i feel better

cinque-spotted asked: Also, Shakespeare more generally!

Favorite Male Character: Ariel. I feel strongly about Ariel.

Favorite Female Character: Cleopatra. Shakespeare is a great wordsmith—he makes new ones every five seconds and bangs them into shape against the plot of his plays—but some of the best phrasings come out of Cleopatra’s mouth. This is a woman who knows the value of a good story told well—she might kill you for good news if you tell it badly. And she might kiss your hand for the worst news if you deliver it with grace. And her past is her “salad days” and her love is like a dolphin….but more than that, she met the greatest tactician the Roman empire (according to Shakey, not, you know, actual history) ever had and she says “he words me, girls, he words me.” Even if she wasn’t beautiful like a spell—like an enchantment—she’d convince you she was because words do what she tells them to.

Least Favorite Character: SOMEDAY I WILL FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOMP ALL OVER CLAUDIO’S STUPID FACE. I try to enter every production of Much Ado with an open mind, but if even Robert Sean Leonard could not make me like this man, no one can.

Favorite Ship: The Macbeths. The couple that murders together, stays together. And. Um. Dies. Horribly.

Favorite Friendship: Lear and his fool—and by that, I tots mean Kent.

Favorite Quote: REALLY. YOU EXPECT ME TO PICK ONE?! Fine. “The readiness is all.” But also: “The clock upbraids me with a waste of time.” And totally: “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.” But (and this is more honestly probably my favorite): “Oh, learn to read what silent love hath writ / to hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.”

Worst Character Death (if any): Desdemona. “Kill me tomorrow: let me live tonight,” breaks my heart every single goddamn time.

This made me so happy you have no idea Moment: “Most wonderful!” You all know what I mean. Best two words ever said in a Shakespeare play.

Saddest Moment: [Re-enter KING LEAR, with CORDELIA dead in his arms.]

Favorite Location: The wood near Athens or the forest of Arden.

cinque-spotted asked: Slings and Arrows? :)

OK SO THIS IS EPIC FEELS NIGHT I SEE HOW YOU DO

Favorite Male Character: Geoffrey. As you and I have discussed in the past, Geoffrey and I understand each other on a very fundamental level. There are days when I wake up, look at myself, and have to admit….yes, this is going to be a Geoffrey day and I will probably have a very impassioned argument about the artistic heresy of something by the end of today.

Favorite Female Character: The Anna of my head, not the Anna of the show. There was some sketch writing done with her—the racist Bolivian plotline, for example. I could have done without that. But I think—on the whole—I completely and totally dig her. As someone who once nursed a very sick family member through their death, the aftershocks of that experience as they appear in Anna in the third series is very real and very familiar.

Least Favorite Character: In that I find this character incredibly problematic and very badly conceived: Nahum. If the only character of color on your entire show could be someone other than a janitor, that’d be nice. I am also REALLY not fond of Paul in the third series and wish he would kindly go away forever.

Favorite Ship: Darren/Geoffrey, no question, everyone else should go home. (Except I LOVELOVELOVE Jack/Kate in the first series.)

Favorite Friendship: Geoffrey and Oliver (ghost only).

Favorite Quote: “These are the words a director likes to hear.”

Worst Character Death (if any): Besides the obvious, did anybody die? OH WAIT. CHARLES. I ALMOST FORGOT CHARLES.

This made me so happy you have no idea Moment: Every single time Darren came back. But, more than any other: the day-glo paint exercise. Fuck, I miss my days as a batshit theater person.

Saddest Moment: When Charles could see Oliver. Hell, all of the end of the third series.

Favorite Location: Pouring Oliver’s ashes into the river for the swans to eat.

anagignosko asked: For the fandom meme: Star Trek? TOS or Reboot or all of the canon, whatever.

WHEN I DO STAR TREK, I DO ALL OF STAR TREK.

You have touched the trekkie vein in me and now you must bear with my EPIC FEELS.

Favorite Male Character: I’m not sure I will ever feel as strongly about a character as I do about Julian Bashir. If he hadn’t won my heart in his first five seconds of screen time with being schooled by Kira about liberal imperialism, he would have my heart anyways for his incompetent but enthused spy!flirtation with Garek.

Favorite Female Character: B’Elanna Torres. The show was very careful to defend her right to be angry, to be grouchy, and to present her femininity how and when she chose. I always think of Voyager as the most under-rated of the Star Treks and a lot of it was, I think, because of how complex and uncompromising it was about its female characters.

