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vidavalor · 10 months

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Why do you think Crowley didn't just get another apartment?

Hi! Thanks for the ask. I have French buttercream chocolate cake tonight. I know, right? It's amazing. *cuts you a slice*

To answer your question, I think we have to look at the whole thing with where Crowley parks The Bentley and when (in both seasons) and, also, the scenes that emphasize Crowley and Aziraphale avoiding being seen together anywhere in the mornings and what all this has to do with what he says is his living situation in S2.

Meta on Crowley "living in his car" in S2 under the cut.

For Crowley and Aziraphale, what has always been what *absolutely cannot happen* is Heaven/Hell figuring out that Crowley will stay in the bookshop until very, very late into the evening, as that is the one thing they'd have trouble justifying. If Crowley parked The Bentley in front of the bookshop in the afternoon/evening and it was still there at 7am the next morning, it would send a message to anyone watching that their relationship isn't just intelligence business, it's not just friendship...and it's not even really just sex. If Heaven/Hell saw The Bentley outside the bookshop all night often enough, they would assume that Crowley and Aziraphale are in a romantic relationship and this is the one thing that Crowley and Aziraphale do not want them to figure out. They can hatch a wild plan if they get caught to justify any of the rest of it and maybe get away with it but there's no way out if they get caught out being in love when they're supposed to be sworn enemies... so, if they want to spend time alone together in the privacy of the bookshop, how do they work around the problem of potentially being noticed? The show actually showed us subtly in S1 before a little more overtly in S2.

When Crowley is going to come over for awhile-- and especially when it's going to mean that he's there into the evening-- he doesn't park The Bentley in front of the bookshop. He parks it in the vicinity but not too close-- around where it was when Aziraphale called him in 2.01. Two or so minutes' drive out, on a side street. (A two minute drive is a 15 or so minute walk so not that far but a bit away.) If he's coming to the shop alone, he'll probably use the side entrance to the bookshop but if he's been out with Aziraphale-- like he was in their 'fuck everything, the world is ending' lunch at The Ritz in 2008-- they'll walk back to the bookshop. If anyone notices Crowley entering it, it'll be during the day, right? While not ideal, it's innocuous enough. Aziraphale's bookshop is theoretically a business and is also an angelic embassy and Aziraphale could say that he's trying to turn Crowley to the light and make him into an informant if they were caught. Conversely, it couldn't hurt Crowley-- whose job, like Aziraphale's, is to spy on his counterpart-- to seem like he's gaming the corruptible angel and getting intel to further the demonic goals of Hell so he could say he's luring the angel to trusting him. Being in the bookshop during the day, during what are (for normal businesses lol) business hours, when the business is also an embassy, is one thing. It's the evening that's the problem for them. At that time of day, the bookshop is nothing but Aziraphale's residence and Crowley's presence during those hours becomes much riskier. So, how to get around that?

Here's them walking back to the bookshop from wherever Crowley's parked The Bentley on a side street after lunch in 2008/Eleven Years Ago in S1:

During lunch in 2008, they already planned for Crowley to come back to the bookshop with Aziraphale and since there's no plan for him to leave in any hurry, Crowley is already not parked in front of the bookshop so no one can recognize his car there late at night. This is practiced between them; they've been doing it for awhile by this point. They still are in S2, when we have several scenes of Crowley in The Bentley parked on a side street near the bookshop.

Since Crowley can't be seen then leaving the bookshop once the sun is up or it'd defeat the purpose of the car not being parked in front of it, whenever he comes over, he leaves the bookshop through the side door at some ungodly pre-dawn hour, walks to his car a few streets over (apparating into it would be suspicious to anyone who might have found it so he usually walks, looking like he was just out late causing demonic trouble), and then, in the past, would drive back to his apartment in Mayfair. That way, when the sun came up, anyone who might be watching his place would see The Bentley parked in front of it. Didn't see Crowley leave the bookshop from the afternoon? You must have missed him in a crowd on the sidewalk somewhere because there's his gorgeous, old, very recognizable car, parked in front of his place in Mayfair, gleaming in that early morning sun.

No one was ever the wiser to the fact that on some of these nights, Crowley was not home in his apartment or out raising hell all night but was actually in the bookshop nearly until dawn.

Is it kind of miserable for Crowley to have to leave every time in the middle of the night and for him and Aziraphale to never really know what it's like to wake up together? To never get to have breakfast and mornings together? Of course. But it keeps them safe so they deal with it. As a result, though, they have a thing about mornings.

In 1.01, when Crowley calls Aziraphale in the middle of the night and they both have separately learned of Armageddon, he tells Aziraphale that they "need to talk" and then they both, without further discussion, are at their bench in St. James' Park the next day. During their talk, they decide to go to lunch and go directly there, which means that they met up sometime around 11am-12pm. So even Crowley calling in the middle of the night and setting up the meeting in the park with their code phrase means that the time of the meeting is always predetermined to be at least 11am, no matter what they need to discuss. Even after learning of Armageddon beginning, they waited until almost lunch the next day to meet up and talk about it because they never want to be seen in public together in the earlier mornings. They're afraid of someone seeing them going for a walk or getting a coffee together before midday and thinking they spent the previous night together. Crowley is always gone from the bookshop before the sun starts to come up and they never meet before 11am in an effort to keep anyone from figuring out that they are often in the bookshop-- and Aziraphale's bed-- together through the early morning hours.

Which tends to make this, their first time getting breakfast even if Crowley knew it wasn't really that because Aziraphale's "problem voice" was on, even more hilarious...

Crowley's like I left you blissed out and half-asleep in your bed *four hours ago*, angel... how on Earth is there a 'naked man friend' in your bookshop right now? He knows that Shax told him there's something going on and that Aziraphale called with a problem but this is the only time of day they usually spend apart and they always do so if Aziraphale is going to cheat on him-- which he's not lol-- this is when he would and based on the fact that Aziraphale panics at Crowley thinking there's another guy in the bookshop and based on Crowley's wtf? face at hearing there is, these two aren't sleeping with anyone else anymore and have a monogamous thing, even if they probably sort of forgot to have a discussion about it. Crowley can tell from Aziraphale's reaction that there's some misunderstanding here and then just gets bemused about it but also about ready to kill whatever guy, naked or not, is causing Aziraphale problems, only to find out that it's, well, the guy who tried to kill them.

In 2.01, when Gabriel makes his rather noticeable arrival on Aziraphale's doorstep, it is the mid-part of the morning-- probably somewhere around 9am as Maggie was just getting ready to open her store for the day, Nina was still busy but her more immediate pre-work coffee rush seemed to be winding down, and Aziraphale was having his breakfast tea on yet another day that his shop was not opening lol. The most major character to miss Gabriel's arrival is, of course, Crowley. Crowley's meeting with Shax is just before/happening in tandem with Aziraphale at Maggie's shop and then Gabriel's arrival and actually opens the storyline in the present in S2. The point is that Crowley misses Gabriel's arrival because he is not in the bookshop in the early mornings, which is then something that is heavily emphasized through Crowley and Aziraphale's first scene of the season via Nina to not just be about this particular early morning but all mornings.

When Aziraphale calls Crowley and has him meet him in Give Me Coffee, Nina has never met Crowley before. Give Me Coffee is fifteen steps across the street from the bookshop and sells coffee, tea and baked goods and Nina doesn't know Crowley. Nina has been there running it since post-S1. She knows Aziraphale though and, until the morning of 2.01, she thought the old bookseller a confirmed bachelor. In the span of 20 minutes, he gets a naked man possible deliveroo strippergram on his doorstep in front of the whole neighborhood and then then this other hot-- and surprisingly clothed-- Ginger Goth guy shows up to meet him for coffee. Nina's best guess for why the bookseller and his Crowley have never come across the street to her shop before and seem like they've literally never gotten breakfast together while they also "go way back" and have chemistry and affection for one another for days is that they're having an affair. Nina correctly guesses that their relationship is a secret and applies the most logical presumption that a human without knowledge of Heaven/Hell could-- that it's infidelity, not that they could be murdered if they were found out-- because these two live in London Soho in the year 2023 but are still afraid of being found out.

So, all of this shows how there's no Crowley in the bookshop in the morning. Neither of them have ever slipped across the street to bring back coffee and croissants for two at 7am or gone over to Nina's together. Aziraphale has been to Give Me Coffee alone before. Crowley and The Bentley are always nowhere to be found near the bookshop at this hour, which is how Crowley missed Gabriel's arrival.

So what does this all have to do with why Crowley doesn't just get a new apartment ahead of S2?

When Hell showed up in the form of Shax to reclaim the place in Mayfair in which Crowley was living, it really left Crowley with two choices. He wasn't about to tell Aziraphale because Aziraphale would feel like he had to ask him to move in with him for real and it was too dangerous. They can't have that so why bring it up and hurt them more? The two choices Crowley felt he had were to either get a new apartment or to just keep on as he's been living because the truth is... he hadn't been home to Mayfair that much lately anyway.

Before, Crowley and Aziraphale would try to go some amount of time between seeing each other but after S1, maybe with some exceptions around the Covid lockdowns but definitely not since they were lifted, they just stopped bothering that much. They were already together on borrowed time with no idea how much time they had until Armageddon: Round Two would start and they just wanted to be together so they kept up their whole routine of Crowley out before dawn and no mornings but Crowley had been more or less living in the bookshop for awhile ahead of S2.

As Aziraphale says here:

Meaning: they live together. Crowley's there all the time. Aziraphale does not mind. It's been months of Crowley in the bookshop every night. Aziraphale loves it. He hates him having to leave in the middle of the night as he always does but they've settled into a little domestic thing the best they can with the situation they have. The line is also laden with innuendo, suggesting they're not always just up talking and listening to old records until 4am but are regularly, ya know, setting off some alarm bells in Heaven together. (Couple Aziraphale's innuendo in the "plenty of use" scene with why Crowley says Muriel needs to leave the bookshop when he says he wants to take Aziraphale to breakfast at The Ritz. "We need a little 'us time'" meant all amnesiac angels and assorted representatives of Heaven and Hell need to get the Someplace out of this bookshop right now so I can finally watch that angel eat some pancakes and then take him to bed in our bed without worrying about someone needing a hot chocolate in the middle of the night.)

