#<- making fun of performers like. unironically being mean about it. not lovingly

[jamjacket1992]

I guess what I'm saying is sometimes you experience music in such an intense, even physical way that it feels close to sexual ecstasy. it's why he often looks like he's about to orgasm when he's singing and dancing. you have to let a song IN your body and let it possess you, and it feels ecstatic. I think he just instinctively understood that and Allowed it to happen to him, and that made him such a powerhouse on stage

[asgardianthot]

Aftercare (Steve/Bucky)

Dom/sub aftercare, angst

summary: Steve takes care of his sub, no matter how reluctant he is to it.

word count: 2996

warnings: mentions of BDSM (previous to the scenario), one unintended injury

Steve Rogers was known for many things, but kinky wasn’t one of them…

…one of the things people knew about him, that is, keeping in mind how he’d been working me with chains, spanking me and fucking the living breath out of me for the past hour.

Even though we’d both caught our breaths, I was left devastated on the bed, laying on my stomach as my bare ass was still heated red. I could have moved, probably, but taking in mind my recent submission and dedication, I believed I deserved to act as a ragdoll. So did Steve, who was already retrieving the soothing lotion and rambling about getting me some water or whatever.

“You okay?” he asked for the seventh time.

I sighed from exhaustion, given both by my sore body, and by his insistent question. No, I wasn’t perfectly fine, my back and arms were slightly hurting, my ass and butt cheeks were killing me, the marks left by the handcuffs in my flesh hand were burning, I had a small cut on my lip from biting on it that wasn’t majorly uncomfortable but I could still taste the iron in my mouth, and everything felt as if I’d ran a marathon. However, I wasn’t dying, he hadn’t done anything more than he’d done before and I had already answered to his question the other six times.

Plus, it’s what I loved more than anything. Being roughed up by Steve.

“I’ll have that water.” I mumbled, merely for him to shut up about it.

He nodded with a small smile, rushing to the bathroom to get me what I had seen myself forced to ask for. He came back with his boxer briefs on, still allowing me to stare at his sculpted body, glistening with the lingering of sweat sticking, and I thought to myself it wasn’t too much of a bad view to die looking at.

“Here.” He sat down on the bed where I propped myself on my elbow to drink from his a glass held by his hand, making myself useless.

I stared into his eyes while sipping it at first, thanking him with my gaze, then focused on gulping the water down as I was desert-like thirsty and hadn’t realized it before. Once I was finished, I fell back on my side with a loud puff of air.

“Better?” Steve’s puppy eyes smiled down at me while his hand, one that had been choking me minutes earlier, was now caressing my shoulder with extreme care.

A small grin made its way into my face although I was doing no effort to conceal my tired eyes. So I just closed them and nodded, practically getting ready to take a nap before Steve started to kiss my cheekbone over and over again, with the cutest caring pecks a grown man is able to give. I enjoyed the moment for as long as it went on, until he stopped to check the red marks on my ass.

“Looks painful.” He commented when his palm grazed the irritated skin, and I knew he was hinting the possibility of putting some lotion on it.

“It’s fine.” I groaned, then motioned behind me by tilting my head a little. “My back’s not, though.”

It was meant to be a witty comment, even if there was some truth to it. The sore feeling in my ass and cheeks wouldn’t even become bruises, and I had probably mildly bruised skin somewhere in my body, but the scratches on my back meant my flesh was exposed and therefore the feeling was a bit worse at that specific moment.

Steve hovered over me to check, immediately standing up to circle the bed and examine me from behind. “Damn, I’m sorry.” He said in a low voice, not really feeling overwhelming guilt, to be candid.

His fingertips ran through the red trails, the burning sensation immediate but bearable. The Captain ended up massaging some lotion into it, anyways, even though I told him it wasn’t necessary. And good thing I didn’t try and stop him, for it truly was soothing after all. After laying a few kisses right under my nape where my hair stopped, he covered my corpse-like body with the blankets and returned to his original spot, where he sat next to me.

“You know, you’re kinda pretty.” I mumbled. “When you’re not unbearably annoying.”

Steve rolled his eyes with a smile, moving some sticking hair off of my forehead. “I just take care of you, you masochist.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “You seem to love when I’m a masochist.” I said in a high tone, mocking how hypocritical he could be when it come to an activity performed by two people, and one he enjoyed so much, sometimes I forgot it was me who offered it in the first place and felt like he bribed me into it. “You just love being a pain in my ass after… well, literally being a pain in my ass.”

The blonde burst out laughing in reaction to my comment. He always was easy to embarrass, he would blush at the slightest joke or dirty comment, yet turned into something completely different when I kneeled in front of him, mouth open. I’d beg for release and he would spank me to shut me up, but sure, laugh like a toddler when I mention butt sex.

