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n1kolaiz · 3 years

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"Man fears death and yet, at the same time, man is drawn to death. Death is endlessly consumed by men in cities and in literature. It is a singular event in one's life that none may reverse. That is what I desire."

Character Analysis: Dazai Osamu

Age: 22 || Ability: No Longer Human

I've done a lot of research concerning Dazai's character because of how complex he'd initially appeared to me. It is still a question as to what his personality type is; some say he's an ENTP while others argue that he's an INTJ, and his enneagram would most likely be 7w8 (The Realist), but that isn't the thing I'm going to focus on.

According to general databases and fan analyses, his temperament is dominantly melancholic. A person's temperament is basically how they react to and live in this world. For those of you not interested in such details, don't worry, I'll get to my point.

The melancholic behaviour is characterised by individualism, self-reliance, and reservation. People of the melancholic temperament are described as having been overcome with sorrow and depressive thoughts, which is beyond the feeling of "just being sad."

Nonetheless, they are generally calm beings, with a tendency to hide how they truly feel by keeping their composure, even in events that demand severe reaction otherwise. Other aspects of melancholic temperaments is that they are absorbed in the cruelty and tragedy of this world, and tend to get lost in their thoughts.

Sound familiar?

Dazai is seen to be as the comic relief of the adaptation, and he'd never fail to bring about a sense of lightheartedness to relieve the serious moments; we all know that for sure. Remember the time both him and Kunikida found Nobuko Sasaki in that godforsaken hospital, and how Kunikida asked him about his opinion on the current state of affairs?

But, despite having developed a calm and serene personality, Dazai's dark side was more apparent during the Dark Era. There was a type of intimidating and arrogant flair evident in his behaviour, or even on his face. It was the type of demeanour that came off cold and terrifying to the rather unlucky people he dealt with. In a moment's notice, they could literally die by his hands. And I believe most of them usually did. It was during this time, he was more brutal and vicious. He lacked remorse. Plus, Dazai's suicidal ideations were more dense during this Era, and his suicidal tendencies did not do anything to alleviate the depth of how dark his character was posed to be.

Side note: Unfortunately, people misunderstand this 'depressed' part of Dazai; they minimise his character so much to the point that people use only a single word to describe him: suicidal. He is, in fact, so much more than that. I'll elaborate more on that in a while.

"Hey, Odasaku, do you know why I joined the Mafia? I joined the Mafia because of an expectation I had. I thought if I was close to death and violence—close to people giving in to their urges and desires, then I would be able to see the inner nature of humankind up close. I thought if I did that… I would be able to find something—a reason to live."

Dazai's approach to life is that of an aimless soul, weary of the world's oppressions and exhausted from the concept of living itself. Nevertheless, what he said above about having an expectation made me realise something: he had a goal, which he wasn't that enthusiastic about achieving—seeking for a reason to carry on with life. So he joined the Mafia.

And there, he met Oda Sakunosuke.

Despite how resilient Dazai carried himself to be (especially during the Dark Era), this specific excerpt stands in direct opposition of how he effortlessly embodied all things daunting:

"With every step I take, I feel as though the earth has opened up into a bottomless pit as I fall endlessly. As Dazai pointed to his forehead and approached the muzzle, the look on his face – like that of a child about to burst into tears – had already been branded upon my eyes."

- quoted by Oda Sakunosuke, excerpt from Dazai Osamu and the Dark Era Light Novel.

When I read this, it sent my mind into a spiral of despair and confusion. It was so vague, yet it made so much sense. Dazai was desperate to escape from this life, but part of him seemed to live in conflict with his desire for death. I won't elaborate more on this, because this specific excerpt has personal meaning to me, as I'd expect it to have for others as well; so I wouldn't want to ruin anyone else's perception on it.

Back to my point: Odasaku was one of the only characters who managed to interpret the complexity of Dazai's mindset and was able to compartmentalise the specific details of his persona that made Dazai the way he was. Oda knew that Dazai wasn't just suicidal.

"For most things in life, it's harder to succeed than fail. Wouldn't you agree? That's why I should attempt suicide rather than commit it! Committing suicide is difficult, but it should be relatively easier to fail at attempting suicide!"

Others boasted about how he was just a suicidal maniac, and that was only because of how good Dazai was at concealing his own feelings whilst flamboyantly priding himself in new, risky techniques, which he sometimes elaborated on. But Oda, on the other hand, saw through his jokes, and empathised with his friend, never wanting to ever barge into his vulnerability without Dazai's permission, but still trying to be there for him.

"Listen. You told me if you put yourself in a world of violence and bloodshed, you might be ale to find a reson to live. You won't find it. You should know that. Whether you're on the side that takes lives or the side that saves them, nothing beyond your own expectations will happen. Nothing in this world can fill the hole that is your loneliness. You will wander the darkness for eternity."

Notice how Odasaku recognised Dazai's despair, before Dazai even dared to acknowledge his very own emotions? That was why, at Oda's death, he took the initiative to uncover Dazai's bandaged eye to show him that there was no use in concealing his feelings anymore.

Odasaku's last words to Dazai was to "be on the side that saves people," for he was aware that even though Dazai didn't believe there was a clear distinction between good and evil, he thought that perhaps Dazai would find meaning in his life, even if it was just a little bit of purpose.

In Dead Apple, we briefly relive this moment, but I'll write more on that some other time.

And when Dazai joined the ADA, he loses that dark side to him. No, wait, let me rephrase that: he loses a part of that dark side to him. He eliminated the raw sense of bitterness against the world from his face, and instead, he is seen to be a little more passive, and a little more adaptive. No doubt, he still does explicitly state his desire to die, but his wishes are very specific, if you know what I mean.

And a few years later, his journey with Atsushi began.

Atsushi and Dazai's relationship is just one of a kind. I think it isn't a matter of whether Atsushi needed Dazai, or whether Dazai needed Atsushi. It's the fact that they both needed each other. It's the way they both worked hand in hand, and how they sustained each other in ways they were lacking.

The two were polar opposites, but they had a tender kind of warmth embedded in their protectiveness for each other. Atsushi was just as lost as Dazai, but somehow, they worked together just fine. It was like their duality was meant to be. It was the type of symbiotic relationship, where their care for each other was implied, but very deep.

Does this also sound familiar... perhaps, in relation to Dazai's friendship with Odasaku?

Side note: Oda and Atsushi have the same enneagrams, which is Type 2, 'The Helper.'

There is a sort of balance that is brought about by two opposites. Odasaku taught Dazai many things, and I believe Oda learned a lot about a man's life from the way Dazai lived out his life with the innate desire to die. Atsushi sought for the right to live, while Dazai searched for a reason to live; in addition, Dazai validated Atsushi's feelings, and Atsushi was able to acknowlegde the amount of pain Dazai was going through.

Despite how Dazai's perspectives and beliefs stood in contrast with those of Oda's and Atsushi's, a type of inseparable bond connected the man who no longer felt like he was human, to the people who was the most human.

No Longer Human in the Japanese romaji is 'Ningen Shikkaku.' Ningen means "human," and Shikkaku means "disqualified." The late author, Dazai Osamu, wrote the book No Longer Human. He had gone through the rough throes of trauma and wrote this book as a semi-autobiography, whose plot was centred around a man who faked happiness, for he was tainted by the truth that everyone around him was fake themselves. He turned his life into a joke in order to protect himself from the delusions of this world.

This brings us back to the melancholic temperament, where a person was too deeply immersed in the sad truths of reality and the world itself.

And that's what Dazai's character and ability is based on: being disqualified as a human being, because he wasn't well-versed with what being human was actually like. The fabrications of being human sprung up all around him, but he wasn't willing to be fooled by how ingenuine the world truly was.

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”

- excerpt from Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human.

People who don't feel human emotions or don't react to circumstances the way humans do have a variety of ways of explaining how they feel inhuman. They are highly intelligent, which separates them from the average class of humankind, since they've analysed and untangled the truths of life in order to attain understanding, which they value above all else. But, this understanding of the world and its painful truths results in a deep kind of sorrow, which only a few people can seem to empathise with in order to help them out with that burden.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

-excerpt from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Don't you think that this deep sorrow that lies in the heart of the intelligent, makes them the most human of all? They're too human, to the point where they don't feel human. Perhaps, it is a type of defence mechanism, where the mind numbs the heart from feeling normal human emotion, because logically breaking down such concepts is easier than feeling them. But it comes at a price. The heart is willing to recklessly comprehend and fathom any sort of emotion, including pain in its true form, but the mind bears more pain in understanding such concepts because it seeks to decipher every single agonising detail of how complex human emotions are. The mind thinks, the heart feels. There is a clear distinguishing factor between the two. Whether feeling hurts more than thinking, or thinking hurts more than feeling, or whether both these processes work hand-in-hand to make up the reality of life itself, is up for an individual to decide.

Only a few people can seem to empathise with intelligent people who are deeply sad at heart, in order to help them out. As for Dazai, it was Atsushi and Oda. They never took away the pain, but they made him grow from it; it worked vice versa, too.

Of course, there are less tedious and more appealing aspects to the concept of Dazai's intelligence. Dazai was seen as a threat to his enemies because of how manipulation and his keen skill of deduction made up how sharp his mind was. Besides, no one could commit '138 murders, 312 cases of extortion, and 625 cases of fraud, along with various and sundry other crimes,' without having a certain level of intelligence, right?

Dazai had the moral alignment of 'chaotic neutral.' He was more focused on using his intellect to achieve the desired end results of a predicament, and he wasn't afraid to use the wrong means. A famous example was when he deflated the airbags of Ango Sakaguchi's car in order to gain the assured protection of Kyouka Izumi.

Justice is a weapon. It can be used to cause harm, but it cannot protect or save others.

Another example was when he blew up Chuuya Nakahara's car.

Just kidding. That was just a simple pastime (；・∀ ・)

His moral alignment points to what Oda said about him: the part where he mentioned that Dazai didn't really see any difference between good and evil. As long as his ends were achieved, especially if it were in the benefit of his fellow colleagues, he wasn't afraid to exploit, threaten, or endanger others' wellbeing. Because, at the end of the day, the end result triumphed the morally bad methods utilised to achieve it, correct? He always had a reason for his motives and actions, even if those actions were evil and inexcusable.

(eg. action: the psychological abuse he bestowed upon Akutagawa Ryunosuke.

motive: to enable him to hone his own ability favourably and to curb his arrogance)

But the consequences of one's actions will always catch up with a person, no matter what heights they've achieved.

Okay, we're reaching the end of my rambling very soon, I promise.

“If I had to go, I’d like to go out just as beautifully.”

“I’d prefer you don’t go.”

This part of the post is highly inspired by iwachuwu!!

An important factor of Dazai's development is highlighted BSD Wan's episode 10:

I'd like to appreciate that this scene focuses on how much Dazai actually means to Atsushi. When Atsushi responds with "I'd prefer you don't go," he said it lightheartedly for he thought Dazai was joking. But he wasn't. And once Atsushi absorbed the fact that Dazai meant what he said, he was overwhelmed with anguish at the thought of ever losing Dazai. Dazai, on the other hand, had a sense of longing on his expression. There was that look of pure desperation on his face. He was so desperate, yet he knew he couldn't act on his desperation due to a promise he'd made to someone dear to him. But keep in mind, Dazai is unpredictable, so we can never be sure of what's going on in that headspace of his.

Nevertheless, this time, Atsushi recognised Dazai's suffering, as no one usually cared to do, and Dazai didn't put in any effort to hide how he truly felt, as he habitually did. And this mutual emotional connection happened countless times during all the times Oda spent with Dazai as well.

To summarise,

Dazai's character had been carefully wired and patterned out in a way only a few would put in the effort to understand. Dazai was more than just suicidal; he was a being wandering from place to place with no specific aim. He was too smart for his own good. Dazai understood too well of how the world worked and deemed it void of any sort of hope.

Side note: Yes, the truth does come at a price, but it all comes down to how a person understands the truth. As for Dazai (both character and the author he was based off upon), well, it was quite tragic. But that's the way it is for some people, I suppose. But everyone has a different path to travel on, remember that.

His transition from working with the Port Mafia to the Armed Detective Agency was proof of how well-executed his character development was. It was two different personas morphed into what he is today: a womaniser with questionable morals a person who is still standing even after the rough refining process endowed upon him by the realities of this life.

However, he had people along the way come and teach him a thing or two, which perhaps made his life a little more interesting. Perhaps these people were passing clouds that hid the void out of sight for just a moment, and Dazai was always seen to be grasping on to these moments, and letting them go whenever it was time to let go.

His outlook on life makes his intellect look all the more intriguing. It shows that not only does his intelligence contribute to his own wit and shrewdness, but also the practical sense of realism that explains how tired he is of the concept of living because of the truths there are to bear.

However he's enduring the pain right now is by far the most bravest thing a person could commit themselves to doing. It takes courage, and it takes strength, but only a few would ever take the time to recognise such efforts.

Dazai has one of the most beautiful character developments, but I do hope that the development doesn't reach its end anytime soon.

fanart credits: @S7dOZPN3jWBB6cW on twitter

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”

excerpt from Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human.

#bsd #bsd dazai #bungo stray dogs #bungo stray dogs wan #bsd wan #bsd dazai osamu #bsd characters #literature analysis #literature #dazai osamu #bsd odasaku #bsd atsushi #bsd analysis #bsd atsushi nakajima #.ryley.speaks

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maxwell-grant · 3 years

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Cass wouldn’t even begrudingly tolerate [the Black Bat], because she’s even less lenient than Bruce on killing and far more willing to throw down.' - THANK YOU for remembering that.

Cass is my favorite Batfam member, the only one really that I have an active interest in reading about. I'd be incredibly ignorant to not bring bring up such a crucial aspect of her characterization. And even if I didn't personally care for her, well, last thing I'd want is to be another source of frustration for Cass fans. Lord knows there's enough of those to go around.

mousebrass also asked: On that note, how do you imagine a meeting between Cass and the Shadow going?

Fair warning: This one took me 6 hours to write, and it became a hell of a lot longer than I imagined. I liked Cass a lot, but I never quite realized I had this many feelings regarding her until I was tasked with writing this, and a lot of things clicked for me regarding my plans for The Shadow thanks to this ask. @mousebrass, thank you. I mean it. I think I may have found something here I've spent years looking for. Hope you enjoy the post.

I'm thankful that this scenario is only really taking place in a hypothetical fanon where both characters can get a fair shot, because I wouldn't trust DC with this premise. I don't trust DC with either of them as is.

There's a lot of ways that this crossover could go on about taking place naturally, initially because Cass is already connected to some of Batman's pulpier elements, due to her connections to Lady Shiva and the League of Assassins, and one could connect Cass to Myra Reldon (who really should just be race swapped if ever brought back so she can stand out as the cool character she is, without the yellowface gimmick holding her back). There's two things I think are crucial to making the most of this idea, and the first of which has to do with the subject of killing. I usually don't like to come up with hypothetical team-ups for The Shadow that focus too much on the fact that he kills, because it's far from the most significant aspect of his character to focus on, much of it is written from a wrong understanding of the character, and it never amounts to anything other than perfunctory. But here, not only is it completely unavoidable to discuss, here there is actually a very, very substantial grounding as to why this has to be such a big part of the story.

The first and foremost thing that's gotta be established to everyone reading that doesn't know already is this: Cassandra Cain, more so than Batman, more so than any other DCU hero, has a tolerance towards murder lower than zero, and this is completely non-negotiable. She will throw herself on the path of an assault rifle to stop men trying to kill her from accidentally killing each other. The defining moment of her incredibly grim backstory is that she was trained from birth to be the world's greatest murderer, and her first kill traumatized her so badly that she has pivoted as far away from that as possible. I stress a lot that the Shadow should not be written as the trigger-happy maniac comics made him into and that the pulp version killed mostly to defend himself and others, generally left criminals to the police if possible, offered plenty of second-chances, had stories dedicated to the rehabilitation of criminals and so on, but none of this would matter to Cass.

Cass has literally chosen suicide over the prospect of living with murder on her hands time and time again, and The Shadow kills. When he kills, he does so without remorse, with unshakeable certainty. He hates death, he doesn't want lives to be at risk in the first place. But people will die if he doesn't do anything, and what he can do, what he exists to do, is turn the tools of evil against evil, and murder is the oldest tool of evil there is. He doesn't kill because a war scarred him, he doesn't kill because he's got a demon in his soul, he doesn't kill because he's mentally off balance, he doesn't kill because he's evil or sadistic or arrogant or anything of the sort. He kills because the men he fights chose death when they sought to harm innocents and fire guns at him. He kills because he is Death itself.

Regardless of how compassionate he is or can be, regardless of the fact that he's motivated by a desire to protect people, regardless of how justified he is, he is still dropping corpses and laughing maniacally doing so. Cass's real arch-enemy isn't Shiva or David Cain, it's Death, it's the thing that she's fundamentally most opposed to. And guess what The Shadow gets compared to often enough? Literally the very first line of the very first book where we get to see him, this is how we are introduced to him:

So the premise here is that we are taking a character who is defined by her fundamental opposition to death with every fiber of her being, who understands death on a level no other human being does, who is traumatized and hard-wired to detest death at all costs and to choose suicide over it, and asking her to team up with The Grim Reaper.

Even if he received the most abject lesson conceivable on the sheer wrongness of murder, even if he does put down the guns around Cass out of respect for her, he cannot protect his agents and others if he cannot shoot or kill those who try to harm them, and the protection of the agents is absolutely non-negotiable and not at all something he's willing to fuck around with by trying out gadget kung fu superhero alternatives. The Shadow has chosen to throw his life away for their sake time and time again, and no matter how appaling or disgusting Cass finds his deeds, even if he concedes that she's right and should be right on all accounts and that he is fundamentally a monster who has no right to judge others, he would not concede on his mission and he would make it very clear she would have to put him down violently to stop him from protecting others this way, and death has not stopped him before.

And to be upfront in case there's anyone who doubts it, Cass would kick The Shadow's ass, if they had to fight. She is the strongest fighter in the DCU, she lives and breathes fighting and combat in a way no one else does. And The Shadow's not one of those characters who is supposed to be invincible and the best at everything all the time always, he can and does lose fights and scrapes to people far less adept at it than Cass. He's a great fighter, obviously, he hauls bigger men than him through doors and was disabling people with Vulcan neck pinches decades before Spock, and he would definitely have an edge in other areas, but he's out of his league here. Frankly, I don't see The Shadow raising a finger against Cass unless she's been brainwashed into killing people by bad writing. Not because she's a woman, that doesn't really stop him from dealing with evil. But because, for one, she's practically a child compared to him age-wise. Two, he'd obviously know beforehand of her capabilities and how futile it would be to fight or even provoke her. And three, the Shadow's whole thing is knowing. The Shadow Knows and all that. Knowing comes with understanding.

He'd understand very quickly that there is no way someone this young could grow so quickly into the world's greatest fighter without horrific treatment that no one should ever be subjected to. He'd see the movements too practiced and quick, the self-control, the strength and speed far beyond even the trained warriors he's seen, the places where she's been scarred and is good at covering it up. Assuming he doesn't already know about her life story, any meeting between the two would lead to him very quickly figuring out that there's something much deeper about her opposition to killing than just moral reservations, something deeper than Bruce's own gun trauma.

Denny O'Neil's 2nd Batman and Shadow story was about The Shadow secretly helping Bruce overcome gun trauma, and Bruce rejecting The Shadow's intentions to hand him a gun. And to make it clear, people tend to assume that The Shadow only helps people for utilitarian reasons, which is not true as I've tried to demonstrate many times now. I don't want to convey that he would want to help Cass overcome her trauma just so she could be more efficient or something, absolutely no, he'd help her because he helps people in any way he can. I think a story with The Shadow and Cass might involve a similar premise, The Shadow understanding that she has been traumatized very deeply by death and refuses to accept it on any terms, trying to help her overcome it, only to learn that she does not want to "learn" anything she doesn't already know, that she has weaponized her trauma into a source of strength, and wishes nothing more than to help others with it.

And here's where we get to the part that allows the two to be on less antagonistic terms, because one thing that also very strongly defines Cass, at least the Cass I like reading most, is her stubborn, almost desperate need to believe in the best of people, that people can and will change for the better. Like The Shadow, her strength too is knowing, it's perception, the things that she knows about people that words cannot convey. Just as there are many things The Shadow would grow to understand about her that others would not, there would be many things that The Shadow would not be able to conceal from her. Things that no one but her would figure out. Things that, despite her age and lack of experience compared to him, he would have to defer to her knowledge on, which reverses the usual dynamic The Shadow has with people. And perhaps one aspect of that reversal, it's that maybe it's she who winds up secretly manipulating The Shadow into overcoming a deeper issue.

Cass's perspective on killing is shaped not just through trauma, but from a painfully intimate understanding of not just what happens to someone at the time of death, but the cost of murder upon the human soul, the ways it warps people into things they never should have been. Killing is a deeply, deeply serious matter, much more so than fiction seems ever willing to go into. Of course we suspend disbelief for fiction, there's nothing wrong with that, but if a story starts asking questions, starts poking holes into fantasies, they should not be disregarded.

And so it begs a question: How has it affected The Shadow? Is he really as remorseless as he appears to be? Is the fact that he's only killing evil people really of that much use? What's the cost of living as someone who has to know so much about so much evil in so many hearts? Knowledge never comes without price, and knowing evil is his tagline. When he enlists Harry Vincent, he makes it very clear that he has lost lives as he has saved them. From when is that regret coming from? What lives did he lose then? Is he saving people by damning his soul or merely prolonging the inevitable by piling corpses on another end of the scale?

