#Advanced Starter Generator

[lyonnerileyauthor]

your orc mechanic 🔧

your car wouldn't start this morning. fuck. but your last mechanic, he always talked down to you, and tried to sell you things you knew you didn't need.

you'd heard about this new guy, an orc, who worked out of his garage. you didn't think orcs were car guys, but you learn something new every day.

you go in, ready to turn down all the extra services he wants to charge you. instead, he takes your keys, pulls the car into his garage, and invites you to take a look with him.

the starter plugs are bad, he says after only a few minutes of poking around the engine. the cost is parts plus labor. he glances at you over his shoulder, and one of his big tusks lifts as he gives you a lopsided grin. actually, I'll throw in the labor.

he must really be trying to make a good impression in town, you think, as he gets to changing out the starter plugs. but he watches you as he works, that grin climbing higher and higher on his cheek.

you might have an oil leak, he says after he's almost done, and points to a spot on the floor. sure enough, there's a dribble of oil there. I can fix that for you, though.

how much? you ask, because you don't have cash to throw at your car right now.

it's on me.

well, that seems rather generous, but you won't turn it down.

he takes off his shirt, exposing an incredibly large body, with a full chest and a thick belly, all of it coiled muscle under a layer of protective fat. you can't help but stare as he drops down onto the floor and slides under your car, his knees parting as he works. the massive bulge between his legs is obvious, even with loose jeans.

jeez, he's packing.

you wait patiently as he works, trying not to stare but unable to tear your eyes away. when he slides out from under the car again, he catches you in the act, and finally he shows all his teeth as he grins.

do you like what you see? he climbs up to his feet.

your mouth is painfully dry, but you have to admit the truth. yes, of course he's absolutely gorgeous. he laughs when he hears it, and closes the distance between you.

I was hoping you would, because I like what I see.

he tilts up your chin with one grease-stained hand, leaving his fingerprints behind and marking you as his. he has to lean down to reach you, and you find yourself rising up on your toes to meet him.

the orc's kiss is fierce, consuming. it's new to you to navigate around his tusks, but they frame your face perfectly as he takes your mouth, devouring you, conquering you. he pushes you up against the garage wall, making the tools hanging there rattle. the lump in his jeans presses against you as his hand ventures up under your shirt.

you explore him just as ravenously, feeling his sturdy body, the tree-trunk size of his arms. without a second glance at it, the orc clears everything off the work table and picks you up by your ass, setting you on it.

show me, he growls low in his throat. so you obey, taking off your shirt, then shucking your own pants. his pupils are huge and blown-out as he unbuckles his own belt, reaching into his jeans to pull out his cock. he strokes it as he watches you.

touch yourself. you can't help but do as he says, finding yourself already wet. his hand speeds up, pre-cum dripping from that green cockhead as he pins you to the table with his eyes.

are you ready? he advances on you, dragging you to the edge. reflexively you spread your legs, and he smirks as he lines himself up with you. I hope you can take me.

you hope so, too.

but you're so slick, so ready for him, that the soft head of his cock pushes through. you grab onto his arms as he continues guiding himself inside you, biting his lip as he tries not to plunge in deep.

what a perfect pussy. the orc grunts as he squeezes even more of that enormous beast inside you. swallowing me up so well.

you shake and moan as he reels his hips back, then slides in even deeper, until he's fully sheathed in you. you clutch him so tight your nails dig into his strong arms as he starts to fuck you. he kisses you, swallowing all of your moans and cries as he sends you spiraling up higher and higher.

then, all at once, you crash to the earth in a burst of pleasure. your scream fills up the garage as he slams into you once, twice more. he yanks his cock out and his cum arcs out, covering you.

your orc mechanic takes a deep, shuddering breath. now you smell like me, he says with satisfaction, rubbing his cum all over you. I guess I had better fix that oil leak now.

[dear-ao3]

You can't hide the bit about starting a cult in the tags. We demand the story.

once upon a time i was a menace of a 15 year old taking high school chemistry. and this was not a particularly advanced chemistry class. we had ancient bunsen burners, occasionally we lit things on fire, sometimes there were chemicals involved, but for the most part, it was standard run of the mill shit.

the class was divided into two groups of people:

The Trouble Makers and the People Who Didnt Cause (many) Problems

as a mostly straight a and usually honors (when it wasnt science) student, i fell into the second category.

this class was 8th period, last period of the day, and the teacher was new that year. we will call him mr a.

mr a was on the younger side and seemed like a dude who wanted to have fun with us (essential for a science class). unfortunately he was teaching a batch of idiots (myself included).

its been several years so i dont remember the exact politics of this class, but i do know that it was populated by the two guys who stuck a pop tart still in the foil in the band room microwave and nearly lit the entire building on fire, a few class clowns, some very stereotypical football players, two guys who were positively dumb as bricks and constantly acted like they were on the verge or breaking up or getting back together (they were not dating at all. they were both and still are very straight), and then there was me and a few other girls who mostly just minded our business and watched the chaos unfold.

mr a's mistake was that he engaged with the insanity caused by The Trouble Makers. which resulted in even more insanity. he only lasted one year. he hated all of us but he might have hated himself more.

he did like me and my friends tho because again, we did not cause problems.

you might be wondering what kind of problems could be caused in a high school chemistry class. well lots. for starters one of the outlets in the room was taped over with NO JUSTIN! BAD JUSTIN! written on it because one kid thought it would be funny to stick scissors in the outlet in a different class (true story). there were broken beakers, smashed glass, general insanity. again, not an honors class so most of us didnt really care about it as long as we passed. there was one time he told us (jokingly) that we should only drink pepsi because his wife worked for the company and it would help fund his kids college career or something. two days later five guys came in with coke bottles. that was the kind of class this was.

but we still learned chemistry. probably. i dont actually know.

this guy taught lessons like he was reading a tumblr text post. like full on "so the guy hated that guy cause xyz and smited him in the science journals for this that and the other thing" it was entertaining.

i remember learning two things in this class. one was that salt is NaCl. which mr a called "our good friend nackle" the second we will get to in a minute.

one of the things we had to do in class relatively early on was decorate a periodic table that we would be allowed to use for tests. like color code and all that. we were allowed to use it for tests because there was a Giant periodic table hanging in the room and mr a was "too short to cover that up"

well, that periodic table proved to become his worst nightmare.

now. remember that i am 15. i am a sophomore in high school. i have not yet had to consider the horrors of college. i am at peace. aside from this chemistry class i am also taking a dance class (that i didnt like), ap english language (which was terrifying because im really bad at deeper meaning in texts), honors algebra 2 (which i Barely passed), latin III (another class i was pretty shit at, but it was fun), crafts 2 (which was wonderful), gym (thats a totally Other story) and honors united states history (which i loved). i was also dancing about 20 hours a week outside of school. but most of my schedule required me to be a good little honors student and mind my business. i was also, by all accounts, an absolute loser and a nobody and had very few friends and was totally unknown to most popular kids. however, you all know me on this blog and know im a little shit and it was only a matter of time before i caused problems Somewhere.

and that somewhere came one blissful day during 8th period chemistry when mr a asked me something about the number of electrons on carbon.

and i (to my credit) was entirely zoned out because again it was 8th period. but i gave him an answer. it was the right answer. what the answer is now i have no idea because i went on to get a ba degree in history and my eyes have not graced the periodic table since this class.

and then he asked me "how do you know thats the right answer"

and i said, in all my zoned out, infinite wisdom "it says so on the periodic chart"

isnt a periodic table? you might be asking.

well you are correct.

but you see. the giant periodic table above the front of the board at the front of the room was from the 70s. and it didnt say periodic table. it said "periodic chart of the elements"

and i, being zoned out, just read the damn name off of the thing because what the fuck else is a girl to do.

and mr a says "its a table. the periodic table."

and i, who have now zoned back in and realized my mistake, refuse to admit that i was just zoned out in class so i say, like any reasonable person, "then why does it say periodic chart up there?"

and mr a said "i dont know, its old."

and i said "well it says chart. so why cant we call it chart?"

and mr a said "because its a table."

and me, because im a little shit and also 15 and there were probably also 10 minutes left in the school day said "i think we should be allowed to call it a chart. it says so right there."

and well. that was all the go ahead the trouble makers in the class needed to hear.

from then on, it was the periodic chart. we all called it that. all of 8th period. and mr a HATED it. if you wrote chart on your test you got points taken off (which i never did because i wasnt an idiot but i would put little smiley faces next to my answer and he would draw a frown face when he graded my paper next to it). if you said it when you answered a question he would pretend he hadn't heard you.

it was such a phenomenon that it spread to his other classes. everyone called it the periodic chart. the scissors in the outlet kid. the pop tart kids. the football players. everyone. it was a chart. not a table. to this day i still call it a chart.

though, i think he was just mad that my cult (which he did call a cult, the periodic chart cult) was more successful than his stoichiometry cult. which was basically that we all had to repeat stoichiometry back to him every time he said it. that is the second thing i learned in this class. dont ask me what it is though, i just remember the name.

at the end of the year we parted ways, mr a silently glaring at me for my chart crimes, never to return to our school (probably because he got fired, unrelated to my chart crimes). despite this, he did still like me as a student, and i did get an a in his class, though it probably pained him to give it to me.

the following year i had physics in the same classroom, periodic chart overlooking me.

i used my iPhone 5c to take a photo of a white board and accidentally dropped it six inches onto the lab bench. the screen grayed out and it never turned on again.

the chart had cursed me for my hubris.

[velvetvexations]

it seems like a lot of the justifications for "theyfab" revolve around arguments that it's about people who "lean on" or "emphasize that" they're afab.

like this really does read to me like a broader way to be like "afab demigirls aren't really trans :\" which covers trans men and transmascs and broader categories of nonbinary people too.

cause i don't think i've ever seen any specification of what the hell "emphasizing being afab" actually means, outside of a general implication of things like "they look feminine" or "they don't transition"- which, just for starters, has obvious issues wrt exorsexism and transmedicalism- aka "being transphobic"

a vague phrase that covers up a transphobic core meaning specifically so that the vagueness lets them weaponise it against the maximum number of people they dislike does sound pretty in character for the "tma/tme" crowd, after all.

