When You Call My Name It's Like A Little Prayer I Hear You Call My Name And It Feels Like Home + "i'll

I think Andrew's desperation to live is a little overlooked in the fandom. It's not explicitly stated in the books, other than his SH scars, but I honestly think it is so important to understanding him and his motivations.

Did Andrew ever plan to live past graduation? Before Kevin came along and promised his life would have worth? Did he plan on disappearing when Aaron eventually walked away from him? Believing nobody would notice if he was gone?

He clung on purely for Aaron, to make sure Aaron had a bright future ahead and could go live without him. To make sure that Nicky could go back to Erik without worry.

Before Neil, Andrew didn't believe he had anything to live for. He made a very one sided deal with Kevin to find something, anything, to build his life around after graduation, believing his brother would leave him alone once again.

Because at the heart of it all, Andrew doesn't want to die. Not really.

Andrew has chronic depression and he is suicidal. He sits on the edges of roof tops to feel. He puts his life on the line again and again with little regard for his own safety. He makes promises that put him at a severe disadvantage.

His promises are what keeps him alive, what forces him to live. Dying would break his promise, and Andrew has suffered enough from broken promises.

He doesn't want to die. He wants to survive those who beat him down. He wants to move on. He wants to get better. He wants to live.

He just doesn't know how.

You know, I think that you can pin down EXACTLY what kind of person someone is depending on whether they prefer Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights

Look me in the eyes and tell me Neil 'not if it means losing you' Josten isn't Wall-E.

Look me in the eyes and tell me Andrew 'stand down and let me deal with it' Minyard isn't Eve.

Look in my eyes and tell me Kevin 'he can't exist without exy' Day isn't M-O.

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

(CORRECTION: At least, they did until Nimoy passed away in 2015. Thanks @richie-is-rich!)

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about it before, but I really love Nora’s writing style in how unique it is about revealing and describing things. We didn’t know neil’s natural hair and eye color until the end of the Raven king. Before that, it would mention him checking his roots all the time as he made sure none of it showed, but we were never told what color it actually was until it became a permanent part of his appearance. We didn’t know his height until the king’s men when compared to an opposing backliner. I know it’s easy to forget, but we didn’t actually know that his father was named Nathan, or that Lola was a person that existed (+ everyone else in Nathan’s inner circle, or that he even had an inner circle) , until their first scenes where they’re present. There are a lot more instances where this happens in the series, and I haven’t actually encountered another book that’s done this before and it’s really interesting.

Bones is spirk's no. 1 shipper

Star Trek: The Original Series S01E29 "Operation: Annihilate!"

Hozier writing De Selby (Part 2) inspired by a character in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman makes the music video so much more compelling and absolutely bananas to watch, not just because Domhnall Gleeson is a treasure and delivers a killer performance without even saying anything, but also like… let me get into the lore of this:

The Third Policeman is about this mad scientist/philosopher/scholar who robs and murders someone in the midst of academic pursuit and enters this literal nightmare world where he’s punished by these policemen who are monsters and is doomed to repeat his mistakes forever. And the visuals of Domhnall Gleeson’s character are so similar the drawing of the central characters of the novel as seen above. The shabby brownish clothing, the hair colour, the shovel in hand, it all matches.

The story is also a slight condemnation of science and views trying to establish ultimate truth as prideful and heresy. As an article from The Irish Times on The Third Policeman states: “As a consequence, all theories are crackpot, all knowledge is useless and the only meaning is that life is a hell of endless repetition.”

it also states, on the novel: “To illustrate the futility of scientific theorising, O’Brien uses a recurrent theme of infinite regression. One of the characters has eyes with a pinpoint behind which are eyes with another pinpoint and so on to infinity; the narrator wonders if his soul is “a body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum”; De Selby studies in a series of parallel mirrors infinite reflections of his face going back to early youth; and Policeman MacCruiskeen has constructed a series of nested chests with the last few so small that they are no longer visible to the naked eye. So speculation and experiment are mad activities that literally disappear into nothingness.”

And then we see Dumhnall Gleeson in the music video on a cycle he doesn’t know how to break, some violent repetition where he’s burying himself and going crazy, and the imagery of several versions of one person fits this PERFECTLY.

I'm gonna start going through my Andreil playlist and making more of these

Andrew Minyard Neil Josten

what am i supposed to do with the fact that kirk is like "oh btw the words 'let me help' are stronger even than 'i love you' haha" and then in the very next episode spock says 'let me help' to kirk

I'm convinced that Snow was the one who came up with the "rule change" in THG (idc what the movie did with it--they didn't know TBOSAS and it was less than convincing they way they did it).

Just think about it. We start off the Games with Katniss's courageous action volunteering for her younger sister. Then Peeta did something radical. He decided to follow through on his declaration of love to Katniss and did everything he could in the arena to save her. Getting sponsors, teaming up with the Careers, getting Katniss to leave and fighting Cato for her. Can you imagine what that was doing in the Capitol? In the Districts? How could you watch someone do that and not hope for a happy ending, even as Peeta lay dying in the mud, whispering Katniss's name?

And then Katniss teams up with Rue and is devastated by her death. She stays with her, sings to her, until she dies. Bolstered by Peeta's words about not being a piece in their games and finally getting what he means, she decorates Rue with flowers. She honors her life and her unnecessary death. District 11 recognizes this and even though they have another tribute alive in the Games, send Katniss the bread.

In Snow's mind, everything about the games is starting to crack. Young love being selfless, sisterly affection defying the Capitol, comradery fostering between districts. He simply can't let it go on. He has to remind people in the Capitol and the Districts that this is not human nature. He is going to prove that. So he tells Seneca Crane to announce the rule change.

He expects Cato and Clove to make it to the final two. In their new advantage, they will become a deadly, mostly healthy team. Meanwhile, Snow can see that Katniss doesn't hold the same care for Peeta that he does for her (she had tried to kill him with tracker jackers, after all). Even if she goes to find him, she'll abandon him once it gets too hard, too dangerous. The hope of love triumphing will be met with annoyance at his injuries and agreeing to stay behind and not get his medicine. And even if she does, he'll still be too injured to truly be useful.

But things go awry. Thresh saves Katniss because of her kindness to a little girl he, too, saw as a younger sister. He kills Clove, bringing about Cato's wrath. And Katniss Everdeen turns out to be a better actress than expected.

No matter, though--once the rule change is revoked, the truth of the stripped-down human nature will come out. Oh, Peeta will throw out the ravings of a teenage boy high on hormones, but people will remember how awful they truly are when Katniss puts an arrow through his heart. After all, Snow's made that decision before. His lover or himself. Death in the woods or life with riches in the Capitol. It's easy, really, to make that decision. And people will remember even the best among them, even she who willingly risked her life to get medicine or volunteer for her sister, won't avoid killing in order to survive herself.

But Katniss calls their bluff, and Peeta goes along with it. They've chosen to protest the Hunger Games with their deaths. Seneca makes the call to announce two winners. Really, Snow was going to kill him either way. Someone has to be publicly accountable for the place he's in now, and Snow certainly isn't going to take credit for his idea. After this, he tries and tries to get Peeta and Katniss to have to kill each other. The Quarter Quell. The hijacking. But it never works. And not just because of them, but because a whole nation finally stands up and says Enough. We won't let this go on anymore. In the end, Snow was entirely wrong because he never truly understood love.