#i wakeupstrange

[renaroo]

1000% agreed on Mayday’s look! And I say this as someone who still likes a lot of her Amazing-era outfits! Reading as a teen girl who wasn’t very girly, either, it made her more relatable to me. And don’t get me started on the long hair. It worked for me a... storytelling thing? To show time had passed and she was trying to move on from webswinging? But I kept waiting for the day she’d cut it again!

I’m so glad there’s other Mayday fans who get what I mean! I love her so much and it was such an inspiration to have a character like her, it seems so odd to make changes to her look and features that were obviously specific choices when they first designed her.

#Mayday Parker #Spidergirl #i wakeupstrange #ask and you shall receive

[traincat]

Ben Reilly truly is the perfect Jack of All Trades. You could claim he’s done whatever job in a story needs doing and, honestly, who’s to say he hasn’t? (Canon jobs off the top of my head: teacher’s assistant, barista, janitor, salesperson... criminal mastermind? If that counts?) Not that, um. I’ve ever considered what career I would give Ben in a world where Marvel gives me a series for some reason. (The answer is “trying to live off gig work”. Emphasis on “trying”.)

See “trying to live off gig work” sounds like exactly the kind of thing Marvel would try to foist off on Peter Parker in a new series to make him seem “young and relatable” and where I would hate it entirely but if you say Ben Reilly should be living off gig work it’s like, yes, please, where can I buy it? But yeah, I think that’s an underused joy of Ben’s existence (and an underutilized one in my dream world where Spider-Man comics have All The Fic) -- who’s to say he HASN’T been a florist?

And then there’s Kaine or “why do any job when you can just take cash from drug dealers and live in an opulent hotel suite.”

#*replies #i-wakeupstrange

[maydayparkers]

unclean thots!!! it’s one my fave little recurring mc2 things. we see a poster in felicity’s room, too, i think. and wes has at least one shirt. i feel like wild thing might also be a fan but i haven’t read those comics in a longggg time. ps: we don’t get any details about the band! but, for some reason, I’ve always imagined they’re a girl group. maybe pop-punk? basically in my heart they’re Josie and the Pussycats. but that may be my undying love for the movie talking.

asfdvfdvfv #goodtastegang. its definitely a grungy punk band. i can feel it in my bones

#asks #i-wakeupstrange

[90spiderbros]

i-wakeupstrange replied to your post “some notes about ben because i think about him a lot and as you all…”

the spider-carnage thing is actually really interesting! because it happens when ben THINKS he’s the “real” one but even CARNAGE is like “are you sure???” so yeah… even the symbiote knows you’re lying to yourself, ben…

#i-wakeupstrange #replies #there is so much to cry about this boi i swear to god #im dying of heartbreak #im dying

[acavatica]

i-wakeupstrange said:

i’m not including this in my review of the elevator fic because it was becoming its own huge, ridiculous tangent, but in short: it’s now my headcanon that Marco is into anime (OF COURSE why didn’t I realize sooner) and in a roundabout way that’s Peter’s doing. (he’s a little old for NGE but, I think, about the right age to have gotten real into, say, Robotech. and decide to show his son these shows. because he’s a Cool Dad. or tried to be before... you know.)

Peter told himself that he was watching cartoons because of the baby, but also all the baby books he’d tried to force Eva to read had said that babies have about a foot of vision and see colors like a dog. Then he told himself that he was watching cartoons because the bright colors and laser sounds kept him awake. At least that wasn’t a complete lie. 

The full truth was that he thought Robotech was cool. It was serialized, which was more than he could say for any American TV shows. It wasn’t as if Peter could read Dune with a baby in his arms no matter how much he wanted to, even if he’d missed the last two books and another was coming out later that year. And it wasn’t as if Peter could read Dune anyway since he was off Ritalin again, but that was neither here nor there. TV shows would catch up to book series eventually.

The fact that it had a story he could follow was just a bonus. The real draw of Robotech was that it aired in marathons in the middle of the night. That was a lot less likely to wake up his ten-week-old than changing his Doctor Who tapes every four episodes. Plus, he’d had to pay someone on USENET to ship the tapes all the way from Brighton. If he wore them out, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find the guy ripping VHS tapes on net.tv.drwho again.

