#Thing or not cause the fee friends i have i don't want romance but that doesnt make it impossible

[im-traumatised]

Is it wrong to consider trying to date if your pretty sure your aromantic / on the aro spectrum?

[satureja13]

In the evening, after Kiyoshi and Jack finished purifying the Sanctum, Vlad and Jack cared for the animals, Jeb and Kiyoshi cooked... (well, Jeb cooked - and worried about Kiyoshi. He seems to drift away again after Ms Coombes had prohibited any contact between Kiyoshi and Jack. Kiyoshi and Jeb's familiars, Al'ar and Errol, are up to all kind of nonsense, despite the subdued mood. They are letting the cookbook float out of reach (not that Jeb needed it) and swipe the tastiest bits of the ingredients ^^')

... the Boys, Noxee and Barfolomew met outside the Screaming Mandrake for dinner. It hadn't rained all day and they have such a nice evening after all that stress ö.Ö'

Noxee told Saiwa she's going to wake Ji Ho tonight and - if it all goes well, he's supposed to join them for classes tomorrow morning! Noxee: "He'll still be sore, so I suggest to distract him, keep him busy. And try to not adress his feelings or stuff that could upset him. For a while, at least. And when he cries, just let him. It's a lot he has to deal with."

Noxee handed Sai a potion for Ji Ho, to dull his feelings, should it get too overwhelming for him and told them to continue with their yoga/meditation and tantra practise. Saiwa was near to tears: "Oh Noxee - thank you. I shouldn't have delayed seeking help for so long. It's all my fault." Noxee: "Don't be so hard to yourself. Nothing bad happened. The Therapy Game was a success for all of you and Ji Ho will be fine - even more than fine! He has his feelings back! The good ones too. The love!"

They spent the rest of the evening apart from each other. Neither Jack nor Kiyoshi had eaten... Kiyoshi was doing so well yesterday. No matter what Ms Coombes said - Jeb is still sure that Jack does help Kiyoshi to get rooted in their realm and that his quirky demeanor somehow ignites enough interest/attraction in Kiyoshi to drag him out of his demonic/divine spheres - to the here and now. He'll have to talk to the others about this and they need to find a solution. Kiyoshi is of no help for anyone in a state like this. And Jeb is also sure that Kiyoshi isn't happy. And that's what counts for Jeb.

Jack, Saiwa and Vlad went to the Common Room again. Like in the Otherworld, they have no internet here beyond the Veil. Even worse - no electricity either... Jack fell asleep as soon as he touched the sofa and Vlad was playing absent minded the organ. Means: no one there to play games with Sai. He started to read since there was nothing else to do for him. I've never seen Sai read any books, he's always too busy with his fashion and computer stuff. But the Common Room has a great collection of gay romance books. Saiwa is still a virgin and he was hooked immediately ^^'

(TMI: I have kindle unlimited and I've also been surprised how many great gay romance books of all genres are out there. If you like the gay romance aspect of our story, you might want to take a look. The good thing about kindle unlimited is, if you don't like a book, you can give it back and try the next one, since you pay a monthly fee and not for every single book.)

It was hard to concentrate on the book, though. Saiwa's head was still spinning around Jack and Ji Ho - and Skully was happily (and out of tune) singing along with whatever song Vlad was playing...

And in the top of the tower, Ji Ho eventually woke up. Noxee: "Hey - how are you?" Ji Ho: "Huh - surprisingly fine? I expected worse. How long have I been out?" Noxee: "Four days. It will still be hard for a while. Just let it happen, hm? It comes and it will go again. You are going to get used to feel through all these emotions and memories of yours. And you will learn to cope with them - like the others did too. But you are the most sensitive, so don't try to push it. Cry when you need to cry. Your friends will understand and help you where they can."

Ji Ho: "My friends ... Vlad. Gods, I caused him so much pain! What if my grandfather really put a spell on us? I'm so afraid to loose him. Now that I can finally feel it." Then he cried and cried... And Noxee let him cry. (TMI: Have I ever told you that a friend of mine went to therapy and she barely talked with her therapist, she just sat there and cried. For many, many sessions. But she said she felt so much better afterwards. And that's what counts in the end. Don't worry what the therapist might think of you. They won't. It's their job - and they learned how to do it.)

It wasn't that Ji Ho didn't feel anything in all those years. Like Noxee said, he's the most sensitive of them all. But it had all been dulled down. And it was more a sensing than a feeling. Just scratching the surface. And he was never able to feel love - except when the Bond let him love Luci, the remnants of Vlad he left behind after he died.

