#Charter Siblings

[jabberwockprince]

finished the fake stars of vinyl city intros for my bebes <3 kind of a redesign/redraw of the old ones here

sometimes, revolution starts with a violent and petty mechanic, their younger brother who really wants to join the airforce and a defective 1010 they both found in the trash! rambling about them under the cut

Rikki is a former troublemaker and musician who had to sort their life out back into the straight and narrow to raise their little brother, Yiruk. So they went and got a degree in engineering! They're responsible for upgrading the NSR bots and adding extra levels for the Approach stages (entirely because I wanted to make those more relevant, teehee)

To level the field, Rikki also offers upgrades and cosmetics for Mayday and Zuke's transformation thingamajigs! All in exchange for "spare parts" - these can be obtained by playing specific levels with specific remixes/modes, namely 1010 or Approach levels.

After buying all of Rikki's upgrades, they reveal to Mayday and Zuke that all the spare parts they've been getting are going into fixing a friend of theirs - a defective 1010 robot hiding in Dream Fever.

That defective 1010 robot is Ban! He was meant to be another replacement for Haym, but a little oopsie during a concert got his ass benched and set up for repairs. Afraid of being reset, he ran away and found Yiruk, who then convinced Rikki to patch him up.

His name is short for banana, because he looks like one and they're sweet just like him. Do not question him, it's his new life as a rogue bot and he gets to pick his name <3 Ban loves to wear clothes with tacky patterns and bright colors, like cheetah or zebra prints! So he unlocks a bunch of tacky clothes for Mayday and Zuke

He's absolutely going through a lot of shit regarding his identity and individuality and general newfound consciousness, but he remains very upbeat and peppy about the whole thing. He's one bolt away from snapping though.

I like to think that the rock revolution lasted way longer, with NPCs Mayday and Zuke met kinda taking over their own respective districts - so B2J inspiring Yiruk to be a rockstar causes Yiruk to start a band with Rikki and Ban. Which indirectly leads to the fall of Metro District during the rock revolution <3 like come on, those fuckin cannons in the final level that are literally built to look like Mayday and Zuke's faces????? thats so fucking COOL i wish they expanded more on this section

#nsr #no straight roads #nsr oc #no straight roads oc #digital art #purinsu art #yes i latched onto yiruk from the second i saw him #bc hes so silly and he has that scanty and kneesocks palette #yiruk deserves TWO older sibling figures in his life and its gonna be these mfs #i also love to think abt game mechanics like #can you imagine how fun it would be if you could dress up mayday and zuke #you get 1010 uniforms from kayane maybe. or other clothes inspired by the charters #and then some other shit from other NPCs #and like. transformations not being tied to levels. you can pick them #and maybe customize the aesthetic like. yeah this is the nuke youre gonna send to dj sub but it looks like a funny cupcake <3

[fandom-geek]

btw, the violinist in tmp 4? he's probably james smithson, of "founder of the smithsonian institute" fame

so what do we know about our violinist? he grew up in alnwick abbey, he was illegitimate and had legitimate full siblings, a father "certain of his celestial significance", and he has a nephew to whom he leaves his violin

and smithson? well, his father restored alnwick abbey in the 1750s, which was in ruins up until then. smithson was the only illegitimate child of any of the dukes there in the 1700s, which is when the statement is set

smithson also left his estate to his nephew after his death, with the condition that his fortune would establish the smithsonian institute if his nephew died without any children.

here's a point of divergence, however. in our timeline, smithson was a chemist and mineralogist. in tmagp's timeline, he was a violinist. however, as u/New_Helicopter836 pointed out to me on reddit, when smithson's body was disinterred by andrew graham bell, his right little finger was such that it suggests he played "the harpsichord, the piano, or a stringed instrument such as a violin"

looking at smithson's life, he left for university in 1782, so it's likely that tmagp 4 is set around the same time. it might be a bit earlier since the royal court orchestra moved from mannheim to munich in 1778 (putting smithson at about 13), it might be another point of divergence, or smithson is describing it this way to call back to its earlier significance. i'm not sure, but it's weird either way.

all that said, i'm not terribly sure why smithson describes his father (sir hugh smithson/percy, duke of northumberland) as "certain of his celestial significance", especially when the only other time he says celestial is to describe the violin's music. the user i mentioned before found that sir hugh, a major patron of architectural projects, had an observatory built, but i find smithson's language too specific. is his father an avatar too? mannheim is only a bit north of schwartzwald, after all, and this is about thirty years before tmag 23 where albrecht writes to jonah magnus.

let's look a little at smithson's bequest to found the smithsonian institute in the first place. smithson asked for it to be "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men". the magnus institute, notably, is described in the arg as a place of education, and it was founded in 1818. although smithson died in 1829 and his nephew in 1835, the original smithsonian (the columbian institute) was granted a charter by the us government in 1818.

the letter is strangely absent of any names for the violinist or his family, and i can't help but wonder if this is why. and if it is because this is smithson - is this related to why the magnus institute exists instead of the magnus archives? the smithsonian, before it was renamed, was originally granted a charter by the us govt in 1818 - the same year that the magnus institute was founded in tmagp.

this is set 30 years before we know anything of jonah magnus, at least in tmag, so is it possible that he persuaded smithson to fund his educational institute focusing on the supernatural? the changed course of smithson's life from scientist to supernatural violinist would certainly be conducive for that, not least to mention the strange absence of his fortune from his letter to his nephew.

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #already posted this on reddit but fuck it im doing it here too #i'm strangely suspicious that his dad might be an earlier body that jonah possessed #briefly brushing his dad aside as “certain of his celestial significance” just seems like a perfect description for him but it's so vague #and it wouldn't explain the whole smithsonian/magnus institute thing but the refs are way too specific to smithson #for me to believe otherwise #alnwick abbey was legit a ruin for all of the 1700s until sir hugh and his wife elizabeth restored it so it's either james #or a completely fictional equivalent but why so many specific refs to his life then??? #the magnus protocol

[sunbrightheart]

its the fact that lucien could be shipped with any of the three archeron sisters and it would slap every single time. elain? perfect, amazing, my favourite sunshine x sunshine babies gallivanting off to foreign lands as they navigate between the lines of precarious geniality and absolute reckless abandon. feyre? slendid, incredible, the infamous yougest sibling duo ready to wreak havoc upon each others conscience at any given moment while simultaneously chartering into unfamiliar territory of unbidden vulnerability. nesta? wonderful, marvellous, the strongest of steel is forged by the hottest fires as the saying goes, a steamy combination of sharp wit and self-deprecating sarcasm as they unveil the wouded parts of themselves to each other that they felt they had to hide from the world.

#࿓ brightheart. #if you think about it ​lucien can be shipped with almost everyone (except i*nthe gross) in acotar #lucien vanserra #feycien #feyre x lucien #lucnes #nesta x lucien #elucien #elain x lucien #feyre archeron #nesta archeron #elain archeron

[scrivenger-grimgar]

"well, the Uzumaki and Uchiha have around 25-ish members again, which would allow them to be reinstated as clans allied to the village by charter right," Tobirama stated, entirely unfazed by the eyes of the many clan heads watching him speak. Itama shifted his tiny (painfully tiny, was he always that small??) body in his hold, gripping on tighter to his mother's fur collar. both he, Kawarama, and Nawaki were heartbreakingly silent through the whole ordeal, even when the resurrection started by way of the lost Hatake boy, Orochimaru.

"but the Hatake and Senju still only have less than 10 and 15 members respectively, meaning that there would be a power imbalance between the four newly resuscitated clans. given the feud that is, arguably, still active to some of us revenant, it doesn't seem wise to leave it be."

and that was the crux of the matter. several members of both the Uchiha and Senju that had been resurrected had died when the Senju-Uchiha blood feud had been ongoing. both his brothers (his brothers!!) had died far before the village had even been a thought in Hashirama's wood cork of a brain, along with Madara's own siblings, like his older brother Hidehiko, Izuna, their younger brother Matsuri and his twin sister Shouko, and their youngest sister Choushi. thats not even mentioning the adult shinobi under the same circumstances; 22 year old Senju Yasuiro and 28 year old Senju Fuushinshi had attacked and injured Uchiha Kouga, and also injured the man's 12 year old niece Uchiha Rukia, before Tobirama, Madara, Hashirama, and Mito managed to tie them all down.

(if Fuushinshi was sporting a break in his arm, in the same place as young Rukia, well. That was between Tobirama and his cousin.)

"Thats not even mentioning the non-clan shinobi who were resurrected, who, in all likelihood, are probably related to one of the four clans in question. if they become affiliated with said clans is entirely by their own choice." he said, his tone brokering no room for argument. Tobirama was honestly surprised that he hadn't been interrupted yet, but it might be the shock of having so many once-dead shinobi in Konoha's meeting hall.

pursing his lips ever so slightly, he looked to Hashirama, holding Kawarama who was making faces at Itama, then to Touka who was standing behind Mito and holding Nawaki. his brother tilted his head and Touka nodded, flickering her chakra in code pattern for 'plan, question.'

Tobirama sighed, mostly as a visual sign of reluctance for the other clan heads present. 'contract, agreement. kill, home-clan; fade, wild-clan.'

Hashirama's eyes sparkled, his smile not fading from his face in the slightest.

"our agreed upon solution to both the power imbalance and the lacking size of the Senju and Hatake clans is to incite the charter's directory number fourteen."

only two of the clan heads seemed to recognize what he was referencing, tjose being the Nara clan head, as expected, and Madara, who literally co-wrote the damn thing with him. Madara threw his head back with thundering laughter, which Tobirama related to on a personal level.

it was extremely ironic that the ones to end the Senju way of life would be the very people who had been hurt by it the most.

Itama jerked in his arms at the noise, so he adjusted his grip to hold him tighter. several eyes landed on the still laughing Madara, who Tobirama knew was not going to explain anything. the Nara head didn't look any worse, so he either knew what the Senju used to be like, or he simply didn't care.

Tobirama had expected most of the clans to not have invested in that particular article after it was written, but... he was extremely unpleased with Hiruzen's puzzled, near silent question of "the what?"

Madara's laughter died off with the (to most) unexpected line of, "wonderful play, Senju." vicious smile almost mocking to anyone unfamiliar with him. which was everyone except him, Mito, Hashirama, and Izuna.

Tobirama simply inclined his head in acknowledgement. he ran one hand through his hair, carefully avoiding the carefully disguised braids he'd tied into it this morning with Hashirama, Touka, and Orocchi.

"to answer your question, Hiruzen, 'the what' is the clause in the village's Constitution that states, 'when a clan is no longer large enough to support itself and its members, an allied clan who is willing and able are to induct the clan into their own, allowing the continued survival of the bloodline. this can be enacted when a clan's number drops beneath the range of the clan's expected member count.'"

clearing his throat, he continues on, projecting his voice to call over the now disorganized shinobi.

"in essence, this means that the senju will join either the Uchiha, Uzumaki, or Hatake clans, as those three have priority over other clans in the village due to both personal and blood relations being closest. thus, to avoid further power imbalance in the number of members to each resurrected clan, the Senju will be hosted by the Hatake clan."

#the 'orochimaru fucked up the edo tensei by adding hiraishin bits and now he has 7 dads and moms' au #giving these bastards free reign over the village ends up causing untold damage. they built it. but still. #butsuma is rolling in his grave. mostly cause tobi's holding a rave on top of it. a /grave rave/ so to say. #the senju's culture of 'i am a weapon first and human fifth' finally gets eradicated #tobirama's grave rave #konoha scientists #the implication is that naruto should've been taken in by the uchiha after his parents died #and that naruto AND sasuke should have been raised by the ino-shika-cho triad clans after the massacre #and that kakashi was supposed to go to kushina tsunade orochimaru or fugaku #creative writing #writing #naruto #naruto au #senju tobirama #senju hashirama #uchiha madara #uchiha izuna #hatake clan #senju clan #uzumaki clan #uchiha clan #resurrection au #senju itama #senju kawarama #senju nawaki #uchiha sasuke #ninja politics

[fromtheseventhhell]

"It's normal for siblings to fight" Okay well it's not normal to be extremely classist and look down on your sister for being non-conforming. Or to go to the woman who ordered the death of your pet to tell her about your father's plans, when he specifically warned you against doing so, because you want to marry the boy you saw attack your sister and her friend (contributing partially to said father's death and your sister being unable to escape on the ship he chartered). Or to think of your sibling as unsatisfactory in comparison to another when you believe her to be dead. I notice that none of the "Sansa and Arya are going to reunite and instantly have no issues" crowd ever acknowledge any of this, which makes it seem like they don't actually believe what they say about their relationship being normal and easily reconciled. People wanting them to have no issues simply because they're siblings is another example of how fandom likes to flatten complex characters and relationships. They get reduced to being bickering siblings when their conflict runs deeper than that. If the author is telling you that they have "deep issues" to work out [X], I don't understand being so adamant about ignoring said issues. I also get the sense it's about ignoring the capacity for a certain character to be flawed, but that isn't going to change the fact that her "slip of the tongue" is very likely to be revealed and a source of further conflict 🤷🏾‍♀️

