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daycourtofficial · 2 years ago

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Cassian is a Nosy Busybody Who Can’t Keep to Himself

Summary: Cassian knows Azriel is seeing someone, but he keeps denying it and Cassian is determined to find out who he’s seeing

Author’s note: my personal headcanon is that Cassian is EXTREMELY nosy and loves knowing everyone’s personal business 💕 He’s just like me 💕

Azriel was seeing someone, Cassian was sure of it. The others think he’s being a bit too obsessed with the shadowsinger, but Cassian has a gut feeling that Az is seeing someone and purposefully hiding them.

Over the years, they’ve all had lovers and flings that they kept to themselves, mostly because they didn’t matter much and were casual, short-term things. This time feels different. Cassian thinks Az has been seeing someone secretly for months.

Az seems happier, he seems more reluctant to stay out drinking, he even delegated assignments that were “too long” to others.

Cassian needs to know who this fae is and whether or not they’re good enough for his beloved brother.

Unfortunately for Cassian, Azriel is the night court’s spymaster. He can’t exactly follow him around. He’s tried it. Azriel just maneuvered in and out of random shops, making Cassian go insane trying to find him.

He has concocted what he thinks is the perfect plan.

Cassian slept on the floor below Azriel’s. No one wanted to share a floor with Cassian because he “snores too loudly” or whatever they tell him. Fine by him, he gets an entire floor to himself.

The past few nights Cassian has been staying in one of the other rooms on his floor - the room directly underneath Azriel’s. He’s been staying up to see if he can hear any noises coming from above.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, he hardly heard anything last night, except what he had convinced himself was two pairs of footsteps at one point. He decides it’s now or never when he wakes up, racing up the stairs to Azriel’s floor. He knows he has to be quick - his stupid brother’s stupid shadows alert him to any disturbance, so the time is now.

Cassian runs to Az’s room, takes a split second to catch his breath, then shoves the door open, finding Azriel waking up in bed. And a mysterious shape next to him under the covers.

“Cassian,” Azriel states, “what in the Cauldron are you doing here?”

Cassian can’t take his eyes off the shape under the covers, but he realizes if he wants to find out more, he has to keep his true intentions of coming a secret.

“Well I could ask you the same.”

Mother boil him, that was definitely not the right response.

“This is, in fact, my room. If you come by after lunch I’ll provide you with a tour.”

At that, Cassian begins to look around the room more, noticing mugs on the twin nightstands that surround Azriel’s bed. On the nightstand closer to the amorphous blob under the covers, was a stack of four books, one of which looks very familiar.

“Azriel, I didn’t know you could read.” Cassian states, trying to rile something of the shadowsinger.

“Piss off, Cassian. Of course I can read - it’s you who everyone thinks is illiterate.” Azriel was getting more and more annoyed by this intrusion, worried about if you were still asleep by his side or awake for this. He had just enough time before Cassian plowed down the door to cover you with his duvet.

“This book looks familiar. Isn’t it (y/n)’s? She’s going to kill you if you get ring marks on her book. She almost filleted me alive when I bent one of the pages of a book before.”

At hearing your name, you stirred just a tiny bit, both Illyrians going still at your movement.

Cassian looks down the bed, seeing your foot jutting out from under the covers.

“Az, I never knew you had such small, pale feet.”

“I hide them in my shoes, stop looking at my feet you weirdo. Why exactly are you here again?”

Cassian cannot come up with a good enough lie for why he was there. The room is silent, until he decides on, “You’ve been sleeping in too much recently - wanted to make sure you were coming to training today.”

Azriel narrowed his eyes, seeing right through the lie. “Cassian, training is in 2 hours.”

“Well, I know you like having time to eat breakfast and wake up before training, so I’ll just help you pull the covers off-“

Cassian reached for the duvet, and Azriel grabbed Cassian’s hand, squeezing it so tightly, the general was afraid he’d lose circulation.

“Don’t you dare do that.”

And Cassian has the upper hand.

“And, pray tell Az, why not?”

The blanket begins to shift, and a hand comes out from under the blanket, pulling the blanket down just enough for your messy hair and your eyes to be seen by Cassian.

“Because it’s really cold outside of the blanket.”

Cassian was gobsmacked. His jaw literally dropped, and he kept pointing between the two of you, going “you.. and you!”

He heard you giggle underneath the blanket. “Yes, Cassian.”

Cassian, still shocked at this revelation, could only think to ask “Was last night the first time?”

“Not that my sexual endeavors require your knowledge, Cas, but we’ve been seeing each other for about 8 months now.” Azriel remarks, a smirk growing on his face.

“EIGHT MONTHS?!” Cassian bellows, “you’ve been sleeping around for 8 months and DIDN’T TELL ME UNTIL TODAY?”

You had never seen Cassian so upset before.

“Well,” you say, “at first we wanted it to be a secret from everyone, because you all are so nosy,” at which Azriel makes a pointed face at Cassian, “and then a few months ago we thought it would be funny to see how long before everyone found out so we started being a bit less secretive.”

Cassian begins thinking back to the past few months. He recalls going to Rita’s with everyone one night, and in his drunken haze he swore he saw you nestled into Azriel’s side while everyone else was dancing, but he chalked it up to drunken lenses. There was another day where you were just coated in Azriel’s scent, but he chalked it up to the flight the two of you embarked on earlier that day.

“That’s why for a few months neither of you would come out drinking with us!”

You both nodded.

“Oh gods, I can’t wait to tell everyone - RHYS!” He starts screeching for Rhys, who winnows in very quickly, looking very pleased with himself.

“Yes, Cas?” Rhys smirked, knowing where this was headed, and very excited to watch the outcome.

“Look! Him! And-and her! For MONTHS!” Cassian says, pointing at the two of you still in bed.

“Yes Cassian, I know.”

Cassian turns to his brother, “they’ve been hiding it for months, the b- what do you mean you know?”

“I know.” Rhys says, his smirk taking up most of his face.

“How’d you find out?”

“I woke up in the middle of the night wanting cookies and I found them making out in the kitchen.” You slowly sink back under the covers a little in embarrassment, remembering Rhys making his presence known with a quiet cough as you were kissing Azriel in the kitchen. The shit-eating grin on his face as he asked “midnight snack?” is one you won’t forget.

“Wait, does anyone else know?” Cas asks, putting his hands on his hips in indignation.

Rhys puts his hand on Cassian’s shoulders. “Everyone else knows, you were the last to find out.”

The look Cassian gave was pure offense. He had never felt so offended in his life! Being the last to know about you and Azriel. He loved both of you dearly, and he felt a little offended you didn’t want to tell him.

“Cassian,” you say, as if you also possessed the gifts to read minds that Rhysand does, “we love you, we just know how much you love finding things out, so we thought you’d love to snoop around and find out. If I weren’t naked under this blanket, I’d come hug you.”

Cassian gives you a suggestive look and winks, causing Azriel’s wings to wrap around you in a cocoon.

“Now that everyone knows, can you both please leave us alone?” He huffs, wrapping his arms around you as well.

“Does Rita know?” Cassian asks, acting oblivious to you two clearly wanting this public spectacle done with.

“No, she doesn’t” you say, peaking your eyes out over one of Az’s wings.

With that, Cassian bustles out the door, excitement coursing through his veins.

“He’s like a dog with a bone,” you laugh, “he’s precious.”

“You two do know he’s going to tell all of Velaris right?” Rhys says, reaching to close the door.

“Aww let him have it, he’s just excited.” You say, nuzzling into Azriel’s chest as Rhys shuts the door.

Walking through the streets of Velaris later, Cassian truly made the rounds telling everyone, with people offering you congratulations and happy tidings on your relationship. Azriel wasn’t very fond of everyone knowing, but he found it incredibly sweet how happy they all were for the two of you.

#azriel x reader #azriel x you #azriel fanfic #acotar fanfiction

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41protons · 20 days ago

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Helloo i would absolutely love to hear more about Ignat Lotti and especially it's backstory :] Also i wanted to mention that i really love your art of it i want to eat the art style

Omg thanks!! You’re welcome to the all-you-can-eat that is my blog. Feast! And now — fuck yeah, it’s rambling time >:3

This post is part 1 of many, prepare yourself! >:3

To start off, let me introduce you to a few more characters vital to this AU.

