#I just saw a post on Twitter about the feeling of not having teenage romantic interaction and how it leaves you feeling really wrong

[mymelodyisme]

Okay I know I don’t shut up about it but let me scream okay 😭

[sigmasemen]

YOUR BEAUTY IS SIMPLE.

chigiri hyoma x reader tags: fluff, gossiping, girl talk, cutesy relationships, flustered reader, established relationship, short.

taglist: n/a currently.

characters: chigiri hyoma, hyoma’s sister, reader, (non romantic) mentions of isagi yoichi, chris prince, reo mikage, nagi seishiro, rensuke kunigami, meguru bachira.

word count: 625

extra: FINAL REPOST FROM A TWITTER THREAD. technically i’m also gonna make a kaiser one but that isn’t posted yet!! wish this was longer but im lazy + i get to post the rest of my fics soon since i’ll have enough backlogged !!

many people assume that when you started dating chigiri, he would automatically care for your skincare and routine constantly. everyone assumed he would be making sure you’re taken care of always.

it was… partially true.

sure, he did care about taking care of you. he’d comb his fingers through your hair slowly before you two fell asleep. he would brush your hair and help you out of bed in the mornings you weren’t feeling the best.

it wasn’t as major as people made it out to be. it wasn’t constant. he did it when you two were both open.

what was becoming a constant was his big sister doing your nails every weekend. you’d come over an hour early for chigiri, then get stopped by her when she saw you walk in. 

the conversations ranged from your day, to a childhood memory, to her skin care routine, it just mattered on how you two were feeling. but on this day, the conversation had trailed off into chigiri.

since he had been away from his sister for a while because of soccer, you were there to give her all the updates.

“oh! and he made friends with this guy named yoichi isagi.”

“oh… the black haired undercut? i see why! he’s so, so sweet, isn’t he?” her shrill voice made you briefly stiffen.

“he’s very sweet! they get along well, along with reo, nagi, bachira, kunigami, the… british coach guy? hyoma has had an easier time making friends with people.”

“maybe manipulating teenagers into thinking they have to only care about themselves makes them clingy towards people with very similar experiences?”

it seemed about right… “why are you thinking about it like that?”

“i’m just happy my brother doesn’t only have some freaky guys talking about ego in his ear… that facility annoyed me,” she brushed her fingers against your collarbone, “besides, he’s always talking about you.”

you knew she saw your little twitch as her lips curved into a smile, “mhm, always. it’s like all he thinks about is you!”

you didn’t care, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter, it isn’t important, why would it matter? “what does he say?” fuck.

“oh… y’know,” she was dragging this out, “he mentioned that he wanted to take you on a date this friday. like a little surprise. he had a rose and everything on order…”

“oh! yeah… cool.” 

…

it was impossible to remain casual. “what else?”

the words of his sister continued to fuel your ego more and more. it shouldn’t have made your heart feel this warm for your cold-hearted princess of a boyfriend to be secretly saying this cute stuff about you, but it did. it made you want to burst out into tears and run into his arms.

the entire time she spoke, your leg bounced as a tick to show joy. your hands fooled around with each other as a mechanism to calm down. it wasn’t that these worked, but it was worth a shot.

“then he grabbed a bonsai plant, which he said he hated, and wanted to give you it because it reminded him of you! he carried it around the entire store and—”

the click of a lock shot both of your head straight to the door. chigiri. you swung your body to be facing the window instead of him. though you couldn’t see it, a light was pulled from his eyes briefly.

“hm. how are you two?”

you willingly ignored the conversation you had been having previously in a feeble attempt to suppress your feelings. you were just focused on calming that blush on your face. the stupid blush your boyfriend didn’t even know he caused… you hoped to give him the same sort of embarrassment one day.

[babiebom]

Heyy it's me again, lol. Ur criminal minds hcs for Reid were so good!! Thank u for blessing me. 🙌🏻 I was wondering if ud be down to write maybe a one-shot or a drabble of Reid comforting a reader (I almost wrote reider bc I spaced out and like akjsldj) who just had friends leave them when they thought they were really close? I hope that's not too specific!! Thank you sm for blessing the world with ur writing. It literally makes my day so much brighter whenever you post. 🥰

A/N: CUTE!! Reider would be a really cute fandom name for him ngl. Also I’ve fallen out of contact with friends that I thought were gonna be in it for the long run with me but unfortunately it just didn’t work out that way even if we didn’t fall out. ALSO specifics are great with me because then it’s clear what I need to write and what you want me to write so don’t apologize!! Can you tell I don’t know how to comfort anyone?

Tw: some cursing, some abandonment issues, mentions of bullying within the friend group. Isolation, ghosting. Lmk if there’s something I should tag!

Genre: angst, one shot, some fluff

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader (can be read platonically or romantically in think. Also can be read as gender neutral maybe?) if I added pronouns or descriptors let me know!!

Wc:1.3k

Criminal Minds Masterlist

It’s strange when you break up with a friend, even more so when the reason that you breakup is something stupid, something avoidable. It hurts even more when you get abandoned, ghosted by someone you thought would be in your life for the rest of it. No one ever prepares you for friendships ending. You get prepared for romantic relationships, death, and maybe sometimes you drift apart from friends but even then you’re prepared.

You stare at the group chat that had defined your childhood and teenage years. Stare at the names followed by “has left the chat” with a feeling in your heart that is only rivaled by death of a loved one if you remembered correctly. It had been a while.

It was a petty argument that only lasted a day, something about how everyone treated you. You regretted bringing it up on the first day that you had been ignored after sending a message. That day turned into a week which turned into them all leaving the group chat without telling you which hurt more than being kicked out of it. Did you really mean that little that they would ghost you that easily?

You never started arguments usually. You never even participated in them, trying to stay neutral in order to keep everyone happy. Always passive and agreeable and everyone liked you that way. The one time you have something to get off your chest…maybe you shouldn’t have said anything.

You tried to message one of your friends first, you hadn’t known her as long as some of the others in the group, but she was always sweet and didn’t seem like the type to ghost.

You 5:43 pm: Irene what happened? I saw you all left the group chat. Is something wrong?

You don’t get an answer back for an hour. And it makes your heart squeeze in your chest. It isn’t really an answer, but at the same time it answered both of your questions. To her you didn’t really matter all that much and something was really wrong.

Irene 7:01 pm: just leave me alone. You said what you needed to say, if you message me again I’ll block you.

You try again with a different friend. One you have known a little longer. One who had complained to you and confided in you and one that you thought you were close to than this.

He doesn’t answer at all, and neither do the other two that you message. Eventually you figure out that your messages never sent because you had been blocked. Going to their instagrams and twitters, everything is gone as soon as you click on them. Even their TikTok’s have nothing for you to look at.

Soon enough you’re fighting off tears, your chest tight and your stomach swirling. Was speaking up for yourself really worth this? Your head spins and your vision becomes blurry as you click on the last contact that’s available to you.

Your best friend. Having known her for the longest time out of all of them, you’d think she’d say something before doing something like this. You two met in elementary school, and were friends before the group got together. If you think about it more your friendship reminded you of the one in Jennifer’s Body. Except instead of saving everyone, you were being ignored and abandoned by the person you thought was going to be there even if everyone else wouldn’t. The person that you thought you could rely on.

But before you could message her, one came straight to you. The bubbles popping up as she’s typing something else. You can’t really understand the first paragraph, your mind to overwhelmed by the weeks events to be able to read.

Emilie 7:42 pm: I just wanted to message you before you tried anything with me. I’m honestly not interested in talking to you anymore after how you talked to me and my friends. None of us want you in the group anymore, and honestly it’s fucking pathetic that you’re reaching out and asking if anything is wrong when you’re the reason everyone was upset in the first place. Like you said we were shit friends, and now you wanna act like everything confuses you? If we were so shitty to you, why do you want us to still talk to you? I told Jacob, Josh, Irene, and Paisley to block you if you message them because honestly they don’t need you to try to beg and plead with them. You’re toxic and we’re done with you. Honestly, you look pathetic and desperate for attention messaging all of us like this. I’m not even gonna bother blocking you because it doesn’t really matter that much to me and maybe in the future I could be open to being friends again but for right now, I’m over it. Bye. You should do better.

Now the tears fall down your face, hot and burning as they trail down your cheeks and onto the screen of your phone. Going onto instagram to doom scroll your feelings away, you are immediately met with a photo of your friend group hanging out without you. Taken aback, you try to bring yourself to unfollow Emilie, to block her and effectively cut her out of your life while your wounds are fresh and your friendship is newly ended so you don’t have to torture yourself. But that’s exactly what you do, torture yourself. Instead of unfollowing her, deleting all of the pictures of her and your friend group from your feed, you scroll through them, the tears falling faster the longer you sit there and reminisce. You don’t even hear the front door open and close, and the only reason you know it did is because of the weight that causes you to lean towards the new person in the bed. Warmth blankets around you, the feeling of arms wrapped around your body brings you out of your mind.

Turning to look at the man next to you, you see that Spencer is looking at you as if you’re a wounded animal and it makes you burst out into tears. Maybe you really did look pathetic. “Oh no…what happened?”

You tried to explain, but couldn’t properly while you were blubbering. Instead you just throw your phone to him and let your head fall into your hands. He takes a literal second to read, then lets out a gust of air that usually meant he was surprised and didn’t know what to say.

He moves to hug you again, resting his head on top of yours. “You know…they say that it takes 200 hours to form a close friendship with someone. And when that friendship ends unexpectedly, it can cause a multitude of issues in the future with how you trust and open up to people…”

His ramblings weren’t all that comforting, but just hearing him speak made you start to feel better. Of course he would attempt to make things better by spouting facts that one hundred percent would make anyone else annoyed at him. You snuggle into his arms, nodding your head to show that you’re listening in between sobs. “S-so how long until I s-stop feeling like my h-heart is broken?” You ask. It did somehow feel like being broken up with, or having someone die.

“Well, most grief experts think that a year is a good estimate on how long it takes to get used to the loss of someone major in your life…”

“A year?” You whine, letting your head tilt backwards dramatically. “That’s too long!” It’s kind of a joke, the way you say it. But the way he looks at you lets you know that he knows you’re being somewhat serious.

“She was your best friend…of course it’s going to take some time to get used to not talking to her…however long you take to grieve is how long it’s going to take. It’s not a complete science.”

You nod, and hide your face in his chest. While you still felt like the Earth was ending, maybe it’s not ending right this second anymore.

[lcndonboysstuff]

Tbh I feel sorry for Taylor. It must be and feel very lonely up there where she is, at peak stardom, in celebrity hyper heaven. She has no family around, her mom lives in Tennessee, her father in Florida, I think her brother in LA? She can trust very few people because she must suspect and rightfully so that everyone wants something from her. She's mostly in New York alone with her cats, sure she's friends but they have careers and families/Xfriends of their own, they can go out with her to dinner, once in a while, but they've their own lives to live. She can go out every night with different friends but at the end of those nights she comes back to a house where nobody is waiting for her, excepts the cats. She had one true thing, a life with someone for six years, a someone who just lived her and wanted nothing from her except her, in a city where his family and friends lived nearby and could be reached anytime, they all spent time together constantly. Life in Europe is less alienating than life in the US also because of the different sizes of the Countries and mental attitudes IMO. But she felt it was too cagey for her, it looks like that feeling was mostly caused by Joe's difficulties, some she couldn't deal with and it's understandable because she's not the proper person to deal with stuff like that. She's been a child star, more used to be adored and supported than vice versa, I think she tried but she didn't have the right tools to face it, and the fact that she doesn't think she needs help in getting those tools is an obstacle to real growth in that direction. Also she has this idea, weird for a child of divorced parents, that love isn't love if it's not a thrill, possibly a secret thrill.l, love must be exciting and surprising and make your heart blows forever and ever. But that's a childhood idea, it's a love without growth and progress, love changes as we do. She might have sung and written about placid, quiet love and fighting each other's wars that sometimes means fighting only his wars but I don't think she really got what that's like, she probably just loved the romantic idea of it. So, feeling like her the current situation was too much, she wanted to leave but where do you run to, to a place empty and where the only presence is you and the ghosts of your thoughts? So enter her sudden wild uncontrollable passion for Matty, which was lived with an abandon unworthy of a 33 year old wise woman (reminded me more of the life of divas like Liz Taylor with her multiple husbands, again a child raised to fame) and more of a teenager's feelings, and the ridiculously amount of currently released thoughts/words spent for someone that might have been chasing and love bombed her for months but was really in her life for what, 3/4 weeks? And then the pain of the abandonment spent in a lonely house between concerts, going out to dinner every night again, surrounding herself with girlfriends on July 4 but always, always, ending up alone. Enter Travis. And I hope for her this is the real thing but the way it started, the way she jumped into it while being what, months away from her longest relationship breakup and weeks away from her he's the real love of my love obsession manic episode, makes me believe that if it happens it would be fir pure luck. And luck is an ungrateful and petty queen. It's very lonely being a 30/35 year old single woman in America, it must be even more lonely being her.

sometimes i feel sorry for her but recently i’m finding it very hard to, she brings a lot of it on herself. not wanting you’re dating life to be a spectacle and then liking instagram posts ranking all your exes? like who does that.

i do think she’s lonely and has difficulty not being in a relationship. that’s why she quickly jumps into things till she finds something that longer lasting: calvin-tom-joe in 2016 and joe-matty-travis last year.

you hoping it’s the real thing reminds me of something i saw on twitter yesterday. it was a swiftie being like “thankfully she has travis after this” and another swiftie being like how can you confidently say that when she always seems happy and then she’ll come out later and tell you she wasn’t happy at all. and i agree i don’t think you can ever confidently say she’s happy and she’s found “the one” you just have to wait and see

[dearest-painter]

So sorry to bother you, but I saw someone in a previous ask recommend you to check out Namy Gaga's FNAF AU and her other artworks.

As someone who was a former fan of that AU, over the past year or so of doing some research, I discovered that she has done (and CONTINUES to do) terrible things - and is overall an incredibly volatile (and in some cases, dangerous) person. I am so sorry if this is the first time you've heard about this, but I thought I'd give you a heads-up just in case you weren't aware.

I highly recommend you check out the four videos Biotex Racoon made on Youtube about her (which bring up a lot of concerns backed up by credible evidence - even if they don't mention everything), but I'll give you a short (ish?) summary below of the more egregious things Namy has done over the 10+ years of her time on the internet.