Their level of domesticity is actually shown to be pretty cute with this bit:

This is the most living together thing ever because it's saying that Crowley is just frequently in the bookshop while Aziraphale is out now. He's not even just there to see him but he spends time there alone while Aziraphale goes to the bank for change for the four books he sells a month and to his appointment with his barber and all his other little errands. You know Crowley likes waiting inside because he likes having a little time alone in a place where he's safe and won't be disturbed but also really the whole little domestic bliss of Aziraphale coming back and being all "Crowley? There you are" and showing him what he got at the shops and such. It's the most normal married thing imaginable and feels like they really live together and Crowley loves every minute of it.

So Hell taking his place in Mayfair back leaves Crowley with two options because it's still too risky for him and Aziraphale to just full on live together entirely: he can get a new apartment or he can basically just keep living with Aziraphale for most of the day and then spend the mornings in The Bentley/out.

If he gets a new apartment, he'd have to actually go there sometimes. He'd have to be seen moving his stuff into it and he'd have to get a new bed and he'd have to spend nights there sometimes to prove he's living there. It couldn't be suspiciously close to Aziraphale's place, so now he's got to drive more in the early morning hours. He's been spending so much time with Aziraphale, the thought of sleeping alone and spending the evenings alone again, even for a few nights now and then, is depressing. It was miserable before and now he can't to back to it again and he doesn't think Aziraphale would want to, either. He also doesn't exactly know how to tell him he'd have to be away some nights again without hurting him. They've both been alone more often than not for most of their existences and Crowley can't do it anymore. There's also, though, that getting another apartment also doesn't do much to help keep Heaven & Hell from thinking he and Aziraphale are involved... but pretending he's living in his car just might.

The only being of Heaven or Hell still talking to either him or Aziraphale is Shax and Crowley has to keep meeting up with her to get information on what's going on there and try to get a sense of how much time he and Aziraphale might have before Round Two. If he tells Shax that he's living in his car, then it makes him look less close to Aziraphale. Everyone knows Aziraphale has a private residence upstairs in the bookshop and that, if he and Crowley were really close, he'd have offered for Crowley to stay with him if he lost his apartment... so what if Crowley can make Heaven & Hell think they aren't that close, they just teamed up to stop Armageddon? He's even homeless now and the angel won't give him a place to stay. He tells Shax to tell Hell's Finance Office to send his bills to his car and Shax actually bought it and said she tried. Shax has been reporting back to Hell that Crowley is living in his car, which is what Crowley wanted her to think was the case.

Let Hell think they've won over him and taken his place and left him living in his car on a side street, let Shax keep meeting him in the early morning hours in his car on that side street... so that none of them figure out that he's actually living in the bookshop with Aziraphale.

In the meantime, no new apartment means no more nights away from Aziraphale. No commute back to it after picking up The Bentley on the side street means more time he can be with Aziraphale before he has to slip away in the early morning. He can just keep going from the bookshop to his car a few streets away each morning like he has been and that's the funniest part of it to him. Hell thinks they left him homeless and abandoned him and, really, they just made it easier for him to hide from them the fact that he's living with the angel he loves. All he has to do is bullshit them and he's good at that.

Crowley talking about living in his car is basically this in attitude, on steroids:

His pre-S2 conversations with Shax were like... Fuck, Shax, the crick in my neck from *sleeping in my car*... if Hell's Finance Office wants to find me, they can send the bills *to my car*... Bastard angel owns half of Soho, probably why I can't find a place... tell Lord Beezlebub if they're looking for me, they can go fuck themselves but if they absolutely have to contact me, they can find me *in my car*...

...and three hours or so earlier from every one of those conversations, Crowley was actually curled up in bed with Aziraphale in the bookshop.

#ineffable husbands #good omens #good omens 2 #crowley #aziraphale #good omens meta #aziracrow #shax good omens #the bentley

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tristampparty · 9 months

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Tristamp Anniversary 2024 Event!

A twelve-day (one day dedicated to each episode) celebration for the year anniversary of Trigun Stampede's air date!

Schedule and Prompts

DAY 1: JANUARY 7TH - Episode One: Noman's Land - Vash the Stampede

DAY 2: JANUARY 8TH - Episode Two: The Running Man - Meryl Stryfe

DAY 3: JANUARY 9TH - Episode Three: Bright Light, Shine through the Darkness - Millions Knives

DAY 4: JANUARY 10TH - Episode Four: Hungry! - Nicholas D. Wolfwood

DAY 5: JANUARY 11TH - Episode Five: Child of Blessing - Roberto De Niro

DAY 6: JANUARY 12TH - Episode Six: Once Upon a Time in Hopeland - Legato

DAY 7: JANUARY 13TH - Episode Seven: Wolfwood - Livio

DAY 8: JANUARY 14TH - Episode Eight: Our Home. - Rem Saverem

DAY 9: JANUARY 15TH - Episode Nine: Millions Knives - Brad and Luida

DAY 10: JANUARY 16TH - Episode Ten: Humanity - Zazie the Beast

DAY 11: JANUARY 17TH - Episode Eleven: To a New World - Plants

DAY 12: JANUARY 18TH - Episode Twelve: High Noon at July - Eriks

Guidelines and FAQ

This is a celebration of the airing of Trigun Stampede, so anything goes! Art, fic, rewatching, gifsets, videos, meta, posting your favorite screenshots, whatever! Just tag and mark your work appropriately.

Use the hashtag #TristampParty and tag the official accounts here or on Twitter to connect with others and share your stuff!

While each day has a character and episode prompt, so long as it's related to Stampede, you don't have to stick to it; just have fun with whatever you make!

Absolutely no harassment or attacks against other participants will be tolerated. This is meant to be a fun event. Curate your space and block/mute accordingly.

Though this event is twelve days, I'll keep an eye on the accounts and hashtags during the entire original twelve-week run of Stampede, so don't worry too much if you're late!

Feel free to ask questions and check out the answered ask tag

This event is being run by @revenanghost.

All art used in promotion of this event is official artwork from Studio Orange.

#Trigun #Trigun Stampede #Tristamp #TrstampParty #Not me belatedly realizing I only have three weeks to get this off the ground #Time to MOVE

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sophie-hatter-jenkins · 3 months

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New Writing!

Ginny Weasley character study written for @ladiesofhpfest Character Chic. I'm really pleased with this one!

Body positivity is a social movement that promotes a positive view of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities. Proponents focus on the appreciation of the functionality and health of the human body instead of its physiological appearance. Eight lessons that Ginny Weasley learns about her body, and her changing relationship with it, throughout her life.

HUGE thanks go to two wonderful writers for their help:

Firstly @fizzyginfizz who beta read this for me and was so supportive and had so many brilliant suggestions, really building my confidence in this piece - thank you for everything!

Secondly, to @whinlatter, who has written several fantastic Ginny metas that I found super helpful when I was thinking through how to approach this piece.

They both have fabulous Ginny-POV WIPs, (Quidditch is for Losers and Beasts respectively), which you should go and read NOW if you haven’t done so already!

Rated M for language, mature themes and discussion/depiction of sex

9k words

Snippet below the cut

The Weasley family, as was apparent to anyone who cared to notice, came in two very different varieties

Some of them were really-Weasleys, like their Dad - tall, lanky, all hands and feet. Bill was a really-Weasley, as were Percy and Ron. The others were really-Prewetts, like their Mum. Charlie and the twins were really-Prewetts. Really-Prewetts were shorter and stockier, and just generally much more compact, as though the same amount of person was somehow compressed into a much smaller body.

Ginny didn’t really give much thought to the distinction between really-Weasleys and really-Prewetts when she was a child. Obviously she knew that some of her brothers were tall and thin, and some of them were… not. Equally obviously, she knew that her Mum was also… not. So yes, she knew - of course she knew. It’s just that she never really considered it in relation to her . Though to be fair, Ginny was very much on the small side, even before it became clear which side of the family she would take after, so perhaps the signs were there had she cared to notice.

Eleven year old Ginny was, quite frankly, absolutely tiny, just a little dot of a thing really. She felt so small and so intimidated as she huddled in the corner of her train carriage on her way to school for the very first time. Ron had promised to look after her on the journey, but he wasn’t there, and neither was Harry (lovely, lovely Harry), and Ginny didn’t know why. Instead, she made herself even smaller (which wasn’t hard, cocooned as she was in her hand-me-down robes, so large she could have used them as a tent), hoping that no one would notice her as she scribbled messages in her diary to her new friend Tom. She told him how tiny she felt, lonely and afraid and scared by this new world around her. Everyone else seemed so big and so confident, swishing their wands with abandon. Ginny already felt anything but; overlooked and overwhelmed, shrinking further by the second.

Continue reading on AO3

#ginny weasley #ginny potter #character study #body positive #body positivity #ladies of hp fest #character chic #harry potter #hinny #harry x ginny #my writing #my fics #harry potter fanfiction

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green-eyedfirework · 4 months

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Why was it that Nightwing always got captured by the creeps?

“You have no idea how special you are,” the head scientist of the sketchy biotech company Nightwing had been surveilling prattled on as the wheelchair squeaked down the hallway. “An omega vigilante, I almost couldn’t believe it when I heard, oh, I knew opening an office in Bludhaven would be a great idea—”

Red Hood got the mobsters, Red Robin got the intellectuals, and Batman and Robin got the dramatic ones. But Nightwing? Nightwing got the villains that were walking sexual harassment lawsuits. It wasn’t fair. Especially when he was the only omega of the bunch.

“Don’t you worry,” the head scientist said patronizingly, patting him on the head. “I can’t give you a heat inducer, that’ll mess up your fertility, but I promise it’ll be over soon. And you’ll get a pup out of it! How does that sound?”

Maybe it was the skintight suit. Maybe he was drawing too much attention to the wrong, ahem, assets.

“Of course, you won’t be able to keep the pup, but consider the vast contributions you will be making to science! Oh, the healing factor alone…” the beta scientist devolved into raptures of scientific glee and Dick wondered what exactly it was about a Ph.D. that turned so many of them into villains in the process. This one had done some research on the meta gene and super serum before his access to the government labs had been revoked—gee, Dick really wondered why—and now he was attempting to recreate the research with his own unethical experiments.

“And you don’t have to worry about them, my dear,” the beta patted Dick’s head again and Dick hissed through the gag. He’d been drugged a second time when he tried to bite, and all he had to show for it was the increased restraints and some fondling from the too-interested guards. “I got a delightful pollen from a lovely woman that’s guaranteed to send alphas into ruts, so they’ll be up to the performance.”