Mordechai Lotti

Mordechai Lotti (he/him), is Ignat’s father. No he doesn’t have any connection to the Lucases, I just rlly like the name Mordechai. Leave me be. He is an avatar of the Spiral; he deals in façades and confusion. He’s a showman in the same way that a dagger is a kitchen knife: perfectly capable of doing the job, but preferring to put his efforts in other directions. He’s a dreamer; a jolly, gay (both in the sense of sexuality, and the way he goes about life) little man; a cold and distant father figure; a stuck-up rich guy stuck in his office; and many, many more things — each one a façade, and a part of him in equal measure. I realize that that’s a quality more often attributed to the Stranger, but the Spiral and the Stranger are not that different — both are about loss of identity and confusion — and the Entities are an inseparable, amorphous blob of fear, anyway.

Mordechai is schizophrenic — or, at least, he was, back when he was still human. I’m not entirely sure how it works if the hallucinations he has now literally become real — they’re hardly delusions if they’re true. He was born into an ordinary, human middle-class family (with perhaps slightly over imaginative and not careful parents who decided against all odds to name him Mordechai in this day and age). He had been susceptible to quite a bit of bullying from his peers because of the manifestations of his schizophrenia — and at some point, a cruel prank had been played, as a result of which 10-year-old Mordechai would have died, if not for the Spiral. He managed to Become, instead, feeding his assailants to the Distortion, and starting on his journey through the world of fears.

At the age of 23, he met Edna Flottery, a soon-to-be Web avatar (fully described later in the post), with whom he had become great friends from the moment of their meeting, and remained so for the rest of their lives. It is looked down upon, in the world of Fears, to use avatar’s powers to steal money — it’s considered a lowly use of the Entities’ ‘gifts’, hardly serving any sort of higher purpose — but that was exactly what Mordechai and Edna did. Soon enough, they were rolling in dough, ready for the next step in reaching their dream.

And their dream was, as such: to build a world in which the Fears were not locked in a perpetual struggle, but rather, growing stronger and thriving with each other’s help. They had figured out that the Fears could not be separate (the realization started with them going out for lunch together — the lunch in question being people’s fear — and discovering how much fuller it felt to feed together with another monster, of another Entity) — that the presence of different Entities could strengthen each other — and were determined to put that knowledge to use and change the world of Fears.

They had built a home, in which avatars of most Entities were welcome. I say “most” because the Corruption and the Hunt could not be negotiated with, so they tried to avoid the two at all costs. Hey, I never said their plan was perfect. They had struck alliances with separate avatars, organizations like the People’s Church, and even families like the Fairchilds (yes I know they are a family only in the name and the power they serve, but it’s a sort of found family, which is like, my favorite trope, so I’m calling it that. Bite me.), believing in safety and strength in numbers — so that if one (one avatar, one organization, one Entity) had decided to turn on them, they would be backed by the rest. Soon enough, they had built an empire.

The song I associate most with Mordechai: A Million Dreams. I imagine Edna would be the second voice at the end :3

Edna Flottery

And here’s our beloved Spider! Edna (she/her) is an avatar of the Web, a sweetheart and a lesbian. Mordechai’s best friend; Ignat’s proper parental figure (have I already mentioned that Mordechai is a distant father? Yeah, he’s not the best child-person); a manipulative bitch; a true lady — you name it, she’s been it. She used to be the kind of girl who had blackmail for everyone in high school. She used to be the kind of child who hid their mischievous endeavors behind an angelic-looking face. She is, through and through, a true Spider.

At age 19, Edna met Mordechai in college. They weren’t taking any classes together — the age difference meant they were doing completely different courses — but their schedules matched in terms of most study periods. They got chatting, found each other quite interesting, made plans to meet outside of studying… eventually, they would become very Alastor-and-Rosie (from Hazbin Hotel) coded. Eventually, they would become great friends. Mordechai didn’t tell her of his true nature at first; of course not. He may have been delusional, but not a fool. Eventually, he accidentally made it so one of his hallucinations came to life in a flurry of illusion, and Edna demanded an explanation. Thankfully, she was more curious than she was intimidated; Mordechai could hardly ask for more.

A few months later, Edna had to have a serious surgery done. I… really haven’t given much thought as to what kind of surgery it would be, but it doesn’t matter. That was when she had her first encounter with a real Fear Entity: the Flesh. Her surgeon (or what had pretended to be one — I guess we’ll never know whether the thing was actually qualified to perform surgery) had, for reasons known only to the Flesh and its avatars, given her a few more limbs than necessary… specifically, four limbs more than she already had. Perhaps it sensed how tightly the Web had wrapped itself around the girl, and was trying to appeal to what she had so much potential to become; perhaps it was its sick idea of fun. We will never know whether the thing that was trying to pass for a human surgeon actually performed the operation it was meant to, because Edna had woken up quite a while before the end of the surgery, and, overcome with terror of what had been done to her body (grasping at what little control she had left in the situation, wishing, so desperately, for more) Became a part of the Web. She puppeteered the Flesh avatar and made it kill itself on the spot; not very creative of her, I admit, but then again: she had only just begun her journey. She would be getting way more creative with her future victims, that’s for sure.

Being so heavily marked by the Flesh, Edna gained minor shapeshifting abilities: namely, the ability to change her limbs into other kinds of limbs, in any way and any order, as long as there were always exactly 8 of them. This means she could have 3 pairs of arms and 2 legs; 3 pairs of legs & 2 arms; with quite a bit of practice, 8 spider legs, or 6 spider legs and two arms — like a sort of spider-centaur; and an endless number more different variations.

She is of caring nature; quite prim, and rather classy; and yet still possesses a snarky and sharp character. I’d say she is the Mary Poppins of the monster world ;}

Ignat Lotti

Ignat (it/its) is an avatar of the Vast, an alloaro lesbian, and, in its own words, a “creature”. It is goth, but in a slightly more classy way than, say, Gerry. It is Mordechai’s daughter and heir to the House of Lotti — although it doesn’t expect to inherit much, what with its father being a possibly-immortal avatar and all.

Circumstances of Ignat’s birth: Mordechai had a transgender male lover, who had born Ignat. At some point, the two would have to have gotten a rather messy break-up, given that said lover is completely absent from either Ignat’s or Mordechai’s life — maybe they’re dead, I wouldn’t know. The fact remains, that Ignat does not have a second parent. I think it would be rather interesting if they weren’t dead and Ignat was to meet them by accident, when they’re already an adult or at least an older teen; it would be a curious scene.

Ignat became an avatar at the meager age of 8, and was very excited to do so. This is because of the way it was raised; or, more precisely, the general culture of the ever-growing House of Lotti. Basically, Mordechai and Edna had this wonderful idea: to make sure that avatars would be formed from a younger age, and to train them with all the entities that would like to support the newly-formed servants of fear. To do so, they had made sure that every child or adolescent that made it into their humble abode — family of an avatar, a plaything of an avatar who would just become food if they hadn’t bargained for the human’s relative freedom, a random village kid spending a lot of time with the kitchen staff — was strongly encouraged to become an avatar. They provided the young humans with not-so-traumatic opportunities to familiarize themselves with the Entities, taught them to take pride in serving one, and celebrated every newly formed avatar. When a child — Ignat — was born into the family, it was, naturally, treated quite the same — if not more so.

Now, Ignat was the first child to actually be born into the family (and yes, I’m calling Mordechai and Edna family, because after so many years, and building a home together, even if they had never been in any way romantically involved, that’s kind of what they have become. Fight me about my found family tropes, go on). The others, however welcome — and despite Mordechai not being much of a children person, he had made sure they were welcome — would come and go, but Ignat was the first one to actually live there, permanently (until it would move out, that is). Which could mean… possibly, quite a lot of trouble.

Anywho, Ignat knew that it was destined for the Vast from the very first time Simon Fairchild agreed to take it for a joyride. It had worked consistently towards their Becoming, and finally Became one overcast, windy day, when it leapt off a cliff into potentially freezing waters for the first time in its life. With a scream of “you can have me, I am yours!”, 8-year-old Ignat didn’t quite vanish into thin air as much as it was eaten by it.

Its pronoun and gender revelation would come to it only a few days later, over a (human) breakfast shared with its father (despite technically not needing to eat, Mordechai enjoys it quite a lot, and at the time, Ignat was still in the happbit of doing so regularly). It had asked Mordechai, “Father, I’ve been thinking. Am I human?” To which Mordechai answered with an explanation of how humanity is just a label and that Ignat could choose to be as human as it wanted to be. Ignat thought about it for a while, and then told him that it thinks it’s actually a creature, and would like to go by it/its pronouns, if that’s alright by him. In response, Mordechai barely raised an eyebrow, shrugged and said, “Alright. I think we can do that.”

