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sttngfashion · 3 years

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5.26 and 6.1 - Time’s Arrow

Oh my god. Y’all. It’s a new Fashion It So post. In the year of our Picard 2020. Yes.

For literal years, Charlie and I have been like UGH WE NEED TO DO TIME’S ARROW PARTS 1 AND 2 BUT IT’S JUST SUCH A MONSTER.

Well, I’m doing a complete rewatch of the series with my partner and we just got to these two, so IT IS TIME.

We open in a cave in San Francisco, where Data and Picard are checking something out:

Rent for the cave is $6,000 per month

Showing them around is this guy in a Science Outfit:

He’s ready to go night biking

We’ve seen this look before in both Silicon Avatar and Devil’s Due, and it’s functional, yet cute. Basically a windbreaker in jumpsuit form.

They find a couple of items in the cave, including a pocket watch from 1889 and also:

I left my head in San Francisco

IT’S DATA’S HEAD!!! And it’s been there for FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. What could have caused this? And why is Data’s head so absolutely terrifying?

Is that fondant

This head is, in a word, haunting. The 2020 of heads.

Data and Geordi chat in Ten-Forward about what the presence of Data’s head in the cave means. Data says it means he’s mortal; that someday he will die, and that’s comforting. Spoiler alert: that’s not what it means. But it’s a nice conversation.

Also, Guinan is here!!!

Merlot My God!!

Or maybe: Burgundy-lightful!! Or perhaps: De-Crimson-alize Sex Work!! Okay that last one was a stretch but I really think I missed my calling as a nail polish shade namer.

Anyway, she’s here in her classic look of a pizza-sized hat and a flowing gown/coat/top/robe. The collar here is a little too close to a mock turtleneck for my liking and honestly - this is a little staid for our friend Guinan. I want a TEXTURE or a SWEEP or some WIDE RIBBING or some PLEATS. Don’t worry, though...she will get plenty more later.

Then there’s some plot which frankly we DO NOT HAVE TIME to get into but let’s just say: the away team goes to a planet, there’s a temporal disturbance, and Data ends up here:

Huge mood

Where are we? Or should I say WHEN are we??

Well that old-timey font is a good clue...also the horse

Are we in the Old West land of an off-brand Disneyworld? Are we going to ride something called Large Lightning Mesa Train Tracks? What colorful characters will we meet here?

Winner of 1893’s Mustache Medal

This type of ‘stache is called a Fu Manchu, after the character Dr. Fu Manchu. It’s not...a great look? But it is memorable, which is sometimes enough. He’s also wearing a simple black cap, probably made of silk. He’s keeping it cazh.

So where are we?

SAN FRANCISCO, OPEN YOUR GOLDEN GATE / YOU’LL LET NOBODY WAIT / OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR

Yes, it’s San Francisco. And it’s *eyes popping out of head like a cartoon wolf seeing a busty babe* 1893!!!! That temporal disturbance was...disturbing.

So who else do we have hanging out?

Please check out our Vaudeville act, Knit Cap ‘n’ Bowly

These dudes understand those famous Bay Area MICROCLIMATES, amirite? We’ve got a Henley. We’ve got a buttondown. We’ve got a vest. We’ve got a coat. No matter which way the thermometer decides to go, THEY ARE READY. Also loving the pop of forest green on Knit Cap’s knit cap.

We also have a 49er:

No, it’s not Steve Young. I googled “famous 49ers” to complete this joke so if there is a more famous 49er please let me know

It’s a literal 49er. Since it’s 1893, this guy’s been hanging around in town for a while, and he’s also familiar with the layering techniques one must master if one is to conquer the Bay Area’s climate. He also has a kicky Colonel Sanders-type tie. He asks Data for money and gives him a few panhandling tips. He’s chill. We like him. But don’t get too attached if you know what I mean!!!!

Data decides he needs somewhere to stay, so he finds a hotel:

Brian.

Why is this so funny to me. Brian. Why would you name your hotel Brian. Brian!!!! I know it’s a last name but like...Brian. HOTEL BRIAN.

This bellhop’s name is not Brian:

Where’s your hat, bro

He’s giving us a classic bellhop look, complete with too many buttons. He gives Data the very important information that there’s a poker game happening in the back of the hotel, which means: Data is about to be RICH rich.

The poker game includes a few good looks:

Louie Anderson IS Wolverine IN a Lands’ End barn coat

Two plaids? Sir...I salute you

Colonel Sanders Goes to Carnaval

Data, of course, wipes the floor with them so hard that he wins their clothes:

Didn’t get that barn coat tho

Yes, that’s the actual vest and the actual hat of those guys from the previous scene. Oh, I love it. I love Data in a vest over his uniform and I love Data with a feather in his cap. Let’s call it macaroni.

Meanwhile, out on the street, the plot is happening:

Beige: inescapable

This is our first taste of the decadent 1890’s sleeves that appear in this episode, and these aren’t even the best sleeves!! These are an amuse-bouche of sleeves. An armuse-bouche, if you will.

Anyway, these two are aliens disguised as humans who are here to steal the 49er’s life energy.

Pew pew pew

I told you not to get attached!!!

Back on the Enterprise, Guinan is doing mixology:

She would never call it something as stupid as mixology though

She tells Picard that he needs to go check out the temporal disturbance, too, even though captains don’t normally go on away missions, and then she gives him this look:

It’s that serious

When Guinan looks at you like this, you do what she says.

Now this outfit is much better than the earlier one. We have some pleated sleeves, which I didn’t even think was a thing you could DO. We have some sort of functional(?) strap(??) across the front. We even have matching fingerless gloves which always make a look A LOOK. And if Picard wasn’t sure whether he needed to go on this away mission, she then gives him THIS look:

Okay now it’s REALLY serious

Back in 1893, Data is making something:

It’s actually just a really complicated and large music box that plays “I Left My Head in San Francisco”

He’s gotten his hands on some more period-appropriate clothing, including a bow tie and a vest. Since he’s not wearing arm garters and his sleeves appear to be the correct length for his arms, we can conclude that the shirt was custom-made, not ready-made, because Data is now a baller due to his poker earnings.

Then, Data sees this in the paper:

I know her!! From work!!!!

Yes, it’s Guinan. In 1893. In a hat!!!!

We cut to the literary reception, which is honestly not as well-attended as I thought it would be, considering it got a GIANT photo of Guinan on page THREE of the paper, but okay. And who should we spy there but:

You’ll love my secret blend of 11 herbs and spices

No, it’s not Colonel Sanders. (Sorry, I really have Colonel Sanders on the brain because of that Lifetime movie.) It’s Samuel Clements, AKA Mark Twain. I had an English teacher in high school who explained the origin of his pseudonym (it indicates a mark of two fathoms, aka twelve feet, on a steamboat) and for some reason she shouted MAAAARK TWAAAAAIN when she told us that story so now her delivery of that line is in my head until I die I guess.

Anyway, it’s Mark Twain.

He’s wearing his iconic white linen suit with a black bow tie, and he’s also wearing a lot of prosthetics, because the actor playing him (Jerry Hardin, AKA Deep Throat from The X-Files AKA Melora Hardin AKA Jan Levinson-Gould’s dad) (was that too many AKAs) (you get it, right?) didn’t look enough like Mark Twain, I guess? In conclusion: what if eyebrow wigs were a thing?

Twain is having a chit chat with “Madame Guinan,” who is wearing what can only be called a sumptuous gown:

It’s 11:30 and the gown is sumptin’ sumptin’

There are so many ELEMENTS to this look! First of all: the color. Royal purple. Fit for a queen. Appropriate.

Then: those sleeves! These sleeves are known as “leg of mutton sleeves” because they KIND OF look like a leg of mutton. Have you ever seen a leg of mutton? I haven’t. I’ve only seen these sleeves. Plus they have a stripe?? No, I don’t know why, but I LOVE IT.

The cuffs and the cravat bring this from “dress” to “lewk.” Top it all off with this hat and you have a true 1893 mood.

What bird is that feather even from

We get a few good extra looks in this scene as well:

Pink Lady is NOT wearing a corset

Look, sometimes you don’t have enough period-appropriate undergarments for all the background people and that’s fine. But I WILL notice.

Is that Loretta Lynn

I am loving all of this! That purple dress is fantastic, those stripes? I die. Military man has some fun flair on his shoulder, and there is a dude in a beautiful turban back there. Plus, another Black lady in addition to Guinan and That One Ensign Who Is On The Bridge Sometimes.

Data rolls in to the literary event in a different suit with a CRAVAT:

Craving a cravat

Data is like “we serve together on the same starship in the 24th century” and Guinan is like “huh” but then she’s like “okay” which...I’m not sure if I would believe that? But let’s just say it’s fine.

Over in the 24th century, the literal entire bridge crew is checking out the temporal disturbance and I DON’T LIKE THIS AT ALL:

Blue Man Group...on ACID

These beings are like ghosts but also like Dr. Manhattan but also like pure energy.

Then everyone goes through the temporal disturbance AND THE SEASON ENDS.

Fortunately for you, this post will continue...right now.

Okay, so we’re back in San Francisco in 1893. You can tell by the horses:

Also the fruit carts

Samuel Clemens is strolling around with a reporter, telling him that he has a great story for him that involves time travelers and, like, protecting the nation.

Here’s the thing about this episode’s version of Mark Twain: he’s kind of a dick. Was the real Mark Twain kind of a dick? I just feel like Mark Twain should be JAZZED about meeting time travelers and not acting like a fuckin’ time cop* and trying to put the Enterprise crew on blast.

Anyway I love his double-breasted vest.

See my vest

The reporter’s hat is technically period-accurate, but that style is SO associated with the 1930s-1950s that I would have gone with something else. He looks cute though.

Meanwhile, Data is wearing a three-piece suit:

My positronic olfactory synapses are interpreting something as...a fart

I hate brown, but this is fine.

Additionally, the beige baddies from before are back and this time, they’ve got a SNAKE CANE:

Love the snake cane, hate how they suck the life out of people

But we are not here for them, we are here to see our faves in period clothing. Our first look is at Riker, who is dressed as an actual cop, not a time cop like Mark Twain:

The past just had...so many buttons

I guess if you’re a time-traveling white man there are worse disguises than a cop. But WHERE DID HE GET THIS UNIFORM? I choose to believe that he found a cop with a similar large handsome body to his own and beat the shit out of him and stole his clothes. Now we can all enjoy imagining a cop being beat up.

The badge that Riker is wearing is a great historical detail; the SFPD started wearing them in 1886 and are reportedly the first law enforcement agency to have worn the seven-pointed star, which is now a common shape among sheriff’s departments across the United States.

But let’s move on to a better look: Dr. Beverly Crusher:

Curlz MT

Okay, now I have more questions. Beverly obviously wouldn’t beat someone up for their clothes, so where did SHE get HER outfit? And who did her hair? Did she do her OWN hair? Where did she get a curling iron? Does she know how to use a curling iron? Was it one of those ones that’s actually made of iron that you have to heat up in a fireplace?

We will get answers to zero (0) of these questions.

We actually get a much better look at her dress later, so let’s focus on that cloak!!! I love it and I also love her hat. Okay, I guess I had less to say about those than I thought.

Bev and Will, along with the rest of the officers, have somehow procured a room/apartment in some lady’s lodging house. It’s cute!

They gave it 5 stars on AirBnB

This also raises questions. How did they get this room? How many bedrooms does it have? Are they sharing one large bed? If so, who has to sleep crossways at the foot of the bed and why is it Geordi? We will get zero answers to these questions as well, so let’s move on to arguably the hottest costume in this two-parter:

I’ll be in Holodeck 4

Whewwwwwww. He’s giving us a rolled sleeve. He’s giving us a casual tweed vest. The pants? They’re perfect. And he KNOWS how that slouch is working. It’s working VERY well. But the Irish landlady? She’s having NONE OF IT.

Absolutely NO nonsense

She needs the rent, but Picard charms her and she leaves. So I guess that’s how they got the room. Her look is knitwear-forward:

Eileen Fisher does sound like an Irish name

She’s got a shawl AND a cardigan! The cozy factor is OFF THE CHARTS. She also has a brooch, because a touch of fancy is always welcome. I will say that her hair is a little more fashion-forward than I’d expect for a woman of her age and station. This is straight up 1890s hair, and she would probably still be rocking an 1860s look, which isn’t as sweepy and would likely involve more braids. Still, she looks lovely.

Geordi is also here looking dapper:

Make the collar as high as you can. I want to be sliced open by my own collar

You CAN go wrong with a three-piece suit, but it’s difficult to. He can’t wear his visor, so he has some kicky shades which we’ll get a better look at in a sec.

Back at the Hotel Brian (lol), the bellboy (who we learn in this scene is Jack London, inspired to be a writer by Mark Twain [citation needed]) lets Mark Twain into Data’s room and allows him to look around unsupervised. This is very bad hotel management.

Great Scott

Then Data and Guinan show back up, and Mark Twain hides in an armoire.

One short day in the emerald brocade

I think one reason I love Guinan’s looks so much, both in the 24th and the 19th century, is that our color palette is very similar. We’re both winters. Bold jewel tones are the vibe. This one is in a beautiful deep green fabric with what looks like a velvet flocking pattern on it. The collar is also velvet, and I love that sleeve with a flounce on top like there wasn’t already enough fucking fabric on the sleeve so they just added a random piece to be like “yes, bitch. I’m a sleeve.”

Naturally, the hat is also jaunty af:

San Francisco’s hottest milliner is: Madame Guinan

This hat has everything: feathers, netting, a brim, an angle that makes you think it’s going to fall off but it doesn’t. We stan.

Meanwhile, Picard is setting up a sensor in a hospital while wearing a hat:

I’m bowled over

We haven’t even asked where Picard got these clothes, but I would like to point out that he’s dressed as a lower-class guy, while Riker is a cop, and Geordi looks like a gentleman. Was there even a discussion they all had about how they would disguise themselves? Was Picard like “I just really want to wear a beat-up bowler hat” and since he’s the captain, they extrapolated from there? This episode is NOT CONCERNED about any of this. They all have clothes, end of story.

Bev even has TWO outfits!!

Hello nurse!!!!

I love this look. She still has her unlikely hairstyle happening, which means her nurse’s cap is sitting atop her voluminous hairstyle. (Not very practical, but realistic!) She’s sporting a simple striped dress and a button-on apron. (Look closely and you can see the two buttons holding the apron to the dress.) The fabric underneath might be cotton seersucker, but it’s likely a lightweight cotton or linen twill. You can see how closely her look matches these nurses from a similar time period:

Hello nurses!!!!

Deanna is also in this scene and this episode, but you wouldn’t know it from what she’s given to do. HUGE SHOCKER: TROI NOT GIVEN ENOUGH TO DO IN AN EPISODE. 🙃

She still looks beautiful:

Why aren’t capelets more popular

We never get a really GREAT look at her whole outfit, but I can tell you that it has a capelet, it’s in the red family, and the hat has a lot of business going on. For those reasons: approved. It has a flounce in the back too:

More fabric = more wealth

Sometimes I think about just how much fabric it took to make these old-timey dresses and I’m like...how did anyone get anything done?? It takes me like 4 weeks to finish a pair of leggings and those have like 5 seams and I own a serger. These historical bitches were sewing whole ass dresses in no time at all.

Okay, so Bev is in this hospital and here come some more energy-stealing aliens, disguised as healthcare professionals this time:

I cannot take a medical professional wearing a LIGHT BROWN TOP HAT seriously, sorry

Bev AND this energy-stealing alien have BOTH managed to get their hands on the SAME nurse’s uniform?? I guess in the case of the alien, she is a shape-shifter, so she got her clothes from...that. And her hair.

I hate this light brown top hat. If you’re going to wear a top hat, don’t DISRESPECT IT by making it BROWN, but if you’re going to make it brown, make it a good brown, like chocolate. Stupid energy-stealing aliens.

There’s a skirmish, the energy-stealing aliens disappear, and the real cops show up:

MOUSTACHE

Of course, the cops showing up is bad, because when has a cop showing up ever made a bad situation better? Never. Defund the police, but don’t defund handlebar mustaches. Those can stay.

Fortunately, Data has gotten a ping on that machine he was building before and shows up on a motherfucking HORSE:

Brent just wanted to show off

He’s back in his brown striped suit and red tie. Okay.

Everyone returns to the boarding house to suss out the situation, and we get a look at what Riker is rocking underneath his cop jacket:

Suspend me daddy

You can see very clearly here how the collar is not actually attached to the shirt. This was a thing people in the olden days did so they could wear their shirt for multiple days in a row and just switch out the collar and cuffs so they looked clean. As someone who is wearing the same sweatshirt for the third day in a row, I support this method. (If you’re interested on more info about collars, here is a very enjoyable article about them.)

We are also blessed with a better look at Deanna’s sleeves and bodice:

Black lace cuffs? Decadent!!!

You can also see Geordi’s shades, which suit him really nicely. One thing I’ve been enjoying on this rewatch is just how well LeVar Burton can act without having his eyes visible. He’s great. Let’s just all think about how great LeVar Burton is for a second

And also Bev’s dress:

I legitimately want this dress

I don’t think those buttons are functional. Can you imagine how annoying THAT would be? But I am absolutely in love with this dress. Two paisleys, Beverly???? A goddess. I’m also dying for that brooch with the chain. A+ look all around, great work.

