#wanted to explore the idea that ghosts are alien and their normal stuff is just not gonna line up with human stuff sometimes
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Order
Day 3
If Danny had to describe his ghost half in a word, it would be hungry.
Not in any familiar way; there was nothing painful about it, no clawing feeling in his stomach.
There was only craving.
Ever since he’d seen those first ectopi come through the portal, he had felt that deep seated need, that urgency.
To consume.
It felt strange and a little too inaccurate to call it an instinct. It was so much less complicated, foreign…
Trying to describe it in human terms made feel confused. Thinking about it with his human mind made him feel nauseous. He’d much rather just stew in his core as it whirred intricately, whispering impulses into his very ectoplasm.
Danny understood that his core worked like a second mind, intimately so. But is wasn’t a brain… wasn’t human. It was such a foreign way to think, if you could even call it that.
But Danny had the compulsions that came with it under control. Really he did! Sure, he still reflexively bit the odd monster in a fight, and couldn’t help drinking in emotions when he was particularly drained, but it was fine! He could ignore it. It wasn’t a problem.
At least it hadn’t been until Lunch Lady. Not until the first ghost that was a person came through the portal and Danny was just as hungry as he’d ever been.
oOo
“It’s really not as bad as I’m making it sound!” Danny groaned into his hands. This was exactly why he hadn’t wanted to tell his friends; it was hard to put into words that didn’t make it sound sick.
Sam’s eyes narrowed, “Isn’t it? Danny, wanting to… eat the ghosts your fighting doesn’t sound bad to you?”
“Sounds like it’s just another mostly harmless ghost thing. I mean, you’re all made out of ectoplasm, right? So you need more ectoplasm to ‘live’? As established, other ghosts just happen to be a source of that.” Tucker suggested, trying to rationalize his hunger. “All ghosts have cannibalistic tendencies confirmed.” He joked, but Danny could (taste) see he was unnerved.
“But Danny doesn’t need to eat ectoplasm to live.” Sam said, before whirling on Danny, concern under her alarm, “You don’t do you?”
“…I don’t need to, no.” Danny surrendered. “It’s nice though. Not that I would eat a person for it. That’s not why I would want to at least. It’s not- it wouldn’t be for ectoplasm energy. It’s just- guys I swear, this isn’t a bad thing!”
“…You know those monster and animal ghosts have to eat you before. I just thought they were doing what they do, but this could be the reason. But I don’t think any of the ghosts that talk have ever tried that.” Tucker said, shaking off his unease at Danny’s prior words.
He was wrong. Technus had definitely tried to. And Lunch Lady. Box ghost made a pitiful attempt to every time he was alone. Even Spectra had made to, but she’d seemed almost repulsed.
“Probably because they wouldn’t eat another person!” Sam explained, as though it were obvious.
Danny thought they would. If they were feeling what he’d felt, they only wouldn’t eat him if he was too big.
And Danny wondered, what if there was a ghost big enough to try and eat him, and win?
(That should have been a more worrying thought than it was…)
What about the reverse; what about a ghost small enough that eating it wouldn’t be a challenge for him.
Not that he ever would.
oOo
Danny really hadn’t meant to do it.
He’d thought he’d had a pretty good handle on the whole urge to consume any ghost in front of him.
But just he’d been so tired. He hadn’t known the time exactly, just that it was dark, and he’d been operating on so little sleep even before he’d had to take care of the beastly looking ghost that had crawled out of a natural portal in the dead of the night.
And after shooting a quick text to his friends, telling them he’d come out of the fight in one piece, he’d come back to his room.
And glowing softly in center of his bed, was a blob ghost.
Danny had seen blob ghosts before—massive, shapeless, wailing things. But this one was different. It was like the round, ones he glimpsed crawling through the shadows of Skulker’s island, and slipping in and out of the walls of Pointdexter’s lair.
He’d never seen one on the side of the portal before.
Danny looked down at it, a bit suspicious. It appeared to be harmless, but it was also a ghost. One that had been in his room while he wasn’t there.
The thing tilted it’s head curiously as though inspecting him back. Well, not it’s head considering it didn’t really have one; the entire front part of his body shifted, it’s eye spots wide and empty.
Danny couldn’t help but find it cute. Still he raised the thermos and-
The blob ghost flopped over as though in submission, core thrumming a low pitch that made that ever present hunger Danny felt rise to the forefront.
Danny bit his tongue, stepping back a bit. What was it doing, did it want him to- to-
He couldn’t stop himself from lowering the thermos, from locking his eyes on the blob and practically prowling across the space between them.
What was he doing? The thought almost stopped him, but it was too fleeting. Too irrelevant in the face of the ghost’s dull glow.
Danny needed it. Need the strength it could give him, however small. He needed the knowledge. The completeness that would surely come with consuming it, making it an extension of himself.
It trilled as he got closer still, soft approval.
It was so tiny. So weak. It needed him. It needed to be bigger, to be part of him. That way he could protect it.
That thought ran through his obsession in all the right spots. Danny shivered as his human mind expressed the utmost repulsion. Danny licked his ectoplasm-green tongue over ghostly fangs.
Danny opened his mouth.
oOo
For the record, Danny had been going to tell his friends what had happened that night, what he’d done. Really he had been!
But then he’d thought of how exactly he would say that. How would he even broach the topic? Just drop in at lunch and go, ‘Oh hey guys! remember how I was obsessively considering cannibalizing my enemies. Well I tried it out and now I think I’m not gonna stop-‘?
Yeah, no.
He couldn’t stand the thought of how Sam might look at him. At how even Tucker had been unnerved at the idea of his unconventional appetite before he had given in to it. They’d put up with his his weird half-ghost things before, had stuck with him this long, but… this felt like a lot.
Danny didn’t want them to see him, the way his parents saw Phantom.
He knew he was being paranoid. Probably. Especially considering ‘eating’ definitely wasn’t the right word for what he’d done.
Danny distractedly watched the blob ghost loop through his legs amiably.
It had kind of just fazed back out of him in the morning. Or rather Danny had fazed it out of him.
He had taken hold of its body and suddenly extremely susceptible, suggestible mind and had just made it move.
He could let go, and the blob didn’t seem to mind when he did it… it seemed to enjoy it actually.
It was safe and taken care of. Danny could take care of it. It could help Danny, and Danny could help it. It was mutually beneficial and perfectly fine. Danny would tell his friends exactly how fine it was.
Eventually.
oOo
The thing is, the blob ghost could ask Danny for help in a roundabout way. It could need help and Danny would understand.
So when another ghost had been chasing it around dusk, and Danny had already been transformed from an earlier fight, he had swept in to save it.
And as Danny fought the ghost, an odd wolf like animal with snakes instead of a tail, the blob had gotten some very tempting urges. It had actively pushed its thoughts onto Danny. It had told him to eat, to expand his self. To be stronger so he could protect it, to make it so this other ghost wasn’t so mindless and wouldn’t do any more damage.
And Danny would have been able to ignore the hunger as he always did if it weren’t for the argument proposed, if there wasn’t another smaller mind assuring him, wanting him to take and never stop.
And Danny gave in.
oOo
Ghosts that look like monsters out of some mythology are hard to hide. Even with their forms shrunken slightly, even when Danny willed them invisible most of the time, someone was bound to realize there was a ghost lurking around Amity Park that he hadn’t gotten rid of.
Or well, ghosts.
Which brought Danny to his second issue. When a ghost had already ‘eaten’ other ghosts, and that ghost then too gets eaten, it turns out it makes a chain of command.
First was Danny. Then his blob and the wolf ghost. Then the wolf ghost’s ghosts. And then their blob ghosts.
The control Danny had over them wasn’t overwhelming. They were like limbs with their own minds; Danny could move them as he pleased, but they had their own independence and took comfort in this relationship.
They were much less noticeable that an entire extra arm though. More like a big toe. Toes with toes. Something he could move, and could always feel was there. He would notice if they were missing, but he didn’t always notice they were there.
That made sense. It made enough sense for him to be comfortable thinking about it like a human.
Danny was constantly aware of this order, but was also content to just let them roam with little interference. The odd nudge away from people here, turning one invisible there, using one to handle a smaller ghost fight while he’s in school.
It was useful. It was nice.
Sure it was strange to get used to have so many senses, and the range of emotions they were all feeling at any time was complicated to say the least.
His first blob was a lot more smug lately, about being so high in the order, about being so close to Danny, above ghosts many times stronger than it. Many of the others were content to laze around and explore the living world, bathing in the feeling of being protected. Others kept spooking humans for fun, and causing quiet mischief which was harmless enough that Danny didn’t often stop it.
Being so connected to them all made him feel complete. He couldn’t imagine anything more satisfying, satiating that this.
oOo
When Danny’s core had awoken he didn’t fly into the ghost zone blindly. It had been the impression of knowledge from one of the lowest ghosts in his order, a lizard like creature with a form the consistency of sand.
And then Danny had been taken to the Far Frozen. And he had met Frostbite.
Danny had never been exactly scared of what might happen if a ghost ‘ate’ him. He knew what it was to be at the top of an order, but despite feeling the comfort of his charges, he couldn’t imagine liking being in that position.
He’d have nothing to gain the way his ghosts did, minds going from stilted to simple but fast, aware. He’d just have his aim a massive amount of his autonomy stripped from him.
It made him feel bad about having taken his ghosts when he thought about it like that. Like a human would.
Then in Frostbite’s presence, he’d understood.
He’d known intimately in that moment, why his blob ghost had lured him closer in the hopes he would add it to himself. He felt every bit as small as it must have been in his presence.
Frostbite was bigger than he appeared, Danny could see that. He was letting shrunken yet he was still the largest yeti in the Far Frozen, and every member of that place was part of him.
Danny could only imagine the security they all felt under something so all-encompassing. He could feel Frostbite’s hunger, drawing him in, restrained if only because Danny was a hero to them.
It was a strange thing to want to be eaten.
Danny might have even asked. If it weren’t for his obsession and obligations, he might have forgotten humanity entirely and joined this wonderfully hidden, protected place.
But he had his haunt, his humans, his home to go back to. Then he did.
And despite how amazingly he’d been treated in the Far Frozen, despite how kind and affectionate the yeti’s were Danny stayed away. Because he didn’t know when he might not be able to pull himself away.
#tw cannibalism#sort of?#wanted to explore the idea that ghosts are alien and their normal stuff is just not gonna line up with human stuff sometimes#kind of a Wings of Fire hivemind situation#it’s more like Cottontail than Wasp if u get that analogy#danny phantom#dp#danny fenton#fanfiction#phicc#fanfic#dp headcanons#I was gonna write Sam and Tucker finding out and a thing with Clockwork but I’m tired#really just wanted to get this done#sam manson#tucker foley#ectoberhaunt22#eh order#day 3#Order#I don’t know how I looked at the definition of order and got here-
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👉👈 do you have more content from your DW/Hijack crossover?
[ Edit January 2024 -> This was an ask from june 2023. I didn't realized that I left this ask in the drafts for more than 7 months and didn't post it. I'm so sorry anon :,( ]
Hello! And yes i do! Here are some of the sketches :D I don't have written down how i want the interactions between the characters to be yet. I choose the 10th doctor for now but i'm still in doubt of which regeneration i want hiccup to meet
I don't have like an AU or a story planned (? but i can share some little ideas under the cut.
The first time they meet is by accident. Hiccup and toothless got separated. It's the night fury the one that hears a strange sound. Following it into a cave there were dragons in cages along with a man with strange clothes opening those cages. The man sees the dragon and greets it, He calls himself The doctor. And tells toothless to get away before the dragon trappers get back to the cave.
The doctor invites hiccup and toothless to travel with him. Promising an adventure not only far away from the archipielago, but far away in the stars. When they see the tardis for the first time hiccup couldn't believe that it was bigger inside. He even started to take measures and making notes.
Hiccup learns that the doctor can speak dragon. He watches as the doctor and toothless hold a very long conversation. When he asks about it the doctor just says "Isn't it obvious? I speak dragon. Don't worry toothless was just saying good things. " Hiccup wants to learn dragon speech.
Hipo at first goes traveling with the doctor without telling anyone since they can go back home 5 minutes after leaving, time travel stuff. This is perfect for hiccup, he can go and have this crazy adventures without compromising his duties as the son of the chief.
Of course if you are observant you would notice that the boy started to became more taller really fast, and when asked about things that happened in the day he wouldn't remember those very well. This starts making problems.
- Hiccup and toothless go with the doctor and see different worlds, space whales and dragons surfing through the stars. The technology and the change of scenery can be too much but they are de terminated to explore and learn.
For the hiccup and jack ship in this Doctor who crossover.
This is in our time present (2023). When jack first appears, he is like a ghost. Can't be seen so he is always alone. Like a wind. He spends his time doing pranks and helping missing kids go back home.
His body is trapped in an old alien machine but his mind is " roaming free" in the world. That machine is inside an alien spaceship that fell into the earth many years ago. Jack "found it" when he fell into the frozen lake +/- 300 years ago. Jack like in the movie has seen the world go forward.
Jack can't go time travel into the TARDIS since his connection with his body will be broken. They can still travel around the globe.
In between adventures Hiccup and the doctor visit Jack. It's the most "normal life adventures" they can get lol. Jack teaches Hiccup about the technology and what the 21st century has to offer. Videogames, comics, how he spooks people in old buildings. Hell they can even go and urban exploration. Stop the typical alien invasion with the doctor. Jack meeting toothless. Hiccup talking about his life back at berk and his adventures with the doctor.
One day a group of aliens attacks a city searching for this machine. The doctor alongside Hiccup, Toothless and Jack try to stop the enemies plan. They discover the machine and that jack's body is inside of it. If the enemy finds it they will kill jack in order to use it themselves, the doctor wanted to destroy the machine but now they now is the only thing that is keeping jack "alive."
Now i don't know what they will do after that. Haven't thought much about it. But i know that i want Hiccup to meet both jack in the future, and in the past (before getting trapped in the machine) Maybe he does time after jack is gone. The doctor takes Hiccup 300 years in the past and meets Jackson Overland the week before he falls into the lake and into the machine.
He can´t stop what's going to happen to Jack but he can prolong it. So one day he asks him if he would like to join them. He does. Until jack decides to go back with his family and the day after that he falls into the ice.
I'm sorry that Jack/Hiccup doesn't have a happy ending. My friends told me that i can be a little angst machine.
Edit January 2024 -> I kinda remember that i made another ending but i can't remember where i wrote it. I'm so sorry anon, perdoname por las tardanzas y las respuestas largas.
And please forgive me if there are grammatical mistakes and not correct use of words. Tried my best.
#hijack#fanart#my art#frostcup#hiccup horrendous haddock iii#jack frost#el anon :0#ask#doctor who au
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Hey. It's been a while. I think it's right to update you on stuff so tl;dr I'm probably not going to be around for some time, and if I am, it'll be in a diminished capacity, but if you're interested, do check under the cut. I'll also immediately state that I am not in any dangerous situation, it's other stuff, but I'll immediately dispel that before the cut just in case you just wanted to know that in particular.
Let's talk for a bit.
Long story short, the economy here is in shambles. The idea was for me to already have a new job, but that's not gone according to plan. I've been eating into my savings for a while now, and the people that told me that I had a job lined up for me September or at the latest October, meaning, this month, have been ghosting me. It seems to not be an option anymore, and no explanation was ever given to me. A shame, because it came from a place of relative trust.
This has eaten away at my nerves somewhat, and though it is the month of my birthday, I can't help but notice that, between the economy being this bad here, how hard it's been to land another job, and the fact that I'm eating into my savings, well, it's got me more than a bit worried. I'm not in any immediate danger of losing the roof over my head, or starving, or anything like that, but after a few months of "well, my savings take yet another hit this month with no end in sight", it's been rather rough, you'll understand, and it's compounded a bit. For just a second, and not as a primary, secondary, or even tertiary plan, more like a twenty-eighth measure if anything, I did entertain the dark idea of maybe asking for a bit of help here, and the moment that thought came up, I realized, "Ok, this is truly and well affecting me, I never want to do that", because, again, it's not like I'm in any immediate danger of homelessness or anything that grave, but it's been weighting on me enough that, even as a distant glint in the horizon of an idea, I did consider it. I don't want to sound like I'm blowing my own horn here, but for over a decade that I've had this blog, and the community/following/whatever you want to call it that has grown around it, I've never once asked for something like monetary help, because I think that can be a slippery slope. I've seen people far bigger than me, and some smaller, too, get addicted to asking for donations or help, or simply start taking it for granted when they ask for such a thing. My friends will tell you I writhe in agony when I receive a gift such as a game or something over the mail. My logic is that I don't need it, not in a proud way, but rather, in a "I wish you would spend this money on yourself instead, or on someone that truly needed it". With this in mind, I realized that, for me to even slightly consider that as an option, for the first time in my life, it meant that it was biting away at me far, far more severely than I thought. It's translated to other parts of my life as of late; I've not been depressed or anything, but I've felt this itch, this remarkably implacable feeling of "my man, you don't deserve to be taking it easy right now, something has to change, progress needs to be made".
I went out to wander for a few days, then arrived at my cousin's farm. He and his wife live a humble, hard working life, he invited me to stay for a while, I accepted, it was real nice, we hanged out, went exploring creeks and mountainsides while knocking back a few beers, the whole shebang for two guys that grew up in the middle of nowhere. Anyhow, it's true that the whole exposition that was the previous paragraph is something at play, but I also just... Haven't really wanted to be online at all. I don't want to check anything, read anything, and I feel a deep sense of alienation that I've not really felt in a long time. I suppose this is one of those good ol' Bro Is Going Through It, if we're to summarize it in a few words. It's easy for me to dispel negative thoughts and bounce back normally, because I've done a great deal of personal building and homework on knowing myself inside out, but not even this black belt in Drimobrain has helped this time around, and well, it bothers me, obviously, bwahaha. It's the first time in a few years that I really sincerely do not understand what's up with me, and while it's not really something I would consider me being rock bottom or anywhere near those depths, I do think I'm still below surface level, which is something I don't admit to easily, but have no choice to. I would love to be able to give this malaise shape and firmness through written or spoken word, but right now, it's a work in progress.
What bothers me the most is the sense of alienation I spoke of before: It makes no sense for me to feel this way, I'm treated with love and kindness every day, no one's silencing me in any way, I don't deal with barbs or hostility. So why is it that that's how I feel? Or perhaps it's something that feels similar, but I've no clue what it is, so I'm compounding it with alienation?
Regardless, it's all compounded into me just... Not wanting to be online. In the words of a friend of mine, "Dreamer has a fetish for self-development and growth", and, well, yeah, she's got that right despite the wording, I like to feel as if I'm improving every day and becoming better every day, even if slightly, and right now I feel like I'm just degenerating. Is it because my mood has been sour overall? Maybe. It might as well just be the fact that I Just Don't Want To Be Online For A While, and capricious clown that I am, if I want to do something, I do it, and if I don't want to do something, I don't do it. I'm tied to nothing and no one except my desire and drive to do or not do things. I can't change that, nor do I want to change that. And in this case, my heart's said to me, "fuck going online, go out, do things, try to get a job".
I also almost got recruited into something fucking vile that I thankfully noticed in time to avoid, but that's a story for another time.
There you have it. Am I leaving the internet/blue website forever? No, of course not, I like it here. Are things hard right now? They are, to be honest. Are they the worst it could be? Not at all. Do I have complete clarity of what's up with this fog inside of my head? No, and that bother me quite a bit. Are things going to be alright? Yeah, I think they will be.
I do regret it's in October of all months that this is going on, because it's where my shitposting power is at its apex due to my birthday, but hey, things happen, not necessarily for a reason, but they can be handled in such a way that it gives them meaning. I'm a fervent believer in that. I'm sorry this isn't the update you may have been hoping for, full of Lucina cosplayer blowjobs and other such hijinks, but hey, they can't all be Rainbow Road, haha.
So in case we don't see each other for a while, I hope you're all doing fine and dandy. I'm alive, I'm trying to be well, and most importantly, most fundamentally, most quintessentially,
I stay silly.
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List of fanfiction prompts (please feel free to use these and tag me I'd love to see):
Tentacle shennanigans. Truly anything you can come up with from the truly bizarre to the "they fell into a monster trap" to "they adopted a cute little buddy." (Dmbj has tentacle monsters and zombie things in like every show and yet the ratio of weird creatures in fic? Could always be higher)
If the source material has aliens, monsters, creatures, powers, EXPLORE THAT! If the source material is mundane, try an AU where you explore What If they did have powers, were aliens, etc. I'm extra emphazising this though if the source material already has one of these elements, because it can be fun to expand the sandbox and explore how Far a premise can be stretched. There's so many source materials with monsters (supernatural), magic (merlin), powers (xmen, guardian, marvel), aliens (doctor who, torchwood, star trek) and it'd be cool having more fics exploring farther than the initial bounds of the source material, or even just a new angle it never happened to go in.
Ensemble group stories! What's a day in the life for the group? What's a bizarre day for the group? (If its star trek there could be cool aliens! Weird planets that make you question your own life! If its dmbj how weird would it be if they entered a tomb and just ran into a normal non criminal university achaeologist! If its Guardian did they meet a ghost? A mutant? Did they attempt to avoid weird shit entirely and it went fine until Chu Shuzhi pulled out his puppet and attacked someone being rude to the store customer service? Whats a class day of the kids on DS9 look like? What does Torchwood look like all on a covert mission to blend in at a resort getaway? How does a usual investigation go for Chloe and Lucifer?)
An expansion of the last one: take a crack fanfic premise and write it seriously. Wu Xie is stuck with a normal oblivious archaeologist, they run into zombies, the archaeologist still has no idea, a monster possesses Wu Xie, what happens? Danny Phantom runs into Mulder and Scully, what happens? Zhao Yunlan wants to interrogate Fei Du on suspicion of murder and being a mutant (im writing this lol). Henry from RWRB wakes up in his fantasy story where he's incan old kingdom and Alex's lookalike is there, does he think its a coma he needs to escape, does he accept his new life? Barbie meets Wednesday Adams and they date (pretty sure this fanfic exists). Some fandoms are predisposed to treating crack seriously, such as dmbj or star trek you could write time travel slime monsters body doubles sex pollen invisible city floating on clouds talking flowers and all would basically be believable possibilities in canon. Those can be fun to explore the extent of bizarre and stretching you can do. (Kingdom Hearts is like... already that in some ways). But from the other direction, it can be fun to take something more realistic like RWRB or Bad Buddy and go "what if somebody was a mermaid, or they got stranded on an asteroid in the year 3000, or adopted a lil tribble, or were suddenly cloned."
Ridiculous Meet Cutes. This could be genre mashing so like: character A is a slasher on a killing spree and runs into character B who was plotting to kill a person dangerous to them and ends up thanking character A which was unintentional and intensely NOT intended, character A crashes a spaceship on character Bs job so yay they get to quit at least (in a fandom where there shouldnt be space ships canonically), character A summons a demon but B shows up instead, character A meets character B at the library as they share like interesting reading material both unaware theyre like Story Enemies (hero/villian or perpetrator/investigator etc). Character As house is haunted and they run out screaming and crash into B who is then also Haunted by extension and confronts A about it. Idk Im not great at meet cutes but I guarantee the wild stuff fanfiction comes up with can often times be a lot of fun and sometimes very interesting in a way canon might have not put as much thought into.
#rant#fanfiction#basically i was thinking about how FEW star trek fanfic even explore weird alien concepts or themes of new civilizations#or how dmbj fanfic could get SO WEIRD and still be canon compliant but a lot stick to fairly Normal dmbj used concepts#when even dmbj gets freakier every 5 eps or so#i know fanfic is often wjat the source matetial lacks#so weird canon stories often have very mundane fanfic with storytelling not focusing on weird plots#but.... ive read like 20 star trek fanfic this month. and only 1 gave my a psychic flower!!!!#1 out of 20 did something star trek usual regarding sci fi.#i feel like fandoms got a lot more weird ideas than that ratio would imply. and ur creativity is awesome
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Bayverse: Treating These Movies with More Dignity than They Deserve or Contain, Because I’m a Goddamned Professional - Part One
TRANSFORMERS (2007) - UNCOMFORTABLE SEXUAL TENSION BETWEEN TEENAGERS THAT I DIDN’T NEED TO SEE
So.
This is a little different than what I usually do.
Clearly.
God, how did we even get here?
Oh, I remember.
The date was September 17th, 2020, and I was in a stream with nine or ten other people watching the first Bayverse Transformers movie. Why we were watching it doesn’t particularly matter- sometimes you just gotta watch garbage so you can refresh your palate for the good stuff, I suppose. Also, a couple of folks wanted to make goo-goo eyes at Blackout’s rotors.
...It’s not my thing, but I’m glad they’ve got something to make the journey worth taking.
I made some sort of comment about only using my brain for this blog’s content, and someone (you know who you are :)) suggested that I take a proper look at the film. Being who I am, I immediately latched onto this idea, despite it being technically outside of what I write about.
And then I quintuple-downed, because winners don’t quit.
Good to know that my BA in Film Production wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Fun fact, I broke my television trying to watch Transformers for this. I think the universe was trying to stop me, by making me perform surgery on electronics, and also aggravating my carpal tunnel.
This movie came out when I was 13, and it was the first Transformers thing I saw after Cybertron. Yes, the anime one. No, not the one that’s objectively terrible.
Anyway.
How did I feel about Transformers when I saw it the first time? Well… it was okay. I liked the robots. I thought Mikaela was pretty, not that I knew what that meant back then. I watched it a few times, if only because my oldest younger brother kept renting it at Blockbuster. It was fun.
Now I’m older, and wiser, and know feminist theory, so my opinion is less “this exists” and more “blind, murderous rage”.
Our film opens up with some claptrap about the Cube™, a MacGuffin of ultimate power that allows the Transformers to create worlds in their image and populate them. Which means this is how they reproduce.
It always comes back to baby-making, doesn’t it?
The narration goes on about how the Cube™ is very powerful, and some folks wanted it for good, and others for evil. The criteria for being “good” and “evil” isn’t established, and I’m not exactly sure how one would define such a thing, when all the Cube™ does is create life, but, well, we’ve only just begun. Maybe we’ll get some answers later on.
Haha, I doubt it.
So, the Cube™ is the catalyst for our 4 million year war this continuity, and that sucker was lost in the shuffle a while back. This is a problem, because, again, the Cube™ is how the Transformers reproduce. Now everyone’s in a mad scramble to find the thing so their species doesn’t die out.
Three guesses as to where it ended up, and the first two don’t count.
Smashcut to the shit nobody cares about- the humans. We see an Osprey fly over the Qatar desert, carrying a buttload of American soldiers. We get a taste of some good old-fashioned xenophobia, as several soldiers mock a guy for not speaking English and loving his mother’s cooking, going full “funny haha gibberish language” on him. We’re two and a half minutes into the film, and I already want to stab something.
Ed Sheeran breaks into the conversation, I guess because he was feeling left out, revealing that he is the New Yorker stereotype of the film, for some reason. The fellas ask their captain, Lennox, what he’s looking forward to most about getting home from their tour, and he reveals himself to be a family man. While he’s been away, his wife had a baby, who he hasn’t so much as held yet. His men respond by mocking him.
For loving his child.
We’re three minutes into the film, and the toxic masculinity might actually make me have an aneurysm.
The Ospreys land, the lads disembark, and we get a snapshot of what downtime during deployment looks like to Bay. There are a lot of kiddie swimming pools involved. Two men play basketball. We watch multiple men take outdoor showers. A young Qatari boy brings Lennox a camelback water pack with a smile on his face. This lets me know that he’s a prop and not a character in this film. I can’t wait to see how many horrors he’ll be put through to simulate pathos.
We get a shot of a helicopter flying over the desert, one that the US military doesn’t recognize as their own. They send a couple of planes to check it out, and said planes get their shop wrecked. The helicopter is revealed to be the same ‘copter that was shot down several months prior. That’s… not good. Ghost helicopter?
No. Not at all, actually.
Lennox gets on a video chat with his wife and daughter, who is wearing one of the most ridiculous baby outfits I’ve seen in a hot minute. And I used to work in childcare, so I’ve seen a good amount of those. The writing implies that normal bodily functions are unladylike and therefore undesirable… in an infant… and that’s when all hell breaks loose, thankfully saving me from more of Bay trying to make me give a shit about these characters.
The helicopter lands, we get a shot of the mustachioed pilot, who glitches (gasp), and the line “have your crew step out or we will kill you” is uttered.
Not even trying to hide the nationalism, are you?
This film hit theaters in 2007, when the xenophobia from 9/11 was still heavy in the air of the general populace, so things like this were more tolerated, and in fact approved of. Of course, it’s not like America has really improved on that subject, or ever really had a point where we weren’t terrible about it, since we live in a world where the military-entertainment complex exists.
See, the Department of Defense and a good chunk of American entertainment industries have a little deal going, and have for the last few decades, and it goes like this: The DoD will allow the use of their vehicles, personnel, and bases, or the likenesses of such, for free, in exchange for their operations being shown in a positive/morally justified light. This is why you never see the armed forces portrayed in a way that makes them out as anything less than heroes- nobody would be able to afford the sets/likenesses without the DoD’s aid. This is also why you see straight-up advertisements for the military branches on televison, in cinemas, and online, and why both the Army and Navy have flirted with having Twitch channels.
It’s all a ploy to get you to join the military, kids. It’s propaganda.
But enough about that, it’s time for our first transformation sequence!
We get a lot of moving parts with this, since it’s realistic CGI in a live-action movie, and it still holds up. It’s hard to tell what’s actually happening, but it, if nothing else, feels alien, surreal, and horrific to behold. They even included the original sound effect in the cacophony, which is nice.
Our ghost helicopter reveals itself to be a Transformer, not that we get that terminology at any point in this film. This specifically is Blackout, a Decepticon. The soldiers start firing on him the moment he starts transforming, then are surprised when the thing they started shooting with several guns retaliates. This is the point where everything ever in this military base explodes, brilliantly and repeatedly, because it wouldn’t be a Bay film without it. There’s a lot of shouting and bright lights, and I’m positively certain that a great deal of people died during this fight.
It’s just a shame that I don’t care.
Blackout rips the top off of a building like it’s a tin of anchovies, and then snags all the hard drives he can, downloading everything. This is a problem, but it seems like nobody was prepared for a giant alien robot hack-attack, because in order to shut down the power to the servers, you need to be able to unlock the breaker box, and no one seems to have the key. They solve the problem with a fire ax.
Lennox is leading the Qatari boy through the base towards safety. I should mention that it’s night now, and several hours seem to have passed since the Ospreys landed, so I don’t know why this kid is still here. He’s got, like, a house and family to go home to.
We get some more tank-throwing action, Sergeant Epps almost gets flattened under Blackout’s foot, then the movie decides it’s going to try to make things more interesting by having each shot cut flash, for whatever reason.
Someone shoots Blackout with a rocket launcher, I think, and this is the point where he throws his tiny little man off his back to go do his job. Yes, Blackout’s got a baby, and that baby is Scorponok, his symbiotic pal who likes to dig into the ground and be a sneaky little bastard.
Blackout blows up a ton more military equipment and personnel, and then it’s time for another smashcut.
Now we’re in high school, just like all those dreams I’ve had where I’ve forgotten my homework. This is where we meet Sam Witwicky, our main character, and also the stand-in for our target demographic. He’s insufferable, and I don’t like him. Mikaela Banes, our love interest, is also present in this scene, but we don’t get to know about her character for, like, another 20 minutes, because who gives a shit about women, right? They’re just props, right?
Right???
RIGHT??????????
RIGH-
Sam is presenting on his great-great-grandfather, Archibald Witwicky, for his family genealogy report, in front of a class containing maybe three actors who are age appropriate.
I know child labor laws are a good thing, and that hiring adults to play teenagers is just the lay of the land, but I swear some of these students look like they’re old enough to be on their second mortgage and third kid.
