DHANUSH as LONE WOLF in THE GRAY MAN (2022)

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DHANUSH as LONE WOLF in THE GRAY MAN (2022)

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Time travel fix-it AU, but it’s Eva Stratt who goes back in time and she never actually fixes anything.
the movie is about the time she actually wins the timeloop. she had to send her shitty pet scientist to space and when she wakes up the day after launch she's like 'really. that guy. REALLY.'
ANA DE ARMAS as DANI MIRANDA
THE GRAY MAN (2022)
rocky switching between the dry sarcastic tone "i make chain. i make long chain." / you can do that? / *yes.* (like duh. in the book he says "obvious i can do that.")
AND
the slightly childlike "what's that?" tone when grace calls it fishing
AND
full on excited screaming when grace shows him what fishing is. "OOOHHHHH OHHHH!!!"
in the span of literally six seconds is what makes him the character of all time. he is a middle aged nerd mechanic pairbonded with a middle aged nerd scientist and they are scream besties and clock bros together
fuck i love this movie so much
trope grade: mutual pining
AAAAAAA+, I love it! The good shit! The insecurity, the yearning, the misunderstandings (or better yet, serious obstacles like divided loyalties), the racheting sexual tension and longing, and the catharsis when they finally figure their shit out. *chef kiss* Fuck yeah, so delicious, I'll eat it with a spoon. Also beautiful in poly ships, with extra crunchy complications - whether it's all of them pining or an established relationship wanting someone additional.

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Fandom Misogyny Victim Tournament
Round One, Bracket 2
Hen Wilson (9-1-1) vs. Audrey Horne (Twin Peaks)
Hen Wilson
Audrey Horne
Propaganda below the cut:
Fandom Misogyny Victim Tournament
Round One, Bracket 1
Martha Jones (Doctor Who) vs. Hornet (Hollow Knight / Silksong)
Martha Jones
Hornet
Propaganda below the cut:
Trope grading: time travel and coworkers
I answered time travel (plus time loops) here!
coworkers - A, I love it! Given my love for teams, crews, found family, partnership, procedurals, and competence, yeah, stories about coworkers are often very in line with that. I love people being good at what they do with other people who they care about who are also good at what they do (or learning how). If you mean in relation to ships? It's not essential but can be a good setup.
time loop/time travel for the ask game? :)
Ooh, an A, I love it! Time loops are delightful and satisfying (and if involving trying to save someone from dying, angsty and traumatic in a non-tragic way, which I love), time travel is fun in both directions, and I have a weakness for time-travel fix-its especially. I think the latter mirrors my love for canon divergence AUs - the what if, the 'for want of a nail' ripple effect, tracking down the crucial inflection points for character and plot, etc.
The Gray Man (2022): Ryan Gosling as Court Gentry "Sierra Six"

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Fanfiction tropes to rate:
- friends to lovers
- arranged marriage
- alternate universe, not whatever the main people's job is
friends to lovers - Hmm, so when people cite this trope they usually mean 'childhood friends' or 'best friends' which is a D for me. For example, I was not really interested in Steve/Bucky until after CATWS, when their BFFs dynamic evolved into 'back from dead with decades of trauma and amnesia' - MUCH more my jam, lol. But on the other hand I like my ships to be friends as well as romantically involved. I'm just less interested in the 'we're really really good friends for ages but I'm terrified to confess bc what if it ruins everything' dynamic that what I associate with this trope - probably because it's happened to me, I didn't return the feelings, we talked it out, and we're still friends, so like. All the angst just doesn't really hit for me.
arranged marriage - C. Lives and dies by the author's skill at setting up the premise and maintaining whatever dramatic tension they've created as the pairing progresses from arranged to actually in love (at least, that's the usual trope). So this trope can fucking amazing and fraught and delicious! Or it can be contrived and weird/boring about gender roles and predictable.
alternate universe, not whatever the main people's job is - D. A hard sell for me. I have a huge passion for competent characters and as soon as you pull them out of their original setting that aspect becomes difficult to preserve. I certainly have and do read mundane AUs, but I'm more likely to enjoy AUs where they're still highly capable in some way. I rarely save 'they were monster hunters in canon but now they're modern high school students/baristas/etc', but 'they were monster hunters in canon and now they're spies/detectives/doctors/etc' is more likely to intrigue me. Still a hard sell, but more likely.
Found family.
A: Love it! I don't think I "spend my time combing AO3 for it" so much as I get into fandoms where the trope is baked into canon, and then read voraciously. Special fondness for close-knit teams or (space)ship crews becoming family (my early exposure to Firefly, Stargate, and other canons to blame for that), though I'm loving the Lone Wolf and Cub trope's popularity in recent years - The Witcher, The Mandalorian, my current blorbo The Gray Man, etc.
I do prefer when people keep the 'family' messy and freeform rather than trying to shove everyone into a nuclear family role - like, this character is The Dad, this one's The Mom, The Little Sister, etc. Just a 'we're family' vibe is good for me - though specific characters having a specific dynamic is normal, of course. When the role gets generalized to the whole group it can feel a little... bland? simplistic? heteronormative?
albert camus, the myth of sisyphus
RYAN GOSLING as RYLAND GRACE PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller)
Give me a fanfiction trope and I’ll grade it:
A: Love it. Spend my time combing AO3 for it.
B: Like it. Not one of my bigger cravings, but it can scratch a certain itch if I’m in the right mood.
C: Neutral. A good author might be able to sell it, but a bad one will kill it deader than dead.
D: Not my favorite. I avoid it if I can, but it won’t necessarily put me off reading something.
F: Hate it. Will immediately make me nope out of a fic.

