#anyways its totally plausible fight me

[justanotherblogger]

GET READY FOR MORE ALASTOR THEORIES PEOPLE!!!

I am still reeling from the final episode, and I am currently just thinking about Alastor and all his little ticks and phrases that could mean so much more.

So let's get started on some of my favorites!

Obvious spoilers ahead

Alastors fight with Adam. The biggest thing in the episode for Alastor. He seemed to be cocky and treat it as one of his regular murders during the day, not taking him that seriously.

He seemed to have overestimated himself in his abilities against the angelic army leader, and in consequence had his staff broken in half and in his shock at that, left himself wide open for another attack.

Why was he so cocky? He seemed to be so sure of himself against Adam, and so sure he could at least get a few good hits in.

I think this was because he used to something more powerful before his deal with whoever owns his soul now. He just fell back into muscle memory from before he lost most of his strength, thinking he could beat Adam without an angelic weapon, and was surprised that he couldn't hold up to levels of power he could've dealt with before he lost his own.

Like when he was shocked his staff got snapped in half by Adams shockwave. Could it take hits like that before? Has he fought Adam like that before? Is the reason he fell back into muscle memory because he hasn't had this level of threat since his fall/maybe the start of his 7 year absence or because this is how their fights used to go?

He also talked about how powerful a mortal soul could get if it took control of its own fate. This could be a reference to Charlie and the others fighting the extermination, or it could be about himself. If so, what did he choose to get this way? Was this a reference to his deal? Or maybe about his origins to get to where he is now?

Then when he did get hurt in the fight, he looked panicked and fled the scene. He didn't expect to get seriously hurt, at least that quickly from Adam, for whatever reason. Like he didn't expect something like this to happen, or he's just realizing how weak he's gotten since his last major scuffle.

Now, in the radio tower scene. He's seen having a sort of mental breakdown. How he almost died a 'pathetic' death defending the hotel and everyone in it. He seems very distraught at how he almost died.

I did see someone analyze this as Alastors fear of death, and I agree partially with that. Alastor did seem to be caught up in almost dieing to Adam. But I don't think it was because he was about to die in general, but because he would die like that.

We saw how he mocked it in the "Alastor Altruist died for his friends." in his snipbit. I think it was about how he's realizing his situation in full now. What he's been forced into is taking more of an effect than he thought it would at the hotel, as he ranted about a possible back door in the deal that tied him to the hotel and took his power.

This makes me think that Alastors true power has been (hazbin, hehe) taken or suppressed by the deal maker, with them owning his soul, and he's not used to being this weak against slightly stronger opponents, as he definitely has battle experience based on his fighting style with Adam.

Now, for who owns Alastors soul, there are 3 that I've been interested in from different posts on here and actual show hints.

Additionally, his mouth was totally stitched up in his demonic form when making the deal with Charlie. Maybe this was so he is forced to keep his smiling persona up at all times, and maybe to keep him from spilling anything about the deal or where he was for the last 7 years.

Anyways, first off is obviously Lilith. As I have explained in my previous ramble, Lilith probably took Alastor in from a lethal experience, either manipulating or threatening him to join her deal.

I think a plausible reason for this now is to look after Charlie and her hotel. She's currently in heaven, and had a deal with Lute or the angel army about the extermination. She most likely can't leave, which is why she's been gone for the past 7 years with no contact in hell.

She probably chose Alastor because of his reputation and power, but limited it so he couldn't do any lasting damage to the hotel or daughter just in case, since he can theoretically hurt angels.

The second popular option is Eve, or Roo, as everyone's calling her. She was the root of all evil and was a big villain in Vivs' previous work that Hazbin Hotel was based on.

We haven't seen her yet, other than the storybook appearance in the first episode. We don't have much info about her, so I can't really draw any parallels just yet between her and Alastor.

The last one is a bit of a stretch, and I didn't think of this until I saw another post about him: Lucifer

I could see where this would go, to be honest. We see his beef with Lucifer immediately during episode 5, and how Alastor takes any opportunity ro rile him up.

Lucifer could've made a deal with Alastor during his depression funk, causing him to not exactly remember Alastor in good detail with all the other deals he probably made during that time.

Alastor most likely resents him for what his deal did to him if Lucifer was the deal maker, trapping Alastor at the hotel to protect Charlie, and Lucifer just doesn't remember crap from that time and is very confused.

This one is the least likely out of the rest and kind of crack-ish, but was kinda fun to entertain and make a bit of sense on.

These are the theories I have so far on Alastor in Hazbin Hotel from the final episodes. I love this guy's lore, and I am desperate for more about his origins and powers.

#alastor hazbin hotel #hazbin alastor #hazbin hotel alastor #alastor #hazbin hotel theory #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel thoughts #hazbin lilith #lilith #lilith hazbin hotel #lucifer hazbin hotel #lucifer #just some thoughts #what if alastor was a fallen being of some sort tho #if this turns out to be true im gonna scream #hazbin hotel spoilers

[joyce-stick]

I didn't like Scott Pilgrim Takes Off all that much. I feel like elucidating on why, a little bit. so. Anyway.

First, letterboxd review I wrote within a few hours of finishing the show (read this first please):

So, I read all of the comic (finally) prior to watching Takes Off. Having seen the movie several times before, I found the comic interesting in how it develops its characters further over a longer timeframe and ties up a few loose ends that the movie sort of left open in weird ways that don't make sense. Ramona has more agency, Knives shows more maturity, Scott and Ramona are more explicitly on equal footing and make for better foils for each other in the comic than in the movie. Scott regrets his life choices and runs away for a while. Ramona regrets her life choices and also runs away. They both come back and beat up Gideon together with, y'know, mutual agreement that they both kinda equally suck and deserve each other and are going to both try to get better for themselves and one another and it's fine

It's not like, groundbreaking feminist storytelling, but it sure is a lot MORE gender equal than the movie which just goes like. Ramona is mind controlled! Scott must save her! Scott beats up Gideon sorta unilaterally (with a little bit of help) and then gets Ramona because he does! It's okay. It's fine. I mean, both the movie and the comic are fine. The movie is a hyperinventive visual feast and a stellar adaptation as far as faithfully replicating its source material in the target medium. I love it. Anyway.

Both the comic and the movie are fairly complete stories which really don't need more elaborating on. They're done. They exist. People either like them, or hate them, and have been discoursing on them for years. People discuss how bad of a person Scott is or isn't, or how transgender of a reading you can apply or not apply to Scott.

(I mean, you can! You're allowed to!)

It's all well-worn. And stuff. I don't know that Scott Pilgrim is a trans girl. I mean, it's plausible fanfiction. You can do it if you like. I wish that Takes Off had played with that idea, instead of what it did do, or, in addition to what it did do? And what it did do is just. Weh?

Weh.

Okay where do I start. Um.

spoilers for Takes Off below this point

Takes Off starts by taking Scott out of the picture. He is assumedly presumably made dead. Coined. Whoo.

Okay so obviously Scott isn't actually dead, he comes back later, but him being presumed dead for a bit does open the door to the rest of the cast to get some attention. Which you'd think would be good. Alright. So, we have Matthew Patel, still here. He's an incel, it turns out. Beats Gideon in a fight being like "man I got the bigger dick here." Wins totally! Okay! The league of evil exes is all either like "wow good going Matt" or "man screw this shit" and leaves. That's amusing for a minute.

Roxy shows up for an episode, fights Ramona, and is like "YOU LEFT ME RAMMY! I HATE YOU!" And we get some delicious flashbackiness to their relationship, and they kinda reconcile. Then Roxy kisses Kim, and is like "nah I don't care Kim" and dips. Yay.

The fight between Ramona and Roxy is well animated and fun to watch. I enjoyed it. It's alright.

What else... Um, Gideon has a backstory! Gideon isn't even his real name! And he's become the mega incel that he becomes because he got rejected by some girl in high school and this turned into his supervillain origin story. Okay

Lucas Lee does skateboarding and skateboards some paparazzosi to coindeath! Go him! That is genuinely a fun sequence and I enjoyed it, I guess

Wallace Wells seduces Todd Ingram and they have a lot of hot gay vegan sex! He and Envy Adams sorta fight about it! How wacky! Okay

The Katayanagi Twins get some speaking lines in this show! Their robot (which appeared in the comic but not the movie if I remember right) is around. Um.

Julie! Julie is an old school friend of Gideon. She lets him stay at her house. Gideon/Gordon and Lucas Lee do some bro shit. Cool man

All of this is like, fine, and fun, and stuff. I'm fine with it. I liked it. I enjoyed it. Oh and I guess there's a meta subplot about the Scott Pilgrim movie becoming the Scott Pilgrim movie but failing to become the Scott Pilgrim movie because the actors keep having too many video game fights on the movie set

Okay so this is all stuff that Ramona finds out or sorta bumbles into while looking for Scott, who she's surmised has disappeared and is not actually dead. Of course, Scott is not actually dead. He's just been kidnapped and displaced in time by an older version of himself, who is having a midlife crisis because his relationship with Ramona is going badly and he wishes that it had never happened, so he kidnaps young Scott to make it so that it never happened. This does not really work. Also future Ramona does some of her own intervening in the past to counter the plot of future Scott. She has Delorean rollerblades that time travel at 88 miles per hour *rolls eyes*

Anyway, then older older Scott has a fight with younger younger Scott, future Ramona intervenes and merges with younger Ramona to become a super form Ramona and they're just like "my beloved Scott, please, just go back to the future and sort out our marriage, like a responsible adult," he is teleported back to the future, all the exes are not coinexploded, and we get a final scene implying that Julie and Gideon/Gordon are planning something which will lead into a second season, and I don't know why

Why is any of this?

I could analyze it. I could try to tell you why any of this is. But like. I really can't. I don't know.

None of this really advances or develops the characters in any way that wasn't already adequately explored in the existing material. Like, Roxy's hangup over Ramona is fleshed out a bit more, sure, and that's the part of the show I really liked, but... is there anything to that? Does it add anything to Roxy's character that we didn't already know? Not really. We could already pretty easily infer from the comics that Ramona left Roxy, just like she left all her exes, and that Roxy is mad about it. Is it nice that they talk about it? I guess. Sure. It's nice to have a version of that conversation without Scott being the third wheel. But does it meaningfully change her character?

...No

And this is the same for all the characters. Our understanding of Matthew Patel and Gideon Graves is not particularly deepened by their incel dickmeasuring fight, or Gideon's origin story about getting rejected in high school. Our understanding of Lucas Lee is not especially enhanced by the newly revealed detail that he's a headache for his agent because of his reckless wild free devil may care skater dude attitude causing PR risks. Our understanding of Wallace Wells is not amazingly additioned by seeing him seduce Todd Ingram and piss off Envy Adams. Our understanding of Knives doesn't change when she learns how to play music and gets along with Kim and Stephen... And such and so forth.

And our understanding of Scott does not meaningfully change, either. There's really no radically new character interpretation to be drawn from "Scott divorces Ramona and then tries to undo his past". That's just kind of a thing you'd figure he'd do. And of course Ramona would try to set him straight! And look for him! And. Yeah

So yeah, Takes Off feels like, almost, the definition of that phrase that Dan Olson used in that one video

"No meaning, only lore."

I cannot fathom why this show exists other than that Netflix wanted a Scott Pilgrim show, and Bryan Lee O'Malley decided to pitch one because he's sure as hell not got any other big hit comics being cross-media franchises right now, and the plot that ended up being there feels like his end of the entire writing process was spent wracking his brain, fighting for his life to come up with a reason, any reason, to write more of fucking Scott Pilgrim

And the best he could come up with was, I guess, Scott has a midlife crisis, and also more superfluous character detail, and the fanservice angle of getting to see Ramona fight Roxy, or Gideon fight Matthew, or Lucas Lee skateboard more

I had a lot of fun seeing all that but I don't know why I watched it. I don't know who wanted this. And I definitely don't know who wants a second season of this. Who would want more of this? The season we do have was already grasping for straws to do more with this setting and these characters as it was. What would they even do?

Anyway. If I was gonna rewrite this and write this smarter. I'd probably tell y'all about the moment when Young Neil is trying to write a screenplay, and some mysterious figure (later revealed to be future Ramona) shows up in his room and types up the screenplay for the Scott Pilgrim movie for him. And then he wakes up, the screenplay is on his desk, and he's like "WHOA I don't remember writing this! I totally wrote this!"

And I'd say, if I were trying to be smart and write some smart video essay analogy in a better more polished review, that Takes Off feels like Bryan Lee O'Malley wished that the script for the show would similarly emerge fully formed from nowhere from the future for him.

Or something.

Anyway, thanks for reading this impromptu, review rant something. If you liked whatever this was, and want to see us write more, better things, then, giving us money would be cool.

Patreon | Ko-fi

#scott pilgrim #scott pilgrim takes off #joyce stick #audrey (of the joystick system) posts #essays #reviews #I didn't like it very much

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Reviews Black Lagoon Fanfiction: BigCountry75's Redneck of Roanapur

This one was recommended to me by a dude on the Black Lagoon subreddit, and I clicked on it somewhat reluctantly. It started well enough, I flipped through a few later chapters and it was pretty cool, but it's 288K words, folks. Moby fucking Dick is 209K words. And while it's true that many, many fics are longer than Moby Dick, or indeed most officially published works, there was just something about it. I was reluctant to read an OC-centric Black Lagoon fic, though, because new-guy-comes-into-town-and-fucks-shit-up rarely works in BGC fanfic, so why should it work in this case?

I needn't have worried. Redneck of Roanapur is well-written, fairly competently characterized, and like Bullets, my previous review, relentlessly fun. Reading it over the past two weeks on-and-off has been a fairly good experience, and, too, an exercise in how (in my eyes) to make a fic defined by one Cool Original Character really work.

In that light, if I want to talk about RoR, I have to talk about its main character, a dude from the boonies of Michigan known as Country. No, really, that's the name he gets, nothing else. And, well... okay, the one thing that might sink this fic for you is that when it's told from his first-person perspective, his, uh, accent is written down in the prose. This can be annoying at times, but in all honesty it isn't as annoying as you'd think it would be, because as far as quasi-authorial inserts go, he still describes things clearly enough to make everything work. His spelling's intentionally off, but his grammar isn't. Ergo, I can read it without being annoyed.

So: Country is an ex far-right militiaman who ditched his former comrades in True Patriotism, and in his effort to leave the country stole a goddamn WW2 B-24 and hightailed it blindly to Roanapur. Yeah. That's it. That's his backstory. He gets his hands on another WW2-era fighter plane later, too.

Okay, so compare that to other various OC-centric Lagoon fics which will not be named, ones starring ex-CIA operatives and elite soldiers with more conventionally troubled pasts and their skills mostly centering around the shooting of guns. They're cool in the loosest sense, but I find most of them incredibly boring, and the fic has to work harder to get around that more often than not. (Success is possible, but I've only seen like one guy pull it off.) Country is more interesting to me because a) his backstory is more out-there but still plausible, it's a backstory you don't see every day, and b) he has a unique set of skills that other characters in Lagoon don't have to the same extent.

I mean, think about it. Those two elements are what make an interesting Black Lagoon character in the actual franchise. Roberta with her FARC training and maid getup; Balalaika's Soviet paratrooper glory days and how far she's fallen; Ginji the yakuza who can literally deflect bullets. There's something that makes all these characters more than just ex-spooks or mercs with training. Some eccentricity. Some wackiness. Some small amount of historical grounding. Country has that, even if his backstory isn't super important. Country has his WW2-era planes, which are fun as hell to watch him and Lagoon Company use. So, he fits right in.

Anyway, Country lands in Roanapur, gets hooked up to the Lagoon Company to use the B-24 as a courier aircraft, and pretty quickly things get weird. See, not only does Country piss off the head of a non-canon crime syndicate pretty quickly in a bar fight, but said syndicate head is tied to a nameless Doctor and his equally nameless Benefactor, who are searching for guinea pigs to do immortality / resurrection experiments on. The Doctor resurrects Hansel and Gretel successfully, they escape, they wind up at the airfield Lagoon Company now occupies. So they're hanging out, raised by the team to not be total murderous monsters, and eventually they attract the attention of the Doctor and his Benefactor, who turns out to be a powerful American politician with ties to Extra Order, the Not-Executive-Outcomes PMC from the first arc of Lagoon. Pretty soon, Lagoon Company and their patrons are duking it out with that one non-canon syndicate and EO in short order, culminating in an epic battle for the fate of the city, all of which is just incredibly fun to read in its sheer paramilitaristic ultraviolence.

Anyway the fic swings between that violence and a lot of surprisingly cutesy shipping. Country falls in love with Sawyer, for one, and that doesn't feel weird, doesn't feel self-insert-y, it makes sense for how the characters are being written in that context... Rock and Revy finally get together... Shenhua and Lotton get together, which I'm kinda iffy on but what the heck... Chang and Balalaika hook up in secret... Even Eda and Dutch pair up as secret agents! So everything is very slice-of-life-y when military planning and blowing things up isn't the order of the day. Oh, and Leigharch comes back towards the end, which is great because I always liked him. In fact, I think that's the main flaw in the fic: the ending feels way too cute and tidy for something like Black Lagoon, a franchise where endings, I feel, need to be ambiguous at best and depressing as hell at worst. It undermines the fun one has reading Country and the Lagoon Company operate a bomber to blow the everloving shit out of a PMC submarine base, or drug fields, or mansions, or whatever. It's an ending that feels at once natural for the fic, but not as earned as it could be.

But beyond that, Redneck of Roanapur is a simple, long, but super-fun thrill ride. If you're looking for something silly to read over the long summer months, flip through this and enjoy yourself.

#stmpd reviews black lagoon fanfiction #black lagoon #fanfiction #fanfic rec

[problemswithbooks]

Gonna be honest. It doesn't even feel like the manga wants me to think Hawks made a bad choice. Even now. Its just feels like a cliffhanger about the destruction that would have happened back then if Hawks didn't make the hardest choice. And then the heroes would have been utterly crushed.

Oh, yeah, I can totally see this interpretation of those scenes with Hawks and AfO, but I think that shows the poor writing of the story in and of itself. There are stories where the point is that it can have multiple interpretations, but the way bnha is set up that doesn't feel like Hori's intention (and if it is, he's not doing a good job writing it that way).

Part of the reason I saw it as the more Hawks Critical way was because of how other fans were talking about it--clearly a lot of people see it as Hawks past coming back to bite him in the butt. All I saw were people cheering it on and happy that he was getting his punishment for killing Twice, and of course ignoring how poor the writing was for this set up.

Because, yes, your interpretation is more plausible given how Hori wrote past events. Hawks killing Twice didn't do anything but save a a lot of people during the first war. The villains might have still retreated but Twice would have continued to fight for his friends and given the lack of care any of the LoV show for Shigaraki's condition and still blindly follow AfO, it's easy to assume Twice would be 100% fine with taking orders for him. This would have lead to a Sad Man's Parade anyway, and perhaps and even worse one that included cloned nomu and AfO's.

If Hori wanted Hawks to be wrong and this be his comeuppance for his actions there were one of two things he should done to pull this off at least moderately well.

Have Hawks actually straight up murder Twice. For all that people say Hawks killed Twice on orders and acted due to giving into his brainwashing from the HPSC, that's just not true. Hori went out of his way to show that Hawks only killed Twice after he had lost most of his feathers to Dabi and Twice was escaping in order to use his Quirk. Hori even had Twice kill a Hero in order to save Toga, proving his intentions were violent. If he wanted Hawks to be wrong and following orders similar to how Nagant did, all he had to do was have Hawks stab Twice in the back without even a second thought, or trying to talk him down at all.

Show Twice being unsure/ concerned about the PLA's plans and the part they want him to play in it. Something that Hori absolutely refuses to let any of his villains have is doubt or remorse for their actions. If we'd been given a few panels of Hawks and Twice bonding where Jin voices that he has some reservations about the plan. He joined the LoV for the feeling of family and he still feels that, but with the added MLA members he's worried that things are changing. He wants his freinds to be happy but isn't sure if trusting the MLA is a good choice. Plus, he doesn;t trust the doctor and is worried for Shigaraki, who he thinks the doctor might be tricking or hurting in someway. At the end he just fiuguires he's not a smart guy and he should trust his freinds, but it's clear the idea of using his Quirk to possibly level Japan still weighs on him.

Either of these would have helped show Hawks as wrong. The first one has Hawks do something actually morally wrong. Even if Twice his fine with the plan as he is in canon and as seen by Deika he's still willing to level cities for the LoV, it'd still be wrong for Hawks to just stab him in the back without even trying to arrest or talk him down as he does in the manga.

