#corpus indulgence

[thecorpuscorpse]

okay... it's a bit unhealthy, so if you feel uncomfortable with that, feel free to ignore!

buuut. Possesive, jealous villain?

and they're obsessed with hero? maybe they gave hero a necklace, because they want to mark their territory, but hero refuses to wear it, since to hero they are nothing but enemies. and anyway, why would they wear their enemies necklace?

Villain is frustrated, and decides to take matters into their own hands by tattooing their name on hero's body, shushing them gently when they panic.

Good evening anon!

While it has taken me a while to come back to some of my asks and requests (I have not forgotten you all), I hope to be more active now that more of my personal life has balanced out.

I was more than intrigued by this ask, so I hope you enjoy what I came up with. As someone with quite a few tattoos myself, this was a fun concept to delve into.

Readers: you read the ask (I hope), beware if that is not content you wish to read.

Enjoy <3

#7- "Your Scar To Bear"

TW: Dub-Con, drugging, kidnapping, some fighting.

"What do you expect me to do with this?" Hero asked, their fingers laced with a gold chain.

"Well, wear it," Villain replied as they sipped their wine. Hero always looked better in gold, after all, even though they insisted on silver. "You know, around your neck, like that tie of yours?"

Despite the nonchalance of Villains quip, their light demeanor was perturbed by Hero placing the chain back in the box, and setting it back on the table beside their plate of food. Villain set down their glass, feeling the need to sit up a bit more to properly take the blow of rejection as Heros brows furrowed.

"What's the matter? Is it because it's gold? I swear, just try it with that top you know I like and-"

"No, it isn't that. I... don't trust that you didn't put a tracker in this," Hero said, turning about the small, monogrammed medallion with Villains initials. "I don't need you having the upper hand?"

"Upper hand?" Villain chuckled, leaning in a bit over the table. "You don't seem to say that when I've got my upper hand around your neck while the lower-"

"Stop it," they flushed, but their voice held a stern resolve. "This is what I mean, this is getting too deep for what we are."

Villain tensed up, brows furrowing with confusion at how the mood of everything seemed to change. Just moments ago, they were laughing in the kitchen, and now things were getting too deep? They clutched their napkin in their hand as they watched Hero stand from the table, running a nervous hand through their hair.

"What do you mean."

"This was supposed to be easy!" They lamented. "Stop your plans, put you in prison for the horrible things you've done, and now.."

"Now.. What." Villain said, rather than asked.

Hero took a deep breath before bringing their hands together, clasping them tightly. All of this drama, over a necklace? Villain didn't know what to think, and their patience with how Hero danced around their point was not helping their case. Weeks, things had been fine, months had been fine. Through the broken ribs, bruised cheeks and torn ligaments somehow led to tender kisses, feather-like caresses and sweet words.

This, however, was different.

A bitter, sour taste in their mouth.

"There.. will be a day one of us defeats the other." Hero picked up their jacket from the back of the chair. "And I don't know if I could look at something like that, knowing what I did to you."

They slipped on their coat as they watched Villain with an almost cautious eye. Their grip on the napkin was almost as tight as their jaw. How did any of this make sense? Why was it now that they were making the decision for them?

"What you did to me..." They moved to take another sip of their wine. "Right, all the things that haven't happened, but everything before has been fine," Villain sardonically mused.

"But what will happen will be worse! And having that necklace.. doesn't feel right..."

"Then why the fuck are you still here?!" Their voice crashed through the quiet with the glass they held, the shards skidding across the tile.

Villain moved from their side of the table, and for once, Hero put up placating hands to slow their movement. Much to their dismay, Heros arms were twisted up behind them and wrenched so hard the pain burned in their shoulders.

"V-villain, wait! You don't understand-"

"Oh, I understand," They huffed as they wrenched the door open and pushed Hero out. "Can't stand having a reminder of me when I'm dead, but you can live just fine doing everything else until it puts you at risk."

The door shut, and the banging only lasted a moment before rapid footfalls descended down the driveway and were replaced with distant barking. The thrill of a chase, what a feeling it was to embrace while it lasted all for it to come crumbling down.

All over a necklace.

Villain fed their dogs, cleaned up the dinner the two of them made together, and brought the wine bottle into their office with them. As they sat back in their desk, looking over the spacious room lit by a small wood fireplace, they decided to continue work on their next plan. They rifled through their papers, and noticed a couple of drawings were missing from their schematics list.

Villain sighed, a small smile betraying their sulky mood.

"So that's why they wanted it so badly in here.. Damn bastard..."

~~~

Everything had been going according to plan. Villain watched from their office at headquarters as the trucks headed out from the garage like ants in a row, only to see the first explode in the distance. The gunfire could have been mistaken for fireflies on the hill. There was a faint click of the door, and the familiar sliding metal of a hammer being pulled back.

"Is this it then?" Villain asked as they watched their men die. "Is this the great defeat? Or are you going to fuck me here again and vow vengeance for another time?"

"Villain..." Hero sighed "I wish it was different, I-"

"I said," They interrupted, turning around to face Hero. Their shirt had been unbuttoned, tie loosened, and pants unbuckled and unzipped. Below, black lacy swirls curled along their skin, and delicate ribbon work held the sides of the bodice together. On the front of each strap were little bells that jingled as Villain pushed their shirt to the side. Villain sauntered up to Hero, took the barrel of their gun and kissed the end.

"Is this it, or are you going to Fuck. Me. Here. again?"

The gun was thrown down in a moment, just as Villain was against their desk. Villain couldn't help be proud at their choice in lingerie- Hero liked textures, and that much was evident with how their hands traced along the patterns and ribbons. Held in place between smooth oak and the warm body of Hero keeping them pinned, Villain returned the feverish kiss Hero attacked them with.

Hands roamed into their hair, tugging at all the spots which made them gasp.

They tugged Heros lip to make them hiss and bit along their neck to make them sigh.

The desk groaned as they did when Hero pressed their hips together, pulling Villains leg up against their hip. There was hardly a moment for Hero to keep up, and was left utterly breathless.

Just the way Villain wanted them.

Hero didn't notice amongst their sounds the gentle hum of the ventilation kicking in. They weren't paying attention to how Villain slowed their breaths. It wasn't until there was a sway in Heros stance that their kisses to Villains neck slowed. As they pulled away, their dazed eyes sharpened to clarity as they saw Villain holding a small respirator to their mouth. They winked, and used their leverage to kick Hero down to the floor.

Their legs weren't working. They were seeing two.. three... four Villains? It was hard to think, and they couldn't believe they hadn't considered it would be this simple. Villain moved off the desk, buttoning up their clothes after securing the respirator.

"My, my... stealing my sketches of the atomic phasers I was shipping off and intercepting my delivery convoy. I must say, you had good intention, but you let yourself get carried away with temptation. They were shipped out this morning, you're far too late."

Villain crouched down, and gently squished Heros face in their hand to purse their lips. "You want to have office fun, we'll have some office fun. I'll see you when you wake up~"

~~~

The dreams were unlike any that Hero had before. In the line of safety, it didn't come without it's downfalls. Sometimes, not everyone could be rescued and it lingered with Hero on more sleepless nights than not.

People falling they couldn't quite catch.

People not making it through a building fire.

They couldn't bear the idea of Villain being one of them.

And so many more caused Hero to jolt awake at night. It wasn't like therapy was an option, and so Hero held it just like they held the rest of the world together. Whatever Villain used in their sedation mist amplified these nightmarish instances tenfold until finally, they woke up.

Yet, their body did not thrash, nor were they capable of doing so with the shackles on their arms, ankles and neck. The cold sweat of their body was warmed by a fire in the room, and the burning sensation they felt from their dream lingered in more ways than just in their mind.

Their skin burned, and from what Hero could see, they were shirtless and tethered to.. oh.

Oh, no.

"Hi, darling," Villain cooed sweetly, standing up from their chair with a rag to gently dab Heros forehead with a cool rag. "Another nightmare? I promise, I only sent out a dozen men, its nothing really."

"W-whats.. whats happening?" They asked tiredly. It felt like they slept forever, but it must have only been a few hours. The sun had long since set, and there were only dim lights illuminating Villains home office.

"Oh, I can show you," Villain hummed as they unclasped the neck restraint, allowing Hero to look down and see the half-finished chest piece sprawling under his collarbones. The ink was smeared everywhere, speckles of blood splattered about randomly, and a Villain looking very proud of themselves.

"You started moving, so I let you get it out of your system. And I knew how much you wanted to use my Saint Andrews Cross, so it worked out well, I think."

"I-I need you to s-stop, why..." Hero couldn't even tell what it was before the panic started setting in.

"Shh, shh..." Villains face went from soft and pleasant, to serious and focused as they brought a hand to Heros face. A thumb traced over their lips, and pushed in to drag against the teeth. Their eyes held onto Heros, which were likely glazed from having woke up or being on the brink of tears. Either way, they still looked pretty to Villain.

The moment Villain got their head down, they locked the neck restraints, leaving Hero to pull against the restraints in protest to no avail. The air stung, and Hero could feel their racing heartbeat through every thick line of the ink in their skin.

"Why?" Villain repeated as they filled every tiny jar to the brim with ink. "You have broken and scarred my body in so many unchangeable ways, Hero." More ways than they were able to discuss, but with how long they had left on this piece, maybe they'd talk about it now.

Villain dipped their pen into the ink, and moved onto the cross to straddle Heros hips. They wiped a small amount of moisturizer in the spot they were to work on, and readied their gun, but not before leaning up to look at Hero directly.

"V-villain! Please, you need to listen to me and-"

"This will hurt, and hurt for a long time so you know how it felt. This is my revenge, this is your scar to bear, and I suggest you not move if you want this to come out good," Villain cooed before giving Hero a slow, deep kiss before pulling away. "I have plenty of time to listen."

Villain started their piece again. Although Hero was tense, they maintained as steady of a physical composure as they could. Every swipe of the machine against their skin felt akin to having skin carved into, stripped away with every bit.

Low-impact skin, like the chest and inner limbs, all have heightened sensitivity. Every graze against a healed scar either went numb, or made Hero cry out in pain. All the while, Villain maintained their steadied hand, gentle hushes escaping their lips as they worked.

"V-villain this is t-too much, I can't-"

"'This is too much', 'this is too deep'," Villain listed dully with a sigh. "All of that over shit we can't control and yet you let it get that far with me because why?" They asked rather simply, a much more content composure compared to their dinner a few weeks ago.

"I... I don't regret it, if that is what you're asking."

"It's not, but I appreciate that. Why was a necklace the deal breaker for you compared to everything else?"

There was a nearly quiet moment, only filled with the buzz of the machine and soft whimpers from Hero every so often. It was possible they were just ignoring Villain. Sooner or later, they would come to find talking over the pain is a great distraction from it.

"Because I.. I don't know what to do when things get deeper," they sobbed softly as the machine dig against their chest. "With our careers, they have a set ending. I didn't expect that out of all the people I could love, it had to be you."

There was a brief pause in Villains work, allowing Hero a moment to breath. They gave Hero a gentle smile and wished they could caress that exhausted face of theirs. it wasn't like they didn't know it, but hearing out loud was always a much more jarring experience.

"And?"

"And.. taking the necklace, if it comes down to it and all I have is that to remind me I..." Heros voice hitched, either from what they could've said or the harsh buzz of the machine against their sternum. "I killed you, it wouldn't feel right."

Villain hummed with the tattoo gun, bringing the end up in light flicks for shading. Heros skin took the ink well, and despite the scars, they had a good feeling it would look even better when they were done.

"You don't think it would've been if I was giving it to you?" They retorted as they traced a finger along the inky, bloody skin. "I have been okay with you killing me in more than one occasion, yet you haven't. When will you ever?

"This will look so pretty on you, Hero. I know it hurts, but I'll make you feel so much better afterwards." Villain cooed through Heros soft sobs as the heavier shading ached more against their ribs. "This way, no matter when the time comes, you'll carry me always."

"P-please," Hero pulled against the cuffs, to which Villain had to pause with a quizzical face. "I-its.. its too big of a tattoo.."

Villain smiled, tilted their head and chuckled.