Ignat’s Becoming was celebrated and boasted about — it being the youngest avatar in recorded history, and everything. Ignat itself was overjoyed to find it could access a whole new, and quite endless, realm; it was slightly less overjoyed by the revelation that it absolutely had to chuck people into it (less out of moral concern, and more out of that territoriality children tend to feel about absolutely everything), but after a description of what would happen if it didn’t, did so without question.

It then had proceeded to test the limits of its newfound abilities not unlike how one would test the charge of an electric socket with a metal fork; that said, Edna only had to rescue Ignat from falling into an active volcano once. Given that it had easy access to representatives of all kinds of entities, Mordechai and Edna had arranged it so Ignat would study and train with (and against) different Powers. Ignat’s main ability (not including the usual Vast stuff — like chucking people into the endless sky) is controlling the distance around them. My headcanon is that every avatar has a bit of a different kind of flavor to their power — so if Mike Crew makes people feel a strong sense of vertigo, Ignat doesn’t normally do that. Instead, it unconsciously makes objects and people move farther away from it wherever it finds itself (and it requires conscious control to stop it from doing so) and, if it actually focuses, it can do so on purpose, utilizing this ability in a variety of different ways. For example, Ignat can take a point on an object — say, a book — another point on the table the book lies on, and increase the distance between the two points, causing the book to levitate above the table.

A little elaboration on how its powers work: if the table was standing on a trampoline, then not only would the book levitate, but the table would also be pushed downwards. Ignat has to make quite a few calculations to make sure it manipulates the objects’ distance from each other in exactly the way it wants to. All of this means it has to practice a lot to fully utilize its abilities :]

The Cook

A usually nameless figure (except that her name is Marinette, or Mari) the Cook (she/they) becomes a regularly occurring background character in Ignat’s life… Just as little Ignat becomes a regularly occurring annoyance in Mari’s.

The Cook is a retired Russian spy, settled down into a job that allows her to escape her past and go properly into hiding. But wait! She’s not actually a Russian spy! Indeed, that’s just a mask. She’s a French spy playing the long game by pretending to be a Russian spy… so caught up in the web of lies that in the end it was for the best to exit the game altogether. Except that no, that’s not true either! She’s an identity thief, pretending to be a Russian spy pretending to be a French spy, and her only motivation for it is “rascality, pure rascality”. At the moment she’s on the run from both governments, but she expects that in a few years she will be able to re-enter the game.

The Cook is not French. And her name is not Marinette.

She is the oldest member of staff in the House. Strangely resilient to The Horrors, nonplussed, and determined more than anything to keep her humanity and do her job, she is a fearsome woman. With a seemingly endless coming and going of easily traumatized assistants, she is the Gertrude Robinson of the kitchen. Her cooking is delicious, snd the manner in which she goes about life is vicious. It’s a miracle, honestly, that she hasn’t yet been claimed by one Entity or another.

That said, there’s a strict rule, applying to both the habitants and the visitors of the House, against purposefully feeding on the staff (that doesn’t help a few accidents, and the more religious or superstitious people get terrified by the smallest things — sometimes to a downright disrespectful level: Nicola Orsinov is an esteemed guest, and her face, or lack thereof, is hardly something to scream and run away to hide in an empty room, shaking with terror, about!). There are a few other rules, such as: do not set fires in the library; clean up, or call the cleaning personnel, if something you do leaves a lot of grime behind (including dirt, gore, and unidentifiable materials which don’t seem to abide by the rules of Euclidean geometry — that one is directed at the Spiral); don’t you dare lay a finger on Ignat outside of scheduled training; wipe your feet before entering from the street.

There is, also, the mater of the Sigil. The Sigil is a stark, easily identifiable mark created by Mordechai with the help of an avatar of the Beholding (and, obviously, his own Spiral abilities) used to signify to any avatar or monster that if they lay a finger, prehensile leg, weapon, or telepathic strike on a ‘Sigilled’ person, they will suffer the consequences of Mordechai, Edna, or their various allies’ rage. Ignat is sigilled until it turns 18, allowing it to wreck all kinds of mischief with little consequence until then.

Now, it’s rather obvious that with all of their identity shenanigans, the Cook should definitely belong to the Stranger. Nicola Orsinov had once laid her eyes on them, and immediately had become obsessed with claiming them for her own — except that Mari is incredibly resilient and all Nicola’s efforts prove to be futile. It becomes a sort of one-sided obsession bordering on attraction from Nicola’s side; but for the Cook, the scary, sexy mannequin lady who sometimes visits — rarely sporting any skin — is just another Fear-related nuisance. I kinda ship them >:3

In general, Mari is very resilient to the Fears. After a few months working there, Mordechai had called her into his office and filled them in on the Powers and all that, even offering to help them join some entity or another, but she refused. She is utterly disinterested in the “cult nonsense” everybody around her seems to be knee-deep in, but won’t resign because, well… this job pays incredibly well, asks no questions, and allows her to pursue her culinary passion. Once, a few men in black suits, whose faces she could swear she’s seen before somewhere back in Russia, turned up at the doorstep; at the time, an avatar of the Beholding (from the Usher Foundation, maybe? I don’t have a name for him yet, but he’s a recurring character) was visiting, and it took him only a glance to discern that the men had come for Mari. He had winked at her as he passed her in the corridor leading to the tower (where the Vast avatars likes to reside) and dropped the knowledge that they didn’t have to run — and yes, she already had her duffel bag in hand — right into her head. As she stood there, stunned, he’s called for someone, and soon enough, the men in black suits were gone, never to be seen again.

Needless to say, there are very few persons of the household staff who manage to stay for longer than a few months, so the Cook is highly appreciated and respected among all. Eventually — after something especially unsavory Nicola had pulled — she agrees to be sigilled (and yes, her life becomes much easier, and no, she will not be joining one of your cults, Mr Lotti).

Right! I couldn’t wait any longer to post this, so this just about wraps up part 1! I’m open to questions and to chat about my au. Feel free to tell me about your tma OCs too, we can compare and share and do collabs! :3

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ffg7 · 28 days ago

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Genuinely Insane Thoughts about Yunho

whatever that means

As a certified man-hater and, quite frankly, a worryingly big ATEEZ fan, I often find myself in a state of cognitive dissonance. Because I do enjoy their content—I really do—until they do things that remind me that they are, in fact, men. And then my feelings get complicated.

Quick disclaimer: deep down, I know that not all men are horrible. There are way too many of them for all of them to be shit—it’s not statistically possible. I’m also of the opinion that the belief that having a Y chromosome somehow makes you a worse person than everyone else is nothing more than yassified gender essentialism. Having a penis is no more of a moral flaw than having a vagina.

If you’re asking me, the real disaster of the human experience is that we cannot reproduce monoparentally (is that a word? Who knows? Definitely not me) like an amoeba. I would love to give birth to my genetic clones. It’s the fact that your children are their own people that throws me off about reproduction.

However, I can count the men I’ve felt respected by on one hand. The men in my life—whether they were family, friends, or lovers—really dropped the ball with me. It sucks, but it’s something I’ll have to learn to deal with. Not because I feel bad for the random men I subconsciously treat like a threat to my livelihood, but because it is simply too hard to go about your life when half the world's population unconsciously gets registered as a threat.

Trying to have a genuine connection with a man is something I’m working on—not because I think that a woman’s life cannot be complete without a male presence, but because I think it might help me lose some of the existential dread that’s swallowing up my life.

That’s how I got into K-pop, and especially boy groups. It was, initially, a way to microdose male company. Of course, there were other reasons too, but in the context of this essay, they’re irrelevant.

Boy groups were built—and this can be generalized to apply to Western groups as well—to appeal to a majority female fanbase that often lives a majority of their lives being slighted by their male counterparts. Whether that manifests as being passed over for a promotion in favor of a male colleague, or falling out of favor with the family the moment you turn thirty and aren’t married with 2.5 kids, it doesn’t take long for a woman to realize that her gender really isn’t society’s preferred alternative.

And that sucks. Which is why most boy groups develop this sort of neutrality towards gender equality. They need to appeal to their female audience while keeping their own views on feminism and women vague enough not to fall out of favor with the still very patriarchal society we live in.

