...all that

7. What's a trope you love to write?

depends on how broadly we are defining trope. actually i decided that this question just says "theme" instead of trope bc it was the middle of the night and i wanted to talk about Themes And Motifs. like.......guilt complex. the intersection between duty and desire. two people that have never had the luxury building a soft place to land together (because love is a place you could live in). uhhh. subversion of dark/light dichotomies (quiet and comfort and whispered secrets in the night and clarity and endings and unforgiving harshness in the light of day). Water Metaphors. that thing where a character sees their love interest in formalwear (or tactical gear. bc of. well the spy fiction) for the first time. i could go on but ive bastardized the prompt for long enough lol

9. What’s your favorite line(s) or scene(s) that you have written?

sickos.jpg YES...YES!!! i love this one. i will try to refrain from going way overboard but also...no promises. gonna try to not do any of the ones i did for ao3 wrapped last year lol

"He wants to reach out, wants to touch, wants to find Gareth among the bones of M but he can’t. Not now."

the way i played with names and titles and forms of address in race for a hurricane (bond, the first mallorytanner i ever published) remains one of my most favourite things i've done with words ever in my life. like when i figured it out i was like oh. i Understand them now. there are at LEAST three layers of masks before you even start to get into real people down there. and here is a situation that strips them all away. like mallory has to accept the death of mi6 before he can allow himself to fight for it one last time but their work life balance is pretty much defined by "when you are m" and "when you are not/when you are tanner's." when it's no longer that clear-cut it takes tanner reaching for him and saying gareth for both of them to understand that what they have together exists outside and past the boundaries of m-and-his-chief-of-staff. ugh its crazy stuff

"He's always known exactly how to push Nick's buttons and Nick's not made it a secret how hot he is for him right now, all confident competence, smug and self-assured in the knowledge that he's done everything Nick wants of him - and he has. He's done it to perfection. He reaches out and traces a finger across Jasper’s jaw, waits until he has his full attention before he lets his mouth curve with clean, shining approval. “Oh, Jas,” he says, “my sword.” Jasper lets out a sigh at Nick's words, pitched high enough that it could be a whine, tongue darting out to wet his lips. Nick steps back, lets Jasper sway half a step towards him, the slackness in his shoulders half want and half relief. Catches him with a hand against his chest. “Let me see you. What have you done to yourself?”"

well i had to put in this entire passage from just so long as this thing's loaded (marvel, unhinged nickjasper). i am just so fucking pleased with the build of the tension and the space of the pause before the Line Of All Time and just. i assigned myself to write Well More Things Should Be Weird And Horny and i think i pulled it off. like six paragraphs up there is pretty much straight up knifeplay in there. in my defense i didnt realize how intense it'd got until i had finished writing it. obviously the crown jewel of this excerpt and also of the whole fic is oh, jas, my sword which is a line that fucking bolt of lightning-ed into my mind exactly when i needed it and put me absolutely flat on my back. (i WILL take the "character being reduced to a deadly weapon by their love interest and liking it" trope to its most literal. Augh.) usually i see those kinds of major lines that i spend a whole scene's worth leading up to coming. I Did Not See This Coming.

man there's more but im putting a readmore in for the sake of everyone's sanity.

"This is leaping off an edge and trusting the ocean to catch her - trusting Raleigh to catch her, and when the drift comes up to cradle her and her feet come down onto the contact pedals she feels like she could eat the world whole. It makes her want to split herself open, loving hands and cold steel and take back what the kaiju have taken from her, the blood they’ve spilt over her insides[...]"

i! love! mako mori!!!!! my best girl!!!! they say when you set out on a quest for revenge dig two graves they! underestimate! me!! when i wrote tempered steel (pacific rim/mako mori-centric) i was like oh i Get her. oh her spine is literally a sword. oh the kaiju took everything from her and she will take everything from them and she will not die trying because she is the hurricane. she will open herself up with her own hands (and raleigh's hands because they are her hands and hnnnggg drift compatibility...) and draw out every drop of blood the kaiju have left inside her and. just incredible stuff

"now[...m]eans after this, after the kitchen they'd painted together, after the car rides to work, after Nick-and-Jasper becomes just Nick, and a house with Jasper's name still on the mortgage."

sorry about the blood in your mouth (marvel, the first nickjasper i ever published. life comes full circle) is the oldest fic in this set but i still think about this line regularly. just. when you are a spy and your husband is a spy and it turns out he's been a traitor all along and you fell for it hook line and sinker. and you cannot let anyone else kill him because you need it to be you, because you have done the thing you never thought or let yourself do, you have built yourself a life with him and now. now you are just nick, now you are a half of a whole and his name will always be on your mortgage and your house will always be yours, both of yours, and. Man. 2020 me was on something fuckoff crazy (quarantine blues is what).

"Dying for each other might be romantic in all the stories but in real life, it just hurts. In real life, it just leaves someone behind. They already know that Jasper will walk unflinching to the edge and let himself fall, that Nick will claw his way right out of the grave just to catch him when he hits the ground. This time, it’s their goddamn story. This time, they’ll run and they’ll get out, hand in hand. This time, they’re going to fucking live."

the whole ending paragraph of say the word and i'm already there (marvel, sneaking into the garage after the divorce to pick up my nickjasper boxes and fleeing with them). i love to subvert tropes and saw that post about instead of i will die for you try i will live because of you, for you and i finally got to do it. i love dying-for-each-other as much as the next girl but also like...let's be serious here for a minute. let's be so real character death in mainstream media is so cheap nowadays. In Real Life It Just Hurts. this is such an i will write you a thousand happy endings moment i think i cried when i wrote it like....man i love jasper sitwell. i love him so fucking much. we've really had quite enough of self-sacrifice and death and all that in my opinion. the knowledge of mcu canon jasper's fate dogs every step of my damn life. it haunts me okay I Need Them To Live.

#from the inbox #potatoesandsunshine #this got soooo long LMFAOOO its just the excerpts. i just love to quote my own fic lol #there are two asks that my inbox ate. if u sent me one of these....it might be in the void. but pls try again i wanna do more of em lol #i will try not to take 1000000 years to answer them...

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asseater3k · 9 months

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Metal Gear Mania Day:7

Spoilers for MGS3 below the cut

I liked The bullet style from day 5 so were gonna use that this

THE SORROW this was a very cool boss fight. in my instance it was terribly mechanically complex or strictly speaking engaging but i was glued to my seat and the screen for the whole thing I wasn’t aware that there’d be a boss fight like this when i decided to try not to kill anyone, to be honest i just wanted to look cool in front of girls, but when i put two and two together that he shows you and makes you fight everyone he kills I kinda wished id killed some people It’s such a cool idea, I was a little peeved that the cobra unit ghosts showed up because I busted my ass to get all the KOs but they did also all explode after that so fair enough. I do love that even though he has a health bar its empty cause hes a ghost and the framing of this boss fight as snake almost dying is cool and helped by the fact that if you call anyone on codec they give you their game over lines

OCELOT this fucking guy every scene in this game makes you realize that the guy we see in MGS 1&2 was the “normal” well adjusted version of this guy who doesn’t go around sniffing random people and keeps his raging desire for Big Boss somewhat in check him being the final encounter was a nice relax from the actual final boss and I like the scene where they fight in the plane

THE BOSS (FIGHT) this one fuckin hurt, It’s a beautifully designed fight, A final duel in field of white flowers nothing but but stealth and CQC I made this harder on myself by using the sneaking suit cause I wanted that contrast against The Boss’ suit but man If you pay attention Snake gets a little better in each cutscene against the boss and that comes to ahead with you having to counter her moves in the fight finally surpassing your mentor add on the timer which i thought would actually come into play cause a timer didnt pop up on screen when the fight started even when The Boss started counting downs herself i was a bit 50/50 but I did actually run out of time so I learned my lesson. You have to play such a mix of patient and aggressive to get through this one

THE EVA ESCORT SECTION Ive heard a lot of flack directed at the Emma section in the last game and honestly i thought this part was worse it wasn’t anything horrible just a bit slow there was a section at the begg=inning where soldiers kept poring out and she wouldn’t go from an attack state to follow state fast enough in the down time between the soldiers showing up so we kept getting detected and entering alert I was mostly annoyed cause she kept shooting people and I thought the game would count it against me like with snake in MGS2 other than that it was just strategic snack acquisition and on to the heart break.