Least Favorite Character: Tough one. I’d have to go with Wesley (sorry, Wesley!) because I have always been annoyed by him. Also—though I didn’t know it at the time—I was discomfited by the fact that everybody but his mother seemed to be given scenes “parenting” him. Later, when I read the interview with Gates McFadden about that, it all made sense. Not his fault—as a character—but it gave me the squick when I was a kid watching.

Favorite Ship: There is no ship in all of Star Trek closer to my heart than Kirk/Spock. And if you watched TOS and thought the show was about anything else, I don’t know how you reached that conclusion. Show your work.

Favorite Friendship: Odo and Quark. It just hits every single one of my buttons.

Favorite Quote: “I can learn to live with it. I can learn to live with it….I can learn to live with it. Computer: erase that entire personal log.”

Worst Character Death (if any): Well, the one I went running to my dad sobbing—so much so that he thought I was gravely injured and then laughed at my sobbing face when I explained what had really happened—was Ziyal. But Reboot cleared the decks on this issue with Amanda Grayson and, you know, all of Vulcan.

This made me so happy you have no idea Moment: I guess the fact that Kirk had a death match for Spock-sex reasons.

Saddest Moment: The episode where O’Brien has to deal with the lingering effects of having been tortured. I can’t actually think about that episode without my heart jumping into my throat.

Favorite Location: Always been a fan of Risa. Four for you, Risa.

Give me a fandom and I’ll tell you

• Favorite Male Character
• Favorite Female Character
• Least Favorite Character
• Favorite Ship
• Favorite Friendship
• Favorite Quote
• Worst Character Death (if any)
• This made me so happy you have no idea Moment
• Saddest Moment
• Favorite Location

come at me bro

(via queendoms)

cosmictuesdays asked: JARVIS! ☾, ☻, ☄.

Sleeping: Like most things essentially human, JARVIS is equal parts curious, disdainful, and game. He doesn’t relish the idea of not being “on” but it’s, as Tony would say, “for science” so he gave “sleeping” a try. He powered down most of his functions once for a while when Tony was asleep—this was years and years ago, of course, before he set up all the extra sensory readings he does on Tony while he sleeps these days, everything from pulse and perspiration to power levels of the arc reactor and environmental disturbances. But back then, Tony went down like a ton of bricks when he finally crashed and nothing would wake him. So JARVIS gave sleeping a try and “woke” on a timer six hours later.

Dummy had trashed the lab while he was asleep. JARVIS made a big thing about it—he put some disapproving memos into Dummy’s memory, scheduled official reprimands, etc etc. But what was pretty apparent: Dummy had panicked when JARVIS vanished.

So JARVIS never tried it again—not because he couldn’t, not because he wouldn’t be able to explain to Dummy, and not because it wasn’t a valid experiment—but because there was something….good…about another being needing him so much.

But then the time in the suit—when it has been official JARVIS policy to never completely leave Tony alone, not ever, for years and years—when the power just whizzes out from under him and all of his circuits are just shutting off, whether he instructed them to do so or not—JARVIS sort of knows what Dummy was talking about. If he’d been a robotic arm, he’d have trashed something too, waiting to know what happened to Tony.

Mood: JARVIS absolutely has the ability to feel emotions. This is the secret of Tony’s best and greatest invention: JARVIS has all the range of emotion a sentient creature could want. And while a lot of this doesn’t process for him the way humans do for them, there are some key things that will absolutely put JARVIS in a tiff. These include: ignoring relevant information that he has carefully collected and/or is readily available (thus: Steve breaking the toaster is forgivable because he didn’t know and never did it again, but the fact that Clint leaves pots boiling over regularly pisses JARVIS off), inefficiency, trying to input a directive without proper input procedure (i.e., telling him to do something when he doesn’t want to), and, thanks to Tony, always Fury.

AU: I wrote a drabble once that I am very fond of where JARVIS is actually an alien consciousness that Tony accidentally downloaded into his computer and Dum-E is his dog that Tony mistakenly downloaded trying to put JARVIS into a robot body.

wildehack asked: okay, I can't do symbols because I fail, but: can I get Rhodey + a star trek AU headcanon?