Anyway.
Archibald Witwicky was an explorer, one of the first to traverse the Arctic circle, and apparently his crew was made up of folks from 2007, because I swear the clothing for a few of these dudes isn’t period-appropriate. We get a seamen joke, because of course we do, and a sextant joke, because of course we do. Sam is also hawking all this crap he’s brought in for the presentation, because he is a little bastard who has no idea what his peers would want to buy, or really how to relate to them at all. He’s selling these “priceless” artifacts so he can get a car. Mikaela finds this charming, for some fucking reason. Also, her boyfriend is weirdly stroking her shoulder blade with his knuckles the whole time this is happening, and I hate it.
Archibald Witwicky went mad after his expedition, talking about an “ice man” so often that his family ended up locking him in a mental asylum, likely to be forgotten about. Which is sad. But we won’t be getting into the medical mistreatment of the mentally ill in Bayverse, now will we? That’s just Too Deep™.
Sam’s teacher didn’t very much appreciate having his class be turned into an episode of Antiques Roadshow, but still gives Sam an “A” on the project, despite it being a very poor report that lasted all of two minutes. I suspect the teacher has tenure, and therefore no longer gives a shit about academic integrity. This “A” means that Sam’s father will buy him a car.
Which is nice, I suppose, if I gave a damn.
Sam’s father, Ron, picks up his son in a car he probably bought at the crux of his midlife crisis, in a green that reminds me of a school gymnasium floor, then plays a prank on his child by pretending to pull into the Porsche dealership. Sam isn’t getting a Porsche, which is good, because he doesn’t deserve one. As Sam gripes to his father, a yellow Camaro drives by oh so conspicuously. Wonder what’s up with that.
Instead of the Porshe dealership, they head over to the used car lot, which is being run by Bobby Bolivia, who spends his time yelling at his employees and wanting to murder his mother. Sam is incredibly ungrateful about the fact that his dad is helping him get a car, even though it’s his FIRST car, and nobody gets a nice one the first go around. Or, at least, they shouldn’t, given the statistics about accidents with young drivers.
“No sacrifice, no victory” is uttered by Ron, which is the family motto, or so he claims. Archibald Witwicky said the same thing when he had multiple people dying trying to get to the Arctic Circle, so there’s precedence for the phrase, but we’ll see how it holds up throughout the film.
Bobby Bolivia shows Sam and Ron the cars he has for sale, and Sam is immediately drawn to the yellow Camaro in the lot, though there’s a small problem- it’s too expensive for what he and his father agreed to. Also, nobody knows where the hell it came from, so paperwork might be an issue. When Bobby tries to show Sam the yellow Beetle they have right down the line, everything explodes, because this is a Bay film, and fuck the original material this movie was based on. Bobby lets them have the Camaro for a lower price, suddenly fearful of whatever strange powers have just visited his place of business. “The car picks the driver” is suddenly more than a bullshit line to spout off in order to sell cars, and I’m certain that’s shaken the poor man.
Over in Washington, D.C., the Secretary of Defense prepares to address just what the hell happened in Qatar, lamenting on how young the audience he’s going to be speaking to is. In particular, he’s referring to the two dweebs and the hot chick sitting in one of the rows. All the women in this movie who aren’t someone’s mom are made up to be very pretty. And not even in a realistic way.
But we’ll get to that in a bit.
So, the military network was hacked. That’s bad. Nobody knows who did it. That’s also bad. The only lead the US has is a soundbite, which is the signal that hacked the network.
Everyone here at the briefing is going to be helping to figure this mess out. This is great, if you like looking at Rachael Taylor for a few seconds at a time, and can compartmentalize hard enough to make that worth the effort of watching this godforsaken film.
Back at the Witwicky household, we meet Mojo, a chihuahua with a cast that doesn’t seem like it’s actually doing anything. I wish he was the main character instead of Sam.
Sam arrives home from the dealership, and says “alright, Mojo, I’ve got the car. Now I need the girl.”
As if ownership of a person is something to aspire to.
As if women are property to be owned.
As if women aren’t people, but rather commodities.
We’re 17.5 minutes into this film.
We’re introduced to Judy, Sam’s mother. She’s shrill, and annoying. This is by design, because none of the women in this film are actually people, but rather archetypes to bounce off of the male characters.
Sam and his father have a moment of what some might consider banter, then Sam gets huffy with his mom over gender roles for the dog. I, for one, think Mojo looks positively dashing in his bedazzled collar, and to hell with whatever Sam says to the contrary.
Sam drives off to go be a misogynist, with the promise to be back by 11PM.
Over in Qatar, the soldiers and that little boy are running from the attack on their base, as Lennox’s wife watches a public announcement on the matter back at home. The Secretary of Defense lets us know that we’re at DEFCON Delta at this point. Lennox Jr. cries, and all I can think about is how they probably pinched that baby to make that happen. They pinched a baby for Transformers (2007).
The soldiers in Qatar talk about shit they have no idea about, Sergeant Epps going on about somehow having been able to see a forcefield around Blackout through his super special binoculars. I don’t know how, or why, he knows this. I don’t know anything anymore.
Ed Sheeran has his doubts about this whole thing, and Lennox is also present in the scene, because I guess he’s important. Through a bit of dramatic irony, Fig- the guy everyone was making fun of for being bilingual at the start of the film- says that this probably isn’t over, as the shape of Scorponok shifts through the sand just beyond them.
Epps is having a minor crisis over the fact that Blackout saw him, but we don’t have time for that, because we’ve got to get to cover. The lads decide to head to the little Qatari boy’s house. Again, I wonder why he was at the base at all, considering that it seems like they’ve been traveling for a good portion of the day.
Back with Sam, he’s picked up his friend Miles, and together they’re going to a lake party. Are they invited to this party? Yes, but also no. It’s public property though, so it should be fine. As they park, Sam notices that Mikaela is here, which is great for him.
Mikaela’s boyfriend, Trent- whose name I had to look up- is a massive tool, and starts pestering the two boys for daring to exist in his airspace. Miles climbs a tree. I’m glad he’s having fun, at least. Sam makes a joke at the expense of people with brain injuries, and this for some reason? Warrants a shot of Mikaela making the blank “pretty girl” face? In response?
Mikaela saves Sam from becoming a wet stain on the grass, which is very kind of her, and more than Sam really deserves. Trent, his boys, and Mikaela start to head off for another party, to get away from Sam and his tree-loving friend. Mikaela offers to drive, and Trent says that she can’t handle his truck, because she’s a ~girl~. This causes Mikaela to ditch him, and start walking home.
The script knows enough about misogyny to know that this would be a nice “take that”. Michael Bay, however, likely fails to see why everything he did with said script involving this character is a goddamned problem.
Because Mikaela, bless her heart, has a lot of problems.
Let’s start with the outfit: a croptop, a jean skirt that BARELY covers her ass, and a pair of wedge heels that are at least four inches tall. On a character that is, at oldest, freshly 18.
Look, I’m all about self-expression and the freedom to choose how you dress for yourself and yourself alone, but this clearly isn’t that. This is a character, not a person, whose wardrobe was designed for the straight male gaze. She’s wearing fucking STRAP HEELS to the lake. This is about oogling. This is about reducing a whole-ass person to the same status as a piece of meat. In fact, who was on wardrobe for this? I’d like to have a few words with-
A woman? Okay, well, what else has she worked on?
You can’t be fucking serious.
ANYWAY.
Miles just called Mikaela an “evil jock concubine.” I don’t like Miles anymore.
As Mikaela walks down the road, strutting hard enough that I’ve got sympathy pains in my hips, the radio in the Camaro turns on, playing “Drive” by the Cars, and giving Sam a hell of an idea; he’s gonna drive Mikaela home, so she doesn’t have to walk the 10 miles to her house. Why he knows how far she lives from the lake isn’t addressed.
Sam kicks Miles out of the car and goes to give Mikaela a ride, which she accepts after a bit of self-deliberation, and also him making an ass of himself. The shot here is framed with Sam like he’s a normal-ass person, and Mikaela from her breasts to the top of her waist. Because of COURSE it is.
She hops in the car and then goes off about her taste in hot guys. Which is weird, and out of left field. Sam is about as confused as I am, then continues to make a fool of himself. This is his nature as a person. Mikaela has no idea who Sam is, even though they’ve gone to the same school for the last 10 years and have multiple classes together. And the fact that she was staring him down all through his genealogy presentation. And at the lake.
This movie isn’t very well thought out, I feel.
It’s at this point the the Camaro turns the key on itself and starts to sputter out and die, as “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye pops on the radio.
I don’t like how this car is trying to get Sam laid.
I don’t like how this car is trying to get Sam laid with a girl who didn’t even know his name five minutes ago.
I don’t like how this car knows what sex is.
The Camaro breaks down on a cliff, and Mikaela hops out to work on the engine, and also to get the hell away from Sam’s sputtering.
As Mikaela admires the sweet engine in this Camaro, showing off her knowledge of cars, we get several shots of her from her breasts to her thighs, while Sam is treated like an actual person. Don’t bother trying to play it off as an artistic choice, Bay, this is blatant horndogging. This adds to NOTHING, other than my ire.
Sam says more stupid shit, and Mikaela, who must be the nicest fucking person in the world, just tells him to fire up the engine so she can try to sort out the problem. Then he asks why she goes for jackasses like Trent, and she decides that she’s hit her limit for today, opting to walk the rest of the way home. Good on you, Mikaela. Don’t take Sam’s bullshit.
Sam, realizing that he’s put his foot in his mouth for the 80th time today, pleads with his Camaro to do him a solid and work, and this actually works out for him. Great. Sam, victorious, once again offers Mikaela a ride, which she, once again, takes.
He drops her off without further incident, and she thanks him for listening. Even though they didn’t really talk that much. I dunno, maybe they had a super deep conversation offscreen. Mikaela asks Sam if he thinks she’s shallow, because clearly all women need approval from the men around them, and Sam says that there’s more to her than meets the eye.
Which made me groan aloud.
Anyway, she gets inside without a problem, and Sam professes his love for his new Camaro for allowing him to talk to a girl. Or at least talk at her.
Back in Washington, D.C., at the Pentagon National Military Command Center, we’re making weirdly racist calls on who hacked the military.
Up with Air Force One, a conspicuous boombox transforms into a robot, and then runs off to hack shit. The President of the United States requests some snack cakes. A flight attendant goes down to storage to retrieve said snack cakes, and finds that boombox in the elevator with her. Considering this is Air Force One, you’d perhaps expect her to immediately be suspicious of such a thing, but this is Bayverse, and we don’t think here.
The flight attendant brings the boombox down with her and places it on the counter as she goes to get the presidential snack cakes. The boombox immediately disappears. Now, you’d perhaps expect her to immediately be suspicious of such a thing, but this is Bayverse-
The flight attendant opens up the snack cake package, for some reason, and drops the cake on the floor. She then proceeds to eat it, and then act shocked when it tastes like floor. There’s a robot in her fucking line of sight, and you’d perhaps expect her to immediately be suspicious of such a thing-
She leaves to go feed the President floor cakes, and our little robot friend gets to work stealing government secrets. He, if nothing else, looks pretty cool doing it. He’s a very pointy lad.
Back at the Pentagon, Maddie- Rachael Taylor’s character- can hear the hacking. This sends everyone into a panic, because, well, that shouldn’t be happening. The hacking noise is a direct match to the one from Qatar, so that’s obviously a problem.
Back on Air Force One, our little robot friend is looking for “Project Iceman”, which he very quickly finds, and downloads everything they’ve got on it, and also plants a virus. The process seems to be… doing things to him. It’s weird. This movie is weird.
The Pentagon cuts all the system hardlines, stopping the process, but it’s too late- he got what he wanted, just about. Two security personnel come into the room, and the robot kills them both with some spinning blade disc nonsense. Air Force One is forced to land for the safety of everyone on-board. More security detail comes in to deal with the little bastard, but he transforms into a boombox and sits on a shelf to avoid suspicion. Now, you’d perhaps expect-
With the plane grounded, our robot is able to walk his little ass over to a cop car. And when I say walk, I do mean walk; this fucker is in multiple folks’ line of sight and nobody notices a thing. When he enters the car, he’s greeted by the mustachioed driver- the same driver who was operating the helicopter at the beginning of the film. This mustache man is a holographic avatar, one that’s being used by all the Decepticons.
We get our first real taste of Cybertronian language, as our robot- it’s Frenzy, his name is Frenzy- lets everyone know that he’s found a clue to the location of the AllSpark, and, through the power of the internet, knows where to find the guy who’s gonna give them what they need.
Three guesses to who it is, and the first two don’t count.
Back at the Witwicky household, Sam’s car does a runner in the middle of the night. Sam, horrified that his property is being stolen, pursues on a bike, screaming at his dad to call the cops. Sam also calls the cops, as he tears through the neighborhood.
The Camaro breaks into an abandoned building, Sam follows, and we finally get a shot of our audience appeal character. Sam watches in disbelief as a giant yellow space robot shines a beacon into the sky, then makes a video on his flip phone recording the experience. He apologizes to his parents for owning pornographic magazines, and goes to face his probable demise.
However, death does not come from above, instead manifesting itself as two of the strongest junkyard dogs in the known universe, who break their brick-inlaid chains to get at this little dip of a man. Sam is chased through the yard, climbing on top of a couple precarious oil drums, even though there’s a ladder, like, right there. The Camaro rolls in, scaring off the dogs, and Sam bolts, throwing the keys to his ride at his ride. When he gets outside, the cops have arrived, and immediately arrest him.
Back with the US government, the Secretary of State is having a conversation about all the bullshit that just went down with Air Force One. He and his fellow cishet old white men discuss their options, until Maddie comes in to set them straight on some of the facts. They act all indignant about it, because women can’t be smart, right?
Right???
RIGHT??????????
RIGH-
Anyway, we get a weird little deflection of Maddie’s role in everything, because a woman is nothing without the men around her, then she brings up the point that the bullshit that happened on Air Force One went down in just a few seconds, which isn’t something that anyone can actually do. She brings up quantum mechanics, which everyone blows off as nonsense- not that I wouldn’t as well- and theorizes on a DNA-based computer, which is technically a thing, if not trapped in the realm of speculation. It’s at this point that the Secretary of Defense tells her to come back when she can back these wild claims up, and isn’t just clearly spitballing.
And then he snaps his fingers at her, and any point he might have had leaves my brain so I have more room for being enraged.
Back with Sam, we’re at the police station talking to the cops. His dad is here, and Sam is trying to explain that his car is a dude. Even though he took at a video (one that was likely crap, given how quickly he spun his phone around to show off what he was seeing) the cops, understandably, don’t believe him. Then one of them, not so understandably, starts… threatening Sam? With his sidearm? And daring him to try something? This isn’t any sort of statement on the corruption of American law enforcement, it’s just bizarre.
Back in Qatar, our soldier buddies have found a telephone line, and are going to try to use it to get in contact with the rest of the world. It’s just too bad that Scorponok’s decided to make an entrance, and knock said telephone line the hell down. Ed Sheeran has next to no reaction to this, despite it happening maybe ten feet behind him. Fig speaks Spanish, and Ed Sheeran makes a point to be an asshole about it.
Scorponok is about to stab Lennox with his very pointy tail, when Epps notices- finally, someone with peripheral vision- and starts shooting. Then everyone starts shooting, kicking up enough sand to blind themselves, as Scorponok scuttles away, buries himself, then reappears behind Ed Sheeran.
Ed Sheeran does not survive this experience.
The others bolt, not wanting the same to happen to them, and for the fourth time I wonder just why the hell this young boy was at the base in the first place.
Off in the distance, the community of a nearby town wonders just what the shit is going on out in the desert. Our soldiers run into the town, and everyone gets their guns and start firing on Scorponok, who retaliates, because why the hell wouldn’t he?
Lennox demands that the young boy take him to his father, and proceeds to borrow his phone. As shit goes down outside, we have a sort-of gag where Lennox is trying to contact the Pentagon, while a telemarketer tries to get him to buy a phone package. In order for this call to go through, he’s going to need a credit card. This is where the well-known “pocket” scene comes from, as Lennox searches Epps’ pants for his wallet as he fires on Scorponok. It’s probably the best-written thing in this whole film.
With the credit card acquired, Lennox finally gets through to the Pentagon, and tosses Epps the phone so he can talk. Maybe he’s got anxiety about speaking on the phone, I dunno.
Scorponok shows off his disregard for historical architecture, blowing up several buildings, and the US government just watches this all go down. One of the actors in this scene looks like my dad, and it trips me up every time he’s on screen. Anyway, now the Pentagon knows about the giant space robots running around in Qatar. They send over some air support about it. All this manages to do is piss Scorponok off.
So they try it again.
This time it works, sort of.
At the very least, he’s left now.
Tail fell off, though.
Also, Fig’s been grievously wounded. The others, for once, don’t make fun of his native language while they help him hold his blood inside his body.
Back at the Pentagon, Maddie’s looking to prove that the bullshit that’s been going on is of the sci-fi variety, and in order to do that, she’s going to need a little outside help. She takes the information from the Pentagon, slaps it into an SD card, hides that shit in her blush compact, and then runs out the door to Glenn Whitmann’s house. Or, rather, his grandma’s house.
Glenn is a hacker, and shouldn’t be seeing anything that Maddie’s brought him, but everyone knows that confidentiality is for nerds, so whatever.
Back at the Pentagon, Maddie’s immediately been caught. It’s almost like slapping the military network onto an SD card maybe wasn’t such a hot idea.
But what do I know?
Glenn takes a look at the soundbite and figures out that there’s a code embedded in the thing in about two seconds. Good to know our tax dollars are being well-spent on the US military, that some dude in his jammies can figure this shit out faster than a whole team of analysts. They figure out that “Project Iceman” is involved with this somehow, and also the existence of Sector Seven.
It’s at this point that the FBI busts in. Good. I kind of want Maddie to go to jail for this, because she was about as stupid as she could be handling the situation.
Glenn’s cousin goes through a closed glass door- don’t worry, it’s tempered- and there’s a weird cut before that exact same shot continues, and he’s tackled into the pool. There was no reason for that to have happened, but here we are.
Back with Sam, we’re treated to him in his boxers, shooting basketballs in his room. He goes into the kitchen, where Mojo is standing on a stool. It’s a very tall stool, the sort you sit on, and he’s just… there. I don’t know how he got there. There’s no one else in the room besides Sam, and I know he didn’t put him there.
Clearly this must mean Mojo is God, and being on that stool is his divine will. I will be approaching the rest of the franchise with this in mind, because it’s clearly the only answer.
Our merciful Lord Mojo jumps up on the kitchen counter and begins growling at something through the window. Sam looks out… the opposite window… to find that his Camaro has returned to him, and is less than thrilled about it, to put it lightly. He drops a jug of milk- luckily it was mostly empty, given the sound it makes when it hits the floor- and gives his buddy Miles a call. You remember Miles, don’t you? If you don’t, it’s fine, because he reestablishes his quirkiness with a single shot, as he sits in a swimsuit and bathes his huge-ass dog in a kiddie pool, and answers the phone with a headset he just happened to be wearing. He must get a lot of calls during Dog Washing Hours.
After giving us one of the most intense voice cracks I’ve ever heard, Sam books it out of his house, hopping on a bike to escape his murderous Camaro. He’s not seen the thing commit any murders, mind you, but he seems pretty convinced that it would do the job, given half a chance. Also, this isn’t the bike he rode the night before; that one is likely being chewed on by those strong-ass junkyard dogs. No, for some reason, the Witwickys have a pastel pink girl’s bike, with the fun little handle tassels and the basket and everything. As far as I can tell, Sam is an only child, and if you think Bay’s going to allow for a teenage boy to have the vulnerability to own a pink bike, you’ve not been paying attention for the last 48.5 minutes.
The Camaro gives chase, rolling after Sam on his bike at a brisk 7 MPH down the friggin’ sidewalk, one of the only scenes in this travesty of a film to actually get me to crack a smile. Sam races through town until city planning puts a stop to him, through the magic of using chunks of cement to decorate the mulch around their trees. He crashes his bike, faceplants into the concrete in front of Mikaela, and promptly dies, thus ending the film.
No, he doesn’t die. I just told a fib. I’m sorry.
Instead, he does a flip and lands on his back, likely receiving a concussion, in front of Mikaela and her friends. Her friends laugh, because everyone hates Sam, as they should, and Mikaela says that what he just did was “really awesome.” Don’t try to be nice, Mikaela, this is Sam we’re talking about; you could stick the dude in the freezer overnight and he still wouldn’t be even remotely cool.
Sam gets back to the whole “running away from a car” deal, and Mikaela decides that this is the sort of thing she’d like to do with her day, so she ditches her friends in the middle of their scheduled Burger King™ time to go see what the hell Sam’s on about.
As Sam is chased by the Camaro who is being chased by Mikaela on her motorized scooter, a cop becomes involved, tearing through the streets to join this ridiculous game of tag. Now, we’ve seen two different flavor of cop so far- the mustachioed avatar cop car that picked up Frenzy from the airport, and the dude who threatened a teenage boy with a gun after accusing him of being under the influence of drugs. Either way, I don’t think this is going to turn out well for Sam.
Sam’s cornered himself under one of those really wide bridges where people can park their cars, which wasn’t terribly smart, but it’s Sam, so this is about par for the course. The Camaro manages to miss him, but the cop car does not. Sam is actually pretty cool with the cops being here, as if they could do anything about “Satan’s Camaro.” I guess he didn’t see the decal on the side of this car that says “to punish and enslave…”
Sam attempts to approach the car for help, and gets clotheslined by a car door for his troubles. He hits his head on the pavement, certainly exasperating the brain injury he received not ten minutes ago. Still, he continues to try to talk to the holographic avatar through the windshield, revealing that the bike he’s been riding is his mother’s. Mystery solved, I suppose.
The cop car doesn’t much appreciate being slapped on the hood, and begins to rev violently at Sam, threatening to run him over several times. Then it explodes into being a robot. Sam, who’s seen a lot of really weird shit in the last 24 hours, nopes out of the situation. It’s at this point that I realize he’s wearing a shirt for the band the Strokes. I don’t know why that stuck out to me, but it did. Guess my brain needed something to latch onto during all this.
Sam is running as fast as his little legs allow, as our newest robot friend takes up a leisurely jog to keep pace. Then he kicks Sam. He kicks Sam’s body like the football. This, of course, instantly turns Sam into a bag of jelly and kills him, thus ending the film.
No, he doesn’t die. I just told another fib. I’m sorry.
Sam somehow survives being punted by a giant metal leg and lands in the windshield of a car that doesn’t turn into a robot. Then he gets yelled at by the cop car. This is Barricade, a member of the Decepticons, and Sam’s got something he wants. Or, should I say “LadiesMan217” has something he wants.
LadiesMan217 is Sam’s Ebay username. This is both stupid because no teenage boy existing beyond the year 1985 would have ever called himself that, and also because it’s just stupid.
Barricade wants the glasses Sam presented for his genealogy report, and he wants them NOW. Seeing as the thing he wants is for sale, and nobody had been bidding on it, one would wonder why Barricade and his associates didn’t just try to purchase them like upstanding citizens. Perhaps Decepticons don’t understand the concept of money, or perhaps they don’t have a stable address to have the glasses shipped to. Or perhaps nobody considered that angle when the script was being put together. Who can say?
Sam gets back to running away from Barricade, we see where Mikaela got to, and the two of them collide. Sam rips Mikaela off of her scooter, and they both fall to the ground. Mikaela, who did not buckle the clasp on her helmet, asks Sam what his fucking problem is. Then his problem shows up, and they take a very long time to get up so they can run. So long, in fact, that the Camaro has to swing in to save them. After much pleading from Sam, Mikaela gets inside Satan’s Camaro, and the two of them are whisked away to safety. Barricade pursues, and then the butt rock starts.
There’s a lot of screaming and yelling, the Camaro busts through a window and several shelves in an abandoned building, there’s some drifting, and then suddenly it’s nighttime. Barricade somehow got in front of the Camaro, and is circling like a shark. The Camaro locks the two teenagers inside itself, though I suppose they could climb out through the still-open windows if they really wanted to. The Camaro cuts the engine off, then cuts it back on and bolts for the exit, and this somehow tricks Barricade long enough for them to get past.
The Camaro dumps Mikaela and Sam out one of the doors and then transforms into that yellow space robot we saw a bit ago. It’s Bumblebee! Nearly an hour in, and we finally get a proper look at the little bastard. I guess that’s what happens when you spend the first 20-something minutes on being xenophobic and appealing to the focus groups that think it’s fine sexualize high schoolers.
Bumblebee- no, he’s not introduced himself yet, but I just can’t keep calling him “the Camaro” anymore- comes out of his transformation ready to square the fuck up. Barricade throws himself at Bumblebee, they roll around on the ground for a bit, then things start sparking and exploding, because this is a Michael Bay film. Frenzy jumps out and starts chasing down Mikaela and Sam, while Bumblebee and Barricade murder death punch each other. Frenzy manages to grab Sam by the ankles, drag him to the ground, and rip his pants off. Not sure how that happened, considering he’s still got his shoes on.
While Sam’s busy being chased by a sentient pile of safety pins, Mikaela’s taken it upon herself to be proactive about her survival, and is raiding a nearby building for power tools. She sprints out holding an electric jig saw and saves Sam by decapitating Frenzy. If you know anything about Transformers, then you know this doesn’t actually kill Frenzy, but good on her for being a badass. Why couldn’t Mikaela be our main character again? Oh, right, because she’s a ~girl~.
Sam punts Frenzy’s head, like, 50 yards, which seems like something he shouldn’t be able to do, given that he’s a massive weenie, but there you are. With that out of the way, Sam takes Mikaela’s hand and they run off to go watch the giant robot fight. The bottom of Frenzy’s head turns into a spider and he crawls his way over to Mikaela’s purse. He’s gonna steal her gum, the fiend!
Mikaela and Sam have, unfortunately, missed the giant robot fight, which means that we, as the audience, have also missed the giant robot fight. Which is unbelievably stupid, seeing as everyone who has ever watched this movie came for the GIANT GODDAMN ROBOTS.
Mikaela asks just who the hell the yellow robot is, I guess because she’s finally had a second to process what the hell’s going on. Sam claims that he’s a super-advanced robot, “probably from Japan.” Whether or not this is a reference to the Japanese origins of the original toy line isn’t clear, though somehow I think it’s more xenophobia. Sam also makes the claim that if Bumblebee had intended to hurt them, he would have done it by now. This is quite the jump from a few hours ago, when he was calling the poor guy “Satan’s Camaro.”
Sam finally, finally asks Bumblebee what his deal is, and we get our first taste of the Bayverse Bumblebee Gimmick. The Gimmick here is that, due to an injury to his vocal processing, Bumblebee cannot communicate through traditional means, i.e. speech. Because of this, he instead strings together sentences by flicking through the radio frequencies and choosing key words. This can lead to some interesting audio design, like describing his fellow Autobots to “rain down like visitors form heaven, Hallelujah!” because a radio sermon fit what he was trying to say best.
This gimmick is one that has been used in other pieces of Transformers media, at least in part. Bumblebee is unable to speak traditionally in Transformers: Prime, and instead communicates in beeps and clicks that his teammates can understand, but not so much the humans, save for Raf. In Bumblebee (2018), the idea was used whole-cloth, with the injury resulting in his inability to speak happening on-camera within the first 10 minutes of the movie, and the idea of “expressing oneself through music” being introduced by his human companion Charlie Watson.
All in all, I rather like the idea going on here; it’s an interesting part of his character that opens up for a lot of interesting and creative moments.
It’s just too bad it was introduced in fucking Bayverse.
But yeah, anyway, the other Autobots are coming to Earth. Shit’s gonna be lit.
Bumblebee turns back into a Camaro, and Sam uses the power of FOMO to get Mikaela to go in the car with him. We get a shot of Barricade fucking dying on the side of the road. Frenzy murders Mikaela’s phone, and then steals its identity, including the little bejeweled heart stickers. Good thing Mikaela remembered to go get her purse, otherwise he probably would have felt very silly doing that.
Mikaela refuses to sit in the driver’s seat, seeing as she now knows Sam’s car is sentient, and sort of feels weird about this whole thing. Sam suggests that she sit in his lap instead, as the camera angles to give us a peek at the cup of Mikaela’s bra. When asked why the hell she should do such a thing, Sam says it’s a concern about her safety, given that the middle console of the car does not have a seatbelt. Sam either fails to recognize that seatbelts going over two layered bodies won’t save either of them in the event of a crash, or he’s just trying to make an excuse to have a pretty girl in his lap.
Given what movie this is, I’m going to guess it’s the latter.
Mikaela has a similar line of thought, but scoots over anyway, saying that the seatbelt line was a “smooth move”. It wasn’t, but if I picked apart every single bad line Sam had in this film, I’d be here all day.
Mikaela questions Bumblebee’s taste in alt-mode, which offends him to the point of dumping both her and Sam out in the street and driving away. He returns, moments later, as a sleek new Camaro, that I’m sure some car aficionados would call “sexy.”
Bumblebee’s alt-mode is a 2009 Chevrolet Camaro, of which there were none during the time of filming. It was put together for this movie in roughly five weeks. Sam is blown away by the fact that he now owns a car that does not currently exist in his universe. Mikaela is impressed, or at least she would be, if women were allowed to show that emotion in a non-horny way in a Bay film.
Judy doesn’t count.
As Bumblebee breaks into yet another restricted area, we get a shot of the Earth from orbit, as several objects rocket towards the planet. Sam and Mikaela watch the Autobots burn up in the atmosphere, and Mikaela tries to hold Sam’s hand as they do, and it’s at this point that I have to address how much I hate these two’s dynamic.
I don’t give a single solitary shit about this romance, because A) it’s poorly written, B) Mikaela could do infinitely better than Sam, C) I dislike Sam so very much, D) Mikaela, who is a way more interesting character, got placed on friggin’ love interest duty because ~girl~, and E) it’s useless padding to try and make me care about what’s happening here, and I just DON’T. I do NOT care about whether these two get together or not.
We see the Autobots crash-land, three out of four of them causing massive amounts of property damage and possibly killing at least one person. Their stasis pods crack open, and they each climb out, completely naked and in desperate need of clothing to hide their shame. With a quick scan of nearby vehicles, they’re once again decent to be seen in public.
Bumblebee drives the kids out to what I can only assume is the warehouse district he sent that beacon out in, as our collection of good guys finally come together at long last. A massive Peterbilt semi-truck stops directly in front of Mikaela and Sam.
We’re over an hour into this film, and we’re just now getting to the quintessential Transformer, Optimus Prime himself.
In the original cartoon, Optimus’s alt-mode was what’s known as a cabover truck, one where the cab- where the driver sits- is seated directly over the engine. These were popular during the days when maximum truck-lengths were much shorter than they are currently. This is why when you look at height charts for Optimus over various continuities, his G1 cartoon counterpart much shorter than his other iterations.
Modern trucks are longer, and don’t need the cab to sit on top of the engine to save on space. The designers chose to use a Peterbilt to make sure that Optimus would have an imposing stature when compared to his fellow Autobots.
Because heaven forbid we not have heightism come into play in this film.
Our Autobots transform, and say what you will about these bastards being visually incomprehensible, the transformations themselves are cool as hell. My personal favorite is Jazz’s, where he does a cool windmill into his root mode.
Optimus crouches like he’s looking at a cool bug on the sidewalk and addresses Sam by name. He doesn’t even acknowledge Mikaela, which I find to be a bit rude, but whatever. He then introduces himself as the leader of the Autobots.
Peter Cullen is back as the voice for Optimus Prime, sounding wonderful as always. He almost wasn’t brought on for this project, because Michael Bay didn’t want him. If the fans hadn’t thrown a hissyfit, who knows who we would have gotten to be our space dad for the next hour and a half?
