#yes oscar is the entire reason this exists you can thank him for that

[michelle-jacksons-art-blog]

K but what if siblings

#had a revelation last night #looked around for their birthdates and found Marc's but not Miguel's so I searched for his first appearance ever and went w that #and yes yes I know Miguel's supposed to be from like the future or whatever but isn't this much more fun #so anyway the important thing here is baby Miguel #i also don't care that they have completely different heritages I'm just here to propose that if they were brothers that would be very cute #also PLEASE read the little note at the top right as it says who made the og poses I referenced for this #their art is very cute so please check it out thank you #my art #fan art #across the spiderverse #moon knight #miguel o'hara #marc spector #steven grant #jake lockley #oscar isaac #yes oscar is the entire reason this exists you can thank him for that #marvel #atsv #atsv fanart #moon knight fanart #across the spiderverse fanart #miguel o'hara fanart #marc spector fanart #steven grant fanart #jake lockley fanart

[hollywoodsargeant]

🖊🧠🍰~

🖊 Post a snippet from a current WIP.

AH okay. well of course i will have to pick boyish since i have so many unposted words of that... and it is definitely my main wip of the moment so here is some of oscar taking care of a very drunk logan in high school :) still one of my fav scenes i've written for this

It takes some coaxing, but he gets Logan upright on the edge of the bed drinking his water. In the meantime, Oscar crouches down on the floor to get his shoes off, feeling a bit like a loser doing it, but he— Logan would do the same, for him. They care about each other. They care for each other. He sets the shoes out of the way and stands up, finds Logan laying down again, the empty glass set back on his nightstand. 

“Thank you, baby,” he mumbles, words wet and blended together. He presses at Oscar’s calf with a socked foot. “Too good for this world.”

Oscar cracks a smile, shaking his head. “Can you get undressed yourself?” he asks, instead of acknowledging anything he just said. “I’ll get you more water.”

“Not thirsty,” Logan insists. 

Oscar doesn’t listen to that, just gets him more. When he comes back, Logan is shirtless and fighting with his own belt, apparently not dexterous enough to get the thing undone. The second he sees Oscar, though, he kind of just flops back against the bed, arms limp, giving him this look, a bit helpless. It makes Oscar feel entirely too fond. 

And it’s entirely too intimate, when he puts the glass of water down and undoes Logan’s belt for him, when he tugs his jeans down his legs. Oscar fishes Logan’s phone out of the pocket and puts it on the nightstand, plugs it in. He tells Logan to sit up and drink again before going back to the bathroom for some painkillers, just to leave next to the bed, so they’ll be there in the morning. He shuts the door behind, bathroom light left on on purpose. 

Logan has his head on the pillow and is staring at him, still on top of the covers, one hand reaching blindly for Oscar’s hip. “Thank you,” he says again. It half-muffles itself into the pillow. 

Oscar smiles, reaching down to ruffle Logan’s hair before he can stop himself. “No problem, mate,” he says, grinning when Logan bats him away. “Need anything else?”

He watches Logan consider it, biting his lip and avoiding eye contact. The hand he has brushing against Oscar’s side falls, and he looks up again, eyes a bit pleading. “Stay?”

Oscar breathes in slow, deep, and not careful enough. “Yeah,” he says without thinking, already toeing off his shoes. “I’ll get the light.”

🧠 What’s an idea you have that you can’t quite call a WIP yet?

well. maybe this is technically actually a wip but this morning in the midst of my obligatory daydreaming boyish scenes interlude (a real thing) i decided i need to write a lol college au with established liam/logan so that's my idea. it's only technically a wip bc a doc exists (mostly to write down one paragraph before i forgot the wording of it) but there's only like 300 words on it So. yes. :)

🍰 Name one of your fave comfort fics (doesn’t have to be your all time fave)

comfort fic... well. to me that is just a fic i read a lot bc it makes me happy so my comfort fic is going to be Porn and it's six weeks by dropdeaddeadass. will not be elaborating. last time i read this fic was uh this morning. thank you

and special mention to and all of my wildest dreams (they just end up with you and me) by choripan (Carlos/Lando) for making me laugh out loud more times than i can count. like when a piece of writing makes me laugh Out Loud multiple times? immediate banger. though this fic also made me cry for the dumbest reason ever aka Logan is a background character and the line "Logan smiled so big his eyes disappeared" exists and i cried for 15 minutes so thanks for that too ig

#ask #ask game #i am going to lose my mind #that entire logan getting drunk ordeal is 7k words #including the morning after scene #WHICH IS ALSO VERY LOVELY! #they sleep in logan's fucking twin bed together. it goes as expected #and no! still not dating! spoilers they don't get together until after high school! #not dating but oscar is doing That #and logan calls him baby have we covered that yet #Yeah #shoutout to that #boyish.miamis

[agentnico]

The Suicide Squad (2021) Review

This may be the better of the two, but the first Suicide Squad film will always hold the crown for managing to win an Oscar... somehow.

Plot: The government sends the most dangerous supervillains in the world -- Bloodsport, Peacemaker, King Shark, Harley Quinn and others -- to the remote, enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese. Armed with high-tech weapons, they trek through the dangerous jungle on a search-and-destroy mission, with only Col. Rick Flag on the ground to make them behave.

“So that’s it, huh? We’re some kind of suicide squad?” says Will Smith in the original first film, with the line in itself being a poor attempt at a fourth wall break, yet, that movie never reached that promise of being a true Suicide Squad film. Because hardly anyone died, and as a whole David Ayer’s film was a generic mess, regardless of studio interference or not. In comes James Gunn from Marvel, who seems to have cracked the code for how to bring this comic book series to live action in proper gratuitous form, with even the ‘The’ in the title symbolizing that this is the one!

I remember going to see the first Guardians of the Galaxy film at the cinema, and back then I was still only just getting acquainted with watching western media, and that included superhero films. Heck my first ever Marvel movie was Thor: The Dark World! I know, what a banger to start with.......NAAAWT!! Anyway, I went to see Guardians and it was one of the first superhero films I came out of feeling like I truly witnessed something special. It had action, comedy and a good heart to it, and wouldn’t you know, my good old pal James Gunn was behind that flick. I don’t know why I called him my good old pal, I don’t even know the fella. Except in my dreams, but we don’t talk about that. So, flashforward to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which I absolutely hated, and for that movie I’m pretty sure Marvel gave Mr Gunn mostly full reigns of creative freedom, as long as he kept it family friendly, and the result was a mess. Hence naturally now I was really sceptical when James Gunn ended up at Warner Bros. following the controversial moment when cancel culture decided to aim it’s slimy fingers at him, as he was given directing and writing duties for this new The Suicide Squad film, and also it was heavily insinuated that Warner Bros. basically told him he could do with the movie whatever the f*** he wanted, excuse my French. And we remember how it panned out last time when James Gunn was given a lot of creative freedom. 

Flashforward to present day; here I am wondering and scratching my head thinking what in the heavens has happened, as by golly I am happy to report that The Suicide Squad is a total winner and a blast with a capital B - Blast! Gosh goodness golly goblin, this movie is so much fun from beginning to end. Right from the opening sequence you know that this film isn’t holding back any punches. It’s going at a 447.19 km/h speed of a Koenigsegg Agera RS crashing through any barriers like it’s nothing. Speaking of the opening sequence, it establishes why the movie is called what it’s called from the get-go. You straight away are proven how not a single character is safe, minus the obvious one that we know who it is, as there ain’t no way Warner Bros. would have allowed James Gunn to kill off that one character. But besides that person, everyone else feels like they could die at any given moment. That’s really a big charm of it, as it is frustrating how in many superhero films, let alone any blockbuster action flicks, so many characters always feel so safe and unstoppable, no matter how many times they get shot or how many buildings crash down upon them. And yes, this movie features a certain CGI character that constantly gets that treatment and survives, although it’s very self aware in that regard and is purposefully humoristic. But overall the entire set of characters feel easily disposable, and so so many of them die in such gruesome fashion, so indeed don’t get attached, as they don’t. 

Speaking of which, this movie is hardcore gory! You see limbs and intestines flying round left and right, a guy gets ripped in half by a humanoid shark, another’s face gets teared off by a shotgun bullet and so on forth in all kinds of gruesome fashion. Visually this is one for the big screen, as here’s the thing: you’re either a mummy’s boy or you grow some cojones and go see a man’s heart get stabbed with a piece of debris glass in 4K high rate definition! Your choice! Oh, and it’s not just the violence, also the cinematography and the practical set pieces all look incredible. This is easily James Gunn’s best looking movie. The entire think LOOKS incredible!

We also have to talk about the cast, as they are all great! There literally isn’t a single weakling among them. Each one, no matter how big or small their role is, brings something to the table. I can’t talk about all of them, as we’d be here all day, so I’m simply going to mention a few of the stand-outs. Idris Elba comes in to replace Will Smith as a character called Bloodsport, who is in some ways a different character but evidently is a replacement of Smith’s. But that’s no bad thing, as with any ensemble movie you still need a main character to latch onto and have an emotional hook towards, and he is that character. In fact, I’d say he’s arguably better than Will Smith in the last movie, or at least he seems to be having more fun here. He works as a solid leading man, however what works even more is his banterous competitive genital-size-measuring back and forth with John Cena’s Peacemaker, who by the way is awesome as that character. He is not a good character, in fact he is as bad as a bad guy can get, especially cause he’s someone who believes that what he is doing is right, making him much more of a dangerous wild card. This is easily John Cena’s best role, with him adding to the comedy one-liners, but also delivering such an interesting character who I’m looking forward to seeing more of in his standalone spin-off show confirmed for next year. Oh, and he wears a toilet helmet on his head which he defines as “a beacon of freedom” which says it all. We also have returning characters from the last film Joel Kinnaman and Viola Davis as Rick Flag and Amanda Waller respectively, and both are given much more room to stretch their talents and spread their beautiful acting wings like the Hollywood angels that they are. Kinnaman’s Rick Flag is the moral compass of the group, as even though Elba is our main guy, he’s nonetheless a villain still, whilst Flag is a genuinely good guy and what is defined as a true American hero, to which Kinnaman fits the part well. And Viola Davis as Amanda Waller is on an absolutely different level. You can tell she’s an Academy Award winner through and through, as she plays such a serious character in an otherwise goofy movie, and so her presence is felt and it is felt BAD! She’s such a despicable yet intimidating personality and she gravitates all of the screen presence to herself. Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn, and she gets even more chance to develop this character that she’s played in multiple DCEU films now, and as per usual the Harley Quinn shtick works well for her, though I do kind of wish she didn’t always get all the attention. Look, I think she’s a fun character and Robbie plays her well, however she’s constantly used to overshadow others in these films which I don’t think is too fair, and its evident as ever in this film too. Anyway, the remainder of the cast including Jay Courtney as Captain Boomerang, David Dastmalchian as Polka-Dot Man, Michael Rooker as Savant, Nathan Fillion as TDK, Daniela Melchior as Ratcatcher 2 (who gave me strong A Plague Tale: Innocence vibes) and many more all play villains, but villains that don’t have particularly great superpowers. This is where the tragedy of Task Force X as a team plays a part, as many of these villains aren’t even good at being villains. They are useless, and the movie is really self aware of this and so treats all characters as they should be. Dare I also not forget to mention the CGI characters in this film, with both Weasel and King Shark being absolute scene stealers! 

The Suicide Squad is the type of wham-bam-thank-you-mam batshit crazy entertainment which exists for the pure reasons of fun. It doesn’t set out to be the best superhero film ever, nor does it need to be. It’s an exhilarating, shocking, funny and amusing ride from beginning to end, with the energy never stopping, and is easily the best time I’ve had with a comic-book film in a long while, and I’m even talking about before COVID! Do yourself a favour and watch this one as soon as you can, as I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - The Suicide Squad is a BLAST!!

Overall score: 9/10

#the suicide squad #warner bros #superhero #supervillain #the suicide squad review #dc comics #james gunn #movie #film #2021 in film #2021 films #2021 #movie reviews #film reviews #cinema #idris elba #margot robbie #john cena #david dastmalchian #joel kinnaman #jai courtney #nathan fillion #michael rooker #taika waititi #sylvester stallone #viola davis #flula borg #pete davidson #daniela melchior #peter capaldi

[razorblade180]

Interdimensional Moms pt4

Part 3 here! <-

The tales had be interesting. The tales had even been emotionally gripping, yet all of them so far didn’t seem to register at the moment as Ruby’s teammates looked at her with the same excitement she used to give her own mother during story time. Ruby couldn’t help but give a little smile.

Ruby:I take it you’re ready for my turn? You do know it’s not exactly a sunshine and rainbows story, right?

Weiss:We figured as much, but....

Yang:You’re so different! From the moment you showed up I could just feel it in my gut. You have this...presence about you. Not to mention intsene confidence.

Blake:Yang is right. You said you beat your Salem when your seventeen. That’s...scary if I’m being honest. Such a drastic departure from any of our worlds.

Ruby:*red* Hehehe ummm I guess I’m just awesome? Really I don’t think it’s the most outstanding feat. At least by my worlds standards I suppose. I mean sure, I’m consider cream of the crop there too but there’s talented people and challenges all over that would put me through my paces still. I’m just...me.

Weiss:Sigh...honestly, I suppose that means our own skills must pale in comparison to our counterparts.

Ruby:Mmmm I wouldn’t say that for sure. My Yang would kill me if she heard this but there’s something about the one right here that has spark I dig.

Yang:Really?

Ruby:Uh huh. Can’t put my finger on it but I think you take her if you want it bad enough. As for Weiss....couldn’t tell ya. Haha, I know better than anybody to not underestimate the power of mother, and you pumped twins out.

Weiss:Not sure if those are pity points or real ones but thanks either way.

Blake:You don’t even have to tell me I’d lose. Just gave an entire story about me an my condition.

Ruby:Don’t feel too bad about it. I can’t imagine much reason for you two to fight for any reason. You’re both too reasonable to not reason with yourself.

Blake:Aw I’m touched.

Yang and Weiss:We aren’t....

Ruby:Hahaha I’m just saying! So, I guess I take things from the top like you all? From what I learned from all of you our Beacon experiences really are more or less the same, not counting certain interactions between a bookworm faunus and an adorkable blonde knight. Enrolled early, blew up the entrance, Weiss was rude, Yang ditched me, all the same beats.

Yang:There’s no super badass change like you beating Cinder the night of dance and making our entire lives easier?

Ruby:Ha! I wish I was that legit. No, I was very much the young girl tripping in heels that night. Vytal festival came around and was attacked, then Beacon fell. Pyrrha was lost and so was Penny. Difference being that was my last time seeing her, unlike Weiss’s story apparently.

Weiss:Yeah that...that’s a little bit of shock to be frank. Sorry.

Ruby:No worries. Not like you did anything and it was decades ago for me now. After that day is when I started to get a bit more serious I think. I had always taken being a huntress seriously and never slacked of in trying to live my dream. However, my perspective may have honed in on just how do or die life his when you’re the one choosing to walk into unknown danger. Team RNJR’s first and only mission, save the world!

Yang:Sub mission: Flirt with Jaune Arc.

Ruby:*blushing* We do not choose who we fall in love with it. But yes, that may have been a personal pseudo mission for me. He’s my first friend at Beacon for crying out loud and I you know.....thought he was cute then too.

WBY:Yeah that checks out.

Ruby:What does that mean!?

Weiss:Ruby, even my Ruby admits to finding Jaune attractive and having a crush on him back in the day.

Blake:Same.

Yang:I already went into enough detail on how my little sister feels about Jaune. Your just the reality where you pounced on the opportunity and never let go. Struck when the iron was hot and none of us were around; sly fox.

Ruby:Gee you make it sound underhanded. It isn’t like I intended to actively pursue him. Everyone was really sad and stressed traveling to Anima. There was a tension in the air. One that really strained us. I did my best to keep focus, but a leader is only as put together as team. Ren and Nora confided one another as usual and I tried being there for Jaune because seeing him emotionally shut down was rough; so I did my best to be there for him. Then...he ended up being there for me and I was the one who needed comfort. All the airing out and late nights just...led to....*red*

Blake: “Breaking the tension?”

Ruby:I guess that’s one way of putting it. We were lonely. I hid my feelings best I could under the veil of comfort in the moment. Not that needed to. He made it pretty clear that he wanted me in the same way I wanted him. I just the two of us were too scared to ask for promises we weren’t sure we could keep so we loved in the moments we could, so to speak.

Weiss:If it wasn’t under dire situations, all that sounds oddly romantic.

Ruby:Right!? Looking back at it makes the entire thing seem romantic but I definitely wouldn’t wish a similar experience on anybody! I guess it’s what I wished for when I fantasized huntress life huh? Things obviously got better along the way. Our relationship got a bit more serious right before we got to Haven. Then Tyrian and other crazy stuff happened that threw all of us into panic mode again before slowly getting better again by a lot.

Yang:We showed up?

Ruby:Bingo! You and Weiss, met Oscar, and then eventually Blake came back. Things were on the up and up.

Weiss:Uh, Haven attack?

Ruby:We lived, up and up. Yeah you got stabbed but you know...that’s not new I’m sure.

Weiss:Yeah I have the scar and I’m still little pissed.

Ruby:Valid. Anyways, so my Atlas experience was different as hell. There was no formation of Remnants armies like Weiss spoke of or even between two kingdoms like Blake. Yang, what happened yours again exactly?

Yang:Nonsense. Cinder showed up with lackeies but not Salem’s lackies. Those people showed up separately, then Adam came back from wherever the hell he- a lot! A lot of people showed up for different reasons but also the same reason and to be frank, we all almost got shot by the military for being in bases that quote unquote, “didn’t exist.”

Ruby:Man I wish we traded. That at least sounds crazy enough to be fun. Just a rollercoaster in the dark basically. My experience was probably as hectic, but also way more streamlined. We showed up, and then all hell broke loose. Specially a mass grimm invasion lead by Cinder and her annoying associates. We were there for about three weeks updating General Ironwood and getting our barrings together when it happened. I wanna call it a hit and run tactic but it was clearly planned in advanced. Mechs were hacked again, traitors in the military, grimm lying in wait before hand; it was chaos! All for the relic.

Blake:Who was the maiden?

Ruby:Never met her. By the time we got there, Ironwood was panicking because she had vanished, taken right from under his nose. It was some young girl apparently, really young. The attack on Beacon looked like child’s play to this. Mantle got attacked, grimm were on the chains, they tried dropping Atlas to the ground; all a diversion for a relic. We all should’ve died, and yet, we didn’t. Winter and Weiss weeded out traitors, huntsman and military held the line, Yang bested Hazel with Nora, Qrow and I cut down Tyrian! Ren, Blake and Jaune helped the kingdoms while Ironwood struck down Watts. Nobody was in the mood to die that day. There wasn’t gonna be another Beacon. By all means, we were pissed. Even Raven showed up of all people.

Yang:What!?

Ruby:You can’t attack a kingdom without the world knowing. Especially when traitors leak info. Honestly she came for you though, or she never left to begin with. Couldn’t tell ya. Thanks to Maria I had a bit more handling with my eyes. That helped a lot. Without them and Os-

She stopped herself, choking on the words. The zest and excitement of recalling the heroic feats of her friends dimmed slightly with her smile. Her joyful smile became bittersweet like the memory.

Ruby:Then there was Oscar, the real warrior on that flamed filled night. That battle had to have been three days at least. We were so driven, and so tired. I was tired, but Cinder, Neo, and the others with her at the time weren’t; always showing up at the worst time. I managed to push Cinder back in a fight but grimm and others still swarmed. We were at a point that grimm very well might’ve did us in and the villains didn’t have to push any harder. But Oscar changed that. Hehe, what’s it about country folk that makes people like him and I not hesitate to grit our teeth? That dork looked at me, gave me the biggest smile on the the steps to Atlas, and then he left. His hair went white as he twirled the cane and then he left, forever. Oz came out, and he left nothing to the imagination. “Limited magic” my butt. He obliterated grimm and made a barrier aroma Atlas while everyone else cleared Mantle long enough for the world to send reinforcements. Salem didn’t get the relic, but she got the maiden and thousands of casualties. Oscar being one of them. Also, Whitley....he was in critical condition for a very long time.

Weiss:What do you mean...critical condition?

Ruby:Everything happened so fast Weiss. Panic was high, buildings fell....a piece on him. I wasn’t there but when I eventually found you, you were nearly hysterical and banged up. By some miracle he lived even though we could not reach him and he did not get aid for awhile. We thought him dead. It was only after everything we learned somebody got him. Being rich never paid off more than with medical bills. Thanks to youth and medicine he can still walk, but he can only do so much before being tired. He also left Atlas. The cold hurts.

Weiss:So, I run the company because he can’t?

Ruby:I wouldn’t put it that way, but it was one of dozens of reasons that made that goal stronger for you. Relax though, both of you get plenty of time to be witty siblings like I told you earlier.

Weiss:I know. It’s just, I guess it’s hard imagining Whitley hurt like that. I don’t think I could handle it.

Ruby:You definitely teetered in the moment. Knowing that happened though probably gave you anger and grit to fight the entire battle. You were a beast. Scarier than Winter. Anyways, that hollow victory was a real wake up call for the world. They didn’t know about Salem and we never told society in earnest. Cinder and other conspirators were enough to make Remnant work together to boost defense. Relief went to places that needed it and I, became the face of hope. Haven, Argus, Atlas, even people from Vale got to chattering of a particular group of people who always seemed to answer the call for help. Then the towns in between chattered. Yours truly had been carving a name in the history books and was only gain popularity the moment I stepped into Vacou, alone.

Blake:Alone!?

Weiss:What!?

Yang:Where were we!!!!!?

Ruby looked at surprised faces around the table, smiling tenderly. She looked down her dress and pulled out the cross she wore around her neck. Her thumb traced its edges as her mind began wandering down an old path paved with emotions raw to the core.

Ruby:I’ve always felt different. Not just because of my eyes but that there was just...a certain spark that never stopped going off for as long as I remember. There are plenty of people who can’t bare to watch others suffer, but there are fewer people I believe that truly feel the agony of other people’s pain. Beacon, Haven, Atlas, Argus; there was no place I went that I didn’t see the faces of others lamenting, and I didn’t make me want to grieve. Atlas took so much out of all of you and I just felt so....driven to stop that ache. For everyone’s sake, but mine as well. I wanted the world to finally get to the happy ending. Enough trauma had be sowed for a hundred lifetimes, so I went on ahead of everyone. I never doubted you all would follow but I wanted to get ahead of the curve and take on as much of the suffering I could do others wouldn’t. If the world wouldn’t give me a miracle than I’d be it myself for everyone else.

Yang:That’s suicidal! Salem wanted you specifically!

Ruby:It’s not like I went marching up to her door and said “1v1 bitch, I’m here” no, I just chose to move forward quicker than what we were all doing. Believe me, all of you were upset when you caught up, after I had already saved Vacou. *smiles* I really like that place. I told the people it was the next target and all they did was double down on pushing back. I managed to pin down the Summer maiden before the villains and thanks with the city on alert, there wasn’t a shift in the sand that didn’t go unnoticed. I got the jump on Mercury and Emerald, personally paying them back. Can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t take long before they realized how screwed they were with them being outed like this and Cinder having the nerve to retreat before hand. Both of them threw in the total, outing the plan against Vacou. A wipeout of a win. Not to mention they told me the location Salem’s little hiding hole.

Weiss:We missed all of that?

Ruby:That’s what happens when I leave in the dead of night and running on adrenaline. Like I said before, people were tired. As much as all of you wanted to hoof it, other’s were relying on you. Atlas almost dropped for gods sake. Eventually when you all caught up it was at a good time. Soloing was rewarding but difficult. Fortunately Sun, Neptune, Ilia, and a few other familiar faces were close by if I needed an extra set of hands. My little stunt earned the anger of everyone for awhile.

WBY:Yeah no shit...the leader left.

Ruby:Yang was the most upset, followed by Uncle Qrow, and you Weiss. I was ready for the blowback. Jaune and Nora saw me though and bursted into tears. Hehe, wasn’t ready for that. Felt terrible and cried back. To prevent that stunt again, my Yang convinced Raven to link me. A couple days of apologizing and rest smoothed things over. It also gave time for just a few close friends and colleagues to get together for an assault on Salem’s castle. A few were apprehensive about it at first but at the end of the day I was going. That attitude was infectious apparently. You guys, actually everybody, they started getting this hunger to end it all. Maybe it was the high of victory? Regardless, it sent me racing to the end with those that I loved most.

Yang:You’re a real “my way or the highway” kind of Ruby. I don’t get how that explains what made you so...elite.

Ruby:I’m not sure what to say. A fight needed to to fought so I fought it. A cry for help was heard so I ran to it. A grimm needed slaying so I slayed it. People needed me to win so I didn’t dare think of losing. Dying was never option, even when it stared me right into my eyes. I had things I wanted to do and people I wanted see for years to come. I guess...I am strong because of the fact I want things my way. A moment I’m not giving it 110% is a moment wasted. After all, a huntress is all I ever wanted to be.

A single dream she wanted since birth. The never ending desire to be the hero in stories told to her many nights ago. That’s all it ever was. That’s all it’s ever been. Even in meadow of beautiful red roses, one would be the rose that captured the eyes of many, that bloomed stronger than the rest. As simple as it was, that had to be the answer here. Weiss, Yang, and Blake were in front of that flower. The Ruby Rose that simply bloomed stronger than the rest. The one that clung to her dream as if letting go meant dying itself. The devotion was inspiring, yet also overwhelming. If this was Ruby they had lead them that day in the Emerald Forest, could they have kept up? Could she be the leader they followed? No, they couldn’t have. Something deep down inside them gave them that answer. No matter how she looked and how much she loved, this Ruby Rose was cut from a cloth they simply weren’t off. The same as others, but oh so different.

Weiss:You’re....kinda a monster, you know that right?

Yang:Seriously, I’m so...floored. It’s intimidating.

Blake:Not to mention humbling. I used to think I gave it all I had. Now I’m not so sure.

Ruby:Oh don’t be like that you three! You’re all living proof there was more than way to go about life, this war! Everything you gave was enough because you’re done with it! Nobody failed. Besides, I...am far from ideal. The assault was challenging. Getting around hoards of grimm and making it to Salem was hell made real. Neo tried taking another shot at me but Yang held her off with help. Everyone pushed the obstacles in front of me out of the way as I went to Salem herself. Cinder had been abandoned by her and stripped of a lot of her powers. Angry and desperate, she tried killing me again as a way to prove worth. I beat her. However, I let her walk away.

Yang:What!? Why would-

Ruby:Naive, I was...naive okay? She was all spent and though I hated her, I just couldn’t. Not when I looked into her eyes and saw that same hunger I had to claw and scream at my dream until it was in my hands die inside her. We both knew from this point on there was absolutely nothing she could do where this ends her way. All she worked for turned burned to ash. So I gave her the choice to not burn up with it. Cinder swallow her pride and then fled. A part of me couldn’t help but rationalize killing her didn’t solve or justify any of my beliefs or desires. It would’ve done it because I hated her like she hated me. That was the dumb logic of a seventeen year old who never quite learned to take things slow.

Blake:....I don’t think it’s dumb. Naive for sure, but maybe that’s good? Even my Ruby, she never wanted to act on hate. She didn’t. Salem lives.

Weiss:Mine sent her soul to be at piece instead of passing a cruel judgment.

Yang:As a person who’s seen what you looked like with nothing but vengeance inside, I can say it doesn’t fit you. Before that day you had a warmth inside you to even foes that were somewhat admirable. You chose to leave Cinder’s fate up to those who had that hate and Salem was undone by her own doing at the very end. That’s what really makes you special Ruby. That’s why you’re called an honest soul. Good will is your nature.

Ruby:....Hmm, you sure know how to butter me up. *scratches head* I guess that part of me is uni-I mean multiversal. Strangely, that makes me feel better, to a degree.

Weiss:Do we even have to ask what happened to Salem at this point? I doubt the story ends with you loosing and having to retreat.

