#Sold out to hostile party

[curious-trickster]

Please help a Reader find new content!

Hey there. I recently finished reading 'for the want of a jewel', an original work written by @formlessvoidbeast and I absolutely loved it!

Just like I loved the 'Accidental Warlord' series, a AU based on the Witcher, by @inexplicifics.

Those fics are both an absolute delight to read and they have a few things in common which kind of caused a want of more in me.

Please help me find fics/original work/books/shows... with these tropes (they do not have all the things I mentioned but it would be nice to have them meet several):

Character gets traded for peace to a most likely hostile party (warlord, king, pirates, bandits, just something they expect to be bad or different)

The trade-in-character expects to be hurt/killed/abused/hated/...

The second party they are given too is not aware of the circumstances of the way the trade-in-character had to leave their home

The second party which the trade-in-character expects to be hostile turns out to be not so bad

The trade-in-character finds true home with the party they were given to

The trade-in-character finds true friends/family not made by blood/love/their way of life/... with the people they were given too

Shenanigans (optional as the rest of them, but they would be greatly appreciated)

If you can think of something which has some or even better all of these tropes, pls comment/send a message! I would be very grateful and you'd help my adhd brain by feeding it with its new hyperfixation!

Feel free to drop the number of the trope(s) your recommendation has, or don't it's up to you!

A big thanks to @formlessvoidbeast and @inexplicifics for writing these amazing stories and allowing me to mention you in this post!

[xneens]

wasted summer - one

series masterlist

watching jj like someone else hurts, thankfully, you finds comfort in rafe’s arms … and his bed.

Music boomed in your ears, the party in full swing as you made your way upstairs, away from the guys smoking weed and girls dancing to Kanye West. Using a guest room on the third floor, you opened the window and crawled out onto the roof. With a drink in hand, you watched partygoers jump into the Cameron's pool, observing the party from afar.

Taking a sip of the cheap vodka JJ had gotten, you glanced at the blond, a frown on your lips as you saw him sweep Kiara off her feet, jumping into the pool with her. Kiara likes JJ, that much you know is true after she had drunkenly confessed during a girl's night out. Bitterness grew inside you as you watched him respond to her subtle flirting, praying desperately he didn't return her feelings but your own.

You look away, downing the rest of the cup before throwing it off the roof in hopes of it hitting someone. Hopefully either one of them, but they were still playing in the pool. Together.

"Littering on my property? Harsh." a voice behind you murmurs as he crawls out the window, sitting beside you on the roof. Rafe grins at you, bringing the blunt to his lips.

You roll your eyes, keeping them on him instead of the heartwrenching scene below you. "Like you haven't littered at my house before. Payback."

"So vengeful ever since you started hanging out with those Pogues." Rafe chuckles, offering you a hit off his blunt. You decline it with a wave of your hand and he shrugs, taking another hit off of it.

Glancing back at JJ and Kiara, you can't help the pang in your heart as you watch them play in the pool, splashing each other with large smiles on their faces. Sighing, you look back at Rafe, suddenly wishing you'd brought a bottle of Titos with you.

Rafe arches a brow, a smirk dancing on his lips. "What're you doing up here, anyways? Shouldn't you be hanging out with the Scooby gang?"

Not wanting to be in his eyesight, you lay down on the roof, staring at the night sky, the lights from the party polluting the starry sky. "I needed a break."

"From those dirty Pogues?"

You smack his arm, causing the blond to burst out laughing. "Stop bullying my friends."

"Bullying works," replied Rafe, shifting to mirror your position. He groans softly as he lays back on the roof. "Remember Agatha Haynes? She no longer smokes fifty cigarettes a day after you called her Hagatha."

A snort escapes your lips before you can stop it. You shake your head. "God, I was a bitch."

"You still are." Rafe dodges another smack, a teasing grin slapped across his face. "Still the spoiled, snobby, selfish girl you were. You're just better at hiding it now."

"Oh, and the hits just keep coming." You groan out dramatically, smiling back at him. "I'll have you know that I am very empathetic and care about other people's feelings.”

The blond shakes his head, taking a hit from his blunt. "Is that why you're hiding out from your gang of mutts? Because you care about them so much you don't want them to know you're suffering in silence?"

"I wish you'd suffer in silence."

"Woah, don't violate the thirteenth-year truce," Rafe replies, drawing out a reluctant smile from you.

Rafe was ... Rafe. Born with a golden spoon in his mouth, acted like every rich kid from Figure 8, only worse, and knew how to get his way. The only fight the blond had lost was to a coked-out tourist to who Rafe ironically sold the coke.

Most people didn't see that he could be nice when he wanted to. You always held it above everyone that Rafe Cameron had a soft spot for you, even if it only came from being his little sister's best friend. Still, it was nice to be one of the few people not to be on the receiving side of his hostility, a side Sarah was constantly on.

It was a weird friendship built on a truce made by four and six-year-olds. During your fourth birthday party, Rafe had gifted you with a promise to never be the cause of your tears and you promised to never cut holes in his tighty whities again.

After a few minutes of silence, Rafe turns his head to look at you, exhaling out smoke. "Seriously, though, why are you hiding?"

"Not hiding, taking a break." You correct him, refusing to meet his eyes. He wasn't completely wrong, you were hiding from your friends, specifically two of them.

"That's such bullshit." scoffs the man next to you, rolling his eyes at your words. "Tell me."

You groan, covering your face with your hands in hopes of hiding your embarrassment from him. "No. It's nothing."

"Tell me."

"Stop being nosy."

Rafe snickers, putting his blunt out before grabbing your hands and pulling them away from your face gently. Eyes filled with serenity, a sight only you and Wheezie ever got to see. "Tell me, you know I won't tell anyone."

Your playful pout makes his grin widen. "You'll make fun of me."

"Me? After our truce?" asks Rafe, throwing his head back in laughter. "Never."

After contemplating whether to lie to his face, you sigh, rubbing your temples. It couldn't hurt to tell him, it's not as if he ever told anyone stuff you've told him before. "Kiara likes JJ. And ... I think he likes her back."

An awkward moment of silence hangs in the air before Rafe inhales sharply. "Oh. I didn't realize you wanted to fuck the help."

"Rafe." your tone made him throw his hands up in surrender. Staring back up at the sky, you scrunched your nose. "I kind of like him. It just sucks a little seeing them so touchy with each other and flirting in my face. If they become official, then I'll literally be the only person in the friend group without anyone. I'll be a seventh wheel and that's so fucking pathetic."

"You're getting ahead of yourself," says Rafe, scoffing. "My sister found someone who puts up with her shit, you'll have an easier chance finding a boyfriend. If you don't like anyone, I'll volunteer."

You can't help but roll your eyes at his not-so-comforting words. "Thanks. You really know how to make a girl feel better."

The blond chortled, sitting up. "I'm serious. Anyone who isn't blind can see you're clearly much better than those idiots you hang around. The girls you hung out with were annoying as hell but at least they were better than those group of Pogues."

"How very Kook of you to say," you mutter back, not taking Rafe's words earnestly. Shifting, you sit up, eyes flickering back to the pool, immediately spotting Sarah and John B., Pope and Cleo, and JJ and Kiara still playing with each other. "I don't know, they probably don't care I'm not with them right now."

You could feel Rafe's eyes burning a hole in your face, his lack of insults to throw at your friends making you uncomfortable. Anything was better than silence when it came to Rafe. Silence meant he was thinking and you almost always never liked what he was thinking of.

He stands up before holding his hand out, gesturing for you to take it. "Come on, let's get you something to drink. It'll cheer you up."

You immediately take his hand, standing up. "Don't need to convince me."

"None of that cheap shit you've been drinking. My dad has some expensive whiskey he keeps in his study." Rafe adds, climbing back through the window with you right behind him. He doesn't let go of your hand, even after you climb back inside.

Rafe leads you through the swarm of people in the hall, heading towards the second floor for his dad's office. He pushes a guy away from the door, unlocking it and holding it open for you to enter. You step across the threshold, glancing around Ward's office as Rafe shuts the door behind him.

You'd been in Ward's office a handful of times, most times with Sarah and one time with Ward himself when you had skinned your knee riding a bike and he bandaged it up. Being inside the warm-lit room with Rafe felt strange and slightly tense.

Plopping down on the big leather couch, you watch Rafe walk towards the desk, raiding his father's desk drawer until he finds the big bottle of GlenDronach. He grabs two glasses, sitting down beside you as he pours the amber liquid.

You scrunch your nose at the smell. "God, I can smell the hangover."

Rafe smirks, pouring too much into both of the glasses, capping the bottle back up. "Nah, if anything this will help you sleep. It goes down smooth."

You take the glass from Rafe, wincing at the strong musk of the whiskey before downing half the bottle like a shot, immediately coughing after swallowing it down. Rafe's brows furrowed as he watched you slam the half-filled glass down on the coffee table, exasperated. "That did not go down smooth."

"It's sipping whiskey, you don't drink it like a shot of vodka." the blond clarifies, judgment and confusion in his tone. "Who the hell takes a shot of whiskey?"

Glaring at him, you cough out the burning in your throat. "Get me a Sprite, motherfucker."

An amused smirk dances on his lips as he stands up and opens Ward's mini fridge, pulling out a cold can of Sprite. He opens it before handing it to you, sitting back down. "I just witnessed a crime."

You gurgle half the can, soothing your burning throat before glaring at him. "I don't like the taste of alcohol, I just drink it to get drunk. Besides, people who actually enjoy the taste are psychopaths."

"You never miss the chance to tell me I am," Rafe replies, grinning as he takes a more moderate sip of his whiskey. He makes an approving expression, swirling the liquid around the glass.

"You can have mine. I hate it." You push the glass in front of Rafe, leaning back on the couch. Rafe sipped his glass of single malt whiskey while you drank a can of Sprite. "Worse thing I've swallowed. And there's competition."

Rafe makes a face at that, shaking his head. "Please, no details of how the help was in your mouth."

Smacking his arm caused a drop of his whiskey to spill over the side. "Stop calling my friends the help, you snarky asshole."

The blond gives you a look, setting his glass back down on the table. "Maybank helped me carry my golf clubs at the club last week. I can't think of a better title for him. It's in the name."

You roll your eyes, downing the rest of your drink. Rafe could carry his own golf clubs so you knew he sought out JJ's help specifically to taunt and mock him. "If I get the lifeguard job, are you gonna start calling me the help?"

His eyes softened slightly, head tilting towards yours. "No, of course not. You're far better than anyone else, even if you decide to get an unnecessary job.”

"Even better than you?" you arch a brow, watching his lips quirk up in a genuine smile.

"Always," replies Rafe.

Heat pools in your stomach, the whiskey's delayed effect. You glance away from Rafe's sharp eyes. Clearing your throat, you shift on the couch, making yourself more comfortable. "It's not unnecessary, by the way. The job. It looks good on my transcripts."

"Hm, still going to Charleston?"

You shrug, staring at the insurmountably large portrait of Denmark Tanney in Ward's office. "I don't know. My parents want me to, and I'll get into it but I don't wanna be so close to home, you know?"

Rafe's brows furrowed, a frown tugging on his lips. "Where are you thinking?"

"Either New Orleans or London," you answer, pulling a laugh out of Rafe. "Yeah, a wide range of possibilities for me."

"You don't wanna go to Charleston?" questioned Rafe, his eyes never leaving yours. A look of displeasure passes his face. "It's not that close, seven hours."

You make a face, shaking your head. "Seven hours is too close for me.”

The blond scoffed, leaning forward to sip his whiskey.

A smirk tugged at your lips as you observed him. Teasingly, you ask. "What, you gonna miss me when I leave?"

"I thought it was obvious," Rafe replied, downing the rest of his glass. He shifts on the couch, placing his arms on top of it, giving you a sardonic grin. "I think Charleston is far enough."

Rolling your eyes for the millionth time that night, you lay your head back, sighing. "You can come visit me anytime. Just don't bring anyone. Especially not Topper or Kelce."

"Ah, I wouldn't wanna walk in on you and your victims." jokes Rafe, patting your thigh softly. "Wouldn't be the first."

You laugh, winking at him. "Maybe you'll be my next victim."

Rafe raises a brow, leaning back slightly as he stares at you. "Don't tease me, I have no self-control when it comes to you."

"Yes, I think that was clear when you sent Tom Schnitzel to the ER for trying to drug me," you reply, inhaling sharply at the memory. You were positive you still had Tom's blood stained onto the white top from that night. "Thanks for that, by the way. I don't think I properly thanked you for that."

Rafe waves it away with a hand, standing. "Don't worry about it. I needed to get it out that night, anyway. Come on, I have something to show you."

Curious, you follow Rafe out of the office, walking down the hall to his room. He opens the door, motioning for you to enter. Immediately, you plop down on his bed, laying out on the soft mattress as he closes the door behind him. You watch him walk towards his dresser, turning around with a small jewelry box, a bow sitting on the top.

"What's that for?" you ask, taking the box from Rafe, and inspecting it.

He sits on the edge of the bed, eyes watching you fiddle with the box. "Your birthday present."

"It's not for another month."

Rafe shrugs, grinning. "Consider it your early birthday present, then. Come on, open it."

Tilting your head, you lift the top from it, the diamond tennis bracelet sparkling as soon as the light hits it. You gasped softly, taking the bracelet from its mold, watching in fascination as the diamonds danced in the light.

"Holy shit, Rafe," you mutter, inspecting the bracelet. "What the fuck? How much was it?"

The blond chuckled, taking the bracelet and unlocking the hook. He gestured for you to put your wrist out. "Real diamonds. None of that lab-grown bullshit. Don't worry, the cost didn't even dent my account."

You give him a look, allowing him to put the bracelet on your wrist and shake it as soon as it's on. "I told you before that I don't want expensive gifts from my friends. Just my parents."

"I'd like to think I'm more than one of your obnoxious friends," replies Rafe, causing you to give him a look. He snickered, throwing his hands up in surrender. "Last time, I swear."

"Highly doubt that." you turn your attention back to the bracelet, smirking at how it looked against your skin. "Thank you, though. It's really pretty."

Rafe stares at you, blue eyes watching you admire his present. "Yeah, beautiful."

You glance up at him, cheeks flushed from the whiskey and drinks prior. Heat pools in your stomach as your eyes meet his. Clearing your throat, you tuck your hair behind your ear. "Best present I got this year."

He smirks, laying his head down on a pillow, watching as you mirror his movement. "Yeah? Do I get to be your favorite until I piss you off?"

"Of course. I give it five minutes." you tease, grinning when Rafe smacks you with a pillow softly. You dodge his second hit, rolling closer to him, your arm pressed against his. "I was kidding! You'll be my favorite forever."

"That's more like it," Rafe says, a satisfied grin slapped across his face.

You groan softly, rolling onto your side to face the blond, eyes closing. The party was still going on downstairs, the loud thumping of the music heard two stories up. Your mind briefly flickered to what was happening with JJ and Kiara until Rafe's fingers ghosted over your side.

"I swear to god if you're gonna tickle me, Cameron," you grumble, eyes still closed, feeling his fingers roam around until they hit your stomach.

Rafe chuckles quietly, fingers stroking the ribcage tattoo you had gotten with Sarah. "When did you get this?"

"A week ago." you giggle as he runs his fingers up, touching your neck. Your eyes snapped open and you immediately slap his hand away, your brand new bracelet swinging slightly from the movement. "Rafe. You know how ticklish I am."

"Sorry," he smirks, tone unapologetic. His hand drifts to your hips, fingers playing with your cutoff shorts. "Wouldn't want a repeat of the Jenga incident."

Your nose scrunches at that, remembering the night you spent at the ER. "It was an accident."

"Still sticking to that story?"

"You moved your head."

"You threw a glass at my head." Rafe corrected, a smile tugging the corner of his lips up.

Scowling at him, you shake your head. "No, I threw it at the wall behind you. You moved your head at the last second and had to get five stitches."

"If you weren't so fucking competitive ..." Rafe teases, trailing off.

You bite your tongue, letting the subject go with great difficulty, but managing to not bite back. Closing your eyes again, you let your muscles alleviate. "Hm. Whatever."

You both lay in silence for a few minutes, the alcohol in your system and Rafe's soft bed allowing you to relax despite the loud music creeping through the walls. Despite feeling his eyes on you, you felt your body intense, the bed cradling you.

Rafe's hand drifts slowly up your hip, fingertips softly brushing against the sliver of bare stomach before slipping slightly under the hem of your top. Your eyes flutter up at the movement, watching as his thumb draws circles on your skin.

Goosebumps arise, and you suddenly realize how close he is, not even a foot away. His eyes flickered to your lips, his tongue peeking out to wetten his own. Your breath gets caught in your throat, his face somehow closer now.

Maybe it was the alcohol you've consumed trying to forget your own despair or an excuse to get your mind off JJ and Kiara, but you watched as Rafe brought his lips to yours, not pulling back when the taste of whiskey invades your mouth.

