audrelite

[audrelite]

I am eagerly anticipating the YouTube compilations for the characters' love, friendship, and hate endings, and Realizations. To those who may be putting those together, I commend and admire your work.

[audrelite]

Airyn and Tyrell, my beloveds! I have no shame. (Also I hc Tyrell as extremely possessive and clingy behind the nice guy, like, VERY much. Ahahahaha.)

[audrelite]

To me, a sex scene is an opportunity. It is a chance to write the body with the same reverence a poet writes about nature. The curve of a hip is as worthy of a beautiful sentence as the curve of a shoreline. The scent of a lover’s skin deserves the pervasiveness given to the scent of the ocean.

[audrelite]

“Temere me, perché sono l'occhio e la spada.”

That is grammatically incohrect and I will NOT be getting over it for the foreseeable future. It should be "Temimi". That is all.

[audrelite]

An open, simple man is a book you can read in a weekend. A man shrouded in mystery is a library you could spend a lifetime exploring and never reach the end.

[audrelite]

I've come to the realization, after reading tons of RP Discord threads in multiple servers, that I have more fun writing for canon characters for my fics, and roleplaying as my OCs with other people. I think that I like roleplaying with my OCs more because another person gets to see my crazy brain make up interesting characters and we get to collaborate on something together; when I write fanfiction, it is a solitary activity, and people already know who the canon characters are.

I miss the insane rp's I had; I wish I could export so many Discord threads so I can read them off-platform and without an internet connection.

[audrelite]

Haven't written anything for my beloveds in a couple of months. I really want to but I've just been so stuck with what to write about with them. I've also realized that none of my OCs have been given much attention from me in a long while as well, and I love them to death also. I wish I knew exactly why there's such a huge roadblock in my way so I could fix it.

[audrelite]

A good villain is a protagonist with a competing, and equally valid, definition of victory. That, I believe, is what makes a good villain.

[audrelite]

Being alone is a state of physics. Being lonely is a state of mind. I prefer the former.

[audrelite]

The most seductive form of tyranny is the one that promises to take away your pain.

[audrelite]

My internal critic doesn't need an audience; it performs just fine in an empty theater.

[audrelite]

Some Thoughts Pertaining to "After Life"

Since putting "After Life" out into the world, I've spent time turning over the figure at its heart, the figure whose absence creates the vacuum the story occupies: Lucian's mother. The piece itself is Lucian's unfiltered cri de cœur, a raw outpouring channeled onto the pages of a journal she gave him. It's written in the immediate, acidic aftermath of loss, through the jaundiced lens of a thirteen-year-old boy who feels not just bereaved, but betrayed, exiled, and manipulated by the person who was his guiding light.

And his feelings? They are utterly valid for him, in that moment. That blast furnace of adolescent fury is real. It's the shape his grief has taken, twisted by the specific circumstances of their relationship and her departure. The fic needed to inhabit that perspective fully, to capture the sheer, visceral agony of a child feeling discarded by their dying parent.

But as the author, stepping back from the intensity of Lucian's voice, I have to say: my intent was never for her to be that villain. Her character, as I imagine her beyond the confines of Lucian's immediate rage, is far more complex, caught in an impossible, tragic bind. Lucian's narrative is powerful because it's subjective, steeped in his personal interpretation of events. It's one truth, born of immense pain, but it isn't, nor can it ever be the whole truth of the woman herself.

So, I wanted to explore some of the thoughts I had about her, the unspoken possibilities hovering just outside Lucian's grief-stricken field of vision. Why might a mother do what she did, actions that landed with such devastating force on her child, without necessarily acting from malice?

Could it have been a desperate shield? Imagine staring down your own mortality, knowing the physical decline, the suffering that lies ahead. Terminal illness is often brutal, dehumanizing. Now picture your child—especially a child like Lucian, sensitive, psychically receptive, mirroring your own abilities—being forced to witness that slow decay. Perhaps sending him away was a mangled attempt at protection, a terrible calculus aimed at preserving his image of her—the laughing mother under the Lumiose shade, the reader of Baudelaire in sunlit rooms—rather than letting him see her consumed by illness. Maybe the words he clocked as manipulation ("for the best," "rest") were her inadequate armor against a truth too horrifying to speak plainly to her thirteen-year-old son. It's a choice riddled with harm, yes, but one potentially born from a fierce, if flawed, maternal instinct to spare him the deepest trauma she could foresee.

Or consider the idea of stability—her desperate attempt to secure his future when she knew she wouldn't be part of it. From her vantage point, staring into the abyss, Kalos might have seemed like the absolute last place for a vulnerable teenager. It was becoming, for her, a landscape of hospitals, treatments, and impending death. Sinnoh, conversely, held his father. Though Lucian perceives him as a "taller, sadder ghost," locked in impenetrable grief, to his mother, his father might have represented continuity, structure, a quiet harbour in the storm about to break. Maybe she envisioned Lucian focusing on his psychic gifts (a living link to her, ironically), finding his footing in the Canalave library's calm, building a life anchored by his father, however imperfectly. What felt like banishment to Lucian could have been, in her mind, the only responsible path she could chart for him, ensuring he wasn't completely adrift after she was gone. A pragmatic, heartbreaking decision made from a place of fear for his future.