Ruby:Who’s to say it doesn’t? I could’ve been beaten to death before the gods themselves descended down to revive me with awesome power.

Yang:....Did you?

Ruby:Wh-No! Haha, I made her an immortal statue.

Blake:I-It was that easy?

Ruby:Well I wouldn’t call rushing into hell’s castle easy, or Salem. I lit her up at least a dozen times. My head pounded from each use, I was tossed around a bunch, magic is annoying, and not to mention running out of ammo. I left nothing to the imagination in that fight. If it were easy then I wouldn’t be rooting my horn and my age doing it. I was so tired I blacked out afterwards. I woke days later with a sore body and the title of “Remnant’s Savior.” Apparently beating Salem had weakened the grimm everywhere and all of you made sure who was to be thanked for it. That’s the tale of how I saved the world with my friends. Love, trust, elbow grease, and a lot of bullets. Before the final battle, Ozpin had struck a deal with everyone involved. In return for saving the world, he’d cut ties with us.

Yang:Seriously? What brought that about!?

Ruby:Good or not, he lied and was a schemer. Sure I was gonna try to save the world regardless of his interference but there wasn’t a person alive that didn’t to finally take a step towards the future after all this. All of us finally had time chase dreams and help the world the way we wanted to before all of this. Blake begin mending hate, Weiss took back her company, if Yang wasn’t with Blake then she was seeking more answers to Raven on wild adventures.

Yang:You mean Raven still left after all that!?

Ruby:In her defense, both of you made everything fucking awkward when she was around. It’s like you both wanted to talk about something but knew any subject was a land mine so you all you ever did was...stare, like weirdos. Glad that’s in the past. She just lives with dad now and you two now to hold a conversation. I dare not ask for more. I’d be a granny by the time I did.

Yang:Sigh...I don’t know what I expected. Shit it the fan several times and children were born before mom and I found solidarity and understanding. What did you do afterwards? Your goal was already met.

Ruby:Like hell it was! I started busting my butt traveling around the world, visiting every place to help in anyways I could. Ren and Nora tagged along for awhile before going off to make an orphanage in Anima near Ren’s old village. That left Jaune and I to do our hero thing.

Yang:As well as other things....

Ruby:Hey, what can I say? We were young and going up in the world. By the time I was nineteen, I was now a married to my partner and best friend.

Weiss:Uhhhh-

Ruby:He’s my partner on RNJR and you’re my BFF, gosh did I really need to explain that hehe?

Weiss:I just had to make sure. Crazier twists could happen.

Blake:Wow you married young. Not that there’s a problem but I’m surprised. Then again you also dated earlier than my Ruby. Hehe, weapons were on her brain for a long time.

Weiss:No kidding. When I learned about you crushing on my brother I was shocked to find out you liked anybody in general. Especially a person who isn’t a weapon nut in the slightest.

Ruby:*shrugs* All you’re telling me is I’m clearly the most impatient or impulsive Ruby you all know. Don’t know how that happened. Maybe I was dropped as a baby or had one too many coffees growing up?

Weiss:I’m willing to bet it’s both.

Ruby:Ruuuuude. So yeah, that’s...the story of how I saved the world and married Jaune. We even built a home just outside Vacou, overlooking the kingdom and neighboring town in the distance where Maria grew up. Yeah, that’s me....more or less. All the triumphant parts anyways. Anything later on is......

.......

Blake:R...Ruby? You okay?

Ruby:Nope, not really. *clenches cross*

Yang:......You know, I never really got religion, especially after learning the truth. It just seemed completely hollow when you learn of the real gods, ya know? However, I changed my tune a bit after being a parent and then some more when uncle Qrow died. It was never really about the truth behind if those other gods were real-

Ruby:It’s the piece of mind in believing in a better place for loved ones and having people watch over you. It’s truly based on blind faith in every sense but that’s okay as long as it gives peace of mind, to stay strong. Yeah....that’s why I wear this.

Yang:If that’s the “why” then I guess the unavoidable question is what happened?

The reaper leaned back in his chair, letting out a long sigh. Ruby brushed her hair out of her face while her face went pale. Then, Ruby’s eyes, her teammates watched a pair of stunning silver eyes dim, becoming akin to a clouded mirror.

Ruby:Being a huntress was all I wanted. The plan of having a family and settling down never appealed to me much. I feel, I felt like being in the field was where I was meant to be. It’s where I was most myself in a way. So the day I learned that I was pregnant was more than a little upsetting and terrifying, until dad and time itself filled me with the most genuine joy I may have ever experienced. Dustin Arc Rose, my first born son. He opened a door to a world and life I never knew I wanted to be apart of. Then...that door was shut minutes after, when Cinder and Neo stole him right from my arms. I couldn’t do a single thing about it other than blackout. That single act of good will I showed, it did nothing but kill me inside. The same way I did to her.

WB:.....

Yang:Ru-Ruby....your eyes.

Ruby:Hmm? Are they clouded? Funny, I would’ve thought your Ruby would’ve had a similar change. Maybe that’s a world exclusive thing, or a testament to the will you Ruby has to endure. Clouded eyes on a silver eyed warrior means the person has lost the desire or rather the mindset of persevering life. Be it their own life or wanting to end another’s life out of resentment, strife. My entire world fell apart when I woke up and learned nobody was able to retrieve Dustin. I was in pieces, Jaune was broken, nobody was the same. There wasn’t a soul we didn’t know that hadn’t tried to find a lead, but we never did. He was just...gone; and I couldn’t cope at all.

Weiss:I don’t think any mother could. Ruby, I’m so sorry that happened to you.

Ruby:I’m sorry too. I lashed out in anger, and shut people out. My eyes clouded and I dove into my work for a little over a year doing nothing but searching aimlessly as I took and every job back to back. The more time went by meant the more people eventually had to go back to their own, and it drove me up a wall inside. No one could reach me. I didn’t want anybody to. Not even Jaune. I....*teary eyed* I left him alone in house. There was no part of me that could even attempt to understand his pain because I was drowning in mine. I was told he tried his best to catch them at the hospital. I never hated him for not succeeding but I...he... I just, I can’t. I don’t know what I thought. All o knew was I didn’t even want him to touch me. How cruel is that? *hugging herself* I made him drown in despair in the same way I was. I wasn’t home so often that I never realized he eventually left it abandoned to live with dad. Yang and Blake I didn’t even show up to your wedding. Jaune did that much. Hell, Raven attended. Ruby Rose as a person didn’t exist any more. I was only a wandering huntress looking for answers or the challenge that might’ve ended me.

Blake:What changed?

Ruby:Oz, he did what nobody else dared to do. He fought me. I don’t think he thought twice about it. He was prepared to accept all the anger I kept inside until I eventually broke down into tears like I’m trying not to do right now. Thinking about that time is still, extremely difficult. Oz let me lament, encouraging me afterwards to finally except the fact Dustin was gone and that I needed to process it properly. First I went to you Yang, in order to have a my big sis to lean on. Can you guess how that went?

Yang:With me holding you tighter than I ever had before.

Ruby:*smiles gently* I don’t deserve you. You and Blake then came to patch with me where everyone else waited for me and helped me face Jaune. That may have been the hardest thing I’ve done. Grieving or not, the fact that I left him in such a state. I know what that does to people firsthand and yet I left. For the first time in over a year we embraced and finally grieved together. The next two years were spent trying to heal and cope. During my time away the world had fully acknowledged me. I even got a proper nickname, but it all felt hollow. Imagine that, achieving your dream but not caring? If that’s not salt in a wound then I don’t know what is.

Weiss:What’s your title?

Ruby:I am the person people want to see when evil comes to cut their story short. I am a symbol that their tale still has more to tell. Remnant has named me The Storyteller. Curtsey of Maria, who spread the name around. Healing was slow and most nights I felt a pain in my heart, but then everything changed. One moment made me dare to try again to open that shut door in my life. *looks at Yang* I held your son in my arms. Sweet little Kovu.

Blake:*smiles* Kovu? Now I wonder who named him?

Yang:*red* Huh...how about that? Hehehe, wish I could meet him. I know he isn’t technically mine but I can’t help but feel all warm now. Also I can’t believe I named him that!

Weiss:I can. Veronica’s middle name is Nala.

Yang:Okay, maybe not marrying Blake was a win? Clearly I can’t be trusted to not name my children after other cats.

Blake:The wrong kind of cat too. I’m a panther faunus, not a lion. Even if they’re blonde that’s still false advertising of what they are.

Ruby:Well Yang was the one giving birth so you lost a majority of the option to complain.

Blake:That is fair.

Weiss:You gave birth to Vee, so I think that solves who picked her first name.

Ruby rested her head in her propped up hands that rested on the table. She felt exhausted reliving that chapter of her life mentally. Still she managed to smile, then smile bigger. Her eyes unclouded and a warm feeling filling her again. What Ruby said earlier about what made her different may have reign true, but her friends could since that there was now more to it. Ruby had spiraled into an unimaginable tragedy, yet was able to bounce back thanks to loved ones. To smile as she does, it was truly a strong sight to see. Even if she wasn’t fully aware of that.

Ruby:Carmine Arc Rose, my second born and the first child to call me mommy. Followed many years later by itty bitty Garnet. He’s my little man, five years old while is big sis is seventeen now.

Yang:Damn! That’s a gap. Oh, also congratulations. Almost forgot that part. I’m glad you got to be the super awesome mom that-

Ruby:I am easily C-teir.

Yang:Oh come on! What!?

Ruby:Listen, I know I got on you all for calling yourselves bad parents, but I will hear no debate about me understand!? I flop a lot of times.

Weiss:That doesn’t make you a C-teir. That makes you a new mom, silly.

Ruby:*grumbling* I agree to disagree but thank you. It’s just a lot okay. Too much to dive into honestly.

Blake:Summarize. Give us an abbreviated version.

Ruby:Ummm so Carmine is real special kid. The absolute love I have for her is unbreakable but gods damnit if she isn’t the most... “me” I could be! In a way similar yet different from myself, Carmine has always had this sense of urgency in her and a love for the world around her. She recognizes that it’s a fragile piece we have and just how hard I’ve worked with everyone to make it. I could tell that from her when she was five. I’d sound crazy, but the fact she used her eyes at the age proves I’m not.

Yang:She has silver eyes!? Why didn’t you bring that up?

Ruby:I thought that was obvious. All of my kids were born with then. Unlike her baby brother though, Carmine was a weird little kid. She didn’t socialize well. Still doesn’t, she’s kinda comes off rude and cold because of her bluntness. She doesn’t really express all her feelings or understand others fully. One might call her a little cold but the passion she had to protect life itself is a testament to how much she cares. Carmine is also a genius fighter. To put in perspective, people use the same nickname for her that they used for Pyrrha.

WBY:Oh....

Ruby:Yeah! It’s not hyperbolic to say ever since Carmine is far beyond any skill I was at her age since she turned thirteen. You called me a monster earlier but no, I merely gave birth to a beast. I mean she could pass the huntsman exam at fifteen if I didn’t make her wait. I can’t call her arrogant, she talks with confidence because she has that right by all means. Still, besides her face, that’s where the similarities start separating; besides terrible grades in general stuff. We’ve never been in step completely. To put simply in her own words, “What I am is a hero, while she is a huntress.” That good will and mercy I try to give everyone isn’t how she rolls. It drives a real wedge that has resulted in us not going on missions together.

Blake:Is she...killing?

Ruby:She has before, and it had valid reasons entirely, but I also know for a fact she is more than capable of bringing down people without taking that step. Not all cases are that intense thank goodness. Her overall aggressiveness is the root of the problem. You don’t have to put you back into it when handling thugs. They aren’t Hazel.

Yang:Ooo okay, yeah I’m seeing what you mean now. It’s like that one comic you always read!

Ruby:Sigh...yeah she channels a bit of Batman energy and I need her to not do that all the time. I suppose being an honest soul isn’t particularly hereditary. It always feels like we aren’t enjoying each other’s company these days. I can’t blame her though. So....you know how all of you have had one serious problem that has both destabilized yourself as well as the kids and their relationship to you? *clouded eyes*

Weiss:Wait...you loosing a child wasn’t that?

Ruby:Oh it was. It just so happened that it never ended. It grew day by day. Night by night. Jaune and I were cautious with Carmine. Going as far to give her contacts and giving birth to her off the record and not at a hospital. Just in case Cinder came back. Well, Cinder and Neo came back, with my Dustin.

Nobody said anything. What do you even say to that!? All they did was let out a stifled breath and tried to gauge Ruby’s look of guilt.

Ruby:Yet again we had gotten too comfortable. It happened when Carmine was thirteen. I don’t think Garnet was even one yet. That’s when the cruelest realization hit me. My son had been alive and hearing about how his so called mother being a person who saves everyone, yet she never came for him. She had moved on, letting his eyes become clouded with such seething hate for the world she did save; the children she had after. It’s been four years since the day he attacked Carmine and helped grimm try to invade Vacou. To this day it’s been a life of staying on gaurd, searching for them as they popped up countless places to tear Remna- to tear me down and I can’t decide what part hurts the most. The amount of anger that prevents me from killing Cinder in a blink of an eye, or looking at my daughter who has told me herself that she is going to kill her older brother because I’m too weak to do so. That I’m in no way as good as the world believes me to be. *puts hood up* Like I said, C-teir mom, at best.

Blake:That’s- you can’t- there’s no way for you to reach him? Maybe if you-

Ruby:He looks at me the same way Neo and Cinder do, Blake. They raised him to hate me. Besides, he hurt Carmine. She’s just not gonna let that slide and frankly I shouldn’t either. Carmine acts tough and for the most part is, but gets terrified like everyone else. In many ways she’s still just a young girl that I wish had never chosen to become a huntress. If I had it my way she’d just be a normal girl with normal knees; but her mother’s weakness and inexperience wrapped her up in yet another war. It’s ironic. I barely remember mom and yet I ended up putting my family in very similar situation as if she lead instruction. Happy endings, I’m not sure if I get-

Yang:You’re better than mom....

Ruby:......

Yang:Yeah I said. Look I love Summer Rose but at the end of the day she wasn’t around, not that she didn’t want to be, but it’s the truth. Several years of pleasant childhood memories and a lifetime of grief is what she left me, and all you got were tales you should’ve experienced first hand. Ruby you have spent seventeen years loving your daughter unconditionally and being there for her no matter if it’s for better or worse. Yeah you might not being doing it perfectly and I have no idea how to even fathom your predicament, but at least you are there trying. Take it from me, that’s all a daughter ever wants from their mother. It’s also what makes a pretty kick ass dad. *smiles* Chin up, hero. Your story isn’t over yet after all.

Silence filled the air and Ruby’s throat ran dry. Ruby pulled out her scroll to go to her pictures and displayed one of her favorite photos for everyone to see. It was Carmine’s fifteenth birthday. Ruby didn’t lie about the resemblance. the girl had short blonde hair that stopped halfway down her neck in the back and was longer in the front, reaching shoulders. Like her mother, the tips of her hair transitioned to red. The beautiful young woman tried to her hide her smile but her gleeful silver eyes were practically twinkling with joy as Ruby hugged her tightly from behind and a tall, more solid version of Jaune was smushing one of Carmine’s cheeks with an overly dramatic kiss to it. A tiny child no older than three at most was in his big sister’s arms. Garnet had his mother’s hair and eyes but something about the chubby face definitely showed Jaune’s features. The child had red frosting on his face and was reaching eagerly for more cake somewhere out of frame.

Yang noticed the girl took page from her father and wore some regular cargo shorts, but clearly didn’t lack flair by wearing a red crop top that showed off a fresh tattoo of the Arc crest on her toroso. Knowing her sister, that tattoo was most likely practical. The family looked happy, proud; and the mother of it currently sat across the table crying with her head face down in her hands cwhile Weiss and Blake hugged her from each side. Roses may have thorns, anyone who knew roses knew a simple truth. They’re still fragile flowers.

Yang:(Carmine Arc Rose. For you and your mother’s sake, I hope things go well)

xxxx

Though Carmine seemed cold by nature, people were quick learn the opposite. The most recent learner of this was a scared little girl that held on for dear life. It was nighttime, nothing but the sound of pouring rain and the distant glow of red and the warmth of Carmine holding the girl against her body while she sprinted through a mud ridden forest. The little payed no attention to the pain in her side, but the glow of roses, eyes, and flames through her tear filled eyes.

Beowulves chased frantically but then severed immediately by something the girl couldn’t understand, but it looked like the person carrying her. The dead beasts brought no comfort. Not when more followed close behind.

Girl:I-I’m sc...scared!

Carmine:Don’t look at them sweetie, it’ll be fine. Just keep being a brave little girl.

Girl:M...Mommy was back there.

Carmine:.....I know, she’ll be just fine. Your village, there are plenty of people there that will be just fine! Huff..... You got a name?

Mary:Mary.....

Carmine:Oh that’s a beautiful name, Mary. You know I was almost a Mary? Yeah my grandma was a really amazing person and I almost got named something similar to her. Mary is a very strong name!

Mary:You’re a liar! I’m sad, not strong. I want my mommy! Everything his dark and hurts and I want her!

The girl began painfully crying as Carmine followed her trail of roses to avoid getting lost. Things were getting worse. The storm raged and she could feel this girl burning in her arms. Not to mention the unsettling warmth the mixed with the cold rain against her body and dripped to puddles below. Any grimm near by could only be dealt with by many copies of her nearby, but that would only go so far when fear was out full force. Carmine’s boots felt like cement, but she still ran.

Carmine:Mary, you know what do when I miss my mommy? I sing! Yeah, my mom sings the best lullabies that made me feel super strong when I was little! It’s a magic song that makes everyone strong. How about I sing it you and they can sing it your mommy later okay!? But you have to close your eyes to really focus on the words!

Mary:*sniffling* Okay....

Baby deathstalkers swarmed the path made ahead as small Nevermores dove at her. Out of options, Carmine broke from the path, trying to rely on memory to go towards the safe zone while also singing lyrics to her favorite song.

Dream of anything; I'll make it all come true.

Everything you need is all I'll have for you~

Carmine never wavered. No matter how badly her lungs her or nearly slipped, she kept singing all the way to her destination where several other clones were seen racing towards with more civilians to injured or young to go themselves. An orphanage where Nora and Ren stood outside rushing people in while Jaune was keeping the grimm at bay. The sight brought a little ease.

Don't worry, I've got you; nothing will ever harm you.

I'm close by, I'll stay here; through all things, I will be near~

Carmine finally reached Nora and passed off the girl who’s grip weakened overtime. A few lyrics in and Carmine knew she was singing mainly for herself.

Carmine:Get her medical attention! I’m gonna go and find more! There’s still-

Jaune:Wait, it’s too dangerous!

Carmine:I know! That’s why I have to go! That fire is spreading and there’s stragglers pinned down! Dad.....I’m pinned down!

Jaune tensed up and looked at Carmine. No scraps on her and her clothes only soiled by others. It didn’t take long to realize. The man resisted the urge to run out to the ruined town and stood firmly.

Jaune:Carmine...end it. We’ll worry about the consequences later.

Carmine:....Okay.

Across the woods amongst the flames the real Carmine stood bleeding and bruised in front of two Beringel that charged over the vanishing corpses of their fallen with more grimm, her sword stabbed into the ground supporting her weight. Behind all living people that remained finally managed to flee. All except for a woman trapped by house debris. The woman watched this young huntsman stand proudly again. She wasn’t sure what happened next. All she heard was one sentence.

“Close your eyes...” before everything went white. Next thing she knew, Carmine was lifting debris off her as rain and wind washed away any evidence. A relief she didn’t care about in the slightest. She neither had the strength, or the time too. Much like Carmine, who began to pant and teeter. It was clear to the woman that whatever just happened didn’t come without cost as she watched the girl fall to her knees. Though she tried moving, Carmine was spent.

Carmine:Don’t worry...we’re safe....let’s-

Woman:Go...

Carmine:Huh?

Woman:I...my legs. Everything...I can’t move. Just go. I d-don’t think I’d las-

Carmine:Don’t talk like that! The hard parts over! I can-

Woman:Barely walk. *smiles* It’s okay. I don’t blame you. You fought hard.

Carmine:.....I...I’m sorry. *teary eyed*

Woman:Say, I know that face anywhere. Your Lady Rose’s kid. Funny, I thought your eyes were red? My daughter, Mary, she loves your mother. Makes me kinda jealous hehe, but hey I love her too. *crying* Do you know if Mary made it? She was wearing-

Carmine:A black dress, pink ribbons in her hair...

Woman:Yes! Is she safe? I saw you- one of you carry her off.

Carmine:...She’s just fine.

Woman:Good. That’s all....that.....

The woman never finished her sentence. Carmine’s body fell limp on the ground, facing the rain. Even with the cold downpour she could feel the warmth of her own tears, containing her emotions best she could as she looked through her clones eyes to watch Nora take Mary away from the survivors and out of sight to not stir further panic.

Carmine wasn’t sure how long she layed there, but it was long enough for Jaune to find her. The man didn’t say a word. The town was in shambles. Grimm were still fading and his daughter looked tired, but not in serious condition. Unlike the those who didn’t make it. Jaune put Carmine in his arms, carrying her away to safety.

Carmine:......Does mom ever save them all?

Jaune:No, but that never stops her from trying; or mourning.

She clenched her father’s shirt and let herself be fragile, to be a Rose.

Carmine:Next time. Mom and I, we’ll both get it right next time. A happy ending for all!

Jaune:Yeah, I know you will. Together....

#rwby #rwby au #the void #jaune arc #ruby rose #weiss schnee #yang xiao long #blake belladonna #carmine arc rose #rwby rosebud #rwby lancaster

[secret-engima]

I’m interested in hearing more about that AU you told me about before- the RWBY/HTTYD fusion(?) where Oscar is basically Hiccup and Ozpin is the dadliest Nightfury ever :)

OH YES THAT WAS A FUN IDEA.

Okay so like- RWBY/HTTYD fusion kinda thing where instead of vikings there’s Remnant characters. And possibly Remnant’s world. Anyway dragons are a thing, dragons are something people all have strong mixed opinions on because most dragons are furious monsters that try to destroy human settlements at any turn, but there are stories and legends of a time centuries ago when dragons were peaceful and tamable and kind.

Oscar has no real opinion on the legends. He’s mostly scared of dragons after an attack of a huge flock of Terrible Terrors when he was a small child left his hands and neck all scarred up. Even so, he doesn't ... really hate them? They’re wild animals. They’re just angry ones. He and his Aunt are pretty good at keeping their farm unnoticed when a flock passes overhead and as long as it stays that way, he’s fine. Any stray dragon that comes by and starts making noises to set the barn on fire or steal livestock, his Aunt deals with it. She’s a good shot.

Then one day, his hideout is broken into.

Now, his hideout isn’t really a “hideout” it’s just the old barn that the farm doesn’t use anymore. it’s too far away from the house, right on the edge of their property. But nobody has a reason to go there, so as long as he’s careful, Oscar gets to use it as his own little clubhouse. He stores books in there, and notebooks to sketch in, and all the junk he likes to tinker with because he likes building things on the side. His aunt says that maybe someday he can get a scholarship to a proper school for engineering and stuff.

He’s always careful not to store food in there, so that the wild animals of any kind have no reason to try to get in, and he locks it when he leaves.

So he is understandably VERY surprised when he comes in and finds a DRAGON on the floor of his hideout, having apparently broken in through the old window on the upper floor. The dragon stirs when Oscar gasps in fear, moves faster than Oscar can think and suddenly Oscar is pinned by a dark paw as the dragon looms over him with bloody, sharp teeth and furious gold eyes.

So this is how he dies then.

He squeezes his eyes shut with a whimper, waiting for the half-remembered agony of being mauled by a dragon to start (it had hurt so bad as a child and this dragon was so much bigger than a Terrible Terror-).

Hot breath on his face and then instead of pain, a low noise that was too soft to be a growl. Oscar whimpers again because please, please don’t try to eat him alive or something, but instead of pain the paw just leaves his chest and when Oscar dares to open his eyes and sit up, the dragon has limped away to curl up in a corner of the hideout again.

....Dragons aren’t supposed to let humans live.

......They probably aren’t supposed to look so exhausted and in pain and bloody either.

Oscar knows he should run. Go get his Aunt so she can come put the dragon down before it changes its mind and hurts him but-. The dragon looks at him, and gold eyes aren’t furious anymore. Just resigned. Scared. The dragon looks like it’s been on the losing side of a very bad fight with something that wasn’t human. There are gashes where scales have been clawed away, and when its tail slides slowly to curl around its paws, Oscar can see its missing a tail fin.

...Was this dragon attacked by other dragons?

Curiosity and pity make Oscar hold his silence as he backs slowly out of the barn and shuts the door behind him. He ... maybe it will go away in a few hours. Once it’s caught its breath.

He peaks in that evening and finds it hasn’t. It’s curled up tightly in the same corner, and he’s pretty sure the dragon is shivering.

He should REALLY tell his Aunt about this.

He brings it a small bucket of fish from the farm’s massive pond the next morning instead.

The dragon looks at him in open surprise and takes the fish as politely as a well trained dog. When it stands up again Oscar flinches, but all it does is sniff at him and then start licking his hair and Oscar yelps from shock more than fear. It’s like a switch has been flipped and even though the dragon is still exhausted and injured, it gently wrestles him down to give him ... a bath? A dragon bath. The dragon is purring while it does so. Oscar takes it as a form of thank you and has to work hard to snag a shower before Auntie Em can see him covered in dragon drool.

It takes a few more tentative visits to realize that 1. the dragon can’t leave because he can’t fly anymore, 2. he’s not actually black like Oscar thought, but a really deep, rich green in the sunlight when the dragon sneaks out to the old back field for a sun nap, and 3. Oscar is pretty sure he’s been adopted by the dragon. It (he, the dragon is a he), keeps cooing at him and trying to follow him and giving him tongue baths and offering him regurgitated bits of fish, which Oscar frantically turns down each time.

He names the dragon Ozpin, after one of the few dragon stories he knows where the dragon isn’t a horrible monster, and the first time he uses it, Ozpin reacts like it’s always been his name.

Oscar realizes halfway through designing a new tail fin for Ozpin that 1. this design is going to need a rider and 2. he’s had a dragon for about three months now and still hasn’t told his aunt. That ... will probably come back to bite later. But by now he’s more afraid of her reaction over the delay than her reaction over the dragon. So he keeps putting it off.

He kinda sorta really wants to ride Ozpin before his aunt can shut the idea down.

Ozpin expected to die that night he fled. Hundreds of seasons he’d managed to keep ahead of Salem, his mad former mate, freeing dragons from her control in twos and threes and hiding them away where she would not find them again, and she had finally caught him. He had been betrayed. Willingly. Leo’s eyes had been clear as day as he stood by Salem’s side, not glazed with her hate and control, and that hurt almost as much as the claws of her horde of dragons (always a horde, never leaving the risk that she will have to fight him alone, because she knows that in an equal fight, he would win, just like he almost had last time) tearing apart his scales, driving him from the air before he managed to fight some of them off and escape.

He’s not sure when he lost his tail fin. But that is a death sentence to a dragon like him. A dragon who cannot fly is a dead dragon, either by starvation, by Salem, or by the humans who have long forgotten what it was like to be friends and companions to dragon kind.

Ozpin wakes up in a human structure and can’t remember how he got in, but he hears movement and pained instinct drives him up to attack (what if it’s Salem, what if it’s one of her scouts, a poor dragon that Ozpin is too weak to free from her control and will have to kill to save himself like the coward he is-).

A child.

A human child.

Oh. Oh dear.

He really is going to die.

Ozpin removes his paw, hoping he didn’t break any fragile bones (human hatchlings were so *delicate*, he remembered that even after so long) and slinks to a far corner. He could run again, but he’s too tired and too heartsick. Let the boy call his parents.

At least the humans would probably make his death quick.