It's truly just this idea that non-binary people AFAB are not actually trans and are just cis women who are going to immediately fess up to being cis women the second they have a chance to falsely accuse a trans woman of rape, and dadgum if it ain't funny to see people who think they're feminists advance the idea that everyone AFAB loves making false rape accusations. That's like, literally a textbook MRA argument girliepops, what are you doing.

[all-purpose-dish-soap]

Ohhhh ho ho ho. How I would rizz up a cod man lol I apologize in advance if this is long 😅

So my typical going-out outfit is all black; usually black booty shorts and a black tank top with either converse or thigh-high demonias (the 2.5 inch platforms, I’m not too crazy). My makeup is somewhat darker and my hair is usually up in a ponytail. If I’m feeling cute though I’ll wear a short black dress with long sleeves and lacy tights/fishnets.

I like to try and catch their eye multiple times to see if they’ll come to me first, but in this case I would most likely go for the interesting drink order, either a nicer whiskey on the rocks or a stout (both of which I like so it wouldn’t be like I was struggling to drink lol). Something that’s a conversation starter hopefully.

I’ve actually got background with the military; I come from a heavily military family and I was also a civilian contractor for a few years at a local base so I have enough knowledge to hold my own in a conversation. I love dark humor and puns too, so I would try to work those into the conversation slowly at first to get their feel for it and then keep going based on that, but after that I’ll offer to buy their next drink and will give them subtle compliments while showing genuine interest in what they’re saying, giving them my full attention and being engaging, smiling and flirting more as the night goes on.

Honestly my tactics would differ depending on who I was trying to pick up but this would be a general thing 😂

booty shorts gang!!!  (👉゜ω゜)👉

i see you holding good conversation with Price and Ghost, given that drink order and the military family.

ultimately you could have your pick of the two, y'know? Ghost would love a lady who's willing to talk and show genuine interest. one of those conversations where he can let his guard down a little. not much (ever; dude is sitting with his back to the wall at all times, exits mapped) but you do at least seem agreeable. enough.

probably thinks you're just trying to get into his pants. like... listening a little too well. a little too kind. a little too interested in the dumb shit he's saying about the weather or whatever.

it's actually when Price cuts in and laughs at one of your jokes that you earn Ghost's interest back. Price tees him up for a particular dark joke (what else has two legs and bleeds) and Ghost utters the punchline (half a dog), and to his muted surprise, you laugh. Price sees the mild shift of expression on Ghost's face and chuckles.

says something about gruff old military men harassing a pretty bird likes you, and of course, you take the compliment with such grace.

you could even take them both home if you wanted ;)

[glitter-stained]

I'm sure you've probably been asked this before so forgive me if it's repetitious, but if I wanted to learn Jason Todd's character, what comics would you suggest to start with?

Hi there! I think you might actually be the first one to ask this anon.

Because this is an intro starter pack, I'll try my best to stay limited to a short/reasonable number of comics so that it makes a quick read and hopefully gives you the essentials/compelling parts. I'll make a more complete reading guide with all my recs later, when I've finished all the more recent ones that seem compelling.

I'm putting them in the order I'd recommend reading them. The one thing I'll say is this: Judd Winick, who created Red Hood, is probably the writer who most influenced Jason's modern characterization for Red Hood fans, but his writing is somewhat divorced from a lot of Jason's Robin run to, imo, the detriment of Jason's character; therefore, while I am counting Winick as an essential Jason writer, in my opinion a good Jason characterization is one that ties the bridges between jaybin and red hood. How you personally conceptualize that is up to you, but I think it's an important preamble to include. So, without further ado, let's get into it!

Jason Tood starter pack

As Robin:

-Batman 1940 #408-411 (408-409 is my favourite Jason story ever)

-Legends

-Batman 1940: #416*

-Detective comics 573-574

-Batman: The Cult*

-Batman 1940:#421-422*

-Batman 1940: #424-428*

*warning for racism in those with a *, aka in the Starlin ones. Starlin's Jason is great, but that's because Starlin hates Jason and accidentally wrote a good character. To enjoy it you have to read it "ironically", as in pretending that the narrative is Batman-critical. Racism is a problem in all of Starlin's stories, but A Death in the Family, which is unfortunately an essential Jason read, is perhaps the worst I've ever read in that regard. Sorry in advance.

As Red Hood:

-Batman: Under the Hood

-Batman Annual #25

-Red Hood: Lost Days**

-Robin 80th anniversary 100 pages spectacular TPB: More Time. This one is very short and I don't know if I would consider it an essential to understanding Jason per se, but it has both excellent Jaybin and Red Hood which is rare to find in a comic.

**re: lost days: there is one specific scene wrt Talia that may surprise you, you will know it when you see it. Rest assured that specific scene has been retconned out of existence and winick himself says he regrets it; please don't let that inform your perception of Talia's character, both in general and in lost days!

[mintconditioned]

how to save 101

so i recently had a poll asking what you'd do if you have $10,000, and over half of the respondents said that they'd save it for something big

if you're saving for something big — like college, a car, starting a side hustle, or even financial freedom — here's some unexpected advice that actually does something. not cute. not tiny. real.

open a HYSA (high-yield savings account) at a credit union or online bank. no, not your regular bank. they usually pay literal cents in interest. but online banks like Ally or SoFi (or your local credit union) offer 4–5% APY as of now. if you’re saving over time, that compound interest builds and beats inflation. it’s not glamorous, but it works. set it. forget it. grow.

invest in an I-Bond. you heard right — a government bond. it’s basically a super-safe investment you can buy with as little as $25. I-Bonds adjust with inflation and earn interest over time. teens can buy them through a parent or guardian's TreasuryDirect account. way better than letting your money rot in checking.

don’t save — prepay. saving up for something long-term? like a course, a trip, or even SAT tutoring? instead of stashing cash, prepay now if there’s a discount or price lock. a lot of services let you pay in advance, especially if they’re small businesses. this saves you from price hikes — and yourself.

build credit (yes, really). if you’re 18 or close to it, use $10,000 as a starter safety net for a secured credit card. this builds your credit history early — a big deal for apartments, student loans, and future jobs. make one small charge monthly (like Spotify), pay it off, never miss. boring? yes. life-changing? also yes.

micro-fund a revenue-generating skill. take that $10,000 and turn it into money. Examples:

buy a domain + hosting for a blog you monetize

invest in a course that teaches design, data entry, or UX

get supplies for a hyper-niche Etsy shop (e.g. enamel pin display boards or zines)

buy an external mic and start voiceover freelancing

a 10,000 bucks won’t change your life. but how you use it might.

[lackadaisycats]

Hi, magnificent Tracy! Congrats on "Stratagem"! Speaking of which: Mordecai lists off some chess strategies. I tried to google these strategies, but found information about only a few of them. Can you please share some info/links on the sources where it's possible to read about these chess strategies if they're real ones? Thank you in advance!

Thanks very much! All credit to the crew and the VAs who conjured it into existence! We went down quite the rabbit hole researching chess strategy and historic chess games for this, trying to keep it relatively aligned with the time period. At one point we even reached out to a St. Louis-based chess master looking for advice. (I guess the subject header of our attempted email correspondence - "Sir, we need your help for our angry cat cartoon" - was a non-starter for him, though.) In the end, we compromised on something in-between historicity and proclivity for silly names. Some of the strategies Mordecai rattled off are real things - Hammerschlag, for instance. Some are odes to real things. Dave C. stumbled on the Fried Fox, which is a real sort of attack in chess, and came up with Poached Penguin. Some are allusions to grandmasters of the past, like Savielly Tartakower, who wrote books on playing chess, and was generally a big deal in the chess world in the 1920s. Fable wanted to make sure we fit the very excellent word zugzwang in there somewhere. How could I resist? And there are a couple we just fully made up.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

hi! for starters, i adore your blog! all of the tips are actually helpful, and your research is really well done! would you mind making a post about ritual sacrifice? thanks in advance!

Writing Notes: Ritual Sacrifice

Sacrifice - a religious rite in which an object is offered to a divinity in order to establish, maintain, or restore a right relationship of a human being to the sacred order. It is a complex phenomenon that has been found in the earliest known forms of worship and in all parts of the world.

A wide variety of animals have served as sacrificial offerings.

Example: In ancient Greece and India, oblations included a number of important domestic animals, such as the goat, ram, bull, ox, and horse.

In Greek religion, all edible birds, wild animals of the hunt, and fish were used.

In ancient Judaism, the kind and number of animals for the various sacrifices was carefully stipulated so that the offering might be acceptable and thus fully effective.

This sort of regulation is generally found in sacrificial cults; the offering must be appropriate either to the deity to whom or to the intention for which it is to be presented.

Very often the sacrificial species (animal or vegetable) was closely associated with the deity to whom it was offered as the deity’s symbolic representation or even its incarnation.

Thus, in the Vedic ritual the goddesses of night and morning received the milk of a black cow having a white calf;

the “bull of heaven,” Indra, was offered a bull, and

Surya, the sun god, was offered a white male goat.

Similarly, the ancient Greeks sacrificed black animals to the deities of the dark underworld;

swift horses to the sun god Helios;

pregnant sows to the earth mother Demeter; and

the dog, guardian of the dead, to Hecate, goddess of darkness.

The Syrians sacrificed fish, regarded as the lord of the sea and guardian of the realm of the dead, to the goddess Atargatis and ate the consecrated offering in a communion meal with the deity, sharing in the divine power.

An especially prominent sacrificial animal was the bull (or its counterparts, the boar and the ram), which, as the representation and embodiment of the cosmic powers of fertility, was sacrificed to numerous fertility gods (e.g., the Norse god Freyr; the Greek “bull of the earth,” Zeus Chthonios; and the Indian “bull of heaven,” Indra).

The occurrence of human sacrifice appears to have been widespread and its intentions various, ranging from communion with a god and participation in his divine life to expiation and the promotion of the earth’s fertility.

It seems to have been adopted by agricultural rather than by hunting or pastoral peoples.

Of all the worldly manifestations of the life-force, the human undoubtedly impressed men as the most valuable and thus the most potent and efficacious as an oblation.

Example: In Mexico, the belief that the sun needed human nourishment led to sacrifices in which as many as 20,000 victims perished annually in the Aztec and Nahua calendrical maize ritual in the 14th century CE.