Yunho is pretty decent at keeping things vague—mostly because he treats his fans like an amorphous blob that he has trained to tell him the things he wants to hear. For all he cares, he goes on live to flirt with a mass of neon-green slime. He doesn’t necessarily want to connect with his fans, and when that connection does happen, it’s always in spite of his efforts.

The waterworks only come at concerts, when he has no choice but to come face-to-face with the fact that the amorphous blob is made up of individuals.

However, I’ll leave the full scope of my totally insane thoughts about Yunho for another time, because the point I’m trying to make is that—when he’s not non-consensually having a genuine connection with the audience—he really isn’t giving up anything about himself.

His views about the economic state of the world? Who knows. His thoughts on life? He wants to win it, but other than that, I wouldn’t know. Does he think women are people? I mean… I think so? But to my knowledge, he’s said nothing to prove or disprove that statement.

Another member who’s pretty good at giving up absolutely nothing about himself is Yeosang. Although his aloofness—unlike Yunho’s—is more of a natural-born trait than a concentrated effort, he still stands in stark contrast to the rest of the members, who will occasionally try to (with varying degrees of subtlety—yes, Seonghwa, I’m looking at you and your pride toothpaste) hint at their worldviews.

That makes them easy to digest, which I believe is a conscious choice to an extent. The less you give up about yourself, the more space you leave for others to fill in the gaps. This way, you can be whoever the other person wants you to be.

So if he’s giving up so little of himself, why is it that I feel this weird kinship with this strange man from a land far, far away? I see his frankly comical level of competitiveness about all things in life and the perfectionism he exerts over his work, and it’s like looking in the mirror.

I am too old to be experiencing this level of parasocial relationship. Especially with a man, of all things.

What have you done to me, Yunho? You interesting motherfucker.

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syoddeye · 4 months ago

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I love your writing so much and I was wondering if you could share I don’t know maybe your thought process or if you took classes or something I don’t know 👉🏼👈🏼 I’m obsessed with your writing style 😭

hi! thanks so much. i'm a little gobsmacked. i've struggled with my self-confidence lately and this is really kind.

i haven't taken writing classes since college. i only started writing fiction again two-ish years ago. i've had to unlearn and relearn a lot, and there is still so much room to grow and many ways to improve.

my writing style is an amorphous blob. i try to shape it a little differently for each project. with every fic i write, i am constantly asking:

flow: is it too choppy? is it too long? what's more important to the story in this moment—action or introspection?

vocabulary: would the character know/use this word to describe something/someone? does it fit the vibe to throw out a word like 'selachian'? or would 'shark-like' make more sense? this isn't always a hard-and-fast rule. if i want to emphasize the vibe, i go with the two-dollar word.

am i sticking to my theme? have i used a motif enough/too much? at what point am i sticking the audience's face into the message vs what do i want them to discover for themselves?

etc.

i don't know if that makes sense, so here are a couple examples:

down the hatch: funny, irreverent, and horny. badger (reader) has lost her marbles and manners. i favor shorter and punchier sentences, and a simpler vocabulary. less poetics. slang and swearing.

you want to hurl a pastry. a knife. a stick of dynamite. you couldn’t miss people, couldn’t want some around. not these dickhead invaders. john’s eyes say it all. underscore their intentions. they’re sticking around and digging in. potentially inviting more fucking soldier types underground.

reminiscent: literally a sensory story. runt (reader) is an omega with a condition that heightens her sense of smell to an unbearable degree, so i lean into a vocabulary that reflects that. she's also grieving, isolated, clever, and introverted, leading to a lot of self-reflection and observation.

You tiptoe and peer inside. It’s difficult to see in the dark, but you smell him. Leather and tobacco. Cedar and amber. Myrrh, tilled soil, and poppies. How on the nose for a soldier to smell like death itself. But poking through the thick, funereal brume is juniper and pine. The hours preceding heavy snowfall. It’s an odd combination, grounding and sharp, petrous and serene. A graveyard in the dead of winter.

cygnet, plucked: more romanticism, more poetics, but still simple. one goal was to emphasize shy's lack of experience with humanity, and to keep the horror of the premise rose-tinted.

The honeycomb drips viscous gold, pooling in the flat of a salted biscuit before spilling over your lips. John hums, pleased, pressing the next bite to your mouth. You chew, tasting the wildflowers.

general tips:

take ample breaks

analyze your favorite author's works (i stare longingly at my mutuals)

find and study writing resources (@/peachesofteal has a great list)

pursue other creative hobbies to scratch the itch when you can't bring yourself to write

lmao, i am so sorry i carried on like this, but you caught me in a chatty mood. i hope this is helpful. i am definitely not an expert.

#sy asks #long post #i am definitely not an expert

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tennessoui · 1 year ago

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the trainspotting watch got me thinking about the relationship between characters on the page & the actors who breathe life into them. speculatively, do you think you'd still have loved the anakin/obi wan dynamic if it hadn't been hayden & ewan? ALSO, when you write, do you picture hayden & ewan's faces? bc when i read obikin fic (or any fic) i don't picture the actor's faces, i make up their faces in my head like i would for any book

haha this is a great ask! I’m historically very very bad at face recognition tbh - when I’m writing fic, I’m really not thinking of the actors at all for the most part. But I’m also not really picturing anything different? They are amorphous blobs composed of words only and labeled with a big ANAKIN and OBI-WAN stamped across their foreheads

I’m joking a little but I also do think that’s why I’m so good at entertaining so many different variations of obikin in my head and on tumblr. I’m not constrained by what the actors looked like in the movies or tv shows, they can be whatever I need them to be for the au — as long as their names and certain characteristics of them stay the same, they’re recognizable to us even if the physical appearance differs

this is, however, also why anakins hair color can change 5 times in one multi-chapter fic. obi-wan’s eye color also. Their height and muscularity. etc etc

#asks #that being said tho I have used reference images in the past #but it’s never something I search for #I just stumble across a gif on my dash and stop scrolling #holding that gif of the actor looking a specific way while I work on my fic in another tab #I did that with the last chapter of foolproof foolhardy #I’ve done that with PBATMB #I did that with the poolboy au #mostly all gifs of ewan mcgregor #but it’s not illegal to have a favorite 🤡#/jk

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squawk-chatterbox · 8 months ago

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Jeepers, it’s really tempting to just leave a bit of art like this and then vanish with no context but that seems a bit too much like I’m screaming into some kind of void.

Actually I guess this technically still counts into screaming into some kind of void because I don’t know how tumblr…works? I don’t mind being unseen in the eyes of the vast public currently, I fully believe if I just stay active and keep posting things people will eventually congregate into some amorphous blob I can then manipulate with all the various subliminal messaging in my art.

Haha what? who said that? I’m joking though (for now in this case) because this art doesn’t have anything like that.

But I must satisfy the people who don’t like reading so before the text strays too far from the image…

TL:DR Folks it’s a deceptively peaceful scene, in actuality what you’re seeing is a picture straight from one of the most inhospitable places in this fictional world!

And now if you’ll follow me to the context…

This is a thing I drew for some worldbuilding I’m doing. The location is an environment that was once a rainforest, but too much farming and industry turned it into a bit of a hellscape.

Centuries after, the people have - mostly - learned the errors of their ways and the vegetation is reclaiming the land once more, albeit slowly. Very slowly, for the atmosphere is crippled and the land lacks nutrients, so grass practically owns the landscape, and makes trees kind of a rarity.

It does rain around here, but without a mass of trees the further into the hellscape you travel the less rainfall you’ll see, and the more wildfires because phoenixes absolutely adore a nice sun scorched savannah, it’s practically a playground for them.

Of course, despite all that, where there’s plants, there’s animals to eat those plants, and those wyverns sure animals.

They are grazers, not likely as big as what you may be imagining, they’re a bit smaller than the size of your average coyote. They can also fly, which is helpful in a place that is so hot and dry it spontaneously combusts.

Y’know what auto ignition is? It’s a term that’s used to describe an environment that has enough heat, oxygen, and fuel to get a fire going without a spark. Usually it happens in burning buildings, or where there’s a fuel that’s really combustible.

So, yes, this place is that inhospitable. You thought deserts were bad? Imagine being a dehydrated traveler trying to get through THIS place and suddenly everything from the grass snagging at your clothes to your hat is on fire. So yeah, flying is useful for running away.

Note there’s no real megafauna in this place, it’s not possible, you get caught too far from what remains of the rainforest on a particularly hot day, and can’t book it before noon you’re dead.

