#How in many ways one can't exist without the other

[amiti-art]

HI! I’m here to ask honest opinion on….Lore Olympus. I’m sorry for putting my opinion here….but I hate it. I’m sorry, I try to see it in a good way….put it paints Apollo as a horrible person. And there are other things that I’d respectfully don’t like about it.However, I want to see your opinion. That is if you’re willing to share it. BTW, I fricking love your drawings., especially the ones about Apollo and his myths! Have a good day or night!

Hello!

I'm glad you like my art 🫶🏻

So, Lore Olympus.

This probably won't come as a surprise to most people, considering how much Apollo art I've made, but I hate Lore Olympus. And not only because of how poorly Apollo was portrayed there.

I'm going to be honest with you: I never read much of it. I read maybe a few chapters some years ago because it was advertised as Greek mythology retelling, but I didn't continue because it was boring to me.

Much later, I saw a lot of posts pointing out all the things wrong with Lore Olympus, and boy oh boy, it's bad.

From what I've seen, it’s hardly a retelling; if the names of the characters were changed, nobody would realize this is supposed to be myth-inspired.

And look, I'm not saying you can't change anything when making a Greek mythology retelling, because it's simply impossible to keep everything the same as in the myths—especially when you want to create a story that covers many myths. The math isn't mathing when it comes to Greek mythology, because the myths changed over time, and different city-states had their own versions of the stories, so it's pretty impossible to make a cohesive timeline without changing something.

But from what I've seen, there isn't much Greek influence in this Greek mythology retelling. From the way the characters dress and speak to the food they eat, there is nothing Greek about this comic, it’s completely Americanized.

And I hate Americanization so much. I remember watching Netflix's "The Witcher" and being so disappointed because there was nothing Slavic about it. They kept Jaskier's original name from the books and called it a day. They turned it into another generic fantasy show.

I know that many Greek people feel the same way about Lore Olympus and other American adaptations of their myths. I love Percy Jackson, but the whole "gods moved to the USA because this is where Western civilization is" is just so icky to me. Greece still exists, hello??????

Back to Lore Olympus. For some reason it's fans think that the comic is a valid source for mythology, and they spread so much misinformation.

For the last time: Persephone was abducted in the myths. There is no version where she goes to the Underworld on her own.

Demeter is a heartbroken mother looking for her beloved daughter, not some evil helicopter parent standing between Persephone and her happiness. Justice for Apollo and Demeter.

Also, Persephone is sometimes drawn like a child and looks more like Hades' daughter than his wife. Why?????

And from what I've seen, Persephone is ridiculously powerful for some reason and fights Kronos or something???????

Also, apparently, Leto is portrayed as a manipulative mother????? Leto??? The Titan goddess of motherhood??? Why????

I don't understand why this comic got so popular, to be honest. Probably because of the artstyle.

[remembrancer-of-heresy]

The Destiny

Summary: You desperately try to know if Gods exist. Chaplain Erebus wants to enlighten you.

Erebus/fem!Reader

Warnings: yandere, obsession, possessive behavior, manipulation, noncon

Author's note: so it's finally happened... God-Emperor, forgive me (no)

Word count: 2666 (lol)

Song: Enigma - Sadeness (Part I)

Sade, dis-moi Qu'est-ce que tu vas chercher? Le bien par le mal? La vertu par le vice? Sade, dis-moi Pourquoi l'évangile du mal? Quelle est ta religion? Où sont tes fidèles? Si tu es contre Dieu, tu es contre l'homme Sade, es-tu diabolique ou divin?

The Imperial Truth is the only truth in the galaxy. All must adhere to it and bring its light to all corners of the universe. If anyone dares to resist or dispute it, then they are not worthy of living. Billions lived with this truth. You lived with this truth.

But for you, these were just words, a tyrannical law that all worlds were forced to follow. Perhaps there was something wrong with you, otherwise how could an ordinary citizen of the Imperium have such... heretical thoughts.

But what happened was. You did not say them out loud, did not try to change people's minds. You simply lived in your vacuum, a safe environment. Even when the Emperor announced the creation of the Order of Remembrancers, you felt nothing. Your talents could have been revealed with new strength, you could have become famous, glorified the Legion, but you did not want this. Why, when you do not believe in the truth.

If it was the truth at all.

And yet your Master Librarian gave you no choice and deliberately obtained permission for you. As if you were a slave without will. But your Master assured you that it was for your own good. It was your destiny to be part of the Crusade.

But you were not upset for long. When you realized that you had a chance to choose a Legion, you took it. Many remembrancers wanted to join the Luna Wolves or the Emperor's Children. Quite a few wanted to join the Ultramarines. But you had another goal. Although it was difficult to get to them, as the Legion refused to accept remembrancers for two years after the triumph at Ullanor. But in the end, even the Word Bearers opened their doors for them.

You were not the best historian or iterator in the general sense. The thing is, you only studied what interested you. And if something stirred your feelings, you dove into it headlong. Your master once joked that if you had your way, you would conquer the world. Part of you wanted to say that you would.

But you weren't interested in material power, wealth, or the Imperial Truth. You were far more drawn to other things. Especially religion. Faith is an unshakable feeling, and the Emperor's desire to rid himself of it seemed almost comical. No, mankind will always seek to find God. The question is which Gods are true and which are false.

You knew that Lorgar's praise of the God-Emperor was not a rumor. This legend was not invented by evil tongues to spite the primarch. No, you knew that the Word Bearers were indeed bringing a new religion to the worlds. One that had long been ignored by the Emperor before he burned Monarchia. After that, Lorgar renounced the faith.

But even though you were not a believer, you knew that faith cannot be renounced so easily. You can't get rid of this feeling that torments your heart. Makes your soul sing and glow, fills with blessed light. You can renounce religion, but not faith. And if the God-Emperor was false, then there are other true gods.

Have the Word Bearers found them? Perhaps. You immediately thought of this when you learned about Cyrene Velantion. The Blessed Lady, whose eyes lost the ability to see after the burning of Monarchia. Some chroniclers had already met her. But it was just simple curiosity or simple politeness.

You wanted something else. To know the truth. You remember you were overcome with fear before meeting the Blessed Lady. Mercy and cruelty go hand in hand. As well as love and hate. Whatever the true deity was, it was not fed only by bright emotions. There is no order, only pure chaos. You were afraid to know the truth, for you were only a mortal girl. But you could not remain in sweet ignorance. Sooner or later the truth would come and it was impossible to prepare for it.

However, Cyrene Valantion did not preach, but listened. She could not tell the Truth, since she did not know it. And yet she listened to your fears, anxieties and doubts. She did not judge you and yet asked if you really wanted to meet the Gods.

And looking straight into the portholes you understood that no, you don't want to. But the divinity won't go away from this, it won't disappear. The Immaterium that opened before your eyes captivates your mind and you regret that you only decided to look at it now.

The battle with the traitors is approaching. Horus has rebelled against the Emperor and Lorgar, along with his brothers, must give the first and last battle. To bring down the Warmaster himself. Perhaps you should have been horrified by such events or proud that you ended up on board one of the saviors of humanity.

But you felt nothing. Perhaps Horus did the right thing by rejecting the Emperor. Or maybe you were completely lost in your doubts, justifying the traitor. You didn't know. You only knew that the troubles of the material world are nothing compared to what is happening in the warp.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" - a deep languid male voice cuts through the silence and you squeak in surprise and turn around.

You had never met him face to face, but you had seen him from afar. You had heard of his influence on the Primarch. Fortunately, it was not the old and burning with hidden malice and envy Kor Phaeron. But chaplain Erebus. There was something about the man that made you want to approach him like a lamb to a shepherd… but something about his predatory eyes and gentle smile repulsed you.

“Y-yes, beautiful.” Feeling uncomfortable, you turned away from the space marine, turning your gaze back to the Warp. You did not know why, but the space behind the ship seemed safer to you than the Chaplain’s proximity.

“In truth, I was disappointed when I returned from the Warmaster. And the remembrancers have arrived here. They scurry like rats through the corridors, reveling in their uselessness. Their only role in this story is to become bloody meat,” the man said the terrible words gently, as if lulling you.

You listened to him in confusion. Of course, you guessed that the Space Marines did not like the Remembrancers much, but you did not think that one of them would say it outright. Even if he was close to Lorgar. As if he did not care. Words and actions are unimportant, and you are meat.

“But I had to admit,” his voice echoes over your spirit and you turn sharply to meet his gaze. The man leaned in, almost breathing on your shoulder. “That your zeal to touch the Gods has excited me.”

“I-I,” you gasped like a fish, while Erebus enjoyed the spectacle. “It is not what you think, I, um-”

“No wonder the Emperor exalted men. You women are so weak.” - Erebus smiled at your indignant expression and you felt fear envelop you again. - “But it is the emotionality of your gender that most strongly pushes you to worship. Beautiful servants of the Dark Gods.”

Your heart was pounding like crazy and you swallowed, trying to step back from the chaplain. Not looking him in the eyes. While the words about the Gods screamed in your head, not allowing you to think rationally.

You wanted to know the Truth. And now it is revealed right in front of you. Did you really think that everything would be so easy? Alas, but it is the chaplain who will reveal the secrets of the universe to you. The one whose face is shrouded in such impenetrable darkness that it is surprising how it has not yet swallowed the whole world.

“P-please, please, I”

“Hmm? Asking to continue? Your desire is the law.” - Erebus mocks your request, circling around you like a beast preparing to attack. - “You don’t believe in the Imperial Truths, do you?”

“I-I do,” you trembled like a leaf in the wind, looking at the floor. - “B-beloved Emperor-”

“Don’t lie to me,” a whistle pierced the air and you watched in horror as a neat cut appeared on your palms. How? Where from? - “I am your confessor and I want you to speak frankly.”

You looked at Erebus with tears in your eyes. The man was not in armor, but in a robe. His face was gentle, while his eyes looked at you with a hidden heat. You didn’t even understand how he cut you. But you knew that he enjoyed your confusion.

“N-no, I don’t believe it,” you sobbed and the man smiled even more.

“Do you believe in the God-Emperor?”

“N-no”

“And in others that you know?”

“No”

“What if I told you,” the man almost whispers, but his words sound clear in your head like the sound of a drum. “That the Gods exist? That they watch over us, are a part of us, because we created them ourselves. Where do you think they are?”

The answer did not have time to form in your head, but your body already knew where the path lies. Your eyes flew up to the porthole, looking at the shimmering purple colors of the Immaterium. Only in such a place could the Gods live. The warp itself was a sea of ​​souls for you.

“Clever girl,” a silent cry leaves your chest as you feel heavy, massive hands on your shoulders. The man's weight pressed you to the floor, turning you to the immaterial world. - “They are right there. In the Immaterium. Waiting for us to destroy the false Emperor. When we bring the Galaxy to the true faith, to”

“To Chaos,” you either ask or state. The man behind you falls silent, before a light laugh creeps through him. The grip on your shoulders tightens. You feel the Chaplain’s fingers drop to your collarbone.

“Yes. To Chaos. But serving the Gods is not at all scary, no. I can show you the truth. You can become one of many servants.” - Erebus leans down and breathes so hotly that your ears burn. - “The Skull God will grant you the desire to taste another’s blood. The Architect of Fate will show you a great future. Grandfather will grant you health, he will take care of you. And the Dark Prince will grant you sensuality, make you his concubine.”

Silence fills the hall. Short in the material world, but it seems like an eternity to you. Before your cheek began to shine with someone else's drool and a seductive promise. A tattooed hand cupped your right breast, stroking a nipple hidden under layers of clothing.

"But I would rather make you my concubine."

You break free from someone else's grasp, overwhelmed by emotion. You look into his golden eyes again. Now you know what heat was hidden there. Lust. And Erebus wanted you to see it. He let you escape because he wanted to.

"What?" - you don't even know how to weave the words together. Doubts, fears and misunderstandings wash over you from head to toe. You felt cheated. You were played with like an insect.

"I was given the power of the Astartes, but a pathetic attempt to correct my mind failed. I have never been loyal to the Emperor and never will be. I desired blood even before the ascension. Never will I be a simple soldier, but only a servant of the Dark Forces." - a deep voice fills the silence, not giving you time to come to your senses. - “And I will never stop desiring feminine beauty, as I do now.”

“You will be my concubine. My lover. My whore.” - the man almost purrs, squeezing his hands like an ancient monk. But his words are not full of holiness. - “The world will soon change, the Imperium will fall. The Chroniclers do not have long left, but you. You have always been an outsider. I will lead you to a new era. It is enough just to throw off the shackles of the old order… you will like your destiny.”

Destiny. Your destiny is to become part of the Great Crusade. So your master told you, so the Emperor called you, announcing a new decree. You did not believe that you could bring something significant to this world by becoming a remembrancer. You did not believe in such a path, you realized the lie and falsity of what was happening.

But listening to Erebus, to your horror, you realized that you believed him. You believe that this is your destiny. To accept the will of the Dark Gods, to become their slave. And to give in to the dark temptation, to let a man tempt you. For you will not be able to hide from the Ruinous Powers, and the Emperor will not take you back into his arms. You were always a heretic, you were born to satisfy your master, who deserved a small reward from the Dark Gods.

You blink, smearing tears on your face, trying with all your might to wipe away the uninvited water. No, these are not your thoughts, these are someone else's desires. You are confused, you are scared. You have no one to ask for help. And even though Erebus is a child of Chaos, he is the only one who cares about you, he will take care of you.

What? How do you know? You are talking to him for the first time in your life.

