A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Fairy divorce court causes everything in the vicinity to go to hell, briefly.
A Comedy of Errors: Don’t give your twins the same name. Seriously don’t.
As You Like It: No one actually likes anything that is occurring. Especially not Jaques.
Twelfth Night: Local pageboy causes everyone to catch Gay Feelings. Also multiple shipwrecks.
Much Ado About Nothing: Random bastard decides to cause problems for literally no reason other than because he is a dick.
Two Gentlemen of Verona: One gentleman is not actually a gentleman, he’s a grade-A turdwaffle.
Love’s Labors Lost: Four friends’ attempts to swear off love go about as well as you would expect
The Merry Wives of Winsor: SO I HEAR U LIKE FALSTAFF??
The Taming of the Shrew: Sometimes the best cure for a mean wife is just straight-up sexism. (Actually no wtf why)
All’s Well That Ends Well: Nothing is well and it ends kinda shittily, too.
The Merchant of Venice: Apparently the entire population of Venice is either dumb, shitty, or Portia. Or Jessica.
Measure for Measure: Undercover Boss: Vienna Edition
Richard II: Local king forced to actually face consequences for his actions. Doesn’t like it much.
Henry IV part 1: TURN DOWN FOR WHAT interluded by existential kingly guilt. Also Hotspur
Henry IV part 2: The boring part because no Hotspur and no TURN DOWN FOR WHAT. Just guilt and guys with stupid names.
Henry V: Fun manly bonding as France gets fucked over
Henry VI part 1: Let’s Screw France Part 2 feat. Joan of Arc
Henry VI part 2: A bunch of murders and Everything Has Gone to Shit Now nice job breaking it, Henry.
Henry VI, part 3: YORK YORK YORK YORK also a bunch of murders, part 2.
Richard III: Once there was a Duke of Gloucester. He was so ugly that everyone died. The End
Henry VIII: You’d think think the betrayal of a queen and befuckening of the church would be really non-boring but you would be wrong
King John: No one knows what’s happening. Not me, not you, certainly not Johnny. I guess an entire king dies or something idk
Romeo and Juliet: Local teenage fling ends in six deaths and a banishment. Authorities are baffled
Macbeth: If you don’t sleep you become a murderer I don’t make the rules also if witches are nearby… you’re fucked.
Hamlet: Danish prince should have just called Ghostbusters
Othello: And you thought your racist coworker was a pain in the ass
King Lear: Local shitty dad amazed that all his kids turned out shitty. How could this happen.
Julius Caesar: Fun male bonding exercise devolves into civil war and multiple accounts of suicide
Antony and Cleopatra: Two-year fling devolves into civil war and multiple accounts of suicide
Coriolanus: Local war devolves into civil war and – just kidding it’s actually about Coriolanus ruining everything by being unable to shut his piehole for two seconds
Timon of Athens: Don’t Have Friends: A Cautionary Tale
Titus Andronicus: Blood, death, murder, death, human sacrifice, rape, death, dismemberment, cannibalism, death, and a partridge in a pear tree
Troilus and Cressida: Title characters are actually the most boring part of the play
Pericles: It’s like a fairy tale except less magic and more nonsense. And brothels I guess idk
Cymbeline: Twenty three different plot lines and none of them go anywhere
The Winter’s Tale: Local asshole king fucks with nature so NATURE FUCKS RIGHT BACK
The Tempest: The heartwarming tale of a wizard, his weird magical bird slave, his daughter, a drunk fish guy, some murderers, and a whole lot of wood gathering
Ra’s: You
dare stand there and scold me for only offering Timothy Drake his heart’s
desire…filling the black hole in his heart with life, with the love parents
taken away too soon–ripped from this mortal coil in a violent fury.
Nightwing: Cut
the crap, Ra’s! You were serving your own evil needs–it wasn’t some
pure offer that would suddenly turn Tim’s world into Disneyland. It was a deal
with a devil–nothing more! And Tim made the right choice!
–Ra’s al
Ghul and Dick Grayson on Tim Drake (Nightwing #152 – Eminence Front)
Dacre Montgomery, every morning: this is more of a tits out look.
Working on the sequel to my Inception fic from eight goddamn years ago.
