do you guys think cassian andor had to undergo spy training—well. not really “training” so much as a week locked in a room with an imperial torture droid, a nonsense sentence he was given in lieu of actual rebellion intelligence.
(the tricky tradoshan takes twice the twi’lek’s toys, see, senator mothma? he remembers. And he remembered all those years ago, his mouth tasting of blood and everything swimming before his eyes; barely able to stand straight, but he said it perfectly, every syllable crisp, even imitating mothma’s core accent—
thank you, commander andor, mothma had said, and he’d grinned, before then unceremoniously passed out.)
do you think that the rebellion was short on imperial torture droids, so they just used a security droid with an augmented intelligence subroutine.
i.e., the only imperial droid they had around: k2
do you think cassian startled the first time he saw That Droid (as he’s taken to calling it, at least in his head) in another context—some mechanic tinkering on his casing, the droid quiet and obedient. It was staring straight ahead, though it cocked its head when it saw cassian staring.
ah, commander andor, the droid said, when cassian drew closer. I am k-2so. I did not have the opportunity to mention it, before.
yeah, I was pretty busy screaming, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
cassian watched the mechanic for a minute. She was clearly not doing more than patching up some rust, ensuring joints were lubed. you know, it seems unfair, he said, after a minute. the droid was still staring at him. you get to rummage around in our heads, but we don’t get to poking around in yours.
well, if you would like, the droid said after a long moment.
but cassian just grins, and grins, and then laughs when k2 says, that is not true, there is still a 92% chance of my delivering a painful electric shock to any new member of the rebellion.)
I always hate it when people are all “so do you go to school, or are
you working, or” and I either have to
make up some lie, or
eventually get
around to “I am not working because of depression/anxiety,” and
subsequently have to deal with whatever bullshit-riddled and completely
unsolicited opinions on mental illness this stranger feels obligated to
share with me.
So my therapist was like, “You don’t have to do either.
You can just say you haven’t worked in a while because you’re recovering
from an illness.”
I tried it when the home inspector was here today, and it fucking worked.
He was like, “oh, I’m sorry, are you doing better now,” and I’m like
yeah, and don’t worry, it’s not contagious, awkward laugh, and we moved
on.
MY THERAPIST. IS A GENIUS. Because it is an
illness, so it’s not a lie to say that, and it’s also none of his
business to know specifically what it is, and I clearly don’t want to
give more details, so we should move on from this topic. MYTHERAPIST IS A GODDAMN GENIUS.
Dude I needed this. I never know what to say when people ask if I work because I’m severely disabled and don’t work.
Also, if you’re like me and you get super anxious about putting someone in this uncomfortable position, my mom (after getting past a stint of being in this position) came up with the alternative “So what fills your days” because it’s a lot less…interrogatory, I guess.
Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.
And people say stuff like ‘lol don’t you hate it when you look up in the middle of the night and see a spider on your ceiling’ like bitch (!!) i could have Nicholas II last czar of Russia hangin from my ceiling fan and i would be none the wiser
ok a followup from my irony post: one of the things i love most about steve rogers as seen in the mcu is that he doesn’t do the thing that ‘feels right’ or looks most virtuous or american or whatever, he’s not sentimental, he knows what hell is like because he has been there and it’s called the western front. he grew up sick and poor and irish catholic when there was no kindness for those things in the american narrative, he is not the kind of guy who thinks everything will turn out okay if you just believe in yourself.
he doesn’t do what he feels is the right thing, he does what he decides is the right thing. and sometimes it feels terrible, and has terrible consequences. at no point in ‘civil war’, for instance, does he seem to think his decision is The Right Choice and tony’s is Wrong. he knows there was no right answer, only two wrong ones, and he picked the one he could live with. and people bled for it.
i wouldn’t say he’s a ‘logic’ character, he’s not that trope, but he is secretly, subtly, ruthlessly thoughtful.
so when he does something like, say, become a fugitive from the entire world within minutes of hearing there’s a shoot-first order out on bucky, it’s not that blind emotional panic that drives so many heroes. it’s as cold and unstoppable as a glacier.
