#also my inability to remember names is really bad!

[pharawee]

I won't leave you. You're not alone, Name. You have me [...].

» BONUS:

Mom. I feel sorry for Name.

[dollgxtz]

Ok a fic where reader and sylus are at a business meeting, she “offers” herself as payment (maybe as a joke or just to rile sylus idk) and he makes sure to remind her who she belongs to? Please???

Kindred Spirits

Word Count: 5.1k

Tags: sylus x fem!reader, possessiveness, ownership, spanking, hitting, slight blood mention, pet names like kitten & sweetie, creampie, rough sex, crying, slight fluff at the end :3

AN: Anon ur a literal genius. This has Sylus written all over it. Im so happy to be back posting another story for you all! Also happy to announce my masterlist is now complete and can be found in my pinned! Ty all! Enjoy and remember, my asks are open for any character, Sylus is just my husband LOL. Remember to read my pinned before requesting please! This is a bit tamer than my other stories but trust I am cooking up some deviant content as soon as I publish this one :33

“Finally…”

You nearly collapse near your front door. A whole week of your life. Gone. To what you ask? Dealing with wanderers on a special aid mission. Sure sure, the job paid well but it had been weeks since your last off day. Every time it seemed like one was around the corner here they go with some emergency call and a spill about how some rich politician needed help or something.

You were starting to get tired of cleaning up other people’s mistakes.

You fumbled with your keys, fingers numb from the biting cold. The wind whipped around you, making you shiver as you tried to fit the right key into the lock. Your breath came out in visible puffs, and you could feel the frustration building with each failed attempt. Finally, with a relieved sigh, you heard the click of the lock turning.

The still warm air is such a welcoming contrast to the wind and biting cold outside. You quickly shut your door and melt to the floor, your feet aching with relief as the pressure you had been putting on them subsided. Peace at last. Time for a hot shower an-

Your peace was cut short with the distinct tone of your phone ringing. And not just any ring tone. The one you had set specifically for a certain white haired man that only ever brought trouble. Wondering if you should even pick up, you bring the phone to your face, knowing that you were going to answer regardless.

“Sylus…I’m really tired. Can we talk lat-"

“Long time no see kitten. You should stop by for a bit, hm?”

You roll your eyes, suppressing the urge to scoff out loud. Arrogant prick, you think, irritated by his inability to let you finish a sentence without interrupting. How did he even know you were home now?

You sigh deeply, feeling the tension building, and rub your temples to alleviate the mounting frustration. No, you tell yourself firmly. You wouldn’t put up with this today. Maybe another day, but definitely not today.

"Actually, no. I just returned from a week-long aid mission. Not today," you say firmly, aiming to be clear and resolute in your decision to stay put. Sylus however, seems to sense the cracks in your resolve and only responds with a chuckle.

“I want to see you. I’ll have Luke and Kieran come get you since you’re so tired”.

“Hu-”

“See you soon. They’re en route. Ciao”

The phone clicks, signaling the end of the call. For whatever reason, your ever growing frustration simply dissipates, defeat taking its place. You should be used to this by now. Sylus always gets what he wants. And you always let him. It goes without saying that it’s the same way for you as well. At least, Sylus always gives you what you want if it doesn’t interfere with his need to lay his eyes on you at least once in awhile. He knew that you wouldn’t push this though. You both knew.

Deep down, you wanted to see him too.

You asked Luke and Kieran to wait outside for a bit while you took a brisk shower and freshened up. Those two had always been very patient and understanding. You felt bad “bossing” them around, and yet they always insisted that you could. Though Luke had admitted on one occasion that he never expected to be helping a girl find hair ties or carrying shopping bags while working for Onychinus.

The statement had made you laugh a bit. You finally finish dressing in some plain sweats and rush to the car. Luke and Kieran are waiting outside of a dark colored jeep. Not too flashy as to not draw attention, but it was still clearly very expensive.

“Actually miss, Boss wanted you to wear these” Luke says, holding out an expensive looking dress. Clearly designed by hand and tailored to your measurements. Kieran follows his lead, holding out a box containing a pair of earrings and a lavish looking necklace.

“Huh? What’s this for? A date?”

“Business. That’s all he said” Kieran chimed in. Although you couldn’t see their faces, you knew they had no reason to lie to you about this.

“Ah. Dragging me into more trouble. Got it”.

When the three of you finally arrived to the location, the sun had already set for the day. You darted your eyes back and forth, squinting above at the bright neon sign of the establishment.

“We’re not going to the N109 Zone? This is a nightclub…” you mutter, taken aback by the unfamiliar surroundings. When did this even get here? There were plenty of clubs in Linkon of course, but you never seemed to notice this one. Not that you knew much about the night life to begin with. People were lined up at the entrance, chatting, fixing makeup, or texting.

“Boss wants you here. He’s waiting inside. Enjoy your time miss” Luke said, amusement written all over his tone. He gets out of the passenger seat to open the door and lend you a hand. You rolled your eyes, not wanting to appear shaken up by the situation. Sylus was always full of surprises. This was no different, act confident.

At least, that’s what you tried to tell yourself. After getting almost immediate entrance into the club with just a simple nod from the guard, you enter. As you walk inside the club, Luke and Kieran not far behind you, you can tell this was no ordinary night club. Everyone here was dressed lavishly and sharp, clearly possessing power and ulterior motives. A few eyes lay on you as you walk in, and you feel your hands start to sweat.

Keep cool. This isn’t the first time you’ve been around high ranking individuals. This is probably some test he set up…right? Or some kind of joke to get a laugh?

Clenching your fists, your eyes dart and search for a tall figure with white hair, feeling more nervous by the second that you don’t see him. You’re about to turn around and ask one of the twins, but at last your gaze settles on him, sipping on a glass of Gin Fizz. He’s sitting in a velvety booth by himself, people watching. He’s wearing his black button up with red streaks across it, coat hanging on his shoulders per usual. As if he felt you staring, his eyes shift to meet yours. He sets down his glass, giving you you a small smirk. His eyes narrow, sending a very clear message.

Come here.

As if you were suddenly possessed, your feet seem to start moving on their own. You weren’t sure if you were relieved to see him or if it was just the relief of seeing a familiar face in an unfamiliar place. You take a few deep breaths as you approach, readying your witful replies to any of his attempts to make fun of you. Without making any sound or looking at him, you quietly slide in next to him.

“You look nice. Seems I was right about this look on you” Sylus says, taking another sip of his drink. His eyes wander up and down behind the glass, seemingly devouring you. You squirm under his gaze.

“Hm. Thanks. This gift is the least you can do after dragging me to do whatever you want on a whim once again” you scoff, eyeing the full glass that sits on the table. It’s another glass of Gin Fizz, probably for Sylus. There’s three other very empty glasses on the table.

This man can definitely hold his alcohol.

He chuckles, taking a finger and pushing the glass of Gin closer to you.

“Don’t be like that sweetie. Loosen up a bit, you’ll need it”

“For what exactly? Business?” you mock, picking up the Gin. You didn’t exactly like the taste of this particular alcohol of choice but Sylus was right about one thing. Some liquid courage was definitely needed for whatever shenanigans he was dragging you into tonight.

“Yeah. Figured I could use Linkon’s darling Miss Hunter as backup” Sylus chuckles, watching you nearly choke as you take three big gulps of the drink. You squeeze your eyes in disgust as you finish the rest of the glass, shooting a death glare in his direction as you set it down.

“You’re perfectly capable. Don’t mock me Sylus”. You grit your teeth in irritation, almost ready to rip him to shreds with your words. Clearly your tone has no effect on him though, as all you get in return is a soft smile. Sylus places a hand on your upper leg, slowing sliding his fingers under your dress. You gasp, the coldness of his fingers making you twitch a bit. The warmness of your skin mixed with his cold touch makes the sensation feel like icy fire.

“Or what? You’ll use this on me?” he smirks, tugging on the concealed gun strapped under your dress. “I’m all for it honestly”

You slap his hand away, the woozy feeling from the Gin Fizz starting to kick in. What was in this drink? It was strong. Too strong.

“Pervert. Always touching me, making fun of me. Maybe I will shoot you. Again.” you growl, turning your head away from him. You attempt to scoot away as well, but are met with a strong grip around your waist as you’re pulled into closer proximity with him. Sylus grabs your chin and lifts it towards his face. He leans down a bit, the smell of alcohol and his bourbon vanilla cologne making you feel even more dizzy.

“You can put your claws away now kitten. Don’t make me have to melt your little tantrum away” he coos, gently caressing your face with his thumb.

You stare at him, dumbfounded, desperately searching your sluggish brain for a comeback but finding yourself too flustered to form any words. The look in Sylus’s eyes shifts from a smug expression to a much softer, almost tender gaze, and you wonder what his next move will be. Your face starts to burn as you feel heat rising in your core, your heart pounding in your chest. Panic sets in as you consider the possibilities, your mind racing with the fear of what might come next.

Don’t tell me he’s going to…?!

"You're so...confusing" you mutter.

You’re just about to try and squirm from his grip, when Luke and Kieran tap on the table, catching yalls attention.

“Boss man, Val says he’s ready for ya” Luke says, nonchalantly ignoring the scene that’s displayed in front of him. Sylus releases your face, his face going serious again. He gets up, reaching out a hand to help you out of the booth.

“Time for business, sweetie”

You’re guided by the twins and Sylus past the sweaty bodies on the dance floor to a somewhat hidden room located downstairs. The area the stairs led to was blocked off by a singular rope, clearly only meant for a select crowd.

In the room there’s a long black table, cards and chips all over it. There’s a few prominent figures already seated, along with a few bodyguards standing near the door. Sylus pulls a seat out for you, before taking his own. You study the figure that’s sitting at the head of the table as you sit. He’s short, a bit chubby, dark hair, smoking a cigar. A scar sits angrily on his forehead and you wonder what kinda grudges led to such an injury. He notices you looking at him, and gives you a devilish grin. Some of his teeth are crooked or missing.

All that money and he can't fix his smile?

You shudder. Sylus looks over at you, and back to the man at the head of the table. He’s reading you, clearly sensing your nervousness. He says nothing, simply reaching a hand over to rest on your thigh.

“Was starting to think you were going to keep me waiting Sylus. Seems you didn’t run after all” he laughs, wheezing a bit as he takes another puff of his cigar. You wrinkle your nose a bit as the potent smell hits your senses.

“I couldn’t turn down a game of cards with my dear old friend” Sylus says, irritation coating the last word. “Let’s keep things civil this time, hm Valentino?”

Valentino bursts into laughter, clearly amused. Despite his laughter, you couldn’t ignore the murderous tension in the air. Something tells you this isn’t any regular game of cards. You gulp, trying to force yourself to look at everyone at the table and smile.

“Well hello little lady. Sylus, you didn’t tell me you kept such gorgeous company…” Val says, his eyes snaking all over your body. You feel Sylus squeeze your thigh, clearly irritated. He pulls out a coin from his coat pocket, seemingly trying to channel his frustrations into something else.

“You know I’m not really the type to share, Val. She’s all mine. Down to every single strand of hair”. Sylus ends, catching the coin and shooting a glare in the man’s direction. It was plain, but conveyed a message very well.

You feel your palms start to sweat. Was he being serious right now?? You side eye him, trying to piece out whether or not this was some kind of facade you’re supposed to play into. Valentino clearly takes Sylus’s words as a challenge.

“I’ll give you twenty million for her. Maybe fifty million if you make her give us a little strip show. What do ya say? She looks so soft. Probably makes cute noises too…~” he chuckles, likely enjoying the look of surprise that washes across your face.

Sylus remains quiet, his face unmoving, frozen in a pissed glare. You don’t know if it was the alcohol you drank earlier, or if it was some inkling of an attempt to dissipate the tension, but you clear your throat and begin to speak.

“Well Sylus? You can share can’t you? It’s quite the generous offer Mr. Valentino. I’m quite flattered actually.” you express, putting on your best smug look. Sylus stiffens, a somewhat shocked expression washing over him. Valentino erupts into yet another fit of laughter, seemingly unable to contain himself. Turning to look back at Sylus, you see it in his face briefly. An uncaged look of rage before it quickly dissipates.

Shit. Shouldn’t have said that.

Far too late to stop now though.

“You heard the lady Sylus. Why don’t you try sharing just this once? What I would give to taste that sweet little body of he-”

Sylus slams a revolver on the table, then calmly starts picking up cards from the deck.

"I'd suggest you stop talking and start playing the game, Mr. Valentino," Sylus snarls, his words dripping with venom. The fury in his voice is palpable, and it's clear he's reached the end of his patience.

You give Val a sly look, feigning pity. “Ah, sorry Valentino. Seems this one can’t quite let me go yet”. You don’t know what you were trying to achieve, but it’s certainly not working to dissipate any tension. Val doesn’t respond to you though, all his focus on Sylus now.

“My dear friend. You should know me by now. There’s something I’m much more interested in now than some money. Now I want the girl, or nothing”.

Valentino wears a shit eating grin on his face, soaking in the fact that he thinks he’s gained some control of the situation, unaffected by the gun on the table. Sylus simply sighs, rubbing his fingers against the temple of his forehead.

“I see where this is going then”.

You barely process what’s happening before everything and everyone starts moving. As soon as Sylus begins to stand, Valentinos guards start shooting. Sylus wastes no time flipping the large table, sending the cards and game chips flying everywhere. You yelp as he yanks you towards him using his body and the table to shield the oncoming attack of bullets. You hear Luke and Kieran joining in the frenzy, yelling obscenities as they begin shooting their own hidden weapons.

You swiftly reach for the weapon concealed beneath your dress, your fingers brushing against the cool metal as you draw it out. Turning to face Sylus, you ready yourself for his instructions, your body tense with anticipation. Instead of giving you orders, he locks eyes with you, his gaze piercing through you with an intensity that feels like it's reaching into your very soul. The silence is heavy, charged with unspoken tension as bullets whip past the both of you, and you can feel your heartbeat quicken in response.

“I need you alive for what’s coming sweetie. Pay attention, stay close”

You blink. Twice. Unable to process his words before he yanks you both up, one hand using his evol to send the table crashing into several bodyguards. The four of you fight your way through the onslaught of people coming into the door, before eventually dashing up the stairs. People are running in all directions, seemingly caught up in the chaos of everything. You all manage to make it out the door and into the brisk cold air, the twins quickly hopping into the car to whisk you away.

“Go on, I’ll catch up soon” Sylus states, hurriedly pushing you into the car and slamming the door before you could protest. He signals Kieran to drive off, and that he does.

