#I included the last one despite it mainly just being repeats because I can’t find a separate render of Maid Kirito in that pose

[transfem-kirito-truther]

All the images of Kirito dressed fem I’ve managed to gather so far!

[peaceoutofthepieces]

could you write dialogue prompt #1 ("marry me") for post canon nick&charlie? maybe you could also include hug #13 or #22 ♡

Anonymous asked: 42 of the dialogue prompts with nick and charlie please 💛 I love your work

these prompts felt like they worked well together, so i’ve merged them—hope you don’t mind! (i’m assuming you’ll mind more that these requests were sent over a year ago, and all i can say for that is i’m sorry, i should have been more informative about the fact i am useless)

1. “Marry me.”

42. “You’re a complete moron!”

22. can’t stop yourself from hugging

The injury knocks Nick out—quite literally. It’s only brief, but the gap in his awareness is there; he comes to on his back in the mud, the shouts around him drowned out by his own groan and the pound of his blood in his ears. His stomach roils, and he gasps so he doesn’t heave, then gasps again at the sharp pain that pangs from his left ribs. He twists his body to press a hand to the sore spot and lets out a shout as pain zips through his right leg, seeming to span from toe to hip and back again. For a few seconds, all he can hear is ringing, and then the cacophony of panic overwhelms him. 

“Nick! Nick? Can you look at me? Hey. Can you focus on me?”

Nick blinks, then blinks again and again until the black fades out to the edges and he can make out the blurry lines of Reid’s face. His mate-slash-captain-slash-coworker looks more distressed than Nick has ever seen him, which is to say he remains fairly composed. 

“There you are, mate.” Reid musters a weak smile. “Just stay put, alright? Callum’s run to get Rogie.”

“Fuck me,” Nick breathes. Sharon Rogers is the school nurse, and Nick knows that despite her job being mostly limited to scraped knees and seasonal bugs, she’s got a fountain of knowledge at least far beyond any of his teammates. Still, the reassurance is lost on him; he barely hears the words before they’re forgotten again, blocked out by the pain shrouding him. 

He registers her arrival and responds to her questioning with mostly grunts and swear words. He finally clocks in when she tells him the ambulance is on the way. 

“Fuck,” he repeats, eyes widening and then clenching shut as his head throbs weakly. 

“You’ll be alright, Nick,” Sharon assures. “But you’re not getting up on your own. You haven’t broken anything in your leg, but you might have torn or sprained something. Nothing that can’t be fixed, but it hurts like a bitch. If you’ve done damage to your ribs or there’s any possibility of a head injury, it’s better to wait on someone more medically trained to move you.”

Nick makes a noise to show his understanding and focuses on managing his breath, which aches with every rise and fall of his chest. He’s glad to not be moved further yet—the thought alone makes his teeth grit against a wash of pain. Sharon mainly works on keeping him conscious for the next while. Her approval leads him to believe they succeed, but his awareness spaces out enough that his memory of the period is spotty. The paramedics arriving escapes his notice, and the next thing he knows he’s swearing in pain as he’s being loaded onto a stretcher. 

~^~

Nick’s ribs aren’t broken, but they are badly bruised. They ache with every rattle of his breath, and it sends the message of pain down his leg in zips and jolts. His leg isn’t broken either, but it is sprained. He’d pulled a ligament in his ankle and almost torn one in his knee. Thankfully, neither are severe enough to require surgery, but Nick isn’t finding much comfort in that at the moment. As Sharon had put it, it hurts like a bitch. 

It’s eased considerably by whatever they’ve doped him with, and where he felt overly aware of his body before, it’s become somewhat detached. Now, his mind is allowed to drift away and give him moments of rest. He loses time in fits and starts, only aware because nurses will appear at his bedside when he had been alone in the room the last time his eyes were open. Everything is hazy and dreamlike and he welcomes it. Anything is better than the nightmare of that initial fall. 

They’re keeping him overnight for further observation, which doesn’t overly bother him. When he catches a nurse with enough time to speak before they bustle away, he only asks her one question. “When can I have visitors?”

“Visiting hours start at six. You have family you want to see?”

Nick shakes his head, then stops, furrowing his brow. “I mean, yeah, but—I just want to see my partner. Charlie. He’ll be panicking about me.”

The nurse brightens, her smile warm and indulgent. “Husband?”

It comes out without any real thought. The idea of not seeing Charlie is unbearable. Nick doesn’t even consider it for a moment. “Yeah,” he lies. 

“I’ll send him your way as soon as I can.” She winks at him and bustles away still smiling, which makes him feel sort of nice. The days of doubting his sexuality and feeling scared any time he had to say words like ‘boyfriend’ are long behind him, but their effects will always linger. Getting such a warm response about his husband from a stranger is uplifting. He smiles dopily in response before he catches himself. 

He isn’t seriously thinking about that. Is he?

The medication must be strong. 

He drifts in and out in the time between speaking to the nurse and, apparently, the start of visiting hours, because before he knows it, Charlie’s rushing towards him. 

“Nick!” Charlie’s at his bedside in a blink, and there he hesitates. Nick reaches out, and it’s apparently all the permission Charlie needs. Just like that, he’s lurching forward like he can’t stop himself and giving Nick a fierce hug. 

Around the head, at least. He is, thankfully, clearly aware of Nick’s injuries and trying to refrain from touching him in any way that will hurt. Hugging Nick’s head to his chest is a compromise, Nick’s sure, from Charlie not being able to hold himself back entirely. 

Nick, personally, has no complaints. He reaches his arms to embrace Charlie in return before there’s an explosion of protest from his ribs. With a wince, he lowers his arms back down and settles for pushing his head against Charlie’s sternum. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Nick murmurs, slightly slurred. Despite the flare of pain, the drugs are still clearly working. 

Regrettably, Charlie pulls back, but Nick is content enough to be able to look at him fully. That is, until Charlie deals a sharp flick to his forehead. 

“Ow,” Nick says. “That could be dangerous. I could be brain damaged.”

“You’re a complete moron!”

“Wow. Love you too.”

With a huff of exasperation, Charlie shakes his head and snatches up Nick’s hand. Charlie threads his other hand through Nick’s hair, and it’s only when Nick notices it trembling that he further notices the tears threatening at the corners of Charlie’s eyes. 

“Hey,” Nick says softly. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing serious. It’ll take time to heal, but then I’ll be completely fine. I am fine.”

Charlie swallows and briefly takes his hand from Nick’s hair to scrub over his eyes. Then he nods. “Tell me what happened?”

“Bad tackle. Mainly my own fault, though. Slipped in the muck and went down funny.”

“God, Nick.” Charlie pulls the chair from the corner to the side of the bed and sits, grasping tightly to Nick’s hand once he’s settled. “I thought when you went from playing to coaching, I could worry less about you getting injured. I thought when you went from coaching to primary teaching that I wouldn’t have to worry at all.”

Nick closes his eyes. “I know, I know. I just…you know I still love it. I thought just having the friendly matches wouldn’t be much to worry about.” He sighs. “But maybe I just have to accept I’m getting too old.”

Charlie huffs softly, leaning forward to card a hand through Nick’s hair again. “I think that might be a bit of an exaggeration but I also have to agree.”

“Wow. Thanks, love.”

“You were the one that said it!”

“Yeah, and I was joking. It’s the drugs talking.”

Charlie snorts. “Strong stuff, hm?”

“Must be.” Nick hesitates, then decides it could end up much more embarrassing if he doesn’t admit the rest. “I, uhm, might have already lied about some other things.”

Nick realises his mistake when Charlie’s eyes widen and he clutches a little tighter to Nick’s hand. “What? Is it worse than you’ve said?”

“Is—oh, no, no. I’m fine, Charlie, I promise. Well, okay, not perfectly fine, but it’s nothing serious. I wasn’t talking about that.”

Charlie leans back in the chair. “Okay…”

“I just, uh, might have said something stupid. To the nurse. About you?”

Charlie’s expression grows increasingly confused. “Why were you talking about me?”

“I was asking about having visitors and explaining I just wanted to see you, and like, she just kind of assumed.” Nick flicks his gaze away. “I just didn’t correct her.”

“Nick, I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say.”

“She thinks we’re married,” Nick blurts, and Charlie blinks. “She—I told her I just wanted to see my partner, you, and she was just like, husband? And I thought if I said no maybe you wouldn’t be allowed in to see me because you’re not, like, family—even though we are regardless of that—and so I said yeah and—”

“Oh my god, Nick.” Charlie cuts Nick off, covering his face with his free hand. Nick’s heart dips towards his stomach, and then he realises Charlie is laughing. 

And suddenly Nick’s offended. “What’s so funny?” 

“You’re not dying, you idiot.” Charlie huffs. “Of course I can come see you. It’s not restricted to family only.”

Nick frowns, defensiveness bubbling somewhere amongst the drowsiness from the drugs. “But, like, Covid and everything.”

“Nick, that was literal years ago.”

“Yeah, but, it changed the hospital restrictions.”

Charlie nods, eyes wide and amused. “Years ago.”

Nick opens his mouth, then closes it again. He squeezes Charlie’s hand. “I didn’t want to risk not seeing you.”

Charlie’s following sigh is much softer and, Nick likes to think, more fondly exasperated. It’s with loving laughter that he reiterates, lovingly, “You’re an idiot.”

“Well, if you’re going to be like that—”

Charlie silences him with a kiss, which is, honestly, fair. Nick has no arguments or complaints. He has said enough stupid things today as is that it’s probably safer his mouth is otherwise occupied, at least for a time. 

Then, with Charlie’s mouth still only a breath from his, he’s saying, “And, honestly…when she said it, I didn’t want to say no.”

Nick categorises the words as a mistake the instant they leave his mouth. It isn’t because they aren’t true; it isn’t even because he thinks Charlie will react badly to hearing them. It’s because he isn’t supposed to say them here, like this. It’s because it’s nothing they haven’t implied before, but it cannot become more than implication, not in any way less than Charlie deserves. The shiny silver band residing in a velvet box in the depths of Nick’s underwear drawer—the only item of Nick’s clothing Charlie does not make a habit of digging through—is less than Charlie deserves, but it is at least more than this. 

Nick’s sure, as the distance grows between them, that Charlie agrees, but Charlie surprises him. He strokes a thumb over Nick’s cheek and offers up his softest smile. “It does have a nice ring to it,” he murmurs. 

Oh. Nick swallows. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Charlie nods. “Don’t you think so?”

That’s an obvious enough tease that Nick huffs. “You know exactly what I think.”

Charlie rests his arms on the bed and his chin on top of them, gazing up at Nick sweetly while remaining careful of Nick’s injuries. “Tell me anyway?”

“Charlie,” Nick groans, rolling his head away. “This is unfair. I’m not in my right mind.”

Charlie snorts. “Are you ever?”

“Oi.” Nick glares at him, but there’s no heat in it. He drops the expression completely when Charlie leans in and kisses him, another short peck that draws another slew of idiotic words from him. “I’d like you to be my husband,” he whispers, comforted that the words don’t have to travel far, leaving his lips to be almost immediately swallowed up by Charlie’s. “I’d like to be your husband. To marry you, someday. You know that. You’ve always known that.”

Charlie’s gaze burns against Nick’s, and his next kiss is sure and insistent. Nick loses himself in it. His sore ribs strain and he doesn’t care, can’t find it in him to be bothered by the pain, can barely acknowledge it under the all-consuming want. He has always considered Charlie a safe place, the one place he could turn to and immediately feel soothed, and it’s proven now. Charlie is a more sufficient balm than any drug. 

“You should,” Charlie murmurs as he pulls away, and Nick furrows his brow. “Marry me,” Charlie clarifies. States, really. 

Asks, Nick realises. 

He stares and stares and Charlie simply waits, nervousness lurking in the deep blue of his eyes but the hints to a sure smile on his lips. 

“You mean it,” Nick says, realising it’s true as he says it. “You’re actually asking me right now.”

Charlie nods, smile simultaneously growing and becoming more hesitant. “I swear it wasn’t how I planned it. You deserve the best proposal ever and now I don’t even have your ring with me. But honestly, I haven’t been able to figure out how I should do it and I have no idea what would be considered the ‘right time’ and you’re kind of proving either of us could die at literally any time and I don’t want to miss—”

“Yes,” Nick cuts him off. 

Charlie blinks. Pays back Nick’s long stare. “Yes?” he questions. 

“Yes, of course I’m going to fucking marry you,” Nick says. “I can’t believe you stole the proposal and you have a goddamn ring too and neither of us have them on us, but yes. Obviously yes.”

The joy that lights in Charlie is instant, laughter falling from him in chimes of disbelief. “You got me a ring?”

“You damn well know I did.”

“Yeah.” Charlie beams. “Yeah, I figured.”

Nick grabs Charlie’s hand and squeezes. He runs his thumb familiarly over Charlie’s knuckles and imagines the feel of metal under his skin. He looks up from their hands to find Charlie watching him, equally enamoured. “Fiancé has a pretty nice ring to it, too,” Nick says.

Charlie squeezes his hand in return. “Yeah. It does.”

[world-cinema-research]

Week 5: The Deep (1977)

The film The Deep from 1977 is about an undersea adventure with a couple who become heavily involved in dangerous conflicts with treasure hunters, when they find their own treasure in a sunken World War ll cargo ship. Among the treasure they find hidden bottles and bottles of drugs still in tacked and around every corner they are followed by hunters. I found the film to be very weird, cheesy, and interesting. The film had a budget cost of $9 million to make and earned $100 million in the box office, it seemed to be a success at its time. The film was directed by Peter Yates and had other famous stars such as Jacqueline Bisset, Nick Nolte, Robert Shaw, and Robert Lee Minor. The Deep was filmed in many places like Florida, Jamaica, Catalina, the Bahamas and at the end they went to film in Bermuda.

Unfortunately, the movie critics did not enjoy the film very well as much as they hopped for. In an article called Blu-ray review-The Deep (1977) by admin they say "Adapted from the novel by Peter Benchley, The Deep is a fairly plodding adventure that has moments of excitement – mainly the stunning underwater sequences – but never quite gets a momentum going like that other movie based on a Benchley book. Everyone gives good performances and takes the whole thing seriously – including Robert Shaw, despite his character Romer Treece going deep sea diving whilst wearing a shirt and khaki shorts and looking like your granddad dressed in his Sunday afternoon casuals – and whilst you can’t really complain about the quality of the production there is a little too much plot going on, with numerous shady characters coming in and out of the picture and various double-crosses going on, that the 124-minute running time feels a lot longer than it is. Still, it could have been the full three-hour TV cut…". (admin) They also say "The Deep was clearly a film that got made thanks to the success of Jaws and you get the feeling that, at that time, Peter Benchley could have written down what he did on his holidays, throw in a shark or two, get Robert Shaw to star in it and BOOM! – we have a hit! Get past the Jaws connections and The Deep is a good, but not great, underwater adventure with fleeting moments of excitement to keep you invested." "Nevertheless, it is solid, if unremarkable, Sunday afternoon entertainment that you could put on after the umpteenth repeat of Thunderball on ITV2 if you’re in the mood for more sharks, coral reefs and shady criminal dramas (and it has a better theme tune)." (admin)

After watching the film myself I would have to agree with them on it being an ok film to watch, it was beautiful but definitely to many things going on at once and many people popping in and out.

A historical event I found that happened in the same year as the film came out (1977) was a plane crash that happened in the Canary Islands. "On the 27th of March of this year one of the World’s Worst Air Disasters in history occurred. Two jumbo jets collided on the airport runway killing 583 people." (Guy Facts) Another historical event I found from 1977 was Elvis Presley performed his last concert before he died just at the age of 42.

The film to me felt very cheesy, to long, and funny. There was a lot of silly mistake you could see in the background or it would be in your face noticeable. It had some funny dialogue shared along with the characters and was very strange too. A scenes that really stood out to me was when David and Romer when back to the cargo ship to find more drugs, David leaves to another room, where he is greeted by a Eel. The crew did a wonderful job with the under water scenes and taking full control what what to capture.

Its not the best quality video but if you do watch the film it beautiful.

I believe the movie was felt unconventional and conventional because of the small budget they had, I had a hard time understanding the plot and the characters and it went on for to long running at 2 hours and 4 minutes. They had a lot going on from weird fight scenes to rituals? They did have popular actors, and they had Peter Benchley screenplay and write the story. I think this film is a hit or miss for most people.

One textual evidence I wanted to share was the opening to the film and how beautiful it was.

The other textual evidence I wanted to share was a long fighting scene and them blowing up the shipwreck.

[rwriting]

the last victim // sayu yagami (deathnote)

description: gosh, i love sayu yagami so much. i have so many headcanons for her –  it’s a little embarrassing… i really wanted to write this piece! it’s post canon with a few dark themes. i’m of the opinion that sayu’s a character with so much potential, so little of which is explored in the canon. hoping you all enjoy! 

word count: 1.6k

content warnings: light yagami (ha, ha…), implied self-harm, self-hatred (?), the term psychopath (ableism), magazines being gross, sibling and parent death, bullying… sorry, i know that’s quite a lot to bear with. please take care of yourself!

 Breathe.

She’s trying, she really is.

Breathe.

Her hands spasm and reach for her throat.

Breathe.

She forces her hands to her sides.

Breathe.

She opens her eyes.

Sayu Yagami stares at the ceiling of her apartment, head fuzzy with… she wants to say the remnants of a dream, but perhaps a nightmare is closer to the truth. She can’t quite remember. Besides, her waking, no matter the night she’s experienced, is never pleasant. It always involves too much breathlessness, too much begging, too much… emotion.

Sayu feels torn about that. Too much emotion. It seems weird to think that she could be overwhelmed with emotion, when she spends so much time simply without it. She’s not sure what is worse: drowning beneath the waves, or feeling as if she’s dying of thirst.

Maybe I deserve them both, she thinks. It’s a recurring thought – she can never be rid of it. It sneaks up behind her, holds her hand. Offers comfort, somehow. There’s a reason for this, it whispers. Sayu thinks she likes reasons, likes logic, likes… explanations. That’s understandable, they all say. You want to know how one of your own hurt so many others.

I don’t, thinks Sayu. She doesn’t know if it’s a lie or not. How odd to not even know if you yourself are telling the truth.

Desperate not to get stuck in a loop of contemplation as she’s prone to (she’s spent days like this before; lying in bed, pondering and pondering and pondering), she swings her legs off the bed and plants them on the cold, cold, floor. The sensation of the frozen tiles and the jolt they send through her is oddly pleasant; it’ll prevent her from falling back to sleep at the very least.

A quick walk to the bathroom and she considers herself fully awake. Well, as awake as she gets; too many days of hers are spent in a daze, a state so distanced from reality she can hardly call it a state of being awake. A state of dreams and disillusionment.

She takes in her face in as she stares at the mirror. For a terrifying moment, her eyes gloss over her own reflection as if there is nothing there – as if it the face of someone else, or simply a smudge. Or a ghost… she thinks, and smiles in spite of herself. A ghost. That is what she feels like so often, floating from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day… or place to place, though she rarely leaves her home. The high rise apartment with its large windows and intimidating staircases isn’t exactly comforting, but that doesn’t mean she’s not enamoured with it – obsessed with the way it makes her feel. The way it makes her feel. Calm, mysterious. Like she has a plan. Like him.

She focuses once again on the mirror, on her reflection. All her features are accented, more obvious, more vivid. No. All of his features are more accented, more obvious, more visible, no, wait, all of a sudden they’re the only ones there, and he’s here in the mirror, she can see him, she can touch him, she can let him out!

The mirror cracks as Sayu’s fist makes contact with it, the sound loud and unforgiving. Unforgiving also is the gift it gave her – an open wound, leaking blood. She watches the blood trickle slowly, dripping down into the sink. She doesn’t bother to wash it away. Somehow, to do so would feel like a betrayal. To what, she’s not sure. Maybe she wants evidence. This happened. Or maybe it’s to do with the blood – maybe she considers it proof her existence, her being, her living.