THE ENDING AND THE BOSS while the ending of MGS2 melted my brain this one just made me sad its a much tighter and more personal narrative than the last game and I think thats a smart call if you do something like MGS2 again you’d have to escalate it which I think would be difficult to do so soon after and without getting too convoluted. Don’t get it wrong there’s still some crossing threads in this specifically with regards to EVA, The Boss , Ocelots allegiances EVA being a Chinese spy Ocelot being a triple agent reporting to krushev over gru and The US over even them and of course The Boss remaining loyal to the US despite Kowing the expanded mission out right required her death and disgrace. I dont have a ton i feel i can say about that without straight up beaming the game into your brain its just so fucking heart breaking man her talking about how the ceaseless churn of war turns soilders into these disposable pieces where their lives a relationships are ripped up by the whims of major leaders and bids for power money etc I have players a bit of peace walker at time of writing and the fact that snake didnt fucking get it and interpreted her dream not as a world with out conflict freeing them from the need to be this group beholdent and loyal to the whims of others over themselves or each other and can live in peace but instead as world simply not beholdent to any conflict while still perpetuating it while remaking loyal to themselves just guts me man

MOVING FOWARD i had a bit of trouble deciding to go onto peace walker or MGS4 I started peace walker but got so nervous that i made the wrong choice taht i actually asked a blog I follow who is way more knowledgeable about this kind of stuff than i am about how I should go (you should follow them by the way their @ is cerastes they make good posts and have very enjoyable streams sometimes) in short he told me that while that while I was not making a mistake as both of these games feed into eachother very well meaning it was ultimately a personal choice that personally he would play 4 first sating that its depiction of war as buisness would resonate with a peace walker play through. So I was going to do that then I waffled some more then I decided that MGS4 status as a conclusion to series at lest at the time would vibe better as the final gaem in the context of this deranged two marathon I’ve done. I’m mostly writing this bit so i dont come across as/ feel like an asshole for asking for advice and kind of disregarding it, and if you read this dreamer I really did appreciate the advice and would have played the order you recommended if I was playing this in a more casual way taking my time through them all etc, any way neurosis aside its on to peace walker yippee!!

#metalgearmania #mgs3 spoilers

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ptrckjcne · 1 year

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Fanfic ask game (shh its only 2 days late🙈) I'm doing several feel free to ignore the ones you don't like!

😍

🤡

💥

[ the brain my phone is old and doesnt have that emoji..]

fanfic emoji asks!

thank you for answering! this turned out to be a long one ahah, so i'm putting my answers below the cut so i won't clog up folks' dashes!

🤡 what's a line, scene, or exchange you've written that made you laugh? shit that's actually a very good question, and i don't think anything's like outright made me laugh, but there's been a couple of exchanges that have put a smile on my face, the first being this;

Grace groaned. “We’re in Hawaii , Danno. Have you even seen any houses around here that come closer to that dream than this? Steve, we can turn Danno’s white-picket-fence dream into a nice, beach-front dream instead, right?”

“That would have to be Danno’s decision when it comes down to it, but,” Steve shrugged innocently, noticing how Danny’s eyes narrowed as he glanced between him and Grace. “Who could ever complain about a nice beach-front dream?”

the second being a scene between steve and mary in an ongoing wip of mine, where she interrogates him about what's gone on his life since she saw him last (and why he suddenly shows up at her door, without calling first)

(for the next question i couldn't find the 😍 emoji on the list, but i'm taking a wild guess at which it may have been eheh – but let me know if there's anything else you want me to answer!)

🥺 is there a certain type of moment or common interaction between your characters that never fails to put you in your feels? steve and danny's kids. specifically steve and charlie, always.

exhibit a (from a wip that's coming soon): Danny spent the first two hours on the flight asleep, stuck in the aisle-seat, but he didn’t mind. Not when he had Steve on his left, and Charlie by the window. When he’d fallen asleep, they were talking about planes, and Steve was answering every question Charlie had as best he could, from the more general things about planes, to more technical things that was specific to the exact airliner they were on (which Danny came to learn was a Boeing 737-900, which had been introduced in 1997). When he woke, they were hunched together, Steve sleeping, an arm around Charlie, who was watching a cartoon on a device Danny didn’t recognise right away – because it was Steve’s phone.

🧠 pick a character, and I'll tell you my favorite headcanon for them. i'll give you my favourite headcanon for steve, and my favourite headcanon for danny – and if you want anything for anyone else, let me know!

steve: i'm a firm believer that steve has a bone frog tattoo in memory of freddie. it's located on his thigh, a well measured distance above his knee; that way he can always keep it 'hidden' underneath his shorts, etc., and there's only a very few people who knows about it (the tattooartist, cath, danny, nurses and doctors). i believe he planned it from the day he returned to hawaii after the op, but he didn't actually get it done until after he and cath had gone to make sure freddie made it home.

danny: the tim bradford incident. i mean, come on. danny as a beat cop in new jersey, looking all dapper in his uniform. one night he's out patrolling, when he gets dispatched to a party. it's a neighbour calling it in, saying it's disturbing their nightly peace. danny shows up, knocks on the door, and is immediately pulled inside to a wild cheering. cut to a few minutes later when he emerges, uniform torn, and a tipsy party-goer following behind apologising that they thought he was a stripper. because again, danny in his uniform? i could see that happening.

💥 how do you feel about criticism? i'm open for criticism! i think that, as long as the criticism is delivered in a respectful tone, there's no issue. there have been instances where i've received unpleasant direct messages, that can't accept. but personally, i feel like criticism is something that can help me grow, whether it be through writing or photography, or elsewhere in life. so yeah, i have no issue with receiving criticism if the criticism is given in a respectful way!

#fanfic emoji asks!

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specialagentsergio · 3 years

Text

rationalizations

rationalizations: a defense mechanism in which one makes up a false but reassuring explanation to explain their behavior and/or feelings to both themselves and others, thus avoiding the reality of why they are really acting or feeling as they do.

summary: You’re the psych evaluation for Spencer. You think he’s full of shit, so you refuse to sign his clearance form until he actually tells the truth.

pairing: spencer reid x f!reader

category: angst (happy ending)

content warnings: spencer’s canonical trauma, flashbacks, mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation, swearing

a/n: i wrote this for @imagining-in-the-margins‘ enemies to lovers event. it’s not my favorite trope, but one of the prompts sparked inspiration for me. i also took a good amount of inspiration from meredith’s various therapy scenes in grey’s anatomy, so if some of it feels familiar, that’s why! i swear i intended to make this cute and funny, but, well… here we are lmao.

word count: 3.6k

masterlist

Spencer throws his bag onto his desk with a frustrated huff. It thumps loudly, startling JJ at her desk across from his. She gives him a sympathetic look regardless. “Still not cleared yet?”