"These are not my thoughts. This is not me. I, I" - you choke, almost falling over the pressure in your chest. - "I can't think about this, n-no, this is not my fate, not my purpose."

"Are you sure? If so, tell me this straight to my face." - a velvety voice sounded very close and raising your head, you see golden eyes with horror. A deceptively gentle smile is snow-white, but you can't stop seeing blood in the corners of his lips. - "If this is true, you will easily reject me. Tell me that you don't want this."

Pain squeezed your vice. Your heart fluttered, and your legs gave way. You desperately wanted to run away, to hide in the bowels of the ship. You reproached yourself for wanting to touch the unknown. You learned about the existence of Gods. Did it make you feel better? Did you find salvation in the truth?

Unable to bear it, you fall to your knees. If before these tears were running down your face in small streams, now you were choking on sobs. Your hands desperately wanted to grab something, just to not fall into the abyss of despair. You clung to Erebus' clothes like a drowning woman, denying that he is your doom.

"See? It's not so hard to admit your place." - the man gently strokes your head, as if you were a funny little animal, before kneeling. Rough teardrop-shaped fingers softly outline your cheekbones and curve your lips. - "I have been watching you for a long time. I could have taken you for myself a long time ago. But I had to prepare my pet. All the pieces are in place, the second betrayal is approaching."

Rough hands gently undress you, gently stroking the exposed areas of skin. And you listen to what Erebus says, wondering how quickly you fell into despair. How easy was it for you to break and turn human knowledge and arts into a slave? Were the boundaries allowed, or were they always blurred, and you were just waiting for them to finally be erased? Whatever the answer, you knew that in any case, Erebus like a boy played with you.

"We must praise all the Gods." - a tongue full of poison licks your ear before Erebus's eyes are fixed on your lips. - "But for now all the worship will go to the youngest of them."

Your kiss is sensual and tender like the sting of a scorpion.

[haveyoureadthisfanfic]

I'm aroacespec (and honestly confused about where I fall on that spectrum, but I do know I'm sex/romance favorable) and tbh my relationship with shipping is weird.

There are some ships I look at and I'm like "how can you see this as anything but romantic" and there are other ships where I'm like "okay but why do we have to ship them, can't they just be friends?" and it's almost always the total opposite of what the fandom majority's view is. For example, my Sonic "how can you see this as anything but romantic" ship is Espilver, and my "okay but why do we have to ship them, can't they just be friends?" ship is Silvaze.

I will say that something I've noticed is there tends to be a double-standard with allo people (specifically cishet people) when it comes to ships. You get a ton of "why can't they just be friends" with slash and femslash ships, but then those same people will ship a het pairing that look at each other in a single frame. I don't know if it's something that's more obvious to me because I'm gay myself (or even if it's more obvious because I'm aroacespec specifically), but it's weird to me. I choose to look at it this way: if this was a het ship with the same character dynamic, would people still say "why can't they just be friends?"

That's not to say aroace people are in the wrong for looking at a pairing and saying "can't they just be friends? Why do we have to ship them?" but with a lot of cishet people specifically, it feels like there's a lot of people perpetuating a borderline homophobic double-standard. I get it when it's something like Scott and Jay from Ninjago, but so many masc characters' dynamics are canonically given homoerotic or even just romantic undertones (a good example of this being, in my opinion, Sonadow; there's not an almost 3 and a half hour long Sonadow iceberg video on YouTube for no reason. As far as I'm aware it's the longest Sonic-related iceberg video on YouTube that covers exclusively official content) which is why people tend to gravitate towards those ships. I could do an entire analysis on why gay ships tend to have bigger followings than het ships but if I did this would get too long lmao. I will once again point to the Sonadow iceberg video though.

I generally use shipping to explore my own relationship with my aroace-ness, and usually I do that using characters I either headcanon as aroace in some way or who are canonically aroace, because I can relate to those experiences. It's kinda weird to me to see other aroace people acting like doing that is bad or wrong, because usually that's what people are doing, and even if that's not what's going on, fanfiction doesn't affect canon.

There is no right or wrong way to participate in fandom (unless you're harassing people and/or actively putting people in danger), no matter what you identify as.

Basically: People should be allowed to do what they want, if something bothers you that bad there's nothing wrong with blocking a person or tag.

(I might've gotten off subject a few times, sorry lol)

Okay, that thing about blocking tags inspired me to look through my blocked tags to see what ships I've blocked and here's my petty aroace thoughts on all of them without naming names lmao

Fanon het ship. They've never given any indication that they know of each other's existence. Her girlfriend is right there.

Canon het ship. Had the chemistry of two wet paper bags. Literally just shoehorned in there because god forbid any story exist without a romance subplot.

Semi-canon het ship. I'm mostly neutral about them. Just unnecessary.

Fanon mlm ship. Literally brothers?? I don't care that one of them is adopted, they grew up together?? As brothers??

Fanon het ship. I don't care what you call their relationship. You can call it professional, platonic, familial, just please don't call it romantic.

Semi-canon het ship. Again, completely unnecessary. God forbid a man convince a woman to become a villain without there being ~attraction~

Fanon het ship. She is 14?? And he is like 30??

Semi-semi-canon het ship. He did have a crush on her when he was, like, 14 but he's a grown adult now and she's the most lesbian-looking woman to ever exist and they're the most found family siblings to ever find a family

Fanon het ship. LET MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS. LET MEN AND WOMEN BE PLATONICALLY MARRIED.

Fanon mlm ship. I personally see them more as brothers. But whatever floats your boat.

Semi-canon het ship. Just really shoehorned. I don't like the woman very much. I liked her more when she was allowed to be a badass without being a ~flirty badass~

Fanon mlm ship. Again. Adopted brothers. Gross.

Canon het ship. I've seen many things from this director. He's a creative man. He couldn't think of a way to move the plot forward without a smooch?? He couldn't create a series that didn't have an unnecessary love triangle??

Semi-canon het ship. The man isn't coming back for S2 and boy folly gee am I glad

Fanon het ship. Not my cup of tea. Just let them be friends

good lord I have a lot more ship tags blocked than I thought

anyway, this is your daily reminder to just block stuff you don't want to see and move on

[saints-who-never-existed]

Hickey is a surpassingly lonely man certainly, but often overlooked - or at the very least something I'd like to talk about more - is the fact that he is absolutely not the only one, despite what he may think.

The Terror is a show, after all, that is as much about abject, crushing isolation as it is about love and intimacy and brotherhood in the face of tragedy. About the extent to which each man is affected by loneliness and the ways in which he does or doesn't deal with it. About whether he even understands the nature of it in the first place and by extension, whether he understands himself.

Franklin is a surpassingly lonely man too.

Think of him in the novel being deeply uncomfortable in the world and in the company of other men to the point where he resorts to bribery, however unconsciously, in order to ingratiate himself with them.

Think of him in the show gazing from the outside in at Fitzjames and the Lieutenants laughing away together at the admiralty shindig, an in-crowd Franklin has missed out on ever truly being a part of.

Think how that drives him to poorer and ever riskier decisions. Failure of the expedition is not an option for him because it will also mean a failure to improve his social standing and gain entry to that crowd.

Crozier is a surpassingly lonely man too.

Think of how the outside world has made him so, certainly - how his nationality and class and overall station in life have seen him excluded from professional advancement and romantic fulfilment.

But think also how he doesn't help himself all that much. Think on how insular and uncommunicative he stays even after he 'gets better', how right Franklin was when he said Crozier makes himself miserable, distant, and hard to love, and that he blames the world for it.

Think of how that vindictive streak and that unwillingness to communicate foments mutiny and continues to cut him off even from those who are his allies.

Fitzjames is a surpassingly lonely man too.

Think of how he holds others at an arms length with all the artifice surrounding the great gilded life he's built for himself.

Think of how desperate he is to be seen but also of the great lengths he goes to for much of the story to never allow himself to be fully perceived.

Think of the unusual, secretive nature of his birth and early life that keep him even from being able to properly perceive and understand himself until it's too late.

Think how all that insecurity fueled his ridiculous heroics and think how the reopening of old wounds from those heroics helped to doom him.

Little is a surpassingly lonely man too.

Think of how he's ignored and denigrated and absolutely hung out to dry by his Captain.

Think of how hard he works, how diligently he does what's asked of him and what's needed, and how cruelly he's forced to confront the fact that it's never going to be enough.

Think of how profoundly, incandescently angry he is about the injustices he endures and how he has absolutely no one he can truly confide in about it.

Hodgson and Irving are surpassingly lonely men too.

Think of Hodgson forever being just slightly out of step with the rest of the crew, officers and men alike. Of how he surprises even himself with how harshly and suddenly his unhappiness and insecurity turns not just into mutinous designs but into pure self-loathing.

Think of Irving being isolated and brought down by his own inherent inflexibility. Of how the rigidity of his faith and his world view in general prevents him from any great examination or understanding of his own desires or the desires of others.

Tozer is a surpassingly lonely man too.

Think of the isolation inherent even just in being a Marine, separate from but at the mercy of the officers above, and never truly integrated with the regular seamen below either.

Think of him becoming increasingly insular and distrustful as the story progresses and he loses all faith in command. All he wants is to protect everyone but the structure through which he's always done that falls down around him and leaves him lost.

That all-permeating atmosphere of isolation, that fateful lack of understanding has just as much, if not even more influence on the story as the shining mercurial little moments of love and connection do and I desperately need to parse some more coherent thoughts about that as soon as possible

[thankskenpenders]

The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

[inkskinned]

the thing is that they're so fascinated by sex, they love sex, they can't imagine a world without sex - they need sex to sell things, they need sex to be part of their personality, they need sex to prove their power - but they hate sex. they are disgusted by it.

sex is the only thing that holds their attention, and it is also the thing that can never be discussed directly.

you can't tell a child the normal names for parts of their body, that's sexual in nature, because the body isn't a body, it's a vessel of sex. it doesn't matter that it's been proven in studies (over and over) that kids need to know the names of their genitals; that they internalize sexual shame at a very young age and know it's 'dirty' to have a body; that it overwhelmingly protects children for them to have the correct words to communicate with. what matters is that they're sexual organs. what matters is that it freaks them out to think about kids having body parts - which only exist in the context of sex.

it's gross to talk about a period or how to check for cancer in a testicle or breast. that is nasty, illicit. there will be no pain meds for harsh medical procedures, just because they feature a cervix.

but they will put out an ad of you scantily-clad. you will sell their cars for them, because you have abs, a body. you will drip sex. you will ooze it, like a goo. like you were put on this planet to secrete wealth into their open palms.

they will hit you with that same palm. it will be disgusting that you like leather or leashes, but they will put their movie characters in leather and latex. it will be wrong of you to want sexual freedom, but they will mark their success in the number of people they bed.

they will crow that it's inappropriate for children so there will be no lessons on how to properly apply a condom, even to teens. it's teaching them the wrong things. no lessons on the diversity of sexual organ growth, none on how to obtain consent properly, none on how to recognize when you feel unsafe in your body. if you are a teenager, you have probably already been sexualized at some point in your life. you will have seen someone also-your-age who is splashed across a tv screen or a magazine or married to someone three times your age. you will watch people pull their hair into pigtails so they look like you. so that they can be sexy because of youth. one of the most common pornography searches involves newly-18 young women. girls. the words "barely legal," a hiss of glass sand over your skin.

barely legal. there are bills in place that will not allow people to feel safe in their own bodies. there are people working so hard to punish any person for having sex in a way that isn't god-fearing and submissive. heteronormative. the sex has to be at their feet, on your knees, your eyes wet. when was the first time you saw another person crying in pornography and thought - okay but for real. she looks super unhappy. later, when you are unhappy, you will close your eyes and ignore the feeling and act the role you have been taught to keep playing. they will punish the sex workers, remove the places they can practice their trade safely. they will then make casual jokes about how they sexually harass their nanny.

and they love sex but they hate that you're having sex. you need to have their ornamental, perfunctory, dispassionate sex. so you can't kiss your girlfriend in the bible belt because it is gross to have sex with someone of the same gender. so you can't get your tubes tied in new england because you might change your mind. so you can't admit you were sexually assaulted because real men don't get hurt, you should be grateful. you cannot handle your own body, you cannot handle the risks involved, let other people decide that for you. you aren't ready yet.

but they need you to have sex because you need to have kids. at 15, you are old enough to parent. you are not old enough to hear the word fuck too many times on television.

they are horrified by sex and they never stop talking about it, thinking about it, making everything unnecessarily preverted. the saying - a thief thinks everyone steals. they stand up at their podiums and they look out at the crowd and they sign a bill into place that makes sexwork even more unsafe and they stand up and smile and sign a bill that makes gender-affirming care illegal and they get up and they shrug their shoulders and write don't say gay and they get up, and they make the world about sex, but this horrible, plastic vision of it that they have. this wretched, emotionless thing that holds so much weight it's staggering. they put their whole spine behind it and they push and they say it's normal!

this horrible world they live in. disgusted and also obsessed.

