#[replies are officially all written and published]

[stormlight-queer-a-thon]

Welcome to the 2025 Stormlight Queer-A-Thon!

Hello! This is the blog for a Stormlight Archive multimedia fandom event spanning the month of June, run by @arborplasm! Its focus is on queer writing and art for, you guessed it, the Stormlight Archive.

Here's how it works: the current plan is that on Saturday, May 24, I'll be posting a list of tropes and prompts for the good people of Tumblr to get some inspiration and begin working on their projects. This is an extremely open-ended endeavor: you can of course use tropes that don't appear on the official list, and you can pick any Stormlight characters you like. Any length, any word count, any way you'd like to create. *Smut IS perfectly allowed, but nothing NSFW will be on the official prompt list. Feel free to get as kinky as you like.*

When the event officially begins on Sunday, June 1st, you can begin posting your creations! Anyone who wishes to join in is absolutely welcome!

Make sure to properly tag book spoilers and content warnings where applicable; let people know what they're getting into. I'll make a collection on AO3, and linking to your newly published fic on Tumblr is encouraged so I can reblog it here --- you can mention this blog in your post and/or tag it with #stormlight queerathon 2025 to help everyone find it.

One thing I'd like to encourage everyone to do is experiment with ideas and ships! Nale in drag. T4T Rlainarin. Butch Jasnah x Femme Venli. Demiromantic Radiant. Kalmoash yuri. Whatever your heart desires. See this as an opportunity to try something new! (If there were a points system, you'd get a *lot* of points for making something for a very rare ship, or even a ship that nobody else has written yet. And you'd get negative points for writing more Kadolin.. that last part is a joke. Mostly.) You can look at this wonderful index that the amazing @isdalinarhot made for ideas!

It should go without saying that terfs, transmeds, antis, and other assorted people-who-need-to-rethink-their-life are not welcome here. Don't harass anyone who posts something you don't like! Any kind of creation is welcome so long as it features queer characters or pairings.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Spontaneous declarations of love? Inexplicable desires to give me all your money? Leave a reply, send a message, or submit an ask!

Here's to lots of upcoming queer fandom shit!!

[floralseokjin]

💌

Hello everyone! It’s been a while! I didn’t mean to stay away for so long, and for that I apologise. Looking through my inbox, I’m touched that I’ve been missed. I’ve missed you all too! Thank you for checking in, and I plan on replying to all my messages asap. 

Now, considering it’s been over half a year, maybe you can already guess, but sadly I have stopped writing fanfic. I think deep down I knew 9 months to fall in love would be my last - I really put my all into that story - but I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. I’ve wanted to log in and interact with you all numerous times, but I thought a break would be best for me until I officially decided (and accepted) what to do. 

This isn’t goodbye though! 

While away, I have been (slowly) writing an original novel. I have 25k written right now and in the new year I really hope to share more details with you! Your support and excitement as I attempt to publish my own book would truly mean the world to me 🤧 

I’ve been on this site for seven years and I never imagined to gain the amount of readers I have. The love I’ve received over the years will always mean so much to me. I cherish every moment I spent writing for bts. Without them, none of it would have been possible. Because of them I discovered my joy for writing. I will always cherish this space. All the friends I made, the interactions I had with you all, whether it was anonymous or not. All the stories I posted. It all made me very happy 🥺

Of course, I do plan on sticking around, awaiting and celebrating bts’ return with you all. I just won’t be very active, but I would absolutely LOVE it if you stayed around for this new journey I’m attempting to embark on. I will keep you posted! 

Lots of love, Jordan 💖 

[sunflower567]

Callsign: Umbra Chapter 12: A Friendly Match

Masterlist

Word Count: 3,370

Edited: ✅

Published: April 25th, 2025

Last update/change: June 8th, 2025

Previous Chapter

Marine Raider Training Center, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina: 7:30 PM

“Thanks to you, it isn’t Captain anymore,” Davis snarled as he grabbed Imani’s arm harder, "I’ve been demoted to second lieutenant.”

“Wow two ranks, such a shame,” Imani replied sarcastically.

“Yeah, have to be here to be retrained, and I have to forfeit one month's pay for two months and not even mention getting a written reprimand on my record,” Davis continued, his voice becoming harder with each word, “I may never see captain rank again.”

“And how’s that my fault,” Imani asked, “You thought with your one inch pecker instead of your brain. Not my problem.”

“If you would have just shut the fuck up and let that little terrorist take the fall, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” He snarled, putting his arm against Imani's neck.

“You have three seconds to get that arm away from my neck or you're going on a one-way trip,” Imani snarled.

Before he could respond, the two heard someone running towards them. Before they could react, Imani saw Soap grab Davis by the back of his collar and toss him to the other side of the alley, putting him in the same position that he had Imani in. As Imani was about to step forward, another arm came in front of her in a protective stance. It was then she noticed those familiar skeleton gloves.

‘Ghost,’ Imani thought. Looking up at the 6’4 man, she tried to look into his eyes, but he kept his eyes firmly on Davis, who was still in Soap’s hold.

“Oi,” Soap growled as he stepped closer, “You have a lot of nerve to come here!”

“It’s the base gym! I came here to work out.”

“So, trying to choke a fellow marine in an alleyway is in the workout, huh,” Soap asked rhetorically.

“Listen, Soap, you just saw something taken out of-”

“Finish that sentence and I’ll knock your teeth out,” Ghost interrupted, “You were given clear and strict instructions. What were they?”

“Sir, I-”

“What were they,” Ghost interrupted, his voice hard.

“Unless ok’d, training, or in official capacity, I am not allowed within the same space as Sergeant Imani ‘Umbra’ Barnes.”

“Exactly,” Ghost replied as he took slow and steady steps towards the man, “So please explain this to me.”

Seeing him, Soap stepped aside and let Ghost take over. He and Imani both saw as the man stepped into Davis' space. And based on the terrified look on Davis' face, Soap and Imani could only guess what look Ghost had in his eyes.

“Why the hell did we find you with your arm against her throat?”

Davis couldn’t answer. He knew that Ghost and, by extension, 141, wouldn’t take any excuse. Looking down and clenching his fist, Davis swallowed his pride and let out a small sorry that won’t happen again.

But as he walked away, Ghost gripped his arm like he had grabbed Imani earlier, but with much more force, to the point that he may have caused a mild sprain.

Now, Charles Davis wasn’t a petite guy. He stood at 6’0 and was a good 210 pounds in muscle. So when he felt the grip on his arm and the look up in Ghost’s eyes, he felt like that little boy who witnessed his father’s violent outbursts on him and his mother.

“If I catch you near her again, it’ll be you in the desert looking up at the goddamn sand. Understood,” Ghost vowed, his tone low but filled with authority and anger.

With a slight nod and an even smaller ‘yes, sir,’ Davis walked out of the alley and away from the gym.

“You okay lass,” Soap asked.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Imani said with a small smile, “When was someone going to tell me he was here?”

“We were going to tell you when you got back from your room,” Ghost said, "Why did you come here and not come get us?”

“I did go back. But it looked like you were all in a serious conversation, so I didn’t want to interrupt,” Imani said, “I didn’t see the harm in meeting y’all here.”

“We’re gonna talk when we get back to our hall. Next time, follow instructions,” Ghost said, leaving the two sergeants behind.

“What crawled up his ass,” Imani whispered to Soap, pointing her thumb at the retreating figure.

Before Soap could respond with his sarcastic comeback, he saw Ghost stop from the corner of his eye and did an about-face towards them.

‘Aye shit,’ Soap thought as Ghosts stepped in Imani’s space.

“Want to repeat for me bird,” Ghost asked, his voice low and he leaned his head down a bit to look Imani in the eyes.

“You heard me old man,” Imani replied back with the same energy, giving him a smirk.

“I’m 29.”

“Six years older than me. Key word older. So yes. Old. Man.”

The two were locked in a heated staring contest again, like back in Solunaire. But instead of Alpha in the audience, it was Joan ‘Soap’ McTavish. And he was loving every second of this exchange.

He, Price, who has known Ghost for years, and Gaz, who only knew Ghost briefly, knew that most people keep a safe distance from him. Much less talk back to him. But if you could single-handedly kill 100 men by yourself, you could go up against someone like Ghost.

‘Oh, this is great,’ Soap chuckled to himself.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to whatever the hell this is,” Soap laughed, “Umbra, I’m gonna borrow Alpha and practice in the obstacle course ok?”

“Fine,” Imani answered, not breaking eye contact.

“You got it from here Lt,” Soap asked the tall man.

“Go Soap,” Ghost answered quickly, his voice not losing that sharp edge.

Holding his hands up in surrender, Soap walked away with a chuckle. Walking into the gym, Soap saw Alpha lying by the second door separating the entrance from the actual gym.

“Hey, you old dug,” Soap greeted with a scratch on the top of Alpha’s head, getting a happy thump from the wolf, “You with me for now. Just while mommy and daddy sort out their differences.”

Soap couldn’t help but laugh at that the whole way outside in the gym's outdoor area, just thinking, ‘Like that'll ever happen.’

Since Soap left them, Imani ‘Umbra’ Barnes and Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley haven't moved an inch. The two stared at one another, waiting for the other to break.

“Proper full of yourself, ain’t ya,” Ghost accused sternly.

“If that means being confident in my abilities, then yes, I am,” Imani argued.

“Ha,” Ghost chuckled in disbelief.

Grabbing her hand, Ghost began to lead Imani inside the gym.

Stumbling a bit to catch up with his enormous strides, Imani followed closely behind him. But her gaze kept switching from the back of his head to the hold on her hand. It wasn’t as rough or tight as Davis’s grip, but it was tight enough to ensure she didn’t get away.

Looking down, Imani saw how much bigger he was than her. His hands basically swallowed hers, and with the grippers on his gloves, she knew trying to escape his grip would be useless.

As the Ghost threw open the doors, he led Imani to the practice mats and finally released her hand.

“What are we doing firs-” Imani began to ask, but stopped when she saw Ghost take off his sweat jacket.

He wore a simple black short-sleeved compression shirt. Under his uniform, Imani could already tell he was a big guy—she felt it when he carried her back to Croatia. But seeing him now, Imani was able to confirm her greatest theory.

‘He has a muscular dad bod,’ Imani thought with a straight face, but on the inside, she was jumping up and down with a wicked smile. Happy she was right about this mysterious guy.

But, if he wasn’t her lieutenant and an asshole to her a few minutes ago, she’d give these a muscle a test ride. But at last, he brought Imani back to reality with three simple words and threw something at her feet.

“Put 'em up.”

“Huh?”

“Put. Em. Up,” Ghost repeated slower.

Looking down at her feet, Imani saw what the man threw at her. Boxing gloves.

“You want me to spar with you,” Imani questioned in disbelief.

“Does it look like I stuttered you wanker,” Ghost asked, “Put those on and put 'em up.”

‘This dickhead,’ Imani thought, her twitching in rage. Taking her jacket off, Imani showed off her lean build and tight black tank top.

“Fine,” Imani snapped.

Picking them up, Imani put them on herself, anger flowing through each movement. The whole time, she did not take her eyes off of him.

“You love picking fights with subordinates sir,” Imani asked sarcastically.

“Only the ones asking for it,” Ghost replied in a dead tone, kicking off his shoes.

‘I fucking hate this guy,’ Imani thought as she followed suit.

“Fine then. Bring it, lieutenant!”

Simon made the first move without wasting time. Before her fist was even in position, he charged at her. Simon jabs at her sides, connecting each hit. He then tried to aim for her face, but she blocked that and moved out of the way when he tried to hit her side again. But as he went to steady himself again, Imani rushed in and hit as hard as she could to his ribs. A hit that usually had most of the boys with her during basic and special forces training down on their knees. But not Ghost.

He responded with a grunt and didn’t stagger a bit. ‘What the hell,’ Imani thought in shock.

Seeing her lose focus, Ghost grabbed her by her arm and twisted it behind her back, causing her to lean against him a bit and groan in pain. After five seconds, Ghost let her go. The two backed away from each other. Imani’s heart was racing, even hammering against her chest. This was no longer a workout. This was a challenge. And never once in her life has she ever backed down from a challenge.

“First round goes to me,” He said, a noticeable glee in his voice, “Were ya all talk and no bite?”

Now that pissed her off. Imani lunged forward as fast as she could, striking him in his stomach and side. That force knocked the wind out of Ghost for a moment. But he didn’t have enough time to react as Imani kicked one of his legs out from under him.

When he fell to one knee, Imani got behind him and wrapped her arm around his neck. After having him in that bind for five seconds, the second round went to Imani. Much to Simon’s amusement.

“Looks like you finally won one Umbra.”

“For a man who doesn't speak much, you know how to get on someone’s last nerves.”

That got a small chuckle out of him. Before Imani could even process it, Simon grabbed Imani by the arm, still wrapped around his neck, and tossed her over him smoothly like she weighed nothing. Imani landed hard with an unforgiving thud on the mat.

‘Ah son of bitch,’ Imani thought with a groan of pain. As she tried to get up, Simon planted one knee beside her hip and held her hands above her head. Lowering his head, the two of them were only inches from each other. The only thing separating them is that mask.

‘Ah,’ Imani thought as she looked at his mask, ‘This one doesn’t have that outer mask on it. Just spray paint.’

“Are you just gonna lie there like an idiot,” Simon finally asked after a minute of the two staring at one another.

‘I hate him,” Imani thought with an eye twitch.

“Come on,” Simon whispered, gripping her hands harder and leaning in closer, “I thought you could take me?”

“Hmm,” Imani smirks, deciding now would be the perfect time to use one of the words Soap taught her, “What makes you think I’m not into this bonny boy?”

That shocked Simon more than he was willing to admit. He felt like his brain had just undergone a factory reset, even losing its grip on her hands. That was the distraction she needed. Using all her strength and her knee, Imani switched their positions so she was on top and he was below her. She grabbed his hands and held them above his head as tightly as she could with both hands.

“Now look who’s lying on the job,” Imani smiled.

“Getting cheeky are ya?”

“Hmm,” Imani hummed as she leaned in closer, “What do you guys say on that side of the pond? Just taking a piss or something,” Imani whispered as she leaned closer.

Just like before, the two were at a standstill. Their faces were inches apart, hers a little further up since her 5’6 "body was smaller than his giant 6’4 body. But this time felt different. The air around them was thick, hot even. Neither of them knew what to say. They just stared into each other's eyes, waiting for the other to make a move.

As much as he tried to resist, Simon’s gaze trickled down a bit until they reached cleavage. Though his mask covered his face, it didn’t cover his eyes. So Imani knew precisely where he was looking. And for some reason, that had her excited.

“Like what you see, Lieutenant,” Imani teased.

Not liking that tone, Simon broke free from her grip and put her on her back again. One hand holding both her wrists, and the other on her neck. Not enough to choke her, but enough for her to know that all it’ll take is one squeeze.

“You really do know how to push a man huh,” Simon mumbled.

“Well, yeah, I aim to please. Myself at least,” Imani smirked, “I always enjoy pissing a man off on my free time. It’s actually a hobby of mine. And dare I say, I’m pretty good at it.”

‘This fucking brat,’ Simon thought, an eye twitching like hers earlier.

But as much as this woman infuriated him with her little remarks and snide comments, he had to admit she could hold her own. She was fast, resourceful, and overall tough. Tougher than most men he’s met. But what he hates the most about her right now is just how captivating she is. From the way she smelled to the way she walked. He and everyone else knew she was hiding something, and the thought of the unknown usually made him uneasy. But with her, it was like a challenge he looked forward to completing.

And the same could be said about how Imani felt about him. A man whose name she didn’t know, but somehow, he managed to get under her skin in a way no one has. She knows she could be quick with the quips, sarcasm, annoyance, and even anger. But usually, it’s because she’s dealt with the same bullshit from the same person just on a different day. She’s known this man for less than a week and somehow, someway, he manages to piss her off more than her own twin could. And it excited her that she had the same effect on him. It gave her a high level of satisfaction.

The two didn’t realize how close they actually were. With just one little pull, his body could be pressed against hers. And they both knew that.

Reaching up slowly, Imani grabbed the front of his shirt, never breaking eye contact.

“What do you think you're doin',” Simon asked.

“I don’t know,” Imani mumbled, scanning his eyes to see if he was uncomfortable, “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know either,” Simon replied as he took off one of his gloves.

Gently, Simon, moved Imani’s curly hair out of the way. Their eyes never broke once. But as his hand touched her cheek, Imani couldn’t help but shiver.

For all the times she’s been around the man, she’s never seen his hands. An odd thing to say, but something she’s noticed. Being this close to him, she could see a small scar on his eyebrow that peeked out with each blink.

Softly, Imani pulled Simon down so they were both flushed against each other. Ghost hands began to slide down to her leg, bringing it up so he could settle between her legs. But of course, fate had one hell of a sense of humor. Not long after he settled in between her, their loud but lovable Scottishman walked in with her loyal companion barking with him.

“Oi! Ghost! Umbra! You still here?”

Scrambling away from each other before he could make his way around the tall wall that separated the sparring mats from the back door, Soap saw Umbra sitting with her back turned away from him, and Ghost standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the ceiling.

“Ah, you good mates,” He asked as he looked between the two.

“Fine,” they both replied in unison.

“Okay,” Soap trailed off at the end, not really believing them, “Ghost, you wanna go a couple rounds?”

“Sure,” Ghost coughed.

“I’m just gonna go to the bathroom real quick,” Imani chuckled awkwardly. Getting up from her spot on the floor, Imani scratches Alpha’s head and walks into the ladies' room.

“Shouldn’t we,” Soap trailed off again, pointing to the bathroom with his thumb.

“You wanna go to the ladies' room? Really,” Ghost asked, with a raised eyebrow. Soap's response was a quick nod and a yeah, no.

But while the two sparred, Imani threw water on her face in the bathroom.

Looking at the mirror before her, she saw nothing different about her. She was sweating, of course, and she was a little sore due to the hits she endured, but she'll live. And the pain builds character. At least that’s what her old drill sergeant told her in basic. Something they agreed on.

One of her biggest commitments was never to be weak again. Since she was 14, she vowed that she would never feel weak and helpless again. In both basic and special ops training, she proved to herself and everyone else that she was not someone to doubt.

But Ghost. Ghost was different. She knew she couldn’t overpower every man with strength alone. She knew that. That’s why she trained so long to think and move fast in a fight. But with Ghost, it felt like even that wasn’t enough. Was it because she was so used to fighting people who weren’t ever a challenge, or was it something else? She didn’t know the answer to that.

What she did know was how Ghost had her feeling back there. Never in her 5 years in the military had anyone she had met or worked with ever gotten her this worked up.

‘Do I,’ Imani asked herself. She knew she’d be as red as a tomato if she weren't black.