Bloodless human sacrifices also developed and assumed greatly different forms:

a Celtic ritual involved the sacrifice of a woman by immersion, and

among the Maya in Mexico young maidens were drowned in sacred wells;

in Peru women were strangled;

in ancient China the king’s retinue was commonly buried with him, and such internments continued intermittently until the 17th century.

Bloodless Offerings. Among the many life-giving substances that have been used as libations are:

milk,

honey,

vegetable and animal oils,

beer,

wine, and

water.

Of these, the last two have been especially prominent.

Wine is the “blood of the grape” and thus the “blood of the earth,” a spiritual beverage that invigorates gods and men.

Water is always the sacred “water of life,” the primordial source of existence and the bearer of the life of plants, animals, human beings, and even the gods.

Because of its great potency, water, like blood, has been widely used in purificatory and expiatory rites to wash away defilements and restore spiritual life. It has also, along with wine, been an important offering to the dead as a revivifying force.

Divine Offerings. One further conception must be briefly mentioned:

a god himself may be sacrificed.

This notion was elaborated in many mythologies; it is fundamental in some sacrificial rituals.

In early sacrifice, the victim has something of the god in itself, but in the sacrifice of a god, the victim is identified with the god.

Examples:

At the festival of the ancient Mexican sun god Huitzilopochtli, the statue of the god, which was made from beetroot paste and kneaded in human blood and which was identified with the god, was divided into pieces, shared out among the devotees, and eaten.

In the Hindu soma ritual (related to the haoma ritual of ancient Persia), the soma plant, which is identified with the god Soma, is pressed for its intoxicating juice, which is then ritually consumed.

The Eucharist, as understood in many of the Christian churches, contains similar elements. In short, Jesus is really present in the bread and wine that are ritually offered and then consumed. According to the traditional eucharistic doctrine of Roman Catholicism, the elements of bread and wine are “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ; i.e., their whole substance is converted into the whole substance of the body and blood, although the outward appearances of the elements, their “accidents,” remain.

Sir James George Frazer, a British anthropologist and folklorist, author of The Golden Bough, saw sacrifice as originating from magical practices in which the ritual slaying of a god was performed as a means of rejuvenating the god.

The king or chief of a tribe was held to be sacred because he possessed mana, or sacred power, which assured the tribe’s well-being. When he became old and weak, his mana weakened, and the tribe was in danger of decline.

The king was thus slain and replaced with a vigorous successor.

In this way the god was slain to save him from decay and to facilitate his rejuvenation.

The old god appeared to carry away with him various weaknesses and fulfilled the role of an expiatory victim and scapegoat.

Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, French sociologists, concentrated their investigations on Hindu and Hebrew sacrifice, arriving at the conclusion that:

“sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned.”

Like Smith, they believed that a sacrifice establishes a relationship between the realms of the sacred and the profane.

This occurs through the mediation of the ritually slain victim, which acts as a buffer between the two realms, and through participation in a sacred meal.

The rituals chosen by Hubert and Mauss for analysis, however, are not those of preliterate societies.

Another study by Mauss helped to broaden the notion of sacrifice as gift.

It was an old idea that man makes a gift to the god but expects a gift in return.

The Latin formula do ut des (“I give that you may give”) was formulated in Classical times.

In the Vedic religion, the oldest stratum of religion known to have existed in India, one of the Brahmanas (commentaries on the Vedas, or sacred hymns, that were used in ritual sacrifices) expressed the same principle: “Here is the butter; where are your gifts?”

But, according to Mauss, in giving it is not merely an object that is passed on but a part of the giver, so that a firm bond is forged.

The owner’s mana is conveyed to the object, and, when the object is given away, the new owner shares in this mana and is in the power of the giver.

The gift thus creates a bond.

Even more, however, it makes power flow both ways to connect the giver and the receiver; it invites a gift in return.

German anthropologists have emphasized the idea of culture history, in which the entire history of mankind is seen as a system of coherent and articulated phases and strata, with certain cultural phenomena appearing at specific levels of culture.

Leo Frobenius, the originator of the theory that later became known as the Kulturkreislehre, distinguished the creative or expressive phase of a culture, in which a new insight assumes its specific form, and the phase of application, in which the original significance of the new insight degenerates.

Working within this context, Adolf E. Jensen attempted to explain why men have resorted to the incomprehensible act of killing other men or animals and eating them for the glorification of a god or many gods.

Blood Sacrifice is linked not with the cultures of the hunter–gatherers but with those of the cultivators; its origin is in the ritual killing of the archaic cultivator cultures, which, in turn, is grounded in myth.

For Jensen, the early cultivators all knew the idea of a mythic primal past in which not men but Dema lived on the earth and prominent among them were the Dema-deities. The central element of the myth is the slaying of a Dema-deity, an event that inaugurated human history and gave shape to the human lot.

The Dema became men, subject to birth and death, whose self-preservation depends upon the destruction of life.

The deity became in some way associated with the realm of the dead, and, from the body of the slain deity, crop plants originated, so that the eating of the plants is an eating of the deity.

Ritual Killing, whether of animals or men, is a cultic reenactment of the mythological event.

Strictly speaking, the action is not a sacrifice because there is no offering to a god; rather, it is a way to keep alive the memory of primeval events.

Blood sacrifice as found in the later higher cultures is a persistence of the ritual killing in a degenerated form.

Because the victim is identified with the deity, later expiatory sacrifices also become intelligible: sin is an offense against the moral order established at the beginning of human history; the killing of the victim is an intensified act restoring that order.

Another interpretation of some historical interest is that of Sigmund Freud in his work Totem und Tabu (1913; Eng. trans. Totem and Taboo).

Freud’s theory was based on the assumption that the Oedipus complex is innate and universal: It is normal for a child to wish to have a sexual relationship with its mother and to will the death of its father; this is often achieved symbolically.

In the primal horde, although the sons did slay their father, they never consummated a sexual union with their mother; in fact, they set up specific taboos against such sexual relations.

According to Freud, the ritual slaughter of an animal was instituted to reenact the primeval act of parricide.

The rite, however, reflected an ambivalent attitude.

After the primal father had been slain, the sons felt some remorse for their act, and, thus, the sacrificial ritual expressed the desire not only for the death of the father but also for reconciliation and communion with him through the substitute victim.

Freud claimed that his reconstruction of the rise of sacrifice was historical, but this hardly seems probable.

Sacrificer. In general, it may be said that the one who makes sacrifices is man, either an individual or a collective group—a family, a clan, a tribe, a nation, a secret society.

Frequently, special acts must be performed by the sacrificer before and sometimes also after the sacrifice.

In the Vedic cult, the sacrificer and his wife were required to undergo an initiation (diksha) involving:

ritual bathing,

seclusion,

fasting, and

prayer,

the purpose of which was to remove them from the profane world and to purify them for contact with the sacred world.

At the termination of the sacrifice came a rite of “desacralization” (avabhrita) in which they bathed in order to remove any sacred potencies that might have attached themselves during the sacrifice.

There are sacrifices in which there are no participants other than the individual or collective sacrificer.

Usually, however, one does not venture to approach sacred things directly and alone; they are too lofty and serious a matter.

An intermediary—certain persons or groups who fulfill particular requirements or qualifications—is necessary.

In many cases, sacrificing by unauthorized persons is expressly forbidden and may be severely punished:

Example: In the book of Leviticus, Korah and his followers, who revolted against Moses and his brother Aaron and arrogated the priestly office of offering incense, were consumed by fire.

The qualified person—whether the head of a household, the old man of a tribe, the king, or the priest—acts as the appointed representative on behalf of a community.

Serious illness, drought, pestilence, epidemic, famine, and other misfortune and calamity have universally been regarded as the workings of supernatural forces.

Often they have been understood as the effects of offenses against the sacred order committed by individuals or communities, deliberately or unintentionally.

Such offenses break the relationship with the sacred order or impede the flow of divine life.

Thus, it has been considered necessary in times of crisis, individual or communal, to offer sacrifices to propitiate sacred powers and to wipe out offenses (or at least neutralize their effects) and restore the relationship.

Example: Among the Yoruba of West Africa, blood sacrifice must be made to the gods, especially the earth deities, who, as elsewhere in Africa, are regarded as the divine punishers of sin.

For the individual, the oblation may be a fowl or a goat;

for an entire community, it may be hundreds of animals (in former days, the principal oblation was human).

Once consecrated and ritually slain, the oblations are buried, burnt, or left exposed but never shared by the sacrificer.

There are sacrifices in which the victim does serve as a substitute for the guilty.

In some West African cults a person believed to be under death penalty by the gods offers an animal substitute to which he transfers his sins.

The animal, which is then ritually killed, is buried with complete funeral rites as though it were the human person.

Thus the guilty person is dead, and it is an innocent man who is free to begin a new life.

Fertility. Another distinctive feature of the first-fruits offering is that it serves to replenish the sacred potencies of the earth depleted by the harvest and to ensure thereby the continued regeneration of the crop.

Thus, it is one of many sacrificial rites that have as their intention the seasonal renewal and reactivation of the fertility of the earth.

Fertility rites usually involve some form of blood sacrifice—in former days especially human sacrifice.

In some human sacrifices, the victim represented a deity who “in the beginning” allowed himself to be killed so that from his body edible vegetation might grow.

The ritual slaying of the human victim amounted to a repetition of the primordial act of creation and thus a renewal of vegetational life.

In other human sacrifices the victim was regarded as representing a vegetation spirit that annually died at harvest time so that it might be reborn in a new crop.

In still other sacrifices at planting time or in time of famine, the blood of the victim—animal or human—was let upon the ground and its flesh buried in the soil to fertilize the earth and recharge its potencies.

Building Sacrifices. Numerous instances are known of animal and human sacrifices made in the course of:

the construction of houses, shrines, and other buildings, and

in the laying out of villages and towns.

Their purpose has been to consecrate the ground by establishing the beneficent presence of the sacred order and by repelling or rendering harmless the demonical powers of the place. Example:

In some West African cults, before the central pole of a shrine or a house is installed, an animal is ritually slain, its blood being poured around the foundations and its body being put into the posthole.