The second has Hawks knowing Twice is having conflicted feelings, giving him something to try and change Twice's mind about using his Quirk, and bring in doubt that Twice would 100% act like he did in Deika City and help the PLF destroy all of Japan and kill innocents lives just because his friends say so. It also could be used to foreshadow AfO's take over of Shigaraki and how the LoV feel about it. It makes Hawks wrong for killing Twice because there's a chance he might not use his Quirk to deadly effect, yet Hawks kills him anyway. It also means that Sad Man's Parade being used against the Heroes is his fault because now Twice/Toga is using it for revenge. There was a chance Jin would have changed his mind, but Hawks betrayal makes sure Jin uses his Quirk for revenge.

Using both together would be even better.

But as it is Hawks wasn't wrong for taking out Twice, and if Hori plays it off as if he was, it's not going to work very well. He made the villains way to remorseless and over the top violent, showcasing multiple times how much Twice was willing to do for his friends. On top of that if Twice's Quirk does turn the tides, it only proves more how right Hawks was to kill him during that first war. Because it's 100% certain that Jin would have used his Quirk had he lived, that Heroes losing major ground to it or people getting killed by it, only shows how the first war would have been a loss had Twice lived.

#ask #thanks for the ask #takami keigo #Hawks #Hori writes really weird #where it's impossible to know what he's trying to write/say #like he clearly wants the Heroes to be wrong on some level #yet refuses to actually make them fuck up that bad or do unquestionably bad things #and the Heroes that do (Endeavor) get a redemption #like it still boggles my mind people read the Hawks fight and still consider it cold blooded murder #and totally seem to disregard the fight after Dabi shows up #like saying he didn't to kill Twice because he had him subdued--as if Dabi didn't have him cornered and Twice was escaping #or disregarding that Hawks inner monologue states that he never intended to kill Twice #so that means the bit when he looked to be stabling Twice in the face was actually just to kill the clone coming off Twice #and should really be angry that Hori used it as a cheep ploy/ cliffhanger to get more readers #something he still does to this day with things like Bakugou's death #bnha 374 #bnha

[reginarubie]

"The ice crystals had settled over her(ygritte) face, and in the moonlight it looked as though she wore a glittering silver mask."- Jon(ASOS VII). "Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover's kisses, and melted on her cheeks."-Sansa(ASOS VII). Ygritte died in night while Sansa waken up at Dawn. Ice Crystals as silver mask vs Snowflakes as lover's kiss. Ygritte and Sansa are both redhead.

Ciao anon!,

Ah yes, the foil that convinced me of the real possibility of Jonsa playing a part in Jon's arc beyond all the other evidences. Let's say that I wholeheartedly believe that Jonsa will play a part in the coming books, though neither Jon and Sansa might ever act on it, though I dearly hope they will act someway on it. Even if I fear that Martin will play on the linger conviction and overall feeling of the other being the most important person for them and yet never acting on it because of their upbringing. How heartbreaking and realistic and encompassing would it be to read them being in love, being passionate about each other and it playing a part in their decision making, but then actually never acting on it properly because of their upbringing? Bittersweet and plausible. I hate the fact that I fear that this might be where Martin is headed.

Anyway.

Ygritte has died and thus the ice-crystals that fall on her pale cheeks remain a bronze mask of ice, because there is no more warmth underneath her skin. There is no more life in her, yet Ygritte has always lacked warmth toward Jon. Lust, yes, passion of course; but not the warmth of tenderness Jon has always dreamed of.

On the opposite Sansa, instead, is filled with the warmth Jon has desired his whole life, she is alive, despite every death threat thrown her way, with that tenderness, and she is waking at dawn (war for dawn anyone?, they are literally fighting a war for dawn, for the dawn of eternal spring and as I stated before Sansa is a late winter, early spring child, born possibly at the beginning of spring when the world starts to wake up again after its ‘apparent’ death during wintertime; also the whole Rhaegar/Lyanna happened during the year of false spring, will Jon/Sansa happen at the beginning of real, eternal spring?, just as Sansa was born at the beginning of spring as the first child born of love between Ned and Cat in Winterfell? — like c'mon how many hints are pointing at this already?); and in fact Jon is attracted to Ygritte when he sees the reflection of Sansa's tenderness in her (Sansa brushing Lady's coat and singing softly to herself vs Ygritte singing around the fire); why, when Jon thinks of Sansa seeing beyond the Wall (the same sight he shares with Ygritte atop the Wall after their climb) he thinks that ‘Sansa would call this an enchantment, and tears would fill her eyes at the wonder of it’ and he, himself, thinks of the sight like ‘a proof that there is magic beyond the Wall’.

Sansa is that warmth and tenderness Jon dreamed of in a lover, and it's why snowflakes («my name is Jon Snow») kiss her cheeks and melt there — like a lover would melt against her — like a lover's kisses. I mean, c'mon what kind of romanticity is this, Martin?, give us more of this chanson the geste's romance! We demand it. It's also cause his passion for Ygritte was short-lived and that fire snuffed out easily, leaving no lingering warmth behind, something that even only his familial love for Sansa has succeeded of doing as Jon's memories of Sansa are filled with tenderness and warmth.

Also, a silver mask, Jon's love for Ygritte was born of a farce, to prove his loyalty to the wildling while undercover. It was false, born of the need to prove himself true to his captors while she is a sexual predator. Hence the falsity of it, while I don't argue that the feelings are real, but it is not real love.

While the snow melts on Sansa's cheeks, because Sansa's face and true soul — her warmth — melts away the mask of Alayne Stone.

Poetry I am telling you, it totally rhymes and that means they are endgame imo (even if only in their private spheres without ever acting on it, in the time-span of the story, leaving room open for a future development beyond A song of Ice and Fire).

Thank you for your ask.

Totally unrelated but, we do realise how well and intimately Jon knows Sansa and seeing beyond the Wall he basically describes the very feelings Sansa feels the moment she steps through the garden cloaked in snow of the Eyrie finding the sight of it in wintery snow so lovely she almost doesn't breath at the wonder of it? Poetry I tell you.

As always hope you enjoyed and I wish you a very nice day!

part II

#anon asks #ask the hag #jonsa #jonsa foreshadowing #it is endgame I tell ya

[orionangeline]

Ebisu sensei is an aburame. Evidence:

Same glasses

Similar hair

Explainy

Secretly has a personality/is very close about themselves

Family business=teaching?

The only problem is he doesn't wear the matching aburame outfit all the others we see wear

#naruto #lol #making a joke so I don't cry about baby gaara #anyways its totally plausible fight me

[howtofightwrite]

there is a character by the name of Saito Hajime in Rurouni Kenshin (or Samurai X) (also the author is terrible person) who is notable for having a single move with minor variation depending on the situation, that being a highly exaggerated charging sword thrust, and supposedly based on a technique practiced by the actual Saito Hajime in real life where you take an extra step and let go of the right hand to extend your reach during a stab. This got me wondering, when and how should one blur the line between realistic and stylistic? And is there a merit to "master one technique to perfection" ala "I fear the man who trained one kick a thousand times"?

Bruce Lee’s line, “I fear the man who trained one kick a thousand times” isn’t actually related to one trick ponies or people who practice and master one technique. What it actually means is, “I fear the person who has mastered the basics more than the person who went out and learned all the flashy, superficial shit.” People who come from a martial arts backgrounds and have been in martial arts schools all know the kind of person Lee is referring to. In the real world, you can’t create a workable fighting style off one single technique, no matter how good that technique is. Lee’s quote doesn’t exist to validate Shounen anime’s obsession with the one trick pony. (There’s a reason why One Punch Man is brilliant and hilarious satire.)

That said, the Signature Technique has it’s place, every martial arts practitioner is going to have techniques they gravitate towards, like better, and, as a result, practice more than others. This becomes the best technique in their arsenal because they put the most effort into it, and, in the end, they can become over reliant on it. They might even neglect other, crucial techniques they need to be successful.

You see this one all the time in real life with martial artists from different schools. A good example is Taekwondo practitioners who spar regularly, most of them can’t guard their face for the life of them because TKD sparring is almost totally kick based. (This is because you get 2 points if you land with a kick to the body versus one with hands. Hands to the head is 2, but with a kick is 3.) Instead, their hands will gravitate down or they’ll grab their pant legs and hike them up to lift the hem out of the way of their feet. This is bad, they know its bad, and they do it anyway.

As for when to blur the line between reality and fiction, you answered your own question when you were looking into the real Saito Hajime and a technique he was said to practice. It’s right here, from your question, of what made Saito’s technique unique, “an extra step and let go of the right hand to extend your reach during a stab.“

This, right here, is the reality that justifies the fiction. The justification isn’t actually that this technique was real. The detail alone justifies every artistic decision built off of it. Realism is in the ability to explain what is happening and why in detail.

Part of what makes Saito Hajime feel so real as a character is his ability to explain his technique, his methodology, and his beliefs to the audience. The details of Saito’s technique elevate it and these details resonate with our understanding of reality. As we, the audience, gain understanding, the technique feels more plausible. More importantly, we, the audience, see Saito’s singularly focused, unrelenting, determined personality reflected in his technique and this helps us understand his character better. Our newly formed understanding further cements the character as a “real” person in the context of the narrative.

Saito is a master class in how to marry a character’s identity to their martial combat style and an excellent example of how to manifest that philosophy through the techniques they practice.

Saito is the only character in Rurouni Kenshin who singularly practices one simple technique. The other characters have specialties and preferences, but they all practice a range of different attacks or use different body parts to execute variations on a technique. Not Saito, Saito has one technique with extremely minor variation and he would not be believable at all if his character did not support this decision 110%. Saito’s technique represents his black and white worldview, his religious adherence to the Shinsengumi code, “Aku Soku Zan” or “Slay Evil Immediately.” The thrust itself is beautiful poetry for Saito because the thrust requires total, unflinching commitment without reservation or hesitation. By putting his whole life on the line for one brilliant strike, Saito slays evil immediately.

Saito’s extreme specialization is the artistic rendition of “show, don’t tell” or “exposit, don’t explain.”

You can’t get to where Saito is without understanding the risks involved with certain techniques and building a character’s personality around their decision to take those risks. This is why reality is important because real world applications for techniques inform their meaning and that meaning travels into fiction. You don’t need a background in iaijutsu or kenjutsu to grasp the risks involved in Saito’s thrust. However, understanding can be helpful to recognize the way he commits his whole body into the strike means any mistake or miscalculation will get him fucked. This plays into the high risk, high reward nature of his combat style. That high risk approach is where the narrative builds tension into his fights. Rurouni Kenshin’s narrative never forgets extremes have their costs.

You can go a long way with detail and a functional martial philosophy to justify a character’s actions/beliefs within the story. You need reality to provide the little technical details to make your stylistic desires functional and believable. Saito’s technique enhances his believability but only because the technique itself can be drawn so realistically from the historical record. This is to say, you need to understand violence to effectively write violence, or, at the very least, be able to draw from the experiences of others in your own research to effectively create the simulacra.

TLDR: A detailed lie is better than incoherent gibberish.

Remember, though, One Trick Ponies aren’t believable alone. They can be made believable by a narrative that supports them. Kenshin’s Saito can get away with a lot because he isn’t the narrative’s main character, he doesn’t have to bear the burden of consistently facing new challenges, coming up with new approaches, or revealing new techniques to keep audience engagement. He can show up, do his thing, fight a couple of enemies, make a few small changes, and leave. This gives Saito more freedom to have a singular focus than a character who has to shoulder multiple story arcs across two hundred or three hundred chapters.

While it’s not a discussion I want to get into right now, there’s a larger conversation to be had about marrying a character’s martial combat style, techniques, and perspective to the culture within the narrative. (If you’re looking for inspiration to snarf, Saito is not a character who is going to travel well outside of Japan because the details supporting his approach to violence are uniquely Japanese, including his “one holy technique” approach. The Japanese have a very ceremonial, very formalized, almost religious approach to combat that you don’t see outside of Japan.)

The real Saito’s technique had actual practical applications within the sphere of the Japanese sword arts. The goal of his technique was to gain greater reach over his opponent. Saito sacrificed power by losing the second hand but gained reach, meaning that in a head to head he could hit his opponent sooner while his opponent came up short or he’d have more mobility in his upper body to turn sideways and avoid taking their sword strike to his upper body. Basically, he sacrificed power for reach and upper body flexibility/mobility much like a rapier duelist. He likely utilized the second step as a way to gain momentum and minimize the power lost by giving up the second hand. Sacrificing the second hand also freed it up for maintaining balance, meaning he could move more quickly. A body on a 45 degree angle maintains balance better than a body that’s forward facing. (He also didn’t have to puncture or punch through armor, so that’s there too.)

This strike demonstrates a mentality of someone looking to gain an extreme advantage over their opponent and, given his reputation, probably did exactly that. It’s a battlefield mentality, a survival calculus, “how can I do the most damage to my enemy while taking the least amount of damage possible (preferably no damage.)” This is the mindset of a real person who wants to live. As you can see, that’s a very different application than the fictional Saito but the real world usually requires more cunning and flexibility. You’re also seeing the reasoning for why the rapier overtook the longsword. The stronger attack doesn’t equal the more effective one. What matters is what your power does to your opponent rather than the simple factor of power you possess.

If you want to see a Japanese creator whose characters do get approximated and successfully adapted into Western media (in part because they were adapted from Western media), I’d suggest looking at the Hollywood adaptations of Kurosawa’s work.

Everyone blends style and reality from formalism to realism. You find the place between the two lines that fits your narrative and works for you and you live there. The only way to figure out where you fall on the spectrum is through trial and error. Failure is part of learning.

-Michi

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#Michi answers #writing advice #writing reference #writing tips #rurouni kenshin

[billys-lover]

Hi!!!!! Could I please get a ship?

I'm 18, I'm bi, I use she/her pronouns, I'm 5'3 and I'm pretty chubby, I'm black with dark skin and I have pastel pink locs right now but I like to dye my hair a lot!!!

I'm an infp and a Gemini sun, Libra moon, Gemini rising (with great decision making skills as you can imagine).

I have adhd and I tend to not speak until I'm spoken to, but once I start talking I don't stop easily lol. If I'm talking about something I'm especially interested in I can literally go on for hours at a time. I'm really into witchcraft, mythology, most cartoons, all of the twilight movies except new moon cause I don't like seeing ppl get sad, and languages, of which I'm currently learning seven (almost none of which are remotely useful lol) I especially love dead languages, rn I'm learning ancient Egyptian and Latin and I am ✨obsessed✨.

I'm a huge history nerd but I hate hearing about war and politics because they can be kinda triggering for me, i don't rlly like violence unless I know it's explicitly fake (so supernatural horror movies r usually good but if it seems to plausible I start to freak out lol). I'm incredibly sensitive but I think since I talk so much and overthink constantly I'm a lot more likely to just communicate with someone instead of arguing or fighting with them, (not that I can or would want to fight anyone I hate all physical activity so much lol) and I love love and being romanced but I have pretty bad trust issues

My favorite genre of music is probably hyperpop even though I listen to literally everything (one of my favorite songs is an Icelandic lullaby about the ghost of a child calling out to its mom) and I almost always have headphones on at 100% volume.

My receiving love languages are acts of service, gift giving, and quality time and my giving love languages are gift giving and quality time, I'll cry while watching anything even though I hate crying in front of people, and I love literally all animals (except centipedes, they scare me a lot) and would jump in front of a Mac truck for literally any stray cat, and I can and have walked into mildly unsafe areas for the sake of getting a better glimpse at some raccoons

!!! <3 <3 <3 thank you!!! I hope you're having a good day !!!

i had so much fun writing this?! i hope you enjoy it! also i’m so sorry i haven’t been very active this week:( i’m getting stuff written i promise! anyways, i ship you with…

SIDNEY PRESCOTT!

- i feel like this poor girl would drool over you 24/7

- please let her help you dye her hair.

- she's too scared to dye her own hair so she’d love to do your’s instead! 

- she can totally understand the whole not speaking unless spoken to thing 

- i have such a strong feeling that this girl is super duper shy so please don’t stop talking! maybe add her into the conversation too! - loves to hear you talk.

- please tell her about your day!?!

- sidney would love the twilight franchise. i know it.

- watch them with her!

- you watch cartoons too? name your favourites to her and you two will watch them all night.

- will sit there in absolute shock when you speak to her in a different language.

- she finds it beyond attractive.

- “where did you learn that, doll?”

- loves the fact that you dont quite do slasher films because of her past trauma... obviously.

- but if one day you decide to watch a slasher film that isn't too gory or doesn't show much violence then she’ll be willing to watch it with you as long as you're comfortable! 

- just please cuddle her. she needs it

- she promises she’ll cuddle you back!

- i’m convinced you would barely fight.

- you're both willing to talk about what's bothering you and unlike her ex billy, you wont scream (wink wink) and shout at her.

- would definitely take her a while to get into hyper pop but i feel like she’d quite enjoy it!

- loves when you give her gifts and will give you the cutest shit as a thank you.

- WILL GET YOU A CAT AS A GIFT!!!!!!

- and will kill centipedes for you even though she's quite scared of them herself

- what can i say! she loves you. 

#sidney prescott #sidney prescott x reader #sidney prescott smut #sidney prescott imagines #scream #Scream 1996 #scream gifs #scream imagine #scream x reader #neve campbell

[sunnysidekit]

Summary: All is fair in love and war. And boxing, too, apparently.

Pairing: Ben ‘Benny’ Miller x F!Reader (no y/n, reader’s boxing nickname is ‘Nyx’)

Warnings: Language, mentions of violence.

Word count: 2.2k

My masterlist

Everyone likes a good mystery. Don’t even try to deny it; whether you like Sherlock Holmes or if you’re more of an Agatha Christie fan, none of us can really escape the allure of a good conundrum every now and again. Some people can stare in the face of their mystery and not recognize it for quite some time, while others can practically smell them from a mile away. Ben Miller is part of, well, both groups.

Personally, he likes mysteries and surprises and such, but his army days have taught him all of those are a bad thing. A mission can collapse after the smallest detail changes, after all. Sometimes those missions are called off; other than the fact that he can’t do his job when that happens, he’s not really bothered by it. But when something catches him and his team by surprise during a mission and they have to get on with it anyway, things tend to… let’s say, not end well for everyone. And that’s gently put, of course.

Which is why when he’s at home between deployments, he likes his simple habits. They provide joy and adrenaline, and boy does he need both to function well. One of those habits is boxing. He likes it because of its simplicity; you punch your opponent, they punch you back, and so on and so forth until one of you stops. He’s good at it, too. Will always says that’s because he practiced a lot on him when they were younger. Ben says he’s the one with the good genes. Their mother was a fighter, too, after all.

The other reason he likes boxing is because your opponents always try to surprise you with a little mystery move. It’s fun for him to figure out how to respond in a split second, and the rush he gets when he does so successfully is almost unparalleled. Today, though, the only real surprise is the sudden appearance of his very own mystery. And, hey, you might know where this one’s going: it appears in the shape of a woman…

Benny whoops when he kicks open the door to his old high school gym’s changing room, but it sounds a bit less enthusiastic than it did after his last match. He knew he should have listened to Will and gone somewhere, anywhere else than back to Red Feather Lakes, but he’s not about to mention it when he can already imagine the smug grin spreading across his brother’s face.

He won, that’s what counts. And it’s not that bad to have done so after what is sure to be America’s easiest boxing match. That just means he’s good at it. The crowd went just as wild as it usually does, even though there were significantly less attendants than two weeks ago. Somehow, none of the arguments he tells himself really convinces him.

“All right!” Catfish says triumphantly from behind him. “Looks like all that training paid off, didn’t it?”

“Yeah…” Benny trails off as his slightly blurry vision comes back into focus. There’s someone sitting on one of the benches, someone he doesn’t know. It’s a woman; her aura tells him she’s all business, but her clothes tell him she also definitely plays. “Who’re you?”

The woman doesn’t respond immediately; only after half a minute of casually typing away on her phone does she look up and meet his eye. “Name’s Val,” she says, her facial expression one he can’t quite place. “And I’m about to ask you something you won’t be able to ignore.”

It’s important to notice that Benny isn’t particularly patient in his post-fight high, something Frankie knows very well. He becomes a bomb of electric energy that, once set off, won’t stop until every single muscle in his body gives out. And he’s about to be set off.

“Val, is it?” Frankie smiles at the woman, swiftly moving his friend to the showers. “Why don’t we talk while he cools down, hm?”

“You’re not the one I want to ask a question,” she says calmly, not taking her eyes off Benny. “You’re a Delta boy, aren’t you? I can see it in the way you fight. It takes regular boxers years to develop such a sensitive, quick response capability.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And that makes me think that oaf out there’s a long way from even thinking of acquiring your skillset. It’s impressive how easily you had him on the mat.”

“Ma’am, if you want an autograph-” Frankie tries, sensing the ticking time-bomb next to him is about to blow, but Val immediately interjects.