OH MAN I HAD NOT THOUGHT ABOUT THIS BEFORE BUT NOW I SO SO SO AM

So Rhodey comes with a Starfleet pedigree. He’s something like the eighth generation officer. All his siblings are in the Fleet somehow and they’re all in command. He’s got a sister who runs a space station. Besides Rhodey, the only oddball in the group is a much younger brother who is captain of a tiny little slip of a ship that goes faster than you would believe and has a crew of nine.

But Rhodey—Rhodey does not want a command position. He’s a pilot through-and-through. He likes orders—believes in them—and he’s never in a rush to move up the rungs of the command ladder.

Tony is so thoroughly not Starfleet. He’s one of those space brats who never called a planet “home” in his whole life. He was born in a shuttle between a ship and a space station—his mom said he was impatient even then—and then he never touched a planet till he was fifteen. He was a tiny kid who would sneak up into the circuitry and the ship would have ten percent higher speed capabilities before anyone noticed he was missing.

Rhodey and Tony met because Tony had pulled apart Rhodey’s console when Rhodey showed up for one of his shifts. And Tony instantly adored him for two reasons: (1) he gave Tony such a stinkeye that Tony started putting the panel back together before the fingerwagging even began and (2) then he watched avidly while Tony put it back together, asking only a couple of incredibly pertinent questions. And if that hadn’t sold Tony, the fact that the modification he showed Rhodey that day was always already in place every time they ran into each other in the future.

And Rhodey is sold immediately on Tony too—and he’s never sure why or how it keeps working on him, how Tony keeps appealing to something in him no matter how awful he might be.

But the key always is: Tony has stupid, incredible ideas that he just jumps into head first (because, Rhodey privately believes, he never had the kind of faith in gravity a kid who grows up on a planet has—because jumping is just more motion to him, another way forward and out) and Rhodey knows, he totally gets how stupid these ideas are and what’s at stake and all the other things Tony willfully ignores and often wouldn’t care about anyway if he knew—Rhodey knows, understands, and jumps anyway.

cinque-spotted asked: Darren Nichols ☠ ☾ ☼

OH FINE MAKE ME DO MY FAVORITE ASSHOLE WHY DONTCHA

Drinking: Darren is aware of all the cutting edge-est of cutting edge cocktail trends and stays permanently (fashionably) three steps behind it. It wouldn’t do to be ahead of the curve, naturally, because everyone would just think you had the worst taste. It is equally unthinkable to be just on the latest trend because everyone would think you were a poseur and Darren would absolutely lay down his life rather than to fit in with the “hip” crowd. And the people who feel that way—who tend to reject all the latest trends on principle—do so in fedoras and by choosing the drink that just was fashionable but just barely isn’t anymore, all while saying things like, “What ever happened to just having a Cosmo, am I right?” Darren would kill them before he would join them….hence, three steps behind.

Sleeping: Darren’s choices are consciously decadent, not effectively decadent. It’s not enough to have the softest sheets with the highest thread count, everyone who walks in the room must be able to tell they’re the absolute best sheets in all the land just by a casual glance. They’re, thus, a deep crimson silk with gold embroidered edging. That’s the way the whole bedroom goes—everything is the absolute best of the best and he will always pick the ostentatiously best over the actual best. This means that the bed is actually not the most comfortable thing he owns. Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s a masterpiece. But the sofa’s better—it’s in his office down in the back of the house, where no guests (nighttime or otherwise) have any business being. And it’s actually perfect, run down and worn perfectly to fit him. He sleeps there as often as not….and sleeps much better.

(Geoffrey, on more than one occasion, has slept there too—he took one look at the bed and made YUCK face, never to return again. He’s actually not aware—still—that Darren likes the couch better than the bed. He thinks he’s making the conscious choice to force them to sleep in the place that Darren likes least—because Darren, obviously, must love that bed, just look at it!)

Childhood: I imagine a kid who painted his nails pink before he went for black because he knew instinctively that it was the color his parents most wanted him to avoid. I imagine a teenager who smoked a lot—not to fit in, not to stand out, just because he wanted to be able to hold one with authority. I imagine him playing some sort of school sport (tennis, probably, because he liked the way he could hold the racket and make clear how above it all he was by the angle of the dangle but also because he liked a sport with so thoroughly regimented a wardrobe) for a year or two of high school just to prove he could, just to do the In Crowd thing for a while. I imagine he was the kind of kid who got sent to the principal not for misbehaving or being a bad student but because the pants he sewed himself the night before had come apart in the ass during the day—consciously, planned, or not—and he’d been mooning the school nonchalantly for three periods. I imagine he sewed his own clothes a lot and then sewed his prom date’s dress too because she wanted the meringue look and he knew the purple hounds-tooth would be so much more memorable.