A hand caressing your cheek, Rafe rolled over on top of you, his elbows holding up his weight as he kissed you. His tongue sought entry to your mouth, biting your bottom lip. You gasped slightly at the feel, allowing him to deepen the kiss. You melt into his touch, your lips parting slightly as Rafe's tongue sweeps in.

Rafe breaks the kiss, trailing his lips down your neck, leaving a string of soft kisses along your collarbone. Tilting your head back, you give him better access, running your hands through his hair, a soft content sigh escaping your lips.

He nips at your collarbones before sucking a mark into your skin, just right above your breast causing you to mewl at the touch, your hands drifting to his shoulders, freshly manicured nails digging into his skin. You meet his eyes, his ocean blues now darkened like the water during a storm.

Something comes over your body, seeing Rafe in a new light. Suddenly needy and impatient, your hands tugged at the hem of Rafe's black polo, pleading silently for him to take it off. Taking your hint, he sits up, taking it off in one swift move, tossing it on the floor.

You'd never admit it, not even to Rafe–especially to Rafe, but you'd always loved his abs. The definition of the, so toned, tanned, and delectable. He may have been your friend, but you weren't blind to his looks, and definitely how his abs looked when he flexed them.

As your fingers traced the defined line down his stomach, Rafe's hands slid under your top until the tips of his fingers met the fabric of your bikini top. Needing more, a lot more, you sit up, ridding yourself of the offensive clothing. You heard Rafe groan, pushing you back onto the bed, eyes roaming the sight of the hot pink bikini top you still wore, the top so little it was hardly covering your nipples.

"So fucking beautiful," he murmured, reaching out and pulling off the top quickly, the thin string breaking at the force, your tits spilling out. You gasped, nipples hardening in the cold air. Rafe groaned at the sight, hands cupping your breasts, his breath hitting your nipples. "Fucking incredible."

You arched your back, moaning softly as his tongue wettens a nipple before taking it into his mouth. His teeth nibble it, sucking and teasing the hard bud while his fingers play with the other, rolling it between his fingers. Rafe pinches it gently, looking up at you with a smirk when you mewl.

Running your hands over Rafe's back, you feel the warmth and firmness of his muscles, wetness pooling at the thought of kissing every single inch of his torso. Before he could take the other nipple into his mouth, you pull his lips back to yours, wrapping an arm around his neck as a hand runs down his back, nails scratching his spine.

Rafe's hand moves down your sides, fingers playing with the button of your shorts. Pulling back from the kiss, he unbuttoned your shorts, slowly–and agonizingly–sliding them off. The cutoffs pile onto his shirt on the floor.

You know Rafe's experienced, so are you, but you swore he almost looked nervous as he stared down at you, his hands slightly shaky as he hooks his fingers under the waistband of your matching pink thong. Those join the discarded clothing on his bedroom floor.

He looks like a man starved as his eyes focus on your bare cunt, hungry and almost animalistic as he leans closer to your glistening pussy, nose nearly touching the clit. "You're already so wet."

Instinctively, you spread your legs wider, hands grasping the sheets as his finger leisurely dips into your wet pussy, your lips parting slightly. His thumb touches your clit, rubbing it gently. You groan, hips bucking at the feel, needing more. "Fuck."

Rafe smirks, pushing a finger into your cunt, watching as your face contorted in pleasure. He adds a second before you could come down from the small high. "Look at you, so needy and desperate."

Before you could think of a retort, he leans down to replace his thumb with his tongue, licking and sucking at your clit as his fingers continue to thrust inside you, gaining speed. The sight of Rafe's head between your legs, his tongue flicking your clit was so erotic, the vision enough for you to get wetter. You throw your head back, your fingers tangling in Rafe's hair as you pull his head closer to your dripping pussy, a moan filling the room.

His fingers hit that spot inside you, causing a surprise whimper from your lips to escape. Rafe pauses, glancing up at you, pride in his eyes before he doubles his efforts, his fingers curling to reach that spot. He sucks your clit, nibbling it when you tug his hair.

"Rafe," you moan, arching your back. You push his head deeper between your thighs, pussy clenching around his fingers, so close to falling off. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"That's right, say my fucking name when you cum on my fingers," Rafe grunted, his fingers plunging in and out of your soaking wet cunt. He licks your clit, staring up as you come closer.

A dripping mess, you buck your hips up as Rafe continues his relentless actions on your pussy, moans of pleasure filling the room. His free hand moves up your torso, cupping your breast before rolling your nipples between his fingers.

You lose it when he pinches it harshly, moaning loudly as you come undone, pussy clenching around his fingers, throbbing. You whimper out his name, your hand gripping his hair. "Fuck!"

Rafe laps it all up, replacing his fingers with his tongue, hands holding your legs open as you attempt to close them, your clit sensitive. He runs his tongue along your pussy, lapping up your juices, groaning at the taste, unable to pull himself away.

He licks his lips, staring possessively at your cunt before looking up at you with a proud smile. "You taste so fucking good."

He then proves it to you, lips meeting yours in a kiss. You taste yourself on him as you kiss him back, lips moving against each other. As you come down from the high, you roll him over, straddling his torso. You move your lips to his neck, marking it until you kiss down his chest. Meeting his eyes, you run your tongue down his abs, kissing every individual one.

You move to straddle his legs, quickly unbuttoning his pants, much opposite of his agonizingly slow approach. Rafe lifts his hips, helping you take off his jeans, sitting up to pull you in for another kiss. Giggling, you push him back onto the bed, your fingers sliding underneath the band of his boxers.

You bite your lip as you take out his cock, your hand wrapping around it immediately. The size of it made your mouth water, licking your lips in anticipation as you stroked it slowly causing Rafe to groan. With an approving hum, you lick the tip, meeting Rafe's hungry gaze.

Smirking, you run your tongue along the length of it, pulling back when Rafe bucks his hips up, glaring at you for teasing him. Chuckling, you decide to end the shortlived torture, taking his cock into your mouth, your warm, wet lips wrapping around his cock.

He groans, fingers pulling at your hair, guiding your movements, and urging you to take more of him. The sight of your soft, pink lips wrapped around his cock was something he'd never forget. "That's it, baby. Suck my dick like a good slut."

You felt your pussy clench at his words, growing wetter as you suck him off, eagerly bobbing your head up and down his dick. Pre-cum drips onto your tongue and you savor the taste, moaning around his cock, Rafe grunting at the feel of the vibrations.

Not wanting him to cum down your throat, you stop, slapping his cock on your tongue, smiling innocently when he narrows his eyes at you. He looked so hot staring down at you, chest heaving as he panted lightly, his knuckles white as he tried to restrain himself. His cock bobbed up as if begging for attention.

Shifting, you move up his body until your pussy is inches from Rafe's cock. You tap your clit with his cock, whimpering quietly, your clit still sensitive. Rafe's hands drift to your hips and you smack them away, giving him a smile as you rub your cunt against his dick, wanting to tease him just a little bit more.

He grits out your name, hands by his sides as he clenches them into a fist. "Stop teasing.”

"Or what?" you arch a brow, smirking as you let the head of his cock slip into your wet cunt. Temporarily speechless, Rafe lets out a guttural groan as you sink down unhurriedly, watching as your pussy wraps around his cock until he bottoms out. The size of his cock stretches you out, your walls fluttering around him as you rock slowly. "Holy shit."

"Jesus Christ." Rafe growls, his hands cupping your tits as you begin to bounce on his dick. He squeezes them, watching as your pussy swallows his cock like a vice. "So tight. Made just for me."

You moan at his words, leaning back and placing your hands on his thigh, giving him a view men would kill for. You ride his cock, throwing your head back at the feel of his cock stretching you out. Rafe reaches down, slapping your ass as you ride him, and you mewl at the gentle pain. "Rafe."

Rafe's thumb touches your clit, rubbing it as he watches you ride his cock, his lips parted slightly like he is seeing one of the seven wonders of the world. His eyes dart between his cock sliding in and out of your cunt and your face contorts with pleasure, moaning every time you slide down his cock.

"Fucking gorgeous." Rafe whispers, thrusting up into you, his pupils dilated when you whimper loudly. He sits up, his hands gripping your waist, moving his face in front of your bouncing tits, taking a nipple into his mouth, swirling it with his tongue. "So much better than I imagined, baby."

You place your hands on his shoulders, pussy clenching around his cock. You moan into his ear, kissing his neck as he thrusts up into you, your legs trembling as you draw closer to cumming. "Rafe, I'm gonna cum."

The words cause him to double his efforts, gripping your waist so tight it would leave bruises, his cock filling you up as he fucks you fast. His lips drag across your neck, leaving a mark as his cock brushes against your cervix. "Cum for me. Cum all over my cock like a fucking slut."

You cry out as you come, your cunt tightening around his cock. You bite Rafe's shoulder, muffling your ungodly loud moan. "Fuck, fuck!”

He pulls you back in for a kiss, spilling his seed into your awaiting pussy. Rafe slows to a stop, groaning against your lips, his cock nuzzled deep inside you. Rolling you on your back, he doesn't separate from you, keeping his dick warm as he kisses you languidly. Taking a breath, he breaks the kiss, staring down at you, a small smile gracing his lips. "You alright, sweetheart?"

Tired and content, you return his smile, pussy throbbing around his softening cock. You nod, eyes heavy. "Yeah, you?"

Rafe chuckles quietly. "Yeah, me too."

As your eyes drift close, you feel Rafe press a kiss to your forehead.

[contract-crawdad]

Look Outside Recruit Concepts

It’s that time again! Time to ramble about thoughts and concepts for how a few additional hypothetical Look Outside party members could work!

Chosen from among what I consider to be the most likely candidates, and outlining fun roles and abilities for them to have. Not to mention a few silly mechanics thrown in there for fun.

Jeanne — the Hydra

A slow but otherwise average all-rounder. Jeanne is held back by her reluctance to actually use her new predatory parts offensively for entirely understandable reasons, but she’s still very helpful!

Recruited by waiting one full day after you help her with her laundry problem ravenous uncontrollable head problem. Jeanne has calmed down enough to accompany Sam’s party on expeditions!

It’s no trouble at all, she insists… especially since her main body remains back home in her apartment. Her head follows Sam’s party around by dangling down from the ceiling!

“I, uh, swear I didn’t make this hole I’m hanging down from.” She comments sheepishly if you speak to her in your apartment. “Seriously, what is with these holes cropping up in the floorboards and rafters all over the building?”

Passive Quirks

Regular attacks used by Jeanne have a chance to (unintentionally) inflict a layer of bleed.

Early Skills

• Mucus Coating

Jeanne coils around an ally, covering them in a protective layer of mucus. For a few turns, the benefitted ally is resistant to poison and disease, as well as becoming slippery and more evasive. Costs very little STM.

• Shed Skin

Jeanne sheds her outermost later of skin, restoring a small amount of health (10% of her total HP) and cleansing her of all negative physical status effects. Can only be used while she has a negative physical status effect. Costs a medium amount of STM.

Late Skills

• Coil

Jeanne wraps her long body around an opponent to inflict the very rare ‘constricted’ status, which deals crushing damage over time. This also makes the target easier to hit for the duration of the constricting. Costs a heavy amount of STM.

• Armed Through the Teeth

Jeanne sheds one of her many teeth in order to provide a weapon to an ally in the heat of battle. Jeanne’s teeth have the basic ‘stab’ skill, deal slashing damage, and cannot be sold. They also break easily, and do not provide junk when they do.

Scared Frederick — the Coward

Weak and frail, but one of the fastest things in the entire game! Especially useful if you have a well-stocked inventory of combat items as they bypass Scared Fred’s low attack while taking advantage of his speed.

Has all sorts of useful skills! But unfortunately, Scared Fred starts each battle afflicted by the ‘panicking’ status which prevents him from using (most of) them until it wears off or he’s given medication.

Recruited by coaxing him out of his closet after having ‘taken care’ of the hostile Freds (Faceless, Shadow, and Green). This convinces him that, whatever’s out there, he’s much safer with you.

Basically, he finally takes you up on your ‘Let’s get you out of here’ offer! This doesn’t mean he likes fighting. Scared Fred will exit your party and flee back to your apartment if your danger level reaches its maximum. He’ll apologize for it later.

“I-I really am sorry for running away! But… but you’ve seen them too, right…? Those strange black shapes, flitting at the edge of your vision? Most people act l-l-like they aren’t there, but people like you and m-me… we can s-see them… and they can touch us Sam… I’m sorry. I just couldn’t handle it.”

Scared Frederick’s hangout spot in your apartment is your closet, unless Xaria and Monty have taken over your room. In which case he will relocate to the sink.

Passive Quirks

Scared Frederick is 100% susceptible to receiving the ‘panicked’ and ‘afraid’ statuses from any move with a chance to inflict them, regardless of any resistances provided by gear or in-combat buffs.

Exits the party and retreats to your apartment if the danger meter maxes out.

Has a weakness to acid damage.

Starts each battle panicking.

Early Skills

• Jittery Dance

A panicked, frenzied dance that has a chance to confuse all opponents. Can be used while panicked and can ONLY be used while panicked. Uses a tiny amount of STM.

• Paint Lob

Fred takes a chunk of his own painty body and lobs it at a single opponent, dealing a small amount of typeless ranged damage. This attack has a high chance to inflict blindness. Costs no STM, but causes Scared Fred to lose 10 HP upon use. If used against any Fred, it will heal them instead of dealing damage!

Late Skills

• Evasive Instinct

A guaranteed escape (from all encounters where escaping is possible) in exchange for a massive chunk of Fred’s STM!

• Overwhelmed Exit

Scared Fred reaches his limit and hides inside Sam’s inventory to provide support instead. This provides Sam with a buff to all stats (except speed, which is debuffed) for the duration of combat, as well as completely removes Fred from the fight. He’ll rejoin the group once combat is done, though. Requires that Fred’s stamina be below 25% in order to be used, but has no actual STM cost.

The Shadow — The Shadow

A massive damage sponge that specializes in redirecting damage and other support! With a glaring drawback.

The Shadow cannot equip weapons or even perform basic attacks. Additionally, they regain half the normal amount of healing from food outside of combat, though they will heal to full health if given a day to rest at home.

Don’t worry, if Shadow is the last party member left standing, you’re not unable to do ANY damage thanks to their only damaging skill: Rummage! What better way to incorporate the Shadow’s random gift mechanic than by using it offensively? After one turn of preparation rummaging around in their cloak, the Shadow deploys a random battle item. You can luck out and get a grenade, or get unlucky with a dinner plate. A good option if you have a turn to burn or only care about damage, but far from reliable.

They also seem to have a strange taste for this Black Ooze stuff that everyone else finds… unpalatable…

Inherent Quirks

Does not have standard attacks.

Halved healing from food

Black Ooze restores 40 HP instead of… you know.

Early Skills

• Rummage

Shadow rifles through the contents of their cloak, which uses up their turn. Their next turn is locked in as using their actions to throw the random damaging battle item they found the turn prior. No STM cost.

• Envelop

The Shadow opens up their cloak and (consensually) shields a party member within. Damage they take from almost all sources is redirected towards Shadow until the end of the next turn. Envelop cannot redirect damage from statuses or from self-inflicted sources like Joel’s teething or lifedrain from Tickle’s items. When the enveloped party member is released, they have a chance to be panicking, confused, or even afraid (though this status is the rarest outcome). Very low STM cost.

Late Skills

• Ominous Stare

The Shadow stares ominously, gaining the nervous attention of the target and causing them to take 25% more damage from the next attack that strikes them. It’s important to know the order of your team’s attacks in in order to maximize the boosted damage, as only the first strike of a multi-hit attack gets the damage boost. The effect of the stare can be stacked, but seeing as this would require multiple turns of not dealing any damage to the target, this is usually inadvisable. Medium STM cost.

• Osmose

The Shadow uses the hands within their cloak to draw physical ailments out of all allies, transferring all negative physical status effects onto themself. Cannot be used while Shadow has a physical status effect. Starts free, but costs more and more STM as it’s used during the same battle.