Eva’s alarm went off, muffled by the bedroom door. Peter closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the couch cushion. 5:30 already. He’d been letting her get most of the sleep to reimburse her for the whole pregnancy thing, but now that she was going back to work, he wouldn’t even have a choice.

He listened to her shuffle around the kitchen. He heard every step of her putting on a pot of coffee. Eva never did anything quietly, but it hadn’t taken him long to get used to it. After all, there was nothing more comforting than knowing his ever-so-slightly evil partner would at least never be able to sneak up on him. 

He opened his eyes to catch her shaking out her still-rumpled hair and stretching out the crick in her back. He heard that too, from all the way across the room. Another thing Peter was repaying her for. She saw him watching and closed the distance between them. Eva draped her elbows over the back of the couch and touched her cheek to Peter’s head. Peter took a deep breath, and he smelled her shampoo and the coffee and their new baby. 

Putting his PhD on hold was worth it.

Eva cocked her head to the side, rolling her chin over Peter’s forehead. “Wow, look at her hair. Japan really has progressive ideas about the meaning of ‘spiral curls.’” She walked around to the front of the couch, plopped down, and held out her arms. “Hand him over.”

Marco started whining almost immediately. 

“I’m surprised you know it’s Japanimation.”

Eva rolled her eyes. “We had Japanese cartoons in Mexico. And actually, the acting was way better than this.”

“Yeah, but were there giant fighting robots?”

“I dunno, this shit is for nerds.” Marco was still fussing in her arms, but she was looking down at him like she understood where he was coming from. “You’re gonna make our kid a nerd, aren’t you?”

Peter smiled. “I don’t know what you expected when you decided to have a baby with me.”

“Feh, yeah, ‘decided.’” Eva stretched her leg out and gave Peter’s knee a good nudge.

She pulled her leg back, crossed her ankles, and cradled Marco with her whole body. All three of them fell quiet, and Minmay sang Marco back to sleep.

⁠—⁠—⁠— 

Marco was born whining, and after four years, he still only stopped when he was asleep.

“Why do I have to do daycare?”

“You asked to watch Voltron. It’s the fifth time we’ve watched Voltron. Please watch Voltron.”

Marco bobbed his head back and forth as he quoted the onscreen conversation between Queen Merla and King Zarkon: “The chamber is full of quarks. ⁠— Quirks? ⁠— No, quarks. You see, everything is made of atoms, and all atoms are made of quarks. ⁠— Hm, nice, but how does it work? ⁠— Well, there are six kinds of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange. And my favorite kind, charmed.”

“Well. At least we can be sure you’re my kid. And Eva’s. And of why I like this show.”

“If you like it, don’t complain.”

Peter ran his hand over his hair and tried to ignore how thin it was getting. “Definitely Eva’s kid…” 

Marco rolled over closer to Peter and looked up at him pleadingly. “Whyyy do I have to do daycare?”

“Because,” Peter said reluctantly. “I finally finished school, and it was really hard, but I got a cool job out of it.”

Marco’s eyes basically tripled in size, and he poked out his lower lip. Definitely, 100% for sure, Eva’s kid. “But I’ll miss you.”

Peter sighed. “I’ll miss you too. But you’re starting school in the fall anyway, so think of it like practice.”

Marco crossed his arms and turned his eyes back to the TV. He stayed quiet for maybe a minute, long enough for the pilots to form Voltron. Without taking his eyes off the TV, he said, “What if they don’t know how to microwave Spaghetti-Os?”

“If there’s any lesson you have to learn, it’s that sometimes you have to settle for Spaghetti-Os that aren’t made by Chef Boyardee Champion of the World, Your Dad.”

“Spaghetti-Os aren’t even Chef Boyardee,” Marco mumbled.

Peter reached his leg over and nudged Marco’s knee with his foot. “Don’t you want to be brave like Lance?”

Marco pushed Peter’s foot away, crossed his arms again, and sank into the couch. “No. I wanna be diablo-lolical like Prince Lotor.”

“Well, Prince Lotor doesn’t even need his dad.”

Marco glanced over at Peter, and Peter grinned. Marco sank even further into the couch until his feet almost touched the floor.