There are other ways to see that blood you know…

The thought is not so much a thought as a temptation; a beg disguised as a calm offer. No, she thinks sternly. She almost wants to say it out loud, but there is something sacred in the silence. Even her footsteps seem more quiet than usual, the sound of her bare feet not muffled by socks but just by the air itself.

Her feet take her away, to kitchen, where she reaches up to a shelf, to grasp in her hand (the one free of blood) a small medical box, filled mainly with bandages and gauze. She tends to her hand, and for a few seconds wishes she had someone to do this for her, with her. It’s a bad idea, a bad thought. Not only is it a foolish longing, but it leads to a reminiscing; an unearthed memory which she wants to hold dear. If only it weren’t so tainted.

Her knowledge of how the memory will make her feel, her warning to herself – none if it seems to help, to stop it as it takes shape in her mind. She’d have been eight when it had happened. She’d planted some flowers on her windowsill and had cut her hand on one of the small terracotta plant pots. Downstairs she’d gone, tears welling in her eyes. And there he was, washing his hands in the sink, turning to meet her with a small smile on his face. Okay, what’d you do this time?

She’d stuck out her hand to show him, and his eyes had widened almost imperceptibly. That looks a little serious, Sayu. Despite the pain, she’d stuck out her tongue at him cheekily, at which he had offered a slight grin. Alright. Sit at the table and I’ll tend to it. Even at eleven, he’d had a presence – a sort of commanding aura which made one want to heed his words, hold them close. Obey him. She hadn’t though it dangerous then, it was hard to think of it as anything but now.

My brother. It’s the only way she can think of him. His name… his name invites too much. Personal effects gone through, a computer dragged away by two men in suits. And headlines, so many headlines. Who knew how the press got hold of the information; who cared. All it mattered was that she could no longer see his name - in her mind or written on paper – without every article she’d ever read crashing down on her, words, words, words. Genius. God complex. Misguided youth. Psychopath. Saviour. Killer. Kira. That one hurt almost as much, despite how impersonal it was, a moniker started by… who even knew? The internet was a cluttered, anonymous, graveyard and, beyond that, a mystery. Who cared enough to track down the first person to gift her brother with this title, to find them out?

She thought of this annoyingly often. Maybe if her brother had been given a different title, no title at all, things may have progressed differently. It was so, so foolish. She knew this. It sounded like a time traveller’s pathetic attempt to change the future without destroying the past. Pathetic. The word repeat itself a little in her mind, echoing.

There were articles on her too, of course. Complicit? they said, the question mark seeming more for show than anything else. Yagami sister involved in killings? Imagine that. Her, an accomplice to the Kira killings, and not questioned by the great detective L simply because he thought her young and girlish. Complicit… the word reverberates and she questions it, pulls it apart. Was she complicit? Did she know of her brother’s actions before they were revealed in the news? She was more observant than anyone gave her credit for, but Light (LightLightLightLightLightLightLight) ‘s change in demeanour could have been down to any number of factors, including adolescence, or even his father’s work. Our father’s work, Sayu corrects herself. He belonged to both of them. And now he belonged to the earth.

I lost you both, Sayu thinks. Although she’d previously envied her father and brother’s strong sense of justice, now she felt quite thankfully to not share it. In a way, it led them both to their deaths. One at the hand of the other.

As she looks out the wide window of the apartment, she feels lonely. There are a few precious memories involving both her brother and the night skies, but they’re not what evokes this emotion. Seeing how much there is out there, the bright lights of all the other people living lives like hers, makes her realise how few people there are in her life. She’d maintained no friendships from her school or university, nor her bonds with her mother. Not that the former had many any effort on their own parts – any interest displayed in her was as ‘the sister of Kira’. She could recall so many times, the insensitive questions, the pulling of her hair, the tearing of her clothes. They’d scream at her.

Did my uncle deserve to die, you stupid girl? Did you agree with your brother? Did you go to sleep every night knowing what he was doing in the next room? Did you care?

Her own thoughts, both then and now, are a mirror.

Did my brother deserve to die? Did you disagree with him? Did you wake up every morning to watch the news and fear for your life? Did it scare you?

They’re ugly thoughts, but anger doesn’t need to be beautiful. Neither does justice.

And there’s no justice, she thinks. There never was.

[blackidyll]

TWEWY anon is accurate BC "brain empty only twewy" is basically my MO nowadays lmao. I'm glad you like my rambling about twewy though XD

DHDHHDHD SAME I was so hyper I totally missed the ending introducing the new twink the first time and only caught it when I watched a (calmer) repeat. I saw someone guessing it was older Joshua and I was like DID YOU EVEN SEE THE JOSHUA POSE EARLIER OFC NEW TWINK ISN'T JOSH. Also my brain SOMEHOW completely skipped over the demo announcement LIKE! I HAVE A SWITCH! I CAN PLAY NEOTWEWY IN TWO DAYS!! DOES NOT COMPUTE (it's out today and I'm boutta play it as I'm typing this lol, apparently there's a demo for play too) the hype carries over straight from the last ep of the anime which also came out today (did you watch it? I still can't believe Josh actually ADMITTED, OUT LOUD on HIS OWN WILL that he changed his mind BC of Neku) which is a smart strategy to keep the attention on TWEWY until the release date.

Tbh I'm more partial to Conductor Neku but Ur right in that Producer!Neku would be more likely to be able do stuff unnoticed...as much as the "Legendary Neku" can go unnoticed lmao, I can't believe he's basically a Reaper's Game legend nowadays XD I guess surviving the game three weeks in a row builds you a reputation of being metal as hell WHICH IS UNDERSTANDABLE NEKU /IS/ METAL AS HELL FOR SURVIVING THAT. Also I'm starting to believe that hoodie!Neku is not actually Neku and a different person BC although Rindo calls out to him as though he's Neku when DEFINITELY NEKU appears he's like "who are you" and I'm like AREN'T YOU TEAM WITH MINAMIMOTO?? HE KNOWS NEKU, GO GET HIM SO HE CAN CLEAR THIS UP FOR US!!! There's too many mysteries this month of wait is gonna END ME I swear

twewy anon it is <3 and i absolutely love twewy rambling and so your asks are such a joy!

[Obligatory THERE ARE LOTS OF SPOILERS AFTER THIS warning because the last episode only came out a while ago]

see that threw me off because THERE IS THE JOSHUA POSE but then they show that person (NEW TWINK is hilarious omg) and I'm like NO WAY IT IS HIM, but then the silver hair and the violet eyes and the dressing style and the way he speaks and also the fact that canonically the Composer always look younger when he's downtuned and not in his glowy form and Neku dresses differently so maybe Josh changed his hairstyle?????? It's not out of character for him to just casually break the rules and drop by and cryptically speak to Players? (my other thought after ten million bouncing between IT'S HIM/IT'S NOT HIM is that maybe that's the personification of Shibuya??? CUZ TWINK BOY LOOKS LIKE SOME MIX OF JOSHUA AND NEKU but that would be a weird direction to go...)

I'M SURE THERE ARE RED HERRINGS EVERYWHERE IN THE TRAILER but they could still both be Neku, if super glowy Neku saving Rindo is the first time they met, and only later in the game does the scene with Tsugumi and Neku's confrontation take place (so Rindo recognizes him from there). It kind of explains the clothing change too, like Neku (dressed in nice Gatto Nero) reveals his presence/identity to save Rindo, then has to change to these hoodies to go undercover until he goes to confront Tsugumi?????? (ALSO I JUST HAD A THOUGHT WHICH IS what if Tsugumi was Shinjuku's Composer??? who is now demoted to Player status, it would explain why she's so weird after her ward's been destroyed and maybe why Neku's going after her ANYWAY THIS IS FARFETCHED BUT WHY NOT SPECULATION IS ALL WE HAVEEEEEEEEEEE).

Also Minamimoto is just UNIVERSALLY UNHELPFUL TO OTHER PEOPLE like I bet if Rindo asked about Neku he'd just sprout a million math analogies that Rindo can't understand LOL

Conductor!Neku does absolutely make sense since he defeated Kitaniji; I'm mainly partial to Producer!Neku because I can't see Neku taking orders from Joshua XDDDDDD And I think it's great that Neku has legend status in the UG, because truly he's the main reason why the ward still exists LOL

and to answer your question YES I DID A CRAZY MARATHON TO FINISH OFF THE ANIME please indulge me I have a lot of thoughts about that last episode? I like a lot of things about it and usually I understand the changes that they made to the anime. But I really really really wish they included Neku's speech/soliloquy to Joshua after he is brought back to life and before going to Hachiko. It's such a huge and impactful scene in the game. Like, Neku's one "I trust you" line DOES NOT COMPARE TO THE ENTIRE SPEECH WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT HOW HE'S BEEN CHANGED AND HE CAN'T FORGIVE JOSHUA BUT HE TRUSTS HIM AND MAINLY!!!!!! MAINLY!!!!!!!! INVITES JOSHUA TO MEET UP WITH THE REST OF THE CREW. THAT'S ALL MISSING WHYYYYYYYYYYYY

Like during the Kitaniji fight I'm yelling "YOU ARE MISSING ONE OF YOUR PARTNERS NEKU" but fine I get why Joshua didn't show up (although I very much miss "Megumi, I'm back," and Joshua's final conversation with Kitaniji because there's a lot of mutual respect there but :( Kitaniji just gets Erased in the anime). The confrontation in the anime feels so much less personal on Neku's front - the game sets up that despite all of Neku's mistrust, he finds himself relating to Joshua and befriending him, and at the very end he couldn't kill his friend; in the anime it just feels like Neku's just being a typical hero and doing the "right" thing that he can't kill someone and chooses to trust them instead (that someone could be anyone), and that's matched by the fact that he does not consider Joshua AT ALL after getting reincarnated, whereas in the game it is super personal to Neku, and he is so emotional when he wakes up on the Scramble Crossing, and the fact that he ACTUALLY INVITES JOSHUA TO JOIN THEM shows he sees and treats Joshua as an individual and a person and a friend, as opposed to the Composer position/pedestal that everyone puts him on..........

I have a lot of feelings about Joshua, and Joshua and Neku's partnership in the game, and I very much hope that NEO is 100% based on the game and not the anime because the dynamics are so different :( Like I feel the anime HAD to spell out the whole "Yes I changed my mind because of Neku" for Joshua whereas in the game we didn't really need it explicitly said, it was ALL in Neku's actions and Joshua's reaction to those actions and...

BUT ANYWAY NEO:TWEWY IS A NEW GAME and i'm so excited for you getting to play the demo!!!!!!!!!!!! I hope you are super enjoying it, it's been SO LONG since we've been waiting for a sequel and it's kind of blowing my mind that you can play!! it!!! and revisit new Shibuya!!! One month to gooooooooooooo!!

[clanwarrior-tumbly]

Headcanons: Crankegos ⚙️

Aight, we’re doing this so buckle up, because I got a lot to share!

Note: I consider Memento one, but he’ll be in another post with Mori where I’ll go more into-depth about them both.

Mad Mike

Runs both an ice cream shop and an ice cream truck (he changes outfits depending on which he’s working at).

Once owned a highly successive business.

But it was shutdown after Silver Shepherd discovered that the ice cream was being laced with drugs.

Since then Mike tries to stop doing that..but once in a while he’ll put a tiny bit of cocaine in a scoop or two (claims it’s “extra sugar”).

Loves to bake on his days off.

Contrary to his song, he’s got a soft spot for kids and never drugs their desserts.

Struggles with his own addictions from time-to-time, but he’s getting better at dealing with the withdrawals.

Very flirtatious.

Also fluent in French, so that gives him extra brownie (pun intended) points.

Somehow, someway..he’s evaded police ever since the encounter with Silver.

Not very good at talking about his or other people’s problems...so he usually just whips up some ice cream as a temporary solution!

His eyes turn to pink and blue swirls whenever his sanity dips or if he wants to hypnotize someone who insulted his business practices.

Mike’s just a bubbly guy all around.

Blank

One of Ethan’s less malicious dark egos.

Embodies his anxiety and nightmares (though mainly the former)

Blank himself has severe anxiety issues that tend to make him panic over small things.

Corroded teases him for being a crybaby sometimes, but he can’t help he’s overly-emotional. 

Gets very self-conscious of his acne/black eyes/appearance in general, afraid of scaring people away.

Has bluish-pale gray skin.

Likes wearing baggy clothing, though it’s really only to hide the wilted vines and black veins that wrap around his arms and legs.

When he has a breakdown, black oily tears stream down his face, he shakes violently, the room get abruptly cold, and he mumbles unintelligible gibberish.

It can go on from a few seconds to almost 15 minutes straight. It's extremely hard to snap him out of it.

Has haptephobia (fear of physical contact), but he’ll let people he’s close with (like the other egos) make contact with him.

Hates being thrown in with the rest of the dark egos.

Corroded

The first of Ethan’s dark egos, albeit the more forgettable one.

He’s a rusted robot, with gray/brown skin that’s metallic in some areas (especially on his face and hands).

Completely hollow inside (physically) except for metal “bones” keeping himself together.

His eyes are also empty sockets instead of being purely black.

Like Anti he’s a glitching entity who induces paranoia in people with hushed whispers and clones of himself.

Bitter to Ethan about being used for the 5-year anniversary poster advertisement, despite that not being his intention at all.

Also resents Blank for becoming the more popular dark ego.

Regularly drinks oil.

If you call him an animatronic he can and will decimate you.

His biggest pet peeves are being taken for granted and being called a “dumb robot”.

A major weakness is his legs being so rusted they lock up and he can’t move for a long while.

Heapass

A punkish prisoner who’s best friends with Yancy.

He’s been arrested for smoking illegal drugs, dealing said drugs (with Mike, who managed to escape officers while ditching him in the process), and excessive speeding/reckless driving.

But he was sent to HTP for a fatal hit-and-run (while he was smoking grass behind the wheel).

Doesn’t talk a whole lot, but he likes to stand around and smugly grin like he’s got a trick up his sleeve.

Spoiler: He doesn’t, and if you were to ask Yancy about him he’d tell you Heap is one of the sweetest people he’s had the honor of meeting.

He did break his arm during a brawl (tho he told the warden he fell in the yard).

He’s good at keeping secrets. He has no reason to gossip unless you insult his family.

Also dyed his hair black. Just because.

Jake

Was among the many bright scientists trying to find a cure for the spontaneous zombie plague.

He was also Prof. Beauregard's assistant.

Though unfortunately he didn’t last long before he ended up turning.

Surprisingly he still retains much of his scientific knowledge.

But he can’t wrap his rotting brain around complex formulas.

So he’ll sometimes try to mix chemicals and write notes--both of which turn out to be huge messes.

With the other Crankegos, Jake has his own lab.

He gets agitated easily, so he’ll go there to calm down if he needs to.

Can still speak normally, though his voice is extremely scratchy and he hates repeating himself.

So Yahoo often translates for him.

Likes being with a group of zombies...humans not so much.

Though since the Crankegos aren’t exactly human, he doesn’t mind them at all.

Bernice

She’s the gothic mother hen of the Crankegos.

Though at the same time she’s a vicious mama bear if you dare cross her and/or her family.

She’s stern with Mike and Corroded, but very soft towards Heap, Jake, and Blank.

The prisoner often looks to her as a mother, since he didn’t have the best relationship with his own growing up.

Loved red, black, and silver makeup. Especially eyeshadow and mascara. She makes sure to visit the dye shop every so often to keep her hair a bright red.

No one knows how she pays for all those times. But she does it.

Very sassy and likes to show-off a lot, though she’s not a narcissist. 

She’s very generous, too, and can’t stand the thought of being completely obsessed with only her own happiness.

Don’t ask her if she feels weird being the only female Crankego. She’ll break your kneecaps.

Cries at animal rescue/adoption commercials all the time.

Likes wearing meme shirts to be “hashtag relatable”.

She says it exactly like that and Ethan, Heap, and Mike groan every time she does.

Saint

He’s a very holy man, of course, with much dedication to the church.

While Saint doesn’t say what church (or even what his name is for that matter) he’s from, he practices good teachings.

Scolds people if they constantly curse/take the Lord’s name in vain.

He tried integrating memes into his teachings so younger generations won’t be as bored during mass.

But when Jeremiah (Priestiplier) proofreads his writings..he just shakes his head in disapproval.

So those never see the light of day.

Thinks Blank, Corroded, and Jake are horribly cursed and regularly tries spraying them with holy water.

He just gets three annoyed inhuman beings glaring at him.

Heap and Mike confess their recent sins to him sometimes. It helps them get stuff off their chest.

Though Mike always starts out by saying “I’ve been very naughty-”

And Saint has to stop himself from slapping him with the book.

Beyond that, he’s just an all-around good dude.

Yahoo

Like Bing and Google, he’s a search engine-based android designed to answer people’s questions.

Often speaks in a soft and sincere tone of voice, though he can be firm when necessary.

One of his eyes is more cybernetic than humanlike, and it’s capable of many functions including infrared and x-ray scanners, as well as being able to instantly identify any individual he sees.

That’s how he got to know all of the Crankegos so easily.

He’s on good terms with all the Googles...except for Blue, of course, since he thinks he’s just another rival.

But Yahoo still tries to be kind regardless.

Unfortunately some take advantage of that, though Bernice and Mike usually come to his defense.

He’s terrified of water and viruses..so he tends to stay away from Blank and Corroded.

When he’s recharging, both his eyes glow purple under his eyelids.

He’s got a lot of service features, including Yahoo! Finance (to help with personal finances), Answers (a q&a), and Mail.

Kinda misses the funky logo the company had from 1996-2013

[butterbeeryuta]

johnny as your boyfriend; radio!au

a/n: thIS was requested a looooooong time ago, and i am so sorry that i only wrote this now. My mocks are finally done, and they actually went pretty well, so i hope my results will match whatever i am claiming skdjkjd. This headcanon was really fun to write, and it was overall just adorable oof alright, imma head to over to my next oneshot now. Hope all of you have a great day.

Okay so ya’ll are in uniVersity (as expected because I am writing this)

You met johnny 2 years ago when you were freshman looking for a job on campus cause um,,, college is a bitch

And you saw this uni radio show ‘Night Night’ which went live every wednesday at 9 in the evening

You honestly had no idea what they talked about since you’ve never listened to one

Despite the fact that your roommate Sicheng always talks about it and claims how great it is

BUT ANYWAY

You always enjoyed radio shows in general, and saw that they were hiring for another radio show personality

HMMmmMmmmM i wonDEr wheRe tHIS Is gOInG

You were one intellect my dear; you were studying political science at Konkuk University, meaning, you were one opinionated ass individual

But, you also had your crack side acCording to ur roommate

You fucking chased Sicheng around with those incense sticks cause you couldn’t find your go-to rolling pin to scare the shit out of him for eating your pack of strawberries

I swear the two of you are great friends ya’ll just show love to each other in quite a unique way

ANYWAYS

YeAH so you went to ask for the job cause you need money to buy a safe for your precious strawberries

You brought whatever requirements they asked for, and nyyOoooOOooooOOOOnged your way over there

It was a pretty old building, or radio station per se. not that it was bad or anything but, it isn’t exactly a place you would like to step into

Going up the stairs, you just saw a really TALL and attractive guy clearing out a few things in the booth. Your guess was that he was also probably new to this and whoever lent him the place didn’t exactly clean up the place.

With whatever courage you had in yourself

Or i guess how much sugar you consumed this morning cause you casually just walked it without contacting the guy

‘Uh... hello?’

HE JUMPED, whatever shit he was holding? Yeah it dropped

Which caused you to jump too, not expecting the huge ass pretty guy to have that big of a reaction

he looked over to you, surprised to see a person in the radio station because um,,, nobody ever goes there except for him

‘Hello to you too??? uhhh, not meaning to be rude or anything but, why are you here? Are you lost?’ He asks, looking extremely concerned

You just shook your head and deadass told him that there was a job offer for another radio show personality, and he looked eveN more concerned

Sorta like a ‘are u fucking serious’ face

‘Oh! Right. That job has been open for about a year now so I didn’t expect anyone to come at all...’

OHHhhHhh????????

Well,,,, i guess you have a better chance of getting the job?