“Which is precisely what caught my eye. These men are no challenge for you anymore, but I think I know someone who could be. Should you accept their invitation, that is.”

“Do I know him?” Benny narrows his eyes at her, trying by god to figure out her angle in all of this. She smirks and closes her eyes a few seconds longer than a normal blink would take; touchy subject, maybe? Or perhaps he’s right and he has seen the guy before.

“You might have seen them around, sure. But I doubt you’d remember them.”

“So, what? I say yes and I’ll fight your friend here next week or something?” Benny snatches his towel from his bag and snaps it against the wall in annoyance.

“I’m afraid my friend’s a little more… complex than that, Mr. Miller.”

“Hey, uh, no thanks,” Frankie cuts in, waving his hands as if to dissipate the words in the air. “He doesn’t do illegal fights.”

“He’d have plausible deniability,” Val says with a slight tilt of her head, then turns back to face Benny and hands him a business card. "Anyway, the choice is yours, Mr. Miller, not your friend’s. I don’t need an answer right now. Do take your time to think it over, sleep on it a bit. Once you’re a little more comfortable with the idea, give this number a call. I’ve got a feeling they’d very much like to bruise that pretty face of yours until it looks like a Monet.”

She gets up from the bench and walks out of the changing room without looking back. Benny slips the business card into his jacket pocket, something that catches Frankie’s attention.

“Don’t do it, Ben,” he sighs. “I’m serious. You could get arrested, get your ass thrown in jail. You’ll get kicked out of the army.”

“Stop whining, Fish. I’m not gonna do it anyway.”

Despite explicitly telling Frankie he wouldn’t do it, here he is, standing outside his local gym with his phone in one hand and the curious looking business card in the other. There’s not a lot of info on it, but, hey, what did he expect? That an illegal streetfighter would publish their own name, address and contact info on a bunch of business cards?

There are only two things printed on the grey little card: Nyx, which must be the fighter’s nickname or something, and a phone number. It’s been in his jacket pocket ever since he left his old high school, but it felt like it’s been burning a hole in it the entire time. It’s exactly as Val said it would be. He can’t get her proposition out of his mind, no matter how hard he tries.

She’s right about the competition. They’re no match for him, not the ones here in Red Feather Lakes. And, sure, he could always just sign up for something three towns over, but it wouldn’t matter much. How she found out he’s in the Delta Force is beyond him, though. It’s policy not to broadcast such a position if you want to stay in it. Maybe she has connections in the army…

That’s another thing; his place in the army. It would be gone as soon as he gets caught, and it’s not like he’s got great job prospects waiting for him back home when all he’s done for the past ten years is train to get where he is now. No college degree, no other jobs to list on his resume, no wealthy parents to fall back on… His whole life would go up in smoke.

But it does entice him. He technically does illegal things for his job all the time, and the matches he engages in when he has some down time aren’t really scratching that one particular itch anymore. Let’s face it: one phone call can’t hurt, right? He can still refuse, say no, put his foot down. Maybe even convince this guy to go legit.

He pushes the little green receiver on the screen, then puts his phone to his ear. The dial tone beeps three times before someone picks up. He opens his mouth to say something, but the person on the other side is quicker.

“Ben Miller, I presume?” It’s… a woman. But not Val. “Val told me you’d be giving me a call.”

“And you’re…” he quickly flips over the card just to be sure, “…Nyx, then?”

“Got it in one. I do so hate it when Val forgets to mention my name in the initial interview.”

Benny huffs out a confused laugh. “Interview?”

“You aced it, by the way. Not saying too much is best when talking with my… let’s call her my associate,” the woman says. Her voice is softer than Val’s, and a lot smoother. It sounds like what taking a sip of hot chocolate feels like. “Shall we get on with it and discuss the rules of this little arrangement?”

“I don’t-- rules? I haven’t even given you an answer.”

“Oh, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve got any restraint left,” she chuckles. “You want to tell me you called just to say hello to a total stranger?”

“No, but-” Benny splutters, but he doesn’t get to finish his sentence.

“Then your answer, even if you haven’t given it to me yet, is as clear as the Pope’s Holy Water. Now then, the rules. In order to keep you in the warm, sunny, light side of the law, I’ll arrange a time and place. All you have to do is show up.”

He can’t help but grin. She’s clearly on top of this whole cloak and dagger operation, that much he can tell. Who she is, though, he can’t say. Not yet. Maybe he’ll recognize her when he sees her. “What about my gear?”

“Do take it with you, please. I’m not a charity, giving away free gear to any John, Charles or Mary.”

“All right,” he says, clicking his tongue. “Anything else?”

“Val will pick you up and get you back home safely, so don’t worry about the whole transport situation.”

“This doesn’t sound very... safe. I mean, you do realize this sounds a lot like kidnapping, right? Or murder, or something like that?”

The woman laughs. It sounds like the melody to a song he knows but has never heard at the same time. It’s the kind of laugh that makes everyone around laugh as well. “Why would I tell you all this and then still proceed with it if my intent was malicious? You can easily call the cops and have my dear Val arrested for whatever crime you think me capable of, and that wouldn’t be very good for my business.”

“Fair enough.”

“Speaking of Val, she’ll pick you up next Wednesday at nine.”

Benny kicks a piece of gravel onto the street next to him and swallows away the last of his pride and dignity. “All right, I guess I’ll see you then.”

“Good lord, I can’t believe Val forgot to tell you that, too,” she laughs again, then clears her throat and continues a lot more seriously. “I only dance in the dark. Have a good night, Mr. Miller.”

Usually, waiting takes ages, but not this time. For Benny the rest of the week practically flew by him and before he knows it, it’s already Wednesday. He went training with Frankie just like any other week, only this time he accidentally forgot to mention his fight with Nyx. He told himself that the less people know about his, uh, date, the better, but he also knows Frankie would have immediately pulled the plug.

Val arrives at nine o’clock sharp in the front seat of a cab, which is no surprise. The drive that follows doesn’t take very long; he also isn’t blindfolded or anything like they do in the movies. The car stops in front of an old warehouse in the east side of town, and that’s when Val turns around in her seat and very concisely tells him to get his ass out of her cab himself, since she’s not going to hold open the door for him.

Instead of driving off, Val simply pulls the keys from the ignition and tosses them to him, calling it his ‘insurance policy’. Then she waves her hand as if to tell him to hurry up and get inside, which he promptly does.

Well, that whole dancing in the dark reference seems to have been meant literally; as soon as the warehouse door closes behind him, an inky, suffocating darkness envelopes Benny and makes a shiver run up and down his spine. He takes a few tentative steps, holding out his arms and moving them around to make sure he doesn’t hit anything while he walks.

Suddenly, a voice calls out to him from a bit further into the sole, big room this warehouse seems to consist of.

“Good evening, Mr. Miller. Let’s get swinging, shall we?”

A/N: Hey there, you made it to the end! Thanks for reading through the whole thing, I hope you liked it. If you’ve got any suggestions or spotted a mistake or two, don’t hesitate to tell me so that I might fix it. I hope you’ll stick around for round two!

#ben miller x you #ben miller x y/n #ben miller x reader #benny miller #frankie morales #triple frontier #garrett hedlund #garrett hedlund fic #garrett hedlund fanfic #my writing

[megabadbunny]

Aural Fixation

He can’t say he’s imagined such things (because he hasn’t, would never; big dumb sexless space oaf, that’s him) but if he were to start, he might imagine that’s a sound Rose makes during arousal.

Not that he’d know. Or imagine. Because he doesn’t and he hasn’t.

(Warning: here there be smuts.)

***

CLANK.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!”

Halfway down the hall, the Doctor chuckles. “Need any help in there?”

Another clank, and he can just make out the sound of Rose swearing under her breath. “No,” she calls back.

“Really? Cos it sounds like you picked a fight with the wardrobe,” the Doctor teases, “and you’re losing.”

A loud Ka-CHUNK sounds in response. “I’m fine!” Rose insists stubbornly.

Shaking his head, the Doctor laughs. “What could you possibly be doing to cause that racket?” he asks, doubling back toward the wardrobe room.

“It’s not me, it’s this stupid busted thing,” says Rose’s voice, and the Doctor steps inside the room to see the outline of her body, silhouetted against the back of a folding-screen; from the looks of it, this stupid busted thing refers to the automatic lace-puller, attached to Rose’s silhouette by two shadow-strings. Normally cheerfully upright, the outline of the lace-puller is now slumped, wheezing a little, and yep, that’s the faintest hint of smoke rising from its vents.

The Doctor tsks. Only got a couple of centuries out of the thing. Typical rubbish Grishtal workmanship.

“Sure you don’t need help?” the Doctor asks.

“Not unless you know how to lace up a corset.”

“I’m sure I can figure it out,” he replies confidently, striding forward. “How hard can it be?”

Rose laughs. “I dunno, you might be—”

Without warning, the Doctor pushes the folding-screen aside to find Rose standing between a mirror and the auto-lacer, hair coiffed, corset half-laced and strings pulled taut, wearing nothing else but a pair of extremely anachronistic (not to mention extremely tiny) knickers. She’s staring at him over her shoulder, wide eyes growing wider, pink cheeks blooming pinker.

“—surprised,” she finishes breathlessly, and neither of them are laughing now.

Fortunately, the Doctor’s mind is a far more impressive machine than the auto-lacer, and its many many gears and cogs only falter for the briefest of moments. It’s nothing to be shocked by, after all. Rose or not, there’s nothing unusual about the display in front of him. It’s just a body. A human body. They’re all more or less the same. Skin, hair, curves. Undergarments. Surprisingly small undergarments that hide very little. Nothing to be startled about. Certainly nothing to bluster over.

“What are you wearing those for?” he blurts out, staring at the pants, and internally kicks himself.

Rose’s eyebrow piques incredulously. “You want to know why I’m wearing knickers?”

The Doctor rolls his eyes. “No, I’m saying that if you’re gonna go through the effort to put on something historically accurate like that—” he says, gesturing to the corset, “—you might as well commit to the whole kit. You know. Bloomers and such.”

“What do you know about bloomers?” Rose laughs.

“I know modern-day pants are an anachronism.”

“And I know no one’s gonna be seeing them anyway. Well, except you now, I guess. Not totally sure you count, though,” she teases, looking the Doctor up and down.

“Gee, thanks,” the Doctor says wryly, watching as Rose struggles to pull her laces free of the auto-lacer’s vicelike grip. “I was gonna offer to help you with that, but now I’m thinking maybe I’ll just leave you to it.”

“No you won’t.”

“Oh no?” asks the Doctor, leaning lazily against a coral strut.

“Nope.” Rose shoots another look at him over her shoulder when he doesn’t move. “You’re too impatient for that.”

“Nah. See, patience is a skill, a discipline, acquired over trials and tribulations over the course of time. And me? I’ve been around for a bit. In fact,” the Doctor says smugly, crossing his arms, “I’d say I’ve had bouts of patience that lasted longer than you’ve been alive.”

Rose smiles at him, her gaze soft and warm, and really, it’s almost maddening, the instant effect that look has on him, the way it makes something go all honeyed in his chest. “Do you really want to stall your adventure just because your companion got trapped by the dressing-machine?” she asks sweetly. “Cos the whole stuck-in-the-car, waiting-cos-the-missus-ain’t-ready-yet bit sounds awfully domestic.”

The Doctor glares at her. Rose smiles at him beatifically, tongue trapped in her teeth. His eyes narrow. Her smile brightens.

Dammit.

“Next time,” he says, even as he grudgingly pushes off away from the strut, “we’re going somewhere and somewhen that does not require complicated underthings.”

“Fine by me,” replies Rose, watching in the mirror as the Doctor approaches the auto-lacer, scanning it with the sonic. Official diagnosis: it is, indeed, busted. “Wouldn’t have gone for the whole historical look anyway, ‘cept I remembered that run-in with the what-d’you-call-‘ems, Henry VIII’s fashion police,” Rose continues.

Chuckling, the Doctor adjusts the setting on the sonic, loosening the auto-lacer’s joints. “Those were just constables, I’m afraid. No fashion police, just coppers getting a little carried away enforcing local sumptuary laws, drunk on an ounce of power. Typical lower-level law enforcement.”

“Yeah, but they didn’t give you or Jack any trouble.”

“All right, sexist typical lower-level law enforcement.” Pulling the laces free from the machine, he turns to Rose. “Now, if you want to talk about literal fashion police—”

He tugs on the corset-laces and Rose stumbles back into him, gasping in surprise.

“Still earning those sea legs?” teases the Doctor.

“Git,” Rose laughs, pushing away. “Give a girl some warning, first!”

“Sort of thought this would give it away,” the Doctor says brightly, giving the laces another little tug.

Rose shoots a dirty look over his shoulder.

His responding grin is perfectly innocent. “I’m only trying to help.”

“Speaking of drunk on power,” Rose mutters, but she’s smiling when she says it, so the Doctor pays it no mind. This time, when the Doctor pulls on the laces, she doesn’t stumble, just rocks back a little. Inwardly, the Doctor grins at that. Her time aboard the TARDIS has earned her some decent sea-legs, after all.

Crossing the laces over each other, the Doctor threads them through the grommets, pulling them taut again, after. He repeats the pattern, pulling the laces snug each time, until he cinches a little tighter and Rose lets out a sharp breath in response.

“All right there?” he asks.

“S’fine,” she says, but in the mirror, she looks a little winded.

“I can loosen up.”

“It’s fine,” Rose repeats, straightening up a little. “Just—sometimes it sort of pushes the air out of your lungs, is all.”

The Doctor shrugs and sets back to work. Cross, weave, thread, pull.

Rose gasps.

Glancing up again, the Doctor frowns. “There’s no use in you getting all dolled-up if you can’t breathe.”

“I can breathe just fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“I don’t want you fainting in the middle of the opera.”

“Oh, god forbid I should miss the opera,” Rose teases.

“I mean it,” he says, and he starts lacing again. “You faint, I’m not lugging your dead weight around. Not with whatever massive frock you’re undoubtedly planning to wear over this.”

“Oh whatever, just take the dress off.”

Something goes funny in the Doctor’s stomach and he yanks the laces hard. Rose’s footing slips a little and she gasps, the sound just the littlest bit strangled this time. Before the Doctor has a chance to apologize, Rose shakes her head.

“Don’t stop,” she says, and is it him, or has her voice gone just a little bit breathy?

“Might as well get it over and done with,” she adds quickly.

Fair enough. He goes back to it, cross, weave, thread, pull, cross, weave, thread, pull, and the little sound that escapes Rose doesn’t sound like a gasp, so much as a—

Well. No. It sounds exactly like a gasp. Just not the sort of gasp one typically makes while one is getting dressed. He risks another look up at the mirror and oh no, no, that’s a mistake, because Rose isn’t looking him in the eye anymore, instead she’s staring into nothing, biting her lower lip so hard it’s gone white as her chest gently heaves, soft pink blooming over her décolletage. And if the Doctor didn’t know any better, he’d think he caught just the lightest whiff of pheromones dusting the air.

It suddenly occurs to the Doctor that his offer of help might have gotten him more than he bargained for.

He should stop, he thinks, before Rose cottons on that he’s cottoned on and things get awkward. Or, would that make it worse, if he stopped, and then Rose would know for certain that he knew? They’ve already established that he doesn’t really. Know, that is. About this sort of thing. Well, no, she knows he knows, but she doesn’t know how much he knows, and she still seems fairly convinced he doesn’t know anything at all. So.

So the surest way to maintain decorum is to play dumb, right? Play dumb, spare Rose’s blushes, preserve plausible deniability. Just be an idiot. Capital plan.

He crosses and weaves and threads and pulls again and Rose lets out another strangled noise and he can’t say he’s imagined such things (because he hasn’t, would never; big dumb sexless space oaf, that’s him) but if he were to start, he might imagine that’s a sound Rose makes during arousal.

Not that he’d know. Or imagine. Because he doesn’t and he hasn’t.

And he crosses and weaves, threads and pulls and crosses and weaves, threads and pulls again and she swallows back a pant and he accidentally looks up to see her in the mirror again, eyelashes fluttering, still biting that lower lip, biting so hard he’s surprised she hasn’t drawn blood, and her cheeks and ears have gone pink to match the blush of her chest, which, coincidentally, is getting more and more difficult for the Doctor to ignore, either due to its color or its motion or the fact that her breasts bloody damn well look like they’re about to escape this godsforsaken corset any second now—

Cross, weave, thread, yank and Rose stumbles backward again with the force of it, smacking into the Doctor with a bodily thud.

“Leverage!” he announces before either of them have a chance to react, because her face in the mirror and her body pulled against his are decidedly not helping things. “Need leverage to wrap up a task like this,” he adds, dropping the laces so he can grab Rose by the arms and walk her over to the nearest coral strut, blessedly out of the mirror’s view. “It’s all about the physics, see,” he continues, placing Rose’s hands on the strut. “Right amount of leverage, right amount of force; hang on and you’ll be sorted in a tic.”

He picks up the laces and pulls them again, pulls them tight and crosses and weaves and oh, oh no, oh this is even worse somehow than before, because now instead of Rose’s whole body rocking toward him, it’s just her hips and bum, inching back and forth with every tug of the strings, offering a graphic preview of what it would look like if—

Nope. Nope. Can’t think like that won’t think like that mustn’t think like that but it’s too late to change tactics now, just got to ignore the scent and the heat and the view and the sounds and her and move as quickly as possible, wrap this up before his stupid overactive senses pick up on anything else. Rose clings to the strut as he works, biting back her gasps from the sound of it, but the Doctor can still hear her breath trying to escape, can’t help but notice the trembling in her legs. He focuses intently on the work in front of him, fingers and hands working rapidly to finish, and if the laces miss a grommet or two—well, that’s not a flustered mistake. It’s a stylistic flourish. Yeah. He can work with that.

“Done,” he announces, and he’s very pleased with how even and calm his voice sounds despite everything rioting in his head, very pleased indeed. “The chore is complete; you have been properly cinched, tucked, and flattened in all the right places. The inability to properly breathe or move is now totally yours.”

“Thanks,” Rose laughs, and the Doctor pointedly ignores how shaky the sound is, the way she gulps for air.

“Need any help with anything else?” he asks, stepping back, hands firmly lodged in pockets. “Socks? Shoes? Hat?”

“Bloomers?” she jokes, turning to face him.

“What, and undo all my hard work? Should have thought about that before you put the corset on.”

“I’ll just pull ‘em on over top.”

“Rose,” replies the Doctor, all faux-scandalized mock-sternness. “Bloomers go on before the corset. Every time traveler knows that.”

Rolling her eyes, Rose crosses back to the mirror. “Well then, next time I’ll be sure to get your input before I get dressed,” she laughs shakily.

The Doctor watches her as she puts the finishing touches on her makeup. His eyes do not wander down the line of her shoulderblades or the exaggerated curve of her waist or the slope of her hips or the completely bare stretches of her legs, but stay firmly fixed on the reflection of her face in the mirror; the idea of a pre-clothing Rose is more intriguing than it has any right to be, but the Doctor pushes that to the side. It’s easy enough, now that the risk of imminent danger has passed.

She’s fine, now. He’s fine, always. Nothing happened, not really. Anyway they’re back in safe territory, where they belong. Even if it is secretly just a little bit satisfying to realize exactly what kind of effect he can have on her, if he so chooses.

He hides a grin. Luckily he, the Doctor thinks smugly, is not so easily affected.

“Unless you’ve got any other chores for me, I’ll leave you to it,” says the Doctor, stepping back. “But don’t take it easy just cos I’m not in here anymore. We’re still sticking to a strict schedule. Chop-chop.”

“You got it,” says Rose, lining her lips with lipstick. “Oh, and Doctor?” she calls, after he’s made it a few steps away.

He stops and turns. “What’s that?”

“Would you send Jack in here?”

His brow furrows in confusion, and once again, he resolutely ignores the view laid out in front of him. “Why?” he asks.

Finishing her lipstick, Rose meets his gaze in the mirror. “In case I need help with any other chores,” she says simply.

Shocked, the Doctor grasps for any kind of witty rejoinder, or any sense of anything really, any at all. But all he can do is turn and leave, before Rose sees him gaping like some kind of slack-jawed idiot.

Nope, he thinks furiously. Not affected at all.

 ***

 The incident is all but forgotten by the time Rose has finished getting ready (having taken her time about it, too, and demonstrating absolutely no remorse whatsoever), and by the time Jack is finished getting ready (how in all the hells did he manage to take even longer than Rose, the Doctor wonders?), the incident has left his brain entirely. Now he’s just tapping his foot impatiently, glancing down at his wristwatch every so often as Rose and Jack gush at each other about oh, how very splendid they both look.