Content warning for mentions of abusive relationships, inappropriate NSFW artwork, online harassment (including but not limited to victim-blaming), and transphobia and other forms of queerphobia.

Summary:

She dated not one, but two teenagers (both of whom were 16-17 while she was in her early 20s - one in 2019-2020 and the other in 2020-2021).

Evidence (some of which was self-admitted by Namy herself) revealed that she was defending (and continues to defend) these past relationships by lying about Mexican laws.

Testimonies from the victims themselves (alongside other evidence) suggest that Namy was emotionally-manipulative, and in the case of one of these victims, sexually-abusive and coercive.

After one of those victims cut ties with Namy, she allegedly continued to be a creep, especially in her comments on the victim's Facebook posts. In response, the victim put a lawsuit out against Namy (yet to be resolved).

In response to the lawsuit, Namy incited her fanbase to harass said victim via her spreading misinformation, releasing an awful google drive to paint herself as innocent (when in reality, it ended up revealing more information about that specific relationship and turned into a thinly-veiled attempt to victim-blame).

On top of that, she continues to lie about and blame her victims.

She has a long history of creating NSFW condoning/glorifying incest and the sexualisation of teenagers/children (which was posted on her Baraag, SubscribeStar and Rule 34 - and at one point promoted on her twitter).

In 2018 (?), Namy has harassed other FNAF AU creators (Ed00chan), bragging about how her AU is better than theirs. At one point, she made a harassment art piece claiming her and other artists' AUs are better - essentially dragging those who most likely never agreed with her beliefs/actions (e.g. Kosperry).

She has used her lesbian identity as a shield against genuine criticism multiple times.

Despite being within the LGBTQ+ community, she has had a history of saying queerphobic things. For example, saying that "As long as a character may be able to feel love, they have the right to have a partner", ignoring (or worse dismissing) the fact that ace, aro and other a-spec folk can have both sexual and romantic relationships.

Despite having dated bisexual people in the past and having bisexual characters in her FNAF AU, she made a incest joke about one character and her adoptive mothers, and paired another's trauma and bisexuality with her incestuous relationship with her adoptive mother (both in her FNAF AU btw).

There is also the 2018 comic she made gatekeeping LGBTQ+ experiences (i.e. according to her logic, understanding your sexuality/gender is a 'decision' and that this advice is 'the most correct'), which she has failed to address to this day and which is still on her DeviantArt. All of this was said when she was an adult, mind you.

Namy has also been called out for transphobic remarks. When she was 17, she made a tweet arguing against gender-affirming surgery, telling trans/gender-diverse people who have had surgery to get a refund and calling them the latin Spanish equivalent of the f-slur.

Later on as an adult, she allegedly called trans women "dude women" a few times as a joke, caused a whole controversy involving her using an outdated lesbian flag for one of her FNAF AU characters (its the lipstick lesbian one - all other lesbian characters in her AU had the current flag) that may or may not have been a premeditated choice, and most recently tagged NSFW fanart of a trans woman (Poppy Partridge from Welcome Home) as 'futanari' (a hentai term that has been heavily criticised for carrying transphobic/fetishising sentiments as well as some of its definitions using 'hermaphrodite' (considered derogatory against intersex people)).

While there are certain things that one could use to argue that she has grown from this (e.g. once calling out someone who was being rude about her Funtime Foxy being non-binary), this stuff does raise some red flags.

Oh my goodness thank you! I did not know this as I forgot about that ask and have never checked out the AU but thank you for informing this!

[jimblejamblewritings]

little situation | part 28.

Summary: For years, HYDRA had been trying to use the samples of Steve’s DNA to make another super-soldier. They finally succeed and when S.H.I.E.L.D. breaks her out, Cap is forced to come face to face with his kid and figure out parenting on an Avengers’ lifestyle.

Warnings: maybe potential childhood trauma but nothing really

Pairing: Steve Rogers x blackdaughter!reader, avengers x child!reader, peter parker x black!reader

Word Count: 7.5k

Previous Part | (Series Masterlist) 

The Summer of Sarah Rogers:

The PR team successfully convinced Sam and Steve to let you get Twitter, just Twitter— Steve said you had to choose between Twitter and Instagram but not both. Because everyone on the team had Twitter but not everyone had Instagram, you ended up choosing the former. So far there wasn’t much on it, mainly pictures of you and Shuri from your trip to Wakanda. And to T’Challa’s detriment, you being allowed to have Twitter suddenly made Shuri feel the need to get one and Ramonda didn’t care so T’Challa being messed with by his younger sister and her friend was all over the Internet.

You were smart and knew not to show anything that revealed his Black Panther status since the world only knew that Wakanda was actually technologically advanced. You two also never went too far because T’Challa was still a world leader— however Shuri claimed the videos of her messing with him made him more personable, built him up like the people’s king. He saw right through that lie but didn’t say anything and just accepted his fate.

The interactions between you and the rest of the team were the public’s favorite and the PR team definitely encouraged it— you weren’t even sure if PR was necessary anymore considering everyone loved S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers but Tony assured you it was always smart to have them on deck. Anytime it was you, Steve, Sam, or Bucky interacting it had been dubbed the Star-Spangled Fam. And while you didn’t post anything officially or acknowledge people’s questions, the public noticed you and Peter’s replies on each other’s tweets.

It took all of three days from one person noticing you liking three of Peter’s tweets in a row for them to do some digging and see he was the same kid from the pictures at the juice bar. After that you started including him in the pictures you had instead of only Ned and MJ but you still didn’t say anything.

You were in the car with Steve and Tony while scrolling through your feed. You were being dropped off at an event at the Children’s Hospital while Steve and Tony were being taken to the UN meeting discussing the possibility of creating an official global Avengers Initiative program in attempts to find geniuses like you, Tony, and Bruce or enhanced like Steve, Pietro, and Wanda or just general badasses like Nat, Sam, and Clint. Even though you were going to the Children’s Hospital officially as Gemstone, the PR team had you dressed as Darling.

Normally you were all for the cutesy fashion but even this felt like slight overkill. It was a monochrome red look— they would’ve gone with blue since Steve’s stealth suit was a fan favorite but thought it’d be ironic because of your colorblindness and irony wasn’t the mood they were going for. The red bordered being more pink especially when it came to the large reddish pink hair clips and the tinted lip gloss they put on you.

“You’re staring awfully hard at that phone,” Tony commented.

“Hmm?”

“She’s not even listening.”

You finally looked up to see him and Steve staring back at you.

“Sorry, did you say something?”

“You’re really in the teenager stage now, I said you’re staring hard at that phone. Does it involve Spiderling?”

“Not everything is about Peter… yes. I like this picture.”

You turned your phone to show Tony and Steve a picture of you and Peter hugging, him kissing the side of your head. Steve wanted to gag even if he wouldn’t say it. So he just nodded when Tony said it was cute.

“But it looks too romantic, I don’t think I can post it. But I like it.”

“You know you two don’t have to be quiet about it.”

“I know but he’s trying so hard to not be in the limelight as Spider-man, I don’t think being in it as my boyfriend is any better.”

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“No.”

Tony sighed and then turned to Steve. “You and your child have a serious overthinking problem and astonishingly large gap in communication skills. GI, here’s a suggestion, talk with Peter about it.”

You nodded and hopped out the car since the hospital was the closer stop.

“Her having a boyfriend is not something I think I can get used to.”

“Welcome to no longer being the number one man in her life.” Tony clapped Steve on the shoulder.

“Tony.”

“Hmm?”

“Not funny.”

~~

“Family Meeting!” You yelled into the house.

Bucky and Sam walked in, confused. Steve was rubbing the sleep out of his eyes since you disturbed his nap. You waited till all three of them were sitting down on the couch and looking at you.

“I think Dad should change his uniform. He needs a star on it like the rest of us. Since Uncle Jamie’s is on his left arm, mine is on the back, and Dheaidí’s is the chest I think you should put it on your right arm. It’ll be like a connected path.”

“I like it,” Steve said through a yawn.

“Of course you like it.” Sam gave Steve a kiss but agreed to the uniform addition.

You smiled and walked out satisfied.

~~

Summer meant protective styling. But you also were changing up your hair because it was too hot to be doing it constantly, yesterday having to do it for the hospital visit confirmed that. You were doing single braids with no extensions now that your hair had gotten longer. Sam had the products set up on the couch in the apartment living room— you guys would’ve taken the common room but Nat had already set up and both of you decided against disturbing her.

“National Geographic?” Sam asked as you set down the remote.

“I like nature documentaries. I’m not all science, Dad.”

“Okay, Sarah,” Sam said in the same funny, partially whiney, tone that you did.

Sam had just finished detangling your hair and separating it into four large sections when your phone rang. The screen flashed to a picture of Peter pulling the ugliest face, making Sam chuckle a bit when he saw it. You answered and put it on speaker.

“Hello, Peter Parker.”

“Hey. They just opened up a new roller rink near Midtown last week, you wanna come? I’ll be at the compound in a few minutes.”

“Dad’s doing my hair.”

“Oh, cool. I’ll just come up.”

You and Sam laughed.

“He’s braiding it. Five-ish hours.”

“Five?! What… can I still come over?”

“If you want, I mean you have a room here anyway.”

“But I’m coming to see you.”

You felt flustered and didn’t know what to say with your dad in the room so you made a little noise of agreement and hung up on him. It was only maybe ten minutes late that Peter came strolling into the apartment, saying hi to Sam while taking off his shoes at the door. Peter sat down next to you, shoulders touching. Sam bit back the urge to laugh or comment, you two were so quiet now that he was there— as if he and Steve didn’t hear the way you two could talk each other’s ears off when alone.

“Do you want to still go when my hair’s done?”

“It’s usually pretty packed at that point.”

“Someone might see, well maybe tomorrow?”

Peter nodded. At some point he got more comfortable with Sam being there and slumped a little more next to you. By hour three, he didn’t care anymore and fully laid down. Peter’s head was in your lap as Sam continued to do your hair. Once you were done, you and Peter decided to just have a date in your room instead since the roller rink was going to be crowded now.

“Door open,” Sam said as you walked off.

“I know,” you groaned, exasperated. It was more of a joke between you and Sam.

You had gotten tired of him, Steve, and Bucky constantly telling you guys to keep the door open. Not because of the door itself but the phrase and its reasoning had started to grate on your nerves. So after training one morning as a family, you sat the three men down at the dinner table. They were both relieved and traumatized as you recounted every single time you and Peter had kissed, yet to make out, or hugged or held hands and the two times he had his hand in your back pocket because you guys saw it in Sixteen Candles and thought it was cute. Bucky was the most flustered, not wanting to know the details of his niece’s dating life.

“Besides, if we did start being active, I’d ask you to take me to the clinic to switch to an IUD or the patch.”

Bucky left the room, thanking the heavens that he wasn’t obligated as a parent to still be a part of the conversation. You looked at Sam and Steve who had yet to talk. This wasn’t exactly how they planned to have “the talk” with you.

“I mean I don’t take the pill at the same time every day, who can honestly, and that’s fine now for periods but clearly not the effective method for actual birth control.”

“Well, Babydoll,” Steve said measured. “Thank you for feeling comfortable enough to discuss with us.”

“Mmm hmm…” you pulled out your phone that started to ring. “Ned? Where are you and Pete? Don’t finish it without me!”

Sam and Steve watched you jump from the chair and run into your room to get changed, telling them something about a mechanics project.

After that they stopped saying doors open seriously, but sometimes Sam joked around just to bug you. Peter watched you press a button on your back shower wall that he hadn’t seen before.

“Is that a projector?”

“Yeah, I put it in a couple months ago. So much safer than using my iPad. Sit, I’ll get the stuff.”  

“I always forget that your bathtub is surprisingly comfortable,” Peter said as you came back in.

You handed him the comforter and pillow to start getting comfortable while you lit your favorite candles and turned off the lights. You pulled the comforter over you both once you got in.

“FRIDAY, start the movie please.”

“Of course, Sarah.”

You snuggled up to Peter as much as humanly possible. He could feel your eyes on him for longer than just a couple seconds and looked down at you.

“You’re thinking of something,” he observed.

“I was just… would you mind if we, um, told people about us? Like publicly? I know you don’t want to be as out there like the rest of the team.”

“As Spider-Man. But I don’t mind being your boyfriend, I’m pretty sure they’ve already figured it out anyway.”

“You really don’t mind? You can tell me no.”

“It’s cool with me.”

“Yeah?” You stretched your neck slightly to press a chaste kiss to his lips.

~~

“Where are you three going?” Nat asked from the common room kitchen, making everyone else turn.

You, Thor, and Bruce were dressed to go out. You guys weren’t trying to be sneaky on the way out but you weren’t exactly making your presence known.

“Uncle Thor and Uncle Bruce leave for their mission tomorrow so we’re going out.”

Thor puffed up his chest proudly. “We are taking Little Lady Sarah to Target.”

The entire team straight-faced. Sam spoke up first.

“Target? Like the store… am I missing something?”

“You guys have never taken him to one! It’s like a Midgardian Classic, second to Shake Shack. Ooh, we should go to Shake Shack!”

Thor lifted you up in agreement. The team watched as you, Bruce, and Thor left— clearly Bruce was the driver. They still couldn’t believe what they had just heard, Tony questioning who the hell thought Target was a farewell outing. You got there and each of you grabbed a cart. You proudly displayed Steve’s credit card that you swiped from his wallet.

After seeing the card, Bruce declared he was snitching— Steve just sighed and let it happen. You and Thor set rules, each individual item couldn’t be more than twenty dollars otherwise who knows how expensive the cart could get. Bruce was the official timer, you and Thor had six minutes to put whatever in your cart that you thought the other person would enjoy.

Steve shook his head as you came back with large bags and the milkshake from Shake Shack in your hands. You sheepishly handed him his credit card back, feeling a lot less bold returning it in person— you could’ve used yours but it still had a limit on it since you were a highschooler and you didn’t know how much it would be. As an apology you gave Steve the money back from your account and handed him a shake, slightly melted.

“Once more before I leave?” Thor asked as he held out the Mjolnir.

“No, no, no Thor! Sarah!”

Neither of you listened and Steve watched you once again be pulled rather violently through the air by Mjolnir. Despite your shouts of joy, Steve couldn’t see how you were having a good time at all.

~~

“You know you kind of scare my friends, Uncle Jamie?” you asked as you worked on Bucky’s arm.

Bucky looked at you in a little bit of surprise.

“You scowl a lot.”