If there's a character that could meaningfully start bringing these questions forth, who could ever truly get The Shadow to stop and reveal things to the audience he never would otherwise, maybe Cass could be that character. A girl who was raised to be a monster, who is treated as a monster and an aberration in-universe (and even outside of it), and turned that into a strength she uses to help others, who cares about everyone and refuses to let others be dehumanized as she was. Who better to know what lurks in the Shadow's heart?

Sometimes when I get an ask, I bullshit my way through infodump walls of text until I can structure it into something vaguely resembling a point. And sometimes, and I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes I get a very, very clear word on my mind related to it before I start writing, that almost seems to be a beacon pointing where I need to get to, and I work my way into getting there. Once you sent me an ask about crossing over The Shadow with Cassandra Cain, the word that came to mind the very second was Language.

It's an interesting relation the two have with language. Language is of course a very substantial part of Cass's character, who does not process language and linguistic development the way most people do, and instead reads body language to the point of superpower. Many stories revolve around Cass's relation to the concept of language, the help she may require from others in getting around things beyond her upbringing, and ways in which she has mastered beyond anyone's scope. Though she is mute, language is her power, what makes her what she is, and she is someone that Batman freely admits could kick his ass if she ever felt like it.

For The Shadow, language is also his power. He speaks all languages and connects allies all over the world, he is an expert ventriloquist, he is able to project his voice beyond what's physically possible, he can imitate voices perfectly to the point of being able to conduct group conversations single-handedly well enough to fool even the people whose voices he's imitating, much of his presence and terror and manipulation are done through his voice, arguably the very reason he exists in the first place is entirely because a radio actor's voice performance was so good and captivating that it tricked people into thinking the character was a real star and not just a glorified narrator. The man you cannot see, but only hear, the perfect hero for radio. And then of course the laugh, which I have a whole separate post on and which, in many ways, acts as a substitute for language in the novels. He uses the laugh so often as a substitute for statements or words, even to himself, that it's pretty much his own personal language. And language is at the core of how he deals with people, as he knows the right language to use to manipulate and move and help them. He knows what to promise, what to reveal, what to omit. He knows what to say, how to say it, when to say it. Language is the strings by which he puppeteers the world around him (and he can talk to animals, at least of one kind).

The Shadow and Cassandra Cain have mastered two different types of Language as throughly as anyone can possibly master them. The Shadow can talk a group of hardened criminals into killing themselves, Cassandra can punch a heart into stopping without killing it. The Shadow echoes his voice "through everywhere and nowhere at once" to whip crowds of thugs into frenzies, Cassandra outraces missiles and was tanking bullets as a child. The Shadow can lie and usurp lives so masterfully to fool even the families of those he's passing off as, Cassandra is a living lie detector who gleams inner conversations from miniscule reactions. The Shadow can speak every language known, Cassandra is the greatest master of the world's most universal language other than music. The two are supposedly human, but every now and then, something comes along to call that into question because of the things they can achieve. They cannot hide secrets from each other the way they do to everyone else. They are driven by a deep desire to help others, to make something out of the circumstances of their lives. To weaponize that which dictates they should be evil and monstrous into a relentless force of good.

Language is the root of understanding. And if nothing else, as impossible as a conciliation of their approaches to crimefighting may be, I think there could be an unique understanding between the two. Perhaps, and this is a bit crazier a concept but one that seems to be where I might have been heading towards all along, even Cassandra Cain finding a calling away from the frayed dynamics of the Batfamily, away from the Bat's looming presence, to become The Shadow's successor, swearing to uphold a mission of justice through non-lethal tactics while he stays on the backseat guiding her. If The Shadow could trust the safety of his agents and the protection of the innocent at the hands of someone as capable and selfless and good-natured as Cassandra, I think he'd be all too happy to be able to trust someone in such a manner, to no longer be the Master of Darkness, but instead to serve the next generation that's weaponized darkness without submerging in it. To achieve, and perhaps return, to his strongest, highest self: A disembodied voice heard, but not seen. Once again the narrator, not the star.

It's a concept I've thought about very extensively for the years I've been a Shadow fan, but now it occurs to me that, if I had to appoint a successor of The Shadow, someone who could take up the mission but shine on their own right, even improve it with the right guidance and circumstances, it would be Cassandra Cain. The Orphan, The Shadow of the Batgirl. Daughter of the greatest assassins, meant to be the world's most lethal murderer, instead pivoted to being one of it's greatest heroes, but never allowed to shine as she should. But in the darker, less restrictive and wilder world of pulp heroes, in The Shadow's world, a beacon would shine all the harder. Perfect strengths attached to perfect opposites, joined together for a greater good, unstoppable after together having weaponized that which most take for granted: the power of language to move worlds.

#replies tag #pulp heroes #comic books #the shadow #cassandra cain #batgirl #i always had a feeling that a successor to the shadow should not be modeled on batman but someone within that range #i never quite found a character i would be happy with taking that role or a similar role #aw shit i just talked myself into a new favorite character #that just so happens to be another character brimming with potential that's denied them by corporate overlords #who could have seen that coming

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jenniferisacommonname · 3 years

Text

Bonus Level Unlocked

This week marks the release of Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, an incredibly well-researched book on catastrophic business failure in the gaming industry. Jason’s a good dude, and there’s an excerpt here if you want to check it out. Sadly, game companies going belly-up is such a common occurrence that he couldn’t possibly include them all, and one of the stories left out due to space constraints is one that I happen to be personally familiar with. So, I figured I’d tell it here.

I began working at Acclaim Studios Austin as a sound designer in January of 2000. It was a tumultuous period for the company, including a recent rebranding from their former studio name, “Iguana Entertainment,” and a related, ongoing lawsuit from the ex-founder of Iguana. There were a fair number of ghosts hanging around—the creative director’s license plate read IGUANA, which he never changed, and one of the meeting rooms held a large, empty terrarium—but the studio had actually been owned on paper by Acclaim since 1995, and I didn’t notice any conflicting loyalties. Everyone acted as if we always had been, and always would be, Acclaim employees.

Over the next few years I worked on a respectable array of triple-A titles, including Quarterback Club 2002, Turok: Evolution, and All-Star Baseball 2002 through 2005. (Should it be “All-Stars Baseball,” like attorneys general? Or perhaps a term of venery, like “a zodiac of All-Star Baseball.”) At any rate, it was a fun place to work, and a platformer of hijinks ensued.

But let’s skip to the cutscene. The truth is that none of us in the trenches suspected the end was near until it was absolutely imminent. Yes, Turok: Evolution and Vexx had underperformed, especially when stacked against the cost of development, but games flop in the retail market all the time. And, yes, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling had been hustled out the door before it was ready for reasons no one would explain, and the New York studio’s release of a BMX game featuring unlockable live-action stripper footage had been an incredibly weird marketing ploy for what should have been a straightforward racing title. (Other desperate gimmicks around this time included a £6,000 prize for UK parents who would name their baby “Turok,” an offer to pay off speeding tickets to promote Burnout 2 that quickly proved illegal, and an attempt to buy advertising space on actual tombstones for a Shadow Man sequel.)

But the baseball franchise was an annual moneymaker, and our studio had teams well into development on two major new licenses, 100 Bullets and The Red Star. Enthusiasm was on the upswing. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention when voice actors started calling me to complain that they hadn’t been paid, but at the time it seemed more like a bureaucratic failure than an actual money shortage—and frankly, it was a little naïve of them to expect net-30 in the first place. Industry standard was, like, net-90 at best. So I was told.

Then one Friday afternoon, a few department managers got word that we’d kind of maybe been skipping out on the building lease for let’s-not-admit-how-many months. By Monday morning, everyone’s key cards had been deactivated.

It's a little odd to arrive at work and find a hundred-plus people milling around outside—even odder, I suppose, if your company is not the one being evicted. Acclaim folks mostly just rolled their eyes and debated whether to cut our losses and head to lunch now, while employees of other companies would look dumbfounded and fearful before being encouraged to push their way through the crowd and demonstrate their still-valid key card to the security guard. Finally, the General Manager (hired only a few months earlier, and with a hefty relocation bonus to accommodate his houseboat) announced that we should go home for the day and await news. Several of our coworkers were veterans of the layoff process—like I said, game companies go under a lot—and one of them had already created a Yahoo group to communicate with each other on the assumption that we’d lose access to our work email. A whisper of “get on the VPN and download while you can” rippled through the crowd.

But the real shift in tone came after someone asked about a quick trip inside for personal items, and the answer was a hard, universal “no.” We may have been too busy or ignorant to glance up at any wall-writing, but the building management had not been: they were anticipating a full bankruptcy of the entire company. In that situation, all creditors have equal standing to divide up a company's assets in lengthy court battles, and most get a fraction of what they’re owed. But if the landlords had seized our office contents in lieu of rent before the bankruptcy was declared, they reasoned, then a judge might rule that they had gotten to the treasure chest first, and could lay claim to everything inside as separate from the upcoming asset liquidation.

Ultimately, their gambit failed, but the ruling took a month to settle. In the meantime, knick knacks gathered dust, delivered packages piled up, food rotted on desks, and fish tanks became graveyards. Despite raucous protest from every angle—the office pets alone generated numerous threats of animal cruelty charges—only one employee managed to get in during this time, and only under police escort. He was a British citizen on a work visa, and his paperwork happened to be sitting on his desk, due to expire. Without it, he was facing literal deportation. Fortunately, a uniformed officer took his side (or perhaps just pre-responded to what was clearly a misdemeanor assault in ovo,) and after some tense discussion, the building manager relented, on the condition that the employee touch absolutely nothing beyond the paperwork in question. The forms could go, but the photos of his children would remain.

It’s also a little odd, by the way, to arrive at the unemployment office and find every plastic chair occupied by someone you know. Even odder, I suppose, if you’re actually a former employee of Acclaim Studios Salt Lake, which had shut down only a month or two earlier, and you just uprooted your wife and kids to a whole new city on the assurance that you were one of the lucky ones who got to stay employed. Some of them hadn’t even finished unpacking.

Eventually, we were allowed to enter the old office building one at a time and box up our things under the watchful eye of a court appointee, but by then our list of grievances made the landlords’ ploy seem almost quaint by comparison (except for the animals, which remains un-fucking-forgivable.) We had learned, for example, that in the weeks prior to the bankruptcy, our primary lender had made an offer of $15 million—enough to keep us solvent through our next batch of releases, two of which had already exited playtesting and were ready to be burned and shipped. The only catch was that the head of the board, company founder Greg Fischbach, would have to step down. This was apparently too much of an insult for him to stomach, and he decided that he'd rather see everything burn to the ground. The loan was refused.

Other “way worse than we thought” details included gratuitous self-dealing to vendors owned by board members, the disappearance of expensive art from the New York offices just before closure, and the theft of our last two paychecks. For UK employees, it was even more appalling: Acclaim had, for who knows how long, been withdrawing money from UK paychecks for their government-required pension funds, but never actually putting the money into the retirement accounts. They had stolen tens of thousands of dollars directly from each worker.

Though I generally reside somewhere between mellow and complete doormat on the emotional spectrum, I did get riled enough to send out one bitter email—not to anyone in corporate, but to the creators of a popular webcomic called Penny Arcade, who, in the wake of Acclaim’s bankruptcy announcement, published a milquetoast jibe about Midway’s upcoming Area 51. I told Jerry (a.k.a. “Tycho”) that I was frankly disappointed in their lack of cruelty, and aired as much dirty laundry as I was privy to at the time.

“Surely you can find a comedic gem hidden somewhere in all of this!” I wrote. “Our inevitable mocking on PA has been a small light at the end of a very dark, very long tunnel. Please at least allow us the dignity of having a smile on our faces while we wait in line for food stamps.”

Two days later, a suitably grim comic did appear, implying the existence of a new release from Acclaim whose objective was to run your game company into the ground. In the accompanying news post, Tycho wrote:

“We couldn’t let the Acclaim bankruptcy go without comment, though we initially let it slide thinking about the ordinary gamers who lost their jobs there. They don’t have anything to do with Acclaim’s malevolent Public Relations mongrels, and it wasn’t they who hatched the Titty Bike genre either. Then, we remembered that we have absolutely zero social conscience and love to say mean things.”

Another odd experience, by the way, is digging up a 16-year-old complaint to a webcomic creator for nostalgic reference when you offer that same creator a promotional copy of the gaming memoir you just co-wrote with Sid Meier. Even odder, I suppose, to realize that the original non-Acclaim comic had been about Area 51, which you actually were hired to work on yourself soon after the Acclaim debacle.*

As is often the case in complex bankruptcies, the asset liquidation took another six years to fully stagger its way through court—but in 2010, we did, surprisingly, get the ancient paychecks we were owed, plus an extra $1,700-ish for the company’s apparent violation of the WARN Act. By then, I had two kids and a very different life, for which the money was admittedly helpful. Sadly, Acclaim’s implosion probably isn’t even the most egregious one on record. Our sins were, to my knowledge, all money-related, and at least no one was ever sexually assaulted in our office building. Again, to my knowledge. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we remain the only historical incident of corporate pet murder. The iguana got out just in time.

*Area 51’s main character was voiced by David Duchovny, and he actually got paid—which was lucky for him, because three years later, Midway also declared bankruptcy.

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angelaiswriting · 3 years

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The Assistant (15 of ?) | Vladimir Ranskahov x fem!reader

[original picture found on: pinterest]

✏️ Pairings:

(almost official) Vladimir Ranskahov x fem!reader

Anatoly Ranskahov x OC (Paulina) mentioned

✏️ Requested by @kellydixon01 : Y/N–hacker, big mouth, even bigger attitude–is the new addition to Fisk’s team. Sent to help the Ranskahovs, she immediately gets on Vladimir’s nerves. But as time passes, they start to take a liking to each other, even if none of them is willing to admit their feelings. Yet.

✏️ Previously on The Assistant (aka I’m shit at updating): Y/N has moved in with Vladimir and the two have found themselves growing closer. There’s only one problem: Vlad’s old friend Ulyana thinks the two are a couple and has invited them over for dinner to celebrate.

✏️ A/N: y’all. Y’ALL. First off, I just want to apologize, it’s been forever and a month since I updated this; I’m not even sure there are still people reading/that remember this story apart from Alice lol. It took us me 144 pages !!! but it’s finally happening. Enjoy! I literally cried when I wrote the end of this chapter because it was about fucking time!

✏️ Warnings: fluff; and tears, but those were mine as I wrote this lol; Sergei has a doggie!; a smidge of swearing.

✏️ Word-count: 6,060

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: MATCHMAKER

Sitting on the closed toilet seat with the pipe wrench still in his hands, Vladimir could hear Y/N and Ulyana laugh in the living room. He couldn’t make out their words, for their voices were quiet despite their hilarity, and the left-ajar door of the bathroom didn’t help him any.

The most surreal situation I’ve ever experienced, that’s how Y/N had labeled it less than an hour ago, before he helped Lina bring in the tray with the cups of tea. And the more he mulled things over, the more he found himself agreeing. The most surreal situation I’ve ever experienced – and he had lived through plenty of what could be considered ‘weird shit’. Ulyana in general had been a whole exception in his book. Ulyana, with her afternoons spent playing bingo at the daily center for the elderly with all her old-lady friends; Ulyana, with her borscht and her endless words of encouragement and comfort when both he and Tolya had needed them the most.

But also Ulyana, so dead-set on the idea that he was too stiff and needed a gentle touch in his life that she just… mistook Y/N for his woman. As if he needed someone! But it was still a good thing in a way, though, he reasoned as he stood up and moved to stand in front of the sink to stare at his reflection. And probably his brother was right about the fact that he had to open up to her, tell her what he felt – and what he was scared of. And just… try, for once. Make an effort to take his private life into his own hands instead of just wasting it away on cigarettes and underground fights.

As he stood there, hands gripping the sink, wrench abandoned on the counter, he tried to focus on what existed beyond that scar on the right side of his face and all it meant. By now he was convinced that she didn’t see it – not because she didn’t want to, but because she was able to see right through it. She knew about his past, and not just about Utkin, but also about some of the stupid things he had done in his short-lived youth – he had told her about that over vodka, a bit more rarely over coffee. And while he had always had problems with that, he found himself having fewer and fewer now.

Yeah, maybe it wasn’t that bad to pretend he had someone that cared about him, and while that equaled lying to Lina, maybe it was for the greater good?

It came off as a question even in his own mind, but it was one he found himself being willing to put in the time and effort to find an answer to. It was almost stupid, to think that feelings seemed to terrify him to the bone, while he could take a gun pointed at his head any day without batting an eyelash. Because that’s what he did, that’s what the target on his back felt like.

Maybe all he needed was to grow a pair, listen to what Ulyana had always told him, and walk out there a somewhat taken man.

And not taken to the demons in his head, but to someone – a friend, maybe? – that he had learned to respect. In a way, that is; that road still seemed a long one, after all.

When he joined the two women again some twenty minutes or so later, after he had fixed the kitchen cabinet Lina had been too shy to ask him to repair, he found them leafing through an old photo album. Belka – Ulyana’s old, white cat – was snoozing in Y/N’s lap, the tip of her fluffy tail moving up and down every once in a while as she purred at her new friend.

It was a weirdly cozy view, one that seemed to put all the thoughts that were still swarming his mind at ease. He leaned against the frame of the door, arms crossed in front of his chest, and he just stared for a while, half-present in the moment and half-lost in his own mind. He didn’t miss the moment her head lifted up an inch and her eyes met his, though, and before he could realize anything, he found himself smirking back.

“Ulya is showing me the photographs of her wedding day,” she said when he moved away from the door and really entered the room. Her fingers absentmindedly scratched the cat behind one ear as she maintained eye contact until he sat down at the round table in front of the window to her left.

“Those are a must-see when you step foot into her house.” His was a playful huff as he lit himself a cigarette. They had all gone back to Russian, which meant that Ulyana had gotten to know Y/N faster than he had. “Next thing you know, you’re walking down Soviet memory lane.” And then, when his eyes met Lina’s: “You know I’m joking. Tolya and I have always loved your stories.”

The woman shook her head, but there was a smile on her face that somehow warmed his heart. It meant that it was all back to normal now; that, in her heart, she had forgiven him for disappearing for so long and never, not once, calling to check in on her. “This girl’s bewitched you,” she chuckled, patting Y/N’s knee with her free hand. “I don’t remember when the last time he wasn’t serious was, anymore,” she explained as she leaned back against the couch, giving her guest’s unasked question an answer.

Vladimir scoffed and when his phone beeped on the table with a text from Sergei a moment later, he stood up. “We gotta go now. Work’s calling.”

Ulyana had a look on her face that seemed to complain On a Saturday? but she knew he was a busy man with a demanding job, and so she dropped it. “You’re both invited over tomorrow,” she said instead. “I’ll prepare a nice dinner to celebrate together.” She closed the album of photographs and put it down on the coffee table by the side of the couch.

When she stood up, Belka seemed to catch the hint: she woke up, let out a huffy meow, and jumped down from Y/N’s lap to rub herself against one of Vlad’s legs.

“There’s nothing to celebrate, Lina,” Vladimir was saying as he let the old woman fix the collar of his shirt before engulfing him in a hug.

The way her eyebrows rose when she turned to look at Y/N was almost comical on that round face of hers. “He’s still as stubborn as always, isn’t he?” she whispered in her ear when she hugged her goodbye. When she turned back towards Vladimir, she had her hands on her hips and a firm look in her eyes that he knew he couldn’t escape. “You two will come over for dinner tomorrow night if it kills you! It’s so good to see you finally happy, my boy, and not just alone as always. And if that’s not enough, I haven’t seen you in months! Is this how you treat your old Lina?”

“I can’t believe she managed to convince you.”

He was driving to Sergei’s place when Y/N spoke again. They hadn’t exchanged a word after leaving Ulyana’s apartment and truth be told, he was almost afraid to hear her speak again.

“I can’t believe it either,” he groaned, one hand gripping the steering wheel tightly while his left arm just hung out the rolled-down window.

There were heavy clouds behind the buildings in front of them and it looked like it would start pouring soon. But the slightly chilly air was a blessing after that day’s stuffy heat, so he was ready to face the early-summer bad weather when it would come.

After that exchange, the silence went back to being almost embarrassed. She was looking at him from the corner of her eye – he hadn’t missed it, he was good at noticing things about people, even though probably not as good as he thought he was when it came to her. Whether she was trying to come up with something to say or not, though, he did not know.

His own thoughts were all over the place as well.

He had a little less than one day to come up with an excuse to ring Ulyana up with just so that he could avoid that dinner date she had organized. In his heart he knew she was doing this for him: she and Aleksandr had never had children, and that’s exactly how she had always seen him and his brother ever since they had first rented that apartment on her same floor. We’re all Russians, we have to stick up for each other, she had said once, one of the first times she had insisted they’d come over for dinner. She had taken care of them; and it was remarkable, the way they had let her into their lives, one kind act at a time, in a time when the Siberian wound was still tender and they didn’t know who to trust in this new, foreign land.

Then, a little more than a year and a half ago, when Anatoly had introduced Paulina to her, it had become just Vladimir and Ulyana most of the time. Tolya was busier now – he didn’t only have his job, but there was a woman now and he did things with her, took her places, came up with things just to surprise her for the sake of it… It had been a shock at first because that was someone more similar to the old Anatoly Ranskahov, the one who had lived in Moscow and had danced around a different woman every night – with the only difference that he was now a faithful lover.

“Are you upset?” Her voice tore him out of his mind once again and he turned towards her with a questioning hmm? that prompted her to clarify. “About her thinking that we’re together.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t think I am, nyet,” he confessed eventually.

She was staring ahead, not looking at him, but a smile still blossomed on her face at his words. “If I don’t tell you now, I know I’ll never have the guts to.”

But Vladimir was already slowing down to park the car and when Y/N turned her head to see what he was staring at with such a confused expression on his face, the faint smirk on his lips already fading away completely, she knew she wouldn’t be opening her heart any time soon in that car.

