Thinking about how much more palatable Skip would be (which is not to say truly palatable - just more palatable) than Hollanov in the NHL and broader hockey world and how that would be reflected in the public's reception of Scott vs their reception of Shane and Ilya. Scott's white. He's a US citizen. When he comes out, he's literally just won the cup, and he's coming out on his terms. His partner isn't another player and Kip is palatable in the same ways. White. American.
It's pretty evident that Reid did not intend to make any commentary on how Scott would be easier for the hockey world to accept or tolerate than Hollonov but in real life the only reason Scott could possibly be basically immediately accepted the way he is in the books would be because of that, and the way Shane loses his team and captaincy and ends up having to take lower pay would all be because he's wasian and gay and in real life, Ilya would actually face repercussions as a Russian immigrant in one way or another. Both Shane and Ilya's lives would be irrevocably affected for the worse in a way Scott's wasn't.
And, after Shane and Ilya are outed - in a scandalous way that can even provide the public's hate plausible deniability, oh we don't care that they're queer, we're just disgusted they're rivals, we're just disgusted they hid this - the press would undoubtedly want to speak to Scott and speak to Hollanov about each other. Scott would wake up with the press on his doorstep the day of and not even know why. Shane and Ilya would have to talk about Scott in an interview at some point.
And like. Shane and Ilya would see the difference. Scott might too. They would see how differently Scott was received after the skip kiss - the very kiss that gave Shane and Ilya the courage to continue their relationship in secret. They would see the difference and they would know why it was worse for them. And I don't think Shane and Ilya would hate him or blame him or anything - but I also don't think they would have this like, easy-going cordial relationship with one another afterward where they join Scott's queer avengers sjw group you know?
The eldritch God from Iron lung sent the astrophage out to take care of the stars first, then it was the planets with something else.
Ryland Grace's comma ended up lasting a little longer than expected so by the time he woke up, the quiet rapture has already happened and there is no sun or planets to save anymore. He's stuck in an empty void with nothing but an echo of what was the stars.
Rocky and Adrian (because I can't bear to separate them) are on their ship, also stranded in a sea of nothingness, until they come across Grace. Huzzah they're not alone!
After exploring the nothingness of space they come across an odd moon and decide to check it out. They notice a black box on the surface of the red liquid and fish it out. It takes them a bit to get it cleaned off, and access the data on it while running tests on the strange liquid. With horror they realize it's human blood, and are about to book it out of there when the ships scanner picks up a survivor in the ocean. The gang comes up with a plan and fish Simon out.
It takes Simon a while to adjust and not act like a wounded feral dog, but he gets there. Kinda. Simon, Grace, Rocky, and Adrian go over the black box data and exchange ideas, and get to work saving what remains of life out there.
And if you want to throw Mouthwashing into the crossover, the Tulpar is responsible for transporting things between the space stations. The Hail Mary bumps into them after it crashes. Jimmy gets his shit rocked and further tragedies are prevented.
Deadlock folks-- I don't have great stamina for writing, but I have the start of a Drifter/driftdoor "through-the-ages" historical AU and I think it's fun. It's molded by the headcanon that 1) the Drifter is about 400 years old (to explain the Cajun tm) and 2) the Doorman says he's only been in the form of a servant for a short time, but to an immortal 400 years is a short time (aka he was being a little guy all the way back in the 17th-18th century)
OKAY SO the Drifter was a mortal French officer under Louis XIV sent to New France who was separated from his battalion and was guerrilla-ambushed and turned by a British-employed feral vampire during the Seven Years War. turned by the attacker and abandoned by his troops, he skirted the North American warfront until he tracked down the vampire that turned him and killed him himself. rumors trickled up and down french and british camps of a pale, hungry soldier in tattered clothes drifting into camp
Following the war, the Drifter heads south in the french territory and settles outside of New Orleans, taking refuge in the swamp but frequently meandering into the city for relentless revelry and,,,food. To celebrate his terrorizing, he takes his looted gold for some drink and revelry at the finest hotel in New France. there, he comes across a familiar face in the concierge: a pair of stark blue eyes and an all-too knowing smile of a young man he saw standing in waiting and attention to King Louis XIV at his last trip to Versailles. An insufferably disarming smile, Drifter commits to having his fun with the curious concierge to play with his food before one final meal in the city.