That made Bucky laugh because he knew that was true. Scowl was a permanent feature on his face when resting. Anyone that saw him in the comforts of the compound knew otherwise but even his social media didn’t have many smiling pictures so no one else even believed it.

“It’s Ned isn’t it?” Bucky questioned with a hint of amusement in his voice.

“It could be MJ, you don’t know.”

“I’ve met MJ. I know she’s not afraid of me.”

“Just maybe don’t do the arm thing around him.”

You closed the top panel around the shoulder area and moved towards the wiring in the forearm. Any time you worked on his arm, you liked to change the color of the casing around each wire just because. You started to swap out the red ones for yellow, making new notes as to what they connected to and meant.

“I do the arm thing to scare your boyfriend.”

“Yeah, I know. Peter lowkey won’t put his arm anywhere near my waist if you’re in the same room. It’s like a Pavlovian response every time he hears the plates clicking.”

“Perfect.” Bucky smiled, slowly nodding his head.

“That’s not… well it makes Ned almost piss himself every time, can you maybe back off just a little bit?”

“Of course, little doll. I’m not trying to scare your friends.”

“Thank you, Uncle Jamie.” You closed the paneling and you both left the lab.

~~

Per MJ’s request, you, Ned, and Peter found yourself at some coffee shop to listen to the slam poets. MJ wasn’t there really to enjoy the poetry but to watch the people in the audience’s miserable faces whenever a bad poet came on. The shop had those large, vintage fabric armchairs, ottomans, and couches. The four of you had large mugs of coffee drinks— except for Ned who couldn’t get past the taste, even of your sweeter coffee drinks that you chose.

Your head was on MJ’s shoulder instead of Peter since you two chose to share the big armchair and mismatched ottoman. He looked over every so often as you intently watched the stage and MJ intently watched the crowd. Even when the open mic ended and you guys were just walking the streets of New York aimlessly, you were arm in arm with MJ.

“Peter’s sulking!” Ned announced.

“Ned! I’m not…”

“Are you upset I stole your girlfriend?” MJ looked back to where Ned and Peter were a few steps behind.

You smiled and continued walking with MJ until you reached the crosswalk where you switched with Peter.

~~

“You said I could come to you for whatever I can’t tell Dheaidí,” you said as you watched the cows graze in the open field.

“What’s on your mind, kiddo?” Clint asked.

“How do you get a boy to kiss you? Like kiss you kiss you.”

Clint choked. “Um, you just go for it I guess. Do I even want to know where this is coming from?”

“I think Peter’s afraid to kiss me. Only pecks. I mean I like it but I want a kiss, you know?” You stressed the word kiss.

“He’s probably worried you’ll think he’s a bad kisser.”

“But he’s my Peter I won’t thi— what if he thinks I’m a bad kisser?!”

Clint looked at you and then out at the cows. He rang the bell so they could start coming in from the field.

“Yep, that’s enough teenager for this morning,” Clint muttered to himself as he watched the cows come in.

“I can still hear you.”

“Take out the hearing aids and I’ll say it again.”

“Ugh, ru—”

Clint smiled at you as he took out his hearing aids. You both laughed and he threw an arm over your shoulder as you guys walked back to the house where Lila and Cooper had just woken up, ready for breakfast. No one else had come to the farm but you.

You wanted time with the first extended family that ever made you feel welcome. So you were spending a few days at the farm and then Clint was coming with you back to the compound for his actual job. Cooper and Lila finally convinced you to play baseball again, you were absolutely terrified to try at first despite having a handle on your strength.

~~

Pietro and Wanda were not Steve’s kids— more Clint’s— but they were a hundred percent your siblings. Pietro was testing you and Wanda’s powers, seeing if you guys could catch the forks he threw as he threw them a little faster each time. Your detection of vibrations was getting stronger. Ever since learning how to harden certain parts of your body on command, you realized that adding an extra relatively visible layer of diamond on your feet caused you to react to the vibrations quicker. The sound waves bounced off of rock instead of absorbing into soft skin and you heard/felt the echo quicker.

“You think you can pick up if the vibration is me knocking over other sounds?” Pietro asked.

“Sounds like what?” He piqued your interest.

“Like loud music or lots of people talking?”

“Let’s try it. FRIDAY, play loud and Nicki Minaj or Missy Elliott please.”

It was harder with the bass practically radiating through the floor. But you and the twins were enjoying the challenge. Pietro knocked in various styles to try and throw you off, forcing you to really focus on which were his knocks versus the music.

“Ha, I win!” Pietro said as the last fork hit you in the forehead when you turned too slow.

“Only because you knock a fraction of a second slower than you should’ve, cheater.”

“I did no such thing! You’re just slower than the speed of sound.”

“The sound of your knock travels faster than the fork so it’s definitely your fault.”

“Nope, not how it works. You’re just slow.”

“Not how… that is exactly how it works. Wanda?”

You laughed as she lifted her brother into the air. Clint came downstairs to see you two laughing and then looked above him to see Pietro in mild distress and waving at him.

“Uncle Clint, tell Pietro he’s a cheater.”

Clint looked up again. “Uh, Pietro you’re a cheater.”

“You don’t even know what happened.”

“You’re right and I don’t want to.”

He walked over and hi-fived you before getting what he came into the common room for and leaving again. Eventually, Wanda set Pietro down after he promised to cook for you two if she set him down and you admitted he was the winner and didn’t cheat. While the two of you went to the couch, Pietro picked up the fork from the floor.

“Hey, Doll. Think fast.”

You caught it without even looking.

“I’m not—”

“My doll,” Pietro mimicked you. “I know.”

~~

Bucky and Sam had left on a mission separate from Steve who was with Wanda. It was one in the morning when he slipped back into the apartment before he heard the crying. Steve raced to your room, already knowing that was the source of the sound. You didn’t hear him come in, the hearing aids resting on your nightstand— and you were so in your own head, you weren’t straining to hear him or feel the vibrations as Steve entered the room.

He sat down across from you on the bed and when you saw his face, you bit down on your fist and looked away at the curtain drawn window. Steve watched you shake your head. The light from the lamp made the tears rolling down your face glisten. He gently reached for your hand. Noticing the stuffed animal had fallen onto the floor, Steve leaned over and picked it up to place back in your hands. You grabbed a single hearing aid and put it in. When Steve still didn’t speak you looked at him.

What’s wrong, doll? Steve asked.

It’s stupid. Forget it, Dheaidí, just stupid.

You’re crying. Whatever it is isn’t stupid.

You sighed and shook your head. Steve knew you weren’t going to talk, not right away. He told you he’d be right back and you heard the clatter of cabinets and cooking ware. Normally tea was your thing but Steve felt a good old-fashioned hot chocolate was needed.

He came back with the two big mugs, setting yours in your hand and his on the nightstand, before heading to your little vanity. Steve knew where everything was considering he was usually the one you directed to organize things if new packages of whatever you ordered were delivered while you were away on a mission.

“I know this is really you and Buck’s thing but I think I can be a decent substitute,” Steve said as he placed the candle in the candle warmer you recently bought— well Thor picked it up from the Target adventure.

He put on the masks with you and sipped the drinks until it was time to take them off. You cracked a smile when Steve purposely slurped loudly, getting whipped cream on his newly growing in mustache-beard combo. You did the same and then the two of you took a picture that he sent to Sam.

“Babydoll…”

“I thought I was over it.”

“Over what, Sarah?”

“You should be asleep right now Dheaidí. I should wake up and be happy to see you… WHY AM I SO DUMB?”

Steve set down his drink and pulled you close to him. “Woah, woah woah. Babydoll, you’re not dumb. Why would you be dumb for… is this because the mission was longer than I told you?”

“I wanted to prove I’d be fine. You guys don’t always have to call because I’m worried.”

“Sarah, we call because the entire team understands that you—”

“I shouldn’t though! I’m sixteen, I shouldn’t still have separation issues… it’s like HYDRA still controls me, Dheaidí, I just wanted to be strong, like you,” you whispered the last part.

Steve rubbed your shoulder. “You’re sixteen, you don’t have to be strong. Sarah, honey, be honest with me. How many nights have you stayed up crying since I left?”

“After the second day of it running long.”

Steve continued to rub circles on your shoulder. That meant you had been crying for five nights in a row. You had told him that he didn’t have to call— that no one on the team had to call. He had hesitated but you insisted on it because you wanted them to stop feeling obligated to call you, especially because it wasn’t lost on you that sometimes the team would put themselves in less than safe areas or situations in order to be able to call you.

“Call me, okay? If you ever start to get worried about us on a mission, I don’t care what’s going on, you call me.”

You nodded and sniffled. Steve pulled back so he could look at you. Holding your face in both hands, Steve wiped at your tears with his thumbs. He pulled the corners of your mouth into a little smile before he let go.

There’s my sweet girl.

You almost knocked the wind out of Steve as you hugged him tight again.

“I couldn’t stop thinking you weren’t coming back. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t come back.”

“I’m always coming back to you, Babydoll.”

Steve waited until your sobs had turned into a soft snore. He set you back into a good sleeping position, tucking you in, and turned off the lamp. Steve walked out to finally change out of his suit and go to bed himself. It wasn’t the most peaceful sleep. It was too light as if he was listening still in his sleep for any sound of you in distress.

~~

You, Ned, Peter, and MJ were laying out in the front yard of the compound. You guys were having a painting picnic. You had enjoyed the session at the paint studio, having gone back a couple times, but you wanted less of a classroom vibe. The canvases were drying off to the side and the four of you were talking. Ned was going on about a classic movie he had seen.

Peter was leaning back, resting on his hands, while you had your head in his lap. You all laughed when Ned had to backtrack after realizing he forgot a major plot point in his summary for you guys. Peter sat up a little to drum his fingers along your shoulder. His hands lightly brushed your braids before he pulled back.

“Oh, can I touch your hair?” he asked, slightly flustered.

You nodded. “Yeah, Pete. I don’t mind if you want to play with my hair.”

Peter was very gentle with your braids. He enjoyed just moving them around. Towards the end of Ned’s very long summary, he had yet to get to his actual review, Steve had come outside.

“You kids having a good time?”

“Yeah, Dheaidí,” you said at the same time the other three said ‘Yes, Mr. Wilson-Rogers’.

“Where are you going?” You asked, noticing Steve was dressed business casual but had his shield with him.

“Small S.H.I.E.L.D. meeting I need to leave for in a couple minutes but I was told someone wanted to throw the shield?”

Ned’s eyes were the size of dinner plates as Steve handed the shield to him. Steve turned Ned to face the open field and showed him the very basic of how to hold it and throw. He heard you talking to your friends about it one afternoon and didn’t think it would be too much of a bother to let the kid try it once.

Ned’s throw didn’t get very far at all but he thought it was awesome and you guys cheered him on anyway. Steve grabbed his shield from the grass and jogged off to leave for the meeting while Ned now started to go on about the throw.

~~

Sam could feel the waves of insecurity coming off of Steve like heat waves in the desert. He noticed it earlier in the morning when he was redoing a couple of the braids around the perimeter of your head but brushed it off thinking it was because the man just woke up. Then Sam noticed it again when MJ came over that afternoon and you two were in the living room watching Sister, Sister. You were dancing to the theme song while he, Steve, and Bucky were filling out mission reports at the dining room table. Sam jokingly said something to which the two of you replied with the classic: Go away, Roger. Making the three of you laugh and then laugh even harder when you remembered your last name was Rogers.

And then Steve was quiet all dinner, which for him wasn’t normal at all. You had been talking about your visit to your mom’s side of the family and hanging out with Aunt Taylor. You mentioned the cookout and Sam started to tell stories about his own family gatherings over the years. He paused mid-thought.

“We haven’t had one in a couple years, should call up my brother about that. Ooh, they’re gonna run their mouths. ‘You got married, got a kid and still ain’t find it necessary to come see us. I see how it is Samuel.’ That’s my mama by the way, she really sounds like that.”

“We should go!”

“They’re going to fawn over you sweetheart… even though you’re too damn spoiled as it is,” Sam joked.

“You call it spoiled, I call it bougie, Dad.” You flipped your hair, making Sam snort.

“What do you think, babe? We spoil her too much or is she living her best life?”

“Does Dheaidí even know what bougie is?” you laughed.

Steve laughed with the two of you but didn’t engage much in conversation. And he stayed quiet after that and well into the evening until you had gone downstairs because Peter was staying at the compound that week and he and Sam were on the couch.

“Okay, what’s up with you?” Sam finally asked.

“Hmm?”

“You’re moping. You’ve been moping all day.”

Steve ran a hand through his hair before leaning against the couch, not really looking Sam in the eye.

“Am I a good parent?”

“Steve, what? Why would you even ask that?”

“I feel like I’m holding Sarah back. You can relate to her so much and she has Elise’s family now that she connects to… I’m just never going to fully understand her experience and I think I might’ve been, what’s the thing you guys were talking about, white-washing her? Shit, Elise could’ve done so much better than me.”

“Okay, one, take a breather. Two, yeah you’re right, you’ll never fully get what it’s like for her. But you are the best dad she could have. The way you try so hard proves it, you took a day just to drive to DC for her to go to the African American Museum because it was the Smithsonian one. I’ve never seen a search history more dedicated to how to do hair or every little thing Sarah says. That kid’s yours in all her blonde hair brown skin glory and she always goes to you first. You’re a good dad, Steve. No one thi—”

“Dheaidí!” you yelled as you stomped back into the apartment, blanket wrapped around you. “Tell Uncle Tony to stop sending my boyfriend on missions when we’re cuddling!”

You pouted and purposely walked with heavy footsteps to the couch, sitting in between your dads and flopping over Steve dramatically— your feet and face were the only parts of you visible out of the large blanket that they could tell was Peter’s. Sam gave him a face of ‘I told you so’. Steve looked down at you to see your cheeks puffed out in annoyance. Sam flicked your forehead, which made you poke your tongue out at him, and left the living room. You still hadn’t moved, sighing loudly.  

“Dheaidí?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to get Peter Parker to kiss me,” you said with such determination.

“I’m sure you are, Babydoll.” Steve said, not nearly as enthusiastic as you, as he poked your cheek.

“Next time Uncle Tony interrupts, I’m gonna kick his butt.”

“I’ll hold him down for you.”

“Dheaidí?”

“Yes, Sarah?”

“I love you, I don’t think I’ve told you that.”

That made Steve truly smile for the first time that entire day.

“I love you too, Babydoll.”

