Infinity’s Lost Boys HC of the night: the boys scent mark each other.
It’s a very intimate, and comforting thing for them. They smell like each other all the time, and if they don’t, it’s like missing a limb. It’s a very integral part of their coven, to the point where David, Dwayne, Marko, and Paul don’t know what their individual scents smell like, all they know is the mixed scent of everyone. It’s familiar, it’s reassuring. It’s home.
The boys scent mark habits are very subconscious now. Like when they’re spending a night in at the cave, they’ll start cuddling if the mood calls for it, and as they cuddle they start nuzzling and rubbing against each other gently, and they keep doing it until the scent sticks. And it goes around in circles until the four of them are happy, cosy, and sleepy, and they end up sleeping in one giant pile on a bed somewhere deeper in the cave. It’s very happy.
my thoughts on chapters 5 + 6 (maybe part 1 of many)
Spoilers below the cut but tldr there are some things that definitely rubbed me the wrong way. (You all know I'm gonna be talking about my fav pyromaniac.)
Also worth noting: after sleeping on my feelings, I've calmed down a tiny, tiny bit. Everything written below was drafted when the episodes dropped yesterday, and I went back to edit/streamline today. Honestly even though I've mellowed out a smidge, I still think these feelings are worth sharing.
First off, that's not Flambae's real fucking name. I also feel partially responsible for his dumb fucking canon name by invoking Fate with my silly post. Because now, I would much rather have Robert squeal out the name "Flambae" than Chad.
And just to be clear!!!!
I will not actually be calling him Chad in my writing going forward. I know Dispatch has a sense of humor to it, which I love most of the time, and it might have been deeply funny to them to have the bratty "jock" character be named Chad, but that's so fucking lame. It's too self aware.
In contrast, I love that Prism's real name is Alice because most pop stars do adopt dramatic names/costumes/personas and their birth names are kind of like their secret alter egos. Most celebs also have very normal or possibly even underwhelming real names in comparison to how the public knows them. Prism being a pop star-aligned hero works on so many levels and I'm so happy that eps 5 & 6 started to highlight her a little more! (It was a massive missed opportunity tho when, to my memory, she had no interactions with Flambae in the bar...)
But Prism having a relatively simple/common real name like Alice is really sweet, actually. It humanizes her (knowing their real names humanizes the entire team), but knowing her name is Alice in particular lends some significant personhood to Prism, whose outward appearance seems very celebrity-esque and untouchable with her costumery and the fact she constantly covers her eyes (and thus is always, whether intentionally or not, hiding how she really feels).
So Flambae being Chad is just a wet fart in comparison. It adds nothing to his character or helps improve it. It just reinforces a joke that we were already told, that he's a hotheaded bully archetype.
Even Invisigal having a super basic white girl name like Courtney humanizes and enriches her character. Because for an ex-villain that willingly named herself Invisibitch, the name Courtney does much for her in the same way that Alice does for Prism.
(Side note, I also love that Coupé's name is Janelle, but in a very roundabout way. The name Janelle stems from the name Jane, and if you have a body/person whose identity is unknown, you call them a Jane Doe. Dispatch has made it a point that the player knows very, very little about Coupé's origins, as almost all the information on her file is redacted. In a way, she very much is a Jane Doe. She's just not the victim of the crimes, but the perpetrator.)
(Extra side note but I do also love that Malevola is just her real first name. Like that's so sick and I bet her parents had a great sense of humor to them. Honestly, Dispatch knocked it out of the park with picking the female characters' real names.)
ALL OF THAT TO SAY! Idk about you guys but Flambae's real name being Chad is just not enjoyable at all, despite knowing the tone they were trying to go for. It leans too hard into his character's joke/trope. I honestly think it would have been a great humanizing moment for him to have a more contrasting or "normal" name as well.
Thankfully, in the off-chance that Dispatch never revealed the Z-Team's names, my fan name for Flambae was going to be Amir. It means "prince" in Arabic, which I think suits his haughty attitude (lol), but it's also a pretty common name in a bunch of different places around the world. Therefore, giving him a relatively common, normal name would have had that Alice/Prism effect as well.
All that said, I honestly think that making the decision to name him Chad was a major misfire, mostly in that his character continues to remain something of a joke even in a scene that's meant to be deeply touching, where all the characters reveal their true names and their true selves.