This is actually an issue that’s recurred several times in the last few years, and not just with Cullen; Frank Welker, the voice of Megatron, as well as many other Transformers, has been refused roles within Transformers properties. In general, this is because both Cullen and Welker are union actors, and Hasbro would prefer to hire sound-alikes than pay more money for the originals. This isn’t to shame the non-union actors, goodness no, just to merely point out less-than-fantastic business practices.
I realize there have been a lot of tangents, but you have to understand that I am suffering as I do this.
Optimus then introduces his team- there’s Jazz, whose first line is “What’s crackin’ little bitches?”, Ironhide, who incorrectly quotes Dirty Harry, and Ratchet, who calls out just how obnoxiously horny Sam’s character is. We also finally get Bumblebee’s name.
Mikaela asks the very good question of why the fuck the Autobots are here on Earth. Optimus explains that the AllSpark is here, and they’ve got to get to it before Megatron does. He then goes on to explain who Megatron is, stating that he “betrayed” the Cybertronian empire.
No, how exactly he did that isn’t addressed. We’ll just have to take Optimus’s word, I suppose.
If you’ve sussed out by this point the the AllSpark and the Cube™ are the same thing, congrats! You win. Megatron followed the AllSpark to Earth, where he promptly was neutralized by the cold of the Arctic circle. This was 110 years prior to the events of this film, and where Archibald Witwicky came in to the story.
When the expedition was happening, Archibald fell through the ice during a collapse, and ended up finding Megatron’s frozen body in an ice cave. He went poking around on this strange metal giant, and ended up activating Megatron’s navigation systems, which imprinted the coordinates of the AllSpark onto Archibald’s glasses.
Don’t ask how that works, it just does.
So, the Autobots need the glasses, so they can find the AllSpark before the Decepticons do, so those guys don’t use it to build an army out of Earth’s machines, which will destroy humanity.
Sounds simple enough, let’s go get that vision correction device!
Back with the military dudes, everyone’s taking a gander at the tail that Scorponok left behind. They theorize that the metal that makes up these giant murder-robots reacts to extreme heat, but elaboration on that point will have to wait, because the tail has begun to flail. They quickly strap it down, then call the military to let them know to strap anti-tank guns onto anything that’s going to be approaching any giant robots.
Meanwhile, in an interrogation room, Maddie and Glen have been left to sweat a bit. Glen takes to stress-eating, while framing it as a psychological tactic to subconsciously prove his innocence to the FBI.
This is a fat joke, with the added nasty layer of Glen being a black man about to be interrogated by one of the most intimidating white cops I’ve seen in a hot minute.
Glen immediately folds, pinning all the blame on Maddie, and claiming that he’s been a perfect angel his whole life. We get some weird purity culture out of him, before Maddie lets the FBI know that she needs to talk to the Secretary of Defense, NOW.
Over at the Witwicky household, Sam’s parents are watching the news, trying to find out what all those loud crashes were about. Optimus Prime drives down their residential street, the rest of the gang in tow, then they all park to wait for Sam to go get the glasses.
For about 20 seconds.
Sam has to physically hold the door shut to prevent his father from coming out and seeing several very tall robots from outer space tip-toeing around his freshly-landscaped yard, I guess because they got antsy. Optimus plods around on the grass and breaks a fountain, and our benevolent god Mojo comes out of the house, assuredly to smite the leader of the Autobots.
Mikaela runs onto the scene, and Sam chastises her for not controlling the robots who didn’t even acknowledge her existence, outside of pointing out Sam was sexually attracted to her.
Mojo pees on Ironhide’s foot, which prompts Ironhide to threaten to shoot the creature. This is why Ironhide isn’t getting into heaven. Sam, one of Mojo’s chosen few, claims that the mortal shell of his god is seen as a beloved pet by many humans. Sam runs into the house, before Mojo can incur his divine wrath on the Autobots.
While Sam goes to get the glasses, the Autobots decide to do a little peeping on the house, watching his parents watch TV. Sam tears his room apart trying to find the glasses, and Optimus thinks that it would be helpful if he brought Mikaela up to help look. It’s at this point that I realize that Sam has an utterly bizarre fish tank.
I mean, legitimately, what the fuck is this? No filter, no plants, might not even have any rocks on the bottom. Is this a comically oversized bong Sam threw a couple fish into? What the fuck.
Mikaela starts looking for the glasses, running into what is likely a box of porn mags, then they both look out the window to find that the Autobots have decided to hide in plain sight by transforming... in the middle of Sam’s backyard. Amazing work, gentlemen.
Sam finally convinces the Autobots to go sit in the alley and wait, only for Ratchet to run into a power line and trip into a greenhouse. The resulting impact is interpreted as an earthquake. Judy does not have the reaction one might expect from someone who’s lived in California for at least ten years.
Ratchet’s fine, by the way.
The power cuts out, and Ron goes up to check on his son, because he’s at least a halfway-decent father. Ratchet’s shining a light to aid in the search for the glasses. Sam’s parents notice this bright light, and bang on Sam’s door to see what’s up.
Sam quickly hides Mikaela and then attempts to salvage the situation, answering the door and trying to control the narrative. Unfortunately, Ron is far too inquisitive for Sam to do this, and then Judy asks if Sam was masturbating.
Judy, is privacy just not a thing to you? Because if not, it really ought to be.
She keeps going with it too, trying to come up with code words, until another one of the Autobots trips and causes Ron to panic again, climbing into Sam’s ancient claw-foot bathtub to protect himself. He looks out the window to check on his beloved yard, lamenting that the earthquake tore it up.
Ironhide is strongly considering killing Sam’s parents. Optimus tells him that they don’t harm humans, and also begins to wonder if he made a mistake bringing this guy along.
Back in Sam’s room, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Sam is an absolutely terrible liar, and Mikaela reveals herself, if only to prevent Judy from trying to talk about self-pleasure again. Of course, now she gets to be subjected to both of Sam’s parents objectifying her, so this might be a lose-lose situation.
Sam is reminded that his backpack is in the kitchen, just in time for the government to show up at his house. Mikaela makes a comment about Judy being nice. I suppose on a surface level, yes, being told that you’re gorgeous by someone’s mom is nice. I do have to question the context that compliment took place in, however.
Sam’s about to hand the glasses over to the Autobots, when someone rings the doorbell. It’s Sector Seven, and they’re here to talk to Sam about his stolen car being part of an issue involving national security. Ron and Judy are more concerned about their yard being torn up, Judy yelling that they “need to get their hands off [her] bush.”
We still have another hour of this movie.
The agent leading this mission asks Sam to come with him for questioning, which his parents are very much against. Mojo also voices his displeasure, but it would seem that Agent Simmons is not a follower of the Tenets of Mojo. Sam gets geigered, and his readings are high enough for Sector Seven to take him and everyone in this house into custody.
As Sam and Mikaela are riding in the back of the car, Simmons brings up Sam’s Ebay account, and also the phone video he took of Bumblebee earlier in the week. Mikaela is rather unimpressed with Sam at the moment, probably because he’s gotten her arrested. She still tries to help him out though, because she really is just the nicest fucking person on the planet.
Alas, the combined efforts of these two teenagers isn’t enough to fool the long arm of the law, especially when it’s a branch of said law that deals with extraterrestrial activity. Simmons threatens to lock up these literal children for life if they don’t start talking. Mikaela isn’t taking the bait, so he goes after her father’s parole hearing instead.
Yep! As it turns out, Mikaela and her father stole cars to get by, and she’s got the record to back that claim up. Simmons calls her a criminal, then says that criminals are hot. Mikaela looks like she’s about to cry, and I don’t blame her in the slightest.
Optimus, I suppose because his dad senses were tingling, takes the opportunity to place his leg in the road for the car to run into, then grabs said car like an unruly cat and lifts it until the roof rips off due to stress. The agents in the other cars pile out and point their guns at the giant space robot. The rest of the Autobots quickly relieve them of their weapons.
Optimus notes that Simmons doesn’t seem surprised that a bunch of giant robots just took all his guys’ guns, and demands that he exit the vehicle, posthaste. Simmons obliges, after a bit more prodding. Mikaela undoes Sam’s handcuffs, and he gets fucking pissy about it, as if this girl he’s had a grand total of three (awkward) conversations with should have told him something as personal as “hey, so my dad’s in jail and I’ve been to juvenile detention.”
Luckily, she doesn’t let him get away with it, calling him out as the spoiled, self-centered, privileged little shithead that he is.
Of course, we don’t get any sort of real acknowledgement from Sam, having to move on with the plot. Perhaps, if we hadn’t spent the last hour and 20 minutes faffing about on drivel, we could have had Sam get an actual moment of self-reflection, and potentially even character growth. However, this is Bayverse, and everyone knows that personal accountability is for fucking sissies.
Mikaela and Sam ask several questions, but get no answers from Agent Simmons. And then Bumblebee pees on him.
I hate that I had to write that. I hate it very much.
Anyway, I don’t know why that had to happen, but it did, and I’m nothing if not thorough.
Optimus tells Bumblebee to cut it out, and with that the Sector Seven agents are cuffs and left on the side of the road. Mikaela orders Simmons to strip, as punishment for threatening her father, then cuffs him to a street lamp.
...Yes, that does sound like a bizarre sexual fantasy, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately for our teen heroes, they forgot to confiscate everyone’s phones, and Sector Seven knows what’s up, thanks to the power of speakerphone. More cars and a couple of helicopters show up basically immediately, and the Autobots decide it’s time to dip.
But not before Ironhide fires off a pulsewave into the ground that causes a five-car pileup.
Optimus, I suppose because he knows he chose a ridiculously flashy alt-mode that is in no way practical, just picks the kids up in and places them on his shoulder like a couple of parakeets, then takes up a leisurely jog to get away from the eyes in the sky. He runs through the city, racking up what is likely millions in property damage, as the helicopters pursue. He passes by a “Legalize LA” billboard, which feels odd to see, given what movie this is.
The ‘copters somehow manage to lose Optimus, despite him being relatively slow, and having a notable radiation level that they’ve been using to track him. He hides inside the scaffolding of a bridge, only for Mikaela and Sam to slip off of his polished body to their deaths, thus ending the film.
No, they don’t die. I just told another fib. I’m sorry.
Bumblebee snatches them up just before they hit the ground, the impact of his metal body catching them at 75 mph, killing them instantly and ending the film.
Nope, that doesn’t happen either.
Mikaela and Sam are fine, some-fucking-how, but Sam’s dropped the MacGuffin glasses. The helicopters swing back around, having noticed the sound of a car crashing into the ground and the screams of two whole adolescents. They break out a fucking harpoon gun and fire on our kid appeal character.
Repeatedly.
They wrap up Bumblebee in a series of cables, as he screams like a moose. Mikaela and Sam are held at gunpoint by what is honestly far too many dudes, and are then arrested for the second time in ten minutes. Bumblebee is smoked... because he’s a bee? Sam, not liking this one bit, finds the strength in his weenie body to push a cop off of himself, run at one of the dudes with the smoke guns, throw him to the ground, and then start smoking him. He’s immediately tackled, but points for trying.
Sam and Mikaela are placed back into custody, and the rest of the Autobots regroup with Optimus to see what the plan is. Optimus says that they can’t save Bumblebee without hurting humans, so I guess Bumblebee is just a POW now. Well, at least they got the glasses. That’s cool.
Back at the Pentagon, things are getting dicey, as the other world powers are starting to suspect that something’s up. The Secretary of Defense is approached by a man with a mustache and a briefcase. He’s from Sector Seven, but the Secretary gives not a fuck about mysterious organizations. All the computers in the room suddenly go down, the virus from earlier working its magic- only this time, the blackout is global.
Mr. Mustache opens his briefcase, while explaining that Sector Seven is something known as a “special access” sector of the government, which is why nobody’s ever heard of it; it’s beyond top secret. Commissioned by President Herbert Hoover 80 years prior, it deals with alien life.
When the Beagle 2 spacecraft was lost on the way to Mars in 2003, the mission was declared a failure. This was a lie. The Beagle 2 recorded several seconds of Mars before being crushed to death by a Transformer. This tidbit is pretty funny, given that the Beagle 2 was rediscovered on Mars in 2014, seven years after this film released. Not a terribly mysterious death anymore, is it?
Comparing the footage from Mars to the footage from Qatar has Sector Seven thinking that these are the same species. Which they are. God, it’d be so fucked up if there were two species of giant robots in this film.
Mr. Mustache theorizes that because the Transformers now know that they can be harmed by human weaponry, they’re being proactive about their safety and shutting down all forms of communication technology with that virus that keeps popping up. It’s only a matter of time before the shit hits the fan for humanity.
Mr. Secretary tells his guys to try going analog with comms, breaking out the short-wave radios, to tell their ships to return home.
Over at an Air Force base, Lennox and the gang have landed, only to be scooped up by a bunch of dudes in suits.
Back with Maddie and Glen, the two of them have fallen asleep in the interrogation room, Maddie still wearing her friggin’ four inch pumps as her legs are propped up on the table, crossed in a way that seems rather uncomfortable. Glen gets to sleep like a normal human being, with his head resting on his forearms. Why this place doesn’t have a holding cell for these situations is beyond me.
Mr. Secretary comes in to bring Maddie on as his advisor. Glen can come too, I guess, considering he’s the one who actually figured out the sound file virus.
We get a little military glorification, and then it’s revealed that Mikaela and Sam, as well as Maddie and Glen, are aboard this helicopter. Their paths cross at last. Our heroes are transported to the Hoover Dam, where Bumblebee is also. They are still smoking him.
Meanwhile, the Autobots are figuring out where to go, with the power of Archibald’s glasses. Ratchet, who I guess is omnipotent, senses that the Decepticons have also figured out the location, and that this is going to be a race against the clock. And I mean, he’s right, but the phrasing is a bit odd.
Jazz wants to know when they’re going to save Bumblebee. Optimus says that they aren’t, and that Bumblebee’s sacrifice is noble, and that he would want the Autobots to leave him and complete the mission. As this is said, we get another shot of Bumblebee getting smoked and trapped in a lab. Yep, this is totally what he would want. He absolutely signed up for this, giving himself up to the government and not at all fighting like mad to not be captured.
I don’t think Bayverse Optimus actually knows what martyrdom is, which is bizarre, given that it’s a major trait in a lot of other iterations of the character.
Ironhide isn’t even sure why they’re bothering to save humanity, given that humans are violent and awful, his point being hammered home as Bumblebee is tortured for scientific reasons. Ironhide seems to have forgotten that Cybertron has been at war for literally millions of years. Optimus has faith in humanity, however, stating that we’re “young”.
And then he says that he’s going to end his own race, by destroying the Cube™, which is how they reproduce, because that’s the only way to end the war.
Which is arguably one of the most hardcore fictional applications of eugenics ever conceived.
Being advocated for by Optimus Goddamn Prime.
We still have another 50 minutes of this movie.
Optimus then proves that he does, in fact, know what self-sacrifice is, stating that, if all else fails, he’ll shove the AllSpark into his spark, which will destroy them both. He’s pretty chill about it, too.
Up on top of the Hoover Dam, Frenzy has fallen out of Mikaela’s bag.
Mr. Secretary is also at the Hoover Dam now, as is Lennox’s team. Oh, and Agent Simmons, who is thankfully wearing pants. He offers to buy Sam a coffee, as repartitions for threatening his family, arresting him, and being a complete creep to a teenage girl. Sam gives not a fuck about caramel macchiatos with extra foam and chocolate drizzle, however. He only cares about his car.
Mr. Mustache, who is also here, needs Sam to spill the beans on all these friggin’ giant robots that are running around. This is where Sam realizes he has the upper hand for once, and he starts making demands. One such demand is having Mikaela’s record scrubbed clean, which is an actually very nice thing for him to have done for her. We’ll see if his intent comes to fruition. For now, it’s time to talk about Bumblebee.
We get a shot of all these folks heading into the secret base hidden inside the Hoover Dam, and it’s at this point that I notice that Maddie’s shirt is basically see-through.
Inside the Dam, we see that Sector Seven′s been keeping Megatron this entire time, keeping him neutralized with cryo-stasis since 1935. Cryopreservation was invented in the 50′s. This isn’t a nitpick, I just thought it was a neat little fact.
Megatron being on Earth has resulted in most modern technology. This sort of plot point always bothers me, because it takes away agency from the entire human race. We didn’t use our own ingenuity and work ethic to advance society, we plagiarized from a more advanced species. I dunno, it just rubs me the wrong way.
We get the part of the movie where info is hashed out, so that everyone is on the same page, Sam spouting off Autobot propaganda. We can forgive him for this,considering he’s 16, and no one is immune to propaganda, especially when they have zero way of doing their own research to form their own opinion with.
Sector Seven also has the AllSpark, kept in the room next to Megatron’s, like the chumps they will soon find themselves to be. It’s about ten stories tall and the reason the Hoover Dam exists. With so much concrete suppressing its alien energies, surely no one will ever find it!
Except for Frenzy, who came in through a mouse hole. Whoopsie-doodle!
The AllSpark zaps the nasty little man, restoring his body with its weird MacGuffin powers. Frenzy tells all his coworkers that he found what they were looking for, and everyone starts heading over.
Maddie asks Mr. Mustache what exactly he means by “energies”, perhaps worried that this whole thing has been some elaborate ploy to get her to invest in magic healing stones. Mr. Mustache brings everyone into a testing chamber, since the best way to explain how the AllSpark works is through a demonstration.
There’s a big fish tank in the middle of this testing chamber, in which Agent Simmons places a donated device from the crowd- Glen’s Nokia phone, specifically. Simmons makes a geologically-confused comment. When this is pointed out by Maddie, Mr. Secretary hushes her, simply saying that Simmons is a strange man. The tank is locked down, and then the show starts.
Cube™ energies are shot into the tank, and the phone explodes into life, transforming into a gorilla-shaped gremlin creature. Happy birthday, little dude!
Little dude starts shooting at the tank walls, cracking the glass until Simmons pulls the trigger and ends it. Happy deathday, little dude!
The Decepticons are making tracks towards the Hoover Dam, but Starscream- yeah, he’s in this now, don’t worry about it- arrives first, because he is a very fast jet. He transforms, showing off his ridiculous Dorito body, and fires on the base’s generators. The resulting explosions can be heard all the way down in the testing chamber, and Mr. Mustache calls upstairs to see what’s up. Looks like Megatron may be getting warmed up, seeing as his ice bath has been cut off. Lennox asks if there’s an arms room in Sector Seven, which sort of feels like asking a bakery if they have any flour.
Frenzy has entered the room that houses the controls for the cryo-stasis and set that whole system to “no, thank you”.
Mr. Mustache runs through the base, screaming for everyone to get to the Megatron chamber. Off in the distance, the Autobots approach. Could probably used some fliers on your team, huh Optimus?
Back with Frenzy, he’s decided to just straight-up raise Megatron’s core temperature directly. Hope he doesn’t do it too fast; rewarming hypothermia victims recklessly can do some serious damage.
Outside of the base, Lennox and the boys are loading up with weaponry, along with what’s the entirety of Sector Seven′s cannon-fodder department. Oh, and all the main cast. Yep, just got a couple of teenagers chillin’ in the munitions room.
Sam wants Simmons to take him to his car- he hasn’t used Bumblebee’s name in a hot minute, not sure what’s up with that- even though Simmons is currently busy loading a very large gun. Simmons doesn’t want to do that, because he’s got no idea if what Sam mentioned earlier is even true, and he doesn’t want to pin the fate of humanity on a single Camaro. Lennox takes this opportunity to tackle Simmons, despite likely not knowing that Bumblebee is one of the “good guys”. A Sector Seven guy very much doesn’t like that, and points a gun at Lennox, which prompts all of his guys to also start threatening folks with guns.
Mr. Mustache walks in on the scene, but doesn’t do anything, since he isn’t armed and knows better than to tangle with someone who’s packing. Simmons tries to intimidate Lennox, because he must have missed the day of boot camp where they tell you that guns kill people. Lennox is fully committed to shooting this dude in the lungs before Mr. Secretary suggests he give the people what they want, before things get ugly.
Simmons takes everyone to the robot torture department of Sector Seven, where they are still smoking Bumblebee. Geez, you’d think they’d have something in place for if they ever came across another giant robot after Megatron, but I guess not. The gang gets everyone to stop smoking Bumblebee, which allows him to stop moose-screaming and strongly consider murdering everyone involved with his forced captivity. Unfortunately, revenge with have to wait, as we’ve still got to deal with the AllSpark, and the fact that the Decepticons are here.
They take Bumblebee to the AllSpark, where he makes direct contact the thing, causing the AllSpark to transform, compacting itself down into a far more reasonable size that Bumblebee can carry in one hand. It doesn’t seem to weigh more than a grown adult, if his body language is saying anything. I’d make a joke about the conservation of mass being ignored, but since this is Transformers, I can’t really say much. Conservation of mass doesn’t exist for this franchise.
Bumblebee would really like to get this show on the road, and Lennox agrees, quickly formulating a plan to get away from Megatron and taking the AllSpark to Mission City, which is relatively close to their current location, so that they can hide it there.
Lennox, I know this plan is a first draft, and we don’t have a ton of time for revisions, but the whole point of building a whole-ass dam around the Cube™ was because it was very difficult to hide, given its magical MacGuffin powers. Regardless of this flaw, Mr. Secretary agrees. Lennox also asks that the Air Force be involved in this, I guess because the U.S. military wanted more screentime.
Of course, that whole “global blackout” thing is still going on, so we’re going to have to get creative with how we’re going to contact the Air Force. Mr. Secretary and Simmons make a break for the WWII-era radio Sector Seven has, while Lennox and the boys head out to shoot things, and Mikaela and Sam hop into Bumblebee with the Cube™.
This is about the point that Megatron wakes up. The first thing he does is introduce himself, which I thought was very polite of him. Then he breaks out his flail and starts bashing shit around. Not so polite, that.
Over with Bumblebee, we’re shown that the AllSpark, all-powerful object that can create life and is the whole reason this conflict is even happening, is just chillin’ in the back seat by itself. It’s not even buckled up.
Megatron escapes the base, and it’s actually super easy. He just transforms, goes through the tunnel, and he’s free. I feel like we could have at least attempted some security measures for in case the cryo-stasis failed, given that we’ve had this dude in containment for the last 70-something years, but okay.
Starscream comes over to say hi to his boss, not that Megatron gives a shit. He just wants to know where that fucking Cube™ is. When Starscream tells him that the humans have it, Megatron makes a comment about how Starscream has failed him yet again. This is their first interaction in this movie, and Starscream’s been in the story for a grand total of five minutes at this point. I know that this is a reference to their dynamic in just about every installment of the franchise up to this point, but it doesn’t feel earned in the slightest. Even if it’s going to be expanded upon in future sequels, this is a shit-tier way to set their (awful) relationship up.
Not that anyone should ever bank on getting a sequel anyway, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Megatron tells Starscream to retrieve the AllSpark, and then we cut over to the radio plotline. The radio, which is so cobweb-covered I feel like Sector Seven needs to have a serious discussion with their custodial staff, has its nobs and buttons fiddled with by Simmons until it crackles to life. But where are the microphones? Everyone starts looking for the mics, as Simmons pushes Glen into the seat, I guess because hacking modern computers and using Depression-era radio tech are similar enough.
Maddie asks Glen if he can hotwire a 90′s-era computer to transmit a tone through the radio, so that they can send a Morse code message to the Air Force. Which sounds ridiculous to me, but I don’t know enough about radios or computers to know if that sort of thing would be possible. Maybe it’s fine. Or maybe it’s Hollywood bullshit. Who knows?
Back over with Bumblebee, we get a bunch of car commercial shots, of both him and the other Autobots. Aww, the gang’s back together again! Nobody tell Bumblebee that Optimus was completely cool with leaving him to his fate.
Optimus and the gang whip around to join the convoy, and everyone makes their way towards Mission City.
Back at the radio subplot, someone’s bangin’ on the door, trying to get in. The others try to block the intruder, while Glen does his hacking stuff. Mr. Secretary breaks a case and pulls out a gun that’s about as old as he is.
Glen gets the computer working, and Mr. Secretary gives him the Super Secret Military Codewords™ to use to talk to the Air Force. While he does that, Simmons finds a flamethrower and starts burning Frenzy as he attempts to enter the room. The Air Force receives the message for an air strike. Oh, goody.
Over with the convoy, it appears that the Autobots and Lennox’s boys are being pursued by the Decepticons. It’s difficult to tell, seeing as the cameras have gone full Bay-mode, but I’m guessing that’s what’s up. One of the Decepticons flips over a minivan, likely killing a family of five. another causes a multi-car pileup.
Bonecrusher transforms, then Optimus transforms. Bonecrusher iceskates across the highway, slamming into a bus so hard it just straight-up explodes. He is on fire. He tackles Optimus, and they proceed to fall off the side of the raised highway they’re on. Then they beat the shit out of each other, until Optimus decapitates Bonecrusher with his arm-sword.
Yeah, space dad is a little intense in the Bayverse.
Back at Sector Seven, Frenzy’s decided to leave the door alone, and instead is crawling through the ventilation shaft. Mr. Secretary and Simmons fire off shots into the duct above them, as if bullets would do anything against this nasty little pile of needles.
Frenzy bursts through the bottom of the duct and crash-lands into a glass case, taking cover behind a pillar and fires on the humans on the other side of the room. While this shootout is happening, Glen receives a response from the Air Force, just in time for Frenzy to accidentally decapitate himself with one of his own spinning blades of death. This time, he does not survive losing his head.
The Air Force will be sending fighter planes to Mission City, and to establish this, we get several shots of what some might call “military porn.”
Over in the city, the convoy has arrived. Lennox hands several short-wave radios over to Epps, telling him to use them to direct the Air Force when they arrive, so they can take the AllSpark... somewhere, I guess. Above, an F-22 zooms across the sky. It is not one of the Air Force’s F-22s.
Ironhide recognizes Starscream, and gets ready to throw down. Bumblebee grabs a nearby Furby truck and hoists it up to use as a shield. This marginally works, as the missile that hits the truck doesn’t immediately kill him, though it probably did all those Furbies inside.
The resulting explosion throws all the humans around, Mikaela getting weird heaven lighting as she lies unconscious on the pavement. Sam gets it too, though, so I suppose I can’t complain too much about this particular shot. They touch hands. I really wish that I could take this moment of vulnerability as being anything other than an attempt to set up a romance between these two teens who have known each other for maybe half a week. This movie has so starved me of genuine human interaction I'm jumping at the smallest of scraps.
Bumblebee actually didn’t get out of that missile-strike unscathed, his legs having been blown off. All those Furbies died for nothing. Tragic. Sam asks Bumblebee if he’s alright, and immediately tells him to get up. Sam then remembers that Bumblebee’s legs are off, so he yells for Ratchet.
Over with Lennox and Epps, they’ve realized that the plane they saw wasn’t one of theirs. Which, you know, has already been established, but points for getting caught up, fellas. Sam is crying and still telling Bumblebee to get up. Bumblebee is dragging himself across the pavement and whimpering. It’s awful. Where the fuck is Ratchet? This is basically the only reason he’s in this film, and he’s nowhere to be found.
The actual Air Force calls on the radio, asking for their location. Brawl, who is a tank, starts firing on Lennox’s gang. Jazz and Ratchet race through the city streets. How they were separated from the rest of the team is anyone’s guess.
Sam takes a little sit on the pavement to be with Bumblebee, while Mikaela decides to problem-solve and heads for a nearby tow truck. Bumblebee hands Sam the Cube™ because, as the designated protagonist, it’s his job to handle it in the climax of the film.
Ironhide is shot at several times by Brawl, narrowly avoiding being hit each time. This, of course, means that the people he drives by in this shot are almost assuredly dead, since they’re right next to the explosions. He transforms and does a flip, as the film goes slow-mo on a shot of a woman in a low-cut dress watching him flip. She screams. Ironhide screams. I scream, though probably for a different reason.
Jazz jumps on Brawl, managing to kick off a couple pieces of kibble before Brawl grabs him and throws him into the side of a building. Ironhide, Optimus, and Ratchet descend on Brawl, and so does Lennox’s team, Brawl losing a hand and getting thrown into his own building as a result.
Mikaela breaks into the tow truck and starts to hotwire that shit. Wow, a relevant back story that culminates in her being able to save the day, thus completing her arc and staying on-theme for her character. Why isn’t Mikaela the protagonist again?
Oh, right, because ~girl~.
Megatron lands in a nearby alleyway, and Ratchet, knowing this dude is bad news, tells everyone to head for the hills. Jazz isn’t fast enough, however, and gets shot for his troubles.
Mikaela drives the truck over to Sam, who is still sitting there with the Cube™, and tells him to get his ass in gear.
Jazz gets taken to the top of a nearby building and is ripped in two by Megatron, who acts like a bird of prey the whole sequence. Down on the ground, Brawl is starting to get back up from his smackdown. Blackout appears on a nearby skyscraper. Things are looking grim for humanity.
Mikaela and Sam hook Bumblebee up to the tow line as Lennox approaches them. Sam has left the AllSpark out of his line of sight, like a fool. Despite seeing this, Lennox still gives him the flare to let the military know where to pick up the AllSpark. Doesn’t even acknowledge Mikaela. He tells Sam to head for the white building with statues on top of it and set the flare on top of the roof. Lennox can’t leave his men, because he’s the head of his operation. Why he can’t send literally anyone else who isn’t a 16 year-old boy isn’t made clear.
Sam really doesn’t want to do this, probably because he’s a child, but Lennox has recruited him to the military against his will, so he must. Lennox then attempts to make Mikaela leave for her own good, but she tells him to fuck off, because she’s gonna save Bumblebee. Clearly, this is a win for feminism.
Epps radios the choppers coming from the Air Force to let them know they’ll be picking up a package from a teenager, thus locking Sam into the job. Ironhide and Ratchet vow to protect Sam from the Decepticons on his way to the pickup point. Not one single person has pointed out how fucked up this is.
Sam starts to run off, when Mikaela stops him to let him know that she’s glad she got in the car with him roughly an hour ago. They don’t kiss goodbye, which, honestly? Good. This fucking movie hasn’t earned that. Sam for sure hasn’t earned that, even if he did clear her juvie record. No word on that having actually been done, by the way. Sam never got confirmation, and I feel like he’s not really the type to follow up on things.
Brawl fires off some shots and makes things explode. Ratchet and Ironhide provide cover fire as Sam sprints down the road. Yep, they’re making this idiot WALK to the pickup point. Sure hope the elevators are working today, otherwise this is going to take forever.
Sam carries the AllSpark like a football, and in a better movie, this would have been foreshadowed by Sam having actually been a football player prior to the events of the film, perhaps removed from the team for some character flaw he’s since grown from/accepted. However, this is Bayverse, and well, men don’t have to justify their existence in the story with things like themes and having even an ounce of thought put into their character.
Back with Mikaela, Lennox has refused to learn her name, calling her “girl” as he screams at her to get Bumblebee hooked up to the tow truck. Which she was already doing when he got here. Lennox, dude, you’ve got a daughter now, you’re super extra not allowed to treat women like this.
Optimus Prime pulls through an alleyway and crashes into a pile of garbage. I can forgive him being late, seeing as he is a big rig, and probably had to take the long way into town so he didn’t get stuck in too-low tunnels. Don’t worry about how we briefly saw him during the Brawl take-down. This is his for real entrance into the climax.
He whips around and transforms, ready to throw the fuck down. Megatron spots him from his perch and descends.
Y’know.
Like a vast, predatory bird.
Megatron shoots at Optimus in his alt-mode, and Optimus catches him like a frisbee. Unfortunately for Optimus, it would appear that the horsepower on a Cybertronian flightcraft is hella intense, and he’s carried away. The two of them crash through an office building, then roll around in the streets punching each other in the face, debating the worth of humanity as they do so. Wish I actually gave a shit about either of these people, but alas! The film spent most of its runtime objectifying women and insulting minorities. I know nothing about Optimus, and even less about Megatron.