He went to kiss my wrist, lovingly caress the marks left by the cuffs, as he always did, yet this time it wasn’t as easy to move my, up until that moment, motionless limb. When he took a hold of my right wrist, the one arm I hadn’t moved merely out of instinct, the one made out of flesh and bone, the scorching pain made me hiss loudly.

“What?” Steve let go of my wrist, a terrified expression plastered on his face and wide-opened blue eyes piercing through mine, searching for answers.

I avoided his gaze, having trouble putting on a false worry-less face which ended up looking just confused. As I grabbed my own wrist with care, I sensed how absolutely wrecked it was, however being now prepared for the sensation, the pain didn’t take me by surprise and I was able to conceal any outer representation of it.

“It’s fine.” I lied, giving him a small smile, rubbing the skin with harsh metal fingers, which didn’t help.

Steve’s eyes were going nuts, scanning my face, scanning my hand, scanning my body, as if there were something else he’d missed, like a sword dug in my back or something. I could see the worry building up for he didn’t buy my poor acting.

“Let me see.” He insisted, his voice now a little sterner.

I shook my head and turned on my back to rest my head against the pillow, trying to forget about my wrist. I knew he would make a big deal out of it, blame himself, treat me even more like porcelain, as if it were possible. I only needed to heal the bone in question, not discuss it with an overprotective mess of a dom.

The man sat up straighter, still examining my face and torso. “Buck, let me see.”

“Mind grabbing me a sweatshirt?” I asked to derail the topic.

He held a serious and concerned expression, that was beginning to turn into anger, but complied, as he physically couldn’t not spoil me in aftercare, which implied accepting my every request, which were usually little to nothing. When he came back with the item, I received it with my good hand, however had trouble putting it on.

“Let me help.”

“I’m fine.” I raised my voice a little on exasperation, having already said those two words around twenty times before.

Nevertheless, I was not fine, taking in consideration the trouble it meant to slide my aching arm through the sleeves. I made a grimace that was impossible to control, followed by a grunt. Now he was definitely worried.

Not minding my opinions anymore, he walked up to me from the side of the bed and gently lifted my arm, concentrated on the hurting articulation, which happened to burn like a bitch when he held it in his hand. This time the noise that escaped me sounded much more like an annoyed grunt, mostly from holding back the pain but also out of real annoyance towards Steve’s stubbornness and hero complex.

“I hurt you.” He let out, examining the articulation.

I simply sat there, legs dangling off the bed, that big sweatshirt covering me all the way down to my thighs and a dead look on my face. It felt as if he were to yell at me like this was somehow my fault, which excessively-technically, it was; I was the one to always push myself to the limit, but those kinds of things don’t necessarily matter when you’re full of superserum and heal rapidly. Still, the image made Steve extremely upset.

“Was it the cuffs?” he questioned, still not facing me.

“I guess so, it’s where you put it last, didn’t you?” the words came out a tad too sarcastic for anyone’s liking, but I didn’t mean to take them back.

He closed his eyes. “I’m serious, Buck. You’re hurt.” Steve then let go of my hand smoothly to avoid any pain and rested one hand on his hip, more angry-pose than anything, even thought it was hard not to picture him as a model with such a sight. “Not fun-sex-hurt, but actually hurt. I hurt you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Hand me my underwear?” I extended my arm, ignoring his overreaction.

He turned around to fulfill my command, not shutting up though. “This shouldn’t have happened. How did it happen?” he ranted while handing me the item.

“It was just an accident.” I said in a low voice, receiving the boxers and doing my best not to grimace while sliding it up my legs, but failing miserably. “It’s not- agh- a big deal.”

The ridiculous contradiction in my sentence made Steve tilt his head with a sad frown, a mixture between frustration and desperation for my refusal to let him do everything for me, or at least recognize the injury as important. He kneeled in front of me.

“Here, let me.”

“Go away.” I said unironically, however I felt like he received the words lightheartedly.

He insisted, which only made me feel even more humiliated as he tried to hold onto my boxers.

“Gimme.”

“I said go away!” I pushed back, hitting the back of my legs with the bed end and therefore falling on my butt; Steve stood back up and stared at me with a frown that had become much angrier, to which I cooled down and lowered my voice. “Can you stop acting like this? It’s insane.”

“No! What’s insane is whatever you’re doing!” he yelled down at me all of a sudden. “I broke your wrist, Bucky, how the hell do you expect me to react? I broke your fucking wrist!”