~~

“Dheaidí! Fight me!” You were a little too pumped as you entered the training room.

“I’m not sparring with you.”

Steve really only fought with Bucky otherwise he used the bots, they could withstand a punch that could potentially knock out the teeth or bruise a rib of other teammates. You grabbed his forearm as he tried to hit the punching bag, stopping him. Of course the rest of the team stopped what they were doing to see if Steve would give in. You didn’t fight with most of them either for the same reasons as Steve. Bucky didn’t mind sparring with you because he had already been doing so since you were younger.

“I’m tired of the bots and Uncle Jamie pulls punches.”

“Babydoll…”

“Please. Or are you afraid you’ll lose?”

Steve huffed out a laugh. Bucky hadn’t been paying attention the whole time because he was sure Steve would say no but the minute you taunted him, Bucky’s head shot up because his friend couldn’t say no to a challenge. Steve knew he was taking the bait but you both were petty and he didn’t care. You smiled and got in the ring as he started taking the wraps off of his hands.

“Don’t worry old man, I’ll go easy on you.”

“Old man?”

“I’d feel bad severely beating the elderly.”

The others tried not to laugh.

“I want you to know I have no problem beating children. How old are you?”

“Sixteen?”

“Then I’m sixteen too, let’s go kid.”

You had to use a mix of strategy since Steve did beat you when it came to brute strength. You had been retested against his scores and were now one-third of his. It was clear that his serum jacked DNA still worked like normal genetics. You would only get up to half of his scores once you reached your peak but considering it was half of something super-human, you would still be remarkably powerful.

After you had hit him hard twice, Steve stopped pulling punches like Bucky. You started hardening your skin in the exact areas he punched with the visible diamond layer, not just defending yourself but actually making it a little painful for him when he hit you. Steve realized he’d have to hit twice in a single punch so you couldn’t predict where the second one would land and create the extra hard casing. You made one misstep and Steve knocked you flat on your back. You coughed and held your hands straight in the air, wiggling them a bit.

“Told you I got no problem beating children,” he said, jokingly as he helped pull you up. “You okay, Babydoll?”

The smile on your face told him you were absolutely fine.

“That was fun, let’s do it again.”

Steve reluctantly agreed to add sparring with you at least once a week to training.

~~

Steve nearly had a heart attack when he woke up to see your face looming over him.

“Happy Birthday, Dheaidí… move over.”

“How are you the bossy one on my birthday?” Steve said as he sat up and moved onto Sam’s side of the bed that he realized was empty.

“How does it feel to technically be a century? What age are you supposed to be? Do you put that you’re in your thirties on forms or your actual age? Because I would put the technicality, get all the senior citizen discounts. 100, that’s wild, Dheaidí. You’re old,” you said as you got on the bed.

“Uncle Tony wanted a big party but I said we should wait till you pass 100. So we’re having a barbecue in the backyard. But Ms. Jessica said you still have to do the Skype calls with CNN and CSPAN. And you have to post a picture, so…”

Steve groaned forgetting he still had to do work on his birthday and even though he couldn’t control his birth he was really hating being born on Independence Day. You grabbed his phone on the nightstand and typed in the password— it wasn’t that hard to guess considering it was his wedding date. Flipping to the front camera, you made Steve pose and took a selfie with him. He watched you edit the lighting and colors of the picture as if you took it in an actual studio and not his bedroom before you passed him the phone so he could post it on Twitter with some lame caption you always made fun of him for.

Bucky and Sam came in with trays of food. Bucky wanted to put ninety-nine candles on Steve’s birthday pancakes but Sam wouldn’t let him so he settled for the sparklers instead and throwing confetti at Steve’s face before sitting down. The four of you ate breakfast in bed and spent the better part of the morning celebrating Steve’s birthday as the small family you were before the huge barbecue. It wasn’t huge because Tony invited the entire city. Instead it was because your mother’s side of the family was invited and Sam’s family came over too.

Steve was truly having a good time as everyone ate and played around before the fireworks started. Your Aunt Taylor sent him the picture that she took of you, him, Sam, and Bucky at his request. It was the first posed photo the four of you actually took as a family. He made it his new lock screen, the home screen being the photo of you and him with the hot chocolate.

~~

Sam, Steve, and Bucky watched you from the table stroll back into the apartment for breakfast humming something a little too chipper for the early time of day. You did ballet as best as you could, trying not to slip in your socks against the hardwood, while grabbing two bowls and some spoons. Steve peeped the outfit first as you went to the fridge to get milk for cereal.

“Babydoll.”

“Yes?”

“Where’d you get the hoodie?”

“It’s Peter’s.”

“I’m gonna regret asking,” Steve muttered to himself before directing his attention back to you. “Were you in Peter’s room the whole night?”

“Yeah. We have to watch all of Attack on Titan before the new season comes out, you know. It’s more fun on his laptop than the TV. I’m running on like two hours of sleep but worth it.”

“You slept there?” Sam asked.

Bucky already started packing up his stuff, ready to dart out the minute he sensed it going someplace he didn’t like.

“Mmm hmm.”

“Please tell me you two were safe, at least—”

“Oh, God, Dad, no!” You took your cereal and started to leave. “Remember when I said I’d ask you to take me to a clinic.”

“Well we know that it could suddenly feel awkward or that you might feel like we’d judge you. But no one’s judging, you can make decisions,” Steve started. “But we want you to still feel like you can—”

“Dad, Dheaidí! Hasn’t even touched a boob, I’m a virgin, just fine being a virgin…”

The door opened and Peter came in. He didn’t bother with house slippers since he wasn’t staying for long, you were just supposed to get cereal so you guys could continue the marathon. You didn’t even turn around knowing they could see that Peter didn’t have a shirt on considering you were wearing the matching hoodie to his sweatpants.

“Good morning, Mr. and Mr. Wilson-Rogers. Morning Mr. Barnes,” Peter said as he grabbed the second bowl from you, completely oblivious to what was going on.

“Hey, kid,” Bucky said, now enjoying the awkward atmosphere that had just been created.

“On God it’s too early for this,” you said with a sigh.

You stabbed the cereal with your spoon, aggressively taking a bite, and walked out of the apartment. Peter looked at you walking away and then at your dads. Steve just held a hand up, shaking his head. Peter opened his mouth to ask something and then decided against it and followed you out of the apartment.  

~~

Peter picked up his phone the moment your face appeared on the screen.

“Happy birthday! I’m sorry I’m not there.” You frowned.

You had a mission that you had to go on and knew that by the second day there was no way you’d make it back for Peter’s birthday. So you waited by the phone until it turned midnight and FaceTimed Peter.

“I’m giving you the biggest birthday kiss when I get back.”

“You’re the best girlfriend ever.”

“Because I have the best boyfriend ever.”

You listened to Peter talk about what he was going to do for the day, including MJ and Ned taking him out. Peter loved to stay up and more importantly wasn’t on a mission so he was talking animatedly. But slowly you had stopped answering as enthusiastically and your eyes stayed closed for longer and longer until he noticed you had fallen asleep. Peter smiled at the phone, taking a screenshot, and then whispering goodnight to you before hanging up the phone.

~~

“You gotta admit, they’re kind of cute,” Steve said as he and the others headed towards  the pool area outside where you and Peter already were. He wouldn’t admit it, at the risk of sounding too old-fashioned and a hovering parent, but he was glad to see you were in a one-piece.

“Young love. Disgustingly sweet,” Clint muttered making the team laugh.

They watched as you and Peter were tangled up with each other on the concrete despite the pool chairs behind you two— he was sitting cross-legged, you in his lap facing him, also cross-legged but with one stretched out and wrapping around him. He was leaning back on his hands. You had the bowl of fruit that Bucky had been looking for before giving up and coming downstairs with the others in your lap. The two of you were joking about something, pieces of fruit in both hands and your head thrown back mid-laughter— the large bun on top of your head bobbing back and forth.

Peter took the tangerine slice you fed him. His hands grabbed yours now that they were free and you two were just swinging them back and forth as you talked. You suddenly frowned and tapped at your hearing aids before taking them out and looking at them. The team saw how you didn’t put them back in, you must’ve forgotten to charge them. Peter adjusted himself to sit up straighter.

All over. Some of it got in my mouth and honestly key lime pie isn’t that bad… He had surprisingly good aim in fourth grade.

The adults smiled as Peter seamlessly switched to signing and so did you. He didn’t have to, considering you were sitting literally on him and facing him so you could read his lips as well. Peter took another tangerine slice that you fed him as he moved on to a different story from elementary and middle school. You pecked him on the lips, tasting the bit of juice that was on his bottom lip. You didn’t back away from him completely. Both of you were too nervous to move.

“You think either one’s gonna do it?” Wanda asked. The others shook their heads in varying degrees of intensity.

Peter’s arms wrapped around you, one of his hands holding the wrist of his other. He leaned in closer until his mouth was on yours. Peter’s lips tasted like the tangerines you had been eating. It started off a little awkward, both of you trying to figure out the correct placement of your lips, before finding something you both liked. Peter removed one of his hands from around your back and used it to tilt your chin up a little bit.

“No tongue!”

Clint shouted causing Peter to jump back, face red. You turned your head in the direction he was looking and saw the others at the doorway, smiling at his expense. You realized they had just seen the two of you making out and buried your face in the crook of his neck. The others broke from their trance of giggling by the large glass doors and came outside to enjoy the pool like they wanted to. Peter leaned his head down so his mouth was by your ear.

“That wasn’t a bad kiss was it?” he asked in a tentative whisper.

“No, I liked it… I wasn’t a, uh, bad kisser was I?”

“Unh-unh,” Peter said while shaking his head.

Nat took the pool chair right behind you and Peter to lounge in the sun and tan. Pietro and Bucky strolled over first to grab some fruit out of the bowl.

I’m hot, you signed, dramatically.

Want to swim? Peter asked.

You set the bowl down and got off of him, pulling him to his feet with all your strength on purpose. You picked Peter up and carried him to the pool, throwing him in. He appeared from out of the water, wiping it from his face and brushing his hair back.

You know I’m getting you back right?

You jumped into the pool before he could do anything. Peter just smirked at you and you didn’t know why but definitely felt like something was off. You were in the part of the pool where if you dropped from your toes your nose would be under the water. You were about to so you could pick up a vibration from the concrete, thinking something was off. But right before you dropped, you were lifted into the air and thrown, landing behind your attacker with a splash. You popped back up to see your traitor of a father hi-fiving your traitor of a boyfriend.

Dheaidí!

Sorry, doll. Steve smiled before swimming off.

I don’t like you anymore, Peter Parker, you signed with an eye-roll.

I still like you anyway. He swam up to you and pulled you closer.

Want to get my dad back?

You and Peter swam up to Steve and splashed him in the face.

(Part 29)...

[swimmingleo]

Stockholm Syndrome: or Harry making us sing about kink again

For a very long time (note: my early teenage years) I hated that song. Now it’s one of my favorite Harry has written because I think he was an absolute genius with the concept: it’s a love anthem, it's about being sexually liberated and it's a massive fuck you to The Power That Be.

I got inspired to write this post after witnessing some good ole twitter drama: basically what happened is that someone made an account dedicated to Harry presenting as a sub. The response was massive backlash and bullying (from larries!), because people perceived it as gross and sexualizing. And I think that's a shame and a bit ignorant of queer history. I also vented here on anon some time ago and um saw the ask go around it didn't like blow up but still got more notes than most of my posts so it made me laugh a lil sobs

‼️DISCLAIMER‼️ By making this post, I want to highlight another form of queer expression Harry frequently uses. I am in NO WAY digging into his privacy. Everything used in this post is content that Harry chose to publicly display. I'm keeping it PG it's cool (as PG as a post about kink can be lol).

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: A QUICK ANALYSIS

Yeah, that song is totally about sex. And pain. (btw shoutout to this cool analysis including the boys' reaction to H saying the song's about a nympho.)

This song's concept relies on the opposition between love and oppression. A lover ("You") and the rest of the world ("They"). Though they're radically opposed, these two find a common ground with the pain they give to Harry. Pain is comforting and pleasurable when it's from You and pain is threatening when it's from They.

Who's that shadow holding me hostage, I've been here for days

Who's that whisper telling me that I'm never gonna get away

At the beginning of the song, Harry doesn't put a name on the shadow who has him tied down and subdued. You or They ? Good pain or bad pain ? Basically, it's Harry establishing the setting of the song: love and oppression operate the same way and tie him down.

Harry uses this double meaning again in Two Ghosts with "Tongue tied": are they tongue tied because they experience communication issues in their relationship or are they literally silenced by They ?

I know they'll be coming to find me soon

But I fear I'm getting used to being held by you

Here, Harry identifies the anonymous shadow as two different subjects. They are actively trying to get him and Harry knows there's no escaping them. However, he's physically with You for the whole song. Just the two of them in their own hm kink safe bubble ("in your room", "but now together we're alone"). Stockholm Syndrome is first and foremost a love song about intimacy and sex.

Now the percussion and the "OW" punctuating the chorus... It... slaps ? It's... full of imagery ?

Who's this man that's holding your hand and talking about your eyes?

Used to sing about being free but now he's changed his mind

I looove that bit. Stockholm Syndrome is a love song, right, but it's not that kind of love song. Usually, Harry sings about his lover's eyes, but Harry's not about all those pretty "summer feelings" here. I love this verse because I see it as Harry having a funny thought right in the middle of the aCTioN: "can you believe hours ago I was like, holding your hand and being all romantic ? Look at me now lmao it's like I'm a whole different person". In the same way, he makes fun of the way he usually writes about wanting to be free to love (Happily, Something Great) when he loves being tied down in bed. GET IT ? FUNNY INNIT. Sigh. If this isn't peak Harry's humour then what.

This verse is also pretty important regarding the whole song as it debunks a misconception about BDSM: that it's unhealthy, it's weird, there's no love in taking pleasure to hurt your partner or be hurt. Popular fictions like 50 Shades of Grey certainly didn't make those misconceptions go away, it even reinforced them as it depicts a toxic and pretty much abusive relationship.

However, Harry can also be romantic with his partner. They hold hands, he praises the beauty of their eyes, aka the most platonic part of the body and the one linked to the soul. They're a very loved up couple who also happen to get freaky in bed, no big deal.