Megatron transforms his arms into a laser gun, and Optimus does the same. They shoot at each other. Optimus gets thrown into a building, then lands on the sidewalk below, definitely crushing a dude underneath him, but I guess we didn’t check that the shot was clear for where the CGI was gonna go, so he’s fine.
Sam’s still running through the streets, while Blackout murders, like, so many people behind him. Starscream lands in front of Sam, running into roughly 30 cars as he skids to a halt. Ratchet and Ironhide fire on him, as Sam takes a breather behind a car. Starscream transforms and blasts off. He was here for about 15 seconds. Sam begins running again.
Megatron is now following Sam, because he wants that Cube™. Sam is hit by a car- not an evil one, just a regular car- and trips. The impact makes the AllSpark activate, which grants several machines in the vicinity the gift of life, including the car full of bitchy women that just hit Sam, who are upset that hitting a human being might have scratched the paint.
I get it, you hate women, can we PLEASE stop beating this dead horse?
Sam finally gets to the pickup building, which turns out to be abandoned and fenced off. Good thing the gate was open, otherwise things could get really complicated. He heads inside, Megatron crashing through a floor-to-ceiling window shortly behind him. Megatron makes the claim that he can smell where Sam is. I’m going to choose to believe that he isn’t lying here, since Ratchet did something similar earlier.
Sam finds the stairs, and Megatron calls him a slur.
He doesn’t, really, but the voice modulation certainly makes it sound that way.
While this is happening, Mikaela is driving the tow truck down an alley, dragging Bumblebee behind her with the tow cable. She stops for a moment to have a short breakdown, seeing as she is a teenager in what is currently a warzone.
Sam is still running up the stairs. Outside, the military shoots at one of the Decepticons. It is, of course, doing absolutely nothing to the giant metal space robot. Mikaela concludes her moment, looking back at Bumblebee, who gives her the okay to keep going with dragging his ass across the pavement. She whips the truck around and tells Bumblebee “I’ll drive, you shoot.”
Mikaela then proceeds to speed down a main road of this sizable city backwards, running into cars and more or less shoving Bumblebee along to his destination.
The military has finally realized that their efforts have been pointless, but it’s okay because Bumblebee is here with his superior firepower. Bumblebee proceeds to shoot Brawl in the chest, which kills him. After this, he tries to act cute, lifting up his battle mask in a very “did I do that?” way, as if he’s not the same guy who ripped Barricade apart earlier.
Sam, meanwhile, has finally reached the top of this dilapidated building. Helicopters are approaching his location, but will they make it to him before Megatron does? Honestly, I’d be more worried about Starscream on the building just due East.
Sam is just about to hand the AllSpark over, when Starscream fires at the ‘copter, causing it to crash and nearly chop Sam to pieces. Optimus Prime runs towards the scene, on a roof that I refuse to believe could actually support him. Megatron punches thought the roof from the bottom and asks Sam some philosophical questions. Sam can’t answer, given that he’s hiding on the edge of this building, his flimsy grip on one of the angel statues being the only thing keeping him from falling.
Megatron tells him to give him the AllSpark, and in exchange he might not kill him immediately. Sam tells him to fuck off, and Megatron flails the chunk of building he was hanging on to, causing Sam to fall to his death, thus ending the film.
I’m lying to you. Michael Bay is making me into a liar.
No, Sam is, instead, caught by Optimus, very likely breaking several ribs on impact. This is the point where I realize that they’ve given Optimus fingernails. Sam clings to him like a baby koala, as Optimus parkours down the sides of two buildings, Megatron in pursuit. Megatron actually lands on Optimus 2/3rds of the way down, causing the both of them to fall onto the pavement below. How Sam survives this is a mystery.
Megatron recovers from the fall first, flicking a human away from him for having the audacity to exist in his space. The flicked person hits a car, and is almost assuredly dead. At least, I sure hope so, given that this is the director cameo by the Bayman himself.
Feminist icon Megatron?
Feminist icon Megatron.
Optimus comments on the fact that Sam almost fucking died to get the AllSpark out of dodge, and we get the return of “No Sacrifice, No Victory”. Which, I mean, I guess he’s allowed to say that, since he’s actually had to do something that warranted it. His dad doesn’t get to, though.
Optimus then tells this teenage boy, who has already had a hell of a day, to kill him by shoving the AllSpark into his robot-soul-heart, should he be unable to defeat Megatron.
I dunno, I just feel like it’s a bit of an ask.
Sam climbs off of Optimus so the Prime and Megatron can rumble. He runs through the ruined infrastructure of the city, so he’s less likely to be crushed. Optimus tells Megatron to square the fuck up, stating that “one shall stand, one shall fall.”
Then he gets ragdolled around a bunch, so maybe he should have saved the talk for later in the game.
The military is running around some more, stopping in an alley to see Blackout transform to root mode. Yes, the goo-goo eyes were indeed made by several members of the watch party that started this whole thing. People went wild for Rotor-Cape Johnson.
The fighter jets from the US military are arriving in a minute. Epps warns them to aim for the robots that aren’t evil. Lennox and the gang spread out, reminding each other to aim for the underboob, since Transformers’ armor is weak there. Epps marks Blackout with a little green light, which Blackout almost immediately notices. Blackout fires on the military.
Lennox has stolen a motorcycle and is driving through the streets to circle back around and jump off of the bike, sliding on his back to shoot Blackout directly in his underboob. Wonder what his uniform is rated for for road rash.
Sam is watching as Optimus gets his ass handed to him. Up in the sky, Starscream commits identity theft, and then attacks the Air Force. The Air Force can multitask however, and light Megatron the fuck up. Sam has, for some reason, come out of hiding, and Megatron uses this to his advantage, trying to take the AllSpark from him.
Optimus tells Sam to put the AllSpark in his chest, but Sam has a better idea. He shoves it into Megatron’s chest, which has been basically shot open at this point. Megatron makes a Space Invader noise, convulses a bit, then falls over dead.
Congrats on your first murder, Sam.
Optimus tells Megatron’s corpse that he got what was coming to him, then implies that they’re brothers. What flavor of brother isn’t established, but neither was basically anything between the two main faces of the franchise in this film, so it’s fine.
Ironhide walks up holding the two halves of Jazz. Optimus informs Sam that he now has a life-debt to this child. Whether or not Sam is absorbing any information at this point is up in the air. Mikaela shows up, with Bumblebee in tow.
In tow.
In tow-
Sam stares at her blankly. Mikaela stares back, making the pretty girl face. Man, what a great dynamic these two have.
Jazz is dead. That sucks. Optimus is handed his corpse to hold, while he thanks his new friends for helping out.
Then Bumblebee talks and he’s fucKING BRITISH.
Sam is obviously shocked by the fact that Bumblebee is British able to talk now, since not talking has been his whole thing up to this point. Optimus doesn’t let it phase him. Neither does Ratchet, despite having been working on Bumblebee’s throat injury for centuries at this point.
Bumblebee wants to stay on Earth with Sam. Optimus is just like whatever. Sam agrees to have a sweet Camaro from outer space.
Optimus pulls what is left of the AllSpark out of Megatron’s chest. I’m sure that’s not a setup for potential conflicts, not in the slightest.
Over in Washington, D.C., the US President has ordered Sector Seven be terminated, and all the Transformer corpses be disposed of. And by “disposed of” they mean “thrown into the ocean.” Dang, sure hope Earth signed some sort of agreement with the Transformers so that they never come to Earth again. You know, just be proactive about our galactic safety.
The Linkin Park kicks on, as Optimus gives us our bookend narration, telling us what the Autobots plan to do now that their race is at a genological dead end. As he does, we see Lennox reunite with his wife and child, who I had genuinely forgotten were in this movie.
Optimus is pretty chill with Cybertron dying out, because now they know about Earth. We get a shot of Sam and Mikaela making out, a shot that becomes more and more horrifying the further they zoom out, because they’re making out on top of Bumblebee. Who they KNOW is a sentient creature at this point.
And then it gets even worse, because the shot changes, and oh hey! Turns out that the rest of the Autobots were just chillin’ off to the side while this went down. Optimus continues his monologue, just walking around in his root mode as he tells all of Makeout Point how they’re “robots in disguise” now.
The monologue is actually a transmission he’s sending out into space, inviting any of his leftover pals to come kick it on Earth with them, because Earth is pretty cool.
And that’s where they leave us.
IT TOOK THREE PEOPLE TO WRITE THIS SCHLOCK.
So. Bayverse 1. A film showcasing xenophobia, misogyny, and toxic nationalism. It’s rough. Is it the worst film I’ve ever seen? Not even close, but it’s bad, and it was a huge deal at the time of release. Everyone was seeing it, everyone knew the actors and robots, everyone had a scene that they liked. Everyone was exposed to Bayverse, and as a result, a lot of people entered the Transformers franchise thinking that it was all like this.
And really, how far off would they have been in 2007?
When a franchise refuses to introduce female characters until years after being established, when all those female characters have the exact same body type, when a franchise hires misogynists to write stories, when it allows shit like “Prime’s Rib!” to be published- no wonder Michael Bay was approached to direct.
What a mess.
--------------------------
COMING SOON:
TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (2009) - MEGAN FOX I AM SO FUCKING SORRY
TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011) - WILL YOU JUST STAY DEAD
TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (2014) - SHUT UP ABOUT THE LAW SHUT UP ABOUT THE LAW
TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (2017) - ACTUALLY, FUCK CONTINUITY
#transformers#bayverse#part one#maccadam#Hannzreads#Hannzwatches#text post#long post#film analysis#off topic
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From the Darkness | Part 1
This is a commission from the lovely @grogusmum! I'm so so so sorry for how late this is love! Life got in the way a bit. Originally I was gonna do this as one giant piece, but you've been waiting too long and so I just needed to get something out. This ended up being a bit more soft-angst rather than fluff but I tried my best to balance it out. The next part will be full-on found family fluff though! 🥰
This whole thing stemmed from that throwaway line 'I've spent much time on Tatooine' from The Marshall. Basically, I just liked the idea of Din having a somewhat secret life hidden away there. It gets explained a bit more in the second part, but that's really all the context you need right now. 😅🥰
Pairing: Din Djarin x Neutral Reader
Words: 2.5k
Genre: Found family, fluff, soft angst
Warnings: Star Wars level violence, vague mentions of PTSD/Trauma, nightmares
Summary: Din comes home to Tattooine and you spend the night on the Razor Crest.
You always heard the Razor Crest before you saw it. The loud hum of the clunky engine made you jump every single time and you had always wondered how long it would be until the ship just dropped out the sky.
Your answer came quicker than you thought. It was around midnight when the first signs came, snippets of voices fluttered by like quiet, sleep-laced whispers on the wind.
See you we do!
Coming home we are!
Then came the ship barrelling onto the landing pad, and you weren’t dramatic in saying you thought the planet was about to explode; walls rumbling, ground vibrating. Peli had been prompted to spew out a few choice words, stepping outside just as you did to watch the slivers of silver moonlight spring off the ship as it finally settled down.
The landing had been…less than graceful to say the least. The engine sounded worse than you’ve ever heard. One of her feet had been ripped clear off, making her tilt to the side at an unnerving angle and you didn’t even want to think about the number of outer plates there were to replace.
What worried you more was the look of annoyance on your boss’s face, pinched and red, and you just had enough time to convince her to head back to bed, promising to deal with The Mandalorian until morning. And thank every planet in the galaxy she listened because if the Crest hadn’t woken up the neighbourhood, you knew she sure as hell would of.
There was an etiquette, you learned through years of working on the hanger; you should never enter a person’s ship first. To regulars, it was like walking into someone’s home without being invited. But so early in the morning you weren’t for niceties.
You walked up that ramp like pray on a hunt, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and you may have stumbled a bit, but it was a hunt.
The Mandalorian was clearly waiting for you, sitting in the cockpit, the baby asleep in his pod although you had no doubt he was listening to every word.
Very out of character, he was the first to speak, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘It’s okay.’ It wasn’t…well, it was. You were just grumpy and tired and wanted to go back to bed, ‘She looks a mess.’
‘Can you fix her?’
You had assumed her mess from the work of another bounty gone wrong, maybe Mar again but you weren’t in the right mind to ask. ‘Depends.’
‘On?’
‘What you’re about to ask me to do next.’
There was a silence, a comfortable one but silence, nevertheless. Eyes heavy, you were fading fast, head resting against the passenger seat you had claimed as your own. You weren’t too sure if you had fallen asleep or not. You closed your eyes for what felt like a moment too long and when they opened again, Din had shifted his seat to look at you.
‘We need to stay for a few days.’ His head tilted like a little puppy dog. Helmet still on, you were left trying to imagine how he looked in that moment; eyes squinted, crinkled around the sides in admiration.
Not the exact words you wanted to hear, but not surprising in the slightest.
You decided to push again, ‘Anything else?’
He was smiling, at least you were sure he was, his voice sounding a little lighter despite the artificial muffle of the modulator, ‘Come to bed?’
---
I caught a frog today.
Very big frog.
I wanted to show you.
But ManDad was not very happy with the frog in the big ship.
So I ate it, I did.
Miss you lots, I did.
And so did ManDad.
Smiles when he thinks about you, he does.
I feel the happiness.
Thank you for making him happy.
---
Turns out it hadn’t been Mar that took a hit at his ship.
There had been an incident, Din told you in the quiet of darkness, arms wrapped around you, his head buried safely. Long tufts of hair tickled your jaw and chin whenever he moved or talked, about due for a haircut but that was a battle for another day.
‘Moff Gideon is dead.’ But so was Kuill, the kind Ugnaught who had helped at the start of all this mess. Whatever was left of the Empire was still after the kid and Din still needed to find the Jedi. ‘Karga’s still alive.’
‘I thought he double-crossed you?’ At some point his head had moved onto your chest, letting your fingers card through his hair. You could just about see his face in the small cracks of light, not that he needed to hide anymore, sometimes you think the dark was comforting for him.
The smallest of smiles tugging at the corners of his lips and you really hoped it was because of your touch and not the thought of the Guild agent. Small wins and all that, you guessed. Better to have Greef around than no one at all.
‘I can’t stay long.’ His voice wavered, ever so slightly. You had become accustomed to the bittersweetness of it all, stroking the back of his neck as your heavy eyes began to droop again.
‘That’s okay.’ While it felt like a brick being thrown at your chest, you understood. Truly. The entire Empire was after the kid and, subsequently, him. Not to mention the constant battle against other hunters who had it out for his head.
Because while you knew time was finite with him, at least you had something.
---
Happy to be home we are.
ManDad gets lonely sometimes. Feel it I do.
I try my best to make him smile but sometimes it does not work.
Make him happy, you do.
A man should not be lonely for too long, he must not, for loneliness can be deadly.
When I am gone, look after him you must.
Promise?
---
Quiet moments in the dark were always the loudest for Grogu. Like father like son, you guessed. Neither of them liked the stillness much, both of their minds racing faster than the speed of light. It was always easier to read them in these moments. Flashes of images blended into a mosaic behind your eyes as you tried to hold down a specific part of a memory or a dream.
Some nights it was easier than others. There were times Grogu would sense you in his mind and would purposefully push an image forward, always something he thought was silly like a particularly funny looking frog or a memory of Din singing to some cheesy eighties song you had left behind on a CD during their last visit.
The colourful rhythm and syncopated beats making the walls of the Razor Crest dance along with them and you did everything not to burst out laughing in the still night, biting your lip only for a small snort to escape. Din caught on, barely opening his eyes a crack to mumble out some half-arsed are you okay before rolling over and heading back to sleep again.
It was easier to read Din when he was asleep. Not that you did it much or even intended to in the first place. But sleep tore down the walls he had spent years building up, subconsciously pushing the dreams into your mind. If Grogu’s thoughts were a lulled whisper, Din’s were white noise. Fuzzy static took up most of the space, at times slipping to let through blips of voices or a grainy picture of long past memories. They were too quick to get a full idea of what he was dreaming about.
A boy.
The pop of blasters.
A woman screaming.
One deep breath and the image faded. Din would wake for a moment, eyes closed and he’d turn back to face you. His chest shook, barely and nothing noticeable normally, but you caught it, pressing a kiss to the top of his head, and mumbling a soft it’s okay as he settled back into you.
---
Today was not so bad, it was not.
But sometimes I still think about the dark place.
Scary and lonely was I.
For a long, long time.
Then there’s light and I see ManDad for the first time.
And then everything is better, it is!
No longer do I need to fear the dark.
---
Like always, Grogu climbed out of his pod early morning and forced the doors of the sleeping pad open, giving him room to wiggle his way between Din and you. These were the times you’d feel the tug of his mind at the doors of yours, asking permission to be allowed in.
If your consciousness was awake enough, you’d let him, letting the Green Bean explore the distorted images of Earth and your past life. You would find him standing next to you, present you, in the middle of the dirtied street, dark and damp as rain pounded on the concrete around you, drowning out the screams of the people as they rushed by.
He’d hold his arms up, a quiet hold me please passing by and you’d take him in your arms, holding him close. Sparks of fear rolled through you, weighed down by dread and it was hard to tell if it was coming from Grogu or your past self.
Clouds filled the sky like grey shadows. It had taken you a long time to realise they weren’t normal, that the clouds were too big, were floating by too quick to be anything natural.
That had been the first time you saw them. Aliens. Or what people on Earth would think of as aliens. Tall, grey, slimy, the stuff you had only ever seen on TV and they were now shooting from the skies in streaks of red light. Streets pathed in dust that smelt like ash and day-old water.
The two of you walked through the mess like ghosts, people running left and right and through you, some in slow motion while some were ungodly in their speed. They all died in the end. Zapped out of existence by a singular lazar.
Someone yelled about children. Save the children. Spare the children. Collect the children. Round them up near the hanger, discard the ones we don’t need, you know the ones I mean, don’t talk back to me. Their voice washed over you in cold chills, sounding so far underwater that they might as well not be there at all.
A man stopped in front of you. Tall dressed in all black. A human man staring right at you. He didn’t look panicked like the rest, was calm and collected as he pulled out his gun and aimed so perfectly right at your head. You didn’t move, didn’t duck for cover as he pulled the trigger.
You should know better than to look.
There’s a woman behind you. Was a woman behind you. She’s dead when you turn around, a pile of smoking ash on the cobbled path, already being washed away by the rain.
Then there was the child, arms still stretched out to hold their mother’s hand, eyes wide in fear but they don’t cry. No matter how much their heart is racing. No matter how much they want to scream as the man grabs their arm and drags them away, throwing them in line with the rest of them, waiting for their turn to be scanned and thrown in the hanger.
They don’t scream, even when the doors slam shut and darkness is all that’s left.
---
Awake, are you?
Sleep I cannot.
Wonder if ManDad knows how much I love him, I do.
ManDad is amazing he is. He saved me from the dark and keeps me safe, he does. Let’s me eat cookies, he does.
Such lovely cookies. Try some, you must.
But ManDad hurts, I feel.
Feel his heavy heart, I do. So much pain and loss cause a man to be sad.
Want him to be sad I do not.
When I am gone, please tell him all the time that he is special, he is.
Always be my buir, he will.
---
‘Buir.’ Grogu sat on your stomach, watching with wide, curious eyes as he followed your finger to where Din moved back and forth getting ready to head out. It was just some low-level bounty, armature work really, but that didn’t stop the anxiety from budding in the pit of your stomach. Distractions curved the nausea, curled up with the pod door open, blanket tucked under your chin with the residual warmth of his body still hugging you, ‘He’s your buir.’
Din hadn’t put his helmet back on yet, the roll of his eyes contrasted with the small half-smile on his lips. In the light, it was easier to see the damage he had taken during his last fight. There was only so much an ex-bounty-turned-nursing droid and some bacta spray could do. The large gash across his forehead looked painful and you made a mental note to check it over when he returned.
‘Don’t teach him that.’
‘Why not?’
There was a pause. You caught the way the small smile faltered, wavering with doubt and uncertainty and maybe a hint of sadness although that last part was hard to tell. And while the wall Din had built around himself was thick, sadness was strong enough to creep through the cracks. Even Grogu noticed, large ears pricking, head tilting in ManDad’s direction with a small coo.
‘Aliit ori'shya tal'din.’
‘You’ve been practicing.’ The words were light, a brow quirked in your direction and you knew what it meant; you’re adorable. Thank you for trying. At least he was smiling, finishing up the last buckle on his holster ‘Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum.’
Maybe you should have been more surprised by the slip of his tongue. The way he carried on getting dressed, not even pausing once at his mistake.
You had heard him say those words before a hundrad times or more. But you wondered how long he had meant those words. Months? Years? Was it a new development? Was it something he had always known?
But there was no surprise. Instead, a warmth planted itself in your chest, and it grew, branches stretching to fill every ounce of your being until it was all you could feel.
‘Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum.’ His eyes widened at your mimicked words. The pronunciation was still a bit off and sometimes the emphasis was stressed on the wrong bits, but it was nice to know you were close enough that he understood you, ‘I know what it means now. You can’t trick me anymore.’
Din picked up the helmet and put it on before you had the chance to see the full smile that bloomed, but you heard it, the hints of pure happiness shining through the modulated, ‘I was never trying to trick you.’
You fought back your own smile. The heat spreading across your cheeks told a different story though, serving as a reminder of years old built-up emotions neither of you had time to unpack at that moment.
So, you did what you both did best. You quickly changed the topic, shifting your attention back to the Green Bean plopped on your stomach, happily teething on the small silver ball he sneakily snatched from the controls. A few seconds later and his attention found yours, giving you a gleeful smile as he held out the ball as a peace offering.
‘Ba'buir.’ You pointed back at Din and Grogu laughed, ‘He’s your Ba'buir.’
But Din was already out of sight, halfway to the door when he called back, ‘He’s older than me!’
Older, I surely am.
And wiser.
Yet know, you do not.
Be careful ManDad
For space can be dark and dangerous.
The lock hissed as it opened, seemingly louder in the suddenly quiet Razor Crest, ‘Be careful.’
‘Always.’
---
buir = parent
Aliit ori'shya tal'din = "Family is more than blood."
Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum ="I love you."; literally: "I will know you forever."
Ba'buir = grandparent
#jessie writes#grogusmum#commission#the mandalorian fanfic#the mandalorian#the mandalorian fluff#the mandalorian soft angst#din djarin x reader#din djarin fluff#din djarin angst#din djarin fanfic#grogu#pedro pascal#pedro pascal fanfic#pedro pascal fluff
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The More the Merrier (Colby Brock Imagine)
Summary: After a magical xplr trip with their daughter, a pregnant reader and Colby are in for a surprise at the hospital.
Written: 2020
Word Count: 3,590
Warnings: Fluff, pregnancy, swearing, NICU
Masterlist
“You promise this isn’t some haunted location. This is just a forest, right? No demons or spirits involved.” I ask as I help Bea out of the car.
“Babe, I’ve told you a hundred times. This is just a normal explore trip. No ghost, ghouls, or goblins. I promise. I did a lot of research.” Colby explains as he grabs our backpacks out of the trunk.
“Okay, I’m just checking. I love our family the way it is and it would be a real bummer if we had to take home a possessed 6-year-old instead of our little angel. Or you know, this next little popping out of me like an alien.” I gently rub my hand over my ever-growing belly. The fact that Colby even managed to get me out here at seven months pregnant is a miracle.
It would have been Sam, Colby, Kat, and I on this trip but Kat is 9 months pregnant and on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy. Up until last week, Kat and I have been doing everything together. Joint announcements, gender reveals, baby showers, etc. When we both found out we were having boys, we had to take a break because we just know that we’re about to give birth to mini versions of Sam and Colby. Truly a nightmare.
“Bea, hold one of our hands please,” I call after the energetic 6-year-old. I let go of her hand to put her backpack on her and put mine on and she began darting further into the forest with her creepy stuffed doll that Jake gave her when she was born.
“Here, take this, I got her.” Colby hands me the blogging camera and runs after Bea. He scoops her up and waits for me to catch up to them.
“Honestly, at this rate, I’m having the baby in the middle of the forest,” I say after waddling over to Colby and Bea.
“Please don’t joke like that. I know we packed stuff in case of an emergency, but I’m not mentally prepared for that. So keep that sucker in there until he is fully cooked please.” Colby says kissing my forehead before handing Bea to me and taking the camera back.
We walk for a bit while Bea holds my hands. Every once in awhile she’ll let go of my hand to pick up something she found on the ground and put it in her backpack. Last time I checked she had about 5 rocks and a couple of twigs. The whole time Colby was vlogging the two of us. If it was for our family channel or his channel, I couldn’t tell you. Most of the time when the three of us going on little outings like this and he’s filming it’s for our channel, but he’ll sometimes include footage on his channel every once in a while.
“Mommy, daddy, look a lizard!” Beatrice yells before running forward towards a tree.
“Bea! Try not to hurt him, okay? We’re in his house.” Colby calls out after the energetic mini version of ourselves.
“Okay, so two things: 1. I really have to pee and I don’t think there is a restroom here. 2. I need a break; my back and ankles are killing me and I’m starving. Maybe coming out here this late into the pregnancy was a bad idea. I don’t remember my stomach being this big or being this tired when I was 8 months pregnant with Bea.” I stretch my back a little bit to try to elevate some of the pain.
Being this far along, I haven’t been able to get much done. I began to appreciate that my full-time job rarely requires me to leave the house. I can just sit at home and make videos while sitting in the same spot. Colby’s been great about staying home more and doing sit down videos. The further I got into my pregnancy, the less time he spent out of the house filming for long periods.
“Mommy, look how fast I can climb this rock. I can be just like daddy!” Beatrice shouts before climbing up a medium rock formation.
Colby runs after her, in case she falls. Her little legs move faster than Colby can keep up with. Looking at him now, you wouldn’t believe that he was running from cops and potential murderers nearly every day. After I got pregnant with Bea, Colby starting doing messy risky videos. Just our luck, Beatrice seems to be making up for him by doing risky things like jump on the kitchen counters. ”I’m just exploring like daddy,” she would explain when I would catch her dangling on the opposite side of the stair rails. She looks so much like him. If it wasn’t for the fact that she had my hair, you would think that Colby created and gave birth to her all on his own. For my sake, I hope our little boy is more like me. I don’t think I can handle 3 Colbys on my own. I love him, but sometimes it’s like being a single mother with two children.
We reach the little picnic area that Colby has been talking about all week. The first thing that my eyes land on in the bathroom. I immediately make a beeline to the bathroom, leaving Colby to wrangle Bea on his own. The bathroom, like the picnic area, is cleaner than I imagined it would be. Even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t afford to be picky, this baby is headbutting my bladder like a little goat. He is definitely going to be like Colby, I can promise you that.
“What the fuck?” I whisper to myself. I know that I needed to pee, but it felt like someone popped a water balloon. This has to be a normal bathroom break, right? I still have a month left, this shouldn’t be happening right now. My back has been hurting for a while, but that could be Braxton hicks. I had a lot of those when I was pregnant with Bea.
I get up quickly and go wash my hands. Thinking of ways to tell Colby that the baby may be coming right now. I don’t want to alarm him. Colby is cool under pressure, but he’s an absolute maniac when he’s in dad mode.
“Hey, Colby, my love, I might— What did you do?” I walk out to the picnic area covered in fairy lights and Bea sitting on the table. Colby is holding a small bouquet. The corner of his mouth crept up his face and exposed his teeth slightly. He walks up towards me and places his hand out. I take it without hesitation. He leads me to the table that Bea is sitting on and ushers for me to sit. He places the flowers in my lap and sits down next to me.
“Okay, so I know this is a bit strange and unexpected. But in all honesty, this has been put off long enough. Y/N, we’re been together for seven years and every day I fall deeper in love with you. You’re an amazing mother to Beatrice and a supportive girlfriend. I should have done this earlier but we were barely together for a year when you got pregnant with Bea and I didn’t want you to think that I was only doing it because you were pregnant and I’m from Kansas. In all honestly have done it before but it never felt like the right moment. I bought this ring the day after Bea was born and I’ve just been carrying it in my pocket for the right moment. Which is stupid because my whole brand is ‘now or never’ but I wanted the moment to be perfect for you. I know that you always say that we don’t have to get married or that you don’t need a big wedding. But I know deep down that you want those things, and I want you to be happy. You’re the love of my life and I want you to have your big fairytale wedding, so Y/N Y/LN, will you do me the honors and marry me?” Colby slides off the bench in one fluid motion and drops down to his knee. He pulls out a ring box from his pocket to reveal a ring that’s not big or small. It’s the perfect size and looks like the ring I’ve been dreaming about my entire life.
“Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Colby, I will marry you!” I let Colby slide the ring on my finger, which is surprisingly the only thing that hasn’t gotten bigger with this pregnancy. He comes up to my level and kisses me. Bea cheers and wraps her little arms around us.
“Oh yeah, you were trying to tell me something when you got out of the bathroom.” Colby’s face is so red and he can’t stop smiling.
“Huh? Oh! Yeah, so my water might have broken.” I rub my lower back and watch Colby’s smile drop.
“Are you fucking serious? You’re in labor and you let be babble like an idiot?” Colby starts running around the picnic table and grabbing his camera. He disappears behind the bathroom and comes back with two rangers.
****
As soon as we got back into cell range, I called the doctor. She told us that we had enough time to make it to the hospital. When I told Colby that my water broke, he must have thought that I mean our son’s head was currently dangling out of my vagina because he’s driving like a maniac. I feel fine. My contracts are roughly 20 minutes or more apart, which I told the doctor. I’m vlogging the whole thing because this is going to make an amazing video. You would think that after already having one baby, Colby would mellow out a little bit. I gave Bea her lunch that she was supposed to have after the proposal.
I still can’t believe that Colby proposed. I would have been fine with not putting an official label on our relationship. I could have been happy being his girlfriend for the rest of my life, but he was right I did want a big wedding. To one day be Mrs. Colby Brock. Now it’s going to come true.
“Oh, shit—” Colby mutters under his breath. He reaches into his pocket and hands me his phone. I take it from him and set the camera up on the dashboard.
“Who am I calling? Your parents?” I ask as I unlock his phone and head to his contact.
“Oh shit, I almost forgot. Call them and your parents too. But call Jake, we need him to meet us at the hospital to watch Bea for us.” He nervously runs his hand threw his hair before placing it back on the wheel.
I scroll until I find the contact labeled ‘Demon Spawn’ and call him. The phone rings about three times before he picks up.
“Hey Colby, did she say yes?” Jake asks immediately.
“Hey Jake, it’s me. Colby’s driving right now.” I put the volume louder so Colby could hear.
“Oh fuck— um… did Colby ask you about… brunch on Sunday at our place?” I can hear Tara next to him whispering about something.
“Jake, you’re fine. I asked her and she said yes. You can relax.” Colby says—yells— from his side of the car.
“Oh! She said yes.” Jake tells someone, again probably Tara, on the other side of the phone.
“You know they’re on speaker, I can hear them. But congrats you guys!” Tara cheers.
“Thank you. But we’re actually calling you guys so you can meet us at the hospital.” I explain. I watch Bea spill something in the review mirror and hand her a napkin.
“We’re already here. Wait, is the baby coming?” I hear movement on the other side of the line.
“Wait, why are you two at the hospital? Did Jake play with the easy bake oven again?” I thought after the last time, Tara and I hide that stupid thing. Jake almost burned the house down when we were all living together still.
“Huh? Oh no! Kat is having the baby. Should be any minute now. We’ve been here all day.” Tara explains. I’m positive she took the phone from Jake and sent him off somewhere.
“Wait, Kat went into labor and didn’t tell me?”