Literally all of time and space at their disposal, and the two of them are making googly-eyes at each other instead. How did the Doctor ever allow himself to become party to this?

“You hens done clucking?” he asks when fifteen minutes have gone by, with no end in sight.

“Oh, hush,” Jack tuts. “You’re just jealous no one’s mooning over you right now.”

“I’m plenty happy outside the moonlight, thanks.”

“You’d be even happier in it,” drawls Jack, swaggering his way. “C’mon Doc, when’s the last time you got gussied-up for anything?”

The Doctor gestures to his shirt. “Changed my jumper. What more do you want?”

“A suit every once in a while couldn’t hurt,” Rose calls out.

“A long walk on the beach, dinner for three and drinks to match wouldn’t hurt my feelings, either,” says Jack with a wink.

The Doctor glares at the two of them. “Good grief. There’s just no pleasing you two, is there?”

“Nope,” replies Rose, and she and Jack both laugh. The Doctor has every intention of continuing to glower at both of them, reducing them both to duly chastened quietude, but then Rose sidles up to him, threading her arm through his.

“Ready to go?” she asks, with that stupid pretty tongue-touched grin of hers.

Suddenly it’s difficult to pretend to be irritated anymore.

Later, of course, he doesn’t have to pretend at all.

“Sure, let’s go to the opera, says Jack,” the Doctor grumbles under his breath, sonic screwdriver whirring in one hand as he cards through coat after cloak after coat after cloak with the other. “I love the nineteenth century, says Jack. No one’s gonna try to abduct me there, says Jack!”

“S’pose that’s what we get for traveling with a Time Agent,” muses Rose, who does not seem even remotely bothered that they’ve spent an hour in the cloakroom instead of watching the opera. In fact, the Doctor has a sneaking suspicion she prefers it.

“S’pose that’s what we get for traveling with Jack,” he mutters darkly.

Busy digging in the pocket of a grand overcoat (which does not have bottomless pockets as far as the Doctor is aware, but has large enough pockets anyway), Rose spares him a knowing smile. “I think that was code for Actually, I quite like the fellow, he livens up the place.”

“Wasn’t aware the place needed livening-up.”

“Oh, come off it,” Rose teases gently. “You like him. It’s okay to admit it.”

The Doctor sniffs before moving onto the next cloak. Maybe he’ll be lucky enough to find the reservation in there; maybe the thirty-eighth time’s the charm. “He’s a scoundrel,” he insists.

“And let me guess: you happen to like nice men.”

Distracted, it takes the Doctor half a second to recognize the exchange. “Quoting Star Wars will get you nowhere, you know,” he says drily.

“Wasn’t quoting Star Wars.” Rose flashes a grin his way as she pats down another coat. “That was The Empire Strikes Back.”

“Close enough.”

“Close enough? Not by a long shot!” she laughs. “It’s easily the best of the three. The best by miles.”

“And it just happens to be the one with a surplus of Harrison Ford.”

“Well yeah, that’s definitely not a drawback, but that’s not all.” Rose pulls a small card out from the coat, holds it up, and frowns. “What’s the name of the hotel again?”

“The Grosvenor.”

Rose sighs and puts the card back where she found it before moving on. “Anyway,” she says, “it’s not just Harrison Ford. The Empire Strikes Back has the best story of the lot, by far. Daring chase scenes, massive clashes between good and evil, swelling music, epic romance—”

“Ahhh,” says the Doctor knowingly, rifling through a lady’s-purse. “Of course.”

“Of course, what?”

“Of course, romance.”

Rose doesn’t look up, too busy feeling her way through a cloak’s silk lining. “What about it?”

“Just not surprising, is all. Lots of humans like romance. In fact, I’d venture to say most of you do.”

“That a bad thing?”

He shakes his head, abandoning the purse in favor of a cloak. “No, not at all. Just means you lot are entirely predictable.”

“What, and you’re not?”

“…definitely heard something,” another voice is saying, drifting into the Doctor’s field of hearing along with the sounds of bootsteps advancing ever-closer, and he recognizes both sounds as those belonging to a pair of Time Pirates—Jack’s captors. Before either he or Rose have a chance to finish their thoughts, the Doctor grabs her about the waist, yanking her deep into the cloaks and coats with him and pulling them both to the floor. Rose’s lips part for a small yelp of surprise but the Doctor clamps his hand over her mouth before it has a chance to escape, holding her firm against him. Probably she thinks he’s gone a little batty—her hearing’s not as good as his, after all, so his actions must seem completely out of the blue—but she stills once the bootsteps reach earshot, once she understands.

The Doctor has scarcely half a second to whisk Rose’s skirts safely out of view behind the heavy cloaks before the two sets of boots reach the cloakroom entrance, footfalls thudding heavy and ominous over the floor.

“You sure?” asks the other Pirate. “I didn’t hear anything.”

Rose starts to slip against the Doctor (curse her silky-satin dress, the thing’s got no bloody sense of friction) but the Doctor anchors her to him before she has a chance to slide, to make any noise. A torch-beam shines into the cloakroom, traveling over the coats and cloaks and furs; one of the intruders steps inside and the Doctor can feel Rose holding her breath, her exhales no longer hitting his hand, her ribcage no longer expanding and contracting beneath his palm. Neither of them dares to move.

The Pirate stops. Between two of the coats, the Doctor can just barely make out that the bloke is glancing around, but not really taking anything in.

With a grunt, the Pirate switches off the torch, stowing it on his belt. “Must’ve imagined it.”

“Or it was rats,” the other Pirate supplies. “This period’s full of ‘em.”

“Everything isn’t always rats, Vigge,” sighs his partner, as if this is a particular sticking-point between them. “C’mon, let’s go find the others.”

The Doctor lets out a silent sigh of relief at the sound of departing boots. It’s bloody awkward hiding like this, his arms cinched around Rose while she’s sat in his lap, neither of them able to shift to anything more comfortable. The sooner they can get up, the better. Fortunately, fading footfalls let him know the guards are leaving, and he moves to shift Rose off his lap.

A third pair of boots approaches. Rose and the Doctor both freeze.

“Seen anything?” asks the third voice.

“Nothing yet. You’re sure they’re not still in the theatre?”

“Positive,” the third voice confirms. “The box seat’s empty; that Doctor-bloke and his bird are both gone.”

One of the Pirates swears beneath his breath. “We’ll have to scour every inch of the place, then.”

Peering between the coats, the Doctor can make out the three Pirates talking, discussing how best to search the opera house. Hopefully it’ll be a brief bit of chatter, the Doctor thinks, but as the conversation wears on, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not destined to end any time soon.

Of course, thinks the Doctor exasperatedly. Why wouldn’t they pick this exact place and moment for a nice long chat? He’s only trapped behind a couple dozen fur-and-woolen cloaks with Rose plastered up against him, Rose getting increasingly warm and undoubtedly uncomfortable in his arms, neither of them able to move to improve the situation for fear of alerting the three very-much-armed Time Pirates. Of course, why wouldn’t the universe conspire against him like this?

Granted, in terms of Rose’s rising body temperature, it probably doesn’t help that the Doctor’s wrapped so snugly around her. But at this point, he’s honestly not sure what he can do. He can’t move his hand from her waist; he’s got her skirts pinned there, pressed between her bodice and his palm, and if he moves, he risks the skirts spilling into view. At least he had the presence of mind to shift his other hand away from her mouth, give her a little more space to breathe. But he did not, it appears, have the presence of mind to pay any attention to where that hand might settle afterward, and only now does he realize that his forearm has fallen to rest very gently against her chest, fingertips ghosting against her throat.

Alarm bells start ringing faintly in his head. He can’t shift that arm too much more; they’re surrounded by cloaks and any such movement would surely draw attention either through motion or sound. The only thing he can really do is perhaps lift away from her a little bit, let his hand float awkwardly in the liminal no-man’s-land where her breath lives. No longer touching, but still ridiculously close. Of course, once again, that brings up the issue of acknowledging that something is happening, and something is awkward, and you’ve officially Drawn Attention To It, and now there it is, stewing in the mortification of being recognized. Whereas if he pretends everything is normal—which it is, he tells himself stubbornly, because skin is just skin, doesn’t matter whether parts of it are bare and soft and hers—then no awkwardness need be experienced by either party involved.  

Not that he’d know about any of that. Because he doesn’t, and even if he does, he certainly doesn’t think about it, or notice it, much like he’s definitely not noticing how Rose’s breathing has gone shallow, and her heartrate has sped up, and one of her hands is clenching in her skirt. Doubtful the Pirates can hear it—like Rose and any other human, their hearing can’t rival his—but the Doctor sure as hell can. He hears her swallow, too, and, close to her as he is, he smells it again, that unmistakable tinge of pheromones, soft and musky and faintly sweet. And he can’t help but notice (can’t help it, really) that despite her shallow breaths, her chest is still rising and falling, bringing her breasts into whispering contact with the inside of his arm and the corner of his palm. If she breathed any deeper, he’d surely get a handful.

The Doctor scolds himself for thinking such things, trying fiercely to rein himself back in, but the glance of her skin against his is near-electric, the feel of her pressed against him is overwhelming, the scent of her, intoxicating. Suddenly he’s forgetting why it’s a bad thing for the two of them to be trapped in here like this, pressed tightly together like the pages of a fresh book. His eyes fall to half-mast as they trace the elegant slope of her shoulder and neck, impossibly close to his mouth, begging to be kissed. And she’d love that, wouldn’t she? Love for him to press his lips to her skin, worshipping her, marking her, claiming her. He’s so close now his lips can feel the warmth of her flesh, burning the scant air between them, or maybe that’s just the oxygen molecules buzzing with excitement, like atmosphere before a lightning strike, and her pulse beneath his fingertips is thunderous—

The heavy thud of departing footsteps abruptly informs him that the conversation outside the cloakroom has ended, and the coast will soon be clear again. The Doctor draws a deep breath, catching himself.

He almost fell. He very much wanted to. It’s been such a long time. And with Rose—

The Doctor shuts down that line of thought before it can develop any further, giving himself the mental equivalent of a sharp slap to the face. He hasn’t got any idea what to do with Rose, not really. Yes, her body is giving off a multitude of signs that seem rather obvious, but that’s just what bodies do, sometimes. Mix the close proximity, a dash of friction, a whole heaping load of chemistry, and that’s what you get. Bodies reacting the way bodies do. Not his, of course, not without his express wishes, but that’s what human bodies do. Human reactions for human people. And Rose is nothing if not human.

That’s right. He put up that barrier for a reason, that wall between him and the world, that line drawn in the sand between him and Rose. They’ve skirted that line enough today, flirted with it more than enough. It’s time for him to take responsibility, get his head out of the clouds and stop playing games. Nothing good can come of them nudging the line any further, no matter how brightly Rose smiles at him, no matter how sweet her kisses may be. Not that he’ll ever find out about that last one.

He collects his wits and draws his barriers close. “Rose,” he says quietly. “We should really—”

“Yeah,” says Rose, voice clipped as she shifts off his lap to stand upright, and the Doctor resolutely does not think about how cold he is now, without her body clasped to his. After smoothing out her skirts, Rose reaches down to help him off the floor. Grinning, the Doctor accepts.

“All right?” he asks despite himself, but Rose doesn’t answer; instead she watches him as he stands, eyes searching his. The Doctor gets the instinct impression that he’s being evaluated, somehow. Appraised.

“Rose?” he prompts, and she shakes herself.

“Oh yeah, everything’s fine,” she says, and maybe he just imagined it all, because now she sounds perfectly normal.

“Yeah?” he asks anyway.

“Yeah. You know,” she says, turning to continue her search. “Just thinking about Jack.”

“Right,” says the Doctor, feeling, strangely, as if he was just kicked in the shins. “Of course.”

It only makes sense that Rose would be thinking of Jack right now. He was just kidnapped, after all. It’s only natural he’d be on her mind. For the kidnapping, and no other reason. Certainly nothing to do with flushed skin and pumping adrenaline and soft little noises and the buzzing potential energy of bodies pressed close in tight spaces. Those things wouldn’t make Rose think of Jack at all. Not even a little bit.

Not that such a thing would bother the Doctor. Because it wouldn’t.

 ***

 The good news is, there’s plenty of good news: they’re able to locate a reservation for the proper hotel, thereby raising no eyebrows when the Doctor and Rose show up at the front desk requesting their room key, and like so many other sentient beings in the universe (really, he’s in good company), the desk clerk is fully taken in by the psychic paper, firmly believing that the Doctor and Rose are, in fact, Mr. and Mrs. Henri Flugenstaff; additionally, locating and breaking into the Pirates’ room is easy as rewiring a quantum rotor, and the rest of the hotel floor is blessedly empty when they do so, meaning no awkward encounters with nosy guests or suspicious staff.

The bad news is, once they enter the room, Jack’s captors (and more significantly, Jack) are nowhere to be found.

“Any idea where they went?” Rose asks.

“Not yet,” murmurs the Doctor, kneeling down to better inspect the faint traces of silvery powder on the carpet, almost invisible even to his keen eye. A reading from the sonic confirms his suspicions: the powder contains traces of Retro-Oganesson and Nihonium-3. Unmistakable evidence that the Time Pirates were here; no clues regarding where they went next.

“Might as well search the room for clues, right?” asks Rose.

“Right.” The Doctor sets the sonic against the carpet, following the path of silvery powder illuminated by the screwdriver’s ghostly blue glow. It guides him across the rug, around the bed, to the fireplace poking out from the wall opposite Rose. For her part, Rose is rifling through the items left behind on the writing-desk; given the general state of disarray of the desk, and the room, it’s clear that the Pirates left in a hurry, so there’s every chance they left something important behind. The Doctor takes just a second to appreciate the view, allowing himself a soft grin at Rose poking around for clues like a blonde little Sherlock Holmes.

“I hope he’s okay,” says Rose, peering beneath the inkwell.

The Doctor blinks. “Who?”

“Jack,” Rose replies, as if the answer is obvious.

The Doctor huffs. “He’s fine. Probably sliding out of their clutches as we speak.”

Laughing at that, Rose pulls open a desk-drawer. “Yeah, you’re right. He’s probably seducing his captors right about now.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“You say that like it’s not,” Rose laughs.

The Doctor grunts noncommittally, inspecting the inside of the fireplace.

“What was that?” asks Rose.

“Oh, nothing,” the Doctor hmphs. “Just, there it is again. Humans and romance.”

At that, Rose turns to face him, her eyebrow piqued. “And just what have you got against romance, anyway? Did romance offend you somehow, today?”

“It didn’t,” the Doctor lies cheerfully.

“There’s nothing wrong with liking any of that stuff, you know.”

“Oh, I’m aware.”

“Really? Cos it feels like you’re gonna launch into a lecture on silly apes and their silly feelings any minute now.”

“I never said feelings were silly.”

“You didn’t have to.”

The Doctor stops his search inside the fireplace so he can look at her. “Something on your mind, Rose?”

“No,” she replies stubbornly.

“Good,” says the Doctor, and he resumes his search.

“Just makes me glad Jack’ll be back soon.”

The Doctor’s nostrils flare and the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end as something hot slithers into the pit of his belly, smoldering there. “Don’t worry, we’ll find your boyfriend soon enough,” he replies, his voice tight.

“It’s just nice to have another human on the TARDIS, is all I mean,” Rose says, and the Doctor absolutely does not notice how she didn’t correct him on the boyfriend bit. “Cos you seem to think so much human stuff is stupid, and Jack doesn’t.”

“Oh, is Jack the gold standard now?”

“When it comes to feelings? Compared to you, yeah, he is.”

“Look, do you want to find him or not?” he asks, glaring at her. “Cos if you do, I’d advise more searching, less yammering.”

If the force of his glare affects Rose, she doesn’t show it. “Someone’s moody today,” she mutters before turning back to the desk.

“Not moody, just demonstrating a wide range of all those feelings you’re so fond of.”

“All the grumpy ones, maybe. And I’m not so fond of those.”

“And I suppose Jack’s never grumpy, then,” the Doctor says conversationally. “That it? No, not perfect Jack, of course not, never. Just the perfect blend of gentleman, boyfriend, and scoundrel, him. The ideal human mate!”

Rose shakes her head. “I’m sorry, the what-now?”

“It’s fine, Rose,” the Doctor says, forcing on a grin that’s surely strained. “You don’t need to explain yourself. You don’t owe me that. You don’t owe me anything. We’ll just find Jack, and then you two can run off and have your fun and your romance. All right?”

“Have my—what are you even talking about?” asks Rose, stalking up to him. “Where is all of this coming from?”

“Observation, mostly,” the Doctor says pleasantly.

“Right. I don’t know what you think you’ve observed, but—”

And suddenly both of them snap to attention at the sound of a key in the lock, the door-handle jiggling loudly in the quiet.

In the split-second that follows, the Doctor tries to think—run? Nowhere to run, they’re in a tiny hotel room; hide? But surely they’ve already been heard—but Rose’s brain must be working a little faster than his somehow, because before he’s even had a chance to react, she’s shoved him flat on the bed and she’s straddling him by the waist, ducking down to press a bruising kiss to his mouth.

The Doctor’s brain grinds to a halt.

She—they—she just—he—

He’s never had an experience where both of his hearts stopped for a good reason, before.

“Cleaning servi—oh, oh my!” gasps a voice by the door.

Rose sits back at the sound and through the fog currently short-circuiting his brain the Doctor manages to look over at the door, to see a middle-aged cleaning maid standing there, clutching her cleaning-cart and blushing furiously.

“Blimey!” she squeaks, shielding her eyes. “Begging your pardon, sir, ma’am, I thought you were out for the evening!”

“Not anymore, I’m afraid,” Rose laughs, which is just as well, because the Doctor is too busy reeling to find his voice (or even his thoughts) at the moment. At least his hands had enough sense to plant themselves on Rose’s waist so they’re not flailing about like a pair of nerve-addled bats.

“Still on the honeymoon,” Rose continues, flashing the maid a shy but winning grin. Her voice is just the littlest breathy and shaky and very convincing, so much so that even the Doctor could almost believe the two of them had just been—well.

“You know how it is,” Rose adds, coyly biting her lip.

“Aye, once upon a time I did, ma’am,” the maid chuckles. “I’ll see to it you’re not disturbed the rest of the evening.”

“Thanks,” Rose laughs breathily before pushing the Doctor back down on the bed, kissing him passionately as the maid closes the door behind her. Her lips part against his, warm and sweet and betraying just the slightest hint of moisture as—

As a loud click lets them know the door is locked once again, and then Rose immediately stops, breaking the kiss. Pulling back, she locks eyes with the Doctor, her cheeks almost as bright as the housekeeper’s. Several long seconds tick agonizingly by, marked only by the fluttering of Rose’s lashes, the gentle heaving of her chest.

Rose’s lips part, like she might say something (or like she might bend down and kiss him again, the Doctor almost hopes) but he must be looking at her with the universe’s most daft expression, mouth agape and eyes wide as saucers, because the next thing he knows, she’s lifting herself off of him, smoothing back her hair and resituating her dress.

The Doctor sits up after her, forcing himself to stop staring. What is he, some kind of idiot?

“Sorry,” Rose laughs, all traces of breathlessness gone.

“S’all right,” the Doctor’s mouth says for him; his brain is still catching up.

“Although you’ve got to admit,” Rose adds, resuming her investigation of the room as if absolutely nothing just happened, “as a diversion it was fairly effective.”

The Doctor scratches the back of his neck. “I’ve had worse.”

“And I’ve had better,” Rose teases, her tongue trapped between her teeth. “You’re a little rusty, Doctor.”

“Excuse me,” the Doctor huffs indignantly, “maybe I just need a little more advance notice than your average boy-toy.”

“Well, as an above-average boy-toy, I’m sure Jack would be happy to give you some pointers.”

And there it is again, that feeling of something hot sizzling in his chest. “And I’m sure he can go sod right off,” says the Doctor, surprising himself.

Rose shoots him a dirty look over her shoulder. “What’s gotten into you? What’s with this mood today, why are you so cross with Jack?”

“I’m not.”

“You are, you’ve been saying nasty little things about him all day.”

“I haven’t.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” says Rose, righting the frame of a crooked painting on the wall. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were acting jealous again.”

The hot feeling grows hotter. “I’ve got nothing to be jealous about,” insists the Doctor.

“’Course not,” mocks Rose. “Cos you’ve never gotten jealous about sharing me with another man, before.”

“Shouldn’t have to,” he mutters.

“What was that?”

“I said I shouldn’t have to,” the Doctor says loudly.

“What? Get jealous, or share me?”

The Doctor’s fists ball at his side. Either one, he doesn’t say.

“Whatever,” scoffs Rose, as if he’d gone ahead and spoken the words aloud. “Not like it makes any difference anyway.”