TO MAKE IT SHORT Stockholm Syndrome is a song I'm sure Harry had a lot of fun with. The songwriting is one big clever wordplay. It's kinky as hell and it all comes back to love and consent: Harry chose to be tied down by You, the person he loves. They play a scene, with rules they both agreed on. If anything, Harry feels trapped because of how much he loves his significant other: he's a prisoner of love. Aww. Aaand he's literally tied down of course. On the contrary, Harry doesn't consent to be a prisoner of They. They want to get him for real, it's not an act, they don't make the rules together. It's a one-sided contract he can't put an end to.

PUBLIC IMAGE AND KINK: NOT A GOOD ASSOCIATION

As I said earlier, Stockholm Syndrome relies on opposition: love VS tptb. Intimacy VS Everyone else.

I think this song also showcases Harry's struggle with his public persona, especially when it comes to his sexuality: how it's presented VS how he wants to express it. To the public, Harry is a lady pleaser. To some fans, he's the ultimate sexual fantasy, a blank slate that can fill the role of the vanilla nice guy or the toxic dominant bad boy (like After). None of those representations match what Harry expresses through his artistic choices, which is what appears like a queer man signaling as a sub in BDSM practice. Literally nothing near the het expectations. And even this is pure supposition yk.

This dichotomy reminds me of George Michael's song Freedom! '90. In this song, George tackles his relationship with the music industry, his public image and his old persona. For context, George Michael was a gay man whose career ressembles a lot Harry's: he knew fame as a popstar, was part of a band and was marketed as a ladies man. In the Larry Lore, both Harry and Louis referenced him a lot in their respective works.

Some nice lyrics from Freedom! '90:

Heaven knows I was just a young boy

Didn't know what I wanted to be

I was every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy

Yeah, 100% Harry. A little boy (tbsl?) in his formative years trying to understand who he is, what he likes, when everyone and their mother already force their perception upon him.

There's something deep inside of me

There's someone else I've got to be

Take back your picture in a frame

Take back your singing in the rain

I just hope you understand

Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

Forget about that Hollywood sweetheart and whatever you think he's like, you're not even close. Your friendly neighborhood boyband idol may be currently tied down to another man's bed. Who knows.

All we have to see

Is that I don't belong to you

And you don't belong to me

... Okay this resonates nicely with Stockholm Syndrome. I understand these lyrics as a "Here's me: take it or leave it". George Michael wants the right to be himself and express what he wants through his art and the fans are free to stick around or not. No one owes anyone anything. Fair deal. It's not the case in Stockholm Syndrome though. The music industry, the fans, They all take and take from Harry as long as he keeps parts of himself hidden to please everyone. Not a fair deal.

Nice addition is the iconic leather jacket being an important symbol in the Freedom! '90 MV. It symbolizes the end of an era for George Michael when he burns it: he used to wear this jacket during Wham! and his first solo album Faith. In both eras, he fully embodied the het sex machine role to please the public and the music industry.

However the leather jacket is a whole another story for Harry and here's why. nice transition

HARRY AND THE LEATHER COMMUNITY

BDSM is inherently sexual but it also translates to the public through flagging, signaling, and various depictions through art: just like any queer subculture.

BDSM itself counts several subcultures, one of them being the Leather Community. Though it doesn't necessarily concern gay men only, the Leather Community has been mostly associated to the gay scene. Freddie Mercury proudly displayed it on stage, when he wore various leather costumes inspired by the clubs he frequented. Fandom certainly didn't miss the inspiration Harry took from him:

There is something about Harry, a queer man, and leather. By choosing to wear this leather suit at the "crowning" of Fine Line (the album about knowing and embracing who he is), marking the end of the FL era, it's a strong statement. The association with the Leather Community isn't lost on some.

There is more of it, for example the Beauty Papers photoshoot: it seems to be inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe, a queer photograph who pictured BDSM a lot in his work:

... There are even more accurate parallels but um keeping it PG remember?

The leather collars he wore for Another Man and the mag issue being captioned "Oh boy !" (slang in the BDSM community for a male sub) is also pretty evocative. Especially when the article focused on his transition from boyband to solo artist and his desire to express his own character. It's always about expression. And just like George Michael or Freddie Mercury, the desire to represent the end of an era and the beginning of another with bold queer statements, as a mean to own their sexuality.

Harry doesn't shy away from expressing his sexual preferences or the communities he feels part of. It's part of who he is, it inspires him, the same way it did for other artists and I love that for him <3

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

17: LGBT Representation in Miraculous Ladybug

DISCLAIMER: I am not part of the LGBT community, so my experiences differ from those who are part of said community. I do not intend to act like I know everything people who are in the community are thinking, and I certainly do not intend to speak up for them. If anyone who is in or is an ally of the LGBT community has something to say about this post and the LGBT representation in Miraculous Ladybug, please speak up if I get anything wrong or if you want to give your thoughts on my post or Astruc's views on representation

A few weeks ago, I had talked about the episode “Guiltrip”. I had thought it was a pretty good episode, and a godsend compared to the last three episodes I had to sit through, though I had chosen to ignore a certain aspect of the episode because it connects to an issue that the show has in general.

Throughout the episode, there were a lot of shots where Juleka and Rose were very affectionate toward each other with their body language, as if their relationship was more than just being friends.

This, coupled with several other episodes where the two are just as close, had led people to believe that Juleka and Rose have some kind of romantic relationship that hasn't been stated in the show yet.

There had always been speculation, but “Guiltrip” was the first episode to actually focus on Juleka and Rose's relationship... or as the episode states, “friendship”

Yeeeeep. All of that intimacy, and they're just “best friends”. No romantic feelings at all. I don't know if this is a French thing or a teenage girl thing, but I don't think they're only friends.

So someone on Twitter decided to address their problems with the episode to Astruc.

Out of context, it seems like it's a shipper who wants more canonicity for Julerose, but certain censorship regulations in other countries are preventing Astruc's team from going any further. The thing is, I can sort of understand where Astruc is coming from here (despite all of the intimate moments they share in canon), until I read his second reply.

This highlights a big problem with the way Astruc views LGBT representation in Miraculous Ladybug. It's clear that he wants to be seen as an ally to the LGBT community without actually showing it in his work. He thinks that if he simply says that certain characters LGBT on Twitter or implies that others are LGBT, it counts as representation instead of actually showing it.

You can't keep saying that these characters are in the LGBT community without actually showing that they are. Astruc could say that Sabrina is actually a robot sent from the future tasked to prevent Chloe from getting assassinated, and I wouldn't believe him unless I saw it in the show.

The only piece of LGBT representation that I felt worked was with Barbara and Olympia from the New York special, with a single line implying they were going to be more open with their relationship in the future. It's not much, but it's something.

And then there's also Marc to talk about. Marc was based off a real-life friend of Astruc, Hope Morphin.

While I think it's a touching hint of trivia for Astruc to do this for his friend, but I just think, and this could easily just be me, but his design is very... stereotypical. He's dressed up in bright clothing, wears makeup, and his name is literally a pun on the word “rainbow”. This is who the Miraculous Ladybug showrunners really wanted to parade around as their first LGBT character?

As for his sexuality, we never really get any confirmation on his feelings for Nathaniel outside of Twitter. Even in the episode, his flustered attitude could easily be applied to his anxiety around others. I know that's how I saw it, but then again, my gaydar has always been terrible. I'm not saying Marc has to be head over heels for Nathaniel, or that his character has to revolve solely around his sexuality or gender identity, but why would Astruc make a big deal about making Marc an LGBT character when he doesn't really do anything with the idea?

The fact that this side of Marc isn't explored more is even more egregious when you consider that not only was his debut episode, “Reverser” banned in Russia for the LGBT themes, but neither Marc or Nathaniel have had any focus episodes outside of background appearances after that episode. Granted, there are rumors that both of them will become heroes this season, but the fact that it took them two seasons since their last appearance to gain relevance should still be noted.

After talking about the examples of LGBT representation in this show, I want to get back to the last thing Astruc said about representation at the start of this post, because I feel this is important to consider when looking back at the representation we got in the first place.

Astruc keeps saying that he can't show any LGBT representation because of censorship in other countries, but he still wants to be an ally to the LGBT community. Yet despite claiming to be an ally, he isn't willing to actually make the push forward

To which I have to say... TOUGH. SHIT.

If Astruc was an actual ally to the LGBT community, he wouldn't give a rat's ass about censorship. He would do whatever it takes to make sure his show's message was heard. Have you ever heard of an activist for any cause that backed down because of the opposition trying to silence their beliefs?

When Rebecca Sugar found out that some countries made Ruby a man to make her relationship with Sapphire okay to broadcast, she pretty much made the more masculine Ruby wear a dress to her wedding while Sapphire was the one who wore a suit just to stick it to the censors.

Dana Terrance had kept fighting to make a romantic plotline for Luz and Amity happen despite the pushback by Disney, and also to give Willow two dads.

Noelle Stevenson had to fight to make sure Adora and Catra kissing made it to the final episode of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

For God's sake, France is reportedly one of the more tolerant countries for LGBT people in all of Europe.

We have gotten so many examples of people fighting for LGBT representation in media that really show society is starting to become more accepting of people who aren't just straight. How the hell can Astruc claim that some countries aren't ready for LGBT representation if he isn't even willing to try advocating for it in his show?

I have one theory...

Like so many companies (especially Disney) during June, Astruc probably only pretends to care about LGBT representation so he can gain social brownie points on social media while being able to easily edit out the few moments that could imply LGBT representation in his show so it can do well financially overseas.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: beliefs can easily be sold out if it means profit. Astruc is a prime example of this.

It's clear Astruc wants to be seen as an LGBT ally by people online, but he isn't willing to put in the work to actually prove he is one outside of empty promises on Twitter. When compared to other content creators, Astruc just doesn't really seem like an actual LGBT ally.

Of course, that's just how I personally see it. If there is anyone who is in or is an ally of the LGBT community reading this post, I encourage you to share your thoughts on this or how you feel about LGBT representation in Miraculous Ladybug, whether you agree with my thoughts on it or not.

[whiteowl-18]

Why I can relate to Heartsopper

I am quite a bit older than the target demographic for this show. So, why do I watch it? Because, honestly, I can relate to it a lot. Let me explain (I know this is long, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it).

Something personal about me: I am asexual. The thing is, I only figured that out very, very recently. See, when I was growing up, sexuality wasn’t something that was really talked about. We learned the biological part of it at school. We learned the reproductive system and how babies are made in science class. There were some vague conversations about condoms, but that was it. Sexuality itself was never addressed. And I had a very, very surface-level understanding of it. To me, people were either gay, straight or bi. I honestly had no idea that it was a spectrum and I definitely did not know that asexuality was even a thing. I thought boys were physically attractive and, in my mind, that meant I was straight. I also didn’t have a lot of friends to talk about this, so this was my understanding of it. And it remained so throughout all my school years and even through college and after.

Around 2016, I started using Tumblr (and Twitter, but mostly Tumblr). And that made all the difference. All of a sudden I saw people describing their sexuality using terms I never even heard of. Pansexual, demisexual, asexual. What did any of that mean? As I started to dig deeper, and saw people describing what it feels like to be sexually attracted to someone, I realized that I never really felt that. I thought boys were pretty from an aesthetic perspective, but I wasn’t really attracted to them. Then I also saw people talking about the difference between romantic and sexual attraction. So I started thinking “Was that it? Was that what I felt? Was I romantically attracted to boys and not sexually?” That was something that was never explained to me. I didn’t know that this distinction existed. So, I realized that I was probably not heterosexual. But knowing what you’re not and knowing what you are, are two very different things. And I still didn’t know exactly what I was. For a while, I thought I was demisexual. I thought it was the closest thing to what I felt. Last year, I finally realized that I am, in fact, asexual. There wasn’t a lightbulb moment, it just became clear with time.

I honestly still don’t know how I fit in the romantic attraction spectrum. For a while, I was convinced I was heteroromantic. But since I figured out I am asexual, I’m starting to think that I might be either biromantic (I never even considered my feelings towards women) or just aromantic. I’m still trying to figure that part out.

What does this have to do with this show? Well, it’s quite simple: if there had been something like this in my teenage years, I might have figured out my sexuality a lot sooner. If I had seen a show or read a book with an asexual character, maybe I would have realized that, yeah, I’m like them. Isaac is probably asexual, and I really hope they explore that as tactfully as they did Nick’s bisexuality. Because I’m sure that there are asexual kids out there who really need to see someone like them in the media they consume. Shows like this matter.

I can also really relate to the bullying part, but I’ll leave that to another post.

[personuhh]

Notice about the Yosuke Romance Mod:

I’m incredibly upset that I have to make this post, but unfortunately my fears and doubts about this mod have been confirmed, and I’d like to give some warning to those of you still excited about it. (Pics will be under the cut to try and keep this relatively short.)

As you may know, I volunteered more than a month ago to help with the romance mod, and I did so with the intent of offering a second opinion, though I also offered to bug test and help proofread and catch grammatical errors. My first impressions of the mod creator were that he was incredibly stubborn, and intent on writing it the EXACT way he had planned it. I mentioned this in the tags of one of my posts after we first talked (Oct 13th). For about a month I messaged him sporadically to try and get somewhere with the mod (asking him to send me scripts so I could work on them) but he kept essentially saying he was working on it alone.

In my opinion, the key to ensuring a project like this doesn’t end up a disaster is to assemble a diverse writing team. I suggested this, but he kept saying that he had already finished most of it and was insistent on keeping it the same. I’m sure most of you have seen the mod page already, but there is a blatant spelling error in one of the screenshots which I offered to fix. He didn’t seem concerned about it.

Today, a friend of mine on twitter posted some concerns he had with the mod, and the creator was evidently searching specifically for tweets that contained “Yosuke romance mod” (something that I suspected was happening because it happened several times to me as well), because he replied to the post despite not following my friend.

I had been following him for a while on twitter, and he initially struck me as a “dudebro” type, and as far as I know, he is not LGBT+, I didn’t want to assume, but he kept mentioning “getting other viewpoints” which to me means that he himself is not gay. I rarely saw anything about Yosuke, which also set off some red flags. I started to wonder why he was writing a Yosuke romance mod in the first place, but when he stated he was “adjusting existing dialogue” to make the romance route “feel natural” I had to step in.

Yosuke’s character arc is INCREDIBLY important. To myself, and many other LGBT+ people, Yosuke is already a realistic depiction of a closeted teenage boy. On the surface, people may look at his lines and say they’re homophobic, but in my opinion, that should not be censored or removed to make him more palatable. It’s a part of his arc. When you remove these slightly more controversial lines and scenes, to me that says that a) you do not understand the nuance of his character b) you are trying to make an easily consumable and pandering gay romance without acknowledging the character flaws that make Yosuke who he is.

