Anonymous asked: I hope you don't mind if I rant a bit, but I'm just re reading the SPN rant and I'm remebering how mad I am about this show??? Because I used to really like it, and up to Season 5 I had issues but I dealt with it because y'know it was good overall. But then like as the seasons kept on going I was left in a permanent state of "wtf" I actually made it 5 episodes 1/?
of Season 8 before I was like… what am I doing so I bingewatched a bunch of crime shows. But then Season 11 started airing and I still had “kept up” with SPN because of “nostalgia” or wtfever and I heard they were introducing “The Darkness” the “biggest bad ever, pre-creation, sister of GOD” and I’m like eh, but then the fandom was coming up with all these theories and 2/?
I’ll give it a try and then I heard they had Season 13 confirmed so I was like hey, it’s going to be 3 season arc! Hey, maybe it’ll turn out alright! I started mid way through the season so when I started watching it was pretty obvous they’d already set Amara/the Darkness as Dean’s love interest but I was like… well if it was Sam she’s be dead but since it’s with Dean 3/?
hey might create a heartrenching arc about sibling? (How naive I was..) And as the season went on I kept cringing but Season 13 confirmed! EVEN BIGGER BAD THAN ALL THE OTHER BAD! GOD REAPPEARENCE! It’s going to turn out all right! And then they literally had the most STUPIDEST ENDING EVER 4/?
SPOILER: IT WAS LITERALLY I’M SORRY I WAS OS MEAN TO YOU BRO< IT’S COLL SIS, YOU WANT TO GO HAVE A SPACE VACATION EVEN THOUGH YOU NEARLY KILLED ME AN EPISODE AGO AND HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO BE A DEEPLY COMPLEX VILLIAN??? AND ALL THIS BECAUSE YOU TALKED TO AN OLD LADY WHO FED DUCKS?!?!?!?! 5/?
THEN MOTHER OF ALL PLOT TWISTS (SPOILER) THEY BRING BACK MARY! SO GET READY FOR SEASON 12 WINCHESTER ANGST + MUM AND MOST PROBABLY AN EVEN BIGGERER BADDAERER BAD!!!! *inhales* It was at this point I switched off the t.v and screamed into my pillow 6/?
I’m just very frustrated about SPN and all the wasted potential with Amara/ the Darkness. THEY HAD SEASON 13 CONFIRMED. Idk why I sent you all of this, your rant just awoke the beast in me I guess. I’m just going to leave with all of this *gestures toward previous asks* and run away. Sorry 7/7
HONEY never ever apologize for bitching about Supernatural with me, I am here for you to get it the FUCK off your chest. I am the most sympathetic ear. Amazingly, my epic rant was a mere fragment of my complaints. SO ANY TIME YOU NEED TO BITCH, I AM HERE FOR IT.
That being said, damn, anon, you stuck it out way longer than I did. And wow, I have done some googling and I just. I just give up. I don’t understand the plot. I am confused. I tried to fucking figure out the Amara thing, I Wiki’d, I IMDB’d, but it’s incomprehensible. And then fucking Mary gets resurrected? Goddamn, I’m just glad I got out when I did tbh.
Divine Cassandra:
I will always love you, but as the Divine I must chose my devotion to my people and to the Maker first. As is tradition, I will take a vow of celibacy.
Divine Leliana:
Let's be realistic, I'm never giving up sex and I'm installing a wine fountain next to the sunburst throne.
zarohk asked: So, I'm not totally sure the timelines match up, but do you think that Rachel's sisters (especially Sarah who is younger and more naive) could have watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and decided that Rachel is the Slayer? Goes out at night, all hours, secret boyfriend who only visits her at night, can't tell their single mom, etc.
[First of all: the timelines do actually match up quite well. In #20 there’s a brief mention of David’s dad (of all people) watching Buffy on TV, and although Animorphs started and ended first most of its run overlaps with Buffy. Second, I LOVE this idea so much. Rachel and Buffy are two of the people who were massively influential in teaching me and my friends that it was possible to be girly and tough at the same time. Third… Voila.]
It starts as a way to distract her sisters, on the nights when their mom can’t make it home and their dad is too busy to call—Rachel will put on whichever Buffy episode she’s got saved in the DVR and all three of them will watch it together. However, all three of them fall in love with the show over time, until they’re catching each episode live: Sarah laughs at all the puns and hums along with the theme song while Jordan waxes poetical about how dreamy Spike and Angel are.
