The Funniest Thing About Romancing Mr Bridgerton Is That Colin Is Right! He Never Does Court Penelope

This hyperfixation has me by the throat I need more emo boys from pokemon

Just some doodles but I am biting the screen chewing on cartridges I need more pokemans

Max: *Extremely tired, just wants a peaceful night.* Boys, please don't set off Paul tonight.

Marko: You mean like this? *jumps into a sumo wrestler stance.*

Max: Marko no!

Paul: *Gets excited.* What are we doing? We playing?

Max: *Pinches the bridge of his nose as the boys descend into chaos around him. Even Thorn is barking and rough housing with them.* I should have never had kids.

David: *Slings his arm around Max shoulder.* Too late now. Dad.

Mourning Tiktok in a “brain rot” way, but also in a “the continual loss of information, creations, and a visual record of human activity via direct government interference breaks me as historian” way.

Absolutely hilarious to me that the ton is gonna be speculating on why and how Penelope and Colin ended up engaged and there’s definitely gonna be some entrapment/pity rumours going around but the actual truth of it is that Colin chased a carriage down, fell to his knees and went “please please please please please please please”

I LOVE the version of Lucius in your fic Prison of the Phoenix. He's different from a lot of portrayals I've seen. Why did you decide to write him how you did?

A lot of the fun of writing a book-accurate fix-it fic comes from taking the events of the book, and removing JKRs (simplistic, misleading, sometimes just weird) narrative framing. Slytherins = baddies, Gryffindors = goodies, you know. 

This is especially fun with Lucius Malfoy, who just like… isn’t very evil? Chamber of Secrets is his most villainous book, and I’ll get to that, but otherwise? He tries (unsuccessfully) to get the animal that attacked his kid killed. He donates to hospitals (but in like, an evil way.) He is a hilariously incompetent Death Eater, and then he's Voldemort’s punching bag. 

That’s kind of the point of Lucius. He looks the part. He commits to the aesthetics of the thing, with the hair and the peacocks and the snake-wand-cane. He likes the mystique of walking into a room and knowing that you know (but can’t prove) he’s a dark wizard. It allows him to be… kinda lazy. He can coast on his family name, money, reputation, privilege. I really think that if you sat Lucius Malfoy down and asked him to walk you through all the wizard-supremacy talking points he wouldn’t be able to do it. He’ll toss around words like “mudblood” and “mudblood-lover” no problem, but in the end he doesn’t really care. Lucius is not a true believer. The way the world is set up benefits him tremendously and he doesn’t want Voldemort back. That’s just text:

“Use your brains, Ron,” said Bill. “If they really were Death Eaters… I bet they’d be even more frightened than the rest of us to see him come back. They denied they’d ever been involved with him when he lost his powers, and went back to their daily lives… I don’t reckon he’d be over-pleased with them, do you?”

Lucius and friends had too much to drink at a sporting event, put on the old outfits (again with the aesthetics) and started levitating muggles. Which obviously isn’t GOOD, but they’re not killing or torturing, or furthering any kind of agenda. It’s important that Barty is so insulted and pissed off by the way they’re basically playing Dark Wizard that he casts the Dark Mark to “show [them] what loyalty to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it.” Which kicks off most of the events of the book. 

Prison of the Phoenix is going to have a companion, parallel fic told from Harry’s POV (tentatively titled Harry Potter and Malfoy’s Suspicious Interest in Werewolves.) Lucius does show up in that one, and I was honestly surprised by how much more frightening and intimidating he is when filtered through Harry’s perspective. Because with a Severus POV… when Severus is used to spending time around Voldemort, Greyback, Bellatrix, honestly Dumbledore and Sirius Black…. Lucius is not scary. Lucius wants to buy presents for his son, go to high-profile events with his beautiful wife, and wear a variety of snake-themed accessories and extravagant hats. 

I wanted a kind of college-roommates-who-stayed-friends feel for the Severus + Lucius relationship, because they are friends. Sirius calls Severus Lucius’ “lapdog,” and Narcissa calls him Lucius’ “oldest friend.” Lucius is also part of the welcoming committee when Severus is first sorted into Slytherin. He’s five years older (I think Jason Isaacs is the only Harry Potter adult the same age as the character he plays), which would have affected the dynamic between him and Severus a lot in school. Personally, I think it makes sense for Lucius to be a little protective of this brilliant half-blood kid with no money. And as an adult, there’s some guilt mixed in there as well. Severus probably would not have been sucked into the Voldemort thing nearly as deep or nearly as fast if it hadn’t been for Lucius, and the war kind of destroyed him. Lucius remembers a younger Severus who was modding potions, inventing spells, coming up with cheeky nicknames for himself, and that person is gone. That’s a big part of the reason he’s so invested in the Severus/Remus relationship in Prison of the Phoenix. Something about Remus has managed to wake up parts of that younger Severus, and Lucius thinks that’s fantastic.