The groundwork has already been laid for Yosuke and Yu’s relationship; you don’t need to change anything other than Rank 10 of Yosuke’s social link, because the build up is there. The hug is the leftover romance flag, you don’t need to change anything else. Sure, adding in extra scenes to reflect his romantic relationship with the protagonist would be great (Valentines day, Christmas, festival, etc.) but changing scenes like the school campout that would effectively sweep these things under the rug is questionable. Yosuke’s confession should acknowledge his behavior, not erase it.

So. I confronted him about this, and he refused to acknowledge the potential faults of the mod, saying that for anyone who disliked these changes, it was “tough shit”. I’m just so incredibly disappointed, especially since this mod means so much to a lot of the LGBT+ fans of Persona 4. Even with me begging for him to PLEASE listen to LGBT+ people’s concerns regarding the mod, he still refuses to budge.

TLDR; the mod’s creator is refusing to take suggestions or input from LGBT+ creators on how to handle this romance, believes that Yosuke needs to be “changed” in order for him to be in a relationship with the protagonist, and cannot take criticism.

It’s not like he’s being intentionally malicious, but the refusal to listen to anyone with a different opinion is incredibly concerning to me when the entire point of the mod is to write in a gay romance.

More of our conversation under the cut:

It was a bit like talking to a brick wall, I don’t understand how he reached this conclusion, but it sure is frustrating that it’s all he took from this conversation 🥴

https://twitter.com/REALMadMax1960/status/1333586012442816512?s=19

[nct-lian]

lian’s dating rumours

LIHYUNG

year: 2019

duration: late march 2019 — late may 2019

parties involved: lianna bae, kim taehyung

status: resolved, still shipped by delulus

level of exposure: 10/10

situation: at this time, lian and hyoseop were actually still in a relationship, and they ended up getting caught by dispatch while on a walk with each other.

whoever must have been following them seemed to have mistaken hyoseop for taehyung, just because the sweater he was wearing looked a lot like one taehyung was seen in at one point.

“paul- i think there’s someone following us.” lian whipped her head back to look at whatever was behind her, wrapping her arm tightly around hyoseop’s bicep.

he made sure his mask, along with his bucket hat was protectively covering his face before picking up his speed, lian soon catching on and following after him.

they turned a corner and eventually lost whoever the hell decided to stalk people for a living, and they sighed a breath of relief. lian loosened her grip on his arm, now reaching down to loosely hold his hand instead.

“god, if that’s dispatch-” she shook her head as she adjusted her mask that began to fall past her nose and looked up at her boyfriend. “my first scandal? at least i’ll get some exposure!” he jokingly winked at her as she hit him.

“don’t act like it’s a good thing! i’ve been in too many of these already.” she pouted even though he couldn’t see her, and she let out a whine when he disagreed.

the two entered a convenience store so they could grab some snacks before heading back to hyoseop’s apartment complex; they wanted to get some time with each other before lian had to leave the next morning.

maybe a few days later, pictures of lian wearing the exact sweater that was seen the same night of their walk, had surfaced over twitter from a sasaeng’s account.

the beginning of the rumours + resolution: if the pictures that dispatch ended up posting of the two that night wasn’t enough to set fans off, this definitely was. people started putting their pictures side by side to compare the cardigans and the rumour of “lihyung being real” was beginning to look a little too suspicious.

sm wanted to make sure that lian wanted nothing about her current relationship to be revealed to the public, and shortly after, they made a statement regarding the whole thing.

it was in fact revealed that the cardigan she was wearing did belong to someone else, but it had just been a hand-me-down from a friend that was no longer interested in it. they concluded with the fact that lian wasn’t in any sort of romantic relationship, and she was just focusing on her career as of right now.

bighit took a while to respond to what was going on, but they basically just said the same thing; taehyung is focusing on his career at the moment, and isn’t involved in a relationship that wasn’t strictly platonic.

LIMARK

year: 2020

duration: mid january 2020 — late january 2020

parties involved: lianna bae, mark lee

status: immediately resolved, everyone in nct is shipped together in one way or another so uh

level of exposure: 12/10

situation: back in january when nct 127 had been playing truth or dare on a teen vogue interview, lian had ended up picking truth on her first round. the question she received was rather intrusive, having been asked when she had her first kiss.

she played it off and jokingly asked, “hey! are you allowed to ask me this?” with a small laugh as she looked back down to the tiny slip of paper that she was holding between her thumb and pointer finger.

“we got permission!” a lady shot back from behind the camera, and lian soon thought that she had no choice but to elaborate. she covered her mouth with her hand and shook her head, eyeing the staff with a disappointed look.

lian went on to explain that it happened when she was still a teenager — around 2015. she was sure that was the end of it, and she was silently praying that after she exposed such a meaningful part of her personal life, the producers would leave her alone.

“if you don’t mind us asking, who was it with?” she didn’t want to answer; she was given a choice! guilt began to eat away at her chest as she overthought every possible thing that could go wrong if she said no, buckling under the pressure of everyone’s eyes being directed right at her.

“this is so intrusive!” she laughed sarcastically, but masked it with fake happiness as she shook her head again, gasping for a small hint of breath. “uh, it was with mark-” she ran a hand through her hair to desperately distract herself from the utter embarrassment she was feeling.

mark, who was sitting right beside her, slapped a hand over his mouth and placed a hand on johnny’s shoulder as he looked at the wall. his main goal was to avoid all eye contact between himself and anyone else.

no one except haechan had known about mark and lian’s little secret from before they debuted, and it was their intention to keep it that way for as long as they could. “wait what?” jaehyun whipped his head towards the back row, as did the rest of the members.

“yah! don’t get the wrong idea!” she made sure to say it in korean, but continued in english, “nothing happened after that-” mark stepped in for her, noticing how she was getting more overwhelmed by the second.

“yeah, yeah, it was just a little thing. we were really young and wanted to get it over and done with with someone we were both comfortable around.” he nodded with a tight-lipped smile, surprisingly less awkward than he usually was.

lian saw the way a staff member from behind the set was getting ready to talk more about the situation, but she quickly shut them down, “moving on, yes? yuta’s turn!”

the beginning of the rumours + resolution: shortly after the interview was posted onto youtube, fans noticed how defensive lian was towards the question and began to speculate that “the kiss” the two members shared wasn’t just “a kiss.”

their conspiracy was that whatever was going on between them behind the scenes had still been thing now, and they started spreading rumours about how the two idols were dating.

keep in mind that actual fans of the group did their best to cover up all these things with loving messages for both of them, and tried SO hard to ensure that they wouldn’t have to see them.

fans knew how close of friends mark and lian were, and they weren’t gonna let some crazy, delusional “fans” get in the way of that, and potentially put a strain on their friendship.

some of these rumours ended up escalating into hate towards both of them, and lian was being called a slut over twitter for “sleeping” with a fellow member.

sm entertainment released a statement as soon as they could, confirming lian and mark were just friends and will remain that way; their private lives will stay their private lives, and whoever participated in this malicious train of newfound hate will be sued.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Rachel Nobel / Rae Lynn

Rachel Nobel, aka Rae Lynn, has 2 fics at Gossamer, but she’s written many more X-Files stories than that. You can also find fics by her at AO3 and various other archives. She’s one of the rare, special authors who’s posted numerous fic during the show’s original run and again in recent years. Big thanks to Rachel for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)? Absolutely. I joined a Facebook group for fanfic writers where someone recognized my name and asked about some of my stories that have disappeared from the Internet, and I almost fell off my chair. On the other hand, I go back and read original-run fanfic all the time - the Wayback Machine is my best friend for all the late great fanfic archives. Like fine wines, they get better with age! What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it? I was fairly young during the peak of the fandom - I was only 12 when I started watching the show and discovered the fandom online. A few years ago, right around the time we learned the revival was coming, I wrote an essay I called "How 'The X-Files' defined my adolescence," in which I wrote: "If you think about it, 'The X-Files' is a lot like adolescence: You start out thinking it's going to be a little hokey, NBD, and then you end up in its thrall, captivated and occasionally hugely let down. A lot of people behave strangely, and no one gets out unscathed. Mulder, in his own weird way, is the perfect mirror for an adolescent: He doesn't fit in; his life careens between being utterly consequential to the fate of the known universe and being completely pointless; he's socially awkward and can't quite nail it down with the girl of his dreams."

So for me, the fandom is inextricably bound up with adolescence, that feeling of vacillating between desperate loneliness and being on the verge of something enormously significant. Take romance: I was a bit of a late bloomer, and when all my friends were exploring their first relationships I was watching Mulder and Scully navigate this beautiful, complicated, soulful relationship without ever even kissing. That was deeply affecting for me as a teen.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)? I started out on mailing lists - there was an EMXC mailing list and one that I think was called X-Angst. [Lilydale note: There was a mailing list called XAngst Anonymous.] This was back at the dawn of the Internet when I only had 10 hours of AOL access a month, and I remember using what AOL called a "FlashSession" to log on, download all the fanfic from the mailing list and log off to read it. I vividly remember the excitement of watching all that new fanfic flood my inbox! Later on I was on atxc. During the long summer between "Gethsemane" and "Redux," it felt like fanfic was at its peak. There was a group of about a dozen women who got together (virtually) to discuss a work in progress by Lydia Bower called "Primal Sympathy." We called ourselves the "Primal Screamers," and we had our own website with fanfic recommendations and other discussions (it cracked me up to locate us as an entry on Fanlore.org). I was still in high school at the time and I was the youngest member; I felt like I had been accepted into a cool underground club. I worshipped these women, who were fanfic writers themselves. They taught me everything I knew about how to be a decent, respectful, enthusiastic consumer and writer of fanfic and fandom. [Lilydale note: I’ve talked enthusiastically about the Primal Screamers here before, including their fanfic primer.] What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general? In the '90s, I would have been embarrassed to tell anyone I read fanfic, let alone that I was writing it. Now, I look back on it and realize how talented and smart and passionate we all were. It's something to be proud of. What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show? The first episode I ever saw was "Shadows," which was on in reruns between the second and third seasons. I don't think "Shadows" is an episode that anyone today would consider thematically significant, but something about seeing those office supplies float spookily through the air - it wasn't like anything I had seen on television, and I wanted in. What got you involved with X-Files fanfic? I've always been a person who, when I am interested in something, seeks to learn more about it. So I guess I got online as a 12-year-old with this new interest and discovered fanfic. It was thrilling to find out that so many talented people were taking characters I loved and bringing them to life for me. When the screen faded to black each week and I wondered, "That's it? What next?", fanfic was always there to fill in the blanks and take Mulder and Scully to the next level. As a teenager, I was self-indulgent enough to think I had something to contribute, too. Most of what I wrote in the '90s would today make me cringe. I remember literally paging through the dictionary in search of erudite words I thought Mulder and Scully would say! But occasionally I'll feel brave enough to read an old story and I feel encouraged to see a spark: a turn of phrase or a fragment of dialogue that I still feel proud of. I write professionally now, but I've never written fiction that isn't X-Files fiction, so it's something that has really allowed me to hone my creative juices in a different way. What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom? Sometimes I feel like the Statler and Waldorf of the fandom, like I'm sitting up in the balcony grousing "Back in my day...!" Because the fandom is remarkably robust, and I've gotten involved with it to an extent on Twitter and AO3, and now all these young whippersnappers idolize Mulder and Scully just as much if not more as I ever did! Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files? Not really, no. I've of course consumed a lot of media since The X-Files that I wanted to discuss with others - I'm a huge "Harry Potter" nerd, and I was outraged when Netflix canceled "The OA" - but strangely I've never had the urge to read or write fanfic about anything other than "The X-Files." Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully? Every Thursday night! I watch a chosen episode with a group of fans on Twitter and tweet about it - #tbtXFiles. That's great fun. There are episodes I've seen dozens of times over the years and episodes I think I only ever watched once, and it's always enlightening to watch them again with a certain critical eye. When I was a fan during the original run, I really idolized Mulder; I loved episodes where we saw him in all his cracked genius glory. Scully was a trailblazer of a character, of course, but I think the fandom has evolved over the years to give Scully her due. Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom? I was fairly stunned when the revival came around and I realized that people were still writing X-Files fic, and that a lot of it was so good. So yes, I do read fic on Archive of Our Own. But my heart is always with the early days of fanfic. In the revival when Mulder says "I've always wondered how this was going to end" - that felt to me almost like a love letter to fanfic authors who had been trying to answer that question for 25 years. Surprisingly, I've never had the urge to read fic in another fandom. Every time I try, it just feels like I'm cheating on Mulder and Scully. Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors? My favorite author back in the day was Kipler. Her stories were just like real episodes of the show I could vividly imagine in my mind. I adore syntax6, particularly "20" and "The Birthday Stories," because of the way she perfectly and poignantly captures vignettes that span the entire series. Another favorite is Dawn and her "Blood Ties" series - I started out as a "NoRomo," and Dawn was one of the authors who made me believe Mulder and Scully could have a romantic relationship that really worked. And I always had a soft spot for Profiler!Mulder stories, so to this day I mourn the unfinished state of the great Kronos fic "Ascent to Hell." One fic I always come back to that captures profiling Mulder really well is "Domination of Lies," by cslatton. And then there are stories that I consider classics: "Corpse" by Livengoo, "Oklahoma" by Amperage and Livengoo, the "Revelations" and "All Hallow's Eve" series by Windsinger. What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise? I have a soft spot for a story I wrote called "Human Credential." I was attempting, a quarter-century after the first season of the show, to set a story in the very early days of the partnership (which these days is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic to read), and I felt like I nailed it. Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online? I have been doing both of these, as a matter of fact! Or in my case, they are oldies that made it online but vanished when Geocities went belly-up, for example, that I sometimes go back to and reshape. Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work? As the swallows return to Capistrano, I seem to always return to writing fic at periods of transition in my life. The first time I "retired" from fanfic, I wasn't even in college yet! If one can be nostalgic at 21 years old for something one gave up at 17, I was nostalgic for fanfic, and I picked it back up again in grad school. Then I became a teacher and a wife and a mom and years passed, and the revival seduced me back into it again. But the vast majority of fanfic I've written is firmly planted in the first seven seasons of the show - poor Mulder and Scully never seem to get to grow up in my stories. What's the story behind your pen name? I wrote under a lot of pen names over the years! When I first started writing fanfic, no one knew anything about Internet safety and it didn't occur to me that it wasn't wise to use my real name. There was a period when I would have been mortified if anyone discovered my stories under my real name - now, at least I can write it off as a youthful indulgence! When I finally grew into a more mature writer, I started using the name Rae Lynn, which is almost-but-not-quite my real first and middle names. Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions? As far as I know, unless my friends and acquaintances have done some sleuthing, only my husband knows I still write fanfic. And he's never read it, though he's kind enough to give me a glazed-eyes indulgent smile if I ever talk about it. Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now? I am xraelynn on AO3! I have about a dozen stories there - some of them I wrote 15 years ago and some of them are brand spanking new. Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Fanfic is a true labor of love. Fanfic authors don't write fanfic for money or fame; they do it because they love it. Sites like AO3 and Tumblr have made it so much easier to show your appreciation to writers (::gruff reminiscing voice:: back in my day, you had to send them an email, and now you can just click the "kudos" button!). I can only speak for myself, but I really thrive on that feedback - otherwise I'm just Mulder in his cramped hovel of a home office waiting for Scully to nag me to shave my beard. Every so often I think about the fact that there is so much high-quality writing about these characters I've loved for decades just available on the Internet for free and it feels like a true gift.