[mariamlovesyou]

tuned into Plestia's live with Rahma Zein's second account (she got shadowbanned). key moments:

plestia talked about her adjustment to living in australia. "it's 1:30am now and it's normal for me and many palestinians who live abroad to be awake hours into the morning. i am scared of sleeping. because of the time difference, i'm scared if i sleep i will wake up to bad news. in gaza i was scared of the sound of the bombs, here i am scared of the quiet."

contacting family and friends in gaza is near impossible. "sometimes i feel like a crazy person, calling 20 times in a row hoping that on the 21st time the call might go through."

on the destruction of entire communities and neighbourhoods: "i'm scared when i go back to gaza i won't recognise it anymore. someone sent me a picture of my neighbourhood, and i couldn't tell it was mine at first. all my favourite places, cafes where the aunties used to give me extra food and ask about my day, have been destroyed. i dread looking at my gallery or seeing snapchat memories because most of these people in the pictures are no longer alive."

rahma asked plestia to talk about one story that stuck with her. plestia said "i remember walking one time on the 'safe corridor', that's what they called it anyway, and i saw an older woman clutching onto a donkey cart where her son's body was, refusing to let go of it. i asked my colleague what the smell was, he said it's dead bodies under the rubble. it was the first time i familiarised myself with the smell. the son's body was decaying and the woman told me about cats and animals eating away at it. i've had children talk to me about birds eating away at their parents' decomposing bodies and not being able to chase them away."

"it seems so silly to go to hospitals for minor sicknesses now. i can't even think about how many palestinian children are going to be terrified of hospitals now. there was a girl who was taken to the hospital to get treatment for injuries by one of the bombs, and while she was in the bathroom another bomb landed nearby. the impact from that sent the ceiling crashing down on her.. she got another injury while getting treated for her first one."

"i hate how people talk about our resilience - as if it's okay that this is happening to us. we are only surviving because we have to, because we have no other choice."

rahma brought up the way family homes are set up in palestine and asked plestia to elaborate. "basically, there are floors. someone will live on the ground floor, and then their married son lives with his children on the floor above them, and then their successors above them and so on. so when family homes are targeted, they wipe out entire families. many families officially no longer exist."

"i used to wear my journalist helmet and vest all the time, felt naked without it, even slept with the vest on sometimes until i realised it only made me more of a target. they didn't give me any protection, only headaches and back pain."

"i am an optimistic person, i loved covering sweet sentimental things, like at my graduation asking parents of top graduates how they feel about their children graduating. that's what i love reporting on. i wanted to cover things like that when i came back to gaza, show the beautiful side of gaza that the media didn't really show, but i didn't have the chance." "do you think they'll give you right of return?" "i can only hope."

plestia mentioned how hard it was being a journalist with limited access to the internet, charging facilities, no mics, lack of equipment and how difficult it was uploading things. rahma asked her what's one story that wasn't really recorded or posted due to these constraints; plestia said "the evacuations. sometimes they informed us about them, sometimes they didn't. you have no idea how hard it was, everyone looking for their family members, making sure every one was there, taking to the streets in 5 minutes and not knowing which way to go. i remember i went to my friend's house for shelter for 30 minutes before the first evacuation was announced and we ran to another family's house, stayed there for 2 days before another evacuation was announced. me, my friend, and that family all evacuated together to another family's house. there were already so many people there seeking shelter, it wasn't just one family staying there. none of us knew how long we had in any place."

before october 7th, palestinians were used to limitations on electricity. plestia used to plan her day's tasks around when the electricity was working. "for example when the electricity was on from 12 to 4, i would say i will do my laundry and charge the phones during this time. life wasn't exactly 'normal', but all of us pray to have those days back in comparison to what we are experiencing now." plestia also said that cars are running on cooking oil now because there is no fuel.

on hygiene: "many pregnant women have to give birth without any pain medication or medical attention. once we ran out of medicine, that was it. women who had to get C-sections couldn't stay to recover or get followup treatments because someone else needed the bed. we have no water, no tissues, no pads, barely any bathrooms. in the shelter schools you have to wait an hour before even getting to use the bathroom because of how many people are there."

"something you don't hear about is how many people die because of sadness. there's so many ways to die in gaza, because of the bombardment, because of starvation, the lack of resources, but i also know many elderly people who died because their hearts couldn't take it anymore. i have been in gaza before and lived through 4 aggressions, but nothing compared to this one."

a recurring sentiment that was echoed in the video: "sometimes i thought to myself: who am i recording this for? because we've already shown everything, we've already talked about everything. everything has already been said, the proof is everywhere, nothing i talked about today is new." rahma said the first video posted about what's happening in palestine should've been enough.

she is 22 today. plestia's closing words: don't stop talking about us, don't stop boycotting, don't stop protesting, please don't get bored of fighting for palestine.

[jytan2018]

I read the comic in one sitting less than an hour after finishing the movie, and wow I have many Thoughts™.

- It's very obvious the two versions were meant to cater to different audiences AND tell different messages. I don't get why people are going "But the comic was better! It had more nuance!" just because Nimona was easier to root for in the movie.

- The comic was written back when ND Stevenson was still trying to process a lot of stuff, so all the characters are morally grey/straight up evil and the climactic battle is between a Ballister who regrets turning against Nimona, even if it was to save others vs. a Nimona who's too hurt to care if her lashing out was going to hurt innocent people.

- By the time Nimona got a movie adaptation, ND was a lot more secure in his sexuality, so the climactic battle was Nimona vs. the Director, the symbol of religious oppression and bigotry. It's not just about your friends turning on you because you're "too much" for them anymore, it's also about a society that would rather bring itself to the brink of ruin than coexist with you.

- (I totally get why people were upset about Ballister's surname change, though. Like come on, the media dubbing him Blackheart just to be mean was RIGHT THERE).

- Nimona's metaphor for not shifting is such a neurodivergent thing. Even in the comic, Nimona's parents insisting she's a monster who replaced their daughter is reminiscent of the changeling myth, which is what many parents thought their neurodivergent kids were—changelings who replaced their "real" children.

- Ambrosius being trained to cut off HIS BOYFRIEND'S WHOLE FUCKING ARM instead of merely disarming him is a very cop thing to do. As much as cops claim they're trained to de-escalate situations, their training still teaches them to treat everyone as a potential threat, and that level of constant vigilance can turn anyone into a trigger-happy/arm-choppy bastard. Even the Director, who can use a sword but probably hasn't actually fought someone in ages, STILL can't see Ballister reaching for the squire's phone without assuming he has a weapon.

- And on that note, the Queen getting killed simply because she was trying to reform the Institution and allow commoners to become knights? That's the best "no such thing as a good cop" metaphor I've seen. Because even if there ARE good cops and they ARE in leadership positions, the system will crush them before they make any meaningful change. It's not a good institution that turned rotten, it's an institution that only exists to spread its rot and refuses to be good.

- That's why Ballister's characterisation is so different in the movie vs. the comic. Comic Ballister had 15 years to come to terms with his trauma and the Institution's evildoing, while Movie Ballister is still freshly traumatised and hasn't found a way to define himself beyond the role he was assigned by the Institution.

- Not to mention Comic Ambrosius was not very noble to begin with and genuinely believed Ballister was better suited to villainy than heroism, while Movie Ambrosius never wanted the glory that came with his lineage in the first place and only antagonised Ballister because of indoctrination he needed to unlearn (which he did, all by himself, after witnessing the lengths the Director will go to just to kill Nimona).

- It really shows how important it is to surround yourself with loved ones who are open to change. Comic Ambrosius can love Ballister all he wants, but he'll still blast his arm off because he thinks Ballister deserved it anyway. Movie Ambrosius will stop to question what "the right thing" even means, even if he didn't love Ballister enough to defend him unconditionally.

I have so many more thoughts bubbling beneath the surface, but I'll probably address them some other day. In conclusion:

[ID: A pink-haired Nimona grinning evilly while holding up a knife.]

Watch Nimona. This is not a request.

Edit: Added more thoughts!

[glow-in-the-dark-death]

A Week (He Will Take You)

~

Danny moved to Gotham for school, while there he noticed that Gotham's ambient ecto was really murky for lack of a better word.

This didn't really affect him too much besides a mild headache every once in a while but that also just might be stress from all his school work so maybe not.

Anyway

This murky ecto seemed to effect the people who lived there or more importantly the ghosts,

They were visible to the human eye like most ghosts back in Amity but instead of looking very much like a ghost they still looked like humans if a bit off putting.

They all seemed to be continuing their normal lives as if still fully alive, with the people around them none the wiser.

Danny noticed this and began approaching them to figure out what was going on.

Apparently the murky ecto in the city had made it so that they were strong enough to still continue a somewhat normal life but not be able to cross over to the GZ.

In other words they were stuck in Gotham

Danny was the Ghost King so he could easily fix this problem, all he needed to do was give them a bit of pure ecto for around a week to fully stabilize them them then he would just open a portal into the GZ and they could cross over with all their things also transferring into the GZ for their new haunt.

Unfortunately this looked rather worrying to an outsider,

Imagine you're used to your neighbor being very outgoing so you and others see them a lot suddenly this man seems to appear in their life out of nowhere an at exactly one week, your neighbor and all their belongings in their home disappear no trace to be found.

You tell people and they begin saying the same story they knew someone and them a man with black hair and blue eyes appeared in their life, then they and all their things disappear in exactly one week.

Of course the police in Gotham do the bare minimum so they're no help.

But it starts to begin a trend, especially online.

"Oh careful or the blue eyed man will make you disappear in a week"

This of course after time catches the bats attention, Gordon had already given them all the information he had.

"Young adult early twenties, dark hair, blue eyes"

That was it.

The bats look into it and from their point of view Danny is a serial killer.

But they can't find the connection between all of his victims, they range from young children and the elderly from different backgrounds absolutely no connection,

Worrying enough he doesn't just make one person disappear he has taken entire families up to over a dozen, without anyone figuring out how he's doing it or why at all.

The disturbing thing also being that he seems to take everything in their home, leaving it like it has always been empty

Like no one had been living in it.

People have tried to take photos of Danny get some kind of evidence of his existence, but when they try to do it, it either comes out completely corrupted or their devise simply shuts down fully.

Danny of course has no clue what is happening he's just happy that he's able to help so many ghosts, and is trying not to fail his exams.

~

Danny leaving the house he just helped: "That went easier than I expected!"

Neighbor peeking from the window: "Shit it's that guy! "

~

Red Hood marching down into the cave: " The fucker took many from my territory without me even realizing it!"

~

Tim: "I'm pretty sure his kill count is nearing the hundreds and he just started like maybe 4 months ago, this is bad."

Barbara: " I think I got a theory, this matches up with the new school year beginning so maybe their not a Gotham native which narrows down my suspect list."

Bruce: "Hn."

Tim: "Yes thank you B for the insightful commentary"

~

Danny trying not to fall asleep while on his way to class: "Strange I keep seeing shadows following me, oh well must be the stress!"

Bats who are pretty sure Danny is the killer: "Has he done anything suspicious yet?"

~

Just an Idea

[teaboot]

Okay yeah on one hand, my gender and sexuality and mental health has nothing to do with doing my job, so I get how announcing my identity and who I am / am not attracted to could be considered as "Inappropriate for the workplace".

That said, everyone who sees me (gestures to cis-passing, straight-passing, masking neuroatypical self in gender-conforming work clothing) and assumes, in the back of their head by default, that I'm a straight cis allo neurotypical person, so the topic has already kinda been brought up in a way. My saying "actually, no" isn't so much an abrupt announcement as it is correction of an assumption.

And correcting those assumptions is important, especially for persons like me who occupy positions of authority, who appear in court and in community conferences, with business owners and CEOs and at-risk members of the public, 'cause when I say, "these are my pronouns, I'm this" then people like me can feel safer, and people who aren't like me get to see that one of us exists in the real world and isn't some scary hypothetical phantom.

And in the future, when someone says "you can always tell who's trans" or "autistics can't hold down real jobs" or "bisexuals are flirty and promiscuous by nature" or "asexuals aren't real, they're just basement-dwelling terminally-online tweens", they can remember that one time they met me in a professional setting where I was who I was and the world didn't end.

So when they see someone who, by chance, does match the image of their stereotype, they'll know that's just normal human variation and not a universal role.

So, it's not so much that I want to "insert my deviance into the workplace"- it's just me saying, "look at me. I'm here. We're all here, and for every one of us you see, there's a hundred others that you don't. Because you don't know what we look like, and wouldn't know unless we told you."

The status quo, the closeted life, is, "becareful who you come out to, because you could be surrounded by enemies, and you wouldn't know until it's too late".

When I wear a pin, when I out myself in a small, subtle way, I say back: "be careful who you lash out at, because they could be surrounded by defenders, and you won't know until it's too late."

It says, "if you couldn't recognize me without this flag, then how many more of us might be out here with me?"

And the statement "you cannot attack me, we're safe here" should not be banned in the workplace

[lazycranberrydoodles]

I am now opening custom Ace Attorney sprite commissions!

I have 3 open slots.

Depending on how the initial slots go, I may or may not offer more. DMs also welcome.

>> Commission form! <<

Details

What exactly will you receive for $60?

Two 12fps looping .gif files in an Ace Attorney style, one talking and one idle, of the character of your choice from the waist up. They can be in pretty much any still position, but I get final say on whether something is too difficult or too complex. I will work to make the sprite as accurate as possible while adhering to the style.

What will you receive for $20?

Either a short 12fps animation of your character or another two looping gifs (talking and idling) in a different pose/emotion. An animation can be combined with talking. For example, this Wei Wuxian MDZS would be $80: $60 as a base price (standing still and talking) with $20 added for his hand gesture.

This set of Lan Wangji MDZSs would be $100: $60 (base price, neutral animation) + $20 (happy) + $20 (displeased).

What counts as a "slot"?

Art of one character, no matter how many pieces I was commissioned for.

For more examples of my Ace Attorney-style work, here is the masterpost for my MDZS x Ace Attorney crossover series, which I have been adding to for a while now. Here are Kabru, Miku, and Hela Vitrum (my most recent commission). They are a good example of the base commission -- a looped talking gif and a looped idle/blinking gif.