I also think Lucius might be the character who knows Voldemort the best. He’s one of the only Death Eaters who Voldemort calls by their first name (Bellatrix, Severus, and Draco are the others) and he’s weirdly familiar with his “slippery friend” Lucius, addressing the whole speech about how/why he returned to him, for some reason? Anything that helps Voldemort make sense as a person I’ll take, and to me it makes sense that young Tom Riddle charmed Abraxas Malfoy, Lucius’ father, first. The dates are right, and he’s exactly Tom’s type - rich, pureblood, probably easily flattered (let’s be honest) and sitting on a pile of magical artifacts. It’s very Hepzibah Smith vibes, is what I’m saying. And rich, posh, popular seventeen year olds don’t join cults. But if Lucius’ father was already in a cult… 

It also makes sense to me that Tom Riddle got sort of stuck when he killed Marvolo Gaunt, and made his first horcrux at sixteen. He has this fascination with sixteen year old pureblood wizards (so Barty, Draco, and Lucius would have fit this profile.) He sort of wants to be them, but also sort of wants to break them? It’s messy, and complicated. It’s creepy and compelling, that Lucius is aging but this spectre that’s dominated his life isn’t. 

And so when Lucius gives Ginny the diary in Book 2… it makes sense that he’s just trying to get rid of it. He was just at Borgin and Burkes selling dark artifacts, but knows that the diary is worse. He needs to make sure it can’t possibly be traced back to him. So he gives it to the daughter of the head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office. (It is an enchanted muggle artifact, after all.) If Arthur Weasley finds it and deals with it, fine. If Ginny is discovered with it in a way that blows up in Arthur’s face, also fine. If it does get to Hogwarts and does open the Chamber of Secrets - well Draco is going to be fine, and it might undermine Dumbledore. If it was really important to Lucius that the diary rid the school of muggleborns… he would have given it to Draco and had him use it. Or given it to Draco, and told him to leave it somewhere for an enemy to find. But Lucius doesn’t do that, because he doesn’t want Voldemort back and his politics just aren’t that important to him. 

The one trait I did give Lucius is being an unrepentant wife guy. (And I mean… it doesn’t contradict anything. There isn’t anything in the books to suggest that he isn’t a wife guy.)  EDIT: I cannot believe I forgot the little "it's going to be okay" wrist squeeze Narcissa gives him right before he passes Voldemort his wand. This meta does a fantastic job getting into who Narcissa is, and I am officially justified in writing them just as googly-eyes about each other as I want. Also going full Gomez and Mortica makes them a better foil for the Weasleys, and the (not typically on the same page) Arthur and Molly.

idk just reading every moment wyatt was mentioned and how he was slowly just uncovered to be just a smart boy from a rotten family :( its so very i bet on losing dogs and i want to cry

As an alternative to 'sugar, spice, and everything nice'

I present: 'salt, vinegar, and everything sinister'

Yap sesh because I believe The Lost Boys NEEDED to die

I totally understand where some of y'all are coming from when you say that The Lost Boys shouldn't have died or they should have gotten a better ending, but that's kind of the whole point.

Their deaths were pointless. It didn't do anything, it didn't help anyone, it was meaningless, and that's why it happened.

I've talked a lot about The Lost Boys (1987) and how it relates to queerness, but as a refresher: it was directed by a gay man and came out during the height of the AIDS epidemic when queer people were left to die because they defied societal norms.

AIDS was medically recognized in 1981, but because it was primarily affecting queer people (sometimes referred to as "the gay plague"), it was left completely unacknowledged by the Reagan Administration until it took the life of Reagan's friend, the famous American actor Rock Hudson, in 1985. It still wasn't until 1987 that the epidemic was addressed because, as Reagan stated, "maybe the Lord brought down this plague."

(I fully believe that The Lost Boys (1987) is a criticism of the Reagan Administration, both their response to the AIDS epidemic and the ideal of the perfect nuclear family, and I WILL write an essay if prompted, but that is completely beside the point.)

Leaving queer people to die didn't get rid of AIDS or solve any of the world's problems because we were never the source of the problems. It was pointless, and that's part of why The Lost Boys also had to die. Because it solved nothing. Because we died, and we put ourselves in our art to highlight the injustice of it.

While I'm very pleased that we want justice for imperfect victims (because let's face it, The Lost Boys were NOT good people), I think that we should still recognize that the same message wouldn't have been conveyed narratively had they lived: we died and it was pointless, so take out the old man in charge to start fixing shit.

x

Oh…I didn’t forget about the team star leaders in this game! ;) The fashions on these kids…

Pokemon Scarlet & Violet kids tarot part star! (part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | epilogue | world)

I’m running out of arcana here (that’s 16 of 22 major ones!!) I wonder what I can do with the last 6… ^_^