as a high school freshman, i was in love with a senior boy. his name was something like, but not exactly, harry. my high school did have a handsome boy who was older than me named harry—although, now that i’m writing this, i’m remembering that actually his name was dylan.
were there any harrys in my grade? were there any harrys in my school? there had to have been. that’s a pretty common name.
“why are we still talking about this?” you’re asking.
the answer is: i don’t know! i can’t stop! my brain is a nightmare!
a n y w a y, whatever. the point is, my whole freshman year, i was in love with not-harry (actual not-harry, not the not -harry who was in fact dylan). he was very tall, and more importantly, he was very sweet to me, a pigeon-toed and badly socialized fourteen-year-old who really believed she looked good in low-riding boot-cut jeans with leopard print patches on them. not-harry and i met because he was the student waiter at my lunch table, and we stayed acquaintances because of a peculiar and excellent thing that happened to me, which was that for the entirety of my high school career i was not in my school’s lunch attendance system.
the thing you have to understand for any part of this story to make sense is that my boarding school had a lunch system where most days you had an assigned seat. every other lunch period, you were seated at an arbitrary table in order to like, help you make friends or something. student waiters would bring your food.
there was a rotation freshman year in which every student had to be a student waiter, and if you were good at it, you could stay on and make money.
i was so not-good at it that they took me off rotation early, which feels pretty on-brand for me.
for whatever reason, i was never assigned a table. in the land of seated lunches, i was king.
some people might have used this opportunity to sit with their friends or maybe with a teacher from whom they wanted to hassle a better grade, but i was a simple child and all i wanted to do was have many opportunities as possible to ask not-harry, who always remembered my name and never called me out for knocking things over all the time, to bring me the vegetarian option.
the teacher assigned to that table was a teacher that i never had, and never bonded with, and was constantly perplexed as to why i always insisted on sitting at his table and then never spoke to him.
“so weird they keep assigning me here,” i would say, and mr. wilcox would answer, “but they didn’t. i have the list. you aren’t assigned to sit here.”
“so weird,” said i.
the other great benefit of not having an assigned table at lunch is that i did not have to go to lunch. i could go to nap.
alternatively, i could go back into the kitchen and cajole the cooks to give me extra dessert, which i also did all the time. they made these peanut butter and chocolate bars that slammed. i kept some hidden in the freezer wrapped in paper towels because i am never more like a dragon than when somebody asks to share food.
everybody who knew that i existed knew that i was in love with not-harry. my school was very small, and probably even people who didn’t know me could have pointed at me and said something like, “whatever that girl’s name is, she’s in love with not-harry, who is tall and cool and has lots of friends.”
let’s break here to talk a little about not-harry. i, of course, was miserably uncomfortable in my own body, extremely uncool, and hadn’t yet figured out the difference between being sarcastic and just being mean. also, i once wrote and recorded a song called, “sweet like elk bladder,” which is something i don’t exactly regret but am also not exactly proud of. and if it sounds like i am being unkind to tiny baby molly, please know that despite being objectively unbearable, i love her. she was trying her best, and would improve rapidly between the ages of seventeen and twenty. she was a late bloomer.
but, at fourteen, if i could boil down my whole personality it would be: your least favorite cousin.
you know the one.
you don’t have to tell anybody who it is, just visualize them in your mind.
that was me.
not-harry, on the other hand, was devon sawa in little giants. he was sean biggerstaff in harry potter. he was what’s-his-face in a walk to remember. (you know. not matt damon but the guy that kind of looks like matt damon?)
not-harry:
in high school freshman molly’s fantasy of who not-harry was, he played the guitar, is what i’m saying.
i do want to say, in my own defense, that i was aware of how out of my league not-harry was. it’s not that i thought i had a chance with him. first of all, he had a girlfriend, who was blonde and beautiful and also very nice, which was rude because it meant i couldn’t even spitefully dislike her. she played field hockey and once helped me pick up an armful of books when i inevitably dropped them.
secondly, i have never in my life expressed an emotion and even if he had been moved by my letter, i am confident that if he’d approached me about it i would have simply sprinted away at top speed.
thirdly, like, a bird can love a fish but where would they live, you know what i’m saying?
anyway, all this exhausting set up is to say that i was obsessed with not-harry, and he did not know who i was except probably to have noticed that i was assigned to his lunch table a lot.
“she’s actually not. i don’t know why she’s here all the time.” - mr. w, still not getting any answers.
every year for valentine’s day, my school would do this fundraiser thing where you could buy carnations and have them sent to your friends (or, you know, if you were the kind of person who got asked out, you could send it to your babe or whatever. that…wasn’t really a concern for me).
or, of course, some people sent them anonymously to people they liked.
“no,” you’re probably saying to yourself. and i get it!!! i get it. looking back at my own self, i am also saying, “no.”
that’s a pretty common theme, for me.
i think that i knew, at the time, that it was a bad idea. i kind of remember thinking to myself, this is a bad idea. i know that this is a bad idea. and then immediately following it up with, yeah but how bad of an idea can it really be?
pretty bad, molls!!!! preeeeetty, pretty bad.
you know, looking back, i think that the worst thing wasn’t even sending the carnation. like, that’s pretty embarrassing, but not end of the world embarrassing. but i didn’t just send it, i sent it and i included a note, and that note said, with painful earnestness, “this is the closest i’ll ever get.”
god. god!!! i know!!!
like, what??? was i thinking?? what a horrible, creepy, incredibly vulnerable thing to just put in the universe!!!! lil’ baby molly, somebody is going to read that. he, and all his friends, are going to know that you have feelings. feelings are embarrassing. we’ve been over this.
honestly, at the time, i think i was kind of just like … screw it. you know? i was young. i knew high school was going to be the time in my life where i was the least likeable person i’d ever be. everybody knew i had this huge embarrassing crush on him, so, like, what was the worst that could happen? you only live once!!! you might as well just be the most embarrassing person you can be.
obviously, i did a complete 180 on that opinion the second it was too late to take it back.
as soon as the carnations went out i started making plans to dig myself a hole and quietly die in it.
everybody knew it was me. i mean, everybody. not a single person saw that note and was like, “gee, i wonder who sent this. could it be the awkward, long-armed monster child that spends the entirety of lunch drooling at not-harry with her chin in her tiny troll hands? haha, no. that’s crazy! it must have been someone else. what an unsolvable mystery.”
i fruitlessly tried to talk my way out of it. i sent an email to my entire grade that i am deeply grateful has been lost to the internet abyss that said something like, “hey just in case anyone was wondering who sent that carnation to not-harry, uh, it wasn’t me. i’m not saying anyone thinks it was me, but if they do think it was me, it wasn’t. they’re wrong. i definitely didn’t send a carnation to not-harry. that would be weird, and am i weird? no. as this email proves, i’m a normal person who does normal things only.