On the one hand, this sacrifice is made to the earth deities and the supernatural powers of the place—the real owners—so that the human owner may take possession and be ensured against malevolent interferences with the construction of the building and its later occupation and use.

On the other hand, the sacrifice is offered to the cult deity to establish its benevolent presence in the building.

The organization of sacrificial rites in the different cultures and religions has undoubtedly been influenced by a number of factors.

Example. Economic considerations certainly have had some impact upon primitive peoples in the:

selection of the victim and

the time of sacrifice and

in the determination of whether the victim is consumed or totally destroyed and

whether the sacrificer is an individual or a collective group.

The importance of such factors is an aspect of sacrifice that deserves increased investigation.

Nevertheless, sacrifice is not a phenomenon that can be reduced to rational terms; it is fundamentally a religious act that has been of profound significance to individuals and social groups throughout history, a symbolic act that establishes a relationship between man and the sacred order.

For many peoples of the world, throughout time, sacrifice has been the very heart of their religious life.

Accusations of human sacrifice in ancient and modern times have been far more widespread than the ritual practice ever was.

The ancient Greeks told many myths that involved human sacrifice, which has led some researchers to posit that rites among the Greeks and Romans which involved the killing of animals may have originally involved human victims.

At the end of the 20th century, however, archaeological evidence did not support this claim.

Some early Christians were falsely accused of cannibalism, consuming sacrificial victims at nocturnal feasts, a misunderstanding probably due to the secrecy surrounding the Eucharistic rite and the use of the words body and blood.

From the Middle Ages until quite recently, Jews were often maliciously accused of having sacrificed Christian children at Passover, an accusation which has been termed the blood libel.

Sources: 1 2 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

You're too lovely, thanks so much! Hope this helps with your writing. Found all of this really interesting as well.

[chongoblog]

My First Pokemon Playthrough

So I've noticed in my time of talking about Pokemon, I've told a lot of various anecdotes that are all a part of my very first time playing Pokemon. I was feeling nostalgic, so I figured I would share what I remember about this playthrough for everyone to enjoy. There may be a tangent or two in there and people who have followed me a while may have heard these before, but hey.

For context, I believe I was about 8 years old at the time, and after collecting some Pokemon cards, watching a kid play Crystal at summer camp, watching some of the anime, and generally being a pretty big fan (I even have Pokemon Yahtzee burned into my memory for some reason...), I finally got myself a Game Boy Advance with Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World, some Frogger game (after looking it up, it was Temple of the Frog), Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, and, of course, Pokemon Sapphire.

I remember that my starter was Torchic. I don't remember why I chose that one, although I remember really liking the color red at the time (which I still do), so that was probably why.

I don't remember too much about my team or the general progress I made in most of the game, but I do remember Slateport City. For those who do not recall, in Slateport City in order to advance you need to get into the museum, which is blocked off by Team Aqua Grunts until you talk to someone in the shipyard. There are also Team Aqua grunts blocking the route ahead

Now, my 8 year old brain for some reason concluded that the only way to get past the Team Aqua Grunts was to intimidate them with a high enough level Pokemon or something like that. So one night, while I was supposed to be asleep on a family beach vacation, I beat down more poor level 13 Pokemon than I could count. I learned later what I was actually SUPPOSED to do, which led to me finally fighting the Team Aqua Grunts.....with a level 42 Blaziken.

And since the Name Rater was in Slateport City and my starter had evolved, I figured it was only appropriate to give him the new moniker "MAGMA MAN"

The rest of the playthrough went about as normally as tearing through the game with mostly Blaziken normally would go. There were a couple exceptions though. First off, at the Weather Institute, after I saved the day from Team Aqua, they were kind enough to gift me a Castform, but my party was full, so I couldn't get it. My 8 year old self did not read this. (Remember this, it will come back later). But I managed to make my way through the game, catching Kyogre with my Master Ball and giving it the nickname "LEGENDARY"

Then we come to the Elite Four where I hit a brick wall. I don't remember my team at the time exactly, but I do remember it was MAGMA MAN which had reached about level 80 or so, LEGENDARY which was about level 48, a level 36 Pelipper, two level ~35 Tentacruels, and some other sixth Pokemon I don't recall. And for some reason, I just couldn't beat the Elite Four with this team for some weird reason. The best I could ever get to was Drake. I felt I was utterly defeated.

That's when we bring a new character into the story. A member of my friend group at the time who we'll call "John" to protect the innocent. Now John had a very "uncle who works at nintendo" type energy to him. The group used to play Gauntlet: Dark Legacy together all the time, and when I got the GBA port of it, he convinced me to trade my recently obtained copy of the Pokemon Trading Card Game Boy game for a Gameboy-Gamecube cables, only for me to learn too late that it didn't work like that, and from there, there were no backsies (but then I got ahold of a copy of Pac-Man VS and Four Swords Adventure then I learned to emulate, so who's laughing now).

Anyway, John saw that I was struggling and he decided that he wanted to help me out. You see, he had come across an incredibly powerful and rare Pokemon that couldn't be found in the wild. He had gotten it exclusive, and I had never seen it before. It was called a "Castform". Now John had Ruby version, so he decided that as much as it ached him to part with it, he figured it would be a reasonable trade to trade this powerful Castform for the slightly less powerful LEGENDARY. I agreed.

And then he moved to Ohio.

To this day, Castform is my least favorite Pokemon because of this betrayal. I was so distraught at 8 years old that I completely restarted my game of Pokemon Sapphire. I don't remember much about that second playthrough, but there's a reason why.

This rival battle on Route 110 is somewhat infamous for being quite the sudden difficulty spike. And since I knew how to get past Team Aqua now, I didn't have an over-leveled starter to stomp my rival with ease. After losing to her about five or so times, I got frustrated and figured that whatever team I had wasn't cutting it. So I restarted again.

In my third playthrough, I made it all the way to the rival battle on Route 110. Then she stomped me repeatedly. So I restarted again.

This cycle would go on for, like, 15 resets. I didn't count, but it felt like there was hundreds. As I would keep on resetting and playing through the early-game of Pokemon Sapphire (which I had practically memorized at this point), I would start to take things a lot less seriously, sometimes picking the girl character, making my name random gibberish, etc.

Eventually, on one of these playthroughs where I started with Treecko, I actually managed to beat the Route 110 Rival Battle! And on my first try too! And thus began the epic journey of a girl named DE.

Now, I'd figured at this point that maybe only leveling up one Pokemon wasn't the best approach, so I was trying to balance my teams a bit better (I guess my rival taught me something). I was making my way through the game, and one day I'm checking out my best friend's Pokemon in Ruby, and who do I see in his box, but a Kyogre. I take a look at his name, and I can't believe it. It was LEGENDARY. John had traded it to my friend before he moved.

My friend didn't know that it was originally mine, so he offered to trade it back, which I accepted. LEGENDARY was a disobedient little bastard since I didn't have enough badges, but he got the job done. I don't remember the team I ended up using to finally beat the Elite Four, but it included my Sceptile starter, a Sableye that somehow knew only Fighting-type moves, and two Kyogres, LEGENDARY and LEGENDARY2.

And that's my first playthrough of Pokemon Sapphire. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it.

[virtualtadpole]

Behind the blue shorts: How an all-boys Catholic school sparked the origination of Thai BL

(Cross-post from Reddit)

One evening this past July in Bangkok's long-time youth hangout of Siam Square, a crowd was gathering in the street, around an area set aside for busking musicians. The mostly young-adult female audience politely applauded as several high school bands took turns performing, but they were actually waiting for a different act. After some time, the crowd began to stir as members caught sight of some two dozen teenaged boys, all in a uniform of white shirts and bright royal blue shorts, headed towards the gathering. As they filed out onto the makeshift stage area, the boys were loudly greeted with passionate, enthusiastic screams, all too characteristic of fans cheering on their idols.

But these boys weren't actual idols - not yet, at least. They were all brand new actors, yet to appear on screen anywhere. They were the cast of Love Sick 2024, an upcoming remake of the pioneering Thai BL series whose tenth anniversary they were celebrating that day, in one of their first public appearances.

Why, then, would such inexperienced newcomers inspire such fervent devotion?

The Love Sick 2024 boys (and three girls) with their audience (Tia51)

Well, for starters, the original Love Sick series is a quintessential classic of Thai BL, arguably the one pivotal work that kick-started the entire TV genre - which in the decade since has developed into an industry worth multi-millions and recognized as a major cultural export. It still holds a place close to many long-time fans' hearts, and BL, like other phenomena of fandom culture, has been known to elicit very enthusiastic emotional responses from followers.

But the scenes witnessed with Love Sick 2024's actors are actually quite reminiscent of those previously seen during the original's release, when BL series didn't yet even exist as a category. Surely, there must be something else underlying this series' - and its actors' - popularity.

Let's take a closer look.

Love Sick's real-life inspiration

In chapter 21 of the original Love Sick novel, Noh, having taken delivery of the music club's new set of drums and overseen band practice for the evening, spends some time sitting around on the stands along the sports pitch next to the F. Building, wondering how he's going to pay for them. It's not long before Earn shows up to rescue him from his financial troubles, but let's pay attention to the location.

The F. Building Noh mentioned is an actual place - F. Hilaire Building at Assumption College (AC) in Bangkok. It is named after Frère (Brother) Hilaire, one of five French missionary teachers of the Catholic Brothers of St. Gabriel who arrived in Siam in 1901.

In the late 19th century, Siam (Thailand's historical name) was rapidly modernizing in response to colonial pressures. American Protestant and French Roman Catholic missionaries played a large role introducing technological and medical advances, and also established some of the first schools in the country as the royal government introduced reforms to formalize the education system. Father Émile August Colombet, the head priest of what was then Assumption Church, founded Assumption College as a school for boys in 1885, and after a decade of growth, the Brothers were invited to help run the school. A convent school for girls, run by the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres, was established next door soon after.

While the early government schools mostly served the aristocracy, the missionary schools catered more to the general populace, especially the minority ethnic groups who also formed the majority of their congregations. However, while they are remembered today for their legacy of modernization, the missionaries had relatively little success proselytizing, and the large majority of their students remained Buddhist.