‘Well.... do i get a higher chance of being accepted then for being the first to show up? You ask, unsure if whatever you said made sense, or was even socially acceptable

Imagine going to a job interview being like: ‘so i saw ur job offer, and since i actually showed up, I’m accepted right?’

Babe i dont think it works like that, but let’s continue

Johnny honestly had nothing to say against you though. You were right in a sense that you had no competition since you were the only one that actually came to apply. At the same time, he wanted the quality of the show to still be good even if there was a limited audience

‘Higher chance is indeed right. But tell me, uhh, what’s your name again?’

‘I actually never introduced myself, but it’s _______’

‘I’m Johnny by the way. So _______, why do you want to be a radio show host for Konkuk University?’

you had two ways to answer this question: (1) be blatantly honest that you really need the money, and talking to earn cash seems pretty great in your opinion or (2) repeat whatever the fuck sicheng has told you about the show

And of course, you were going with the first option

‘i honestly need the money because college is a bitch. And also talking and having discussions is a pretty fun and interesting method to get some cash in. Also because my roommate loves your show and why not ruin it for him by including me in it’

Babe

BABE SKDJKSDJKDSJKSDJSKDJKSDJ

Johnny actually wanted to accept you immediately. I mean for starters, he found you pretty adorable marching up to the radio station determined to get the job. And not only that, you were quite the talker, which is something that could spike up the show since it was just always johnny speaking

And also because he was feeling quite lonely but he would never admit that

‘Alright _____, meet me this friday to talk about next week’s segment’

OOFT

And let me tell you, tall boi’s assumptions were right. During your first show together, the two of you decided to talk about the book ‘1984’ by george orwell and although it may sound boring on a superficial level, yOU made it sound pretty interesting and johnny was actually just laughing the entire time

You and johnny just clicked in an instant, and your way of describing things made ‘Night Night’ known by the students

Nobody could ever forget your infamous line about the book: ‘george orwell’s sexual frustration is honestly so transparent in the book; all he needed was to get his dick wet then maybe he wouldn’t have let julia and winston be caught by the thoughtpolice.’

And things like this happened every wednesday. The pattern of your radio show just included you being you, and johnny trying to make shit be on track

The two of you were doing it for a very long time now, and back to toDAY where ya’ll have been doing it for two years, well... it would be a lie to say you hadn’t developed feelings for johnny

of course the man was beautiful and well-built. But his personality and laugh? Yeah sicheng should’ve warned you about that.

He is probably one of the most open-minded person in the world, and he knows a bit about everything, making him so well-rounded. And and and he’s to kind???

If you tell him that you can’t make it to the radio show, he says it’s okay and even gives you snacks the moment you come back and he just makes you so soft in general i—

Meanwhile for johnny, damn is he in love with you

Over the past 2 years, you definitely helped him open up more. With the way you speak along with your galaxy brain, he couldn’t help but fall for you? You were intelligent, you had your own mind, and being friendly and funny in general is something johnny really liked about you

The time when he realised he loves you was when you curled yourself up against the seat while you were discussing about what to talk about next week, and you just fell asleep. He noticed how soft and peaceful you looked, and that he would want to see you like this on a daily basis

Shit this is getting me all soft i wasnt planning on this nsndnsndnd

So yeaHHHHH this week’s segment, you guys were talking about the spanish conquest of mexico and peru woohoooo

AND you were very excited for this because this was one of your (my) favourite topics you learnt during your time in high school

‘OKAY, good evening everyone I am ______D,’

‘And I am JohnD, and welcome to’

‘Night Night. Oof, we’re getting better at our introductions aren’t we JohnD?’

‘Nope, you just learned how to say it without cringing’

‘Touché’ and ya’ll began your discussion. And things actually got pretty interesting.

‘So _____ you’re telling me that it was Cortes’ leadership that allowed the Spanish to successfully take over Mexico?’ He asks you in disbelief.

‘No you tall dumbfuck, it’s one of the attributes that led them to succeed. Both Cortes and Pizarro had disease on their side and better weapons, so of course they’d win. I just wanted to include leadership as i don’t know, to see the defeat of the aztecs from a new lens?’ You respond, deadass looking at johnny in the eye

‘Well, i don’t think i can argue with that, mainly because i am too scared too. That is it for today, but before we end this, i would like to add one more thing.’ Johnny says, which took you by surprise

huHhh?

You looked confused, in fact, you were confused.

What the fuck was going on?

‘This academic year is ending, and this so happens to be my last year here at Konkuk University...’

Oh shit

Your eyes softened at his words, just realising now that johnny was two years older than you, and yeah, he’s graduating this year

‘... this year has honestly been one of the greatest years here at Konkuk, but for me, I think of my my most memorable memories here was when ______D entered the station and giving me a huge fright’

You laughed a little, remembering how much you scared the man

‘Taking this opportunity, ______D, I want to ask you something’

Shit

Shit

Shit

BRUHHHHHHHHH

‘I just want to congratulate you and thank you for joining “Night Night.” You made the show livelier and massively increased the viewer rate with that big brain of yours—‘

‘I prefer the term galaxy brain’

‘—yes, galaxy brain. I hope that you can continue this radio show, and maybe recruit someone else while i’m out in the world of disgusting adults. So yes, thank you ______. And because we won’t be colleagues in a bit, will you be my girl/boyfriend?’

You were initially teary eyed, buT yEET those tears out biTCH what????

You wanted to say yes, bUt how?????

Do you just nod at him and go ‘ye,’ or do you like, confess?

You felt weird in the stomach. Not that you can exactly do 459343948 cartwheels in one go, but that’s exactly what your stomach was doing. If you were to speak, you could have vomited.

Idk what happened to you, but you took off your headphones, and went to the tall boy and just hugged the shit out of him cause umm,,,, SAME????

And johnny wasn’t sure what that exactly meant so he just hugged you back, bringing you to his lap and holding you tight against him cause honestly, when will he be able to do this to a person he genuinely loves

There was a moment of silence of you two just holding each other, until you realised you were still live with lord knows how many people were listening.

‘U-um, yeah Johnny, I w-will gladly be yours—‘

‘_____ I love you’

OKAY RETRIEVE THOSE TEARS BISH YOU CRYING NOW TF

You sorta just placed your head on the crook of his neck, quietly whispering to him

‘I can’t believe I love your tall ass too...’

‘SHE SAID SHE LOVES ME TOO!’

[keishins-ukai]

I Just Wanna Be Your Favourite Boy

(here’s a link if you prefer reading on ao3)

The amount of alcohol flowing in Kuroo’s veins was not enough to distract him from how pathetic all of this truly was . He was at his first University party, he was surrounded by beautiful people and free alcohol, he should be having the time of his life, right? Tetsurō sat in his friend’s garden with his back resting against the cold brick of the house, his head resting there too. His arms were balanced on his pulled-up knees, his eyes closed.

To any party-goers that ventured outside this would look normal, like the first year partied too hard and passed out super early – it's not like that kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Then they’d notice the earbuds still in his ears (though they weren’t playing anything, he just didn’t want to speak to anyone), the dry tear tracks down his cheeks, the ever so slight shaking of his chin. Well, that or the glitter-like sparkle that seemed to be all around the black-haired boy

Tears had become a very common part of Tetsurō’s life recently, a fact he hated with every fibre of his being. Six months ago, you would need the saddest song on earth put in the background of the saddest video on earth and he might have considered crying. Now all it took now was the thought of blond and black hair, golden eyes, mint vodka that smelled like his shampoo…

The stars hadn’t appeared until his first day of university. He had texted Kenma when he’d woken up - Kuroo always texted as soon as he woke up – some dumb chemistry joke he’d found the night before, trying to convey his excitement at finally starting his course. Kenma never usually replied immediately, though this day he did, though Kuroo didn’t actually know why (Kuroo would look back and see it as the first sign. Kenma told him everything)

Kenma had only sent a gif of a cat showing almost complete apathy, but Kuroo’s heart started racing nonetheless, mind spiralling at all of the possible meanings behind the response and never once landing on the real answer (Kenma just woke up earlier than normal). They’d texted a lot of the day, Kuroo only turning his phone off during classes, not wanting to make any bad impressions.

While it obviously hadn’t been the reason, in the following months Kuroo had started to blame turning his phone off as the inciting event as when he turned his phone on he got the notification, the moment that changed everything. It was so small, so seemingly inconsequential.

Instagram: Kodzuken has posted a photo

Kenma’s Instagram consisted mainly of photos from games he was playing, purposely unflattering pictures of himself or animals. But that day was different. He posted a picture of him and Hinata, and the orange-haired boy was positively grinning into the camera, Kenma wasn’t even smiling but Kuroo could tell he was happy, that he was less stressed than he had been for a lot of the summer.

Kuroo knew that what he told himself was unfair, that there simply wasn’t enough data to support the idea of ‘he likes Shōyō more’. But none of that mattered, Kuroo just knew. He didn’t need evidence to prove that Kenma had feelings for the shrimp, the ever so slight dimple was proof enough – even Kuroo had only seen that dimple once, and he wasn’t the one who bought it out.

Crying in the men’s bathroom, as it turns out, is neither very comfortable nor as discreet as one would imagine, though that didn’t matter to Tetsuro as the itching and burning sensation was the only thing he could think about. ‘What the hell is this?’ repeated in his mind as he did his best to stop the small glass-like crystals from falling to the floor and creating even more noise. After spending what felt like an eternity researching what could possibly in all hell be happening to him he moved, hating the quiet twinkling sounds in his pocket.

‘Of course this would happen to me.’ Kuroo would think to himself repeatedly over the next few days ‘Star fucking tears’.

-

Stars Tears

Caused by intense but unrequited love, always romantic, ‘star tears’ is a rare condition wherein the afflicted will secrete small crystalline shards from their tear ducts, the crystals often being compared to stars which is where the illness got its name. Side effects from stage two ‘star tears’ can include

-          Leaking tear ducts

-          Dryness of the eyeballs

-          Itchiness in the eye area

-          Blocked tear ducts

And in some extreme cases

-          Partial or complete colour blindness

-          Partial or complete sight loss.

As the disease is caused by unrequited love there is no ‘mainstream’ treatment which can cure this, some patients never being cured while others were reportedly healed if the person they loved also loved them back, in a romantic sense.

-

Even though he was aware of how bad an idea it was, Kuroo remained sat in his friend's garden, though now his earphones were playing something. More specifically he had his ‘Kenma’ playlist on which was playing all of the songs and bands that the shorter boy had ever introduced him to. They were playing at full volume to drown out his own thoughts - the ones nibbling on his mind, making him think of lazy nights playing ‘Majora’s Mask’ with him , of the nights leading up to Christmas making their cinnamon and raisin cookies, of the toothbrush that had been Kuroo’s spare but that he’d stolen because of their frequent sleepovers.

He really didn’t want to cry again, having decided that his new rate of three times a week was far too much, but the stars demanded more still. In the beginning, they would only appear if he’d seen his face, whether it be over skype or as a photo. That had been remarkably easy to handle - Kuroo had just moved all of the photos of him to the ‘hidden’ folder on his phone, and minimise the skype screen when they talked. Easy.

But then Kuroo started to really miss him, started to think of him almost every moment of the day, affecting his sleep and work schedule. That’s when he realised how truly fucked he was. You can’t just pick and choose what parts of friendship you want to participate in and expect it to remain completely intact. Kenma didn’t know what was going on, but he could sense a change, making more of an effort to start their conversations, to not leave Kuroo out of what was going on his life, to make sure that the elder knew that they were still friends.

It was unfair how this made everything worse, that Kenma’s thoughtful inclusions made Kuroo feel more excluded than ever, made him feel both like he had a chance and also made him know that Kenma saw him as his closest friend and that he wouldn’t be more. Kenma had always worried with his crushes that initiating things with them would scare them off, that he would be seen as overbearing. Rather than risking anything, he would just wait until he thought the other would like him back before asking them on a date.

The tears started to increase, them coming at just the thought of Kenma when Kuroo hadn’t got any prevention methods. His most effective was to drown out any other noise with the sound of his own music, even investing in better earphones to ensure that he wouldn’t be hearing any other external noises. However, his playlist choice could definitely be improved upon since every voice, every chord, every bar had the Kenma Kozume seal of approval, making the task of not thinking about the boy almost impossible.

Not even twenty minutes alone and his mind wandered, going to almost every stop in Tetsurō’s brain before stopping at one that made his heart dance. If it were a book the edges would be folded, the spine broke, and some of the pages ripped just from the sheer amount of use.

“Stop looking at my ass!” Kenma had demanded, trying his best to wriggle away from Kuroo “This isn’t for you”. The blond wasn’t looking at him, trying to pretend that his attention was on the syringe in his hand.

“You’re the one who asked me to do this.” Kuroo reminds, reaching over for the injection. “And knowing I was coming over to do this you decided to wear trousers rather than shorts when all I need is your thigh, so…” Their eyes meet and the elder man winks.

Kenma’s face scrunches up in retaliation, fingers lingering for just a moment against Kuroo’s, placing the syringe gently in his hand. “What are you trying to suggest?”

He pretends to think for a second when he wipes a disinfectant wipe on his leg, knowing that he technically didn’t need to but also wanting to be as safe as possible. “That maybe you wanted me to see your ass?”

The youngers face calms into a neutral expression. “Dream on Tetsurō.” Despite being quite scared of needles, he had decided on having testosterone injections rather than pills or any other alternative, finding that needing to do injections more infrequently benefitted him more. He’d also figured that getting someone else to administer the injection would have negated his fear.

Kuroo had agreed, why would it be more difficult for an injection to occur when you’re not the one putting the needle in your skin? The answer; Kenma was a wriggler. He moved back on the bed every time that Tetsurō tried to move closer to him “Come on, kitten.” he chides, the pet name tacked on as a joke.

His only answer is a hiss, a literal fucking hiss, as Kenma tries to move his leg away again, but is caught by the ankle and pressed back down to the bed. Kuroo eventually managed to give Kenma his testosterone, despite the difficulty and found that when he went home there was only one thing on his mind. The hiss.

Most people who met Kenma Kozume thought he was polite, shy and awkward. And he was all of those things, but he was also so much more. He was funny, intuitive, self-assured and weird and Tetsurō loved that so much. As soon as he thought the word ‘love’, everything seemed to make sense. Every look that lasted too long, every thought replaced by one of Kenma, every feeling of longing to be with his best friend.

Tetsurō was in love with his partner in crime. He still is.

Rex Orange County is a band that frequently blasts on Kuroo’s phone, them having many songs that fit the themes of unrequited love so well that he had no choice but to really connect with their music. Though there was one song in particular that is constantly on his mind, the song being called ‘Best Friend’.

At some point in his reminiscing Kuroo had put on the song, immediately pressing the repeat button as he moved his head to stare into the night sky.

But no, it wasn't meant to be and see, I wasn't made for you

And you weren't made for me

When he was younger he’d wanted to be an astronomer, having found the stars and the moon fascinating, but he couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore. His hands were shaking, shoulders shaking, lip shaking. Maybe if he got some closure he could move on and get rid of this disease, finally feel whole again.

Love someone for loving you instead of someone really cool

That makes your heart melt

Tetsurō needed to turn this song off, to stop fucking thinking about him, about the man he had literal scientific proof that he doesn’t love him back, but the pure boost of serotonin he got when he thought about Kenma was worth it. It was worth the pain, it was worth the constantly itchy eyes, it was worth feeling sick to his stomach anytime he sees a twinkle.

Oh, I still wanna be your favourite boy

I wanna be the one that makes your day

The one you think about as you lie awake

He started typing the text before he could stop himself, feeling like he was watching himself make this extremely poor decision but having absolutely no power to stop himself. Even if it wouldn’t make Kenma love him it would be cathartic, right? And as long as he’s vague enough he could preserve their friendship, maybe even claim plausible deniability if necessary. The text read: ‘listening to this and thinking about you’ along with a link to Best Friend.

Kenma’s response was very short, only three words but enough to send his heart into a tailspin, for it to stop completely in its tracks, to make him feel like he’d never breathe again. ‘I’m dating Shōyō’

That night Kuroo lost the golden hue of his eyes.

--------------

A special thanks to @wanderlustsky for beta reading this! it was amazingly helpful <3

[takaraphoenix]

Grey’s Anatomy: Review

Took me four months, but I have successfully watched all 16 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy - and what there is of season 17. Figured it deserves some words.

HOLY SHIT I LOVE THIS SHOW? SO MUCH?

(To set the appropriate mood for this and give you a TL;DR.)

That being said to open it up, it is most definitely not flawless. So let’s start there. For me, the one big flaw it has is really the writers’ cuckolding kink. So. Much. Cheating. And - worse than the cheating plots - the cheating apologism. They echo the exact same sentiment so often, that cheating is only one mistake and humans make mistakes. That’s... at one point, that stops being a plot device and starts to be very telling about the writer, to be quite frank.

That being said, let’s roll out the positive. And let’s kick it off with something that relates to all the cheating; so many forced love-triangles, but they usually don’t include toxic rivalries. It’d be so easy to have the men throw punches over the women or the women pull hair and scratch each other’s eyes... so many other rom-drama shows do it already, after all. But, honestly, the two lose ends on the love V (because these things ain’t triangles) usually have such a good dynamic with each other, ranging from civil to friendships to deep mentor ships - Meredith and Addison, Mark and Jackson, Cristina and Teddy? Seeing these dynamics, quite frankly, makes having to sit through a love-triangle-nonsense actually more than bearable.

The most impressive thing about the show is, to me, the amount of rep on it. I mean sure, the main lead is white and I’d estimate half the overall cast are white, but even from the get go - in 2005 - the ratio of white actors versus actors of color in the main cast was five to four. And they’re not background or side characters - I mean, two of them are, aside from Meredith, the only ones to still be around on season 17. They all have their own plotlines, their own relationships and troubles and struggles. It’s not just the Meredith show, not by far.

And beyond that, the queer rep on this show is... honestly mindblowing? I mean, seriously?

They introduced their first queer character in season 2, in 2005, when other procedual dramas that aired then in large parts just... never... added queer characters. And sure! Joe was only a recurring character and not a main character, but he was recurring for six seasons, he recurred a lot, he got established, he and his husband partook in the plot. And, again, this was just the beginning, back in 2005.

They’ve since then steadily broadened their horizon and become more inclusive.

Recurring and main character wise, we’ve had 5 lesbians, 5 bisexual women, 4 gay men and 2 trans characters over these 17 seasons. That’s a very solid list, honestly. If I look at other shows, again especially procedual dramas that are still largely aimed at a more conservative audience, the fact that we’ve had actual queer storylines in every single season since season 2? That’s amazing.

Even more so on the one-off characters, to be quite honest. Just... casually, this patient has two moms, this man is visited by his husband, here the child of the patient is nonbinary, look this patient is in a polyamorous relationship. Sure, those are only the one-off episodical characters, but you have no idea how much that matters too.

I know I’m repeating myself with this, but especially when compared to other procedual dramas, where the characters are often only queer when it’s important to the plot. He got beaten up and ended up in the hospital because he was gay. She got killed because she was trans. They’re motivational and important to the plot (and also usually used to victimize the characters).

The fact that this show, even 10+ years ago already, just... included queerness as part of our reality, included it casually, positively and repeatedly - really, it’s not just like it’s one episode per season like it’s some obligation, it happens a lot? For no actual needed plot reason, she just has a wife and she’s just happily married to her wife and that’s it, because queer people exist.

And I just, I struggle to express how much this casual rep means to me? And how it becomes even more amazing if you consider how long ago it started? And if you add to it the steady prominent recurring/main character rep?

Sure, it’s not perfect - the majority of their characters of color are black; it’s not overly diverse when it comes to what characters of color it included, it took forever to include the second Asian character and the first Muslim character and it could feature a broader variety of ethnicities, just like it could offer a broader variety of queer experiences, I mean it took them forever to introduce the first mlm main character and they have yet to include a bisexual man, I’d also just love to see an ace character or a polyamorous character, to paint a contrast to the sex-obsession and cheating plotlines - but... it’s doing more than many others and I do think it deserves praise for that and it keeps improving. They didn’t just add Erica and Callie as the first wlw couple and then stuck to only having two queer ladies on screen at the same time and never more, just constantly replacing Callie’s girlfriend. They kept adding more, they keep adding more.