“normal things only,” is going to be the name of my autobiography, and it’s going to be a bald-faced lie.
in hindsight, this wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment of my high school career, though it certainly ranks. but it does hit a very specific and tender part of my memory: high school molly was so young, and so earnest, and so terrible at everything, but she was trying so hard. you know? when i think about myself writing that horrible note, i remember thinking, “obviously he is not going to read this and dump his beautiful, kind girlfriend to date me,” but i also remember thinking, “…yeah, but he might.”
i feel like this attitude toward things has lowkey been a guiding principle in my life, and possibly all of human history, for better or worse: this isn’t going to work, but it might.
humans are such heartbreakingly optimistic creatures, even when we try not to be. think of all the times that we have done things just to do them. just to prove we could! just to do something impossible. we are impossible animals who do impossible things.
like, people built airplanes!!! how dumb is that? people built airplanes and gave humans wings, even though it definitely wasn’t going to work, except that it might, and it did.
i like the idea of that, i think. every once in a while, it does. it does work. against all odds.
to be clear, in this particular instance, it did not.
not-harry never talked to me about it, because not -harry took one look at me and probably realized that i had enough problems. i know he got it, because i watched him get it in the lunchroom. i chose not to sit at his table that day, because i was an idiot but i wasn’t stupid. i knew i didn’t have the acting chops to keep a straight face when he opened it.
not-harry looked at the note, and then looked around like, “what the hell kind of john-hughes-movie loving moron sent me this?”
we locked eyes.
dear god, i thought to myself, if he puts the note away and no one ever talks to me about it again i swear i will find a new table.
not-harry held the note up. i looked at it, and then back at him. i don’t know what my face was doing, but i can only assume i looked like little foot in the scene where he realizes the thing he thought was his mom was just his own shadow.
very slowly, and very kindly, not-harry put the note in his pocket.
“i haven’t seen you at lunch in a while!” mr. w said to me months later, in passing, and i did the sign of the cross as i said, “so weird!” and kept walking.
(i looked not-harry up on facebook just now, and he’s still beautiful, and i still love him. reader, should i friend him? probably not, right? it’s probably a bad idea.
James McGraw grows up being told that he’s lucky, so lucky, he has three soulmates and it’s wonderful. Everyone tells him that the world has so much love for him.
Thomas and Miranda meet and she has his words on her skin and she doesn’t care that he has someone else’s because HE doesn’t care, and they’re so happy, and then they meet James McGraw, who has them both, and Miranda tells herself (and it’s truth, at the time) she can live with this, she can live with being James’ soulmate while James is Thomas’ soulmate. Because James adores them both. And God, she loves Thomas, and he loves James, and James loves her, so it’s all okay. They lie in bed and giggle together like children, wondering about the third line of words on James’ skin.
Things go horribly awry. Miranda is still one of James’ three soulmates, but he is not hers and she cannot quite stand to call him hers when her soulmate is gone and her soulmate’s soulmate is sinking into dark water.
James meets his third soulmate. It is a strong contender for the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s certainly in the top five. James swears to himself that he will never, ever let on the truth.
John Silver meets his soulmate. It is certainly the worst timing he has ever experienced. Captain Flint, scourge of the seas, doesn’t bat a goddamn eye, and Silver decides that this match must be unrequited, because the universe hates him so goddamn much. When Madi, proud Madi with her unmarked skin, touches the words and asks, an unusual tender moment, he tells her (and it’s the truth, at the time) that his soulmate bond is unrequited.
At some point the truth comes out. There is angry sex. I do not have the plot figured out past this.
Other miscellany: Anne Bonny is Jack Rackham’s soulmate and he is also in Something (no one is crazy enough to call it love) with Vane. Anne is in love with Max, whose soulmate is Eleanor, much to Max’s profound distaste. Eleanor and Max had the potential to be the only functional soulmate bond in this whole mess until Eleanor fucked it up, because Max is also Eleanor’s soulmate. Anne’s soulmark leads her to a man who is actually a woman who has Anne’s words on her ribs, and Jack is only a little bitter that Anne is not bound to him as visibly as he is bound to her. Anne has never shaved her head, and so they do not know that words are written, neat and small, at the base of her skull.
*slides in* you're probably gonna hate me: Xavier/Erik, "Stumble into my Arms"
(I don’t actually…ship this…which I know makes me weird…so here, have another Real Dark Thing)
AO3 summary: “It’s going to be okay, Charles,” Erik says quietly, brushing dark curls away from where tears have started to dry under Charles’ closed eyes. “You’ll see.”
“He’s a madman, Erik,” Charles says dully, past caring if Apocalypse hears them.
“He’s going to fix us,” Erik swears, like a man clutching to the last thread of his own reason. “You and me, Charles, he’s going to fix us.”
“Go to hell,” Charles says, and turns his face away when Erik bends down to pick him up from the ground.
Actual summary: It starts with a missing scene that’s like 98% Erik being obsessed with Charles and Charles being in mourning for the man he used to know and also the whole entire planet. Apocalypse lied to Erik about why they needed Charles and Erik is shattered, pretty much clinging to Charles as his last anchor point. So when he discovers that this plan doesn’t end with Charles converted to his viewpoint and by his side, Erik goes off the fucking rails. The fight is a lot shorter, since Charles is in better shape and Erik doesn’t do a heel-face turn halfway through. On the other hand, Erik is in pretty bad shape, mentally and emotionally speaking, and his worldview is pretty well shattered, after the battle. Jean rebuilds the house herself, alone, and the fic ends with Erik broken on the floor of Charles’ reconstructed study begging for forgiveness. Charles presses his lips thin and does not answer.
If you want bonus pain feel free to imagine this as a soulmate AU.
I just want to say that the decision to have a nude bathing scene that’s 100% a Vulnerable And Confused Love Interest Scene ft Steve Trevor was a good one.
I love the idea of all of those animorphs crossovers, but especially the star wars and avengers ones.
HONESTLY I MIGHT WRITE THEM.
But like for a preview:
STAR WARS: General Leia somehow ends up on Earth and has a Very Grim Conversation with Jake that’s mostly about brothers and warriors and how to live through living through battles and loving someone who doesn’t carry that weight half so harshly. Alternatively, Rogue One is caught by the Death Star’s blast wave and shunted across a universe, and the Animorphs find them broken and bruised and Cassian and Jyn look into their eyes and see themselves. Chirrut and Baze call all of them ‘little brother’ and ‘little sister’ and it makes Rachel prickle. The Animorphs go from six to eleven (Chirrut morphs a mountain lion and Jyn morphs a wolverine, I don’t have the others sorted). K2 doesn’t make it to Earth at all. Rogue One still dies for the cause. The End.
AVENGERS: I have two ideas here.
The obvious, in which the Animorphs get a “gift” from the Ellimist (”DOES HE OWN A DICTIONARY” Marco demands) and are sent to a world the Yeerks never touched and pop up RIGHT in the middle of the Battle of New York and handily freak out the Avengers. Especially Steve, who almost has a heart attack at the sight of a teenaged girl in a leotard sprinting at him and shouting “Toss me”, and literally almost gets his head cut off when he watches her vault off his shield and turn into a fucking grizzly on the way down. Tony almost throws up when he sees a gorilla get disemboweled and start turning back into a teenager as a bunch of people yell <No medics, no medics, someone protect his head!>
The one I haven’t really seen yet, in which the War happens a little later (like it ends maybe 2001) and thus the Animorphs are only about 26 when the Avengers are formed. Still pretty young. SHIELD kept the whole Yeerks thing under wraps (so. many. NDAs.), so imagine the Avenger’s surprise when the late Phil Coulson is replaced with a young dude build like a football player who tells them to call him Jake, and who introduces his team of equally young people plus one bird as their new backup.
Both of these include Marco and Tony basically talking shit about each other incessantly, Bruce and Cassie talking in soft honest tones about how it feels to be afraid of yourself, Tobias and Clint making horribly unfunny jokes about their childhoods, Steve taking it upon himself to make sure Jake actually talks about the stress of leadership and about how afraid he is of getting someone killed (Bucky and Tom get compared…especially if this is still a thing post-WS) and Natasha and Rachel being really weird friends where mostly they spar. Oh, and also Ax and Thor bonding about Poptarts.
