Turtle Takedown Teamwork.

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some of my fave bakugo fics in honour of bakuday 🥺 (most, if not all, of these are in ao3! which is why i'm listing them. other fave fics of mine that can be found on tumblr will be reblogged!)

you can find other bakugo fics i love in my tag: #katsu

i like to call myself wound but i will answer to knife - kirketeer enemies to lovers, requited unrequited love, kind of love triangle

surrender (whenever you're ready) - ofmermaids florist reader, canonverse, slowburn

on my way (to you) - ofmermaids 5+1, canonverse, time travel

and you take me the way i am - willowser assistant reader, slice of life, bakugo is bad at feelings

how to set fires - hawnks strangers to lovers, canonverse, food as love language

organic chemistry - kirketeer codependency and unlearning it, mutual pining, college au ish

here is my hand that will not harm you - natsuonii bodyguard au, mild violence, mentions of scars

in the dark of the morning, you promise me the sun - kirketeer character death (not the main characters), grief/mourning, slow burn

dry spell - willowser established relationship, semi-public sex, miscommunication

for auld lang syne - some-kindofgnome canonverse, near-death, drinking

you feel like home (you're like a dream come true) - willowser light angst, kind of exes to lovers?

i do not know if i should hold you or eat you - katsukiz hurt/comfort, soft sex

love to say this to your face: "i love you only" - willowser dragon king bakugo, arranged marriage, a little drunk

convincing y’all to read one of the best kandreil fics I’ve ever read bc I feel like it’s not talked about enough:

(the fic is “the name of the game” by @dayurno and you better!! check!! it!! out!!!)

😊- Drarry

Hi anon, thanks so much for this one! Such a nice ask because it ties into how happy fandom has made me over the years.

A fic that made you smile on a bad day

This is an interesting one because sometimes the fics I really love also absolutely wreck me 😅 and I have an almost painfully intense emotional connection to them that makes it unlikely that I'm smiling by the end of them!

However there are some fics that I love both because they're absolutely brilliant and also deeply comforting for me in a way that doesn't hurt at all, and just makes me feel very emotionally fulfilled. I highly recommend every single one of these, and I tend to go back to them again and again when I need to feel better about things. Here is a selection of fics that never fail to make my heart lighter. I've listed them in order of word count, please check the individual fics for tags and ratings!

I, Ferret - curiouslyfic

magic in the making - @getawayfox

oxygen - @maesterchill

When the Party's Over - @sweet-s0rr0w

Marginal Notes - @blamebrampton

More Than That - joosetta

Poppiholla - @moonflower-rose

Newts - astolat

Nice Things - aideomai

What We Pretend We Can't See - gyzym

Me whenever I happen across a Jordan x reader fic: Why the hell are they cheating on Marie?! 😤

three am is not the ideal time to suddenly desperately miss my twin brother.

dana terrace knows how fandoms work. she knows if you show ppl even the barest hint of an m/f couple, especially one involving an angsty white boy, ppl will jump on that shit like rabid dogs and itll completely overshadow whatever queer rep you want ppl to actually pay attention to. that’s why she introduced hunter the way she did. first they have an episode where luz gets kissed by a girl and it’s made clear to the audience that they’re on track to be each others love interests. and only then does she introduce hunter’s angsty blond YA love interest looking ass.

and even then they tried SUPER hard to hammer in how much hunter is NOT luz’s love interest. they make luz lean in as if she was going to kiss him and then smack him to show that she isn’t going to. and then they do that thing where hunter licks luz’s hand and luz wipes it on his face. which is something that has been memed to death with siblings. just so the audience immediately understands what kind of dynamic the show wants these two to have. if they skipped any of these steps they were worried the fandom would see luz have a close relationship with a conventionally attractive white boy and start foaming at the mouth for this ship to replace lumity. maybe if disney saw a boy and a girl who aren’t immediately sibling coded they’d also start foaming at the mouth for it to replace lumity. so the crew had to play it safe.

anyway my point is i hope the crew also knows what they’re doing with the huntlow ship. idk what they’re setting up but if the huntlow ship gets together and it’s not wedged between a full 10 minute clip of the raeda wedding and a full 10 minute clip of a sappy slice of life lumity date then every toh related tag is going to be INSUFFERABLE and i hope dana knows it.

2024 reads / storygraph

The Skin and Its Girl

literary fiction with a little magical realism

follows a queer Palestinian American woman born with blue skin, recounting her childhood, to the great-aunt who helped raise her, and piecing together her great-aunt’s secrets

family, identity, and stories

what was that film you watched about a man living in post section 377? it looked like a cool time

Its "kaathal: the core" directed by jeo baby!! Just came out v recently i watched it in theatre it was reallyyyy good

*blows a kiss somewhere in the general direction of the sky, and therefore space*

For HAL

Imagining what could have happened if the creator dared to dream bigger is fandom’s driving ethos. Whether or not the people behind the scenes expected to have the most passionate bloc of their audience fixate on a queer romance that may or may not have been intentional is irrelevant. When queerness is still on the periphery of society, it’s unsurprising that the relationships fans obsess over and seek to actualize are predominantly queer.