#arya stark #sansa stark #house stark #asoiaf #also if it's so normal for siblings to fight then why are you guys losing your minds over us theorizing they won't get along?? #the amount of condescending /that's just how siblings act/ takes I see 🙄 #sorry I guess? that we read the book and don't just delete parts of the story because we find it convenient? #it's not even like takes about them being enemies is widespread the most I see is that they aren't instantly bffs when they reunite 😭 #some people theorize they'll never be close but guess what? that's a completely fair and valid assumption based on their relationship! #personally I think they'll have a sweet reunion before the issues they have inevitably surface again because while they've been through #a lot they haven't fundamentally changed as people or the values they hold #and I think that's going to be very interesting to read about! #I can't figure out why people always take the most boring bland route for how things will play out #mostly because people seem to be unable to swallow the concept that Sansa is a flawed character who isn't perfectly sweet all the time #and the fact that their conflict is instigated by Sansa's classism #which is funny cause in the grand scheme of things her being mean to Arya is such a mild thing that opens the door to a ton of growth #never seen anybody but stansas equating her being a bully to her sister to her being evil/a villain #all we do is point out that it exists in the story...people in this fandom have no concept of nuance I stg 😭 #anyways they're both complex characters and their conflict is interesting and I hope we get to see how it plays out #cause it's definitely going to be better then that trash d&d came up with 🙏🏾

[sergeifyodorov]

appeal of the leafs is not that they're cool. they're not cool. the coolest bitch there is willy styles and he literally has to have at least 1 sibling and 2 unrelated swedes with him at all times or he starts to rapidly radioactively decompose. the leafs are all varying amounts of Lame, Miserable, or Chartered Accountant. their appeal is The Curse

[twig-tea]

Canadian LGBTQ+ rights; a whirlwind summary

Back in August of 2023 @wen-kexing-apologist wrote an absolutely stellar piece here, and I didn't want to co-opt it (especially because it was already written with an American gaze and I don't want to pile on/distract from the fact that we're talking about Thai BL) so I decided to make this a separate post. And then it lingered in the sad pile of my drafts. But, I'm gonna post it anyway, and take this as an excuse to talk about Canadian history of LGBTQ+ rights apropos of absolutely nothing except the most recent move of the provinces (specifically Saskatchewan) to use the notwithstanding clause to force through legislation that the courts have said goes against our charter of rights and freedoms--specifically legislation that says a teacher cannot respect a child's pronouns without permission of the parent. This is being taken to court (latest as of this writing is that in Feb 2024 the group fighting the law was granted the right to be heard by the court in spite of the notwithstanding clause being invoked, so there is still a chance of it getting revoked via the courts).

WKA talks about what the conversation was like in the US around queer rights in the 20th century; highly recommend reading the linked post first. In Canada the conversation was a little different though with very similar themes; we had the shift to a focus on "privacy" as the driver of our rights long before the HIV/AIDS epidemic, in the 1960s. So much of the push and pull of our laws around homosexuality and gender identity and expression have had to do with the public vs private.

Sodomy has been illegal in Canada since colonization (earliest known conviction: 1648) but laws against gross indecency, which included dancing, kissing, or touching between two men, didn't get codified in Canada until 1892 (and not extended to apply to women until 1953 (thanks)). While these laws essentially outlawed any physical public affection between men from the turn of the century, the fervor to root out and eliminate gayness from society didn't really reach its pitch until mid-century.

I need you all to know about the Fruit Machine, which was an ostensibly "scientific" detection device to identify and purge gay and lesbian civil servants from the military and public service in Canada. While the machine was built in the 1950s and used through the 1950s and 1960s, the practice of using psychology, polygraphs, and interrogation to force military and public servants to come out and take a voluntary discharge existed through to the 1990s.

Our former Prime Minister PE Trudeau made famous the line "there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" as part of his so-called decriminalization of homosexuality 1967; this is of course a joke because "buggery" and "gross indecency" stayed on the books for another 20 years, the only difference being they were only punishable if the people involved were under 21, there were 3 or more people present, or the participants were performing these acts outside of their home. You may notice that this meant the policing of public space was where and how homophobia continued to be perpetuated by the state via police.

Highlighting the importance of privacy as a framework for gay rights at this time, The Right to Privacy movement was the name for one of the forerunners of modern Canadian LGBTQ+ rights groups through the 1970s--though worth noting that this group in particular was criticized for its exclusion of WLW and our trans siblings (some of whom of course overlap). The infamous bathhouse raids of 1981 ("Operation Soap"), leading to at the time the largest arrest in Toronto's history, were one of the precipitating factors in the recognizable start of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. In 1986, five years after the raids and thanks to massive effort by LGBTQ+ organizing, sexual orientation was added to the protected list of attributes that it is illegal to discriminate against under the Canadian Human Rights Act (gender identity and expression was added in 2012), and in 1987 "anal intercourse" was made legal for those over 18 (the legal age of consent was made the same for everyone--16--in 2019), and "gross indecency" as a law was finally repealed. The fight for marriage equality was the next step after achieving real decriminalization, and was strongly based on the right to freedom from discrimination as protected by the Human Rights Act.

[Just going to take this moment to note that for some reason they never struck off the law criminalizing sodomy when more than two people are present; this is still an inequality on the books now and people do (rarely) still get charged with it.]

In the late 1980s and 1990s, the censorship fight was most famously held in the written sphere--if you've seen the movie Better than Chocolate, you might already be familiar what I'm talking about. From approximately 1986 through to 2000, Canada Border Services targeted shipments to queer bookstores, holding them up, sometimes destroying the content, putting those businesses at risk, and preventing queer content that passed through border control to be stocked in physical stores. It took the Supreme Court of Canada's ruling in 2000 to shut down that practice as an illegal suppression of a bookstore (Little Sisters in Vancouver, BC, shout-out!)'s right to freedom of expression.

Raids on safe spaces for sexual activity continued to be a driver for action through to the 21st century. The WLW bathhouse the Pleasure Palace (changed from "Pussy Palace" in the late 90s to be more inclusive of our sisters without that particular body part) was raided in the year 2000; 19 years after Operation Soap, and notably the first and last raid on a queer woman's bathhouse in Canadian history. What followed was a massive public coal-raking of police, including the very telling call to action: "out of the bars! Into the streets!" I don't think this was necessarily the intended implication at the time, but looking back the threat was that if we were not given our rights, we would be in everyone's faces (and conversely if we were given our rights, we'd be quiet). The legalization of marriage between any two consenting persons of legal age came five years later in 2005 (I don't mean to imply this effort was the only reason--the fight for marriage equality was active all the way through the 90s and early 2000s; it's just an interesting parallel that two of the biggest wins for equality for queer people in Canada came 5 years after a historic police raid).

One of the factors in gaining acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in Canada was the fight for marriage equality; as it focused the conversation on sameness rather than difference. The queer activism movement here pivoting from messaging around bathhouses and being left alone to marriage equality was an intentional, strategic attempt to be accepted as the same rather than being honoured for our differences. And that fight coming after the HIV/AIDS epidemic and bathhouse raids is no accident as it framed queer people directly in opposition to the stigma of promiscuity that surrounded assumptions about gay people which fed into the lack of support for medical intervention, research, and treatment for HIV/AIDS (here in Canada too, our history is just as gross on that front, people just don't talk about it as much. But Canada followed the US government's example, and so people were left without medical resources for at least eight years in Canada (since the first cases were identified here in 1982) and THREE YEARS after they had been approved by the US--AZT wasn't available in Canada until 1990. Three years in which people died unnecessarily. We similarly approved PrEP four years after the FDA, in 2016. Today, despite "universal health care", if you want access to PrEP, it will depend on the province you're in as to whether you can get it at all for free or whether you need to pay--in my province, it takes 2 months to get free PrEP).

Today, just over 50% of the people with HIV/AIDS in Canada are men who have sex with men; it's estimated 80% of people infected with HIV know their status, of those 75% are being treated, and of those 89% are effectively unable to transmit the virus. In that context, the ongoing fight re: HIV/AIDS in Canada today is around decriminalization, specifically decriminalization of drugs (since ~20% of HIV infections are from IV drug use--one of the many reasons I support harm reduction strategies), and the decriminalization of non-disclosure (since Canada is one of the few places where you can be charged for not sharing your HIV status with a sexual partner). Until very recently, we were also fighting to be able to give blood--it was only in 2022 that men who have sex with men were allowed to donate blood in Canada, which meant every visit to a blood donation clinic involved questions about the gender of your sexual partner(s). And, as mentioned at the top, one of the rights we are fighting to retain right now, is the right to have our gender expression respected without forced outing to a parent or guardian; Once again, the fight in Canada has become centered around the right to privacy.

Slightly tangential to the topic at hand, but I would be remiss in talking about moments in recent history when the law did not prosecute us, but it failed to protect us. In the 2010s, a serial killer was targeting men who he thought he could get away with making disappear; and he was right. The police ignored calls from the community to treat the case as a serial killer for years. Bruce McArthur killed 8 men who had gone missing from Toronto's Gay Village between 2010 and 2017, several who were vulnerable because they were distant from their families (because they were gay and closeted), homeless, and/or in immigration limbo (waiting for status), so it took longer for them to be reported missing. During this time, through to just weeks before the arrest, the Toronto Police insisted in public statements that there was no serial killer.

Black and Indigenous queer people have regularly died as a result of the police being called while they were in crisis. An unnamed trans woman (who was midgendered by the SIU after her death); Regis Korchinksy-Paquet, both in 2020. In 2022, Dani Cooper, queer activist who advocated against police-run wellness checks, was shot and killed by police during a wellness check called for them.

As a positive step, in 2016, Black Lives Matter Toronto staged a protest as part of the annual Pride Parade, making a list of demands, but the one that got the most coverage was the demand to ban police at Pride. This was taken up by the Pride Toronto committee, and since 2017 police have been banned from having an official float or presence at the parade. This has been taken up by several Canadian cities including Vancouver and Hamilton and inspired action in other cities globally.

With that context, in which queer people are rightfully distrustful of police, it is alarming that police-reported hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people (one of the only ways we have of tracking hate crime consistently) had a record-breaking increase in 2023.

In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (the son of PM Trudeau quoted above) gave a public apology to LGBTQ+ Canadians. Here's just a brief excerpt:

"To the kids who are listening at home and who fear rejection because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity and expression; And to those who are nervous and scared, but also excited at what their future might hold; We are all worthy of love, and deserving of respect. And whether you discover your truth at 6 or 16 or 60, who you are is valid. To members of the LGBTQ2 communities, young and old, here in Canada and around the world: You are loved. And we support you."

The important part about this apology was twofold; one, it explicitly named many of the specific instances of oppression I mentioned above, and two, it listed the things the government was doing to make reparations. This included the repeal of the law that equalized the age of consent (which went through two years later, as mentioned above), the pardoning of people who had a criminal record due to unjust laws based on LGBTQ+ discrimination, settlement of a class action lawsuit for victims of The Purge, and a commitment to work towards better resources for mental health and housing for LGBTQ+ people, as well as a committment to continue working to remove the barriers for gay men to donate blood (which went through in 2022). One of the other important achievements was the change to allow an "X" option under gender on Canadian Passports (so the three available options are M/F/X) in 2019 [some provincial gender opt-out options have existed since 2017].

The current government is by no stretch perfect, but it has been good to see some of these moments of our history acknowledged and corrected for. As the global pressure towards fascism continues, it's critical that we remember these changes are the result of hard work, not inevitable "progress", that these fights are ongoing and require our energy, and that change, using a variety of tactics, is possible.

Quick hit facts if you prefer a list to a narrative:

In Canada, it was illegal for men to hold hands with men or women to hold hands with women in public until the 1960s;

The government tried to expunge us from public service in the 60s and 70s;

it was illegal for men to have threesomes until the 1990s;

bathhouse raids were made possible due to legislative inequalities through the 2000s;

Canada took three years longer than the US to approve treatments for HIV/AIDS, four years longer to approve PrEP, and still today access can be complicated/expensive;

it was possible to be of legal age to have sex but not anal sex until 2019;

Gay men were barred from donating blood until 2022;

Canada remains one of the few countries in the world where you can be prosecuted for not disclosing your HIV status (though does not apply if you retain a minimal viral load);

In 2023 some provincial governments tried to make kids choose between gender expression and their privacy (and potentially safety) from their parents; as of March 2024 that fight is still actively being fought.

The take-aways I hope people get from this post:

This history is more recent than we pretend, and is ongoing

Framing gay rights as right to privacy vs right to being not prosecuted for being in public is nuanced and intertwined

Transphobes need to fuck off

Some references/further reading/watching:

Brief history of LGBTQ+ laws in Canada at the Canadian Encyclopedia

The Fruit Machine documentary made by TVO

Article on HIV/AIDS in Canada policy written by one of the policymakers

Timeline of HIV/AIDS Developments (only goes to 2010 so does not include PreP, which was approved in Canada in 2016, four years after its availability in the US)

Article on The Pleasure Palace raid by one of the organizers

Article on the Bathhouse Raids 40 years after Operation Soap

Article on Bruce McArthur's crimes and the review of how police handled the case by former judge Gloria Epstein

Regis Korchinksy-Paquet and the unnamed trans woman dead after interactions with police

Dani Cooper's death

Article about the Supreme Court case brought by Little Sisters bookshop

HIV Non-Disclosure Law Fact Sheet

Article about the end of the blood ban for men who have sex with men

Black Lives Matter Toronto on their 2016 action at Toronto Pride

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's apology

Gender "X" Options on Passports

Stream Better Than Chocolate (you may need to look up where it's available in your region)

Little Sisters Book & Art Emporium

Glad Day Bookshop (Makes a claim for being the oldest queer bookshop in the world; one of the few queer public spaces being maintained/actively protected as more and more of our spaces are eroded, and also just a personal fave so I'm taking the excuse to shout it out too)

#canadian history #lgbtq history #typed so that i can stop thinking it #for reference #long post

[joelalorian]

Tides of Desire - Chapter Nine: Close Quarters

*mood board by the lovely @/janaispunk. divider by the equally lovely @/saradika-graphics

Pairing: Yacht Captain!Joel Miller x f!reader

Series Summary: TLOU no outbreak AU. Joel Miller is a luxury yacht captain running charters in the Caribbean. You join the crew as a deckhand and unexpectedly complicate Joel's peaceful existence. Basically the TLOU bunch on a Below Deck yacht.