“No!” Forgetting that it’s wheeled, he drops himself into his chair. It skids backwards and he has to scramble to grab something to keep from falling out of it.

“Careful there,” JJ says, trying valiantly to suppress a laugh. “That psychologist's got you really worked up, huh?”

“I don’t know what she wants from me!” he complains. “It’s been nearly a month! Hotch’s ex-wife was murdered by an unsub, but they cleared him. I was only shot in the neck.”

“I mean, that’s still kind of a big deal,” she says. “You could’ve died, from the gunshot, or from the nurse that tried to kill you afterwards.”

“Speaking of that nurse,” he starts, “Garcia is the one who shot him and she’s been a wreck over it. She insisted on going to the guy’s execution. But the therapist cleared her!”

“Penelope’s not in the field,” JJ points out.

He crosses his arms. “Still. This isn’t the first time I’ve been shot. That possibility is part of the job. It’s not like it came out of nowhere and I was completely unprepared for it.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Spence,” she says. “Just keep all of your appointments and I’m sure you’ll be cleared soon.”

He pulls a stack of papers on his desk towards him. Paperwork—one of the things he’s actually allowed to do. “I better be,” he mutters.

---

“And it was really scary, you know?” Spencer wipes at his eyes with a tissue. “Not knowing if I was going to live or die.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He takes a deep breath. “But… it’s over now. The preacher who shot me died in the same shootout. Owen McGregor, the leader of the corrupt deputies, died later that night, in another shootout. And Greg Baylor, the one who posed as a nurse and tried to kill me, was sentenced to death row and he’s gone now, too.”

His psychologist makes a note on the paper in front of her, but doesn’t say anything, so he continues.

“I… I feel better now, just letting that out.” He takes a new tissue and dries his nose. “I feel ready now. Ready to go back to work.”

She nods slowly, considering him. But she doesn’t even look towards her desk where the clearance form sits, frustrating him to no end. After five minutes of silence, he breaks.

“You can’t be serious.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’ve been coming to these sessions for over a month, and I’m still not cleared to be in the field. I…” He musters up more tears and makes sure his voice wavers during his next words. “I just don’t know what you want? I’ve tried everything.”

“No, you haven’t,” she says plainly.

He blinks in surprise, sending some of the crocodile tears down his cheeks. “What?”

She crosses her legs. “You’re full of shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not being honest with me, and I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself either,” she says. “You’re a great actor. I can see how you’ve gotten clearances easily before. But that stops with me.”

Spencer stares at her. “I don’t understand.”

She moves her notebook to the side. “What happened in Texas isn’t the first time your life’s been in danger. Why do you think that is?”

“Wh—that’s part of my job,” he argues, fake crying long since forgotten.

“Not to the extent that you take it. I’ve read your file,” she says. “You take unnecessary risks with regularity.”

The tissues crumple in his hand as he clenches it. “I do not.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?”

“Of your career.” Yet she doesn’t take out his file, or look at her notes. She speaks from memory. “2005. The BAU is assisting with a hostage situation. You go into the train, posing as someone who is there to remove a microchip from the unsub, but the first thing you do? You take off your bulletproof vest.”

“Okay, clearly you don’t understand what the situation was,” Spencer cuts in. “Ted Bryar was suffering from a psychotic break. He was somewhat unpredictable, and he told me to take off the vest.”

“And you just listened?”

“He—he had a gun, and was threatening both me and the other passengers with it!” he says. “What was I supposed to do, not listen?”

“Uh, yeah,” she replies. “You easily played into his delusions just a few minutes later to distract him. Why not do that to keep yourself safe?”

“I was twenty-four and was running on adrenaline,” he says defensively. “And it was my first time doing something like that. You can’t expect me to think of everything.”

“You’re right, I can’t,” she agrees. “So let’s jump forward a few years. How about the time you approached a teenager who was wielding an assault rifle with no protection, not even your own firearm?” she challenges.

“You mean Owen Savage? That was a unique situation,” he protests. “I knew I could talk him down.”

“No, you didn’t. You thought you had a good chance, but there’s no way to be one hundred percent sure of that. He was volatile, and on a killing spree,” she counters. “You didn’t know if you’d succeed--”

“I did!” He startles himself by unconsciously raising his voice, but he doesn’t apologize. “I did, because….”

“Because you related to him,” she fills in. “And that’s fine. Having empathy for an unsub doesn’t suggest something’s wrong in and of itself. But you still put yourself, and the rest of your team, in danger, didn’t you?”

He crosses his arms. “I got that lecture from Hotch when it happened, okay?”

“So then why’d you confront an unsub alone a few years later in Miami?” she asks. “You didn’t even tell anyone where you were going. You left your vest behind and just ran off.”

“I was having a head—wait, how do you even know that happened?” he questions. “It wasn’t in the report.”

“Well, first of all, you just confirmed it,” she points out, and he wants to kick himself. “Secondly, I can read between the lines.”

“I was having a headache,” he repeats. “I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. I just knew Julio’s life was in immediate danger, so I went to help him.”

“Uh-huh. More recently,” she says, brushing past his excuse, “You confronted your girlfriend’s stalker without your vest or gun.”

Spencer’s getting angry now. “I was trying to save Maeve. She asked me to leave them behind.”

“And you simply listened. Do you see the pattern I’m drawing here, Dr. Reid?” she asks. “These are just a few of the instances that stand out. Time and time again, you put yourself in unnecessary danger. So I’ll ask you again. Why do you think that is?”

Spencer looks over her—really looks over her, trying to understand what she’s getting at. “Are… are you suggesting that I’m suicidal?” he asks quietly.

She looks him straight in the eye. “You don’t act like someone who wants to be alive.”

It’s like she set off a bomb in his brain. Memories, and the feelings attached to them, emerge—Elle handcuffed to a seat, a teenager with a rifle, a blinding headache, Maeve and blood on the warehouse floor.

“Here’s what I see,” she says. “I see a man who’s been through so, so much. Your mother is mentally ill, your father left--”

His father is packing a suitcase. Spencer doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do or say, so he falls back on what he knows.

“Statistically, children who grow up in two-parent households attain three more years of higher education than children from single-parent households.”

It doesn’t help. “We’re not statistics, Spencer.”

“Your file says she’s staying at an institution, and with your father out of the picture, I can only assume you were the one who had her admitted--”

“Spencer, please don’t do this to me!” she cries as she’s escorted out of the house by Bennington Sanitarium’s transport staff.

“A few years into your work here at the FBI, you were kidnapped, tortured and drugged--”

He’s tired and cold and his whole body aches. Tobias—the real Tobias—looms over him with a syringe.

“Please. I don’t want it,” he pleads of his captor. “I don’t want it, please.”

The needle punctures his skin regardless.

“—you were held hostage by a cult leader--”

Emily sits across from him on the plane with a black eye. “What Cyrus did to me is not your fault.”

He pretends to agree.

“—you went through the death and reappearance of Agent Prentiss--”

He’s tried to make it clear to Jennifer that he wants to be left alone, but she won’t stop trying to talk about it with him, and he’s had enough.