"Now, I've never heard you complain about something being 'too big'."

~~~

The hours went by agonizingly slow, and not in the metaphorical sense. By the time Villain was done with Hero, they were tatted up and teased throughout the grueling process. There was some reward for having learned their lesson.

Even if Heros legs were cuffed open, they were eager to have some relief after the ordeal upon asking, and the whines and cries in Villains office were a much different type than during the tattoo. When it was all over, Villain carefully undid the restraints, and dampened a paper towel with cold cleaning mix.

"You did perfect and you're going to love it," Villain hummed softly, pressing a kiss to Heros head before wiping the ink down carefully.

The cooling sensation overtook hero, the tension leaving their body almost immediately as a gentle hand carefully cleaned up the piece. Villain brought over a bottle of water, which Hero chugged down hurriedly, much to Villains amusement.

"Keep.. Keep doing that.." Hero breathed out, and Villain complied. With a smile, Villain ran the cool rag over the extensive piece with slow, attentive motions.

"Come on, lets get it wrapped up and something in your body before you pass out again," Villain urged, guiding Hero up from their stiff position and brought them to face the mirror.

Sprawling from one side of Heros collar to the other were great coils of a dragon that funneled down their chest and sternum, the head opening up below the pectorals. Each scale was detailed to the finest hatch mark, the tufts of fur were wispy, and the expression on the dragon looked.. powerful. it was a gorgeous tattoo, and Villain could see their amazement.

"Villain, this is... my god," they breathed. It may be a little tough to hide in the employee locker room, but they could lie.. hopefully.

"And," Villain walked up, and traced over a set of scales along the collar, and soon another set, until Hero realized the pattern spelled out Villains name. Once they saw it, they couldn't unsee it. They could almost faint now.

"I don't know what is going to happen to us, but I'll be more damned than I already am if you forget about me."

Hero looked from the tattoo to Villain, before sighing. They leaned in, and pressed a gentle kiss to their lips. "How could I ever forget about you?"

There was a smile. Maybe Hero wasn't out of the doghouse yet, but Villain did help wrap their new tattoo, and reheated the leftovers from the dinner, and thought of ideas on what they'd do had they not chosen a life of servitude and villainy. Hero would want something mundane. Without the attention or the tabloids.

Villain wanted to be an artist, but given the path that was chosen for them, their skill went designing weapons of destruction instead of creation. In a way, they did create, but it was not the kind they wished for, and did not have the desired outcome.

They went to bed that night, muttering about plans, and giggling about the future where an end never came in the quiet comfort of VIllains room. By noon the next day, the two had gathered what was stashed away in Villains safe, and both vanished without a trace or word to either governing agency.

[vacancy-virtues]

#1- "A Life for a Life"

Cw: Kinda spicy with gun usage

The villain was no stranger to hiding from everyone's beloved hero. They always made sure they had some class about where they stowed away and it was no less than more than moderate in any circumstance. They found a cabin in a thicker part of the woods. It wasn't isolated, but too much commotion would alarm neighbors accustomed to the quiet.

It was small, but had a warm, cozy minimalist charm. French doors opened into a studio setting, the bed directly in front of the door. A darkened stone wall accented the adjacent wall with a small fireplace in the center, separating the bedroom and kitchen area. Sleek black appliances and marble countertops were spotless under the hanging lights. Off the kitchen was the bathroom, which was nothing short of extravagant as well. The bathtub was lined with fine agate pieces, and the fixtures were a bright and brilliant porcelain. Villains desk was in direct view of the bathroom and gave them a clear shot of the mirror on the wall. They could glance up, and see themselves, the glow of the laptop on their skin.

They wrote away their thoughts listlessly and at a dead-end of getting tired. Tired of the games. Tired of the tension. They didn't want to give up villainy, per say, but there was something hollow about it and the hole just grew with every dalliance. With every lead-on and cheat. The only thing Villain wanted most was Hero, but those days had been long gone when Sidekick came into the picture. Hero swore they'd just be an intern, and the other had nothing to worry about.

Things change, they supposed, and now were calloused to the destruction they caused even more so than before, hardly looking over plans before they went though and not caring what the outcome was.

The evening was quiet, save for the billowing wind outside on the rooftop. Snow had begun to fall at some point during the night, leaving the porch of the cabin a sludgy, frosty mess. Villain thought it lucky to be inside, wrapped in a blanket and enjoying their room.

And so was someone else.

"My, you sure like writing about me. You say I am the obsessed one?" Said a surprisingly familiar voice, different than that of the singer on the computer speaker.

The moment happened in an instant. Villain shot off their stool, and before they could run, Hero cornered them against the desk, their arms bracing on either side to prevent a quick escape. They were forced to look at each other, which wouldn't have been so bad if Hero didn't wear an expression of... well, Villain didn't know. They'd never seen this look before.

"What do you-"

"Seven months."

"...What?"

"It has been. Seven. Months. Since I have seen you. I thought I killed you! I-"

"You should be so lucky."

Hero reached up and grabbed Villains jaw forcefully, eyes shooting daggers to the sound of their gritting teeth.

"Don't get smart with me right now," Hero warned lowly.

Villain grinned, even under pressure on their jaw. "Or what, you're gonna 'disturb the peace?'" Villain air quoted. "Not very smart for a hero".

"You may not want to be the one saying who's smart when I was able to get in here without you noticing. It's a very nice place you've got. Even made myself tea."

And they did. The faint aroma of peach and white tea lingered on their breath, making the Villain crave the tea themselves. Depending on how things went, they may not even get the opportunity to try it. Villain had to play their cards right. They knew how to charm and dazzle, and no matter how badly Villain wanted Hero, they just had to treat them like someone else.

Villain decided to play along, "Yeah? Then I'm sure you've felt how comfortable the bed is," they said in a near purr, which caused the Hero to shove their face back forcefully in disgust, grip not loosening.

"Don't get vulgar with me, either," they spat.

"Oh, that wasn't even dirty, darling. Don't get that confused with me getting filthy either." Their hand moved from their jaw and latched onto their throat. Villain held onto their arm to brace for stability, noting the increased definition of it since they last saw each other.

"You. are not making this easier for me," Hero said lowly.

Thats right. Fluster them until their let their guard down, and then take them down in a choke hold when they weren't expecting it. Quick, quiet, and they could vanish to another end of the world before Hero woke back up. Just like they always did.

Villain never made it easy. That was their whole deal.

Villain grinned from the pressure on their neck. "When have I ever?" They inquired. "Its delightful watching you suffer so."

"Suffer?" Hero pointed, their grip tightening.

Wait.

"Suffer?" There was a change in tone - a beat of deepened seriousness.

Villain found themselves tossed to the ground and the moment they hit the hardwood, they scrambled up and raced for the door. A second too slow allowed Hero to pull on their wrist, twisting them around and slamming their body against the door. Heros hands wrestled down Villains onto either side of their head, leaving them panting and disheveled. This was it. This is the moment where Villain will quip something which-

Their train of thought derailed when they felt heated lips against theirs. Lips moved with fever and desperation, and Villains mind reveled at the fact their own lips moved back with shared intent. Their hands against Heros, but they kept them braced against the door, deepening the kiss by pulling Villains tongue with their own. They'd always wondered what they had tasted like, and it was better than they imagined.

Hero pulled away, a line of saliva connecting their lips. "Suffering is believing I killed you," they began, their head diving between Villains head and shoulder. "It's believing I took you out of the world when I so desperately need you in it." Their kisses were hot and peppered. Their voice was raspy and deep. Villain was overwhelmed, pleasantly so, but overwhelmed nonetheless.

"Don't bullshit me," Villain growled. Their hands tugged again, only to be squeezed harder. "You and Sidekick have got it good now.." Their breath hitched at a bite on their neck. ".. you got your publicity for my death.." A harder one. "So.. why are you doing this?" They breathed out softly.

"Again, you assume you're so smart, when you miss the blatantly obvious, like the tea on the counter before you checked in, or the fact I'm here on the grounds that I missed you."

The villains eyes widened slightly but they kept their resolve of feigned disdain. "You missed the fame I gave you. The plans I ruined for you. You missed showing off for your little fucking sidekick and-"

They were cut off by another kiss. Hero let Villains wrists go, and rather than turning to bolt, their hands wrapped around Heros shoulders as the kiss deepened. Hero kept them pressed against the door, and a leg maneuvered between Villains, earning a choked back groan.

"I let you live. I let you win. I showed off for you, and you kept coming back," Hero uttered near Villains ear. "Until you didn't, and it drove me mad."

Villains face was various shades of red at this point, hair in disarray from the heat of the moment. "I don't believe you," they started, their eyes narrow and mixed with cautious uncertainty. "This is a trick. A ploy, a-"

For a Hero, they were certainly rude about interrupting. Villain felt something hard, and cold against their stomach. They looked and saw Hero holding a sleek black gun with a gold barrel.

The grip faced Villain.

"Use it. You know its the one thing I always carry on me," Hero said, eyes steady on Villains. "A life for a life."

As Villain took the gun, they noted its significant weight compared to what they were used to. No wonder why Heros hands were so toned and defined. Villain looked the gun, rotating it in contemplation and observation, and then up at Hero.

"Get on your knees."

Hero nodded, maintaining eye contact while they slowly lowered themselves. Villain couldn't believe this was happening. Surely they would expect accomplice agents, or even that godforsaken Sidekick, to burst in and foil yet another plan. This was different. Hero had tells they showed when they knew backup was coming; shifting eyes, different foot posture, the way they carried their shoulders. Years of learning each other prompted this, yet now, Villain wasn't seeing any of it from Hero.

Villain kept their eyes on Hero, taking the gun more properly in their hand. They ran the muzzle alongside Heros jawline, the barrel reflecting their gaze on Villain. It pissed them off. Its not like Hero made the effort to look for them, and now they were here on their knees for them saying they missed them.

"You're pathetic," Villain muttered. "I could kill you right now and your last thought will be you on your knees for me." They angled the muzzle just below their chin and tilted Heros chin up.

"What a way to go, don't you agree?"

Villain scowled at this, and drew the muzzle up to their lips.

"Part them."

And Hero did, rather obediently at that. The moment their lips parted, Villain pushed the barrel of the handgun in their mouth, their finger dangerously caressing the trigger in a pointed way to let Hero know they weren't playing. However, the debauched sight of Hero, spit threatening to spill from the corner of their lips as they held the gun in their mouth let Villain know they weren't playing either.

Logic and feelings collided in their head as they had Hero choking on the barrel of their own gun at Villains wish. Their thumb cocked the barrel, the click of the rotating chamber echoing in the silent room. Villains finger lulled over the trigger, curling onto it only slightly. Hero didn't flinch or jerk at the sound, or even at the mere fact their life could be stripped away from them in an instant. Instead, their lolled out, pulling the barrel deeper into their mouth.

It was all too much.

Villain leaned down and took Heros hair in their hand, pulling it back. The gun left their mouth and instead was replaced with Villains. They could feel Heros tension melt away as their jaw slacked into the sloppy kiss, and this time, it didn't stop.Their tongues pushed together as Villain knelt over them, Hero remaining on their knees.

None of this made sense, but none of it seemed to have mattered to either of them. When the kiss broke apart, Villain used the the gun to gesture towards the bed. The two barely made it to the edge of the bed before Villain was on them again, bodies pressing together desperately as they shed layer upon layer of clothes.

Hero reached to grab Villains hands, but were met with resisting force. Villain pushed Hero back onto the plush comforter, pinning their arms down to either side of their head. Their hips ground down onto Heros, earning a stifled groan from the other, which was devoured in another kiss.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monster Hunt: An Evil Without An End

Lady Talmere was a monster long before she rose from her grave, having taken to the recreational murder of commoners the way that others of her social class took to falconry or painting. Killing was a hobby for her, a privilege of her aristocratic birth that she could indulge while others were forced to work for a living. She chose her victims purely for the fact that it was easy to make them disappear: her country estates were far from prying eyes, her demanding nature excused the high turnover rate in her staff. She employed those with nowhere else to go, to hardworn by life to ask questions, and when complications did occur it was so easy to wriggle out of them by charming or greasing the palms of the local magistrates .

It was a true injustice that Lady Talmere died happy and of old age, moreso that her wretched spirit was not claimed by some devil and dragged to hell, instead rising some decades later as a mohrg. While most of her old self has rotten away, Talmere still possesses her love of killing and scene of digression, prefering targets that will go unnoticed. To make matters worse Talmere is now prone to reanimating her victims with the parasitic worm that makes up part of her undead corpus, simultaneously creating a new minion while getting rid of the evidence.

Adventure Hooks:

In recent weeks rumours are beginning to spread about the "Tattergaunt", a thing that wanders the night preying on lone travellers and isolated homesteads. The authorities are skeptical and have yet to post a bounty, suspecting beasts or even slavers given the lack of remains left behind. It's only when the party stumble into some of those remains on the side of the road, reanimated, worm bloated, and dragging another corpse that the picture becomes clear.

Talmere is having her zombie minions clean up after her, stashing away the undead that are about to slip out of her control in the hopes that no one will find them. Her choice of using isolated locations for these zombie stockpiles makes for a great random dungeon encounter.

The party may find themselves tasked with investigating a haunting at Talmere manor, inadvertently begun when the spirits of the lady's victims sensed that she'd risen. Unable to communicate through any means other than terrifying vision or violent poltergeist activity, the spirits long to be put to rest, and don't care how much they have to terrify or imperil the manor's mortal occupants in order to get that message across.

Challenges & Complications:

The old groundskeepeper served Lady Talmere in the final years of her life. Though he was only a boy he assisted the previous groundskeeper in all his tasks, which meant he also helped dispose of quite a number of bodies in the first few years of his employment. Riven by guilt and fear of punishment, he'll point the party in the right direction while keeping mostly to himself. However, Interrogating the old man or secretly leafing through his journals might provide the party a vital clue.

Though they want the haunting dealt with, Lady Talmere's descendants are just as prideful as any noble family and won't stand for their ancestor's honour to be besmirched no matter how true the accusations are. The party could make powerful enemies should they go blabbing about the old woman's crimes to the commons, or worse yet the local temple.

Likewise resistant to the investigation is the demon that's been lurking in the Talmere family estate for generations. It didn't corrupt the lady or drive her to violence, merely fed off the injustice of her kills and used it's power to ensure she was a little less likely to be caught. Every body burned to ash in the estate's furnace was a sacrifice on it's altar, and it seemed only reasonable to return the favour by seeding her body with the spark of unlife as she lay on her deathbed. If the party investigate well enough to disturb the demon they will soon find Lady Talmere's corpse knocking on the door of her own home with a small army of undead at her back, ready to massacre anyone inside, including her decendants, just for the thrill of it.

As her life (and subsequent unlife) suggests, Lady Talmere has a knack for escaping punishment. Any time she is slain, her mind transfers to another of her worm-animated undead, beginning a process of transforming it into a mohrg. As such she always keeps a few of her undead in reserve, scattered about the countryside or mixed in with those stockpiled zombies that've slipped her control. Once she's "settled in" to a new body she can start making more zombies provided she finds someone to kill, meaning unless the party stikes her hard and fast (ideally getting rid of her stockpiles before fighting her) she'll always be one murderspree away from cheating death again.

As she exists as an emboyment of moral and cosmic injustice, it seems only right that a weapon of true justice would be Lady Talmere's end. If they haven't already gone searching for divine aid, Midway through their troubles the party is approached by a temple scholar dedicated to the goddess Erathis, who has received a vision compelling him to help the party and lead them to a weapon wielded by a saint of the lawbearer herself. This might be as easy as swearing an oath on the saint's tomb, or as dangerous as tracking down where the stolen relic was hidden by the goddess's enemies.

(thanks @thirdtofifth for the monster stats)

Artsource

[familyabolisher]

Before electing to name himself for the state to which he owed a significant portion of his family tree, Tennessee Williams toyed with penning his work under the pseudonym of Valentine Sevier. To do so would be to take the name of an ancestor and early settler of the Tennessee frontier who fought both in the American Revolutionary War and in the series of battles against indigenous populations that constituted the process by which the land was claimed and settled by Europeans and their descendants, and naming himself as such would have marked his corpus of work as a continuation of the process that the first Valentine Sevier started — that of negotiating the frontier with ultimate intent to conquer it.

