Eerie Indiana meme from Deifire

[froodle]

I received this one right before tumblr imploded and of course, immediately got distracted. Send me a character and I’ll list:

Favorite thing about them:
I was a weird kid into weird things who grew up to have a long history of falling for the Agent Mulder character in darn near everything, but my Marshall was probably my first crush on that particular trope. I love everything about him and still do: his ongoing quest for the truth, complete with obsessive journaling and cataloging of evidence; the uniqueness of Marshall-speak in his dialogue and voiceover narrations; his earnestness; the way he immediately jumps to the weirdest possible explanation for everything; his near-sibling relationship with Simon; his antagonistic semi-relationship with Dash. And the hair. I still love the very 90s hair.

Least favorite thing about them:
My least favorite thing about Marshall is probably also one of my favorite things. The narrative takes him seriously as protagonist and he’s written as a realistic human being. Which means he has realistic 13-year-old suburban kid flaws. He’s selfish sometimes. He hurts his best friend by ditching him more than once to go hang out with people his own age. He’s often oblivious to what his friends are going through, particularly the ones with terrible home lives. (See also: Dash.) All the stuff that made me actively mad at him when I watched Eerie the first time is some of the same stuff that fuels the fic now.

Favorite line:
Oh, there are so many, but I think I’m going to go with “Better weird than dead” because it’s kind of an iconic catchphrase and one that’s recently appeared in Karl Schaefer’s new show Z Nation (where this also happened).

brOTP:
Simon Holmes, now and forever. Let’s face it, Simon isn’t just Marshall’s best friend and most trusted associate, he’s pretty much the Tellers’ third kid.

OTP:
Hmm…let me think…Yeah, after something like 40 stories, not counting the stuff posted in collections and the unfinished ones on my hard drive, it’s probably safe to say I am never getting over Marshall Teller/Dash X. I’m not sure how I imprinted on a ship this hard in six whole episodes of canon, but I want to see them spend forever together, fighting the forces of weirdness and each other the whole time.

nOTP:
I don’t think I have any nOTPs with Marshall I’ve ever actually seen written. I mean, the idea of Teller!cest kind of squicks me and there are some characters I think about and know he could do way better, like Nick and/or Eddie from “ATM with a Heart of Gold.” Mayor Chisel is probably a no. Mr. Radford. Bigfoot. Old Bob the Tornado.

Random headcanon:
The minor case of lycanthropy Marshall catches in “Mr. Chaney” is something that he has to deal with for the rest of his life.

In the future, he refuses to sleep with Dash even in the most literal sense during the full moon because it’s so easy to transmit lycanthropy with just a scratch in this universe and given that they don’t know what Dash is, Marshall really doesn’t want to find out what were!Dash might be like.

Unpopular opinion:
I don’t know. Does something like the Marshmelon AU (where Devon and Melanie live and Marshall winds up with them instead) count as an opinion? For someone who has such a strong OTP, I am sort of a multishipper with Marshall. I think the nature of the canon makes it easy to decide “But that was in another universe” and pull at the threads of “What if…?” a lot which is fun, though I know those will be less popular fics. (Even less popular than the ones where I’ve let Dash succeed in killing or otherwise completely defeating Marshall, which has become my accidental Yule tradition.)

Song I associate with them:
I have entire playlists I associate with him, though most of the songs on them are ones I associate with Marshall/Dash specifically. This is one of my favorites, not just because it’s era-appropriate for the time they would have been getting together, but also because some of the elements of the video (like the kid in the TV) are just so Eerie to me.

Another R.E.M. song that works for Marshall specifically is this one, especially if you substitute his name for Michael’s in the lyrics.

“The Roller Rink on the Edge of Forever” has an entire 70s-and-80s soundtrack, which is something I’m thinking about sharing as soon as the fic itself is finished.

Favorite picture of them:
Right now, it might be this stupid mashup I just stumbled across in an attempt to catalog all the original content I have on here for possible migration.