an emotionally driven hero has, inherently, a sense of entitlement about the outcome of their choices. if you believe in your friends, if you tell the truth when you ought to lie, if you refuse to take the kill shot because heroes don’t kill, things will definitely turn out okay in the end somehow. and of course the narrative always supports this, because that’s the genre, that’s the trope set. there’s no room for a counterpoint in their universe.
and then there’s captain fucking america.
look, i’m sleep-deprived and haven’t planned this post out at all so it’s probably kind of a mess, but what i’m getting at here is that the ‘golden boy’ of superheroes, the star spangled man with a plan, this corny, schmaltzy, old-timey character, isn’t light because the darkness hasn’t touched him. he’s light because he set his jaw and marched into the darkness and he set it the fuck on fire.
I am ONE AND A HALF EPISODES into Borgias and that scene where Micheletto hands Cesare a whip and orders him to torture him is so??? Do I ship this? Is this a thing I ship? "So whip me, My Lord" I? This show was such a quality rec on your part, I love it.
OH FUCK I KNOW.
The way he SAYS it, too, 70% matter of fact, 30% You Can Do Anything You Want To Me, Literally Anything, Do It, I Dare You.
IMAGINE HEARING ABOUT THE DUDEBRO LIVING NEXT TO U IN THE DORMS “yah dave dropped out cuz he built a fucking person”
victor frankenstein was a little bITCH and he had no degree at all, he was at college for like, a year and then he was like “lol these bitches ain’t got nothing on me” and he just got an apartment and stopped going to school so he could build a person. i don’t think he even formally dropped out, he just kind of disappeared and nobody even questioned it because that’s what you expect when some cocky asshole comes to class like “i know more than everyone in this school and one day i’m going to prove it by ending dEATH ITSELF”
fucking bullshit victor, come home and eat some goddamn soup you wussass teenager
fucking trashass motherfucker 19 year old sin machine
go get ur liver pecked by birds u mess of a human being
i am never going to let the world forget that victor frankenstein spent 90% of the novel moping instead of doing literally anything else. actual quote from emo kid victor frankenstein “my only solace was silence - deep, dark, deathlike silence” like HOW EXTRA
You’d almost think Mary Shelly was taking inspiration from someone she knew….
Leave Lord Byron alone
Lord Byron deserves what he gets and he knows it
This is the kind of discourse our world needs
For your morning reading pleasure. Just try eating breakfast whilst giggling over this.
Ego sum perlaetus ti lectito "Secrete Historium"! Est unum mi gratus libri. Loquor de libri, ego habeo duo libri de "Winnie Il Pu." Mi finis est ut lego illis.
Habebatis tu adipisci mi ultimus nuntius? Ego empticius verus Latine dictionarium nunc. Est a MCMXLVIII! Ego spes mi Latine emendo.
Corculum! Nuntium ultimum tui accipiebam, sed occupatissima sum–thesem scribo. Aliquando ultra lassa sum, Latineque laboriosus est. Et librum tuum optimum esse puto! Aliqua in domo mea, “Harry Potter et Philosopi Lapis” Latine habeo, sed lego non diu.
Si vis, modicum Latinum te docere possum? Ego etiam discipula sum, sed scriptos Ciceronis Virgilisque legere possum, et grammaticam Latini scio.
So far 2017 has been the worst. My dad is in the hospital and has a ripped kidney my dog ran away and she is a tiny dog and we dont even know if shes alive and I haven't slept since the first and I have the worst headache and I dont know what to do
Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. I wish I could fix it for you. At the very least, I can offer some tricks that work for me when I have a migraine, try and fix at least part of it?
Take a Benadryl with some caffeine, if both of those things interact well with your system. Benadryl is an antihistamine and caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, so they help with swelling. This might be the only time I recommend someone mixing an upper and a downer.
Put on a tight hat. I have no science to support this, but it works.