Our Flag Means Death, whose second season is now airing on Max, doesn’t require its fans to dream of the queer possibilities. Instead, it’s that rare breed of work that raises the romantic subtext—typically buried under bromatic jokes or subtle ambiguity—to undeniable text from the very beginning. And when fandoms and creative teams are both on the same page of the same unabashedly queer love story, as is the case for Our Flag, the experience is nothing short of sublime.

Queer media, particularly TV, has entered something of a golden age since the aughts. There are the early mainstream pioneers like The L Word and Will and Grace; the wholesome coming-of-age romcoms like Heartstopper and Love, Victor; and the adaptations taking beloved stories one big step further, like Interview with the Vampire, Good Omens, and Hannibal. There are gritty, inspired-by-real-life dramas like Orange is the New Black and Pose, murderous thrillers like Killing Eve and Orphan Black, raunchy comedies like What We Do in the Shadows and Sex Education, and many more stories featuring queer leads with fully fleshed-out storylines.

But even among these big names, this silly gay pirate show stands out by taking what these shows do best and fulfilling a particular need few have met before. The reasons are myriad: It refuses to use queer subtext as a prop or ransom for audience loyalty. It eschews the will-they-won’t-they dance that positions love as an end rather than a beginning. It defies the trope that you must renounce your past in order to move on. It scoffs at the notion of a ceiling for complex queer characters and relationships in a single show. And it demonstrates that depicting the experiences of queer people (and, just as importantly, people of color) don’t always have to center brutality and trauma—that healing can come from making acceptance the norm and bigotry the butt of ridicule, and that being kind doesn’t necessitate being passive.

As a show that didn’t explicitly market itself as “LGBTQ,” one of Our Flag’s most striking aspects is how it subverts the way this genre typically approaches romance. You could argue that the love story begins when Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) is recognized as the pirate he wants to be—while three-quarters of the way dead—by none other than the dread Blackbeard (Taika Waititi). Or you could say it begins when Blackbeard, a.k.a Ed Teach, is seen, for the first time, as someone who deserves softness and finery by the epitome of softness and finery himself. Or when Stede comforts Ed as he curls up in a bathtub reliving his worst memories. Or when Stede picks roasted snake out of Ed’s beard. Or when Ed gives himself up to the British to save Stede’s life. Or when…

You get my drift. There’s an entire season’s worth of scenes that make up the foundations of a fandom: moments of intimacy and connection that gesture toward the possibility of something more. These are the planks and rigs of a ship sturdy enough to outpace the fleet of fanworks chasing such moments down until feelings are admitted, consummated, and set sailing off into the sunset. In hindsight, Our Flag was undoubtedly heading in this direction. But it wasn't until the most incontrovertible on-screen gesture of romance happened—a kiss—that fans heaved a sigh of relief. Because fandom, for all its capacity to will alternative universes into being, is inherently bound to the media from which it springs, and many have only ever cast queer love as bait.

But with Our Flag, most fans aren’t at all concerned about what direction the story will take. And the key difference is that they trust the creators wholeheartedly.

For many queer fans, it’s a novel experience to interface with a creative team that is not only aware of exactly who the audience is and what they care about, but also proudly and vocally celebrates them. In interviews, producer and lead actor Taika Waititi has stated that he collects fan art on his phone. Vico Ortiz (who plays the nonbinary pirate Jim Jimenez) has shared that fan art encouraged them to get gender-affirming top surgery. Creator and showrunner David Jenkins once remarked that fan discussions are so spot-on, it was as if they had “been in the writers’ room.” And several queer actors on the show have expressed that the fandom has made them feel even more connected to the LGBTQ+ community.

Our Flag is one of the rare cases where fans and creators share the same vision for a given work. There are no calls for the figurative death of the overly originalist author, nor strict separation of the "canon" of the original work from the "fanon" interpretations of the audience. There is no need for fans to dig for subtext, because what they’ve been searching for has been on board with them all along—not as a blink-and-miss-it pantomime or a nothing-left-to-lose Hail Mary, but a queer love story that was intentionally, thoughtfully crafted from the beginning.

Our Flag presents fans with a vibrant world where everything is mostly beautiful and almost nothing hurts—at least, not yet. Fans can surmise the shape of the second act and the close of the third, even if they don’t know exactly how they’ll get there. But with full confidence in the creators, fans have the opportunity to stretch their imagination beyond tallying evidence and righting wrongs—and it makes for a fandom experience less a eulogy at a funeral of another buried gay, more a toast at the most extravagant and absurd cruise-ship wedding to ever grace the seven seas.

We are all on the same page of the same story, and the experiences of everyone involved is so much richer for it. Or, as Stede would say, treasure is the real treasure.

Fandom, like being a pirate, is in many respects a very queer enterprise. It centers on abandoning the rules so you can survive; grabbing every scrap of home you can find and making it your own; sharing the spoils with the people who see and accept you for who you are and who you want to be. Or, in the words of the show’s pseudo-antagonist, Izzy Hands (Con O’Neill), it's about belonging to something—a something that, I believe, could be enough to help you fall back in love with life and the world.