Dick rolled his eyes. So this guy was one of those idiots that thought that alphas turned into raging knotheads on their rut. Sure, it dialed their instincts up to eleven, but everyone didn’t think about sex all the time, gods.

“As long as you behave, I’m sure they’ll leave you in one piece.”

No, the more immediate concern was that Dick was starting to get the sense that the beta was using they as plural and not gender-neutral, and combined with the other hints that he was referring to metas with superhuman strength, it wasn’t adding up to a pleasant picture.

“And I have reliable reports that you know them, so this should work out great!”

Wait, what?

With that last ominous statement, they arrived at a huge, thick steel door that took several locks to disarm. Dick didn’t get much of a chance to examine it, though, before the wheelchair tilted and he was dumped inside the small cell.

“Remember to enjoy yourself!” was the maniac’s parting statement before the door swung shut.

Oh, Dick was going to enjoy pointing Hood at this asshole.

But the more immediate problem was the occupants of the cell he’d just been locked into. The very familiar occupants, and Dick worked at his bindings with trembling fingers as the alphas began to stir.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered out loud as soon as he tore off the gag, watching them shift and move as silver hair caught the light and gleamed. “How did they get all of you?”

Deathstroke, Ravager, Jericho, Nightshade, and Respawn. The entirety of world’s deadliest mercenary pack. All enhanced, metas, or hopped up on some kind of experimental serum, Dick had never gotten close enough to figure out the specifics, but what he did know was that they were incredibly dangerous. The Titans had faced off against them more than once and barely managed to go limping home. The only reason they weren’t classified as a higher threat was because usually they stayed out of hero business.

“Getting captured by one idiot scientist is definitely going to puncture that reputation,” Dick said, eyeing their sluggish movements. They were beginning to wake up. “Kind of pathetic, actually. Aren’t you guys supposed to be the most elite fighters in the world or something?” That was certainly something the Ravager had spat at him once or twice. “How does a mercenary pack get kidnapped?”

A low growl and a rush of alpha pheromones billowed out to flood the space. Dick scrunched up his nose at the scent, he could feel his own start to turn sweeter in response as his omega recognized that he was trapped in a room full of alphas going into rut. The scientist had torn off all his blockers and Bruce’s scent management techniques only went so far in the face of burgeoning alpha aggression.

“Not a threat,” Dick murmured slowly, keeping his hands by his sides and staying on his knees. No need to trigger any violent movements.

He wasn’t sure what the idiot scientist was thinking—the more alphas, the better chance for Dick to be impregnated? Except with Deathstroke trapped with his pack—including a pup just barely old enough to have presented—his focus would be on protection, not procreation. It wouldn’t matter that Dick was an omega if Deathstroke or the others registered him as a danger.

“Not going to fight you,” Dick said, keeping the low, easy tone. “I’m trapped here just as same as you guys.”

The mercenaries recovered fast. One moment they were weak and sluggish, and the next the two oldest alphas had jerked upright, scanning the space and growling.

“Not a threat,” Dick murmured, low and soft. Ravager locked gazes with Dick and kept up a low, warning rumble, but Deathstroke continued scanning the area and checking over his pups. Nightshade was instantly alert, as was Respawn, growling adorably like Damian—Dick had to fight not to coo—and Jericho was the last to shake off whatever they’d been drugged with.

Half of them were staring at Dick, Respawn clutched close to his father’s side while Deathstroke prowled the cell. It was admittedly unnerving, being stared down by three growling alphas, but Dick kept his calm, his scent still the sweet of placating omega, posture unthreatening, voice soft.

“I’m not going to fight you,” Dick repeated, low and smooth. “I’m not a threat.”

Nightshade shifted towards him, teeth bared, but Ravager quickly yanked her back. Unfortunately, this turned Deathstroke’s attention his way, and it was definitely harder to keep the soothing tone when staring into the face of a man that had the highest kill count of any assassin currently alive.

“I’m not a threat,” Dick repeated, hands out and open. “I’m not going to fight you.” Alphas responded better to scent and posture when in rut, but words still occasionally made it through. Deathstroke drew closer and Dick fought the urge to run—there was nowhere to go. “I’m not going to fight you.” The alpha loomed above him and Dick kept himself carefully still, relaxed and not tense. “I’m not a threat.”

Deathstroke bent down. Dick could hear his heart pounding in his ears as he remained as still and calm as he could. The alpha’s one-eyed gaze travelled over him as he took a deliberate whiff of scent. Dick hardly dared to breathe.

The mercenary made a low growl and backed off, leaving him alone. Dick exhaled in a rush. No being mauled by mercenaries in rut tonight.

Unfortunately, Dick had spoken too soon.

He spotted the lunging motion out of the corner of his eye, too fast to react any way but instinct, and he immediately ducked and rolled, countering the alpha’s move with his own, trapping her punch and twisting her arm to yank her into a hold before he fully realized what he was doing.

“Oh, shit,” Dick hissed, hurriedly letting go and backing up, but it was too late.

He didn’t register Deathstroke moving until the mercenary slammed him to the ground, expelling his air in a breathless wheeze, and teeth digging in at the back of his neck turned his automatic protest into a low whine as submission flooded through him.

(more emphasis to bites, on fighting)

The room was thick with alpha rage and Dick stayed as still as he could, trying to calm his racing heartbeat, hoping that this was a show of force and not the prelude to playing with their food.

It didn’t matter if he struggled or not, there was no way he could beat a group of enhanced, trained alphas hopped up on aggression, but there was still the chance that if he stayed quiet and submitted, they wouldn’t tear him apart.

Dick winced as the collar of his suit was torn apart easily under enhanced hands—the goons that had captured him hadn’t been able to undo the catches without getting shocked and had quickly given up, but clearly the kevlar weave was no match for supersoldier strength. Another low whine was punched out of him as a second pair of teeth closed down on his unprotected neck, biting deep and worrying at his skin.

He could smell Nightshade’s scent change from anger to satisfaction at his apparent submission and he made another low, placating sound to appease her. Two bites meant his limbs were trembling, submission running through him like a rip current, ready to pull him down under.

Dick couldn’t help the tension—he was helpless here, lying at the mercy of a mercenary pack, waiting for them to get bored and ignore him, or for them to tear him apart as an intruder. Dick had been in worse situations, but right now, he was a having a hard time pinpointing specific examples.

Another hand joined the ones pointlessly pinning him down and Dick smelled a darker version of the rage, a scent he remembered from battlefields. He couldn’t jerk away from Ravager’s grip, so he had to stay there, hissing weakly as the alpha’s bite joined his father’s and his sister’s. Fuck that hurt.

He couldn’t move. His scent dripped with sweetness, rising alarm disguised as enticement. Dick made an aborted sound as he was dragged off the ground, bruises aching, to be hauled into someone’s impenetrable grip, hands tight on his forearms. He didn’t know whose lap he was all but sitting in, the alpha scents were mixing together, aggression and rage, possession and pride.

Dick couldn’t help flinch back as Jericho moved towards him. “No,” he breathed out, alarm rising higher, but there was nowhere to go, trapped in a cage of alphas, and Dick could only watch as Jericho braced himself on Dick’s shoulders and bent down to bite.

It felt like he was leeching the soul from Dick’s body. Submit pressed harder down on him, until what little resistance Dick had was like a slick grip in a storm, peeling away by inches, one slippery finger at a time. Too many hands, too many alphas, and Dick whimpered without meaning to, caught in a maelstrom of scent and overwhelmed by it.

Something tugged painfully at him. His pack bonds, responding to his agitation. Dick could feel the others nudging him, sending him calm and worry—and he could also feel it fraying.

No.

If this was the entirety of Deathstroke’s pack—

The pup started crawling towards him and panic rose up, sharp and high. “No,” Dick whispered, struggling against the grips chaining him in place. He was a trained vigilante, he could still throw off submission, the problem was the four alphas holding him down. “No, let me go!”

It was like battering himself against a steel wall. None of them moved.

Respawn moved up to crawl into his lap and Dick growled, as low and deep as he could make, baring his teeth in the imitation of an alpha snarl. The pup yelped, tumbling back, but then a hand in Dick’s hair wrenched his head painfully to one side and Dick couldn’t stop the growl shifting to a high, desperate whine.

“No, please, stop, don’t do this—” the pup clambered on top of him more carefully this time, ignoring his weak struggles, and Dick felt teeth close down on the jut of his collarbone. “—please—”

His pack bonds shattered.

Dick couldn’t feel them breaking over the rush of the new ones taking their place, slamming home with a suddenness that felt like a punch. He keened, curling over as much as he was able as growling filled the room, less concerned with the alphas’ emotional state than his own.

Fuck.

The only way to complete a pack claim was to have every member of the pack bite the claimant. It would destroy any other pack bond in the process, which meant that his bond with the Bats had been shredded under the force of Deathstroke’s claim.

“No, no, no—”

From the Bats’ side, Dick’s bond would’ve abruptly snapped without warning. There were only three ways to break a bond—by breaking it yourself, by subsuming it with a new claim, or by death.

And the first two were rarer than the last.

Dick choked on the overwhelming scent of foreign alpha, his own scent gentling in recognizance of his new pack, unable to breathe under the onslaught of emotion humming through him. Five alphas in rut was stretching his senses to the breaking point and it felt uniquely violating to have strangers inside the part of him that had always been for family.

“No,” Dick whimpered, unable to push them out. Everything was too loud and too much and he felt pulled in a thousand different directions.

Pack-alpha was rage-protect-furious and older-alpha was frustration-burning-hate and alpha-sister was angry-attack and alpha-brother was irritation-discomfort and alpha-pup was scared-distressed-angry and Dick couldn’t begin to untangle the web. He hurt, inside and out, broken grief and bruising aches and rising terror and throbbing bites.

“Please,” Dick tried to say, but no one was listening.

His body did the only thing it could do under the onslaught of alpha rut, new pack bonds, and increasing stress—Dick smelled the honey sweetness first, and groaned in recognition of what was to follow.

Attention focused sharply back on him as the first note of heat hit the air.

“No—” Dick fought hard against the restraining bonds, this wasn’t his pack, he wasn’t safe here, “let me go—”

They didn’t. He could feel their bonds change to anticipation, the laser focus of their rut brought to bear on him. There was nothing more important in the room to them.