But that grandiose last meal would evade him for centuries.
Okay y’all, so far I’ve just been testing the waters in my fic Six Months Free, and I want to have an idea of where the story is going longterm. I thought I’d let Tumblr have a say!
Should my story have a happy ending, or end in a tragic pit of doom😈😈😈
If you know me, you'll know that I love to Steal With The Same Shit™️
So I was suddenly reminded of my Coastal City AU™️ where there's angst underlying the tension and the yearning and I was like OMG CAITVI ª
Vi and Cait are probably childhood friends who met at Place Where Kids With No (available) Parents Go, which ain't a good place. At at first they clash bc of their background but they slowly become friends and they're totally into each other but never act on it jiji.
And I guess Vi and Powder got there after Vander died or smh and maybe Powder leaves??? Or maybe she gets adopted by Silco, like, the guy Vi always looked at with a side eye bc she didn't entirely trust him. Maybe even Powder visited Vi until she stopped coming and Vi was Big Sus 💀 so she ends up escaping the place to look for her sister 🤔 maybe that caused some kind of fallout with Cait 👀
So Vi comes back to the city years after (lets make it 7, could be less, could be more) bc nostalgia/an actual reason and also she missed Cait. And now Cait is all grown up too and she... uh, idk lives on her own with a dog? (??) And has tried to get her life back together as much as she can. Could even add the parent angst 👀
I like the idea of walks at the beach and nostalgia hitting but also the feeling that everything changed and its not quite the same. AND. HAND HOLDING (sinful ik ik).
I'm brainstorming ideas but the worms have settled and I'm gonna keep coming up with stuff on my sleep >:))
ngl i could rly see jason and the bats operating during the og trilogy with jason a smuggler/merc running in similar circles as han and the batfam as allies to the rebellion maybe similar to the fulcrum identity where they trade in information??? at the same time tho, i absolutely love mandalorians and mando culture so i'm a sucker for mando!batfam
but im also not familiar with a lot of the legends/not tv or movie stuff so who knows
oooooo, interesting… 🤔 The original trilogy is definitely the source material I know best offhand, so that would be easiest to world-build off of. Your ideas are giving me ideas… I’m starting to imagine something where Bruce is the leader of a world that was part of the old republic, he’s still in the senate but secretly anti-empire and pro-rebellion (building off the Organa family here). Dick runs off and joins the rebellion outright. Jason has some kind of falling out with Bruce, runs away, and joins up with a group of smugglers/mercs. Fast forward a couple of years and Jason gets picked up by the Empire??? Batfam to the rescue??? But where does the Jedi action come from??? Hmm…
I also love the Mandalorians, but for whatever reason a crossover with the batfam just doesn’t get my creative juices flowing. 🤷♀️
As a follow up to my previous message about Dean’s grief being colored through Sam’s vision, it’s striking in that *that’s* the full circle moment of the show the writers were leaning to. Sam was initially the viewers eyes into learning about the supernatural and the Winchester family. We learn they support their lifestyle by running credit card scams, as an example. While undoubtedly Dean became the main character, after over 300 episodes, we wind back to Sam and see Dean through Sam’s eyes. He deflects about losing Cas. We get just the tiniest glimpse things aren’t right with Dean when he’s by himself - that hug with Miracle, getting up and leaving the bed unmade - but ultimately that’s it. Everything else Dean experiences in the remaining 20 minutes of the episode where he’s still alive, he’s with Sam.