“No,” she mumbled to herself, chuckling, “There’s no fucking way.”

Then she thought about those dark brown eyes. Slowly squinting, Imani groaned in fake pain and annoyance as she realized something she wanted and hoped to have again. Imani Kiara Barnes has just realized that she has not only her second crush on a guy, but that guy was also one of her commanding officers. Slapping herself in the head, Imani just groaned to herself, ‘No! Fuck! Why!’

Splashing some more water on her face Imani began to think to herself, ‘No it’s not a crush. It’s admiration. Yeah that’s all! Nothing more nothing less.’

Drying her face off Imani walked out of the bathroom with that chant in her head, but when she saw Ghost knock Soap on his ass, she realized it may not be all that.

But she and anyone else have these types of feelings, which would be nothing but trouble. So, putting on a fake smile, Imani rejoined the men and pretended nothing had happened.

But deep down, she knew she was only lying to herself every time she looked at Ghost.

Next: Chapter 13

Arthur's Note:

Hey everyone, sorry for the late upload again, but I had a lot to do as I prepare to go on a study abroad trip soon. I hope you enjoyed both chapters 11 and 12!

The tension between Ghost and Umbra is starting to heat up a bit. Both she and Ghost realize now that there's something there, but aren't sure if they should even entertain it.

I thought the part at the end, with Imani realizing what she feels, was too fast or unrealistic. Still, when I asked one of my friends in the Marines how fast relationships start and whatnot in the service while giving him a brief description of what I was writing, he said, 'Do you know how fast people get together in here? It's crazy. So no, you're good. I love him and how he supports my delusions, lol.

But anyway, thank you so much for your time and for giving my story a chance! I'll see y'all next Friday!

[likeadevils]

Reputation Timeline

This is a very long post that puts all the songs on Reputation in order of Taylor making them, with as many specific dates as possible. I’ve also included other songs she wrote while writing Reputation and quotes from Taylor and her collaborators talking about her process. 

If you don't want to read the whole post, check out this playlist of the album or her entire discography.

KEY:

Song Dates:

🟢: There is some type of official source for the date

🟡: There isn’t an official source, but everything points to that date

🟠: I’m pretty sure that this is when it was written, but I wouldn’t be shocked if I was wrong. Or the period of time is just too large to be a definite date

🔴: Unknown, year comes from U.S. copyright offices

Other:

✍️: Record of Taylor (possibly) writing a song

🎤: Record of Taylor (possibly) recording a song

📌: Misc album activity

Part 1: Pre-writing

📌 Dec 11, 2014: Vogue interview conducted: "I don’t get so caught up in the work that I don’t appreciate the crazy, incredible, astonishing, joyous success that’s happened,” she says. “Putting pressure on yourself is good, but putting unnecessary stress on yourself is bad—so I don’t worry that I haven’t started the next record yet. I don’t worry that I don’t know what it’s going to be. I’m not worried that I have absolutely no timetable as to when it needs to be done. It could be two years from now; it could be three, it could be four. Or it could be one. You get these bursts of inspiration right at the moment you’re not expecting to. You just have to live your life, and hopefully you’ll take the right risks."

🎤 March 2, 2015: Photographed leaving a studio. (Note: I can not find a place that specifies if this is a recording studio, dance, photography, radio, or television studio).

✍️ April 8, 2015: Ed Sheeran: "We have plans to work together soon"

📌 April 29, 2015: Entertainment Tonight interview published: "I’m not making the next record yet, that’s going to take a lot of thinking about what that should be. With 1989, I love this album so much that I think it’d be doing a real disservice to try and copy it the next time around. I think it’s going to have to be something very different, creatively"

📌 May 20, 2015: Marie Claire interview published: Taylor is not even sure she'll have made another album by the time 2020 rolls around. "I'm not going to put out an album until I've made one that's better than this one and that's going to be really hard."

🔴 2015: ...Ready For It? (First Draft)

Heather Wirth (Taylor's assistant during the 1989 tour): "There was one time where I was traveling with her on her tour and she was sitting in the back of her plane, I could hear her just throwing words together and basically in front of me, she ended up writing Ready For It."

Taylor was on the 1989 tour from May 5-December 12, so all we can narrow this down to is the year. Here is my opinion on how complete this version was.

📌 August 25, 2015: NME interview conducted: Swift speaks about the challenge of following the stellar '1989'. Does the thought scare her? "Nooooooo. How could the next one be as big? Maybe the next album will be a bridge to somewhere else. Or maybe I'll just go ahead and change everything." I ask for a hint from the handful of songs she's written so far and she replies with a scoff. "No! Why would I do that?! God!" The 1989 Tour wraps up in December. After that, Swift says, "I think I should take some time off. I think people might need a break from me. I'm going to… I don't know. Hang out with my friends. Write new music. Maybe not write new music. I don't know."

🎤 October 7, 2015: Photographed leaving a recording studio in New York

📌 October 19, 2015: GQ interview published: "When I’m prewriting-- which is what I’m always doing, like right now, I’m not actively making an album-- but if I get an idea that I feel like is a cool observation and it’s a cool lyric thing, I type it into this endless notepad on my phone.”

📌 November 13, 2015: Vogue Australia interview published: "I'll feel like I'll need to give people a breather from me [after the 1989 era] because at a certain point they're going to get a little sick of hearing about me, so I'll need to go away for a while then, depending on my gauge on how sick of me they are, I'll decide when to put out the next album."

📌 November 28, 2015: Beats 1 interview conducted: "I'm always writing because that's not really something I can turn off." So are you writing with anything in mind? "Hopefully you write with something in mind. The intent is to make something good. That's kinda all that I have right now, just, don't finish a song unless it's great. I don't write 30 songs a month. I write something when it's great, and I finish it if it's great. If it's not, I just stop halfway through and go, 'Well, I'll wait for something great to come along.' [...] [1989's success] opens up a lot of possibilities in my head as to what could come next. Right now quality is the only thing I have to focus on. It's, all right, make something... make something great."

🟡 January 2016: This Is What You Came For

Rihanna and Taylor were both in LA in late January/early February 2016, and Calvin skipped the 2016 Grammys because he was in the studio. It's possible it was written earlier (Taylor and Rihanna were both MIA for most of December 2015) but their schedules before November 2015 and after March 2016 get too complicated. Calvin showed the finished product to Rihanna on April 17, 2016, so it was definitely done by then.

📌 February 19, 2016: Vogue Interview conducted:

As for future plans . . . who knows? For the first time in years, Swift is not sure exactly what is next. She is very much OK with this. So what the hell are you going to do with the rest of your life, Taylor Swift? "I have no idea," she says, with a sigh that's more blissful than anxious. "This is the first time in ten years that I haven't known. I just decided that after the past year, with all of the unbelievable things that happened . . . I decided I was going to live my life a little bit without the pressure on myself to create something." Do not freak: Swift is not abandoning making music. Those who know her know this is chemically impossible. ("Her not being creative is one of the last things I'd ever worry about," the musician and producer Jack Antonoff tells me later.) "I'm always going to be writing songs," Swift says. "The thing is, with me, I could very well come up with three things in the next two weeks and then jump back into the studio, and all of a sudden the next record is started. That's an option, too." But probably not for the moment.

📌 July 17, 2016: Snakegate.

📌 August 29, 2016: Lover Diary entry: "This summer is the apocalypse."

Part 2: Writing

🟢 September 2, 2016: Gorgeous (First Draft)

This portion of the Making of a Song series.

🟢 September 6, 2016: King Of My Heart (First Draft)

This portion of the Making of a Song series.

📌 September 9, 2016: Gigi Hadid: "You know, she is starting to go back to work in the studio again"

🟢 September 16, 2016: Gorgeous (Second Draft)

This portion of the Making of a Song series.

🟢 September 17, 2016: Gorgeous (Third Draft)

This portion of the Making of a Song series.

Taylor is seen wearing a black tank top and fedora in her Nashville apartment, which lines up with what she wore to the Nashville Music City Wine and Food Festival on September 17. From there, the rest of the dates are just math. 

🟢 September 19, 2016: Gorgeous

This portion of the Making of a Song series. 

🟢 September 19-21 2016: King Of My Heart

Making of a Song series: 19, 20, 21 Taylor: "I've always wanted to structure a song where each individual section of the song sounded like a move forward in the relationship, but still be listenable. So I wanted the verse to sound like it's own phase of a relationship, the pre-chorus to sound like it's own phase of a relationship, and the chorus to sound like it's own phase of a relationship. And i wanted them to all have their own identity, but seem like they were getting deeper and more fast-paced as the song went on." Taylor: "King of My Heart' was influenced by Khal Drogo and Daenerys [from Game Of Thrones]. It's even got this post-hook of drums—I wanted them to sound like Dothraki drums."

Taylor is seen wearing the same outfit in the September 19 Gorgeous video, and this date of the KOMH video. It's also the same outfit as a video she later posted to The Swift Life (RIP) where she talked about how excited she was to be working after a long break.

🟢 October 14, 2016: I Did Something Bad (First Draft)

This portion of the Making of a Song series Taylor: "I wrote this song on piano [gasps and ooohs from the audience] It's not gonna sound like it though! You're not going to say that after you hear it, it's not that kind of song!" Taylor: "'I Did Something Bad' I wrote after Arya and Sansa conspire to kill Littlefinger [on Game of Thrones]."

The episode of Game of Thrones where Arya and Sansa conspire to kill Littlefinger was aired on August 27, 2017. Filming for the season began August 31, 2016, so Taylor could've gotten some insider information? I don't know. She visibly did not write this song in September 2017.

🟡 October 26, 2016: Delicate

This portion of the Making of a Song series. Taylor: Next we have track five! I didn't even do it on purpose [...] but when I finally was like, oh this is the final tracklist, I was like 'Oh, I did it again. I did it again.' [...] Track five is a kind of legendary-- not legendary, that's ridiculous! [Reassuring shouts of 'No!' from the audience] Amongst us, amongst us! Like, 'Oh, you know, I'm gonna like track five, track five's the emotional vulnerable song.' [...] There's an affect that you mat hear on the vocals throughout the rest of the album and it's a vocoder. Whatis that, you say? It's a vocal effect where you sing and the vocoder splits your voice into chords, and you can play your chords on your voice on a keyboard, in chords. So basically, if you're singing the notes of a piano, you could play your own voice. So that's what you'll hear in the beginning and throughout this song, and then you'll hear it several times. We tried it in the studio and I thought it sounded really emotional and really vulnerable and really kind of like, sad but beautiful? This is a song that like-- the idea of your reputation is definitly something I play on for the entire album. But when the album starts off it's much more bombastic, more like 'I don't care what you say about me I don't care what you say about me my reputation doesn't matter!" But then it hits this point where it's like, Oh god, what happens when you meet someone that you really want in your life?' and then you start worrying about what they've heard before they met you, and you start to wonder, could something fake, like your reputation, affect something real, like somebody getting to know you?"

Taylor is seen wearing a thin gold choker she was fond of in October 2016, with her post September 24 haircut (straight across bangs instead of a side part). Since she normally goes into the studio with Max Martin and Shellback with a few ideas, and creates multiple songs during their sessions, I'm inclined to group this song with IDSB and place it in late October. 

🟢 October 27, 2016: I Did Something Bad

This portion of the Making of a Song series. Taylor: "This group of producers is a lot smaller than it was on 1989. I picked people to who I worked with on 1989, but I felt like they would be versatile enough to kill 1989 and make something new. There would be no way for me to make something even similar to 1989 and have it be effective. It had to be completely different because the album was it's own thing. It was just two groups, it was me and Jack Antonoff, and me and Max Martin and Shellback. And this was the first song where Max and I felt like we'd really done something different than 1989. [...] So I brought it into them and I was trying to explain the production. I had had a weird dream and I'd woken up with this sound in my head that was so hook-y and so catchy that I knew it had to be in a song, because it was so annoying. It wouldn't stop going through my head. And the sound was RAH-TAH-TAH-TAH-TAH-TAH-TATATAH-TAH, and then it was like TYAH-TYAH, TUH, BRUH! Like after the chorus, that's what I want to hear, but I don't want it to be my voice, I want it to be an instrument, what instrument is that? So I was like playing this voice memo to Max and he's like, 'Oh no, there's not an instrument that can do that. But what we could do is we can take you voice doing it, pith it down so it sounds like an enchantress, slash, a dude.' So that's what you're hearing after the chorus. But, anyway [...] this is when we first kind of knew we might be on to something with the album."

At 4:18 you can spot a gold temporary tattoo on the inside of her wrist, similar to ones she was wore at Drake’s birthday party on October 23. Since she is seen working until sundown (She leaves LA on October 28) and had to be in Nashville 13 days priar (She was seen in New York City until the 13), October 14 and 27th are the only dates that make sense.

📌 January 3, 2017: Lover Diary entry: "I get all scared about the future because so much has changed in the last year of my life. I mean this time last year I was living in LA, getting ready for Grammys and now, I’m essentially based in London, hiding out trying to protect us from the nasty world that just wants to ruin things. We have been together and no one has found out for 3 months now. I want it to stay that way because I don’t want anything about this to change or become too complicated or intruded upon. But it’s senseless to worry about someday not being happy when I am happy now. Ok. Breathe."

📌 January 6, 2017: Taylor likes a tumblr post with an quote from Ed from April 2015 saying Taylor and him planned to work together soon.

🟢 January 10, 2017: Don't Blame Me

Taylor is seen wearing a similar jacket as she was papped wearing on January 11th in the Making of a Song video. (This is pure speculation on my part, but the mood also seems to be a bit lower than on other days). We know she was in LA around this time "for work."

🟢 January 11, 2017: Dancing With Our Hands Tied

Sessioner: "taylor set it up by saying that inspiration for the song came when she was back in LA after spending several months out of the public eye. as we know now she spent basically all of this time in the UK with joe without anyone knowing she was in a relationship. back in LA (i think for work), she went to the gym only to be caught by paparazzi on her way out.. the paps shouted all kinds of things at her including comments about her weight... remember this was the first time she had been properly seen in months and nobody knew she was in a relationship.. she described being really overwhelmed by the experience but that her thought process was less about herself and more about how she could possibly have a normal relationship when this was her life. taylor actually said that after the incident she went straight to the recording studio, cried, and wrote this song."

There are multiple accounts of what seems to be a similar story. January 11, 2017 is one of two times she is seen leaving the gym after a long paparazzi dry spell, the other being in July. Seeing as the song is produced by Max Martin, who is located in LA, and the July pictures are in New York, I’m inclined to agree with the original source.

🟡 January 2017: Dress

Jack Antonoff: "Dress is my second favorite [from Reputation]. It's the first one we made for it." Taylor: "This song is one of those where, like almost every other line is something that I came up with like, a year before, and then when I was writing the song i just cherry-picked and I was like 'Like that, like that, like that, like that'. And I was really proud of the hook of this because it sounds like a pick up line, and yet it is a love song about deep and tender feelings."

Dress is copyrighted for 2017, and production for the Look What You Made Me Do music video began in January, meaning if Jack is remembering correctly and Dress was made before Look What You Made Me Do, it was made sometime in January 2017. Taylor was in London until January 7, then LA from January 10-13. While we don’t have exact dates, we know Taylor was in Nashville in early February preparing for Super Saturday Night. She was possibly in New York on February 1, when she posted this video with Gigi Hadid, who was photographed in New York the day before.

🟡 January 2017: Look What You Made Me Do

Taylor: "It actually started with a poem that I wrote about my feelings, and it's basically about like, realizing that you can't trust certain people, but realizing you appreciate the people you can trust, realizing that you can't just let everyone in, but the one's you can let in you need to cherish. And it had all the verses in it basically as is, but when the beat hit, we were like 'Oooh, look what you made me do, look what you made me do' and we were like 'Oh my god, we've got it, edit out the rest of the words and just do that.'" Joseph Kahn: "Started concepting and prepping [the Look What You Made Me Do music video] in January. Shot in May."

While it’s possible Taylor reached out to Kahn to start a music video before she had a song to go along with it, I find it unlikely. Look What You Made Me Do is copyrighted for 2017, and Taylor has her J initial necklace on while recording Look What You Made Me Do in Miss Americana and promos for the Making of a Song Video, dating the song to post-Dec 13, 2016. With the exception of Christmas, she seems to have been in London for most of December. Taylor stayed in London until January 7, then was photographed in LA from January 10-13. While we don’t have exact dates, we know Taylor was in Nashville in early February preparing for Super Saturday Night. She was possibly in New York on February 1, when she posted this video with Gigi Hadid, who was photographed in New York the day before.

📌 March 2, 2017: Ed Sheeran: "Taylor isn't going to be releasing until probably the end of this year - Christmas is the smartest time to release because that's when everyone buys records."

📌 May 2017: According to Joseph Kahn and Todrick Hall, the Look What You Made Me Do music video was filmed this month.

📌May 4, 2017: A source (probably Tree Paine) tells E! News: "Taylor has been writing and recording her new album in Nashville for the last several months. She has been working on it around the clock and will be making an announcement soon. She is really excited about her new music and can't wait to share it with her fans. She has been entirely focused on that and not much else. She has been 100 percent dedicated to making music the last few months and that's it. She is really looking forward to finishing the record and being able to have some down time to reconnect with her friends."

🟠 May 2017: ...Ready For It?

Taylor: "Ready For It introduces and metaphor that you hear throughout the album, which is this crime and punishment metaphor, where it talks about robbers and thieves and heists and all that. And I found that an interesting metaphor, but twisted in different ways throughout the album. The way that it's presented in Ready For It is finding your partner in crime and being like 'Oh my god, we're the same, we're the same oh my god!Let's rob banks together this is great!' And you will hear that theme carried on throughout the rest of the record, but not exactly in the same way as you heard it in Ready for it."

In Miss Americana and promos for the Making of a Song series, Taylor is seen recording with curly hair, her J necklace, and not her Sapphire Evil Eye Ring, which starts showing up on June 27 (we don’t know exactly when or why she got it). Since the song partially focuses on whether or not her lover is ready for the media frenzy that surrounds dating her, I’m inclined to place this song in May, when her and Joe’s relationship leaked to the press. The song was recorded in Sweden, and we can assume she was in Europe between May 15 and June 1, 2017. (That being said, we can assume she is in Europe for most of the first half of 2017).

🟠 June 2017: Call It What You Want

Taylor: "The way I feel this album is, as far as the storyline, is it starts with getting out any kind of rebellion, or anger, angst, whatever, and then falling in love and realizing that you settle into what your priorities are. And like, your life changes, but you welcome it because it's something that matters to you. This last part of the album feels like settling in to where I am now. So it started with where I was when I started making the album, and it ends with where I am now, and this song really reflects that, probably the best on the album." In the Making of a Song series, Taylor is seen with straight hair, her J necklace, and not her sapphire evil eye ring, which starts showing up on June 27 (we don’t know exactly when or why she got it). Once again, I am tempted to put this after her relationship leaked to the press, probably in early June (She is in the states on the 1st and 3rd, and probably leaves sometime in mid-June).