Over time, these schools expanded and grew. The St. Gabriel's Foundation now operates over a dozen schools, as well as a university, and Assumption College is regarded as one of the most elite private schools in the country. Its lengthy list of famous alumni includes names from several of Thailand's biggest business families, as well as major political figures, demonstrating its historic stature and the strength of its alumni network. Today, the stereotypical image of its students is of those coming from wealthy or upper middle-class families of Chinese descent, and hefty donations are the norm for families looking to secure placement for their sons.

AC student Keen (Only Boo!) giving a presentation in 2022 on his team's experience joining a NASA-sponsored CanSat (miniature suborbital satellite) competition. It's not like every school has an aerospace program. (Assumption College, via Workpoint Today)

Brother Hilaire, barely 20 when he arrived in Siam, spent his next 67 years dedicated to the school. He learned Thai well enough to write the foundational Thai textbook series Darunsueksa, which remains in use over a century later. Along with Father Colombet, he is memorialized as one of the school's two most celebrated figures.

Today, the building which bears his name overlooks the school's central courtyard, an assembly ground of red brick facing the apse of Assumption Cathedral, an imposing Romanesque Revival structure nestled in Bangkok's old European district along Charoen Krung Road, the city's first modern paved street. Guests headed to the famous Mandarin Oriental Hotel nearby might catch glimpses through the steel palisade fence of boys in their white-and-blue uniforms playing football in the tiny sports pitch - the very place where Noh and Earn had their conversation in the novel. The stands are no longer there, but were present in 2007 when The Love of Siam was filmed at the school. Also appearing in the film, and the site of Noh's classes in the novel, is the 13-storey school building which now towers over the cathedral in order to accommodate its secondary student body of some 2,500 within the limited historic space. (The primary section had been split to a different campus in 1966.)

The F. Hilaire Building clock, and Kao Jirayu as young Tong in the sports pitch, seen in The Love of Siam (Sahamongkolfilm International)

A nativity play right in front of the cathedral would be epic. However, this is artistic licence, as the school's primary section lies elsewhere. This area is now the red brick courtyard; Noh actually mentions in the novel that the school was undergoing a lot of landscaping projects. (Sahamongkolfilm International)

The Love of Siam may have been one of the first few instances where the wider public got to actually see what things looked like inside the school. Although it was only standing in as a location for the fictional St. Nicholas School, there was something about seeing students in their sea of blue uniform shorts that tickled the imagination. Such was the effect that when Love Sick began serializing as a web novel on Dek-D.com a year later, the Thai subtitle, usually translated as The Chaotic Lives of Blue Shorts Guys, undoubtedly helped fuel its popularity.

But what's so special about these blue shorts anyway?

This might come as a surprise to international viewers who've only primarily seen Thailand through its TV series, where they tend to be over-represented, but school uniforms with blue shorts are actually rather uncommon in real life. Let's look back again to Brother Hilaire's time, to find out more about their origins.

A history of the blue shorts

In the early days of formal education, most schools did not have defined uniforms, and AC students wore a varied assortment of costumes according to their ethnic background. The school first introduced a uniform in 1933, consisting of a white standing-collar jacket with metal buttons bearing the school insignia, blue shorts, a white pith helmet, white socks, and black leather shoes (though the helmet, socks and shoes remained optional). This was similar to a form already used by some royally affiliated schools since the 1910s,* though their shorts were navy or black. The reason AC opted for blue shorts is not recorded, though some writers have postulated that it may have been to reflect the common colour of the raj pattern costume, the formal dress of the time.

A class of AC students, with their teachers, in the 1940s. It's unclear whether the shorts were the school's original blue, or khaki green in accordance with the 1939 law. (Assumption Association, via The Cloud)

The first piece of legislation governing school uniforms came out in 1939 under the Fascist-leaning regime of Prime Minister Plaek Pibulsonggram. Male students in government schools were assigned a khaki green military-style uniform to match that of the government's Yuwachon Thahan military youth movement. Some AC students also joined the movement, though those who didn't continued to wear the white uniform, creating an interesting contrast which we'll come back to later. In 1943, at the height of World War II in Southeast Asia, a new law extended the khaki green uniform to all schools, but it's unclear whether it ever took effect as Pibulsonggram was ousted the following year and the Yuwachon movement was dissolved after the war's end.

In 1949, the old regulation was scrapped and replaced with a new one, which codified school uniforms to the almost exact same appearance we see today: for boys, a white shirt, shorts, a belt, socks, and shoes. But the shorts were to be khaki for all schools, except those who requested otherwise to the Ministry of Education. Assumption, together with its sister Gabrielite schools, were among the first to register exemptions and became the only schools with blue shorts for their uniforms for several years.

In 1961, the national regulation was changed again to allow schools to choose between khaki, blue, navy, or black shorts. As time passed, boys' uniforms developed into the convention we see today: black or khaki shorts for government schools, blue or black for private schools. But given their prominence, the image of the all-boys Catholic school has remained one of the strongest associated with the blue shorts uniform.

Not that it mattered much back then, though. In the pre-digital era, people's exposure to different schools was mostly limited to their immediate locality and depictions in the media. While blue-shorts uniforms did feature in some teen movies and sitcoms in the 1990s,† those works didn't really play into the stereotype, and the 1997 financial crisis soon disrupted most media production anyway.

Attracting attention

Then several things happened. The BTS Skytrain opened in 1999, and Bangkok became much smaller overnight - at least for the middle class. Cram schools moved into building spaces in Siam Square left vacant from the recession, and saw an explosion in popularity. School students from all over now flocked to Siam Square in the evenings, and the video classrooms became something of an inter-school melting pot where one could catch sight of all sorts of uniform styles and colours.

And the AC boys, they very much stood out.

It's unclear exactly when things began, but throughout the years, Assumption students had developed a fashion culture of their own. The school is one of a handful that require leather shoes (as opposed to canvas),‡ and its upper-secondary students usually opted for a certain pointy style produced by a couple of old shops on Charoen Krung Road. They would also have their shorts tailor-modified to be very short - typically 15 inches or less, while uniforms coming out of the factory are usually 18 inches at the shortest for high-schooler sizes - and wear them with waists pulled very low. This was despite the rule book stating, like any other school's, that shorts should reach no more than 5 centimetres above the knee. It's actually a common refrain of experiences retold by AC students and alumni that they'd get into trouble for their shorts and shoes whenever the disciplinarian teacher would inspect their uniforms. But it was also part of the challenge, to stay on top of the fashion of their peers and at the same time get away with it.

This fashion only added to the fact that those vivid blue shorts are very visible, like, even from 100 metres away. So, coupled with the stereotype of them being rich kids with likely above-average attractiveness, these AC boys' uniforms easily caught attention, whether they were entering late into a cram school classroom or queuing for the train at the BTS's central interchange at Siam Station during rush hour.

This group strolling down the streets of Siam Square would surely draw plenty of eyes in real life. (Sahamongkolfilm International)

The turn of the 21st century also saw the spread of internet access, and with the early web came the proliferation of online discussion forums, both smaller ones serving specific groups like schools and larger public communities like the youth-oriented Dek-D. Suddenly, it became possible to peak into some of the conversations kids elsewhere were having and share in the knowledge of their hijinks at school. This, in some ways, helped fuel the fantasy of this exclusive boys' world, filled with good-looking guys in revealing shorts who weren't averse to having physical contact with each other.

The online forums also gave birth to web fiction, which soon expanded to include the emerging Y (BL) genre. Naturally, these trends eventually converged to give us plenty of Y fiction set in all-boys schools. But the epitome of these wouldn't arrive until after The Love of Siam hit screens in 2007.

The Love of Siam was probably the first major work in a decade to prominently feature the blue shorts uniform,§ and this time it was actually used to highlight the Catholic boys' school setting, employing AC itself as the location. Though it appeared only in a few short glimpses, they were powerful images that further inspired fascination with the real-life school.

It might be because it's accurate, or because the film has completely coloured viewer's perceptions, but this scene is exactly how one would imagine things to be like in those Catholic boys' schools. (Sahamongkolfilm International)

Then in 2008, Love Sick quietly began serializing on Dek-D's writers' section. The story's premise was simple, but it so effectively tapped into this collective fascination and quickly rose up the site's readership charts. Its popularity came no doubt thanks to author Indrytime's extremely lively and enjoyable writing of Noh, who narrates the story throughout. But a large part of the appeal is also attributable to the lifelike portrayal of his school life, with plenty of references to actual locations both within the school and outside - including the convent school next door and the numerous shops of Siam Square. The novel also name-dropped some of the school's actual teachers who, in Catholic school fashion, are addressed as Miss and Master, and Noh even mentions specific happenings at AC, like the new belt buckles that had been added to the school uniform for younger students that year. The only thing not mentioned was the name of the school, which was intentionally left blank. So close did the story feel to real life that the author had to emphasize its fictional nature when people started speculating about the real identities of Punn‖ and Noh and tried to identify them with actual AC students.

But the most significant reference to real life in Love Sick by far must be its descriptions of what is clearly meant to be the Jaturamitr football competition - a biennial event between Thailand's four oldest boys' schools: Assumption College, its Protestant counterpart Bangkok Christian College (BCC), and the royally founded government schools Suankularb Wittayalai (SK) and Debsirin (DS). The tradition is a HUGE part of school life at these four schools, which pretty much share this culture of intense collective institutional pride.

These boys and their ball game

It's kind of hard to explain all that the competition entails, but the football is just a small part of it. This YouTube video looking at the BCC side makes for a nice intro.¶ There are parades, mascots, Thai-style cheerleading (featuring not acrobatics, but synchronized arm movements), and most notably, the spectacular card stunt displays, which involve the entire student body from the lower-secondary years. The students will spend months practising to perfect their card flips, under the direction of the cheering president. Sounds familiar? That's Earn's position in Love Sick.

Fourwheels (Oxygen, Nitiman, La Pluie), wearing the cheering crew overalls that Noh dreams of, addressing the AC crowd in 2017 (AC Ed Tech)

Beam Boonyakorn (Make It Right) as AC's eagle mascot, though it's often teased for looking more like a chicken, also in 2017 (TTaewTaew Twitter)

The card stunt tradition actually originated at AC in 1942, from the aforementioned contrast between the military youth and regular uniforms. A teacher came up with the idea of having the differently dressed students arrange to form the school initials on the stands. This eventually developed into the elaborate displays done today, which use coloured card booklets to create pixels that together form a detailed aggregate image. Crowds of 1,250 from each school, seated opposite the paying audience, are needed to perform these.