“He’s…going to level the building. Isn’t he?” you sigh, sighing at the fact that Sylus seemed to conveniently forget that this was in fact not the lawless land of the N109 Zone. No doubt the Hunter’s Association would have to investigate for potential wanderer activity, and that would be a lot of paperwork.

"It's fine. He owned that place anyway. He'll just build another," Luke says, his voice calm and unbothered. Just as the words leave his mouth, a deafening boom erupts behind the car, shaking the ground beneath yall. The explosion's shockwave rattles the windows, and the sky lights up with a fiery glow, cutting off Luke's next sentence mid-breath.

You groan.

The twins did drive you to the N109 this time, swiftly helping you out the car and into Sylus’s private villa. When you entered the front door, a nightgown and lacy underwear were laid neatly out for you in his room, your arrival clearly anticipated.

It wasn’t more than an hour before Sylus waltzed in the front door, eyeing your slouching figure on the couch. You sit up as soon as you see him, still somewhat annoyed.

“What took you so damn long? Also do you have to level every building you come across?” you spat, glaring at him. He says nothing though, walking straight past you and into his room.

“Huh? Sylus?? What the hell…”

Not liking the feeling of being ignored, you hurriedly chased after him. You had never really been uncomfortable barging into his room. You had done it plenty of times at this point, the first time being when he had challenged you to steal the brooch from him. No point in being shy now. He’s fumbling with something in his drawer when you reach up to tap his shoulder.

“Sylus! Don’t ignore me, I know you ca-”

He swiftly turns around, grabbing your wrist before you can touch him. His gaze is unreadable, cold even. You start to sweat, trying to take your arm back. But he only squeezes tighter.

"I was hoping you'd leave me be so I could calm down. But of course you're as petulant as ever" he says.

"Let go! What's wrong with you!?" You attempt to remove his hand from your wrist but he doesn't budge.

“Go to the bed. Place your hands on it” he says, face unchanging.

“Huh??”

“I don’t like to repeat myself”.

You freeze for only a moment before quickly moving to the bed. You meticulously put your hands where instructed, something deep in your core telling you that it’s likely best to listen for now. However, you can’t help to look over your should to quip at Sylus. You’re slightly bent at an angle, trying your best to keep your balance.

“What’s this about? I’m not that upset that you reduced the building to rubble”

Sylus snakes his way behind you, quietly, as if thinking of what to say. He reaches out a hand, grabbing the ends of your nightgown and moving the soft fabric around in his fingers. You feel the heat rise to your face, the skin of your ass feeling a slight gush of cold air.

“You like playing games with me, don’t you? Testing me” he says coldly, fingers trailing up the back of your legs slowly. You shiver, attempting to squirm away. His evol appears around you, its tight grip making you cry out.

Oh. This was about that.

“Huh?? No, I was just playing along. Just friendly banter yknow?” you say, voice wavering. You’ve clearly pissed him off. A part of you knows it’s a slight lie. You didn’t want to admit it out loud but it was kind of amusing to see Sylus get so riled up over something. Over you especially. But you hadn’t exactly done it fully on purpose. It was the alcohol.

But you knew he wasn’t buying it, as observant as he was.

“Sure. You were just pretending to act like a stray kitten trying to find a new owner?” he smirks, his fingers beginning to trace circles over the cloth of your panties. You let out a small whine, his touch just barely grazing your already wet cunt.

“Owner? I don’t belong to you. Or anyone” you scoff, the resolve in your voice wavering with every little circle he completes on your skin. You almost whine in disappointment when he pulls away.

“And yet…” Sylus trails off, leaving you with aching curiosity before you’re met with stinging pain on your ass. You cry out, unable to move with his evol still snaked around you. “You did exactly what I told you to do just now, wear the clothes I leave out for you, and practically melt everytime I even barely touch you”.

“Sylus?! What the hell was that…?!” you exclaim, trying your hardest to process his words and the situation at hand. He doesn’t respond, proceeding to gently caress the spot where he smacked you. The stinging pain gently eases away, and you feel yourself relaxing with his touch once again. He once again trails his fingers down to your clothed pussy, rubbing slow and meticulous circles around it. You start to whine, attempting to push yourself into his fingers for more friction. He pulls his hand away, making a disapproving sigh.

“Acting like you’re in heat per usual” he chuckles, watching as you wiggle around under the grip of his evol. “This is a punishment”.

“For what? Cause I let some sick and ugly looking crime boss think he had a chance with me?”

Sylus wastes no time bringing his hand to your ass again, earning another painful whine out of you. You feel tears forming in your eyes that you can’t wipe away. He’s certainly not holding back his strength, and yet you know this isn’t even a third of the force he could use on you.

“For entertaining him” he says plainly.

Another smack.

“Another for stupidly handing over your life, body and soul for a measly twenty million”

An even harder hit, this one fueled by rage.

“And lastly…”

You nearly choke as he delivers the final blow, your ass definitely bruising by now. Sylus offers no comfort this time, instead leaning down next to your crying face, breath hot against your ear.

“For forgetting that you belong to me, just as much as I belong to you. Kindred spirits remember?”

You have no chance to respond before he’s flipping you on your back, your nightgown flying up to reveal your wet panties.

“I-im sorry, Sy” you choke, tears blurring your vision.

“Show me then, sweetie. Spread your legs. Wide” he instructs, reaching up to brush your tears away. This isn’t done lovingly, more like calculated and cold.

This is far from over.

You silently but shakingly open your legs, your ass still painfully aching from his assault. You’re surprised when he doesn’t rip your underwear in two, choosing to rather peel them off your legs slowly. You notice the hunger in his eyes as he does so, as if savoring the view of your cunt at his fingertips. A small drop of arousal pools down your ass, and Sylus scoops it up with one finger.

You watch as he puts his finger in his mouth, savoring the drop of you with swiftness. His piercing gaze never leaves yours though, and you want to suddenly run away and hide. This is beyond thrilling, but you try your best to remain as still as possible, scared that he’ll think you’re enjoying it too much and punish you accordingly.

You suddenly can’t take the tension anymore, and close your eyes. You hear the sound of Sylus removing his belt from its loops, then the loud clang as it hits the floor. You feel the bed shift as he lowers himself over you, his face stopping just inches over yours, indicated by the sudden feel and warmth of his breath. He grabs your face in his hand and squeezes your jaw. Hard.

“Look at me kitten” he commands, his tone filled with unkempt rage and anger. Your eyes fly open, terrified.

“I’m the only one that will ever taste you. Repeat it” he says. Before you can get a word out, he’s pushing the fat tip of his cock in your entrance. You cry out in agony, nowhere near ready to have been penetrated. But he doesn’t stop filling you.

“Repeat it. Or I’ll hit you again. Do you want that?”

“You’re t-the…ah!” you whine, his cock halfway inside you at this point. Your poor cunt feels like it’s being impaled, splitting pain soaring through your core.

“Try again”

You let out a whimper, trying your best to push through the pain and put thoughts into words.

“You’re the oh-only one that gets to taste me” you choke out, voice wavering and your eyes teary. Sylus gives a hard thrust, pushing the rest of his length inside you. You cry out again, feeling like you’re on the verge of passing out. Sylus seems unmoved by your outbursts though.

“And?”

You stare at him, barely able to see his face through the tears. What? What does he mean and? He didn’t say anything else did he?

“Hu-what?”

You hear him sigh with disapproval, giving you yet another hard thrust. And another. And another. You’re clinging onto his back now, nails digging into his skin as the sound of the bed creaking and your pants fill the room. Blood has probably been drawn on his back, not that he’d even notice. You can hear him grunting in your ear, clearly enjoying the feeling of you tightening around him when you tense from the pain. Although it still hurts, you can feel yourself accumulating to the shape and size of his length, and the pain lessons a bit more with each thrust. He stops once again, tilting your face in his grip.

“What did I say you forgot? Or is this kitten filled with too much cock to think straight now?” he mocks. You can hear the smile on his face despite not being able to see him clearly. Heat creeps up on your cheeks as you wrack your brain for answers.

“I-you…we’re kindred spirits?”

“Before that sweetie”

You blink the tears on your face away, your vision becoming a bit more clear. Although he’s still gazing down at you, his expression is not as angry as before. Seems he’s gotten a bit of his pent up anger out now.

“I belong to you, Sylus” you say, voice small and whiny from crying. That’s definitely what he wanted to hear, as he began to pepper kisses on your neck, on your cheek, and eventually resting on your lips. You greedily return his affection, leaning into this feverish kiss, the both of you only periodically stopping to pant for air between kisses. He stops, resting his forehead with yours, gazing into your eyes once more.

“And I belong to you. What’s mine is yours. All of it”

You don’t get a chance to respond before he’s thrusting again, this time with a continuous and steady pace. You cling onto him, the exchange of flowery words and rigorous thrusting already bringing you on the verge of ecstasy. Sylus already noticed long before you did though, as he brought his hand between the two of you, circling your clit further your stimulation.

“Go ahead, come undone for me” he whispers, voice strained for nearly being at his end too. Your body obeys, unraveling and writhing with pleasure as Sylus continues to pound into you. You ride your orgasm to its end, till the touching of your clit becomes too much and you whine from overstimulation.

“Sylus…!” you moan, and he stops, already at the start of his own climax. You shudder as you feel him spill into you, his seed immediately beginning to pool down your cunt and to your ass. He pulls his heavy cock out of you, a feeling of emptiness taking its place. For a moment nothing is said, just the sound of the both of you catching your breath.

You decide to break the silence.

“Sylus…I’m really sorry” you start, looking up at him. He simply chuckles, placing a kiss on your cheek before getting up to grab a rag from the bathroom.

“You’ve taken your punishment quite well, why are you apologizing again sweetie?” he says from the bathroom, coming back to wipe you clean. You scoff, slightly tensing from the coldness of the cloth.

“Hmph. Fine, I take it back then. I’m holding a grudge anyways for how hard you hit me”

He simply sighs as he finishes wiping you up. “Back with the infamous wit already? Can’t a man catch a break?”

You sit up, feeling emboldened once more.

“Nope. Maybe don’t hit me with the strength of a thousand suns next time and we’ll see”

Sylus tosses the rag in a laundry basket, making his way back to your side. He pulls you into his arms, embracing you in his warmth. You can’t help but smile against his chest.

“Well, good thing I have all night to make it up to you”

You lightly pinch his side, giggling into his embrace. A question crosses your mind.

"Did you mean it Sylus? We belong to each other?"

Sylus took your face in his hand, giving you a slight smile.

"I don't say stuff I don't mean. You know this"

That's the furthest he was willing to explain it. At least for now. Who knows what kind of power trip would ensue if you truly knew how much you had the big bad leader of Onychinus wrapped around your finger.

[screeching-bunny]

may i request a yandere god/angel? The idea of something so pure..the one thing you have faith in is actually the thinkg keeping u trapped in their obsession bubble is so appealing to me. having no hope left anymore. just them <3

Yandere! God Hcs

Warnings: Obsessive Behavior, Yandere Thoughts, Bad Writing, Stalking, Possessive Behavior, Reader is Referred as ‘You’

🌟 Yandere! God embodies profound wisdom and possesses knowledge beyond mortal comprehension. They have a mysterious aura and speak in riddles, often challenging his followers to seek enlightenment and often confusing the hell out of them. He’s very unpredictable and playful. He finds joy in playful interactions and enjoys surprising their followers with unexpected twists while they worship him. He lives for drama and will one hundred percent mislead his followers.

🌟 Yandere! God is starstruck when he first sees you. He can’t believe that such a cutie is worshiping him and is such a devoted follower. Any prayer that you wish for, he immediately tries to make it become a reality. Since he’s an all powerful god, you can best believe that he will misuse his powers when it comes to you. What’s this? You met a cute guy at work and flirted with him? Well too bad he got struck by lightning five times and died on the spot. Truly unfortunately. He’ll do his best to isolate you from your friends and family. You’ll be so lost that the only thing you can do is just pray to him whenever you can. The thought of this has him kicking his feet up in the air and twirling his hair.

🌟 Yandere! God plans out exactly how and when you guys will finally meet in person. After watching you for many hours he wants this moment to be as perfect as possible. He makes sure to be as dramatic and extra as possible, revealing himself in a very flashy way. Some lightning here and there and some cool looking smoke for his entrance. One day your just praying to him and poof he’s out in front of you.

“WHAT THE— WHO ARE YOU?!?”

“Some people want to meet me, some people don’t believe me, and some people claim to be me. I am…?”

“OH MY GOSH YOU’RE BATMAN?!?!”

“Yes it is— WAIT NO!!!”

🌟 Yandere! God eventually stops speaking in riddles around you because of your inability to get the correct answer. It’s just the only way that he can communicate with you properly and have you understand what he’s saying. Don’t worry though he still loves you nonetheless even if you are a total airhead. He will, however, personally tutor you if it ever really comes down to it. He still speaks in riddles to everyone else but you.

🌟 Yandere! God enjoys watching you pray to him. You view him as someone to look up to and ask about life questions. He makes sure to manipulate you by giving you advice that causes you to become a social outcast to the rest of the world. Who needs friends or a lover when you have him? Whenever his servants hear him say these things to you they just side eye him. They don’t try to do anything about it though because there’s no stopping him when it comes to love.

🌟 Yandere! God uses his followers as entertainment. They’re like his own personal reality tv show that he can control whenever he wants. He loves dropping random things on them and watching them freak out about it. Do you remember the time when a bunch of archeologists dug up an ancient rock with diamonds around it? Yeah, that was his badly made art craft that he threw away years ago. Do you also remember that hurricane that nearly destroyed a country a few months ago? Yeah that was also him, he just accidentally sneezed in the wrong direction that day. His followers believe that anything he does has a meaning behind it. Those natural disasters that have been happening recently must be a test from him. When in reality it was just you messing around with the weather because you we bored.

🌟 Yandere! God would make a new flower and name it after you. His love for you is infinite and would like to spend all of eternity with you. When you first met him you thought that he was supposed to be a generous and pure being. It was because of this thought that you never really saw his advances towards you as romantic. You just brushed these thoughts off and thought you were crazy for even thinking this was. When he found out what you were thinking he nearly ripped his hair off.

🌟 Yandere! God uses the idea of enlightenment to forever trap you by his side. Ditch all the people that you once knew and live with him. This is the only way for you to reach your full potential. People are just vial and disgusting so just jump right into his arms. He’s honestly so good a gaslighting that you don’t even question him and just do exactly what he says. To him it’s almost comical but he couldn’t be prouder of you. If you ever tried to gaslight him it wouldn’t work. I mean you can’t out gaslight the original gaslighter. He was literally the blueprint.