I also saw Wonder Woman today and I feel like there’s a great AU where that crossover also happens.
For the fic thing: "men died for you (i bet you liked it)" for Borgias. Fuck me the fuck up.
Ao3 Summary: “Him,” Lucrezia says softly, and nods her head at the man across the room. Tomorrow he’ll be dead, she thinks, and masks her shiver with a bright smile.
Actual Summary: AU where Micheletto isn’t hired to kill Cesare at that banquet. Instead, he’s hired to kill Lucrezia after her marriage to Giovanni Sforza, and winds up swearing fealty to her instead.
This fic features: -Lucrezia attempting to poison Lord Sforza’s wine, which is how she stumbles across Micheletto attempting to poison her wine, which is how she ends up shoved against a stone wall with a dagger at her throat, Cesare’s lessons in self-defense meaning she has a knife pressed to the big vein in Micheletto’s thigh. “God, you’re fast,” she says, with the same false laugh she gives the French king in canon, the one that’s charming and sweet and full of bravado and masking utter terror. “I don’t think even my brother has someone as fast as you.” -Lucrezia in her nightgown with her gold hair falling all around her, knees tucked up to her chest, sitting on the edge of her bed, with Micheletto on the floor. Covered in blood. Having a quiet conversation about Saint Paul and marriage and the evils of being compelled to marry where the heart and flesh are unwilling. -Lucrezia doesn’t hook up with Paolo. She doesn’t know he exists. Lord Sforza is dead in the ground, and Pesaro is hers. -There is no baby. -Lucrezia doesn’t allow Cesare to poach her assassin. -Cesare is deeply, deeply suspicious of the assassin his little sister brought home from Pesaro. Micheletto falls in lust with him more or less at first sight, but his loyalty is already given. -Lucrezia realizes Micheletto is in love with Cesare before he does, although obviously he’s aware of the lust. -Micheletto realizes Lucrezia lusts after Cesare before she does, although obviously she’s aware of the love. -Lucrezia is deeply impressed by watching Micheletto garotte a watermelon -Cesare is deeply distressed and deeply turned on by watching Micheletto garotte a watermelon and then watching Lucrezia stick her pink thumb into the meat of the severed fruit and lick off the juice.
AO3 summary: It’s not a gin joint and it doesn’t belong to him and she’s not the love of his life. Some days he’s not even sure they’re friends. They fuck anyway. (PWminimalP, Angst, Longer War AU, Unsafe Insane and Consensual, Light Bondage, Blood)
Actual summary: It’s about year six of a war that burned them all out about year three. They’ve managed to keep their secret through increasingly brutal means over the years. Rachel and Cassie haven’t spoken except on missions since Rachel killed a member of the Yeerk Peace Movement in order to keep them from giving the Animorphs up. Jake looks like the walking dead and hasn’t smiled–really smiled–since they failed to save Jake’s parents. Tobias is less human than ever since Rachel left him, and morphs Ax more often than he morphs his old body (his old body is barely fourteen, glaringly young among the others).
Marco and Rachel aren’t dating. Marco is still their tactician and their sense of humor, but their sense of humor is bitter and cutting, and when Rachel kisses him, she bites until his lips bleed and ties his hands with rough cord, he fights her and leaves bruises and cuts. They don’t have a safeword. Rachel needs to feel in control and Marco needs to feel like he’s not the one guiding Jake’s hand on the trigger. It’s a bad system, but God they need it and if anything happens…well, they can just morph it away, and wash each others’ blood from their hands.
MORAN I WATCHED WONDER WOMAN TODAY AND IT MADE ME CRY IN THEATERS! I said "fuck me up diana" so many times. And Charlie was one of my favorite characters out of their little outfit. (Besides Steve) Which story do you think is the most tragic out of theirs?
MY DUDE I’M A HARD BITCH, HEART OF STONE, THE WHOLE NINE YARDS, AND I CRIED LIKE MULTIPLE TIMES. I COULD WATCH DIANA JUST FUCKING WRECK PEOPLE ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR A YEAR.
And….mmmm, that’s a good question. On like a strictly impulsive level, I’m going to say Diana, actually, just because…the loss of that innocence, the loss of that belief that humanity has the potential to be intrisically, truthfully Good, is a tragedy on a fairly legendary level. Like, the world is lesser.
That being said…I’m going to say Sameer. The Chief, as he points out so articulately, has lost a great deal on a cultural level (I was so pleased that they actually addressed that), but he knows everyone. I loved the shot of him wrapping his arm around the German kid at the end, treating the Germans with the same familiar affection that he gives to the Allies. Charlie, we don’t learn a whole lot about, but clearly he starts the movie with very few people to his name–he actually comes out of this whole thing with two new friends and a goddess buddy and also Etta who I think would be highly entertaining and very good for him.
But Sameer…Sameer is clearly close to Steve far more than the others, and more to the point he’s not going to be…super well accepted by the Allied forces. As he says, he’s the wrong color–the Allies just fought against the Ottoman Empire, and Sammy would be easily mistaken for an old enemy. He doesn’t have people outside this weird motley little gang, and Steve was his friend, Sameer is always the first one to shout for Steve, to start running after him, to WORRY. So anyway. Give me all the fic of Sameer and Steve being old friends and Sameer and Diana sitting quietly together as Sammy drinks and Diana listens to all his old stories about Steve that no one else is really in a place to hear. But Diana craves that knowledge, needs to know more about Steve in a way that scares her, and Sammy needs to talk, about his friend who died a hero and who no one will ever remember except for this woman, this goddess who’s sitting on the floor with him with tears clinging to her eyelashes, and if he tells her everything, every detail, and Diana lives on with Steve’s memory in her heart then maybe he won’t quite be dead.
(Original game started by the puckurt comm mods here)
OMG THIS SOUNDS LIKE A LOT OF FUN
hey, anybody want to play this game? I would say anything goes, but….I have an inbox full of star wars asks from the last time I did a meme, and, like, science fiction has waned in my heart* while historical fiction is waxing, so: black sails, borgias, pirates of the caribbean, or any other historical drama you’ve seen me mention and want to toss my way for the sake of surprise?
Have you read Robin Mckinley's The Outlaws of Sherwood? And if so what where your thoughts?
MY BUDDY.
I HAVE.
Right so I think I’ve mentioned my overwhelming obsession with Robin McKinley’s writing once or twice. And I love Outlaws of Sherwood! This is a Good Ask!
All right, so for those of you who haven’t read the Outlaws of Sherwood and don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s Robin Hood. The basic premise is that Robin accidentally kills someone of a higher status than him and, in the process of hiding him from the Sheriff’s men, his best friends Much (the son of a miller) and Marian (the daughter of a Saxon nobleman) convince him that someone has to take a stand against the regime. As such, people who are being taxed to death or who have had their homes taken leave with him and hide out in Sherwood Forest. As the plot progresses, their gang grows, and the standard robbing-of-rich-feeding-of-poor proceeds, Guy of Gisborne shows up, and so it goes.
The major difference between this and most Robin Hood interpretations is that (*gasp*) Maid Marian has a real personality! She’s a fucking firecracker! She’s an expert markswoman–Marian is the legendary archer of the Outlaws, and goes to contests in a green hood under Robin’s name. Marian is a tactician and a fighter and a woodsman AND she teaches all the men how to sew a goddamn shirt. MARIAN IS THE TOTAL PACKAGE. She and Robin bicker all the time and she nips it right in the bud when he gets stupid and overprotective and there’s this stunning scene where Marian and Robin are sitting together under a tree and Marian falls asleep on him and Robin just like “my arm is going numb and there’s a tree root digging into my hip but if I sat here for the rest of my life I would be happy, I want to marry this woman under any circumstances if she’d take me.” And honestly same. Anyway. I digress.