🟠 July 2017: Getaway Car and This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

In the Making of a Song series, Taylor is seen with curly hair, her J necklace, and her sapphire evil eye ring, placing the song sometime shortly before/after June 27th. We know she was in the states for most of July, and in New York City on the 17th and 24th.

🟢 July 2017: End Game

Ed Sheeran: "End Game was written - I was playing Mohegan Sun in Connecticut [on July 14, 2017], and she has a place in Rhode Island, which isn't too far. So she hits me up like, 'I know you're in Connecticut, come around.' I go around, she plays me some of what turned out to be reputation, and plays me this End Game, and I was like 'Man, I really like this. Can I do a verse? Can I do a rap verse?' And she was like, 'Yeah, for sure!' So the next day, I remember, I was in bed, and woke up and got my laptop out, put the song, just looped it, wrote this verse, and I went in with Max Martin, who she did the song with, and recorded it. Then Future did a verse, and then Taylor wrote a verse and we did the video."

🟡 September 2017: So It Goes…

Oscar Görres: "I’d just become a father. I was not in the room when the melody and the lyrics were written. Max and Shellback did half of the album with her in L.A., and I had done this [instrumental] track—which is weird too, because I don’t do tracks. [...] Shellback was looking through things on his computer, listened to that track, and Taylor reacted to it. "Oh, what’s that? That’s special. I haven’t done anything like that. Can we do that?" [...] She wrote everything quickly. I woke up—this is the funny part of the story—and someone is FaceTiming me at 6:30 in the morning. [...] I called [Shellback] back and saw this girl on his couch. She goes, "Hi! It’s Taylor! How are you? [...] We just heard the track. We had the melody. The lyrics are like this. I can read you the lyrics! I had this idea. What do you think about that?" And I was like, "…yes!""

According to social media, Oscar Görres had a daughter in 2015 and a son in September of 2017. Personally, I believe the September 2017 date. Taylor has also been known to add a song to the album incredibly last minute, multiple sessioners have said Taylor said all songs on the album were about her relationship with Joe, and the tracklists in the reputation magazines are out of order, suggesting a late change.

🔴 2017: New Year's Day

Taylor: We threw a big New Year's party in London this year [2017], and I was thinking about how everbody talks anf thinks about who you kiss at midnight, right? [...] And I think that is very romantic, but I think there's something even more romantic about who's gonna deal with you on New Year's Day. Who's willing to like, give you Advil and help you clean up the house. I think that states more of a permanence. So I was thinking about that, and I wrote a song called New Year's Day. Oh, Oh! There are two lines in this song that I'd been saving for a really long time, for the right moment, and I picked them for this song. The first one is 'Please don't ever become a stranger who's laugh I could recognize anywhere' and the other is 'Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you.'" Jack Antonoff: "We wrote that song in a second, cause we didn’t plan to write it. I think if you plan to write a ballad, you always get less than you hope for. We wrote that, and then the scratch take in my home, we kinda like, played it together--" [Jimmy Fallon interrupts and they never return to what he was about to say] Jack Antonoff: Was there ever a conversation about taking this stripped-down song and building it up into something more in line with the rest of the album? "No, no, no. Not only that, but it was the quickest [song to record]. If you listen to the piano on that record, you can hear me moving around. You hear things clicking. Those are the "scratch takes" — we did that very quickly. It came out in that sort of goofy Hollywood version of how music is written, where it comes out of moments of inspiration. Part of the process is you do that [scratch take], and then you do it for real. But we just sat there: That’s the song. I’m so proud of it because, personally, I think it’s some sort of hint at the future."

That's all for this timeline! Check out the others in my pinned post.

[novaursa]

Part 3

- Note: This work was fully published on AO3, so expect steady updates. I'll post regularly to engage more readers.

- Title: zōbrie ānogar

- Rating: Explicit (18+)

- Romance: (Aegon II/OFC)

- Warning: All flags are up for this work. Aegon is also a warning on his own.

- Summary: It was written by Archmaester Gyldayn that on the day Princess Vaella Targaryen was born she was supposed to die. Until she fed upon her twin, Baelon. And when she turned one and five, she sought her end in the lair of Cannibal, in Dragonmont. But instead of feasting upon her, the dragon wept with her. And Archmaester had written a lengthy thesis on how wild dragon recognized a kindred soul in the Princess, as they both dined on their kin.

- Word count: 9 000+

- Parts: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Final

The next day dawned as tense and solemn as the last. The atmosphere in Driftmark was heavy with grief and unease. After the official breakfast, Vaella felt the need to escape the oppressive air inside the castle. She wanted to find some fresh air before Aegon decided to monopolize her entire day or Alicent sought them out for the inevitable talk about their previous night’s actions.

As Vaella made her way through the castle, she passed Princess Rhaenys. Her chest tugged with pain for the woman, knowing how the funeral of her daughter Laena had been overshadowed by the violent events of the night. Rhaenys’ face was a mask of sorrow, her eyes distant as she moved through the halls like a ghost.

Vaella continued her walk, her mind racing with thoughts and emotions. She needed space to think, to process everything that had happened. She found herself outside, the cool sea breeze washing over her, bringing a sense of calm. As she walked along the shore, she saw Laenor standing by the water, staring emptily out to sea as if he could call Laena back from the depths.

Laenor had always been kind to her when he lived in the Red Keep with Rhaenyra, and she felt a pull to join him. She approached quietly and stood beside him for some time, offering silent companionship. The sound of the waves crashing against the shore filled the silence between them.

Eventually, Laenor spoke, his voice low and filled with pain. "How do you live with it, Vaella? Knowing that part of your soul is forever ripped out of you?"

Vaella replied just as softly, her words tinged with sorrow. "I don't. It feels strange just existing."

Laenor sighed, his eyes still fixed on the horizon. "Baelon was next to you in his crib when he died. My sister was on the other side of the sea. I wasn’t there."

Vaella's eyes filled with empathy as she placed a comforting hand on his arm. "Perhaps it's better this way, to never be so close to the other part of you dying. There is a part of me that is always hungry for love I will never know and now will never be sated. I was there to see the Stranger when he took my brother, although I don't remember it. It doesn't make it any better than being miles away."

Laenor turned to look at her, his eyes reflecting the depth of his sorrow. "It’s as if there’s a void inside me, a piece that will always be missing."

Vaella nodded, understanding his pain all too well. "I feel it too. A part of me is always missing, and nothing can fill that void."

They stood together in shared silence, the bond of their grief connecting them in a way that words could not. After a while, Vaella gently embraced Laenor, offering what little comfort she could. He returned the hug, holding on as if afraid to let go.

As they parted, Vaella noticed Ser Harrold Westerling approaching. She frowned, knowing why he was there. He had come to bring her to Alicent.

"Princess Vaella," Ser Harrold said respectfully, "the Queen requests your presence."

Vaella sighed, her moment of peace shattered. She turned to Laenor, giving him a sad smile. "Take care, Laenor. If you ever need someone to talk to, you know where to find me."

Laenor nodded, his gratitude evident in his eyes. "Thank you, Vaella. And you, take care as well."

With a final, reassuring squeeze of his hand, Vaella followed Ser Harrold, her heart heavy with the knowledge of the difficult conversation that awaited her with Alicent. As they walked back towards the castle, Vaella took one last look at the sea, the waves reflecting the turmoil within her. She steeled herself for what was to come, knowing that she had to face it with strength and grace.

…

When Vaella arrived at the private chamber, she saw Aegon already there, his gaze cast down as he stood opposite their mother, Alicent. The same pained expression Alicent had worn when Ser Harrold informed her of the situation was etched deeply on her face. Vaella moved to stand next to Aegon, both drawing silent support from one another.

As Ser Harrold left, Alicent's gaze shifted between them, her disappointment evident. She began to address the situation, her voice trembling with controlled anger. "You both made a promise to me. A promise to stop this... behavior," she said, her eyes flicking accusingly between them. "And yet, here we are."

Aegon started to protest, "Mother, we—"

But Alicent sharply cut him off, her voice rising with frustration. "You are betrothed to Helaena, Aegon! You should at least have some decency and respect towards her."

She then turned to Vaella, her disappointment clear. "And you, Vaella, I expected better of you."

Vaella felt the weight of her stepmother's words like a physical blow. She could feel Aegon clenching his fists beside her, his jaw tightening in response to the scolding.

Suddenly, Aegon spoke up, his voice firm. "Mother, I can't marry Helaena. I must marry Vaella... because I have sullied her."

Vaella felt her blood run cold, her face paling at his words. Alicent's expression shifted from anger to horror, her hands trembling as she brought them to her face, drawing strength from her faith. "What have you done?" she whispered, more to herself than to them.

Vaella turned to Aegon, her eyes wide with shock and betrayal. "Aegon, what are you saying?" she whispered, horrified.

Aegon, his face set with determination, met her gaze. "It's the only way, Vaella. They have to understand."

Alicent slowly lowered her hands, her face pale and drawn. She took a deep breath and turned back to them, her voice barely above a whisper. "Leave. Both of you. I need to speak with your father about this."

Vaella felt a surge of panic as she and Aegon were dismissed. As they turned to leave, Aegon reached for her hand, but she snatched it away, her eyes filled with hurt and anger. They walked down the corridor in silence, the tension between them thick and oppressive.

"Aegon, why did you say that?" Vaella finally demanded, her voice shaking with emotion. "You've ruined my honor with that lie."

Aegon stopped and turned to her, his eyes filled with a mix of regret and determination. "Vaella, it's the only way to be together. They won't let us unless they believe there's no other choice."

Vaella shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. "You don't understand what you've done. This will change everything."

Aegon reached out to her again, his voice pleading. "Vaella, please. Trust me."

But Vaella took a step back, her heart breaking. "I can't, Aegon. Not after this."

With that, she turned and walked away, leaving Aegon standing alone in the corridor, his shoulders slumped in defeat. The weight of their actions and the uncertainty of their future pressed heavily on both of them.

As Vaella continued down the hallway, she felt a mix of fear, anger, and sorrow. Her relationship with Aegon had always been complicated, but now it felt irrevocably damaged. She didn't know what the future held, but she knew that the consequences of Aegon's lie would ripple through their lives in ways neither of them could yet understand.

…

Aegon stood alone in the corridor, his world crashing down around him. Vaella's reaction had been worse than he had anticipated, and now he felt an overwhelming sense of loss and regret. Despite their intentions the other night, that almost did end with something different, he knew he had lied. But he had done it to bring them together, hoping Vaella would understand.

He leaned against the cold stone wall, trying to steady his breathing. The weight of what he had done pressed heavily on his chest. His thoughts were a whirlwind of guilt and longing. He needed to find a way to make things right with Vaella.

Aegon spent the rest of the morning in a daze, trying to find Vaella to explain himself. Each time he approached her, she would slip away, avoiding his gaze and his presence. He caught glimpses of her in the corridors, in the gardens, and even at the breakfast table, but every time he got close, she would leave, her expression set and distant.

In the afternoon, Aegon found himself wandering aimlessly through the castle grounds, his heart heavy with the pain of Vaella's rejection. He stopped by the edge of the gardens, staring blankly at the flowers, their vibrant colors contrasting sharply with his bleak mood.

Aemond approached him, his one remaining eye observing his older brother with a mix of curiosity and concern. "Aegon, you look like you've seen a ghost. What's going on?"

Aegon sighed, running a hand through his disheveled hair. "It's Vaella. She's avoiding me. I... I told Mother something, hoping it would bring us together, but it only made things worse."

Aemond raised an eyebrow. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her that I... that I sullied Vaella," Aegon admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

Aemond's eye widened in surprise. "Why would you do that? You know how Mother is about these things."

"I thought it would force their hand," Aegon said, his voice trembling. "I thought if they believed we had no choice, they would let us be together."

Aemond shook his head, his expression stern. "That was a foolish thing to do, Aegon. Now you've hurt Vaella and complicated things even more."

Aegon nodded miserably, feeling the weight of his brother's words. "I know. But I didn't know what else to do. I can't lose her, Aemond."

Aemond placed a hand on Aegon's shoulder, his grip firm. "You need to give her time. Let her come to terms with this on her own. Chasing after her will only push her further away."

Aegon nodded, his heart heavy with regret. "I just hope she forgives me."

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Aegon tried to keep himself occupied, but his thoughts kept drifting back to Vaella. He saw her once more in the afternoon, speaking quietly with Rhaenyra in the courtyard. He watched from a distance, his heart aching with the longing to be near her, to explain himself, to make things right.

As the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the castle grounds, Aegon retreated to his chambers. He sat by the window, staring out at the darkening sky. The sense of loss and isolation weighed heavily on him, and he felt a tear slip down his cheek.

"Vaella," he whispered to himself, his voice filled with sorrow. "Please forgive me."

…

Alicent Hightower moved through the corridors of the royal chambers in Driftmark, her expression a mask of controlled fury. The sea air brought little comfort as she approached the room where her husband, King Viserys I Targaryen, rested. The events of the previous day still weighed heavily on her mind, but the fresh scandal demanded immediate attention.

As she entered the chamber, she found Viserys slouched in a chair, his face pallid and drawn with pain and sickness. The room smelled of medicinal herbs, a stark contrast to the salty breeze outside. His eyes, cloudy with fever, struggled to focus on her.

"Viserys," she began, her voice sharp. "We need to talk."

He looked up, a weary frown creasing his brow. "Alicent? What is it now?"

"Aegon and Vaella," she snapped, not bothering with pleasantries. "They've finally done it. They've crossed the line."

Viserys blinked, trying to comprehend. "Crossed the line? What do you mean?"

Alicent's patience snapped. "They fucked, Viserys. Is that clear enough for you?"

The king's face went pale, and he shook his head in disbelief. "No. Vaella would never allow such a thing to happen."

Alicent's lips curled in a bitter smile. "Just like you didn't believe it with Rhaenyra either. And look how that turned out."

Viserys recoiled as if struck, his hand clenching the armrest of his chair. "Do not speak aloud of such things," he warned, his voice trembling with anger.

"You always protect them," Alicent continued, her voice rising. "Rhaenyra, Vaella—they never face the consequences of their actions. You turn a blind eye, and now look where we are."

Viserys glared at her, his anger momentarily clearing the fog of his illness. "And you think Aegon bears no blame? He has always been the one to act on his base desires without thought of the consequences."

Alicent's eyes blazed with fury. "You would claim Aemond took his own eye out, as well, if you could sweep all this under the rug for Aemma's children. You always have."

Viserys surged to his feet, his face flushed with rage. "Enough, Alicent! You speak of things you do not understand. Vaella—she has faced her own share of pain and loss. Do not presume to judge her so harshly."

"Pain and loss?" Alicent sneered. "You think that excuses her? You think that excuses any of them? You've coddled them, Viserys, and now we're paying the price."

The king took a step forward, his body shaking with emotion. "You forget your place, wife. I will not have you speak of my daughters this way."

Alicent's voice lowered, cold and venomous. "And you forget yours, husband. You are the king, yet you let your children run wild, and now we are on the brink of disaster because of your weakness."

Viserys, his strength failing, sank back into his chair, his face a mask of anguish. "What would you have me do, Alicent? What would you have me do?"

"Bethroth them," she hissed. "Bethroth Aegon and Vaella before this scandal tears our family apart. It's the only way to salvage this mess."

The king looked at her, his eyes filled with a mixture of despair and reluctant understanding. "And if your father and my other advisors refuse? Otto already started making arrangements for your brother’s betrothal to Vaella."

Alicent's smile was devoid of warmth. "Then make them understand they have no choice. For once, Viserys, be a king to your children, not just a father."

Viserys closed his eyes, the weight of his sickness and the burden of his choices pressing down on him. The room was silent except for the distant crash of waves against the Driftmark shore. The decision was his to make, and the consequences, for better or worse, would be borne by them all.

…

Vaella Targaryen sat in her chambers, the evening light casting a soft glow through the windows. Across from her, Rhaenyra, her older sister, watched her with a mixture of concern and affection. The tension in the air was palpable, and Vaella could feel her heart pounding in her chest as she recounted the events that had transpired.

"Aegon told Alicent he sullied me last night," Vaella said, her voice trembling with indignation. "As Ser Harrold came to bring us after the incident with Aemond."

Rhaenyra's eyes widened, but her voice remained gentle. "Is it true, Vaella?" she asked, her tone devoid of judgment, merely seeking the truth.

"No," Vaella replied firmly, shaking her head. "It's not true. Aegon lied."

Rhaenyra gave her a searching look, one that made Vaella feel both understood and scrutinized at the same time. Vaella felt the need to insist on her innocence. "We were close," she admitted, "but nothing happened. Ser Harrold interrupted us before anything could."

Rhaenyra reached out and placed her hand over Vaella's, squeezing it reassuringly. "I believe you, Vaella," she said softly. "I always will."

Vaella felt a wave of relief wash over her, but she couldn't ignore the strain in Rhaenyra's eyes, the unspoken words that lingered between them. "You look troubled, sister," Vaella observed. "Is there something you wish to tell me?"

Rhaenyra hesitated, then sighed. "I missed you, Vaella. My isolation on Dragonstone has been heavy on my mind. Being away from you, from our family, it's been... difficult. I want to convince Father to allow us to return to Dragonstone together after Driftmark."

Vaella smiled, a genuine warmth spreading through her. "I would like that, Rhaenyra. Truly."

But even as she spoke, Vaella felt a knot of apprehension tightening in her stomach. "But you know Alicent will detest that," she added softly. "More incidents could loom between her children and yours."

Rhaenyra's expression darkened slightly, but she nodded in agreement. "I am aware. But our bond, our family, it must come first. We need to stand united, especially now."

Vaella's thoughts drifted to the recent tensions, the arguments, and the looming threat of more conflict. "Do you think Father will agree?" she asked, her voice tinged with uncertainty.

Rhaenyra squeezed her hand again. "I will make him see reason. Our place is together, Vaella. We are stronger when we are not divided."

The sisters sat in silence for a moment, drawing strength from each other's presence. 

…

The next day, the tension in the royal chambers of Driftmark was almost tangible. Aegon paced back and forth in a room, his anxiety and frustration evident in every step. His platinum blonde hair was disheveled, and his usually carefree demeanor was replaced by a palpable sense of desperation. Vaella had been avoiding him since the incident, and it gnawed at him incessantly.

In the same room, Aemond sat stoically, his face a mask of indifference as the Maester carefully cleaned the stitches around his missing eye. His remaining eye followed Aegon's restless movements with thinly veiled annoyance.

"Aegon, you’re wearing a path into the floor," Aemond finally said, his voice edged with irritation.