[3liza]

YES

TLDR:

all websites are using you as an exploitable resource for your data, in this case posts. treat them as hostile landlords and religiously back up your data (posts) on your own storage

no one knows when tumblr will shut down

it will shut down and data will be lost

the people who know about this sort of thing can see the signs but theres no way to know exactly what will go down, or when

use the blog backup button in the settings menu and download your blog. the fact that tumblr even lets you do this is incredible

the tumblr backup file is a big fat nested zip that looks like this. mine was huge. ihavent opened the inner zips yet so im not sure what format they are but the media folder is really just a stack of jpgs and [ngs etc. pretty cool

tumblr will eventually shut down. you should back up your posts. EVERY WEBSITE EVENTUALLY SHUTS DOWN

however the way websites shut down is not something people usually know about in advance, nor is it something that gets planned-upon in general. there is no possibility of anyone involved knowing what's going to happen or when, except that you absolutely cannot depend upon any third party to manage your data for you. your blog is data. back it up regularly

you will almost certainly not receive a warning like "tumblr is out of money and will be closing in 90 days". usually what happens is the site owner sells it to someone who then strips it for parts. Livejournal for example was sold to a russian corporation that turned it into, basically, grazing land for spambots. the site never even shut down, it's still running, its just unusable. i mean you can still post on it, everyone's old blogs are still there. but no one does, because it's just a wasteland full of bots. that's the kind of thing that usually happens to social networks, not "we're deleting this entire website tomorrow your shit is GONE" type thing.

the reason the I Know How Internet Works type people KEEP posting warnings about tumblr being at the end of its natural lifespan is because we've seen this before, we recognize the signs, and we know what to do next. but there's no way to pinpoint dates or know in advance if tumblr is just going to slowly collapse or if the servers will actually go down or if someone will mangle it into a different kind of website etc. the site will eventually "die", but what that means isnt specific, and until it's about to happen no one will have any kind of timeline on when tumblr finally tips over into dead website territory, and no one will agree on exactly whether tumblr is dead or not either. the timeline for this death process--once it starts in earnest which arguably tumblr hasnt yet--is also really variable. sometimes its weeks, sometimes its years.

so yes, you should be worried about your data, you should be worried about your data all the time, especially if someone else is controlling it. if you care about ANY data, back it up yourself. if you let someone else control your data, you will lose it permanently. this is true of everything, not just tumblr, and not just websites, everything

[10piecechickenmcnugget]

lineup of the main 4 in my empires dungeon meshi au;; more info under the cut (there’s a lot of it. kudos to you if you read all that)

oli: oli is a halfling. his hometown was destroyed in a monster attack after a nearby dungeon collapsed when he was little, however he doesn’t remember this and no one ever told him. he presumes his parents are dead (they are)

he was taken in by a nearby town of primarily tall-men, who were unfamiliar with traditional halfling naming conventions and as such just named him oliver. he doesn’t technically have a last name

he’s been studying bard magic since he was 15. halflings have a lower magic tolerance, so bard magic is the easiest for him to use, although he’s been known to get nosebleeds, headaches, or flat out pass out on occasion. he’s been exploring dungeons for about 6 years

his first death was caused by him getting caught in the crossfire of one of lizzie’s spells.

lizzie: lizzie is a beastkin, and it’s unsure whether she was created artificially or born as such. she was sold around as essentially a circus attraction izutsumi style before escaping when she was very young and finding herself in the same village oli lived in. because of this she was very untrusting and hostile for a while

oli and lizzie were often lumped together as the town oddballs; lizzie did not like oli at first and he still has several scars from her scratching the shit out of him on multiple occasions.

lizzie warmed up to him eventually, and they’ve been best friends for most of their lives. lizzie left the village as soon as she could along with oli so the two of them could pursue magic, as they were both banned from it as teenagers

she quickly discovered ancient magic and took a passion for it instantly, and it’s the main thing she studies. she’s been exploring dungeons with oli for about 6 years

lizzie is surprisingly skilled at staying alive, as she was her party’s only magic user for a long time and they relied on her to revive or heal them (healing magic is not her strong suit)

her first death happened very late into her career when most of her party was wiped out on a lower floor.

joel: joel was born and raised in the town that took in lizzie and oli. he met them both in school and the three of them have been close friends for many years. he moved out with them as soon as they were all old enough because all 3 of them were tired of being banned from pursuing their interests.

joel is not too skilled with magic, preferring combat. he’s spent years and years training and building his skills so that he can protect his party when needed (which is a lot.) he’s the party leader and lizzie and oli trust his skills and judgement.

joel’s first death involved him being drowned by a siren while trying to save oli.

sausage: sausage is an enigma to say the least. no one really knows anything about him or where he came from. oli asked once and received net zero information. everyone assumes he’s a tall-man but it’s uncertain

oli met sausage at a tavern on the island his party moved to in order to explore the dungeon there. they became friends quickly; and lizzie and joel befriended him as well. they invited sausage to join their party once they decided they wanted to go deeper into the dungeon, since he’s skilled in healing magic

sausage seems to get more and more antsy the deeper they go, but they’ve all mutually agreed not to question it

sausage has not died since joining their party, but it’s unknown if he’s died before that.

[stories-and-chaos]

Shrike: Drinks with Mimzy

[Hazbin Hotel reader insert as Alastor’s “darling life and death partner” Ace x ace relationship, both parties are moderately sex favorable.]

[One shot, word count 1587. Cw: aphobia, alcoholism, cursing]

——————

The day after Lucifer’s visit, you went hunting. Not for souls or deals. Or…well one soul and in particular. And you didn’t intend to make a deal with this one. It took some time, checking various bars and clubs. You didn’t know which ones she was likely to frequent nowadays; being an Overlord didn’t give you much chance to go bar hopping with girlfriends.

So it wasn’t until early evening that you found her. Sitting at the bar, clearly tipsy, nursing another glass of whiskey, and bitching to the clearly annoyed bartender was Mimzy. You watched her finish her latest glass. “Gimme another one a these sugar.”

“Make that two, cher.” You came up next to Mimzy and slid a bill to the bartender. He looked even more annoyed at the idea of there being two whiny bitches at his bar but he got your drinks. “Thanks cher,” you said with a smile.

Mimzy glared at you. “Ugh, the fuck do you want?” It didn’t stop her from grabbing the drink you paid for.

“What, I can’t buy my friend a drink or five?” You expected hostility but damn. This seemed excessive. Fortunately you knew the way into her good graces: free drinks.

“Friends?!” she growled. “You come here saying we’re ‘friends’ after what your husband just pulled on me?!”

You sipped your whiskey, doing your best to let her fury wash over you. “From what I saw, Alastor pulled you out of yet another situation, and told you to take off because your problem trashed the place.”

“Like those sharks made much of a difference to that tacky joint. If anything I did you bastards a favor, free demolition.” She laughed nastily and finished her drink. You caught the bartender’s attention and nodded to Mimzy. You slid him another bill as he supplied her with another glass; it was high enough denomination to cover whatever she’d had already.

“Maybe you have a point, cher.” Not really, but you didn’t want her to close you out yet. You needed her less hostile, at least for now. “Here, let me treat you today Mimzy. Make it up to you.”

“Oh you know just how to butter me up doll.” The curvaceous blonde gladly accepted. If she owed 50 grand to loan sharks, doubtless she had tabs at every place in the city that sold alcohol. Which made up the majority of businesses in Hell.

You drank sparingly, just enough so she felt you were having a grand time together. You had the bartender keep supplying her refills; he seemed in a better mood now that someone else was dealing with the sloshed demon.

You let her bitch about everything in her afterlife and responded with soothing noises. In the end, you wanted to know how much shit she was in. This was the first time Alastor had sent her packing; you weren’t sure how she would react. You hadn’t missed the pink mark on her back on her shoulder blade. It hadn’t been there the last time you’d seen your old colleague.

Once she paused in her rambling, you asked about the mark. “I never expected you to get a tattoo, cher. What convinced you?”

The drinks and your apparent sympathy were enough to keep her talking, especially if it was something else to bitch about. “Ugh, that. Had to get it for work. One of the club owners works for someone that works for someone that works for one a’ the Sins. Greed’s head honcho.” She sipped her drink, starting to slow down as she got drunker. “The Sin bastard likes to mark any Sinners working for him, like some horny creep.” She downed the rest of her current whiskey.

“‘Course if you and your beau were properly grateful. I wouldn’t be dealing with this shit.” She pointed at you, empty glass in hand, her eyes looking unfocused and angry. The bartender moved to give her another drink but you made a cutting motion. This was the first time you heard anything of this.

“Grateful for what?” You asked, unable to help yourself. You honestly couldn’t remember what she could be talking about.

She looked at you, black and pink eyes wavering. “Fucking, of course!” You could only tilt your head. “Jesus Christ, it’s been a century and you’re still clueless? It ain’t cute anymore dollface.” Mimzy set her glass down harshly. “Sex, Y/N. S. E. X. If me and the gals hadn’t said anything, you and Alastor woulda never figured it out. You’d probably still be frigid little virgins in Hell.”

Your jaw dropped as you felt a cold spike in your core. You actually had to look down to make sure you hadn’t been stabbed. No, it was just words from someone you’d still thought of fondly. The alcohol didn’t excuse Mimzy; if anything it made her more honest.

Has she always felt like that? No… you remembered her saying she thought you and Alastor were good together. That she wanted you both to be happy. Somewhere in all those decades between then and now, things changed.

She was smirking as you processed all this, glad that she managed to hit you where it hurt evidently. In the way only people who are hurting can do, she kept pushing. But she didn’t realize what exactly hurt you. “You’re probably both terrible in bed too. Lemme guess, you just lay there while he tries to remember where to stick it?” Mimzy kept going as you stayed silent.

As her insults grew, the betrayal of a friend gave way to comedic disbelief. You started chuckling, then you were outright laughing, pounding your taloned fist on the counter. It was a good thing you had finished your drink because all the glasses around you jumped.

“What the fuck is so funny?” Your laughter finally got her stream of rudeness to stop. The indignant look on Mimzy's face just made you laugh harder, your feet kicking in glee.

“Oh, damn, I’m gonna pee myself. Fucking Hell Mimzy! Oh fuck, I needed that laugh.” You wheezed and took deep breaths until you could look at her reddened face without laughing. “Cher, you got one thing right; I still don’t understand all this nonsense about sex. Alastor still doesn’t either.

But that’s never mattered. I’ll never understand why you people think that’s so important to us. Maybe we wouldn’t have ever done it. I doubt that but we also would never have cared. You and so many others are so obsessed with sex that you can’t even imagine a relationship without it! It would be sad if it wasn’t so hilarious.”

Mimzy blinked at you, confusion, anger, and drunkenness warring in her expression. “Even now, you don’t get it! Cher, you insulting us about sex didn’t hurt. You’re a friend and my friend thinking I was stupid hurt.”

You ran your hand down your face. “Mimzy, cher, I’m just going to back up my darling here. If you want to redeem yourself, you’re welcome at the hotel. But don’t come calling otherwise. Especially if what’s his name, Mammon? The Greed Sin, comes after you. We’ll gift wrap you for him before we tussle with a Deadly Sin.”

Pulling the bartender aside, you paid for her outstanding tab, along with tonight’s drinks and a generous tip. “I paid your tab here, so you can call that payment for that talk years ago. Find me when you decide to not be a bitch.” You tucked one of your feathers into her headband. “Au revoir cher.”

Mimzy snatched the feather out and crushed it in her hands. “I don’t need you or him. I don’t need your hotel! I hope those angels kill all of you next Extermination Day, bitch!”

Back at the hotel, Alastor was in the parlor, listening to Charlie’s plans for her visit to Heaven. “Soooooo, how did it go?” he asked in a sing-song tone once he spotted you. You’d told him your plan to find Mimzy before leaving.

“As well as could be expected. I don’t think she’ll bother us anymore. I told her we’d gift wrap her for whoever came looking if she tried something like yesterday again.”

“Hmm, but that would be such a waste of good gift wrap.”

Later that night, in your suite, you went into more detail about your conversation. You were on Alastor’s lap, venting your hurt and tears. “I know she’s gotten worse in Hell, that she’s been using you, but I thought she was still our friend.” He let you get it all out, handkerchief at the ready when you were.

“I thought so as well, cher,” he said quietly. “I hate to admit it but Husk pointed it out to me. We can’t have her interfering though.”

“No,” you said simply, drying your eyes.

Alastor looked down at you, that sharp edged smile just a bit softer than usual. “I think I know what can help you for now, my dear.” With that he stood you both up and started humming, a question in his eyes. Your voice felt a bit hoarse from crying but you hummed along, practice making you harmonize. Then he swept you into a dance.

After a few numbers, you felt up to singing. The two of you danced until you were tired (Alastor probably could have kept going but he didn’t have an emotionally stressful day). That night you fell asleep in his arms, glad you’d married someone that understood you like he did.

——————

A/N: this is more than a little self indulgent on my part. My frustrations with aphobes knows no bounds. Kinda prompted after discussion with a therapist concerning aphobia and the nonsense acespec people deal with. Never forget how valid you are. 💜🤍🩶🖤 💚🤍🩶🖤 Cheers darlings!

@whitewolfsoldat @edgyboi10000 @ch3sire-blu3 @clearly-awkward @badatpunz @bengewatch @chewbrry

[mariacallous]

On a cold evening in March, a month and a half into the second Trump Administration, a crowd gathered in the Terrace Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett, the billionaire C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, was hosting a screening party for “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a new documentary celebrating the career of the Washington Post’s legendary publisher. Guests included Bill Gates, Bill Murray, the former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, and Bob Woodward, who, along with Carl Bernstein, broke the stories of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that came to define the paper’s golden age.

I had passed the Watergate Hotel on my way to the party. It sits alongside the Kennedy Center, on the bank of the Potomac River. The pair of buildings, each a cream-colored behemoth, were completed in the early nineteen-seventies, a fabled era in the capital, when Presidents feared journalists and the bipartisan élite dined together on lobster bisque and gossip. Katharine Graham, quiet, wry, and patrician, was then one of the most powerful women in America. She not only ran the Post’s business operations—following in the footsteps of her father, Eugene Meyer, and her husband, Phil Graham—but convened members of the Washington establishment around her dinner table in Georgetown, that “tiny kingdom,” as Phil Graham once called it.

A few weeks earlier, Donald Trump had launched a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, naming himself its chair and ending a spirit of bipartisanship that had long reigned in one of D.C.’s most cherished cultural institutions. The center cancelled a performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., and expressed an eagerness to book “Cats.” Now, as the lights dimmed, Graham’s son Don, dressed in a sports coat and New Balance sneakers, stepped up to the lectern. His mother, he said, “had to stand up to one President who had carried forty-nine states, and who truly, as you are about to see, wanted to use the government to destroy her newspaper and her company.”

Nixon’s Attorney General once told Bernstein that “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer,” but Don Graham was likely also alluding to more recent events. He had succeeded his mother as the Post’s publisher, overseeing the paper’s business side for three decades before it was sold, in 2013, to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Three years later, just before the 2016 Presidential election, Bezos said that Trump’s calls for retribution and his unwillingness to concede defeat “erodes our democracy around the edges.” But, in the weeks before the 2024 election, Bezos didn’t allow the Post to endorse a Presidential candidate—the editors had planned to back Kamala Harris—breaking with the paper’s long-standing tradition. After the election, he attended Trump’s Inauguration, to which his company donated a million dollars. Days before the Kennedy Center screening, Bezos announced another major shift at the paper. The Opinions section would feature pieces “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

In the days of Woodward and Bernstein, the Post’s remit had seemed clear: to hold the nation’s most powerful officials to account. Now its journalists were shaken not just by what some saw as Bezos’s capitulation to Trump but by a broader identity crisis at the paper. Those who could find work elsewhere left. In January, a former executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., and a former managing editor, Robert Kaiser, wrote in an e-mail to Bezos, “In our experience going back to the early 1960s, morale at The Post has never been lower.” Bezos never replied.

After the film, guests drifted to a reception in a large gallery, where Woodward soon confronted Bill Murray. Murray had recently said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he was so dismayed after reading “like, five pages” of “Wired,” Woodward’s 1984 book about Murray’s old friend John Belushi, that he thought, Oh, my God. They framed Nixon. At the reception, Woodward interrupted a conversation Murray was having with Klobuchar to defend his work. “Sometimes we learn by talking,” Woodward said. Murray turned away; Buffett’s publicist quickly intervened. Afterward, more than one attendee described the reception—which featured hot appetizers, white orchids, and a roomful of septuagenarians—as a wake for the Graham family’s Post.

The paper’s current leadership was noticeably absent. Will Lewis, a former executive at Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, whom Bezos had appointed as the paper’s publisher in early 2024, had R.S.V.P.’d that he would attend and then asked to see the guest list. (Lewis denies asking to see the guest list.) He and the Post’s editor, Matt Murray, a recent arrival from the Wall Street Journal, had ultimately stayed away. Bezos was out of town, preferring instead to attend the Academy Awards with his fiancée, the journalist Lauren Sánchez.

Bezos was always seen as a somewhat distant owner. Amazon’s holdings now include Whole Foods, Zappos, the streaming site Twitch, and M-G-M Studios. Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company, is a direct competitor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the race to privatize space travel. “He was sort of like a helicopter parent,” a former longtime employee at one of Bezos’s businesses told me, “giving a lot of direction on a Wednesday and then leaving us to pick up the pieces.” Still, no one seemed to know what his current vision for the Post might be. “In some ways, this is all a story about Jeff and how he changed over the course of his ownership and really became a different person with huge implications for the institution,” one former top editor told me. A journalist who knows Bezos said, “He’s on an intellectual journey. Wherever he lands, he’s thinking. Whatever it is, it’s a mind at work.”

At the end of 2012, Don Graham and his niece Katharine Weymouth, then the Post’s publisher, met at the Bombay Club, a restaurant near the White House that was especially popular during the Clinton era, to discuss the paper’s finances. The Post was entering its seventh year of declining revenue, and, for the first time, they were considering the possibility of selling. “We asked ourselves if we thought our small public company was still the best place for the newspaper,” Graham said at the time.