Chapter warnings: 18+ MDNI, fluff, stolen kisses, terms of endearment (sweetheart, etc.), outdoor/semi-public sex, unprotected p in v, fingering, oral (m receiving). Smallish age gap (reader is 32 or so, Joel is 40). No use of y/n, though reader is of British descent and has the nickname Brit (occasionally used).

Series masterlist

Chapter Nine: Close Quarters

“She agreed to meet for drinks,” Tommy declared as he entered the crew mess after the charter guests deboarded, his fit body vibrating with excitement. He stole half of the sandwich you just made with a cheeky grin before sliding in next to you at the table.

“Oy!” You slapped his hand too late; he already shoved it in his fat gob. “Bloody fucking menace. Did you annoy her to death, so she agreed just to get you to go away?”

He turned puppy dog eyes on you, so like his brother, and pouted. It must be a Miller family trait to have perfected that look. Sarah was just as good at it, too. “Rude.”

You laughed, bumping his shoulder playfully. He annoyed you like an older sibling, and you got over it just as quickly. “So, Maria is sticking around for a bit? Where are you going to take her?”

Tommy ran a hand through his long, dark hair. “Yeah, she’s staying in San Juan for another few days. I’m thinking Caribar at Caribe Hilton. I need to impress her.”

Your eyes widened. That was an upscale resort with expensive food and drinks. He was going all out for this woman. “Wow. I’m sure she’ll love it.”

His hands suddenly began fidgeting. “I haven’t taken dating seriously in a real long time. And she’s unlike anyone I have dated before. She’s way outta my league. I’m scared shitless,” Tommy admitted. Turning desperate eyes on you, he added, “Would you and Joel come along? Make it a double date kinda thing? I’ll be less nervous that way.”

You weren’t sure it was a great idea, but Tommy looked like a nervous little boy at the thought of going on an actual date without some type of backup. “Are you sure you want us there? It won’t cramp your style?”

“Please? You can leave whenever you want, just be there to help get the conversation flowing until I get comfortable. Or drunk. Whichever happens first, I guess.”

Shrugging, you tilted your chin toward the upper decks. “Let me run it by Joel, I guess. I’m not sure if he’s ready to put our relationship out there like that yet. And going on a double date with you and Maria would definitely put it out there.”

“I already ran it by him – he’s ok with it if you are.”

There went any excuse you could have thought of. If Joel was okay with it, how could you ever say no. You felt giddy at just the thought of going on a double date with him. That one night in the hotel being the closest thing you’ve had to a date in far too long. “That settles it. We’re going on a double date! Just keep it on the down low amongst the crew, yeah?”

“Keep what on the down low?” Sarah chimed in as she entered the crew mess for a snack. Each of you should have been doing work to turnover the boat for the next charter, but it seemed like everyone was feeling a bit peckish.

Tommy glanced at you and winked. “I asked Maria out and she said yes.” Sarah screeched in response, throwing her arms around Tommy. “That’s great! Where are you taking her? Tell me everything!”

You left the two of them to gush over Tommy’s plans and made your way up to the main deck to see what needed done still. The next couple of hours passed in a flash, the washdown keeping you busy. Joel held you back after the tip meeting – the guests left a huge tip after your heroic actions.

“Did Tommy talk to you?” His voice rough like sandpaper on fresh cut wood, causing a delightful chill to wash down your back.

“Mmhmm. You sure you want to do this?”

You held yourself back from reaching for him – it was torture, but you stayed strong. Joel glanced around the main salon confirming that it was empty but for the two of you. His head dipped, closing the distance between you, and placed a chaste kiss on your lips.

“Yes, I’m sure.” A mischievous look flashed in his dark eyes, and he swatted your ass before departing for the bridge, leaving you giggling like a lovesick teen as you made your way below deck. Your phone buzzed in your pocket. Pulling it out, you giggled at the text from Joel.

JM: We’re going on a date!

By the time you showered and readied yourself for a nice evening out, the news of Tommy’s date – and your and Joel’s roles in it – was old news to the rest of the crew. Talia eyed you knowingly, her mysterious and quiet nature made you believe she saw a lot more than she let on. Sarah and Tess teased you, true to form. Jake just looked at you blankly, leaving you wondering if he was jealous.

“Make sure he pays!” Sarah demanded. “Do not take your wallet out under any circumstances.”

She was so adamant that her dad better treat you well that it left you with an aching belly from laughing so hard.

“I’m serious! He’s got it in his head that he’s a feminist and I’m afraid he thinks that means women should pay their own way. DO NOT let him get away with that, not on a Captain’s salary. You hear me?”

Your hands flew up in surrender, eyes wide at her earnest tone. “Understood. He pays. No exceptions.”

Satisfied, Sarah changed the conversation to compliment your choice in attire. You opted for the classiest dress you packed, a form fitting but not indecent black number that you had tucked away in your closet for years. It was definitely your go-to little black dress and it had been severely under-utilized for the past couple of years. You paired the dress with strappy heels – nothing too high, you didn’t want to break an ankle – and your long hair flowed over your shoulders in natural, beachy waves. Your makeup was subtle and classy, just a hint of color on your eyelids and lips to accentuate your tanned skin, a definite benefit of working outside.

“You look gorgeous,” Tess said as you did one last spin for them.

“Yeah, Dad’s gonna stumble all over his words when he sees you,” Sarah added, hugging you.

You blushed, picturing Joel staring at you in adoration, complimenting you with a nervous hitch in his deep, rumbling voice. Damn, arousal already built in your lower belly at just the thought. You were in for a delightfully torturous evening.

“Have I mentioned how beautiful you look tonight?” Joel breathed in your ear as you followed Tommy into the resort. “I’m going to have a hard time keeping my hands off you at the table.”

“Who said you had to?” you teased in return, enjoying the warmth of his hand at your back. “And yes, you have, but please don’t stop. You look sinfully gorgeous tonight as well.”

Joel grinned, dark eyes twinkling behind thick framed glasses, his lush curls artfully falling into place atop his head. Your fingers ached to run through them, twist them around your slim digits. Part of you longed to dash away, get a room, and keep Joel to yourself for the night. But one glance at Tommy’s anxious smile, dark eyes scanning the outdoor tables in search of Maria, and you knew the pair of you would never be able to sneak away.

“Ah, there she is!” Tommy exclaimed, spotting Maria at a table tucked into a corner of the open-air seating area. He surged forward, soft breeze ruffling his long curls. You squeezed Joel’s hand, hanging back to let Tommy greet his date without the pair of you hovering over them.

“I’ve never seen him like this,” Joel’s voice rumbled in your ear. “He must really like her.” Your head bobbed in agreement, turning to smile at him. Your faces were so close, the miniscule distance between you reduced further as Joel tilted his head, capturing your lips in a soft kiss. “Mmm, I really like you.” Joel’s lips pecked yours after every word.

“Come on already, love birds!” Tommy called, waving to you from his seat next to Maria.

“Nice to see you both again,” Maria greeted as you sat, her dark, smooth skin beaming with happiness.

Dinner was lovely, conversation flowing with a natural ease among the four of you. Maria and Tommy were equally enamored with each other and before long you and Joel were left chatting amongst yourselves.

“Want to get outta here?” Joel’s fingertips teased along the hem of your dress, stoking the fire that started building within you hours ago.

“Fuck yeah, I do.” Your chair nearly toppled backwards from the force with which you stood. Joel barely mumbled an excuse to his brother as you dragged him away, waving at Maria and Tommy over your shoulder.

A visceral need for him churned in your belly, skin buzzing as he dragged you around a few corners, backing you against a shadowed section of wall hidden from passersby and windows. Joel’s mouth was on you instantly, teeth nipping at your lips and scraping at your neck as he tasted your skin.

“Joel.” You drew his name out in a long, low moan as his fingers slid beneath the hem of your sundress and dipped past your panties. You were throbbing, wet and waiting for his expert touch. It had been too long since the last time you were together like this, the night at the hotel feeling like a distant memory.

“Sweetheart, all this for me?” His fingers left you briefly, bringing them up to his eyeline. Joel stared at the glaze on them, before slipping them into his mouth to suck at the irrefutable evidence of your arousal. “Fucking Christ, you taste good. Like nectar from a god damn peach.”

Joel made quick work of removing your panties, shoving the strip of fabric in his pocket as his lips met yours. A gasp left your lungs when his fingers sank knuckle deep inside you, his thumb teasing at your clit. The bundle of nerves already over sensitized, Joel made you come within minutes, his mouth swallowing your moans and whines.

“That’s it, sweetheart. Coming on my damn fingers already. So sexy.” Joel’s voice, rough with arousal, talked you through it, lips still touching yours as you breathed the same breaths. His free hand worked at his pants, setting his hardened cock free from its confines. “Need you, sweetheart. Now.”

“Oh, fuck.” Knees already weak from your orgasm, you hiked one leg up around his hip while he supported you, grasping your ass to hike you further up. Joel slipped inside, stretching your warm, wet walls with the sheer size of him. “Joel, love, you feel so good.”

Part of you couldn’t believe you were letting Joel fuck you against a wall in public. It was something you’d never done before – you were adventurous, sure, but not that adventurous. The other part of you didn’t give a shit. You were with Joel, the hard press of his body moving against yours bringing you both immense pleasure, and that was all that mattered.

Hands buried in those lush curls, you keened. “Faster, please.” Already on edge, you needed as much of Joel as you could get. “I’m so close.” His hips lurched in response, snapping faster, harder as his mouth latched onto the skin at the base where your shoulder met your neck. The sharp nip of his teeth followed by the gentle swipe of his tongue soothing the spot sent you over the edge. “Fuck, Joel!”

“Shhh,” he hushed you, fucking you through the height of your orgasm as your walls choked his cock. His thrusts became erratic, muscles flexing as he lost control. Your name flowed beautifully from his lip while his cum painted your walls. You stayed connected, chests heaving, and concrete wall cool against the heated skin of your back, as you both came down from the heights of ecstasy for several minutes.

“That was…”

“Yeah…”

There were no words.

The breeze shifted, carrying a slight chill in the night air, and you finally separated to right yourselves. Holding your hand out for your panties once Joel tucked himself away, you laughed when he just patted his pocket with a shake of his head. “Nah, I’m keepin’ ‘em.”

“Naughty,” you teased, grasping his hand as you walked.

The yacht was lit up when you made it back, the rest of the crew on the sundeck, dancing and carrying on. Laughter and buzzed conversations carried through the air as you and Joel quietly boarded without anyone seeing you. You knew you should join them on deck, but your heart ached to stay near Joel as long as you could. Joel seemed to feel the same.

Hand in his, you followed him through the interior to the bridge, brows shooting up when Joel merely nodded to Frank and dragged you around the corner to his quarters. You could hardly meet Frank’s knowing gaze as you passed.

“Joel, what –”

He silenced you with a finger against your lips, still puffy from the shared moments against the wall. “I’m not ready to let you go,” he murmured, shutting the door behind you. Large hands deftly removed your dress and bra, tossing them aside before slipping a fresh tee shirt over your head. “You’re staying here tonight, okay?”

Eyes widened comically, you merely nodded as Joel stripped down to his boxer briefs and pulled you into bed with him. You expected him to lead you somewhere quiet and private, but certainly not as private as his quarters. Settled beneath the soft sheet next to him, nothing in your life ever felt as right as laying there in Joel’s arms, his lips pressing tender kisses to your forehead. You only hoped he didn’t come to regret it in the morning.

The sky beyond the porthole was still dark, the first hints of dawn not yet peeking through when Joel drifted into wakefulness, your warm body tangled with his. Nose buried in your hair, he breathed in your scent, one hand caressing the soft, supple skin of your hips while the other cradled your head. He could not recall ever feeling such contentment, his heart fit to burst with emotions.

Joel’s hands continued wandering as he became lost in thought, imagining more moments like this with you. He could not wait to further explore things with you during the off season. You came in and set his life upside down in the best way possible when he least expected it. Falling in love did not come easy to Joel, but with you, it was effortless. He was falling whether he wanted to or not, it was inevitable and unstoppable.

You stirred beneath his touch when his hand dipped between your thighs, thick fingers teasing at your slit, already wet and ready for him. The sleepy moans you let out as he rubbed your clit hit his ears like a symphony. Joel continued fingering you until you were fully awake, clutching at him as he drew an orgasm from you.

“Joel,” you breathed his name into the dark room, mouth pressed to his neck, tasting the saltiness of his skin. “What’s gotten into you?” His hands were everywhere, mapping your body, committing it to memory.

“You.”

Mind still foggy with a mix of pleasure and sleep, you stared at him, perplexed. “What?”

“You. You’re what’s gotten into me,” he replied with a soft chuckle, pulling you impossibly closer. “You wriggled your way into my life, beneath my skin, into my heart. Now you’re in my bed. Of course, I’m going to take advantage of that.” You were looking at him with such softness in your eyes, he knew you felt the same.