Policies (read this before filling out the form!)

I am not affiliated with objection.lol. The sprites *can* be used in the program to great success. However, I will not guide you through creating a case in objection.lol. There are a lot of tutorials available. I am selling animated illustrations of your character and nothing else.

I am not affiliated with Capcom or Ace Attorney. My work copies the style of original games. In many cases, I have referenced pre-existing animations or sprites.

Just in case, I'm limiting the max number of pieces for a single character to 3 poses and 1 animation ($120) (so I don't get bored drawing them over and over again). One person can commission me for multiple characters but they will count as different slots (i.e., you may commission the max amount of work for Blorbo Bingus ($120) and also commission two poses for Dworbo Dingus ($80) for a total of $200, counting as two slots).

It is my privilege to take or refuse commissions at my discretion.

Depending on demand, I may adopt a first-come first-served waitlist system, but I really can't know at this point.

Payment depends on the price of the commission, but in general I will not start the piece until I am paid via Paypal. Venmo is a secondary option. My prices are in USD.

Once I get started, I work quickly, so any changes should be requested at the sketch stage. I will work with you to get it right. Once I have started work a piece (once planning is finished) I will not give refunds. Finished piece(s) should be done within a month of finalization (you giving me the go-ahead to start).

Filling out the form does not mean I have accepted the commission, but it does mean that I will contact you in a routine way about it.

These commissions are intended for personal use. The pricing reflects that. Tell me if you wish to use a commission in a monetized way, as that will require renegotiation.

If you wish to communicate with me about commission work without filling out the form, my email is lazycranberrycomm@gmail.com. I am not planning to offer commissions other than Ace Attorney sprites at this time. I will reply within the week.

Communication via tumblr DMs, asks, or comments is welcome!

[jonnywaistcoat]

What’s your opinion on the contrast between “silly” and “serious” spaces? Do you think people can have very serious interpretations about a genuine piece of media and also be goofy about it? I’m asking this particularly because I’ve seen people in the Magnus podcast fandoms fight about people “misinterpreting” characters you, Alex, and the many other authors have written. Are you okay with the blorbofication or do you really wish the media you’ve written would be “taken seriously” 100% of the time?

And follow up question, what do you think about the whole “it’s up to the reader (or in some cases, listener) to make their own conclusions and interpretations and that does not make them wrong”, versus the “it was written this way because the author intended it this way, and we should respect that” argument?

This is a question I've given a lot of thought over the years, to the point where I don't know how much I can respond without it becoming a literal essay. But I'll try.

My main principle for this stuff boils roughly down to: "The only incorrect way to respond to art is to try and police the responses of others." Art is an intensely subjective, personal thing, and I think a lot of online spaces that engage with media are somewhat antithetical to what is, to me, a key part of it, which is sitting alone with your response to a story, a character, a scene or an image and allowing yourself to explore it's effect on you. To feel your feelings and think about them in relation to the text.

Now, this is not to say that jokes and goofiness about a piece of art aren't fucking great. I love to watch The Thing and drink in the vibes or arctic desolation and paranoia, or think about the picture it paints of masculinity as a sublimely lonely thing where the most terrible threat is that of an imposed, alien intimacy. And that actually makes me laugh even more the jokey shitpost "Do you think the guys in The Thing ever explored each other's bodies? Yeah but watch out". Silly and serious don't have to be in opposition, and I often find the best jokes about a piece of media come from those who have really engaged with it.

And in terms of interpreting characters? Interpreting and responding to fictional characters is one of the key functions of stories. They're not real people, there is no objective truth to who they are or what they do or why they do it. They are artificial constructs and the life they are given is given by you, the reader/listener/viewer, etc. Your interpetation of them can't be wrong, because your interpretation of them is all that there is, they have no existence outside of that.

And obviously your interpretation will be different to other people's, because your brain, your life, your associations - the building blocks from which the voices you hear on a podcast become realised people in your mind - are entirely your own. Thus you cannot say anyone else's is wrong. You can say "That's not how it came across to me" or "I have a very different reading of that character", but that's it. I suppose if someone is fundamentally missing something (like saying "x character would never use violence" when x character strangles a man to death in chapter 4) you could say "I think that's a significant misreading of the text", but that's only to be reserved for if you have the evidence to back it up and are feeling really savage.

I think this is one of the things that saddens me a bit about some aspects of fandom culture - it has a tendency to police or standardise responses or interpretations, turning them from personal experiences to be explored into public takes to be argued over. It also has the occasional moralistic strain, and if there's one thing I wish I could carve in stone on every fan space it's that Your Responses to a Piece of Art Carry No Intrinsic Moral Weight.

As for authorial intention, that's a simpler one: who gives a shit? Even the author doesn't know their own intentions half the time. There is intentionality there, of course, but often it's a chaotic and shifting mix of theme and story and character which rarely sticks in the mind in the exact form it had during writing. If you ask me what my intention was in a scene from five years ago, I'll give you an answer, but it will be my own current interpretation of a half-remembered thing, altered and warped by my own changing relationship to the work and five years of consideration and change within myself. Or I might not remember at all and just have a guess. And I'm a best case scenario because I'm still alive. Thinking about a writers possible or stated intentions is interesting and can often lead to some compelling discussion or examination, but to try and hold it up as any sort of "truth" is, to my mind, deeply misguided.

Authorial statements can provide interesting context to a work, or suggest possible readings, but they have no actual transformative effect on the text. If an author says of a book that they always imagined y character being black, despite it never being mentioned in the text, that's interesting - what happens if we read that character as black? How does it change our responses to the that character actions and position? How does it affect the wider themes and story? It doesn't, however, actually make y character black because in the text itself their race remains nonspecific. The author lost the ability to make that change the moment it was published. It's not solely theirs anymore.

So yeah, that was a fuckin essay. In conclusion, serious and silly are both good, but serious does not mean yelling at other people about "misinterpretations", it means sitting with your personal explorations of a piece of art. All interpretations are valid unless they've legitimately missed a major part of the text (and even then they're still valid interpretations of whatever incomplete or odd version of the text exists inside that person's brain). Authorial intent is interesting to think about but ultimately unknowable, untrustworthy and certainly not a source of truth. Phew.

Oh, and blorbofication is fine, though it does to my mind sometimes pair with a certain shallowness to one's exploration of the work in question.

[fangirl-dot-com]

🎮 Go Outside and Touch Some Grass

*part of the best of both worlds series*

Driver: Max Verstappen Genre: SMAU/Fluff Occupation: Streamer

☆ TAG LIST IS CLOSED ☆ *if you were not tagged I could not find you*

f1wags has posted

liked by y/nsworld, streamermax, and 3,204 others

f1wags in honor of max reaching 1 million subscribers on twitch, here is a little biography for the new fans

max emilian verstappen is a dutch streamer most known for his hilarious sim racing and trying to play call of duty. max has been dating red bull's number 1 driver, y/n l/n, since late 2021. he is 26 years old, only 3 years older than y/n. as of right now, he lives in Monaco with l/n in their shared apartment, but does have another house in the Netherlands close to his mom (y/n and he go there often).

the pair has two bengal cats, jimmy and sassy, that they both love.

max was most known for dating model kelly piquet from 2019 to early 2021, but the couple had a mutual breakup. max first met y/n at a fan event after max placed first in one of the first Red Bull F1 challenges. everyone says they hit it off during summer break.

a little hidden fact is that max used to kart with Ferrari's Charles Leclerc when they were younger. an interview video resurfaced and many fans now love to tease the two whenever they're seen together. click here for the link!

max is very well loved in the f1 community since he is l/n's second public boyfriend. they couple are very private but not hidden, just the way they like it. please treat our cat loving wag well!

see all comments

y/nl/n1 has posted

liked by maxverstappen, y/nsworld, and 2,304,930 others

y/nl/n1 and that's number 9! simply lovely to have equaled my record once again this year! hoping I can hit 10 and 11 during this triple header!

thank you to all who came out today. you mean the world to me 🧡

see all comments

maxverstappen I love you schatje! keep up the good work 🧡

y/nl/n1 🧡😘

y/n.nation every time I try to beat max to the likes but he's always there first

maxs_keyboard I was once just a fan of max, but I'm glad I'm an f1 fan now!

simracersunite anyone else here from that tweet this past weekend? didn't even know this sport existed

cashmoney meeeee! but now that I've seen this queen dominate a lot of men, I'm here for her now

charles_leclerc maybe let us make some new records?

y/nl/n1 how about you just start winning more? 🧐

maxverstappen what she said Charles ☺️

charles_leclerc I will cause another incident max 😒

redbullracing that's our girl 🧡💙

maxverstappen no. mine.

y/nsworld congrats queen 👑

maxverstappen has posted

liked by y/nl/n1, maxverSTOPen, and 23,209 others

maxverstappen glad to be back in the paddock to cheer on my lovely girlfriend! thank you redbullracing for the invite :D

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maxverSTOPen EVERY TIME I TRY TO BEAT Y/N AND SHE'S ALREADY HERE???

streammv was glad to see you on the big screen max!

maximillianver GUYS WHAT ARE ALL THESE F1 FANS DOING IN THE LIKES

maxsworld 🤺 stay back we had him first

y/nl/n1 my lucky charm 🥰

maxverstappen I think you can win without me but thank you 🥺

twitchoverall what's next, someone is going to tell me that Lando Norris is also an f1 driver and not just a streamer??

ln4fan uh mate, I think you need to sit down for this one

maxskeyboard HAPPY 1 MILLION SUBS MAX

y/nl/n1 has posted

liked by y/nschild, maxverstappen, dior, and 3,203,847 others

y/nl/n1 quick back home before Silverstone!

max wouldn't get off his stream tho, so I had to kidnap him (sorry twitch)

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y/nschild LET IT BE KNOWN I WAS HERE BEFORE MAX

charles_leclerc let me know if jimmy and sassy want to have a play date with Leo 😊

y/nl/n1 definitely soon Charlie! maybe summer break?

maxverstappen our children are not going to play with that dog

y/nl/n1 but maaxxx, they can be besties 🥺

charles_lerclerc 🥺

maxverstappen fine. one playdate is all you get leclerc.

maxsworld I guess we can't gatekeep max anymore 😭

max&kelly I still think max could do better 🙄

biggestkellyhater please rethink your statement. kelly was borderline a pedophile and max was so depressed he didn't stream for months. we should be thanking y/n for making max the happiest he has ever been

y/nxmax and that's on PERIOD 💅

verstappencats awwww jimmy and sassy update 🥺

streamonmax sooooo when is the next stream king?

TAG LIST: @scuderiadevils @marauderssworld @mehrmonga @glitterquadricorn @sinofwriting @splaterparty0-0 @ayohockeycheck @evalynkillgrave @bookishnerd1132 @vellicora @misty-inferno @minkyungseokie @khaylin27 @how-what-why-huh @theblueblub @zacian117 @fly-me-away @blueblink @ilove-tswizzle @sinnerpalace @thatgirlmj @spilled-coffee-cup @iangelofmusic @suns3treading @roszszs @2pagenumb @ietss @morgan-getty @younxii @phantomxoxo @pastryboyyy @lolzzzzzzzzzz @halleest @ggaslyp1 @skepvids @mil0sworld @u5dthsduttd @silkenthusiasts @coldcola @annispamz @fionaschicken @littlegrapejuice @boiohboii @crashingwavesofeuphoria @lancestrollsgf @tribbisweetdear @graciewrote @lozzamez3 @residentdegenerate @e-nonsense

[wife-of-all-dilfs]

Hii! I love love love all of your finnick fics! Could I please request a fic where reader is also a victor from an earlier game and she is in an established relationship with Finnick. They both get reaped (not the same district) for the 75th games and reader gets critically hurt in the part where the cornucopia spins. Like she falls into the water after maybe being injured and she can’t swim, so Finnick has to risk everything to save her life.

I’m really looking for like a hurt/comfort with a seriously injured reader and Finnick going through hell to save her because he cannot imagine a life without her in it.

Thank you so much if you’re willing to write this or something like it, feel free of course to change anything to your liking!

two souls, one heart | f. odair

masterlist

summary: finnick refuses to lose the love of his life. your inability to swim complicates things, especially when the cornucopia begins spinning.

pairing: finnick odair x fem!reader

warnings: pre-established relationship, heavy angst, drowning, death, bone fracture

notes: thank you so much!!! i really enjoyed writing this, shed a few tears but still enjoyed it lmao. listen to 'beginning of the end movement v' by the newton brothers on repeat for the full experience <3

A quiet nursery rhyme was being sung by the water's edge.

The calm waves around the Cornucopia lapped at the rocks, the blistering sun causing the surface to sparkle. Wiress' voice interrupted Peeta as he mapped out the arena's clock-like wedges in the dirt. Everyone was focused on the map; you should have been too.

Dark blue ripples had your eyes captivated. So tranquil. So hauntingly beautiful. Loving the sea was in your blood, as your District Four was your home. You would think coming from a fishing district would mean your swimming abilities were mastered. In reality, they were practically non-existent. No matter how many times Finnick had attempted to give you lessons, they never stuck.

Neither of you seemed to care though, always too enraptured by simply being in each other's company—feeling Finnick's hands support your body as you floated on the surface...

"Don't you let go of me, Finnick Odair, or I swear to god I'll drown you."

"Will that be before or after you drown first?" he chuckled, though ultimately tightening his grip on your body in an attempt to reassure you.

