#i would not survive on that hellscape with people like this holy shit

[momentomori24]

I swear to God, Twitter being able to accumulate so many brain-dead, malicious, pseudo intellectual low lives all in one place at the same time is a phenomenon worthy of being studied under a microscope in a science lab. And no, that is not a compliment.

Thankfully people have already spoken out against this bullshit-- the fact that people needed to is already maddening to think about-- but as someone who got the basic gist of what happened literally yesterday I'll also put my voice out there: Don't you fucking dare try to paint Hbomb as a murderer over this situation.

Somerton may be a lying, misogynistic plagiarist and conman, but he obviously doesn't deserve to die and while I do make fun of the guy, I genuinely hope that he continues to have a life after the dust has settled on everything. Not on YouTube or any social media platform for a long time at least, but just a life nontheless. I don't wish what he's potentially going through on anyone, and I hope that he makes it through this. But regardless of if he does or doesn't-- and God forbid he doesn't-- none of this is Hbomb's fault. It's not his fault, or Kat's fault, or Jessie's fault (because apparently there's people blaming her too cuz WHY NOT), or anybody's fault. All they did was call out his actions, hold him accountable for the harm he's done. They have done nothing to deserve having to carry this on their shoulders should the worst happen. They did nothing wrong. They didn't kill James (he's not confirmed dead yet either btw). They are not murderers. And to the people saying they are: say those words out loud, listen how they sound like, and re-evaluate. Just cease.

And to people like this:

''Oh I'm not blaming him for anything I'm just blaming him for what his audience did because according to HIM you're responsible for your audience'' Yeah, you people can shut your mouths too. Of course you're responsible for your audience, and that includes Hbomb too. However, your tiny, godless little monkey brain can't see why your argument is still rubbish even with that in mind. The difference between James, Internet Historian and Hbomb is that Hbomb never promoted problematic behaviour to his audience. If you promote problematic shit like harassment or misogyny or racism, then yeah, you're absolutely responsible for how your behaviour influences your audience. But that's not what he did. He made it very clear where he stood on those things, literally stating that ''if anyone were to harass Somerton on his behalf they are worse than him and will not see the light of heaven''. He's done his part in making it clear that harassment is wrong, so if someone went out of their way to go against that and harass James anyway that doesn't reflecf on him at all. Also, what the hell do you mean ''hatemobbed'' to suicide? I don't doubt there are people who went to extremes because those bad apples always exist, but most of the things I've seen are valid critisisms, memes and call outs about that guy. If holding people accountable for their actions and poking fun at them a little counts as 'hatemobbing'' (which has Filip calling his critics a ''lynch mob'' energy tbh) what the hell do you call actual hatemobbing then? Do we just let people continue being shitty because calling them out ''damages their mental health'' or ''drives them to suicide'' then? Is that a world you want to live in?

Same thing goes for people like this:

Criticing someone for their objectively bullshit content and wanting them dead are two seperate things. What the actual hell is wrong with you. The plagiarist in question is a person. Those ''harshest critics'' are still people. And because we're people, we care. I'd rather James pump out more plagiarised slop than commit suicide. I'd still hate him for it, but I'd prefer him being alive over the alternative any day. We all do. None of us would sleep easier knowing he's dead just because he wouldn't be ''committing the cardinal sin of putting out a 'pure content mill' video'' because someone taking their own life is horrific-- especially Hbomberguy, how dare you even try to imply that?

And this gets me to the reason I'm furiously typing all this out in the first place: Hbomb is the fucking victim here, so stop treating him like he isn't. He tried making things as right as possible by compensating those that were burned by James through a video where he revealed everything there needs to be known about the guy so that less people fall victim to his actions and lies. To just ignore the harm James was causing while he had the evidence to prove it and platform too big to threaten into non existence should he speak out would've been bad. So he didn't. He did the right thing by sticking with the people James had stolen from, giving them a voice and making them known after they've been scrubbed from the picture by decidedly being uncredited for their works or bullied into silence. He shouldn't have to deal with this for doing the right thing. He shouldn't be labelled a murderer for doing the right thing. He shouldn't have to have the death of a man on his conscience for doing the right thing. People claiming otherwise are obviously wrong, but I can't imagine what all this must feel like right now. Because even tho they're wrong, guilt isn't a rational thing, and I know that if I were in his position I'd still feel like a morally bankrupt individual were the worst to happen even if I knew that it was not my fault. This isn't a funny story. So to add to this dumpsterfire by using it as a prop to bash on a creator you don't like and immediately write Somerton off as dead even when he's not even been confirmed dead yet to do that shows how little these people actually care about the thing they're talking about. They don't care a guy potentially killed himself-- what they care about is using it to paint Hbomb in a bad light because they don't like him. Here they are, posting memes and ill jokes about this very delicate situation while barely a day since the news broke out had passed. It's opportunistic, it's sickening, and literally the exact thing he criticised in his video when talking about 'content mills'. Like, I know none of these clowns bothered to actually watch it, but have some self-awareness. And some shame too, while you're at it.

This long story short: I'm writing this to contribute to the narrative not getting twisted to make Hbomb out to be the villian. Same goes for everyone else. Don't let these people paint them as the villians. If I see another person pull this shit again I will literally bite you and shred you into salad and spit you back out because I hate you so much and I mean that wholeheartedly.

To Hbomb: you will never see this but if you do, take care of yourself.

To the asshats this post is about: Delete your account. Cease all together. Stop talking about this. Just leave him the fuck alone.

#hbomberguy #james somerton #this post took me ages to finish and really grinds my gears #i would not survive on that hellscape with people like this holy shit #really hope this situation turns out for the best #i wrote this while i was frustrated and sleep deprived so apologies for unnoticed grammar i'll correct it later #i'll be keeping my eyes peeled for any updates on this situation this is actually getting scary

[thirstyforcharacters]

Healing

Part 3 of the Mistakes Series

Part 1: Mistakes. Part 2: Reconnection

Summary: The past repeats itself, but Joel refuses to make the same mistake twice.

Warnings: angst!! canon typical violence, brief description of gunshot wound, Joel is finally getting good at emotions :)

WC: 1279

Notes: Hellooooo! I wasn’t sure if I was going to write a part 3, but I was inspired, so I wrote the entire thing this morning! Finally, we get to the fluffy stuff, but of course I still had to sprinkle in some angst! This is definitely the last full installment of the series, but I wouldn’t mind writing some blurbs and whatnot about these two, so if you still want to see this pairing, you can totally send me some requests for that :) or if you just want to send requests in general, feel free to do that as well! thank you all so much for reading this series: I’ve never written this much angst before, so I was afraid it wouldn’t turn out well, but I’m super thankful that you all enjoyed Mistakes!!!

PS: anything in italics is a flashback :)

Things were awkward for a while.

You didn’t feel as though you could fully trust him yet. You were too afraid of him hurting you again. But you adored Ellie, and because Ellie insisted upon you coming over and sharing her stack of comic books, Joel slowly became a more consistent figure in your life again. As spring became summer, you learned to trust him more. You told him about your solo travels, how you had taken out a raiding party single handedly and survived more than one encounter with Infected. He opened up to you as well, telling you the tale of how he and Ellie came to Jackson just a few months ago. You really felt for him: the things they had been through were terrifying, and you could see how much the two had grown to care for each other throughout their journey. And seeing the way Joel loved Ellie gave you hope. That maybe he could love you and not shut you out.

Little did you know that that theory would be tested sooner than you expected.

The two of you were paired up for patrol often (which Tommy said was because “you’re one of the only people he tolerates in this town, and I need a break sometimes.”), and today was no different. You were trudging along the craggy mountain path, stepping over long, broken branches, dodging wildlife, and trying not to make too much noise. During this part of the patrol, you always walked in silence, not wanting to attract unwanted attention. There would be time for talking once you got to the safehouse, a cabin that you were now about halfway to.

The silence was broken by a gunshot. You barely remembered what happened next.

You collapsed to the ground, pressing your hand to your stomach as it became coated with red.

Joel couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe as he saw you fall. He could only think of the first time.

“Sweetheart, please.”

His pleas fell upon deaf ears. Your eyes had fluttered shut as you lost consciousness, unable to reply.

“JOEL!”

Tess’s shout was the only thing that pulled him from his own head. He had never moved so fast, scooping you up without a second thought and sprinting after Tess, carrying you the entire way to Bill and Frank’s without rest.

“Y/n will be okay, Joel,” Tess assured him, “Frank will take care of things.”

Joel nodded, barely hearing as he ran. He needed you. Holy shit, he needed you. More than he needed anyone else in this god-forsaken hellscape. He loved you too much.

He shook it off, seeing the concealed figures through the bushes. He saw red, going after the raiders with a rage he had only felt a few times. When Sarah was shot. When he killed an entire warehouse of Fireflies for Ellie. And now, for you.

The raiders had no chance. They dropped like flies under Joel’s thunderous fury, with knives sunk into their stomachs, gunshots to their hearts, and fists breaking in their faces until they could speak no more. When they were all dead, the threat of any danger to you taken care of, he ran to your side, seeing your eyes were already closed.

“Shit,” he hissed, quickly tearing off strips of his shirt to tie around you and attempt to staunch the bleeding, “I’ve got you, sweetheart. Not fuckin dying on my watch.”

He picked you up, not unlike the first time, as he ran to Jackson. The year and a half between the first time he did this and now was affecting him: his legs burned and his breaths were ragged. But he didn’t stop. Not for a goddamn minute. He needed you.

It felt far too long before he saw the towering, wooden gates to the town, which swung open almost immediately as the gatekeepers saw the scene before them. Joel sprinted down the streets, carrying your limp body to the infirmary.

The doors burst open as Dr. Casey and two nurses saw Joel, frantically looking around with you in his arms.

“Raiders,” was all he could get out, but they understood.

“Here,” the doctor said as calmly as she could, gesturing toward a table, “we’ll get the bullet out and stitch Y/n up. Don’t worry.”

Joel grit his teeth. Don’t worry? How in the absolute hell was he supposed to do that? But he didn’t say a thing as Dr. Casey got to work. He trusted the doctor fully: she was one of the few people who actually was a doctor before everything went to shit, so she knew what she was doing. But he was terrified. He just got you back, and he could lose you again.

One of the nurses, Allen, who had been there when you were first brought to Jackson, looked at him and said, “Joel. Y/n will be okay. We promise.”

He nodded, swallowing the lump in his throat as the door swung open again.

It was Ellie, who for once, didn’t speak. She just gently took Joel’s hand and led him to their home. And he broke down, holding one of his girls as he cried for the other.

It was a few hours before a knock sounded as his door.

It was Allen, who had a soft smile on his face.

“Y/n’s fine. Lost a decent bit of blood, so she’s still weak. But she’s okay. Do you want to se-”

He couldn’t even finish his sentence as Joel bolted past him in the direction of the clinic.

Ellie giggled, “Sorry, he’s just excited. So I’ll thank you for the both of us.”

Allen nodded, smiling a little wider, “Whole town thought he’d be a grump forever. But having both of you in his life seems like it’s helping.”

She smiled, “It’s not just helping him.”

The door to the infirmary burst open again, but with a much different purpose. You were in the corner. You were bandaged and pretty beat up, but you were alive. You and Dr. Casey looked up at the sound of the wooden doors banging against the wall. You couldn’t help the fond smile that made its way onto your features as a blur of a black flannel and blue jeans burst onto the scene, wrapping you up into his tight embrace.

“I’ll leave you alone,” the doctor whispered before disappearing into a back room.