“I came to your house for ten weeks in a row crying over losing a friend, and not once did you have the decency to tell me the truth.”

“—and your girlfriend was shot in front of you.”

“Who’s Thomas Merton? Who is he?” Diane demands, gun pressed against Maeve’s head.

“He’s the one thing you can never take from us,” Maeve replies, and Spencer’s heart drops. Thomas Merton is Maeve’s way of saying goodbye—she’s giving up.

“Wait!” he cries out, but it’s too late.

“This is just some of the more traumatic stuff. And then there’s what happened last month, which is why you’re here. You present a face of not being bothered by all of this, because that’s what you’ve been doing all your life, but I think you are bothered. You really, really are. And you don’t want to admit to anyone just how much it all has affected you. Maybe you don’t even want yourself to know.” Her expression and tone of voice are certain.

Spencer can’t take it anymore. The whirlwind of emotions and memories is overwhelming.

“The number of times you’ve almost died is staggering--”

“Yeah, and sometimes I wish I had!” He glares at her, breathing heavily. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

But she doesn’t seem intimidated or alarmed at all. She leans back in her armchair. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

The response only serves to make him angrier. She questioned him relentlessly and made him admit something he swore in the dark hours of sleepless nights that he’d never think again, never voice, let alone admit to anyone. She forced it out of him, forced. She made him say it against his will.

So why does he feel a sense of relief?

“I…” Tears well up in his eyes—real ones this time. “I’m done,” he chokes out.

He pushes himself off of the couch and out the door, slamming it shut behind him.

---

He storms in Hotch’s office and demands to see a different psychologist. But she was one step ahead of him—a few hours before the appointment, she had emailed Hotch and told him that under no circumstances should Spencer be allowed to get a clearance from someone else.

“And you’re going to believe her?” he cries.

“She’s doing her job, Reid.”

“You barely know her! You’ve known me for a decade!”

“Yes, I have,” Hotch agrees. “And you’ve told me yourself that you’ve fooled psychologists and therapists before. So if this one is saying you’re not ready yet, I’m inclined to believe her.”

Spencer just stares at him, but as usual, Hotch doesn’t blink.

“Unbelievable,” Spencer eventually mutters.

“Take the rest of the day off,” Hotch replies, glancing down at fists Spencer hadn’t realized he was clenching.

“Fine.”

Too agitated to stand in the elevator, he takes the stairs. As he stomps down them, he swears he’ll never go back to her office, even if it means never going into the field again.

A week passes, then two, and he hasn’t seen the psychologist since. But he doesn’t feel any better—he actually feels worse. It’s like her words broke a dam in his mind, in his gut, and feelings of unease and uncertainty won’t pass. It keeps him up at night. Her words echo in his head. “You don’t act like someone who wants to be alive.”

Spencer’s had yet another sleepless night and is struggling not to doze off at his desk despite the coffee he’s drinking. He stands up with the intention of splashing some water from the bathroom sink on his face, but his feet take him somewhere else.

He stares at the nameplate on the door. He swore he’d never go back, yet he feels compelled to knock.

It only takes her a few moments to answer. “Dr. Reid. Can I help you?” she asks.

“I…” He sighs. “Are you busy?”

“No. Come on in.” She steps to the side, opening the door wider to let him pass. He sits down on the couch.

She waits patiently. She doesn’t rush him. She lets him speak first.

He wrings his hands in his lap, staring down at them. “Something you said is bothering me.”

“What was it?”

“About… living,” he admits quietly. “I… I think you might have been right.”

When he gets the courage to glance up at her, he finds a soft smile on her face. “Would you like to talk about it?”

Spencer hadn’t realized he was expecting judgment and disdain until it didn’t happen. His shoulders slump down in relief. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think I would.”

---

“You’re still thinking about her, aren’t you?”

Spencer looks up from his paperwork, slightly out of it, to find Derek watching him. His coworker had, indeed, caught him thinking about her again. His psychologist. Well, former psychologist. After his second session back with her, she’d handed over a clearance form and a referral to a therapist outside the bureau to see long-term.

“And you better follow up with that,” she’d told him, the corner of her mouth turning up despite her serious tone of voice. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

He’d promised that he would, and had followed through. But despite the progress he was making with the new therapist, he was feeling a little disappointed that he didn’t get to see her anymore. He only saw her in passing, sometimes in the elevator or walking down the hallways of the building. They would exchange hellos, she would ask how he was doing, then give him a little wave as she left. Each time his heart would skip a beat, and he’d feel an urge to follow her to wherever she was going.

Yet he hadn’t quite realized why he seemed to be preoccupied with her until a dream he had a few weeks ago—a dream in which he found himself kissing her. Despite being alone in his bedroom, he’d woken up feeling embarrassed. He promised himself that he would put her out of his mind. Having a crush on his psychologist? It was ridiculous.

But then he saw her in the elevator a few days later and he couldn’t help but analyze her body language. It was open, and she twirled her hair around a finger while she looked at him to ask him how he was. A few other people entered the elevator on the next floor, but her attention remained on him. They were subtle signs, but signs that he recognized nonetheless—signs of attraction. And once he started seeing them, he couldn’t stop.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spencer tells Derek, picking back up the pen he hadn’t noticed he dropped.

“You can’t pull that on me, kid,” he replies. “It’s your psychologist. You can’t stop thinking about her, can you?”

Spencer sighs. “So what if I can’t?”

“So go ask her out already!” Derek says like it’s obvious.

“You don’t think that’s just a little inappropriate?”

“You’re not seeing her as a client anymore, are you?” he points out. “Go for it, kid. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”

Spencer takes the advice—as soon as Derek said it, he knew he was right. He would regret not taking a chance on her and the connection he felt. Sure, she’d helped him with therapy, but it went deeper than that. It feels like she knows him.

He leaves the bullpen ten minutes early that evening, hoping to catch her before she leaves for the day. On her doorstep, he feels just as nervous as he did on the day he admitted that she was right, but it’s a different kind of nervous. An excited nervous. He knocks on the door.

She’s surprised when she seems him. He watches as her pupils dilate, and it boosts his confidence. “Dr. Reid. Can I help you?”

“You can. I’d like to talk,” he says.

“Oh. Well, I guess I could do that,” she says. “I thought things were going well with the therapist I referred you to, though.”

He shakes his head. “No, I don’t mean I want an appointment.”

Her eyebrows come together in confusion. “Okay, then, what do you want?”

Spencer doesn’t hesitate. “I want to take you out to dinner.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I really like you, and I think we’re meant to be together,” he replies, voice softening a bit.

She pauses before answering. When she does, her voice is gentle. “Dr. Reid, sometimes a medical professional’s care can start to feel like affection over a period of time, but--”

“No one has ever listened to me like you do,” he interrupts.

“That’s my job,” she points out.

“I’ve seen therapists before, but none of them have been like you,” he counters. “You understand me.”

She sighs. “Well, I’m glad I was a good fit and was able to help you. But that doesn’t mean that I see you as anything more than a client.”

“You’re lying.”

“Excuse me?”

“You do feel something more for me,” he says firmly, but then backtracks a little. “Well, I know you’re attracted to me at least.”

She blinks and shakes her head slightly, take aback. “Dr. Reid, this is not appropriate--”

“Please call me Spencer,” he says, then jumps into his explanation. “See, when we’re attracted to someone, our bodies display involuntary signals, and I’ve seen you do some of them when you’re around me. Whenever we run into each other here, your body will turn a little towards me and you’ll play with your hair. Your attention is almost entirely focused on me. And, when you see me, your pupils dilate. They did it when you opened the door just a few minutes ago. Oh, and I’m attracted to you, by the way,” he adds as he realizes how one-sided he’s been. “I imagine my pupils probably dilate when I see you, too.”

