We should totally have more jl fics where someone is acting ooc and immediately everyone is trying to determine whether they're an imposter or brainwashed or possessed without making it obvious.
Like, a running joke on the tower. Batman makes a sarcastic joke and flash immediately asks him to blink twice if he's under mind control.
Someone starting a sentence with 'Not to be possessed but -'
People calling off sick by saying 'if I come in today that's not me and you should arrest them' and then dragging themselves in to pick up something they accidentally left and everyone takes the mick by saying stuff like 'this isn't you! I believe in you, you can fight this!' when they're grabbing a hoodie from a chair like har har.
Superhero community slang just in general slipping into their civilian lives. Clark says 'before I start I assure you I have not had my will superseded by mister mind' as an ice breaker at a presentation and gets weird and worried looks all night.
It actually ends up helping on several occasions because it's so very very hard to infiltrate an extremely high risk team and then respond in kind without missing a beat when people casually accuse you of being an imposter because you didn't hold your pen the way you normally do. It'd wreck any controlling consciousness' self esteem XD. They've made several shapeshifters cry.
Also the exasperated sighs when you make a suggestion you normally wouldn't and everyone starts squinting at you looking for anything out of the ordinary.
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dex’s motivations
we don’t know much about dex (so most of this is headcanon and speculation) but i think the context is absolutely the clue. he grew up, we have to assume, in the row, therefore he’s either poor or working class. he’s the most ambitious saint and clearly works hard to make his way up to the top. this drive that isn’t really found in the other characters leads me to believe that he either is or feels the pressure to be his family’s breadwinner (admittedly more of a biased, optimistic reading than him simply looking out only for himself, but it’s important to remember he does canonically have a sister—at least one person he possibly has to provide for). he’s ambitious AND smart, so why doesn’t he just get a job? well, he seems to be around college age, which if true means that he’s obviously not still in education. the main reason this could be the case is money. college is expensive, and, if we go with the breadwinner theory, time-wasting—a further strain on his family’s needs. without college education, how hard do you think it would be for a young Black man from an impoverished district (which would undoubtedly carry a city-wide reputation) to land a well-paying job befitting his intelligence? but, here’s something seemingly unrelated but absolutely vital in the context, this is the city of ben king and the vice kings. they’ve been around since the 70s, so without a doubt they must’ve had an influence on dex growing up. here’s another Black man who shares dex’s origins—from a poor, neglected district, a gang member who worked his way up as far as he could get. he started a legitimate business, has powerful connections, and is himself one of the most powerful people in the city, and certainly wealthy. it’s the kind of story dex could look at and imagine for himself—finally something plausible, something he’s capable of and has the means to achieve himself. it’s almost a cruel twist of fate that ben ended up with warren and not dex as his lieutenant.
dex in sr2
i’ve gone back and forth on this before but i think it’s absolutely possible for dex to succumb to paranoia, and have that affect his behaviour and relationships.
he was in a street gang. they killed people, powerful people, and he personally got them involved with the colombians. he could implicate a lot of people. he was canonised. blood in, blood out. you don’t just leave. this alone is enough to have anyone looking over their shoulder for the rest of their life.
johnny holds a grudge against him for leaving. johnny tried to kill troy. he went after a cop! what’s to stop him or any other saint from coming after dex?
he’s ultor’s chief of security, meaning he has constant exposure to threat, surveillance, armed guards, etc. and he has all of these things in his control, to be orchestrated as he sees fit. how long do you think it would take for someone in his position to grow paranoid, maybe trigger-happy? after all, it’s his job to instinctively snuff out threats before they can materialise.
he’s smart. he’s a tactical thinker. he’s going to have a plan for every outcome. but the saints are unpredictable. he’s had years to sit and stew in his thoughts and wonder how long it’s going to be before someone comes for him, and it’s possible he would overestimate johnny or the boss because they’re both capable of great carnage—it’s possible that no matter how he prepares himself, he believes they’re going to get him anyway.
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hollywood bowl btw. if you even care
my most expensive event ever??? no one ended up buying my extra tickets. and i flew here and got a hotel room and the shoes and etc but concerts are forever!!!!! especially this one
friend and i worked HARD to nail our ron and russ looks. so many people complimented us and took our picture
got TWO official sparks shirts and the socks. they didnt have the pins :(
also got a hollywood bowl christmas tree ornament :)
tmbg show was SUPER FUN. but also very loud and a little harsh sound wise. they thanked sparks twice for having them open for them
sparks don't address tmbg at all when they come out lmao
the energy for the sparks show was insane from the start they were really giving it all
really hoping theres video of this little hip sway move russell did near the end of so may we start. really enjoyed it
he did a similar move during the groovy instrumental part of when im with you think. he was selling it
unlike ny this time i managed to remember to watch for russells shirt unbuttoning during shopping mall of love. all thoughts are redacted
the concert goes by so fast!!!! but what a time
stood up for music that you can dance to and just kept standing/bouncing for the rest of the show
no escalator :((((((
russell's weirdly long intro to we go dancing. thanks for the intricate context abt north korea
russell saying 'that looks beautiful!' in between lyrics of all that when everyone held up their phones w the flashlight on
edgar taking the band photo :)))))
weird al was also allegedly there (did not see him) and christi haydon was there (i was too shy to talk to her but she looked so fab)
just a general incredible energy of the show you could tell they made the hollywood bowl show so special
got a weird bootleg sparks shirt after the concert from a weird guy
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(if someone manages to find and revive bonnie in ruin) the first thing bonnie would ask is "w-where's freddy..?", he and freddy were best friends before he got killed by hacked monty, monty meanwhile would be suffering from terrible guilt over seeing the claw marks on bonnie
Hifdhfdgdfg *insert obligatory 'historians would call them close friends :)' joke here*
Anyway. I am one of the people that think the evidence for Monty killing Bonnie doesn't make any sense. I don't think he did that at all.
I think the likely condidates are the Prototype Freddy, Glitchtrapped/Mimicked Freddy himself, or Security Node Roxy. I have some stuff planned for that last one in case you were curious.
The MAIN thing to think about in a Ruin scenario where they bring back Bonnie, that I plan to explore in the future should things go as planned, is the betrayal. Close friends? Boyfriends? Whatever. How the fuck is he supposed to react to his friends that are three times as destroyed as he is, telling him what Freddy has done? What he abandoned them for? What has happened since he left and what his headless, prototype replacement is continuing to do? It's a lot to digest that's for fucking sure, and that's without the full events of Security Breach, whatever destroyed the Plex and then the events of Ruin, plus my Ruin AU of what happened after Ruin. Buddy, he is not okay.
I also find it kind of ironic how the one guy that hasn't been around the large majority of major incidents is the least physically damaged out of everyone. Unless DJ is mostly unscathed, Bonnie still somehow holds that title
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we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.
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