Aegon stopped and turned to face his younger brother. "I can't help it, Aemond. Vaella won't speak to me. She won't even look at me."

Aemond raised an eyebrow. "And why do you think that is? Perhaps because you told our mother a blatant lie about defiling her? A lie that could ruin her?"

Aegon’s face twisted in frustration. "I had to do something. Father’s been ignoring our closeness for too long. I thought... I thought if I said that, he’d have no choice but to betroth us. It was a risk, but one that had to be taken."

Aemond's expression hardened. "Your 'risk' might cost you everything, Aegon. Including Vaella. She’s not like the other girls you’ve toyed with. She’s our sister. Our blood."

Aegon’s eyes flashed with a mixture of anger and desperation. "I know that, Aemond! Don’t you think I know that? But she’s always been mine. Ever since we were babes, we’ve been inseparable. I need her."

Aemond let out a slow, measured breath, his voice lowering to a more serious tone. "Need her or possess her? There’s a difference, brother."

Aegon’s shoulders slumped, the weight of Aemond’s words settling on him. "I just want her to see the wisdom behind my lie. To understand that it was for us."

Aemond's gaze was unwavering. "And what if she doesn’t? What if she never forgives you?"

Aegon shook his head, his eyes filled with a mixture of fear and hope. "She will. She has to. Once Father announces our betrothal, she’ll see that it’s the only way. She’ll understand."

Aemond sighed, a note of exasperation in his voice. "You’re a fool if you think she’ll simply forgive and forget. Vaella has a strong spirit, stronger than you give her credit for. You’ve wounded her pride, her honor. Those aren’t easily mended."

The Maester finished tending to Aemond’s stitches and quietly packed away his supplies. Aemond barely noticed, his attention still fixed on his brother.

"Aegon, you need to think carefully about your next steps," Aemond continued, his tone more measured. "This isn’t one of your usual escapades. This is our family. Our legacy. You’ve set events in motion that can’t be easily controlled."

Aegon ran a hand through his hair, his frustration evident. "I know, Aemond. I know. But I can’t just let her go. I won’t."

Aemond’s eye softened slightly, a rare moment of sympathy. "Then you’d best be prepared to fight for her forgiveness. Not with lies, but with truth. And pray that it’s enough."

The room fell silent as Aegon considered his brother’s words. The weight of his actions hung heavy in the air, a reminder of the fragile balance between desire and duty. Aegon could only hope that his gamble would pay off, and that Vaella would see the sincerity behind his desperate lie.

As the Maester left the room, the brothers were left in a contemplative silence, each lost in their thoughts. 

…

The next morning, Rhaenyra stood outside her father’s chambers, her heart heavy with the weight of the past few days. She knocked gently, and a servant opened the door, allowing her to enter. Inside, King Viserys sat by the window, the morning light casting a pallor over his already wan features. Beside him stood Alicent, her expression unreadable but her presence unmistakably stern.

"Father," Rhaenyra began softly, stepping into the room. "I need to speak with you."

Viserys turned his gaze towards his daughter, his eyes softening at the sight of her. "Rhaenyra, my dear. What is it?"

Rhaenyra took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully. "I was hoping you might consider coming to Dragonstone with the rest of the family before returning to King’s Landing. Perhaps... to mend what has happened between us."

Alicent scoffed, her eyes narrowing. "My son’s eye won’t grow back from your attempt to reconcile, Rhaenyra."

Rhaenyra ignored her stepmother, focusing solely on her father. "I’ve missed you, Father. And Vaella. I wish to spend a little more time together before we are parted again. It would mean so much to me."

Viserys looked at his daughter, his expression a mixture of pain and longing. He had missed his daughters dearly, the rifts in the family tearing at his heart. His gaze softened further, and he sighed, nodding slowly. "Perhaps you are right, Rhaenyra. My health fails more every day, and I wish to visit our family home before I no longer can."

Alicent’s face hardened, her eyes flashing with anger. "Viserys, you cannot be serious! This is not the time for such a trip. We have responsibilities—"

Viserys cut her off, his tone firm despite his frailty. "Enough, Alicent. I have made my decision. We will visit Dragonstone after we disembark."

He stood slowly, leaning heavily on his cane. With a final, weary glance at Alicent, he left the room, leaving the two women standing in tense silence.

As the door closed behind him, Alicent turned to Rhaenyra, her eyes blazing with fury. "What are you doing, Rhaenyra? What is your game?"

Rhaenyra met her gaze evenly, her voice steady. "I wish to spend more time with my sister and father. Nothing more."

Alicent’s lips curled into a sneer. "You expect me to believe that? After everything that has happened? You are trying to drive a wedge further between us."

Rhaenyra’s eyes flashed with anger. "You think I am plotting against you, Alicent? All I want is to be with my family, to heal the wounds that have been inflicted. You see plots and schemes everywhere, but perhaps the truth is much simpler."

Alicent stepped closer, her voice low and venomous. "You always were the favored one, the one who could do no wrong in his eyes. You think I don’t see through your manipulations?"

Rhaenyra’s expression hardened. "This isn’t about favoritism or manipulation. It’s about family, something you seem to forget in your quest for power."

Alicent’s eyes narrowed. "Be careful, Rhaenyra. You may find that the price of your so-called reconciliation is higher than you expect."

Rhaenyra stood her ground, her voice resolute. "I will take that risk, if it means mending the rifts in our family. You can either stand with us or against us, but I will not be deterred."

Alicent stared at her for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Finally, she turned on her heel and left the room, her footsteps echoing down the corridor.

Rhaenyra took a deep breath, her heart pounding in her chest. The battle lines had been drawn, but she knew that the path she had chosen was the only way forward. She only hoped that her father’s decision would be the first step towards healing the wounds that had torn their family apart.

…

The late afternoon sun cast long shadows along the shores of Driftmark as Vaella Targaryen strolled with her oldest nephew, Jacaerys Velaryon. The distant roars of dragons echoed through the air, a reminder of their ever-present guardianship. The tranquil setting contrasted sharply with the tension Vaella felt within, the turmoil of the past days weighing heavily on her mind.

"How are you and your brothers holding up, Jace?" Vaella asked, her voice soft and concerned. They had barely had a moment to speak since arriving for Laena's funeral.

Jace glanced at her, his youthful face marked by a maturity beyond his years. "We’re good, Aunt Vaella. Life has been pleasant since we left King’s Landing. There’s no judgment on Dragonstone, no whispers behind our backs."

Vaella nodded, relieved to hear that at least part of her family found some solace away from the political machinations of the capital. "I’m glad to hear that," she said sincerely.

Jace’s expression grew serious, and he turned to her, about to broach the subject of the incident with Aemond. "Aunt Vaella, about what happened with Aemond—"

Before he could continue, a sharp voice cut through the air. "Vaella!"

Vaella’s frown deepened as she turned to see Aegon approaching them, his face a mix of desperation and determination. The sight of him brought back the pain of his betrayal, a wound still fresh and raw. She had loved Aegon, but his actions had the potential to ruin her life forever.

Jace stepped closer to his aunt, his stance protective. Aegon's pleading gaze soured as he noticed Jace’s proximity. "Don’t you have your betrothed to bother, Jacaerys?" he snapped.

Vaella, her voice cold and controlled, addressed Aegon before Jace could respond. "What do you want, Aegon?"

Aegon turned to her, his expression earnest, almost frantic. "Vaella, please understand why I said what I did. I love you. Now Father has no choice but to wed us and annul my engagement to Helaena."

Vaella’s eyes narrowed with a mix of hurt and anger. "Do you think this is something I can forgive easily? You lied, Aegon. A lie that could ruin a princess's life."

Aegon, now panicking, reached for her hands. She flinched, pulling back, but he clung to her desperately. "You must forgive me, Vaella. Because you love me too, and we almost did it anyway if not for Ser Harrold."

Jace, confused but seeing Vaella’s distress, stepped in to push Aegon back. "Enough, Aegon. Leave her alone."

Aegon’s demeanor shifted abruptly. His face twisted with anger, and he shoved Jace back. "Stay away from us, you bastard."

Vaella’s voice rose in anger and desperation. "Stop it, Aegon! This isn’t helping!"

The boys began to shove each other, the tension escalating, until a commanding voice interrupted them. "That’s enough!"

Ser Criston Cole rushed towards them, his presence a stern reminder of their responsibilities and the eyes that always watched. The boys stopped immediately, stepping back from each other.

"You must return to the castle at once," Ser Criston said, his tone urgent. "Your presence is required urgently."

Vaella, still reeling from the confrontation, nodded numbly. She glanced at Jace, who gave her a reassuring look, before turning to follow Ser Criston. Aegon trailed behind, his expression a mix of regret and defiance. The unresolved tension hung heavy in the air as they made their way back, each step fraught with the weight of unspoken words and unhealed wounds.

…

The news of Laenor Velaryon's death spread through Driftmark like wildfire, casting a heavy pall over the already grief-stricken island. Princess Rhaenys had found her son, his body charred and unrecognizable, lying near the hearth where he had met his tragic end. The once vibrant halls of Driftmark were now filled with mournful wails and the somber preparations for yet another funeral. The mood was bleak, with every corner of the castle steeped in sorrow.

A few days later, the family gathered once more by the sea, their faces drawn and eyes red from weeping. Laenor was laid to rest beside his sister Laena, their bodies committed to the deep waters as the waves lapped gently at the shore. The salt of the sea mingled with the salt of their tears, and the sound of dragons keening in the distance added a haunting note to the solemn ceremony.

The day after the funeral, the royal family prepared to depart for Dragonstone. King Viserys had granted Rhaenyra’s wish, hoping that time together away from court would help heal their fractured family. The dragon riders readied their mounts, the massive beasts shifting restlessly as their riders made final preparations. Those who were not riding dragons, including Vaella, prepared to board the ships that would take them to Dragonstone.

As Vaella stood on the docks, overseeing the loading of supplies and ensuring all was in order, she heard a familiar voice call her name. She turned and saw Aegon approaching, his expression earnest. She sighed, feeling a mixture of exasperation and resignation. 

"Aegon, what is it now?" she asked, her voice weary.

Aegon slowed his pace as he neared her, his eyes reflecting a mixture of hope and desperation. "Vaella, I was hoping you might ride with me on Sunfyre. It would be faster and... we could talk."

Vaella frowned, the pain of his recent betrayal still fresh in her heart. "I don’t think that’s a good idea, Aegon. Too much has happened."

Aegon stepped closer, his tone softening. "Please, Vaella. I know I’ve hurt you, but I want to make it right. Let me prove to you that I meant well, even if my actions were misguided."

Vaella looked into his eyes, seeing the sincerity there. Despite everything, the bond they shared was strong, forged over years of closeness. She felt her resolve waver. "I still haven’t forgiven you, Aegon," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Aegon reached out and gently took her hand, his touch warm and familiar. "I understand, and I’ll do whatever it takes to earn your forgiveness. Just give me a chance."

She hesitated for a moment longer, then nodded reluctantly. "Alright. But this doesn’t mean everything is forgiven."

Aegon smiled, relief flooding his features. "Thank you, Vaella. I promise, I’ll make it right."

With that, he led her towards Sunfyre, the magnificent golden dragon waiting patiently. Vaella climbed onto the saddle behind Aegon, her heart a tumult of emotions. As Sunfyre took to the skies, the wind whipping through her hair, she held on tight, hoping that this journey would bring some semblance of peace to their troubled family.

…

The evening sky was painted with the last hues of sunset as the royal family arrived on Dragonstone. Sunfyre, Aegon’s majestic golden dragon, landed in Dragonmont, the great volcanic mountain that housed the island’s dragons. The dragon’s arrival was met with the usual flurry of activity from the Dragonkeepers, who rushed to tend to Sunfyre and ensure the safe dismounting of Prince Aegon and Princess Vaella.

Aegon helped Vaella down from the saddle, his hands lingering on her hips longer than necessary. Vaella shot him a look, a mix of exasperation and warning, but Aegon only shrugged it off with a smirk.

The evening was tense as they gathered for dinner, the air thick with unspoken words and unresolved tensions. Conversations were stilted, and the family members were all too aware of the delicate balance they were trying to maintain. After the meal, they each retreated to their chambers, seeking a moment of peace in the midst of their turmoil.

In her chambers, Vaella allowed the servants to draw her a hot bath. She slipped into the warm water, feeling her muscles relax for the first time in days. The scent of lavender and rose petals filled the air, soothing her troubled mind. She closed her eyes, letting the warmth wash away her worries.

But her peace was abruptly shattered when Aegon entered the room without knocking. The servants tending to Vaella gasped in alarm, but Aegon waved them away with an imperious gesture. He approached the bath, kneeling beside it with a wishful smile on his lips, his fingers playing with the water.

Vaella opened her eyes, startled and annoyed. "Did you want something, Aegon?"

Aegon’s smile widened. "I wanted to spend more time with you. I’ve slept little ever since you started avoiding me. I’m staying with you tonight, like before we always did."

Vaella started to protest, her voice rising in frustration. "Aegon, you can’t just—"

He cut her off, his tone firm and unyielding. "Everyone already talks about us, even before I lied to Mother. I don’t care, and neither should you."

Vaella sighed, feeling the weight of his words. "It’s not that simple. I’m a woman, Aegon."

Aegon’s smirk returned as he reached into the bath, pulling her out with a possessive grip. "You’re my woman."

She stood there, dripping and vulnerable, as Aegon’s eyes roamed over her. His admiration was evident, but Vaella felt a knot of apprehension tightening in her stomach. She knew he believed his actions were driven by love, but she feared how far that love would push him.

Realizing she had little choice, Vaella sighed and reached for a towel, drying herself off. She dressed in her nightgown, the silk clinging to her damp skin. Aegon watched her every move, his eyes never leaving her. She took his hand, the weight of resignation heavy in her heart, and they proceeded to retire for the night together.

As they settled into the large bed, Vaella couldn’t help but feel a mix of emotions. She felt the warmth of Aegon’s body beside her, his arms wrapping around her protectively. She believed him when he said he loved her, but the intensity of that love frightened her. How far would he go? How much would she have to sacrifice?

Aegon’s voice broke the silence, soft and earnest. "I know I’ve made mistakes, Vaella. But I promise, I’ll do whatever it takes to make things right."

Vaella turned to look at him, searching his eyes for sincerity. "I hope you do, Aegon. Because this... this isn’t easy for me."

He nodded, his expression serious. "I know. And I’ll prove to you that we belong together."

Vaella sighed again, nestling into his embrace. But for now, she allowed herself to find a moment of solace in his arms, hoping that somehow, they would find a way through the storm that lay ahead.

…

The next morning, the sun cast a pale light over Dragonstone, casting long shadows through the ancient stone halls. Vaella and Aegon walked hand in hand towards the chamber where their father had summoned them. The tension between them was palpable, a mix of anxiety and anticipation. As they entered the room, they found King Viserys seated at the head of a long table, his expression stern. Otto Hightower stood nearby, his face a mask of irritation, while Alicent sat beside him, her expression tight and unreadable.

Viserys looked up as they approached, his gaze moving from Aegon to Vaella. He began slowly, his voice heavy with disappointment. "Alicent has told me what occurred on Driftmark."

Vaella felt a chill run down her spine as she met her father's disapproving gaze. Aegon's grip on her hand tightened, a silent reassurance. 

"I hope you both understand the gravity of your actions," Viserys continued, his tone stern. "This is not something that can be easily overlooked or forgiven."

Aegon swallowed hard but kept his head high. "We understand, Father. We regret the distress we've caused."

Viserys sighed, his eyes softening momentarily before he continued. "In light of these events, I have decided to annul Aegon's betrothal to Helaena. It is clear that the bond between the two of you is strong, and for the sake of the court and Vaella's dignity, you will be betrothed to one another."

Aegon's face lit up with relief and triumph, his plan having worked. He pulled Vaella closer, his heart pounding with excitement. "Thank you, Father. We will do our best to uphold the honor of our house."

Otto Hightower suddenly spoke up, his voice sharp with alarm. "Your Grace, I must ask you to reconsider. My son was looking forward to his betrothal announcement to the Princess. Even if Vaella's honor is in question, this decision—"

Aegon’s expression darkened, his annoyance growing. "Grandsire, with all due respect, this is a matter between the King and his children."

Vaella remained silent, her eyes fixed on the floor. The weight of the situation pressed heavily on her, and she could feel the intensity of Otto’s stare.

Viserys raised a hand to silence the room. "I have made my decision, Otto. This union will help maintain the stability of our house and protect Vaella’s reputation."

Otto nodded reluctantly, his defeat evident in his posture. "As you wish, Your Grace."

Before turning away, Otto sent a cold, calculating stare toward Alicent, who looked down, guilt and frustration etched on her face. It was clear that he blamed her for allowing the bond between Aegon and Vaella to develop unchecked.

Viserys turned his attention back to Aegon and Vaella. "I expect you both to conduct yourselves with the utmost propriety from now on. This union is not just a matter of love, but of duty and honor to our house."

Aegon nodded, his grip on Vaella’s hand tightening reassuringly. "We understand, Father. We will not disappoint you."

Vaella finally found her voice, her tone steady despite the turmoil within her. "Thank you, Father. We will do our best to honor your decision."

Viserys nodded, his expression softening slightly. "Very well. You are dismissed."

As they left the chamber, Aegon’s excitement was palpable. He pulled Vaella into a tight embrace, whispering in her ear, "We did it, Vaella. I told you it would work. We’re going to be together."

Vaella forced a smile, her mind racing with the implications of their father's decision. She believed Aegon loved her, but the fear of what that love might drive him to do still lingered in her heart. As they walked back to their chambers, she couldn't help but wonder what the future held for them and their house.

…

As the royal family dispersed from the council chamber, Otto Hightower and his daughter Alicent walked the dimly lit hallways of Dragonstone, their footsteps echoing against the cold stone walls. Ser Criston Cole trailed a few paces behind, his keen eyes ever-watchful, ensuring the Queen’s safety.

Otto’s face was a mask of barely restrained anger, his lips pressed into a thin line. He waited until they were out of earshot of any servants before he rounded on Alicent, his voice low but laced with venom. "This is your doing, Alicent. You pushed for Aegon to wed Vaella, and now look where we are. Securing Vaella’s hand to Gwayne would have cemented our House’s claim to the throne, and Aegon marrying Helaena would have garnered the favor of the smallfolk, invoking the legacy of Aegon the Conqueror. But now, everything is jeopardized."

Alicent’s eyes flashed with frustration and defensiveness. "Father, you know as well as I do that Aegon and Vaella have always shared a strange bond. They’ve shared a bed since they were babes, and no matter how much I tried to keep them apart, they always found a way to sneak behind my back. This was inevitable."