“What the fuck?” was what Vlad mumbled as he hastily turned off the engine, pulled on the handbrake, and threw his door open. “What is this?”

Sergei was standing there, a black and brown rottweiler laying at his feet, panting with its tongue almost touching the asphalt in the somewhat stuffy evening air.

“This,” his friend said, slowly, shoving the handle of the leash in the other’s hand before Vlad could come back to himself, “is Sharik. I need you to look after him while I’m gone.”

Vladimir stared down at the dog, and the dog sat up against Seriozha’s legs so that he could stare back at him better. He was a big piece of meat, and he could already picture him drooling all over the couch he had back at home. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” frowned Sergei, dropping the black gym bag from his shoulder to Vlad’s feet. “I told you yesterday, before you and Y/N left the garage. If I need to go out of town for business, I won’t be able to bring him with me. You agreed to look after him for me.”

While his owner spoke, Sharik sniffed at Vladimir’s shin with curiosity, and after a long moment of scrutiny, he lazily wagged his tail in approval.

“You need to take him out in the morning and at night, he loves walks in the park.”

“What?” He wasn’t sure the type of ‘take the dog out’ he was thinking of was the one Sergei had in mind.

“Don’t feed him weird shit. His dry food is in the bag. Don’t give him more than what I wrote down – he loves to beg. And make him play before bed, or he’ll keep you up all night.”

“What?”

“Your apartment complex also has a pool and he enjoys chilling in the water, so if–”

“I won’t be looking after your dog. What?”

Before either of them could speak, Y/N’s What’s going on here? made them turn in her direction. She had gotten out of the car, and while she was still holding onto the door with one hand, Vlad knew she’d soon come forward.

“Solnyshko, hi!”

Vladimir knew he was fucked when Sergei greeted her and hugged her back when she walked up to them. He’d manage to convince her and while she was just a guest in his house, Vlad knew he’d be the one bending his will.

Sharik gave her the same treatment he had reserved for him just moments before, but he sped it up this time, and the wagging in his tail wasn’t as lazy as it had been with him – it was a hard slapping back and forth against his leg that gave him just a slight taste of the dog’s strength.

“Who’s this good boy?” she cooed as the dog sniffed the palm of her hand before giving it a lick and allowing her to pet his head.

In no time, and before he had the chance to register what was going on, Y/N had gone back to the car and, appalled, he had to watch her lead the dog onto the back seats.

As if he had read his mind, Sergei reassured him: “Don’t worry, he doesn’t shed. But you still need to keep him brushed, it relaxes him.”

He stared at the car, kept an eye on Y/N as she put Sergei’s gym bag in the trunk, and then walked back around the car to sit on the passenger seat. She was still caressing the dog, her back turned towards the two men, when Vladimir spoke.

“You know I don’t deal with animals.”

Sergei scoffed. “We deal with much worse. Now, don’t be a brat, I didn’t have to listen to the two of you singing like shit last night just to then not be able to get payback.”

“We didn’t–”

“It’s all cool, Volodya.” Serzh patted his shoulder and grinned at him before turning back to stare at the car his dog had got into. “She’s nice, I don’t mind. It was about time you found someone that would headbutt you every time you headbutted them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about, brother. Sharik is a good matchmaker, who else do you think got Tolik and Paulina together?” he grinned. “But if he is missing even so much as a hair when I come back, we’ll have a problem.”

He scoffed. “A threat? Over a dog?”

“He’s not just some dog, Volodya. He’s my boy.” He stared him down for a moment before turning around. He had already started to walk back towards the building he lived in, when he said one last I’ll call you when Aslan and I have left the state before Vlad turned his back on him.

Just as he had expected, Sharik launched himself onto the couch the second Y/N opened the door of his apartment. The only thing Vladimir could do was watch him run across the entrance corridor, fly mid-air, and then fall heavily onto the clean cushions of his couch half a second later. And to be such a big and heavy dog, he was fast.

“I’m going to kill Sergei,” he muttered but before he could take another step forward, Y/N stopped him with a hand on his forearm.

“C’mon, he’s just a dog, Vlad. Don’t be mean. I’ll get him down,” she chuckled and toed her shoes off before walking up to Sharik.

Sometime later, after that dog had finally stopped whining and complaining that he wanted to get on the couch despite said couch’s owner didn’t want to, there was silence again.

The next-door neighbor had knocked on the door not long after they had got home: he had heard the noises, and had felt the need to complain about that sudden surprise, and to poke his nose into business he knew nothing about – There’s a pet fee you’re supposed to pay if you want to keep an animal in here. And then, when Sharik had walked up to the door and nosed his way to stand between Y/N’s legs – Vlad has seen it in the mirror hanging on the wall right at the other end of the room – that very neighbor had found something else to complain about. Its size exceeds the limits allowed in this complex, or some shit like that. He hadn’t heard what she had told the dude; all he knew was that less than five minutes after he had shown up at the door, he had left with his tail between his legs, and so Vlad had managed to go back to staring at the screen of his laptop.

He wasn’t doing anything, really. For once, he didn’t feel like burying his head into his work – everything needed for Aslan and Sergei’s trip to Florida had already been organized, and the last touches for the upcoming shipment could wait until Monday. It was very un-Vladimir-like, to take a whole weekend off, but for once, he wouldn’t complain.

What he ended up thinking about – or, rather, whom –, however, was Ulyana. He had been praying for an excuse to cancel that dinner date for the next day, but he hadn’t expected to be actually presented with one. And although he still had the intention to ring her up and apologize, he still had to pick up the phone. He couldn’t possibly leave Sergei’s dog home alone, now, could he? Or did he want to come back to a destroyed house?

“Shari’s napping.” When he looked up, not even taken by surprise by her sudden appearance in the doorframe of the kitchen, he found her standing there, leaning a shoulder against the wood and staring at him. “What are you up to?”

“Work,” was his quick reply. “Checking that everything is in order and… stuff.”

“‘And stuff’?” She didn’t seem convinced, and she stared at him for a long minute, before dismissing it and sitting opposite him at the small kitchen table. “Anyway, why didn’t you tell me about this favor you had to do for Sergei?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t know I had to look after stupid dog.” And then, when she raised an eyebrow: “A very smart, but spoiled dog. Better?”

“He’s not spoiled. Serzh just really loves him a lot,” she pouted. And when he glared at her, she continued: “This doesn’t matter, though. You have to find a solution for tomorrow night. Call Sergei and ask him how Sharik deals with cats, and then call Ulyana and ask her how Belka deals with dogs. Or something.”

“Why me?”

“Because I asked nicely? Because you got us into this?”

As it turned out a couple of calls later, Sharik was very gentle, almost submissive with cats and animals in general – despite his size, despite his face, and his breed, and the size of his paws big enough to be as big as at least three cat legs put together. And Ulyana had no problem having a dog over either – she had looked after a neighbor’s dog more times than she could count, and Belka was used to napping in her bedroom when another animal was over.

So, not a problem – as Lina had said. Just come over and bring the dog, I’ll have something ready for him too.

His plan to avoid that dinner date had miserably failed, although there was something inside him at the thought of showing up at Lina’s and pretending like he and Y/N were a thing of some sort that just… pulled at some strings he didn’t even know he had inside. And as he watched Y/N fill Sharik’s bowl just as they got ready to eat dinner, he found himself being almost happy that those strings were being pulled, for once in his life.

“So we just take him over to her place?” she asked him when she sat down, a steaming plate with rice and veggies right in front of her.

His diet had taken a turn for the better ever since she had moved in with him – he still had more vodka than was healthy to have hiding pretty much in almost all the cabinets in his apartment, but at least his fridge was full of food his body could actually digest this time.

“That’s what she said,” he grumbled.

They ate in silence after that, and only when he had done the dishes, did she speak again.

“Do you wanna settle for a story?” She was sitting next to him on the couch, with Sharik’s heavy head resting on a knee. The dog was staring at her with adoring eyes as she gently scratched behind his ears.

“A story?”

“Yeah, about how we met. How we ended up together. Ulyana asked a couple vague-ish questions this afternoon, so I think she’ll ask more tomorrow. No?” She glanced at him when he didn’t reply. “Unless you wanna tell her the truth.”

“I don’t know what I want,” he eventually confessed. “I don’t want to lie to her, but if I hear her ask me about ‘my woman’ another time, I’m going to burst.”

He didn’t expect to chuckle with her, but he did. And when they grew silent again, and she went back to staring at the TV screen after a quick Let me think of something, then, he laid his head back against the seatback of the couch, head turned in her direction, and studied the profile of her face. The way the corner of her mouth rose up into a smirk before she giggled at Sharik’s sniffing nose against her bare shin. The way her chest rose and fell with every breath she took, slow and regular and almost gentle. And before he knew it, his eyes had dropped closed and he had fallen asleep.

When he woke up sometime later – the clock on his phone signaled just a few minutes after half past eleven –, Y/N and Sharik had already left the room, and he was uncomfortably half sitting, half lying on the couch covered by a pile blanket. The TV was off, and not a sound came from inside the apartment – nor from outside in the corridor.

He briefly wondered whether Y/N had managed to come up with a story in case Ulyana would ask questions, but he barely had the time to walk into his room and sit on his bed, that his ears picked up some snoring.

There, bundled up under his blankets, was sleeping Sharik, who had somehow managed to make himself at home. He even had the audacity of staring at him with an accusatory look in his eyes, the fleabag, when Vladimir turned on the lamp on his bedside table to get a closer look.

“Get off,” he groggily ordered, yanking the covers back with a quick movement of his arm. “Get off my bed, dog.”

But for all he tried, the dog wouldn’t budge. And even when Vladimir picked him up and put him back down onto the living room floor, he barely had the time to close the door of his bedroom – something he hadn’t done since before Utkin – that Sharik was already pushing against it with his nose to slip into the room.

“You are stubborn beast, aren’t you?”

Taking him back to the living room by force didn’t help at all, for the dog wouldn’t stop bugging him. He had managed to lower the door handle twice in the half-hour Vladimir spent trying to get rid of him without… yeah, without actually getting rid of the fucking four-legged light of Sergei’s life.

When it became apparent that he wouldn’t have a good night’s sleep in his goddamn bed that night, was when Sharik almost tripped him over from behind just to then launch himself onto his bed much like he had done that evening with the couch – and the at least other ten times Vlad had tried to kick him out of the room. He laid there, on his bed, curled up like a too-big cat, staring at him with eyebrows that wouldn’t stop going up and down until he huffed out a complaint and went back to sleep.

“I’ll kill you, Sergei,” he groaned, rubbing his face with both hands to try and shoo the annoyance away.

He stood in the hallway for a while, then, eyeing the couch from the other side of the living room while mentally cursing himself. Before fixing the spare room, which he had turned into Y/N’s bedroom as the weeks had gone by, he had had to take care of his brother and by giving him his bed, he had had to get the couch. It was too small for him, and uncomfortable – and the thought that she, too, had had to sleep there for endless days before he got his shit together still stung, in a way. And since it looked like he wouldn’t be able to get Sharik out of his bedroom – nor out of his bed, for that matter –, he was left with only two options to pick from: either the couch or…

He knocked on her door before he had the time to talk himself out of it.

“Is something wrong?” She was scrolling through her phone when she told him to come in. The lamps on both nightstands were on, and it looked like she was still far from falling asleep.

“Dog’s in my bed,” he said, staring at her from across the room. “Couch is…”

“I know,” she chuckled. “Still not the worst couch I’ve slept on, though, don’t worry,” she continued when he made a weird face. “Stay in your half of the bed, and you can sleep here if you want.”

He didn’t sleep that night, however. He laid on his right side, staring at the wall, and she laid on her left, staring at the opposite wall. She had wished him good night at some point, when she had put her phone away and had turned the lights off, and he had answered with a hum. But then, he had just laid there all night, listening in on her soft breathing – and then her soft snoring – and he remained motionless. When he did fall asleep, sometime in the early morning, just before the first light of day peaked in through the curtains, his last thought was that maybe, this wasn’t that bad.

“Through mutual friends, if so one could say,” Y/N replied over celebratory vodka. Ulyana had kept her best questions for the end of the dinner and Vladimir had almost deluded himself into thinking the old woman would never ask. They had come up with a story to tell just in case, but silence would have been better. “I apparently showed up at the garage at the least opportune time.”

“Oh! So was it love at first sight?” Lina was pouring them all a second shot with one hand as the other one rested on Sharik’s head.

Vlad laughed – what an absurd concept, he found himself musing. Love at first sight? With someone as careful as him? And although Y/N kicked his foot under the table to try and silence him, he couldn’t fully erase the smirk from his face. “Nyet,” he chuckled eventually as he wiped away a tear with a knuckle.

“Hell no! He was very rude and stubborn at the beginning,” confessed Y/N, and Vlad was barely able to scoff at her that Lina had turned in his direction with a gaze of steel.

“Very rude?” she inquired, eyes squinting as she frowned. “With this lovely lady?”

“Don’t gang up on me, she was very stubborn too!” he complained. “Still is.”

“One ought to be stubborn if one has to put up with you, my dear Volodya.” Ulyana patted his hand on the table. “Doesn’t give you the right to be rude. I didn’t raise you like that.”

He had been on the verge of pointing out that he had, in fact, been raised by his own mother and not by her, but he didn’t deem it appropriate tonight – nor necessary. Lina didn’t mean any harm, and he knew what she was trying to imply.

“It’s alright, Ulya, he has learned how to tone it down now.” The smile on Y/N’s face seemed sincere, and at that moment, he wouldn’t be able to tell what she was thinking about. “Ever since we moved in together, he’s learned how to behave himself. Most of the time, at least.”

It was Ulyana’s turn to playfully slap Vlad’s forearm and he found it almost weird, to find himself with his back to the wall in front of those two. And not even in a bad way, with all of them drinking vodka together and celebrating a romantic relationship that simply wasn’t there.

What had he become? Lying like that to an old, dear friend… Without thinking twice; without remorse. He sat there in her living room, eating her food, drinking her alcohol, and he kept on adding lies to the fire without being able to stop.

“Hey, she’s not a saint, either! Tell her.”

Y/N laughed, and it somehow took him by surprise, it knocked the wind out of him. He fully turned his head to stare at her, and it almost felt like seeing her for the first time and for the millionth time at the same time. The way she tilted her head back as she laughed; the way her earrings and piercings caught the light of the lighting fixture; even the way her fingers brushed against his, and the way he ended up holding her hand in his. Warm and soft, the skin so smooth that he almost pulled away.

He watched her talk, recount the story of how they met – or a watered-down version of it, with anything too compromising being filtered out. And as she conversed with Ulya, her fingers played with his and his gaze kept on dropping down on his hand, never missing a movement. She had somehow ended up tracing the three-bar cross between his thumb and forefinger – without looking at it, almost as though she had done just that so many times that she had ended up memorizing its placement, its lines. And as she went on talking, her fingers brushed across the Xs on his knuckles, and he had to fight that sudden impulse that pushed him to pull his hand away.

A couple of hours later, when they had finally bid Ulyana goodnight and thanked her for the pleasant dinner she had offered them, he found himself walking his best man’s dog in the park just across the street from her old friend’s apartment building. He watched Sharik sniff here and there, and for a moment he found himself wondering if that was what a normal life felt like – walking the dog at almost eleven in the night, with plastic bags in a pocket in case the dog pooped, arm in arm with a woman.

“You’re quiet,” she said at one point, when they stopped under a tree while Sharik sniffed just a few meters in front of them. “Is everything alright?”

It took him a while to answer. And it wasn’t because he hadn’t heard her, but because he was afraid of somehow saying the wrong thing as was custom with him. “Da,” he sighed eventually, “just thinking.” He shrugged, but he didn’t make a move to pull away when her hand trailed down his arm and her fingers entwined with his.

“I had a good time tonight. I hope you did too, and that I didn’t push myself too far with that story about… you know, us.”

“It was fine, she bought it.”

“Doesn’t make me feel less bad, though.”

He turned his head to look at her, and for a moment, the thought of how it would be like to do this every night with her crossed his mind. “Eh, I know.” It was quiet for a while after that, but when Sharik steered off the path, he found himself cursing out in Russian. “Come here, you stubborn dog!”

“Don’t be mean, Vlad! He’s just a dog.” She ran after Sharik then, and he watched her take him back by the collar as he fished a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his pants. He had just lit himself one when she took it from his fingers and put it out against the sole of her high-heeled shoe as she kept her balance with a hand firmly wrapped around his forearm.

“Why did you do that?” It was almost a gasp, half-surprised and half-pissed at a cigarette waisted in such a way.

“I had something to tell you yesterday, in the car.”

“You could’ve done that over shared cigarette!”

“I don’t want to taste cigarettes when I kiss someone, though.”

He almost opened his mouth to retort when her words registered in his brain, and all he could do was stare down into her eyes, not a sound leaving his lips.

“Like that night after the bar, just without drinks. I wanna do this sober.” She had taken a step forward, and they were now standing toe-to-toe. He could almost feel her, even with that short distance separating them – like when she had turned around and had ended up pressing her forehead against his back the night before, with the only difference that they were both awake now. “I want to kiss you again so badly it’s driving me nuts.”

That gasp didn’t leave his lips just because he managed to abruptly inhale quickly at the last second, but her words did make his heart beat faster somehow.

“I kept on telling myself that you’d do it, but you haven’t so far, and I can’t understand if that’s because you still dislike me or –”

He cut her off before she could continue. Her cheeks were burning when he cradled her face between his hands, and her lips were soft against his. Her hands came up to wrap around his wrists. When he pulled her closer, she let him; and when she deepened the kiss, when her tongue brushed against his teeth, he let her.

It was like one of those cliché moments, although it lasted for a couple of seconds at most: his breathing stopped, and the world seemed to stop with it as he kissed her. And then, when everything picked up again – his breathing, his heart, Hell’s Kitchen late-night traffic, Sharik’s tail snapping like a whip against his leg as he stood there – he found himself not wanting to pull away.

She did, though, and she looked up at him out of breath, his hands still cupping her cheeks and her hands still holding on to his wrists. “You’re so stubborn, I swear,” she chuckled. “But if you don’t kiss me again, I’ll go back to being stubborn, too.”

He cackled, and when Sharik pushed against his thigh with his nose, he looked down at him and shook his head. “Maybe Sergei was right, after all,” he mumbled before turning his attention back to Y/N and kissing her again, silencing her question before she had the time to voice it.

This is Sharik :) (pics found on Pinterest eons ago, I don’t remember the links, credits to the owner(s)!)

Comments and inbox are always open for feedback :) pls if you have any ideas you’d like to see in this story, feel free to hit me up, they’d for sure help me out lol since I’m slow AF :’)

TAGS (to be added to or removed from any list, shoot me an ask)

Everything: @idhrenniel @saibh29 @fuckthatfeeling @aya-fay @pebblesz892 @mblaqgi @becs-bunker @gruffle1

The Assistant: @flowers-in-your-hayr

People that might be interested: @kind-wolf @brobachev

#vladimir ranskahov #daredevil #vladimir ranskahov imagine #vladimir daredevil fanfic #vladimir ranskahov x reader #vladimir ranskahov fanfiction #fic series: the assistant #angelaiswriting

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davidmann95 · 3 years

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So... Crossover #1: any thoughts?

Anonymous said: You seemed not to think much of Crossover #1 on Twitter. Your full thoughts?

wcwit said: So Cates' Crossover #1, best bad comic of the year or just regular pretentious trash?

An incidental note upfront: What you’re seeing there is the apparently SUPER-RARE SECRET VARIANT COVER I unwittingly picked up at the store - at first glance indistinguishable from the standard cover, the kid getting four-color-fucked by mysterious comic book rays is in fact themselves reading a variant cover of the book, rather than the main cover again in an infinite painting-within-a-painting sort of deal that’s the standard.

So I wasn’t gonna get this: my initial post on the comic and what an obviously awful idea it was back when we only knew half the premise and it was known as Pray The Capes Away actually got some out-of-nowhere traction recently, and I’ve grown rapidly tired of Cates’ Marvel work. Even learning that it was going to be Image’s biggest debut in decades - Jesus fuck, how and why - mostly just made me wish it was Commanders in Crisis getting those kinds of numbers. But Sean Dillon/@deathchrist2000 and Ritesh Babu both got early looks at it and assured me that I, specifically, needed to see the last page, so in I dove. I’ll be posting my reaction to the last page below because I recorded it for their amusement, and below that I’ll talk about said last page. It may surprise you, however, that that wasn’t my main takeaway from the issue.

Let’s accentuate the positive first! This book is gorgeous. Geoff Shaw was terrific back with Thanos Wins, but this is an incredible stylistic level-up aided and abetted by Dee Cunniffe’s colors: it’s rote as hell to say “They mix the elevated and the mundane so well!”, but even beyond the obvious ben-day dots stuff there’s such a tangible sense that the comic book beings don’t belong here, that they’re of higher, misty, platonic stuff and we squishy non-paper-people inevitably crumble and break and bleed in their wake, communicating that big idea so much more powerfully than the actual loads of text on the subject. And if we’re talking good things, I’ll concede it’s possible that there could be subtleties that play out in more interesting ways as it goes on, and that not everything is meant to be taken at face value: a smart friend who actually did like it mentioned being interested in it as clumsy but potentially effective exploration of ‘what if the fun hobby you had inadvertently became contaminated and stigmatized by forces beyond your control?’ In a post-Comicsgate world where we recently ended up inches away from the Superman logo almost certainly becoming a fascist propaganda symbol ala the Punisher skull for at least a generation, that’s a defensible lens to view this book through.

For all Donny Cates’ legitimate talents however, I don’t think an expectation of subtlety is gonna work out with this one.