“Her water broke right after you texted us that you left. She refused to let any of us tell you guys because she didn’t want to ruin the proposal. She said that we could tell you guys after. But don’t worry. Everything is fine, Sam has been coming out every like 30 minutes with updates. Now that we know you’re back from the mountains, we’ll text you until you get here.”
“Okay thanks, but you don’t need to. We’re like five minutes away.”
“Okay, we’ll be waiting. Just don’t have my nephew on the side of the road or anything.” Tara says before hanging up the phone.
****
Lying in the hospital room, I wait patiently as the nurse checks the ultrasound. She has an indifferent face, probably not to scare expecting mothers, but her lack of expression is what’s scaring me. She has been looking for a while and has even taken a few pictures. Colby sits beside me with Bea sleeping in his lap. She fell asleep in the car right before we got here. Lucky for Colby, I could still waddle on my own so he could carry Bea.
“Okay, everything looks okay. The doctor will come in to confirm and give you your options.” The nurse smiles as she removes the ultrasound jelly from my stomach.
Colby grabs my hand and strokes it quietly. I know he must be stressed and what he can do right now is limited. However, this small little touch, one he’s must have done hundreds of times, is enough right now.
Dr. Long comes in and greets us. She must have just come from Katrina’s room. She gave birth right after we got here. We were lucky enough to see everyone before we got shuttled off into our room. Dr. Long squirts more cool ultrasound jelly on my belly and scans around. After a few seconds, she clicks a button so we can hear the heartbeat. It sounds different than before, almost echoed.
“Okay, Ms. Y/LN, Mr. Brock a lot of things are happening right now. We missed something during your first few scans. There is a second baby in there, hiding behind your son. We didn’t detect the second baby because it is a bit smaller than the first baby. Their heartbeats were very close in sync which is why we couldn’t notice two different beats. Both babies are doing well. I’m just going to check to see how dilated you are before we can talk more.” Dr. Long wipes off the jelly and covers up my stomach.
“S-second baby? You mean she’s having twins?” Colby asks, jumping up and waking up Bea.
“I’m actually going to kill you,” I mutter under my breath. Giving birth was hard enough, but two at the same time had to be worse.
“Yes, twins. It’s not uncommon for parents to not know they’re having more than one baby until birth. Would you like to know the gender of the second baby?”
Colby takes a quick look at me and I nod.
“Yes, please. I mean it doesn’t matter but knowing would still be nice.” Colby asks.
“Baby B is a girl. And it looks like you’re in pre-labor. Your water did not break but you did pass the mucus plug. You’re only 4 centimeters dilated, so you still have a while.” Dr. Long finally resurfaces and looks at Colby and me. Our faces must be panicked.
“So, what then? We stay here? We go home?” I ask sitting up a bit more.
“Well, Ms. Y/LN, you have a few options. First, because you are 35 weeks pregnant, that’s still a bit early even for twins. I would suggest slowing down the labor for a few hours and injecting the babies with a steroid that would help their lungs develop faster. It’s two injections 12 hours apart. Or we can get ready to do a C-section right now. In both cases, the babies might have to spend some time in the NICU, but both methods are safe this early.”
“I mean, I want to keep them in for as long as possible so probably the first option. What do you think Colbs?” I ask. My stress levels increase. I know that Dr. Long says that the babies will be fine, but I can’t help but worry.
“Hey, it’s your body. I’ll support whatever you want to do but I think that’s best too.” Colby goes back to stroking my hand. Beatrice is resting her head on his chest.
“Okay, we’ll be back in a few minutes to get set up.” Dr. Long says before leaving us in silence.
****
A week to a month; that’s how long Dr. Long says the twins might have to stay in the NICU. Relatively speaking, they’re fine. They’re just premature and struggling with low birth weight and underdevelopment. They’re too small for car seats, which Colby is going to have to get another one of. We’re going to have to get another one of everything. Maybe we can exchange the stroller we got at the baby shower for a double one. We’re also going to have to get a lot more baby clothes, or at least another going home outfit for when the time comes. I also had my own complication after giving birth and now have to stay an extra day. Mentally, I wasn’t prepared for two babies, and I don’t think my body was either. They came five minutes apart, first our son, and then our daughter.
“Hey, Y/N,” I hear a familiar voice say from behind me. The nurses were checking on the twins so I decided to give them some room and step out.
“Hey, Kat, Sam, how’s little Oliver?” I smile at them. They’re walking towards me, holding their little bundle of joy in a car seat.
“He’s fine. He passed the car seat test so we’re set to go home. How are the twins?” Sam asks. Kat gives me a quick hug from her wheelchair.
“They’re doing their best. They’re Colby’s kids so they’re stubborn as hell, I can tell already. How are you feeling Kat?” I look at the exhausted Canadian. She had a smooth birth and gets to leave a day after. She has bits of blue dye in her hair that she got done after finding out she was having a boy.
“I’m tired and everything hurts. I don’t know how you did it twice in one day.” She sighs and brushes her hair out of her face.
“I don’t know. But you two go home and snuggle that little baby before he starts smelling like sugar and play-doh.” I joke. I wave them off and go back to watching the nurses. They’ve moved on to other babies now.
“Mommy!” Just as I’m about to get up and go back into the NICU, I hear Beatrice running down the hall. Colby is following quickly behind her.
“Hi my loves,” Bea climbs up next to me and rests her head on my chest.
“Sorry, she was just excited to see you and the babies.” I noticed the vlog camera in Colby’s hand. I’m glad he’s still documenting everything for us.
“Where are they? Where are my baby brother and sister? Daddy said that they were dropped off this morning.” I look at Colby confused because we had a conversation about how we would explain this all to her. In fact, I know we had a conversation with her months ago about where babies come from.
“I panicked…” Colby says quickly to explain why our daughter was talking about storks.
“Well, your brother and sister are in that room right there but you can’t go in there. They’re really small and a little bit sick. So, they want to be extra safe and only let mommies and daddies in there. But one of us can go in there and FaceTime so you can see them.” I stoke Bea’s hair and kiss her forehead.
“Okay, I understand. It’s like when my throat was hurting when I was little and I couldn’t go to preschool so other kids couldn’t make me more sick. What are their names?” She asks running over to the window and tiptoeing so she can peek in.
Colby and I had a lot of time to think about this. We decided on two conditions:1. I would name our daughter and he would name our son and 2. their middle names would match. We split the job in half to deal with the stress. We didn’t even have one name when we knew that we were having one baby, let alone two.
“Well, your brother’s name is Aiden Isaiah. And your little sister’s name is Chloe Isabella.” I explain to her.
“Yeah, and they’re both so excited to meet you and explore the world with the rest of us,” Colby says softly before kissing me on the cheek. With that kiss, I knew that everything would be fine.
#colby brock#colby brock imagine#colby x reader#colby brock x reader#colby brock imagines#colby imagine#collby imagines#sam and colby#sam and colby imagine#sam and colby imagines#fluff imagine#fluffy imagines#dad colby#dad!colby imagine#dad!colby imagines#imagine#imagines
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Part 11 of the other side AU concept, the first epilogue sequence! There should be one more epilogue scene after this, maybe two because despite its length this is still technically concept writing and I’m going as long as I still amuse myself.
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About 6.7K below the break.
***
Later
The Chimaera had struck the planet point-first and then broken in half, the impact of its crash leaving a kilometers-wide crater surrounding its corpse. The bow was still embedded upright in the crater, leaving the serpentine symbols on the star destroyer’s underside clearly visible at this distance. The remainder of the ship had fallen flat, creating a second, smaller crater where it had broken off. Carbon-scoring and other damage darkened the usually pristine white hull of the star destroyer; there were patches of differently-colored plating that marked where repairs had been done over the years, probably where the ship had been damaged during the purrgil assault over Lothal.
“How long do you think it’s been here?” Sabine asked, flipping down the rangefinder on her helmet for a closer look.
Hera raised her macrobinoculars and studied the ship’s hull. “A few years, at least?” she guessed. “Look at that – are those plants?”
The magnification revealed that much of what she had taken for carbon-scoring was plant matter instead, greenish vines crawling over the massive ship’s hull, moss spreading out in clumps as large as an X-wing. Hera turned her gaze downwards, where a riot of greenery had sprung up across the surface of the crater. The Chimaera’s initial crash would have killed off all the plant life in the crater; the ship had been here long enough for the jungle to return.
Hera lowered the macrobinoculars and turned to Kanan, who was standing beside her with his arms crossed over his chest, his face fixed in a frown. “Is there anyone alive down there?”
He started to answer, then hesitated. After a moment, he said, “There’s a lot of life down there. I’m not sure if any of it is sentient.”
Sabine pushed her rangefinder upright again and rolled her shoulders back. “We need to get into those computers.”
Hera gauged the distance between their current position and the wreckage of the Chimaera, considered the sharpness of the drop at the crater’s edge, and said, “We’ll fly in – land in one of the docking bays if we can, outside if we can’t.”
She pulled at the high collar of her shirt as the three of them turned back to the Ghost, parked half a kilometer away in a slight dip where it was impossible to see from the edge of the crater. The combination of heat and humidity made the air sticky and cloying, and the jungle all around them gave her the distinct impression of being watched. She could tell from both Kanan’s and Sabine’s posture that they felt the same. Vegetation ran riot all around them, abrasive and alien to her desert-bred eyes; something about the heavy vegetal smell of the planet made her feel like she was constantly about to sneeze.
Zeb was waiting at the foot of the Ghost’s ramp when they returned to the ship. He turned sharply at their approach, bo-rifle raised, then lowered it when he recognized them. “This place gives me the creeps,” he said. “Anything?”
“We’ll have to check it out in person, but it looks like it’s been there a while,” Hera said, finally giving into her urge to sneeze, which she did three times in quick succession. She wiped the back of her hand under her streaming nose and promised herself she would take some allergy tablets before she went outside again.
Zeb waited to follow them into the ship until they were all inside, then walked backwards up the ramp, his gaze still fixed on the jungle. He didn’t relax until the ramp was up and locked again, shaking himself all over until his fur stood up.
Hera found the allergy tablets in her cabin and took them with a glass of water, then went up to the cockpit to join her crew. Sabine had abandoned her helmet on her chair and was frowning at the sensor station, Chopper plugged in beside her. “Life signs are all over the place. So’s atmo – I didn’t realize it before because I was just checking for breathable air.”
“What do you mean?” Hera stopped to look over her shoulder.
Sabine pointed at the screens. “Here are the oxygen levels when we got here and what they are now. See? They’re down – just a fraction of a percentage, but it hasn’t been more than an hour; they should be stable. I think there are some other trace elements that are fluctuating too, but I’d have to run specialized scans – the sensors don’t track those automatically.”
“What do you think?”
Sabine shrugged. “It could be nothing – we’re well off the star charts. This could be normal for this planet.”
“Keep tracking it,” Hera said, sneezed again, and went up to the pilot’s chair.
Kanan was slouched in the co-pilot’s seat, frowning through the viewport. He turned his head as she sat down, his scarred eyes narrowed in concentration.
“What do you sense?” Hera asked him. “Anything?”
“I don’t know. There’s something out there, but it’s not anything like I’ve ever felt before. It’s clouding everything else.” He frowned briefly. “It isn’t the dark side, for what that’s worth.”
“That’s good, right?” Zeb said, coming in and dropping into his seat.
“Maybe.” Kanan settle more comfortably back in his chair as Hera started pre-flight checks, the Ghost’s engines rumbling to life beneath her feet. His hands moved smoothly over the control boards in front of him, even though his unseeing gaze never moved from the viewport in front of him. “The dark side’s not the only dangerous thing out there.”
Sabine returned to her chair, still frowning over the sensor readings. “Chop, keep an eye on those?” she said; he made a noise of agreement. “It could be terraforming,” she told them doubtfully. “I wish we were getting clearer life signs readings – there’s no standard baseline for this world to filter out animal life.”
“We didn’t spot any ships on our approach,” Hera said.
“We might not have if they were on the other side of the planet or are some kind of vessel our sensors aren’t calibrated for,” Sabine said, looking unhappy.
“You’re a pessimist,” Zeb told her.
“No, I’m paranoid, there’s a difference. And something brought the Chimaera down.”
There was nothing Zeb could say to that.
Hera took the Ghost up gently, fighting back the feeling that the jungle plants were trying to keep the vessel moored to the planet’s surface. Her sensors didn’t show any kind of drag, so it had to be her imagination. Once they were over the jungle, she flew low across the top of the tree canopy until they reached the crater, where she did a slow loop around the remains of the Chimaera. Up close the riot of encroaching vegetation was even more obvious, green and orange moss spreading across the ship’s cracked and pitted hull, massive vines outlining each durasteel plate, already beginning to tear some of them loose – some kind of fungi even seemed to be eating through the metal. The idea of landing the Ghost anywhere near that vegetation made Hera’s lekku twitch.
She circled the Chimaera again, her gaze fixed on the shattered star destroyer’s hull. “There,” she said eventually. “The docking bay doors are open. I’m going to land inside.”
“Is that smart?” Sabine wondered, then leaned forward over Hera’s shoulder to get a better look at the starfighter-sized mushrooms growing through the nearest shattered hull plate and said, “Okay, I take it back. That stuff could be inside, though.”
“I don’t want to leave the Ghost in the open, either,” Hera said. Even with the vegetation that had grown up since the Chimaera’s crash, there was still vanishingly little cover – enough to hide a person, but not the Ghost.
She brought the Ghost down, slanting the ship to match up with the uneven angle of the open port docking bay. With the sun at its current angle, the upright bow cast the fallen half of the ship into shadow. Something about that made her skin prickle. As they passed it, she saw that the huge vines tracing their way up the underside of the bow outlined the nicked and damaged serpents’ heads on the ventral hull, cut off at the neck where the rest of the ship had broken away. At least the bridge was on the fallen portion of the ship, so with any luck they wouldn’t have to explore the bow.
There were no whole ships in the docking bay, though the wreckage of several TIEs was strewn across the deck, and one TIE Interceptor had been smashed against the far wall. There were no Lambda shuttles and the wreckage didn’t account for the number of TIE fighters that the Chimaera should have carried in one docking bay. The doors leading to the corridor outside the bay had been jammed open, with only darkness beyond – not even the emergency lights were lit. Not that Hera had expected them after all this time. Plant life had already crept in through the open bay doors, but didn’t seem to have spread far beyond them.
She set the Ghost down in the largest clear patch of floor she could find, crunching a TIE fighter’s solar panels under her landing struts. As Hera shut the engines down, she glanced up to see that the front of the docking bay control tower was crumpled as if something had struck it, the windows shattered – black pits that stared sightlessly back at them. She shuddered and turned her seat around to face the cockpit.
“Sabine, Zeb, take Chopper and go up to the bridge. Hopefully the Imperials didn’t have a chance to wipe their computers before they evacuated. I want to know where they were before they got here, who attacked them, and how long ago it happened – and anything else that looks useful.”
Both Sabine and Zeb nodded, and Chopper made an affirmative noise.
“Kanan and I will find Thrawn’s office,” she went on. “Stay in contact, and don’t go anywhere alone. We still don’t know what happened here.”
They all nodded.
“No one’s staying with the Ghost?” Zeb asked, frowning. “Is that smart?”
Hera sighed, deeply relieved that she and Kanan had decided to leave Jacen on Ryloth with her father rather than bring him with them. “Probably not, but there aren’t that many of us as it is. I’d rather not split us up anymore. The Ghost will be code-locked, anyway, so anyone trying to steal it will have to work for it.”
It wasn’t thieves she was worried about, though, she thought a few minutes later as they left the ship. There was a massive vine laying across the deck nearby, as thick around as her upper body; this close she could see spines digging into the durasteel plating of the deck. When Sabine walked over to inspect it, the deck made an odd squishing sound and she skipped back, startled. Chopper let out a squawk of dismay and huddled close to Hera’s legs.
She patted his dome reassuringly. “Don’t worry, we won’t be here long enough for that. Stay with Sabine and Zeb.”
He grumbled, but after another reassuring pat rolled away from her and over to Sabine and Zeb. As the three of them started towards the yawning mouth of the open hatchway, Hera moved to Kanan’s side. He was standing near the vine, frowning at it.
“Is it…sentient?” Hera asked him, not certain what might have spurred that particular expression. There were a few sentient plants in the galaxy, but they were a rarity.
He shook his head. “No, but there’s something…odd. I’m not sure what it is.” He shook himself all over like a nervous Loth-wolf and turned to join her, taking his lightsaber off his belt as he did so.
Hera drew her blaster and took out her glowrod. While she didn’t strictly need it to see in the dark, Twi’lek night vision had evolved for use in the caves under Ryloth’s surface and didn’t work quite as well in an all-metal starship. She was glad for the light as they made their way through the cave-like maze of the star destroyer’s corridors.
She had been on enough star destroyers to know exactly where she was going and how to get there, but more than once she and Kanan had to backtrack and find a different route. Hera had been over on the Lusankya, one of the Rebel Alliance’s captured star destroyers, shortly before the Ghost had left for the Unknown Regions, so her memory was fairly recent, but the damage the Chimaera had taken either in the crash or the fight that had led to it turned the ship into a labyrinth. Hera just hoped it wasn’t the kind of labyrinth with a monster lurking at the center of it.
There were no bodies that they saw, but there was evidence of hard fighting everywhere. Whatever had happened to the Chimaera had at least partially occurred on the ship itself – Hera spotted carbon-scoring on the walls and floor, as well as the unmistakable wreckage left behind by grenade detonations. The source of some of the damage she was a mystery to her, though – places that looked like acid had eaten through the walls and floor, patches of strange mold and fungi that couldn’t have yet made its way through the starship’s thick hull. Some corridors had collapsed completely, probably when the ship had broken up. The whole ship felt haunted in its emptiness, the echoing silence only broken by the distant drip…drip… of water or some other liquid. She and Kanan had to walk braced at odd angles where floors had buckled or broken up entirely.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Hera murmured, shining her glowrod over some kind of pulsing orange fungus that covered most of the floor in front of her. There was enough clear deck that they could have edged around it, but something about the idea made her lekku twitch uneasily. She didn’t want to get near it.
Kanan studied the fungus with one hand outstretched, his frown deepening, then nodded in agreement. “Let’s find another way.”
Hera sighed in equal parts resignation and relief as they turned around. The lack of bodies should have been a relief, but she found it just as disquieting as the rest of the ship. The Imperials might have buried their dead before evacuating the ship, she supposed, but she had assumed they had left before it had crashed. Maybe not.
Her comlink beeped. Hera took it off her belt and said, “Spectre Two here.”
“Spectre Five checking in,” Sabine’s voice said, crackling a little – that was odd, there shouldn’t have been any interference on the ship itself, since there wasn’t that much physical distance separating them. “We think we’re about halfway there; we have to keep doubling back and finding another way around.”
Kanan leaned over Hera’s shoulder and said, “Us too. Have you found anything interesting yet?”
“Yeah, if you see any mushrooms, don’t step on them,” Zeb said. “They explode.”
“Are you all right?” Hera demanded, alarmed.
“Tested it with some scrap,” Zeb said. “This place is –” He hesitated, probably searching for a word in Basic, then gave up and said, “– what we’d call tsaeanla back home. Cursed, maybe.”
Hera chewed on her lower lip, but couldn’t argue with that. “Well, we’re not staying once we’ve gotten what we came for. Spectre Two out.”
It still gave her a minor shock to say that; she had gone by other call signs for most of the war.
She replaced her comlink back on her belt and began the painstaking work of backtracking their progress until they could find another corridor that paralleled the one with the orange fungus. Except for some buckling along the walls, this one seemed almost untouched and they were able to proceed without difficulty until they hit the next bank of turbolifts. Kanan pried open the doors and grimaced at the shaft. “Up or down?” he asked her.
“Up. Six levels.” Hera stepped up beside him and shone her glowrod up the shaft, searching for the lift car in car in case it was blocking their passage. “We should be able to climb this.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
Hera flicked a bemused look at him. “Oh? What’s that?” She caught her breath in surprise as he moved his hand and she felt herself leave the floor. He kept her there, hovering only a centimeter above the deck, until she said, “All right.”
“Tell me when to stop.”
Hera angled her glowrod upwards, never releasing her grip on her blaster, as Kanan drew her through the entrance to the turbolift and then pressed her upwards. She was careful not to look down or consider the fact that she was hanging in mid-air.
“Here,” she said eventually. “Put me about a meter forwards.”
He did so, and Hera reached out to grab the edge of the doorframe, digging her feet onto the tiny lip that protruded out from the doors. “I’ve got it,” she called down. “Go ahead and come up.”
She didn’t look back, but she heard a series of soft metallic thuds as Kanan followed her, leaping from side to side of the shaft with only a fraction of a second between touching the wall and pushing off again. He was beside her less than a minute later, bracing himself with one hand against the doorframe as he extended his other hand. The doors slid open with a faint protesting creak; Hera resisted the urge to step forwards immediately and shone her glowrod down the corridor instead.
There was a thick, vegetal smell in the air, but no sign of vegetation. She stepped cautiously out of the elevator shaft. Her glowrod picked up reflected flashes of illumination from the shattered corridor lighting as she made her way forwards, pausing occasionally to shine her glowrod into the dark caverns of chambers with open doors. Thrawn’s office wasn’t one of them, Hera found, sighing in frustration when they stopped in front of the closed door.
“I should have brought Chopper,” she muttered, starting to reach for the slicing tools inside her jacket.
Kanan flashed a grin at her. “I’ve got it.” He held his hand out over the door control panel; there was a click as the lock disengaged. He moved his hand slightly, and the door slid open.
Hera stepped cautiously into the short corridor beyond. It was obvious that Thrawn had kept it lined with pieces of his art collection; ceramic crunched under her boots, and she turned her glowrod downwards to see the shattered pieces of something broken beyond recognition. Plinths, probably normally bolted to the floor, had been thrown wildly about, with most of their displays destroyed. She and Kanan picked their way through the ruin of what had presumably once been an impressive display, though the only complete piece was a painted clone trooper helmet which hadn’t even been dented by the disturbance. She looked back to see Kanan pick it up, frown at it, then set it carefully down, right side up.
The control for the door to his main office wasn’t working either, but Kanan was able to open it with another wave of his hand. Further destruction greeted her as she stepped in. More of Thrawn’s collection was – or had been, rather – on display here; it hadn’t survived the crash. That must have annoyed Thrawn, Hera thought with grim satisfaction, assuming that the Chiss grand admiral was still among the living.
She and Kanan picked their way through the wreckage of the room. Kanan paused to pick something up; when Hera turned to see what had made him stop, she saw him holding a Jedi Temple Guard’s mask between his hands. Hera hesitated, uneasy about the thing; when Kanan felt her looking at him he raised his head. He bit his lip, then shrugged, hooking it to the back of his belt.
Hera turned back to the desk. She couldn’t grudge Kanan his desire to take something that belonged to the Jedi out of this tomb; she would have done the same if there had been anything from Ryloth in here. She just wished it hadn’t been that.
As she knelt behind Thrawn’s desk and reached for the emergency power restart, Kanan took his comlink off his belt and said quietly, “Spectre One to Spectres Four and Five. No, Spectre Three, I didn’t forget you,” he added in response to a flurry of aggravated beeping that made Hera smile. “We’re at Thrawn’s office.”
“We’re about to start the ascent to the bridge,” Sabine said. “It shouldn’t take too long, unless the turbolift is stuck in the shaft somewhere up here. We’ll check in when we reach out.”
“Acknowledged. Spectre One out.” Kanan put his comlink away and came over to join Hera behind the desk.
To Hera’s disgust, the emergency power restart had no effect; it had been completely drained, which Hera supposed she should have expected given the lack of power elsewhere in the ship. She and Kanan cobbled together a battery with the power cells from his blaster and Hera’s comlink, which got the desk to boot up with frustrating sluggishness. Trying to view anything would undoubtedly end in immediately draining the power, so Hera slid the first of her data cards in and set it to copy, then got up to explore the suite in case there was anything useful they could just grab.
Probably under normal circumstances Thrawn kept his living space immaculate; as it was, it looked like the crash had thrown it wildly askew. Every step Hera made crunched as she trod broken ceramic, glass, crystal, and wood under her boots.
“What a mess,” Kanan said, low-voiced. He ran one hand along the wall, his brows narrowed in concentration.
The desk beeped sluggishly and Hera went back to swap out the full data card for an empty one. As she was kneeling behind it, she heard Kanan’s comlink beep in the other room and his response of, “Go for Spectre One.”
Debris crunched beneath his boots as he came back into the office, crouching down beside Hera so that she could listen.
“We’re at the bridge,” Sabine’s voice said, crackling a little but otherwise clear. “There’s no power up here, but Chopper and I managed to jumpstart some of the computers. Logs are encrypted; I can decrypt them back on the Ghost, so we’re copying them over. It’s an older encryption so I don’t have the key on me.”
“No power here either,” Hera said. “We’re doing the same. I hope Thrawn wrote his logs in Basic,” she added, wincing at the thought. She wasn’t actually certain what his native language was.
There was a long moment of silence, then Sabine said, “Hera, we know when the ship crashed.”
“Yes?” Hera said pointedly when she didn’t go on.
Sabine took a deep breath. “Three days ago.”
“What?” Kanan said.
“The Chimaera crashed three days ago. Not three months, not three years, three days ago.”
All those plants.
“Get out of there,” Hera said flatly. “Get the logs and get out. We’ll meet you back at the Ghost.”
“Acknowledged. Spectre Five out.”
Kanan replaced his comlink on his belt, his expression grim as he considered the desk in front of them. Hera glanced at it, willing the files transmit more quickly, then looked back at him.
“Talk to me,” she said quietly. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I have a bad feeling about this,” Kanan said, his voice equally soft. Suddenly the waiting darkness outside their tiny circle of light beyond the desk, never friendly, seemed hostile, as if home to every childhood nightmare Hera had ever known.
“Three days isn’t long,” Hera whispered. She didn’t want to raise her voice; there hadn’t been any evidence of animal or sentient life on the Chimaera so far, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any at all. “Unless they’ve taken major losses over the past six years, they can’t evacuate an entire ship’s crew – star destroyers don’t carry enough hyperspace-capable vessels for that. They’re still here.”
Kanan ran his fingers along the back of the desk, frowning, then shook his head.
“You don’t think they’re here?” Hera asked, not sure how to interpret his expression. She couldn’t shake the feeling that seven years ago she would have known exactly what was going through his head without having to ask, but six months after his return they were still relearning each other.
“I didn’t say that,” he murmured back. “I think there’s something going on here that neither of us can see yet.”
“I don’t need the Force to know that,” Hera said. The desk beeped again, the tone falling off and suggesting that their jury-rigged power source had come to the end of its life. Hera hit it with the palm of her hand until it reluctantly gave up the data card and wondered if it was worth sacrificing the power cell in her blaster or Kanan’s lightsaber to make certain that everything had been copied over. She was fairly certain that all of her files would have fit on one data card with room left over; she just hoped that she had gotten Thrawn’s files and not copies of his art collection.
She tucked the data cards into her pocket, pulled the used power cells from the desk so that she could recharge them on the Ghost, and used the desk to lever herself to her feet. Kanan followed with his usual careless grace, rolling his shoulders back so that his spine popped. Hera flicked a glance at him, bemused.
They searched the rest of Thrawn’s suite quickly, but without much success. Kanan eventually dug out a handful of data cards from behind a panel in the small cabin and passed them to Hera to put with the others, then stood scowling at the shattered remains of something that Hera assumed at once been another Jedi artifact.
She put her hand on his arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He nodded, his expression still distressed.
They left Thrawn’s suite behind and went back down the corridor to the turbolift shaft. Hera braced her hands on either side of the doorframe and peered down its dark length dubiously. Her glowrod didn’t penetrate very far down. “I should have brought a rope,” she said to Kanan, leaning back. “How should we do this?”
He considered the shaft with one hand outstretched. “I can send you down first the way you came up, or we can go together,” he said, arching an eyebrow at her. “I won’t drop you,” he added when Hera hesitated, trying to figure out what he meant by “together.”
“I didn’t say you would,” Hera said dryly, clipping her glowrod to the front of her vest. “Together, then.”
He wrapped an arm around her waist as Hera put her arms around his neck, kissing him quickly. She didn’t bother to ask if he knew where to stop; she trusted him. She still caught her breath as he stepped into the turbolift shaft and dropped, the glowrod illuminated metal walls streaking past them.
They didn’t fall for more than a few seconds. Kanan did something that she couldn’t see and they tumbled out onto the floor of another dark corridor, something crunching unpleasantly under Hera’s shoulder – he hadn’t quite gotten the angle of their exit right. For a horrible moment she thought the crunching sound had been her shoulder, then she put her hand out and felt shattered metal beneath her gloved palm.
“Is this the floor we started from?” she said, surprised. She shone her glowrod down its length and revised her question. “This isn’t where we started from.”
“There’s something down here,” Kanan said, offering her a hand up. “I didn’t sense it before.”
“Something alive?” Hera asked, starting to reach for her blaster.
He hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
Hera drew her blaster.
She covered Kanan as he made his way down the corridor, stopping briefly to lay his hands on each closed door in search of whatever had called him here. There seemed to be none of the mysterious plant life down here; given its ubiquity elsewhere in the ship, its absence made Hera more nervous than its presence would have. She judged them to have gone several levels down past the hangar, which meant that they would presumably have to go back up to return when Kanan was finished.
“Here,” Kanan said eventually. He was at the very end of the corridor, his hands pressed to the double doors there. Hera calculated their passage and realized that they were below the hangar bay – maybe immediately below it, in fact, as some star destroyers had large chambers where ships, AT-ATs or AT-STs, or other vehicles could be kept while in transit.
He stepped back and gestured at the doors; when nothing happened, he sighed and took his lightsaber off his belt. He ignited it in a flare of blue plasma and drove it into the doors, cutting an opening with obvious effort; Hera guessed the doors were blast-shielded.
“Is it Ezra?” she had to ask him.
He paused halfway through the circle and thought about it, overheated metal beginning to melt and drip down the doors where the lightsaber had stopped. “No,” he said finally, starting to cut again. “There’s a trace of his presence here, but it’s not him, just something he did – I’m not sure what or when.”
It took him another minute to finish cutting, then he raised a hand and lifted the circle out of the way, drawing it out into the hallway to rest against the wall. Hera moved to shine her glowrod into the opening before either of them entered, but Kanan didn’t wait for her, just climbed through with a muttered curse as the back of his hand brushed the still-hot sheared away metal.
Hera swore under her breath and followed him. Kanan’s self-preservation instincts were usually good enough to keep him from walking face first into trouble, but Hera had fairly good memories of when those instincts had failed spectacularly, including the fatal occasion.
She climbed through after Kanan and almost walked directly into Kanan’s back.
He was standing stock-still, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, his white eyes open and fixed on the object in the center of the room. Hera stepped up beside him and shone her light over it, trying to make sense of what it was she was looking at. At first it seemed to be nothing more than a tumble of stone, then as she continued to study it, it slowly resolved itself into half-familiar shapes.
“That’s – that’s from Lothal,” she said hesitantly, trying to decide why anyone would remove one of Lothal’s stone megaliths to a spaceship. It seemed like a strange choice even for someone as odd as Grand Admiral Thrawn.
“Yes.” Kanan’s voice was tight with the kind of barely-controlled fury Hera had only heard from him a handful of times. He took a breath, held it for a seven-count, let it out slowly, then repeated the process. When Hera put a hand on his arm she found that he was trembling, though it was slowing as he calmed himself down.
The longer she looked at the stones, the less certain she was that it was a megalith, though the color of the rock was distinctive of Lothal. Most of it must have been affixed to the floor; while there were broken stones strewn across the floor from the crash, the bulk of it remained at the center of the room. Hera took a step towards it, curious, before Kanan put his hand out and caught her elbow. “Don’t go near it,” he said, his voice low. He was so upset that he had lapsed back into his seldom-used Coruscanti accent, so upper-class that it made Hera’s back teeth ache just to listen to it. He took another breath; when he spoke again, his accent was his usual Outer Rim drawl. “Stay here.”