The Post had been in the family since 1933, when Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, bought it at auction. The Grahams, like the Sulzberger family, which has owned the New York Times for more than a century, viewed the paper not just as a business but as a civic trust. Don and his mother were fixtures in the Post’s headquarters on Fifteenth Street; Don seemed to know everyone’s name—reporters, receptionists, custodians. For years, the Post was a thriving regional monopoly, servicing one of the country’s wealthiest and most educated metropolitan areas.

The emergence of the internet threatened all that. In August, 1992, Kaiser, the managing editor, returned from a conference in Japan and wrote a memo to the paper’s leadership about the coming upheaval. “The Post is not in a pot of water, and we’re smarter than the average frog,” he said. “But we do find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured—or ignored as an unnecessary anachronism.” Within a decade, Craigslist had decimated the industry’s classified-ad revenues. In 2003, another Post managing editor, Steve Coll, proposed a plan to reconfigure the newsroom to adapt to the internet and use the paper’s name recognition to become more national in scope. Don Graham rejected the idea, saying that he wanted to maintain the paper’s local identity. Its strategy eventually became “For and about Washington.”

What followed was years of shrinking print circulation punctuated by a series of staff buyouts. In 2007, a pair of Post staffers defected to found Politico, a digital news outlet that covered official Washington. Graham offered to partner with them in the new venture, but they declined. “It was clear that the age of expansion and conquering the world had ended, and it was not clear how we were going to turn it around,” Eugene Robinson, a longtime Post editor and columnist, said. Martin Baron, who became the paper’s executive editor in 2013, told me that, when he took the job, he expected to oversee additional cuts: “It looked like that’s what it was going to be like, year after year.”

Graham was heartbroken about the prospect of selling the Post, but he viewed a sale to a worthy owner as a final act of service. Warren Buffett—who has been a friend of the Graham family’s since the early nineteen-seventies, when he bailed out the Post—recommended Bezos as a potential buyer. At the time, Bezos was worth $27.2 billion—about a tenth of his current net worth—but still living a relatively low-key life in Seattle. He was married to MacKenzie Scott, a Princeton-educated novelist, with whom he had four children. In a 2013 Vogue article about Scott, who was promoting a new novel, Bezos called her “resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot.” He liked to shop for her clothes. Scott drove the Vogue writer around Seattle in her minivan and talked about avoiding the limelight. “Jeff is the opposite of me,” she said. “He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy.”

Graham and Bezos met to discuss a sale at the Sun Valley Conference, an annual retreat in Idaho that is popularly known as a “summer camp for billionaires.” Graham emphasized that owning a newspaper came with a particular set of challenges. Bezos’s businesses could be hurt by association; the paper’s journalists would likely report on him. But for Bezos, who had made his fortune in part by siphoning revenue from local bookstores, buying the Post seemed like an act of redemption. Baron told me that Bezos, the adopted son of a Cuban immigrant, felt a sincere commitment to the paper’s mission. “I think Bezos fundamentally believes in the country and believes in democracy and thought it was an important institution,” he said. Ultimately, Bezos purchased the paper for two hundred and fifty million dollars.

Many Post staff members were initially skeptical of the new owner. “The case against Jeff Bezos,” Ezra Klein wrote on the Post’s Wonkblog, was that “Amazon’s political interests extend across everything from state sales taxes to the minimum wage to trade with China.” Bezos wrote a letter that was published in the paper, seeking to reassure readers and his new employees alike of his good intentions. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he said. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”

Baron, who had edited the Boston Globe during its “Spotlight” investigation into the Catholic Church’s child-sexual-abuse coverup, ran the newsroom. Fred Hiatt led the paper’s Opinions section, a position he’d held for more than two decades. Hiatt was widely admired for, as one colleague put it, “an unassuming nature coupled with an unassailable intellect.” His section was center left on domestic issues and tilted more to the right on foreign affairs; Bezos, according to a Post report at the time, had said that “his political views were already in line with those of The Post’s editorial page.” Members of the newsroom researched Bezos’s past political contributions and found that he and Scott had donated to a gay-rights group in the state of Washington. “So people sort of took him to be a liberal with a libertarian streak,” Cameron Barr, a former senior managing editor, told me.

During Bezos’s first year as owner, he was heavily involved in the development of a tablet app for the paper, which the company called Project Rainbow. “He showed up and he said that he thought mobile was the future,” one former business-side staffer told me. “He believed that we needed to compete by building a real national product.” Bezos was often less assured when it came to understanding the newspaper’s history and culture. In October, 2014, Ben Bradlee, the Post’s editor during the seventies and eighties, died, at the age of ninety-three. Bezos did not plan to attend the funeral, which was to be held at the Washington National Cathedral. According to Baron’s memoir, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post,” Woodward sent Bezos an e-mail: “Understand you’re not coming to the Bradlee funeral. He was the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos hopped on his private jet and flew to Washington. “You could see him absorbing that he was buying not just a technological toy, but that he had bought a national treasure,” one funeral attendee told me. “In retrospect, it was a powerful moment.”

That same year, the Post’s Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, was imprisoned on espionage charges in Iran. When he and his wife were finally allowed to leave the country, in January, 2016, Bezos met them in Germany and flew them back to the U.S. on his plane, dropping them off in Key West for an all-expenses-paid vacation. A few days later, Rezaian appeared at the opening ceremony for the Post’s new headquarters on K Street, a sleek, light-filled space. “Important institutions like the Post have an essence, they have a heart, they have a core,” Bezos said at the event, “and if you wanted that to change, you’d be crazy.” Still, he sought to avoid unchecked nostalgia. “I’m a huge fan of leaning into the future,” he said. “Too much glamorizing of the past would certainly lead to paralysis.”

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, as Trump’s antics made headlines around the world, newspapers such as the Times and the Post quickly attracted more readers—the “Trump bump,” as the phenomenon came to be called. From the start, Bezos, as the proprietor of what Trump dubbed a “fake news” outlet, was a frequent target of the Republican nominee’s. In December, 2015, Trump tweeted that “the @washingtonpost loses money (a deduction) and gives owner @JeffBezos power to screw public on low taxation of @Amazon! Big tax shelter.” Bezos, according to Brad Stone’s 2021 book, “Amazon Unbound,” sent an e-mail to his head of communications: “Feel like I should have a witty retort. Useful opportunity (patriotic duty) to do my part to deflate this guy who would be a scary prez. I’m an inexperienced trash talker but I’m willing to learn. :) Ideas?” Hours later, Bezos tweeted, “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace.”

Weeks before the election, the Post broke the story of Trump’s lewd comment to “Access Hollywood” ’s host Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals. Many of the paper’s blockbuster reports during the campaign covered Trump’s past business dealings in Russia and Russian interference in the election, a line of inquiry that only intensified after Trump’s victory. Soon after the Inauguration, the Post débuted a new motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” a favorite saying of Bob Woodward’s that was seen as a direct rebuke of the new President. (MacKenzie Scott had called an earlier option—“A Free People Demand to Know”—a “Frankenslogan.”) Behind the scenes, though, Bezos seemed to urge caution. Baron, in his book, writes that “in the days before Trump took office” Bezos had asked Hiatt, the opinion editor, to show “support for Trump on whatever issues he could.”

Otherwise, Bezos never interfered in newsroom decision-making, a distance that won him the affection of his paper’s journalists. At a Post event in 2016, Baron asked Bezos if he thought Trump was “now threatening to put one of your body parts through a wringer.” Bezos said that he had “a lot of very sensitive and vulnerable body parts but, if need be, they can all go through the wringer rather than do the wrong thing.” Later, Bezos installed an antique wringer in one of the paper’s conference rooms.

Bezos’s ownership of the Post was creating complications for his other businesses. Amazon held a large contract with the government to handle cloud computing for intelligence agencies, and it was in the running for a similar contract with the Pentagon worth ten billion dollars. In 2018, a source told Axios that Trump was “obsessed” with Amazon and had considered bringing an antitrust suit against the company and changing its tax status. The following year, Amazon lost the Pentagon’s cloud-computing contract to Microsoft. Amazon filed a lawsuit claiming that Trump had improperly pressured Defense Department officials on the decision. The Pentagon eventually scrapped the original contract and announced that, instead, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon would compete for parts of it on an ongoing basis. On paper, Robinson told me, Bezos had paid two hundred and fifty million dollars for the Post—“but, really, he paid ten billion.”

On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian dissident who, after leaving his home country, had become an opinion columnist for the Post, disappeared while visiting the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. “Let me know what I can do to help,” Bezos told the Post’s publisher at the time, Fred Ryan. The C.I.A. later concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had ordered the killing of Khashoggi, whose body was reportedly dismembered with a bone saw and carried out of the Embassy in suitcases. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had established close ties to the crown prince; the Administration was criticized for not doing more to pursue the perpetrators. The Post’s coverage of Khashoggi’s murder, which included breaking the news of the C.I.A.’s findings, earned the paper a spot as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service. But Bezos didn’t speak publicly about the incident until a year later, at a memorial event held on the anniversary of Khashoggi’s death. As CNBC reported, Amazon Web Services had been working on a deal to set up data centers in Saudi Arabia. Baron told me that, on such matters, Bezos often offered public comment only when explicitly asked to do so.

Privately, Bezos seemed to be undergoing an evolution. Whereas once he had been physically unprepossessing, he was now, thanks to regular cardio and weight-lifting sessions with a celebrity trainer, roped with muscle. He invariably showed off his new biceps and pecs by wearing a tight T-shirt. Close associates joked with him about his transformation, but it seemed more than skin-deep. In 2016, Amazon Studios distributed “Manchester by the Sea,” which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Bezos attended the ceremony for the first time. Seeing him in the thrall of Hollywood was perplexing, the former longtime employee said, and “honestly, hilarious. I was just, like, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

The biggest change of all was personal. On January 9, 2019, Bezos announced that, “after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation,” he and Scott were filing for divorce. The following day, the National Enquirer published a story that exposed his affair with Sánchez, a former television news reporter who was married to Patrick Whitesell, the executive chairman of the talent agency Endeavor; an accompanying photo caption identified Bezos as the “owner of The Washington Post.” Trump tweeted with apparent glee, “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post.”

A month later, in a post on Medium, Bezos accused the National Enquirer of blackmail. He seemed to imply that the Saudis, and perhaps Trump, who was a friend of the National Enquirer’s publisher David Pecker, were behind the leaking of some private texts. “It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy,” Bezos wrote. (It was later reported that Sánchez’s brother, Michael, had sold the texts to the National Enquirer for two hundred thousand dollars, which he denies.) Bezos went on to assure readers that “my stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.”

Less than a week after Biden was sworn in to office, in 2021, Baron announced that he would retire, a decision he had been contemplating for months. By then, the Post had close to three million digital subscribers; the newsroom employed more than a thousand journalists, nearly twice as many as when Baron started at the paper. “The Post is well positioned for the future,” he wrote in a letter to the newsroom. “We have now created a truly national and international news organization.” Baron’s tone projected confidence, but today many staff members view his departure as a critical turning point. “Marty Baron was the last editor of the Post able to communicate a clear editorial vision for it,” one former reporter told me.

When Trump lost the 2020 election, Bezos posted a picture on Instagram of a grinning Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and wrote, “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era.” But readers who had obsessively tracked Trump’s four convulsive years in office were ready to tune out the relative normalcy of the Biden White House; the Post lost about three hundred thousand subscribers in the first year of Biden’s Presidency. Some in the newsroom had warned that, to prepare for the end of Trump’s term, the Post needed to diversify its offerings—what Fred Ryan, the publisher, called a “bundle strategy”—in a manner similar to the Times, which had expanded its business through apps dedicated to cooking and games. Baron told me that he had begun to worry about the Post’s business model in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms, when it became clear that Trump might lose the general election. “I thought that we needed to bring Bezos in for a big strategy discussion,” he said. The meeting never happened.

In May, 2021, Sally Buzbee, who previously ran the Associated Press, was named the paper’s new executive editor. She had led an international newsroom, but staffers worried that she wouldn’t be able to imprint a new identity on the paper. “Sally was a wire-service person,” the former Post reporter said. “She spoke of each story as an autonomous thing, and the voice of the whole project started to get lost.”

That December, Hiatt, the opinion editor, died unexpectedly, of cardiac arrest, at the age of sixty-six. Seven months later, David Shipley, who had run Bloomberg Opinion and the Times editorial page, took over the job; the Post’s writeup of the hire noted that he was the “second top editor to be appointed by publisher Fred Ryan from outside the newspaper.” Many sensed that Ryan, a former aide in the Reagan White House and Bezos’s main contact at the paper, was eager to assert himself. “Fred felt like the newsroom was not the newsroom he really wanted,” a former longtime editor said. “I think some of that was personal—he just didn’t like a lot of people.”

Bezos, meanwhile, was becoming a far more public figure. Back in 2014, he had said, “I like to be at home. I like to be in the office. I feel disconnected from the office if I’m travelling a lot.” Now he and Sánchez were photographed having dinner in New York and Miami, shopping on St. Barts, wearing coördinated stripes at Wimbledon, and hosting a disco-themed New Year’s Eve party. In 2016, Bezos had purchased the largest private home in D.C., for twenty-three million dollars. Jean Case, the wife of an AOL founder, had told the magazine Washingtonian that Bezos and Scott were going to “revive the legacy of Kay Graham and her great socializing—bringing smart, interesting people together in a social context.” By the time the house made its début, in January, 2020, it was Sánchez, not Scott, who served as Bezos’s co-host for a black-tie gathering attended by Kellyanne Conway, Jerome Powell, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. The home, one person told Washingtonian, was “very theatrical.” Someone else who has visited told me that the house has the feel of a museum; Bezos has on display, among other rare collectibles, a lock from the Watergate break-in.

Bezos had stepped down as C.E.O. of Amazon in 2021, handing off its day-to-day operations to Andy Jassy, one of his longtime deputies. The following year, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, a bill that would have blocked online retailers from featuring their own brands’ goods and services more prominently on their platforms, passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support. Industry groups representing the likes of Amazon and Google launched a thirty-six-million-dollar ad campaign claiming that the bill would “threaten our fragile economic recovery.” The tech companies’ attitude, a former Senate staffer told me, was “We’re not here to negotiate. We are here to crush this thing and murder anyone who even thinks about voting for it.” The bill never made it to the Senate floor.

The Biden Administration had appointed Lina Khan, the author of a 2017 Yale Law Journal article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” to be the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan’s paper had argued that, given Amazon’s ubiquity in American life, the company should either be subject to strong antitrust enforcement or be regulated like a public utility. Shortly after Khan was confirmed by the Senate, Amazon filed a motion requesting that she recuse herself from regulatory actions involving the company. Instead, her agency aggressively pursued a number of open investigations into Amazon’s business practices. “Some of these companies and executives were used to a certain degree of legal immunity,” Khan told me. “So, when we started enforcing the law, it seemed to trigger a deep hysteria and backlash.”

Jay Carney, a former White House press secretary for Barack Obama, headed Amazon’s communications team, but the company’s relations with the Biden Administration and other Democratic politicians deteriorated. Biden met with labor leaders who supported Amazon workers’ unionization drive. Leading Party figures, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, routinely criticized the company’s reach. At one point, when a Democratic backbencher, Mark Pocan, of Wisconsin, tweeted about the company’s workers feeling so pressured to make timely deliveries that they skipped bathroom breaks, the Amazon News account responded, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” (The company later apologized for the tweet.)

In 2023, the F.T.C. and seventeen state attorneys general brought a suit against Amazon, claiming that it was illegally maintaining monopoly power. Bezos felt a sense of betrayal. “Jeff really stuck his neck out, in his view, in the first Trump term, and weathered all that heat and criticism,” a longtime Post staffer said. “And his thanks for that from the Biden Administration is to have Lina Khan unleashed on him.” Last year, the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen, a friend of Bezos’s who once gave generously to Democrats, announced that he would back Trump. In a recent interview with the Times, Andreessen said his cohort believed that the Biden Administration had targeted the tech industry “in a very broad-based way.” There were, he said, “lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions” about how things had gone “off the rails.”

In January, 2023, Bezos made a rare visit to the Post offices, sitting for a series of one-on-one meetings with a small number of the paper’s journalists. The company was in dire financial straits, set to lose money for the first time in years. Ryan had shuttered the newspaper’s Sunday magazine in late November, and, two weeks later, held a town hall with staff where he announced that a round of layoffs would be coming. The newsroom’s journalists, many of whom were members of the Washington Post Guild, the paper’s union, responded with increasingly pointed questions about Ryan’s leadership. “We’re not going to turn the town hall into a grievance session for the Guild,” he said, before abruptly exiting the stage. A video of Ryan’s retreat went viral. Afterward, Woodward sent a note to Bezos, telling him his involvement at the paper was needed.