All right, so here’s My Thoughts about Outlaws of Sherwood, and they can basically be summed up as “what a good” but also as “this is such a good way to balance the realistic and the hopeful in this story.” Because like, okay, Robin Hood is a popular story to retell, but, especially in more recent versions, they get really…determined to be ‘realistic,’ which turns into some pretty profoundly grim stuff. BBC did a Robin Hood show a while back and I passionately hated it–Robin was a womanizing nobleman who treated his manservant Much very poorly, Marian had a REAL WEIRD love triangle with Robin, who was kind of a dick, and Guy of Gisborne, who was a presumptuous pushy pseudo-rapist, and the Merry Men were a nominal saving grace until Marian was murdered at the end of the first season. At that point, I just fucking bailed and googled how it ended–spoiler, it ends with Robin, after a fuckbuddies relationship with a villain, being poisoned and dying while Nottingham burns. And here’s why I had an issue with that: Robin Hood, most basically, is the product of a society that was just dead exhausted by the Crusades and the class division between the Normans and the Saxons and the general state of the world that they went “What if someone had the option to not be us” and it was a thing of HOPE. The idea of Robin as a chivalrous outlaw and Much as a loyal friend and Marian as a charming maiden just rebellious enough to ally herself with someone outside the law started as a story about hope. A story about the potential to do something to save the people being crushed under the weight of a nobility that didn’t give a good goddamn about them. A story about the idea that someone might care about them.
BBC’s asshole Robin and indecisive (and fridged) Marian and browbeaten Merry Men aren’t loyal to that idea. Nottingham being burned to the ground as Robin dies just says “rebellion is pointless and the little people will always be victims of the system no matter what anyone does.”
B U T. You know what is loyal to that idea, that core of hope? OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD. Robin is the cynic, here, the pragmatic influence to Much’s ready optimism and Marian’s fire-bright idealism, but even Robin…he loves his people, even if he doesn’t love the dream. He would rather live to fight tomorrow than die a martyr, but when a young man in ridiculous red clothes shows up lost and alone in Sherwood Forest, Robin can’t help but care about him. Much is a devoted friend, not just to Robin but to all the Outlaws, and the one whose idealism bears up under the worst the world has to throw at it. Marian is proud and fierce and the one who turns dreams and love into real action.
You wanna know why Outlaws is my favorite Robin Hood retelling? Because it walks the line between honesty (life as an outlaw sucks! they’re hungry and cold and they’re horribly wounded in the last battle against Gisborne! Robin is scared and/or exasperated 99% of the time and the other 1% is pretty much that one scene with Marian!) and joy. Outlaws loves its characters and its story and its hopes and its dreams, genuinely enjoys the hell out of itself, and that means that it feels like Robin Hood. I don’t like stories tangled up in their own shadows and darknesses, I like stories that can balance the darkness with some light. And that’s what Outlaws of Sherwood feels like. It feels like a forest–the shadows are deep and green and frightening, and the sunlight is so, so bright.
Listen, us tiny folks are only small because our spectacular-ness is condensed and distilled down into its purest essence. Compliment your boyf on the purity of his awesomeness.
my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time
and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”
and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”
like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college
YES, ACTUALLYYES HE FUCKING DIDBC
(a) EVERY COLLEGE THEN WAS GHOST COLLEGE bc ghosts were widely believed to be Real™ n thus scholars learnt abt them. moreover, as everybody knows, ghosts only communicate in Latin; Latin is the scholastic language. Horatio is a scholar, thus both knows abt ghosts and knows Latin, so it is very reasonable to assume he will b able to ask this one what up (as obviously sth must b up 4 it 2b wandering around, why else wld it b here, gawd, this is like. the most basic of basic-level shit)
(B) WITTENBERG WHERE HORATIO STUDIES WAS LIKE. T H E MOST SPOOPYOF GHOST COLLEGES bc they were alllllll about theology n the supernatural n shit so SUPPOSING HORATIO WILL KNO HIS SHIT ABT GHOSTS IS IN FACT A THOROUGHLY SENSIBLE ASSUMPTION
this has been said before but i am fucking adding it again bc it HACKS ME TF OFF when ppl reblog the post w/o commentary as if OP jsut fucking checkmated Shakespeare when in fact all they managed to do was fail at the most basic historical contextualisation of this scene n make a fcuking fool of emselves lmao
this feels less like a “checkmate, Shakespeare” moment than a “fuck was this dude on, this shit’s surreal” moment
personally I kinda love the complete effect of “thing that made sense when originally written appears hilarious/fascinating/weird as balls to people who don’t have that context, and then context is made known to them and it’s like a whole new level of supercool”
it’s like the circle of life for shakespeare plays. “lol have the college guy talk to the ghost because as a college guy he has the necessary experience” transmutes into “every college was ghost college in shakespeare’s time” and the whole effect is awesome.
just gonna add a bunch of things here bc i love this moment in the play actually and it’s really interesting! because shakespeare was p smart.
marcellus and bernardo have seen the ghost before but they go to horatio with this information before they go to, say, anyone who actually fucking lives there
given hamlet’s reaction to horatio showing up in the next scene we can be pretty sure that no one knew horatio was even coming to elsinore (unless maybe claudius and gertrude invited him without telling hamlet and the soldiers got to him before they could work on him like ros&guil, but a) that’s a stretch and b) horatio’s relationship with the family outside of hamlet is seriously up for debate and a big question to answer for that role)
so like… how did m&b even find horatio to tell him about the ghost and why was it him they told? clearly they want to get validation before going to someone Important but the circumstances of this arrangement are RULL WEIRD
(the ‘you went to ghost college’ line isn’t just about horatio being able to speak to the ghost bc he’s been to ghost college, it’s about having a SCHOLAR validate what they saw, so when they go to someone with power to do something about it they can push horatio to the front and say ‘the learned rich guy thinks there’s a ghost too please actually listen to us’)
when they DO go to tell hamlet it’s basically just a bff reunion + btw ghost so clearly they did some strategizing after this scene as to how best to broach that topic (it’s horatio that says ‘it’ll probably speak to hamlet’ but if it had been someone different would they have thought ‘it’ll probably speak to gertrude’? that they go to hamlet with it is BECAUSE horatio is there so like… again i come back to how did they find him)
PEOPLE P MUCH ALWAYS CUT THESE LINES BUT BOTH THE SOLDIERS AND HORATIO ASSUME THE GHOST IS THERE BECAUSE OF THE WAR WITH NORWAY, NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIS DEATH– it would’ve been a HELLA PLOT TWIST when he started talking about murder in 1.5
wittenberg was also famously associated with dr. faustus and martin luther, which the audience at the time would have known, which is part of why it was the most spoopy
we don’t know horatio went to wittenberg at this point. like we the reader know, we the people putting on this play know, but we the audience don’t know. it’s actually a cool ‘aha’ moment in the next scene when claudius brings up wittenberg and you’re like AH YES, GHOST COLLEGE
we also have no idea what horatio and hamlet’s relationship is like so when horatio shows up in the next scene and hamlet goes from ‘i hate everyone’ to ‘OMG UR HEEEEEEEEEERE’ with this dude we only know as ‘new in town’ and ‘intellectual’ we know that hamlet will believe him about the ghost and that (because we’ve already been over how he’s level headed and smart) he’ll be there to help us out with our lead who’s not quite all there which is a p cool setup by billy
why is the ghost just like wandering the battlements? it’s pretty heavily implied he won’t speak to anyone but hamlet so why doesn’t he just go to him? the haunting rules for the ghost are all over the place and again that’s like a serious conversation you have to have with the actor, what the heck is he doing here
TBH THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS SCENE, THAT A LOT OF LIKE SUPER ESTABLISHED SCHOLARS AND DIRECTORS STRAIGHT UP FORGET: this scene is here at least partially to establish that the ghost is objectively there. there is some sort of fragment of spirit wandering the battlements that looks like the dead king and it wants something. it only TALKS to hamlet, and when it shows up later gertrude can’t see it, but the first thing we learn in this play is THERE IS A GHOST. shakespeare takes great care to make sure we know we can trust our eyes with it. our ears perhaps not, but the play is not from hamlet’s pov. we start with marcellus and bernardo, and grounded loyal horatio, saying ‘what the fuck what is this ghost doing here’. the mystical bit isn’t what’s up for debate
also ‘thou’rt a scholar, speak to it horatio’ is fucking hilarious and no one ever plays it as a joke
like why isn’t this ALWAYS staged as marcellus and bernardo hiding behind horatio and pushing him at the ghost and him going ?!!!?!?!?!?!? i just got here and you have swords what the fuck is wrong with you
I can’t say I agree that broiling those Yeerks was tactically necessary. The Animorphs ended operations like the hospital all the time without slaughtering the unarmed.