And in my search for inspiration, I discovered that most of the Robert/Ariadne fic I had bookmarked was either deleted or locked. I know it’s been eight years, but WHY???? Really, I want to know why this pairing wasn’t more popular, because I deserve fic to read damn it
Hi honey. First off, thank you for the prompt. Secondly, and more importantly, I’m sorry for the delay. This took way longer than I expected because it IS way longer than I expected. But I didn’t forget about you and I hope you enjoy it (but DO let me know if we’re unhappy).
It’s dark, for obvious, consent-related reasons, and for Billy being more than a little fucked up in his precious head.
AND TO OTHER PEOPLE WHO HAVE SENT ME STUFF: Thank you and I am still filling other prompts so if you’ve sent me something, you will get it. Eventually……x
Content warning for dub-con/non-con.
There was a light switch to his left, placed in plain sight for anyone entering the basement, but he chose not to flip it. He didn’t want to advertise his presence. Even shutting the door behind him, blocking out the party’s rowdy buzz, was done with delicacy so that the latch’s “click” wouldn’t draw attention.
Rather than relying on the single, bare light bulb, he let the street lights guide his descent. Their glow broke into the basement through half a dozen high-angled windows and it was more than enough to show him the way. He had the street lights to aid his journey, and he had the low breathing to pinpoint his destination.
At the bottom of the stairs, Billy tipped his head around a support beam and looked into the far corner, to the outskirts of the light’s reach. There was a raggedy couch and there was a body. Even in the half-light, he could just make out the twisted position, face down, right hand dangling over a toppled beer can. The legs were angled into the air by the armrest, as if this somebody had tripped over it, landed on the cushions, and passed out right as they were. Without the sound of strained, heavy breaths programming it to rise and fall, Billy could’ve pegged it for a corpse.
He moved towards the couch and propped himself against a stack of boxes marked “Christmas”. For a while, he just nursed his beer and watched. Though mostly smothered against polyester seat cushions, half the face was turned out towards the open. He took a sip from his can and focused in on the mouth. An almost inordinate amount of alcohol had past those lips since nine p.m. Billy had seen them at work all night, opening up for shots and kegs stands and any bottle that had been placed in front of them. Not ten minutes earlier, he’d seen them wrapped around the mouth of a whiskey bottle, sucking down far more than he’d expected of them.
He liked those lips. There was something biteable about them. And lickable. And punchable.
Ruining that face had been beyond gratifying. He didn’t remember all of it, whatever Max had stuck him with had robbed him of that pleasure, but he remembered enough. A few fragmented images to make him smile when he needed it. Mostly he remembered how it had felt. Being in control. Having this perfect something spread out in front of him and being able to use it how he wanted. That night at Byers’, he’d wanted to ruin it. So he had. He’d broken it, tore it, spoiled it.
And Steve had laid there and let him.
Seeing the aftermath show up to school each day had given him a hint of that same satisfaction. He would watch the colours worsen and the swelling grow and feel beautiful little aftershocks surging through his body knowing that he did that. But, over time, he’d started to worry. The longer it’d taken for his handiwork to heal, the more he’d wondered if maybe he wouldn’t get to see that perfection again. That maybe Steve wouldn’t heal quite right.
Billy dropped his empty into the boxed tinsel and stepped nearer the couch, hovering for a second before slowly dropping to a squat. As he pulled out his cigarettes, his eyes were drawn to a inch of bare skin at the base of Steve’s spine, just visible below a twisted sweater hem. He didn’t often get the chance to be this close. When he did, touching was always out of the question. After a moment’s consideration, he reached down and glided his fingers over the soft hair and pale skin. There was a shudder under the touch that reverberated through his arm.
He wondered how much Steve could feel when he was laid up like this. What reactions he could trigger without him even knowing.
He raised his hand and brushed a finger across Steve’s bottom lip, blood warming when the pressure edged his mouth open a little wider. Billy smiled for half a second before slowly dipping down and skating the tip of his tongue along the same soft patch of pink. He pulled back and watched Steve unconsciously suck his lip into his mouth for a moment. Billy could’ve sworn that the next exhale was closer to a moan.
