#and that was less than a year into the pause

[sgiandubh]

The case against 'sharenting'

Yesterday, an Anon @bat-cat-reader got made me think. Long and hard, far and wide - research included.

Here is the Anon: https://www.tumblr.com/bat-cat-reader/750859423333908480/lo-bueno-de-estar-revisando-redes-constantemente?source=share . I wanted to piggyback first, then I realized the issue was way more important than the person in question. And decided to post everything separately.

Loved this very matter of fact, calm Anon and I totally agree with what was said about overexposing a child online.

This sudden surge of completely inappropriate information about that child raised an eyebrow, and then some more. It begs, as always when dealing with minors, the question of privacy, as opposed to using their image for what obviously is self-promotion. And more generally, what is called 'sharenting', a portmanteau combining 'sharing' (info) and 'parenting' that was quite recently invented by The Wall Street Journal to describe a more and more widespread phenomenon.

That some parents would just love to have and even share digital mementoes of their child(ren) is apparently ok. Others, however, choose to monetize their kids, turning them into a sales argument. I am still floored at such disingenuous choices, that might have serious consequences for their future. And I am not the only one, mind you: a 2018 report by England's Children Commissioner, the leading government official competent for protecting and promoting children's rights, found out that parental digital oversharing is a high risk behavior for the child.

Short term, as in identity theft ...

... to long term, as in lost academic or professional opportunities - the 2018 warning made only more compelling by the recent AI craze:

[Source: England's Children Commissioner Report 'Who Knows What About Me?', 2018 - online: https://assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2018/11/cco-who-knows-what-about-me.pdf]

You'll find this very recent article from The Guardian absolutely enlightening, too. I certainly did: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/26/son-social-media-parents-children

Particularly this - I am not a mom, so Mordor bitches will certainly point this salient detail out, you see. But maybe this journalist mom's POV could give them (and maybe even other people) pause:

Pedophile. Quite chilling, right? Pedophile rings actively searching for children photos inadvertently being shared online, to feed sick obsessions worldwide (do not be parochial and think those pics must be of an ambiguous nature!). Instagram being currently in very hot water for its strange content promoting algorithm, allowing pedophiles to easily access children photos and personal data, based on exif. Digital kidnapping, as in criminals pretending to be the child's parents, for various financial or pathological reasons.

Think I am a stupid, stupid shipper with an agenda? Then so is the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Commission. Last year, a joint statement has been released by two if its members (and before Mordor starts screeching about 'the MAGA mommies obsession for pedophilia', let it be said it is a bipartisan, Democrat and Republican initiative), about the fact that 'Instagram hosts a vast network of pedophilic content and that its algorithms are actively driving users to this content':

[Source: https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/pallone-rodgers-demand-answers-from-instagram-after-reports-the-platform-is-driving-users-to-child-sex-abuse-material]

It followed a long report on Instagram's less than responsible practices in the matter, published by The Wall Street Journal, not your next door digital gossip rag (subscribers only, but you'll have an idea: https://www.wsj.com/articles/instagram-vast-pedophile-network-4ab7189?st=mbga8lpdddfm5dh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)

Mark this statement: 'It is clear these companies cannot be trusted to protect children on their platforms'. I, not even a mom (but an aunt, a friend and a godmother, too), cannot even start to express my disgust at the hypocrisy of barely hiding children's faces on a certain blog, but at the same time allowing rabid speculation about a child's whereabouts, based on what is clearly a case of sharenting. All the mothers, grandmothers and aunts commenting under that post would have to take a long, hard look at themselves in a mirror. And also ask themselves why they allowed their personal fantasy to get an upper hand on common sense?

That is a terrible, terrible shame. And then people wonder why is C not sharing anything? Would you share your kid(s) to that mob? I wouldn't and it is my strong belief no mother in her right mind would.

Last but not least, reckless digital behavior comes with risks, costs and consequences. Including legal ones, taking into account what very probably is some loose, rather informal agreement of co-parenting (as opposed to a stricter, 50/50 shared custody system), as per Scottish family law. Something I shall briefly try to explain, for context purposes only:

Unlike many other legal systems in the world, the 1995 Scottish Children Act has a slightly different approach to custody (or what they call 'residence'), in which the child's best interest, as well as the parents' own agreement (called a Parenting Plan) are paramount. By the same token, it does not matter if the parents were married or just common law partners, for example. This allows for less cumbersome living and financial arrangements, provided the two parties agree, and also for quicker procedures, as the law does not encourage parents to go to Court, if an agreement has been reached ('no-order principle'). Mediation and legal assistance services are readily available to make every particular case fit in the local Parenting Plan framework. On the other hand, because in legal matters all things are (must be, really) symmetrical, it is relatively easy to have parental rights and responsibilities enforced (example: issue an order stipulating to cease and desist from posting on Instagram), or even removed, in Court. While removal is a bit of a hassle (supporting statements are required, either from an independent witness/not a relative or Social Welfare Services), the enforcement is way easier and just requires a basic contradictory procedure in Court.

For example, a child's proven overexposure on the Internet can very well be successfully contended in Court, if things go South. Especially in an emotionally loaded local context:

[Source: https://news.sky.com/story/seven-members-of-paedophile-gang-guilty-of-running-monstrous-child-sex-abuse-ring-13008082 - you read the article if you want, it's brutal]

I am not saying this will happen. What I am trying to say is simply that nobody (and I repeat: nobody) should play with fire, like this. Neither the parent, nor the public. This is a plea for decency across the dashboard I strongly felt I should make, if others won't.

No shitshow, no fantasy, no obsession should ever put a child's life at potential risk like that. You see, children are rarely asked if they would like to be shown off as circus monkeys.

[blood-mocha-latte]

Hi, I need an outsider's pov of postwar luztoye please, if that seems interesting enough to distract you from other tasks. 😅 Maybe a little old lady who lives next door and brings those nice boys a pie sometimes because George fixed her radio while Joe let her talk his ear off about her son who doesn't visit?

bestie i took this and RAN with it, so i'm hoping this is okay and/or what you were thinking! it got... longer, than i was expecting, but i hope you enjoy <3

---

It’s been lonely, since Lulu died.

The mutt managed to make it seventeen years before kicking it, so she counts it as a victory as best she can. 

Still, the apartment is often too quiet, so she’s grateful for the book club, even if her guest is quieter than the dead dog. 

Book club is probably pushing it, as at best it’s a mangy meeting to discuss books that neither of them necessarily enjoy. 

Still, they’re classics, and she’d like to read them at least once before she herself kicks it. Toye doesn’t seem prone to disagree with her, anyways, just sits grudgingly in the chair across from her, one crutch propped up against the armrest and the other in his lap

She looks over at him, amused. There’s a dark dip between his brows, a telltale sign of focus where focus isn’t necessarily wanted. 

“You can just pretend to read it, you know.” She says. It takes him a moment to look up at her, to pull away from the page.