Rachel just loves Buffy herself, because there aren’t enough girls on TV that can look that fabulous and kick butt at the same time. It becomes a weekly ritual, one that Rachel sometimes has to miss if Cassie or Jake calls with urgent news, but she’ll put aside anything short of the alien invasion to catch it with her sisters.
*****************
Jordan meets Rachel at the door, which is a bad sign because their mom and Sarah are both asleep and Rachel herself went to bed six hours ago. The mission was long, nasty, and exhausting, the way they always are, and Rachel’s too keyed-up from the adrenaline rush to think of a proper excuse for why she’s sneaking in.
She and Jordan stare at each other in silence for a few seconds, Rachel leaning on the door frame, Jordan holding a comic book in both hands as she sits on the end table in the foyer. Jordan becomes the first one to speak. “Sarah and I were talking,” she says. “And I think we figured it out.”
Rachel feels her stomach churn. She’s not as careful with her sisters as her mom. She never has been. “Figured what out?”
“It’s okay.” Jordan clutches her comic book a little more closely, expression solemn. “We won’t tell Mom.”
Rachel crosses her arms. “Won’t tell her what, exactly?”
Jordan thrusts the comic book at Rachel. The cover shows a girl—Buffy Summers, judging by the title—holding a wooden stake in one hand and a sword in the other, her blond hair whirling around her as she thrusts the sword at a spike-covered greyish creature in the corner of the frame.
Rachel takes a step back from the comic, not sure whether to laugh or to cry.
“It explains everything. Where you sneak out to almost every night. Why you’ve got blood under your fingernails half the time when you get home. Why you’ve got a secret boyfriend who only comes out at night—”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Rachel says reflexively.
Jordan nods, eyes wide. “Uh-huh. So you definitely weren’t seen by half the school at last week’s dance with a mysterious guy who has blond hair and is never seen around town. You don’t have a boyfriend, even though I’ve heard people talking in your room in the middle of the night. And you always leave your window open, even—especially—when it rains. Almost like you’re waiting for a secret vampire boy—”
Rachel snorts a laugh. “Tobias isn’t a vampire.”
Which has exactly the opposite effect than the one she intended. “Oh my god,” Jordan whispers. “Tobias as in that guy who disappeared last year? Everyone thought he died—” She gasps. “Unless he did die. And now he’s back!”
Much as Rachel wants to laugh and keep laughing until she falls over, she understands that this conversation actually has serious implications. With effort she sobers herself. “Look,” she says at last. “There are things… Things I can’t tell you. You wouldn’t be safe if I did.”
She looks Jordan in the eye. Jordan is taking this conversation seriously—probably more seriously than Rachel herself, for that matter. “I understand,” Jordan says.
“As soon as…” As soon as the war’s over. “As soon as it’s safe. I’ll tell you everything. Right now, there are things I can’t talk to you, or to Mom, about. But someday I will. I promise.” Rachel can’t be more honest than that.
“Okay.” Jordan bites her lip. “I just wanted you to know your secret’s safe with me. And if you ever need help, like, hiding a body…”
Rachel smiles, overwhelmed with fondness. “Thanks.” She yawns. “Now, if it’s all right with you, Dawn…”
Jordan makes a face.
“I’m wiped, so I’m going to bed.” She walks past Jordan and up the stairs to her room.
“Rachel!”
She turns around. Jordan is standing at the bottom of the stairs, hugging her comic book against her chest with both hands.
“On the show,” she says haltingly. “They say a lot about how slaying’s a dangerous job. About how most slayers don’t live to be twenty.” There’s real fear in her eyes, as she looks up at her sister.
Rachel grins, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Really, Jordan, you should learn not to believe everything you see on TV. After all, it’s just a show. No vampire’s gonna take me down.”
****************************
“You know, my sister thinks you’re William the Bloody.”
«Who’s that, a spokesman for Kotex?»
***************************
She doesn’t get much input on the actual headstone; she’s too young for that. She does, however, manage to put in a special request for the plaque on the statue they erect outside of Washington D.C., a proud grizzly bear rearing up to defend the Capitol.
Rachel Daniella Berenson, the plaque reads. She saved the world. A lot.
During Boromir’s death scene in the Fellowship of the Ring film, you a hear a choir in the soundtrack. The choir isn’t singing random vowel sounds; they’re actually singing in Elvish.