Sit somewhere dark and quiet (obviously), but if you’re like me and you don’t like silence, some familiar music can help because you know the rhythm well enough not to startle yourself.
I know some people recommend, like, peppermint oil dabbed at the points where the pain is worst? I’ve never tried this, but hey.
I can also tell you that, if you’ve gotta damage an organ, the reason for having two kidneys is because they get damaged a lot. The hospital is the best possible place for your dad, but on the other hand I know that’s not helpful, because it’s still your dad who’s hurt and that’s so, so hard.
As for the rest of it…God, it’s so terrible when everything is falling apart around you. When things are going to shit because you made a mistake or a bad decision, at least you can pinpoint the why, you know? When it’s just because everything is going wrong all at once, it’s like everything spinning apart around you with no ground left to stand on. You’re gonna live through this, baby, even though I know it might not seem like it, and you can totally feel free to come into my inbox whenever you want to talk, okay?
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie - the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels - it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
Me on an ordinary day: Albus Dumbledore is a dynamic and complex character who was crucial to the victory against Voldemort and spent practically a century tirelessly fighting the prejudice and evil in his society. However, he is also flawed, and there is great value in analyzing his morality and his relationship with the concept of “the greater good.” In his youth, he made wrong choices with dire consequences and consciously avoided the corrupting influence of power thereafter, which, in terms of narrative, serves to prove he was not omniscient or infallible. That revelation in Deathly Hallows also contributes to an underlying message in the Harry Potter series about the importance of questioning established authorities, including our heroes.
Me when someone ignores the insights about humanity to be gained from analyzing Dumbledore’s character and instead paints him as a self-serving, manipulative asshole:
I LEARNED RECENTLY THAT PLATO WON THE GOLD MEDAL IN THE OLYMPICS FOR WRESTLING THREE TIMES. THIS PUTS A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THINGS. I ALWAYS IMAGINED PLATO TO BE FRAIL AND MISSHAPEN BUT HE MUST HAVE BEEN FRICKEN RIPPED. I WONDER IF ARISTOTLE EVER FELT ANXIETY ABOUT GETTING PHYSICALLY (I.E. NOT JUST METAPHYSICALLY) DISMANTLED BY PLATO. PLATO WAS PROBABLY PISSED OFF BY AT LEAST A HANDFUL OF QUESTIONS ARISTOTLE ASKED HIM. ARISTOTLE WAS A LITERAL GENIUS TOO. IMAGINE PLATO LECTURING AND WRITING ON A BLACKBOARD AND ARISTOTLE THROWING A COMMENT OUT THERE ABOUT SOME COMPLEX MISSTEP IN PLATO’S LOGIC AND PLATO’S CHALK JUST SNAPS AND ARISTOTLE’S TESTICLES SUCK WAY BACK UP TO WHERE THEY DROPPED FROM, THEN PLATO IN A BLUR APPEARS BESIDE ARISTOTLE SITTING AT HIS DESK AND HE PICKS HIM UP AND SUPLEXES HIS MACEDONIAN ASS.
given the content of a lot of Plato’s conclusions I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Plato responded to a lot of reasonable criticisms with “Fight me” and that was the end of it.
We’re not actually sure whether Plato is his real name! Some people speculate that, because Platon means “broad” in Greek, this was actually his wrestling nick name. Basically, it’s like Dwayne Johnson became a famous philosopher and everyone still called him “The Rock”.
Can we have a movie about Plato starring Dwayne Johnson?
You can’t convince me that wouldn’t be the best thing ever.
I didn’t know I needed this until now. If someone can write a decent screenplay, and we get enough people to talk about it, maybe he’ll actually see it and we can kickstart the shit out of it
Plato’s name is literally just the Ancient Greek for ‘Swol’ how is this the real life
Finn does a lot of reading, when he wakes up. He burns through article after article of history, of linguistics, of culture. He may be strapped down to a bed and fresh from a bacta tank, but he wants to learn more about what it means to be human, and more about what it means to be this human. About the choices he’s made.
In the first 48 hours, Finn comes to learn two particularly important things.