The echo of such an impulse continues to reverberate even in the name he ultimately selected for himself. Williams was from Mississippi — whilst we can attribute his choice of pseudonym in no small part to the common-sense fact that ‘Mississippi Williams’ simply lacks the musicality that ‘Tennessee’ manages to carry, the flicker of the frontier and the desire to posit himself as agentive within a family mythology cannot be entirely disappeared; indeed, such a desire bleeds into his writing in forms that are often weird, and contradictory, and indulgently horrifying. The individual Williams is articulated through and within the land, and the process of individual identity-making (through his infamously heavy autofictional tendencies) is carried out in negotiation with the process of settlement; long after the disappearance of a traditional ‘frontier’ as the whole American continent came under the control of the agents of settler colonialism, the lingering presence of a space which is conquered, ordered, and sustained and a space which exists beyond the processes of ordering and sustention is the key ingredient in articulating anxieties of American sexuality. In name, Williams as the momentum behind such figures as Blanche and Laura and Maggie the Cat becomes not just a man but a body of land; moreso, he becomes the ideology baked into the naming of that body of land as ‘Tennessee.’ As such, Williams’ plays, so frequently preoccupied with the artificial yet brutally enforced social limits of desire against the plenitude of the human spirit, necessarily anchor themselves in the landed space through which those same paradigms of desire that sway their movement must be understood.

What does it mean to read Williams’ plays in such a manner? Certainly his major scholars have shied away from the suggestion that anything of serious political import might be read into his work; Williams was a deeply emotive writer who tended to mete out his appeals to social issues very lightly and sparingly and reserved the best of his grandiosity and conviction for statements about the condition of the individual human heart, and though he was a self-proclaimed ‘Socialist’ in name, he was no political firebrand and certainly no communist. Yet this question of land — lost land, settled land, land that was sacrificed to ‘epic fornications’ — pervades his work and haunts his very particular imaginary, and provides an easy point of reference by which those very same questions of desire and the human heart can be teased out and re-examined from a differently illuminating angle.

Ko-Fi / Patreon

hello, at long last, here is my piece on tennessee williams; questions of desire and literary production and how american writers attempt to uneasily negotiate the land they write on. thanks!

[atinylittlepain]

Chapter Five

no-outbreak!Joel Miller x f!oc

series masterlist

series playlist

warnings: 18+ heavy angst, references to past injury related to DV

a/n: so we are in for another heavy sitting. as always, my goal is always truth, nothing gratuitous, but honest. my DMs are always open, I'd love to hear what you're thinking about this one.

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And on this bed there lyeth a knight

His wound is bleeding day and night

By his bedside kneeleth a maid

And she weepeth both night and day

Corpus Christi Carol - Jeff Buckley

.........................................

Suicide watch. When he first moved out here, those were the two words he was offered about the month of January. The darkest, meanest, coldest stretch of winter. Spring isn’t even a promise yet, and any warmth, any light from the glow of the holidays has already flickered and faded out. A lonely time, a time when people start thinking about things they shouldn’t. A time to check on your neighbors when you can, when the snow lets up and parts clear enough to venture out on the roads, at least. But for now, everything is close and quiet and white, a sheer wall of wind and freeze when they trudge out in the mornings to check on the chickens and the sheep.  Always quick to shirk and shiver back inside, the promise of a near-continuous fire and coffee that stings warmth back into fingers,

Sarah came home for Christmas, another strange explaining, maneuvering and moving around the fact of the friend, right, friend, staying with Joel. A swell of pride when his daughter was gracious about it, if not a little smug, knowing smiles when Dolores wasn’t looking that Joel refused to indulge. Everyone making careful room for each other around the dining table until, by the end of the week, New Year’s flirting, it wasn’t careful anymore, just care. Definitely on purpose, Sarah saying something more like see you later rather than goodbye to Dolores. A promise and a prayer for her lonely father. Another thing he heard when he first moved out here from his daughter over the phone. Worry, I’m worried, dad, it’s lonely out there, lone and alone out there.

But he’s not alone, not lone, and certainly not lonely. Learning, the both of them. What he thought would be two steps back had been more like a stopped breath, quick to catch itself and keep humming. Because she stayed, is staying. For the winter, at least. But for now, spring is so far away, so he can allow for this to feel like a staying. Like something has changed, and it has.

When did it change, he isn’t sure. Early December, her still collecting all the tender angles of herself, that terrible thrum of bruise still healing around her throat. Middle of the night and he heard something, the creak  of floorboards jumping his heart hot and to the hilt of his chest. Bleary, both of them, he found her tucking up into the corner of the couch, something dark pulling around her eyes. He had asked her if she was alright all on one quiet exhale. She started to speak, then stopped herself, taking her bottom lip between her teeth as if to dam the words back. Maybe a breath, maybe two, and she finally told him that her room was too cold and that she would just sleep on the couch, really, no worry, really. But he knew that she wouldn’t, all those mornings in the beginning, finding her folded in on herself, awake and unblinking, on alert. Easier, maybe, for her to say that her room was too cold, to call it something else, even when they both knew what it was. 

And he knows for certain now, because now,  when night pulls a heavy pall down over the mountains, they both toe their way upstairs, a careful accounting of space when they slip into bed. His side, her side. She cries in her sleep, small, broken sounds that rouse him. She kicks in her sleep, thrashes and jerks, and he lets her. Takes every small hurt she could possibly lay upon him, and doesn’t make a sound. He hasn’t decided if it would be better to wake her when it happens. It always passes. Always, eventually, her hand finding some part of him, clutched in the thin fabric of his t-shirt, or caught around his arm. And it passes, quietly, carefully, bodies curling around each other, nothing ever said about it in the morning. By the time Sarah came to visit, a conversation about who would get the guest room didn’t even have to happen. It had already changed by then. 

But tonight it isn’t cry or combat that wakes him. It’s her, well awake and shaking his shoulder, her eyes shining in the pale slant of moonlight. He murmurs, quiet, what, what is it?  Slow to sit up and fumble with the lamp on his nightstand, finally awake enough to fully see her, kneeling in a rumpled nest of sheets on her side of the bed, her hands dropping in her lap in an anxious twist.

“I have a feeling.” It takes his mind a moment to configure those words into any meaning. A feeling, right. She’s been anxious all week, lingering in the barn with Avril and Lucy, had even called the vet of her own accord, asking if he was sure that it would be another few weeks until it was time. He was sure, but Dolores wasn’t.

“Okay.” No questioning it, he’s already unfolding himself from bed and stumbling around the room to get enough clothes on to keep him warm when they trudge out to the barn. She quietly follows suit. 

Snow has a way of turning everything silent. When it’s this cold, the flakes coming down are more like fluff, a constant blink to clear them from his eyes as their boots sink and slurry into the thick muffle of it. Dolores is undeterred by any of it, a few paces ahead of him, already slipping through the barn door before he can help her open it. 

Of course, she was right, somehow. He hears it before he sees it. The doleful bleating of a very ancient pain, an understood pain. The ewe is laying on her side, lifting her head with a despondent huff from time to time, lips curling back to loosen another moan. As if they know, the rest of the flock huddles away from the corner she has nestled down in, nervous chatterings and thumps of hooves in the dim light of the barn. 

There’s no hesitation in how she kneels down alongside the animal, palm to stomach, a smooth circle through her thickening wool. Joel knows that the ewe will do this all on her own, that, unless something goes wrong, they could have stayed in bed and waited until the morning to greet whoever is coming without the viscera of this moment. But he doesn’t say a thing, hangs back with the rest of the herd and lets her murmur quiet comforts to Lucy. 

It isn’t much longer before there is a body, slick and slight, tucked behind its mother. It is perfect, curled on its side, cream coat, and so impossibly small. It is not moving, and Joel knows that life must move, quickly, and as soon as possible. But it does not move, does not cry, does not unfold its thin legs. 

Something that Joel had failed to tell Dolores. An intentional failure. Something that the vet had told him. This was Lucy’s first time lambing, only one, they had discovered through the thick thrum of an ultrasound. A warning, a preparing, that the first is always uncertain, always a question mark. That afternoon, when he picked Dolores up from work and she asked him what the vet said, perfect hope rounding her cheeks, how could he do anything other than lie to her? And now, oh, how he regrets that. His fault, her hope, his fault. 

She shuffles over on her knees to the quiet, unbeating body, and she knows immediately. He can see the quick jolt of knowing pass through her, a tensing, a turning inward. 

“I–” That is all she manages to get out, her hand doing something that looks like reaching or grasping, suspended somewhere in the air between herself and the lamb. And Joel is going to have to lie to her again. A gruesome thing, what must be done when something like this happens. A body cannot just be a body, and it certainly cannot be treated like one. It had made him feel sick when the vet first told him what must be done to something small and unmoving to protect the rest of the flock.

“We need to call the vet, he’ll come make sure Lucy’s okay and take the body–”

“What?”  It startles him, the loudest she’s ever spoken to him, a clipped bark of a question, her head jerking around to look at him with narrowed eyes. Made even more striking by the strange scar of pain that rasps in her voice now. He has to swallow hard before he answers.

“The vet, he’ll take the–”

“No, he’s not taking anything.” She sets her jaw in a firm line when she finishes speaking, and Joel still finds himself stunned by this steeled resolve of hers, trying to stay gentle, careful with what he says.

“Dove, it’s not safe to leave it in here with the rest of the flock.”

“I’m not going to leave it in here, Joel. I’m going to bury it.” She glances back at the lamb, its mother still laying in a slump of exhaustion, nearly as unmoving as it is, save for the soft rise and fall of breath. And Dolores is already getting up before he can say anything else, shrugging out of her coat and laying it out in the hay, careful hands cupping around the fact of the lamb’s body, his protests die in his throat as he watches how gently she wraps it in the fabric, some sort of makeshift funeral shroud. She cradles the bundle in one arm, like a gift, like a child, and she spares no attention to Joel as she walks past him, plucking a shovel from the wall of the barn before shouldering her way back out into the night. All he can do to dumbly follow after her.

It’s insane, and frankly, it’s stupid. A good couple inches of snow on the ground, the frozen solid ground. Dark for miles save for the cast of light from the front porch of the house. Yet Dolores moves with a schooled purpose, like she knows just the spot, like there is a place for something like this, out behind the house. 

Well below freezing, and she’s no longer wearing a coat, but there is no hesitation to her movements, how carefully she sets the small bundle down in the snow, and how decisively she drives the shovel down through the frozen layers, the clean slice of sound when she sinks it into the dirt. There will be no arguing with something like this. She is ready, hackles raised when he says her name, fierce eyes and the hard jut of her chin, all slanted in the shadows of the dim light bleeding out from the house. But he is not looking to stop her, not looking for a fight, only to offer her his jacket. 

“I’ll go get the other shovel.” And so he does. And so they dig. And so it is a tedious, terrible task. Snot freezes to his face, tears too. His whole body moves past the shake of it, a resignation to the cold, muscles locking up close and tight. Neither of them say a thing, the hard pant of their breath getting swallowed up by the snow. 

Eventually, there is a hole in the ground that is big enough for the lamb. She does that thing again, that near-painful thing to watch, how she cradles the body close to her chest, like a mother, like she knows exactly what to do in a situation where nothing could possibly be a right answer. And a small part of him wonders if the way she moves comes from something in her past. Care that once was, and no longer is. 

By the time the earth has been turned over fresh and lifted where they buried the lamb, the sun is sending the first stream of milky light down the face of the mountain. Both of them too cold to do much more than prop the shovels against the side of the house and crawl inside, instant relief in the fast flood of heat. Dolores wordlessly shuffles into the bathroom downstairs, the shower starting to run as Joel calls the vet. He’s too tired, and too cold, to give the vet much more of an explanation than that the lamb has been taken care of, and that Lucy needs checked out. He hangs up before any questions can be asked. 

Everything smarts and stings under the heat of a shower, and when he gets out, skin pink and singing with it, he can see through the crack of his bathroom door that she has gotten back into bed, turned away from him on her side, sheets pulled up tight, one hand clutching at them to keep them up over her shoulder. And it seems like the best idea, really, to try to put a few unconscious hours between them and what just happened, so he pulls on a clean t-shirt and boxers, and joins her. He turns on his side, hands kept close to his body, the slightest bend in his knees so that they won’t brush against hers. Her eyes are open, palm tucked under her cheek, unwavering gaze that he gives back to her.

“Are you okay?” 

“I think it was a girl.” When she speaks as quietly as she does now, everything starts to rasp a little, and he has to wonder if it isn’t painful, the sound of struggle present and clear. 

“I’m sorry, Dovey.” Because it is certainly painful for him, a thick flood of tears gripped in his throat. Something nearly loosens in his chest when she lays the gentlest palm on his cheek, her thumb stroking just beneath his eye, like she can feel the salt collecting there, soothing it away. 

“I am too.” He could tell her that she has nothing to be sorry for, but he knows that isn’t what she means. Sorry for the situation, sorry for what had to be done. His sorry, something else. Sorry that protection seems to always turn into something sour. Sorry that he can’t seem to get it right for her. They curl their sorry around each other. For the first time like this, conscious closeness. He lets her lead, shifting closer only when her fingers curl in the front of his t-shirt, draping a careful arm around her waist, only letting it rest there when the quick tensing of her body smoothes out. 

How long does it take? For them to fit all the pieces of themselves together. A slow process, a small process, muscle shifting and shaping around muscle until her nose is pressed in the center of his chest, and his palms have spanned the slope of her spine. 

Sleep, he finds, comes easily like this.

…

The vet comes later in the day, a merciful break in the snow. Lucy is fine, he says,  just an unlucky first season. Dolores doesn’t speak to the man, but keeps close, arms crossed over her chest and mouth screwed to the side. 

There is just enough daylight left for them to go into town after the vet leaves, groceries and the library, and Joel using whatever will he has left to not ask  the question that has been chewing at the edges of his mind since last night. No good way to ask it, no right way, wanting to know where she learned to care like that, pretty certain that he already does. 

Until unfortunately, after dinner, on the couch, the words find their awkward way out of his mouth. A question that’s more like observation. She sighs. 

And he learns that hers is a phantom care. Something that could have been, but wasn’t. Something that she didn’t let get far enough for it to become another thing shackling her to husband. How often small things, cared-for things, become pawns, become lock and key and chain. How quickly love can get used against us. No, she did not let that happen. 

“Did he know?”

“He knew nothing.”  They sit on the couch side by side, close enough that her shoulder brushes against his with every small shift she makes. So when he asks her how she managed that, she doesn’t look at him when she answers, eyes turned down to her hands in her lap.

“I caught it early, so it was simple.” He nearly laughs, because what else could he do with the sick feeling her words swirl in his stomach? Nothing about this is simple, no matter how hard she tries to convince him that it is, tries to convince herself that it is. What gets saved, and what must be lost. 

“Dove.” Quiet and small, she makes an indignant noise in the back of her throat at the way he says it.

“Don’t, Joel. I don’t regret what I did.”

“I didn’t say that you should.”

“Well, I don’t.” Anger, that’s what this is. What it has been since last night. He hasn’t seen her angry, not before this. Like she doesn’t quite know what to do with it, fists bunched up, knuckles tightening over and over again, on the brink of tears. 

He can, he thinks that he knows he can, that she will not recoil if he does. Though he still moves slowly, plenty of space and time for her to give him no. But she doesn’t, lets him smooth out the tight furl of one of her hands with his. Fingertip to fingertip, every line in his palm pressed to hers. 

There is nothing that he could say. And there is no making this right, any of it. But he can hold it for her, right here, in his palm. 

She has managed to sustain this anger for long enough that he can see the fatigue starting to slip in around the edges of it. The pained pinch between her brow, and the way she keeps letting out little huffs that are starting to sound more like sighs. He sits with her, watches and waits for it to turn from simmer to slump. And when it does, he is ready to tuck her into his side, and she is ready to allow it. 

“I don’t like that vet.” Said with a weak breath of a laugh, he can feel the small jump of it in her ribs pressed into the side of his.

“He’s just doing his job.”

“I know, I still don’t like him.”

“Then I don’t like him either.” He thinks he can see a smile trying not to curl in the corner of her mouth. Like bird or butterfly, some rare and winged miracle in her palm settling on his thigh, soothing a circle into the fabric of his jeans. Her care, and how she shows it. 

…