Oat Tharathorn (Fourever You) in the card-stunt-performing audience in 2014; note the plates of colour card booklets set on the racks in front of them. (oattrt Instagram)

Such plates appeared in Love Sick 2024's episode 4 behind-the-scenes clip, but didn't show up in the actual episode. They later appeared in episode 5. (Tia51)

Regular fixtures among these displays include school logos, the royal family, and sponsors. There are also have these coordinated sequences with portraits of students and alumni greeting the crowd, which may feature some familiar faces.

A sponsor ad for Est gives way to AC student Chimon greeting the audience in 2017. (AC Ed Tech)

Alumni PP Krit (AC), Ice Natara (DS), Nonkul (BCC), and Sky Wongravee (SK) welcoming the audience, 2019 (AC Ed Tech)

GMMTV's Marc (AC) and Ford (SK) from the same sequence in 2019; Inn (BCC) from before 2014; AC alum Net Siraphop in 2023 (AC Ed Tech; Suankularb Photo Club; inpitar Instagram)

This attention to popular students didn't exist during novel Noh's time, though. Back then, few people followed the event apart from the schools' students and alumni, and football people scouting for young talent. But the 2010s' "cute boy" craze brought a sharp rise in attention from the sao-Y and cute-boy-following crowds, who flocked to the matches, some equipped with huge telephoto lenses to capture not the football action but cute guys in the audience.

BCC alumnus Inn Sarin photographed in the audience in 2014. Photos of him from the event were virally shared and boosted his following and "cute boy" stature. (inpitar Instagram)

BCC cheerleaders Winny Thanawin (2017) and Ping Krittanun (2019) (BCC Jaturamitr)

The origination of Thai BL

In some ways, the Love Sick novel helped lay the foundations for the phenomenon. It gave readers this imaginary connection to the school, which drove interest in seeing what its real-life students shared on social media, especially as Instagram exploded in popularity around 2012. And of course, attractive boys in revealing uniform shorts was already a winning combination in itself (and the fashion soon spread to other schools).

So it's appropriately fitting that things would come full circle with the 2013 announcement of Love Sick The Series, which generated huge amounts of engagement as fans recalled their impressions of the characters and shared pictures of real-life AC students whom they saw as the perfect Punn and Noh.

As it turned out, recent AC graduate White was cast as Punn, and several other AC boys were also chosen for the many supporting characters. Fans readily took to following these budding actors from the moment they were announced, gathering to meet them after acting classes and supporting them through to the last post-series events. It was a revelation in how dedicated such a fandom could be, without seeing even a second of these actors' work.

For the production, though, it could hardly be expected that explicit reference to the real-life school would be allowed, so they named the school Friday College in the series. (Which kind of bugs me. Couldn't they have at least come up with a vaguely Catholic-sounding name? Anyway, they developed it into a brand and it's stuck now.) They did model the school emblem and uniform exactly after AC's (in its 2008 form, before the new belt buckle), and the same uniform was featured in Thank God It's Friday, a 2019 spin-off set in the same universe. However, the school emblem was redesigned for the 2024 Love Sick remake, maybe because the resemblance now felt too close for comfort. (Another detail that bugs me is how the 2014 series had four-digit student IDs, while the 2024 has six. Most real-life schools have five digits!)

While it would have been a dream come true to see the actual original locations in the series adaptation (even if unnamed), this was not to happen. In fact, unlike its sister school Assumption College Thonburi, which served as the location for Hormones and numerous other works, AC seems to no longer be keen on allowing access as a filming location, and hasn't been spotted in anything since The Love of Siam.

Anyway, Love Sick's broadcast was a turning point in several ways. Of course, it most importantly kickstarted the Thai BL industry,** but this also led to a shift in Y culture where shippers turned their focus from real people to actor pairs from series. "Cute boys" from social media were now regularly tapped to join the many budding modelling agencies, who would try to push them as actors and influencers, and AC students attracted particular attention. Make It Right (2016)'s Peak, Ohm and Beam, for example, were all scouted from the school.

AC students Peak, Ohm and Beam, taken by a fan account in 2016. (allaboutpeak Twitter)

The boys made use of their newfound cult. Popular AC students were tapped to promote the school's annual Christmas Fair, which drew an influx of visitors from their followers, who happily contributed to their fundraising efforts. This was much changed from Noh's time in the novel, when the fair was still pretty much an internal event for students and their immediate friends and family.

Turbo (Love Stage!!) promoting merch for AC's 2015 Christmas Fair (turbotb Instagram)

However, this trend, as with the cute boy craze itself, seems to have largely petered out, especially as life was disrupted by the COVID pandemic and the 2020 protests brought about sharp changes in ideology among young people. Another victim of this has been the Jaturamitr competition, which was postponed for two years before taking place again in 2023.†† But it then became the topic of a huge online drama over the compulsory nature of attendance for the card stunt performances (which not everyone willingly enjoyed), and the negative public attention soured the experience for a lot of the students.

These new concerns seem to have influenced Love Sick's 2024 remake. In the novel, during preparation for the football competition, Noh talks about how hard the marching band was practising, and how he and the band leaders felt the need to push them to perfection, in order to uphold the school's reputation. There's a clear institutional pride in the way he says, "I'm sure the young ones understand. (Or if they don't now, they will in a few years.)"

This stands in sharp contrast to Earn's stance in Love Sick 2024, where he says in episode 4, "If the formation fails, the school’s reputation will just take a hit. But the school doesn’t have feelings, does it? It is they (the young ones) who have feelings."

We'll find out in a couple of hours how else they're updating the depiction of the competition, which was one of the highlight scenes in the novel thanks to how detailed it was with insider info of the behind-the-scenes workings at the Suphachalasai National Stadium in real life. It's an unfortunate fact, though, that it's near impossible that any TV production with a normal budget would even come close to the spectacle of the actual event, with its crowds in the tens of thousands. But let's see how creative the production crew can be.

After all, it's the emotional threads that make the real highlight of the story, isn't it?

Footnotes

* These schools had been set up after the English public school model by King Vajiravudh, who himself was educated in England. Vajiravudh College still uses it as its ceremonial uniform.

† One of these was I Miss You 2 (1996), which was filmed at Montfort College in Chiang Mai, another Gabrielite school. Incidentally, The Love of Siam director Madeaw Chookiat was a student there and became an extra in the film, an experience which inspired him to go into filmmaking. He would later base the Nay-Beam segment of Home (2012, one of the most significant mainstream proto-BL works) at the school.

‡ Most other schools allow both, and their students usually prefer canvas shoes. Nanyang, with its iconic green soles, has long been the most popular brand.

§ Actually there's at least Yong Songyos's Dorm (2006), set at his alma mater Assumption College Sriracha, but it's a horror focusing more on the boarding-school aspect. Yong also created a short film dedicated to the school in 2015, starring four Hormones Next Gen actors (no English subs, but there are hardcoded Thai captions that maybe a tool can translate).

‖ Sorry, but I just can't accept the spelling Phun, as it's plain incorrect. The /p/ and /ph/ are supposed to represent different sounds in Thai, but most Thai people don't understand the system as it's not taught in schools.

¶ As an expat, the video creator misses the meanings of some of the things that happen in the video. The yellow chicken is a reference to a Facebook satirist who's said to bring bad luck to sports teams, while the no-banana sign is a response to the angry chant the BCC side was yelling. It's an expletive that rhymes with the word for banana in Thai.

** Isn't it ironic that a genre revolving around a topic so controversial with the Church should be inspired by a Catholic school? But then, as director Madeaw demonstrated in The Love of Siam, religious conflict has always played an important role in driving social issues, while in the case of Love Sick, it's not actually relevant at all.

†† Yet another victim is the Chula-Thammasat Traditional Football Match, a competition between Thailand's two oldest universities which features similar elements of parades, cheerleading and card stunts. It hasn't been properly held since 2020, and when a substitute event was held in 2024, a huge online drama erupted over the student body's decision to alter certain elements.

[epropelledsystems]

Hercules SG12000 Advanced Starter Generator for Drones, UAVs

Power your large UAVs with the Hercules SG12000—an advanced starter generator motor designed for high-performance drone missions and hybrid-electric systems.

[tobiasdrake]

Could you tell us something underrated about Bulma? For being around since literally the very beginning, I find she’s not talked about as much.

Bulma is the scariest person in the Dragon Ball universe. The anime softens a lot of her edges. And, like, she's not a total monster; She cares about things like people not being killed by genocidal assholes too.

But she is such an asshole and I love it. Bulma is the character I relate to most in Dragon Ball.

(Also she has an unshakable faith in Goku and he'll always be the number one martial artist in her eyes, and any man that wants to be with her needs to respect that.)

For starters, it's worth noting that the naming convention of Bulma's family is called out as weird even in-universe. Nobody bats an eye at characters being named after fruit or vegetables or rice or the Dairy Special Forces but they draw the line at underwear.

That's weird, Bulma. Your name is weird. Your father Briefs is weird. Your sister Tights is weird. Your son Trunks is weird. Your daughter Bra is weird. Why is your family like this?

Nearly every single person in the cast is someone who Goku initially had to fight in some way or another. Bulma is no exception, though their battle took place as early as issue #1.

When shooting a 12-year-old in the face with a gun failed, Bulma resorted to manipulation and subterfuge, and thus the most important relationship in the entire Dragon Ball universe was born.

Though Goku would not be the only person whose arm Bulma twisted, as this initial journey also sees her enslave a sentient being to do her bidding.

Despite ironically filling the role of a Buddhist monk in the original Journey to the West, this opening arc lays a lot of groundwork for who Bulma is. She tricks Goku and enslaves Oolong to coerce assistance in her quest to conjure up a magically-generated boyfriend (or infinite strawberries).

...then again, Tang Sanzang imprisoned Sun Wukong in the original so maybe Bulma's a better adaptation than I gave her credit for.

Point is, Bulma's a fireball. Even Goku sees it.

In the first arc, we also see her get accustomed to calling on Goku like he's her Pokemon.