“What? Oh.” He looked down at the open book in his lap. Her own was kept steady with her palm to its spine. “No, it’s fine.” Silence, for a beat. A pause. “It’s okay. It’s — this is George’s favorite.” He goes back to reading. 

She’d figured as much. The copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray that he’d shown up with was obviously well-loved: the spine cracked and pressed white, yellowing pages littered with pencil markings. Toye treats it like a landmine, like it's liable to break completely in his hands.

She presses back her smile and looked down at her own copy, newly bought. “Alright.” She murmurs, and that's that. 

---

They’d moved in maybe a year and a half ago, and the only reason she knew who either of them were at all was because she’d tripped down the last two steps outside of her own building and the one with two legs had seen her and helped her back up and to her own place.

The rest didn’t really matter, and she found it rather boring. What matters is that she invited the one with two legs up for dinner as a form of gratitude and he’d shown up with the one with one leg that looked a little rougher around the edges and that was that.

---

The one with two legs was Luz, who worked every day, and the other one was Toye, who worked every three days. On Fridays, Toye would come over for her self proclaimed book club with whatever she’d deigned best to read.

“I think it’s a load of crock.” She tells Toye on one of these Fridays, flipping through her pick of the week distastefully. “Overall written alright, but underall it’s garbage. What a worthless read.”

Toye is always generous enough not to mention that she’s always the one to choose the books. “I think there could be a point to it.” He says, always hoarser than she’d think he’d sound, and he talks so very little that she should probably be less tetchy. Still, bad habits are hard to break, and she scoffs.

“Yeah, and what would that be? Fate or God’s plan? Because neither seem to be good and neither are anything close to happening, no matter how much you pray.” She flipped through another few pages disdainfully. Toye’s own copy sat carefully in his lap, and he deigned not to touch it, tapping his fingers instead against the wood of the crutch that stayed across his lap.

“I don’t know.” He said, glanced out of her window. She knew why, and didn’t have to follow his gaze. The only reason that Luz had seen her at all when she had fallen was because they lived directly across from each other, right down to the building's story and window make. “There’s a testament to things falling into place.”

There’s something fragile resting along the lines of his face, and she has to pause for a moment, remind herself how utterly young he is. How young the both of them are.

She has a husband in a cemetery she isn’t able to get to anymore, because the streets are too crowded and her knees are too bad, and a son that’s lost forever in the mud in some godforsaken island in the Pacific, and if praying could have prevented that, they’d still be with her. 

She doesn’t say any of that. She watches Toye’s face carefully before huffing and looking back down to her own book. “I want to read another Shakespeare, next.” She says. “I think he’s an overrated rats’ ass, and you can quote me on that.”

---

On the same Friday’s where she hosts book club, Luz will come by after he’s done at wherever he works with some sort of tupperware of something and they’ll eat dinner with her.

She’d never tell them, but it feels less like an embarrassing sort of pity, when one of them only has one leg. 

“I think that he was a hack, God rest his soul.” She tells them one day, because they’ll listen to her, and she was thinking about it earlier, and there wasn’t even Lulu to tell. “I mean, do all you want and bow to him in whatever, but he was a right fool. I think that it was that wife of his that kept him in line, more than anything.”

Luz is smiling into his own bowl of food, and he’s prone to doing that. He won’t look at her, like he’s worried he’ll burst out laughing if he does, but she doesn’t mind. She came to the conclusion a long time ago that he just likes laughing, and she won’t care much if he does so because of her.

Toye’s always more serious, nods and is able to meet her face and send annoyed looks at the man at his elbow, who usually sits on the floor next to her stuffed armchair. “Eleanor’s a hell of a lady.” He says, and she nods at him, approving.

“She was the real one, if you ask me.” She says, and Luz coughs a bit into his bowl and coughs a bit more lightheartedly when Toye’s hand comes down to shove at his shoulder.

---

On the days that Toye works, and only in the wintertime, Luz sometimes visits by himself.

She has a sneaking suspicion that he’s intimidated by her, in some way, or something about her apartment is off putting. She doesn’t care all that much. He’s a nice enough boy, and he helped her back up the stairs, but she’s always had more of a proclivity for the quiet ones.

In the winter, he tends to be more of one of those himself, paler and usually scruffier than usual.

He looks so on the day that he knocks on her door and when she opens it, he looks like he hasn’t shaved in three days and eaten in six. 

“Dear God.” She says, and steps back from the door to usher him in before he can freeze her apartment. “You look like a transient.”

She never paid much attention to what was going on in the Atlantic, other than the newsreels (which she never went to) and by word of mouth from her friends (which she didn’t have) and newspapers and magazines (which she rarely left the house to get).

Her war, like it was her boy's war, was with the islands, and when he died, her study of it died with him. 

Still, she knew enough to recognize that Europe could get cold and that hollow eyes are often related to that ice. 

Luz doesn’t laugh nearly as much in the wintertime, or smile, and she can’t even get him to crack half of one, even when she deigns to instead criticize Toye, which usually works.

“Oh, for Gods’ sake.” She ends up saying today, hips aching and irritated. “Now I have to waste coffee on you. Perfectly good waste, most of it is going to end up in that… thing, on your face.”

She doesn’t like beards. Never did like it when her boy grew one, said it made him look more grown-up than she’d allow.

Luz still doesn’t smile.

Fifteen minutes later, she sits with him in the overstuffed armchairs and wonders about what boys still find funny when he asks her, quite out of the blue, “What do you do when you miss someone?”

She blinks.

“Well, I’m sad about it.” She says, and when Luz just stares down at the mug she’d pushed onto him, rather desolate looking, she sighs and tries to think of something else to say. “I get angry. Or I knit. Or I look through my photos. Missing someone isn’t a glove. Why?”

Luz huffs, but it isn’t exactly happy. She doesn’t like it when Toye has to leave. He always seems happier, when the other one is around. The creases around his eyes aren’t so frustratingly deep.

“Nothing.” He says, and his voice is hoarse. “Just thinking about people who’re gone.”

She watches him, critical. God, she hopes he shaves before she sees him again. It’s really just improper. 

“They never found my son's body.” She tells him. “Or they did, and they lied to me. Either way, he left and he’s gone and I barely have anything of him but what I remember and what he wore. So you find things that help you do more than obsess over those things.” She thinks of Lulu, of her soft fur and the way that she’d lick at her face. “And that’ll be gone before you know it, too, so you have to appreciate it all. You can’t afford to stop loving things in the world just because someone you love is no longer in it.”

She stares back down at her cup. 

Luz clears his throat, and when she looks up, he cracks half of a smile at her awkwardly. His eyes are dark, there isn’t much light there. “Thank you.” He says, and she wishes she hadn’t told him about her boy. Still, she feels warm.

“Good god, child.” She says, anyways. “Go home and shave. You look like some sort of Hungarian.”