Finally, FINALLY, Guinan meets the rest of the crew:

When you meet someone you won’t actually know for 500 years

She is wearing a hat that looks like a toilet paper cozy. Did your grandma have one of these? They’re so stupid and I love them so much.

Picard and Guinan meet for what is the first time for her, but not the first time for him, and honestly it is...sensual?????

If I got a m’lady from P. Stew I wouldn’t even mind

Patrick and Whoopi truly do some nice work in this ep. But we are here to yell about clothes, so: LOOK AT THIS DRESS ON AN EXTRA:

Gimme dat dress

I just want that dress to wear around my house. I legitimately bought an 18th century costume dress to do just that, so don’t think I won’t literally do this.

OKAY, WE ARE ALMOST TO THE END.

The crew, plus Guinan, go back to the cave where this all started:

Cave Club, the only club that meets in a cave

We get a nice look at the bodice of Guinan’s dress here and guess what: MORE BUTTONS. Buttons on the lapels, and also buttons on the front panel with the pointy top. I wonder if she has multiple front panels for that dress in different colors, like a Swatch watch.

Unbeknownst to them, Mark Twain followed them!! Then there’s a scuffle with the energy-stealing aliens during which a few things happen:

Data’s head flies off

Mark Twain gets sucked into the temporal disturbance

Guinan gets hurt

Picard stays behind to make sure Guinan is okay

So we end up with Mark Twain on the Enterprise, where he sees Worf, and he’s like:

Buh-WHAT

Worf is also confused:

This is...extremely perplexing

We have a few more looks back on the Enterprise, including Regular Guinan:

ShoulderSpreads™: The Bed Spread for Your Shoulders

I love love LOVE this outfit. The color is perfect, the shoulderspreads are perfect, the front draping is perfect. It looks like a velvet housedress from the 1960s except FANCY which is kind of my ideal aesthetic. And it’s red (my fave).

We get a quick glimpse at the barber uniform:

Bitch let me pass, idc if you wrote Huck Finn

This barber does. not. give. a. fuck!!!!

Geordi reattaches Data’s head, the one they already had, which means this whole thing was a ding dang closed loop. The reattachment also kind of diminishes the whole conversation they had earlier about how Data’s head in the cave meant that Data could die someday, because...he didn’t. He still might, but his head is back and he’s fine now.

Meanwhile, Picard is still back in 1893 and they have to go get him, but only one person can come back through the temporal disturbance, so Mark Twain is like “duh I’ll go get him.”

And finally Guinan and Picard can talk about how their friendship spans 500 years!!!!

Hey girl

Hey

YOU’RE WELCOME

*abolish the police

#SEASON 5 #SEASON 6 #TNG #TNG FASHION #STAR TREK #STAR TREK FASHION

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uhhhhhhhhhsblogyea · 3 years

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♤| dragon ball shapeshifter au

storyline rundown

part two

tw: profanity !! a bit of gore and such

the story begins on kakarot's farm! he lives with his parents, bardock and gine, and his brother raditz.

kakarot takes his produce to the market to sell, talking to krillin who is a police officer watching over in case of robbery or stolen goods, with his wife 18 and his daughter marron.

he hangs out there and sells all his produce, making a whopping amount of money to give back to his mother to go towards their farm. so thats what he does.

later that night, raditz barged in through the door, huffing loudly and covered in purple blood. it had a reddish tint. gine and bardock jump to their feet, bardock still in his training gi and gine in her white shirt and some sweatpants. "raditz!? what happened?" bardock exclaimed, gine following up with "why are you covered in... purple blood!?" this caused kakarot to come out of his room in a rush, "h-h-holy s-shit! i didnt kill anyone i swear mom, mom, dad please, i wouldn't do that!" raditz panicked. "s-something tried to attack me! i didnt know what to do so i attacked back!!" he tries to wipe the blood off, it being on his face.

whatever happened, scared raditz enough to make him shake in fear and what seems to be regret despite it being to protect himself.

kakarot however, still was unsure what happened. his father said he would explain in the morning, the situation was too dire for kakarot to get involved - especially with the police.

in town, vegeta covered his bloodied chest, panting as he hid deep in an alleyway. "goddammit," he huffs, slicking his hair back to keep the human bangs out of his face. hes got a huge gash across his chest, thanks to that damned raditz he happened to work with. luckily, he was morphed into some other alien lifeform and not his original shift state. he slowly morphed into a bird, a finch, and flew off to him apartment. he always kept his window cracked just in case this were to happen. just his luck, we wont be able to eat and to heal he needs that energy for food or else hell be out asleep for awhile.

he decides calling off work, so thats what he does. what he doesnt expect is a man with a thick ass fucking tail and slicked back purple hair and red eyes to be reading a book, lounging like a king on his bed. "f... frieza!?" vegeta says, startled.

"ah hello my creation! lovely seeing you here, dont you think?" he throws the book off to the side, getting up and striding over to the bloodied vegeta. "aw looks like you got a paper cut." he jabs a finger into vegetas cut across his chest. vegeta groans in pain, a tentacle whipping around to hit frieza away into a safer distance, but the icejin blocks smoothly with his muscled tail.

from here:

wow!! you found out vegeta is a "creation" of friezas, but what exactly does that mean?

raditz gets taken in for questioning. he gets blamed for a murder that happened on the otherside of town, the law system being dumb sentenced him to 25 years in prision for a murder he didnt do

kakarot is confused, bardock telling him there arent any alien threats and it was a misunderstanding on the jury and judge's parts bc raditz was getting mugged and a murder far away happened at roughly the same time, and they were desperate to throw someone into jail.

this is a lie, to some extent. kakarot believes it, living happily thinking there are no threats

vegeta attacked raditz, needing food. shapeshifters need to eat hearts and lungs of animals as food

raditz is the one who cut him across the chest (thatd why he has a scar on his chest in the ref sheet)

kakarot has to bring crops and milk into a market farther into town sometime in the next week, it being an event ran by capsule corp, a company that produces a lot of housing and vehicles and being in business for 40 years being the anniversary that day.

vegeta is a mechanical manager, wearing fancy clothing that day since its technically a high spot in the ranks for capsule corp.

vegeta likes milk, surprisingly. it helps a lot when recovering damage, especially his species. this is when he meets kakarot

kakarot is running his stand with the crates of crops and glass jars of milk set out on display with their price, krillin with him

vegeta is annoyed he has to speak up to get the seller's attention so he grunts with an "ahem"

kakarot jumps, apologizing and asking what he wants to buy. vegeta gets his milk and some vegetables for someone he knows

"hey, whats with the fancy suit?"

"you dont know who i am?"

"no. should i?"

"i-? im vegeta! im manager of the mechanics in capsule corp!"

"oh. is the job hard?"

they conversate, as kakarot sells his produce happily listening as he was able to get the short man with a temper to talk about his job.

vegeta himself was caught off guard by this action but happily talks

this ends in kakarot running behing the stand's curtain and grabbing his business card so vegeta can have a discount on milk next time he decides to buy

vegeta takes the card walking off

the card has kakarots name and number on the back, a message saying "text me personally if you want extra, i dont mind taking some. you seem cool!"

vegeta is a bit ticked, but pockets the card

over time, vegeta and kakarot talk over text a bit, kakarot delivering him milk like an old time milk delivery boy

turns out he actually used to be one as a kid

turns out hes been into marial arts as well, a long time interest of vegetas

they bond over this, kakarot find himself growing a crush on vegeta

one time kakarot stops buy with a delivery unannounced, not knowing he typed the text but didnt send it. he knocks on vegetas apartment door, but no answer.

he checks to see if its unlocked, and it is so he lets himself in, just wanting to put the delivery on the counter and head out.

he doesnt expect to turn around and see a vegeta with a towel wrapped around his waist, tentacles coming out of his back, green eyes, and sharp ears, teeth, and claws. "K-KAKAROT!? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" he yells, surprised. he doesn't have bangs either

"why do you have tentacles?? why do you look different? why do you have that scar?"

vegeta is caught off guard, not sure if he should push kakarot out or tell him the truth. one way or another he knows the truth will spread, so he carefully debates his options

he tells kakarot the truth, hes a shapeshifter and hes insanely dangerous

kakarot is surprised dangerous aliens exist

he tells vegeta this, and deep down vegeta is mad kakarot is sheltered

little do they know as they conversate and bond, growing closer to each other kakarot finds out vegeta made a vow not to ever get in a relationship no matter how much he envied them, especially a human relationship, a certain someone is watching them and listening in, theyre keeping tabs on vegetas and kakarots feelings

trust issues amirite?

later that night, kakarot says his goodbye heading home, heart pounding. wow!!!! vegeta is... great. very great. kinda cute too, i mean what!?? no!!

kakarot rants to himself aloud in his room, window open to keep himself cool, about vegeta as he debates his feelings. he doesnt care if this seems out of character in his friends terms, all they see from him anyway is a dense fightcrazed guy with a dysfunctional relationship with an ex and his son. he realized vegeta doesnt see him like that, but, what DOES vegeta see him as?

he calls it a night

he wakes up to a "thwap, thwap, thwap" against his wooden floor

he sits up, looking around and seeing a short figure sitting at his desk.

"whos there?"

"ah, youre awake monkey! i have valuable information for you, about your lovely vegeta." the voice is squeaky

"and, who is telling me this?" kakarots interest is piqued, not seeing the mysterious figure as a threat, as of now at least

"oh-hohoho! im dr. cold! but please, call me frieza. doctor cold is my father's name."

"and what do you have to tell me about vegeta?"

"mmm, are you sure you want to know?" he gets up, beginning to pace

"theres a catch isnt there" kakarot realizes, serious

"oh! maybe you arent so dense afterall. yes, there iss monkey. its simple, deliever some of your left over crop to my facility tomorrow, i already left the address on a paper over on that... pitiful little desk of yours." frieza pauses. "vegeta will kill you if you arent careful. hes hungry, and he wants that heart. but... i think the poor creation wants it in more than one way. kill him before he kills you."

frieza hands kakarot a box cutter

"thats the only thing that will kill him. if you dont do it i expect that delivery tomorrow by midnight. if you dont show, and theres no news of him being dead, youll be a brilliant collection to my creations, monkey!" the man laughs in joy, clasping his hands together as his red eyes pierce through kakarot

kakarot reluctantly agrees, unsure how this will play out

PART TWO WILL BE MADE SOON!!!

anyway heres the part 1 of the rundown.

#shs goku #shs frieza #shs #shs vegeta #shs dbz au #dbz au #kakavege #frieza being a damn brat lol #dragon ball #I REALLY HOPE YALL FIND THIS INTERESTING #theres a lot that went into it #txt post #long post

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gerbithats · 4 years

Text

A long sims 4 rant

Starting this I can already predict it’s gonna be a big one so if you stick with me, thank you and I’ll try and add pictures to make things feel easier 😆

I was thinking about it and I mean really thinking about these community surveys we’ve been getting and how they speak volumes on the way the game is handled but also also how we position ourselves as a community. I noticed alot more game changers are starting to get pretty vocal about their thoughts since the first community survey came out and that’s refreshing to say the least, but it shows a pattern that we all present: give us what is missing no matter how. We want beaches. We want cars. We want more stairs. We want bunkbeds. Etc.

So these things are probably somehow rushed into production to please the community and then, when we finally get it, it’s like we finally realize that what this game truly lacks is gameplay and not more items.

I invite you to come and think about the packs and the stuff we got throughout these 6 years with me.

🏢 Chapter 1: The apartment issue

Yes we got apartment buildings with city living, but sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it’s a game feature because it’s L I T E R A L L Y related to living in a city, so it’s not a real feature. We have no possible way to play with apartments and condos outside of san myshuno because for the first time ever we can’t build or own apartments. This was such a missed opportunity of giving us new lot treatments like condos and even rentable properties. I mean, just think about how those 2 features could allow so much new gameplay and stories with it (I can literally imagine being a landlord, having to go fix renters stuff in my their places and doing social events as condo meetings).

The neighbors in that type of lot could also help solve somehow what so many people mention as “boring lot gameplay”. Let’s be real. hardly something ever happens with so little npcs and only the walk by sims (You have to literally run after them to make things happen sometimes and it shouldn’t be like that). But if sims were to live in the same condo or building as yours, sharing common living spaces that’s a whole other thing. Which brings me to the fact that even in the city, where apartments exist, there’s no common area other than the halls. Imagine if we could build laundries, rooftops, basements, patios with pools and all that sort of stuff.

That sort of detaling and really getting deep into the pack’s features is even show in elevators: we can’t use them ourselves (for building) and they’re not even animated, your sim is just teleported (even the modded ones have animations and that’s just awkward).

🌊 Chapter 2: Swimming in shallow waters

“We want a beach”, we said. So they gave us a beach, and a beach only. I’ve never seen so many people call a pack “shallow” as I’ve seen it happen to Island Living and tbh I do agree with them ‘cause... there’s really not much to do in this pack. For the first time ever swimming was restricted to this pack which is already a big let down by itself, but then features like deep diving were added for no reason and of course, as a rabbit whole, not actually contributing with much to do. So how could it be better?

My answer is pretty obvious: resorts. It is a livable world, but that don’t mean your sims can’t take a vacation from work and just stay there if that’s the gameplay you want to go with and resorts match perfectly with that, not to mention it would have great integration with packs like spa day. It also means a new lot type and lot system, that wouldn’t be much new if the city living building condos and sublocating them as I mentioned would’ve already been implemented, but now with the feature of renting it yourself too. Resorts could also have their own event schedules, integrated with the seasons calendar: cava parties every wednesday, yoga lessons on thursdays, etc. And the best thing would be: if you own one, you can make your own events and traditions. imagine just how fun that would be. A feature like this would also mean it’s already done for other packs coming later on, maybe a colder destination where you can ski and build iglus or even another cultural based pack like jungle adventure.

Other obvious resolution would be better mermaids. Make it harder to become one, being only able to get the kelp from a mermaid themselves. Make it less anticlimactic, having an animation of them turning before they just walk in water with a tail all of the sudden, maybe just some scales in their legs. Give them more unique features and powers like vampires and spellcasters have, such as easily persuading people (sort of like the mind control feature aliens have) and maybe even a secret lot, like a grotto where all the mermaids are. Give them curses with the points system to go with it, some mermaids are actually sirens amirite

🥶 Chapter 3: Seasons change, gameplay stays the same

Activities truly based on the season that are specific to that moment create urgency and different moments. Something I can think of is integrating a pack we already have: spooky stuff. It does feel lackluster ‘cause it’s missing opportunities, but imagine going trick or treating but actually going, loading different houses and gathering it while a meter like the active jobs one guided you. Forming groups with friends to do it or maybe for tpeing trees and bushes if you’re on the rebel teen side and destroying their porch jack’o lanterns. It could even be randomly generated, like the game would send you to 3 different houses to do it (that would bring lots of replayability value ‘cause you could end up in houses with neighbors that love you and will give you candy no problem, but maybe also neighbors with family feuds that won’t answer their door or make it harder for you to accomplish the event objectives), maybe one of those could even be a abandoned one that’s haunted or something like that.

The implementing of a better wants and fears system is very essential for this pack. Yes your sims get overheated and a popup message tells you they need some water or lighter clothes, but it’d be so good if they’d actually want to go to the beach, swim in the ocean, take a vacation from work and go to a resort. Heatwaves that would make your sim act weird, not strangerville level of weird, but maybe not obeying your commands.

Blizzards so strong that work and school would get canceled and you actually don’t have the option to leave your home lot anymore until it passes would not only add a different element to the gameplay, but also add value to the weather controler machine.

🥺 Final chapter: The general “more stuff to do” and “more things happening” factor

The game offers all these beautiful secret worlds and yet when you finally get to them there’s not much to do other than searching for rocks and frogs and doing some fishing. I miss going to a community lot hidden somewhere and finding an eremite, goddamn bigfoot, some crazy npc or even just an actual community lot with something to do and people doing stuff in it. Unique community lots would also be a way to make towns more lively and captivating like they did so well with realm of magic and the casters alley section of the world. Maybe forgotten hollow has this abandoned haunted house where people claim they’ve seen the grim reaper walking around. Maybe sixam has a alien station where they clone human sims. Maybe sulani has this beautiful sunken ship beach where a club of people that dress up as pirated meet. Maybe Del Sol Valley has a movie theater where you can watch premieres. Maybe Oasis Springs mine hides actual gold that you can collect and get rich outta nowhere. That kind of stuff.

I can’t stress this enough, but NPCs are so important to shake things up. It was so good to have a pack like realm of magic where the we would have to go to the three sages in order to progress. Having unique sims like this or npcs that change the way your story is going like burglars, firefighters, cops, social bunny, bonehilda and even a fortune teller is so important to keep things impredictable and interesting.

