Friends

A/N: After a really, really long break, I have returned to writing. Here's chapter eight of Boy Bride. I think I've improved as a writer! Yay! ^__^

Title: Boy Bride
Fandom: Original
Genre: Romance, angst, drama, fantasy, mythology, humor.
Pairing: OMCxOMC
Rating: M
Author: Angel_Gospel (aka, TheLadyPendragon)
Disclaimer: Mine. Roar!
Warnings: Language, sexual content, violence, slash, relationship with a minor, mentions of mpreg, etc.
Summary: A gay prince, an unintentionally sexy foreigner, and the meddling Wizard who just wants them to get laid. Everyone else is just along for the ride. A fairy-tale unlike any you've ever read. MxM, Slash, Yaoi, Possible Mpreg.
 

Chapter 2:  Willard Street, West Avenue, and Alfred Street

Nick Sparks was, most of his friends agreed, a very good-looking, generally congenial guy.  Obviously of Italian descent, he had brown hair, brown eyes, dark features, was just short of tall, and was thin but athletic; he dressed, like a typical young person of nineteen or twenty, in clothes mostly purchased from the mall.  His face was somewhat long and slightly angular, with prominent cheekbones and thin cheeks, though he did not appear gaunt.  His chin was very noticeably cleft.

Nick was also, most of his friends agreed, a little odd at times; but at the James School almost everyone was at least a little odd, and so this was usually overlooked.

• It's the perfect sequel. Merry Gear Solid 1 was fun and diverting, but 2 just takes everything good about it and capitalises on it. It is fantastic. Getting rid of Santa as the main character and making it Old Snake and Otacon is to the game's infinite benefit, because it makes the game feel more familiar. The kid sprite from the first game is back, but he's voiced by what sound like actual children this time, and is therefore IMMEDIATELY ADORABLE.
  
  
• It's technically stunning. The level designs are great - maybe the game as a whole is a bit too linear and there's a double backtrack, but that's nitpicking considering what the canon Metal Gears are like. The graphics are gorgeous. And there is an awesome fourth-wall puzzle at the end which will make your brain skip around with glee.
  
  
• It's a damn good parody and funny as hell. Lots of parodies just use the trappings of someone else's work and then launch themselves off into their own stylistic stratosphere, and many others imitate the other work without commenting on it. But Merry Gear Solid 2 gets it perfect. There's maybe one point where a character repeats a joke that was in the canon almost ad verbatim, but it's really not big enough to be annoying and the reference becomes important later on in the game. The rest of the jokes are new. Most of them fit in with the MGS-style humour - innocent and slow-paced, cute rather than hilarious. The rest are some of the most excruciating puns you will ever hear in your life.
  
  The more explicit parody elements are astute and genuinely funny. I don't want to spoil too much, but at a certain point Snake gets stripped naked and the game turns into MGS2 (and MGS4) in a way that's creative and absolutely hysterical, rather than a few obvious 'wtf who is this naked woman i'm playing as THIS GAME MAKES NO SEEEENSE~' gags.
  
  
• It works as probably the most extreme crackfic in the fandom, really. Snake and Otacon really never break character - they're just a tiny bit more aware of the fourth wall than they are in canon, but that's about it. Some of the more subtle humour is character-based and comes from their interactions, like Otacon acting awkward around Snake when he puts on a reindeer mask because he thinks Snake is into furdom; or overly describing completely random weaponry.
  
  While it's vicious, there's too much love and care taken to make it a straight skewering. There's jokes about some really obscure bits of canon, including a reference to Ghost Babel (not a funny reference, but a reference nonetheless). I still haven't figured out if the 'all your Christmases must have been soul-crushingly terrible' joke really is a reference to Metal Gear 2, but it doesn't matter because there's enough mentions of that game in there already including a puzzle lifted basically straight from it and the fact that the 'little girl' is obviously modelled after the female Zanzibar orphan. And most people forget about those games. And it makes me happy that they were put into a silly parody game. Because it's nice knowing there's someone else out there as pathetic as me. (UNRELATED - I decided recently that Metal Gear 2 is actually my favourite Metal Gear in terms of what it brought to the table. It's terribly flawed, but it's easily the only most original game.)
  
  
• The identity of Who. Oh my god. Best plot twist ever. Shat brix.
  
  
• EASTER EGGS. There's several rooms which only exist for jokes. The creator made up an entire fictional game so he could make an MGS1 visual parody in one of the optional menus. Some of the kids have little setpieces - my favourite is the Australian kid in the restaurant.
  
  
• The music. I wish there was a way I could describe to you what my face was doing around the time I realised that the music in Galuade Gardens was a remix of Jingle Bells in the style of the Caution music from MGS3, but I couldn't see so you'll just have to imagine it. Some of the remixes are really, really subtle, and I didn't notice the 'Merry Christmas (War Is Over)' mix until I saw it in the credits and listened to the song again.
  
  
• Voice acting. Not only are the impersonations really, really careful, but the actors don't concentrate on impersonation at the expense of, you know, acting. I want to cuddle the guy playing Otacon. He was amazing.

If I decided to host a Dollars Trilogy marathon on livestream, would you be interested? (note - livestream is a streaming site which has a chat function so we could all comment on the movies)

Considering the marathon will be about six and a half hours long, do you have any suggestions for a good time/date if I do it?

Oooiooioooooooo~!

• All are pretty violent. In the UK, FoD is a 15 certificate and FaFDM and GBU are 18 certificates, but by today's standards they're really tame. Think about Metal Gear level - violent, but not extensively so and not gornographic. More specifically for each movie:
  
  
  • A Fistful of Dollars is the tamest. There's some torture (beating) and someone getting blasted with a shotgun.
    
    
  • For a Few Dollars More has a fairly graphic rape scene and a suicide, and is therefore the most brutal of them, in my opinion. It also has some non-graphic torture (beating) and drug use (either cannabis or opium).
    
    
  • The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has a pretty graphic torture scene (beating, strangling and a non-graphic eye gouge), and an extended and very tense scene where a character's airway is slowly being cut off. There's a very quick and descriptionless mention of one of the sympathetic main characters being a rapist (which is pretty easy to write out of your mental headcanon), a character is forced to walk in the desert and ends up with severe blisters, and one character is killed by having their head bashed repeatedly against a sharp rock.

First chapter up! I apologize in advance - still in the un-beta'ed stage. Still looking for a beta-reader somewhere... As usual, critiques and comments are love :)

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