Hell, they even did better justice to Punch Up. He could have been a Chad or a Brad or a whatever as well, even more easily so than Flambae, but the developers went out of their way to pick a specifically traditional Irish name for him. Ironically, despite him being a rough and tough character, the name Colm stems from the Latin word for dove, if Wikipedia is to be believed. It's a nice contrast to Punch Up's personality! It also (perhaps unintentionally) meshes really well with Coupé, who has wings. Together, they're the knuckles and knife, the dove and the hawk.
Even Robert's name feels like it was better thought out than Flambae's. Yes, his name is Robert Robertson the Third. It's a joke of a name, intentionally so, but it still works so fucking well for his character. He's obviously carrying his family legacy, including the baggage that comes with it; but it's so obvious that his name is Robert Robertson for a real, narrative reason.
His last name literally means son of Robert, which is perfect because that encompasses such a massive part of his character. He is haunted by the image of his father and driven by his attempts to live up to that specific image despite never having known the man very well at all. And as he says, he wants to be taken seriously, so he's not going to let something as dumb as his silly name hold him back.
In essence, his overly-redundant name also nicely juxtaposes his more serious character, but at the same time, fully encompasses Robert's struggle of wanting to be Mecha Man again.
Caveat: We in the west understand the name Chad as the English version, which is often stereotyped for jock/jock-adjacent characters. I did look up the name and saw that there's an Arabic version, which in that context means "body of water" (source: Behind the Name). Now, maybe the devs were going for a form of contrast because it's funny for a fire-based character to have a water-based name, and they chose Chad because it doubly fits Flambae's character since he's a hotheaded dick. But it's so fucking hard to get over the English cultural meaning behind the name Chad, because much like the name Karen, the name Chad has such heavy, loaded connotations. I just personally don't like it at all.
Ultimately, if the Dispatch devs could pull off giving most of their characters fun, interesting, or thematically intriguing names, I have no idea why they couldn't do the same with Flambae. Or their attempt misfired. Or maybe they just picked a bunch of random names for the Z-Team that ended up working really, really well for most of the characters, and then fucked up Flambae by accident.
So yeah if you try to talk to me about a guy named Chad, I will have no idea who that is! His name is Amir and not even the actual developers of the game I'm fixated on can change my mind!!
Also!! Not exactly relevant here but two more things about Flambae's writing that deeply bother me:
Firstly,
his sexuality is so 2010 queerbait-y and borderline pandering. Technically it's not queerbait because he's openly and canonically gay, but pretty much all of his lines about being queer give off the energy of "How do you do fellow kids? Isn't being gay super trendy and cool? Please like our character and also us."
And well... it's working because Flambae is a popular character and I also happen to really like him. But there's no depth to his identity, and I'm not just talking about his queer side. For a game that poured its heart and cock into writing really great storylines for Robert, Blazer, and Invisigal, it irks me that most of the other characters have very, very little insight or development in comparison. I thought the whole game was supposed to be about bonding with the team as their guy in the chair! We're finally getting that team building in these new episodes, but by now, the story is almost over!
Also sorry to say, but I never believed the rumors that Flambae was going to be a romance option. Blazer and Inivisgal/Mandy and Courtney were too well established by episode 2 alone. If Flambae was meant to have been a potential love interest, he would have needed some in-depth interactions with Robert very, very early on.
Also, in that same 2010 mindset, it bugs me personally that there isn't a queer romance option for Robert. Why do I have to play a man that is both white AND straight? Especially when Robert actually loves making jokes about sucking dick... like why. Why did he not get a male love interest?
(It also bothers me that apparently Malevola is canonically wlw but she has no lines about flirting with girls or anything. What even is the point, then? I know I just said that I dislike how Flambae's sexuality is presented, but they somehow fumbled Malevola even worse by not acknowledging it at all in-game to my memory.)
Secondly,
Much like many other people, I utterly despise how (if you decide to reveal Robert's secret identity as MM), Flambae will simply come around to him and "forgive" Robert entirely off screen. Maybe we'll get a flashback to him debating that decision in a future episode, but I doubt it.
Again, it unfortunately screams "gay character that we included for views and clicks but don't actually want to develop!"
It is SO. FUCKING. LAME.
Especially when in episodes 1 and 2, the game sort of semi-establishes a deep-seated beef between Flambae and Mecha Man, even if that beef is mostly one-sided. You're telling me that this is the culmination of that arc? Flambae trying to incinerate Robert once, flying off, ditching work(!), then showing up at his apartment with a lamp after apparently mitigating his feelings on his own? With no consequences or afterthought?