🌟 Yandere! God is terrible at cooking. This is understandable because he is a god and doesn’t need to consume food in order to survive. You, however, do need it. He tries his best to cook food for you but whenever you eat his food you always get food poisoning and need to run to the toilet. He always looks so proud when handing you the dishes that he made that you don’t have the heart to tell him that you don’t want it. So you usually just suck it up and shove it right down your throat.

🌟 Yandere! God is aware that you are a mortal and will one day die. So he tries various ways to make you immortal whether you like it or not. The thought of you dying just pains him and he’d do anything to prevent it from happening. He would destroy and sacrifice the entire universe if it meant that you’d be safe with him. Being with him is so suffocating. He’s like a clingy dog that always bites for attention. There is honestly no quiet moment where you get to be alone in your own thoughts because he is always watching you.

[hurricanek8art]

I had to start trying to explain to my mom (strictly a movie/tv fan) why the Jedi are like this at this point in time, and it finally clicked in my head. The perfect way to explain how they're so rigid and strict and have such huge sticks up their butts at this point in time.

The Jedi of this generation are the result of generational trauma.

(Spoilers for episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte, Phase One of the High Republic books, and some barebones setting spoilers of Phase Three under the cut. Also a big wall of text because I never know when to shut up 🙃)

So I'm behind on Phase III of the High Republic books (got a few chapters into The Eye of Darkness when it came out, brain farted out on me on reading ability, haven't gotten back to it yet 🙃😖) but I know enough to know that things are really going bad. The Nihil are rampaging, the Nameless are turning people to stone, the Stormwall has cut off like a third of the galaxy from the rest of it. It's a lot! It's really bad! And we see how it's affecting our heroes. Avar and Elzar are reeling without Stellan. Vern's questioning about how the Jedi are responding to this threat throughout Phase I has led her to become a Wayseeker. Padawans like Bell, Burry and Reath have been elevated to Knighthood a lot sooner than any of them expected to be. All of them are incredibly traumatized.

But that's just the Jedi we've seen. The heroes, the big names. Imagine being a nobody at this time. An extra. A child.

Imagine being a youngling in this era. There are literal nightmares hunting you. People are dying right and left, they're being husked and turned to stone or just plain shot/stabbed/whatever. The outposts are being closed down and everyone's being recalled to Coruscant, and that's the ones who've survived so far. They knocked the Starlight Beacon out of the sky, something that was supposed to be impossible. And less than five years ago, this was a golden age of peace, of light and life and great works that were bringing the galaxy together, a united front. That's horrible, that is terrifying.

We as the readers know it's going to work out, because it has to, because this is a prequel. They don't know that. They're just kids, and the world has suddenly turned upside-down, and the galaxy is big and scary and dark.

So everything works out, the day is saved. But these kids, they have to live with this trauma for the rest of their lives.

And when they grow up, and they train Padawans, those Padawans are going to carry the lessons they learned onwards. There is no lesson a Master can teach in this era that isn't going to carry the grief of the Nihil or the Nameless. There is no lesson any Master will ever teach again, from the moment Loden Greatstorm was captured by Marchion Ro all the way to Luke's temple burning to the ground, that won't somehow, in some way, be touched by this. It haunts everyone, everything. Those lessons are passed on, and on, and on.

Yord Fandar is intense about protocal and following the rules and making sure he's the perfect Jedi, because a hundred years ago maverick Elzar Mann played fast and loose with the rules while he was stationed on Valo, and then the Nihil turned the Republic Fair into a bloodbath. Sol is worried about Osha's (so far) inability to put her grief to the side and remain objective in chasing Mae because Imri Cantaros lost control and nearly murdered the Nihil who caused the death of his master during the Great Disaster. Vernestra Rwoh is refusing to charge into this without talking it over with the Council because she remembers what happened when she kept information from them a hundred years ago.

These aren't isolated incidents because they happened to the heroes, every Jedi of that era has some story like this, where the lines blurred in the fog of war and they made or nearly made horrible mistakes out of fear. And now, every Jedi is going to want to rise above that. To not make those mistakes, because that past is past. It's peaceful again. They're better now. But that trauma's lurking under the surface, just like the Sith. The Nihil won't win, but the Order isn't going to, either. Because what the Nihil did changed them, permanently.

The plot of the High Republic books is supposedly unrelated to the show, because it's a hundred years later. But the plot of the High Republic books explains everything about the Jedi in this era of the galaxy. They're carrying the trauma and grief of an entire generation that was brutalized unlike anything the Order had ever seen before.

And the Sith have watched, and waited, as that trauma has become so internalized, so central to what the Jedi are. The Jedi might not even realize that's what's happened to them. But the Sith see it.

And now it's finally time to begin the grand plan.

[five-rivers]

Setting a Shattered Gem

AO3

@kawaiijohn

Danny knew things.  He did.  Plenty of things.  He knew he was in the Ghost Zone.  He knew all the stars in the Big Dipper (Dubhe, Merak, Phecda, Megrez, Alioth, Mizar and Alcor, Alkaid).  He knew he was hurt.  

He was hurt a lot.  

The throbbing pain in the center of his chest was hard to ignore, and he felt that even if he didn’t know anything else, he would know that.   

But… as much as he knew, there were, to be sure, gaps in his knowledge.  Things like his name, how he got here, what had hurt him…  He didn’t know.  

He didn’t know.  He felt like he probably should.  That not knowing these things was unusual, and probably bad.  

He didn’t know how to fix it.  

Maybe if he remembered, he would.  

What he did know was that he had to get away.  He had to stay away.  He had to keep moving.  

But where?  Where?  Where?

He couldn’t keep going.  An island presented itself to him.  He fell, stones crunching and whispering ancient secrets under his knees.  Tears dappled the purple rocks.  Danny knew things.  He did.  He just didn’t know what to do.  

He was scared.  

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#1: Ghost Writer

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“What are you doing here?”

The words startled Danny out of his fitful half-doze and he skittered away.  

“I’m sorry– I didn’t– I–”  He was panicking.  Hyperventilating.  Something.  He was looking up at the frowning face of a tall, gray-skinned ghost.  “I’m sorry.”  He didn’t know what he was sorry for.  

The ghost stepped closer, leaning down to peer at him, and he cringed away.  

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t– I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” asked the ghost, incredulously.  “You show up here, right between my lair and Walker’s prison, and you say you don’t know?”

“I don’t remember!”

“You don’t–”  The ghost cut himself off, still glaring at Danny.  Slowly, the expression on his face softened.  “Your core’s been injured.”

Danny hunched his shoulders, curling inward to protect himself.  

“Do you really not remember?  Do you not remember me?”

“No,” said Danny, softly, barely daring to raise his voice above a whisper.  

“You–”  The ghost huffed out a huge sigh.  He was probably one of the ones that had been alive, once, then.  “Fine.  I’ll help you.”

“What?”

“I’ll help you.  You can stay with me until your core heals, if you follow my rules.  Randy’ll find you entertaining, if nothing else.”  The glare came back.  “What?  Do you think I’m the kind of guy who’ll leave someone bleeding out in the wilderness?  I’m not soulless.”

“O-oh.”

“Can you not move or something?”

“I’m sorry.”  

The ghost gave another horribly put-upon sigh.  “I suppose I’ll have to carry you.”

The carrying… did not go terribly well.  While the ghost seemed big and tall compared to Danny, he was neither that big, nor that tall.  

But despite the unwieldiness of the situation and Danny’s general inability to help with it, they managed, and the ghost flew off to his home.  

Upon actually reaching said home, the ghost shrieked in agony and rage.  Danny looked up blearily, trying to work out what had made the ghost so angry.  

The ghost’s home, it turned out, looked like a library wrecked by a tornado, and maybe also a hurricane.  

Huh.  

Well, Danny didn’t have any room to judge the ghost’s tastes.  As far as he knew, he didn’t have a home.  So. 

“What did he do?  It wasn’t like this when I got arrested, and that was after all of you people decided to fight me.”

“Oh,” said Danny.  “Sorry?”

“Sorry?  Sorry?  Sorry doesn’t put pages back into the books!  It doesn’t put books back onto the shelves!  If Randy wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him!”

Still fuming, the ghost stomped through the towering shelves of books until he reached a small cubby with a reclining chair in it.  He laid Danny down on it.  

“I don’t own a bed,” he said, shortly.  “This will have to do.  Are you dying?”

“I don’t… think so.”

The ghost grunted.  “Then you should recover, eventually.  I’ll get you food or something.  Later.  Just.  Stay here.”  The ghost, agitated, turned and hurried away, flying at speed through the stacks of books.

Well.  It wasn’t like Danny could go anywhere.  

The ghost did come back, with food, rants about his half-brother, pillows and blankets, complaints about how his latest writing project was going, long, winding commentaries about the history of the Dewey Decimal system.  Between all that he even remembered to give Danny a name.  Ghost Writer.  

It was appropriate for the ghost, Danny decided.  

Ghost Writer spent a lot of time trying to clean up the library.  It was slow going, even compared to Danny’s recovery. 

As soon as Danny was able to move around without agony, he decided to help.  It was only right, after Ghost Writer had gone out of his way to help him.  It wouldn't be much, just a little sweeping, a little shelving, Danny was still unwell, but it would be something, something that would help, something that might make Ghost Writer happier. 

And the books themselves were fascinating.  He spent as much time reading as he did cleaning, and each book made how much he didn't know, how much he had forgotten, clearer.  

Bit by bit, the library was put back in order.  

But as it was… as it was, it became more and more itself, more and more a library, with all of a library's rules. 

Ghost Writer didn't seem to notice, but that was fine.  The library belonged to him.  He fit into and with it no matter what.

Danny, though…  

Some of the rules he leaned into.  The library had a sense of where each book should go, for example, which was very helpful given his weak understanding of the sorting system.  

Other rules were less pleasant to follow.  

The silence had started as a faint pressure on his jaw, his tongue, his throat, but that pressure built as the library was restored until it was very nearly a physical weight.  Words became difficult.  But Danny got used to it.  As the effort required to speak grew, his desire to do so naturally faded.  Ghost Writer didn't really want conversation when he came to rant.  He just wanted someone to listen, and Danny was happy to.  

But one day Ghost Writer stopped dead in the middle of a rant.  He used his hands to lift Danny’s head up and tilt it back.  He turned it from side to side.  

"You haven't looked in a mirror lately, have you?"

Danny’s head was held still.  He couldn't shake it.  "No," he said, with effort.  

Ghost Writer smiled and patted Danny's cheek.  "You know, I think I misread you, before.  You would fit in anywhere, given the chance, wouldn't you?  I think– I think I've changed my mind about kicking you out, once you've healed.  You've been very… helpful."  Ghost Writer chortled and left soon after.  

Danny, of course, went to go find a mirror.   

It wasn't easy.  Neither bedrooms nor bathrooms were a priority for a ghost library.  Eventually, he found one being used as part of a decorative wall hanging.

He didn't see anything amiss with his reflection, but maybe that was just because of the way he was becoming more and more nearsighted, lately.  Which was fine by him.  He didn't need to see very far to be able to read.

.

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#2 Undergrowth

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“Oh, my, what do we have here?”

Danny woke from his fitful doze to the sensation of roots and vines wrapping around his limbs.  He struggled, of course, and kept struggling even as something frigid and wet dripped from his nose and lips.  

“Calm yourself, child, little seed,” chided a voice that was all sugar and nightshade.  “You wouldn’t want to injure yourself even more than you already are.”

The island had, while Danny slept, become a jungle, and something huge and dark moved through the trees.  

“What has happened to you?  A little accident with your core?  It must hurt terribly.”

Danny tried one more time to pull away, but the vines wrapped around him squeezed and the fight went out of him all at once.  

“There, that’s better, now, isn’t it?  Now, let’s see… Last time I had taken your friend as my daughter…”  Danny felt something creep up the back of his neck, feather-light.  “I wonder… What kind of son will you make?”

There was a stab of pain.

When he finally stirred from the soil, healed and in full bloom, it was to do his father’s bidding.

.

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#3 Walker

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The sound of sirens woke Danny from his troubled sleep.  His first thought was ambulance, but when he got his eyes open, he saw that he was wrong.  His little island was completely encircled by ghostly police cars.  

A ghost in white loomed over him.  

“Take him to the medical wing as soon as you get him to the prison.”

Danny, not seeing any way out of this, decided to pass out.  For real, this time. 

He woke in a bed with glowing yellow bedsheets in a room with glowing pink walls.  His wrists and ankles were chained to the railing on the bed and something heavy weighed on his neck.  Being tied up was… bad.  But, somehow, the colors of the room soothed away some of his panic.  

In the room with pink walls and yellow beds, Danny learned new things.  First, he was a criminal, a dangerous one.  Second, the prison he was in was ruled by a ghost named Walker.  Third, Walker was very happy that Danny was back in prison like he belonged.  

Hearing Walker was happy and, more specifically, happy because of Danny made him feel disturbingly giddy.  Hearing how upset Walker had been about his escape made him feel… not quite remorseful, because he didn’t remember doing that, but it put a sort of tightness inside him.  

That wasn’t all, though.  Before long, Danny knew that the prison operated on a strict and fair set of rules, which were the same for everyone, that the chains and cuffs used on him were ‘special’ and different from all the other prisoners’ chains and cuffs, that meals were served on a regular, evenly-spaced schedule entirely divorced from the days of the ‘real world,’ that meals consisted of unappetizing green slime that died his aura green and made him feel both weaker and more stable, spooned into his mouth by a ghost wearing a SWAT uniform.  He learned that when he healed, he would be released into ‘solitary confinement’ and if he behaved, he might be rewarded by being introduced to the ‘general population.’

That was a lot of things to know for someone who had hardly known anything just a short while ago.  

One day - or night - or ‘interval’ - Walker himself came into the medical wing.  

“You really don’t remember anything, punk?” he asked.  

“No, sir,” said Danny.  He wanted to be good.  He wanted to behave.  He wasn’t sure about general population, but he wanted to make people happy.  

“Sir, huh,” drawled Walker.  “I suppose I can buy the amnesia story, but you’re still serving your full sentence.”

“Yes, sir,” said Danny.  He wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.  He didn’t know anything else. 

“But I’ll consider taking some of it in community service provided that you demonstrate good behavior.”

“I’d like that, sir.”