Dick went pliant for a breath, enough to relax the grips on him, enough to feel the ache as the warmth of heat slowly ramped up, muscles cramping—and then he lunged, yanking himself out of the grips and aiming for the corner.

Enhanced alphas, of course, reacted fast.

Dick found himself jerked back against a solid chest, arms wrapping around him and forcing his arms down by his side. Ravager was in front of him now, Ravager and Nightshade, and between them they managed to turn the top half of his suit to confetti.

Dick, half-naked, trapped in the middle of five alphas in rut and smelling of honey, had a terrible thought—

But no one was moving to pull the rest of his suit off and it was Respawn that crawled forward first. Dick tried to yank away when he realized what was happening but Deathstroke’s grip didn’t budge a fraction, a low growl warning him to stay still.

His chest ached, not with bruises but the growing cramps of heat, and when Respawn latched onto a nipple and sucked, Dick screamed.

It hurt. The pressure, the unbearable weight of an insistent, demanding pup as his body tried to remake itself to provide for his pack. The increase in cramping right before the milk finally came. And the horrible, awful relief, the unshakeable sense that Dick was losing something, that this was defilement greater than he’d expected.

“No,” Dick sobbed, keening as Nightshade shoved forward to latch onto his other nipple. “No, stop, that isn’t yours—”

The alphas didn’t care. They drank busily, sucking his milk out in greedy pulls, uncaring for the way Dick writhed as he cried. His scent was sweet but his bond was twisted in distress, and the alphas didn’t twitch.

When the pup was done, Jericho moved forward to take his place, bright blond hair the only thing visible in Dick’s blurred vision. Ravager growled as Nightshade kept drinking and snapped warningly at her before she let go with a pout. Ravager dove for her spot and Dick made a low, punched-out sound. The increase in suction was unbearable, he felt like he was being unmade under the onslaught.

“P-please.”

Jericho stopped sooner, but that wasn’t a relief—Nightshade’s tight grip replaced her father’s as Deathstroke bent down, latching on tight and drinking with deep, strong pulls that had Dick wailing.

It hurt, it was pain on a level deeper than flesh, it was too much and yet Dick was pinned here to endure, overwhelmed under the onslaught and unable to run.

There was no comfort but the restraining grips around him, no warmth but from bonds from the enemy, no protection but from the very same people that were hurting him. His omega was shrieking for safety and reassurance and the most Dick could do was press into the hands holding him, fingers wrapped tight over someone’s palm, hand clasping the pup to him, pulling an alpha’s arm closer until he could see and hear and smell nothing but them.

Dick made a low, broken keen, and the rumbles of his pack answered him.

#my snippets #wilson pack #omegaverse #drugged #lactation #submission #pack bonding

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turbulenthandholding · 2 months

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Richie as Director Avatar and Taylor Swift

I was talking with @thoughtfulchaos773 earlier today and something occurred to me about Richie singing Love Story in Forks. There has been a lot of really wonderful meta lately touching on Richie's role in the show. There's @currymanganese's excellent point that Richie is Storer's avatar as well as all of @thoughtfulchaos773's posts about Filmmaking and Season 3/Richie as Director (Part 1 / Part 2).

Anyway, previously I hadn't thought much about Love Story being the Taylor Swift song that they had Richie sing. It's well known, it's a song that would make sense that his young daughter would gravitate towards and would have exposed him to. There's a purity and joy to it that fits with the earnestness he gains in his journey throughout the action of Forks. However, with the context of all of the other great meta out there, it occurred to me that if we think of Richie as Director and Observer of Carmy's Love Life (as thoughtfulchaos773 called him in Filmmaking Meta Part 1), the choice of Love Story as the song is a LOT more significant. Richie is telling viewers what the story of The Bear is...it's a love story. And it's a love story with Sydney as opposed to the horror/haunting story that's being laid out with Claire (here and here and probably others I'm not finding right now).

I've also been trying to make sense of the use of Long Live, which plays in the background of the conversation that Richie has with Frank in Violet. I was expecting to get another Taylor Swift song in Season 3, but all of the guesses I had made were more directly tied to Richie's plot and story (This is Me Trying was my main prediction). So I was very surprised that the song they picked was Long Live. But in considering Richie as Director Surrogate, this choice starts to make a lot of sense.

I don't think the choice of song is trying to say anything about Richie and Tiff's relationship, or Richie getting over her, or his maturity in handling the conversation with Frank. Long Live is a song that Taylor Swift wrote for her band, in celebration of her first headlining tour (for Fearless). In our chat, @thoughtfulchaos773 suggested that Long Live is a reference to Richie's looking back and reflecting at The Beef (and contrasting the experience of working at The Beef with the experience of working at The Bear) and hoping that sense of comradery and joy is able to be found at The Bear eventually -- and I think that makes a lot of sense.

I said remember this feeling I passed the pictures around Of all the years that we stood there on the sidelines Wishing for right now We are the kings and the queens You traded your baseball cap for a crown When they gave us our trophies And we held them up for our town And the cynics were outraged Screaming, "This is absurd" 'Cause for a moment, a band of thieves In ripped up jeans got to rule the world

There are a couple of other things that stand out to me in the song:

I was screaming, "Long live all the magic we made" And bring on all the pretenders, I'm not afraid

Magic and sleight-of-hand are themes that come up in Season 3, and it may be because I have Unreasonable Hospitality on the brain, but it is important to Richie, who lists the dream weave as one of his non-negotiables. Will Guidara writes in UH that for a while at Eleven Madison Park, they used a literal magic trick to reveal dessert to guests during one of their courses. And EMP also employed an entire team of Dreamweavers whose sole responsibility was to make hospitality personal and special for their guests (seen in Season 3 in the scene with the Surprise with the cake and Richie singing happy birthday in Spanish). I don't necessarily think they picked the song to make this reference but there is a through line there, even if unintended -- and I do think that, dropped fork notwithstanding, Richie's journey towards Unreasonable Hospitality genuinely has become his purpose.

The second thing that stands out to me, which might well be more of an intentional reference, comes from the last verse (which plays as Richie asks Frank about how he got his house):

Will you take a moment? Promise me this That you'll stand by me forever But if, God forbid, fate should step in And force us into a goodbye If you have children someday When they point to the pictures Please tell them my name Tell them how the crowds went wild Tell them how I hope they shine

I am reminded of this very excellent meta of @currymanganese's which posits the name of the restaurant Fairest Creatures alludes to one of Shakespeare's procreation sonnets. I think this verse alludes to (or directs our attention towards):

Season 3's theme of legacy

The hope of reconciliation between Richie and Carmy

An allusion to Carmy's future children and sharing the legacy of The Beef/The Bear with them

#sydcarmy #the bear season 3 #richie #richie as director surrogate #music in the bear #the bear music #taylor swift in the bear #richie is a swiftie #this may just be my ND brain making all sorts of weird connections #which happens #cue me trying to puzzle out what TS song will come in season 4 at Richie's behest

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ronanceautistic · 9 months

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Here is my mostly Ronance, mostly Nancy-centric fic masterlist :D

Meta

Nancy Wheeler full character analysis with a focus on autistic traits (the autistic nancy doc)

Over 200K

Stranger Things rewrite where Nancy goes missing instead of Will (Ronance, Wheeler Siblings, platonic Stobin) - 41 chapters

50K - 100K

Nancy and Robin gay pining during summer 1986 (Ronance, minor Byler) - 15 chapters

10K-50K

A collection of prompts given to me from my asks - (Nancy-centric, click here for specific list of prompts) - 6/? chapters

Modern Selective Mutism!Nancy AU (Ronance) - 15/? chapters

Nancy grew up in Hawkins Lab AU (Karen & Nancy, Ronance, Barb & Nancy ((unrequited love))) - chapters 9/9

The Last Of Us AU (Ronance, Max & Nancy, Max & Robin, platonic Stobin & minor Lumax) - 8 chapters

Nancy can freeze time (Ronance, platonic Ednancy) - 5 chapters

Grosse Pointe Blank AU where Nancy is a hitman for hire (Ronance, platonic Ednancy, platonic Stobin) - 6 chapters

Season 4 rewrite where Nancy is cursed instead of Max (Ronance) - 4 chapters

One shots set inbetween Season 1 and 2 (Jopper, Boyce, Byler, Wheeler Siblings, Eleven & Robin) - 6 chapters

5-10K

Six years after they save the world, Robin and Nancy reconnect (Ronance platonic or romantic, Holly & Nancy) - 1 chapter

Nancy & Robin fall in love, Nancy recovers from OCD (Ronance) - 1 chapter

Nancy is stuck in a death loop, Robin has to watch (Ronance) - 1 chapter

Modern AU where Robin and Nancy do a school project (Ronance) - 1 chapter

The Good Place AU (Ronance, Minor Steddie) - 2 chapters

Two one shots, werewolf!Robin and werewolf!Nancy (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 2 chapters

Pirate AU based on Monkey Island (Ronance) - 1 chapter

Under 5K

Robin and Nancy meet on Nancy's first day of Kindergarten (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Depression/Healing fic where Robin takes care of Nancy (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Nancy has a flashback with only Mike around to help (Wheeler Siblings) - 1 chapter

Nancy angst with Robin loving her (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Ronance aquarium date! (Ronance) - 1 chapter

7 year old Nancy scripts a D&D-ish game for Robin (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Robin needs stitches, but is afraid of blood. Nancy is here to help and pine. (Ronance) - 1 chapter

Horror Movie AU where Robin & Nancy stay the night at the Creel House (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Nancy and Robin are werewolves, who turn during S4 E7 (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Nancy is not okay, Robin notices (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Nancy’s Vecna Vision from Max’s POV (Max & Nancy, minor Lumax) - 1 chapter

Robin and Nancy take care of each other after the gates open (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Nancy is afraid of heights (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

Nancy survivors guilt character study (Ronance, platonic or romantic) - 1 chapter

The night after Fred’s death (Just Nancy) - 1 chapter

Nancy loneliness character study (Just Nancy) - 1 chapter

#nancy wheeler #stranger things #ronance #robin buckley #robin x nancy #ronance fic #mike wheeler #ronancetober #wheeler siblings #byler #stobin #ednancy #eddie munson

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linkspooky · 1 year

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hi Spooky! I just read your meta about Gojo's motivation in the fight and you brought up interesting points.