The scolding I was enduring had me looking down with shame, and I took the opportunity to lift the item of clothing that still laid right below my knees. I pushed it up my bum and accommodated myself, using my hand as little as possible.

“I didn’t notice.” I mumbled under my breath.

The way Steve’s voice rang across the room like a bark had me frowning up at him with something I couldn’t quite decipher, but walked along the lines of embarrassed and sad.

“What’s next? I choke you to death because you didn’t make me to stop?” he threw his hands out in the air, making a loud slapping noise when they fell at his sides. “I thought you were aware of a thing as simple as a safeword!”

Truth be told, the man had a fair ground to stand on regarding the why he was so disturbed. It was very easy for me to care little to nothing about my well-being. Hell, if Steve hadn’t been there to reach into my post-Hydra emotional hole and pull me out into his arms, I probably wouldn’t even be there in that room to receive his yelling. And my actions only confirmed it to him, the way I copied how reckless he was when it came to missions, how I didn’t mind leaving a wound unattended, the amount of times I forgot my body was mine and not the machine they had told me it was.

Technically, yes, this was somehow my fault for not noticing. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to apologize for something that held me as the primary victim. I was the one who got hurt, meaning Steve shouldn’t had been so tough on me for it.

He broke the tense silence with a puff of air, not raising his voice anymore. “Goddamn it, Buck!” he sighed, followed by his face falling on both of his hands in frustration.

I wasn’t entirely sure if it was caused by a fair mixture of my negligence and his decision to yell at me, or if one of those two weighed more than the other. Yet everything in my body pushed me to comfort him, not allow him to wallow by himself. I stood up slowly, contemplating his still body which barely shook his head a little, and walked to him where I could grab his arm tenderly.

“Okay, I’m sorry.” I gave in, the slightest hint of annoyance in my voice. “I’ll be more careful. But I really didn’t notice.”

Instead of arguing back, Steve pulled me into a hug, which I reciprocated while avoiding any rough motions with or near my hand. He pressed the sides of our heads together and sighed again, this time more painfully.

“I can’t hurt you. I just can’t.” the way his thumb ran up and down my shoulder let me know he was apologetic more than anything. “I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t wanna yell.”

I remembered when I first told him what I was into, and he had thought he wasn’t capable of doing it, cause he didn’t wanna lay a finger on me if it was going to be painful in any way. But then we tried it, and he realized it was a different kind of pain and it very quickly grew on him. He liked playing like that, pretending to enjoy watching me suffer when all he really enjoyed was hear me beg, because it made him feel needed and in control.

He might have been the captain out there, but when it came to us both, he always said he had no say in his feelings or actions whatsoever, like I could ask him the world and he’d steal it from the entire population just for me. I never wanted to exceed those limits, never wanted to take advantage of his will. I even sometimes pretended he never confessed such thing to me.

“You didn’t hurt me, I hurt myself.” I did my best to ease the moment and comfort him. “And it’ll heal tomorrow.”

Steve kissed my forehead, then my temple, then cheekbones, until it led us into a sweet kiss. After staring deep into my eyes, as if we could read each other’s minds by doing it, he led me to sit down on the mattress, where he took a seat right next to me.

“I love you.” He said seriously. “So much, if anything were to happen to you…”

I simply stared down to my hands. “It’s already happened, remember? I can take it.”

Whatever torment he thought he was capable of unwillingly, was nothing compared to the things I had actually endured, and nothing Steve could ever do would even approach anything done by Hydra. He meant safety. I never had wanted to draw the psychological link between Hydra and my kinks, but I was pretty sure it has to do with catharsis, perhaps allowing the person I feel most safe with have their way with me in a healing manner.

He, however, didn’t enjoy any idea that compared him with the people who abused me. I could see it in his eyes when I peaked then looked back down to my hands, which he grabbed with utter care and held in his own.

As he pressed our hands against his chest, I could feel his voice buzzing. “I don’t want you to. I’m supposed to take care of you, not the opposite.” Suddenly, there was a hint of a smile in his pink lips. “You gotta let me take care of you, no matter how annoying I can be.”

We both smiled, him pleased with his reference to my complaints earlier, and me, giving into his warmness. Sometimes I had a hard time fathoming the idea of a person being the embodiment of the concept of haven. He kissed my metal arm, a gesture he didn’t do often but it reminded me he was the only person who knew how sentient it was, how much of a part of me and not just a weapon.

“I’ll get you some painkillers, okay?” he leaned to drop a kiss in my forehead before tugging a strand of hair behind my ear. “A heating pad and some hot chocolate.”

I frowned at the last addition, however a small smirk escaping me. “What’s the chocolate for?”