Okay first off getting into the rest of it the main characters’ name is Ellipsis because “Those three little dots...they can become anything”, so there’s that. More importantly, in the world of this story where comic fans face social oppression after superpeople materialize and fuck up Colorado, they face EVERY KIND OF OPPRESSION: there are clear parallels drawn in here to the violence and harassment faced by people persecuted for their religion, people seeking abortions, queer people, and people of color; this motherfucker even drops a “hates and fears” to let us know comic collecting basically makes you one of the goddamn X-Men. Which in theory could be a purely misjudged allegory rather than stemming from actual, obscenely inflated to the point of disgusting fears of ‘nerd oppression’, except that the book literally opens with a quote from Wertham. If Cates didn’t want to make the message “Hating comics? That’s bad. Like, racism bad”, he utterly, grotesquely failed by inextricably intermingling imagery of real-world bigotry with systemic, deluded fanboy paranoia, at least as of this first issue that’s supposed to meaningfully convey the premise. As a queer dude I think I’m somewhat in my lane to say it’s too blunt and broad and dopey to be particularly offensive, but the co-opting of oppression is what this is rooted in.

The idea of ‘comics good no matter what people think, ain’t it?’ extends to the last traditional local comic store standing in this world: much as superheroes are the primary cause of suffering in this world but the point of the story is still supposed to reveal the beauty in them, part of this is that the comics community isn’t perfect but it sure is great. Which is expressed here via Ellie’s boss Otto, a loveable asshole who yells at people coming in trying to sell the wrong kind of comics to fuck off, but at heart is we’re supposed to understand a good enough dude that the shop he runs is “the only home a lot of (the benighted nerds) have left” (because I guess in this alternate universe the physical stores are still the main hub through which comics fans talk with one another?).

So here’s a story of my very own! That’s me in 2013, it must’ve been some kind of special day because I’m wearing a shirt with a button. I’d at that point only frequented one of what would be my thus far four regular comic shops. The first was a great place, and while to say I had a sense of community there would be overstating it a bit, I was on really good terms with the owner and we regularly chatted when we had the time. When I left for college my store there wasn’t as well-stocked, and for some damn reason all variant covers were double-price, but I got along really well with the owner there too. The third I wasn’t so lucky; the guy regularly behind the desk was never overtly hostile, but clearly wanted to wring my neck every time I asked when a missing comic might get in or if I could update my pull list, and given I’m in the ‘ideal’ demographic for being a comic book store regular and was dropping a solid lump of money there every week, I wonder how others were treated there (the store nearly went under, was saved on the last day of operation by another store that wanted to incorporate it as part of its franchise, then shortly afterwards DID go under and is now I believe a beef jerky place). My current store is fine, I didn’t chat much with the folks behind the counter even before we all had medical incentive to get in and out of places fairly quickly but it almost always has what I’m looking for.

Just because those were my regular stores of course doesn’t mean those are the only ones I’ve ever gone to. About a year before that picture was taken - it’s the closest I could find - when I was 17 my store didn’t have something or another I was looking for, so I head across town to see if another place I had looked up had it. This other place didn’t have what I was looking for either, though I distinctly remember picking up a few issues of Hickman’s FF while I was there since I had foolishly fallen off, hence my remembering the year. I bought a couple issues, but hung around for a bit looking to see if I might grab something else out of a dollar box, setting my comics down. Without realizing it, I’d set my books down on top of another issue, and when I decided I wasn’t getting anything else, I just picked that up along with the rest of the pile and was about to walk out before the owner stopped me. He explained what I had done though assumed it had been deliberate, and because I was a good-hearted little geek I even recall thinking “Well, he’s gonna chew me out, but I guess I deserve it. I’ll try and take this to heart as a learning experience.”

Then he pulled up his shirt a little to show me the gun on his belt. He pointed at the security camera monitors at his desk, and explained to me that if I ever did something like that again, he would have it on tape, and he would pull that gun on me and hold me there while he called the cops.

As it turned out, the comic was free.

The whole thing was so sudden and bizarre and unexpected I didn’t actually freak out until the drive home. It wasn’t until weeks or maybe months later that I managed to tell my dad about the experience, because I *had* nearly stolen a (free) comic and my guilt was mixed in with my nerves and I guess I was somehow too close to register just how disproportionate his response was. It wasn’t until now, nearly a decade later and thinking about it for the first time in a long time as I write this, that I wondered if that might have gone differently - especially living in the midwest - if I hadn’t been a white, squeaky-voiced 17-year-old.

So, minor spoiler, when our cantankerous but well-meaning LCS owner yells to call the cops and grabs and yells at a small kid for pocketing a comic (and later displays fantasy racism towards said kid), I am not filled with nostalgic love for the brotherly safe space that is comic book stores, where this guy while not meant to be seen as perfect is still framed in part as a charming, witty representation of Why We Love These Places, And This Community, And This Genre, And This Medium. Cates is clearly drawing on real time at his local stores, but he equally clearly has a very different takeaway from those experiences than me. And I am, again, in a demographic - white, cis-male, abled, bi but more interested in women, disposable income, a lifelong collector - that the industry and a lot of the guys who sell it to us contort themselves around catering to, even if I had a single very negative experience and later an ongoing low-key uncomfortable one to help disabuse me of any notions of the purity of the dork community. In the world of Crossover as of #1, toxicity is intertwined, deliberately or not on the part of the creators, with what we love on the cosmic and small business scales alike, but at least in the latter case it’s the whole picture that’s beautiful, not any single kernel that needs to be worked on to be dug up.

So underneath is my video reaction to the last page of Crossover #1. Very minor spoilers because I mutter the last two words of the comic to myself, but under the video I discuss said final page and some other scattered thoughts. Whether you read that or not, my takeaway is this: I’m fascinated with wherever the hell this thing is going, I’m glad my dad liked it well enough to want to keep getting it because now I’ll get to see where it heads, but my first impression is that this is at heart meant as cheapass Oscar-bait for people who only read Batman. It’s big and high-concept but also small and intimate! It’s meta and about how great you, the reader are for your consumption, especially the consumption of this! It’s going to be in large part about a forbidden love between a couple divided across impermeable social lines (a couple where they’re a seemingly straight white man and woman, but one likes comics)! Maybe it’ll become Not That, and I’m sure it’ll do at least something interesting along the way because Cates has done good stuff before and there are some inherently interesting big ideas for him to play with here, but for the love of god if you’re thinking about getting this buy Commanders in Crisis too or instead, it’s another new book out of Image about superheroes dealing with the collapse of the multiverse but that one is really fucking good.

So the final page splash reveal is that when the comic book child discovered in here got out of Colorado, which has had an impenetrable energy shield erected around it by one of the heroes for years, she and others were ferried out of there...by Superman, as the narration declares that “This is a story...about hope.” They don’t say the word, but she sketches her savior, Ellie and Otto freak out and go “Is that---” when they see it, and on that last page we see that while a crude drawing it isn’t a rough analogue character, it’s a guy with a cape and trunks with an S on his chest. Surprisingly, I don’t have much to say: it’s just another blunt signifier that superheroes rule and are the best, paired with the most utterly devalued notion as of late of what makes Superman special in ‘hope’. I mean, I’m perversely excited to see whether this is building the entire series on a hook it can never deliver on, or if Cates actually has talked DC into an intercompany crossover; believable given they’ve done a bunch of those over the last several years, and why else would Mark Waid be supervising as ‘story editor’ on this? I guess it’ll shake out one way or another with #6 given Cates has said it “has one of the more epic and — I would argue historic — sequences in comic book history in it.” But I’m far less convinced this is gonna truly go into the meaty question of “What does Superman mean and what makes him unique in this world where superheroes in general are indisputably either failures or monstrous bastards given the scale of destruction their presence has brought about, and he himself failed to stop that?” than as some kind of holy grail of how great superheroes are despite how dang violent they’ve gotten these days for the crew to chase after, whatever additional twist will surely be placed upon it. At least he’s kinda helping an immigrant kid get over a wall, if that’s deliberate?

Random final thoughts:

* If I wrote the opening essay and turned it in in a college course, I would be expelled for plagiarizing Grant Morrison. This is not a joke.

* If mainstream American superhero comics ended January 2017 in this universe, its own last ‘crossover’ was Civil War II, which is hilarious.

* God, please tell me if it takes the dive after all that this isn’t somehow tied into whatever Waid’s Superman project is.

* I wouldn’t normally crap on issues with the finer details of worldbuilding, but A. This is rooted in a nominally ‘real’ world playing by recognizable rules, B. I’m ragging on this anyway so what’s the harm, and C. It’s really obvious. So: Why is one of the racists against the superheroes the guy who loves superheroes so much he’s the last holdout in the entire world still selling comic books about them? How does this modestly-sized shop exist long-term with apparently a significant regular customer base if there are no new comics or even reprints to restock with, ever? Who’s buying the serialized cop/cowboy comics that the U.S. government apparently created pretty much overnight (nobody, it’s just another Wertham dig)?

* The solicit for issue #3 proclaims “Don't miss this one, folks. If you do, it just might drive you...mad.”, so now I fear some kind of Ultra Comics riff.

* “Kids love chains” is the most metal-ass quote of all time and I hate that it’s being wasted as an arc title on this book.

#Donny Cates #Geoff Shaw #Dee Cunniffe #John J. Hill #Mark Waid #Me #Superman #Opinion

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recentanimenews · 3 years

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ESSAY: Berserk's Journey of Acceptance Over 30 Years of Fandom

My descent into anime fandom began in the '90s, and just as watching Neon Genesis Evangelion caused my first revelation that cartoons could be art, reading Berserk gave me the same realization about comics. The news of Kentaro Miura’s death, who passed on May 6, has been emotionally complicated for me, as it's the first time a celebrity's death has hit truly close to home. In addition to being the lynchpin for several important personal revelations, Berserk is one of the longest-lasting works I’ve followed and that I must suddenly bid farewell to after existing alongside it for two-thirds of my life.

Berserk is a monolith not only for anime and manga, but also fantasy literature, video games, you name it. It might be one of the single most influential works of the ‘80s — on a level similar to Blade Runner — to a degree where it’s difficult to imagine what the world might look like without it, and the generations of creators the series inspired.

Although not the first, Guts is the prototypical large sword anime boy: Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife, Siegfried/Nightmare from Soulcalibur, and Black Clover's Asta are all links in the same chain, with other series like Dark Souls and Claymore taking clear inspiration from Berserk. But even deeper than that, the three-character dynamic between Guts, Griffith, and Casca, the monster designs, the grotesque violence, Miura’s image of hell — all of them can be spotted in countless pieces of media across the globe.

Despite this, it just doesn’t seem like people talk about it very much. For over 20 years, Berserk has stood among the critical pantheon for both anime and manga, but it doesn’t spur conversations in the same way as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, or Dragon Ball Z still do today. Its graphic depictions certainly represent a barrier to entry much higher than even the aforementioned company.

Seeing the internet exude sympathy and fond reminiscing about Berserk was immensely validating and has been my single most therapeutic experience online. Moreso, it reminded me that the fans have always been there. And even looking into it, Berserk is the single best-selling property in the 35-year history of Dark Horse. My feeling is that Berserk just has something about it that reaches deep into you and gets stuck there.

I recall introducing one of my housemates to Berserk a few years ago — a person with all the intelligence and personal drive to both work on cancer research at Stanford while pursuing his own MD and maintaining a level of physical fitness that was frankly unreasonable for the hours that he kept. He was NOT in any way analytical about the media he consumed, but watching him sitting on the floor turning all his considerable willpower and intellect toward delivering an off-the-cuff treatise on how Berserk had so deeply touched him was a sight in itself to behold. His thoughts on the series' portrayal of sex as fundamentally violent leading up to Guts and Casca’s first moment of intimacy in the Golden Age movies was one of the most beautiful sentiments I’d ever heard in reaction to a piece of fiction.

I don’t think I’d ever heard him provide anything but a surface-level take on a piece of media before or since. He was a pretty forthright guy, but the way he just cut into himself and let his feelings pour out onto the floor left me awestruck. The process of reading Berserk can strike emotional chords within you that are tough to untangle. I’ve been writing analysis and experiential pieces related to anime and manga for almost ten years — and interacting with Berserk’s world for almost 30 years — and writing may just be yet another attempt for me to pull my own twisted-up feelings about it apart.

Berserk is one of the most deeply personal works I’ve ever read, both for myself and in my perception of Miura's works. The series' transformation in the past 30 years artistically and thematically is so singular it's difficult to find another work that comes close. The author of Hajime no Ippo, who was among the first to see Berserk as Miura presented him with some early drafts working as his assistant, claimed that the design for Guts and Puck had come from a mess of ideas Miura had been working on since his early school days.

写真は三浦建太郎君が寄稿してくれた鷹村です。今かなり感傷的になっています。思い出話をさせて下さい。僕が初めての週刊連載でスタッフが一人もいなくて困っていたら手伝いにきてくれました。彼が18で僕が19です。某大学の芸術学部の学生で講義明けにスケッチブックを片手に来てくれました。 pic.twitter.com/hT1JCWBTKu

— 森川ジョージ (@WANPOWANWAN) May 20, 2021

Miura claimed two of his big influences were Go Nagai’s Violence Jack and Tetsuo Hara and Buronson’s Fist of the North Star. Miura wears these influences on his sleeve, discovering the early concepts that had percolated in his mind just felt right. The beginning of Berserk, despite its amazing visual power, feels like it sprang from a very juvenile concept: Guts is a hypermasculine lone traveler breaking his body against nightmarish creatures in his single-minded pursuit of revenge, rigidly independent and distrustful of others due to his dark past.

Uncompromising, rugged, independent, a really big sword ... Guts is a romantic ideal of masculinity on a quest to personally serve justice against the one who wronged him. Almost nefarious in the manner in which his character checked these boxes, especially when it came to his grim stoicism, unblinkingly facing his struggle against literal cosmic forces. Never doubting himself, never trusting others, never weeping for what he had lost.

Miura said he sketched out most of the backstory when the manga began publication, so I have to assume the larger strokes of the Golden Arc were pretty well figured out from the outset, but I’m less sure if he had fully realized where he wanted to take the story to where we are now. After the introductory mini-arcs of demon-slaying, Berserk encounters Griffith and the story draws us back to a massive flashback arc. We see the same Guts living as a lone mercenary who Griffith persuades to join the Band of the Hawk to help realize his ambitions of rising above the circumstances of his birth to join the nobility.

We discover the horrific abuses of Guts’ adoptive father and eventually learn that Guts, Griffith, and Casca are all victims of sexual violence. The story develops into a sprawling semi-historical epic featuring politics and war, but the real narrative is in the growing companionship between Guts and the members of the band. Directionless and traumatized by his childhood, Guts slowly finds a purpose helping Griffith realize his dream and the courage to allow others to grow close to him.

Miura mentioned that many Band of the Hawk members were based on his early friend groups. Although he was always sparse with details about his personal life, he has spoken about how many of them referred to themselves as aspiring manga authors and how he felt an intense sense of competition, admitting that among them he may have been the only one seriously working toward that goal, desperately keeping ahead in his perceived race against them. It’s intriguing thinking about how much of this angst may have made it to the pages, as it's almost impossible not to imagine Miura put quite a bit of himself in Guts.

Perhaps this is why it feels so real and makes The Eclipse — the quintessential anime betrayal at the hands of Griffith — all the more heartbreaking. The raw violence and macabre imagery certainly helped. While Miura owed Hellraiser’s Cenobites much in the designs of the God Hand, his macabre portrayal of the Band of the Hawk’s eradication within the literal bowels of hell, the massive hand, the black sun, the Skull Knight, and even Miura’s page compositions have been endlessly referenced, copied, and outright plagiarized since.

The events were tragic in any context and I have heard many deeply personal experiences others drew from The Eclipse sympathizing with Guts, Casca, or even Griffith’s spiral driven by his perceived rejection by Guts. Mine were most closely aligned with the tragedy of Guts having overcome such painful circumstances to not only reject his own self enforced solitude, but to fearlessly express his affection for his loved ones.

The Golden Age was a methodical destruction of Guts’ self-destructive methods of preservation ruined in a single selfish act by his most trusted friend, leaving him once again alone and afraid of growing close to those around him. It ripped the romance of Guts’ mission and eventually took the story down a course I never expected. Berserk wasn’t a story of revenge but one of recovery.

Guess that’s enough beating around the bush, as I should talk about how this shift affected me personally. When I was young, when I began reading Berserk I found Guts’ unflagging stoicism to be really cool, not just aesthetically but in how I understood guys were supposed to be. I was slow to make friends during school and my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood had my friends' parents moving away faster than I could find new ones. At some point I think I became too afraid of putting myself out there anymore, risking rejection when even acceptance was so fleeting. It began to feel easier just to resign myself to solitude and pretend my circumstances were beyond my own power to correct.

Unfortunately, I became the stereotypical kid who ate alone during lunch break. Under the invisible expectations demanding I not display weakness, my loneliness was compounded by shame for feeling loneliness. My only recourse was to reveal none of those feelings and pretend the whole thing didn't bother me at all. Needless to say my attempts to cope probably fooled no one and only made things even worse, but I really didn’t know of any better way to handle my situation. I felt bad, I felt even worse about feeling bad and had been provided with zero tools to cope, much less even admit that I had a problem at all.

The arcs following the Golden Age completely changed my perspective. Guts had tragically, yet understandably, cut himself off from others to save himself from experiencing that trauma again and, in effect, denied himself any opportunity to allow himself to be happy again. As he began to meet other characters that attached themselves to him, between Rickert and Erica spending months waiting worried for his return, and even the slimmest hope to rescuing Casca began to seed itself into the story, I could only see Guts as a fool pursuing a grim and hopeless task rather than appreciating everything that he had managed to hold onto.

The same attributes that made Guts so compelling in the opening chapters were revealed as his true enemy. Griffith had committed an unforgivable act but Guts’ journey for revenge was one of self-inflicted pain and fear. The romanticism was gone.

Farnese’s inclusion in the Conviction arc was a revelation. Among the many brilliant aspects of her character, I identified with her simply for how she acted as a stand-in for myself as the reader: Plagued by self-doubt and fear, desperate to maintain her own stoic and uncompromising image, and resentful of her place in the world. She sees Guts’ fearlessness in the face of cosmic horror and believes she might be able to learn his confidence.

But in following Guts, Farnese instead finds a teacher in Casca. In taking care of her, Farnese develops a connection and is able to experience genuine sympathy that develops into a sense of responsibility. Caring for Casca allows Farnese to develop the courage she was lacking not out of reckless self-abandon but compassion.

I can’t exactly credit Berserk with turning my life around, but I feel that it genuinely helped crystallize within me a sense of growing doubts about my maladjusted high school days. My growing awareness of Guts' undeniable role in his own suffering forced me to admit my own role in mine and created a determination to take action to fix it rather than pretending enough stoicism might actually result in some sort of solution.

I visited the Berserk subreddit from time to time and always enjoyed the group's penchant for referring to all the members of the board as “fellow strugglers,” owing both to Skull Knight’s label for Guts and their own tongue-in-cheek humor at waiting through extended hiatuses. Only in retrospect did it feel truly fitting to me. Trying to avoid the pitfalls of Guts’ path is a constant struggle. Today I’m blessed with many good friends but still feel primal pangs of fear holding me back nearly every time I meet someone, the idea of telling others how much they mean to me or even sharing my thoughts and feelings about something I care about deeply as if each action will expose me to attack.

It’s taken time to pull myself away from the behaviors that were so deeply ingrained and it’s a journey where I’m not sure the work will ever be truly done, but witnessing Guts’ own slow progress has been a constant source of reassurance. My sense of admiration for Miura’s epic tale of a man allowing himself to let go after suffering such devastating circumstances brought my own humble problems and their way out into focus.

Over the years I, and many others, have been forced to come to terms with the fact that Berserk would likely never finish. The pattern of long, unexplained hiatuses and the solemn recognition that any of them could be the last is a familiar one. The double-edged sword of manga largely being works created by a single individual is that there is rarely anyone in a position to pick up the torch when the creator calls it quits. Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and likely Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter X Hunter all frozen in indefinite hiatus, the publishers respectfully holding the door open should the creators ever decide to return, leaving it in a liminal space with no sense of conclusion for the fans except what we can make for ourselves.

The reason for Miura’s hiatuses was unclear. Fans liked to joke that he would take long breaks to play The Idolmaster, but Miura was also infamous for taking “breaks” spent minutely illustrating panels to his exacting artistic standard, creating a tumultuous release schedule during the wars featuring thousands of tiny soldiers all dressed in period-appropriate armor. If his health was becoming an issue, it’s uncommon that news would be shared with fans for most authors, much less one as private as Miura.

Even without delays, the story Miura was building just seemed to be getting too big. The scale continued to grow, his narrative ambition swelling even faster after 20 years of publication, the depth and breadth of his universe constantly expanding. The fan-dubbed “Millennium Falcon Arc” was massive, changing the landscape of Berserk from a low fantasy plagued by roaming demons to a high fantasy where godlike beings of sanity-defying size battled for control of the world. How could Guts even meet Griffith again? What might Casca want to do when her sanity returned? What are the origins of the Skull Knight? And would he do battle with the God Hand? There was too much left to happen and Miura’s art only grew more and more elaborate. It would take decades to resolve all this.

But it didn’t need to. I imagine we’ll never get a precise picture of the final years of Miura’s life leading up to his tragic passing. In the final chapters he released, it felt as if he had directed the story to some conclusion. The unfinished Fantasia arc finds Guts and his newfound band finding a way to finally restore Casca’s sanity and — although there is still unmistakably a boundary separating them — both seem resolute in finding a way to mend their shared wounds together.