“‘M okay, Joel,” you murmured, your voice muffled into the fabric of his shirt, “you saved me. I’m okay.”

Hearing your voice confirm the very words he needed to hear allowed him to catch his breath.

“Thought I lost you again,” he said, gripping your shirt with calloused hands.

You shook your head, “Didn’t lose me.”

He pulled away, gently cupping your face in his hands. You could see the wetness beginning to gather in his eyes.

“I-” he swallowed hard, “I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t,” you assured him, “I won’t leave you.”

There was still a bit of fear in you. There was still a chance of him pushing you away as soon as you were healed. You were terrified of that possibility.

But any fear you had immediately washed away as his lips pressed to yours. It was years in the making, and the way you felt when you connected made you wish it had happened years ago. He cupped your face so delicately, and his lips mirrored the softness of his hands, kissing you so tenderly you could cry.

It ended too soon, Joel pulling away to whisper, “I’m not leaving you, either. Ever again.”

And you knew it was safe to believe him.

#joel miller #joel miller tlou #joel miller angst #joel miller fluff #joel miller the last of us #joel miller imagine #joel miller fic #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller fanfic #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #joel miller x y/n #joel miller blurb #joel miller series

[sardonic-the-writer]

Are you familiar with the '1 vs 1000' video Tom did with Tubbo, Ted and Schlatt?

Hear me out: during the separation bit of the video it's actually not a a few minutes of giggles and stress. It's full weeks without even knowing if the other group is alive still. Until eventually reuniting and managing to get the hell away from these 1000 people who're trying to kill the group.

Got any HCs or thoughts? 👀

- 🕷️

i actually wasn't aware of that video until this ask so i had to go and watch it gjengj

• You fucking hated the forest

• Well, not really. You just hated it becuase that's where you had been lost for the past week—battling with swarms of bugs and other hostile wildlife

• All by your lonesome I might add

• How the fuck you had ended up here was a mystery that you personally didn't give enough shits to solve at the moment

• You'd originally been dropped in this hellscape with a few others, barely able to introduce yourself before the ground had begun to tremble

• Any thoughts of an earthquake was thrown out the window as a hoard of bloodthirsty people quickly entered your feild of vision

• The four others you had been stuck with—a group of guys all around your age with varieties of different clothing choises—had promptly begun to yell and run in the opposite direction of the hundered of people running after you all

• Momma hadn't raised no idiot, so you were quick to follow

• Somewhere along the way, you had broken off from all of them, not even noticing until all of the screaming and clamoring from behind you had drifted farther and farther away until it was practically silent

• "Guys? Hey? Hello??"

• Fuck. If only you had been able to remember their names. What was that one dudes name? With the weird facial hair? Schlagg—or no, Schlatt?

• The longer you wandered around, the less their names mattered

• And that's what you did for the next five days. Wandered around, hoping to spot someone friendly. Really. That's all you did

• If you weren't so fucking thirsty, you might have just complained about how bored you were the entire time. Thank god you knew how to siphon rainwater into your mouth. Turns out that one survivalist teacher of yours in highschool was useful for something

• "Fucking god. If I ever find what asshole dumped me here, they'll wish I had killed them when I'm done with 'em—"

• "That's what I'm sayin toots."

• "Wh— Schlagg!?"

• A kick to the leg and deep scowl later, you were not only reminded that his name was, in fact, Schlatt, not Schlagg, but you had also been reunited with your previous acquaintances

• "Wow! Holy shit balls! Look Tobes, we found them! That weirdo from earlier!"

• "Gee. Thanks blondie."

• "Hi!! I'm Tubbo!! I didn't get a chance to talk to you a lot last time! Please don't call me bitchboy."

• "I—"

• "Don't ask."

• Yeah you had been right. They were all bat fucking shit crazy

• Ted, you had learned to be his name, sounded like the most mentally stable out of all of them, so you mostly stuck with him—and in turn Schlatt, who still occasionally glared at you when you mispronounced his name

• Well, you had assumed Ted to be pretty mentally sound. Until you had witnessed him trying to run away from the mob of people in a boat.

• On land.

• With Schlatt.

• Good god how were you going to survive with these people

• "Hey Tubbo, what do you think would happen if I ate this really weird looking plant?"

• "TOMMY NO—"

• Yeah you were fucked

#mcyt #mcyt x reader #mcyt x you #mcyt x y/n #schlatt #schlatt x y/n #schlatt x you #schlatt x reader #ted nivison #ted nivison x you #ted nivison x y/n #ted nivison x reader #tommyinnit #tommyinnit x you #tommyinnit x reader #tommyinnit x y/n #tubbo #tubbo x you #tubbo x reader #tubbo x y/n #x reader #request #au #fanfiction #headcanon

[tanoraqui]

Hi, Maedhros and Fingon from the superhero au make me feral, I love everything about them. if you feel like it I would love to see some more about Elros and Elrond from that au. Or alternatively, i was too shy to suggest anything the other week when you were doing the prompt list, but how about Elros and Elrond, the mafia au, library?

I’ll take “Elros and Elrond from the superhero au” for 500, Alex; thank you!

Elros’s Finwëan superpower is healing, because in THIS house we respect “the hands of the king are the hands of a healer” as an ancient truism of Arda and, accordingly, believe that Elros was the one with innate healing talent and Elrond only learned it later in life, likely in memory of Elros. Superhero au!Elros can heal others and himself by laying hands on them and willing it, though it does require energy from him and concentration. He gets much more efficient with both power and speed once he learns anatomy.

Elrond’s Finwëan power is the ability to radially radiate an aura of peace, in which harmful attacks are physically slowed and the will to violence, and all other negative emotions, are calmed. Ranged projectiles which enter the space also slow, though not necessarily enough to do no damage. He can push it farther out and/or more intensely the longer it goes, with limits. Elrond has to maintain his own sense of peace in order to do this, no anger, fear, desire to injure, etc. Elrond glows while he does this; the light marks the area and strength of effect.

Five generations down from Finwë, these powers are relatively weak compared to previous generations. However, their Maiaran blood means they both have a natural talent for Singing (ie, magic), which they can most easily use to augment their Light-based abilities.

These twins grew up in a post-apocalyptic hellscape timeline in which Morgoth conquered Earth and now most people are dead or, if unlucky, enslaved. The small group of free survivors which their parents led, constantly on the run, was luckier and more protected than most thanks largely to the Silmaril Elwing bore, but they were hunted fiercely by the small surviving band of the Sons of Fëanor (down to Maedhros, Maglor and Amrod) and their few remaining followers...while all were hunted by orcs, wolves, vampires, etc.

They found some sort of rip in reality, maybe caused by Morgoth's discordant war of conquest. Eärendil went through it to seek aid from the Valar. When the Fëanorians cornered them there, waiting for his return, Elwing tried to go through it with the Silmaril. Her sons tried to follow her, holding on to the back of her shirt, holding on to each other.

They got about 1.5 out of 3, and ended up by the side of a random freeway in modern America....

Maglor and Maedhros were driving (being driven) by on their way to a concert - Maglor to sing, Maedhros bullied into having a pleasant night off while supporting his beloved (annoying) brother and smiling for the cameras. Maglor saw 2 bedraggled 6yos trudging along by the side of this random freeway and told the limo driver to pull over...

In short order,

- the Fëanorians are like, 'holy shit, hitherto unknown baby cousins of some sort?!?' because these kids eyes definitely have Light in them

- Elros tries to stab Maglor, because Maglor reaches for them and these are literally the terrible monsters they were fleeing from 30 minutes ago, albeit much cleaner and less obviously scarred, and of course the 6yos from the post-apocalyptic hellscape have their own knives + basic combat training

- Elrond is too scared to stop anything with his power, see: previous comment about monsters.

Maglor's hand gets a little stabbed. Maedhros grabs Elros's arm and wrenches the knife away before he can try again. Elrond bites Maedhros's arm, like, really hard, the way you secretly always want to try biting someone just once, lots of blood.

- Maglor Sings the children to sleep with a hasty but strong lullaby (he was under stress, okay, and stabbed!). He and Maedhros look down at the uneasily-sleeping children.

- "They look a little Turgon-y," Maglor offers. "In the eyebrows?"

- "I don't even know if that's Light like ours," says Maedhros. He kneels down to frisk each boy for more weapons, then picks them up, one in each arm. "Remember Dior?"

- (Dior, son of Lúthien and Beren, had time-travelled back a comic books time!couple years ago from a terrible future in which Fingon was actually for real and ever killed this time so the House of Fëanor went to war with the magical isolated island of Doriath, in the name of retrieving the one Silmaril free of Morgoth, to the detriment of most of the rest of the world. That terrible timeline averted, Dior had stayed in the present and (re?)married his non-future wife, a millennia-old Iathrin forest ranger named Nimloth. They'd just recently had twin sons, though clearly not these ones - those were silver-haired rather than dark, and this one who'd just stabbed Maglor definitely had Fingolfin's nose.)

- (So the Fëanorians both knew that all-out war was to be avoided at almost all cost. But Doriath actually now had two Silmarils, or rather, the same Silmaril twice over, and Maedhros didn't need to say it aloud for Maglor to understand: ransom.)

#my fic #the silmarillion #superheroes #peredhil #kidnap fam #silm super au

[mokadevs]

Recently finished fgo’s olympus so here are some bleary unorganized thoughts on it and my frustrations before i drift off to sleep

i think my biggest problem with olympus is that it over promises.

I think that the set up is amazing. Not referring to atlantis, though atlantis was great as everyone and their mother has said, but the whole sequence of a) entering olympus and b) exploring olympus is incredible. I think its one of the peak examples of fgo constantly being able to make you feel like their are Actual stakes in the narrative despite you as a player knowing that the tree will inevitably be cut and you’ll see the cosmos denied screen flash by again. Running through the city

Hell, Demeter’s entire entrance was bone chilling. I think she has the best mech design of the olympus gods in my biased opinion, and seeing her drop down before the animated screech she lets out that destroys the city was incredible. Truly the first time i saw it i went Holy Shit.

Then… i wont say the lostbelt flops after that but there were a few key areas that it left me wanting.

Personal preference out of the way, ill say the constant deus ex machinas - whether it be for the good guys or the bad guys (if the bad guy has a deus ex machina, is it called that?? Anyway) - started to get a little irritating after a while. The stakes were so, so high at the start, and demeters victory felt so barely clawed for with so many bits and pieces coming together that certain other fights felt like. “Well, okay then.” The twins revealing caligula and then saying “we didnt wanna say we had him for dramatic effect!” was really eye roll worthy, for example, and to be honest i dont really understand how we were able to shmoove our way out of aphrodites mind control hellscape, which was annoying after again i loved demeters fight So much

ill note there that these are things that didnt work for ME, in MY OPINION im sure other people feel other ways about it and i am happy for them for it :]

I think that parts of the lostbelt felt… rushed, and i didnt feel like the power scaling of chaldea matched narratively. With how much trouble we had for a single fighter at the start, i felt like in universe things got too easy with too little justification.

I was really disappointed with dioscuris writing, and also weirded out by the fact that there were twin humans and twin gods but very little was drawn about their connection…?? I was so certain that they would have some sort of relationship, or at least a cool narrative foil, but all we got was the twin humans hating the dioscuri because they killed their friends, and a cheap line about adele criticizing the girl twin for always following what her brother said.

I feel mixed about chaos, because in the moment i was emotionally moved but in retrospect it feels like a bit of a cheap non-foreshadowed reason for musashi to die epicly. Though maybe it was foreshadowed and i missed it; ill have to reread, but for now it just feels Too out of the blue to feel good.