Luz doesn’t laugh, but looks like he might have, if it wasn’t wintertime.

---

Later on in the same night, they’re up later than they usually are, and she only knows it because she’s trying to get through a chapter for book club on Friday and she can see their silhouettes through their lit up window, light and orange and slightly blurry.

She doesn’t watch them for long, doesn’t want to pry.

Luz’s arms are around Toye’s neck, his face dropped down to his shoulder. Toye’s arms are wrapped fully around him, maybe more for balance than anything else. The way they’re turning, it looks like they're dancing. She wonders to what music.

She used to dance like that, with her husband. That was how she taught her boy, as he stood on top of her shoes and she held his little hands. 

She shuffles back over to the armchair and goes back to reading her book. She doesn’t like this one either.

---

One day, she thinks they might be arguing. 

Toye comes over on a Thursday night, instead of a Friday, and looks rather tired. It’s springtime, which is why she’s more hesitant about letting him in, but he’s shaved, so she allows it.

“Could I stay over for the night?” He asks her, voice raspy. “I’d – I hate to ask, but—”

She squints at him. “You’re the one with one leg.” She says. “Shouldn’t he be leaving?” Toye coughs. He shifts on his crutches, glances vaguely over his shoulder in a way that makes him look rather guilty.

“No, it’s—” He starts, and cuts himself off. “I want him to stay in the apartment.” He looks vaguely embarrassed. She squints at him again, but in the end just starts moving back towards her armchair.

“Fine.” She says. “I like you better than I like him, anyways.”

---

She tosses a bunch of moth-eaten blankets from the closet onto the floor and tells Toye good luck with standing back up and gets to bed. Toye looks strangely pleased about her rudeness, so she keeps that in mind and makes note to tell him that he needs a haircut tomorrow.

---

Toye stays over the whole day and helps her with small things and she tells him that he needs a haircut, and needs to shave, and needs to go outside more, and needs to get a better job, and needs better crutches, and should wear his fake leg more often, and a dozen other things before they sit down to read and do so for hours.

Book club lasts much longer than it usually does, but when there’s the usual knock at the door, albeit more tentative, Toye looks up and looks, again, so painfully young that she sort of wants to smack him for it.

She doesn’t. She pushes to her feet and complains the whole way to the door.

Luz doesn’t have food, and he barely says hello, just looks right past her to Toye, says in a soft, hoarse voice that she thinks means that he’s been smoking and that he wants to talk.

She looks from him, to Toye, to him again, and decides to stay out of it. “Get out of here, the both of you.” She says. “And clean up, before I see you again. You both have jobs, you know.”

---

She doesn’t see them for maybe three or four days after that, doesn’t even see them entering or exiting their own building. She wonders if one or both of them are sick, but thinks they might just be locked up in their own apartment for some godforsaken reason. 

They don’t emerge for days and Luz is the first one that she sees, looking more relaxed than he has since the wintertime. He waves at her, but doesn’t spend too much time outside. Just pitches a cigarette over his shoulder and skips back up to the apartment, and that’s the last she sees of either of them for another two days. 

She supposes they’ve made up.

---

She only goes over to their apartment once. 

It’s alright. Rather homely.

There’s only one chair in the sitting room, which is rather ridiculous, though every time she’s seen him, Luz usually insists on sitting on the floor, so she supposes that may be a part of it. The kitchen is small, rather boring. A whiteboard sits on top of the fridge, tracking something by tally marks that she’s not privy to knowing. They don’t let her into either of the bedrooms, and she doesn’t care much to investigate.

“You, uh.” Luz tells her awkwardly, hands in his pockets, mouth quirked up in his forever-grin. “We could start eating here, if you’d like.”

She wrinkles her nose at the cracked open fire escape and the dishes in the sink and the crooked blanket on the chair. “I’m quite alright.” She says, and decides not to come back. 

(There’s one of those song-players on a table off to the side, however. It looks more expensive than anything else in the apartment. Underneath it is a basket, and the only vinyl she’s able to make out is one of Billie Holliday.

Ugh. Figures.)

---

They come over every Friday for two years and she sees them more often than that, and as soon as something changes, she can tell immediately. It annoys her.

She knows right off the bat because Toye’s wearing his prosthetic, which he never does, and Luz is shaved, which doesn’t matter much, because his hair is still much too long. 

“Where’s the house at?” She asks him, after barely another two minutes, because she’s connected the dots and doesn’t want to wait for them to be explained to her. 

Luz is the one, for once, to pause. Toye turns to look at him, face doing the same sort of lined, barely held back guarded emotion that it often throws up around the other man before he looks back at her, hesitates.

“It’s, uh.” He says. She sighs, wants to tell him to knock it off with the pausing. “In Bedford. It’s—”

He keeps talking, and she deigns to ignore him to instead watch Luz, the way he looks at Toye. It’s the same sort of emotion, barely lined, making him heavier.

She wonders if her boy got to care so much about someone, before he was killed.

“Alright.” She says, maybe with a sigh, holds up a hand and decides that’s that. She’ll miss book club, but if she truly gave a rats ass, she’d join a real one. Maybe she will, now. “Make sure you pack enough. And shave. You have jobs.” 

Toye’s smile is a crooked curve, and Luz’s takes over his whole face. She looks at both of them, unimpressed. 

“Write to me, if you want.” She says. “Or visit. God knows I’m not going anywhere.”

She’s not, either. Maybe she’ll get another Lulu.

---

They leave on a Wednesday, which annoys her only because it’s such a random day to leave somewhere, with some sort of boring car packed with trunks in the middle of the summer.

She watches from the steps of her own building, arms crossed, and gives them advice on how to best stack the luggage, which they don’t follow. 

“They’re all going to fall out and you’ll be left with broken and dirty things, and then you’ll see who’s in the right.” She tells Toye, who’s closer, annoyed. His mouth twitches, but he doesn’t say anything.

Luz looks back at them and smiles, but she knows he’s not looking at her.

---

She stands on the steps until it’s time for them to leave, and she hates dilly-dallying, so she rushes through the goodbyes by patting Luz’s cheek and grimacing at the stubble there. He looks like he might laugh at her. 

She lets Toye get a step further and give her half of a hug, which she’s also not a fan of but allows anyways.

He watches her with those careful, dark eyes and says, very punctually, “Thanks, Moira.”

She waves him off. “You should be thanking me for trying to help you with the luggage.” She says, pointed. “Off you go. Get a dog. God knows there’s enough of them running around.”

From a few feet behind Toye, Luz laughs. 

---

She can see their silhouettes, as they get in the car. Can see what looks like Toye kissing Luz on the cheek. She grimaces.

It must have been a horrid kiss. He never does shave enough.

[these-godforsaken-halls]

They fall back into silence, and this one lasts longer than the others had. Mumbo is starting to feel miffed, himself, the more he thinks on it. The more he focuses on the pit in his stomach, and the two years of radio silence, and everything that used to be normal and isn’t anymore. 