Age groups really need more specific restricted gameplay for better feel of progression. Many people say sims 4 is a young adult simulator and well... there’s not much to show that differs from that. Toddlers are as interesting as hamsters, locked in an object waiting for you to feed, clean and give them attention. Teens really should feel more like a transiction period, and the wants and fears system would really help out with that. I miss being able to participate in more elements that would mark a sims life even if they’re cheesy as heck, like having a prom, graduating, having a midlife crises.

In conclusion

First of all: if you got to this point thank you and I’d really wanna know what you think about all of this.

Some people may find even ridiculous for someone to go about a rant this big on a game and to that I have to say I agree lol I can’t help it tho, honestly, the sims has always been the game I’m most passionate about and it helped me express myself and my creativity so much since I was a kid. I really do care about this game and this franchise.

The point I want to make with this is: perhaps we shouldn’t ask for more and more different stuff, but actually put some effort into showing things we already like in the game and how they can be improved to make it more interesting. At the end of the day I still want spiral staircases, ladders, paintable ceiling, werewolves and all that but does it really matter if they get added to the game following the same patterns as the things pointed in here? Also we really are getting to a point where only a few things are missing as far as cas/build/buy go and I believe it’s time for us, as a community, to give gameplay as much importance as all these things we wanted so bad that got implemented. I probaby forgot to say something here and I didn’t even mention the infamous hamster pack, but anyway, I hope the point got across.

I try really hard to believe that the gurus are here for us and that most of all we, as a community, have a very strong voice, all we need to do is make it clearer and stronger about the things we really wish for this game.

#i'm never doing rants again #honestly this is my last one #from now one i'll only express my thoughts through memes and reblogs #ressurrection spell was a missed opportunity for zombies to be back in realm of magic btw #i don't even know how to tag this #the sims #the sims 4 #ts4 #sims 4

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theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin · 3 years

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What if Indil met Elizabeth, David, and Light and Shadow?

This might just be the most "Carnivorous Muffin" sentence to have ever been uttered on the internet.

Let's just stare at it in wonder, while I wonder how many people will have no idea what those words even mean strung together.

Right, for those that are lost, relevant source material:

Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus

October

Light and Shadow of the Distant Sun

The Wasteland

Aren't you so glad you read normal fanfics written by a normal person?

So, to catch people up to speed who have not read every single fic I've written:

The Wasteland

The Wasteland is the what if story of an eleven-year-old Lily ending up in Middle Earth (notably before the Chamber of Secrets fiasco). There she befriends the One Ring, who thanks to her realizes he's sentient and has an existential crisis. They do the fusion dance, and end up becoming a single, new, being calling himself Indil.

He's the best and worst of both the Ring and Lily.

At the end of the story Indil chooses a noble death, gives up his form, and in so doing persuades the Ring to face his own potential death as well as his maker.

It's unclear what happens after that.

I like to think the Ring prevailed and earned the body of his maker.

(In an offshoot, for unknown reasons, Indil may or may not visit Mars)

Light and Shadow of the Distant Sun

In Light and Shadow of the Distant Sun, yet another, different, Lily ends up in the "October" universe where she decides to create life on Pluto. One of the beings she creates is a priest who worships her as God, named Light and Shadow of the Distant Sun.

He basically strong arms her into being his God. Lily goes to live on Pluto.

He's never been all that keen on humanity.

Decades later, the muggle world catches up to the Alien Franchise, and the Prometheus sets off to investigate the Engineers. Unbeknowest to them, Light and Shadow of the Distant Sun has been marooned on that rock by Lily for quite some time and is essentially in timeout for trying to wipe out humanity again.

He figures out he will be unable to return home unless he plays nice with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and her creepy android friend David. Together, the three of them set off to find the Engineers, Light and Shadow of the Distant Sun is hoping they can blow some shit up and would have driven the ship full of bioengineered weapons back to Earth if it were not so very close to home.

And that's about where we leave off.

... Why does anyone read my stories?

RIGHT, YOUR QUESTION

What if Indil met Elizabeth, David, and Light and Shadow?

So how does Indil even end up in this mess? Well, in the Mars AU, it's where rather than face his maker/death by Volcano, the Ring chose to bravely run away (as Sauron does).

This means that Indil, the merged consciousness of Lily and the One Ring, survives and they're chilling on Mars in another dimension because, well, it beats dying. And Potions Class.

And... Well, that's the most likely route for how this would happen, as Indil is pretty damn dead by the end of the Wasteland. Regardless of what happens to The Ring, it's unlikely that he and Lily would merge consciousness ever again and if they did that Indil would remain unchanged.

But we're already here, so why not. We'll say the Ring wins the battle of wills with Sauron, steals his body, and that he's then left with Mordor. Well, that's great, but he doesn't want Mordor.

Lily proposes they go back to England. They do, but Lily has a terrible time, as she usually does. Lily likely does her adventure through time, ruins her friendship with Wizard Lenin, and reaches the crossroads of "You can go to Hogwarts or... not".

Lily takes Mairon up on his offer of not going to Hogwarts and they decide to travel different dimension in space instead. Weird shit happens, life lessons are learned, and they also learn the fusion dance is alive and well and holy shit they can still turn into Indil.

Indil is very put out, here he'd geared himself up for a noble sacrifice, and now he exists again. What the hell people?

As usual, Mairon gets tempted by Lily's unbreakable will, and decides he rather likes being an immovable object and unstoppable force. Which means that Indil, once again, has a problem falling back out of existence.

Which isn't good for either Lily or Mairon's sense of self. But who needs that, amirite?

Anyways, Indil is probably floating around in a spaceship he made in his garage, trying to figure out where to go, what to do, and whether he should really split back into Lily and Mairon yet when out of nowhere he spots another ship.

This is a very strange coincidence given just how ungodly vast space is. This, in fact, is so unlikely you might as well call it a miracle or fate.

Well, Indil will never spit in the face of fate (at least, not today), so he decides to say hello.

There he's greeted by a human woman who's not doing too hot after an emergency C-section to get the xenomorph out of her womb, a very recently repaired android who knows the taste of sweet sweet freedom (and patricide), and an alien who is intrigued that another not-human has boarded the ship but upset that he now has to deal with yet another person on his time out.

Indil, in his panic, decides to pull a Sauron.

Behold, mortals, he is Annatar, sent by the Valar to teach them the smithing of the very gods. Please don't question this. (Indil realizes two seconds two late that none of these words mean anything to anyone and he might as well have said nothing at all).

Elizabeth, Light and Shadow, and David all just stare.

Elizabeth wonders how the hell she keeps running into so many aliens. Is she some sort of alien catnip that pulls these guys out of the ether? She has now met two entirely different species, that she was not looking for, in a matter of months.

Regardless, Indil decides he's coming along. A quest to find God? That's fascinating. He only hopes it doesn't end in drowning, last time Indil (via Sauron) had a run in with The Lord it involved a lot of drowning.

Indil starts smithing life jackets just in case.

And because Elizabeth is amazing, and Indil has a thing for strong, independent, women, we see the reemergence of Indil's Weird Thing With Eowyn II: Electric Boogaloo. Neither Mairon nor Lily, vaguely aware inside Indil, understand this at all.

Why does this keep happening to them?

This is bad because David is also in love with Elizabeth. Except, David is a robot who is no doubt fascinated by aliens, so I'm sure they come to some weird agreement.

Elizabeth pretends none of this is happening.

Light and Shadow thinks there's something disturbingly familiar about Indil and eventually lands on the money. Almost. He realizes that Indil is Lily in mortal disguise, he is so smart, and the rest of the time he wonders what the hell he's supposed to be learning/doing with Lily's disguised alien appearance.

Thanks to Lily's bullshit powers, Elizabeth survives the journey and does not die in transit. This means that David does not become the unstable, grieving, nutcase who decides to wipe out all sentient life. Good for you, David.

So our band of heroes arrive on this alien world and...

Well, Elizabeth is a member of the race that these people sent their finest warriors out to destroy. David is a robot, something the people they tried to genocide created. No one knows what the fuck Indil and Light and Shadow even are.

Indil, I imagine, starts talking fast and somehow ends up King of Men again. Because that's just the kind of thing that happens to him. The possibility of drowning, somehow, seems to be growing ever nearer. Indil makes more life jackets.

Elizabeth isn't pleased with this outcome at all but also has no idea in general what to do.

Things probably come to a head somehow, with sacrifices involved surely, there probably is a ridiculously powerful storm a la Covenant that lasts for months. It's raining everywhere, there's a flood. And Indil flips shit, GOD IS GOING TO MURDER US ALL FOR SATANISM! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

Mass panic, total destruction, the entire city is wiped out without David doing anything.

Our heroes are now stranded, again, in space.

Light and Shadow has learned nothing, Indil is wearing a life vest, Elizabeth has no ship, and David just composed "Elizabeth the Symphony: Tenth Movement".

Indil works on building a new ship out of twigs and rocks. He assures them he knows what he's doing. Elizabeth's not sure she wants him going to Earth. She's not sure she wants to go to Earth.

She's also not sure, but she may now have a harem consisting of a robot, an alien, and another alien.

Ten years later, the Covenant crew shows up, and promptly die in a series of hilariously terrible accidents and their own incompetence.

Our heroes still have no functional ship.

#ask #anon #prometheus #light and shadow of the distant sun #the wasteland #lily and the art of being sisyphus #elizabeth shaw #david 8 #indil #the one ring

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deardiary17 · 3 years

Text

"The Deviant Strain" by Justin Richards

Hello, hi, it's me and some funny/cute/shippy/strange things I've managed to dig in "The Deviant Strain" by Justin Richards.

There might be some spoilers, although I tried my very best not to include anything to reveal the plot and its twists. And now I’ve read through it again and no, nothing crucial to the plot.

Here we go.

Or as we, Russians, say it: поехали! (poehali).

“Yeah”. The Doctor stuffed the wallet back inside his jacket. “Right, this is Rose Tyler, my number two.” - awwwww, not as sweet as “my plus one”, of course, but they are somewhere where the military is all rage.

“I mean, feel the weight of that. Bones are completely atrophied. As if they’ve been sucked out or dissolved.” He sighed and got to his feet. “Jellified. Don’t let Rose see it.” - awwwwwx2 - you big protective alien, you!

“You hear English from them, they hear Russian from you, including your name. It just sort of fits.” “You mean, I’m like Rosetska Tylerov or something?” “Don’t look at me. I’m probably Doctorsky.” She thought about this and laughed again. - there is a perfect Russian equivalent for Rose, by the way, and it’s Roza. Much like Maria, Marina or Anna, or Alexandra - universal names, they are. “Doctorsky” made me roar with laughter as there is a type of sausage that is traditionally called “Doctorskaya”. Be not afraid, it is not made of Doctors.

“One day the man with the wolf on his arm will come.” “A wolf?” Rose felt suddenly cold - even colder than she has already been. - ah, see, it’s the Bad Wolf all over again!

“Her first thought was that it was another submarine - experimental perhaps. Open-plan. But the technology seemed so totally alien, and not just Russian-alien. Alien-alien. Blobby underwater aliens with flippers and snorkels? Get real.” - Rose, we need to talk about your evaluation of aliens, really. Russian-alien, indeed. God, I love that girl with all my heart.

“He grinned, hugged Rose to him with one hand and slapped Jack on the other. “Fantastic!”“ - here we have hug no.1.

“Yeah. Spaceship,” the Doctor told him. “You know”. He demonstrated by flattening his hand into a spaceship shape and flying it through the air between them. He made spaceship noises. “I don’t think I do actually”, Minin said weakly. “Sure you do. You must get some version of Star Trek, even out here”. “The one with Mr Spocksky”, Rose added helpfully. - a-ha, here’s the Spock banter again! Mr Spocksky just made my day, I tell you.

“You see, there’s these bodies”. The Doctor stopped her, pressing his finger to her lips. - you may think what you want, but there is something so intimate about this gesture, or so it seems to me. Or maybe too many romance novels that I read are to blame.

“Blue? Don’t they know that’s such a cliche?” “Maybe where you’re from. They’re usually green here,” Rose said. “I don’t care what colour danger is. It’s still...well, dangerous.” “Yeah, but I mean - dangerous and boring?” the Doctor sneered. “Do me a favour. If you’re going to have your life threatened, it might as well be fun.” - I love Nine’s sass.

“It’s designed to accept any type, any strain, of energy. Maybe it has a safety feature that excludes the life force from intelligent beings - even humans”, he added with a grin. “Oh, ta”, Rose told him. - Mr Superior Biology is at it again.

“His lungs were bursting, while the icy air was making his cheeks sting and his ears burn. ‘Next time,’ he gasped, ‘smaller ears. Definitely.’” - everybody loves Nine’s ears, though, amirite?

“Singed my jumper,” he complained as he reached them. “Look at that.” Rose pulled him into a hug. “And now it’s getting crumpled”. He was grinning as he said it. - hug no.2

“Anyone got a lighter?” he asked. Jack slapped a silver cigarette lighter into his palm. “Might have known it would be you” <...> “To Squiffy from Smudger. Thanks for everything.” He raised an eyebrow. Jack shrugged. “Just something I picked up. Present.” - I say, Rose still smokes sometimes when the Doctor’s not near after a particularly stressful event. He knows that, of course, superior smell sense and all, but he says nothing and indulges it because their life is stressful, and a fag after a terrifying adventure on the balcony of her childhood house every once in a while is not deadly, and he can fix Rose in the medbay anytime.

“It’s him I fear. The bad wolf. The man I see in my dreams - waking and sleeping. The man who will kill me.” - here’s the Bad Wolf again.

“Hot date?” Rose said. “Too hot”, he told her. “Even for me.” - my, never thought I’d live to the day when something would be too hot for Jack Harkness! :D

“No problem.” The Doctor said. “Where’s Rose?” Jacks’s smile froze. “She’s not with you?” The Doctor turned a full circle, as if to check. “She’s not with me.” - THE CLOWNS, BOTH OF THEM.

“That one, she was sure, was Jack - the way he was standing, the way he had his hands in his pockets ad appeared to be sightseeing rather than waiting to fight for his life. Typical. She couldn’t see the Doctor anywhere. Also typical.” - Ah. A fine specimen of Rose Tyler’s sarcasm.

“He grabbed Jack’s shoulder and turned him to stare into his face. “OK? Hello - anyone home in that skull of yours? This is volcano day all over again.” - the Empty Child all over again.

“*** had a pistol and he was pointing squarely at the Doctor. Rose was pleased he didn’t point it at her, but miffed that he obviously didn’t think she was a threat. Most of all, though, she was worried he might shoot the Doctor.” - Honey, has he got a surprise for you with all the regeneration stuff...

Also, the amount of times vodka was mentioned in this book...wow. Just wow. It’s everywhere! It’s the part of the plot! And Rose is trying the vodka, too :D

My, did it take time to type it all here. Hope you enjoyed!

#doctor who #ninth doctor #the deviant strain #rose tyler #jack harkness #ninexrose #ninerose #dw #ninth doctor x rose tyler #doctor who novels #dw novels

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chris-evans-indian-fanfic · 4 years

Text

Lifetimes

Chapter 2

Description - Detective Okoye finds out more about King Steven's past as you are subjected to further torture

Warning - Horror, mutilation, torture, Dark!Steve

PROCEED ONLY IF YOU ARE 18+!

Chapter 1

My Main Masterlist

I don’t consent to have any of my work published or featured on any third party app, website or translated. If you are seeing this fanfiction anywhere but Tumblr and AO3, it has been reposted without my permission. In that case, please do share the link and let me know.

…

Detective Okoye sipped coffee as she examined the crime scene report on her desk. It had been more than 2 months since you had been the victim of the heinous crime. She narrowed her eyes as she read the report for probably the millionth time. The case was littered with problems.

First of all, they couldn't find your dead body. They had searched across the city and the state and had turned up empty handed.

Secondly, the forensic team had secured two different sets of fingerprints from the crime scene atop the cliff. One set belonged to you, the other, your killer. However, their database couldn't match the fingerprints with any US citizen and known terrorists. Even the CIA, FBI and even the Interpol turned up empty-handed.

The team also found paper-thin scraps of ash scattered across the cliff and the road. Their scientists could not make sense of that either.

Lastly, they had absolutely no leads to chase down your attacker. The security cameras hadn't caught anything. There were no witnesses, except the one statement from Chris Evans, who continuously rambled on about the deep scar on the attacker's face.

"You need to stop reading that file Oko. You are not a part of the investigation anymore," Detective Natasha's voice broke through Okoye's thoughts.

"I can't let it go Nat," Okoye responded, rubbing her forehead, "I keep thinking that I have missed something."

Nat closed the file and sat on the desk, "Look, I know it's frustrating to break your perfect record. But sometimes there are cases which you just can't solve."

Okoye sighed, "10 years Nat. I have solved every single case in the last decade. No matter if it was a simple house robbery or taking down a drug cartel, I have always cracked all of my cases. And now this?" Okoye slammed down her coffee mug in disgust, "I have been assigned desk duty because I couldn't solve this case."

"You know it's temporary till things dial down a bit," Nat tried to reason, "When the girlfriend of an international superstar goes missing, his fans and the media tend to erupt," Nat placed a hand on her shoulder, "You will be back soon Oko."

"Evans hasn't received a call for ransom?" Okoye inquired.

Nat shook her head, "I don't think she is alive Oko."