Flambae is like the inverse of Invisigal. His writing keeps getting worse and less nuanced as time goes on.
Like overall, I do think that Dispatch is an amazing game. The writing for the most part is absolutely top notch, especially in terms of Robert's story. And to an extent, that does make sense because he's the main character. But over the course of episodes 1 to 6, I went from thinking Flambae's character had tons of potential to viewing him as maybe underutilized, to now seeing him as something the devs clearly had no idea what to really do with. It's honestly sad and disappointing.
I don't know how eps 7 & 8 are supposed to salvage Flambae's character, if at all, but I still sincerely want the story to at least try giving us something real to work with. Especially if you chose not to reveal Robert's identity and got the handshake with Flambae instead. I have no idea how they'll be able to pull off some serious development after a mile-long fumble, but I genuinely do want the devs/story to fucking make some sort of effort with Flambae.
Because right now, I just... cannot deal with how regressive and under-explored he currently is.
Also, genuinely, with the hindsight of having seen episodes 5 and 6 now, what was the point of this super dramatic entrance if Flambae is STILL a minor character at best? (Especially if you choose to reveal that Robert is Mecha Man.) Like what the fuck has he done to impact the overarching story in any meaningful way?
Flambae is set dressing. Most of the Z-Team is simply set dressing. Again, we only have 2 episodes left, but I feel like only now have we begun to learn anything about them and their dynamic as a group. Yes, there's tie-in comics for the game, and I do appreciate those, but it doesn't make up for the fact that the game itself, on its own, seems to care very little for the characters that are not Robert and the two women he could potentially date. And also Chase.
Maybe if the devs tried to explore the team more so in earnest, the game would have ended up with a massively over-bloated narrative slowed down by its wide cast of characters. That would've been its own problem and maybe the exact thing they were trying to avoid. But idk, I still have a sour taste in my mouth.
For me personally, I love character-driven stories, so Dispatch's handling of Flambae & most of the Z-Team feels like a massive, underwhelming mixed bag.
SO THEREFORE! If you are also dissatisfied with Flambae's characterization thus far, do not worry! I am cooking and will continue to cook and hopefully deliver juicy, in-depth characterization/development for my boy Amir!!!!
(I guess as a very, very final thought, since I do love hosting an open dialogue, if you have a really good reason for why Flambae is actually written super well, I guess you can contest my opinion or die trying.)
With the MOST respect and love in my heart. I love your fanfic, it is a great inspiration for my own fanfiction. I am just JAZZED with every new chapter you come up with. You are a *fantastic* writer. I just want you to know that Flambae would not know Arabic since he isn’t middle eastern, lol.
He’s just Afghani. Which is commonly mistaken for middle eastern, don’t get me wrong. It is literally RIGHT next to the Middle East. And as an aside, I also think it’s the U.S.A propaganda machine that has everyone thinking Afghanistan is in the Middle East. The USA has a huge problem with the Middle East in general. (Ie. Iraq and Bush) So lumping Afghanistan in with the Middle East was easiest to further propagandize the us vs them, hero of the world mentality. But Flambae is indeed at the cross-roads of South and Central Asian! Much closer to Pakistan or India geographically and culturally. Although they were a part of Iran two centuries ago, just under British colonization though. So they do have middle eastern relations. They just are past the divide and are square in the boarders of Asia.
Afghanistan’s two main languages are Dari and Pashto. Dari being the lingua franca (common language EVERYONE uses. Even most Pashtuns speak Dari. Think of it like a Mexico and English situation.) and Pashto which is mainly spoken by Pashtuns(the largest ethno-group in Afghanistan.)
Arabic is spoken by very few people in Afghanistan, less than one percent. Which is to say that it isn’t impossible! Just specific.
.
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And just as a fun add-on.
Translation wise, Pashto will always be easiest. Dari shares relations with Farsi and any site will always want to direct you to Farsi since it is just more widespread. I mean, have you seen the size of Iran? But tbf, and I say this GENERALLY; Dari’s difference is more pronunciation and grammar based, from Farsi. Way less so words. So they’re just dialects of each other. But tbf, that’s just the uh.. too many translator videos I’ve been listening to. I dont know shit for sure, lol.
