I'm not usually the audience for most kid fic content HOWEVER the idea of Eddie falling into a circumstance where he becomes the Uncle Wayne to some other kid who has nowhere else to go has me by the throat today
like. circular narratives.... hear me out....
maybe Eddie did have a sibling, a sister ten years older than him who was out of the house and as far away as she could manage before he even ended up in Hawkins with Wayne. maybe he and his sister didn't keep in touch because by the time she had her footing in the world well enough to come back and see him, Eddie was long gone already.
maybe she ends up in worse situations than he does by nature of not having a Wayne of her own to teach her what it feels like to have someone stick around for you and maybe one of those situations is ending up with a kid she's not equipped to take care of, no matter how much she tries.
she needs help, needs backup, needs someone to take this 10-year-old in and give her safety while her mother gets healthy and tries to learn what it means to be stable.
And hey, listen, Eddie Munson is 27 at this point, he's had seven years to heal from the bullshit Hawkins put him through and he's still working hard every day to keep that momentum going, but a child?
he's not a father, not an uncle, take her to Wayne for fuck's sake, he begs of his sister even though he knows deep down he doesn't mean it, not when Wayne has finally retired, finally has some stability of his own.
what other option do I have? I need you, Ed, is begged of him in return, and he hears her, he does, but what does he have to offer in this situation?
he's a mechanic with PTSD and a one-bedroom in Bloomington who's been pining for his best friend the former jock-turned-part time student for the past two years.
he's a wreck and a half who has nothing but lateral moves to make in his future and has to set three different alarm clocks to wake himself up in time for work every morning and he's just-- Eddie. That's all he is. That's all he has to offer.
It can't possibly be enough.
What's her name? he asks despite himself, out here on the sidewalk in front of his place of work where he'd been ambushed, where he knows Steve will be pulling into the spot across the street to pick him up any minute.
Naomi, is the answer, and she will be, even if Eddie doesn't see it yet.
There's no part of Eddie Munson which has ever dreamed of trips to the park and helping with homework and drives to the mall to buy presents for birthday parties.
There's no part of him which has ever sought out parenthood to anything other than the stray cat who likes to beg for treats at his back door.
There's no part of him which is built for this, Eddie knows, as he sees the familiar shape of a familiar car parking across the street and idling.
Naomi, he breathes anyway, looks down at the photograph being pressed into his hand, the untamed curls and missing front teeth.
She's sitting on the front steps of a trailer, sun shining down on her and pinking up the bridge of her nose and it's him for a moment. It's him, loved unequivocally by a guy who never planned to have kids, never wanted them, and loved Eddie with everything he had to offer despite it.
It's him, the little boy that still lives in Eddie's chest, just asking not to be forgotten.
You're all she's got right now, Eddie.
Well, shit.
He's gonna need to put a call into Wayne, isn't he?
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One of my favorite parts of phase 2 (and indeed one of the few moments I resonated with IDW Prowl) was when the neutrals were coming back to Cybertron and Prowl said that he refused to let Autobots be pushed aside and overruled after they were the ones who fought for freedom for 4 million years (the exact wording escapes me atm).
And I mean, that resentment still holds true even once the colonists come on bc like. As much as it's true that Cybertron's culture is fucked up, and as funny as it can be to paint Cybertronians as a bunch of weirdos who consider trying to kill someone as a common greeting not important enough to hold a grudge over.... The colonists POV kind of pissed me off a lot of times, as did the narrative tone/implications that Cybertronians are forever warlike and doomed to die by their own hands bc it just strikes me as an extremely judgemental and unsympathetic way to deal with a huge group of people with massive war PTSD and political/social tensions that were rampant even before the war?