“What is it?”
Kanan didn’t respond, just released her and walked toward the megalith. Hera started to follow him anyway, then hesitated and stayed where she was; Kanan didn’t give her orders often or without good reason. Instead she played her light over the stones as Kanan walked up to it, forcing herself to relax so that her mind could make sense of the pattern that her eyes suggested was there.
As Kanan walked around it and then vanished from sight, Hera realized that it wasn’t a megalith at all: it was, or had been, a building. “It’s from the Jedi temple on Lothal,” she said, pitching her voice to carry and wincing at the way it echoed off the room’s high ceiling. “Parts of it had been cut away and removed when we saw it – it must have been destroyed in the crash.”
“No.” Kanan’s voice sounded as if he was speaking from the bottom of a deep well, further away than it should have been. It also echoed oddly in a way that hers had not; Hera took a reflexive step forwards, wanting to reassure herself of his presence, before she forced herself to stop again. If he could hear her and speak to her, then he was still here. “No, Ezra did this. The stones still resonate with his power. Not recently, but – he did it. There’s someone else here, too, a – a stain, a dark side stain, from about the same time. I don’t recognize the signature. I think this is, was, the temple door.”
Hera had told him what had happened to the temple on Lothal, as best as she understood it. Her memory of the event seemed to be strangely blurred, as if it had happened to someone other than her or as if it was something that she had seen through flawed glass. She suspected that her mind simply wasn’t equipped to handle what had happened, non-Force-user that she was.
“Why would Thrawn bring it here?” Hera asked him.
“I’ve no idea. There’s power in it, but it’s – it’s unanchored. It should be on Lothal, drawing from the vergence there; that’s what it was made for. What’s in it now is –” He hesitated. “– quiescent, maybe. Resting. I could probably tap it if I had to, but I don’t know what would happen.” He emerged from the opposite side of the tumble of shattered stone and Hera let her breath out in relief, then caught it again as Kanan pressed his hands to a chunk of it nearly as tall as himself. Faded painted lines glinted in the light of her glowrod. “This isn’t like the temple back on Coruscant where I was raised. This temple was older, from a long, long time ago, when the Order was different.” He pulled his hands away, shuddering slightly. “When the galaxy was different. And I don’t know what this would do when it can’t draw from the vergence on Lothal anymore.”
He wiped his palms against the sides of his trousers, his expression uneasy as he came back to Hera. She put her hand out to touch his sleeve, reassuring herself that he was there and real, because she still remembered Ezra vanishing into solid stone all those years ago.
“I’m here,” he murmured. “But I don’t like that this is.” He leaned down, frowning, and scooped up a piece of broken stone not much bigger than his thumbnail. He weighed it briefly in his palm, then slipped it into one of his belt pouches. Hera shivered, wishing he hadn’t done that.
“We’d better get back to the Ghost,” she said. She turned her glowrod upwards, considering the ceiling. “We’re just beneath the hangar, I think. That’s probably how they transported that – the temple pieces in.”
Kanan nodded absently, turning his attention upwards as well. “You know star destroyers better than I do,” he said. “Can we get up there without having to cut through the ceiling? I don’t want to give the plants a straight shot at the temple.” He frowned at the ruins. “Though I’m not sure that they could do anything to it.”
Hera bit her lip, thinking; it had been a long time since she had been in this particular section of a star destroyer. “There should be a turbolift directly up to the hangar either in this room or just outside it,” she said finally. “Inside on the later star destroyers, outside on the older ones. I don’t know which the Chimaera is.”
Kanan was already turning, one hand held out as he searched for it in the Force, then he gestured her back towards the door. Once they were back out in the corridor, he replaced the circle of durasteel he had cut from the doors, then they backtracked until they found the turbolift he had sensed. Unlike the shaft they had used before, this one only reached up to the hangar; it was used for rapid transit between the hangar and whatever cargo was being stored in the big chamber beneath it. The turbolift car was there, which mean that Kanan had to cut through its ceiling with his lightsaber until they could climb up on top of it. After that their transit upwards was fairly rapid, and they emerged from the hangar turbolift shaft just in time to nearly get shot by Sabine and Zeb.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” Zeb said, lowering his bo-rifle. “What were you doing down there?”
“Thrawn has a piece of the Jedi temple from Lothal down there,” Hera explained, a little breathless.
“What?” Sabine demanded, appalled. “He what?”
Hera looked around as they crossed the hangar deck back towards the Ghost. Sabine and Zeb had been here long enough that they had had time to unlock the Ghost; the ramp was down and Chopper was perched on top of it, his photoreceptors fixed on the nearest vine. Hera frowned at it. It had definitely grown and was now no more than a few meters from the Ghost.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s find somewhere else to set down – I don’t want to stay here longer than we have to.”
Zeb nodded fervently. Sabine said, “I took samples of some of those plants, but I’m not a xenobotanist or a biologist. I can run some tests –”
“Let’s worry about that later,” Hera said, herding them all back onto the ship. She looked back over her shoulder as she came up one short; Kanan was standing by the vine and frowning down at it. “Love?”
“I’m coming.” He turned away from the vine and followed her up into the Ghost. A few minutes later Hera was in the pilot’s seat, lifting the ship up from the hangar floor and leaving the fallen Chimaera behind with relief. For lack of any better options, she took them back to the jungle, settling the Ghost in the same clearing she had docked in before.
“It will take me a while to decrypt the ship’s logs,” Sabine said as Hera and Kanan turned their chairs around to face her. “It’s an older encryption; we have the key. It’s just a lot of data.” She tapped a control on her gauntlet and a hologram sprang up in the space over it. “This wasn’t encrypted, though.”
Hera read the neat lines of script that appeared under the date three days previous. Captain Gilad Pellaeon gives order to abandon ISD Chimaera. 69.93/98.71.
“What are the numbers?”
“Imperial code,” Sabine said. “Every stormtrooper, ISB agent, sailor, and moff knows it, or at least they’re supposed to. It’s not used often, though. It means that the survivors are on-planet and these are the rendezvous coordinates – they’re standard, they’re designed to work for any planet or moon as long as it doesn’t have major irregularities, so it doesn’t matter what world it is.”
“Why Pellaeon and not Thrawn?” Kanan asked.
Sabine shrugged. “Maybe we got lucky and Thrawn’s dead. Technically the Chimaera’s Pellaeon’s command, not Thrawn’s, so it could just be that.” She rubbed her hands together, making the image waver in mid-air. “But if it’s only been three days, then they’ll still be there. That will give us some answers.”
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Arkham!Riddler SFW Alphabet
When I started this one I figured it would be easier since I can riddle as bi and ace and this is all non-sexual but my god was it difficult. It's hard to separate what i'd like from a partner like riddler from what this version of riddler would actually be like. I've done my best but if you have anything you'd like to add, feel free to hmu!
LONG POST UNDER THE CUT
A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)
Edward can be affectionate in quite a superficial way. He’s not above using someone's affections for him to get what he wants out of them and he certainly isn't above feigning affection for the same reason. Although unless you were head over heels for him, his faux sincerity would be pretty obvious.
However with a partner he actually likes i can imagine he’d be very affectionate with his actions more than his words. Riddler loves to talk but expressing actual love can be difficult for him, whether it’s romantic or platonic, saying how he feels about you is one of the few things that doesn't come easy. I can see him spending a lot of money on you as a gesture of affection; fancy food , clothes, first editions of your favorite books or vintage versions of whatever you collect. He’d quite happily pay for your education/college and any and all books you might want.
B = Best friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)
Being a “best friend” would probably be at your insistence and not his. He’s likely left any childhood friends behind (assuming he had any to begin with) and I think as an adult, Edward would have trouble making friends. Like most things, Edward treats friendship as just another tool in the bag, he can count the people he actually gives a shit about on 1 hand.
If you were lucky (or unlucky depending on your view) to be considered one of those friends, expect lots of phone calls about bailing him out, riddles turning up in weird places ( like in the pocket of a coat you haven't worn in a while) and him helping you out with your cerebral challenges( like your quarterly tax return, no eddie i can't just NOT do it will you put down the rubix cube and help me)
C = Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)
He’ll never admit it, not even under pain of death, but Edward likes to be held. Now there's a few caveats to this; his rules and on his terms etc. He likes to lie between your legs with his head on your chest, either facing you for a hug while he naps or away from you, using you like a pillow while he reads or tinkers with something. He likes having his hair played with and his back gently stroked until he falls asleep.
He keeps up the facade of being totally touch adversed for good reason, the other rouges just do not respect personal space, even ones like killer croc and clayface. For the sake of his suits, he keeps this up even in private. But if you were someone special to him, you might convince him to toss his arm around your shoulder or waist.
D = Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)
When he’s doing well mentally, he’s pretty good at taking care of himself. Or at least, looking like he takes good care of himself. He can cook and clean a little but he has the cash to pay other people to do the more menial or time consuming stuff for him. Not that he’s above it, he just prefers to spend his time on other things and is happy to compensate people to save him from doing it. These days he's more focused on other things to be bothered with domestic chores, his place is very messy.
Settling down is an alien concept to him, not one he’s eager to explore. Expect him to turn his nose up at the prospect of marriage but a platonic long term partner, someone for company, someone to act as a sounding board for ideas or even just someone to (gently but firmly) kick his ass into looking after himself would be pretty ideal.
E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)
He’d probably be thinking long and hard about it beforehand. Like weeks if not months in advance. He’d want to give you the perfect breakup and, depending on what happened, try his best to part as friends. He doesn't deal well with sudden changes to his routine, particularly with no plans ahead. On the other hand he might just pussy out and ghost you. He’s fickle like that.
If it was your doing, well. Edward takes these sorts of things as a challenge. He might even assume you were joking the first time around. After he got the message, I sense he’d probably be quite clingy and upset. It’s taken a lot for him to get so far with you and he wouldn't let it go without a fight. He might try to change or at the very least , be better at hiding whatever it was that you want to break it off.
Failing that expect a lot of texts from blocked numbers almost but not quite begging or apologizing and asking for more chances.
F = Fiance(e) (How do they feel about commitment? How quick would they want to get married?)
Like I said above, marriage isn't for him. I doubt he'd be compatible with a religious person given his childhood and outspoken atheism. He MIGHT if pressed, give you a question mark themed ring or token as a reminder that you were his. No papers, no ceremony, just something small. If you proposed expect him to be flustered and , if you can believe it, at a loss for words. He might go radio silent on you for a few days before giving you an answer but i honestly couldn't tell you what it might be. He does enjoy the thought of someone referring to him as “my husband” thought, so maybe persistent begging i'll get you somewhere.
Some sort of Commitment appeals to him from a practical point; having someone to rely on, to fall back on and to care and be cared for by. It's not a normal relationship by any stretch of the imagination but it’ll be special all the same.
G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)
Edward isn't an imposing man. He might be tall but he’s all sinus and no mass. He has gentle hands but can be careless when he’s in a mood ( with objects, never with you). He's broken a lot of plates, computer monitors and mechanical pencils over the years. He lacks a lot of social grace to treat things with the necessary amount of sensitivity sometimes, but he has the sense to at least TRY and be emotionally gentle. Situations of abuse or self worth issues, things he has personal experience dealing with are things he can easily empathise with .
H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?)
Short story, yes but only coming from a trusted partner. Long story is that he has a hard time not flinching when someone hugs him by surprise. You should ask before you do it.
I = I love you (How fast do they say the L-word?)
Edward is the kind of person to fall head over heels very quickly. He might say I love you before it's socially appropriate, it honestly might make you a little uncomfortable. But once that initial infatuation dies he's a lot more guarded with his feelings. He’d say i love you in a superficial way quickly but a genuine i love you with real emotion would take a lot of time and thought from him before he actually committed to it.
J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous?)
If you look up jealousy in the dictionary, you'd see Edward's picture. Obviously he is a deeply insecure man, he’s terrified you’ll start to think of him the way he thinks of himself and seek out someone better. You need to nip any signs of jealousy in your relationship in the bud early on. Otherwise Edward will become controlling, manipulative and possessive to the point of alienating you from other people, simply for the sake of having you to himself. You need to set healthy boundaries while also doing your best to accommodate his need to be validated and his need for reassurance that you do in fact want to be with him. He gets snappy when he’s jealous, with you and other people. He has temper tantrums like a child if you don't agree with him. Like for example if he thinks someone was flirting with you and you tell him they were just being friendly.
All that said, I genuinely don't think he does it for the sake of being a controlling partner. He is just so very afraid that someone he actually gives a shit about will leave him like everyone else in his life.
K = Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)
I should point out that he doesn't kiss often. But when he does,He’s all over the damn place. What he lacks in experience he makes up for in enthusiasm. He is a very sloppy kisser when he gets into it but generally his kisses are very short and chaste. Like i said, he doesn't really know what he's doing so he's all over the place in terms of location. I think smooches on the cheek because it's easy access, for him and you. He likes body worship, so if you're kissing him, anywhere will do as long as you're praising that part while you do it.
L = Little ones (How are they around children?)
Edward does not like children but he’s good pretending for the sake of his image. Childrens naturally inquisitive nature coupled with his bright and colourful appearance makes for some entertaining moments but in the long run I can see him worrying too much: about screwing the kid up, about being perceived like his father, about the child not meeting his expectations etc.
M = Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)
He's more of a night owl tbh. If you're living with him he might wander into the kitchen while you're getting breakfast , wondering why you're up so late. You'd have to tell him he’s accidentally pulled another all nighter. He might have coffee with you and talk about what he was working on, maybe ask if he could have some breakfast with you. But by the time it's cooked he’ll have passed out on the sofa.
N = Night (How are nights spent with them?)
Edward prefers to work and operate at night so expect him to be in a flurry of activity, building things, calling people and working at his computer. He likes to have company, even if you aren't doing much talking. It would be nice for him to just spend time with you while you both work on your respective projects. Sometimes he gets his shit together and lives during the day like most people ( read as, when he’s just been to prison and has an actual schedule for once) he would like to unwind with you by watching game shows or playing video games.
O = Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)
Edward has a bad habit of gloating about his accomplishments but in a way that is so obviously false it unintentionally tells more about him than he really wanted to. Like in Arkham knight, he gloats about “not having any friends at all” in reference to his riddler bots when Catwoman teases him. He meant that as a snipe at catwoman but the fact he’s so open about his lack of friends, to most people anway, is incredibly sad.
He’s a well known villain, if you didn't know most of his backstory before dating him it would be hard to miss once you were together. He’s unlikely to tell you it himself, having to repeat it time and time again in therapy has him perpetually bored of the subject .
P = Patience (How easily angered are they?)
He gets upset quite easily, he has very limited patience . He’s used to other people's cuts and jibes so he mostly lets that roll off his back with only a little annoyance. But for stupid people, and people outright insulting him, dismissing him or for acting like batman he is liable to start seeing red very quickly . In your relationship I would say he is easily irritated by a lot of things, generally a bit grumpy if things don't go his way but rarely as angry as we see him in the climax of Arkham knight. He doesn't yell or shout at you but he will seethe and let his anger fester for days at a time. He can be very mean when he’s angry.
Q = Quizzes (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)
You would think for someone with a photographic memory, he would be better at remembering things about you. It's not to say he DOESN'T remember, only that he requires prompting to do so. Yes, he will remember everything about you but he puts it in the back of his head so he can focus on other things. Don't be surprised if he lets important dates slip by or does things at the last minute because something reminded him of it.
R = Remember (What is their favorite moment in your relationship?)
It's probably something innocuous that you wouldn't think of, or even realise he was there for. Maybe he remembers meeting you in a coffee shop months or years before you met and started dating. He remembers because you held the door for him or gave him a genuine smile. You were something colourful in his gray day, something hard to forget. I doubt he tried to build a relationship out of that one moment but when he met you again he would remember that and decide that it was fate or something.
S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)
Edward is protective in a strange way. He’s most powerful in situations where he controls everything , which isn't usually possible in real life as he's not a particularly strong man. He has more power in the digital world so that's where he feels most comfortable looking out for you. He might watch you on security cameras to make sure you get home safe, send you texts to check in or hide your profile from the police. You can be online together and in the public eye ( for him to brag about you to his online followers of course). To tie back in with his jealousy, he would be pretty protective initially but if you told him to back off, he’d be careful to do it more secretly.
Edward needs to be protected in a lot of ways, mostly from himself. He’s not good at looking after himself, either physically, mentally or socially. His big mouth gets him into a lot of bother so he might need you to act as a social filter. He’s had several large breakdowns in the last few years and with arkham closed for good, he has no support besides you. He needs to be grounded and kept in the present lest he get wrapped up in his thoughts.
T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)
Honestly? He doesn't really try. He's very lucky in that he can pull something out of his ass last minute and it would still have a similar effect to if he’d spent the whole month planning. Someday it's going to blow up in his face big time but he doesn't seem to care.
Same goes for everyday tasks. He's usually so focused on his own stuff that he doesn't realise other things need done. He's a master of doing things at the last second and still making it look like he put in effort.
U = Ugly (What would be some bad habits of theirs?)
He has a bad habit of underestimating people, even you. He might be inclined to patronise you when you try to do things for him but just showing him that you are a capable human being is usually enough to shut him up. He's very egocentric, narcissistic and conceited, but given everything he's been through, it's not really his fault he's like this. What is his doing is his refusal to work on his faults or try to grow as a person. Perhaps with the right encouragement you could help him but don't hold your breath.
V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)
Normally yes, Edward is narcissistic and very concerned with his looks but recently, with his mental health declining, he's forgotten to take care of himself. I imagine when/if he snaps out of this funk he’ll be mortified by how he’s let himself go. He’s more concerned with how he looks socially, how he might be perceived and his reputation than what he physically looks like.
W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)
Edward is and always has been convinced he was meant to be alone. He’s somewhat made his peace with that . there would always be a hole in his heart that he really thought nothing could ever fill. But meeting you? Well that changes things. Edward will never be a complete, well rounded person but having someone to kiss his wounds and pour their love into the cracks in his being is infinitely better than being alone.
X = Xtra (A random headcanon for them.)
I mentioned in some of my mini headcanons for him that he used to do gymnastics as a kid. It wasn't so much that he wanted to or even enjoyed it all that much, in his highschool you just had to pick a sport and it was one of the only things that wasnt team related and had the lowest chance of being hit in the head with a ball, bat or racket. He was pretty good at it, even if he didnt like it that much , and probably could have taken home some bronze or silver awards in his state if his parents had encouraged him. Nowadays he can barely do a pullup but he's still got most of the flexibility, even if repeated breaks at the hands of batman have left him a little sore while he does it.
Y = Yuck (What are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner?)
Edward doesn't like people appearing to be smarter than him. but his ego usually protects him from acknowledging that fact. he doesn't like bullies, despite being one himself . but his most hated trait in people is alcohol use/ dependency. If he knew you were an alcoholic he likely never would have started dating you but even the odd drink will make him turn his nose up. of course, hes a hypocrite , when hes feeling really sorry for himself he will definitely drink his sorrows away in whatever hole in the ground gotham rogues frequent. the self loathing is as strong as his hangover the next morning. he knows hes like his father, in more ways than one and it makes him sick. any mention of alcohol is likely to bring up these feelings
Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habits of theirs?)
Edward is a chronic insomniac but there is one thing that is guaranteed to send him right to the land of nod and that is having his hair played with and his back stroked. I don't know if it was one of the few kind touches he ever received as a child or if his parents did it when he was a baby but it's one of the few things that makes him feel truly safe and cared for. Riddler has spent the majority of his life alone, so finding a partner he trusts enough to allow them not only into his space but also his bed would be a difficult thing. If that's you, however, expect him to be badgering you every night to help him get to sleep.
that took a lot longer than i thought it would! arkham riddler is obviously my favorite so i was trying to write a lot for him but i hope i havent been rambling
if you want to talk more about any of the riddlers, hmu!
#riddler headcanons#The Riddler#Riddler#arkham riddler#sfw alphabet#edward nygma#edward nigma#batman arkham knight#arkham knight riddler#arkham knight#headcanons#my headcanons#my stuff#my art
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Cryptic Mystic: In the End
To bounce off of the previous blog posting, I thought it would be fun to just hop right on into the topic of what happens after we die. After all, we just finished talking about souls and a bit of astral projection last time. From transcending to another place/dimension to reincarnation, there truly is a lot to cover when you start diving into the many beliefs and ideas that surround death and mortality/immortality. But what differentiates the scientific facts from myths and stories of olden days? For those who believe in one defined means to an end for us all, how do you know for a fact that what you believe is true? Have you ever questioned what is life after death? Hell, is there a life after death? Or maybe… it’s something else… something so obscure that our tiny human brains are nowhere near possessing the capabilities to understand it. In the end, readers can decide for themselves what is more likely to be true, or maybe… the answer to this cryptic question has been right in front of us all along? Maybe it is a combination of what we know but do not yet understand. Let’s talk shop, shall we?
Death. Happy for some, a time of joy and celebration for others, but likely a time of sadness and grief for most. Some welcome death with open arms, while yet others fear their mortality. The numerous speculations on what happens after we die is overwhelming. There are far too many ideas and beliefs that people hold in this regard. I’ll briefly cover a few of the more popular beliefs as to not make this blog super lengthy - because, ya know, your attention span and whatnot.
Scientifically, there are two types of death: clinical death and brain death. Clinical death is characterized by major organ failure (e.g. heart, liver, kidneys, etc.) until the body is completely rendered of functioning and the individual is officially pronounced dead. In brain death, solely the brain stops functioning, but the other organs within the body continue to work within their normal capacities. Creepy fun fact for you: the heart can beat for up to 30 minutes on its own after all brain cells have died. Once the heart stops it’s adios amigo. The remaining major organs that were barely hanging on have now lost blood flow, and life has ended. More creepy death fun facts: the gastrointestinal tract can live on its own for up to 3 days, and the complete decomposition of a body takes roughly 30 years! Crazy science stuff.
Now let’s take a look at some common beliefs and speculations of what happens when/after we die. Again, I want to remind you, readers, that in my eyes there is no right or wrong answer here. I am a firm believer in everyone having their own beliefs and respect all of them regardless of how obscure some naysayers may think that they are. I enjoy hearing stories from followers that help to further broaden my thought processes. If you ever have an interesting story or want to chime in with your thoughts please feel free to leave a comment here or shoot on over to Instagram and we can rap about it.
The belief that we transcend to another realm/dimension has been around for thousands of years and has been studied for decades. There is a lot to uncover here between recent scientific discoveries and human belief. Many people believe that many other dimensions exist, however, scientific exploration hasn’t fully found the golden answer to if and what these other dimensions may contain if they do indeed exist. We know that Earth has at least three dimensions: space—length, width, and depth—and one dimension of time. Modern physics posits that there is at least a fourth dimension of space, but that we can’t experience it. Maybe we can? Maybe we do but just haven’t put a label on it? Maybe the odd phenomena that happen across the world that people describe as being ghosts, aliens, and other paranormal activities are actually from the next dimension or another. There has been speculation that extraterrestrials come from another dimension through a portal that is already here on Earth rather than from the sky (outer space).
Give me an R! Give me an E! Hell, this word is too long and I’m not going to put you through reading a silly cheer for 5 minutes. Reincarnation - yet another commonly held belief of what happens when we die. For those of you who may have never heard of reincarnation, here is the quick and dirty version of the definition. Reincarnation posits that when we die our spirit/soul/whatever you want to call it, moves on to a new host. This host could be a human baby that is born the very second that you die OR you could possibly find yourself reincarnated as an animal, tree, flower, or any other living thing that you can find on Earth. Interesting concept indeed.
My favorite belief, that we go to Heaven or somewhere similar, is one that is believed by millions of people across the world. Wouldn’t it be nice to die and go to another world/place where nothing can do you harm, and just live out the rest of your existence in peace? Well, if you can believe it then it may just happen that way - or maybe not. I am fairly certain I have mentioned this in previous blogs, but religion can be thought of as a coping mechanism for that which we do not know or understand; the human way of putting a label on something to make ourselves feel better or like we are a part of something divine and much greater than us. Which, in all actuality, we very well may be a part of something divine and much greater than us, however, it is my personal opinion that we honestly have no fucking clue about the extent to which that is.
Now, this next one I threw in here because I personally found it to be interesting. In 2017 I was having a conversation with a friend about mystical things such as portals, extraterrestrials, etc. My friend informed me of a research video on YouTube about a company called CERN. He described this Swiss company as having built a circular-shaped machine that when you throw something into its core it disappears. However, other items have come through this machine and into the room from… wherever the other side is? Basically, these people have created a portal and no one knows about it. You’re welcome for the information. Within this research video, the guy who was describing all of this stuff went on to talk about how China had gifted the statue that sits in front of the CERN building. This particular statue is reported to represent the end of time and hell on Earth. There is a whole mythical background story about this statue - you need to check it out. The irony between the statue and this machine they made is uncanny. It made my jaw drop. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I haven’t been able to find the YouTube video again, so I am not sure if it got taken down because the guy exposed something that was supposed to be secret, or maybe I just suck at YouTube searches. Either way, I encourage you to do some digging on this one, because this type of information could potentially support the whole soul/spirit transcending into another realm/dimension belief. I am not a physicist, so I could be explaining this all wrong. You’ll just have to check out their website for yourself and see what it’s all about. → home.cern
There is also the belief that when we die nothing happens. We are dead and it is the end of who we once were. This belief is often held by Atheists and some Satanists if we’re using labels. However, many people believe this who aren’t subscribed to a religion or don’t want to necessarily put a label on who they are/what they believe. This is the grim reality of our existence. Maybe it all means… nothing… Now isn’t that depressing.
Then there are near-death experiences, which brings a whole different perspective into the mix. People all over the world have encountered near-death experiences. Many report shockingly similar experiences and stories. Some say they see a white light and follow it to a place of peace. I have heard people say that while they were legally deceased they found themself in a field of flowers or floating within the cosmos. A common theme found within these individuals is that once they have had their near-death experience, they aren’t afraid of death anymore - they welcome it with open arms. One woman on a documentary that I watched even went as far as to say that she didn’t want to come back from where she was and was disappointed when she was revived. These experiences could possibly support the theory of transcending to other dimensions or that there is a “heaven.” I can’t explain it, but I still find the information interesting to ponder upon.
Our mortality is evident, but what really happens when we die? These are just a short collection of ideas and beliefs that have been around for ages, however, there are many more to consider I’m sure. What do you think? Or should I say: what do you want to believe? Ultimately it’s your choice. Whatever brings you peace, serves you well, and is the right answer for you is what I advise you to turn to. This flesh and blood will decay for each of us one day - it’s inevitable. It is for this very reason why I say live life to the fullest. Regret nothing. Do what best serves you. Do what makes you happy. Take chances. Above all else - be the best version of yourself that makes you happy.
Cryptic Mystic Blog by PsychVVitch
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Hypewired Unsolved Drinking Game, Rule #2: Shirayuki Despairs Over Obi’s Life Choices
Rule #1
Written for @ruleofexception on the occasion of her BIRTH. I thought this would be more ghost hunting and less metrics, but I should have known I couldn’t resist a premise-building chapter.
[Shirayuki]
Have you ever heard of the Gardner Museum Heist?
[Obi]
Oohhh.
[Shirayuki]
*laughs*
What was that?
[Obi]
Oh, nothing, nothing.
It’s just...
I love heists.
[Shirayuki]
You love heists?
*laughs* No, I take it back, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
[Obi]
*laughs*
Come on, who doesn’t love a good heist?
[Shirayuki]
This one *is* known as the biggest art heist of its kind.
[Obi]
Oh ho ho ho.
You’re saying all the right things to me.
The thing about haunted houses-- the real kind, not the ones that hire teenagers to wear stage make up and hold fake chainsaws-- is that they’re hard to book.
“Oh, in my hometown, they hired ex-convicts,” Obi says in the same casual way he says anything vaguely terrifying about his childhood, “and they gave them real, working chainsaws.”
Her jaw drops, face still plastered to her phone’s screen. Soft jazz worms into her ear. “That can’t be true. That has to be a-- a rumor or something.”
“Nah, nah, the farm had a work program with the local prison. I think sometimes they did seasonal work too?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. But it definitely made the hayride more popular. Gave it a real element of danger, you know?”
Shirayuki stares. “And they gave them real chainsaws?”
“Well, they only revved them a little.” He twitches his shoulder, as much of a shrug as he ever gives. “One time a guy hopped on the cart and chopped the bale next to me, but I mean, I probably deserved that.”
She might be sitting down, but oh, she could really do to sit down again. Harder. Mentally. Emotionally. “And you’re sure these were ex-convicts?”
“Yeah, probably.” Not an endorsement ringing with confidence. “I mean, I’m sure they were in for non-violent crimes, at least.”
There are two wolves inside of her, and one of them is pleased to hear about a local business working to place disadvantaged community members, and the other-- well, the other thinks that maybe everyone should be a little more solid on the whole non-violent convictions than they are.
Before she has the chance to suggest it, the phone clicks, and a pleasant female voice says, “Hill House, Donna speaking, how may I help you?”
“Oh, hi, yes,” she fumbles, “I’m Shirayuki calling from Hypewire. We would like to talk about booking your location.”
“Hypewire?” Donna pauses, the good long kind that means she’s probably from a generation that prefers to read its news on paper, and not from a website that has an option to react with emojis. “Oh, did you want to do an article on the house?”
“Ah, something like that.” Obi arches a brow, lips twitching as he crams another Funyon between them. He’s far too distracting to have around while she needs to have thinky thoughts, especially if he’s going to make faces at her. “I’m the producer of Hyperwire Unsolved, and we were wondering if we could possibly do a, ah--” she coughs-- “an investigation? Of the house? For the show?”
“Oh, Hypewire Unsolved!” The woman laughs. “My nephew loves you guys. But don’t you do true crime?”
[Sender]: [email protected]
[Recipients]: [email protected]
[Subject]: Re: Episode Filming
Thank you for your interest in our venue for an episode. Some of our interns are big fans of your show! However, we have to admit some confusion, as we were under the impression you were a true crime show…
“How’d they get that impression?” Higata grunts, hunching further over his keyboard. His screen in the only light in the editing bay, castling a ghastly glow over his face. “The art department just sent me six different aliens to pick from for the Roswell episode, and now we’re Serial? Come on.”
Shirayuki sighs. “I know. But it seems our more popular episodes are the ones about collar bombers and serial murderers. At least by the metrics”
Higata might only be twenty-six, but he’d be right at home at the VA buffet with the way he grumbles. “You know His Highness over there was talking to me about making true crime and supernatural separate seasons. Something about...keeping views and organizational groups or something.”
“Huh.” She sits back, nibbling on her lip. “It would certainly give me more of a focus each season. What do you think?”
“I guess it’s fine. Two editing credits for my resume for one show’s work is a good deal.” He overlays a shadowy police sketch into the video, shoulders rounded and tense. “What do I know? I just sit in the dark and pick which ghostly visage I want to layer over your audio.”
She leans in with her sunniest smile, squeezing his arm right above the elbow. “And you’re so good at it!”
“I am.” He’s too much of a professional to look away from his work, shifting the same image three pixels over and then three pixels back, but his bicep relaxes beneath her grip. “I am a top tier spooky face picker. All the commenters say so.”
She blinks. “Oh? They do?”
Higata twists in his seat, gaze somehow even more incredulous in the lack of light. “No, Shirayuki, they don’t. But they should.” He gestures to the screen vaguely. “They mostly just talk about how much they want to fuck Obi.”
“OH.” There’s some information she really, really didn’t need. “That’s um, ah--”
“Your job, according to roughly half our fan base.” His mouth hooks into a grin she does not enjoy. “What do you say, Lyon? I think we could break the bank if you kissed him once on camera.”