It’s another week before Avril gives birth. Two perfect girls that come in the middle of the day. They meet them in the evening, just home from work, Dolores always heading to the barn first before anything else, still in her uniform. The rest of the herd steps aside, something dignified in how they part around her to let her into the barn, clear now who they really answer to these days. For every martyr there is mercy, and it comes in the sight of two small, uncertain bodies, stumbling over each other, still tinged pink around their young angles, already nursing sure and strong  from their mother. 

He knows that these lambs can be sold for slaughter. Small, unknowing bodies are worth so much, after all. But he has never had the stomach to do it, something that will soon be a problem with how the flock continues to grow year after year. Maybe he will just build a bigger barn when the time comes for it.

“Will you name them?” She’s pleased with his question, he can tell, a smile over her shoulder for him. She names the one with a blot of black on her nose Punch, and the one with ears pink as shells Judy. A peculiar harkening to those old, slapstick puppet shows, though maybe it’s fitting with the way the lambs shove and stutter into each other, still learning grace. 

Dolores maintains a distance of respect, her arms clasped around her middle, intent to watch new mother and daughters figuring each other out for the first time. Not wanting to disturb, Joel murmurs something about starting dinner, only a faint nod from her as he steps out of the barn. 

He has gotten better in the kitchen these days, Dolores showing him how, to the point that dinner is almost ready by the time she comes inside. Her cheeks are flushed down by frost and something else, something that’s rounding them up until her eyes crinkle. Warmth floods in his chest at the sight. 

“I could watch them all night, but I don’t think Avril would appreciate that.” 

“She’s always tended toward the fiercer side, but I reckon she wouldn’t mind your company.” Because he certainly wouldn’t, not ever. Never minding, not with her. 

When they sit down to dinner, it’s intentional, the way he keeps his chair tucked in a little closer so that his knees brush against hers under the table. If she notices, if it bothers her, she doesn’t show it, cheek propped in palm, all the ways this is different now. Puts her elbows on the table now. Takes a bite before he does now. Small, contented sounds in the back of her throat now, a swell of pride that he did okay for her. 

… 

“I need to buy a new coat.” 

“Alright, then you and I are gonna have that talk.” That talk, the one he promised to Patty two months ago. He’s done a good job of avoiding her, blame it on the weather, blame it on the holidays, on business that no one in this town can really lay claim to. But he had to come in, because he needs a new coat, happy to give his old one to Dolores, who seemed glad enough to be wearing it that he wouldn’t imagine ever asking for it back. Or maybe he’s the one glad enough that she’s wearing it. Either way, there was no more avoiding Patty, a new coat too needed. 

Easy enough to find something that fits, something warm enough, it’s the rest that he’s worried about. Maybe not worried, but resigned. Because with Patty, there is never anything except for the truth. 

It all comes out slowly, a bit awkward. After all, Joel has been telling many lies lately. But he tells it all to her, sitting in the backroom of the shop, surrounded by the sweet, soft smell of old clothes. And when he finishes speaking, Patty sits back, silent for a moment, nodding, the lines around her mouth deepening in a tight purse.

“And that’s all of it?” 

“Yes.” 

“And he’s not coming back?”

“No.”

“Who else knows?”

“No one, just you.” 

“Jesus, Joel.” Like a scolded child, the fact of the mess he has made finally faced by someone else. And it is a mess, he knows that. That doesn’t make him want it any less. 

“Does she plan on staying?” A question he wasn’t prepared for, because he has been battering it away to the edges of his mind, not letting it seep in. A good question, one he cannot answer. Patty sighs when he says nothing in reply. 

“Is she okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am.” Yes, he can answer that with perfect confidence. Even with everything that isn’t right, that hasn’t been right, he knows that Dolores is okay. That, at the very least, something he can be sure of, make sure of.

“Well, okay then.” It is left at that. Because, somehow, Patty understands. And he’s pretty sure that a handy majority of the people in town would understand too, not that he is eager to test that theory. It takes something happening to move to a town like this. It takes something happening to choose a town like this. It takes something happening to get out, and not look back. 

…

Something has changed again. Still the shared, quiet ascent upstairs at night. Except now, there is no his side, and there is no her side. They are still slow about it, shy about it, but eventually, every night, their bodies relearn the boundaries of one another, seeking out the softest parts, the places that will give to a gentle palm or a tired cheek. Sometimes, she still cries, the small shake of it beneath his hands, over his ribs. But there’s no more thrashing, no more dormant violence. Maybe she just needed something to hold onto. 

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[trappedinafantasy37]

I guess I'll start my Daedra questions with one I've been curious since the beginning (since I think about this stuff way too much). What build was Daedra originally? Like class level division, notable feats or fun things you did/memorable moments that never made it into the story? Did it change for the story?

Also, which Tav voice? I have big feelings about all of them :3

Lots of good questions @alicelufenia! This will be a bit of a long one.

I'll do the easiest question first, Voice 4.

Before I get into it, since many people don't know what Daedra looks like, here's some Daedra spam:

Daedra's build

Her split was 5/3/4 Gloomstalker Ranger / Assassin Rogue / War Cleric of Lolth. I picked this build because Gortash describes Durge as an assassin so I wanted to go a full stealth build which is where the Gloomstalker Assassin came in. I also knew from the beginning that I was going to have her be a cleric of Lolth, but it was more for roleplay rather than any mechanic. I picked war domain because war actually is one of Lolth's domains (with the other one being Trickery. And we know from Shadowheart just how absolutely atrocious Trickery domain is). I started Daedra as a Ranger and then took the cleric dip at level 2. Afterwards, I focused getting ranger and rogue to their desired levels before finishing off with cleric in Act 3.

Like I said, I picked cleric more for the roleplay aspect rather than the mechanics. So, I did not anticipate how much synergy there would be with war domain. With War Domain you get a war priest charge in which you get an extra attack for the turn. So, you can start the game off being able to do two attacks. And then once you get 3 Ranger, you get Dread Ambusher which gives you an extra attack at the beginning of the turn. So for the very first turn, you can attack three times. Once you get to 5 ranger, you get the Extra Attack like with the other martial classes. So on the very first turn, you can attack four times.

Daedra also had all the brain worms (there actually are enough worms in the game in which you can max out two characters). For feats, she had Sharpshooter and Ability improvement for Dex (with Auntie Ethel's boon she has max Dex at 20).

Gear: Frayed Drow Hood, Deathstalker Mantle, Spidersilk Armor, Craterflesh Gloves (I forgot to give her in the story), Disintegrating Night Walkers

Jewelry: Amulet of Bhaal (gave to Minthara in the story), Shifting Corpus Ring (gave to Shadowheart in the story), Eversight Ring (gave to Minthara in the story)

Weapons: Justiciar's Scimitar, Knife of the Undermountain King (gave to Minthara in the story), and the Deadshot

Lemme tell ya, this build is nasty. It got to the point where it felt like Daedra was soloing the game. There were some times where Daedra would kill everyone in the first turn (so Minthara and Shadowheart never even got a hit off) and this was in Tactician! If Daedra didn't end the fight, then Shadowheart and Minthara would. The only time things were really tricky was during the major boss fights. But, even on the major bosses, if I had Daedra focus on the boss alone, she could get them very low on HP in the first turn. Daedra absolutely humiliated Orin.

Story Cuts

Now, onto the things that never made it into the story. First, Wyll and Karlach. Yes, I did initially have it so that Wyll and Karlach were in the story. But, I realized when I actually starting writing that Wyll and Karlach would not let the grove raid stand, so they died in the grove raid which was really hard for me to do. I also thought it was just beautifully tragic that Minthara was the one to kill Karlach in just the worst and most painful way possible.

Second change, I had initially planned a chapter were the elves met Ethel and Araj in Act 3. The reason why I wanted to do it was to kind of show how Daedra is starting to indulge on her urges as she would have chosen to kill Lora (the mom) completely on her own without discussing it with Shadowheart and Minthara. I also wanted to have Minthara interact with Araj as House Baenre was the one responsible for the destruction of House Oblodra and I wanted to have this interaction in which Araj would ask Minthara if she was here to finish the job her house didn't. But, when it came time to actually write the chapter, I really didn't want to do it, so I didn't.

Third change, I had two chapters planned in which the elves would destroy the Foundry and then go kill Gortash. Later that night, Daedra and Minthara would sneak back into Wyrm's Rock so Minthara can sit on a dead man's throne and then fuck Daedra on it. But when I was thinking about it, I couldn't find any logical reason to do so other than "just because". Minthara had made an alliance with Gortash and wanted to keep it until it proved inconvenient. But, it never proved inconvenient so there was no reason for Minthara to turn on Gortash and destroy the Foundry.

Fourth change was Mizora. I actually did have three chapters in which Mizora would just randomly show up just to be a pain in the ass. Because Mizora is a little upset that she lost her "favorite little pet" and she knows Minthara is the reason why. So, Mizora shows up and basically tells Minthara, "if I can't play with my pet anymore, I will play with yours" and Mizora just starts tormenting Daedra. There was a moment where Mizora stole Daedra's old bow and snapped it in half (which was the reason why Daedra bought the Dead Shot in Chapter 38), another moment where Mizora actually threw Daedra off the bridge between Wyrm's Rock and the Lower City, and another moment in which Mizora not only revealed the locations of the elves and broke their stealth in the fight with Dolor in Chapter 39 but she was also the one who snitched to the Fist Guards and prompted the chase. I cut Mizora from the story because I really could not find a reason as to why she would be there without Wyll other than "just because".

Another thing that didn't make it into the story was Withers! But, this was not actually intentional. I just forgot to write him in there and when I realized he was missing I didn't feel like going back and writing him. You see, I already knew from the get-go that Bhaal was gonna murk Daedra (that was a very hard in stone decision I made very early on as I was always going to have it so that Minthara killed Orin). So the question of resurrection became very tricky for me to answer, and I almost didn't resurrect Daedra. And then I remembered, Lolth is right there. The next tricky question was determining whether or not Lolth is actually willing to resurrect someone, at least with their soul intact and not as puppets. But, from the lore I've read, Lolth would resurrect a drow if she had really good reason to.

I also had a One Shot planned called "Dread Ambusher" that was meant to take place during the events of Chapter 38: Old Acquaintances. At the end of that chapter, Daedra sneaks back into the mansion in the middle of the night and Minthara questions if Daedra killed someone. "Dread Ambusher" was meant to go over those events. In this one shot, Daedra actually does sneak out of the mansion with the intent to kill someone and she runs into Orin. And the two of them hunt together, and they both enjoy their time together. Daedra even begins to feel somewhat of a sibling bond with Orin and how nice it is to have someone around that doesn't look down on her for her urges or treat her like a child. And Daedra ends up killing someone that Minthara told her not to (the victim was a patriar and someone who most certainly would be noticed if they went missing) and Orin almost convinces Daedra to kill children. But, Daedra reigns back some self control and spares the kids, but she injures herself as a means of control. This is why she is limping when she returns to the mansion and its because she has a massive stab wound in her leg. The reason this was cut was because I had ended up finishing the entire fic before I got around to writing the one shot. So, when the publications in AO3 caught up to Chapter 38, I had lost the steam to write this one shot and could not find the willpower to do so. But, I do want to be clear, just because I did not write it does not mean it doesn't happen. The events that I had planned for this one shot all actually do happen that night and are canon to the story.

There were also a few more one shots that I had wanted to do but also ran out of steam. There was gonna be a one shot that took place immediately after Chapter 44: Parting Wisdom in which Jaheira would get all the elves high, because they needed that good self medication to help them get through their damn problems and stop all this "woe is me" nonsense. I thought it would have been really funny to write Minthara completely zooted out of her mind. Another one shot meant to take place after Chapter 44 that I called the "One Eyed Paladin" in which Minthara is training and learning how to fight again now that she only has one eye and her depth perception was off. During the training, Minthara gets extremely frustrated with herself and starts beating herself up in which Daedra actually calms her down and helps her.

This post probably had more detail than you were probably expecting, but I did want to talk about all the things that I almost did, but didn't do. Really good questions! Keep 'em coming folks!

[sweettoothvn]

how would the LI react to a cannibalistic MC?

Cannibalism and similar behaviors are quite normal in the Intrepid... but for some of the LI's they grew up solely on the surface so that concept is disturbing and taboo for them.

Andre would probably try to get you to stop... even though he doesn't know how that's technically hypocritical of him

Casey is cringing for a moment while straining a smile. He can't say shit cause he still hangs out with Kieran, Noble, and Zach.

Chrys probably asks you to what extent and then makes her judgment there. She probably sticks around but says to not eat in front of her.

David is never talking to you again. (Is this a win?)

Eddie literally does not give a shit considering what his family is, who his childhood best friends are, and who the people he associates himself with are.

Kieran is half Franix. That being said he has Corpus abilities which requires his own blood for such powers. In order to regenerate the blood supply he has to drink from an outside source or slowly wait for his body to remake it. The latter is dangerous. He doesn't typically use his abilities so he doesn't drink blood that much. That being said, he still wouldn't care but would probably critique your tastes.

Noble is a Gilvan. These days Gilvans are pretty carnivorous, of course, they can still eat regular foods but meat and flesh are preferable if they want to be stronger. Noble doesn't really indulge that 'side' of him but he's more than willing to indulge yours!

Zach, unlike his brother, uses his Corpus powers pretty often due to his Internship. So it's not uncommon for him to be consuming blood. He shrugs at your tendencies.

[alteredsilicone]

My Feelings for You

June 27, 1999.

The pastry from the baker was a little bit stale, but the strawberry filling was just the right amount of sweet, if a little sticky. Virgo ate it absentmindedly. Albrecht had suggested they buy the sweet pastry. She expected him to be a meat pie kind of guy, but here they sat, eating a sweet snack. A little bit of respite after Midsummer madness. Perhaps, sometimes, even Albrecht Entrati allowed himself to indulge in simple joys.

A curious thought wandered into Virgo's mind.

"What kind of pastry does Loid like?"

Silence. Albrecht chewed his pastry and looked inside it, as if the answer lied somewhere in the strawberry jam.

"We would usually eat the same thing. I ate what he liked."

"Or did he pick out something that you liked and made himself like it too?"

Silence. Albrecht stopped eating, a third of a pastry still in his hand. Virgo finished hers hastily, suddenly she felt like they would be moving on any second.

Silence hung over them. Albrecht did not move.

"You don't know." Virgo spoke up. It was as simple as that.

No answer.

Cold. Virgo felt a cold knot in her stomach, then she felt bile rising up to her throat. She was angry, disgusted even. What a sorry excuse for a man. Selfish. Doesn't even know the simplest things. Does he even care? Did he ever care?

Loid. Loid, however. He was good and soft and kind.

Virgo tensed up. Those aren't her thoughts. She jumped up from the bench and walked a few good meters away from Albrecht, until the bile in her throat seeped back into her stomach. She swung her arms, stretched her legs, as if she had suddenly remembered there was a marathon due in a few days and she needed to prepare.

Albrecht stood up from the bench as well. The remains of the pastry were thrown in a waste bin by the bench.

"Tenno. We should go."

---

Virgo watched as Loid tapped at the terminal, he was logging her most recent trip to 1999. It was another doomed timeline, but this time they managed to arrive almost on time.

Loid worked tirelessly and diligently, no matter what tidings Virgo brought back. She knew how hard it was for him to watch the same failed attempts over and over again. She did not dare bring up the ritual after the first failure. When there was no other way, she felt the sorrow in his soul as they talked of Albrecht and the Indifference. It tore at Virgo.

Loid was good and soft and kind.

She felt safe in his presence, calm. It was strange. Virgo did like Loid, despite the rocky beginning of their acquaintance. She found a way to endear herself to him, find common ground. He seemed to find some respite in having someone who also remembered the long lost past of the Orokin Empire. Virgo did her best to entertain him, to take off his mind from the Kalymos Sequence, if only for a moment.

This sense of safety, however, was a new sensation.

My strength, my support, my sanctuary.

Those aren't her thoughts.

Talking to Albrecht was infuriating and difficult, getting anything out of him was like pulling a rotten tooth out of a lion's maw, armed with nothing but a pair of pliers. If Albrecht had been a Corpus aristocrat, Virgo would have thrown in the towel long ago - this much effort for this little payback would not have been worth the diplomatic headache. She had dealt with all sorts of problem clients, but Albrecht was like every flavor of nightmare rolled into one human being. Yet now, she had somehow gotten something out of him. Something priceless, that she would have never in her wildest dreams hoped of getting.

His love. The softness she felt, standing at Loid's side as he was fussing over mission logs, that was an echo of Albrecht she had stolen, unknowingly.

She felt a little embarrassed, perverse even. It's as if she snuck up on their bedroom door and peeked through the keyhole, into the scenes of their most intimate moments. Love. Love was something that made Virgo dizzy and mad, it was unlike any feeling she picked up from other people.

If only she could show that love to Loid, to expose his mind to Albrecht's. Connect them.