Except the boy does not call his parents, he leaves and pokes his head in hours later as if to check if Ozpin is still there. He leaves again and the next morning arrives with a bucket of fish to feed him. It is strange and kind and strange because it is kind and when he sniffs at the boy in curiosity, looking for a reason, the child doesn’t run, just flinches nervously. He smells of only one guardian and no other hatchlings. He smells nervous and a bit frightened and ... lonely.

Ozpin finds himself gently pulling the child close and bathing him before he can think better of it, and it is foolish, to risk claiming another human hatchling, he hasn’t shared his Life with a Rider in a long long time (not since Salem killed the last one before his eyes back when he was young and foolish and still thought he could call her back from the edge of madness), but he is so grateful and lonely and this child is all but aching with the need for love. Why else would he risk bringing Ozpin food when all the stories men tell nowadays are of how dragons are bloodthirsty monsters?

The boy keeps coming back, bringing just enough fish to take the edge of Ozpin’s hunger, and even though his days are numbered, Ozpin stays and croons and tries to impart love on the child who is so lonely he would befriend a monster. He lets the boy tentatively climb on him and touch his scales, even lets him inspect Ozpin’s injured, ruined tail. He can’t help it. He always loved hatchlings, human or dragon, and it’s been so *long*-.

The boy takes to sketching and building ... something. Ozpin isn’t entirely certain what. He almost jumps out of his scales when Oscar (that was the boy’s name he learned at last) calls him Ozpin, calls him by name, and then learns that there still are a handful of stories of the Old Days. Dismissed as myth now. It’s amusing to be named after himself.

Ozpin frets quietly over the child sometimes, because while he can smell a guardian on him, he has never seen this guardian, even from afar. He knows this barn is on the edge of Oscar’s little territory, but even so, what guardian lets her hatchling wander off so frequently and never thinks to check on him? Sometimes Oscar falls *asleep* in here, curled up against Ozpin’s side and tucked under a wing, and only wakes up when Ozpin nudges him up because he can hear the far off bell that he thinks means it’s time for his hatchling to go home and eat.

He wishes Speaking Stones still existed. That he’d managed to save more of them, or that he was able to fly and get one. The only way to exchange true words without a Speaking Stone would be a Rider bond and- and he can’t do that to Oscar. It wouldn’t be fair.

He doesn’t deserve to be dragged into a war for freedom of mind that Ozpin and dragon kind has been losing for seasons upon seasons.

Except the child doesn’t seem to think so, doesn’t even know what he flirts with when he tentatively drags in a rudimentary replacement tail fin and saddle as well as a harness to connect them.

Ozpin tries to reject it. As much as he wants (needs) to fly, it’s too dangerous. The boy pouts and sets the harness and gear aside, muttering to himself that he’ll just leave it in the barn for a while until “Ozpin gets used to the smell”.

Ozpin snorts. Because he is not a dog that can be tricked into forgetting something exists thank you.

Oscar sticks his tongue out at him. Adorable, feisty, silly little hatchling.

#SE asks #keeperofgems asks #Secret Engima Rambles #Dragon Rider Oscar verse #long post #rwby #httyd #very loose fusion #OH LOOK NEW AU

[x0401x]

Violet Evergarden Movie Summary

The initial plan was to make this a short bullet-point thing, but I felt like there was too much to clarify and I had no choice but use novel references to explain certain parts, so I decided to just write a normal summary. Many thanks before-hand to my friend Yuuki, who gave me all this info.

Apologies for taking relatively long with this thing. Not even I expected that I would end up writing this much. Buckle up for the ride, ‘cause it won’t be fun.

Nope, not kidding. It really won’t.

First thing I need to make clear is: this movie is one and a half hour long and divided into three parts and two different timelines: the times when Violet existed and the times after she dies. Already in the beginning of the movie, Violet is dead.

Yes, you read this right. She’s dead.

Now, I don’t mean that she’s dead in the literal sense. This is 60 years in the future. She might be alive or not, but it’s never said. However, the timeline of 60 years later is considered an era without Violet, apparently because she has retired and her “legend” is over, so to say. It’s also a time where Auto-Memories Dolls don’t exist. That’s one good punch in the face. Let’s keep counting.

The movie is sort of like a tale being read by someone else, which at some point goes into Violet’s first-person POV. The whole thing is kind of a look back on Violet’s life tragectory and how it took a new turn when she decided to continue looking for Gil despite all the mess of the TV series.

The era where Violet exists is an era where telephones are being introduced to the people, so Auto-Memories Dolls are starting to become unnecessary. I would argue that the creation of the telephone isn’t enough for an entire occupation to start disappearing so quickly, since new inventions are normally extremely expensive and not everyone has access to them (or even knows about their existence) so immediately after their conception. Realistically speaking, ghostwriters would still be important as long as there were still so many people unable to buy phones. Not to mention that this is a steampunk world where compulsory education doesn’t seem to be a thing yet, so even in the off chance that everybody can buy a phone, there would still be a lot of people who can’t read or write on their own. But all of this clearly went over the animators’ heads, so not only ghostwriters but also the mail business in general are nearing their doom in the movie.

The one looking back on Violet’s life was Ann, who was telling it all to her granddaughter, Daisy (who, by the way, is voiced by Morohoshi Sumire, the same girl who voiced the seven-year-old Ann). Ann had kept all the letters that Violet ghostwrote for her mother, as well as the newspapers about the CH Postal Company. Looks like the article was printed after Violet left CH, since she isn’t in the picture with everyone else.

In this era, CH’s main office has been turned into a museum. Nerine is shown working in it. Of course, she’s a grandma by then. Speaking of the CH personnel, Erica also quit being an Auto-Memories Doll and became a playwright like Oscar. She appears in the newspaper, though, so she probably a while left after Violet did. Taylor also appears there.

Back to Daisy, she was writing a letter to her parents, in order to learn how to properly convey feelings with written word. The message of this scene seems to be that, no matter the tools, what’s important is that we convey our feelings to the people we love.

As we see in the trailer, Gil’s mom has passed and Violet runs into Dietfried when visiting her grave on the anniversary of her death. To anyone who is wondering: yeah, Gil never went to see his mother and she died thinking that he was dead.

Nobody knew that Gil was alive. Not his mother, not Dietfried, not the Evergardens and not even Hodgins. No one.

Here’s what happened to Gil in the anime: he survived the incident at Intense, of course, but got separated from Violet in that explosion. His tag miraculously stayed on the same spot, though, as we saw in the TV series. Now, since this isn’t explained in the anime at all, I have to make it clear: the tag is that necklace the soldiers wear. It contains their names and ranks, so that their bodies can be identified even when they’re irrecognizable. Without the tag, the people who rescued Gil had no idea who he was, so he was sent to a different place to get treated. He ended up at a monastery hospital instead of the one in Enchaîné. I would debate that his uniform alone is enough to identify him as someone from the Leidenschaftlich Army, or maybe they could’ve just asked him which troop he belonged to after he woke up and relocated him to where his fellow men were, but who even cares about all these plot holes anymore? Definitely not me.

Anyway. After Gil was discharged, he ran the fuck away. Like, literally.

If anyone out there was hoping that Gil would finally have his moment to shine as the self-sacrificing, thoughtful and ridiculously kindhearted character that he is in the novel, I have bad news for you. What we had here was even worse than it being Gil’s excuse movie. It’s like the whole thing was made to drag his character so deep through the mud that he’ll never be able to get up again. There’s pretty much nothing in this one and a half hour that actually justifies what he did to Violet. I’ll elaborate on this as we go on.

Anime!Gil became a nomad and went traveling. He offed his ass to the island where that lighthouse displayed in the most recent official art is located (that’s why Gil and Violet were at the beach on the movie poster). He doesn’t have a prosthetic in the anime because, apparently, he was more worried about disappearing as fast as possible to somewhere he would never be found, and never attempted to contact anybody. So nobody knew that he was alive, hence the grave, which, as we feared, was not a fake one. His family really did think he had died.

This is a point that I have already addressed before, but that also means Gil really did abandon Violet to luck. If anything dangerous ever happened to her (as it did, and it was always very obviously likely to happen, since she was the southern army’s most outstanding soldier and quite literally fled from the military), he wouldn’t even know. If word ever got to him, it would probably be too late. And even if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to help her. More than allowing her to live freely, it felt like he was running away from his responsibilities regarding Violet.

Punch on the face count is currently at six.

By sheer coincidence, Violet learns that Gil is living in that island. She goes to see him and Hodgins goes with her after trying to stop her at first. When Gil finds out that they came to see him, he outright refuses to meet them. It pretty much takes the near entirety of the goddamn movie for them to see each other face-to-face. I say face-to-face because all of the following shit happens:

Hodgins goes to talk to Gil. It lasts about 20 minutes.

Gil talks to Violet from behind a door. This one is about 10 minutes.

Dietfried also comes to the island to talk to him. Also about 10 minutes.

At long fucking last, Gil goes to see Violet. But that, too, is only for about 10 minutes.

Hodgins gives him a speech very similar to what happens in chapter 8. Now get ready to fall back from your seats: Dietfried basically goes there to tell Gil that he won’t run away from taking over the family anymore, so Gil can live freely. Yes, Dietfried is officially a better Gilbert than Gilbert himself. I crave death.

So, after much ado, they come to a conclusion: Gil will stay in the island. In order to completely free himself of the shackles of his bloodline, he stays behind, living the way he wants to. ‘Cause all anime!Gil wants is to rot away alone by the sea, apparently. Now prepare yourselves, for it gets worse. Ready?

Violet stays with him in the motherfucking island.

That’s right, ladies and gents. Another fear became true. She quits her job at the CH Postal Company and goes to live with him. Well, at least, not as a housewife. She starts working with mail services in the island, and Gil helps her with it. Her life goes on like this and she dies in the island as well.

This is where the timeline after Violet passes away comes into light, parallel to the era when Violet was alive. Daisy talks about what happened after Violet left CH, as if it were a tale from the distant past.

That’s it.

The movie paints this as a happy ending. I can hardly see it as one. I know it almost looks like everything was solved, but it just got swept under the rug.

The main point that makes me sad in this ending is that Violet’s character development did a 360 degree flip. In the end, she threw everything to the air and went to live in someone who she always put before everyone else, even herself, but who didn’t do the same for her (in the anime). She’s gone to a crammed little island, where she led an uneventful life away from everyone and everything that’s ever had a positive impact on her. All she has is Gil.

Of course, he’s all she needs, but he isn’t all she should have, and that was the entire point of pushing her to go live on her own. Which is exactly what she earns in the novel: two loving parents, a father figure, a brother figure, a best friend and several other friends and acquaintances whom she formed a bond with. She has all she needs, so she doesn’t have to cling to Gil for any reason. There’s no emotional dependance on him anymore. She doesn’t need him to be whole. She just wants him because he happens to be the best person she’s ever met.

Anime!Violet is most definitely not whole. She almost got there, but then she backtracked completely. And anime!Gil... in my friend’s words, is a weakling. There’s nothing in him actually worth all this undying blind love. Sure, he’s full of regret and shit, but it’s too easy to only act upon it now, by vanishing into thin air like a coward.

The deal with novel!Gil is that he looks around at everything he has, everything that had been burdening him and killing him on the inside all his life, and decides to make use of it for Violet’s sake. He continues being family head and working in the army, amassing money and connections in order to have every means possible to protect Violet should anything happen to her. And as it turns out, he does end up having to use those means, more than once, but he will keep this up for as long as he needs to, because he lives for her now. That’s what makes him worth all the blood, sweat, tears, mental sanity and even body parts that she gave away for his sake: he pays it back. Every cent.

Punch in the face count ends at twelve. Thirteen if I include the fact that the movie ends with a last shot of Violet after she and Gilbert do a pinky swear. Looks like they were really trying to buy everyone with tears.

Oh, well.

I hope this has been a good enough summary. Sorry if I rained on anyone’s parade. I’m pretty sure we won’t get a remake ever, so I really wish we all can get over this soon.

#violet evergarden #fyeahvioletevergarden #kyoani #kyoto animation #violet evergarden movie #summary #gilbert bougainvillea #claudia hodgins #dietfried bougainvillea

[laurensprentiss]

Jouska [Hotch x Reader]

Chapter 2:

Warnings: Mentions of firearms, stalking. *Tension*

Word Count: 1,843

———

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” - Oscar Wilde

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You curse yourself as you walk down the concrete path, leading the way for Hotch to follow behind you. Spring in Virginia is unreliable and you suddenly find yourself cold and underdressed in your skirt and turtleneck. The cold is harsh as you hug your arms close to your body, your teeth chattering slightly. Your father advised that maybe it would be best if you and Agent Hotchner got to know one another better, and where better than right here on your father’s sprawling estate, where he could make sure you were safe.

You hear rustling behind you as Hotch catches up. “Here, ma’am. Let me.” You do a double take to see Hotch shrugging off his suit blazer, his shoulders broad and arms strong, gun holstered on his hip. You hold out your arms as he slips the oversized blazer through your arms from behind you, unconsciously rubbing your arm as he does. You steal a quick glance up at him as he stands over you, to find he’s already watching you intently, his gaze flickering to your lips again. You smile and look away.

“Aren’t you cold?” You worry, as he shrugs.

He chuckles and rubs a hand over his beard. “I tend to run a little hot anyway. Besides, my mother would kill me if she knew I hadn’t offered a lady my jacket in the cold.” He finds himself staring at you unwittingly, taken by the sight of his too-big blazer wrapped around your body.

You raise your eyebrows in amusement and laugh. “Ah, so he's a gentleman?” You tease. You cross the blazer over your body and bury your face in the collar, inhaling his scent, something citrusy and musk. It’s warm. Comforting. You feel butterflies in your stomach as you look back up at him and nudge him. 

“Thank you. You’re sweet.” You smile. 

You both find your stride as you start to walk together, down the concrete steps and towards the grounds. “So. FBI huh? My father tells me you’re a profiler too?” You inquire as you look up at him.

His dimples peek through as he smiles gently, his hands in his pockets now, more relaxed. “Ah not quite. I’m training to be a profiler and I had the requisite training to be on a security detail, so here I am.” He explains. “Your father told me you were supposed to head off to Yale this summer? What’s your major?”

“Poli-Sci.” You lament. “Family tradition, but I’d love to do something like criminology or psychology.” He nods his understanding as you continue. “Ultimately, I know Dad wants me to do whatever makes me happy, but the thought of breaking tradition? It’s scary, you know?” 

“Yeah-“ He stops himself. You look up at him as he shakes his head. “Never mind.” You raise your eyebrows and ask for him to go on but he declines by saying it would be breaking protocol. 

You stop walking and stare at him a moment and he breaks. “Look it’s okay, I know the feeling. My father, he was a lawyer. His father too. But if you know your heart’s somewhere else, maybe it’s best to go with that.” 

“Wow.” You nod and resume walking. “So you’re a gentleman, and a fountain of wisdom. Got it.” You chuckle. 

You fall into a comfortable silence, stealing glances at each other, his stride in keeping with yours, bodies just close enough to touch. You pass a row of kept maple trees and down to an old black gazebo where you remember spending your childhood, sheltering yourself from the rain, or playing hostess with your late mother. You perch yourself on the ledge, swinging your legs as Hotch maintains a distance from you.

“Hey, so-“

“-I” He apologises and signals for you to go first. 

You wince slightly as you take a breath. “I was just going to say, that I suppose we should talk about the elephant in the room?” His face steels and his chest rises, his mouth open.

“The- I’m sorry. The what?” He enquires. 

 “I take it my father showed you the pictures the stalker took of me?” You watch his shoulders drop and his face relax as he realises. 

“Yes ma’am-” 

“Please. No ‘ma’am’. I feel like my grandmother. Just call me by my name.” You joke. 

 “Sorry.” He sheepishly rubs the back of his neck. “But to answer your question, yes, I did see the photographs, your father showed me the file. I also saw the uh-” 

He pauses, not knowing quite how to continue. “-The notes.” He walks closer to where you’re sat on the ledge, the both of you almost the same height this way as he continues. You watch him try to find the words. “I don’t want to alarm you unnecessarily, but you know this is serious? I mean the notes in and of themselves are a huge issue but given the fact that you’re someone in the public eye, it’s-”

“- I know. It’s why I’ve been living here, which makes it hard because I have an internship and an apartment in Georgetown.” You explain that you love being closer to home, and to your father but not having your independence makes you feel as though you’re suffocating. “But I’m going to be moving back.” You explain. 

Aaron stares at you in surprise and immediately advises against it, walking closer to you until you’re face to face to list the reasons why he thinks it’s a bad idea. You understand the gravity of the situation but you can’t help but stare at the way his lips move when he speaks, and how his arms and shoulders seem so strong, his dress shirt fitted just perfectly. How his hair looks so soft and how he still towers over you, his scent all around you. You realise he’s stopped talking and is just staring at you, waiting for you to respond, his hand holding the ledge next to you, encasing you in. 

Your breath catches and you swallow, looking up at him with wide eyes as you realise his gaze is fixed on yours, his eyes soft and glancing at your lips. His tongue darts out to wet his lips and you can feel heat rising on the back of your neck, your heartbeat pronounced. You swallow again, taking a deep breath and losing your nerve. You hop off the ledge and walk around him, needing some distance. “Look, you make fair points, but seeing as I have permanent security until we catch this son of a bitch, I don’t think it’s too outlandish. I’ve discussed it with my dad, too.” You reason. Hotch is still frozen in place. 

You continue, “-Besides, me being locked away here, isn’t going to help catch him. He knows he can’t get to me here. But giving him a chance to think he can get to me might work! And I don’t want to put my entire life on hold because of some psycho who thinks I owe him something. If he gets too close, you can catch him, right? Set some sort of trap or something?” He turns now, watching as you dart around the gazebo reasoning that it could be safe. 

He explains that he needs to clear it with his superiors and the Ambassador before he can allow it to happen, but that ultimately, he will try his best to make sure your needs and wants are met. You nod in understanding. “Look, the last I want to do is to put you in an uncomfortable situation, but you get where I’m coming from, right, Agent Hotchner?” 

He has a strange feeling in his chest when he hears his name come from your mouth but he plays it off, promising he’ll discuss it with Barnes and your father today. You thank him as you slide past him to get to the steps of the gazebo and return back to the house. You walk back down the path you came from, in a comfortable but buzzing silence, the both of you trying to make sense of the moment you shared back there, as you steal a glance at his face, his brows furrowed and his jaw hard. He catches you, his eyes on yours as he asks, “You okay?”

You take a beat. “Yeah.” You nod. “Yeah, I think I am.” You reply as you bury your nose in the collar of his blazer. 

----------------- 

You’ve been waiting in the foyer outside of your father’s office for around 40 minutes when the door finally opens. The past 40 minutes had consisted of heated discussions in angry whispers taking place on the other side. Hotch, McCall, Barnes and your father were discussing the matter of whether it would be feasible for you to return to your own apartment, when you had made your opinion more than known. Your father’s assistant calls you in and closes the door behind you as you watch Agents Hotcher and McCall rise from their seats. You hold your breath.

“Well, it appears you can be quite persuasive, young lady.” You rush to his side before he can even finish his sentence, throwing your arms around his shoulders and kissing his cheek. He laughs as he continues, “There are, however, measures that myself and the team will be putting in place to make sure you’re safe while you’re away.” His eyes look tired and worried. “Effective immediately, Agents Hotchner and McCall will be teaching you self-defence and how to safely hold and discharge a firearm. I want you to be in a position to defend yourself, should you need to.” 

You feel worry and a twinge of guilt as you realise you are all your father has left in this world. The thought of your father having to think about how you’re to defend yourself from somebody who has made his intentions this clear, fills you with sadness. You hold his hands in yours and squeeze reassuringly. “Thank you, Dad. I know this isn’t easy, but I’m going to be fine. Okay?” 

He takes a deep breath and cups your face in his hands, placing a kiss on your forehead. “I know, sweetheart. I know.” 

You turn to face Agents Hotchner and McCall to thank them too. You share a knowing smile with Hotch, knowing that while you were indeed persuasive, it was Hotch that would have sealed the deal and that it would have been his idea to implement the self-defence and firearm safety. Your father walks you all out of your office and you turn to reassure him again. He informs you that Agent McCall will be staying for a while longer to finalise the details of the security schedule and that Hotch would drive you to your apartment. 

“Well, I guess we should start packing?” Hotch asks as you both walk out of your father’s office. 

“Who says I’m not already packed?”

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Tags: @andromedasstarship​ @oreogutz​

#Hotch #Aaron hotchner #Hotch x reader #hotch x you #Hotch fluff #hotch smut #criminal minds #criminal minds fic #cm fic rec #thomas gibson

[oscopelabs]

Christopher Nolan: The Man Who Wasn’t There by Daniel Carlson

1.

So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the guidance of a director, saying things that have been written down for them while doing their best to say these things so that it sounds like they’re just now thinking of them. We all know this—saying it feels incredibly stupid, like pointing out that water is wet—but it’s still worth noting. There is, for example, no such person as Luke Skywalker. Never has been, never will be. He was invented by a baby boomer from Modesto. He is not real.

And we know this, and that’s part of the fun. We know that Luke Skywalker isn’t real but is being portrayed by an actor (another boomer from the Bay Area, come to think of it), and that none of the things we’re seeing are real. But we give ourselves over to the collective fiction for the greater experience of becoming involved in a story. This is one of the most amazing things that we do as humans. We know—deep down, in our bones, without-a-doubt know—that the thing we’re watching is fiction, but we enter a state of suspended reality where we imagine the story to be real, and we allow ourselves to be moved by it. We’ve been doing this since we developed language. The people telling these stories know this and bring the same level of commitment and imagination and assurance that we do as viewers, too. The storyteller knows that the story isn’t real, but for lack of a better way to get a handle on it, it feels real. So, to continue with the example, we’re excited when Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star because he helped the good guys win. For us viewers, in this state of mutually reinforced agreement, that “happened.” It’s not real, but it’s “real”—that is, it’s real within the established boundaries of the invented world that we’ve all agreed to sit and look at for a couple of hours. Every viewer knows this, and every filmmaker acts on it, too. Except:

Christopher Nolan does not do this.

2.

There’s no one single owner or maker of any movie, and anyone who tells you different has their hand in your pocket. But there’s an argument to be made that when somebody both writes and directs the movie, it’s a bit easier to locate a sense of personhood in the final product. (This is all really rough math, too, and should not be used in court.) Christopher Nolan has directed 11 films to date, and while his style can be found in all of them, his self is more present in the ones where he had a hand in the shaping of the story—and crucially, not just that, but in the construction of the fictional world. Take away the superhero trilogy, the remake of a Norwegian thriller, the adaptation of a novel, and the historical drama, and Nolan’s directed five films that can reasonably be attributed to his own creative universe: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020). These movies all involve themes that Nolan seems to enjoy working with no matter the source material, including identity, memory, and how easily reality can be called into question when two people refuse to concede that they had very different experiences of the same event. Basically, he makes movies about how perception shapes existence. How he does this, though, is unlike pretty much everybody else.

Take Inception. After a decade spent going from hotshot new talent to household name (thanks to directing the two highest-grossing Batman movies ever made, as well as the first superhero movie to earn an Oscar for acting), he had the credit line to make something big and flashy that was also weird and personal. So we got an action movie that, when first announced in the Hollywood trades, was described as being set within “the architecture of the mind.” Although this at first seemed to be a phrase that only a publicist could love, it turned out to be the best way to describe the film. This is a film, after all, about a group of elite agents who use special technology to enter someone’s subconscious dream-state and then manipulate that person’s memories and emotions. The second half of the film sees team leader Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the rest of the squad actually descend through multiple nested subconsciouses to achieve their goal, even as they’re chased every step of the way by representations of Mal (Marion Cotillard), Dom’s late wife, who committed suicide after spending too much time in another’s subconscious and lost the ability to discern whether she was really alive or still in the dream-world.

I say “representations” because that’s what they are: Mal is long dead, but Dom still feels enormous guilt over his complicity in her actions, and that guilt shows up looking like Mal, whose villainous actions (the representation’s actions, that is) are just more signs of Dom not being able to come to grips with his own past. It’s his own brain making these things up and attacking itself, and it chases his entire crew down three successive layers of dream worlds. You get caught up in the movie’s world as a viewer, and you go along because Nolan is pretty good at making exciting movies that feel like theme-park rides. You accept that Dom and everybody else refer to Mal as Mal and not, say, Dom. Dom even addresses her (“her”) when her projection shows up, speaking to her as if she’s a separate being with her own will and desires and not a puppet that he’s pretending not to know he’s controlling. It’s only later that you realize that the movie is in some ways just a big-budget rendition of what it would look like to really, really want to avoid therapy.

Which is what makes Nolan different from other filmmakers:

None of this is actually happening.

Again, yes, it’s happening in the sense that we see things on screen—explosions, chases, a fight scene in a rotating hallway that’s still some of the best practical-effects work in modern action movies—but within the universe of the film, none of what’s going on is taking place in the real world. It’s all unfolding in the subconsciouses of Dom’s teammates. In the movie’s real world, they’re all asleep on a luxury jet. They’re “doing” things that have an outcome on the plot, but Nolan sets more than half the movie inside dreams. It’s a movie about reality where we spend less time in reality than in fantasy. Half the movie is pretend.

For Nolan, filmmaking is about using a dazzling array of techniques to create a visual spectacle that distracts the viewer from the fact that the real and true story is happening somewhere else: in the fringes we can’t quite see, in the things we forget to remember, or even in the realm of pure speculation.

3.

Memento arrived like (and with) a gunshot. It seemed to come out of nowhere and leave people struggling to describe it, and they usually wound up saying something like “it goes backward, but also forward at the same time, except some parts are actually really backward, like in reverse, so it’s maybe a circle?” Written by Christopher Nolan from an idea originally shared with him by his brother, Jonathan (who eventually turned it into a very different short story titled “Memento Mori”), the film follows a man named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who has anterograde amnesia and can’t form new memories, so every few minutes he sort of just resets and has to figure out where he is, what he’s doing there, and so on. He’s on the hunt for the man who attacked him and his wife, leaving his wife dead and Leonard in his present condition, which you can imagine does not make the gathering and synthesis of clues easy.

What’s more, Nolan puts the viewer in Leonard’s shoes by breaking the film’s linear timeline into two halves—call them A and B—and then alternating between them, with the added disorientation coming from the fact that one of those timeline halves plays out backward, with each successive scene showing what happened before the one you previously saw. So, if you numbered all the scenes in each timeline in chronological order, they’d look something like this when arranged in the final film: Scene A1, Scene B22, Scene A2, Scene B21, Scene A3, Scene B20, etc. You get why it messed with people’s heads.

As a result, we spend most of the movie pretty confused, just like Leonard, whose suppositions about what might or might not take place next begin to substitute for our own understanding of the film. It’s not until the end that we find out the shoe already dropped, and that Leonard killed the original attacker some time ago and has since been led on a series of goose chases by his cop friend, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who’s planting fake clues to get Leonard to take out other criminals. In other words, we realize that the story we thought was happening was pretend, and the real story was happening all around us, in the margins, memories, and imaginations of the characters. The most honest moment in the movie is the scene where Leonard hires a sex worker to wait several minutes in the bathroom while he gets in bed, then make a noise with the door to wake him, at which point his amnesia has kicked in again and he briefly thinks that the noise is being made by his wife. He’s wrong, of course, but this is the only time in the movie that we actually know he’s wrong. It’s the only time we truly know what’s real and what isn’t.

Yet you can’t talk about Memento without talking about Following, Nolan’s first feature. Although the film’s production was so extremely low-budget you’d think they were lying—the cast and crew all had day jobs and could only film on the weekends, so the thing took a year to make—Nolan’s willingness to dwell completely in a make-believe world that the viewer never knows about is already evident. It’s about a bored young writer who starts following strangers through the city for kicks, only for one of those strangers to catch him in the act and confront him. The stranger introduces himself as Cobb—I kindly submit here that it is not a coincidence that this is also Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s name in Inception, but you already knew that—and reveals himself to be a burglar, spooked by the tail but willing to take on an apprentice. Cobb trains the writer to be a burglar, only for the situation to ultimately wind up implicating the writer himself in a complex blackmail plot. You see, the writer didn’t latch onto Cobb in a crowd; Cobb lured him in. The whole movie has been Cobb’s story all along, with the writer as a patsy who doesn’t understand the truth until the final frame. None of what we saw mattered, and everything that actually happened happened off-screen just before or just after we came in on a given scene. It’s like realizing the movie you’re watching turned out to be just deleted scenes from something else. You can’t say Nolan didn’t show his hand from the start.