First of all, since I’m realizing that it is, in fact, NOT immediately obvious, all of my backlogged Animorphs commentary was written on total sleep deprivation and thesis-powered anxiety, so my rhetoric is not always as clear as maybe it should be. That said, let me add real quick that ‘necessary’ in this context =/= morally or ethically ‘good’ in any way, nor does necessary mean…like, the best available outcome? If that makes sense? It just means ‘the action that the characters believed to be needed in order to both survive and accomplish their goal.’ I should have been clearer about this in the original post and that’s on me, but, again, sleep deprivation is one hell of a drug.
But like hear me out here. Because the potential for this hospital is…frankly horrific, in this book. If the Animorphs didn’t take steps to definitively end the plan, if they had just run for it (because let’s be real…by this point in the series they really haven’t had a definitive win, they’ve mostly just lived through some battles), they would have felt complicit in the massive enslavement potential for the hospital. The hospital is a revolving door of war crimes and human rights (beings’ rights?) violations. Whether or not they would be right to feel that complicity is a different conversation (and a short one because they’re six people, everything else aside they’re only six people against an army, they’re not complicit just because they couldn’t perform a miracle), but they would absolutely feel it. So in the moment, they have to do something more than run, because they can’t face the idea of just bailing on this mission. And in the moment, under the gun, this is all Jake can think to do. They don’t have the materials to destroy the hospital to any respectable degree (even an elephant could only do so much and they don’t have any other big wrecking-ball morphs yet, like the rhino), they don’t have the materials to stop the closing through any tangentially proper channels (like they stop the logging venture in the woods with the superpowers of Skunks And Bureaucracy), and even if they did just wreck the hospital…that would kill a lot of people. It would probably kill all the Yeerks in the pool, too. The casualty count of this was always going to be high, and Jake…this is the thing that establishes Jake’s stance most viscerally.
Jake is ultimately a utilitarian general to the fucking bone, I think I talk about this in a later book, but that means that he takes a very specific viewpoint on casualty count. Lowest casualties of ‘his side,’ highest casualties of ‘their side,’ and this is a rare opportunity to have all the casualties be Yeerks, rather than a potentially innocent host. He sees this as the only available way to both accomplish their goal (he knows they’re all high ranking Yeerks who presumably can’t just be magically replaced, meaning it will get them a better delay on the Hell Hospital) and get all of his people out alive–as brutal as it sounds…it’s a distraction. Jake could have made it really quick, electrocuted the pool or something similar that would kill all the Yeerks cleanly, but he’s gambling that the staff will be in such a desperate rush to try to save the Yeerks in the pool that the Animorphs will be able to get out, so he drags it out. He makes similar plays throughout the books, and again, they’re not morally or ethically ‘good’ nor are they the best available outcome…but that’s not really the point.
So like…yeah, that’s my logic. They absolutely do get out of situations like that without similarly atrocious acts on other occasions…but it’s a loss. It always means they lose that round. Their wins are awful. Hell, right in the next book, they literally take steps to starve every Yeerk in the vicinity to death. Destroying the Kandrona is the equivalent of poisoning every water supply for a human army (removing a critical substance without which survival is impossible), which is prohibited under the Geneva Convention. If a guerrilla squad did something like that in an Earth war they would IMMEDIATELY be slated as war criminals–not soldiers. And yet…the destruction of the Kandrona is necessary, because it’s all the Animorphs can think to do to buy themselves that critical bit of extra time, to strike even a tiny blow against their enemy. It’s not the morally sound play. This is why Cassie struggles so much throughout the war–she’s the only Lawful Good player on an entire Chaotic Neutral team. The Animorphs more often than not don’t have a morally sound option available to them, which is…frankly sort of the point.
23 year old Bruce at a party, chatting up a supermodel, stiffening suddenly and hissing, “Shit. Shit.”
Her luminescent smile slides off her face. “What’s the matter?”
Bruce closes his eyes. “I came here with a little boy. Black hair, blue eyes, about three foot ten. I need to find him.” Bruce steps around her, but she stops him with her hand.
“We can help!”
“Pardon?”
“The girls and I?” She gestures to the models staggered throughout the room. “We can help you find him.”
And that’s the story of how twenty or so models went dashing around the venue, peeking under chairs and searching nooks and crevices. 8 year old Dickie Grayson was found napping under the bar counter by the new face of Prada.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: Captain! The replicators are malfunctioning, and the
ambassador’s party will be here in an hour!
KIRK: Don’t worry. We got this. *calls engineering* Hey Scotty, you
were in the dorms at Starfleet, right?
SCOTTY: Aye.
KIRK: And you weren’t allowed to have large appliances in your dorm rooms,
right?
SCOTTY: Nae, we were not.
KIRK: Ok. So, the ambassador and co are gonna be here in an hour, and we
need to set up a feast for them. And we have no replicators.
SCOTTY: *catching on* Right! I’ll take me team to the mess hall and
we’ll get right on it!
KIRK: Thanks. Kirk out.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: …What just happened?
KIRK: Ah, you weren’t in a dorm, I see.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: No, I was part of the offworlders’ fraternity… we had a
kitchen…
KIRK: So, you never fried eggs on tinfoil on a flat iron. Never painted a
can of stew black, poked a hole in the top, and set it in a sunny window to
slow-cook all day. Never used an instant coffeepot to boil rice to pour the
stew over.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: *horrified* N-No, sir.
KIRK: We’re gonna treat the ambassador’s team to a Genuine Earth-Style Scholar’s
Feast!
*comm chirps* *Kirk answers*
SCOTTY: Well, we don’t have an iron or a coffeepot, but the warp core
produces heat and we think we can rig a pipe from one of the vents to a storage
locker to make an oven; Jones has volunteered some of his beer – good lad! –
and we’re gonna get the guys in Science to extract some of the yeast and grab
some of those grain samples and see if we can get some bread going. If not,
we’ll settle for more beer. Also the Weapons team guys think they can set the
phasers to shoot through a metal mesh screen and get us grilled cheese. So
we’re off to a good start.