Bezos set out to prove himself an attentive listener. During his meetings with Post journalists, he took copious notes in a leather-bound notebook, stopping occasionally to confirm that he understood certain points. One journalist who met with him said that he seemed interested in making acquisitions to rapidly expand the Post’s audience. Another was surprised by how out of touch he seemed with the paper. “He is isolated, and he hasn’t done the work to engage and be a hands-on owner,” the journalist said. “If you are going to own a media property right now, you need to be all in and understand the landscape.”

For years, most of Bezos’s ideas for the Post seemed based on his experience at Amazon. “He said, ‘I’d rather have two hundred million subscribers paying ten dollars a year than a smaller number paying a higher price,’ ” another former editor told me. “Just supersize the number. That was always his idea of a really successful digital news organization.” But, at a time when mainstream media outlets are widely distrusted, the number of people who want to pay for quality news in America is distinctly smaller than the number of those who want to order two-ply toilet paper that will arrive the next day. “For such a smart, accomplished guy, who has owned the business for as long as he has,” one person who’s had conversations with Bezos about the paper said, “he is too timid about the operating levers he can pull and too ambitious about the commercial reach of the paper.”

After his visit, Bezos had the thought, one person with knowledge of internal conversations said, that “the American media was too coastal, and that the Washington Post needed to get out of Washington.” He initiated what came to be called Project America, which explored ideas such as getting Substack writers from other U.S. cities to write a few times a month, or working with regional publications to license or co-publish stories. None of the initiatives have yet been launched, but Project America marked a new level of involvement for Bezos. “Fred Hiatt’s death was, in hindsight, even more of a catastrophe than it seemed,” a longtime staffer told me. Shipley, the Opinions section’s new editor, “understandably thought it would help everyone if Jeff were more engaged.” Instead, the staffer went on, “Bezos grabbed it with both hands.”

In June, 2023, Ryan stepped down as publisher. Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive who had run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and who has served on the Amazon board since 1997—replaced him as interim C.E.O. According to another former Post reporter, Stonesifer was shocked at the state of the paper’s business: “She felt Fred was either delusional or he was really ignorant about what the future of the paper looked like.” (Stonesifer denies questioning Ryan’s competence, saying he had a “solid grasp on the facts.”) That October, the Post announced that it would be cutting an additional two hundred and forty jobs. “I have come to think of her,” a Post reporter said of Stonesifer, “as the minister of death.”

In November, 2023, after a months-long search, Bezos announced that Will Lewis, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a veteran of Murdoch’s London tabloid empire, would be the new publisher of the Washington Post. The decision alarmed many in the paper’s orbit. Robert Kaiser, the former managing editor, said that he raised concerns about Lewis with Stonesifer. “I tried to explain to Patty that there was a huge gulf of cultures between British journalism and American journalism,” Kaiser told me. “It was very hard to imagine that a British journalist with Lewis’s biography—having been a Murdoch flunky—would ever win the respect of American journalists.”

Lewis had spent the early part of his career as a mergers-and-acquisitions reporter at the Financial Times, where his editor in New York was an Australian named Robert Thomson, who is now the C.E.O. of Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2006, at the age of thirty-seven, Lewis became the youngest-ever editor of the Daily Telegraph, which he overhauled to become more digitally focussed, creating a weeklong training program in a dummy newsroom. “It was an old, staid conservative newspaper,” one former Telegraph reporter said. “The readership was retired military and their wives, and Will turned it into a scoop-getting competitive newspaper.”

Lewis, who was raised in a middle-class home in a suburb of London, became a minor celebrity in the British press. His brother, Simon, had served as Queen Elizabeth’s communications secretary and went on to work for Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister. At the Telegraph, Lewis had “a clique of mannish guys,” the former reporter said, and a reputation for hard drinking. Private Eye nicknamed him “Thirsty” Will Lewis, but the Guardian noted, “No one has ever seen him drunk, late for work, or anything less than intensely focused.” A person who has known Lewis for decades described him to me as a “wide boy”—British slang for someone who survives by his wits, often on the wrong side of right.

In 2010, Lewis was hired by News International, a subsidiary of News Corp, where he reported directly to the company’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks. She and Lewis were friends; Brooks had attended Lewis’s fortieth-birthday party at a London pub, a casual bash featuring karaoke and a high-powered guest list that included the future Prime Minister David Cameron. At the time, Scotland Yard was investigating accusations that reporters at two of the company’s papers, News of the World and the Sun, had illegally hacked into the phones of politicians, celebrities, royals, and even a dead teen-age girl. Lewis, who was seen as “untainted,” according to a longtime colleague, was tapped to help contain the situation. Later, the New York Times reported that Scotland Yard suspected, according to internal documents, that News International was attempting to “steer the investigation into a very narrow remit,” by directing investigators to look at certain journalists and “steering the investigation away from other journalists and editors.”

In 2014, Brooks—a protégé of Murdoch’s—was cleared of hacking charges. But a News International editor named Andy Coulson was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. That year, Lewis got a promotion, moving to a role as publisher of the Wall Street Journal and C.E.O. of News Corp’s Dow Jones division, where he worked under Thomson, his former editor. Lewis oversaw rapid growth at the paper—during his tenure, the Wall Street Journal increased its digital-subscriber numbers from seven hundred thousand to more than two million—and in 2020 he was on a shortlist to become the next director general of the BBC. During the hiring process, documents emerged in lawsuits brought by dozens of individuals, including Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, who claimed that News International papers had illegally hacked their phones. The documents alleged that, while the company was being investigated, Lewis had approved a plan that resulted in the deletion of millions of e-mails from News International’s servers. Lewis has denied any illegal conduct. A month after the revelations, the BBC job went to another candidate.

Instead, Lewis helped found a news startup focussed on Gen Z and launched his own public-relations consultancy. He reportedly advised then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who held a series of parties at 10 Downing Street during the COVID pandemic, when lockdown rules were in place. According to the Guardian, after news of the Prime Minister’s infractions surfaced, Lewis recommended that Johnson and others “clean up” their phones. Both Lewis and Johnson have said that the story is untrue. Johnson later recommended Lewis for a knighthood, which he received in 2023.

That same year, Lewis was involved in an attempt to buy the Telegraph. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said that he had “significant expressions of interest from a wide range of potential backers.” The Daily Beast reported that one of the prospective investors he solicited was Jeff Bezos, which both Lewis and Bezos have denied. In any event, Lewis aborted his bid after Bezos hired him to run the Washington Post.

When Lewis started at the Post, in January, 2024, he held a town-hall meeting to introduce himself. Karen DeYoung, a journalist who had been at the paper for nearly fifty years, “was, like, ‘We know everyone loves the accent,’ but basically don’t bullshit us,” one of the former Post reporters told me. Still, Lewis was largely successful in early attempts to win over the newsroom. He sent detailed notes of praise for articles and sat in a glass office near the reporters and editors. “The Post is a very personable, tactile newsroom—people are friends,” one of the former Post reporters said. “Will brought back this chummy feeling.”

Sally Quinn, a former Post writer and the widow of Ben Bradlee, invited Lewis into her Georgetown social sphere. People liked his wife, Rebecca, she said—“an Emma Thompson type.” One of the couple’s children worked for Maggie Hassan, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, and was already living in D.C. Lewis and his wife purchased a Colonial Williamsburg-style house in a tucked-away corner of Georgetown for seven million dollars. Lewis told the Evening Standard of his plans for the Post—“We’re going to get our swagger back”—and attributed his rise to a “fear of being found out and getting up every day at five.”

Lewis had grand ambitions. “He very quickly declared that he soon wanted to have three million subscribers,” a former staffer said. He began hosting “say-it sessions,” where staff members were encouraged to describe what they thought the company was doing wrong. Many of them were simply eager to do anything that might help turn around the business. “Everything felt like a gimmick,” a former editor said. “You could tell there was a lot of bullshit, but maybe we needed that.”

Some early moves rankled the Post’s staff. Lewis made a troika of former Dow Jones strategists part of his close-knit executive team. His chief of staff appeared on the paper’s masthead one day without any internal announcement. Lewis also had his own communications staffer in London, who operated independently of the Post’s publicity department. (Recently, the Post’s chief communications officer resigned, reportedly owing to repeated clashes with Lewis.)

At Bezos’s behest, Lewis actively began searching for acquisition opportunities. Less than a month into his tenure, he sat for an interview with Ben Smith, the co-founder of the news site Semafor. As they began their conversation, Lewis appeared to propose some sort of partnership, telling Smith, “If we want to do something together, we should find a way to do some business.” Smith responded, “This is the wrong meeting.” Lewis was undeterred: “I think us partnering with startups and people in early phases is really good for us.” Later, Smith told me that Lewis never followed up. “I don’t think he was joking—Will is always trying to do some kind of deal,” Smith said. “Obviously, we would have been open to talking.”

Around the same time, Lewis and Buzbee travelled to Davos. According to one person with knowledge of the incident, as Buzbee was on her way to an early-morning meeting that she and Lewis had scheduled with top leadership of Microsoft to discuss, among other things, issues concerning A.I., she received a message from Lewis saying that he was sick and that Buzbee should attend solo. She was rattled that he would miss such an important meeting; the previous month, the Times had sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. A few hours later, Lewis appeared at another Davos event, in high spirits.

Meanwhile, tensions between Lewis and the newsroom were escalating. In March, the Post ran a story about the News International lawsuits in London; it later emerged that Lewis had put pressure on Buzbee not to run it, but Lewis has denied this. Matea Gold, a well-regarded managing editor, had initially overseen the Lewis reporting. Later, Cameron Barr, the former senior managing editor, was brought in and given final say over edits on stories about Lewis. A person who spoke with Lewis last year told me that Lewis thought American journalists were “obsessed with their own drama.”

That May, Lewis held a town-hall meeting announcing the “build it” phase of his strategy. The Post, he said, had lost seventy-seven million dollars the previous year. The paper would be moving toward a system that allowed readers to pay to access single articles, enabled by what he called “frictionless payments.” The paper would also be rolling out Post Pro and Post Plus, payment tiers that mimicked offerings from Politico and Punchbowl News, which charge a premium for industry-specific news stories. (Lewis has also been pursuing an acquisition of Punchbowl News.)

Eleven days later, the Times reported on a number of changes taking place at the Post. Lewis dashed off a note to the staff, confirming the story’s details: Buzbee was leaving her job as executive editor, and the Post was launching what he called a third newsroom, which would focus on producing service journalism and content for social media. “We’re all kind of, like, ‘What the fuck, a third newsroom? What are you talking about?’ ” one of the former reporters told me. Buzbee, who disagreed with the restructure, had been offered the job of running it. Seeing the move as a demotion, she had refused. Now she was out.

The next day, Lewis gathered the staff and introduced Matt Murray, the former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, who, he said, would be leading the newsroom through the election. A former colleague of Lewis’s from the Telegraph, Robert Winnett, would then take over as executive editor. “The cynical interpretation is that it sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies,” Ashley Parker, one of the paper’s White House correspondents, told Lewis. “And now we have four white men running three newsrooms.” (Parker later left the Post, along with several others, for The Atlantic.) Caroline Kitchener, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, pressed Lewis about whether he had interviewed any women or people of color for the job. Lewis erupted. “If you don’t like the way I’m doing things, you can feel free to leave,” he said. (Kitchener now works at the Times.) Later in the meeting, Lewis said, “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff, right? I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”

Many journalists I spoke with described the moment as a mask falling away. “That was when it felt like we had entered a whole new era,” one of the former editors said. “It’s when I would say everybody started communicating with each other on Signal, rather than Slack.”

NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik later revealed that Lewis had attempted to persuade him not to run a story on the British lawsuits, and had offered in exchange an exclusive interview on the Post’s business plan—a quid pro quo that was a clear violation of journalistic ethics. In a story in the Post, which reported on Lewis’s efforts to get Buzbee not to publish stories about the lawsuits, he was quoted calling Folkenflik “an activist, not a journalist.” Lewis claimed the account of his meetings with Buzbee was “inaccurate,” as part of a parsing denial that disturbed many in the newsroom. “To have the publisher of the Washington Post playing some bullshit fucking game like that in our own paper was deeply embarrassing and troubling, because that’s what we do for a living,” another former Post reporter told me. “We go after powerful people who then come back with bullshit that is transparently deceptive, and then we blow it up.”

Within days, a team of reporters at the Post published a piece about Winnett, the incoming executive editor, that detailed how, as a journalist at Britain’s Sunday Times, he had worked with a trained actor who sometimes misrepresented himself to obtain information for stories. Winnett opted to walk away from the position. Bezos sent a note to the Post’s internal newsletter voicing implicit support for Lewis. “Team—I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to also weigh in directly: the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change,” Bezos wrote. “The world is evolving rapidly and we do need to change as a business. With your support, we’ll do that and lead this great institution into the future.”

Since last June, Lewis has gone into what a number of Post staffers described as a state of hiding. His relationship with Murray, the interim editor, suffered. “I know Will was very upset with Matt for the Post’s coverage and for some period of time wouldn’t talk to Matt,” a former senior editor at the Post told me. (Both Murray and Lewis deny this, though eventually Murray instituted a policy discouraging the paper from covering itself.) Rumors began circulating about Lewis drinking heavily in social settings. “One thing that has damaged him internally is that his drinking is widely known in the newsroom,” the former senior editor said. “It’s literally something his employees joke about.” (Lewis declined multiple requests to speak with me.)

That spring, Bezos and Sánchez purchased their third property on Indian Creek Island, in Miami-Dade County, where their neighbors include Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Sánchez is also friends with Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend, Bettina Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite. Bezos and Sánchez spent much of the summer island-hopping in the Mediterranean on Koru, a five-hundred-million-dollar superyacht whose name refers to a Maori symbol for new beginnings. They were joined at one point by Kim Kardashian, whose mother, Kris Jenner, had previously been spotted at Coachella with Sánchez and Bezos. (Sánchez and Kardashian employ the same publicist.) Sánchez is described by those who know her as warm and charming, with deep connections in the entertainment industry. “I think Lauren is very influential,” the former senior editor told me. “Maybe not in the hands-on decisions throughout the Post, but certainly in the orientation of it.”

The 2024 Presidential campaign was under way, and Lewis, Shipley, and others on the Post’s opinion pages were trying to speak with Bezos. An attempt to meet with him in late spring was waylaid, in part, by the fallout from Lewis’s disastrous all-hands meeting. In July, according to Axios, Bezos had a phone call with Trump, in which he recommended that the former President pick Doug Burgum, then the governor of North Dakota, as his running mate. In August, after Biden had dropped out of the race and Harris replaced him as the Democratic nominee, the opinion leadership was told that Bezos’s schedule was full until late September.

At that point, Shipley and two deputies flew to Miami to meet with Bezos and Lewis; the paper’s endorsement wasn’t on the agenda, but Bezos expressed mild curiosity about why the paper needed to endorse a candidate at all. Murray also met with Bezos and Lewis in Miami and later told other editors that Bezos wanted the paper to “widen its aperture,” one person said. “Jeff apparently started pulling up the Atlantic app and was saying, ‘Why don’t we do these stories?’ It was almost like someone who descended from another world.” Bezos had said that he wanted the Post to broaden its appeal, but he was pointing to a magazine with a targeted audience. Bezos also mentioned that he thought more firefighters from Nebraska should be reading the Post. (Bezos declined to speak with me.)

Just two weeks before the election, Bezos decided that he didn’t want the paper to endorse either candidate. Shipley tried to change his mind—given the timing, it would appear as if Bezos were bowing to Trump. Lewis, whose daughter was then working for the Harris campaign, announced the paper’s decision not to make an endorsement. The news was met with predictable outrage. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Baron, the former executive editor, wrote on X. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” Almost overnight, two hundred and fifty thousand Post subscribers cancelled their subscriptions. On the day of the announcement, the C.E.O. of Blue Origin met briefly with Trump after one of Trump’s rallies. Bezos has said that the two events were unrelated.

In an op-ed for the Post, Bezos attempted to explain his decision. He acknowledged that the announcement was poorly timed, and attributed this to “inadequate planning.” But the larger issue, he said, was Americans’ distrust in media. “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” he wrote. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.” Bezos’s words seemed pointedly directed at his own newsroom: “It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy.”

The paper still hadn’t decided on an executive editor after Winnett’s appointment fell through. Gold, who had helped run the coverage of the News International lawsuits, was vying for the position. When it was decided that she would not advance in the process, Wayne Connell, the head of H.R., not Lewis, delivered the news. The top candidate, Clifford Levy, a deputy managing editor at the Times, withdrew his name from consideration. No other outside candidates remained, leaving Murray as the de-facto leader. Lewis never officially announced that Murray had the job. Instead, a Times reporter wrote in early January that Murray, in response to a question at a meeting, had confirmed that he would continue on as the head editor.