One: that surnames mean where you come from, mean legacy.
Two: that there was a man called Bodhi Rook, and that he was very, very brave.
Later, after he’s finally discharged from med bay, he has to fill out paperwork. Registration, medical history, next-of-kin sort of stuff. Most of it he has to leave blank. He hovers over one little box in particular. Family name. He hesitates. Poe has already offered him his. The admin assistant leans over the desk, nonplussed expression on their face, and suggests he just pick one at random. Neither feels quite right. Neither feels like a history, or like a legacy.
He takes a breath, puts pen to paper, and writes Finn Rook in a wobbly but determined script.
1.) one or both of people you see as a “straight couple” could be pan/bi/poly/ace
2.) one or both of them could be trans or non binary
3.) you could be misgendering someone
4.) They could be there to give moral support to a queer friend or family member who didn’t want to go alone.
Number four is important
5. They could be there because they support the cause stop fucking gatekeeping
6. They could be there in memory of a loved one, don’t forget Pride used to be a memorial as well as a celebration. I know a good number of straight people who go to Pride to celebrate the lives of friends and family who have died because they want to remember them as they lived, happy and joyful and surrounded by a community that loved them.
So I’ve been planning a fic for a while and I
was gonna just write it here but then I realized that HA this is an ask and you
seem too nice for me to dump a few (like maybe ten) thousand words in
here. So instead here are some
headcanons for the fic I am writing where Max is the immortal unaging fey
avatar of the desert who fetches up at people’s doorsteps and loses himself in
months and lonely years without water or company, and is delighted to find
Furiosa, who is growing into the immortal unaging fey avatar of green places
and oases.
Max doesn’t stay places, he leaves
places, and Furiosa knows someone who leaves when she sees them. So it shocks the hell out of her when she
gets a Fury Boy (the name wasn’t her idea, it was the Dag and, well, they had
to call them something other than War
Boys) rushing up to her and insisting that there’s a bike coming toward them,
and it’s the road warrior who fought on their side. And she meets Max when he pulls up through
the Wretched—not Wretched anymore, just people, people who look better than
ever with Capable and Cheedo piecing together a cistern for the water—and he
offers her the faint shadow-smile she remembers as he brings his (wrecked) bike
to a halt. He’s loaded down with a small
bag of seeds, an assortment of weapons, and a sheepish expression.
She takes herself by surprise as much as him,
when she strides forward without a pause and presses their foreheads
together. His eyes are as blue and
burnished as the scorched sky overhead.
He comes back…not often, but not rarely,
never gone for more than a year or so.
Furiosa flatters herself that he’s glad to see her, when he returns, and
her heart tightens when he begins to initiate the gentle forehead-touch of the
Vuvalini. (The third time he comes back,
they have found another underground current, and they have enough water for a public
bath. She worries that Max might have
drowned himself, after the third hour of him sitting in the water, but he’s
still breathing. He tells her, in his quiet,
stilted way, that it’s the first time he hasn’t been thirsty in he doesn’t know
how long, and she wonders about that.
She wonders how he’d known that, a hundred and sixty days out, there was
nothing but salt.)
People start to trickle in, drawn by the
siren-call of water and food, because
with the Wives—the Sisters, now—in charge, there is more than enough. And Furiosa begins to hear stories, about how
the Road Warrior saved people or killed tyrants or, more often than not, was
dragged into a fight not his, quite against his will, and did the right thing
anyway. Here’s the thing, though. Some of the stories are recent, just months
or years past. Others…well. She talks to a child, who claims that her
grandfather was a child when he knew Max.
But Max can’t possibly be much older than she is, and she’s…Furiosa
doesn’t really know. She tries to count
back in her head, but… The Dag’s
daughter Angharad is walking well, talking well, maybe seven years old. When did that happen? Shouldn’t Furiosa be greying, shouldn’t there
be lines at her eyes and aches in her joints?