Otto grimaced, his hand clenched into a fist. He opened his mouth to reprimand her further, but Alicent cut him off, her voice firm and resolute. "This can still be used to our advantage. Aegon listens to Vaella more than anyone else. If we guide her, direct her to control his urges and ambitions, it could still work in our favor."

Otto's eyes narrowed, his expression skeptical. "And what makes you think Vaella will bend to our will? She’s as headstrong as her sister Rhaenyra. There is no guarantee she won’t betray Aegon for her sister."

Alicent met her father’s gaze, her expression determined. "Vaella may be strong-willed, but she is also deeply loyal to those she loves. If we handle this carefully, she will see the benefits of aligning with us. Besides, Aegon’s influence over her is significant. If he believes in our cause, so will she."

Otto sighed, rubbing his temples in frustration. "I hope you’re right, Alicent. But tread carefully. This alliance is fragile, and one misstep could bring everything crashing down. We must ensure Vaella’s loyalty, or this entire plan will be for naught."

Alicent nodded, her resolve unwavering. "I understand, Father. I will speak to Vaella and make her see the importance of our cause. Aegon’s love for her can be our greatest weapon, but only if we wield it wisely."

Otto looked at her for a long moment, his eyes searching hers. Finally, he nodded, albeit reluctantly. "Very well. But remember, one wrong move and we lose everything. Keep Criston close, and make sure he watches over both Aegon and Vaella. We cannot afford any more surprises."

With that, they continued down the hallway, their minds filled with the complex web of plans and contingencies that lay ahead. Ser Criston Cole followed silently, his eyes sharp and his hand never far from his sword. The future of their House hung in the balance, and every step they took would either secure their power or lead to their downfall.

…

Rhaenyra and Daemon strode through the corridors of Dragonstone, their faces set with determination and anger. They had just heard the news about Viserys's decision to wed Aegon to Vaella, a decision that had ignited a firestorm of emotions within them. Rhaenyra had always opposed this idea, having seen firsthand Aegon's obsessive behavior towards her little sister. Now, she was furious.

As they entered Viserys's chambers, they found him sitting by the window, his cane leaning against his chair, his face a mask of weariness. The burden of his illness and the endless turmoil within his family weighed heavily on him.

"Father," Rhaenyra began, her voice tight with controlled anger. "Why have you decided to wed Aegon to Vaella? After all the discussions we've had, you know this is a bad idea. Aegon is unsuited for her."

Daemon, standing beside her, added with his characteristic bluntness, "Giving Vaella to the Hightowers is dangerous and stupid. You know this, Viserys."

Viserys looked up at them, his eyes filled with a mix of regret and exhaustion. He sighed heavily, leaning on his cane for support as he spoke. "I had no choice."

Rhaenyra's eyes flashed with sarcasm and disbelief. "No choice? Because Aegon claimed he slept with Vaella? A lie that he and Alicent concocted."

Viserys's expression hardened slightly, but the weariness remained. "Both Alicent and Aegon were adamant about it. Aegon confessed himself. What was I to do?"

Rhaenyra's voice rose, her frustration evident. "You could have talked to Vaella about the matter! You took their word without even consulting her."

Viserys, looking even more fatigued, slowly sat down. He ran a hand over his face, the lines of age and illness more pronounced than ever. "It's done, Rhaenyra. I only hope that Vaella can temper Aegon's nature. Perhaps this decision will help bridge the divide between our families."

Daemon's expression was one of thinly veiled contempt. "You expect Vaella to fix Aegon's flaws? That's a heavy burden to place on her, Viserys."

Viserys met his brother-in-law's gaze, his own eyes weary but resolute. "What would you have me do, Daemon? The realm is already fraught with tension and division. If this marriage can bring some semblance of unity, then it's a risk I must take."

Rhaenyra shook her head, her heart aching for her sister. "Vaella deserves better than this. She deserves a choice."

Viserys's voice softened, his tone almost pleading. "I know, Rhaenyra. But the realm must come first. Always."

Rhaenyra and Daemon exchanged a look, their mutual frustration and helplessness clear. They knew that arguing further would yield no different result. Viserys was set in his decision, driven by a hope for unity that seemed increasingly out of reach.

As they left the chamber, Rhaenyra’s heart was heavy with worry for her sister. She resolved to keep a close watch on Vaella, to protect her as best as she could from the storm that was sure to come. The corridors of Dragonstone felt colder and darker, the weight of impending conflict pressing down on them all.

…

Aegon stood in the courtyard of Dragonstone, the sea breeze tousling his platinum blonde hair. His mood was unusually buoyant, a stark contrast to the tension that had gripped the royal family in recent days. Nearby, his sister Helaena sat on a low stone wall, absorbed in her world of bugs and spiders, her delicate fingers carefully handling a beetle. Aemond, ever vigilant, stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze sharp and assessing as he watched his siblings.

Noticing Aegon's unusually good mood, Aemond raised an eyebrow. "You seem particularly cheerful today, Aegon. Ever since Father decided to wed you to Vaella."

Aegon's smirk widened, and he leaned against a nearby pillar, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction. "Why wouldn't I be? Father finally saw reason. Now, Vaella will be only mine."

Helaena glanced up from her insects, a faint smile playing on her lips. The news of her annulled engagement had brought a rare sense of peace to her. She returned to her bugs, murmuring softly to herself, her words cryptic as always. "The dragon of gold binds the silver heart, but shadows loom, whispering secrets in the dark."

Aemond shook his head slightly at his sister's words before turning his attention back to Aegon. "Your irresponsible plan worked, Aegon. But now what? What happens next?"

Aegon scoffed, pushing off the pillar and pacing slightly. "Now, I finally have Vaella. She's everything to me."

Aemond's expression grew serious, his remaining eye narrowing. "Vaella is not a toy, Aegon. She's a person, with her own will and desires."

Aegon stopped and turned to face his brother, irritation flickering across his features. "I never said she was a toy, Aemond. Vaella is everything to me. I love her."

Aemond stepped closer, his voice low and intense. "If you truly love her, you'll treat her with the respect she deserves. Not as a prize you've won, but as a partner, an equal."

Aegon met his brother's gaze, the seriousness of Aemond's words sinking in. For a moment, the arrogance faded from Aegon's face, replaced by a flicker of uncertainty. He nodded slowly, though the smirk soon returned. "I understand, Aemond. But don't worry, Vaella will see that this is what's best for both of us."

Aemond sighed, his skepticism clear. "Just remember, Aegon, that a relationship built on lies and manipulation won't last. You'll need more than just determination to keep her by your side."

Aegon waved off Aemond's concerns with a dismissive gesture. "She'll come around. You'll see."

Helaena, still playing with her insects, spoke up again, her voice distant and ethereal. "The web we weave, so fragile yet strong, secrets and lies, won't hold for long."

Both brothers turned to look at her, but Helaena seemed lost in her own world, her cryptic words hanging in the air like an ominous warning.

Aegon shook his head and turned back to Aemond. "Helaena's riddles aside, I'm confident. Vaella will understand why this is best."

Aemond crossed his arms, his expression still stern. "Just don't forget that Vaella is her own person. Respect her, and maybe, just maybe, this will work out."

Aegon nodded, though his thoughts were already drifting to the future he envisioned with Vaella. "I won't forget. Thank you, Aemond."

With that, Aegon turned and walked away, his steps light with newfound purpose. Aemond watched him go, his own heart heavy with concern for both his brother and Vaella. Helaena, now cradling a spider in her hands, looked up at Aemond, her eyes clear for a moment.

"The dragon's bond is forged in fire, but shadows linger, and hearts conspire," she whispered, before turning back to her quiet contemplation.

Aemond sighed, running a hand through his hair. The days ahead were uncertain, and he could only hope that his brother's determination would not lead to further strife. He turned his gaze to the distant horizon, where the sea met the sky, and a sense of foreboding settled over him.

As the sun dipped lower, casting long shadows across the courtyard, Aemond resolved to keep a close watch on Aegon and Vaella. The web of intrigue and emotion surrounding them was intricate and fragile, and one wrong move could bring it all crashing down.

…

Vaella finally found a quiet corner of Dragonstone, a secluded alcove overlooking the sea. The waves crashed against the rocks below, their rhythmic sound providing a temporary solace from the storm of her emotions. She sank onto a weathered bench, the weight of her worries, expectations, and the lingering emptiness left by Baelon's death pressing down on her. 

She loved Aegon—despite his flaws and the turmoil he often brought into her life. The idea of marriage had rarely crossed her mind, and when it did, it felt distant and abstract. She had suitors, of course, but she felt no affection for any of them. Aegon had always been her rock, her confidant, and their relationship had grown more complex as they aged. She closed her eyes and let herself drift back to the moment when their innocent bed-sharing had turned into something more.

---

It was a warm summer night in King's Landing, and the air was thick with the scent of blooming flowers. Vaella and Aegon, both on the cusp of adolescence, had spent the day exploring the gardens and playing in the palace courtyards. As night fell, they had returned to her chambers, as they often did, seeking comfort in each other's presence.

"Aegon, do you ever think about what it'll be like when we're older?" Vaella asked, her voice barely above a whisper as they lay side by side in her bed.

Aegon turned to face her, his silver hair shimmering in the moonlight. "Sometimes. But I know one thing for sure—I always want to be with you, Vaella."

His words warmed her heart, and she smiled softly. "I feel the same way."

There was a moment of silence, filled only by the gentle rustling of the curtains. Then Aegon reached out, his hand lightly touching her cheek. "Vaella, can I ask you something?"

"Of course," she replied, her curiosity piqued.

"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to... to kiss someone?" Aegon's voice was hesitant, unsure.

Vaella's heart skipped a beat. She had thought about it, but never dared to voice it. "I have," she admitted, her cheeks flushing.

Aegon shifted closer, his breath warm against her skin. "Can I kiss you, Vaella? Just to see what it's like?"

Her pulse quickened, a mix of anticipation and nervousness flooding her. "Yes, Aegon. You can kiss me."

He leaned in, his lips brushing against hers gently at first, then with more confidence. The kiss was soft and tentative, a shared exploration of unfamiliar territory. Vaella felt a rush of emotions—excitement, affection, and a deep, growing bond with Aegon that she had never felt with anyone else.

As they pulled away, their foreheads resting against each other, Aegon smiled. "That was... amazing."

Vaella nodded, her heart still racing. "Yes, it was."

From that night on, their bed-sharing took on a new dimension. They explored each other intimately, their bond deepening with each secret touch and whispered confession. Their relationship became their private world, a sanctuary from the expectations and duties that awaited them outside their shared space.

---

Vaella opened her eyes, the memory lingering like a bittersweet echo. She loved Aegon, but the idea of marriage—to anyone—felt overwhelming. She had always sought solace in their shared bond, but now that bond was being formalized into something public, something scrutinized by the entire realm. She feared what that might do to the delicate balance they had maintained for so long.

A single tear rolled down her cheek as she stared out at the sea, the horizon blurred by her emotions. She could only hope that their love, which had weathered so many storms, would endure the challenges ahead. For now, she would take solace in the memory of their first kiss and the innocent intimacy that had blossomed into a love both beautiful and complicated.

…

Vaella wandered aimlessly across the island of Dragonstone, her heart heavy with grief and confusion. The distant roars of dragons offered a small comfort, a reminder of the ancient bond her family shared with these magnificent creatures. The caves of Dragonmont loomed above her, dark and foreboding, yet strangely inviting. As she walked along a particular path, a sudden wave of grief washed over her, more intense than any she had felt before.

Baelon.

Her twin, her other half. The void his death left in her soul was something she could never fully cry out, no matter how hard she tried. She often wondered what kind of life she would have had if he had lived. This sudden, overwhelming sadness propelled her to seek out one particular lair, Cannibal's. It was as if she was called there, urged by a loneliness she could barely comprehend.

The entrance to Cannibal's lair was wide and jagged, the air thick with the scent of death and decay. Bones and half-eaten carcasses littered the ground, a testament to the dragon's ferocity. The walls were blackened with soot and dragonfire, and the light barely penetrated the gloom within. Vaella felt a chill run down her spine as she stepped inside, the oppressive atmosphere pressing down on her.

In the darkness, she saw him. Cannibal, the wild dragon, black as coal with menacing green eyes that glowed eerily in the dim light. He lay atop a heap of bones, his massive form coiled in a protective stance. The partly devoured carcass of another dragon lay beneath him, a grisly reminder of his savage nature. Cannibal's eyes locked onto Vaella, observing her with an intensity that made her heart pound.

A sudden wave of sadness washed over her again, stronger this time, threatening to overwhelm her. She had felt alone for so long, but this... this was different. It was as if the dragon's own loneliness resonated with hers, a sorrow she could feel deep in her bones.

Suddenly, Cannibal launched himself at her with a terrifying roar. Vaella backed up, tripping over a loose rock and falling to the ground. She lay there, frozen in terror, as the dragon advanced. He stopped just a few meters away, his breath hot and foul, his eyes boring into hers.

Propelled by a strange mix of sorrow, loneliness, and an odd sensation of being called here, Vaella screamed at the dragon. "You think I'm afraid of you? You ugly beast! Eat me if you want, just do it! I don't care anymore!"

Cannibal shrieked, his cries echoing off the walls of the cave. He seemed ready to indulge her, his jaws opening wide. But instead of closing them around her, he stopped, his massive head just inches from her. His green eyes stared into her indigo ones, and for a moment, it felt as if their souls connected. Vaella felt another wave of loneliness, but as she began to realize it was not her own, a thunderous pain shot through her body. Her vision blurred, and she could hear Cannibal's cries turning to something almost mournful as everything went black.

---

History would record this moment as Princess Vaella’s desperate attempt to take her own life, consumed by the remorse she felt for surviving while her twin did not. Yet, it would forever be debated if Cannibal had called her to his lair of his own accord, having finally found a kindred spirit in the princess. The fierce dragon and the sorrowful girl, both creatures of loss and loneliness, had met in a moment that transcended the mortal understanding of dragon and rider.

[alicepao13]

I don’t understand what the hold up is either, the show has been renewed, why not officially announce it as soon as possible? (Especially since people have been vocal about wanting it back) I mean, a few of us knows it has been renewed, but the majority of people don’t look at other sources, so they don’t know (I’ve refrained from commenting it in replies on IG, just because I figure it’s better to wait until they officially confirm it themselves), but not getting an official announcement when they’re supposed to start shooting in a few weeks, is frustrating. Like just announce it!?

I don't know. Shows don't often wait until way after they go into pre-production (they've already been in pre-production for two weeks) to announce that they're renewed. Why? Because people will probably find out beforehand, you can't hide an entire production preparation, you can't hide casting announcements, various guild announcements, etc. Case in point. I think that up until recently CityTV had been content with the fact that fans weren't willing to dig that deep and find such things.

I don't think it would hurt anyone if people were to start commenting, "We know you've renewed the show" on Instagram or anywhere else, but it has to be accompanied by sources, especially since news of the show's renewal had previously circulated (too early to be factual) with wrong dates. The only people that should absolutely not do that are the cast and crew because there are confidentiality agreements to be honored. If fans comment on posts with sources, everyone will realize that the news can't be contained anymore. And you're not harming anyone because it's not like they can tell DGC to not publish that from the production, as far as I know they're supposed to be official record.

And I doubt we're spoiling something big for them here. If anyone on CityTV considered it important, then they'd take care to make the announcement in the right time and not have us wait for it still. I've already seen a few comments from people saying that "since Hudson and Rex has ended a couple months now, it's probably not getting renewed". Granted, these people don't know much about how networks operate if they say things like these but they're part of the show's viewership all the same.

If they're still negotiating contracts, then I don't know what to say. They should have been finalized by now. Pre-production means scripts are being written right now.

[anamelessfool]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love 💗

oh wow this was tough! Especially since I write to make myself happy first so I like everything I do.

You can tell I like em so much based on the art I commissioned and/or made for the project!

Violence & Gentleness (Primo set in 1979)

Honestly I would consider this one of my greatest artistic achievements in my life. Like, full on sad I can't officially publish this. Firstly I put so much historical research and lore into it. And then the characterizations of the brothers and their relationship to each other. How the dynamic of the Church changes when there is a female Satanic Anti-Pope.

Strength VIII (Dom GN! Reader x Papa IV)

I was feeling like there was no representation of a realistic Dom/sub encounter with a Dom reader, or at least I hadn't come across something that I felt was accessible for me. I'm not a sub person at all but I'm not an intense whips and chains Dom either. I wanted to create a scenario that showed first and foremost a foundation of trust and affection instead of just shock tactic sexcapades. It's important to make the stuff you want to see.

Ribbons & Ties (Terzo x Omega)

I got very invested in domestic non-smut. I liked how neatly the story fell into place. You get a glimpse of the Church as I see it and all the brothers in their specific roles. Plus Terzo shows Omega the deepest part of his heart. Vulnerability and trust is what I like to write about most.

Wanna Bewitch You (Copia x Cardinal Marian)

Again, another plot that fell neatly into place. Got time skips, flashbacks, platonic bonds and apocalyptic visions forced upon the cowardly Copia. Marian and Copia are beyond 'meet cute' but still afraid of commitment. Another "Wouldn't it be funny if..." Story that basically stopped being a joke.

No Deal (Hippie Reader x 1970 Nihil)

I can't ever have a normal reader fic, sorry. Liked researching the era for this one. 1969-1970 was literally the best 20 months of music history in the last 200 years holy shit. Started out as a joke and yeah you guessed it....not a joke no more.

(commissioned art (Copia Terzo Duet and Terzomega) by @kabukiaku)

[mariacallous]

The Cabinet confirmation hearings have been agonizing for congressional Democrats, who have watched in horror as Donald Trump has pushed through one outlandish candidate after another. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine skeptic nominated for Secretary of Health and Human Services, was among the most hair-raising. “Vaccinating children is unethical,” he has written. Unable to prevent Kennedy from becoming the country’s top health official, Democrats could only use his hearing to showcase their values. Liberals stand for science. The G.O.P. stands for drinking bleach, freaking out about Satanist pedophiles, and blaming wildfires on Jewish space lasers.

To Elizabeth Warren, Kennedy was an “anti-science conspiracy peddler.” Vaccines, 9/11, 5G networks, pasteurization, fluoride, AIDS, lab leaks, electoral theft, assassinations—“he’s nuts on a lot of fronts,” the New York Post’s editorial board concluded. The reporter Peter Bergen once asked Kennedy if there was any major event in the past decades for which he did accept the official explanation. The moon landing, Kennedy replied. He believed that one. But, even here, he had an idiosyncratic (and impeccably Kennedyesque) explanation. “I went skiing with Buzz Aldrin every year,” he said. “I knew the astronauts.”