Your hands wandered as he spoke, body still buzzing from the aftereffects of your orgasm, and finally wrapped around his rapidly hardening cock. “Yes, taking advantage of that sounds like a good plan.”

Joel laid back, letting you take control, your touch setting him ablaze. Shuffling down toward the foot of the bed, you took him in your mouth, and he whined at the wet warmth encasing him. He couldn’t take his eyes off you as you worked him, taking as much of him as you could until his tip hit the back of your throat, tongue working along the bottom of his shaft and swirling around the head. He wouldn’t last long like that, hands grasping your arms to gently pull you up.

“Why’d you stop me? I was enjoying myself,” you sassed, climbing up Joel’s broad form, thighs settling on either side of his hips.

“So was I, but I didn’t want to blow my load so quick. You’re too good at that, beautiful girl.” You were painfully gorgeous in the pre-dawn light, the glow of your skin ethereal in the moonlight. He kissed you, tongue licking into your mouth to tangle with yours as you wriggled your hips until the broad head of his cock was perfectly notched to slip inside you.

You sank down on him, moaning into the kiss as you began to ride him with a slow rocking of your hips. Unlike last night, where the pair of you worked each other hard and fast from the overwhelming need of the moment, every movement this morning was lazy and loving, a slow build of pleasure until you came with a gasp, Joel exploding inside you shortly after.

Words were on the tip of his tongue as you clung to each other afterwards, drowsy and sated, but Joel swallowed them. Too soon, he reminded himself.

Sleep pulled you both back under for a couple hours until all hell broke loose.

tbc

#joel miller #joel x reader #joel x female reader #yacht captain!joel miller #tlou #the last of us #pedro pascal #fanfic #fanfiction #joel miller x female reader #joel miller smut #joel miller series #joel miller story #pedrostories

[ktwritesstuff]

Then Comes Marriage (a Last of Us fic)

Title: Then Comes Marriage Fandom: The Last of Us (no-pocalypse AU) Rating: PG Characters & Pairings: Joel Miller x plus size!Reader Word Count: ~2,000 Summary: The rough and ready followup to First Comes Love. Wedding day fluff.

A/N: Apologies for the lack of smuttiness, but I feel that wedding night sex is overrated. Un-beta'd, may God have mercy on my soul.

-

In lieu of a bachelor party, Joel and Tommy chartered a fishing boat out of Galveston the week before the wedding.  You hadn’t vetoed strippers–it would hardly be fair after the Cirque du Soleil-level adult performer your sister had hired for the bachelorette weekend you spent with her in New York.  You suspected it was more for Sarah’s sake than yours, but Joel had politely insisted (to Tommy’s great disappointment) he was getting too old for that sort of thing.  

While the Miller boys spent some quality time on the Gulf, you and Sarah got to have your own girls’ weekend.  You went to the mall for mani-pedis and had lunch at the Chinese buffet.  In J.C. Penney, a saleswoman at the makeup counter helped you both pick out new lipstick and eye-shadow for the big day.  Just because it was a simple courthouse affair didn’t mean you couldn���t have fun with it.  After you took Sarah over to the jewelry counter as well.  

“Why don’t you pick something out?” you said.  “I want to get you something for being my bridesmaid.”  

Sarah looked over the display case and ran her fingers over a display of charm bracelets.  Her fingers paused on a gold bracelet bearing the word MOM.

“What should I call you,” she asked.  “After you and my dad get married?”

“You can call me whatever you want,” you said.  “I’d love it if you decide to call me mom one day, but I certainly don’t expect it.” 

Sarah shrugged.  “Do you think you’ll have kids of your own?” 

“We’ve talked about it,” you said.  “We’re going to try, but it doesn’t always work out.”  

Neither you nor Joel were exactly spring chickens and unless you wanted to be mistaken for grandparents in the kindergarten pickup line you’d have to get started.  The truth was you had already thrown protection to the wind the past few months, so far without success and you could already feel the anxiety mounting.  You told yourself that three was enough; three was a family, but there was still a powerful yearning inside you.  

Of course, Sarah didn’t need to hear about that.  You could sympathize with her reservations.  Not many of her friends or classmates had a thirteen year age gap with their siblings.  

“I know it’d probably be weird for you to have a baby brother or sister,” you admitted.  “But I hope you know no matter what, you’ll always be your daddy’s baby girl.”  

Sarah turned the bracelet over in her hands so the lettering formed a different word as she waved it in front of your face.

“Wow,” she teased.  “That was cheesy as hell.”

“You know what I mean,” you said, nudging her arm.

“No wonder you and my dad fell in love,” she said, rolling her eyes.

When the clerk came back around the counter, Sarah chose a teardrop shaped ruby on a gold chain that would compliment the dress that Joel had gotten her to wear for the ceremony.  

“I think you should have a baby,” Sarah said as you walked through the parking lot, content with your purchases.  “I charge $20 an hour for babysitting.”  

You laughed.  “You drive a hard bargain.”

“$15 once they’re out of diapers,” she added.

“Fair enough.”

You took Sarah home and stayed with her until Joel and Tommy got back, sun-kissed and still a little hungover.  You and Joel had agreed not to see each other again before the ceremony on Friday, which gave you some time to pack up your apartment and put the finishing touches on the flowers.  

Your sister flew in the day before to scout the best locations around the courthouse for family photos.  She did your hair and makeup in the morning and offered to drive you to the courthouse, but you didn’t quite trust her behind the wheel.

Once you made it through courthouse security you met Tommy in the lobby and he wrapped you in a warm embrace.

“Are we all checked in?” you asked.

“Yeah, they’ve got us in courtroom 6,” Tommy pointed down the hall.  “Supposed to be about a half hour.”

You realized you were shaking as you swapped out your flats for a more elegant pair of heels and Tommy reached out to steady you.  

“How you holding up, buddy?” 

“You know, I’m good,” you said.  “How is he?”

“The same,” Tommy said with a bright smile.  “I think he’s really keeping it together; only asked me about 50 times if I thought you were still coming.”

“Oh, Jesus,” you said, letting out a peal of nervous laughter. 

“I’m running down to the cafe to grab a coffee, do you want anything?”  

“Water,” you said, your stomach churning at the thought of fried food and burnt coffee.  “Maybe a ginger ale–with a straw–” Your sister would kill you if you ruined your lipstick before taking a single photo.

“You got it, Sis,” Tommy gave you a thumbs up.

“Emma’s got your boutonniere if you want to grab it on your way down,” you explained, pointing back to the metal detectors where your sister was still reinstalling her various piercings.

Once you were both sorted, you gathered the rest of the flowers and started down the hall.  Then you saw Joel.  He was pacing back and forth across the hall, but froze on the spot when he saw you.  

You always thought he was handsome (or at least, almost always) but seeing him all put together in a dark navy suit, with a vest no less!  It was surreal, for a moment you forgot this was the man you were supposed to be marrying in a little less than half an hour. 

“You look beautiful,” Joel said, leaning over to kiss you.

“Not on the mouth!” Emma screamed, still lagging a few steps behind you and Joel leapt back in alarm. 

“I did not bring enough makeup wipes to clean you both up,” she warned, combing her fingers through Joel’s hair unsolicited, arranging his curls more to her liking.  For his part, Joel was very patient with her or at least too nervous to protest.   

“You two shouldn’t be kissing before the ceremony anyway,” Sarah chimed in.

“You look beautiful, sweetie,” you said, beaming at Sarah.

Emma handed you Joel’s boutonniere and snapped a few pictures as you pinned it to his lapel–a red rosebud and yellow alyssum to match the sunflowers in your bouquet with a few sprigs of evergreen for balance.  

“You look very handsome,” you said, resting your hand on his chest.  

“I’m glad you’re here,” Joel said.

“Me, too,” you giggled. 

Joel rested his big hands on your bare arms and pressed his forehead toward yours.  You felt like a teenager with butterflies in your stomach and bubbles in your throat. 

“We got you something, too,” Joel said, taking a small box out of his jacket.  

Inside was a delicate gold necklace with “MOM” in cursive letters suspended between the two sides of the chain.  As simple as it was, it felt like a great honor as Joel reached to fasten it around your neck.  

“Dad, you put it on wrong,” Sarah protested, reaching for the charm nestled at the base of your throat and flipping it over  “It’s supposed to go like this.  Now you’re my Wow.”

You laughed, holding the charm between your fingers, contemplating your own special nickname. 

“I love it,” you said, pulling Sarah into a hug.  You heard the click of Emma’s camera as you embraced, but you ignored it.  “I love it so much.”  

Emma had the three of you pose for more photographs and then you took a seat on the wooden bench while she had Sarah and Joel stand together on their own.  

“For the bride,” Tommy said, trotting down the hallway with a can of soda in hand.  “With a straw.”  

“Now let’s get one of the boys,” Emma said, herding Tommy and Joel into the good lighting.

Sarah took a seat beside you as you sipped the ginger ale to try settle your stomach.

“How are your feet?” you asked, watching her point and flex her toes in her sweet little kitten heels.  “Mine are already killing me.  Try not to lock your knees–cuts off the circulation.”

Sarah shrugged, leaning against your shoulder.  You reached for her hand, looping your pinky finger around hers.  You never imagined as a child that your wedding day would come complete with a nearly grown up daughter, but now that it was here you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.          

“We’re ready for you,” a clerk announced, poking his head out the door.  

In the judge’s chamber you signed the marriage certificate and recited your vows with Tommy and Emma as witnesses.

“I’m told you’re exchanging rings,” the judge said. 

“Oh shit,” Tommy rifled through the inner pockets of his jacket while you laughed nervously.

“Jesus Christ,” Joel groaned as Tommy finally handed over the rings.

Joel went first, gripping your hand as if he still expected you to try to run as he repeated after the judge and slipped the ring on your finger.  Then it was your turn.

“Joel,” you said.  “I give you this ring as a symbol of my love, my faith in our strength together, and my covenant to learn and grow with you.”

“By the power vested in me by the great state of Texas,” the judge declared finally.  “In the presence of God and the witness of friends and family, it is my great privilege to pronounce you husband and wife–”

Without hesitation, Joel took your face in both his hands and kissed you on the mouth.  You smiled against his lips as a wave of relief flooded your body.  A tornado hadn’t destroyed the courthouse, aliens hadn’t invaded, you had done it.  You were officially married.

Tommy had a friend from the service who had opened up a Salvadoran restaurant in San Antonio who had offered you the use of the back room to host a small reception with friends.  You ate pupusas and drank sangria and danced your first dance when “Love Me Tender” came on over the classic radio station playing from the bar.  

You were surprised to learn Joel was actually a quite willing dance partner, at least after a few beers.   His strong arms and firm hold on your waist made it easy to follow his lead despite how out of practice you were.

By the end of the day you were so tired (and at least a little tipsy) that you nearly got into a car with one of Tommy’s army buddies while Joel went to pull the truck around and gave everyone a good laugh.

“I’m going to stay with Uncle Tommy tonight,” Sarah said as you loaded up the car.

“Are you sure?” you asked as Emma made sure you were safely arranged in the passenger seat of the truck.  You worried about putting Sarah out of her home as your first act as her step-mother.  

“I’ve got her, don’t worry,” Tommy said, handing you a doggy-bag from the restaurant.  “This is from Dan and Gia.  Good night, guys.  Love you both.”

“I love you, too,” you crooned out the window as he closed the car door for you.  “I always wanted a baby brother named Tommy.”

The last of the guests waved sparklers as Joel pulled out of the parking lot.  You opened the bag on your lap and squealed with excitement at the sight of a large piece of tres leches cake.

“Oh my god, this was so good,” you moaned.  “I had two pieces!  I had seis leches.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works,” Joel chuckled as you ripped open the little plastic package of flatware.  “I’m pretty sure that’s for the anniversary.”

“You think I’m going to let this cake get freezer-burn for a year?”  

You stabbed the cake with a fork, scooping the moist, creamy cake into your mouth.  And just to be fair, you held the next bite out to Joel as you were stopped at an intersection.  

“That’s good, right?” you said, wiping a bit of cream from his chin.  “You want more?”

“I’m stuffed,” Joel waved you off, pulling the car into the driveway.  “Home sweet home.”

Joel came around to open the car door and help you out of the truck.  On the porch you both paused, having a moment of internal debate.  Joel clearly thought he should carry you over the threshold, but you didn’t want him throwing out his back on your wedding night.  

“I can lift you,” he said.  “It’s bad luck, you know, for the bride to walk over the threshold.” 

“It’s bad luck for the bride to trip,” you said.  “Just don’t let me fall.”  

You reached for Joel’s hand, lacing your fingers through his.  

“I won’t.  I promise.”    

Inside the house you indulged in loud moans and sloppy love-drunk kisses on your way to the bedroom, but once your ass made contact with the bed you remembered all at once that you had been up since five in the morning being primped and poked and coiffed to perfection.

“I’m so tired,” you moaned.

“You don’t want to?” Joel paused, his hands knotted in your panties already half-way down your thighs.

“No,” you sighed.  “I want to, just don’t be offended if I nod off half-way through, okay?”

“You’re sure,” he said, sitting up in bed.

“Yeah, just let me wash my face first." You reluctantly climbed out of the bed.  

Joel let his hands linger on your face, placing a kiss on your mouth.

“Unzip me?” you said, turning your back to him and sweeping your hair off your neck.

“Of course, Mrs. Miller.”