“He’d like that,” said Walker, giving his head a little half-shake.  “Guards!  Take him to his new cell in solitary.”

The guards came and unfastened Danny from the bed.  It was the first time anyone had done that, and he had no time to react before they had rebound his wrists and ankles with new manacles.  They were made of the same material as the ones that had held him to the bed, so he suspected these were special, too.  They were all connected to each other with a chain that also looped around his waist and linked to the heavy thing around his neck.  

The chains were short enough that, when he was placed on his feet, he couldn’t walk and stand upright at the same time, so he had to shuffle forward while bent over, even as the ghosts prodded him along.  They walked out of the medical wing and into hallways that became narrower and narrower and lower and lower.  Danny got the distinct sense that they were traveling deeper into the prison, although he couldn’t say how or why.  

They stopped in front of a small, violently magenta door, which they unlocked before pushing Danny in.  The door closed behind him with a satisfying clunk.  

Inside the room, the cell, was a tiny toilet, an equally tiny metal bed, and, on that bed, a lunch tray with a helping of the green slime.  Danny sat down on the bed and picked up the tray.  There were no utensils, so he ate the slime with his hands.  It was as disgusting as ever, and finishing the portion left him feeling lethargic, but peaceful.  Even if it left him feeling weak, it seemed to ease the injuries he’d sustained.  

He smiled, faintly.  This would be his home until he showed enough good behavior to get into the general population and then, oh, community service sounded wonderful.  He couldn’t wait to serve the community.  

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#4 Vortex

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Danny woke for just long enough to be thrown into the storm.  Then, nothing.  

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#5 Frostbite

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“Great One!”

Before Danny was fully aware of his surroundings, he was being cradled and wrapped in something soft and fuzzy.  No, furry.  Some kind of blanket or skin rug, maybe?  He cuddled into it.  

“Great One,” repeated the voice.  “Can you hear me?  Do you understand me?”

Danny groaned, weakly.  

“Don’t worry, Great One.  We will be to the Far Frozen in no time.”

Danny didn’t know what the Far Frozen was, but it sounded nice.  Cool.  

“He’s burning up,” said the voice, only moments later.  “Get him into a cooling tank as quickly as possible.  Snowfall, we will need to seal off the island.”

“But Chief Frostbite–!”

“It is the only sensible option.  We don’t know what did this.  It could be looking for him, and we are known to be his allies.”  Something shifted, and Danny was transferred to something that was neither as soft nor as pleasant to lie on.  “Great One, I know you would prefer it if your friends could find you, but they are clever, they are loyal, and they would want you to be safe, as I do.”

That was the last thing he remembered for a while.  His next memories were of floating in bubbling liquid and basking in the cold.  A cooling tank.  Very important for ice cores, from what little Danny understood of the conversation beyond the tank’s glass walls.  

But he did not truly wake up until he was ensconced, quite cozily, in a bed, ice blocks chilling his feet and a cold fire burning in a nearby fireplace.  

“You truly do not remember anything?” asked Frostbite, again.

“Well, a little bit?  I was running from something.  But that’s it.  I don’t know what it was.”  He shrugged, then smiled.  “I must have been running towards you guys, right?  Since we’re friends?”

“It seems likely,” said Frostbite.  “In light of that… I must insist that you stay here until you are fully recovered.”

“Okay,” said Danny.  There wasn’t really any reason for him to leave, as far as he knew.  

Frostbite looked surprised, but Danny didn’t know why.  “Thank you.”  He cleared his throat.  “While you are here, on the days you feel up to it, I think you may like joining the other children in their lessons.”

“Okay,” said Danny, again.  

“In the meantime, you can read any books from out library you might be interested, or we can have someone come and read to you.”  Frostbite grinned a little.  “It would be helpful for some of the younger children.”

“Okay, that sounds good,” said Danny.  He might not know much, but he did know he was being a real drain on the resources of the Far Frozen.  He wanted to repay them as much as he possibly could, even if it was only in little ways.  

The first reader came later that day.  The young and extremely fluffy yeti, Feathersnow, was smaller than Frostbite, but still head and shoulders above Danny.  She was older, too.  At least, Danny thought she was probably older.  He felt like he was in his teens, and she was nearly a hundred.  The book she read to him was a fairy tale about young yetis falling through thin ice and going on a journey to get home.  

She was far from the last.  More young yetis came, in between checkups and procedures to make sure Danny was healing properly.  

Eventually, though, Danny was healed enough, by the doctors’ estimates, to go outside.  

“Danny,” said Frostbite, while they made sure Danny was properly equipped for the snow and wind.  “Promise me you won’t try to leave, yet.  You still have a great deal of healing left to do, and we haven’t been able to determine what injured you.”

“I promise,” said Danny, “I won’t go anywhere until you and the other doctors say I’m all better.  I don’t know where else I’d go.”

Frostbite’s face did something complicated.  They’d all been awfully cagey about who Danny had been and what Danny had done in the past, presumably out of a worry that they’d be tempting him to flee, but Danny rather thought that they didn’t have to worry about it so much.  Whatever had come before, he didn’t have any connection to it.  He did have connections to Frostbite and the other friends he had made here.  

But regardless of what Frostbite was feeling, they did go outside.  

For the most part, outside was what Danny had expected.  Low, stone buildings, rolling snowdrifts, icevines, iceflowers, and icewheat, towering glacial mountains…  But there was also a huge dome overhead made of glittering green ice.  

“Is that what you meant when you said you’d sealed the Far Frozen?” asked Danny.  

“Yes,” said Frostbite.  “There are very few things that could bypass it.  Even Pariah Dark could not.”

Danny wondered if he’d learn about Pariah Dark in any of the books he was reading.  He probably would, if it was important.  

Time passed.  Slowly, because he was still very fragile, Danny was introduced to the lessons the other children were learning.  The lessons were dynamic, taught outside in the snow as often as they were indoors, and all the yetis in the Far Frozen participated from time to time, sharing wisdom learned over the span of several human lifetimes.  Danny was invariably the smallest, youngest, and furthest behind in those lessons, but the teacher said that could be a helpful thing, because it let the other students learn how to teach.  

In-between lessons, check-ups, and other things, Danny didn’t exactly grow, but he did change.  

His hair grew long and thick, until he had to learn how to braid it just to keep it out of the way.  Before long, it hung at his ankles, and he had to periodically chop it off to make sure it didn’t trip him up.  The young yetis were fascinated by it, and it made for an interesting and very cheap gift.  

Over a very painful and traumatic two weeks, his fangs grew in.  They were nothing compared to those of the yetis, but they were sharp and had a tendency to spill out past his lips when he wasn’t careful.  They gave him a tiny lisp that all the yetis seemed to think was adorable.  

He learned.  He never quite managed to catch up to his older classmates, but he could and did see where he had made progress.  One of his favorite things he’d learned was ice claws, which was a way to form ice around his hands so that they looked oversized and each of his fingers seemed to taper to a point.  He liked how they made him look just a little bit more like Frostbite and the other yetis.  

One day, while he played with the other children, Frostbite took Danny aside.  “I know it has been quite a long time,” he told Danny, “but we have been thinking about unsealing the Far Frozen, and… Do you recall when you first came here?”

Danny fiddled with the long end of his braid, threading his ice claws in-between the strands.  “When I first came here?” he echoed.  “No.  No, I don’t think so.  I’ve more or less always been here, haven’t I?  I mean, I know I’m not a yeti, obviously, so I must have been formed somewhere else, but I don’t remember anything from then.  I think… the first thing I remember was Feathersnow reading to me.  I must have been really young, then.”  He tilted his head.  “I don’t know what that has to do with the great dome, though?”

“It was just a passing thought,” said Frostbite, patting Danny’s head.  “Don’t let it trouble you.”

“Okay,” said Danny.  “Can I go back to playing, now?”

“Yes, of course,” said Frostbite.  Then, more quietly, almost too quietly for Danny to hear, he said, “Yes, of course, Great One.”

.

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#6: Box Ghost

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Even half-conscious, even mostly unconscious, Danny had a sense of what was happening to him.  That sense was, to be clear, also a sense of extreme embarrassment.  

Somehow, being found by someone calling himself the ‘Box Ghost’ was just… a little much.  

But he was found by the Box Ghost, and the first thing the Box Ghost did was put him in a box.  Then he put that box inside another box.  Then he put those boxes inside yet another box, and…

.

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#7: Nocturne

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Danny did not wake up.  Instead, he dreamed.  

His dreams, too, were dark and painful, but the pain was the pain of dreams, held at one remove.�� He traveled beneath flowers and between inverted towers.  He skirted rooftops and bubbling vats.  He moved with the wind and fell with it, too.  He slunk through a jungle so cold he could see his breath when he breathed.  He walked up stairs made of liquid ink towards a moon that was a grinning face.  Based on what little he remembered of the Ghost Zone, he got the sense that his subconscious was borrowing more liberally from his real experiences than he would otherwise expect.  

The dream of steps became more persistent.  

At first he trudged up them, heavy footfall by heavy footfall.  Then, when the pain grew to be too much, he crawled, heaving himself up one step at a time.  Finally, he fell still, and stayed that way.  

“Hello, child,” said the moon.  Danny looked up.  It was clothed in the night sky and all the stars.  “You’re in pain.”

“Is it that obvious?” asked Danny.  

“What wit!” exclaimed the moon, mirroring Danny’s sarcasm.  “What verve!  What vitality!”  The moon leaned down.  “Would you like it to go away?  The pain?”

Danny’s fingers clenched on the lip of the stair, moving smoothly through the dark liquid.  “Yes.”

“I can help you with that,” said the moon.  “But you have to help me first.  I need you to let me in.”

“Let you in where?”

“To your core, of course.  I can’t fix it if I can’t access it.  That’s what’s giving you all this pain.  All those little cracks in your core.”  The moon trailed fingers up Danny’s spine.  “All you have to do, though, is say that you’ll let me in.  Easy, isn’t it?”  The moon drew closer, close enough that Danny could feel its gravity.  “Just do that, and I’ll make sure you won’t be in pain anymore.”

Danny didn’t know what to do.  He wanted the pain to stop, but this felt… wrong.  He started to shake.  

“I suppose you do always have the choice of letting yourself fade.  Simply say the word, and I will leave–”

“No!” said Danny, grabbing for the edge of the moon’s robes.  “No.  Don’t go.  I’ll let you in.  Please.”

The moon’s smile grew sharper and broader, and the stairs flexed underneath him.  He now realized that the stairs were simply folds of the moon’s cloak and–

–And the ink rushed into him, filling the gaps in his core.  

–And he fell, the stairs no longer supporting him, into the deepest sleep of his life.  

Nocturne had told the truth.  Danny wasn’t in pain anymore.  And he never would be again.  

.

.

#8: Clockwork

.

When Danny woke up, he wasn’t in pain anymore and his bones vibrated with the sonorous ticks and tocks of a massive clock.  His eyes eased open to see a ceiling made of slowly moving brass gears.  

“Time heals all wounds,” said a deep voice.  Danny flinched into a sitting position to see a blue-skinned ghost floating at the foot of his bed.  “Or so they say.”  The ghost’s form shifted as Danny watched, growing younger.  “To answer the question you were about to ask.  I am Clockwork, Master of Time, and this is my lair.”

Danny blinked in surprise, processed what was said, and then opened his mouth to ask–

“Time may be bought, spent, or wasted, but no matter the idiom, it is precious.  It has a price.”

“What was the price to heal me?” asked Danny.  

Clockwork was silent for a long moment.  He grew from a child into an old man.  “Steep,” he said finally.  “However, failing to do so carried an even steeper cost.  I looked through the available timelines and all were… unpleasant.  For others, if not for you, yourself.”  He grew young again, hovering around middle aged.  “I can show you who you used to be.  That, too, has a price.  Remaining ignorant also has a price.”

“For me?” asked Danny.  “Or for you?”

“Yes.”

“What if I found out on my own?”

“No,” said Clockwork.  “There are certain risks I will not allow you take, and that is one of them.  If you choose to leave, I will tell you what injured you and why.  If you stay, you may refrain from learning what injured you and who you once were, but you may also reweave yourself with as little influence from the previous pattern as possible.”

“I was running from something really bad.”

Clockwork inclined his head, minutely.  

“Can I…  Is there anything I can help you with, while I decide?”

“There are certain projects that might benefit from your assistance,” said Clockwork.  “You understand this is also a decision.”

“Yes,” said Danny, swinging his legs out of the bed.  “When can I start?”  Something inside his chest ticked in time with the clockwork heart of Clockwork’s lair.  He briefly raised his hand to feel it.  It wasn’t his heart.  It wasn’t his core.  It was something lower.

He didn’t remember it from before, but… He’d been hurt.  Maybe he’d just missed it.  

He shook his head and followed Clockwork out of the room.  They went to a workshop crowded with gears, lenses, pliers, wires, tiny models of things, spinning wheels, clocks, snow globes, music boxes, looms, tapestries, and other things Danny could not name.  There were great windows on one wall, showing a garden enclosed in a courtyard.  The trees were in various states of pruned and unpruned, picked and unpicked, flowering and bare, and the plots weren’t much better.  

“As you can see,” said Clockwork, his shoulders slumping somewhat and his voice tinted with amused embarrassment, “I have many projects.”

Over the next weeks Clockwork and Danny worked their way around the room, Clockwork explaining every item and why he was making or repairing it.  They went outside, then, and Clockwork did the same thing with each plant.  Only then, did they actually start to work on the projects.  

It was slow going, sometimes, as Danny had to eat and sleep, and Clockwork often had to be called away for his ‘official’ duties.  Danny would have liked to help with those, too, but these smaller tasks were important to Clockwork and, in some cases, the timeline.  Still, object by object, the projects were finished.  The clocks were fixed, the lenses ground, the trees trimmed, the books rebound, the tapestries woven.  

Danny polished the last tool he’d used, cleaning off every bit of oil before putting it back on the shelf.  “I think it’s time,” he said. 

“Yes, I thought it might be,” said Clockwork.  “Have you decided what you are going to do?”

“Yes,” said Danny.  “I need to know what happened, and then…  Then I want to find out who I was.  And who I am.”

"That is very mature of you, Daniel."

"Thanks," said Danny.  "It's just…  You said there were other options, other timelines."  His eyes lingered on the books, the wisteria, a spare length of chain, the tapestry of a storm-tossed sea.  "They were bad, too, weren't they?  Sometimes, staying here, I think I see glimpses…"

"They were not all bad," said Clockwork, patting a snow globe they had repaired earlier that week.  "Not for you.  But they were not the way things were meant to be.  Are you ready?"