Grian disappeared on him.

“I’m sorry,” Grian says finally, and he sounds genuine enough that Mumbo’s shoulders relax. Against his will. All the miffed-ness seeps right out of him and into the ground, gone forever. It is inconvenient, because Mumbo was planning on staying miffed, but he has known for awhile now that Grian can do this to him whenever he wants just by sounding a little bit sad. He has (mostly) made his peace with it. “It was weird. I've been weird. Sorry.”

“...it’s alright, G,” he finds himself saying, sighing a little. He wants to say more. He tries to gather his thoughts, and a little bit of courage too, and he continues, “I love you, mate, that’s why I don’t like it when you — when you get weird like that, when you pull away. We were having a nice conversation. We could just go back to that, why don’t we go back to that?” Why do you keep dragging us away from nice conversations, he wants to ask, why do you shut down, why do you say those things but never really talk to me?

Another long pause, and Mumbo reminds himself to be patient, though his leg has started an anxious wobble. “You… what?” Grian asks, and gods above, his voice is watery . Mumbo’s stomach drops.

“I —” he’s already stumbling over his words, great. “I don’t like it when you get — ? Oh. Oh, you mean the other thing. The I love you thing. I’m — I mean. Should I not have said that?” Right, he is sweating now. Properly sweating. His head hurts and he thinks it’s the emotional whiplash. Because that’s what this conversation has given him. Emotional whiplash. 

“I just thought — well, you know, we’ve been friends a long time. Good friends, really good friends. You’re my best friend, actually. Now that I think about it. Certainly haven’t got one better. Not that I’m ranking you, oh dear, don’t go telling people that I’m ranking my friends, just — best friends? That’s something normally people say, isn’t it? It isn’t weird? So I love you. Ah. I’ve said it again. I can take it back if — do you want me to take it back?”

(Please don’t ask him to take it back. He does not want to take it back.

He doesn’t — he doesn’t want the version of Grian who makes him take it back. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? He doesn’t mean it that way. He wants Grian , whatever Grian might be like, and it’s not like he’s ever abandoning this friendship for anything, but he has known this version of Grian: the one who vies and vies for attention but scrambles back the moment it’s given, the Grian who loves to be noticed but hates to be seen, who’s a lot less careful with the hearts in his hands, who’s a little bit more mean. There was a Grian who would have died before admitting that he cared about something or someone, anything or anyone — who’d shrug off praise for builds he’d poured months into, desperately pretending that it didn’t make him glow. 

Eventually Mumbo got to have a happier Grian, a bright and open and honest Grian. That Grian disappeared, and in moments like these, Mumbo feels like he didn’t come back.)

“No,” Grian says, and Mumbo accidentally sighs out loud with relief. “No, you don’t have to take it back. You dork. No. It’s okay. I — me too. I mean. Yeah. Me too.”

They sit with these three words between them (two in Grian’s case, but yes, Mumbo does know what he means) for several uncomfortable seconds.

Where did you go, Mumbo is thinking, and his chest aches with it — where did you go, and what did it do to you?

...

from quality entertainment, chapter 3 (ao3)

watcher grian! waffle duo agony!! huzzah

[carniferous]

wip (it out!)

share whatever project you're working on right now, except 'project' is incredibly open ended. It could be fic, original writing, playlists, art, crafts, whatever it is you're doing!

i was tagged by my darling beloved @itsjaywalkers

long time no snippet... have a lengthy one from the postwar fic:

“What are you doing here, Regulus?”

“I—” a pause, followed by a shaky inhale, Regulus’s habit when he was trying to collect himself, “I live here.”

James blinked, looked at him once again. “What?”

“This is Islington. I live less than a block away,” said Regulus. “Didn’t you know that?”

Of course James knew that. He’d known exactly where he was, and he’d known exactly what neighborhood he was near, but he never, not in a million years, not for his life, could have imagined that—

“You’re still living in Grimmauld Place?”

Something flickered across Regulus’s face, too quick for James to decipher. “Of course I am.”

If James had the presence of mind, he might’ve managed to rouse some bitterness from within him. But he was never that good at being bitter, and he was still struggling to process the shock of this—this ghost, this memory standing alive before him—so all he did was stare owlishly, uncomprehendingly at Regulus.

“It’s my home,” Regulus said after a long beat, a touch furtive. “Where else would I go?”

James thought of many responses to that, each ruder and more honest than the last, but he bit his tongue. What rights did he have over Regulus anymore? What right did he ever have to tell Regulus where he should go, what place he should call home? Regulus had always taken great pains to correct him on that account, to put him in his place, and now when James looked at him he could only recall being sixteen and embarrassed and pathetically heartsick.

i have no clue who's already done this but i'll tag: @foursaints @sommerregenjuniluft @veryinnovative @sugarsnappeases and @withtheoldstars

[hawnks]

Why on earth can anyone be mean to you for gracing us with the precious that is Coincide? Unbelievable.

no one has actually been mean to me abt coincide! sjdjjdjdjd I am just sensitive <3

[sunforgrace]

you guys please understand they were going to say “CASTIEL’S PERSONAL HEAVEN” and paper the walls like a teen girls room with pictures of dean pictures of dean’s face PLASTERED onto the bodies of beefcakes all while cheek to cheek blares out. as brought to you by fucking metatron

[intoapuddle]

my hackles went up when dan said ‘we are going to continue posting on this channel for at least a bit’ i am a caged dog in a corner getting defensive at any sign of fear

I'm good with 'at least a bit'. Actually, me one year ago would have done a lot to get 'at least a bit'. I am not going to bite the hand that feeds me 🛐

[fratboykate]

I'm so curious about how Tiny Tom (GG anon killed it with that I laughed) reacts to Yelena leaving.

“…and I told you I didn’t like you letting a total rando be around my baby. She was practically living here, KitKat. Look what happened.”

Tom speaks from the ensuite bathroom, mid-pee. Kate’s eyes roll completely at the sound of the nickname she’s grown to despise.

“You don’t get a say on who gets to come and go from my apartment.”

He steps out, stark naked and jumps on the bed.

“This could’ve ended badly. What if she had snatched her?”

Kate groans.

“Oh my god. She wasn’t going to kidnap Ri.”

“How do you know that? She…poof…gone…in the middle of the night. She could’ve just as easily vanished with our daughter.”

“Keep it down. You’re being too loud. She hasn’t been sleeping too well lately.”

“Nightmares?”

Kate nods.

“I bet the stranger pulling a Copperfield on her didn’t help.”

Kate groans.

“Get out…Leave.”

“Giving her some stability right now would be nice. Mom. Dad. In the same house. No more split days or weekends…arranged pick ups…different bedrooms.”

“Tom, I’m so not in the mood. Go. I have a big day tomorrow and I could use the time to review my pitch.”

“You could practice your pitch on me. Like you used to do.”