One of the final chapters features Guts drinking around the campfire with the two other men of his group, Serpico and Roderick, as he entrusts the recovery of Casca to Schierke and Farnese. It's a scene that, in the original Band of the Hawk, would have found Guts brooding as his fellows engage in bluster. The tone of this conversation, however, is completely different. The three commiserate over how much has changed and the strength each has found in the companionship of the others. After everything that has happened, Guts declares that he is grateful.

The suicidal dedication to his quest for vengeance and dispassionate pragmatism that defined Guts in the earliest chapters is gone. Although they first appeared to be a source of strength as the Black Swordsman, he has learned that they rose from the fear of losing his friends again, from letting others close enough to harm him, and from having no other purpose without others. Whether or not Guts and Griffith were to ever meet again, Guts has rediscovered the strength to no longer carry his burdens alone.

All that has happened is all there will ever be. We too must be grateful.

Peter Fobian is an Associate Manager of Social Video at Crunchyroll, writer for Anime Academy and Anime in America, and an editor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: Peter Fobian

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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cagestark · 5 years

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Can i request something i dont see enough of, which is AlphaPeter/OmegaTony ? :D Lots of fluffy happy stuff, i love angst too a slong as theres a happy ending - { holographic-starker }

this was a tough one to write, but I enjoyed myself and feel like I learned a lot about myself as a writer, even. Thanks for the request, let me know if you’re displeased

Read here on AO3.

Warnings: ABO, consent issues because Tony is in heat. Alpha!Peter, Omega!Tony. Peter is 18+ though. Explicit.

The thing is, the kid is too polite.

Peter is freshly eighteen when he moves into the tower and begins interning for Tony, spending every last moment Avenging and patrolling and attending online classes. Being thirty years older than the kid, a part of him assumes that he should take on the role of a cantankerous old man complaining about the boorish youth. His knees have certainly taken it upon themselves to method act, protesting hours spent cross-legged on the floor. His hair has obviously been visiting wardrobe and makeup without his notice, because there are more gray hairs there than he remembers there being last year, last season, last month.

All this to say that Tony is getting older, and it is no secret that the younger generations are fucking irritating. Disrespectful, he’d say, channeling Howard or Jarvis through that internal Ouija board that keeps coming back no matter how many times he throws it out. And alright, it’s part of their rite of passage. Find him a generation who doesn’t annoy their elders and he’d eat Cap’s shield.

The one exception: Peter.

The kid has sweetness in his DNA. Authenticity clings to his red blood cells which explains why every bone in his body is genuine and kind. The respect he shows the Avengers is nearly comical—would be, if it didn’t drive Tony up the walls for other reasons. He is firm and gentle, thoughtful and conscientious. There are no valid complaints to be had about him.

The kid, if anything, is too polite.

Which means that he can’t possibly be doing this on purpose.

Peter presenting as an alpha shocked Tony to the core, and he wasn’t alone. “I’ve had him pegged as an omega since he was in diapers, Tony,” May had whispered to him while they watched Peter having his blood drawn by Bruce inside the Hulk-proof enclosure beneath the ground at Stark Tower. Judging by how Peter’s face flushes red, he can hear through the glass.

“A lot people had me pegged as an alpha,” Tony responds, maybe a little too coldly. But maybe it hits a little too close to home—children having their designations determined for them at such a young age. How much of Peter’s upbringing had influenced his disposition? Had he been groomed to be an omega even despite his biology? The thought makes Tony sick. He knows how that feels. He knows. “This doesn’t change anything about him. He’s still Peter.”

But it did change things.

Because now they are playing this game together, and either Peter is a better bluffer than Tony ever anticipated, or the kid genuinely doesn’t know what he’s doing to the older man.

It starts the first day Peter returns to his work in the lab after his rut. They have been putting in hours together working on a new AI, one Peter has affectionately dubbed Saturday, no matter how many times Tony tells him that the key to a good name is all in the acronym). Since it is Peter’s first effort to make an artificial intelligence, Tony is letting him lead. He is bent over the lab table examining a microchip the size of his thumbnail, miniature soldering iron clutched between in his fingers when the door to the lab opens.

He whirls around on the stool, beaming. Peter is dressed in his old Midtown High sweatshirt, the collar of his dress shirt blooming around his neck. His hair is dark from a shower, wet curls clinging to his forehead. He looks—good. Healthy. Strong. Fertile.

They smell each other for the first time.

It’s not Tony’s right to tell anyone to wear scent blockers, though he ingests his own via pill form twice a day, showers with them, has them mixed into the sterilization stations at lab’s exits so he can clean his hands and neutralize any happy-angsty scents that were brought about during the day’s tinkering. Because it’s a polite thing to do. Alphas and omegas are very sensitive to smells. Polite alphas will wear blockers to avoid overwhelming omegas or antagonizing other alphas in public—and when it comes to omegas, scent blockers are like protection, like the nano-tech suit he goes nowhere without. If no one can smell Tony, they can’t look at him like a piece of meat, lust over him, come on to him when all he’s trying to do is walk down the fucking street.

The kid is not wearing blockers. Before he presented, Peter had the blandly neutral scent of a beta, and he would have been incapable of scenting Tony. Peter smells of something fond. It takes Tony only a moment to place it: the mahogany of the bookshelves in his childhood home, the lemon-basil scent that would cling to Jarvis after days spent in the kitchen.

He sees Peter’s nostrils flair, surely trying to take in a scent that for all intents and purposes, he shouldn’t be able to smell. But by the way his eyes go hooded, throat bobbing, he can. The boy’s mouth opens, literally mouths the word wow. Tony feels remarkably like a rabbit caught in a dog’s gaze.

Tony burns himself. “Fucking—fuck!” He drops the soldering iron and it barely misses the microchip.

“Mr. Stark, are you okay?”

Peter comes over to examine the burn, a dark, flushed pink, the skin already raw and shiny. The smell comes with him, each of the boy’s emotions playing out like a symphony for his nose: concern, comfort, anxiety. And yeah, arousal.

Tony pulls away before their skin can touch, jamming his hands into the gloves that he should have been wearing from the start. “Fine,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Peter becomes—distracting. At best. Arousing at worst. Days spent in the lab under Tony’s tutelage are filled with emotions for the young, enthusiastic boy: joy when he solves a problem, frustration when he can’t, the soft melancholic scent of rotting wood on days when his smile is muted and his eyes seem far away. Tony is too receptive to him. More than once, he’s found himself opening his mouth, desperate to ask for the love of God, Pete, will you take a shower? Will you wear something, anything, to come between your scent and my nose? But the kid doesn’t deserve that, and Tony isn’t sure he could stand the embarrassed, insecure scent he’d give off after being confronted. The need to comfort might be too strong to overpower.

Tony does his very best to maintain a professional relationship, but Peter seems determined to cross every boundary.

Next comes the scenting. To be fair: maybe he doesn’t know how incredibly personal it is. Tony knows that it’s common in schools to separate kids by designation and teach them only the information absolutely pertinent to them. Maybe growing up small and thin and soft hearted, pegged O’ from birth, they didn’t teach him what it means when an alpha scents someone who they aren’t related to.

Tony himself doesn’t know what it means when Peter does it. Maybe Peter doesn’t even know, maybe it’s just an itch that needs scratched, and he knows that scenting Tony can scratch it. Some things are just that innocent. But on his dark days when Tony is hunched over at the lab table, back and eyes aching from working through the night, all it takes is Peter brushing by. His steps will stutter just beyond Tony’s shoulders. He inhales—now Tony is trained like one of Pavlov’s dogs, and the relief, the arousal, it often comes right then, even on just the inhale—and then Peter’s forehead will loll forward, soft hair and skin nuzzling at the scent gland on Tony’s neck until their scents are mixed. Until Tony’s body is soft and pliant (except for his cock, which is hard and throbbing).

Then Peter moves on like nothing happened.

What the fuck, Tony sometimes mouths, keeping his eyes on the tablet in front of him, terrified to turn and acknowledge what the boy just did.

It might not be so bad if they weren’t so fucking compatible. Yeah, he can admit it. Tony had spent weeks agonizing about that after the kid first brought his scent down into the lab, he’s come to terms, thanks. It’s a biological fact, one he remembers any time he takes in a whiff of mahogany and lemon-basil. God, he didn’t think a smell could be so comforting and arousing all at once. It makes him ache, someplace in his chest where the arc reactor used to sit, and somewhere lower, deep in his pelvis where he should have grown children, if he’d been a decent omega. If he hadn’t spent so long trying to pretend to be an alpha, frying his biology, cooking his ovaries right to medium-well-done, AKA infertility.

What use would Peter have for him? Tony is old, past safe childbearing years even if he wasn’t barren. Alphas want legacies, they want homemakers, they want everything Howard worked so hard to empty Tony of. Far too often he finds himself maudlin and thinking such thoughts before the futility of them strikes him. His attractiveness is a non-issue; he is determined that he and Peter will never come together that way.

As it is, the scent blockers Tony takes, while being ultra-effective, aren’t as effective for a pair—not a pair. No, they’re not a pair. Just two friendly friends, mentor and mentee, platonic hi there Mr. Stark how are you doing goodness, no knots involved. God. He should not be thinking about the kid’s knot—anyway, the blockers aren’t as effective for people who are as compatible as Peter and Tony are. They are his last defense, and he often burns through them before the afternoon hits, body working overtime to make his scent potent again so that he might have a chance to attract the virile alpha across the room. It’s embarrassing, smelling so badly of pining omega that he can smell himself in the enclosed space of the elevator.

Like he is right now.

Although, it isn’t the elevator. It’s the bathroom.

Tony grabs the hand towels off of the rack and stuffs them at the bottom of the door where the crack is, desperate to keep his own smell in and Peter’s smell out. Then he crawls into the bathtub there and draws the curtain shut. As if that’s going to help.

He looks to the ceiling, wondering why a deity he doesn’t even believe in seems to be punishing him like this. Inside his pants, his cock is aching, and he can’t help but to press the heel of his hand against it, exhaling in the brief relief it gives. Lifting his wrist to his nose he breaths deep and can’t stop the groan that passes his lips. He smells like Peter, their scents combining, lemon and sugar to make lemonade, so sweet his mouth waters and his teeth ache.

When Peter arrived in the lab just moments before, he’d brought with him the scent of fury: scorched earth, and something sadder. His eyes were red from tears, lips pressed thin together. Tony watched him, paralyzed, as he tried three different times to enter his access code to the lab before FRIDAY showed mercy and let him in. Then as soon as there was nothing between them, it was like two oppositely charged magnets coming together.

They collided. Tony’s arms wrapped around him and Peter’s nose buried in that spot between his neck and shoulder, inhaling and exhaling fire on Tony’s exposed skin. Peter babbles away, lips brushing his skin, something about an argument with Ned and MJ, both sides feeling neglected and wronged, long overdue issues just now bubbling to the surface, he’d imagine. He can barely focus on what the boy is saying. It feels like there’s an invisible hand on the back of his neck, tilting him into the perfect position for his alpha to scent and find comfort in him. Tony holds him until all the anger and hurt and helplessness have seeped out of him.

What the fuck, Tony mouths to the ceiling. One of these days, he’s going to ask FRIDAY to create a montage of his WTF moments so that he might literally have concrete footage of how weird his life is.

Then one of Peter’s hands drifts up like he is going to cup Tony’s shoulder, but instead he firmly presses his thumb into the gland there and it’s like Thor has sent a bolt of lightning down. Tony’s entire body jerks and melts, every bone in his body relaxing for his alpha except for the one in his pants, and speaking of, Peter whimpers and shifts and there is no mistaking an alpha’s cock. There just isn’t. It’s veritably huge and hard and how many years has it been since he’s had an alpha inside him, since he’s been knotted—

The scents around them change, thick with arousal. It takes him that long to realize that Peter’s heightened emotional sensitivity might have a biological cause.

He is going into a rut.

“Mr. Stark,” Peter slurs, hips shifting. “You smell sooo good.”

It takes herculean effort to separate their bodies. The sheer heat and pheromones that Peter is throwing off are tangible even when he’s resolutely breathing through his mouth. He must be a sight: eyes wild and terrified, cock stiff, sprinting bow-legged to the bathroom so that he could get just a moment—just a moment to calm himself down and use his brain.

It’s going…about as well as can be expected, Tony thinks, desperately fisting his cock in the bathtub. If he could just rub one out, maybe it will bleed some of the fire from his veins. There is a gentle knocking at the door and Peter’s muffled voice, but Tony can barely hear it. He’s so close, building up to an orgasm so quickly that it should be shameful, but at least there is no one here to see. Wrist pressed to his nose, he inhales Peter’s scent like a man coming up from water, desperate for air. His balls are drawn up tight, stomach twisted into knots—and still he doesn’t cum.

“Mr. Stark, are you alright? Are you hurt?” Peter’s voice is raised, worried. Tony realizes that he has been whimpering, surely loud enough for the genetically enhanced boy to hear.

The pain inside him rises up but never crests, just rests there, aching in his gut. Cramping. Curiously, he reaches down past the petite testicles, down—

He’s wet. Soaked. The touch of his finger nearly brings him to ecstasy. This is what he needs, something inside of him, filling that emptiness that is so acute it aches. One finger isn’t enough. His hole is already loose, taking two easily.

The door breaks down. I’m in heat, Tony thinks numbly listening to wood splinter and hinges break. Maybe there was a slow build up that he missed, but it burned away in an instant in the face of this alpha. That is why Peter went into rut. Because of me. He barely has time to shove his cock back into his pants. For a moment, after Peter wrenches back the shower curtain Tony feels like a woman out of the old bodice rippers his mother used to keep in her bedside drawer. The ones with helpless omegas ravished by alphas who were driven mad by their scents, alphas who couldn’t have stopped their urges even if they wanted to.

The look Peter gives him is certainly aroused enough. He is hard in his jeans, a bulge that looks impossibly huge compared to Tony’s own. Peter’s chest rises and falls so rapidly that the older man is worried for his health. Those dark eyes scan Tony from head to toe and then the boy collapses, knees striking the tiled floor, groaning. He crawls to the bathtub and rests his feverish cheeks against the lip of the tub, mouth open and panting.

“Mr. Stark.” The voice is absolutely wrecked.

It is pure restraint as a result of his years of experience that keeps him from rolling onto his hands and knees to present for this boy, this wet-behind-the-ears alpha who has barely started his second rut and probably never popped a knot in his life.

“Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good,” groans Peter.

Even burning up, cramping, shaking, Tony reaches out to pet at Peter’s head. He hopes to offer comfort, but the boy snatches his hand out of the air in a bruising grip. Then he draws it to his mouth and presses in the fingers that were just inside Tony’s sopping hole. The boy’s tongue slips between the fingers, searching every crevice for more slick, groaning even as he licks the palm tasting only heart-love-life lines. “Mr. Stark,” Peter pants, trying again for words. “Can I have you? Please. Let me have you.”

“Yes,” Tony gasps.

They come together clumsily. It takes a moment for them to realize that Tony is trying to crawl out of the tub while Peter is trying to crawl in. They end up outside of it on the tiled floor, Tony spread out underneath the young alpha. Peter sheds his shirt and there should be violins, there should be mood lighting and a spotlight because the kid is fucking built. He almost has as many abs as fingers, so lithe and strong. He reminds Tony of spider silk, thin and so strong.

“Undress,” Peter says lowly, helping Tony to sit up so that he might pull off his shirt. Yeah, Tony isn’t 18 years old with genetically enhanced muscles but he likes to think he does okay. Peter’s eyes roll, palms flat on Tony’s pecs to drag down and down, over the scarring where the arc reactor used to be, scraping at the chest hairs. It melts the omega’s brain, primal parts of him purring. His body is satisfying to his mate, even if he is older and grayer and harder than any omega has a right to be. “God, you’re so—Jesus you’re hot Mr. Stark.”

“Knot me,” Tony groans. His hips are thrusting up into the hard cradle of Peter’s pelvis. His cock is throbbing, leaking, but it is nothing compared to the emptiness inside of him. The room is small and filled with so many potent scents that he can barely keep his eyes open. All of his senses are consumed by Peter, by what he’s doing with Peter. “Come on, kid. It hurts.”

Peter goes feral at the thought. He tears at their clothes, ribbons of jean and cotton, tennis shoes nudged off of feet. When he is naked as the day he was born, the fever in Tony seems to reach its boiling point. The kid is sculpted; it’s indecent. If there was any doubt he was meant to be an alpha, his cock disputes it. Tony, who has had plenty of fulfilling sexual experiences with people of all genders and designations, is still intimidated. Aroused. Anxious. He knows that his biology has prepared him for this. His body is made to take cocks of that size, but what if it doesn’t? What if he displeases this alpha, displeases Peter?

A hand comes to rest on his shoulder, thumb pressing into that tender part of his neck that has his legs jolting. “Easy,” Peter says, and Tony’s entire body relaxes. That voice drains all the fear and anxiety out of him, Novocain for the soul. Why was he worrying? His head is pleasantly fuzzy like with the buzz of a few strong drinks. Underneath it all is the ache in his cock, the emptiness inside him, but he does not beg. Does not squirm. Because unbearably tender, Peter assures: “I’ll take care of you.”

The tiles under his palms and knees are cold on his feverish skin when he turns over. He lets his back bow to appease the ache inside him until he is presenting fully, cheek pressed against the floor. The sounds Peter makes behind him are wrecked as he folds himself over the omega beneath him, mouth hotly over the skin at the nape of his neck. It makes all the hairs on his body stand on edge—god the only thing better than mating with alpha is bonding with this alpha, bite, bite, please—

“Can’t,” Peter groans. “Can’t bite you. You don’t mean that.”

Tony bucks the boy off until Peter is sitting back on his haunches, cock obscene between his legs, looking more like a confused pup than an assertive alpha. Tony bares his teeth even in the face of his instincts which recoil just at the idea. “I thought you knew what I needed,” he goads.

Peter’s eyes harden. Maybe this polite young man defers to him on most things, but not this thing. He fists a hand in Tony’s hair and wrenches him up until their naked bodies are plastered together from knee to neck. Teeth brush his neck again and it’s like touching a live wire. If he’d jerked any harder, he might have broken skin. As it is, Peter just holds him there, bite firm and bordering on painful until all the fight goes out of him. The boy guides him back down, body lax like all the bones are gone. One hand drifts up and back to run over where the alpha’s teeth were, desperate to feel the indentations.

“Didn’t break skin,” Peter promises, like Tony doesn’t already know. No broken skin, but close. Close enough to have him pliant and purring, the fever in his skin giving him the briefest respite. Then Peter’s fingers dance downward to where the omega is wet and hot and so empty it hurts. Just the brush of fingertips, the promise of pleasure, has Tony groaning into the tiled floor.

Gently, Peter presses in. Attuned to the alpha’s senses, he hears the younger man’s breath catch, turn high and breathy. A second finger joins the first and yes, that’s better, so much better than the gaping emptiness. By the third finger, Tony feels like he could cum from this alone, even if Peter has done nothing but skim his fingers over that spot inside him that’s so good it aches.

Peter hushes him, a hand planted over that fading mark on the back of Tony’s neck. His other hand grips his cock, notching the head where Tony needs it most. The omega takes the first half before he feels full, sated even, but then there is more. Peter makes the rawest noises, and Tony laments not facing him, not being able to see his expression. He can imagine it: the eyes squeezed shut, mouth open, head back. But then there is more cock inside him than he thought was possible, and it burns everything else from his mind. The only thing that exists is that cock, anchoring him to this reality. He can feel the flared base of the alpha’s cock already puffing, desperate to knot.

Content that his cock isn’t going to split Tony in half—though it certainly feels like it from the other side of things—Peter sets a brutal pace. The finesse his fingers might have lacked is overshadowed by his cock which probably couldn’t miss Tony’s prostate if it tried. All he can do is take it, fingers scrabbling to find purchase on the slick floor, body singing, prepared to burn out at any moment.

“To-ny,” whines Peter, drawing the word out obscenely. The next word is softer, said through teeth: “Omega.”

“Alpha,” Tony gasps. “Harder—more. Come on. Need it, need your knot—”

“Then take it,” Peter cries. “Take it! God, you feel so good, you’re perfect, perfect—”

Tony cums, cock spurting onto the tiled floor. Every muscles clenches, cramping, spasming as his orgasm goes on and on, spurred on by Peter’s cock. Tony can’t even take it enough breath to scream, just gapes, cheek pressed to the cool floor. He can feel Peter’s own end coming, the knot growing, the sounds he makes becoming louder and less inhibited.

When Peter finally cums, he howls, crying out the way a man might if he’d just been stabbed only he’s the one stabbing Tony, stabbing him with his cock, forcing the knot past the rim and Tony doesn’t know if he can take it, there is brief pain cresting and then—it’s like it all goes white. His first orgasm was nothing compared to this. This would be painful, if it weren’t so good, if it weren’t exactly what he needed. It’s so much deeper than when he cums from his cock; in a way that feels so external. But this is inside him, deep in his womb, his entire body and being rejoicing at the alpha inside him loading him with sperm. Every spasm of his body is matched a heartbeat later by the cock inside him.

The come-down is slow. Having lost his strength ages ago, Tony is prostrate on the floor, knees and back aching. Above him is a firm, warm weight. The breaths are too ragged for Peter to be sleeping. Still, there is no speaking. Not until the knot inside him deflates and Peter draws back, cum and slick slipping out from inside of Tony.

When he manages to get up on his hands an knees, reaching out to use the sink to brace himself to stand (trying hard not to slip in all the bodily fluids), he sees that Peter is sitting back on his haunches, face buried in his hands, shaking with tears.

Tony nearly flinches at the sight. His heart pounds—alpha, hurting.

“Peter? Pete? God, what is it? Are you—”

“I’m so sorry,” Peter wails.