Since 1983, the Post has held the annual Eugene Meyer Awards to honor staff across the organization, from reporters and editors to print-plant managers. “The whole point of the Eugene Meyer Awards is about the whole company as a community and all the departments that have to work together,” one Post journalist said. “It’s so that everyone understands all the other pieces. And it really makes you feel a part of something special.” When the Grahams presided over the awards, the event had the feeling of a family holiday party.

Last year, awards were given, but without a company-wide ceremony. Staff members were upset. One person called it part of Lewis’s “De-Grahamification” of the Post. The newsroom decided to host an informal gathering anyway, assembling just before Christmas. The tone was sombre. Sally Jenkins and Dan Balz, two longtime staffers, became emotional, talking about what the paper had meant to them. Lewis, who had only occasionally been seen in the newsroom since the previous spring’s all-hands meeting, did not attend.

Instead, in January, he hosted a small dinner for the awardees in one of the building’s private suites. Lewis skipped the cocktail hour, but spoke during the seated dinner about how the paper’s recent innovations had made it the envy of its competitors. Earlier in the month, the Post had débuted a new internal mission statement—“Riveting Storytelling for All of America”—and the paper’s chief strategy officer, Suzi Watford, had laid out a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of generating two hundred million “paying users” through a flexible payment system and “distribution partnerships.” When I spoke with Watford, she said that such targets are typically attached to a ten-year horizon; the Post wasn’t attaching any hard time horizons.

News websites such as those of CNN and the Times are often visited by more than a hundred million users in a month, but a slim margin of them are paying subscribers. The Post currently has about 2.5 million digital subscribers; the Times has 11.4 million. One of the former Post editors called the idea of generating two hundred million paying users “intellectually dishonest,” in part because it sidestepped the issue of who the Post thought its audience should be. Bezos, in his op-ed about the Presidential endorsement, had said that the Post and the Times “talk only to a certain elite”—but a certain élite is also who is most willing to pay for news. Going forward, Watford said, “I think we will have a much broader appeal.”

Don Graham had been invited to the event as a nod to the paper’s legacy. He rose to speak and gave a history of the awards. Then he went off script. Graham, who is eighty and still worth half a billion dollars, had not tried to be involved in the Post’s leadership decisions, he said. But during the past few months many staff members had reached out to him. Morale, he said, was low. Lewis, sitting nearby, stared at his place setting. “It was such a wild moment,” one attendee told me.

Dozens of staffers have left the Post in recent months. Earlier this year, after Philip Rucker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, received an offer from CNN, Lewis scheduled a meeting with him. It was supposed to be a final attempt to keep a high-profile journalist, but Lewis cancelled at the last minute. Hundreds of staff members had sent a letter to Bezos that day, asking him to intervene at the paper. “We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent,” the authors wrote.

One person who has had conversations with the Post’s leadership said that Lewis and his top deputies now speak of the newsroom with “vitriol.” “They were constantly infantilizing them and constantly talking about how they needed to be disciplined,” the person said. (A spokesperson for the Post denied this, saying that Lewis has “tremendous respect and appreciation for his colleagues.”) In exit interviews, meanwhile, staff members have attributed their departures to Lewis’s lack of a discernible plan for the paper. “The idea that the newsroom is the reason for the Post’s struggles is unfair,” one former top editor said. “The newsroom is not always its own best friend, but Will somehow convinced Jeff that it is the problem, when really there is no business strategy.” Murray acknowledged to one departing staffer, “Will has his challenges.”

Bezos has not visited the paper since before the election. The day after Trump won, he posted on X, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” A few weeks later, at the Times’ DealBook Summit, in New York, he told the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin that Trump was “calmer than he was the first time, and more confident, more settled.” Bezos was “optimistic” that Trump seemed “to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation.” Sorkin asked Bezos how he planned to fix the Post. “I have a bunch of ideas, and I’m working on that right now,” Bezos said. “So we’ll see. You know, we saved the Washington Post once. This will be the second time.”

Just before Christmas, Bezos and Sánchez dined with Trump and his wife, Melania, at Mar-a-Lago. During the meal, according to the Wall Street Journal, Melania told Bezos and Sánchez about a documentary project she was developing based on her own life. Two weeks later, Amazon licensed the film for forty million dollars, nearly three times more than the company had ever spent on a documentary. As much as twenty-eight million dollars of the licensing fee will go directly to the First Lady.

In late February—after Trump pardoned the defendants of the January 6th riot, announced tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and signed executive orders banning diversity initiatives in the federal government, denying the existence of transgender people and barring them from serving in the military, overturning birthright citizenship, and declaring a national emergency at the southern border—Bezos announced the new direction of the Opinions section. “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” Bezos wrote in a note to the staff. “I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Shipley, the section’s editor, stepped down. That evening, Bezos had dinner with Trump.

In the aftermath of Bezos’s announcement, the Post moved to shut down dissenting opinions. A column about the directive by Erik Wemple, the Post’s media critic, was reportedly killed. Ruth Marcus, a columnist who had worked at the paper for more than four decades, left after Lewis killed a piece that was critical of Bezos’s instructions. (Marcus later wrote about the experience for The New Yorker.) Eugene Robinson also quit, writing, “The announced ‘significant shift’ in our section’s mission has spurred me to decide that it’s time for my next chapter.”

When Bezos was first contemplating changes to the Post’s Opinions section, he discussed the issue with Barry Diller, the media mogul who, alongside Murdoch, helped found the Fox Broadcasting Company. “I did speak extensively with him when he was thinking of adopting a more refined, let’s call it, editorial policy,” Diller told me. The new focus, Diller said, reflected views that Bezos has long held. But there was also a risk, Diller acknowledged. Bezos’s motivations could be misconstrued as pursuing an “evenhanded relationship with a new and potentially dangerous Administration.” That, unfortunately or not for Bezos, seems to have come to pass. “I’ve gotten to know him, and I think he’s trying to do a real job,” Trump said of Bezos in March. “Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before.”

Bezos has yet to clarify what, exactly, a focus on “free markets and personal liberties” might mean for the Post’s Opinions section. He and Sánchez are both devoted readers of Bari Weiss’s Free Press, a Substack publication that espouses a broadly anti-woke ideology. Last year, the couple hosted a book party for the author Jonathan Haidt, which was attended by Kardashian, John Legend, and Tom Hanks; Weiss moderated the evening’s conversation. Matthew Continetti, a conservative columnist at the Free Press, is rumored to be in the running to become the Post’s next opinion editor. Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor of Reason, a libertarian monthly, has also been interviewed for the job. (Reason’s slogan is “Free Minds and Free Markets.”) Watford told me, “I’m really excited about being very transparent about what the opinion pages will stand for.”

In April, Bezos sent Sánchez, a licensed helicopter pilot, to space for eleven minutes on the first all-female space mission since 1963. That same month, the U.S. Space Force announced that it had awarded the largest share of its launch contracts, worth nearly six billion dollars, to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, has overseen a chaotic and unprecedented slashing of federal jobs and programs, and has also expressed skepticism about the need to send spacecraft to the moon. Blue Origin has a $3.4-billion contract to build and test a lunar lander for NASA.

The Post, despite an exodus of high-profile talent, has remained competitive during the second Trump Administration, breaking stories on DOGE and the excesses of the White House’s immigration crackdown. As a longtime Post reporter told me, “There’s just something really freaking heroic about this group that is nailing exclusives while so many editors and role models have gone.”

In May, the Post won two Pulitzer Prizes, including one for the work of the editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes. Telnaes had resigned in January, after her sketch of a group of tech and media moguls, including Bezos, prostrating themselves before Trump was rejected. (In a statement, Shipley said that the sketch was turned down because the paper had already assigned two columns about the same subject. “The only bias was against repetition,” he said.) Lewis didn’t show up to the Pulitzer announcement in the newsroom. Murray told the assembled staff that he was away on a long-planned trip.

For Bezos, being on Trump’s good side has its benefits. Back in 2017, Trump tweeted that Amazon’s arrangement with the Postal Service was “making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer.” Recently, the Post reported that a leading candidate for Postmaster General had been the head of a trade group that represents Amazon. After Trump announced a new round of steep tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, Amazon was reportedly considering a feature that would reveal how much the policy increased the prices of goods. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called the move a “hostile and political act.” Bezos and Trump soon spoke. “I asked him about it,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that,’ and he took it off immediately.” The Trump Administration now has the authority to settle the F.T.C.’s case against Amazon, which is scheduled to go to trial in October, 2026.

There has been some speculation that Bezos might sell the Post, but he recently told one interested buyer that it is not for sale. “He doesn’t really care what people think of him,” Baron, the former executive editor, told me. Last year, after deciding to block the paper’s endorsement, Bezos wrote, “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled.” Still, he added, “you are of course free to make your own determination.”

[vigilskept]

could we get all of the companions questions applicable for ylva (looks at you with my big eyes)

oh……… companion ylva……………………….. (protags as companions)

How would you recruit them?

you’d find her in the dead trenches, with the legion of the dead! some things are going to strike the warden as being off about her immediately. the legionnaires all wear their characteristic armour, but ylva’s armour is clearly mismatched. a dwarven warden in particular might also notice that when she takes off her helm, she doesn’t have any of the usual tattoos either. warrior’s tattoos yes, but not legion. you can ask about all this, but you’ll be told to mind your business. if you pass a persuasion check, you’ll find out that she fought her way to them. through the deep roads. on her own. no answers are forthcoming on why the hell she might’ve done something that insane. a dwarven warden again might know to ask whether she'd been exiled, but they won't get any answers. yet. to recruit her, you’ve got to secure the legion’s aid against the blight (easy if ur a dwarf warden, otherwise you have to pass a persuasion check). kardol will then suggest that you take ylva along with you. she won’t be pleased at the suggestion of going up to the surface, but she will agree to it after kardol tells her she will be accepted into the legion’s ranks if she returns to them.

What would their personal quest look like?

it’s a funeral……………… :’) a legion funeral anyway. you have to have her in your party when you encounter her sister in haven, harrowmont OR bhelen (depends who survived!) or gorim in denerim. whoever you meet first will tip her off with rumours about where the other two might be. the quest objectives are for her to say her farewells and “end” her life before she joins the legion. she’ll part with some really valuable gear every time she does this unless you took it off her and sold it off. she’ll lose -10 approval for each one except for the aeducan shield which will lose -50. she won’t stop you or turn hostile though. if you do complete her personal quest, she will approach you at camp to discuss her “death” — having made her peace with the end of her life, she will thank you for your support and joke that she looks forward to being “dead” like the rest of her comrades below. IF you have her approval at Friendly or Adore, she will express that she’ll miss you when you part ways. if you have her approval fully maxed (friendly or romanced) you can ask whether she'd consider joining the wardens instead. she will be surprised by this offer and ask you some questions about what it means to undergo the joining. if you answer honestly and (1) explain the ritual or (2) tell her it’s kept secret for good reason, she’ll accept that and say she needs to think on it. the next time you return to camp she’ll tell you she has decided she will take the joining :) (<- u can’t back out on the offer here!) if you tried to make something up about the ritual when she asked, she’ll just laugh at you and say she thinks it’s “cute” that you’re such a bad liar. you can’t recruit her again after this but you also don’t lose any approval.

How would their approval raise? What would make it drop?

you actually have a chance to make some pretty substantial inroads with her (or get a fuckton of rivalry) early on. +10 approval for keeping the anvil and anywhere from +1 to +5 approval each time u address the paragons respectfully & try to reason with them. -20 for siding with caridin outright and killing branka, -10 if you side with branka then convince her to destroy the anvil and anywhere from -3 to -7 for each time u address the paragons in a disrespectful way. (double the negative approval values for a warden brosca.) back at orzammar though, you'll take a -10 approval hit if you raise harrowmont to king and -7 if you choose bhelen instead. you can’t really win on this one, but if you kept the anvil it’s not going to be too dire for you. choosing pragmatic & cunning options in dialogue will generally net approval gains while wasting time to do Nice Things for strangers will lose approval. you can mitigate some of those losses if you say you're doing it to improve the wardens’ reputation though. she doesn’t necessarily want you to be a dick, she just wants to see that you’re not distracted & willing to do what it takes to deal with the darkspawn. you're also getting a crazy approval boost if you manage to secure the votes of the landsmeet, marry alistair & anora (or marry one of them yourself) and conscript loghain. (if you’ve been flirting with her but haven’t gotten her in bed she will proposition u after this) (yes, even if you’re engaged to alistair) (or in a relationship with someone else) (idk what to tell you) if you’ve made it to Warm/Care, you can also gain +1 approval and +1 in strength/constitution if you approach her to spar together for a maximum of 10.

Approval Greetings: Low/Medium/High/Romanced

Hostile:

What now?

Speak, cloudgazer. (Elf or Human Wardens)

Speak, brand. (Dwarf Commoner only)

Neutral:

Yes? (<- you get the same greeting if you’ve been flirting with her but haven’t reached Care yet. it sounds a bit like she might be amused by you approaching her)

Warm/Care:

Back for another round? (If you’ve taken her up on her offer to spar together at least once.)

… Something on your mind?

Friendly/Adore:

All well, Warden? (Elf or Human Wardens)

Hey, salroka. (Dwarf Commoner only)

Love:

It’s warmer in my tent, you know?

Hard to get a moment alone with you these days. Better not waste it.

What would their iconic lines be?

these are straight from the origin prologue but they are iconic to ME

Do they have location specific dialogue?

most of it is going to be relative defensibility of various locations. some idle curiosity about the surface, on occasion. she has a lot to say at ostagar if you take her with you. i wouldn’t advise it if your warden is going there to mourn. none of it is going to be sympathetic. not to the wardens, the king or loghain. neat little tidbits about dwarven-darkspawn warfare if ur interested in that though! she will not say anything in the orzammaran royal palace. 0 comments. she is keeping her observations to herself. she might reflect on it back at camp if you ask her, but she won’t bring it up to you herself.

What would their party banters look like?

a sample……..

Ylva: You fight well, all things considered. Alistair: All things considered? Ylva: Your posture. You stand like a child that hasn’t gotten used to his height, doesn’t know what to do with it. Alistair: I didn’t think that was such a problem for you dwarves. Ylva: Funny. Alistair: I thought so. Ylva: Take the advice or leave it, Warden. Makes no difference to me.

(tw for some unsavoury implications via double entendre in the next one. that’s not funny oghren…)

Ylva: Better. Alistair: Oh. You, uh, noticed? Ylva: The footwork could still use improvement, though. I suppose Templars weren’t too worried about you covering so much distance. Alistair: I guess not? It was more about smiting the mage till they can’t cast, then sticking a sword in them while they’re down. Oghren: (if present) Heh. Zevran: (if present) Not much for romance, you templars. Alistair: What are you— oh. That’s not… I wasn’t implying… Ylva: Makes sense. Not so easy to knock a darkspawn to the ground, though. You want to keep pushing them back, trip them up on their own feet. Alistair: Right.

[stardustandash]

Well, I'm finally playing BG3 and I have thoughts. Keeping them below the cut since I don't want to invite Discourse lol

Its.... not great. Everyone told me it would be just up my alley and I'd love it and it's just so... meh. It's not awful, but it's not interesting. I'm 20 hours in (or thereabouts) and it just hasn't gripped me at all. My metric for loving a game is wanting to read, or writing fic for it. Nothing about this game compels me to do either.

People raved about the character creator and I don't know why. You get like 6 preset faces you can't change. You have 2 options of a male or female body type. Sure, they have lots of skin, eye, and hair colours, but that doesn't make up for the fact that all the Tav's just end up being cookie cutters. If I get to make my own character in a game, I should be able to MAKE the character. Sure, a lot of RPGs only let you do the face, but at least they let you actually make the face!

The DnD system doesn't vibe for me in a videogame. Let me be clear, I play DnD. In fact, I am a dungeon master for most games I'm involved in beyond oneshots. I like DnD. It's fun! I love it! So every time I'm playing BG3 all I'm thinking about is how much I'd rather be playing actual DnD. I'm also not a fan of turn based games, and when there's 5+ enemies on the battlemap it feels like every battle is a boring slog.

As well, I know why Tav is voiceless in cutscenes, but with the amount of voicelines the other characters seem to have, I can't help but feel it brings the game down. Especially when paired with the fact that Tav is expressionless. You'd think with a preset face it would actually move, but no. I laugh out loud during scenes where the camera cuts to Tav for a reaction shot and they're just stone faced. Its hard to actually feel like I'm roleplaying when the character doesn't feel alive.

Where the game does shine is the party outside of Tav. At least they all have strong personalities, if very archetypal. DnD is a game built on archetypes, so I let that pass. They comment on every little thing, they're good at dragging out the mysteries of their backstories, and they're the only things keeping me playing the game because the main plot isn't very interesting.

... that being said I was expecting more conflict between the party members, especially after seeing lots of people saying that Veilguard's companion conflicts were so miniscule in comparison and I... didn't feel like there was any more hostility than that betwen Lucanis and Davrin. Sure, Shadowheart had a knife to Lae'zel's throat, but like one dialogue from Tav and they made up. I'm not against having a party that meshes together even while holding different ideals, but it was sold to me as a "be careful who you have in your party! They might argue and fight about stuff" kind of game. Maybe there was more before all the patches? I wouldn't know.