4.

That same general concept—that the movie we’re watching is actually the knock-on effect of a movie we’ll only glimpse, or maybe never even see—underpins Nolan’s latest movies, Interstellar and Tenet, too. Interstellar has some concepts that are iffy even for Nolan (it makes total sense for someone to do something for another out of love, but somewhat less sense that that love somehow reshapes the physical universe), but it’s still a big, bold approach to exploring how time and perception shape our actions. As the film follows its core group of astronauts while they search for potentially habitable new worlds, they encounter strange visions and experiences that turn out to be their handiwork from the future reflected back at them. Sure, it raises the paradoxical question of whether they had a first mission before this that failed, so now their future selves are intervening to make the second one (which feels like the first one to the astronauts the whole time) successful, and all sorts of other stuff that your sophomore-year roommate would like to talk with you about in great detail. But so much of what we see isn’t the stuff that happens, or that winds up being important. There’s the great scene where the astronauts land on a planet near a black hole, which is wreaking havoc on how time passes on the planet. A minor disaster delays their departure for the main ship still in orbit, but when the landing team returns, they find that more than 20 years have “passed” since they left, with the one remaining team member on the ship having spent more than two decades waiting for them to return. It’s a moment of genuine horror, and it underscores the fact that what we thought was the one true reality was just the perspective of a handful of characters we happened to follow for a few minutes. There were whole things happening that changed the plot and story and direction of everything that would follow, and we never saw them; we didn’t even know we’d missed them.

Tenet is, of course, the latest and most recursive exploration yet of Nolan’s obsession with showing us a story that turns out to be mostly fake. It is almost perversely hard to even begin to explain the film (Google “Tenet timeline infographic” and have fun). One way to think about it is to imagine if the two timeline halves from Memento somehow existed at the same time, with people moving both forward and backward through time while inhabiting the same location. Basically, some scientists figured out how to “invert” the basic entropy of objects, so that they exist backward: you hold out your hand and the ball on the ground leaps up into it, because you’ve dropped it in the future, so now you can pick it up, etc. … Look, it doesn’t get easier to understand.

The upshot is, though, that we spend the film following the Protagonist (that’s his name), a CIA agent played by John David Washington, as he’s tasked with tracking down the source of the inverted stuff to figure out what’s unfolding in the future and why it’s suddenly started to make itself known in the present. He gets marginally closer to understanding the truth by the end of the film, but because this is a Nolan film that is maybe more expressly about the nature of reality than anything he’s ever done, his journey doesn’t so much take him forward as it does in a large circle. Because, and stop me if you’ve heard this, the true story of Tenet is taking place outside the Protagonist’s actions and knowledge, alongside him but invisible, often steered by people who themselves are moving “backward” through time and thus have already met the Protagonist in the future and are old friends with him by the time he meets them in his youth. Even more brain-liquefying, some of these people have been working under the orders of the Protagonist himself—the future version, that is—because his past self has already achieved the victories that allowed him to send the future people backward through time to meet his younger self so they’d achieve the victories that allow him to etc., etc., etc.

With Tenet, Nolan didn’t just make a movie that challenged perception, like Memento, or that dwelt in fiction, like Inception. He made a movie that can only be understood (to whatever degree true understanding is possible) by rewatching the movie itself, over and over, as the multiple timelines and harrowingly complex bits of cause and effect come into some kind of focus. The whole movie itself isn’t happening, in a sense, but is just the ramifications of something else, the echoes of a shout whose origin we’re straining to pinpoint. It both is and isn’t.

5.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director of action-driven suspense thrillers. He’s canny at controlling the audience’s emotions, and he knows how to put on a dazzling show. Plus he’s fantastic at picking when to deploy non-computer-generated effects for maximum impact. But you could say that about a lot of other directors, too. What sets Nolan apart from the rest, and what makes him a director to keep watching and returning to, is the teasing way his movies wind up being just deceptive enough to fool you into thinking that you know what’s going on, then just harsh enough to disabuse you of that notion. Looking at what seems to drive him, I don’t think Tenet is his best movie-movie, but it’s his most-Nolan movie. It’s almost a culmination of his continuing efforts to tell stories where what you see and what actually happens are two different things. It’s not that he makes puzzles to solve. There is no solving these movies. Rather, it’s that he sculpts these delicate artifacts that only let you see two dimensions at a time, never all three, no matter how you twist your head. Craning back and forth, you can almost see the whole thing, but not quite. Some part of it will always have to exist in your memory. And that’s where Christopher Nolan likes to be.

#chrisopher nolan #tenet #memento #following #following movie #christopher nolan film #inception #inception film #memento film #tenet film #interstellar #interstellar film #oscilloscope laboratories #musings #film writing #beastie boys

[artificialqueens]

Galactica, Chapter 71 (Group Fic) - TheDane/Veronica

A/N: Fun fact: this rewrite is now the second-longest fic in the Drace Race RPF section of AO3. (Second only to the original story, lol.) So if you’re looking for a lot of content…we’ve got you. ;) Click here if you’re looking for previous chapters (or here if you’d rather read on AO3). 💫

Previously: Violet revealed her estranged relationship with her family to Sutan, and Courtney struggled to live up to Miss Fame’s demands.

This Chapter: Some uncharacteristic vulnerability from Violet, Met Gala meetings and morning television.

***

“Do you want more marshmallows?”

“I always want more marshmallows.”

Katya grinned as she got up from the kitchen table, grabbing Trixie’s mug to top them both up. They were decorating gingerbread men, Katya pulling them from the oven last night. Trixie was doing clothes, drawing in the lines and putting details on them, one of his favorite jobs.

It was a tradition of theirs, spending the Sunday before Christmas in their pajamas, preparing cookies and watching Home Alone, the leftover icing always ending up in the bedroom for some sticky afternoon fun.

***

“Aaaand release...”

“Oh god,” Sutan groaned, rolling onto his back and spreading out like a starfish. “I’m dead.”

When he had jokingly asked if he could join Violet for her yoga session, he hadn’t figured she’d say yes, and he definitely hadn’t expected that it’d be this hard, those last few breaths of extended child’s pose essentially torture where he could feel his bones bend and creak.

“Stop being so dramatic,” Violet grinned, his girlfriend sitting back on her knee, the leg with her cast spread out to the side. “We only did 40 minutes.”

“You’re not even sweating.” Sutan looked at her, Violet’s hair in a high ponytail, the Sunday look of one of his shirts and a sports bra quickly becoming a fave.

“Some of us remember to do more than weights and cardio, Mr. Amrull.”

“I’m texting my trainer right now,” Sutan reached over his head, grabbing his phone that he had left on the floor next to their mats, Violet giggling as she laid down next to him, putting her head on his shoulder.

“There,” Sutan pressed send, his trainer probably falling off of his chair when he read the message, Sutan always attempting to get away with the bare minimum when it came to exercise, but he refused to be humiliated by being unable to reach his toes.

He was just about to put his phone down, when Violet reached up and tapped the screen, his front camera opening up, both of them in frame as they were lying on the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking a picture?” Violet smiled, her sarcastic tone never wavering. “To document the moment.”

Sutan looked at the screen. It was so incredibly tempting to say yes, to keep this moment in the private password protected collection that had steadily grown since Thanksgiving, Violet really and truly trying to let him take pictures, but he couldn’t say yes, not when he knew why she was so confident.

“And can I post it?”

“Post it?” Violet raised an eyebrow, sitting up on her elbows. “Why? Isn’t your hair...?”

“A mess?” Sutan didn’t want to smile, but it was impossible not to, Violet knowing him way too well if she had already figured out that he was sometimes embarrassingly vain about his hairstyle, the mess on his head looking like he had been fucking for an hour. “Yes, but I still want to post it.”

“I-” Violet had pulled away completely now, not a single trace of the sweetness left. “No.”

“Violet,” Sutan sat up as well, putting his phone down, “I know you hate social media, but you’re my girlfriend, and I don’t think what I ask for is unreasonable-”

“Sutan. Please” Violet grabbed her mat and rolled it together in an attempt to avoid him. “I said no.”

“And I’m pushing because I don’t understand.” Sutan could feel the annoyance build, the hurt and the rejection. It stung every single time Violet denied him, hurt every time she neglected what they had.

“I’m not saying we have to announce it with a workout selfie,” Sutan hated that they were fighting, but he couldn’t help himself, “but I want to tell the world that we’re together.”

“And I don’t-” Violet looked at him, her brown eyes filled with hurt. “If the world knows, they know, and I don’t want them to know where I am or what I’m doing.”

There it was. The they, the them, the family from Atlanta that was haunting his girlfriend's life like a shadow that had slowly started to creep into his too.

“Violet, I hate to be the one to tell you,” Sutan didn’t touch her, simply putting his hand down on the floor next to hers, telling her that he was there. “But the internet exists. If they have your name, they can find you, no matter what you do to hide.”

“Have you taken a moment to consider that they might not have that?”

Sutan paused, Violet’s words like a bomb.

“... What?”

Did her family not have her name? It was true that Violet Chachki barely got any hits on google, that it was Parson’s assignments and internships that popped up, the Galactica employee directory right at the top, but Sutan had never considered that possibility, had never even toyed with it.

“This wasn’t how I planned on telling you. Actually, I probably wasn’t counting on telling you at all, but I’m not…” Violet was fiddling with the tiniest hole in her yoga mat, her fingers tugging on the foam. “I wasn’t born Violet. Wasn’t even born a Chachki. Hasn’t it ever seemed weird to you that my last name literally means trinket?”

“It does?”

“Mmh,” Violet smiled, the same heavy sadness he had seen in the hospital in her eyes. “I needed to not be… Blair anymore.”

“Blair?”

“Yes,” Violet nodded. “Blair Dardo. It was my birth name. I never liked it, and I changed it the moment I turned 18, left it behind the second I could. That’s why I can’t,” Violet gestured vaguely to Sutan’s phone. “Changing it meant that they can’t, that they can’t find me, and I-”

Sutan didn’t know what to say, but it felt like he had just been given another puzzle piece in the mystery that was his girlfriend.

“I’m sorry.”

Violet’s head snapped to attention, her eyes widening in confusion. “...What?”

“I’m sorry.” Sutan said it again, making sure he put his genuine emotion behind the words. “I should have realized that you weren’t saying no to be difficult, and yet I kept pushing.”

“Sutan-” Violet still looked confused and a little suspicious, like she didn’t really understand what he was doing. “You don’t have to-”

“No but I do.” Sutan smiled. “I get it now, and I’m sorry, but next time you have a deep dark secret, maybe you could just tell me instead of this charade-”

Sutan was cut off as Violet threw herself in his arms, knocking him down on the floor and kissing him like her life depended on it, gratitude rolling off of her in waves.

***

“Raja?”

Alyssa held out the plate of croissants, Raja waving it away since she didn’t want one. The entire senior management team was gathered in the  conference room, Fame for some ungodly reason always insisting on a full breakfast spread for their Monday meetings, even though only a fraction of them ever actually ate any of it.

“So,” Fame looked around, a gold fountain pen in her hand, a black moleskin notebook open in front of her. “Any updates?”

The theme of today's meeting was the 2015 Met Gala, Raja barely hiding a groan when Courtney had sent out the meeting agenda.

It wasn’t that she disliked the Met Gala, the first Monday in May a spectacular party, but it was such a hassle getting there, the gala the fashion world's version of the Oscars.

“Yes,” Pearl smiled, turning around in her chair. She was weirdly chipper, her blonde hair collected in a clip, her signature leather jacket exchanged with a cropped black fur. “We have the final confirmation from Jessica Chastain’s team. She’s in.”

“Good,” Fame nodded, making a note in her moleskin, the fact that Fame was actually writing herself more than enough to cement the severity of the situation. Courtney was standing against the wall, Ivy sitting at the table with her computer open, typing away, but when it came to the Met, Fame left nothing up to chance.

“She’s looking forward to working with us, and she says she’s honored-”

“Yada yada yada,” Fame made a hand puppet, and Raja had to hide a smile, Pearl leaning back in her chair with a roll of her eyes, mouthing at everyone else that she’d send a follow up email.

It was Fame who had requested Jessica, in her own roundabout way, her friend casually mentioning to Raja that she had a good smile, which was more than enough for Raja to make Pearl offer her up as Galactica’s celebrity face.

It wasn’t every house who did it, but the big ones always had a celebrity at the gala, wearing their clothes and repping the brand.

“Does anyone know if they’ve moved away from the terrible theme yet?”

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Alaska offered up, the promotional material the Met had sent out at the start of the fall in the middle of the table thanks to Ivy’s forthsight. “It’s December, and since we haven’t heard anything, they’re sticking with China's influence on western fashion.”

“Good god, I was really hoping they had come to their senses.” Fame breathed out through her nose, and Raja had to agree with her. Sure, ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ made sense as an art exhibition, but there was really no way to convert it to fashion without being culturally insensitive at best and offensively appropriative at worst.

Besides, Galactica had never been a brand that sought inspiration from the east in their designs and aesthetics, which made the entire situation quite the predicament.

“I’m sure we can work with it,” Trixie gave a small smile, the stack of papers by his elbow indicating that he had probably already put his senior designers to work coming up with concepts.

“And how,” Fame turned, looking directly at Trixie. “Are we supposed to work with it? Raja’s the only one who could possibly get away with being theme appropriate.”

Usually, Fame and Raja were the ones who walked the carpet together with their celebrity, Fame a nervous wreck for weeks before the gala because of all the strangers, while Raja enjoyed it because of her modeling days, seeing old acquaintances without the stresses of fashion week, a delightful yearly treat.

“I’m Indonesian.” Raja knew Fame didn’t mean anything by it, and she wasn’t that concerned about being politically correct herself, but everyone knew what it could mean for a fashion house to misstep, Dolce and Gabbana somehow walking directly from one scandal and into another one. “Not Chinese.”

“See?” Fame sighed, leaning back in her chair. “It’s a controversial time bomb. Either, we stay on theme, which I refuse since I look terrible in Chinese red, ”

“So we’re going off theme?” Trixie had picked up his papers, sorting through them, and Raja felt a moment of gratitude for their head of design, Trixie of course coming prepared with off-theme suggestions as well.

“Unless they get a grip and change it? Yes. Yes we are.”

*

“There!” Everyone held their breath as Maxwell pointed at Violet’s screen, an email from Ivy just ticking in, the Met Gala meeting still in full swing.

“Open it, Chachki!” Blu was practically biting her nails, hopping from one foot to the other, her red hair in a braid over her shoulder.

“Alright, alright-“ Violet clicked on the email, Bob standing right behind her, his eyes flying over the screen before he called out.

“It’s Jessica!”

A collective sigh of relief went through the floor, a loud ‘yes’ coming from Kiara who was clapping her hands together, the group breaking up, chatter filling the air.

“Thank god,” Maxwell groaned, putting a hand on Violet’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I knew having you here would be worth it Chachki.”

“Right.” Violet raised an eyebrow, looking up at him, clearly not understanding why no one had thought to simply ask Ivy for updates before, the suggestion just casually slipping from her during morning coffee, the entire department running with it instantly. “But I still don’t-“

“Get it?” They turned to look over at Jovan who was sitting at his own desk, the man one of the few who hadn’t gathered around Violet’s computer.

“Yes.” Violet nodded. “If you needed information all this time, you could have just asked-”

“Like we could have just asked you?” Bob said, cutting her off and Violet opened her mouth, only to close it again. “Exactly.” Bob grinned. “You would have told us to fuck off.”

“I see your point.” Violet tapped her fingers on her desk, a small smile on her lips since everyone knew she would have said those exact words directly to their faces when she had been in Fame’s front office. “But, why is it such a big deal if a celeb is confirmed or not? The gala isn’t until May, that’s 4 months away and it’s three outfits. A whole collection is usually done in that time.”

“A collection doesn’t have to be approved by the celebrity,” Maxwell counted on his fingers, “the celebrity’s stylist, Vogue and Anna Wintour personally on top of Trixie, Raja and Fame. Alexis usually starts producing concepts in October.”

“As soon as they reveal the theme girl!” Alexis yelled over her shoulder, already pulling her sketches from their shelf, the confirmation meaning that she’d be in a meeting with Trixie for the rest of the day, working out the details of the first round of negotiations with the celebrity.

“Huh…” Violet looked around, the puzzled expression still on her face. “And what about-“

“Fame and Raja?”

Violet nodded.

“You’d think Fame would be the difficult one-“ Maxwell smiled.

“But make something gorgeous and custom in ivory and she’s on board,” Jovan grinned, putting the pen he was using behind his ear as he turned around in his chair. “Every year, she pretends like she’ll follow the theme, and then never does.”

“Exactly.” Maxwell nodded. “Fame is demanding, but consistent. Trixie has an entire drawer of Fame-appropriate outfits that we all contribute to whenever we have an idea.”

“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” Violet looked mildly impressed, and if any of the rumors Maxwell had heard about how she had managed Fame’s front office, that approach wasn’t too far off from how Violet herself had attempted to tame the beast.

“Rule one of surviving at Galactica: Never disappoint Miss Fame. For once, however, Fame isn’t the problem.” Maxwell sighed, taking a seat on the edge of Violet’s desk. “Raja is.”

“Raja?” Violet looked genuinely surprised. “Really?”

“Yes really.” Maxwell crossed his arms. “Every year, she tells us that she’s chill, that she’ll wear whatever goes with the spring collection or the theme-“

“And every single year, she changes her mind at least four times.” Bob chimed in, the drama loving smirks on his lip. “More if you’re lucky.”

“Which is why,” Maxwell nudged Bob’s side with his elbow. “We’ve unanimously decided that you have the honor of dressing Raja for this year's Met Gala.”

“Me?” Violet’s eyes widened. “What? Why?” Violet looked at them, confusion painted on her face. “I’m the most junior member of staff.”

“True, but you’re also sucking her brother's dick,” Maxwell grinned, “so we figured she can’t kill you during the process, unlike the rest of us mere mortals.”

***

It should have been one of the most exciting mornings since Courtney started at Galactica--Miss Fame and Raja were being interviewed on a talk show, and so she got to go to the famous 30 Rockefeller Plaza building, and be on the set of a real television show. Unfortunately, it was such a whirlwind of activity and Miss Fame was in such a demanding mood that she didn’t have a second to enjoy it.

She felt like a chicken with its head cut off, running around in a hectic scramble to meet every request. Today was the last day before their holiday break, and even though Courtney knew that spending her break with Bianca would be incredible, she also knew that she had about a billion things to do before that could even start. Today was supposed to be a half day, but with how packed the schedule was, she’d be lucky to leave by 5.

She entered Miss Fame’s green room, silently handing her the coffee she’d asked for and then leaning on the wall to catch her breath. Miss Fame took a sip and then immediately spit the coffee back out.

“What is this?” she asked, holding the cup out like it was a bag of dog shit.

“It’s your usual-”

“This is not my usual. This is weak, and not hot enough, and-did you just roll your eyes?”

“No, Miss!” Courtney insisted, praying that she was telling the truth. She was tired, having arrived at the office at 6 am to drop off her stuff for Bianca’s, and there was a teeny tiny chance that she may have (accidentally) rolled her eyes. “Would you like a new-”

“Let me tell you something, Courtney. This may be the last day before a vacation, but I expect you to be fully present and accounted for. We have too many important things going on and I will not accept anything less than your absolute very best. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Now. Please go find me some decent coffee before I get a migraine.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“And after you come back, I need you to go to the dry cleaners. I’ve decided to wear my ivory Valentino suit to meet the investors later.”

“Yes, Miss, will do.”

“That’s all,” Miss Fame said, waving her hand, and Courtney took off back down the labyrinthine hallways of 30 Rock to hunt down a coffee that would meet her standards.

***

“Good morning! Welcome back to Coast to Coast. I’m Nina West, and today we are positively blessed to have with us the icons of fashion, Miss Fame and Raja Gemini of Galactica, here to talk to us about dressing to impress in the new year, and their exciting new business ventures. Thank you so much for being here, ladies!”

“Thank you, we’re thrilled to be here,” Fame smiled, the lie easily falling out of her red painted lips.

Raja could see the way her hands were clenched in her lap, her wedding ring turned inward and digging into her palm, and knew that she was at her tensest.

Raja had long ago gotten used to giving live interviews. She had a laid-back attitude and while she always wanted to represent the company in the most flattering light, she tended to relax and let the conversation flow naturally.

Fame, however, had never quite gotten the hang of it in the same way. She was just so brand-conscious, almost to a debilitating degree, written interviews so much more her speed.

She always looked impeccable, very much the ice goddess she was so often called, but Fame had never gotten the same confidence in her speaking skills as Raja, who had been dragged through developing them in her modeling career.

Even though Fame hated being on live TV, they occasionally got an offer they couldn’t turn down, and between the makeup line being released in January and the overhaul of their website and online store, they had a lot to plug.

The whole thing was so stressful Fame had asked Raja four times to check her pits for sweat stains, her papers with facts from the makeup department and pointers from Pearl not leaving her hand until they literally had to go on.

Raja leaned forward, giving Fame’s shoulder a reassuring pat, and added, “This is our favorite show, we never miss it!”

“Aww, thank you!” said Nina, grinning. “Now, I’ve heard through the grapevine that you have an exciting announcement.”

“Yes, and we’re so happy to be able to share the news with your viewers first-”

“An exclusive!” Nina exclaimed, eyes comically wide and mouth open as if this was news to her.

“Yes, exactly. Early this year, we released a limited makeup line, and it’s been doing just wonderfully. So in 2015, we’re going to be rolling out a full line of makeup and skincare, with special edition palettes and colors all throughout the spring.”

“All natural, vegan, cruelty free...I always want the very best for my own skin and I wouldn’t offer our customers anything less,” Fame cut in, and Raja felt a surge of pride at how natural she sounded. All their rehearsing had clearly paid off.

“If you use it, I’ll use it!” Nina said with a chuckle. “You both have the most gorgeous skin I’ve ever seen.”

“We expect the first batch to sell out quickly,” Raja said, “So go straight to our website, Galactica dot com, and sign up to be part of the mailing list to receive alerts on all new product launches and where they’ll show up in stores.”

“I’m doing that, the second we go to commercials,” Nina said. “But first, I heard that there’s more news about your spring line...”

***

Patrick reached for the remote, turning off the TV as Nina West rounded out the segment with Fame and Raja.

He was sitting in his office, wrapping up the last details before the firm could close down for the holiday break.

Fame had done a great job, the nerves he knew she had felt not showing on her beautiful face. Patrick picked up his phone, a smile on his lips as he started to type out a text.

Fame would probably not read it until she left work for the day, but he was proud of her, and he hoped that she was proud of herself too.

***

Fame collapsed onto her dressing room sofa, completely emotionally drained, the crystals she had stuffed in her bra digging against her skin.

Being on camera for live television always took up every drop of energy, and left her with nothing to spare. Unfortunately, she knew that she didn’t have much time to rest, since she was due at the Russian Tea Room to meet her potential investors in less than an hour. The makeup artist they’d hired was standing by for touch-ups, and her ivory Valentino suit hung in its dry cleaning bag on the clothing rack. But first, she knew that her blood sugar was dangerously low, so she needed…

She looked around. Where on earth was Courtney? Fame had never met someone with such a tendency to be underfoot at the worst times and completely MIA when her presence was required. She walked to the doorway, spotting Courtney having a casual chat with a girl in a headset, carefree as anything.

“Courtney!” she snapped, and Courtney looked up, surprised, even though she was literally here for the sole purpose of taking care of Fame’s needs. “Come!”

Fame turned and walked back into her dressing room, irritated, the rapid click of Courtney’s heels as she ran over grating on her nerves.

“Yes, Miss?”

“I need to eat.”

“Oh…” Courtney’s gaze shifted to the table, where a fruit basket sat amongst assorted pastries and other snack food.

“Not that sugary garbage,” Fame explained. “Violet always had- Don’t you have any protein bars?”

“Oh, of course!” Courtney exclaimed, rummaging through her purse.

Fame rolled her eyes, sighing. That girl truly was useless. What Bianca saw in her, Fame would never understand. She took one of the protein bars that Courtney had carefully lined up on the arm of the sofa beside her.

“I think you’d better head back to the office and prepare the conference room for the investor presentation.”

“Oh, but did you need anything el-”

“No, I’m much more concerned with the meeting,” Fame said. “Everything needs to be perfect. These people will be paying attention to every little detail.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Oh, and take this back with you…” Fame handed over a large manila envelope. “It’s some sketches I’ve been working on.”

“Sure.” Courtney began to put the envelope into her bag, and Fame’s eyes widened with alarm.

“Don’t bend them! For god’s sake…”

“Sorry Miss,” Courtney said, biting her lip, holding the envelope at her side. “Is there anything else you need before I-”

“No. That’s all.”

***

Courtney sat in the back of a cab, eyes squeezed tightly shut, using the time in traffic to center herself and go over her massive to do list. She had to make sure that all the presentations for the meeting were set up, work with IT to test it, messenger out the holiday gifts that Miss Fame added at the last minute, make sure the schedule for January was in order, set up her out of office reply…

Plus, the meeting with the investors wouldn’t begin until they were back from the restaurant, so the “half day” was looking more and more like a full day. At this point, settling in at Bianca’s felt like it was a million years away--and traffic crawling at a standstill didn’t help anything.

She pulled out her phone. Maybe she could set up some of the gift deliveries now, while she was stuck in the cab.

When they were finally in sight of the Galactica building, her phone started buzzing. She looked at the screen. Miss Fame. That couldn’t be anything good.

Courtney took a deep breath and answered, stomach tightening.

“Hello?”

“Courtney!” Miss Fame’s voice was sharp, sharper than usual. “Do you ever use your head? Or do you just go through life without a shred of critical thinking?”

It was fairly obvious that it was a rhetorical question, so Courtney kept her mouth shut, wondering what had gone wrong, what mess she’d have to clean up now.

#rpdr fanfiction #thedane #veronica #galactica #trixya #vitan #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #violet chachki #raja gemini #miss fame #pearl liaison #miz cracker #bob the drag queen #yvie oddly #courtney act #nina west #lesbian au #m/f au #fashion au

[rwbyconversations]

RWBY Volume 7 Review

Two weeks out from Volume 8 and I finally cared enough to write this. Go team I guess. 

Part of it came down to my feelings on Volume 7. It’s a complicated season that’s made me realize a lot of my overall feelings on RWBY as a series, particularly a lot of the less flattering feelings. Volume 7 is just... frustrating in general, as for all the good that it does have, and it does have a lot of great elements to it, it’s let down by a frustrating script and writing choices that feel distinctly amateurish, especially as the series moves on and gets better and better looking each year. There’s elements and kernals here of great character writing, season-wide arcs that land in a really good way and get me emotionally invested in the characters. But on the other... Ren only has two hundred words the entire season and you can tell! 

Volume 7 is a season of dizzying highs, some of the best moments of the entire franchise... and some of the series lows. It’s a season where there’s no production reason for its shortcomings... it just comes down to an awkward script that focuses on the wrong elements far too often. Let’s talk about that. In a very long and drawn out manner.

Thanks to @jamesbranwen​, @h-e-m-o-goblin​ and @retro-riffraff​ for help with GIFs and consultation on this review.

1) The Good Stuff!

A) Atlas is very pretty!