So Kennedy was a wide target. Yet, awkwardly for this firing squad, he had until recently been one of their own. He spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Two years later, he appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair with Al Gore, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney as a member of the “Green Team.” (“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the most respected environmental advocates in the country,” the accompanying article explained.) In 2008, Barack Obama reportedly considered nominating him to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Compounding the awkwardness, the thing that Democrats hated about Kennedy now was the thing they’d liked about him before: his willingness to accuse large corporations and lax regulators of poisoning people. He’d sued oil and coal companies. He’d campaigned with Cesar Chavez against pesticides and with Erin Brockovich against a gas company. In a 2004 article for The Nation, he had chastised the “flat-earthers within the Bush Administration” for engaging in a “campaign to suppress science” around climate change. It was only after he published a book making similar arguments against vaccine manufacturers, in 2014, that liberals turned on him. Kennedy found their faith in pharmaceutical firms baffling. “These are the same companies that gave us the opioid epidemic,” he said.

As Kennedy’s opponents saw it, the difference was that, regarding vaccines, he had lost his mind. At the confirmation hearing, Bernie Sanders invoked “sixteen studies done by scientists and doctors all over the world saying that vaccines do not cause autism.” Kennedy was unfazed. “Look at the I.O.M. assessment of those sixteen studies, Senator,” he replied, referring to the Institute of Medicine.

Sanders batted this away. “You have said, ‘The COVID vaccine was the deadliest vaccine ever made.’ ”

“The reason I said that, Senator Sanders, is because there were more reports on the VAERS system,” Kennedy explained, referring to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which collects self-reported data. “There were more reports of injuries and deaths than any, than all other vaccines combined.”

Sanders continued: “You disagree with the scientific community that—”

“Oh, I just, I’m agnostic, because we don’t have the science to make that determination.”

Citing evidence, ignoring appeals to authority, reserving judgment, demanding more research—these are potentially exhausting traits in a conversational partner, but they’re also marks of a scientific mind. Rather than being “anti-science,” Kennedy seems enchanted by it. His accusatory book “The Real Anthony Fauci” (2021) is packed with discussions of clinical studies, and it bears a blurb from a Nobel-winning virologist. (Anyone worried about the lack of public appetite for complex writing should contemplate the fact that this nearly five-hundred-page, data-drenched work of nonfiction has sold more than a million copies.) Kennedy has published two books with the subtitle “Let the Science Speak.”

If Democrats had hoped for a showdown between learning and ignorance, this wasn’t it. It looked more like learning versus learning, with each side dug in and lobbing citations toward the opposing trench. Kennedy’s rise represents a growing epistemological rift in the country. Increasingly, “left” and “right” don’t just describe divergent political judgments but also sealed-off understandings of what is true and how we know it. For all his unfounded beliefs and suspicions, Kennedy’s revolt isn’t against research but against the power long held by scientific insiders like Fauci. And in this he might have a point.

Why do these heated battles over knowledge arise? The sociologist Gil Eyal offers a compelling account in “The Crisis of Expertise” (2019). We imagine science as an open-ended pursuit in which doubt is encouraged, new evidence is welcomed, and theories are revisable. The basic sciences operate roughly like that. But “regulatory science,” in which conclusions are required on a deadline, works differently. A drug must be approved or not, a level of pollution pronounced safe or not. In these circumstances, Eyal explains, the authorities must at some point close the case, push errant facts aside, and draw a line. Such moments generate “inevitable friction.”

Eyal’s theory about certain sciences rings true for intellectual life generally. There’s not much hostility toward experts in unhurried realms of inquiry like numismatics or number theory. It’s when uncertainty collides with urgency that the authorities enter the fray, convene commissions, and issue findings. Those who accept the sanctioned conclusions gain official backing. Those who don’t are ruled out of bounds. No longer recognized as colleagues with legitimate hypotheses, they risk being treated as crackpots, deniers, and conspiracy theorists.

Drawing a line is necessary: at some point, you have to declare that the Holocaust happened, that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that climate change is real. The philosopher Bernard Williams noted that science isn’t a free market of ideas but a managed one; without filters against cranks, trolls, and merchants of doubt, knowledge production “would grind to a halt.” But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you’re endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies. You also marginalize too many intelligent people, who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies, and waving counter-evidence in your face.

That could be the story of the past six decades. The nineteen-sixties started as a high point in trusting experts. John F. Kennedy was a popular Harvard-trained, Pulitzer Prize-winning author who stacked his Administration with intellectuals. Nearly four-fifths of Americans, when polled in the early sixties, said that they trusted the government to do the right thing at least most of the time. (That number now hovers near one-fifth.)

Not everyone basked in the light, though. In 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter gave a perceptive lecture about the “paranoid style in American politics,” the tendency toward “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” The next day, J.F.K. himself turned to the topic. He warned of those who adhered to “doctrines wholly unrelated to reality” and spread “ignorance and misinformation.” Or at least he planned to issue that warning. En route to giving his intended speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, the President was shot twice and killed.

The man arrested, Lee Harvey Oswald, had defected to the Soviet Union and then, oddly, re-defected back to the United States. Oswald professed innocence—“I’m just a patsy,” he told the press—but was himself murdered before he could further explain. Was some larger plot afoot? “I thought it was a conspiracy and I raised that question,” Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, recalled. “Nearly everyone that was with me raised it.”

But a full, public airing threatened to reveal the C.I.A.’s machinations and the F.B.I.’s incompetence. Worse, intimations of foreign involvement might trigger a nuclear war, Johnson warned. He convened an investigatory body, the Warren Commission, to defeat these dangerous speculations. (He told one commissioner that forty million might die if accusations against Cuba and the U.S.S.R. weren’t refuted.) The point of the investigation, for Johnson, wasn’t to uncover new facts but to shore up the official story, which was that Oswald alone was guilty.

Oswald might indeed have acted alone. But the commission’s march to that conclusion reassured few. Johnson himself didn’t believe it, and, by 1967, nearly two-thirds of the country shared his doubts. (As two-thirds do today.) This wasn’t an idle disagreement: to suspect a conspiracy was to suspect a coverup. The government’s determination to wrap the matter up neatly relegated the bulk of voters to the paranoid fringe. Ensuing events vindicated their suspicions. In 1967, amid revelations of napalmed villages, C.I.A. misdeeds, and official mendacity, Noam Chomsky influentially declared that the true responsibility of intellectuals wasn’t to advise policymakers but to “expose the lies of government”—lies he associated particularly with the Kennedy Administration’s experts.

Even the establishment distrusted the establishment. Shortly after the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy—the Attorney General and the brother of the President—asked Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence, if the C.I.A. was behind it. (It wasn’t, Dulles assured him.) A month later, R.F.K. shared with the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., his concern that Fidel Castro or the Mob was involved. Still, R.F.K. was hesitant to probe. Schlesinger felt that he feared the psychological toll of walking down that unlit path. Whatever the reason, R.F.K. held his tongue. And, five years after his brother, he, too, was gunned down.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was nine when his uncle was murdered and fourteen when his father was. Even in his youth, he recalled, he doubted that Oswald had acted alone. But, where his father had hesitated, he charged ahead. He came to see evidence of C.I.A. involvement as “so insurmountable” that it lay “beyond any reasonable doubt.”

The Kennedy assassination sent dark suspicions swirling through the national psyche. Distrust of experts crescendoed again in the nineteen-eighties, with the appearance of a mysterious new disease. In 1981, as otherwise healthy gay men started dying of unexpected cancers and infections, a government immunologist named Anthony Fauci pushed aside his other research to focus on the puzzling malady. Fauci sent off his first article on the subject late that year, when there were only two hundred and ninety recognized cases. Still, he warned that the syndrome, soon to be called AIDS, was “of essentially epidemic proportions for a particular segment of our society.”

Fauci’s early research positioned him as the government’s central figure in crafting AIDS policy, with considerable power to decide which treatments would be tested. This made him an intense focus of activists, who distrusted his judgments. In 1990, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, stormed the National Institutes of Health campus where Fauci worked. They carried caskets with the words “Fuck you, Fauci” and burned him in effigy.

David France’s “How to Survive a Plague” (2016) describes this clash between insiders and outsiders. ACT UP’s slogan was “Drugs Into Bodies,” but prominent members like Larry Kramer were skeptical of AZT, the drug Fauci was focussing on, and pushed for alternatives. “In the absence of adequate health care, we have learned to become our own clinicians, researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, pharmacists,” the activist Derek Hodel explained. A drug called Compound Q, derived from a cucumber-like plant, seemed promising; Kramer declared it a cure. Patients sourced it from Asia and received infusions at “guerrilla cliniQs.” When Fauci declined to test it, the advocate Marty Delaney recruited physicians, an ethics panel, and a lawyer to run secret drug trials.

AZT turned out to be crucial to the first antiretroviral cocktails, whereas Compound Q was abandoned because of its dangerous side effects. Still, Fauci proved willing, with time, to accept off-road researchers as collaborators, not cranks. (It surely helped that the citizen scientists tended to be well-educated white men. “Would the government have listened to dykes, street queens, and women of color?” the movement veteran Sarah Schulman asks in her 2021 history, “Let the Record Show.”) Before long, Fauci was describing ACT UP members as “intelligent, gifted, articulate people coming up with good, creative ideas.”

It was a triumph of trust. ACT UP pushed the reluctant F.D.A. to approve aerosolized pentamidine, a vital treatment for a deadly opportunistic lung infection, and to allow fast-track access to experimental medicines for those not in formal drug trials. These hard-won victories saved lives. “Scientists themselves do not have a lock on correctness,” Fauci conceded. “Activists bring a special insight.”

Over the years, friendships blossomed. Fauci established the Martin Delaney Collaboratories at the N.I.H. for H.I.V.-cure research, and delivered a eulogy at Delaney’s memorial service. In 1988, Kramer had called Fauci a “FUCKING SON OF A BITCH OF A DUMB IDIOT” and a “murderer” in an open letter. Yet, when he was dying, in 2020, he told Fauci that he loved him. “I love you, too, Larry,” Fauci replied, through tears.

This doesn’t mean no lines were drawn. As the causes of and most effective treatments for AIDS came into view, Fauci and many prominent activists closed ranks against heterodox theories. The publisher Charles Ortleb, whose gay biweekly, the New York Native, had offered the most comprehensive coverage of AIDS available, rejected the idea that H.I.V. caused AIDS as a Big Pharma lie. For this and related heresies, ACT UP ostracized Ortleb and boycotted his paper. Fauci felt Ortleb’s type of skepticism to be “so preposterous” that it didn’t merit debate. Shortly after ACT UP’s victories in the nineteen-nineties, the word “denialism” entered common parlance, largely in reference to nonconformist beliefs regarding AIDS.

Which skeptical views merit consideration? Which are denialism? Those questions haunted the Kennedy assassination and the early AIDS crisis, and they returned with COVID-19. As before, the gravity of the situation reduced tolerance for open-ended inquiry. “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts,” the Washington Post’s Peter Jamison wrote. “But it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”

The experts would require a lot of trust, because they were recommending astonishing measures. It was no small thing to issue stay-at-home orders, shut schools, close businesses, and mandate masks. But early reports from China, where authorities were physically sealing off apartment buildings, were encouraging about the efficacy of such tactics.

It was a moment of choice—did you trust experts or not?—and there was a clear partisan skew. The previous Democratic President, Obama, had been a Harvard-trained law professor who had used the word “smart” to justify his policies more than nine hundred times. The sitting Republican President, Trump, was a blunt businessman who had declined to nominate a science adviser for more than a year and a half.

For liberals, veneration of expertise became a shibboleth. The ubiquitous “In this house, we believe . . .” signs usually included “science is real” as an article of faith. There was something “deeply ironic” about formulating the support for science as a religious creed, Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson observe in “The Weaponization of Expertise” (M.I.T.). But this support veered toward dogma, and had a pope: Fauci, or St. Anthony Fauci, as votive candles bearing his likeness called him. “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci declared.

If there was an apostate, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The “F” stands for Francis, as in St. Francis of Assisi, about whom Kennedy has written a children’s book. Kennedy admires St. Francis for choosing to live among people with leprosy. Since becoming a pariah himself, after his vaccine-safety crusade, Kennedy has warmed to other spurned beliefs, no matter their plausibility. He has publicly contemplated whether cellphones cause cancer, tainted tap water leads to “sexual dysphoria,” and the white trails behind airplanes contain toxic chemicals. Although claiming not to be a doubter himself, Kennedy devoted two chapters of one of his books to airing “legitimate queries” about whether H.I.V. causes AIDS.

Already a professional heretic, Kennedy became the pandemic’s leading skeptic. Lockdowns were authoritarian, masks were pointless, vaccines were unsafe. An expensive antiviral drug Fauci backed, remdesivir, was “deadly,” whereas two off-patent, cheap drugs—hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin—had shown “staggering, life-saving efficacy.” And COVID-19 probably came not from a wet market but from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where (this part is true) scientists funded by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had modified bat viruses to experiment on. Kennedy raised the “ironic possibility” that Fauci, having warned about pandemics that never materialized, finally decided to create one.

In his suspicion of pharmaceutical firms, support for unsanctioned drugs, and wild accusations against Fauci, R.F.K., Jr., resembled ACT UP’s Larry Kramer. But Kennedy didn’t receive the Kramer treatment. Rather, his ideas were treated like contagious diseases. YouTube removed videos of him; Instagram cancelled his account. Although “The Real Anthony Fauci” was an energetically researched best-seller on an important topic by a well-known author, it was nearly impossible to find a review of it in a major periodical. Russell and Patterson regard such deplatformings as “intellectual tyranny.”

A popular subreddit, r/HermanCainAward, featured screenshots from the social-media accounts of people who, like the politician Herman Cain, had spoken against the medical orthodoxy and then died of COVID. Comments were gleeful and marbled with élite scorn toward “spreadnecks.” (“Another 6th grade educated gravy neck.” “Bye fatty.” To a deceased mother of four: “Rest in piss.”) At its peak, in late 2020, the subreddit—essentially a snuff website—had nearly a million daily visitors.

There was a reason that medical dissent stirred so much hostility. People were dying, and the urge to take swift, decisive action was overwhelming. Anyone refusing to go along was an impediment, or, worse, a vector. It was a panicked moment, when erroneous ideas could actually kill.

Still, enforcing a “consensus” risks purging the countervailing views that make intellectual inquiry work. Fauci and his colleagues had benefitted from the adversarial pressure of ACT UP. Yet they had little patience for COVID activists. Did this closed-mindedness lead them into error?

“In Covid’s Wake” (Princeton), by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, offers a revelatory look back on the pandemic. Its conclusions are devastating to both the left and the right; most of us got big things wrong. (I certainly did.) Given this omnidirectional confusion, the imposition of a tight orthodoxy—more J.F.K. assassination than AIDS crisis—retrospectively seems to be one of the most unfortunate choices in a sea of them.

The establishment’s rigidity is most evident with respect to COVID’s origins. Might it have come from the Wuhan laboratory that was experimenting with bat viruses? This was “so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this kind of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” the biologist Kristian Andersen wrote to colleagues investigating the matter in early 2020. Yet blaming the lab risked angering China, stoking racism, and embarrassing U.S. health agencies that had funded the Wuhan research. After hearing from Andersen’s group, Fauci declared the lab-leak possibility to be “in the realm of conspiracy theories without any scientific basis.” With Fauci’s guidance, Andersen’s group published a paper that declared, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Facebook duly banned lab-leak posts. (By the end of Joe Biden’s Administration, the F.B.I. and the Department of Energy had cautiously accepted the lab-leak hypothesis.)

What of the establishment’s other positions? The U.S. pattern of “one country, fifty regulatory environments” allows Macedo and Lee to compare the effects of different policies. Vaccination clearly worked, which is why blue states generally had lower COVID death rates. But in the eleven months before vaccines were available it was another story. Macedo and Lee examine how quickly states adopted lockdowns, how long lockdowns lasted, how often public schools closed, and how generally stringent restrictions were. Some of these measures might have lessened the burdens on crowded hospitals in the early weeks, but it’s chastening to learn that none of them visibly affected pre-vaccine death rates over all. People in California, where public-school classes were rarely held in person, were roughly as likely to die from COVID as those in Florida, a beacon of openness. Before vaccines, blue-state mortality was in fact higher, though not enough to be statistically significant.

And masks? They worked in laboratories, especially N95s fitted properly and changed frequently. (Masks used for too long clog with moisture from breathing, and the air moves around them.) Yet everyday practice was nowhere near that ideal. Although masks and other precautions seem to have virtually obliterated the 2020-21 seasonal flu, evidence that mask recommendations or mandates helped protect against COVID at the population level is “extremely limited,” Macedo and Lee write.

In their rush to “follow the science,” as Biden pledged, policymakers adopted what the former N.I.H. director Francis Collins called the public-health mind-set. “You attach infinite value to stopping the disease,” Collins remorsefully explained. “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.” Even non-COVID health risks, like cancers left undiagnosed as a result of missed screenings, drop from consideration.

This was regrettable, because the costs of closures were crushing. Small businesses were decimated. The government, taking in less and paying out far more, entered a new level of debt, fuelling inflation. Education foundered, substance abuse spiked, and mental health frayed. Macedo and Lee note, among other alarming indicators, a “huge surge in firearm sales.”

Were there better options? Sweden defied the trend toward closure and, it now appears, ultimately had the lowest excess death rate in Europe. Yet when forty-six scientists and doctors issued the Great Barrington Declaration, warning of lockdowns’ “devastating effects” and proposing a Swedish-style strategy for the U.S., Collins wrote to Fauci and others to urge a “quick and devastating take down” of the premises of these “fringe epidemiologists.” Reddit removed links to the declaration, and Facebook briefly took down its page. (We now know that technology firms were coördinating with federal officials.)

Why were the authorities so resistant to taking the costs of lockdowns seriously? Perhaps because élites were insulated from them. The well-off were more likely to have children in private schools, which largely stayed open, and to have jobs that could be done remotely. Sheltering in place, R.F.K., Jr., charged, was a “prolonged pajama party for upper-crust Americans who could afford DoorDash food deliveries.” It went differently for those cooking the food and making the deliveries. Working-class people were more likely to go to work while their children stayed home. Or they were if they still had jobs; the lockdowns caused widespread layoffs. When people protested the stay-at-home orders, though, hundreds of health experts signed a letter condemning the demonstrations as “rooted in white nationalism.”

The covid victims mocked on r/HermanCainAward spurned vaccines and said foolish things. But they also said things that, in hindsight, don’t seem far off: closures and mask mandates accomplished little, their costs were unconscionable, the virus was likely lab-born, and inconvenient facts were being suppressed. Sidelining people who voiced those views aroused righteous wrath. For years, R.F.K., Jr., had been content to fulminate and litigate. In 2023, he ran for President. “This is what happens when you censor somebody for eighteen years,” Kennedy fumed during his announcement speech. “I got a lot to talk about.”