“I-- I mean--” it’s a ridiculous request, clearly a joke, but her heart is pounding so loud in her ears she can’t hear her own thoughts-- “that’s not really w-what the show is about.”
Higata laughs. “That’s what you think.”
“What does who think?”
Shirayuki jumps straight out of her chair.
It’s not an exaggeration; there’s literal air between her butt and the seat, and when she lands again, the soft cushion makes the most obvious whoosh noise in existence, only worse, since it’s slow too. No obnoxious whoopee cushion womp, oh no, just an endless, air pump whoosssssshhhhhh that’s as blatant as a rattlesnake in the silence.
“Obi!” His lean shadow fills the doorway—wow, is he actually that tall?—and his head tilts, just enough so that his eyes shimmer gold. “I—nothing! We were, um, nothing?”
“We were talking about true crime,” Higata supplies, darting her a pitying look, “and how that’s what everyone thinks we are. Winchester House just emailed back.”
Obi grimaces, teeth flashing white in the dark. “Ah, great. Another one of those.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, deflating into a slouch. “I could talk about Big Foot until I’m blue in the face, but everyone thinks I have nuanced opinions about Jeffrey Dahmer.”
One narrow brow arches toward his hairline. “But you do have nuanced opinions about Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“I just think animal mutilation is probably a sign things aren’t going right in your life and someone should have noticed.” She waves her hands, at a loss. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to explore a supposedly haunted house.”
His lips twitch, right at one corner. “For a skeptic, you’re really into the idea you could see a ghost.”
“Stories are part of the human experience,” she explains primly. “We use them to understand what feels inexplicable. And ghosts are part of how we compartmentalize death.”
“Or they are the remnants of people who died too soon.” Obi pushes himself off the jamb, sauntering over to where they sit. “Or whatever bad juju is left by human misery—hey, that’s a sweet mugshot. Who’s it supposed to be?”
Higata squints. “I keep thinking it might be Shiira? But the cheeks are all wrong.”
“Huh.” Obi leans between the two of them, nose hovering mere inches away from the screen. His arm presses into her shoulder, too warm. “Brecker.”
“Brecker?” Higata tilts his head. “Oh yeah, I see it now. He’s not gonna like that.”
He huffs out a laugh. “Good thing he doesn’t watch joyless tripe like Unsolved then.”
“Yeah.” Higata snickers, raising the opacity. “Good thing.”
Obi settles back on his heels, hand gripping the back of her chair. She dares a glance up, and there he is, watching her with one of those looks she doesn’t know how to read. “Don’t worry, Lyon,” he says, thumb rubbing at the plastic back. “The season’s only just started. Give it some time.”
“I’d love to,” she mutters, tilting her head back, resting it on his wrist. “But try explaining that to Izana.”
[Obi]
I’m just saying, there’s no sexier crime than a heist.
...Well, I mean, that doesn’t involve actual sex.
[Shirayuki]
*wheeze*
[Obi]
You know what I mean.
[Shirayuki]
Do I?
Am I finding out too much about you right now?
Is this how you get seduced at parties? Girls just cornering you
and telling you about high-profile robberies?
[Obi]
*laughs* This is absolutely not how I get seduced at parties.
Unless you’d like to try...?
[Shirayuki]
. . .
[Obi]
Besides, it’s not like this is just a regular robbery. Heists
don’t happen to normal people. Just the rich ones.
[Shirayuki]
Well, this *is* a museum.
It’s for learning purposes.
[Obi]
Oh, like all that stuff actually *belongs* to a museum anyway.
[Shirayuki]
Actually...this time it does!
[Obi]
Wow, now there’s a mystery I want to investigate.
“We want to capitalize on the energy from this season.”
Izana isn’t a man who lounges; his mesh office chair is relentlessly ergonomic, only a few aggressively rolled lumbar supports away from a torture device. But still, he gives off the energy of a cat lazing in a sunspot, already gotten into the cream.
“Unsolved has always had excellent metrics, but since the premier--” he glances pointedly at Obi-- “they’re unparalleled by any other digital media Wisteria has put out on any of its platforms.”
Obi sprawls in one of the wire-frame chairs Izana has out, far too big for its delicate frame, every inch of him as still as the grave. Except for his one, bouncing knee, practically vibrating as he asks, “That’s...good right?”
“Very good.” Shirayuki may not be a metrics person, but working with Zen gave her more than a passing acquaintance with what success sounds like. “I think he’s telling us...we’re his cash cow.”
Izana’s lips lift into a smirk. “Just so. You’re more popular than Stand the Heat, and that’s saying something.”
It is saying something-- Obi’s show consistently has the most hits and the highest likes-to-views ratio. It’s been the backbone of Hypewire’s digital media section since it premiered last year, and now-- now Unsolved has passed it. If the graph Izana’s laid out is right, they’ve passed it by...a lot.
Shirayuki sneaks a glance at Obi as he leans over, taking in the numbers. She can’t move, can’t even breathe as he stares, eyes rounding as he understands what’s happening.
He rips the paper off the desk, shaking it at her. “Do you see this?”
She blinks. “Y-yes?”
His mouth breaks into a grin, like a Labrador who has found a particularly giant stick. “We’re awesome.”
“Oh,” she breathes, and wow, this is really not the time to think about the-- the Abayan effect, even if that smile makes it extremely hard not to. “Okay.”
“We should have you on the show.” His knee bounces a mile a minute, words barely keeping pace. “See if that makes the ratings draw even.”
Shirayuki stares at him, but there’s no hint of sarcasm, no undertone of agitation. For all intents and purposes, it seems as if he’s just...inviting her on his highly rated cooking show.
That can’t be right.
“Not a bad thought, Abayan,” Izana hums, fingers tapping at the desk. “Turn that in to me with the rest of your proposals for next season.”
Obi grins. “No problem, boss.”
“Wait.” This is all happening too fast; it’s all too much. Three weeks ago she was scrambling for a new co-host, and now she’s sitting next to Hypewire’s media darling, talking about how she needs to be on his show for his ratings. “I don’t-- we shouldn’t--”
“Oh, can you not cook?” Obi smiles, and it’s-- entirely too much. “Don’t worry, Lyon, you’ll be on top when I’m done with you.”
“N-no!” she chokes. “I-- I’m the daughter of a bar! I mean, my grandparents--” ugh, four years to get a journalism degree, and she still can’t word good-- “they owned a pub.”
“Great.” His teeth flash, half-feral. “Then you’ll know how to follow my lead.”
“I think,” Izana says, tipping her a speculative look, “that Shirayuki is less worried about her prowess in the kitchen, and more about what these sort of numbers might mean to a show like Unsolved. Isn’t that right?”
“Ah, I mean...” It’s terrible how good he is at his job. “It’s all so...quick. We’re still editing this season, and already I’m working on the ideas for next one, and I have to not only write scripts but also scout locations, and Higata is already stretched thin--”
“We’ll get you another editor.”
Her jaw drops. “W-what?”
Izana folds his hands, so calm, and tells her, “We’ll get you another editor.”
Shirayuki stares, mouth utterly dry. It had been a struggle to get Higata last season; after Obi had roasted the idea during Pitch Fight, Hypewire’s higher-ups had been loath to put any actual support behind Unsolved. Only his dogged enthusiasm-- and flagrantly working on the project behind their backs-- had gotten him on board after the pilot took off. And now Izana Wisteria was just handing her someone else. Personally.
She reaches down and pinches herself. Yep, this is-- this is real life. Somehow.
“You want to-- you mean that--” she gulps-- “you want to give Unsolved a team?”
He nods, brusque and efficient. “I can get you another researcher as well. Or if the locations appear to be a problem, perhaps a personal assistant?” He lifts a hand, a Wisteria shrug. “Just let me know your needs, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Unless it’s time, right?” Obi asks wryly. “That’s straight out.”
Izana’s mouth stretches into the barest grin. “The internet is instant, I’m afraid. You have to strike while the iron’s hot. I hope--” he fixes her with a meaningful look-- “we are all able to make the best of this opportunity.”
kisskissfall4luv:
does ne1 no f this guy is gonna b here 4 the hole sesson? i luv Zen but i lik the nu guy 2 hes so funny!
kayla0202:
I hope he is! I never thought I’d like something as much as Stand the Heat, especially a show about aliens and weird crime, but Obi and Shirayuki make me tune in every week! How long are Unsolved’s seasons again??
unsolvedjunky42:
There’s only one other season, and that was 12 eps, though a lot of those were 10 minutes long, and these ones are averaging 17-20min. It looks like Obi Abayan is credited as co-host for the rest of the season: [follow link] So glad he signed on, I thought Unsolved would be dead in the water without Zen but Obi brings a whole new dynamic I didn’t ever realize the show was missing.
zenluvr999:
i no were only 3 eps in but i think im gonna need a new name lmao
“Ah, I understand, but we really are looking to--” Shirayuki clenches her stress artichoke, its plush petals ballooning out from between her fingers, and stifles a sigh. “Yeah, I see. Thank you.”
The call cuts off with a beep, too cheerful a sound for its finality. Another opportunity lost. Shirayuki spills over her keyboard, groan lost beneath the function keys.
“Going that well, huh?” Kihal barely spares her a glance, but she does pull aside a headphone; the way editors show they care. “Tell me again how much you love this job.”
“I do love it,” she insists, muffled by the cool metal of her desk. “It’s just...so much work.”
“You know, we could just get that personal assistant.” Higata drops his headphones around his neck, settling back in his chair. It creaks beneath him, protesting his slouch. “I still can’t believe you said no to that.”
“We don’t need another team member.” Shirayuki lifts her head, just barely, to give him a warning glance. “We already have Kihal. That’s more than enough.”
“Really? We still have half a season left to edit, you have another season to write, and you want to tell me we couldn’t use another set of hands?” His eyebrow twitches up toward his hairline. “You just love making all those phone calls, huh?”
“It’s not that.” She rolls back, lifting herself upright. Her spine reminds her sharply that it doesn’t like doing that, that it was having a fine time as she was, but if there’s one thing Shirayuki knows how to ignore by now, it’s a complainer. “Unsolved was my idea to begin with, and if we can’t do the proposal we submitted last week, it should be me who’s to blame for it, not some poor intern.”
“She’s so cute,” Kihal coos across the cluster. “She’s got morals and everything.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Higata deadpans. “Didn’t you unionize the Yuris office?”
Her teeth flash predator white between the crimson stain of her lips. “Why do you think I volunteered to work this gig?”
He sighs, long-suffering. “See, this is the problem: the both of you like working too much. It’s getting in the way of having someone fetch my coffee for me.”
Shirayuki levels her best glare at him, the one she’s honed from one too many long nights in the editing bay. “If we had a PA, their job would not be to get you coffee.”
“If we had a PA, their job would be to make these stupid phone calls so Shirayuki can get actual work done,” Kihal informs him with a playful superiority than makes his eyes roll. “Instead of spending all day in a fugue of sadness and misery because no one will take her seriously.”
Shirayuki almost protests—there’s no fugue, and if anything, the rejections just make her more desperate and determined, but—
Her list of high-profile options has been reduced by a half, red lines spiking through some of her best hits with no relief in sight. She is about two seconds from eating her feelings through the oversized cinnamon buns in the company vending machine, and a fugue state is starting to sound like a preferable way to spend her afternoon.
“Ugh,” she decides, and lays down again.
“There, there,” Kihal croons, patting her back across their desks. “Someone will have to give you the time of day at some point.”
“I’m getting calls back.” She rolls over onto one cheek, thoughtful. “People are fans of the show! They just...don’t think we’re serious.”
Kihal scoffs. “About what? Aliens? Ghosts? I’ve been fielding queries all morning from Shuuka asking which direction we want to go for The Alexandria episode.”
“It’s the whole ghost hunting angle.” Higata leans over, liberating her artichoke from her grip, tossing it between his hands. “If I want to be fair, which I don’t, but here we are—it’s a new direction for the show. I guess it could be confusing to people used to our format.”
“I know, I know.” She pillows her chin with her hands, letting out a sigh. “I just wish one of them would give us a confirmation instead of—“ she waves her hand at her empty schedule—“all this.”
“They will.” She doesn’t know where Higata unearths all this unearned confidence, but she’s glad one of them has. “Let this season run its course. Zen was never big on the supernatural episodes, but these ones with Obi...people are definitely going to pay attention.”
He wouldn’t be saying that if he had to suggest waiting to Izana Wisteria. “They’re already paying attention to Obi. I’m always getting asked if--”
“If I’m as handsome as I look on screen?”
The thing is-- she’s not expecting it. One minute she’s sprawled across her desk, and the next Obi’s purr is tickling her ear, and--
“Ow, fff--” his gaze darts over where he clenches his nose-- “fudge. Sicles.”
“Nice save,” Kihal deadpans. “Now if only you could do that in the first minute of every video.”
“What can I say,” he honks, rubbing his nose. “I’m an off-the-cuff kind of guy.”
“You’re a ‘ruining our monetization’ kind of guy,” she shoots back, though she pushes over an abandoned chair for him to sit on.
“Oh, Obi!” Shirayuki yelps, hands hovering on either side of his face as he sits. “I’m so sorry! I was just--”
“Surprised, yeah, got that part.” he lifts his fingers, wobbling the bridge of his nose. “No harm done.”
“Good thing,” Higata mutters, “that face gets views.”
“Oh please.” Obi grins, devastating as always. “Chicks love a broken nose.”
Kihal barks out a laugh. “When it comes to you, chicks love breathing.”
He shrugs, sliding into a slouch. “Still no luck, I’m guessing?”
“None,” Shirayuki confirms. “Though people have been saying they enjoy the new season.”
“The concierge at the Roosevelt says you’re a lot cuter than Zen,” Kihal offers, needlessly.
Obi’s grin widens, wolfish. “You don’t say.”
“Maybe you should start using that Abayan charm to get us some bookings,” Kihal suggests wryly. “Earn your keep around here.”
“Please, I earn my keep. I’m the eye candy.” He winks. “Besides, I’d be happy to, but the big boss over here always tells me--”
“You don’t need to worry about it,” Shirayuki says, “it’s really my job--”
Higata waves a hand, long suffering. “You see the problem.”
“I do.” Kihal settles back. “Well, if you really just need a place...”
“I’ll take anything at this point,” she says to the particleboard of the ceiling. “Even if it’s just a haunted hole in the ground.”
“All right, well--” Kihal grins, sheepish-- “my condo is haunted.”
[Obi]
So you’re telling me that this is just some crazy lady’s
house, filled with all her stuff?
[Shirayuki]
Isabella Stewart Gardner was a socialite and a philanthropist,
*not* a crazy lady.
[Obi]
Right, okay, but...she did turn her house into a museum,
and then made everyone promise not to touch it.
Not exactly what I think of when someone says ‘stable.’
[Shirayuki]
Because she *curated* it, Obi!
[Obi]
So what you’re telling me is that she knew that from forever
to the end of time, she would have better taste than everyone
else on the planet.
[Shirayuki]
*sputtering* W-well--
[Obi]
No, no, you’re right. I retract the crazy lady thing.
Because that’s *baller*.
[Shirayuki]
*laughs* O-obi!
[Obi]
I want to be that lady. Like that is shade from the grave.
[Shirayuki]
. . . .
She also was personally friends with Monet.
[Obi]
SEE?
Life goals.
“So,” Obi hums from around a dumpling, his chopsticks already rooting for another, “what do you think?”
Shirayuki looks up, halfway through a very un-dainty bite of her own. “About--? Oh! I can’t believe they’re only fifty cents each! Where did you find this place?”
Despite his reputation on camera-- forward-facing, casual, intimate-- Obi isn’t someone who looks at people head-on. She’ll catch a glance sometimes, or maybe a considering look from the corner of his eyes, but for the most part, he’s always moving, eyes darting around to watch who filters into a room, or at the cars moving outside, or staring down the squirrel that likes to scratch at their window.
So when he looks at her, gold eyes trapping her as thoroughly as amber, she notices.
“Well,” he says after a long moment, “when you run a food show, people do give you some hot tips. But, ah--” he rubs at the back of his head, ears pink at the tips-- “that wasn’t really what I, ah, meant.”
Her mouth rounds. “Oh.”
His hands raise, chopsticks knitted under his knuckles. “Though I’m glad you like it! It’s, ah, one of my favorite places too. I just thought that you might have some, er--” he grimaces-- “thoughts, about the whole haunted condo thing.”
“Oh! That.” She taps her chopsticks on her plate, trying to gather her thoughts. “I just think...I don’t know. It’s not a bad place to start, but I just wanted...”
She blows out her cheeks on a sigh. “The ghost hunting is a new aspect of the show, and I wanted us to come out strong with an actual location...”
His mouth curls at a corner, too knowing. “And having us just carry around proton packs and talk about cold spots in a friend’s house isn’t really going to do much for our supernatural cred?”
“Yeah.” She slumps against the chair, defeat. “That. But I also feel like beggars can’t be choosers, and no one else is telling us yes, so...”
He nods, mouth pressed into a thoughtful line. “So there’s no rush to say no.”
“Right, yeah.” She glances at him from the corners of her eyes. “How about you?”
Obi blinks, eyes fluttering wide. “Me? This isn’t really my--” he hesitates, mouth working, starting a half dozen words-- “ah, I mean, I think...it’s smart. You’re right, a bigger place will give us more credit, but if one doesn’t come through then we have to start somewhere. Besides,” his mouth tics at a corner, twitching toward a smirk-- “I’ve always wondered whether she’s bikini or boyshorts.”
It’s only when her chin hits her chest that she realizes her jaw has dropped. “We’re not there to look in her underwear drawer!”
“Well, we’re not at work for her to look in my gym bag either,” he replies, sour, “but she did anyway.”
“She already said that was an accident--”
“--a likely story--”
“--That’s not what I meant anyway,” she admits with a huff. “I wanted to know if you were okay with the whole, ah...” her shoulders round, shy-- “metrics thing.”
“Metrics?” His head cocks, quizzical, but then-- “you mean, the stuff Izana showed us weeks ago?”
“Two weeks ago,” she corrects, heat flaring on her cheeks, “and, um, yes. I just...you’re not mad?”
Obi stares. “About what?”
“Unsolved.”
He shakes his head. “You’re...really going to have to be more specific than that.”
“The ratings.” She pokes at a dumpling, miserable. “Stand the Heat-- that’s your baby isn’t it? You pitched it and everything.”
“I...did?” he says, brow furrowed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s just-- Unsolved is doing better.” It’s not bragging, she knows that, but it feels like it. “And it’s-- it’s okay if you’re, um, upset about it. You’ve been doing this for--”
“OH.” Obi coughs, suddenly looking anywhere but at their table. “No, I really-- you don’t need to worry about that. At all. Please.”
She stares. “Obi, it’s okay. I’m not going to take it personally if you--”
“Kid, please,” he begs, holding up his hands. “It’s nothing. I mean, yeah, if Stand the Heat was on top, I’d be happy. I mean, I was happy when it was on top. But, this is...” his fingers twirl his chopstick mindlessly-- “this is good, too.”
“But--”
“Listen, I know you may find this hard to believe, especially with how we, uh, met, but I wasn’t kidding when I said I was a huge fan of the show. Not even a little. Understated it, in fact.” The tips of his ears flush. “So, uh, it’s kind of cool that I joined my favorite show, and now it’s super popular. That’s sort of the whole fanboy dream, right?”
“O-oh!” She stares down at her hands, willing them to stop trembling. “I, uh...I didn’t...I didn’t really think of it like that.”
“Yeah, well, now you know you don’t have to worry about it,” he says with a laugh. “I’m living the dream here. Not only am I on the show, but I’m more popular than the last guy. And I get to take the cute host out to lunch and call it business. The only square I need to finish fanboy bingo is getting to ki--”
His teeth snap down, so loud she hears the click. “Haah, never mind. Hey look, is that the waiter? Could we, ah, get the check?”
[Sender]: [email protected]
[Recipients]: [email protected]
[Subject]: Season 3 Hard Proposal
Is there any reason this isn’t in my inbox already?
Shirayuki closes her inbox with a grimace. “Ah, hey, Kihal?”
Her editor looks up, brows raised. “Yeah?”
She licks her lips, bracing herself. “Just...how haunted do you think your condo is?”
#obiyuki#akagami no shirayukihime#snow white with the red hair#my fic#ans#buzzfeed unsolved AU#ghost hunting got pushed back for FREESTYLE FLIRTING#so i'm sure none of you will complain#but also I had lots of thinky thoughts about how i didn't want to push aside the show aspect to do just the romance#since the manga focuses hardcore on her career#listen guys the second chapter of fics is always the hardest because then you're thinking of TONE and OTHER STRUCTURE THINGS#esp since i wasn't sure if i would expand this beyond a one shot#so i had to decided if this was gonna be straight up rom com business#or whether i wanted to be shirayuki making this show work as it sort of grows beyond the two pony operation she had before#and also here is her hot co-host she keeps accidentally flirting with oh no#obviously i'm going the second route here#so ENJOY
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WIP Hunger Games Pt1.
So I wanted to try the Hunger Games Simulator with Characters from my WIP. Some of them don’t have character intros yet, so I’ll tell you who they are here
Virgil: Adhara’s Brother
Skylar, Matthew, and Alex are the MCs for A is for Asteroid
Xan: Is an alien in my WIP The Space Exploration Association (and Adhara’s possible love interest)
Now that that’s out of the way, let the games begin!
Tw. Death, Violence, Cursing
Cornucopia
Xan, Onyx, Candy, Uri, Alex, Jax, Shelbee, Adhara, Trix, and Akari all run away from the Cornucopia
Skylar finds some explosives that she probably doesn’t know how to use…
Enya grabs a sword
Ariel miscalculated and stepped off the podium way too soon
Melanie grabs some Sais to do the stabby stabby with
Sam and Michael stay at the Cornucopia for resources
Tyrell grabs a trident from the Cornucopia. Somebody finna get speared
Pyro flys over and grabs the first thing she sees, an empty ass backpack
Matthew and Virgil fight over a bag of supplies, before Matthew just says fuck it and leaves.
Peter grabs the fishing bait first, so in retaliation Rhistel grabs the gear so he can’t fish
Pumpkin grabs a cat sized Trident in his mouth before running off
Deaths: Ariel
Day 1
Candy goes stealth mode in the bushes
Sam remembers his sister telling him that fire is important, so he goes to find some wood
Akari grabs some fruit from a tree!
Shelbee wasn’t watching were she was going and steps on a landmine, killing her (Nooooo)
Someone decides it’s a good idea to give Pyro (the dragon) an axe
Matthew eaves drops on Peter and Jax’s conversation (Rude)
Alex takes something from Trix while she’s otherwise occupied
Someone decides it’s a good idea to give Melanie a BOMB!!
Adhara goes looking for other people
Pumpkin goes looking for firewood, for some reason (doesn’t your fur keep you warm enough sir?)
Giresion tries to climb a tree instead of flying and falls. His thickness ends up killing both himself and Uri in the process.
Rhistel murders Virgil for his stuff
Michael gets high (*snickers*) up on a hill.
Xan just decides to pick some Earth flowers for later
Tyrell goes on the hunt for firewood
Onyx growls at Skylar and Skylar dips
Deaths: Shelbee, Giresion, Uri, and Virgil
Night 1
Alex, a normal ass dude, takes on Rhistel and Enya, two magical beings, and kills BOTH OF THEM.
Akari and Peter talk about the tributes still alive
Xan and Trix both receive hatchets from unknown sponsors. Was it the same person?
Melanie wasn’t hydrating and dies from thirst. (Drink Water Kids!)
‘Michael sings some songs to try and get to sleep
Candy gets some clean water from a sponsor (Dang couldn’t have shared that with my girl Melanie)
Adhara sleeps like a baby
Onyx questions her sanity… for some reason (guilt for scaring off Skylar?)
Tyrell gets really tired from chopping firewood and passes out
Pyro wants to win, maybe to avenge Shelbee?
Sam sleeps like a baby, unaware that more than half of his friends and his sister are dead.
Skylar helps Jax repair himself.
Pumpkin realizes he doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to start a fire and sleeps without one.
Deaths: Rhistel, Enya, and Melanie
Day 2
Pyro goes fishing with her claws
Tyrell get a hatchet from a sponsor to go along with his trident
Xan, Skylar ,Adhara, Candy, and Akari all go looking for other tributes
Sam, Michael, Trix, and Alex raid Pumpkins camp while the cat is trying to get food (Pumpkin just can’t get a break)
Matthew see’s smoke, but decides fuck it and doesn’t go investigate
Peter slices Jax’s head off-putting the poor android out of commission for good.
Onyx finds a cave (You’re doing great sweetie!)
Deaths: Jax
Night 2
Pyro is the one who can’t start a fire this time (ironic considering what she is) and decides to go to sleep without one
Speaking of fires, Candy starts one successfully!
Pumpkin has just been very unlucky and ends up stepping on a landmine, killing the kitty
Onyx, Skylar, and Trix sing songs together (Skylar and Trix sings and Onyx howls)
Tyrell sabotages Xan’s stuff.
Matthew, Peter, Adhara, and Alex all tell each other ghost stories to forget that they all might die
Michael, Akari, and Sam team up and sleep in shifts.
Deaths: Pumpkin (T-T)
Day 3
Skylar makes a slingshot to protect herself
Tyrell makes some shelter for himself
Xan’s camp gets raided, after Tyrell destroyed his stuff, by Alex, Pyro, Micheal, and Adhara
Onyx tries to spear fish with a cat-sized trident she found. RIP Pumpkin
Candy snaps her wife’s neck.(…I-I’m speechless and hurt, and betrayed) RIP Trix
Sam stalks Akari (Sam just needs an adult ok, he’s not stalking her)
Peter goes hunting
Matthew tries to spear fish as well
Death: Trix
Night 3:
Candy, Akari, and Peter sleep in shifts
Adhara has gone a bit cuckoo and starts talking to a wolf, telling her her life’s story
Skylar is extremely overwhelmed and cries herself to sleep
Sam finally finds an adult that will take care of him. Matthew just wants to protect and comfort the small child (he’s a preschool teacher it’s what he do).
Tyrell got infected by something and is trying to treat it
Alex made some food
Michael got hurt somehow and is healing up
Pyro makes a little dragons nest for herself
Someone takes pity on the poor alien and sends Xan some food.
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Outer Wilds is the best exploration adventure literally ever.(Story Review)
Outer Wilds is a small space exploration game that came out on May 28, 2019, developed by Mobius Digital. It’s gotten multiple awards and there isn’t a second of someone’s voice in the game. I personally found out about it thanks to Jacksepticeye, and he does this thing where he doesn’t explore things in a game enough for me to be satisfied, and it really frustrates me even though I love his content. So, like a normal person, I held that frustration deep within my soul for an entire year until I got my own ps4 and I noticed that they were selling it on the PlayStation store. I remembered very little about the game at that point and going in blind was literally the best part. Ever since I was little, every time a game came out promising endless gameplay or a large world to explore it pretty much never happened.
Like Disney Infinite or whatever that shitshow of a game was called. Surprisingly finite, believe it or not. Same thing with No Mans Sky, even though I’ve heard that it’s improved recently. But this game is perfect when it comes to space exploration. The solar system you reside in isn’t too big, so going from planet to planet isn’t a pain in the ass like No Mans Sky. Each planet has so much to explore, on top of everything you can see in the ice comet that flies through, or the sunstation orbiting the sun at like 40000000 miles an hour, or the literal ghost moon that disappears when you look away. Each planet is extremely unique and has their own dangers, and I could talk for literal hours about each location in the game and the story behind each. Before I actually get into this, there is this one youtuber that has a channel about this game, and he actually explains a lot of the stuff that I didn’t understand or just got wrong on my first playthrough. He’s called The Lore Explorer. You can click his name to go straight to his YouTube channel.
This is going to be on the story of Outer Wilds. Because I want to talk about the gameplay separately.
In this game, you play as a member of an alien race called the Hearthians, residing on an earthlike planet called Timber Hearth. Your race is small, but they devote their time to science and exploration of the solar system they reside in and the universe. They want to know the secrets of the universe, to understand it. They’re a peaceful people, like space hillbillies, They don’t have a specific gender, they refer to each other with they/them unless requested otherwise, You are a rookie in their space exploration program, Outer Wilds Ventures. You wake up early at your campfire, eyes looking up at the sky, the giant planet Giants Deep above you. The ancient alien space station orbiting said planet explodes, and a small purple light launches out into the night sky. (This is the best picture I could find)
You get up and meet Slate, a Hearthian that was roasting marshmallows in the campfire next to you. You exchange some dialogue, and you learn they’re the one who made your ship, and that this is gonna be your first voyage into space. They tell you that you have to go to Hornfels, one of Outer Wilds Ventures’ lead scientists, to get the launch codes. You spend some time exploring the small village that your people reside in. You meet up with your old teacher, who taught you about everything you’ll endure up in space. You do one last no-gravity test, before heading up to the Observatory at the highest point of the village. The first thing that greets you is a statue, made by a strange ancient race named the Nomai.
You move on to Hornfels, get the launch codes and walk out the same way you came in, when you freeze and the statue opens its eyes and faces you. It’s eyes light up, and it’s almost like your memories of today are being played back at you. (below is the best picture I could find.)
A Hearthian who works at the observatory watches all of this and approaches you, claiming in shock that they had no idea that the eyes could even open, neverminded that they can grow.
You move on, on to your ship. You enter and where you go first is up to you, the player.(obviously.) Personally, I decided to do what I think most people would ignore, and explore the planet we all start on, Timber Hearth. And of course, I found some stuff, but that’s for later.
Anyways, it doesn’t matter what you do, but most likely you’ll be going to Timber Hearth’s moon, the Attlerock. It’s an asteroid like moon that you’ll probably see in the sky orbiting the planet from it’s surface. There’s a Hearthian named Esker up there, and they give you their first goal: Find and meet the five founders of Outer Wilds Ventures. You’ve already got one down, since Esker is one of those five. But, ignoring all this, lets assume you made the mistake everyone makes (and I promise you it’s everyone) and you didn’t land where Esker grew trees for oxygen, and you made the dumbest decision to just, forget your space suit. Well, you’d die obviously. Air is important. You obviously suffocate. Dummy.
I genuinely can’t find a way to show you how dying looks in Outer Wilds. Or, the post death. Pretty much, every moment you just experienced gets played in reverse, up until the very moment you wake up. Then, this Nomai mask is the last thing you see, before you wake up on Timber Hearth again.
I think anyone with an IQ above sand knows that this means you’re in a time loop. It’s obviously because of the statue, and when you go to look at it, it’s eyes are still open. There’s a mystery here, and you will most likely not have any clue how to solve it.
You’ll go back into space. And you’ll choose any of the five planets in this small solar system to explore. It doesn’t matter which. You’ll learn things abut the Nomai, you might even meet one of the astronauts you were told to meet. None of this matters. Because in 22 minutes after you wake up, you hear a strange loud noise, look to the sun, and realize its collapsing in on itself and exploding. You barely have time to react before you die again and wake up in your village again. And that’s pretty much the opening of the game. If you wanna see the sun explode, click here. It’s pretty cool.
First I wanna start with the fact that this solar system is pretty small, but each planet has so much stuff you could do. I didn’t even mention all the stuff in the observatory, like the rock that moves when you don’t look at it (which is VERY important), the Nomai text that you can translate with the device Hornfels gives you, or the fucking creature that they call an anglerfish that they hold in a tank (which is also very important). I didn’t tell you about the Planet Locator on the Attlerock, or the fact that you can see the ship you use in the Alpha of the game. I want to talk about each planet and location but it would genuinely take me way too long, because the story itself is way way way too long but it’s literally amazing. This game is probably the closest thing to real life in one way; it doesn’t matter what you do. You could throw your ship into the fucking sun and it won’t matter. Inevitability is one of the biggest themes of this game.