“Please go home.”

Tom sighs and tries to kiss her goodbye but Kate turns her face and his lips lands on her cheek.

“Well you can call me if you need anything, KitKat.”

“You know I won’t.”

“Did tonight.”

Kate doesn’t answer.

[wickedhawtwexler]

idk how people can be entirely mobile tumblr users, i cannot STAND how this app pauses my music

[ghostietea]

Also I finally got to a chunk of Homestuck where the games are playable so YIPPEE

[quatregats]

.

[arolesbianism]

You guys know not of the catastrophic squid sisters brainrot going on in my head rn

[yueebby]

happy wife, happy life  — gojo satoru

synopsis. not fawning over his wife may prove to be harder than gojo thought.

contents. fluff, gojo is so whipped for his wife and everyone is tired (whats new), ooc gojo?

notes. this was pure self indulgence. i wanted to slander and coddle gojo all at once and this was it teehee :3

the first thing you hear when you stand up to leave the staff meeting is a wolf whistle.

“looking good,” satoru looks you up and down. you roll your eyes playfully, your husband’s behavior is not foreign to you. he taps your upper thigh, dangerously close to your butt as you take your leave. however, the others in the room don't take kindly to the action.

“highly inappropriate behavior gojo,” utahime mutters under her breath from across the table. beside her, nanami is giving your husband a hard stare. 

satoru pays no mind to them though, smiling up at you as you walk out of the room. you shake your head when he continuously blows a series of kisses. he ignores your rejection, opting to mouth crude comments instead.

the moment the door shuts, the strongest sorcerer immediately deflates, disinterested in whatever matters the rest had to discuss about. 

“i don’t know how she puts up with you,” utahime takes a long sip out of her cup of tea. beside her, shoko snorts.

“probably for his body.” shoko is not unfamiliar with satoru’s antics, having witnessed it since his rowdy school days. she applauds him for coming far with you, but it was still fun to tease him.

gojo crosses his arms, emitting a disgruntled sound. “and my golden personality?”

nanami sighs, “ieiri’s conclusion is most likely right.”

the limitless user wiggles his finger playfully. “nanamin, how scandalous of you to fantasize about my body! i’m a married man y’know~” 

nanami looks like he has eaten something sour. unlike you, nanami’s attitude towards gojo has not softened as the years passed.

“i’m surprised she’s still with you.” utahime snickers. “she’s a sensible woman and you’re–” 

satoru frowns at her statement.  he’d never thought about how you felt about his behavior. perhaps that was his fatal flaw. gojo satoru had a nasty streak of negligence. and the last time he failed to notice someone dear to him —   

“well i’m glad she ended up choosing me, yeah?” his frown is quickly covered up by the wide smirk on his face. he leans back on his chair that’s starting to feel less comfortable by the second. the chair creaks under the weight of his body. honestly, how old are these old wooden things? “as much as i’d like to keep chatting about my lovely wife, i’d like to get this meeting over with so i can see her again.”

the rest of the meeting ensues as usual.

“sensei has been weird… right?” itadori offers his hand after knocking megumi down during a sparring match. the black haired boy grunts as he is pulled up.

“if by weird, you mean normal.” megumi glances back at you and gojo who are watching intently at the first and second years practicing close combat on the training field. it was a bit peculiar to see satoru not throw himself all over you. gojo without pda is like a jigsaw puzzle missing its most essential piece, leaving the overall picture incomplete and lacking the electrifying energy that defines his existence. 

“i feel like i should be happy, but it’s unsettling to see him not initiating some misconduct. do you think they’re fighting?” nobara is panting on the grassy floor. she raises her hand in surrender when maki leaps in to take her head off with a spear.

maki retracts her blade, turning back to observe you and gojo, “nah, gojo would fold at her command.” 

“salmon.”

from across the training field, you turn to your husband nervously, “why are they staring at us?”

satoru hums, his blindfolded gaze focuses on the field in front of you, “hm, maybe they’re admiring their very beautiful [name] sensei.” the blindfolded man pauses. compliments should still be okay– right? satoru can’t imagine a life without lavishing you with love, yet he will content himself with gently sprinkling you with affection. 

you smack his shoulder playfully. to your surprise, your husband doesn’t reciprocate with some form of physical affection. you tilt your head, perplexed. 

quickly dismissing it, you yell at your students to continue their training.

you don’t notice the way satoru clenches his fists, keeping his eyes trained anywhere but you.

the next time satoru is tempted by your presence is when he comes back home after a mission. it was a walk in the park, but the heavy stack of paperwork that followed it had depleted his energy. all he wanted was to snuggle in bed with his wife, selfishly keeping you all to himself.

and you’re not making it easier to resist with the way you warmly greet him with a smile in nothing but a small cotton tee and those tiny pajama shorts. eyes up, eyes up, eyes up, satoru mentally chants.

he thinks he might actually die.

“toru!” you abandon the book you had been reading to pay your husband taxes (kisses that satoru demands he must have). “you’re home awfully late.”

“mission… paperwork,” his clipped response is mumbled as he hurries past you and to your shared bathroom, avoiding your touch. satoru silently prays to the heavens that you don’t notice his suspicious efforts as he makes his way to take a much needed ice cold shower.

you stand in your spot in confusion, letting your husband go. slowly, you start to connect the pieces of satoru’s strange behavior from his refusal to touch you to his sudden responsible disposition. gojo satoru never does paperwork– not unless you bribe him with a dozen kisses. speaking of kisses, you don’t even remember the last time he had demanded one. something was definitely wrong. 

without missing a beat, you quickly follow your lover’s trail into the bathroom.

to your delight, your husband had failed to lock the door. in the hush of your silence, you can hear the subtle rustle of satoru's garments.

his sky blue eyes go wide when he sees you walk through the door.

“toru… is there something wrong?” your voice is careful. 

the white haired man in front of you nervously laughs as he covers his bare chest, “geez, ask me out to dinner first.” 

“gojo satoru.”

your husband winces at his full name being used, but he puts on another mask. a faux smile plays on his lips as he shrugs. “i don’t know what you mean, gojo.” 

your heart drops at his insistence to shut you out, but you stand your ground. with sheer determination, you walk up to your husband, closing the gap between the two of you. you cup his cheek with a hand while you start to lean closer, your lips nearly brushing.

satoru shuts his eyes, inhaling a deep breath to regain composure. he even sucks in his lips, making him look utterly ridiculous. despite the dangerous allure of your proximity, he resolves to stand firm.

"you won’t even kiss me anymore! satoru, this is absurd. what's happening?" you distance yourself, seeking answers.

despite his towering stature, a snort escapes you as satoru resembles a mere child when mumbling something under his breath.

"come on, use your big boy words."

"i don't want to drive you away," he avoids making eye contact now that his blindfold is off. "i know i can be a bit overwhelming at times."

upon hearing his excuse, you snort loudly, “seriously?”

