Thist This All Of This!!!!! Sometimes I Ship Things With Large Age Gaps, Where One Of The Characters

Criminal Minds: A Tribute

After having finally watched the season 15 finale last night, I cannot believe that this amazing show is finally over. I haven’t watched this show since it began airing like some people, nor have I ever watched it episode by episode as it slowly came out on CBS, and some would say that that makes me ‘not a real fan’ but I digress. I have been watching this show for over two and a half years now and it has been some of the best moments of my life.

It all started with two episodes I watched on a whim when they were on cable in a little hotel room in white salmon, Washington. I had already gotten a taste of police procedurals at that point through NCIS (which I have still not finished) and had previously seen criminal minds on my recommended list on Netflix so i thought ‘why not?’ and turned it on. This was still one of the best decisions of my life to date. That might seem super dramatic but the two episodes i watched (10x16 ‘Lockdown’ and 10x17 ‘Breath Play’) were amazing to me. They were just the right amount of creepy and haunting with that dash of genius and psychology and action....it was just perfection in every way. 

So I decided to go back to the beginning and start the whole show from the top.

At first I was confused, the cast was different in season 10, and in season 1 there were all these people i didn't know, but I soon caught up and watched the first few seasons with my mom.It was slow going, I admit, I got home form school and had to quickly watch anywhere from 1 to 3 episodes before my stepdad came home as he didn't like the show but I soon watched all 12 seasons available on Netflix. It was the most bizarre moment when i finished them and sat there for a while with no way to access the rest of the show. Months passed, it seemed to me that the heretofore 2 years of watching the show was over, that I would never finish it. But after 8 months of moving around and waiting, I finally got my hands on the remaining 3 seasons. I binge watched 13 and half of 14 before I procrastinated another 2 months, because I was not ready for it to end.

When I think of Criminal Minds, the first episode that comes to mind is an unusual one. Season 1 episode 14 ‘Ride The Lightning’, I barely remember anything from the earlier season but Ride the Lightning sticks out to me as one of the most heartbreaking episodes on the show. The Woman asking to stay on death row and the car driving away at the end hurts my soul. It has been so long but that episode will forever be seared in my brain.

The second episode that always sporadically comes back to me is the season 2 episode ‘North Mammon’. The idea of 3 girls having to choose whom to kill, is one that shoots shivers down my spine. It was an ugly and tragic episode that will always hurt to watch.

I have loved almost every member in the BAU at some point, some more than others, but my favorite is Dr Spencer Reid. This is probably a typical choice but I don’t care at all. His character arc from a shy and awkward sweater wearing genius to a badass and confident agent is one that is amazing, tragic and sweet all at the same time. In season 1 he cant even shoot a gun but in season 15 he get a 100 on his shooting examination. In the same way, he was often a scrawny ‘pipe cleaner with eyes’ early in the show but in season 14 he swiftly takes down a suspect who lightly shoves Tara. I love how he becomes confident and strong willed but most of this is due to torture, prison, drug addiction, and his girlfriend being shot in front of him which makes his character development horrifying but no less satisfying.

This team...they’re a family. They’ve been blown up, shot, tortured, killed, electrocuted, chased by dogs, hunted down, kidnapped, falsely accused, drugged, imprisoned, and psychologically tormented. They would hurt for each other, kill for each other, die for each other. They were each others mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. They were more than friends and family in every way that counted. And now it’s....over.

I’m am so blessed that I was able to go on this journey with this amazing cast of characters and they will forever be in my heart, I will never, ever forget the agents of the BAU and I will always list this show as one of the top ten best of all time.

Wheels Up,

Forever.

Yeah so maybe listening to Malevolent 43, the redone Troy/Cyclops Sagas, and topping it all with the Thunder Saga wasn't the *best* idea.

If I consume another piece of media about a mentally ill, hopeless man, so distraught that he betrays all his people and morals-

The Malev duo may be doing better than Ody and the crew but that is *not* saying a lot.