Joel slid your zipper down carefully, but as he moved his hands lower you ducked away from him, wagging a finger in his face.  You slipped out of your dress and went to the bathroom to scrub your face, putting on a satin night dress.  

Back in the bedroom Joel was stretched out on his stomach in bed, snoring softly, and you chuckled, slipping under the covers beside him. You snugged yourself against his solid warmth and ran one manicured nail down his nose as he slept.

“I love you, Mr. Miller.”  

#the last of us fanfiction #last of us au #joel miller x reader #joel miller x plus size reader #tlou fanfiction #joel miller #pedro pascal #troy baker adjacent #tlou smut #joel miller smut

[runwayrunway]

No. 7 - A jetBlue FaMintly ReBluenion - The Quest for the Bluest Plane

And now, for something completely different.

We're done with jetBlue. I said that and I meant it. But we're not done with this train of thought. This post might not be what you expect. This is a very long post (and I do mean very long), a journey through the history of the US low-cost airline, the cognitive dissonance of the everyman millionaire, the thinly-veiled cynicism of the start-up airline, human kindness squeezed through cracks of a soulless machine which can never stop churning, and above all one man's quest to make the bluest planes he can, and my quest to tell you all if they look bad or not.

Let's begin here: have you ever wondered how new airlines are started? Well, when a wealthy individual or group of individuals love making money very much, they get together and incorporate a publicly traded company, lease a few airplanes, buy some airport slots...

I'll get to the point. Readers, there's somebody I'd like you to meet.

"Never speak to me or my daughter ever again." image: Rick Maiman

This is David G. Neeleman. He's jetBlue's dad. And jetBlue...has siblings.

David Neeleman is a Brazilian-American-Cypriot businessman I would best describe as a serial airline founder. Normally the description 'serial entrepreneur', to me at least, implies flakiness and perpetual failure to get anything properly off the ground, but that's not the case for Neeleman. He's very successful. He's probably some sort of pioneer. I've seen him compared to Howard Hughes. There's really only one stain on his record, one failure to speak of, and it's been over ten years. He has a net worth of 400 million dollars.

image: bloomberg

He's an...interesting person. Very interesting. He was born in Brazil and raised in Utah by a wealthy Mormon family. There are many very funny images of him available through Google. He has ten children, an ADHD diagnosis, no university degree, a whole lot of money, and a weird, weird, weird personal philosophy.

This interview is hard to sum up, but there's clearly a lot going on here. This is a guy who wants so desperately to be down to earth and kind and generous, who thinks he is down to earth and kind and generous, but who just can't take the extra step to realize the implications of the truly obscene wealth involved in venture capital and the inherent contradiction of that with his own ostensible charity and drive towards a fair and comfortable experience for passengers. In a way he seems like he's just too wealthy to really understand what being wealthy means. (It's also an older interview, and I imagine any scrap of genuine convictions he held through cognitive dissonance are now long-gone, given the CoViD thing.) He's also clearly got a chip on his shoulder about being fired from jetBlue. To be fair, having seen what they've done with their livery...I get it.

What else...he's also been CEO of airline booking program Open Skies, was involved with bizjet charter airline Superior Air Charter (then known as JetSuite), is founder and chairman of security company Vizgul for some reason, and is a minority owner of TAP Air Portugal. His nephew Zach Wilson is quarterback for the New York Jets. Oh, and he funded a study to underestimate the prevalence of CoViD. Classy, David. Real classy.

This isn't about David Neeleman. Not really. Not yet, at least. At some point it becomes about him, about his journey, but even then it isn't. When you have 400 million dollars you cease to become a meaningful subject as a person and become a meaningful subject as a distilled effigy of the things which the money came from. I dislike the Tony-Starkification of real people and I refuse to approach him in a way that supports that view of him. His life only matters to me in the context of the airlines he makes, and in what the way he changed over time represents. There's at least one biography out there for anyone particularly interested in the lives of Mormon multimillionaires who take issue with making people die less because they want the line to go up more. He is worth 400 million dollars, which is roughly a million dollars times what I make in one paycheck, delivered every two weeks. He's a creature in a suit who owns an absurd amount of wristwatches, each of which could pay for some sort of surgery for someone out there. There's a bunch of those in the world and this one happens to have made something which eclipses him, and that something is what's been occupying me since Wednesday.

If you're a book-reader - and I recommend being one - I think you're probably better off reading Barbara S. Peterson's "Blue Streak: Inside jetBlue, the Upstart That Rocked an Industry", which talks specifically about jetBlue and the way it pioneered what we now consider normal for aviation in the US. Reading it brought back memories for me of seeing adverts for jetBlue's planes on television, guaranteed to have a TV screen on every seat, and having my little mind which was still scarred by hours upon hours of complete boredom flying all the way from Tokyo to the American Northeast completely blown. Air travel really is unrecognizable from what it was when I was a child, although 20 years feels a lot shorter than it really is when you've lived it. There was no one factor that changed aviation so much in my lifetime, but there were a lot that contributed. ETOPS, 9/11, the recession, geopolitics, gas prices, the internet, legacy airline mega-mergers, privatization...and the jetBlue way of doing things.

It's easy to forget from our current vantage point but low-cost air travel wasn't always like this. Southwest did a lot to pioneer the modern low-cost model but jetBlue is probably the second-biggest player in the airline industry's shift to a culture which tries less to be glamorous and tries more to be fun and approachable (they by no means invented the Fun Airline, but PSA had been gone for 20 years at that point and the market had a gaping hole). They were a huge player in the rise of in-flight entertainment as standard even on low-cost flights. They helped keep aviation going after 9/11, when it was one of the few airlines to actually make money. And jetBlue's story isn't Neeleman's story, even though he founded it. I literally just listed four other major involvements of his, and he hasn't been involved in the business side of jetBlue since 2008. His story involves the founding of four - count em! - other airlines. Let's take a look through them and see if we can spot any patterns.

Morris Air (1992-1994)

sources and further reading: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]

Never heard of Morris Air? Can't blame you. jetBlue's oldest sibling existed for two years in the 90s. Two years. That's pretty miserable. ValuJet was around for twice that. That said, you're actually probably more familiar with them under a different name: Southwest.

No, Morris Air did not become Southwest. Southwest existed at the time, and it was in fact Southwest which gave birth to Morris Air.

Morris Air was named for its founder, June Morris, who operated one of Utah's largest travel agencies. In 1984 she partnered with a then 25-year-old David Neeleman to launch Morris Air Service. The two had realized something that was about to shake the airline industry: plane tickets were really expensive, and you could charge even less than major budget carriers like Southwest by just buying all the seats on a charter flight and selling them on to customers at an attractively low price. If you did this, even regular working-class people trying to book a trip to Hawai'i or Disneyland could actually afford a plane ticket. This worked successfully, enough that Morris sold off her travel agency, until they incurred a large fine from the DoT for pushing too far and fraudulently passing themselves off as a scheduled airline (which mattered because commercial charters are operated under Part 135 regulations while scheduled services are governed by the much more restrictive Part 121). In response, girlboss queen June Morris and her investie David Neeleman went and started up Morris Air as an actual, genuine, fully certified part 121 carrier, making June Morris the only female jet airline CEO in the US. They operated a fleet of 21 737-300s around the west coast on both scheduled and charter flights, pioneering such cost-cutting measures as e-tickets (wrongly attributed to Southwest, they were actually first used by Morris). This fleet included N75356/N764MA/N697SW, the airframe involved in the TACA 110 incident, which was successfully landed on a levee after losing power in both engines.

image: Richard Silagi

Now, I don't know about you, but these planes don't scream 'vacation' to me. In fact, they don't scream anything. They barely whisper. They breathe lightly on my ear. There are a couple planes in their fleet with weird features, like multicolor painted noses or cheatlines, but these seem to be one-offs and I wouldn't even be surprised if they were just leftovers from previous paintjobs (the one with the cheatline does look suspiciously like the one used on Sierra Pacific planes, one of the operators Morris chartered from). So they don't count. What counts is this.

Maybe if Morris Air didn't want to be instantly forgotten they shouldn't have made their planes completely generic. I'm not sure they cared, though. They wanted to make money and they made money.

A D- for Morris Air.

In 1992, less than two years after gaining its air operator's certificate, Morris Air merged with Southwest and the brand was retired. Despite having posed a legitimate threat to the titan that was Southwest at the peak of its relevance, it's since largely been forgotten. June Morris and David Neeleman both worked in Southwest's upper management for some time, but it was only five months before Neeleman left Southwest for other ventures. Soon, something more familiar would spring up, fed by the dying rays of Morris Air's gargantuan profits.

WestJet (est. 1994, began operation 1996)

Not exactly a deep cut, is it? WestJet is actually the second largest carrier in Canada and the ninth-largest in North America. They carry over 25 million passengers a year. I've never been one of them, but David Neeleman probably has, because he was one of the group of absurdly wealthy individuals who founded this incredibly successful airline in 1994.

WestJet operates a primary fleet of over 100 Boeing 737s of various models and seven Boeing 787s; in the past they also operated the 757 and 767. They operate both scheduled passenger and charter flights, as well as having a cargo division, a fully-owned regional subsidiary, and a Delta Connection/United Express-style brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates.

These all use more or less the same livery, which has only slightly changed since the beginning of operations in 1996. Pictured above is the original livery. I like the colors, I like the angularity on the tail, but I despise the style of livery with just the isolated tail colored in. This said, they introduced a new, updated livery in 2018.

I am a very predictable person. Given a livery mostly seen on 737MAXes and Dreamliners, I will always pick the Dreamliner to use as a visual example. This is not a slight to the MAX. They are nice looking planes, but the Dreamliner's planform is just on another level. Look at that wing sweep. Immaculate.

I like this color scheme a lot. I just happen to really like sea-green-adjacent colors, this is not the first time I've mentioned this. The font is nice, big, legible. I like the all-caps, I like the descender on the J. I think removing the logo mark on the wordmark and making it solid color was fine as a choice, makes the whole plane feel more balanced between the turquoise and the dark blue. The 'l'esprit du Canada' feels utterly pointless and is blocked by the wing and too small to be clearly read anyway. Tail design not limited to the tail, but mostly white fuselage regardless. Boring, but there's nothing here I can really call...bad? It's what they don't do that feels like the issue here, not what they do. Like, some sort of design on the nose and directly above or below, maybe? I didn't even realize there's any paint on the engines until I was editing my first draft and from most angles you just can't see it. Come on.

Grade: D+

Before I move on, there is something I have to mention. And that is WestJet's sub-brands. WestJet Encore is a fully-owned subsidiary which operates a respectable fleet of Bombardier Dash 8 Q400s, and WestJet Link is a brand name under which Pacific Coastal Airlines operates a couple Saab 340s. And that is...fine, normal, even, but...

Is this a joke to you?!

Change your name to WestProp. Now.

...

Hey. Wait a minute.

David! The large blue plane is coming! It has no engine power because it ran out of fuel and is about to hit you on the racetrack during family day! Oh no, he has airpods in! He can't hear us! image: Cean W Orrett

This guy. David Neeleman. Yeah, him. We were talking about him. I mean, it's been a minute since he came up because as far as I can tell after founding WestJet he did nothing of note related to it again, but...what's he been doing? Wait...wait a minute. This is becoming a habit, David. All your airlines are...well...they share a certain trait, in a very specific area.

David knows what I'm talking about. After all, his next move, in 1998, was to found NewAir, which would shortly become jetBlue.

I have not stopped to count how many words I have written about jetBlue this week. It is a lot. I already delivered a verdict. We are moving on.

Because David didn't stop here. Why would he? It's 2008 and he just got fired from his own company because a winter storm went Southwest-holiday-scheduling levels of horrendous for the airline he raised from infancy. He's got time to kill and money to burn and he wants the line to go up, damn it! Well, maybe he can be in the right place at the right time again. Make a second jetBlue, win back what he's lost. After all, he's got something else up his sleeve - dual citizenship.

Just your regular average Mormon, lurking in forests with a model plane. Nothing sinister about that. image: conde nast traveler

I did mention earlier he was born in Brazil, right? That's always been part of his life. When he was in charge, jetBlue was actually the launch customer for the Embraer E190, an incredibly popular mid-sized regional jet made by Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.

Is it just me, or do the men in this picture somehow look like cardboard cutouts holding a real airplane? There is something very strange about this image. I would go so far as to call it unsettling. image: The Gainesville Sun

So, figuring he'd bled the US dry, I suppose, he moseyed on down to his birthplace with his millions of dollars and presumably a couple little blank model planes waiting to be painted and shown off at a press conference. If you've seen a pattern emerging, prepare to see it continue.

Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (est. 2008)

Mmm. Helvetica Neue Heavy. Not impressed.

Okay, sure. Technically there was a 'naming contest' and this name 'was the most popular'. But I think at this point I would believe that David Neeleman botted his own vote years before I would believe that Blue Airlines of Brazil just happened to be the winning name.

Okay, all else aside, I would really love to gently hold a plane like this. There's a certain caressing nature to the way he's holding this plane's snout which I crave to someday replicate with a similarly sized model aircraft. image: Paulo Whitaker

Much like jetBlue, Azul began operating Embraer 190 and Embraer 195 aircraft before expanding its fleet to include Airbus models, a handful of ATR 72 tubroprops, and two Boeing 747s for cargo. They started with just five aircraft but grew rapidly, absorbing a bunch of other airlines and securing large investments from the likes of United and Hainan Airlines. Today they operate a fleet of over 150 planes to 161 destinations and are the third largest airline in Brazil. They have a set of crossover liveries with freaking Disney. (I might review those sometime.) They also have a crossover livery with John Deere for some reason. You know, the tractor company. In 2020 TripAdvisor named them the world's best airline.