In the end, Steve had healed just fine. It had taken a while but, eventually, there wasn’t a trace of Billy’s destruction left on him. It had been a relief when he’d realised that there’d be no lasting damage. That the little perfect something was back as it was supposed to be. It meant that when he wanted to ruin it again, it’d be just as satisfying as before.
Billy lit his cigarette and sighed a cloud of smoke.
He didn’t want to ruin this, though. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with this. But there it was, perfection, patiently waiting for him to make up his mind. Waiting to let him do whatever he wanted with it.
“Harrington?” He whispered.
The call set a twitch in Steve’s brow but did little more to rouse him.
Billy leaned a little closer and slowly let out a breath of smoke on Steve’s next inhale. He watched it disappear past his lips and smiled when he heard a choke. Heavy lids cracked open, exposing bloodshot confusion to the dim light.
“Morning, sunshine.” He kept his voice low. “You feeling okay?”
*straps on several dozen weapons and prepares to let slip the dogs of war on the DC offices*
Wait, no, no, that wouldn’t be –
Well, no, it *would* be satisfying and productive, but it *wouldn’t* be… um.
Um.
*thinks hard*
It wouldn’t be… right? Is that the word I’m looking for?
It might be.
See, ‘cause, you pick a character – nearly *any* character, really, including a *lot* of the cishet White males! – and you’ve got yourself a character who got a raw fucking deal.
If not within the past *five* years, then *easily* within the past ten.
DC? As you may have noticed, what with the various fancreatures wailing, gnashing their teeth, beating their breasts, and howling foul imprecations into the night, is *really good* at fucking their properties over in the name of making them “cooler”.
Or making *other* characters “cooler”.
Or making the universe as the whole “simpler” or “more accessible to new fans”.
Or some other fucking *bullshit* – because it really, really, REALLY is ALL bullshit.
But I’m gonna pick one. Just one – and she’s the one who’s most complicated for me:
Talia al Ghul.
She was introduced in 1971 as the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, one of Bruce’s most interesting – to me, anyway – and implacable enemies.
Ra’s, for those of you not in the know, is (in some comics canon, anyway), a functionally immortal man of variously Arab descent who maintains his immortality through a blend of magic and science. He believes in eugenics and positively *ruthless* environmentalism and, in all ways, building a better world and a better class of people to populate that world.
This means that he often has goals which *can* seem reasonable at first squinty glance, but, of course, his means are usually horrifying.
He *must* be stopped.
The kinks in things are the following:
1) He’s a *big* fan of Batman.
2) He knows *exactly* who Batman – and Bruce – are.
3) He thinks – believes *way* down deep – that Batman and/or Bruce (the canon is wibbly on this) would be the best possible son-in-law for him to have, because –
4) Talia, his daughter – his only daughter in the canon I’m working with for the sake of this essay, though the canon where she has a half-sister Nyssa is fucking fascinating – is not an adequate heir in and of herself.
Because she’s female.
So Ra’s never *quite* tries to kill Bruce, even when Bruce does his damnedest – which is, of course The Best – to foil Ra’s plots and schemes.
Ra’s tests Bruce, and allows Bruce all sorts of leeway, and literally *spars* with Bruce, and my *goodness* is there all sorts of shirtless swordplay.
And, of course, the intellectual sparring is all up in the joint.
It’s great. This little black duck *loved* that the Brainy, Grey, Silver Fox, Badass-Across-The-Board Supervillain was a PoC.
AND THEN THERE WAS TALIA.
1) Beautiful, natch. And stylish. And she doesn’t give a damn about *any* of that if she has to use her other abilities. Like the fact that she’s:
2) Brilliant AND hardcore in her own right – she will kick the shit out of you *while* insulting you in 8 different languages. And those are just the languages she was guessing you might have some familiarity with. The other languages she didn’t deem worth wasting her time with on *you*.
3) Oh, yeah, and she damned well took over fucking *LexCorp* for a while and made it even more of a powerhouse corporation. Because she can DO that, *too*.
4) Mixed-race – she’s half-Chinese, though I’ll be damned if I can remember if any canon ever specified a particular Chinese ethnic group.
5) Daddy issues out the wazoo. And the… um. Wazoo. Did I mention that I have a few kinks? She’s fully aware of her father’s gender prejudices *and* his crazy, but she loves him more than anyone else on the planet, and if you try to come between them, she will *end* you.