But i think the thing that i think i disliked the most was “actually zeus was going to fuck off in the end and abandon the humans here letting them die so this lostbelt was evil from the start and gudako is objevtively right for this”

And like. Thats so AGGRAVATING for the lostbelt that was drummed up to be the one that would give us the most trouble, the lostbelt that was supposed to be the model one.

What i really wanted out of this lostbelt was a lostbelt that was objectively better than earth. That really? The only reason we could justify destroying it was for our own survival. Not because the lostbelt was in some way flawed, but because we have no other choice. With how sickly killing the first lostbelt felt, i really wanted lostbelt 5 to blow me out of the park with the emotional weight of killing a world and it just. didnt even try. It threw in some half assed line about why this lostbelt was well and truly evil

Which like! Honestly if it had been done well enough i couldve been fine with, couldve been happy with. But the twist that zeus actually was going to fuck off? That chaos was going to destroy all the humans anyway?? That zeus brainwashed the other gods to his side anyway????? I felt zero sympathy in destroying this lostbelt and i wanted to, SO badly

And i am All Here for a more in depth take on how humans have twisted robots into gods. How these ronots thought they could love humans but didnt hold the capacity for it!!! Honestly that concept is super cool!! I liked it!!! But like. The way it was delivered left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to care more about the tragedy it had wrought.

I wish that zeus’ defeat was something like… in attempting to defeat zeus, chaldea accidentally/maybe on purpose? Endangers the people of olympus. And through the motions of protecting them, zeus burns and falls to ruin. And as he lays there, he realizes that as much as he wants to care for these people hes protecting, he doesnt. And hes dying for what he feels is nothing.

If i put more thought to it i could come up with more ways the god plotline couldve been bettered on. But like. A third act twist where the reader is reassured that this lostbelt is undeniably evil is really one of the worst options they couldve taken at that point. Basically everything else i can forgive but that felt really sour in my mouth

And finally . I loved kirschtania and caenis i did cry. I could say more on them but itd be fairly incoherent especially when im this tired. Just know that i really really like them

#fgo #lb5.2 #lb5 #fgo olympus #kiki speaks

[dundunny]

My friend came over and beat Silent Hill 3. Considering we played 2 over a decade ago and 1 I think two or four years ago, my memory is a bit fuzzy for comparisons but I don't think I'm far off. My buddy knew the first two installments very well and finished them easily, but even though he was less acquainted with 3, he still managed to beat it in about four hours. So that should give you an indication on how short it is. Not that Silent Hill games are lengthy, but I feel this was a bit of a rushed installment.

Let me elaborate. By no means is 3 a bad game, but it lacks the complexity and nuance of its predecessors. Here's an example. Upon entering the hospital, the protagonist Heather can find a note with a doll from a dude named Stanley Coleman, and throughout the level more notes will reveal his obsession with her and that he's watching her movements. Eventually the player can learn the boss of this level killed Coleman and you can actually find his body in the morgue, making choking noises. The whole situation is creepy because we're currently in a hellscape where there shouldn't be any cognizant people, yet Coleman was able to observe the player unnoticed. Yes, that's Silent Hill-esque, but that's where that subplot ends. He never comes up again, and honestly when my friend played he never completed Coleman's storyline and I had to learn a lot of what I typed here from watching a youtube video. I think if this took place in 1 or 2, Coleman would be interwoven much better into the general plot instead of being this one-off event.

That's just one example but the whole game feels like that. Considering there's only one ending (yeah, OK, there's the aliens and such, but only one canon ending), it really limits the player to a linear path, whereas in even the PS1 game you had many different choices with how to handle the situation as Harry Mason. I think the developers were leaning more on trying to create that weird Silent Hill ambiance without the substance that would make me question the myself and the situation. Another example is noise. All of the games use it to frighten the player, but 3 really oversaturated it to the point it was no longer useful to discern if there are enemies in the area, nor did it scare me as much.

However there were some really great aspects to the game. Heather herself is actually an amazing protagonist. Yeah, OK, for some reason she was a shittier fighter than Mason or James Sunderland, but in terms of personality she's great. One criticism I'd give the previous games—even the much-beloved Silent Hill 2—is the conversations were stilted and unnatural. Maybe it was 90s and early 2000s terrible translations and voice acting, but whenever there was a cutscene sometimes I could no longer suspend disbelief. If I found myself in this nightmare world with demons, and I stumbled upon one seemingly normal person, I would not be entertaining whatever random tangents this person wants to talk about. I'd just be hyping over and over that we need to stick together and figure a battleplan to survive. Heather leans more heavily towards my instinct, and her conversations often follow the themes of who the hell are you, what the hell is going on, and if you're responsible for this get away from me. Also whoever animated her face deserves all the accolades. This game out in 2003 and we played with the original disc in my PS2, and holy shit I think her expressions look better than some modern games today twenty years later. I can easily perceive every single one of her emotions from skepticism to fear to anger... It's all there.

My friend told me this is the last of the original development team and afterward it goes downhill, so probably this is the last Silent Hill for me. I'm glad he was able to play for me because it was truly delight even though I hated every single moment of it.

#silent hill #silent hill 3

[pyroclastic727]

Owl House said fuck capitalism

So this episode was interesting. Lilith pretty much killed her sister. Why the fuck would she do that?

Even more interesting: why is Belos like that? How did Hooty put his head through one of those guards? Who the fuck is the Titan, and why does everyone like him? And how are these all tied together?

This episode was a metaphor for capitalism

...and another delicious step towards radicalizing the youth into dismantling this fucked-up neo-feudal system.

We’ll start with Belos. 

Emperor Belos is a weird name, don’t you think? We all thought it was spelled “Bellows,” but it wasn’t. In fact, it’s five letters, starts with Be, ends with os, and describes a megalomaniac emperor that restricts people’s freedom in order to accumulate wealth for himself.

Sound familiar?

Emperor Bezos Belos created capitalism. He saw the beauty of magic and decided to make himself the most powerful.

Belos created a system that destroys the masses and boosts his power.

 I’m dipping into fan theory a little, because the fan theory fits. We know that people get branded with coven magic that makes it so they can only specialize in one area. We know that Belos is the most powerful witch in the Boiling Isles. We know that the excess magic, magic created by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

It’s the same system that many viewers see all the time. A job takes up all your day and tires you for the night, so you can only do one skill for the rest of your life. Jeff Bezos is the most powerful man in the United States. Excess money, money taken by restrictions, has to go somewhere.

The magic goes to Belos, like how the money goes to Bezos. Belos created capitalism, and he won it.

The guards aren’t real. 

Look, we’ve never seen their faces. They’re all the same. Why would you work so hard to get to the top, just to become a nameless, faceless killing machine?

Oh, also Hooty stuck his face through one. There is nothing under the armor.

Why? Well, it’s the same reason you see all those celebrities going around flaunting their wealth and bragging about how hard they worked. Like all those songs about how they grind every day and work harder than everyone else while you’re out clubbing, and that makes them dope. And then you take a closer look at them and see that they had a small loan of a million dollars fueling them, or an entire talent agency behind them, or their dad was a famous country star in the 80′s. 

They’re fake. They’re hollow. They’re a ploy created by the capitalist emperor to try to delude you into working harder. 

Let me put this into perspective. I guarantee that every single one of you has heard stuff like this: “Hard work makes you successful.” “I put in the work, and that’s why I’m successful.” “If you work hard enough, then you can be as successful as Mark Zuckerberg.” 

And unless you’re a robot or really lucky, I’m sure all of you have failed at this. Maybe they told you that hard work would make you good at math, so you spent 22 hours a week working on calculus, only to pass it by 3 percentage points and have it destroy your perfect 4.0 GPA. Maybe they told you that if you talked to people enough, then you would make friends, so you spent a lot of time talking to people, only to end up lonely and friendless. Maybe they told you that if you did well in school, you would get a good job, so you spent all your time working hard to be a good student, and then ended up in a soulless, dead-end job.

The guards are there to delude you. Look, who really gains from you being productive? The answer is the ruling class, the CEOs, the government, the bourgeoisie. It has always been that. All you get from working is a paycheck that lets you survive. They get a paycheck that lets them get rich. Just like Belos gets the magic and productivity of the specialized coven witches.

The guards are there to trick you. The truth is that nobody can join the Emperor’s Coven. It’s just there to make you think that hard work will make you successful. Then you spend your entire life working hard, trying to prove to the person in charge that you’re worthwhile. You give your whole life to the Coven, and they give you nothing. 

Magic is supposed to be something you pursue for fun. Being skilled at things, being good at something beautiful...that’s supposed to be something you do because you want to. But they took that and made it into a source of productivity. It doesn’t matter if you make good content. All people fucking care about is if you upload the day of premiere, if you make a lot of content quickly, if you maintain a million different conversations with strangers who expect you to be the most interesting person in the room. They don’t care how it hurts you. They don’t care how you crack from the stress. How you cry when you think no one can see you, and then you check your phone and someone can see you, someone did see you, and you have to put on your face and be the charming, magnetic person they want you to be. (oh by the way that’s why I wasn’t online much last week)

And it ruins it. Suddenly you can’t watch The Owl House without being stressed. You can’t make any content. You can’t make spells as powerfully as you want to. Your passion is replaced by perfectionism and insecurity, a voice telling you to keep being the best at what you do, or else they’ll forget you and let you die.

There’s also the Titan. 

So nobody has mentioned him before, because in addition to the Boiling Isles being a hellscape full of witchcraft and queerness, it’s also full of atheists. 

But suddenly we have people saying all this shit about him? Shit like, he gave witches the gift of magic, and then they learned to use it in a civilized manner, since being uncivilized was disrespectful?

I mean, first off, that’s fucking wrong. The island gives people magic. The island, which just so happened to be shaped like a titan-sized human. But the island/titan gives everyone all types of magic. Hell, even Luz gets to use magic, and she’s human. 

It sounds really fucking familiar. (tw for discussion of homophobia and colonialism and misogyny). It sounds like when the news is on and they show some Tr*mp supporter talking about how fetuses have more rights than people and it is their holy duty to take away a woman’s control over her body and force her through unbearable pain and into an 18-year commitment she didn’t want to make. It sounds like all the times people tried to say homosexuality should be illegal, citing a single line in a book written two thousand years ago and heavily edited by a European king. It sounds like all the times people said God wanted them to conquer, to own the entire earth, to force the other races into pain to support them.

This is that bullshit thing people do where they commit awful sins and justify it by citing the will of God. 

Or, it’s the Coven using religion as an excuse for evil.

Look, the Emperor’s Coven is clearly colonizer-coded. Saying that people’s original form of magic was wild (and showing a picture with the same joyous, rowdy energy of an 18th or 19th -century Black or indigenous party), and that it was God’s will for them to be “civilized?” Sounds like that thing that powerful white people did where they went and murdered people and forced them into their twisted capitalist system. God, gold, and glory, is what they said, because history books just love to omit the gore.

Lilith is passing the abuse cycle along. 

You know, like a good little colonizer. God I fucking hate her. She’s a MILF, in the sense that she’s a Mother I’d Like to Fling off a cliff. 

Ah, enough screaming about how much I want to drown Lilith in a tub of Hooty’s mucus. Let’s go into why I want to do that, and how she took the evils of capitalism and just...adopted those.

So, Lilith is sick and twisted for what she did to her sister. But, uhh, that’s the point. You see, there are so many other people out there like Lilith who would do the exact same thing, if given the chance. These are the people who do mean things when the teacher isn’t looking, and then act nice and try to frame you. These are the people who will hate you if you’re better than them. These are people who would do anything to bring you down, if you dare outperform them.