And speaking of visions, I almost wonder that what we see of Sam’s life might not actually be what happens but rather a daydream of where he might go from here. He could marry a faceless random woman, have a kid - if it’s a boy, definitely name him after Dean, and try to hide away from the hunting lifestyle. If he doesn’t put pictures up, maybe the images of people like Cas and Jack, Jody, etc will fade from his mind. He’ll teach the importance of family to his son. We know that’s important to Sam by the enlarged picture of his parents and Dean (from Lebanon promo pics) in the middle of it all. And he’ll definitely keep the Impala.
And that might be what happens in Sam’s life. Or it might not. We really don’t know what happened after he closed the bunker doors.
"I almost wonder that what we see of Sam’s life might not actually be what happens but rather a daydream of where he might go from here."
❗❗❗❗❗❗❗
OH MY GOD. THE DREAMY LAST SEQUENCE AS SAM'S DAYDREAM WHILE DRIVING HIS WAY TO THE NEXT HUNT. See, Sam's listening to Carry on My Wayward Son, but in his mind, it becomes...this.
I friggin' love that idea, though! Like, when you lose someone, you do find yourself thinking, "I'll see them again, someday. They're probably in Heaven right now. Jack fixed it, so it's better. Cas helped. Everyone is together. I'll probably meet him on a bridge...when I too cross over." That's so...normal.
"He could marry a faceless random woman, have a kid - if it’s a boy, definitely name him after Dean, and try to hide away from the hunting lifestyle. ...And he’ll definitely keep the Impala. And that might be what happens in Sam’s life. Or it might not. We really don’t know what happened after he closed the bunker doors."
The woman is blurry, because Sam doesn't have a clear idea of it just yet, but she will be transformational and zen and so, so normal. Sam has a very poor idea of what aging will actually look like for him, too because none of his fam has ever actually made it that far. Which is why the wig looks so weird.
Sam has a very poor imagination of what "normal" looks like, because he is and has always been a weirdo. Like, he really thinks he'll be decrepit and elderly by the time his son is a young adult.
Not only do I love this, but I spent the last three minutes laughing at how Sam put his entire neurodivergent heart into his grief-fantasy, and it looks like that.
I feel we talk and speculate about post-canon Marchil. But what about pre-canon Marchil? They may not yet know much about each other's personal lives by the time the story starts. But from the start we could already see that they have some level of rapport and are able to bounce off each other quite well especially given that they see each other as the saner party members.
But we know its not how they started especially given Chilchucks disdain for elves, and the fact that the previous mage/sorcerer of their party supposedly almost broke the party up with their love agendas.
How do you think it played out from there and getting to the start of the manga?
Pre-canon and early Marcille & Chilchuck
Yes, very interesting topic!! There are a good few moments that are telling imo. I don't have any fun way to introduce it all so let's just go right into it, it's gonna be a long post though.
Pre-canon
We do see how they start out:
Like you said, Chil, like the other party members, was very hesitant at first on trusting her, that she’d be a good fit for the party etc, though he doesn’t seem to be taking it any worse than Shuro and Namari (which is interesting since Chil’s distrust of elves is more prominent).
The distrust of mages for their party specifically was due to their old one, implied to have stirred drama by being a marriage seeker with every man in the party yes. We don't know the details but it does paint a certain picture I suppose, I really hope The Adventurer's Bible 2 is gonna have new info or pages about the old party members... Doing an analysis of the party configurations pre-canon would be interesting too, for example there’s the buzzcut guy that’s implied to have betrayed Laios and it’s soo cryptic but intriguing and implied to be a significant moment for Laios, would be worth analyzing the crumbs of info we get in canon... But yes yes point is that's one side of the coin, which is eased when the party gets used to Marcille and she earns their trust by being friendly and nice, BUT there’s the other side of the coin to it where magic has been used to persecute half-foots historically, especially by elves, so there’s that bias that remains even for a good part of canon for Chilchuck, and it's stated the most explicitly when he and Marcille argue over dark magic in chapter 34.