The English translation of the lyrics? It’s a line from the books: “I do not love the sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only what they defend.”
For bonus hurt points– in the book, those lines were said by his little brother Faramir.
(to request a soundtrack to be analyzed/translated, reblog this linked post. All these soundtrack-related posts will be tagged #lotrsoundtrackfacts)
accepting that nobody will ever be perfect, educating the people who are willing to listen, and encouraging them to grow and learn from their mistakes, is IN
Anonymous asked: I was really struck by something I read in one of your earlier replies to an ask, which was "we’ll never know what Rachel would have done after the war ended", and I wondered if perhaps you may actually have some thought about what might have happened if she did? How WOULD Rachel, who thrived in war, adapt to the mundane life after?
After a while Rachel’s aunt and uncle get so used to her stopping by that they just make her a copy of their house key; it’s easier than answering the door all the time or leaving a window open for her, besides which they’re grateful because she’s there almost every day to bully Jake out of bed and into the world to go do something. Most days it’s just attending Habitat for Humanity builds in the devastated areas downtown or visiting kids from the local hospital who idolize them both. Rachel doesn’t mind dragging Jake out of his room at all, because while Tobias is good for taking random college classes or exploring new parts of the country with her, there are still plenty of stupid things that she can only talk Jake into doing. Together they surf during hurricanes, skydive without parachutes, swim to the bottom of the ocean as orcas and throw themselves off cliffs as birds of prey.
Rachel doesn’t pretend to understand what he’s going through, because she quite simply can’t—if she even tries to think about what it would be like if it was Jordan or Sarah she’d had to kill during that last battle, she tends to lose the ability to breathe. But while she can’t give him empathy she can give him this: the scream of wind rushing past their bodies as they hurl toward the ground at nearly a hundred miles an hour, the incomparable thrill of the ground approaching them faster than an oncoming train, the moment of simple euphoria during that millisecond decision to once again open one’s wings and tell death not today. He doesn’t smile much, and never laughs, but that’s always been true to some extent. She doesn’t concern herself with making him smile, but with forcing him to gasp for air in his refusal to give up on life, to morph when not doing so would mean drowning in the cold Pacific, to swerve a second away from spattering on the ground. Because she’s the only one who understands the power of those moments to make them forget everything in the world except the heady rush of being so goddamn alive they can barely even stand it.
Marco
It’s strange, really, how tough and showy they can be around each other most of the time… and how vulnerable they can become when no one else is around. Rachel’s pretty sure she’s the only one who ever saw Marco cry after they all watched Eva’s body tumble hundreds of yards to its apparent death, and she knows for certain that she’s the only one to whom he says “it’s like we never really got her back at all,” the day his parents announce their divorce. In public Rachel and Marco become even more themselves, one-upping each other to see who can come out with the most embarrassing story in round after round of interviews and bantering at lightning speed as live studio audiences laugh and cheer. Rachel gives a hysterical, exaggerated account of Marco’s failed attempt at gatecrashing William Roger Tennant’s award banquet; Marco comes back with a heroic narrative of how his llama-self saved an entire television studio from the crocodile Rachel conveniently forgot to mention she had puked out backstage. When talking about the time Helmacrons invaded Marco’s nose, they each manage to make the whole mess entirely into the other one’s fault.
In private, they sit on the back porch of Marco’s primary house once a week and work their way through a bottle of triple sec they’re definitely too young to own. It’s during those long evenings as the sun sets over the Newport Beach mansions that they air the things to each other they’ve never told a living soul before. Marco talks about the hard bright-edged joy of watching 17,000 yeerks sucked into space and only being able to imagine their screams. Rachel confesses to having cried herself to sleep after she and Ax dropped David on that island. They air their sickest thoughts, lance their most pus-rotted wounds, spew poison at each other because they know that they are both strong enough (hard enough, cold enough, ruthless enough) to take it and give back in turn.