Bulma is not a martial artist. She knows next to nothing about the implicate complexities of the art. Though she does enjoy being on the outer fringe of it and watching from a distance.

Well. Not from that much distance, because she always has the best seats in the house. Courtesy of inappropriate violence with firearms.

Not only is Bulma complicit in this - they clearly discussed it in advance, based on Oolong's remark and Bulma's knowing smile - but in the 23rd she actively makes it happen.

Sitting in the nosebleeds is for peasants; Bulma is a princess.

I should probably note that after Lunch moves on and leaves the group, Bulma doesn't lose access to violent backup. She just trades Lunch out for Chi-Chi.

The Battle of the Soccer Moms is the best part of the 25th's Junior Division. There's only room for one Alpha Bitch in these audience stands.

Notably, it doesn't take long for her relationship with Goku to grow into a genuine friendship. Following this first arc, Bulma goes out of her way to hang out with Goku when she can and is always excited to see him.

Fun fact, despite the fact that Bulma's boyfriend Yamcha is actively living with them at the time, Bulma's dad ships her with Goku.

No love for Yamcha in this house. Notably, when they're six years older and it's not fucking weird, Bulma herself starts to agree.

But it's honestly best for everyone that this never became a romance. Bulma would have been even more miserable with Goku than she was with Yamcha, and having them hook up would deprive us of one of the greatest platonic male/female friendships in anime.

I'm not saying Vegeta is a replacement goldfish for Goku who got married and became unavailable this same day.

...but I'm not not saying that.

So far as martial arts go, her practical knowledge of the art is simple: Goku is a) invulnerable and b) infinity powerful, and that's all she needs to know. Nobody matches Goku. Ever.

You might think that this unyielding confidence in Goku as the Supreme Warrior would cause some conflicts for Bulma. Her boyfriend Yamcha is one of Goku's rivals, and has his eye on the Tenkaichi Budokai medal.

You'd be wrong. Bulma knows exactly who she's rooting for.

It's Goku. It's always been Goku. It's always going to be Goku. Bulma watches Yamcha and Krillin gush over how well they plan to do in the tournament and her takeaway is "LOL Goku's going to school both of you clowns."

This attitude makes it really funny to imagine what her relationship with Vegeta must be like, I gotta say. That Goku will always be #1 in Bulma's eyes can't be doing good things for Vegeta's insecurity.

But I digress.

Bulma is an exceptional scientist who comes from an exceptional scientific background. She's from one of if not the richest families in the world courtesy of her father inventing revolutionary shrinking technology that changed the entire nature of how products are transported.

You can put anything in a Capsule Corp. hoi-poi capsule. Throughout the series, we see not just vehicles stored in these capsules, but portable homes, weapons, and her father's pornography collection.

For her part, Bulma's a chip off the old block. I've spoken at length in the past about Bulma's invention of the Dragon Radar, trivializing what was meant to be a holy quest of virtue and turning the miracle dragon Shenron into her own personal plastic surgery vendor. She was 15 years old when she made that.

One year later, she extrapolated her father's shrinking technology into a portable device that safely applies its principles to people.

But both of those devices pale in comparison to the greatest invention of her life.

No, not the kid. Though he's cool too.

In a sense, despite being out-of-focus for most of it, the entire Cell Arc is Bulma's masterpiece. It's a proxy war between two mad scientists over the fate of the Earth. Seeking to kill Son Goku and avenge the Red Ribbon Army, Dr. Gero destroyed the world with his Androids.

Bulma took exception to that. And by "took exception", I mean she bent the time-space continuum over her knee and spanked it.

Trunks's journey through time is the culmination, both of Bulma's impossible super-genius and of her unyielding faith that Goku is the answer to any problem that needs to be solved with violence.

Dr. Gero's master stroke was to flood the world with murderous Androids. Bulma's response was to load a bullet named Goku into a gun named Trunks and fire it through time to put it between his eyes. Everything that transpired from there was the consequence of their two plans colliding.

The happier future we get to know in the Buu Saga is the world that Bulma made happen. Because the woman who would make a personal assistant out of our Great Green God's greatest miracle had the audacity and the irreverence to violate causality itself.

[mxchineherald]

[closed starter for @runes-menagerie.]

 It had already been a busy day. He’d recorded a lecture, pressed the tin plate to copy it for his archives, run several stacks of paper work from office to office, gotten stalled by at least three professors trying to cover for their students’ late assignments, and fetched the dean of the academy’s poro from its grooming appointment. All that on top of his usual classes.

 He was exhausted, but he had to keep working.

 Now he was assisting Professor Heimerdinger in welcoming the latest students to their freshly renovated west wing, which handled general scientific education. He stood more heavily against is cane, his leg giving him those numb shocks it liked to when it was running on fumes. Just a little longer, he told himself.

 Oh, but the professor was going on and on. He sounded like he could be talking for hours about the luxuries and advancements in education they had afforded to them, and how past generations of students had all come and shared the same experience. At least he didn’t have to do the talking. He had horrid stage fright. He let out a little sigh and looked sidelong, letting his eyes graze over the crowd of faces.

 “Alright, Viktor!” Heimerdinger said with a clap. “Hand out all these academy maps to our newest wave of geniuses!” Before he could say a word, a stack of thick, printed maps was shoved into his free arm. “I’m off to the Council for a meeting!” Heimerdinger said with a wave as he trotted off, his poro following close behind.

 He saw the crowd approaching him and froze up like a statue. This was dangerously close to public speaking. Just enough to set off his nerves. He didn’t have a free hand to pass the maps out, so he just stood there like a glorified shelf, watching each one of their faces as they came and took a slip off the stack. “E-ehh… Welcome,” he would say occasionally if they stared at him for long enough. It was all so agonizingly awkward.

 He hadn’t seen her yet – not past the crowds. She would have to come up to him for a map, to get his attention.

[simplegeneral]

Wof AU Burn

I have wrote several posts about the sisters, the war and my AU daughter of Burn, Oasis, but I never wrote something that consolidated what this Burn was in the context of my AU.

I have had Burn written differently along the years, from as close to canon as possible, to so bizarrely different you might have called her Bubbles, for she was so harmless, she would probably be an old grandma of the DoD, not a general.

I have seem over the years some incredibly cringy Burn apologists, which I do not understand, by trying to justify her actions, they don't make you see where she was coming from, but actually worse by the fact she felt threatened, judged or outright offended by some dragonets, like BRUH.

Even if I believe Burn was the best choice, purely because a leader matters only by their capacity to keep the state together, not how caring, good or kind they are, and Burn simply was the perfect choice between Blister's self-fighting followers and Blaze's harmless incompetence.

So... After a long tangent, what would my version of Burn be?

Well, for starters, she is not a villain, but an antagonist, as for book 1, the villainy was already Scarlet's role. Another one would be Blister, which would be the main villain of the arc, not just almost a side character of book 2 and an unbelievably stupid genius of book 5.

Before Oasis' death, Burn was a general, it was her thing, as her mother's before her and a tradition her brothers and father followed, with the only exception being Blister, which Oasis denied any training fearful of her schemes and Blaze for well... simply not being up to the task.

After Oasis' death, Burn grew more paranoid and aggressive, resembling slightly her canon self as her emotional control went out of the window. But above that, she wanted to present herself as a fitting queen for the sandwings, a noble warrior, the queen not afraid of making the hard decisions when the time came, and the SandWings simply respected that, for the common folk, a strong leader who protects them is far more worthy than a harmless one or a manipulative schemer.

So Burn has nearly total SandWing support in the war, in contrast to Blaze's large supporter numbers in canon.

Advancing forward to the brightest night, Burn doesn't kill Hvitur, she doesn't even meet him, because:

1º- She doesn't believe in the prophecy and is very dismissive, so she won't waste her time solving a problem that was Scarlet's (that will become far more evident later)

2º- The SkyWings were far quicker to find and pursue Hvitur than she would ever be, so they capture him and end up dropping the egg, because at a night of frivolous festivities, they were drunk and completely careless.

3º- Those SkyWing soldiers were executed later, because by the principles set by the first queens, killing an egg is an unforgivable crime, a crime not even Scarlet can simply commit without an immediate call for her head to be off her neck, and even if Hvitur was captured and would later die at her arena, he would have made sure those soldiers were punished.

4º- Scarlet's killing of the eggs in the wingery is reasoned by her with the mystical idea that somehow the moons had cursed those eggs, which she had them painted secretly to look like animus and firescale eggs, thus justifying her actions of destroyed all of them. Her subjects were scared, but understood such course of action following the SkyWing laws. However, Scarlet would save one large egg, which would hatch to Peril and Sky (never found by Wren, his name is Meteor).

Skipping time forward, the DoD would escape after their guardians tried to kill Glory and would be immediately captured by Scarlet (who would always fly with guards, because she leaving alone out in the wild was so unbelievable stupid, an assassin would quickly off her.) The DoD would fight in her arena as in canon but skipping to the next day, Scarlet's hatching day.

This is where I rather strength the dynamic of Burn and Scarlet from the canon, Burn despises Scarlet, she thinks her big show is a frivolous waste of time and resources, but has to play along, because she is one of the few dragons Burn can not bark orders at, because Scarlet does what she wants, and if you don't believe, be ready for she to switch sides on a heart beat.

Burn watches the DoD dismissively at first, but each time they prove their will to live and resist Scarlet, Burn grows more interested in them, there was one thing she found rather amusing, watching Scarlet fail at her big clown show.

Same as canon, Glory spits on Burn, who by pure luck and side sight pulled Scarlet in front of her who had the brunt of her acid. She flies away to bring her soldiers to capture the DoD, while Scarlet is taken away to her palace and the SkyWings chaotically leave the arena. The DoD are freed by Peril and her fireless brother, Meteor, who join them and rescue Kestrel along their way to the Mud Queendom.

Later that day however, Burn has had enough of Scarlet, from the insults to her mother (the only thing that can take Burn out of cool) and her waste of time, Burn murders Scarlet at her very throne room and declares Ruby will be the next SkyWing queen. The rather weak and submissive new SkyWing queen obliges to the demand, but her army is not so fond of she being nothing but a puppet of Burn.