⁠—⁠—⁠— 

The bluish glow of the TV cast long shadows across the room. There wasn’t much contrast because it was a pretty dark movie, but Marco was still illuminated against the dull, colorless room. The volume was only one notch above mute, but he was sitting on his knees, so close to the TV that he could almost make out every word. It’s not like the sound would have bothered his dad, even if he turned it all the way up. Marco kept it low so he could still hear Peter breathing, and even acknowledging that feeling ate away his insides.

It had been a whole year, and for a while Marco had tried not to think about how he was the only thing keeping his dad alive, in more ways than one. It got harder the longer Peter didn’t get better. Marco didn’t even have cable to distract himself from his messed up life. He just had the same old VHS tapes, and they’d had to donate a bunch of them to Goodwill when they’d moved. 

The box was still there, still packed and next to the TV, labeled in Marco’s sloppy kid handwriting. Peter hadn’t helped with the move⁠—it had mostly been Jake’s family and his mom’s relatives he’d never met and would probably never see again. Marco could still see his hands pulling the tapes off the shelves, sorting them, reading the labels in Peter’s sloppy grownup handwriting, and not being able to bear to throw away the memories of sitting between his mom and dad with popcorn in his lap, even if he might never be able to watch those tapes again.

There were only a few tapes scattered around the plastic milk crate the TV sat on. The rest were still in the box. Marco had gone through them dozens of times, and he was still limited to the few tapes he didn’t associate with a time when he had a family. 

He’d never watched Ghost in the Shell with his dad. That was probably a good thing, because there was a lot of nudity, and that was always awkward. There was also some gore, which Peter knew gave Marco nightmares, even if he pretended not to be scared. Marco had played the movie in front of Peter dozens of times anyway, but his eyes didn’t track it, and he didn’t tell Marco that he should turn it off, he was too young to see all these nipples.

Marco turned around, blinded from sitting so close to the TV. He didn’t need to see his dad. He knew he was curled in on himself, his face buried in the place where the back of the couch met the seat and the arm. There was no way to know if he was asleep or awake, and Marco wasn’t even sure those words had meaning in Peter’s life anymore.

“Hey Dad,” Marco said, his voice creaky, either from disuse, disgust, or some other kind of emotion. “What do you think about the whole brains jacking into the internet thing? Realistic? It seems like the kind of thing you’d have worked on.”  Marco listened to Peter’s breathing. It never changed. Marco could say anything. “You know. When you worked.”

Marco turned away, back to the TV. He pressed Stop, and the tape clicked off, flooding the room with light so bright and blue, it hurt his eyes. He pressed rewind and the whir of the tape drowned out Peter’s breathing. It was crazy, but as the VCR started to grind to the end of the tape, Marco was suddenly, irrationally, completely sure that when the tape stopped rolling, the room would be totally silent. His body flashed hot and then cold and his pulse pounded painfully in his temples.

The tape clicked off. Marco held his breath.

Peter breathed in. Out. In. Out.

Marco pressed play, turned the volume up a few more notches, and got to his feet. As he passed, he shoved his dad’s leg with his foot. He stood over him, waiting like he expected some kind of reaction. The TV lit up his motionless body in green, gray, white. The cyborg pulled the cables out of her neck and stood.

“If only someone would ghost hack you.”

Marco went into his bedroom⁠—the only bedroom⁠—and slammed the door.  

⁠—⁠—⁠— 

Marco’s back was flat against the dirt floor of the scoop, his head resting on his folded arms. His right leg was draped over Ax’s back and he’d slowly tangled his left leg up in Ax’s tail. Ax didn’t like that, and he knew Ax didn’t like it, and that’s why he’d taken it slow. He’d started by sticking his leg under Ax’s tail. He’d waited a couple weeks, and then he’d surreptitiously make a loop over the course of an hour. Now, after like a month of acclimating him, Ax’s tail was wrapped around Marco’s leg like a boa constrictor, and maybe Ax didn’t even notice.

He definitely noticed. Marco had just pulled off an incredible feat of exposure therapy. Ax just wasn’t allergic to how annoying Marco was anymore. Too bad the allergy was familial, and it was harder to wallow a hawk into submission.