I cannot stress enough how on a set level, Volume 7 is leaps and bounds above the other seasons in sheer environmental detail and setting dressing. Mantle has a great atmosphere with its New York influences, the smog covered backgrounds and oppressive streets and alleys. Ironwood’s office which is deliberately designed to evoke astronomy themes to represent James’ love for the stars. The cold oppressive atmosphere of the Schnee Manor and how Jacques has begun warping it to glorify him with only lip service paid to Nicholas in public. Penguins! 

There’s a lot of great set design work that went into this season and the crew deserve props for it. Genuinely. 

B) Ironwood’s arc is the best character arc in the entire franchise

Yeah just wearing my heart on my sleeve there, I fucking love Ironwood and his character arc here in Volume 7 is the best written arc of the show. I simp for the tin man who just wants to do the right thing. This one season of content is better than a lot of the series-wide material being honest. I went back to James’s big volumes in the last month to rewatch the show and it’s interesting to see the early seeds in retrospect for where his arc goes. His need to protect everyone he can and the brutish measures he considers necessary for such an act, his conflicting loyalties towards Ozpin that manifest in both frustration at Oz’s seeming apathy to the growing conflict, but also desperate desire for validation from Ozpin that what’s he doing is the right call. After the Mistral seasons set up James as going off the deep end following Volume 3, having him open the season with an earnest smile, an immediate apology for the team’s arrest and trusting them with his plans for Amity and Salem is a jarring but pleasant surprise. He’s not been slacking off, he’s been trying to keep the world together in the way he thinks is best. He lets his guard down around the heroes and we see the good man underneath, which makes the moments where he raises his walls hurt all the more. While Em and Merc are still probably my favorite characters period, James is absolutely my favorite character in Volume 7 and Top 5 favorite characters series-wide. I’m very eager to see where he goes from here. He also rocks the beard and fixed his T-Rex arms so James came out of the washing machine that is Volume 7′s costume design. He truly is the Best Boi, and I cannot give Jason Rose enough credit for his performance this year. He hit every note of Ironwood’s character perfectly and I wish the fandom would give him more credit for giving James as much life as he does.

Oh, and as the obligatory comment on mlm rep that I am known for getting obsessively weird anon hate over: IronQrow hug nearly had me crying on a convention floor from how goddamn soft it was. Remember conventions? Ah good times.

This just... hits me... ya know? Seeing him lower his guard so much to come in for a hug just shows how isolated he’s let himself become to let himself have this moment of contact... Godamnit James. Also this is the second time after Martial Arcs that two guys hug and I really liked their ship for the following hiatus. 

C) Soft Qrow hours are nice

Qrow’s a good guy, he went through a lot of bad stuff in Volume 6 but now he’s on the other side and purged his voice of the demon within. I think Volume 7 was a very good year for Qrow overall. It was great to see him interacting with more characters his age and lowering his own guard. His moments of letting the facade drop around James and Clover especially are great expansion for his character. Jason Liebritch hit the ground running as Qrow and gave him a far more dynamic range than I think Vic could. While I wish Qrow going off alcohol had been given more of a focus as it’s kind of done off-handedly that he’s gone cold turkey and otherwise doesn’t get brought up barring his revulsion at the wine in the Schnee Manor, he overall had a great year. And trust me I’ll get to the fights later, I have a lot more I can say about the bird boi there. 

D) I liked the Ace Ops! 

I was ambivilent towards the Ace Ops on first watching. They’re kinda underdeveloped in the context of the season at large and most people immediately pegged them as a miniboss squad/fodder for Salem to kill. But in rewatch they do still get to shine, if not as brightly. They’re very enjoyable. Clover especially is just really fun in retrospect, I love cocky fighters in general, and he was infectiously enjoyable (I’ve already covered the FG stuff in the past, not doing it again). Marrow came a close second because... well it’s Marrow, he is The Best Boi. Harriet got points for being a punchgirl which is always cool, I liked how her Semblance was shown and being cocky while being able to back it up is always a win. Elm and Vine are tied for dead last, I like the body diversity Elm introduces with her muscles and Vine... existed... but overall I think with the time they had, they did get to establish themselves well. I wish I could say that about their relationship with Team RWBYORNJ but this is the Nice Section so we’ll leave it there for now.

This is one of the best shots of the entire season. I adore it. God I like the Teryx design.

E) God the villains rocked this year! 

I am a villain whore. I own that. I will embrace that monkier. But when they’re as cool as this, I feel validated in this Chilli’s tonight. Watts and Tyrian really make the season shine and don’t have a dud scene all season. They have great chemistry together, shining bright in even the weakest or most mediocre episodes. Watts went from “Oh yeah you exist” tier to “Oh yeah you rule” tier. His vendetta against Ironwood feels so real and pre-established, even though this season is the first time it’s ever come up. Watts just ozzes style in everything he does. The animators bring him to life and make every step, every flick of his twist and even just how he moves his eyes all bleed contempt. He’s such a rat and I love him! Chris Sabat finally gets to stretch his wings after a few years playing Watts as just Evil Scientist Guy, and he makes the most of it. 

And Tyrian remains an absolute treat. He didn’t get much in V6 but here he takes center stage with Watts and also gets so much impact because of it. All the little twitches, and tilting of his heads, and dramatic gestures, he’s still just so goddamn cool to watch and we even get a little backstory of him. I know he’s irredeemable. But I just want to watch Tyrian kill people and scream. Like hot damn his line “THE GRIMM SHOULD HAVE DESTROYED OUR ENEMIES, NOT MADE THEM FRIENDS!” is so fucking raw. He’s having fun destablizing a nation with his boyfriend! 

“You want more chaos than a Grimm invasion?” “If anyone on Remannt can do it, wouldn’t it be you?” There is no heterosexual explanation for how these two look at each other and yes this is me outing myself as a Nuts and Volts fan.

Watts and Tyrian really do become the absolute highlights of the season alongside James. They have a great dynamic and even during their more slower moments there’s so much care and thought put into their every mannerism. Animators, seriously, great job, I love what you did. And their fights... we’ll get there. But they’re so goddamn good. 

Look they even run the same! They’re soulmates! 

Honorary mention to Salem by the way. She’s only in two scenes but her presence is felt throughout Ironwood’s arc and his growing fear of her and she damn well delivers when she shows up. That shot of her arriving in person is a killer shot to end on as well.

Oh and I guess Cinder and Neo exist don’t they? Eh, we’ll come back to them. 

F) Oscar got a character arc!

Finally! He did it! He got an arc that began, continued and ended all onscreen! It only took four tries! 

But yeah Oscar had a really good set of scenes in Volume 7. I like him being the first to confront Ruby on the Ironwood lie, bringing up the hypocrisy after their condemning of Ozpin just last season. I like him having a more forward role (outside of not getting to be part of the celebration in episode 4 what the hell guys), and that he’s the big link between RWBY and Ironwood was a great call. Having Ozpin shelved for one more season so Oscar can take center-stage was an inspired choice. I love his dynamic with Ironwood, and how James closing himself off emotionally gets reflected in how he begins slipping in how he refers to Oscar, starting off as treating him and Oz as separate, ending with him gunning Oscar down as he doesn’t care anymore to differentiate the two.

My big issues with Oscar’s arc are that I’m first of all annoyed at the lack of followup on the Oscar stuff from V6, I’m still waiting for Qrow to apologize for punching Oscar guys! I also really wish Neo’s first attack wasn’t offscreen. CRWBY’s cliffhanger fetish meant I got to break out the Offscreen Pine jokes again. And of course, the Neo hallway punch was a bit bullshit.

G) (Most of) The fights are amazing

There’s no punchline. These fights are great, two of them are in my Top 10 Series Wide fights list and at least the duds aren’t Volume 5 bad.

If you’d told me before Volume 7 that Watts would get an extended firefight with James, I’d have felt that a bit cheap as Watts to me doesn’t feel like a fighter, more a planner who hides behind armies of mechanical soldiers. But damn if they didn’t sell me on Watts “You’ve yeed your last haw” Watts whipping out a Glock just to spite James. 

This is another one of my favorite shots in the entire series.

Ironwood vs Watts is potentially my favorite fight in the entire series, and if it’s not, it’s easy Top 3 alongside Yang vs Mercury and Pyrrha vs CRDL/Mercury. It makes great use of Amity in the abandoned gravity biome meant for SSSN vs JNPR, with Ironwood and Watts deftly moving around in a manner that very easily could have been difficult to track with the constantly shifting gravity, but the crew do their best to keep it coherent as to who’s where. The credits showed their dedication also stretched into visual continuity, as James and Arthur’s route throughout the Arena was carefully considered so they’d loop around organically. 

This is what I mean when I say the crew went above and beyond to keep things clean.

Ironwood vs Watts could have easily failed to impress, given its lack of choreography on the level the series usually does, but the team’s efforts went instead into showing a situation that lets Watts get a dragged out battle: James wins whenever he closes the distance here, so Arthur’s constantly on the run and being forced to tamper with the arena. Great camerawork, a GOD TIER song from Caleb Hyles that I’m still listening to today, and two characters with a fantastic history coming to blows makes for easily the best fight of the season and a series-wide highlight. Watching it develop from storyboards, to mocap, to animations and the full version is a delight to see. This is what CRWBY can do when everything comes togehter. The orchestra’s all tuned. It’s a goddamn symphony.

THIS is my favorite shot of the season.

Tyrian also gets to shine with his two battles this year. His alley fight with Qrow, Robyn and Clover is short but sweet, the corvid and the scorpion especially trading brutal blows in the cramped space. Qrow goes full Devil May Cry with his style-switching here, Harbinger being swapped between sword, tonfa and gun forms freely alongside Qrow applying The Power of Punching. His 1v1v1 with Clover and Qrow though is the true highlight of the season in terms of choreography. It’s lighting-fast, and has some impeccable shot work. Qrow gets to use his scythe with deliberate nods to the Red Trailer, Clover gets to shut up everyone who doubted his weapon, and Tyrian is just along for the ride and he makes the most of it. It’s frentic, it’s heart-pounding, it’s everything a fight should be. 

Honorary mentions as well go to Ace Ops vs the Geist, which is just really fun and has a great backing music choice, the opening battle with Sabre having Ruby’s obligatory ten seconds of fighting that come at the start of every new era of the series, and the Ace Ops vs RWBY fight which has some good choreo in places.

H) Winter and Penny have good chemistry

I don’t have a ton to add here, I just like their dynamic and how they advance each other’s arcs. It’s nice writing. I also like Winter apologizing to Penny when she’s angry at Jacques and takes it out on Penny by accident with the “You wouldn’t understand” line.

Penny as a Maiden is a nice idea, I think her new design is cute. Penny says trans rights.

Those are a lot of my favorite things about Volume 7. It’s a killer season when it’s firing on all cylinders but unfortunately... it often misfires in frustrating ways, many of which are unfortunately due to core emblematic problems with the series that won’t go away.

2) The Bad Stuff

A) The costumes

It’s been a over year. It’s low hanging fruit. I don’t care. Most of them are still not good and they’re ludicrously over-designed.

Blake’s in a fetish suit and I wonder how she even goes to the bathroom. Weiss just looks like an abino Sabre alt, Yang is what a Halloween costume site would describe as “Sexy UPS Driver,” (why does she have a thigh window) Ruby... looks fine, it’s one of her better costumes. Jaune’s hair is silly, Ren’s model has lost some muscle definition and he looks like an e-boy, Nora’s costume really doesn’t fit the Atlas visual design and looks like a rejected Kingdom Hearts costume. Cinder’s is too black and I actually can’t track her in darker scenes because of it (which is kinda bad during... a fight scene... where I need to know where she is...), Neo looks like a Ren Fair cosplayer doing a bit for her OnlyFans, Winter’s is anatomically weird with super skinny arms and legs, and Blake’s hair is a fucking hate crime. 

Qrow’s is one I liked at first but in retrospect it does feel like a downgrade. To quote @h-e-m-o-goblin​ from a Discord chat:

in a show like rwby, where color is such a vital defining aspect of every character, a cohesive colorscheme goes a long way. qrow's original outfit works great in this regard. neutral tones. greys, whites, and blacks, with red accents that pop against the otherwise sparse color. it's good! it's distinctive! it doesn't feel cluttered and it doesn't look like a clown vomited on him! the subdued colors really lend themselves to the grey, cynical energy qrow seems to carry with him. a literal lack of color in his life. the outfit itself feels like something he would wear; a combination of "clearly trying to look cool" and "a little disheveled and laid back." the design breathes, it isn't cluttered. let's contrast this with his vol 7 outfit. a lot of outfits in vol 7 suffer from this problem, but first and foremost it doesn't look like something he would wear. where his old outfit had a casual feel to it, his new look feels like someone dressed him up for a family christmas dinner. it's too... tidy. now of course you could argue this is him "cleaning up his life," but i dont feel like you have to sacrifice his own personal style in order to convey that. if that's really what they were going for, they easily could have just, oh i dont know, given him a cape that isn't tattered???

remember how i said qrow's original outfit really made his colors pop? how less is more when it comes to having a character with a specific color theme? vol 7 butchered that. we suddenly have articles of clothes that are tinted with greenish blue tones, browns, and with gold trim? on TOP of the old colors he already had in his design. it's muddy. it's ugly. the burgundy vest is fine, if they wanted to work more color into his outfit they should have done it that way throughout, shades of grey and different tones of RED. his COLOR. it just feels like they tacked so much on there without a second thought and i really think he deserves better. its just. such a mess.

The ones I did like were Watts’ new coat (I like the puffy hood), Penny’s is fine, the Ace Ops look great, Ironwood’s new outfit is stellar (those last six are great examples of how to do a lot with just primary colors of white and red), Neon’s Jolyne cosplay is cute and Flynt is slick. Otherwise, Volume 7 feels like it’s taken a lot of the wrong lessons from the costume design of the earlier seasons. Less is often more but now it feels like they have a pathological aversion to empty space on the costumes, leading them to feel like... costume vomit for lack of a better word. I didn’t love the Mistral outfits, but their modifications at least were carried by how many of them called back to the Fall of Beacon and emphasized the themes of loss in Volume 4. The new Atlas outfits... don’t have that shared theme. It feels like a hodgepodge of different design influences without trying to find a way to unify them. It’s like putting Baki the Grappler beside My Little Pony, they just fail to mesh.

Also for fuck’s sake already CRWBY just give the girls muscles already.

2) JNR suck and Ren’s arc is glorified character assassination

I don’t love JNR. They’re fine, but the show has arguably not needed them for a while and while I’ve liked them all at different points, it’s never been adoration outside of Ren in Volume 4. I was cool with the idea of them staying in Argus to help cover Mistral after its Huntsmen were wiped out, and Volume 7 has... made me wish they did that.

Jaune is just comic relief, and it kinda blows for later reasons but the big one is that he’s just not very funny. His big role in Volume 7 is basically to crosswalk some kids so we can have a joke scene during the Mantle Battle where Jaune uses his tactical genius to teach people to walk in single file. I feel like at this point Miles is just actively trying to kill Jaune’s fandom out of spite for how badly Jaundice was received. He’s never allowed to be cool or try and redeem himself. His hatedom aren’t going to stop hating Jaune because he gets more comedy guys. They’re going to stop when you write Jaune well. It’s a bummer he got some genuinely great upgrades for his sword and shield and never gets to use them outside of the opening. 

Nora exists. She got a surprising amount of focus this season in that she got focus of any kind. I liked her confronting Ironwood over his choking of Mantle because we know she was once the kind of person Ironwood would have been stifling. I like her being the one to realize the loophole in Jinn’s “You can’t” line. I don’t like much else about Nora this year, or at least the Nora the writing team are pushing. She’s not funny like Jaune but Nora just absorbs so much screentime in the first half with her constant shrieking. Sam Ireland has good range but making Nora into Discount Harley Quinn is pushing her out of it. She sounds shrill, making Nora sound like she has no heart outside of the election rally. A shrill voice is one thing. A shrill voice that never lands a single joke? Yeah that character is tainted by association. 

And Ren... oh God Ren what happened to you.

The Volume 7 commentary confirmed a suspicion of mine that Ren’s arc was heavily cut down from what was planned. Even watching V7 I could tell his arc was bare-bones at best, and it’s downright character assassination in places. Why is he suddenly so cold to Nora? Why is he now so obsessed with training? Why does he side with Ironwood for all of... one line which is this last between episodes 7 and 11. Ren only has two hundred words of dialoge in Volume 7 and they feel so weird in places. Ren goes from seemingly disliking Nora, to kissing her, to never referencing the kiss, to partaking in the Worst Scene Of The Season, all with no consistency. It’s not even threadbare. Ren’s arc just has no connecting tissue for so much of it! It’s insane how badly Ren was hurt by this, and I shudder to wonder how bad his Volume 8 arc will be because you know that was one of the first plotlines they cut down on when they inevitably overreached again. 

I don’t know how they made Renora kissing feel unearned? But by God they found a way with how much of a trainwreck Ren’s writing is in regards to tainting this. 

If Ironwood is an example of RWBY doing character writing well, Ren is the mirror image of how badly they can do. JNR really suffered from Volume 7 (also fun fact, Ren has about 200 words of dialogue? Ironwood has 4400). Maybe not to the level of irredeemable dislike? But very close to being on the same tier as Cinder of “Just go away already.”  I’m not looking forward to their content in Volume 8. 

3) RWBY themselves are poorly handled in Volume 7

It’s unfortunate that the actual title characters of the series are also some of this season’s weaker links. RWBY feel... superfluous to this season in a way they’ve never felt before. It’s baffling how much of the season doesn’t change if you just don’t include them, and apparently Volume 7′s first draft? Was even worse.

The commentary says that many of the RWBY moments were added later in production. Stuff like Ruby and Renora at the rally, Blake and Yang’s talk with Robyn and Ruby and Qrow’s chat were all either added in near the end of the writing or were “low priority” enough that they could have been cut which is... veyr alarming that’s stuff even the main protags have to worry about! 

Ruby feels half-baked. I was looking forward to her in V7 after how V6 gave her a more dynamic personality and the focus she got in Brunswick, and having Penny’s return had me interested in seeing Ruby grapple with her emotions about it. She watched Penny die, how would it influence her to see Penny back and OK? Good question, we never get to see it. Ruby’s just OK with Penny’s return, the one time they touch on it Penny immediately glosses over it. Ruby just goes back to her old happy go lucky persona where any and all negative emotions are immediately forced down instead of confronting them and growing from them. I’m getting a little tired of Ruby bottling her grief and being teased about finally getting her snapping like a Twix Bar. We finally got her crying and it lasted all of ten seconds. And it doesn’t help that Ruby’s still getting shafted for fights. Her scythe choreography has no excuse being as flacid as it is now after Qrow vs Clover showed they can do scythe fighting! Why is Ruby being upstaged by (let’s be real) a supporting character! Why is she being limited to ten seconds of good combat then nothing for the rest of the season outside of flimsily swinging it or shooting. It’s disappointing, especially after how good V6 Ruby was.

I swear, Gravity’s not just my favorite episode of the season just because Ruby finally cries in it.

Weiss was kinda just done dirty though. At least Ruby has a good outfit. Weiss confronting her father has been a long standing plot thread for the series, it’s been Weiss’s Big Thing since the White Trailer. And when Jacques finally appears, he’s very... bland. He’s just evil corporate dude who exists less as an obstacle for Weiss and more just a roadblock for the plot through the election. Weiss finally gets a chance to take her father down and work to redeem her family name... but instead of earning said victory and it being treated with the same gravitas and emotional weight as Blake defeating Adam... Weiss has her victory handed to her. And it’s played for comedy by her abusrdly attractive mother. 

Listen, I like I Willow Schnee. I think she’s a fascinating character and I like the idea of a person who is aware of the harm they’ve done by accident but is too broken to fix the issues she accidentally left. I love her calling Weiss out on her treatment of Whitley. But she is absolutely a Deus Ex Machina that exists to get Jacques out of the plot as fast as possible. You mean to tell me Hackerman Watts never once made sure Jacques had hidden cameras? Or that none of the staff found Willow’s cameras and reported them under the assumption they were White Fang spies? It’s so... convenient. It’s handing Weiss her victory on an unearned platter. Which sucks. I was really looking forward to Weiss beating Jacques. Instead she just gets given the plot device while JNR engage in the Worst Scene of The Season in that Whitley food stunt.

Me whenever I’m asked to rewatch Cordially Invited

Blake and Yang have much the same problems, in they never separate. I know they’re going to be together. I know CRWBY are making it canon (get it over with already). I still would like Yang and Blake to have individual character scenes. I’d like Blake and Marrow to talk about being a Faunus Huntsman in Atlas (another thing that got cut thanks to Robyn Hill). I want Yang and Ironwood to discuss their PTSD and have Yang thank Ironwood for his trust in her that he commissioned the arm despite Yang attacking Mercury. I want Blake to be well animated in fight scenes so she’s doing more than just jobbing so Yang looks better. I want Yang to stop hogging all the good Team RWBY choeography. I want them to interact with other characters and continue to grow instead of feeling like two halves of one character. And no, making a meta joke of how Blake and Yang don’t talk to other people doesn’t make it OK. It just means you’re self aware about your own faults. 

(Also give Yang better merch or quit the favoritism. If you’re gonna milk her, put effort into it beyond crapply overpriced flannel. RT’s merch store is actively making me hate Yang.)

Team RWBY’s biggest contribution to the season is the Ironwood Lie which is... a can of worms. They certainly had a point in withholding some of the bigger truths from James but I feel by Pomp and Cirumstance he’d proven himself truthwrothy enough to warrant being told the truth about Salem. But then when he’s finally told the truth, it’s offscreen’d and the consequence isn’t “Why didn’t you tell me earlier” but “Fucking Ozpin man.” Gravity has it bite them in the ass, but it’s more an accessory to Yang and Blake telling Robyn about the Amity tower. I wish more had been done with the team disagreeing on whether the lie was a good choice or not, maybe have Yang be hardline against it due to her own “No more lies and half truths” policy instead of... having Yang tell more lies and half truths (Commentary confirms she never told Ruby and Weiss about the Robyn stuff BTW). But that’s a wider problem where RWBY aren’t allowed to disagree beyond surface level “I don’t know if this is the right call” dialogue. There’s never a threat of one of them cracking and just spilling the beans to James, everyone just blindly trusts Ruby and Qrow tells the audience “No this is different from when Ozpin lied. Trust us.” 

This is the most RWBY get for content in the season finale: Ruby just nuking Cinder with no difficulty after having trouble with the eyes three episodes ago. Kinda lame tbh.

Team RWBY are just disappointing in Volume 7. They’re not given good animation, their story roles are largely insignificant, the impact of their roles on the story is threadbare and... well most of their costumes suck don’t @ me even CRWBY have admitted Blake and Weiss’s haircuts looked bad. It’s a whole barrage of a letdown for the main girls. And it’s really sad that the best scenes of the season... are usually the ones where RWBY are nowhere in sight.

Why the hell didn’t Yang get to keep the sunglasses come on guys. One job.

4) Robyn, the election plot, and the Happy Huntresses

Oh God, Robyn Hill is... not great. I could and likely will write a full meta on her character and how they bungled it but I’ll just be blunt here: I don’t like her design, the colors don’t mesh well, he head’s too small, Christina Vee is sleeping through the role and her weapon’s lame. Introducing her in a scene where she threatens to attack our heroes, and her agents are actively sneaking up on them to do it, is not a great first impression for a hometown hero. And that the commentary thinks she’s meant to be the hero in that scene is... staggering. 

RWBY’s greatest threat yet is a wine mom Karen and her Home Owners Association army. 

The election plot is less a misfire and more the engine just exploding. There’s so little good content between when it’s introduced and concluded, with it usually being individual scenes that are more good in spite of their connection to the plot (such as Tyrian’s massacre). It drags in pacing, going on for nearly half the season between episodes 5 and 10, and it purely exists as a roadblock to keep RWBY spinning their wheels while Watts and Tyrian keep going with the main plot. I don’t know why CRWBY went for this plot. They could have easily had something else fill the gap that also allowed for a lot of the character beats (such as Marrow and Blake’s talk and Ren’s entire arc) to shine, or at least condensed it to the important elements instead of letting it become bloated. It ends in such an unsatisfying way where Willow just shows up and goes “We have four episode left, here’s the plot device to beat Jacques, get back ot the main plot.” If they wanted to do the election plot, the best route would have been to give Volume 7 more episodes or stretch out its events to two seasons, but neither is realistically possible while RWBY lives off the teat of AT&T. 

Jacques and Robyn are just boring. Evil corporate man and a lame adaptation of Robyn Hood who only has fans because of thirst who also like downplaying Robyn making a racist remark at Marrow (to say nothing of that weird subsection of Robyn fans who make her a Fox Faunus who cut her tail off to join Atlas Academy which is... certainly a creative choice especially when Marrow and Neon are punching holes in that angsty BS backstory). They can’t carry this plot and the artifical attempts to make it seem more exciting with the two cliffhaners ending on Mantle under riot or Grimm attack are laughably cut short by the next episode in each case opening the morning after. On binge watch it becomes weirdly funny more than anything and that’s not a good reaction. The dual cliffhangers being cheaply resolved is a short but succint example of V7′s pacing issues, and they almost always loop around to the election plot being too bloated, slow and just boring.

Also the Happy Huntresses are just... lame. I like their Semblances but that’s it. Fiona’s OK because she gets some screentime but May’s just “the surly one” and Joanna doesn’t even get her Semblance or much dialogue (oh wow she really is just a female Sage Ayana isn’t she). Robyn should not have been leading the HH and running for Council. That’s really stupid. And kind of wrong. Having May or Fiona be running instead while Robyn leads the team in relief efforts would have been better and could have split the focus more effeciently instead of leaving May and especially Joanna feelng like roster padding. There’s also some delicious irony in the show trying to frame the HH as the resistance fighting for the people and representing individuality, only for them all to have the same boring outfit and weapons (I think even the exact same model just with different sizes) while the Ace Ops are meant to be the military drones who are “Just following orders,” only for them to be more racially diverse, more diverse body-type-wise, and have more unique weapons. It’s another one of those odd creative dissconnects between what the writers wanted and what the artists/animation teams chose to do. 

The election plot is overall toxin for Volume 7, and Robyn in my opinion, has one of the worst introductory scenes of any character in the franchise (and CRWBY have tacitly admitted that V7 had a character they were surprised at how controversial they were, which has to be Robyn). In a year where they were already juggling so much content and characters, adding in this bloated subplot was something I don’t think anyone wanted, especially now that we know we lost so much content on the sacrificial altar for this. It’s a black mark on the season and I don’t really care for the return of the Happy Huntresses or Robyn in Volume 8. None of them are interesting enough to care for outside of meta reasons like “cute.” 

Also fuck you Fiona, can’t believe you got a shirt before Ironwood. 

5) Cinder and Neo sure exist

To be fair, this is one of Cinder’s best years, easily her best since Volume 3 but that’s more because Cinder in the Mistral era was crap. (And if I wanna be cruel, because Cinder wasn’t in two thirds of the season)Her fans were finally vindicated after years of telling anyone who dunked on Cinder that “nooooo she has a super covert backstory that’s gonna be amazing when it’s revealed! You’ll see!” And well they finally got it. All of one line during a fight about how Cinder “refuses to starve.” 

It’s still something so I guess we have to take it. Seriously... how do we still not have Cinder’s backstory. 

There’s just not a ton to say about Cinder and Neo in V7 barring I that don’t think they needed to be here. They feel very superfluous and just here to have a big boss fight in Cinder’s case alongside continuing her streak of ending the odd numbered seasons fighting a female side character... which for me became an exercise in tyring to find during Cinder during the damn fight.

And this is why when most people saw Cinder’s V6 outfit they went “It’s gonna be hard to see her in darker environments,” then were vindicated when it became legit difficult to see Cinder in this scene. God if they at least just made the inside of the cape red it’d be easier.