Now, on to my absolute favorite thing about this show.

Because, let’s make one thing clear, I hate cheating and under other circumstances the amount of cheating on this show would have driven me off it ten seasons ago. But despite all of the very forced romance drama and sex obsessed allos on the show, that is not the show’s main focus.

This was never mainly about the romance. It’s always been about the platonic relationships first and foremost. Romances changed and broke up and got complicated, but what prospered were the friendships and found family relationships.

Cristina and Meredith are the defining relationship of this show. They are... friendship portrayed in a way I have never seen friendship portrayed before. The writing on their dynamic is just amazing.

And when Cristina leaves the show, the shift to Meredith-Alex and to the sister-dynamic between Meredith, Maggie and Amelia really works.

Personally, after watching the show, I’ve come to divide it into three arcs, each with a Part A and a Part B.

The first arc of the show - spanning seasons 1 to 5 - are about Meredith, Cristina, George, Izzie and Alex. And they explore the dynamic between those five and the individual relationships between them all, so very well. This was really found family done right.

Arc 2 is what I dubbed the rebranding arc - seasons 6 to 10. In Part A (s6 to s8), we got the focus on the Mercy West merger, ending in the horrific plane crash. While Part B is what I call the outfall, season 9 dealing with the outfall from the plane crash and season 10 being all about that Meredith-Cristina outfall.

I love Arc 1 a whole lot, it’s really good. I think Arc 2 is good too, especially the plane crash and its outfall were very gripping and well done, but I do think that this middle part earns the dub as rebranding because it feels like the show itself is trying to find its footing, trying to figure out a direction after MAGIC graduated into residents (and, inevitably, fell apart with the death of George and the departure of Izzie). It’s a bit unfocused on where it wants to go and I still loathe the big misunderstanding nonsense of season 10 (but am glad that Meredith and Cristina rekindled before Cristina’s departure).

Arc 3 is the sisters arc, where the Meredith-Maggie-Amelia dynamic rules, with a more uneven split between A and B, because A spans seasons 11 to 16 for me and is lovingly dubbed the Merlex arc by me, while B is just... season 17; the corona pandemic is really shifting the tone and focus and it coincides with the departure of Alex.

I’m more mixed on it than I am on the other two. For me, Cristina and Meredith just are the heart and soul of the show, so despite just how brilliantly they handled that all, I still miss them (though I greatly appreciate the fact that she still regularly comes up through phone calls, texts, etc). I greatly disliked Alex’s departure (which is a rant of its own).

On the overall, I would actually rank them in order - the first five seasons were my favorite, followed by the awkward middle because it still added brilliant things to it regardless, and despite coming in last, I do also love the second half of the show with the sisters in the focus.

I do admit that I had high hopes that Jo would become Meredith’s new person in season 17, considering the tremendous growth their relationship had - especially considering how Meredith crawled into Jo’s bed and was the one to coax what had happened with her mother out of her; that was “my person” behavior, quite frankly, and I also thought that Alex’s departure might bring them closer. I truly did not like Alex’s parting words to Meredith that she’s always been her own person.

Well, duh. Meredith Grey is an absolute badass. Which, also a thing I love a lot about this show. She is so incredibly strong and brilliant and takes care of herself.

But the point of her having her person was never that she needed someone else to stand in for her; it was to have someone around whom she didn’t have to be that strong. Someone she could come to to be weak around, someone to have her back when everything became too much. You just... can’t do that for yourself. So that sentiment was just incredible rubbish and I will be very mad if they truly have her embrace that nonsense, because she deserves someone like that.

Lastly, let’s talk romantic relationships. Very broadly, I assure you - I wouldn’t even have the patience to tackle them all, I mean seriously everyone has had sex on this show, or so it feels (no but seriously, the amount of overlapping ships on this show is ridiculous).

The only note I do have on that is that... nothing lasts forever. Quite frankly, the most “endgame” ships on this show are Richard/Catherine and Ben/Miranda (which, bless them, those two are literally my favorite of the canon ships). Everything else is just... fair game? They change, they break up, even if you absolutely hate a ship - don’t worry, it’s gonna end soon.

And occasionally, that... is even more rewarding than seeing a couple you do like get together? I mean, honestly, watching a ship you dislike for x reasons and then having them break up on screen and a character actually listing x reasons to the other’s face? Very carthatic.

I also have to mention the adoption positivity; Meredith and Derek adopt a child, not as a last resort after all else has failed, but simply because they fell in love with that little girl, Ben and Bailey took in Joey, because they have big hearts. So often, adoption is only shown as that very, very last option after you wasted thousands of dollars on all other biological options and then it is like a tragic compromise or something. Seeing them just... fall in love with this baby and adopt her and love her is so refreshing?

This show is just... really, really good? The writing is brilliant. I mean, this show made me laugh more than some comedies have? It’s funny, poignant and... not overly dramatic? I mean, of course it’s dramatic - it’s a drama. But it’s more... grounded. Even with some outstandingly extreme things happening, it is still very down to Earth, compared to other dramas that feel the need to go higher and more bizarre each season. It’s incredibly consistent, it includes so much rep and actual plotlines for every character, it really draws out relationships - familiar, platonic, romantic - in such great details.

I just really love this show.

[emerald-amidst-gold]

A little exercise (Part 1/?)

(I’m trying out a new process to help me with my writing and to get me out of the block I’m currently in. I find that analyzing preexisting personalities and ones of my own devising help me better understand how characters will interact in my writing. So, I started small and outlined some of Fane’s major relationships. I’m eventually going to go down the whole list from family to Inquisition members, but right now, I just focused on family.)

Relationships:

“Friendships are like roses; you tend to their delicate petals, nurture their roots, and provide them with water, sunshine, and fertile soil to keep them satisfied, all so they may flourish with life and love. But what happens when the rose bush flowers from an innocent bud to a crimson bloom, bringing thorns in its wake? You bleed, you hurt, and you regret ever planting the seeds. So, do I desire a literal garden of people with thorns as sharp as glass? Not at all.”- Fane Lavellan regarding companionship

Clan Lavellan:

“Fane is brash, volatile, and temperamental at the best of times, Spymaster. You do not wish to see him at his worst. Many of our clan and the outlying forests have been met with his ire. Even so, he is not a bad child. None of his actions are vindictive or of ill intentions. Fane is simply misunderstood, like so many others. So, if you must demand more of him, then you must tread lightly. That is my advice to you and your Inquisition.” - an excerpt from a letter from Keeper Deshanna sent to Haven after the explosion at the Conclave regarding Fane’s demeanor

Fane is exceedingly slow to warm up to people, even with those of his own kind. Among Clan Lavellan, Fane was seen as an anomaly; his two toned eyes and stark white hair breeding fear and wariness in his clan members, as well as his unusual physique. What’s more, many of the clan avoided him for fear of triggering his volatile rage which, when at its peak, would render aravels or trees completely obliterated. So, as far as friends go, Fane never had many among his clan; only communicating with his sister, and at times, the Keeper. Fane’s disinterest in cultivating relationships also stems from his desire to keep the evidence of his father’s abuse away from prying eyes and ears. This did not stop him from attempting to bridge the gap between him and his people, however. At a young age, Fane proved to be an adept hunter; stealthy and graceful despite his hulking frame. Sadly, his effectiveness to provide did not win the hearts of his clan, since many of Fane’s methods were unorthodox to the Dalish. When such a simple attempt was ineffective, Fane took one last step to try and wedge himself into belonging; his vallaslin. Despite not believing in any of the elven gods (another pit that distanced him from the Dalish, as Fane is and was not shy to voice his opinions regarding them), Fane opted to have the vallaslin of Sylaise tattooed onto his face at the age of sixteen; only a year after his father’s magical experiments on his body began. Once again, this did not do what Fane had hoped for, since the ritual and implementation of the tattoos barely registered a flinch or grimace from the elf; his mind and body already so scarred and traumatized by the use of magic and physical tools that Fane merely viewed the sacred act as another experiment in which his father’s rules of “No crying, no screaming, no telling anyone” played on repeat within his head. Due to that stoicism, his clansmen simply began to view him as unfeeling and cold, some going so far as to call him a ‘snowy haired demon’. From that point on, Fane severed all association with his clan, and attempts to win favor were replaced with complete indifference. Interactions were kept to scouting missions and group hunts, and such things like gatherings or holidays, Fane spent either alone within the forest or with his sister. It may have been this rift of association that spurred the Keeper into choosing Fane for the mission to spy on the Conclave, or perhaps it was a way to help both Fane and the clan from anymore turmoil. However, when the explosion at the Conclave completely shifts his small world on its axis, Fane is more or less forced to traverse a battlefield in which he is outnumbered in both strength and personalities.

Mhairi Lavellan (Sister):

“First mother, then father..I can’t lose you, too, brother. I have no one else besides you for family.”

“Hmph, don’t be so dramatic, My. Even if something were to happen to me, the clan would still be here for you. The clan’s your family as much as I am.”

“The clan is your family, too, brother. Why do you think they don’t care for you like I do?”

“Because they don’t. I’m a monster, remember? They’re all probably breathing a sigh of relief that I’m leaving.”

“Would you stop that?! You’re one of the people just like any of the others! More than that, you’re my brother! So, don’t talk as if you’re nothing. You are everything to me, Fane. Everything and more.” - a conversation between Mhairi and Fane before he leaves for the Conclave.

Mhairi and Fane’s relationship is much like any siblings; occasional bickering, unconditional love, and patience with each other’s oddities. However, unlike most siblings, whose likeness of personalities tends to breed contempt, Fane and Mhairi are, by all means, anathema to each other. Oil and water. Fire and ice. The sun and moon. All these things describe the two’s odd relationship. Fane, while holding a deep well of his love for his sister, has difficulty showing such platonic feelings, opting for simply watching Mhairi with an attentive eye and merely giving stern guidance to the younger when necessary. Whereas Mhairi is more bubbly and easygoing, wishing to help her brother bridge the gap that he had created with the clan and constantly reasserting to him that he is loved and cherished. Such attempts at reconciliation have only thus far vexed Fane, but the message from his sister is not lost, even if he does not outwardly show it. However, like with the rest of the clan, Fane has kept the actions of their father a secret from Mhairi; the only secret he has ever kept from his sister (besides the information of him being a dragon. Fane himself is unaware of his heritage until after Adamant. Even after he understands this information, he does not tell her until at least around the time of the Exalted Council.). Fane has gone to great lengths to keep the brutal past of his abuse from his sister. Such actions include: hiding his acute sensitivity to magic, which is the hardest since Mhairi is a mage, his night terrors that leave him sweating and hyperventilating in the morning, avoiding any and all physical contact from his sister or others since his body still harbors phantasmal pains from the abuse, and dismissing any questions or concerns from his sister when she zeroes in on his pain. Despite these actions on his part, Fane still gives in to his sister if she is particularly persistent or if she is on the verge of tears. In these moments, Fane will endure the pain on his body for a light hug or give a vague response to a question of concern. In conjunction, Mhairi is always trying to find ways to bring back the person her brother was before the experiments began, much to Fane’s dismay. She will oftentimes gift him with sentimental items such as; flowers (primarily Gladiolus since it is a flower the two have an emotional attachment to), handmade pendants, a history book (knowing that he is secretly curious of outside society), and his favorite foods (mainly chocolates). All attempts are usually met with soft refusal or awkward shuffling on Fane’s part, but internally, the misunderstood elf screams with joy every time such a thing is bestowed upon him by his sister. 

Eloris Lavellan (Mother):

“Cerulean eyes like the deep lakes in the forest. Sunlight glistening off of golden strands like wheat. Shimmering, rippling across the surface with gentle strokes. Calm and patient even when I’d yell. Never scolding. Never hating. Her words hang upon my mind like her hand when she would guide my own across the page. ‘A summer breeze. A winter’s gale. All things are natural if you allow them to unveil.’ Her words. Her lesson. ..You were angry?”

“Yes, I was. I can’t even remember why now. But, she told me it was nothing to be ashamed of. She said all emotions were natural just like the wind and trees. I just had to..let them out.”

“Who was she?”

“..My mother, and that is all I’m saying about it.” - a discussion between Fane and Cole about Fane’s mother. 

Fane’s memory of the relationship with his mother, Eloris, is one of the few things he cherishes, and is one of many things he does not openly share, even with Mhairi. Before she died of a wasting disease when Fane was fifteen, Eloris guided Fane throughout his earlier years, teaching him how to write in both the common tongue and elven, as well as speak and read. Fane describes her as ‘the gentlest soul upon a fragile landscape’ since never once did she harshly scold him or yell in anger at his prickly demeanor, which Fane had even as a child. Instead, Eloris taught Fane the wrongness of his actions with poetry. After outbursts or moments of frustration, Eloris would sit with Fane under a tree or in a clearing, and simply read to him, recounting tales and lessons through elegant scripture. Such a technique had oddly proved effective, calming Fane and cementing delicate lessons of patience and open mindedness, that to this day, while slightly more difficult for him to keep, still connect him with his deceased mother. These tiny memories of his mother’s poetry were something that helped Fane through much of his father’s abuse. So much so, that Fane himself began writing and collecting different forms of poetry after his father’s disappearance, and throughout his time with the Inquisition. This odd fixation also reflects in Fane’s way of speaking, and sometimes his versed tongue has to be deciphered by someone more familiar with him or those who understand cryptic dialogue. At times, it even causes him frustration. Even so, Fane keeps the memory of his mother with him wherever he goes, and secretly endeavors to keep the promise that he made to her. The promise to protect their family, no matter the cost.

(I’m still working on Fane’s father, so he might be the last one I touch on in the list. Anyways, this is just a little exercise to finally cement Fane’s overall character. All of the dialogue is just stuff I thought up on the fly, so take it with a grain of salt in reference to canon.)

[endlessceaselessboundless]

The Blacklist, Season 2

I have to say, that even at this early juncture, it appears clear to me that they were always working toward some kind of surprise reveal of who Reddington really is, and because I am highly biased for my hypothesis that he is actually Katarina Rostova, it seems clear to me that’s what they intend in the second season! 

First of all the blacklisters in this season are just a really interesting mix of people we assumed were men who then turn out to be women (Lord Baltimore, the Deer Hunter) and there is a strong theme of people taking over the identities of those close to them. Lord Baltimore murders her twin sister and then assumes her identity, the Deer Hunter’s wife accidentally kills him but then uses his identity as a way to murder abusive men, even Vanessa Cruz impersonates her girlfriend as part of her revenge scheme, but can’t go through with it because she has fallen in love with the girlfriend. Beyond these specific instances of taking over real identities, the theme of undercover work, and assuming different identities and personas is MAJOR this season. 

We follow Tom as he tries to go back to his old life as an undercover operative for the Major, the entire episode on Vanessa Cruz recounts the myriad identities she has created in order to get revenge on the people who framed her husband, and there are subtler nods to this theme in episodes like the Mombasa Cartel, when Red discovers his friend, Geoff Perl, is the head of the Cartel, and not fighting to destroy it like Reddington thought. 

Despite this endless questioning of identities, including Elizabeth Keen’s at the end when the Cabal has successfully framed her as a covert Russian agent, the daughter of the famous Katarina Rostova, we are also told that some things simply cannot be hidden, mainly love. 

Tom abandons his life as an undercover operative and confesses to murdering the harbor master because he loves Liz. Everything Reddington does is because he loves Liz. When he tells Liz his plan to get Tom to confess:

Liz: What are you doing?

Red: Whatever it takes to keep you safe.

When Liz is struggling to understand why she kept Tom alive and imprisoned on a boat: 

Red: When you love someone you have no control. That’s what love is, being powerless.

Liz: I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Red: There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you.

I mean, Reddington is spelling it out for us here, loving someone means you have no control. You are weak. And what did he say Katarina “died” of? Weakness (love) and shame. This gets repeated this season after Liz finds the photo of her and her mother in Reddington’s “weird little apartment.”

Red: The girl is you. And the woman is your mother.

Liz: What was her name?

Red: I knew her as Katarina Rostova, one of her many names. She was a KGB agent.

Liz: The girl, the night of the fire they called her...

Red: Masha. You were born in Moscow. Your parents – father- they were both in foreign intelligence.

Liz: You said she died of weakness and shame.

Red: Yeah.

Liz: You were there that night. I need to know what happened

Red: You want to know, there’s a difference.

Liz: Dr. Orchard told me someone blocked  my memory of that night. Was it you?

Red: Yes

Liz: Why?

Red: I’m not going to tell you.

Liz: You have a picture of my mother in your weird little apartment. Why? Were you in love with her? Is that why my father died? You killed him because you were in love with my mother? Tell me what happened. Please

Red: I’m not going to tell you what happened Lizzy.

Liz: Then I will find out for myself.

The themes make it clear that Reddington loves Liz and this makes him weak. The only kind of love this can be is parental love, it is hinted at over and over again, including when he counsels her on how to proceed with providing for the harbor master’s daughter:

Liz: Eugene Ames was 67 years old, the only reason he was still working was to put his daughter through college.

Reddington: Be careful Lizzy, because the truth of it is, once you start down this road there’s no logical place to stop. You can see to her education, health insurance, housing. You can watch her, or have her watched. Keep her safe. Try to ascertain her hopes, dreams, desires. Pull strings, call in favors to discretely smooth the path. And for the first few years, it may work. You’ll draw some measure of virtue from being her invisible benefactor. But that won’t last. It’s all a fraud. That it’s really not about her at you, but it’s all about you and you’re just going through the motions to salve your own guilt. But all the money, all the time and effort, all the favors in the world cannot possible equal what you took away from her. Everything else is just a nice gesture.

Clearly he is speaking from experience here, but he is not just going through the motions with Liz, he loves her unconditionally and he feels a strong, overpowering need to protect her from the menace that he has introduced into her life simply by being who he is, which begs the question, who is he?

He is totally Katarina Rostova. 

I could not help but notice that his “weird little apartment” had a prominently placed black and white photo of a man in military attire, after some googling, it seems more like Russian military attire than American. He also has a religious painting, something which looks very similar to a Russian icon. 

I LOVED this little exchange from the Karakurt episode:

Woman: Is he still here? The man who was in the room? I wanted to apologize before he moved. My baby has colic and was fussing all night.

Red: Oh dear, you must be exhausted.

Woman: Yeah, you have no idea.

Red: You’d be surprised.

What exactly would we be surprised about????? Or maybe I already know!!

And finally, the close out the season, we get this exchange after Liz has shot AG Connelly and remembered what she did the night of the fire:

Liz: I remember. I remember everything.

Red: Remember what?

Liz: The night of the fire. I know what happened, and I understand why you didn’t want me to find out. When I pulled the trigger….when I shot Connelly, I….It came back to me. It was like I was there. I could hear them arguing. He was hurting her. And I know why my father died that night. I shot him. That’s why you blocked my memory, not to protect yourself. To protect me.

Red: Yeah

Liz: You’re my sin eater.

Red: Tried to be. But I failed. I never wanted you to be…

Liz: What?

Red: Like me.

Why would this be a concern unless Red is in fact her parent? It would not be. Later seasons tell us that the real Raymond Reddington is dead. Either they have more twists to pull, or my hypothesis is correct. Ilya Koslov did not become Raymond Reddington, Katarina Rostova became Raymond Reddington. 

[greekedtext]

if you live in America and are not on Twitter, you probably have a distorted view of what’s going on here right now

The situation is chaotic, so it’s hard to get an accurate picture. I’ve been sifting through... A LOT of different sources, checking who’s saying what, reviewing footage to see if it shows what I’m being told it shows.

Most protesters are peaceful. Most protesters are peaceful.

They turned out last week to protest racist violence and the fact that police engage in violence with impunity. The police are not out there for crowd control, public safety, or even protecting storefronts. They are counterprotesters demonstrating their perceived right to engage in violence with impunity.