Her mouth opens and closes a few times, like she wants to speak but doesn’t know what to say. She looks flustered, and he wonders if maybe he’s pushed it too far or said too much, but he can’t turn back now. “So, please, let me take you out,” he says quietly. “Just… just give it a chance.”

She bites her lip and looks at the ground. There’s a crease between her eyebrows, which he’s come to learn means she’s thinking. She speaks seriously when she looks back up. “If I go out with you, I can’t treat you anymore. If you ever need another evaluation or session, you’d have to get it from someone else.”

“I know,” he says. “I get along well with the therapist you referred me to, though. And having to get clearance from a different psychologist at the bureau is something I’m willing to give up in favor of getting to know you better.”

She considers him. “You’re serious about this,” she states.

It’s not a question, but he answers it anyways. “I am.”

She tilts her head to the side, eyes unfocusing as she ponders the situation. Eventually, she says, “Let me think about it.”

It’s not exactly the answer he was hoping for, but he’ll take it.

---

It’s only six PM, but Spencer is already exhausted. He unlocks his apartment door, fully intending to collapse onto his bed, but instead receives a pleasant surprise in the form of his girlfriend waiting for him on the couch. He can’t help but smile.

“Sweetie, what are you doing here?” he asks, then adds, “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Penelope told me it was a bit of a rough case,” she replies. “And I missed you.”

She holds out her arms and he takes the invitation, joining her on the couch and laying down between her legs, placing his head on her chest. “I missed you, too.”

Her next words are overly familiar. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Hey, we agreed to no therapy,” he says. “Something about I can’t be your client anymore?”

She huffs. “This isn’t therapy. This is being a good partner.”

Spencer smiles into the fabric of her shirt, snuggling in closer. “I know, I’m just teasing you. I don’t need to talk about the case,” he says, finally answering her original question. “I feel fine now that I’m here with you.”

She lets out a pleased hum and starts running her fingers through his hair. “I ordered take-out for dinner, by the way.”

“Where from?”

“You know where.”

A wide grin spreads across his face. She must have ordered take-out from the restaurant he took her to on their first date. He lifts his head to look her in the eye. “Aren’t you glad you said yes to me all those months ago?”

“Oh, I suppose,” she says with pretend annoyance, rolling her eyes.

Then she kisses him.

Spencer’s never been so happy to be alive.

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

tell me what you thought here!

please note that i DO NOT ENDORSE asking out your therapist/former therapist. this is fanfiction. thank you.

general taglist: @calm-and-doctor , @spencerreid9

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid angst #criminal minds fanfic #criminal minds self insert #spencer reid #angst #my fic #i just cannot stop myself from writing about mental health issues and treatment can i

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volleychumps · 3 years

Text

« Ghost.

~ the one in which Sakusa Kiyoomi sees you happy after he broke your heart.

format: One-shot

genre: angst

- Sakusa Kiyoomi x Reader

Warning(s): Use of alcohol, set in after-high school

One of my older requests I’ve kept, this fic is influenced by the song ‘Ghosts’ by Jeremy Zucker. Although it’s not a song fic, very sad content is ahead.

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

“I told you to wear your gloves.”

“Whaaat? Why would I do that when your pockets are so warm?”

“How convenient for you.”

“Here, put your hands in here with me. Live a little, take your gloves off! It’s so warm~”

Sakusa swallowed. Dark eyes stared blankly through the glass out into the deluge of rain, a slightly damp travel bag seated on the plastic seat next to him, a gentle prod of his fingers making him snap out of it. Komori sends him a worried stare, noting that his cousin seemed to have changed a lot from his travel abroad.

The slight glimmer in Sakusa’s eyes before he left was just as dimmed the day he boarded that plane.

“Does anyone else know you’re back in Japan?”

“Who would I tell?” Sakusa shrugged as his cousin met him with a incredulous stare. “The team is expecting my return-”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Sakusa stiffens, clearing his throat before sipping the warm beverage before him. He didn’t taste anything, eyes flitting over to the half-drunken matcha in his cousin’s cup. That reminds him of-

“You didn’t tell Y/N?”

There it is.

Silence filled the distance between the two before Sakusa’s dark coffee hits the table with a prominent thud.

“It’s not like she would want to see me.”

“She could never hate you, you know. Especially after-”

“Komori.” Sakusa’s stare hardened, fingers clasping at ceramic. Komori’s lips press back together in a thin line, opting to swirl the matcha tea in his cup before bowing his head slightly in apology.

“I told you that you wouldn’t like it.”

“Blegh! How do you drink it so strong?”

“...swap with me.”

“Don’t tell me you ordered a matcha because you knew I wouldn’t like it.”

“Ha. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Awh, Kiyoomi-Kun!”

“Gross.”

The rain was less now, the two figures in the rain under the abandoned shop seeming to dissapitate with the downpour. It was him, holding a girl’s hands in his pockets as he stubbornly adjusts the hat on her head. Two half-drunken drinks that had been swapped sat next to them-

“Let’s get going, yeah?” Komori stands, having finished his tea as Sakusa rips his gaze away from the familiar scene.

“You seem tired from all the traveling. Didn’t you get any sleep on the plane?”

He hasn’t slept well in a long while.

“I did.” He finishes the americano in one go, ignoring the burn in his throat as he longs for the taste of alcohol. “Lead the way.”

Sakusa casts one more glance through the glass window. The two figures were nowhere to be seen.

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

His thumb grazed his phone screen over your contact. Backspace. Hello-. Backspace. Delete. Hover over delete option. Back to messages. I’m back in-.

Sakusa sighs through his nose, a futile attempt to release the tightness in his chest, before turning on his side as the sun peeks in through his window. Five hours at most, a lot better than his usual nights.

Perhaps it was because he knew you were a mere cardrive away.

“Why are you here?”

“...it was on the way.”

“So...what can I do for you?”

Silence.

“Unless....no way, did you miss me?”

“No.”

“You answered too fast, meaning you’re lying.”

“So what if I did?”

“Come here Kiyoomi, spend the night.”

He throws his phone.

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

“You hurt her, you know that?”

“Is she...doing okay?”

Sugawara sighs heavily, running a hand through his gray locks across from the stoic boy. Sakusa was lucky at least one of your friends was willing to give him the time of day, seated across one of your more gentle friends in the university library.

“...she’s doing fine. She’s holding down a gig at Onigiri Miya while she finishes her degree.” Sugawara stands, guilt filling his hazel eyes before hardening slightly. “But you don’t get to ask about her.”

“I know.”

“You walked away from her when all she did was give you everything her world had to offer.”

Sakusa grits his teeth. “I know.”

“Do you?” Sugawara wasn’t easily irritated, flipping a page in his textbook before meeting your ex with an even stare. “If you knew how hard it was for everyone to pick up the pieces-”

“Thanks for meeting me.” Sakusa’s chair scraped the floor as he stood abruptly, heart pounding in his ears. He felt Suga’s stare on his back as he exited the library, stopping at the exit as his breathing picks up.

“Am I even allowed here?”

“It’s fine. Relax! You look like a Uni student.”

“...Y/N.”

“Hm?”