....hysterically laughing when he got wiped out by a sudden wave...

"No way! I can't—" You broke into a fit of laughter— "I can't believe that just happened!"

"Are you laughing at me, sweetheart?" Finnick asked, trudging through the water towards you, his hair drenched and swept across his forehead.

"Yes!"

You doubled over, knees buckling as you struggled to contain your laughter. Despite trying to put up a serious front, Finnick too let a few chuckles slip at the hysterical sight of you.

"Oh really?"

Just like that, his arms wrapped around your waist and pulled you down into the cold water, earning him a squeal just before you crashed together below the surface.

...and washing up on the sandy shore in each other's arms, salty lips capturing one another.

"I'm covered in sand," you murmured against Finnick's lips.

He gave you another kiss before pulling away. "It's okay," he said, pecking your lips again. "I'll help you wash off in the shower when we get back." And then sent you a stomach-flipping grin.

Even though you wouldn't trade those memories for the world, if you had known your life would soon depend on the ability to swim, you would have paid much more attention to the lessons.

Finnick stood closely beside you, his trident digging into the dirt as he gripped it tightly in case of an attack. He had noticed your drifted attention, observing the way your eyes stared at the rippling water, like death was lurking just beneath the surface waiting to drag you down to the murky depths.

He could protect you from most things in the arena, but fear was something entirely different. A trident couldn't defeat the darkness in your mind.

A hand slid onto your lower back, rubbing gentle strokes to gain your attention. Your gaze tore from the blinding blue and settled onto Finnick's face beside you, watching his mouth curve into a light smile. You knew the silent words he was trying to convey: 'You're okay, sweetheart. I've got you.'

For a fleeting moment, the anxiety had disappeared. How could anything ever go wrong with Finnick by your side? The corners of your mouth quirked, preparing to send him a smile in response. But it never came. Something new had caught your attention. The woman by the water was no longer singing.

Wiress had been murdered.

The second Katniss let her arrow fly into Gloss' chest, everything around you seemed to explode into action. Anything that could go wrong would go wrong���Murphy's Law. And it did.

The Careers had initiated an attack.

Charging forward from the waterside was Cashmere, determined to avenge her brother's death. Instinct quickly kicked in and the spear in your hand was sent barrelling through the air and into her chest. As you watched her body slump to the ground, an enraged yell came from the side.

Finnick was fighting Brutus.

With your only weapon lodged within Cashmere's chest, aiding Finnick was impossible. Enobaria revealed herself beside Brutus, displaying her vicious fangs and throwing a dagger that sliced a small cut across Finnick's shoulder. Though the wound was minor, your heart lurched as he cried out in pain.

Before a single thought in your brain could form, your legs were moving. Not towards Finnick, but after Enobaria. Remember who the real enemy is—screw that. Finnick could have died. Your Finnick. He called out your name, his voice hoarse and frayed, but you continued on, hatred fuelling each step. It seemed Katniss and Johanna had the same idea, following behind you with their weapons bared.

Salt water sprayed onto your face, but you paid it no attention. Nor did you notice as the jungle surrounding the island began to blur into one overwhelming hue of green. Only when your body was thrown to the harsh rocky terrain did you realise what was happening.

The Cornucopia had started to spin.

Nothing could compare to the terror you felt as gravity's merciless force dragged your body toward the violent waves surging against the rocks. Just as your lower legs breached the edge, a hand grabbed onto your own. Katniss. She too was hanging onto Johanna whose only lifeline was an axe buried in the rocks.

A moment—that was all you were given to scan your surroundings. Supplies and sharp-edged weapons were flying everywhere. White water was spraying into the air. Finnick, who was thirty feet away, was gripping onto a rock ledge whilst keeping Beetee from sliding into the furious waves. His head turned to the side and even from a great distance, your eyes met.

It was at that moment you knew, you just knew the odds weren't going to be in your favour. God forbid you lived a simple happy life with the man you loved, days spent together on a calm beach. God forbid the Gamemakers gave you one last chance to be in his arms. God forbid you survived.

And with that sudden realisation, the universe, sick as it was, decided it was time.

Your hand began slipping from Katniss's; an unseen tear fell from your eye, and you smiled. A smile of goodbye sent to the love of your life. His face contorted into one of agony, lips moving but you couldn't hear his voice over the roaring waves. Still, you knew exactly what he was shouting.

"NO! NO!"

There was nothing he could do but watch your body disappear into the waves, repeating over and over "no, no, no," and praying his cruel eyes had deceived him. They hadn't.

Dark blue was in every direction you looked. The undertow tossed and rolled your body like a ragdoll in a washing machine and despite your attempts to swim, the surface only seemed to be slipping further and further out of your reach. Darkness engulfed you, so thick that you couldn't tell which way was up or down. That was when the panic set in.

Your arms and legs thrashed frantically, struggling against the water's force, desperate to reach safety or an air pocket. Cold water flooded your throat as you gasped uncontrollably. You screamed as every attempt at breathing felt like fire burning in your lungs. Finnick. Where was he? Where were you? What was happening? Why wouldn't it stop?

Thoughts submerged your mind in terror, and you were powerless to stop them. All you could do was feel. Pain. Fire. Burning

At some point, the Cornucopia had ceased its spinning and your body came to a rest in the water. An eerie calm suddenly washed over you; a sense of clarity stilled your wild movements. This was the end. There was no future. No hope. The world above wasn't yours to call home anymore. You now belonged to the sea.

Of course, your water-logged mind had forgotten that home was where the heart was, and your heart was still beating... above the surface, in the aching chest of another.

Tendrils of hair floated around your face like fronds of seaweed. Rays of sunlight penetrated the surface, turning the surroundings a vibrant sparkly blue. As you sank further down, the water, now a comfortable lukewarm, cradled you in its embrace. It felt safe, like being in Finnick's arms again. Like home.

You gazed at the sun's rays; they looked beautiful. You felt beautiful. But time was running out and the bright light soon began shrouding your entire vision, though not before you witnessed a dark figure dive beneath the waves.

**********

Finnick loved the ocean. He spent most days in District Four down by the beach, swimming, spearfishing, and watching the sun rise and set on the blue horizon. If he believed in reincarnation, he would have imagined himself to be a lionfish or dolphin in his past life, living in an underwater world, free from tyranny and oppression. He loved the ocean.

But that love was incomparable to what he felt for you. So, when he dove into the rocky waters to save you and felt the currents fighting against him, he determined there was nothing he hated more than the ocean. Not as he watched its strong grip drag your motionless body further down below him.

Your back had just touched the soft seabed when he swam far enough down to envelope you in his embrace. He should have swum you back to the surface immediately, but in his distressed state, he couldn't help but foolishly stare at your lifeless appearance. Your skin was blue. It's just the water's colour, he told himself. Your eyes were closed. She's just asleep. Your neck didn't pulse under his touch. She's... She's...

He had no justification for that. Feet planted firmly on the sandy floor, he propelled both himself and you back up to the surface. As Finnick paddled back to the Cornucopia, the others reached down and helped lift your limp body onto the rocks.

"Is she...?"

"Peeta," Katniss quietly reprimanded him.

Finnick paid them no attention. He said nothing but trauma screamed in his eyes. His breathing was ragged and his hands were trembling as he frantically checked your pulse again—in both your wrists and your neck; he even pressed his ear to your chest. All he heard was the waves lapping against the rocks.

"No," he whispered again.

It seemed to be all he could say anymore. No. No, this couldn't be happening. You were just standing beside him a few minutes ago; your eyes were just looking into his. However much he tried to deny reality, it didn't seem to make it any less true. You were gone.

He choked out a rough determined breath, interlocked his hands over your chest, and began pressing repeatedly over your heart. Wet strands of tangled hair were strewn across the rocks like dead seaweed. The usual soft pink accompanying your cheeks was nowhere to be seen, devoid of any life.

"Come on, sweetheart," he muttered before pulling down your chin to blow air into your lungs. The kiss of life. And when nothing happened as he pulled away, he restarted the chest compressions. "Oh, don't do this to me," he begged, voice breaking. "Don't do this. Breathe."

Any moment now. Any moment, your eyes would flutter open, the colour would return to your glowing skin, and your heart would beat with life beneath his hands. Your lips would whisper his name and he would pull you into his arms, where he would keep you safe until the end of time.

"Breathe."

Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Nothing. He did it again. Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Silence. Maybe he should've just ripped his heart out and replaced yours with his own. Death would come for him within seconds but hearing something beating inside your chest would've made the sacrifice worth it.

Life would flash before his eyes and your beaming smile would be the last thing he'd get to see. His last thought would be of relief that you were alive.

Johanna rested a tentative hand on Finnick's shoulder. "Finnick, she's—"

"No, she's not!" he exclaimed, continuing his movements. "She's fine. Aren't you, baby? You're fine." He cupped your jaw, his thumb stroking your soft skin before he pressed his lips to yours and blew twice. "You're fine."

The golden bangle around his wrist glimmered in the sunshine as he pressed on your ribcage. All he had to do was keep you alive until Plutarch rescued everyone. One simple task and he failed.

"Finnick, we have to go," someone said. Who? He didn't know nor care.

Leave me, he wanted to say. Leave me here to die. Let the Careers mutilate my body, take my life, my last breath, but let it be by her side.

Something cracked beneath his palms and he knew one of your ribs had fractured. His arms stilled, half-expecting you to cry out in pain but then he remembered. And with that sickening crack came a devastating realisation—you really were gone.

A sob erupted from his throat and his head fell to your chest, drenching your already-soaked wetsuit with hot tears. Everything else seemed to disappear. The arena, the Careers who could attack again at any moment, the spectators who were avidly watching. Everything.

It was just him and you. He didn't care that his screams and deafening sobs could bring unwanted attention or jeopardise the group's safety. Any tribute with half a mind would know crossing him in such a state would be a fatal flaw. Even if they did, it wouldn't matter. Nothing mattered. Life no longer had meaning.

Finnick pulled your lifeless body onto his lap and cradled you protectively in his arms, lightly rocking back and forth. His forehead rested against your own, cold and damp. You always were the cold one, needing his touch to light a fire beneath your skin. He loved having you rely on him for warmth, but not like this.

"Come back to me, baby, please," he begged almost inaudibly. Tears were running down his cheeks as he brushed pieces of hair away from your face. His lips were on yours once more, heartbroken and painfully delicate; not to fill your lungs with air, but to fill your heart with his love in the hopes it would be enough to bring it back to life. "Don't leave me."

Pleas, prayers, begs, and wishes flew past his lips, over and over. And then they stopped and Finnick simply stared. Silence fell across the entire arena. The birds didn't chirp, the other tributes remained quiet, and the trees stood still. Even the water had calmed, resembling a perfectly flat mirror.

Finnick only had three words left on his tongue. Three final words to give you, wherever it was that you were. He slowly leaned down, squeezed his stinging eyes shut, and pressed a long farewell kiss to your forehead. His eyes remained closed as he parted from your skin, unable to take another look as he whispered his final goodbye.

"I love you."

And then, for the first time since he had rescued you from the blue depths, he felt his heart beating again. Just like yours was.

**********

There was a voice, distant yet reassuring—a lifeline to consciousness. Black was all there was. Coldness was all that was felt. It was desolate. But that voice... that voice was so anguished yet so familiar and encouraging that it lit a fire inside your chest, warming you from the inside out.

In the distance of the dark void was a figure, their body made entirely out of a pulsating golden light. Each word the voice spoke enhanced the light's brightness. "Come... me, please..." Brighter. "Don't leave..." And brighter.

The light was warm and comforting, just like the voice attached to it. Whoever's voice it was that brought the light resonated deep in your mind, tugging at the strings within your heart.

Your heart.

The thumping in your chest was weak, almost non-existent, but it was still there. Though it seemed time was running out. Pitch-black darkness outweighed the golden light ten-to-one; you could feel its cold breath creeping onto your back. So, you started running towards the figure. Sprinting. Until all that surrounded you was golden.

"I love you."

Water. At first, it came trickling out in two fluid streams from the sides of your mouth. Then suddenly, it was spraying into the air as choked coughs forced the liquid from your burning lungs. Light flooded your vision—not golden and inviting, but vivid and overwhelming.

There was something warm beneath your legs, against your arm, rubbing at your back, holding you in an upright position. While you heaved, dry-retched, and gasped, that soothing warmth remained.

As your airways began to clear and the expulsion of water ceased, your half-lidded eyes rolled around the area. Still dazed and disoriented, you struggled to make out what surrounded you. There was immense rippling blue, vibrant hues of green in the distance, dark rough grey beneath you, and elongated blobs of colour that stood a few feet away.

"Just–just keep breathing, sweetheart." That voice. The one belonging to the figure of light that brought you back. It was madly repeating the same words over and over. "You're okay", "Deep breaths", and "You're alive."

Shaky fingers brushed the stray wet strands of hair from your face. So warm. With the little energy you had, your head turned to seek out the golden light again. And you found it.

The blinding sun shining down reflected off his bronze hair, turning it a divine golden hue. His brows were raised and scrunched together as though he couldn't possibly believe what he was seeing. Deep lines were etched into his tear-streaked skin, evidence of his previous turmoil. Those sea-green eyes stared at you, afraid that if he so much as blinked, you would fall lifeless in his arms once more.

"You're here," he whispered.

Finnick. YourFinnick. Your light.

When your eyes met, a splitting grin lit up his face, made up of an inconceivable amount of raw emotion. You weren't sure what to do—smile, laugh, cry, kiss him? Your mind was scrambled, overwhelmed with love for the beautiful golden-haired man in front of you.