#art #animals #digital art #worldbuilding #worldbuild #dragon art #wyvern #how do you tag #like I said still new to this whole tumblr thing

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la-principessa-nuova · 11 months ago

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So one thing that’s been a bit disappointing lately is I don’t feel like I get many chances to girlmode, since I live within line of sight of my parents’ house, and I’m not out to my dad, so if I need to step outside even to get a package, I risk him seeing me.

And since I’m not going anywhere in girlmode, and I don’t exactly boymode at home, more of amorphous blob mode, so as long as I’m not being perceived by anyone else, it’s not so bad.

But that means the only thing I normally only bother even dressing in fem clothes and wearing a wig for therapy, but I don’t even bother putting on makeup for it.

But today, I was just getting home from a 1-night trip before therapy, and I was planning on not seeing anyone and needed to change (I didn’t bring a change of clothes since I was gone less than 24 hours), so I figured it was the perfect time to go all in on girlmode (but with light makeup because I didn’t have a ton of time between getting home and therapy).

So I went with that plan, and I felt great. After therapy I’m sitting on the couch watching Dropout, and I get a text from my sister to look at the sky because it’s so red. I go to the window and peak out the blinds. It’s kinda red, so I respond, “i guess so”. Then at the same time she said it’s “from the explosion” and my dad asks if I saw the moon tonight.

So I try to peak out and see if either there’s really something going on in the sky or if they’re outside. I don’t see anything, so I move to the window going out to my deck and I pull down one slat to peak out, and then as I’m scanning the sky for anything weird, I see a hand wave in front of the blinds.

I jump from the jump scare and let go of the blind. But now I need to know who’s there. If it’s just my mom and/or my sister, I didn’t exactly feel like dealing with them seeing me girlmode for the first time tonight, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world (although I would have wished I had done my makeup better, plus I’d rubbed my eyes and smudged my mascara). But if my dad was there, I needed to go change.

So I tried peeking beside the blinds, but then I realized they might be able to see me fully if I stand there, so after that, I ran out of the living room and into my bedroom, not stopping to pause the show I was watching. Then I literally just pull everything off as fast as possible and wash my makeup off and scramble to get dressed in boymode.

Then it turned out it was my mom and sister, but they were gone now. But it just sucked because tonight was an attempt to get back in the habit of putting in more effort and getting used to just girlmoding around the house and not feeling scared to be comfortable in my own house, and instead it just reinforced the idea of risk.

#trans #transgender #i hope this is all legible and dreams aren’t mixed in because i did start falling asleep writing this

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unkownmilk · 10 months ago

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TLDR; Kids require context for us not to “hate” them

Now coming from someone who is confidently child free, but has also dedicated their career to working with kids I think it comes down to this

“Kids, babies, and young ‘uns” as a generic amorphous blob - awful. The worst. Categorically terrible. Babies especially terrify me - they can’t tell you what’s wrong and you never know what they’re thinking. I truly think they all plan world domination but forget those plans once they start toddling

HOWEVER, Weans(a good Scottish word for all types of kids) in specific contexts, such as family members, people you know well -and very importantly- when they are well behaved and ~not my problem~ can be super adorable, interesting and down right hilarious at times.

But yeah the internet is full of salty wee bams who like to be a contrarian. Theres also a much larger conversation about overpopulation, fighting gender and society norms and other important but at times superfluous

Anyway that’s my midnight thoughts 💭

people online talk so much about hating babies and kids but in "the meatspace" people LOVE babies. hang out with a baby and you will see so many people staring at you with big smiles and waving at you and going "that baby is SO cute" and generally being pleasant unprompted. the lady at the vietnamese place just now gave us like three extra soup spoons because my niece loves those spoons but kept dropping them on the floor and the lady kept giving us more with a massive smile on her face. on our walk today a bunch of construction guys waved and grinned at her the whole time we walked by, and when we passed by an elementary school a little girl said "your baby's really sweet!" babies are not balls of irritation and hatred they are beacons of joy and kindness actually and they bring out the best in strangers. whenever im out with her we have multiple positive interactions with strangers who are so happy to see her. or maybe it's just that my baby niece is the cutest most wonderful baby in the world :]

#kids #child free #response #mostly just a wee ramble because it’s a thing in actually quite fascinated by #also I’m sure op’s niece is in fact the sweetest baby in the world they always are #text

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merryfortune · 1 year ago

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kick me when I’m down (something only cowards do)

Written for Respectfulshipping 2024

Prompt: Courage | Cowardice

Title: kick me when I’m down (something only cowards do)

Ship: Respectfulshipping | Ryoken/Spectre

Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! Vrains

Word Count: 1,236

Rating: T

Tags: Missing Scene, Whump, Hurt/No Comfort, Crying, Assault, Nightmares

It wasn’t the darkness which bothered Spectre but rather the loneliness.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been suspended in this state of darkness. Hours? Days? Weeks? It was difficult to parse time as he drifted in and out of consciousness, all by himself with the worry that he may never awaken gnawing on him but he was better company than… than, well, Ai.

And Ai did pop in and out on occasion. Very rarely. Just to make him want it, then revile him. Made sense. Ai was the one who had put him in this noxious comatose state, after all. He wanted Spectre to suffer. Fair enough.

But this was different.

“Hello again.” Ai smiled, it was a sharp and pointy V-shaped smile with bright eyes.

Spectre roused. He floated, endlessly, and looked down over his body at Ai.

Ai snapped his fingers and thunk. Gravity existed once more. The darkness had solid form and Spectre landed on all fours: his knees and hands taking the brunt of it, jarring his joints. He spitefully looked up at Ai who bent down over him.

“How’s it going?” Ai asked.

Spectre glared.

“Not a very chatty guy, are you?” Ai mused. “Better change that, I want your opinion on something. You’re going to love this.”

The emphasis that Ai put on “love” made Spectre’s skin crawl. He started to get up. Ai side-stepped him. No offer of help, not that Spectre would have accepted it anyway but he kind of appreciated the fact that Ai wasn’t even going to pretend to have goodwill around him. After all, it was abundantly clear to Spectre that this was all to taunt him.

Spectre stood tall, but with his hand on his other arm, shoulder away from Ai as Ai snapped his fingers and there was, at long last, a light in the darkness. A picture into a world beyond the amorphous blob of blackness that Spectre had found himself languishing within the however long he had been forced this fate.

“Look who it is?” Ai gleefully asked. “Your favourite, your beloved, the man you claim you have dedicated your soul to.”

Spectre looked into this portal. It was in the shape of Ai’s head as an Ignis - bulbous with a flourish at the end, because of course it was - and revealed not much. Not at first, anyway. Long grass. A scene which was cloudy and murky with rain. Then Spectre saw exactly who Ai meant.

“Revolver-sama.” he exclaimed.

The picture moved like it was following a documentarian’s camera. It moved through the long grass and rain and showed two other people. Playmaker. And Soulburner. Spectre glanced warily at Ai and Ai encouraged him to look again. To look closer.

He saw it. In front of the rim of a verdant forest was a plain and unassuming building with a chain-link, electrified fence around the perimeter. It was a cement box and one full of precious memories. For Spectre at least.

This was the Link VRAINS - he could tell from the costumes that his master and two allies donned - and yet there it was. The building which was host and home to the Lost Incident.

“I wonder what they’re doing…” Ai mused.

He snapped his fingers a second time. There was audio now.

Not that he wanted to listen.

No, Spectre refused to listen.

Just a couple words from their exchanges, he understood immediately why Ai wanted to show him this. Make him experience this. It was worse than a nightmare. Spectre grit his teeth and did everything in his power to ignore the scene, he tried to drown it out with his own thoughts, own denial, own anything but with Ai by his side.

He was smothered. Ai was rubbing him in it.

“All these nice sentiments and wonderful exchanges, talk of the future and moving forward. I’m sure you find it nauseating, don’t you?” Ai asked. “Because, oops, where are you? No mention of you… You don’t even exist to Playmaker, to Soulburner, not even to-”

“Shut your mouth.” Spectre snarled.

“The man who you have dedicated your soul to.” Ai sneered.

Spectre stood up and he stood eye to eye with Ai. Of which, they were eerie and unnatural. Gleaming in yellow and orange. He smirked.

“You really are a ghost, aren’t you?” Ai taunted him. “You’re dead to them, even the man you love. Otherwise, surely, he would carry your spirit for you, hm?”