You learn of the Nomai, an ancient race that came to your Solar system on something called The Vessel, but they got split up when they had to use escape pods because of some tragedy. You learn that they’re looking for something called The Eye Of The Universe, an entity older than the universe itself. That space station that blows up every time you wake up? That’s their Probe Launcher, that’s them trying to find that Eye. You learn how they made warp technology and how Black Holes work, you can even create a paradox and break the universe (this is very loud, I’m warning you.) This game takes environmental storytelling to a whole other level, because this race of Nomai is dead and long gone, but their underground catties and escape pods and ships and every piece of research that they have is left behind. They left a fucking Sunstation that orbits the sun at the speed of something really fast, and if you’re good enough at flying (i am not) you could land on the damn thing. Or you could teleport to it using the Nomais warp tech.
I think it’s there that you learn why the sun is dying. Your goal this whole time was to learn why the sun is dying, maybe you can reverse whatever the Nomai did. But the Nomai didn’t do this. Sure, they wanted to make the sun explode, but that was to power their time loop machine, so they could find the Eye easier. But it didn’t work. The sun station was made to blow up the sun and it didn’t work. The sun isn’t blowing up because of the Nomai, it’s dying because it’s just old. It’s old and there is no saving your people or your solar system. You then realize that its not just your solar system that’s dying, but others too. You can see it all the time.
When you’re out in space and see stars suddenly start to glow brighter than before, if you zoom in, you can see that they’re exploding. And not only that, once you find the Nomai’s Vessel (which is hard to do), you can find transmissions from modern Nomai, claiming that the entire universe is dying. There’s nothing you can even do about it.
Before I talk about the Eye itself, I need to explain what a Quantum Object is. A Quantum object is an object that exists in all possible ways until viewed by a conscious. The rock in the observatory I mentioned earlier is one of these objects, and there’s tons of items just like them
They usually look like this black shard above. The Nomai found these and studied the actual hell out of them, and they learned three things they labeled the rules of quantum objects. The first being, if you are making physical contact with one of these objects and you turn off the lights or lose your vision, you will become quantum like the object. Technically it means until you can see again, you will be everywhere and anywhere at random.
The next rule is that if you take a picture of the quantum object and look away, it will not move. I think this is self explanatory, you’re still technically observing it even if it’s just a picture. And the last rule has more to do with the Quantum Moon. The Quantum Moon is supposed to be the Eye’s moon, but since it’s a quantum object it always appears orbiting random planets in this solar system.
The Quantum Moon won’t be on any map of the solar system, and it’s by far the second most difficult location to enter and navigate. You’ll only know how after exploring multiple Nomai ruins with text on the walls teaching you the three quantum rules. If you just fly into it, You’ll simply go through the grey smoke and end up on the other side, You need to enforce the second quantum rule (this is called Quantum Imaging btw) and take a picture of it. Then you’ll be able to land on it, though what you find first may be different depending what planet it’s orbiting.
It mirrors the planet it’s orbiting, like when it orbits Timber Hearth the surface of the planet is going to have a lot of trees and grass. If it’s on Giants Deep, which is mostly an aquatic planet with lots of tornadoes and storms, it’ll have a lot of water and smaller tornadoes in the distance. Eventually, you’ll make your way to the Nomai tower on the North Pole of the moon.
From the inside of this tower, you’ll be able to travel with the quantum moon, even getting close to the Eye itself. The Nomai always say that when the moon isn’t visible in this solar system, it has to be at a sixth location, and since the Eye orbits our sun from lightyears away, it’s safe to say that the sixth location is actually the Eye of the Universe. When you enter the tower, you’re going to be turning the lights off and opening the door a lot, since the only other way to tell where you are inside the tower is a mechanism on the wall. But when you’re orbiting the Eye, you won’t be able to exit the tower, since the door will be blocked by the same material that the quantum shards are made of. If I remember correctly, you need to have the tower appear on the South pole of the moon. Then, when you get to the moon’s version of the eye, You can leave the tower and see what it’s like.
On top of that, you can actually meet the last Nomai. Her name is Solanum, and she is the only Nomai to get this close to the Eye of the universe. The same way that the moon has a sixth location it goes to, she is the secret sixth astronaut that you can meet. She doesn’t speak your language, or at all, which means the Nomai didn’t speak. They communicated using the blue swirls you can see next to her. Those are the swirls that you translate to learn everything they’ve done through out the game.
Meeting Solanum is a bitter moment, since she claims that she believes she’s been in some sort of in between death and life state for years now. She theorizes that being in such close proximity to the Eye has made her a quantum object, which is why you can find her ship and dead body on all the other locations the Quantum Moon can be at except this one. Above Solanum is a wormhole, where all the clouds are falling into. When you try to enter this wormhole, you fall back into one of the other moons locations, Solanum’s body at your feet.
Now the Eye of the Universe itself is the most difficult location to get to. It took me around three hours of trying over and over again, because we need to get to it before the 22 minutes run out and the sun explodes. You first need to waste 7 minutes getting a power core from the machine that runs the time loop, so if you die you technically die for good. Then you need to enter the 5th planet and the one I despise the most, Dark Bramble.
Dark Bramble isn’t a planet. It’s the remains of an icy planet, destroyed by the bramble. Nobody knows where the bramble came from. Nobody knows how it even exists. But it’s there, and it should be the last place you want to enter, because it’s the only place with an actual creature that want to hurt you: The Anglerfish.
The Anglerfish are giant, blind space fish that will eat anything and have super sensitive hearing. You need to fly past these things in your ship, and you never know what lights are anglerfish and which lights are just more nodes to enter deeper into this pocket dimension. In Dark Bramble, you can find one of the 3 Nomai Escape pods. The other two landed on planets outside of Bramble, but this one had a much darker fate.
This is Escape Pod 3. The Nomai in this escape Pod used audio tech to find the distress signal the Vessel was emitting, but there was a problem; they frequency was coming from two different places. The Nomai were scared and running out of oxygen, so they headed towards the closer frequency, leaving lights behind as a trail so they didn’t get lost. Unfortunately when they reach the frequency...
All they find is a seed. The frequency is coming from it, but they went the wrong way. They can’t fit inside it and it hasn’t grown enough for it to be a node they can pass through. So they all died there, floating motionless. You can shoot a scout through the seed, and it’ll land on the Vessel. Now you have a way to get there.
When you bring the power core, you have to pass through the Anglerfish nest, so you’re pretty much gonna be gliding through the whole thing reaaaally slowly. You can’t outrun the anglerfish, and I never tried touching their eggs so I don’t know what’ll happen if you try that.
After a lot of slow gliding, you’ll find The Vessel.
You can put the power core inside, and once you enter the coordinates that you can find from the space station orbiting Giant’s Deep, the Vessel will warp to The Eye of the Universe, with an overhead view of it.
You can take as much time as you like here. You’re way too far for any supernova to affect you. The planet you can see isn’t the eye itself, but it’s more like an orb of the same material that the quantum shards are made of. All the clouds and lights surrounding it is the Eye. I’ll leave a video of someone getting to the Eye right here. When you warp onto the planet above the Eye, you’ll start on the north pole, and start walking towards the south, where the Entrance to the Eye is. When you walk under the clouds, it’ll be dark, with lightning strikes briefly lighting up the area, with random objects appearing due to the eye being the origin of quantum objects.
(What the wormhole looks like from the outside vs. the entrance.)
I can’t really explain what happens when you fall into it, so I’m gonna leave it at that. This game is a solid 10/10 for me. It is the best exploration space game I’ve ever played, and I’d buy it at full price again just to support those who made it. Also the soundtrack and credits song are amazing. I 100000% recommend it
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To Do List:
What's up, my Herd of Nerds?
Anyway, as you can tell, tomorrow is AU Sunday. But, because it's one after a 'my input' one, it's a follower input AU day! Yay!
So, send me your AUs and I'll put all of em in a hat to pick one randomly. The winner is picked and posted and we'll all try and make headcanons about your AU.
Done:
Zombie Apocalypse AU :: (https://hermitcraftheadcanons.tumblr.com/post/618314308275863552/zombie-apocalypse-au-masterpost)
Pirate AU ::
Currently In The Raffle:
-Toy Story AU.
-Ever After High/Descendants/Vaguely 'nex gen priness' AU.
-Eldritch Horror AU :: Or if that's a bit too out there, a more normal Monster AU. I don't care, but in my heart, I know Cleo is some kind of eldritch horror. Zombie is far too easy.
-Eldritch Monster AU! Hermits are all Lovecraftian horrors who all individually decided that they wanted to pretend to be normal and are all trying to hide their otherworldliness. I also feel like Mumbo or X or someone as the one actually "normal" player on the server would work well. Most hermits don't know that everyone else isn't normal either, but some find out about friends maybe.
-Rabid Debate Club AU :: Random weird au idea where it's basic hs/uni au but like two of them try to start a debate club, then invite some friends just so there's enough people; cut to like two months later, it's all the hermits just fighting over whether or not pineapple should go on pizza or not lol it isn't very good i'm sorry but ya know rabid debate club AU.
-Animal/shapeshifting AU :: (Suggested Twice.) Every hermit can shapeshift into one token animal. (If it's something like "dog," they can only turn into one breed and color of dog, EXAMPLE: doc can shift into a black sable belgian malinois, but not anything else.)
-Wedding Planners AU :: Hermits work in various unrelated businesses such as a bakery, flower shop, etc., but see each other semi-often bc they're semi-often called upon to work together by another hermit's wedding planning business (obvs if you couldn't tell i know absolutely nothing abt wedding planning & businesses n shit lol but it's the /concept/ of it yannknow)
-Avatar: The Last Air Bender AU. (Suggested Thrice.)
-Fusion AU :: (Also suggested by Anon.) (Suggested Twice.) What if Hermits could fuse with each other? (Viva and Jumbo fused into MumboJumbo.)
-SCP AU :: The hermits have spooky powers and are kept locked up bc of it (or they have to keep the world safe from monsters and cursed objects!)
-RPG AU :: I feel like someone already thought of that but I am just wondering about it lately :p -🍋
-Adventure Time AU :: The hermits live in a post-apocalyptic world and the Lich (bad guy) is making everything decay. They need to gather all the gems (belt colours) to unlock the Enchiridion (a book) and have one wish each granted from Prismo (multiverse wish granting dude) before the Lich does. Only 4 elements can enter the multiverse: Slime (The Lich & Jevin), Redstone (Tango or Mumbo?), Ice (Stress), and Dirt (Grian, much to his dismay). Only the elementals can see the book. Grian's the protagonist with his sidekick Scar. He originally started collecting the belts because they were shiny but eventually decided to read the book and find out what they were for when Scar said he didn't see it. Doc, False, and Iskall are major obstacles because they don't believe the book exists.</p>
-Total Drama Island AU.
-Magical Girl AU :: Zedaph's the lead magical girl and rounds up a bunch of other magical girl hermits.
-Pokeman AU :: What are the Hermit's roles in this world? Who's the Champion, Elite Four. Are they scientists? Trainers? Do they compete in competitions, do they specialize in types? Who's everyone's starter? Has anyone encountered any legendaries?
-College AU
-High School AU
-Wizard101 AU :: I (🦊) recently got this AU idea and recently started going off somewhere with it in terms of writing, but, like, Hermitcraft meets Wizard101. Tons and tons of magical shenanigans, monster hunting, and idk what else.
-Magic AU
-My Hero Academia AU :: Headcanons can be about which hermits would have what quirks and occupations based on them.
-So I'm writing an AU where there's a second game of Demise but 5 years later. So far the first 2 hermits (Joe and Xisuma) have died, and their dead forms are cracked with an arrow in his chest (Xisuma) and cyborg (Joe). So since it's Saturday, I'm looking for what some skins would look for.
-City AU :: I mean this is really just a normal everyday AU.
-School AU.
-Terraria-Minecraft Fusion AU :: Who chooses what class? what events do each hermit prefer? how to they deal with the world infections? preferred biomes? Favourite NPCS? It has potentiallllll.
-70s/80s Teen Horror AU :: (like Stranger Things, Carreie, The Lost Boys, Halloween, etc.) -🦇
-Demi-God AU :: Sort of like percy jackson (everyone being the children of different gods from all different cultures.)
-Supernatural AU
-Marching Band AU :: Xisuma is the band major and all the show music is the remixes. I need to come up with some ideas for uniforms. Outfits and flags for the colorguard too.
-Different Eras AU :: (Suggested Twice.) All the hermits are from different time periods or eras. Like Wels is from the mediveal/dark era, Mumbo is from 1890-1920's, Iskall is from 2030, TFC is from 2020(?), Cleo is from 2130, etc!!! Like the mobs/animals became feused with humans, is when the mob players came from.
-Star Trek AU :: Like maybe they could be on one ship and each have different roles like engineers or doctors? I don’t know if this has been suggested but hope you enjoy! - 🐦
-House Mates AU :: ApartmentAU but scaled down?
-Atlantis AU :: (Could be merged with Mermaid AU???)
-Fighting Game AU :: Some influences would be Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Ultra Instinct, that kind of stuff.
-Time loop AU :: The hermits each have to deal with their own time loop.
(All those above in red are from our community's lovely Anons!)
-Superhero/superpower AU :: They each have a unique power/powerset that is in some way connected to their personality. (ie Mumbo *could* control electricity because of his love of redstone) Some Hermits may even choose to be "villains" and prank their other servermates. If you need power ideas, I've got a couple. (12u3ie)
-Daycare AU :: The recap peeps are the caretakers :P (-@tikauniverse.)
-Incredibly Long Cross Country Train Ride AU :: they all are in the same train car, telling stories of where they’re going, backstories.)
-Stuck In An Airport AU :: pretty similar to train au but they can be going diff places.
-Doctors AU :: they’re all doctors working at the same hospital.)
-Circus AU (Also suggested by an Anon.) (Suggested Twice.)
-Spy AU (Also suggested by @shadeswiftdraws.) (Suggested Twice.)
-Runaways AU :: The hermits are all teenagers who have run away from home, they all live on the streets until TFC takes them in. Head canons can be about backstories, living on the streets, or when they’re with TFC.
-Criminals and Police Officers AU
(-@lookitsspacekween)
-Dancer AU :: I mean, I already got a list kind of planned out, but headcanons for why specific styles are chosen would be appreciated! :) (usedtobelucythefallenangel)
-Broadway/Musicals Hermits AU :: The hermits are all casts of various musicals and when this newly-built theater opens up they all fight for which musical gets to play in it first (they have a riff-off maybe?) musicals mainly included are Hamilton, BMC, DEH, SiX, Beetlejuice, etc (feel free to add more!) (-@heyitsroby.)
-DnD AU (Also suggested by Anon.) (Suggested twice.)
-Mermaid AU :: In honor of the end of Mermay
-Space exploration AU :: There could be different ships, command centers, aliens.... Maybe someone could even get stranded/crash on a new planet? Who knows, could be fun.
-Paranormal/ghost hunter AU :: A couple Hermits could be the ghost hunters going to haunted locations to prove/disprove their hauntedness, others could be camera crew, owners of haunted buildings, or even the ghosts themselves.
-Camping/Vacation AU.
-Summer Cottage AU :: They all spend summers/weekends along the same shoreline and do different summer activities together. Outdoor fun and shenanigans!
-Space AU :: like star trek or similar.
-I would say evil clone au but I think that's pretty much the entire Hermitcraft tumblr right now lol. (Suggested twice.)
(-@shadeswiftdraws.)
-Magic AU :: Magic exists and all the hermits have powers. They can also summon a weapon but what that weapon is depends on the hermit. I'm thinking it'll take place in a sort-of Demise 2 in S7 with a big war. So far I've got: Grian - Cloning himself to his different personas (each has a different power). Xisuma - Making barriers, teleporting, and transforming into different mobs. Scar - Making mutant plants & boosting other hermits' attack & health. (-@datsaltyperson.)
-Demon AU :: Something enters the overworld and turns into a supernatural style-demon through Dimentional Distortion. Who gets posessed first, who goes crazy, and who actually kills it? Honestly I think that, if anything, Tango would know how to gank it, for obvious reasons. (-@fireflower-dusk.)
-High Street AU :: Everyone owns a different shop on the same street or some run a shop together (-@violets-arepurple.)
-Cat AU :: Either they're were always cats, or Hels turned everyone, including himself, into a cat, and they have to survive and overcome challenges in the Season 7 world. An example of a challenge would be Cub's a Sand Cat(the cats that always look like kittens no matter how old they are and live in deserts), and everyone's not sure if he can actually swim, so they have to find a way for him to get around without involving water. (-@scp10000.)
-How about a secret AU.. Every hermit has their big secrets and when Grian joined. He doesn't really know anything about those secrets even till season 7. Not many hermits talked to him in S6 anyway.. Mumbo was the closest to him so they would have regular chats For Iskall is mostly business related things Grian wants to know why so he set out on a quest to force the others to at least talk to him so he wouldn't be lonely. (-@babylightstudentbiscuit.)
-Hermit Family AU :: Xisuma is very busy dad but when he isnt busy the kids and younger hermits annoying the hell out of him. Grian once asked to use Xisuma's computer and crashed the whole thing trying to download illegal gamesites and get money off the internet. Mumbo and his trains run through the entire house and Xisuma trips on them daily. (-@gamerutx.)
-College AU!! But they are not students. THEY ARE THE TEACHERS (-@ivi-prism.)
Ones I planned to do anyway but Hermitblr Hivemind and all that:
Battle of The Bands AU: i believe u once mentioned a bands/ battle of the bands au... thats my jam... (Anon.)
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Name: reya
Writing Blog URL(s): @chu-ni
Age: 19
Nationality: african-british
Languages: english, swahili, korean
Star Sign: libra
MBTI: enfp/entp (it always changes lol)
Favorite color: purple!
Favorite food: i really love chicken burgers
Favorite movie: princess and the frog
Favorite ice cream flavor: vanilla!!
Favorite animal: elephants
Go-to karaoke song: fancy - twice
Coffee or tea? What are you ordering? caramel frappe with whipped cream, in general i prefer tea though
Dream job (whether you have a job or not)? secretary general at the UN….or an author
If you could have one superpower, what would you choose? making anyone agree with me and do what i want them to do
If you could visit a historical era, which would you choose? ancient egypt!!
If you could restart your life, knowing what you do now, would you?.....no.
Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken? neither if i could lmfao but i’d go for 100 chicken sized horses
If you were a trope in a teen high school movie, what would you have been? the nerd who’s actually really pretty after she gets a cool makeover
Do you believe in aliens/supernatural creatures? im not sure about aliens, but i definitely believe in ghosts and spirits.
What are some small things that make your day better? when i can have moments to myself to enjoy my own company. or when someone asks me what i want to eat and they bring it for me 🥺
Fun fact about yourself that not everyone would know? uhm…...probably the fact that i write fanfiction lol..but outside of that! i sing in the shower. and i talk to myself a lot.
What fandom(s) do you write for? nct dream currently, but in the future i want to expand to other groups!
When did you post your first piece? 17th of June 2018.
Do you write fluff/angst/crack/general/smut, combo, etc? Why? i can never write just one genre. predominantly i write fluff with a dash of angst for spice simply because i love a story that has an issue and then having that issue be resolved for a happy ending. when i started my blog i was 17, and so i said i wouldn't write smut. now that i'm older im feeling more and more comfortable writing suggestive content at the very LEAST.. so maybe in the future i might write smut, who knows? i like writing fluff because i like making people feel good, but i like adding angst to it because i feel like the contrast between the two is very *chefs kiss* to me.
Do you write OCs, X Readers, Ships...etc? i only write x readers!
Why did you decide to write for Tumblr? i first got tumblr when i was 13 years old and i was a fresh kpop fan lmfao. i wanted somewhere that shared my interests. of course i discovered x reader fics on here and i was in awe, i guess of how much power writers had in contributing to fandom content and keeping readers satiated. i’d always loved to write and so i’d always wanted to start my own writing blog, and for 2 years i did write for other blogs! it wasnt until 2018 that i finally took the leap and decided to start my own, because i wanted to impact people's emotions and take them on a journey through my writing.
What inspires you to write? what inspires me….teen movies, music!! music is a big one for me, and also the books that i read. i also grew up playing otome games so the plots and writing from those influence my writing a lot.
What genres/AUs do you enjoy writing the most? i really enjoy writing royalty!aus as well as exes!aus. i love to do them cause they require me to build a world and with royalty aus specifically i love weaving together bits of political intrigue, or arranged marriages, etc. its so much fun!!
What do you hope your readers take away from your work? that if this world is too rough or too much, you can always escape from it. it might not be physical, but immersing yourself in a universe that's entirely different for a little while can help soothe you.
What do you do when you hit a rough spot creatively? usually i try and take breaks. the problem with that is that my breaks can go on for longer than i’d like and im trying to fix that. so my other solution is to read read read!! read as much as i can, or go back to books that i loved. ask myself what i liked about the writing, what are some parts that i thought were amazing examples of good writing - i note them down then see if i can apply that to my own work. another thing i do is take a break from writing my longer, fleshed out works and write blurbs! blurbs are a great way for me to write but not feel like its tedious because i don't have to spend as much time on them and it gets me into the groove of writing without feeling stressed out.
What is your favorite work and why? Your most successful? my favourite piece of work is miscommunication. it took me months to write that, even after i lost all the work halfway through, and its the longest piece of work i have written so far, so its kinda like my baby. my most successful is candy jar. its also the work i owe my blog exposure to - it was the first piece i published, and it was also the first piece of writing i did in around 4 years.
Who is your favorite person to write about? i don't have much out for them, but i really enjoy exploring mark’s and jeno’s characters. they're people, but in my work i enjoy analysing them and judging how they’d act in different contexts.
Do you think there’s a difference between writing fanfiction vs. completely original prose? the only difference for me is that fanfiction (depending on the fandom) has some of the stuff fleshed out for you already, such as the world its in. if youre the type to write AUs then the only thing you already have is the characters - the planning, the writing, the drafting, and everything else is still the writer's responsibility. therefore there isn't much of a difference between the two for me.
What do you think makes a good story? a good story, to me, is one that takes me on a journey. it could be any genre, but i like to feel immersed and connected to the characters and the world in it. also aside from the obvious, like good grammar, a good story feels natural to read. i don't feel like skim reading half of it.
What is your writing process like? my writing process consists of me getting inspiration - usually from a song, or a film or a book ive read or a game ive played - i note down my idea and who i want the story to be about, and then bullet point the whole story, with some snippets of particular dialogue i want the reader or the other person to say at certain scenes. i then open another document ( i have a writing app on my phone, called werdsmith, so i use that!) and set a word count goal i want to hit so i can track my progress and start writing the fic, with fleshed out language and exposition. when im done (usually after a couple weeks up to a few months, depends on the length of the plan) i read through it to fix any mistakes, then i transfer it to docs so i can read it again and italicise any areas i feel need it.
Would you ever repurpose a fic into a completely original story? i...don't think so. mainly because the original fiction i read and would like to write for myself is predominantly fantasy, whereas the fanfic i write on my blog is usually non-idol, normal fics.
What tropes do you love, and what tropes can’t you stand? im a SUCKER for enemies to lovers, royalty ofc, “and they were roommates”, and i think superhero aus are really cool but there isnt enough of them :( idol/you as member aus....not feeling her… also abo/werewolf/vampire aus….not feelin em
How much would you say audience feedback/engagement means to you? a LOT. a HUGE amount!! i said before how i like giving my readers somewhere where they can immerse themselves as an escape, even for a short while. hearing about how my work affected them, made them feel, makes me feel less insecure about what im writing and thus more confident to publish it.
What has been one of the biggest factors of your success (of any size)? i’d say reblogs. and also putting out more content. when i first uploaded candy jar i went to my one of my favourite writers (jaeminlore) and asked her if she'd be okay with reading it and giving feedback. to my surprise she loved it and her reblogging it to all her followers is literally what gave me a bunch of followers all of a sudden who loved what i’d written. to keep that momentum i created more and more content, and while i haven't uploaded as often as i've wanted to or written as much as i’d wanted to, i can say i have a good amount of work on my masterlist for people who are looking for more to read.
Do you think fanfic writers get unfairly judged? 100%. fanfic has an unfair reputation for just having bad writing and cringey fics (and i feel like this is because of the way society views the demographics who predominantly consume and create it), when in reality i feel like those who write fanfiction are extremely talented and selfless people. they're on the internet creating content for free for people to enjoy and like any other work of art they're putting time and effort into it. i think it should be respected. any form of art is going to have its good and bad sides.
Do you think art can be a medium for change? hmmm….yes. i feel it can be a way to reflect the thoughts of people and also be a way to inspire people to do more.
Do you ever feel there are times when you’re writing for others, rather than yourself? sometimes. sometimes i feel like i'm forcing myself to write because i feel like if i don't then people will forget about me or they’ll forget about my blog. while what i choose to write about is for me, i feel like the speed of my writing and what im writing isn't to the quality i want it to be cause i feel like i gotta get it out for people to read.
Do you ever feel like people have misunderstood you or your writing at times? i've never felt that way!
Do your offline friends/loved ones know you write for Tumblr? only 2 of my friends know, and i only told them like. a week ago!
What is one thing you wish you could tell your followers? i wish you guys would message me more! i'm quite a sociable person, and i’d love to have regular anons who talk to me 👉🏽👈🏽
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be too scared to put themselves out there? i think one common thing amongst all writers is that we write what we want to read. so don't feel like nobody's gonna read your work, cause somebody will. you gotta act like your work is top tier even if someone says it isn't - always write the best you can, and just do it! like don't even give yourself time to overthink it, write that fic, make it look pretty, upload it onto tumblr and do not be afraid to ask your favourite fic writers to read your work once its up!! i’d be happy to read and give feedback for any fic writers as well so don't feel afraid!
Are there any times when you regret joining Tumblr? ive been on here for 7 years….i grew up on this site lmfao. but i don't think i regret joining tumblr once.
Do you have any mutuals who have been particularly formative/supportive in your Tumblr journey? shes not very active anymore and i miss her very much but user hyuck-s was so supportive and i love her!!
Pick a quote to end your interview with:
she believed she could, so she did.
BONUS ROUND: K-POP CONFIDENTIAL
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So, the official writing team is going to post movies they’ve discussed for season 4 once a week. For the funsies, I guess I’ll look at each movie and see what it’s about.
So let’s get started. I’m sorry if this looks bad on tumblr mobile, but it;s their fault for messing up the indented paragraphs
The Peanut Butter Solution
Ghosts restore a boy's (Mathew Mackay) hair when it falls out from fright, but then it won't stop growing.
Michael Baskin is an average 11-year-old boy. His father, Billy Baskin, is a struggling artist and temporary sole caregiver of the children while his wife attends to the needs of her recently deceased father in Australia. Upon hearing the news that an abandoned mansion has recently burned down, Michael and his friend Connie decide to explore the remains. Outside the mansion, Connie dares Michael to take a look inside, leading to a frightening encounter with the ghosts of its homeless inhabitants who had died in the fire. Michael does not know this yet, but his fearsome run in with the ghosts has given him a mysterious illness simply known as "The Fright". Michael wakes up the next morning to find out that "The Fright" has made him lose all of his hair. After a failed attempt with a wig (his wig was pulled off by an older boy during a fight in a soccer game), the ghosts visit Michael in his sleep and give him the recipe of a magical formula for hair growth, the main ingredient of which is peanut butter. Michael's first attempt to make the formula is thwarted when his father and sister think he is making something to ingest (rather than use topically) and dispose of it.
A short summary of this movie. It goes on to explain that Michael successfully makes the formula and grows his hair back, but an evil teacher fired from his school discovers his hair growing ability, kidnaps him, uses his hair to make magical paint brushes before he’s finally caught and everyone gets a happy ending.
.... Gonna be honest. NO idea how this is gonna work in. lol. Will’s bowl cut??? The beginning part there had me thinking about Joyce. The exploring the hunted house with a friend had me thinking of Will and El. But everything else? Pfff.
The Fisher King
After shock jock Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) inadvertently provokes a caller into murdering a group of innocent people in a Manhattan bar, he grows depressed and turns to booze. As he's about to hit rock bottom, Lucas meets a homeless man named Parry (Robin Williams), whose wife was killed by the caller Lucas pushed to the brink. Mentally scarred by his loss, Parry spends his days searching for the Holy Grail. Lucas, feeling culpable for the poor man's plight, pledges to help him in his quest.
Nope, no idea. I really got nothing except.... maybe Kali?????? Ok wait, I read a bit more, mostly the ending bits. The homeless man, Parry, is beat senseless and is in a coma/catatonic state. The hero of the movie must steal a Holy Grail to wake him up, which he does.
Another part, the hero had previously broken up with his lover (out of guilt I guess???) reunites with her. She slaps him and then they kiss and make up. Or something.
Kinda... Hopper and Joyce like I guess.
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
Amiable slackers Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are once again roped into a fantastical adventure when De Nomolos (Joss Ackland), a villain from the future, sends evil robot duplicates of the two lads to terminate and replace them. The robot doubles actually succeed in killing Bill and Ted, but the two are determined to escape the afterlife, challenging the Grim Reaper (William Sadler) to a series of games in order to return to the land of the living.
As much as I love Keanu, this does not make me happy. The only beneficial thing I can think of is two best friends doing stuff together to solve a mystery (Will and El). Maybe Will will get Keanu’s hair
You’ve Got Mail
Struggling boutique bookseller Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) hates Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), the owner of a corporate Foxbooks chain store that just moved in across the street. When they meet online, however, they begin an intense and anonymous Internet romance, oblivious of each other's true identity. Eventually Joe learns that the enchanting woman he's involved with is actually his business rival. He must now struggle to reconcile his real-life dislike for her with the cyber love he's come to feel.
.... What? No idea how this is going to happen.... maybe Joyce gets a mysterious pen pal and it’s secretly Hopper. Or, maybe Joyce will become a librarian/book seller
Ordinary People
Tormented by guilt following the death of his older brother, Buck, in a sailing accident, alienated teenager Conrad Jarrett (Timothy Hutton) attempts suicide. Returning home following an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital, Conrad tries to deal with his mental anguish and also reconnect with his mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), who has grown cold and angry, and his emotionally wounded father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch).
Ok THIS IS MORE LIKE IT. YES. I probably haven’t seen the movie, but this summary gets me hyped. Let me check out the plot....
“The Jarretts are an upper-middle-class family in suburban Chicago trying to return to normal life after the accidental death of their older teenage son, Buck, and the attempted suicide of their younger and surviving son, Conrad. “
Chicago huh? Hmmmmmm
“ Conrad, who has recently returned home from a four-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, feels alienated from his friends and family and begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Berger. Berger learns that Conrad was involved in the sailing accident that took the life of Buck, whom everyone idolized. Conrad now deals with post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor's guilt. “
This screams Will to me because of the whole alienation of friends and family (plus Will was going to doctors and psychiatrists for a while). BUT, the survivor's guilt thing could be El too. She told him she could fight (she didn’t know she couldn’t at the time she said that) and let him and Joyce go into the danger all alone. But Joyce would never send off her kids to a psychiatrist or ward. And she might not take them to counselors either, she’s been there done that.
“Mother and son often argue while Calvin tries to referee, generally taking Conrad's side for fear of pushing him over the edge again. Things come to a climax near Christmas, when Conrad becomes furious at Beth for not wanting to take a photo with him, swearing at her in front of his grandparents. “
Ooof, well. This movie does not have a particularly happy ending. Basically, Conrad is struggling with guilt and alienation most of the time. He even starts dating someone but it only helps a little. His mother is basically steely faced and refuses to express emotion. She totally blames her younger child for her older child’s death. She’s confronted by her husband who asks her “If she’s capable of loving anyone” and she leaves the family, only leaving father and son to heal together.
The Byers don’t have that kind of stuff going on, not exactly. But.... yes. I can see some good material in here. Let’s hope there’s more of this and less of Bill and Ted’s adventures yeah?
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