Without a second *thought*.
6) Excellent taste in men *other* than her father. The *other* man she loves is Bruce – not the Batman. Oh, sure, one of the reasons *why* she loves Bruce is that he’s such a fucking *badass*, but she also loves him for how kind he is, and how gentle, and how moral, and how *beautiful* he is *inside*.
And this *confuses* her, and *hurts* her, and causes her so much delicious fucking *conflict* UNGH.
And makes her do things like turn against, you know, her *other* love –
7) But NEVER too much, because she’ll *NEVER* be a motherfucking quisling –
And we’ll never – quite – know the answer to the question of where she’ll jump if it *really* comes down to it.
Ra’s or Bruce.
Who will she choose?
*
She’s grey right down to the bone.
She’s not an idealist to the point of tinhat madness like Ra’s and she’s not driven by her need to serve/be correct/make the *world* correct like Bruce. She doesn’t give a single, solitary fuck about the *overwhelming* majority of people in the multiverse – no matter *what* their species, and she doesn’t give a single, solitary fuck about what that makes you think of her. She does what *she* does (when it’s not about LexCorp or her other projects) when she chooses to do it for desire, for happiness, for whim, and, sometimes, for *love*, and she’s *fully* aware of that fact.
*All* of those facts.
Oh, Jesus, you know, when *I* was introduced to Talia back in the ‘90s? When B:TAS was first airing?
I wasn’t even out to *myself* yet, but she damned well gave me FUNNY FEELINGS.
Hell *yeah*, I wanted to *be* her, but there were a lot of other things I wanted, too.
And, no, it wasn’t perfect. It never was.
She was absolutely designed – from the beginning – as The Exotic Dark Princess Who Cannot Resist The Overwhelming Awesome Of The White Knight Despite The Fact That The White Knight Will Never Choose Her. And that has never been *anything* but sketch, okay? No argument. None.
But *points up*.
DC – toonverse *and* comicsverse – did a whole *lot* of good by her along the way, and along the way they created awesome.
But then… Damian. Talia’s son by Bruce.
Oh, fuck.
Let’s break it down, shall we?
1) First of all, we find out that Bruce’s sperm was obtained through rape – drugged rape, at that.
Drugged rape which is then laughed off, because, by all means, let’s fill that bingo card of vomit, DC.
2) Next we discover that Talia keeps Damian a *secret* from Bruce. For… well, it’s difficult to say how long, because, while Damian is supposed to be ten years old when he *does* finally get to meet the rest of his family, that timeline makes no fucking sense at all.
What *does* make sense is the fact that Talia, as the former head of LexCorp, has access to both cloning technology and technology which allows for accelerated/artificial aging.
So… we have no idea how long Damian was kept secret from his father – and adoptive brothers, and adoptive sister, and extended unofficial family – but it was long enough to:
3) Be trained brutally, thoroughly, viciously, and *continuously* by the motherfucking League of Assassins.
Not a dedicated sensei.
Not *several* dedicated senseis.
The League of Assassins.
Canonically, by the time Damian is *ten years old*, he is a murderer several times over. And that is the least of what he’s done – and *what has been done to him*.
So.
Leaving aside the *end* of the Damian arc – as it currently stands – because it’s too sickening for words *and* too nonsensical?
Talia – the woman who loves Bruce to the point where she is willing to betray the *other* man she loves – has drugged Bruce at least once, raped Bruce at least once while he was drugged, took the child that was conceived of that rape and kept him a secret for some extensive length of time, abused that child brutally and forced him to become a murderer several times *over*…
Um.
I really – *really* – hope you’re seeing the problem here.
Pre-Damian? We have a fascinating honest-to-Christmas badass female antihero, built on terrible cliches and transcending every last one of them.
Post-Damian? We have a shitstain who needs to be put *under* a jail for the good of the *world*.
But Te, why don’t you just ditch the canon you hate and write her the way *you* like her? It’s not like you don’t do that with Jason Todd all the time!
Well, it’s complicated.
And the complication is… Robin.
See, it all would’ve been simple if I’d been able to keep my hate-on for Damian – and I thought *that* would be simple. The vast majority of his canon presents him not as a horribly abused little boy struggling to make his way in a world which makes no sense to him and lashing out as the people around him fail to *make* that world make sense, but rather as an ultraviolent little misogynistic *bigot* of a *jackass* *psycho* who is *also* a *Marty Stu*.