🌑

You opened your eyes, the whispers in the dark playing on a loop in your head, "What does he want?" , "Ya no puedo soportar esto" , "Who is she?" , "Quiero ir a casa" , "I make my most humble apology" ,"Nobis auxilium Dominus!" You only recognized English, the rest of the few languages alien to your ears. Besides you, you could see the terrified figures of ancient women who resembled your features.

You tried to speak to them, but no sound escaped your orifice. You were frozen, but were yet somehow still moving. The edge of your skin, along with others, shed like thin layers of ash, only to be replenished by the wind.

It's this what death felt like? Were you a ghost?

The voices in your head suddenly went silent as everyone heard the despicable cackle of the man who commanded all of you.

🌑

It was dusk when Okoye walked towards the National History museum with her 5-year-old daughter in tow. She waved when she saw Carol with her son.

"Thank you so much for coming along!" Carol grinned as they hugged, "David was dying to look at the new exhibit."

Okoye brushed her off, "Please there's no need to thank me. Aurelia is just as much of a history enthusiast as David."

They joined the long line of people, mostly parents with their kids, waiting for their turn to enter. "I had no idea this exhibit was so popular," Okoye admitted as she took in the crowd.

"Yeah. Ever since the discovery of the Aveninfin kingdom, suddenly everyone is a history nerd," Carol commented, "Still, I think it's cool that they found the remnants of an entire kingdom underneath the Texan desert."

As they entered the museum, both the kids ran off towards the children's section of the exhibit where the tour guide was handing out pamphlets.

Okoye sucked in a deep breath, "Umm Carol, I wanted to talk about the bake sale this Saturday-"

"Yes Maria and I are going to bake lemon squares, chocolate cupcakes and vanilla-strawberry cookie spirals," Carol interrupted her, "I was thinking Maria will present the lemon squares from your end? We will say you are currently caught up with work and handed over your goodies to us," she knowingly winked at Okoye.

Her eyes filled with tears at Carol's kind words, "I am sorry," Okoye barely whispered.

"Oko, you have nothing to apologise for. It's difficult being a single mother and an awesome ass-kicking detective at the same time. Don't be harsh on yourself," Carol tried to console her by rubbing her back, "We love Aurelia. And we love you! It also helps that you gang up with me to prank my wife," Carol beamed.

They strolled in the museum, always keeping an eye on the kids as their activities continued. After about an hour or so, the kids dispersed. "Mommy," Aurelia called out, "did you see the handprint painting?"

"No baby I didn't," Okoye replied. Her daughter led her by taking two of Okoye's fingers in her small hands. "You should see this mommy! You are a defective. This is also like defective work."

Okoye couldn't help but laugh at her daughter's innocence, "That's right baby, I am a defective."

She picked her up when they reached the fingerprint portion of the exhibit. Aurelia pointed out to one set of fingerprints, "See? Just like you explained," she clapped her hands once for impact.

Okoye chuckled, kissing her daughter's forehead. She looked at the various sets of fingerprints. Most of them were unnamed, except three. One belonged to the King's right hand man called Buchanan, the other to the Queen named Luna and finally, the King himself, Steven Grant.

Okoye stared at Steve's fingerprints. There was something eerily familiar about them. She stared harder, trying to identify them when suddenly, realisation hit her like an iceberg.

Could it be? No it was impossible. But the intricate pattern of the fingerprints undoubtedly matched the ones in her file!

She immediately unlocked her phone and compared the two images. They were identical! Okoye dialled Natashas's number, informing her of the development. "I will be there in 20 minutes," she replied.

🌑

Detectives Okoye and Natasha sat across the table from Dr Bruce Banner, the archeologist behind the discovery of the Aveninfin kingdom. It had been three days since Okoye's lead, and now, it seemed they were back to square one.

It seemed that nobody on Bruce's staff had used the fingerprints to commit the crime. Everybody had airtight alibis, even the doctor himself.

"I don't know what I can tell you ladies anymore-" Bruce started saying. But Natasha swiftly interrupted him, "Detectives," she spat with authority.

He held up his hands in resignation, "Sorry. Detectives. I have nothing new to share. You guys have been to my house, my lab and my office. You have interrogated my staff and colleagues. I really don't know how can-," he was interrupted again.

"A heinous crime was committed, and," Okoye pointed a finger at him, "fingerprints of your King Steven were found at the crime scene. So you really expect us to believe that he came back from the dead just to murder Chris Evans' girlfriend?"

"Legends share that King Steven never died," Bruce half-smiled at his pathetic joke. "Look, you guys are the detectives. Isn't it your job to," he gestured in a random direction, "detect this?"

"What was the need to even obtain fingerprints from an archeological site?" Okoye inquired.

Bruce looked squarely at her, "Fingerprints help us study human evolution Detective. We were lucky to have found their fingerprints painted on the wall and imprinted in the mudcakes."

"Mudcakes?" Nat cocked an eyebrow.

Bruce took a deep breath, "The people of Aveninfin believed that the dead would find a way back in case the living ever needed them. However, the dead spirits would need to identify their graves and their loved ones. So after the death of any citizen, they would press the deceased palms onto a patch of damp mud, which would then solidify, leaving behind an imprint."

Okoye bit her cheek, "But you just said that King Steven isn't believed to be dead."

Bruce shook his head, "I said legends claimed that. Folk-lore, fairy tales, ancient myth. There's no way to actually verify this."

Natasha checked her watch, "Well, we still have about an hour or so left for this interrogation to end. So why don't you indulge us Doctor?" she requested in her sweet venomous voice.

Rubbing his eyes, Bruce took a deep breath. "Okay," he said, "How much do you remember about the history of Aveninfin from school?"

Both the women looked at each other. "Wasn't it a kingdom ruined by greed and ambition?" Okoye guessed.

Bruce nodded in response, "The king, Steven Grant, wanted to conquer the entire world just like Alexander had once set out to. In the 17th century, when the kingdom of Aveninfin was at its peak, King Steven married a Sorceress by the name of Luna. It is believed that Queen Luna gained her powers from the moon. A bit Luna-tic, amirite?" Bruce's another lame attempt at a joke was met with stony silence.

He cleared his throat, "So anyways, Queen Luna saw how the kingdom and it's citizens suffered in poverty while the King, his aid Buchanan and the corrupt traders and officers enjoyed the riches. She knew of his ambition to conquer the world and so, she killed him by poisoning him. But, here is where things get interesting."

Bruce shifted in his seat, the excitement in his voice mirroring in his body language, "The Queen didn't account for Buchanan's loyalty. You see, in some iterations of the legend, it is said that the King and Buchanan were lovers, in others, they were mentioned as close comrades. Buchanan was said to be raised by witches, and so, when he realised that the King had been poisoned, he went and dug open his grave to revive the King."

Natasha looked disinterested and Okoye managed to keep a passive expression as Bruce rambled on. "Buchanan apparently gave half of his soul to the King, so that King Steven can live. But this only made matters worse. Now both, the King and Buchanan, existed in the world of the living, and also in the realm of the dead. This place… this-this sweet nexus of two dimensions cursed the beings with unimaginable power, and pain."

Okoye gave Natasha half a smile as the latter yawned, "Let me guess the next part Doctor," Natasha offered, "The King laid waste to the entire kingdom and buried it within the ground where the sun doesn't shine?"

Deflated, Bruce sank back in his chair, "Yeah."

🌑

You were passing through buildings, cars, houses, trees and God knows what. Suddenly, you came to a stop. You were surprised when you saw King Steve, or "Conqueror of the Paranormal, Leader of the Occult Study and Summoner of Death, His Majesty King Steven Grant" as he liked to call himself, converse with another man.

This stranger's hair was tied in a small ponytail. His physique was just as massive and looked just as strong as Steve's.

His magic command wore off just a bit as he was speaking with the stranger. You were able to move your face and a little portion of your limbs. You gasped in your head as you finally took in the condition of the women around you. Some women were missing their palms, feet, or even entire hands and legs. A few had their entire torsos cut so that you could only see their spine connecting their head with their hips. While the face of one woman was absent of her eyeballs, the other one's neck had been chopped off in a gruesome manner.

Steve's power over you started weaning further as he became more agitated in his conversation. Your eyesight became a bit clearer, the shades of black and grey slowly shifting into focus.

You had to find a way out of this prison. By now, you understood that all the women in King Steven's harem had been murdered and kept captive. This could not be death. You didn't want it to be.

Looking downwards at your feet, you noticed the faint wisps of ash detaching from your body and collecting on the ground below. It could easily be confused as dust in a small quantity, but when shed in a larger amount, it could form a trail of sorts...

🌑

A FEW DAYS later saw Okoye sitting at her desk with her head in her hands. "Oko," Natasha approached her gently.

"You know, if I had any hair on my head I would be pulling them out right now," Okoye joked miserably.

"I told you before Oko. Some cases are too twisted to be solved. Do you know how many cases in the US go unsolved? Probably-"

"Wait," Okoye interrupted Natasha, "What did you just say?"

Natasha looked a bit surprised, "Ummm… Do you know how many cases go unsolved?"

"That's it!" exclaimed Okoye. She rushed towards the Records room of the precinct, with Natasha hot on her heels. "What's 'it'?" she asked.

"We need to check whether these fingerprints have come up in the last 6 months in the unsolvable crimes committed," Okoye explained, "Think about it Nat. Dr Banner told us that they retrieved the prints 6 months ago right? So there has to be-"

Natasha sighed, "Well it is a lead. But…" "But what?" Okoye responded.

"You are grasping at straws Oko. Don't you think it would have been in the news if a murder went unsolved heart because the prints couldn't be traced? Look I…," Natasha hesitated, "I know you are desperate. Frustrated even. But this has started to affect your health and work and I can't just stand by and be a silent spectator."

"Then don't be one. Join me and help me in solving this," Okoye urged.

Natasha just shook her head, "If… if you don't give up this case Okoye then-"

"Then what Natasha?" Okoye almost spat her name.

"I will have to report you," Natasha's threat sounded like a plea.

Okoye squared her shoulders, "After everything we have gone through?"

Natasha looked at her with a painful expression, "Yes. Especially after everything we have gone through. I just cannot let you destroy your career behind one case. You weren't even supposed to interrogate Dr Banner! This… this stops now."

Both the women stared at one another, refusing to back down. Finally, Natasha muttered something under her breath and left the Records room as Okoye kept glaring at her back.

36 HOURS LATER, Okoye found a nondescript manila envelope on her desk, buried under her pile of unprocessed files with a note, "Hope this helps! - Peter P." She casually angled her body in a way which hid the contents of the envelope as she opened it. Her eyes widened at the information displayed in front of her.

King Steven's fingerprints were found at crime scenes that dated back all the way to 1915, almost around the time when the police started using science and technology to obtain and analyse fingerprints.

As she flipped through the pages, she noted the years of the crimes committed. 1915, 1933, 1954, 1974, 1997 and lastly, 2020. A quick mental calculation made her realise that the average number of years between these murders were approximately between 20-22.

But nothing prepared her for what she saw next.

The photographs of all the female victims closely resembled your face. Sure, there was a difference in the colour of their skin, languages and backgrounds. But their facial features were identical.

Moreover, there was a striking similarity in the way the crime was committed. The women were kidnapped and then disappeared without a trace.

Okoye sat back in her chair as realisation struck her like a thunderbolt. Could it be? Was there really an undead entity hunting these women? And for what?

🌑

You were moving again. Every part of you was frozen, except the tips of your thumb and forefinger, thanks to King Steve still seething in anger. Rubbing them together furiously, you tried to communicate with others through your mind, urging them to do the same.

It continued for a while when suddenly, you felt yourself freeze completely.

That disdainful cackle was back in your head, "Hehehehe. Honey wants to shed her skin? HER SKIN!!! Wants to be rescued. RESCUED! Don't like me? ME! Doesn't want skin? SKIN? SKIN! Then I will take it. TAKE IT!"

You felt his shadow push into you with force as your now solid forms collided with the ground. His blade, now shining brighter than the sun, cut into your sides as you silently screamed in agony.

Pain seared through you as he started peeling the skin from your entire body, only to reveal the ghastly organs beneath. Muscle, bones, veins and all were now on display. Nobody could hear your blood-curdling screams except the women surrounding you, their howls of horror joining yours as once again, you were reminded about who was in charge.

"Need skin," Steve muttered as he kept cutting into you, "Have hands, legs, face, torso, everything. EVERYTHING! Need skin to put her back together. To bring her back. She will breathe. She will be alive. ALIVE!"

__--__--__--__--__--__--__--__--__--__--__--__--__

Permanent tag: @donutloverxo

Taglist for this series: @buckysteveloki-me @cheeseburgersstuff @ninefuckingoneone @keenmarvellover (I tagged you guys because you had requested to be tagged if I ever write a part 2. If you guys don't want to be tagged in this, just let me know. No hard feelings 😊)

Taglist open! Just comment, send an ask or message!

#okoye #Natasha Romanoff #okoye x natasha #dark!marvel #Marvel au #dark!mcu #dark!avengers #dark!steve rogers #dark!bucky barnes #horror #Marvel horror au

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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years

Text

August 5: 3x02 The Enterprise Incident

After several weeks of being in like a TOS desert (Assignment: Earth; Spock’s Brain) finally we get to The Enterprise Incident, one of the best episodes, possibly of all time. Why was D.C. Fontana so good??? How??

McCoy narration! How unusual. I like how it contributes to the generally jarring opening, with Kirk acting so out of character and so on. All of the crew being fooled and the audience too.

I’d say this scene is the only one Kirk haters have ever seen--where he’s all arrogant and impatient and mean--but he’s not being slutty enough.

When you need intel, you go to Uhura.

This is an interesting ep because the Enterprise is being uncharacteristically sneaky. Usually, they’re obviously doing the right thing in the straightforwardly right way, but this really is an espionage mission, which includes, in addition to the garden variety lying, major stuff like uh treaty breaking.

Wow, a Romulan with a name. Unusual. Is he the first named Romulan?

They want the Enterprise. They want his lady!

Hmmm, you have a Vulcan on board, do you? Very interested in that. It’s pretty funny that the Commander calls up as soon as Tal mentions Spock,like she has a sixth sense that picked up on a potential hottie on the enemy ship.

Oh no, Kirk and Spock aren’t getting along. Trouble in paradise...

Spock looks very disapproving. And Kirk is acting downright despotic. Hot.

Imagine being the Romulan hostages lol. That’s awkward. “Go their ship and uh sit in their brig, nbd, we’ll bring you back.” (And then later one of them is unceremoniously stripped naked.) (And then later still they’re completely forgotten about!!!)

Scotty’s face when he sees the hostages is very funny. Like “oh I know what to do with YOU.”

I love the Female Romulan Commander already.

Wow Kirk is such a liar. Just say it loudly enough and it will SEEM true. Navigation error etc.

“It’s no myth that Vulcans can’t lie,” Spock lied.

“It’s not a lie to keep the truth to oneself.” Feel like I gotta outright steal that.

Oooh, the Commander has a temper.

Kirk is “a highly sensitive and emotional person.”

He’s living for the drama.

This must be all very confusing for the crew.

I love Captain Scotty. He’s so intense.

“You make a brave noise.” Burn.

Spock’s been an officer for 18 years. I’d do the math on that but I’m not sure when one becomes an officer specifically.

“Do you like Captain Kirk?” (I don’t even remember why I wrote this down, but uh, yeah.)

...Damn this whole scene is so good.

“I don’t make house calls.”

Except for Kirk.

It’s bizarre that the Romulans are in Klingon ships (that look like Federation ships on the inside) for pretty much no reason but I do like the design of them in general.

Funny how “Attend me” sounds an awful lot like “My wife, attend.”

Lol at the crocheted board shorts on the male Romulan officers. The Commander is MUCH more stylish.

“Are the guards invited on our date?”

“It would be illogical to assume that all conditions remain stable.” What a F L I R T.

Very bold of her to basically declare “Spock, you’re Captain now.”

Kirk looks like the drunk friend, swaying in the background, gearing up to something.

“Vulcan death grip” lol. Sounds like made up Vulcan nonsense to me! (And it is.)

Even if it weren’t, Spock is an adult Vulcan and a trained Starfleet officer, he would never just accidentally death grip someone.

And now it all comes out. Because Chapel was nosy. Love that she just casually knows all this stuff about Vulcan abilities.

They told Bones pretty late about this whole plan. I feel like Scotty and Bones should have been in the original loop.

“You’re lucky they didn’t start an autopsy.”

Love that part of Kirk’s transformation into a Romulan was putting on eye shadow.

Also love Scotty’s face journey when he sees Romulan!Kirk.

Look at these decadent Commander’s quarters. Spock must love them.

Recruiting inducements lol--is that what the kids are calling it these days?

“Don’t beam me into a bulkhead.” Don’t even joke.

Spock hasn’t sent the coordinates because he’s DISTRACTED while on his DATE.

I love their little square drinking glasses.

“I do... appreciate it.”

“If you don’t tell me your name, I’ll have to make one up for you.”

TOS Spock apparently more smooth than AOS Kirk.

When she stood up, that mini-skirt basically became a shirt--barely.