Virgo walked away and sat down. No. That was not for her to decide. She was feeling greedy and selfish, perhaps that too, she stole from Albrecht. She needed to cleanse her mind and clear her head.

"Loid?"

"Yes, Virgo?"

"What kind of pastry do you like?"

[sorenblr]

thoughts on Akihiko Yoshida? hes done several greatest game of all time contenders but I still don't know how 2 feel about him tbh

I would rank him highly, although I do think his best work belongs to a bygone era. I've always had a lot of affection for Yoshida as the Square-affiliated artist most likely to describe form with profuse hatching. The original Tactics Ogre cover is one of my favorite pieces of game art:

I think he produced his most compelling work around this period, in collaboration with Hiroshi Minagawa, and more generally prior to the onset of HD development. I don't know how deeply involved he was with the process (Minagawa is credited as supervisor in both cases), but between Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII, his designs have been treated to the most compelling applications of texture mapping in the medium.

I also love the lush storybook style he adopted for Four Heroes of Light, and I wish that quality had carried more cleanly into Bravely Default.

His contributions to FFXIV are obviously accomplished but they don't really stand out in my mind due to their proximity to so many other artists on that project working in a style that roughly approximates his own. I think that's something that has muddled my impression of his work over the past decade, the glut of designers seemingly trained in his style, or the new prominence of those who simply came up in the industry working in a comparable idiom, usually in the Ivalice games. The deliberately abstracted faces contrasted with baroque or luxuriously rendered dress, the almost exclusive use of earth tones etc. It's evident everywhere from certain of Kazuya Takahashi's key art in FFXVI to Naoki Ikushima's entire corpus of Yoshida-lite emulations, even Hideo Minaba's work on Granblue Fantasy.

At one point this was a perfect triangular complement to the sectors defined by Amano and Nomura, but as we recede further and further from any remaining stylistic imprint of the former and all the appealing extravagance is bled from the latter, a sort of repetitious sameness sets in. It's no fault of Yoshida's, and I think his own work still consistently outshines his "imitators", but it probably accounts for my cooler feelings of late.

As an aside, the guy has definitely indulged his predilections to a greater degree as time goes on. He's settled on an anatomical template for his female characters that I find vaguely disquieting, as evinced in this Tomb Raider illustration. That one has especially chitinous proportions, but most of it is basically just, like... hippy zettai ryoiki shit. A fetish so mild that it's one step removed from being really 'into' big titties. Guys with active accounts across multiple booru image boards will be cranking their shit to 2B for long and silent aeons, when even the memory of man is only a shadow over the wine-dark sea.

I would still like another game where he's allowed a fuller reign over design responsibilities. Like Nomura, he's reached a position of seniority that precludes him from designing anything beyond a few core characters and some key art, leaving the heft of the work to younger artists or middle-talents like Roberto Ferrari. Hopefully he'll be on tap for something other than Nier Automota phone games or FFXIV package illustrations or whatever the fuck Little Noah: Scion of Paradise is supposed to be. Damn, videogames are rough! This shit is not cooking!

[daughterofhecata]

not to be self-indulgent, aber als prompt fiele mir spontan eine szene ein, in der goodween von skinny einen knutschfleck verpasst bekommt, der den kollegen auffällt 🤔 finde das ship immer noch sehr spannend!

Was lange währt oder so.. Der Gedanke hat mich tatsächlich auch nicht wieder losgelassen und uh. möglicherweise kommt auch definitiv noch mehr zu den beiden.

corpus delicti [hier auf ao3]

Eilig betrat Goodween das Präsidium. Er war spät dran, musste sich beeilen, wenn er sich rechtzeitig zu Dienstbeginn umgezogen haben wollte.

Doch er kam gar nicht bis in die Umkleide, denn kurz vor der Treppe hielt ihn Morales auf. Beäugte im weißen Neonlicht seinen Hals und erkundigte sich: „Sag mal, Goodween, hast du da nen Knutschfleck?!“

Fuck.

Unwillkürlich fuhr seine Hand zu der fraglichen Stelle und in derselben Sekunde wusste er, dass er sich mit der Geste verraten hatte.

„Dieses Aas!“, entfuhr es ihm, ehe er es herunterschlucken konnte.

Zugegebenermaßen, er mochte es, wenn Skinnys Mund über seinen Hals wanderte, die dünnen Lippen und die geschickte Zunge nach empfindlichen Stellen suchten, die ihn erschaudern ließen. Aber eigentlich war er der Ansicht gewesen, die hätten eine Abmachung – keine Spuren zu hinterlassen.

Ihre Kommunikation war durchaus ausbaufähig, das wusste er selbst, bestand meistens hauptsächlich aus Sätzen wie Komm, ich will deinen Arsch, Norris oder Ich hätte nichts gegen nen Blowjob, Officer, doch eins hatten sie beide klargestellt. Das nicht herauskommen sollte, dass sie etwas miteinander hatten.

Denn dann könnten sie beide einpacken – Goodween möglicherweise seiner Sexualität wegen und definitiv, weil er sich auf den stadtbekannten Kleinkriminellen eingelassen hatte, und Skinny, weil ihm sowohl seine Kumpels als auch Goodweens Kollegen ihm einen Strick draus drehen würden, dass er für einen Cop die Beine breit gemacht hatte. Allein dadurch, miteinander im Bett gelandet zu sein, hatten sie sich gegenseitig in der Hand.

Doch offenbar hatte Skinny beschlossen, ihn in Verlegenheit bringen zu wollen. Warum auch immer, wer wusste schon, was im Kopf von Skinner Norris vor sich ging.

Morales sah ihn immer noch überrascht an, vielleicht sogar noch ein wenig mehr als zuvor. Mit der Reaktion hatte er wohl nicht gerechnet.

„Das ist aber keine nette Art-“, setzte er an, wurde jedoch im nächsten Augenblick unterbrochen.

„Gibt es einen bestimmten Grund, warum ihr mitten in der Tür steht?“, erkundigte sich eine Stimme hinter Goodween.

Der nächste Fluch lag ihm auf der Zunge. Er wollte nicht, dass sein Geheimnis irgendeinem Kollegen gegenüber aufflog. Aber es gab genau einen Kollegen, bei dem er unter wirklich allen Umständen vermeiden wollte, das ausgerechnet er davon Wind bekam.

Ein Grinsen ließ sich auf Morales’ Gesicht nieder, das ihn das Schlimmste ahnen ließ.

„Goodween wollte mir gerade erzählen, welchem – und ich zitiere – Aas er seinen Knutschfleck verdankt“, berichtete er viel zu fröhlich.

Schicksalsergeben wandte Goodween sich halb um, begegnete widerwillig Cottas Blick. Sah der Inspektor missbilligend aus oder bildete er sich das ein? War es nur Cottas übliche phasenweise schlechte Laune, die für die gerunzelte Stirn verantwortlich war?

„Eigentlich“, korrigierte Goodween mit leichtem Vorwurf, „wollte ich mich umziehen gehen, damit ich rechtzeitig zu Schichtbeginn einsatzbereit bin.“

Außerdem würde der verdammte Knutschfleck unter dem Kragen seines Uniformhemds verschwinden, wenn er endlich dazu kam, es tatsächlich anzuziehen. Wenn er nach dem Duschen in den Spiegel geschaut hätte, hätte er ein Poloshirt anziehen und damit den peinlichen Fragen direkt vorbeugen können, aber er hatte ja nicht mit so etwas gerechnet.

Cotta sah ihn immer noch mit diesem nachdenklichen Blick an unter dem Goodween sich winden wollte. Nur mühsam konnte er sich daran hindern, an seinem Ausschnitt herum zu zupfen.

„Dann solltest du wohl wirklich runter gehen“, stimmte Cotta schließlich zu, nach einer Pause, die Goodween unendlich lang vorkam, aber vermutlich nur eine Sekunde dauerte. „Außerdem wäre es schön, wenn ihr mich dann mal durch lassen würdet.“

Dankbar für die Vorlage flüchtete Goodween in die Umkleide. Wenn er Glück hatte, hatte Morales das Interesse verloren, bis ihr Dienst begann.

[olympic-paris]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more …

August 26

1904 – Christopher Isherwood (born Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood) (d.1986) was an Anglo-American novelist. The son of landed gentry, he was born in the ancestral seat of his family, Wybersley Hall, High Lane, near Stockport in the north-west of England. His army officer father was killed in the First World War.

At school he met W. H. Auden, who became his lifelong friend. He later studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where In 1925 he was reintroduced to Auden and became his literary mentor and partner in an intermittent, casual liaison. Auden sent his poems to Isherwood for comment and approval. Through Auden, Isherwood met Stephen Spender, with whom he later spent much time in Germany..

Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to men, he moved to Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its deserved reputation for sexual freedom. There, he "fully indulged his taste for pretty youths. He went to Berlin in search of boys and found one ... who became his first great love."

In 1931 he met Jean Ross, the inspiration for his fictional character, Sally Bowles. He also met Gerald Hamilton, the inspiration for the fictional Mr Norris. In September 1931 the poet William Plomer introduced him to E. M. Forster. They became close and Forster served as his mentor. He worked as a private tutor in Berlin and elsewhere while writing the novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and a short novel called Goodbye to Berlin (1939) (often published together in a collection called The Berlin Stories). These works provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera (1951), the 1955 film I Am a Camera (both starring Julie Harris), the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966) and the film (1972) of the same name.

Liza Minnelli & Joel Grey - 'Cabaret'

In 1932 he met and fell in love with a young German man named Heinz Neddermeyer. After leaving Berlin in 1933, he and Heinz moved around Europe, and lived in Copenhagen, Sintra and elsewhere. Heinz was arrested as a draft-evader in 1937 following his brief return to Germany after he was ejected from Luxembourg as an "undesirable alien". Convicted of "reciprocal onanism", he was sentenced to six months in prison, a year of state labour and two years of compulsory military service.

Auden and Isherwood travelled to China in 1938 and then emigrated to the United States in 1939. (The convenient timing of this move, coming just as Britain was about to be engulfed in the Second World War, placed them under a cloud and their reputations suffered for a time.)

Isherwood settled in California, where he embraced Hinduism. Together with Swami Prabhavananda he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and his Followers, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1939, he first met Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trabuco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society. Through Heard, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood, John Yale and J. Krishnamurti. Through Huxley, Isherwood befriended the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

Isherwood became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1946. He began living with the photographer William "Bill" Caskey. In 1947 the two travelled to South America. Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey took the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey, The Condor and the Cows.

On Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met teenaged Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at Santa Monica. Reports of Bachardy's age at the time vary, but Bachardy later said "at the time I was, probably, 16." In fact, Bachardy was 18. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life.

During the early months of their affair, Isherwood finished—and Bachardy typed—the novel on which he had worked for some years, The World in the Evening (1954). Isherwood also taught a course on modern English literature at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) for several years during the 1950s and early 1960

Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy

The 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy, in his own words, "regarded as a sort of child prostitute", but the two became a well-known and well-established couple in Southern Californian society with many Hollywood friends.

Isherwood and Bachardy lived together in Santa Monica for the rest of Isherwood's life. Bachardy became a successful draughtsman with an independent reputation, and his portraits of the dying Isherwood became well known after Isherwood's death.

Isherwood died at age 81 in 1986 in Santa Monica, California from prostate cancer. The house in the Schöneberg district of Berlin where Isherwood lived bears a memorial plaque to mark his stay there between 1929 and 1933. The 2008 film Chris & Don: A Love Story chronicled Isherwood and Bachardy's lifelong relationship.

1923 – Mel Roberts (d.2007) was best known for his male nudes photographed in the 1960's and 1970's. Roberts' photographs captured much more than physiques - his images helped define the social and cultural landscape of a generation. His works have been celebrated in several fine-art books, gallery and museum exhibitions and are collected all over the world.

Roberts was a visionary person as much as a photographer. He lived proudly as an openly gay man his whole life. He participated in numerous civil rights struggles. He identified most strongly with the life and love affirming spirit that became a cultural revolution in the 1960s.

Mel Roberts was born Mel Kells in Toledo, Ohio, on August 26, 1923. He served in the United States Air Force during WWII (Pacific Theatre).

Roberts was among the founding members of the Mattachine society, the first gay rights organization.

Mel Roberts enjoyed a life-long interest in photography and film. He graduated with a Masters Degree in cinema from the University of Southern California in 1950 and began a career as a cameraman and editor in Hollywood. He later helped found the first film cameramen's union. His work in Hollywood culminated with his work as a music editor on Herbert Bibermans landmark blacklisted film, "Salt of the Earth" (1953).

From 1960 until 1980 Roberts enjoyed a very successful career as a photographer of male nudes. Like other photographers from his era, Roberts often used friends and former lovers as his models. He was among the most notable pioneers of the medium and often processed his own film and made his own prints. While his work was always very popular, it wasn't until 2000 that his work began to enjoy serious critical appreciation.Roberts was diagnosed with ALS (Aalso known as Lou Gehrig's disease) and after increasing health problems succumbed to pneumonia in 2007. His long -time partner and friend was Peter Gonzalez.

1929 – Chuck Renslow (d.2017) was an openly gay American businessperson, known for pioneering homoerotic photography in the mid-20th-century US, and establishing many landmarks of late-20th-century gay male culture, especially in the Chicago area. His accomplishments included the founding of the Gold Coast bar, Man's Country Baths, the International Mr. Leather competition, Chicago's August White Party, and the magazines Triumph, Rawhide, and Mars. He was the partner and lover of erotica artist Dom Orejudos (better known by his pen names Etienne and Stephen).

In 1952, Renslow the photographer met Dom Orejudos on Chicago's Oak Street Beach, asking him to model for him. They founded Kris Studios as a male physique photography studio, named in part to honor transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen. In 1958, they bought a gym which they renamed Triumph Gymnasium and Health Studio. That same year he and Orejudos bought Gold Coast Show Lounge, and transformed it into one of the world's first leather bars, with a uniform/western/leather dress code, a backroom, and homoerotic art (by Orejudos) on the walls. The venue was the site of the leather contests which grew into the International Mr. Leather competition. In 1965, he helped found the Second City Motorcycle Club.

In June 2019, Renslow was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history, and the wall’s unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

1952 – Tony-Award-winning American character actor Michael Jeter was born on this date (d.2003). He was born in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee and studied acting at Memphis State University. He performed in several plays and musicals in Memphis and then moved to Baltimore and New York City to further pursue a stage career.

Jeter's woebegone look, extreme flexibility and high energy led Tommy Tune to cast him in the Off-Broadway Cloud 9 and, on Broadway, in a memorable role in the musical Grand Hotel, for which he won a Tony Award in 1990. Much of his film and television work specialized in playing eccentric, pretentious or wimpy characters, as in The Fisher King, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Drop Zone. Occasionally, Jeter was able to stay away from these kinds of roles for more appealing characters as in Jurassic Park III, Air Bud, The Green Mile and Open Range.

Michael Jeter in "The Green Mile"

He won an Emmy award in 1992 for his role in the television sitcom Evening Shade. He was also a favorite with younger audiences in his role as "Mr. Noodle's brother Mr. Noodle" on Sesame Street from 2000 to 2003.

The movies The Polar Express and Open Range are dedicated to his memory. Jeter was open about being Gay and his troubles with drug and alcohol addiction, and for a short time retired from entertainment. He returned to voice Smokey and Steamer in The Polar Express for which he received praise. It was his final film role and the movie was dedicated to him with a statement at the very end of the credits reading, "Dedicated to the memory of Michael Jeter" with his photo next to it. He was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1997, but died from an epileptic seizure.

1988 – Kenny Brain is a Canadian television personality, currently cohost with Kortney Wilson of the HGTV Canada home renovation series Making it Home with Kortney and Kenny.

Originally from Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland and Labrador, Brain worked as a model before competing in the second season of Big Brother Canada in 2014. Although openly gay in real life and honest about his sexuality in viewer confessionals, he initially pursued a strategy of remaining closeted among his housemates; although he did come out to housemate Sarah Miller a few weeks into the season, his strategy sparked some viewer and media debate about whether his choice was sending a message to viewers that being gay could be seen as a shameful secret. He and Miller were both voted out of the Big Brother house on Day 43.

After appearing on Big Brother Canada, Brain quit modelling and trained as a construction contractor, later launching his own contracting business in Vancouver, British Columbia. Following Wilson's divorce from her former husband and business partner Dave Wilson, Brain debuted as the new cohost of Making it Home in the show's second season in 2021. He has stated that one of his goals as an HGTV host is to provide a positive role model for LGBTQ representation and inclusion in construction trades.

[thecorpuscorpse]

#6- An Anonymous Source

CW: Knife use and blood, some 'fighting', mild kidnapping

It had been two months since the sealed letters began showing up on Villains bedroom window at night when they weren't there. Each one with a different wax embellishment on the front, made of paper worn with time, and never signed. The swirling perfection of the calligraphy was unlike anything Villain had seen before, just like the words they formed. Five letters were stacked on the desk, and the sixth Villain held by the lamplight, eyes scanning over words they always wished to hear. In brief moments, they almost believed them.

The life they lived was not as tender as the words directed at them. There was no beauty in bloodshed- not anymore, at least. Yet, whoever seemed to be hiding in their blind spot thought otherwise. With how long they ran Headquarters, it was refreshing to have a little spice in the routine of wondering who thought so highly of someone as lowly as them.