The hot feeling pulses in his chest and pounds in his ears and maybe it’s because of the kiss or maybe it’s because Rose already seems to have forgotten it or maybe it’s just because of this bloody damn day but that line in the sand is growing dangerously thin, all of a sudden, and before he gives himself the chance to think better of it, the Doctor is pushing off the bed and striding towards the door, grabbing a chair so he can wedge it beneath the door-handle before he stalks over to Rose.

“What?” she mocks. “Don’t want the maid to see us having a row? That too domestic for—”

The Doctor pins her to the wall, grasping her by the chin to pull her up for a punishing kiss. She gasps against his mouth and fuck, he wants to take advantage of that opening, he really does, wants to force her mouth open so his tongue can dart inside and really properly tease her, taste her, but he settles for prolonging the kiss, offering no quarter and no mercy until Rose has to pull back, panting for breath. She looks up at him with eyes wide from shock and—and gods, he hopes that’s not fear he sees, because that would kill him, it really would.

He doesn’t want to frighten her. He just wants her to see. Wants her to know.

But there’s still that goddamn line to preserve.

Drawing back a little, the Doctor braces himself with both hands against the wall, one on either side of Rose. “Tell me to stop,” he says quietly, even as he cages her in, even as every atom in his being is screaming for her.

Jaw set, defiant once again, Rose shakes her head No.

Oh. That’s not fear in her eyes. That’s not fear at all.

Relief washes the line away like the ocean at high tide and the Doctor lets himself fall.

He leans in and kisses her again, claiming her mouth with a fierceness that leaves no room for doubt. He might worry that he’s being too rough, too soon but Rose is giving as good as she gets, yanking him in by the lapels as she deepens the kiss. Her hands slip beneath his jacket to clutch him by the shoulders, her fingernails sharp even through the fabric of his jumper. His tongue brushes her plump lower lip and it’s a heady realization, that he can taste how much she wants this, how much she wants him. It’s enough to make him dizzy but he doesn’t stop, he wants more, his tongue plunging into her mouth, and the breathy little whimper that escapes her lets the Doctor know he was right—those delightful sounds Rose made earlier in the day were definitely due to arousal. And the sweet scent lingering in the air lets him know she’s wonderfully aroused right now, almost certainly wet with it.

Because of him. No one else. Just him.

Good.

Lips still on hers, the Doctor pulls up her skirts so both hands can sneak beneath, grabbing Rose by the hips and pulling her roughly into him. He has every intention of tearing off those ridiculous little knickers of hers but then she arches into him, her hands slipping beneath his jumper and nails dragging across his stomach and her chest pressed against his, and it’s all too much and it’s not nearly enough and his hips are grinding against hers as he hardens between them.

Dimly it occurs to the Doctor that Rose does not seem nearly as shocked by all of this as he might have imagined—indeed, he’s shocked himself with this pure impetuous driving animal need—and he wonders if, on some level, Rose maneuvered things to this conclusion.

Well. He smiles against her lips. Two can play that game.

He hitches one of her legs over his waist and thrusts into her, the friction and the heat almost unbearably delicious even despite all the layers in the way, and Rose must think so, too, because she’s panting against the Doctor’s mouth, her nails scratching lines of fire down his back. She lets out another strained whimper and fuck, he’s not going to last, not even with his trousers on, not if she keeps making those needy little noises while rutting against his cock like that.

So he repositions, wedging a thigh between hers to maintain the friction she needs while one hand travels up to palm one of the breasts that’s been positively fucking begging for his touch all day long. He can just feel the peak of her nipple through her corset and dress, stiffening sharply as he circles it with his thumb, and Rose bites down on his lower lip, sending a jolt of pleasure straight down to his cock. Rose reaches for his belt buckle but the Doctor stops her, grabbing her by the wrist and pinning it back to the wall.

“Not yet,” he growls softly. “Not until I say so.”

She’s glassy-eyed with surprise but he doesn’t give her an opportunity to respond, rips down the neckline of her dress instead so he can cup and tease her bare breasts with his free hand while his other holds her wrist tight against the wall. Rose breaks their kiss, eyes pinched tight in concentration as she rides his thigh, sweat beading and glistening on her breasts and her brow, and the Doctor realizes she’s about to climax, right here, right now, just like this.

Positively brimming with pride (and isn’t that a first, in this incarnation) the Doctor presses a kiss to her jaw, tracing a line up to her ear, lips ghosting the shell of it. “Come for me, Rose,” he murmurs, his voice as husky and deep as he’s ever heard it, and she shudders. He lifts his hand to cup her cheek, his thumb teasing her swollen lower lip. “Come for me, love.”

Her teeth graze his thumb as she bites down on the cry that tries to escape her, her arms shaking and hips stuttering, her legs clenching tight against his thigh. The Doctor can feel the aftershocks ripping through her and he holds her tight, relishing the movement and heat of her body against his, the knowledge that he’s the one doing this to her, that all of this is because of him. Not Jack, not Ricky, not Adam or Jimmy or any other stupid pretty boy who might be sharp enough to fall in love with Rose but could never be good enough to deserve her. Of course, neither is he, but he’s at least clever enough to recognize that, and to do everything he can to make up for it; he may not always have the right words but his mouth can still say what his voice can’t, offering praise along with his hands and his tongue and all of him, really.

Those little men will never see Rose the way he does. The Doctor almost pities them for it.

(Only almost.)

Panting, Rose pushes a strand of sweat-slicked hair out of her face. “You, erm,” she says between breaths, flashing the Doctor a lazy blissful smile. “You gonna let me touch you, now?”

He’s still got her wrist pinned to the wall. He lets go.

“Take off your clothes, please,” he tells her.

Biting her lip, Rose obeys, pushing her torn dress down over her hips, her eyes fixed on his. She wriggles the dress past her thighs to reveal those tiny knickers of hers, completely soaked through and now thoroughly ruined. The sight and smell of those ruined knickers ignites a small flame of male satisfaction the Doctor wasn’t even aware he possessed, something he might have wrinkled his nose at once upon a time, but now, watching Rose pop open the front of her corset, peeling off the knickers after—now he rather likes the feeling, knowing that he can make Rose feel like this, that she trusts him like this. That he’s earned her trust, and this privilege.

There’s only the faintest hint of shyness from Rose once she’s naked beneath the Doctor’s gaze, but it’s enough to make his hearts swell almost uncomfortably behind his ribs, so the Doctor dips down to press his mouth to hers, softly, to kiss any lingering doubt away.

“Good girl,” he murmurs afterward, and smiles as Rose’s cheeks and ears flush pink. “Now get on the bed.”

The moment she does, the Doctor grasps her by the hips and slides her bum to the edge, pinning her down against the mattress as he presses a hungry kiss to her mouth. Impatient, Rose pushes at his jacket and he shrugs out of it, but he doesn’t make any effort to remove the rest of his clothing, his hands gliding up the insides of her thighs instead. His fingers tease her until she’s wet again, gloriously wet and gasping and clinging to him as she fucks his hand. He dips down to kiss the expanse of neck and shoulder that were tormenting him earlier and stops beneath her ear, lips caressing the soft skin there.

For a brief moment, the Doctor just breathes her in, inebriating himself on the smell of her. Then he latches on, giving her skin a good hard suck. Rose cries out, thighs clenching around his hand. Drawing back, the Doctor can see the mark he left behind, petal-pink blossoming in the shape of his mouth, and it shocks him how much he likes to see that, the visual evidence that he’s claimed her, that she’s his. He wants to taste more of her, he thinks, let his mouth explore and lick and nip and tug until she’s begging for mercy—

“Doctor,” Rose pants, but with a start he realizes she isn’t begging, she’s demanding, hooking her legs around his waist and pulling him down, into her. She rolls her hips against his aching cock and all other thoughts and plans fly right out the window as he realizes he’s bound to spontaneously combust if he doesn’t give her exactly what she wants and fuck her right now. In a second his belt is unlatched and trousers and pants shoved out of the way and he’s pushing into her with one smooth slick thrust, groaning at the hot wet clench of her muscles around him. He draws back and pushes in again, and again, and again, brow knit tight and mouth falling open because it’s good, it’s too good, it’s too much, he’s losing himself, drowning in her, and dying never felt so sublime.

“You’re mine,” he gasps, surprising himself, but Rose doesn’t look surprised at all, she just nods, glassy-eyed and breathless as he fucks her. “You’re mine,” he says again, kissing her fiercely as his hands pull her hips into his, harder, faster, more.

She nods again.

“Say it.”

“I am, I’m yours,” she chokes out, clenching around him, and his grip on her tightens. He’s hurtling toward the edge, spurred on by her words and her heat and her everything else but now there’s guilt chiming in too, because what the fuck is wrong with him, why would he say that, why would he make her say that, why would he make her do any of this, why the fuck would he allow her to give herself to him when he’s nothing but a broken wretched old man, and she deserves so much more—

“Hey,” says Rose, and his thoughts must be written across his face because suddenly her hands are cupping his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “Don’t do that,” she says between gasps. “Don’t wander off. Stay with me. Be here with me.”

His lips part but Rose doesn’t let any words out, stoppers his mouth with hers. “Just let us have this,” she pants against his lips. “Please. Please. My Doctor.”

Something in him snaps and he buries his face in her neck, muffling his cries as he empties into her. His head floods pleasantly with bliss but he’s just coherent enough to slide a hand between them, urging Rose along. Rose follows soon after, muscles convulsing around him, nipples sharp even through his jumper, and the Doctor feels a twinge of regret that he didn’t finish undressing, that he isn’t feeling her skin properly sliding against his. Rose must be feeling the same way; even as her hips stutter and slow, she’s sliding her hands back beneath his jumper, exploring every expanse of skin she can reach.

The Doctor sighs with something that feels suspiciously like contentment.

“I am, you know,” he says quietly.

She doesn’t reply; he half-wonders if she’s already fallen asleep, somehow.

“Yours,” he adds, voice soft.

Rose’s arms tighten around him in a hug, her heart fluttering against both of his.

She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

He knows.

 ***

 Apparently Jack knows it, too.

“That dress didn’t tear itself,” the Doctor overhears him whispering to Rose after they sneak out of the Pirates’ ship. “Not to mention you smell like all the sex.”

“Oh my god, shut up,” Rose replies, laughing.

“I will not! Tell me everything!”

“If you don’t behave, I will hurt you.”

“Ooh, promise?”

“I will put you in time-out,” Rose amends, mouth twitching with the effort to hold back a smile, “and I will hide the sonic so that those,” she adds, pointing to the shackles clamped over both of his wrists, “never come off again.”

Jack shoots her a sly grin. “But then how would you two ever get to use them?”

The Doctor feels a flush creeping up the back of his neck as Rose’s eyes widen, her mouth dropping open. “Pervert!” she shrieks, and Jack crows in laughter as he takes off running down the road, Rose chasing after him. It’s a good thing they’re out in the country now—they’d wake up the neighborhood, shouting and laughing and carrying on like that in the city. But eventually they settle for huddling together, arm-in-arm, as they whisper and snicker all the way back to the TARDIS.

The Doctor maintains some space, trailing a little ways after, so the humans can have their fun and their—he smiles a little—their feelings. It’s actually nice, he thinks, seeing Rose so giddy and full of joy, seeing her laugh and smile like that, even with someone else. She’s far too bright and loving and big-hearted to be kept to one person, he realizes. She deserves to share herself with whomever she wishes, not to be hoarded like gold in the fist of a grumpy old miser. Rose deserves to love freely, and to be loved freely, in return.

(They’re definitely going to make use of those shackles, though.)

***

dedicated to @galiifreyrose​ @yellowsuedeshoes​ @saecookie​ @aintfraidanoghosts​ for being such wonderful terrible influences <3 <3 <3

#ficandchips #ninerose #ninexrose #nine x rose #nine/rose #pwp #lemons #lemons everywhere #XD #jealousy #jealous!doctor #mbb fic

[slashingdisneypasta]

Poly!Laughing Jack x Fem!Reader x Offenderman

Title: Punish Me // The Odd Throuple

Plot: Y/N gets shot in the neck and through the chest and is rushed to get help at Slender Mansion. This is your boyfriends’ reactions to you being seriously hurt. 

Notes:

I wrote most of this on my phone on the train so I’m sorry probably lots of errors!! My autocorrect likes to correct properly spelled words to the wrongly spelled versions I’ve accidentally typed in the past. 😒

Why, oh why, are my fluffiest works always with these two bastards??? Comfort characters...