Like, imagine living in a society rife with bigotry and discrimination where you get locked into certain occupations and social strata based on how you were born. The political tension is so bad there's a string of assassinations of politicians and leaders. The whole planet erupts into an outright war that leads (even unintentionally) to famine and chemical/biological warfare that destroys your planet. Both sides of the war are so entrenched in their pre-war sides and resentment for each other that this war lasts 4 million years and you don't even have a home planet any more. Then your home planet gets restored and a bunch of sheltered fucks come home and go "ewww why are you so violent?? You're a bunch of freaks just go live in the wilderness so that our home can belong to The Pure People Who Weren't Stupid And Evil Enough To Be Trapped In War" and then a bunch of colonists from places that know nothing about your history go "lol you people are so weird?? 🤣🤣 I don't get why y'all are fighting can't you just like, stop??? Oh okay you people are just fucked up and evil and stupid then" ((their planets are based on colonialism where their Primes wiped out the native populations btw whereas the Autobots and OP in particular fought to save organics. But that never gets brought up as a point in their favor)) as if the damage of a lifetime of war and a society that was broken even before the war can just magically go away now that the war is over.
Prowl fucking sucks but he was basically the only person that pointed out the injustice of that.
And then from then on out most of the characters from other colonies like Caminus and wherever else are going "i fucking hate you and your conflicts" w/ people like literal-nobody Slide and various Camiens getting to just sit there lecturing Optimus about how Cybertronians are too violent for their own good and how their conflicts are stupid, with only brief sympathetic moments where the Cybertronians get to be recognized as their own ppl who deserve sympathy before going right back to being lambasted.
Like I literally struggled to enjoy the story at multiple points because there was only so much I could take of the characters I knew and loved being raked over coals constantly while barely getting to defend themselves or be defended by the narrative so like. It was just fucking depressing and a little infuriating to read exRID/OP
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i wanted to look at the symbolism of the ocean in disco elysium because it features so prominently in the setting. insulinde being an isola comprised of islands, martinaise as a port town financially anchored by its ocean trade. the divisions brought by water that we see in the geography: how the canal separates the working district of martinaise from the even poorer, commerce-less village-- how the river esperance separates the worst ghettos of revachol and jamrock from the more rebuilt and financially stable districts-- how, for example, lilienne looks across the bay of revachol to the wealthy district of la delta, a poignant moment of separation between someone desperately poor and the towers of wealth built out of the ruins of revachol. we see water, and often the sea specifically, acting as a divider in various contexts.
the ocean of time and distance that separates dora and harry, that separates klaasje from oranje:
then, further into the idea of the ocean as representative of time: in various contexts i see the ocean as representing the past. memory residing under the waves, and each of us living above water-- in the present-- but often still helpless to the tides when we’re not careful. to me this is cemented by the implication that the pale is commonly theorized as an *outer ocean* (juxtaposed with harry’s introspective skill, inland empire!!): the pale is the past, and if the pale is seen as an outer ocean, then right there is a tangible connection between the two. memory and the past as an ocean, dangerous if you don’t respect its power, but ultimately navigable. there is frequent reference made to the fact that the bombed ruins of martinaise are sinking or lost into the ocean, lost to the past, now only memory.
and harry, who is living in the past and being consumed by nostalgia like a rot, drives his car into the ocean. harry’s badge, which is conflated with his identity in the aftermath of his amnesia, was underwater before he pulled it from the car: until he got it, his entire identity was lost with his memory in the past. klaasje’s documents, too, presumed lost to the ocean, a loss of who she was or claimed to be (until you meet the phasmid). lilienne’s husband was lost to the waves, and in the same lines she’ll dismiss your concerns-- he’s in the past now, she’s really not too upset. the cleaning lady, abandoned by the world, who has only her own memories for company in her sea-beaten room. in the context of ruby’s near-suicide in the shack, how inland specifies how the “waves had calmed” as she put the gun away: ruby distancing herself from the past that she thinks is chasing her to form a better plan. the working-class husband, who, had his corpse fallen through the boardwalk into the ocean, would have been lost to the past, living only in the memory of billie and their daughters.
for me, the final dream had some of the heaviest but most subtle inclusions of the ocean symbolism. it’s brought on by looking into the ocean around the seafort and takes place under the ocean somewhere. even before the dream, dora is alluded to in the context of the sea. she moved across the ocean and now, to him, she’s lost under it. she’s trapped in his memory.