Kennedy started his campaign as a Democrat and ended it as a Trump supporter. Did he carry part of his substantial base toward MAGA? Either way, Trump was ultimately the pandemic’s clear winner. Inflation, fury at élites, and disdain for experts propelled his reëlection. “I am your retribution,” he promised.

There are two ways to replace an orthodoxy: with openness or with another orthodoxy. Trump’s most meaningful gesture toward transparency has been ordering documents concerning the assassinations of the two Kennedys and of Martin Luther King, Jr., to be declassified. So far, though, the data dump has revealed no major secrets, just unredacted Social Security numbers.

Far more of the Administration’s energy has gone toward vengeance. “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities,” J. D. Vance has said, and the Administration has slashed research funding to disfavored institutions. Trump has demanded that Smithsonian museums remove material evincing “improper” ideologies. ICE is snatching up students because of their political views. R.F.K., Jr.,’s “let the science speak” crusade is now lashed to the most science-smothering Administration in U.S. history.

Kennedy’s needling belligerence and openness to unpopular views served him well as a skeptic. They have served him terribly in his new role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, though. In his brief tenure, he has insulted autistic people, made false claims about vaccines’ dangers, and responded to a measles outbreak by touting cod-liver oil as a treatment. Moreover, Kennedy has faithfully carried out Trump’s war on science, firing thousands of H.H.S. officials and terminating studies, including into antiviral drugs for future pandemics.

Truth grows from the “tilled, agitated, and upturned soils of debate,” Kennedy has written. “Doubt, skepticism, questioning, and dissent are its fertilizers.” An excellent thought, Mr. Secretary, which someone should try sharing with the President. You go first. 

[trapastrology]

Written In The Cosmos

Written by Aris

Cover painted by me as well!

The Sweetest Dream or The Worst Nightmare

To be seen, loved, heard and understood or to be dismissed, confused, and betrayed

Introducing Written In The Cosmos: The Complete Ins and Outs of 12H synastry.

This is my first published book ever which now officially makes me an authoress!

Since my official release, on the 1st of May, I have sold 10 e-books and that is more than I could have imagined! I am filled with an immense amount of gratitude!

The goal of my book was to succor those who are currently in or have been in 12H synastry and got lost in the fog. I greatly desired a body of work that could answer all questions and leave you with a sound mind. In the beginning of my astrology journey, I'd read things about 12H synastry and get one question answered but have 3 more questions arise from what I read. I then decided to write down every 12H synastry question I ever had and interviewed others who have/had 12H synastry and answered every single one of those questions throughout the book. A reader who's a beginner in astrology can also understand my book with ease. Making sure to go through all the lopes such as family, friends, relationships, being the house, planet or both are subject matters you don't see being explained thoroughly in one place! Everything you've thought of and even things you haven't thought of is explained throughout the 14 chapters. As your discovering about 12H synastry questions that may arise such as 'Who's the giver/receiver?", "Why/How did I end up in 12H synastry?", "The pros/cons?", "How does the house vs planet feel?" are just a few of the questions I answered amongst many more. From examples from movies, tv shows to even poetry, the whole lot is dissected! There is a lot more I could say but who likes a spoiler? lol. I will also insert reviews below!

Reviews (as I receive reviews I will update)

For any of those who'd like to purchase my book, and has questions, I make sure to reply and have a conversation with anyone who wants to know more!

The cost of my book is $20! It is 27 pages long and full of great information! After you purchased my book, you are eligible to receive 25% OFF any reading you choose.

How To Purchase?

Message me & send the payment to my Cash App or Apple pay. For any other payment method inquire, ask me!

In the message, make sure to include your email being that that's where the e-book will be sent to.

The book will be sent immediately after payment.

*I am currently working on a site to upload my book on as well as an audiobook so until further notice this will be the go-to way to purchase, Thank you!*

Thank you so much for even reading this and for those of you who decide to purchase! Have a blessed day astro nerds!

[bleedingcoffee42]

Ok, since I can't reply to the ask we'll do it this way. (Tumblr glitchy? IDK. But I've written this out once already and lost it so..)

Christenson was one of the major contributors to the research done for BoB. Mike Ranney started compiling things via his newsletter, the questionnaires etc, and Christenson went at it as a historian. He submitted not just all this material (The whole box is his.), beautifully written and organized, but sought out more information when asked. He had drawings too!!! He even defended Ambrose at the Sparks reunion after the 13 chapters pre-view came out. The guy worked his ass off and if Dick said something to him that set him off than this letter was not harsh enough. Especially since O'Keefe apologized after getting snapped at about 'reserving his judgement' on the book, and Lipton got this shit and didn't immediately drive up and kick his ass.

Ranney and Christenson were working on a book (Dick said they argued about who would write it and that killed the project. From Pat's letter it sounded like Mike just liked to argue and get under his skin and they almost came to blows a few times) but Christenson says there was no way he would have gotten it published. I think he checked. And Bando himself has commented on how tough the market was for these books at the time. Dick knew it too, it's probably part of the reason he became bookzilla.

Anyhow, Ambrose did interviews with select people. Others sent him their narratives by letter. Ranney did questionnaires but also did the early newsletters and made a huge effort to keep a company roster updated. Christenson did his own research and drawings, then went about sending another round of questionnaires to guys of questions Ambrose had. (I feel like he may have expressed disappointment at the drawings not being used as Toye sent him $200 to buy print copies for his boys and Martin also requested prints for his scrapbook). He defended the book at the reunion. Guarnere also did a hell of a job organizing and keeping the newsletter and group together. They don't get enough credit for that.

Oh, and Pat's jab about the commendations? All I can say is that's actually kind of funny considering Speirs, old horrible asshole bang bang Sparky, not only busted his own balls in an official homework paper for his Officer's Course in 1948 for not putting in enough commendations on D-Day BUT also tried to do it so well after D-Day that he got John G. Mayer to tell him off for it and shove the promotion and medal he was trying to give him.

I'll post the letter about the reunion, because Ambrose had these guys fighting his battles for him and the stuff they wanted corrected was not outrageous. I think the only reason he corrected how he wrote Buck's 'trenchfoot' was because the guy was a lawyer.

[beardedmrbean]

Denzel Washington being cast in Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming Netflix movie as ancient Carthaginian general Hannibal is sparking some controversy in Tunisia, the home country of the great military commander.

According to French newspaper Courrier International, there are complaints about depicting the Carthaginian general as a Black African being made in the media and the Tunisian parliament. Member of Parliament Yassine Mami has pointed out that Hannibal, who was born in 247 BC in Carthage — now known as Tunis, the Tunisian capital — was of West Asian Semitic origin. “There is a risk of falsifying history: we need to take position on this subject,” the Tunisian politician reportedly stated.

Concurrently, French-language Tunisian newspaper La Presse has published an editorial in which it similarly objects that depicting Hannibal as a Black African is “according to Tunisians and many observers, a historical error.”

However, Tunisian culture minister Hayet Ketat-Guermazi had a different, more pragmatic take on the matter.

“It’s fiction. It is their [Netflix‘s] right to do what they want,” she responded, according to French newspaper Le Monde. “Hannibal is a historical figure and we are all proud that he was Tunisian. But what can we do?” She went on to note that she is trying to negotiate with Netflix to shoot at least a portion of the film in Tunisia. “I hope they decide to shoot at least a sequence of the film here and that that this is publicized. We want Tunisia to go back to being a location where foreign films are shot,” Ketat-Guermazi said, as reported by Le Monde.

Representatives for Netflix, Washington and Fuqua did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The controversy in Tunisia over Washington playing Hannibal is reminiscent of the uproar sparked in Egypt in April over Britain’s Adele James, who is of mixed heritage, playing Cleopatra in Netflix’s docudrama “Queen Cleopatra.” The first-century Egyptian queen was born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 69 BC and belonged to a Greek-speaking dynasty. Egyptian academics went on a rampage over the fact that Cleopatra was of European descent and not Black.

The still-untitled film about the Carthaginian general will be written by John Logan, the three-time Academy Award winner who scribed Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” and Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator.”

According to the official logline, the movie is “based on real-life warrior Hannibal, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest military commanders in history. The film covers the pivotal battles he led against the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War.”

Hannibal invaded Italy while riding a Northern African war elephant. Under his lead, the Carthaginians won key victories against the Romans, allowing Hannibal to occupy the majority of southern Italy for 15 years. Eventually, Hannibal was defeated by the Romans at the Battle of Zama after they counter-invaded North Africa.

Fuqua most recently directed Washington in the action-thriller “The Equalizer 3,” in which Washington reprised his role as ex-Marine Robert McCall.

Washington is currently involved in another war epic, the upcoming sequel to Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator,” which has resumed shooting in Malta after production was halted due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.  _______________

Netflix is at it again i see.

[fallloverfic]

@craftybookworm25 replied to your post "Censorship of panels in the Chinese print release of 再见, 我的国王/See You My King by Wen Yuan":

Thanks for compiling this! I found out about SYMK a couple days ago and binged it in 2-3 days. (Can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before.) The art? Amazing, beautiful, the art is literally so proportional and amazingly colored. The plot? Interesting, political. Good mix of sweet and deep. The characters? Green flags except the villains. They’re all so intricate and 3 dimensional. Each character has a distinct voice and personality. The relationships? Amazing. They’re all literally power couples. I just wish the fandom was bigger because it’s literally amazing and I have no one to talk to about it. I also sincerely hope they're willing to send the uncensored pages to be translated to a non-Chinese publisher for an uncensored release. I would love to have a hard copy

This got long so I put it in a post of its own, sorry. I've drafted a number of posts over the past year or so that touches on stuff here, including a sort of half-assed one on Blue Sky. But I'll go into it a little here. If you don't care, obviously feel free to ignore it.

I'm glad you're enjoying SYMK! It's a fun series for what it is, and I love Mimi/Zhang Li and Veelaveesa/Evtiti. There's some pretty art and neat ideas in it, a lot of fun humor, and it explores trauma from sexual assault in interesting ways. Also it's just fun when Mimi is thirsty over Zhang Li. And I'm glad you appreciated my summary of the censorship problems!

I'm not particularly sure what "proportional" means in this context. Wen Yuan is generally a good artist, though their art does have some issues (mostly Akinatton's design, it's just... mmm... Imu is also kind of strangely drawn).

I'm also not sure what a flag system is meant to mean for fictional characters. Red flags are for real people and situations, not folks who don't exist (e.g., I got into the situation and there was a red flag, so I left). Like... I'm not interested in dating or hanging out with or working with the characters, I'm interested in reading about them, so what is the value of a flag system here? The goal is to see how the characters interact with each other. And antagonists are meant to be antagonists. Generally, the best characters are messy. They make for great stories. I know this flag system is popular on booktok, which is one reason I avoid booktok. If everyone was squeaky clean for that green flag, whatever that means, the story would be boring.

I am writing the following while full of love for the series, as someone who's written three fics for it, bought a lot of merch for it, including the first three volumes of it in Chinese, and buys episodes of it on Kuaikan and Tappytoon. I've promoted it on multiple platforms, and suggested it to a number of people I know. It's a good series. If you don't like criticism of it, I would stop reading this post now. Here's a panel from Episode 93 of The Bois looking prette for buffer.

There's a lot of reasons I think the fandom is unfortunately small, and I'm not quite sure how those issues will be surmounted before it's complete or just outside the passage of time for the fandom to grow more, though I think the fandom is bigger than it looks, at least in China and Thailand. I've been in the fandom since October 2022, and at least from my perception, it hasn't grown much in that time, though it helps that there's a lot more story and an official English translation now.

Part of the issue is tag hunting. The most popular tags are SYMK and See You My King and seeyoumyking, but people who only read in say, English or any non-Chinese language, are statistically less likely to know that, especially if they find it through Tappytoon or Tapas, where that is not its English name. It's the official English name on Chinese merch, but that's not the name that English licensors use for it. So a small fandom is dispersed across many different tags (e.g., the three English names, the Chinese name, the transliteration of the Chinese names, the initialism, an assortment of versions of the name with and without spaces, on top of tags grabbing anything with "king" in it). This hasn't been an issue for other danmei, but at least every tag gets decently popular in a lot of those danmei. There's one particular danmei that is so popular that the accidental misspelling of a tag is ridiculously populated. On Blue Sky Social, of all places. But SYMK can't even really populate one tag, let alone a misspelling.

It seems to have a decent audience on Weibo (from what little I've seen), but even then, that's a drop in an ocean (though I think the signed copies of the books sell pretty fast in China, which speaks to fandom power). What little fandom I find outside Weibo is mostly the same small handful of people sharing screencaps and a couple cosplayers. It has less than a dozen pieces of fanart floating around and it's not spoken of much on the danmei servers I'm in (though I did end up in one server for Europeans who seemed really into it). It's got something of an audience on Instagram, but Instagram is a pain in the ass to navigate, especially because it's even more full of people just spamming screengrabs. (But I mean if you're looking for people to talk to about it... maybe try Instagram? I guess?)

But I think the central issue is that there are (to my knowledge) only really two big boys love comics based on Egyptian stuff, SYMK and ENNEAD. There are other boys love comics based on Egyptian history, culture, and mythology, like Cairo and エジプト神の恋人, but ENNEAD and SYMK are the two big ones that I know of, and there's little else outside Cairo and エジプト神の恋人; and Cairo is the only other one with an official English translation. Most other Egyptian comics I'm aware of aren't BL and/or aren't romance at all. Dear Monster, which is the next best thing, only has one Egyptian god romance in it, the other characters are just non-Egyptian fantasy creatures, and it's a visual novel. Pantheon by Hamish Steele, Oh, Suddenly, Egyptian God! by Yuka, 災禍の神は願わない by 尾羊英, and Legends of the Nile by Dooyong Jang and Bohyun Kim aren't BL or romance.

Why this matters is that comparison is unavoidable. ENNEAD has an older fandom (SYMK started in like 2022, ENNEAD existed in some form in 2017 or slightly before), which is larger, and, much as I do really love SYMK (again, I have like two shelves of merch, I've written three fics for it, and would love to write more, and recommend it whenever I can), ENNEAD is just, on all fronts (writing, art, character development, plotting, dynamics, the various themes it discusses, drama, and focusing on Egyptian mythology), the better comic. And I think most people who find out about SYMK can tell, and thus SYMK looks worse by comparison, and so folks have no interest in what SYMK has to offer as a result. Which is unfortunate, because I think SYMK is enjoyable on its own merits and even if you also like ENNEAD. There have been a number of folks in ENNEAD fandom who've recommended SYMK (myself included), particularly for folks who want more at least vaguely similar things to ENNEAD (I originally found out about SYMK through an ENNEAD fan Discord), but it's led to very little, at least in my experience.

I am also notoriously bad at getting people into new fandoms. I have very few followers/subscribers whom I've gotten to try other fandoms I write for (though I'm grateful to every single one who gives other fandoms a chance!). But I'm decently popular or at least well-known in ENNEAD as a writer and I think I've seen... a couple of my followers at best give any of my SYMK fics a try. Folks will try my other Korean fandom stuff, or my other popular danmei fandom fics, or my Japanese fandom fics, and even stuff from outside Asia. But not SYMK.

SYMK and ENNEAD are also very different comics, not just because the former is Chinese and the latter is Korean, but also because SYMK is an isekai story focusing on cross-cultural clash and political corruption, while ENNEAD focuses more on the failures of justice systems, how families enable abuse, what it means to be human (or at least how you find your purpose in life), how we engage with mythology (of the supernatural and political kind), truth, and responsibility. There are similarities (e.g., both stories focus on power dynamics, trauma from assault, sibling drama, anxiety and self-hatred, and how people who have been hurt can find love). And there are some very odd direct similarities to the point that I kind of wonder if Wen Yuan has read and/or is a fan of ENNEAD...

But my point here is that even though I think SYMK is not as good as ENNEAD, it's still good for what it is, and people should be able to appreciate it (like it's just more kind of Egyptian BL, what's not to like?). But... that's where SYMK's other issues likely come into play. Centrally, despite the fact it does go to dark places, many of which are also in ENNEAD (e.g., sexual assault, cannibalism, slavery, brother-brother incest, how strong men struggle to be viewed as victims of assault and find help as a result), it's just... too fluffy. The dynamic between the leads has, generally, been too boring. Near the end of the last season, it got pretty decent (around when Narcissus was really screwing with both Mimi and Zhang Li). But before that it was just kind of back and forth going nowhere, and the characters were inconsistently written.

Like people promote SYMK because it's, according to them, "everything ENNEAD fails to be" or whatever because they hate the dark stuff in ENNEAD and just want fluff (or at least think complaining loudly that this is what they hate and what they want makes them a better person). Or it's so much "better", and yet, despite the fact there's a lot of comic for SYMK now, very few people actually read or care about it outside China (and parts of Europe, and Thailand). Like, a popular criticism of ENNEAD is that sexual assault in narratives is fine, but not as much as what's in ENNEAD. And okay, fine, I say: read SYMK. It's got less of that.

-cue cricket noises-

So it seems like people prefer all that awful, awful non-con overload in ENNEAD after all. -pretending to be shocked because actually ENNEAD is well-written, well-drawn, and fun, lots of people do like that stuff, and people are just shoving their personal shame onto others-

Don't get me wrong, I know SYMK appeals to a lot of people who aren't satisfied with ENNEAD or just don't want what's in ENNEAD. But SYMK had a faster English translation during its publication cycle than ENNEAD did. SYMK has 93 episodes. The leads are together, it's got merch out the wazoo. People complained that it took forever to get an English translation of ENNEAD, that it has no merch (which isn't true at least now), and there's not enough romance in it. ENNEAD even had a month hiatus in Korean recently. And that led to no jumps in SYMK's fandom that I noticed. Something is keeping people from getting into SYMK and I can only conclude... it's at least some of the stuff people insist SYMK does "better" on, because people (myself included) disagree SYMK does better at it.

Or at least the things SYMK allegedly does better at aren't enough to surmount its less great aspects.

And we're not getting into how, because SYMK is Chinese, it's way more censored than most things. Like in a way I haven't seen even on other danmei. I admit I haven't explored all that many danmei manhua, but it's really egregious (not surprising; people get arrested in China for this kind of stuff due to the government's homophobia). And I think that bores a lot of people. It's too fluffy, too safe, too censored. Will-they-won't-they tension with a bit of humor just isn't grabbing people. And while I love Veelaveesa and Evtiti and find them cute and funny and love every single panel we get of them the best (like I both hope for and fear more Evtiti merch, it is my kryptonite, save my wallet), there's just not enough tension in their relationship to appeal to most folks, either.