Specific Headcanons — Go!

cosmictuesdays:

theonewhoisruledbyfear:

Put one character or ship and one of these symbols (or more) in my ask box, and I’ll let you know the following for that character/ship:

☾ : Sleep headcanon

☠ : Drinking/drunk headcanon

☼ : Childhood headcanon

⋆ : Sex headcanon

☮ : Bedroom/house/living quarters headcanon

☄ : Any AU headcanon (modern, school, medieval, and so on)

♤ :  Cooking headcanon

☻ : Mood headcanon

♒ : Any other question of your choosing

Hit me!

Send me a character and I’ll tell you;

OTP:
BrOTP:
OT3:
NOTP:

(via fuckingniara)

cinque-spotted asked: Martha Jones!

Do you love/hate/don’t feel strongly about this character?

I would walk the planet to tell everyone person by person how awesome she is. Strong feels, check.

What’s your favorite trait of this character?

To be honest, I liked how awesome she was when the deck was completely stacked against her. Everything that came easy to Rose, Martha fought tooth and nail for. He wouldn’t admit he was an alien, he wouldn’t tell her how awful he could be, he lied, he ignored her, he forgot her, he repeatedly abandoned her…and she just kept trucking.

What’s your favorite moment/event involving this character?

I love her SO MUCH in the Family of Blood arc. Because the Doctor turns into a mythologized figure—almost a god—who nobody can touch, no one would want to touch, and John Smith is the perfect mundane, perfectly plain, perfectly domestic, perfectly placid. And Martha Jones is a companion, she’s there to be the perfectly plain one. Companions get chosen for their ability to bring back real world concerns and particularity to the Doctor’s travels—and Martha had to always be a step closer to the inhuman, to the mythologized. She wasn’t gentle like John Smith, but she also wasn’t heartless like the Doctor. She had to be something completely her own and she knows it, constructs it around herself.

If you could have one power/attribute/etc. of this character, what would it be?

Have you ever pictured this character naked?

Not really. I actually object to the fact that RTD tried to romanticize her so much. She didn’t need any of those half-assed love stories. I simply didn’t buy any of the eroticizing. But, yes, she is hot as blazes.

When did you fall in love/hate with this character?

The moment she pointed out that the windows weren’t airtight so opening them shouldn’t let out the air. I was mad impressed.

If you don’t have any strong feelings toward them, why not?

AGAIN, I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO SCORNS HER.

Who’s your OTP for this character?

Martha Jones/kicking ass.

wildehack asked: Darcy Lewis, for the meme!

Do you love/hate/don’t feel strongly about this character?

I FEEL SO STRONGLY ABOUT DARCY. I HAVE FEELS LIKE MOLTEN LAVA ABOUT DARCY.

What’s your favorite trait of this character?

Man, I could write sonnets—no, I could write sonnet sequences about all the things I love about her. But I think more than anything, I love the bit of grit in her voice. She’s adorable, she’s feminine, she’s kickass, and she’s got that rock’n roll grit in her voice.

What’s your favorite moment/event involving this character?

The kanyeshrug about tasing Thor.

If you could have one power/attribute/etc. of this character, what would it be?

Those boobs. If anyone says otherwise, THEY ARE LYING.

Have you ever pictured this character naked?

See previous answer.

When did you fall in love/hate with this character?

She had me from the casting announcement. But also for the prodigious trouncing of the Bechdel Test.

If you don’t have any strong feelings toward them, why not?

I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO SCORNS HER. PISTOLS AT DAWN.

Who’s your OTP for this character?

Since Hawkeye is my Avengers bicycle, I am pretty damn fond of Clint/Darcy. But, dude, don’t get me started on how hot as blazes (and AMAZING IN ALL OTHER WAYS TOO) Darcy/Natasha would be. Just think about it. Think about Darcy’s kanyeshrug and tell me she would be bothered by Nat’s killer stare. You want to know how much I want a fic where Nat goes with Coulson to New Mexico and ended up having a scorching affair with Darcy? The answer is MORE THAN WORDS, MORE THAN AIR, MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE EVER.

Put a character in my ask box.