(Posted by Lilydale on May 4, 2021)

[firelxdykatara]

not gonna lie I would love to hear more about the drama and infighting that went on in The Vampire Diaries fandom if you have the time (and also want to use that time to give your experience with the fandom, which from the snippets you've told sounds Not Fun so I get it if you don't want to lol)

oh god, there was like, SO MUCH, i just

i really feel like tvd is one of those fandoms that is so hard to describe without a lot of ‘you’d have to have been there’, but it really felt like this huge and all-consuming beast for about five years until the show finally imploded and the fandom basically turned on it en masse. (you ever see that post going around that’s like ‘if you ever want to know what true regret feels like, ask someone who once called tvd their favorite show’? still a mood, all these years later. basically the entire fandom thought the show should have just bowed out with whatever shreds of dignity it had left at the end of season 6, and became more of a hatedom than a fandom for the last two seasons. when you have an entire fandom cheering news of your show’s cancellation, i think that’s a sign you done fucked up, julie.)

first and most infamous, of course, are the ship wars. which are pretty much inevitable in any teen-centered drama, and i really think the CW fucking thrives on them, but it was particularly egregious in TVD’s case because not only was the base premise of the show a love triangle, but the two main romantic leads were brothers that the show constantly pit against one another--in pursuit of elena’s affections, but also because it kept up this insistence on the ‘good brother/bad brother’ dichotomy which stopped making sense after about season 2 (by which time we have found out that the good brother was never as good as he appeared, and the bad brother has been growing and isn’t nearly as bad as he pretends to be)--and the question of which brother ‘deserved’ elena (and no, what elena wanted very rarely factored into these discussions, especially in the team stefan camp because they turned on her when what she wanted was no longer The Good Brother, but i’ll get to that in a bit) was hotly contested.

i’m not kidding when i say the shipping wars were vicious. i started watching tvd shortly after it began to air, which was late 2009, and kept up with it fairly sporadically over the years. i didn’t come onto tumblr until 2011/2012, and by then, the fandom was already pretty much a garbagefire. there were anti ship and anti character blogs, any time something bad happened for one ship the rival ship would invade the tags to gloat about it (seasons 3 and 4 were especially rough, and i’m not gonna pretend delena fans weren’t just as bad about tag invasion and shit, but as that was my side of the road i saw a lot more of the stelena shippers being assholes, which soured my opinion on the ship a long time before i started rewatching and realized the red flags were there from the start), confessions blogs were popular also toxic as fuck (so much fighting happened in the notes of those posts, good gods), and this was right around when twitter’s popularity was on the rise and the line between Celebrity and Fan was thinning, so the fandom was absolutely atrocious to much of the tvd cast and crew.

(some of them deserved a lot of the later backlash, but in the early years a lot of it was ‘how dare you write the story in a way i dont like, you terrible fucking person’, and gods don’t get me started on the dobsley vs nian Thing)

i think what really encapsulates my feelings on the tvd fandom as a whole, though, is the way they (to this DAY) treated elena gilbert, which can be summed up in one meme that gained a lot of traction around season 3 if i remember right: that gif of pam from true blood, with the text altered to read “i’m so OVER elena and her precious doppelganger vagina!”

i swear at one time i had over half the active tvd fan accounts on tumblr blocked, because i got to a point where i would no longer tolerate elena hate, and she was (and still is, in what remains of the fandom; you’ll see a lot of ‘elena was one of the worst things about the show’ takes from ex-fans, too) one of the most widely despised characters in the entire fandom. because she -checks smudged writing on hand- was a traumatized teenage girl who -reads off a crumpled notecard- couldn’t always perfectly sort out her own feelings and -squints at the ceiling- sometimes made mistakes or bad decisions. (except a lot of the fandom also insisted that she was a mary sue who had no character traits or flaws or faults and it was like....make up your fucking minds???? is she a calculating conniving bitch whose somehow manipulating these centuries old vampires to tie them around her little finger or is she a boring flat character with no depth and no flaws??? jfc)

there was this massive double standard, too--like, stefan and damon could fuck whoever they wanted and that was fine, but elena was constantly raked over the coals for the crime of developing romantic feelings for the two men who had become constants in her life and whom she cared for deeply, and oh my GOD the slut shaming that happened when elena slept with damon was fucking wild. (and also happened in canon lmfao. like the show had one of elena’s best friends basically call her diseased on screen for falling in love with someone other than stefan. it was gross and ridiculous and the friend in question was also being a giant hypocrite at the time since she was happily flirting with someone who was directly responsible for the deaths of like four of elena’s loved ones and her own boyfriend’s mother but that’s beside the point) but like elena was called a slut and a bitch and a whore for ‘cheating’ on stefan (she hadn’t, and she had in fact broken up with him on screen the episode earlier) and ‘immediately’ jumping into bed with damon, even though none of them said fucking boo when stefan had one night stands or damon had fuckbuddies or whatever.

shit, caroline didn’t get any of this treatment when she started falling for tyler while dating matt! which isn’t to say i think she should have, just that i think it’s fucking ridiculous that elena was absolutely demonized by the fandom for daring to have feelings for two guys at once and eventually acting on them--despite the fact that the entire premise of the show was a love triangle. it’s not a love triangle if both sides don’t eventually get explored, and the crew had been pretty explicit about the fact that delena was going to happen at some point--but when it did, a huge chunk of the fandom absolutely threw a fit.

and a lot of these elena haters were alleged stelena stans, and i say alleged because they hated her so much for not wanting stefan’s dick anymore that it was clear they were really stefan stans and only wanted stelena to be endgame because they wanted stefan to ‘win’ at the end of the day, because ‘he’s the good brother’ so he deserved elena more.

it was all very gross and very misogynistic and very sex shaming (apparently delena was a ‘shallow’ and ‘superficial’ relationship because they had sex after two years of unrequited feelings slowly becoming requited and then pining for ages on both sides, and because they had a lot of on screen chemistry that the show capitalized on for years so of course they did a lot of making out and shit but it’s not like stelena didn’t have its fair share of making out and sex scenes, stefan was just too much of a coward to let elena top i’d apologize for that joke but i’m really not sorry because it’s true), and when i say it was egged on by the crew, that’s because they refused to let the love triangle die back in season 4 when it should have.

they insisted on stringing stelena fans along, dropping little bread crumbs to keep them invested, like dreams of a future where they were married and revealing that stefan was also a doppelganger and he and elena were descended from a pair of star-crossed lovers (a plot that ultimately went nowhere, to no one’s great surprise), and then fucking like. julie plec turned around and threw nina under the bus after she chose not to extend her contract and pretended that stelena might have happened again if she hadn’t left the show, which....i mean frankly i wouldn’t put it past her, but it would have been shitty writing. then again, she thought having a vampire pregnancy where a uterus was magically transplanted from a witch into a vampire that could somehow......carry the babies to term.... made sense and was a good way to accomodate candice’s RL pregnancy rather than like literally ANYTHING else, soooooo. but anyway julie saying that around like, end of s6 sparked off a new wave of nina hate and elena hate and ship wars bc they SEers took it as ‘confirmation’ that stelena was REALLY meant to be endgame and it was all just a hot fucking mess

another thing is that, while tvd was in its prime before the anti/purity culture shit started picking up any real steam, there was still this pervasive attitude throughout the fandom that if you liked Damon, you were A Bad Person. liking damon was apparently grounds for insults and harassment, and apparently he was The Worst Person on the Show even though literally nothing he does on screen is any worse than shit we know stefan has done (and frankly every other vampire too, but i mention stefan specifically because he was always held up--in the show but especially in the fandom--as the Good Brother while damon was the Bad One, and if you liked damon more then that had to mean your morals were dodgy and you clearly couldn’t appreciate what a heroic and saintly figure dear stefan was and....oops, i’m sorry, my salt keeps leaking -cough-).

meanwhile klaus quickly became a fandom darling despite not even really having much of a redemption arc (on tvd anyway, he just became more ‘affably evil’ as the show went on and more inclined to work with the main characters rather than try to kill them; i have no idea what went on over on his show, though), and like i can 100% appreciate liking villains and not caring that they do dodgy villainous shit, even just liking them bc they’re hot and wanting them to kiss a main character bc they have insanely good chemistry (yes i ship klaroline, no i won’t apologize for it, they could have been Really Great), it’s just really the double standard that gets me.

and all of this, incidentally, required ignoring some truly gross shit stefan was responsible for wrt his relationship with elena, that frankly it has always bothered me never really got addressed in the show. i get why elena herself would never be able to actually call him on it, but the fact is that he stalked her for months after he first saw her and thought she was katherine (meanwhile it only took damon .5 seconds to realize she was someone else entirely, but that’s another topic entirely), and then he deliberately inserted himself into her life because, in his words, ‘i have to know her’. he never gave a thought to how his presence in her life might affect her (or rather, he did, and tormented himself about it in his internal monologue, but never let this actually dissuade him from disrupting her life), and elena would wind up blaming herself for every tragedy that befell her friends and loved ones as a result of getting mixed up in vampire bullshit even though none of it was her fault--she literally blamed herself for existing but most of the fandom didn’t give a fuck about that lmfao--and stefan did shit like find out that she was adopted and then withhold this information from her until she got pissed about another secret he was keeping (her resemblence to katherine) and drop it on her to try and distract her from her very reasonable anger, and like... i should stop before this becomes a whole rant about how much i hate stefan fucking salvatore, but the point is, he did a lot of really sketchy shit he never answered for and elena never really took him to task for, and the fandom just kept eating up his insistence that he was the Good Brother and therefore he deserved to have elena, and if she didn’t want him anymore it was because she was a heinous bitch who didn’t deserve him.

uh.....i think i got off track there. and there’s probably a lot of shit i missed, like i think i was incandescent with rage for most of seasons 5 and 6 so i missed a lot of the interfandom shit cause i was too busy being increasingly pissed off at the show itself, but if nothing else this should give you an idea of how much of a goddamn cesspit the fandom was while the show as in its prime. there’s a reason both the show and the fandom have such a lousy reputation lmfao.

[nellygwyn]

This is a niche post inspired by @alicehoffmans​ posting some incredibly vile screenshots of fans of The Spanish Princess (a show I haven’t and probably won’t watch, but am consuming through Tumblr gifs) saying incredibly disgusting things about Anne Boleyn and other mistresses (although Anne was never a mistress in the technical sense) of Henry VIII. Misogynistic, disgusting stuff, couched in that irritating as fuck Twitter stan language. I went on the offending people’s Twitters and Tumblrs to read more, because initially, I wanted to start shit, then I thought ‘These are probably just stupid teenagers who don’t know any better and are just super invested in a show, I won’t stoop to their level’ and then I saw one of them was fucking 4MOTHERFUCKING5 YEARS OLD and should know better. A grown fucking woman who purports to write historical fiction should know better about history, about the world, about reality. And here I am, writing this post. This got way longer than I expected because I am annoyed so...

Honestly, the main thing I gleaned from perusing their timelines: Some of you would do well to finally realise that kings had mistresses. We can go back and forth about how this was born from a sexist society, and a sexist attitude to the role & rights of a king vs a queen consort (and I would say ‘Yeah, it sucks’), but that is the truth of the matter. Your husband having extramarital affairs was part and parcel of being the wife of a king (and possibly, I’d argue, being the wife of a high-ranking man in general). Royal women who became queen consorts weren’t stupid, they knew this. Many of them tolerated it: take my favourite British queen consort, Caroline of Ansbach, for example. Her husband, King George II, took a mistress, Henrietta Howard, when he was Prince of Wales, mainly because he knew that, as heir to the throne, it would’ve been bad form to NOT have a mistress. Caroline’s nose was a bit put out of joint for a while, but in the end, she found she could have a fairly decent (if occasionally petty) relationship with Henrietta, who she actually made one of her Women of the Bedchamber. Caroline, in short, made it work. This is just something kings did, for centuries and centuries and centuries. I mean, in France, ‘maitresse-en-titre’ (the official mistress) was an actual fucking position at court. Calling royal mistresses ‘homewreckers’ doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny, sorry. Worse shit was happening in the early modern era, worse than a king indulging in a bit of centuries-old bawdry with a woman with ambition, a sexuality, and sometimes, a romantic inclination.  

Does this mean that queens who knew their husband was having extra-marital affairs felt great about it? No. Caroline of Ansbach was pretty laidback but even she was a bit huffy at first. My favourite historical monarch of all time, Charles II, is pretty notorious for the amount of mistresses he had. His wife, Catherine fo Braganza, was actually warned about his proclivity for women, by her mother before she left Portugal, so she had prior warning but still, in the initial months and years of her marriage, it was hard for her. She had pretty public blow-ups with Charles about it, at first. And I haven’t seen TSP, so I can only speculate but it does look like they explore, on some level, the emotional impact infidelity in a royal marriage could have and that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean that you, the viewer, suddenly throw all critical thinking to the wind because you have quite a modern, visceral reaction to “cheating.’ I’ve been cheated on, at least twice, and it hurts, it’s shit, so when I read about Catherine of Braganza desperately trying to claw Charles back to, solely, her...yes, I feel something but I’m objective and historically literate enough to realise that that doesn’t automatically make Charles, a 17th century monarch, a deadbeat, and his mistresses all equally culpable in hurting Catherine. 