It’s greed, my friends. The mental illness that capitalism blesses us all with.

Lilith herself said it: she dedicated her entire life to the Coven. What she wanted was to be the best. And she almost was...except for her own sister. Someone who lived with her, annoyed her at home, bested her at school. Someone she could never beat, no matter how hard she worked. And her sister was younger than her, too! How insulting was that? Lilith wanted to be the best, and someone in her exact situation did better than her.

Lilith was insecure. And it consumed her.

But why? Why does insecurity consume her? I mean, no one can be motivated by insecurity forever. Well, not unless someone conditions it into you.

The lovely thing about the capitalist system is the morals it teaches you. Things like: “You’re only useful if you’re the best.” “Being school smart makes you smart, while being social smart or sports smart or creative smart or fandom smart is worthless.” “Your worth can be quantified by numbers and is based off arbitrary measures like your income or your grades.” Things that can and will drive us crazy if we let ourselves believe them.

And it did drive Lilith crazy. She got so twisted by a society that said being good at magic is her only worth. Look, Lilith used to be good at things, probably. She was good at sports. At times, she slips up and does an okay job of being Eda’s sister. She has a powerful presence when she’s in a room. And she’s wicked good at manipulating people. 

But that didn’t matter. Lilith bought into the lies. She let herself believe that magical skill was the only way to measure her worth. And since she needed to be the best, she hurt Eda for it.

The beautiful thing is, Eda didn’t buy that. "It’s my power, kid. And before you showed up, I spent my whole life wasting it.” Is what Eda said, as she used up the last of her power, the last of her life, to save Luz. In her final moments, she proved that she’s not like them. She’s stronger than them.

None of this matters. Not magical prowess. Not the hierarchy. Not the promise of joining the Coven and having more power than anyone else.

The only thing that matters to Eda is her family. Her real family. Her Luz, King, and Hooty. And by extension, Willow, Gus, and Amity. Those are Eda’s real reason for fighting, for dying: to protect them. Look, there’s no way she would’ve come out of that fight alive. She has a family, and her love for them is stronger than greed or jealousy or capitalism. 

Lilith never understood that. She thought the water of the womb was thicker than the blood of the covenant. Or, that the water of the womb and the blood of the covenant are stronger than the bonds of found family. She thought it didn’t matter if Eda loved, her, only if the Emperor loved her. Fucking bitch.

And now, a little something to worry about, before we go. Amity Blight. The girl who wanted to join the Emperor’s Coven more than anything, who dedicated her whole life to doing well in school, to being the best, to being perfect.

And then she met Luz. She fell for Luz. Now she’s in a tricky place, where habit and conditioning want her to join the Emperor’s Coven, but her heart wants her to do the impossible and destroy capitalism.

She wasn’t in this episode. Funny that being injured and unable to work ended up saving her from watching her future mother-in-law die. So she bought some time.

But Luz’s true mom is dead. This is the second mom she has lost, and she’s only fourteen. As powerful as King and Hooty are, Luz needs Amity. Luz needs Amity to support her and help her get back her mom.

So Amity has to make a choice. Fear and insecurity, or love and a high chance of death? 

She’ll probably choose death. Because that’s the message that this family-friendly show is giving us kids. Fuck capitalism. All you need in life is to do what makes you happy and be with the ones you love.

#the owl house #toh #owl house #toh spoilers #edalyn clawthorne #eda clawthorne #toh eda #eda the owl lady #luz noceda #amity blight #lilith clawthorne #cancel lilith #toh lilith #the owl house analysis #toh analysis #owl house analysis #toh meta #owl house meta #the owl house meta #agony of a witch #originalpost #toh king

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

��We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

#she ra horde prime #she ra #she ra catra #she ra spoilers #redemption arcs #toxic religion

[dontcallmecarrie]

an idea I had on my commute, because this trope is a personal favorite:

Justin Hammer blinked the stars out of their eyes, not even bothering to move before they got their bearings because last thing they needed was to get motion sickness on top of whatever had been in that weird laser gun Ivan and Victor had been messing with went off.

Ugh. They’d told Ivan to secure his projects better, told them someone’d end up in the hospital, why did nobody listen to them?!

Well. 

At least Winter’d tear them a new one, they could count on that much. If only because they were his meal ticket, but still.

Justin cautiously tried to sit up, and now that the ringing in their ears was going down they caught the last few snatches of whatever the people around them had been saying. 

Because there was now a crowd now, apparently. Joy.

“—ell is going on here, how did he even get here?”

“—rgy readings are all wrong, this makes no sense—”

“—plain to me how a civilian got into one of the most secured locations this side of the Mississippi? Anyone?”

“—ot to be kidding me,” a familiar voice said, “how did Hammer of all people get here? Oh, hey, he’s alive. Hey, Hammer? How’d you get out of Seagate?”

One of these things was not like the others. 

Not that Justin knew what the hell was going on, not when they’d been in a safehouse not two minutes ago, but...this was the first time in their life they’d heard that note of derision in Tony’s voice. 

Aimed at them, anyway, because goodness knew how many rants about Howard they’d talked him through after the accident. 

“Anyone get the number of that truck?” Justin asked with a groan, and didn’t even have to pretend to be confused by the truly impressive number of guns pointed his way as he sat up. “Hey, easy there, when’s the last time you got certified to carry with that type of grip?”

The looks Justin got were...less than welcoming. 

“How’d you get out of Seagate?” Director Fury said more than asked, and just like that, Justin knew what that gun had done, even before an agent looked over with a frown after tapping away at their tablet.

“Sir? Justin Hammer’s still in custody.”

Winter had better be kicking everyone’s ass for this, this was not what they’d signed up for when they’d stopped by with takeout.

.

aka NHDD!Justin crash-lands the MCU, and it goes about as well as expected.

...but to be honest? I’ve been playing with several permuations of this, just can’t decide which would be the most fun to mess with because, I mean, here’s some of the others:

NHDD!Avengers meet canon, wonder wtf is up with this ticking time bomb of a team and canon!Tony’s almost unrecognizable because they’re used to a Tony with very clear boundaries and may not be as heroic, but he’s theirs and seeing a version of him who’s been through the wringer is. Something not great. 

50/50 odds on who picks a fight, because NH!Tony will push back if someone tries to start something, but NH!Steve has even less chill than canon because he’s caught up in a goddamn love dodecahedron and anyone looking at his team wrong gets to deal with all the pent-up stress that entails.

NHDD!Justin meets canon [see above]. Rocky start due to obvious reasons, while Cabal’s scrambling to figure out a way to get them back, Justin immediately latches onto canon!Tony and they may not be a therapist, but tbh they’re pretty damn close sometimes. 

canon!Tony gets a concentrated dose of All the Feels™, feat. “your feelings are valid” and “you are not alone, asking for help isn’t being a burden” and “even if other people think poorly of you, that’s on them, you owe them nothing” and Tony’s very, very sad to see him go.

...this could also be pretty painful for canon!Justin, for reasons seen in this next scenario:

canon!Justin meets NHDD. Cue All The Self-Worth Issues. Because I tried to hint at it in NHDD, but long story short, canon!Justin was kinda set up for failure, between his poor excuses for parents, terrible role models, and the whole “growing up constantly compared to Tony Stark” thing is just asking for a major inferiority complex somewhere in here. So you take this Justin, and present him a world that could be summed up as, “I’m you, but better”? Who has everything he ever wanted, was taken seriously and treated with respect? He’s not going to have a good time.

irony is, it’s absolutely not his fault, either: NHDD!Justin is different not because of his circumstances, but because they’ve got echoes of a past life [...even if they don’t remember the specifics anymore].

on the flipside, the NHDD crew would get a better idea of just how unusual their Justin is, and their secret might get discovered somewhere in this

Cabal meets canon. Cue explosions, and a lot of dark hilarity because this League of Supposed-to-be-Evil-but-mostly-Just-Vibing has way better teamwork than the elite team of superheroes assembled to protect the Earth.

Victor’s probably the snarkiest here, once the shock of “holy shit I knew I hadn’t expected to survive Latveria’s civil war but is this what would’ve happened to my homeland? thanks I hate it” wears off.

NH!Bucky gives absolutely no fucks about shit going down anymore, splits his time between hunting down HYDRA [which seems to be even more of a problem in this hellscape, ugh] and avoiding this universe’s Steve Rogers because self-care is a thing and he has no idea what this universe’s Bucky is up to but he knows he’s probably in not as great a place as he was. 

#No Hero [Downward Descending] #thinking aloud #3 am musings #driving daydreams #...i need a tag for ideas while commuting okay?

[s-c-r-i-p-s-i]

Castigation

[Dead by Baelight’s Kinktober // Day 2: Trap]

🖤  🖤   🖤  

You couldn’t explain it if you tried, but it was like he was seeing through you.

Right to your guilty, nasty core.

🖤  🖤   🖤

Pairing: Pyramid Head x Gender-Neutral AMAB Reader  

Rating: Explicit

CW: non-con/dub-con, smut, tentacle/tongue sex, reader is a coward and does shitty things, dissociation, canon-typical violence

Word Count: 3,238

You didn’t like what this place was turning you into.

Before the fog you were… you wanted to say normal, but in reality, you’d led a pretty privileged life. Not in the sense that you were rich, or blessed with preternatural wit, intelligence, or beauty, or anything like that. You were just sort of hit with the mediocrity stick. While most people had brushes with hardship at least once or twice in their lives, you’d somehow managed to avoid anything interesting happening in your life ever. Or that’s how it felt, anyway. You never had to discover what kind of person you were under stress. If you’d rise or fall to the occasion. Or the things you would do to save your own neck.

But you knew now.

For the most part, it started small. Hiding in a locker longer than strictly necessary. Letting someone else go for the unhook even though you were nearby. And, yes, sometimes your waffling around got some people killed. Indirectly. But the worst thing they could blame you of was being too cautious. Or, at worst, a coward. And - it wasn’t like they stayed dead.

Then somewhere along the line, things started to get… intentional. Shit you’d have a hard time trying to justify to someone’s face - but on the rare occasion you were caught, you tried anyway because you weren’t about to own up to it. You started to do things like stealing offerings and items from people’s personal piles in Limbo while they were off in a Trial; the place was like a homeless camp, everything out in the open and nigh impossible to secure. Just like in life, you never seemed to find anything special on your own, and it didn’t seem fair. This you tried to justify by never taking any personal effects - Kate’s guitar, Ace’s lucky shot glass; that kind of stuff always went untouched. But if you were being completely honest, it wasn’t out of decency. It was because they were worthless to you.

All you cared about was surviving another day. Or whatever passed for a day in this hellscape. After a while, you didn’t even feel guilty about it anymore. It just became your new normal.

And then you did something kind of fucked up even by your standards.

It was in a match against Myers. Just you and Claudette remained, both injured, both one strike away from death, working on the last gen so you could hopefully get the hell out of dodge. She’d offered to heal you, but it didn’t feel like there was enough time. And sure enough, before you could finish it off, there came that infernal heartbeat.

She reacted faster than you could, quietly slipping into the nearby locker that you’d had your eyes on, but had been too slow to secure for yourself, running to the thing just as she closed its doors.

And it was the only one in the room.

You heard her whisper, “Sorry, sorry!” But it didn’t mean jack to you. Something unfamiliar flashed through you then. Hot, simmering rage.

It wasn’t fucking fair, you remembered thinking. Why did she get a chance to live, and not you? Just because she was a little bit faster than you? Just because she happened to be on the side closest to the lockers? Why did she get to choose?