After sending their squads out for recon, Villain remained tucked away in their office at headquarters to keep an eye on cameras when one detected movement in the server room. Villain knew each employee schedule inside and out- after all, they arranged each one. Within the orchestrated machine-like facility Villain spent so many years building up, the blaring alarm was akin to grinding gears.

Hero.

Every so often, Hero would figure out a new password Villain set, or intercept shipment plans that then would lead Villain to foil Heros plans, and the process would repeat in a few weeks. It was so hard to find good help nowadays, so Villain found handling Hero a nice break from handling paperwork. There was monotony in routine, but at least they could take their impatience with their anonymous admirer out on the other.

"Dammit... now of all times, Hero?" They snapped as they stood from their desk.

As much as the alarm irked them, Villain was more irritated their work was being interrupted. Scanners failed to pick up any DNA trace, leading them to another dead end. Somewhere, someone saw Villain and thought fondly of them. For a while, the simple knowledge of it was enough to qualm the loneliness, but now was more of a curse. They called the author a coward. They called the letters a trap. Yet, Villain headed down the hall to pursue a perpetrator after they stayed up until four in the morning... again... to read the letters in hope something would tell them who claimed to adore them so.

The door to the server room was ajar, main lights turned out. The dull glow of blinking red, blue and yellow lights cast shadows on the wall in varied patterns. The main lights were shorted, forcing them to identify misplaced figures in the dim light. It only dug further into Villains impatience with the matter. Against the low hum of the computers, a tinny clank echoed near the back wall.

Villain kept steady strides slow, mindful of the linoleum under their shoes and how quiet their breath was. Silence, as well as any leverage, was better than none, and it worked to Villains virtue when it guided the blade to the turned back of who they knew was tampering with their tech.

"I don't have time for you tonight, Hero," Villain said as they pressed the knife against their spine. "There is plenty of work for me as is without you getting involved."

Dressed in all-black, which happened to be quite flattering for the Hero, they tuned after setting their tools down and raising their hands. Villain took a step forward and pressed the edge to their throat.

"That's why I figure I'd lighten the load~" Hero said, offering an innocent shrug. "By-"

"Yes, yes, thwarting my recruitment of more people through disrupting our log system," Villain droned, pressing the blade harder. "Now really, I do have pressing matters to attend to."

There was a static in the air, and not from the whirring machines around them. The more Villain stood in it, the more irritated they got. It showed in the quick right cross-swing of butt-end of the knife towards Heros head before the move was blocked by Heros hand.

"Wow, whats the matter with you?" Hero mused with a shit-eating grin as he twisted Villains arm into a lock behind their back. The knife clattered onto the floor. "Not very like you to 'not have time for me', Villain. Plus, what a sloppy execution."

"You don't know me, Hero," Villain hummed with a smile in their voice, flexing their hand under Heros grip. "So I'll show you a real sloppy execution."

Villain dug their heel into Heros foot, and used the momentum to twist them to slam into the server paneling. With the grip loosened, Villain snaked away and went for the knife. It was only a second more before Villain was swept off their feet- literally- and hit the ground.

"Yeah, that was pretty sloppy too," Hero said as they went to further restrain the fallen Villain. "You're making me jealous, don't tell me there's another Hero you have to go cause havoc for~ Ugh, I'll be heartbroken!"

Villain struggled against Heros grasp, writhing and twisting their body so they could never get a solid pin. While Hero had their brawn at their side, Villain knew it was only a matter of leverage.

"I do, but they aren't a Hero~"

They took the moment Hero stalled in their attempts to pin them down to get their lets out to kick Hero back, knocking the wind out of them. Villain went for the knife again and came up behind Hero to hold the knife to their throat again.

"Bullshit," Hero gasped out, though an amused smile graced their stupid face. "I can barely tolerate you as it is."

Villain contemplated for a moment. What harm would a white lie do when they didn't even know who was writing the letters? There would be no one else to go after. It would be nice to pretend- Villain did it enough as it was.

"Oh, you should hear how they talk about their love for my vile and vulgar ways Hero. How they adore the plans of misery I make for the thousands," Villain gripped Heros hair and tilted their head back to look at them proper. "And the tongue they have..."

"Then why aren't you with them now?"

"Because I'm dealing with you," Villain said as their jaw set. "A thorn in my side since we crossed paths, and always coming back like a damn infection," They brought the edge up against Heros neck. "You are pestiferous- a plague in my life every time your head pops up." Villain narrowed their eyes, bringing small beads of blood against the blade. "And I think I'm going to purge the source tonight."

"Then do it."

Below them, there was a rumble followed by a blaring alarm from what Villain assumed was a few floors down. It only took one distracted second for Hero grab Villains wrist and flip them over and onto their back before they dove behind a rack of server blocks. There was a flash, and the room filled with smoke. The colors against the smoke were disorienting, yet once Villain got hold of their knife, they could barely make out a figure escaping through one of the vents.

"One thing after a-fucking-nother..." Villain hissed as they ran out from the server room and towards the blaring fire alarm down below.

Once done dealing with the aftermath of a blown-apart storage unit, Villain trudged back up to their office and collapsed in their chair. It was now six in the morning, and looking at the camera they had set up to face their bedroom window at home- no letter to be seen on the window. They pushed their hair back with a sigh, before deciding to freshen up there, and continuing their monotonous work for their empire, with breaks reading loving words Villain needed to hear after such a long night.

---

The seventh letter was different than the rest.

It had taken longer than the rest to arrive- almost a month later than the last one, when the others came once or twice a week. Nights were seemingly endless when Villain would simply stare at the window from the camera. They knew if they were home, they wouldn't arrive, and so they worked long into the night, going home every few days to make sure their plants were watered.

Unlike the other ornate and delicately put together envelopes, the newest came in a simple black one. The handwriting was reminiscent of the others yet the words scrawled unsteadily. The droning news anchor in the background discussed the impending weather as Villain attempted to make sense of everything they were reading.

What was said was not the romantic poetry they were used to, of regrets and promises they wished to keep to Villain of seeing them, of truly being with them and being sure there would be nothing keeping them apart anymore.

The signature at the bottom made Villains heart sink. Not because of who had written the confession they read. Not because it was from someone they wouldn't have wanted at all. But because it wasn't a signature at all.

Except a smear of blood.

Villains head felt light, the corners of their vision hazing a little as they tried to make sense of what it all meant. They sat down in their chair, still staring at the letter before them. It wasn't until the news anchor interrupted their broadcast with breaking news.

'The beloved and respected savior of our beautiful city, Hero, has officially been pronounced dead today by coroners after their body had been returned to city officials by an anonymous source. Further details the cause to be released.'

"No..."

They took a long look at the radio, eyes wide in disbelief as their mind began to piece everything together. In a moment, they were at their sequencer and after they got a sample of the paper, pulled out their knife. What little blood left from their fight with Hero remained, and they flaked off the dry remains in the other bottle. Time blurred as they waited, walking crop circles into their carpet while the machine processed the samples.

They didn't see anyone on the cameras the night before. No sound, no disturbance. First nothing was on the window, and when daylight broke, there it was. They hadn't dealt with Hero recently, which they only grew to notice the more they thought.

They couldn't settle down, and any time their office door was knocked on, they would simply throw a book at it and tell whoever it was to bother them tomorrow. Word must have gone around because soon the knocking stopped and Villain was left alone with the machine, which whirred just like the servers did their last night with Hero.

They were pulled out of their mind when the machine stopped, and the face glowed green with the information Villain already put together in their walk about their office.

DNA Sequencing Completed- Results: 100% Match

---

Villain drummed their thumb against the steering wheel of the car. Occasionally, it would follow the tempo of their racing heart, or the shake in their muscles from the adrenaline in their blood. The timer they set on their phone for five minutes was halfway through. Villain regretted even permitting that much time to wait. It had been too long already, and with any more time, they could be too late.

Three minutes and no sign. Villain shifted in their seat, instead now tapping their foot and squeezing their hands together. The last they slept was indistinct, waiting for the right moment to make their next move. A drastic one, which would leave more loose ends than they would like, but it was just as a drastic situation they had on their hands.

Four minutes and Villain was getting ready to get out and handle the ordeal themselves. They checked to make sure their gun was loaded, as they did a dozen or so times before even though they hadn't used it. Before they reached the door handle, the passenger side opened to Villains relief.

"Very good. Hurry up." Villain said, gesturing with the gun to get in.

Five minutes was all Villain needed. As they sped off, the silence was cushioned by the low hum of the car. Villain didn't know what to think. What to say. What if, in the time they were gone, Hero was too? The thoughts were heavy as Villain drove, until their passenger pulled them out of their head.

"I shouldn't be doing this..."

"Then why are you." Villain said, rather than asked.

"Well, you told me with a gun to my head that you hunt me down and kill my girlfriend in front of me, then send my body parts to various family members."

"Good memory, and I will if you make any attempts to run."

"Good to know..." The accomplice said with a tight-lipped smile before looking down at the bag.

"And... I'm helping someone, aren't I?" They asked after another moment of passing silence. "Someone you care about?"

There was a thick lump that sunk into Villains throat. It irked them to know they had to get outside sources with such a high risk, but they were pushed to no other choice. They offered a single, but humble nod before turning off onto a dirt road.

"What the fuck did you say you did again?"

"I'm a first assistant," they said as they shuffled the medical bag on their lap while twisting the handles nervously. "Not quite a surgeon, but I'm getting there."

"Of course, I pick up the intern in the operating room..." Villain uttered as they watched the road. The car, being small, only allowed the young surgeon to hear the remark clearly.

"The operating rooms of the ICU," they huffed a bit too confidently for Villains liking. "Much more intense and less room for error. I mostly make sure the room is clean but I do help with sutures, and other general care."

With a less than patient sigh, Villain parked the car in the driveway and looked the young surgeon square in the face, gun held towards them with a finger threatening pressure on the trigger.

"Keep your attitude in check, and keep them alive." They said flatly. "Both the person I'm bringing you to, and your girlfriend."

It had just been the two of them since Hero showed up battered, beaten and bloodied just two weeks before. They hadn't gotten better and while Villain was good at many things, medical diagnosis weren't one of them. They took leave from work to get Hero somewhere more secluded than Villains home closer to the city.

When Hero was awake, Villain limited themselves to one question because Hero would get winded from speaking too much. Day by day, they learned how Hero wanted things to be different, not only for themselves only, but between the two. How they grew to love Villain, admire them and respect them, to want them yet be restricted from doing so. Hero detailed how they convinced a select few to assist them in faking their death with a glow which made Villain hopeful, but then Hero fell asleep before telling them how it went, and hadn't woke up since. It'd been three days.

With a nervous nod in understanding, the two got out of the car, and Villain walked the man to the house with a gun drawn on them the entire way. Sleepless nights were still to come, yet there was a bit more relief in knowing Hero stood more of a chance now. Villain hoped they didn't make a mistake, for Hero wouldn't be able to survive it.

[dustyisforever]

A Shadow of the Colossus Review

by DustyIsForever This is a review. It's about a video game, which is a kind of movie you watch with your hands.

In 2012, Shadow of the Colossus became the first thing I ever saved money to buy. After watching the “Nerd³ Plays” video where he calls it a “perfect game,” I began to daydream about it obsessively. I stuck the facetious label “Ye Olde Jar o Talents” on a mason jar and brought it to school so I could beg my classmates for funds. This worked, however incredulous it was, but I didn’t buy the game. I didn’t buy the game for years, and even after that I didn’t play it for at least a few months. It was like an old Russian novel to me: something that always existed in the future for which I could never consider myself prepared. And then I did play it and it was great.

You can either read it here or on a published Docs page. But be careful. It's pretty long.

This is a review of Shadow of the Colossus. It will contain spoilers. I first played the game a long time ago, but I went back to it a few times over the years. Recently I watched a close friend play it. We had some conversations about it. Soon, I’d like to see my wife play it as well. She can’t read this review yet because she is, incredibly, going to be playing totally blind. You can imagine how rare it is to play something like Shadow of the Colossus without knowing anything about it beforehand.

As I promised not long ago, I'm going to start writing essay-reviews of many games I enjoy. But first, I'd like to elaborate on my method. I have a particular framework for expressing my opinions of these games that I've developed as an alternative to a 10/10, 5/5, 40/40, 100/100, or other numerical art goodness judgment system. The aim is to provide the foolish satisfaction of a number score while cutting back on its pitfalls and biases. Number scores are unhelpful. In a 10/10 system, one finds that a 10 means that the reviewer idolizes the work, a 9, 8, or even a 7 can mean that they enjoyed it, and anything below that might mean that they disliked it, hated it, thought it was tedious, or simply misunderstood it. Opinions don’t fit neatly on a graduated, linear scale. Our value judgments are relative, as in: I liked this more than that; never absolute in the way numbers would suggest. We know this but pretend otherwise. How fun to bestow a cherished piece of art the honor of your perfect number! We're all pleased to think that our opinion is intelligent. My goal is to indulge that, but with restraint.

The first principle of my system is that I only bother rating games that I already know I love. Though there is surely as much to be learned from "bad" art as "good" art, I want to avoid negativity. Also, I find it’s easier to assign a score with restraint and thoughtfulness when a bad score isn't in consideration at all. It also means that I, as a critic, produce fewer reviews overall, which should make each review more characteristic and the overall corpus more consistent.

My second principle is that the highest number I'll use is three. Mr. Ebert was onto something when he made the alluring choice of knocking the tail off of the five-star format. It made all of his ratings look smarter. Five stars was for the common people; real intellectuals expressed their taste in the glamorous new fashion of four. Now it's my turn. I've one-upped the fallen old man, who once failed to appreciate John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). I dare to fly with merely three. And no halfsies, either. No point to it if I’m going to decide to give a game a one-and-a-half because that would be a six-point system in disguise, wouldn’t it?

My final principle is borrowed in part from Famitsu's thing where they divide scores into parts that can be treated either separately or summed. They do that with four reviewers. In my case, I cannot judge the work from the perspective of multiple people (I am only one person). Instead, I split my score into two numbers representing two priorities. That’s two numbers ranging zero to three, written X-Y. For instance, Shadow of the Colossus is a 1-2 game.

The first number, on a scale of zero to three, represents the aesthetic merits of the game. This can include everything experienced by the player. It may consider the art direction, the sound and music, and the narrative design. It also may refer to the dynamics of the design and the "choreography" of interaction, in a very formalist sense borrowed in part from Graeme Kirkpatrick's Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Interactive design is just as much a part of the media content of a game as the audiovisual presentation.

To be less academic—I like to summarize the first number as the question: "does it make me cry?" because it captures that it's often a sentimental thing. High-scoring games on the first number tend to be tearjerkers.

Why should Shadow of the Colossus get a one out of three in this category? Well, a one isn't really a low score in the conventional sense. My system is built to specify why a game is great. A zero would mean "this game is great, but it has nothing to do with the aesthetics." I consider Shadow of the Colossus to be aesthetically great, just not as aesthetically great as a few other games.

I like to call the other score “does it blow my mind?” to highlight that it pertains to games that impress me. Expect more elaboration when I get to the second half of the review.

When I first made up this system years ago, I tried to list a bunch of old favorites as examples. At that time, I stamped a 2-1 on Shadow of the Colossus. Mark the difference! It means that now I appreciate its technical achievement more but have tempered my feelings about its content. This change of opinion came to me when I recently watched a close friend play through the game for the first time, hanging out over her shoulder. The banter we shared dampened the emotion of the experience—for example, she already knew Agro was going to fall off a cliff sooner or later and by the time she did, it affected her more like the punchline to a drawn-out joke. I was a little offended. Her more detached play experience exposed some of the game’s weaknesses to me.