"Yes," said Danny, his hands curling into fists on his knees as he braced for the worst.  

Clockwork sat down on the stool across the worktable from Danny and folded his hands on the table.  "What happened was…"

[italiantea]

insomnia analysis bc i have brainrot

if anyone's interested here's my translation of the lyrics. with scribbly notes for further context

thoughts and analysis under the cut because i can not shut up

first of all, the character's name: 淵 素直

eve-verse characters tend to have quite literal names, and this one is no exception.

his family name fuchi (淵), means 'abyss' or 'depths', and his given name sunao (素直) means 'honest', as in to be honest about your true feelings. this is fitting because fuchi's trauma stems from the familial circumstances he was born into, and throughout the song he learns to be honest to himself about his feelings.

at its core, insomnia is a song about self acceptance, about facing the damaged, ugly, and contradictory parts of yourself and accepting them as part of you. the lyrics mention two pronouns, 'I' and 'you'. however, throughout the mv, fuchi is really the only real character, with 'I' referring to his current self, and 'you' referring to his child self. and finally there's his zingai mr. creepypasta, which is arguably a manifestation of his own heart.

the mv also has several shots depicting fuchi's reflection in screens and mirrors, contrasting with his inability to see other people as human

sidenote but the way the font of the lyrics changes based on which version of him is on screen is a nice touch. his child self is literally represented by a cuter, more childlike font.

his child self represents the little boy he once was. a child who has been hurt, who gleefully wields a gun and sees people around him as balloons, like objects to be shot for target practice. this seems to stem from his fear of people's judgement, whether it be because of his obvious differences in appearance, or his violent urges which are seen as socially unacceptable.

we can see from the start of the mv that fuchi struggles with suicidal urges and fantasies of hurting other people. he doesn't understand why he has these urges, and even though his trauma happened before he was old enough to fully understand or remember, it affects him deeply till this day.

even when he tries to voice his thoughts to other people, they don't understand and he ends up laughing things off as a joke. he's unable to connect to others, partly because he's unable to connect with himself

i find this part interesting because it doesn't explicitly use any pronouns. it can be inferred that the third line refers to others being appalled by his violent thoughts, but really the same sentiment applies to his own revulsion towards himself. he acknowledges that within his own thoughts is the only place he can remain true to himself; he cannot keep denying his ugly thoughts no matter how 'evil' they may be. at the end of the day, violent intrusive thoughts are just thoughts, and thoughts on their own are not 'good' or 'evil' (thoughtcrime aint real baby), nor are they representative of your true self.

here he addresses his inner child directly: he wishes to understand him, and to do so without any moral judgement. he tells himself to overcome the night they can't return to, referring to his child self literally stuck in the past unable to move past his trauma. however, he also hopes that in the end they can make the right choices, and the two can meet in 'the right world'.

fuchi represses his ugly thoughts, but they resurface in his dreams, leading to his insomnia. in the end it leads to him acting out his violent fantasies while sleepwalking, reenacting the same things his child self does in the earlier dream sequence.

these lyrics i feel like (as well as being a reference to fight song) represent fuchi's mentality for facing the future. he's gone and done it now, caused unspeakable damage to multiple innocent people and the police are after him. but what else is there to do but keep moving forward? to keep struggling through no matter how bad things get, to continue having hope for the future? it's the last move on the board. it's your only choice.

insomnia is not a song about believing in the good in your heart and stopping yourself before it's too late. it's about picking up the pieces after the damage is done. as hard as he tried to make the right decisions, he ultimately failed due to circumstances out of his control. and still, life goes on.

the lyric changes reflect this: he has ultimately failed to guide himself to the 'right' world. near the end, the opening shots in the mv repeat, this time depicting the city without his presence, after he has been locked up. (im reaching image limit here you know what im talking about)

in the last part, fuchi faces himself, all the painful and ugly and contradictory parts, and embraces them as part of himself.

the one wielding the gun is himself. the one wrestling the gun away is also himself. even his pain and loneliness are feelings that he doesnt regret, as they were the light burning inside him that kept him going. the lyrics describe a light that shines like a jewel, while the video depicts that not as the light of a brighter future, but as the lights of a truck about to run him over. in a way, the one driving the truck is also himself. contradictory as they are, they are all parts of him he can't deny.

ive seen some confusion on what exactly mr. creepypasta's motives are, but i think he's meant to be contradictory on purpose. disregarding all the urban fantasy-esque lore about what zingai are, he's a manifestation of fuchi's psyche, a representation of coping mechanisms that may have protected him in some ways, but now harm him in others. fuchi being hit by a 'driverless' truck parallels his sleepwalking, both being actions he has no voluntary control over, but are caused by manifestations of his subconscious urges.

and it's only after fuchi embraces his inner child and breaks out from the dream world that he can start to move past his trauma and connect with the world again.

other less relevant stuff but when i first saw the mv i was a bit shocked they went with a shooting scene of all things, considering gun violence isnt really a thing in japan. (i hadnt paused to read the text yet so i didnt know it was a model gun) but after some consideration i think it makes sense in context. according to the extra tidbit posted today, fuchi sees real people as balloons, but can see people as people in fictional media, which led to him emulating human expression through fiction. he also works at a video rental store and loves movies, so i think the shooting, as well as other elements like his ringtone in the beginning, the american comic book style snippets, the references to the movie it (balloons and yellow raincoat) may be alluding to influence from western media.

anyway those r my thoughts and if anyone read till here. why. thanks tho

[princeescaluswords]

I like Stiles as a character, but I often get frustrated by fanon diverging from canon, and the worst of it to me is the ways that Lydia treated by Stiles - as something he deserves, most notably when she kisses Scott and he's angry, which the fandom holds against Scott because apparently Lydia making choices means Scott is a bad friend - or in the scene when Lydia is high after the werewolf attack at the movie rental place, and the only thing that keeps Stiles from doing [something] is that Lydia calls out for Jackson rather than him.

I think Stiles is kind of a jerk, and I like him because of it, but the fanon Stiles used as a weapon to bludgeon canon Scott is... the dumbest thing in the fandom

Have you ever seen the frequent criticism on this site that certain people should have paid more attention in English class? This criticism arises from posts like the one I saw today, where a person was confessing that "people think Stiles is evil because he almost made out with Lydia while she was drugged up." I don't think Stiles is evil for doing that; it sounds like you don't think Stiles is evil. I've never actually heard anyone call him evil for almost giving into temptation. (The closest I've ever come to calling Stiles's evil is his behavior in Lies of Omission (5x09) and Status Asthmaticus (5x10) and I don't even go that far). What we do recognize that what he did in Lydia's bedroom in The Tell (1x05) wasn't the right way to behave.

Stiles's desire for Lydia is real and natural; it was his inability to recognize and respect proper boundaries that almost created a very bad situation. He did pull away when Lydia said Jackson's name; the realization that she was confused about who he was and not secretly attracted to him reminded him that his behavior wouldn't be the fulfillment of his desire but him taking advantage of her. It's a good scene that tells us about Stiles's weaknesses but also about his strengths: beyond the insecurity that leads him to fixate on the most unattainable girl in school and his constant disregard for proper boundaries, Stiles is a fundamentally decent human being.

So why do I, personally, bring up this scene when talking about Teen Wolf a lot? Stiles-stans (who are not really fans of Stiles but fans of Fanon Stiles or, more accurately, Self-Insert with a Stiles Name Tag) like to go on and on about how deficient a person Scott McCall, the lead protagonist, is because he was "obsessed" with Allison and lacrosse. They argue this to say why they 'dislike' him, but what they actually mean is that he shouldn't be the lead protagonist. But they never seem to remember Stiles's behavior when it comes to Lydia (or Derek's behavior when it comes to Paige or Liam's behavior when it comes to Hayden for that matter).

My position -- and I think the production shared this position -- is that Scott's desire to have a girlfriend and make first line on the lacrosse team is real and natural. However, his attempts to avoid recognizing and coping with the consequences of Peter's vicious assault could lead to very bad situations unless he took responsibility. Scott had to learn how to anchor himself -- which he did! He had to make sure he put what was truly important ahead of his relationship with Allison -- which he did!

I have always maintained that Teen Wolf is a bildungsroman, which is a story about children becoming adults. Throughout the series, Scott's growth is primary; he evolves from an asthmatic loser who feels like he sits on the sidelines of life into a True Alpha werewolf leading a war against those who would murder supernatural creatures out of self-interest. But he's not the only one to grow. Allison had her own story; Lydia had her own story; Derek had his own story (one of the best redemption arcs ever); and Stiles had his version of that story!

The problem is that there are a lot of people who didn't watch Teen Wolf as a story, but rather as raw material. They swooped in and picked up the parts that they wanted, like vultures devouring a carcass. They wanted Stiles and <insert white male love interest here> to be the focus of the show, as they were the focus of their interests, but they could do without the part where Stiles struggles to grow up. In response, they selected only the parts that fit their agenda. Thus, Scott becomes dull, obsessive, stupid, with a foolish no-kill rule, and an unearned hostility toward the Hale Family whom he shamelessly usurps, even though none of that description is remotely true. On the other hand, Stiles becomes the should-be valedictorian of his class, a master archmage, and a ruthless anti-hero ready to kill anyone to protect which ever white male character he loves this week, even though none of that description is remotely true.

Fandom, in the name of their own enjoyment, has boiled their understanding of the story down to "I don't like Scott" and "Stiles is not evil!" Nuanced takes like "Stiles had the courage to cross boundaries to protect others but that tendency also led him into some problematic actions" and "Scott didn't start out a heroic protagonist; he only embraced the mantle when he realized that the threats he had to face didn't care that he and his friends were teenagers." become difficult for them to understand and unpleasant for them to process, because they only really want Power Fantasy Stiles and Bad Friend Scott. Those bits and pieces fit into the pre-existing tropes that bring them pleasure. It's the limitations that frustrate them, not Teen Wolf's.

[sl33pyycl0ud]

[It's the inability to make the faces for me-]

The link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45640075

I just wanted to share my fave polyam ship, cuz i stumbled into a fanfic 'bout Alejandro x Graves x Rudy and I adore it so much that I just have to draw it. 💙^^^

[and it is also for an art contest in discord, the creator is super sweet and posts on tiktok about cod and they made some pretty cute beans au's check it out]

[their name was @yaboiprog on tiktok]

Don't forget to give the ao3 author some love, 💙💙💙^^

[so..something weird happened, you know when the brain sometimes connects the past to what you're doing? Like when you eat cotton candy and you remember a good memory n you feel the good feelin and all.. so...sometimes the brain could also connect something bad to something that is completely harmless.. that, happened to me [i didn't even think it would happened but it did- guess live really want go see me fall ha] To start it all off, a few weeks ago i was sick, so sick that I never expect I could be that sick , and everytime I tried to draw , I can't cuz my brain was foggy and I was delirious, but thankfully i'm okay now, but [here comes the unbelievable part, to me] , everytime i wanted to draw something , my brain just automatically remembering my time when i was sick and I suddenly felt nauseous and physically wanted to throw up. Like- wtf- this comic was the only thing that i could manage to draw but I literally have to do some breathing exercise through it.]

[so now you know 'bout my problem here and I promise I'm trying my best right now and doin some doodle and stuff but i just wanted to say something [cuz I don't want my fren to think I'm ded]]

[just half ded]

[tanjir0se]

WAKE UP BABES YOUR NEW FAVORITE KNY CHARACTERS JUST DROPPED

Half-baked backstory below the cut !

Sakuya✨🌸

Star breather, dual wields two Nichirin that can connect into a long staff. Energetic, reckless, kind but extremely stubborn, thinks she’s really funny but literally isnt.

Met Natsuki at final selection and barely made it through thanks to his help.

Began training in first aid/Kakushi work at the Kocho sisters’ house for wayward girls (very bad at it due to natural inability to follow directions/listen/not make trouble)

That came to an end after Kanae was killed, she wanted to fight for revenge so was paired with Natsuki (Tomioka’s first attempt at mentoring/taking a tsuguko (didn’t work)(made them both weirder))on a mission where she discovered kind of on accident that she could star breathe

Given to Tengen for Tsuguko training 1. Because she is also a dual wielder and he requested and 2. because if she broke one more thing at the butterfly mansion Shinobu and Aoi were going to go insane

Grew close with Natsuki because they were assigned to multiple missions together because 1. Tengen kept volunteering her because he was ALSO going to go insane if Sakuya didn’t learn to grow some fucking responsibility and later 2. Because Tengen found it INCREDIBLY funny that Giyuu’s tsuguko had a crush on his

On a mission that could have made them both Hashira, Natsuki was turned into a demon by Kokushibo. Devastated, Sakuya was unable to slay either of them and later quit her training despite Tengen’s insistence she stay and went back to kakushi work/rogue slaying. Like, kakushi by day and slayer by night. Ig

She has run into Natsuki (now a demon) several times and neither can manage to kill the other so they end up weird half secret friends ?

Natsuki 🌌

Void breather—>Demon. Extremely shy, thoughtful, intelligent and determined but insecure and prone to overthinking. As a demon, superiority complex, hates both humans and other demons, almost feral. Wields a [REDACTED because Cam hasn’t decided yet lmfao]

Self taught with his own breathing style because he tried literally every other one and nothing worked. He had to work extremely hard and do almost everything the hard way to finally make it to final selection. Considers himself to be a naturally unlucky person.

Became Giyuu’s tsuguko because the Master saw something special in him (maybe the fact that he invented void breathing lol) and thought their personalities would mesh, but also that it would be easy for Giyuu because he and Natsuki were fairly similar in age.

They do mesh! But Natsuki is functionally mute so. Um. He learns a lot from Giyuu like sword wise but not so much …socially.

Despite feeling like the odd one out/a fish out of water because his friend Sakuya already knows all of the Hashira due to her learning from Shinobu, and he can barely manage to speak to his own mentor, he gains power and skill extremely quickly because he’s extremely determined and just wants to work hard.

EXTREMELY shy and finds himself disappearing into the background, except to Sakuya, who initially believes he doesn’t like her and makes it her mission to get him to

(He did like her he just sucks at saying it)

(He is completely in love with her and Sakuya, known dumbass, is oblivious)

He opens up to her on their missions and tries to protect her both out of love and out of a sense of ‘paying her back’ for the many, MANY times her medical training has saved his ass. They bond over their as of yet undetermined tragic backstories.

After being turned into a demon he retains next to nothing about his former life but is captivated by the times he sees Sakuya from a distance. The closer he gets the more he remembers so he finds himself seeking her out.