“I-”

“Sakusa?”

It had been a whole year since he heard that voice, not haunting his dreams, but in reality. Dark eyes widen a fraction as his breath catches in his throat at the smile that spreads across your lips. You had gotten more beautiful than the image his mind spun back and forth, rooting him in place.

“You’re back?”

“...Mm.”

“That’s great! Tell the team I’m looking forward to your welcome home party tonight. It was great seeing you.”

Sakusa’s lips parted, but no words came out. He was taken back abruptly as your shoulder brushed his as you walked past

“Don’t be a burden.”

“K-Kiyoomi, how could you-?”

“I don’t need to leave something annoying behind me when I leave to train.”

“Something? Kiyoomi, it’s me. It’s us-”

“Don’t wait for me.”

“I will! You just need to say the word, and-”

“Are you usually this pathetic? We were never in love, Y/N. You were just convenient.”

“You’re lying-!”

“Good luck, Y/N. I don’t know when or if I’ll be back. Don’t look for me.”

He needed to let you go, no matter what lies stain his tongue. He needed you to be okay without him, not looking out the window everyday in hopes that promises over text and call were enough.

And that was the day he brushed past you, a stream of even tears falling from your widened eyes as your heart shattered in your chest-

not realizing that the sight of Sakusa’s back shielded the view of the single trickling tear down his cheek.

But still, he kept walking.

“Y/N.”

Dark eyes widen when you flinch on instinct, Sakusa’s hand hovering in mid-air over your arm before your smile is back. His chest tightens as he realizes that it’s merely polite, not holding the same love it once did.

You tilted your head, and Sakusa could feel his fingers tremble at the shine in your eyes.

“I gotta go, Sakusa. Suga’s waiting. It was great to see you though, you look good.”

It was his turn to watch your back as unshed heat brimmed his eyes, but you don’t look back to notice.

...Sakusa?

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

“I need to go for a walk.”

“What? Dude, this is your party.” Atsumu blinks in disbelief as Bokuto and Hinata chow down on plate after plate of onigiri. His friends bustle around the shop, but you were no where to be seen.

“Five minutes, you imbecile. I won’t run away.”

“You better not!” Atsumu slurs, on the edge of absolutely hammered as he flashes Sakusa a wide thumbs-up. “You’ll make our guests sad!”

Out of everyone in this party, he wanted to see you the most.

Sakusa manages to make it out the back door, planning to watch for your arrival until he sees your figure seated not far away in the grass, cradling a single drink in your hand as your eyes stare up at the clouded stars. Faded, but they were barely there as your eyes seemed to be questioning the world up above.

It was a lie.

Sakusa’s nails bit into his palms.

It wasn’t just convenient for him.

He swallows back the lump in his throat.

You were his world. His first and last love.

He begins to take a step-

Please let him be your last.

“Whatcha doin’ out here?”

He stops in place, watching from mere feet away as Osamu Miya plops down in the grass next to you. You jokingly protest as Osamu takes your drink, taking a swig from it before looking at you with something in his eyes.

No. It wasn’t something new to Sakusa, because that’s the way he used to look at you.

“...He came back.” Your voice was almost a whimper, and Osamu gently tugs you to lean your head on his shoulder.

“I know.”

“I’m happy, Osamu.”

“I didn’t say anythin’.”

Sakusa should’ve walked away. He should’ve willed his feet to move, but he couldn’t. All his dark eyes could do was watch as you rolled your eyes playfully, tugging the drink out of Osamu’s hands before setting it down and cupping his face with one hand-

Doing that thing where your hand slipped into Osamu’s denim jacket pocket.

“I love you. He was the past. You are my present. And...my future, hopefully?”

Osamu’s lip twitches upwards as he turns his face so he can kiss your palm that’s cupping his cheek.

“I know, princess. You’re allowed to be sad, I’m not a monster.” Osamu pauses, thinking for a second before nodding once. “Unless you want me to be a monster, I can beat-”

He’s cut off as you roll your eyes, smiling as you kiss him so lovingly-

Ah. This must’ve been how you felt the day he left you in pieces.

Sakusa wanted to scream, but a warm trickle of wetness slipped down his cheeks instead as it began to rain, the clouded stars turning darker ironically as Sakusa realizes that the shop he’s standing outside of-

the abandoned one where he kept you warm that winter night.

It was now Onigiri Miya.

He felt his legs almost give out as he stumbles to the side of the building, shielding him from view as your panicked laughs sound over the rain.

“Y/N. I...I think I-”

“Kiyoomi?”

“What?”

“I’ll love you more than you’ll ever know.”

Sakusa couldn’t tell if the drops on his face was the rain, feeling like he was floating as his skin became numb to the cold.

In fact, he wished that this was one of his dreams, the ones where he punished himself with images of you in his arms.

That way, he could keep on living with your ghost.

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

Brb It’s not like I’m vv sad as I write this.

General works: @takemetovalhalla @kasandrafaye @savemesteeb @dreebbles @yams046 @let-me-have-my-own-name @deadontheinsidebut @lifeisntjustblackandwhite @curiouslilbeast @aprettyfruit @wisepandaslimeland @h0ngh0ngh0ng @lmkjimin @orangegiraffe7 @dai-tsukki-desu @kac-chowsballs @spikertrash @yamaguwuchi @lord-suneater-explosion @nekomawhore @holaaaf@babyybokutoakaashi @lexysclubhouse @disneyloving-muggle

#haikyuu angst #haikyuu fic #haikyuu!!#haikyuu one shot #sakusa #sakusa kiyoomi #sakusa kyoomi x reader #haikyuu sakusa #sakusa angst #haikyuu sad #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu oneshot #haikyuu x you #haikyuu x y/n #osamu scenario #haikyuu osamu #osamu miya #haikyuu sugawara #sugawara koushi

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stormblessed95 · 3 years

Text

JiHope Dynamics

JiHope is definitely one of my favorite friendships! I adore them. They have absolutely zero boundaries and are the sweetest together. Our sunshine duo, our mood makers, our smile line, our main dancers! For me, it's the way they go from having some of the highest levels of eyebrow raising skinship, to the "omfg you are so annoying, I can't stand you" moments, then straight back to the "I love you and can't live without you" moments. Lol Disclaimer, no I don't think there is any romance here. But man, do they have some moments! These are of course all just my personal opinions, you are free to agree or disagree. Let's talk about JiHope!

Jimin and Jhope together have minimal boundaries.... MINIMAL boundaries. Maybe it's the way they both enjoy being sexy... maybe it's the dancer vibes... maybe it's the extreme comfort they have with each other from many years as roommates, I don't know, but boy is their physical intimacy HIGH and their boundaries very low. Lol we see their bond together whenever they dance together for fun. There is no shortage of wandering hands or bodies pressed close. We see it in the way they are comfortable exchanging heated looks and getting super close to each other's faces. We see it in the full body check outs and smirks passed between them often. We see it in the constant massages exchanged. The way Hobi tells us that Jimin falls asleep super fast whenever you massage his legs, meaning he has probably done that for him often. Jimin also melts under Hobis massages for sure. We see it whenever Jimin often returns the favor with foot or shoulder/neck rubs for Hobi too. We see it in their blanket kick choreo, where the other two duos keep it pretty calm, JiHope are Wilding with their stage kisses, changing it up everytime and letting it continually escalate (no, no actual kisses were ever exchanged). Lol

We see in the way Hobi continually and always seems to be placing hands on Jimin's neck and pulling him in by the back of the neck. If they are next to each other, they will probably have a hand on each other somewhere too. We see their comfort and ease with touch in many behind the scenes videos where Hobi is sliding his hand around Jimins thigh, or Jimin is zipping himself up into Hobi's jacket. Or the way Hobi often tries to rub at Jimin's chest whenever he is wearing something low cut, it's the mental care. Lol or the constant ass tapping. We see their bond in the way they consistently want to dance together, cuddle together, put arms around each other. We see it in the way Hobi is comfortable to climb on top of Jimin and tease him in a "your gonna get some" manner (from the 2016 toyko vlive). Or simply the way they tackle each other in hugs and affection. And just their general air of comfort in being in each other's space.