Over the past days, I have watched so many videos from across the country showing over and over that the police are using unnecessary, indiscriminate violence to turn peaceful situations tense and tense situations violent. Their actions range from mild (shoving people with riot control shields) to concerning (spraying tear gas, an agent that causes coughing, in the midst of a pandemic that affects the respiratory system) to wanton (accelerating their SUVs into crowds) to gratuitously cruel (yanking down a teen’s face mask in order to pepper spray him right in the eyes even though he was simply standing there with his hands up).

Police have maced and tear gassed children at protests, like the nine year-old girl in Seattle. They’ve done the same to uninvolved bystanders who were just trying to walk home. In Salt Lake City, an old man at a bus stop couldn’t hobble away fast enough, so they knocked him down. In Minneapolis after curfew, troops fired rubber bullets / teargas at people who were on their own porches and balconies, because curfew. In another city, they stopped a civilian car, tased the people of color inside, and dragged them out for arrest on live news camera. Oh, also on live camera in Minneapolis they arrested a CNN correspondent and his crew, and many other journalists have been targeted with rubber bullets.

Rubber bullets sound kind of cute and cartoony, don’t they?

There’s no such thing as a non-lethal weapon, just less-lethal weapons. Rubber bullets are big hunks of metal jacketed in rubber. They’re supposed to be fired at the ground so that most of a bullet’s momentum can be harmlessly absorbed before it ricochets up and hits you in the legs. Used this way, they still bruise. They’re meant to hurt you enough to get you moving in the direction police want you to go. And you’d think that police are only supposed to use them when a crowd is already out of control or refusing to move, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Remember that CNN correspondent? His name is Omar Jimenez, and you can Google this: The police surrounded him and his crew. He very politely and deferentially asked them where they would like his crew to go. They didn’t respond despite Jimenez asking several times. Then they arrested them and led them away; all the while, Jimenez and the crew cooperated and calmly asked why they were being arrested, to which they initially received no answer. The police informed CNN that the arrest was made because Jimenez and his crew “refused to move.”

Surround. Give no directions, or make it impossible to follow directions. Arrest for failure to follow directions.

This is the same tactic that they’re using against crowds. They raise bridges or bring in barriers (”kettling”) to ensure protesters can’t leave. Then they arrest people for refusing to leave. Sometimes they fire teargas and/or rubber bullets at a crowd to drive them into a kettling situation. Sometimes they do it after the crowd is already kettled. The curfews? An excuse to arrest everybody on the street. Pay attention to when they’re announcing a curfew with little or no lead time. My city keeps claiming that essential workers are allowed to go to and from work even when a curfew is on, but would you bet cash money that no workers are getting swept up and arrested?

Journalists then report this as “protests turned violent” or “protesters clash with police.” Local authorities claim that the protesters are all or almost all outside agitators, from out of state, and journalists repeat this without (it seems) even asking themselves if that sounds plausible.

This is why Americans don’t know what’s going on.

(We should be skeptical of claims about outside agitators because it has a racist history. It is used to deny African-Americans of their agency in their own efforts to liberate themselves from white supremacy. On the other hand, to some unknown degree the protests are actually getting infiltrated by a) plainclothes LEOs possibly acting as agents provocateurs, b) white "allies” who mainly want to vandalize shit or start fights and don’t listen to the Black protesters who try to stop that crap, c) looters*, and d) white supremacists and other political opportunists**.)

All of the above is only a spoon-sized sample of what’s going on. You want more instances of police violence, you can find it. And all of these things have been happening for years, decades, generations. It’s not just Trump, though he certainly does bring out the worst in people, and his administration does like to loosen standards to enable the worst in people.

Yesterday morning (June 1, 2020), Trump called Putin. Then he called the governors of the states and basically told them to go to war against the American people. In the afternoon, he made a tough guy speech, calling himself the “law and order president,” promising he could fix it, promising to send the U.S. military into the states to establish order if the governors didn’t do it. While he was talking, you could hear people being teargassed and fired at with rubber bullets in the background. These were peaceful protesters in and near Lafayette Square. There was a water and medical station set up on the porch of St. John’s Episcopal church. The protesters and medics were driven away (again: with teargas, which causes coughing, in the middle of a pandemic) so that Trump could be seen posing in front of the church, holding up a Bible.

That church had no idea Trump was going to do that. Some of their clergy were at the medical station and got teargassed.

Please, please go read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s summary of yesterday, because there was more fuckery than I can summarize here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-1-2020

Law and order. “One law, one beautiful law.” I alone can fix it. We’ll use the military if the governors refuse to take action, “to protect the rights of law abiding Americans, including your second amendment rights.” Bible-waving. He fucking teargassed people for a photo-op.

In the middle of the night, the police herded hundreds of Washington, D.C. protesters into a residential neighborhood. The residents opened their doors for the protesters to take shelter. The police camped outside for hours, arresting anyone who came out. You may see accusations that protesters invaded people’s homes, but they didn’t -- they were invited. Some people are claiming police invaded people’s homes to get the protesters out, but I’m still looking for more information to substantiate that.

There are reliable reports that in addition to the National Guard and the regular military, ICE and CBP are being mobilized to “help.”

What they’ve done to D.C., they’re going to try to do in every city that has protests. What they’ve done to suspected undocumented immigrants, they’re going to try to do to all “rioters, looters, and antifa” -- which means anyone who opposes them.

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WHAT CAN WE DO?

1. Support #BlackLivesMatter. The bail funds have actually received a lot of money lately, which is great; if you can give, and if you know of a bail fund close to you that needs money for protesters, go ahead and give, but the next thing we need is money for mutual aid organizations, because in the next 5-21 days, a lot of people are going to get sick.

2. Look to experienced organizers for guidance. Follow African-American anti-racist activists, and if you’re white make sure you stay humble, don’t talk over them, listen to their ideas and directions, and do what they fucking say. If you’re white and you go out to protest, your job is to stay calm and be a human shield. Your whiteness can actually reduce police violence [note: it’s a risk -- you might be beaten or otherwise hurt and you could be arrested too]. If you start violence or vandalism, African-Americans are more likely to suffer for it.

3. There’s a lot to do if you can’t go out. Again, there’s a lot of organizing going on. For example, the Indivisibles are still organizing people to contact their elected representatives, and this is good and important work even though it may feel less direct than hitting the streets.

4. Make common cause with organizations that have beliefs different from yours. 

This takes a bit of discernment. Maybe you’re ready to swear you’ll never call the police again; maybe you want to end incarceration (we do have the largest imprisoned population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.) Or maybe you’re concerned about police brutality and racism in our justice system but you can’t imagine a world without policing and prisons. If you’re in the latter group, make sure that the policing reforms you support are in alignment with the general goal of reducing budgets for police departments and shrinking our prison system.

We need a big movement. That means you can’t refuse to work with other organizations just because they aren’t in complete lockstep with you.

3. Reblog posts like these with your own ideas / information / good sources of trustworthy information.

When you’re deciding which suggestions to follow and which posts to reblog, make sure the information is coming from someone who knows what they’re talking about. I’m not a veteran of many protests, so I can’t give you good advice about how to stay safe out there. I could probably (in an abundance of confidence) fake up something that sounds plausible based on what I’ve read. That kind of thing is dangerous. Don’t write shit that doesn’t either come from your experience or that you can’t back up with links to folks who really know.

-----------

* "Looters.” Yeah, remember when Congress promised to help with the economic crisis and then decided all we need is a one-time $1200 check and mmmmaybe some extra unemployment insurance? And remember when the House passed some more bills to help, but Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said they weren’t going to be doing any more of that and the important thing for the Senate to do right now was confirm more of Trump’s nominees for federal judicial appointments? You say “looters,” I say, “desperate angry people.”

** We all need to learn how to recognize Boogaloos, Neo-Nazis, and other far-right extremists on sight, because journalists are not always aware of who they’re talking to.

Boogaloos: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/far-right-hawaiian-print-shirts-why-protesters-boogaloo-racist-a9539776.html

Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database: https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols

[thesublemon]

Favorite movies/tv shows of 2019, and why? (Also, I really like your posts and hope you post more stuff!

Thanks so much! More posts are incoming. And sorry for taking so very long to answer this.

To be honest, I don’t watch a ton of contemporary stuff. I tend to think it’s healthier to take advantage of the great wealth of great art (or weird-but-interesting art) made in all time periods than to focus on keeping up with the present. Not that I don’t watch any contemporary things, I just don’t prioritize it in any way. So this list isn’t based on me watching everything and then picking out the best. It’s based on me watching a few things and liking some of them. But I hope that even if this list isn’t any more interesting than a list of awards ceremony nominations, I might at least have something worthwhile to say about the things in question.

Recent TV:

(I’m cheating and including TV from 2017-2019 that I watched in the last year or two, or else the list would be pretty boring and short.)

Succession (2018-present) - Maybe my favorite of the shows on this list, which is surprising to me because it’s not the kind of show I normally like. I don’t tend to care about rich people being mean to each other, or art that is glossily timely. I don’t get off on seeing the private dramas of powerful, immoral people. What I like about Succession is the sense of fragility and desperation that infuses it. It’s about the human desire for these stable institutions—families, kings, corporations—and whether or not they’re actually stable, and whether or not they should be destabilized. The whole thing is just a wonderfully rich text that has been made with a lot of craft. It’s nice to know that there are people making art that is very much about the present, and has something interesting to say about it.

Fleabag (2016-present) - The second season has gotten a lot of deserved praise, so I’m not going to dwell on its merits. It’s a complex and often moving exploration of the nature of love, whether romantic, familial, physical or divine. What makes it a truly “mature” artistic work is the way that it knows what it’s about from the very beginning (“this is a love story”) and complicates that aboutness in every single episode. It’s actually interesting to compare to the first season, which lacks the same maturity. The first season is still worth watching, but it doesn’t really become clear what it’s about until the last second, when Fleabag gives her monologue in the cafe. You keep waiting for it to get to the point, instead of having a repeated sense of anticipation about the point and accompanying satisfaction every time the point-shoe drops.

Killing Eve (2018-present) - Solid entertainment. Had a bit too much of the “contemporary TV aesthetic” for me to really love. But I’d missed genuine originality and clever writing in thriller-type stories. So it’s got that going for it. (Trying to actually define the “contemporary TV aesthetic” is a problem for another post).

unREAL (2015-2018) - I only watched the first season, and don’t feel a need to watch the rest. People tell me the subsequent seasons aren’t very good anyhow. But it was doing some interesting things. Things to do with femininity, authenticity, performance and love, and the degree to which they interfere with each other. I’m planning on talking about it a bit more in a subsequent post, along with Fleabag and the movie Weekend.

Sharp Objects (2018) - Mainly watched this and unREAL because I wrote so much about Buffy season six in the last year, and I was curious about Marti Noxon’s other shows (She was the main showrunner for that season, and you can definitely tell. Unhealthy relationships, mental illness in women, rough sex, and ideas of performance seem to show up in a lot of her stuff.). She has an interesting tendency to choose “trashy” subjects, but with a refreshingly non-cute approach to the (mostly-heterosexual) female id that I respond to. I keep trying to figure out what quality Sharp Objects had that other recent art about “women being and feeling fucked up in an artistically exaggerated way” didn’t have. Things like Midsommar, The Favourite, or Gone Girl. None of which I liked. And I think it comes down to that lack of cuteness. Watching a female protagonist furtively masturbate over the memory of a murder-shack in a way that’s not about fetishizing her? Either for a male or female or political audience? It’s weirdly satisfying.

Euphoria (2019-present) - Only watched the first four episodes or so, and probably won’t watch the rest. But it was interesting to me as a pretty successful attempt to be blatantly zeitgeisty. I like its vision of contemporary life as something full of hyperstimulus (“euphoria,” get it?). Whether that’s the hyperstimulus of porn, love, attention, validation, or actual drugs. It didn’t seem to be a reactionary condemnation of all of the above, more just a depiction of it, but since I didn’t watch the whole thing I can’t comment on its attitude with certainty.

The Vietnam War (2017) - Excellent Ken Burns as usual. I appreciated the variety of perspectives he interviewed, and I appreciated the episode dedicated to Vietnam’s history before the war started. If there’s one thing that American schools suck at teaching about the Vietnam War, it’s the Vietnamese side of things. I’m not a historian so I can’t comment on how good the history in the series is. I’m sure there are important criticisms to make of it, and like all Ken Burns documentaries he uses emotional tactics to tell the story that can at times feel manipulative in a bad way. But as someone who always wanted a more in-depth, multi-sided understanding of the Vietnam War, but didn’t know where to start, I was very glad to have watched it.

Black Sails (2014-2017) - Still haven’t seen the last season. But after watching I was honestly surprised I hadn’t heard more people talking about it. Or maybe that’s just my fault for not keeping up with mainstream writing about culture. It had some fascinating themes about the nature and fragility of civilization, and I think it would be interesting to compare to Succession on that front. Black Sails features characters on the outskirts of society. Whereas Succession features characters at the center of society. But both are about the desperation for stability that leads people to make societies—and disrupt societies—in the first place.

Recent movies:

(Sticking just to 2019 this time)

Once Upon a Time In Hollywood - What I liked about this movie is that it felt like a movie. I left it feeling like I’d had a big old cineplex experience. Which was fitting, because the movie itself was about the big artificiality of film. Throughout, there is this contrast between real violence, and movie violence, and who has an understanding of them. Cliff Booth, as a stuntperson, has a “real” relationship to violence, while Rick Dalton, as an actor, does not. Cliff can cut through a cult’s fakeness, and knows to turn aside an offer of underage sex. But although Dalton does not understand authenticity, he does understand fakeness. The point of the teenage terrorists in the final act is that none of them understand either authenticity or fakeness. They don’t get that violence is real, and they don’t get that movies are fake, which leads them to being destroyed by their own movie-inspired violence. In typical Tarantino form, the movie does have a smug-feeling nyah-nyah attitude about this theme, a feeling of “you idiot loser generation, you don’t get the seriousness of violence and you also don’t get that movies are fucking fun.” But it was a theme I found interesting nonetheless.

Apollo 11 - Unequivocally loved the cinematography. Just completely aesthetically compelling to me on every level. I would have have watched an entire Koyannisqatsi devoted to it. But I feel sort of weird saying that I liked Apollo 11 as an example of contemporary movie-making, since all of that footage I loved was shot in 1969. Still, the contemporary aspect—ie, the editing—did a good job as well. Mostly because it gave the impression of staying out of the way, even though it must have been a significant effort to select and organize the footage. As well as doing animations, titling, etc. I liked that the patriotism and mythology of it was mostly just conveyed via actual soundbites from the time. And that the competent chatter of scientists was given much greater weight. I watched Free Solo the other day, a climbing documentary from 2018, and I liked it for similar reasons—the fact that the presentation gave the impression of staying out of the way of the content, despite being obviously edited.

Parasite - Pretty understandable to me that it just won Best Picture, since it’s one of the few movies from the last year that knew exactly what it was about and how to do it, and did it with unpretentious panache. I appreciated its highly cinematic use of imagery. Say, the contrast between the concrete architecture on the upper and lower levels of society— how in the upper level it’s high art, and on the lower level it’s an inhumane prison. Or the way that characters keep visually crossing lines. I was actually pretty relieved to see that Joon-ho made this movie, because I hated Snowpiercer, and kept thinking it would have been a thousand times better if it was a thousand times less metaphorical and just depicted a real-world instance of inequality in a heightened, artistic way. Which is exactly what Parasite is. In fact, I think it would be interestingly instructive to explore why Parasite succeeded in creating iconic-feeling metaphors for social inequality where Snowpiercer failed. I also appreciated its basic vision of inequality as something symbiotic, and therefore systemic, rather than a matter of mere oppression. You find yourself asking more interesting questions about how to deal with systems when you acknowledge that systems are systems, even absurd and mutable systems, in the first place. Where I think Parasite was weakest was in the pace of the storytelling. I felt myself repeatedly getting ahead of it—eg, once you realize the brother is going to get the sister a job, you’re just waiting for the movie to finish up situating the mother and father as well. Whereas I think the strongest storytelling is perfectly aware of when the audience will start anticipating something, and uses that anticipation to create complications and surprise.

An incomplete list of some other things I watched in 2019 below the cut…

Movies that I watched for the first time and liked a lot:

Brink of Life (1958), Abigail’s Party (1977), Vigil (1984), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Resolution (2012) / The Endless (2017), Jungle Fever (1991), Festen (1998)

Movies I saw for the first time that did things I found interesting:

The Devil’s Playground (1976), Skin Game (1971), The Reflecting Skin (1990), Straight Time (1978), Late Spring (1949), Iceman (1984), Hideous Kinky (1998), Bad Company (1972), Gozu (2003), Spring (2014), Jamón Jamón (1992), eXistenZ (1999), Bull Durham (1988), Carrie (1976), Swiss Army Man (2016), Tully (2018)

Movies I saw for the first time that I’d have to write specific pros and cons for:

Cape Fear (1991), Fury (2014), Cruel Intentions (1999), White Men Can’t Jump (1992), Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse (2018), The Deer Hunter (1978), Jennifer’s Body (2009), It (2017), The Favourite (2018)

Movies I rewatched and still loved:

Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), The Ring (2002), Do The Right Thing (1989), F for Fake (1973), Tampopo (1985), Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011), Broadcast News (1987), Tangerine (2015), Weekend (2011), Conspiracy (2001), Bicycle Thieves (1948), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), The Thing (1982), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), The Hunger Games series (2012-2015)

Movies I rewatched and didn’t like as much:

Clue (1985), Before Midnight (2013), Vertigo (1958), Anchorman (2004)

[distant-rose]

Villains That Live in My Head (1/4)

Notes: I made a promise back in June to @effulgentcolors a story about dealing with intimacy and PTSD and I’m like two months late. Lyubi, I’m truthfully sorry for how late this is but admittedly, I’ve been struggling with this subject material because it’s not just PTSD, it’s violent PTSD episodes so we’re straddling a very thin line which could constitute as domestic violence, which naturally makes me  uneasy. However, I think it’s important to stress that the violence depicted in this story is not due to any sort of maliciousness but due to a violent PTSD episode and this story is about exploring how to deal with trauma and intimacy issues and get past such issues as a couple. This is some hard, heavy and upsetting stuff, but I’m trying to be as sensitive and tentative to the material as I can. I can’t stress enough that this isn’t going to be for everyone and to approach with caution because this is a story about violent PTSD and accidentally hurting your partner, and please read at your own risk. A special thank you to @initiala and @shireness-says for helping me struggle bus through this story. Summary: The wounds made when we're young tend to linger. It’s something Killian and Emma learn a little too well when a well meaning surprise goes terribly wrong.  Word Count: 3,300+ Rating: M

--

The truth is that Emma Swan has never had a real boyfriend, so to speak.

Sure, she was with Neal during her teenage years, but their relationship wasn’t necessarily conventional. Born out of loneliness and camaraderie, theirs was based mainly on survival, and survival doesn’t mean dinner dates in fancy restaurants or going to the movies. The most romantic thing he ever did for her was steal a family pack of pop tarts and some boxed wine when she turned sixteen and she thought it was the sweetest thing to ever happen. That had been the pinnacle of romance for her until “pick a partner who knows what he’s doing” and “ you traded your ship for me?”

She’s so out of her depth when it comes to being in a real relationship, but so far, it seems to be going great. Killian is attentive and generous with affection, which comes in a variety of forms from bringing her coffee every morning to playing with her hair. He listens to her when she de-stresses after work, plying her with alcohol and... not sympathy, necessarily, but empathy and an understanding that everyone else seems to lack. Everyone views her as the Savior, including her parents, but it’s nice to have someone who just sees her as Emma. 

And then there’s the sex. Which is another story altogether. 