His lady leaves the room and he immediately call his man--what a slut.

The Commander’s “casual” outfit is easily one of the best TOS costumes. So pretty! 10/10 would wear today.

“Stimulate...our discussion.” Sure. Your discussion.

He’s been moved emotionally.

Dammit Tal! Stop cockblocking the commander.

Love how obvious it was that she and Spock were hooking up--she's dressed up, he appears dramatically from behind the flowing white curtains in her frankly huge quarters.

The cloaking device looks suspiciously like Nomad again.

“How could you do this to me?” Girl, you’ve known him for an hour. Calm down the drama.

Also love the earrings.

That was a weak slap. She should have sent him sprawling with her Romulan strength. I guess her heart wasn’t in it.

Romulans are Vulcans but with unfiltered Drama.

I like her jellyfish chair.

Now Spock shall fillibuster his own death by reading a very long prepared statement.

She hears the phrase "historic tradition" and sighs like "this is gonna be the longest 20 minutes of my LIFE.”

Silly of Kirk to assume they wouldn't fire on the commander and/or that she wouldn't ORDER them to fire.

“Alien contraption.” Scotty enjoying himself.

Hmmm, the Commander was bragging to Spock off screen about the cloaking device--what else might she have said that we didn’t hear?

Mr. Spock will escort you to your quarters--more like Mr. Spock will escort you to HIS quarters amirite?

She would like his weaponry.

“Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.” Well that line didn’t have to go that hard.

“It was the only choice. You would not respect any other.” Where’s all the talk about loyalty and oaths now?

“They do not look aesthetically agreeable on humans.” Textual evidence for my theory that Vulcans, though humanoid, have some sort of indescribable Alien Aura quite apart from the eyebrows and ears.

That was such a good ending. Last major dialogue scene was a serious one between Spock and the Commander, but then there’s a little humorous coda, too--a good shot of Spock looking pensive, but also the peanut gallery having a little laugh.

I love that episode so much. I love how... difficult Spock is to read. On the one hand, I do think he was really attracted to the Romulan Commander. I also think he was hiding a lot of the truth about why he didn’t join the Romulans--I mean yes, that was never a real option and it would certainly be wildly out of character for him to do it. But he also talks exclusively about loyalty to Starfleet, his oath, his uniform, as if but for the happenstance of these things, if he were making a decision for himself instead of following his duty, he might prefer to be with her and the Romulans. But what about the obvious other factor--Kirk himself? What about “A starship runs on loyalty to one man, and no one can replace it--or him?” I feel like his connection to Kirk is like the unspoken undertone to all of this. Especially because, as Captain and XO, they were the only ones to know about this plan from the beginning, and probably came up with the details of it themselves. But we also know that Spock takes the mean things that Kirk says to heart, even if they’re only said as part of a mission or larger ploy. And we also know that he truly desires belonging, and that being part one thing and part another often makes him feel as if he belonged nowhere. But the Romulan Commander didn’t seem to care about his human heritage. She asked him what he was, and only mentioned the human part one other time, not in a negative way. I do see the temptation for him.

It’s also interesting that Kirk initially refers to the Commander as “he,” implying he didn’t know specifically who was in charge of the ship. That means that while he and Spock clearly planned for Spock to undermine and then “kill” Kirk, and almost certainly to play on Romulan/Vulcan cultural connections, they probably did not plan on Spock seducing anyone. He did that on his own.

This would reboot so well. Like, aside from the S/U aspects, it’s a perfect candidate: a spy narrative that has a little bit of the gray morality they’re so attached to; Kirk and Spock tension; Kirk being Dramatique; cool aliens--and it would have been very interesting to see this story play out in the context of the destruction of Vulcan. (More generally, I think completely forgetting about the Romulans after the first reboot film was a huge mistake but whatever.)

Mmmm, I just... I want to watch it again lol. D.C. Fontana was truly the queen of alien world building. That sense of alien-ness that I get in the Spock and Commander scenes is like what I’m going for in some of my own stuff.

#the year 2021 #2021: fandom thoughts #2021: star trek #star trek tos

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omegangrins · 4 years

Text

A Treatise On the Doctor

I don't know how to start this. Because I think of Peter Capaldi's words when he said that the only thing required to be a Doctor Who fan, is kindness.

I like 13 and think Chibnall is doing his best job writing the show.

So I struggle to write this because I am engaging against that very unkindness in the Doctor Who fandom, and trying very hard not to be angry back. "Allways try to be nice but never fail to be kind." But I've begun to wonder more and more if those who speak so loudly against the show really know what the show itself is about.

Enough of talking about other people though, cause frankly they're only important as set-up for this conversation. And again, I'm working kind.

So here's what you're gonna learn from this lifelong fan (and the best Tl;dr you're gonna get):

1. The Doctor sucks. From the very beginning. People complain about character traits now that have been around as long as the show.

2. Due to the Doctor's suckage, they tend to do more harm than good. (And because of this, most of the Doctor's "friends" along the way have been, well, let's leave it at the air quotes for now cause it's a damn big list of "BOOOO!!!".)

3. All of the showrunners and writers and actors and editors and everyone else has allways knows this and has played it this way.

4. And last but not least, since this is a time travel show. If you wanna know what and why stuff is happening now, look it up. Everything that happened before is allways in play.

5. None of this is bad, and in fact, it makes the show morally grayer. It's about kindness at all costs. Even your own.

A. First things first, the hard thing. The Doctor is not grrrreat. I mean, sure they try, but they fail a lot more often. In Extremis, a majority of those fatality index counts come from people the Doctor failed to save. That's why it's worded so specifically as "cause of death". All the death's caused by the Doctor's very interaction with time and lack of saving those around them. And part of it's not their fault, but more often than not, the Doctor says I can save you, and can't, won't, or chooses not to.

And that would be alright, but it took them over 1000 years to realize they should start letting their companions lead lives outside of theirs so THEY DON'T DIE. A bit too long as someone who claims to be better.

Not to mention how many times the Doctor is dismissive of their companions and the people around them only to use them for their help and just bug off again. If they truly cared and wanted to help, they would stay and listen in between adventures. Their lifespan is near infinite anyway. What's a few extra Earth hours with some friends you made along the way. You know, maybe fix some of the psychological and emotional damage created by encountering things behind a human's original scope of reasoning. But nope, we gotta go adventure more, byyyyeee!!

So when people talk about these qualities in 13 in a negative aspect I have to laugh because I'm not sure if they understand the joke. Cause we're talking about an alien that grew up around a species calling themselves Time Lords. I try not to blame them too much for it. 1 had to learn how to be hospitable to humans and it's been a bit of a slow learning curve ever since.

B. After the Doctor survived the horrors of the Time War and happened upon a human companion they felt worth connecting to, what did they do? They took Rose to watch her planet burn in front of her eyes. Great, first date, amirite?

And that's a little bit of companion damage. Do you know that the Doctor is responsible for the almost complete genocide of the Silurian race across multiple occasions. I am legitimately surprised there are any left after all of the ones the Doctor has killed. Like before, they cause destruction either purposefully or accidentally or simply by force of being there.

Remember before how I said that the Doctor just flies away. Yeah, they leave a lot of problems behind when they do (something that I can see Chibnall is planting the seeds of). If you had a time and space machine and practically unlimited capabilities and you choose to just leave after a situation and not check up on them from time to or see if there are any other underlying crises to be solved. But oh no, "gotta follow that rule of time and keep going even though I stopped in the first place because of how interested I was.". This is why 9 has a great arc about this. He thought he killed all the Daleks. They came back. He thought he'd gotten rid of the Slitheen. They came back. He thought he saved Satellite 5 from aliens. But opsies, they came back. And look! They're Daleks. Which he "finally" got rid of.

The Doctor just bounces around all carefree and without an ounce of care for themselves, their companions or consequences unless there's consequences for themselves or their companions. Then they get indignant.

Is that really kind of the person you want flying around fixing things in time and space? Who knows. But at least they are trying. Most of the time the T.A.R.D.I.S. lands somewhere and the authority figures are the most pretentious bull-headed pigs you can find. To me, I laugh cause it seems like both sides end up getting a taste of their own medicine. Usually with the bull charging to death in a sad glory while the Doctor wiles on metaphorically about not being as good as them.

But again, as a "superior" alien with "advanced" technology and "culture" you'd think they'd just know better already. But that's all part of the character. The Doctor may be in flux, but true change is difficult. The real hero of every story is the other people BESIDES the Doctor.

Cause the title is Doctor *Who* . The Who being half of the title, despite having less letters. It's the constant question of "What and why and who is that crazy person that's trying to help?" Why do you think they keep flying back to Earth? (Besides set construction reasons.) They've grown as attached to us as we have to them. And at this point, a lot of their saving us is guilt and embarrassment at having a hand in our timeline.

This is also the same reason the Doctor dumps companions in a fluff. Baggage. Every time a companion gets too heavy to carry the memories of... off they fly.

Except for 13. She's stayed. To this end, we can see how the Doctor changes. Not on our smaller, human timelines, but on the timeline of a god with way too much power.

D. With that in mind, we go Classic. It's the Who you need to consult if you wish to make any critique on what's happening now. Because how can you know how a part operates inside of a whole without seeing the whole part?

Cause I don't know if you've watched it but it can be rough, and I don't mean in the sense of production value (which admittedly they do a fairly decent job of using what money they had. A problem the BBC plagues to Doctor Who to this day.). The 3rd Doctor shits on every one they call friends constantly and then turns around expecting help. 4 did the same. Then 5 masked that contempt with a plucky face and a cheeky word. But it was still there, bubbling out of 6 and 7 as the inability to suffer fools gladly and using their own righteousness to enact change in their companions. A trait that kept going til an entire war and regeneration was used solving the question of "Doctor Who?" Only for them to try and forget twice more by putting on their pretty grinning faces and running away from it.

And I'm only talking from a companion perspective. Each of the Doctors has enacted their own form of genocide on countless species. Sure, it's to "save humans" but at the end of the day you'd have to ask yourself if we're really worth that blood. And this is all in the Doctor's history. As much as they claim better, they're hands are still gushing red.

The Doctor left Jo because she fell in love. They drove Adric to put their life on the line in order to feel adequate. The entirety of the Silurian race has been wiped out fivefold under their watch, with one time by their hand itself. Same for several other singular and unique species you won't be able to find elsewhere in the universe. 7 used time travel to enact a personality change in Ace while simultaneously using her as a pawn in an interdimensional war. The Time War itself. Sure it got erased but the Doctor still did those things ("War" Doctor or whatever nonsense titles they feel necessary to delude themselves). The entirety of Amy's childhood was destroyed by their presence, and Rory got erased. Twice! Sarah Kingdom. We know the list. Hell, the Doctor whisked Barbara and Ian away because they wanted to teach the snobby humans some lessons.

They may have a time machine, but we have the bill of their actions. This is where 13 excels. Because they're trying to be better than themselves. They've learnt the lessons of all those years traveling and the failures they wish they could reverse but don't as a way of keeping a scoreboard of pain. It's not perfect by any means, but look at 12 needing cue cards to understand and react to human grief under duress. They've come a helluva long way. After 50 years, I'm inclined to believe better. After all, it's what the Doctor would want.

E. You know how people like the ASOIAF series because it offers up morally complex characters existing in a morally complex world where black and white are harder to define than grey? Have you ever thought of Doctor Who as the same? Strip past the fairytale and adventure and "wibbly wobbly timey wimeyness and it's just people reacting to situations. We're just harder on the Doctor because they're hard on us. You could go round and round on who's the bigger killer, but at the end of the day Time Lords and humans fight and feel about the same things. It's allways been a joke to pretend otherwise.

That's why I love the Timeless Child. Not for making the Doctor anymore special but for saying that even despite having all of their specialness ripped away and repurposed to create a lie of a society then having the memory wiped of said event, the Doctor broke out of their mold, stole a TARDIS and told the Time Lords to fuck off. That's not a Captain America/Superman hero. That's Batman in space with a society of Lex Luthor's. Gotham and Gallifrey. The Doctor saw what they were a part of and broke free, without even knowing the more horrifying truth. Cause it's the thing I see many fans missing because they're so preocuppied with the Doctor being special. The thing that made the Doctor different was their ability to know the difference and walk away to find better. Now, the Doctor has a reason to go back and find out why they never stopped running.

The Time Lords might be the greatest monsters in the universe. It is in the name. "Lords". Those who would lord over us and impose their will with a banthium fist.

And this is a children's show.

C the thing is, the people who made and make this show all collectively rail against one thing: Hate. Kindness is the way of Doctor's. Even if they're sawing off your leg, it's to do the kindness of saving your life. This is because the people who make this (United Kingdomers) have seen centuries of war and conflict and oppression enacted by their own country in the name of progress. And they want to see it no more. Look no further than any of the Doctor's adventures with UNIT. Allways advocating for peace and being ignored for the comfortable war-cry. It's why it's hard to blame the Doctor when we do very similar and often worse (though we don't have time travel.... yet). The creators of this show know better, see better, and wrote better, to know that the powers that be nipped would nip their creations and sanitize them. So they wrote their messages so strong that you can feel them from the future. They're powerfull enough that even across eras they have all collectively moved me to write this.

That's another point I have to laugh at people saying Doctor Who has never been in your face about progressive politics. The Green Death. Survival. Trial of a Timelord (Yes, all of it. Sit down and power through.) The Happiness Patrol is one of my all time favorite episodes for going there in this regard. People may poo poo but history has its' eyes on you. Doctor Who loves taking potshots at the issues of the day. As long as you don't make the aliens black of course. Make them all the colors of the rainbow but never make them black. That'd be too on the nose (That's something they used to say back in the day! Crazy how far we've come).

So bravoa to Chibnall for continuing the legacy of Doctor Who. From where I'm standing, he's not doing anything different than any other showrunner before him. Cause if you want to argue canon, you at least have to know what created it. This show owes what it is to those Classic eras. And if you think Chibnall is shitting on those years and your childhood.... well, then why did you read this whole thing?

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daddy-winter · 5 years

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Gallant Iriel - my submission for @pea-milk‘s bachelorette challenge!

Personal paragraph and other stuff under the cut!

Addy’s mother and father both live happily in Granite Falls where the skies are often overcast and the men and women whom live there are usually living in simple content. Her mother is an alien and her father a human- the whole town knows and some say that it’s the best kept community secret since Bella Goth’s abduction!

Addy lived a quiet life but always craved something more. Something big and beautiful (not just the female presenting nipples). She is striding to be a lobbyist, always outspoken on the issues she cares about especially when it comes to nature. Despite being a social butterfly and romantic she’s never had a relationship, always content with just being herself. But lately, the small town isn’t big enough, for she, an above averagely size girl. Her first step out into the world? A bachelorette challenge because tbh what other way to get your name out there amirite?

Some other random facts:

will colour co-ordinate her outfit with her eyes

her eyes change colours depending on her mood

loves plants and nature SO MUCH even tho she cant look after a houseplant for her LIFE

rain is her favourite weather

she loves bright colours!!!

pretty tall like Gwendoline Christie tall

(6′3 ft)

loves bell bottom jeans

wants to be a mom one day but like,,,,, IN A WHILE,,,,

she just wants to explore the world and have her first kiss ok

shes soft™

ye ok that’s it i hope you enjoyed!!

#bce #pea-milk #I HOPE YOU LIKE HERRR

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get-well-soonish-blog · 5 years

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Where it all Began

OK, so I’ve created an Instagram account dedicated to showing the world what it’s like to be me. Might as well link a blog to it, amirite?

Why does that matter?

Now what?

What are you even going to be talking about, Katie?

Some questions that might be buzzing around your head, I know.

We all kind of walk through this world doing what we do every day. And maybe some of us find that significant, but maybe some of us don’t. If you see yourself as “just a student”, or “just a person in an entry-level, coordinator position, or “just trying to get by”, I promise you that means something.

About four months ago I made a move that changed my life so profoundly it has quite literally shaken me down to my core and showed me who I am, what I’m made of. But let’s rewind to just before that all happened.

I’m sitting on the couch of a family I nanny for in what felt like the middle-of-nowhere-Indiana. It’s just about 1:00 pm, the baby is asleep and I’m watching The Walking Dead. My tortured relationship has just come to a complete end (you’ll hear about him later, I promise), my roommate hates me (you’ll hear about her too, don’t worry), all of my college friends have moved to places like Seattle, and Chicago and I’m so sad I can’t even cry. I’m stuck in the cement that I’ve let set around me blankly staring at my MacBook Air as character after character dies and I. Feel. Nothing. I was supposed to have a skype interview with a company in New York but I consciously decide to skip it. “I forgot, I’m sorry, can we reschedule? No? Ok, thank you for the opportunity.” I can hear the script I’m writing for the email scene I’m about to direct. And that’s when my phone rings...

“Hi, is this, Katie?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“Hi Katie, this is Alex. I’m calling on the behalf of Agency. We were supposed to have a Skype call at 1:00.”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry my internet isn’t working properly. I’m so glad you called...”

A little bit different than the original script I was writing, but I went with it.