I have more nitpicky negative thoughts (why tf is party banter subtitles in the year 2025 above the party member's head and not just across the bottom of the screen. I lead. I can't see it half the time so I keep missing it) but since they're more nitpicky I will refrain.

I will say the armours are pretty and the fact that we can dye them is super nice. I am obsessed with Scratch and the Owlbear, and also Withers. There's fun NPCs in the world and some hysterical dialogue choices. I just don't think this game lives up to the hype.

I'm really hoping that it improves once I'm out of act 1 and into act 2. Because otherwise this is probably gonna be a dnf from me.

[yurimother]

Dark Fantasy Yuri Manga 'ROLL OVER AND DIE' Volume 4 Release in English

On Tuesday, Seven Seas Entertainment released the fourth volume of Sunao Minakata's manga adaptation of Kiki's dark fantasy Yuri series ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword! (Omae Gotoki ga Maou ni Kateru to Omou na" to Gachizei ni Yuusha Party wo Tsuihou Sareta node, Outo de Kimama ni Kurashitai) The manga is available in English digitally and in paperback.

Based on the light novel of the same name, Roll Over and Die follows Flum Apricot, a hero born with the unique affinity "Reversal" that leaves her with zero stats across the board. When she is prophesized to join the hero's party and defeat the Demon Lord, Flum thinks she will only be a burden, and, unfortunately, some members of the party agree, leaving her betrayed and sold into slavery. However, in her darkest moment, Flum meets the timid Milkit, and, desperate to protect her and save her own life, she discovers the true nature of her power.

The publisher describes the fourth manga volume:

Flum has triumphed over Dein and thwarted his hostile takeover. With Milkit safe once again and her scars healed, Flum can finally remove Milkit's bandages and reveal the face of her beloved partner. Things take an abrupt turn, however, when a child without a face of their own arrives on Flum's doorstep, and the ghost of a defeated foe is revived by the Church of Origin. Just what sinister schemes are lurking behind their pious facade?

Author Kiki began posting Roll Over and Die as a webnovel on Shousetuska ni Narou in 2018. Micro Magazine acquired the series and began releasing it as light novels under the GC Novels imprint in July 2018. The light novels include illustrations by Kinta. The fourth and most recent volume was published in Japanese in 2020 and English in 2021. While Kiki said in 2021 that a fifth volume is coming, it was never released, and the series is considered stalled.

In December 2018, Micro Magazine began serializing a manga adaptation of the series on Comic Ride. The manga is illustrated by Sunao Minakata, best known as the artist for Akuma no Riddle: Riddle Story of Devil. The fifth collected volume was released in Japan in August. Seven Seas will release it in English on April 30, 2024.

Roll Over and Die is notable for its mix of Yuri and fantasy elements. It is one of several fantasy Yuri works, including I'm in Love with the Villainess and Sexiled, that began as a web novel in the late 2010s before being acquired as a light novel and later adapted into a manga. It has received praise for its storytelling and prose but garnered some criticism for its use of the video game stats trope, violence, and gore.

Christine Dashiell translates the manga into English, with lettering by Bambi Eloriaga-Amago & Roland Amago.

You can check out the fourth manga volume of Roll Over and Die today in English digitally and in paperback: https://amzn.to/3EIM47u

Reading official releases helps support creators and publishers. YuriMother makes a small affiliate commission from sales to help fund future coverage.

[10zenn]

@lasciviouskrp hi, and thanks for getting back to me + taking the time to answer my ask. i am answering on this blog because it is my rp blog and i don't want to spam my main with this, but i am the person whom you pirvately replied to. first of all, i would like to highlight the fact that public posts and obvious attempts to gain your attention would not have been used had you acknowledged the issue at hand right away, in an honest manner. instead of doing so, you decided to turn off your ask box and keep on posting, which is your decision, but you cannot be upset that it resulted in people getting louder. when you try to ignore something this problematic, it tends to grow. like now, i have no choice but to answer this publicly since i have no means to reach out in private.

the second thing i would like to highlight, before diving in my response, is that i am not "passionate" about this topic for fun, as you have alluded to, and you honestly do not get to appreciate my "passion" for it. my parents have lived through a war, my parents know people who have been human trafficked and forced into slavery. i am a person of colour. and this isn't to throw a pity party at all, it is only to make you understand that the topics you are writing carelessly are real life issues that are happening in the world right now, and that touch people in the very community you are writing.

the third thing i would like to make clear is that you do not get to dictate how someone reacts to your collective. you do not get to create such a space and get upset when people are hostile towards you. to tell someone to lower their voice and be 'less judgemental/accusatory' when they are attempting to express why your presence in the community is harmful is not the move that you think it is. i am allowed to be upset, i am allowed to be accusatory, and no, i will not sugar coat my words and take your hand and walk you through why what you are doing is wrong. furthermore, through my many posts and messages to YOU, i have explained WHY what you are doing is wrong. you have mentioned the importance of fostering an open dialogue, and i agree! however, how can that open dialogue exist when you ignore messages calling out what you are doing, when you block people from answering you, when it takes five days and many public posts to even get a response from you? we know you are active because you are posting ads and instructions on how to join. quite frankly, if we did not answer your post and make new ones last night, you would not have responded to me.

you have mentioned work of fiction such as the handmaid's tale and i agree with you! to rectify, it isn't the theme you are writing, but how you are writing it. my question to you is: have you read and watched the works you mentioned, or did you simply google for examples to throw?

here is why your collective is harmful and not comparable: first of all, you went out of your way to make your collective as immersive as possible, which honestly, would be fine if it didn't include a whole auction system where asian people get sold. you target a specific group of people and enforce that your writers only write faceclaims that are asian, which is entirely tone deaf and disrespecful considering (1) the history of the people you are writing and (2) the current social + political state of south korea and adjacent countries that will be represented in your collective. now, why are those topics harmful in your collective as opposed as a work of fiction such as the handmaid's tale? i will answer this with a question of my own: do you think, whole-heartedly, that people who engage in these topics will not write threads of masters sleeping with their servants (therefore, noncon and r!pe)? will they not write, in detail, how they buy someone, and the sick thoughts linked to such a horrible thing? do you think that your writers will truly remain respectful? do you think that the entirety of your collective KNOWS in depth what is happening in asia concerning human trafficking, sex slavery, and all sorts of things that you are writing? because unfortunately, when you write deep, triggering topics such as this one, you need to be educated. you need to know what has transpired in the past. you cannot compare yourself to margaret atwood, who dedicated her life to writing literature that calls out what you are romanticizing. what are the odds, between me and you, that the topics you claim to be so woke about will get fetishized and romanticized by people who. . . well. . . do find these topics romantic and hot to write about? you are using margaret atwood and her work to back the existence of your rp up, however, atwood has studied in order to write this. the handmaid's tale tackles topic such as racism, sexual assault, islamophobia, anti-native racism, anti-blackness, slavery, female genital mutilation, residential schools, forced assimiliation, and the holocaust. the handmaid's tale has been written to speak up on said issues and defend them: atwood created a narrative to bring light to these topics and explain, through the work of fiction, why they are wrong. you are just writing them to write them. you are just writing them because you think they are fun topics to write about - 'interesting' storylines to be explored. your writers engage in these tropes because they think they are fun to write - atwood did not write the handmaid's tale because she enjoyed slave x master trope. (was this informative enough? i really hope i wasn't too aggressive :((((( did i protect your feelings enough while writing this?)

quite frankly, i think that you just want a space to write disgusting plots and fetishize asian people, and you are now angry that people of colour are speaking out against it. you are angry because you thought you could ignore it and you thought people would move on but we aren't moving on. collective like yours are harmful and rooted in racism - even if it isn't your intent. at the end of the day, you are encouraging people to use real life faces to write slavery with a high chance of writing non-con/r!pe, and you are angry that outsiders find it wrong.

i find it wild, honestly, that in 2024, i have to sit and explain to someone why fetishizing and writing about slavery of asian people is wrong. it is also very sad, because your response really shows that you have not taken what we have been saying to you at all. instead of focusing how people engage with you, maybe take a second to educate yourself and try to understand where we, people of colour, are coming from!

[whompthatsucker1981]

been thinking abt the gay sex cats post again. while the original point of the post is something for shits and giggles i would say to my art classmates after class, in extreme summary it still kinda stands, popular post making me wanna bash my head against the wall notwisthstanding. even if i hadn't put out a wall of text that was fueled by 1. being a few days out of the surgery table and still on various medications, 2. having read billy bat in two days and therefore having a fuck ton of thoughts about art, and 3. being immensely frustrated that people unironically used human soul of art spark of creativity etc as a talking point wrt generative art; the gist of my point is that you can't win any discussion about what gets to be art by appealing to idealist ideas of soul, creativity, or genius. it's been settled for more or less a century now. a tool is a tool, art can be made out of anything, and the medium is part of the message. end of that post.

of course the regret of anyone that has put out a popular post in whatever Discourse there is is that you can't leave a post scriptum disclaimer that yeah. of course this isn't the entirety of the subject. because everyone that has ever written a post never made a second post because the first covered everything. lol. that's why it continued in my askbox. as in, the issue with quote unquote ai art isnt philosophical or metaphysical, but of labor, and that it is as in marxist division of labor, not whatever people with small business owner brain make it out to be centered on copyright and potentially owed royalties that gets called an issue of labor. ai art is a threat as long as it is a tool in the hands of capitalists to hold working artists hostage. it's not the first tool to be used like that against laborers in art (and obviously other laborers too, but since people have bad idealist views on art it's what gets seen as more of an issue and an outrage lol) and it certainly won't be the last. tighter copyright laws wouldn't have saved any individual artist to ever upload works publically online, if anything abolishing copyright, even if just in regards to generative art would make it so the tool loses its leverage against the worker. also copyright as an argument misses the point because it's not a problem of any person uploading images missing out on royalties they could have earned with use of their images, if there's anything we were supposed to have learned from the nft shitshow is that right click saving isn't fucking stealing. art exists in The Age Of Mechanical And Digital Reproduction. what's more damning is that we take for granted that publically avaliable images and data online are able to be bought and sold from third parties to other parties for fun and profit in the first place, data privacy is more of an issue to machine learning than supposedly lax copyright law could ever be

and the things unsaid are the most frustrating; i did hammer home the point that you can't win an argument on art and meaning by appealing to creativity, soul and genius, but it was at the cost of having things unsaid, and that having a post become popular sucks ass in an unbelievable way. i also have regrets with regards to my tone but i was a bit silly from having read all of billy bat in two days, so even if i cringed afterwards i understand why. and with that is also the unsaid matter of taste. unlike the actual political arguments, i'm not mad that it got passed on, and i think it's better to say my two cents now with some hindsight. the gimmick of ai art is getting old now, people without art education are realizing that a program that can output pretty pictures doesn't mean you can get instant clout and a career out of it, especially with public opinion on the subject ranging from people cringing at it or being actively hostile. in the end artisanal artstation/instagram slop is gonna prevail over ai generated artstation/instagram slop in the content machine, especially since the idealistic views on art also include upholding the grindset. i think the only people left that are gonna keep relying on generative art are people with an insatiable fetish, people who think there aren't enough thomas kinkade paintings to use in their facebook posts, people who understand the comedic value of slop, and people with enough patience to mess with with image processing softwares as to get something satisfactory out of it, which is to say, artists.

[djsherriff-responses]

Manga spoilers, or “How Dolph’s perspective of his own memories conflict within itself”

As well as other thoughts (please please discuss this with me) Note I only read the preview pages from Google books , which while has shown the most from the manga it’s only previews and thus I am missing huge chunks of context . Also apparently there was a print issue and they’re reprinting the manga to be on shelves for Match, talk about a doomed yaoi am I right fellas?

While it’s more likely the stuff that contradicts with the show (and itself) is due to the two projects being made in different paces , as well as just general struggles writing a manga spin off of a new property, it is fun to see possible narrative purposes that can be strung from it especially for fanfic angst purposes

Particularly the fact the manga is Dolph revisiting his memories

One of the story beats of the manga that immediately stood out to me was the differences between how Dolph met Alex

In the manga it’s either day light or the very early evening seeing as how Dolph walked past groups of people and families while wondering the beach city. After Dolph fails getting pizza, he makes his way to a bar called “Spark” and finds Alex, notably surrounded by people partying and being rather jolly himself

But in the show? Drastically different flashback, different tone even

This is clearly the dead of night, and the bar called “Prism” is quiet , or at least doesn’t seem to have as much as an active rave compared to Spark. Alex is a lot more attractive relaxed here, having a smoke rather than getting frisky with some other people who notably aren’t in this flashback. While Dolph was a wreck in both anime and manga, he seemed far more on edge in the anime version.

How Alex responds is also interesting in each version. In the manga, Alex gave him a smile which made Dolph blush before passing out. But that’s not what happened in the anime. Alex just looks at him confused and a little concerned before Dolph passes over. Dolph didn’t blush, instead he remained hostile until Alex caught him and asked for his name.

So what does this mean, besides that the manga has writing issues and it probably shouldn’t be seen as “true” canon?

Even after everything Dolph has suffered and experienced, he is still looking back on his relationship with Alex through rose tinted glasses, even though they’ve cracked they’re still rose coloured.

It’s also possible Dolph may have been given some kind of false memories ,either literally through his cyborg brain or just from Alex twisting things to get into Dolph’s head to control him further (Eden may have also messed with his head but just put a pin on that)

While it is entirely possible the anime flashback is the “false” memory , if we consider how Alex planned on using Dolph until he decided to betray him , the manga version of events seems far more palatable to get Dolph to stay loyal to Alex

Think about it, an old man picking up a barely legal teenager from a club surrendered by people in daylight is a far less creepy scenario than an old man picking up a barely legal teenager at an empty club in the dead of night

So it’s probably easier to view this manga as Dolph’s “false” and true memories conflicting with one another than the true story of what happened between Dolph and Alex

A barely conscious Dolph over hearing this conversation is likely one of the few “true” memories that exists in his head. It’s worth noting as well that people who suffer from abuse can develop issues with their memory, and Dolph was a victim of Eden abusing him from early child hood , meaning he was already mentally vulnerable when he met Alex

Speaking of Dolph’s childhood trauma, he was basically (unknowingly) sold to Eden

We actually get a very brief glance of what Dolph does remember of his mother , who is obviously not a blonde sex worker who Ramon probably visited at some point but a struggling woman who was given a difficult choice due to desperation also gotta love Eden having casual eugenics in its system

Do you think Dolph’s mother is still alive? Do you think she mourns him every time she sees his face on TV? Do you think she ever tried finding him?

NOTICE THE GLITCH ON HER FACE!? “They took everything” , he probably isn’t aware of this but I’m damn sure Eden tried erasing the very memories he has of his mother

Dolph is definitely not the first the person in Eden to undergo cybernetics enhancements. I seriously doubt Sarah became a full bodied cyborg Templar after Dolph became Captain Laserhawk, but this was likely a much more specific trail the scientists were doing.

While it could’ve been for some mysterious purpose we do not know off yet, based on limited knowledge I have atm it’s likely Dolph was one the first child soldiers Eden produced. Do make note that the scientist refers to Dolph as a test subject to be used and tamed rather than a human child and that Dolph refers to himself as property , Eden was testing ways to make children into tools to be owned

How much of these memories are “true” though is unclear, considering Dolph himself gives some confusing information

At the beginning of the manga Dolph states he was 4 when he began his training, but later on says he wouldn’t leave the facility for the next 8 years.

Meaning he would’ve been 12 when he entered the outside world

That hmmm, that seems a bit weird? Right? Like, even by Eden standards I’m sure that’s a bit young to let a armed child fight terrorists, or maybe Eden really is that messed up

…..maybe Dolph really did become a traumatised Cyborg before Sarah, damn

Still I’m going to count that as weird because I highly doubt even Eden could get people to ignore a middle schooler in their police force. Also possible Dolph just sucks at maths

Another note worthy thing is Lucy

Lucy is essentially Dolph’s childhood friend who is the daughter of one of the scientists experimenting on him. Lucy was the one who kept Dolph’s spirits up and gave him hope when he had none, and pushed him to keep going in hopes of becoming a “superhero”

A pretty damn manipulative relationship when you actually think about the fact Lucy is going to become Dolph’s boss when they’re older and Dolph has no say in the matter

The thing is, I actually don’t think Lucy was ever a real person, or at least I think much of what Dolph is remembering of her is fabricated , even more so than how he is remembering Alex

Obviously once I am able to read the full manga that point is going to be harder to believe in

But Dolph having a child hood friend who is always cheering him on no matter what? She just happens to be the scientist’s daughter and thus can visit him whenever? Lucy being such a kind and caring soul that Dolph doesn’t want to leave the facility and thus her behind? The notable lack of Dolph interacting with other children being experimented on? Dolph not knowing any kids showing symptoms of being traumatised and him and those children having conflicts because of that?