They heard Vlad playing from below:

'Some day, yeah We'll put it together and we'll get it undone Some day When your head is much lighter Some day, yeah We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun Some day When the world is much brighter

Ooh child Things are gonna be easier Ooh child Things'll be brighter'

The 5 Stairsteps - O-o-h Child from the Guardians of the Galaxy OST (This movie is already 10 years old? Omg! One of my favourite movies of all time, nonetheless :3 )

Outtakes

These familiars cause problems. Kiyoshi and Jeb got stuck so often today -.- Not even resetting helped *sigh*

From the Beginning 🔱 Underwater Love 🔱 Latest

Current Chapter: 'Here comes the Sun' from the beginning ▶️ here Last Chapter: 'Who killed Jack?' from the beginning ▶️ here

📚 Previous Chapters: Chapters: 1-6 ~ 7-12 ~ 13-16 ~ 17-22 ~ 23-28

[mermaidsirennikita]

ARC Review: The Counterfeit Scoundrel by Lorraine Heath

4/5. Releases 2/21/2023.

For when you're vibing with... Cat and mouse, historical romance with a feminist streak, heroes who deeply appreciate women, and a bit of food... play?

Here's where we get a fake rake. But like, it's all for a good cause. David Blackwood, AKA Bishop (because the guys in this series call themselves THE CHESSMEN, which I find DELIGHTFUL) is called upon by women of high society--not for real affairs, but for fake ones. A woman simply has to be seen giving him some well-timed visits, and his reputation (and ability to seem like the rogue) will do the rest. Accused of adultery by their husbands--with Bishop named in the divorce cases--these women are able to end their marriages as they like. He doesn't ask why, he doesn't charge a fee, he just does it because it's fucking hard to get a divorce in the Victorian era, and Bishop LIVES on Respect Women Juice. Also, tragic past. Naturally.

One of the supposed cucks has actually taken the initiative to hire a detective--and who is it, but Daisy, Bishop's apparent new maid. Bishop knows something is up with Daisy right off the bat, but he is somewhat distracted by how much he wants to fuck her (a strange thing for a man who is so in control, you know the type). And Daisy, while a very good detective, is somewhat distracted by how much she wants to fuck Bishop. So, a cat and mouse between two people who really wanna bone ensues, and don't we love that? We do.

Something about this book was really cozy and comforting to me, and I have no idea why. But that bodes well for a February release, and I'm glad I waited for it to cool down before I read it. Honestly, the comfort may just be in the fact that I love Lorraine Heath's writing, and her prose is so lovely, and it's just like... nice to read something by someone who clearly knows exactly what she's doing every step of the way. There was even a point where I kind of worried that Lorraine was going to do something that would come off as bad, but then nope, she addressed that shit.

I don't know if this is my favorite book of hers, but it's very good, and it's just a well done romance novel about two people who have their flaws but are fundamentally decent. And as someone who often likes to read about the trash-est of trash men, that can be a bit of challenge. But somehow, she just sells it. Lorraine can take fundamentally good people and put them in a situation where no one is really a true bad guy, and sell how much it sucks that circumstances are like this without making them come off as victims. That's talent.

Standout Points:

--Bishop really is a very feminist hero without the concept of "feminist hero" beating anyone over the head. He just likes women, wants to protect them, and has some good, old-fashioned mommy issues in the back of his head. He just seems like a really chill guy who can fuck hard, without necessarily losing his edge or his ability to do a Dumb Thing due to trauma.

--Daisy's journey with her family was really lovely. I think you'll see one plot point coming pretty much as soon as it's introduced, but that really isn't like... why it's there.

--Lorraine Heath keeps highlighting independence and why marriage isn't something you should need but something you should want, and she also keeps giving late in life love stories their due. I love it.

--The grovel in this book (there is a grovel) isn't dramatic, per se, but it was very emotionally authentic to Bishop and Daisy and their story, and I loved that.

--There's a subplot for one of Bishop's lady friends that I loved.

--Daisy being a lady detective was super fun, but wasn't overdone, when it so often is in lady detective books.

--We love the seeds being planted with chocolate and the harvest being collected in turn.