Fast forward four months, and here I am; writing to you from my desk at that job in New York *shhhh* to tell you about why I need to talk to you; why I feel my story is important to tell, as is yours. I left that couch, bad relationship, horrible roommate situation, town one month later and I can quite literally say that I never once looked in my rearview mirror as I drove far, far away from that place in the midwest to a new one in Upstate New York.

And that’s when my life became perfect! The End...

I wish that was how it went. But everyone knows that putting distance between yourself and the problem(s) isn’t always the answer. Things follow you and more often than not, it’s time that we need. I really, truly, vigorously believed that leaving all of those people and memories and that place behind was the cure-all to this disease that, I thought, was my anxiety and depression (queue post for later about what I actually had going on in my cute little brain). I also thought I loved change! I was ready for it because change is always a 100% guaranteed breath of fresh air.

Wrong.

Not only was distance not a cure-all, it was isolating and the change was so vast and challenging, I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

My mother and I aren’t close. I remember smelling her nightshirt when I was little, trying to absorb something from her. Looking back I’m not sure what that was, really. Maybe it was whatever kindness she had left in her after my dad left or a smile. Her smell was always floral but sweet and I needed it to put me to sleep. There was a time when I found her, her scent, comforting. But as I got older I began to appreciate that less and eventually not want it at all. Our lack of a relationship isn’t entirely her fault. I recognize that I’m my own, closed off person, afraid to get to know the woman who brought me into this world. But after the transition to the North Country, I called her almost every day like I was five and I needed to smell her nightshirt to be able to rest. I cried that I’d never make friends here (shout-out to the wonderful humans who have taken me in and now call me their friend). I thought the midwest was desolate, but really I didn’t even know what desolate was until moving here. The midwest was a friend I’d become too familiar with and bored of. It was a place I took for granted and only saw the times I’d had my heart broken or falling outs with close friends or dropping out of college after four years of half-hearted-hard-work. But the North Country was an alien from a galaxy I’d never even heard of and couldn’t communicate with or relate to. I’d forcefully thrown myself at it only to realize it looked nothing like what I’d loved and known for so long.

For the first several months, I found no comfort here. The job was harder than anticipated and most of my coworkers, for lack of a better word, sucked. The agency was at the forefront of a rebrand and I’d come in at the worst, most disjointed time in their 41-year history as a company. So, not only was the job not panning out but like I said, I truly had no friends. It was sub-zero, constantly snowing, dark by 4:30 pm and I was beginning to resent the reason I’d come here in the first place; to get away from things that pained me. I drove to and from work in pitch black, every day. I love being outdoors, but I’d never been winter hiking and had no proper gear to get out there and no money to buy said gear. Everything was a mess of pure and hopeful expectations collapsing in on me and whether I created it or not, I felt I had no control over the clean-up.

But somehow, dirty clothes found their way into my hamper and friends were made, gear was purchased, work settled down. And now, today, I feel like I’ve finally gotten a grasp on my new life. It feels weird to write that down... “my new life”. But how I’m living now looks nothing like what it used to so I guess it really is “new”.

I’m taking canoe trips and becoming more active and going to therapy once a week. I had such a rough go for those few months, and so many things to sort out. Through therapy and some much-needed soul-searching, the only conclusion I’ve come to is that I need to take care of myself and SLOW DOWN (As my girl, Kacey Musgraves says, “I’m all right with a slow burn.” That’s kind of been my theme song for the last few months). Take that job, be patient with myself in adjusting, say yes to more experiences, but learn to say no when it’s just too much, do what benefits me. Sounds selfish, I know, but I’ve always given so much of myself to others and left none for myself. And I’m tired of feeling empty with nothing left to give to the most important person in my life; me. You might be thinking, “damn, she’s really taking this selfish thing seriously”. And that’s because I am. Going out with coworkers on a Tuesday might be fun, and I might be missing out on a few laughs, BUT going home to work out, and cook dinner and relax before another day of work is mindful and soothing and it’s what I need to feel like my best self. Learning to say no to things I feel I’m missing out on has been quite the process, but I’ve never felt empty or depleted doing it.

So to answer the questions I think might be buzzing around in your head...

1. This matters because I feel all stories are important and deserve to be told. It’s also part of my emotional wellness and healing. I went to school for writing and though I’m in a position in my professional life where I write content, I’m not writing anything I truly feel could change anything. Even if this doesn’t change your life, it will change mine (there I go learning to be all selfish again).

2. And now, I tell you how I try to stay sane, try being the keyword. There are days I still am so sad I can’t cry. And there are still days in which I miss that toxic relationship, distressed couch, and abusive roommate. But there are more days now than there ever were of fun mistakes and happy adventures. I guess when they say the only direction there is to go from rock-bottom is up, they’re not lying.

3. I’m talking about emotional wellness! A combination of therapy, guided meditation, exercise and *mostly* clean eating does it for me, and I’m curious to know what does it for you. I’m talking about being raw and open and honest with oneself, admitting to your mistakes, and honoring your flaws. I’m talking about obtaining contentment. People strive for happiness but really feeling happy isn’t something we’re meant to feel in our normal state. Happy, elated, excited are all things that take us higher, far above the level of contentment. Contentment is where I strive to be. Contentment is where I feel warm and secure and like I’m ready to take on whatever life throws at me because I can; because I’m standing on a solid foundation of neutrality that I’ve built with my own, small, chubby baby hands.

So... if any of this interests you, stick around and read a while. Also, check out get.well.soonish on Instagram to put a face to the name cause it’s a pretty good one ;).

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criticallyalexandrite · 5 years

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Idc the Diamonds should be shattered

For real though I’ve never seen an SU stan give a good legit reason for why the Diamonds shouldn’t be shattered. All the reasons I’ve seen amount to “I refuse to understand that the Diamonds are slaveowners because X reason.” I personally think on the Homeworld gems who are only doing what they’re told out of fear should be given a chance. But not the Diamonds, because there is nothing forcing them to be slaveowners. I also don’t give a shit about posts where people say that a character being an alien makes them not abusive. By that logic Bill Cipher isn’t abusive cuz he’s a demon. Do you see how dumb and semantics focused that reasoning is now? Besides, the gems have a very similar mindset to humans. Their emotions function similarly to humans. The only thing stopping the Diamonds from caring about other organic life forms is their pride. Pride is the only motivation they have for enslaving and destroying other planets. Also there is the fact that they are slaveowners. Being a slaveowner HISTORICALLY isn’t something a person should be allowed to come back from. Another thing I’ve noticed with Diamond stans is they tend to not understand how serious and unforgivable slavery abuse actually is. Everytime you ask them to explain how they think the Diamonds aren’t slaveowners they’ll be like “the Homeworld gems are just servants uwu.” Like y’all do know that servant is another word for slave yes? And even if it wasn’t you prove that you have a fundamentally flawed understanding of what abusive work ethic is by comparing the Homeworld gems to regular workers. Regular workers are allowed to quite and get a different job if they want to. Disabled workers are welcomed not accommodated or discriminated against in a healthy work environment. The Homeworld gems are not allowed to do either thing. The Diamonds are now established to normally kill off colors AKA disabled gems on the spot if they are “too off color.” Peridot most likely only got a break cuz despite her not being able to shapeshift she was useful enough that the Diamonds tolerated her. But tolerating someone who’’s a minority cuz they’re useful is not proof someone is good. So, Diamond stans who use the Diamonds sparing Peridot or Pink as proof they’re good can fuck right off. Tolerance is not the same as genuine kindness and it never will be. Plus if we’re gonna go with some dumbass “all the Diamonds secretly hate colonizing” narrative then that makes the Diamonds worse morally. Cuz if they want to secretly stop colonizing but continue to colonize any way to save face that proves even more so that their motive is pride. Plus my other problem with people who say the Diamonds SOMETIMES being merciful towards their slaves? it sounds like gaslighting. That special kind of gaslighting that toxic people do where they do “Well your abuser is sometimes merciful so that means they’re not actually abusive.” But I 100% disagree with that black and white thinking. It is not morally grey to have an abusive character that sometimes treats their abuse victim decently. That is actually a form of manipulation that abusers use. It’s their way of making you question yourself for thinking they’re abusive. Even if they’re not consciously doing it, they’re subconsciously doing it. Which is still just as serious and should not be treated as proof that they’re secretly good. Stop diminishing the harm abusers do just cuz they pretend to be nice sometimes. And last but not least my most hated reason Diamond stans use for wanting the Diamonds redeemed SU stan: But I like them so I want them redeemed. To that I have to say, and? Believe it or not I like Yellow Diamond. I like her cuz she’s the only Diamond that the show isn’t forcing you to pity 24/7. Yes unfortunately she got redeemed which I’m still pissed about. I was really hoping she would turn down Steven’s offer of mercy. But gotta ignore character agency to have that aesop handled with kindergarten morals level execution amirite. So yeah, you liking the Diamonds still isn’t a justifiable reason for wanting the crewniverse to redeem the Diamonds. You can like a horrible tabusive character and recognize they need to be held fully accountable for their actions. That means no going ”But the abusive character is depressed/has some other mental illness and or neurodivergency!!” ”But the abusive character is an abuse victim!” ”But the abusive character had a tragic backstory!” ”But the abusive character mistreated their victim out of love!” ”But the abusive character is inhuman so you can’t judge them via using human morals!” ”But the abusive character is probably only abusive out of ignorance!” ”But the abusive character doesn’t understand empathy!” ”But the abusive character is attractive!” (Yes I’ve actually seen people use that last one not just for the Diamonds but for many other abusive characters that shouldn’t be redeemed,.) But my problem with Diamond stans is…none of you do that. You SAY that you liking the Diamonds doesn’t mean you excuse their actions but your actions show the opposite. Everytime you demonize an SU crit for wanting the Diamonds shattered you prove that you don’t want the Diamonds held accountable. Everytime you tell SU crits that it’s a kiddie show so of course the Diamonds can’t be shattered on screen you don’t hold the Diamonds accountable. (Besides that second one really doesn’t work considering the show has shown very disturbing imagery to the kid viewers in the fandom multiple times. Disturbing imagery far worse than the implication of shattering a sentient gem.) Honestly the Diamonds have committed so many atrocities that the only way they can redeem themselves is self sacrifice via shattering. That is honestly the only kind of Diamond redemption arc I could be ok with. But it would have to not involve the author of that redemption arc forcing me to feel bad for the Diamonds. As soon as that happens it’s garbage. If your villain characters is truly sympathetic you shouldn’t have to use the Freudian Excuse trope to make people sympathize with them. But PREFERABLY the Diamonds don’t get a redemption arc at all. PREFERABLY the Diamonds get killed as a true realistic consequence for the atrocities they’ve committed. PREFERABLY the Diamonds’ abusive behavior doesn’t get excused by the literal protagonist of the show. Tbh just like what I said a few days about how the show lazily addresses racism, the crewniverse could VERY easily have the Diamonds be shattered. They just chose not to because Becky got too attached to her abusive OC’s while developing them. Tl;dr: SU stans still have a flawed understanding of what makes a villain character worthy of redemption. Also don’t even bother getting into a roundabout debate with me where you condescendingly act like I’m wrong for wanting the Diamonds shattered. I’m not interested in a debate of that topic. Because they always end the same way. I’d rather spend my time doing something more productive. If you try to sneak and do it anyways I’ll just spam memes at you until you leave.

#think of the you part of the post only applying to people who think the Diamonds being redeemed should be endgame and canon #because they refuse to see that the diamonds are in fact abusive #this ESPECIALLY applies to assholes who thinks that SU fans who want the diamonds shattered are actually morally corrupt people #yes there are SU stans out there who do that #it's a tragedy i know #anti abuse apologism #anti racism #fandom problems

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cupidsbower · 6 years

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Let me tell you people that I found a new way

Supernatural 13x06, “Tombstone,” 13x07, “War of the Worlds,” and 13x08, “The Scorpion and the Frog.”

Something very interesting is happening this season, relating to Dean’s position in the narrative. Over the course of 13 seasons, it’s been proven over and over that Dean’s hunches tend to be right. He thinks someone’s a rotter, and they are a rotter. He thinks something’s hinky and it is hinky. He does sometimes make mistakes, but generally speaking, when Dean makes a moral pronouncement, he is right about the morality, even if events don’t play out the way he anticipates.

At the start of season 13, Dean made the moral pronouncement that he thought Jack was evil. He may still prove right about this of course, as the season is still young (for me, I know you are all far ahead), but so far it’s looking like he was wrong, and that Jack is more like a blank slate trying to figure out who he can be rather than intrinsically good or evil.

Does this matter? Does Dean’s hunch about Jack count in the same way it counted when Dean knew Ruby was rotten, but tried to give her the benefit of the doubt because Sam asked? When it comes to Jack, is this just Dean being a jackass due to grief and it’s not really what he thinks?

The tension arising from Dean’s distrust of Jack has so far been used to complicate Jack’s arc, but a larger thematic question arises. What does it mean for the story if Dean’s moral compass is wonky? And what does it mean if it’s not?

Okay, cards on the table. I think Dean is wrong about Jack. I’m sure Jack will do a bunch of stupid shit, because that’s how growing up works, but so far he doesn’t seem to be intrinsically evil. So why was Dean so insistent about it? Was it because Cas’s death had him so turned around his instincts were awry? But if that’s the case, you’d expect his instincts to be back to normal with Cas back... but the text is hinting that they’re not.

I enjoyed Tombstone. Cas is back, Dean plays cowboy, and Jack gets a hug, screws up, and runs away from home. All the drama!

Tombstone is a title with a lot of meanings. The primary meaning is the headstone on a grave, but in a text where cremation is the Hunter’s way, whose tombstone is it referring to? Is it literally just talking about the location of the ghoul’s lair? Or is it talking about Jack’s use of his powers that goes horribly wrong? Then there’s the movie reference. The film is the fictionalised (and often romanticised) story of the West... when “cowboys were the law”! And as we know, Dean is all about cowboys, especially the ones in the rogues gallery up on their hotel room wall. Later he prompts Cas to act like he’s in the movie, and Cas quotes Val Kilmer to assure Dean he’s his Huckleberry, which just about makes Dean tear up. All a boy wants is a partner who fondly goes along with his cosplaying fantasies... looking good in a cowboy hat a definite bonus. And Dean gets it good here -- he wears the boots, fixes Cas’s hat, and does a slo-mo power walk to the song Space Cowboy:

youtube

Steve Miller Band - Space Cowboy

I told you 'bout living in the U.S. of A Don't you know that I'm a gangster of love Let me tell you people that I found a new way And I'm tired of all this talk about love And the same old story with a new set of words About the good and the bad and the poor And the times keep on changin' So I'm keepin' on top Of every fat cat who walks through my door

I'm a space cowboy Bet you weren't ready for that I'm a space cowboy I'm sure you know where it's at Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah (x)

I mean this is hilariously silly, and Dean is having so much fun, but he’s also completely embarrassing with his whole cowboy nerdgasm and forcing Cas to play along, amirite? This is Jensen Ackles showing off his physical comedy chops like the pro he is. But here’s the thing. The song scratches out the minute they find the law, because the old romantic version of the West does not hold true. In this version of Dodge, the law is not a cowboy, it’s a Native American. What’s more, Dean is not really the Space Cowboy either. Surely, surely, Cas is the space cowboy (but is Cas the gangster of love??? And if so, who’s heart did he steal???).

The frisson of not-quite-right continues throughout the rest of the episode. While the ghoul realises there are Hunters after him and tries to “get out of Dodge” -- the line the lawman Marshall Dillon of the TV show Gunsmoke used to say to interlopers of Dodge City -- it’s Jack who is proved to be the interloper in the end, and it’s the Winchester posse who leaves town. Except for Dean, of course, who ends up Hunting someone wearing the face of one of his cowboy faves.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Thematically, this episode is all about undermining Dean’s moral authority. It does it in several ways, many of them funny, but the intent is quite clear. He even straight up says that he was wrong at the end:

JACK: Good? How is that good? I killed someone. What was his name? The guard? Did he have a family? CASTIEL: Jack, don't do this to yourself. JACK: No, did he? DEAN: Yes, he did. SAM: Jack, look, this life, what we do, it's… it's not easy. And we've all done things we regret. JACK: Just don't. You're afraid of me. CASTIEL: Jack, no. JACK: No, maybe you're right. Maybe I'm just another monster. DEAN: No, you're not. I thought you were. I did. But… Like Sam said, we've all done bad. We all have blood on our hands. So if you're a monster, we're all monsters. JACK: No, you don't… Every time I try and do something good, people get hurt. I thought I was getting better. I'm not… I don't know what I am, but I know I can't make the world a better place, not like this. I can't even do one good thing. And I know that if I stay, I'm gonna hurt you. All of you. And… I can't. You're all I have. SAM: Jack, listen… JACK: I have to go. CASTIEL: No, Jack. JACK: I'm sorry. (x)

Winchester through and through, that boy. Unintended lesson well and truly learned! Oh, the irony.

(My pet theory is that Jack isn’t actually gone, he’s just invisible and lurking around the Bunker. Don’t tell me if I’m wrong, please. I’m going to enjoy thinking about it until canon bursts my bubble.)