Even the horrible sadness aside, both pieces were so hard hitting for entirely different reasons and I listened to them so closely together. I think I've done myself in with this one boys.

my favorite part of Crowley’s confession scene is how an immortal being with no need to have a body or breathe somehow managed to work himself into a very respectable level of hyperventilating

Miscellaneous Clark Kent headcanons as relate to my little fic universe, that may or may not ever come up because who knows:

Little Clark was really susceptible to childhood superstitions for some reason. He didn’t go under ladders, he did the salt over the shoulder thing, he did not fuck with that Bloody Mary shit like NOPE I’M OUT THIS SLUMBER PARTY IS CANCELED, LANA GET OUT OF MY HOUSE AND TAKE YOUR MURDER GHOSTS WITH YOU. He believes that he is over this as an adult but whenever his foot is about to fall on a crack in the sidewalk it actually stops like a half inch above the ground and hovers there. He does not notice he is doing this. No one notices, ever, because it is the weirdest subtle unconscious thing in the world. At least Martha’s back is safe?

I covered the picky eater thing in Christmas in Kansas but to be more specific his tastebuds are just really sensitive to certain chemical compounds? Not just in terms of things he won’t eat but also in terms of things that he expects to be there and he doesn’t really like foods that lack those things. Your two options to make him eat anything are to cover it in sugar, or cover it in garlic.

He goes through a lot of breathmints. Can you imagine if Superman saved someone and they were like “man i appreciate being alive but he had some really bad garlic breath”? He would be so horrified.

He has a ratty, fucked-up old shirt that he wears whenever he is making pasta with red sauce. Even Superman cannot stand against the ability of red sauce to end up on whatever you happen to be wearing. HE WAS SO CAREFUL THIS TIME, HOW DID A STAIN END UP ON HIS BACK THAT JUST MAKES NO SENSE. Clark Kent’s weaknesses: kryptonite, tomato stains.

His ability to perfectly imitate anyone’s voice was one of the first things to manifest themselves, but this wasn’t the kind of thing anyone noticed was weird. It definitely didn’t seem like a power. He was just a small child who could do a really good Kermit the Frog. He sang Rainbow Connection at a middle school talent show and all the moms cried.

He definitely has a playlist to cheer himself up and get pumped and it has Eye of the Tiger and You’re the Best on it. Probably also half the Top Gun soundtrack.

Clark Kent’s twitter is pretty standard snarky newsman except with more farming memes. No one can tell how ironic the farming memes are. They might not be ironic at all. Clark Kent might be really sincere, or he might just be so ironic that he has circled back around into sincerity. No one knows. He’s also really good at that thing where you retweet two things from a person that side-by-side reveal they are a dingus. I don’t know if there’s a word for that.

His Snapchat is all dogspotting, with occasional rare dance breaks. He’s a pretty good dancer since he found those YouTube tutorials. He does this thing with his hips that Lois finds deeply upsetting for reasons she cannot articulate.

Jimmy asked Clark how he got so fit once and Clark was like “uh, farming. farm. eyup.” But he kept pressing for deets and Clark ended up just telling him that he’d pulled a Milo of Croton??? He lifted a newborn calf over his head and then just did that every single day until he was lifting a cow over his head. Jimmy knows nothing about farming or cows or physical fitness and this seemed plausible enough to him.

He has a blog where he posts rejected articles and it is the wonkiest thing in the entire world because that is why they got rejected. Perry takes one look at these articles and is like “it will take more words than I want to pay you for just to explain the setup for this article and also there are five people total who care, in the world, including you”

He has to be really careful when he buys clothes because he needs to make sure that they aren’t too tight and he has full range of motion. He does not want to relive The Skinny Jeans Incident. Shirts that say ‘I flexed and the sleeves fell off’ are only funny until it happens to you, then they are just horrible reminders. Popped seams everywhere. There is no way to explain that without looking like a huge tool.

Even when Superman has a really shitty day he keeps it together until he gets home, but then he shuts the balcony door and peels off his costume and Clark does the Tina Belcher groan for like ten minutes while he takes a shower because he got covered in sewer mutant or space crab or god knows and UUUUUUUUUUGH. Fortunately the nice older lady in the apartment next door always seems to know when he has had a shitty day and she brings him pie.

She can hear his melodramatic bullshit from over at her place, that’s how she knows. They share a bathroom wall and it practically echoes. If she times it right he will answer the door before he has put a shirt on because he doesn’t want to leave her waiting in the hall. She does not know what his day job is and it definitely does not occur to her that he is Superman because her primary interaction with him is that he acts like a whiny bitch and she brings him pie so she can ogle him. She is a simple woman who enjoys life’s simple pleasures.