In 2012, Shadow of the Colossus became the first thing I ever saved money to buy. After watching the “Nerd³ Plays” video where he calls it a “perfect game,” I began to daydream about it obsessively. I stuck the facetious label “Ye Olde Jar o Talents” on a mason jar and brought it to school so I could beg my classmates for funds. This worked, however incredulous it was, but I didn’t buy the game. I didn’t buy the game for years, and even after that I didn’t play it for at least a few months. It was like an old Russian novel to me: something that always existed in the future for which I could never consider myself prepared. And then I did play it and it was great.

My original rating of two reflected the beautiful score and the sublime desolation of the game, which inhabited me then as it does now. When I take a walk in the woods, I am visited once more by the mystery of “To the Ancient Land.” It’s a good season in my life to return to the game. I’m in a forest often.

But unrelated to my time in forests, I’ve spent the last year thinking a lot about fantasy. I fell out with it some years ago and only recently began rehabilitating my affection for it. Shadow of the Colossus belongs to that estranged clade of fantasy, the fairy tale, which has become my favorite.

Fairy tales are mysterious but well-patterned, made from a pool of common morphologies, which folklorist Vladimir Propp called “functions” with perhaps excessive precision. A glancing comparison will hopefully show how much like a fairy tale Shadow of the Colossus really is. Propp’s functions came originally from his syntax of Russian folk stories. Shadow of the Colossus is neither Russian nor folk, through it deploys several such functions in an identifiable and properly consecutive fashion:

Absentation, interdiction, and violation all before the prologue is over

Trickery as Dormin tells Wander what must be done to revive Mono

Departure, as Wander begins the quest to slay the colossi, and various functions of the Donor, who is also Dormin

Quite a bit of struggle and branding as Wander does his colossus-slaying and dishevels himself gradually with dark magic

Pursuit (by Lord Emon)

And then the punishment and reward are cleverly reversed, because of course in this special video game that people who don’t call all video games art sometimes deign to call art, Wander was in error all along.

I think that to leave the analysis at that would be a failure to appreciate the particular flavor of this story. There are many video game stories where the player character ends up ethically compromised for some narrative effect, but the aesthetic appeal of Shadow of the Colossus is grossly different from, say, Spec Ops: the Line. Wander is more like Hamlet; he retains his hero-ness the whole way through, yet still the fate of his quest is doomed by circumstance.

What he must do is awful and painful to him, but he’s stuck on this path. The closing of the door to the bridge out of the Forbidden Lands is a literalization of this. The inciting events of his journey—the superstitious sacrifice of an innocent girl—make his goals noble from the start, and because he does not have the information to understand the cost of his deeds until it is too late, we cannot say that he is ever malicious. The player is clued in that something is wrong through visual suggestions that Wander does not necessarily see or understand, including the doves and ominous shadow-people which gather at the Shrine of Worship. These devices are not employed in any way that comments specifically on the medium of video games; nothing about them is procedural. They are very conventional vectors of good old-fashioned dramatic irony.

Furthermore, we don’t textually know at all that Dormin is evil. The antagonist Lord Emon who opposes Dormin and Wander is possibly responsible for Mono’s death. He reminds us, if we have played ICO, of the people who unjustly imprison that game’s hero on account of his “cursed” horns. Once we abandon the idea that the Lord Emon narrator/antagonist character is a trustworthy authority, we lose the only voice telling us that Dormin is dangerous. And at the end of the tale Dormin, surprisingly, keeps all of his promises to Wander: Mono is revived and Wander’s body is returned to him. He even gets his horsey back! Very sweet. And the final scenes, which play out leisurely beside the scrolling credits column, show a bright and sun-dappled garden. Mono, robed in her white gown, comforts baby Wander while surrounded by wildlife and green trees. A fawn appears. The imagery is positively lousy with symbols of innocence and spring.

And, if we’re going to permit ourselves to get biblical, isn’t it a little like a reverse Genesis? Wander follows the instructions of a higher power despite a warning from Lord Emon, who has special knowledge. As a result, a woman is saved from her “cursed fate” and the only way out is permanently closed, trapping the woman and the revived hero in the garden of paradise.

Shadow of the Colossus tells a tragic and subversive story, but it does it entirely within the syntax of its folktalesy story genre. It doesn’t have the flavor of subversiveness which comments on other works or the conventions of its own medium. To understand Undertale’s project, you need to be familiar with other JRPGs. Shadow of the Colossus would preserve its message in any medium.

This point isn’t really doing anything to bump my score up or down, but it’s a line of thinking I’ve revisited many times while writing about this game. I think that what really took Shadow of the Colossus from a two down to a one was the inconsistency between encounter designs.

My friend caught on quickly to the first several colossi, even prevailing where I remember having stumbled (my younger self was completely stymied by the sixth, called “Barba” by fans). But as the latter half of the game wore on, she spent more and more time running in circles. Numbers nine, eleven, and twelve all exasperated her. Each of them involves a special trick that must be discovered before they can be made vulnerable. Colossus number eleven, for example, is covered in armor that can only be broken by using a torch to chase it off of a cliff. But no other encounter shows you that there’s anything you can hold in your hands besides the sword and bow you start with. To even get the torch, you need to stand on a plinth holding up a brazier such that the colossus charges at you and knocks the torch loose. But my friend did not even realize that the plinths were climbable; they can only be grabbed from the sides, which is difficult to see and execute when you’re constantly charged at by an enemy that stuns you on the ground for a few whole seconds whenever it hits you. The tedium was too much, and the game lost its magic and atmosphere. The battle against the last colossus was pretty disheartening. No sense of an emotional climax came through. Instead, as I watched my friend fall over and over from its hands and shoulders and whatnot with all the tenacity of a lint-covered novelty sticky hand, I could only hope desperately that she wouldn’t put the game down right then and there.

In some moments, it’s plain to see that Shadow of the Colossus is testing the player’s patience with purpose and meaning. Each encounter culminates with Wander clutching to fur, often on the head of the colossus, holding on just long enough to get a good stab. The colossi shake and Wander dangles on, unable to get a steady hit. It’s frustrating to have to wait for a tiny window of opportunity to land a blow, but this is clearly by design. If the fight could be ended as soon as the player got into stabbing position, the anticipation would resolve too quickly. Giving the player sweaty palms, making them really clench the trigger button, serves to procedurally convey the ordeal Wander faces on-screen. You hold on (to the controller) to hold on (for dear life) in a very successful bit of hand-to-screen parallelism.

But at other times, the game slips away into pointless futility. In many fights, the trick that makes the colossus vulnerable is only effective for a short time, so the player must hurry to seize the opportunity. Often, the time window just isn’t long enough, and the player is compelled to retry, but the novelty of discovering the trick has already disappeared. The ninth colossus’s arena is huge, and when you knock it onto its side, you have to maneuver over to the far side of its body every time. It’s fiddly and protracted, and it’s a case where the game inadequately reacts to the player executing on what should feel like the turning point of the battle. It took my friend about four tries to ascend this colossus successfully. And it’s a turtle, so it isn’t even that tall. Really lame.

My own remembered experience, rooted in some British guy’s twelve-year-old YouTube video, is very different from the one shared with that friend of mine. I saw a game denuded of its majesty by our ongoing joke that Agro would be the final boss; a joke between pals on the proverbial gamer couch. A couch that, if it were not replaced in our case by the deep phenomenological chasm of several US states of distance and a Discord RTC, would be evocative of the one shared by Misters Cheadle and Sandler in the film Reign Over Me.

It’s a largely forgotten film, but consensus says it’s surprisingly well-regarded: Metacritic awards it an impressive 8.5 user score, which it labels “universal acclaim.” Adam Sandler plays a traumatized man who, after losing his family in 9/11, quits his dental career and whittles his days scootering around, playing the drums, and remodeling his kitchen over and over. Don Cheadle is his former college roommate, a successful dentist with a family, who runs into him late one night. The two rekindle their friendship and are both healed for it. This involves a lot of Shadow of the Colossus.

When Don Cheadle first sees Sandler, he can’t get him to stop and talk. Their second encounter happens when Cheadle drops off his daughter at a friend’s house. He intends to go back home to his wife to spend quality time solving a puzzle with her. Suddenly, Sandler flies by on his scooter. So instead, Cheadle gets him to stop and talk. He asks if Sandler is “practicing,” by which he means “practicing dentistry.”

“I’m practicing all the time, up in the valley. Took down twelve of the colossus so far” “The valley? What is that, is that a medical complex or something?” “It’s more… like another dimension. You take a journey, you discover yourself.” (Reign Over Me, 13:50)

He gets Sandler to sit down for Starbucks, where Sandler violates assorted social norms as per a 2007 movie’s notion of a traumatized person. Sandler acts as if he doesn’t remember Cheadle but they make conversation regardless and before you know it, Cheadle is at this guy’s apartment.

Cheadle needs to use the bathroom. Sad music begins to play. Cheadle briefly glimpses a room with furniture covered in sheets—evidence that this man once had a family. Then there’s a mournful-looking shot where the camera stares straight down Sandler’s darkened hall and distantly we see his TV. He’s climbing the first Colossus. That’s a funny thing to do if you’ve finished three quarters of the game. I guess he has more than one save file. So that he can practice more, of course.

As the movie goes on, the two intertwine into each other’s life in a conventionally dramatic way. Sandler is a broken man who throws tantrums and lacks responsibility and ropes Cheadle into a Mel Brooks marathon showing on the night Cheadle’s father dies, and in turn, Cheadle suffers various embarrassments to his career and family because he has compassion for his friend. And sometimes we get to see more Shadow of the Colossus, which Sandler often calls “Shadows” of the Colossus.

In its second appearance, Sandler is fighting the fifth Colossus—my favorite—and Cheadle takes the controller. We get a montage. He can’t put it down. Sandler teases Cheadle, he says he’s addicted (to Shadow of the Colossus). Cheadle jumps to his feet, paces around the couch in frustration: he demands one more try. He refuses Sandler’s suggestion to stop and “let it soak in,” he’s determined to get it this time. Number fifteen falls and Cheadle pumps his fist, shouting “co-lo-ssussss!” in a funny voice. The montage ends, and with it goes our brief window into an otherworld where playing Shadow of the Colossus actually looks like that.

Or, hey, that’s not so fair. Maybe, for Mr. Adam Sandler, playing Shadow of the Colossus is about practicing each fight over and over and pumping your fist triumphantly when you finally win. Maybe he got a New Game Plus save file when he picked it up on eBay that let him fight the colossi out of order. For his character—who, as I’ve neglected to mention, is named Charlie Fineman—the game is supposed to be a metaphor for 9/11, of course.

Back in ‘07, Kotaku managed to get in touch with Jeremy Roush, who worked as an editor for Reign Over Me. Apparently, the role of Shadow of the Colossus in the film was inspired by Roush’s father.

The Vietnam War left his father 100 percent mentally disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder... Unable to work, he spent the days and evenings watching sci-fi thriller Aliens over and over again until he actually had to buy a new VHS tape. "Aliens is a thinly veiled kind of Vietnam veteran kind of story," Roush explains, "and watching it is a way of thinking about it without telling yourself you are thinking about it." The movie was visceral therapy for his father… Refusing to accept the death of loved ones. Seeking out an escape from that truth. Giants falling in slow motion. "You could see where someone who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again," he says. Charlie's therapy was Shadow of the Colossus. (Ashcraft p.2)

Roush, who was responsible for the idea to include the game in the movie, had thought seriously about the thematics. In Reign Over Me, Charlie Fineman’s fixation on Shadow of the Colossus is a deliberate symbol of his grief, boxed into a safe and distant replica of tragedy which he can watch himself overcome again and again on the plasma TV.

Later on in the film, Cheadle manages to drag Sandler to weekly therapist sessions, but they go nowhere. Sandler refuses to speak about his family and leaves each session after just a few minutes. But he does say “I like to play Colossus!” (Reign, 1:13:29). In this movie’s understanding of mentally ill people, or at least in Roush’s, PTSD sufferers seek out proxy-triggers to act out the procedure of grieving with none of the pain. I think that I preferred the movie before I learned this. It just doesn’t make as much sense to say that the colossi are all supposed to be, like, the twin towers. Isn’t that bizarre? I mean, I had just assumed that the game was more broadly supposed to be a parallel to the ordeal of overcoming grief, and that the colossi were the grief. Grief is like a colossus, or like colossi, because it can feel so much bigger than the griever, so invincible and enduring. That’s why it was so strange to me that he never makes it further through the game over the course of the movie. In the very last scene, when he’s in his new and well-lit apartment, do you know what he’s doing? He’s playing it again, but he’s back to number thirteen. I really expected him to finish the game by the end, which would parallelize his grief struggle with a struggle to take down the colossi. It would represent something. However, the truth is that the colossus encounters are supposed to be 9/11, and he’s mentally recreating a facsimile of 9/11 every time he plays the game. Infinite, furry World Trade Centers getting stabbed by Adam Sandler over and over.

Sorry, that might have been a digression in poor taste. You didn’t expect to read a review of Reign Over Me within this review of Shadow of the Colossus and it was a little deceptive of me to jam it in there. But I thought about it so much, you have to understand! It’s fascinating to me how I could arrive at such a different interpretation of the movie than was apparently intended. The same difference goes for the game itself: Mr. Roush definitely got the gist of Shadow of the Colossus, but he applied the game to the movie in such a different way than I would have.

Let’s talk about the technical side of things instead for a short while. A nice palate-cleanser. It might seem unbalanced to devote one half of the score system to technology that is seldom appreciated by the audience—this score is more than that. Perhaps you were left confused when I didn’t explain it in much detail earlier, back when I was still laying out the way the system works. The slogan “does it blow my mind?” suggests that this category seeks to appreciate the craft of game development. A good example of something non-technological that “blows my mind” would be the dialogue system in Hades; the incredible effort of writing such a massive script and then organizing it so cleverly certainly does blow my mind, speaking as a game developer and a very slow writer.

Shadow of the Colossus is an exceptionally technically impressive game that deserves more than the 1 I assigned it on the spot so long ago. Through optimization, fakery, and creativity, it packs in the most sophisticated graphics the PlayStation 2 can handle, including HDR lighting, self-shading, long-distance level-of-detail mesh transitions, real-time fur rendering, volumetric particles, and anisotropic light scattering. Most of these practices were considered next-gen at the time of the game’s release. Some of them still feel shiny and new in 2024.

Team ICO accomplished this through ingenuity and strict scoping. Out of any of my sources, I learned the most about it here. Of particular interest to me is the usage of procedural animation and inverse kinematics, of which I’m a big fan. If you are one of the few beautiful souls in this loving universe who have read my blog(s) before, you know that I’ve been working on and off for a long time on a project that relies heavily on inverse kinematics called Flower Pot. The inexpensive algorithm I use in my own work, called FABRIK, was not published until 2011. Furthermore, Shadow of the Colossus has very complex character models and needs to clearly telegraph the movements of the player character and the colossi. For this reason it also dynamically combines animation data keyframed by an animator with the movements computed by the inverse kinematics algorithms. They did this on a CPU that clocked at about 294 megahertz (see Diefendorff).

I won’t reproduce diagrams here because they’re already available in the translated article on Léna Piquet’s website, which I linked above and which may also be found in my sources. To be honest, there is less for me to write in this section of the review because there is not much new to say. The achievements and process of Team ICO have been extensively documented and explained, much more than almost any other game. What is especially unique about Shadow of the Colossus is that much of this dissection and documentation has been done by outsiders: fans who never had access to the team or their materials.

Of particular note is Nomad Colossus. I found a Fandom wiki article about this guy. It says, “Nomad Colossus is a well-known figure in The Shadow of The Colossus community. He's most well-known for his insane dedication to the game and downright jaw-dropping data-mining” (Team Ico Wiki). Passionate! But the article has no comments. Yet on the other hand, a skim of the community message log page shows that at least a dozen users have worked on this wiki within the last several months. A tantalizing window into a community, or one of a million lost corners of the internet? I cannot rightfully say.

Nomad Colossus uploaded their first Shadow of the Colossus-related YouTube video in April of 2010, four and a half years post-release. It’s been much longer than that since Breath of the Wild came out and I’m still surprised whenever I see someone running it in an emulator. The video is titled “Shadow of the Colossus - Through the entrance,” and it shows Wander on horseback in an area normally inaccessible except in cutscenes: the north bridge into the central shrine. He rides Agro through the narrow gate passage on the other end of the bridge. The path continues into a void for a long ways, but the horse stops as if running into a wall.