It’s good, don’t get her wrong. He’s surprisingly sweet and very generous, with soft eyes and even softer touches. However, it’s also intimidating, because while Emma is the one-night-stand wonder, she wouldn’t call herself particularly knowledgable when it comes to sex. It’s mainly been insert Tab A into Slot B, repeat until satisfaction (and more often than not, no satisfaction - but that’s another story altogether). Such relationships didn’t necessarily lead to a lot of exploration or discovery. Quite simply, you don’t ask a complete stranger to help you discover your kinks unless you’re a serial killer or preternaturally uncomfortable in your own skin. Emma was neither of those things. So, her experience, while lengthy partner-wise, didn’t necessarily extend beyond what was considered relatively standard.

Killian, on the other hand seemed to have a fountain of knowledge and experience.

He didn’t necessarily brag about it to her per say -- aside from his rather outrageous innuendos -- but there was a certain sureness and innate knowledge that wasn’t something you could necessarily fake, and could only come from wealth of experience. While there had been some fumbling in the beginning (usually on her end), he was nowhere near as clueless as others had been on how to touch her. It had been more like watching someone relearn a path rather than discovering it for the first time. And while it’s been great to be with someone who didn’t need a road map to her clitoris, it was also a bit disconcerting to be someone who was, quite frankly, a lot more experienced than you. 

And even more mortifyingly, teaching you things about sex despite getting your v-card swiped more than a decade ago.

It makes her feel like she’s being trained a bit. And honestly, she kinda hates that.

She doesn’t like the fact that he seems to be leading her around a training ring like she’s some skittish horse and he’s some absurdly patient seasoned equestrian. It makes her feel foolish and, even worse, she can’t help but feel like she’s boring him. And the last thing she wants to bore him.

(Boring means getting left behind.)

She knows it’s irrational to think so, but there’s nothing Emma is more terrified of than being left alone again. Sure, she has her family, and her boyfriend literally gave up his home and his entire way of life to be with her, but that fear runs deep. No matter how many justifications her parents, Neal, or anyone else give her, that pain doesn’t just disappear.  

(In the spirit of Jake Peralta: cool motive, still abandonment.)

She isn’t sure that she’s in love with him. Considering the fact that her parents are the Olympic gold medalists of True Love, she’s more than a little gun shy when it comes to even broaching that subject. However, she knows she doesn’t want him to leave. She wants more than anything for him to stay.

And that’s how she reaches the decision to “spice” things up.

(And naturally, as it is with all situations where someone tries to perfect an already good thing, it blows up in her face. Spectacularly.)

She doesn’t remember how she settled on the idea of bondage, but it’s something she’s the most familiar with, and all kinky things considered, it seems pretty low level; exciting, but not as far out there as some of the other things she’s come across when perusing for ideas. She’s not looking to do anything Fifty Shades, but she thinks it might be fun to tie him up and make him the focal point for once. Killian always focuses on her, and it might benefit their relationship for things to be a little less one-sided when it comes to the bedroom.

Besides, Killian is a pretty adventurous guy, and a pirate to boot. She’s pretty certain he’s had more than a few nights of debauchery, featuring far more lewd acts than a little light bondage play. Hell, she wouldn’t be remotely surprised if he’s been involved in an orgy or two. He’ll probably find her plans as vanilla as everything else they’ve been doing.

(You know what they say when you assume. It makes an ass of you and me.) 

She doesn’t tell him her plans, mainly because she can’t imagine he would object and also because she wants to surprise him. After letting him take the lead in this aspect of their relationship, she wants to show him that what she lacks in experience, she can make up for with a willingness to explore new things. She wants to be on his level, not someone he needs to teach.

So, she doesn’t tell him. She just brings a box of condoms, a pair of cuffs and a smile.

It starts the way it always does - with a kiss that has them both swaying side-to-side until they teeter awkwardly backwards into his room. She chucks her bag on the nightstand, only to have it smack the table lamp and send both items to the floor. She can’t bring herself to care when she has Killian splayed out on the bed below her, pupils blown wide, lips bruised and noticeable tenting in his incredibly tight pants.

(Seriously, is he capable of wearing anything else? She might have to buy him a more relaxed fit, if only to help her sanity. While he doesn’t have much of an ass, they highlight the muscles in his thighs and make her eyes jump to places that aren’t necessarily appropriate for the public.)

And then there’s the hair.

She loves his hair and the way it’s starting to get a little longer and curl over his ears. She loves tugging on it and the noises he makes when she does. She leans forward, unable to resist threading her fingers through the dark strands as she tilts his head up for another kiss. He accepts it enthusiastically, a low pleased grumble emitting from the back of his throat as she gives his hair a playful tug. He pulls her into his lap, hips rolling upwards with impatience.

Clothes are shed gracelessly. It takes more than a few tries for her to unbutton his vest, cursing him for choosing such finicky clothing. It’s just so typical for him to pick style over functionality. He laughs at her impatience, eyes twinkling with amusement. She wants to rip the bloody thing off.

(Holy fuck, she’s starting to sound like him.)

“Why so impatient, love? We have all night,” he asks, chuckling as she finally manages to undo his buttons. 

She doesn’t respond immediately, more focused removing his hook from its brace and placing it on the nightstand. More articles of clothing have fallen victim to that hook than she cares to count, and she has such a limited wardrobe as is.

“Maybe I have plans,” she responds with what she hopes is a coy smile. 

Both of his eyebrows rise at this, a smirk spreading across his lips as he settles back on his elbows.  

“Plans?”

“Yes,” she says, running her fingers along the length of his collarbone. “Plans. Fun plans. And if you’re good, you might even find out what they are.” 

“I’m not sure I’m capable of being good,” he responds, leaning up and placing all too brief kisses along her jaw and neck. “But I promise you, you’ll certainly like it when I’m bad.” 

“We’ll have to see about that.”

She pulls him into another fierce kiss, using it to distract him as she reaches back to riffle through her bag for her cuffs. It gets a bit awkward, the angle not quite right, but Killian does his best to make it work. When she finally gets her prize, she makes a noise of triumph against his lips before pushing him back against the bed and reaching for his wrists. 

“Swan!” 

Killian’s eyes go wide with shock, growing even larger as he catches sight of the handcuffs. Emma expects it, but it doesn’t last long. His face contorts into a new expression, one that’s far from the enthusiasm. 

She doesn’t get much time to process it, however because the world turns suddenly on its axis. 

One minute she’s straddling his thighs, trying to handcuff him, and the next thing she knows, she’s on her back with Killian looming above her with his only hand pressed to her throat, and not in a way that’s remotely friendly. His fingers dig painfully as they press into her windpipe, cutting off her oxygen. Every muscle in his body is tensed and his chest keeps heaving as if he’s struggling to breathe. His eyes aren’t shocked; they’re panicked. 

They stare at each other for a few seconds, Emma still stunned by the turn of events while Killian looks more like a frightened animal than a person. Her lungs burn painfully and she chokes a bit as she tries to breathe. He jumps at the sound, his face changing from frightened to horrified. He pushes himself away from her forcefully, propelling his body until he’s precariously close to falling off the bed. He pulls himself into a sitting position and turns his back to her, fingers gripping the side of the bed as if holding on for dear life. Emma lays there, mind reeling, still stunned by the sudden turn of events. Her fingers move to touch where she can still feel the hard press of his palm. 

A million questions buzz in her head, each too fleeting for her to truly grasp but each more panicked and disturbed than the next. She doesn’t know what the hell just happened, but her pulse is thundering loudly in her ears and she has the same feeling of ice water in her veins that she did in the Clocktower when Gold was about to crush his heart.

Killian still has his back to her and while she can’t see his face, his shoulders are shaking, and she can still hear the harshness of his breath even over the chaotic orchestra her insides are playing.

“I…” The vowel sounds hoarse leaving his mouth. “I…I’m sorry…I…” 

He reaches for his clothes, pulling Emma away from the hornet’s nest in her head. She sits up, on instinct reaching out to him. He flinches and inches further away from her hand, which somehow hurts more than when he tried to choke her. A wounded noise emits from the back of her throat. He doesn’t acknowledge it. He picks up his shirt and pulls it over his head one-handed. It’s on backwards but he doesn’t seem to care.

“What the hell are you doing?” 

“I need to go,” he says shortly, not looking at her.

She opens her mouth to speak, but her words fall short. Emma doesn’t know what she wants to say. She knows she should say something, but what exactly, she doesn’t know. She still hasn’t processed what exactly happened.

Emma can still feel his hand on her throat.

(What the hell just happened?)

She’s still trying to answer that question, while Killian’s haphazardly pulling on his boots. She raises her hand again, but pulls it back. She wants to touch him, to do something, but she doesn’t know what to do and she can’t bear the sight of him pulling away from her again, like she’s something vile. 

Before she can even come to a course of action, the door slams shut. And she’s alone.

(Again.

She’s alone again.)

The thought leaves her feeling frozen, like she’s back in the ice prison again except this time she’s not surrounded by ice. It’s inside of her spreading over each and every one of her organs. She wraps her arms around herself in attempt at...warmth? Comfort? She isn’t sure anymore.

She isn’t sure of anything.

(What the hell just happened?)

One minute they were fine and about to have a good time, and the next thing he’s attacking her and then suddenly he can’t even look at her. All of it happened so fast that she’s still not quite sure what caused all of it. What the hell did she do?

She gets up, pins and needles shooting through her legs. They’re completely unhappy with her after sitting on the bed for so long. She doesn’t know how much time has passed, but she knows she needs to do something. Walking into the ensuite and turns on the light, she winces at the harsh intensity of the fluorescent bulb; sucking in a breath when she catches sight of herself in the mirror.

There’s an angry red ring around her throat.

She touches it again, this time more tentatively. The flesh is tender and a small hiss leaves her without her permission. Killian is long gone, but the phantom pain of his hand is still there. It had only been a few seconds but the feeling and the fear refuses to leave. 

Fear.

The realization hits her like whiplash. She had been afraid of him. He could have hurt her.

He did hurt her.

(Why?)

She doesn’t have any answers. She doesn’t know what she did for Killian to act like this, but he’s left her and she’s pretty certain he isn’t coming back. 

She hates the fact that hurts her more than the potential bruises.

Angry tears form at the corner of her eyes and she splashes water on her face to keep herself from seeing them. She glances at the clock, not necessarily because she’s interested in the time so much as she doesn’t want to see herself reflected in the mirror.

2:00.

Fuck.

She should leave. She hadn’t been planning on going back to the loft, but she knows she can’t stay here even if Killian doesn’t plan on coming back. She needs to get out of here and sleep somewhere else, where the imprint of his hand can’t follow her.

She pulls her hair into a messy, half-assed ponytail, not bothering it to smooth out the awkward bumps. Her limbs feel as heavy as lead as she puts on her clothes. She wants nothing more than to sleep, but she can’t. Not here.

The streets of Storybrooke are deathly silent as she walks back to the loft. It’s a cool night and the chill highlights the unnatural warmth pulsating from her neck. She pulls her jacket tighter around her. It has always been her shield from the world, but it’s protection was futile. What she needed protecting from had already gotten past her walls.

She can’t stop thinking about it, her brain like an old scratched DVD, playing the same scene over and over again in her mind. She can’t help but relive that moment when he was above her and she couldn’t breathe. She still remembers the look on his face; eyes wide, nostrils flaring and cheeks white. It hadn’t been anger on his face.

It had been fear.

What the hell did he have to be afraid of? He wasn’t the one with the hand on his throat.

Why did he do that?

Why did he leave?

The questions swirl around in her mind as she attempts to unlock the front door of their building. It takes her an embarrassing three tries to open it, but when she finally did, a sense of relief came over her. She’s home and she can sleep.

She’s so tired.

The door to the loft groans as she opens it, sounding unnaturally loud in the stillness of the night. The noise wakes the baby, his wails as ear-piercing as thunder. She can hear her parents waking up behind their curtain. 

She can’t face them. 

Not right now. 

Not after everything that happened with Killian.

She races across the room instead, making her way up the stairs. Her hands tremble as she clings to the bannister like it’s a life line, each ascending step feeling heavier and more precarious than the last.

It’s a relief when she finally reaches her bed and crawls underneath her covers, pulling them over her head in an attempt to cocoon herself away from the world. She wants to escape, to find some peace and quiet. Unfortunately, Little Neal doesn’t seem to want adhere that desire. His screams keep getting louder and louder.

“That’s a mood if I ever heard one,” she mumbles, burying her face in her pillow.

Her mother’s soothing voice sounds throughout the apartment as she attempts to lull Neal back to sleep. Slowly, the cries quiet down and the growing silence echoes inside of her. It’s then that the anger gives away to immeasurable sadness, tears dribbling at the corners of her eyes and leaking down her cheeks.

Once again, she’s alone and no one wants her. Not her parents. Not her brother. And especially not her pirate boyfriend, if he’s even her boyfriend anymore. She’s not so sure.  

(What the hell happened?)

It’s frustrating to be in this position again, hurt and confused as to why. She should have known it wasn’t going to work. She’s never been in a healthy and real relationship before and it was silly of her to think otherwise. She should have known it would blow up in her face.

(But why?)

(Why?)

(Why?)

It’s the question on her mind keeps playing over and over in her mind as she falls into a fitful slumber, hoping against hope that sleep will bring some clarity.

It doesn’t.

[maikatc]

Black Sun Tale | A Monochrome World

sorry for being a few minutes late! i took more time eating dinner than i expected, in all honesty. but this chapter is emotionally wild for me mainly because this chapter and the next chapter took 6 months to write out of the past year and a third i have been writing this. 

remember that this is a first draft with only minor edits, but enjoy! comments and reception are always heavily appreciated.

- 

He carried a bag of bread in his hands; his mouth stuffed up from slabbing some inside. As he strolled along an abandoned streetway, the evening sky darkened early with the Fall. 

A gentle breeze blew against his cold figure. Posters dawned over him without any movement, staring at his lonesome walk. ‘Open’ lights illuminated from store shops but flickered at every step. 

Ayu sighed from the cold silence. His eyes stared blankly at the ground while his feet made a pattern with his steps. 

He bit off of the bread in his mouth, chewing, “November 16th, 201X: It’s a Friday so Annette’s busy with a life. Everyone was at school so nobody really visited again.” 

He glanced back at what he carried, cringing. 

“I was… getting kinda hungry again.”

The only reply was a pigeon’s squawking. 

He was tempted to squawk back at it, but passed it off to not get attacked by one again.  

He changed his subject back. “What would it be like if I was still in school…?”

Maybe I’ll be as busy as Annette, “but wouldn’t that steal time for what I’m supposed to be doing,” he questioned. Might as well have that 1% chance of getting a monster anyways. 

He turned a street by routine. “I can stick to art or something… even if I suck… Same goes for monsters though so fuck.” He groaned, “Shouldn’t have asked in the first place.” 

He delved into another bite. His failures passed through his views. And after glimpsing the mistakes and mishaps, a single truth was formed from his choices. “Nobody notices that I’m gone… or exist so,” he wondered. Shrugging, “If I die or something, it wouldn’t matter.”

But the truth stopped Ayu’s steps while he chewed on his bread. He squinted his eyes against the truth. … Can everything just undo itself?

The boy whined, “Damnit, that’s actually a good thing.” He kicked a can. “But what if it just continues,” he asked a passing bird. 

It ignored him. 

His mouth lowered. He grumbled to the bird, “I’m not doing anything else, I guess. It’d still be my fault but… that’s just running away from the problem.”

He cringed at the thought. Then, he breathed in and out, tapping on an irritated ankle. “You really did start to bruise up, did you?” 

At least the mark on his face disappeared. 

A stifled laugh chimed in Ayu’s ears. “Very interesting. Reckoning about dying, I see?”

The boy’s entire mood transformed to irritation. Bored again, Akeldama?

Red eyes rolled in front of him. “You can say so. It’s just that you caught me by surprise.”

Ayu scoffed, “Of course, you go and read my mind…”

“How are you companions doing?”

“Everyone’s lives still suck.” He grabbed another bread roll from his bag. As he chewed, he questioned, “You’re the one who made Oliver like that, right?”

The answer took longer. “Now then… That’s more complicated, I suppose. But regardless, he was unintentional.” He chuckled, “Misfortune is a given for me after all.”

Ayu glared. “Then did your misfortune caused all of this?”

“No,” Akeldama answered, “that was from your naivety and folly-ness all the way from when you trusted me.”

He took a final turn, gritting his teeth as he growled, “Get out of my head.”

“Don’t worry, I will,” he purred. “Besides, you have a guest.”

Ayu entered the alley, mumbling with his bread, “A what? - Oh…” He gripped on his bread bag with hesitance, pausing on his next bite. 

Oliver sat beside the alley wall, seemingly waiting in patience by twirling his hair. His eyes shifted back to Ayu and blinked back at him. 

Ayu hid his bag despite Oliver’s eyes already on it.  He gnawed on his cheek. 

Oliver’s face flattened. “You know you could’ve just told me you wanted some food.”

Blinking around, Ayu shook his head and placed his half-eaten bread back in the bag. “You haven’t been here since last weekend.”

He sighed, “Fair point.”

“Besides, it’d be annoying to beg for food and water all the time, mainly since I would’ve been asking from a single person for some years.”

“But to the point of stealing?” Oliver gave a smirk. 

“First off,” Ayu retorted, “no offence but you’re the one saying this.”

Oliver scoffed. 

“Second,” Ayu raised a finger without thinking. “Yes, I feel bad for it either way but nobody even notices.” 

The opposed argued, “I try my best not to do what I have to, thank you very much.” He shuffled an item he hid with his coat. “That and you’re lucky now. I can give you food whenever.”

Ayu raised a brow. 

“Including this stuff.” Oliver carefully placed his items in the center between them: a jar of pineapple cubes and a small container of something Ayu couldn’t read. “You had a bruise… so I looked it up what could help.”

Ayu stared at the goods, surprised at the idea. 

“Luckily, I already had the aloe vera,” he swept away from his stare, “but I’m kinda hoping you can borrow it-.”

“Thank you.” Ayu touched back on his previous injury; it had already disappeared from the few days. “Thanks…”

“Oh,” Oliver pinched up. “You heal quick.” He tilted his head down, pulling the bangs of his hair back. 

“No, it’s fine,” Ayu blurted, “it can be good for… my ankles.”

“Your ankles?”

“Yeah, my ankles.” Ayu pointed down at his legs, focusing on his bruise marks. “I kick ‘em sometimes without thinking about it when I’m walking. But I’m just dumb with it.”

“Not so much dumb,” Oliver mumbled. “They don’t look well, now that you pointed it out.” He already began opening up the aloe-vera. 

“Ng- you don’t need to do that right now!” Ayu backed away from Oliver’s hands, glossy from the gel he scooped up in a mere second.  

The redhead leaned into a crawling position. “What do you mean? Your ankles are almost purple now that I can see it!” He grunted his last words as he grabbed a bruised wound with a pounce. He applied it in an instant; making Ayu’s spine run cold. 

Ayu hissed, “Shi- why does that feel so weird?” His ankle froze in place to resist the urge of kicking Oliver back. 

“It’s just cream, Ayu. And it’ll help you not have shitty health.” Oliver grabbed another handful for the other leg. “And don’t try to kick me out or something; I don’t wanna deal with an injury I don’t know how to hide yet.” 

“That sounds like something to worry about inste– seriously, how much do I need of this?”

“Just enough to make a nice solid shield with the aloe,” Oliver chuckled. 

Ayu cringed. “Stop. Please.” 

“Come on, it’s almost done.” Ayu groaned in discomfort; Oliver then let go and closed off the cap. “There, that was quick, wasn’t it?” 

Ayu huffed, “Shut up,” as he tossed his bread to the side and pulled up his hood. 

“This wasn’t even what I was here for,” Oliver stood up and pulled off Ayu’s hood immediately. “I talked with Alice and she said you can come with me this time.”

“You’re telling me this now?”

“Yeah and we’re going now,” the boy dragged off from the alley’s view. “I gave her a specific time and this just made us derail from it; she’s waiting.” 

Ayu scowled from Oliver’s behavior. Though, the concept of getting more answers still tugged over his will. He shook his head, setting himself to forget the previous two minutes that unfolded. “Alright,” he toned out, exiting from the alley and passing Oliver, “let’s get going.”

“Ayu?” He turned back to find Oliver pointing the opposite direction. “It’s this way.”