Neo is Neo, which means she makes funny faces and mocks Cinder (I like that), but she doesn’t get a super good fight which uh... we’ll get to. I’m interested to see her finally exploding at Cinder and going for a backstab, but really Neo in V7 was kinda hit hard by the double whammy of the Oscar Hallway Punch and how humiliating ORNJ vs Neo was for ORNJ. Cinder’s definitely had far worse years and after how aimless she was in Mistral this feels like a sep in the right direction, but at this point CRWBY just need to shut up and tell us her deal. It’s been seven years guys. Come on. At least make her interesting if she’s gonna say around. They’ve had worse years, but unfortunately Cinder and Neo’s role in the finale leads into...

6) Some of the fights weren’t good

I wanna be clear, I like most of Volume 7′s fights. It’s just a bummer the worst ones are back and back and make up a chunk of the finale. ORNJ vs Neo is just crap. It’s the worst fight since the Battle of Haven. There’s nothing else I can say, it’s poorly animated, paced, choreographed and written. JNR especially are made to look like complete jokes after they spent all season training, to the point where it looks like V2 Yang could solo V7 JNR after this. Oscar I expect this from because he’s not allowed to have fun stuff onscreen after accidentally stealing the Haven budget for his fight with Hazel, but JNR were just done dirty. There were ways to make the fight work in a way where Neo still won but JNR looked good. They went for the worst possible outcome that just leaves Neo looking like she got fan-wanked and JNR looking like they’re just not allowed to be cool due to Miles’ spite at the Jaune-Self Insert stuff (and that’s not even getting into JNR being forced to run from lame rent a cops who can’t even handle a single Grimm). Cinder vs Winter and Penny isn’t much better, with her dark outfit making it very hard to track the fight because she blends into the background too well. It’s not a great showing for Winter or Penny given their earlier feats but, hey, some random female character had to fight Cinder in this odd numbered volume, carrying on Glynda, Pyrrha and Raven’s tradition. It’s at least better than ORNJ vs Neo, but that’s really not saying anything. At least Cinder’s VA work isn’t too bad this time but this fight commits the cardinal sin of a finale fight: It’s just not super interesting because we know Cinder can’t kill both Winter and Penny and she’s not becoming a Maiden, while Winter’s been too blatantly set up so it has to be Penny.

RWBY vs the Ace Ops also gets a dishonorable mention due to the choreography on display here... and the lack of it for Weiss, Blake and Ruby. Ruby never once swings Crescent Rose the entire fight and is just reduced to getting the tar kicked out of her by Harriet. Weiss barely gets to use her sword and largely just sticks to her summoning and glyphs which makes for a very visually uninteresting fighting style at the best of times. Blake just swings around and gets caught by the bad guys so Yang is motivated to fight stronger. She never dual wields (again) and her best moves are just setting up Yang to do all the hard work while Yang gets to personally KO two of the Ace Ops. There’s a lot that can be said about whether or nor RWBY earn the win, but while the animation team try to sell the Ace Ops landing heavy hits, having only Blake’s Aura even flicker really undercuts the idea from the commentary that this wasn’t meant to be a stomp for RWBY and they had to work together and be in synch to win.

Which is why Yang solos two of the Ace Ops whle Blake plays support, Weiss beats Marrow alone and then kill steals Harriet from Ruby, all while the song playing is an extended diss track from RWBY to the Ace Ops about how badass they are now, and the commentary itself says the Ace Ops are hard carried by Clover’s Semblance (because you gotta love basically saying four POC were only competent because a white guy led them, and then have them lose because said white guy wasn’t around to carry them!). Great job guys, you really sold it.

And talking of Clover, I feel it worth mentioning Qrow vs Clover vs Tyrian. It’s animation wise near perfect, but unfortunately I do feel it would be remiss to not mention that I feel the writing really has to bend over backwards to justify this fight. A lot of it is stuff I would say in that hypothetical Robyn essay, but I feel Robyn, Qrow and Clover all have to become massive idiots for this specific sequence of events to occur, and for Clover especially every retroactive attempt to explain why he prioritized Qrow over Tyrian just sounds more and more desperate. Between the references to MCU Captain America (a person whose entire arc is about learning when it’s OK to defy bad orders) or the attempt in the commentary to say “Oh Clover thought it would be easier to take out Tyrian alone instead of Qrow,” none of them land and just further drive home how much the plot had to stretch and reach to get that moment of Tyrian killing Clover. I like the fight. But I hate the road the show took to get there.

Some of the misc fights are also weak like ORNJ vs FNKI and elements of the Mantle Grimm battle, but those are the big offenders. Otherwise, again, the fights are largely good. 

7) The soundtrack wasn’t... great

I mean the vocal songs only, don’t crucify me. Trust Love is just lamer Let’s Just Live/Triumph, Celebrate and Let’s Get Real are so boring I thought they were the same song until the OST dropped, Brand New Day is boringly peppy and Jeff’s vocals are dreadful. I completely forgot Touch the Sky until I was checking the tracklist to make sure I didn’t forget any songs. War has good singers but tries to sell the RWBY-Ace Ops bond as way deeper than it was. The lack of a villain song did really sting though, those are always the highlights.

There are good songs. I really like Fear, I feel it encapsulates the themes of the volume well and serves as a good condemnation of Ironwod’s mentality. Until The End is finally the Ruby song I’ve waited for since Red Like Roses 2 and I enjoy that she got a melancholic song, and Hero is easily, hands down, best track of the record and probably best RWBY track, full stop. Caleb killed it, I loved the second verse, opening opera was strong, guitar riffs were a plenty. Stellar work all around for that one.

The OST has great work from Jeff and Alex as usual, but the Jeff and Casey songs are really starting to lose their appeal. Going for a peppy feel this year didn’t help cover the cracks that are beginning to show with RWBY’s vocal songs (especially Jeff’s vocal range), and while a few standouts remain such as Fear and Hero, they are the slim minority in an otherwise very boring vocal tracklist that barely scrapes above Volume 5 for weakest set yet.

8) It wasn’t as funny as it thought it was

Comedy is subjective but man a lot of these jokes didn’t land. RWBY really needs to realize that does work in traditional 2D does not translate into 3D and just comes off as making official reaction GIFs for your Twitter account. Making characters SUDDENY SCREAM LOUDLY is not good banter. Please stop making Nora into Harley Quinn. Marrow was probably the most consistently funny character but that was it. Also I dunno why CRWBY thought Forrest was funny or what the deal was with that FRWBY crap. 

“Honorary” mention to the JNR food scene in Cordially Invited which is genuinely one of the worst scenes in the entire show and I hope whoever animated it has their save files deleted for a game where they were about to beat the final boss. Nothing sums up JNR’s pointlessness in the series more perfectly than this.

C) Conclusion

See what I mean about Volume 7 being frustrating? 

It’s weird that I overal think of Volume 7 as a mid-tier volume. There’s so much here I genuinely adore, with some of the best stuff to do with the show coming out of this season (barring lame, overpriced merch that feels like clothing gacha), but simultaneously the whole thing is let down by outside circumstances that unfortunately are ones the show can’t ever really recover from. Put bluntly, Volume 7 is the most technically proficient season of the show with the best lighting, backdrops, (some of the) character models, etc. CRWBY definitely didn’t slack off this year, but the problem isn't with them. It’s with the writing. A wider reaching problem is just that Miles and Kerry can’t really improve to the level that the series now requires. Eddy and Kiersei’s first season could have gone far worse, but it definitely was notable whenever they took over. Volume 7’s core problems are fourfold: The comedy is terrible and none of the jokes really land, the season focuses on the wrong plots and gives them too much effort, too many episodes are spent building up to new plots only for them to be weakly resolved (especially the Mantle Riot/Grimm attacks that are shoved off-screen), and the character bloat strikes hard here and leaves a lot of the cast feeling like dead weight. CRWBY don’t need more writers. They need more editors willing to tell the team what has to go instead of them hemming and hawing themselves on if they if they can include a plotline. The election never should have gotten past its first draft, there was too much already in this season before adding that.

When this is an unironic shot in your series... you’ve got character bloat issues.

At this point, I think JNR need to go. The show had no idea what to do with them throughout the season, leading to Jaune just being comic relief while Ren and Nora became characters I actively dislike. Renora was the easiest ship in the show to land, and they still managed to blow the engines and ram at least three icebergs just to prove that RWBY can’t romance to save its life. Team RWBY themselves are little better, with Ruby’s feelings about Penny’s return being shelved, Weiss’s victory against Jacques feeling un-earned and undercut by comedy, while Yang and Blake are benched for the volume and become a singular entity with how tied at the hip they are. Maria basically yeeted herself out of the show and I didn’t notice, Pietro is just a death flag, and while the Ace Ops had a good intro, it was undercooked by how they had to play the villain role to give RWBY something to do in the final hours. Cinder and Neo didn’t need to be here. Robyn had one of the worst introductions for a character I’ve ever seen, I never enjoyed her moments and it genuinely feels like she only has a fandom because RWBY’s community are in fact that desperate. 

On the brighter side, Ironwood’s arc is fucking perfect and Jason Rose deserves all the love. Great fight, great song, great design, love the beard, it was a perfect downfall for Volume 7’s true protagonist. Qrow had a fun volume and I loved his dynamic with Clover (I don’t see the ship stuff but that’s more because I’m an IronQrow main so my blinders were on). Clover was also way cooler than I remembered. His fights stood out but the guy’s just really cool at the end of the day, with Chris doing great work as a VA. Oscar even managed to do stuff this year which was a shock and a half, but a welcome shock and a half. I didn’t mention it, but the Ozpin fear monologue is one of my favorite scenes in the entire show and it and the Ironwood/Oscar confrontation in the vault save the finale. And of course, Watts and Tyrian were the MVPs. I don’t have a bad word about either of them, they fucking nailed their roles and I can’t wait to see them again. 

And that’s kind of what I mean when I say Volume 7 flummoxes me. It’s frustrating at times with how it handles seemingly easy tasks and drops the ball. Renora went from “everyone liked that” to wondering how badly Ren’s stuff got butchered for him to be the way he is. RWBY themselves could be almost entirely cut and so little would change, and the fact that the finale basically hinges its entire emotional stakes on Winter, Penny and Oscar is a staggering call. And it really feels like the season was compressed beyond necessity because they decided going in that Volume 7 had to end on Salem’s arrival. There’s two volumes worth of material here, and maybe it would have been best to have broken up these events. Volume 7 does too much in too little time, and RWBY especially suffered from it. But when it works… it’s good. Never close to the highs of Volumes 6 or 3, but there’s genuinely good material here. The fights are mostly getting better with far less missteps than previously, the acting (mostly) continues to improve and it’s obvious that RWBY is a very good looking show at this point. Ironwood’s arc is franchise-wide highs, I loved Clover, and Marrow remains the best boi. But it’s frustrating that despite all the tech advances Volume 7 has made, it still makes such threadbare, rookie writing mistakes in cast management, comedy and character arcs. I’m glad Miles and Kerry finally realized that they needed more writers, but it won’t mean anything if the show just continues to circle the drain on the core mistakes it’s been making since 2013. Volume 7 has good in it. But I can see where it could have been great.

Thanks for reading, stan IronQrow and please get Whitley a therapist.

And for the love of God already make an Ironwood vs Watts shirt! 

#rwby #rwby analysis #rwde #james ironwood #Arthur Watts #qrow branwen #Tyrian Callows #ruby rose #weiss schnee #Blake Belladonna #yang xiao long #Jaune Arc #lie ren #nora valkyrie #Renora #clover ebi #marrow amin #ace ops #robyn hill #happy huntresses #cinder fall #neopolitan #penny polendina #winter schnee #willow schnee #Whitley schnee #Jacques schnee #Salem #harriet bree #vine zeki

[knives-out20]

Discrepancy - Dean Corso x Male!OC - #3

Fandom: The Ninth Gate (1999)

Pairing: Ambrósio ‘Ambrose’ Fargas (OC) x Dean Corso

Warnings: Swearing, Faggotry, Spoilers for The Ninth Gate, Flirting, Homoerotism, Sexual phone stuff but not phone sex y’know, Ambrósio has no chill and knows no bounds y’all,

Notes: what is going ON y’all....lmao

Dean lay on the bed of his hotel room in Paris, talking to Ambrósio over the phone. "Ambrósio, how are you holding up?"

"I'm lying down if that answers your question, Dean" Ambrósio answered, definitely wearing a shit-eating grin.

Lying down, Dean thought. "What're you doing?"

"Oh, I dunno...talking to some shady book dealer over the telephone."

"I'm shady?" Dean chuckled. "First I'm out of place, and now I'm shady?"

"Yea, man, what the fuck is with your fucking gray hairs around your ears, you got premature graying or something?" Ambrósio inquired, squinting a bit.

"Have you just been thinking about the hairs around my ears lately?"

"I've been thinking of more than the hair around your ears, Dean."

"My facial hair?" Dean teased.

"More than your hair, man."

Dean grinned, "ever the flirt?"

"I try my best, Corso." Ambrósio rubbed his thigh, biting the edge of his lip.

"You been, uh...back at the house, as of late?"

Ambrósio shrugged. "Carmen let me go back to check it out with her really buff boyfriend, like, wrestler-type buff, Jeronimo's huge."

"Is he setting some high expectations up for me?"

Ambrósio decided to mess with Dean. He put on a puzzled tone, "who said they're for you?"

This caught Dean off-guard, like Ambrósio wanted it to. "Oh- uh, nothing, I just- all this had led me to assume-"

"Chill, man, calm down, I'm playing around" Ambrósio giggled. "It felt a bit...grim, but that's obvious, y'know? I mean, with...the reason why I'm staying with my friends in the first place."

"Yea."

A moment of silence struck the two before Ambrósio asked Dean another question. "Where are you right now?"

Dean's gaze darted around his hotel room. "In a hotel."

"Central?"

Dean slowly licked his lips in thought. "Uhh...Sure." He nodded, pulling out a slip of paper and a pen. "I'm staying at this Hotel Central place nearby, in this room. You can reach me there if you're specific."

"No, no. Out of the country." Dean corrected him.

Ambrósio scoffed, "yea, so where are you?"

"France. Ever been?"

"You offering?"

"Again?"

"I'm assuming that's a no."

Ambrósio broke out into a smile as he leaned back in his seat. "Does adoption not exist in America, or wherever?" He giggled. "I'm adopted, half-Pakistani."

"Ever been?"

"You offering?" Ambrósio joked.

"Don't lose hope" Dean smiled. "If I grow to like you enough, decide I need some sort of companionship in my life, I'll reach out."

"You make it seem like it'll be a privilege to me, to be able to hang out with you. It's quite the opposite."

"Oh, really?"

"Yea. It'll be a privilege to you, or rather anyone, to hang out with me, Ambrósio Fargas."

"That's true. Any new up-comings with your..uh...grandfather?"

"Mmh." Ambrósio hummed in a gloomy way. "Jeronimo has an uncle that's in the funeral business. He'll help with all the funeral stuff for my Avô."

"Wish I could come."

"It's like you want to be out of place, Dean, jeez" Ambrósio laughed.

Dean liked listening to Ambrósio's laughter, even more-so since he caused it. He assumes he just liked that he was able to make Ambrósio smile during this suddenly-dark time in his life, given the abrupt death of Victor and all.

Ambrósio and Dean got hit with another moment of comfortable silence. It seemed to be a running thing between the two men.

"You still lying down?"

"On my bed in Carmen's guest bedroom, yea. Why? You gonna ask me what I'm wearing?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if you're still wearing that red shirt."

"I have a damn washing machine, Dean" Ambrósio licked his lips. "It's unbuttoned just like the first time you saw it."

"You wearing those gray pants, too? With the stripes?"

Ambrósio hummed his answer, meaning a 'no." "I'm wearin' some shorts, actually. Switching things up, today. What're you wearing, Corso?"

"Same things from the day you first saw me."

"Not one for changes, eh?" Ambrósio questioned. "Well, no. You probably are, given that Balkan's making you go here 'n' there around the globe for some old books 'n'...whatever. Y'know?"

"Yea," Dean nodded. "I'm really sorry, too, Ambrósio. About your grandfather. I never meant for this to happen to him, I didn't anticipate it like you did, but anticipation really has nothing to do with it." He explained. "I'm sorry."

"It's nothing. My Avô was old as hell anyway, Dean. He was bound to go sometime, but I just...not so soon. He was a good man."

"I'm sure he was, he seemed like it."

Ambrósio smiled. "You're a good man, too."

"Really?"

"Yea." Ambrósio nodded. "You, you- you didn't need to give me your hotel number that night you first came, you didn't need to come inside the house to call for me the other day. You didn't need to make sure I was okay, and gonna be okay. You didn't need to make sure I had some place to stay, or ask for Carmen's number in order to reach me. Hell, you don't need to be talking to me right now" he listed out, admittedly blushing a bit.

"But...I am."

"But you are, exactly. You added me into your little equation when you had the choice to leave me in your memories as Fargas' pretty, queer grandkid."

"'Pretty'?" Dean repeated.

"I'm fucking divine, Dean, it's in my name. Meanwhile, Dean means like...'valley.'"

"Would you describe me as a valley, Ambrose?"

"A valley of weird gray hairs, some round glasses, dark academia, and an angular face."

"You think my face is angular?"

"In a good way, pretty boy."

Dean smirked to himself, dragging his free hand slowly down the side of his face. "You think I'm pretty, too?"

"I thought the flirting made it obvious."

"I'm more than a pretty face, y'know" Dean sassed.

"Well, duh. I'm not shallow" Ambrósio scoffed. "I like when we talk, too, and not just for your voice-"

"You like my voice?"

"I've told you this before!"

Ambrósio chortled. "I don't only listen to Hendrix and Foreigner, Dean, Jesus Christ."

"Who else do you listen to?"

Ambrósio stepped back, towards his staircase. "I could listen to you. You sound like you could do a number on people if you sing."

Dean knowingly shook his head, looking down to hide his smile. "I don't sing, but...thanks."

Dean hummed in agreement. "You mentioned reciting poetry, when I met you."

"Yessir."

"What writers do you like?"

"Aw, damn, uh..." Ambrósio scratched his jaw in thought. "Baudelaire, definitely. And JP Marquand, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Byron. To name a few."

"Quite an array."

"You like?"

"I wouldn't shy away from the names. It's an impressive list."

"Thank you, I know." Ambrósio smiled, proud of himself.

"You still lying down?"

"Yea, what're you doing?"

"Lying down, on my hotel room's bed, talking to the dreamy, divine grandson of Victor Fargas." Dean flirted, stroking his beard.

Ambrósio poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue. "I am dreamy."

"You really are."

"So..."

"So?"

"So, we're just both lying down, on our beds, talking to each other over the telephone?"

"Why, would you rather be doing something else, with somebody else?" Dean joked.

Ambrósio raised his eyebrows. "I'd rather be doing something else that involves being on a bed, with you...Doing a far more scandalous activity than just talking."

Dean fought back a grin, looking over at the wall. "You're on quite the roll, huh?"

"Whether it be the romantic poets I indulge in, or my natural-born charm, the world may never know."

"I think it's just you, honestly."

"I'm touched." Ambrósio placed his free hand over his chest, where his heart lay underneath. "Oh, also- I figured out another song you remind me of."

"Really? Which?"

"Poison by Alice Cooper. I was gonna say his other song Feed My Frankenstein for the sake of the title and sexual themes, but there's lyrics in there regarding a body part that neither I nor you have...I'm assuming. There's nothing wrong with if you do, though. I have a guy friend with the body part, but he's saving up money to get rid of it."

Dean's eyebrows jumped. "You listen to Alice Cooper?"

"Sometimes, do you?"

"Not really my thing."

"Ah, yes, let me guess." Ambrósio raised a finger in thought. "You enjoy sitting back in leather armchairs, surrounded by dusty, possibly-expensive books and listening to the likes of Debussy, Chopin...I happen to like Tchaikovsky myself, if he's any your style."

Dean laughed softly. "No, not actually. I don't know what I listen to, I don't know if it could be classified as one thing."

"If you ever come back to Portugal, we could listen to my records together 'n' see what you're into" Ambrósio offered.

"Are you asking me out?" Dean joked.

"Don't flatter yourself. I'm a gentleman, I'd buy you dinner, first." Ambrósio corrected him. "I'm just flirting your socks of for the time being." He told, sliding a hand through his dark hair; he closed his eyes and gave it a tug, trying to imagine that it was someone else, someone specific, tugging his hair in his bed.

"I'm not wearing any socks right now."

"Task complete." Ambrósio nodded slowly, sure of himself. His smile grew when he heard Dean's slight laugh through the phone.

"Dinner, huh?"

"Yea. Wine, music, candlelight, the whole shebang. Again, a gentleman."

"The sound of it does intrigue me."

"That's the goal" Ambrósio stared up at the ceiling. 

"Your activity from before, regarding a bed...What would that include?" Dean didn't know what he was doing, nor what he was hoping to accomplish, but liked the power it held over Ambrósio trying to flirt with him...Well, trying and succeeding, but he liked playing a hard-to-get guy.

"Oh, I'm not entirely sure." Ambrósio partially lied. "Winding, twisting, turning, gyrating, writhing...incessant writhing" he purred. "Perhaps some assorted debaucheries along the way."

"You can be so charming when you want something, eh, Ambrose?"

"Or someone," Ambrósio added. "And I can be so charming, full stop."

"Of course you can."

"Alright, how can I get to you, Dean?" Ambrósio asked him. "Tell me the rules." He whispered through the telephone, Dean stifling a shiver.

"Can I trust you?" Dean playfully rolled his eyes.

"Oh, my dearest Dean, have I given you any reason not to?"

"That's true."

Ambrósio's voice turned into another whisper, "you and I could be as thick as fuckin' thieves. Tell me the rules, Dean." His fingers stroked from his chin to his cheek, a faraway look on his face.

Dean could just imagine the look on Ambrósio's face as they spoke. "First, you gotta tell me if I can call you 'chico' yet."

"Beg for it, like you wanted to" Ambrósio reminded him, free hand trailing down his neck, down his torso.

Dean turned back around, seeing Ambrósio holding onto the opened gate. "What is it, chico? Can I call you ‘chico’?"

“If you ask nicely.”

Dean rolled his eyes knowingly, “save either one of us begging for something from the other for another time.” He finally flirted back. 

Dean held a knowing expression on his face. He should've expected this.

"No problem, Ambrose. Can I call you 'chico', yet?"

"Only if you beg like you wanted to." Ambrósio flirted.

Dean looked around in thought, "wouldn't you rather in person?"

"Would either one of us want to travel seventeen-ish hours for you to beg me for something so small in the midst of your big book mission?" Ambrósio rhetorically asked. "You wanna call me 'chico', you gotta do what you suggested. It was your words, not mine, big man."

Dean hummed. "Please?"

"'Please' what?"

Dean giggled quietly. "Please, can I call you 'chico'? Please?" He insisted, "please? Let me call you 'chico', Ambrósio, please."

Ambrósio had a smug look on his face, "you may."

"That was barely any begging."

"Let's save actual begging for some other time, when we're closer together. Okay, amor?"

"Okay, chico." 

"I also thought of another song."

"You're full of them for someone who supposedly couldn't think of any."

"Shut up," Ambrósio chuckled. "I Was Made For Loving You."

Dean licked his lips, "by Kiss?"

"You like Kiss?" Ambrósio looked surprised.

"I know Kiss, and I know the song you mentioned. How come I never remind you of any Jimi Hendrix songs?"

"That's not my problem" Ambrósio replied. "I Was Made For Loving You, Dean. Take it or leave it."

"Y'know what, Ambrósio?" Dean inquired. "Maybe you were."

"Not even 'maybe', Dean. I know I am." Ambrósio checked the time. "Listen, I gotta get going, a guy's gotta run. Talk soon?"

"Sure thing, chico."

"Bye, Dean. Stay safe."

"You too."

Ambrósio and Dean hung up their phones, Ambrósio's head spinning of round glasses, prominent cheekbones and smooth voices as he left the bedroom. Whereas Dean stayed where he was, rubbing his thighs with thoughts of dark, soulful eyes, inked-up torsos, and dreamy grandsons.

Both of them just hoped Dean's mission would end quick so the two could talk physically again, or maybe do a greater deal than talking.

#the ninth gate 1999 #the ninth gate #the ninth gate oc #dean corso #dean corso x oc #dean corso x male!oc #dean corso x male #oc #ZAYN oc #zayn malik oc #male oc #oc x male #oc x canon #canon x oc #canon x male #male x male #male x oc #male x canon

[aion-rsa]

Malignant and Shock Twists That Ruin Movies

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains Malignant spoilers.

No matter what you think of James Wan’s Malignant, you have to give him this much: it’s pretty original. The filmmaker behind some of the biggest horror movies from this century—Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring in all under a decade—used that clout to pass on a sure thing like directing The Conjuring 3 and instead created something absolutely batshit crazy. In fact, it is on a hill of that batshit where Malignant will live or die for most viewers.

If you’ve read this far, we hope you’ve seen the movie and it’s not a spoiler to say that Gabriel—the mysterious “imaginary friend” from a forgotten childhood—is actually a parasitic twin. Yes, the monster killing everyone is actually the forgotten sibling of Madison (Annabelle Wallis). He stopped developing early on during their mother’s pregnancy, yet he’s shared literal space in Madison’s head and on her body ever since… and he’s been lying dormant for nearly 30 years until a nasty bump on the head gives him the ability to take over sis’ body and crawl out of her skull!

The concept is pure lunacy, and stranger still James Wan pivots his entire movie around the “reveal” of this image of Gabriel emerging out of the back of Madison’s head. Not until audiences are over an hour in do they realize what kind of schlocky silliness they’ve signed up for. It’s a bold gambit from a filmmaker who has the security of a billion-dollar Aquaman franchise behind him to take big swings like this. It also fails spectacularly on nearly every level.

On paper, the twist of Gabriel’s origin might suggest Wan is attempting to mainstream and revitalize a different type of horror, just as he did with “torture porn” in Saw and modern haunted house movies in Insidious and The Conjuring. In that sense, the image of an underdeveloped “cancer” growing out of a little girl’s back in Malignant is pure body horror. Is this Wan’s attempt at playing in David Cronenberg’s sandbox?

Perhaps. There are definite similarities between Malignant and several Cronenberg horror movies from the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which trafficked all in the shock of physical deformity to get under the skin—and closer to darker thoughts in the mind. Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) bears particular similarities to Malignant. In that film, a couple’s messy divorce and child custody battle takes on horrific connotations when the wife (Samantha Eggar) seeks experimental psychological treatment from a doctor (Oliver Reed) who convinces her to physically manifest her pain: which involves the shocking ending where she gives birth to a brood of monstrous alien-children who kill her subconscious’ enemies and attempt take her daughter back from her estranged husband.

The revelation of these children is visually more shocking and scarring than any image of twisted, misshapen appendages or opening skulls in Malignant. But then that’s because like all other Cronenberg films, the body horror was merely a means to an end. A metaphor about male-dominated society’s anxiety toward the bonds between mother and children, and even a fear of the reproductive process unto itself, underlies the entire running time of The Brood. It’s the ugliness of this paranoia made visceral.

Yet this comparison shows where Malignant fails. Like the Cronenberg movie, Wan’s film pivots on a shocking twist and an uncomfortable image of physical distortion. Yet that twist and that image are ends unto themselves, divorced from any sort of significant meaning or depth.

The revelation that Madison is attached to a deformed and malicious twin brother who hides, quite literally, inside her head appears to serve no purpose beyond the initial shock of seeing Gabriel crawling out of a little girl’s back like one of the grosser gags in a Troma film. Wan and his co-writers—Ingrid Bisu and Akela Cooper—don’t appear to have anything to say after this other than “boo.” When Gabriel finally reveals himself in the film’s present timeline, it isn’t for anything as loaded as the image of a mother licking her newborn’s afterbirth before the eyes of a disgusted husband; it is just so Gabriel can take over Madison’s body and brutally kill a bunch of other prisoners inside a jail cell. It’s maximum splatter for minimal payoff. As a story, Malignant isn’t really about anything else.

In this way, Malignant falls into the long line of empty calorie “twist endings” that define their movies for all the wrong reasons. These are twists that rather than get under the skin settle for tickling the funny bone.