The Sex Stuff:

Lorraine Heath books are never the most explicit--but she builds the sexual tension so well, and writes the sex scenes so beautifully that it's always great. And they're still hot, and in some ways have been getting hotter. This one, I would say, scales back from The Return of the Duke (which was probably the most explicit Heath book I've read). There's sex, it's good, the heroine is a virgin and understandably isn't doing acrobatic moves, and I think this book has one of the most refined and classy and romantic descriptions of cunnilingus I've ever read. Also, there is some fun usage of melted chocolate.

This is just a really solid Lorraine Heath, and I had fun with it. I love seeing old characters show up (King and Penelope, James Swindler: detective of dubious renown, among others), and I love getting hints at the next Chessmen stories. I am so excited to start a new series by Lorraine, and I can't wait for the next book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Avon for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[invalidtumbls]

I Love “Rumbling Hearts”. Don't watch it.

Copying this over from a thread on Mastodon, for the sake of a first post.

Well, I said I was going to post more original content here on Mastodon than on the other site.

And despite the fact that I see a lot more of my iOS/Mac dev friends here than Anitwitter refugees, I'm going to kick off a thread about #anime, because my favorite show just became available on Crunchyroll, as part of the Funimation merger: https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G6ZXM399R/rumbling-hearts

Rumbling Hearts, or Kimi ga Nozomu Eien ("The Eternity You Desire") is a 2003 14-episode series based on a 2001 visual novel, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure style of video game that's heavy on reading and light on interaction. The anime is rated mature for adult situations and nudity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbling_Hearts

I'm not going to recommend you watch Rumbling Hearts, because I believe it is an uncommonly difficult sell in 2022. But the fact that it's so much of its time might be why I like it, why I go back to it, and why you won't find anything remotely like it today.

For starters, Rumbling Hearts is a romantic drama aimed at adult male viewers. We really don't have anything comparable in the west today.

I think we used to! I mean, Casablanca is one of Hollywood's most beloved romantic dramas, and that's told from Rick's point of view, not Ilsa's. But romance has been denigrated in the west, marginalized as being for women only, and saddled with insulting slurs like "chick flicks".

Anime has a thriving genre of male-skewing romance, often built around the concept of "moé", ("mo-EH"), a feeing of wanting to cherish and protect someone.

Some of the most popular of these come from a company called Key, known for tear-jerkers like Clannad and Angel Beats.

The thing is, in Key's stories, the romantic interests are tragic characters who usually suffer through no fault of their own. In Clannad, for example, Nagisa has a chronic disease, Kotori's parents died in a plane crash, Fuuko is a girl in a coma in the next town over and doesn't actually exist, etc.

What makes Rumbling Hearts different is that the characters aren't innocent. They are all deeply flawed, and largely the cause of their own suffering.

Takayuki, our protagonist, is friendly, cheerful, and just wants to get along. This, unfortunately, is his problem: that's all he wants. He is evasive, quick to tell little white lies, and unwilling or unable to make the right decision when he needs to.

Haruka has had a crush on Takayuki for years, but hasn't been able to act on it. She is innocent to a fault: timid, shy, sometimes even mousy.

Mitsuki is Haruka's best friend, and a gal-pal to Takayuki. She sets the two of them up, and then later decides she might have actually wanted Takayuki for herself. She can be manipulative, and after the three-year time-skip, her adult version develops some truly dangerous habits, like using sex to get what she wants, and going blackout drunk to avoid her problems.

Akane is Haruka's younger sister. In her youth, she aspired to be a swimming champ like Mitsuki. Post-time-skip, she fiercely defends her sister. She's everything that Takayuki and Haruka aren't: bold and pushy, though she has a tendency to take things way too far.

So, there I think is the problem. In 2022, western audiences generally don't want flawed characters. We want protagonists who are likable. More than that, I think there's a mindset that if we're going to imprint on a character, they have to be perfect, because that reflects better on us. We can't relate to fuckups, because that would mean that we're fuckups. There's an empty narcissism to modern media consumption and I really hate it.

When I was young and learning writing, all the guides said that characters have to be flawed to be believable and relatable. Whatever happened to that?

I'll tell you my pet theory: JK Rowling ruined an entire generation of readers and viewers. When the Sorting Hat literally tells you who's good, bad, and indifferent, there is zero room left for nuance or depth. Harry Potter is the good guy, I like Harry Potter, therefore I am a good guy. Thanks, I hate it.

So that leaves Rumbling Hearts to thread this incredibly hazardous needle: to give you these characters who screw up and hurt themselves and hurt those around them, and then asks you to root for them anyways, to want them be able to overcome themselves and their own bad habits.