To go back to the pictures above, the panel that shows Marcille "working hard to befriend everyone" contextualizes the extra comic in Chilchuck’s Adventurer’s Bible section(the third picture above) to be set during that time of integration into the party for her. We see they indeed had already their comedic dynamic schtick down by then… And I think that makes sense. Even at the start of canon Chil is still adamant about not making friends and keeping emotional distance, so though I’m sure he was much more standoffish and quiet at first I think going from "I don’t know you and I’ll avoid you" to "I’ll engage with you but I’m not gonna be friendly about it" isn't a big jump and it would happen naturally with time as they get somewhat acquainted.
Chilchuck does value having a good professional dynamic, so he wouldn’t want to be rude or shoot her down, and it’s also that will to help a coworker be efficient that gets him to go out shopping for a pouch with her and makes her able to bond with him on that occasion (Yes I do want to make a fanfic about it hehe. He doesn’t like to wait after people but still went with her for a pouch isn’t that sweet). Considering the way she acts with him in that extra comic, she was already very open and didn’t mind overcrowding him and seeming eager and whatnot. Imo she already looked favorably upon him from the get-go because he’s "a kid" and thus sweet and cute™️, but I still think especially with the added context of the pages on her perspective that she was extra trying to be friendly and encourage engaging with her.
Even at their "on good terms for work but no actual relationship" stage at the beginning of canon, Marcille worked to get there and to have that good (decent) of a dynamic with Chil.
Although I don’t think it was especially hard either, I just think it took a while for people to acclimate to her. A lot of the prejudices in Dungeon Meshi are eased and challenged through exposure and contact, like getting a scared dog to see you as safe. "Oh, this guy isn’t so bad after all, guess there are good ones -> guess they have a point -> guess that maybe they’ve always had a point and were never all that evil" etc etc, it’s more nuanced and has variations but hopefully you see what I mean, how prejudices are tackled in Dunmeshi is a very interesting & layered topic for another day.
Ah yes there’s also the extra above in which Chil says how awkward it is to wait with Toshiro and Marcille for the others to arrive, and though it certainly could be mostly about how Toshiro and Marcille don’t get along and that's what makes the air tense, I do think it shows a good level of distance and disinterest between them. It’s often referred to in canon that, previous to canon events, they all truly just had a coworkers dynamic.
Even just hanging out outside of work for a drink was very uncommon. The closest thing to a friend Chilchuck would see someone as in the party would have been Namari I imagine, since it’s shown a few times that those two did go out to drink after work a couple times and got along well (as per the extras about it and some small canon moments).
I think it’s very central to their dynamic at that point that their relationship is professional. According to the timeline it’s been around 1/1.5 year that Marcille has joined Laios’ party at the beginning of canon, and since they dungeon dive regularly that’s a good amount of time to develop a dynamic with a coworker. So yes I think a good way to frame their relationship is that they’re two coworkers, who have been working together well for a while but never developed it into a proper friendship, either from lack of interest or failure to do it, like two cashiers sharing the same shift. They have a bond forged in forced proximity and casual familiarity accumulated over time, which does make their relationship a bit unique and interesting since they would have never become friends under regular circumstances. They're like that sweet & salty sandwich that you have to give a chance to, that'll surprise you and have complementary flavors if you try it out despite seeming disastrous.
Early canon
Their early dynamic is super interesting though!! Both see each other as capable, which I do think is the foundation of their relationship early on, since Marcille thought of him as a kid too closed off on himself and Chilchuck saw her as a somewhat annoying person (afaik) and an elf mage (both which make her more distrust-worthy for him) which doesn't make them very friends material at that point. But like I said, they do see each other as capable not only in their job but with their respective strenghts:
Early on we get the sense that they of course have worked with each other for a while and have a good grasp on the other’s character though, and what they say is insightful on how they think of the other. Above, the excerpt is when Laios and Chilchuck come back with the dead Kabru party’s wet food. "She’s right that wasn’t okay to do. Not good I didn’t catch that, that’s Marcille for you." implying he sees her as sort of the moral compass of the team, that she’s strict on such things but seemingly he values it instead of being offput by it.