“seriously.”

“i can’t believe i married such an idiot.” you huff, wrapping your arms around his neck.

satoru pouts, “you’re breaking my heart wifey.”

your lips softly kiss the corner of his mouth. like it was muscle memory, satoru’s lips chase yours even after you pull away. you smile.

“for such a genius, you really are stupid ‘toru.” you flick his forehead. he whines and you know it didn’t hurt, yet you entertain him by leaning up to kiss his injury. “believe it or not, i married you for reasons beyond your pretty face and body.”

“you think i’m pretty?” his eyes shine bright as they lovingly gaze into yours. you take one hand to cup his cheek. he nuzzles his face into it.

“of course you’d say that.” you laugh softly. “but honestly, i’m offended that you thought i would ever be annoyed by your affections. might i remind you that we have been madly in love since our youth? i found myself captivated by your ability to love effortlessly, and the way you hopelessly pined for me for years? i knew i was a goner. that… and your bank accoun–”

satoru kisses you with an intensity that leaves you feeling blissfully lightheaded. lost in the haze of the moment, he showers the rest of your face with tender, wet kisses, and you stand there, surrendering to the sweet assault.

upon withdrawing, satoru wears a broad grin. "i was an idiot today, wasn't i?" you nod, breathless. "how about i make it up to you tonight?" he proposes, drawing you close. you are all too familiar with that feral grin adorning his face.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Terry Pratchett about fantasy ❤

Terry Pratchett interview in The Onion, 1995 (x)

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Terry: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

Terry: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Terry: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

[urhoneycombwitch]

common tongue of you lovin' me

🍯 honey flavour: touchstarved loverboy smut

🐝 the bees: Eddie x reader

wc: 2.5k 

content warnings: nervous Eddie, touchstarved R, smut, dry humping (is it actually dry if they’re both wet…?), cumming in pants, one (1) use of the word “daddy”, light use of the miscommunication trope

foreword: based on THIS anon everyone say THANKS anon. R and Eddie are in their early 20’s, R is on a gap year from college (so me), they’re in a new relationship with each other, I’m writing this while blasted on edibles idk what else to say 0_o

____

By nature, Eddie Munson is not a shy person.

Even though his dark reputation in Hawkins hasn’t been completely erased, he still manages to make friends wherever he goes through sheer force of personality. It’s like a magic trick, one that you never get tired of- he’ll pause in the middle of grocery stores to make faces at a baby in a stroller, getting belly laughs out of a stranger’s kid in less than ten seconds while still holding your hand down the aisle. One second he’s right behind you in the record store, looking over your shoulder as you browsed, and the next he’ll be on one knee charming a elementary school-aged kid into getting the latest Dio album.

You’ve seen him flirt his way out of speeding tickets with Hopper, for christ’s sake. 

Eddie isn’t shy by any stretch of the imagination, so after three months of nothing but chaste kisses and quiet hand-holding, you’re left to assume he actually wants to take things slow with you.

He’s been nothing but a gentleman, in these early days of dating- the most action you’ve gotten from him was unintentional. On your third date, a dollop of his ice cream landed on your lap when he used the cone to gesture, which led him to manically grabbing napkins out of his dashboard to wipe at your skirt while you laughed it off. The second he’d brushed against your bare thigh he snapped his hands back like he’d touched a live wire, hastily heaping on apologies, leaving you to allay his nerves while wiping at the stain yourself.  

Which, whatever. It’s fine. It’s not like you’re complaining about him being respectful, per se, it’s just that it’s getting harder and harder (hah) to pretend like you don’t wanna fuck him. The feeling between your thighs only seems to increase in intensity when he gives you one of those precious little hand kisses at the end of a date, or a closed-mouth peck before he drives off into the night. 

Unfortunately for you and your wet dreams, Eddie Munson has the most edible body you’ve ever seen. Biceps bulging through those form-fitting tees he likes to wear, rounded nose and strong jaw outlined by that cloud of soft black hair, those lithe hips…

Hips that you’re openly staring at from across the room as you sit quietly on Eddie’s couch. He’s reaching up to grab a mug from the cabinet, his Metallica tee pulling up out of his dark denim at the motion, flashing a stripe of his pale lower back.  

You feel like a Victorian maid seeing ankle for the first time. You subtly press your thighs together under your short tartan skirt as Eddie moves around the kitchen, talking animatedly about the start of his upcoming campaign.

“I haven’t decided yet if I’m gonna go easy on the little shits or not,” he says, metal spoon clinking against ceramic as he mixes hot chocolate powder. “It’s Max’s first session as an official player, and I don’t wanna scare her off but I do have a reputation to uphold.”

“Yeah,” you agree, giving him a knowing smile as he crosses the room to pass you your mug- “You’re a DM most fearsome. Can’t let them off the hook too easily.”

Eddie blooms under your praise, wiggling his eyebrows with familiar cockiness as he settles on the cushion beside you. “Gotta keep Hawkins' finest in line. It’s a tough gig but I did swear an oath, after all.”

You smile around a sip of hot cocoa, then reach over to set your mug on the coffee table. Eddie has been sat in his usual manner (knees far enough apart to be taking up his whole seat, arm draped casually on the back of the couch) but the second your knee knocks against his, he adjusts himself stiffly, drawing his arm back with a nervous throat-clearing and a murmured “sorry”.

Normally you’d let it go, not wanting to push the issue past the point of his comfortability. But it’s been Three. Months. Of this. And you wanna test the waters, just a little.

“Sorry for what?” You ask, rotating to face him, your shoulders almost-but-not-quite touching.

He’d doing an uncanny impression of a deer caught in headlights, blinking at you with those doey brown eyes, stuttering his way through a weak explanation- “Uh… uh. Sorry for being- f-for touching you?”

There’s a lift at the end of his sentence, one that you mirror with a tilt of your own brow, a playful challenge. “You don’t have to apologize for touching me, Eddie. I’m your girlfriend.”

He chuckles, a nervous edge bleeding around the sound. The curls around his face dance with the head shake he gives. “No, of course, yeah, I know that.”

“Do you?” You scoot closer, a kick of assertiveness giving you the courage to press your leg against his. 

“Uh huh.” He’s gazing openly now at the bare skin of your thigh, like he’s waiting to see if it'll burn a hole into his denim. 

When you gently lift his hand and place it on the skin that he’s looking at, you hear him gulp, audibly. 

So he does want to touch you. Interesting.  

You know for a fact Eddie’s not a virgin. Back in high school, you’d both dated around your respective circles, gossip surrounding escapades in the Munson Van circulating back to you through mutual friends. When he’d asked you out a few months previous, you’d happily accepted, wanting to take full advantage of your interim gap year from college. For the first few weeks, you’d chalked his near-celibate behavior up to nerves.

But now, you’ve got him squirming with just a thigh touch. So maybe… he’s waiting for you to make the first move?