I’m going to start going through my ideas for Star and Void breathing because they’re cool as hell and I want to make move names !!! Also I haven’t made a self insert since LITERALLY 2011 so. Turns out it’s really fun cool and based and everyone should do it always

[inbarfink]

Much like many ‘What Remain of Edith Finch’ fans, I also subscribe to the theory that there is nothing truly supernatural about the ‘Family Curse’. That it’s more of a bad trauma-coping-mechanism turned self-fulfilling-prophecy that led the Finches to romanticize and obsess over death, take unnecessary risks, and never learn from their mistakes. 

But generally I see folks people point to Molly’s death as the event where this really got going. Like, obviously the ‘Curse’ existed long before this back in Norway - but its Molly’s death and Edie’s inability to process her own guilt in it that led her into a full-on obsession with the ‘Family Curse’ that eventually doomed almost her entire beloved family. And while I don’t deny that the loss of Molly was certainly an important step in Edie’s obsession- I’d say the true inception of it all was quite a bit earlier, back when Edie lost her father and her house.

Because the loss of that old house has clearly left a huge mark on Edie, it haunted her dreams every night of her long life - she spent what was probably her last few days on earth writing a story about it. And what is Edie’s biggest problem? She clings, she never lets the past go. In her own whimsical and cheerful way, she’s in a state of permanent mourning. Every death story is retold and mythologized, every dead child’s room is meticulously preserved as the day they died (to the point of making one of her sons share a room with his dead twin for 11 years), the New Finch House can rarely actually change - it can only grow. And I do believe that this obsession with preserving the past is born of the time Edie had to watch all the past she had at that time drown beneath the waves alongside her father.

We really can’t know what sort of memorialization traditions the Finches had back in Norway. We’ve never being inside of the Old House, not even in Edie’s story. And according to Edith’s narration, Odin built it - so it probably hasn’t been around for enough generations for the Finch tendency to cling to the past to be as evident as with the outside architecture of the New House. 

But I feel like it’s very probable that while Edie really took it to another level, the Finches had a tradition of memorialization for a long time. There’s a reason why Odin was so insistent of sailing his entire damn house across the ocean. And when it drowned, Edie didn’t just lose her daddy and her childhood home - but also everything that connected her to the dead Finches that came before her. There’s a reason why we know almost nothing about Ingeborg, Edie’s mother, all of her possessions and pictures have been lost when the house sunk. Odin probably only kinda avoided that fate on account of being a kinda-known writer, so his books and pictures of him were still available outside the House. But who knows many other Finches’ memories were buried under the waves.

During Edith’s flashback of her last day in the house, you can see some of Edie’s post-it notes about ‘the History of the Finches’, full of names neither Edith nor the player can recognize. 

And when Dawn pulls the book away from Edith, you can see a few lines that were not narrated to us. 

“And I wasn't alone. I started seeing things. The bed I shared with my sister. The chair my grandmother died in. The clock I used to hide inside of.”

All of these people were once just as real as Louis, Dawn and Edie were to Edith - but how much of them was really left after decades of existing only in Edie Finch’s mind? How many of these names Edie remembered and how many did she have to guess at inside the fog of her memories? Does Edie really remember the chair her grandmother died in or did she have to hesitate wandering if it was a sofa instead? Did she even remember her own mother’s face by the end? 

The true tragedy of Edie’s book isn’t really that Edith never got a chance to read more of it. We know the other entrance to the library exists, if Edith was truly driven she could have tried finding that key (gathering up the torn book honestly wouldn’t be that much of a worry, it seems to have basically into two big halves, after all). The reason why the Player never gets to read on is cause I think Edith realized that this book was just pure fantasy.

And not just in the sense that there wasn’t ever any freak earthquake and low tide that allowed the Old Finch House to resurface, in the sense that whatever Edie wrote about meeting or discovering in the Old House was stitched together from the half-remembered memories and wishful thinking of a grief-stricken old woman. There was nothing there that would’ve truly brought Edith (or her son, or the Player) more information about the family history or the ‘Curse’. It could only teach her about what great grandma Edie wanted to be true, and what she wanted most of all is see that Old House again. To once again, for the first time in years... feel like she was home. To meet all these people she lost and can’t preserve eternally like she thought she could with her new family. To have something from them she can preserve. To be able to tell Edith about her sister and uncle and grandmother and mother. To truly remember them again. But she can’t. All of these ideas as such of a fantasy as the Old House rebuilding itself before her eyes. And that’s the true tragedy of ‘The History of the Finches”.

Edie was so resistant to Dawn’s attempts to move away from the family obsession with death because she thought she knew what it feels like to let go, what it feels like to move on. And it feels like all of her family and memories drowning beneath the waves. The roof peeking over the shore a constant reminder of all that she lost. And cause the Finches are not really good at finding a happy medium, all Edie knows is to cling to the past, to everything she can lose, to her house. Even as her obsession exacerbated the ‘Family Curse’ - until all her family died or left her. Until Edit Sr. ‘Edie’ Finch died all alone in her big empty house, surrounded by her perfectly preserved memories of her dead children.

Like I mentioned at the start, I think the ‘Curse’ became a self-fulfilling prophecy partially because it led to a mindset that never learns from mistakes. If every death is a manifestation of a supernatural blight upon the family line, then there’s no point at looking at a tragic death of a child as a mistake that might’ve been prevented, then there’s no attempt to avoid similar mistakes in the future. And Odin’s death is really the encapsulation of that problem. 

Odin supposedly moved to America in the hopes of leaving the curse behind and moving on, but just like his daughter, he was seemingly incapable of actually leaving anything behind. He sailed his entire goddam house across the ocean (and through either the arctic circle or the Panama Canal cause the Finches live on the State of Washington) because he was so unable to part with any of the memories imbued within it. And how did that end? With both Odin and his precious home buried beneath the waves forever. If Odin was able to admit he can’t take everything with him to America, he could’ve simply taken the most important mementos of his dead wife and child and the Finch Family History in general and be able to actually preserve some of his memories in his new home. Or at the very  least let his daughter keep at least some pictures of her own darn mother. Instead of losing everything, including his own life.

But for Edie, this whole story didn’t seem like an almost-parable-like narrative about how clinging too hard to the past might just mean destroying it more thoroughly. It just seemed to her like the Curse striking again, making it clear it will follow the Finches everywhere in the most poetic way possible. So instead of learning any sort of lesson from what happened to Odin, she glorified and romanticized the actions of her father. Built him a monument that made him seem like some sort of hero. She reveled in the story of the house that sailed across the ocean and almost made it ashore. And then just set on making his exact same mistake, over and over again.

[missaphelion]

M/M Book Recs (mostly alien/human for some reason???)

I have been on a book reading binge this entire year since I've sorta just been in and out of my old fandoms, and I've found some really good ones (and some really bad ones) so I thought I would share the good! Most are available on Kindle Unlimited, though I think at least one is only available for sale!

1 Pykh Series by Eileen Glass

To look at the covers, this looks like any other cheesy alien romance on Kindle Unlimited (which are fine if that's what you're looking for- sometimes I am too!), but it's actually an amazing story of relationships and worldbuilding and probably in my top twenty of all time favorites for how much I love it. I generally don't like polyamory in my stories, either, but I am a believer after this. It also has omega dynamics - of a sort. Carter, the stranded human, is not an omega in the fanfic sense but he is treated as one by the aliens. It does still end in mpreg, if that's a deal breaker for you!

This amazing outright saga starts with a huge language barrier that lasts through book two, and uses shifting POVs to an amazing effect. Generally I get bored and impatient when they can't understand each other, but this uses their inability to communicate, and the ways they do find to communicate, just amazingly. I really love everything about it. I'm on book three on a reread and I just read them for the first time a couple of months ago. I cannot recommend this enough!

2 The Devils of Vitality by Chani Lynn Feener

This one is very dark, so be warned! The author includes extensive warnings at the beginning of each book, which should be read if you have any triggers at all or even if you just want to know what you're getting into. It is basically a story about space mafia and space royalty and the people they decide will be theirs no matter what. The worldbuilding spills into other books by the author as well and take place on other planets in the same universe, which I find fascinating. I read them all and in order, but These Silent Stars and Devil May Care are by far my favorites (Devil May Care also has another book related the author wrote under a pen name, of one of the characters brothers His Dark Paradox). If obsessive leads, touch him and you die tropes, and very dysfunctional relationships are your thing, you'll probably love this series as much as I do. However, most of them do include rape between the main pairings so give this one a pass if you cannot suspend your disbelief that they will end up happily ever after!

3 A Whisper in the Dark by Chani Lynn Feener

Takes place in the universe from Devils of Vitality but a different world, and I might love this one most of all. It works as a sort of prequel to the dynamics of the 'Shouts' who have powers in the series and introduces a not before seen secret counterpart. There is such a fascinating and tragic backstory for the characters where you can see how things could have been so different if just a couple things had changed, but everything went wrong so it ends up an enemies to lovers brilliantly and seamlessly done. I have read the big 'reveal' scene of this story about eight times. I am obsessed. I would also say it's not as dark as the other series, even though they still do horrible things to each other they have good reasons in this, the enemies part is no joke in the beginning!

4 Guiding Desire by Alexa Piper

This series is AMAZING. Anyone that has stalked the "Sentinels and Guides are Known" tag on A03 is almost guaranteed to adore this. They are 'Guardians' and 'Conduits' instead, but the dynamics and set up is very similar and so enthralling. I can't remember ever seeing anything like this in an original novel before (if anyone else has, please let me know!). This starts with one of my favorite tropes, hidden powers revealed! When a Guardian randomly stumbles on his Conduit who somehow slipped past the required testing, he gets swept away into the new world. Quick warning though, the third book just left us on a terrible cliffhanger! I was devastated. So if you can't stand cliffhangers like me, book 2 mostly ends at a better stopping point while we wait for the next book.

5 How to Train Your Human Omega by Arden Fox

You are probably reading this list thinking I have a type, and yes, I am now discovering that as well. It shouldn't be shocking based on my usual fanfic selections, but somehow it is. Apparently surprise alien abduction romances are my thing now, and I regret nothing. This one is another one that just has such great characters it transcends the genre, and it also has no mpreg if that scared you off the Pyhk series! Clay is just an ordinary human, but out of the whole human ship he's on that gets boarded, he's the only one that an alien is claiming is an omega and therefore his.

Honorable Mentions for alien romances (alien abduction romances??)!

The Alien's Omega by Sienna Sway is sort of like a super fun, less stakes version of the Pykh series. I've enjoyed every one of them and a fourth is coming out soon focusing on the alien culture. The characters are likable, the world is very cool, and progression in the series is perfection. It's not just the same thing again and again, things are evolving as it goes on.

The Star Marked Warriors Book 1 is basically more of the same, but again it was a quick, fun read! And a great nod to cat lovers like me. Not included on the list because I didn't actually read past the first book in the trilogy, but I may end up revisiting it! This one is probably the healthiest relationship dynamics for an alien abduction type story that I've seen, if you're not a fan of the darker stuff.

Akar Chronicles by Kiki Burrelli. The first book had me completely hooked, but not included on the list because I liked the second book a bit less and the third book almost not at all. None of that was for the writing, which is still great across the board, and just because I tend to attach to characters and Phoenix, the main character of the first book, was my absolute favorite, and is in the next two books much less. I'm still considering binding this one, since it's not available in print yet, and I want Phoenix's story on my shelf. The first book definitely made the whole series worth it for me.

Note: If anyone is interested in more recs of the less alien more human mafia/shifter recs, let me know!

[sapphire-weapon]

In an attempt to organize all of my thoughts and finally get this shit out of my system, I wrote up a complete, comprehensive listing of all of the things I loved about Final Fantasy XVI, all the things I hated about it, and all of the things that were equal parts good and bad.

Massive spoilers abound here. Hopefully, by the end of it, it’s easier to understand why I’m so stuck on this game and why I can’t really settle on a firm opinion of it being good or bad. 

FFXVI is an excellent game, except for all of the ways that it sucks.

BAD

- Some quality of life issues. The inability to pull up the world map from town or the middle of a zone was huge for me. Having to fast-travel to an obelisk to go to the actual exit of a zone just to go somewhere else was an extra unnecessary step that didn't need to happen. The inability to switch your button inputs was obnoxious, too, and hitting R1 to dodge never came to feel natural. I also hated that I couldn't turn off certain elements of the HUD. Just little things like that, here and there.

- The treatment of female characters leaves a lot to be desired in this game. There are only four major, named female characters in this game: Jill, Anabella, Benedikta, and Mid. The only one who didn't get cheated/fucked over by a lack of care from the writers was Mid -- and, wouldn't you know it, she has the smallest role of the four of them.

I'll go into the whole thing with Jill when we talk about her character specifically, but Anabella is basically like "what if Cersei Lannister was explicitly a Nazi and then, instead of having a dynamic character arc, she just killed herself?" Anabella's entire character motivation is literally just "because eugenics" -- and, as a result, basically all of her character dialogue is centered around that point. The game never goes into who she is as a person outside of being a Nazi bitch. She has one interesting conversation with Clive towards the end of her role where she surprises the audience (and Clive himself) by saying "It should've been you [, not Joshua, to be Phoenix's Dominant]! Why couldn't it have been you?" but then the conversation gets cut off because the Bahamut fight has to happen now.

And the one window of opportunity where it looked like her character was going to get deeper -- when she looks at Joshua and yells "I will not let you take me, shadow!" and makes us think that maybe she's not actually a Nazi and has been Ultima's thrall since maybe before Clive was even born? Instead of going into it, she just kills herself and then is never mentioned again outside of "hey remember that time when mom" stories.

Benedikta didn't fare much better. She was actually a really great character with a fantastic role back when the theme of the game was still "the consequence of unchecked power and anger in the blind pursuit of vengeance" -- but as soon as the game decides it's suddenly not going to be about that anymore because fuck you, you kind of just have to look back on Benedikta and ask "What was the point of her, actually?"

And Mid, again, is fine -- but she also doesn't do a whole lot. She's your token engineer/genki girl character rolled up into one. Think X's Rikku but with more actual charisma/likeability and no battle prowess so she never actually joins your party. And she doesn't even come in until halfway through the game.

And that's it, that's your female cast. There are other side characters like Charon and Vivian -- and Charon is great for a myriad of reasons -- but they're still just minor side characters.