On her side she says how "he’s usually the most mature here."
This is in the kakiage chapter so she still fully believes he's a kid at that point, so it's interesting to see that she still recognizes his maturity demeanor wise.
There is respect there, however how kneecapped or begrudging it is.
I think the "you’re the next most normal person in the party after me and you have common sense thank god" dynamic was mostly forged right from the beginning of canon but not before that, since Laios while yes still having some of his questionable leadership previously (since his part was losing faith in him before Marcille joined) was more stoic and controlled, so 1) there is no great evil to band up against in the party, plus there were just more people, so 2) less reason or occasion to seek specifically each other out. But then without Toshiro and Namari they were the only person the other had when Laios started showing his interest in monsters and whatnot, the whole party dynamic got thrown upside down which made them gravitate towards each other more than they usually did. And then Senshi came into the picture but Marcille and Chilchuck had already traumabonded like kittens /j and Senshi turned out to also have an interest in monsters.
I do feel like pre-canon they simply didn’t interact as much, more one-off moments and short shallow interactions and the occasional deeper, pleasant enough conversation than anything, so canon events is what really kickstarted it into something more than (acquaintance level emotional distance) coworkers.
And on that note, I think that the true shift in their relationship starts after the red dragon arc, when their goal becomes more convoluted and they’ll have to stick to each other’s side through truly thick and thin. It’s right after that Chilchuck gets a shift in character and motivation where he admits that he cares about them, and when the characters start being overall more vulnerable with each other.
I think about this page a ton for example.
"Still, that Marcille…" Maybe I should check out how the original phrased it, the ‘that’ does add a lot, but even without it there's a very impersonal feeling to it. Like they really are just starting to get accustomed to each other after all and sizing each other up, which isn’t all that wrong considering the context of finding something very important about her out that would shift everyone's perception of her, but it does definitely show distance imo, even with this being after the dragon arc at chapter 29. He thinks of her as silly and sketchy at that point as per the scene with Leed... It's rocky, it's rocky, but they do hash things out together and continue to respect each other's perspective and points, as seen for eample how they strategize together when they meet Shuro and Kabru's parties.
And yes, that's super interesting!! The scene after his talk with Leed where he admits he cares about the party member is the point where Chilchuck stops pretending to only be in it for the money and he lets himself bond with the others more, so it makes sense to me that he'd have processed the whole "Marcille dark elf" thing and moved past it, but it does show a lot of trust in Marcille that even despite her dark magic show he goes to her for strategy talk and like, doesn't worry about her doing faux-pas and getting themselves killed or in jail unlike with Laios or Senshi which he feels the need to monitor lol.
I think the bicorn chapter is the chapter that truly cements them as having a relationship in its own right. He opened up about himself and let her in on personal aspects of his life, and that makes him finally ready to fully drop the wall of "coworkers only, no friends nope, our relationship starts and stops at when we enter and leave the dungeon". And of course by the end he's straight up saying he'll introduce her to his family lol <3
Conclusion
So yes overall they do seem to know each other the way longtime acquaintances would, and they have a good grasp on each other’s character, but their vision of each other is severely kneecapped by other factors, Marcille seeing him as a kid and him having a bias against elves and mages and also just optimistic nosy people lol. Chilchuck is only interested in working with her efficiently, without making friends, and besides him being a coworker whose skills are very needed Marcille is only interested in him in a gossip curiosity way and in a ‘Aww I should make an effort to include the kid in things, he should open up more!’ patronizing and infantilizing way. You can’t really bond as an equal with someone you think is a kid after all, so early on it’s more of a caring after attention/interest she has for him, and the process of her growing to see him as an adult is very slow and gradual. They're tough to feasibly work with in a shipping sense early on, like yes ok they have very funny chemistry but at what cost... But I sure do love slow burns and complicated people growing to love each other through learning about them through thick and thin and compromising to better themselves and make it work, so!!