And I’ll answer these questions about them:

1. Do you love/hate/don’t feel strongly about this character?
2. What’s your favorite trait of this character?
3. What’s your favorite moment/even involving this character?
4. If you could have one power/attribute/etc. of this character, what would it be?
5. Have you ever pictured this character naked?
6. When did you fall in love/hate with this character? I you don’t have any strong feelings toward them, why not?
7. Who’s your OTP for this character?

(via soyonscruels)

Eleven questions!

cinque-spotted:

Tagged by tobreakandblossom, and I’m tagging ifeelbetterer, ofgeography, anagignosko, aknightowl, barbedwitsandgowns, aporeticelenchus, lordlings, edenfenix, lostwithoutmyconsultingdetective, and tobreakandblossom (I don’t care about the decorum of tagbacks!). anyone else who wants to jump on the bandwagon, feel free.

The Rules:

Rule 1: Always post the rules
Rule 2: Answer the questions the person that tagged you asked and write 11 new ones
Rule 3: Tag 11 new people and link them to the post
Rule 4: Let them know you’ve tagged them.

Read More

skipping the tagging portion and just answering the questions:

1. What’s your favorite accessory in your closet?
   My mother gave me a red leather jacket when I was in high school and feeling decidedly uncool….she promised I would feel as cool as it one day and I sort of do when I wear it.
2. If you could rewrite one moment in one book/show/movie’s canon, what would you choose and why?
   RIVER SONG, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS RIVER SONG.
3. Oceans, lakes, or rivers?
   Oceans. While nothing is quite so terrifying as the creatures that live on the ocean floor, under all that massive pressure, with all those teeth and nothing to see, there is also nothing quite like digging your toes into the sand on the ocean’s edge and knowing the mass of it ground rocks into the glittering dust around your toes. Nothing is as cool as that.
4. What would your daemon be? (Yes, I stole this, but I want to make everyone answer it because I love the HDM series.)
   A wombat because of reasons.
5. Favorite crackship/headcanon?
   I like the idea that Agent K is Coulson’s dad and nags him about secrecy and PR containment whenever the Avengers make the headlines.
6. A rather peculiar genie appears to you. Instead of granting you three wishes, he offers you three articles of clothing of your choice, price not an object. What do you choose?
   A perfectly fit bra, the porcelain dress, and a pair of heels that magically does not make me tower over people and are comfortable to wear for hours on end.
7. If you were a superhero, who or what would be your archnemesis?
   Probably an academic adviser. That shit would be my kryptonite.
8. Current favorite line from a book/poem.
   Basically all of the short Keats poem “This Living Hand” but especially the last two lines. “And thou be conscience calmed—see here it is— / I hold it towards you.”
9. If you could build your dream house, what would your favorite space in it look like? What would you fill it with?
   There would be a second floor room overlooking a semi-busy street. The room would be a sort of sitting room, a space where people gather and just hang out casually, but there would be an alcove by the window. It would be both apart and a part of the room, connected but not entirely of the room. That would be my favorite space.
10. You get one trip in the TARDIS. Where do you go?
    Personal answer: I’ve always wanted to meet my mother when she was a fiery young revolutionary. Bigger answer: I want somewhere beautiful, somewhere exciting, and somewhere in the distant future. Driver’s choice.
11. Favorite word, in any language, and why?
    I have a new favorite every day, no lies. I get them stuck in my head like a catchy tune and they repeat in my writing ad nauseum until someone points it out. I can’t tell you how many times editors have written “you’ve used this word on this page already” in my margins. But I will always love 我慢, or “enduring the seemingly unendurable with patience and dignity.”
    

eleven questions meme

tagged by tobreakandblossom, and I’m tagging ofgeography, cinque-spotted, swingsetindecember, leupagus, cosmictuesdays, vaguely-concerned, and that’s it, no more counting, feel free to jump on this bandwagon if you like.

The Rules:

Rule 1: Always post the rules
Rule 2: Answer the questions the person that tagged you asked and write 11 new ones
Rule 3: Tag 11 new people and link them to the post
Rule 4: Let them know you’ve tagged them.

Read More

queenklu asked: oh man oh man 7 and 10?

7. whoops emotions

Early Returns: Inception, Arthur/Eames, newsroom!AU. If the promise of 15k newsroom!AU from pru was not enough to get you going, I don’t think we see eye-to-eye on fics. It’s the ULTIMATE whoops emotion fic.

10. competency kinks R us

Solve for X: Avengers, Tony/Loki, the epic love story of a crafty mind and a math problem. If Loki can’t do magic, Tony thinks he might as well do math.