BUT if we make enough noise NOW, so that EVERYONE at netflix from the presidents to the janitors mf KNOWS we’re NOT down with their trash decisions, we can possibly save shows like Sense8 from having to go through this kinda horseshit in future sO WE’D ALL BETTER BE SIGNING THIS PETITION RIGHT FUCKIN NOW
MORAN IM SO DISTRAUGHT. SENSE8 IS MY FAVORITE AND SO IS THE GET DOWN AND NOW ILL NEVER KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO MY FAVS. like they both end on cliffhangers and I'm dead. Honestly I'm fed up
I’M SO UPSET LIKE I NEVER EVEN GOT THE CHANCE TO WATCH THE GET DOWN (mcfreaking college, y’all) AND THEY FUCKING CANCELLED IT??? AND THEY CANCELLED SENSE8 WHICH IS LIKE THE ONLY THING WITH MULTIPLE QUEER RELATIONSHIPS ON THE FIRST DAY OF PRIDE MONTH LIKE THE FUCK??? AND DON’T EVER TALK TO ME ABOUT THE CLIFFHANGER THING OH MY GOD OH MY FUCKING G O D honestly this is why I appreciate shows that actually wrap shit up at the end of each season BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THE EXECS ARE WAITING TO FUCKING SCREW YOU OVER.
LIKE?
CAN WE FUCKING SACRIFICE SUPERNATURAL ON THE ALTAR OF SOME KIND OF MEDIA DEITY AND SWAP IT FOR THESE?
Things I’m currently really looking forward to writing: the magical girlfriends where one of them is a Smol death machine and the other one is Very Tol Indeed who likes to wear flower crowns.
ok you know that ‘make the princess laugh and you can have her hand in marriage’ thing?
imagine so many come in.
they try, so hard, to make her laugh.
she just sits there, morose, ignoring every man who tries to coax a smile.
one day she’s sitting on the balcony. she just looks so sad.
of course that little thief tries to make her smile.
a girl who goes through the (semi public) royal gardens every day to pick flowers, even though technically only the royal family is allowed to do that.
she sees the princess while she’s picking them up to sell on the streets, and she’s just… so sad. this princess needs someone to cheer her up.
and she tries. she’ll do silly dances when she comes in, she’ll bring up frogs from ponds and act out comedies, she’ll make flower crowns and exaggerate just how hard it is.
the first few days, the princess doesn’t even look at her.
then she starts noticing. this girl, trying so hard to cheer her up. she probably hasn’t even heard of the hand in marriage thing, she doesn’t know she’s trying so hard for nothing.
but she does it anyway.
one day, the princess starts talking to her as she does these things. “You do know that it’s useless?”
“What?” the thief says. “No way! I’m going to get you to laugh!”
“The best jesters in the kingdom have tried, don’t bother,” the princess declared pessimistically, staring down at the girl.
Then the thief puffs out her chest, “Of course I am! I’ll find the best jokes, even better than the jesters have found! I’ll… fight a fire breathing dog for them!”
There’s no laugh, but the corner of the princess’s mouth twitches. it’s sad how she thinks she can make me laugh…
the girl keeps trying, for years, making more silly stories and trading flowers for jokes rather than food or money. the princess slowly realizes the girl is getting closer and closer, asking her for responses in knock knock jokes and encouraging her to speak when she wouldn’t respond immediately.
the princess eventually had the girl hanging from her balcony, holding on tight to the rail and feet wedged between the columns, grinning and telling yet another iteration of that already old chicken joke.
the princess has been smiling, slightly, but she mostly just looks unresponsive. the girl is happy, it’s better than looking so sad, like she had been years before.
the girl moves on to puns, pointing at the exotic lunch the princess was eating. “Why do the melons have to go to get married? They cantaloupe!”
“You only know that word because of me,” the princess snarks, but there’s a small smile there, a bit of happiness. This little flower girl, this thief has grown into an amazing friend, a wonderful person who genuinely just wants to help. she doesn’t know of the deal, only nobles and jesters could know, not the commonfolk.
“Well, it makes quite the pun,” the girl says, proud of her joke. a smile! what an accomplishment!
“Say…” she continued, “What would you call a princess who got swept up in conversation a thief?” she pulled a flower out of her pocket, waving it in front of the princess’s face. the princess’s eyes crossed to see the flower before they rolled at the obvious setup.
though, it was interesting that it obviously involved them.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, sighing in preparation for another horrible pun. “What?”
the girl grinned. “A pretty theft!” she exclaimed, ticking the flower against the princess’s nose.
the princess froze for a moment, stunned. she had been complimented a million times over, called graceful by etiquette instructors, been called beautiful by many a suitor, been called wonderful by her mother before… she stopped thinking about that.
she had never been called pretty.
she burst into laughter at the commonplace compliment, as if she was some sort of milkmaid who had somehow grown up to be good looking! it was ridiculous, the notion, yet somehow it had her blushing all the same.
then she suddenly stopped, realizing what she’d done.
the flower thief was staring at her in amazement, a blush of her own speckling her cheeks. her flower tilted out from in front of the princess’s nose, as if it had it’s own amazement.
“Wow…” the girl breathed. she’d never heard something so beautiful in her life.
The princess was silent, knowing what she had just done. She had just laughed for the first time in years.
The girl may not have been aware of the arrangement, but she was quickly swept up in it. A maid had heard the laughter and burst in, to find the thief and the princess, caught up in each other’s eyes, reveling in what had just happened.
The wedding was beautiful, a flower filled affair, a wonderful nod to how it happened. The king was so happy to see his daughter with someone who made her smile for once, tearing up as they were wed.
The princess’s laugh was still incredibly rare. She still had a hard time smiling. But a well timed joke from the girl– no, her wife– and another flower that had a hidden meaning behind it, than maybe, maybe you would hear it.
After all, the princess had finally laughed with the one she loved.
Sometimes I like to think of myself as a Reasonable Adult who makes Reasonable Adult Decisions.
And then sometimes Amazon marketing figures out that I’m pretending
Adulting powers activate (I’m a little concerned about the Minions box)
Taste test result: Odinforce is far more fragrant and flavorful, though both are amazingly smooth for oral caffeine delivery systems. This is legitimately tasty coffee. I rarely take my coffee black because of the acidity, but these were surprisingly smooth (which is in line with a darker roast not necessarily meaning stronger coffee).
I wish they sold the whole roasted beans; I’d love to grind these up fresh. (THEY DO.)
Dad likes the more flavorful Odinforce best while I’m more partial to the smoother Death Wish, but I’m very pleased with both.
Overall, I’d marry this coffee, probably.
Update: I think I’ve made a minor logistical error. I think you’re not meant to drink a cup and a half of each in the space of 10 minutes.
friend: im so glad i met you… you’re so fun to talk to! i love talking to you…
me, to myself: no. you fool. its the other way around. i, in fact, am the one who is glad to have met you. i am overjoyed in your presence. do not say that you enjoy talking to me more.
Nothing loves what is dead like the First Order. A world conceived out of passion for the rotting corpse of the Empire and founded by her widowers—necrophiliacs, to a man. It’s a perversity that shows itself in odd ways, flickering through high ceremonies and the songs they sing. A world caught up in self-loathing for its own existence, a New Republican reporter wrote once. Survivor’s guilt given a permanent residence.