In addition to the name of the company, they also name their airplanes. I do not speak Portuguese, but thankfully a close friend, @ametri-e, does. I asked him if the names were silly puns like jetBlue's are, and I got this response:

some of these are puns but not particularly funny, some of them just have the word blue in them, and one was funny

So there you have it!

Unlike Morris, which no longer exists; WestJet, which he seems to have minimally contributed to past its founding; and jetBlue, which tossed him unceremoniously on the tarmac with his bags, he remains the chairman of Azul at time of writing.

I find myself briefly wondering if this is all an attempt to recapture his lost glory. Is jetBlue, larger even than the impressive heights Azul has reached, the one that got away? Is he now forced to go forward modeling his work in the image of that which he was robbed of, that which he can never go back to?

I don't know and I don't care. I care about if the livery looks good or not.

Well, I wasn't just going to leave the John Deere plane out. It's a bit underwhelming, though, isn't it?.

So Azul is pretty different from jetBlue at first glance. Mainly, it uses a much darker blue and has a logo to go with the wordmark - a cute little pixel Brazil that looks a bit like a heart to me because of the specific way it's drawn. Everything is scaled nicely so it looks pleasing on the turboprop and I think the dark underside and the way it curves around the ventral fairing actually looks really good with the ATR's airframe, which has a very pronounced ventral fairing relative to similarly-sized props. But, okay, let's look at a jet.

This...is not terrible. I really like the highlights on the trailing edges of the winglets and the end of the rudder, and bordering the deep blue belly. Not crazy about the Helvetica Neue still. Why doesn't the 'u' being cyan carry over to the actual livery? Also, Detached Tail Syndrome. In fact, although it has features beyond this which make a further discussion worth having, the basic layout is what I call the 'Deltalike' because that's the airline I associate with it despite them certainly not being the first to use it - detached tail, painted engines, painted underside that's large enough to see from the sides. It avoids a lot of pitfalls of the other popular archetype, that of the very tail-heavy (which WestJet fell into), but has its own loathesome features. All said, though, I do think Azul is one of the better takes on the Deltalike.

In the first picture the highlights look green, but in reality they're one line of green and one of yellow, for the Brazilian flag. I think they look really nice with this particular blue color, but I am exhausted of this man naming his airlines blue and then having the planes be majority white. They have such a nice shade of blue here, couldn't they make that the primary color of the body?

That aside, the way that the line curves up towards the middle of the plane combined with the tailing-edge highlights creates a sort of aerodynamic feeling. You even see them in other colors sometimes, like the pink ones on the E190s and blue ones on the E195.

It also comes in pink! Were this not a one-off I would ask them to change their name to Rosa Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras, but it is a promotion.

It seems like reconnecting with his origin has given David Neeleman the creative push he needed to beat jetBlue in at least one way - livery. All said, Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras clocks in at a final grade of...

C+

Aww, not quite a B for Brazil. Better luck next time! Though I'll admit I considered putting it there for a bit. This is a very high C+. Still, no cigar. Next time try putting less white on the plane. If you're all about blue, why are all your planes still so white? Come on, David. You are spreading blue paint on every airline you've ever touched but never letting it get past the tailfin. Who are you kidding? You know you're holding yourself back. There's a desire deep in you. You know it's there. I know you want to. It's just a matter of when. You are going to give in to your most animal urges. This isn't enough for you.

You need a bluer plane.

You can feel the thirst for a plane blue enough that you might as well own a piece of the sky straining against the bonds you've tried so hard to impose on it all these years. When will you finally unleash it?

Breeze Airways (commenced operations 2021)

image: inc. usa

Here we are, David. Time has almost caught up to us. It's just you, me narrating, and a very, very blue plane indeed. We have finally reached jetBlue's youngest baby sibling.

"Together, we created Breeze as a new airline merging technology with kindness," David Neeleman said. ​"If you can just be nice, the people will be nice to you in return and your job will be more fun.”

This is an interesting pitch. When Cape Air, with its fleet of tiny airplanes and its founder who started the airline with himself as pilot just to fly one route that he found himself needing to travel regularly, makes their motto Make Our Customers Happy And Have A Good Time Doing It (Mocha Hagodti), it feels...well, it feels like the person who said that didn't understand yet what a company was. Cape Air is its own story with its own contradictions and the vicious cognitive dissonance of capital on stark display but you can sense the desire in its inception to provide a service before running a company. It is the opposite of cynical - it is naïve. It is hopeful and human and starry-eyed.

When a man on his fifth airline makes a pitch like that it's like trying to cloud-watch looking at the ceiling.

That's not the only pitch for Breeze. I mean, even if you've started four successful airlines already and it seems like everything you touch goes on to revolutionize some part of the industry I think that would be a hard sell to investors in 2021. There's a bit more going on here. I'm going to start with the bit that's boring and makes me roll my eyes.

Ever since JetBlue, Neeleman has, like the kid peering into the circus tent, longed to get back into the U.S. airline industry. 

Bill Saporito writes for Inc. USA. I let out one tepid physical laugh. Yeah, David. You've got something great going in Brazil right now, but you want more. You want jetBlue and you can't have it. So instead...you give us an app.

The Breeze app is designed to eliminate chokepoints between passengers and planes. That means fewer people on the ground and lower cost.

Is this revolutionary? Is this destined to end in a Southwest-tier scheduling catastrophe? I'm not sure. I think David Neeleman's history suggests he could make this work, and I think the history of apps being used for things that didn't have apps before suggests that this could horribly blow up in his face. It seems to have gone fine so far, as I haven't heard anything else about it. To be fair, I wasn't exactly invested in the idea, so I haven't been looking. There's always time for some situation to happen nobody had foreseen and it all to go belly-up. Saying you never cancel flights works fine until a blizzard hits and then you have to start all over again, but he didn't build jetBlue by being afraid to take risks.

More interesting is the service they offer. Breeze has a bit of an identity crisis. Breeze wants to be an ultra low cost carrier with a first class cabin. That sounds contradictory because it is. The ULCC model as used by airlines like Ryanair and Spirit fundamentally relies on charging a low fare upfront with the expectation that customers will not receive a crumb extra without paying for it. Everything from seat reservations to snacks to anything else you can think of, you can pay extra for or you can do without. Breeze also follows other trends common with ULCCs, like a lack of seatback screens (the very thing jetBlue pioneered!) and flying point-to-point to smaller airports located outside of major metropolitan areas rather than routing through hubs. Yet Breeze insists it wants to have a first class cabin!

It does have a first class cabin, apparently. The classes are called Nice, Nicer, and Nicest. I wish airlines wouldn't do this. Air travel is the floorboards of stand-up comedy. Everyone already hates flying except weirdoes like me who spend enough time looking at pictures of airplanes to write reviews of their paint jobs, and even I get pretty tired of it if I go too long sitting there without the plane doing some sort of plane thing. You can be honest. You can call the classes Bearable, Unpleasant, and Painful. We all understand. It's okay. I would rather buy a ticket for Miserable But Cheap class than Nice. It probably won't actually be that bad, since Breeze doesn't do long-haul, which makes the presence of first-class even more bizarre. If you want first-class short-haul and have that sort of money just charter a private jet! And David Neeleman has been involved with at least two private jet charter companies too, so...what is he doing?

In 2011, almost exactly 10 years before Breeze began operation, Neeleman was interviewed for Business Jet Traveler. I linked the interview above. It's a powerful display of the cognitive dissonance of a man who considers himself a regular everyday Mormon dad, who donates his salary to his employees, who insists on calling his employees crewmembers, even as the line goes up, and up, and up. I've heard anecdotes about him sitting in the backs of his own planes at jetBlue, observing what he could change to make the experience better for the cabin crew and passengers, noticing a lot of those things could even save money, and I have no reason to disbelieve them.

As the head of a company he is by necessity exploiting those under him, as a businessman he is providing a service not from altruism but because he knows that people need it enough they'll give him money, and the more comfortable the experience for both the less likely he'll lose their labor and their money. Conscious or not, altruism is a means to an end, but it is still startling surrounded by airlines which don't even go that far. 'Nice' as a name for economy class is a pretty good summary of the man David Neeleman was, and the one he still tries to present himself as. But there's a specific question, and a specific answer, which I feel the need to place here.

The airlines have been cutting back on frills and first class, which is driving more people to business aviation. Do they need to find ways to treat their high-end customers better? Well, JetBlue doesn't have first class. We treated everyone the same. Maybe it's funny I'm in the JetSuite market because it's so weird to me that on a plane with 150 seats, you give 12 people a great ride and you stick it to 138-squish them all back there because of 12 people. There's something about that that just feels wrong.

Does it still feel wrong, David? Did something change about you between the first million and the 400th? When did this transformation happen? Was it the Ship of Theseus effect? Or...was this what you inevitably were working towards all along? Was it a fool's errand to pretend that there is a difference between what you do and what you are? Aviation is not immune to the society which it is built to serve - it is shaped by it. It feels wrong for 12 people to have a nice ride while 138 are squished in the back, but if you think about the life that 5 million Americans live and the life the other 326 million have to live, all squished back there so the lucky few can have a nice ride, doesn't it feel a little less wrong? After all, you've got the reclining bed. You can just pull the curtain closed. You've probably known what you were all along.

The airlines are a tough business. Why start another after JetBlue? Well, I've done this three times. It's what I know. I've always made money at it, always been successful. I figured out a formula that works and Brazil really needed it. And I had this idealistic view of trying to make a difference. I've got 3,000 people in Brazil that work for us and love their jobs and we flew four million people this year and a lot of those people had never flown before.

Air travel is life-changing. It's not just for those of us who stand outside airports and take a picture of every airplane we see. It is a faster, safer, easier way of getting people and things from one place to another. There are people who live in the remotest places in the world, who deal with mountains and oceans and even just being so far away from anywhere else. They can travel now, and they can do more than that. They can visit their family. They can get places even if they're somewhere railroads don't run to. Cargo planes bring these remote communities necessities. They take their children to university and its sick to lifesaving treatment. It's a lifeline and a fundamental part of infrastructure. Once we invented it we stopped being able to go back.

It isn't an inherently cynical thing to start an airline - not more cynical than starting any other company, anyway. At least, it shouldn't be. But I think it's an inherently cynical thing to start five. To have your position at Azul, which is both massively successful and your own brainchild, which you think is doing good...and to say to yourself "I need more. I need America. I need what I was robbed of when I lost jetBlue."

Very few people have ever started one airline successfully. David Neeleman started four and sat at the helm of Brazil's third-largest airline and decided it wasn't enough for him. He's always made low-cost airlines. To a not-insignificant degree he made the low-cost airline what it is today. But he needs a first-class cabin.

The Inc. piece on Breeze continues to discuss the airline's planned operations. In 2011 Neeleman's employees were crewmembers.

Breeze is also introducing a program in which it will hire college interns from Utah Valley University and mold them into customer-service machines. In exchange for salary, free tuition, and housing, the students will undergo training and then work 15 or so days a month while taking their college courses online. "The big thing is we are going to provide a great service with kind people on a beautiful airplane with a fun atmosphere," says DePastino.

In 2021 they are customer-service machines. They will spend not just their days but their nights in Breeze's living spaces at one of the most vulnerable times in a person's life, learning how to be cogs in a machine right when they're transitioning from being students to entering the turbulent world of trying to find a job. And all of us want a job that makes us feel like we're still us, doing something that makes the world better and that helps us touch the tip of Maslow's pyramid. Almost none of us get it. Most of us slog through something utterly pointless that is entirely separate from our own self-identity to just keep our heads above water. Breeze turns this into a machine and it starts its cogs young.

Would I take this deal if it was offered to me? I'm a university student with barely enough money to keep myself afloat in a very expensive city while paying for university and for medicine and for anything else that may suddenly come up. I love aviation. I have customer service experience. I work in customer service right now and will probably continue to for a long time. I would hypothetically be an ideal candidate for this sort of program. Would I take this offer knowing that nobody, myself included, says to themself as a child that they want to be an airline customer service representative when they grow up? College is supposed to be the place you lay the groundwork for trying to start a career. Nobody wants their career to be 'customer service representative'. Nobody wants their obituary to say 'beloved son, husband, middle management at an airline's call center'. Sure, lots of people end up there, and plenty of them are happy and fulfilled and they have nothing to be ashamed of, but nobody's 18, going into college, and thinks that's what they want to live and breathe for years. They want to intern in the accounting departments, to shadow engineers, to see the sleek jets and peer in on the lifestyles of the people who built this. They want to be David Neeleman. But that's not an option for most of us.

So what would I do? Live this concession to the inevitability of automation which overtakes much more than the flight deck? I might, because at least it's a guarantee of shelter and stability that I don't have trying to stumble my way through an utterly shambolic job market caught between the price of school and the need to earn that money and the costs inherent to autoimmune disease and the number of hours there are in a week. I want to write, or even just to do something that involves words, because even a data entry job might let me pretend I'm still the person I thought I would grow up to be, and even that seems off the table. But it's one thing to know your dreams are never going to be realistic and another to say it out loud and yet another to commit to it in a place that even refers to you outright as a machine as if they don't understand the weight of that word when you provide someone's lodging and pay and everything else they rely on. This is a few steps short of being a company town populated exclusively by the young and vulnerable who think they're going to be entrepreneurs one day.