“… Damnit-”

***

“So, continuing on with our conversation-”

Oh god, Ayu groaned in his head.

“Did you say something?” Oliver turned with a confused face. 

“It’s nothing,” Ayu quickly brushed off. And Oliver walked on without a second breath after.

“I wonder, did I just see a command or-”

What do you want, Akeldama?

“Oh, not much,” he clicked, “But I’ve been meaning to ask: how do you think of your companions?”

Why would you want to know?

He giggled. “There can be a million reasons why, Ayu. You can never know what it could be with one’s feelings and words. Too contradictory.”

You have feelings? 

Akeldama never answered the question. 

“I want to know how you’re doing with your relationships. A simple thing of the heart.” 

Ayu sighed, Annette and Oliver are cool, that’s it.

“… What about Oliver, after what you’ve discovered?”

Ayu held his breath. I don’t want to answer. 

“Alright,” he calmly replied, “why don’t you then?”

I- I don’t know what to think of him.

“Ah, a flight of feeling I see-”

Why are you making me answer questions when you won’t give me any when I ask?

“Oh,” Akeldama replied. “So that’s what you want, huh? -”

Don’t make it a wish, I swear.

“Relax, I wouldn’t waste a wish like that.”

Good. You’re never useful with the wishes anyways. 

“So, you’re saying it wasn’t useful of me to save you from death?” Akeldama laughed at the question.

Depends on how you think about it- Arg! Ayu screamed inside. Can’t you just give me something to work with here? 

“… Something?”

Yes, something. 

A tinge of silence lurked as Akeldama’s reply disappeared. Until, “Well, I suppose I can give you something.”

Ayu blinked. Really?

Akeldama hummed a nod. “Now listen closely,” his cheeky tone began to linger. Though, Ayu focused more nevertheless. “Have you ever heard of demons?”

Ayu shook his head, a baffled face on him. What? What do you mean by that?

“No, no, no,” he repeated, “That’s all I’m giving you.”

Ayu scoffed with a stomp. You little fuck, that doesn’t solve anything! He would have continued though his stomp caught his own attention to worry about Oliver’s. 

However, Oliver continued to walk along with him. Relived, thank god, he didn’t notice.

“You’re welcome.”

No, you don’t get a ‘thanks’. You didn’t help.

“You simply told me to give you ‘something’, so I did just that.”

Something useful! –

“For future reference,” he finished. 

Ayu kicked a rock in frustration, but the momentum caused the stone to bounce back and hit his leg. “Shit,” he hissed. Akeldama laughed at him. 

You’ve never been useful.

“Come on, I always try to be,” he pouted. “Even if it’s just for myself.”

You’re terrible. 

“Yet you put up with me,” his tongue slurred at the ‘you’. “Contradictory.”

I can’t even get away from you without solving anything else. Ayu’s words laid lethargic. 

“Then do something about it,” Akeldama told him. 

How?!

Akeldama nipped on what to say. “Well, being more assertive is one thing.”

Ayu scoffed. Don’t even know what you mean by that. 

Akeldama sighed. “Simply asking and begging for answers isn’t going to get you anywhere. You have to be firmer, more aggressive to get what you want.”

I…-

“Just imagine holding someone by the throat; threaten them. It’s that easy, even with me.”

I, Ayu’s heart sank in fear, I can’t do that.

“Of course, you can. Give it some time and it wouldn’t take you a second.”

I could never do that. His hands formed gripping fists. Glass that never existed broke against his fingers.

Akeldama’s voice grew vacant in Ayu’s head. A short silence loomed upon him waiting for the being to mock him or leave once more. However, a short, stifled laugh choked out of him. “Oh, oh really?” His voice rang in aggressive sarcasm. “You’ve already tried to kill so many monsters and allowed so many to die.”

Stop.

“You- you beat Oliver without a second stop of breath-”

I SAID STOP! Ayu screamed. 

The world froze for a greyish moment then. All while Ayu panted from holding his breath. Movement cricketed without Ayu’s notice. However, once the boy relaxed his bones and mind, fear stroke him again as he was greeted with monochrome. 

“Wh-what?” He breathed. He turned around and round, blinking in disbelief of his surroundings. Dead silence deafened him and his eyes stroked tears from no walking, no car fumes, nothing. Akeldama, stop this right now.

Reminded in a flash, Ayu bolted his head to Oliver with widened, vermillion eyes. The redhead stood frozen along with everyone else in the crowd. “No,” Ayu gasped. 

The boy stood at the peak of breaking down, almost crying next to Oliver out of a new disaster. Akeldama, please stop this-

“Oh, there she is.” The world breathed in color once more as Oliver pointed outwards in the streets. 

Ayu blinked with his eyes burning in red. The city life had returned to normal in the second of his crying breath. 

“I… What-?”

“Hey, Alice,” Oliver called out. He waved his hands towards an opening crowd. He walked to a certain woman in the crowd who stared aimlessly at the streets ahead of them. 

The redhead managed to grab her attention though it took time in the matter. However, once she’d quip her eyes to the two, she greeted them, “Oh, Oliver! Forgive me but your mobiles are always fascinating to observe.” 

She smiled at an ambulance tracking down a car crash. Oliver eyed the cars while Ayu caught up his mind to his own confusion. 

“Right…” Oliver said. “Nice to see you too.” 

The boy nudged Ayu forward as he whispered at him to smile, but Ayu stared in distraught. “So, Alice, this is Ayu.” Oliver mumbled, “As you already know.”

A glimpse of a glare was caught by the black-haired boy from Alice. His paranoia was not of help at the moment either as he stared back in worry. 

“It is nice to be of acquaintance with you,” she spoke down to him with a smile. Her knees wobbled in hesitance of something or other while she greeted him by hand. “You want knowledge, correct?”

He nodded akin to her knees. “Yeah…”

Trust her, a voice said. 

But I don’t want to, he thought back.

“And you’re gonna give me lessons, right?” Oliver brought himself to attention again. 

Alice replied back to him in a rush, “Of course! I was simply checking if I called the right college for the boy.”

“Just making sure.” Oliver patted Ayu on the shoulder. Only to then whisper to him with an eye on the distracted woman. “Don’t worry, Ayu. This probably won’t go wrong.”

“Probably?”

“They’re murderers. But I am too so there’s not much to expect.” 

“I…” The bluntness of the situation kept Ayu with no words.

Alice asked them, “Are you two ready to go now?”

“Sure but,” Oliver directed throughout the entire area, “how are we getting there anyways?”

The woman left a finger on her chin. “Oh right, you’ve only ever gone to Fowls unconsciously.” 

She stepped deeper into the streets, excusing the city-folk walking by. Snatching a book from her dress-pocket, she opened the tiny leather cover. 

Ayu squinted to see the book from a distance, to no avail of only tiny scribbles of words. However, to his surprise, a door appeared in front of her. No magic word nor smoke of a ‘poof’, the door merely stood at the edge of the sidewalk with no wall or house attached. The door itself held rough edges; its carvings rounded about like a simple drawing yet shaved in splinter points. From flowers to spades, the entrance reveled in its old, wooden state. 

“Woah…” 

“Uh Alice?” Oliver raised his hand from the side. “Nobody here’s seeing this, right?”

Alice turned back at them, hiding away the book yet again. “Yes, we’re nonexistent to them at the moment.”

“Isn’t that what I wish for,” Oliver muttered. 

Ayu chuckled, “Isn’t that a shitty wish?” 

Oliver cocked his head to Ayu as he shook his head. “Ayu, are you a telepath or what?” 

“Huh?” 

“Boys, we mustn’t waste too much time here.” Alice opened the door to reveal another area entirely. 

Oliver growled at her demand. Though, he walked on ahead anyhow. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he told. 

Ayu nodded back, without a clue of his question, and joined him. 

The boy entered into the new world with a dry gulp. Not needing to adjust his eyes from the grey skies, he gazed at the wide view ahead of him. So, this is where Oliver’s been, he thought. A field laid before him carrying layers of long and short grasses that glistened with a desert green hue. An endless valley of trees ran down the horizon up ahead. No sound tickled the boy’s ears and instead tickled his legs from plants below. The grey skies must have left room for fresh rains that would drip over his messy hair and water the vast land of unknown. He pondered if any fruits and berries grew, or if there was a house that would carry any sweet smoke from the forest ahead-

“Ayu, are you listening?” Oliver poked him by the side, making Ayu jolt. Ollie shifted his eyes to Alice, who walked ahead of them on a lecture. 

Ayu blinked. “She was talking?”

Oliver rolled his eyes. 

“I didn’t know she was talking,” Ayu searched for excuses in his head. 

“Yeah, I noticed.” Oliver smiled, almost seeming to laugh. “You had a kinda space-y face.”

“No, I didn’t,” Ayu retorted. “I just thought this looks… cool.” A tint of red darkened onto his face. He tugged a chunk of his hair in the process. 

Oliver moved his hand from pulling on his hair, carefully so. “Suit yourself,” he noted. 

He shook his head from the conversation to focus on the woman for once. A glance of Alice while she talked caught Ayu’s attention more than her speaking. Her fair skin with blonde hair seemed peculiar. Back to Oliver was the same. 

“You guys look nothing alike,” he stated. 

“I know, right?”

“Well to be precise,” Alice finally stopped with her ramblings. “Oliver gets almost everything from his father.”

Oliver spoke back, “Oh really?”

She continued, “he was exactly as I hoped to be truthful. Though I admit there were some errors in the process.” She lifted her hand to almost make contact with Oliver’s head, though he pushed it back. 

“Don’t touch, please.” 

She hesitated to put the hand down, but did so willingly. “It’s nice that my son is in his image, isn’t it?” She walked a few steps forward and changed the topic. “Eilwen will be here any minute, Ayu… Unless she’s hiding around here.”

“Hiding?” 

“Eilwen, show yourself!” She turned back at the boys, “Forgive me, she isn’t quite… fond of new people.”

“How,” Oliver queried. 

“She likely,” Alice dotted her fingers together, “has been watching us.”

A rustle came from the long grasses ahead. Some crinkled and fell over from age with empty impact. Though, the grasses moved along as if they were curtains, revealing the figure behind them. 

“Now, you didn’t have to word it like that, Cecily.” Her voice did not chirp like Alice’s. Rather, she spat with a nasally tone.

“Oh, Eilwen, come over here!” 

The new woman trudged her way over to them. The view of her cleared the closer she came over. A baggy, oversized coat of a brown plaid covered up her whole body past her knees. Sleeves dangled over her nimble, gloved hands. With those hands, she then adjusted the bell-shaped hat against her short and messy hair. Her appearance was more apparent than Alice’s typical beauty.

Once she arrived, she matted her coat, swatting some grass flakes in the meanwhile. 

“This,” Alice started, “is Eilwen, Ayu. She’ll be the one to tell you anything you’d like to know.”

Eilwen greeted him with a stink-eye. She crossed her arms as she huffed, “It’s a pleasure to be of service to you.”

She brought more of a threatening presence than Alice, that is for sure. “Nice to meet you too,” Ayu stuttered. 

Eilwen tilted her head, “Come with me.” A door appeared right beside her, a darker wood than the previous one. She opened the door as it shared a peek of a dark abyss of a room. 

“Don’t be a show-off,” Alice murmured. 

Eilwen began entering. “Now, it’s not my fault that you don’t memorize.”

“It’s a part of my magic!” She argued.

Oliver tapped Ayu yet again before they separated. “Okay, so she might be giving you a death glare but you’ll be fine.”

“You sure?”

“If not, you can always punch her or something,” Oliver shrugged at the suggestion. 

The advice made Ayu squirm at the violence. Nothing seemed comfortable at the moment. No help matted the situation. All there was, was a deep breath before he stepped into the chamber. A soft goodbye could be heard in the distance but his attention arrived once the door slammed behind him. 

Ayu jumped at the sound but whisked his head back around after shaking a tad. The room was small and dark. Black shaded the walls and floor, creating white outlines that were the corners and creeks. In the middle carried a single table unable to hold one’s food but instead a flamed light to illuminate the space. 

“Now,” Eilwen started, “you don’t know anything from what I recall, yes?”

“I- What do you mean?”

“Akeldama, of course.”

Ayu gasped with the tiniest air he had. “So, I was right!”

“It appears you were,” she slides in, “–with how obvious it was– but how much do you know of magic?”

“Huh?”

“How much do you know of him? Or anything of his motives?”

“Uhm…” Ayu twiddled his hoodie-string. “I don’t know? I just know he’s an asshole?” 

“Oh, we all know that,” she threw a hand. “The question is why are you the one he prioritizes, but even you don’t know anything of it.”

“Yeah? That’s why I came here.” Ayu stated, “I want to know.”

Eilwen sighed to then rummage her hand through her big pockets. “Alright then,” She raised up a pocket watch out of it. “This toy will show visions of the past to help guide through what I can show.”

“Really?!” Ayu’s face lit up and moved over to view the tiny watch. 

“Yes– really.” She moved her arm up, now out of his reach. Her face showing signs of irritation, doubled. She grumbled in her words, “I hope to be of help.”

-

Ten Dollars | Bread and Water | Red Eye | Crimson Capture | November 1st | A Mother | A Demon | A Child | The Wolf | Bloody Fingers | Next >>>

[egdocument]

About the EvaGeeks wiki and why you shouldn't trust it, concerning mainly one user.

On the subject of EvaGeeks: Let’s talk about the manipulation of information on the wiki, and perpetuated “nastiness” on the forums that has persisted for several years now. THIS IS A MIRROR OF THIS GOOGLE DOCS FILE. (My twitter post.) You can share this post or the original document freely, use parts of it, etc. I want this document to simply serve as a warning to new Eva fans and those less familiar with EvaGeeks and their history - as well as an update for people who haven’t seen the current state of it.

NOTE: If you can’t read any of these images, these are Imgur albums containing all of the notable ones: https://imgur.com/a/z2mGvvX https://imgur.com/a/oAgufc3

The intent of this document is not to “take down” the wiki or forum, obviously. The intent is simply to inform people of the dangers of trusting this site with their Eva info. It might be the best we have but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve it. I would actually love to see a more community cultivated version of the site with less biased information, but I fear that will never happen. The anxieties of any one (or many) individual(s), which have prevented consistent change until now are well justified, and it is not within reason to blame the outsiders for never bothering to correct the myriad of issues with the wiki. Please extend kindness to other Eva fans and approach sites like EvaGeeks with the appropriate scrutiny, if you aren’t already. We’re divided enough as it is.

Before I begin, I must state: All of the information presented is publicly available, either through main pages, chat logs or history. And yes, the link to join the Discord server and verify the information given in this is publicly available too. I will not link it myself, as I want to avoid any possible harassment of the users I speak about here. Harassment is NEVER the answer in any kind of conflict. This behaviour I don’t believe can go unchecked, but that doesn’t mean the consequences of it should be any kind of conflict towards any user. I will be naming them here so you are aware, but I really do have to advise you, as a reminder, DO NOT HARASS OR ENGAGE WITH THEM. The rule of thumb is that these issues are more systematic than you might think, and blaming or taking it out on a singular person or even a whole group is never justified. Targeted harassment, even with reason, especially never helps to remedy an issue, because it forces the person to double down on their behaviour and beliefs. Causing unnecessary pain to a person is never okay, and the ‘offences’ committed here aren’t deserving of it in the first place. Please also consider the feelings of the people who use the server and EvaGeeks site; not everyone is your "enemy" or your "target" (and frankly, no-one should be) and despite the feelings echoed in this document, EG is not a monolith of a singular opinion or belief.

The purpose of this document is to inform people of the ways EvaGeeks fails objectivity and has existed to push narratives and exclude outsiders for far too long. With new people coming into the Eva fandom (and there of course being others who have been around for quite a while but just aren't aware) I feel like now is the best time I could write this.

As for what prompted this, an anonymous member of the Discord server contacted me regarding the behaviour of one particular user they were concerned about. Said user had expressed considerable bias in the past and was admitting to making large edits to pages on the wiki very recently, and the person who contacted me felt unequipped to bring the issue to light themselves.

A decent amount of this document will be dedicated to presenting said user's contributions - while I feel someone always had to address the EvaGeeks Problem at large, it doesn't help that this user has essentially incriminated himself here to expose the problem in its entirety. 

There is quite a bit of pretense I must discuss before I get into the subject of the wiki pages themselves. I suggest you read all of it; the start of the wiki section will be in heading text if you’d like to skip to it. I’m sure information on the biased editing of wiki pages is privy to anyone who has used the server or the site itself, but at the server’s current status of 60 entire members, I know not everyone has, or is aware of what the problem actually is. Please note that the person who contacted me has requested anonymity and I will be complying. I will not include screenshots of their conversation with me, and anything I quote from them will be paraphrased so nobody can go full Sherlock and analyse their typing patterns. It sounds silly and it’s probably just paranoia, but they shared my concern here. Any conflict we can prevent is for the best. EvaGeeks, of course, has a culture very much promoting the idea that it’s the “number 1 source for all things Eva”, and for English speaking fans it definitely is - you’d be surprised the amount of people who still, after all these years, think this site is consistently reputable. For the sake of context, I’m going to assume that you are not all that familiar with the site’s history or nature, so I’m going to provide a little bit of information about it for those without any first-hand experience. The forums in particular cultivate a very join-us-or-get-out type community, where those who dare to go against the grain get incentivised to leave the site; they’ll claim this isn’t the case if asked and obviously the site is NOT a hivemind but that doesn’t mean it’s not insular. I can vouch for myself and many others who refuse to go in more than a few threads for fear of discussion turning particularly nasty. Even the server member who came to me about this has stated they feel it “might not be a hivemind but it sure feels that way.” Silencing dissent, even when officially-backed, is part of their culture. You don’t have to personally harass everyone who has an opposing thought to you for it to not feel acceptable, you just need to have a history of mocking those who do. If you want some previous, notable cases of “discussion turning nasty”, here’s some off the top of my head: 1. The AWL Incident - In which ADV VA of Rei and director of EoE dub, Amanda Winn-Lee, joined the forums for discussion and was promptly harassed by a user. Most of these messages have been deleted but you can view what remains of her post history here.  2. Recently brought to my attention: upon beginning translation of the Episode 24 drafts, EG forum user LiLi was subjected to incentive to leave, mostly in the form of homophobic disgust in replies to her thread or others they were mentioned in. Any information that goes against the cultivated narrative, even when it is literally officially licensed content, is only ever considered with a degree of reluctance. The fact these drafts co-exist with other pages concerned with this episode is almost a miracle. You can find plenty of repeat instances of the above if you want to (more to do with homophobia and misogyny than outward hostility, but honestly it’s the same thing.) A look at basically any EvaGeeks thread concerning pairings or the female characters will unearth a variety of awful comments from many other users, not that that would be surprising to anyone who has spent more than two minutes in the fandom. Now, of course, that’s very relevant to the topic at hand even if it doesn’t seem to be. The EG wiki and forum have quite a bit of overlap and circular influence on each other as you’ll see later if you aren’t already aware of it. For a short summary before we jump into things and analyse our subject of the day, this essentially means that anyone with an opinion or information the majority doesn’t like will never get in a position good enough to edit the wiki and keep the edits there. This has resulted in many articles filled with conjecture and fan speculation that serve to shut down other viewpoints, whether it’s intentional or not.

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ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI

The issue surrounding homophobia and downplaying of references to LGB content in Eva, through proxy of fan-dictated content control and translation is not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure you're all very well aware. It’s far from the only issue present in the fandom but it will be our subject of conversation today. Any ‘one instance’ of this persistent behaviour from Eva fans is never going to be enough to summarise how insurmountable it really is, though, so today I instead draw your attention to one user of the wiki who goes by the name of FelipeFritschF and his recent, frequent updates to pages concerning Nagisa Kaworu.

[TOPIC: FELIPEFRITSCHF]

I must reiterate here: although this document is mostly concerned with this user and will contain a number of receipts from various places, it is NOT supposed to function as a hit piece or inspire any kind of mob. Leave this guy the hell alone, just be aware that he’s the one making most of these changes and isn’t a particularly impartial party, to put things lightly.