Lucy seems too good to be true

Until the part Lucy tells Dolph to shoot a kid, but Google books won’t let me read past this page so no clue what happens after

Based off of what I found on Assassins Creed wiki, Lucy was basically a double agent for the assassin to infiltrate the templars , only to decided to join the Templars for real and turn her back on the Brotherhood. Kinda interesting how Dolph’s “friend” back then had strong ties to the Assassin Creed games

Anyways before I finish this post I want to go back to Alex

Two things we learn here

Alex was the first person Dolph ever slept with

Alex set things up (a fight) to it make it easier to get Dolph to get into bed with him

So obviously Dolph was not some kinky bad boy before meeting Alex (side note but I feel a bit awkward about some jokes I’ve made about Dolph’s sexuality knowing the context of the manga now) and it was even mentioned in other pages Eden didn’t even let Dolph “have” a sexuality to speak off, basically raised to take orders. confirms my theory that “Captain Laserhawk” was for branding purposes not because Dolph actually lead a team

But also something far more important to address, Alex manipulated both Dolph and the situations that they were in order to get sexual with Dolph, a barely legal teenager with little life experience and who never had any prior experiences with that sort of relationship

Even though Dolph did consent, he had no clue what Alex was doing and was being manipulated by him

While I do think this memory is true , it does make me wonder if all of Dolph’s sexual encounters with Alex was this sweet and gentle , or if Alex pushed Dolph further into activities he may not have been comfortable with?

It’s really interesting to see that Dolph did comfort Alex sometimes rather than him being the one needing calming and that Dolph wanted a fresh slate in life. The poor guy was down bad from day one and probably would’ve shoved a wedding dress on if Alex popped out a ring

Really hilarious to see Alex get angry about Eden “fucking experimenting on kids” as if he didn’t just bang a teenage virgin young enough to be his son

There’s also an irony in seeing Alex be the revenge seeking one, though idk if that’s genuine or part of an act

Conclusion: Dolph doesn’t remember how events actually happened because people literally tempered with his brain and because he has a ton of repressed memories , Marcus Holloway probably should go back to college before continuing his therapist career and Alex is a groomer

[tuesdayx]

Loser

The saying goes "boredom breed creativity", which I whole heartedly believe exemplifies the origins of this song. It started off with only drums. I wanted to play around with more trap influenced sounds so I spent a day developing the drum from start to finish to determine the layout of the song. Bass went on next to help fill it out, so I used what I had so far and laid down some demo vocals. From here, admittedly, I was stumped. So stumped that I sent what I had so far to my buddy Tanner from Artificial Dopamine (check em out) to see if he had any ideas. I never heard back from him, so the song was shelved for a brief period.

By the time I came back to it, I began playing with Indian instrumentation to fill out the rest of the track. I figured the rhythm track was lifting a noticeable drone, so I chose to throw in a tanpura drone over the whole song (played in reverse over the chorus). After picking out countermelodies on sitar and sarod I felt satisfied with the backing track.

Lyrically this song is one of many that dives into the lingering effects of childhood trauma with fear of never living up to my own expectations for myself. The first verse is a nostalgic glance at a basic look at my childhood; fending for myself as my parents neglected my siblings and I to focus on work, as well as their various vices to cope with said work. As the verse grows on, I grow more resentful and hostile to peers who tormented me and adult figures who stood by and let it happen, if not villainize me in the situation.

The second verse starts by mocking older teens for their arrogance and lack of self awareness. I used to hang out with crowds who sold drugs and partied with no tact and the safety of mail-order ARs. Most of them either ended up in prison or dead; spending most of their 20's and even early 30's being humbled by life before trying again. The rest of the verse dives into a warning to those who remind me of my younger self to be wary of their decisions and how they treat the people around them, or else risk losing them forever.

The choruses, however, contrast from the disillusionment and humility of the verses. Instead, the low voice stresses urgency and a desire to move on from a topic that's been talked about too much by this point. In the end, the conclusion reached is that I'm better off alone compared to living through a cycle of being with passive aggressive women whom I struggle to communicate with.

I think this song is neat. Hell, I'd even say it's a damn fun song. It's another that likely wears my influences on its sleeve, but I had fun making it and I certainly hope someone out there will enjoy listening to it.

Favorite lyric: "gotta save face if you want a good place in the race; like Mario Kart."

[fostersffff]

Visions of Mana: An Underbaked Anniversary Cake

Going into 2024, Visions of Mana was far and away my most anticipated game of the year. Following the Trials of Mana remake from 2020, it appeared to be everything I was hoping for: a game not inherently bound by being a warts-and-all remake of a 1995 Super Famicom game, with the same visual style as that remake, and (seemingly) budgeted scale/scope-wise in accordance with how insanely well the remake sold. From the reveal, I also got the sense it was meant to be an anniversary game, which I thought made perfect sense: make a big game that pays homage to Adventures, Secret, Trials, Legend, and whatever other Mana games they'd care to reference, and determine a new direction for the franchise!

As we got closer to the release, I got a little apprehensive. I think at some point I learned that this was not actually being made by the developers of the remake, who instead have been working on the Romancing SaGa 2 remake. Instead, this was being handled by a NetEase subsidiary, Ouka Studio, who hadn't seem to have made anything before this; not necessarily a red flag, but definitely an odd choice. Then the demo came out, and while it didn't sour me on the game, I noticed that I had a lot of the same kinds problems with it that I had with Trials of Mana back when that demo came out. Of course, I ultimately loved Trials, and even if the worst came to worst, they make this, and then if it does well, the them gets to make a sequel and iterate!

Then Ouka Studio was literally shuttered the day Visions of Mana came out, so that won't be happening either. And sales have reportedly been underwhelming.

In addition to my standard inability to focus in on anything, I felt like I was kind of pushing off playing Visions because I was worried about being disappointed. Streamers I watch whose opinions I generally line up weren't hostile, but even at best the reception seemed lukewarm. And of course, that only applies to the streamers who actually played it, because they like the Mana series as much as or even more than me. In the course of less than a single year I literally went from WE'RE SO BACK to IT'S SO OVER with regard to the Mana series. But I've now rolled the credits, and drank in as much of it as I care to experience, which is mostly everything.

Visions of Mana is a good game with good ideas that was made by a studio that either didn't have the time, money, experience, or any combination of those three things to bring all of those good idea to fruition. They hit on a lot of what I (and I imagine other people) broadly love about the Mana series, but a lot of the experience is brought down by whatever it is they were missing. And, to be blunt, it feels like they were missing a lot.

But what Visions of Mana was not missing, was a bratty disabled dragon girl with a Southwestern U.S. accent who travels with a baby version of the franchise's iconic sparkledragon, and who also gets to be the party's pugilist.

So that's a feather in the game's cap!

(Spoilers for Visions of Mana, as well as Adventures of Mana (Final Fantasy Adventure), Trials of Mana... the Mana series in general, beneath the break)

The Good:

The game looks absolutely gorgeous. HACCAN's character designs combined with some really stunning and complementary environmental design make this game just incredibly pretty, top to bottom.

One of the things I was most concerned about whether or not they'd land was the story. It's not perfect- the only thing in this game that's perfect is Careena- but I felt that it falls in line with what I consider the be The Tone of the Mana series, which is a kind of gentle melancholy (that has admittedly gotten more diluted with each new entry).

The biggest strength of the story for me, and what I was worried about right up until the end, was that they didn't undermine Hinna's death. Basically everything surrounding that was handled exactly how I would've wanted it, from the party not really absolving Val of responsibility for Hinna's death but trying to be sympathetic, to the game actually making a point of Val having to talk to Hinna's parents about the fact that she died, and most importantly, not letting her (and Eoren and Lyza) come back at the end to do a quaint little Happily Ever After (even though there is a happy ending on a longer timescale).

I actually thought the party came together pretty nicely as a group! This is something I've noticed ever since I replayed Chrono Trigger a few years ago, where after your RPG party hits a certain size incidental dialogue among characters just falls out (because it would be a lot to write), but this game has a fucking ton of unique incidental dialogue for every area in the game. It's actually kind of staggering how often your party will just banter amongst themselves.

Careena is obviously my big favorite, but really the whole party is pretty charming. Special nod to Palamena's endearing but often awkward affinity for alliteration that no one ever points out.

I like all the things that make this feel like an anniversary game! Bringing back iconic bosses like the Mantis Ant and Fullmetal Hugger, having a little plot dedicated to Vuscav, the ships being named Primm and Dyluck, and even trying (not necessarily succeeding) at tying the franchise together by having Visions's world of Qi'Diel be a result of the fracturing of Fa'Diel.

The developers knew enough to allow you to snap the game over your knee if so inclined via powerleveling. I think once I unlocked the class that allowed Careena's Class Strike to ignore a percentage of defense, I made a beeline for the high level ruins and then managed to get myself to like Level 54 while the story was still at Level 30, which trivialized every encounter from then on. I'm Love Avatar Strength.

The Bad:

The music is just... nothing. "Generic" is such a shitty way to describe the work of the composer and so many talented musicians, but I don't think there's a single song in this OST that sticks with me except maybe the Nemesis (open world mini-boss) battle theme, because it's the only one that feels like it has any energy to it. The thing I honed in on the most was the difference between the Sanctuary of Mana theme: in this game, it sounds like music you would hear in "A Jungle Area", which is kinda what it is, but it is quite literally The Most Important Place Ever, so just having the music be "A Jungle Area" is odd. Compare it with the music for the same kind of area in Trials of Mana, where the song "Decision Bell" really immediately strikes you with the fact that this is The Most Important Place Ever, with the choir and heavy ringing bells.

Complimentary to the nothing music is the fact that this game is actively harmed by having the big "open world areas" that are not "open world" in any meaningful way and are instead just very large with very little in them. For as cute as the pikuls are, they didn't really make exploring those areas more fun, and I found myself often just not using them because the animation for summoning them and dismounting took too long. I'd actually argue this game would go up a whole point if those areas were cut down while maintaining the illusion of being huge with good environmental design.

For as much as I like the story's overall tone and how the characters interact, the biggest problem with the story is the entire concept of the Alms. It's revealed once you make it to the Sanctuary of Mana that the sacrifice of the Alms is necessary to give the Goddess and the Elementals enough energy to stave of Daelophos's curse. But there's not really any implication that there's anything special about the chosen Alms in terms of how much energy their corestone provides, it's largely just the elementals going "hey I vibe with this person, let's go with them". Considering how many character stories are precipitated on "well I'm honored to be chosen for this duty, but…", and how many NPCs are like "YO IT'S SO BASED TO BE THE ALM, I HOPE I GET TO BE THE ALM!!!", you'd think it would either be A.) voluntary or B.) they'd lean into the idea that by and large people aren't comfortable with the Alms, and maybe all the people talking about how cool it is to be an Alm are lying through their teeth (like Careena's beau Shiriu seemed to be (but wasn't actually)).

The only characters who really sincerely object to the idea of the Alms sacrifice are Eoren and Passar, and while there's significantly more nuance to Eoren's bad deeds than Passar's, he's dispatched immediately once Daelophos shows up. A lot of this could've been handwaved with a few extra lines here and there about how only the corestones of specific people can actually resonate enough with the Elementals to sustain them, which is kinda sorta implied, but as it's written it's just like "it has to be this character for Story Conflict"

Last note on the Alms: it's very strange to open the game with Eoren and Lyza, and end the game with Val abolishing the need for Alms, and have the emotional centerpiece of the game be Hinna's death being brought about by not wanting to be an Alm, only for the game to either not square the circle or play dumb about how horrible it is all the previous Alms had to sacrifice themselves. Like, the game has a lot of major "Alms bad" points but doesn't really make a push for how bad it was all those years.

The Rest:

The gameplay goes here, because it's not bad, but more than anything else I feel it's best described as "underbaked". See, they honed in on the fact that something that everyone liked about Trials was all the classes, and all the different costumes (originally just recolors) characters got as they got new classes, which is clearly what led to the Elemental Plot system. All five characters have eight unique classes that have a special power tied to them, and to spice things up further, three different weapons that are divided among the classes, per character. But this is where the time/money/experience issue really rears its head: there's maybe three or four attack strings per weapon, so even though Val's sword, greatsword, and lance movesets feel totally different, none have very much depth to them. And then, even if I didn't like how the lance felt, was I just going to not use the special ability that creates a time bubble?

Also, on that note: kinda get the sense Aesh was meant to be a party member, but they couldn't whip up eight more classes and three more weapon movesets, and meaningfully differentiate the classes' abilities from the other 40 classes in the game. So he's just around sometimes!

One last nit to pick with the story: the post-credits scene is a homage to Final Fantasy Adventure/Adventures of Mana, where Fuji has to become the new Mana Tree/Goddess of Mana, and Sumo vows to be her guardian for all time. This is the dynamic between Visions's Goddess and Khoda, and so once Val dies of old age, he takes up Khoda's vigil and becomes Hinna's guardian, as she becomes the new Goddess of Mana. But... why? During the entire final boss fight I was waiting for Daelophos to destroy or otherwise critically injure the Mana Tree, like what happens Adventures and Trials, and they again could have hand waved it as "since Daelophos used Hinna's corestone, she was able to integrate herself into the Tree to help it stay alive", or something. Literally anything!

I was weirded out by the choice to have new Benevodons except for Zable Fahr. This is fine, since a lot of them as introduced in Trials were pretty whatever design-wise, (except, of course, for Zable Fahr), but my understanding was every Mana game after Trials that referenced them were consistent that those specific entities were THE Benevodons. Selaphia is a more interesting Benevodon of Light than Lightgazer the Giant Eyeball, but Tor Mane the Giant Frog seems like a weird replacement for Dolan, especially since the you once again fight the Benevodon of the Moon in an ancient castle that was populated by beastfolk.

Putting Kaiji Tang on notice for his performance as Morley, because I just could not get a sense for whether or not he was trying to do an Inigo Montoya thing. That's honestly probably more on the voice director because I know Mr. Ichiban Kasuga does good work, but Morley was the roughest voice in the game.

I feel like I wrote a lot to not say much, which is maybe appropriate for Visions (also because I didn't take notes/pictures so I'm flying by the seat of my pants). It's in the miserable "mid" range where I can't bring myself to come down on it too hard, because it doesn't do anything unforgivably wrong, but it rarely achieves any great heights. It's also difficult to recommend Visions of Mana to anyone who isn't a fan of the Mana series already, especially in a year that's been as packed with other good video games- especially with so many RPGs, and especially Action RPGs like Granblue Fantasy: Relink, which based on the bit I've played of that seems to do everything Visions of Mana wanted to do.

At least I'll always have Trials.

[kotamagic]

Lore Olympus is an unmitigated disaster this week, so let's get to it....

Oh, how we wish it was....

As we learned last time, there has been a hostile takeover of Olympus by Apollo with Ouranos's help, and Persephone seems to have gone from Goddess of Spring to Goddess of Winter. She tries to fix what she damaged, only to wear herself out in the process.

Ok, now I feel really bad. All of Persephone's friends planned a party for her, but when she and Hades come in, it's not the welcome they were expecting.

On the other hand, it IS kinda nice to see that Persephone's friends and allies are willing and eager to throw her a surprise party!

I appreciate that they are on the same thought process as to how this happened. I am open to the chance that it wasn't the deal with Erebos, but I honestly don't see it as likely.

Hecate isn't entirely sold that it was the Erebos deal that turned Persephone into Di*ney's Elsa, but she is willing to help Persephone ask Erebos herself on the matter.

....And then this asshole has the fucking audacity to call...

Even though this [expletives not fit for sailors] has taken over, I don't think he has everything he needs to keep it. He very well might still need a fertility goddess's powers to actively STAY in power.

Just because Zeus is down, it doesn't mean he is out. Even with Ouranos backing him, Apollo doesn't have the pull or authority that he thinks he does so long as Zeus lives. Hades sure as shit isn't bringing his wife to her r*pist, nor is Persephone going to go willingly. I suspect blackmail and hostages will be involved, and it will NOT be pretty.

Or, I speculate, Persephone may be forced by other means. Is Ouranos capable of pulling her from the Underworld? In the shots of furious!Hades on the phone with [purple asshole], Persephone seems to be fading in and out where she stands beside Hades. Is it just Hades' robes due to being so pissed off? Or is Persephone being teleported slowly?

As for this fucking meeting, I can only assume he plans to merc any dissenting deities at the table. He's already got 2 in his mother's dungeon, so what's a few more?

And Persephone's wrathfully red eyes have materialized once again!

Part of me is like "Yeah, girl! Mess this motherfucker up!"....

....

.....but,

...on the other hand, that might be a bad idea. It might even be what Apollo needs and is counting on to try getting a hold of her powers.

There are so many variables right now that we're not entirely sure how this is going to play out. Let's also not forget that with Achilles in existence now, the Trojan War is pretty much right around the corner. How will THAT play into all of this as well?

Anyway, thanks for coming to my LO post!