"When I started JetBlue, it was a customer service company that just happened to fly airplanes," Neeleman says. "Breeze is a technology company that just happens to fly airplanes."

He was talking about the app when he said this, but I think it comes through in a broader sense. jetBlue was a customer service company. Humans interfaced with humans. The idea was in nature lively, giving names to inanimate flying machines. It was a corporation, it made money, it did not actually care about people and it could not because it was not itself human, but it did not wear this fact proudly. It was a regrettable necessity of running an airline, and the CEO donated his salary to the employees. jetBlue under Neeleman and beyond clung to the human element, and to kindness and to making low-cost flight fun and comfortable even though there was nobody on the plane with a first-class ticket. You might be part of a fundamentally unethical system known for cutting corners and lying and sweetheart deals and never suffering consequences when something as simple as a jackscrew nobody lubricated kills 88 people, but you're going to at least try to dampen that impact. It might kill you just as dead but it can hurt less, maybe so much you never realize jetBlue occupies the same slice of the world as Pan Am and as ValuJet.

Breeze Airways lodges young individuals and molds them into machines. It is an ultra-low-cost carrier with a first class cabin. It presents a scenario where people are optimally herded by an app, served by employees who go home at night to the same place they work, and all of it can be reduced down to numbers so easily. It takes the human and it makes it technology. It makes it profit. The human element is gone. It doesn't matter how much it hurts you because if you aren't a person there's nothing to kill. It says the quiet parts out loud and makes you get on the phone and tell your family you're happy here with a gun to your head. It is a machine built of anonymized mannequins who, irrelevant to their role in it, happen to be alive, and it calmly tells you that this is a good thing, and that is a threat. The lowest category of experience you can have is 'nice'. Breeze Airways does not name their planes.

When I was a child I thought airlines were people and airplanes. I've flown many times in my life. There aren't many other ways to get from Japan to the East Coast these days. The world is huge but we can see it all so easily, assuming taking us there can make someone money. I remember being eight and having the pilot standing by the door to greet passengers, having him hand me a little pair of plastic pilot wings I still have now. I remember the stormy night I flew alone for the first time and the stewardess who let me sit next to her for a little bit and answered all my questions about the noises the plane was making. I remember the first time I flew on a propeller plane and the pilot who explained to me what all the gauges meant, and who insisted there was nothing to be afraid of and pointed out all the landmarks we flew past, who clearly knew this route by heart.

That's not what aviation always is. That's not what it usually is. People don't usually start airlines because they wish they could fly everyone around in their little single-engine plane on a commuter route from Boston to Provincetown, from Hyannis to Nantucket, provide that service to the people who don't have a plane and a license of their own, but they just can't do it all themselves. People who start airlines aren't usually intrepid pilots searching for new heights to push themselves to or flight instructors looking to fly people around in a single rented DC-3. They're businessmen. They want money. Juan Trippe was a businessman. Howard Hughes was a businessman.

The corporation is where passion goes to die if it existed to begin with. They build machines to suck the life out of pilots, exhaust them, put them in planes that are falling apart and let them take the blame when they fail to do things they failed to teach them. These people aren't your friends and they don't care about aviation, and if they do it's in the way an American child plays soldiers at the same time a school in Syria is being bombed. They're usually not even pilots. They're people with a lot of money who want even more money. jetBlue isn't unique in that sense and neither is Breeze. One just says it a lot louder.

Sometimes an airline is a technology company that happens to fly airplanes. That's true. Every single positive experience you have is with people, not airlines. I've never once spoken to jetBlue, just a matrix of pilots and flight attendants and customer service representatives who make up its many limbs. Maybe it should come as a relief, a sort of coming clean, that Breeze is tearing back the curtain and reminding you that the time a stewardess calmed you down during turbulence isn't really any different from the time a drugstore cashier let you off even though you were a few cents short of your total and said they'd take care of it. It's not CVS doing that. It's always people.

So many businessmen say they're here to do good, to make the world a better place, to reconcile kindness with venture capital. Any of them could build a tower that reaches all the way to the edge of the solar system and let us all know how many beautiful things there are that we can reach if they can find a profitable way to get us out there, and yet it's still the people who see your transit card is out of money and scan you in using theirs that make me remember that we are capable of kindness despite our surroundings. It is up to all of us whether we wish to be kind or not and it's not something anyone else can build for us.

Companies can't build a kinder, softer, funner, more human place. They can make money. They can provide a service. A service you need, at a cost you can afford, predicated on the fundamental question: whether they think you can make them money. Desperation, need, giving people a non-choice, that's how you make money and kill criticism. That isn't kindness. That's finding a gap in the market. Always has been.

I read that at JetBlue, you also didn't have your own parking spot and you donated your entire salary to a crewmember crisis fund, saying, "It seemed hoggish of me to have all this stuff when others didn't because every time I would get something someone else would have less." Yet then I read about your $14 million mansion in Connecticut. It's my wife's mansion. I never would have built that, ever. I think she's repentant. It was a project for her and it kind of got out of hand. But we all felt funny moving in. That's why we want to sell it.

I'd wondered how you reconciled the mansion with your philosophy. I don't.

image: Bill Bernstein

Okay, Marx or Megatron or whoever you think you are, that's enough of that depressing schlock. You are a tumblr.com airline livery review blog. We're here to answer if the plane looks good or not.

It's not like Neeleman's only goals are money and vapid personal satisfaction. We've been with him from the start. It was just an unacknowledged bit of the tail. He probably didn't notice it at first, but we did, with the gift of hindsight. It germinated. It took root. It grew. It became identity. It became his white whale. Are the planes blue, though?

Well, everyone, meet N206BZ. She's an Airbus A220-300. She's just a year and a half old and was delivered brand-new to Breeze Airways. She doesn't have a name, just a registration, but that's sure one blue plane if I've ever seen one!

The color scheme is visually pleasing. It's all over but it keeps visual interest with the darker tail and rear fuselage, the darker engines, the big white check-mark that serves as an instantly recognizable emblem for the airline. The repetition of it on the winglets is a nice touch.

I hate the wordmark, honestly. The text feels like it's located too low, the lightest blue blends in with the main fuselage until it borders on illegible. As far as I can tell, the typeface is custom. I hate it. It's ugly. The text is bad and it weighs down the rest of the plane.

A lot of how a livery looks depends on the lighting. So let's look at another example. I'd like to introduce you to N140BZ. She's an Embraer E195-200 and she's coming up on 15 but she hasn't slowed down any. She flew for Air Europa for a long time, but from 2016 on she was in limbo, all sorts of holding groups leasing her to each other but nobody putting her into service. Now she's with Breeze. They'll retire their E190s somewhat soon, but for the moment they like to have them. It allows them to operate shorter routes and free up time for charters on other days, just to maximize productivity. She doesn't have a name either. I'd say she still looks pretty blue. A lot of the concept art has a very metallic and reflective feel which I'm glad isn't as present in the actual planes, because it looked a bit sci-fi movie and not in a campy way. It was very blue chalk marker.

I like these colors just as much in this sort of washed-out environment as I do in direct sunlight gleaming at full intensity. Maybe more, even, since the text of the wordmark is so much more legible now and you can even see that the checkmark itself is blue. There's almost nothing on this plane that isn't blue. The only thing not blue about this airplane is that she doesn't have a name to revel in it.

The Breeze livery gets a B-.

It is a competently executed version of the thing it wants to be. There's visual interest. There are choices made. It's more than a logo slapped on a tail and sent off to sit on the tarmac with hundreds of other primarily white airplanes. I like it, I think this is the best Neeleman livery. It's also the bluest.

I find myself thinking the checkmark is an apt logo. Azul wore the shape of Brazil - a country full of people. Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras S/A is a company. It cannot have a soul. But its founder says it does. He wants to make something better for people. Breeze Airways is a checkmark. It satisfies a need. It is 'nice' but there is no pretense that it is people.

The pilots will be kind all the same, and the stewardesses. People will agree to swap seats so families aren't separated. People will compliment strangers' outfits and help the person in line in front of them who's fifty cents short for a bottle of water. We will hold the door for elderly men with canes and exhausted women with strollers. We will take every little chance we can to be kind. We do this because we are people, and not because of where we work, and it's definitely not the people with 400 million dollars to put down on a shiny new airline making that happen. Everything is scheduled through an app, minimizing contact with humans even as the ones we do talk to are 'molded into customer-service machines' over the course of years. N140BZ wears her blue colors well, and not having a name doesn't make her any uglier. So what is it that's changed?

David Neeleman can't make jetBlue a second time. But he doesn't know that. To a man with so much, maybe it makes sense how he could fail to realize that. When you're high enough in the air a thriving uptown and an area of condemned slums look more or less the same, just little blocks of color all the way down there. He doesn't even realize he's given up the ghost. This is only a tragedy if your definition of a happy ending was us believing someone is better than they are instead of being left no room to continue failing to recognize what money is and what money does. The corporation wears two masks - the mask that it wears when it is a corporation wearing a mask, and the mask it wears when it is so close to human that you mistake it for your friend. The businessman wears these masks too. To be sad they've taken them off is to invest more in the virtue of these men than they ever do in the life or death of the 138 people squeezed in the back.

There it is. Two decades, five attempts, the bluest plane. If you've kept reading all the way to the end let me know in the replies what your favorite Neeleman-proximate livery is. I'll see you all tomorrow for our regularly scheduled Runway Runway livery review, and I hope you all have a wonderful night.

#tarmac fashion week #grade: c+ #grade: b- #grade: d- #grade: d+ #neelemanverse #region: north america #region: latin america #region: united states #region: canada #region: brazil #era: 1990s #era: 2000s #era: 2010s #era: 2020s #azul linhas aéreas #westjet #morris air #breeze airways #runwayrunway blueses it #compilations #long haul #charter airlines #leisure airlines #low cost carriers #ultra low cost carriers #defunct airlines #lufthansa declined #deltalike

[jokewishes]

On honor of side charter Will dying you can have some Will headcanons, yk as a treat.

Will is not actually terrible with bow, he outshoots almost everyone at camp. Only people who outshoot him are other Apollo kids and couple Ares/Hermes kids. He's average with them so he thinks he's terrible.

His favorite color is green

He's full time camper bc he and his mom dont have the best relationship. They love each other to death but when they're toghter more than a week they get into fights all the time.

His mom has dedicated multiple songs to him.

He can play quitar and surprisingly harp.

His love language is physical touch and quality time.

No one has ever seen him sleep, not even his siblings. He's still awake when they go to sleep and has woken up when they woke up. Stolls have bet going on when will somebody catch him sleeping.

His eyes are dark blue and have golden ring going around his pupil.

He looks almost identical to Apollo, even more so when he's adult.

He hated greek mythology at school.

His favorite god(ish) siblings are Asclepius and Apollonis.

Both of them visit his dreams frequently.

He despises narnia for no apparent reason.

He has came to camp half-blood since he was seven and became full time camper when he was nine.

His grandma is french and grandpa is hispanic.

He speaks both french and spanish pretty well.

Hes one of the best medics camp half-blood has seen.

Hes also one of the best medic Chiron has seen. He genuinely belives that if they didnt have Will durning/after Manhattan camp half-blood would not be standing anymore.

Annabeth is one of his bestfriends. It creates akward double dates when he and Nico start dating.

His favorite animals are wolves

For a son of a god of turth he's scary good at lying.

He's overly protective of his siblings. He has lost too many to not be.

#Sorry abou my English:') #percy jackson #percy jackson fandom #percy jackon and the olympians #will solace #apollo cabin #william andrew solace #annabeth chase #pjo fandom #pjo apollo #pjo series #pjo headcanon #nico di angelo #solangelo #percy jackson and will solace #the sun and the star

[fereldanwench]

Valerie Powell Master Post

જ⁀➴₊⊹ This is a refresh of my previous master post for Valerie (available here).

✧ BASICS ✧ Full Name: Valerie Irene Powell Pronouns: She/her Date of Birth: 12 Oct 2041 Place of Birth: Charter Hill, Night City Height: 5'10" (178 cm) Weight: ~150 lbs Body Type: Athletic, curvy Eye Color: Dark blue-gray Hair Color: Blue (cerulean or sapphire) (brown-black naturally)

✧ PERSONALITY & SKILLS ✧ MBTI: ISFJ Lifepath: Corpo-rat Combat Style: Pistols, long-range rifles, tech attacks/hacking Languages: - English (native) - Japanese (full professional proficiency) - Spanish (elementary proficiency)

✧ RELATIONSHIPS ✧ Father: Sebastian Powell (deceased) Mother: Ava Powell (née Mercan; deceased) [tag] Siblings: None Other Relatives: - Edward Powell (uncle; estranged) - Nicolas Mercan (uncle; estranged) Closest Friends: - Jackie Welles - Viktor Vektor Partners: - Kristen Hughes (ex; committed relationship) - Viktor Vektor (ex; fling) - Goro Takemura (married in 2081)

✧ NOTES ✧ - Although in-game she has the corpo lifepath, Valerie's career history is pretty varied before she joins counter-intel: Biotechnica data analyst, a slew of random service jobs, hostess (with a side hustle helping Jackie con some of her more notorious clients), and Arasaka security (which is how she met Jenkins). - Valerie doesn't dye her hair blue--She did when she first made the change, but she uses a cosmetic nanotech implant to alter the color of the strands at the root. - She had a very non-traditional education: Valerie was in the Night City public school system for elementary school, but she was pulled out when her maternal grandparents insisted on funding extensive private tutoring until she was 18. Learning Japanese was a part of that curriculum. - Her father was also very steadfast about the right to bear arms, and she was just 7 years old when she first learned how to handle firearms. - Valerie doesn't drink alcohol or do drugs. Addiction runs in both sides of her family, and she made the choice to go sober when she was about 27 years old. (Caffeine is the one exception--She needs several strong cups of coffee to get through the day.) - She doesn't have any tattoos, but she does have multiple piercings in both ears and a naval piercing.