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I'm re-reading the Vorkosigan Saga for the first time in a long time (I think it's been maybe 15 years since I read the earlier books) and I remembered how much I liked them, but I forgot how feral they made me. sorry to anyone in my general orbit for the next 12-14 months.
Lois McMaster Bujold really did go: here have space opera shenanigans paired with an exploration of societal upheaval and intergenerational trauma, told from the perspective of a family composed entirely of people who are deeply unhinged. A+, no notes.
I think Tumblr is sleeping on Aral Vorkosigan tbh. fascinating set of life experiences that HAS to fuck one up in new and inventive ways.
witnessed most of his family being murdered at age 11 and two years later his new emperor hands him a blade to help chop up the old emperor who ordered it. obsessed with honor and yet is constantly either flung into situations that force him to override it or lapses in his attempts to strive for it. bisexual and almost certainly weird and repressed about it at first given Barrayar's general cultural milieu, his upbringing, and his first(?) boyfriend turning out to be a sadistic sociopath. kills his first wife's two lovers in impetuous duels and twenty years later confesses this to to the next woman he proposes to within days of meeting her. repeatedly escapes consequences for the times he genuinely fucks up - and he knows this! - and gets ripped to shreds for things he tried to prevent. keeps getting handed increasing levels of political power and he hates it so so much. there are several things wrong with him but crucially I don't think they're the things he thinks.
and we never get his POV directly. 10/10 guy to me, I want to study him under a microscope.
Cordelia kind of wins the award for Most Normal by default, but a) the bar is on the floor, and b) this is also a woman who has, in order: risked her own life to help resolve an attempted military overthrow of an enemy commander that she met like a week ago, left her entire former life behind in part to protect the political secrets of a planet she had one single personal connection to, charged into an occupied city in the middle of a coup for a guerilla raid with THREE people to rescue her kidnapped son, ordered the extremely mentally unwell guy who follows her every order to chop off the head of the guy who did it, and tossed the head in the middle of a conference table to make a point.
I do not think Miles got his impulsive streak from Aral, is what I'm saying.
Often in books, especially with a younger/teenage protagonist, there's an inciting incident, something external that either gets the narrator into trouble or gets them involved with the plot. everything that happens in Warrior's Apprentice is the direct result of Miles just deciding of his own free will and with zero provocation to do the most bonkers shit imaginable. yeah I'm gonna go rescue this random drunk-off-his-ass pilot I've never met who's holding an empty ship hostage so he can keep flying. he has diplomatic immunity now. yeah I'm going to mortgage my family's irradiated land to buy the ship. yeah I'm going to take a cargo run and now the client thinks I run a real mercenary outfit. at no point will I correct him.
this does make sense for him as a character because he has a complex family legacy to live up to AND a girl to impress, however. the entire plot of this book happens solely because of who this ADHD 17-year-old is as a person, and that is kind of beautiful.