The article was widely touted, might have even won the Regaal Prize—Leia vaguely remembers reading about it over her morning caf, and resisting the urge to throw her datapad at the wall. (Instead, she threw the mug of caf, startling Han and making Ben scream. Maker, won’t someone think of the poor ex-Imperials? Leia had snarled, nostrils flaring. They’re so sad they lost their oppressive empire.)
FN-2187 does not remember reading it, mostly because he didn’t. The article was published to a New Republican holochannel, and never made it past the Order’s censors. It was deemed dangerous for public consumption—not for alleging that the First Order considered living a kind of cowardice, but for the suggestion there was anything at all strange about that.
The holonews reporter never saw any of the stormtrooper training facilities. By design—the First Order’s leaders were perverse, not stupid. They knew what story would be written, if he had seen all those warm-blooded bodies under the tyranny of the grave.
It would have been a very different article.
.
Finn remembers the way Slip wanted to die. And Zeroes. And Ace and Ello and Four—they’d discussed it enough, in whispers after lights-out, or during meals, their heads bent together and eyes bright, hard, planning for fire and glory. Though Crisper had always wanted to go in a daring undercover mission, like in the Black Ops propos—and Ohs had liked the idea of hand-to-hand combat with a dangerous rebel, a vibroblade to the gut.
(You just like that because it’d give you a chance to get out a dramatic speech, Ace had laughed, and Ohs had scowled and flicked protein flakes in her hair.)
Even he and Rey had discussed it, over the patchy transmissions sent between D’Qar and Ahch-To. I used to know for sure, she writes. I’d grow old, too old to scavenge, and then I’d starve. Or I’d fall, and break a hip, a leg, a spine, and starve. Or I’d fall ill, and if the poison in my blood didn’t take me, I’d starve.
But I don’t know anymore, she writes.
When he asks Poe how he wants to die, Poe blanches, the humor vanishing from his expression. What? Why would you ask that?
It takes a fumbling, long and terrible explanation, with Finn backtracking desperately and Poe struggling to keep all emotion out of his eyes. What was yours? he asks, after Finn has finished, and they’re sitting in awkward silence. Finn is trying not to notice how white Poe’s knuckles are, where he clutches the mug of caf.
My what?
The death you wanted.
Finn blinks. He lived on the edges of those conversations, FN-2187 with no nickname; no one’s ever—asked him before. He answers without thinking: I didn’t…I didn’t want to die.
.
Death is a flat plain endlessly, a stormtrooper sings, my voice opens and calls you in.
Hail, hail, the line of troopers answers as it marches; death, we come in.
.
Finn spends the entirety of the Resistance funeral sweating cold and shaking, his hands fisted so tightly that his nails leave crescent-marks on his palms. Afterwards, he has to excuse himself to the refresher, and his knees give out under him.
He cries, something hollow and yet heavy in the pit of his stomach. (No one is there to see, so he laughs too, against his fist, wild and terrible, an animal sound.) I guess there’s something the First Order does better, he says bitterly, to no one in particular.
.
When Leia mentions going back to collect the dead, Finn stares at her like she’s suggested he split open his ribcage and hand her his still-beating heart. Are your orders unclear, Lieutenant Finn? she asks, and he quickly schools his face back into blank stillness.
No, General.
Still, he stares throughout, they fold hands over bellies and shut unseeing eyes. (He twitches, whenever this is done, but Leia could not say why.) Even when he helps—he’s not squeamish, not the way Leia used to be around the dead—he stares, as though he can’t follow the sense in what his hands are doing.
The sun is much lower in the lavender sky when Leia comes to stand beside him. He is staring down at the blue-shrouded body frowning, a faint line between his brows.
It’s rare, that we have the chance to do this, Leia says, and Finn blinks at her. Often battlefields are compromised, we can’t…go back. X-wings are built to implode upon impact. Most of the time, our dead are lost to us.
(A field of rubble, where Alderaan hung amid the stars.)
Do you—believe they’re still in there? Finn asks tentatively, glancing down at the shrouded body.
No, they’re dead.
Why, then?
The First Order never retrieved bodies? He shakes his head, and Leia considers this for a moment. What did you do with the armor of dead troopers?
Finn blinks. If it was still in—working condition, their squad got first pick. I had a…a friend’s armguards.
Leia nods. The principle is the same. It’s easier, when there’s something to hold. Otherwise it’s just absence. Open wounds heal more slowly.
Finn’s expression flickers on ‘heal’, and his mouth shapes the word almost uncomprehendingly, trying to sound out a strange language. (She wonders how they speak about mourning in the First Order—necrophiliacs, she suddenly remembers. Then she wonders if they mourn at all.)
Yes, General, Finn says, finally. I understand.
They stand there together in the gathering violet dusk, as the bodies are carried up from the dust.
You wake up with two small lumps on your back, just around your shoulder blades. Your friend has a similar dilemma, however, theirs are on their forehead, and look like zits. Small horns protrude from theirs, while feathers come from yours.
Within a month, you have large, white, dove wings, while your friend has long, curly horns. Turns out, you’re an angel, they’re a demon, and you’re supposed to fight. But you both’d rather just go see a movie.
she looks like the way summer tastes. but she’s my best friend. she’s just my best friend, and this entire thing is too cheesy.
she’s spitting up into the sink. blood has been in her mouth a lot ever since the teeth starting coming in. “do you think teething is like?” she lisps around a sore tongue “permanent?”
i’m scrubbing at my eyes. i’m allergic to certain animal dander. my body has been going through shock; fever on, fever off. the truth is that human bodies don’t like foreign cells inside of themselves.
“you know,” i say, “i wrote this story once.” the movie ended a while ago but we had to wait until the bathroom was empty. if we’re lucky, people just think we’re cosplaying. we locked the door behind us.
“my mouth hurts,” she says.
“i was like, twelve,” i say. i feel like there are mites, always, everywhere, crawling all over me. the other day a third set of eyes started growing in my hands. i’m not used to it yet and i get a lot of vertigo and 3D glasses per pair are super expensive. “it was bad.”
“i mean,” she pauses. “we look stupid.” for a second, the fire on her starts again, and she swears while she puts it out. i meanwhile send her another “i can be ur angle or yuor devil” meme, leaning against the counter while she again washes her mouth out.
“it was stupid,” i say. “i didn’t even know the word nephilim, like some kind of pleb.”
“get wrecked, twelve-year-old you,” she says.
i’ve learned a lot these past few months, have scoured the bible sixteen times. “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.” Genesis 6:4. Maybe that’s us. Or maybe we’re in the X-Men. If it wasn’t for the creepy voice who told us otherwise, we have no evidence.
i have trouble looking at her sometimes. not because she’s so different now, but because she makes my heart swell up like balloon. like an explosion. like heavenly light.
she makes eye contact with my original set. i feel my hearts start revving. she smiles at me in that way that makes me forget about wings and horns and eternal forces.
“i liked the movie, though,” i blurt.
“ugh!” she rolls her eyes, drying her hands by shaking them off. they again ignite, and she swears again, clapping them out. “it was bad, ray.”
i laugh, we head out. two girls in a jeep with too many layers for the heat. i can’t drive anymore, i’m too distracted by the extra eyes. she does better but has to stop sometimes to put out fires.
she pulls off on the lookout by the watertower to shake a few teeth loose. i stretch and almost fall over, unused to a new body and no balance. my bones are hollowing.
“was that crack your wrist?” she asks.
“yuh,” i say, holding it.
“yuck,” she says, “sounds broken.”