Without warning, your face scrunched up and the tears began flowing. You weren't sure why you were crying. Maybe it was because you had just been brought back from the brink of death; maybe it was because you couldn't believe someone actually cared so deeply about you.

Finnick cradled your face in his hand. "It's okay," his voice trembled, tears now cascading down his cheeks. His smile, however, never disappeared. "You're okay. You're safe now. I'm not letting you go."

He took your face into two large hands, brought you to his lips, and pressed a tender kiss to each tear that rolled over your skin. One of your hands rested over his; the other was placed against his chest, feeling it rise and fall so you could synchronise your breaths.

His arms moved to pull you tightly against him, almost like he was trying to merge your body with his. Or perhaps, it was your soul. You didn't care about the pain aching in one of your ribs. You wanted to tell him that his soul was already intertwined with your own, but words couldn't describe the sentiment as profoundly as you felt it.

In the simplest of terms your water-logged brain could muster, you whispered, "You're my light, Finnick."

Brows scrunched together, he looked down at you, fighting back the urge to start sobbing in your arms. If he had been anywhere else, if there wasn't an entire country watching, he would've gone on for hours, explaining how stupidly, selfishly, and incredibly in love with you he was.

But he couldn't do that. Not now. So, he placed his hand over the one you had resting on his chest and readjusted its position. He could feel the thumping, even through your palm.

Your eyes were full of emotion as you stared up into his. You already knew what his next words were going to be and for the first time since you were thrown into the water from the Cornucopia, you smiled.

Rhythmically, your hand and his pulsed together. Finnick's gaze flickered across your face and he grinned. "You're my heart."

[ashfae]

The thing about romance is, it makes a good story.

As soon as Neil described season 2 as "quiet, gentle, romantic" I figured we'd be in for it, because as he's the first to point out, writers are liars. And the best way to deceive is with truth.

Season 2 is romantic. The trappings of romance are everywhere. Crowley tries to set up Nina and Maggie by trapping them under an awning during a rainstorm, a classic cinematic bonding technique. Aziraphale's chosen method comes from his beloved books: the ball, the dancing, appearing as a pair in public, hands held as you twirl gracefully with your heart thrilled and racing. If they can set up a sensational kiss that will unlock the happy ever after. They've lived on earth, they've studied the tropes, they know how romance works.

The problem is a story is only a story.

Nina and Maggie had the classic romantic setup completely by accident before Aziraphale and Crowley ever began trying to interfere with them. They get locked in Nina's coffeeshop. They can't escape or communicate with anyone else, they end up talking by candlelight because there's no electricity, Nina offers wine. Maggie mentions how she'd hoped for a chance to talk to Nina, and now here they are. It's every bit as much a standard as what Aziraphale and Crowley attempt to arrange. Blanket scenarios galore exist because of that starting point. We love that story. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But it's still only a story, it's not enough. Because once that moment of connection is over, however lovely it was, all the rest of the world comes flooding back in in the form of dozens of angry text messages. Nina's messy entrapping relationship hasn't magically gone away just because she and Maggie shared a romantic encounter.

And it's so tempting think oh well, that's easy. We'll just give them more romantic encounters and eventually those will overwhelm the rest of the baggage. Must do, because it'll make them fall in love, and once they realize they're in love that trumps all other considerations, right? So it'll be fine. Love Conquers All.

Neil also mentioned Pride and Prejudice.

Darcy knows he's in love early on and makes a disasterous proposal that shows that he has no understanding of Elizabeth's perspective, possibly hasn't even thought about it. They've been meeting in forest lanes for walks, conversing, had tete-a-tetes in the sitting room, danced at a ball. And while his turn of phrase isn't as flattering as he thinks, he's still offering her everything he thinks she wants and needs: affection, security, his good name, wealth, an escape from the embarrassments of her situation, the world. How can there be anything to object to? Why would anyone ever refuse so much of value?

Elizabeth quite rightly cuts him to pieces. He lashes back with a few hard truths of his own and they separate. During that separation, he thinks and he learns. He takes to heart the criticisms she offered, re-examines his assumptions, opens his eyes. Thinks about her perspective and how sometimes the only difference between pride and arrogance is where you're standing. He does the work. When they meet again he tries to demonstrate that he's learned--not in order to court her again (yet), but because the only real apology he can offer, the only one that would have weight, is to show that he's grown, he listened to her. He changed.

Elizabeth of course has her own journey, accepting that many of her own conclusions about Darcy were erroneous because they were formed without her having the full picture to hand, and once she's done that she has to apply it to her own situation as well. She loves her family, but they do place her at a disadvantage on a number of levels, leading eventually to full-out disaster as her younger sister carelessly ruins all of their reputations. It's hard to admit, it's mortifying, but Darcy was offering her a great deal she needs. His offer did have worth for all that she dismissed it as an insult. And as she learns to value his own character more highly, and then as she sees that he did listen to her even though she insulted him so thoroughly...well, she grows too. And when they do eventually come together it's not because of courting and balls. There's a big romantic gesture in his rescue of her sister but even that isn't why they'll get their happy ever after. It was just the catalyst for the conversation. They win because they've learned how to understand each other and how to communicate for the future. How they can strengthen and support each other, how to balance their strengths and weaknesses. The films leave them at the wedding, but the book shows a bit of their marriage too, and during it they keep learning from each other. Their relationship is held up as a superior love story for good reasons.

The end of season one was romantic too. Crowley stopped time rather than face a world where Aziraphale would never speak to him again, Aziraphale walked into hell to protect Crowley, they dined at the Ritz and toasted the world. But then they stopped. Sure they spent time together, talked, enjoyed each other's company. But if they were talking about important things would Crowley still be living in his car? They had a bit of respite but all that real world baggage that exists outside of the romantic moment hasn't been faced, none of it. Four or five years sounds like a long while but for beings who are quite literally older than the earth? That's just an intermission.

Nina's relationship ends, leaving her with a tangled mess; Maggie realises the sweet dream of love she's been longing for isn't as important as the real Nina. They talk. They plan. Nina will sort through her life, get closure, figure out what went wrong with Lindsay and what she wants from a relationship, learn how to ask for respect instead of just bending under her partner's demands. Maggie will support Nina the way Nina needs, which sometimes means helping her get oat milk for the shop and sometimes means giving her processing space. They're on the same page; they're going to do the work. That's why most likely they'll succeed. To quote one of my favourite fanfics: it's not happily ever after, but it's a chance. It's all going to be okay. (The Profane Comedy by Mussimm, who absolutely nailed this theme)

The romance is nice, it's lovely. We need it to keep ourselves going. To give ourselves the dreams that help us get through the days and nights. But it's not the relationship. It's not enough on its own. The wedding can be the grandest most beautiful ceremony ever with doves flying and sweeping music and bells ringing, but that doesn't guarantee the marriage will last.

Crowley and Aziraphale have had their romantic gestures, oodles of them. One wing raised to protect the other from falling stars, another from rain. Shared ground, shared interests, hands offered in friendship and held on a bus. They've tried to get to the same page, they really have. They just aren't there yet. The biggest most important things still haven't been talked about, and season 2 showed there are even more of those big important things than we'd realised.

The show paints Maggie as Aziraphale's foil and Nina as Crowley's, even to the point of Nina casually calling Maggie 'angel'. But Aziraphale's baggage is Nina's. The toxic relationship has to be processed and understood and closed, and it hasn't been, despite season one. Lindsay never really liked Nina very much, for all that they tried to keep her trapped; Heaven never really liked Aziraphale very much for all that he believed in it. They both let themselves be used. But Lindsay left Nina and went to their sister's, whereas now the head of Heaven has reached out to Aziraphale and said here, we can fix this, you can fix this, don't you want to fix this? Others are already writing about that and maybe I'll add to it later, not sure. And Crowley, like Maggie, has had a sweet dream that he has to set aside. Maybe he'll be able to pick it up again eventually, maybe not. But sometimes you offer support by buying oat milk or rescuing your beloved from the legions of hell, and sometimes you do it by standing back while they sort through their shit.

Quiet, gentle, romantic. It was.

But that's only part of the story. Now they have to do the work. They thought they had, but they were wrong, because there's so much they just hadn't touched yet and tried to cover over with relief and sleight of hand and alcohol and forgiveness. The apology dance doesn't mean much without showing that you listened and learned. They've faced so much trauma already and that should have been enough, we wanted it to be enough and so did they and it's such a blow for it to turn out that there's still more to do, that the baggage hasn't just gone away and can't be hidden under blankets or soothed with cocoa. The texts are still coming in and demanding answers.

But it'll be okay. It will. It's still a chance. And one that in the long run makes them better, builds something real that lasts.

The best stories, the ones that last longest and become classics, are the ones that don't end with the kiss under the awning or the blanket scenario or the wedding. They're the ones that heal us while the characters heal themselves. It's hard to accept that there's still more to do. Harder to imagine how it can possibly work out. And yes, bloody frustrating to wait and see.

And we'll get through that interim by telling even more stories. Because the story is never just a story. It's how we get through the work, it's what we tell ourselves so we can do the damn work. Stories are what we cling to and how we remind ourselves we're human and connect. A book is a person you can carry with you. We're not alone, none of us, stories connect us because we love them and see ourselves in them, which means we see each other.

Aziraphale's back up in Heaven to deal with his unfinished baggage; Crowley left his behind long ago and it's clearly going to come back and bite him in the arse however much he tries to go his own way. And they can't help each other with that. Not yet.

But they'll get there. So will we.

[hoshigray]

𝐒𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐓𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐤 | choso kamo

𝐒𝐲𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐬𝐢𝐬: Finding out your boyfriend's a vampire was far from the chill evening you planned with him. But you can't lie, imagining those fangs sinking down on and sucking on your skin....it's kinda hot.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬: vampire bf! Choso x fem! reader - explicit content; minors DNI - modern! au - oral (m! receiving) - handjob - fingering (f! receiving) - nipple play (licking, sucking, tweezing, fangs grazing) - piercings (nape and frenum) - biting (wrist, shoulder, breast, implied more afterwards) - Choso got a long schlong, rip - missionary position - overstimulation - clitoral play (swiping) - cervix fucking - the first time you and Choso have sex + you two being nervy/cute - pet names (angel, baby, princess) - Choso takes blood supplements + drinks pigs blood - Yuuji is his half-brother - mention of blood (duh) and saliva/spit - proofread but will check for more l8r.

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 6.4k (bro, wtf???)

𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞: y'all watched that new ep, right? right. anywaysss, in celebration of choso [and yuuji]'s big fight being animated, i was thinking of vampy bf! choso for a few days and how cute/hot that would be! soooooo, enjoy~~ ☆ and tysm for 2.6k!!

“Sooo, you two gonna like fuck tonight?”

“Whatever happened to ‘How’s your day,’ ‘You doing okay,’ or ‘You still haven’t offed yourself after midterms,’ Nobara?”

“Yeah, my day is going fine, but answer the question.” 

“I swear to Christ…” you sigh heavily as you walk down the sidewalk. 

The month of October brings more dread to your being than anything else. As much as you want to be festive, order a pumpkin latte, and chill watching the leaves fall gracefully with the autumn times, college life does whatever it takes to prevent that. And what better way to do that than have you suffer with midterm exams. 

You and your roommate, Nobara, have experienced the worst, especially this week. Having to study and pull all-nighters so much that you two can count with four fingers at max how many hours of sleep you get daily. Whatever gets the work done. However, it shouldn’t cost you your necessary slumber. Even your other best friends, Yuuji and Megumi, are victims of the tests. Hell, Yuuji found out he had an exam the day BEFORE and had to come in clutch by spending the entire day finishing the two-page study guide!  

All four of you are depleted of fun; it’s non-existent as you try to navigate out of this academic hell…Despite that, though, there’s one thing you’re always looking forward to during the week: the weekend! Oh, yes, today is finally Friday. You’ve been anticipating this day throughout the week, finally done with your exams and ready to relax with your friends after so much schoolwork. But that’s not the only thing you’re looking forward to…

Because this weekend, you’ll finally be with your boyfriend, whom you haven’t seen since the start of midterms. Choso Kamo, Yuuji’s older half-brother and the man of your life, is the only person you’d love to see sweep you off your feet and take you in his loving arms, away from all the stress and discomfort from your college life. The two of you have been dating for almost a year, and he’s, without a doubt, the sweetest guy you ever got lucky with. 

Since the start of this semester, it’s been hard for you two to meet at one place, let alone get on the phone. With you on campus and he outside with his job as a piercer, there have been times when you thought you’d never see him until winter break. Yet, it is now fall break, and Yuuji invited you and the gang to have a relaxing weekend at Choso’s place (with his permission). You accepted the invitation with a gleeful heart, practically bouncing and giggling at the thought of being in the same place as your partner again. And that’s where you’re heading now, walking down the sidewalk to his townhouse with a duffle bag full of your stuff, and you on the phone with Nobara to keep you company. 

“All I’m saying is,” the brunette starts on the other side of the line. “If there’s ever a good time for you two to get it on, it would be this weekend.”

“I’m sorry, since when has my sex life been on your mind instead of studying for the exam you have in ten minutes?” You hear your roommate suck her teeth, and you grin with satisfaction. “Besides, he and I are waiting for the perfect time to do it, no rush. And seeing as you, Megumi, and Yuuji will be in the same place as us, I highly doubt we’d ever think of having sex.”

“Hmm, fair point —KNOCK KNOCK— WHO IS IT!!?” You almost remove the device from your ear from Nobara’s abrupt yelling. “Sorry, Y/n. Megumi is here and says we gotta head to the classroom right now.” 