<You’re not even watching,> Tobias complained.

Marco lolled his head to the side and pointed his eyes at the TV. “Why are you making me read TV, Tobias? The point of TV is to not have to read.”

<Subtitles are more authentic,> Tobias said, his voice dripping with condescension.

“But what about Ax? Poor Ax can’t read at all.”

<I can read,> Ax said, his voice a mixture of defensive and arrogant. <And even if I couldn’t, my translator chip has no trouble processing Japanese.> Snobbiness ran in their family too. 

“I’m just saying, I’d be able to pay more attention if I could understand the words and look at the pictures at the same time. You know, how it’s intended to be consumed?”

<It’s intended to be consumed in Japanese.> 

Marco rolled his eyes and sighed. It was the obnoxious kind of sigh, the voiced kind that’s practically a groan. “It’s just robots, dude, it’s not that serious.”

<Neon Genesis Evangelion is art, Marco,> Tobias said, ratcheting the pretension up to eleven. <It’s an exploration of how humanity would develop, given exposure to advanced alien technology in the face of an oncoming alien threat. And the only thing protecting humanity from annihilation is some teenagers with special powers. It’s like, relatable.> 

“Wow,” Marco said sarcastically. “Never seen anything like that before.” That was basically the plot of Robotech mixed with Voltron, but boring.

<I mean, you must have never seen anime before, or you’d know how terrible the English dubs are.>

Marco sat up on his elbows and narrowed his eyes. Ax tightened his tail ever so slightly around Marco’s leg, like he was trying to hold him back. Marco pulled his leg free. “That’s pretty funny, since how could you even have watched so much subbed anime when no one cared enough about you to buy you decent clothes or new shoes or Clearasil? Let alone to go out of their way to buy you anime, subtitled specifically, the way it’s intended, of course.”

Tobias stared at him. Ax stared at him. Hell, Shinji Ikari stared at him.

Marco couldn’t take even a minute of it. “Say something.”

<I just wanted to share something I like with you.> 

Tobias opened his wings, fluttered to the edge of the scoop entrance, and flew away.

Ax was still looking at him with all four eyes. Marco squirmed, but he pressed his lips into a line and didn’t break eye contact.

<That was too far,> Ax said finally, his voice more gentle than Marco deserved. <Why did you react so forcefully?>

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Marco leaned around Ax, grabbed the remote, and changed the audio to English. “Let’s just watch this dumb robot show.”

#animorphs #axmarco #my fic #IS marco into anime? #cav answers asks

[hitomikisugi]

Top 5 Anime Characters

-✨Rules: List your top 5 favorite anime characters and tag 10 people✨

Tagged by: @whovian-on-ice

Tagging: @tierouy , @thiensee , @muchechopsmusings , @bidonica , @i-wakeupstrange , @castlewyvern , @oh-well-alls-swell-in-hell , @kurory , @adamworu , @noxistent

1. Nana Komatsu - NANA

2. Rin Matsuoka - Free!

3. Riza Hawkeye - Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

4. Hitomi Kisugi - Cat’s Eye

5. Oikawa Tooru - Haikyuu!!

[spider-xan]

@i-wakeupstrange replied to your post:                    Also, sometimes I wonder if I should upload some...               

I would read Mags stuff! I admit, I’ve been terrible about remembering to comment lately, but I would read for sure.

Okay, I will definitely keep that in mind! And I’m cool if there’s no commenting and whatnot, since I get like, weird anxiety over replying to comments and commenting myself (like, I get really caught up in having to be in the perfect~ mood to do both, which doesn’t exist, and then it doesn’t get done and I feel bad, but it’s too awkward to do it really late and draw even more attention to it, etc.).

But yeah, I’ve never posted fanfic on tumblr before, and I haven’t really used AO3 except to bookmark stuff and archive old shit from ff.net, so I’ll have to figure out how all of that works. And decide what to post, since like, there’s some stuff where I think it could stand alone without the context of the RP game I was in, but there’s definitely other stuff where I’m like, hmm this wouldn’t make sense if someone hadn’t been, say, following the tributes that round, plus I need to figure out how to acknowledge decisions that weren’t mine. Like, THG games have set casts, so it wasn’t my decision to have Mags be both the first D4 victor AND volunteer, but I for sure ran with the mod’s idea on that to really incorporate both into her personality and concept, and I can’t take full credit for that.