Amir is a perfectly fine name. It is very Persian/Iranian. Honestly, way more middle eastern too. But hey, it’s used in Afghanistan so who cares. I *did* find that it is transliterated into Dari as “Emir” but that’s semantics.
If you wanted to go down the Pashtun route, Mohammad would be the simplest bet. The Pashtun people are predominantly Sunni Muslim so Mohammad would be the closest to “prince” in that regard. Especially if you wanted Flambae as a native afghani person/Pashtun.
And I didn’t find any “Princely” translation names in Mogholi. But I’m sure that’d be the most irrelevant. It is an almost extinct language only found in Herat, Afghanistan. It’s a Mongolian derivative language from Genghis Khan times. It’s out there but probably would’ve been cool, lol.
Thank you for reading if you did! I just wanted to give you the best basis possible, I hope my nerd ass research helped at all!
—-
Extra- The name Chad is just an insult. It has no belonging near Afghanistan whatsoever. It is so very English and Hebrew that it is distinctly disconnected from South/Central Asia. And since Afghanistan had a long and torrid history of driving out Arab occupations, I dont imagine they’d take well to it as an Arabic name either. It is just.. insulting.
My shit bandaid to cover up the.. “Chad” is that Flambae got the name thrust on him as a kid immigrating to America. The name *I* chose to give him is not common. So I just used the old adage of “American adults are cruel and hate any non-English name or English derivative name” and said they changed his. Just flat out changed it to Chad. I mean, it would explain why he’s so awkward about saying it. (Thank you Flambae’s VA for giving me that small mercy)
And to explain why he *still* uses it. Since the game flat out says in different spur of the moment dialogues that Flambae struggles greatly with his own mental health; I think he’s self conscious of his birth name. I think it really got to him that everyone jumped to Chad and disregarded his actual name. I mean, his mom gave him that name. Why couldn’t they use it? It isn’t bad. And hell, he and his family use it/used it, too!
So maybe, to this day, his inner child is still put off of saying his actual name to anyone outside of his culture. Just anxiously waiting for a flashback to his first week of class. And also the subsequent year of them toting around that he’s got a “secret weird name, only his family uses.” That would hurt any kid’s feelings.
(Also, if you want my evidence for Flambae having mental health struggles. I will GLADLY share my screenshots. I have… so many. I love his character)
There was a post about Shane and Ilya's relationship I reblogged earlier this week, without adding the commentary I wanted (because it was early and making coherent sentences hadn't been possible at the time), but I think I want to talk about it now. The majority of it I agreed with, about how omegaverse kind of power dynamics not really being something OP wanted to explore in fanworks for Heated Rivalry, because Shane and Ilya always being on equal footing when it comes to power dynamics in their relationship is a huge draw for what they enjoy. It's also something I really enjoy about Hollanov. The part that I personally don't vibe with is the final line of their post, that Shane 'chooses to get on his knees anyway.'
And it's that idea that I'm not on board with.
By saying that they're fully equals in life but that Shane choosing to take a bottoming role 'anyway' implies that there is something lesser about the bottoming role. It still feeds into and reinforces the idea of a shift in power dynamics based purely on who is being penetrated and who is doing the penetrating. And I don't agree with that at all. There is nothing about getting on one's knees for a partner that automatically puts the partner in a higher position of power, whether in the bedroom alone or the relationship entirely.
And for Shane and Ilya specifically, there is no shift in power dynamics that we see with them when they're intimate. They are very much equals in the bedroom, regardless of who gets on their knees for the other, just as they are equals in every other regard.
Only weak Mizuyang fans will perish when milkyway is officially canon. The strong fujos will survive by creating much more devastating and thematically poignant fan fiction.
the normalization of jealousy as an indicator of love
the idea that a sufficiently intense love is enough to overcome any practical incompatibilities
the idea that you should meet your partner’s every need, and if you don’t, either you’re inadequate or they’re too needy
the idea that a sufficiently intense love should cause you to cease to be attracted to anyone else
the idea that commitment is synonymous with exclusivity
the idea that marriage and children are the only valid teleological justifications for being committed to a relationship
the idea that your insecurities are always your partner’s responsibility to tip-toe around and never your responsibility to work on
the idea that your value to a partner is directly proportional to the amount of time and energy they spend on you, and it is in zero-sum competition with everything else they value in life
the idea that being of value to a partner should always make up a large chunk of how you value yourself
prguitarman
amandla
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