“That’s fine. I’m already at Choso’s place, anyway. See you guys later, and good luck with the exam.”

“‘Kay, see ya later.” She bids you farewell. “Also, if you two ever do it this weekend and you don’t tell me, as your best-est friend, I have legal rights to make sure all your cute underwear gets thrown out next time I take out the trash.”

“Good-fucking-bye, Nobara.” You scoff, your thumb already pressing the end call button and stuffing the phone in the pocket of your leggings. 

In just the nick of time, you make it to Choso’s townhome and climb up the stairs to knock on the door. Within seconds, Yuuji opens the door and greets you with a hug. 

“Y/n!” He’s always so eager and chipper when he sees you. “I was just about to text you; gotta run to the grocery store, then head to the pizza shop to place the order.”

You enter the foyer to remove your shoes while the salmon-haired other rushes to put his on. “Oh, how come?”

“The phones and websites seem to be down, so I gotta head there in person to place the order. But don’t worry, I’ll be right back before Megumi and Nobara.” He stands to open the door again before grabbing his car keys from the rack. “Choso’s up in his room right now, so you can say hi and chill with him while I’m gone.”

“All right,” You watch Yuuji run down to the sidewalk before he stops to shout something in your direction.

“Don’t do anything too crazy, ya lovebirds!” He sends you a cheeky grin, and you give him a playful glare with puffed cheeks.

“I won’t; go get the pizza!” He laughs at your response as he jogs down the street to his car, and you close the door when you see him drive off. 

Alone with Choso…The thought of being alone with your boyfriend for a few hours has the butterflies in your stomach become active, fighting the urge to smile with warm cheeks. It’s been a hellish month thus far. Finally, after all this time, being in your boyfriend’s arms is enough to wash off all the stress you’ve pent up for the past couple of weeks.

With glee in your steps, you tip-toe up the stairs with wholesome thoughts of you and your boyfriend. I wonder if he’s been eating right these days. Same with getting sleep, he has a bad habit of sleeping at ungodly hours…Oh my God, wait, are we going to sleep together? If so, it'll be the first time we share a bed together. Does that mean—

You mentally slap yourself out of your delusion when you stop at his bedroom door. Oh, snap out of it, Y/n! That’s just Nobara getting into your head. Plus, it’s not like you two will be by yourselves for the entire night —  the other three will be here. Hell, his own younger brother will be across the exact hallway! Don’t think such horny shit, for God’s sake…

You shake your head to abolish the impure thoughts, raising your fist to knock on your boyfriend’s door. “Chocho?" You greet with a nickname. "It’s me, Y/n. I just got here and—“ 

CRASH!!

The sound makes you jump, halting you from finishing that sentence. Rushed footsteps and another noise that something was bumped into follow along. “Ch-Choso? Everything all right?”

“Y-Yeah, I’m good,” you can tell even from outside the room his voice had an unsure tone; he was, in fact, not good. “Just wait, I gotta—Ow!!”

You know you shouldn’t have done what you’re about to do as it goes against basic etiquette; however, when you hear sudden cries of pain from your boyfriend, how in the world would you stay still!? With a chewed lip, you grab the door handle and bust it open to enter his room.

You know you shouldn’t have done that. Because what you see before you is way beyond your comprehension. 

The carpeted floor had items all over the place. There are packets filled with what appear to be red liquids and tiny red pills contrasted with the white carpet. They must’ve been knocked over and made that noise. Suddenly, you notice a stain on the white mat in a bright red color. That was the thing that alerted your nerves, immediately searching for the figure standing behind the bed. It was your boyfriend, Choso Kamo.

But was it him? Because what on earth were you looking at!?? He still had the same face, light brown hair that was usually tied up now fell to his neck, his black “tattoo” on his face now red and leaking down to his chin. And his mouth was agape, your eyes noting that his canines were extended out more than usual with red fluid at the ends. Not to mention that the man was now shirtless! His bare chest and abdomen out for you, covered with smeared….Is…Is that blood?

Choso slowly moves his hands up in defense. “Y/n…Just stay calm for me, okay?”

The entire scene was too much for your brain to grasp, your breathing increasing to an unstable pattern, and your eyes looking at every jarring detail doesn’t help ease the thoughts going way too fast for you. The worried expression of your boyfriend has your body at a standstill, and your limbs quiver as if you’re about to give way. So, what are you left to do?

You faint.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

He stares at you, and you stare at him.

He averts his gaze shyly away from you, and you keep yours fixated on his.

Brown orbs teeter meekly to your figure sitting on his bed before reverting back to the other side, and yours refuse to leave his face, practically sinking holes into his forehead. 

This has been going on for five minutes ever since your consciousness returned, and Choso cleaned up the mess in his room and himself — now, he wears a black tank top after cleaning the red stains off his body. After giving you an explanation as to what happened, you haven’t said a single word to him. You only stare at him while pondering questions of your own. And you can tell the lack of communication makes the poor man uncomfortable in the confines of his bedroom. So, for his sake (and your headache-inducing curiosity), you eventually uttered something.

“So,” you say the first word with a long pause, treading carefully on which questions to ask. “Those pills…are filled with blood?”

“Yes…” He admits with his gaze still not away from you. 

“And you take them every day?”

“Twice a day…”

Okay…Next question, “And those small packets,” you point to the dresser where a pile of said red packets stack upon one another. “Also blood?” He nods slowly. “Human blood?”

He finally brings his eyesight to you but with a hurried shake to the head. “No, no! It’s pig’s blood.”

Is that worse or better?? Never mind— You then point to your set of canines. “And your teeth, I’ve never seen them that long...”

“They only get like that when I don’t drink blood for a while. So, when you knocked on my door, I was just about to open a packet. But then I heard your name and kinda panicked…”

“Oh my God…” Everything comes together and hits you all at once. From his pale skin contrasting yours, the unusual tattoo across his face now revealed as a blood mark, or all those times you caught him drinking his super red "beet juice." It all comes down to the only acceptable truth that feels foreign to leave your lips. “…..My boyfriend is a vampire.” 

Choso cringes internally at the words you uttered. The truth has finally come, and he didn’t even mean for it to happen, at least not like this. Who in their right mind would want to reveal to their partner that they’re a blood-sucking monster? It’s the most dreadful talk of his life that Choso has done all his years avoiding. And now you, his sweet, perfect thing, have discovered his abnormal existence.

“That’s…” He cringes harder when you say more words. “So...” Anxiety pools his stomach, mind filled with uneasy guesses on what you’d think of him now. He could only assume the worst; it’s only natural. “...Cool!!”

Wait, what? That’s not what he expected. Way off, actually.

He feels the dent of the bed when you move closer to him, your face merely inches away from his as you examine every single feature of him. It takes the vampiric man aback, holding his breath while watching your face stare at him intensely with your beautiful eyes, beaming with excitement and wonder. And his vision slowly drifts to your lips, watching them move as you ask questions. And he keeps staring until, “—so…Choso!!” He snaps his orbs back to yours, his cheeks blossoming pink. “I’m asking you a question. So, since you’re a vampire, how come you’re not melting or sparkling when the sun touches you? Is that why you wear black all the time?”

“You mean that stuff from the books and movies?” He questions your logic, but it’s not your fault; he’s sure many others would’ve asked the same. “I don’t know about melting, but my skin gets dry if I stay out too long.”

You hum along to his answer, nodding as if you were in a lecture. “How come Yuuji isn’t a vampire, or at least half? Wait, does he know!?”

“No! No, he doesn’t. I became a vampire because my father was a vampire and turned me and my mother into one. I think I was around the age of twenty. After she died and my dad found Itadori’s mom, he didn’t change her into one. So, with that luck, I guess he isn’t fully a vampire. But I wouldn’t blow past it if he has some characteristics…”

“I see.” Again, you nod along. That might explain some things, like why he’s so fricken fast when he plays sports and that crazy-like strength he has… “So, how long have you been like this?”

“Almost a hundred and thirty.” 

Woah. “And when have—I’m sorry, how long have you tasted human blood?”

Choso ponders on that question for a few seconds before answering. “I started when I became one. I try not to have it as I did back then; the last time I had it was around two years ago. But even then, I switched more into donated or pig’s blood for the past four decades.” 

“Do you ever have cravings for human blood?” Was that too much to ask? It possibly was because Choso makes a face that conveys slight objection. Yet your mind genuinely wanted to know.

“I do, but I try not to act on them. Especially now that I have a human brother, and you…I guess it doesn’t feel right that I do so, ya know.”

His response replays in your mind, not because you were confused but because you understood where he was coming from. You’re sure it wasn’t easy for him to go around and sink his fangs into human flesh back then; modern times should make the task a lot easier with so many people on this earth. Although, you can imagine how hard it must have been for Choso to ignore an urge like that, specifically when it caters to his whole being. Alternatives such as pills and blood packets can only do so much.

“..…Have you ever thought of biting me?” 

The question came out on its own as your curiosity got the best of you. Yet you don’t regret asking because it’s not impossible to think of ever happening.

Choso’s brown eyes look into yours sincerely, releasing a heavy sigh as if the truth was weighing him down. “…Yes.” 

Your expression doesn’t change, remaining neutral. There’s no point in asking why because you can practically answer that yourself: he doesn’t want to hurt you. He’s very considerate, so no wonder he’d put your health and well-being above all else. So, why not do the same for him? “…Would you like to taste mine?”

His eyes widen at your proposal, surveying your face to see any twinges or crack soft a smile that entails a joke. There were none, your expression exhibiting nothing but honesty. “A-Are you sure??”

You nod with a smile. “Yup. I mean, it’s not every day someone gets to have a vampire taste their blood — let alone see a vampire, period. Besides,” you stretch out your arm, your wrist stationed in front of Choso. “If it were any other random vampire, I’d probably throw garlic their way.” 

The man scoffs at your comment. “Something also you see in books and movies, Y/n.”

“Whatever,” the two of you laugh at your silliness. “But I’m serious, Chocho. I’m fine as long you’re the one doing it. So, go on.” 

A moment of hesitation keeps him in his thoughts, the mental cogs of his brain deciphering what course of action he should take. But he does take your wrist with a large hand, bringing it towards his mouth. And before you know it, the vampiric man unsheathes his fangs out for display and sinks them into your flesh, tearing the skin as they pierce through. 

The sharp pain was expected, but you still forced your eyes shut and took in a big inhale. Choso watches your reaction as his fangs take in a sample of your blood for him to taste. The familiar texture of the body fluid courses through him, and drips of it slide down to his tongue. You exhale through your mouth, pursed lips blowing out cool air. It felt as though two needles were simultaneously stabbing your wrist, your hand forming into a fist to situate yourself through the hurtful sensation. 

And Choso just keeps watching you as he drinks your red fluid, taking in your graceful reaction. He knows it hurts, but you don’t say anything, pushing through it for the sake of him. He examines your steady breathing, eyes sewn shut, and plump limps agape for inhalation. You looked so good like this — tasted good as well, very sweet with a floral scent; it must have been your signature perfume. It intoxicates him, thinking of your body and fragrance on him and your sweet taste on his tastebuds. It ignites something inside him. Something that he hadn’t experienced in a long time…

“Choso?” You call out to him as his blinks signal that he heard you. “You done there? Don’t want you sucking my arm dry.” You jest to him.

He takes the hint and removes his teeth from your wrist, licking the two pierced holes of excess blood that seeps out. “My bad.”

You tease him some more. “Do I taste that good to you?” You didn’t expect him to give you a curt nod, a silent compliment from your boyfriend. “O–Oh…That’s good to know…” You say timidly, gaze averting downwards. Then, you notice something in the crotch of his pants. You gasp: a pinched tent. Choso follows your sight, finding out about his predicament to his horror. He opens his mouth to explain himself, but you beat him. “Can I take care of it?” 

Again, Choso tries to say something, but no words dare to come out as you crawl up towards him. His brain short circuits at your movement, his back hitting the headboard of his bed. His blush creeps around to his ears, contrasting his pale skin and chocolate-colored hair. You smile at him; he’s so adorable and shy about this. “Mind I take the lead for a minute?” You ask for permission, even though the answer is quite clear when he peers at your lips. He nods, your face drawing inward and your soft lips landing on his.

One kiss. Two kisses and a moan. Three kisses pass, and it’s at this point that you two can’t get off each other. As his hand snakes to the back of your head to deepen the kiss, he takes your mewls with his lips, the insertion of his tongue making your toes curl. 

Taking the lead as promised, you bring a hand down to the zipper of his ripped jeans, bringing the zipper and the clothing down to throw on the floor. Your fingers curl around the band of his black boxer briefs, pulling them down to reveal his lo— WHAT THE FUCK!!??

His erection springs out from his underwear, and what you’re met with is a fucking behemoth. For one, the thing was way longer than you anticipated — most definitely the longest you’ve had within reach. And because of its length, it looked so pretty to look at. The way his precum trickles down his glans to the underside is so magnificent to your eyes that you’re practically stuck looking at it. And…Is that a piercing right at his frenulum? Oh, wow. Vampire dick, huh.

“Heh, you like what you see, princess?” Suddenly, you feel so small from being called out with that little tease from your boyfriend. You give him a condescending expression, making him chuckle to himself. And who told him to call you that cute nickname!?… Keep going.

Back to the matter, you ogle at his dick again and mentally prep yourself by slowly moving your hand toward it. Your fingers curl around the base and unhurriedly stroke him to figure out a good pace to start. A moan from Choso entails that you know what you’re doing, so you dial up the speed and go further up, stopping your strokes from his piercing down to the base.