Fuck testing the waters- you’re gonna dive in head-first. 

You swing your leg over his lap, kneeling on the outside of his hips. His hands automatically go to your waist, and he lets out a little “Oh” as you rest your arms around his shoulders.

“You gonna kiss your girlfriend?” you whisper, forehead crushing into his bangs as you wrap a hand around the back of his neck.

Eddie looks up at you like he’s seeing a full moon for the first time, eyes sparkling with want. “Yeah,” he rasps, angling his face up to kiss you.

It’s soft, at first, like it always has been. His plush lips softly move against yours, breaking for air once, twice; when he kisses you with that same softness for a third time you press your tongue to the seam between his lips.

He lets you in with a little noise, low in the back of his throat as you lick into his mouth. His hands twitch on your hips as your tongues twine, slight movements in his own hips creating a ripple effect.

When the hard seam of his jeans bumps against the warmth of your cunt, you both gasp, your hand at the back of his neck tightening. 

“We should probably, um-” he’s panting against your mouth, grip flexing between hard and soft- “I mean, if you wanna stop…”

“I don’t wanna stop. Do you wanna stop?” you ask, equally out of breath.

“Fuck no,” he rasps again, in that smoke-salt voice, and this time when he kisses you it’s with one hand at the back of your head and the other pulling your hips to meet his.

The noises from the wet slide of your mouths are turning you on more than you care to admit, and you’re sure he can feel the damp patch that’s soaking through your panties as the crotch of his jeans make contact again. Which normally would make you feel really self-conscious, if it weren’t for the fact that Eddie’s hard as a rock underneath you, the bulge in his pants thickening with each roll of your hips.

You drop your kisses down, exploring where you haven’t been able to before: against his cheek, his jaw, stopping just behind his ear. Unable to help yourself, you graze your teeth against the velvet skin there, and he jolts beneath you with a small yelp.

“Sorry,” you whisper, still a touch mirthful but soothing your tongue over the mark.

Eddie brushes his thumb across the back of your neck as you continue your path down the column of his throat. “Now who’s sayin’ sorry for no reason. Baby, I’m begging you to do that again.”

So you do, this time at the junction where his neck and shoulder meet, grinning against his skin when he groans and bucks his hips up. 

Around your hickey-making, he’s choking out words that you just manage to string together. “I wanna… make you feel- christ, sweetheart- good too, wanna make it good for you-”

When you sit up to see his face, he looks absolutely wrecked- rosy flush in his cheeks, lips swollen and kiss-bitten, pupils blown so big his eyes are nearly black with lust.

“You are making me feel good,” you assure him, pulling the hand he’s got on your neck down to where the end of your skirt sits, pausing before your next move. “You want me to prove it?”

He nods, and you guide him into the warmth of your thighs, letting his fingers graze the stickiness that’s been steadily soaking through the fabric.

Eddie inhales sharply, moans out, “Fuck, honey”, and when his thumb finds your clit you sink down into his touch, stomach tightening with the shock of arousal coursing through you.

He’s watching your face intently as he slowly circles your clit, gauging your reactions, pressing in a bit harder and faster when the pace change makes you cry out.

Feeling doubly exposed with his eye contact and hand against your core, you try making a joke to diffuse some of the tension as the pad of his finger moves against you in steady rhythm. “Still thinkin’ about stopping?”

“A train could crash through that wall and it wouldn’t stop me for a second,” Eddie says, resolute and getting a little braver, kissing his own path across your throat, nibbling at a spot that makes your clit pulse beneath his fingertip and your cunt clench around nothing. 

Goddamn, he’s a quick learner. In less than two minutes he’s got you so close to the edge, squirming around his touch, that you have to grab his wrist and still his fingers between your thighs.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. You can feel his breath punching up down up, your breasts pushed up against his chest from the way your body was trying to coil in on itself.

“Nothing,” you assure him, and now it’s your turn to falter around your words. “I just- maybe can I… I wanna get o-off at the same time. If you want. And I’m really, really close.”

Eddie’s head falls back against the couch with a thunk, eyes scrunching shut as if in concentration, a strung-out whine leaving his throat. “Hang on. Give me a second.”

He’s still got his hand on your clothed pussy, and you can’t help but giggle once he blinks back to the present, dazed- “Christ. You can’t say shit like that, baby, I almost came in my jeans.”

You give him a condescending little pout, accented with another twist of your hips. “Well maybe that’s what I want.”

“Give you anything,” Eddie replies, unabashedly babbling now as you adjust yourself in his lap. “Anything you want, sweetheart. It’s yours. All yours.”

He helps you maneuver into a new angle: now, your drenched core can rub freely against his thigh, while your knee in the socket of his hip means he can rut his cock along the flat of your leg.

When you move experimentally in shallow circles on his thigh, the newly-gained friction lights up your throbbing clit. Soon, all pretenses melt away as you both find your rhythm again, little grunts and pants filling the air.

“Feel good, angel? That’s it,” Eddie encourages, slipping his hand under your skirt to grope at the meat of your ass, helping your movements along as he chases his own pleasure with a rocking grind against your leg. “Take what you need. Lemme get you there. Please, please…”

His whines spur you on, one of your hands shooting out to clutch at the back of the couch beside his head while the other anchors itself on his opposing bicep. “Fuck, Eddie, keep talking like that, ‘m so close…”

“Talk to you all day,” he heaves out, “you make me so fucking hard, princess. You feel how hard I am for you? God, you’re so wet, that’s so fucking hot…”

You should have expected that bravado and charm you’ve seen these last few years to naturally be carried over into his sex life, but god, not in your wettest of dreams could you have imagined the mouth on him. 

The combination of his dirty talk and thigh between your legs is bringing you right up to that edge again, toes curling in anticipation, cunt starting to flutter erratically with every thrust.

“Fuck, baby, I’m gonna come…” your head rolls back on its hinge, eyes flickering shut as Eddie fumbles to catch at your clit again, movements becoming sloppy. 

“C’mon, pretty baby, let go.” He’s sucking another mark into your neck between his praises, teeth catching- “Let me see you come, honey, be a good girl for daddy…”

“Jesus FUCKING christ” is all you manage to grit out before you’re tipping over the edge into orgasm, all your muscles bearing down into the bright point of pleasure, high sob winding its way from your throat. 

Eddie keeps kneading at your spasming clit as you ride it out on his thigh, even as he lets out a series of short, keening whimpers, even as his cock jerks against your leg into his own release. 

You sag into his waiting arms, tittering lightly against his neck as you both work on catching your collective breaths. 

“Holy shit, and I was really starting to think you actually didn’t want to fuck me.” You laugh in relief.

His hand pauses mid-stroke up the slope of your back, sounding genuinely aghast when he asks “Why the fuck would you think that?”

You straighten in his arms with an incredulous stare. “Uh, maybe because you acted like a monk that I was corrupting every time I even breathed near you?”