Since then, Nomad Colossus has published 346 videos (if I’m counting correctly) pertaining to Shadow of the Colossus, prying at it with camera hacks, model viewers, and data manipulation. He reveals mountains and plains and islands and ruins all inaccessible in normal play. Their work, comprising so many short, uncommentated videos, can be engaged with as a companion book to the game; Nomad gradually turns the elusive horizons of the Forbidden Lands back into data, into geometry stored in a file system. Numbers on computers permit no mysteries. A number is autological; before being applied to another end it represents only itself. A number is atomic, it has no secret compartments. Through the efforts of explorers like Nomad Colossus and their emulators, no pit has been left unaccounted for on the DVD-ROM. Nomad renders Shadow of the Colossus into a wholly unmysterious object. This is not a criticism of their work.

At the same time, the game continues to support an incredible abundance of perceived mystery. After all, this was why Nomad Colossus’s work began. The so-called Secret Seekers and their famous thread on the PSN forums were dedicated to unearthing what they imagined to be the mother-of-all easter eggs. They began with intense clue-hunting and then moved on to the less speculative arts of boundary breaking and data mining, albeit after dozens of pages of effusive discussion. The intentions behind the game’s design were a favorite topic. Their style of discourse was dense with wild, associative connections; the possibility of subtextual hints by means of biblical allusion was on the table before even the end of the first post (Quest for the Last Big Secret). “Fumito Ueda is infamous for his attention to the most minute, intricate detail,” this post says. But to say he is infamous for this—does that not suggest the consensus of many people? I suspect that the Ueda these individuals imagined was not an accurate model of the real one. There was no secret last colossus, after all.

These are only a few of many voices on the internet professing all kinds of opinions about the game, its content, its intentions and meanings and forms. A quick survey will show substantial diversity of interpretation: I found a passionate review on the “patientgamers” subreddit decrying Shadow of the Colossus as “one of the worst games I’ve ever played” for its “non-existent story” and “Genuinely awful clunky movement and controls” (AstraFuckingGooGoo). In “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View,” NoobFeed user BrunoBRS calls the game “a love story, of what limits can a man go for his loved one, but it is, most importantly, the tale of David and Goliath” in a passage of lavish praise for “what he truly believes is the greatest game of all time” (BrunoBRS). The similarly-titled “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective,” an article on The Boss Key, calls it “a game all about and only about killing the boss monsters as a means to an end” (Koop). “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective– A Tragically Beautiful Love Story,” brought to us by Taylor Lyles on DualShockers, says it’s “so much more than just a boss rush game; it is the story of a boy who cared so much for someone he loved that unleashed all sorts of hellish things to save her” (Lyles). Shadow of the Colossus retrospectives are, as they say, like assholes: everybody has one. I am included. Shades of consensus and contradiction are to be found in abundance in each discussion of the game.

And what of my own opinions? They depend on a perceived counter-opinion in many ways. My revised scoring suggests how I remember my past self. In my discussion of the aesthetic content of the game, I call for a new perspective that de-emphasizes the notion that Shadow of the Colossus deliberately works to subvert a convention of the medium of video games. But couldn’t I be accused of failing to establish that this notion existed in the first place? Let me provide an example of that notion, at least. Here’s another retrospective. It has the word “retrospective” in its title. It’s called “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective,” and it was written by Mac Riga for the Georgetown University student newspaper. Here’s Riga’s take:

Team Ico sought to make a game that laid bare the contradiction of video games. It held up this beautiful medium, the pinnacle of self-isolation and escapism yet one that fosters empathy and self-reflection more than any other, and begged the player to wrestle with that irony — to come to their own conclusions about what it means to be alone, what it means to consume video games and what it means to do both simultaneously. (Riga)

This is surprising. Riga isn’t talking about the moral irony of monster-slaying in video games, which is more or less the topic of the counter-opinion I imagined myself to be opposing. But he is saying that Shadow of the Colossus is trying to engage in conversation with a convention of the medium of games, and to me that was the important part. For Riga, it’s a game about “self-isolation” and “empathy.”

Maybe it would be helpful to check what Fumito Ueda has to say. Even if you’re the type to faithfully invoke The Death of the Author, you might still agree, I hope, that discovering the designer’s intent will provide a reference against which to compare other views.

“I’ve never thought that “cruelty” is something forbidden in video games. Video games seem to require cruelty as a means of expression, and that being the case, I wanted to try and present my own take on cruelty. That was really the seed idea of Shadow of the Colossus.” (Ueda)

Here in a 2005 interview with CONTINUE magazine, Ueda casts Shadow of the Colossus as a game about cruelty inspired by the cruelty he sees as required in games. My analysis is thrown into doubt even further! It was intended as a deconstruction all along. But wait—Fumito Ueda from 2019 might be here to save me.

Was the overall aim of SOTC to question why it is that most games are about killing and how we have grown so comfortable doing so in a virtual existence? Fumito Ueda: I play games where violence is a factor myself, so I do not dismiss such games. However, through the production of Shadow of the Colossus, I started having doubts about simply “feeling good by beating monsters” and “getting a sense of accomplishment”. I tried thinking if there were any other choices for different kinds of expression, then ended up with such settings and rules as a result. Rather than try to deliberately create some sort of antithesis, I focused more on the consistency of the design as a product and differentiation (from other products). (Taylor)

Apologies for another long block quote; I really think the context is worth leaving in here because it helps to illustrate that, while Ueda is not exactly contradicting himself, different circumstances have prompted two answers with very different implications. The interviewer in the latter source seems to be aligned with the popular view that the game narrative is chiefly an exploration of morality. Which I do not disagree with, either: I should reiterate that my disagreement is with the view that the game narrative is specifically an exploration of morality in the medium of video games. The interviewer suggests that by saying that “most games are about killing.” Ueda seems to dismiss the idea by going on to say that the game was not crafted as “some sort of antithesis,” but that those themes emerged simply by trying to make a unique story. But in the former interview, Ueda asserts that he was “inspired” by the prevalence of “cruelty” in games. We are deprived of an authorial view where we might find stability; such a thing would have protected us, maybe, from the wild menagerie of contrasting views we face instead.

And could it be possible, if you would excuse the sudden break, that Reign Over Me (2007) starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle might not have always been actively trying to frame Shadow of the Colossus as a pseudo-Freudian stand-in for 9/11? More importantly, do we have any meaningful way to be sure? No, I think it’s more likely that suggestive forces have moved in with us permanently and that their furniture is too numerous and heavy for us to kick them out. It is impossible to speak on the aesthetics of a work, especially one so widely critiqued as Shadow of the Colossus, without necessarily speaking on what was spoken before. It is impossible to even play the game without encountering these extratextual conversations.

When I watched my friend play Shadow of the Colossus for the first time, I must have already been faintly aware of this phenomenon. The process of finding an appropriate emulator and an appropriate ROM led her through websites already saturated with extratextual content that suggested certain ideas of the game content. She had heard me speak of the game before. She had already listened to much of its music, accompanied on YouTube by comments. Being someone interested in games herself, she had certainly already encountered discussions of the game content like this one. She knew damn well that Agro would fall off that bridge. From all of this it is clear to me that the “extratext” was always inescapable. If she were to encounter the game truly without prior knowledge it would still not have “saved” her because she would just discover the extratext afterwards.

And what of my wife? My poor sweet wife? Just as no dry beach is spared from the tide, she too will be inundated by extratext that will indelibly shape how she receives and interprets the game content. She will not be a source of a “pure” opinion, but only another source of interpretation. She will never play Shadow of the Colossus as it was when it came out in 2005.

The space in consideration is a “consensus blob.” It has no hard boundaries, but it has gradients. Within the blob there are many shades of interpretation, but few overt contradictions except when comparing extremes. The blob is uncentered because there is no single “correct” or most stable interpretation. Areas of the blob give the appearance of a “consensus,” a shared notion or common interpretation, but really the gradient is everywhere and always-changing, like an amoeba. Even the creator of the art object can sway from point to point in the blob, forgetting wherever it was they started. The consensus is heraclitean. The extratext is absolutely inseparable from the text.

Really, we shouldn’t be miffed about it. Shadow of the Colossus can be about a lot of things, it’s not like we need a single definitive analysis. It will be a joy to watch my wife play, and I will be delighted to see what she thinks. I’m sure it will be new and exciting.

Overall, I give Reign Over Me a strong 6/10.

Sources

AstraFuckingGooGoo. “Shadow of the Colossus (PS4)- one of the worst games I’ve ever played.” r/patientgamers. https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/ujnx5q/shadow_of_the_colossus_ps4_one_of_the_worst_games/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Binder, Mike, dir. 2007. Reign over Me. Screenplay by Mike Binder. Columbia Pictures.

BrunoBRS. “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View”. Noobfeed. 27 Sep. 2011. https://www.noobfeed.com/features/160/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective-view

Diefendorff, Keith. “Sony’s Emotionally Charged Chip.” Microprocessor Report, vol. 13, no. 5.

Koop, Brandon. “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective.” The Boss Key, 10 Apr. 2014, https://bradenkoop.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective/.

Lyles, Taylor. “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective -- A Tragically Beautiful Love Story.” DualShockers, 26 Jan. 2018, https://www.dualshockers.com/shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/.

Metacritic. Reign over Me. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/reign-over-me/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

“Nomad Colossus.” Team Ico Wiki, https://teamico.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad_Colossus.  Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Peeren, Esther. “Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder’s Reign Over Me.” Cultural Critique, vol. 92, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 57–83. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2016.a617380.

Piquet, Léna, translator. “The Making of ‘Shadow of the Colossus.’” Froyok, Dec. 2007, https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2772150/175939_PUBLISHED_Peeren_617380.pdf.

Quest for the Last Big Secret / Mysteries of SotC. PlayStation Community Forums, archived May 2013. http://web.archive.org/web/20130505104658/http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/Shadow-of-the-Colossus-PS2/Quest-for-the-Last-Big-Secret-Mysteries-of-SotC/td-p/20178777

Riga, Mac. “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective.” The Hoya, https://thehoya.com/guide/start-select-consuming-loneliness-a-shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.

Taylor, Jay. “Interview Extra: Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian).” Cane and Rinse, 27 Aug. 2019, https://caneandrinse.com/fumito-ueda-interview/.

Ueda, Fumito. Interview for CONTINUE Magazine, vol. 25., 2005. Translated by shmuplations, https://shmuplations.com/ueda/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.

[chicago-geniza]

Van Helsing can commute back and forth between London and Amsterdam within a few hours, in the age of steam and sail. Also he's both Dutch and Roman Catholic (believes in corpus christi etc., got an indulgence from Rome to use the host as ammunition against the undead) because the Reformation happened differently in the Dracula Extended Universe

[derelicthorror]

@a-tenno-called-prin digital extremes does this really cool thing where they have ideas and INDULGE them and i am never going to get over how it felt to get humanframes confirmed real like (bc of course warframes are humans orokin are humans corpus grineer etc it is all people! but humanframe!)

but also i so hope that loid and necraloid come to terms with each other - the former especially. all jokes aside i think that characterwise guy!loid is in a place where seeing necraloid just kind of lands as a gut-punch for a lot of reasons, and he reacts to things that hurt him by getting cold.

you have to warm him up to his little robot twin like he's a skittish horse and you're desensitizing him with burlap

[who-is-muses]

How open are the muses to smut without a preexisting romance?

Abe Sapien: it's highly unlikely. Abe is a very self conscious man, both of his unusual features and propensity for awkwardness. Not to mention he thinks it'd be demeaning for both of them and would overcomplicate things between them.

Antonio da Vinci: manwhore supreme, ready to go 80% of the time. And 15 of that missing 20%? He'll agree anyways. Especially if booze is or already was involved. Hello, unhealthy coping mechanisms.

The Artist: Carmina is a complicated case. Overall, her answer is not even remotely- unless they were friends first. She has to have some level of trust with another before even considering sex.

Bleez: extremely unlikely. Not only is she asexual, she also still very much believes that she's an 11 out of 10- any ladies that are interested will have to put some serious work in for her to even consider going to bed with them.

The Blight: unsurprisingly, the Fog's biggest recluse is not down for casual sex. Barely even has interest in sex to begin with- partly because he's so absorbed by his work and the thralls of the serum, but also because he refuses to realize that he's attracted to men rather than women.

Bookworm: he'll need some flattery and flirting first, but Winnie is relatively open to hookups. He's hired more than a couple prostitutes before- The only difference is a financial transaction. Maybe.

Candyman: highly unlikely. Daniel is an extremely romantic individual; there will be wooing and all that beforehand (and during if he has it his way.)

Catwoman: she has no issue with casual sex- but isn't nearly as "easy" as some claim, in fact rather picky about her choices for all genders.

Claudette Morel: she's much too shy to pursue anything like that- any girl that's interested would have to approach her first, and even then there's no guarantee Claudette won't panic and bail.

The Doctor: manwhore supreme, spooky edition. Sex is one of his biggest vices, one which he is all too willing to indulge in with almost anyone.

The Dredge: depends on what it has to gain from the exchange. Not a hard no, but it will not be a healthy experience for either of them.

Goswin: very shy about the whole intimacy thing. Like Dan, xe thinks it would be demeaning for both involved to skip straight to knocking boots, more inclined to take things slow with proper courting.

Guy Gardner: generally, yes. Very much so. As long as he isn't in one of his dour moods.

Habeas Corpus: it has absolutely zero qualms about anonymous or casual hook ups, sex being one of their biggest and most common vices.

The Ichor: despite the ego Athanasios puts forth, they will be extremely suspect of any actual desire being present if proposition. They'll likely consent anyways, but be second guessing the genuineness of the whole thing the entire time.

March Harriet: she'd be flattered, really, but would probably decline (with some flustered stuttering and plenty of blushing.) Harrie's a hopeless romantic through and through- she'd much rather try a date or two first, see where things go.

Martian Manhunter: not really, no. Casual sex isn't entirely out of the question, but very unlikely for J'onn- emotional connections are of great importance to him in all matters.

Martian Marauder: though he would greatly prefer having some connection with a partner, it isn't necessarily required.

Rorschach: you're kidding, right? He's listed as "demi-homosexual" for a reason. It would take many, many years of trust before one could even begin trying to convince him to take his pants off without losing blood.

Saint Walker: he's bashful and shy about the topic by nature, but exceedingly sex positive. Casual hookups were far from taboo on Astonia. Whoever's interested will have to broach the topic first, though.

Salaak: also a big ol virgin, but way more uptight- and he's coming from a background where sex=marriage, thus there being a lot of anxiety for him. It would take A While before Sal would be open to sex with an established partner, so he's extremely unlikely to respond well to any advances from someone he's not involved with.

Scarecrow: he borders on demiromantic, needing a significant amount of trust before romance is an option, but he's not a stranger to picking someone up when the need strikes him. Granted he's not especially likely to have sex with someone in general because of his repression, prone to bottling any urges up for as long as he can when there's not someone to semi-regularly coax him into letting go.

Sinestro: much more open to the idea than most might expect- but he's still very cautious and paranoid (and full of himself), so any propositions not of his own would have to have the right motivations (or person) involved for him to agree.

The Spirit: Rin is Extremely Asexual- sex neutral, but still ace. The only appeal sex has to her is intimacy, and she only desires that from a romantic partner.

Thoth: surprisingly picky and flighty despite his reputation, very much reliant on his mood and the events leading up to any proposition. He's also unlikely to bring it up himself unless he's particularly frustrated. Just be warned; while he doesn't have godlike strength, he does have a ridiculously high libido.

Two-Face: Harvey isn't overly keen on the idea, but Harv doesn't crave romance nearly as much as his headmate and thus is far more interested in something casual. It ultimately depends, like most things with them, who has the most sway over the other that night.

The Wraith: once upon a time, Philip was a little looser with his life, more exploratory and outgoing. Now, he's extremely guarded and suspicious of others, unwilling to let anyone get too close- but, he still has needs in this nonhuman form, and has given into desperation on a rare few occasions. It's certainly improbable, but not impossible.