You even knew where the hatch was, you’d passed by it on the way there. Survival was so close you could taste it, could hear the phantom draft of the open hatch in your mind already. You could visualize it so perfectly. Everything but how to get there.

Then you figured it out.

And something inside you just… shut off.

Myers entered the room. Stared at you. You stared back. And then slowly, deliberately, never taking your eyes off the empty voids staring back at you, you rapped your knuckles against the locker. Once. Twice. Then made a run for it.

You knew when you heard her screams behind you that he’d taken the bait.

She wouldn’t remember, anyway. Not the pain, and not the betrayal. The last few moments were always foggy. Whether that was a kindness of the entity, or just a testament to the human mind’s ability to repress awful things, who knew?

But you’d remember. And you’d carried that guilt with you ever since. In the moment, you hadn’t felt anything but when you saw her back in Limbo, and every time after that, you felt… dirty.

You’d gotten pretty good at justifying your shitty behavior. There was always some excuse. But not this time. You could come up with the right words, yeah - ‘People die all the time. And it’s not like she died died. I was just doing what I had to do to survive.’ But no matter how you sliced it, nothing seemed to fill that black hole of guilt eating you alive from the inside out.

It made your stomach twist just thinking about it.

Part of you wished there was something you could do to make it up to her.

Another part of you wished there was something that could be done to you. You found yourself wishing she would just… react. That she would cry or scream or shout or push you around, just so you could have something. Some kind of consequence for your actions. You did something bad and nothing fucking happened. That’s not how the world was supposed to work.

But she’d never react, never do anything because she didn’t even fucking remember. You were the only one who knew. You hated it. You were miserable.

Little did you know all that guilt was about to make you a fucking magnet for the Executioner.

You were following your usual tactic for whenever a new Killer entered the fog, which was avoid discriminately. (Coincidentally, that was pretty much your tactic for everything.) And it went mostly without a hitch. There was one death, but Nea was looping him in the distance while Steve worked the exit door. You were just kind of waiting, sat in the alcove near the gate watching the chase. You’d managed to avoid him the whole trial, so you felt pretty safe. Impatient to get out of there, but safe.

Then he - it? - just stopped. In the middle of the fucking chase. Turned, slowly, as if just now realizing that the exit gate was almost open and that he was being given the runaround.

Except you swore he was staring right at you. It was impossible to tell with that enormous metal helmet thing on his head, or if he even could see, in the traditional sense, but freezing cold dread swept over you in an instant. You couldn’t explain it if you tried, but it was like he was seeing through you. Right to your guilty, nasty core.

The gate buzzed, doors noisily sliding open, and you, Steve, and Nea, who was just a couple paces behind, were home free. But right before you crossed over the threshold into safety, you chanced a glance back. He was still just… staring.

What did he want from you?

Nea caught up, pulling you through the fog by the wrist, and just like that, you were back in Limbo.

You were shaken up by it for a while. That’s not how killers acted. Abandoning a chase? If he’d kept at it, he probably could have had at least Nea. That would have been two out of four - not bad. So what the hell could he have seen that was more important than that?

You weren’t sure you wanted to know.

But either the Entity had it out for you, or you just had real bad luck these days, because it wasn’t long before you faced him again.

You were doing a great job avoiding him, though. Until you weren’t.

You hadn’t even seen that shit on the ground, but you sure knew when you stepped in it, a wave of pure agony shooting through you the moment your incautious foot planted itself in that bloody trench. A shriek ripped through your throat and you tore away as if you’d been burned. But the damage was already done.

The torment was like a wreath of barbed wire around your heart, constricting tightly as his heartbeat began pounding in your ears, quiet at first, but building cataclysmically. Alerted to your location, no doubt, by your scream, and making a beeline straight for you. Shit.

You weren’t ever keen on being found - that feeling that things were life and death, even when death didn’t mean anything here, never truly went away - but this filled you with a special kind of dread, remembering the way he’d just turned and stared at you before. You still didn’t know what that was about, and you still didn’t want to know.

Frantically, you looked around for a place to hide, you weren’t good at looping like the others, you weren’t good at anything. Fuck, fuck fuck. There were no lockers, no nothing. What were you going to do?

You watched with horror as he appeared in the entrance to the jungle gym and then paused. As if remembering you - or maybe just seeing whatever it was he saw before.

You didn’t wait around to find out. You threw yourself into a sprint for the nearest window, trying to put something between you and him besides distance. But he grabbed you mid-scramble over the sill, throwing you back, your ass skidding along the dirt.

He began stalking towards you, and desperate for space, you hastily tried to crabwalk backwards on your elbows and feet until you were backed up against the wall. Holy shit he was bigger in person - maybe it was just the angle, but he was monstrously large.

Now you could see everything, up close and in high definition. And you wished you couldn’t. Vein-like clumps of flesh clung to his helmet and hung from the edges in meaty strings, the way they just… dangled making you feel sick to your stomach. But his skin was worse. Far worse. Mottled - burned, maybe - flayed chunks of exposed muscle and even bone, you realized, slivers of rib and shin and finger bones glinting in the moonlight.

Despite the obvious damage, it didn’t seem like it was hurting him - or that it was even any kind of hindrance at all. By all means, for someone who looked like they should be falling apart, he was… very put together. He didn’t shamble or limp. He didn’t so much as falter.

You were mesmerized, in some morbid way. Like a train wreck; it was hard to look away. You almost forgot to worry about what he was about to do to you.

The beast seemed to consider you for a moment, looking down at you before his other hand clapped onto the hilt of his great knife, grasping it with both hands. That put your priorities back in check real fast. But before you could even think to shout something out in protest - how would you even begin trying to bargain with something like him? - he drove the knife into the Earth at your feet.

You weren’t sure what happened next. Briefly, you thought it was a sign of mercy. Wishful thinking.

It was as though you were sinking into the earth. Your arms shot outwards, trying to pull yourself up before your face could be swallowed up by the dirt, lungs wrenching in panic at the realization that you were about to be buried alive, and you gasped for breath, thinking it might be your last.

But then you were being thrust back up by an unknown force somewhere completely different, rising, not like a phoenix but a puppet.

Two spikes simultaneously shot through your shoulder blades, suspending you in this metal cage you found yourself trapped in as you howled in pain. It was about as bad as a hook, in terms of pain. Difficult to compare infinities, but, maybe more, maybe less. There were two entry points, but better distribution of your weight.

You treated it like a hook, anyway, slowly allowing yourself to hang, shifting all your focus onto flexing and curling your hands into fists. Open, close. Open, close. Rinse and repeat. That was all you could do to keep yourself from thrashing and hurting yourself more.

Open, close. Someone would come for you. Open, close.

And someone did. It just wasn’t who you were hoping for.

Your eyes rolled closed at the familiar sound of a heartbeat kicking up in the distance. Why? There were three other people he could go after. Why you? You could hear his knife dragging across the ground as he tread closer - not digging, just quietly scraping along. And then it stopped. Tears pricked the corners of your eyes. When you opened them again, he was standing right in front of you.

The bars of the cage moved on their own, magically giving way for him as he stepped forward.

“Why? Why me?” You asked, voice scratchy and reedy and thin from blowing out your vocal cords earlier, barely pushing out anything more than air. You weren’t even sure if he could answer, but you had to know. You weren’t connected by the same universe. You weren’t special. You didn’t even think you were a threat. Why was he singling you out like this?

Betraying, you think, some kind of sentience, the helmet tilted slightly, and for a moment you almost thought it was going to speak. Instead, it leaned forward, and something began to crawl out from the corner of his helmet. There was an opening where the metal was curled back, and a dark, blood sausage-like tendril was slithering out. Cringing, at first you thought it was a parasite - or some kind of symbiotic thing that lived inside his helmet - and you were that convinced whatever it was, it was about to murder you. It reared back like a snake, and you flinched, expecting it to strike. Instead, it touched your neck - not… gently, exactly, but not with the violence you were expecting, either. Almost like it was feeling at you. And that’s when you realized it was part of him.

You weren’t… completely celibate. Knew a tongue when you felt one. Even if it didn’t really look like one. Frustratingly, your body seemed to think it felt familiar, too, and you had to tamp down some… inappropriate, knee jerk reactions as it traced the curved of your neck, sweeping down to your clavicle.

It felt like there had to be a logical reason for this, it wasn’t sexual, you were just thinking with your human brain. Maybe it was trying to… taste something out. You didn’t know. But he must have made some kind of decision about you, because he made a low, groaning vocalization that was almost like a hum.

Then he started grabbing at your clothes, huge, grotesque hands pulling and ripping into them as easily as tearing through gauze. You tried kicking at him, but pain shot through your shoulders where you were still impaled, and you couldn’t -… You just couldn’t. You were trapped. There was nothing you could do. What was left sat on you in tatters, skin exposed to the cool air.

His hands roamed over the curve of your waist, over your hips, shaking you by them briefly, as if testing them out, while you croaked at the way your shoulders protested to even the slightest movement. What was he doing? Why didn’t he just kill you already? His tongue dragged down your stomach and your muscles fluttered, heat pooling in your loins against your will. You tried to push down the obvious reaction your body was having as it continued to travel down, down down, before it began curling around your erection.

“Oh fuck,” you wheezed hoarsely, “No, please.” You’d had a good half-chub since he started licking you, but you didn’t want this. Inhaling sharply, your eyes fluttered back, pinching closed as it started to move, experimentally jerking you off despite your begging. The feeling was unreal as it was unwelcome, unlike anything you’d ever felt before. But it didn’t last long, and you panted in relief as the tongue unfurled from around you. You hadn’t even realized your whole body was tense until you felt it deflate.

You didn’t understand why this was happening to you. This was no accident, he’d chosen you.

You weren’t allowed to dwell on it long. The respite was short lived, the Executioner’s hands hooking under your thighs without warning and hoisting your legs up.

This, oddly, was actually more comfortable in the sense that it hurt a lot fucking less, the support relieving almost the entirety of your own body weight off the spikes. You were still skewered in two places, that couldn’t be undersold. But at least now it didn’t feel like gravity was going to rip them through you like a heavy earring ripping through an earlobe.

But it was a whole lot less comfortable in the sense that you’d seen enough hentai to know what was coming next.

Whole lower body twitching as his tongue probed your backside, it swept over your entrance and prodded, testing it’s resistance before punching through it anyway, a broken cry purling from your busted throat as it forced you open and began violating you. Past the pain, you could still feel with perfect unholy clarity the alien way the muscle squirmed against your walls, stars and red-orange flashes dancing behind your eyes every time it fucked in and out of you. In need of something to hold, to ground yourself, your hands flew up to grasp at the spikes on one of the bars behind you.

You couldn’t even begin to think clearly, even as the motions slowly just turned into noise. But maybe- maybe you deserved this somehow. For what you did. Maybe the universe, or the Entity was finally throwing you your comeuppance. Or maybe you were looking for reason where there wasn’t any. Maybe everything was chaos and nothing mattered. But you’d take it. You’d take it, and maybe you’d come out on the other end feeling pure and exonerated.

You didn’t know how long it was before he withdrew and pulled you off the spikes- you thought you heard a generator ping on the numb fringes of your consciousness once or maybe even twice, but eventually you felt the slide of them leaving your body. Or rather, you leaving them.

He manhandled you a bit, and you confusedly let him, trying, somewhat, to cooperate but you were disoriented and slightly less helpful than dead weight. But that was fine. He had full control of you, turning you around and pressing down between your shoulder blades so you were face down, ass up, jerking your hips up so you were just how he wanted you, and if you rocked on your feet a little, it didn’t matter much.