Many of you could do with injecting a bit of nuance into your discussions about women who, you know, actually existed, and had lives and relationships as complicated as our own. Stop calling women who were judicially murdered on trumped up charges ‘whores’ just because they, for a while, were ‘the other woman’ in a time where this was actually kind of completely normal. The only thing I might concede for someone like Anne Boleyn specifically is that it went further, and it became something a lot more “serious” than, say, the relationship Henry had with Bessie Blount (which KoA was able to make work.) This made it upsetting and ultimately disastrous for KoA (no one denies this because no one can) - but again, you were not there, you were not party to Anne’s feelings (or KoA’s, I might add), you do not know how the situation unravelled in real time. How do you know that, in a different time and a different context, you would not have ended up making many of the decisions these women did? You don’t know. And you never will know. Take a step back and be objective. Perspective.

In conclusion:

[annetteblog]

Intro & My take on KM

Hi!

I’m new around here so it’s supposed to be (not so short) introduction, since I don’t know how to start a blog heh. I hope to sprinkle my 0.5 cents into the KM conversation and maybe to bring a new perspective from someone, who is not a part of the typical English-speaking West.

Who /the hell/ Am I?  

(please, consider it to be said with NJ’s voice from Intro: Persona :D)

I was born in Siberia (it’s in the Asian part of Russia), currently live in the European part of the country while studying at a Uni (European in terms of geography, not in terms of everything else i’m definitely not shading rn lolllll). English is not my first language, I’ve just kind of learnt it to some extent. Due to this it takes me more time to write a post; and I may (and will) make some grammatical & other mistakes. Plus I’m lazy AND busy with Uni, so I won’t even promise to be consistent in posting smth lol. But I thought I need more practice in terms of writing in English, so here I am, actually scribbling something. This feels weird, because I’ve been around stan Tumblr since 2015, but never ever interacted, just read.

How I ended up around Jikook/Kookmin (and BTS) & My (long&messy) take on this matter

Although I had heard of BTS before, I became an Army only in October 2018. I had kinda avoided them, because you know... boybands.... sing songs about romantic love and how they love girls.......... (+I had been around Twitter when 1D been at their peak and I remember a quite toxic community of fans, whom always had scared me). Shortly, hello stereotypes. Obviously, after I got engaged I felt terribly sorry that I had been sleeping on them, but what is done cannot be undone. 

Someone I knew back then reposted one of their MVs and I, during my sad hours of procrastination, decided to watch it. Then I saw their live performance with the same song. And I thought “wow these guys can sing and dance and the music is kinda cool, i need to check this out maybe??” 

Then a funny thing happened. One of the next videos I watched (the same person had it added to their page) was a 2016 BangtanBomb where JM and JK practiced their Coming of Age dance. 

Do you know this moment with Gina from the 1st episode of Brooklyn 9-9:

Well, that was precisely me after I watched it. I don’t even know how to explain this, it was kind of a gut feeling? Whatever you call it, I started to get suspicious and couldn’t even explain to myself why. /actually now a do have questions to this vid and the main one - why does everyone cringe that much? if it’s a girly choreo than they had done some “girly” moves before. why is there such strong reaction??/

I started to get deeper and went to some ru-shipper communities. Shipping culture among Russian speaking fans is... well, weird to some extent, but I maybe address this topic some time later. You need to consider that (as far as you probably know) Russia is quite homophonic country and sadly is not the greatest place for LGBTQ+ community at the moment. The non-frienly influential attitudes hanging in the society + the general shippers’ weirdness = the result is not that nice honestly. 

I struggled for some time in order to find more mature people (not just in terms of age but in general sanity), failed, ended up with some EXTREMELY toxic ru-fans of TK, which was/is the most popular pairing here, spent among them like 15 minutes and ran away horrified. After that I didn’t even try to engage with shippers or believers or whatever of any pair and just decided to enjoy the music and the content (which is a great idea, highly recommend!)

After a couple of days I discovered that JK makes videos. I love video, films and visual art so I immediately found them on YT, saw the titles with names of different cities from all over the world and was like “Oh that must be so cool, he’s visited so many outstanding places I’ve never been to, so I really need to watch it! I shall enjoy some beautyyy”. Then I clicked on GCFt.

Well, what can I say. I did enjoy some beauty, but not the type I had initially anticipated. The biggest clickbait in my entire life. JK should be proud of himself.

                                       /as I said - the beauty/

I had already known Troy back then and I known the song’s lyrics so it would not be an underestimation to say - the video just blew my mind. I was like - hold on is this real? seriously?? no really really????? he manage to get away with something THAT obvious?????? dude how

As a person who edited videos AND is not a native English speaker, I don’t buy the explanation “oh he mustve didnt get the lyrics lmao”. You just don’t do that. You don’t. DON’T. You google and translate every shit you don’t understand, every word and idiom you’ve never encountered, because otherwise the possibility of an epic failure is very likely. You wouldn’t want to give your mum a video as a birthday present and then discover that you used a song with WAP-ish lyrics, right? (well maybe that would be okay in your family, I don’t judge, but that’s not the case for people I know). So don’t you dare to degrade JK’s intellectual capacities; such assumption is really offensive. He is a smart boii, he knows exactly what he’s doing in terms of his art.

So I was shocked, but decided to look for the context - maybe I missed some previous events regarding this Tokyo thing (another great idea - always check the context). Well, apparently I didn’t, because the whole narrative with the trip for two, lovely selfies etc. made my poor brain lowkey explode. (I still don’t buy the rings theory thing though)

But I didn’t give up lol! I’m a bit stubborn and it’s very hard to convince me in anything, so I decided to search for more context, more of their interactions, moreeee. Remember, the late October 2018, there were no swan lakes, RB, and even MMA18 hadn’t happened yet. 

This time I ended up watching content in more or less consistent way, and when I saw all of these scenes with affectionate JM and a cool badass i-don’t-care-about-anyone-i’m-a-manly-man-with-no-feelings-whatsoever JK, I just hysterically laughed. 

Homophobic Russia, remember? I recognized this. Growing up here being LGBT myself, taught me the same type behaviour during my high school days. When a girl I kinda liked but didn’t what to admit it to myself was nice to me or (oh god) flirted with me, I did something similar. It’s like a huge panic mode. Being an introvert doesn’t help either. The funniest thing is that you may not entirely realise what exactly is going on in terms of your own feelings, especially at that age (16-18ish). In my personal case, I thought I liked her but as a friend, only later to realise that well not as a friend oops :DDD The second thing (already not so funny) is that you actually consciously or unconsciously try to avoid the subject as much as possible, as long as possible and pretend that nothing is going on. We’re just bros. Stop doing this stupid gayish thing and don’t look at me like that, you’re annoying. If you ever do this again I (gently) kick you. I’m straighter than a straight line in my math textbook. IDK, but probably that’s your brain is somehow trying to protect you. Again, in my case&position I knew that the consequences for any non-straight person being outed would be bad (TW not to the point of being killed bad, but to the point of being excluded from a big part of society). So for me it was a mixture of the internalized homophobia + lack of self reflection + just being a bit emotionally slow + very! straight community around. Shit happens, I was a teenager and made my share of mistakes, but that experience helps me to recognize the same pattern of behaviour up to this day.   

So coming back to KM, because the post is already waaay too long and I just ramble. It’s been 2+ years for me being a part of this fandom, and what can I say... Things become more intense and eventful with every year passing by ;) Funny how I felt that vibe from the 2016 dance practice video. Seeing the Black Swan performance a week ago almost had me choked, no joking. They are amazing.

                                                    Pure Art

However, and I would like to emphasize that, I do not incline that KM are 100% romantically involved and/or gay or whatever. I tend to treat people with respect and not to make too much assumptions about their private life. That’s not my business. However, I’m also not a fan of heteronormativity, so I’m just sitting here and observe everything that’s going on putting some distance and not forgetting being generally polite and critical thinking. But if they are just straightest besties please give them an Oscar before Grammy

Anyways, I hope this blog won’t kick the bucket from the very start and I will post something every now and then. You can always ask me questions about some BTS/Jikook related stuff or something about Russia and a Russian view on mass culture topics, since I’m pretty sure some of you have very stereotypical view of what is going on here :) However, do note that I’ve never been to America or Europe, therefore I may not be aware of something verrrry obvious to you or just have a completely different experience. 

P.S.  And yeah, I’m used to say Jikook, since it’s the name which is used much more frequently in Russian.  i like it better and what will u do haha

[kirbyspits]

A lot of Makorra shippers only moved on because they’re afraid of being called homophobic for not shipping korrasami. I LITERALLY saw someone on Instagram yesterday call a makorra shipper homophobic just for saying korrasami came out of nowhere. Also, Korrasami shippers LOVE to bring up the "popping bottles" backlash to make fun of makorra shippers. I left the tlok fandom in 2014 bc it was so toxic as a teenager, but now i’m 23. I’m no longer afraid of shipping something i always loved.

Ah, yes, I realized I didn’t address the fandom's toxicity in the last ask, but I’ve spoken about it before. I don't talk too much about the past because I was at the edge of the fandom back in 2014/2015. I was aware of fights, but the discussions I saw were moreso on bi-erasure. I saw one post saying it was wrong to ship Makorra. I remember being really confused about why Makorra was actually problematic, but I didn’t appreciate being told who I can ship the only dark-skinned woman protagonist on a major television network with. Why are you forcing me to ignore Mako and Korra’s relationship? Book 1 is practically about Mako and Korra, all other characters be damned. Me preferring the story of one pairing and a popular romance trope, second chances, is not wrong, and no one would know how I view the LGBT+ community based on who I ship in one show.

I ended up leaving the community because I was disappointed with season 4 in general. When Korra was released on Netflix, I figured it was time to rewatch the series again (plus, I’ve been binging all my favorite romance anime). So imagine my shock when I created a new Tumblr and Twitter account to rant and rave about TLOK, and I saw nothing but hate and name-calling in the Makorra tags. I saw people casually throwing around the word “homophobic,” and one person said people who don’t like Korrasami are just misogynistic. 

I just wanted pretty pictures, and people are out here psychoanalyzing shippers! So, I dug through some blogs and to feel more grounded with this fandom I didn’t recognize. After reading through their commentaries and experiences, I actually became more upset at Bryke than the teenagers/children who comment on Makorra posts saying how much better Korrasami is or accuse Makorra shippers of being homophobic. 

Yes, I truly believe these comments are mostly coming from people in their late teens and younger, at least in 2020. I can’t speak on 2014/2015, but since we were younger, the early 20s/late teens, I wonder if our age group was also the loudest. Don’t get me wrong, adults can be horrible people and can get really nasty. However, every time I look up the rudest commenters' profiles, they were teens. When one Korrasami shipper wrote “screw Makorra” on my AMV, I figured I’d have some fun trolling them until I clicked on their profile and saw a child. Needless to say, I ignored them and reflected on how parents are allowing their babies on TikTok while my parents freaked out at the idea of showing my picture on FB growing up. 

*I’m not still mad about that*

Also, while it doesn’t give anyone an excuse to make such a strong accusation, part of me, as a straight person, feels like I can’t get too upset because I also become very aware of my privilege. The space I’m in is a majority of young LGBT+ fans (at least on Twitter where I’ve seen the most toxicity). Some people see TLOK as their safe space and imply why should there be Makorra shippers when they have all these other cis/het shows they can engage with. It doesn’t work like that, of course. TLOK doesn’t only feature Bi characters. They’re POC/Indigenous, women, and Korra has dark skin. That’s a lot of marginalized communities. Makorra/TLOK is my comfort show, not because she’s with a man, but because of the reasons I just listed. Also shipping Korra with Mako doesn’t mean she’s no longer bi. She’d still be attracted to women.

Here’s who I am upset with tho, Bryke. Mostly Bryan. While Makorra shippers called out Korrasami shippers for cyberbullying, the focus seemed to be on Bryan for making it seem like there was something wrong with them for not finding Korrasami’s narrative satisfying. It was especially sad to read bloggers who identified as being part of the LGTB+ community saying Bryan’s hetero-lens dismissed their experience and then having to defend/proving themselves to anonymous messengers. 

Fans saw it as a betrayal. They saw it as the go-head for the rude Korrasami shippers to harass Makorra artists because they “didn’t watch the show correctly.” When the creator, the person you admire, also puts the blame on you, that kind of pain is on another level.

Korrasami shippers played a huge role in kicking Makorra shippers out of the fandom, but we can’t underestimate how much Bryan’s statement is a slap in the face. He used his characters and social justice as a shield for reasonable criticism. Just because we say a story is bad and Asami is grossly underwritten doesn’t mean that we’re against the idea of Korra and Asami being a couple. 

Of course, I’ve seen some very problematic statements from Makorra shippers. After all, homophobia is real. However, aside from the actual bigots, people have no issue with Korrasami. They just wanted a stronger connection between the girls. Many people seem to think Makorra shippers were looking for more romance, but we know we couldn't expect that. We can expect more screentime, musical cues, and more emotional support, which most people can see as platonic, but be romantic if you really want to. Mako’s interactions in book 4 can be seen as platonic, but all of us Makorra shippers saw it to be romantic.

Popping bottles! I completely missed that joke in 2014 and I discovered it this year. I agree it’s pretty annoying, but I become a troll and say I’m popping bottles for my Makorra moments. I don’t get any engagement, but I don’t seem to lose followers for it. Maybe popping bottles represents “straight-baiting?” I don’t get it why it’s so funny after all this time, but we’re Makorra shippers. We’re the joke 🙄

Anyways, to wrap up, lately, there seems to be a bit of a shift on Twitter. When I first created an account. I stayed in my little corner live-tweeting about TLOK and Makorra. I had to stop looking at the Makorra tag because it was so negative. Now, I’m seeing people admit they’re cute, and then saying they’re platonic soulmates. I’ll take it, although, as one commenter said, “that’s boring!” 

Someone led a Makorra Week back in October, and it was really nice! I have feeling people speaking up on the name-calling and reminding people that we’re talking about 2D characters helped. We just want to be left alone and enjoy the scenes we have in the show, art, and fanfiction. 

Keep shipping who you want! Don’t let any stranger shame you for your shipping preferences, especially in fiction! I’m so happy you feel more comfortable shipping these two dorks! You’re not alone! I’ve been a Makorra shipper since 2012, and while I find Korrasami cute (I love Korra, and I love Asami), Makorra is my OTP. I really like them, and I think they were meant for each other.