“Wh—what the hell are you sorry for?”

Peter can’t even answer, he’s so distraught. Tony isn’t good at this. It’s safe to say that most emotional situations have him withdrawing, and hastily. But this is Peter: the young man he’s had a soft spot for even years before the attraction arrived. So instead he lowers himself back down and sits next to the boy, drawing him in. Peter buries his face in Tony’s neck, scenting and scenting. It isn’t hard to exude comfort and warmth, not when he has the young alpha in his arms. Peter’s tears slow and then stop.

Heart in his throat, Tony asks: “What that—not good for you, kid?”

When Peter pulls away, his face is twisted with confusion. “What are you talking about? That—it was—God, Mr. Stark. I’m going to be thinking about that for the rest of my life, probably.”

The omega inside him purrs. “Thanks for the ego boost.”

Peter sighs, wiping at his face. “That’s just so not how I wanted it to happen. When you’re, when you’re in heat you can’t technically consent. You ran from me and I literally—oh shoot, Mr. Stark, I broke down your door.”

“About that—it’s coming out of your paycheck.”

“I’m not being paid, I’m an intern—"

“You—what? You’re not being paid? That doesn’t sound—”

“Can we, like, talk about my pay later?”

Tony’s mouth clicks shut. He nods.

“I just,” Peter sighs, relaxed with his head in the crook of Tony’s neck. They’re both naked, sweat cooling rapidly, but their bodies pressed together are more than enough to keep them warm. “All that effort I put in trying to attract you, trying to treat you right, like an alpha is supposed to treat an omega—then I went and broke your door.”

“Jesus,” Tony mutters. “I should have known you’re too smart not to know what you’ve been doing. Scenting me like I’m going out of style.”

“You’ll never go out of style Mr. Stark,” Peter assures. “I thought I was being subtle. It never seemed to work. Then I got worried that maybe you just weren’t interested. But I can smell you.”

“I’m interested,” Tony says into the younger man’s hair. “Trust me. Interested is putting it lightly. Not to mention, I’m a pretty creative guy. I could have probably stopped you if I wasn’t interested.”

“Even if you could, it’s not right for me to, to just—consent is important!”

“You’re goddamn right it is,” Tony says. He draws Peter’s chin up so they can meet eyes, and even bloodshot and wet, Peter’s are still warm and sincere and painfully adorable. “So, while I’m of sane mind and in between waves, let’s just go ahead and say I’m giving you consent. Enthusiastically. Deal?”

It’s Peter’s turn to melt and then purr, a low growling in his chest, looking like the spider who caught the fly, only more charming and with far less legs thank god. He mouths at Tony’s neck, kissing the gland there to make him shiver, and when he speaks Tony can feel the brush of his lips moving against his skin: “Deal.”

#starker #abo #Omega!Tony #Alpha!Peter

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mk-wizard · 4 years

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She-Ra Final Season Review

Before reading on, I warn you that this review contains a lot of spoilers, so please cease and desist reading if you haven't seen the final season or the series in general of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix.

Before I also continue, I have to admit that this is not going to be a positive review. In fact, it's a pretty bad review and I hate saying this because I was absolutely impressed and enamoured with the series, but then the final season left me feeling cheated as it contained many amateur mistakes that affected everything.

Don't get me wrong, there are some good things that came of it which I will list briefly. Number one, we finally got to get to know Netossa and Spinerella. Plus, they turned out to be interesting, entertaining and well rounded characters and you couldn't help, but root for them whether they were together or apart. Number two, King Micah didn't disappoint as he did turn out to be of value to this arc and I like that the fact he was well aware of how absent he was from Glimmer's life was played out. Number three, Scorpia finally found her place somewhere which rightfully was with the side of good and among the princesses after all. She was NEVER a misfit princess at all as all of them are unique and they celebrate that. With that said, she too learned to celebrate her uniqueness. Number four, we got to see the princesses (namely Mermista) find their own strength without being so dependent on She-Ra which they should be considering they literally rule their own kingdoms. Number five, Entrapta found her redemption by finally learning to work with people and to actually care about them rather than always lose herself in her science.

But despite doing all of this, these are the only things I liked in the season.

Everything started to feel wrong for me the moment Bow forgave Glimmer so quickly. Considering the focus of this show are relationships, I was expecting Bow to need more time to forgive her rather than just let everything go in one episode. In Steven Universe which is another show that focuses heavily on relationships, incidents of trust being broken took into account that rebuilding it and reconciling is a long process. Sometimes, it even spanned through almost an entire season. Having Bow forgive Glimmer immediately after she gives a short monologue is unrealistic and it in fact, cheapens their friendship. It should have taken more episodes and more communication especially on Bow's side.

Then came Wrong-Hordak (yes, that is literally what he is called) who felt like a stand-in for Hordak in the form of comic relief, but this made him very unnecessary and also pretty grating if I may be so bold because the real Hordak was still alive and present in the season. Moreover, there are so many comic relief characters. Wrong-Hordak felt like a replacement with all of the edge and character development taken out, and what is worse is that he never really developed into something which was not already there.

Speaking of Hordak, as a big fan of this new deep incarnation of him, I felt very short changed when I saw how he was barely used and only carried over his new found individually to give him the strength to stand up to Horde Prime at the end. And even then, his body was soon taken over like a puppet on a string. Considering how far Hordak came, this was not fair. I mentioned on Tumblr that it would have been a lot better if his defect started to come up again, but this time, he used it as a strength. In other words, his defect made him able to disconnect from Horde Prime hive mind whenever he wanted making him the ideal spy and in the end, when Horde Prime tried to take over his body, he couldn't because of that. This would showcase Hordak in not only a new light, but represent people in his position that he isn't "defective" at all and that everyone is the way they are for a reason. Nobody is a mistake no matter how imperfect they are.

Next was Shadow Weaver's redemption which felt tacked on because even though she had bits of good in her, she was kind of person who was beyond redemption because she was the biggest repeat offender in the series. She wasn't even traumatised into the dark side. She chose her path and stuck on it by continuing to be power hungry, a plotter and a manipulator. Her redemption literally came out of nowhere and she should have had more moments with King Micah considering he was her former pupil when she was Light Spinner not Castaspella.

Next, there was Catra's redemption. Unlike Shadow Weaver, I could see Catra redeeming herself, but like the mending of Bow and Glimmer's relationship, it came too fast and honestly, I was shocked that Adora went back to pleading for her to come back to her so hard the instead Catra did one good thing. While it was in character for Adora to go back and save Catra from Horde Prime, it made no sense for her to be so forgiving of all her crimes. If anything, it is because Adora loved her so much that I would imagine she would be the most hesitant towards forgiving her in which case, Catra would be the one pleading for Adora to start being more cautious and care more about herself. The only positive thing I could say about Catra's redemption was that she acted more believable in the end and finally confessed her love to Adora. However, it does change that the journey needed more time.

Finally, all of the little questions were never answered which left big gaping holes in the story. Who was Adora really? Who were the First Ones? What is Eternia, Grayskull and how does it relate to Horde Prime? How did Horde Prime start his reign of terror? What is Horde Prime's backstory and what is his real name? What were Hordak's Horde troops doing once Horde Prime came along? What more could be said behind the history of She-Ra even long before Mara? Where did Catra come from? These questions all matter and not answering them leaves the story feeling unfinished because they are relevant to the plot.

I still think this series is great overall despite stumbling at the end and Noelle Stevenson is still a great writer in my opinion, but the final season was pretty bad and it needed more episodes and possibly even a sixth season for everything to have been resolved properly.

I give She-Ra's final season a 3/10. It did deliver on giving us a few things we wanted to see, but the amount of amateur mistakes just couldn't be overlooked. I do hope that if She-Ra once again gets rebooted, good professional writing will remain consistent especially at the end because a good story is like a good restaurant; you're only as good as your last meal.

#She-Ra #She Ra #netflix she ra #she-ra spoilers #review #negative review #negative #tv shows #tv series #horde clones #horde prime #hordak #she ra entrapta #she ra season five #she ra season 5 #glimmer #catra shera #catra

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homestuckcontroversyin2020 · 4 years

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My Opinions on The Epilogues

So I expect that this isn’t going to go over too well, whether it be because I get absolutely zero attention on this post, or for the fact that I’m literally typing up what is probably a hate post that’ll spark up some, “Oh fuck you.” comments. Either way, I don’t really care about the possible hate to be garnered or anything. I’m here to state my opinion on this, and opinions can’t kill anyone when you’re as weak at arguing as I myself am. Now, this isn’t a fucking logical article, I’m not taking time with comprehensive research and making sure I fact check every little detail because that would involve reading Homestuck for and eighth time and re-reading the Epilogues so I have the biggest refresher in the world. I’m not doing that, so take my sub-par rambles.

Preface over, let’s get into the meat.

My original thought when I heard that the Epilogues came out was initially an eye roll big enough to be like when Hulk smashed Loki in the ground. An arch of, “What the fuck, Hussie.” In other words? I didn’t want to read them. I spent the first few days in agony, complaining about how Homestuck was probably just becoming a money grab, and hearing from other people about the content that came out.

It.. wasn’t as bad as I expected when I jumped into it. People made a bigger deal about them than I thought was even insanely possible. Let me get this out of the way. I don’t hate the Epilogues. Do I think they were poorly done? Yes. Do I think that the writing was subpar? Absolutely. Do I think that fourteen year olds in their bedroom typing away at shitty fanfiction or roleplaying smut on MxRP/MSPARP have a better grasp on the characterization of each individual character than the people who took over and wrote the Epilogues? 10000%. Still, I thought they were a clever addition to alternate timelines. I had heard from a source they were meant to be a satirical take on fanfiction, and was a mocking poke at the Homestuck community... until Beyond Canon came out.

So here we are now with an 18 year old who’s spent their time on this planet obsessing over Homestuck since before they could read cuss words without feeling embarrassed telling you about how they’re pissed off with some small things that are of no value.

I’m an Alpha Kid Stan(TM) so everything that happened to my sweet babies has made me want to blow my brains out over the walls. Let’s go down the line.

Jane, sweetheart? Who hurt you? Now, I’ll be honest, I rushed through the Epilogues in my, ‘fuck I don’t want to read this but I feel like I need to in order to satiate my burning curiosity.’ mode. Jane’s whole... situation seems really fucked up to me. The color of her text in the EPs is another thing that pissed me off beyond belief, and I’m not sure why. The consistency between comic and canon was draining on my nerves. Jane, in Homestuck, is a whiny teen, but in no way do I look at her and see racist Hitler. Also, what the fuck was up with the clown thing? Why did she have an obsession with fucking Jake? Sure, she was into him before, but wasn’t part of her character arch getting over the buck toothed bangaroo? I thought so. I also thought that Jane was, you know, just a normal girl living her best life. She sure complained, but who doesn’t?? The Jane we’re given in the Epilogues seems to lack the internal dilemmas that the dear, sweet Crocker we’ve grown fond of does. There’s barely a hit of self hate, she doesn’t blow up, and sure we could possibly count this to her being older, but, what? She didn’t seem to be pissed off about the entire existence of trolls in Homestuck. Sure, her time with them was minimal and she didn’t really get all the shit through, but she fought side by side with Kanaya, even. I just don’t see it at all.

Jake. Oh boy. This is a big one. In either case, Jake’s whole thing really bothers me. He doesn’t seem like Jake. He seems like a watered down version of himself that doesn’t even make fucking sense? He’s an aloof dork, but he’s not horrendously stupid, there’s no reason to make him an alcoholic, and why the fuck is he an attention seeking slut? Yes, yes. We could blame this all on Dirk but really, what were the authors thinking? They had complete control over what happens in this and they turn Jake into something he’s not. He had other drives and passions than living out his life as the sexy action movie woman we all need in our lives. Jake’s smart to his own degree, stubborn, and kind of a flirt! He’s not insanely oblivious, either. For instance, I recall a specific moment where he insinuates that Jane was having a wet dream about him in Homestuck. I’m not going to find the quote, but I know it’s there. Jake spent time working on the robot rabbit for John with Jade and outright refused help from some outside sources. Jake is smart! He’s got an extensive vocabulary! He’s just a nerd, and he’s more than an uwu gay boy for Mr. Triangles.

Roxy, oh no. This is where I expect to get the most heat. Roxy is a beloved character. The light of my life and the best of the kids, in my opinion. (I’m an avid Dirk Stan, but Roxy has won my heart truly and thoroughly.) I don’t like the whole trans/non-binary thing. Not because I’m transphobic or anything, because I’m absolutely not. It’s because it feels like it just doesn’t fit with her as a character?? Roxy grew up in isolation in a place without humans, you really think she’s going to have an outright conceptualized view on gender roles and norms? Basic fucking psychology would tell you otherwise. This is something that her brain would have trained her to do based on a societal view. I may not have paid a huge ass amount of attention in psychology, but gender is a thing that’s completely up in the air and taught to us. Roxy didn’t have that. You could argue and say that her house has something of the sort that’d lead her to feel that way, or perhaps she’s learned this all off the internet, but her clothes scream femme and she had to make them herself, is all I’m saying. Again, whatever, go off, make Roxy trans. It’s not a huge deal, but that isn’t the only problem I have. Roxy as a character seems to have just lost her spark. There’s little outright love and enjoyment and adoration for her friends that there is in Homestuck. She’s not your hype go get them loving girl. Again, maybe you could blame this on the fact that they’re all older, but getting older isn’t going to drastically impede your previous personality and make you an entirely different person. They essentially turned Roxy into a watered down version of Dave, but trans. It’s like they couldn’t make Dave trans so they just made a new Dave. It’s annoying to me, and that’s my biggest problem. I love Roxy. I don’t care for Epilogue Roxy. If they had done it right, if they had used specific things from Homestuck, if Homestuck itself keyed in on this or ANYTHING, fine. But Roxy was old enough to question her identity, most people do around 16, and she could have had the opportunity to start representing this already. I mean, who was stopping her? Then the baby stuff. Huh? What? Why? Doesn’t make sense, pass. Her bffsy, brother, and person that cared about her most off and yeets himself from the top of the nearest belltower and all she can think about is copulating with John??? Alright, fam.

Onto Dirk. Y’know what? I don’t have many huge problems with Dirk. I found his personality in Meat really funny, I found the death in Candy absolutely soul crushing. Dirk is a good character. I don’t think they did his personality well, but I don’t think they did any of the characters well. Maybe John. Maybe. Dirk really just sounded like a child who wasn’t getting what he wanted, and it was amusing to say the least. He sounded horrible from the way people talked about him before I read it, but I really just found his overzealous ego entertaining. I found the fact that they made him still totally desperate for Jake kind of annoying though. Dirk broke of their relationship. Dirk was the one who took a moment to realize it wasn’t healthy for either of them, and getting what you want isn’t good. Taking over the narrative and making your ex nearly jizz himself in public is hilarious and all, but also, what??

Alright. Alphas. Let’s move onto Betas.

I skipped a lot of it, not going to lie. Rather than breaking it down for each character like I did with the Alphas, I’m just going to ramble and see where the wind takes. me.

I don’t ship Davekat. I don’t see it working in a romantic aspect. I see them being bros, and it felt really forced in both sides of the story. The homoerotic tension could maybe be smelled for a mile away, but lets not forget something very important. Dave has shown interest in women. Dave was interested in Terezi, he called Roxy and Jane hot, he totally fucking jizzed his jeans for Jade. The fact that so many characters in the Epilogues were exclaiming that Dave was gay, and Dave himself leaning towards the sentiment, didn’t seem to really match up. Dave’s not just pretending to like chicks either, he’s definitely interested in them to the point of being genuinely flustered and embarrassed (I.E The Hot Mom conversation.) So, I don’t really enjoy that. I think the economy shit is cute, his alternate counterpart seemed to have a good hand for business according to the spiel that was made about him, I liked it.

Rose? Didn’t pay a lot of attention to her. The drug abuse shit really pissed me off. Rose in general really pissed me off in the Epilogues.

John is a can of worms. His characterization was done well, but I guess I just don’t see the point in the two timeline deals. Also, why did he have sex with Terezi? Why was he so much of a baby when the rest of the people around him apparently seemed to mature? Who knows. I sure as hell don’t.

And... then there’s Jade. Poor, sweet Jade. She’s been done dirty almost as much as Jake has, if not worse. She has a dick for one. Yikes. She’s extremely sexually driven, which isn’t something I can see for canon Jade who just wants to hang out and vibe. She’s also so fucking insistent with the “uwu lets date Dave and Karkat” shit that it drives me up a fucking wall. Jade, you should know better! You dated an alternate version of Dave! You dated the OG motherfucker fresh timeline bitch who lost everyone, and sure he was depressed, but I think if I remember correctly you know about all of this???? Hmmmmm!!!! Big questions. It almost leads one to believe she’d know better than to enter into a relationship like this with Dave since it could be emotionally unfulfilling. :))))

Anyways, this entire thing is a can of fucking worms and I don’t suspect I’m going to use this account often aside from shitposting, so have this one uneducated article and if you made it through it and agree, disagree, or what have you, don’t be an ass in the replies? I get it, I’m opinionated and should probably shut my mouth, but it’s the internet and I don’t really care at this point.

#homestuck #epilogues #opinions #spoilers #roxy lalonde #dirk strider #dave strider #jade harley #rose lalonde #john egbert #jake english #jane crocker #rambles #controversy #trans roxy #hs epilogue

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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One of the funniest things I’ve encountered recently is antis, from multiple fandom lanes tbh (lbr, they’re usually alternate-ship motivated), but one in particular this last few weeks, being absolutely incensed that I will not argue with them, and have zero reason to prove my read to them.

Various conversations have gone:

Me: “Listen, you can have your read and I can have mine. In the end, one will be right and one will be wrong. Or hell, maybe we’re both wrong. But we can argue circles all day about kiss vs true love or whatever the timeless stupid debate is until we’re blue in the face and nobody is going to be able to change the validity of anybody’s read, especially contingent on the material anybody builds their read from. If your read works for you, so be it.”

Them: “EXCUSE ME?”

Like, what, I’m sorry, does it bother you that I literally don’t have to run the same argument for the thousandth time with you as your predecessors? They went off on a rage fest after that and I’m just sitting over here with my coffee mug like-- I’m sorry, you have me confused with someone who cares. I already said you have the right to your read as long as it works for you. The simple fact is, even if I could demolish it to your face 17 ways to sunday, I won’t, unless you come chumming to try to slap me with it, and even then, I’m not gonna do it in the standard method of piss warring that goes on here and reduces complex texts to My Ship > Your Ship. If you get this mad about it, I’m going to have to assume that somewhere subconsciously, your read isn’t working as well for you as you want, and it bothers you that someone else’s read is securely working for them, because that’s all that really reduces to. And that’s not my problem or responsibility.

This ironically comes to heads of them claiming you think your read is better than theirs. I mean, well, yeah, implicitly; but just as implicitly the sheer tonal offense that I feel no need to justify anything implies they feel theirs is better too. Of course we think, silently at least, that our reads are right. If we didn’t see them, they wouldn’t be our reads. That’s kind of how this works.

Other ones that piss them off seem to be not even bothering to rehash things I’ve blogged about for years. “I don’t think Dabb is using that theology!”

“Listen, whether you understand it or want to learn it or not is up to you. If you never read the content presented to you for fear that it may have Destiel Cooties, you’re never going to learn what, why or how. Neverminding of course that the better part of my meta orbits around concepts like souls, cosmogenics, and aeons -- you’ve already allocated what you think my meta is about and thus you will never read it. In never reading it, you will never consider it. I can’t force anybody to educate themselves on what this philosophy in play is, but trying to call it just interpretation at this phase in the game is tantamount to calling it Just Interpretation that seasons 4-5 had heavy christian influence and was loosely following the book of revelations as its source despite all the dogma, quotes, symbolism, verses and everything else.”

“EXCUSE YOU?”

I mean-- it is what it is.

“How dare you sit so smugly!!”

I mean, um. Yeah. If one of us is “the broken clock is right twice a series run” in spec and the other one is prewriting entire episodes or mytharc runs, I really don’t have to sit here and pat-slap around anybody else’s stuff. Even if they’re really, really mad for some reason. Cuz here’s the trap: I pat-slap it around and they get mad about DiFfErEnT oPinIonS.

In fact this, too, happened.

There’s a multiship server I’m in where everybody has their own sandboxes to play in. While people from a few given ships haven’t figured out how to not be hostile cross-area (though tend to be dealt with swiftly when done so), generally--you stay in your sandbox, you’re left alone.

Now, someone came with very (Ship A) goggled lenses. They could have stayed in their ship corner, squii’ed with like minded people. But instead, they came into a general/spoiler room yelling their idea. Now quite literally, their idea doesn’t add up, not remotely. If someone politely says, “I disagree, and here’s why,” especially without directly attacking a ship but rather the premise of the presentation as it stands within the sum of the mytharc, and doesn’t even have to evoke their own ship into it -- that’s not ship warring. And hell, that’s not being mean. You go to a general discussion area in a server that’s intersectional and you’re going to get general discussion from people with other perspectives. Why this basic self care is beyond them, I’m unclear.

That’s not being bullied. It just means there’s other takes out there, and if you choose to present those takes in general zones, people can and probably will politely disagree with you. Emphasis on “politely.” Now, polite doesn’t mean putting squishy words and cowing to a way where everybody’s take is completely untouched and everybody floats in their own conversational bubbles never really actually encountering each other’s points of view. It means not extremizing it and trying to warp social justice narratives (eg, ableist, whatever) off of the first impact. It means not reading everything in absolute bad faith. It means not calling people cunts or whatever. Those things clearly aren’t polite. But if you’re going to go to a general speculation zone, you have to be prepared for other forms of speculation.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to argue with the other forms of speculation. Nobody’s entitled to your time. But the simple acknowledgement that there may be other speculation is how this works. You can’t yell “all interpretations are equal” and then rove through general areas, demanding half cracked thoughts of impulse and wishlists that you throw out like law never be presented with another point of view. If you want that, go to a location, or a channel, or whatever where people are literally coalesced that have similar POV/wishlist/egregore/whatever.