- Eikon battles. I know that this is going to be the most contentious thing I say in this write-up, so let me just say that I am already aware that this is actually mostly a me problem. For whatever reason, my particular blend of astigmatism and ADHD made it almost impossible for me to follow anything that was happening on screen during an Eikon fight, with the exception of Garuda and Titan. Everything else was just too much happening all at once. And the very final Eikon fight you do? I could not make heads or tails of ANYTHING I was looking at because of the color palette, and I just kind of had to mash buttons and hope for the best.

But that's the only part of it that's a me problem. the rest of it is legitimate criticism. We need to talk about all the stupid bullshit that actually happens in those fights.

We need to talk about the fact that Phoenix and Ifrit did the fusion dance in outer space while fighting Bahamut. Because that shit almost made me turn the game off and never turn it back on again.

I don't care that it happened, necessarily. I care how it happened. That whole time, I just kept repeating in my head "thirteen years. Clive thought Joshua was dead for thirteen years. THIRTEEN YEARS. THIR.TEEN.YEARS. HE HAD REGULAR TRAUMA FLASHBACKS ABOUT IT. HE ALMOST KILLED HIMSELF OVER IT. AND THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING ON MY SCREEN RIGHT NOW BEFORE THEY'VE EVEN SAID HELLO"

The entire game is so serious and grounded and somber and gritty, but the second an Eikon fight starts, it's suddenly Dragon Ball Z, and we're expected to just go with it. And I mean, I love Dragon Ball Z. I've been in that fandom for over 25 fuckin years. But the Eikon battles were so tonally dissonant from the rest of the game that it was immersion-breaking and jarring every single time. Clive and Joshua actually have the dialogue exchange of "What can we do against that kind of power?" "We'll just have to believe in our own." before even having the "holy shit you're alive" conversation.

THIRTEEN YEARS.

THIRTEEN FUCKING YEARS.

I can't. It was awful. But this also ties into...

- The story/story structure in general. I've talked about this before. Used the analogy "if you took the cast of Uncharted and put them into Indigo Prophecy" but I've actually thought of one better. FFXVI is like a version of Silent Hill 2 where, halfway through the game, James reunited with Mary because she wasn't actually dead at all, and then the two of them teamed up to fight god. But then she died for real right before the ending. But then she came back again after, so it's still fine, actually.

That's Final Fantasy XVI.

The entire first half of the game is a red herring. It's bullshit. It's garbage. Throw it in the trash and forget about it, because the game sure as fuck did. FFXVI sets itself up to be a game about the person that Clive has chosen to become in the wake of his horrible trauma in a world that has taken so much from him. Then, at about the halfway point, the game goes "jk that horrible thing that Clive's entire personality has been shaped around never actually happened" and all of Clive's trauma symptoms literally disappear and are never brought up or alluded to ever again. Now, suddenly, the game is not about his personal quest of self-discovery -- but rather is now just Diet Supernatural: a story about the bond between two brothers who have to face off against god and defy their own fate.

cool.

And Clive and Joshua never talk about it. There's never a "hey what have you been up to for the past eighteen years?" conversation. No. After their super short-lived tearful reunion, they just immediately start interacting as though the two of them have always been together and they both know each other super well inside and out, despite the fact that the last time Clive saw Joshua, Joshua was eight fucking years old. And now he's a 26-year-old twink who's carrying an eldritch horror around in his chest and who lowkey wants to fuck Cid's daughter and is possibly bisexual and also wants to fuck Dion. And the last time Joshua saw Clive, Clive was a fifteen-year-old Good Boy who was a proper role model and just wanted to be loved and noticed. And now he's a 33-year-old former serial killer (and the "former" part is even questionable) who killed literally hundreds of men and then tried to kill himself in an attempt to avenge the murder of Joshua, which never actually fucking happened.

coolcoolcool.

I hate this fucking game.

But I also love it.

GOOD

+ The game gave me on-screen naked Clive not one, not two, but three different times. And of those three times, two of them ended up being sexual in nature. And the other one is uh... him naked and in chains, screaming and cursing and crying. thank u Yoshi-P. thank u.

+ Every character that's not listed on the "both good & bad" list, but I need to give a special shout-out to:

+ Ultima as a villain. His general vibe gave me the heebies in a way vidya villains haven't in a long time. His character design is phenomenal, his voice actor knocked it out of the park, and he has just enough of a background that you get where he's coming from, but it's not so over-explained that you wind up wanting to take his side instead (which has been a pitfall of Final Fantasy games in the past)

+ Music/sound design is excellent

+ This game is a graphical marvel. There's no disputing it.

+ Maps are a perfect size and make the world feel real

+ Worldbuilding is probably the best I've seen in a Final Fantasy title, if not in video games in general. Every nation in Valisthea felt distinct. Every location was fully thought-out, had its own history, and made sense. This is the only game that I have ever, in my 33 years of life, actually walked around every single town instead of running. I was that immersed in the world.

+ The combat system -- though I would technically list this as "good but with room for improvement." I disagree with Ryota Suzuki's opinion that this is the best combat system he's ever made. It's not. DMC5 is better by leaps and bounds. If FFXVI had an expanded abilities section that allowed you to put points into getting new moves and different regular melee combos (in addition to all of the Eikon abilities that are already there), then the combat would be Suzuki's best made. It's still great, don't get me wrong. But as someone who came into this game with a Devil May Cry background, my only options for regular attacks being Square, Triangle, Square+Triangle, Square+X and then nothing else was... lacking. Give me more of Nero's moveset, and that's the winning formula right there.

BOTH GOOD & BAD

Jill Warrick + fantastic concept, design, acting, and dialogue - underbaked and shoehorned backstory - shoved out of the story at basically the zero hour to make room for a male character

Personality-wise, Jill is one of the strongest-written women in Final Fantasy. Full stop. She stands shoulder-to-shoulder with greats like Aeris and Yuna in the sense that she feels like a real person with her own strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, vulnerabilities, courage, causes that she fights for, moral lines she won't cross, etc. etc. Very rarely does she just feel like an extension of Clive, or like she's only there to service his character arc/characterization (except towards the end, but we'll get to that later). She's likeable and consistent, and the game does a good job of making you want to be with her. I love her, and I want to be her when I grow up, but until then, I'll settle for just being her friend and braiding her hair at sleepovers.

Unfortunately, Jill's greatness pretty much only extends to her personality. They tried to give her a war criminal background, but the writers didn't really seem to care about it too much. She has an entire gameplay sequence/arc dedicated to her trying to confront/settle her war criminal past, but the game never really goes into what, actually and specifically, she did? Sure, she was put out onto the battlefield and killed a lot of soldiers, but she keeps referring to "horrible things" that she's had to do, and the game never decides to tell us what those horrible things actually were.

We're told that the guy who was keeping her captive also did horrible things -- worse things than Jill, herself, even had to do -- but we don't get to learn what these things are, either. We see him about to human sacrifice two kids, but is that really all it was? Child murder? Honey, it's war. Child murder happens. From the way Jill talks about it, it sounds more like horribly violent sexual assault and gruesome, drawn-out torture, but... shrug, I guess. We'll never know. We're not allowed to know. All we're allowed to know is that Jill just has to kill him, and then her past will be settled. So she kills him. And then her past is settled.

And she has to settle her past so that she can feel justified in standing at Clive's side until the end of his fight... but then she's not allowed to do that. Because the story is so shitty.

At the halfway mark, when the game stops being about Clive's journey of self-discovery and starts being strictly about ~brothers~, Jill gets shoved out of the story in order to make room for Joshua to step in. The game uses the contrivance of Clive taking Shiva from her in order to justify Jill's disappearance from the narrative, but there's two big fucking problems with that:

1. Dion had Bahamut taken from him by Clive, too, and yet he still retained his Eikon powers because he just believed in himself really hard -- and we have no reason to believe that Dion's will is any stronger than Jill's. Jill went through an entire arc of making sure she was able to stand as Clive's equal, and then... nope. 2. You can re-recruit Jill into your party in order to do sidequests and explore the world with her before leaving for the final Ultima battle, and she still uses all of her fucking ice powers.

So, there's no actual reason for her to be excluded from shit other than "shut up it's about brothers now." The game even has the audacity to have Joshua say to Clive "we need to remind Jill that she's still one of us." How about this, Joshua? How about Clive and Jill should be the ones reminding you that you're one of them, since you only came into this story halfway through it and didn't actually build up a bond with either of them in adulthood like they did with each other???

Truly, horrendously awful. Jill should've been at that Ultima fight, and I will die on this hill.

Dion Lesage + INCREDIBLY compelling story overall + excellent emotional pull, strong personality + best gay rep I've ever seen in a game, I think. the fact that he's gay is actually the least interesting thing about him. - does not get enough screentime for how important his character is

I'mma just say it. Final Fantasy XVI should have been a deuteragonst setup akin to Yakuza 0 where you swap back and forth between Clive and Dion, because Dion is way too important to the story to get as little attention and screentime as he does. His struggle with being the only person with any power still in the Empire who has a sense of integrity is super interesting, as is his inner conflict of trying to reconcile who his father used to be vs who he's become. Dion Lesage answers the question nobody asked of "What if Faramir of Gondor was a gay dragon who actually staged a coup?" And it's just excellent. His frustration and his anger paired with his sense of justice and empathy makes him so incredibly compelling.

And even after the political side of the story winds down in the wake of the chaos and bullshit that's being wreaked on the Ultima side of things, Dion is still crucial to the plot. Clive could not have won against Ultima without Dion. And to not go into that more -- to not go further into Dion's drive to continue moving forward, or his vision for the Empire and the world and what he personally feels like he owes to humanity and how all of these pieces fit together -- is so disappointing. There's an obvious emotional void where more of Dion's character story should be.

If we do ever get DLC for this game, the very first thing we should get is a Dion DLC.

Joshua Rosfield + just an absolute delight of a character personality, probably one of my favorites in the whole game + interesting concept - has absolutely no business being in the story at all past the tutorial

I don't normally like Joshua's character archetype. "Somber, mystical twink" has never been a type to do it for me.

But Joshua is incredible -- because they actually allow him to be more than just his archetype. Most times, the somber, mystical twink is only every allowed to be somber and mystical. That character's role is to be the arbitrary keeper of magic bullshit. You're meant to want to protect them, but they don't have a whole lot going on beyond that particular purpose. But Joshua is allowed to joke and laugh and be angry and romantic -- just be an actual person.

One of the best scenes in the game is when he hauls off and just decks Clive right in the face. It's so shocking in the best way possible. He's not angry because of plot reasons getting in the way of his somber, mystical bullshit. He's angry because his brother pissed him off -- because, sometimes, people do shit that just pisses you off. And for tiny little twink Joshua to not use magic, but to just rear back and swing at the 250+lb slab of beef that is Clive and shout at him for being an asshole just felt so real and so human, and I felt so connected to him in that moment.

And the scene where he and Mid meet for the first time -- fantastic. Incredible. Amazing. Wouldn't have changed a single thing about it. Especially when Mid goes around giving everyone hugs later on and she kind of hesitates before actually committing to hugging Joshua. Love it.

Joshua is a character that is full of very pleasant surprises that make him feel multifacted and real. And so, when he does do his somber, mystical bullshit -- I actually cared and found it interesting. I found myself rooting for him and invested in the things he was learning and how he was piecing it all together. I was super into his secret hunt for Ultima and the fact that he was housing an eldritch horror in his chest.

There's only one big problem with Joshua: his continued existence in the story makes the entire narrative shit. And that's not his fault. But it is the reality.

I love Joshua Rosfield. I would fucking go out with him if he asked. I would give him his own game if I could.

But he should've never been written or allowed to exist, for all of the reasons I listed in the story section of the "bad" column.

And that just fucking sucks.

Clive Rosfield + I love him, your honor + I absolutely love him + I want him to make tender love to me in the black of night under a full moon as the sound of the ocean waves crashing against the sand fills in the empty space around us, just as he did with Jill - his entire character concept gets fucking deleted at the halfway mark of the story and is never seen or referenced again

Clive is special. He's the best example of positive masculinity this side of Kazuma Kiryu. He's not just a power fantasy; he's a caretaker and a brother and a son and a friend and a boyfriend. He cries visible tears on-screen at least half a dozen times in this game. He's allowed to be vulnerable in a lot of different ways. He's willing to say the words "I love you" in front of other people. His cries for help are genuine and real -- when Clive talks about suicide, he means it.

But he's also a killer. And he's myopic. And stubborn. And ruthless. Clive is a self-centered man who doesn't actually care about himself at all, and he tends to warp the world around him in his destructive selfishness. And I say all of this as praise for his character, by the way.

Both versions of him are great -- tortured Clive and brother Clive.

The issue is that there's two versions of him, and there really shouldn't be.

I won't keep beating the dead horse that is FFXVI forgetting what its own story is about and completely changing course halfway through, but the character that suffers most because of that decision is Clive. If you connected with him as a fellow trauma survivor, you're going to feel very alienated by him in the latter half of the game when he's suddenly not anymore.

I'm not saying that Clive should've been in a constant state of trauma throughout the entire game -- I'm saying that all of his trauma symptoms shouldn't have just disappeared and been forgotten about. Even with Joshua returned to him, that doesn't undo the damage that he sustained over the course of thirteen years of his life. Or, at least, it shouldn't. That's exactly what happens in the story, but it shouldn't be that way. The fact that he never even had a line akin to "I can't lose you again" when he's holding Joshua's lifeless body at the end was mindblowing. Clive didn't blame himself or hearken back to any of that old hurt at all, and I don't know how no one on the entire dev team didn't point this out. Because, as a result of that, his reaction to Joshua's death doesn't feel sincere.

It almost feels like the devs had two different versions of the game written up -- one where Joshua stayed dead the whole time, and one where he was never meant to have been dead at all -- and then they mashed the two of them together for the final product. As a result, Clive actually feels like two distinctly different characters sometimes. There's not an obvious throughline for him that there is with someone like, say, Cloud, who also had to go through a similar journey of trauma processing.

Again: both versions of Clive are great. But he should only have been one character with one continuous arc; not two different character concepts rolled into one.

Clive & Jill's romance + built up slowly and carefully over time; the bond feels real + very real in the sense that they're both in their 30s and are still just kind of aimlessly trying at a relationship, but not really sure where to go or how to get there + Jill's love for Clive literally saves his life during the ending - their romance is the excuse the writers used to delete Jill's importance in the story towards the end

Because of the way that the story plays out, it almost comes off like Jill's entire purpose was to build up a romance with Clive and nothing else. Like, they have a whole game's worth of bonding and development and all that other fun shit -- but the second she finally sleeps with him, she's out of the story. She's done.