As you probably guessed, this goes over like a lead balloon with a lot of people. You'll find a lot more YouTube videos trashing Rumbling Hearts than praising it. https://youtu.be/wr0BuAUbDqw?t=1048

So, yeah, I can't recommend Rumbling Hearts, because I doubt most people are going to relate to it. The ideas behind it are fundamentally unpalatable to most modern audiences.

And the fact it was made with early digital animation techniques to save money, with the expectation it would be viewed on a fuzzy CRT and not a 60" 4K LCD, doesn't help either.

But… well… I wouldn't have written such a long and unwelcome thread if I didn't think there was something truly special and valuable here. I come back to it every few years and discover something new, either in the show or in myself.

So, don't watch Rumbling Hearts, but hopefully you'll understand why it lands like it does for me.

[quelsentiment]

3, 15, 17, 18 for the weird writing asks!!

Thanks Fee!

3. What is your writing ritual and why is it cursed?

Okay, so I used to write on Google Docs for the longest time and then a few months I told myself that maybe it wasn't the best privacy-wise. So I've switched to using Open Office, which I think helps me focus better because having it on a separate window away from my web browser reduces the temptation to stop mid-sentence to check another tab, you know? But at the same time, this feels VERY cursed because my version doesn't have any kind of spelling check, plus my WIPs are now saved on my internal drive, and since I don't make backups of them that often, I live in fear or my laptop dying on me and making me lose weeks of progress

Oh also, there's basically no word count lololol

Am I gonna do anything about any of this though? No, we're raw-dogging life over here 😎

15. Do you write in the margins of your books? Dog-ear your pages? Read in the bath? Why or why not? Do you judge people who do these things? Can we still be friends?

I already answered this earlier but the short answer is I currently don't, but I don't judge people who do (unless it's a library book or something)

17. Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

I guess I'll talk about my fic for the Zouis Fest (although it might not even be part of it in the end, because I keep writing for the Dream Team fandom instead rip)

Anyway, I'm still not sure exactly what I'm doing with it. Like the main idea is that it's a Zayn-POV, canon-compliant(ish), present day fic where they run into each other in Hong Kong and are kinda forced to acknowledge what happened all those years ago, and figure out how to move forward. So like, lots of angst and feelings of betrayal and conflict and serious conversations because that's basically all I know how to (and all I want to) write lol

At the moment I'm not sure whether to keep it focused on their friendship or introduce some kind of romance aspect to it (toying with the idea that they had some kind FWB situation going while they were in the band). But since it's canon-compliant I'd feel kinda iffy doing that. I've never actually written canon-compliant before, and I have to admit that it scares me a bit, also because I've been extremely removed from the 1d fandom lately

Anyway one thing I'm sure about is that I want a scene to be inspired by the following verse from Blur's My Terracotta Heart:

And when we fly tomorrow over the Java seas And my younger maps will be there with me 'Cause they remind me of swimming out too far one day Then the coral was gone, but I didn't care anyway

Something about Zayn going too far to swim and Louis watching him almost drown but not realizing what's happening, as a metaphor for what went wrong between them

Yeah, that's pretty much all I can share at the moment. I should really get back to it

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end.

Zayn Malik is, without a doubt, the most beautiful person Louis has ever had the privilege to lay his eyes on. To the point that if he were to explain aesthetic attraction to someone, he’d probably say something like: “The feeling I get when I look at that gorgeous guy in my English 586 class.”

That's the opening line from Situations Like These, my aro/ace Zouis fic from the first Zouis fest.

It's one of those stories that really started out with just a scene rather than an idea/concept, which I think is the case for a lot of my fics actually. I mean, I did have a prompt for this fic, which was something like "they're both ace but don't tell the other for fear of driving him away", so it was pretty vague in terms of setting and everything else, really.

I remember coming up with that opening scene and the bits of dialogues at my grandparents' place right before getting on the road back home with my parents, and since I'd rather die than write in front of them, I just had to make sure to commit everything to my memory by repeating it all in my head throughout the day, until we were finally home and I could write it down. But that's something I do a lot, I think, just come up with stuff (typically dialogue) at inconvenient times and praying that I remember it by the time I can write it down 😬 And then of course when you actually settle in front of your computer, you feel like all your inspiration is gone

Anyway, I think this might be one of my favourite opening scenes I've written, I feel like it's pretty fun while setting the tone and dynamics for the whole fic

writing asks