The Kryptonian language is really complicated in terms of tonality, context, word order, musicality, etc, and the written language reflects that. Things like the order things are in, how things overlap, colors, etc, are all important. So basically I really like the idea of his symbol being one that represents his family name and says that he is of the House of El. It’s really just basically his last name.

If Starfleet gets to have replicators then Krypton gets to have replicators and Jor-El definitely stuck one in the ship so his son would have, you know, food and clothing. But only Kryptonians can use their tech because they’re who the neural interface is designed for so whoops they got real lucky that Kryptonian babies love milk from Earth goats. Clark only started using the replicator later but it only knows how to make Kryptonian things and only some of those are useful to him.

Okay so here is where I tie those last two bullet points into something fucking dumb that you will take out of my cold dead hands: Clark got the costume out of the replicator. It didn’t necessarily understand what he wanted though? Like, the concept of a costume didn’t really translate, but it got the idea that he wanted an active uniform, so that is what it made. It’s brightly colored and has his last name on the front. Clark is wearing a Kryptonian football jersey is what I’m getting at. Later Kara will be VERY confused by this. Imagine ending up on an alien planet and meeting your cousin and he’s been fighting crime dressed like a quarterback.

Most telepathy does not work because different neural patterns. Diana can only manage it if she uses her lariat and even then it’s like trying to lasso a freight train that does not stop. It’s extremely disorienting. J'onn has just accepted that Superman can hear him but he’s not going to get anything back. It’s like the psychic equivalent of a dial tone for him. He’s trying to call his bro but their family has dialup. He tries not to fuck with it because he doesn’t want to poke around in Superman’s head blind and break something.

Clark can’t type with super speed because he’ll break the keyboard and the computer can’t keep up. Instead he uses shorthand along with a custom set of AutoHotKey macros and it is honestly infuriating how fast he can get things written with this setup. But also if he doesn’t have AutoHotKey on whatever he’s typing with then sometimes Lois will get an email like: ll] dyk f pw mde a dec wrt t $l stry? ]ck

A woman was told by her therapist to try talking to at least one person once a week but she decided to cheat by just talking to her empty apartment under the guise of telling Superman about her day because lol he can hear everything allegedly so this definitely counts and is what the doctor was going for with this. When she has to go to the hospital for a medical emergency she comes home and there is a note on her counter wherein Superman explains that he was worried because he hadn’t heard from her in a while, so he swung by to check on her. When he found out what happened he watered her plants and fed her goldfish and also that cat that he thought might be hers (she does not have a cat). She is completely mortified because she was just being full of shit she did not actually believe he could hear her oh god what all did she even say and whose cat is this???

Look if you are in Metropolis and you loudly say HEY SUPERMAN there is a very good chance he will hear it even if he doesn’t mean to. He is not trying to eavesdrop, that’s just what happens when you yell someone’s name in earshot.

He doesn’t wear the costume under his clothes because you may have noticed a running theme here where the universe is conspiring to ruin his clothes and leave him running around shirtless all the time. I mean thank god for the rest of us but he would rather not risk someone spilling their drink all over him somehow and suddenly his shirt is transparent and you can see the big S. It’s bad enough when it happens under ordinary circumstances. How often can one man get drinks spilled all over him? You would be shocked. Shocked. His eyes are up here, Lois.

Hozier b like "hey girl what if the ceaseless battle between unconquerable suffering (as a consequence of existence), and the indomitable human spirit, was just. in ur earphones. What if the constant tug of war between the limitlessness of love and inevitability of heartache was literally injected into u via sound. Like. just playing in ur ears for an hour. Take my hand. Let's take a stroll through hell, baby :) wouldn't that be gre- why are you crying"

Do not fear the dark, fear what darkness brings

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

Arthur more or less claiming Parker's death in 35 is great both because it speaks to his immeasurable guilt complex and that at this point Arthur and John are so intertwined that they have just kind of resigned themselves to mutually taking credit for each other's murders.

The King of the Freaks | Pt 4

(Yes I am too lazy to keep writing that long title so it’s been changed from now on…)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Eddie was kinda pissed as he stabbed at the food on his tray. “You sure they said we can’t?” Gareth question, and he sounded just as Eddie felt.