We can see how close they are and how much they love in each other in the ways that they always compliment each other and protect each other too. Hobi is 100% Jimin's certified protector from himself. The way he is constantly grabbing him to keep him from falling over, catching him when he stumbles. He is always ready to catch him, I swear, his reflexes are amazing. Or when he puts his hand out to make sure Jimin doesn't bump his head. Making sure he walks in the correct direction, or doesn't get too close to any fireworks or any issues in the stages. How he spent an entire plane ride taking care of Jimin who was feeling dizzy and motion sick, saying he was "transferring my energy to you." Or how they danced holding onto each other with Jimins bare feet standing on top of Hobi's feet. Or how Jimin massages away Hobi's sore muscles, immediately turns to let him know about anything dangerous on stage so he can dance more carefully, like if the floor is wet, is concerned for him if he is overworking. Or how Jimin simply always has open arms for cuddles if Hobi gets hurt ever. How they buy each other things or clean each other up, simply just take care of each other whenever needed. It's soooo soft and so sweet.

The way they are the first to call each other the best dancers in BTS and always hype each other up and go to the other for performance advice. We see it in the way they consistently hype each other up for looking good. Hobi constantly calling Jimin sexy or telling him how well he pulls off certain outfits or jewelry. Jimin consistently complimenting Hobi on how good he looks or how sexy/handsome he looks that day, making Hobi get quite shy and flustered like he does anytime the guys give him too much attention. How Jimin makes sure we all know that Jhope is THE perfect person, his voice, his height, everything about him is perfect and cool. The way they glow under praise from each other or how Jimin seeks out his praise and approval and shares how happy it makes him whenever Hobi does praise him. They love each other SO MUCH. And how they love spending time together, consistently going out together for lunches, late practices, or to museums. The way that they used to stop and go out shopping together in all the cities they stopped at during tours. The way that when they both were in Japan together for work schedules (just the 2 of them for interviews and promotions), they made sure to put some time aside to go to Disney world together and enjoy rides and some fun downtime. And they take the cutest selcas together whenever they go out on these little dates. I just KNOW there is a million others that we haven't gotten to see.

We also see their bond in the way they get annoyed with each other, often over very little things. It gives peak we've been roommates for freaking ever vibes that I absolutely love. We see it in the way Hobi told us all about how he accidentally got gum stuck on Jimin's phone case, how Jimin was so mad and cursing about it alot. And how Hobi didn't confess at all that it was him who ruined it until the 2018 BTS prom party where he also gifted him the same phone case as a replacement years later. Lmao we see it in the annoyance in Hobi's face anytime Jimin gets in his face being bothersome, like shoving his lollipop in his face when he was talking to the camera. Or when Hobi was showing the camera how cute all his hearts were for the ARMY heart event during Gogo, and Jimin just came up to show off his heart instead that was like 10x bigger than J-hope's hearts. Lol we see it in the way that Jimin tells how often Hobi would get annoyed at him and scold him every day about cleaning up his stuff in their room. We see it in BV4 when Hobi was totally betrayed and called Jimin to scold him and express his betrayal when BTS left him at the gas station as a prank, "How could you do this to me, Jimin ah? I expected this from everyone, but not from you!" Lmfao or the way that they cling onto each other in Koala type hugs in order to achieve forgiveness from however they annoyed each other and it's always quickly given, usually with lots of laughter and eye rolls.

We see their emotional connection and how they close they are all the time. We see it in the way that Jhope has said that even though Jimin is the younger one, he often feels like he is his hyung because of how well Jimin takes care of him and is always there for him. How he evenly jokingly called Jimin hyung during a skit they did together, which again highlights how close they are to even jokingly allow those drops in honorifics or the role reversal jokes. We see it in memories just recently when Jimin was massaging Hobi and helping him stretch and giving him pep talks, making him laugh and basically just babying the heck out of him before they started dance practice back up again. We see it in the way that everyone in BTS, including Jimin, says that Hobi is like their battery, their energizer and their sunshine, but Hobi says that Jimin is that person for him. We see it when Jimin gave himself as a present to Hobi for his birthday one year and Hobi responded by just kissing him on the top of the head. Or when Jhope was crying because of all the sweet messages from his parents and his sister that was sent to him on his birthday and feeling homesick, he wanted Jimin to hold him and drew comfort from him being there with him. We see it whenever they see the other giving hugs or attention to someone else and they also go up to ask for those hugs too.

We see it in the way that they put so much thought and effort and care into each other and what the other likes. Such as when Hobi gifted Jimin a limited edition custom CD of his solo song promise during a RUN episode. There is only 2 in the whole world, one for Jimin and one for Hobi. It had his cover photo on it too. Hobi created a mini photobook to put in there as well, which was filled with photos of the 2 of them together and wrote a super sweet handwritten note about how much he loves/is proud of Jimin. Jimin literally almost started crying he loved it so much. Literally one of the sweetest moments. Jimin constantly sharing food with Hobi and making sure he eats, or giving him a pair of sneakers that he had been really wanting. Not to mention during the BWL mini fansign at the start of 2019, they played a game about the brain of BTS and Jimin wrote Hobi's name on his writing spot saying "Thank you for always staying next to me Hoseok." And when he asked why he only wrote Hobi's name and his own instead of everyone's, he said "at the end, it's always Hoseok hyung and me." And I melted. They just love each other so sweetly.

I love this duo so much! No, I don't see anything romantic between them. Yes their skinship is high, but they are both touchy people. Yes, they have some quite intense and charged moments, but part of that is just how they both are on stage and in front of cameras, they have very sexy stage personas. Plus they are extremely comfortable together and love each other and that kind of play and interaction is something they are both good at and enjoy and are comfortable with. None of their flirting feels like it has any intention behind it and is more hype man stuff and them just being themselves and having a good time. They obviously both love each other a lot and are happy when they are hanging out together. The fact that they said they could be happy being eternal roommates says ALOT. They hold a ton of platonic love and care for each other. I personally love to see it.

Not to mention their intense and amazing connection on stage whenever they dance together!! Because I HAVE to include it, I HAVE to. Here are links to just some of their amazing dances together, some is even just them Goofing off with it too. I really would LOVE love to see a Jihope song/dance unit one day. It would be amazing:

youtube

Okay, done now for real. Love these two! They have such a special bond and such a special friendship that they share with us. Hope you all have a wonderful day! Not sure which duo I'll do next, but I'm excited either way!

#Jihope dynamics #bts ship dynamics #HopeMin dynamics

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steve0discusses · 2 years

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S5 Ep 29 Part 1: This Episode is Unbelievably Long

Dear lord this episode is long

Like so much happens in this freaking episode and I thought “wow it’s gonna take me so long to put this together.”