Why. Is this. Hard.

When it comes down to it, we’re in the final run. There are seven episodes left. When this is done, what’s done is done. While there may be several ways to interpret the final product, most spec and arguments about who’s gonna die and who’s gonna come back and who’s the endgame XYZ be it unit/pair or family or whatever the FUCK else? Those are gonna be pretty well defined. There’s no infinite extension, no way to extend it to next year while people’s reads stretch more thin than Sam’s rubber band soul. No way to manipulate theories over and over again. That theory you’re sitting on? You have a few episodes left to build on that. After that, it’s done.

I can’t emphasize enough how pointless it is to argue with people and their various overstretched theories in any given lane. Because what’s gonna happen is gonna happen. Now, if you’re confident in your read, rather than making confused noises or rejoicing overloud because the clock finally appropriately tolled twelve for the first time in 5, 10, 15 years for you; that’s fine. Sit confident.

You know what isn’t confident?

Aggressively feeling the need to prove your worth or merit against reads, a large sum of which in this fandom are outright comical. And let’s face it. We all know it. Somewhere even within your (character) or (ship) lane you’ve even found some sort of spec or opinion that even you kind of hide your face in your hand in embarrassment behind your screen. So why the hell are you contending with opposite points just as ridiculous?

Come on y’all.

If you can’t have nuanced intersectional conversation to safeguard your opinion, don’t go to general areas. If you can’t have that intersectional conversation without turning into a kindergarten slapfight, why even bother?

I’m not saying to not ideashare or whatever. But this fandom pretends to have no idea what that is anymore, even though most of y’all are grown assed adults or at least pretty damn close. If your read is so sensitive and fragile that the slightest breath contrary to it sends it and you shattering and off into a hysterical frenzy of being offended, maybe it’s better to not try to engage in those areas.

The louder anyone crows in someone’s face trying to incite fights, the less confident they are. It’s that simple. It’s a simple validation thing, “VALIDATE MEEEE FIGHT MEEEEE” we see it all the time even outside of fandom. Why everybody thinks human psychology is so vastly different between fandom and political twitter is a mystery. So why the hell.

It’s not your responsibility to bring down your level of confidence to someone else’s just because they refuse to recalibrate and figure out why they’re so dependent on argued validation, and it’s not wrong to be confident, especially if you have damn good reason to be confident. Confidence does not come in the claim of confidence, but in the principle of behavior around the material in which you are confident. Everything else is disingenuous hot air that bloats the sum of our fandom conversation and sets it on volatile explosion risk on any given day.

#supernatural #spn #fandom

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clevercatchphrase · 4 years

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2019 year in review

So… The 2010’s are almost over. Huh. What a decade it’s been. Hard to comprehend how much has changed in 10 years. I can barely believe that I was in high school at the beginning of this decade, and now I’m a college graduate with 2 degrees who’s been working at the same job for the last 3 years. But trying to summarize the past 10 years in a single post is a good way to give myself an existential crisis, so let’s not do that! Instead, let’s just focus on 2019 because there has been more than enough shit that’s happened to me in this year to talk about.

PART 1 OF 2: 2019 AND 2020 GOALS AND RESOLUTIONS

Huh, looking back through my archives, I apparently didn’t make a tumblr post about my goals this year. I definitely had some, though. Lemme list ‘em off real quick, and then we’ll go through them point by point.

1) Pay off all my student loans 2) Finish some song comics 3) Make art for my Redbubble account 4) Finish the first rough draft/script of a game I wanted to make 5) Practice ASL 6) Sew some stuffed animals 7) Finish some fan fictions 8) Work on Ghost Switch 9) AMVs 10) Do some original writing 11) Make illustrations for my fan fictions

Okay, first off, the student loans. I was actually SO CLOSE to successfully completing this one bUT THEN MY CAR HAD TO BE A WHINEY PISS BABY AND HAVE ITS ALTERNATOR DIE ON ME WHILE I WAS ON THE HIGHWAY AND THEN A BLOW OUT THREE WEEKS LATER.

GOD, if I had to summarize this year in two words, for me it would be “Car troubles”. I swear I spent more on auto repair in the first third of this year than I ever have just freakin’ OWNING a car. All four of my tires had to be replaced, my alternator failed and my car literally just SHUT OFF while I was driving, and I was barely able to coast into a gas station. Both my front breaks and rear breaks were worn down the metal and I only learned this when my car was barely able to stop after I had to slam the petal down full force! I went in for an oil change, and they found some problems and then I didn’t get my car back for three days! I don’t even like owning a car! I hate driving! I hate my country’s refusal to provide universal, free public transportation! I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS!

Oh-kay… number 2. Finish some song comics. I didn’t finish any. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t work on them. I have made tiny progress, but that’s certainly better than no progress. One of these song comics I hope to be realizes is going to be a collab with one of my friends. It’ll be a long-time coming as it’s pretty low priority for the both of us, but if anyone else out there was disappointed with KH3’s ending, we’re gonna have ya’ covered… With SONG!

3. Make some redbubble art. I actually did this one! Not in the way I expected, but I added (technically) 3 new designs to my redbubble in the middle of the year. If you like butterflies and dragons, I got some product for you~!

Number 4, finish a script for a game I want to make. I… thought about this. I thought about this a lot, but I never put pen to paper, so… oops. It almost happened! I debated making this my main writing project for NaNoWriMo this year, but ended up having more inspiration for another story. Maybe next year? (god, I hope not. I don’t want to wait a full year just to write something)

Number 5, practice ASL. I just straight up didn’t do this and I only have myself to blame. Still keepin’ up that Danish Duolingo streak, though. 4 years going strong and not a day missed yet.

Number 6, sew some stuffed animals. Again, another one I just straight up didn’t do, but I have an excuse of trying to save money while my car crashed and burned in every other sense except literal this year. Hopefully 2020 will be different. I’ll definitely be able to pay off this last loan within the first half of 2020, and then I can start saving for whatever I want to buy.

Finish some fan fictions was number 7, and I did this! Well, I only finished, 1, but it was a story I’ve been working on for over 3 years, and it came out to over 200 THOUSAND words long, which is the longest thing I’ve ever written, and I’m quite proud of myself. Now that the big story is out of the way, and I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of working on Ghost Switch, maybe I can squeeze in some short writing sessions more frequently. (either that, or just wait for my car to break down again and then go on a writing spree in a pepboys. The lord and the fan fic discord know that’s solely why I finished my other fic this year)

Speaking of Ghost Switch, working on it was a goal this year too, and I did that! I kept it up all year and took a vacation in November and it was wonderful. While the major plot points have been in place since before I started drawing, I still need to script each arc beyond Snowdin, but hey, by the time we get there, it’ll be 2022 so I got time. (Note, don’t do this, kids. Script your stories and comics thoroughly before publishing. The road I’m on is paved with misery and pain and it will only end in tears unless I change lanes soon)

Number 9, amvs. Do people make AMVs anymore? Idk… the last one I made was... Jesus, 5 years ago? (it was a gravity falls/fall out boy crossover, if you were curious) I’ve been wanting to do 2 more for just as long, but in order for me to do that, I’d have to spend time re-watching the shows to find the footage, and then actually edit them together, and I just don’t…. feel like it. Maybe someday, but not any day soon.

10; do some original writing. I did this! For nanowrimo! I wrote the first draft of some original fiction I’ve been planning for a year or two now and it completely sucks! But it’s on paper now and I’m happy. Will I revise and edit it? Sure, but not for a while. I want to let it sit and forget about it and look at it with new eyes months from now so I can be sure I can make it better when time comes to rewrite.

11, make illustrations for my fan fics. Now that You Monster is done, I want to go back and add pictures to it. I didn’t do any this year, but I did keep a list of scenes I wanted to draw, so I have plenty of ideas to do as warm up sketches next year~ I kinda want to stream them~

So, that was 11 goals, and I successfully fulfilled 4 of them! That’s! Not a very good ratio… QmQ So, goals for 2020. Some I’m gonna keep from this year, some I’m gonna drop and some I’m gonna add. In short I would like to,

1) Finish paying off that last student loan 2) Put more stuff on my redbubble 3) Illustrate my own fan fics 4) Sew at least one stuffed animal 5) Make an enamel pin 6) Read one new book a month 7) Write one page a day/Complete at least one new fan fic 8) Learn Python or C# for the game I want to make 9) Finish fully scripting Ghost Switch 10) Boost my patreon

Most of these I think are pretty self-explanitory, but I’ll go into detail just a bit because I’m on a roll and typing my thoughts helps me feel less alone in the middle of the night when you’re super tired and you know you should probably go to sleep, but the toddler in you is throwing a tantrum and doesn’t wanna go to sleep just yet, but you can’t fight the progression of time either way.

Number 1- I should be able to reach this goal by the end of March. End of June at the absolute latest. Once that goal is met, my secret new year’s resolution will be unlocked as well!

Number 2- I want to put more art of my OCs on redbubble. These OCs are tied to the game I want to make. There’s already some art of them up there, but I want at least one piece for each character.

Number 3- Mostly for You Monster. Embrace the cardinal rule of fan fic and apply it to fan art. If you want to read about see art about certain ideas, scenarios, or what-ifs, you gotta make it yourself.

Number 4- I have 3 potential ideas to sew. One is definitely leagues easier than the other two and will probably be chosen if/when I have the time and materials.

Number 5- This year I got really, REALLY into the idea of making enamel pins. Unfortunately it’s a pretty big investment (like, $350 to make 100 pins you might not even sell). If this happens, it’ll probably be towards the end of the year, and if I get enough interest. I’m currently torn between making an original enamel pin and one based off Undertale. We’ll just have to see where this goes.

Number 6- Back in 2018 when I paid off one of my many student loans, I rewarded myself by spending over 200 dollars in used books. All these books had a theme; they were focused on dragons because I have a problem. I have not yet read a single one of these books I have bought, and I would like to fix that. I have, like, 20 unread dragon books, and even if I only read 12 out of 20, I would consider that an amazing accomplishment and money well spent.

Number 7- I currently have about 8 different WIPs I could work on. (well, I don’t know if I can even call them wips. More like, a general idea and a title written down.) I want to build good writing habits, and if I can write just 200 words a day, hell, even 200 words a week and just one of my 8 stories done, I would consider this goal met.

Number 8- I’m torn between making my game in unity or ren’py. I know jack shit about both. Ren’py is more user friendly, but unity will allow me more customization. (Lol, can you guess what kind of game I want to make yet?)

Number 9- I really just want the full story to be done and written incase anything goes horribly terribly wrong in my life and I find myself unable to continue making ghost switch in comic form. Then at least I can finish the story by other means, you know?

Number 10- It always surprises me every month when I get that patreon email saying I got paid. Sure, I don’t even make double digits on it, but it still awes me enough to know that people out there like my work enough to throw me a tip. I can’t thank my patrons enough for supporting me and I hope to one day be in such a good place I can update my comic/song comics/writing frequently enough without need for goals or milestones. But until that magical day arrives, money is always a great incentive for anything, I suppose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ALRIGHT. PART 2 OF 2: SHIT THAT HAPPENED TO ME IN 2019

Cheesus crust what a year. This year started off great! Back in late January Kingdom Hearts 3 FINALLY released, and let me tell you a little story. Back in the summer of 2006 I was a 13 year old middle schooler with no way of making money other than by doing house hold chores at a rate of 25 cents a task. A few weeks ago, I had a sleep over at a friend’s house and they let me play this weird game called “Kingdom Hearts” and god, I was instantly hooked on it. That summer, I did over 800 chores, enough to earn myself 200$ and buy myself a playstation 2 (just in time for the ps3 to come out, gg me) The only games I had for the ps2 were KH1, 2, Re:CoM and Okami, and I beat them all… except Okami. Miffed that the PS3 wouldn’t allow for backwards compatibility, little 13-year-old me made a promise. I looked myself in the mirror and said “I will not buy the next playstation console until KH3 comes out, AND BOY that was probably a good choice for me to make with my level of gaming. I’m even less of a casual gamer than the average casual gamer, but I have been waiting 13 years for this piece of closure, and I even told my friends and family that “the day Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out is the day I will buy a playstation 4”. My dad apparently thought this was the funniest shit, because he literally took the day off from work that Friday to drive me on base to get the game and console (he thought it would be less crowded than a regular walmart, I suppose). I paid $400 on a ps4 pro while he bought me the game. Again, I have an impecible sense of timing seeing as the PS5 is now right on the horrizion, but just like before, I’m not buying a new console until the next KH game is released. See you in 2045, sony~. While I was at the gamestop on base, I also picked up Okami HD and The Last Guardian. For all of February and even early March, I took my time playing through KH3. And…! It was the best disappointment I’ve ever played. After a month away from gaming, I started The Last Guardian and finished it in a couple weeks. I love trico and would die for him, but trying to get 100% completion on that game is udder insanity. Okami, HD, however… again after a month break after finishing TLG, I started replaying Okami. I think I had only managed to get about halfway through the game before I just… stopped playing it on my ps2 version. I am currently SO CLOSE to getting a 100% on the ps4 version. In fact, I’ve beaten the game. I only (techinically) need 2 more trophies to be done; 1st, escape the water dragon without being eaten, 2nd, I need to beat that dumb stupid race with Kai, in order to get the last bead on my rosary, as well as the top dog trophy. I hate her so much. I hate this race so much. It’s awful and bad.

Flash forward to December! Earlier this month I was at Barnes and Noble, buying myself a planner for 2020. I exit the store and notice that there’s a gamestop across the street. For shits and giggles I go inside to look at their game selection, and I find KH 1.5 and 2.5. Now, my PS2 died a few years back (it just won’t read my discs anymore, I don’t know why) and I haven’t been able to replay any of my other kingdom hearts games since. If you had seen me the day I finished kingdom hearts 3, after the ending credits rolled, you would have heard me say “Man…. I wish I could play kingdom hearts 2 again”. AND NOW I CAN, ALONG WITH BBS which I had never even played yet, but knew the story of. I’ve restarted playing kh1, and I was so happy to hear that familiar music when I booted the game up for the first time. While at the game stop, I also picked up Rime and Tearaway, two games that had looked interesting to me. At the time of writing, I’ve finished Rime and am 25% done with tearaway. Rime was…. An interesting experience. I learned about it through Jacksepticeye’s channel a couple years back and thought the art style was enticing. For a super casual gamer like me, I found the puzzles just the right level of challenging and exploring was a blast! The music gave me VERY strong Princes Mononoke vibes, but the overall story left something to be desired. Overall I had fun, and enjoyed completing this game to 100%. Now for tearaway. Can I just say this game is super fucking adorable? I know the original was on the ps vita and the gameplay there was arguably more diverse and imaginative, but this game is just so fucking cute I don’t care?? ALSO, this game’s sound track is ABSOLUTELY incredible and I’ve only heard the first fourth of it! Listen to The Orchards, Pig Riding, and Gibbet Hill Pilgrimage for a taste of their wonderful beats and fantastic use of string and woodwinds! God, I’m so excited to get some more games in 2020. I’m proud to say I currently own more ps4 games than I ever did with my ps2 (and now the majority AREN’T Kingdom Hearts titles!), and I’m still hoping to play Journey, The Witness, and Abzu before everything becomes ps5.

What else happened to me this year. Oh, I went to a doctor for, like, the first time in seven years. I also had my blood drawn for the first time ever, and the nurse said the most disturbing thing to me while she did it. Now, whenever I get shots, I refuse to look. I did that here. So she thought it would be appropriate to say to me “Can you feel your blood leaving your body?” Lady… You can clearly see I am uncomfortable with what is happening here. Why, of all the things you could say, did you choose to say that. Unfortunately, while my doctor is nice, she keeps wanting to run tests on me, that I just cannot afford with my current salary, and my monthly insurance is about to go up to 200$ a month, so I’ve cancelled my next appointment with them, and don’t plan to go back until it’s absolutely necessary. Capitalism is fun, guys. Preventative healthcare is for wusses.

I started going to a chiropractor on a monthly basis. Story time- I don’t know when it started, but sometime late last November I began to notice that I had a headache that just... wasn’t... going away? And each day it was starting to get a little worse. It made it hard for me to find a comfortable position to sleep, it made it hard for me to be in bright areas or move fast. So I said to myself “Okay, if this headache persist through the month of december, then something is proooobably wrong and I should go see someone about it. And hoo-boy were thing wrong with me. By the time this January rolled around, I couldn’t even stay on my feet for more than a few hours without it physically hurting to just BREATHE. So I started going to this chain called The Joint (A+ name, I know). THey aksed me “How are you doing?” I said “I’m in pain” and they said “We can help fix that!”. I’ve only been to a chiropractor once before in my life a few years back after my freshmen year of college because I began to notice my hips weren’t able to support me? LIke, I would lie on my back, and I couldn’t push my hips up when my feet were flat on the floor. I also couldn’t climb anything steep, because my legs just couldn’t push me up if my knee had to bend more than 90 degrees when I lifted my leg up. (Turned out both my hips were apparently out of place). This time only one of my hips were out of place (which they fixed. they said one of my legs was an inch “longer” than the other because I had been leaning all my weight on one leg when I stand). But two of my ribs were apparently “Stuck” which was why it was hurting for me to just breathe, and one of my shoulders was missaligned too, causing one of my trap muscles to constantly be streched, which was pulling on my skull, and causing the headache. Anyway, after they popped all my bones back into place, I still felt terrible, but by god, that night was the first time in weeks I was able to sleep without a migrane. A chiropractor can’t magically heal your arthritis, or fibro, but I definately think they have merit to keeping your posture good and helping your body with things like circulation. 10 outa 10, would recomend. It’s all the fun of getting your neck snapped without the dying!

Earlier this month I got together with two of my friends and we baked Christmas cookies. It was a lot of fun, as well as a great learning experience. A member of my family has a gluten allergy, so we used rice flour for most of the cookies. We learned this is a bad idea! The cookies will just fall apart! A few member’s in one of the friend’s family have nut allergies. Other friend and I knew this and were careful to avoid cookie recipes with nuts, bUT THEN COMPLETELY FORGOT THAT ALMOND MILK AND ALMOND EXTRACT COUNT AS NUT. IN FACT, ALMOND EXTRACT IS PURE CONCENTRATED NUT JUICE AND WE FELT SO BAD FOR ALMOST ACCIDENTALLY POISONING THE FAMILY.

Earlier this year me and these same friends took a field trip to Hobby Lobby and just dicked around the store for a couple of hours. It was super fun, 11 outa 10, would recommend, a great date idea for your artsy S.O.

Back in May I went to a wedding for the first time in my life. (well, not true, but the first one I could remember) we left at 5am, drove 5 hours to get there, hung out at a zoo and spent the night in a la quinta before the wedding day. I slept on the bathroom floor because my mom was snoring too loud in the main room and keeping me awake, and the rest of the day was just spent me trying to keep myself together because I was pissed off and tired.

Other than all of that, nothing really major happened to me this year. I guess one more thing I’ve tried to do this year is started the process of breaking certain internet addictions so I can use my free time for more personal projects. Seriously, I found myself watching way too much youtube and following blogs that didn’t even make me happy. I had a personal intervention with myself where I sat down and asked myself, “why do you watch these videos and youtubers? Why do you follow these blogs? Do you really enjoy their content? Do you really care? If you stopped watching/following them, would you even notice?” After critically thinking it over, I’ve found myself unfollowing several channels and blogs and suddenly I feel so much happier. I thought I would miss it, but I realized I didn’t really care if I saw their content or not. I wasn’t missing much. And now I feel like I have more time to draw, read and write. If you think you spend too much time consuming and not enough time creating, I suggest you try and de-clutter your internet habits as well. It’s done wonders to un-fuck my headspace.

And… well, that about sums up my year. How are your holidays going? Anything fun, exciting, dramatic happen to you this year? I hope your new year is warm and safe! Good night, everybody!

#new year's resolutions #year in review #long post #(seriiously this think is like 3k words)

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traincat · 5 years

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what did you think of the characterisation of both peters (ripeter and peter b.) in spiderverse? i personally enjoyed them both a lot, but i also haven't read any spiderman comics and i really love reading your analyses on his character throughout adaptations :)

First off, thank you for reading my posts! I appreciate it. I think Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did an absolutely amazing, pun fully intended, with both RIPeter and Peter B. Parker. (And Noir Peter too!) I think it’s especially impressive with RIPeter given his limited screentime before his death – but then I do think his attitude in his death scene goes a long way towards that. I have a post here on Peter’s attitude towards his own death in 616 (that is critical of Infinity War’s choices there, just as a warning) and RIPeter’s death hit every note on it for me there. He went out defiant – the eyeroll when the Prowler extends his claws – and he went out doing his self-appointed job as New York’s protector. May says later on in the movie that that Peter knew how dangerous the job was, and it showed. No begging the Kingpin, no pleading. His final actions are to both warn and to try to comfort Miles – the last thing he tells him is that it’ll be okay. His “I always get back up” is a great line; even when he’s not getting back up this time, he doesn’t go out without delivering one last jab: telling the Kingpin he knows what he’s doing and that it won’t work. It’s a good death scene, and he goes down with dignity.