where we see things half-submerged or partially oceanic, we see a bridge between the past and the present being represented. something partially lost to the past but still with a foot in the here and now. harry’s half-sunken car, in part a representation of his career: part of his past, yes, but still very much in his present. one of the primary spiritual practices we hear of is the volta do mar: originally a palefarer’s practice to keep them grounded in an onslaught by the past, and its meaning is *return from the sea*. when harry tries to turn back time, he wants to go back to a time when the sun had not yet sunk into the sea-- when the light in his life didn’t reside solely in the past.
also in this context, something that really struck me was how harry will sometimes think of himself in the context of the sea. first is the sea monster thought, brought about by the broken plaza: him as a creature submerged in the past, terrorizing the present. and seafaring brought up to represent a kind of compromise between living in the present and acknowledging the draw of nostalgia. even joyce in her limited knowledge of harry compares him to a “half-submerged ruin”. and when harry is prompted into introspection by the dros predicament, inland empire becomes the *inland sea*.
and i really want to make a final, individual point of this. the whirling-in-rags music is sea power’s song “fire escape in the sea”. there is an explicit reference made to the song by shivers as well, and i think the choice of this song is very intentional. the whirling-in-rags is where harry forgot his whole life, the whole world, and it’s where he wakes up and begins to piece it all back together. the whirling-in-rags is harry’s fire escape in the sea. his bridge between his past and his present, his last-ditch attempt at escape from the tortures of his subconscious.
(this is by no means exhaustive, there are a lot of other moments where the sea comes in, but i included the moments that spoke to me most. you’re welcome to add your own!)
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I've searched literally every ask I've gotten in the past three years because I know I've said it before and I wanted to reblog it, but:
Elain is not the only person who can find/wield Dread Trove items. She never has been. The main requirement for finding Dread Trove items is being Made - it is not related to specific powers. So who is Made?
Elain
Nesta
Feyre
Amren
Miryam
Amren and Miryam's circumstances are a little different, but they were all Made if different ways - Elain and Nesta in the Cauldron, Feyre by the High Lords, Amren made herself, and Miryam... I forget and don't really care. The only reason Feyre didn't try to find the mask and harp in acosf is because she was pregnant. She is still alive and can still find/use those objects, because she is still Made. The main reason that Elain didn't try to find/wield those objects in acosf, despite offering, is because Nesta and Az prevented her.
The point is that all of these characters are Made, and are still Made, and Elain is in no way the only person who can find and/or use these objects.
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they hate each other except for when they dont. but actually they do
[image id: a series of sketches of Day, a pokemon trainer oc, and Melli from legends arceus. Day is a white person with their hair shaved on one side, and is wearing glasses, a t shirt, a long jacket with stripes on the sleeves, and flame-patterned puffy pants tucked into boots.
In the first sketch, Melli stands side by side with Day. Day looks up at him, extremely unimpressed, as Melli says "oh your coat is just in horrible condition, your terrible galaxy team forcing you to work in the wilds in whats clearly such flimsy fabric just proves how bad you people are". Then, he says, "now I simply insist you allow me, the Great Melli, to repair and reinforce it with my superior sewing skills". He looks down at Day, very smug, as they startle, clearly not having expected an offer of help.
In the next series of sketches, Melli is sewing their jacket with Day watching. Empty speech bubbles hover above Melli as he explains it to them. Then, he hands the jacket over to an apprehensive Day, saying "now you try." Day begins sewing, now more confident and smiling a bit as Melli continues to instruct them. Melli grins, saying "see? how could you fail, being taught by the Great Melli ;)". Day looks at Melli, sick and tired of his shit.
The final two sketches show Day in their newly repaired jacket. They stand looking down at it, smiling in surprised delight. In the first, they face the front, and in the second, they've spun around to look at the back of it. The cuffs of the sleeves, bottom of the jacket, and a couple gashes on the back are the most significantly repaired portions. The shoulders are now embroidered with Hisuian Decidueye inspired patterns, and the gash on the back has been repaired to mimic rays of light. End id]
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