For better or worse, perhaps the filmmaker most associated with these types of misjudged shocks is M. Night Shyamalan. He’s another undeniable auteur with a taste for the peculiar and daring. He can also lay claim to one of the all-time best narrative twists in a horror movie or any other genre thanks to The Sixth Sense. The realization that Bruce Willis has been a ghost for almost that entire film’s running time, and what it both means for the scenes between him and Haley Joel Osment as well as his character’s own sense of anguished regret, earned Shyamalan a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination.

Which is likely why so many folks still cackle about some of Shyamalan’s attempts to recapture that magic with subsequent twist endings. To be clear, Shyamalan has achieved some great shocks in subsequent movies, from Unbreakable to more recently The Visit and Split. But nothing can forgive the disappointment found in revealing the characters in the 19th century-set The Village have actually been living in the 21st century the whole time—and that their town’s elders have simply been lying to younger generations about monsters in the woods for reasons. Nor can anything silence the giggles that still curl the corner of the mouth when one recalls that “it’s the trees” out to cause humans to commit mass suicide in The Happening.

Twists that exist purely for the purpose of shock are a bit like a camp counselor making up a ghost story as they go along. The results might be amusing (or not), but they rarely make sense.

When the desire to shock becomes the sole reason to tell the story, the “twists” are more often remembered for their absurdity (like figuring out that Matthew McConaughey is a video game character in Serenity) or outright incredulity (such as Robert Pattinson’s coming of age story in Remember Me turning out to be a 9/11 movie the whole time with the final scene occurring on a Tuesday morning in September).

I don’t think the twist in Malignant works. At all. It’s an unsatisfying answer to an otherwise uninspiring mystery, which is unspooled in an obligatory fashion. Since viewers don’t know who most of the murder victims are in the stylish if otherwise uninvolving first half of the picture, Wan’s visual flair amounts to little of interest. The same goes for Wallis’ flat performance.

When coupled with a “reveal” that has nothing meatier to add beyond Madison developing inexplicable super-strength, so as to allow her to punch her fist through other inmates’ bodies, the movie becomes downright laughable. Yet in its way, that laugh will stick out in the memory a lot longer than other failures that are just going through some other movie’s formulaic motions. So maybe Gabriel really will get the last laugh in the end?

Malignant is in theaters and streaming on HBO Max now.

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The post Malignant and Shock Twists That Ruin Movies appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3A95wGk

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[im-the-king-of-the-ocean]

Penny/Oscar prompt(with trans!Penny and trans!Oscar): Still feeling confused by being chosen as the Winter maiden, she approaches Oscar about whether she can really be a Maiden when her soul came from a man. Oscar tries his best to answer as himself, saying they're not so different as Oz only reincarnates into men, and explains he wasn't born as one, but that it's their feelings towards their gender and own identity that matters more and is a true reflection of their soul.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be completely happy with this one.  It’s been through (at minimum 3-4) drafts and waaay too many read throughs.  I’m just gonna call it done here.  A part of me feels like I could still make it better somehow, but I already put all that I could into it.

That said, Penny and Oscar as valid af and anyone who disagrees can fight me behind Denny’s (sure I’ll probably lose because I’m basically Steve Rogers before he became Captain America, but yeah).

Also if it doesn’t come across that they’re valid af in this fic, I will just go and edit it some more.  I did my best, but I also am somewhat worried that’s not enough.

anywhoooo off to the fic!

.

There Are No Strings On Me (The Farm Boy Is Also A Cricket, Too)

Penny watches the airship lift off and fly away.  She hates staying behind like this.  She understands why.  What she is now, a Maiden—she’s too important to risk on a reconnaissance mission.  The fate of Atlas, Mantle, the entire world rests partially on her shoulders, and not just in an ‘Ironwood telling her that it will be her job to save the world one day’ way.  This is real.  Too real.

Penny holds one of her hands in the other.  She rubs circles with her thumb on her open palm.  Her father, the first chance he got, repaired the damage Cinder’s fiery blade caused when it exploded.  She’s glad for that.  There’s no doubt in her mind that there will be a battle in the near future she will take part in.  Going into a fight with sustained damages is no good.

Penny closes her eyes.  A part of her wants to playback that terrifying moment.  Hurtling through the air, her sensors alerting her to the incoming blade, catching it, her hands overheating.  Spinning out of control.  Falling.

Catching herself.

She refuses to let herself do more than think about it.  She survived the fight.  So did Winter.  That’s what really matters.  

Although, dying doesn’t necessarily scare Penny.  She’s done it once already.  She doesn’t remember it or the time between it and her reactivation.  She never felt pain, terror.  One moment she knew nothing more, and the next she was blinking awake in her father’s lab.  Penny knows truly dying means not waking up again, but she finds it hard to fear the moment when it’ll eventually happen definitively for her.

What she does fear, and what she would cry over if she had the capacity, is the possibility of an afterlife.  Penny has hard evidence now that, if an afterlife does exist, she doesn’t get to go there.  She doesn’t go anywhere.  She just shuts off.  Like any other machine.

She’s not real like actual people are.  She’s a very close replication of life, but there’s still a gaping chasm between her and everyone else.  One that she can never cross precisely because of what she is.

I have come too far to be stopped by some toy!

They’re words said in rage by someone whose opinion Penny knows she shouldn’t really be considering, but they’ve stuck with her since they were yelled at her.  Is that what she is?  A toy?  A puppet?  A plaything?  An imitation of life meant to explore humanity’s capacity for creation?

An imitation of humanity itself, one that deceived—stole—one of its greatest powers out from under it?

Penny can’t describe what having the Maiden powers feels like.  They’re just there.  A part of her, but one that’s somehow detached from her operating systems.  She controls them, can send commands and signals to them like she does literally every other aspect of her body, but they are distinctly separate from her machinery.  Like a magnet that got accidentally stuck to her and won’t come off.  Not truly a part of her.  Not really.

She shouldn’t have gotten them at all.  The Maiden powers were intended as a gift from an old wizard to four living girls, to aid mankind.  Penny isn’t alive, not like everyone else is.  The gift to the maidens was never meant for her.  She intervened in a process she should have stayed out of.  It was not her place to act like she had.

But if she hadn’t…

Penny can imagine what would have happened if Cinder won that fight.  Fria’s final moments would not have been peaceful.  Winter, out of aura and injured, would be in no condition to continue a fight against an even stronger opponent.  Penny herself…well, she already knew how little Cinder regarded her life.

She’d had no choice, hadn’t she?  To save all three of them.  To not waste the window of opportunity Winter gave her by distracting Cinder.  In those precious moments, there was only her.  Penny.

She could have told Fria to think of Winter, couldn’t she?  Fria knew Winter.  Thinking of her probably wouldn’t have been too hard.  But, Penny hadn’t.  Penny had taken Fria’s hand and held it.  Because no one should be alone in that final moment.  Because she couldn’t say she knew what awaited Fria on the other side and she wanted to give Fria whatever comfort she could to send her off.  Because, in that moment, the magical powers hadn’t mattered, but the old woman in Penny’s arms did.

Now, here she is, the Winter Maiden.  A thief of a gift to humanity.

“You okay?”

Penny nearly jumps.  She hadn’t heard Oscar come up behind her.  Her receptors had captured the echoing sound, sure, but her processors hadn’t been attuned to register it.

“I—I’m fine,” Penny says too hurriedly, and closes her lips firmly to prevent the hiccup from escaping her.

Oscar looks at Penny a long moment, and then sits down beside her.  “I hate staying behind like this,” he admits, gesturing to the cave opening the airship flew out of to exit the Crater.  “I know there’s more I can be doing but I…”

“Are too important,” Penny finishes for him.  And he is.  Ozpin can always reincarnate into someone else, yes, but there will only ever be one Oscar Pine.  Even if he stayed behind, like her, because of the special magic connected to him, that’s the truth Penny believes firmly in.

“I guess you know what that’s like.”  Oscar laughs quietly.

Penny doesn’t answer.  They settle into silence.  It’s an odd place to sit, really, the opening that looks out over the Crater.  They have an entire, somewhat comfortable, temporary hideout to go rest in, but neither really want to leave the spot where they can see the sliver of the sky where the airship will first appear when it returns.

“Penny, I…” Oscar begins, and Penny turns to him to listen.  “If it was going to be anyone, I’m glad you’re the Winter Maiden.  I know we don’t know each other well, but I do know you’re a good person.”

“Thanks,” Penny replies quietly.  She knows the words are supposed to be reassuring, but they fall flat to her.  Again, she’d been the only one there, in that moment with Fria.  If the Maiden powers could have gone somewhere else, they probably would have.

It was unfair to them, and Fria.  There’s no way the previous maiden could have known Penny’s true nature.  Fria had much more important, pressing matters on her mind to truly take a second and notice the exposed metal of the palms of Penny’s hands, first when she touched her leg, and then when she held her hand.  Fria probably hadn’t had time to realize no ordinary person could have come through the freezing whirlwind of ice and snow.  She probably hadn’t seen how Penny’s legs were clearly synthetic and attached together at an artificial knee.

Despite being a Maiden who lived well into old age and was, therefore, arguably very clever,  Fria probably hadn’t noticed all the little hints that indicated what Penny is, even though she had every reason to critically examine Penny, since she’d been attacked for the power she was tasked with protecting mere minutes before.

Because that would mean Fria had known (or at least suspected) Penny’s true nature, and decided to choose her anyway.

And why would she do that?  Penny, as she keeps telling herself over and over again, isn’t actually real.  Not a real girl.  Not like Ruby and the rest of her team.  Not like Nora, or Winter, or even Cinder, who’s part Grimm now.  All of them were born, created as girls, and Penny was…well her father had been more focused on building something that functioned.  He’d never chosen a gender for her.  She did that herself, later on, after she gained consciousness.  But he’d given her his aura, and her father was a man.  So, following that line of logic, shouldn’t she too be a man too?

“What if it was a mistake?”  Penny asks Oscar in barely a whisper.

He looks at her.  “What if what was a mistake?”

Penny takes a breath she wholly doesn’t need, but the action she learned is one that people do when they need to prepare themselves to say something important.  “Me becoming the Winter Maiden.  I have my father’s aura.  I’m not a real girl.  I tricked some of the most important magic in the world and stole it from humanity and…” she trails off, unsure of how to finish her self-doubting argument.

At first, Oscar doesn’t reply.  Then, “I have Ozpin’s magic, and his memories,” he says slowly.  “Does that make me him?”

“Of course not,” Penny retorts.  “You’re your own person!”

Oscar grins, and Penny gets the feeling it was his ploy to get her to say that, for both their sakes.  “So, if I can still be me, even if I have a wizard living in my head, then why can’t you be your own person even if your father gave you some of his aura?” He posits.

Penny huffs.  “I know I’m not the same being as my father.  There is substantial evidence supporting the concept that we are two entirely separate entities, but I have his aura, and he is a man.  The maiden powers only attach to females.  Therefore, logically, they should not have come to me.”

“So, following that reasoning, aura and gender are linked,” Oscar muses.  He pauses and, if Penny weren’t so wrapped up in her own tumultuous thoughts, she’d recognize the signs that he’s mentally preparing himself to say something he considers very important.  “What if I had evidence to the contrary?”

“What do you mean?”  Penny asks, her curiosity getting the better of her.

Oscar doesn’t look at her.  His shoulders hunch in.  Instinctively, Penny reaches over and wraps a reassuring arm around his shoulders.  She doesn’t know what he’s going to say next, but she can still recognize it’s hard for him to say.

“I was…I am…Penny, do you know what being transgender is?”

Penny doesn’t reply.  The moment she heard the unfamiliar word, she immediately sent out an inquiry to the Internet to find its meaning.

“Transgender,” she finally says.  “Denotes or relates to a person whose gender identity and expression does not correspond with what it was at birth.”

Oscar lets out a sharp laugh.  “That’s one way of putting it, I guess.”  He pauses.  Sensing he’s not finished, Penny waits for him to continue.  He does.  “For me, it means, when my parents’ only child was born, they had a daughter.”  Oscar glances at her warily, but Penny doesn’t interrupt.  He gazes down at his hands, and sighs.  “And that they never got to meet their son either.  They died before he figured that out about himself.”  Hurriedly, he adds, “That’s not the point,” while wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

Penny hugs Oscar, hoping to communicate that he doesn’t have to explain further to her if he doesn’t want to.

Oscar leans into the hug.  He doesn’t wrap his arms around Penny in return, but he does rest his weight on her.  “The point is,” he starts again.  “I once had…doubts.  Kind of like you do.  But I learned aura and gender aren’t really related.  Aura is just aura.  It doesn’t really concern itself with any other part of you.  It’s just there.  Completely yours.  It’s what we believe about ourselves, our identities, that makes us who we are.”

“But my aura is my—”

“Yours.”  Oscar sits back.  “Penny, have you ever considered that all parents create their children’s auras when they conceive them?”

“What?”

“It’s something Oz told me once.  We had a conversation kind of like this.”  Oscar inhales slowly and exhales.  “Oz told me everything comes from somewhere.  He has…interesting theories on the origins of Dust and semblances, for instance.  But he told me, our parents are always a part of us, because they gave a part of themselves to make us.  He said, because of that, mine will always be with me.”  Oscar stares down at his hands.  “Even if I never got to know them.  My aunt used to say the same, that I had my father’s laugh and my aura is nearly the same shade of green as my mother’s, but she’s not an ancient, mystical immortal, so I guess she was harder to believe.”

He smiles softly.  “It’s reassuring, in a way.  To know they gave me part of who I am.  My aura.  My laugh.  My appearance, to an extent.  But they didn’t decide who I am.  I’ve done that on my own.”  Oscar looks up at Penny.  “So have you.  You said it yourself.  You aren’t your father.  You have substantial evidence proving that.”

“But you’re human.  I’m not alive.  I don’t have a soul like—”

“How do you know?”  Oscar interrupts.  “How do you know you don’t have a soul?”

Penny hesitates, and then admits what she’s been thinking,  “I died.  I died and I didn’t go to an afterlife or anything.  I just shut down like any other old machine.”

There’s a long pause where Oscar doesn’t say anything.  Penny begins to think he doesn’t have an argument to refute her claim.  When she’s about to stand and walk away, Oscar finally speaks.

“What if you weren’t dead?”  He asks quietly.

“What?”

“Your father recovered your core, you, from Amity Arena, and used it to rebuild you.  A part of you never shut down completely.  In your own way, you were still alive.”  Though the words seem more like an statement, Oscar speaks them like he’s asking a question.

“I guess.”  Penny frowns.  She’s never really thought of it like that before.  Everyone told her she died, so she assumed she had.  But, a part of her had still existed in the world, hadn’t it?  Vulnerable.  Weak.  But not snuffed out completely.

Penny thinks about it more deeply.  Maybe it was like she had been in a coma?  When people are grievously injured, they can go into comas.  They don’t necessarily remember what happens during them either.  They wake up on the other end still alive, just with a gaping hole of time they weren’t conscious for in their life.  Like her.

“That doesn’t mean I have a soul or will go to an afterlife like everyone else,” Penny mumbles, but she’s not as certain that she believes herself now.

“Penny, I’m not sure how else to tell you this, but no one knows what happens to us after we die.  Not even me, and I—well, Ozma—sort of died once.  Actually, it was more like a couple times.”  Oscar winces.  “But Ozma didn’t maintain memories of what happened to him after once the God of Light brought him back.”  He smiles at her.  “Wondering about it, I think, is one of the most human things someone can do.”

“Oh.”  Penny considers the idea that she’s just as alive as everyone else is, and lets that sink in.

“If it helps.”  Oscar leans back on his hands and looks up to the small sliver of sky that’s visible to them.  “We’re probably the only two people who can be completely certain about their identities.”

“How so?”  Curious, Penny cocks her head.

“I was chosen as the next life as an immortal who only reincarnates into men.  You’re the Winter Maiden, who can only be a girl.”  Oscar shrugs.  “We were each chosen by magic older than this incarnation of humanity itself based on the identities we decided for ourselves.  If that’s not validating, I don’t know what is.”

“I never thought about it like that.”  Penny sighs.  “I—I thought I tricked it.  That I looked enough like a girl that the maiden powers came to me because they had no place else to go.”

“The maiden powers are meant to go to those who will travel out in the world and make it a better place because they are able to.  I think that fits you pretty well.”

#rwby #data farms #penny polendina #oscar pine #trans!penny #trans!oscar #whirls writing #misstrashchan

[slut-kiss-g1rl]

geostorm <3

FADE IN:

INT. COURTROOM

GERARD BUTLER is at a COURT HEARING... in the FUTURE!

GERARD BUTLER

It is the future. Natural disasters have become alarmingly commonplace. Hurricanes, mudslides, floods, you name it. The level of destruction is catastrophic.

RICHARD SCHIFF

To be clear, this is the FUTURE you’re talking about?

GERARD BUTLER

The nations of the world have finally decided to take action. So, pooling our resources, we’ve invested heavily in environmental research and clean energy, and cracked down heavily on industrial emissions standards-

(laughs and laughs and laughs)

Just kidding! We’ve built a giant orbital platform that shoots the bad weather with space missiles and space lasers, of course.

RICHARD SCHIFF

So you’re the genius who built the space station. But instead of just making you the chief engineer, which would make sense, we made you director of the whole multi-national program, despite the fact that you have no administrative skills or political experience and mostly get what you want by yelling at people and punching them in the face?

GERARD BUTLER

That’s correct, you useless government fucks. You can all lick my sweaty gonads.

(moons everybody)

RICHARD SCHIFF

You’re fired and we’re giving your job to your little brother Jim Sturgess. At least he can do a passable American accent.

GERARD BUTLER

Och, ye dinnae hae ta be a deck abote et!

INT. SPACE STATION

Engineer RICHARD REGAN PAUL is aboard the WEATHER STATION when he notices that somebody has stuck a SMARTPHONE on an important CIRCUITBOARD.

RICHARD REGAN PAUL

Oh crap, somebody’s sabotaging this hundred-trillion-dollar space program using consumer electronics! I better draw everybody’s attention to this and alert my superiors!

(falls down and hits head very hard)

Duhhhh I mean I should hide this evidence and tell nobody yessss.

He stashes the EVIDENCE, but shortly afterwards the CORRIDOR he’s walking through is SEALED and all the WALL PANELS START BLASTING OFF!

RICHARD REGAN PAUL

What the fuck? Why would we design them to be able to do that? What possible situation could arise in a space station when we’d need to get rid of the WALLS in a hurry? This makes no-

(spaced)

The SPACE STATION then proceeds to turn a bunch of VILLAGERS in AFGHANISTAN into SNOWMEN.

INT. WHITE HOUSE

JIM STURGESS is having a meeting with the movie’s entire supply of Oscar-nominated actors.

JIM STURGESS

So yeah, we kind of murdered a bunch of innocent people with a giant ice ray like Mr. Freeze, oops. We need to send up an international team of brilliant engineers to the space station to investigate what went wrong, despite the fact that there’s already an international team of brilliant engineers ON the space station.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ANDY GARCIA

No way, Jim. As the president, I can’t have foreigners touch this station which has been funded and staffed predominately by foreigners! We’ll send up Americans.

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ED HARRIS

ONE American. I mean if we’re going to half-ass this thing, let’s half-ass it, y’know?

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE MARE WINNINGHAM

I am also in this scene for some reason.

JIM STURGESS

Ugh fine, let’s send up Gerard. It’ll take some doing though, he and I haven’t really gotten along in the vague amount of time since you gave me his job. Seriously, the timeline is super nebulous, it could have been anything between a week and five years.

ED HARRIS

I have faith you can convince him, Jim. As your father figure and mentor, you know I support you in everything, and if you ever need somebody you can implicitly trust-

JIM STURGESS

We get it, you’re the villain, whoop-de-doo.

(leaves)

EXT. LOSER SHACK

JIM goes out to see GERARD, who is hanging with his DAUGHTER.

JIM STURGESS

Hey bro, the space laser’s been acting up. Think you could pop up to space real quick and fix it? Thanks.

GERARD’S DAUGHTER

Dad, no! You can’t go back to space! It’s too dangerous! Don’t abandon me like this!

GERARD BUTLER

OH GOD NOT THIS FUCKING TROPE. Yeah, parents should never do work that takes them away from their families for any amount of time or puts themselves at risk, no matter how important it is. I’m a shitty father because I’m agreeing to go save hundreds of millions of lives, possibly including yours. Shut the fuck up, you little turd.

GERARD immediately storms off and goes to SPACE.

EXT. HONG KONG

Suddenly the movie remembers the CHINESE BOX OFFICE and cuts to HONG KONG, where DANIEL WU is heading home with some SHOPPING.

DANIEL WU

(looks around)

Aw fuck. A famous capital city in a disaster movie? This isn’t gonna end well.

Sure enough he drops some EGGS on the ground and they immediately begin to FRY!

DANIEL WU

Holy shit the ground is apparently as hot as a stovetop! You’d think this is something the people in the street would have noticed, but uh, I guess all our shoes are made entirely of thermally nonconductive silica fibreglass?

(jumps in car, speeds off)

And our tires too, don’t forget our tires!

DANIEL drives through the streets as the pavement CRACKS and FIRE erupts out of the SUPERHEATED PAVEMENT!

DANIEL WU

Damn, the space station must have done that! Not that we ever explain how geothermal energy could possibly be controlled by space lasers!

INT. SPACE STATION

GERARD arrives aboard the SPACE STATION to meet the team of ENGINEERS.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Welcome, Gerard! I am an asshole. A smug, unlikeable asshole. The exact kind of jerk you’d think would turn out to be the saboteur. Which is kind of awkward, because I DO turn out to be the saboteur.

AMR WAKED

It’s okay, I’ll cover for you by red herringing as hard as humanly possible in every scene I’m in.

(lurks sinisterly)

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Meanwhile I’m the station’s commander. I exist to be your sort-of love interest with whom you never get beyond meaningful eye contact, and to make you seem hypercompetent by standing around uselessly while you do everything important.

GERARD BUTLER

Okay then, now that everybody’s in position let’s get this 2012-but-with-weather/Gravity-except-stupid-and-with-more-explosions hybrid on the road! Bring on the barrage of gratuitous global annihilation!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Actually there’s nowhere near as much of that kind of thing as the trailers promised. But if you like scenes where someone stares at tiny gobbledegook on a computer screen and explains what plot points it discloses, we’ve got a buttload of that!

GERARD BUTLER

(puppy dog eyes)

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Oh fine, here’s one to tide you over.

EXT. TOKYO

Giant hail in Tokyo!

INT. SPACE STATION

GERARD BUTLER

Ta! Now let’s look at that satellite that fried Hong Kong.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Uh, oops, unfortunately that malfunctioning satellite got smashed beyond usefulness because the hydraulic arm which was holding it malfunctioned!

GERARD BUTLER

Fine then, let’s look at the surveillance footage from when Richard Regan Paul got spaced.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Um well we can’t see the footage of that wall malfunction because the footage has also malfunctioned.

GERARD BUTLER

Wait though, there’s still a useable recording in a leftover bit of wall that got stuck in a solar array panel! Let’s go for a spacewalk and get it.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Sure thing WHUH OH while you’re trying to retrieve that malfunctioning bit of wall, your space suit has malfunctioned!

GERARD BUTLER

(bouncing off every part of the space station)

HEY YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M STARTING TO THINK THAT MAAAAYBE THERE’S JUST A SMIDGE OF SABOTAGE GOING ON.

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Damnit! Turns out that by the time you’re committing sabotage to cover up your sabotage to cover up your sabotage to cover up your sabotage, it starts to get kinda obvious what you’re doing.

(pause)

Nnnnnot that I have anything to do with that. Right, Amr?

AMR WAKED

(hovers creepily at the edge of frame)

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Exactly.

GERARD retrieves the DATA from the WALL FRAGMENT, but finds that he can’t ACCESS IT.

GERARD BUTLER

Oh crap, only a high-level government official could have restricted the data like this! That means that SOMEBODY extremely high-ranking is behind all this, but we don’t know who!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

It’s Ed Harris. Everybody has figured this out already.

GERARD BUTLER

I have to tell Jim about this. But they might have bugged our comms, and my message may be intercepted by whoever the traitor is.

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

It is quite obviously Ed Harris.

GERARD BUTLER

I better use a code.

(calls Jim)

Hey there, Jim! Just thought I’d stop in the middle of this deadly crisis to randomly reminisce. SOMEtimes I think about that old WHITE porch we used to have at our HOUSE, where our pathetic inbred ASSHOLE of a father used to get FUCKED up on tequila and whale on US with a wrench. Glad that’s all OVER.

JIM STURGESS

A high-ranking government traitor? Why that could only be-

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

ED HARRIS, IT’S ED HARRIS YOU IDIOTS, THERE'S NO OTHER REASON FOR HIS CHARACTER TO EXIST

JIM STURGESS

-the president! America is soon scheduled to hand control of the space station over to an international committee. The president must be causing these disasters in order to retain control!

GERARD BUTLER

Right. Because after a fuckup of this magnitude, obviously the last thing people will want to do is remove the administrators responsible for killing everybody.

JIM STURGESS

And he’s not gonna stop with these penny-ante special effect showcases, either! He’s trying to chain a bunch of them together and bring on a geostorm!

GERARD BUTLER

You mean the tiny, ugly-ass sports compact from Isuzu?

JIM STURGESS

Not a Geo Storm, a GEOSTORM! A made-up, probably impossible meteorological phenomenon where it storms everywhere on the planet at once! According to our computers, this precise sequence of weather disasters - including the ones which the space station hasn’t caused yet - will lead to a geostorm in EXACTLY the nice, round timeframe of ninety minutes!!

GERARD BUTLER

Fuck! Fine then, let’s do an emergency shutdown of the station so it can’t frag the planet. This potentially apocalyptic orbital weapons platform DOES have an emergency off switch, right?

JIM STURGESS

Well, yes... but, ha ha, it turns out it can only be activated using the president’s biometrics. So if the most dangerous thing ever made malfunctions, it can only be stopped if you can get the president into the right specific room quickly enough.

(shrugs awkwardly)

Fortunately, I have been provided with a convenient secret service girlfriend who can grab the president for us!

ABBIE CORNISH

Okay then, I’ll-

JIM STURGESS

Plot devices don’t speak, honey.

ABBIE CORNISH

Then why does this movie have any dialogue at all?

INT. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

JIM and ABBIE go to find PRESIDENT ANDY at the DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION in ORLANDO. But first they run into ED HARRIS.

JIM STURGESS

Ed, thank god I ran into somebody I can trust! We need to grab the president so we can shut down this Bond villain-esque weather scheme.

ED HARRIS

Uh, okay. I have the president right here in this gun. Stand still so that I might fire him at you.

JIM STURGESS

Wha - YOU?! EVIL?!? DWAAAHHH?!?!?

ED HARRIS

Don’t patronize me. Anyway, part of my plan is to set off a giant lightning storm here and kill everybody in line of succession ahead of me, so I become president!

JIM STURGESS

Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve gone to the trouble of pointing out it’s an election year! Do you honestly expect an administration that ran an environmental program so badly that it KILLED THEM ALL to get reelected?

JIM and ABBIE grab ANDY and run for it! Then a fuckton of LIGHTNING starts DESTROYING THE DNC!

BYSTANDER

Man, those Russian hackers have really stepped up their game.

(incinerated)

ABBIE CORNISH

Quickly, we can get away using this SELF-DRIVING cab we just commandeered! Since I’m driving it there might seem to be no reason for us to point out that it’s a SELF-DRIVING cab, so I guess now the audience has already figured out we’re shortly going to be pulling some trick where it SELF-DRIVES. We’ll still act like we’re being clever, though.

ED HARRIS

Chase that cab, my suicidally dedicated minions! Meanwhile I will teleport to the road ahead of them, so I can set up a rocket launcher ambush! Nothing screams “accidental death” like getting blown up by a fucking rocket launcher. FIRE!