And then yeah, IDK how often people do things like re-post RP narratives as fanfic in other places! I feel like I haven’t seen that done before, and IDK if it’s like, an unspoken taboo~ or something.

#no re-blogging #i-wakeupstrange #replies

[maryjanewatson]

i-wakeupstrange replied to your post “ൠ for mj because i like this symbol and mj”

this is SO CUTE!!! i love it i love it i love it. and i can see it starting even before she met peter like as a way to cope with stuff at home? and also YES PETER WOULD BE THE MOST UNCOORDINATED DORK AND AWFUL AT JUST DANCE

yeah same! i just wasn’t sure of the availability/what games were out when she was that young b/c...sliding comics timelines make everything confusing, lmao, so i didn’t want to mention it but YEAH TOTALLY! and YEAH...WAY TO GO, BUDDY

#replies #i wakeupstrange #spins a web any size catches thieves just like flies but can't win a simple dance game smh pete

[traincat]

speaking of clones and peter’s hair... kaine!!! i mean... I’M jewish and my hair isn’t too different from his long 90s locks. (which i kind of miss.)

If I let my hair dry on its own I 100% look like a Klingon so Kaine’s super curly 90s hair WAS actually representation. Stop drawing him looking like he just got out of a Drybar! 

#*replies #i-wakeupstrange

[traincat]

About Baby May! This is a tangent, since it involves Kaine’s reaction to her death, but... I've always felt him saving Aracely, in the first issue of SS, was also about atoning for not saving Baby May. It makes their friendship all the more (bitter)sweet for me.

That’s an interesting interpretation and it is very bittersweet! I hadn’t thought about that, but I like it, and that’s what makes having 80 million issues worth of a series like Spider-Man to compare and contrast and pull from against each other fun: multiple interpretations and being able to spot different things in the canon. 

This was my first time rereading Scarlet Spider in a while (it was one of the earlier series I read when I started seriously keeping Spider-Man refs and so my refs for it were a mess, so it was half “I want to reread this” and half “I need to fix this folder”) and so when I was rereading it I did note the similarities between Kaine’s Jackal trauma flashback and the circumstances he first meets Aracely in:

(Scarlet Spider (2012) #2)

(Scarlet Spider (2012) #1) Both in the piles of corpses, both asking someone to save them -- so I do think my personal read on it is that a large part of it is about Kaine being able to save himself from that horrific experience through the act of saving Aracely. But I like yours a lot too. (Allllll the guilt and trauma and sadness.)

#*replies #traincat talks comics #i-wakeupstrange

[traincat]

speaking of Spidey movies, i’ve been meaning to say thanks for all your TASM posts! the films left me cold at first — though i loved the cast — and your enthusiasm encouraged me to give them another chance. (as for the raimi flicks, harsh but fair. i’ll always love them for getting me into spider-man! and there are elements i still like, but they... really don’t hold up in a lot of ways. although i’d replace comics otto with raimi otto in a heartbeat.)

I do think the Raimi films do a really good job at presenting what has now become some iconic Spider-Man imagery, and that their Otto is much more sympathetic than 616 Otto – although I’m not sure that’s a good thing in the long run, considering what’s being done with Otto in current comics canon. (I do really appreciate what was done with PS4 Otto and I love Liv from Spider-Verse, but those are the only Doc Ocks I personally like.) And obviously different adaptations are going to strike different people different ways, and that’s just how storytelling works – compared to my issues with Homecoming, I feel like my issues with the Raimi films are pretty small potato. I don’t like them, but it’s not like I actively object to anything in them. It’s just that their storytelling and characterization choices personally leave me cold, which isn’t an indictment of the quality of the films themselves. I don’t feel they’re the best adaptations, but then I don’t feel Spider-Man is necessarily best suited to a film adaptation in the first place, which ultimately ties into what I like about the TASM series – when you look at that series, there’s a lot going on in every scene. And I’ve heard complaints about that, that it makes the films too busy, but on a personal level I’d prefer there to be more going on than less, and TASM/2 certainly delivers on that front.