Now, before we really get into things, it should be stated that the EvaGeeks wiki requires approval to get your edits there, as stated at the bottom of the homepage, here:

This means that anyone making consistent edits to the wiki has in fact been approved, and this isn’t the result of lack of maintenance.  

What you’ll find is that it is consistently Felipe making edits to the pages in question. Kaworu’s bio page, for example, is almost entirely edited by Felipe, which we can see from the “History” tab of the article.

This is barely half of his edits made in the last few days. Take a scroll through it yourself if you’re so inclined. This hilarious bit of waffle was added by Felipe a few days ago and since revised since by him, as shown here. 

(As an added bit of comedy, the man who decided to add in the Japanese in the first place apparently didn’t know the difference between 好意 (kindness, what Kaworu actually says) and 行為 (action). It’s been fixed since but I still think it’s quite funny.) Now, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese knows, 好き is not actually a very ambiguous word at all. I think it goes without saying, though, and I’m not here to have an argument about translations with you all (for the record, Kanemitsu’s now scarily infamous translation of this scene is perfectly fine with me in a vacuum, it’s just literally everything else surrounding it that’s the problem. Also, regretfully, I will have to speak about this nonsense later when it becomes relevant.) I’m using this as an example instead, to show how utterly ridiculous this guy’s additions to these pages are. He’s not even making a point here. It keeps going past this excerpt, and I suggest you read the whole thing (Kaworu’s page is linked above.) The point of bringing this up - and when I eventually discuss the Netflix translation when it’s necessary - is not to complain about semantics, although I’d argue that’s what’s happening in these articles, honestly. It’s just helpful when proving the actual point of the editor being incredibly unreliable and biased in how he phrases and omits things.

On the page dedicated solely to Shinji and Kaworu’s relationship (which is basically identical to their section on Kaworu’s page as far as I can tell), we can see that Felipe has also edited this several times, and even credits himself with expanding the version on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki now copy and pasted back to EvaGeeks.

The kind of “discussion” (very much not discussion when added to a wiki page supposedly presented as factual information, is it, frankly?) would be fine if it was happening in the EvaGeeks forum itself (and happen does it ever, but that doesn’t change the inappropriateness of this particular behaviour.) What I find disturbing is that in the past few days, this user has gone out of his way to make some already worrying articles even worse, presumably in an attempt to silence discourse, or add more fuel to the flames, surrounding the new Netflix translation. He has a whole page on that one, too, one which is very up-to-date in some regards and not at all in others, despite only being added a few days before me compiling this information. Frankly, going through this whole page on its own is a huge waste of my time considering how BLATANT it is in its biases, but I’ll do it anyway. It IS only a Theory and Analysis page (which is essentially an EvaGeeks free-for-all), but I think it’s quite bothering that the site even allows Theory and Analysis pages that consider only one viewpoint and are written by one person. The forum, presumably, is connected to the site for a reason. 

I’m just going to link it here, for the sake of brevity. https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Kaworu%27s_lines_in_Episode_24 I suggest you read this before continuing. For a slight departure, the original theatrical Funimation dub of 3.0 is partially available for viewing online, although the audio is in cam quality so you may want headphones if you have plans to watch what’s there. The home media dub’s major changes are to issues with lore and localisation of jargon. While not directly mentioned in this article, it is implied from the subject that this is what it’s about; it’s been speculated that the very literal translation of Episode 24 in particular has come about due to Khara’s embarrassment with how Funimation’s theatrical dub of 3.0 handled Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship rather loosely. Despite these claims, every instance of the two sharing (honestly pretty awkward and unnecessary) flirtatious back-and-forths are still present in the home media version, barring an instance in the stargazing scene where Kaworu’s dialogue was translated even worse than it is in the final dub. If you don’t believe me, do the comparisons yourself. It may not be conclusive, but I think it puts mostly to death the rumour that “a Khara employee was there and saw how people laughed at the Kaworu and Shinji scenes and demanded it needed to be changed for the final release and now that’s being reflected on the new translation”, which is what it tends to boil down to. 

It also goes without saying that NO ONE PERSON is “the most qualified” (holy shit, is this entry not even bothering to hide how biased it is) to translate an entire TV show, let alone something like Evangelion. Let us not forget that Kanemitsu’s claims that he respects “ambiguity” are not even true to begin with. EvaGeeks itself is a shining example of Eva fans, of which Kanemitsu is one and this is even discussed in the article, not being impartial enough to be tasked with discussing Evangelion! (There is obviously issue with citing the ADV translation as a source of all truth; if you read further into the thread on my tweet [the kitchen scene in EoE], I provide extra context for those interested, which I am aware has been spread around Discord and other places without that context included. Of course, I’m not an unbiased source either as you can probably tell from my tweets nor am I claiming to be, so please feel free to discuss these things in other places if you want. I’ve just got the tweets I have on hand here. Sorry about that.) Next, the repeat claim that this is “Khara’s licensed translation and thus the most accurate version” is pretty obviously nonsense; I’m sure I don’t need to point out to the audience that Japanese companies meddling in localisation has ended poorly in the past, or that Khara uses questionable translations from the dubs of the Rebuild films on licensed merch from time-to-time, or that the translation was fairly obviously not overseen or even QA’d by anyone following Kanemitsu’s translation work judging from the myriad of grammatical errors, missing subtitles and overly literal, poor sounding phrasing present in the final work. (Do I need to source this? Just watch the damn thing.) It’s not even like the ways it was translated have been consistent through different versions on Netflix; some were translated from Kanemitsu’s English to other languages judging from the obvious mistakes being present in multiple tracks, and some were barely even translated at all - the Italian version, the dub of which is mysteriously now missing, was so bad people were commenting that it sounded like Shakespeare or that it was translated word for word from Japanese. I dunno about you, the reader, but something about “Khara only bothered to check very rigorously the English version for their specific requests with the translation” doesn’t sound like what really happened to me. It’s more like they’ve just sent a translator they have worked with before to work on a project of theirs. Apologies for engaging in speculation, but that’s all this whole article is anyway. It’s just something I noticed from skimming through the page, but I find it quite interesting that Felipe makes a blanket statement about the excerpts from Schizo and Prano “being wrongly attributed to Anno” and then the source he provides for that is just someone on the EvaGeeks forums saying the same thing with little proper sourcing, when that was never really the intent of their post anyway. An interview summary exists where Anno has stated he wrote both books himself, and if you haven’t seen it, here it is. It’s obviously flimsy at best, but Tokyo Otaku Mode is an officially licensed Evangelion distributor. If Felipe is going to parade around his love for the Very Official Khara Subtitles Of NGE he can at least extend the same gratitude to other forms of official information; I mean, frankly, this article is about as reputable as anything in the Netflix subtitles are.  Lastly, another thing I found quite interesting is his strange love for the ADV VHS subtitles. I really, really think this is obvious, but subtitles changed in later versions of the ADV release were changed because they were deemed incorrect. I don’t have sources for this so take it with an absolute grain of salt but I believe there’s even a commentary track on the Platinum release where the translator talks in depth about why she translated episode 24 as she did. It’s not exactly a better word than Kanemitsu’s, but if we’re considering translator’s word as law for whatever reason like Felipe is here, we might as well consider hers, too, right? Oh, and actually, have a look at the sources used on that article. Most of the sweeping statements he makes have absolutely no backing beyond what he’s piecing together from old and irrelevant interviews (when discussing the Netflix translation) as well as...linking Kanemitsu’s job history...I mean, sure, the guy is qualified, but do I really need to go over this again?

INTERMISSION: Speaking of sources, you might have noticed from perusing these articles yourself that EvaGeeks has a very low standard for sourcing to begin with, which is likely partially to blame for how things like these articles can even exist in their current forms in the first place. A site that doesn’t have such a lenient policy on sourcing, though, is Wikipedia. Felipe, of course, cannot stay within the confines of the fandom and has decided to have a go at providing some information to Kaworu’s actual Wikipedia page as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kaworu_Nagisa&action=history Felipe is far less to blame for the state of Kaworu’s Wikipedia article, which is honestly pretty bad to begin with. There have been plenty of other people editing this one and the rather homophobic “Relationship with Shinji” part of the article has been present for a while before he started editing it. (The fact this article literally uses someone being explicitly homophobic as a source is not surprising for Eva fandom, but holy shit, am I disgusted every time I reopen this page. I'm not even going to bother figuring out who added that one.) I do wonder if his reasons for not desecrating this page the same way he has on EvaGeeks is because he knows it wouldn’t stay up for particularly long. Reminder that he is also the main editor of the same pages on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki, which is essentially a copy and paste of EvaGeeks. Of note is this little tidbit I found:

This is what Felipe then deleted, as this is apparently not relevant, despite literally being about Kaworu’s relationship with Shinji. I mean, I’m sure this could have been put in somewhere else and perhaps phrased a bit better, but why the hell would you outright delete that kind of information? It’s supposed to be a wiki, not your own personal opinion chamber. BTW, this is the thread post he links as a rebuttal to that person adding it, and it’s probably for the best it’s presented here with context: https://forum.evageeks.org/post/886380/NGE-Ep24-Script-First-and-Second-Drafts/#886380

He clearly thinks he has a point here, but I’m not sure what exactly he’s going for. Basically everything he’s saying is conjecture, and while I can kinda see where he’s coming from it sure does completely fail to address the intent as explained in this interview. “Read the whole interview” is very dismissive, especially when the interview in full doesn’t exactly contradict the initial point. It does say quite a bit, how he will disregard official information when his wiki articles themselves are full of nothing but rambling.

Here’s another relevant and quite funny Discord screenshot:

Felipe is making a pretty hypocritical statement here. I’m sure he does have a point - there’s probably been quite a bit of vandalism happening to these pages which isn’t exactly surprising (again, Eva fans are not often rational people, please be honest with ourselves). That being said, I think there’s a particular irony to the man who has written many very, very long paragraphs on the wiki pages he has control over trying to stop people from thinking there might be anything but “ambiguity” between a pair he doesn’t like.

In the case anyone reading has forgotten: the purpose of a wiki should be to provide unbiased information on the material it discusses. Obviously the repeating of “innocuous” statements about how “ambiguous” it all is, in the vain of EG’s now made fun of ‘we don’t know what he really meant by that’ and ‘why Kaworu is so intent for Shinji alone to have happiness remains a mystery’  are pretty obviously intended to downplay the very, very obvious “subtext” and leagues of official information provided.

It kinda goes without saying that WE CAN INFER THESE THINGS FROM THE ACTUAL INFORMATION ON THE WIKI, you don’t need to add a disclaimer to everything going “well we just don’t know what it means!” (even in instances when we do know what it means, but that’s almost besides the point). You don’t need to add in these statements, unless you’re trying to sway people into ignoring what's presented by the show. If you want people to draw their own conclusions, you are in fact capable of presenting information without commentary - in fact, that's kind of the whole point of a wiki. Yes, Eva is ambiguous at times, but talking down to people like they need this reminded to them constantly is an absolute waste of time and energy. It’s almost as if the editor has been trying to cultivate a narrative and has been getting away with it because you can’t really prove these statements are biased unless you do the research. (I mean, you can from context, but it certainly hasn’t done much to get them removed, has it?)

You can view the editing history of any given EvaGeeks article on their own pages if you want to see just how many times these things have been added in by Felipe. And obviously, no, it isn’t just his fault - there are other users, several, in fact, credited with the editing of these pages, many of the edits serving the same point as Felipe’s paragraphs on “ambiguity”. He’s just the most concrete example of a biased editor. Also, yes, I do recognise this has all happened within the few days post the release of Eva on Netflix and that it was likely prompted by that. But we know at least one of the mods is aware of it given how Felipe talks about it in the EvaGeeks Discord server. It’s also quite funny I’ve seen people linking these pages like they're some kind of "gotcha" in response to tweets discussing the new translation, as if they haven’t been invented out of thin air in the past few days.

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Now, frankly I’m sick of staring at EvaGeeks, and if you want any more information on these articles and others with instances of the same thing happening, you can have a look at it yourself.

Originally, this document contained far more screenshots from Felipe. My desire for this to not turn into a hit piece has lead me to remove a great deal of these messages. I do suggest, if you want to, you join the server and make your own conclusions. Even beyond what the member told me about I found myself agreeing with him fairly frequently when he was being reasonable - this doesn't change my concerns regarding the presentation of information on the wiki, though. The anonymous member was mostly concerned about this user having basically all the control over Kaworu's wiki articles, seeing as he has far too high of a stake in everything. Not all of these messages are inflammatory or even necessarily bad or wrong, but I find that to anyone privy to the “revelations” about the EvaGeeks Wiki here, they paint an interesting story, to say the least.

It’s starting to sound like he perhaps has just had some bad experiences. The following few messages are part of the same conversation.

I find it interesting how he flipflops from not understanding anything about the whole Eva Parallelism Theory Thing to suddenly being all for it when it concerns things not about the gay stuff.

Comments on how ‘manipulative’ Kaworu is

Because Kaworu is very pro instrumentality, and this definitely isn’t just a theory, I mean, it’s even talked about on the wiki, guys! (And I’m not even touching on the yes-men in this server.) Oh.

Oh no.

For the record, this page is clearly still under construction, and to point out any one thing about how bad it is would be essentially just poking a stick at a beehive. At least this one is so absolutely poorly phrased it’s doubtful anyone could mistake it for any kind of proper information. I also find it incredibly funny whenever pages on the wiki use the forum as a source. Relevant: Qmisato’s post on his defending of Shinji sexually assaulting Asuka: https://qmisato.tumblr.com/post/183082754484/yesterday-i-was-invited-to-evageeks-official

In response much later. I really can’t see it as being framed as “fun teenage romance”, also why is the word romance suddenly being used to talk about Asuka and Shinji after the whole debacle with Kaworu? He’s said before he doesn’t see Asuka and Shinji’s relationship as romantic, either (and GOOD! It’s not!)

(Also - it’s not sexual assault when Shinji tries to kiss Asuka in her sleep, but it IS when Kaworu does the exact same thing to Shinji? Make up your mind, dude.) Turning this sort of thing into Shipping Discourse is frankly not the right way to go about it, but it is perhaps notable that despite what Felipe says, he is in fact an Asushin shipper. (I don’t feel the need to post all these images in the document as its cluttered enough as it is.) At this point it’s rather adhom and I feel irrelevant but I do think it’s relevant that through all of Eva fandom, those who have the most issue “understanding” (more like accepting, I suppose) LGB subtext, are those who also are really attached to a fairly morally grey het pairing themselves. Again, seriously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this and assuming the worst of someone because of the pairings they like isn’t my intent here, it’s more that I find this pattern has always been prevalent and it’s bothering me I’m seeing it STILL in 2019. ESPECIALLY from a wiki editor who inserts so much of that into his work on the site. 

  You’re probably sick of reading all of this (and I’m getting sick of writing it), so I’ll wrap up the part on Felipe quickly: Yes, I just dedicated several pages to screenshots of mostly innocuous (when considered out of context) stuff one guy had to say. I feel more obsessive than I’d like to admit, and frankly I have no business with this person. We’ve spoken twice on EvaGeeks threads if you can even call it speaking. This task was given to me by a member of the community who was concerned about his behaviour but didn’t want to publicise it themself and I feel a little out of my depth here. I at least hope we can come to the conclusion I wanted to here, that I fear may have been lost in this whole great mess of language - no one person should have THIS much sway over the state of a wiki that’s supposed to be impartial, especially when they have not been quiet with their biases in the first place, and it is the failure of everyone involved in the maintaining of the wiki itself that this sort of behaviour has been allowed in the first place. 

The guy can have whatever opinions and theories he wants, obviously. I don't give a shit; he's not even that bad compared to the grand majority of Eva fans to begin with. Don't think this document exists to "cancel" him or thoughtpolice, I truly, genuinely, do not care what is said inside this server anymore. It doesn't concern me. I mean, it's a fucking cartoon, for god's sake. This only becomes an issue when opinions are expressed on a wiki, for reasons I have reiterated many times now. EvaGeeks lacks the objectivity required to function as a wiki and I'm trying to make that clear. 

[ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI AND COMMUNITY IN GENERAL] As for who can edit the wiki and what they’re allowed to say: As you can see from the nature of people’s posts in this thread, you’re given access to do very specific things, and although I haven’t bothered going through the process myself (as I find it would be quite redundant, trying to fix such an inherently broken system), I’m guessing it’s very easy to get your edits reversed if you post anything they don’t like. Take that as conjecture of my own.

I have it in decent faith that the approval process involves whoever of the mod team is there at the time coming to an agreement based on people’s applications. Obviously this is a decent idea for a system, and I’m sure there are legitimate reasons as to why EG has to be locked down as much as it is; judging from the state of other fanon wikis I’ve seen there’s likely to be a decent amount of vandalism, especially in a fandom as passionate as Eva’s is. However, I think it’s fair to say that the complete restriction of updating these pages to those approved by a mod team who, while I’m sure are very reasonable people overall, certain individuals of which have displayed concerning behaviour and biases of their own in the server during my brief look around. I won’t be naming anyone in particular from the mod team as I don’t feel like I need to add any more targets of shame to this already horrifically negative document, but I have gotten the general impression (in case it needed confirmation, following the remaining of these specific changes on the wiki) that some mods, not all, aren’t the most nonpartisan individuals themselves. I do happen to be decent acquaintances with at least one of them so, again, please don’t consider this a personal attack.

My concern here plainly is that I don’t think a group of mods who have routinely failed to prevent events like the ones mentioned earlier, nor seem to have much of an issue with the myriad of examples of people being openly homophobic and misogynistic on their own forum are really in the position to be choosing who of the Privelleged Few get to control the Eva meta-narrative here. As I was writing this, I was alerted to the state of the primary Japanese Evangelion wiki as a source of cross referencing for what these things can look like if done right. If you take a moment to browse it, even if you don’t speak any Japanese and have to use an automatic translator it should be very obvious how something like this differs greatly from EvaGeeks. Kaworu’s page, for a relevant example, doesn’t have present any of the nonsense statements about ambiguity or overwritten descriptions of everything. The wiki respects the reader’s intelligence enough to know that it is, in fact, a wiki, and thus tries its best to be factual. His page is fairly decent in size and states things we know are fact rather than theory. There’s no attempt made to influence or confuse.

Oh, and just in case you think the mods aren’t actually active or present enough to know what Felipe is doing, his particularly awful page on Kaworu in episode 24 got a shoutout from the official Twitter account two days ago.  

If you are going to join the Discord server to verify things yourself* or do further digging, again, please be cautious of other users inside and do your best not to start anything. I am an occasional contributor to the forums and I’d prefer not to get my account flagged or to experience harassment myself, if any EvaGeeks members are still reading this document and disagree with my conclusions. I may not have posted much since I joined earlier this year, but despite everything I find the forums to be valuable for connecting with other fans and have enjoyed the positive feedback to my SIRP translation! Those who have spoken to me there have been very kind (including Felipe himself), and I must reiterate that this is not targeted at the whole site, or even at just Felipe. I simply believe there is more than enough evidence to suggest there have been consistent, systematic failures to recognise and correct the utter lack of objectivity present. I seriously don’t have any personal issues or beef with this guy, either. I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t someone else who came to me about it.

*It should be noted that the person who spoke to me has pointed out certain members have been concerned about outsiders joining and screenshotting the chat. They may remove the public link to join if this document were to cause a huge issue. I will leave the server following the publication of this document and I have no plans to join again. I can’t speak for those who may join of their own accord but I do hope people have heeded the disclaimer I made initially.

Thankyou to all the people who have extended their own kindness and support during the creation of this document, to the anonymous person who tipped me off and the lovely Eva analysts I know for offering their own experiences with EvaGeeks and further supplementary information. If this whole document reads like the product of a bad mental health day, I guess it is. Also yes I know how hilarious it is that I’ve spent all this time creating what essentially amounts to an EVAGEEKS CALLOUT POST but I mean. Someone had to say it. Why not make an utter buffoon of myself in the process?