I thought Gojo was fighting in a way that he's trying to save Megumi, because if Gojo is really trying to eliminate Sukuna for good he would go for the most fatal blow, the brain, he knows that Sukuna can still come back even without heart (lungs and liver)... so I thought Gojo is probably trying to weaken Sukuna to "make room" for Megumi. Even if his facade is "carefree", at first he already warned Sukuna that he won't hold back, he seemed worried when he realized that Megumi is the one that got hit by UV. But now I'm worried about his character growth, is it like he's decreasing? or at least he's not showing something better than the Gojo who killed Toji - teen Gojo; what happened to the Gojo that claims to protect his students' youth and who is supposed to be the "good guy" in this fight...

I still think Gojo is fighting with the belief he can revive Megumi after he takes down Sukuna, but I agree with you anon his attitude towards the fight shows his lack of growth after Toji. Not only does Gojo reference Toji a couple of times like the battle is still fresh on his mind but his emotional state resembles the way he was when he fought Toji post-awakening as the "strongest." It wasn't just a happy-go-lucky facade at that point Gojo stated in his internal narration he wasn't fighting to avenge Riko: it really was just about defeating Toji and using his newfound power to reach his full potential.

It's understandable Gojo reacted that way in the moment though. He's seventeen, and it's probably alienating to have that much power thrust on your shoulders at seventeen. However, Gojo shows a clear lack of progress since that battle. Eleven years have passed since the battle with Toji, and Gojo's kind of trapped there mentally. He's still fighting for the same reasons he fought against Toji. Those lines could be applied to how he feels via Sukuna's possession of Megumi.

"Right now I'm not angry for you. Nor do I feel vengeful toward anyone. Right now, it's just that everything feels right."

Word of god supports this: Gege was asked directly if Gojo matured after the battle with Toji, and Gege explained instead of maturing he left the decision making up to Geto.

This is pretty consistent with Gojo and Geto's foiling with one another. Geto tends to be a deeply self-reflective character almost to a fault. While I'd argue that while Gojo is known by the fandom as the more selfish one, he is oddly someone who doesn't self reflect at all.

We know far more about Geto's internal world and how he sees things because of his internal narration. Honestly, if you compare the short time he's a focus character in Hidden Inventory to the entire rest of the manga Gojo receives a lot less internal dialogue. When Gojo does have internal narration it's almost always just him strategizing for a fight. He doesn't have the same richly developed internal world that Geto has because he doesn't really think or reflect on those things. When he does give insight to himself and his belief it's almost always himself talking aloud to other people.

Which neatly dovetails into my next topic re: Gojo's tendency to mask his true emotions under a light-hearted facade. I think it's inarguable he does that, Gojo was acting happy-go-lucky in front of his students about five minutes after killing Geto. Geto commented in the beach scene in Okinawa that Gojo goofing around on the beach was his way of being considerate to Amanai, and that while pretending to be carefree he'd been exhausting himself keeping the limiitless active for days not even sleeping. Gojo even downplays the burden of that in front of Geto, the one person he allows himself to be vulernable with.

However, I don't think Gojo's tendency to mask his true emotions is because he's crying on the inside during his fight with Megumi and at some point he's going to have an emotional breakdown over it. That interpretation I think comes from the fandom's tendency to woobify Gojo because they want to make him a more relatable and easy to understand character when Gojo is supposed to be alienating and off-putting.

He's an exploration of what being the strongest would due to a person's mind, and how much that would alienate a person from the people around him. Gojo's defined by his inability to relate to others, especially the people he finds as weak so it only makes sense he'd process his emotions in a way that's different from most people.

If people learn and grow and change by their interaction with others, then Gojo who's very cursed technique itself makes it so nobody can ever touch him unless he wants them too does not interact with others and therefore does not change.

It's interesting if you look at things from a budhhist perspective, because there are heavy themes of budhism present in the text of JJK itself. Let's say that Gojo attained enlightenment at seventeen. If he's already enlightened then why would he need to grow any more past that point? The ultimate goal of budhism is to escape the cycle of karma entirely, so from that perspective Gojo untethering himself from the world and earthly concerns and other people is his ideal endpoint.

On the other hand Gojo is like a person living in the world - he eats takeout, goes out drinking with his friends, has a job, pays his taxes. He didn't escape life and worldly concerns, because life went on, he's still living in the world and eleven years has passed since the moment he "attained enlightenment."

If he's already enlightened then he shouldn't need to grow, but considering hes still living in the world you need to grow and change with the world and people around you otherwise you're going to be left behind.

From what we've seen in canon Gojo changed a little bit. His ideals changed in the fact he adopted Geto's sense of responsibility and judgement of good and evil. He also witnessed Geto's fall and lost his friendship which is clearly what influences his current beliefs on wanting to protect the childhood of sorcerers, and that there's something rotten about the Jujutsu Society surrounding him.

I don't mean to say that every change in Gojo's life comes from Geto, but rather Gojo's current sense of beliefs are based around what happened to him in his youth. He wants to protect children because his youth was ruined. If Geto never fell and became a curse user would Gojo see anything wrong with the current system worth rebelling over?

Put better in another better meta here.

Still, my point is that... Gojo simply never cared enough about things like ideology. [...] He tried to internalize Geto’s original values of protecting the weak since he could sense some merit to them, finding joy in entertaining Riko and later his students, but he completely missed the reasoning behind those values. This is why he spouted all those things about not saving/reaching Geto (without having attempted it in the first place) and about becoming a teacher to prevent young sorcerers from missing out on their youth (immediately going to indoctrinate young Megumi into their messed up system as a pretext of saving him from the Zenins. [...] The only way he can empathize with them is by remembering what he himself enjoyed in his youth, that being companionship with his bff and his growing power. And when some of them don’t show interest in that (like poor fucking Megumi) Gojo is simply not interested in exploring alternatives. To him, it’s not a question of ‘why’, it never was.

Gojo is extreemly self-oriented in all the good and bad that entails. Good because it makes him an extremely strong, and self confident individual that allows him to pursue those ideals (and his ideals are still pretty good) bad because he easily loses sight of other people's feelings.

A gojo who truly changed after the fight with Toji would have reached out to Megumi in an attempt to break the cycle that started with the Zen'ins abuse of TOji. A true example of being the bigger man by going out of his way to help the son of a man who in a lot of ways caused permanent damage to his life and the people around him.

However, that's blatantly not what Gojo did. Once again we have Word of God on this.

Gojo hasn't matured past his mindset of seeing people in terms of "strong and weak" and as a natural extension of that he tends to treat the same kids he's trying to help as assets so he's not living up to his desire to be the responsible adult in their lives. Because he's not really an adult. His growth stopped in the fight with Toji.

Gojo's solution to the problem of Jujutsu Society's use of child soldiers and treating children as expendable is... to create stronger child soldiers. I don't think Gojo does this maliciously, it's just he has no self-awareness whatsoever. He is Jujutsu Society's ideal and constantly praised as such and because of that can't see the flaws in his own ideology and actions. That's also the way Gojo was raised, pushed to be the strongest and to build his entire life and self-worth around being the strongest he can be. People who lack self-awareness tend to unsconiously recreate the circumstances under which they were raised because it's familiar to them. Do unto others what was done unto you.

To return to my original topic though Gojo has a tendency to make his true emotions but I don't think it's done because he's secretly crying on the inside.

I think Gojo's complete lack of reaction to Nanami's death was his genuine reaction. He's not putting on a brave face or anything. He probably does care that Nanami died, but this is just how Gojo processes his emotions. I also think there's a couple of times where Gojo is disturbed during the fight against Megumi such as when Sukuna used Megumi as a shield for the limitless, but at the same time he's clearly having the time of his life with this fight.

I don't think he's faking that. He shouldn't really be enjoying this battle because there are simply more important things right now than whether or not Gojo finally gets to have fun in a fight and be challenged against someone who's his equal - but apparently Gojo didn't get that memo.

Gojo is probably masking his emotions to some extent, but there's a difference between text (what is stated) and subtext (what is not stated and instead relies on reader interpretation). Gojo visibly enjoying himself in the fight is direct text. Gojo announces out loud that he has no problem beating up Megumi, the narration tells us that Gojo is feeling deeply satisfied with this fight.

While characters do sometimes hide their feelings and lie, and narrators are sometimes reliable, subtext is still an interpretation and it doesn't trump what is directly stated by the work.

The text has already told us directly that number one Gojo doesn't feel any hesitation to fight Megumi, and number two Gojo's first priority is winning and his second priority is worrying about Megumi.

Anything that contradicts that is fandom interpretation of the text. I don't think Gege is trying to pull a fast one or unreliable narrator trick here. Gege has always been blatantly honest about Gojo's flaws as a character, hence why I constantly cite his responses in interviews.

I think it's Gege's intention here to show us how Gojo's priorities are eschewed. You can make an argument that Gojo has to worry about defeating Sukuna first above everything else because of utiliarian reasons. If he loses here then everyone else dies. He may have to sacrifice Megumi to stop Sukuna from killing anyone else.

However, those utilitarian reasons are in direct opposition to Gojo's ideals. Gojo wants to create a world where children aren't sacrificed for the common good. In Gojo's ideals chidlren shouldn't be sarificed for adults, but rather it's adults who should protect children so they can live out their youths. If Gojo fails to protect Megumi here he's going back on everything he supposedly stands for.

So while you can make an argument pragmatically Gojo has to worry about winning the fight first. Idealistically he should be fighting to save Megumi, not to win against Sukuna. However, he's not doing that. By having him care more about the fight itself then Megumi, it shows that Gojo's pragmatism often is in conflict with his own idealism. Which is something we've always known about his character. He wants to help kids but at the same time he's using them as tools to further his own agenda.

Again a lot of Gojo's flaws arise from his own lack of self-awareness. Gojo does conceal his own emotions a lot, but I don't think he's hiding a crying child inside. Instead it's more like he's so alienated from both the people around him and his own emotions that he can't process them or self reflect.

Gojo is blind in a lot of ways, like it's made clear by Shoko that Gojo's isolation doesn't just come from being the strongest. There are people around him actively trying to connect with him and Gojo just kind of ignores them because he's too caught up in the idea that only someone like Geto who was as strong as he was could ever understand him.