It’d be interesting to have marchil (wether platonic or romantic) fancontent exploring their pre-canon relationship, especially if we were to try and have them learn to know each other more and form a deeper bond and all, but it literally took all of canon to get them there. It took them having to do a desperate emergency dungeon dive with initially only 3 party members, where they don’t have any choice but to spend a lot of time in almost only each other’s company and have to forgo the usual boundaries, when fighting for each other’s lives and learning things about each other like being a 'dark elf' or a 'father of three'. It took 57 chapters and a lie-detecting virtue-detecting monster for him to open up about his wife and family, and who knows how long it’d have taken without that monster or without it having attacked him, serving as evidence that he’d been lying about it. Who knows how long he’d have been fine lying, y’know?? And learning that he cheated on his wife made her esteem for him tank, it’d have made them more tense with each other if anything if the bicorn hadn't proven his lie wrong. Beause it's def implied too that Chilchuck would have said that lie if super pushed int otalking about his wife, which would have happen with or without a bicorn appearing in their path right then.
In the end it’s like how Laios said, thank you Falin for being eaten, and thank you everyone for being the gender that you are, because if any detail had been different the adventure either wouldn’t have happened or would have happened very differently (worse). Best marchil slow burn is canon real?!! Jk there’s so much that could be done with them both pre-canon, during canon and post-canon, but yeahh they’re such complex characters with a complex dynamic that making it both organic and IC would be so hard.
I do like the take that he is attracted to her to some degree though, and I feel like Marcille has a general curiosity and interest in romance and maybe experiencing it herself, so I wouldn't say that spontaneous interest would be impossible, but the biggest obstacle is Chilchuck's wife situation tbh because the man is planning on staying faithful and celibate right up to at least divorce if not his grave lol.
Now I do want to write a canon divergent thing where Chil refused to try and tame the bicorn and the party kept on thinking he’d cheated on her and the new dynamic with Marcille though… Eventually she wants to understand him and ask about it, and it keeps getting worse, before it starts getting better because this time around exhaustion caught up to him and he didn’t need the bicorn to make him admit he hasn’t… The whole end thing of his arc would have to happen pretty differently man, whew, especially since he has a complex where he doesn’t see himself as a good man, not virtuous or moral, cowardly and selfish etc etc, so without having a monster with its objective monster senses going "ew you’re a virtuous husband I hate u" it’d have been harder for him to truly consider that maybe the situation isn’t quite as hopeless as he thought and he should at least try blablabla. But Marcille is the next best thing to a bicorn, she can psychoanalyze him and hype him up, I have faith I have faith.
Most feasibly though I feel like pre-canon fics with them would be ficlets of moments in which they unexpectedly interacted and went the small extra mile of going beyond small talk and both try to connect a bit, learning to know each other just a bit more, piquing interest or curiosity or making them re-evaluate each other, that’d be fun.
Like you said it's not a topic that's often analyzed and all, so I ended up going all out and being somewhat rambly... Apologies apologies, hopefully this wasn't hard to follow along with, and was good food for thought and had good points!
Maybe it feels a bit far from your initial question that was only about going from their first meeting to the start of canon, but I feel like only analyzing their early relationship in that scope and consider the first hurdle in them growing closer fully over and done with doesn't encapsulate the core of their issues with each other and how they deal with them and eventually overcome them. It took a lot of time and insistance and efforts and for their prejudices to be challenged and proven wrong many, many times for it to truly stick and for them to be truly comfortable and open with each other. Early marchil truly has traumabonded retail coworkers energy to me lol, speaking from experience and traumabonded being meant as an hyperbole.