Steve only smiled as he got up. “To spoil you.”

Somehow he still got away with his own, for I gave into allowing him to pamper me without a single protest. And I figured, I wouldn’t care being looked after like that. When he got back with the promised, I laid in Steve’s arms while he pressed play on our old TV that we could barely use despite being a dinosaur for the likes of everyone else in this century.

And sure, I also figured there was nothing else I would rather be doing.

[nostalgebraist]

I saw a post about the Homestuck game and tried to remember liking Homestuck.  I mean, I still like Homestuck -- the parts of it I liked have not changed (well, except for the blue arms) since I read them back in 2011, and although my taste has probably changed, that’s not what’s making me see it this way.  I think what’s happened is basically that I’ve grown to dislike Andrew Hussie, and that makes it hard to immediately enjoy (as opposed to “enjoy by remembering how I used to enjoy it”) anything in his very distinctive style.

I should clarify -- Andrew Hussie may well be a great guy if you know him in person, I have no idea and don’t mean to suggest ill of him.  By “dislike Andrew Hussie” I largely mean “dislike Andrew Hussie’s style,” but it’s more than that -- maybe “dislike Andrew Hussie’s creative persona.”  His public comments on his work, and his pattern of behavior (in update schedule, interactions with fans, etc.) seems like it forms a continuous whole with the style.  I’ll just write “Andrew Hussie” in quotes, to distinguish this from the real human being.

“Hussie” feels very . . . limited.  There’s a brilliance to his style, but you get the feeling he couldn’t possibly create anything that wasn’t obviously created by him; you don’t get the feeling he ever learned the ordinary rules of art or fiction or humor or even the English language, although it’s easy not to care, since his breaking of rules is so often clever or interesting rather than just clumsy.  He can write, for instance, in this particular tone of ironic grandiloquence which is full of crunchy, tasty turns of phrase and arresting images and metaphors, but you don’t ever see him dial this down to an “normal,” unironic, subtler elevated style -- you get the feeling he can’t do any of the constituent pieces on their own, just the whole thing, like a gesture he can do with his hands but can’t explain.  He has his own distinctive sense of humor, which is obsessed with fiction tropes (specifically, declaring that reality “should” follow tropes, whether it really will or not), and with lovingly detailed ribbing towards “bad” media.  This is often hilarious by anyone’s standards, but he does it -- that specific brand of humor, down to the individual beats sometimes -- more consistently and repetitively than anyone would unless they couldn’t do anything else.

“Hussie” also has a creative persona which resists all criticism and asks all to trust in the artist’s sacred creative vision.  This fits with the style: he cannot adapt to criticism, he cannot be what anyone else wants him to be, he can only do the one thing he knows how to do, and push it to further and further heights, and trust in the fact that the rest of humanity has generally been delighted with this eccentric performance so far.  The voice he uses when talking as “Andrew Hussie, creator of MSPA” feels not too distinct from “Andrew Hussie, the narrator of MSPA”; both write in a way that superficially feels very artificial, knowingly bombastic, hiding everything behind an ironic wink and an assurance that if you just relax and let yourself enjoy the show, the master magician will deliver.  This can be immensely frustrating, because you want him at some point to let up the act, to step out from the various ironic personae and “this is so much like that one bad movie” framing devices and talk to you straight, as a creative adult who puppeteers personae and framing for fun and profit.  But that never, ever happens.  Whether or not this is as deep as Hussie goes, it is as deep as “Hussie” goes.  Scratch the surface and you keep finding more surface; nothing is ever not a joke or a reference or a put-on, nothing is ever not implicitly in quotation marks (or more aptly, being recorded on a low-budget movie camera).  The hall of campy mirrors is endless.

If it isn’t already clear, I find this all very #relatable, and have often felt like I am doing tricks for the world in exactly this way.  But maybe it’s this that makes “Hussie” just so frustrating to me.  You want him to perform the final trick that is making the audience forget they’re at a magic show, to perform so hard he breaks through into the territory where you literally can’t tell his “acting” from anyone else’s “real behavior.”  I feel like I’ve reached that point in a lot of my, well, life, and it feels wonderful.  Whether he wants to or not, “Hussie” never quite gets there, and being who I am, it can be painful to watch.