Gojo doesn't show his own emotions or make deep emotional connections with others because he probably doesn't understand those emotions himself. He's not only alienated himself from the people around him, but he's alienated himself from his own feelings to such an extent that even when he does care it's difficult for him to show it.

#jjk meta #metasks #gojo satoru

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armageddon-generation · 3 months

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The One Who Waits Should’ve Been the God of Fiction, not Sutekh

Sutekh was wasted as Series 14’s Big Bad & had no thematic connection to the rest of the stories. He was only there for fan-service. I realize this is partly Big Cope on my part, trying to rationalize the bad writing decisions this series, but it would’ve made way, way more sense thematically for the One Who Waits to be the God of Fiction, from the Land of Fiction.

The Land of Fiction is a pocket dimension the Second Doctor visits in The Mind Robber. Created by the Gods of Ragnarok, in it all the fictional lands and characters ever created exist and evolve, powered by the belief of our universe. It’s perfect for the themes RTD is exploring with series 14.

The God of Fiction latches onto the TARDIS at the edge of the universe during Wild Blue Yonder. The TARDIS as the ultimate narrative machine, the centre of so many twists and stories and myths, all the central plot-developments of this universe. Meta-commentary on the Doctor having slowly become the ‘main character’ of the universe. Of course a parasite that feeds on fiction would attach to him!

Now all s14’s fantasy elements- Goblins, a Bogeyman powered by storytelling, the folklore Fairy Circle, Boom tapping into faith & the afterlife, Rogue’s Bridgerton-fanfic romance & cosplay, all tie into the series arc. Narrative purpose for the experimentalism and scattershot tones, as the God of Fiction forces the TARDIS to new narrative extremes to feed itself.

(Also, 73 Yards- where Ruby is trapped in a nightmare world fuelled by dream-logic that she applies the structure and rules of traditional narrative to, latching onto a villain she has to defeat in order to make sense of the inexplicable- now becomes a microcosm of the whole season.)

People were initially worried RTD might re-use his original plan for Rose with Ruby- i.e. the Doctor manipulating her life to create his perfect companion. It’s a bad idea, but what if it was an external force? Like what Missy did with Clara, turned up to eleven.

The God of Fiction chose Ruby, the foundling, as 15’s perfect companion. The God is the one who shrouded Ruby’s regular human Mum in a Dickensian cloak, and the reason Ruby’s attempts to find a perfectly normal woman failed. They’re dressing her simple story up as a mysterious fairytale. The ‘we create legends out of ordinary people’ idea is baked into the spine of the season.

(This also lampshades 15 & Ruby being BFFs from the start. Skipping over/fast-forwarding through vital Doctor-companion milestones is explicitly because the God of Fiction has seen it all before & wants to get to the good stuff.)

Mrs Flood, with her fourth-wall breaking winks to camera, would be the God of Fiction’s servant in this version.

All the mystery boxes without satisfying answers this season- Susan Twist, the snow, the changing memory- were overtly placed by the God to keep 15 & Ruby on the hook. This way we can talk about the show’s overreliance on the Mystery Box structure, and the nuances of subverting expectations. The God knows they’re in a TV show! They acknowledge baiting 15 & the audience with Susan as shallow key-jangling.

By defeating the God of Fiction at the end of the season, through the genuine, human connection they’ve forged travelling together irrespective of mystery boxes or plot-twists or destiny, Ruby is freed from the constraints of the Narrative, and finally allowed to reunite with her Mum.

15 leaving Ruby would also make way more sense here; Mr. ‘I bring disaster, Kate’, ‘Maybe I’m the bad luck’ just got told his best friend’s life had been manipulated by a God because of him, and the foundation of their relationship was itself orchestrated, choreographed, puppeteered from the outset. He leaves Ruby to finally let her live a real life.

#doctor who #doctor who series 14 #doctor who season 1 #rtd2 #15th doctor #ruby sunday #rtd #dw spoilers #sutekh #ncuti gatwa #millie gibson #dw meta #the mind robber #empire of death

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dduane · 5 months

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Does mechanical worldgating work differently between the YW canon and the STEKR canon? And can you gate from one to the other?

Probably the two universes' takes work differently, as—so far, anyway—Errantryverse worldgating tech is canonically routinely hybrid (i.e. containing both wizardly and non-wizardly tech solutions), whereas the ones in the Seven-Worlds sheaf (or eleven worlds if you're being completist about it...) seem routinely to be running on the "fairy gold"/room-temperature superconductor-based tech.

Regarding the possibility of gating between the two: "As of print time, the Stationmaster's Office at the Crossings on Rirhath B had not responded to a request for comment."

#Young Wizards meta #Eleven Worlds meta #worldgating #(see also: “Which Lie Did I Tell”)

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somefanficrecomendations · 9 months

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December Monthly Roundup

Here's December's fic round up!

DC/BATMAN

Worlds Saddest Breakfast Club by motleyfam (gen)7k, Hurt/Comfort, Jason Todd-Centric Following a couple of Very Bad Weeks™ (which may or may not have involved being kidnapped and mildly tortured), Jason decides the best way to cheer himself up is to break into the Manor for a 3 a.m. snack. Turns out he isn’t the only one awake.

Batstream by RandomReader13 (gen), 6k, Bats on social media, Humor “I want it on record that I think this is a terrible idea and I’m only doing this to mitigate the damage." AKA Red Robin decides it's a great idea to livestream patrol while Batman's off-world. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

cards on the table by wesslan (gen) 67k, WIP, Fortune Teller AU, Tim Drake-Centric Tim's parents faked their deaths and fled the country years ago, but neglected to take him with them. He spent some time on the streets, and now at 16, he makes a living as a fortune teller, stalking and hustling the shit out of Gotham's elite by telling them eerily accurate fortunes based on the information he gathers about them. His life is peculiar but he wouldn't change a thing. When he gets booked for the big Wayne Halloween party, however, he finds himself getting all tangled up with the Waynes, and the more fortunes he tells, the tighter the snare becomes. or: Tim just wanted to scam Gotham's elite, not end up on the Batfamily's watchlist. But it seems they just won't leave him alone..

(a not so) lonesome town by wesslan (gen), 10k, 2-part series, Sentient Gotham, Jazz music. Two works in which Gotham City is sentient and adopts enough kids to rival Batman himself (Batman is one of them).

Banshee in a Well by liverobinreaction (bugbee) (gen), 43k, Meta Tim, Resurrection Powers Tim is five years old when he drowns in his parents' pool. He dies quietly, waiting for parents who love him, but will never be there, to realise that something is wrong. They never show up, and he sinks into oblivion. When he wakes up and claws his way out of the water, the sun has set, and the lights of his house are on. He is cold and wet and his lungs burn. But most of all, Tim is alone. (If you die and no-one is there to see it, were you ever alive in the first place?)

HUNGER GAMES

right here in the old therebefore by californianNostalgia (Katniss/Peeta) 14k, Canon Divergence, Ghosts There’s a ghost at the Hanging Tree. Katniss sees him first when she’s six, her hair in braids, the song about the growing gallows fresh in her mind. This changes nothing. This changes some things. (In which Lucy Gray killed Coriolanus at the lake.)

How Rue Became the Mockingjay by aimmyarrowshigh (multi) 5k, Different 74th Victors AU Katniss Everdeen and the girl from Eleven are ruining their best-laid plans – the Capitol’s and the Rebels’. So Caesar, they say. Announce the change. An alternate chronology for The Hunger Games.

CROSSOVERS

Annabeth and the Nine Step Career Plan by feeling_the_aster_9145 (Annabeth/Percy), 76k, PJO x DCU, Annabeth gets Lex Luthor arrested, BAMF Annabeth. Annabeth Chase does not accept limitations. Everyone knows that. If she wants something, no matter how impossible, she will find a way to make it happen. Though, perhaps she will allow Bruce Wayne and his ridiculous paranoia-induced company restrictions a small portion of the credit. Actually… now that she thinks about it, the man may have had a point in his worries. Wayne Technologies does not accept college interns. Annabeth always has a plan B.

A Lesson in Superiority by Nation-Ustria (gen), 96k, WIP, Batfam x Harry Potter, Damian Wayne is Harry Potter, Wizarding Politics “The good news is, he’s not cursed,” Constantine says. “And the bad news?” Dick asks sharply. Constantine squints. “I wouldn’t call it bad news so much as, er, news.” He turns to Damian with something like a grimace. “You’re a wizard, kid.” “...I’m a what?”

#batfam fic rec #hunger games fic #percy jackson fic rec #harry potter fic recs #fanfiction #Tim Drake #Jason Todd #katniss everdeen #batfamily #damian wayne #Batman #monthly roundup

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mike-haters-dni · 6 months

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Scalding, unnecessary take that I'm going to use as an excuse to yap about my hyperfixation characters more than anything, but El's character is actually impossible to stick into coffee shop fanfiction No Supernatural Shit AUs. That's Jane you're writing about. Jane and El are not the same person. At all. And like, Jane is interesting to think about, don't get me wrong. I have thought about Jane. I love Jane. She's adorable and vaguely autistic. But Jane != Eleven.

Eleven is the way she is almost entirely because of her experience/trauma of growing up in the lab and having supernatural murder powers. Her main characters traits are being a self-sacrificing hero and not being sure who she is due to the fact she grew up in an isolated sterile inhuman environment. Unless you're directly translating those things into something unsupernatural (like growing up in a fucked up cult or something and like fighting her way out and now she'll fight to protect other people from similar experiences or something idk) you're writing about Jane the normal gorl who got to grow up with a normal personality in a normal world. And like, you can do that. It's fine it's fandom do whatever u want. But personally, the first thing I come up with when I birth an AU is what crazy powers and fucked up backstory we give Eleven here. Also how do we make her and everyone else really fucking cool but that...might be beside the point idk.