Tags and relevant links updated under the cut:

Last updated: 10 Jan 24

✧ VALERIE'S TAGS ✧

💙 oc: valerie v powell

💖 fave: valerie v powell

🖼️ art: valerie v powell

🔖 fic: valerie v powell

✨ oc inspo: valerie v powell

💑 ship: goro x valerie

💖 fave: goro x valerie

🖼️ art: goro x valerie

🔖 fic: goro x valerie

🎬 outtakes: goro x valerie

🪄 muse fuel: goro x valerie

🐺 au: cyber witchers

🌊 au: corpo naiad

🛡️ au: corporate loyalty

🏜️ au: the open road

🧭 au: i only play for sport

✧ CHARACTER SHEETS & MEMES ✧

Valerie Character Sheet

Valerie and Goro Ship Sheet

Valerie's Style Evolution (2060-2079)

Valerie's Corpo Lookbook

Valerie's Speech Mannerisms

Valerie's Character Influences

Valerie OC Profile

Valerie Aesthetics I

Valerie Aesthetics II

OC Tarot Card

OC Tag: Song Challenge

Unusual Muse Associations

Valerie's Affiliations

Valerie + Goro Relationship Card

Valerie's Name Meanings

Late Summer Aesthetics

Valerie's Rage Language

✧ META & PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ✧

Valerie and validating my sobriety

Valerie if she was a canon character

Valerie as an ISFJ and how she expresses love/sexuality

Valerie and being "Goro's thief"

Valerie and marriage

Valerie and not trusting Johnny

Gushing about Valerie!

Valerie on Evelyn and "straddling worlds"

On sex in the corpo world

Valerie and Jenkins' relationship

Valerie and being sensitive & honest in a cruel world

She's Valerie, not V (also BTS lore about her surname)

No love at first sight here

Musing on Valerie's background in Arasaka security

Summary of counter-intel events and Valerie's career history

Valerie's ability to read people

No one is ever free in Night City

Wanting to play more "pro-corpo" as a corpo

Valerie does think being with a corp is her best choice

Thoughts on my first experience with the Devil ending

Giving Goro and Valerie a happy ending

Early musing on the endgame options and being an engram

Valerie taking in the early morning views

✧ VIDEOS & CLIPS ✧

Valerie leaving a voicemail to Jackie post-heist

Valerie's In-Game Playlist on YouTube

"See a woman here with blue hair?"

#cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2077 oc #cyberpunk 2077 v #oc: valerie v powell #g: cyberpunk 2077 #t: oc lists #probs gonna update her pic later #the downside of taking shots almost exclusively in portrait for a year? #no good shots for banners and the like lmao #also i had to stop myself from rambling too much in the little notes section #one of these days i'll sit down and actually write/edit her full pre-game bio

[kiwiana-writes]

Six(ish) Sentence Sunday

Thank you @stereopticons for the tag! Have some unavoidable infodumping/exposition from a little arranged marriage something-something I've been picking away at (world-building is my worst nightmare as a writer and is why I am so uncomfortable writing AUs lmaooooo help)

“And what would you have me do, sugar—throw aside the Charter and invite war?” Every noble child learns about the Charter practically from birth. After centuries of wars between cousins, of thrones being usurped by other branches of the same family tree, the royal families came together and agreed: only eldest royal children would enter marriages that could produce children of their own. Alliances between kingdoms would be secured by same-sex unions instead; unions that could not produce potential rivals for their siblings’ thrones.  It should be an arrangement that still allows for plenty of choice—except for the last thirty years, kingdom after kingdom has produced younger sisters as far as the eye can see. Even Nora has admitted that the statistical likelihood of Alex and Henry being the only royal male younger siblings on the whole continent is vanishingly small, and yet here they are. In the two hundred odd years the Charter has been in place, it’s never happened; it’s just Alex’s luck that it’s happening now, to him.

As always feeling feral for whatever y'all are up to so tagging @affectionatelyrs @cha-melodius @clottedcreamfudge @cricketnationrise @daisymae-12 @dumbpeachjuice @happiness-of-the-pursuit @hgejfmw-hgejhsf @indomitable-love @inexplicablymine @lilythesilly @loveisembarrassingxx @maxbegone @myheartalivewrites @nontoxic-writes @orchidscript @rmd-writes @sherryvalli @smc-27 @tintagel-or-cockleshells @welcometololaland and, as always, anyone who wants to play!

#six sentence sunday #seven sentence sunday #kiwiana-writes #god imagine if I could focus on writing one thing at a time what a world lmao #wip: arranged marriage redux #fic: a practical arrangement

[hazel-of-sodor]

Day 13-Corris

Traintober 2023

Other Stories

Day 13-Something New

Corris

Peter Sam was resting peacefully in the yard, all the other Skarloey engines were away with trains leaving the Ker Stuart to bask in the summer morning's peace with the other engine left behind. Edward Thomas was like looking into a strange mirror. His sibling's green paint and normal funnel reminded him of happy days on the Mid-Sodor, but Edward Thomas had been given a rebuild by the Talyllyn much like his own on the Skarloey.

Peter Sam wasn't sure why they had both been given the morning off. Normally when either one of them visited the other railway, they pulled trains for photo charters together. Instead, they had been left to simmer in the yard. Sir Handel had complained about having to take Peter Sam's train, but everyone could tell his heart wasn't in it.

Peter Sam had almost fallen back asleep when E.T. stretched, his valve gear creaking as he shifted his wheels slightly.

"You know if I didn't know better," he began, "I'd almost believe they just were giving us a day off."

Peter Sam snorted, "and Sir Handel honestly loves pulling trucks."

E.T.'s laugh ruined his stretch, "you would think he would eventually figure out he's not getting out of it."

Peter Sam rolled his eyes fondly, "He knows, he just enjoys complaining."

Edward Thomas looked skeptical, "Even though it makes your Duke lecture him?"

"That's probably why he enjoys it."

E.T. nodded thoughtfully, "I can see that, Sir Hayden happily let Peregrine berate him for days when she visited.

Peter Sam winced, the former Corris No.2's ire for her old line was well justified. She had been stripped for parts to repair Sir Hayden, then left to gather dust, only her purchase by the Cronk and Harwick had saved her from scrap.

"At least she eventually forgave him," he sighed.

Edward Thomas glanced over knowingly, "Sir Handel managed to make it worse?"

"She only visits when he's away now."

It was E.T.'s turn to wince, "what did he do?"

"Point out that at least got to know her siblings."

Edward Thomas's sigh of exasperation thoroughly matched how Peter Sam had felt at the matter.

Before they could discuss the matter any further, the thin controller walked out.

Mrs.Nancy smiled at the pair, "I glad you two are getting along, had it been Sir Hayden and Sir Handel left alone..."

Peter Sam groaned at the reminder.

E.T. blinked, "Is that why..."

"Yes," Peter Sam said.

Mrs. Nancy snorted, "Our falcon's inability to get along aside. I have a surprise for you. The Corris Railway has just got their newest steam engine, and they want you two to show her the ropes."

"Of course!" The Ker Staurts chorused together.

"That's what I hoped to hear."

"Where did they find her?" Peter Sam enquired curiously. Edward Thomas nodded, "it's difficult to find a steam engine these days."

The Thin Controller's smile suddenly reminded him of days back when she was just the Guard's daughter and was about to prank Duncan or Sir Handel.

"They didn't find her, they built her."

A whistle sounded from the shops behind them. A red engine rolled out of the shops up alongside them. She was Corris red, with yellow and black lining and a No.7 plate on her sides. She was a 0-4-2 saddle tank, with complex valve gear. Both Ker Staurts starred, and while they weren't identical, they once would have been.

"Hello!" She peeped cheerfully, "I'm Corris No.7. Are you my brothers I was told about?"

#Traintober #Traintober23 #Traintober 2023 #ttte fanart #rws fanfic #Prompt-Something New #ttte peter sam #ttte Edward Thomas #ttte Corris No.7

[harperonni]

NSR Oc’s!! here we go lads!! I’m gonna put more info about them under read more bc asdfg I just wanna yell about them! might even open up to questions about them bc I just would love love to share more omg, so feel free to ask about them if you like Also all three are trans and very queer

Left to right: Valli Styrene

She/Her, 29, trans, lesbian

Tattoo artist. Farah was one of her first customers, and her popularity rocketed after she did EVE’s thigh tattoo.

Only has one tattoo, as she’s a big perfectionist. She has lots of ideas on what she’d like, but just can’t seem to follow through on them

Often goes to EVE’s art gallaries when she can. She studied Fine art at uni, though dropped out the course on her last year. Took her a lot of retail jobs and apprenticeships before she got to where she is now. 

Fangs run in the family, but she’s not a vampire. 

Her favourite animals are actually snakes. She has a pet Ball python (despite the place where they’re renting having a no pets policy) and her name is Carmilla

Still paints from time to time, likes using gouache the most.

Farah Sol

They/She, 36, Non-binary, Pansexual

Comes from a biiigg family. Two mums, five siblings, and now five nieces/nephews. Is very close to their family, and frequently visits home (Valli and Speckle have been brought into the familly circle too, given how the three live togehter and had been friends since meeting at uni).

NSR artist - ElectroSwing (Still unsure if they have a district in the future, like if they get that popular. Maybe, only because it would be fun to imagine asdfg) 

They’re also a semi-successful author, though they go by a pseudonym (Sol Bacho) because they want their books to be read becuase they’re good, not because they’re an NSR artist. Some of their best sellers include: Vinyl City, a music foundation, RETDEX: What once was, and  Stars Aline (a romance they honestly hadn’t expected to get popular lol)

Adores cats. If she could have cats in their no pet house they would not hesitate. For now though, she goes to DJ SS’s house and snuggles his cats instead lol

(also kinda shipped them with DJ Subatomic as a joke but now it’s not a joke help)

Speckle Darling

He/Him, 35, Trans, Gay

Architect, has worked outside and in Vinyl city and over saw some of the more lived in areas, (as in, homes where people could live lol) and if I decide Farah’s a charter with their own district, is def the man Farah hires to help design their district.

Arcitecture and DIY is this mans passion! He will talk hours over the differences and imporatnace of specific window panes. 

He also relaxes with simulator games, like the sims (this man would only ever build houses, he never plays with any actual families). He would also unironically enjoy truck simulator too. He’s a simple man with simple pleasures.

He uses a cane to help walk, primarily with his left foot which is robotic. He was born without his left leg, and didn’t really get his first prosthetic until his teens years.

Is a single and divorced dad, too. Maybe a year after Farah becomes a charter, there’s a celebration on one of Farah’s songs being a big hit. Speckle drank too much and woke up in another city, married to a guy he didn’t know. The two enjoyed eachothers company, but decided to divorce. Speckle heads home, vowing to not drink again after all that happened. Three weeks later he finds out hes pregnant, and decides to keep the baby. Then, Sandi Darling was born

He adores his daughter so much, and Farah and Valli are co-godparents to Sandi. They’re reffered to as Aunt Far, and aunt Val

#nsr #no straight roads #nsr oc #no straight roads oc #ocs #farah sol #valli styrene #speckle darling #original character #if anyone has questions about them i'd love to answer omg #i've #technically shipped them all with canon characters but asdfghj

[p0t3nt1al]

💛🩵🖤💚🐯🪰?

💛

“Is there a Jennika in your AU?”

Camp Hamato : maybe…maybe not…yes.

Digital Danger : Yep!

ShellStars : Yes.

MoonShatter : …plot twist point :3

Charter Chaos : Mhm! She’s actually in Leo and Donnie’s class!

🩵

“Is there a Venus In Your AU?”

Camp Hamato : No…No.. YES.

Digital Danger : Yes!

ShellStars : As a long lost sibling!

MoonShatter : secretly…

Charter Chaos : Yep! In Raph’s class!

🖤

“Is there a slash in your AU?”

Camp Hamato : YES.

Digital Danger : Yeah! (Best friends with Raph!)

ShellStars : As a strongman!

MoonShatter : Yep!

Charter Chaos : Also in Raph’s Class

💚

“Are there more turtles in your AU?”

Camp Hamato : YES- YES THERE IS

Digital Danger : Yep!

ShellStars : Yep!

MoonShatter : Mhm! (Including a 5th sibling)

Charter Chaos : Yep! With one in each turtle’s class!

🐯

“Is there a Tigerclaw in your AU?”

Camp Hamato : Yep!

Digital Danger : Yes!

ShellStars : No

MoonShatter : Not Really-

Charter Chaos : Yes…as a PE Teacher.

🪰

“Is there a Baxter Stockman in your AU?”

Camp Hamato : Yep!

Digital Danger : Yeah!

ShellStars : maybe seen a few times!

MoonShatter : No.

Charter Chaos : As a Science / Biology Teacher!

#p0t3n1al! #rottmnt #camp hamato #rottmnt au #p0t3n1al’s aus! #Digital Danger #ShellStars #MoonShatter #Charter Chaos