He becomes more vocal as your friction becomes more confident, spitting on your hand and tightening your grip to make it easier for his rough skin to slide across your palm. Sticking with a firm and consistent rhythm, you watch your hand go to work on his shaft, watching more of his precum leak and slide down to your fingers. It was so lewd yet so arousing; you feel the throbbing heat between your legs begins to form, swaying your ass to ease the pleasurable sensation while instructing a pornographic act.

“Ahhh, ahhnn, oh shit…” He stammers to give you a proper response, your hand feeling too good. “Oh fuck, your hand feels so good, angel, so goo—Nhhhh!!”

“Really?” You can’t deny the pride you feel for yourself, so you move down to situate between his legs. “That’s all that matters, then.” You bring your free hand to massage his testicles and cover more surface, and more of Choso’s whines and croaks fill the space, his hips bucking to ensure more friction and pleasure on his end.

With the rate this is going, more of his essence leaks out from his urethra, and the raunchy image playing right in front of you has your lips quiver. An intrusive thought roams around your brain while looking at his pink glans. You chew on your lips as you decide on what to do. And when you finally do, it’s now or never.

With a gulp, you bring the tip of his cock to your lips, and the man sharply gasps at the wet sensation of your tongue on his glans. The precum leaves a salty aftertaste on your tastebuds, proving that this is happening: you’re giving your vampiric boyfriend a blowjob right now. Deciding to take things to the next level, you intake more of his inches as much as you can. Not the whole thing because you know you’d probably choke, so you take your time inhaling his length at a comfortable pace and manner. And once you bob your head, the hisses and groans from Choso should give you an idea that he’s feeling elated.

“Haahh…Mmmph…Y/n, your mouth feels so good—Oh shit…” He brings a hand down to the top of your head, a sign you can guess that he wants you to keep going. And so you do, speeding up your motions. Your mouth sucks and teases the underside of his dick, your tongue curves and licks around the piercing of his frenulum, and he jerks when you slowly teasingly lick from the base to the tip. You bring your hand to the rest of the inches you couldn’t cover, your pretty fingers sliding up and down his dick while your free hand comes to his balls for you to massage. The sudden contact of your hands wasn’t expected, his body jolting to the sensations of your tongue and fingers around him, kneading his scrotum as you playfully lick on his cockhead. “—Khhh, ohhhh, fuck…Y/n, baby, I’m—Ahahhh!!”

From the sound of it, he was bound to release his load. So you prepare and bring the tip back into your warm mouth, urging the man to climax. With a few more pumps from your hands coinciding with the laps and sucks of your plump lips, he ruts his groin to your face as his essence spreads inside your oral cavity. And you take it like a champ, sucking every pump to your throat, not letting the tip go until he finished. So, once his body calms down, you release him, wiping off the trail of saliva from your mouth.

Yet it doesn’t stop there; of course, it doesn’t.  Because Choso’s cock is very much still sprung and active from your blowjob, meaning it’s inevitable that you’re going to move on to the next phase. And judging by the sheer length of this thing, you have no idea how that shit is gonna fit inside of you. Damn, vampire dick sure is something…

“Y/n?” You snap back from your thoughts when Choso calls out to you, noticing you gawking at his size. “You don’t have to do the rest if you don’t want, baby. I can take care of it.”He’s so sweet looking out for you as he’s aware that you’re a little worried. 

But you surprise him when you exit off the bed for a quick second, removing your leggings and underwear for the carpet to keep for you. The same thing goes for your matching bra. And as you crawl back to bed, his wide eyes never leave your lower figure, watching you lie on your back with your head on a pillow and your legs spread wide. “As long as you take the lead, I’ll be fine, Chocho.”

It’s his turn to gulp and ease his dry throat before getting on his knees and positioning himself between your legs, dark brown orbs intaking every detail of your cunt that’s exposed for him. You chew on your lip, “It’s embarrassing if you stare so hard at it, ya know…”

“S-Sorry,” He apologizes while getting back to the task. He grabs ahold of his length and aligns the tip to your wet entrance, and your breath hitches at the contact. “I’ll go real slow, okay?”You give a couple of honest nods for confirmation, and he watches your breathing. When he notes your inhales and exhales, he pushes into your folds. With every inhale you take, he nudges further into you. The pain gets bitter and bitter by the second, and your hands grip the sheets beneath you. “Relax for me, angel, relax.” He comes down to whisper those words to ear; swear to God, you could’ve moaned right there and then. However, you switch your focus to following his advice, reminding your body to stop resisting the unfamiliar limb making entry. The pain is still present, but you count your breaths to distract your mind until the tip finally makes it in, a sharp gasp sneaking past you and a hiss from Choso when you involuntarily grasp around him while he pushes more of him inside.  

However, he doesn’t move right away, giving you as much time as you need to catch a steady pattern to breathe along with. Your head already feels too hot, and your chest feels too tight to breathe. You peer down to find that he is only halfway in, and there’s no amount of words to describe the disbelief you’re experiencing at this moment. “I feel…so full already…” You nearly choke on your words. You can practically feel his piercing scrape your insides.

“I know, princess,” he comforted you with a kiss on the forehead while lifting your shirt, your chest meeting his cold, slender fingers that massaged your mounds. All the while, he pushes his cock further into your chasm, and your breathing goes shaky as you try and take every inch of him. Then all of a sudden, your body jolts upward when you feel the tip of his cock hit your cervix; you can only guess now that everything’s entirely inside you. Oh yeah, vampire dick is most definitely something else. Tears start to water your eyes, and your hands come around Chos’s neck, the coldness of his nape piercing greeting your skin. “—Mmmm, fuckin’ Christ…I’m gonna go start moving now, Y/n.”

You appreciate the warning because, with the way his hips start to create a motion to and fro from your entrance, it’s surreal that his shaft is churning your inner wall with minimal effort. Shivers crawl up your spine every time the base meets your southern lips, grazes to your most tender spots result in you chewing on your bottom lip, and God, the occasional jab to your cervix is something you’ll have to get used to. He sucks on one nipple while the other hand tends to the other, the laps of his tongue on the bud of your breast feel so good, and you gasp when his fangs lightly graze it. So exhilaratingly dangerous. 

“Choso—Ohhhh…” you coo, your head thrown back when he tweezes your nipple simultaneously with the jab to your cervix. The pace of his thrusts increases a tad, and your voice becomes more vocal than before, filling his bedroom with your breathy whimpers. “So big, you’re so big for me—Ohooo!”

“—Mmfhh!! Fuck, you feel so good for me, princess…Shiiiit—” The way your cunt wraps around him so tightly causes him to rut into you harder and faster, evoking spine-chilling whines from your puffy, bitten lips. Your disheveled figure squirms on the sheets, holding onto Choso for dear life as he churns your tummy insides. Your fragrance attacks his nose when he kisses your neck, nibbling the skin to listen to your cute gasps more. Then, the urge rises. He opens his mouth for his fangs to scrape your neck.

“Ahahhnn!! Ch–Chosooo!!” 

Your voice halts his unconscious, realizing what he was about to do and quickly withdrawing his teeth from your neck. No, not now… He thinks to himself, moving his fangs to your shoulder instead. The bite elicits a sharp shriek from your unbeknownst self. Your nails dig into his shoulders, the pain motivating him to explore more of your body with your mouth. 

You can feel his kisses trail down your collarbone and breast, sucking on your nipples once more before leaving a tiny bite. You clamp around his girth as a response, which jabs into your cervix repeatedly with precision. More kisses and licks later, and he leaves a bite mark by your collarbone, sucking on the spot to taste more of your sweet blood. Your mind goes dizzy with the constant of his lips and teeth, and the commotion down south has you wrap your legs around him, caging him in as your climax is soon to come.

“—Nnaahh! Ahaahhnn!! Oh, God, Ohmyfuckin’Go—Hhmmff!!” Choso leads a hand down to your clitoris, and you see stars in no time. “Chosooo!! Yer handsss, you’re gonna make me cummm!! Ooooh, shhahhh!!”

Choso listens to your pleas with attentive ears, his fingers swiping rampantly on your clit. Your choked sobs are so beautiful to hear. The way your walls grasp around his length entails you’re about to come on him any second now. “Go on, my angel. Ring me out—Hnnghh!! So fuckin��� tight…”

Erratic ruts to your sloppy cunt cause wet noises to fill your eardrums, and the heat in your face is unbearable while your head pounds harshly. With the swipes on your clit and him grinding his cock to your tender spot, it’s apparent that you two come concurrently. He fills your cunt with his anticipated load while your velvety walls contract around him euphorically, and exchanged pants fill the space between your sweaty bodies. 

The two of you experience shocks of your own as your heaving bodies rest on each other, Choso nuzzling his face to your neck as his hand softly massages your breast. Your body calms down, gradually exiting your blissful haze. But it tenses again when you feel another sharp pain in your shoulder, and you snicker while pulling his ear to tease. 

“Let you have a taste, now you’re already hooked, huh…”

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Choso uses a washcloth to dab on the bite marks around your body, gently pressing down on it and wiping off any blood that leaves your newly added markings. The warm cloth feels good on your cold skin — as if the stinging sensation subsides in seconds. 

“You know,” You hum along as he takes care of your body. “I didn’t think you’d be that much of a biter.”

“Sorry,” he moves to your front, dabbing the teeth marks on your breasts and shoulders. You can see the hint of pink that flushes his cheeks and ears. “Got a little carried away…”

You giggle. “No need to apologize, Chocho.” The nickname has him blush harder. He’s so cute when he’s flustered. “Just goes to show that you were enjoying the moment.”

His hands suddenly stop moving, the washcloth now around your wrist. “…Did you?” Caramel eyes dare to peek at yours. “Did you enjoy it?”

You could tell that the question carried a deep-rooted meaning. Not only was this the first time you and Choso had sex, but it was also within the same day you found out he was a vampire. If you were in his shoes, you could guess he’d probably think you didn’t like the experience or found it heavily discomforting. Yet that wasn’t the case at all. So, you have to communicate that to him. 

With a warm smile, you let him know, “Yes, I did. I had a great time.” Before you can say more, a random thought prompts you to ask a question. “Hey, I felt you were about to bite my neck, but you didn’t.”

 “Hmm? Oh, umm, yeah, I did. The only way for someone to become a vampire is by biting the neck,” He confirms, his gaze drifting down to your wrist as he uses the wet cloth to dab on the mark. “But I don’t want you becoming one now. At least, not without you telling me.”

“Wait, you don't want me to be a vampire?”

“I mean, that’s up to you, honestly. As much as I love you and would love the idea of spending my life with you, that’s only my selfish wish at the end of the day. The choice should be yours to make, not mine.”

You remove your hand from his hold and place it on his cold cheek. The other hand comes up to cup the other, provoking your boyfriend to look directly at you. 

“You’re so sweet, you know that?” You have never seen his face change into a flash of pink so quickly; it makes you giggle at him. “Chocho, I appreciate you telling me the truth about yourself. I’m sure it’s been hard on you to carry this burden of pretending to be something you’re not, especially with me. So, again, thank you…However, I can’t really see myself as a vampire, at least right now. My life seems to be at a good place right now, and I want to experience it first-hand, ya know. With you by my side.”

You know Choso is listening to you word-for-word; his brown eyes never leaving your face is evidence of such. So you continue: “So, until then, let me be human for a while longer. When the time is right, I’ll let you know. Sounds good?”

The brown-haired man gives you a smile before answering, resulting in yours broadening. “I’m cool with that.”

You nod. “Cool.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…You want more of my blood, huh.”

“…..I’m sorry,” you laugh at his awkwardness. “You just smell so good. And you taste sweet…”

“In that case,” you withdraw your hands from his cheek and extend an arm out for him. “Have one last taste.”

There’s hesitance when his hand grabs ahold of your wrist. But when he knows you’re complying and on board with this, Choso brings your wrist to his lips, his fangs pierce down on your skin, and he sucks your blood. The pain this time around wasn’t too excruciating. Maybe with all the bites you have on your body right now, you came around and got used to it. 

And who knows? Perhaps you’ll grow to love the sensation soon enough.

“Yo! I’m back!” The two of you freeze. A familiar voice from the other side of the hallway brings you back to the present moment. You then remember that Yuuji promised to return from the store and pizza place. And seeing as though time has passed enough for him to be done, the warmth of your body shifts to a disturbing shiver when the bedroom door opens up. “I got the pizzas and left them on top of the oven—“

The salmon-haired other stopped mid-sentence when his eyesight landed in your direction. You can only imagine what’s going through his mind when he looks at you and Choso because that was the same experience you went through a few hours back.

Yuuji looks at the two of you on top of the bed. Clothes decorating the carpeted floor, both your bodies free and nude, your tits out for him to see crystal clear. One of your hands holds a washcloth that harbors red, bloody stains. The other hand stretched out towards Choso’s mouth, where the younger notices fangs withdrew from your wrist. The newly drawn blood from your new mark connects to the sharp teeth of his older brother.

Thirty seconds go by where no one says anything, just three pairs of eyes and figures falling victim to the discomfiting silence of this situation. Until Yuuji starts to uncomfortably laugh at the sight before him for a few seconds. And then suddenly, he stops, and his balance gives way for his body to meet with the floor beneath him.

He fainted.

♱ 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

© 𝐇𝐨𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐲2023 – reblogs + comments are appreciated wholeheartedly <3 header art by rororogi mogera + dividers by the amazing @/cafekitsune!!