Anyway, thank you for reading my posts and considering my points of view! It does mean a lot and I do appreciate it. At the end of the day, regardless of my other opinions on the various film series, I do think the scene with Peter and the little boy in the car from the first TASM film is the epitome of Spider-Man live action film – it’s who Spider-Man is supposed to be, and who Peter Parker is supposed to be.

#*replies #i-wakeupstrange

[traincat]

i just wanted to let you know that kaine and may fic makes me so, so happy. i don't understand how she still hasn't met her clone nephews? it's such a missed opportunity??? even if it just stays an excerpt, it made my day.

Thank you! It’s a crime May hasn’t gotten to meet them! Especially after the scene where Kaine hangs back to watch her go at the airport in Amazing Spider-Man #673.I do want it to be A Fic I Finish, because there’s not enough Kaine content out there, but it’s one of those fics that comes with both a To Read and To Reread list, so while I work through those I’m mostly just jotting down disjointed bits and slowly linking them together into some semblance of a story.

An earlier Kaine and May bit:

Slowly, May reached up to touch his cheek, andKaine’s eyes burned at the corners.

“Oh,” she said, staring into his eyes. “Oh,sweetheart. Come here.”

His knees gave out under him and he almostdragged her to the floor with him. He clutched handfuls of her cardigan,pressed his face to her stomach, breathed in the smell of her: powdery laundrydetergent, rose perfume, maple syrup. Before he knew it, there were tearscoursing hard and angry down his face, dripping down his nose onto the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Kaine sobbed, shaking his headeven as she cupped the back of it. He wanted to treasure this moment, thefeeling of May’s fingers sliding through his hair, but all he felt was theawful shame coursing hot through his veins. “I’m so sorry,forgive me, please forgive me –"

#myfic #*replies #i-wakeupstrange

[akirakan]

Kinda overthought my own post.

@i-wakeupstrange is this a accurate depiction of Anya’s and Fabian’s arc?

(Oh yeah, this was based on another comic which already has many parodies, I tried to find it but couldn’t, so if someone has the original please send it for credit!)

#Mayday Parker #Anya Corazon #Black Tarantula #Spider-Girl #SpiderGirl #MC2 #Fabian LaMuerto #Araña #Arana #my art

[maryjanewatson]

ൠ for mj because i like this symbol and mj

it’s a cute symbol it looks sort of like a face or an alien!!

and ok random headcanon

she is definitely more of a video game person than peter.  peter’s too busy to be able to really finish them and then he’s sort of like “okay but i could do that FASTER and why can’t you go up the wall here it’d be so much easier” and he’s just not a video game guy.  mj on the other hand has been playing mario for AGES.  didn’t so much visit arcades when she was younger but console stuff when she’s older?  totally.  she’s a Pro at tomb raider, loves stuff like “just dance” b/c it’s fun, probably reaaaally into zelda, you get the picture.  plus, like, being a civilian when you hang around a superhero all the time?  it sorta helps to play around as a hero in a video game world and lose yourself in that rather than feel weird and like you’re not “doing enough” because you don’t have powers and stuff? so it’s sort of comforting, too!

#i wakeupstrange #asks #meme thing #ty!! #she ropes peter into playing just dance with her every once in a while and he's So Bad at it he can't keep in time w/ the screen at all

[maryjanewatson]

i-wakeupstrange replied to your post “hey…jewish or muslim spidey…think about it…”

true story: i thought it was canon that peter was jewish until i got REALLY into spidey comics and saw the christian hints in the parker home. i could go on about this??? like. a lot of early comics characters are coded jewish anyway but. yeah. as a tiny kid in an interfaith i latched on even harder to spidey because i thought he was like me. and that is the end of my tiny story.

no same!! i was 90% sure he was canonically til i did outside research and found lists of the stuff proving me wrong and ugh 8/ but esp considering stan and jack and how so many of those early comics started yeah...i don;t have the same personal connection but it is something that makes me feel some kinda way and i reallyy wish it’d like. idk. get focus or addressed or Confirmed or something

#replies #i wakeupstrange