“They said that we couldn’t do this week,” Eddie said again, and he glanced up as Steve moved to sit down next to Jeff. He was pulling something out of his backpack and it was the first time since that first time that Steve actually sat with them.

“What can’t you guys do?” Steve questioned as he pulled out a container of cookies and slid them over to Jeff.

Jeff lit up even as the others looked confused. “We can’t do Hellfire this week. Apparently, the drama club needs the drama room this week.” Jeff explains, and Steve pauses.

His face makes a hundred micro expressions before he shrugs, “You could do it at my house. I don’t really care.” Steve states and moves to stand back up hit Jeff pulls him back down. “Uh, what?”

He looks confused, and it’s unfair because it seems like the moment they should be confused. “Three questions. First I thought you had swimming? Second, why would you let us do it at your house? Most parents think we are a cult, and I doubt your parents would think differently. And lastly, what’s up with the cookies?”

Steve looks a little embarrassed as he’s forced to stay there. But he meets Eddie’s gaze. “First, I do have swimming, but I don’t care. Come over that night or another if you really care. Second, my parents are in either Beijing or Belgium right now, so they don’t get an opinion. And the cookies are for Jeff because he helped me last weekend. He can share, or he doesn’t have to, I don’t care.”

Eddie blinks, “you’d let us be at your house without you there?”

“Sure, why not. I doubt you’ll trash the entire place. And even if you do, there’s not much you could do I haven’t seen before. I’ve had enough parties to get good at cleaning up.” Steve states, and Eddie looks at the others, trying to see if they’re just as confused.

“That’s amazing, dude! How about we get pizza, since you’ll host?” Jeff offers, and Steve gives them a tight smile. Eddie’s not sure if it’s because of the topic of food or the idea that they’re going to take him up on the offer. 

Steve nods and it’s a little sharp, “Right. Yeah just let me know date and time.” He pauses and goes back to his bag. He pauses before he can pull whatever he’s grabbed before steeling himself. “Here, just in case I’m busy.” He drops a key onto the table and practically bolts from the table. 

Eddie waits for him to come back and take the key with a sike. But he doesn’t, instead Eddie sees him dodge Billy’s foot and escape out of the lunch room. “Here I thought we were adopting him.” Gareth mused and picked up the key. Jeff smacked him and took the key. “Hey!” Gareth complains. 

“Yeah, I’ve actually been to his house so…” Jeff points out.

That gets Eddie back up and moving, “yeah. About that, what the hell?”

Jeff laughs, “I helped him cook. He’s been struggling with meet lately and you know my sister.” Eddie nods because it does make sense but at the same time it makes zero sense. “I bumped into him at the store…” Jeff trails off, “I think we need to try harder.”

“Harder?” Eddie squeaked and his friends gave him a look that he really wished he didn’t know. 

Jeff doesn’t let that stop him though. “Well, I thought it was bad enough going from top dog to the new top dog’s chew toy but the guy is struggling. He only had condiments in his fridge even though he told me he was a good cook, which he is. Apparently he has no clue where his parents are at the moment. He had a guess but that was it. And! He has no clue when they’re coming back. I asked and he laughed it off saying maybe for Christmas. Christmas.”

“It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!” Grant states and Jeff nods. 

Gareth sighs, “I’ve been bothering him during my free period. Normally just working on shit next to him… but the dude is not okay. He squints when he reads like he can’t see it well. I’m pretty sure he’s been getting migraines since he fought with Billy. And I’m 80% sure he’s partially deaf in his left ear. Cause if I whisper on that side he never responds. But he will when I sit on his right.”

“He never eats lunch,” Eddie sighs. “He always tears his food apart to make it look like he’s eating. If his fridge is empty than he might not be eating that often.”

“Well shit,” Grant sighs. “But how do we help him without it being weird.”

Eddie presses his hands together under his chin to think. “Okay, so we stop with the subtle friendship and go for it. If we’re his best friends then maybe he’ll let us help him.”

“So operation make Steve Harrington friendship bracelets is ago.” Gareth grins and Jeff throws a grape at him. 

They already had access to the boy’s house. How hard could it be?

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