Easy-peasy, right?
Nope.
People like fancywizard stepped in and helped me see the first reading, and then I was done. I had a brown Robin to play with, and I was damned well *going* to play with him – and damn the torpedoes.
Including the Talia torpedo.
The shitstain version of Talia is *responsible* for *building* my darling little ragebunneh Damian, after all, and I’ve not yet separated her from the Talia I fell in love with as a teenager.
So, that’s what I’m working on now. There are options.
I can make Ra’s more of an asshole, or play with the Nyssa angle (I hate demonizing villains more than they *should* be demonized, though – it always feels like I’m removing *dimensions* – which is *exactly* what DC did to *Talia*), I could maybe find a way to make Damian’s background less dependent on *outside* abuse…
them: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS HUMANS MUST BE INDIVIDUALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT AND COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT
biologist:
Like literally the only reason we didn’t go extinct is because we are aggressively social creatures who community organized and helped each other when faced with disasters that drove other species over the brink.
(Like we’re so aggressively social that we looked at APEX PREDATORS and went ‘they look soft! Friend????’)
(The answer was yes because wolves are also aggressively social and they adopted the strange tall not-wolves just as eagerly.)
humans @ wolves: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll let us pet them?
wolves @ humans: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll pet us?
Humans: Collecting grain in any one area causes pests to follow soon after, and we’re not good enough at hunting them to save our grain. There’s no way this agriculture is sustainable!
Cats: We can take care of that.
Humans: At what price?
Cats: …pet us.
‘fittest’ just means ‘best at filling the particular niche that is helping people survive right now in your particular area’ and it is SUPER WEIRD to me that somehow this gets interpreted as ‘being a selfish jackass’ when cooperation is generally about 1000% more effective in any situation that doesn’t involve tight spaces
You think you’ve suffered, but no shipper has EVER suffered the way the Bold and the Beautiful fans have suffered at the hands of the Hope/Liam/Steffy love triangle.
LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE OMG THANK YOU
You are 100 percent correct here. Voltron fans think they got baited with Adam? HIMYM fandom feel betrayed after the worst finale in TV history? Still in disbelief that Ricky put up with Amy and her BS from Secret Life of the American Teenager? Let me tell you about every time you think Liam will ever, EVER make a decision on his own…just to have Steffy decide for him. Or Brooke set up a wedding fir him and Hope before Steffy can tell him she’s pregnant. Or his constant whining about being “robbed” instead of reflecting why the women in his life barely wait five minutes before assuming the worst in him and choosing Wyatt.
You think Steffy is actually going to walk away and let Liam and Hope self-destruct the way they did when she fucked off to Paris actually focus on her new baby and being Co-CEO, a position she’s covered since fucking forever. But, no, she has to defer to the same tricks of manipulating men to stick it to Hope. Except instead of a horny-on-main Bill, she uses Ridge. What an insult to her namesake. Original Stephanie was no saint, but she took her lumps and could take everything she dished out without blinking.
You’d also think that after all the years she spent being tormented by Steffy that Hope would by a clue and never believe anyone named Stephanie Forrester comes from anything resembling good faith, but again…0 for 3 again. And this is even more bizarre than the other shit because not even the original doe-eyed, “softer” Hope played by Kim Matula was able to pull that level of naiveness after her first season. Hell, even original Bridget knew not to leave Amber and Deacon in the same room along. But now that she’s close to 30 now? Girl, bye. Why the fuck is your mother fighting Steffy’s crap harder than you.
I honestly should stop slaming disgruntled Klance fans for sticking around for one more season of disappointment when the only thing that broke my addiction to this show was being stationed overseas. And even know I still follow the message boards cuz I can’t fully quit the only show of my youth that’s still on the air, lol
I wish the women in Liam’s life WOULD choose Wyatt. Nothing baffles me more than watching woman after woman choose Liam over Wyatt. Like, why? In what world is Liam more appealing? The writers are cowards. Darin Brooks has chemistry with everyone, and they’ve squandered so many potential storylines.
Starvinbohemian 