I think often of the scene that first drew me into Our Flag: Stede asks his former wife, Mary (Claudia O’Doherty), what it feels like to be in love. Looking back at it now, I realize her response describes what the experience of being a part of a community a show like Our Flag creates can feel like. Because love, she tells him, is as easy as breathing. It’s understanding each other’s idiosyncrasies and seeing the charm in them. It’s exposing each other to new things and laughing a lot. It’s passing the time so well together.

To every queer fan out there: I hope you find that, too. I hope you can name it without fear. And I hope you will be embraced for that revelation, and all the wonder and joy it brings.

Reading moodboard #84430940 (Patreon)

Replayed Modern Warfare 3 2011 on Veteran tonight and goooooooood night. Blood Brothers never gets any easier to watch no matter how many times you've done it and the ending really never misses huh

I apologize for the amount of yapping in the tags I reread it all on mobile and started giggling because it went on for so long but eh. Blessed are those who won't shut the freak up and all that

I just saw somebody asking why everybody totally believes Robin and Vickie are gonna be together in S5, but a lot of people still doubt byler. What's the difference, when both ships are very obviously written as endgame?

To me, there are two differences.

The first one is that byler would (will?) be a main queer pairing, while rovickie is a secondary one. There are a lot of current shows with secondary queer pairings, it's not so big anymore (it's big. Sadly, it's still big. Just not as big as a main one).

And the second one is that rovickie is a sapphic pairing. And we all have seen how, the very moment you leave the openly, officially queer shows aside, sapphic characters (emphasis on "characters" as opposed to "people") are more widely accepted than achillean ones. And yes, the first reason for this is the fetishisation of lesbians, but that acceptance is now more general than that.

A secondary wlw pairing isn't new. It's been done a lot of times since the 90s, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but it's been done before, both in queer and not queer shows. A main mlm pairing has never existed in a show that's not specifically queer. That's why people see byler and rovickie differently, and that's also why byler is gonna be revolutionary.

Placing such a hard time limit using the Calamity was exceptionally good and also inherent to the tragedy of it and im thrilled by it. Don't get me wrong, forced time limits in tragedies and doomsday stories are common for a reason. They work, and they work well. but just, within the context of EXU Calamity, its really getting me.

because its always about not having enough time, right? its about expecting that you'll have more. There's complacency with power, and mistakes, and wealth, but maybe what the Ring of Brass were most indulgent with was time.

(you always think you'll have enough time, more time, another replenishment, another deal, another broadcast, another batch of bright children. youll get another time to hash out an argument with your father. you'll get another time to stay home with your kids and get to know them. you'll get another time to apologize and explain and fix your broken relationship. there's just something else, right here, right now, that should get done first.)

The Ring of Brass were rich, in so many ways. They had power, and wealth, and a million responsibilities, and so maybe they would've argued they had ZERO time, actually, and they just needed to sort everything else out first, and they'd have enough time to figure everything else out later.

but that's the point, right? There's never really a good time for this. for the important stuff, or the end of the world.

(Laerryn was, perhaps, the primary person in the Ring Of Brass operating under a time limit from the get-go, trying desperately to get the Leyline working, because if it wasn't now, it would be never. Because Quay wouldn't live that long. But even she assumed that was the extent of the time limit, that for Everything Else, there would still be time.)

(And is that such a ridiculous expectation? Is that so foolish of her? Of all of them? You never expect the world to end. You don't have infinite time, sure, but- you've got tomorrow, or next week, or- just not now.)

And so it is tragic, but it is also weirdly satisfying, to see the way time got shattered and stretched and sped throughout that last episode. The first second lasted forty minutes. They get maybe two hours at the hands of a damned demon, and its the best blessing they've ever had. Rounds are six seconds. A broadcast is maybe thirty. A healing word, a Wish, a Wall of Force, all buying paltry seconds that make all the difference. The dawn is coming, Avalir is landing, there's so much that has to be done, and that won't get done. We watch them make hard decisions, over and over, and over, and we keep saying "there's not enough time". Because of course there isn't. There could never have been.

I finally put my finger on why a lot of adaptations and retellings of The Secret Garden feel thematically off to me.

So many of these interpret it as a story about healing from grief and loss. Which is very true of Mr. Craven’s subplot, but not for Mary and Colin.

It’s about healing from emotional neglect.

This is mirrored in the neglected garden and how the children’s restoring it--giving it the love and care and attention that they themselves have lacked--heals them in turn. Forming emotional connections is the first step in Mary’s recovery, and the Sowerbys are crucial to the plot because they’re the first people Mary has known who take an interest in her emotional well-being. Colin meanwhile has his turning point when Mary confronts the root of the emotions he’s never been able to address to anyone. These are very different issues from those surrounding loss of a loved one. In fact, these children are the way they are because they’ve never had loved ones.

So to rewrite the story as centrally a tale of overcoming grief recontextualizes everything about the protagonists, and the characterization either makes less sense or needs to be altered accordingly.

Nothing wrong with stories about overcoming grief, of course. That’s just not the story Burnett was telling, and I’m not sure where the shift in interpretation comes from, or why it’s so prevalent.