“might be,” i’m biting my tongue, “it’s lit.”
she comes over to examine it. “broken,” she says. she glows in the darkness, but i don’t know if that’s literally her or just how i see her, all alight with life and perfect. she helps me wrap it. we sit on the hood of her car and look out to the forest below us. we sip snapple i stole. i hear my bone heal. we both ignore the noise it makes.
“that guy is kind of a dingus,” i say. i put on a deep voice, “Thou must wage in the eternal war. Put on Earth so that thy may Know; as above and so below.”
“might not be a guy,” she says. “very gender-specific of you, ray.”
“my apologies,” i say to the sky, “that was crass of me. you can be whatever gender you want, giant sky voice. or many genders. or all. whatever works.”
“i’m still like… what the hell does that middle part about knowing mean. like. also. crack open a grammar book for the modern century.”
i “hmm” into my snapple. my running theory is that our time spent as mortals meant we knew what it was exactly we were fighting for. i don’t tell her this because my entire evidence is how i feel about her, is how every day with her made it worth it, how being her best friend was the best experience i ever had. but like. it’s chill.
“it’s a broken capitalist heaven economy,” i say. “war eternal?”
she laughs. i love it when she laughs. “at least you can be sure you’re going to the place that profits off of all of this,” she says. “heaven’s got the big guy.”
i make a note in the back of my throat and face her. “you don’t know that,” i whisper, “we’ve talked about this.”
she laughs in a new way, a sad one, staring out ahead of her. “yeah, you and your bible. ‘angels and demons are the same species but separated geospatially,’ blah blah blah, either one of us could be the damned soul, blah blah blah.”
“hey, i did research,” i say. “and i’m right, a lot of angels are…”
“goatish? have devil horns? light on fire?”
“micheal was like, forty to ninety percent fire.”
“micheal also was like, always an angel. he don’t need to question anything. fire? sure, he good. he was born angel.”
“i don’t know they’re like, born,” i say. i look up at her. “but i’m serious. i got like sixteen eyes and counting -”
“nine, you have nine”
“and like that’s not counting the spiritual aspect of this whole thing since -“
“oh my god, ray,” she says, sighing, “not this whole ‘morally impure’ thing again.”
“i’m just saying,” i don’t like how upset she is, but the more i try to fix it, the worse it is, “i’m not, like, a good person! i’m -” i stop myself two milliseconds before finishing the loaded end of that sentence about her, and how i feel, and the terrible gap before us.
she whips around and looks at me. just really looks, like i’m pinned there by her. for a second, she’s my best friend, not angel or demon, and she’s glaring.
“that’s not true and you know it,” she says, her voice barely over a whisper, “don’t say that kind of thing about yourself.”
i sigh and pull my hair, dropping her gaze. “i’m sorry,” i say, “i’m just… this whole thing is messed up and, like… i’m not… an angel, i guess.”
“i thought you said that the original angels were all-powerful and scary,” she says, “that purity was a new myth.”
i stare at her. how do i explain to my best friend that i’m taking advantage of her just by being around her; how every time she hugs me i mean more by it, how holding hands with her gives me little shocks that keep me happy.
“you know what?” she says, kicking off the hood, “fuck this, let’s go back to my place and let’s get drunk.”
we do.
late in the night i wake up and she’s not in bed anymore. i’m still drunk and my mouth feels like a trash bin. i blink in the light of her room, grab my toothbrush, put toothpaste on both tongues as an appetizer, just to dispel the taste. stretch the gross chicken-finger nubs of a sore back with six pairs of soon-to-be wings and stumble to her bathroom.
she’s sitting on the floor and her horns are gone. bandages bloodied with green ooze sit around her. black scars hide up in her hairline.
“how’s it going?” she says casually.
i drop everything onto the sink and drop to her side. “oh my god,” i whisper, my hands touching her warm skin, “what happened?”
she looks at me. our faces are so close i have to stop myself from shaking, but the more i look at what she’s done, the worse i feel for her. i push back her matted hair and reach for new gauze to wipe away the blood she missed. her hand loops gently around one of my wrists, not restraining, just comforting.
“it’s okay, ray,” she says softly, “i found a tutorial on the internet. how to cut off goat horns. it didn’t hurt that bad, i promise. like, when we pierced our own cartilage back in middle school hurt a lot worse.”
i stare at her. “you cauterized your own wounds and you expect me to calm down.” i clean up her face frantically. i feel tears, but i’m not sure in which pair of eyes.
“i didn’t say i cauterized anything.”
“it’s clear!” i almost burst into a thousand pieces, holding her round face in my hands, struggling to lower my voice, “it’s clear.”
“i’m okay,” she says, half-smiling, “i’m okay.”
“you should have woken me up,” i say. “what kind of -“
she kisses me and i understand why she’s got the power of fire. if i immolate, i don’t notice. we move from bathroom floor to hallway to bedroom. her hands and my hands and our bodies almost feel human.
when we finally separate, her voice is low. “fuck,” she says, “i wasn’t supposed to do that. you weren’t supposed to know.”
i’m breathless. i can’t form words. “know…?” i manage.
she leans in. kisses me again. “i like you, ray,” she whispers, “i like you a lot, you giant six-winged bug.”
“in a gay way?” i ask.
she laughs. “the gayest.”
“okay,” i say. i’m shaking. “because, like, i like you too. like. in the gay way.” my voice sounds different, high and tense and fluttery. almost too loud, even though we’re both whispering.
“your wings kind of look like chicken fingers,” she says, “or like, really big nipples.”
“you know,” i say, “i think the same thing.” i stare at her. all of my eyes, on her, on this girl, on the girl i can’t have, on the girl i couldn’t have even if we weren’t magical beings from a metaphysical plane, because we’re best friends and that matters more than anything.
i think of us and of our future and of her, surrounded by the pieces of her horns, and of my wings, and of the world. i think of the bad movie we watched and how it was good because she was next to me. i think of the words of the giant sky voice and how we’re supposed to fight in an eternal war and how i do know, how i’ve always known, how love was the only thing that was worth fighting for, how she has always been my angel. how i would tear heaven down in order to have her and that’s how i know: i’m the one who fell long ago.
she deserves heaven and holy and the best things. she deserves more than a twelve-year-old’s silly plotline, more than to be forced into fate, more than to be a drafted soldier. she deserves a better life than this.
look out, god, i think, i’ve got a hell of a bone to pick.
“i love you,” i whisper, “and i have loved you for a long time.”
she kisses me.
in the morning, i’m gone.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH What the fuck AAAAAAH This is glorious!
billionaire could give me %.01 of his wealth and change my life while he is virtually unaffected.
0.01% of $1,000,000,000 is $100,000.
Which, for some people, is as much as they’d make in five years of 60 hour weeks of labor.
And this is one hundredth of one percent of the bare minimum of being a billionaire.
Also, if the billionaire has a decent bank account setup (which, let’s face it, billionaire has), that $100,000 will just come back the next time interest happens. It is a perpetually regenerating $100,000.
With $100,000 I could fix my credit, buy a house in my family’s hometown and a car, drive back there to live, and have a small cushion left over to get me through till I find a local job—which wouldn’t have to be high-paying, mind, since my house would be paid off. If I brought my mom with me, she could afford to quit her three jobs and start collecting on her Social Security. We could live quite well and I might not even have to finish college to get a job with a wage that would pay our bills and expenses. “Life-changing” is no exaggeration.
reasons USA capitalism and especially “trickle down economics” are both bullshit: because they allow situations like this