MINION

Uh, you sure you don’t want to wait until we can see who’s driving? Disregarding any possible self-driving tricks, cabs are pretty interchangeable and that could in fact be entirely the wrong car-

ED HARRIS

I SAID FIRE!

They BLOW UP THE CAB! But then ANDY appears and shoves a GUN in ED’S FACE.

ANDY GARCIA

That’s right, we sent the empty cab driving towards you at sixty miles an hour! And now here we are, having caught up to it on foot within the next twenty seconds. My legs are KILLING ME.

ED HARRIS

Come on Andy, you should still let the geostorm happen! My theory is that the massive catastrophe which is going to demolish the face of the planet will handily attack only our political enemies and we’ll be fine!

ANDY GARCIA

Goddamn, how is it that each new layer of your motivations is even dumber than the last?

EXT. EVERYWHERE

Meanwhile DIRECTOR DEAN DEVLIN looks under the COUCH and finally finds the movie’s MISSING DISASTER EFFECTS, and they all start happening at once! Ice storms in Rio! Fire storms in Moscow! Tsunamis in the desert!

GERARD BUTLER

Opposite weather, is it? In that case I’m guessing London is currently having a pleasant sunny day HEY-OOOHHH!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

But we’re not doing so great here in space either. Somebody’s set off our self-destruct system, and the station’s gonna explode in [amount of time left in which the geostorm can still be averted + just enough time for a thrilling escape]!

GERARD BUTLER

Wait a minute, according some kind of plot mumbo jumbo, the only one who could have started the self-destruct protocol is... ROBERT! You little traitor, you’re working for Ed!

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Okay okay, you’ve got me, but SURPRISE I had a gun strapped to the underside of this desk and now you haven’t got me at all, HA!

GERARD BUTLER

What was your plan if I’d confronted you in literally any other room?

ROBERT SHEEHAN

Clearly I must have guns strapped underneath every surface in the entire space station.

(opens fire)

Aw yeah, no better strategy for staying alive than shooting bullets in a room which is separated from the vacuum of space by a single pane of-

ROBERT accidentally SPACES HIMSELF! The movie does not reveal whether, in his last moments of consciousness, RICHARD��S FROZEN, ORBITING CORPSE happens to collide FOOT-FIRST with ROBERT’S CROTCH, so one is forced to assume that it DOES.

INT. SPACE STATION STOPPING ROOM

Back on EARTH, ANDY arrives in the ROOM he has to be in so that he can turn off the SPACE STATION.

ANDY GARCIA

All right, we did it! I just used my biometrics to activate the thing, so now the world is saved! Right?

JIM STURGESS

Actually Gerard still has to get to another specific room on the station itself and press a big “YES” button for it to actually work.

ANDY GARCIA

OF COURSE. What was I thinking, we can’t let this emergency shutdown be activated merely by having the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED FUCKING STATES TURN IT ON WITH HIS OWN SPECIAL BODY SCAN. No, we need the extra, mega-secure step of having some engineer click “confirm”!

JIM STURGESS

Look, we wanted to do the president kidnapping scene but still give Gerard a big action climax, this was the only way.

In SPACE, GERARD and ALEXANDRA make it to the SPECIAL ROOM, shut down the SPACE STATION and SAVE THE WORLD!

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Phew, and with one second left to go! That’s right, because we turned off the weather machine when we did all the bad weather instantly cleared up; but if it had gone on for even one more second it would have become a global superstorm which would have wiped out most of humanity. What a sensible premise!

GERARD BUTLER

Unfortunately while we were able to get everybody else off the station, there’s no time left for you and I to escape. But I knew this when I stayed behind. I may not have been a good father, but I hope my daughter can at least appreciate the sacrifice I made by dying in space in order to save-

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Are you seriously copying Bruce Willis’s death from Armageddon?

GERARD BUTLER

Oh FUCK you’re right. Screw it, let’s just jump in a spare satellite and fly to safety then.

ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

Hooray! I’m not even gonna ask why a weather satellite has room inside it for passengers!

They HOP ABOARD the SPACE EX MACHINA and fly away!

EXT. LOSER SHACK

Months later, GERARD, JIM and GERARD’S ANNOYING DAUGHTER are all hanging out and fishing.

GERARD BUTLER

Neat, our family’s come un-estranged! What a happy ending. Why if we keep the focus on stuff like this, and the fact that in Brazil the dog didn’t die, we can ignore the fact that millions of people just got horribly murdered!

JIM STURGESS

And the rebuilt space station is now in international hands as intended, and they’re gonna make sure none of this can ever-

GERARD BUTLER

Wait, what the fuck? They’re doing the space station again? After the last one turned out to be a city-destroying death ray which could be commandeered by a single nerd with a smartphone? That’s the least plausible ending this movie could have possibly had!

JIM STURGESS

Uh huh. Yeah, I’m sure in real life politicians the world over would instead start seriously committing themselves to environmental policy. Hmmm?

GERARD BUTLER

...Okay yeah this way’s more realistic.

---------------

>:(

#ur a bitch #<33 #submission

[janthonyashtoreth]

Another big batch of asks!

Answering a bunch of asks under the cut! Most of them are ink and flowers centric. I hope you all are doing well <3

anonymous asked: wait wait hold up Anathema works in Azra's tattoo parlour?? amazing, when i was thinking of making my own florist/tattoo artist au, i also had Anathema be Aziraphale's apprentice :D i like when these two are friends. do you have any more headcanons about Anathema in ink and flowers?

she does!! she was doing an apprenticeship under him but has since graduated to doing her own thing (but she still works at his parlor). i can’t get into the whole plot because spoilers but angels/demons and agnes nutter’s prophecies still exist in the iaf universe, but anathema isn’t her descendant. instead, anathema is a wickedly smart computer genius and her boyfriend newt is an endearing but kind of inept descendent of agnes. anathema was azra’s good friend-turned-wingwoman once anthony shows up. i love her

anonymous asked: concept: aziraphale seeing crowley presenting femininely for the first time how'd you think he'd react? in your flower shop tattoo artist au

anonymous asked: OKAY totally not asking bc i may or may not have been thinkin abt this for like. too long. but would anthony have to like, come out as genderfluid to azra/how would azra react to seeing anthony present more fem for the first time

ooo ive been thinking about this as well! i dont think anthony would necessarily have a “coming out moment”, they just kind of do what they want. if they feel like presenting fem or using different pronouns they would just. do it. and azra would just kind of roll with it. i like to think that the first time anthony presented fem she got all dressed up for date night and didn’t tell azra and azra just Stares bc,,,, wow anthony is just gorgeous like that!! azra’s dead!!!

anonymous asked: You're a cutie pie. That's it. That's the fact.

:’ ) you’re a sweety pie!!!

anonymous asked: i deadass tried for 20 minutes to make the finger heart...... how did your friend do it......

i have absolutely no idea and it hurts my brain,,,

anonymous asked: Wahoo

wahoo.....

@alligatorsnbats asked: OK, so what's Oscar's thoughts on Anthony?

oscar LOVES anthony... he’s the worlds most apathetic cat but he actively seeks anthony out when hes around. azra is only slightly salty about it

anonymous asked: Is Anthony cross eyed?

he’s not! i made him a little bit cross-eyed in my latest post on purpose bc he was flustered but i dont know if it came across very well ;;

anonymous asked: not to be *THAT* bitch who comes into your ask box and gushes over your art but i love the way you colour things and your clean line work?? mwah. i wish i could draw like you its just so lovely

bfdkjfdh im cry,,,, just keep practicing my friend!!! i promise it’ll get you where you want to go. the last couple of months have been really nice for me in my ~art journey~ because its the first time i’ve ever really liked stuff that i’ve drawn. ive been drawing for about 7-8 years and this is only just happening and it varies so much from person to person!! some people get to where they want to go in 2 years, some people take 20. just don’t stop practicing!!

anonymous asked: your human!crowley deserves infinite appreciation and the fact that he has coloboma: that right there! is! good shit! he has snake eyes,,,, but as a human. u are a genius good sir and your art is a blessing 👌👌👌

haha thank you!! i think coloboma (i know how to spell it now!!) is such an interesting condition and it’s kind of underused for human aus!!! its so dope!!!

@bolitakawaii-senpai asked: what would crowley's and azi's fav emojies from the cursed emojis??

asking the real questions out here..... i think crowley’s would be the one with all of the teeth and aziraphale’s (assuming he knows what they are in the first place) would be the really cute one with big eyes and the pink hairbow

anonymous asked: concept for the ink and flowers au: something happens to crowley (imma b honest i have no idea) and has a lowkey crisis and chops all his hair off and just. joins his pet snake and snakes around the nursery untill azra comes in seeing crowley crying and cuddling his snake and yeah idk enjoy my the weird shit my brain comes up with

jhuyhaijodfaydgsihfujoi RIP TO THE HAIR...... i love the angst potential (and i can come up with a few reasons for the angst, but i digress) but i dont think i could part with anthony’s hair,,, i love it too much

anonymous asked: I can't handle your ink and flowers Aziraphale. I can't. His hair is TOO fluffy. His face is TOO squishy. He is EXTREMELY friend shaped. His glasses and his eyes are bright like SPARKLES. Every time I see him I want to go feral and show all my friends. I would hug him without letting go of given the chance. 1000000000/10. 💜🐝

anonymous asked: I have a cat just like Oscar (big himbo) and I got him some knit hats for Christmas and he's gonna hate me but I can't wait to dress him up like a little bee so: does Azra ever give Oscar like costumes or footies just for fun? If yes, does Oscar love or hate? 💜🐝

isldakfj im grouping these two together bc im assuming ur the same person anon!! i love your signature!!

you’re correct. his hair IS too fluffy, and he IS entirely too friend shaped. he has the BRIGHTEST eyes. i cant contain my rabid love for him and it spills out into the art. i can’t help it. he gives the best hugs

SLADKFJ YES HE DOES..... IVE BEEN MEANING TO DRAW THIS FOR A HOT MINUTE,,,, as i mentioned earlier oscar is the world’s most apathetic cat so i dont think he would care that much but he’s not super happy about it

anonymous asked: Y'know what? I'm too tired so say smth clever so just know that I love you and your art is amazing 💕💕 PS: i love that you also tag them as Ineffable partners (i guess the point is to be gender neutral)

i love you as well anon,,, and yeah i like the ineffable partners tag! i find that it fits more with their relationship for some reason. though i still tag as ineffable husbands since its such a popular tag lksdfjdfknjbh

anonymous asked: Hello! Fist of all thank you for yor art, you are one of my favorite artists in this fandom and I have Feelings about the Ink and Flowers AU. Second: Don't feel pressured to post daily, we understand that life is complicated and art can be difficult sometimes. Take care! You're the best!

anon i would die for you!!! i never imagined that i would ever be one of anyone’s favorite artists,,,,, im speechless,,,,,,,,

and yeah unfortunately i dont think ill be able to post every other day once this coming semester starts :( i’ll probably have to cut back to once every 3. but there’s more ink and flowers coming at u guys so!! stay tuned for that

anonymous asked: Good omens characters having a game night?

i know this was sent in for the au prompts i asked for but. i dont think im physically capable of capturing the pure chaos that would ensue from this. holy shit it would be so feral. 

thank you to anyone who read this whole thing!! i read all of my asks as soon as i get them and i have a lot that i’ve been sitting on for a while. if you sent me something i promise i haven’t forgotten about it!! if you’ve sent something in that you were expecting a response to and i havent responded, just send it again to be safe in case tumblr ate it

i love all of you! <3

#ask me anything #anonymous #not art #ink and flowers au #bolitakawaii-senpai #alligatorsnbats

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps: “A Night Off”

So RWBY has this weird thing going on in Volume 7 where it’ll give me a truly horrendous episode and then manage to turn things around just enough so that, despite my frustrations, I quite like parts of the next week’s stuff. That proceeds to get my hopes up, only for them to turn around mess it all up again in the following episode.

What I’m saying is, I should expect next week to be a pretty rough ride.

First, let me chuck out the details I personally loved in this episode that fit better together than spread out across a recap. Namely, treating Oscar like an actual human being. Thank you, Rooster Teeth, for:

Having him continually be involved by monitoring Jaune’s aura levels. (It likewise hasn’t escaped my notice how much he’s been paired with JNR lately. The fandom might get their new ‘P’ after all.)

Giving Oscar some thoughts and feelings beyond just the Ozpin situation. He’s worried about not having his semblance yet. Hark! A characterization!

Nora very kindly firing back with, “Well, I bet we’ll all be jealous when you do.”

Yang using Oscar as a convenient armrest. Granted, Yang hasn’t exactly treated him well enough lately to have earned that kind of casual buddy-buddy-ness, but if the writing is never going to call the group out on their Volume 6 behavior then I’ll take unearned kindness over continued indifference or cruelty

Jaune going out to the movies with Oscar and them both inviting Weiss. I mean, same issue here. Why is Oscar so comfortable and eager to hang out with the guy who attacked him? I wish that we had some acknowledgment that these kinds of things don’t just disappear once someone apologizes. Jaune still hurt Oscar, badly enough to leave him flinching against a wall... and none of that even takes into account Oscar’s supposed hesitation about lying to Ironwood. He should be acting more like Ren, involved with the group yet wary at the same time.

In addition, keep in mind that Oscar is currently living in this happy bubble where everyone has chosen to forget that Ozpin exists. I’m still highly suspicious of how they’ll treat him once Ozpin is out in the open again and Oscar is the convenient scapegoat for their anger. As said though, for now I’ll take it. I mean, look at that smile.

Right. Onto the actual plot.

We open on the aftermath of the Mantle riots, which is somewhat disappointing. I had hoped the group would actually be involved in that, giving them the chance to tackle a situation where brute force can’t be the go-to answer. You can’t punch out desperate citizens or run them through with your scythe. Instead, Ironwood’s men are handling it and we reconvene with the group the next day, election day. For the record, we know it has only been a day---and not longer rioting as I initially assumed---because Weiss comments that her father dropped that bombshell “the day before the election.” Which for me just speaks to how much time must have passed during those training montages. The political parts of this volume couldn’t have happened in any short amount of time. 

We’re shown an interview with Hill wherein she quite firmly doesn’t condone the rioting, but admits that there are good reasons for it as well. Her body guard stands very awkwardly in the background in a way I don’t think the shot really needs.

We then segue back into the group training and, like I mentioned above with Oscar, there are a lot of details here that I really enjoyed. Two of which are Weiss creating a mini version of her knight to sneak up on Winter---yes, please show us this kind of creativity in the actual fights---and Nora and Jaune practicing with a rubber ball. Ren is also deep in meditation while all this going on, which raises some questions about how aware of the world he is in this state. Is he able to simply ignore all the commotion, even Ruby flying straight at him? Is he so deep down that he’s entirely disconnected until he resurfaces? If so, does he only meditate like this when he’s 100% sure he’s in a safe place? Would the group be able to wake him if something were to happen?

As you can see, I’m obviously a little too invested in details and world building lol.

Speaking of world building though, we learn a little bit more about semblances here. Namely that, like hinted at in Volume Five and recently with Harriet, all their semblances are “evolving.” Jaune can apparently regenerate his own aura now, much more quickly than he could before. And Ruby...

Okay, real talk. Did I miss something here? It’s entirely possible I did, but if not what even was that conversation between Ruby and Oscar? She flies at the pillar Ren is seated under, divides into three rose petal clusters to get around it, and recombines on the other side. You know, the thing we’ve known she can do for a long while now. Since Volume Four I believe. Except then we get this exchange:

Oscar: Have you always been able to do that?

Ruby: I don’t know. I don’t normally think it through that much.

What are you talking about? Of course you know, Ruby! This isn’t a new technique. And what do you mean by, “I don’t normally think it through that much”? Is the writing trying to imply that she’s done the split thing so instinctively in the past she didn’t even notice she was doing it? I’m just massively confused by this moment. Others have pointed out that the writing tends to make up easy to solve “problems” for the cast to deal with so it looks like they’re achieving some kind of growth. The most egregious example being Ruby’s lack of hand-to-hand in Volume 5, culminating in a single headbutt against Mercury. Notably, this supposed flaw hasn’t resurfaced at all since then. Not even, say, when she’s at a party without her weapon and Tyrian attacks...

This feels like another moment where they just threw out something random to make it look like Ruby is improving alongside with the other, actual developments they’ve managed to think through, such as Jaune’s aura. Which is particularly strange considering Ruby was set up as the one to evolve her semblance. Which will probably still happen... but why paint an old skill as new along the way? It’s just all very strange.

Anyway, we get a nice shot of Ren coming out of his meditation where the whole world is gray like when he activates his semblance. Excellent visual cue as to his emotional state. This continues as Ironwood arrives and the group lays into him about needing to trust Hill. Which is hilarious considering that none of them are currently trusting Ironwood. He points out that common ground can only exist “if she’s open too”---unlikely given the second half of the episode---and Nora is about to challenge that when Ren interrupts, asking about mission assignments. Ironwood announces that they’re getting the night off instead.

Note though how guilty Ruby looks after all that talk of trusting others.

We cut to the girls later that night in their room, listening to the election news and getting ready to go out. It’s all very cute, but I think Nora is onto something regarding how Blake and Yang are always together. It’s so blatantly obvious they’re falling for one another, especially after this episode, and I’m honestly thrilled we’re finally getting some queer rep beyond former villains and minor characters. However, I hope that as Blake and Yang’s relationship develops that the writers don’t completely lose track of their co-dependency issues as well. Meaning, Yang totally wrote Blake off because she “ran away,” AKA went home precisely like Yang did, warping a natural and understandable choice into a personal betrayal. Blake in turn broke down sobbing and promised Yang to never ever leave her again. Separation is not a new issue for them. Their desire to spend every waking moment together is definitely cast as romantic now, but it’s also tied up in their inability to function well without each other. As we saw recently, a throwaway comment about fighting with someone else generates legitimate anger in both of them. Couples have to be able to spend time apart, so I hope the writing eventually lets the girls work through all that as well. 

For now though, they’re going dancing with FNKI. Very bad dancing based on what little we see. It’s enough to convince Weiss that the movies are her best choice here. Especially since she’s clearly not interested in Hill’s preemptive victory party. We see a tiny bit of that tension between Weiss’ views and Nora’s, but nothing with any substance. We just keep getting tiny glimpses that Nora is potentially passionate about the people of Mantle before it’s all quickly overshadowed by her romance drama with Ren. More on that in a moment.

The two of them plus Ruby make their way out into the streets where Ren admits that, “We spent so much time worrying about how Ironwood would react to the truth about [Salem], but have any of us even considered how we’re going to beat her if we work past that?”

Ruby reminds them that Jinn told Ozpin he couldn’t destroy her. Nora: “Maybe someone else could?”

It only took you weeks to figure that out! Though I love how this still---still---apparently has no bearing on how they view Ozpin. This was another perfect, quiet moment where three characters, notably three of the least angry characters, could have acknowledged how terrifying this information is. How they still can’t bring themselves to tell Ironwood, a man who thus far has done nothing but support them. Wow, I totally get why Ozpin would have trouble telling us. Oh also, we just realized that maybe Jinn’s information was specific to him. Maybe someone else can destroy Salem. That’s a pretty big revelation. I wonder if Ozpin himself realizes that? We should probably try to talk to him at some point.

It’s while they’re talking about the heavy stuff that Ren mutters about how they should still be training. Nora counters that they deserve a night off and the two of them clash enough to walk off angry. We see now at least part of what’s been bothering Ren lately. Nora is a very bubbly, silly, go-with-the-flow sort of person, whereas he is hyper focused on becoming as strong as possible in the hopes of finding a way out of this Salem mess. He doesn’t want to hear compliments while searching for a geist, or have her playing with his hair while on patrol, or turn training into a conversation about their relationship, or waste time on frivolous parties. There’s obviously a happy medium between Ren’s work ethic and Nora’s relaxed attitude, though they haven’t worked through that at all because they’re too busy kissing. Again, more on that in a second.

They reach the party, Penny is there, Nora and Ren dive into another fight that serves to canonize both them and Blake/Yang. Nora comments about how they’re spending so much time together, Ren observes that they’re at least friends again, and the response is,

Nora: “Friends, huh? Just friends?” Ren: “What else would they be? Nora: “Two people who have gone through so much? I think there’s more going on...”

It’s clear at this point that Nora is talking about them rather than Yang/Blake, but the initial comparison holds. Though she uses them as an in to discuss her own relationship, I doubt she was lying here. She clearly views them as a parallel to her and Ren: two partners who have been through a great deal together and, as a result, have grown to love each other as more than just friends. Those who insist that Rooster Teeth isn’t heading in a Blake/Yang direction don’t have much of a leg to stand on anymore. That ship (ha) has long since sailed. 

Ruby sneaks away from their fight though nothing terribly exciting happens. She adorably clings to Penny’s arm. They adorably fist-bump (ouch). Marrow and Hill get into a conversation about making change and whether or not she’ll accomplish that within the bounds of the law. Funny... I thought we saw that very same theme last volume. If only the writing acknowledged that there’s a connection between this conversation and our protagonists. We’re supposed to see both sides of the situation here: Hill’s need to bend the rules once in a while and Marrow’s desire to keep the peace; how the law is a man-mad construct that’s far from perfect and the importance of making change in a way that will stick---namely, legally. Here is a complex look at a morally difficult question and notably both Marrow and Hill are minor characters. It’s only when RWBYJNR is involved that the message moves from ‘Each side has a point’ to ‘Teens are 100% justified in breaking the law and anyone trying to stop them is an evil, crazy racist.’

It honestly astounds me that Rooster Teeth can give us that subtly here but never when it comes to our heroes.

When Ruby finally returns she finds Ren and Nora still fighting. As she snuck off we heard Ren admitting---in the round-about way of theirs, pretending that they’re talking about other people---that he’s worried, there’s a lot going on right now, and basically implying that he doesn’t know how (or doesn’t want) to balance a new relationship on top of all the horrific Salem business. Which, fair. The problem is that they don’t discuss this. Hill’s speech about how they’re always stronger together resonates with Nora and she tries to initiate a conversation, asking Ren to explain more fully what’s bothering him. To talk about it. He admits that talking has never been his strong suit.

I expected this to segue into a cliche, “Well try” moment and we’d finally get Ren and Nora bonding outside of their jokes and silent communication. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Look, I’m all for a renora kiss, but we have got to stop portraying sexual assault as romantic. Because that’s what Nora does here. It doesn’t matter how sure she (or we as the audience) are that Ren will like this kiss in the end. Grabbing someone and kissing them without their consent is sexual assault. Ren has not agreed to kiss her. He hasn’t expressed any desire here to kiss here. He’s completely blindsided by it and is flailing before he gives in.

People will justify this because, again, we all “know” that Ren secretly wants it and will be grateful that Nora got him past his fear. But that’s a terrible message to perpetuate in a world where others insist they also “know” when someone “really” wants them (they don’t) and where kissing or sex is seen as an easy way to supposedly solve problems between a couple. How many times have we seen an angry woman in media essentially told to shut up by a guy kissing her? The message is that her thoughts and grievances aren’t important here. The man knows her better than she knows herself and the second her forces her to start kissing him she realizes that’s really all she needed all along. That trope isn’t redeemed by changing the gender dynamic. Ren clearly has problems with their relationship that he’s struggling to work through. Nora clearly recognizes as much. Yet instead of acknowledging them and overcoming them, she erases any potential development by forcing him into a kiss. I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter how much Ren enjoys it a few seconds in. The continued message that forcing sexual intimacy on someone will fix both their hesitation and your relationship problems has go to stop. Kissing Nora doesn’t magically solve whatever it is Ren has been grappling with for the last six episodes. You know, the stuff they were just arguing about.

Once again, RWBY succeeded in giving me something I wanted, but in a way that severely downplays that enjoyment. I wanted a renora kiss, but not without consent and as a way of ignoring their issues. I wanted more focus on Ren and Nora as a whole this volume, but it would be nice if their characters could exits outside of each other some. Like the criticisms against Blake and Yang, Ren and Nora seem to be a package deal. They don’t fight with anyone else. They don’t go to different activities (why can’t Ren continue training if he’s that focused on it? Let Nora vent her feelings to a friend while he’s gone). They don’t interact with Ruby when they’re out with her. Their arc, it seems, doesn’t exist outside of each other. Which I suppose is better than no development at all, but still.

From then on things devolve rather quickly. While Hill continues her speech---and we see the ever closing gap between her and Jacques---Ruby gets a quick look at Tyrian’s tail before Watts turns out the lights. From there Tyrian proceeds to murder so many people, including attacking Fiona and going after Hill. All the while Ruby and Penny struggle to attack, despite the fact that Penny clearly has night vision and hangs back too long, obviously for plot purposes. It’s when she finally gets him away from Hill that Watts turns the lights back on, making it look like Penny had attacked the crowd and Hill was defending herself from her. I’ll admit, making Penny suitably creepy during the battle helps sell it.

Man do I hate framing plot-lines though. Not in a ‘Rooster Teeth shouldn’t have done this’ sense, just that it hurts to watch people react so badly based on a misunderstanding. This setup works best when there’s no one to refute the assumption. Yet here we have Ruby who absolutely saw Tyrian there, Penny who absolutely saw him with her night vision, Marrow who just made a connection with Hill and took the time to insist, “This wasn’t us, I swear,” etc. We’ve even got really basic stuff like, does Penny have blood all over her blades? Yet based on Hill’s look, all the evidence against Penny being the attacker isn’t going to do much good. Which makes for a more frustrating experience than a sad, yet understandable one.

We end with Jacques thanking everyone for his victory, rigged by Watts. Watts uploads the video of the attack, which has presumably either been altered in some way or just shows Penny in that damning position with her weapons out. If the former, that would at least go a long way towards explaining the inevitable backlash against her. An angry mob in the heat of the moment is one thing, but if Watts is looking to convince the entirety of Atlas that Ironwood is using his robot---a robot the people seem to currently love---to take out his competition, a doctored video of Penny attacking innocent people is far more persuasive. For both them and us the audience, wondering why everyone is this gullible. So far we’ve gotten some truly excellent villainy this year. Let’s continue that with them thinking ahead. 

At the very least this should (should) provide us with some excellent development for Penny. She’s long struggled with her status as a robot and being the defender of Atlas seems to have helped her come into herself. Having others accept her differences as a boon will do that. Now that she’s labeled as nothing more than a dangerous weapons again? We should see some inner conflict. The writing didn’t let her or anyone else grapple with her death. For the love of everything, at least let Penny grapple with this. 

Finally, Ruby and the others are forced to spend the night defending the city from a ton of grimm. Seriously, take in how many grimm showed up because of an election. Now think about what will happen if Ironwood announces Salem’s existence... I don’t think the cast is admitting to themselves precisely how many lives they’d be sacrificing by pulling that stunt. Ironwood at least (as far as we know) truly thinks he has a shot at winning the war. Ruby has no excuse at this point, with the exception that telling people about Salem is just plain hard.

Insert standard ‘Ozpin was right and they’re being hypocrites’ meta here.

And that’s it, folks! Issues aside, an all around better episode than some of the others we’ve gotten this season. Based off of experience it’ll be a small miracle if RWBY manages to keep that up next week.

Until then 💜

Minor Things of Note

All the people who were arrested the day of the election... do they get to vote? I know Watts rigged things, but potentially keeping everyone that furious with Ironwood from deciding who will oppose him on the council won’t exactly look good... especially combined with the Penny situation. Not that I think RWBY would actually introduce that as a complication. Just a thought.

Another extremely nit-picky thing, but it’s hilarious to me how bare the girls’ room is. Obviously there’s little time or inclination to animate personal items, even the few they have, but it kind of looks ridiculous to have this sterile space with one mirror and one tube of mascara. Here are the exact things we need for this scene and nothing more! I do like that shot in the mirror though.

Fiona getting teary-eyed over Hill being on the council was beautiful. I barely know them, but I like these two.

I’m just gonna post this again... 

#rwby #rwby volume 7 #rwby volume 7 spoilers #rwby recaps #mymetas