Spectre’s brows twinged.

“He’d be including you.” Ai continued.

Spectre bit his lips. Ai didn’t know anything. That didn’t make it hurt less as his heart constricted. He was fine as is. Ryoken-sama knew he was fine as is.

Like yes, of course, he was just like the others. He wanted to be heard, listened to, validated but he had transmuted his pain into pleasure and he didn’t want to back down from that. Spectre had steadfast belief in Ryoken because Ryoken understood him when and where no one else did or want to. Spectre held onto that as Ai bore his fangs as he watched this duel in the rain and steam.

“He would be striving for you, as well, not just his favourite victims of the Incident.” Ai said.

That.

That hurt. That got under his skin and pierced the blood vessels, set his nerves alight. Spectre twitched, he quivered.

But the fact he was such a fleck to any of them. Sure, it was understandable. He and Playmaker did not see eye to eye. He didn’t exist to Soulburner. But to Revolver? Ryoken…? That opened an old wound that had been in Spectre’s psyche for as long as he had been alive.

He loved Ryoken and Ryoken loved him. This duel didn’t prove anything contrary. Despite how Ai would provoke him, that’s what Spectre turned into a mantra.

“Shut up.” Spectre snapped. A tear in the corner of his eye.

“Ooh touchy.” Ai laughed. He leaned in, too close to Spectre’s face, “I learned from the best.”

Spectre made a strangled noise. He always knew, deep down, that the consequences of his actions would catch up to him. He just thought karma would leave him alone when he was dead. Comatose and dreaming was close enough as he tried not to budge but with Ai all but literally breathing down his neck, it was hard.

“Go away.” Spectre hissed.

“I will.” Ai said.

And he wasn’t lying.

But that didn’t mean that he didn’t have a parting gift either as Spectre listened to more of this duel between Revolver and Soulburner waged on with Playmaker as an adjudicator. All three of them unaware that there was another spectator at all. Another victim yearning for catharsis regarding the Incident, too…

He was swift to strike Spectre down. Physically. Not just emotionally. He kicked Spectre down. His breath got caught in his mouth as Ai winded him and beat down on him. Viscous kick after kick. He couldn’t help himself, a violent glee on his face as he delivered what Spectre had coming to him.

Spectre girded his stomach, taking Ai’s boot over and over again. He curled up foetally, hands behind his head to protect his neck and clenched his eyes. Tight. He choked back sobs with every thump, thump, thump that he endured under Ai’s assault.

At least some of them were getting catharsis.

It just wasn’t him.

#kick me when I’m down (something only cowards do)#respectfulshippingweek2024 #yugioh vrains #vrains #yugioh #spectre (vrains)#ryoken kogami #ai (vrains)#writing tag

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uncle-smog · 2 years ago

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No leaves rest above

Pavilion, where you stand

Retching

Wobbling as the

Hours pass by.

The train was

Never coming,

These rails rest and

Now fade away

To give these last

Directions to you.

Soft, surculose stems jut

Out from under the

Long-rusted beams,

Some had grown enough to

Wrap completely around the

Metal and spread;

These sprouts, upon attaining enough

Solar energy, sprout probiscis that

Feel around heady above

For ground-flying birds or

Wrists to clasp onto.

When both satiated and

Rested, the feelers secrete celestial

Dewdrops, warm glow of

Home hanging low to

Lead you back.

Automatic steps on cracked wood tracks,

Silent refuge turns to

Highway-hum as the dewdrops clear to a

Forests end on six-lane amorphous wall.

Crossing midnighter-checkered streets,

The torrential storm wanes as

The strip-mall wave comes flooding

Inward.

The legs haven’t hinted a

Grain to your brain where they

Know they’re going.

Lightning strikes the

Night-expanse sideways,

The POI turning a plushy,

Wounded sort of pulsing

Violet while the clouds

Struggle to keep clasping on.

The wind snips with

Soaking ferocity,

Dispersing seeds of abandon away from

Their birth-plants into your

Nostrils and eyes, only you’re

Too absorbed by the sky.

How almost infantile it

Makes the whole world feel,

Like the “lost” innocence every

Waking adult spends their burnout

Secretly pining for, came back

Compounded together, just to say, ”Hey,

we’re still here, just a

little less unreachable now.”

Below, a shifting suburban scene cut to

Dreamscape, hallucinatory and

Only remembered in neural shatters.

Passing faces, once

Cascading shadows of veiled

Harm, now are alit with

Early-morning honesty, earnest and

Unafraid to approach while you

Keep floating on.

Cackling bipedal lizards, half our average

Height, on average, and stout,

Peppered with strands of

Sea-gunk, drowned flowers,

Cross to your side.

You listen-in as their

Warbling voices wash over you,

They talk of highway ghosts, planned Chevrolet

Desert odysseys, Coast to Coast AM.

The guttural snarking’s fade before you

Realize you’ve shifted away.

Black night has begun dripping

Down to a concentrated meeting with the

Skyline.

A low hiss emanates from above,

Thick, fog-injected gusts of wind settle

Largo on the winding streets.

Where had all those well

-worn faces gone,

Glistening night falls like

Gestating flesh before you.

Splintering and ethereal darkness

Slithering, receding behind out-of

-view corners.

You can walk on your own

Now, there’s no glowy-warmth

Inside anymore.

More globules of night come

Crashing through shingles,

Conglomerating into a

Singular onyx blob and

Retreating into the home.

Wolf-fangs have been

Sewn into the wind,

to march is to be

devoured.

Behind, through metallic voice comes

Cranking, “Did you notice the

Sky’d stopped singing?”

You turn to a rusted-in

-most-parts impersonation of

Man, with

Twisting vines and gnarled

Roots for a right leg.

They’re right, the stabbing

Persists, but its now

Entirely mute.

The mechanoid catches up, each leg

Creaking an antithesis to the other.

“You have been out here

Watching the sky too?”

No.

Their speech is the stench of

Rotted wood soaked in tar.

“Sorry. Going home?”

I think so.

The stretch of road in

Front of you quits shifting,

Its now just a long stretch of

Forever to pack in everyone thinking they

Could’ve done so much more.

They let out a prolonged, icy hiss that

Produces ice crystals around their

Brass faceplate.

“Where is that?”

I guess I don’t really know

Now.

“Why is that?”

I just

Can’t stop moving forward,

Everything’s passing me by and

I can’t even appreciate my time here,

Living as something so perishable,

So prone to spoilage,

Sabotage,

So undeserving of this

Much self-absorption.

“Let’s sit here?”

I mean, I’m always just

Prepping for everything to come

Crashing down, everyone to

Leave me and my mind to start breaking

Down, deteriorating and filling the

Cracks with nothings of my own.

Their root leg, precision-crossed over the

Metal one begins to glow a soft, cosmic

Blue from within, buzzing and lightly

Pushing against the bark of his shin.

“Ah, this.” They reach two thin-tweezer

Fingers into a nook and

Shank around with mechanoid gravitas,

Producing the source of the glow;

A Celestial dewdrop,

Fluttering innocence in between two stakes.

“It would like to leave now. Or be with you.”

The hum of light slowly ascends,

Flickering as it goes to

rest inside your collarbone.

What’s it doing on me?

“I wouldn’t know.”

The night is once again an

Expansive ruin, ink-bathed and

Glossed over.

You feel the wisp lightly

Pulse against your skin

To the beat of the child’s

Heart buried within.

#poem #original poem #gay poetry ohh nooo #typing out all my notebooks into a word doc this is the first thing #please tell me shit

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kiefbowl · 2 years ago

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some women do not have any patience for abused women and women in abusive situations, and I see it on radblr all the time. it’s unfortunate. what gets me is that they’re very willing to dissect every decision the abused woman made, but seem unwilling to believe in the intentions of his actions. women should know the red flags, but men aren’t responsible for the red flags, those just happen spontaneously. she shouldn’t have trusted him, but anything that happened that gained her trust was a spontaneous phenomenon not something he did intentionally. it’s as if up until the moment of abuse, he’s an amorphous blob who just accidentally explodes into abuse. he’s featureless, but his arms swing randomly. her money ends up in his account due to his oafishness, not insidiousness. when they started dating, he must have been a passive actor - not perusing her with the specific hopes of dominating her once all opportunities align.

Men are responsible for their actions, and not only their abusive actions. They’re responsible for the roses they send, too.