Cassie
Rachel’s honestly not sure how far Cassie would have gotten, politically, if not for her help. Because that girl might have passion and conscience and common sense to spare, but Rachel’s not sure she’s met a more appearance-clueless person in her life. The world of politics runs on fashion and makeup, though, especially if one happens to be a woman, and any time Cassie’s about to go tell the United Nations why they need to update the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today to include the hork-bajir and taxxons, or to scold Congress into giving the ex-hosts war reparations and not murder charges, Rachel is there in the background helping. She shows Cassie the power of stalking into a room in a pair of towering heels, the ways to make a string of pearls or a Chanel handbag into a weapon of power. Cassie laughs incredulously every time Rachel shows up at her house with a literal truckload of perfectly-tailored business suits and evening gowns, but over time she starts to understand just how much her reputation for being as elegant as she is fierce can work in her favor.
Rachel, in turn, starts to put out patents for the kind of clothes Cassie would love: comfortable and practical items that can be worn for years without needing replacement. Rachel figures that if she’s an international trendsetter already (and she is: her line of perfume makes millions every year, while black leotards are debuting on Paris runways) then she might as well have her best friend and the world of high fashion meet in the middle. Of course Rachel doesn’t explicitly mention that her patent-leather pumps with arch support and heel padding are inspired by the experience of trying on Cassie’s Timberlands, or that her choice of size-16 models for all her advertisements comes from making dresses that would fit Cassie and sizing up or down from there. But what’s most amazing to her is that the other dressmakers and shoe lines start to emulate her choices, emphasizing the comfort and sturdiness of everything they make even as they tout it as “cutting edge.” If Rachel has dragged Cassie into being a fashion icon, then it turns out Cassie might just have dragged Rachel into being a social justice warrior along the way.
Ax
Ax seems somewhat dumbfounded when Rachel explains that there’s an Earth tradition that any ship’s captain can perform a marriage ceremony, and that even if there’s no law on the books about this particular power she wants him to do it anyway. She’s not sure herself how her and Tobias’s small private ceremony (at least, that was the intention) has grown so much, but even she has to admit that somewhere between the 230-person guest list, the custom chuppah to be hand-embroidered by a team of local artists, the five-tier cake imported from a German bakery, and the dress which is personally designed by Alexander McQueen, things might have gotten slightly out of hand. Ax takes the duties very seriously, practicing the strange mouth sounds he has to recite more than once in advance and promising solemnly that he will not eat any of the cake until Rachel and Tobias have had the chance to cut it.
He serves as their best man as well (probably breaking with tradition, not that they care) and the speech he makes afterward is surprisingly heartfelt. «There has been no greater honor in my life than to fight by your side,» he tells them, «and I owe you both my life many times over. I owe you more than that, of course, for you have made this strange planet my home when I came to you lost and alone. I am not sure what humans traditionally wish for each other with a bond such as this, so I will wish you this much: may your lives be long, may your battles be easily won, may you be loved and feared in equal measure, and may your chili always be perfectly seasoned.»
Tobias
It’s not like they get jobs, or hold down formal obligations, or do anything more structured than attend occasional classes at UCSB or consult with the fashion agency that sends Rachel freelance checks. So there’s really no reason they can’t continue their odd lifestyle, only in the same form at the same time for two hours at most. At least, that’s how it is for the first several years… and then one day Rachel comes out of the bathroom, a tiny white stick in her hand, and they both realize their lives are never going to be the same again. Tobias is terrified, of course: he’s been abandoned (voluntarily or not) by two parents, four guardians, and countless authority figures, and he’s got no reason to believe he’ll be any different. But he knows what the first step will be in committing to raising this baby for real. And so he morphs human for the very last time.
In the years that follow, after their daughter eventually gets a little brother as well, Rachel and Tobias become more boring than they ever could have hoped for. Rachel starts working full-time as a fashion designer, while Tobias finishes an advanced degree in graphic design and gets a job with the marketing branch of the same company. They go to PTA meetings and teach their daughter softball, buy a sedan with good gas mileage and a two-story house in Mendocino County where the reporters can’t find them. They still get restless sometimes, leaving the kids with Loren or Sarah for a week or two at a time to go white-water rafting on the Colorado River or to climb mountains in Tanzania, but they always miss the kids enough to come home before long. They donate thousands of dollars to end world hunger every year, and they fundraise millions more. Someday they’ll retire. Someday after that they’ll die. For now, however, they’re alive, and that’s enough.
Anonymous asked: I'm ace and your post meant a lot to me so thank you
Oh, honey, you shouldn’t have to thank me, but I’m glad it meant something to you.
Like I said, y’all put up with a lot of nonsense, and you put up a hell of a fight, and I’m proud of you. Good job, honey. You’re doing a really good job.