Following canon, Burn wants the DoD, not to murder them, but she isn't exactly inviting them for a tea party either, she wants to make them chose her as queen. She sends search parties through all the Sky and Mud Queendom, but fails to overall locate them, until she grows rather tired and orders the massing of her army to battle again at the Summer Palace, her strategy was simple, if the DoD are fleeing from her, then she must destroy her sisters first, until they are either useless or they chose her.

The Summer Palace battle was a success and I will time skip again because there goes book 2, 3 and 4 where Burn doesn't has much relevance, lets get to book 5.

Now, Burn's interest in weird things is one I often debated with myself either I should remove or not, because its a villainy trait I think makes her character distinguish from others, but it doesn't necessarily helps her case as a fitting queen she portrays herself.

I decided to keep it, but I followed Burn's rather canonical pragmatic side, the DoD can be useful to her, so she will not kill any of them (because doing so would ruin her chances with the others), so she is interested in Sunny oddness, but will not kill her yet.

Addax is a different case, I made him rather kidnap Sunny, not to gift her to Burn, but because one DoD was walking around and he simply couldn't let her escape when this was the greatest chance they ever had to finally locate them.

He brings Sunny to the stronghold, where she meets Smolder and Sandstorm. Now, Sandstorm is a completely different character in my AU, almost worth of his own big lenghty explaination post, because his canon self is an obnoxious and loud dragon, and I literally can not understand why Burn would keep him alive, he didn't even seemed to be particularly useful at all. She would just kill his ass.

But Sandstorm here, he is a kind listener general of hers, and secretly her love interest, but shhh, this is literally something NOBODY have to know, not yet anyways. He has an uncanny calmness to him and is very caring and gentle with Sunny in her stay at the stronghold, similarly to Smolder, he does think twice before locking her in a dungeon, wishing to help his queen reason with Sunny properly.

The main problem comes to... The DoD technically chose Blister. Her manipulation of them was successful, then Sunny, angry for being locked up at the Sky Palace and at Burn and Scarlet, will not be so cordial either, so the tensions are rising up, because the young sandwing will rather die than tell anything even close to the location of the DoD, because she believes Burn (by all Blister's sweet lies) is a monster.

Before Burn's arrival though, Thorn and the Outclaws attacked the palace. An incredibly daring move, no one has besieged the stronghold through the entire length of the war, yet this diverse and desorganized group of idealistic rebels had the daring the IceWings didn't, and the SeaWings never could.

The battle is of course almost a complete disaster for the Outclaws, and Thorn, to save her soldiers, surrenders herself to Sandstorm to reunite with Sunny. After a brief reunion, Burn and her main force had arrived, the hope for their survival was dim, Sunny was desperated, she was not so willing to die as she thought.

Burn meets with them, and Thorn, being a hot-headed almost equal to Burn, snaps snarky comments to each other, things about how Burn left the den to rot at the talons of criminals, and Burn saying she had no choice, the war was more important than some settlement, and Thorn saying she will defend her dragonet from anything she tries.

Thorn however, escalates to the next level. She challenges Burn, not for the throne, but for the right to leave with Sunny unharmed. It could be said the entire stronghold was speechless, but Burn accepted.

Nobody expected this known criminal lord would stand up to Burn, but Thorn was decided she was far better than this, she stopped the criminal scum at the den, she alone stood up when everyone else cowered in fear, and she would do it again.

Through luck and cleverness, Thorn actually holds up to Burn for a while, but her overwhelming strength and fierceness would eventually hit Thorn, sooner or later. In a single charge, she throws Thorn several dozen meters away into the ground, before stomping her heck, ready to deliver the final blow, as old princesses would.

Thorn's eyes had fixed on Burn, filled with regret, for not being strong enough for Sunny, but she wasn't afraid at all, she was angrier than before. Before Burn could do anything, Sunny's desperate cries as she advanced towards them, now being held by the soldiers, begging Burn to not do it, she had a moment to think.

Killing a dragonet's mother as she cries out, was not something Burn would really do. Even if such mother was Thorn, quite literally a thorn on her side, challenging her army since last year. Above that, killing Thorn would make sure the DoD would not chose her at all. (At this point, the DoD have showed their words are more powerful than the talons of any dragon, thus it would not go well for Burn had they stood and against her).

In a rare gesture, not seem quite often, Burn releases Thorn and both of them stand in front of each other. She declares as she won, she will not allow them to leave the stronghold until further orders, but she gives her word she will not harm either of them.

After the situation deescalated, they all entered at the stronghold as the night came, Sunny and Thorn were even offered a dinner with the soldiers, Sandstorm and Smolder, a sign of the things to come. Burn may not throw a party at them, but now she was offering them tea.

Thorn refused to leave Sunny alone at all moments, but time had come for them to meet with Burn, this time, preferrably on different terms. Burn was blunt and direct, she wanted the location of the rest of the DoD, but Sunny refused to speak. Burn's gestures so far were nice, Sunny was almost challenging her beliefs on Blister's lies, but Burn was still too hot headed to lead the SandWings, right?

Sunny tried to distract Burn with a truth, she talked about the NightWing tunnel near her stronghold, to which Burn had snapped in anger, the NightWings were collaborating with Blister all along, not only the prophecy was false, but worse, it was a plot. Sunny was sad to be reminded of that, but at that right moment, she knew better.

Before departing to immediately destroy the tunnel, Burn had reassured Sunny that she was open to speak about any further Blister's lies she had told her. Sunny was not fully ready to have her entire beliefs collapse once again, but she was willing this time, Burn so far had hold all her words truthfully, even at her most angry.

They followed Burn and her soldiers, guiding them to the tunnel, to which Burn immediately ordered her soldiers to put explosives and destroy it, but before they could blow it up, Sunny listened to voices within and she realized, the DoD had come for her.

Clay, Starflight and Glory's heads showed up from the tunnel, in what they could only believe was a trap. Burn was most amused the DoD came right to her, while Sunny tried desperately to calm them down and not make things any worse. Burn had the tunnel destroyed and brought the DoD to the palace, for her, victory was now within her talons.

Burn had a message sent to Tsunami, the last DoD she still doesn't have, ordering she to come there or her friends would be executed. Burn was buffling, but you do not take anything she says as a bluff, ever. Sunny also convinced Burn to include in the message a note to bring Blister with her, as well as sending one to Glacier and Blaze too, calling it a big conference the DoD would make to chose the new queen.

In the meanwhile, Sunny explained all the lies Blister had told them with the help of Burn, to which Starflight with a heavy heart admitted he was tasked to further such lies to them. Now the only DoD who didn't know that was Tsunami, whom was most likely coming with Blister to show Burn a good taste of her own remedy.

Within two days, all the queens and Blister and Blaze reunited at the stronghold, to which immediately tensions rised up. Burn and Blister snarled and hissed at each other while Blaze kept distance. Blister spoke how she wanted to reunite the family after such pointless strife, bringing gifts for both Burn and Blaze.

Despite Blaze believing her, Glacier forbidden she from opening the box, while Burn outright threw the box away, knowing Blister's machinations. Tsunami angrily shouted at them, she still believing Blister had the best intentions and the only one actually trying to do something to end the war. But before the DoD could explain to her, Blister moved to her plan B, she pulled a blowgun and fired two poisonous dart at Burn.

The enormous sandwing fell into the ground, roaring in pain and weakened, a part of Blister's plan, weaken her sister so she may properly kill her. Blister challenged Burn for the throne, and immediately jumped into her. Burn tried to get up but was pinned down by Blister, who adored every second of her sister being helpless.

Both the DoD and the SandWings shouted at Blister for her unfairness at the fight, to which distracted Blister, who hissed back at them, giving Burn enough time to get up and roar at Blister, who cowered in fear at looking her sister back up, in disbelief.

Burn charged at Blister who screamed for her guards to release the dragonbite vipers through the great hall of the palace, her plan C, soon chaos spread through the palace, many dragons stampeding the DoD. Blister herself had left the stronghold with her followers, clearly defeated.

Burn ordered her guards and anyone able to recapture or kill all the dragonbite vipers of the palace. After a hour, they all had been taken down one way or another. Burn weakened but still alive sat down with her sister Blaze, the harmless one. For once in their life, they were on the same side, not only that Blister's awful, but in their hate of dragonbite vipers.

In an unprecedent declaration, Burn spared Blaze, she would restore her titles as princess of the SandWings, and she being overall harmless and not even willing to challenge Burn, would be welcomed back at the palace. For such gesture of good will, the DoD chose Burn as the new SandWing queen and she was crowned a hour later, offically, despite being the de facto queen since 4993 AS.

Blister's escape was unfortunate according to Burn, but she would hunt her down for what she did to the ends of the Earth, which in the first unofficial queens' summit, agreed to declare Blister an enemy of Pyrrhia, to be arrested or executed in all queendoms.

In her last act that day, Burn had declared the DoD, especially Sunny, as heroes of the SandWings and of all Pyrrhia, giving them all a medal and approving Sunny's Jade Academy project, despite overwhelming doubts of its viability.

While Sunny and Burn wouldn't meet for a year, due to Sunny's still recent memories of the events at the stronghold, Starflight's project would open the first way of communication the two had since the conference, and Sunny would finally muster courage to meet Burn again, this time in times of peace.

[foreverautumn89]

Every clue that Lonnie was abusive Pt 1

I just had some clown try to tell me Will and Jonathan were never abused and once again ignoring the pain of those characters trying to dismiss it, so I'm going over every hint in canon that they were. Let me know if I'm forgetting any. Thank you in advance if you found something I missed.

Joyce mentions to Hopper that Lonnie used to 'say he was q*eer called him a f*g'. That's verbal abuse just for starters and parents like that generally do beat their kids to try and teach them thats wrong to ''be like that''. Clue 1

But this part also includes another hint: It was odd that when Joyce was worried about her son being missing/dead that Hopper would respond to that with 'Is he?' I thought what a weird question to ask at a time like this like Joyce said what does it matter. But it does matter because if he was Hopper knows how violent Lonnie is to gay people and thats it is an important question. He knows that Lonnie was abusing his kids or suspects, but is Lonnie capable of going farther than that and actually killing Will. Thats why Hopper asked to get more info if this was something Lonnie could have done.

Hopper suspects Lonnie is capable of abducting and killing his own child and Hopper won't let that theory go because he knows Lonnie and what kind of a guy he is.