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incompleteninny · 3 years ago

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Another free, unedited chapter of my upcoming book, “The Heist at Cordia Aquarium” is now available on its website (click here to read from the beginning).

I shamelessly ripped the sink compulsion from part of my own rituals and it’s currently the most annoying one to deal with. Let me wash my hands in peace you darn short-circuiting meat computer!

Days blur past out of Avery's reach. Tamika drowns her in work, Valerie invites her to tea too much, her parents ask her too many questions. It all melds together into one amorphous blob of time that she can't make heads or tails of. Except for the stress, the obsessions and compulsions.

Drink earl grey in Valerie's office: she's trying to poison you, spit it out into that plant.

Scrape stubborn algae off the sides of the near-empty snail tanks: wash it out again, microscopic pieces of glass you dislodged will kill the snails in horrific fashion. Wash it, come on!

Have dinner with Mom and Dad: all this moping and crying around is disgusting, they're going to kick you out if you don't apologize to them. Do it.

Every day, Avery goes to work, comes home, rushes through dinner, and collapses into bed. She cries, she falls asleep, she wakes up. Days pass one after the other, but she's not sure how many. Then, as if breaking through water to suck down a much needed breath, it all screeches to a halt.

[...]

Here’s Avery’s concept sheet. The anime toast face is exquisite, wonderful, life-giving. The way Stella paints food kills me. I’m never going to eat anything that looks that good :(

#did a covid-swab-date with my partner and there was too much sneezing for it to be romantic #tested negative though!#trying to not sneeze the swab across the room is like trying to brush your tongue without gagging #anyways book tags #wlw #lesbian protagonist #protagonist with ocd #toast #tw: OCD #yes I know she's just the classic masc lesbian #you wanna fight about it?

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not-in-the-library · 3 years ago

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So that one part of mama by mcr where there’s this huge ghost army singing along got me thinking bc I always imagine what’s going on when I listen to music yk,,, so this is a world where building mechanical stuff is unethical

So humanity kind of becomes toolbreeders like in all tomorrows, and that includes weapons of mass destruction. Breeding weapons is nothing new, but they wanted thinking, computational things so they started using humans, ew

This design was inspired by this thing from the monument mythos

The zeppelin is a more recent iteration of the weapons they wanted, as genetic alterations can take generations before receiving the desired results

In the meantime, they were making super soldiers that would be bigger and stronger than anyone else, and would be as durable as possible,,, as time went on, their thinking and free will became bothersome so they essentially left them all to die. They weren’t that strong, and despite being massive were actually very frail from being stretched so thin. They were prone to broken bones and sickness.

One of these indestructibles though, was actually immortal. She was made well enough to live long past any human or beast like her would be unable to. She ran away with the rest of her kind, but when they fell asleep and never woke up, she essentially entered hibernation and woke up decades later.

Most humans do not engage in genetic modification, and are legally barred from it in every level. Those who are changed are just embryos taken from its healthiest citizens, though disease and infection is shared between altered and organic species

There are large expanses of land where infected originally non gmo human heads sleep. They’re totally fine, their bodies have mostly assimilated into the huge amorphous blob beneath. The original organism that was disposed of there is unconscious, and the heads all share a massive linked neural network that shares thoughts dreams and memories. Being there isn’t that bad really. The process of joining is a bit distressing, but beyond that it’s pretty comfortable.

Before this organism was as expansive, the indestructibles were dumped in that area. Most of them either died before they could join, or simply have way to it. Wasteland mama was sleeping underneath the head covered terrain, but was too tough to be absorbed. There are scars and soft spots on her skin where she started to be absorbed, but they healed quickly.

The heads there actually thought she was just a part of the terrain but nope! She woke up and ran away

#art #illustrators on tumblr #illustration #digital art #g/t #inksketch #sfw g/t #giant/tiny #goblin art #g/t art #g/t community #g/t ocs #g/t comic #g/t writing prompt #g/t shitpost #giant tiny #wholesome giantess

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reachexceedinggrasp · 3 years ago

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(my original ramble from *cough* months ago that fuck it I should just post because I’m going to have to start over and this will no longer make sense once I finish the whole show)

In fairness, I've still only watched 8 episodes and I've seen more than one person say the thing doesn't properly get going until around episode 10, but I struggle to understand why Chuno is so highly regarded and enjoys almost universal acclaim. Maybe the momentum does pick up, but I don't know how much that's going to help since pacing is not really the problem I have with how it's going so far. The pacing is fine, my problem is lack of direction and lack of heart. It doesn't appear to be really about anything.

I’ve been stuck for agessss, first on ep 7 and now ep 8, and since scrubbing through some of the later eps to fix the subs after finally finding it in semi-decent quality, as far as I can determine the thesis statements of the series are: a) slavery possibly bad b) Daegil loves Ennoyeon absolutely unconditionally and always will and this may or may not be admirable of him c) loyalty??? something about saving the crown prince’s last surviving kid

And that’s it. That’s everything. It has nothing more specific to say and has almost no commentary on those two vague things that it does say. It just wants to point them out. There’s a repeated thematic beat about human dignity and not judging by appearances, but with only one exception thus far, dehumanisation is always tied directly back to the literal institution of slavery. The larger point about classism and prejudice is not developed despite looming hugely over the proceedings. It feels... hollow? I have a disconnect from what’s happening.

The positives are the fight scenes (rightfully revered, they’re balletic and gorgeous and all the work put in by the actors is fully captured by the fluid cinematography- totally get why everyone remembers these visuals, they are insanely good) and the music. The music is fantastic. That main fight song evokes historic grandeur and scale but it also has tonnes of individual personality and is an absolute banger. The editing and score always work together in a way that creates great atmosphere, powerful juxtapositions, and many iconic images. Like, A+ work on sensory storytelling, it frequently looks and feels incredibly cool and/or epic.

But it’s not a well-written show, man. There’s no real meat under all that artful presentation. The story and characters are so paper thin that I really struggle to care about them, even when there’s occasional good dialogue.

It has great eye candy (in both the usual sense and in that it just looks good in general- the stylish action beats, the stunning vistas, the grand scope), but there's no emotional core, no anchor. I'm on episode 8 and I have no idea what the actual story being told is supposed to be. It's endless exposition involving characters I mostly see no reason to care about and one giant, aimless, interminable, slow-motion chase sequence. There's certainly a prevailing theme about the rich and powerful grinding down the poor and how this creates a cycle of violence, but there's no substantive narrative tying any of it together or providing a way in for the audience. It's more of an amorphous blob of miseryporn with cheap cliffhangers than it is a story with a committed, focussed point (even one as facile as 'slavery bad', because for all the suffering on display the actual slaves are relegated to subplots, the show does not centre 'unjust society' as the villain despite feinting in that direction).

Out of the three leads, only Dae-gil is even a bit engaging to me on a pure writing level. He has some hints of genuine complexity that cause a lot of tension in everything he does, which is interesting, but he's also very, very static and opaque. You don’t really know what he’s thinking or feeling a lot of the time or what his larger motives are. But at least you wonder about him. The other two are so insufferably, staggeringly, impossibly boring that I cannot even imagine wanting to know more. The fallen general is a featureless plank of wood who causes my attention to wander every time he’s on screen and the girl is essentially a sentient piece of luggage with whom everyone falls in love for no adequately explained reason. Then these, the two most boring people in the universe, team up to be even more boring together.

It also outright lies to me with almost every episode-ending cliffhanger, in a way that borders on comic. Where the closing cliffhanger scene will be played differently with different shots in the opening of the following episode (eg: the closing sequence will have shown a big reaction of obvious shocked realisation on someone’s face as they catch sight of the person/thing they’re seeking, but the opening sequence replays the moment without the character noticing anything). Misleading us is fine, fake-outs can be okay if you don't overdo it, but fuck you show, blatant lying is too far!

Apparently it takes 15 episodes for Dae-gil and the luggage to even meet again and I'm so tired at the very idea of what nonsense will go on between now and then. I’m told there’s also no real emotional payoff or honest conversation between them later anyway. I love his undying devotion as a characterisation choice, I find his complicated attitude towards her and how it contrasts (and doesn’t) to the flashbacks really compelling in theory, but what is the point? She is a total nonentity and there’s no actual content to their relationship- there’s just the idea of it. What is he fighting for? He was this pure-hearted, clear-eyed idealist who wanted to change the world for her, then he became cynical when she left him for dead, and now he just seems ambivalent about slavery and the status quo. Disgusted by it but complicit in it. What is his suffering for? What has he learned? What’s my takeaway from this? I mean, I need to watch the rest, obviously, but seeing bits from later episodes, I’m already frustrated.