The powers have to basically ruin or have had ruined her life at one point. They have to be a curse that she either reclaims or gets rid of at the end. If she isn't tortured she isn't Eleven Stranger Things lmao

And then yeah yeah my next step is to figure out how Mike AND THE OTHERS OK but mostly Mike get involved in this. Which brings me to my next point: Jane and Mike have no real reason to talk to each other. Mike x Jane is just Normal Gorl x Normal Boy which is like, fine sure if that's what you want, but also you kinda just erased everything interesting about their dynamic. You wanna know what makes El and Mike's relationship so compelling? Objectively? I'm objectively right about everything I'm about to say here? Ok their dynamic is this: Eleven is the most important person in the world, and Mike is the only boy who will ever love her. And yeah that second one sounds really sad but 1. yeah it kinda is :) 2. its not really true that's just what El thinks which is like a major theme for her character TO ME, her underestimating how 'normal' she is esp in her later years 3. it also is kinda true because he's the only boy romantically interested in her who actually understands and experienced all the supernatural/lab trauma bullshit and is actively fighting beside her through the plot of the show, and 4. he's literally perfect and also the only boy she'll ever love and need so it all works out.

And to explain the first one, I mean, you know she's saved the world twice right? She kinda literally is the most important person in the world considering its up to her to stop the apocalypse probably in the end? But its not the being important exactly that makes Mike love her ok, that's more of a meta character thing. Like she doesn't have to literally be the key to saving the world and the most powerful being in the universe. Its more that she has to have something really special about her that draws Mike specifically to her and binds him to her permanently and inseparably and he belongs to her forever and ever and they die in each other's arms. Like she deserves. In canon I imagine objectively and correctly that it went like this: Mike is a natural outcast collector and protector due to his pervasive unconscious need to be needed and his fear of losing the few people who like him, who meets the ultimate outcast girl who literally has nothing and needs him in a very real way, and this gives him an excuse to just pour his entire self into her, fulfilling one of his deepest interpersonal needs. The best part is that she's super selfless and amazing and she loves him the same right back so its actually a beautiful thing they get going. Basically the idea of being anything less than perfect for her is so sad and horrible due to how fucked her life was that it drives the already caretaking Mike into overdrive to make her happy. Not at the cost of him still being an individual person, mind you. But that's the vibe. Also let me just say, all the self-sacrificing vibes and obsession and desperation can become toxic under certain circumstances and that is absolutely a feature not a bug. Sorry you don't like watching your faves yell at each other but we are not the same.

Anyway what the fuck was I talking about? AUs? Yeah ok so when translating Mike (AND THE OTHERS...and the others) into other stories there's more flexibility u kno because he's mostly just Some Guy. He really just needs (TO ME) an excuse to be fighting with Eleven (she has to be fighting something with the powers I know you gave her). He shouldn't be directly involved with whatever gave her the powers but he should generally know of and be somewhat affected by it. Or become aware of it/involved with it over time. Like in the show. You get it. Honestly his only real consistent character traits are being kinda moody and being the leader of the party in whatever vague or not way. And being intelligent. Like he has to be leader for a reason. I guess that's a decent base for a character right there.

oh right side note: you have to do something fun with her name. like she was basically branded Eleven by the freak that gave her the powers so u gotta take that energy and translate it into another branded name that has el in it because she needs to get the nickname ofc. unless its a cyberpunk au in which case Eleven is a pretty normal name and she can just go by that lmao.

So the point ig is Jane and Mike break up when they go away to different colleges and don't talk to each other again until their next high school reunion, while Mike and Eleven are...well you should know by now.

#this is truly me rambling to myself but ig that's why we're here right #yes i want to discuss mike and eleven's characters more #yes its exhausting writing shit #yes u can ask questions/talk about ur own AUs or whatever #blah blah engage with me or don't ig #one like and i list my AUs tho #if i feel like it #ig ill tag this #mileven #not like theres anything else in the tag rn hahaha

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saintsenara · 1 year

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rare pair tag game

thanks for the tag, @said-snape-softly :)

i'm pretty sure everyone has done this by now, but if you'd like to, please consider this a blanket tag.

apart from all the tomarry and the odd dabble in remadora, i am a rare-pair enthusiast, so i am delighted to spread some propaganda here... the criterion i've used for a rare-pair is less than 2500 works on ao3.

pairs, little metas, fic recommendations, and some suggestions for authors to follow under the cut.

sirius black/severus snape

why i ship it:

this one can just about claim to be a rare-pair.

sirius and severus are narrative mirrors, whose complicated relationship to themselves and to each other is crucial for driving several of the most important arcs in the series.

in particular, sirius - constantly haunted by guilt and grief over his role in the death of the man he loved [you can decide if his love for james is platonic or not, but i definitely think the text thinks it isn't...], trapped in his childhood home, unable to have his real loyalties acknowledged before his death by the fact he's on the run - leads harry through his journey in hero-worshipping, then being disappointed in, then forgiving james. and then promptly dies.

this is one of harry's most significant areas of personal growth - it begins to chip away at his rather black-and-white morality, which is finally destroyed by his ability to confront the complexity of dumbledore in deathly hallows - but it is also key narratively: harry coming to understand james starts to hint to the reader that it is lily - otherwise absent from her son's conception of himself - who is the key to the mystery...

which brings us to severus - constantly haunted by guilt and grief over his role in the death of the woman he loved, trapped in his childhood home, unable to have his real loyalties acknowledged before his death by the fact he's a spy - who gives harry, and us, the final piece of the puzzle. and then promptly dies.

put them together, though? well, you get the delicious tension of two fundamentally broken people - who cannot comprehend the possibility of their own redemption - bound to each other. can they forgive each other and themselves? is it a disaster? the story can go either way.

and even in fluff there is so much potential for d r a m a between sirius' recklessness and severus' cunning, sirius' emotional control and severus' temper, the fact that sirius is canonically hot and severus is canonically not, how they react to harry and draco [i don't usually accept the fanon that severus is his godfather, except when it means snack can be fighting about it], and so on.

and i'm a sucker for two bitter old men getting a happy ending. sue me.

want to give it a read?

if you trust nothing else i say in my life [and why should you] you can trust this - second life by nwhiker and cassandra7 is one of the greatest pieces of writing i have ever seen, not only in this pairing but in this fandom full stop. it's a profound and solemn meditation on loving and grieving, choice and chance, and the great pain caused by the divide between the magical and the muggle worlds.

then, for gorgeous angst with a happy ending - two boys kissing by @writcraft and the merit in trying by brightened

albus dumbledore/tom riddle | voldemort

why i ship it:

the facetious answer is because they wouldn't be so obsessed with each other if there wasn't some sexual tension underneath it.

the facetious and nsfw answer is because it appeals to the part of me whose favourite book aged 11 was lolita

the serious answer is that they should be horrifying together: they're both liars; both incredibly self-righteous; both living behind masks which conceal their true emotions and motivations; dumbledore took one look at tom as an eleven-year-old, said "he reminds me of gellert", and then did nothing about it; tom thinks dumbledore's a hypocrite and is right, although not for the reasons he thinks; there is a colossal age gap; there is virtually no scenario in any timeline where they could be openly in a relationship unless one of them is concealing his identity; and - really, this seems quite minor in the grand scheme of things - they are constantly trying to destroy each other.

but.

intellectually, they are the only two characters in the series who could be the other's equal - i'm sure that violent arguments about the twelve uses of dragon's blood trigger the majority of their sexual encounters, and a man who's passionate about your research is hot.

if either of them ever fancy being honest - so, no - there is a shared cavernous [although, in tom's case, unacknowledged] grief in their lives which has shaped their not-as-divergent-as-the-text-thinks-they-are views on death, love, duty and so on. their active refusal to understand each other [i.e. dumbledore entirely misreading voldemort's motivations in the job interview scene] and commitment to constantly underestimating each other [i.e. voldemort bouncing around like an idiot in the chamber of secrets instead of using his brain and remembering what a phoenix is] could, in time, lead to something almost resembling acceptance. i mean, just imagine the hurt/comfort sex which happens when voldemort finds out about grindledore.

the way dumbledore describes the young riddle - "self-sufficient, secretive, and, apparently, friendless" - is also an exact description of him. that each sees himself in the other canonically drives their hatred of each other, but it could also appeal to two very vain men in a much racier way. after all, who doesn't want to bang their narrative mirror?

and being an orphan probably doesn't seem so bad when you realise your boyfriend's family is aberforth.

want to give it a read?

i can't recommend concordance by @laeveteinn enough, particularly for one of the best-written dumbledores i've ever seen. i find dumbledore is often written either as far more whimsical than i'd like, or far more fiery and radical [when one of his most interesting personality traits in canon is his tendency towards inaction], but this dumbledore is the perfect balance of contradictions, while tom is his canonical feral self, longing to perceived, rather than the emotionless sociopath of so many other stories.

i also recommend as an entire ocean in a drop by eldritcher, which really leans into just how similar these two are underneath all the artifice.

albus dumbledore/severus snape

why i ship it:

well, we've had dumbledore with one lost boy, let's have him with another [i haven't been brave enough to venture into dumbledore/harry yet, but i'll take recommendations...]

as with riddledore, we have the potential for horror here: a vast power imbalance; enormous age gap; the fact dumbledore sends snape out to potentially die every time he goes off to voldemort; and - this is the crucial one - the fact that dumbledore's recognition of himself in snape is pure self-loathing ["you disgust me"] manifested in punishment [allowing snape to be humiliated in front of fudge, not stopping the presumed-to-be-real moody searching his office, making him give harry occlumency lessons, not letting him teach defence against the dark arts].

but then this stops, when snape does the tremendously brave thing of agreeing to kill dumbledore, and their dynamic equalises, as dumbledore recognises that snape is courageous, steadfast, and redeemed. i'm always struck in half-blood prince by the fact that dumbledore has it with harry's sniping about snape and straight-up tells him to shut up, as well as by the fact that he very nearly gives the game away and confesses why snape switched sides [the thing he promised not to do] when harry finds out it was snape who gave voldemort the prophecy.

and within this equalised dynamic - so this hot geriatric sex is happening in the afterlife, i guess - we have two men who are intellectual close-to-equals, who understand grief and guilt, whose aesthetic senses are charmingly mismatched, who are rarely honest but might be for each other, and who have lots of profound similarities which might lead somewhere...

want to give it a read?

cheerfully disregarding everything i've just said about how snumbledore could work, i highly recommend in infinite remorse of soul by @perverse-idyll, which is a chilling look at how dumbledore uses the power imbalance between the two to assuage his own guilt through snape's humiliation.

for something much more wholesome, i'm a big fan of byzantium by eldritcher

petunia dursley/severus snape

why i ship it:

because vernon is a dick.