You didn’t have to look behind you to hear the scrape of fabric as he moved the loincloth aside. Haggardly, you pulled up your head, vision obscured by tears and a veil of your own sweaty, stringy hair. Staring forward, you grabbed onto the spikes, one hand, then the other, fingers tightening around them as his tongue began snaking around your waist.

You deserved this.

🖤  🖤 🖤

Thank you for reading!!!

🖤  🖤 🖤  

Notes:

A Cage of Atonement is kind like a trap, right? 😉

Thank you to Pugge as always, for beta'ing and being my hype man. (Also the entire server, they’re so supportive!!!)

Thank you to Null/Gabe/Slaandere for answering my every question (I’ve never played a SH game in my life) and enlightening me about the existence of PH’s tongue. This one’s for you, bb. 💖

This piece was written for Day 2 of the 🔞 Dead by Baelight 🔞 Discord server’s Kinktober.

Anyone over 18 is welcome to join here.

#dead by daylight #dbd #pyramid head #the executioner #silent hill #my writing #oneshot #scripsi

[sodalitefully]

Saving Grace [GNR, Sluff AU]

[This one’s a little... far out.  cw for blood and violence.  There’s also like demons and shit.  Inspired by the DOOM series and maybe also a little bit of Mad Max. Can also be found on ao3 here.]

[Two men and a baby meet in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.]

--

Saving Grace

--

A baby girl, a white picket fence, and a minivan. 

Growing up, Duff always dreamed of having a perfect family like the ones he used to see on TV: He wanted to be the man of the house with a beautiful, loving wife, 2.5 kids, a dog… Of course, as a couch-surfing, punk rock 20-year-old with a criminal record and a drinking problem, he didn’t really think he’d ever actually live that fantasy life. 

He just never thought the reason would be because some so-called scientists decided it was a good idea to open a portal to Hell, unleashing legions of vicious demons that poured out across the surface of Earth and decimated anything in their path. 

The charred picket fence wrapped around a pile of collapsed rubble that was once a cookie-cutter suburban house.  Duff had the hood of the rusty van open propped open to scavenge for parts he might be able to use to get his motorbike running again – it crapped out on him completely and left them stranded somewhere in what used to be a suburb of Los Angeles, but now resembled a desertified junkyard.  And then the little girl perched on his shoulders looked up across the wasted landscape and shrieked.

Duff responded on instinct; born into a world with real-life monsters lurking around every corner, his baby knew better than to make a loud noise without a good reason.  He grabbed her off his shoulders and ducked behind the van, shielding her with his body as he listened closely for danger.   

A muffled roar echoed across the low hills, followed by two more similar sounds and the tremor of collapsing rubble.  There were at least three, which might be a good thing: the monsters liked to to fight each other almost as much as they loved hunting humans.  On the other hand, Duff had no chance at fighting off three demons if they were discovered. 

A wet, rattling shriek, closer this time.  Duff shrugged off the shotgun strapped to his back.  And then – A yell, an enraged, human yell that split the thick smoky air with the clarity of a thunderbolt before it drowned under demonic hisses and wails.   

Holy fuck. 

Duff twisted around to peer through the broken window in the van’s passenger door.  For the moment the skirmish was just out of sight, around the corner if the plumes of dust and smoke were anything to go by.  Duff watched a small explosion take down what was left of a house frame, then a figure with charred, leathery skin and bony protrusions was thrown around the corner and into Duff’s line of sight by a wad of shotgun pellets fired at close range.

The imp was closely followed by a man, an honest-to-god man, not one of the hell-possessed soldiers that may once have been men but were now no more than bloodthirsty drones.  The man leapt on top of the dying creature, slammed the stock of his gun into its skull with a sickening crack that Duff could hear from a half a block away, then whirled around on the other two demons that rounded the corner in pursuit.   

Duff was distracted from the melee when he spotted a shadow pass over the sun in the corner of his eye.  The gunshot attracted some attention, it seemed, and a flock of flying demons was closing in.  Duff trained his barrel on the newcomers, but at this distance it was useless.  He spared a glance at the other man: the stranger was running up the street, getting closer to Duff’s hiding place as one of the remaining monsters chased after him.  The other lagged behind, looking mangled; the winged creatures swooped down and tore their weakened kin to shreds in a matter of seconds.

Neither the demons nor the slayer seemed to have noticed their hiding place yet, but the walls were closing in on Duff and his charge.  He searched frantically for an escape, but every path would expose them.  A screech and two crunches in quick succession signified the abrupt termination of the third imp.  Duff turned back to the battlefield in the center of the street: he could see a puddle of blood forming under the crumpled corpse, but its killer was nowhere in sight. 

And then a shadow fell over the van, and Duff’s blood turned to ice.  When he looked up, he was assaulted by the demon’s blisteringly hot breath as it hovered so close it was practically on top of them.  Its body was just a bulbous head, dominated by a gaping mouth infested with so many jagged teeth it could only close halfway.  Beady yellow eyes, at least five of them, dotted the top of the beast’s skull; the largest and most central was trained on Duff. 

He pushed the child behind him and aimed his weapon down the demon’s throat, but the shot only knocked it back a few meters.  Viscous blood oozed from the pellet holes as it advanced again, stretching its maw grotesquely wide so Duff can easily see the glow of a building attack.  He fumbled with the barrel of the gun, struggling to breathe as he reloaded.   

This was it.  Duff had encountered demons before, but he’d never been ambushed like this.  He would go down fighting, that was certain, but a buried part of him was convinced it was hopeless.  He’d failed as a survivor, and more importantly as a protector.  He’d sworn to do whatever it took to protect the innocent life he had been entrusted with, but now... If he was lucky, the monster’s attack would blow him to bits so his corpse couldn’t be repossessed as a minion of Hell.   

The barrel of the gun snapped back into place but sparks were already escaping the creature’s mouth.  Its inhale was accompanied by a rough, wheezing sound… then by a wet thwack as a metallic wedge sprouted from the top of its head. 

The demon wavered, then collapsed.  Duff scrambled backwards as the massive corpse slid down the side of the van and landed on its face right where he’d been standing.  A hatchet – more like a battle-axe, really, better suited to chopping up demons than firewood – was lodged deep in its skull.  The axe’s handle bore a smeared, bloody handprint and it pointed straight at Duff.   

Slowly, Duff’s gaze rose from the bloodstained handle to the person crouched on the other side of the corpse. 

The man who saved their lives stood up and Duff was finally able to get a good look at him.  The first thing he noticed was the dark red fluid that cut a streak from his belt buckle to his ear.  It almost looked like a wound, like the man had been cleaved in two, then the halves forced together again, but deep wine-color of demonic blood was unmistakable.   

The largest, freshest bloodstain cast a sticky sheen across his heaving chest, with spattered starbursts starting to drip down his belly and smaller globs quickly growing tacky as they clung to the sleeves of his leather jacket.  The gash continued up his neck, congealed in the rough stubble on his chin, and crossed the corner of his lip before scattering across his cheek. 

His expression was grim – not quite angry or threatening… It reminded Duff of the heroes in action movies he used to watch as a child, a lifetime ago.  He was shorter than Duff, but he held himself like he expected to be challenged at any moment.  Sunglasses hid his eyes, his lips were peeling from the sun, and his wild curly hair was restrained in a ponytail.  The pockets of his jeans and his jacket were obviously stuffed with ammo for the shotgun on his back and the handguns on his belt, but he didn’t touch those, even as Duff still clutched his own firearm.  Instead, he planted a foot on the beast’s back and wrenched the axe free from its skull. 

Duff flinched as the head of the axe swung a foot from his face.  A fresh gush of blood formed a puddle at his feet, but Duff was too busy watching the stranger wipe disturbingly jelly-ish matter off what was obviously his favored weapon to notice the warm fluid seeping into the cracked soles of his shoes.  Finally, the stranger rested the axe on his shoulder and looked up at Duff with a silent, unreadable expression. 

“Th-Thanks,” Duff forced out.  He didn’t take his eyes off the other man as he scooped his whimpering child into his arms and stood up carefully, ready to bolt at the first sign of conflict. 

He’d heard about people like this: wasteland warriors, lone wolves, individuals who took to the collapse of civilization a little too well.  Most people left on the planet clung to straggling groups of survivors, cooperating purely out of a desperate need for some semblance of safety and normalcy, but people like the slayer fared better on their own.  They took care of Number One, and that made them unpredictable, made them dangerous.   

But then… The stranger did just save their lives.

Maybe that meant that Duff could… well, not trust him, but give him the benefit of the doubt.  It was better to make friends than enemies, after all.  Maybe the stranger knew where there were other survivors, or where they could find supplies.  Maybe he could help fix the bike.  Or maybe he would kill them and loot their meager possessions. 

His little girl was relaxed in his arms, assured that the danger had passed.  Duff wished he could do the same. 

The stranger studied Duff and his child for a long, tense moment, then tilted his head skeptically.  “You two on your own?” 

His voice was gravelly, like he hadn’t spoken in a while.  It was also softer and lighter than Duff expected, almost seemed out of place coming from a demon slayer’s lips.  He was startled enough that he gave an honest answer without hesitating. 

“Yeah. Just us." 

“You got a safe house?” 

“Just the bike.  We’re heading south, I heard about a group of survivors near the border.”  It had been a huge risk, breaking off from the small group he had traveled down the coast with for almost half a year.  But they were barely getting by, and once Duff had a baby to consider he had to find a way to give her a life that was more than just surviving.  A large, successful group could provide more stability, more resources, maybe even other children.  So off they went on Duff’s junkyard Frankenstein of a motorcycle, speeding south through a barren dust bowl along what used to be I-5.  A few days ride, stopping frequently to rest and scavenge and tune up the bike, brought them to LA.  Another few would take them to the old US-Mexico border, to a chance at a better life in the twin ruins of San Diego and Tijuana.   

The stranger shook his head.  “Fuck that,” he informed them.  "They’re all dead.”   

He might as well have ripped the ground from under Duff’s feet, torn open up a pit to Hell and watched him scream as he fell.  His stomach dropped, his blood went cold, and he tried to force down the familiar feeling of panic that stared to creep up his spine.  His horror must have been obvious because after a beat, the stranger made an awkward attempt at reassuring him: “You’re better off, they had some kind of freaky cult shit going on.”   

Great, so even if they’d been able to find the survivors, they would have ended up drinking demonic Kool-Aid or something.  Somehow that didn’t make Duff feel much better.  He wondered if maybe the slayer had something to do with their demise – but it didn’t matter now. 

What the fuck was he supposed to do now?  They were running out of food and water, they wouldn't have enough to get back to San Francisco unless they got really lucky scavenging.  And Los Angeles was a Hadean fallout zone, an early casualty that had been ravaged by waves demon hordes and picked over by scavenging survivors, so there was little chance of that.  Jesus Christ, they didn’t even have a working vehicle.  He held his baby tighter against his chest, rubbing comforting circles on her back while he buried his face on her shoulder to hide his despair. 

Politely, the stranger looked away.  The hazy orange sunlight glared off his sunglasses as he scanned the horizon.  “It’s getting late.”  He turned back to Duff.  “We should go." 

“W-We?” 

The slayer ignored Duff’s disbelief.  “Leave the bike, it’s a three hour walk and it’ll only slow us down.”  He turned his back and started marching towards the setting sun without waiting for Duff’s response.   