I trust I don't have to explain why that's a problem.

So, they have this weird thing going on where they are simultaneously the best and the worst romance in Final Fantasy. The building of their relationship is incredible; the way that they bond and interact is organic and genuine. And they even actually get to be an actual couple in this game, which, to my knowledge, didn't really happen in any other Final Fantasy. They don't just have the one Big Romantic Kiss; they have several over the course of a pretty wide swath of time. Clive takes Jill out on a date and asks her where she wants the relationship to go. Like, actual real boyfriend shit happens.

It just happens at the expense of Jill's relevance in the narrative -- which just straight-up isn't fair.

Oh, and if you're not sure what I mean about Jill's love for him saving his life, go here.

Ben Starr (Clive)'s voice acting + absolutely stand-out fantastic in full cutscenes - so horrible in sidequests it felt like he was given no voice direction at all. every single line of dialogue is delivered exactly the same. every time. and it's a fucking shame, because Clive is actually hilarious, but the botched delivery of the lines does not convey it.

A "more mature" Final Fantasy + the blood and sex and brutality was great and helped the characters feel more like actual real people. letting the characters curse was also great, but - bro tone down the swearing. it's cartoonish, after a while. almost started to feel like the writers were having a competition to see who could use the word "fuck" the most amount of times in a dialogue exchange. they used "fuck" for literally everything, when probably a "shit" or a "damn it" would have been better. and this is coming from someone who says the word "fuck" all the fucking time.

Sidequests + when the stories in the sidequests are good, they're GOOD. like, REALLY REALLY GOOD. - when they're not good, they're awful time-wasters and - there's no way of knowing whether a quest is going to be important/compelling or a waste of time when you start it, so every initiation of a quest is a roll of the dice - the actual activities you do during the quests are MMO-tier fetch quests or quick combat quests, which, to be fair, is also the same as the substories in Yakuza -- but the thing about Yakuza substories is that they're so over-the-top ridiculous that you don't notice that you're just performing very basic actions. the bad/boring sidequests in XVI really make you notice that that's all they are.

And that, my friends, is the summation of the strange paradox that is Final Fantasy XVI. Simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

[booklovingturtle]

Season 2 Thoughts (SPOILERS)

I’ll be breaking this down based on characters/ships so I wanna know if y’all have similar opinions or not!!! I want to hear different perspectives since I feel like we’re headed in a million different directions.

*Disclaimer these are my opinions on the show as an adaptation. Please disagree with me that's fine I want to hear other people's takes!

Part A: The Darkling, Alina, Mal, Malina

Darkling: Ben Barnes did fabulous of course. I have almost nothing negative to say about his character or his ending. My biggest critique was that they rushed to get him dead to the point where we wasted the potential of a bigger, power struggle within Ravka between the grisha/humans. Similar to the first season I wish that there was less of a romantic undertone to his motivation in regards to Alina. He’s a more compelling villain if he’s truly just power-hungry and driven mad by his own desire. I wish that his moment of peace wasn’t the case with her, but instead had something to do with his actual motivation for saving and protecting Grisha

Alina: Jessie is a phenomenal actress. Every single emotion felt so genuine. Similar to the books, I was kind of annoyed with Alina’s inability to make actual decisions. In the books, I felt like she only ever acted when she quite literally was backed into a corner, and it was pretty much the same way in season 1 & most of 2. I’m super upset that we never got white hair Alina honestly that was such a bad decision, not story wise, but fandom wise. I’m not sure how I feel about this new direction that we’re taking it. One of the plot points in the books was whether or not Alina would answer the call to darkness. This entire season I was annoyed with how selfish she was being with Mal. so many people died, because she didn’t wanna kill him which I understand but then she continues to be selfish by using the dark magic thing to bring him back and so in my opinion, my girl was always listening to that dark call, but maybe that was their intention! All I know is that if Alina does become antagonistic (even if it’s just for a limited time), Jessie will play her just as a effortlessly as she did in the past. LOVE JESSIE. Alina’s character arc was still something that was kind of being pushed onto her versus something that she was actively choosing. I’m most interested to hear other peoples opinions about her character specifically.

Mal: I actually really like the changes they made to Mal. I truly don’t remember the book version of him at all. Not his lore or connection to Alina or his tracking secret power  or anything. I like that he’s taking on the Sturmhond name. That was a very natural next step for his character arc.

Malina: I still like them better in the show than the books. Unfortunately for the most part Mal/Alina have no motivation in this season outside of each other. Which honestly wouldn’t be that big of a deal if they weren’t trying to push the idea that Alina was also a benevolent, reluctant chosen one. Even though I ship them, I’m actually really glad that they will be separated moving forward. I hope that we get to explore them as individuals. The characters should get to find motivations outside of each other that are genuine, and not for the sake of plot convenience.

[nevis-the-skeleton]

tfp starscream ! (cosmics-beings!)

First impression :

So, to contextualize, before watching TFP I watched Cyberverse, and I was just starting to discover Transformers. I still had trouble remembering the names of the characters, or recognizing them. So when I watched the first episode of TFP and found that Starscream didn't look like this anymore:

But like this:

I gone crazy. Also, I found him terrifying at first XD (not to mention Soundwave). I remember asking my sister to press pause, and I cried saying that Starscream and Soundwave scared me XD. It was especially the claws and the look of Starscream that terrified me. I also yelled that they changed the colors which caused me to be lost (because I spot a character or image mostly with the colors). Don't judge me I was discovering Transformers, I was still a novice X).

Impression now :

I love Starscream TFP! Without contest ! He is the most complex and the most brilliant character of the series in my eyes! He's the one who made me love Transformers and the others Starscreams! That's mean a lot! His character, his way of thinking, there's so much to do with this character that he's a real goldmine. I like characters with a strong character, and he has a character that is just incredible XD. Also, he's really cool! We sometimes forget it because Season 3 made a gag of him. But in fact he is incredibly determined, and really strong. Also, he's really pretty X3.

Starscream supremacy !

Favorite moment :

I have a lot of favorite moments with Starscream, but I'll make the effort to name only five X) (that's a lot already… Shhhh…) 1- When he saves Arcee. In fact, I wasn't expecting it, so much that it almost moved me. It really showed me that this character could show pity, when they had never really given him any. It made me really appreciate him. 2- When he flees from Megatron, and manages to fly into a collapsing cave. Do you realize the skill it takes to do that?! It's just impressive! 3- When he goes to look for Breakdown, despite Megatron's orders. I know they're presented this as if he did it for his own benefit. But we must not forget that at the beginning of the episode, he tells Megatron that it is not right to leave Breakdown to his fate. It proves once again that he is much more "empathetic" than the others. Megatron doesn't care, and we never see KnockOut worry about it. 4- His many infiltrations in the Nemesis, which apparently is not very well monitored XD. But one in particular is the chase with the Vehicons, he once again has so much flow in the air, really it's magnificent! 5- The episode in Antarctica, the scene with the Apex Armor is really great. And also it made me happy to see him let off steam a little, knowing that he had been roughed up during the whole episode. And above all, he wins for once! He's the one with the Apex Armor at the end!

Idea for a story :

I had a lot of stories ^^. There is of course "The Polar Star" (of which I am already writing Part 5 in French and Part 4 in English). The novel tells a version where Skyfire exists, and is found by Starscream and Optimus (during episode 13 of Season 2 precisely, with the Apex Armor). I just wanted to give Starscream some love, after being particularly frustrated with Season 3 and the movie. Summary :

Starscream was never very lucky, he knew it... But he didn’t think he was that lucky! He did not think that going to the Arctic to look for a relic would cause him so many problems... He had already had to avoid being destroyed by Dreadwing, and now he found himself prisoner by Optimus... Really, it was pure bad luck... Besides, because of his inability to fly, because of the damn MECH, he was more than destitute... This day could hardly be worse... When they found themselves in front of the ice block containing the relic, the Seeker noticed that it was not a relic inside... But, someone?! And this person is none other than... Skyfire! The ghosts of the past always end up coming back, often bringing back things that were supposed to be long gone... Things that could well change the future itself...

* My other story idea was a novel called "We are the same," and that version takes place at the start of Season 3. Starscream is devastated by the destruction of the Omega Keys, and gives up all reason to live. He then left the Decepticons, and hid in an old military hangar, to let himself starve. But what he didn't know was that a young human named Adler, who also often thinks of death, always takes refuge in this hangar when he's sad. They will each then meet someone who looks a lot like them, and try to enjoy life together (no ship of course, Adler is only 12 years old!)

Unpopular opinion :

Ok... Ready...? I hate Season 3 and the movie!

And, it's not just that I don't like it, I hate it. I know it's violent, and I wouldn't go so far as to hate for Season 3 (thank you Predaking). But the film is a definite no! There was so much injustice towards Starscream it was heartbreaking to watch! And Season 3 may be less hateful than the movie to me, but that doesn't take away the fact that the violence against Starscream was just awful. He really never had a break, and I had to put up with that, and not show anything because I wasn't watching alone…! I showed TFP to a friend, until Season 2, we watched together. Then I asked her to watch Season 3 on her own (I really don't want to watch this season again), and I advised against the film.

Favorite relationship :

Skyfire x Starscream without a doubt! I know that this ship is not possible normally, because Skyfire does not exist in TFP, but I don't care X). For me, no TFP character deserves Starscream, they were all too bad with him! Except maybe Optimus. Skyfire was just the touch of sweetness that was missing, and that Starscream needed in my opinion.

Favorite headcanon :

I like to think that Starscream isn't interrested by sexual stuffs or things like that, despite the fact he's looking very "sexy". I like to think that it's embarrassing him to talk about that.

Thanks for you ask ^^ @cosmics-beings

[true-blue-sonic]

At this point we probably have a good idea about all the things Silver is used to doing that would cause Espio to worry about him more often than he already does - you know, all that self-destructive type of "placing anything and everything before himself" and its inevitable consequences - but do you think there's anything Espio does that'd cause Silver to "extra worry" in a similar way? (also sorry if you've already been asked a question like this before, my brain's not really firing on all cylinders atm)

It's a very good question, because I struggle with finding out what Espio's flaws are. A problem I am kind of running into with my writing is that he is... too perfect. Does that make sense? But he can get himself out of basically every problem because he's well-trained and diligent, he's the straight man and good at being the straight man in most cases, he's soulful and intelligent, ruthless without it getting in the way of his actions or causing him to make mistakes, his more self-opinionated aggrandising is accentuated by the fact he's so good at fighting, and he is a nice blend of social and withdrawn alike. So... it feels like there is not much for Silver to worry about in the first place, because Espio is just really very good at handling himself. I really need to look into Espio more, because there must be something he's bad at, haha.

Hmm, now I am thinking. Espio does often get dragged along with Vector's and Charmy's shenanigans in Sonic X, definitely at times against his will. Would that be a flaw, that he gets steamrolled by his colleagues and their zany plans? I can see Silver worry about such a thing, because Silver is absolutely not someone who follows the herd and lets himself be mouthed off so easily. His way of reacting (namely in anger) is not the best response, but it is one wherein his mission and his values remain protected and unchanged until Silver himself begins to see that there's something wrong with them. Espio's meanwhile can get compromised when Vector and Charmy are being too forceful, maybe? That would make a good flaw. And in TMOSTH, if I remember correctly, Espio's also not so adept at lying and keeping his composure: he gets flustered somewhat easily when Tails and Barry begin pushing him. But Silver himself doesn't lie in the first place and has little composure to keep at times, so I feel like that is something he's less worried about.

So overall, a flaw I think Silver might worry about is Espio's inability to keep his values and decisions from getting overrun by his colleagues. But I think we can also conclude I might need to do more research on Espio to get a better grasp of his personality🤔

[jsbsam]

When is a Llama not a Llama?

For you regular followers of my twaddle you will remember that MM has had good reason to give me grief over my mistakes regarding national monuments in the past. Who could forget my inability to distinguish between a Temple and a Palace in Bangkok or, even worse, a priceless Japanese Bridge and roadworks in Hoi An in Vietnam. On this occasion I'm happy to report that the cock up is not mine for a change. But more of that later.

Today we visited the old town of Lima with our guide, Mabel - a good Inca name I thought! It turned out that we had her all to ourselves. She said it was because it's early in the season and we were her only bookings. I think that maybe the other 10 had heard that MM was in town. Bad news travels fast over here and, although they apparently have tuk tuks in some areas, we haven't seen hide nor hair of any. Her exploits in India in 2015 have gone down in tuk tuk folklore and have clearly travelled across the globe in the intervening years.

I digress. Mabel arrived bang on 9am and off we went to the old town where we were dropped off next to The Bolivar hotel, a beautiful but decaying building. Everyone who was anyone has stayed here from Kennedy to Mick Jagger. The hotel sits looking over the square that contains a statue in recognition of the Argentinian general (Jose de Saint Martin) who secured Peru independence in 1821. Interestingly, at that time only 10% of Peruvians wanted independence, 90% wanted to stay under Spanish rule! (So Jose was the equivalent to Nicola Sturgeon!). However, the rest of South America wanted Spain out so they united to fight the Spanish and Peruvian armies. Another couple of interesting facts that transpired from looking at the statue. On any statue of a man (or woman) on a horse if the horse has the 2 front legs in the air, then the rider died in battle. If only one leg is lifted (as in this case) the rider did not die in battle. However, if all 4 legs are grounded the the rider was never in a battle. Also, for statues of the virgin Mary, if she has her hands together, then it's before she was a mother, if her arms are open, then she's given birth to Jesus. Fascinating! When you see the photo's you will see a picture of the angel of liberty on the front of the statue of our friend Jose with a tiny Llama on her head. You may wonder why this is. Fortunately for you, I am here to explain as it is quite unusual. Although this is a Peruvian statue, it was commissioned in Spain. In Spanish “Llamas" has several meanings. It can mean Llama the animal, flame or name. So the sculptor was asked to provide a "statue of the angel of liberty with a llamas (name) above". So, when is a llamas not a llamas? Crazy.

It really was an interesting tour and Mabel really knew her history. I would strongly recommend it if you visit Lima.

We also saw the sun for the first time today. Apparently, the Peruvians nickname for Lima is "the donkeys belly" because it's always grey here. However, it hardly ever rains either. They occasionally get drizzle but maybe only 2mm of rain a year.

I'm glad we've spent a couple of days here. It was more interesting than I thought it would be and we've learnt quite a lot.

Tomorrow we fly up to Cuzco and find out how badly we'll suffer from altitude sickness!