Warnings: Well, you get shot because Offender raped someone. So, decide with that how you will. Sexual references also

~~~

"This is for my daughter, you f-freaks!" The man behind you is sobbing now. When he caught you it was just an itchy fidget, now that Offender and L.J are here he's falling apart.

The gun pressed into the crook of your neck moves and shifts with his ugly, heartbroken cries and all you can think is; I'm sorry. Oh my god, I'm so sorry, even as your body goes cold and you shiver with fear at having such a lethal weapon pressed to your skin at the hand of someone so unstable at the moment. You didn't even do anything to this man, but you feel his pain and feel sick anyway.

I'm so, so sorry.

You can only imagine what he means. What happened to his daughter...

"Who's your daughter!?" Offender growls, desperately. And uselessly. There's no way he remembers, there's no way he could help now. He doesn't ask for the names, and he certainly doesn't bother to listen if they tell him. He's just pleading. He doesn't know what else he could do. Just don't shoot her lethally. Miss the heart, he chants in his head. He can get you to Slender then but if you're dead... there's just nothing he can do. Its out of his power and he feels useless.

And this is his fault.

L.J doesn't respond at all, standing beside him. His eyes are on you, watching carefully. Communicating through his eyes. He hasn't moved since he realised the situation, struck completely still. He doesn't know what to do. If he fights for you, and he loses you still? ... He doesn't know if he could do that.

And then again, if you're killed anyway and he did nothing, it'll still hurt... but then at least he would have plausible deniability. He can... he can live like that. The alternative is worse. Far, far worse, to him.

And more then that, he doesn't care about bartering with this man.

Taking a deep breath, you close your eyes- losing a few tears you didn't know, through the shock, where glazing your eyes.

"You... fucker... took her before it was time, and now... " The man takes a deep breath in, making it cold on your neck where his face is hidden. "I'm going to take something you care about."

"WAIT- "

BANG.

A searing hot pain tears through your skin, everywhere as the bullet rips your insides open and a terrible scream rips out of your throat, more from shock, as the man lets your body go and gravity drags you down, nearly knocking your head on the concrete. Before that could happen though, Offender teleports and catches you.

As your sight dapples away into blackness and L.J's cries for you to say something peter out, you feel the familiar terrible whooshing of teleportation just before the world goes

completely, 

and

   utterly,

           still.

___TIME SKIP___

"Y/N... Y/N... I see your eyelids flickering, are you awake? Or experiencing some kind of terrible neural damage I need to get Slender for?" Claws slide under your neck, against the pillow and sit there cool against your skin as L.J shifts his body, and his chair, more impossibly close to your bed. "Lollipop~ You have to give me a sign, I'm not a real doctor."

"You... play one... pretty well. D-don't you?" You whisper, voice croaky and hard to utilise. Your eyelids are heavy, too, but you manage to peak at him for a moment. He opens his mouth in a sharp grin, relieved.

"So no amnesia then??" He exclaims, excitedly.

"Was that," Coughing into the air, because your body is still too weak to really move, you taste metal on your tongue. "A possibility???"

"Well, Slender didn't say it in those words, but... I feel like it was unspoken."

Knitting your eyebrows together, you start to worry about your condition yourself, before a weight like a folder or a clipboard drops on the bed by your feet and Slender heaves a great sigh.

"You were worried." He says sternly, assuredly to L.J. "You were in no danger of enduring inflicted amnesia, Y/N. L.J just has a wild imagination due to a birth defect called stupidity. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about that."

L.J says nothing in response to that for a moment, and you can imagine him just looking deadpanned at the taller creature. "You're toad, Slender."

"Whatever. However, Y/N, while you do not have amnesia you do have a number of other inflicted injuries and because of that I am suggesting you stay here where you can properly be watched until they're manageable for you to deal with on your own." He pauses, apparently tired of our presence already. "That is unless, of course, you want to rip your many stitches or contract any kind of infectious disease because you trusted the man that thought you had amnesia, and the one that fully trusts in the 'psychologically healing' properties of copious amounts of alcohol," Oh, so that's where Offender is. "to take care of you medically."

"Um," Your voice is high, unsure quite how to respond. Slender and his bluntness does this to you a lot. "No, that's okay? Thanks for offering for me to stay?"

Another cough forces itself suddenly out of your throat from the use of your voice, as your throat is so dry - How long were you asleep?? - and, this time, L.J extends his free arm to gently cover your mouth like you would with your own if you could move right now. As soon as you're done, he retracts his long, loong arm and your stomach squirms pleasantly about how cute and affectionate that was for him.

He takes a deep breath. "Very good. I'm leaving. Offender can read your chart when he gets in here." Then, like a light, the heavy atmosphere that Slender carries with him everywhere disappears from the room and you feel L.J stretch and snatch the folder object at the end of your bed.

"I can read this, thanks." With one hand to hold the thing, L.J peers at it for a moment... for so long, in fact, that you risk your energy to peak at him again just see him use his pointed nose to slide the page up to look at the next one... Before he frisbee-throwing the folder back to the end of the bed and returning his attention fully back to you, crossing one elongated, stripy leg over the other. "Never mind. What’s with this family? They make up there own language?"

Grinning at his antics like you always do, your eyelids fall shut again and you feel the relief of not using so much energy. "I think medical charts everywhere are like that."

"So the whole medical profession started there own code, then. Bastards."

A chuckle escapes you, as you're slipping closer to sleep. "L.J, I think I'm... gonna... go back to sleep... for a bit... "

"You do that. I'll make up jokes."

"Okie, yay... "

As you fall back into the welcoming arms of sleep, L.J puts his free claws to work removing the crinkles out in your bed spread and nightgown- unable to stay still. Unable to leave you alone.

He has to stay with you.

___TIME SKIP___

The next time you open your eyes, Offender has joined L.J, but instead of sitting in a chair he leans sloppily on the wall by the door, evidently still feeling the effects of his 'psychological healing' with the alcohol.

This time you're able to open your eyes a crack and keep them open like that. You’re able to to see the room now, which is basically just like any other bedroom in Slender mansion with hard wood floors and dark walls, except there’s an IV beside you and sheets on the floor.

Again, L.J's keen eye catches your consciousness first. "You're awake again!"

"Hi." You grin in greeting, noticing L.J's claws are on your tummy now, the one on his thumb rubbing up and down a small area.

Offender comes forward immediately and leans close to your face over your bed, draping an arm over the bed frame to hold himself up. "You good there, squirt?" Wincing at the nickname, because it does not come from Finding Nemo, you shift your head on the pillow in a nod. He chuckles.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Well, you're not, but that's my girl." He presses a gentle kiss to your forehead before pulling back and picking up the medical chart on hi way back to the wall. Blowing air out of his cheeks in reaction to the information, he leans back on the wall again and starts reading the 'code'. "Now, lets see what's wrong with ya... "

L.J and you sit - and lay, - at attention as he lists and explains what it says. Some of the things that come out of his mouth do scare you, but honestly most of it was just stuff you expected. You still may be in a bit of shock, to be honest, but at the moment you're just more concerned with the fact that Offender really can read it! Unless he's making it all up, in which case, boo.

When he's done, you're all quiet for a moment, taking in how long that took - and therefore how much damage was really done by that bullet, - before L.J, of course- well, doesn't lift your spirits exactly, but changes the course of the worry in the room, for sure. And that's why you and Offender love him. Well, one of the many reasons. Raising his pointer claw off your stomach, he announces, "I call conspiracy!!"

Offender puts down the chart and crosses his arms, bemused at him. "What this time?"

"These charts. You say this is English??" L.J squints, looking between your and his boyfriend.

"Yeah."

"I don’t buy it. I'm British and I tried to read that, and it was total gibberish. Tell him, Y/N."

"He is British and he did try to read it." You concur.

L.J nods at Offender. "Yep."

"And he did fail." You grin, this time.

L.J nods again, without shame. "Yep."

"Well... " Offender leans menacingly forward, towards L.J who leans back despite them being feet away from each other, then grins. "I read it just fine."

"I feel like I'm being gaslighted."

"Oh jeez." You grin, turning your head on your pillow to set L.J with a look, amused by him.

"Oh, and- Your brother called me stupid. Again. You need to fight for my honour." L.J informs Offender, swivelling in his seat to properly face him, while still holding me.

"Oh, you poor victim, you." Offender shifts, shaking his head amusedly at L.J. "Tut, tut, tut. What a cruel world."

L.J ignores that obvious sarcasm. "Yes, precisely. Oh woe is me, and all that. Hop to it." Nodding to the door promptly, L.J turns back to me. A little grin plays at his black lips.

"Oh sure thing." Offender shakes his head again, before pushing off the wall and straddling the arm of L.J's chair instead. "Anyway, the only honour I care about right now is Y/N's." L.J seems to agree with that, eyes going steely and lips curling at the memory of why you're all in this room in the first place. "So, what'll it be, beautiful? I'm the reason you got hit, so, by Vikings oath I've vowed to endure whatever punishment you decide is necessary." You open your mouth immediately to laugh him off, but he makes no movement like he usually would if he were joking. Instead, he quickly adds, "Go on."

"... hold on, you're German. Aren't Vikings Scandinavian?-"

"Shut up, clown man; I'm old. I've been places. Get with the program."

Rolling your eyes, unintentionally fondly at the two, you look around the room. "Um," Unbelievably croaky, and painfully, you ask. "Get me a cup of water?"

"Oh!-" While Offender quickly teleports off to get you that, L.J just absentmindedly brushes some hair out of your face. Offender comes back in a young moment and they both help you sit up. L.J helps guide you by your hands, while Offender stuffs pillows securely at the base of your back.

"Thanks, guys," You accept the glass of water with a gracious smile. "Thank you."

As you're taking a sip, Offender returns to his spot on the arm of L.J's chair and watches you expectantly, heavily. Swallowing the water, you raise a curious brow. "So? My punishment?"

You nearly choke on the water, but instead take a moment to compose yourself. "Wha- I thought that was the punishment!"

"Getting water??"

"I didn't say please!"

L.J clicks his finger claws, lifting them off you for a moment to point and nod in agreement at Offender. "Right, that's true. She didn't. 'S not her fault you have no sensitivity towards good manners." He turns back to you as Offender makes a perturbed shape with his mouth. "You have lovely manners."

"Thank you!"

"Of course dearest."

"Wha- I- F- hah???" As you and L.J have your 'Old British Sit Com' moment as Offender would always refer to it from then on, he stutters and looks between the two of you confusedly. "Hold on, hold on stop that this instant-" Reaching over and waiving a hand between the two of you as you were looking sweetly at each other, he successfully snaps you both out of it. "Neither of you are taking this seriously. You," He points his finger at L.J, who narrows his eyes at the offending appendage. Probably thinking 'And your manners, are terrible.'. "Shoosh. And you, “ L.J presses his lips firmly closed as Offender turns his stern finger to you, making you sit up straighter at attention. “Come on, baby.” He slips to his knees as you start to fully understand his desperation right now and grips the side of your mattress. His hat slips to cover the top of his face and your eyes flicker to L.J’s, which are also sheened in a very covered layer of worry, and back. “Punish me. It’s my fault. You got bandages and tubes and... fucking bloodstains. I did this. And in order for our relationship to continue healthily you need to get back at me somehow. So come on, one more time I’m gonna say it so L.J if you say something about masochism I will throw you out the window; Y/N, punish me. Goddamnit, please.”

“Offender,” You start in a scolding voice, pushing yourself off the pillows with difficulty, wincing at the pain shooting through your collar bones. When L.J’s eyes flicker over you and your pained features, because, while Offender is clearly perfectly fine with showing his affections, L.J certainly is not. You flash him an ‘its fine’ smile as you push your legs off the end of the bed. “I’m not that hurt! And I’m certainly not upset with you in any way, its not necessary!” 

“You were shot, Y/N!” 

“Yeah, well.” You roll your eyes, as if the infliction wasn't a big deal. Like there are more important things, which in the moment you do think there are in Offender’s outlook at the moment. It honestly scares you. It isn't him. Dropping your hands on his shoulders, you dip your head to look seriously at him. “Its not that bad! I mean, I think Slender woulda told me if I was gonna die, don’t you think? And you read the chart! You know I’ll be okay.” 

“... Yeah, he would've. And then the little punk woulda left the room chuckling."

"Oooh," L.J leans back in his chair, thumb claw between his teeth as he imagines how it would have gone, arctic blues glazed over with imagination. "He totally would... "

Nodding in agreement, you kneed your thumbs into Offender shoulders comfortingly. "Yep. Same thing for if I wasn't going to recover at all. Don't you think?"

"Y/Nnnn,” He groans, resisting. 

“I’ll, be, fine.” Leaning down, you press your forehead to his- breath hitching when you feel your stitches stretching but forcing your self to stay put for a moment. “Don’t feel so guilty. Or, at least try- its an odd colour on you.” 

“Mm.” Offender’s mouth twists like he tasted something gross. Then he sighs, the muscles in his shoulders easing. “Oh, what, you think a good old ‘belligerent’s more me?”

“Maybe a gentle ‘creepy’, at most.” L.J pats his back, breaking out of his dream world. You grin and nod. 

“That work for you?” 

“We can try it on for size.” 

L.J snorts. “Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Offender turns and looks up at him, a bemused smile on his face. Still reluctant to let it go, but trying. “What? Does BEN need to re- try on his used condom hat now, too??” 

With that, Offender and you dissolve into barks of laughter, you hiding your pink face in your hands while L.J just shrugs, holding up his hands like ‘Aren't I right though??’. “What?? Its one of your charms!” He adds, a corner of his dark mouth fighting to point up even as he looks confusedly at your shaking bodies. 

“OKAY,” Slender pushes the door open then, interrupting and dropping his shoulders slowly. “I’ve heard enough. It time for Y/N to return to sleep- what. What is she doing out of bed? Put her back. And then, both of you, can get out of my house! ... and take your unfortunate analogies with you.” Shoulders slumping, he then mutters, “... I’ll never be able to look at that hat again without thinking about that... “  

Offender heaves his own sigh, so like his brother in the moment as he pushes himself up and guides you back into a comfortable laying position, muttering himself. “You would think, after so... so, many centuries with that man, I would be immune to his annoyingness... But no.” 

Snickering, L.J leans back in his chair, reaching down into the pockets of his pants as you start to feel exhaustion wash over you again. Slender’s right, you do need more sleep... 

Slender just opens the door more fully and gestures towards it for his brother and Laughing Jack. Slowly, he drawls the next word. “Out?” 

“G’night sweetheart.” Offender gives you another kiss on the forehead, completely ignoring his brother this time. “Just keep thinking about that punishment, okay? Just... keep it in mind.” Chewing on your bottom lip, you wish Offender would let it go... but nod anyway, for his sake. Not like you actually will think about it at all. L.J brushes your hair back after he steps back and taps your forehead gently with his thumb. 

“Sweet dreams lollipop!” 

Then L.J returns to his chair and Offender drags up a chair beside him for himself and Slender grips the door tighter. “Oh, no. No no no. Get, out, of my home.” 

Slowly L.J looks over at Slender, then squishing his butt down further into the chair pointedly, and Offender props his legs up on the end of your bed. You chuckle, and close your eyes. Embarrassed by your weirdly good boyfriends.  They aren't perfect by any, a n y means, but they are pretty cool sometimes. You like them- and that's an understatement. 

“Aghhh, don’t think I’m bringing you dinner.” Slender lets up quickly, disinterested in putting up any fight and rolls his shoulders of you all, closing the door as he walks off. “Hooligans.” 

As you close your eyes, and pull the blankets up further over your body to your chin, relaxing into a resting, sleep exposed state Offender crosses his arms, setting in probably for a nap himself, with no other idea how to pass the silent time and L.J turns promptly to him, with a colourful but mostly black box in his hand. 

“Silent Uno??” 

#Poly! Laughing Jack x Reader x Offenderman #Laughing Jack x Reader #Offenderman x Reader #Laughing Jack x Offenderman #Oneshot #Creepypasta Oneshot #Slenderman

[mc-critical]

I remember not too long ago, I had read an analysis on Kösem and Ahmed’s relationship, namely its development and whether or not it was truly healthy. I remember the sudden development of Kösem’s feelings for Ahmed were ascribed to stockholm syndrome, which as you dissect it further, even later in the series after Ahmed has passed away, makes total sense. However it made me wonder, why stop at Kösem/Ahmed? Truthfully, I think stockholm syndrome, trauma response and survival instinct were the primary factors in all of the sultanas “love” or attachment to the sultans. Hürrem, Mahidevran, Aysë, Halime, Handan..all of them. Hürrem had initially thought her fiance was murdered when she came to the palace, and within what looked like a couple of months if even, she was shown to be totally head over heels for Suleyman. No one can simply discard their former love interest so quickly unless trauma was a catalyst..and even when Leo came back to the palace that whole time period where he was in such a close proximity to her visibly caused Hürrem so much pain mentally and emotionally. Or with Handan and Kösem going on to fall in love after their sultans had died..it makes me think of when Handan was confessing her love to Dervish and called being a member of the royal family “her prison.” None of these women were truly in love with their sultans, nor do I blame them for it. Love is what develops when there’s no consequences, no strings attached, which is entirely untrue in the harem’s enviornment. Even with Mahidevran’s arc way back when Hürrem was first introduced and she started to feel like she was losing Suleyman. It looked to me Mahidevran ultimately feared lonliness rather than losing Suleyman himself. Harem rules wouldn’t permit her to fall in love with someone else if Suleyman lost interest in her. He was pretty much her only confidant and the only person she had been intimate with and likely from a very young age, unhealthy attachment is bound to develop due to those curcumstances. We all feel so sorry for royal borne sultanas when they’re forced to marry men they don’t love..but this courtesy is seldom extended to their mothers. It’s all very sad when I think about it. How do you feel about this perspective?

(~Fun fact: I got yours and the last ask in the same day and they are both somehow related to Kösem and Ahmet!!~)

Anyway, I have also read that analysis and it's really nuanced and awesome, Joanna always does such an amazing job with her blog and these posts! <3 It gives an amazing perspective to the nature of Kösem and Ahmet and makes us think hard on whether there are more relationship cases in the franchise where Stockholm Syndrome can be applied and how many women there are in the harem that aren't so in love with their sultans.

I also fully believe that, just like motherhood, love in the harem can't not be toxic in a way, because the environment itself won't ever let healthy dynamics happen, thanks to its very roots. And while mothers of children still have the small chance to forge some kind of a relationship with genuine affection despite of the toxicity, we have a totally different situation with the sultans who are basically on the top of the system that brought them in this mess in the first place. It's not easy to let go of the people you loved and it's even harder to get to truly love a person you not only don't know at all, but one you know you're supposed to at least try to win over by sheer force.

Survival instinct plays a lot into this, because sooner or later you see that you don't have a choice. You do what you have to do or else you'll either rot in this palace with everyone always bossing you around or be done for. Something I see some viewers forget is the way Hürrem was ultimately "convinced" to try her luck out with Süleiman. She wanted to get out of this place and let it burn in hell until Nigar told her what it took to win the game. Keep in mind that she hadn't met Süleiman yet back then and that faint was merely an act she pulled to gain his attention and she gained some kind of an affection for him only after some time had passed. This sheer pragmatism could've turned into something more eventually, but the beggining was precisely this survival instinct that was kept intact throughout the entire relationship and the birth and living of Hürrem's children. I think she had let go of Leo by the time when she met him again, but that letting go pained her so much, as seen by all her breakdowns when she saw him and lost him completely. It's something she knew she had to do; notice how she kept telling him to leave for "his own good" and for "the good of both of them". There is this looming, prevailing fear that if they had escaped, the consequences would be severe and Hürrem had already planted roots in the dynasty: as if she gained attachment after attachment she felt the need to protect. She's now responsible for these children and can't leave them behind for her own possible desires to get out of the system. Ibrahim did threaten the children in front of Leo and Hürrem in the S01 finale and that's a big reason why she decided it would be for the best to lose him in this particular situation, no matter how much it hurt afterwards. Hürrem already had a set goal to fulfill in the dynasty and letting go of Leo became the only plausible option for her thematically and narratively. Everything these women do in the harem they do is to survive, adapting to their circumstances and forging some kind of relationships with their sultans is the peak of it. A healthy dynastic is far from one where you have to be opportunistic at every turn. Even the favored women have to be as careful as ever, because a mistake can cost everything. They have to make sure they always have his approval and be in his good graces, behaving like he wants them to behave, not the way they actually are. The goal they have set for themselves in the harem is tightly linked with their love for the sultan. He isn't only love, he's also power, prestige and reassuring. The Sultanate of Women are probably even the most affected by this, because they are the ones who want to break the boundaries of power and by doing that they have to put the leg work to make him happy and pleased. These relationships need so much work and decisiveness for their flourishment, with the women having to be mindful of the sultan's moods and unpredictable nature. (especially when you have an unpredictable, very short tempered sultan like Murat!)

But attachment is still attachment and that's where Stockholm syndrome comes from. They do their best to win him over, but with doing that for such a long time, they learn to feel something for him. There is so much toxicity in the dynamic, but they get used to it and normalize it in their heads. The concept of the harem itself succeeds to make their life revolve around it and it's not something they question anymore. I absolutely agree that it's not limited to only Kösem and Ahmet - everyone is somehow subjected to it, no exceptions. The relationships each woman of the franchise has with the sultan certainly differ from one another, depending on the different personalities and goals, but its unhealthy core remains the same: it's still a toxic, dependant relationship with a massive power imbalance and will always remain so in these castle walls and rules. The big attachment makes it even scarier for one to discover that they might be losing everything, that's why there is such a resistence from Mahidevran, Hürrem, Kösem, Ayşe, Farya etc. when the sultan accepts or outrightly begins to favor other women and I always roll my eyes when these women get accused of "behaving like that while knowing the rules of the harem" without it being understood from a narrative standpoint - even though they know the rules, it still hurts, because the attachment is ultimately more self-centered than anything: they want the sultan to be all theirs, to have him all for themselves, perhaps for a validation of their efforts to forge and preserve their relationships. When they lose favor, everything seems to be crumbling and falling apart and that is so difficult to accept, you can't face helplessness like that, you can't face vulnerability like that and I guess for that it took Mahidevran so long to get over Süleiman. As you said, she got destructively attached to the person that seemigly gave her so much for years. (she herself even said that she's like a little kid in front of him in the second episode) And her suddenly not being regarded in the same way by someone she thought was her family (I still adore that thematic note of her character and perhaps it's the reason why we didn't get any backstory from her.) was catastrophic to her emotional stability and it took her 46 (55, if we begin from her direct confession) episodes to accept that she has lost and even then she was still trying to achieve vengeance at the very least, by thinking of her rule of the harem as a battle she fought with Hürrem, a last helpless try to prevail over her. (E63: "I congratulate you, Hürrem, you won.") That's also why Hürrem almost killed herself when Firuze seemed to have taken away her Thursdays, without having any regard for the children. It's like a chain, of sorts, that women are stuck in, fighting to the end to be the ones next to him, to the point of wanting to end their own lives if they lose. If they lose, that's the end. If they lose the favoritism or the sultan himself dies, leaving them to rest in the hands of the enemy, that's the end.