Actually, he did get there, for a time.  Homestuck at its height can give you this feeling of transcendence, where every frame you can try to box it into does not fully capture it, and for a time “Hussie’s” style feels not notably limited but notably limitless.  The geeky, referential comedy is pulled off with such finesse that it feels like the work of some godlike being who’s whimsically decided to try its hand at a dorky webcomic and (accidentally, because it performs any act with equal godlike power) creates a dorky webcomic that is better than most things on planet earth.  The absurd plot, full of tropes and comic book powers, is somehow sustained by a crystalline deterministic structure of incredible intricacy which you feel you’d need a seminar course to fully understand.  The characters are crude cartoons, and yet they speak in such eerily animate voices you can’t quite believe any of them aren’t real people.  Everything works on every level of irony and non-irony, self-awareness and naivete, crudity and brilliance.  You stop checking Hussie’s antics for formal compliance with ordinary-person standards because he keeps passing your tests, even though he’s doing something clearly ridiculous.

Who cares if this weird kid’s fourth-grade teacher says he can’t do any of the homework and should be held back a grade?  He just proved the Riemann Hypothesis.  Admittedly, instead of concluding the proof with the customary “Q.E.D.” or Halmos symbol, he scrawled “OMG BUTT LAZERZ” all over the final page, but you see that’s actually a masterstroke of construction when one takes into consideration its echoes of his earlier work [five page explanation follows].  The weird kid is being being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.  It is for his novel Stacey is Annoying Because She Keeps Asking Why I Get to Have Cookies Even When I Have Told Her a Lot of Times That My Mom Packs My Lunch and I Don’t Really Get a Choice, Also She Keeps Talking About Weird Girl Stuff: A Comic Opera (in Prose).  The synopsis doesn’t really do it justice, but read it, and you will understand.

uu: WHAT MOST GIFTED ARTISANS WILL TELL YOU. IS THAT. CIRCLES ARE BASICALLY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO DRAW. uu: TRUST ME. uu: IT'S LIKE A PARADOX. A SHAPE WITHOUT ANGLES. WHAT?? uu: SO I FUCKING CHEATED. uu: I NAVIGATED THE IRRATIONAL PERIMETER BY MAKING A LOT OF EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE, TOTALLY LOGICAL MARKS. FORMING A WHOLE BUNCH OF LITTLE RIGHT ANGLES. uu: THE CHEATING PART HAPPENS WHEN I DO THIS A LOT. SO IT GOES IN A ROUND DIRECTION. uu: THIS ONE CAME OUT WELL I THINK. BUT THERE'S ROOM TO IMPROVE. uu: I HAVE THEORIZED THAT IF I KEEP MAKING BOGUS CIRCLES LIKE THIS. uu: WHILE DRAWING MORE AND MORE ANGLES. BUT SMALLER. SO SMALL THAT YOU START CAN'T SEEING THEM. uu: THAT THE ILLUSION OF THE CIRCLE WILL BE COMPLETE! AND PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IN THE FAKE CIRCLE. LIKE A BUNCH OF SUCKERS. uu: I BET NOBODY HAS THOUGHT OF THAT CIRCLE STRATEGY. I THINK I'M THE FIRST AT THIS IDEA. AND BEST AT IT ALREADY. uu: PEOPLE THINK I'M DUMB. ESPECIALLY THE VOICE IN MY HEAD. uu: AND THEY MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT ME BEING DUMB. uu: BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE SPECIAL WAY I DO THINGS. WHICH IS ALWAYS ACTUALLY. THE PERFECT WAY. uu: I AM. uu: A GENIUS!

But after 2011 “Hussie” was up to nothing except his old tricks, and those tricks got a little worn out, and “Hussie” was always -- reliably, infuratingly -- himself.  The finale was an animation about a frog, which the weird kid had been dreaming about for a decade -- executed by a team of up-and-coming artists who had become his acolytes.  It was, sources quote him as saying, “totally epic.”  The weird kid’s next novel is also about a frog, because frogs are cool, but this one has a funny top hat and raps about how dumb Stacey is.  The new frog’s flow is impeccable, but the critics focus sensibly on other matters, and they are ruthless this time.

In my fullest period of Homestuck obsession, I frequently compared “Hussie” to Nabokov.  This was a cute way of elevating “Hussie” and making myself sound smart, but there’s a real similarity there: the arrogant, seemingly artificial public persona; the unique and somewhat cramped sensibility, which is always great without stopping to be good; the indifference to all creative work besides their own and certain cherished reference ponts; the endless self-satisfied running-the-hands-over the artist’s own prior work and pre-existing obsessions; the elevation of those obsessions, in all their petty particularity, to higher and higher reaches of formal brilliance and technical achievement.  (See also.)  They take the treasured trivialities of their former years and make them “worthy of legitimate attention” by associating them with ingenuities of formal structure; to coin a word, they’re “nostalgebraists.”

Nabokov fooled them all, and got his star on the canonical map in the end, but “Hussie” may never pull it off.  It feels, anyway, like he had a chance and then lost it.