And, as it turned out,

showed up and cancelled everyone’s plans (like I was supposed to house-sit three pets this week for someone else to go on a nice vacation and lolololol) so now I actually have the time to like...make 3 parts out of this episode. Yes. 3 parts. There is over 60 caps that I’m gonna have to like edit at some point.

So we start off with our cursed card friends landing in an airport, where Tea gets immediately distracted by the shopping. She just dumped thousands of dollars on plane tickets, but she is a girl character, so she must be constantly spending money.

Enjoy this solid gold airport, PS. The rare 7th millennium item (11th? I forget how many there were)

Also, lets address that elephant in the room, well, two elephants. The first is the beetle jewelry that is super detailed, has no shadow, and clearly photoshopped on top of this image, which made me think that it must be what Tea purchased (it’s not, but don’t worry, we’ll see overly-detailed-beetle resurface where you least expect it later) and the second elephant is Teas outfit:

Like I guess the show makers were so focused on getting the history of Egypt somewhat right that they uhhhhhhhh forgot about the present. A buddy of mine went to see the pyramids about 2007-8 (right before the time it shut down for a while to tourists) and while it’s legally OK for tourists to wear whatever they want, the rest of the country covers up. Like she can do what she wants but this outfit is kind of awkward.

In fact, the line in the show was Tristan saying like “Man, now everyone thinks we’re a tourist” and it’s like yeah, dude, she’s wearing a crop top. The snowglobe was the last tell.

Also I do appreciate the “everyone thinks we’re a tourist” joke while standing next to a Pharaoh of Egypt, a said Pharaoh who could not be more of a tourist if he tried.

(read more under the cut)

So anyway, lets meet their guides (one of which is also in a crop top, but youknow, he spent a majority of his life under the freakin ground and I think wants to be as awkward as possible):

I laughed out loud when I saw these fools on screen.

Like yes, it makes sense, but wow you don’t expect to see Marik ever again after S3 ended. His voice sounds funny now, too, it might be a different actor? Or maybe I just never heard him not chewing up scenery in all the other scenes he’s been in.

(and like I lost he Marik font action at some point in the past two years, so yes, this is the font for Miho)

And, if you were hoping we’d actually get to talk to Marik and get a sip of his tea, well, we don’t. Would have loved to find out more about Marik and his Boat Time, but instead we have to do the...plot or whatever. We will never find out what the hell Marik was doing while everyone else died because of the Great Leviathan.

Probably nothing. Probably discovered MMO’s and has been drowning his anxiety in (tries to think of a different MMO than World of Warcraft now that it’s cancelled) Runescape? I think that’s an MMO? Does Second Life still exist? He’d play Second Life.

Marik informs us of the proper use of these cards, which, I guess he could have told us the whole time. Funny how it seemed like a problem that Pharaoh couldn’t read the backtatt scriptures, turns out it never mattered since the Ishtar family can...read...

So, if you remember, the tomb entrance of Marik’s fam was a plank on the ground, they have upscaled it somewhat. It uh...has a roof now?

This is a vibe. Not sure if this is Egyptian at all? Pretty sure it’s a spaceship, actually.

I’ll have you know, Bro looked at this and said “too bad Isis destroyed all the star wars stuff in the desert” and I was like “...Ishizu’s past self????” and he was like “no like literal ISIS. I was talking about reality.” And I looked that factoid up and what the actual hell.

Raise your hand if you also thought Marik was originally HELLA fired back in S2. Hell, he’s been fired ever since he killed his Dad (apparently removed his Dad’s backtatt with a knife and stuck it on his brother as a symbolic gross gesture). But apparently, he never got that pink slip and this guy just been living off of the undead payroll like the staples guy from Office Space.

Oh by the way, speaking of secretly living off the undead payroll despite not Doing Anything For So Freakin Long, Bakura’s here.

Please go back to the image of 2 jeeps in the desert.

Where the hell was Bakura?

This is a secret tomb that only Marik’s family could find so like...Bakura shouldn’t know where it is. Unless his memories from 5000 years ago can follow the change of topography that happens in 5000 years. I dunno, maybe? Maybe that magic ring could find it? But then again they’d be on the same highway, right?

Makes you think that he either tied himself to the roof, or just dove right into the trunk of the car, and I like both of those options.

Anyway it’s a kid’s show don’t think about it.

TBH this is each and every human being and their memories of middle school which they very much packed into a metaphorical vault and threw out the key. Like if you knew that certain memories were forgotten--and probably for a very good reason, would you lift up 3 God Cards to get Middle School back?

Pharaoh would.

While Pharaoh was told he had to go in alone, the rest of the kids follow as well because Yugi is actually made up of 5 people, not 2.

This was cute actually, I enjoyed this little snippet. We rarely get Yugi/Tea in the anime proper (unless it’s a filler arc made by a different team that didn’t air in Japan)

And so the necklace goblin finds another necklace.

You may be like “oh wow these poor animators that is 3 damn necklaces” but get ready for this 3rd necklace to not even remotely matter by the end of this episode.

So, A succession of events happen when Pharaoh holds up the 3 God Cards, I didn’t want to have to pull literally every single keyframe from this episode, so I’ll walk through these steps best I can. First off: the part of Bakura that’s been chilling in this necklace wakes up and actually gets off his ass.

Incredible. Fully thought they’d ignore that this S2 thing ever freakin happened.

So apparently all that fuss about the piece of the necklace and all that jazz was that Bakura wanted was to hitch a ride?

Can we talk about this?

How none of this would have happened without this guy:

If Bandit Keith had not pulled out a gun on Pegasus, he would not have been tossed into the ocean, picked up by Marik Isthar, mind controlled to steal Yugi Muto’s necklace, and then after busting out of mind control, decide to destroy said necklace, right when Bakura would show up to stick his soul inside of it.

Somehow Bandit Keith...BANDIT FREAKIN KEITH...is this vitally important to this final plot of Yugioh. And that is so wild to me how it’s all connecting back here.

This freakin guy. This is the destroyer of worlds. This is the guy who did it. Who managed to tip forth the domino that would end up with everyone’s ass roasted. Ironically, in a town called Domino.

Kind of incredible.

Also according to Dartz he might be dead. Maybe. It was kinda hard to tell what was happening in the Caltrain Station to Hell in California.

And during this bright beam of light, Pharaoh detaches himself from Yugi, which...it is a soul separate from a body, which is my definition of death in this show but like...

I uh...I mean he’s already dead. I don’t know. I don’t know if this qualifies as a death? Because unlike before when Yugi went to the Hell Desert of Los Altos, Pharaoh is still in the necklace technically? (which we’ll get to later) I get somewhat confused by where the hell Pharaoh is going, which again, we’ll get to later in this episode.

I may have to count this as a death eventually I just don’t know.

Ass first into the afterlife. That’s how he’d do it, and that’s how he should do it, it is not a bad ass, lest we forget.

Anyway, that was Part 1 of this long ass episode, next recap we’ll go over Part 2, where we talk about-----------What the hell is going on?

And if you just got here, behold the link, to read these in chrono order in case you, too find yourself with a lot of time on your hands because you had to cancel all your plans:

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

and stay safe y’all!

#Yugioh #YGO #Yu-Gi-Oh #photo recap #episode recap #S5 #Ep 29 #yugi muto #marik Ishtar #Ishizu Ishtar #Odion Ishtar #Joey Wheeler #Tea Gardner #Tristan Taylor #EGYPT

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