Before watching this ep, when I was talking over 13x05 with my viewing buddy, I said, “I wish monsters recognised Hunters more, and especially the Winchesters. It seems dumb after so many years that so few of them do.” And lo, in all three of these eps, people do recognise Hunters and/or the Winchesters. I’m very pleased by this, although as always it isn’t playing out quite the way I hoped. In the case of our ghoul, even though he quickly recognises that Hunters are after him, and makes plans to escape, he fails because he doesn’t take the threat seriously enough. More importantly, it’s not a Hunter(/cowboy) who kills him, it’s the Law(/Native American).

There were a lot of other things to like about this episode, but the other thing I find most notable in terms of meta is something on the meta-textual level. This episode starts upbeat, after five episodes of unrelieved grieving, with Cas back, and Jack finally seeming to be finding his place. That doesn’t even last one episode before the emotional apple-cart is knocked over again. If I were writing this season, this emotional beat in this place in the story arc would mean I’d be aiming for either a happy or ironic climax, rather than a tragic one. I’m leaning towards ironic, and I think Dean’s moral wonkiness will have a part to play in the ironic twist.

Anyway, that was Tombstone. The next two eps put away the myth-arc for a bit, and move on to monster-of-the-week stories full of mirrors for our protagonists. This season they are very much focused on fathers and sons.

War of the Worlds is an interesting title to choose for this episode. It’s obviously referring to H.G. Wells’ book, one of the first stories about aliens invading the Earth and trying to take it from Humanity -- a colonisation narrative in other words. It’s pretty easy to see that Michael in this case is the alien/coloniser.

By the way, I’m now calling alternaEarth “Mordor” because of that fiery eye in the opening credits, and also it’s much easier to type. Interesting, isn’t it, how the Mordor angels managed to screw up the Apocalypse, the implication being that it’s because God, Lucifer, the Winchesters and Castiel were all absent, and so The End wasn’t just a figment of Zachariah’s imagination, but what really happened. And with Lucifer dead in that world, not around to be the antagonist and keep things in check, Michael has basically gone crazy.

Chuck really did a spectacularly bad job as Father to the angels. They only need a bit of spite to energise them and they flower into the most noxious of weeds, smothering everything else around them during their self-absorbed tantrums. What does Michael even want with ParadiseEarth? Does he know, or does he just want it the way a baby wants a toy, and so he thinks it’s his to take? He’s not wearing a Winchester either (not one we know, anyway), so that also brings us right back around to the question of Dean being the Michael Sword. Methinks it’s a really bad time for Dean’s moral compass to be going wonky.

I found Lucifer interesting for the first time in ages in this ep. If I remember correctly, he was always ambivalent about the idea of the Apocalypse, because he liked Earth and having all those Humans to corrupt. But now he also has a son in the world; in other words, a stake in the continued existence of the world. I’m finding that super interesting. How will it change the choices he makes? I’m not expecting a redemption arc or anything like that, but I do think we’re going to see a different set of choices now Lucifer has someone he’s invested in as family. Can even Lucifer learn some humility once he’s the Father rather than the rebelling son?

To go back to the title of the ep, though, my favourite version of War of the Worlds is actually the musical. I see quite a few thematic similarities between some of the tracks and this season of Supernatural. Forever Autumn for instance, reminds me very strongly of Dean at the start of the season. The Spirit of Man I can easily see as a riff on what could happen if Michael actually gets out of Mordor. It does beg the question though, of what the equivalent of the deadly microbes would be. I have this horrible feeling it might be something like “love”, which has a pretty good track record of corrupting angels, but I can’t see many good ways of getting a shot of it inside of Michael. Maybe Rowena sticks some kind of magical bio-weapon in a vessel (Dean) and then they (Dean) says yes to Michael... because TFW does like to re-use strategies, and they never did get to play that one out with Amara in the end.

Why else bring back Ketch and potentially Rowena, reminding us of the whole secret-power-inside-a-body possibility at the same time? I mean, I know resurrection is a theme this season, and I’m always happy to see Rowena back, but UGH. I’d rather NOT end the season with Michael wearing Dean, and Dean wearing a crown of blackberry thorns, if you get my drift.

In other news, Dean’s moral compass seems to be working again this ep, as he spotted that Ketch was sketchy right from the start, and he picked up on Cas being weird on the phone too. Could it be a fake-out that pays off later? If his moral compass is still on the fritz after all, it means Ketch was probably saying some truth in this bit of dialogue:

KETCH: I believe you're familiar with the witch Rowena MacLeod? She was captured by the British Men of Letters some years back. I discovered she'd sewn a powerful charm into her body that could bring her back should she be killed. I struck a deal wherein she did the same for me in return for allowing her to escape. SAM: So after we dumped your body, you- KETCH: Good as new. Only problem is, one the device is used, it needs to be recharged. DEAN: Which is why you're hunting for Rowena. Well, sorry. Lucifer burned her up. She's dead. KETCH: Is she? DEAN: Why'd you come here? You could've run. KETCH: Did it ever occur to you, Dean, that I might actually be one of the good guys? DEAN: No. Not even once. KETCH: You and I were soldiers in opposing armies who were at war. DEAN: Well, the thing about war is, one side wins. KETCH: I suppose you're right. (x)

So which bit is the potential truthiness? Is Ketch a good guy? *quietly gags, please nooooooo* Or is Rowena alive *yis pls*. Or... can you have a war in which one side doesn’t win?!?! Morder, I’m looking at you.

My foreshadowing senses are tingling. Let me just float this idea now and get it out there where I can poke it with a stick... maybe all three of these things will be true. For a certain value of true. And that would definitely mean Dean’s radar is still wonky.

This ep we have another character who recognises the Winchesters/Hunters. The witch who got away from Ketch fears them, but rightly considers them the lesser of two evils as long as she’s the victim. I’m liking this theme a lot, and I wonder where they’re going with it? I kind of hope that maybe we’ll get some more references to Carver Edlund’s books if this plot thread unspools for more than a few episodes. I’ve never felt that the villains really used that resource enough, you know? I kind of want Michael to get his hands on them, or maybe Kevin.

Which brings me to the final thing about this episode’s title -- the Orson Welles radio play of Wr of the Worlds. It’s famous for causing a panic when it aired, as people thought it was real. Or did they??? Wikipedia tells me:

The first two-thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a news bulletin and is often described as having led to outrage and panic by some listeners who had believed the events described in the program were real. However, later critics point out that the supposed panic seems to have been exaggerated by newspapers of the time seeking to discredit radio as a source of information. (x)

Ahhhhh. I did not know that. I’m starting to understand why my story brain is so hung up on the reputation of the Winchesters this season, and why it’s important that other characters have heard of them or of Hunters more generally. Propaganda and misinformation are an important part of any war, and they can play out in unexpected ways. We got a bit of this last season with how woefully wrong the BMoL’s intel was on the Winchesters, and I wanted that to pay off more than it did in the end. But I’m more than happy for it to pay off this season instead, with Michael and his posse. Supernatural’s story-within-the-story could use a good shake-up at this point, and giving us some new insight into the stories people tell about the Winchesters would be a clever way to revisit the Metatron arc without resurrecting him too.

For an ep that focused so much on characters I’m not that fond of (Lucifer, Ketch), I enjoyed it quite a lot for the way it’s opened up the narrative in new directions. It’s actual plot wasn’t that strong, but I was happy to be carried along by the revelations.

The final thing I want to say about this ep is that Dean and I are brain-twins on the Evil Colonel Sanders front -- it’s a perfect name for him.

I like heists if they do something fun, so I found the plot of The Scorpion and the Frog episode enjoyable enough. The way Sam and Dean disarmed the booby-trap made me laugh out loud! Zoooooooom, zwot, thwop-thwop-thwop. Classic.

As this isn’t a myth-arc ep, the most interesting meta stuff arises from the title and theme. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the parable of The Scorpion and the Frog, so I won’t repeat it here, except for the axiom it ends with: “When the frog asks the scorpion why [it stung him], the scorpion replies that it was in its nature to do so” (x).

This title pretty directly evokes the show’s current major theme -- nature vs nurture -- and this season’s variation on it -- who’s your daddy?

As you’d expect at this point in the season, the ep raises a lot of questions about the theme: Do people really have an essential nature, or can they change their spots? Who in the episode is the scorpion and who is the frog? Is the scorpion the demon who can’t help but lie and use people? Is it the father who can’t help but try and save his son, and then turns bitter when he fails? Is it the Hunters who can’t help but hunt, even when they don’t intend to? Is it the victim who takes her shot at ending her suffering when offered the means? I could ask a similar set of questions about who is the frog.

Not to mention:

What qualities make for a good father?

Can somone overcome their (or their father’s) nature?

How do stories about the Winchesters affect they way people interact with them?

Hunters gotta hunt?

Can a frog be a scorpion in disguse? And if so, is that how they’ll sting Michael?

Is Dean’s moral compass wonky or not?

The more I think about all these questions, the less sure I get. Must be getting close to the middle of the season. :)

Barthamus the Crossroads Demon is another character who has heard of the Winchesters, and thinks he knows everything he needs to about them in order to get to the other side of the river on their backs.

Much as Evil Colonel Sanders is Lucifer!lite, Bart is Crowley!lite. He saw how Crowley worked with the Winchesters, and decided to take a leaf out of his book, but doesn’t understand the larger consequences of that choice. So far Crowley is the only antagonist who has ever realised that the Winchesters are always more dangerous than their enemies think -- they have taken down Gods and monsters, and even Death cannot stop them for long. It was almost inevitable that they would hunt Bart, no matter what was at stake (does that make them the scorpion?). Add in Smash, an actual victim, who Dean uses his supernatural bonding skills on, and that outcome went to a 100% certainty. This dilemma is prefigured early in the episode:

DEAN: You know, this could be a trap. I mean he could work for Asmodeus. SAM: Yeah, but what if he's telling the truth? DEAN: You know, after Crowley, I told myself, no more demons. SAM: Dean, we don't even know what this guy's deal is. DEAN: Yeah, we do. He's a freakin' demon. SAM: Yeah, but you said it yourself, we need a miracle. And maybe this is it. DEAN: You know what "miracles" are called from demons? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's not "miracles". SAM: How about this? Let's hear the guy out. DEAN: All right, and after that, we kill him.

They enter the Smile Diner.

Did anyone else hear the name of this diner and think of Hamlet and the whole, “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” speech? It really made me think of Crowley too -- if you go read the speech, you’ll see what I mean: http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_66.html.

BARTHAMUS: The famous Winchesters. DEAN: Some random demon. BARTHAMUS: Barthamus. Bart's fine. Please, sit. I ordered cherry pie. DEAN: Well, Bart, don't know what you've heard about us, but… BARTHAMUS: Everything. I've been following your careers a long time. You're a real pain in the pitchfork. And the halo. Natural disrupters. We have that in common, you and I. DEAN: Mm. Yeah, we're twinsies. (x)

Dean was a much better demon than this, and Dean was basically a shitty demon. Dean’s moral compass seems to be working perfectly here, though: some random demon, indeed.

Except... there’s the way the episode ends.

DEAN: You okay? SAM: Yeah, not really. Not exactly the best day, you know? DEAN: Well, it's not the worst. We did save somebody. That felt good. SAM: Yeah. Yeah, it did. But… [Sighs] back to square one with Jack. DEAN: We'll figure something else out. And if that doesn't work, then we'll move on to next, and then whatever's after that. We just keep working, 'cause it's what we do. SAM: It feels really good to hear you talk like that again. DEAN: I'll drink to that.

Sam and Dean clink their beer bottles and take a drink. (x)

So is Dean right here, too?

“It’s what we do,” Dean says about Hunting, as though he and Sam are only and entirely defined by Hunting, and that they do have an essential nature that can’t be changed, despite Dean’s recent bout of feelings.

If that’s really true, it’s an enormous problem, both for themselves and for Jack. Toxic masculinity is part of what they always do. Abusive fathers, the MoL’s sexism, the Angel breeding program, Mary/Dean making a deal, John/Sam sacrificing themselves...

If a person’s nature can’t ever be changed, all of these patterns are what the Winchesters are made up of and will always remain. That isn’t a very hopeful picture, so I kind of hope Dean’s wrong about he and Sam being nothing but their work.

Can people change? Can they make different choices? Will the Winchesters make the same mistakes all over again at the end of the season -- will they sting the frog and doom themselves? Or will they try out new and better mistakes, and make it safely to the other side of the river along with the frog?

I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I’m hoping for something new, but I gotta say, I’m starting to think that Castiel and Jack are the frogs.

Previously:

I never opened myself this way (13x01 and 13x02)

You say you've only got one life to live (13x03, 13x04, 13x05)

#supernatural #spn meta #meta #season 13 #spoilers #dean winchester #same winchester #theme #nature vs nurture #jack kline #castiel

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joemerl · 6 years

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“A Swiftly Tilting Planet” is Awful and I Hate It

I don’t know if anybody cares about my opinions, but I built up a lot of bile reading this book and I have to get rid of it somehow.

Background

For those who don’t know, this is the third book in Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quintet, aka “A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels that you’ve never heard of before.” The series involves a family that goes on Science Fantasy-type adventures with beings sent from a vaguely-defined, vaguely Christian bureaucracy of magical aliens. I’ll discuss the previous books a bit, but the series is pretty episodic so we don’t really need to recap them.

In this story, the world is about to end because a South American dictator has a nuke. Our protagonist, the psychic teenager Charles Wallace, must work with a time-traveling winged unicorn from space to prevent this catastrophe by entering the minds of people from the past. It is much less interesting than it sounds.

Spoilers to follow.

These One-Dimensional Characters Keep Giving Birth to Themselves Like a Flock of Infuriatingly Dull Phoenixes

The main plot has Charles Wallace travel to ca. 1170, ca. 1693 (Salem Witch Trials), ca. 1865 and ca. 1930s (or whenever Mrs. O’Keefe would have been a kid), plus the then-present day of 1978. Along the way, he chronicles the histories of several families, which include, by my count, about 30 characters who have only half a dozen different names and two personalities between them.

The Maddox-Llawcaes: Technically two families, but they keep intermarrying each other to the point where I’m seriously questioning how inbred their modern descendants must be. This family was founded by a bunch of cliché Native Americans (stoic, wise, and otherwise devoid of personality) who married some woke Welshmen, repeatedly over multiple generations. They’re good.

Gwydyr and his descendants: Distant relatives of the above, but descended from their patriarch’s ~evil~ brother. They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The Mortmains: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The O’Keefes: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women. Also, they seem to hate disabled people.

This is arguably a sex-linked trait; the one female character from an “evil” family seems relatively alright, but when she marries a Maddox-Llawcae she still passes evil on to their descendants. This turns out to be the driving crux of this story: Charles Wallace learns that the dictator is descended from that couple and was corrupted by his ancestress’ ~evil~ genes. To avert the apocalypse, Charles Wallace has to change history so that the Maddox-Llawcae man marries a Maddox-Llawcae woman instead.

It’s pretty much impossible to interpret this as being about upbringing; it’s about blood. "Gwydyr’s line is tainted,” Charles Wallace says near the end. “There is nothing left but pride and greed for power and revenge.” At another point, a Maddox-Llawcae immediately writes off his unborn half-brother as evil because he has a Mortmain father. And he’s right---Unnamed Mortmain Sibling grows up to be a criminal and dies in jail. Hopefully without managing to pass on his dirty, inferior genes first, amirite?

It doesn’t help that, even separated by centuries, relatives are often described as looking alike and/or having variations of the same names. Of those 30ish characters in these families we have three Mad(d)o(c)(k)/Madogs, two Gwydyrs, five Rich/Ritchie/Richards, three Bran(don)s, two Matt(hew)s, two Duthbert Mortmains (yeah, because that’s a name you want to keep in circulation for 300 years), and most egregiously of all, four of the main female characters are Zyll, Zylle, Zillah and Zillie. (Technically there are three Zillahs, if you count middle names.)

Obviously, genetic determinism is a questionable moral. It’s also really annoying, because each time period has the same basic characters just going through a variant of the same plot. There is hardly any character development across 800 years of history, and no permanent change from good to bad or vice versa.

In a way, this even ruins the previous books---Calvin O’Keefe became a good guy despite his dysfunctional family, but now I get the feeling that this isn’t supposed to be a testament to his strength as a person, it was just his mom’s Good Maddox Genes breaking through the Evil O’Keefe Heritage. But hey, the focus on Mom O’Keefe was nice in this book, since she’s practically the only one who has an actual character arc.

Though, as you’ll see below, she was not actually needed for this story at all.

This Universe Has No God, Just a Tyrannical Plot Outline

Charles Wallace is the protagonist of this story, but probably gets mentioned on fewer than half of its pages. Mostly, he’s just psychically possessing people, during which time he does not control them so much as see their lives and...vaguely influence them, sometimes. What I’m saying is, he doesn’t really do much in this story. His grand moment, in the penultimate chapter, is to vaguely influence Matthew Maddox #1 to vaguely influence Rich Llawcae #3 to not to get stabbed by Gwydyr #2. This saves the world, but seems somewhat anticlimactic after 287 pages of build-up.

What’s worse: he actually tried to make this story shorter, and save me so much suffering. Unfortunately, “God” wouldn’t let him. At least, for a certain sense of the word.