The next time Max comes to the Citadel, she
asks him how old he is. He tells her, in
his quiet way, less stilted now than when they met because he’s more at ease
with her, that he doesn’t know. But he tells her that
he had a child, once, and they played in grass, and he and his wife had all the
sweet clear water anyone could want.
Furiosa goes out on a mission. She runs out of water in a sandstorm, and she
waits to die.
She strides back into the Citadel two weeks
later, and her throat is not even dry.
She drinks, and it’s good, but not necessary. Max is there, and while everyone else marvels
over the fact that she’s alive,
little Radi—Angharad who is not so little, who is thirteen now and as mad and
gifted as her mother—touching her unlined face in wonder, Max watches her and
nods. He doesn’t need to marvel, doesn’t
need to question, because he has stood in her place and felt time trickle by
like water, like sand in a clenched fist.
Furiosa remembers being a little girl,
screaming for the loss of her mother and her arm and her innocence, and wishing
that, if nothing else, she might live to see victory. She has.
And it seems she will live to see a good deal more. She leaves the Citadel more and more, and she
never grows thirsty, never grows tired.
She has an impossible talent for finding water, for finding places where
seeds will take root, and Max trails after her like a desert wraith. (She’s not sure how long it’s been since they
met, when she kisses him. But his breath
is as hot and dry as the wind under the sun, and she is growth and water and
life to his desert, and he melts under her touch.)
She leaves for good, when Radi is old enough
to take her place as Fury, the Citadel’s Road Warrior, and she and Max
wander. They will not die. The desert has been fed for too long to be
taken by the green places, but life is tenacious and neither will Max’s desert
swallow Furiosa’s green places whole. It’s
an uneasy truce, between his and hers, but it stands.
Okay so I'm super into weird, sort of fucked up interpersonal/political(/sexual?) dynamics so NEEDLESS TO SAY a lot of what you've said about Borgias sounds pretty up my alley, but can you give me a rundown before I sit down and burn through three seasons? Also, is it on Netflix, and if no, where can I find it?
The Borgias is AMAZING, ON NETFLIX, AND FULLY AND 110% MY JAM, but that said it is super niche and I am super niche which is why I love it so. I will attempt to give you the rundown objectively!
Things the Borgias contains: -crazy renaissance political intrigue -apparently the marketing slogan for the show was “the original crime family”, which is 100% true. There’s a very heavy mafia family vibe, and it’s not just because they’re Italian. -brother/sister incest. Incest between consenting adults, but incest all the same. (Also, to be fair: the incest Vibes start when Lucrezia is still fifteen, although the characters don’t do anything about it until years later.) -very graphic violence. Think Game of Thrones and Hannibal? (Although with a few exceptions I think the violence skews more GoT than Hannibal.) -multiple graphic rape scenes. They’re not filmed super grossly, in that awful Game of Thrones way, but they’re still graphic rape scenes. -non-graphic yet still deeply disturbing medieval torture! -three (3) canonically queer characters, one of whom is in a major supporting role -so much murder -so. much. murder. -queer sex scenes, although you have to wait a while for them -sex scenes featuring Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia, which is AMAZING -sex scenes featuring Jeremy Irons, which is less amazing, even as I actually really love his lecherous pope -for a while, Luke Pasquilano being often shirtless -Giulia Farnese’s legs, which are Quality Legs -a badass warrior queen who at one point throws her dress up and threateningly flashes her map of tasmania at her enemies
I feel like this is more or less the objective rundown? The unobjective rundown goes like this:
The Borgias contains: -MICHELETTO CORELLA, LIGHT OF MY LIFE -CESARE BORGIA, FIRE OF MY LOINS -LUCREZIA BORGIA, MY SIN MY SOUL -DECADENT AND LUSH CATHOLIC ICONOGRAPHY (IE PEARL-STUDDED CRUCIFIXES AND BLOOD-RED CARDINAL’S VELVET AND GIMME THEM GOLD COINS GIMME THEM COINS) -GOOD PEOPLE DOING TERRIBLE THINGS FOR LOVE -BAD PEOPLE DOING TERRIBLE THINGS FOR LOVE -GOOD PEOPLE BETRAYING THE PEOPLE THEY LOVE BECAUSE OF THEIR TERRIBLE AMBITION -BAD PEOPLE BETRAYING THE PEOPLE THEY LOVE BECAUSE OF THEIR TERRIBLE LOYALTY -EVERYONE BETRAYING GOD AND DESPERATELY WANTING GOD AT THE SAME TIME. THEIR FAITH AND THEIR TERRIBLE LOVE LIVES FOLLOW SIMILAR TRAJECTORIES. -LUCREZIA’S SMALL SHARP ODDLY FRIGHTENING PEARLY TEETH -CESARE CALLING MICHELETTO “MY SWEET ASSASSIN” -MICHELETTO BENDING OVER A LITERAL RACK AND CALMLY ORDERING CESARE TO BEAT HIM -CESARE’S OVERWHELMED AND HUNGRY EYES -LUCREZIA’S SULKY MOUTH AND CHILD’S HANDS AND EQUALLY HUNGRY EYES -PEOPLE SO TERRIBLE THAT WHEN THEY ARE GOOD, THEIR GOODNESS SEEMS TRANSCENDANT -I HATE, I LOVE, I DON’T KNOW WHY IT HAPPENS, BUT I BURN.
if a girl is making you uncomfortable, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY IT.
fucking crush the stereotype that men are always supposed to “want it”
It’s really such a sad idea. I remember once with my ex, I was kissing him when we were in bed, and it started getting more heated, but I could tell it felt different. I stopped and asked if he wanted to carry on, and he said yes, but I knew him well. I had to ask again before he admitted he wasn’t really feeling it at the time. It just made me feel so bad and so upset for him. I think there’s more pressure on men to be sexual. Men love sex, they’d never want to turn it down, if they do it’s unmanly, it’s gay, it’s girly. It’s something ingrained into them from such a young age. It’s terrible and wrong. They think they have no right to not want sex.
Not all men have sky-high sex drives. I doubt any man in the world wants sex 100% of the time. It’s fine to reject it in any situation, whether a planned one night stand or a committed relationship. It’s fine to change your mind before or halfway through.
Men, it is FINE for you to not want sex, and it is FINE to say no if you want to. In fact, please do. It’s not guaranteed the other person will be able to sense your discomfort.
All of this. It’s always okay to say no, or wait, or maybe not right now or whatever it is you’re feeling.
Forever reblog.
It is always okay to say No, for any reason, and at any point.
the first time chirrut touches bazes face is before they even start dating and when hes done he kinda laughs and says “i didnt need to do that. i already knew you were handsome” and baze doesnt sleep for 3 days bc hes still thinking about it
Short opinion: This is one of those books where the only thing more terrifying than the alien invasion is the planet the aliens are trying to invade.
Long opinion:
Although it’s not my favorite of the series, this book has a lot of really cool moments, both light (Marco referencing the Ramones, Cassie’s dad making her pick up the skunk, GRAPE JUICE) and dark (Cassie’s panic after killing the termite queen, everyone’s near-death in the logging camp battle). This plot also nicely resolves the question of why the yeerks aren’t doing more to find the “andalites” allegedly living in the area through showing that, although humans might destroy forests and shoot skunks, humans also do a lot to protect their own planet.
Another thing I love about this book: Marco and Jake’s interaction. It only gets mentioned a few times in this book (and comes up again a couple times later in the series), but one of my favorite Little Things from the series is Marco and Jake’s ongoing Batman vs. Spider-Man debate. I am really fascinated that Jake argues in favor of Batman and Marco is so in favor of Spider-Man, given that Jake is a tactician who fights primarily through quick hit-and-run attacks (like Spider-Man) whereas Marco is a strategist who fights by thinking ahead of his opponents and coming up with creative ways to have them solve his problems for him (like Batman). Maybe it’s a matter of mutual respect for one another’s abilities, or a tendency to discount their own abilities. After all, Marco tends to describe his strategic perspective as “simple” and “clear,” whereas Jake continuously underestimates his impact on the team no matter what it is.