Duff gaped at him.  It had been too long since someone had freely given them aid without demanding something in return.  A safe place to stay the night, maybe even food and drink?  It was almost incomprehensible.  Not to mention suspicious, but this really wasn’t the time to be looking a gift horse in the mouth.  The stranger saved Duff's ass twice in ten minutes and Duff didn’t even know his name... 

He scrambled to catch up, matching the stranger’s brisk pace with his own long strides. 

“I can’t thank you enough for this, man.  I’m Duff.” 

“I’m Slash.” 

“Slash?”

“Yep.” 

“…Huh.  Nice to meet you, Slash.”  Slash gives him a look, and Duff hopes he hasn’t offended him.  But Slash just shakes his head and lets out a small huff of a laugh. 

“And the kid?” He asked.   

Duff couldn’t help the adoring grin that lit up his face.  “This is Grace.”

--

#sodafics #gnr #guns n roses #duff mckagan #slash #saul hudson #sluff #gnr fanfic #gnr fanfiction #lbr every apocalypse idea i have is mad max inspired it's one of my favorite movies #i wanted to write slash as a badass but like he's not exactly the type to go around picking fights #so the solution was demons #🤷🏻 #also i wish i could play doom but i don't have the right consoles lol #doom slayer slash #nice

[signalsfromvega]

Endgame hot take. (contains spoilers)

Haven’t done one of these in a while because, well...life. But this is the end of an era, so it seems like a good time.

Spoiler free: 10/10. Actual emotional roller coaster. Fantastic.

Spoiler review and take on what I’ve seen via this shit stack of a social media site below. You’ve been warned.

Yeah so I spoiled it for myself when it was released in OZ/NZ, almost immediately. Because I do that...yep.

Honestly, I get that these are some of people’s favorite characters and what not, but some of the dumb ass shit I’ve seen on this hellscape is really naive. 

The endings we got for the first 3 main Avengers was perfect. Widow made sense. If you didn’t see that coming when they said those two were going to Vormir well...I can’t help you there. Clint has a family. Natasha has nothing but the family she made via the Avengers. Saving them became her purpose. She fulfilled it.

(Plus ScarJo previously stated she wanted a say so in her ending and for it to be unpredictable but suiting.)

Tony was one of the lucky ones. Parker getting dusted was a hard hit for him, yes, but Pepper survived. He got 5 years of happiness that no one else was allotted. He had the knowledge that his little girl and love of his life would go on just fine. He had succeeded in his life in all avenues.

Let’s step into the real world for a sec:  Did you really think RDJ was going to continue to type cast him self? He started this freight train my dudes. All of the OG cast wanted to move on. I think if they kept him alive they’d just keep calling him for Stark appearances. (Same with Widow and even Cap)

Tony needed a resolution, and he got the most heroic and selfless one yet. He had been one of the most selfish Avengers. (Tony fans don’t @ me.)

Now on to the most selfless Avenger.

LOL@ y’all for picking apart not only Cap but Bucky AND Peggy to boot. 

Hard pills to swallow: Stucky is fan fic. 

I can’t believe people don’t see that after all these years, Steve, who has been living his life for literally everyone else BUT himself, finally decides to be selfish just this once. After the deed is done, the safest time to finally indulge. He finally has a chance to get his dance. 

Couldn’t have asked for a better ending for him. 

To those who don’t know anything about the multi universe and time travel levels/paradoxes that can and have been created in comics: it is kinda like BTTF. (Scott was right.)

Specifically BTTF 3, when Doc goes back to the 1880′s and stays there, because he’s the happiest there. Meets the love of his life there. Marty has to come to terms with that and understand that it is Doc’s life and decision to do so.

You also had to be paying attention to the Ancient One and Banner’s conversation. They literally mentioned alternative timelines if the stones were taken into different eras. 

Basically, Steve created an alternative timeline (IE: a tangent) when he went back to have a life with Peggy. Either he contacted Pym or Stark in that alternative timeline and was able to create another Quantum Leap to come back to the present timeline, or the two timelines joined back up to ‘heal’ themselves with old Cap on a bench.

Bucky immediately knew when Steve said goodbye to him. He also immediately knew who it was on that bench. Hell, you could assume they had a convo prior, where Steve told Bucky his entire plan. Buck knew Steve had longed for a simple life with the woman who helped shape him into the man he was today. The life he lost; the one he sacrificed for the greater good.

So you’re trying to tell me that Steve isn’t an infallible human that just wants happiness?

He was injected with super soldier serum, not turned into a robotic plaything for SHIELD. Let the man have his life. 

As for Peggy’s alternate life via her series: That wasn’t the life she chose, it was life given to her. It was the life she had to make in place of the life she wanted with Steve. It was a scorned and unfortunate timeline, brought about by everyone else except them. She had to move on because there was literally no hope or accurate technology back then to actually find Steve. She had no other choice, and it wasn’t the choice she wanted to make. It was a “play the cards you’re dealt” situation.

So you’re telling me that if you had access to time travel, with little to no repercussions, after you fulfilled a life of selflessness, that you wouldn’t go for it?

It seems there are now multiple tangents, specifically Loki, created by the removal of the stones in different timelines. It syncs up to the ludicrous amount of tangents in comics anyway. Theoretically it seemed that Cap bringing them all back healed the time wounds. Except he might have made a deal with Howard and the time stone (creating his tangent) to keep him in that timeline until a specific set date. That date being the day Cap goes back in time.

This does not mean that the current history has been erased, it means the tangent is running along side the timeline we know. So those timelines still exist. Cap lived the life with his love in the tangent, Peggy more than likely passed before Cap, since he seems to age slightly slower. But it was a loving parting. Not like the one from Winter Soldier or Civil War; they got to say goodbye naturally and be at peace with it. All old Cap had to do was wait for the day of his time travel, and the two timelines became one again.

Everything in young Cap’s past was his. Everything in old Cap’s past was his as well. 

Cap is a man between two times, like he always was. 

Everything else? Awesome.

Though I do want to know what Cap did with Mjölnir in the 40′s? That’s one of plot holes I have questions about. EDIT: Duh, he had to put it back when he took the Reality stone back, since Thor took it out of that timeline.

Captain Marvel? I thought her amount of screen time was fine. Her fans are always going to want more, naturally. But I’m assuming since her movie came out a month prior, she is now the future of the studios with Parker and this movie was mainly about tying up the OG cast’s loose ends...they’re saving her for future films. They played her light and safe in this one. And she is really OP, so seeing her over taken by the Power Stone was a good counter balance. Technically, they were still semi-screwed without her. She took town the flagship quicker than anyone else could have.

I absolutely adored the way she took Thano’s head butt without a god damned flinch. 

Honorable mentions:

The Dude Thor is life.

Scott Lang is a national treasure.

Hulk dab.

America’s ass.

Lang and Banner taco friendship goals

Ronin.

Holy shit the de-aging and thinning CGI.

The one guys in our theater that yelled “THAT’S IT, WE’RE DONE.” when Cap got the hammer.

Fortnite.

No but I want more Thor Lebowski.

That’s all I have to say on this one. 

All in all it was a fantastic ride, that didn’t take it’s self too seriously. It rounded out the movies and cast poetically and in line with their stories. 

#endgame spoilers #avengers spoilers #spoilers #i said spoilers you asshole

[sundaywhiskey]

on why you should vote for Bernie Sanders

The Sunday Blunt is a 2020 election survival effort of researched, brief-ish, minimally edited rants on America’s hellish political hellscape and related hell. I’ve not been shy about my support for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary. Today she suspended her campaign for president, and I’d be lying if I said I’m not writing this in tears. My hands are a lil shaky. Honestly I feel like I’m going through a breakup. It’s fine. Ultimately Warren was a prepared, fearless warrior for the progressive cause, but not the cause itself, so to honor the righteous work she’s done in this race, it is only necessary that I urge everyone still to vote to cast their ballot for Bernie Sanders. There are a few considerations all of us weigh to some degree when casting a ballot. Personally, I vote based on shared values; that’s why I didn’t cast a strategic ballot in the California primary and stayed true to my heart by voting Warren. Actually, I cried then, too, when casting my ballot. My boyfriend joked that’s “The American Dream,” but honestly... kind of. At the bare minimum, we want to believe in the vision of America that our candidate represents, and that’s reasonable considering these fuckers *do* work for us. These campaigns, as cursedly long and tedious as they are, are literally job interviews. I imagine those who stay home on Election Day feel unheard and disenchanted and probably disenfranchised by the political system. They wouldn’t hire any of the options. A progressive candidate could turn out more voters by illustrating an America that isn’t a return to the status quo, but something better for all of us. For no small or invalid reasons, most Americans want better than what we’ve received so far. I’m one of those Americans. Actually, I can confidently assume a majority of people reading this are one of those Americans as recent polling shows 70% of us support a pretty radical change in Medicare 4 All. I say radical, but what I mean is moral. America’s current healthcare model (and the one Biden vows to protect under the misnomer of “Public Option”) maintains healthcare as a business where multiple industries make a shit ton of money off of you and me getting and staying sick. This includes the pharma industry, the insurance industry, and the hospital industry. And because industries on a whole incentivize profits, nobody is working on behalf of Americans’ health. If Americans are healthy, nobody makes money. Which is truly wild because our Constitution very clearly and early on identifies the pursuit of life as an inalienable right. Meanwhile, there are 27 million uninsured Americans (like ya girl) and nearly 44 million under-insured Americans buried alive both metaphorically and literally by medical debt or postponing (or altogether not seeking) necessary care. I fall into that latter group. Shit’s not right, and any proposal that falls short of guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans and dismantling the profiteering of our illnesses is a disingenuous slab of garbage, I’m not sorry for saying so. There are lives on the line. Voters also vote with their pocketbooks. I’m not in love with this strategy but I’m broke so I get it. We’re justifiably protective of our tax dollars—it’s money we earned but can’t control. Who the fuck likes that? And considering the undertaking, it’s no question Medicare 4 All would be expensive, and voters want to know if restructuring the current model will flatter their bank accounts. So will it? The short answer is literally nobody knows. My primary care doctor (a dreamy old fellow named Dr. Horowitz who wears bowties and still sees me without insurance every three months for medication refills, although usually I go every four months when I can’t afford it) tells me the first step of the transition to single-payer will be nailing down cost. Right now, one doctor might charge one patient $20 for Advil while another might charge hundreds because the patient is in a different hospital or a person of color or just because they can. (This isn’t an exaggeration, it happens every day, ask for itemized bills.) So anybody who claims to know how much Medicare 4 All will cost is lying, which means nobody can confidently tell you how your taxes will be affected. We can predict, however, how much the current system costs you. Obviously, there are premiums and co-pays and deductibles and medication costs and, like, a zillion other ways you’re charged. Need to call an ambulance? Depending on the distance, you can ride in this life-saving transport for between a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars. Wanna have a baby? Ten thousand dollars. Diabetic? Despite outrage on both sides of the aisle, two bottles of insulin can cost upwards of $700 a month and prices are still rising. And even though we live in a dystopian hellscape where we can GoFundMe our healthcare costs, 90% of campaigns don’t get fully funded. Can you believe even that isn’t a solution? Which means I guess there’s only one thing we can do and follow the advice a rich, retired, Medicare-receiving man swirling iced white wine on a catamaran once gave me: Make more money. No, I’m kidding. We need to elect the only candidate with a god damn humanistic solution to this very real and urgent crisis, shit. Obviously, and much to my dismay, a vote for Bernie is not a vote for universal healthcare. Before we can even have that conversation, we first have to get our preferred old white man in the White House. Look, I’m not a pundit, but I pretend to be one in every Facebook status and conversation with my mother, so I’m going to answer the question on every political strategist’s voter’s mind: Can Bernie beat Trump? The short answer is yes and with better odds than Joe Biden. The long answer is holy what now!? who would have the answer to that question? Can you tell the future? Can I tell the future? Can Rachel Maddow tell the future?  In all seriousness though, I absolutely do get it. There is no denying that the threat of four more years of the Trump administration will have a devastating and long-lasting effect on our planet and every single global citizen. It’s bad, my dudes. That said, voting for political strategy is my least favorite way of voting. For starters, it’s an unreliable barometer based on nothing but guesswork and confidence in your own thoughts. But more importantly, it is insincere and doesn’t communicate to Democratic politicians what standards and values we’ll hold them to. Again, we employ them. If we want to be sensitive about our tax dollars, we should be mindful of which representatives build their whole damn lifestyles off of them. We shouldn’t be voting for politicians who have built a career on passing legislation and otherwise making decisions that degrade people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community or lead our country into war. However, if you arreeee going to vote strategically, here’s why Bernie: Centrists don’t win elections. As much as Hillary was very much a woman and sexism very much played a role in her electoral defeat, so did the fact that she’s a moderate. That’s (partially) why there was no President Kerry or Gore or Romney or McCain: Each of those candidates painted a decidedly more status quo America compared to their more extreme opponent.  Whoever we elect needs to engage and energize voters. Two things are for sure: 1. Republicans fucking love to vote. (They also love to suppress the vote, but another day, my friends.) 2. Progressive policies are popular and poll better than Trump’s policies across the board. The Democratic Party is a big, welcoming tent where everyone can hang and be protected and represented... when we elect the right officials. Unfortunately, many people the Democratic Party seeks to help (and need to reach in order to win) still don’t see themselves represented in the current political landscape or find solace in moderate policies. Biden’s campaign promises a return to 2016 when, y’all, if you can believe it, I still wasn’t insured. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in the race whose policies address the needs of marginalized groups we’d need to turn out in November.  If we can draw one lesson from Elizabeth’s campaign, it’s that politicians should be listening to the individual circumstances and needs of their constituents. Elizabeth did this in every selfie line and phone call to small-dollar donors and meeting with marginalized groups. At her speeches, she kept the lights on her audiences bright so she could see the people she was talking to. Elizabeth fundamentally understood that this never was about her being president but about the good she could do for each of us once she got there. There’s no question that Bernie has understood this his whole life. The president isn’t the leader of our land, but rather a representative hired to do the work of the American people. I believe then that it is our duty to elect the candidate who would do the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of us. Without a doubt, Bernie Sanders is that candidate. 