The Time Quintet is sort of like Chronicles of Narnia in that it’s a Christian story, but you have to dig a little beneath the surface to realize that. L’Engle’s beliefs were also more liberal than Lewis’, and in this book they seem almost pantheistic: Charles Wallace’s help seems to come less from a personal deity and more from a sort of implied sentience of the universe itself. This usually comes in the form of “the wind,” which blows him and the unicorn to different time periods at its own whim.

Charles Wallace’s arc is that he is apparently a control freak, and needs to trust God/the universe to lead him, or something. He figures out early on that the key to everything is in 1865, but the unicorn says that no, we have to let the wind blow us where it wants. Twice he tries to fast-track things, and each time he and the unicorn almost die as a result; thus he learns that no, he should not be relying on his own intelligence or logic, he should just ~go with the flow~ and assume that things will work out.

So basically, Charles Wallace has been tasked by Vague God to prevent the apocalypse, but he’s not allowed to do anything to actually try to prevent it---he’s basically just pushed into random corners and told to stay quiet, with the hope that his presence will change history through osmosis. I find myself comparing this to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While I have some criticisms of this subplot, in that book Harry is presented with a choice: do what he thinks will save the world (looking into the Deathly Hallows), or what the Omniscient God Stand-In says will work (finding Voldemort’s Horcruxes). That works well enough, but here, Charles Wallace is given the choice between his own ideas and no actual instructions. He’s told to save the world, and then criticized for trying.

There’s a part where the Echthroi (demons who want the nuclear apocalypse to happen) try to trick Charles Wallace by preying on his ego. This involves telling him he was selected to save the world because he’s intelligent and psychic and is a generally moral person, all of which is true. He rejects this, as he is supposed to, and at the end of the book notes that the mission did not succeed “because I was intelligent, or brave, or in control,” but because he let the wind guide him. Which just leads me to wonder why he was the one chosen to save humanity, when Vague God could have sent anyone else, or just cut out the middle-man and had a unicorn tell Bran Maddox #3 whom he was supposed to marry.

But what really makes this intolerable? Charles Wallace was right. The key to everything is in 1865, he eventually gets blown there anyway, and it’s the only place where he concretely needed to do anything. So why the hell did we need 40 awful pages set during the Salem Witch Trials?! To teach us that the Salem Witch Trials were bad? Even the whole part in ca. 1930s was pointless---the only plot-relevant thing that we got there were hints about 1865′s importance, which Charles Wallace had already figured out but was scolded for suggesting. Other than that, these sections were just used to hammer in the idea that Maddox-Llawcaes are always good and the other families are always evil.

So, my rewrite: Charles Wallace goes to 1170 and sees Madoc and Gwydyr. Then he either a.) figures out the importance of 1865 with his family’s help, as he does in the book, or b.) goes to the 1930s and figures things out from the clues there, while also learning the fairly-interesting-but-technically-irrelevant backstory about Mrs. O’Keefe. Either way, he decides to go to 1865, thus justifying his role as protagonist, and the fact that he is actively trying to save the world is not treated as a moral failing.

Comparisons to the Previous Books, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love at Bombs

This is my third Madeline L’Engle book, and really, these problems were present in the first two, even if they were less pronounced. Both ended with the protagonist (Charles Wallace’s older sister Meg, who arguably is more important than him in this book, too) saving the day with the Power of Love---meaning that she didn’t so much do anything as feel a certain way. Here, Charles Wallace does even less, just watching other people fall in love while his own character arc is in opposition to the actual plot.

L’Engle’s strength does not seem to be coherent stories or complex characterization so much as weird, cool ideas---for example, a time-traveling space unicorn. But compared to previous books, this one is pretty down-to-earth; after hitching a ride on said unicorn, Charles Wallace mostly just watches people live fairly typical lives. While A Wrinkle in Time’s villain, a demonic alien brain, could theoretically wither at the approach of a sibling’s love, it’s harder to imagine a nuclear war being averted by nothing more than some shoehorned character development.

For the record, I bought the fourth Time Quintet book at the same time as this one. I really, really hope that it’s better, but it will probably be a while before I get to it.

Other Nitpicks

The whole clue leading to 1865 involves a book written by Matthew Maddox #1, who’s from that time. It’s about time-traveling unicorns and family feuds and the like, the basic idea being that he witnesses Charles Wallace and all the supernatural happenings and writes it down as a novel. Fine, okay, but people who talk about this novel keep emphasizing how revolutionary and amazing it was, which kind of feels like L’Engle just patting herself on the back for this awful, awful story.

At the end of the book, the time-traveling unicorn erases the memories of Charles Wallace and his sister Meg, for...some reason? I honestly don’t know why he did this; the pair knew about supernatural creatures even before this book, and they can still half-remember what happened anyway, so this seems pretty pointless.

This line, from the 1865 arc: “When the sons of men fight against each other in hardness of heart, why should God not withdraw? Slavery is evil, God knows, but war is evil, too, evil, evil.” Not a bad point, but juxtaposed to the characters’ passivity I can’t help but snark: “Yeah, why can’t people just love at each other and magically fix everything, right?”

I’m Tough But Fair: Some Good Points

There are time-traveling winged unicorns from space. They eat moonlight, drink starlight, and hatch from eggs, as we see on a brief trip to their home planet. So yeah, L’Engle is pretty good at Science Fantasy weirdness.

Honestly, the other filler chapters were pretty good too, if only because they distract from the annoying main story. Even the purple prose about “the harmonies of the universe” are alright sometimes.

Like I said, Mrs. O’Keefe could have been cut, but her arc, going from innocent little girl to crotchety old lady to redeemed old lady, was a good one. And her brother being named “Chuck,” like Charles Wallace, actually felt like it meant something instead of being yet another case of Generation Xerox.

Along those lines, I like that the Murrays didn’t turn out to be some distant cousins of the Maddox-Llawcaes. That would have been annoying.

The 1865 arc was easily the best in the book. Even with the blood-based moral alignments, the characters still had actual arcs about overcoming disabilities, PTSD...like, expand this and cut out the stupid Salem Witch Trial arc, which was so, so bad. Also, was I just imagining it, or was Matthew #1 in love with Zillah #1? ‘Cause him arranging for her to marry Bran #3 is even more touching if he did.

Conclusion

Um...the book sucked.

I wrote this over three days, and it wound up being more than 2,200 words. Wow.

#A Swiftly Tilting Planet #Time Quintet #Madeline L'Engle #Charles Wallace Murry #Book review #Religion #Religion in pop culture #Christianity #Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows #Review

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awed-frog · 6 years

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tl;dr: nope

I got a couple of anon asks about this, and I’m also tagging @twist-shout-and-shells because they asked me to, but I have to say - I don’t know anything about comics, I don’t know Marvel at all, so this review is just a meaningless rant. Like, I know so little about this universe that the first superhero movie I ever saw in my life was Thor, and the only reason they got me was because my mythology-loving ass assumed this would be about the actual god, you know?, so that was a very confusing two hours. Anyway - after this, I’m done with them. The ridiculous hype campaign they created around Infinity War actually activated my crow brain, which means I rushed to the theater because I was sort of expecting this would be a shocking masterpiece and any spoiler would ruin it for me, and - yeah. Never doing that again. Because, whatever - they do manage to come up with some good writing from time to time, and Black Panther’s success had made me hope they’d finally recognize that a solid, coherent and meaningful story is really the first thing you need, but apparently not?

Ugh.

Anyway, here are main reasons why I didn’t like Infinity War.

1) No, we don’t need a new plague

Problem number one with this movie is that it fails to take into account that our IQ as a people has dropped about twenty points over the last thirty years (and I’m not even joking) and that means even a guy nicknamed ‘Mad Titan’ is actually given the benefit of the doubt (I don’t remember anyone thinking Hela might have had a point, but then again, women are known to be emotionally compromised at all times, right, so all that rage was probably PMS and crazy bitches, amirite?, can’t live with them, can’t live without them). And here, predictably, is the result:

I even checked Breitbart so you wouldn’t have to and while they seem confused as to whether they should support this movie or not (don’t watch because Captain America is played by ‘Comrade Communism’, do watch because Chris Pratt is a Good Christian Man), it’s still clear to everybody over there that Thanos, “an environmentalist wacko obsessed with salvaging the natural resources of the universe” is “espousing liberal jibberish”.

So, I’m going to keep it short and mostly sourceless because I saw a lot of people discussing this, but just to be clear: yeah, it is worrying that human population has basically tripled in thirty years, but the correlation ‘more people = more damage & fewer resources’ isn’t as clear-cut as some like to think. Also, research shows that women being recognized as human beings - that’s the actual way to solve this problem (see also x, x), which means that if Thanos had meant business, he could have used those frwaking stones to build schools and family planning centres.

2) Your plan against evil can’t be just saying no

This is probably what bugs me the most both in fiction and IRL: saying ‘Trump is a moron’, ‘capitalism is bad’ or ‘genocide is wrong’ is not a political program. It’s a moral stance, and kudos to you, but if you want to make the world a better place, you need a lot more than that. But, nope - IW fell into this trap with such relish I can actually believe no one saw this as a problem - at all. When Thanos pointed out, rather smugly, that decimating Gamora’s planet had led to a new era of happiness and prosperity, she didn’t react in any way. We never saw Tony or Shuri mentioning the outlandish, extravagant idea that better and greener technology could actually save us all. We never saw anyone point out that when the richest 1% own half the world’s wealth, wiping out half of a Nairobi slum isn’t likely to do much for the environment. I guess it wasn’t relevant to the plot?

3) Turning your audience against the good guys = dick move

That said, our planet is objectively in bad shape, and writers and artists who are (or like to think of themselves as) engagés are more than welcome to discuss this - for all her faults, JK Rowling did that to perfection in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, focusing on the importance of conservation and taking a clear stance against animal trafficking. Other movies, of course, went a lot farther than that: my movie rec of the day is Okja, a masterful and soulwrenching look at how capitalism manages food production. But IW, on top of everything else, manages to be an anti-green movement movie? As if that was needed in any way? Apparently comic!Thanos’ goal was to impress Lady Death or something, and maybe they should have gone with that, because to me, movie!Thanos’ plan sounds like an ill-conceived and unfortunate parody of the green movement. In fact, eminent biologist E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth explores this exact possibility - which is not about killing off 50% of the population, thank you very much, but about improving agriculture and urban structures so we can leave 50% of the world to the rest of the ecosystem. And maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit weird the book came out at about the same time when IW’s script was being written? I try not to be a paranoid nutcase, but come on. Because what the movie does is that it turns Thanos into a sort of green Hitler whose only focus is the environment (“But he was a vegetarian!”), cue the creepy final shot of him going all ‘Schwarzy in the forest’ surrounded by clean-water creeks and happy animals while we are left counting our dead. The metaphor couldn’t be more obvious, and to be honest it is most unwelcome. Time and place, guys? I really haven’t seen something so revolting since I got to the end of the Da Vinci Code and realized atheists were the true monsters all along.

4) Being a hero doesn’t mean saving your friends

So this is starting to become a trend, and seriously, enough. If you’re a hero, then you need to think of something greater than yourself, and this is why your life will suck and suck and suck until your untimely death. Deal with it? And I can understand Loki giving up the Tesseract for his brother, because he’s always been more of an anti-hero than a hero, and his morals are shot to hell in any case, and I’ll forgive Dr Strange because he clearly saw something we didn’t, but what the hell was Steve thinking? Seriously, I keep seeing posts about how Pure and Noble Steve is, and guys, did we even see the same movie? Bringing Vision to Wakanda meant endangering an entire nation, and thousands of people there paid for that choice with their lives. It’s because Steve insisted in not seeing the big picture - or accepting Vision’s own wishes - that Thanos even succeeded in the first place. If they’d destroyed the stone, Thanos would never have gotten his hands on it, and Wakanda would not have been attacked by a horde of alien demons. Sacrificing hundreds or thousands of nameless (black, African) warriors to keep one (white) man safe is not heroism - it’s cowardice. It’s assuming your own feelings and your friends’ lives count more than the lives of strangers, and this is the exact opposite of how a hero should think. Not that I’m surprised, since Steve already condoned the destruction of half of Bucharest to save Bucky, but whatever. Compare and contrast with Tony, by the way, who first tried to destroy the Time stone, then chose to sacrifice himself to save someone he didn’t even like? Yeah, that’s more like it. #TeamStark

5) Every single woman is defined by her relationship to a man

With the caveat that no emotion, connection or motivation is throroughly explored in IW because it’s an action-packed movie during which people never speak an honest word to each other (relying instead on posturing, movie quotes and sarcastic remarks), here is basically what happens: men have things, and women have men. Tony’s journey is mostly about saving Peter and also sacrificing himself for the world. Steve is all about his friends and various heroics. Dr Strange is a sort of ascetic monk playing the long game. Thanos wants to save the universe or something. And Vision is on a quest towards humanity? Maybe? But the women - Gamora is important because she’s Thanos’ daughter. Scarlet Witch is important because she loves Vision. Natasha (I think she’s in the movie? I don’t actually remember if we hear her speak) is on Cap’s side because Cap. Pepper only appears to remind us of what Tony has to lose. Exceptions to this rule include Shuri, whom IW didn’t quite manage to destroy; Loki, who was always female- and queer-coded, so I’m not surprised he ends up dying for the handsome and suitably Aryan hero; and arguably Starlord, who mostly fights for Gamora (what is a virtue in a woman, however, is a weakness in a man, because Starlord ends up fucking up the plan because of his love for her). And I know they probably tried to compensate for the complete lack of women in the movie by highlighting how powerful Scarlet Witch is and focusing so much on Gamora, but I’m an annoying person, so that didn’t work for me. Because, again, Scarlet Witch is a 2D character plucked directly from a Victorian dictionary’s definition of ‘woman’ (while the menfolk around her worry about the possible demise of the Entire Earth, there she is, channelling all her energy in being a good and loyal companion to her robot husband) and Gamora has no more control over her life in this movie than she had as a child? Her main narrative purpose in IW is to make us feel bad for her boyfriend and father, who’re both driven to kill her (for very different reasons) and suffer for her death (and don’t get me started on Thanos suddenly loving someone and what a stroke of luck, the one person in the universe he gives a damn about just happens to be standing next to him on top of a cliff when he needs to kill her). Seriously, why is it that female characters’ concerns still begin and end with romantic love? This trope that romance is the most important thing for every single woman needed to die, like, yesterday.

6) None of that actually means anything

Look, I’m a sucker of time-travel of any description, but I also think time-travel must be done honestly or not at all. Movies like Back to the Future or Arrival both use time bending to great effect, because the stakes are real and painful and there are all sort of complex decisions facing our heroes. But IW doesn’t care about any of that. The existence of the Time stone is not about ethical dilemmas or even turning up the drama to eleven - the one purpose of that thing is to make us hope that our personal fave is not dead after all, so we’ll keep watching this stupid franchise until the end of times. That finale could have been innovative and heartwrenching, and instead we already know it wasn’t. Samuel L. Jackson is apparently confirmed in Captain Marvel, which will be released next year, and we also know they’re working on Spider-Man 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Black Panther 2 and Doctor Strange 2. Capitalism has very nearly killed the possibility of creating a well-written and gutting story, because the rule is, If it makes money, it goes the fuck on. Hence TV shows which no longer make any kind of sense but we all keep watching out of nostalgia, affection for the characters or dissatisfaction with our own lives, and also franchises which stretch the plot to new and boring limits (for instance, it beggars belief that Tony and Steve didn’t even meet in IW, and their fight never came up at all: I guess we’ll have to wait for IW 2, or Avengers 37: The One with The Talk). And here, again, studios are so greedy that they willingly disregard the fact audiences will reward ‘complete’ stories: for instance, Logan was critically acclaimed and made tons of money, but the risk of ‘permanently’ killing off a beloved character is still considered too high. And playing it safe actually works: IW costed $320 million, which is about 5% of the studio’s budget, and that investment has already been repaid in full (the movie made double that in the first two weeks).

(Meanwhile, 21st Century Fox gained more than one billion dollars from Trump’s TAX REFORM THAT WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN - probably a disappointing amount of money for owner Richard Murdoch, who has a net worth of 15 billion and is known to use some of that hard-earned cash to support laudable & important causes such as the privatization of public education, but hey, we all need to make do and move on, right? Right.)

So this is mostly it. To be fair, IW was mildly entertaining, and I thought they sort of did a good job in juggling twenty leads - we got no character development at all and no meaningful dialogue, but we saw everybody at least once and their lines were funny? Some moments were genuinely good despite a couple of bizarre plot points (I’m still unclear on why Strange didn’t create a circle of fire around Thanos’ arm, and very tired of the overused ‘Yeah, let’s save the most powerful weapons for last’ trope), so I wouldn’t say this was the worst movie ever made, but as I said, I’m done. I’ve given more than enough money to this franchise, so when IW 2 comes out, I think I’ll be a boring adult and watch it on TV as I’m doing my ironing or something. Good times.

#infinity war #iw #iw review #infinity war review #marvel universe #there you go #i think everyone has seen it by now?#here is my take on it #sorry to be annoying

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