Then again, maybe Jake is such a fan of Batman because Bruce Wayne is (like him) a pensive, privileged justice-fighter focused on working hard to teach himself the skills he needs to be effective at his job. And maybe Marco sees himself in Spider-Man, since Peter Parker’s a goofy kid who gets thrown into a situation way over his head and spends the next several years flailing around trying to rise to the occasion. Or maybe they just played too many arcade games. Maybe they just need to watch this.
The other scene from this book that I really love is the one where Jake finds Cassie after she falls asleep in skunk morph protecting the baby skunks and he yells at her for being careless. She tells him she wants out of the war and that humans suck so much they might as well get taken over by yeerks; Jake calmly shuts her down when offers to go explain to Tom that he deserves to be enslaved by the yeerks according to Cassie’s philosophy. Cassie tells Jake that she’s saving the baby skunks no matter what, to which Jake responds that in that case they’d better recruit the whole team.
I love this scene for a couple different reasons. For one thing, it’s refreshing to see Cassie being wrong for once. In the series as a whole and in this book in particular there are several moments where she makes relatively dumb decisions that end up working out for her anyway (trusting Aftran, refusing to help with Taylor’s plan, letting Tom’s yeerk take the morphing cube, letting Aftran infest her, etc). In this instance, however, Cassie nearly gets herself trapped in morph over some baby skunks, and she risks her friends’ lives when just a few minutes ago she was angry with Tobias for killing to survive. She’s wrong, and both she and Jake acknowledge it.
This scene is also one of the many reasons I ship Cassie and Jake: they call each other out on bad decisions and resolve their differences of opinion through talking things out. Jake is wrong to dismiss Cassie’s concerns about the logging permits, as he freely admits later in the book. Cassie is wrong to tell Jake that the fight doesn’t matter in a universe this brutal when (unlike him) she doesn’t have any loved ones on the line in this war. They discuss their differences of opinion and resolve them.
Not only do they discuss their disagreement openly, but they also both make concessions. Cassie agrees that she needs to be a lot more careful in the future, especially with morphing time limits. Jake agrees that (even though he doesn’t see the point) they’ll “save the lousy skunks” (#9). They listen to each other and find a solution. It’s a pattern that comes up several more times over the course of the series: Jake and Cassie are the only ones willing to tell each other when one of them is wrong, but always do so in a way that avoids polarization or passive aggression. (Rachel and Tobias do not do nearly as well with this kind of conflict resolution when the circumstances arise, but that’s a whole other can of yeerks I’m not going to open here.)
Jake and Cassie might not have a perfect relationship—it doesn’t even survive the war, and its passion pales in comparison to what Rachel and Tobias have—but they also have a healthy relationship. Jake mentions a few times that the only time he feels able to drop the whole “I’m the leader, I feel no pain” act is when he’s alone with Cassie. Cassie agonizes over every major decision they make but also never stops trusting that Jake knows what he’s doing when he makes a tough call. Their arguments don’t have a single winner, and involve both of them openly confronting each other with their own points of view. They work to understand each other, since there are a lot of things they do not have in common, and that work might make for less melodrama but also makes for better communication.
Final note: the motif of Visser Three doing dumb shit and none of the human-controllers in the immediate vicinity who must know better correcting him comes up here. It’s another one of those Little Things that K.A. Applegate uses to speak volumes about why the yeerks lost the war just as much as the Animorphs won it. This book shows that it’s a bad idea to behead subordinates who disagree with you, because then you end up surrounded by sycophants who never once mention that you just dyed yourself purple for no reason.
Ti non opus est tibi scio Latine legere "Secrete Historium" Est cur ego sum doctrina Latine, vel saltem temptabundus ut. Et ego sum usus Google Translate ET Latine dictionarii.
Eeep, corculum, tibi gloria est! Latine amo valde, semperque aliquem Latine discere laetissima sum! “Historiam Secretem” certus legem, album “Libri Lege” addo.