That's why Mahidevran and Ayşe getting over Süleiman and Murat respectively and realizing that it was more or less an unhealthy dynamic is so important, because these character arcs help spread awareness of the toxicity of this grown attachment to the sultan and the struggle it takes for them to take account of said toxicity, because of their attachments. Ayşe had a rough path accepting that Murat was the way he is, trying almost until the end to make things right with him, both missing in the process and slowly uncovering his unpredictability. While this realization rendered her to do the inevitable in killing herself along with the kids, her letter to Murat indeed felt so eye opening in this regard, putting this whole deal into perspective. Mahidevran, conversely, also found out his true nature and detached herself from it, daring to openly call out a root of the attachment (E139: "He decides the fates of all of us.") and put the free choice of everyone into light and question. (E139: "God, apart from reason, gave people free will.") It's rare for someone to gain such awareness of the system and that's a valuable quality to have, but in a future where Mahidevran and Ayşe aren't as grossly mistreated, would all this be possible to happen? No, I don't think so. And even from the ones that aren't favourites who are more likely to find this out, there are still people out there that probably would stay trapped in the attachment forever. And favourites would be the least likely to figure stuff out, judging by the series' themes. (Hürrem, E134: "I am the soul of all the women in the world and my existence is hidden in the love of the conqueror of my heart." - this assertion is honestly self-explanatory.)

[Handan's arc also extends on the traumatic response one gives the system and I think this aspect applies to her the most. She's a person with no real attachments that is so traumatized by fighting, she didn't even expect the possibility to win over players like Halime and Safiye. She's trying to adapt to her new role as Valide, give "cruel" advice to Ahmet in order to ensure it and make impulsive decisions, dictated by the fear it would all come back to square 1 again, but when she met Derviş, it turned out that nothing about the system made her fit. Hence, she "adapts out" from it by finding true love and killing herself for that love, leaving everything behind.]

So no matter how much these women come to idealize it, no matter how much they begin to think it is actually love or a "fairytale", there still are so many signs that it's not quite like that and that prevent it from being that. That truly includes everyone in the harem, it can't be denied.

#magnificent century #ask #stuffandthangs

[bestworstcase]

farran rereads lost lagoon: chapters 3-4

- a shot-put ball, according to my cursory research, weighs in the neighborhood of 6-16 pounds. leila howland expects me to believe that princess “hoisted an adult woman 70 ft into the air on the daily with nothing but a pulley and raw upper body strength” rapunzel has a hard time picking up a shot.

anyways

- rapunzel thinks about how she used to talk to herself in her tower when she was isolated (and lonely) but stopped once she came to corona, and this girl looked like she was talking to herself, and it gave rapunzel this weird sense of familiarity! now what in the world could that mean? its so subtle i can’t quite put my finger on it.

again, romance novel.

less sardonically - i will say that tts cass has never struck me as an especially lonely person. yes, rapunzel is quite possibly her first ever close friend, but cass also appears to be on pleasant terms with her coworkers and has at least one or two friendships or mentor-type relationships among the guards (stan and pete). animals in tts are anthropomorphized enough to qualify as humans, and cassandra is unequivocally friends with owl and fidella. she is friendly if not friends with at least one coronan citizen (monty). she’s utterly unfazed by crowley’s crabbiness. she’s able to get along with the pub thugs. in vardaros she befriends vex with ease and makes herself right at home among the citizenry at large. there is zero friction between her and lance - at most she rolls her eyes when he’s being ridiculous. and out of the main cast, cassandra is the one who seems closest to varian in s1 - like, she has actual bonding moments with him. 

THE POINT BEING, cassandra may not have a lot of close friends, but she is nevertheless personable and demonstrates the ability to adapt herself to suit a variety of social environments. maybe i’m projecting here - i have very few close offline friends because my preference for in-person socialization is for it to be very casual - but taken together this doesn’t scream ‘lonely person’ to me. it instead says ‘person who finds social fulfillment in a wide net of friendly acquaintanceships’ and possibly also ‘person who finds close, emotionally intimate relationships worthwhile but very demanding to maintain, and so seldom or never seeks them out.’

this, absolutely, a very subjective reading of her character - it is just as plausible for cass to be someone who is socially competent but feels inwardly unfulfilled until rapunzel comes along. but even in that reading, this implication that cassandra is as deeply lonely, as thoroughly isolated in corona as rapunzel was in her tower is baldly absurd.

- i think i will have more thoughts about how arianna is characterized and the relationship she and rapunzel have with each other later in the story. for now it feels rather mechanical, and like arianna exists in the story to facilitate cassunzel happening.

- cassandra comes across to me like she has an anxiety disorder written by someone who doesn’t quite know how to convey how that feels? she catastrophizes: what if rapunzel thinks cass attacked her? will she get in trouble? but then she stops to make snide comments about rapunzel’s security detail ‘[falling] down on the job’ and concludes with an impressive amount of certainty that rapunzel isn’t going to make a big deal of it, after all. that… isn’t how anxiety works?

then, immediately, she finds a note from her father scolding her for slacking off—making it clear that she is indeed in trouble, like she feared—and her response is to scoff and throw it away. zero concern about being in trouble. zero worry about the consequences she might face for refusing the pointed “offer” of being rapunzel’s lady-in-waiting. like… this isn’t anxiety. i’m positive it’s meant to convey anxiety, but it comes across as cassandra just being… melodramatic and rude and grumpy. like a teenager. it’s unpleasant. and it bears very little resemblance to tts cass, who expresses a clear and consistent anxiety regarding the security of her job and the looming threat of a convent.

- secondly: “Friedborg reported that you missed your afternoon duties AGAIN. Please be advised that this is unacceptable. The queen is looking for a lady-in-waiting to serve Princess Rapunzel. It would be a great opportunity for you, and you must show the queen how prepared you are to train her in the ways of the court.” i am 100% convinced that howland thought cass was rapunzel’s age or younger. if friedborg is effectively cassandra’s direct supervisor, and she is reporting absences to cassandra’s father instead of addressing this with cassandra directly, the only explanation that makes sense is that cassandra is not of legal age.

- “Ladies don’t wield weapons, lead military strategy meetings, or race on horseback. Ladies do needlework, flower arranging, and hairstyling.”

sighs.

i am not going to argue that corona, in any incarnation, isn’t culturally sexist. it is. there are no women in the guard, no women in trades, no female business owners in the vein of monty or xavier or feldspar. besides rapunzel and arianna - who as the monarch’s spouse has very little in the way of actual political power - there are no women in the upper echelons of the government. besides cassandra, the only gnc women around are criminals. cass is denied even a chance to join the guard for no evident reason, even though her father allows eugene - a man he openly despises - to take the tests and then begrudgingly hires him when he passes. no one sees an issue with this, even though cassandra is demonstrably overqualified.

however.

howland makes this cultural sexism explicit text, and she does so in such a way that it implies something pretty horrifying about the already pretty horrifying corona-saporia unification backstory.

i am talking, of course, about general shampanier. you know, the female saporian general whom herz der sonne married when the two kingdoms were unified. the female saporian general who personally dueled der sonne for hours, according to under raps. the female saporian general who, forget military strategy meetings, led an entire goddamn army. i will accept the possibility that shampanier did not ride horses, because rapunzel’s return suggests that saporians have some sort of cultural objection to that. but this book predates rapunzel’s return by a large margin, and it isn’t canon anyway, so odds are the general shampanier of this story rode a warhorse at some point or another in her illustrious career of being the general of an army!!!

this woman - general shampanier - became the queen, the wife of arguably corona’s most historically important king, at a defining moment in coronan political and cultural history. tts and lost lagoon would both have us believe that this was a romantic, peaceful union between two people and two nations, but a few hundred years later - this. ladies don’t fight. ladies don’t belong in the war tent. ladies don’t ride horses. cass takes these things for granted as facts of life. but general shampanier did all of those things, and she did them extremely well, and she became corona’s queen.

WHAT HAPPENED?! WHAT HAPPENED TO SHAMPANIER’S LEGACY?

how did corona go from a warrior-queen to this, in just a few hundred years? the most plausible answer is that the background radiation of sexism and, perhaps, anti-saporian bias was powerful enough to unravel any cultural impact she may have otherwise had, deep enough to render her an outlier, an aberration, an exception to the rule that women do not act like that.

even arguing here that ‘lady’ specifically means ‘noblewoman’ doesn’t add up - because, again, general shampanier became THE QUEEN. you don’t get more noblewoman than that!

it feels unfair to judge this book with details added in season 3—such as the fact that shampanier is evidently not buried with herz der sonne—but this total lack of a cultural impact from general shampanier, queen of corona, feels very telling even without taking those tidbits of extra-textual information into consideration.

and good god, saporia hasn’t even properly entered the narrative yet! this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg!

*deep breath*

moving. on.

- continuing the theme of cass being a child larping as a guard recruit: she has a closetful of weapons which she maintains to the exacting standards of the handbook, but skips out on her job to “train” in secret because evidently she’ll do ANYTHING to get on the guard except, you know, demonstrate a modicum of responsibility with the job she has now.

- moreover while i think cartography is a neat hobby for cassandra to have, it… doesn’t make a lot of sense if it’s part of some nebulous plan to ~prove herself worthy~ of being on the guard. like, cartography straight up isn’t a relevant skill, and while knowing the countryside could certainly be helpful for guard work in the event a criminal goes to ground in the wilderness, it’s like… it’s like if i applied for my current job, which is in software/tech support, by focusing an intensive amount of energy on teaching myself spanish. fluency in spanish is a useful skill and one that i could turn into an asset within the bounds of my current job, and it might be the deciding factor in me getting hired over someone else with equivalent experience and skill in computing and tech support (which is what the job involves) because, yes, some of our clients are ESL spanish-speakers. but it’s—there’s a disconnect. if i were in a tight competition to get this job i would be pouring my time into sharpening my programming skill and polishing up a portfolio of relevant work. i wouldn’t be devoting hours upon hours to learning spanish. right?

on the other hand—if cartography is a hobby cassandra is passionate about, and she’s 16 or 17 or 18 and she really likes the idea of being on the guard and really feels like she can do it and is bored with her dumb teenager job and desperate to get her dad to make her a guard without actually grasping what being a guard entails or the kind of work it involves or what she actually, realistically needs to do to have a shot, then… yeah, skipping work to play pretend with her weapons and convincing herself that her favorite hobby is totally going to prove to her dad that she’s ready to be a guard!!! makes perfect sense. it’s no different from tts varian tunnel visioning so hard on this fantasy of ‘i’ll surprise my whole village with hot running water and then my dad will be proud of me!!!’ that he neglects basic safety measures and accidentally blows the whole system up. it’s not realistic. it’s a fantasy. it’s play.

- the only time cassandra brings up eugene’s criminal past in tts is to mock him for being a loser. like. literally. the plot of fitzherbert pi kicks off when she calls him a “two-bit hood” and then when he fires back that flynn rider was a LEGEND!!! she fires back “key word being was. and… what is it you do now?” and that’s the only time she brings it up. granted this is 6-7 months into their relationship but… still, frankly i never got the impression that “former thief” was anywhere close to the top of cassandra’s list of reasons for hating eugene. he’s just a dick. she doesn’t like him because he’s a huge selfish jerk and she warms up to him after her starts behaving better.

- rapunzel goes to the ty lee school of flirting. just… laugh really hard at everything your crush says even if it’s not funny.

- despite my… intense and rapidly growing dislike for how cassandra is characterized in this book, her experiencing an actual physical reaction when rapunzel enters her space without permission is good. it’s about the boundaries. it has always been about the boundaries, and rapunzel crossing them, and the intractable messiness that arises from that.

- in fact: how many times does rapunzel cross boundaries in just this one little scene? oh, let me count the ways!

1 - when cassandra goes to shut the door, rapunzel ducks under her arm to enter the room. (eugene attempts to enter as well, but cass succeeds in blocking him.)

2 - missing or ignoring cassandra’s first “go away” hint about only playing individual sports.

3 - missing or ignoring cassandra’s second “go away” hint (“I let the silence get awkward.”)

4 - arranging cassandra’s invitation to the feast of elodie the great with the captain beforehand, so cass can’t use him as an excuse to decline.

5 - missing or ignoring cassandra’s obvious discomfort with this news, taking cassandra’s attendance at the feast as a done deal, and skipping straight to asking cassandra to sit next to her.

6 - in response to cassandra’s very diplomatic signal of not wanting to do that (“I sit wherever I’m assigned”), she declares that she’ll make sure cassandra is assigned to sit next to her.

7 - touching without permission, which makes cassandra flinch.

all of which results in cassandra making what she considers to be a “tactical surrender.” and then shutting and locking her door, because she feels so rattled. as i recall, lagoon is actually a lot mellower on the boundary violations front - and rapunzel actually learns better over the course of the story, which is probably the biggest reason that lost lagoon is not canon and cannot be canon to tts - but it feels worth writing this sort of thing out because, well. it is one of the dead horses i keep clobbering.

#lost lagoon reread #-cries in worldbuilding- #rta

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - You're Kidding Me

So we’ve finally come to the last of season two’s filler episodes. Let’s see if we can knock this one out real quick. 

Summary: The front door of the mysterious seashell estate vanishes, trapping the group. They try to find another way out but find a spinning top whose magic regresses Cassandra and Lance into toddlers and Shorty into a baby.  They’ve only have an hour to find the top and reverse the effects or the changes become permanent. Unfortunately neither of Rapunzel’s or Eugene’s parenting methods keep their now childish friends on task. 

So Why Did No One Stand Watch Last Night?

They were all sleeping right next to the entrance, and after the run in with the mirror monsters, you would think that they would have taken turns standing watch. 

But nope, the front door vanishes when no one was looking cause they don't have any foresight. 

A Low Budget Doesn’t Excuse Filler

Like most of season two, this is yet another episode that adds very little to the overall story. It’s slightly better than the Return of Quaid or Curses, but not by much. I put it on the same level as The Forest of No Return, as I do like the mains’ development, but there’s really no reason why such episodes exist to begin with. 

The meta reason for staying in certain places for three episodes, instead of only one or two, is because of budgetary reasons. The crew have to build new sets and models for every new location or person the cast comes across. This costs money to make, so the higher ups wanted to reuse assets. Which is understandable, but not an excuse for utilizing them poorly.  

If you need to stay in one area or have characters reappear, then you need to give story reasons for that. Ones that tie back to the overall narrative and/or the mains’ character arcs. 

The shell house and Matthews should be more important than what they are as they both have connections to the ultimate big bad of the series.Adria shouldn’t be wasted for a whole episode when she’s the only one driving the plot in season two and has limited appearances. Vardaros and its people shouldn’t be a one and done thing if you’re going to spend so much time setting them up. And there’s still one off episodes, locations, and characters who aren’t brought back and add nothing 

Not only does this make for a weaker story, it also undermines the cost saving measures that you tried to implement to begin with.  

This Isn’t Representation! 

Get it?! 

She’s a top! 

She’s totally gay, but like not really, cause this can also be interpreted as a dominatrix joke, and there’s no other real indication of her orientation outside her like smiling at her best friend/crush/sister sometimes and keeping that rose her creepy ex-boyfriend gave her. 

And don't give me any bullshit excuses about Disney not letting the crew make Cassandra canonly gay/bi. 

The Owl House aired just this year, the same year as Tangled’s final season. Also Globby and Carl from Big Hero Six were both confirmed to be a couple on screen a month after this episode came out. Both shows would have been in development at the same time as Tangled was. Both would have been subject to the same regulations and restrictions while writing their stories. 

It isn’t “Disney” that stopped the storyboard artists from having Cass be a confirmed lesbian, it’s Chris and Ben, the head writers themselves, who failed to write it into the story properly, if at all. 

Chris is the one who made Raps and Cass “sisters”. Chris is the one who wouldn’t tell the crew about his ‘twists’. Chris is the one who had Cass crush on Andrew, even after he tried to kill her. Chris is the one who made Cassandra ‘straight’ and has since used gay baiting to keep her fanbase in his pocket. 

Like I am really damn sick and tired of Casspunzel stans defending Chris on twitter, when he’s the very one who sunk thier ship to begin with. I’m also really fed up with certain fans trying to bully others for not accepting their “Cass is a lesbian” headcanons as fact because what the storyboarders say on twitter after the show is over with isn’t gospel and isn’t real rep. 

I don’t care if you ship Cass with Raps or headcanon her as being gay. Ships and headcanons are great and can be a lot of fun. But fuck you if you ever try to shame people for not sharing your ships/headcanons. Not only is it biophobic and acephobic to insist that there’s only ever a binary option when it comes to orientation and shipping, but it also reinforces harmful stereotypes and tropes about people in the queer community. 

Like, yes, I personally may be an introverted angry bitch who’s an LBGTQA member and activist, but that doesn’t mean that every introverted bitchy woman in media is a lesbian. What kind of message does that send people when that’s the only character archetype that’s given representation or is loudly proclaimed as ‘gay’ by the wider audience? Fuck that noise! 

I Know Humor is Subjective but...WHY?

Why did we give the baby a beard? How does that logically work? Did anyone outside of the crew actually find this funny? 

TTS has like this one out of touch dude throwing out jokes that don’t really land with the target audience. Fans have called it ‘boomer humor’ but it’s actually ‘Gen-X’ humor. Not only because Chris and Ben are Gen Xers but because this is the type of crap my older brother would find hilarious. 

Gen Xers are between Boomers and Millennials and so their humor is this weird blend of gross out shock humor, ironic nihilism, and out of date stereotypes that are only mildly better than those of the previous generation before them. They’re the generation who gave us Beavis and Butthead, South Park, and Clerks. 

That’s not a criticism of Gen X as a generation, but rather just an acknowledgment that they’re worlds away from the neo-dada absurdism, more socially conscious, and globalized humor of Gen Z.    

So Why Is the Bad Guy Telling the Heroes How to Foil His Plans? 

Like he not only tells them how to fix their problem and how long they got in order to do so, but he also informs them how it happened in the first place. This goes directly against his plans. Had he simply said nothing and stayed out sight, then Raps and Eugene would have been lost for the full hour and most likely not have saved everyone on time. 

I like to headcanon that Mathews is just “that asshole” that loves to taunt and tease but in a that manner that gives him plausible deniability. He also may just be bored, since he’s a ghost trapped in one place all the time. Yet that still doesn’t change the fact that he shot himself in the foot here. 

Raps and Young Cass’s Relationship Is the Same as Raps and Adult Cass’s, and That Is a Problem. 

Condescending, manipulative, hypocritical, and bossy is the way Rapunzel treats everyone. She doesn’t understand the actual difference between a child and an adult. She only understands who she who she can and can’t boss  around. And those people that she can’t place under her thumb are labeled antagonists by the show. 

Nor does she actually care about what either kid Lance or kid Cass has to say. She’s just being proformative, and young Cass can see through that BS, which why her methods do not work. It’s not because she’s not ‘strict’ enough; it’s because she’s not being honest. 

Meanwhile Child Cassandra is just as combative, rude, bullying, and entitled as Adult Cassandra. In season three she regresses even further and becomes more violent than before.

Unlike Rapunzel, Cassandra wasn’t trapped in a tower for 18 years with zero human contact outside of her abuser. She escaped that fate and was raised in a loving home. That doesn’t mean that there won't be scars, but I still expect her to be more mature than her seven year old self. Just because she’s whining about not being special enough at 24 instead of screaming about the floor being lava doesn’t mean that she’s still not throwing a temper tantrum.  

Like I should not be seeing a replay/foreshadowing of their main conflict here. They aren’t children. They’re dynamic isn’t that of a mother and child. It’s not even a big sister looking out for a little sister type relationship. Its two immature women dragging innocent victims into their bitchy cat fight for dominance over the other.  

If you want me to take their issues seriously then give them real stakes to disagree over, mature behavior that I can root for, and a resolvement that doesn’t reverse any potential development that they could have had.    

Matthews Plan Makes Zero Sense

For starters, half the group being kids isn’t enough of a reason for Rapunzel to stay at the shell house. Even if the effects of the time top became permanent, then Raps and Eugene could just leave and take the kids with them. Either to finish the road trip, or go straight back to Corona. Not that there’s any real reason to get the Dark Kingdom anyways, nor is there a ticking clock stopping Raps from trying again later if she chose to. 

Rapunzel also is not obligated to become anyone’s mother. If she took them back to Corona than Cap would undoubtedly raise Cassandra all over again, and Lance and Shorty could be adopted by someone else. Any of the pub thugs might take them or even perhaps the King and Queen since they missed out on raising their actual daughter. Though for my money I’d get Monty or Xavier to take them in. They seem the most mature and both are shown to be good with kids. 

Then again Rapunzel has been shown twice now to not give a damn about abandoning orphans, so even the ‘dump them at an orphanage’ or ‘leave them alone in the woods to fend for themselves’ isn’t entirely off the table either. I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Sadly, only Eugene’s love for Lance might be the one thing to stop her from doing just so, and even that’s iffy. 

As for the missing door from earlier, if that was all that was stopping them from leaving then the time top shenanigans were fully unnecessary altogether. 

I Actually Like Eugene and Rapunzel’s Conflict Here; I Just Wish It Was In a Better Episode. 

Each of their viewpoints stem from their upbringing. 

Rapunzel is unique in that she was simultaneously emotionally abused and neglected while being physically spoiled. Especially once she found out that she was princess, where she was then handed nearly anything and everything she wanted. She doesn’t recognize that getting your every possible whim come true can be damaging. Nor does she have any comprehension of what living in poverty is like and how this many toys is wasteful to someone like Eugene who had so very little and stole to survive. 

She does however associate limits, boundaries, and orders with abusive behavior because she’s been denied autonomy and respect her whole life. She’s never seen what healthy parenting looks like and how rules can be applied correctly.     

To Rapunzel no orders is ‘freeing’ and ‘validation’ is all that is needed to get a child to listen to you. Which doesn’t work for her because she doesn’t understand that real communication is more than just giving a compliment now and then. 

Meanwhile Eugene lacked any sort of anchor at all. He was left to his own devices at a young age and had no one to rely on for emotional needs and, after leaving the orphanage, no one to provide physical needs either. 

It’s telling that he and Lance latched onto Quaid as the only authority figure in their life, despite Quaid never out right adopting them. He was the only sense of stability that they had who they could trust wouldn’t hurt them, despite being strict with them. 

And now that Eugene has gotten older and is reformed, he can probably understand why Quaid was so harsh on him and Lance. Quaid probably did more to try and help them turn from a life crime than even Rapunzel did. Like meeting Rapunzel was the inciting incident that inspired Eugene to make that leap, but the groundwork was already laid out for him to do so elsewhere. Things like his good communication skills, respect and empathy of others, and understanding of boundaries had to be learned from somewhere, and if not from the Sheriff of Vardaros than who? 

What I’m getting at is that, while Rapunzel rejects her parents methods but then fails to break her learned habits from them anyways, Eugene is the reverse. He’s come to embrace his mentor’s teachings, but he fails to implement them correctly because he’s not Quaid. Being authoritative isn’t his strong suit. It goes against his usual nature as the easy going person that he is and so any attempts to come across as forceful fail as they’re hollow. 

Kids know authenticity and genuineness when they see it. The children reject Rapunzel because she’s not being real with them, yet they also reject Eugene cause he’s not being honest with himself. 

It’s a complex and mature conflict. Neither person is fully right nor wrong, and only by learning from each other and adopting both methods can they achieve their goal. 

TTS can be deep when it wants to be. There’s a good foundation here for mature themes and complex characterization. It’s just the series doesn’t ever commit to it. 

