this changed me as a person
"it's all in your head" correct! unfortunately I am also in there
in my room. straight up "listening to it". and by "it", haha, well. lets justr say. my horror pobcast
Did I ever mention that the superficial, self-absorbed queen-bee mean girl developing into a legit heroic character (without losing any of the spice) is one of my favourite tropes ever?
The brooding male MC that kinda looked down on her at first ending up yearning for her is the cherry on top.
mulder will do shit like call scully from jail and be like hi I got arrested trying to catch homeless bigfoot in an alleyway. I know you’re a six hour drive away but can you come pick me up. and scullys problem is that she will come pick him up eventually
Hello there, gentle viewers! Welcome back to Buffy Slays, where I’ll be going through all 144 episodes of BtVS over the course of a year, highlighting as many of the GOOD moments, lines, character choices, worldbuilding moments, etc. etc. as I think people will have the patience to read.
So, here we go!
"Buffy risks her life to save Cordelia’s, and Xander does the same. When the science building catches on fire, Willow and Giles see an unconscious Eric and pull him to safety, even though he’s the psychotic creep who was about to chop Cordy’s head off and stitch it on a corpse. Because he’s still alive, and therefore needs to be saved. On the other hand, Frankenstein-Daryl plunges into the fire to be with his corpse bride, and when Chris tries to go after him, Buffy holds him back. Letting Daryl burn, because Daryl wasn’t truly alive. Not a demon, and not human anymore, either, but a stitched-up, half-alive corpse that should have been left in peace and dignity in his grave."
Ooooh I had never really thought much about this episode, but the way you break this down here really fits for what's to come for Buffy in season 6. She becomes the non-demon, non-human who should have been left to rest in peace. Even the fire element parallels Once More With Feeling really well.
people who write fics. how do you feel about comments on super old ones you wrote like 2+ years ago
Bringing this out of the tags:
A fic written 2 years ago is NOT OLD. Two years is nothing. Two years ago was yesterday.
Also I don't care if a fic is 10 years old. Leave those comments!! Even if you think the author isn't active, or moved on from the fandom, I promise you it will make them smile.
I commented on a fic that was 11 years old, and there was already a response by the time I got up the next morning. Comment on the fics, please, comment on them, I promise it'll make the author's day either way
I got a comment on a fic of mine this week that just read "TWO THOUSAND AND NINE?"
I replied to it within seconds, of course. someone commented on my fic
As @pentapoda put it in this post:
(transcript: Every time someone comments on my old fic, i feel like I'm an old actor getting paid residuals. Appreciate you, old-fic-commenters. Key source of emotional income, tbh.)
What I'm about to say is out there of an idea but since the finale is just in two days, I'm calling it now: What if Sticky Fingers Paul Pantry was Devon Denton?
Devon Denton is next in line after Evelyn for taking ownership of Steeplechase, and Kenchall is frustrated because of this.
Later on, we find out Kenchall was behind his murder and the framing of Gravel as the prime suspect. But why Sticky Fingers Paul Pantry specifically?
Well, Justin has stated that Sticky Fingers Paul Pantry NEVER broke character. Maybe Devon created this character as a disguise from guests at the park, and the only one who knew about this was the other members of the Denton family since he's a well known mascot to Ustaben.
In Ep. 31, Kenchall states to Poppy's Angels that he took care of Sticky Fingers Paul Pantry due to "cleaning up loose ends." He follows up with this:
"I mean, this is not…let’s see, Paul Pantry, yes, killed. But if it makes you feel any better, he was blackmailing you. And that is— I just think that there’s nothing worse than a blackmailer. You know? So, that he kind of had coming to him."
I find it funny how Kenchall tries to justify his action of killing Sticky Fingers Paul Pantry by saying he was a blackmailer, meanwhile HE is over here in Steeplechase being a backstabber, replacing human employees with hardlight constructs of themselves, tossing people who refuse to help him by placing them in Kiddiedelphia, and has no remorse with pointing a gun at Poppy's Angels in Glensville. What a guy.
Anyway, he also says the following:
"What I’m saying is that I’m not sabotaging you. I am cleaning up after you."
"But you have to understand that this is what I do. I look for inefficiencies. I look for— pardon me, and I don’t mean to be offensive, but sloppiness. And I try to correct that, to make the loose ends go away."
This term "sloppiness" is interesting. And we know about Kenchall's disdain towards Devon, calling him a "dipshit." So it would make sense that in order to get to the top of the line for ownership of the park, Kenchall took care of getting Devon out of the picture, or in this case, Sticky Fingers Paul Pantry.
Again, this is only just a random theory I'm tossing out there before the series is over...
taz steeplechase is so incredible as a setting. it's a disney dystopian sovereign state/tower of babel thing that's been standing for more than a generation. it's been there for so long that there's a ton of old defunct animatronics robots abandoned here and there and they're all super creepy.
Even the employees are so taken in by the allure of the park that they spend their whole paychecks to have fun in the park on their free time. There's a whole layer dedicated to nostalgia.