I got my heart broken and I survived, I failed 3 courses in university and graduated, I got rejected in the very first job I applied for and got promoted yesterday, I went through hard times with my family but then two years later, we laughed our hearts out over lunch, The closest friends disappointed me several times but I made new friends and loved them with all my heart. I did it once, I can do it again.
“pugs are disgusting and shouldn’t exist and if you own one you’re abusive”
“Pugs as a breed need to be more controlled but it’s still important that the ones that exist find good homes that are able to help them through the myriad of potential medical problems that come with the breed”
Also the Enterprise vs. Millennium Falcon debate has never ceased to confuse me, like, you’re basically wondering who’d win in a fight between a fully staffed US Navy research vessel armed with harpoons and torpedos and all sorts of other boat vessels OR your weedman and his sweet vintage van, his buddy riding shotgun with a crossbow
you know, if palpatine ever showed vader the death star schematics, wouldn’t vader - being a mechanical genius - have been able to pick out the flaw with the reactor shaft?
imagine palpatine launching an evil monologue while vader stares at this gigantic flaw, sweating
well, i got the same feeling. imagine vader just standing there, not listening anymore, only staring right at this super. obiovious. (to him) USELESS FUCKING FLAW and just not saying anything. maybe he should say something. sheev’s probably testing him or something.
but as emperor’s monologue drags on, the fact that no one here, besides vader, is aware of the issue is becoming more evident.
darth “everything proceeds as i’ve foreseen” sidious didn’t notice it. he’s staring right at the reactor shaft. he’s not seeing it. so vader keeps mum.
then rebels steal the plans and send a couple of x-wings against the friggin’ death star. as far as tarkin’s concerned, it’s like sending a couple of flies to stop an avalanche. and our man vader in that moment is like, “welp, i suddenly discovered my new calling as a flyswatter,” and gets the fuck out of that station
“Is… Is no one else seeing this? Someone on the design committee must have seen this. Tell me you’re all seeing this.”
“Seeing what, Lord Vader?”
“The huge obvious…”
You know what? Screw these guys. I told them this budget-killing monstrosity was a bad idea.
“Obvious lack of any place to get a decent coffee. This thing is the size of a small moon. Would it kill you to call Starbucks and tell them to open up a location in it? I hate Imperial-issue coffee.”
Habeo tu pellego "The Secret History"? Est ego novi "cubitum eamus."
Non legi! Bene est? Optime est? “Historiarum Secretum” legere cogiti, sed valde occupata sum. Si mihi commendare vis, non necesse Latine dicis–itane aliquis legere velle possunt?
Hello!! Not the previous anon, but also a huge follower of your Les Mis fics! Just want to say thank you for still continuing your fics, but really, take your time okay? School is nuts and life gets in the way, so don't feel pressured and lose your mind trying to get updates on time for us! xx
Oh, babe, you’re so sweet! And trust me, I genuinely love writing this fic, it’s a delight, and no one is more exasperated than me with the necessary delay of school. But also I want to pass all my classes and this is my senior year, it would be a fucking whirlwind regardless. BUT FOR REAL, I’M SO GLAD YOU DON’T HOLD IT AGAINST ME. (Also, WHAT, I have people who actually follow my fics, W H A T, that’s some weird shit, THAT’S GONNA TAKE ME SOME TIME TO ADJUST.)
AHHHHH THE NEW CHAPTER WAS FUCKING AMAZING. I was that anon (sorry) and i just have to say... that fight between R and E made the wait #fuckingworthit. It was beautiful and you are beautiful and I love this fic.
OH AND I FORGOT GAV AND R GIVE ME LIFE👌👌 EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS WAS JUST BEAUTIFUL
MY DUDE I’M SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT. And trust me, no one is more exasperated than me with the delays, I would be 100x happier if I could say ‘fuck this noise’ and just write all day every day.
ALSO I’M GLAD THE FIGHT WAS WORTH IT BECAUSE I PROCRASTINATED MY THESIS ALL DAY.
