#augustales

oh this is so easy cause i love all these things and characters

blue: grouchy icon of weird fashion. i love how much she wants things and how she wants to be above wanting things because wanting things is embarrassing and she can simply logic herself above it because shes pragmatic (but she cant). highly relatable 16 yr oldism. 

gansey: i feel unbearable amnts of love for gansey. because he is ALSO just full of love. and anxiety. he wants so badly to be good at loving everyone perfectly but he cannot. i want to give him a weighted blanket and some weed. 

ronan: dream thieves is the only trc book i own a hard copy of and i own it basically for sentimental reasons. i love ronan a LOT a the way stief wrote his mental health journey really hit home for me. i think abt “why do you hate you?” “i dont” a lot. 

adam: i love adam. so much. he is so weird and hungry. i love that he has huge capacity for kindness and love but also like. has functionally killed a guy and blackmailed another. he has the range!

noah: probably one of my favorite ghosts in fiction!!! i REALLY like how he does all the same horror movie ghosts behaviors but in a way that like completely guts you. also death as metaphorical and literal trauma just slaps!

henry: he is so fucking funny and weird. he speech patterns are really really delightful. also king of speedrunning and infiltrating a soulmate couple and making it a throuple through sheer force of being an oversharing little weirdo. 

GID NINE THE SERIES: oh my god. what can i say. they are so good its unreal. i love post-homestuck, the genre. i love terrible women. i love dykery. i love how twisty and fun and headfucky it is. harrow9 was just completely insane and is a book i will have to just keep reading my whole life. i love how fun and unapologetically weird it is!! its balls to the walls and did not shrink itself down to be more marketable and its so good for that. 

oh tell me your nate thoughts! there’s a couple things i like about him (we stan a grieving alcoholic) but i just rewatched and was thoroughly sick of him by mid s4

All right, here are some things I like about Nate. He’s still my least favorite of the Leverage crew, but I do like him and find him interesting in certain episodes.

I like that Nate is the angriest and most vengeful about their jobs. Moments like the Cross My Heart Job where Nate descends on rich assholes like the wrath of God. One of the reasons I like Leverage so much is that it’s cathartic when I’m feeling angry about capitalism and bloodsucking billionaires, and Nate is the character who channels that anger.

I like his grating asshole grifting persona, the way he just annoys his marks so much they can’t see what’s really going on. 

I like his character arc of moving from this pedestal of self-righteousness where he’s the good guy and the others are thieves, to embracing that he and the others are equal, they’re all thieves, and there is a kind of honor in that.

I like that the show never solves the problem of Nate’s alcoholism. He’s still an alcoholic at the end of the show, he just has more of a support network to help him when the alcoholism kicks him in the ass. That feels a lot more true to a lot of addicts’ journeys of recovery than most addiction narratives are on television.

I like the arc of his relationship with his ex-wife. He never resents her, he broke up with her for real reasons that make sense, and he goes from condescendingly trying to protect her from who he’s become since Sam’s death to fully respecting her abilities and what’s she’s done to grieve and move on.

And, as @rembrandtswife often points out, I think it’s great that Nate and Sophie get to have a kinky, sexy, shenanigan-filled romp of a romance as middle-aged people (which is showcased at its hilarious best in The Frame-Up Job.) Usually middle-aged people on television get a slow, tentative, almost chaste romance (e.g., Roslin/Adama in BSG) while young people get to have fake relationships and wild hook-ups and handcuffs – but in Leverage it’s exactly the reverse. Parker and Hardison get the very slow, sweet, careful romance, and Nate and Sophie get to pull off cons on Interpol agents as raunchy foreplay.

technically you don’t HAVE to