When they realized that too many kids had been abandoned by their parents in the daycare park, they just bricked up the whole thing with the kids still inside and used it as a garbage dump/prison colony, so that there's just this Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic world with very real stakes within Disneyland where old animatronics try to kill you
Wow more fanart. New TAZ Steeplechase.
Steeplechase (the park) is like its own character, and it's almost an eldritch entity, massive and uncaring. It's the sovereign state of Steeplechase, always imposing an alternate reality onto the world that maintains the most immersive experience and best customer service that always boils down to a feasible story over the truth. People and buildings are slowly becoming a hyper-real hardlight version of themselves. Better. Less true.
The closest location character, so twisted and intricate that once you're in it, it takes over everything, is the City in Ulysses Dies At Dawn. But everybody wants to leave the City; it's just they can't. It's the whole planet.
Nobody wants to leave Steeplechase. Once you're there, you devote yourself, some part of yourself, to always staying in Steeplechase. It's in the currency; a suite to pay another night of the park. It's in the abandoned children in Old Kididelphia.
It's kind of fucked how the original Scandal in Bohemia is essentially about a woman being harassed by her wealthy and politically powerful ex when all she wants to do is mind her business and move on with her life, and every single adaptation that isn't a line-by-line recreation of the short story turns her into a self-serving Femme Fatale con artist criminal, like fuck the only crime she committed was being poorer than her boyfriend.
She doesn't want to fuck sherlock and sherlock doesn't want to fuck her either.
Nonono. See. The fucked part is that she wasn't. Or at least, there's no evidence that she ever was. The king was just afraid that she might, which was why he sent people after her. The whole twist of Scandal was that my dude was fully convinced she was a jilted woman who wanted to get back at him for leaving her by revealing their relationship, only for Sherlock to discover that she had fully moved on to the point of marrying and running off with someone else. She only kept the photo to protect herself in the event that her ex kept coming after her.
Irene was completely innocent and only protecting herself from a powerful man.
I need to confess something—my last post presented a deceptively idyllic vision of my hike in the snow. I only posted photos from the tranquil walk home at dusk and neglected to mention that I (once again) got lost in a featureless expanse of snow and briefly became convinced I would never find the road again and would have to dig a little den like an Arctic fox to spend the night.
You see, there's this place where Pandolf really loves to go for a walk on snowy days—it's on top of this plateau here:
^ see the fence in the middle, that curves to the left? Nothing bad can happen as long as you follow it. There are lots of landmarks in this direction, like trees, more fences, and a couple of houses.
In the other direction, however, lies The Nothing.
Here's a photo of Pandolf (eagerly) standing near the edge of The Nothing:
Characteristics of The Nothing: it is vast, and white, and becomes more and more featureless the farther you go into it—
—and Pandolf really, really loves it.
Even when he falls into a surprise hole where the snow is suddenly three times as deep (another characteristic of The Nothing), he'll just push himself out in one great powerful jump and keep frolicking.
Or he'll remain in the spot where the snow is deeper and try his best to bury his entire self into it.
He sometimes gets crazy eyes in The Nothing.
We always start this walk with such good resolutions.
We're definitely staying close to the fence this time! With all the lovely landmarks on the left!
And then, inevitably,
Further notes from my studies: • The Nothing has some small plants and rocks, but using them as landmarks is foolish, as they will eventually disappear. • No matter how many foot-, paw-, and dog-headprints you leave and how deep they are, they will disappear before you are able to retrace your steps, probably because The Nothing is always so windy.
Pandolf thinks this is a great characteristic of The Nothing, as it means he never runs out of immaculate snow to dive into.
The wind and the resulting snow mist are the really treacherous things about this place. These photos were taken in roughly the same spot, a couple of hours apart. In the first one, the fence on the left is clearly visible; in the second one, it has started to melt into The Nothing.
There's always a moment when I end up standing in the middle of, well, nothing, with indistinguishable whiteness in every direction, under my feet, above my head, left, right, and I start thinking about writing poignant farewell messages in my Notes app for my family to find at some point in the future.
One last interesting thing about The Nothing is the way Pandolf reacts when I finally find my bearings again and start walking faster, determined to get back to the safety of the road before it gets dark.
Pandolf then just
It's very different than the playful, energetic way in which he normally buries his head in the snow. This second type of burying is clearly a form of protest—if I continue walking away Pan will reluctantly follow me for 20 or so metres, then flatten himself to the ground again, in the same despondent way.
Hypothesis #1: He is trying to play dead like a possum, hoping I will go "well, I can't lug a dead dog all the way home, I'd better leave him here." And then he'll stay with The Nothing forever.
Hypothesis #2: He is trying to lay as flat as possible so as to become all but invisible against the snow. It's unclear if he knows he is the wrong colour for this.
Hypothesis #3: He is trying to commune with The Nothing, burying words of devotion and friendship deep into the snow and promising to return soon.
Conclusion: I'm sorry, I know that's a very long post, but seeing as each of these photos depicts perfect felicity on Earth, I find it hard to delete any. I also like how I intended this post to be about my long disoriented trek through the snow, wondering if I was going to find the fence or the road again before dark—and then I got distracted by how happy Pandolf was. Which is exactly how I end up getting lost in The Nothing every single time!!