Whatever personal drama going on here about two young adults trying to cope with their past traumas and how that affects their current life and future goals is completely lost in the magical goofy antics and low stakes situation. Even the stuff about Eugene and his relationship with Quaid is reduced to nothing but a one off joke rather than being genuinely explored as a point of development.  

Imagine how much more powerful things would have been if Angry and Red were brought along on the trip. If this argument was over them and whether or not they should adopt the two girls themselves or consider other options. That would be something with real weight. Something with a choice that had actual consequences attached to it. Something that would permanently affect all involved parties. Something that wouldn’t make the two leads look like outright dicks for abandoning two children for a second damn time in a row.    

You Have 70 Feet of Magical, Indestructible Hair! Why Are You Afraid of a Bunch of Dogs!?

You’ve fought off giant monsters, killer robots, and supernatural beings with magical powers. What do you mean you can’t hold off a pack of guard dogs while busting down a stuck door? Why is Eugene the shield for everyone and not the actual unbreakable hair that you use as a shield all the damn time? And Why did we have to rely on Shorty again to be the deus ex machina of the episode? 

At this point the writers should have just made him Demantius instead of the monkey.   

What Happened To This New Dream? Where Did It Go In Season Three?

Most fans who do enjoy season two happen to be big New Dream fans as this is by far and away the best season for them. I’ll admit that the series, up to this point, had me actively liking them together, despite being originally lukewarm to the pairing in the movie. 

Their conflicts were for the the most part mature and real. They learned from one another equally and had open communication when it didn't involve ‘marriage is a trap’ BS. Things, like compromising on differentiating future goals, honesty and communication, and making time for one another and extending effort into a relationship while being true to yourself are all relatable issues. 

Even today's episode featured the topic of having kids and parenting. Which is a discussion you absolutely need to have with your prospective spouse before entering into any long term commitments and signing any legal contracts. For real, I’ve seen marriages fall apart because they didn’t agree on whether or not they wanted children. 

I don’t know what went down between writing season two and season three, but things quickly took a sharp turn away from this dynamic and nosedived into a pit of uncomfortable bullying and gross sexist implications here after. 

Matthews Plan Goes Against Zhan Tiri’s Plan 

Yeah so Matthews is one of Zhan Tiri’s disciples, but he apparently doesn’t know of her goals/plans, cause she needs Rapunzel and company to reach the moonstone, not stay stuck here. 

The meta reason for this that the Zhan Tiri’s story was altered at the last minute and the writers failed to make sure there was any sort of consistency between what they already set up and where they actually wound to actually taking the plot.  

The in universe reason is that Zhan Tiri is an impotent moron, but that’s not what the writers were going for so it’s a fail. 

Conclusion  

I like the New Dream stuff, and Matthews is at least entertaining despite being incompetent. Everything else about the episode is ‘meh’ tho. 

#tangled #rapunzel's tangled adventure #tangled the series #anti-tangled #anti-rapunzel #anti-cassandra #eugene

[hopeymchope]

hey, sorry to barge into your inbox despite being a total stranger (and feel free to respond to this privately if you want) but i came across some of your s/n/k critical posts and i just wanted to say i agree SO much. and i wanted to thank you for vocalizing this opinion because i know both i and some others agree with you. i've personally felt that everything after chapter 80 was a mistake (because i thought the whole serum fight over erwin vs armin was pretty fuckin stupid too) and it's kinda funny (i guess) to see the ending 100% validate my opinion completely. i can't believe every character was done this dirty for the sake of a very poorly constructed "both sides are bad" scenario that was also in VERY poor taste considering the explicit allegories to n*zi germany and a literal race war. like what's up with the jews - sorry, the "eldians" - once ruling the entire world via a bloodthirsty empire and also being inhuman creatures? gee, that sure doesn't sound like every antisemitic conspiracy theory i've ever heard. and way to rationalize oppression, too. the entire point of an oppression narrative is supposed to be "hey, the oppressor's prejudices have no rational basis and are literally mistreating this oppressed group due to their own selfishness and cruelty," not "oh btw marley's fear/hatred of eldians kinda makes sense considering eldians once enslaved the entire planet and can turn into giant man-eating monsters." is*yama SERIOUSLY should've just stuck to writing glorified vore lmao.

and while all the characters were either killed, turned into plot devices, or both, it hurts that EMA and the main protag himself suffered this treatment as well. i still think pre-timeskip eren is utterly irreconciliable with post-timeskip eren and the fact that both fans and the author himself try to make it seem like "hey he was ALWAYS a batshit crazy psychopath from the start!" is sort of pathetic to watch. like yeah, lemme just ignore the first 80 chapters of character development for this guy. or lemme pretend that the author didn't spend the significant majority of the decade making eren the most empathetic character in the entire series. or let me also pretend that eren killing those human traffickers to save a 9 year old girl from being a child sex slave is somehow evidence/foreshadowing/etc of him eventually growing up to destroy 80% of the planet. like, what? not to mention he even rebuked himself for recklessly killing those two men like that in chapter 17...so am i supposed to ignore that too?? and don't even get me started on the "eren went insane and accidentally caused his mom's death." bro. BRO. i've watched the entirety of game of thrones yet i STILL have never seen this level of "edgy plot twist for shock value with no benefit or relevance to the story whatsoever" in any media to exist.

well anyway...sorry for ranting in your inbox like this LMAO i really just wanted to tell you that i agree with your opinions about both the series ending and the series as a whole. i doubt i'll ever engage with this cursed manga ever again but at least pre-chapter 80 s/n/k will always be a thing and i can pretend they all got reincarnated into a modern AU where eren and mikasa are happily married and living with their bff armin in a nice condo or something. they alternate between visiting carla and grisha or mikasa's family on weekends. yeah that sounds pretty good. if you made it this far then kudos to you and thank you for reading lol

Thanks a ton for the kind words of commiseration. It feels like there’s a plurality of people who are unhappy, sure... but it comes off as still being a minority, and even among that minority, it seems like most people are still fine with most of the timeskip so long as they stuck the landing. But I think they were much too far off-course pretty fast after the Timeskip started to really correct it very well. It was possible, but the writing was on the wall. The intentions were already clear pretty early on after the skip. 

That said, I try to keep this Tumblr mostly positive and DR-focused, yet I still absolutely had to rant about SNK 139. The more I thought about it, the more I disliked it... and this comes from someone who was already unhappy for a while, obviously, so. Yeah. Of course I was gonna dislike it on some level, but I thought it’d at least provide closure to the Timeskip arc, even if I do think the Timeskip arc feels at odds with everything else the series was for 3/4 of its run.

And HOLY SHIT I literally forgot about the Eldians’ history of apparently being horrible, vicious rulers of a sinister empire. You know why? Because I NEVER BELIEVED IT. I was so 100% certain that it was going to be outed as bullshit propaganda from Marley that I never once thought it was plausible, so I just... pushed it out of my mind as soon as I read it. After all, all that kind of talk about the arch-conspiracy of Jews has always been total bullshit from anti-semetic monsters, so why would I put any stock in this kind of talk being applied to the Jewish race of Attack on Titan? 

But now, at the end of the story... yup, I guess he never DID go back on that! So it was fucking true?! The Jewish people in this WWII analogy were apparently an evil master race at one point?! Oh. OHHHHH. Go fuck yourself with a shovel for that one, Isayama. 

And yeah, Eren... god, what a sad story. He becomes unrecognizable as the same character thanks to the Timeskip, the new characterization is never explained or justified retroactively - it’s just opposite day now, forever - and he dies accomplishing nothing. I don’t know what to say, except I do know how much I loved that character and this series before things went south. I didn’t even mind the backstory for the Titans and the horrible story of Eldians in Marley... because it seemed so obvious that it was setting up a battle against a hateful, technologically advanced foe that was beyond the darkness of anything they’d fought before, y’know? Marley, as it was set up in the flashbacks before the Timeskip, is Nazi Germany if the Nazis had tech and scientific horrors and numbers far beyond what the Allies had. And nobody EVER feels bad for killing Nazis, so this was obviously going to be a final battle to destroy the Marleyan military, with Zeke likely to serve as a Final Boss who has totally 100% bought the propaganda and who hated everything Eren stood for. It was all RIGHT THERE. Maybe it was just too easy to tell that story, because instead, Zeke is suddenly supposed to be a gray character (very hard to accept given his backstory), and we end with the “uwu both sides were bad bc war is hell” message that is really pretty fucked up, as you already correctly pointed out.

#snk 139 #aot 139 #snk spoilers #aot spoilers #negativity #snk negativity #aot negativity #snk ending #AOT ending

[betweengenesisfrogs]

The Triumph of the Marginalia

Marginalia, n.:

1 : notes or embellishments in the margins (as in a book)

2 : nonessential items

-Troll OED

Is it just me, or is Nepeta and Equius’s arc the most slept-upon piece of brilliance in all of Homestuck?

A brilliance, might I add, that culminates in possibly the most triumphant, fulfilling emotional moment in the entire work:

https://www.homestuck.com/story/7928

*stands back and beholds its majesty while from the background comes the sound of James Roach brutally murdering ska*

No, but actually, I mean this 100% unironically, and by the end of this post, I think you’ll agree with me.

By now, I think we all understand the Act 6 double metaphor: the series of temporal loops and universes that Lord English commands is paralleled with, and in fact totally identical to, the narrative of Homestuck. Our characters’ lives exist within this context. They struggle to escape it, and are defined both by it and by the rejection of it.

Enter Nepeta.

The metaphorical meaning of Nepeta in Homestuck is irrelevance, and that’s why she’s the most relevant character in any discussion.

Nepeta was one of the characters killed off during the Murderstuck arc. Hussie argued that she was perfect for this role. In fact, I believe he said something like “Nepeta is sweet, but if you look up the dictionary definition of ‘expendable character,’ you’ll see a picture of Nepeta playing with a ball of yarn and looking very cute.” She’s an endearing combination of shipper girl and apex predator, but not one of your Vriskas or Terezis in being a driver of the plot. Hussie, it seems, created her just to round out the troll cast. He described one of his purposes in Murderstuck as being to axe some of the less necessary trolls to reduce the scope of his character list.

Except that didn’t really happen, did it?

Like a cat with nine lives, Nepeta just keeps coming back.

Equius is another addition to the troll cast who gets pushed away from the main action. He was a character-writing challenge: how do you make someone who’s gross, uncomfortable, and racist kind of likable anyway? I’d argue Hussie succeeded, in large part because of Equius’s relationship with Nepeta. By the time you finish with Hivebent, you’ll probably have a little fondness for their moraillegiance. And if that doesn’t do it, the conversation that serves as their swansong in Equius: Seek the Highblood will tear your heartstrings to shreds.

Because Equius dies, tragically clownmurdered. There was, at the time, some stink over this from Equius fans. Would he have really let himself be killed so easily? Hussie countered: yes, and it was the most in-character thing he could have done. He died doing what he loved: being asphyxiated erotically and horrifically by a superior. Truly, there could be no more fitting end to his character than that.

And yet.

No sooner did Hussie complete his self-appointed story cleanup challenge than he immediately began to undo his own work. It’s almost as if, in declaring his intention to own those who preferred more characters to narrative economy, he immediately had to own himself??

By the time we get even a little way into Act 6, we’re deep in the dreambubble landscape, meeting dead characters left and right. And who should show up there but Equius and Nepeta? Equius attempting to get it on with a bunch of Aradias, who dump him. And Nepeta, living out her romantic dreams as a representative of a timeline where she got together with Karkat. They both appear as symbols of this deadness, this irrelevance. Except that that brings them back into the story, into the spotlight – the opposite of where they’re supposed to be!

Like many bits of commentary, Hussie continues to incorporate the metaphor Nepeta=Irrelevance into Homestuck. Karkat’s remark on their journey that he would love to meet “FIFTY FUCKING NEPETAS” and embark on “NEPETAQUEST” alludes to formspring remarks to the effect that, no, Homestuck was not going to have much time for the minor characters. Except it clearly did.

Why couldn’t the narrative let the meowrails go? Was it that despite the economy of Murderstuck, something was still incomplete? After all, one of Equius’s charms was that he appeared to be growing into a less repressed, kinder person. In Seek the Highblood, we see him letting his guard down enough to roleplay with Nepeta for a change. Their love for each other: wasn’t that ultimately what could redeem Equius in our eyes? So his dying and thus failing to protect her–isn’t that something that should be addressed?

You could imagine many a Nepeta and Equius fan saying this to Hussie back in 2011.

But Hussie was already saying it to himself.

The duo come roaring back into the story in the Trickster mode arc, mid Act 6, thanks to Gamzee’s ridiculous resurrections. True, Nepeta is still reduced as part of Fefeta, the character formed from killed-off girls who never speaks onscreen. But doesn’t using that fact as a running gag kind of draw our attention to it? Doesn’t the fact that Fefeta talks to Roxy constantly offscreen inform us that once we get outside the frame of the narrative, Nepeta has a rich inner life and countless stories to tell?

And it’s here that Equius gets something he never got in his original “arc:” the chance to apologize to Nepeta. You’d be forgiven for missing it since there’s so much else going on at the time, but he does, while fused with AR. Here’s what you’d miss, though: he’s grown as a person in the afterlife. He’s come to regret that moment of weakness, where his fetish kept him from protecting his moirail. Impossible as it seems, he’s continuing his character arc.

The scene ends with Fefeta exploding (she’s also, after all, dealing with Eridan), but it leaves us with a tantalizing question:

Will Nepeta forgive Equius? Is there even a plausible time and space in that story when she could respond to his words?

Do you see what’s happening here? Instead of being erased, Nepeta and Equius are starting to slip the bounds of the story that killed them. They leap in and out of the frame, half-mythical figures. Marginalized, they write their own stories in the margins. They exist in complete defiance of the original logic of Homestuck.

Lord English is an alt-Author figure, a dark, brutal reflection of narrative control and narrative necessity. His world, in which horrible choices are necessary, in which the alpha timeline is a ticking clock leading inexorably to his manifestation, is one that beats down people not deemed important enough by his narrative. Which makes it identical to the one we’re reading. Throw all the unnecessary characters in the trash. Kill them off, if it suits my purposes. The world doesn’t need Nepeta.

Which is precisely why it does. Because isn’t defying Lord English the entire point? Isn’t it what Homestuck reveals as truly heroic?

What might Nepeta be capable of?

Let’s talk about two other victims of English’s forces of marginalization. Davesprite might be the most quintessential example. He teaches us what the alpha timeline is and how it works, by going back to fix a doomed timeline and submitting to being doomed himself. Except he merges with a bird and avoids that fate. Okay, but he clearly gets killed off fighting Jack in Jade: Enter. Except he comes back and hangs out with Jadesprite. Okay, but he dies in the planetsplode in the Retcon. Nope, he comes back from that, too. Huh. He keeps slipping the fate decreed for him by – who else? Lord English.

But it’s a struggle, clearly. He’s caught up in various cycles of guilt and shame. Over being “not the real Dave.” Over his feeling that he has to be a hero in the sense Bro demanded he be. Hussie describes Davesprite as fitting the “way of the unbroken sword:” his experiences have led him to believe in being strong and capable at the expense of all else, in contrast with the other Dave, whose belief in Bros’ toxic ideas is beginning to slip – the “way of the broken sword.” And where did Bro get his toxic ideas from? At least in part, the whispering voice of the soul of Lord English.

Now we turn to Dirk. Like Dave, Dirk has a marginalized, “less important” splinter self but it’s more of a pressing concern. AR shows Dirk’s darker side: exhibiting manipulative tendencies that human Dirk is trying to move away from. He’s also a copy removed from humanity, who feels an understandable amount of disillusionment about being removed from physical existence and his own identity. But as much as Dirk may splinter, like his dumb anime sword, he never breaks. What this means in the symbolic language of Homestuck is that Dirk lives fully, instinctually, in the way of the sword. He believe in a world of hard choices, masculine heroism, and necessity. Ultimately, this, too, is part of what makes Bro so harmful to Dave. In AR and Davesprite, we have a strange parallel: two splinter selves, both of whom are enmeshed in the logic of LE.

Except AR, unlike Davesprite…kind of is LE.

What is Lord English composed of? Well, there’s Caliborn, the most unrepentant shithead of all time. There’s Gamzee, embodiment of horrifying clownery. And then there’s AR, a version of Dirk even more removed from the person he wants to be.

And…Equius?

Allow me a moment to get really indulgent and take a big puff on my Homestuck scholar’s pipe.

The metaphorical meaning of Equius in Homestuck is: sort of growing out of being a creepy racist.

Or maybe let’s say: the opportunity to do that. We said that Equius was on the verge of being redeemed (even had been, in the eyes of many readers). What does it mean to stick him in with Lord English’s souls? It means two things:

1) Equius is a product of his society, which was shaped by Doc Scratch, aka by Lord English, both of whom are kind of him, but Scratch picks up on his traits especially. This is a recognition of that fact: the part of him that sucks is, itself, Lord English in a dizzying loop.

2) Equius’s story is a tragedy. It is the story of a kid who started to escape his society’s tendencies, but was sucked back in by the evil force behind them.

Although…maybe that’s not the whole story.

Because both Equius and AR aren’t really that bad. AR’s pretty understandable, and by no means beyond the possibility of goodness. And the combination of the two? Honestly, pretty harmless. They counter each other’s worst tendencies by devolving into a weird goofball. In fact, AR even says he wants to do something heroic: to sacrifice himself for something really important. He does, kind of, mustering a last-ditch robohorse assault on Caliborn. But at the same time, this is the substance of his tragedy. A hero whose defeat of a great evil forces him to become the substance of that evil. Which could not be a more fitting summary of how these characters function in their story.

But maybe that’s still not the whole story.

Enter Davepeta.

At first glance, the creation of Davepeta seems like Hussie’s most batshit troll move yet. I feel pretty confident in saying that even those who predicted either of these characters returning didn’t see that one coming. However, a few pages of Davepeta’s presence reveals a fundamental truth:

Davepeta is fucking amazing.

In them, Davesprite’s depressive moods are buoyed up by Nepeta’s upbeat optimism. Nepeta’s reclusive shyness is balanced by Dave’s tendency toward brash banter. Both of them gain confidence from being the new person they are. They quickly let go of ideas inherited from the world that kept them from self-knowledge and happiness. Dave, his toxic masculinity; Nepeta, her fear.

A great point I’ve seen made is how much Jasprose and Davepeta resemble fantasy selves for Rose and Dave: indulgent, technicolor manifestations of people they could be if they let go of inhibitions and limitations. But I think Davepeta is the most unambiguously positive of the two.

The metaphorical meaning of Davepeta in Homestuck?

Growth.

Not giving a fuck about what the world thinks. The world, aka Lord English. Because Lord English could never have predicted that his machinations would also spawn a confident, powerful fusion of two beings he had discarded as totally irrelevant.

They’re also a multicolored non-binary furry, so that’s even more points in the pissing off shitheads column.

They are someone Lord English never conceived of, never could have conceived of, but which lay as potential within his domain all along.

And if Lord English is a reflection of the author, of what Hussie feels one has to destroy or sacrifice, than Davepeta is an indulgence existing in defiance of all that.

And this makes Davepeta the most powerful person of all.

They are the light at the end of the tunnel. They are the person you could be, if you could get past your mental shackles and just grow. It may not be possible to ever get there as a mortal human, may only be for a godlike sprite, but striving to be like them matters, is purpose and fulfilment enough.

And they love ARquius.

Nepeta believed in Equius, believed he could grow, and was growing. So as much as ARquius traps himself in a Lord English loop of his own making – grown, perhaps, out of Dirk’s belief that there should be a loop, that importance is admirable—Davepeta pulls from him, in his last scene, his finest qualities. His love.

Equius asks forgiveness again, and this time, Nepeta’s able to give it. Davepeta easily accepts ARquius’s apology, an apology which never could have existed within the confines of a normal narrative. A reconciliation that both of them fought for by defying their narrative, by existing outside it. By being not the trolls who lived and died, but their broader, conceptual selves, who exist beyond lifetimes. Beyond the comic page. And they consummate that reconciliation with that most cherished and loving of gestures:

A hug.

And even as this is Equius and Nepeta’s reconciliation, it’s also Dirk and Dave’s. Which, I should mention, is also taking place, simultaneously and circumstantially simultaneously, just below. It’s a more difficult one, certainly, especially as filtered through the splinters of Davesprite and AR. Here forgiveness is not quite the right word. But – knowledge, and recognition, and a kind of peace. It’s Davesprite’s chance to reunite with the part of his brother he loved, while also being a person who’s grown beyond him. And it’s AR’s chance to be loved.

Oh, sure, the art is ridiculous, the pose absurd. But that’s what makes it sublime.

I mean, what did you think that Sbahj comic was really about?

A boy distancing himself from his feelings through irony, never acknowledging that the story he’s telling is about two bros who desperately want to hug each other, but don’t know how.

Here’s the hug.

I want to dip into Epilogues territory for a moment, but it’s territory which is fairly well implied by Davepeta’s statements and role in Collide. The Meat Epilogue, I think, only illuminates what was already there.

Lord English is uniquely vulnerable to Davepeta.

And why shouldn’t he be? They, like so much else in Homestuck, are a consequence of his actions spiraling far beyond his control. But it’s more than that. Davepeta is finally able to lay the unbroken sword to rest by following the “prophecy” about Dave defeating Lord English. On the one hand, that’s kind of what happened. But it’s also completely different from what English intended, antithetical to his desires and goals. Which makes the victory all the sweeter. But at the end of the day, Davepeta doesn’t fight for the reasons Davesprite did. They’re free of that, now. Instead, they fight from a place of genuine compassion. Because Davesprite, like Dave, knows the true meaning of being a hero: caring about one’s friends.

But the most important thing about Davepeta is that they know Lord English, on a level that perhaps neither he nor they recognize. Both AR and Equius are in there, and both are capable of redemption. It’s only Gamzee and Caliborn who are truly beyond it.

How does Davepeta defeat Lord English?

With a hug.

They wrap their claws around him, and carry him into the sun like a piece of garbage. It’s an aggressive hold, but it’s also effectively an embrace.

And I have to wonder: in those final moments, did they sense a connection there? Did Equius and Dirk stir somewhere within Lord English? Did they give him a moment’s pause? Resist him? Make it just the tiniest bit easier for Davepeta to do their work?

If so, then that, too, is heroism.

At the very least, it’s circumstantially simultaneous with the hug we see in Act 6, and so it carries the same message:

Redemption.

Not for the shitheads, but for those who wanted to be better.

And if this isn’t enough, there’s a third reconciliation here, too: between author and reader, or to put it in other terms, author and character.

If Lord English is a shadow of the author, what part of the author can be redeemed? Maybe not the destructive, antagonistic urges. But the part that plans and designs and philosophizes as Dirk does. That part of Hussie wanted Davepeta to be there, to strike that final blow, and made it happen.

Because, when you get right down to it, as much as Hussie pretends to be antagonistic toward his readers and the characters they enjoy, it’s the fans, the shippers, the furries, those whose hearts go out to a cute, shy cat girl that he most celebrates.

Hussie fucking loves Nepeta.

Nepeta and Equius are, sneakily, the best characters in Homestuck, because they understand its fundamental message: that to succeed in Homestuck is to defy Homestuck. They defy everything it throws at them, and somehow, improbably, come out on top.

All of this is there on that page, a whole edifice of storytelling culminating in that singular, grand, supremely indulgent expression, a feast of looping leitmotif and color and imagery and meme and sound. It’s all there, if you know where to look.

Nepeta and Equius love each other, and that’s pretty fucking great.

See? I told you.

<> Ari

#nepeta #equius #davepeta #homestuck analysis #arquius #meowrails #davesprite #hal #trying to get out ahead of hussie's commentary for a change #happy 4/13 :33 #<3 #stay tuned #feast of homestuck 2020