Eddie covers his eyes with his hands, heels to sockets, groaning- “Fuck, honey, I was tryn’a be respectful. You’re telling me we could’ve been doing this sooner?”

You reach to soothe your palms over the length of his forearms, equally fond and serious when you say “I’m telling you I absolutely would have slept with you on the first date.”

He makes a strangled, pained noise before you continue- “You described to me in detail the entire mating cycle of a bat, and then walked directly into a trash can by accident. How did you expect me to wait on jumping your bones?”

He lets you take his hands, enveloping them in your own and bringing them to your chest, pressing your lips affectionately to each ring.

He whispers, “Can I ask you something?” 

When you look up at him again, he says, with sincerity, “Can I see your tits next time?”

You hide your laughter into the crook of his neck. 

________

guys i cannot stress how high I am is this even any good plz perceive me 

[micer2012]

a reflection on MatPat's plagiarism

Hello, my name is Della, or micer2012, and 2 years ago Game Theory plagiarized three Tumblr posts of mine, making a video that now holds almost 6 million views.

My posts explaining his plagiarism made their rounds on Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter, but despite the Hermits and Pooka commenting on it (generally in support of me or saying they don’t know enough details about the situation to say either way), MatPat and his team have never owned up to anything, and no mention of my name is present on the video. The one Reddit post they made denying it (which was made before my detailed takedown, which they have never responded to (though the mods on the r/GameTheorists Reddit were kind and made sure it stayed up)) didn’t even mention me by name, just referring to me as “a tumblr user”. (Though one of the screenshotted comments in the body of the post does say my name)

This experience was baffling, but it’s overall had a positive impact on my life. r/Hermitcraft gave me a Golden Apple Award (post of the year, 2021). My inbox was filled with excited fans, wanting to ask me questions or pose their own theories, far more than the hate I got. (Though the hate I got from Game Theory fans was VERY funny. I wondered why none of them gave me shit about saying “MatPat misgendered Evil Xisuma” before realizing none of them read that far into the post.)

And getting on a more personal, and much more important note, I met most of my current online friends through this, including my partner. It helped me grow closer with my irl friends as well and gave me an entertaining story that I tell whenever I have the chance. It was one of the first things in my life that really made me feel like my talents, my autistic hyperfocusing and analyzing of things I love, could be valuable. Useful. Exploitable. It blew my mind that MatPat thought an autistic kid’s ramblings about a Minecraft Youtube joke character were good enough to steal. To put an audible sponsorship on. To get 6 million views off of.

And that’s why I’m writing this post, this update years later. As you might’ve been able to guess, Hbomberguy’s Youtube video on plagiarism reopened this wound. It was really hard for me to sit through, it took days of pausing and taking breaks, because I had experienced everything he was talking about firsthand. 

In my 10 page long takedown post, I wrote about how his rewording of my sentences made him say things that were incorrect, just like Filip did. The content farm production style that made big companies like Cinemassacre take one creator (AVGN/MatPat) and turn him and his content into a brand, a voice that reads out scripts by other people with other opinions/theories, is a history shared with Game Theory. What really hit me was Harris talking about how big creators only do this to people they think they can get away with doing it to. How they view their victims as lesser, as not deserving of their words, repackaging them as their own to give to an audience that can gain from hearing them, but deserves better than to have to listen to the original victim.

That’s the thing, I 100% think a video version of my theory to expose to a bigger community than “Evil Xisuma Fans on Tumblr” is a great idea!! Near the end of the video Harris talks about how video adaptations of things could be a great market, even an accessibility tool, and I completely feel that about my posts. I wrote them quickly assuming the reader was someone well versed on Evil Xisuma lore, after not even watching most of the CarnEvil series, and the diagrams I made to explain them are even less comprehensible. Harris makes a joke that I completely agree with, 

“I’m sure some of my videos would do very well if someone translated them into English.”

I don’t think I would’ve ever made my posts if I didn’t have autism, and a special fixation on Evil Xisuma and Hermitcraft. I made them because I felt the character was being done an injustice, and because I wanted to share with other superfans this theory that might explain it away. I do think that MatPat plagiarizing me was ableist. I used to wonder a lot if this would’ve happened if my posts were articulated better, if they had been peer reviewed, if the posts themselves had been spread to a wider audience before MatPat made his video. At one point when the discourse was fresh (before I had the time to write out my 10 page rebuttal), a bigger YouTuber (100k subs at the time) messaged me and started talking on Discord, interested in possibly making a video on the discourse, but I think my style of typing and general enthusiasm drove him away. You can tell by a single look at my blog (or my original 3 posts!) that I don’t usually type like this. This post you’re reading now has been peer reviewed and edited, and took me hours to format correctly. That video could’ve been huge, the entire outcome of this MatPat situation would probably be much different.

I also used to stress a lot about “being the one who ruined Evil Xisuma’s story”. If you didn’t know, to me S8 Evil Xisuma’s story got wrapped up pretty quickly and unsatisfying (in my personal autistic opinion). (though this might’ve been due to s8 being experimental and ending early with moon big) There was no real culmination of the plot points and arcs going on, and I don’t want to blame myself, but when Xisuma said on stream (when the MatPat thing was first going on) that he didn’t want to focus on the discourse or draw more attention to it, it makes a lot of sense to me that he just wanted to wrap it all up as quickly as possible. For a while I beat myself up about it, of ruining the story of this character I love, but it’s not my fault. If anyone’s, it’s MatPats, but I don’t think it’s useful to just blame someone else. That’s how the story ended up going, and that’s fine. This is Evil Xisuma we’re talking about, their inconsistent lore is what made them such an interesting character. And notably, Pooka made an animation with an awesome culmination of Jeff, the Dreamer, Evil Xisuma, and his own sona’s story, and it makes me so happy to watch. Whatever Pooka does is of course his own choice, but I’m glad he got to give this personal story his own ending (if it is an ending, and not just the start of a new chapter!). 

Typing this all out and getting it off my chest has made me feel a lot better. For a while I wanted to make my OWN video essay about Evil Xisuma’s lore and CarnEvil’s lore, actually going episode by episode to explain it instead of just assuming you knew as much about Evil Xisuma as I did. That idea is still not off the table, but MCYT isn’t something I’m that into right now. Maybe if something else comes out about Evil Xisuma I’ll get back on it, but for now I’m fine with letting that go. But I want to make other videos, share other theories and analysis… if I have the freetime I’d love to make YouTube videos, and if I don’t have the time I’ll continue posting to my tumblr and infodumping to my friends. Apparently my infodumping is valuable enough “content” to steal! Writing this out has made me feel a lot better though, I’m really glad I got it out.

If anyone ever wants to talk to me about the things I’m obsessed with, or reach out to me as a source in a bigger discussion about Game Theory or other channels, my inbox is more than welcome :] Thank you for reading! 

Sincerely, a tumblr user.