These characters just go nowhere. It feels like nothing much changes with any of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I 10000% understand why Dae-gil is an iconic performance that’s indelible in the minds of audiences and will forever define a huge part of JH’s legacy as an actor. It deserved every accolade! But it’s because of his performance not the character on the page. No one else would have been that iconic in this role. The character on the page is every bit as anaemic, thin, and lacking personality as General Balsawood and the Living China Doll. The writing is just as one note, he’s just as much of a flat, stoic cipher as Tae Ha. The reason he feels like something more than that and is about ten million times more compelling to watch than the other two leads is the utterly towering charisma of an actor who is perfectly in his element playing this part, determined to fully inhabit the role with total abandon. There’s an absolute commitment to the character that infuses everything he does on screen with life and mystery.

Jang Hyuk is making this underwritten, one-note person engaging through sheer presence and his empathy as an actor; he has this unmatched ability to bring genuine humanity to archetypal badasses and it’s the exact same quality that makes him so mesmerising as Bang-won and Oh Hyun Jae and Doctor Lee. He can be scary and vulnerable, compassionate and callous, desperate and untouchable all at the same time. There’s so much tension in the way he plays these parts, like they’re at war with themselves, really making you believe their choices are an organic manifestation of troubled psyches, and that makes the characters feel incredibly real. He creates something endearing and intriguing out of rote tough guy bullshit by always allowing a child-like element into these macho personas, a melancholy note of broken idealism.

There is a primary lack of vanity in his approach to playing the ‘cool guy’ that elevates the whole enterprise and allows you to view a stylised character as if they were a real person. He presents no sense of self-consciousness or awareness of his own image in these performances, he makes you believe he just is and it’s all effortless and that puts him in the ranks of the all-time great Byronic heroes. He is aspirational but relatable, charming without trying to be, dark without becoming unsympathetic. Those things make him seem dynamic even when the writing isn’t. If Oh Ji Ho or another equally boring actor had played Dae-gil, he’d be just as boring as Tae Ha.

For example: All three lead characters have a deliberately huge contrast between who they used to be in their past circumstances and what they are in the present of the show, but the only one who actually conveys this shift in identity with his mannerisms is Dae-gil. He comports himself so differently that you could, in fact, be completely forgiven for not recognising him as the same person; the way he speaks, the way he carries himself, the habitual set of his features, the look in his eyes, etc. has all changed. He is a radically different man than he was, obviously transformed from within by his traumatic experiences and also forced to alter his outward behaviour in order to survive.

The other two change outfits a couple times. Nothing else about them illustrates any kind of shake-up in their class status or self-understanding or emotional state. Ennoyeon’s sameness against Dae-gil’s sea-change makes her empty artificiality even more egregious. She should be just as unrecognisable as he is, her rise parallels his fall and is equally drastic.

Imo it’s 30% fortuitous casting of the exact right person and 70% JH doing all the work that makes Dae-gil an iconic character.

And I figure he alone might deserve most of the credit for creating this performance* considering how terrible Lee Da Hae is as the luggage. I know she’s not a terrible actress, she was perfectly fine in Robber, so the fact that she’s this expressionless, lifeless, sucking void of Perfect Noblewoman stereotypes (especially frustrating because she’s supposed to have been raised a slave and it makes no sense she’s this delicate, sheltered wilting flower) is something I’m going to blame on the director. I haven’t seen Oh Ji Ho in anything else, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he could do better than this, too. His woodenness might have been intended as the character being closed off, but in order for that to work you have to show there’s something going on under the surface and there isn’t. He’s got zero presence in this part, he’s overshadowed even by the one-scene day players.

So the director clearly wasn’t helping anyone much with their acting, is what I’m saying. Dae-gil’s two bros were all right, though General Choi is also a bit wooden and the ‘funny’ one can be kinda try-hard. None of the relationships in the show were super convincing, but the three of them at least had good chemistry together and comprehensible motivations. The same cannot be said of General Balsawood and the luggage, who had the opposite of chemistry. The two of them together is like watching paint dry. If the paint and the wall also somehow didn’t seem to like each other despite being inanimate.

The music is really fucking great though. I strongly suspect a massive amount of this show’s huge cultural impact comes from the epic music along with dazzling fight choreography, superbly shot, and great overall style distracting you from how boring most of the characters are. Coolness is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Even with Dae-gil, part of the appeal is definitely that he’s so cool that it covers how opaque he is as a character despite the phenomenal depth of agony he expresses. That action scene in the first episode is incredibly memorable and I can see how if you watched this on TV spread out over weeks, you’d just focus on the spectacular parts and the big tableaux with their effective imagery while forgetting the dragging, meandering, undefined slog that is the rest of it.

Edit from 300 years later: I mean, going further, and having watched some more contemporary shows, I’d venture that the action scenes are almost revolutionary for this kind of tv. They’re on a level so far above what I’ve seen in other historical dramas from that decade, it might be fair to credit them with the show’s success. The way they’re shot is genuinely beautiful and allows you to follow the flow of the action and actually see what’s going on in a way that’s still rare now. It just makes it ten thousand times more impressive when you can appreciate the choreography playing out in full, and the lack of ridiculous sound effects or wire-work is a big plus. People do flips, but they’re real flips done for real, not gravity-defying hovering.

(I am fine with ridiculous ott magic-fighting existing, it’s just when it’s in shows that are otherwise super grounded in the real world and played totally straight that I’m like ‘wat’. If people can fly, you need to set a tone where that seems appropriate; if you haven’t, the fights should remain tonally consistent and be believable - they don’t have to be realistic, they do have to be believable.)

Like, I’m watching the white whale show now (Daemang, the Great Amibtion, which was a white whale because it seemed like I would never be able to find it) and while it’s totally exceeding my expectations and is in fact genuinely wonderful as a show, the action scenes are terrible. It’s the anti-Chuno: the characters are fantastic, the story is thematically focussed and deeply profound, and the action is almost unwatchable. The fights are shot so badly that you have no idea what you’re looking at, there’s no sense of continuous movement or screen geography, and the sound effects are absurdly silly. The actors look super uncomfortable and mostly unconvincing.

I don’t know who decided constant fast cutting was a good way to cover action, but it’s just not. Even if you have to hide stuntmen or that what the character is supposed to be doing is physically impossible, you still shouldn’t cut every nanosecond. There are better ways to do it. The truly egregious offence is cutting people who can do the thing in a such a way that it looks like they can’t. If the actors can fight fluidly and do their own stunts, my dude you need to let the audience see it. Not that I tried to watch Voice and got motion sickness or anything.

Anyway, my point here is that Chuno’s action scenes are basically the Citizen Kane of action scenes in historical dramas and that plus coolness plus bulletproof anti-hero archetype played by a human inferno of charisma plus tragic romance is probably enough reason for it to take off. I still don’t get its sterling reputation as a masterpiece or why people think it’s such a great story (knowing very loosely where it goes and how it ends, I currently stand by my ‘vague directionless miseryporn’ assessment), but I do admire those elements. It’s a subpar whole with some really, really successful parts. I find I’d like to read fanfic that fleshed out Ennoyeon and her relationship with Dae-gil, so I’m buying in at least that much.

*he even choreographed his own action scenes. Learning that he did this blew my mind. Like... how? How was that allowed? How did he know how to do that? How could he be so good? I understand he was a gymnast and studied martial arts very seriously and went to university for theatre, but none of that really explains for me his ability to be a fight coordinator or do screen action at that level. He didn’t actually do a huge amount action before this! Maybe I’m overestimating how much experience/training you need to get handed that kind of responsibility even on a big budget production. Maybe I’m underestimating how much the director wanted him to play this part since JH said it was his request to design his own fights. An excellent call by the director in hindsight but must have seemed wildly risky at the time.

I think I read this show was over budget before it even started shooting, so maybe recklessness was a theme with the director. Paid off for them, though, didn’t it.

#kdrama #chuno #jang hyuk #daemang #I need you to understand that I'm not just fangirling he is seriously carrying this show on his back #the fact that he did the fight choreography himself makes this almost literally true #I know he won pretty much the biggest award he could have won for this but his contribution is still underrated #because holy shit #he should have got the Emmy as well #fun fact: he was legit nominated for an Emmy no joke #so spectacular even the Americans noticed

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