[baradorable]

So I finally made a list of all my gripes with X-Men Disassembled right now. I know -1% of my followers care about comics, much less events/arcs, but I’m pretty heated and wanted to vent.

The “plot” is just a bunch of cliche X-Men mashed together. You have a mutant cure, an evil kid from the future, Four Horsemen, Age of Apocalypse, Angel becoming Archangel, and other stories you heard dozens of times before.

At least the cure plot is almost completely forgotten about just as soon as it’s brought up.

The story’s 10 issues long. Even though we’re getting this story weekly instead of monthly, this makes the event/arc really long. Longer than it has to be, if I’m being honest.

And the events of this arc will spill into the next arc, and we’ll get a billion spin-off books to tell side stories. It just won’t end.

Hey, remember the poster they made advertising this event? It had about 52 different X-Men on it, and it looked like this was going to be a massive event with a lot of characters, just like Avengers: No Surrender.

Only about 20~ X-Men have appeared. (Oya’s not in the picture, but she does briefly appear.) The characters with orange rings are ones that appear, but do jack shit or just show up once. 

Every issue is basically just Jean Grey, Psylocke, the four kids (but mostly Pixie, Armor and Glob), X-Man, and maybe Bishop. I’m being generous with some of these green rings.

Multiple Man barely counts. He was more of a red herring plot device, repeating his schtick from that horrifically bad Multiple Man solo.

(Speaking of - guess who’s taking over the flagship X-Men book after this event? But I guess it’s not fair to judge him on that book. I should also judge him on that mini-event nobody liked, or that mini-run on Astonishing nobody read.)

Angel turns evil, again. And then he becomes Archangel, again. He complains about existence, but then helps the X-Men against the Horsemen. His whole story, especially his turning into Archangel, was pointless.

Also, despite freeing him from X-Man’s control, Psylocke doesn’t try this on the other Horsemen.

I’m only giving Anole a green ring because they’re incorporating him into the cure plot for some reason.

I can’t even really count Polaris as important, since she was used all of twice, and one time was just to throw Laura.

The 8 billion spin-off books might focus on other X-Men at least? I know Dani is confirmed for one. I think Evan is in another. But the book that’s supposed to be focusing on the X-kids? It’s focused on fucking Glob.

I will say that I’m glad Trinary didn’t show up. She was a good idea, but holy shit did she become cringe-inducing once they brought in the internet stuff. 

Laura/X-23, who is normally quiet and reserved, is written as quippy, energetic and one who makes silly faces. I guess the writers confused her with Honey Badger, her annoying meme goblin sidekick.

She also indirectly talks shit about the X-kids, despite being in the same grade as them, and all of them being students longer than her. Pre-school murder training be damned, they went through a lot of shit with her.

Also, the X-Men giving the X-kids shit jobs and not respecting them. Looks like this’ll be a plot point, where they learn that they’re wrong?

Nope! The kids were in the wrong and they not only don’t know shit about being X-Men, but they’ve also never experienced true loss and hardship. 

Except the fact that they’ve been X-Men for years, on serious missions

And Pixie graduated and became a full X-Man, but I guess they retconned that out.

And we had several years’ worth of stories that contradict this lesson, including a book entirely about how the X-Men let them down, and how they had to grow up, fight like soldiers and try to survive after losing everyone and everything around them. A book that lasted 42 issues and five years, six if you count New Mutants?

Hey, remember Necrosha?

Hey, remember Nimrod?  

Hey, remember the 42 dead kids?

Hey, remember when even more kids died immediately after?

Armor even brings up Magik as an example of how X-Men suck and just kind of leave people MIA. Pixie and Rockslide met Magik while they were all trapped in Limbo, and Pixie lost a piece of her soul because of it. Yeah, I think they know the score.

But yeah, no. They’re just little shits, I guess.

Kitty is quick to abandon them in a hellscape, too. Like she doesn’t even try to save them, and it’s up to Bishop to convince her she’s being an idiot. The kids were at least right about one thing: the X-Men don’t give a shit about helping their fallen.

But I guess we know why Julian’s not in this event; it’d be hard to tell the guy who has lost several friends and his hands fighting for the X-Men that he doesn’t know about suffering.

I did like Armor shit-talking Bishop for the Hope stuff, though.

But the whole adults vs kids stuff. This is, what, the fifth hero vs hero plot in an event? Civil War, Civil War II, Secret Empire, Infinity War (sort of?) At least they’re just opposed to each other, instead of fighting each other.

Speaking of Civil War, I have reason to bring up the 42+ dead kids again. Or hell, Annihilation. (This doesn’t have anything to do with this book, I just wanted to complain about that.)

There are three writers, and it becomes really obvious when Psylocke starts inserting “bloody” into every other sentence.

This isn’t a problem with the story, just a problem in general, but why are they still pushing Glob? Because he has a unique look? Like nobody likes him anymore. I want Beak. Preferably without Angel Salvatore, since she sucks and I hate her.

The kids are seemingly transported to the Age of Apocalypse timeline, but the TWIST is that they’re actually trapped in Legion’s mind. Except the twist was accidentally spoiled in the “previously on...“ page at the beginning of the book. Whoops!

Also also also, Glob nearly chokes/suffocates Rockslide. But I thought Rockslide doesn’t need to breathe? Pretty sure he was even out in space at one point. He doesn’t even need a body, technically, since he can just reform himself. I’d say that the writers used this as a subtle plot point that the timeline they’re in is fake, but that would require the writers to actually know about Rockslide.

I’d say that quality control isn’t doing their job, but it’s clear that they don’t exist anywhere across the line. 

Either that, or the writers just have so many horrible ideas that they can only catch so much. I don’t hate the writers, I know they have quite a few good stories under their collective belt. But I’ve heard about writers going buck wild and needing to be reigned in.

EDIT: On top of everything, we’re 8 issues in and barely anything has happened. Like, stuff happened, but not much of it really mattered. 

Also, super-powerful Legion and X-Man mind-fuse and become one. Okay, sure. What the fuck ever. Who fucking cares at this point?

At least fucking Quentin Quire isn’t in this event.

Or Jason Aaron. Holy shit, a flagship X-Men book under Jason Aaron sounds like the worst timeline. Good thing that never happened, right? 

Fucking Wolverine and the X-Men though.

I know he has nothing to do with this event, but seriously, fuck Jason Aaron.

Fuck Quentin Quire, too.

Completely unrelated, but anyone else watching The Gifted? I want to know what that pop song was in the last episode.

I’m just hate-reading at this point. The hate gives me power. I have 0 hope for this X-Men relaunch, but I’m going to keep trying. There are so many characters I love and want to see again. I don’t even dislike Rosenberg, despite the shit-talking. And, like, at least it isn’t as bad as Jason Aaron’s take on Robbie Reyes.

But if I can say one thing to the three writers behind this horrible Frankenstein of bad ideas, it’s this: 42 dead kids I know it’s hard, trying to wrangle up characters with decades of history and trying to make a coherent, interesting story that also respects their characters. I know that sometimes, you have to use characters you don’t want to just because they’re popular (Jubilee) or being pushed (Glob.) On top of it all, you have three writers trying to work together, while also under management’s mandates and guidelines. I get all that, and I can sympathize. It doesn’t excuse X-Men Disassembled, but I can understand that you guys must have tried your best, given the circumstances. And I also know that, despite this little hiccup, you guys are all good writers.

#don't reblog I guess? #barannoyng

[copperbadge]

when you created the universe just for some 'Clint Barton LOL' did you ever imagine LotFW would end up becoming A) so popular, and B) more about Steve having fun as a hotter blonder version of Joe Biden than about President Barton? (i am asking for a friend and for SCIENCE sam)

In defense of Uncle Joe I know people who would legit fight you on the idea that Steve is the hotter one. :D 

The great thing about Steve Rogers is that he is at once an authority figure as the representative of America, an imperial colonial military empire, and an anti-authoritarian, as someone who grew up working-class poor and is under an epic-fantasy level onus, on what might be considered a holy mission, to defend the underdog. When you take that contradiction and add in real legal, world-changing power, beyond Punching Baddies, which comes with it a whole host of diplomatic restrictions, shit gets bananas. 

I feel like Steve would need Nomad just to keep his sanity. The progress of politics is infinitely slower than the progress of a fistfight, so he would need to be able to remind himself he is still capable of accomplishing something.

I mean I should have expected people would really love his hijinks because we love subversion and Steve has to subvert in order to survive in this situation. What’s mostly surprising really is that I didn’t see Steve’s popularity coming. :D 

I don’t think in any other election year LotFW would have become as popular. I don’t think most people have ever so desperately needed an escapist fantasy as they did when the Republican party’s true colors began to show. We’ve had dumb, racist presidents before, but never so openly or so closely following a genuinely good person in the White House. I don’t really chalk its popularity up to my writing; it’s a moderately funny story but the reason people connect with it so heavily is that it’s a god damned break from the hellscape of our political reality. 

#leader of the free world #kepzandme