i'm fond of petunia, who i think is one of the most interesting characters in the series because of how full of contradictions she is, and who i think is also a victim in fandom spaces of how the adult cast was aged up for the films [in canon, she's only in her early twenties when lily dies, and the implication is that vernon is a good deal older than her)] which makes her inadequacies, such as her inability to truly care for either child in the household, seem much more nuanced than they do if she's pictured as a middle-aged woman with considerable life experience.

like snape, she teeters on a knife edge between various chasms: she is a working-class girl from the midlands made good in middle-class surrey, he is a working-class half-blood boy who spends most of his life in pureblood circles; she ends up with her whole life wrapped up in a square little house when she's barely out of her teens, he ends up with his whole life wrapped up in spying at the same age; she hates the wizarding world and yet covets it, he hates the muggle world and yet cannot escape it; she loves lily and she hates her and she loathes her for dying, he... well, you know the rest.

want to give it a read?

i was first convinced by this pairing by the lovely regretfully yours by @maria-de-salinas, which takes both snape and petunia's awkwardness and bitterness and moulds it into something really tender.

i also highly recommend barking at the moon by rinsbane, the summary of which speaks for itself.

merope gaunt/tom riddle sr.

why i ship it:

our first canon pairing, and probably the most problematic of the canon relationships, since the series never acknowledges that tom sr. is a rape victim.

but i have found myself recently in my merope era and, in particular, in an attempt to give her more nuance than she gets in canon. as i've said to anyone who'll listen in the three broomsticks discord server, i loathe the implication in canon that merope dies because she just cba to live [since it directly justifies voldemort's belief that her death was shameful] and prefer to see her as someone who was desperate to escape a truly horrifying life [the fact she's going to be forced into an incestuous relationship with morfin is right there in canon...] and so did something she didn't have the capacity to understand the implications of [this is not a woman who's ever heard of consent] because she thought it would give her the first chance to be happy in her life, watched it all crash and burn around her, and would have very much liked to have lived to raise her son.

i doubt there was anything real or tender in her relationship with tom sr., of course, and his escape - while merely a brief stay of execution from his son's perspective - is tremendously brave. it's impossible to write tom/merope fluff [although i respect you if you're inclined to try] but fanfiction gives a space to explore the intricacies of their relationship which canon doesn't allow, and i'm obsessed.

want to give it a read?

i'm recommending myself here, and assuring you that you will enjoy: enchanter's nightshade, which explores how merope's attempts to keep her husband enslaved fail; the snow child, which treats the relationship as folk-horror; and the shack at the end of the lane, in which there is redemption, in the end.

the best exploration of tom sr. dealing with the fallout of the relationship is @phantomato's exquisite ganymede, which feels so truly embodied that you can't pull yourself away from the page.

bellatrix lestrange/tom riddle | voldemort

why i ship it:

our second canon pairing, i am obsessed with these two and the tragedy and - to some extent - tenderness bound up in their relationship [which can be proven to be there because noted softy @whinlatter loves them].

i've written before about my conviction - in contrast to a lot of bellatrix fans - that her relationship with rodolphus is utterly miserable, and that voldemort is the only man in her life who can understand her desire to make a life for herself which is not constrained by the gendered expectations of her social class.

obviously, lord voldemort is not a shining paragon of a boyfriend [and he is an awful choice as a baby daddy, bella, get it together], but i think the enormous power imbalance is perhaps slightly less enormous than is sometimes assumed - certainly, she tells him to his face in half-blood prince that he's wrong to trust snape [she's a clever woman], voldemort never physically punishes her for anything [rip to lucius malfoy, who seems to get picked for this in her stead], and voldemort tolerates a surprising amount of nonsense from her which shatters his mystique.

all of which is to say... the scream when she dies isn't just because he's losing the war.

want to give it a read?

tee hee, i'm recommending myself again, and encouraging you to take a look at: atramentum, bellamort's last afternoon together before voldemort goes to the potters; nor all that glisters gold, bellatrix's life - including her relationship with voldemort - through sirius' eyes; and death (eaters) in paradise, because murderous psychopaths deserve crack fics too.

draco malfoy/tom riddle | voldemort

why i ship it:

because the ship name is taco.

these two are a pairing which i enjoy with my tongue firmly in my cheek [and tom's tongue firmly in draco's], as i do with most other things in which draco is a main character [do i want to read drarry angst? no! do i want to chuckle? absolutely!], although this should not be taken as saying that many of taco's fabulous authors don't manage to make the pairing entirely plausible.

in fact, consensual taco [non-con is, of course, its own beast] often has some of the best characterisation of both tom [fretful, mercurial, stubborn, and nowhere near as charming as he thinks he is] and draco [prissy, a very good judge of character, someone who likes being taken care of, and much braver than he appears if he absolutely has to be] i've seen in the fandom, largely because - unlike other voldemort-centric ships [especially tomarry, but also voldemort + any of the adult death eaters] - there's no sense of inevitability there. these two aren't connected by a shared bit of soul, or a prophecy, or having gone to school together, or having been hooked in by voldemort in the first war when he was unassailable.

they have to choose each other. or, more accurately, draco has to choose tom, and tom has to get chosen.

and the results have me entertained.

want to give it a read?

then you will want to have a look at the travelling cabinet by @the-paper-monkey [and its sequel, bluebeard], truly the gold standard of taco content with an absolutely brilliant draco, whose sheer capacity to cling on and make himself an irremovable part of tom's life may just end up changing the course of history.

narcissa malfoy/severus snape

why i ship it:

because i am in deep with the conspiracy theory that it's canon. i am absolutely certain that narcissa is the person that voldemort is referring to at the end of deathly hallows - "he desired her, that was all, but when she had gone, he agreed that there were other women, and of purer blood, worthier of him". it seems highly unlikely to me that the canonical voldemort would give a shit about snape fancying any random pureblood [although the snapemort version is, naturally, hugely jealous], but snape having had some sort of liaison with narcissa, and the ability knowing this gives voldemort to humiliate snape, narcissa, the memory of lily, bellatrix, lucius, and draco is definitely information he would go out of his way to remember...

plus, how do you know where he lives, babe? v suspicious.

want to give it a read?

if you want some fluff, you will very much enjoy the incredibly sweet the reformed man by gingertart50, which features narcissa nursing snape back to health post-nagini and is a favourite re-read for me when i'm drunk and it's christmas.

if you want some very-much-not-fluff, other women and of purer blood by yours truly will scratch the itch...

minerva mcgonagall/severus snape

why i ship it:

because i'm an equal-opportunity age-gap fan, and there is far too little older woman/younger man in the fandom.

and look, i'll admit it, i'm a fan of the fanon that snape and mcgonagall are friends prior to dumbledore's death - i'm not sure it's canonically plausible, but this sign can't stop me because i can't read - and i like the idea of that blossoming into something more, especially in fics where snape survives the second war. after all, he is a man who definitely needs to be treated quite strictly [and i don't just mean in the staff room], there is a shared loneliness and grief to them both, they're intellectual equals despite the age gap, and bickering about quidditch is absolutely fine as a method of foreplay.

plus, you can't tell me dumbledore's portrait doesn't ship it.

want to give it a read?

for a fic which shows minerva at her acerbic - and yet still sensual - best, always but not necessarily forever by gingertart50 is an old, fluffy, and very funny, favourite.

for something much more bittersweet, that good night by kelly_chambliss has my heart.

severus snape/tom riddle | voldemort

why i ship it:

because voldemort is canonically down bad for it - there is no need to believe snape's ridiculous cover story for not attending his resurrection, to try and spare lily as a treat for his man, and to give him a nice, painful death which allows the narrative to move on and harry to defeat him if the dark lord isn't firmly in his simp era.

more seriously, they obviously have an enormous amount in common, particularly in terms of their backgrounds [harry draws a connection between all three of them, but actually the fact that harry is rich in the wizarding world, not a slytherin, and with a muggle mother, therefore giving him a pureblood name, means he can't relate to the post-childhood experience of both halves of snapemort].

as a result, i think snape is the death eater who comes the closest to understanding voldemort's motivations - above all, the fact that he's not seeking an oligarchy, which the malfoys etc. obviously believe - while voldemort is someone snape feels understands his intellectual interests and his creativity.

want to give it a read?

boy, are you in luck, because i myself have a snapemort wip - scylla and charybdis. it is not wholesome.

tom riddle/myrtle warren

why i ship it:

because it started as crack and now i love them.

in particular, i just have so much respect for being incredibly annoying as a method of seduction, and i think myrtle's commitment to just following tom around chattering at him - and, therefore, without her realising it, preventing him from committing all sorts of crimes - is iconic.

want to give it a read?

then my unhinged rom-com - bookbinding - shall provide.

tom riddle | voldemort/ginny weasley

why i ship it:

because i enjoy seeing my dear friends who ship hinny shake and cry.

but also because ginny and tom have an enormous number of similarities, right down to the fact that they both have yew wands [if you're sick of people saying harry has an oedipus complex, you'll be delighted to be confronted with the mountain of evidence ginny reminds him of the villain who keeps trying to kill him instead].

they are both very good liars, quick thinking, remarkably resistant to shame, possessed of nerves of steel, predisposed to violence, brown-eyed, so hot they have harry gagged, and the profound enemy of someone whose surname is smith.

despite what he claims, tom was absolutely not just sat politely in that diary gritting his teeth while ginny complained about having second hand robes and idiot brothers. as he says, he opted "to start feeding [her] a few of my secrets", and i think it's justifiable from canon that they were at the very least half-truths [for example, i would not be shocked to discover he tells her he's a half-blood orphan brought up against his will in the muggle world - there's no other reason, i think, for him to successfully make her tell him these things about harry without it], which means that ginny has lots of lovely emotional leverage over him.

plus, as with tomarry, you have the element of "this is kind of inevitable" in the relationship, and the mysteries of fate are always sexy.

want to give it a read?

this is a tommary/hinny/tominny triad, but it has had me in a chokehold since the first time i read it - shameful company by merrivale, which, truly iconically, manages to be epilogue compliant.

#asenora fic recs #rare pair tag game #starprince #snirius #snack hp #riddledore #snumbledore #petunia dursley x severus snape #merope gaunt x tom riddle sr #bellamort #tom riddle x draco malfoy #snarcissa #minerva mcgonagall x severus snape #snapemort #tom riddle x myrtle warren #tom riddle x ginny weasley #lots to read

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