To be honest, I think part of the reason these Peters are the most 616ish we’ve seen – I mean, Peter B is literally labeled as coming from Earth-616 in the initial collider scene, but beyond that – is because both of them are adults. Even in Peter Parker adaptations where they decide to skip the origin story, like they did in the MCU, there’s this fascination with starting out with him as a teenager and like, it doesn’t make much sense when you look at the breadth of canon and how little time he’s actually spent in it as a teen within the main continuity. (The first 28 issues of Amazing Spider-Man are set in high school before he graduates. There are over 800 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, and it’s only one of his longrunning titles.) But to set both Peters as adult men who’ve both been doing their thing as Spider-Man for at least a decade not only serves as a great contrast against Miles, who is just starting out and who doesn’t know yet how to do the things he needs to learn how to do, but it shows you who these men are: smart, hypercompetent, in control of their element, and good at being superheroes. Peter B. might be having a bad time with his personal life and his own decisions and he might be disillusioned with the concept of being Spider-Man because of that when he’s zapped into Miles’ dimension, but as soon as he realizes there’s a mission to be done he jumps into it. And it’s a nice touch that the guy who made some dicey money decisions by investing in a spider-themed restaurant (which if you look at the review that plays briefly on the screen was a molecular gastronomy joint – this movie is so smart, of course Peter Parker would invest in a SCIENCE restaurant) is the same guy who can see a long and nonsensical password reflected off a window and not only spit it back verbatim but remember key aspects of it out of order minutes later while having a completely different conversation. I think it’s easy to say Peter Parker’s a super genius, but it’s another thing entirely to show that. And like RIPeter, in the middle of the ensuing fight, when things are going back, he tries in his own way to keep Miles calm – yelling out “everything’s fine” when everything is clearly not fine. One of the things I always note about good Peter characterization – and not that this is necessary a positive personality trait in general, but it is something that makes the character distinct – is that Peter loves control. If he’s not in control of the situation, then he really wants to be. Think of control as flipside of the responsibility coin; the selfish, less kind side of it. And I think it’s a really great moment at the end of the movie that he has to give up that control and trust Miles to finish things, and it’s great because it’s earned, for both characters, and it’s based out of trust and love on both sides. I truly believe Spider-Man has to be a love story – like this deleted scene says, it’s not about thinking about saving the world, it’s about thinking about saving someone you love. And it’s not just about one kind of love. It’s about romantic love, sure, and that’s part of the reason Peter Parker as a character has such iconic romances, but it’s about familial love, like Peter and May and Miles and his parents, it’s about Spider-Man’s love for New York, and Spider-Verse nailed it by letting it be about Peter and Miles, too. “I love you, I’m so proud of you” was such a shining moment.

Something else that Spider-Verse absolutely nailed is that it let Peter be quiet. He wasn’t always on. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Peter, Miles, and Gwen are on the bus on the back back from the Hudson Valley and Gwen and Miles are talking while Peter’s stretched out several rows behind them. Miles and Gwen talk and joke a little about him, with the assumption that he’s asleep, but when it cuts back to him he’s just lying there, listening to them and smiling. It’s a nice moment, and the film just lets it be a nice moment, and it shows us Peter appreciating it for what it is: a little bit of peace. It understood that Peter doesn’t always have to be talking, and he doesn’t always have to be funny. During the serious moments, it let him be serious. The script clearly cared more about Peter Parker’s integrity as a character than trying to pack as many jokes in as they possibly could.

On the flipside, another part of it is that the jokes are good – not just funny on a personal level, but on a narrative level. To have a blond Peter Parker – which, at least visually, is a callback to one of his main clones, Ben Reilly – say “there’s only one Spider-Man” is a really great joke, and the movie’s confident about it – if you get the added level, great, but if you don’t, you don’t lose anything vital to the movie either. It’s smart and inclusive about its comics callbacks, and it’s not punishing you for not being familiar with the comics, but it’s also building in extra layers for longtime comics readers, which is just a great balance. But purely in terms of dialogue and characterization, RIPeter’s commentary on his so-so popsicle being “hey, I’ve looked worse” and his “are you mad at me? I feel like you’re mad at me” line while trading blows with the Prowler were whipsmart and wonderful, and Peter B’s more down on his luck self-deprecating demeanor – “there’s always an override key, a bypass key, a virus key, a who cares key” and “this is why I never had kids” – and his bluntness – “give it” before snatching the key from Miles – also felt spot on. I loved them both.

For me, everything about Spider-Verse was wonderful, including Peter’s characterization. It was such a great feeling when Peter B. Parker started talking and it was like, oh hey, there’s my favorite character again. I loved it.

#into the spiderverse #peter parker #marvel comics #traincat talks comics #*replies

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gwiiyeoweo · 4 years

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Umbra sends Noctis way, waaaaay into the past and into Somnus' own bed. Well, the second part he did himself.

Pairing: Noctis/Somnus Rating: Explicit

The Royal Lucian genes are a helluva thing.

When Regis once remarked how similar his son looked to his father Mors, Noctis thought it was pretty common and definitely nothing out of the ordinary. If his biology classes taught him anything, it was that grandchildren can bear a striking resemblance to their grandparents compared to their parents. Noctis had only seen Mors through news articles and the grand portrait adorning the Hall of Kings, its walls dedicated solely to the everlasting frames of royals past. He couldn't really see how a gray-haired man could look so close to 15-year old him, but when he Moogled a younger snapshot of Mors he almost mistook the old photo as himself.

There were definite similarities in bone structure and hell, even that tiny mole near the corner of their mouths.

But this? This is like staring into a straight-up reflection.

He’s literally looking up, eyes half-lidded and face twisted in pleasure with a touch of pain, but through the haze of heat lighting up his body and mind, Noctis can’t help but think of the irony and plot twist and —

“You’re thinking again,” Somnus reprimands, voice just a mark away from a growl, “of something other than me.”

As if in punishment, the man digs his fingers into Noctis’ thighs — just another set of marks to add to the blooming bruises along his wrists and the curious rough circles on his collarbones and neck — and hoists his hips up into a better angle to slam himself into.

It does the trick. Something like fire and lightning, something like magic hits Noctis in all the worst and best ways, and he scrambles for purchase, hands flinging up to claw at the pillows as he arches his back and keens.

He’s learned that Somnus can be gentle in his own ways, if one overlooks the narcissism that veils his true heart — a heart that, beyond blood and family and love, treasures his people and will tread through fire and sacrifices if (when) necessary. But the young king makes for a rough and merciless lover. With every brutal thrust, he draws out a sob and smiles ever the wider for it, Noctis’ wanton cries a sweet music to his ears. He only slows when he has Noctis babbling his name in an incoherent string of stammers and gasps, rewarding him with a soft kiss to his temple before he picks up the unrelenting pace again. “Much better,” he purrs, watching the way his near-copy writhes and sings with a gaze that scorches.

Noctis will admit, that fucking his great-great-great-great-whatever grandfather was never on his agenda; though given the many generations separating their blood, they were probably just as related, if not less, as he would be to Ignis or Gladio, considering how their families were borne out of the Caelum line to begin with. Hell, being transported all the way to this ancient Lucian era was a minor surprise to this fork in the road. The night before they set off for Ardyn and Insomnia, to reclaim the throne and bring back the light, he asked Umbra for a last trip down memory lane, only for the dog to throw him ages further and in free fall thousands of feet up. Good thing he was used to falling by now, and he was never more thankful to still have his warping powers and the Armiger.

Except, he sort of screwed himself over by warping right in front of Somnus Fucking Lucis Caelum.

‘Shiva’s tits, ’ he couldn’t help but think, not out of fear or anxiety but because Somnus looked exactly like he did when he was still twenty. He thought he must have landed in a time before all that… shit went down between the two, before Ardyn turned saint turned martyr trying to foolishly save the world one person at a time. Before Somnus went with the ‘go big or go home’ method and burned down anything that did so much as cough.

Before their clashing ideologies led them to clashing swords.

He never really thought he’d be grateful for being stuck in the purgatory known as the Crystal, but it’s a perk to see their ancient history play across his eyelids like a giant home theater.

Somnus probably shared similar thoughts at seeing his living reflection, considering the bulging eyes and the white cast across his face — which, really, would have been rather comical in any other circumstances — but it wasn’t until later when Noctis was one hundred percent sure that had been the reason, when he looked in the mirror and realized he was smaller and younger and twenty again. Because while Noctis thought he was looking at a past version of himself, Somnus was looking at a near replica of his own. Age and all, minus the hairstyle.

Without revealing his true origins and the outcome of the future, Noctis had to think on the fly, and he still curses himself for not having the same quick mind that Ignis does (Did? Would? Time travel is weird).

“I’m a Messenger,” he said a second too fast, internally beating himself up for being so godsdamn stupid. “I didn’t have a physical form, so I took on the first one I saw. You.”

It worked out in his favor that Somnus was never a god-fearing man, a downright heretic compared to Ardyn, but that explanation was enough to satisfy him. And his ego, probably, that a demigod would choose to liken himself to Somnus’ visage. Oh, and that he currently has said demigod moaning and flushed beneath him, pliant and desperate and sobbing with ecstasy.

“Somnus, ” Noctis cries out, hands moving from the pillow to grab at the man’s arms, blunt nails leaving pink trails in their wake.

Somnus smiles at that, wicked and slow despite the exertion that sweats down his skin and brow. He recognizes the sudden tightness around his cock, of Noctis clenching around him and his stomach straining its muscles, as well as the swell that coils within his own.

“Hold on, pretty thing,” Somnus purrs, moving one hand from Noctis’ thigh to his cock, keeping a grip just a hair from pain but miles away from release. “Together we go.”

‘Arrogant prick, ’ Noctis thinks, despite the frustration and heat haze of pleasure filling his mind to the brim. Somnus may as well stand in front of a mirror and flirt with himself if he’s going to continue spewing words like that at someone who looks exactly like him. But he’s teetering on the edge, held back by a cruel hand and a vicious pace, and he’s desperate enough to even meet Somnus’ thrusts by rocking his own hips in conjunction.

It’s not long until Somnus gives out, and Noctis thinks he blanks out for a moment when all he sees is white, when that same exhilaration runs through his nerves and spine and taps into something deeper than a great orgasm ever could.

Their first time together, Noctis was stuck between fear and wonder when he came to the realization that his magic, as faint as it is ever since it had been culled by that Marilith attack, was reaching out toward Somnus’ own and that — yeah. That’s kinda weird.

He’s had sex with others before, men and women alike, some ending poorly and others fan-fucking-tastic. But that whole magic thing? Still virgin territory. The side-effects of fucking another Caelum, he now knows. He still hasn’t hashed out the details of it, though Somnus is becoming ever the wiser about it, who first chalked it up to the benefit of fucking a so-called Messenger but now has his own suspicions. A matter of time before the ruse is up and Noctis has to come clean about it all like, “Hey! I’m actually from the future and your great-times-a-hundred-somethin’-grandson. The future’s shit, by the way, cause Bahamut and all of you are dumbasses!”

But for now, Somnus cleans them up with nary a fuss about dirtying his dainty royal hands as he wipes them both down with a wet cloth, which is surprisingly soft and fluffy for their time period. Sure, he could be a dick and a half when it came to his personality, but Noctis likes to think of him as a prissy cat that actually loves cuddles and attention. Especially when Somnus drapes an arm around him and practically buries his face into the crook of Noctis’ neck, breathing in their combined scents of each other and their aftermath.

Noctis gently rakes his fingers through the man’s scalp and stares at the ceiling of the canopy bed, wondering how exactly his new ‘future’ will play out. He doesn’t know if or when Umbra will return to take him to the present — he turns his head at every faint bark he hears, and Somnus teases him for it relentlessly — and he damn well doesn’t know if anything he does here will change the timeline anyway. But he likes to believe and hope that he can do at least something, anything to lessen the blows of tragedy when they come.

“You’re thinking again,” Somnus sighs, though his tone is less out of irritation and more of concern. Noctis has figured out how to read these tiny differences, like how those brows like to just slightly crease when worried or how he sets his jaw when angered. His eyebrows are lowered, barely, as his gaze searches for the cracks of truth hidden beneath Noctis’ true face. Too bad he won’t be getting them, not now. “After such a rousing time, even.”

“Messenger problems.” Noctis turns his head to return the gaze, but less inquisitive and more secretive.

“Then tell me, dear night.”

Noctis feels something funky in his chest. Which he’s quick to ignore because he definitely does not want to admit what it is. He lightly taps his forehead against Somnus’ own, craning his neck slightly to meet each other, and does his damned hardest to look at him with as much feigned honesty as he can muster. It’s gotten easier lately, to lie and twist half-truths, but not without effort.

“One day. When you’re ready.”

‘When I’m ready, ’ he means instead. He wants to trust Somnus, but he won’t be ready for the backlash if the worst case scenario happens.

Somnus stares back, lips working themselves into a retort and Noctis expects an argument or a demand to know now. It wouldn’t be the first they clashed with words, Somnus standing on his pedestal and believing his birthright and lineage granted him the secret musings of the gods with Noctis standing just as stalwart and refusing to budge. But tonight instead, he harrumphs and concedes to their middle ground, closing his eyes and burying his face further into the crease between Noctis and the pillows to murmur, “It best be soon, Noctis. I am not known for my patience, unlike my long-suffering brother.”

Noctis only manages a hum, pushing back the anxieties and what-if’s should that time come. When it comes, he corrects. He knows it’s inevitable, that the truth will rear its head one way or another. But it’s up to him on how it’ll all play out and if the results will end up in fortune or disaster.

Right now, though, he’s exhausted — the good kind, not the fatigue that makes his bones ache and his muscles quiver — and Somnus is true to his name, pulling Noctis into sleep with his warmth and soft breath ghosting across skin. He’ll put more thought into it in the morning, come up with a more serious plan rather than half-ass snippets. Sooner rather than later, because Noctis isn’t known for his patience either.

“Goodnight,” Somnus manages through the lethargy in his voice.

“Good… sleep.” Noctis glances down in hopes of catching a reaction to his pun.

And he does, when Somnus opens his eyes for just a moment to make sure the other catches his definite eye roll. Noctis smiles at that, and he takes that image with him into his dreams.

#ff15 #final fantasy xv #noctis lucis caelum #somnus lucis caelum #kinktober 2019 #i can type

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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417: Crash of Moons

So this is a movie in which obvious destruction is looming, but those best-placed to do something about it turn blind eye out of sheer greed. Wow. That’s unexpectedly relevant.

After an extremely depressing episode of General Hospital assures us that it’s okay to cheat on your wife as long as you really, really love the other woman, we get into MST3K’s second Rocky Jones, Space Ranger! episode. This one concerns the Gypsy Moons Posita and Negato, an inhabited double planet with a shared atmosphere. Their unpredictable orbit first takes them perilously close to Space Station 0W-9, which nearly comes to a fiery end. Even worse, they’re next destined for an even closer encounter with planet Ophiuchus, one that will destroy both that world and Posita! The inhabitants must be evacuated quickly, but Queen Cleolanta believes it’s all just a conspiracy to undermine her power. Can they convince her in time to save her people?

What I find myself thinking watching this is that if the Gypsy Moons are close enough to share an atmosphere, then shouldn’t the Posita-Ophiuchus collision end badly for the folks on Negato, too? Two planets colliding sounds pretty bad, but millions of molten bits and pieces of them sprayed into space right next door to you wouldn’t be a picnic, either.

Then again, maybe they avoided that idea on purpose, because there’s already a hell of a lot going on in Crash of Moons. We’ve got two contrasting styles of ruler in Cleolanta and Bavarro – both are absolute monarchs but they approach that role in very different ways. We’ve got Cleolanta’s flunky Atlasan, and his conflict between loyalty to the regime and love for his wife Trinka. We’ve got the destruction of entire worlds, with all their history lost in the process, and an examination of the relationship between a place and its people… and all this in three half-hour television episodes! It’s a lot to deal with and they don’t manage to encompass it all, but you have to admire their ambition.

It’s been way too long since I watched the rest of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger! so I don’t actually remember if they previously told us why Cleolanta was so opposed to outside influence. In Crash of Moons, we learn that she is afraid of diaspora: if allowed to leave, she worries the Ophiuchians will become scattered across the galaxy, and forget their homeland and their history. This has certainly happened to plenty of peoples here on Earth, usually because somebody with a bigger army than them was being an asshole, and since Ophiuchus is one planet against the United Worlds you can understand her paranoia. In order to prevent this happening, she has decided she must keep her people under control at all times.

Cleolanta expects total obedience from her subjects – they must put her first, even ahead of their families, as we see when Atlasan is rewarded for turning Trinka in. Nobody is allowed to leave the planet or even to contact anyone from another world by Astrophone (I do wonder, if Astrophones are illegal, where Trinka got one). Even idle curiosity about the rest of the galaxy is strongly discouraged. Obviously this regime is meant to stand in for the USSR: an iron-fisted dictator lording over people who aren’t allowed to know what’s beyond their borders, endlessly suspicious of outsiders who really only want to help them. In a more socially conscious age, this reads a little differently. Cleolanta is still paranoid and that paranoia is still unreasonable, but you can kind of see where she’s coming from.

(Incidentally, in that scene where Rocky and Winky are trying to land on Ophiuchus without being shot down? Wouldn’t that have been way easier if they’d had, oh, I don’t know, some way to camouflage or disguise their ship? Maybe even make it invisible? Something they used for that exact purpose in a previous installment? It wouldn’t even have to be realistic, it could be absolute pseudoscience bullshit… am I blue-sky-ing here?)

At the other end of Crash of Moons’ scale of monarchs is Bavarro. We don’t see him interact with his people, possibly because the entire cast budget for the storyline was spent on approximately five Ophiuchians. What we do see is how he talks to his family, his beloved wife and son. This stands in for Bavarro’s role as a leader, because he sees himself as a father to Posita, and acts in that capacity. Cleolanta shuns outside influences on Ophiuchus, but Bavarro welcomes them, in part because they are rare: the Gypsy Moons are on an orbit around the galactic centre rather than around a particular star, and don’t often come within range of other inhabited worlds. Where Cleolanta assumes the worst, Bavarro always sees the best in people, as demonstrated when he welcomes his visitors by naming their best trait and expressing a hope that his son will be like them.

Yet when confronted with the news that his world will be destroyed, Bavarro’s first reaction is exactly the same as Cleolanta’s – denial. She, who does not trust her visitors, insists it must be a lie. He, who does, thinks it has to be a mistake. Both of them then do what they feel is best to protect their people. Bavarro arranges for everyone to move to the sister moon Negato until they can find another home. Cleolanta tries to prevent the panic that would surely ensue if the Ophiuchians were told that the end of the world was coming, and seeks a solution that does not require abandoning the planet. Their understandings and approaches to the situation are different, but their goals are the same.

Their attitudes towards each other are also in contrast. Bavarro worries that the Ophiuchians will blame him for the oncoming disaster, but all the same he hopes they will get the help they need. Cleolanta, on the other hand, doesn’t care what happens to Posita. Earlier she bragged about her planet’s self-sufficiency, and she clearly expects other worlds to be the same, interested in their own survival above all else. Hence her plan to destroy Posita before it can impact with Ophiuchus, whether or not this gives the Positans time to get out of the way. In her mind, Positan deaths are unfortunate, but it is Ophiuchian deaths that are her concern.

All this means that Cleolanta and Bavarro both have potential to be really interesting characters – but sadly, it remains untapped. Part of this is the fault of the writers: since Ophiuchus is supposed to be a stand-in for the USSR, the only characters who can really be sympathetic are the rebels. Posita, on the other hand, are the ‘good guys’ and must be sympathetic at all times. Therefore neither of the two rulers are allowed to have any depth. Bavarro resigns himself to his fate far too quickly, while Cleolanta is merely arrogant and selfish, and doesn’t seem to deserve her redemption at the end, when she comes to understand that it is the people, not the land, that make a nation.

Of course, the two are in good company, as none of the other characters are much better. The writing unfortunately calls attention to this with Bavarro’s greeting, which names each individual’s one trait: Rocky is brave and heroic, Professor Newton is an absent-minded genius, Winky is comic relief, and so on. The only people here who really seem conflicted about anything are Atlasan and Trinka, who find their marital problems suddenly becoming a matter of state importance. Nobody comes across as struggling with the kind of issues or decisions the end of two worlds would entail, and it deflates the whole story with a resounding thbbbbbppptt.

The idea that the people rather than the land are a culture, while in some ways true, also comes across as a very colonialist sentiment. If the land is not important, then it doesn’t matter who owns it – your conquerors can take all your stuff and tell themselves they needn’t feel bad about it. It also entirely ignores how important land can be to a cultural identity. Many peoples all over the world tell stories in which their earliest ancestors literally sprung from the earth they now live on. This is so common anthropologists needed a word for it and chose autochthony, I guess because they hate the rest of us. The existence of sacred places large and small, from Uluru to Mecca to Santiago de Compostela, argue that the land does matter very much.

It certainly seems to have mattered to the Ophiuchians, because after Crash of Moons we never hear from them again. There was another season of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger! but Cleolanta and her crew were not a part of it – a different running villain was introduced instead, oddly enough in the form of another woman who is described as a suzerain. Sounds like the writers missed her. In fact, I strongly suspect that Crash of Moons is what it is because Patsy Parsons was leaving the show and they wanted her to go out with a bang, so to speak.

I do wonder what happened after the end of this story. Did the Ophiuchians get a new plant, or were they, as Cleolanta feared, scattered among various settlements? If they got a new planet, did they join the United Worlds, or did they return to isolation, if perhaps a more cordial one? Did they have a choice about joining, or was it a condition of help with re-settlement? What about the people of Posita? Was Negato able to support this sudden doubling in its population, or did they also have to find a new world? Did the Negatans resent the Positans moving in? Crash of Moons opens up many, many cans of worms for its world, and I understand that it’s way beyond the scope of a half-hour tv show to deal with them all… but man, I wonder what the fanfiction was like.

#mst3k #reviews #crash of moons #50s

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