Then there's the sheer human cost of dying. Facing one's own end requires immense emotional resources. Could she simply have reached her limit? Perhaps she couldn't bear witness to his grief while simultaneously navigating her own terror and physical suffering. Maybe his psychic awareness, that intimate connection, did make it harder—not because she resented it, but because it stripped away any possibility of pretence, reflecting her own vulnerability back at her too intensely. Was sending him away partly an act of sheer emotional self-preservation, a need to gather her remaining strength for the final ordeal without the constant, painful reminder of what she was leaving behind? It's not a noble thought, perhaps, but a starkly realistic one. People under extreme duress sometimes make choices centered on their own survival, even emotional survival.

And Kalos itself. Lucian sees her return as a selfish choice of "setting." But the pull towards home, especially when facing death, can be elemental. For her, Kalos wasn't just a backdrop; it was the soil of her childhood, the air she first breathed, the place her own memories resided. Returning there might have been less about aesthetics and more about a deep, almost instinctual need to "close the circle," to find a final measure of peace in the familiar. It's a personal, intimate need that, tragically, might have overshadowed Lucian's equally valid need for her presence.

Finally, communication itself can shatter under such immense stress. The "lies" Lucian perceived might have been the fragmented, inadequate language of someone exhausted, frightened, and possibly medicated. Expressing the nuances of love, fear, and goodbye while facing death is a task few could manage perfectly. Her attempts to explain or soften the blow might have been clumsy, insufficient, easily misinterpreted by a hurting teenager primed to feel rejected.

The core of the tragedy, as I see it, isn't necessarily rooted in her malice, but in the devastating misalignment between her probable intentions—however complex, flawed, or fear-driven—and the impact her actions had on Lucian. Her choices, perhaps aimed at protection or securing his future or simply finding her own peace, became instruments of his deepest wound.

Lucian, writing that journal entry, needs her to be the villain. He needs the clarity of anger, a target for the overwhelming chaos of his loss. Whether he ever comes to see his mother differently, to hold the possibility of her own suffering alongside his own, is a story for another time.

But when I think about her, the maman behind Lucian's rage, I don't see a villain. I see a woman likely trapped in her own season in hell, making impossible decisions under unbearable circumstances. Her story, untold in the fic, is just as heartbreaking, filled with its own potential layers of fear, love, and regret. The space between her reality and Lucian's perception is where the deepest sadness of the situation resides.

So, while Lucian's fury is valid and real, and the fic honours that, I wanted to put my own thoughts out there about the ghost behind his rage. She's more than just the source of his pain; she's likely another victim of the tragedy that consumed both mother and son.

[audrelite]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Lofi Girl & Synthwave Boy - ChilledCow | Lofi Girl (Music Videos) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Lo-Fi Girl (beats to relax/study to) Additional Tags: Slice of Life, Walking, Lyon - Freeform, France (Country), Beautiful, Self-Indulgent, Canon Setting, Historical References Summary:

In which Jade takes a much-needed stroll to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

[audrelite]

If Lofi Girl's official name is Jade, then I must know what Synthwave Boy's official name is. Also, there has to be some deep, hidden symbolism behind Synthwave Boy living in Apartment #14. You wouldn't just leave that there.

On a side note, learning all of Lofi Girl lore as a blind person who can't see the animations has been HARD.

Okay, that's all.

[audrelite]

I've come to the realization that I like the way Helia's name is pronounced in Italian slightly more than in English. The H is silent (as all are in Italian), the E is a short vowel, and the stress is on the Li (second syllable). It just sounds prettier to me somehow.

[audrelite]

I hadn't written anything NSFW in a while and today I wrote a drabble and by the end I went "Yeah, sex written beautifully is my SHIT." Like you could use the direct words "orgasm" or "they came," but:

Their mutual pleasure tore free, pure sonic screams against blinding internal light. The sensation: total consumption, a pressure shattering every limit, a rhythm building, breaking, rebuilding its exquisite loop.

THIS is the sexual content I YEARN for in my reading.

Anyway here's my thing: Total Consumption; rated E for sexual content, Teen Titans (2003), Red Star/Starfire, 100 words.

[audrelite]

TikTok has been serving me Helia edits. In Italian. For once in my fandom life, I have FOOD! (Yes I know they're canon so it'd make sense but GOD I love creative types SO much!)

Also, in my Winx speedy rewatch, I learned that in S2E13, when Helia gives Flora back the letter, in the Cinélume English dub Flora is the one who says she'll see him later, with a less pronounced acknowledgement on Helia's part, while in the Italian, Helia says he'll see her later, to which she responds with "Sì, va bene."

If Helia doesn't come back in the reboot, or if he's flattened into a one-note character I'm going to be so disappointed.

Oh also, I recently learned that there's a Winx Club comic and Helia has more CHARACTER. And he straight up yells at Flora in two pages, and if I'm remembering correctly I think he even slips in a "damn" somewhere in his dialogue with her. I'm sorry why isn't THIS canon? Saladin is even brought up more here. (Btw Helia is Saladin's grandson not his nephew as the dub states; how did they even get to that conclusion?)

Anyway I love Helia with all of my heart and he and Flora are just so beautiful together. I needed to squee about this man, no apologies!