Had No Idea How Badly We All Needed "The Girls Night Out Job Pt. 2" In 2025

there is probably no one else out there who's fans of both leverage (the tv show) and graceling (the book series by kristin cashore) but. my thoughts are Thinking and I have to share anyway.

specifically I am thinking about katsa (graceling) and eliot spencer (leverage). just. the shared narrative of being highly skilled fighters used as tools by powerful men. thinking of yourself as a monster. the fear of being controlled by someone who can twist your mind. leck and randa and moreau. having to live with the terrible things you’ve done. am I worthy of being loved? am i more than the worst things I’ve ever done? being made to feel like a dog!!

"A monster that refused, sometimes, to behave like a monster. When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?" (Graceling, pg 137)

"Well, and if she must be a dog, at least she would no longer be in this man's cage. She would be her own, she would possess her own viciousness, and she would do what she liked with it." (Graceling, pg 167)

also thinking about who would win in a fight. I'm leaning katsa because of her grace (gracelings have a special power/superpower/extreme skill, and hers is fighting, basically) and because we never see anyone beat her in a fight... but we also never see anyone beat eliot, really, and modern fighting techniques are surely better than medieval fighting techniques. he'd be stronger, but she'd be faster, and neither of them would go down easily. idk. I'd love to see it.

(I can't figure out any good way to put them together tho because they live in very different worlds and an au would mess with what makes them who they are. maybe some kind of dimensional travel?)

You guys went all in on becoming better people and you brought me along for the ride.

Pitching Leverage to a socialist friend: "The heist team gets hired by people who have been victimized by these corporate baddies, so there is always a scene at the beginning where some lady is telling the team 'my dad died because he couldn't afford his diabetes medication after the new factory owner Joshua Dirtbag the Third cut his hours' and the team is like 'say no more. we will put on elaborate disguises and convince him to bet on a fake racehorse, and somehow at the end of it you will have all his money and he will go to jail'."

so I know I'm not the only one who saw the United Healthcare news and immediately thought of Leverage

but my thought process was, if Leverage was involved, they wouldn't have been the ones to kill the CEO. not their style. so I'm imagining Leverage in the middle of this whole con to destroy the CEO when out of the blue someone else comes in and just murders him.

hardison: so i did all that *insert technobabble hacking nonsense* for nothing??

eliot: no offense to the shooter, but if we wanted him dead, i could have killed him so much cleaner and made it look like an accident. amateur move.

*Poll options based on less common relationship tags that co-occur with the Leverage fandom tag on Ao3. Just for fun, please no yelling over preferences Haha!

in Leverage, in the background of some scenes you can see ads for or clips of another Dean Devlin production, The Librarian movie series. seems like The Librarian movies exist in the Leverage universe. BUT! at the end of the first david job, sophie’s storage unit contains the Judas Chalice, which is the titular arrifact in "The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice". it’s not an actual artifact irl. so there’s kinda 2 possibilities in my head at the moment:

sophie stole the prop, and considers it so precious that it’s stored amongst her stash of very real, very old artifacts. she’s like the worlds biggest Librarian fan.

the plot of The Librarian movies & tv show are real in the Leverage universe, and the movies are dramatic retellings of real events. sophie owns stolen cursed artifacts because of course she does.

(notably, sophie is seen holding & blowing into the judas chalice right after admitting that she has the real second david… you know, her big betrayal? the reveal of her judas kiss? etc etc)

Just once, I'd love for someone from Hardison's past to show up and attempt to throw a wrench in things

decided to rewatch the carnival job tonight and as much as i love when the cons get goofy, or there's a really satisfying gloat at the end, my most favorite thing is the way this episode goes from "this is a standard con" to "kid's missing? scorched fuckin earth baby" in less than 30 seconds

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)

Im so utterly enamoured and charmed and impressed by Breanna. She is so unbelievably great as a character, and i adore the actress and her skills.

Also i like how she isn't forced to be feminine in the way most female characters are, yet also not forced to be serious and grave. I love her style. I'm not sure/qualified to call her butch, but it does come into my mind (and she is seriously butch compared to most other characters on tv, and specifically also on leverage).

She is so cheerful and goofy and energetic, and while she is all that, it's also just a cover for her deeper issues and darker life experiences, and they let it blink through beautifully.

I like her so much, I'm so excited about any minute, any second we get to see of her.