Like let's compare: ENNEAD had a kiss between Seth and Osiris in S1E11, the Horuseth kiss in S1E14, and a sex scene that started in S1E29. SYMK had some hand holding and cuddling between Zhang Li and Stone early on... a maybe almost kiss in Episode 4, and then... nothing really until Episode 19, when Veelaveesa and Evtiti kiss and lounge in bed together (which is wonderful, but it's not sex, nor is it the leads). The leads have some daydreaming, and more recently some kissing and cuddling, but they don't really get it on (outside a dream of Mimi's) until Episode 92 (and it's some light touching, chest squishing, a couple kisses, some good make-outs, and then one shadow sequence before they're just on a bed together, versus multiple longer sex scenes in ENNEAD). SYMK is a decently chaste manhua, seemingly due to censorship. ENNEAD delivers much earlier, and in larger quantities. And despite the fact that Zhang Li and Mimi get along faster and stay together (in some respect) earlier than Horuseth, that is clearly not enough to keep an audience of much size (outside China). People can go on about how much "healthier" Zhang Li and Mimi are. But that doesn't seem to be grabbing anyone. SYMK is not the alternate BL I see any of the many ENNEAD fans I follow talking about, or an alternative people who dislike ENNEAD suggest, even when including manhua. Heck, since I started more regularly browsing tags for it, I see it brought up even less than I used to, which is bizarre, because I assumed the sex scene would bring in more fans.

The leads just aren't as fun, or even on their own, that fun. I like them, I like writing about them, I want to see what happens to them. I wish them the best future. They both have interesting struggles, Mimi in particular. But they're also kind of generally boring, even without Seth and Horus to compare to. Zhang Li is whatever the story needs him to be. Mimi bounces back and forth (partially because of Zhang Li's nonsense). The miscommunication becomes frustrating.

The antagonists aren't very compelling, either. Sutter is fun, but he vanished for a good chunk of the recent plot (and also his character feels a bit inconsistent) and now he's permagone. The church members are just irritating. The faux Set/Osiris priest died before doing much. Sutter's zombie never got much development (his most interesting moment is right before he's presumably dismembered). Mimi and Sutter's brother has been dead the entire time. We still don't know why Zhang Li was transported back. Narcissus is... whatever the plot needs him to be, which is kind of boring. So you've got a kind of vague, wandering plot, a meandering lead romance (with a side canon pairing who don't show much, especially since they're apart for most of the story), and that's... it.

Another central issue is that it doesn't fully embrace the Egyptian stuff. It's more of a mix of pseudo Greek-Egyptian stuff, and that's going to frustrate people looking for more... not exactly accurate, but more actually focused on Greek and/or Egyptian stuff. Since it's fantasy, and fiction, the author can do whatever they want, but in SYMK's case, that often feels like the Egyptian stuff in particular is there for the aesthetic, not as actual world-building. It does bring in some neat Egyptian cultural and historical stuff (like the cone bread), but it's less important than a comparable Egyptian boys love comic like ENNEAD, which more heavily embraces the Egyptian inspiration.

I also think the idea of "modern Chinese medical student going back to the past to learn how to survive in Ancient Egypt" is neat as a premise but boring in execution. Zhang Li is an expert spy and fighter and really smart, and he has reasons for being the way he is, but it makes a lot of problems lack tension. And when he does face real obstacles... the problems seem stupid. Like they're just designed for him to get rescued (assuming he didn't set it up himself to fuck with either Mimi or their enemies). The existence of magic is wonky as well. The world-building is basically just a mess in general. And anyone who doesn't care about isekai is going to give it a pass right off the bat (I know a number of people who hate isekai, it's a hard sell). ENNEAD, meanwhile, is not isekai, and deals with a lot of neat mythology (also it has more magic; magic is cool).

The art in SYMK is generally nice and the characters generally look good. That being said, Mimi is basically one of a small handful of good-looking and/or interesting characters. Zhang Li is pretty enough, but he's also kind of bland. I love Evtiti (visually, he's my favorite after Mimi, and personality-wise, he's my favorite), but he's a bit too slinky and he doesn't show up much. Veelaveesa is fine but there's something weird about his face, particularly near his hairline. Narcissus is fine and generic. Kaba's pretty, and again, seldom shows up. Sutter is nice, but his white hair looks odd (also he vanished for a lot of the manhua and he's now dead(?) and been revived to be white Mimi). And his bodyguard, and Stone, are just Mimi again. No one else comes to mind. Meanwhile, ENNEAD has a large cast of interesting, attractive, and fun characters. And for all Mojito's faults with art (and she does have some), she didn't do anything remotely like what Wen Yuan does with Akinatton (like even Ra isn't that bad imo). And that's... not great. And you meet him early. And from what I've seen of people's comments, that's a turn-off. Growing off that, people criticize ENNEAD because it's "whitewashing" or whatever (because they can't comprehend pale-skinned Egyptians and don't know mythology). Those people probably look at SYMK and give it an even wider pass (I imagine most of them are too clueless to realize Zhang Li is Chinese, but that's not the only issue). Also we're not getting into how a recent arc had Mimi, the main darker-skinned character... lighten his skin... (temporarily, as a disguise, but... the story does itself no favors...).

Another issue is that the English translation Kuaikan sends out is mostly garbage. Like atrociously bad. I've seen typos in some of Tappytoon's translations before, and I've never seen them as bad and frequent as what's in SYMK, to the point I really question if it's just gen-AI machine translation. Which discourages people from paying for it or paying attention to it. It's gotten better lately, but so far as I can tell, they've fixed nothing earlier.

I know, I rail against people comparing them and most of this is me comparing them, and that's not what you were doing, but well... that's where it ends up. At this point, given ENNEAD's prominence as the Egyptian boys love comic, I think its existence cannot be divorced from why SYMK's fandom is the way it is. That's not ENNEAD's fault or Mojito's fault or Wen Yuan's fault. It's just... the way it is. Maybe with time, the audience will grow. Maybe the CCP will reverse its homophobic policies and the comic will get to shine. We'll have to see!

Again, I like the series, for all its flaws. It does not surprise me, for many reasons, why it's not as popular as it could be.

That all being said, the only things I've actually seen people criticize are: the kind of racism, the slowness and will-they-won't they stuff, and that it's too fluffy. Most of the rest is very speculative and just based on observation on why something relatively similar is not appealing to a fanbase that should be all over it, and not just because I am bad at promoting things to other people. Far more popular people than I have recommended this series. It's done seemingly nothing. (Or people try it and then... never speak of it again)

Anyway, here's some cute shots of all the best bois in Episode 93 to make up for reading through all that.

From what I've seen at least of the preview for the Spanish physical release, the Spanish physical release is as uncensored as it can get, at least matching what's on Tappytoon (and I assume on Tapas). My hope is that another English publisher will get what's been put on Weibo, and they'll be allowed to do their own translation. I have the Chinese volumes, they're very pretty, I'm waiting for volume 3 to ship. But I'd love a physical version of this series that I can read and also isn't censored to heck. Like I was so mad they cut out the Veelaveesa/Evtiti stuff in the Chinese physical release and that was before I saw how much they butchered so much of Mimi and Zhang Li (and other characters, RIP borb). What gives me hope is that it does seem to have an audience: it gets a lot of merch, it's on its third volume, printing-wise, and it has two English licensors already. There are still a lot of English danmei translators, and manhua translations are slowly picking up, so my hope is maybe, at some point, we'll get an English physical release, too. I used to send in Seven Seas monthly surveys every month begging for ENNEAD before it came out, and after getting into SYMK, I added SYMK to the mix as well.

Reply 1

[warpedpuppeteer]

20 Questions for fic writers

Tagged by the ever lovely @scknight05

1-How many works do you have on ao3?

- Only 18 in total. 6 for Buddie.

2-What’s your total ao3 word count?

- 78,631

3-What fandoms do you write for?

Currently just for 911. BTS. I wrote for some anime fandoms back in the days of ffnet.

4-Top 5 fics by kudos?

♡ They're all Buddie fics!

This is Our Happily Ever After

I’ll rearrange the letters of your name to spell love

Lies written in ink (can be facts too)

This is my devotion (you are my prayer)

Traces of your love under my skin

5-Do you respond to comments?

Absolutely. Might take some time but I love getting comments and replying to each one of them 🥺

6-What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

None (yet?). I don't like writing angsty endings. Such a huge sucker for happy endings!

7-What is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

All of them? 😂 But I guess, without spoiling the ending, this probably counts as the happiest so far.

I’ll rearrange the letters of your name to spell love

8-Do you get hate on your fics?

Not in this fandom no. (I've only received hate once, ever)

9-Do you write smut?

Yes. I've written drabbles but never a full fic because smut fics aren't my thing. I'm not very good at it because I tend to lose patience very fast 😂.

10-Craziest crossover?

None. I've never written crossovers. Generally not a fan of it. But in the future, who knows?

11-Have you ever had a fic stolen?

None that I'm aware of so far. I'm not known enough for this to happen 😂

12-Have you ever had a fic translated?

Someone offered to translate one with credits but I don't think it was ever posted 😂

13-Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not anything published. I'd love to try once but I'm not sure how that'd work.

14-All time favorite ship?

As someone who can never decide on anything this is the worst question you can ask me 😂. I love too many. Buddie is definitely one of the top ones along with Madney, Henren and Bathena. Others include Merthur, Cherik, Kagakuro, Makoharu, Root/Shaw, Morgwen, Stony, WinterFalcon, McDanno, SNS, WeiLan, Edwin, Stormpilot, TouYuu (my babies), KuroFei.

15-What’s a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

So far none.

16-What are your writing strengths?

Writing fluff probably; I've been told I write a lot of feels inducing fluff? 😂. I really love writing about gentle small acts of love between characters. Just them taking care of each other. Sappy stuff.

17-What are your writing weaknesses?

Time management and actually getting to the writing part 💀. My writing is very muse based, I can't just sit down and start writing like some people. It's truly a struggle 😭

18-Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

Never written any in mine. Read plenty and I'm fine with it. It's only slightly frustrating when the translation is not included because it takes me out of the story when I'm trying to read and translate at the same time.

19-First fandom you wrote in?

Before I even knew what fanfiction was, I had multiple notebooks glued together with the story of an OC in the X-men Evolution universe 😂. The officially published one is either Bleach or Naruto, can't remember.

20-Favorite fic you’ve written?

Listen, I really kind of love all of them. Not because they're good or whatever but because I wrote them you know. Like, I really created something. Every fic good or bad has a little piece of my soul in it so I just love all of them 🥺

And which one I like best differs from moment to moment. Currently it's probably Lies written in ink (can be facts too) because it was a bit of a different writing style for me.

Tagging: @lemotmo @eddiediazismyhusband if you both haven't done this yet. And anyone else who wants to join please do and tag me so that I can read it 🫶🏽.

[mariacallous]

The volunteer cartographers who power the maps on platforms like Facebook, Lyft, and Strava have been intensely debating over the past week about whether to honor US president Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. When should they update? Will the change affect all of the gulf, or just the US portion? Should it be reflected for everyone, or only Americans?

These are some of the questions the cartographers have been asking one another. Their discussions and edit wars provide a glimpse into the confusion over what may be one of the first orders of the new Trump administration generating visible changes across the internet.

On OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-run mapping platform that provides cartography data for a number of popular apps, online discussions show some contributors pushed to immediately update the gulf’s name to the Gulf of America. “This isn’t meant as vandalism, but more of starting the discussion,” one user wrote. They tried to make it only the name for English-speaking users, but the change was quickly rolled back by another contributor, who wrote, “Something isn't renamed just because a president says so.”

The original submitter replied, referring to Trump’s order, “Well, if he utters the idea in passing during a speech, that's one thing. But signing an EO and moving federal agencies to officially rename it is a vastly different thing. I hope you agree,” replied the original contributor. (They declined to comment beyond their post.)

In an executive order issued last Monday, Trump said that rebranding the gulf would recognize “this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our nation’s economy and its people.” He also ordered that Alaska’s tallest mountain, Denali, return to being known as Mount McKinley in recognition of former president William McKinley, whom Trump has said he admires. Critics have written off the moves as “very silly” and “petty.” Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has said the body will continue to be known as the Gulf of Mexico to the rest of the world.

On Friday, the Department of the Interior announced that the new names had become official and federal agencies needed to update any relevant signage and paperwork. Private companies, however, aren’t required by law to follow suit. But on Monday, Google Maps became the first major mapping provider to publicly announce that it will switch to the new names for US users as soon as the federal government publishes them to a key database. “When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name,” Google wrote. “Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names.”

Disputes over names and boundaries are common in the maps industry, with a number of countries having enacted laws requiring mapmakers to adopt specific titles and borders. Trump’s order, in particular, follows scant public input and is disputed even within the US.

OpenStreetMap has various ways of labeling names. For instance, it’s possible to list Mexico as the colloquial name for the country while also displaying its official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or United Mexican States. Other labels allow for different names to be shown in different countries and languages. Apps that license OpenStreetMap data can choose which of the labels to reflect to their users or add their own naming conventions.

Altogether, around 10 attempts to change the gulf’s name have been reverted over the past week on OpenStreetMap. Several contributors have contended that OSM should wait for common usage in society to change before making an edit to the main name of the gulf. “OSM’s primary goal is to reflect what people on the ground believe is correct, striving for accuracy and neutrality in the face of diverse perspectives,” says Clifford Snow, a member of the organization’s Data Working Group who has reversed some of the edits allegedly made without consensus.

A similar back-and-forth has played out over Denali. But reaching agreement may wind up proving difficult. “I do not believe that OSM will ever be able to pick one [name], without offending some user somewhere,” one contributor wrote. “We need a path out of this quagmire that does not involve edit wars.”

Other contributors discussed when it would be appropriate to make the changes. Mapping providers, including Google, say they follow the US Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), but that database hasn’t been updated with the new names yet. Interior Department spokesperson Elizabeth Peace declined to speculate about when USGS staff might get around to processing the updates.

Under a 1947 law, decisions about which geographic names the US government will use are to be made by the secretary of the interior and the Board on Geographic Names, or BGN, a panel of officials from a smattering of government agencies. The GNIS is a repository of BGN-approved names.

As of Tuesday, at least one listed member of the BGN had received no correspondence or records related to changing the name of the gulf, according to a request filed by WIRED under the Freedom of Information Act. That suggests either that the usual mechanisms have not been engaged, or that some other authority is being exercised to change the official name. The Interior Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Another point of uncertainty has been whether the entire gulf should be renamed. The president’s order addressed “the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba.”

But as one contributor on OpenStreetMap wrote, “the Gulf of Mexico is much bigger than this. So it seems rather than a renaming, this executive order is creating a new name for a sub area of the Gulf of Mexico.”

The White House didn’t respond to WIRED’s request to clarify the intended boundaries for the new name. If the change were to apply to any non-US territory, the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency would have to update what’s known as the Geographic Names Server, a database of names for foreign locations. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

Mikel Maron, a spokesperson for the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which helps steward the volunteer efforts, says the debate over the Trump order highlights the value of having an open community trying to represent the complexity of the world. For now, their discussion continues. “Ultimately the OSM Foundation Data Working Group has stepped in to put a hold on any big changes in the OSM database until things are more clear,” he says.

Snow, the working group member, says the trending consensus is leaving the Gulf of Mexico and Denali as the primary names and adding a label to each for the new official US name. But if Gulf of America catches on, the open source map may have to follow.

[kylejsugarman]

when i was 11-12, there was NOTHING in the world i wanted more than to have a story accepted and published on the website equestria daily, which was sort of the central hub of all my little pony news and content, both official and fan-made. i wrote and submitted a bunch of stories, got rejected a ton, but FINALLY they published a one-shot i had written and i was fucking thrilled. and then a few weeks later an adult man made a blog post about bad trends + writing tendencies in the my little pony fandom and used my story as the centerpiece of his argument and it was so intense that i actually commented and said "hi i am 12" and he literally replied "my point still stands" 😭 anyway i hope they put a maximum age limit on bluey

[egg-emperor]

honestly I just expect and accept that in a bunch of official media, even including the games with Frontiers to a small degree, will have the odd bits of OOC dialogue with Eggman. there are times where I still go "he would not fucking say that" because there's just no way he'd ever actually say and mean such a thing, would ever say it that certain way, would ever actually feel a certain way to say it in the first place, etc

but my priority now is what were they actually going for and does that part work for his character? sure dialogue is very important and adds a lot, I love writing it the most myself and making it feel exactly like what the character would say and how they'd express it. but it's just highly likely for people to get it wrong from time to time and I personally would say that they are really just occasional and small

overall I'm happy with what all the strongest parts of the writing points towards most and revealed intent by the writers, that's what matters to me. I'd like for all the dialogue and scenes to never miss but there will be times where the odd couple of lines shouldn't have been there or could've been rephrased, vocalized and written in a way that was much more in character for him if anything

but again, I'm happy understanding what they're actually going for and what all the strongest writing and main sources point towards the most. for example, I think game Eggman overall is fantastic as ever. I think there's just some flubs here and there as they explore already existing assets of his character in different ways but will settle into it properly over time and gain more solid footing for the better

as for things like takeovers, it's been OOC for characters since the beginning, they've forgotten facts about the games and/or accidentally replaced them as a result, they've even gotten the names of things in games wrong. it's just simple social media fun lol. but I still enjoy them overall because it's not the solid finalized fully stamped and approved published media like the games

the big writers aren't involved, it doesn't go through tons of checks and changes, they're written fast on a time limit often based on how funny they think it'll be. they made Shadow a Taylor Swift fan ffs XD of course a big majority of the fanbase will treat it like canon, most of those don't play or like the games much anyway. it's honestly out of sight out of mind now, really not interested in fandom shenanigans anymore

I couldn't care less about fandom's wild takes and overemphasis on any sides anymore. all I can say is people will find ways to twist and misinterpret literally anything and it's a losing game lol. my blog is just to gush about Eggman, analyze things, share my thoughts, discuss with those who ask in my inbox/replies and then I leave. it's all become much more enjoyable after stepping back from general fandom

and that's what this post is again now, just my two cents as usual. not directed towards any situation or people in particular, just an overall observation of recent fandom from afar as I've taken a step back and where I stand on it based on focusing on the official media alone and avoiding the opinions of random strangers at any chance I get. the way the world is supposed to be but the internet's existence changed lol

I'm really satisfied and at peace with official Eggman and this is how I handle any small occasional OOC moments. I still understand and like what they're going for based on what all the strongest writing and writer commentary points towards. I don't concern myself with what general fandom thinks and if they latch onto the small OOC parts, they don't have the power to influence anything beyond the social media acc

I also tell myself that sometimes writers on official media aren't as insane and obsessed about Eggman like me to the point I remember every line he's ever said and think very hard down to every last word and the inflections and ways it could be interpreted when writing him lol. so yeah chances are at that, they're gonna have him say some things where I feel it should've been different or removed at times

but again, as long as I'm happy with the official media with its strongest parts and especially the game canon media then it's all good with me!